China's leader begins another campaign to bolster party, bring bureaucrats to heel

On April 6, Xi Jinping, China's president, launched yet another ideological campaign. It is named (as most such initiatives are) with a low number and a couple of nouns: "Two Studies, One Action."

The aim, said Xi, is to "strengthen the Marxist stance" of Communist Party members and keep them in line with the party leadership in "ideology, politics and action." Previous such efforts under his rule had focused on officials, he said. Now it was time to focus on the rank and file.

Ideology has always mattered to the party's leaders. University students endure lessons on "Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought." Soldiers have to spend hours a week studying the party's history and the military writings of its leaders.

Applicants for party membership undergo rigorous indoctrination. Chen Xiaojie, a 25-year-old official, recalls weekly classes on party theories and having to write a 1,500-word essay every three months on the latest doctrine. "When you're in the party, you'll join a group at least every month to learn about the latest thing they're promoting." Officials take regular refresher courses at party schools.

Since Mao's rule, when ideological training took up a considerable portion of almost everyone's lives, leaders have given people much more time to get on with their jobs. Deng Xiaoping's catchphrase, "It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice," captured a new mood of pragmatism. But the party continued to stress the importance of indoctrination. After the prodemocracy upheaval of 1989, Deng expressed regret that there had not been enough of it.

Since taking over in 2012, Xi has shown particular enthusiasm for ideology. One of his first moves was to set up a National Ideology Center to push — or invent — his own interpretation of Marxism-Leninism. He quickly spelled out to officials that ideological work was of "vital importance" to the party.

Numbers and nouns have come thick and fast. Some have been aimed at improving the behavior of a corrupt bureaucracy. Xi's "Eight Points" campaign launched in 2012 required party officials to eschew such things as lavish welcoming ceremonies and traffic-snarling cavalcades when they tour the country. His "Three Stricts, Three Honests" drive of 2014 was about strengthening officials' moral rectitude. Other campaigns have been more ideological: the "Eight Musts" of 2012 stressed the importance of the party's monopoly of power as well as of "reform and opening"; a campaign was launched in February requiring officials to bone up on Mao's essay, "Working Methods of Party Committees." and "improve their consciousness of democratic centralism".

They soon got it from the party's Central Committee, which told universities in January 2015 to make the teaching of Marxism a higher priority. The education minister then restricted the use of foreign textbooks

It is not clear how much the president really expects to change people's beliefs. He will certainly have difficulty doing so. Some folk are clearly indifferent to ideological browbeating.

Why, then, has Xi chosen to put such stress on ideology? Roderick MacFarquhar of Harvard University said that Leninism may be the part that most appeals to Xi. Lenin has a lot to offer someone trying to establish centralized one-party rule. The campaigns, with their emphasis on discipline, also help Xi in his efforts to root out corruption — a problem so pervasive when he took over that he saw it as a threat to the party's survival. By requiring members actually to attend classes as rituals of loyalty, Xi is tightening his grip over the party's 88 million members and, he hopes, strengthening the party itself. The head of his new ideology center, Zhu Jidong, argued last year that the Soviet Union had collapsed in part because it failed to maintain ideological standards.

The party's concerns were made clear in a document that began circulating in secret in April 2013 and was later leaked. Document Number Nine, as it is called, describes "the current state of the ideological sphere" and identifies seven challenges to it. They include Western constitutional democracy, universal values, civil society, neoliberalism and "the West's idea of journalism."

To combat these, the communiqué says, party members must make ideological work "a high priority" in their daily lives. The document was approved by the central leadership and appears to represent Xi's thinking. Its ideas have permeated his subsequent campaigns as well as his broader efforts to tighten social and political controls.