A brand new movie collection produced in China, When Marx met Confucius, was seen greater than 8 million occasions within the first two weeks after it was launched on-line in October. However this isn’t one other blockbuster drama of the type China has been adept at producing lately, however a propaganda movie aimed toward popularising the newest model of what’s referred to as “Xi Jinping thought”.
Ever since Xi took energy in March 2013, his regime has centered on introducing stricter ideological controls and banishing what it calls “false ideological developments, positions and actions”. The Chinese language Communist Occasion has printed common communiques pushing Xi’s ideological line and When Marx met Confucius is the newest model of this propaganda drive. Its intention is to reconcile the regime’s official Marxist underpinnings with an attraction to a extra particularly Chinese language cultural heritage.
However 8 million views doesn’t signify nice field workplace in a market as massive as China and its reception has been something however constructive with audiences and critics both in China or all over the world.
The collection primarily consists of dialogues between Confucius and Marx in question-and-answer classes. These comprise questions raised by a bunch of younger Chinese language college students and embellishments on these conversations by official students and propagandists. The content material, construction and goals of the movies are unmistakably geared in the direction of popularising Xi’s concepts, with a selected deal with the youth sector.
The movies are distinctive in a number of methods. They mix a few of the tropes and strategies of in style leisure, together with the employment of subtle AI and digital applied sciences, whereas mixing conventional cultural genres resembling Chinese language shadow play with trendy genres resembling rap music.
However maybe they’re most distinctive due to the unlikely concept of conversations between historic figures who lived greater than 2,000 years aside: Confucius (551-479BC) and Marx (1818-1883). Remark within the west has tended to deal with what’s seen because the quite laughable nature of this gadget. However there’s extra at stake than the inventive shortcomings of the manufacturing.
The central theme of the collection revolves across the notion of “second integration”. This concept was launched by Xi in July 2021, to mark the one centesimal anniversary of the Chinese language Communist Occasion. It emphasises the mixing of the essential rules of Marxism with China’s particular realities and its wealthy conventional tradition.
Whereas Marxism has been the official get together ideology since Mao’s period, Confucianism has been extra just lately invoked to construct nationwide cohesion. However this movie elevates the importance of Confucius to the extent of Marx. It’s a shift that may have been unlikely with out the approval of Xi himself.
Some analysts view Xi’s propaganda efforts by the lens of his regular encouragement of a cult of persona in China. However this attitude overlooks the deeper challenges confronted by China’s one-party state.
Challenges of legitimacy
The political thinker Ci Jiwei, professor of philosophy on the College of Hong Kong, has argued that China’s propaganda campaigns and ideological repression might be seen as reactions to the get together’s problem of legitimacy. As Ci observes, the CCP “can don’t have any different publicly avowable supply of legitimacy than the one tied to its communist revolutionary previous”.
However this legitimacy was considerably weakened after the Tiananmen Sq. bloodbath in 1989. Since then, the get together has relied on public acquiescence to its management in alternate for financial growth and enhancements in individuals’s residing requirements.
However this efficiency legitimacy, relying closely because it does on financial success, accommodates inherent vulnerabilities that might undermine the regime. Chinese language society has undergone vital and complete shifts.
These have concerned the emergence of various financial lessons, the event of pluralistic mental thought, a revival of pluralistic spiritual beliefs, and consciousness of citizen’s rights. In the meantime, for all its efforts at propaganda, China’s general worldwide picture is more and more damaging.
This prompts concern among the many CCP management and explains the intensifying crackdown on liberal values and ideological management that was going down even earlier than Xi took over in 2012. To some extent, the supercharging of this ideological offensive as represented in “Xi Jinping thought” is a consequence of this pattern. It has earned him the favored nickname, the “chief accelerator”.
However this has led to a vicious spiral through which authorities by diktat – as exemplified within the zero-COVID coverage – has led to a slowdown within the Chinese language financial system and hovering charges of youth unemployment. As Ci warns, with out embracing democracy and opening as much as dissenting views, the get together’s legitimacy will proceed to weaken because of the deep contradictions and flaws inherent within the CCP’s monopoly of energy.
Lukewarm public response
These fissures have, if something, been made extra obvious by the mission to recuperate Confucianism through When Marx Met Confucius. Outdoors of official endorsements, the movie appears to have acquired few constructive feedback inside China. Considerably, preliminary responses from two principal ideological camps – the Maoists and the Confucianists – have diverged dramatically.
On two of the preferred hardline Maoist and Chinese language Marxist web sites, Wuyouzhixiang and Crimson Songs Affiliation, commentaries have strongly maintained Mao’s condemnation of Confucius and ridiculed the movie’s perceived departure from Marxist rules. These commentaries emphatically reject the concept of recognising Confucianism as the foundation of the nationwide tradition and of equating the significance of Confucius with Marx.
On the 2 principal Confucian web sites, the Chinese language Confucius Academy and Confucian Community there was a conspicuous absence of debate of the extensively circulated movie.
Among the many Chinese language diaspora abroad, two outstanding bloggers – Trainer Li and Mr Shen – every discovered the movie each weird and cringeworthy in its conception and incoherent in its doctrine.
In the meantime, China’s propaganda marketing campaign, the worldwide civilisation initiative is assembly with intense scepticism within the west. So this try to advertise “Xi Jingping thought” to the Chinese language public seems to be a tough promote.