Zeng Ge
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By Chris Buckley
Slogans studded with numerals and abstract exhortations are central to the dramaturgy of the Chinese Communist Party, intoned like spells to exalt leaders, cajole citizens and malign enemies. Yet as President Xi Jinping’s latest contribution shows, the magic of a party slogan often works through its supple vagueness.
In comments made in mid-December, Mr. Xi spelled out his four big priorities, and lately party media have acclaimed his “Four Comprehensives” as a profound doctrinal breakthrough. While visiting Jiangsu Province in eastern China, Mr. Xi said the country must:
Comprehensively build a moderately prosperous society,
Comprehensively deepen reform,
Comprehensively govern the country according to the law,
Comprehensively apply strictness in governing the party.
Since last week, People’s Daily and other party newspapers have acclaimed the Four Comprehensives as a visionary guide for China’s future. In implausibly well-worded comments online, citizens have declared their joy that, finally, they have the Four Comprehensives to show the way forward. Scholars have been recruited to laud Mr. Xi as the “designer of China’s road to being a great power,” completing a path set out by Marx and Mao Zedong.
Catching the breathlessly convoluted tone of the orchestrated torrent of praise demands a longer quote.
“This strategic layout incorporates profound strategic thinking,” said one of the many commentaries that have appeared in People’s Daily, in print and on its website. It added: Each “comprehensive” is in itself a system of thought grounded in reality, forging a way to the future and possessing distinctive features. Combined, the four “comprehensives” complement each other so each shines more brilliantly in their shared company, and this is a new leap in innovating the party’s strategy for governance and wise rule to keep up with the times while combining Marxism with Chinese practice.
The hoopla over the stolid, multi-clause slogans that speckle party leaders’ speeches in China can baffle outsiders. To be sure, the Four Comprehensives read more succinctly in Chinese than English, and they broadly sum up Mr. Xi’s crowded agenda: promoting economic growth and adjustment, cleaning up the flawed legal system while wiping out political and ideological challenges to party power, and rooting out corruption.
But why would bland phrases about well-established goals prompt such a big fuss?
The answer is to be found not in hunting for a single precise meaning or purpose in the words, but in seeing such slogans as tools to help Chinese leaders maintain an aura of invincibility while they navigate shifting imperatives. They are as much vehicles for evasion and elision as for clarification, allowing party leaders to adjust priorities under a protective canopy of rhetorical continuity and coherence.
“I think they try to capture four basic contradictions that they see presently,” Sebastian Heilmann, the director of the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, said in a telephone interview. “It leaves a lot of room for adjusting these concepts in the policy-making process in the next few years. It sounds like a very tactical slogan.”
Mr. Xi is following the example of his predecessors, each of whom coined defining slogans that helped project an image of confident, unwavering authority, even when confidence faltered and policies wavered.
Mr. Xi’s immediate predecessor as national leader, Hu Jintao, tried his “Scientific Outlook on Development.” Before Mr. Hu, Jiang Zemin offered his “Three Represents” and before that his “Three Stresses.” Deng Xiaoping first signed on with the “Four Modernizations,” then added the “Four Cardinal Principles” and many other catchphrases, and tried to synthesize them as “One Center, Two Basic Points.”
Mr. Xi’s slogan is, like these, capable of shifting emphasis to ride out political tides, said Perry Link, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has written a study of Chinese political language.
“Exactly what it means could be put to various purposes,” Mr. Link said in a telephone interview. “You’re automatically correct even though it’s not clear what you said. It provides, as it were, a theoretical cudgel with which you can pick your own fights.”
Even the rhythms in the slogans, rooted in the cadences of traditional Chinese, can “add some kind of exalted feeling,” and enumeration adds an aura of definitive, scientific truth, he said.
“They finalize the result. One, two, three, four — you absorb things and that’s it,” he said. “It’s got that comprehensive feel about it that, if you’ve got this, then you’ve got everything.”
The timing and evolution of Mr. Xi’s “Four Comprehensives” show how these formulaic party messages are crafted, and recrafted, to give an aura of grandeur to the business of ruling.
In fact, Mr. Xi’s Four Comprehensives were initially three.
Mr. Xi announced his big idea after a busy year in which he sought to combine an intense drive against official corruption with promoting economic adjustment, and a vigorous crackdown on dissent and ideological heterodoxy. Some commentaries have said that Mr. Xi wanted to remind officials and citizens that he had a full-fledged agenda that went beyond purging wayward officials.
“At the same time that everyone is applauding and cheering, some people have begun to worry,” said one commentary in China Youth Daily, a party-run newspaper. “With the intense campaign against corruption, what is the ruling party’s strategy for its next step?”
Indeed, when Mr. Xi first enunciated his “comprehensives” last year, the last one, referring to the continued campaign against corruption, was not on the list. In a visit to the eastern province of Fujian in early November, Mr. Xi laid out the first three items on his list. But that formulation was promptly reworked, apparently after he and his advisers decided that leaving out fighting corruption might send the wrong message.
In December, during his visit to Jiangsu Province, Mr. Xi rounded out his list to four, adding on the promise to strictly govern the party. If that shift looked hasty, party propagandists did not miss a beat.
“The shift from the ‘Three Comprehensives’ to the ‘Four Comprehensives’ carries profound implications,” explained one party commentator in Xingtai, a city in northern China. The addition, he said, created an “even more complete and ever more mature overall framework for governance and wise rule.”
Some have speculated that Mr. Xi might seek to install the Four Comprehensives into the party and state constitutions as his foundational contribution to official doctrine, just as Mr. Hu and Mr. Jiang managed to have their contributions included. It may be too early in Mr. Xi’s decade-long tenure for that.
But the new party formulation will help elevate Mr. Xi and dim even further the profiles of his predecessors. Throughout the five commentaries published last week on the front page of People’s Daily to explain the Four Comprehensives, Mao was not mentioned once, nor was Mr. Jiang or Mr. Hu. There was one passing reference to Deng. Mr. Xi’s name appeared 23 times.
Slogans studded with numerals and abstract exhortations are central to the dramaturgy of the Chinese Communist Party, intoned like spells to exalt leaders, cajole citizens and malign enemies. Yet as President Xi Jinping’s latest contribution shows, the magic of a party slogan often works through its supple vagueness.
In comments made in mid-December, Mr. Xi spelled out his four big priorities, and lately party media have acclaimed his “Four Comprehensives” as a profound doctrinal breakthrough. While visiting Jiangsu Province in eastern China, Mr. Xi said the country must:
Comprehensively build a moderately prosperous society,
Comprehensively deepen reform,
Comprehensively govern the country according to the law,
Comprehensively apply strictness in governing the party.
Since last week, People’s Daily and other party newspapers have acclaimed the Four Comprehensives as a visionary guide for China’s future. In implausibly well-worded comments online, citizens have declared their joy that, finally, they have the Four Comprehensives to show the way forward. Scholars have been recruited to laud Mr. Xi as the “designer of China’s road to being a great power,” completing a path set out by Marx and Mao Zedong.
Catching the breathlessly convoluted tone of the orchestrated torrent of praise demands a longer quote.
“This strategic layout incorporates profound strategic thinking,” said one of the many commentaries that have appeared in People’s Daily, in print and on its website. It added: Each “comprehensive” is in itself a system of thought grounded in reality, forging a way to the future and possessing distinctive features. Combined, the four “comprehensives” complement each other so each shines more brilliantly in their shared company, and this is a new leap in innovating the party’s strategy for governance and wise rule to keep up with the times while combining Marxism with Chinese practice.
The hoopla over the stolid, multi-clause slogans that speckle party leaders’ speeches in China can baffle outsiders. To be sure, the Four Comprehensives read more succinctly in Chinese than English, and they broadly sum up Mr. Xi’s crowded agenda: promoting economic growth and adjustment, cleaning up the flawed legal system while wiping out political and ideological challenges to party power, and rooting out corruption.
But why would bland phrases about well-established goals prompt such a big fuss?
The answer is to be found not in hunting for a single precise meaning or purpose in the words, but in seeing such slogans as tools to help Chinese leaders maintain an aura of invincibility while they navigate shifting imperatives. They are as much vehicles for evasion and elision as for clarification, allowing party leaders to adjust priorities under a protective canopy of rhetorical continuity and coherence.
“I think they try to capture four basic contradictions that they see presently,” Sebastian Heilmann, the director of the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, said in a telephone interview. “It leaves a lot of room for adjusting these concepts in the policy-making process in the next few years. It sounds like a very tactical slogan.”
Mr. Xi is following the example of his predecessors, each of whom coined defining slogans that helped project an image of confident, unwavering authority, even when confidence faltered and policies wavered.
Mr. Xi’s immediate predecessor as national leader, Hu Jintao, tried his “Scientific Outlook on Development.” Before Mr. Hu, Jiang Zemin offered his “Three Represents” and before that his “Three Stresses.” Deng Xiaoping first signed on with the “Four Modernizations,” then added the “Four Cardinal Principles” and many other catchphrases, and tried to synthesize them as “One Center, Two Basic Points.”
Mr. Xi’s slogan is, like these, capable of shifting emphasis to ride out political tides, said Perry Link, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, who has written a study of Chinese political language.
“Exactly what it means could be put to various purposes,” Mr. Link said in a telephone interview. “You’re automatically correct even though it’s not clear what you said. It provides, as it were, a theoretical cudgel with which you can pick your own fights.”
Even the rhythms in the slogans, rooted in the cadences of traditional Chinese, can “add some kind of exalted feeling,” and enumeration adds an aura of definitive, scientific truth, he said.
“They finalize the result. One, two, three, four — you absorb things and that’s it,” he said. “It’s got that comprehensive feel about it that, if you’ve got this, then you’ve got everything.”
The timing and evolution of Mr. Xi’s “Four Comprehensives” show how these formulaic party messages are crafted, and recrafted, to give an aura of grandeur to the business of ruling.
In fact, Mr. Xi’s Four Comprehensives were initially three.
Mr. Xi announced his big idea after a busy year in which he sought to combine an intense drive against official corruption with promoting economic adjustment, and a vigorous crackdown on dissent and ideological heterodoxy. Some commentaries have said that Mr. Xi wanted to remind officials and citizens that he had a full-fledged agenda that went beyond purging wayward officials.
“At the same time that everyone is applauding and cheering, some people have begun to worry,” said one commentary in China Youth Daily, a party-run newspaper. “With the intense campaign against corruption, what is the ruling party’s strategy for its next step?”
Indeed, when Mr. Xi first enunciated his “comprehensives” last year, the last one, referring to the continued campaign against corruption, was not on the list. In a visit to the eastern province of Fujian in early November, Mr. Xi laid out the first three items on his list. But that formulation was promptly reworked, apparently after he and his advisers decided that leaving out fighting corruption might send the wrong message.
In December, during his visit to Jiangsu Province, Mr. Xi rounded out his list to four, adding on the promise to strictly govern the party. If that shift looked hasty, party propagandists did not miss a beat.
“The shift from the ‘Three Comprehensives’ to the ‘Four Comprehensives’ carries profound implications,” explained one party commentator in Xingtai, a city in northern China. The addition, he said, created an “even more complete and ever more mature overall framework for governance and wise rule.”
Some have speculated that Mr. Xi might seek to install the Four Comprehensives into the party and state constitutions as his foundational contribution to official doctrine, just as Mr. Hu and Mr. Jiang managed to have their contributions included. It may be too early in Mr. Xi’s decade-long tenure for that.
But the new party formulation will help elevate Mr. Xi and dim even further the profiles of his predecessors. Throughout the five commentaries published last week on the front page of People’s Daily to explain the Four Comprehensives, Mao was not mentioned once, nor was Mr. Jiang or Mr. Hu. There was one passing reference to Deng. Mr. Xi’s name appeared 23 times.
