Introduction

If we take the expansive definition of ideology offered by a cultural theorist such as Terry Eagleton, where ideology is `the process of production of meanings, signs, and values in social life; a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class; ideas which help to legitimize a dominant political power’, then to some extent what is broadly understood as ideology matters in every society ( [1], 2–3). From the United States, with its constitutionalism, libertarianism and modern faith in the wisdom of free markets, to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, with its narrow interpretation of Marxism and a large dose of local nationalism, we find that ideology is everywhere. The question is more about how it manifests itself from place to place, how it is embedded in political and social life, and in what ways it figures as a resource for different kinds of political, business and other leaders and their networks and followers. In this context, the People’s Republic of China, with its commitment to a Marxist-Leninist party having the monopoly on power, provides a particularly rich object of study, both through the keywords it adopts and in the ideological associations and context used by its elite leaders, as well as in the very specific power structures whereby this is conveyed.

From 1949 to 1976, the People’s Republic of China was seen as a highly ideological society. Studies from Schurmann and Hsiung from this era testify to that. There was a specific Party State dogma, some of which was borrowed from the international movement of Communism, and some of which was home-grown. Scholars such as John Lewis and A. Doak Barnett analysed the ideology of this time with its recognized vocabularies and discourses within an institutional context. The result was a clearly designated formation that came to be called Maoism, which could be broadly described as a belief in the achievement of Utopian social goals by means of class struggle and the cleansing of society in order to create an egalitarian society. The Cultural Revolution, which ran from 1966 to 1976 and underwent various phases of intensity, marked the high point of the development and impact of this on Chinese society. (See [2], and [3], 106–147).

Since 1978, this iteration of Maoism as a living ideological and social force has largely died away, despite the adherence of some small groups and individuals. It seems to exist in the language of the current leaders of the Communist Party of China (CPC) as something akin to a rhetorical stain; present in words, but with no underlying prescriptive force that reaches into wider society. The class struggle is, at least as an ideological concept of the Mao era, over. It was replaced after the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress in December 1978 by something more akin to an indigenous pragmatic ideology, best summarized by the formulation `market socialism with Chinese characteristics.’ ( [4], 1–32).

Many things that were anathema prior to 1978, such as the acceptance of a non-state sector, foreign capital, and domestic markets, became permissible afterwards. So, while in the Maoist period the Party state’s legitimacy was based to some extent on strengthening the country by economic means, the ways in which it did this fundamentally changed, shifting from a complete command economy model before 1978 to a more hybrid, pragmatic one after this date. The delivery of tangible material outcomes for families and individuals became permissible, rather than the collective approach with communes and work brigades that had prevailed in the period of high socialism up to 1978. Such a shift in approach has served the People’s Republic of China and its ruling CPC well in terms of achieving its targets, with China crowned as the world’s second largest economy in 2010, having lowered the headcount of people living below the poverty line to an unprecedented 6.47% by 2012.Footnote 1 Dengist pragmatism has kept the CPC in power. But even though it took a looser institutional and rhetorical form than Maoism, this article would argue that the idea of China post-1978 as marking a non-ideological era for the country is erroneous. Since 1978, ideology has become more concealed, more nuanced, and in some spaces more flexible, but it has lost none of its importance to the Party and its mission to stay in power. Contemporary China is still a place where there is an identifiable ideology and its keywords and language continue to link the aims of a political force, the CPC, with national prosperity, historic rejuvenation, and the delivery of the political goals promised when the Communist Party was founded almost a century before, i.e., modernity in Chinese society.

What do Chinese Leaders Believe – and Does it Matter?

People outside China often ask what Chinese leaders believe. On the surface, this is a hard question to answer definitively. Based on the language they use, they seem to believe something – Marxism Leninism and state socialism – which is often at odds with the society around them, which has embraced markets, entrepreneurialism, and often appears to be more capitalistic than ostensibly capitalist societies such as the US, UK or Australia. Is it the case that Chinese leaders are hypocrites and confused, or is it that they just believe something no one else around them does, something that, happily, does not interfere with the material development of their society? Why is it that they seem to say one thing, while in the wider society everyone else practices something different? Perry Link has gone as far as to argue that Chinese leaders neither believe not disbelieve a particular ideological assertion, but rather consider whether a particular issue will serve or not serve their political goals. ( [5], 283–284) Develo** this line of thought, the current essay will argue that they do in fact stand by the ideology contained in their words – but that this is not an issue of belief in a set of propositions contained in that ideology per se, but more because this ideology and its keywords and language create a consensus, marrying the current leaders to those of the past, and thus having utility.Footnote 2

Deng was the great articulator of this idea. As his biographers have made clear, it is questionable whether he read any more Marx and Engels than Ronald Reagan or George W Bush read Adam Smith.Footnote 3 But he did stand by the idea that Marxism, when applied to China, had a practical value, and that this was something that history had proved. Ideology, therefore, was a set of statements about the reality of the world as seen from China’s vantage point, which at least served to forge Party unity, to answer hard questions facing the Party, to strengthen the master narrative of the ‘party spirit’ (dangxing) and deliver consensus. ( [9], 244) It addressed the explosion of debilitating confusion that China had experienced in the Republican era, when there was a marketplace of ideas, but also a chaotic clash between different power structures resulting in domestic and external fragmentation. Therefore, while foreign scholars such as Frank Dikötter speak of the Republican period from 1911 to 1949 as being, at times, a halcyon era of pluralism and openness, for China’s leaders after 1949 it was a period blighted by disunity, weakness, poverty and tragic vulnerability in relation to foreigners. (See [10]).

For Chinese contemporary leaders, therefore, a unified ideology is partly viewed as a key means of avoiding the fracturing that the country has experienced in modern times. It also figures as a body of practices, beliefs, and language that has been bequeathed to them by previous leaders, and shows that they are part of the same historic movement that runs from 1921 to 1949, and through 1978 until today. This ideological consistency shows that they are delivering goals that are part of a historic inevitability, resulting from the operation of Marxist dialectics. But ideology also has organizational utility. Most of the 88 million members of the CPC in the second decade of the twenty-first century do not ask searching, profound questions about just how `true’ and realistic the stated belief system of the political organization they belong to is. In some ways, the CPC is a faith community, where tenets of Marxism-Leninism are accepted instinctively and unreflectively because they still remain an established part of the worldview and practices of the CPC. Ideology in this organizational context forms part of the broader culture of the CPC and is important because it signifies and carries that common culture. This paper looks at the particular ways that this utilitarian side of ideology has been manifested in the tight subset of discourse contained in the major speeches of elite leaders in the decade since 2007, and how they illustrate this functioning of ideology as an organizational, cultural trait. Particular focus will be directed at the keywords that have been used in the era of ** and what these betray about control, discipline and the attempt by the CPC to relegitimise itself through the use of older, traditional strands of Chinese belief systems, revitalized and presented in a new political context. These testify to the hybridity of contemporary Chinese CPC ideology.

Hu **tao – Ideology during the Era of Technocratic Leadership

To understand the ** and the ‘Three Represents’, an idea devised by Jiang Zemin when Party Secretary before 2002, aimed at enfranchising the non state sector by allowing it to join the Party. ‘Scientific Development’ was presented as the next step in the Sinicisation of Marxist thought carried out by the CPC.

‘Scientific Development’ at that time was presented as part of the journey of develo** state- and party-building theory. It was regarded by elite leaders as being a natural progression from, not a rupture with, previous dominant ideological formulations. However, despite the somewhat abstract sound, it was also more pointedly a response to a very specific set of questions about inequalities, imbalances and structural problems in contemporary Chinese society that stemmed from the unequal impact of rapid economic development following the country’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.Footnote 4 The simple fact is that over this period, while China on the surface had grown increasingly capitalistic, allowing marketization to spread to further areas of the economy, the CPC had been asserting the need for a unified political centre, and for a continuation of its monopoly on political power.

‘Scientific Development’ contained a number of key themes. It made it clear that economic and social development remained the top priority of the Party. In order to help close the gap between officials and the people they were meant to be serving, the idea also utilized the ancient Chinese phrase from the philosopher Mencius of ‘putting people first’/‘person as the core’ (yi ren wei ben). This was to address the rising criticisms of Party officials as being remote, corrupt and living in a separate realm from normal people. Part of this was an attempt to achieve sustainable, more equitable growth.

In his 17th National Congress of the CPC report in 2007, Hu went out of his way to praise the success of China’s post-1978 development. But he did admit that the country needed to deal with a relatively new set of problems, ranging from the uneven distribution of growth across regions, industries and social classes, to economic challenges such as low productivity and the lack of substantial innovation, as well as such social issues as the income gap and urban-rural misbalances. On top of these issues, there were institutional and structural ones, such as the lack of impartiality within the legal system.

Social justice within the ‘Three Represents’, ushered in under Jiang, was addressed by calling for the wellbeing of people as a whole (renmin). One difference from ‘Scientific Development’ was the way in which it talked about the person, the single human and his/her interests, centring on the word ‘person’ (ren). Hu breathed life into the formula ‘person as the core’ and declared this to be the prime objective of the new ideological formulation. This upended the bias of previous ideological formulations, which had privileged collective stances over those based on the individual.

Whatever the tactical merits of this Hu-era formulation, however, there was still a problem: a widespread lack of public interest in the idea outside elite Party circles. Despite its intense usage during the final years of the Hu era in official publications such as the ‘People’s Daily’ and elsewhere, as evidenced by the keyword analysis chart generated by the Chinese Academic search Website sciinfo.cn, the use of the phrase yi ren wei ben entered a steep decline in 2013–14. This occurred precisely after the leadership change around 2012 that marked the transition from Hu to **’s take on ‘Scientific Development’ still appears in analytical publications as of May 2016, he began distancing himself from Hu’s definitions as soon as he replaced Hu as head of the CPC.

**: the Rhetorical and Political Use of Ideology

** in order to preserve and reaffirm ideology was to reassure the public that there existed a level of continuity and solidarity among leadership generations, paying respect to the legacy of power of the CPC in a speech at the Central Party school on January 5, 2013. In the spirit of such continuity, **. 2015. ** tan zhiguo lizheng. Bei**g: Waiwen Chubanshe." href="/article/10.1007/s11366-018-9541-z#ref-CR13" id="ref-link-section-d154953902e537">13], 22–23).

Ideology is strategic because it plays a crucial role in delivering sustainable one party rule and in ensuring that in an era of flat-lining GDP growth and increasing social, economic and political challenges the Party is able to survive, to occupy its crucially important coordinating role in society, and to ensure that no organized opposition forms against it. The assertion of discipline can be seen in the issuance of lists such as Document Number Nine by the Central Committee in 2013,Footnote 8 which prescribed university teachers from being seen to promote multi-party democracy, constitutionalism, and bicameral parliaments in their lessons. The enforcement of organizational discipline can be seen as part of the clearing away of official malfeasance, the removal of corrupt officials, and the stress on party unity and cohesion. At the heart of this is a focus on the control of the core tactical spaces where the Party needs to assert dominance in order to ensure that it achieves middle-income status for China by 2021 and avoids the demise of the Party as in the Soviet Union, cited an example of what can go wrong when Party strategy goes awry and leaders lose sight of their core political mission.

This attempt to extend control over the political and ideological space within China is best exemplified by the ‘Four Comprehensives’ (or ‘Four Pronged Strategy’, Sige quanmian zhanlue buju 四个全面战略布局) issued in February 2015. The idea first surfaced during an inspection tour that ** undertook of the southern province of Jiangsu in December 2014, but was formally announced by the Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily) in February of the following year. The four objectives covered were:

  • Comprehensively build a moderately prosperous society

  • Comprehensively deepen reform

  • Comprehensively govern the nation according to law

  • Comprehensively strictly govern the Party.

Labelled somewhat grandiloquently as an ‘unprecedented and strategic leap forward’ in the state-owned Global Times, a publication that has become infamous for its nationalistic and sometimes bombastic and strenuous support for populist positions, the first three established pedigree within state information campaigns.Footnote 9 Seeking to build a moderately prosperous society had been part of the Hu era mission, linked to the phrase ‘moderate prosperity’ (xiaokang). ‘Comprehensively deepening reform’ had figured as a slogan since the Third Plenum in 2013, when ** has been willing to deploy a more direct register in his language. The ‘China Dream’ (Zhongguo meng), a term widely used in the public sphere since 2013, is the most striking in terms of emotional resonance, despite the vagueness in official discourse about what it actually means. The concept was first mentioned by **, among others. This phrase spells out more clearly than any other the grand aim of the Party, its power and the contemporary discourse of ideology that drives it.

The role of ‘socialist spiritual civilization’ has never been as strong as it is today. In the 1986, “Central Committee of the Communist Party of China Resolution on the Guidelines of the Construction of Socialist Spiritual Civilization”,Footnote 20 the term itself only appears as the fourth term within the socialism modernization strategy. The first to be posited in this document, economic development, stands at its core, followed by reform of the economic system, political system reform and, finally, spiritual civilization construction. The main task is explained as to ‘adapt to the needs of socialist modernization construction, to foster socialist citizens with ideals, morals, culture, and discipline, and to improve the moral qualities of the thought and scientific culture qualities of the Chinese nation as a whole’. Informing people about socialist culture can be seen as the key role of this concept. Constructing a spiritual civilization, as presented by Deng **, is an addition to the construction of material civilization, (wuzhi wenming jianshe), thus forming ‘the two civilizations (liang ge wenming). Just as during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 and onwards, the aim was to ‘remake man’ – but not in the often brutal manner adopted in that turbulent decade. Instead, the aim was a synthesis, a harmonious balance between the two.

It was in order to promote this idea of public morality, in line with CPC ideology, and to service the needs not just in terms of the material but of the whole person, that campaigns to promote ‘civility’ and ‘being civilized’ were launched throughout the 2000s. Never quite disappearing from the public sphere, the element also made an appearance in Hu’s speeches, presented as something that was not to be sacrificed during a time of rapid economic growth.Footnote 21 However, from 2012 onwards, the ‘spiritual civilisation’ concept entered a new phase. Starting from the 18th Congress, the main line of the spiritual civilization construction agenda was to cultivate and practice core Socialist values, to promote truth, goodness, and beauty, as well as to spread positive energy throughout the whole of society and to generate a strong spiritual power within hundreds of millions of people. It is evident that on comparing the 1986 document, the concept is still in place, although its constituent elements have been remodelled. They are now part of a much grander aim – to make one party rule sustainable and to push China towards the goal of being a great and strong nation by the achievement of the first centennial goal by 2021.

When addressing the topic of ‘spiritual civilisation’ in his speeches, **.Footnote 22 Despite this, innovations in the concept are evident. In ** demonstrates ownership of the concept, using it alongside his signature keywords: ‘China dream’ and ‘the four comprehensives’.Footnote 24 The new link has not gone unnoticed among Party School think tankers such as Professor Zhang Rongchen, who has called for a ‘focusing on the ‘four comprehensives’, promoting the development of civilization.’Footnote 25 Furthermore, ** centres his new personal ‘people have faith, nation has hope, country has power’ (renmin you xinyang minzu you xiwang guojia you liliang)Footnote 26 punch line around the ‘spiritual civilisation’ notion. Deemed to be of great importance by the PRC media and containing a straightforward ‘strong China’ narrative, the slogan illustrates that a country can only be great if people have faith and hope in its future. That can be achieved by constructing a spiritual civilization, spreading ‘excellent Chinese traditional culture’ (Zhongguo youxiu chuantong wenhua) and core Socialist values. ** demonstrates his eagerness to adopt traditional culture right there and then, recruiting the Confucian family-country parallel.

To conclude, it can be argued that the main focus of the discourse element ‘spiritual civilisation’ has shifted from Deng **’s introduction of the reform and the opening up of Socialist culture and the balancing of economic goals, to the applied civility-promotion campaigns of Hu’s time, all the way to the stressing of the uniqueness of the Chinese civilization and the notion of proud nation framework-building during the **? What can we read into the ordering of official discourse around a number of core keywords? These now link the Party with its ideological positions of the past, stressing its socialist heritage, but also with the larger hinterland of Chinese philosophical thinking that stretches back deep into the imperial era. They occupy a more comprehensive space, one that also attempts to relegitimise the CPC by making an emotional, rather than just intellectual, appeal. They tap into nationalism, the aim of national rejuvenation through attaining great nation status, and appeal to the current profound sense amongst Chinese people of their being justified in wanting to move from a history of victimhood to one of agency, pride, global recognition and power. Current ideology can work in this society because it serves the longing of China to appear strong and united - a country with a Plan - in the eyes of the international community. A claim can be made that inconsistencies, such as declaring the “Rule of law” and then immediately cracking down on human rights advocates, can be forgiven because undermining the ideology can lead to the destabilization of China’s claim to be offering ‘two guides’ on a global scale, i.e., guiding the world towards a new international order and towards a safeguarding of international security.Footnote 28

On an internal scale, the message of continuity contained in CPC ideology helps society to avoid the embarrassment of having to break the ties with its past, hence foregoing the toxic disruption of social solidarity experienced in post-Soviet Russia. Manoeuvres and changes in policy are, therefore, less traumatizing, being attributed to the “correction of mistakes” and to “learning from experience”.

In the 1980s and the two decades thereafter, the Party went through a series of crises in relation to its function and the need to maintain faith with ideology in order to stay in power. These ranged from the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, followed from the late 1990s onward by the breakneck enrichment programme and the temptations this offered to Party officials and society. In the era of Hu, China increasingly seemed to be a capitalist society in all but name, with the CPC behaving like a massive business operation, one which paid only lip service to the ideology it was meant to be serving.

Under **, we have seen a return to more focused political commitments, based on an acknowledgement that the great prize of national rejuvenation is within sight and an awareness that the Party must maintain organizational unity and discipline in order to achieve this. This future is already being mapped out with the talk of centennial goals. In this new context, ideology supplies a precious elite unity, a common language of power, while also promoting a particular vision of society. Through the 12 keywords mapped out above, the objectives of the Party in the twenty-first century are revealed, appealing not just to the material needs of people, but to their wider aspirations. This lies at the heart of the ‘spiritual civilization’ language. Ideology in **’s China is important because of the ways it enforces unity, creates a common purpose, and operates as a means of guiding the country, under the direction of unified CPC rule, towards its great objective – modernization with Chinese characteristics.