ANALYSIS: Xi Tightens Propaganda Messaging Over Party Image Concerns

Newly-added censorship targets are ‘discrediting the Party’s image and policies’

Chinese Communist Party’s leader Xi Jinping (2nd L) attends a meeting with Gabon's President Ali Bongo Ondimba at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on April 19, 2023. Ken Ishii/AFP via Getty Images

Top Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping told a political education meeting to be aware of two forms affecting the Party’s image that he described as “low-level red” and “high-level black.”

When talking about strengthening the propaganda and guidance of “Xi Thought” at a political education meeting on April 3, he stressed the need to guide official coverage and public opinion to prevent “low-level red” and “high-level black,” reported state media Qiushi on April 30.

“Low-level red,” as per official definitions given by the Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee’s propaganda department in September 2022, intends to praise the CCP while fabricating exaggerated or extreme stories cheaply and vulgarly, resulting in the opposite effect.

“High-level black” is the use of explicitly positive and implicitly derogatory approaches to “attack and denigrate” the CCP in a carefully projected but unobtrusive manner.

“Whether it’s ‘low-level red’ or ‘high-level black’, it will damage the Party’s cause, affecting the Party’s image,” the propaganda agency said.

“Low-level red” and “high-level black” first became targets of Communist Party censorship in 2019, with a crucial document released by the Central Committee on Jan. 31 that year requiring Party members to “safeguard firmly Xi’s core position in the Party” and “centralized and unified leadership of the Central Committee,” “not to engage in any form of ‘low-level red’ or ‘high-level black,’” and not to be “double-faced or feigning loyalty to the Central Committee.”

Blood red has long been a color idolized by the CCP, and it has been used in all the communist regime’s emblematic badges and flags, indicating complete “political correctness,” while black is the opposite of red correctness, or even what the CCP deems as “anti-Party with ill-intention.”

Although Xi has already been the so-called “one above all” in China for years, many people who support him and flatter him on the surface are not doing so out of sincerity, Li Yuanhua, a former professor at Capital Normal University, told The Epoch Times on May 3.

“The praise or exaltation of him [Xi] instead served more or less to mock him, and this he knew,” Li Yuanhua said.

An outdoor screen shows live news coverage of Chinese leader Xi Jinping during the National People's Congress (NPC) opening session at the Great Hall of the People, along a street in Beijing, on March 5, 2023. Jade Gao/AFP via Getty Images

‘Clumsy Cases of Self-Glorification’

The propaganda agency in Zhejiang Province cited several cases analyzing how “low-level red” and “high-level black” operate in official reports. The agency said the two forms often appear in public articles covering significant events and sensitive moments in the CCP. They can also be combined.

Among the examples given by the agency were official reports about “a deputy mayor finally ate the moon cake with money from his own pocket” to tout the Party member’s integrity. Another was on “a poverty-alleviation cadre married a poor woman” to highlight the cadre’s dedication, and one about a “couple copying the Party chapter on their wedding night” to paint people’s love for the Party.

The agency said these clumsy cases of self-glorification are criticized and teased by the masses. They can be described as “inferior red loyalty to the CCP, while high-profile blackening the image of the CCP,” said the agency.

Li Yanming, a U.S.-based political commentator, said the emergence of these two forms is due to Xi’s pivot to the Maoist “left.”

It’s a return to the Cultural Revolution to prolong the Party’s life and centralize power, Li Yanming said.

“Officials at all levels pander to the left and fawn on Xi, resulting in ‘low-level red’ to prevail in the CCP’s officialdom,” he said.

Chinese Paramilitary police officers stand guard below a portrait of the late leader Mao Zedong in front of the Forbidden City at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, on June 4, 2014. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

But many officials are also dissatisfied with the top, especially the remnants of Xi’s political opponents, who abuse their power, intensify social conflicts, manipulate public opinion, and carry out anti-Xi activities such as “high-level black,” said Li Yanming.

Excuse for Purge

Li Yuanhua stated that it’s not only Xi who is not confident of his position but all officials in China from top to bottom, as they wield power not through elections but through nepotism.

“No matter how high their positions are, they doubt everything and don’t trust the people around them,” he said.

In addition, each member of the Communist Party, no matter which faction, is in a state of self-preservation, and competition and rivalry between them are inevitable. Therefore, they often use various excuses to attack their opponents, which is the CCP’s usual practice, Li Yuanhua added.

“Low-level red” and “high-level black” are among those excuses for internal infightings between various Party factions in this period.

Meanwhile, Li Yanming said that Xi was deeply trapped in the internal and external woes of the communist regime and is looking to weed out his potential enemies by identifying them as “low-level red” and “high-level black".

But along with the Party’s relentless political purges, the “low-level red” and “high-level black” will be difficult to eradicate, and the purges will only escalate. “This is also one of the typical features of the CCP’s doomsday crisis,” said Li Yanming.

Kane Zhang contributed to this report.