Director of the Institute of Asian Research Dr. Timothy Cheek’s lecture on “Xi Jinping’s Counter-Reformation” is now available for viewing on Facebook!
Further information on the lecture:
Xi Jinping is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao. The media is full of his “mass line campaigns,” the anti-corruption campaign, his much-touted “Chinese Dream,” and China’s assertive actions in the region, as well as conflicting news about his Belt and Road policy across Asia and into Africa. How can we make sense of what Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party are doing? This talk offers perspectives from the history of the Party and its notable style of governance: Rectification. The traditions of Party “statecraft” dating back to the Yan’an in the 1940s and across the Mao period draw on long-standing Chinese political norms and help us see how the Party leadership today interprets the challenges it faces today. This is a form of ideological governance in which only the Party can save China, and only rectification under one supreme leader can save the Party. This is a reaction to the reformation of politics and society in China in the two decades after Tiananmen in 1989. It is Xi Jinping’s Counter-Reformation.