Bhopinder Singh
Under Xi Jinping's leadership, the seeds of Mao's manipulative propaganda tactics have mushroomed like never before in China
In the early days of ‘helmsman' Mao Zedong's Chinese revolution, propaganda assumed a key role in shaping the Chinese optics, discourse and popular narrative. In 1958, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, People's Daily, wrote: “…today, in the era of Mao Zedong, heaven is here on earth….” — ironically, this was also the year of the start of the Great Chinese Famine that has been regarded as amongst the greatest manmade disasters in human history, accounting for millions (estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million) deaths. The instinctive cover-up reaction of the Chinese officialdom entailed releasing propaganda posters of Chinese children standing atop surreal green fields of wheat so dense that they could hold their weight — the reality of the ‘fields', actually made of deliberately transplanted stalks with a bench to hold the children, was hidden from the masses.
Today, in Xi Jinping's China, the seeds of Mao's manipulative propaganda tactics have mushroomed like never before, and the curation of the ‘Chinese Dream' is a zealously guarded effort that brooks no contrarian viewpoint. Xi's barely concealed and insidious efforts to “tell China's story well” comes packaged with the usual spirit of defensive and reactive censorships, heavily massaged headlines, deflections to even outright buying out international opinions eg, South China Morning Post. Awkward subjects like the ensuing dissonance in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet or the Dalai Lama remain subject to editorial manicuring with the requisite smoke-and-mirrors to ensure that the domestic audience does not get ‘brainwashed' to what Xi calls “western values of journalism”. An important aspect of this control phenomenon is to define the so-called redlines that necessitates the continuing maintenance of the official charade of the Communist Party's supremacy, infallibility and perfection — anyone questioning the same risks immediate threat or, in Chinese context, mysterious disappearances.
Last year, flamboyant Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma, at the cusp of the world's largest public offering of his company ie The Ant Group (a flourishing empire including the Alibaba, then valued at well over $1 trillion), was subjected to a reality check of overstepping the mandated redlines (in this case, criticising Chinese regulatory policies) in Xi's hypersensitive China, and soon disappeared. Since then, Ja Ma has gone under the radar with patchy, dubiously organised and sanitised public appearances, that are typical of China's treatment of anyone blowing the lid off the official narrative. Many others like award-winning photographer Lu Guang, businesswoman Duan Weihong, actress Zhao Wei, artist and activist Ai Weiwei, real estate tycoon Ren Zhiqiang — all followed the patented route of inexplicable ‘disappearances'. No criticism of the leader, party or its policies is ever tolerated.
Now, the hardly curious case of former No 1 women's tennis doubles player, Peng Shuai, follows the exact same path. Her crime: Calling out the bluff of so-called discipline, propriety and morality within the top ranks of the CCP by accusing former Chinese Vice-Premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault. Expectedly, Chinese social media platform Weibo took down Peng Shuai's post and discussions about her sudden disappearance were heavily censored within the controlled realm of Chinese media, and her physical whereabouts remained unconvincingly scanty. Following a concerted effort by the World Tennis Association (WTA), the Chinese Tennis Association issued perfunctory assurances that Peng Shuai was safe and “not under any physical threat”. In a throwback to Ja Ma's carefully calibrated ‘reappearances' that raised a lot more questions than it addressed, Peng Shuai too has started making what is increasingly getting dubbed as ‘hostage videos'. For an internationally active player, there has been an inexplicable curb on access and ability to reach out to her with strangely incommunicado and stage-managed ‘sightings', dished out as means of meaningless reassurances of normalcy. Unfortunately, and embarrassingly so for the Chinese, the WTA Tour has suspended its tournaments in China and upped the ante, exactly what the Chinese were seeking to avoid, in their quest to suppress the truth and the accompanying outcry. Crucially, this specific disappearance (unlike countless others) could further sully the Chinese perceptions, weak as they are in the COVID era, to derail the Winter Olympics which are due in a couple of months.
It's not so much about defending Gaoli's personal reputation (who too remains away from public gaze) as much as it is about defending the linear mirage of the ‘Chinese Dream' (read, Party's governing capacity and infallibility) and of, therefore, avoiding the dangerous precedent of ‘questioning' any of its imperatives. The People's Daily, which noted the “heaven on earth” analogy in 1958, launched its English daily tabloid, Global Times, in 2009 with the same level of propagandistic enthusiasm — so it noted WTA's action as “pursuit of political correctness”, “forcing her to comply in accordance with the imagination and expectations of Western public opinion” and as “politicisation of sports”, all the while remaining deflective on the specifics of Peng Shuai's disappearance. This is the thin ice on which the Chinese society, governance and sustainability is predicated; Xi Jinping knows this, and therefore among his predecessors, he prefers Mao Zedong's hard propaganda approach to the relatively reformist approach of Deng Xiaoping.
(The writer, a military veteran, is a former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry. The views expressed are personal.)
