SinoInsight 1
Xi Jinping chaired the study session and delivered a speech. Highlights of Xi’s speech include:
1. Xi opened by touting the CCP’s domestic and external propaganda achievements since he took office. He claimed that the Party had created a “media group with international influence,” carried out “international public opinion guidance and struggle,” took preliminary steps to establish a “multi-subject, multi-dimensional Great External Propaganda structure,” and notably enhanced the PRC’s “international discourse power and influence.”
2. Xi said that the CCP is facing “new situations and tasks,” and must focus its efforts on improving “international communication influence, Chinese cultural appeal, Chinese image affinity, Chinese discourse persuasiveness, and international public opinion guidance.”
3. Xi requested that CCP external propaganda should “have a good grasp of tone; reflect openness and confidence yet convey modesty and humility; and strive to create a trustworthy, lovable and respectable” image for the PRC. He added that the concept of the “community of shared future for mankind” should be widely promoted, as well as the idea that “China’s development is itself the world’s greatest contribution.”
4. Xi called on all local governments and departments to play to their distinguishing features and advantages in conducting cultural exchanges through various channels. “We must make friends, unite, and win over the majority,” and continually expand the PRC’s “international public opinion circle of friends.”
5. Finally, Xi requested that Party Committees at all levels increase financial investments in propaganda work. Also, Party schools (schools of administration) at all levels should step up training in international communication capabilities, while universities should strengthen the training of “reserve talents” (younger generation of officials) and improve their research standards.
OUR TAKE
1. The CCP spent decades setting up foreign propaganda and influence operations, and poured billions into its “Great External Propaganda Plan” (大外宣), to create its “Red Matrix” and keep the world plugged into it. And until the past three to four years, the Party has enjoyed relative success in external propaganda operations, facing minimal pushback.
The Politburo’s recent study session on “strengthening and constructing China’s international communication capabilities,” however, is an indirect admission by Beijing that its external propaganda efforts are running into serious resistance.
2. The CCP is seeing reversals in its external propaganda operations partly due to Xi Jinping shifting the Party’s general strategic approach, as well as what appears to be coordinated international opposition to Xi Jinping.
After taking office in 2012, Xi accelerated the CCP’s gradual move away (“the East is Rising, the West is Declining” concept emerged after the 2008 financial crisis) from Deng Xiaoping’s “hide strength, bide time” (韜光養晦) approach to global dominance to one where the PRC loudly proclaims that “China has arrived” on the world stage. A major factor pushing Xi to make the shift is fierce intra-Party factional fighting; to clearly differentiate himself from the Jiang faction (who followed in Deng’s footsteps) and justify his power consolidation, Xi had to take a different tack in working towards the Party’s ultimate objectives. Xi’s ambitious and more abrasive strategic approach were the most obvious in foreign policy and propaganda, with “wolf warrior” diplomats and propaganda workers outdoing each other in “preferring left rather than right” (寧左勿右) in implementing Beijing’s “Great Power Diplomacy” (大國外交).
The natural outcome of the CCP’s “wolf warrior” approach to foreign matters is greater resentment towards the PRC in the international community, and increased global wariness of CCP external propaganda and influence operations. Efforts by the Trump administration to directly expose the CCP as a Marxist-Leninist organization bent on struggle and world domination also threatened to wholly undermine the Party’s painstakingly crafted external image (just a “normal” country looking to revise a “Century of Humiliation”). Moreover, Communist China’s effort to cover-up and leverage the COVID-19 pandemic to further its domination agenda were met with pushback by the international community. On the whole, Xi’s strategic approach to external affairs appears to have markedly decreased the CCP’s foreign propaganda efficacy and created an external influence crisis for the Party.
Another reason for the CCP’s external influence crisis is mounting and seemingly coordinated international opposition to Xi Jinping. Since 2018, the international community has paid greater and greater attention to the CCP’s persecution of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, with the issue gaining significant press coverage and governments prominently censuring the PRC for committing crimes against humanity. While increased global attention on Xinjiang is laudable, it is also unusual given the general under-reporting of the CCP’s other notable human rights abuses (persecution of house Christians and Falun Gong, forced organ harvesting, etc.) in the preceding years. The Western mainstream press also seems to be in sync in spotlighting Beijing’s erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy, and recently did a 180-degree flip in calling attention to the coronavirus “lab leak” theory and the PRC’s role in a cover-up. Again, while the mainstream media’s focus in calling out the CCP is commendable, they were mostly absent in reporting the outbreak of the SARS virus and the CCP’s coverup back in 2003, and did not track the CCP’s steady “reddening” (赤化) of Hong Kong and de facto erosion of its autonomy since the handover.
Xi bears responsibility for Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and mishandling the coronavirus outbreak, and should not escape scrutiny and censure. However, the CCP has been trampling on human rights and reeling in Hong Kong to the fold long before Xi. Instead of pointing this out, the mainstream media and the international community are acting as though “China under Xi Jinping” is radically different from what it was before. In fact, Xi and his predecessors only differ in how they approach oppression and subversion, with the latter preferring stealthier means and the former going loud. Yet popular international sentiment (or in Party parlance, “international public opinion”) is content with condemning Xi while largely refraining from exposing the Party in the manner of the Trump administration and other discerning dissidents of the regime. The mainstream media and Western elite establishment’s unisonance in how they perceive Xi and the CCP, and particularly the media’s sudden about-face on the COVID-19 “lab leak” theory with only weeks to go before the crucial CCP centennial celebration, suggests that the “anti-Xi, not anti-CCP” strategy that emerged at the end of January is already being implemented.
3. Some mainstream media outlets have been framing the Politburo collective study session as the result of a successful China pressure campaign by the Biden-Harris administration. According to Bloomberg News, “Xi may be rethinking his communication strategy on the global stage as President Joe Biden works to bolster U.S. relationships weakened under his predecessor’s ‘America First’ policies.”
While Xi did call on the CCP to become “trustworthy, lovable and respectable,” state media reporting of the collective study session indicates that Beijing is only planning to tweak its approach to external propaganda and influence operations, not abandoning or “rethinking” them. The most obvious clue stems from Xi instructing the Party to engage in “international public opinion guidance and struggle,” with “struggle” betraying the Marxist lens through which the CCP views the world, i.e. the CCP, long “oppressed” by “hostile foreign forces,” needs to answer the dialectic by improving propaganda work to win over external “oppressors.” In translation, Beijing is now likely looking to win over foreigners (particularly those in media, business, and government work) through somewhat softer, but no less subversive, means, with the same ultimate goal of progressing towards global domination (“a community of shared future for mankind”). And because the CCP is wont to “spin tragedy into cause for celebration” (喪事當喜事辦), Xi has to claim that the Party’s external propaganda and influence efforts earlier in his tenure delivered results even when reality states otherwise.
The collective study session suggests that Xi is focusing more on survival rather than dominance in the area of external propaganda and influence operations. This is partly born out of necessity given growing “anti-China” sentiments in the international community. However, Xi may find it tough to turn the CCP “trustworthy, lovable and respectable.” PRC officials, struggling to rectify the difference between doing less abrasive propaganda work and Xi’s “Great Power Diplomacy,” could end up “preferring left rather than right” and go to extremes (propaganda and influence work that is either too soft or too harsh), leaving their interlocutors confused. Moreover, Xi’s factional rivals will likely consider the “international public opinion” collective study session as Xi admitting that his way of doing things has not delivered results, and count that against him when arguing against his bid for a norm-breaking third office term.
Meanwhile, mainstream media outlets or commentators may want to reconsider their framing of the Biden-Harris administration/Western democracy finding “success” with Xi adjusting the CCP’s external propaganda and influence work. As explained above, the CCP has not given up its domination agenda and is only tweaking its approach. Further, the Biden-Harris administration dropped a Trump-era federal rule requiring American schools and universities to disclose agreements with CCP-backed Confucius Institutes back in February, and has largely avoided exposing the Party’s ideology and how its ideology-driven outlook represents an existential threat to the U.S. and the world. Failure to recognize the CCP as a Marxist-Leninist organization, efforts to stealth-revert the Sino-U.S. relationship back to “engagement,” and promotion of Marxism at home will spell disaster for America and Western liberal democracies in general.
SinoInsight 2
On the same day, Xinhua posted a questionnaire on its official Sina Weibo social media account with the heading, “Are you ready for the three-child policy?” Four options were given, namely, “Ready, can’t wait,” “Already on the agenda,” “Hesitating, many questions to consider,” and “Not even considering.” Screen captures circulating on Chinese social media show that as of 3:22 p.m. Beijing time on May 31, 28,000 out of 31,000 chose the “Not even considering” option, and the questionnaire was quickly deleted thereafter.
Yi Fuxian, a University of Wisconsin-Madison scholar and prominent critic of the CCP’s population policies, told VOA that he was “surprised” that the PRC government introduced the three-child policy so soon after announcing supposedly healthy-looking census data on May 11. “The National Bureau of Statistics said that China’s population age is similar to America’s, with a very dynamic age structure and such a good birth rate,” Yi said. “Actually, they completely covered up the data … the demographic data isn’t as good as they claim. Now they are anxious; a three-child policy has been announced less than a month” after the publication of the census data, he added.
Yi also noted that the CCP’s population policy change comes too late because decades of one-child policy have completely changed the Chinese people’s outlook on fertility issues. He added that China’s neighbors with aging populations and low fertility like Japan made very limited gains with the sort of pro-natalist policies that the CCP has raised. Yi believes that the PRC is worse off when compared to Japan in dealing with its demographic troubles because “China has no money; China will grow old before it is rich. An aging population will slow down China’s economy; the economic slowdown will result in many local governments facing debt crises and they won’t have the money to promote child-bearing.”
OUR TAKE
The new three-child policy and the timing of its introduction (a little over two weeks after the census was released) further corroborates our CCP census analysis and conclusions.
2. The CCP’s shift to a three-child policy further exposes its contradictions and will likely further alienate the Party from the Chinese people.
Deng Xiaoping introduced the one-child policy in 1979 when China’s population was nearly 1 billion as part of poverty alleviation and economic growth measures. The fact that there are officially over 1.4 billion people in China today suggests that Deng’s policy has been far too successful to the PRC’s detriment; the one-child policy has led to demographic imbalances and low fertility, which in turn have serious ramifications for China’s economic prospects and regime survivability. Now Xi Jinping is encouraging families to have three children to “maintain the country’s demographic advantage,” a move that underscores the gravity of China’s population problems—the CCP elite have to indirectly concede that population problems brought by decades of restricting families to one child has become existential and they can no longer afford to kick the can further down the road.
Of course, the CCP will never admit to its earlier error to preserve its “great, glorious, correct” image. The Party is also looking to avoid being held to account by the Chinese people for the many evils that were carried out in the name of population control such as fines and forced abortions. Chinese netizens are already complaining that people were made to pay fines just last year for flouting the two-child policy that was instituted in 2015.
Historical baggage aside, there are several other reasons why the three-child policy will drive a wedge between the Party and the Chinese people.
First, the CCP usually implements policies in heavy-handed, invasive, and totalitarian fashion. Efforts to aggressively push the three-child policy appear to be already underway. A screenshot of a local community government WeChat group that was originally posted on Weibo and reposted on Twitter on May 17 read, “Hello everyone, I’m Jinsui Community’s married woman inspector [隨防員]. Please send the date of your last menstrual period to me via private message” (Jinsui Community is located in Jiaxing City, Zhejiang Province). Pro-CCP Hong Kong companies have also gotten in on the act. Shih Wing-ching, the chairman of Centaline Group, wrote in a May 31 article on “how to solve the problem of declining fertility rates” in China that he “do(es) not support a total ban on contraception; but I think that after a person has completed the most basic fertility responsibility, like having two children, can they have the right to use contraceptive products.” A droning, long-term pro-natalist effort adds unwanted fertility-affecting pressure on married couples of child-bearing age.
Second, families are struggling with worsening economic conditions (the pandemic has not helped) in China, and have fewer means to have more children even if they want to. Young families already have to support between four to eight older folks (parents and grandparents), and having three children requires them to have enough money to feed seven to eleven people. Government pressure will only alienate and enrage those who are just keeping things together.
Third, the younger generation of Chinese are exposed to more liberal ideas than the older generations, and are less culturally-inclined to want to have children even if they can afford it. There is not much that the CCP can do to change the culture, especially when it is responsible for creating the culture and accelerating moral decline in society.
3. It is no mean feat for Xi Jinping to change the CCP’s one-child policy. Xi would have had to convince the CCP elite to “admit” their failures and find ways to overcome resistance from various interest groups and factional networks who benefited from Deng’s policy. For instance, the Family Planning Commission was able to hold sway with the National Bureau of Statistics for years, creating the impression that China’s population and fertility figures were more robust than they were in reality. Meanwhile, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao lacked the “quan wei” to push through the required reforms even though the problems of the one-child policy were becoming more and more obvious. The fact that Xi has changed the CCP’s population control policy twice in nine years is a benchmark of his political strength and “quan wei.”
Changing the CCP’s population control policy, however, comes with intra-Party political risks for Xi. We previously looked at those risks in analyzing the 2020 PRC census. Put another way, just because Xi has the political strength to do something does not mean that he will not pay political costs for doing so. The heavy-handed manner in which the three-child policy is likely to be implemented also risks destabilizing Chinese society in the medium- to long-term, which in turn results in political risk for Beijing.
In the interim, however, Xi will milk the three-child policy for all its worth. The population policy change could be added to Xi’s list of “accomplishments” as he looks to bolster his bid for a norm-breaking third term in office at the 20th Party Congress. Xi could also use the policy change as an excuse to test the loyalties of officials and root out those opposed to his rule in the PRC bureaucracy.
