Chinese Political Culture

Today’s Chinese economic miracle exists at the end of almost 200 years of trials for China, the first half involving their ‘century of humiliation’ and the second Marxist struggle.

Similarly to many other parts of the world, China underwent rapid social and cultural change after the industrial revolution. The evolution in Chinese political culture began with the abstract concepts of Marx (and Lenin), which began to be integrated with Chinese specific physical reality. This is similar to what Lenin (and Stalin) had done previously with Marxism in Russia.

The notion of taking pure Marxist ideology and giving it Chinese characteristics returns again and again in Chinese political culture, from ‘Mao Zedong thought’ to ‘Deng Xiaoping Theory’ and now ‘Xi Jinping thought’. Xiaoping had introduced ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ during a fundamental cultural shift in China that also introduced an idea we will return to, ‘the primary stage of socialism’.

The thread of Marxism runs through all of these leaders, including Lenin (and Stalin). Marxism is revealed as not necessarily being about class struggle or materialism, but as a way of thinking about society and culture that aligns the political entity with the deeper prejudices of the people. Marxists achieve this by creating a framework in the collective mind that ultimately empowers the political entity (which is now the state apparatus).

In this process, a synthesis occurs between the political entity, the people and their deepest (manufactured) values¹.

The people are supposed to associate the political entity (now the state apparatus) with ‘their’ cultural values (that have been manufactured for them), and the political entities’ enemies being ‘against’ ‘their’ cultural values. The state apparatus becomes a champion of the people as representatives of the ‘proper’ outcome. This starts as ‘the poor’ vs ‘the wealthy’ but quickly becomes whatever it needs to be¹. Marxism becomes the conscious channelling of this method to create social and political dichotomies that clear the way for a single channel of power between the ruling entity and people. The moral authority of a ruling elite is created, assumed and controlled by the political entity.

The Chinese political-cultural success also reveals how Marxism is experienced in practice. Paradox and contradiction are fine, even necessary in order to promote new realities that are a path to greater power. Symbols and icons are redefined on an ongoing basis to maximise the power of the political apparatus.

The truest way of saying it is that the most powerful social and cultural mechanisms are aligned with the party and the party is equally aligned with them. The end result is a total synthesis of social, cultural, religious, economic and government power as a single co-operative entity. That entity is streamlined by processes of purification that remove anything that interrupts this alignment, whether that interruption is a person, organisation, idea, religion, racial group etc.

Success in achieving this allows for total contradiction. In China, Mao’s Communist Red Guard, who tortured, robbed and murdered people for having money end up becoming the world’s most voracious capitalists under Deng Xiaoping. In the Marxist fashion of synthesising the people, their values and the state, Deng Xiaoping announced that ‘to get rich is glorious’, the phrase he is most remembered for and that the ‘primary stage of socialism’ was actually ‘100 years of capitalism’.

So, from within the doctrine of the supremacy and inevitability of socialism and communism, socialism is capitalism! Socialism is actually ‘100 years of Capitalism’.

This is the Chinese Marxist cultural triumph. Although the Western tradition could suggest that this reveals a deep socio-cultural conflict in China, in Chinese Marxism it means that the highly sophisticated Chinese elite think in terms of 100-year blocks! We find out that everything is a total victory in Chinese Socialism, not including but especially total logical contradiction.

To re-iterate. The Red Guard, the Marxist political vanguard, was murdering their countrymen for having money and within 20 years pivoted into believing that ‘to get rich is glorious’, and that extreme capitalism is a symptom of socialism. The 100 years of socialism story used to sell capitalism becomes a legend — out of a vicious logical failure comes cultural supremacy. Alchemarx! Talk about creating gold out of lead.

It is clear that Marxism does something significant and powerful in political culture. If we go back for Karl Marx’s own view of this type of re-imagining of his ideas — of Marxism with Karl Marx characteristics — then ‘what is certain is that if they are Marxists, then I myself am not a Marxist’. Ouch.

Whatever it means to the people who invoke Marxism, (a materialist philosophy of money and class relations) in the spiritual, and apply it ‘to their unique physical circumstances’, it allows them to exert significant willpower, to never confront their own contradictions and in fact to make their own contradictions the problems of their enemies. This power is the cultural and ideological prize that China has gained from its 100 years of humiliation and 100 years of a refining fire.

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