Beijing is on a mission to portray the last decade under President Xi Jinping as some of the most dynamic years for the country, and the propaganda blitz is at its peak less than week ahead of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) all-important 20th national congress.
Two new materials released this month — with one being a compilation of Xi’s speeches and written works from November 2012 and June 2022 — highlight the ongoing personality-building campaign.
“Since the 18th National Congress of the CPC (Communist Party of China) in 2012, the CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core has advanced the development of intra-Party rules and regulations,” a statement on the compilation said.
Separately, the English edition of Understanding Xi Jinping’s Educational Philosophy was published by the Foreign Language Teaching, Research Press and the Higher Education Press.
At the same time, official media is full of praise for the president and his policies, publishing glowing tributes on how China has advanced under him.
Xi is expected to emerge as China’s most powerful leader – possibly at par with Mao Zedong, modern China’s founder – at the end of the national congress, beginning October 16. Some of his policies are expected to be incorporated into the CPC constitution at the end of the congress. A set was already included in the constitution five years ago.
The signs are clear.
State-run China Daily newspaper is running a series called “China’s Dynamic Decade”.
Sinocism, the China-focused newsletter by former media executive Bill Bishop, noted earlier that CPC’s top propaganda arms — the People’s Daily newspaper, Xinhua news agency and national broadcaster CCTV — have launched a new series titled Navigating China that “praise the progress and policy successes since the 18th Party Congress (held in 2012 when Xi came to power) under the leadership”.
Xinhua is also highlighting Xi’s foreign outreach under the tagline “Xiplomacy”.
The glowing tributes to Xi and the party have drowned out criticism of government decisions taken in the past decade, including on the economy, crackdown on dissidents, alleged violations of human rights in Xinjiang and Tibet, and its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which first broke out in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.
A key strategy of Xi’s that has come under international criticism is the “zero-Covid” policy.
“In a key example of the impact of authoritarian rule on rights, even as effective therapeutics and vaccines for Covid-19 became available, the Chinese government doubled down on its Covid-19 restrictions, imposing repeated, unpredictable lockdowns on hundreds of millions of people under its abusive ‘zero-Covid’ policy,” the New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement on Monday.
In September, in the run-up to the congress, China’s cyberspace watchdog the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) launched a three-month campaign to clear up “rumours and false information involving major meetings”, effectively censoring discussions as well as criticisms of the 20th Congress without directly naming it.
Social media accounts of Chinese citizens thought to be critical of the government have since been blocked.
