In October, a Communist Party–run television network in the province of Hunan aired a five-episode program called When Marx Met Confucius. In it, actors portraying the European revolutionary and the ancient Chinese sage pontificate on their doctrines and discover that their ideas are in perfect harmony.
“I am longing for a supreme and far-reaching ideal world, where everyone can do their best and get what they need,” Marx says. “I call it a communist society.”
“I also advocate the establishment of a society where everyone is happy and equal,” Confucius responds. “I call it the great unity of the world.”
The program’s message is that modern Chinese culture should be a synthesis of Marxism and China’s traditions—a fusion achieved by another great philosopher, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. “There has been endless debate about how traditional culture should be treated,” one scholar on the show explains. But finally, thanks to Xi’s wisdom, “the problem was truly solved, and people’s bound thoughts suddenly became clear.”
The Marx and Confucius show is just one small part of Xi’s campaign to fashion a new ideological conformity in China. Its apparent aim is to foster unity in preparation for struggles at home and abroad—but with the ultimate purpose of tightening Xi’s grip on China. Chinese leaders “want to have a very powerful, socialist, ideological framework that can congeal the population, and this is of course under the party’s control and guidance,” Wang Feng, a sociologist at UC Irvine, told me. “What’s a more powerful way to centralize power than to control people’s thought?”
Xi’s push for communist conformity might seem anachronistic in the age of social media and the global digital commons. But it’s only one way he is dragging China back into an older, darker time. He has reversed decades of market liberalization in favor of renewed state intervention in the economy, returned to Cold War–style confrontation with the West after a period of fruitful cooperation, and reestablished one-man rule to a degree unseen since the days of Mao Zedong, the Communist regime’s founder. Now he is attempting to restore the intense ideological indoctrination of earlier years of Communist rule—the era of Mao’s Little Red Book—in a quest for national “unity,” as he defines it, and total Party dominance.
In this sense, China is in the throes of a culture war—one that the state has been waging against society for some time, using the measures of repression available to its leader. Xi has already intensified censorship and strangled private education. Now his campaign is picking up pace. In October, he unveiled a framework he calls Xi Jinping Thought on Culture, the latest installment in a growing corpus of his “thought” meant to direct foreign affairs, the military, and other aspects of policy and private life. With this pronouncement, according to the state news agency Xinhua, Xi’s aim is to “provide a strong ideological guarantee, spiritual strength,” and “a socialist ideology that has the power to unite and inspire the people.”
Nor is this indoctrination meant to stop at China’s borders. “Profound changes in the international landscape prompt an urgent need to increase China’s cultural soft power and the appeal of Chinese culture,” Xinhua noted. In a related move in March, Xi introduced the “Global Civilization Initiative,” a manifesto in which he advocates “respect for the diversity of civilizations” and that “coexistence transcend feelings of superiority.” Countries, he adds, should “refrain from imposing their own values or models on others.”
That’s Xi-speak for denying the existence of the universal rights and values that undergird the global primacy of democracy. Xi’s culture war has geopolitical implications in this regard: In seeking to undercut the West’s cultural influence abroad, Beijing appears to realize that winning its battle with the United States will require not just missiles and microchips, but media and messaging as well.
Chinese leaders have a long history of trying to control thought. In 213 B.C.E., the first emperor of the Qin dynasty became irritated with scholars who compared him and his policies unfavorably to rulers of the distant past. His solution, so the story goes, was to confiscate suspect texts on history, philosophy, and other subjects and burn them. He did this, one ancient historian commented, “in order to make the people stupid and ensure that in all under Heaven there should be no rejection of the present by using the past.”
Two thousand years later, Xi Jinping is attempting something similar. In October, a Chinese book distributor recalled a recent reprint of a biography of the Ming dynasty’s last emperor from sellers without a clear explanation. The Chongzhen emperor, as he was known, hanged himself when his dynasty collapsed in 1644. Perhaps the book’s cover language, which advertises that “Chongzhen’s repeated mistakes” had “hastened the nation’s destruction,” could be construed as an implicit criticism of Xi amid the country’s mounting economic problems and geopolitical tensions. Whatever the reason, today’s censors, much like the Qin emperor, seem to prefer that readers not compare present and past.
Xi’s vision for China’s present includes old-fashioned and supposedly “socialist” morality. In October, the Chinese leader shared his view that women’s proper role in Chinese society is to stay home and have babies to reverse the country’s population shrinkage, brought about, in part, by his party’s misguided policies. He urged women to follow “a new trend of family” and stressed the need to “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing.” In a sign of the times, Lisa, a member of the K-pop group Blackpink, was recently suspended from the Chinese social-media platform Weibo for unspecified reasons; the ban came after she had performed a burlesque show in Paris that was controversial in China. The Hong Kong celebrity Angelababy was also banned, perhaps because she may have attended the performance.
Others with lifestyles that the state considers unhealthy for communist society have also come under pressure, most notably members of the gay, lesbian, and transgender communities. In 2021, censors barred imagery of “effeminate” men from local television and closed dozens of social-media accounts associated with LGBTQ groups. Just this month, the government’s top internet watchdog announced a crackdown on short social-media videos that have sexual content or images of cross-dressing.
Ethnic minorities have fared still worse in this ideological framework. Xi has used his notion of national culture, largely defined by the Han Chinese majority, as a bludgeon for forcibly assimilating the country’s Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other such groups. Touring Xinjiang—home to the Uyghurs—in 2022, Xi made the case that minority societies were all part of a greater “Chinese culture,” because they have been connected to Chinese civilization from time immemorial.
That narrative is inaccurate. Uyghurs and Tibetans, for instance, have their own languages and religious practices. Their societies have distinct cultural roots and have been governed by entities largely independent from China for most of their histories. Xi nevertheless instructed local officials that his version of the relationship had to be taught more concertedly in order to “firmly forge a China heart and Chinese soul” across the region’s diverse peoples. This effort to amalgamate minorities into a single category of “Chinese”—as opposed to “citizens of China”—may be behind the severity of Xi’s suppression of minority traditional life: The government has smothered Uyghur culture by destroying religious sites; curtailing the study of Uyghur culture, literature, and language in schools; and associating the practice of Islam with extremism. A 2020 policy reduced the study of the Mongolian language in favor of Chinese in schools in northern China, leading ethnic Mongolians to protest.
The West is subject to a parallel erasure. In a recent video that went viral on Chinese social media, Jin Canrong, an expert on U.S.-China relations at Renmin University, in Beijing, argued that “there is a question as to whether Greece and Rome existed.” Aristotle, he claimed, is a fabrication: No single person could have written so much on so many topics. Even the writing materials for such a volume of words would have been unavailable in antiquity, he claimed. By contrast, ancient Chinese works were relatively short—and, by implication, more likely to be real. His listeners got the point. “It’s just common practice for European leaders to make up philosophies and philosophers in order to rule and spread their ideology,” a commenter on Weibo opined.
During China’s decades of reform, culture and ideology took a back seat to national development and the pursuit of wealth. Xi has apparently seen fit to reverse this pragmatic turn, and to do so by promoting a new concoction of Chinese traditions and socialism. Promoting this cultural fusion, he said in a recently published speech, “is the strongest assurance for our success,” because “only with cultural confidence can a nation stand firm and tall and traverse great distances.”
Xi’s government isn’t just urging the public to adopt his new culture. He’s imposing it. In October, China’s rubber-stamp legislature passed the Patriotic Education Law, which mandates the intensive teaching of ideology, national defense and security, “ethnic solidarity,” and the “deeds of heroes” in schools, according to Xinhua. The purpose, a spokesperson for the legislature told local media, is to “guide people to deeply understand the trinity of loving the country, the Party, and socialism.”
Such heavy-handed efforts might seem poorly matched to the times. Sources of information abound, and large numbers of Chinese people travel and study abroad—surely the government can’t restrict them to state-approved ideas.
But only a small proportion of the Chinese populace possesses the interest, language skills, and resources to seek out information beyond the censors’ firewall. The majority still depend on Chinese media and other sources of state-sanctioned information. Chinese authorities use this extensive control not just to keep undesirable content from the public’s eyes, but also to actively shape what people believe. Throughout the crisis in Gaza, for instance, Chinese state media have fed the public a steady stream of pro-Palestinian messaging that has contributed to an upsurge in anti-Semitic and anti-Israel discourse online. Censors could easily suppress such sentiments, but they don’t, because they help build domestic support for Beijing’s foreign policy.
The potential consequences of Xi’s culture war should worry the world. An ever more isolated, indoctrinated, and politicized Chinese populace could become that much more hostile to the West and more supportive of nationalist causes, such as a military assault to claim Taiwan. Xi’s quest for social control presents risks for the Communist regime as well. Though some Chinese people may find Xi’s conservative and nationalist values appealing, the segments of the population that do see beyond the firewall, or that have grown accustomed to a more open environment, are likely to bridle. As a result, “you might see some significant polarization within Chinese society,” Mary Gallagher, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of Michigan, told me.
The precedent for such tensions is not encouraging. Back in 1966, Mao’s Cultural Revolution convulsed the country in violence, as radical Red Guards sought to stamp out ideas and practices they saw as corrupting. That campaign, too, was the work of one man determined to preserve his power.
