November 21, 2014 6:25 AM
The Chinese Communist Party’s Problem With Model Behavior
By Russell Leigh Moses
China’s Communist party wants to remain in the driver’s seat when it comes to managing morality in society–even during the country’s annual auto shows.
An auto show in the southern city of Guangzhou had barely gotten underway this week when the People’s Daily pulled up with a commentary covered across Chinese media (in Chinese) decrying the “vulgarity” of past events.
Chinese media have previously lamented how Chinese auto shows, particularly smaller ones like the Guangzhou event, tend to slather new car models with scantily clad female models, to the point that the latter often get vastly more attention. But it’s an unusually mundane topic for the august pages of the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper. Equally unusual was the screeching tone that ran through the commentary.
“These ‘human flesh’ exhibits of the half-naked, slithering across car hoods have become,” according to the essay, “a very bad social influence.”
That the People’s Daily would devote so much bile to an industry event says something about standards – or lack thereof – at play in marketing cars in China. But it says more about the Communist Party’s renewed effort to be the driving force behind morality in the country.
In October, Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted a meeting on arts and literature in which he insisted that the country’s creative endeavors be patriotic and moral. Channeling an address given by Mao on the same topic seven decades earlier, he said the “fundamental task” for artists and writers was “to create and produce outstanding works worthy of our great nation.”
The next month, at a major meeting dedicated to legal reform, the Communist Party’s Central Committee produced a policy document that said the party needed to focus on “governing the country according to law” but also “governing the country according to morality.”
While campaigns against spiritual pollution are nothing new in China, they have often been perfunctory, running for a few weeks or months before petering out. This current push is both broader and more serious.
This week’s auto show commentary, for example, was signed with the sort of authoritative pseudonym that usually represents the views of high-level party officials—in this case, the penname of “Forthright Admonitions” was employed, clearly to signal an instruction from Beijing for those behaving badly to beware.
It also called for actual punishment, saying auto show organizers who opt for such low-brow marketing techniques should suffer heavy fines, be prohibited from holding the event in subsequent years, or at least be ordered to make a public apology across the same media they employ to hype the event. Carmakers themselves should be placed on what the commentary called a “spiritual civilization blacklist,” denoting their unwillingness to abide by bans on vulgarity.
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Even attendees, the editorial concluded, should themselves “display a little more responsibility, curb their bad impulses, and conduct themselves in ways so as to enable a civilizing spirit to flower once again.”
It’s not surprising in the current era that the Communist Party would attempt to make itself the arbiter of what constitutes acceptable behavior in the country. One of Xi Jinping’s goals is to shore up the party’s legitimacy by making it the authoritative solution-provider for China’s ills, and spiritual bankruptcy is one problem that has received ample attention from intellectuals and officials alike in the past decade.
The question is whether the party can, or should, play that role.
One of the party’s most widely-praised moves in the post-Mao era was its decision to retreat from the private lives of Chinese citizens. That opened the door for some boorish behavior, but it also provided the space for business and culture to flourish and helped fuel the country’s recovery from decades of malaise. In a country where people have grown accustomed to personal choice, attempts by the party to exert more control over those choices run the risk of being ignored – or, worse, generating resentment.
Either result renders the Communist party less than relevant to the very residents Xi has been trying to reach out to.
Then there’s the question of capacity. More than a few Chinese people see their own problems mounting and Beijing’s prospects for solving them fading just as quickly. At a time when the country faces real questions over issues like health care, environmental pollution and mounting public debt, should the party be expending the considerable energy required to impose its own moral order?
Encouraging party members to be more moral makes sense. Requiring private citizens to do the same feels like a step backwards.
Early indications aren’t encouraging. The day following its commentary on the Guangzhou Auto Show, People’s Daily ran an account (in Chinese) of the event’s opening day that quoted one organizer saying that “vulgarity had certainly been curbed” this year. The story admitted that some industry representatives were apparently warned ahead of time that journalists would be visiting, and so a special meeting was held cautioning car exhibitors to take care.
Despite that attempt, the story noted, “our reporter found that in some booths there were models wearing thin, transparent, and other revealing clothing, just as before.”
Russell Leigh Moses is the Dean of Academics and Faculty at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies. He is writing a book on the changing role of power in the Chinese political system.
http://m.wsj.com/articles/BL-CJB-24971
