The story of a female college student driven to suicide sheds a light on the crackdown on “political xie jiao.”
by Chen Tao and Hu Zimo
The CCP uses the ancient expression “xie jiao” (邪教), literally “heterodox teachings,” which Party’s documents in English translate somewhat incorrectly as “evil cults,” to designate religious organizations that operate independently from governmental control. Being active in a “xie jiao” in any capacity is a crime in China.
However, while any form of “illegal” religion regarded as rebellious and dangerous for the CCP is a “xie jiao,” not all “xie jiao” are religious. In the 21st century, the CCP has also called “xie jiao” ideological or political movements the regime does not approve of or does not manage to control. Some of them are so far from religion that they proudly declare their atheism
In the Xi Jinping era, “xie jiao” has been used for “Maoist” movements that organize themselves independently of the CCP and use texts of Chairman Mao to criticize the “reform and opening up” of Deng Xiaoping and sometimes President Xi Jinping as well. Some hails the Cultural Revolution and see it not as the unmitigated social and economic disaster it was but as a glorious moment in the history of China and communism. And some professors and students go back to the typical Cultural Revolution practice of devoting some of their time to work in factories or agricultural fields.
A well-known such group was the Peking University Marxist Society (北京大学马克思主义学会), established in 2000 and more or less tolerated until Xi Jinping came to power and the students of the Society sided with factory workers who tried to organize independent unions. Workers at Jasic Technology, a company in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, tried to form one such union in 2018 but were severely repressed. After the ”Jasic Incident,” a crackdown on the Peking University Marxist Society followed. Some of its leaders were arrested.
After the crackdown in 2018 and 2019, the so-called Maoist movement divided, with some groups continuing to criticize Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping and others believing they can survive by praising Xi and only emphasizing the continuing importance of Mao and studying his texts.
One such group, ostensibly both “Maoist” and pro-Xi-Jinping, organizes summer camps called “Walking the Straight Path, Walking the Long Way”(走正道行远路; warning: link does not open in some browsers). Recently, a number of Chinese-language media outlets and social media pages focusing on human rights issues in China reported that Liang Yan(梁燕), a female graduate student at the Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine(北京中医药大学)was forced to commit suicide after being accused by the university of being “anti-Party” for attending the summer camp. She had then been forcibly “disappeared’ along with her family members, who had attempted to advocate for her rights.
The Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and other colleges had denounced the camp as a “xie jiao” or a “pyramid scheme” and discouraged students from attending it. The well-known Twitter self-media account “Mr. Li is not your teacher” (李老师不是你老师 @whyyoutouzhele) also received netizen reports that at the end of last year some students of the Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine reported the summer camp as a “xie jiao” to the school authorities. It certainly has been denounced as such. “Mr. Li is not your teacher” also mentions that the organizer of this camp is a controversial figure called Ding Xiaoping(丁小平).
Several informants from various Chinese universities confirmed to “Bitter Winter” that the authorities had exposed the camp as a “xie jiao.” But they say this did not happen because some students at the Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine reported the camp to the college authorities. In fact, they claim the state security department had long since privately viewed the camp as a suspect “xie jiao” and had been conducting long-term covert surveillance of the organization. They had demanded that Liang Yan should admit to being “anti-Party” and release the names of the other participants in the camp, thus preparing for the next step of further cracking down on the organization.
Students familiar with the issue interviewed by “Bitter Winter” offered different evaluations of the camp. A Maoist student with knowledge of student associations in Chinese universities saw Ding Xiaoping as a “rival” to the Maoists in developing organizations among students. “Ding Xiaoping’s group,” he said, “is not as opposed to [Deng Xiaoping’s] reform and opening-up line as we were, and their ideology was a bit confused, but they advocated a warm and collective atmosphere and studied books by Mao Zedong and [Chinese writer] Lu Xun, which attracted some of their classmates from the lower strata of society or from rural areas. Their audience overlapped with the Maoist student associations, and they developed their own student organizations in a number of schools. The CCP’s purge of student associations from colleges and universities following the Jasic Workers’ Movement of 2018 also affected them, and some of their organizations have been banned, but not entirely, so they have remained active to the present.”
A student said that all the activities of this camp are openly available on the Internet, that is, they do some lectures, military training, book clubs, labor practices and the like, and that there is no such thing as a “cult-like” unlawful restriction of personal liberty at all. He insisted the fees charged are not very expensive, but just enough to cover the costs. He mentioned an article published back in 2007 accusing Ding Xiaoping of “brainwashing” his followers that he believed was politically motivated.
The same student said that the positions of Ding Xiaoping and of the Peking University Marxist Society are not the same. Ding was not involved in supporting the workers’ right to unionize independently and does not praise the Cultural Revolution. However, in the end, the CCP uses criticism of Ding Xiaoping to crack down on all “Maoist” groups, the student said.
Another student, with more liberal positions, criticized both the “pseudoscience” of Ding’s group, which he finds manipulative, and the CCP’s use of anti-xie-jiao rhetoric to crack down on any organization that, while not being really “anti-Party,” operates independently of the Party and escapes its control. “After all, they are not opposed to the CCP, and they have nothing to do with religious beliefs; in fact, they are staunchly atheist,” this student said.
It seems that organizing independently is enough to be called a “xie jiao” in Xi Jinping’s China—irrespective of the ideology.