Opponents of the President accuse him of dismantling Deng’s reforms. Xi is now trying to falsify history to present himself as the new Deng.
by Hu Zimo
So what exactly happened from July 15 to 18 at the Third Plenum, hailed as China’s most important political event of the year, one only held every five years (and postponed from 2023 to 2024 for mysterious reasons)? One answer is we don’t know, as its works and deliberations are surrounded by secrecy as usual, and the final press release mostly offers platitudes. Rumors are that the authorities will react to the economic crisis as all governments do, by increasing taxes, which will not make them more popular.
One way to look at the Plenum is to analyze the domestic propaganda surrounding it, not because it “tells the truth” but because it reveals what the CCP is afraid of. This year, the propaganda focused on President Xi Jinping as the new Deng Xiaoping. It is true that Deng has never been expelled from the CCP’s pantheon. The Party’s litanies recited in all meetings list Marx, Lenin, Mao, Deng, and Xi as parts of an interrupted line of Marxist thought. However, there is little doubt that Deng has been downplayed, to the extent that many within the Party and beyond are concerned that Xi is slowly liquidating Deng’s reforms and returning to the more centralized political bureaucracy and economy of Chairman Mao. This is a social problem in China, as Deng’s reforms, while failing to make the country more democratic, gave to the average Chinese more money and a better life.
There is thus a massive effort to reshape Xi as the heir of Deng’s “reform and opening up” program, although it is explained that we live in the high-tech era and Xi’s reforms, while coherent with his predecessor’s, are based on promoting cutting-edge technologies and somewhat different from the 20th-century ones.
A significant sign of where the propaganda is going is the emphasis on the alleged contribution by Xi himself to Deng’s reforms, particularly the rural reform moving back from the Mao-era collective farms to individual household farming. When Deng started these reforms in the late 1970s, Xi was a college student in his twenties, but the CCP propaganda solved worse problems than this one.
In a documentary promoted before and during the Plenum and in short propaganda spots saturating TV channels and social media, the story is told that in 1978 the young college student Xi Jinping went to Xiaogang village in Anhui Province to study the first experiment in China of the move back from collective farming to the household contract responsibility system.
It is argued that young Xi’s study of Xiaogang, which demonstrated the economic advantages of the new system, played a role in persuading Deng to abandon collective farming nationwide. It is also claimed that not less important was Xi’s implementation of the household contract responsibility system when he first obtained a CCP leadership position as deputy Party secretary in 1982 and secretary in 1983 in Zhengding County in Hebei. It is said that his implementation of the system was adopted as a national model.
Except that all this never happened. Scholars such as University of Notre Dame’s Joshua Eisenman, whose revisionist theory that economically speaking the communes were less catastrophic than Deng claimed was noticed in China too, doubt that the Xiaogang experiment ever happened. It was fabricated posthumously by Deng’s propaganda, which would make it impossible for young Xi to have visited Anhui to study it in 1978. And there is no evidence that Xi, a young and obscure local Party bureaucrat like thousands of others, had any impact on Deng’s rural policies. The truth of these Plenum-related claims is not important, however. What is important is the message: Xi, we are told, is as committed to reforms as Deng and works tirelessly to make Chinese less poor. This is as false as the Xiaogang story, yet the CCP is confident that its hammering propaganda will achieve some results.
Uses a pseudonym for security reasons.
