At LAT, "China's Xi Jinping appears more Maoist than reformer so far":
At a Politburo meeting in April, Xi announced an effort to reeducate party cadres, using language that harked back to Mao's "rectification" campaigns of the 1940s when he was consolidating power at his revolutionary base in Yanan.Boy, that sounds familiar. No doubt Xi's even getting a few pointers from President Dronekiller.
Trying to boost morale in the military, Xi decreed all generals and officers above the rank of lieutenant colonel must do stints of at least 15 days as rank-and-file soldiers. Mao used almost exactly the same tactic in 1958.
In public speeches, Xi tends to elevate the Communist Party above the nation and even above the Chinese people. He's tried to clamp down on criticism of Mao.
"To completely negate Mao Tse-tung would lead to the demise of the Chinese Communist Party and to great chaos in China," Xi told a high-level forum in January, according to an article last month in Study Times, an official publication of the Central Party School in Beijing.
Just to show that he is not Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Xi blames the collapse of the Soviet Union on wavering from Communist convictions.
"It's a profound lesson for us. To dismiss the history of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, to dismiss Lenin and Stalin, and to dismiss everything else is to engage in historic nihilism, and it confuses our thoughts and undermines the party's organizations on all levels," he said in another unpublished speech from December that was widely leaked.
Xi's predecessor for the last decade, Hu Jintao, was a bland figure. But political analysts believe he may have been more inclined toward political reform.
"Xi Jinping is very good at public relations, much better than Hu, who acted like a robot," said Willy Lam, a political analyst based in Hong Kong. "But ideologically he is really a Maoist, who wants to maintain tight control over the party and the military and to put a freeze on Western values."
Nobody expects Xi to reverse the opening of China's economy and, in fact, many are predicting reforms this year to loosen the grip of state-owned enterprises. But unlike Hu, he rarely speaks about rule of law.
Tighter controls were in evidence June 4, a sensitive day marking the anniversary of the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989. To much ridicule, censors deleted all references to the anniversary on the Chinese Internet — including a doctored photograph of yellow rubber ducks marching like tanks toward the square. Hong Kong journalists were detained briefly and prevented from filming the daily ceremony for the raising of the Chinese flag.
Authorities made sure no commemorations took place, rounding up activists and putting others under house arrest.
