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The Chinese leader seeks to restore an earlier era of ideological indoctrination and national unity—whether his society wants it or not.
The Marx and Confucius show is just one small part of Xi’s campaign to fashion a new ideological conformity in China. Its apparent aim is to foster unity in preparation for struggles at home and abroad—but with the ultimate purpose of tightening Xi’s grip on China.
Chinese leaders “want to have a very powerful, socialist, ideological framework that can congeal the population, and this is of course under the party’s control and guidance,” Wang Feng, a sociologist at UC Irvine, told me. “What’s a more powerful way to centralize power than to control people’s thought?”
Xi’s push for communist conformity might seem anachronistic in the age of social media and the global digital commons. But it’s only one way he is dragging China back into an older, darker time.
returned to Cold War–style confrontation with the West after a period of fruitful cooperation
reestablished one-man rule to a degree unseen since the days of Mao Zedong, the Communist regime’s founder. Now he is attempting to restore the intense ideological indoctrination of earlier years of Communist rule—the era of Mao’s Little Red Book
in March, Xi introduced the “Global Civilization Initiative,” a manifesto in which he advocates “respect for the diversity of civilizations” and that “coexistence transcend feelings of superiority.” Countries, he adds, should “refrain from imposing their own values or models on others.”
That’s Xi-speak for denying the existence of the universal rights and values that undergird the global primacy of democracy
strangled private education
Lol foreign investors get fucked
Chinese leaders have a long history of trying to control thought. In 213 B.C.E., the first emperor of the Qin dynasty became irritated with scholars
unlimited genocide on westoid “scholars”
If any china-watchers or xi-speakers want to unpack all the other bullshit 
Pure projection by the Western media that invented the fake “culture war” in the first place.
the media didn’t need to invent anything or propagandize anyone, the american people do that themselves
Like Bacteria in Petri Dishes, the ruling class has had a considerable effect in cultivating what would likely only be a very very small incident. For example, the antivax org in the UK that launched the original huge suit that caused the antivax scare we know today had like ten members in it before the case and the news running with the (false) possibilities of the case.
the media didn’t invent racism sexism or homophobia and these weren’t “small incidents”
Yeah I just mean it’s amplified by bourgeois media, it’d still be there in a “neutral” society but it’s amplified because it benefits the bourgeois class, whereas in a socialist society it can be “negated” with education until it’s as eradicated as things like that can be.
yea but whites are the bourgeois class
No, that’s not correct. Bourgeois power structures are upheld by whiteness as a concept, but I don’t think the unhoused white man I saw yesterday was bourgeois.
The vast majority of whites are globally bourgeois (yes I’m also bourgeois as an individual)
Globally bourgeois isn’t a thing. Western workers have often times been incentivised into siding with their national bourgeoisie. There’s no need to use incorrect terminology to suit the vibes. A small business owner in Africa would have very different interests overall than the global imperialist class (national liberation and all that, flooding of national markets with foreign goods etc…) but they’re still bourgeois. Call a spade a spade.