Across China, police, judges, prosecutors, and feared state security agents have studied Mao’s methods of political purges, absorbing them as an accompaniment to a new Communist Party drive against graffiti, abuse, and infidelity in its ranks.
The campaign is being created as a sharp tool for Communist Party leader Xi Jinping to support domestic discipline as he prepares for a two-year leadership split, as well as ongoing war with the United States and other countries.
Officials in China’s law and order apparatus have been instructed to ‘push the blade’ and ‘scrape poison off the bones,’ setting up personal loyalties to expel angry colleagues. The leaders have told them that the model for this “education and rectification program” should be the Mao Zedong station of the 1940s, which cemented its dominance over the party from a base in the city of Yan’an.
“Root out the harmful members of the herd,” Chen Yixin, the campaign’s chief supporter, told a kickoff meeting last month. “Root out ‘two-faced people’ who are unfaithful and dishonest to the party.”
Such mobilization sessions have proliferated throughout China – in courts, police headquarters, prison administrations and the secret Ministry of State Security, which controls the country’s most important civilian surveillance and espionage force.
They and other bodies of law and order come under the Central Committee on Political and Legal Affairs, a bastion of party power, along with the army. Mr. Xi calls command of the security system the ‘snap’ of the party, a threatening term taken from Mao.
The genuflections to Mao, who remains respected by the Communist Party, reflect Mr Xi’s desire to use the campaign to protect his power of the party and the party against possible unrest.
“The Yan’an rectification was about following Mao in everything, and that is the greatest signal of Yan’an’s learning this time,” said Deng Yuwen, a former Chinese editor of a Communist Party newspaper. an interview from the United States, where he now lives. “The core purpose of cleaning up the political and legal system is also to follow Xi in everything.”
Soon after Mr Xi took office eight years ago, he unleashed a wave of anti-corruption scandals that have hit hundreds of senior officials. The former head of the domestic security apparatus, Zhou Yongkang, was sentenced in 2015 to life in prison on charges of corruption.
Despite these efforts, experts and recent Chinese studies say the party leadership has still struggled to manage its hydra-headed bureaucracy of police, security agencies, courts, prosecutors and prisons. Early last year, the party published new rules to strengthen top-down control of the system. Studies by Chinese researchers have shown that fragmentation and rivalry between institutions remain problematic.
Months of protests in Hong Kong last year, and the pandemic crisis this year, seem to drive Mr. Xi to strengthen for iron authority right to local police stations.
“Commit to absolute loyalty, absolute purity and absolute reliability in action,” Public Safety Minister Zhao Kezhi said this month while monitoring enforcement of the campaign in northeast China.
China’s leaders appear to be most concerned about policemen and legal officials of the lower and middle classes, said Qin Qianhong, a law professor at Wuhan University in central China. A separate campaign since 2018 to break alliances between criminals and officials reinforces the concerns of senior officials that their local troops continued to be compromised by corruption, he said.
“Although China’s investigation into official crime and corruption has taken many people, the main political-legal structure has largely not been replaced,” said Professor Qin. Calls from Mao’s Yan’an purge did not mean that officials applied their harsh methods, he said.
“It is clear that this rectification needs to be taken seriously,” he said. “But Yan’an was about establishing a core leader and establishing loyalty, and that needs to be followed.”
The campaign is scheduled to last until early 2022, the cusp of a Communist Party Congress that will install a new cohort of central officials and, presumably, the time of Mr. Xi in power will extend. Publicity about the campaign has prompted local officials to describe the writings and speeches of Mr. Xi studied at night.
Teams of investigators have already unpacked cadres accused of corruption and other abuses. In the first week of the campaign, 21 public safety officials as legal systems came under investigation, officials announced.
Investigators revealed this week that the head of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, Gong Dao’an, was placed under investigation over allegations that were not publicly specified, making him the most prominent police officer killed since the campaign began.
Other officials who have recently fallen include a former head of prisons in Inner Mongolia, a region of northern China; the Chief of Public Safety of Jiangmen, a city in southern China; and a former longtime state security official in eastern Jiangsu province. The specific allegations against her were not made public.
Earlier this year, Sun Lijun, a deputy minister of public safety, was investigated. Unconfirmed rumors that retired central security leaders could be investigated have been circulating among political insiders in Beijing and spilled on the internet.
“It suggests constant pressure on Xi Jinping’s part to remake China’s coercive apparatus into a force that responds fully politically to its direction,” said Sheena Chestnut Greitens, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Chinese police are studying and have written an upcoming document about the station to clean up China’s law and order bureaucracy.
Mr. Xi wants to “put his authority down in the lower levels of the political-legal system” for the party congress in 2022, she said.
The campaign also confirmed the rise of Mr Chen, a 60-year-old official who has handled a succession of politically difficult tasks over the past few years. He also led the drive against local crime protection rackets, and took action in an effort to quell the coronavirus epidemic in Wuhan in February, when the city where the outbreak began appeared overwhelming.
“These high profile roles have certainly given him a lot of name recognition and the opportunity to build a base of followers,” said Ling Li, an expert on Chinese politics and rights at the University of Vienna, in email answers to questions . “It looks like he’s ready for bigger roles.”
Some analysts have seen this campaign as an attempt by Mr Xi to oust factional opponents. But the breadth of the actions indicates that Mr. Xi wants to shake up the entire hierarchy, said Christopher J. Carothers, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who is studying anti-corruption policies in China.
“Xi’s vision of a highly controlled society requires a strong apparatus to maintain that control; corruption is a threat to that, ”he said in an email. “Even if there has not been a new peak in infidelity or abuse in these institutions, the leadership of the Communist Party may not yet be satisfied that they are effectively dealing with a growing and rapidly changing mission.”
Mr. Xi has also recently telegraphed that he has been boring his government for a difficult few years.
China has emerged from the coronavirus crisis, and its economy has recovered. But Mr Xi and other senior officials who met in Beijing late last month warned that “China’s international environment is growing increasingly complex, and instability and uncertainty have clearly increased.” They called Mao’s idea that he was waging a ‘longer war’ to drive that warning home.
Earlier this year, the party set up another policy committee – called the Secure China Development Group – to support efforts against unrest and crime.
“The next five years are a crucial window of time for China,” said Mr Deng, the former editor-in-chief, citing growing rivalry with the United States and efforts to push the Chinese economy into a new phase of growth. “In Xi Jinping’s opinion, the rectification campaign is in the political-legal system to ensure that no problems can turn into a severe domestic crisis.”
Amber Wang contributed research.
