The CCP’s recently concluded Third Plenum yielded a final communiqué that acknowledged current economic, geopolitical, and ideological risks and the need for continued systemic reforms but offered little (yet) in the way of specifics. Nevertheless, propagandists promoted various “Xi as Reformer” narratives in Chinese state media. Some of the claims, including one that Xi visited the “cradle of reform” Xiaogang village in Anhui province in 1978, were met with incredulity on Chinese social media. The pushback to these glorifications of Xi’s reformist image appears to have led to at least one deleted state-media commentary and censorship in the form of deleted comments and extensive comment filtering on social media posts.
Monday, the opening day of the Third Plenum, saw heavy state-media promotion of “Xi the Reformer,” a 10,000 word commentary from state-media outlet Xinhua that hailed Xi Jinping as a great reformer on the same level as Deng Xiaoping. From Josephine Ma at South China Morning Post:
The commentary, titled “Xi Jinping the reformer”, said [Xi] was behind all the 2,000 “reform measures” rolled out over the past decade. These ranged from poverty elimination, urban-rural development and corruption crackdowns, to support for business and innovation, and a “green revolution” – a phrase referring to China’s rise as a leader in new energy vehicles and other green technology.
[…] It also compared Xi with paramount leader Deng at length, saying both carried forward the mission to achieve China’s modernisation. However, it also highlighted the differences, saying Xi’s reforms were more than economic and aimed to shape “Chinese people in a new era”, filled with national pride. [Source]
The commentary, which seems to have first appeared in early March during the Two Sessions legislative and advisory meetings, was reportedly deleted from Xinhua’s official website and became unsearchable on Baidu sometime this week. Some have speculated that the commentary may have been deleted due to its overblown claims and potential for fueling a backlash among already skeptical social media users.
A heavily promoted hagiographic video feature from Xinhua, “Leading a New Journey,” also prompted a massive backlash after it was posted to Weibo on July 15. The comment section beneath the video was flooded with responses skeptical of its claims that a young Xi Jinping had visited Xiaogang village in Anhui province in 1978—well before the village’s experiment with decollectivization was publicly revealed in 1980—in order to research agricultural reform. Although the video has not been deleted, it was the subject of comment filtering and the extensive deletion of critical comments. The video also attracted criticism on overseas social media sites such as X. CDT editors have collected some of the Chinese-language comments from X, a few of which are translated below:
@whyyoutouzhele: Why not just claim that Xi Jinping personally invented and implemented the household responsibility system?
@ThomasYoung198: Since he doesn’t have a great reformist track record to brag about, let’s make some stuff up!
@speedupxjp: In the beginning, Xi Jinping created the Heavens and the Earth.
@wuyuehua1776: It wasn’t until the Xinhua News report on June 28, 1980 that we learned that [Xiaogang’s] bumper harvest was due to decollectivization. Before that, the hush-hush contract and the decision to parcel out the land had been a closely kept secret. So what could Xi have been investigating in late 1978?
@lanniaoyouke: Before the harvest results under the household responsibility system were even available, he went to conduct research on them.
@Pledgeme2414475: He traveled back through time. [Chinese]
It is not altogether impossible that Xi, as the son of a recently rehabilitated senior cadre who was one of the Party’s most prominent voices in favor of reform, visited Xiaogang early on. But state media reports about Xi’s 2016 inspection visit to Xiaogang village made no mention that it was, allegedly, a return visit. The story of Xiaogang as a “cradle of reform” is deeply enshrined in CPP history. Xiaogang is home to a museum dedicated to its role in agricultural reform, and the village’s history is often cited in state media pieces. As the accepted history goes, a group of 18 Xiaogang farmers—having seen their village suffer greatly during the Great Famine of the late 50s and early 60s, a crisis they attributed to the inflexible commune system—signed a secret contract to de-collectivize and subdivide their common farmland in an effort to improve the harvest and provide more food for themselves and their families. That hush-hush contract would pave the way for the “household contract responsibility system,” a key component of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening policy.
Foreign Policy’s James Palmer reported on the inconsistencies inherent in the “Leading a New Journey” video, and discussed the reasons behind Party propagandists’ and state media’s desire to burnish Xi’s reformist image in the run-up to the Third Plenum:
Xi has previously claimed that he went as a student to Anhui to study the village that introduced the aforementioned system, a set of reforms later adopted across China that moved the country away from collectivization. But as political scientist Joshua Eisenman has shown, the story about the local system in Anhui is largely a propaganda fabrication that Deng used to implement his policy changes; Xi’s trip is also probably made up. Now, the documentary says, Xi has “taken up the baton of history” in order to advance further reforms.
The drum is being beaten so loudly because there are fears within the party and wider public that Xi has effectively abandoned Deng’s projects of reform and opening up, returning to the top-down mentality and Maoist ideals of the pre-reform era. Deng’s efforts made life better in China, and the idea that his approach might be reversed is frightening for most people.
[…] State media is thus trying to reassure the public that Xi is committed to reform. The economic buzzword this year is “new quality productive forces,” or using technology to produce decisive breakthroughs that will give China critical geopolitical advantages over other powers. Coupled with Xi’s traditionally Marxist focus on manufacturing—and a shift away from previous attempts to move the Chinese economy toward consumption rather than production—the Third Plenum announcements are likely to focus on technologically focused growth. [Source]
Yet another Xinhua feature published this week, “The ‘Xiaogang Dream’ Is Also the Dream of the Vast Majority of Farmers,” looks back at Xi’s April 2016 visit to Xiaogang village, where he met with Yan Jinchang, one of the farmers who signed the legendary secret contract so many years ago.
On Thursday, as the Third Plenum concluded, state media published the meetings’ final communiqué. As expected, the document reiterated the Party’s stand on various challenges and ideological issues, and focused on the general direction of policies rather than the specifics of implementation. Sinocism’s Bill Bishop’s early analysis noted that the document did not signal any significant change of course: “The Communique details the progress in comprehensively deepening reform since the 2013 Third Plenum and again makes it clear the leadership thinks they are on the correct path.” In his Substack newsletter Tracking People’s Daily, Manoj Kewalramani characterized the communiqué as “a strong endorsement of the policy direction that China has been on, and Xi Jinping’s leadership. For instance, it tells us that the Central Committee offered a ‘highly positive assessment of the success and achievements’ of reform work since the new era.”
CDT editors tracking online censorship throughout the Plenum noted that Weibo hashtags related to the event were strictly controlled, and search results were limited to content posted by verified users. In addition, comment filtering was enabled for Weibo accounts such as People’s Daily, CCTV News, and Xinhua News Agency. Some social media comments in response to the final communiqué criticized it as tepid or meaningless, devoid of content, or even a sign that China had entered a “garbage time in history.” One Chinese-language comment on X described it as “a garbage draft in a garbage era.”
Although Xi Jinping presided over the Third Plenum’s final meeting and unveiling of the communiqué, his lack of visibility earlier in the Plenum sparked unsubstantiated rumors of political infighting, illness, or even a serious health condition such as a stroke. On X, Teacher Li reported that after a spike in Baidu searches for “stroke,” the platform appeared to have enacted a search ban on the term. Phil Cunningham’s CCTV Follies noted that throughout the Plenum, state-broadcaster CCTV dealt with Xi’s low profile by airing a selection of past “greatest of Xi” content, including such perennial features as “Xi’s Time,” “Xi’s Vision,” “Xi’s Focus,” and “Xi’s Story.”
