The mainland authorities have recently issued an article stating that they will “comprehensively revive traditional Culture” by 2025 and increase propaganda to tell the Chinese story well. Song Yongyi, a scholar in the United States, told Radio Free Asia that the Communist Party is clearly “anti-traditional culture” and now it is holding up the banner of “reviving traditional culture”, but in reality it is communistizing and authoritarianizing traditional culture. Wang Dan, a student leader of the 1989 pro-democracy movement, denounced this move as an attempt to restore the “imperial system”.
The General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the General Office of the State Council issued the “Opinions on the Implementation of the Project of Inheritance and Development of Excellent Chinese Traditional Culture” on the 14th, stating that the traditional culture should be revived “by 2025”. The key tasks include “increasing publicity and Education“, integrating the Internet and media to highlight the charm of Chinese culture, promoting red tourism, developing educational activities on the theme of “love my China” and cultivating the spirit of patriotism.
In the “promote Chinese and foreign cultural exchanges and mutual appreciation” project, this opinion requires the use of overseas Chinese cultural centers, Confucius Institute to promote the international dissemination of Chinese traditional culture, strengthen cultural exchanges and cooperation with countries along the “Belt and Road”; opinions also encourage the development of The opinions also encourage the development of foreign cultural trade, so that more cultural products reflecting Chinese cultural characteristics and with strong competitiveness to the international market. The main purpose of this new policy is to tell the Chinese story and showcase the Chinese image through communication and dissemination.
Song Yongyi of the University of California, Los Angeles, who has long studied the history of the Chinese Communist Party, pointed out in a 16-day interview with Radio Free Asia that the Chinese Communist Party itself started as an “anti-traditional culture”. But history records that the Tang dynasty’s “going out to the West” was not primarily for military purposes, but for economic and cultural exchanges.
Intended to “communize” traditional culture
Song Yongyi said: “He went to those (Belt and Road) countries and took over their ports, turning them into his military ports and developing his military. I’m afraid this is not something in the previous Chinese traditional history. He first wants to engage in his ideology, he first wants to promote the so-called ‘Chinese model’. This is not traditional culture, he is spoiling traditional culture, he is communistizing traditional culture.”
Xi Jinping, then Chinese Vice President, attends the Inauguration ceremony of the Confucius Institute of Chinese Medicine at RMIT University in Melbourne on June 20, 2010. (AFP)
The “Opinions on the Implementation of the Project of Inheritance and Development of Excellent Chinese Traditional Culture” begins by stating that the policy highlight and basic principle of reviving traditional culture is “to firmly grasp the direction of advanced socialist culture and adhere to the people-centered orientation.
Song Yongyi retorted: “What advanced culture does he (CCP) have? That so-called culture of his is deception, lies plus violence. Doesn’t the Communist Party have three major treasures? The first is ‘armed struggle’, which is his violence; there is also ‘party building’, which is to unify the world and ideological dictatorship; and there is also a ‘united front’, which is to put the whole deception (of the act), to get to the international level, like a belt and a road.”
Song Yongyi: Confucius and Mencius advocated benevolence, forgiveness and advice, but never said to arrest dissidents
As for what is the real “traditional Chinese culture”? Song Yongyi said bluntly that he would not talk about such a big issue, but only about the small issues that the communist regime can do. For example, the “Confucian culture” is about benevolence, forgiveness and straightforward advice, which the Communist Party never advocates. The Communist Party recently sentenced Geng Xiaonan to three years, but she was just a good woman who sympathized with Xu Zhangrun’s dissident intellectuals, so they forced her to serve three years.
Song Yongyi said, “Then neither Confucius nor Mencius ever said that you can arrest people who disagree among your disciples or among the people. On the contrary, Confucian culture advocates intellectuals to give advice to the monarch or emperor, and Confucian culture believes that Tao is higher than the king, that is, intellectuals should first be loyal to reason and Tao, and then loyal to the king.”
Song Yongyi stressed that from his experience growing up in the Red Continent, all that talk from the Communist Party has to be understood from the opposite side of Chinese Communist propaganda, and can only be taken as a joke and not as a serious matter.
Song Yongyi also said, “You want to restore traditional culture, it’s very simple, you just give me all the political prisoners first release, I only believe you want to restore traditional culture. If you can do it, you can do it first. Just like you say you want to unify Taiwan, you can, you and Taiwan as democratic, we will be unified! Is that right? He can not do it, right. The simplest thing, let’s not talk about your DPP newspaper, let’s talk about a few major newspapers that lean towards the KMT’s position, whether people from mainland China can also subscribe, can also be freely distributed, he can not do it! What do you mean by traditional culture? He himself has never been anti-traditional culture.”
Hu Ping: Preaching Confucius and believing in Marxism-Leninism-Mao is funny
Hu Ping, editor-in-chief emeritus of the U.S.-based Chinese magazine Beijing Spring, pointed out in an interview with Radio Free Asia that while the Chinese Communist regime adheres to the ideology of the Communist Revolution, its actual actions are a hundred thousand miles away from that ideology. They also know that this ideology is no longer attractive to the mainland public and the international community, so they need to fill the vacuum with something else.
Hu Ping stressed: “He faces a big problem because the Communist Party originally started by opposing traditional culture. The Communist Party, a political group, is the most hostile and negative political group to Chinese traditional culture in modern Chinese history. The Confucius Temple, for example, was not damaged by foreign invasions in all dynasties, but only during the Cultural Revolution was the Confucius Temple smashed. So, it is a huge irony in itself that the Communist Party is now playing such a role of inheriting and promoting traditional culture.”
Wang Dan Facebook posting his views on the Chinese Communist Party’s declaration to fully revive traditional Chinese culture by 2025. (Wang Dan’s Facebook page)
According to Hu Ping, the CCP is only making slogans and using the “symbols” of traditional Chinese culture to decorate the facade, but in reality it is emasculating the most valuable soul and essence of traditional Chinese culture. As we all know, the mainland has recently been restoring traditional Buddhist and Taoist temples, but in reality it has been controlling and suppressing traditional religious activities even more severely, not really respecting religious freedom, and the apparent and actual actions are totally contradictory.
Hu Ping mentioned that a few years ago, the Chinese Communist Party built a large statue of Confucius to Tiananmen Square and then quietly withdrew it, making a big joke. “On the one hand, he wants to use Confucius as a symbolic and representative figure of Chinese traditional culture to show his respect and inheritance of Chinese traditional culture, but he can’t place Confucius in the same position as your communist ancestors. Don’t you want to believe in Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong? And what is Confucius in the middle? So it’s comical!”
According to Hu Ping, another purpose of the Communist Party’s emphasis on traditional culture is to emphasize “Han culture” in order to suppress, deny, and eliminate the cultural traditions of other ethnic minorities, and to play the card of “nationalism” at heart. Xi Jinping’s current expansion of power is based on the traditional Chinese concept of “Home world”, “world view”, and “under the sky, nothing is king’s land”, and the establishment of a world order centered on the mainland. The Chinese government has the ambition to rule the world.
Wang Dan: The core of the policy is the revival of the “imperial system”
Wang Dan, a former leader of the Tiananmen School Movement, teased on Facebook, “The Chinese Communist Party has announced that it wants to ‘fully’ revive traditional culture by 2025! How exactly is it going to be ‘comprehensive’? All women of school age should be prepared to wear small feet. Men, needless to say, will naturally grow braids, and the wig industry will become the leading industry driving the economic take-off after the Epidemic; the complete destruction of pens, pencils, and ballpoint pens, keeping only brushes; and the abolition of post offices in favor of raising geese as a means of transmitting correspondence.”
Wang Dan added, “The core of the core replaced by ‘comprehensive revival of traditional culture’, in fact, don’t pretend, is two words: imperialism.”
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