Can mass indoctrination save Xi Jinping? Times of turmoil and transition are always unstable and unpredictable; the mood of the “crowd” becomes critical and mercurial. The narrowness of the power base around a leader makes the ruler vulnerable and, of necessity, paranoid.
Even trustworthy factions and supporters aren’t trusted. Neither is the loyalty of the crowd, regardless of the level of repression and surveillance.
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi, having eliminated all possible senior-level opponents or relegated the more innocuous or inaccessible to places of containment, is attempting to transition the People’s Republic of China (PRC) back to the Maoism to which he’s loyal. And while that may be feasible, despite the mass suffering being escalated against the population of mainland China, it may find its breaking point if it leads to a command to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to unleash a war against Taiwan (the Republic of China, or ROC).
Such a war, given its automatic escalation into a conflict involving most of the PRC’s neighbors plus the United States and its allies, is seen by many in the PLA as being suicidal or, at best, pyrrhic, in that it would lead to the destruction of the CCP and much of mainland China’s infrastructure, even if it were technically successful in destroying the ROC.
The growing uncertainty of his ability to command obedience among top People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officials was highlighted in the sudden removal in June of PLA Rocket Force Commander Gen. Li Yuchao (commander since January 2022) and possibly one of the Rocket Force deputy commanders, Gen. Zhang Zhengzhong. Gen. Li’s removal was reportedly over “possible connections” with the United States, where it was understood that his son was studying.
The Rocket Force is, understandably, where Mr. Xi must rely on technocrats. He can appoint loyalists to posts in the Ground Forces, the Navy, and the Air Force, but the Rocket Force is more specifically the preserve of the technocrats, and there’s little love lost between the Rocket Force and Mr. Xi. But the Rocket Force remains the essential component for any war against Taiwan or any of the PRC’s major potential adversaries.
The split between Mr. Xi and senior PLA officers may have been real or the result of perception dominance operations by the United States to play on the paranoia around Mr. Xi’s throne.
In a July 6 report in The Epoch Times, I noted:
“Would it be best for Xi’s adversaries to devise strategies to separate—split—Xi from his power, much as the Last Emperor, Puyi, was left unknowingly isolated in the Forbidden City while China descended into the destruction of the land’s historical nobility. Significantly, the CCP has a history of ’splitting tactics’ and ’splittist tendencies’ within the Party, to a far more obvious degree than in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), but there is little evidence that Western agencies have truly attempted to exploit this characteristic.
“Xi has effectively sealed off much of the current generation of youth in mainland China from news and influence from abroad. They may protest against Xi and the CCP based on their own present distress, but how can they and the rank and file of the PLA be motivated by the comfort of support from abroad?”
The severe doubts are now apparent as to the loyalty of PLA commanders—not to mention the rank-and-file—to obey a command to engage in full-scale war, and Mr. Xi has personally embarked on talks with the PLA to urge an increased readiness for war. During the first week of July, Mr. Xi, on an inspection tour of the Eastern Theater Command, urged the PLA to “deepen war and combat planning to increase the chances of victory in actual combat” while implying that there was a heightened threat to “China’s sovereignty and territory.”
There’s a brief window of opportunity, because of the balance of forces issues and because of the PRC’s declining economic capabilities (among other factors), for Mr. Xi to actually follow through with his threat to overwhelm Taiwan. But there’s now considerable clarity that a move for Mr. Xi to commit to that action—to fulfill his promise to take Taiwan—could result in a humiliating rejection of his authority by his own PLA or a failed military operation that would bring down the CCP/PRC structure.
That this isn’t an entirely new realization comes with the fact that, for the past few years, Xi’s national security concerns have been focused largely on the domestic population. Internal security spending in the PRC is now consistently more than spending on the PLA. And, as the “zero COVID” operations in the PRC—particularly in Shanghai from April 1, 2022, until after June 2022—the PLA is also at the heart of domestic security force considerations.
Mr. Xi has consistently attempted to distance the Party from the economic woes that currently plague mainland China but with little success. The last holdout of unquestioned support for the CCP was from the so-called little pinks, younger-generation Chinese nationalists (usually 18-to-24-year-olds and mainly female), who didn’t experience the brief window of exposure to external (i.e., non-Chinese) media imagery and exposure to foreign contacts. Unsurprisingly, most of the “little pinks” are from second-, third-, and fourth-tier cities, much like the ultra-conservatives in Iran, Turkey, and so on.
So the question now is whether Mr. Xi has also lost the opportunity to do what Mao Zedong and his followers attempted from the 1920s onward: to find a means of mass conditioning of the Chinese population. It was always a “work in progress,” and the Maoists took as much as possible from the intense research done into the subject by the CPSU, particularly during Stalinist times.
Stefan Possony, the great grand strategist and authority on communism (and the world’s leading authority on psychological strategy), who died in 1995, consistently wrote on the topic of mass conditioning and so-called brainwashing and particularly on the CPSU and CCP commitment to it. Much of the CCP’s work had a profound impact on Mr. Xi, whose psyche was unavoidably conditioned—or scarred—by the Cultural Revolution and the Maoist purge of his father and family.
Without question, Mr. Xi and his psychological strategists, functioning under the distinctly Chinese approach to “total war” in the 21st century, have been keenly aware that the work of such pioneers as Ivan Pavlov in the USSR, furthered by Mao’s loyal deputy, Kang Sheng, was now of necessity accelerated by modern communications and social media technologies. So far, however, the massive “zero COVID” and other internal population control measures—using surveillance and social media technologies coupled with digital currency coercive capabilities—haven’t been able to overwhelm the reality that the tsunami wave of impoverishment of the Chinese population was attributable to the Party.
So Mr. Xi is now on the horns of a dilemma: He can’t trust the PLA to go to war and distract the domestic population from its internal woes, and he can’t trust the internal security mechanisms (including mass conditioning) to stem the tide of domestic unrest. He can demonstrate, however, that he has the ability to selectively set examples of individuals within the PLA, the domestic security services, and the more self-confident wealthy entrepreneurs that they can be picked off separately without bringing down the house of cards.
Meanwhile, it now seems a gamble that Mr. Xi can do more than he has done so far—and particularly with the searing mass psychosis induced by the COVID-19 fear pandemic—to subdue the Chinese population. All that awaits, unless economic relief can be procured, is for the critical mass to move toward a tide of open resistance.
Mr. Xi’s response, even now, has been physical suppression but done in a fashion to induce caution among those who would attack him. Added to that is the Party’s ability to make domestic communications so fraught with the prospect of eavesdropping that conspiracies are reduced in scope and, in many instances, suppressed.
If Mr. Xi doesn’t know who he can trust within his power structure, it’s equally true that no one in the PRC can feel fully secure in speaking sedition to even a close relative.
Every act of dissidence in the PRC is a reckless display of courage.
