Organized Loyalty: A New State Ideology for China as a Global Power (Politics and Development of Contemporary China) 3031400364, 9783031400360

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Johan Lagerkvist

Organized Loyalty A New State Ideology for China as a Global Power

Politics and Development of Contemporary China

Series Editors Kevin G. Cai, University of Waterloo, Renison University College, Waterloo, ON, Canada Daniel C. Lynch, School of International Relations, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

As China’s power grows, the search has begun in earnest for what superpower status will mean for the People’s Republic of China as a nation as well as the impact of its new-found influence on the Asia-Pacific region and the global international order at large. By providing a venue for exciting and ground-breaking titles, the aim of this series is to explore the domestic and international implications of China’s rise and transformation through a number of key areas including politics, development and foreign policy. The series will also give a strong voice to non-western perspectives on China’s rise in order to provide a forum that connects and compares the views of academics from both the east and west reflecting the truly international nature of the discipline.

Johan Lagerkvist

Organized Loyalty A New State Ideology for China as a Global Power

Johan Lagerkvist Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden

Politics and Development of Contemporary China ISBN 978-3-031-40036-0 ISBN 978-3-031-40037-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40037-7 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Jens Sörensen, Sten Widmalm, and Johan Eriksson for giving valuable comments on parts of this book. Thanks also go to the two anonymous reviewers, who gave valuable input at the beginning and the end of this book project.

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Contents

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Introduction: China’s National Self, President Xi Jinping, and Realizing the Chinese Dream References Anti-Corruption Forever: Discipline and Loyalty Disciplining Vested Interests and Punishing Secret Cabals From Discipline to Loyalty Confucian Loyalty Repudiation of Xi Jinping’s Predecessors: “Leninist Greed” Versus Capitalist Greed References Loyalty Toward State and Nation: Top-Level Design and “Moral Careers” Toward a State of Maximum Security Algorithmic Control and the Shaping of Moral Careers References Loyalty to the Nation: Lunar and Martian Exploration for Lasting Greatness Lighter and Darker Aspects of Past Space Races Lighter Aspects: China’s International Cooperation in Space Darker Aspects: Potential US-China Conflict in Space and the Russia-China Axis of Friendship

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Reasons for China’s Pursuit of Space Power: “Restrained Status Seeking” and Military Preparation References

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Post-zero-COVID-19 Policy: Limits to Loyalty on the Horizon? References

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References Index

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About the Author

Johan Lagerkvist is Professor of Chinese Language and Culture and Director of Stockholm Center for Global Asia at Stockholm University. His research interests concern state-society relations in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Chinese foreign policy, particularly China’s relations with developing countries.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: China’s National Self, President Xi Jinping, and Realizing the Chinese Dream

Abstract This chapter explains that China’s new state ideology under Xi Jinping is constructed around three key ingredients: loyalty, discipline, and greatness. It argues that this ideology is a bridge between Maoist pure ideology and Dengist practical ideology. Keywords Ideology · Governance

In his seminal work Ideology and Organization in Communist China, Franz Schurmann claimed: “China is today more its national self than ever before in the history of the People’s Republic. In its stance it is proudly nationalistic, and in its internal constitution its Chinese character is more than ever evident” (Schurmann 1973: 505). These words are from the second edition, which was published two years after the outbreak of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, formally launched by Chairman Mao Zedong in August 1966 to undo the existing political order. In light of the chaos created by Mao, Schurmann realized that that if he were to give the book a new title, it ought to be named Ideology, Organization, and Society in China. Subsequently, in the introduction, Schurmann argued that the adjective “Communist” had to be dropped,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Lagerkvist, Organized Loyalty, Politics and Development of Contemporary China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40037-7_1

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since the passage of time after the 1949 revolution had led to the resurrection of dormant forces in society. Quite contrary to Mao’s millenarian intentions with the cultural revolution, it had unleashed social forces that put China on a track not toward communist utopia, but back to tradition. An ancient tradition which can be seen as a different type of utopian ideal. Schurmann’s observation of China in the late 1960s was pertinent at the time and became even more so in the following decade of 改革开放 (gaige kaifang), the policy of “reform and opening-up”, which Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping famously initiated at the Party’s third plenum of the eleventh central committee in December 1978. In the de-ideologized political climate of the 1980s, a vigorous thought pluralism flourished, especially under Deng’s appointed successors Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. Even Confucianism, the ideological archenemy of Chinese socialism, slowly returned to intellectual life and later on also in material form, through the Confucian learning centers in China and Confucius institutes around the world. Echoing Schurmann, under Deng Xiaoping the Communist Party added the suffix “with Chinese characteristics” to many of its policies, as in Deng’s famous description of the reforms as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. Over the years, this suffix spread to all spheres of life (Breslin 2021: 199). It has been argued that the student and worker movement for democracy in 1989, to some extent, also displayed social protests with Chinese characteristics. On June 4, these protesters for democracy in Beijing were ultimately crushed around Tiananmen Square by the military. The violence silenced political debate and protests in urban areas for years. It was only by the late 1990s that more open discussion burst out into the open, but this time onto the burgeoning internet scene. During their respective ten-year reigns as Deng Xiaoping’s successors as Party leaders, Jiang Zemin (1992–2002) and Hu Jintao (2002–2012) sought without much success or determination to control online freedom of speech. Yet at the time, it was unclear if control or freedom would prevail on China’s internet (Lagerkvist 2006, 2010). Under Xi Jinping, however, internet regulations and overall policy toward civil society became more repressive. During his hitherto decadelong rule between 2012 and 2022 as the Party’s general secretary, Xi’s ideas about China’s problems and their solutions have year on year become more distinct, progressively making it possible to interpret Xi’s mission as China’s paramount leader. An important milestone

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marking this mission was the twentieth National Party Congress of China’s Communist Party. The conclave was concluded on October 24, 2022, when general secretary Xi Jinping and the new standing committee slowly stepped onto the front rostrum of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. In order of rank, the committee’s seven members, all with strong ties to Xi, took positions in front of scores of photographers. This symbolically important ritual marked the ending of the week-long congress, which unsurprisingly confirmed the new extraordinary status of Xi Jinping, appointing him to an unprecedented third term as the Party’s general secretary. Before this milestone, in 2018, the thirteenth National People’s Congress (NPC), i.e., the national legislature had amended what is officially called “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” to the constitution of the People’s Republic. Despite not succeeding in making a similar amendment, or the expected abbreviation “Xi Jinping Thought” to the Party constitution in October 2022, the twentieth Party Congress was yet another historic breakthrough for Xi. Without an inkling of opposition, he secured an unprecedented third term as the Party’s general secretary, but it was also a break with the past because the new members of the standing committee were all considered staunch loyalists to Xi. For the first time in the hundred years of Chinese Communist Party history, no leaders of alternative power bases, factions, or “lines” rose to the Party’s top governing body. Observers noted the arrival of a new era in Chinese politics, characterized by a general secretary who was supported by the “yes-men” of his “inner circle with loyalists” (Davidson and Yu 2022). Xi Jinping’s exceptional status in the Communist Party hierarchy has become a standard feature in observers’ portrayals of him as the archetypical dictator and “the chairman of everything”. As Robert Kagan contended in 2018, “The year 2018 was springtime for strongmen everywhere. It was the year Xi Jinping put an end to collective leadership in China, made himself president for life, and put a final nail in the coffin of U.S. Sinologists’ credibility as predictors of Chinese behavior. (They’ve been prophesying liberalization for decades.)” (2019). Already before the twentieth Party Congress and its display of a new era of “Maximum Xi”, some observers held him to be the most powerful man in the world (Aust and Geiges 2022). To support their argument, they pointed to the impressive growth of the Chinese economy, a politically polarized United States in the post-Trump period, and with Russia under Vladimir Putin being a small economy. Also referring to Xi Jinping as the world’s most

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powerful man, Kerry Brown argued that the description is due to China’s rising material capabilities, the amount of power that Xi wields through his control of the political system and the army, and the fact that “Xi himself seems to exemplify power. It exudes from him almost like a physical force” (2022). More neutral observations simply note that: “By many accounts, Xi is the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong” (Economy 2018: 11). Other scholars have, to the contrary, doubted the power of Xi Jinping. Alice Miller has maintained that he is not Chairman of everything; rather, he is still bound by the rules and norms of the Politburo, whose members have recognized the necessity for one among them to forcefully drive through much-needed policies of reform. Even more doubtful are the analysts who have seen nothing new in this development. To them, Xi’s concentration of power around himself in the Communist Party is nothing personal; taking control of crucial “small leading groups” is about enhancing “the effectiveness of the consultative Leninist system, not to assert himself as a strongman” (Tsang 2016: 330). Tsang has also hashed out, somewhat counterintuitively, that Xi sits atop a “Leninist consultative system” that elicits the opinion of the people (2016: 19), and that the institutionalization of Party structure and norms on succession to the top leadership post and retirement rules is still an ongoing phenomenon in Chinese politics (2016: 24). However, the majority view among scholars is that institutionalization of “collective leadership” under Xi’s predecessors Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin has been abandoned for installing Xi as “the core” among the Party’s leadership (Fewsmith 2021). Nonetheless, a perspective that overly focuses on Xi as China’s most powerful man, as another Mao Zedong, or even the world’s most powerful man, overlooks essential points. Surely, seeking personal power is part of Xi’s mission, but his quest is not just about one powerful man and his machinations to ascend to the top of the Party, it is also about his and his advisors’, especially Wang Huning, one of only two members who were reappointed to the Politburo Standing Committee at the twentieth Party Congress, ideas on how China should be governed. Wang is widely credited with the long slogan created for Xi’s time in power: “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”. Xi Jinping’s ideas on society, politics, the national economy, detailed policy prescriptions as well as grand strategies are important to analyze to improve understanding of what kind of ideology emerges in China. In May 2023, Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs, authored

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a policy paper with the title “Reshaping our relationship with China, engaging with China, competing with China”. Ahead of a meeting with the EU’s twenty-seven foreign ministers, Borrell sent a letter attached to the paper. According to him, three reasons motivated adjustment of the Union’s China policy. The first concerned China’s internal changes “with nationalism and ideology on the rise”, whereas the other two reasons related to increasing US-China competition and China’s status as a key global player (Rankin 2023). It is obvious that ongoing ideological change within China will have global consequences, but what kind of ideology is rising in China today? The short treatise presented here investigates this subject-matter and is guided by the following inquiries: What kind of “national self” is under construction in China today, and what amounts to nascent ideology in China ruled by Xi Jinping? Based on an investigation of Xi Jinping’s collected speeches between 2012 and 2022, an attempt is made to answer these questions. From these speeches, it is clear that his mission, in both rhetoric and practice, concerns moral quality and character. In Chinese social and political parlor, moral quality is often referred to as 素质 (suzhi) and used for a variety of political purposes (Anagnost 2004). This mission is as much about ideological reorientation and reactivation, as it is about organizational innovation. Therefore, to investigate this mission, it makes good sense to use Franz Schurmann’s two-pronged focus on organization and ideology for a study of the organizational reforms and ideological cues created by Xi Jinping. Organization is clearly important to set ideological values and worldviews in motion. A decade earlier than Schurmann, Philip Selznick also emphasized how crucial organization was for communist parties, when he claimed that: “The stress on organization is the kernel of Lenin’s entire viewpoint”. In The Organizational Weapon, Selznick pointed out that Lenin maintained that “the proletariat has no other weapon in the fight for power except organization” (Selznick 1952: 8; Lenin 1904). To achieve the sequential stages and goals of revolution, dictatorship of the proletariat, and communist utopia, a Communist Party had to create an organization prepared for combat in an openly antagonistic environment—an outfit that was highly adaptable, able to operate efficiently with secrecy and subversion. This meant that whereas ideology was indispensable for organization, sometimes ideological propaganda had to be subordinated to organizational secrecy. Openly communicating goals might prove counterproductive, so while fighting for revolution it was

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better to hide the organization’s true mission. In the immediate postrevolutionary phase, propaganda work and ideological indoctrination had to take a more prominent position. After many years in power, however, communist parties became more bureaucratized. Schurmann maintained, however, that even in such a situation “ideology remains a latent instrument which can be reactivated if the leaders, and the external situation, call for it” (1968: 107). Since Xi Jinping took power in China, it is such a reactivation of ideology that has been on top of his agenda. Important in this regard is Schurmann’s distinction between pure and practical ideology. This division of ideology as a belief system between on the one hand the intellectual and on the other hand the pragmatical and practical has been thoroughly theorized by Giovanni Sartori. To him, Schurmann’s notion of pure ideology would qualify as “ideologism” or “rationalism”, whereas practical ideology equals “pragmatism” or “empiricism”. In Sartori’s words “…for the rationalistic attitude is to argue that if the practice goes astray, there must be something wrong with the practice, not with the theory” (1969: 402), meaning that the ends are more important than the means. This bifurcation into the pure and the practical resonates with the debate in international relations between idealism and realism, especially the writings on the two world wars by Hans Morgenthau and E. H. Carr. The utopian dream of Maoism was a clear case of pure ideology, whereas the ideas of other senior but pragmaticleaning leaders in the post-revolutionary phase such as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and technocratic cadres were of a practical-ideological nature. Attacked by Mao as counter-revolutionary capitalist-roaders, many technocrats were hounded to death at the struggle meetings of the calamitous cultural revolution. During this period, pure ideology dominated totally, and China descended into an organizational chaos that bordered on civil war, as different red guard factions battled for power across the country. Under Mao, pure ideology dominated over practical ideology. It was not until Deng Xiaoping’s reform policies implemented in the late 1970s that a clear break was made with revolutionary Maoism, and Deng’s practical ideology of pragmatism set China’s political course for the following decades. Although entirely different from the Maoist past in terms of ideological passion and Mao’s direct activation of social forces, Xi Jinping’s articulation of “the Chinese dream” to rejuvenate the Chinese nation belongs to the same realm of pure ideology. In explicating more concretely on the

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meaning of the Chinese dream, President Xi has pronounced that: “The Chinese dream is the people’s dream, and if it is to succeed, it must be based on the Chinese people’s aspiration for a better life” (Xi 2017a: 29). At a study session with government officials on July 26, 2017, Xi made a similar reflection related to the overarching project of this grand dream, stating “…we aim to ensure that the Party always concerns itself with the people’s needs and work together with the people in forging ahead towards the Chinese Dream” (Xi 2017b: 67). Some scholars hold that this dream and contemporary nationalism have become the overarching state ideology (Tsang 2016: 34). However, there is more to Xi Jinping’s new state ideology than nationalist dreams. It is also suffused with very practical ideology and concrete organizational ideas related to issues of governance. According to a minimalist definition, ideology is a set of normative ideas about how society and political life should be organized in a community. This is a “set of idea-elements that are bound together, that belong to one another in a non-random fashion” (Gerring 1997: 980). In line with this classification, a state ideology is not for the ruling Party only, it is about legitimizing a coherent set of ideational ingredients to organize power and society for a specific national purpose. Revolutionary ideology, in the interests of a particular social class, is certainly a thing of the past, even if Maoist catchwords such as “people’s war” and “the mass line” have occasionally been invoked by Xi to legitimize crisis policy, such as the lockdowns of entire cities during the global COVID-19 pandemic, which erupted in the Chinese city of Wuhan in the beginning of 2020. The Party’s devotion to orthodox Marxism is quite idle, beyond the formulaic utterances given at Party meetings at all administrative levels of the Party-state hierarchy, whereas statist socialism has a broader following. Despite that Xi Jinping in his speeches refers to Marxism, and the professed need to continuously adapt socialism to Chinese realities, shining through the speeches is the idea that the organizational power of Leninism is what makes the realization of the Chinese dream attainable. Compared to the revolutionary and socialist utopian dream that Mao offered the Chinese people, by using the Party as the organizational weapon, Xi offers them a traditional and nationalist dream: The goal of building China into a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious can be

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achieved by 2049, when the People’s Republic of China marks its centenary; and the dream of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation will then be realized. (Xi 2014: 38)

The above quote well reflects the sequencing of China’s two centenary goals, which Xi Jinping repeatedly refers to in his speeches. It is significant that Xi’s pronounced end goal to be met by 2049 is preceded by hard work to build a China that is strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious. For Confucian philosophers, harmony in the state was a primary objective, impossible to achieve without having the social arrangements in place that made possible “the development of a harmonious network of relationships” (Higgins 2013: 22). For Xi, this is a long-term objective, whose realization is not utopian, but visionary as the year 2049 is not that far away and abstract. The dream of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is by Xi often called the second centenary goal. The target year for the first centenary goal to achieve a “moderately prosperous society” for all citizens was 2021, when the Communist Party celebrated its hundred-year anniversary. According to the Party, this goal of a prospering China was effectively met on time. In terms of sequencing, meeting the material demands of the people was a prerequisite for realizing the second goal, Thereafter, between 2021 and 2049, concerted efforts will be made to improve on the metrics of strength, democracy, culture, and harmony. Thus, Xi Jinping has a practical ideology in place which concerns the metrics to be achieved by institutional reforms, reorganization, and effective governance. Along these lines, and echoing Deng Xiaoping, Xi has also stated: “A theory can only find its inspiration in the richness and vibrancy of real life and the practical need to solve social problems” (Xi 2017a). For Xi, fulfilling the economic needs of Chinese people and providing deliverables contribute to bolstering regime legitimacy. This goal is firmly anchored in benchmarks put together by the Party’s “top-level designers”, i.e., the Party-state social engineers who are trusted with making sure that practical ideology is concretely felt and fuses with a pure ideology, based on the nationalist ideas of the rejuvenation of China. Thus, Xi Jinping’s new state ideology for China concerns both pure and practical ideology. To further improve our understanding of this ideological assemblage, which bridges the eras of Mao’s pure ideological inclination and Deng’s practical ideology of empiricist pragmatism, an obvious starting point is the reading of Xi Jinping’s own words on

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governance and what is presented and represented as China’s goals and problems, and how these should be achieved and solved. In the following chapters, the four volumes of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, a series based on Xi’s speeches between 2012 and 2022, are put under the microscope. In these tracts, the term governance used by Xi and the Communist Party is much broader than the concept of “good governance” coined and employed in the 1990s by Western governments and international organizations such as the Word Bank. Governance as understood by Xi Jinping is more expansive and managerial, and more in line with Leftwich’s description of governance in his comparison between government and governance: “Governance on the other hand, refers to a looser and wider distribution of both internal and external political and economic power” (1993: 611). Thus, The Governance of China entails a more encompassing and systemic view of how China ought to be governed. Apart from this collection of speeches, could other material have been studied than this official version of Xi Jinping’s ideas on how to govern China? There is definitely an abundance of Chinese media articles, other official documents, and reports on Xi’s activities and other speeches he has held at domestic and international events, and during his countryside inspection tours at all levels of the Party hierarchy and state bureaucracy. Adding to these, there are underground writings that give room for imagining a less dignified image than the self-righteous speeches rendered inside this book series. However, the book series is a concentrate of Xi’s political thought and worldview, and an ongoing prestige project that merits systematic scholarly analysis on its own. It is noteworthy that the first volume was published in 2014, just two years after Xi Jinping’s ascent to the apex of power. Also striking is that neither of his predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, had their speeches compiled in this way. Xi and his inner circle of aides seem to have been inspired by the publication of Mao Zedong’s selected works, after which followed the production of the Chairman’s famous little red book, The Sayings of Chairman Mao. Like most Chinese ideological tracts, the officially sanctioned and carefully edited texts extracted from Xi’s speeches in this series concern issues as seen from the perspective of the paramount leader. Almost all of them are redacted from the original often very long speeches, and it is likely that more sensitive parts have been omitted. The texts are at times infused with a Marxist worldview that few outside (or even inside) Party chambers wholeheartedly believe in. For foreign readers, such cumbersome language may be hard to digest. Nevertheless,

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the ambition by the editors at the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing is precisely to make outsiders better understand China: The book serves as an important window for the international community to understand contemporary China, which had been written in a fresh and simple language with vivid stories reflecting the Chinese leaders’ plain, natural, honest and humble style. (Jiao 2016)

Despite the remaining issues of reader-friendliness, there is a clear intent to send an official signal to the world concerning what the Party under Xi’s leadership is determined to grapple with, in terms of domestic issues and strategies for international relations. The signal has been received by actors as diverse as Meta’s owner CEO Mark Zuckerberg and spokespersons for the Thai military junta, who have heaped praise on Xi’s speeches on how China is governed (Rojanaphruk 2016). Alongside material reasons, the reception of Chinese ideational messages can be conceptualized as a gravitational pull toward China (Lagerkvist 2022). Likewise, the original speeches were intended to send signals to both Chinese cadres and citizens about the direction that Xi Jinping’s political project is taking. And yet, as Qiang and Pearson have shown, signals still have to be interpreted. In practice, also clear signals can be hard to decode even for the state bureaucracy that has to implement the policies (2019: 409). Although there are some poignant details in the speeches, even after the careful vetting of sensitive issues, for the most part the general secretary is painting with broad strokes. On their own, the four volumes do not yield a full understanding of what “Xi Jinping-thought” is. Nevertheless, it is also remarkable how understudied Xi Jinping: The Governance of China series is. A reasonable cause for these works being under-researched is that they are held to be nothing but crude political propaganda, and that the “truth” about Chinese politics is located elsewhere, in other less scripted material and data. However, as political communication everywhere can be regarded as value-laden propaganda, it should be studied regardless of the sort of polity that produces it. Reading the volumes makes possible the identification of a pattern, which emerges from paying attention to the representation of problems and tailoring of policies related to Party organization, state governance, and how China will realize the dream of national rejuvenation. The problems constructed and represented by politicians are certainly connected to existing real-world phenomena, but it takes the committed efforts of policymakers and media institutions to

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construct, represent, and disseminate them in a way beneficial to implementation of a set of specific solutions (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016). In the case of Xi Jinping, the Chinese Party-state’s propaganda and media system were important to represent particular phenomena in a certain way to fit with Xi’s agenda of policy change and ideological reorientation. The two major domestic problems that stand out in the book series are worsening corruption in the Party-state and moral malaise in society. These are the overarching dilemmas that Xi has represented as primary obstacles to further political and economic reforms. This representation was a deliberate choice by him. Other ways of framing and representation could potentially have constructed these obstacles in a different way, as problems being in essence about economic inequality, power abuse of a systemic character in the Chinese Party-state, lack of accountability of officials, even “capitalist greed” in society, etc. The cure to the dilemmas, as represented by Xi Jinping, has been the anti-corruption campaign and related policies, which he launched in 2013. In this book, the analysis of the speeches that relates specifically to corruption in the Party and moral malaise in society made possible the extraction of three key ingredients of Xi’s ideological reorientation. First of all, commensurate with the two centenary goals, China’s new state ideology concerns the realization of the Chinese dream to attain high levels of general welfare, and thereafter what Xi Jinping calls rejuvenation of the great Chinese nation. In many of his speeches, this rejuvenation is the same as greatness, or simply great power status. Greatness is a key ingredient, which is dependent on effective top-down organization of the other two key ingredients loyalty and discipline. While loyalty, discipline, and greatness have a meaning as political objectives, they can also be understood on a conceptual and theoretical level. In Xi’s vision, the former two are important practical-ideological objectives that relate coherently, crucial to attain because they are the precondition for the pure ideological objective of greatness. In turn, greatness is needed to inspire the personal sacrifice that is also necessary for its very realization. In that sense, being on track to achieving great power status also reinforces patriotic and political loyalty. This is a circular procedure wherein conceptual elements of both pure and practical-ideological character are combined. In the beginning of Xi’s tenure as general secretary, his focus was mostly on discipline, which implied the implementation of the robust policies of the anti-corruption campaign. However, this concept entails more than disciplinary measures to prevent graft and embezzlement an

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improper behavior of Party leaders. Therefore, discipline also included measures of securitization, i.e., in the domestic Chinese context issues that concern “stability maintenance”, social governance, and social control. Over time, the emphasis on loyalty increased, but the two concepts are intertwined in ideology and policy seeking to contribute to more effective organization to govern both the Party-state and society. In Xi’s China, practical ideology is organized to attain the visionary objective of “lasting greatness”. Hence, in this book, the conceptualization of “organized loyalty” refers to the idea of fostering loyalty among members of a community. This aim can be achieved through a variety of means, including through the use of rewards and incentives, the establishment of clear rules and expectations, and the creation of a strong sense of belonging. By fostering organized loyalty, a leader such as Xi can help to ensure that members are committed to the state’s objectives and are willing to sacrifice and work together to achieve them. This is especially important in situations when the community is faced with challenges or sudden crisis, as it can help to ensure unity and a focus on overcoming shared hardships. Along with John Kleinig, loyalty is in this treatise conceptualized as a virtue that is strongly connected to identity (2014).1 Many competing loyalties unquestionably tear at the individual: family, friends, organizations, one’s profession, home country, and god(s). However, in the following chapters of this book, priority is given primarily to two kinds of loyalty that the Chinese Party-state demands of citizens—the political and the patriotic. The meaning of loyalty in Xi’s speeches first and foremost concerns the unswerving allegiance by members of the Chinese Communist Party to the Party’s central committee and its directives. Yet, this conception of political loyalty is also stretched to encompass members of the public. In more granular detail than its definition of loyalty, Encyclopedia Britannica defines political loyalty is as “devotion to, and identification with, a political cause or a political community, its institutions, basic laws, major political ideas, and general policy objectives”. In further explanation, it says that “Loyalty turns into fanaticism when it becomes wild and unreasoning and into resignation when it displays the 1 According to Encyclopedia Britannica, loyalty “signifies a person’s devotion or sentiment of attachment to a particular object, which may be another person or group of persons, an ideal, a duty, or a cause. It expresses itself in both thought and action and strives for the identification of the interests of the loyal person with those of the object”.

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characteristics of reluctant acceptance”. One such case, obviously, was the cultural revolution that raged between Mao’s launch of it in 1966 and the Chairman’s death in 1976. However, political loyalty can also be a show of “feigned compliance” (Pye 1968), drained of energy, to the point that members of society only passively relate to their political community. Such loyalty is inherently unstable and therefore a source of concern for authoritarian leaders. The two strands of loyalty discussed here and throughout this book, the political and the patriotic, have strands that are ancient-Confucian and modern-Leninist, and both are in tension with the identity changes and capitalist modernization that characterizes post-Mao China; yet there is a difference. Political loyalty in Xi Jinping’s China is arguably akin to habitual obedience and thus more passive than active for most people. Therefore, the legitimacy gained by the Party’s economic growth policy may be “thinner” than what public opinion polls and surveys indicate (Lagerkvist 2015). Patriotic loyalty, on the other hand, has for many years energized many Chinese within a broad movement of popular nationalism (Gries 2004; Chen Weiss 2014). Given the prevalence of the term loyalty in Xi’s speeches over time, and in particular between 2017 and 2022, it is also surprising how little attention his employment of the concept has received by observers. It was only after the twentieth Party Congress that “loyalty”, “loyalists”, and “acolytes” entered the headlines of major newspapers and foreign policy magazines. For over a decade of Xi Jinping’s rule, the shrinking space of civil society has subdued China’s social forces, in yet another cycle of repressive policies. When Mao Zedong in the 1960s deliberately unleashed social unrest, using the innocence and fervor of young people against the political establishment, the Communist Party was shocked to its core. Just a month after the twentieth Party Congress, in November 2022, it seemed like Xi Jinping through his hard policy of zero-tolerance of the COVID19 virus had like Mao, but totally unintended, also unleashed subdued social forces. With the eruption of anti-lockdown social protests across university campuses and in China’s biggest cities Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, a popular challenge unprecedented under Xi Jinping’s tenure was directed at him and the Communist Party. The protests indicated that dissent had gone under the radar for a long time, not visible even by ubiquitous digital surveillance and algorithmic governance. Thus, deviancy can hide in shadow, but also erupt into collective protest if a trigger event exposes government mismanagement (Lagerkvist

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2015). Competing norms on China’s heavily censored social media has been an ongoing struggle for more than two decades (Lagerkvist 2010). For all the sophisticated AI-enhanced control used by top-level designers and technocrats, the formation of identity among young generation(s) of Chinese continues to be a difficult issue to manage for the Communist Party. Xi Jinping may represent and frame China’s “national self”, as a united and collective national self under one banner and one leader, yet the Party can no longer take for granted that patriotic loyalty will forever trump political dissent. To study Xi Jinping’s organizational and ideological transformations of the Communist Party in order to realize the Chinese dream, the following chapter is devoted to a new focus on ideology and Party-building. It explains how loyalty became the most important criteria to cleanse the Party from poisonous corruption and achieve unity. The third chapter explains organizational reforms and institutional change to enable holistic governance, so-called top-level design. This term is mentioned so often in Party and State documents that it arguably qualifies as tifa (提法), an ideological formation in itself, but essentially it is the “methodology” of the new state ideology. The third chapter also discusses China’s sophisticated algorithmic governance and the shaping of “moral careers” in the state apparatus and society to maintain social stability. The fourth chapter is a case study of China seeking great power status on the world stage. It scrutinizes how China’s space policy and “space dream” serve the purpose of instilling patriotic loyalty and restoring what is often termed China’s rightful place in the world. The book ends with a fifth and concluding chapter with a few remarks on the limits of organized loyalty and potential popular challenges—in the form of “disloyal moral careers”—to Xi Jinping’s new state ideology.

References Anagnost, A. 2004. The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi). Public Culture 16 (2): 189–208. Aust, S., and A. Geiges. 2022. Xi Jinping: The Most Powerful Man in the World. London: Polity Press. Bacchi, C., and S. Goodwin. 2016. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A guide to Practice. New York: Palgrave. Breslin, S. 2021. China Risen?: Studying Chinese Global Power. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

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Brown, K. 2022. Xi: A Study in Power. Chen Weiss, J. 2014. Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations. New York: Oxford University Press. Davidson, H., E. Graham-Harrison, and V. Yu. 2022. China’s Leader Xi Jinping Secures Third Term and Stacks Inner Circle with Loyalists. The Guardian, October 23. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/ 23/xi-jinping-to-rule-china-for-precedent-breaking-third-term (accessed Nov 26, 2022). Economy, E. 2018. The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State. New York: Oxford University Press. Fewsmith, J. 2021. Rethinking Chinese Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gerring, J. 1997. Ideology: A Definitional Analysis. Political Research Quarterly 50 (4): 957–994. Gries, P.H. 2004. China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Higgins, K.M. 2013. Loyalty from a Confucian Perspective. NOMOS: American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy 54: 22–38. Jiao F. 2016. Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, a Bestseller in 2016. http:// www.scio.gov.cn/32618/Document/1478091/1478091.htm (accessed Nov 26, 2022). Kagan, R. 2019. Springtime for Strongmen: The World’s Authoritarians are on the March and the West Paved the Way. Foreign Policy, Winter. https:// foreignpolicy.com/gt-essay/springtime-for-strongmen-authoritarian-leaderschina-russia-north-korea-venezuela-turkey/ (accessed Nov 26, 2022). Kleinig, J. 2014. On Loyalty and Loyalties: The Contours of a Problematic Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lagerkvist, J. 2006. The Internet in China: Containing and Unlocking the Public Sphere. Lund: Lund University Press. Lagerkvist, J. 2010. Before Democracy: Competing Norms in Chinese Media and Society. New York: Peter Lang. Lagerkvist, J. 2015. The Unknown Terrain of Social Protests in China: ‘Exit’, ‘Voice’, ‘Loyalty’, and ‘Shadow’. Journal of Civil Society 11: 137–153. Lagerkvist, J. 2022. Gravitational Pull of Authoritarian China in South Asia? In Routledge Handbook of Autocratization in South Asia, ed. Widmalm Sten, 346–356. London: Routledge. Leftwich, A. 1993. Governance, Democracy and Development in the Third World. Third World Quarterly 14 (3): 605–624. Lenin V.I. 1965 [1904]. One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: The Crisis in Our Party. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Pye, L. 1968. The Spirit of Chinese Politics: A Psychocultural Study of the Authority Crisis in Political Development. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Rankin, J. 2023. EU Tells Ministers They Must ‘Recalibrate’ China Policy over Support for Russia. The Guardian, May 12. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2023/may/12/eu-tells-ministers-they-must-recalibrate-china-policyover-support-for-russia Rojanaphruk, P. 2016. Read Chinese Governance Book Because It Suits Thailand. April 13. https://www.khaosodenglish.com/politics/2016/04/ 13/1460541191/. Sartori, G. 1969. Politics, Ideology, and Belief Systems. The American Political Science Review 63 (2): 398–411. Schurmann, F. 1968. Ideology and Organization in Communist China, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schurmann, F. 1973. Ideology and Organization in Communist China, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Selznick, P. 1952. The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation. Tsang, S., and H. Men, eds. 2016. China in the Xi Jinping Era. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Xi, J. 2014. Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Xi, J. 2017a. The Chinese Dream Is the People’s Dream. In Xi Jinping: The Governance of China II , 29–31. Part of the speech at a reception in Seattle, Washington State, the United States, September 22, 2015. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Xi, J. 2017b. Complete a Moderately Prosperous Society and realize the Chinese Dream. In Xi Jinping: The Governance of China II , 62–67. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.

CHAPTER 2

Anti-Corruption Forever: Discipline and Loyalty

Abstract President Xi Jinping seeks to avoid the fall of the Communist Party. Under his leadership, corruption has been singled out as an existential dilemma and important object of securitization. The implementation of the forceful anti-corruption campaign after Xi’s takeover in 2012 centered on enforcing discipline. After ten years of Xi Jinping’s rule, the anti-corruption campaign is still ongoing, yet over time, however, Xi’s emphasis on loyalty has become stronger. Reclaiming political loyalty has been crucial to achieving Party reform and Party-building inside the Party, the army, the state apparatus, and private companies. Political loyalty in China has both Leninist and Confucian undertones, and as illustrated by Xi Jinping’s speeches, both traditions are invoked by him. Keywords Corruption · Anti-corruption campaign · Loyalty · Discipline · Party-building

Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Communist Party in 2012. Thereafter, he constantly presented and represented rampant corruption in the Party as the most pressing and dangerous problem to both the Party organization and the People’s Republic. In various speeches, Xi

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has referred to corruption as an existential dilemma, and how corrupt behavior causes political decay: Since the 18th CPC National Congress, we have sought out a path to resolve problems rooted in the Party’s long-term governance so as to avoid the historical cycle of rise and fall, and we have built a set of effective systems for scrutinizing the exercise of power and for enforcing Party discipline and state laws. (Xi 2020d: 633)

As Bacchi and Goodwin have argued, the representation of a social phenomenon as a particular problem makes possible for particular solutions (2016). However, even before Xi had the opportunity to make his forceful presentations and representations of corruption, the stage for him was actually set and prepared by his predecessors. Prior to Xi’s takeover, the identification of corruption, as well as other issues related to bad governance, prompted various groups of high-level leaders in the Communist Party to question the long practice of “collective leadership”, i.e., the division of labor between members of the Politburo and the idea of a decentralized Party leadership. The work report that Xi’s predecessor as Party secretary, Hu Jintao, had presented at the eighteenth Party Congress in 2012, after much consultation with other leaders, already amounted to a clear break with the past. Hu’s report stressed enforcement of Party discipline and a more centralized leadership to tackle fissures and factionalism within the Party (Lee 2017: 329). It is important to note that senior Party leaders had come to a consensus conclusion that the Party needed, if not strongman rule, at least more robust governance to effectively combat the ills in the Party. In the beginning, this was not Xi Jinping’s singular project to scheme for the overthrow of the principles laid down by late leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s (Miller 2020). However, by the time of Xi’s over-centralization and the obliteration of any competing Party factions by the time of the twentieth Party Congress in 2022, some senior leaders may have regretted having previously laid the foundation for personalized strongman rule. To fully resolve the hard problems of Party disunity, regime insecurity, and ultimately the survival of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi initiated during his first term in office as general secretary an unprecedented and powerful anti-corruption campaign. In Xi’s first report as Party Chief to the nineteenth Party Congress in 2017, he was blunt about the problems that his predecessors had caused the Party:

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Over the past five years, we have acted with courage to confront major risks and tests facing the Party and to address prominent problems within the Party itself. With firm resolve, we have tightened discipline and improved Party conduct, fought corruption and punished wrongdoing, and removed serious potential dangers in the Party and the country. (Xi 2017a)

The all-encompassing problem of regime security and growing the economy are closely related—without having the latter, the former may crack as the legitimacy and status of the Communist Party erode. In the research literature, this phenomenon is referred to as performance legitimacy; that is, the ruling Party must deliver economic growth to avoid social unrest. If delivery fails, preemptively controlling both Party and society through a wide range of disciplinary measures, or securitization, is necessary. As mentioned in the introduction, the concept of discipline is a key ingredient in China’s new state ideology and runs through many of the most important speeches given by Xi Jinping. Originally developed by the Copenhagen School, securitization is conceived as a process in which a significant actor proclaims something or someone to be an existential threat. Representations of such a menace have to gain enough resonance for a platform to be made from which it is “possible to legitimize emergency measures” (Buzan et al. 1998: 25). To tackle the Party’s existential dilemma, represented by Xi as caused by corruption and moral malaise, these two objects were selected as the overarching objects of securitization. To represent the problem as imminent, and therefore crucial to handle immediately, is one fruitful way to legitimize exceptional policy measures. The swift implementation of Xi Jinping’s forceful campaign against corruption in the Party, state agencies, and the army after his takeover in 2012 centered on enforcing discipline and meting out punishments. Before the beginning of the twentieth Party Congress in 2022, it was reported that as many as 4.7 million cadres and officials had been punished for corruption (Zhang 2022). The anti-corruption campaign was generally judged by observers as a way to consolidate and centralize power in the general secretary’s own hands. The most famous case of the campaign concerned Bo Xilai, Xi’s more charismatic rival at the top of the Party. In 2012, the central leadership arrested the flamboyant Party Chief in the city of Chongqing on charges of corruption, bribery, and abuse of power. On September 23, 2013, Bo was given a life sentence for corruption after having been brought to a publicly broadcast trial in Jinan, the capital of Shandong

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province. On June 11, 2015, after a trial held in secret, the powerful security czar Zhou Yongkang, a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, was also given a life sentence for bribery and corruption. Like Bo and Zhou, many other high-ranking cadres and officials, socalled “tigers”, have been given harsh sentences and sent to prison. These sentences were important to communicate to Party leaders at all levels that Xi was serious-minded about corruption being a systemic threat to the Party’s survival. However, he also emphasized that it was important to cleanse not only the top echelons of the organization’s ranks from corruption. It was just as essential to look at lower administrative levels of the Party and state bureaucracy: “The interests of ordinary people are hurt more by the ‘flies’ that buzz around than the ‘tigers’ that are far away” (Xi 2017b: 182). In fact, Xi Jinping’s stern warnings are echoed in the analyses of China scholars who have also described corruption in China as a fatal disease which will ultimately undo communist Party rule (Pei 2015). Such arguments are based on the phenomenon’s systemic character. As millions of Party cadres and officials are readily and easily corruptible, it was early in Xi’s reign regarded as impossible to eradicate the scourge, as it would entail excessively draconian purges of Party-state institutions with severe consequences for the operations of the bureaucracy. It was contended that with a corruption rate of 10% of grassroots Party cadres, millions of people would face disciplinary measures. This would lead to a situation where “party morale crumble along with its organizational strength” (MacFarquhar 2015). The latter argument seems to have been borne out to some extent, as Xi’s anti-corruption campaign indeed proved to be both monumental and long-lived. Out of fear of being accused for corruption, officials have become wary to invest in both hard infrastructure and soft welfare projects for their communities. As has been maintained by Tsang and Men: “No state where systemic corruption has existed for a significant period can afford a vindictive approach to punishing corrupt officials to the last man, as such an approach will, at least in the short to medium term, delegitimize the regime, gravely undermine its stability and capacity to govern effectively for some time” (2016: 329). Remarkably, after almost two years of Xi Jinping’s initiating the campaign against corruption, the organization Transparency International reported that corruption had gotten worse, not better (2014). According to the report, one reason was that few Chinese believed that

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the campaign would last very long. However, one scholar of Chinese corruption argued to the contrary that anti-corruption work before Xi Jinping’s time actually performed quite well (Wedeman 2010), a result that other researchers attributed to the particular workings of the socialist cadre bureaucracy (Rothstein 2017). When Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign had picked up steam and momentum, however, the numbers started to improve significantly. In Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index of 2017, China was positioned at 77 out of 180 countries, whereas in 2021 it had improved to 66 (2017a). Below was India (85), Brazil (96), Iran (150), and Russia (136) (2017b). Thus, China was actually doing significantly better than scholars’ and Xi Jinping’s alarmist tone about the regime’s impending “rise and fall” suggested. How then can this discrepancy be explained? A central moral tenet of Confucian thinking holds that a corrupt sovereign and court officials undermine the right to govern and administer the country, making popular rebellion righteous. This idea still permeates popular discourse in contemporary China. As the ethics scholar He Huaihong has put it: “The abuse of power to obtain money and personal advantage has long infuriated people in China, where there has always been talk of punishing the corrupt” (2015: 143). Since the early 1990s, fictional accounts of heroes and villains in television dramas on corruption, crime movies, and popular literature have had enormous appeal among the public (Bai 2015). Domestic and international surveys have also shown that the anticorruption fight resonated well among the Chinese population. In a study from 2015, as many as 94.8% of respondents felt strongly confident about Xi Jinping’s “handling of domestic affairs” (Saich 2015). The moral and social discourse on corruption in China is bound to an old narrative of the disintegration of the state, the decay of Chinese civilization, and a persistent “worrying about China” (Link 1992; Davis 2007). Thus, there will always be fertile ground for reaping legitimacy for anti-corruption work, while it is also undoubtedly useful in tackling potential adversaries in the Party’s top leadership. Xi Jinping has effectively capitalized on the anti-corruption effort since it began in 2013. He assumed the role of the just strongman that many in China, senior technocrats as well as ordinary citizens, had long wished for, after an interregnum of general secretaries unable or unwilling to tackle the problem head-on. This combination of academics’ fear of a social fabric in tethers and popular resentment further enabled the powerful policies that facilitated exceptional discretionary power in the hands of one supreme leader.

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Disciplining Vested Interests and Punishing Secret Cabals Apart from punishing corrupt cadres, the anti-corruption campaign had a deeper focus on problematic institutions and issues of structural change. Xi Jinping and his former Prime Minister Li Keqiang were concerned about market distortions that were facilitated by vested interests in the vast state bureaucracy and in state-owned enterprises. Following the 2012 World Bank report, China 2030: Building a Modern, Harmonious and Creative Society, Li Keqiang and his aides in the Development Research Council, an influential think tank, advocated a freeing-up of China’s financial market to keep GDP growth levels in the vicinity of 7% annually. The third plenum of the Communist Party that took place in December 2012 acted on the report’s idea that further economic liberalization would foster continued economic growth, which is vital for political stability. However, at the outset of Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, it was clear that rival factions and leaders in the Party were targets too. Improved state capacity is undeniably central to the core goal of legitimacy and survival of China’s existing political institutions, yet it is also likely that President Xi’s passionate and moral distaste for China’s nouveau riche has been another important motivating force, to an otherwise rational calculus. An old friend of Xi was quoted in some of the American diplomatic cables, which in 2011 were revealed by WikiLeaks saying: Xi knows how very corrupt China is and is repulsed by the allencompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveau riche, official corruption, loss of values, dignity and self-respect, and such “moral evils” as drugs and prostitution. (Eckert 2011)

Xi Jinping’s calculus has centered on getting rid of “tigers on the road”, not just because they were powerful rival, but also because they were roadblocks to economic reform. As influential individuals in officialdom and many state-owned enterprises, they could mount resistance to further reform. These tigers were, and still are, locked into networked interests of the state-owned sector of the economy. In the 1980s, the central state decentralized considerable power to local authorities. Therefore, the recentralization of political power in Beijing and personal power under Xi Jinping should be viewed also in light of implementing the transformative

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agenda of the World Bank Report. Centralization of power was employed to control and stem the decentralized power of multifarious interests, primarily strategic state-owned companies, their bureaucratic allies, and their joint remonstrance. Efforts at centralization were also directed to the wider problem of official graft, and the growing influence and potential independence of large-scale private conglomerates. Economists and scholars have unceasingly argued that China needs to proceed further with reforms of its state-owned companies in sectors such as steel, energy, and telecommunications (Naughton 2020: 80; Walder 2020: 350). Such analysis concludes that continued economic growth hinges on future development of the private sector, not the politically well-connected stateowned enterprises. After taking office in 2012, Xi Jinping at first signaled that further market reform was inevitable. Under new circumstances cadres at every level, especially leading cadres, must keep steadfastly deepening their studies in the course of implementation (of policies) and during when studying the must deepen implementation. They must incessantly investigate new issues, collect new experiences and learn how to correctly employ ‘the invisible hand’ and ‘the visible hand’ to become good experts at mastering relationship between state and market. (Xi 2014: 128)

Xi Jinping and his top economic adviser at the time, Liu He, sought by more economic reform to avoid the risk of China becoming a stagnating middle-income country. To enhance reform, it was judged as crucial to attack the various interests in state institutions that acted as a brake on this plan. Over the years, however, the deepening of market reforms has proven to be a protracted struggle even for a powerful leader such as Xi Jinping. One reason could be that state-owned companies have been quite effective in their resistance to market reform, despite such restructuring being congruent with both China’s commitment to the World Trade Organization standards and former general secretary Hu Jintao’s report to the eighteenth Party Congress. In addition to such remonstrance among key state-owned companies, a legacy of government economic planning, an ambivalent respect for private property, and a reliance of over-investment and loans from state-owned banks to maintain growth numbers also play an important part (Lardy 2019; Walder 2020: 349).

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In the beginning of the anti-corruption campaign, the struggle was as much with the vested interests that sought to delay further market reforms, as with the corrupt Party cadres. This fight capitalized much on the discontent of “the masses” and strongman populism. As mentioned above, the theme of the anti-corruption campaign “holding high the banner of swatting flies and smashing tigers” has proven popular among Chinese citizens. However, for all the mass appeal of the anti-corruption campaign, the Party did not enlist the public or investigative journalism in the effort. Xi has made clear the hierarchical order in this battle: In general, what do Party discipline and rules include? First the Party constitution, the overriding statute all Party members must observe. Second, mandatory and binding Party discipline, especially political discipline all Party members must abide by on political direction, stance, words and actions. Third, state laws from which no Party member or official is exempt. The state laws were formulated by the people under the leadership of our Party, and our Party must set the example in obeying those laws. Fourth, the traditions and working practices developed by our Party over the years. (Xi 2017c: 164)

The state laws are important, but they come a distant third in Xi’s corrective hierarchy, making national laws secondary to Party discipline. Enabling these other institutions in society in the fight against corruption in the Party-state, would incur the risk of destabilizing the other overarching objective of securitization, i.e., social stability. On January 11, 2018, at a session of Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, Xi Jinping reinforced this point: Corruption that directly affects people’s lives must be harshly punished. We should carry out investigations in the fields of poverty relief and public wellbeing. In order to ensure that policies designed to benefit the public are implemented to their satisfaction, we should be tough in dealing with officials who embezzle disaster and poverty relief funds and supplies, who violate policies relating to land acquisition and resettlement, and misappropriate compensation funds, and who exploit their position at the primary level to take bribes, embezzle funds, and seek benefits for relatives and friends. (Xi 2020b: 591)

However, to buttress loyalty among the rank-and-file members in a Leninist Party, the leadership must be able to trust some members to

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be more than regularly loyal. As outlined by Xi: “As a disciplinary force within the Party, discipline inspection commissions are meant to exercise supervision and this will make some people unhappy. They should be absolutely loyal to the Party and willing to assume their responsibilities” (Xi 2020b). Andrew Wedeman has described the anti-corruption campaign that Xi started in the beginning of 2013 as a political purge, insofar as it seeks to “cleanse the party-state from corrupt officials, cadres, and managers” (2020: 84). In this process of cleansing, Party members can be disciplined or prosecuted, with an aim to reform their erroneous thinking and behavior. Recruiting politically healthy individuals is a top goal of the Party-state, and as argued by Xi, imbuing young cadres and officials with the imperative of obeying discipline is especially important for the future of the Party: “They need to realize they will eventually destroy themselves if they fail to observe Party discipline and rules, ignore Party organizations, seek a higher position through greed for power, or stop at nothing for personal gain” (2017c: 170). The use of terms such as “virus” and “unhealthy” has been repeatedly used by Xi Jinping in his many speeches, and he has commanded that violators must undergo disciplinal measures by the Party in order to be restored. Similar expressions have also frequently been used by Xi in internal Party meetings on the political situation in Xinjiang. In one such meeting, he declared that the terrorism that infected many of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang was so severe that: “Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health” (Ramzy and Buckley 2019). After ten years of governance by Xi Jinping, the anti-corruption campaign looks like a perpetual project; as Andrew Wedeman has observed, the campaign seems like it may “go on forever” (2020). Indeed, after five years of intense anti-corruption work, the nineteenth Party Congress of 2017 decided to create a new government body that merged with the Party’s central disciplinary inspection committee: the National Commission for Discipline Inspection. The twentieth Party Congress that was convened in October 2022 yet again confirmed that the unrelenting campaign against corruption continues. At the Congress, state media gave ample space in their reporting to the new cadres appointed to the National Commission for Discipline Inspection. This continued emphasis is quite contradictory, since Xi at the Congress also declared an

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overwhelming victory against corruption. In his speech in 2021 to the Commission, however, Xi gave some clues to why the combat against corruption must go on: We must be soberly aware that the battle against corruption is still fierce and is shifting to unfamiliar terrain. We are facing a formidable task to guard against collusion among malevolent interest groups seeking to corrupt officials by various means…We need to keep a clear head and bear in mind that the battle against corruption is a protracted one, and we should be ready for fight at any time. As long as the soil and conditions for corruption exist, it will never be eradicated and our struggle will never end. (Xi 2022a: 641)

To be able to achieve the grand objectives set by Xi, the two centenary goals to be fulfilled by 2021 (the founding of the Chinese Communist Party was in 1921) and 2049 (the founding year of the People’s Republic was in 1949), Xi and his aides have chosen to continue to clean up the Communist Party and the state bureaucracy. A practice known within the Chinese Party-state as rectification has been used to sanction deviant thought and malpractice among cadres. In the Party’s history, rectification usually came in the form of individual self-criticism in front of one’s colleagues. This infamous practice, as well as programs of self-reform and self-governance, has been revived and reactivated under Xi, though mostly inside the Party, not in state agencies. During his first term as general secretary, 2012–2017, discipline became the defining theme as the anticorruption campaign was rolled out across the country, and scores of top cadres, as well as local Party leaders, were severely punished. The first volume of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, published in 2014, does not have a single speech on the issue of discipline. The second volume, however, which was published in 2017, contains twelve speeches on Party discipline, all in one section with the title “Governing the Party with Strict Discipline”. Since then, discipline features regularly in volumes III and IV. In a study session with the Politburo on June 29, 2018, Xi Jinping argued that it was still very important to enforce discipline: It remains a conspicuous problem that some colleagues overlook or downplay political matters….Some are a law unto themselves and ignore our Party’s political discipline and rules, and others run things according to unspoken rules or act as if doing business deals in the Party. (Xi 2020c: 116)

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Select citations of Chairman Mao Zedong on discipline are carefully quoted in the volumes of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China series to fit the disciplinary campaign against those who chose to become Party members to serve themselves. The following quote of Mao, rendered by Xi, proves this point: You know, a troop formation is not always in order. That is why we have to often dress our ranks – ‘Dress left’, ‘Dress right’, and ‘Dress Center’. We must dress to the Party Central Committee and to the Party National Congress. Maintaining order is the principle, but deformation is inevitable in real life. We dress our ranks whenever there is deformation. (Xi 2017c: 171)

Less passionate than when referring to military Maoism are references to the foreigners in the Party’s pantheon. Although lip service is paid to Karl Marx, the European philosopher seems more abstract and distant to Xi Jinping than the Confucian scholars in imperial service two thousand years ago. This makes sense as Xi is less interested in Marxist political theory than the technocratic governance of the Party-state. It is the organizational principles, not the revolutionary instincts of Lenin that has made it into Xi Jinping’s agenda, which is primarily concerned with regime security and stability maintenance. Gradually moving into his second term, 2017–2022, the focus on discipline and sanctions continued, but it has been followed by a heavier emphasis on loyalty. This may be connected to the fact that by acquiring his second term as general secretary in 2017, Xi Jinping had fully consolidated his position in power. Loyalty in China has both Leninist and Confucian connotations, and both of these are important to understand the direction of Xi Jinping’s ideological thinking.

From Discipline to Loyalty To unite a Party that according to Xi atrophied and fragmented under the rule of his predecessors, he has since 2012 worked hard to reclaim the loyalty of both cadres in high offices and ordinary Party members. Since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, we have addressed problems of weakened, ineffective and marginalized measures in upholding Party leadership that had existed for some time, and called on the whole Party to take responsibility in upholding the Party’s centralized, unified

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leadership. With constant improvements in the Party’s leadership system, the whole Party has become more unified in thinking...Unity and solidarity require absolute loyalty from all Party members. Loyalty to the Party is the political character essential to China’s Communists. It should be sincere, unconditional and absolute, allowing no room for maneuver. (Xi 2022b: 57)

As the above quote makes clear, over time, Xi’s emphasis on loyalty and political standards has become stronger, especially when recruiting people to important positions in the Party and the State council (Li and Prytherch 2023; Wu 2023). During the twentieth Party Congress in 2022, as well as at the National People’s Congress in 2023, it was obvious that personal loyalty to Xi had become a key criterion for selection to the central committee (Buckley 2022). However, already in a speech to the central committee on October 25, 2017, Xi Jinping made it clear that political standards were a priority in the selection of cadres: “Political leadership is crucial to the CPC Central Committee’s authority and its centralized, unified leadership. When we assess the caliber and capabilities of Party members and officials, especially those in high positions, we will judge in the first place whether they are politically resolute and reliable” (Xi 2020a: 32). Since 2013, Xi Jinping has in speeches related to assessing ideological mistakes of cadres returned to the old communist slogan “devotion and sincerity” (zhongcheng laoshi 忠诚老实). As convincingly argued by Susan Shirk, the meritocracy of the Deng Xiaoping’s technocratic era of experts that followed after the “virtuocracy era” of Mao Zedong seems to have been replaced with yet another round of virtuocracy under Xi (Shirk 2022). The sociologist Lewis Coser has defined the Leninist organization as a “greedy institution”, since its leaders seek “exclusive and undivided loyalty and they attempt to reduce the claims of competing roles and status positions on those they wish to encompass within their boundaries” (1974: 4). Reclaiming political loyalty has been crucial to achieving Party reform, attaining the targets of the anticorruption campaign, and initiating a new focus on Party-building: inside the Party, the army, the state apparatus, and even private companies. Many years separate the small pre-revolutionary Bolshevik Party under Vladimir Lenin and the world’s largest political Party under Xi Jinping in its post-revolutionary phase. Lenin realized the need not to attract a large membership, but instead cultivate a devoted and restricted cadre of revolutionaries. As he professed: “We must train people who shall

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devote to the Party not only their spare evenings, but the whole of their lives” (Coser 1974: 129). Regarding the high demand on the individual member, Coser observed a similarity between the Jesuit order during the counter-reformation in Europe and Lenin’s Bolshevik revolutionaries: “Jesuits and Leninists created highly similar organizational structures which in their superlative “greed” and their rage for disciplined order attempted to make their members complete instruments in the struggle for domination” (1973: 113). However, despite the difference between the original ideal-type Leninist organization in Russia of the 1910s and Mao Zedong’s Sinification of Marxism-Leninism and its related organizations to China’s realities, the ideational legacy of Leninism’s demands on the individual is still at work today. Coser noted that even if the Communist militants of the 1970s were hardly Leninist professional revolutionaries, something distinct remained: “Yet even today, the Jesuit and the Communist are still recognizable human types that stand out markedly from their contemporaries by the singularity of their commitment” (1973: 128). After a long period of downplaying the importance of loyalty while accepting, or at least tolerating, capitalist greed because the market facilitated the growth of the national economy, Leninist legacies have been reactivated by Xi Jinping. Under him, the Party’s return to ever deeper involvement in social and economic life has returned what can be conceptualized as the organization’s latent “Leninist greed” to the fore, which is evident in the demand of absolute loyalty. As Xi argues: All the political problems within the Party, in the final analysis, are ascribed to lack of loyalty to the Party. Loyalty defines the quintessential character of Communists, and numerous revolutionary martyrs have demonstrated such loyalty by sacrificing their lives. “My loyalty comes from the bottom of my heart, and it stretches all the way from the Earth to the Heavens. I shall hold to my beliefs even at the cost of my life.” They were dauntless and no torture could force them to yield. They would be loyal to the Party and never betray it for as long as they should live. Loyalty to the Party must be sincere and unconditional. (Xi 2020b: 585)

Maintaining members’ loyalty to their Party is, of course, a number one priority in achieving unity within the organization that sets the political agenda of the nation. However, being an exclusive and secretive organization since its founding in 1921, secret cabals have ironically and occasionally been formed inside this most secret organization. In a speech

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to the Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection in 2015, Xi Jinping elaborated on Party members failing to report changes to their marital status and of relatives settling down abroad: Some have many passports and even fake ID cards. Should not these things be reported? According to the rules, they should report them. Why do some keep such things unreported? One reason is that they do not know the rules, and the other is that they have ulterior motives. Some highranking Party officials have even compiled a coded language, which they use when speaking with their families and those close to them, just like spies. Is this normal? (Xi 2017c: 166)

Thus, “Leninist greed” is organized from the top and down the Party hierarchy. First and foremost, these efforts seek to reinforce loyalty among the Party’s members. As Xi Jinping outlined in a meeting with county Party secretaries who studied at the Central Party School in Beijing in January 2015: Loyalty to the Party is an important criterion for county Party secretaries. There could be many more standards for evaluation, but loyalty is central, ‘as the greatest virtue is none other than loyalty’. (Xi 2017d: 154)

The concept of loyalty has strong historical overtones in China, yet Xi’s personal history is probably also significant for the renewed emphasis of the term throughout his collected speeches. His father, Xi Zhongxun, a high Party official who was purged by Mao Zedong, told the young Xi that he must “keep faith in the Party no matter how it treats you” (Brown 2022). As the temptations of money lured away many highranking Party cadres, state officials, and their family networks during the rule of Xi’s predecessors Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, stark warnings are directed toward the members of the highest circle of power in the Party, the Politburo: Members of the Political Bureau must resist the temptations of privileges, and provide good guidance for and exercise proper management of their relatives and immediate staff. (Xi 2017e: 210)

For the Party under Xi Jinping, ever more attention is paid to maintain the loyalty and track deviating tendencies and identities. However, this is

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not just an observation of the upper echelons of the Party. The grassroots are also in sharp focus: You have made the wrong choice, working here, if you intended to get promotion and make a fortune: you should never have come here in the first place if you care for nothing but your own gain and advancement…I hope that you remain faithful to and devote yourself to the organization; then the organization will take care of you, cherish you, and trust you. (Xi 2017f: 212)

To Xi, there must be a zero-tolerance of corruption. As mentioned above, he has repetitively emphasized how crucially important it is to purify the Party from those who violate its discipline and deviate from prescribed political behavior, and put the social order under pressure. As he has claimed: We must maintain a tough stance on corruption. Showing zero tolerance, the fight covers all those holding public office without exception…We will establish a tight-knit scrutiny network, reinforce relevant institutions, and let discipline inspection cut like a blade through corruption and misconduct. (Xi 2018: 121)

This zero-approach to the anti-corruption campaign has been echoed in other policy areas as well, as in the zero-COVID-19 policy and the zerotolerance of ethnic separatism that has led to full low-tech and high-tech repression in Xinjiang and subsequent condemnation from other states, international organizations, and even the United Nations (OHCHR 2022). Much of China’s campaign and policies devoted to maintaining social stability are thus dressed in the language of physicians—speaking of viruses, the healthy and unhealthy. As Xi Jinping remarked at a conference on legal challenges: As an ancient physician noted, “Remove health risks before they emerge and treat ailments before they are serious, thus preventing illnesses before they arise”. To develop the rule of law we must prioritize prevention and defuse potential risks while treating symptoms and solving existing problems. (Xi 2022d: 340)

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However, zero-campaigns and harsh policies do not come without costs. The forceful anti-corruption effort effectively stifled entrepreneurial innovation, public–private initiatives, and new and more limiting laws on nongovernmental organizations stemmed the vitality of civil society.

Confucian Loyalty In addition to re-activating the Party’s heritage of Leninist greed, Xi Jinping has frequently invoked ancient Chinese traditions of loyalty. In the four volumes of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, there are plenty of quotes from Confucian mandarins demonstrating their loyalty to emperors as well as their concern for poor people. In so doing, Xi adds weight and historical resonance to his moral mission to restore China’s greatness. Nevertheless, scholars such as Zhao Dingxin have argued that Confucianism’s revival is unlikely in China because neoConfucians lack institutional support in China (2015: 374). The view of other researchers is more optimistic in this regard. Some have maintained that hierarchical rule in China is justified on the basis of classical Chinese notions of political meritocracy, especially due to the country’s size as a large-scale political community (Bell and Wang 2020: 73). Certainly, even without organizational backing, the moral-political legacy of Confucianism continues to impregnate across East Asia. The foremost beliefs are that the interests of the harmonious community shall override individual liberties, that good government means prioritizing collective economic well-being more than individual rights, and that there should be a propensity toward an authoritarian mode of governance (Shin 2012: 320). Political rhetoric does not equal the institutionalization of Confucianism as a state ideology. Nonetheless, this school of thought is gaining ground as part of the practical ideology of the communist Party, as Xi Jinping has progressively over the years been nudging the Communist Party in the direction of giving support to Confucian ideas. In a speech in Confucius hometown Qufu in November 2013, Xi Jinping stated that he wished to “emphasize national studies and our traditional culture”. He compared China’s capitalism to that of the West: “Western capitalism has had setbacks: a financial crisis, a credit crisis and a crisis of confidence – and their self-image wavers. Western countries have openly or surreptitiously, started to reflect on and compare themselves with China’s politics, economy and routings” (Buckley 2014).

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The hierarchical structure that Confucian philosophers profess is hard to digest for people who advocate Western liberal democracy, yet, as Higgins has contended: “the Confucians make a persuasive case that loyalty is prerequisite to the flourishing family and the well-functioning state” (2013: 35). It is such a harmonious and well-governed nation that President Xi envisages for the People’s Republic when it will celebrate its hundredth anniversary in 2049. While Xi Jinping in his collected speeches mostly bring the Leninist idea of absolute loyalty into play, there are also many references to Confucian notions of loyalty. Of particular interest are references to ancient traditions of selflessness. At a meeting with the Central Committee on November 11, 2021, Xi Jinping quoted from The Classic of Loyalty (Zhong Jing 忠经), a work attributed to Ma Rong, a statesman of the Eastern Han dynasty in the first century AD: “Selflessness in governance creates social equity.” Our Party has no interests of its own – this is the source of our courage and strength in self-reform. It is because of this that we have regularly examined our conduct and reflected on mistakes from a purely materialist perspective. It is because of this that we have been able to overcome attempts by individual interest groups, power groups, and privileged strata to corrupt us. We have been able to seek out and punish Party members who have done wrong under the influence of these groups. (Xi 2022c: 630)

Ma Rong, who lived between 79 and 166 AD, also stated that loyalty was the most important virtue for people when organizing their community. When Xi Jinping met with county Party secretaries at the Central Party School in Beijing on January 12, 2015, he also resorted the words of Ma Rong: Loyalty to the Party is an important criterion for county Party Secretaries. There could be many more standards for evaluation, but loyalty is central, as “the greatest virtue is none other than loyalty”. (Xi 2017d: 154)

The core of Confucian ethics concerns human relationships, and within the family, the concept of filial piety outlines the relational virtue of 孝 (Xiao), which is the loyalty between family members. Outside the family, the two concepts of 忠 (Zhong) and 恕 (Shu) comprise commitment and allegiance between subjects and superiors. Zhong is mostly translated as loyalty, whereas Shu is understood as deference or obedience. Xiao, or filial piety, involves loyalty toward senior members of the family, such as

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father and older brothers (Higgins 2013: 22). Shu is what governs relationships with subordinates, yet this is not what Xi Jinping dwells much on in his speeches. Rather, it is Zhong, which specifically refers to the “steadfast support of someone in a superior position” (Nivison 1996). As Kathleen Higgins notes: “the subordinate spares no effort to facilitate the attainment of the superior’s aims” (2013: 32). As “sparing no effort” is close to Lenin’s notion of absolute loyalty, about giving one’s all for the revolutionary cause, it is quite evident that the Leninist and Confucian ideals of subordinates’ loyalty in “Xi Jinping-thought” bleed into each other. Loyalty from lower to higher ranks within the Communist Party is of crucial importance to the general secretary of the Party, but the loyalty of the armed forces, the People’s Liberation Army to the Party, is also a top priority to Xi Jinping. In his report to the nineteenth Party Congress, Xi explained that the army’s absolute loyalty to the Party depended on the soldiers studying the “thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”, that is, Xi’s political thought and ideas: We must continue to educate our officers and soldiers with the Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era and our Party’s philosophy on strengthening the military for the new era, as a foundation for maintaining the military’s absolute loyalty to our Party. (Xi 2017a)

It is beyond the scope in this short text to expand on the topic of the army’s relationship to the Party’s top leader. Suffice it to say that Xi has made it abundantly clear that he only tolerates the utmost loyalty from the armed forces, to him in his capacity as Chairman of the Party’s Military Affairs Commission, and their de facto commander. What Xi Jinping demands of the red army, i.e., the Party’s own army, in terms of Party-building and loyalty within its ranks comes across in his numerous visits to PLA headquarters (Xinhua 2013). In a speech to the navy in Guangzhou in 2013, Xi stipulated that the armed forces “should be totally loyal to the Party” (Tsang 2016: 34). It is also beyond elaboration in this study to expand on the issue of loyalty between the subjectcitizen and the authoritarian leader, which is a topic that merits more investigation. The personalization and centralization of power under Xi Jinping have undoubtedly been developed into the rise of a cult of personality around him in state media and propaganda, a matter that warrants further research. On October 27, 2022, this issue of devotion to, and

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loyalty to the supreme leader, was illustrated by a violent incident at the gates of the People’s Republic’s diplomatic mission in Manchester, the United Kingdom. Not long after the twentieth Party Congress, an exiled democracy activist from Hong Kong protested outside the Manchester Consulate General where he was beaten up by Chinese security guards. Admitting responsibility, Beijing’s consul general in Manchester, Zheng Xiyuan, explained that “it was his ‘duty’ to intervene as the protesters were ‘abusing my country, my leader’” (Abdul 2022).

Repudiation of Xi Jinping’s Predecessors: “Leninist Greed” Versus Capitalist Greed The policies of China’s paramount leader in the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping, centered on reform (gaige 改革), primarily economic reform by setting free the entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism. This was a deliberate move away from the ideologism of Mao Zedong to more pragmatist politics. After the devastation of ideological fervor of Mao’s initiation of the cultural revolution and the Red Guards, the process of deideologization of society was enormously important to Deng. As he famously proclaimed: “development is a hard truth” and “getting rich is glorious”. While many prospered thanks to unprecedented double-digit figures of GDP growth, under the rule of his successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, Chinese people also witnessed the social consequences. Alongside the stunning economic performance came inequalities between the rich and poor, and between urban centers and the countryside. Deng wanted to set free the spirit of economic dynamism of the Chinese people, but he had to fight conservative factions in the Party for full implementation of his reform policies. However, he also acknowledged the conservatives fear of free-wheeling economic freedom and that opening-up would contaminate the minds of the Chinese people, prompting political freedom and democratization propelled by outside forces. Deng wished to maintain stability and uphold a tenuous equilibrium between control and freedom. His balancing act was informed by profound insight; it was near total control over society and the economy that had made China stagnant during the reign of Mao Zedong. What he desired was control to an extent that safeguarded the Party’s monopoly of political power, yet this control calculus was challenged by social forces

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such as the democracy movement in 1989 (Lagerkvist 2016) and increasingly by a new class of private entrepreneurs that arose in the following decades. Under Jiang Zemin’s time as the Party’s general secretary, from 1992 to 2002, the Communist Party decided to accommodate this new social class of entrepreneurs into the Party’s fold. At the time, Jiang’s political notion of “the three represents theory” was hailed as a socialist theoretical innovation. The argument was that the Party should welcome society’s most productive forces within its ranks. By co-opting private entrepreneurs into the Party, they would in theory align with the Party program and undergo an ideological transformation. In practice, however, these red capitalists were not easily co-opted, and to the contrary, the unintended consequence was that many Party cadres were ensnared by the spirit of capitalism. The contributions to both economic growth and the technological innovation of private industrialists, such as Alibaba’s Jack Ma, were beyond doubt. Nonetheless, suspicion toward the ideological inclinations of the rising class of tech-workers and their tech-billionaire bosses remained strong among conservative elements in the Party. Their nightmare scenario was “an unravelling of the economy and destabilization of the Party-state” (Tsang and Men 2016: 341). As opportunities to cooperate with “red capitalists” led to them lining the pockets of cadres at all administrative levels of the political system, it was evident that capitalist greed had trapped Party members less loyal to the Party manifesto. Thus, the Communist Party underwent a serious process of withering from within its own ranks. According to the many instances referred to by Xi Jinping in his Xi Jinping: The Governance of China series, some senior leaders even formed their own alumni-groups within the Party. Whereas Jiang Zemin’s political adaptation of Marxism, “the three represents theory” centered on co-optation of capitalist forces, Jiang’s successor, Hu Jintao, instead focused on the rifts that “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, i.e., capitalism, had created in society. Hu’s program for a more cohesive social fabric was motivated by the imperative to mitigate the inequality that had been unleashed by setting free the forces of capitalist accumulation. Xi Jinping, however, in contrast to his two predecessors, has crafted policies that are holistic and systemic as they center on all-encompassing governance. To an extent, this is a continuation of Hu Jintao’s act to rebalance the diverging forces in society that began under Jiang Zemin’s rule. Xi Jinping’s political ideas have focused more on strengthening the Party

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by rectifying its moral integrity, bolstering the top leadership’s capacity to control the Party apparatus and state bureaucracy, and balancing the need for equality and economic growth which is dependent on the private sector and technological innovation. The speeches in Xi Jinping : The Governance of China illustrate that Xi Jinping is—like Deng Xiaoping before him—engaged in a delicate balancing act. To Xi, however, it is as important to letting the Leninist genie out of its bottle, as it is to shove the private-capitalist genie back to a place where it can be controlled. Nevertheless, in so doing, fundamental and structural economic reforms away from state planning are further delayed into the future (Naughton 2020). It is precisely such a notion of splendid oversight and planning, by “top-level” design, that informs Xi Jinping’s approach to organization of the state bureaucracy. It is an ambiguous idea, which is not well defined in Xi Jinping’s speeches. Nor have Chinese academics, such as Dai Yanjun at the Central Party School, contributed much to making the concept clearer (CCDI 2020). Thus, it is not surprising that some scholars have altogether dismissed the concept, saying “There is no ‘top-level design,’ despite frequent use of that term by policymakers” (Naughton 2020: 63). However, as ideology permeates both law and policy in China, other scholars argued that it is necessary to study in greater depth the concept of top-level design that the Party “envisages for its governing architecture” (Creemers and Trevaskes 2021: 3). Moreover, as demonstrated by Tsai and Zhou, top-level design has been the means for Xi to centralize political clout to leading small groups (2019: 20). As eight of these small groups are headed by Xi, the “mini politburos” effectively rule by what Barry Naughton has aptly termed grand steerage. They are clearly “Xi’s signature governance innovation” (Johnson et al. 2017). As such, these miniature politburos work to effectively make possible the organization of both discipline and loyalty, two of the key ingredients of Xi Jinping’s new state ideology.

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of China III Speech at the First Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, October 25, 2017. Xi, J. 2020b. Strengthen Party Self-Governance as an Ongoing Mission. In The Governance of China III , 584–596. Part of the speech at the Second Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. January 11, 2018. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Xi, J. 2020c. Initiative and Resolve in Reinforcing the Party’s Political Foundations. In Xi Jinping: The Governance of China III , 114–123. Xi Jinping’s Speech at the sixth group study session of the Political Bureau. June 29, 2018. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Xi, J. 2020d. Strengthen Discipline and Scrutiny over the Exercise of Power. In Xi Jinping: The Governance of China III , 632–637. Main points of the speech at the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. January 13, 2020. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Xi, J. 2022a. Make Further Progress in Party Self-Governance. In Xi Jinping: The Governance of China IV , 638–643. Main points of the speech at the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. January 18, 2022. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Xi, J. 2022b. Reinforce Our Party’s Political Foundations for Unity and Solidarity. In Xi Jinping: The Governance of China IV , 56–57. Part of a speech at the second full assembly of the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, November 11, 2021. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Xi, J. 2022c. Self-Reform: The Second Answer to Breaking the Cycle of Rise and Fall. In Xi Jinping: The Governance of China IV , 629–633. Part of the speech at the second full assembly of the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Xi, J. 2022d. Provide Sound Legal Guarantees for Socialist Modernization. Part of a speech at the Central Conference on Law-based Governance, November 16, 2020. In Xi Jinping: The Governance of China IV , 329–346. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Xinhua News Agency. 2013. Xi Jinping Inspects the Navy’s Sanya Headquarters, Encouraging Officers and Soldiers to Keep in Mind and Sacrifice for Realization the Goal of a Strong Navy (习近平视察海军驻三亚部队时勉励官兵 牢记强军目标献身强军实践). 12 April. http://cpc.people.com.cn/n/2013/ 0412/c64094-21107967.html (accessed Nov 26, 2022). Walder, A.G. 2020. China’s National Trajectory. In Fateful Decisions: Choices That Will Shape China’s Future, ed. Thomas Fingar and Jean C. Oi, 335–357. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wedeman, A. 2012. Double Paradox: Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Wedeman, A. 2020. Anticorruption Forever? In Fateful Decisions: Choices That Will Shape China’s Future, ed. Thomas Fingar and Jean C. Oi, 82–106. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wu, G. 2023. The Rise of Xi Jinping’s Young Guards: Generational Change in the CCP Leadership. May. https://asiasociety.org/policy-institute/rise-xi-jin pings-young-guards-generational-change-ccp-leadership. Zhang, H. 2022. China Punishes 4.7 Million People in Decade-Long AntiGraft Campaign. Global Times, June 30. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/ 202206/1269498.shtml (accessed Nov 26, 2022). Zhao, D. 2015. The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Loyalty Toward State and Nation: Top-Level Design and “Moral Careers”

Abstract Top-level design has become Xi’s pet phrase for organizational reform and specifically the enforcement of discipline in malfunctioning state agencies. It involves acquiring a bird’s eye view of the field, and from there initiating full-scale and multi-level planning from the top of the management pyramid, ideally making it possible to overcome inertia, risks of failure, and weaknesses in complex governance systems. In a more foreboding time and a digitally well-connected society, the Party-state, under Xi Jinping, envisages the need for more control and security measures. In his speeches, Xi Jinping has made it clear that he foreshadows more active involvement by social media and tech companies in the efforts of top-level design. As illustrated by the creation of national and local social credit systems, active censoring of online content the Party-state seeks to foster citizens’ moral careers and cultivate the political loyalty of citizens. Nonetheless, this endeavor is fraught with risks. Keywords Top-level design · Patriotic loyalty · Erwin Goffman · Moral career · Social credit system · Mo Yan · Jack Ma · “Nationalist greed” · Operation Fox Hunt

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Lagerkvist, Organized Loyalty, Politics and Development of Contemporary China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40037-7_3

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Political loyalty to the Communist Party is not demanded of non-Party members, at least not in a direct way. What there is no doubt about, however, is that all Chinese citizens must be loyal to the Chinese state and nation. Patriotic loyalty is significant as it can, and often does, transfer legitimacy to the ruling clique of a country. Thus, it works to conceal, for both insiders and outside observers a potential lack of political loyalty. As Xi’s report to the nineteenth Party Congress in 2017 made clear: “We will encourage our people to strive for excellence and to develop stronger virtues, respect the elderly, love families, and be loyal to the country and the people” (Xinhua 2017a: 38). This exhortation, to not let one’s own nation down, is directed toward Chinese people living both at home and abroad as exchange students, visiting scholars, and businessmen. The controversy surrounding the Nobel Prize laureate in literature, Mo Yan, is quite illustrative of how Party members in various professions work to instill political loyalty by invoking both national and Party traditions. Mo has been criticized by other Chinese writers and within the creative community, after having defended Mao Zedong’s infamous decree on artists obliged to adhere to Party ideology, as well as praising Xi Jinping’s leadership on multiple occasions (Philips 2015; Leng 2017). As argued by Willy Lam, a Hong Kong-based political analyst: “The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Mo Yan is an apparatchik in the official cultural establishment, one of whose missions is to ensure the political loyalty of the country’s literati (2015: 264)”. There are other illuminating personal cases that testify to the increasing pressure to be political and patriotic loyal subjects in the People’s Republic. For example, after having criticized China’s state regulators at a conference in Shanghai on October 24, 2020, world-renowned entrepreneur and founder of the e-commerce giant Alibaba, Jack Ma, was effectively silenced for daring to criticize the competence of the government (Zhong and Stevenson 2021). His comments were especially daring since the Communist Party had earlier that year officially demanded that “businesses must ‘maintain high consistency’ with the Party regarding the political aspects of position, direction and principles” (Reuters 2020). Following in the footsteps of his predecessor Jiang Zemin, who invited successful members of the business community into the Party, Xi Jinping has worked hard to ensure the loyalty of private businessmen. However, in addition to encourage entrepreneurs to become Party members, Xi has sought to further embed the Party inside these very private companies, a process that started under Hu Jintao’s leadership (McGregor

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2010: 2016). At the nineteenth Party Congress in 2017, an amendment was made to the Party’s constitution, stipulating that any organization (company, school, research institution, military unit, and governmental institution) that has between three and fifty Party members should form a Party branch (dangzhibu, 党支部). Enterprises are strongly encouraged to form Party branches, and if they have more than three Party members, it is mandatory to form a Party branch (Schubert and Heberer 2021: 115). If encouragement is insufficient to attain political loyalty, then disciplinary measures will be taken. For instance, in the stipendiary contract between individual exchange students and the State Education Commission, “acting in a way so that the interests of the state are compromised” is listed as the first of ten reasons for annulling the contract.1 Formulating such a vague clause makes it possible to accuse individual speech acts and behavior for being detrimental to either the nation or the Party-state. Moreover, the Chinese government’s “Operation Fox-hunt” has been an important part of the anti-corruption campaign, seeking to bring corrupt officials who fled China to go back for disciplinary actions or prosecution. Just as in cases that concern dissidents or individuals from ethnic minorities, who have escaped repression and discrimination in China, state operatives and agents have pressured loyalty-breaching people to return (Safeguard Defenders 2022). Thus, loyalty to China is expected regardless of where in the world a citizen, or exiled citizen, is located. This demand of patriotic allegiance can be understood as “nationalist greed”, as exemplified by the law and the practice of China not accepting dual citizenship. It is an issue that concerns the Party-state’s worry that you cannot fully trust a person who holds a foreign passport. This argument is prevalent in other Asian countries as well, and not just authoritarian states, as Japan is of the same view. Regarding the carrying of two passports, Jelena Dzankic of the Global Citizenship Observatory has pointed out that there “is a belief that it can create divided loyalties among citizens” (Yeung 2021). Given the tense geopolitical situation in the beginning of the 2020s, a new concern for many countries is the loyalty that the Chinese state expects from its citizens regarding information provision. In legislation, the state’s intelligence and security agencies expect full cooperation from citizens. Article 14 of the Intelligence Law grants intelligence agencies the authority to insist on this support: “state

1 A copy of this document of the state education commission is on file with the author.

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intelligence work organs, when legally carrying forth intelligence work, may demand that concerned organs, organizations, or citizens provide needed support, assistance, and cooperation” (Tanner 2017). Moreover, according to evidence from a number of cases, it is also obvious that if political or patriotic loyalties are breached, then the Party-state will be ambitious in seeking the return of Chinese citizens to prosecute them. Forced repatriation is regularly sought by diplomatic channels, but can also take clandestine ways. The latter phenomenon has been described as involuntary repatriation or “transnational repression”, a practice that the Chinese Party-state frequently resorts to (Freedom House 2021). Ideological cues are employed to instill loyalty, but if not received properly by the individual, disciplinary action is taken to prevent disloyalty. To enhance effective action meticulous and sophisticated organization is needed. In the last decade, the Communist Party has taken steps to improve organization in what is often referred to “in an all-about way” and according to a principle called top-level design. After becoming leader of the Communist Party in 2012, Xi Jinping was interviewed in a Russian television program, where the host Sergei Brilyov asked Xi Jinping about his plans for reform and more specifically how he would govern. Xi outlined that international economic competition was fierce, which prompted China to implement a reform plan consisting of more than 330 measures in fifteen policy areas. The most important of these areas were: the economy, politics, culture, society, ecological process, and Party-building. Xi emphasized that: “China’s reform has been greatly furthered in both breadth and depth. Top-level design is needed to advance reform” (Xi 2014a: 112). This is the first and only mentioning of the term “top-level design” (dingceng sheji 顶层设计) in the first volume of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China book series. In subsequent volumes, the term is used more often. In the latest, volume IV, top-level design is mentioned eight times in the collected speeches that were given between February 2020 and May 2022. Adjectives that often accompany the use of top-level design are “holistic”, “complex”, and “systematic”. As Xi argued in a talk on the need for further reform of Party-state institutions at a meeting with state officials on July 5, 2019: We should facilitate the systematic integration of reform achievements, review and apply the results in a coordinated manner, and make various systems more mature and well-defined as a whole. (Xi 2020g: 133)

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The Chinese Communist Party is a “high-degree organization” that under Xi is dedicated to integrating and improving different systems of governance and taking a holistic view of Chinese society from the top and down. According to a definition by organization scholars Ahrne and Brunsson, such an organization consists of (a) large membership, (b) hierarchical decision-making, (c) authority, (d) rules, (e) monitoring, and (f) sanctions (2011). A high-degree of complexity in a large organization such as the largest political Party in the world, which takes on the complexity of a huge social system, obviously entails an organizational challenge of exceptional magnitude. In a speech to the Party’s national conference on organization work on July 3, 2018, Xi Jinping laid out the Communist Party’s new organizational line in the following way: 1. fully embrace the Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era; 2. focus on improving the organizational system; 3. train high-caliber officials who are loyal to the Party, have moral integrity, and demonstrate a keen sense of responsibility; 4. gather talented people who are patriotic and dedicated, evaluate them in terms of both political integrity and professional competence, with priority given to integrity, and appoint people on their merits; 5. guarantee a strong organization in upholding and strengthening overall Party leadership (Xi 2020f: 598). After having cleaned up the Communist Party with forceful discipline and thereafter focused more on fostering loyalty, Xi Jinping turned to disciplining the state’s institutions. The high-degree organization of the now “loyal and united” Party, characterized by the standard features outlined above and armed with powerful and hierarchical top-level design, set out to cleanse the vast officialdom from corrupt practices and overcome inertia. On October 28, 2019, Xi described the usefulness of top-level design in a speech to the members of the Central Committee in this way: First, upholding and improving Chinese socialism and modernizing our system and capacity for governance is key to achieving the Two Centenary Goals. Building a modern socialist country and realizing national rejuvenation are two great goals our Party has always pursued”… “Compared with the past, reform now aims to solve deep-seated problems of our systems

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and mechanisms, and this sets higher requirements for top-level design. It becomes more imperative to pursue reform in a systematic, holistic, and coordinated way, and to establish frameworks of systems and institutions. (Xi 2020h: 137)

Top-level design has become Xi’s pet phrase for organizational reform and specifically the enforcement of discipline in malfunctioning state agencies. Then again, as previously mentioned it was his predecessor Hu Jintao, who in his report to the eighteenth Party Congress paved the way for top-level design by emphasizing the need to implement reform “in a holistic way according to plan” (Lee 2017: 329). Thus, top-level design was already on the table when Hu Jintao ruled as a way to target the problems of division and corruption that had become worse under both him and his predecessor Jiang Zemin’s rule. The year that Hu stepped down as leader, in 2012, the concept appeared in the twelfth Five-Year Plan. The concept stems from top-down design as understood in the theory of systemics, whereby a grand and complex goal is identified and then broken down into smaller objectives. Liu He, one former member of the Politburo and close aide of Xi, is credited with being the inventor of the specific term top-level design. Around the time of the twentieth Party Congress in 2022, “top-level designer” was used as a specific term to depict the grand planners at the top of the Party (Li 2022a). Toplevel design is somewhat similar to what organization scholars refer to as metagovernance, sometimes called the governance of governance, a heuristic concept on how to deal with complexity (Meuleman 2019: 73). It involves acquiring a bird’s eye view of the field, and from there initiating full-scale and multi-level planning from the top of the management pyramid, ideally making it possible to overcome inertia, risks of failure, and weaknesses in complex governance systems. Thus, the idea of top-level design percolated quite some time before Xi’s takeover under Hu Jintao, but the concept can be traced back even further, to the father of Chinese rocket science and China’s space program, Qian Xuesen. Qian theorized on how to best manage what he called an “Open Complex Giant System” (Lee 2017; Chin and Lin 2022). As inertia in the Chinese political system originates from the nature of “fragmented authoritarianism” (Lieberthal and Oksenberg 1988; Mertha 2009), “leading small groups” are often created by the central leadership in Beijing. These groups coordinate issues that cut across ministry and agency silos, which hampers the implementation of reform policy.

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However, since 2018, these important groups are no longer just a coordinating mechanism; they are also “decision-making institutions” (Tsai and Zhou 2019: 19). The transformation of the power of these groups testifies to their increasing importance in overcoming policy implementation problems related to inertia, what Xi Jinping often calls “bureaucratism”, and fragmented authority. In essence, the leading small groups are intended to solve the protracted and classical principal-agency problems of any bureaucratic system, by cutting administrative corners and promoting the integration of different agencies (Niskanen 1968). These new groups amount to organizational change according to the model of top-level design, which under Xi means that they are hierarchical, centralized, and personalized. These leading groups are personalized since the most important of these, namely the Central Commission for Comprehensively Deepening Reforms, the Central Cybersecurity and Informatization Commission, the National Security Commission, and the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission, are all led by him. To other cross-sectoral leading small groups, he has appointed loyalists. Toplevel design has, by centralizing power in the top office of the general secretary, also effectively by-passed colleagues in the Politburo Standing Committee. As Tsai and Zhou point out: “These ‘Xi-in-command’ groups have unexpectedly turned into ‘mini politburos’” (2019: 20). However, despite China’s transforming into more traditional notions of its imagined “national self” through the specific character of institutional changes and employment of the concept of loyalty, organizational developments in China do not occur in isolation; they mirror worldwide trends of autocratization (Diamond 2019), centralization, increasingly top-down hierarchical rule, and what Robert Kagan called the “springtime for strongmen” (2019). The personalization and centralization of personal power by “strongmen” leaders in different polities such as Hungary, the Philippines, Turkey, and Russia are oft-mentioned examples of increased levels of authoritarian rule. Nevertheless, democratic politics and societies have also caught the winds of authoritarianism (Lagerkvist 2016). In recent decades and across a range of both authoritarian and democratic political systems, three particularly strong inputs for hierarchical rule and the return to regulation have appeared. These are the rise of new digital technologies, risks of market failure, and risks of social disorder (Bell and Hindmoor 2009: 77). However, echoing Franz Schurmann’s idea of “national self” and country-specific characters, these

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factors take on different characteristics in different political cultures. In China, Xi Jinping’s answer to risks posed by market failure and marketinduced inequality, corruption, and the ensuing risk of social breakdown is to strengthen the Communist Party by insisting on Party-building and keeping both the Party’s members and citizens loyal to the Party-state’s moral mission to achieve lasting greatness for the People’s Republic of China.

Toward a State of Maximum Security In his report to the twentieth Party Congress, Xi Jinping mentioned the word security more than eighty times, twice as many times as in his previous report to the nineteenth Party Congress in 2017. It is likely a reflection of the unstable geopolitical situation after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In uncertain times, arguments for more security and strongman politics carry weight universally, and needless to say China is no exception. Domestic securitization was on Xi’s agenda very early in his first term as general secretary. The campaign to fight corruption within the Party and officialdom was paralleled by an intensified security drive and a focus on “stability maintenance”, which diminished freedom of speech and the professional activities of independent-minded investigative journalists, defense lawyers, and public intellectuals. In 2013, a sustained “securitization drive” was planned and new legislation was implemented alongside the anti-corruption campaign. A new National Security Commission headed by Xi Jinping was established and new laws on national security, a cyber security law, and a foreign NGO management law were all implemented. Some law scholars argued that the national security law “manifested a neo-totalitarian ambition to reach into every sector of society” (Gan and Yu 2015). After five years of the anti-corruption campaign, the nineteenth Party Congress decided in 2017 to create a new government body to merge with the Party’s central disciplinary inspection committee. The new body was named the National Commission for Discipline and Inspection. The 2017 Congress also made the historical decision to eliminate term mandates for the general secretary of the Communist Party. This was followed by a similar decision at the National People’s Congress in 2018 to scrap term limits for the presidency. From the beginning of Xi’s second term as the Party’s general secretary, governance has taken a turn toward “maximum security”.

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Taken as a whole the governance of China is a picture of increasing social and political control and the politics of securitization. However, the consolidation of Xi Jinping’s personal power and the intra-Party struggle after his rise to power in 2012 does not fully explain the profound process of securitization. Undoubtedly, the anti-corruption campaign was useful for settling personal vendettas, purging the Party’s central committee of members of rival factions, and installing loyalists to important positions. Nevertheless, after the twentieth Party Congress in 2022 and as described in the previous chapter, it is evident that the campaign shows little sign of coming to a halt. The twentieth Party Congress report that Xi Jinping delivered focused heavily on uncertainty and the need for further efforts to improve China’s security. Despite Xi having a firmer grip on the Party than any leader since Mao Zedong, under him China seems to need more security and discipline than ever before. One reason for the stronger emphasis could be that state agencies have identified, perhaps by culling vast amounts of big data from social media accounts, growing discontent among some groups in society. Such discoveries could motivate more security. Xi Jinping has many times expounded on the perennial problem of having to adapt governance systems to rectify and correct disloyal and deviant citizens outside the Communist Party. To the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee on October 31, 2019, he maintained: The vitality of a system lies in its implementation. Some people today still lack reverence for our systems. They do not act in accordance with them and even bend them to their will. Some make every effort to exploit loopholes and circumvent them. Some fear or are reluctant to obey them, and try by every means to evade the restrictions and supervision they impose. Therefore, we need to strengthen enforcement and supervision to put our systems into better practice. (Xi 2020i: 154)

Repressive control to maintain social stability was easier for people to tolerate under conditions of double-digit GDP growth. As prospects for high growth in the 2020s look dim, along with increasing difficulties in accessing Western markets and rising unemployment, the decades of “accepting authoritarianism” may be ending. In this more foreboding time and digitally connected society, it comes as little surprise that the

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Party-state, under Xi Jinping, now envisages the need for more algorithmic control and security measures assisted by new technologies and artificial intelligence.

Algorithmic Control and the Shaping of Moral Careers Already in the 1990s, the “techno-cadres” in Chinese government became aware that “informatization” could help to reform governance and amend weaknesses in the vast administrative apparatus (Lagerkvist 2004). In the beginning of the new millennium, former Prime Minister Zhu Rongji told the national leading group on science, technology, and education that: “We must emphasize the usage of the means of informatization, in order to strengthen the efficiency of government work. This will make the supervisory work of the government more serious, effective, increase the proximity to people, and raise the efficiency of service. It will make every level of government clean, industrious, pragmatic, and highly efficient” (China 2003 yearbook 2003: 9). The efforts of these technocadres to employ informatization and digitalization for the purposes of both social services and control have continued under Premier Zhu’s successors Wen Jiabao and Li Keqiang. As Xi Jinping outlined in a speech in 2020: We should strengthen and reform grassroots social governance, and carry on and improve the Fengqiao model in the new era – building stronger urban and rural communities, strengthening grid-based management and services, and improving the mechanism to prevent, mediate and resolve social conflicts and disputes by multiple means at the grassroots level. All of this will contribute to social stability. (Xi 2022a: 67)

The digital grid-based management that Xi referred to in his talk was introduced as early as 2004 to invigorate government work at the lowest rung of the administrative ladder. It uses geo-coding technology, QR codes, and data collection to provide better community service to citizens, but also enhance social control and prevent instability (Mittelstadt 2021: 2). The latter objective dominated “grassroots government” during the COVID-19 pandemic, to make sure lockdowns in Chinese cities were fully enforced (Huang 2023: 15). Grid-based social governance may well come to provide the social security that many vulnerable groups will need

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in the future, but currently, the local grid managers mostly mimic the top-level design that is now used to “holistically” manage society, and that means focusing more on stability maintenance, not service provision (Tang 2020). In his work The Total Institution, Erwin Goffman introduced the term “moral career” to classify those processes of self-change that are subjected to value-laden social judgments of (dis)taste, (dis)approval, and (in)tolerance (1991). For almost three years of recurring lockdowns to fight the spread of the COVID-19 corona virus between 2020 and 2023, Xi Jinping’s China resembled a total institution to the outside world. However, the social protests against the severe measures of the zeroCOVID-19 policy that began in major Chinese cities on November 2022 showed that the willingness to indefinitely “eating bitterness” (chiku 吃苦) had ended for at least some segments of the population. Nevertheless, China is not a total institution and despite all the disciplinary measures taken by Xi to cleanse the Party from corrupt elements, not even the Chinese Communist Party is a total institution. It has basically become too large an organization to earn that label. Even during intense phases of totalitarian control such as Maoist ideological indoctrination during the cultural revolution, people could find ways to escape thought control. It is nevertheless comprehensible that, aided by the legacies of Leninist and Confucian political loyalty, Xi Jinping is intent on seeking to morally engineer and shape the moral careers of both Party cadres and citizens. Thus, people in China whose conduct is deemed inappropriate and who appear immune to what Tom Burns (1992: 169) calls the “ordinary normalising force of socialisation are…subject to regimes of improvement”. This is because they challenge the sanctity of established rules, norms, and values, which threatens to disrupt the interaction order. For example, someone who abides by the norm may win cultural approval, while someone who does not tends to face negative sanctioning. In the latter case, an individual may persist and develop a deviant, and therefore immoral, career (Becker 1963). Subject to both government sanctions and government-approved social control by the community, in Xi Jinping’s China such deviancy can be conceptualized as a “disloyal moral career”. The Communist Party actively promotes moral careers for Party cadres, government officials, and ordinary citizens, ceaselessly seeking to (re)shape their identities and moral careers by demanding rectification of “unhealthy” thoughts and immoral behavior. If the advice is unheeded, deviant behavior will be sanctioned

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and punished. As almost every Chinese citizen today has a smartphone and often several social media accounts, fostering a healthy internet and wholesome digital communications has become very important for China’s leaders in maintaining social and political stability. As Xi has pronounced: It is a long-term task to ensure that online public opinion is healthy and sound. We should innovate and improve online publicity, and use Internet communication rules to advocate things wholesome and positive, and disseminate and put into practice the core socialist values. We should properly handle timing, extent and efficiency so as to make our cyberspace wholesome and clean. (Xi 2014b: 219)

Everyday, propaganda departments and police agencies at all administrative levels—central, provincial, and local—uphold the Party-state’s “thought management” by cultivating moral careers to keep internet communication healthy. For over ten years of Xi Jinping’s rule, the anticorruption campaign was supported by a general mood of crisis, as people from all social classes held political institutions to be too corrupt. This discourse on institutions and their leaders is still mirrored in arguments about Chinese society in general being overly immoral. Arguments on ways to improve trust are ubiquitous. The attempt to establish a national social credit system feeds into this moral discourse that facilitates the Party’s anti-corruption struggle. Ordinary people have lamented the lack of interpersonal trust, and studies have reported low levels of social capital. Such observations center on the consequences of the transition to a market economy, followed by mass migration from rural provinces to urban areas. Huge influx of migrant workers to cities transformed the social world into a world of strangers of dubious origin and intent. In his work China in Ten Words the novelist, Yu Hua offered two explanations for what he calls China’s “moral bankruptcy”. The first of these elucidations is the breakneck speed of China’s economic development. The other is the absence of political reforms and the tangible presence of taboos and a lack of freedom. To Yu Hua, these are the two overarching factors that have made opportunistic fraud among the country’s citizens as well as corruption among Party members and civil servants a strong norm. People who do not engage in graft, plagiarism, and swindling are considered backward. The sociologist Sun Liping even argued, shortly before

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Xi Jinping took power, that “society is quickly moving toward collapse!” (2011). The ethicist He Huaihong has summed up the current situation as such: Fundamental trust and fundamental kindness are being lost in our society, sometimes at a shocking pace…we are now in a state of transition: the old has been destroyed, but the new is not yet established. In the midst of these wrenching changes, a litany of severe moral problems have emerged. But a society’s moral habits can be changed, and so can a nation’s moral character. (He 2015: 123)

This broader moral discourse on society’s ills was seized upon by the Communist Party. The creation of a nationwide system for social governance is part of the efforts intended to improve the “moral careers” of citizens. Unlike the systems of credit control in democratic countries, the coordination of vast volumes of data is not only a question of financial records, but also one of fostering moral careers (Goffman 1991). China’s social credit system will, according to the Chinese government, also register opinions and attempt to grade people’s characters. The system also contains elements of “opinion control”, making use of people everywhere to report trust-breaking acts to the authorities. It is argued under item V(1) in the State Council Notice that the government must give rein to the masses in appraisal, discussion, criticism, and reports, shaping social deterrence through social moral condemnation and censuring trustbreaking acts of members of society. Moreover, it is stated that there is a need to “establish rewarded reporting systems for acts of breach of trust”. For some scholars, increased monitoring of individual behavior and data collection, through a country-wide social credit system, was framed as a remedy to the moral crisis that permeated Chinese society. A document from China’s government, the “State Council Notice concerning Issuance of the Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014–2020)” (State Council Notice 21 2014), revealed how such a new social credit system was intended to work. The document indicated how collapse narratives, popular anxiety, and a crisis mentality had yielded a rare opportunity to increase the oversight of citizens who differ from the state-prescribed moral career. It was believed that the nationwide anti-corruption campaign would be aided by establishing a social credit system that was supported by big data and artificial intelligence. The system was originally expected to be fully operational by

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2020, yet in 2022 it had not been implemented to the extent envisioned in 2014. The system’s Orwellian character received considerable attention, but also much skepticism regarding its implementation (Creemers 2018). Just as the anti-corruption campaign was top-level designed to clean up Chinese politics, the social credit system was designed from the top to clean up online communication. As argued by one of the research groups that originally designed a part of the social credit system: “China’s social transformation has resulted in its gradual transformation from a society of acquaintances into a society of strangers. This has eroded trustworthiness and diminished the credit and moral evaluation systems needed to support social functions” (CASS 2014). Some observers have, however, noted “a lack of a clear punishment mechanism for acts of dishonesty” (Cheng and Ou 2014: 171). Before the ascent to power by Xi Jinping, the reports on a future social credit system were generally more technocratic than moralistic. The language of the 2014 state document, however, makes a point about how the system will improve ethics, virtue, and trust. The social credit system was designed to assess the credibility of individuals and organizations in four different areas: administrative affairs, commercial activities, the judicial system, and social behaviors. Pronouncements on the fourth area, how to assess individuals’ social behavior, received most attention in foreign reportage on the system. The People’s Bank of China and the National Development and Reform Commission drafted the outline, which draws up a social credit system with profound consequences for citizens and internet usage. By allocating vast resources relating to the systematic collection, monitoring, and coordination of big data between government and industry, the social control of organizations and people’s behavior and online speech acts would intensify. On the integrated nationwide platform, authorized users would be able to share information about the credit and financial status of diverse actors, social security payments, or traffic violations. A focus has been on establishing an incentive and punitive mechanism to improve people’s sense of integrity, which goes beyond the individual’s right. It is conceived of as integrity in the form of social cohesion and joint understanding of the common good. Many Chinese scholars have argued that the system will award honest people and punish the dishonest. As argued by Yin Zhentao, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on finances, “the purpose of the social credit system is not to monitor citizens or classify citizens into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories but to better serve people with good credit and warn dishonest people” (Liu 2019).

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Dishonesty in the form of market fraud does exist, as news about food poisoning, medical fraud, and credit card scams in the recent decade has illustrated. Without seriously tackling these problems, economists have argued that China’s market economy will not follow step with the deepening of reforms. However, the social credit system is not just about preventing fraud and improving social ethics; everything that is reported about individual citizens, what they have done or said both on and offline, can be linked to their personal ID cards. People’s behavior, purchases, online statements, and comments—all the information deemed valuable by the authorities to judge the “sincerity” of individuals—were to be stored in their personal files. As a report by Xinhua News Agency on the problematic situation concerning traffic accidents in China illustrates, the creation of “sincerity files” is believed to promote better behavior among citizens (Xinhua 2014). Character-cultivation inspired by and in line with Confucian tradition is found throughout the document. Item III of the State Council Notice is clear about the need to “strengthen construction of sincerity education and a sincerity culture”. With inspiration drawn from Maoist socialism but also “the fine traditional virtues of China”, Chinese researchers argued that Western credit systems cannot be superimposed onto China. In one text, it is even claimed that, while advantageous components of foreign systems could be applied, a national system “adapted to the Chinese context must be developed” (CASS 2014). To justify the continuation of the anti-corruption campaign and implementation of a digitized social credit system, state media portrayed them as necessary to cleanse politics and society from evils. In a speech given to academics, Xi Jinping made it very clear that he foreshadowed further active involvement by hi-tech companies in the efforts of top-level design: We should improve supervisory technologies and methods and bring every step in innovation, production, operation and investment under supervision and governance. We should clearly define the major responsibilities and obligations of platform enterprises, and build an industry self-discipline mechanism…we must take into consideration our needs and possibilities in top-level design and in building the institutional framework. (Xi 2022f: 239)

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In this particular talk, Xi also singled out the measures taken in the Five-Year Plan covering 2021–2025, intended to optimize social governance. Of the ideational measures, he emphasized the need to “adapt to profound change in social structure, relationships, attitudes and behaviors” and to “strengthen social governance, resolve social conflicts” to maintain social stability. These methods were also judged as necessary to address the material issues of demographic change, unemployment, and public health prompted by improvement of the social security system. As Xi emphasized in a speech to the tech-industry: The social structure of our country is undergoing profound change. The internet has reshaped human interaction. Social norms, attitudes and behaviors have changed too…Modernity is built on a balance between order and dynamism. We must optimize social governance based on collaboration, participation, and common interests, synergize government efforts with public self-regulation and community of social governance. (Xi 2022e: 393–394)

As social norms change and identities are susceptible to various influences, it is apparent that Xi envisions that the Communist Party, state agencies, and private companies that facilitate online platforms must work together to superintend the transformation. The social credit system and other measures taken within the policy realm of securitization aim at increasing conformity to the ideal moral career prescribed by the state. At least until the end of 2022, the acceptance of the politics of authoritarianism, as expressed by the professed intentions of the national social credit system, was met with approval among a majority of respondents in surveys. In one national survey, less than one percent of respondents disapproved of the idea of social credit systems in general (Kostka 2019). In another study, the survey of respondents’ attitudes focused specifically on state-centered social credit systems (Liu 2022). In this more focused survey, it was discovered that trust in a social credit system with which they were familiar varied among different groups. The most intriguing finding was that Party members were “less likely to support state-centered SCSs compared with non CCP members” (2022: 404). This finding is highly relevant for a discussion on Party-state organized loyalty in China today. The author of this study points to caution regarding taking for granted that the loyalty of Party members to Xi Jinping is by any means absolute; efforts organized through top-level design and moral engineering from the apex of political

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power run the risk of ideological pushback contrary to the intent to foster absolute loyalty. Ironically, the expanded and institutionalized securitization, including the anti-corruption campaign, quality assessment systems for state officials, various Party member evaluation programs, and even AI-controls of Party members’ loyalty (Qiao 2022), may actually hamper security. These actions to uphold discipline are taken in tandem with the propagandistic messages and campaigns orchestrated and implemented by the cyberspace administration of the State Council, the ministry of education, and the publicity department of the Party. Propaganda messages and active censoring of online content seek to cultivate political loyalty of citizens. The Party-state will continue to seek to shape the moral careers of China’s citizens, but this endeavor is fraught with risks. Opinion surveys have indicated that more critical and independent attitudes are simmering in the uncontrolled minds of younger generations (Wei 2017). For the sociologist Andrew Walder, such shifts herald that bottom-up protest and perhaps sociopolitical change may eventually return to China (2020: 357). For an understanding of future development of state-society relations and citizen identities in China, further theorization along the lines of Suzie Scott’s development of Goffman’s concept of the moral career might be fruitful. Regarding individual agency against (state)imposed identity, for example, her emphasis on “stages of role exit and transition out of a closed setting” (Scott and Hardie-Bick 2022: 82) opens up an area of research away from Chinese citizens “accepting authoritarianism” (Wright 2010).

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CHAPTER 4

Loyalty to the Nation: Lunar and Martian Exploration for Lasting Greatness

Abstract The Chinese space program has for decades been a source of immense pride in China. The program is an illuminating case of a state that seeks both status and promotes patriotic loyalty that the government hopes will instill political loyalty to the ruling Communist Party. The overarching goal of the Chinese space program is formulated along the lines of President Xi Jinping’s ideological framework of the China dream: “to explore the vast cosmos, develop the space industry and build China into a space power is our eternal dream” (space white paper 2021). To understand China’s pursuit of space power, it is thus meaningful to view it as part of generally seeking (and regaining) great power status and respect within international society, which will make possible the longer-term goal of a multipolar world not dominated by the United States. However, more importantly, this pursuit is also crucial to fortify the idea of national pride and citizens’ being loyal to the nation. Keywords Moon · Mars · NASA · Space power · Prestige · Status-seeking · Patriotic loyalty

In 2022, the importance of technological self-sufficiency, scientific innovation, and domestic market development progressively rose on China’s national security agenda. One obvious reason was the risks caused by © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Lagerkvist, Organized Loyalty, Politics and Development of Contemporary China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40037-7_4

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the tense geopolitical situation after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February and China’s professing “limitless friendship” with the Russian Federation. Therefore, China risked suffering the same kind of sanctions and restrictions to accessing US and EU technologies and markets that applied to Russia. Yet, evidence is accumulating that China is effectively leading the United States in almost all technology fields (Hurst 2023). Xi Jinping’s report to the twentieth Party Congress was notable not only for the heavy emphasis on all aspects of security, but also for the increasing focus on the importance of science, technology, and education: We have witnessed major successes on multiple fronts, including manned spaceflight, lunar and Martian exploration, deep sea and deep earth probes, supercomputers, satellite navigation, quantum information, nuclear power technology, new energy technology, airliner manufacturing, and biomedicine. China has joined the ranks of the world’s innovators. (Nikkei 2022)

This was not the only time that Xi Jinping listed manned space flight and lunar and Martian exploration first. When he in his report to the 2017 national Party Congress accounted for China’s spectacular scientific feats to the Party’s top leaders, pride in China’s space program was also evident. In 2017, the achievements in space also figured prominently, such as the launch of the Tiangong-2 space lab, the spherical telescope Tianyan, the launch of the dark matter probe satellite Wukong, and the quantum science satellite Mozi (Xi 2017a). As Marco Aliberti has outlined, the Chinese achievements are significant as “…China has stepped up the pace of its launches, increased its launchers fleet, performance and reliability, constantly upgraded and polished its satellite technology, built an ever-growing GNSS constellation, entered the human spaceflight domain, reached the moon multiple times…” (2019). Xi’s pronouncements on China’s ambitions in space, the new space station Tiangong, and the Chinese governments’ white papers on space policy have fueled debate among policymakers and experts worldwide, but especially in the United States, concerning whether a new space race is taking place between the United States and the People’s republic of China (Garretson and Goswami 2017). In this debate, the space industry is particularly important as this sector makes possible the fusion of civilian and military technological developments. At the 2022 Party Congress, political observers noted the

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elevation of prominent scientists to the new central committee (Dickson 2023). Significantly, some of these scientists are members of China’s community of space engineers. So, the Chinese space program is vital besides beneficial scientific exploration and technological innovation. For Xi Jinping, the rocket scientists and the space and aerospace industries are pivotal for both material and ideational reasons. First, these industries are important for national security. Second, this sector has a long tradition of uplifting the public’s patriotic spirit, as activities in space for a long time have been a source of immense pride in China. As a prestige signifier, the space program is an illuminating case, of a state seeking security, global status, and patriotic loyalty, which may generate political loyalty to the ruling regime. The Chinese space station, Tiangong, and the lunar and Mars exploration projects have become permanent themes in state media. These themes of the Party-state’s media narrative also connect to efforts to promote patriotism in the educational system. In media outlets, Tiangong is often referred to as “our home in space”, women de taikong jiayuan (我们的太空家园吗). On China’s national radio station China’s Voice (zhongguo zhisheng 中国之声), there is a program that regularly hosts a Q and A session on physics, in which Chinese astronauts who live on the space station communicate live with students on the Earth. Thus, the space program sends a strong message to the motherland that China has made significant scientific advances in space, whereas other space powers have stagnated, lowered, or substantially outsourced their ambitions to private entrepreneurs. The program is becoming an even more important component of Chinese patriotism in the increasingly intensified geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China (Grano and Huang 2023). Ahead of China’s building of Tiangong, a leading Chinese space expert was in April 2021 interviewed on the radio station Beijing News Broadcasting. The program host asked how the new space station would compare to the International Space Station (ISS). The answer was confident and straightforward: We are more advanced than the United States. We are further ahead, as we have had the advantage of coming later into this field and going it alone. The Americans were dependent on Russian technology for rocket launches and space station assemblage. They have the capability to develop that of course, but they don’t have it right now. We are also ahead, if compared with the respective strengths of the Europeans and the Japanese. China has the advantage of building a smaller station than the ISS, and doing

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so with the very latest cutting-edge technology developed at relatively low cost inside China. (Beijing News Broadcasting 2021)

This expert’s answer conveys tremendous belief in the future of the Chinese space program. In Chinese state media, statements such as these communicate news about China’s coming and lasting greatness, to the domestic public as well as the world at large. As scholars have noted, Chinese space commentary also often cites foreigners’ admiration, that achievements in space show how China climbs the ladder of major power status, and not least that “space successes validate its socialist political system and the wise and skillful leadership of the communist party” (Sheehan 2013: 111). As Xi Jinping has made clear, “lasting greatness” is what the Communist Party under his rule seeks to accomplish: Today, a hundred years on from its founding, the Communist Party of China is still in its prime, and remains as determined as ever to achieve lasting greatness for the Chinese nation…it is certain that with the firm grip of the Party and the great unity of all the Chinese people, we will achieve the goal of building a great modern socialist country in all respects and fulfill the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation. (Xi 2022b: 17)

The above quotation is immersed with the kind of patriotic loyalty that Xi Jinping expects of Party members and non-Party members alike. If all Chinese citizens stand united as one, then the fulfillment of the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation will only naturally follow. Being able to establish a permanent human presence in space, first on the existing Tiangong space station, and later on the Moon, sends strong signals about China’s greatness to the international community. Many policy fields are involved and intersect in a country’s space program. Ostensibly, many of these concern scientific exploration, yet to a significant extent prestige is also involved. Status-seeking projects such as manned space flight are not for all states, as few have the resources to build aircraft carriers, construct space stations, stock-pile nuclear weapons, or stage Olympic Games. They are intended to signal acquiring of great power status (Pu 2019: 20). Research on the Chinese public’s attitudes toward the space program indicates that “…despite the steep costs, respondents strongly support investments in human spaceflight, as well as lunar and Martian exploration. Respondents also view it as essential that China becomes a leader in space exploration and are confident in the trajectory of China’s space program” (Hines 2022: 9).

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Status-seeking projects have the potential to significantly boost patriotic loyalty, a crucial part of the organization of loyalty, which permeates the new state ideology of Xi Jinping. It is obvious that the space program contributes well to such ideological efforts, as its agenda has “allowed China to attain domestic legitimacy and international prestige” (Bowe 2019: 2). In order to forestall individuals who may doubt Party ideology, and the difficulty of always supervising and morally guiding many people (Coser 1974: 117), invoking not just loyalty to the Party but also the nation is an additional strong motivating force. This is why Xi Jinping is constantly beating the drum of nationalism, and in his speeches reiterating that all Chinese citizens. The overarching goal of the Chinese space program is formulated along the lines of President Xi Jinping’s ideological framework of this China dream: “to explore the vast cosmos, develop the space industry and build China into a space power is our eternal dream” (China space white paper 2022). Buttressing patriotic sentiment and citizens’ duty to the nation are important for many aspects of development, be they related to ultimately having the world’s largest economy, the biggest navy, the most technologically advanced nation in quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and biotech, or the most successful space program. Achieving higher status in different technological fields bolsters pride, patriotic feelings, and loyalty to the political leadership that brings that about. A Chinese citizen may perhaps be hesitant to acknowledge their allegiance to the Communist Party or the Party-state institutions, yet patriotic loyalty can subdue discontent over domestic politics, as restoring the greatness of China—and making it last—is a powerful dream that is much older than the Chinese Communist Party itself. As stated in a famous adage in the History of Song, commissioned in 1343, an upright subject must always “be loyal and serve the country” ( jinzhong baoguo 尽忠报国). China long sought participation in the International Space Station (ISS) as a partner, but decided to build its own station when the United States, citing national security concerns, denied China admission to the ISS. Seeking a different image, China has since chosen to speak to humanity as a whole, inviting both developed and developing countries to cooperate with the People’s Republic in space. The Chinese government has stated that: “China’s space station is the first project of its kind that is open to all UN member states” (Fan 2022). The message is that China discriminates against no individual country on political grounds. Without a doubt, the functional space labs, the Tiangong space station,

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future manned missions to the Moon and Mars, as well as the exploration of the Jupiter System make for a grand vision that commands the attention of other countries, especially in the developing world. However, as the Chinese space program is clearly a status-seeking act, it is fused with China’s national interests in space, just like the programs other space powers. How Chinese-led international cooperation in space will be organized in more complex missions in the future remains an open question. In its successive white papers on space policy, which were issued in 2000, 2004, 2009, 2016, and 2022, there is a clear progression of conviction and ambition. By publishing these official documents, China wishes to communicate to the world the intentions of the space program, whose achievements, as the most recent white paper proudly states, “have attracted worldwide attention” (2022). The Chinese government’s white papers are quite clear on the “lighter” aspects of the space program, such as exploration and scientific study, which is conducted by China on its own, but also in cooperation with other countries. Nevertheless, the eternal dream of becoming a space power also concerns “darker” aspects of power.

Lighter and Darker Aspects of Past Space Races Since the beginning of the space age in the 1950s, American space policy has often been described as a mix of dark and light aspects—superpower rivalry and the military goal to dominate the ultimate high ground, combined with the civilian goals of scientific discovery and technological development (Sheehan 2008). The space race between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s was undisputedly about national prestige, a military agenda, and an ongoing arms race on Earth that threatened to reach space too (Sheehan 2008; Dolman 2002). In 1967, both countries took the initiative to create the Outer Space Treaty, which declares that no celestial body can be seized by any state. Significantly, the treaty outlaws weapons of mass destruction in space. Since then, there have been many ups and downs in Soviet/RussianAmerican space relations, including the détente of the 1970s and the famous handshake in space, followed by militarization such as President Ronald Reagan’s so-called Star Wars initiative of the 1980s, after which new collaboration between NASA and Roscosmos led to the establishing of the International Space Station (ISS). Since 1998, this joint international enterprise, led jointly by the United States and Russia, has orbited

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the Earth. A cooperation on the ISS has survived despite new friction in international relations. However, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, followed by strong condemnations from US President Joseph Biden, relations between the two countries deteriorated to the lowest point since the Cold War. This negative development had consequences for cooperation and conflict also in space, as the former strident and nationalistic director of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, hinted that the International Space Station without Russia’s help would crash to Earth, perhaps on American soil. In any case, the ISS is definitely about to retire, as Washington’s funding for it will end in 2024, and retirement begins in 2031. Analysts have argued that, just like previous assumptions about US and Soviet/Russian policies, China’s space policy also matches the dual image of light and dark; that is, it is guided by a parallel mix of rivalry, military, and civilian ambitions (Lele and Singh 2013). However, despite valuable studies of Chinese space plans (Aliberti 2015) and a number of works on China’s quest to become a space power, systematic knowledge of the lighter and darker aspects of China’s space policy is lacking. Nevertheless, the following analysis of the 2019 defense white paper, the January 2022 space white paper, and the February 2022 joint statement with Russia on their “boundless friendship” provides some provisional insights.

Lighter Aspects: China’s International Cooperation in Space Countering American claims about the secrecy and isolation of the Chinese space program, China argues that it contributes to international cooperation in space: Outer space is a critical domain in international strategic competition. Outer space security provides strategic assurance for national and social development. In the interest of the peaceful use of outer space, China actively participates in international space cooperation, develops relevant technologies and capabilities, advances holistic management of space-based information resources, strengthens space situation awareness, safeguards space assets, and enhances the capacity to safely enter, exit and openly use outer space. (China white paper 2016)

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China has in fact, over the years, cooperated with many advanced industrial nations on their respective space programs and exploration activities. Many developing countries have also partnered with China to launch satellites and undergo other space-related technology projects. Among the more developed countries, Russia, the European Union, individual European countries, and the United States have worked with Chinese colleagues. In fact, during the 1980s, a time of escalating tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States, NASA did cooperate with the Chinese space authorities. It was only after the violent crushing of the student and worker movement for democracy on June 4, 1989, that cooperation was halted and never returned to the previous modus of open collaboration. In the 1990s, the American Congress stopped NASA from having any direct meetings with the China National Space Administration (Pentland 2011). After the publication in 1999 of the Final Report of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China, known as Cox Report, China was also rejected by the US Congress from partnering with the International Space Station. The report had articulated US national security concerns regarding dual-use issues in various fields of technology, whereby advanced space technology could potentially fall into the hands of the Chinese military. Given this history of American policy changes, effectively halting US-China cooperation, it is quite intriguing that NASA’s director Bill Nelson in recent years has blamed China for being uncooperative and the real reason behind the advent of a new space race. In December 2021, Nelson confirmed that the United States is once again engaged in such a race, this time with China. As for establishing better relations with his Chinese counterparts, he was utterly pessimistic: You can’t have a relationship if the other Party doesn’t want to have a relationship. It takes two to tango. They have indicated no interest in the two of us doing the tango. (Smith 2021)

Contrary to these remarks by Nelson, it has been contended that “China long sought participation in the International Space Station as a partner equal to the other players and had no other choice but to build its own station because the United States relentlessly denied it admission” (Harvey 2019: 508). As a result of the isolation from the ISS, China decided to construct its own space station, despite having limited access

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to key technologies from the most advanced space power. Therefore, China’s rapid advancement to become a full-fledged space power on par with the United States has indeed “caught worldwide attention” (China white paper 2022), making China’s space program a key instrument in Sino-American geopolitical rivalry that reinforces patriotism. In effect, China’s ambitious space program is a quite remarkable selfhelp project. As argued by Aliberti: “China has been doing this in quasi total autonomy, forced to develop in-house substitute technology, barred from exploiting the global demand for satellite launches, and isolated in terms of cooperation in space” (Aliberti 2019: 55). In the wake of China’s successes, in a move that spoke directly to the previous US efforts to deny China cooperation and access to the ISS, China welcomed cooperation on the CSS with any other UN member country. In 2018, Beijing declared that other countries may use the Chinese space station for scientific research, stating that “everybody is free to join” (UN Office for Outer Space Affairs 2018). However, on July 2, 2022, Bill Nelson went even further than in his previous remarks, when he vented his fear over China’s planned future mission to the Moon, dubbed as the International Lunar Research Station. In the interview with Bild Zeitung, the NASA director said that the Chinese space program was run by the People’s Liberation Army and furthermore added: “We should be very concerned that China will land on the moon and say: ‘This is ours now and you are going to stay out’” (Both 2022).An anonymous op-ed, published in the often brazen Communist Party tabloid Global Times, refuted the warnings by Nelson that China’s space program was military in character and intent on colonizing the Moon for itself: The US used to be an innovative country, but now it is somewhat sluggish on the road to innovation due to institutional constraints. Essentially, the US political party system has resulted in a country that is not able to focus on big things, using space programs as an ornament, or even a sacrifice, for partisanship. (Global Times 2022)

As this op-ed piece shows, the projected belief in China’s space mission remains steadfast, confidence that merits observation. First, according to the commentator, the remarks by Nelson illustrated growing anxiety in the United States over its technological decline and China’s increasing prowess in space engineering. Second, China’s practical state ideology of top-level design, holistic “systems-thinking”, as outlined in the previous

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chapter is a superior way of governing society and high-tech projects. The explicit comparing of China’s governance with the ills of the American political system demonstrates that the new space race, just as the previous between the United States and the USSR, has a sharp ideological dimension. The mutually hostile communication between NASA and Chinese authorities and state media accentuates the existing broader mistrust between the United States and China.

Darker Aspects: Potential US-China Conflict in Space and the Russia-China Axis of Friendship Chinese space policy has developed substantially since President Xi Jinping’s takeover in 2012. Shortly after taking office, President Xi also communicated that “The space dream is part of the dream to make China stronger” (von Carnap 2019), which indicates that the mix of darker and lighter elements of the American and Russian space policies of the past also exists in the Chinese case. A longtime observer of the Chinese space program has even maintained that “…Chinese researchers are unanimous in their belief that space war is inevitable, a belief also stated by the Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission Xu Qiliang” (Pollpeter et al., 2015: 2). That may be overstating the point as security-related details remain hidden for outside observers, not to be found in open sources or in the government’s white papers. When the Chinese white papers mention military aspects, they strike a defensive posture, warning that it is other states that threaten peace in space through their constant efforts to weaponize it. China’s 2019 defense white paper argues that safeguarding “China’s security interests in outer space, electromagnetic space and cyberspace” is one of nine core aims of the People’s Liberation Army. Yet, safeguarding security interests is a quite vague formulation; it does not preclude the use of offensive measures. Moreover, an interesting comment by Ye Peijian, chief architect of China’s lunar exploration project, did reveal how China’s core territorial claims on Earth echo in outer space. Ye likened the Moon and Mars to the Senkaku Islands (which both China and Japan claim sovereignty over) and Spratly Islands (which China and several Southeast Asian countries claim as theirs). He warned that not exploring the celestial bodies could result in a failure to protect China’s “space rights and interests” (Bowe 2019: 8). This argument obviously contradicts Chinese official statements

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that national and sovereign rights do not exist in outer space. It is probably such commentary that led NASA’s director Bill Nelson to utter his remarks on potential Chinese colonization of the Moon. In support of its military space operations, China did in fact establish the People’s Liberation Army Strategic Support Force (PLASSF) on December 31, 2015, whose main purpose is to integrate cyber warfare and space capabilities into joint military operations. The 2019 defense white paper, “China’s National Defense in the New Era”, strongly emphasized the need to use space to defend the national interest of the People’s Republic: The PLASSF plays a crucial role in overall national security and military strategy…In line with the strategic requirements of integrating air and space capabilities as well as coordinating offensive and defensive operations, the PLASSF is accelerating the transition of its tasks from territorial air defense to both offensive and defensive operations, and improving its capabilities for strategic early warning, air strikes, air and missile defense, information countermeasures, airborne operations, strategic projection, and integrated support, so as to build a strong and modernized air force. (2019)

In light of the modernization of the Chinese space command, several high-ranking officers in the US Army and policymakers have flagged that the darker aspects of China’s space program are now a factual concern for America’s national security. Former Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan warned at the annual Space Symposium that “China is the greatest threat to America’s assets in space, and that threat will only increase should the United States not adapt its war-fighting approach in orbit” (Kogan 2021). Moreover, at the Reagan National Defense Forum in December 2019, the Chief of the US Air Force, Dave Goldfein, cautioned that “the biggest threat posed by China lies in advancements in space capabilities” (Kogan 2021), and his cautioning was reiterated by John Raymond, Chief of Space Operations at the US Space Force, who acknowledged in December 2019 that “the US and China are accelerating the building of space warfare capabilities as part of a race to dominate the area beyond Earth’s atmosphere and the threat of [China’s] attacks against satellites vital for American defense and infrastructure is real” (Kogan 2021). At the start of the Winter Olympics in Beijing on February 4, 2022, the Russian leader Vladimir Putin visited Xi Jinping. After the two presidents’ summit meeting, a joint statement was issued, which announced that

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“the friendship between our two countries knows no boundaries”. When Russia twenty days later, on 24 February, invaded Ukraine, observers primarily wondered if China might lend military support to Russia in its war against another sovereign country. The Sino-Russian joint statement reiterated familiar Russian views on Ukraine and standard Chinese arguments on Taiwan, and stressed the need to “democratize international relations” to resist US hegemony. Given the assault on Ukraine, the joint statement’s long section on outer space strategy flew under the radar. The core of the two countries’ argument in the document concerns the prevention of a militarization and weaponization of space, a long-standing but somewhat hypocritical aspect of Soviet/Russian space policy (Privalov 2023: 67). This is an objective that Russia and China maintain should be achieved through negotiations at the United Nations, which will result in legally binding multilateral instruments and commitments. While not specifically singling out the United States, the statement was nonetheless clear about potential military risks “from some States”, and the joint determination of the two countries to oppose hegemony in space: The sides oppose attempts by some States to turn outer space into an arena of armed confrontation and reiterate their intention to make all necessary efforts to prevent the weaponization of space and an arms race in outer space. They will counteract activities aimed at achieving military superiority in space and using it for combat operations. (Joint Statement 2022)

In light of Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s continuous upping the ante regarding its territorial demands on Taiwan, it is obvious that both Moscow and Beijing take the potential strategic use of US space assets in earthly conflicts very seriously. For China, the issue of American weaponization in space has for decades been intimately connected to the reunification of Taiwan with the People’s Republic of China (Podvig and Zhang 2008: 31). Similar arguments are made in the United States. When former Vice President Mike Pence in 2018 announced that the US military would establish a Space Force, he pointed to the danger that Russia and China pose to American space assets. The reason was their having conducted highly sophisticated on-orbit activities, and the fact that the Chinese military in 2007, with great precision, shot down one of its own satellites. An editorial in the Global Times made the case that the United States, by this decision to establish a distinct Space Force, had “started an

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outer space arms race” (2018). Interestingly, the editorial advocated that China should refrain from becoming: …involved in a comprehensive space arms race with the US as doing so is not in line with China’s national strength. We should develop a trump card to form an asymmetrical deterrence, a move to first establish a security bottom line so that Washington dares not launch an outer space offensive on China.

This subtly hawkish position echoes some of the reasoning in Bleddyn Bowen’s outline of a “space Pearl Harbor” scenario. Bowen refers to Chinese analysts who believe that China could score success in the opening shots of a China-US war over Taiwan. This would be possible by quickly disabling American space infrastructure (2021: 228). On January 12, 2023, US State Secretary Antony Blinken together with the Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi pointed out that the risk of a Chinese attack from space was a concrete scenario that allies had to prepare for. At a meeting in Washington DC, the two countries declared that such an attack would trigger article five of their security treaty (McCurry 2023). By putting US space capabilities out of action, the American navy would be crippled without access to sophisticated satellite navigation, therefore delaying Washington’s responses to assist Taiwan. However, another editorial in the Chinese military newspaper, the People’s Liberation Daily, had a more relaxed attitude toward the creation of the American Space Force, claiming that it was anyhow “overdue”, and that China and Russia already managed their space defense in a single department (2018). The military analyst Zhou Chenming conveyed the nationalist confidence of the Chinese space commentariat claiming: “The US space security is not as efficient as China’s, or Russia’s for that matter…” (Chan 2018). The tit-for-tat ripostes between NASA, the US Army, and Chinese state media reveal that both countries’ narratives of their interactions on space policy lack nuance and a grasp of history. This is a reason for grave concern given current geopolitical tensions and major power rivalry. Despite the joint Russia-China statement issued in late February, over the course of 2022 China slowly distanced itself from Russia. At the BRICS-summit in Kazakhstan and at the G20-summit in Indonesia, Xi Jinping voiced concern about the global energy and food crisis that followed upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At a space symposium in Paris on September 21, 2022, China’s delegates did not mention Russia in their presentation on their

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joint future lunar mission (Jones 2022). It appears that China is on a trajectory to establish a presence on the Moon on its own. According to Lin Xiqiang, Vice Director of the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA), the goal is to achieve China’s first manned landing on the Moon by 2030. Lin argued that the mission will “contribute Chinese wisdom to the development of lunar science” (Xinhua 2023). Lin announcement means that China’s new timetable of a Moon landing coincides with NASA’s plans to construct a permanent Moon base by 2030 (Manning 2023). So, a new space race to get to the water-rich south pole of the Moon is clearly on. However, in spite of China’s wishes that more countries sign up for the China-led International Research Lunar Research Station, and saying that “everybody is free to join” China’s space station, the more advanced industrial nations have chosen to sign up for the US-led Artemis Moon mission. To date, twenty-three nations have signed on to the project.

Reasons for China’s Pursuit of Space Power: “Restrained Status Seeking” and Military Preparation According to Xi Jinping, China is pursuing a dream of space power. The concept of space power is somewhat nebulous. James Oberg has defined space power as “the combination of technology, demographic, economic, industrial, military, national will, and other factors that contribute to the coercive and persuasive ability of a country to politically influence the actions of other states and other kinds of players, or to otherwise achieve national goals through space activity” (1999). This definition incorporates both the material capabilities and the relational resources needed, to effectively influence other state and non-state actors in various ways, coercively or not. Lambakis has reasoned that a space power is “any entity that has the capacity to utilize effectively the space medium for commercial or national security purposes” (2001), while Aliberti has delineated space power as: “an entity with the means to autonomously deploy, operate and benefit from any space-related capability to support the achievement of national objectives” (2019). There is no generally agreed definition of what space power is, yet a common denominator is that it concerns both national security and power projection. China’s rapid rise to become a space power to be reckoned with explains the confidence of Chinese military analysts and civilian experts.

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As the Chinese white papers on space demonstrate, the space program has many objectives. Scientific exploration of the cosmos is the ambition of Chinese scientists, and developing a commercially viable space industry is the dream of private entrepreneurs and some economic policy planners. However, exploration can be both a scientific goal and economic endeavor if different professions, for example, join hands in mining rare metals on asteroids. Thus, the scientific and economic goals of China in space contribute to the political goal of becoming a space power. At face value, these are the lighter aspects of space power, although as the debate of potential dual-use showcases there are always a risk of military use of civilian scientific discoveries. American analysts such as Kevin Pollpeter and Alexander Bowe argue that similar to other issue areas, China is also seeking to become a peer with the United States in space and pursues a greater space power status to achieve its broader goal of a multipolar world (Pollpeter et al., 2015; Bowe 2019). It is thus fruitful to frame the pursuit of space power as a way to gain higher status in fiercely competitive international society. Desiring space power can be conceptualized as status-seeking. Krickovic and Zhang have argued that declining powers (such as Russia, but arguably also the United States) are likely to be more risk-acceptant, inclined to incur more costs, and compete hard with other states to attain the status they believe they deserve (2020: 220). Due to their rising material capabilities, rising powers like China tend to be more risk-averse, cost-conscious, and are awarded more status without having to initiate security competition. These arguments are contrary to Johan Galtung’s established theory of status-seeking, which predict that rising powers should be aggressive and decliners more cautious. Nevertheless, as Krickovic and Zhang have convincingly reasoned, the evidence of Russia’s and China’s behavior during the past decade points to the opposite conclusion. Despite a more forceful and assertive Chinese foreign policy under Xi Jinping, they claim that unlike Russia “China has refrained from competing directly with the United States for status, preferring to pursue status through peaceful and non-confrontational means, even as its power has grown” (2020: 241). Seeking to become a peer with the United States in space can be conceived as non-confrontational, although it is not entirely friction-free either. Nonetheless, it is a far less risky endeavor than invading a neighboring sovereign state. Displaying space power is quite different from staging soft-power events such as Olympic Games, but in the same way it caters to a spectacle of capability, conviction, and confidence for both international and

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domestic consumptions. For the common Chinese citizen, the arrival of the People’s Republic as a top space power, almost on par with the United States when it comes to manned space flights, holds enormous attraction. It resonates well with the century-long nationalist ambition of the Chinese people, carefully groomed by the new state ideology of Xi Jinping, to regain their rightful place among the world’s major powers. This is in line with how Kulacki and Lewis interpreted Chinese space ambitions. In their analysis, China sought a recognized role in space exploration rather than to “win” a space race. A typical phrase they encountered in their research was “a place for one’s mat” (yi xi zhi di 一席之地), i.e., “a seat at the table” (2009). This is equivalent to what Pollpeter calls “becoming a peer”, yet there is more to it, beyond the romantic veneer of Western observers who find catching-up with the West and the United States reasonable and fair. However, the space dream is not just about catching-up, but about leading and securing “the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and its return to the very apex of great power status” (Pu 2019: 124). As has been argued by military analysts, it is not unreasonable that China may actually one day have the edge in technology innovation, and that other states will have to rethink their military strategies as a result (Fravel 2019: 277). To understand China’s pursuit of space power, it is meaningful to view it as part of generally seeking (and regaining) great power status within international society, which will make the longer-term goal of a multipolar world possible. More importantly, this pursuit is also crucial to fortify the idea of national pride and citizens’ being loyal to the nation. As Xi Jinping has made clear, this goal is not just about climbing back to the top. It means that once at the apex, China intends to stay there and enjoy “lasting greatness”. Conversely, current American space policy can be understood as a project of generally preserving preeminent status—as is indicated by frequent US official statements that raise security concerns. Russia’s space policy is also about preservation and avoiding decline, but certainly more so than in the case of the United States. The further weakening of Russia’s international position is likely to have important implications for the declared “limitless friendship” between Russia and China, as their status-seeking ambitions are so starkly different. As Krickovic and Zhang see it, Russia is engaged in “aggressive statusseeking” and China in a more “restrained status-seeking”. It makes good sense to conceptualize China’s pursuit of space power is a means to the end of safeguarding national security, achieving higher status within the

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international community, while at the same time bolster patriotic and political loyalties. As Xi Jinping’s great rejuvenation of China necessitates bringing Taiwan back under Mainland China’s control, the entwining of space power and national security entails a risk that the strategic darker aspects of Chinese space power may over time overtake the “lighter aspects”. This is especially the case if the regional Asian security order, or even the global security order, crumbles under the weight of a new Cold War. What is in the open, as the information found in the Chinese government’s white papers, are the lighter aspects such as space exploration for the benefit of all man-kind. The blueprints of manned missions to the Moon, Mars, and exploration of the Jupiter System are clear testimonies to grand ambitions. Conversely, what is in the dark is the subject-matter of defending China’s national interests and security on Earth, in lower Earth orbit, and perhaps beyond. Already having become a formidable space power, China simultaneously seeks to bolster patriotic loyalty and status commensurate with greatness, the ultimate goal of national rejuvenation, and one of the key ingredients of Xi Jinping’s state ideology.

References Aliberti, M. 2015. When China Goes to the Moon … Cham: Springer International Publishing Beijing News Broadcasting, (北京新闻广播), 照亮新闻深处 (News Light and Probe), April 29. https://www.qingting.fm/radios/339/, 02:00–02.40, Beijing Standard Time (accessed Apr 30, 2021). Both, M. 2022. Chinesen wollen den Mond besetzen: Nasa-Chef schlägt Alarm, July 2. https://www.bild.de/politik/inland/politik-inland/nasachef-schlaegt-alarm-chinesen-wollen-den-mond-besetzen-80490242.bild.html (accessed Nov 26, 2022). Bowe, A. 2019. China’s Pursuit of Space Power Status and Implications for the United States. https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/USCC_C hina%27s%20Space%20Power%20Goals.pdf (accessed Nov 26, 2022). Bowen, B.E. 2021. War in Space: Strategy, Spacepower, Geopolitics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Chan, M. 2018. Why Donald Trump’s New Space Force Can’t Hurt China Like Star Wars Hurt the Soviet Union. South China Morning Post, October 4. China space white paper 2016. 2016. China’s Space Activities in 2016. http:// english.www.gov.cn/archive/white_paper/2016/12/28/content_2814755 27159496.htm (accessed Nov 26, 2022).

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CHAPTER 5

Post-zero-COVID-19 Policy: Limits to Loyalty on the Horizon?

Abstract The first serious test of Xi Jinping’s new state ideology based on organized loyalty came not long after the conclusion of the twentieth Party Congress. In November 2022, widespread social protests erupted across China against the harsh zero-COVID-19 policy. As a result, just after having achieved his goal to secure a third term as general secretary at the Congress, organized political loyalty, top-level design, and legitimacy incurred damage to the Party organization and Xi personally. The protests demonstrated that there are the limits to loyalty-based ideology, which is promulgated and implemented through “Leninist greed” and by the methodology of top-level design. Therefore, a challenge on the horizon concerns the limits to loyalty envisioned in Xi’s moral and ideological mission. Xi Jinping cannot take for granted that the demand of absolute political loyalty on Party members and a calculus of patriotic loyalty trumping political disloyalty from all citizens will pay off. In China’s postsocialist society, the urge to independently form identities will always threaten organized loyalty, as identity is key to loyalty. Individuals may therefore choose to develop disloyal moral careers, in opposition to a state-scripted moral career. Chinese youth, in particular, are fostering new identities and may resurface as critical citizens who challenge the new state ideology of Xi Jinping.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Lagerkvist, Organized Loyalty, Politics and Development of Contemporary China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40037-7_5

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Keywords Moral career · Zero-COVID-19 policy · Identity · Political loyalty · Patriotic loyalty · “Leninist greed”

How does China’s leader Xi Jinping frame the Chinese Communist Party’s political mission today? What emergent ideological formations can be assembled from his own words and what do they say about the country’s “national self”? This short treatise has been an attempt to answer these questions. What “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” actually means comes forth in the Party’s selection of its leader’s collected speeches in Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. Through analysis of more than two thousand pages in altogether four volumes, loyalty, discipline, and greatness emerge as the three defining key ingredients of President Xi’s new state ideology for China as a global power. Loyalty and discipline are the two central key ingredients, as they are the necessary stepping stones, to achieve the third key ingredient, which is lasting greatness for the Chinese nation. The third key ingredient is officially labeled “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and is also declared to be the second centenary goal of People’s Republic to be achieved by 2049, the year of the hundredth anniversary of the communist revolution. The first centenary goal of being a “moderately prosperous society” was officially reached in 2021, one hundred years after the foundation of the Communist Party. These conceptual key ingredients fit with Franz Schurmann’s bifurcation of ideology into “pure” and “practical”, where greatness belongs to the realm of pure ideology and loyalty and discipline have their place in practical ideology. This ideological assemblage of Xi’s making seeks to bridge the eras of Mao Zedong’s pure ideological inclination and Deng Xiaoping’s practical ideology of empiricist pragmatism. In today’s China, practical ideology has to be well organized and perfected to attain Xi Jinping’s visionary objective of “lasting greatness”. In today’s China, practical ideology is organized to attain the visionary objective of “lasting greatness” for the Chinese nation. Hence in this book the conceptualization of “organized loyalty” refers to the idea (and pursuit) of fostering loyalty among members of the groups and organizations that make up Chinese society. Organizing loyalty entails the use of rewards and incentives, the establishment of clear rules and expectations, and the creation of a strong sense of identity, community, and belonging within these groups. By fostering organized

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loyalty, the central Party leadership can help to ensure that members of their organization are committed to its goals and requirements, and are willing to strive hard as one to achieve them. This can be especially important in situations, and under conditions, when members are faced with challenges or obstacles, as it can help to ensure that they remain united and focused on overcoming them. If such encouragement and incentives are insufficient to instill loyalty, disciplinary measures and the politics of securitization will be enforced. Xi Jinping’s new state ideology for China as a great power is firmly centered on governance from a top-down perspective, a methodology which in the speeches and in central government documents is referred to as top-level design. Xi has sought to wrestle the concept of governance away from its original meaning, as conceived by the World Bank. This is not the concept of “good governance”, but rather “governance that is good” for China, according to its own situation and national conditions. A key concern in this ideology is the relationship between political and patriotic loyalty. If ordinary people and perhaps even Party members find the political demands of loyalty that the Party puts on them to be too austere, patriotic loyalty may not be enough to work as a “fail-safe” to forestall social protests and bureaucratic foot-dragging. Patriotic loyalty has often been used by China’s leaders in the past, as evidenced by the song “without the Communist Party, there will be no new China!” Similarly, as the country’s foremost prestige project, the space program aims at increasing China’s status as a risen global power—earning the admiration of the outside world. Does this logic of patriotism still work its magic? The first serious test of Xi Jinping’s state ideology based on organized loyalty came not long after the conclusion of the twentieth Party Congress, in the form of the most widespread social protests in China since the student and worker democracy movement of 1989 was crushed around Tiananmen Square on June 4. Just like the space program, the building of aircraft carriers, China’s zero-COVID-19 policy set out to demonstrate the virtues and indomitable strength of China’s political system and developmentalist economic model. In the first two years of the COVID-19 global pandemic, the “zero-COVID-19 policy” functioned as a prop for patriotic loyalty. The policy was closely connected to Xi Jinping, who had invested much personal prestige in it. From 2020 through 2021, the policy proved successful as the virus was effectively controlled by hardline lockdowns of cities, enforcement of QR-code controls, mass testing, and communal quarantine centers. By keeping death rates lower than Western

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countries, the Chinese political system was depicted as superior. In a speech on January 11, 2021, Xi Jinping told an audience at the Central Party School in Beijing that the world could “clearly see who had done better” when comparing how different leaderships and political systems had handled the pandemic (Zheng 2021). This seemingly unassailable fact served to reinforce the political loyalty of Chinese citizens. However, holding on to zero-COVID-19 proved disastrous in 2022 with the more contagious Omicron variant of the virus, and signs of economic downturn as well as social anxiety followed. After a fire in a locked-down apartment building in Urumqi killed ten people on November 25, 2022, protests against harsh zero-COVID-19 measures spread across the country. On 7 December, the central government ceased mass testing and allowed home quarantine instead of the dreaded communal quarantine. On January 8, 2023, inbound travelers to China were no longer required to quarantine. The social protests around the country were followed by an abrupt about-face of the hardline policy. While it was a relief for the population, the turnaround surprised China’s citizens as much as the rest of the world. For many observers, it seemed plausible that the Party-state had actually responded to the demands of the people. A more reasonable explanation for discontinuing the policy is that Xi Jinping and his aides may actually have pondered abandoning the policy earlier, but dared not risk mass infections to coincide with Xi’s total consolidation of power at the twentieth Party Congress in late October. In any case, both the prolongation of zero-COVID-19 and its sudden ending explain that contrary to the professed nationalist ideal of “people first, life first”, the interests of the Party and its top leader were prioritized. Zero-COVID-19 policy under the guidance of Xi Jinping was a clear case of top-level design, where political demands from the Party Center in Beijing overrode medical expertise, as evidenced by the harsh lockdown of Shanghai for two months beginning in March 2022 (Yang 2023). The surprisingly swift abandonment of zero-COVID-19 policy to a “hundred percentCOVID-19 policy” was arguably less of a problem than holding on to a zero-COVID-19 policy that no longer served the national interest of proving China’s greatness. Just as information about the initial outbreak in Wuhan was covered up by the authorities in the beginning of 2020, the mass deaths following the ending of zero-COVID-19 through the celebration of the Chinese New Year in 2023 were severely underreported. However, the policy about-face was so rushed, the silence of Xi Jinping so striking (Huang 2023: 22), and top-level design in this case so unclear

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to local authorities that they, without any detailed instructions, had to undo zero-COVID-19 policy on their own accord. As a result, just after having achieved his goal to secure a third term as general secretary at the Congress, organized political loyalty, top-level design, and legitimacy had incurred no small damage to the Party organization and Xi Jinping’s prestige. The tale of China’s zero-COVID-19 policy shows that there is always an inherent risk that what Lewis Coser conceptualized as organized greed in a Leninist organization such as the Chinese Communist Party may spiral into override mode, because its leader demands too much control. The tale of China’s zero-COVID-19 policy shows that there is always a risk that the inherent “organized greed” in an organization such as a topdesigned Leninist party can seriously paralyze its lower level units. The kind of dormant individual agency against (state)imposed identity that came to the fore in the social protests across zero-COVID-19 policy in Chinese cities in 2022 opens up an area of research away from longtime perceptions of a social contract whereby Chinese citizens are “accepting authoritarianism” (Wright 2010). Under President Xi’s repressive policies of anti-corruption and securitization that were implemented between 2012 and 2022, popular dissent was effectively silenced and went into shadow (Lagerkvist 2015), a social circumstance that Scott and HardieBick refer to as “unbecoming” (2022: 4). Suzie Scott’s discussion on “stages of role exit and transition out of a closed setting” (Scott and Hardie-Bick 2022: 82), as well as Hirschmann’s classic work Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, is useful for theorizing such a potential identity shift, with concomitant changes regarding the limits of loyalty. What then are the potential limits to organized loyalty, through Leninist greed and top-level design, ideologically calculated to reaffirm loyalty to the Communist Party and the Chinese nation? Based on the cross-country protest wave that erupted in November 2022, a few remarks can be made. A fundamental weakness of the new state ideology is that despite being a Leninist Party, the Party of Xi Jinping is as far from being a revolutionary organization as it has ever been before. Its goals are regime security and national grandeur, whereas Leninism’s original demand of loyalty and obedience from the Party’s cadres concerned not national rejuvenation, but class-based revolution. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party was a small group of hardline recruits, whereas the Communist Party today is a heterogeneous cohort of more than 90 million members, being the world’s largest political Party. Therefore, a challenge on the horizon

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concerns the limits of loyalty in Xi’s moral mission to organize political and patriotic loyalty. An overwhelming majority of Chinese people are not Party members, and those who are have other identities outside the Party. While having a Party membership, these people can at the same time be state officials, soldiers, or have other professional capacities as ordinary citizens. Moreover, most of them have some sort of family loyalties with which political and patriotic loyalty competes with. Drawing on Albert Hirschman’s theory of institutional decline, the philosopher John Kleinig argues that there are three facts that determine the point where loyalty to a faltering institution gives way to exit (2014: 144). The first fact concerns the social importance of the institution. If the value of institutional continuity and the costs of developing a substitute organization are high, people may still favor an institution that has long established its social place. The second fact has to do with associational identification. If loyal attachments to a decaying institution wane, due to a lack of identification with its values and mission, then loyalty may suffer. The third fact relates to the seriousness of institutional decay. If people perceive that the prospects for improving the institution are dim, they may judge it as unsalvageable. In Liu Chuncheng’s study of trust in state-centered social credit systems (Liu 2022), the most important finding was that Party members were less likely than non-Party members to support the intrusive evaluations made by China’s various social credit systems (2022: 404). This finding indicates that Xi Jinping cannot take for granted that the demand of absolute loyalty, originating from institutionalist “Leninist greed”, on Party members is by any means going to pay off. The onerous demand placed upon these members may actually stem from the very insight among the central leadership that political cadres are not only engaging in corrupt behavior, but also wander ideologically, weary as they are of being constantly scrutinized and digitally monitored. In a modern and post-socialist society, temptations of all kind and the urge to independently form identities will always be a threat to political loyalty, as identity is key to loyalty. Reclaiming and even expanding demands of loyalty and obedience in such a large and heterogeneous organization as the Communist Party is a monumental task. If there is little tangible reward for political loyalty, but huge risks of being subjected to disciplinary action, local leaders may put up a face of feigned loyalty. In such a situation, patriotic loyalty may not be enough to weigh up the lack of political loyalty to the Communist Party. Such a scenario echoes Paul Hollander’s analysis of declining faith among state officials in the former Soviet Union

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(1999) and could prove relevant for a discussion on Party-state organized loyalty in China, if future policy failures were to occur. Hypothetically, actors with an alternative political agenda might sway Party members over to their side, especially if such an agenda strongly and credibly professes patriotic loyalty. A quote by Xi Jinping speaks directly to such a risky scenario: As an ancient Chinese said, “A sovereign who shares the interests of the people will have their support; a sovereign who denies the interests of the people will provoke their opposition”. (Xi 2022: 61)

The above quote of Guan Zi, an official of the State of Qi in the Spring and Autumn period of China’s history, seemed to boomerang back to Xi Jinping in November 2022, when Chinese cities witnessed such largescale protests. Mao Zedong’s unleashing of the cultural revolution in 1966 led to what Schurmann viewed as the reawakening of the “national self”. At the time, he and other China scholars were surprised by the consequences of the rebellion that Mao launched against the Party establishment. By the end of 2022, onlookers of the social protests inside the People’s Republic, as well as outside observers, were astonished by the unexpected burst of social energy. It seemed that many Chinese youth, after nearly three years of recurring urban lockdowns, perceived President Xi as exactly the kind of “sovereign who denies the interests of the people”, and one whom in Confucian tradition it is justified to oppose and dethrone. Shaping China’s national self to one’s personal preference will be increasingly hard for the incumbent and future political leaders. There will always be competing loyalties, norms, and forces in society, no matter how forcefully subdued some of these social forces seem to be. Individuals may choose to develop disloyal moral careers, in opposition to state-scripted moral careers. Some may long dwell beneath the surface of both online and offline mainstream public spaces online and offline, having gone into a state of “unbecoming”. Nonetheless, in such smaller and more clandestine spaces, Chinese youth, in particular, may foster new pluralizing and independent-minded identities, returning to a state of “becoming” and resurface as critical citizens who challenge the new state ideology of Xi Jinping. It cannot be ruled out that state officials and Communist Party cadres who are considered non-loyalists will in subtle, or perhaps one day more overt, ways contest Xi’s new state ideology and future policies that will flow from it.

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As of yet, the ideological and political era of Xi Jinping has no name. Under Mao Zedong, it was the struggles of perpetual revolutionary Maoism; under Deng, it was Dengism with its camps of supporters and antagonists. The era of Xi looks set to be an era of loyalism, in which complex contestation between Xi-loyalists and disloyal elements is on the horizon.

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Index

C China, 2–14, 19–23, 27–32, 35, 37, 44–46, 48, 50–59, 67–83, 90–92, 94, 95 Communist Party, 2–5, 8, 9, 12–14, 17–19, 22, 26, 32, 34, 36, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 53, 55, 58, 70, 71, 75, 90, 93–95 Cultural revolution, 2, 6, 13, 35, 53, 95 D Deng, Xiaoping, 2, 6, 8, 18, 28, 35, 37, 90, 96 Discipline, 11, 12, 18, 19, 24–27, 31, 47, 48, 51, 59, 90 G Governance, 7–9, 13, 14, 18, 25, 27, 32, 47, 48, 50–52, 55, 57, 58, 76, 91 Greatness, 11, 32, 50, 70, 83, 90, 92

H Hong Kong, 35 Hu, Jintao, 2, 4, 9, 18, 23, 30, 35, 36, 44, 48 I Ideology, 4–8, 11, 12, 14, 19, 32, 37, 44, 71, 75, 82, 83, 90, 91, 93, 95 J Jiang, Zemin, 2, 4, 9, 30, 35, 36, 44, 48 L Loyalty, 11–14, 24, 27–30, 32–34, 44–47, 49, 53, 58, 59, 69–71, 83, 90–95 M Ma, Jack, 36, 44

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Lagerkvist, Organized Loyalty, Politics and Development of Contemporary China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40037-7

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Mao, Zedong, 1, 2, 4, 6–9, 13, 27–30, 35, 44, 51, 90, 95, 96 Mars, 69, 72, 76, 83 Moon, 68, 72, 75–77, 80, 83 Mo Yan, 44 N NASA, 72, 74–77, 79, 80 Nobel Prize, 44 P People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 34, 75, 76 Power, 3–7, 9, 11, 14, 18, 19, 21–23, 25, 27, 30, 33–35, 49, 51, 55, 56, 59, 68, 70, 79, 81, 82, 90–92 R Russia, 3, 21, 29, 49, 50, 68, 72–74, 78, 79, 81, 82 S Schurmann, Franz, 1, 2, 5, 6, 49, 90, 95 Space power, 69, 72, 73, 75, 80–83

T Taiwan, 78, 79, 83 Top-level design, 14, 37, 46–49, 53, 57, 58, 75, 92, 93

U Ukraine, 50, 68, 73, 78, 79 United States, 3, 68, 69, 71–79, 81, 82

W World Bank, 91

X Xi, Jinping, 2–11, 13, 14, 17–34, 36, 37, 44, 46, 47, 49–53, 55–58, 68–71, 76, 79–83, 90–96 Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, 3, 4, 90 Xi, Zhongxun, 30

Z Zero-COVID-19 policy, 53, 91–93