Party cadres urged to ‘emancipate the mind’ but Chinese officials remain more cautious than ever

Communist Party officials in the southern Chinese province of Hunan returned from the Lunar New Year break last week with a new mission: to free their minds. In a campaign that will run until the end of March, they will engage in “large-scale discussions on emancipating the mind” – in strict accordance with Xi Jinping Thought.

“Emancipating the mind is the essential requirement of the party’s ideological line and an important magic weapon for the success of the development of the cause of the party and the country,” the provincial party directive said.

“The development process of Hunan’s reform and opening up for more than 40 years shows that when we emancipate our minds, dare to try, and innovate boldly, our development will be good and fast; When the thinking is conservative, timid, and conformist, development will be sluggish and slow.”

The campaign’s title echoes Deng Xiaoping’s call for the emancipation of the mind when he initiated market reforms and an opening up of the system following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. But Xi has also deployed the slogan to urge party cadres to be more daring and the Hunan campaign identifies a number of issues officials need to address.

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They include: a lack of confidence, a weak sense of mission and an insufficient sense of responsibility; putting pleasing the leadership over satisfying the masses; an ostrich-like mentality of deliberately avoiding and concealing conflicts and issues; and adopting a “lying flat” attitude of preferring not to take action in order to avoid trouble.

With an economy struggling to recover amid sagging consumer confidence and other deflationary pressures, both the party and the country could certainly do with some fresh thinking

The campaign won wide coverage in official media when it was announced last week but has scarcely been mentioned since, and most foreign China watchers have dismissed its significance. But Hunan’s party secretary Shen Xiaoming is an ally of Xi’s who has previously led innovative efforts in Hainan and Shanghai, and as Mao’s home province, Hunan has a special place in the Communist Party’s imagination.

With an economy struggling to recover amid sagging consumer confidence and other deflationary pressures, both the party and the country could certainly do with some fresh thinking. And in a report published two weeks ago but removed shortly afterwards, a leading sociologist warned that a culture of box-ticking and pandering to superiors was producing social stagnation.

After a field trip to four rural areas, Wuhan University professor Lu Dewen found that the economic downturn was being felt everywhere, with factories’ profit margins narrowing and workers’ wages flat. Many township governments are so short of cash that they can barely function, and some village authorities are unable to pay salaries.

“Village-level organisations serve their superiors’ targets and do not serve the community. Even if they serve the community, they do so for the superiors to see,” he wrote.

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One reason party officials are keen to keep their heads down and their mouths shut is because they fear the consequences if they step out of line. According to the party, more than five million officials have been investigated since Xi clamped down on corruption and introduced a tougher line on internal discipline a decade ago.

The difficulty became apparent during the last months of the zero-Covid policy when the government told officials to keep lockdowns as short as possible and to exercise discretion before locking buildings or neighbourhoods down. Instead of fewer lockdowns, the directive produced more because officials understood that the penalty for allowing an outbreak of the virus was greater than any reward for exercising restraint.

If Hunan’s campaign to emancipate the minds of officials is to succeed, it will have to give them more freedom to act and cut them more slack if they make mistakes

According to Lu, this bureaucratic culture has left all walks of life ever more detached from reality and when he met some of his old classmates from secondary school over Chinese New Year, he found them sliding into social stagnation.

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“They come from various industries, including civil servants, doctors, teachers, bosses, state-owned enterprise employees, migrant workers, and media professionals, all unanimously complaining about formalism, not working hard, feeling extremely disgusted, but also helpless. When they reach middle age, they dare not voice their opinions, dare not stick to reality, and can only go along with the flow,” he wrote.

If Hunan’s campaign to emancipate the minds of officials is to succeed, it will have to give them more freedom to act and cut them more slack if they make mistakes. But that will require a change of attitude at the very top of the party and a shift away from the preoccupation with security and control that has taken hold over the past decade.