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China's great experiment

BEN CHACKO examines the latest reforms aimed at reinvigorating the Communist Party

Chinese President Xi Jinping used the anniversary of Mao Zedong's birth last month to speak out on the "mass line" campaign which has dominated Communist Party activity since the summer.

This wasn't much noticed in the West, where most commentators preferred to concentrate on his remark that "revolutionary leaders are not gods, but human beings," which they could treat as a move away from Mao's legacy.

That wasn't really the case - any Chinese party leader, including Mao, would hardly have disputed the assertion, and Xi made it clear he was seeking a balanced approach. "We cannot worship them like gods and refuse to allow people to point out their errors just because they are great. Neither can we repudiate them and erase their historical achievements just because they made mistakes," he told the central committee on December 26.

Still, the emphasis of Xi's speech was on current affairs. 

Which is where the mass line comes in.

Launched in June, the mass line is in theory nothing new. The phrase comes from Mao and denotes the need for Communist Party members to be one with the people they seek to lead.

But Xi's campaign, scheduled to last a year, was billed as a "thorough clean-up" of the party's approach to grass-roots politics.

Officially it will rid the party of "formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagance." Xi's own language when addressing party members was blunter: "Look in the mirror. Take a bath. Seek a cure," he said.

There are strong echoes of Mao in the language - the chairman insisted that the party should "wash its face every day" back in the 1950s.

Regular Star readers will be aware that since his election Xi has prioritised a massive anti-corruption drive which has seen thousands of officials dismissed for taking bribes or abusing their power, including some who held office at the highest level such as economic chief Jiang Jiemin and former rail minister Liu Zhijun.

 

The mass line campaign is the ideological counterpart to this effort, an attempt to change the party's culture. Beijing is concerned that after more than six decades of leading China, too many party members see themselves as a cut above ordinary people.

In response new guidelines are being issued almost every week on how party members should behave. 

China has seen a massive crackdown on state-funded banquets, with Xi even going on TV to eat a basic lunch as an example to others not to be extravagant. 

Cadres' use of official cars has also been attacked, with members told to use public transport instead. This week they were told not to hold grandiose funerals and - in a touch that will bring a wry smile to the face of anyone who has lived in China - warned that No Smoking signs do actually mean you're not allowed to smoke.

Liberal observers tend to see the whole project as a propaganda offensive and cast doubt on its ability to revitalise the party's popular roots.

Certainly we should judge the campaign by its results rather than its rhetoric. But communists do not have to share the sniffy cynicism of the Western broadsheets. 

The reason liberals assume an ideological campaign to promote "socialist values" can't work is because they don't believe in socialist values in the first place. Nothing short of scrapping the socialist system and restoring capitalism will satisfy the columnists of the Guardian or Independent.

In any case the campaign is not some abstract appeal to people's better natures, but operates alongside penalties for those whose behaviour is contrary to the party's creed.

The party has been swift to act when such cases are brought to its attention, one example being a member who was expelled in Zhejiang in October after photos appeared online showing he'd got a piggy-back ride from a local while visiting a flooded village to keep his feet dry.

Whether or not the mass line solves all the party's problems it is paying dividends in some respects.

Environmentalists - even in the West - have hailed the ban on shark-fin soup at official occasions. Consumption of the dish has dropped by 70 per cent in a year, leading to rosier prospects for endangered shark species worldwide.

Xinhua reported this week on cases like that of Zhang Guiqin, a resident of Jining municipality in Shandong province.

Zhang suffers from a genetic disability which her parents and son also have. They all lived together in an ageing and dilapidated house for years without being able to afford to move, since no-one in the family could work after her husband retired.

As part of the mass line campaign Communist Party members have been "doing the rounds," essentially being given individual targets of families to visit and get to know.

In Jining alone 73,000 officials have made contact with 1.8 million families, according to the city's Communist Party organisation department chief He Siqing.

Zhang was visited by He Ximing, an accountant working with the State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.

He was able to get her family access to enough money to move through government funds earmarked for moving people out of dangerously degraded houses.

Zhang could have applied for these funds before but had no idea she was entitled to them.

This is not an isolated case. Jining has ordered its most senior party officials to spend at least five nights a year staying in rural villages "to feel the living conditions of the masses and respond to their demands," but all across China similar things are happening. 

What makes Zhang's case interesting is that it is a case of a party member helping a poor family access rights that are already theirs.

Some years ago, after massive strikes broke out at the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn factories, then All-China Federation of Trade Unions leader Wang Zhaoguo gave an apologetic interview on Chinese television. 

The party and the trade unions had supported the strikes once they had begun, but neither had done anything to agitate or organise the workers beforehand. 

Wang admitted that trade unions had failed to adapt to a labour market in which private capital is allowed to operate and were behind the curve in proactively seeking to organise the working class to fight for its rights. 

This is a crucial issue in a country where labour rights on issues such as minimum wages, pensions and medical insurance are actually quite strong - especially in the wake of a labour legislation drive during the Hu Jintao years - but are far from universally respected.

The Communist Party is often seen as a "ruling" body, but actually relatively few of its members work in the state or government apparatus. 

The vast majority have ordinary jobs. In this sense, the party does have the potential to become a campaigning mass movement.

As Shandong University professor Wang Zhongwu puts it, "The party has 80 million members. If each member could reach out to needy people it would contribute a lot to improving their livelihoods."

 

This vision, of a party educating, agitating and organising in farms, factories and mines across China to give working people the tools to fight for their rights, is a fascinating departure from "top-down" socialism and may owe something to the methods used by the PSUV in Bolivarian Venezuela, a country the Chinese see as a close ally.

China has combined private investment and state planning to develop its economy. In the process it has been transformed. No nation in history has lifted so many people out of poverty at such speed.

But the class make-up of China has also changed. The peasantry that were dominant in the Mao years are still there - half the population is still rural - but the size of the urban working class has grown exponentially and is still growing.

Ever since the 1940s the Communist Party has held that it represents a progressive alliance of classes. Four of the stars on the Chinese flag represent them - workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie and "patriotic" bourgeoisie. 

The larger the working class becomes, the more weight the party will need to devote to its interests.

Indeed, in a country where the private sector now has a sizeable, though not dominant, role and in which antagonistic class relations characterise a fair share of the economy, a revitalised, democratic Communist Party that fights for working-class interests is probably the only way to build socialism long-term.

Xi publicly ascribes more importance to ideology than his predecessor - some note that he gained a doctorate in Marxist philosophy in 2002, having taken the unusual step of taking a postgraduate correspondence course while governor of Fujian province.

In contrast to most Chinese analysts, he does not view the collapse of the Soviet Union as a primarily economic phenomenon, having stated that the Soviet Communist Party "disintegrated" because it allowed its "ideals and beliefs to be undermined."

It's possible, then, that Xi really means business on the mass line campaign and that a reinvigorated Communist Party will keep China on the road to socialism.

It will certainly be an interesting experiment.

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