By Kerry Brown
As economic growth slows, China’s leader are trying their hands at building moral (rather than economic) capital.
A visitor to Beijing over the last few weeks will have had trouble avoiding the latest swathe of slogans pasted everywhere from public notice boards to roadside billboards. Flashing among the usual advertisements are brash neon-lit signs extolling socialist values.
There is nothing new about such campaigns. Among all the changes in China, the constant presence of slogans has been reassuringly stable. In the mid-1990s, when I was living in Inner Mongolia, even the most remote grassland areas were full of phrases extolling “love of the motherland” (a slogan linked to a patriotic education movement at the time) and even more direct exhortations to “raise the quality of the population” (tigao renkou zheliang). In the era of Hu Jintao, from 2002 on, it soon became impossible to wander far without coming across some formulation working in Hu’s trademarks of “scientific development” (kexue fazhan) and “harmonious society” (hexie shehui).
The latter was a particularly rich one for ironists. I once saw two brawny men having an all-out fist fight under a huge sign at Beijing’s airport demanding that Chinese people bring about the harmonious society. Chinese society in the Hu era had many facets, but harmony was not the most obvious of them.
In the China of Xi Jinping, the most striking aspect of the slogan campaign is its emphasis on moral education. The so-called socialist values are broad enough to encompass nearly any virtue. The values listed in that category include equality, justice, industriousness, professionalism, and harmony. This heady mix is bereft of any explanatory framework.
But the emphasis on these values comes as China is in the midst of a major clean-up of the party through the anti-corruption struggle, and as Beijing moves toward something akin to Chinese-style austerity politics. Falling growth means an end of the excesses of the Hu and Wen golden years. Slowing economic growth means that the Party is now concentrating on a different kind of capital – moral capital rather than economic wealth.
Read the full story at The Diplomat