The Political Thought of Xi Jinping by Tsang Steve;Cheung Olivia;

Author:Tsang, Steve;Cheung, Olivia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2023-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

Creating a Patriotic Chinese People

Party-Centric Nationalism

Xi Jinping’s goal for promoting “patriotism”—in reality, party-centric nationalism—is to forge a single united people out of China’s diverse population of 1.4 billion. He is effectively seeking to resurrect Chairman Mao’s failed project to create “new socialist people,” which ended in mass disillusionment with socialism. To do so, Xi sustains a perpetual campaign of creating “new-era people” who “love the nation, love the Party, and love socialism.”1 What distinguishes Xi’s efforts from Mao’s attempt is that the “patriotic Chinese people” or “new-era people” Xi seeks to forge go beyond residents of the People’s Republic of China. It consists of two concentric circles, with people in China constituting the inner circle, and members of the Chinese diaspora forming the outer circle. The inner circle is Xi’s primary concern. But Xi also tries to recruit, to the greatest extent possible, members of the Chinese diaspora as well. Strictly speaking, Xi’s inclusion of the diaspora in the “patriotic Chinese people” contradicts China’s Nationality Law. Under Article 9 of this law: “Any Chinese national who has settled abroad and who has been naturalized as a foreign national or has acquired foreign nationality of his own free will shall automatically lose Chinese nationality.”2 Article 5 further stipulates: “a person whose parents are both Chinese nationals and have both settled abroad, or one of whose parents is a Chinese national and has settled abroad, and who has acquired foreign nationality at birth shall not have Chinese nationality.”3 Since the Chinese Nationality Law “does not recognize dual nationality” it is strictly speaking illegal for the Chinese Government or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to ask or require ethnic Chinese who do not possess Chinese nationality to become loyal to the party-state, as if they were Chinese nationals. But law in China must follow the leadership of the Party and Xi. Under Xi, Xi Thought is held at a higher level than any state legislation. No law in China can stop Xi from making ethnic Chinese outside of China a part of the “patriotic Chinese people.”

Although the Communist Party has systematically instilled party-centric nationalism in the people in China since at least the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989, it was in 2021 that Xi finally launched a perpetual campaign to forge a single people out of the Chinese. This involves integrating “patriotism” or party-centric nationalism into Xi Thought. Thus, it has an intensely ideological and disciplinary character, over and above that of earlier organized efforts to promote party-centric nationalism, the first of which was the “patriotic education campaign” of 1994, which aimed to inculcate loyalty to the Party without promoting socialism.4 In contrast, Xi now seeks to indoctrinate every Chinese person to be loyal to him and to the Party and to embrace Xi Thought as the most advanced form of socialism best suited for today’s China. This means people in China are asked to act on such a belief and to subjugate their self-interest to national goals defined by the Party, encapsulated in “the China Dream” of “national rejuvenation.

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