The Art of War: PRC Weaponizes Culture to Galvanize the People

Executive Summary:

• The Party sees culture as a tool to achieve its strategic ambitions both inside and outside the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Speeches, articles, and conferences portray it as central to achieving national rejuvenation.
• Party discourse on culture is shot through with militaristic terminology. Not just echoing Mao-era rhetoric, this reflects Beijing’s desire to “engineer souls” in pursuit of a strong nation.
• Artists, culture workers, and academics are perceived as pawns in a project to present the PRC globally as peaceful and prosperous, but the Party is aware of the deficiencies of its soft power.

In his 2003 book From War To Nationalism: China’s Turning Point 1924–5, the historian Arthur Waldron noted that military modernization has been perhaps the single most important engine of change in China since the nineteenth century. [1] Two decades on, this observation seems truer than ever. Today, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is attempting to mobilize the population of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in preparation for battle, while pushing forward an ambitious agenda under the rubric of “modernization.” Underpinning these two interrelated programs is the Party’s ideology, a prominent aspect of which is the place of culture and history—both that of the CCP itself and that of “Chinese civilization” more broadly. The clearest articulation of this in recent years has been the formal introduction of Xi Jinping Thought on Culture at last year’s National Conference on Propaganda, Ideology, and Cultural Work (People’s Daily, October 9, 2023; China Brief, October 20, 2023)

The last month has seen an effusion of writings and events by the Party on this very topic. Issue 20 of this year’s volume of Qiushi (求实), the Party’s flagship theory journal, was published on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the “Symposium on Literary and Artistic Work (文艺工作座谈会),” and includes Party General Secretary Xi Jinping’s speech from that event (Qiushi, October 15).

The ninth meeting of the Standing Committee of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), held from October 9–11, was titled “Promoting Cultural Confidence and Self-Strengthening, and Forging a New Splendor of Socialist Culture (推进文化自信自强，铸就社会主义文化新辉煌)” (CPPCC, October 28). “Self-strengthening (自强)” is of course a reference to the nineteenth-century “self-strengthening movement (自强运动)” that was geared toward modernizing the Qing and building up its military and industrial power. Two weeks later, the CPPCC looked even further back into China’s past, co-hosting an event to celebrate the 2,575th anniversary of the birth of Confucius, under the theme “Confucianism: civilizational diversity and modernization” (CPPCC, October 21).

Most recently, on October 28, the Politburo met in Beijing to hold a collective study session on building a strong cultural nation (建设文化强国) while, around 600 miles further south, the Fujian government co-hosted the “Second World Sinology Conference (第二届世界汉学家大会举行),” on the theme of “Understanding Chinese Civilization and Promoting World Modernization (读懂中华文明，携手促进世界现代化)” (International Department, October 28). (Xinhua, October 28).

The Party’s current idea of “culture” can be traced across these articles and events. Ever the materialists, the Party views culture as a tool, or perhaps even a weapon, that can be marshaled, directed, and deployed, both at home and overseas, to “realize the Chinese Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation (实现中华民族伟大复兴的中国梦)” (Qiushi, October 15; International Department, October 28). For Xi Jinping and the CCP leadership, culture is oftentimes merely a byword for a unified patriotism (or Party-otism), which can be used to buttress stability at home or burnish the regime’s idealized narrative of prosperity and harmony abroad.

Militaristic Rhetoric Pervades Cultural Discourse

Militaristic rhetoric pervades much of the Party’s language about art and culture. The theme of Monday’s Politburo session, “building a strong cultural nation (建设文化强国),” is indicative of this. Artists are referred to collectively as a “cultural talent force (文化人才队伍),” and are told that they must “have the heart of competing to win (要有竞胜之心),” while Xi argues that art criticism must have “combat power (战斗力)” to be persuasive (Qiushi, October 15a; October 15b; October 15c; Xinhua, October 28).

This is because the Party, at its core, remains an organization forged in war. Its insistence on promoting its own hagiographic cultural history underscores this. A separate Qiushi article in the issue highlights a concert that took place in Beijing in recent weeks to celebrate the country’s 75th anniversary, whose program included the Yellow River Cantata (黄河大合唱). Composed in 1939 during the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japan and first performed in Yan’an, the contemporary assessment of the work was that “one chorus is worth 100,000 Mausers (一曲大合唱，可顶十万毛瑟枪).” This line is still repeated today (Qiushi, October 15).

Another Qiushi article from the latest issue, authored by the journal’s editorial board, also underscores this point. It starts by recalling former CCP Chairman Mao Zedong’s May 1942 speech at the Yan’an Literary and Artistic Symposium in the midst of the war—the first time that the Party’s ideas on literature and art were systematically expounded (Qiushi, October 15). Mao’s speech, which introduced the Yan’an Rectification Campaign (the first internal purge of the CCP), made clear that literature and art must “become a component part of the whole revolutionary machine, operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy, and help the people fight the enemy with one heart and one mind (成为整个革命机器的一个组成部分，作为团结人民、教育人民、打击敌人、消灭敌人的有力的武器，帮助人民同心同德地和敌人作斗争)” (Marxists.org, accessed October 31). Xi’s 2014 speech—which the editorial board’s article follows—refers back to Mao’s, emphasizing the ideological and historical throughline and thus the importance of weaponizing culture as a battlefront against the enemy (Qiushi, October 15).

The return to martial language is most apparent in an article by the Party Organization of the Party China Literary Federation (中共中国文联党组) (Qiushi, October 15). In a subsection titled “Casting the Soul of the Nation: The Fundamental Task of Literary Creation (铸造民族灵魂：文艺创作的根本任务),” the authors double down on the idea of literature and art as “the engineering of the soul (铸造灵魂的工程),” and of literary and art workers are “the engineers of the soul (文艺工作者是灵魂的工程师).” [2] This language, which comes from Stalin via Mao, is a potent metaphor for how the Party sees those in the culture industry.

Patriotism is Failing to Inspire

PRC artists are, according to the Party, perpetually forging the Chinese nation. Thus, patriotism lies at the heart of its desired cultural products. As the Qiushi editorial board highlights, in the ten years since Xi’s 2014 speech, major artworks have centered on themes such as fighting poverty alleviation, building a moderately prosperous society in all aspects, on major risks and challenges such as fighting the new crown epidemic, and on sports events such as the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Hangzhou Asian Games, as well as on the realization of the people’s aspirations for a better life and the Chinese Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. The International Department similarly notes that artists should “make patriotism the main theme of their literary and art creations (把爱国主义作为文艺创作的主旋律)” and “carry forward the spirit of China, unite the strength of China … to march into the future with vigor (弘扬中国精神 …朝气蓬勃迈向未来)” (International Department, October 28). Despite suggestions by the CPPCC to look at the “Korean Wave(韩流)” or at Al Jazeera to learn lessons in how to improve cultural soft power, the prescribed (and proscribed) topics on offer are unlikely to lead to the “creation of excellent works worthy of the times (创作无愧于时代的优秀作品),” as Xi envisages (Qiushi, October 15; CPPCC, October 28).

The image the Party wishes to portray abroad, however, is undercut by the means it intends to use. The coverage of the World Sinology Conference provided by the International Department suggested that, “as sinologists, they are willing to actively disseminate Chinese culture, promote exchanges and mutual understanding between Chinese and foreign civilizations, enhance mutual understanding and trust, promote the implementation of the three major global initiatives, and join hands to build a better world (作为汉学家，愿积极传播中华文化，促进中外文明交流互鉴，增进相互理解和信任，推动落实三大全球倡议，携手建设更加美好的世界)” (International Department, October 28). This is instructive on two levels. Not only has the Party quite literally spoken for foreign academics who study China here, but it has also betrayed its view of what sinology, as a discipline, ought to entail. Namely, regurgitating CCP talking points and propaganda narratives.

One problem with tying culture ever more closely to the nation-building project is that, in the Party’s lexicon of official rhetoric, the word culture increasingly becomes devoid of any real substantive content. Instead, it can be seen as yet another ideological box to tick, whose importance comes from its repeated association with whatever other ideological terms are salient. This is why one Qiushi article links culture to this year’s favorite buzzword, calling for “cultivating new quality productive forces in the field of culture (培育文化领域新质生产力),” while others link it to modernization (the theme of this year’s Third Plenum) and to building the Global Civilization Initiative and the Community of Common Destiny (Qiushi, October 15; October 15b).

The Party’s martial rhetoric, which will doubtless become increasingly enflamed next year during the 80th anniversary of the end of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japan, is at odds with the image that the PRC wishes to project abroad of itself as a peaceful civilization (Xinhua, October 29). At the second World Sinology Conference this month, the head of the International Department, Liu Jianchao (刘建超), made the astonishing—if unsurprising—claim that Chinese civilization “possesses a ‘history gene’ that values peace (有以和为贵的历史基因)” (International Department, October 28).

One suspects that some of the literary workers at Qiushi understand cognitive dissonance here too. The editorial board’s article includes a famous quote from an essay by the early twentieth-century writer Lu Xun (鲁迅): “Literature and art are the fires from which the national spirit glows, and at the same time the lamps that guide the future of the national spirit (文艺是国民精神所发的火光，同时也是引导国民精神的前途的灯火)” (Qiushi, October 15). Out of context, it makes for a rousing call for the arts to support the national project. But in the context of the essay in which it originally appears, another reading emerges. “On Looking at Things with Eyes Wide Open (論睜了眼看)” was written in the wake of the Shanghai massacre of 1925 and is full of critical language that could easily be redirected to critique the Party today (Wikisource, accessed October 31). Lu writes, “The world is changing day by day, and the time has long since come for our writers to take off their masks, to look at life sincerely, deeply, and boldly, and to write about it in all its flesh and blood (世界日日改變，我們的作家取下假面，真誠地，深入地，大膽地看取人生並且寫出他的血和肉來的時候早到了).” He finishes the essay by saying that the contemporary culture only contains “eulogies of iron and blood (鐵和血的贊頌),” and laments that under the political label of “patriotism,” the eyes of so-called critics are closed once again, if they were not closed all along. Next year will be the centenary of Lu’s essay, yet his diagnosis still echoes across history, remaining just as salient today.

Notes

[1] Arthur Waldron. From War To Nationalism: China’s Turning Point 1924–5. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dr. Waldron is a board member at The Jamestown Foundation.

[2] This topic is treated at length by John Garnaut in an August 2017 talk titled “Engineers of the Soul: What Australia Needs to Know about Ideology in Xi Jinping’s China” (Sinocism, January 16, 2019).