The perfect world of the Chinese state

Dr Fengyuan Ji

The concept of human perfectibility has a long history in Chinese tradition. Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi and their successors all believed that human nature was malleable, and that people could move towards perfection through self-cultivation and learning from others. The goal was to walk in the footsteps of Confucius, who described his own journey as follows: “At 15, I set my heart on learning. At 30, I was firmly established. At 40, I had no more doubts. At 50, I knew the will of heaven. At 60, I was ready to listen to it. At 70, I could follow my heart’s desire without transgressing what was right” (Analects, 2:4).

Within the Confucian tradition, perfection was a regulatory ideal used to guide the behaviour of individuals and the conduct of the state. The Emperor was supposed to emulate the mythical sage kings – idealised rulers who were held to have invented China’s language and socio-political institutions in their original and perfect form. More generally, the Emperor and the state were charged with adopting policies that assisted the pursuit of perfection among the Chinese people.

The Confucian ideal of perfection was exemplified by the stories used to illustrate the practice of filial piety, the virtue that lay at the heart of the traditional social order.

In particular, they had to do two things. First, they had to regulate the Chinese language, keeping it true to the forms established by the sage kings so it could provide an agreed and correct perception of reality. Second, they had to rule in accordance with Confucian principles and fill official positions with scholar-bureaucrats steeped in those principles. These scholar-bureaucrats and the schools that educated them then disseminated the Confucian ethic and its ideal of perfection to the wider population.

The Confucian ideal of perfection was exemplified by the stories used to illustrate the practice of filial piety, the virtue that lay at the heart of the traditional social order. Here, the most influential text was The 24 Filial Exemplars, also translated as The 24 Paragons of Filial Piety, which was published under the Yuan Dynasty (1260–1368). The paragons included Wu Meng, who allowed mosquitoes to suck his blood in the hope that they would not bother his parents; Dong Yong, who sold himself as a slave to a rich man to pay for his father’s funeral; and Wang Xiang, who lay naked on a frozen lake until the ice melted and he could catch fish for his stepmother – a woman who had treated him very badly. These stories were told and retold, and became culturally entrenched at all levels of society.

The ideal of perfect filial devotion presented in these stories consolidated hierarchical rule within the family. Moreover, because the idealised father-son relationship was promoted as the model of all top-down relationships, it also cemented hierarchical structures within the Chinese clans and local communities.

Above all, because the Emperor was seen as the father of all the Chinese people, it reinforced imperial rule. It was therefore central to the ideology that underpinned the traditional socio-political order.

From the late nineteenth century, reformers began to attack the doctrine of filial piety as oppressive, but they did not question the usefulness of the goal of perfection. Nor was that goal questioned when the Communist Party introduced a new political order after its victory in 1949. Rather, the party gave the goal of human perfection a new and revolutionary form, while simultaneously assuming the full authority of the Emperor, taking over the welfare functions of the clans, and making itself the sole focus of loyalty by appropriating the language of filial piety.

The party’s redirection of the language of filial piety was one aspect of a vast program of linguistic engineering. This involved teaching the whole population a new, revolutionary language whose words, it was believed, would sink into people’s minds, transforming their consciousness. Virtuous young people were now referred to as ‘good children of Chairman Mao’ (Mao Zhuxi de hao haizi) and as ‘the party’s good sons and daughters’ (dangde hao ernü); members of the People’s Liberation Army became the children’s Liberation Army uncles (jiefangjun shushu); and the term qin ren (relatives), which had referred exclusively to blood relatives, was extended to the revolutionary masses as a whole. In the process, filial piety was transformed from a series of overlapping loyalties modelled on ideal family relationships into a totalising ideology in which loyalty was directed solely towards Mao, the party and the revolutionary masses they claimed to represent.

As in the Soviet Union, the formation of perfect revolutionaries involved getting people to imitate model workers, model students, model soldiers, revolutionary martyrs and other paragons of revolutionary virtue. Perhaps the most famous of these was Lei Feng, a simple soldier whose posthumously published ‘diary’ exemplified the officially approved ethic of selfless service inspired by Mao and his thought. The diary was written or refined by party propagandists, and it consisted entirely of standardised political scripts that modelled the revolutionary ideal: “I am a party member and a servant of the people. For the freedom of mankind and the cause of the party and the people, I am willing to climb the highest mountain and cross the widest river, to go through fire and water”.

Lei Feng spoke with the same voice as the heroes of the novels and revolutionary operas that provided fictional models of perfection during the decade of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. Their leading characters all had to be ‘tall, great, and complete’ (gao, da, quan); they had to use revolutionary words more than any other characters; they had to quote Mao more than anyone else; and they had to emerge victorious in heroic class struggles against villains who avoided revolutionary words, never quoted Mao and personified evil. People had to imitate these models, learning Mao’s words by heart, quoting him at every opportunity and seasoning their greetings, conversations and correspondence with revolutionary slogans.

At the peak of the Mao cult, the pursuit of revolutionary perfection required huge numbers of people to engage in the ritual of ‘asking for instructions in the morning’ and ‘reporting back in the evening’. Workers, students and peasants started their day by standing in front of Mao’s portrait, raising their Little Red Books head-high and wishing Chairman Mao ‘an infinitely long life’. They then praised Mao by singing ‘The East Is Red’ and reading quotations from his Little Red Book to guide their actions.

At the end of the day, they then reassembled in front of Mao’s portrait, sang songs of Mao‑worship, and confessed how they had fallen short of the model of perfection provided by his thought: ‘Chairman Mao, today I did this and made such and such a mistake’.

Throughout the Mao era, the ideal of perfection also played a central role in the practice of small-group criticism and self-criticism, which was used regularly within the Communist Party and in some urban work units. People had to examine their own beliefs, behaviour, and attitudes against the ideals of revolutionary rectitude proclaimed in the latest party documents or Mao’s works. They then had to write self-criticisms that were scrutinised for sincerity and adequacy, and their colleagues had to criticise their attitudes and behaviour as well. No one could claim to have met the required standard of revolutionary virtue, for the purpose of the exercise was to make everyone confess shortcomings and submit to inspection and control.

The use of the concept of revolutionary perfection in producing linguistic conformity and enforcing social control was undoubtedly very successful.

It also motivated many people in their attempts at inner transformation, but here its successes were more limited and often transitory. Indeed, by the end of the Mao era faith in the revolutionary project had waned and for many people the pursuit of revolutionary perfection had become a matter of outward display, rather than a genuine attempt at inner transformation. This was linked to three factors.

First, Mao had originally promised that ardent revolutionary endeavour would bring rapid economic development and a quick transition to a happy and harmonious Communist society. “Three years of struggle,” he said, would bring “a thousand years of Communist happiness.” However, this promise was discredited when his attempt to accelerate development during the Great Leap Forward resulted in economic disaster and caused a famine that killed 30 million or more people.

Second, Mao further undermined faith in revolutionary politics when he attempted to recover his position by using class struggle to eliminate every rival source of authority and every hint of incorrect ideology during the Cultural Revolution. He directed revolutionary class struggle against one group after another, until the conflict took

on a life of its own and parts of the country descended into civil war. At least 1.1 million people died, countless millions suffered and the country was still no closer to the promised Communist future. Indeed, Mao himself was now talking about another 200 years of class struggle. This was a future that hardly anybody wanted to believe in.

Third, the real-life revolutionary models used to inspire the pursuit of perfection had been discredited one after another. Most of the party’s leaders, once paraded as paragons of revolutionary virtue, had been targeted during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guard leaders, lauded as revolutionary heroes when Mao used them to attack the party, had been discredited and suppressed in their turn. And then in 1971, Lin Biao, Mao’s deputy, his ‘best student’ and a man long paraded as a model of revolutionary rectitude, was suddenly unmasked as a ‘traitor’. For many, it was too much. As one young man told Anita Chan, Richard Madsen and Jonathan Unger in Chen Village (1984), “We came to see that the leaders up there could say today that something is round; tomorrow, that it’s flat. We lost faith in the system”.

Those who had lost faith were able to express their true views within a few years of Mao’s death in 1976. His successor, Hua Guofeng, quickly secured his position by arresting the main supporters of Mao’s totalitarian vision; his wife Jiang Qing and her ‘Gang of Four’. Hua was then forced to seek the support of moderates led by Deng Xiaoping, who had lost faith in revolutionary politics after the disaster of the Great Leap Forward and had been driven from power during the Cultural Revolution. As the moderates returned to official positions, they quickly gained the upper hand, and from 1978 they initiated a succession of far-reaching reforms, sweeping away Mao’s policies of class struggle, his totalitarian controls, and his concept of revolutionary perfection. Most people welcomed the changes, as they were ready for a new message that promised both an end to class struggle and material rewards within their lifetimes. That is why a slogan as crass as ‘To get rich is glorious’ was so attractive, and it is why most people were so glad to abandon the pursuit of revolutionary perfection in favour of something as mundane as bettering themselves.

The concept of revolutionary perfection in the Maoist sense is now dead, but the ideal of perfection lives on in different and attenuated forms. There are still model students and model workers, Lei Feng is still trotted out as a model of self-sacrificing service to others, and there are even model capitalists. However, no one pretends that any of these real-life models are perfect, and the party’s aspirations have become more modest and realistic.

State-sponsored ideals of perfection are now framed within the ideology of Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream’, which aims to create a ‘moderately well-off society’ – a society that is powerful, civilised, harmonious, beautiful, and, in the long-term, highly developed. In the pursuit of this vision, the party appeals implicitly to concepts of perfection in the form of ideal types of civilised and harmonious behaviour, and an ideal type of unpolluted natural beauty. It has also adopted a range of policies designed to close the gap between these ideals and current realities. The most draconian is a ‘social credit system’ for grading people’s behaviour, with withdrawal of privileges for bad ratings.

Despite this, the ideal of perfection is not the tyrannical weapon it was in Mao’s time. It is no longer used to enforce totalitarian uniformity or to engineer the emergence of new, revolutionary human beings. Devotion to the party no longer subsumes every other loyalty, and people are free to engage in the strenuous pursuit of ideals that advance individual or family interests. So the concept of perfection has been normalised and, in its varied forms, it plays much the same role as in Imperial times – serving as an inspiration and guide to individual and collective improvement. In that modest capacity, it is not just politically useful but widely accepted.