Self-Criticism

China Revives Mao-Era Self-Criticism, but This Kind Bruises Few Egos

BEIJING — The 10 middle-aged officials who gathered in a nondescript government office in southwestern China last month were assigned a highly fraught mission: Highlight one another’s faults and confess any transgressions that might undermine the Communist Party’s credibility among the masses.

Officially, at least, nothing was off limits. Superiors could be criticized, a colleague’s affinity for expensive jewelry was fair game, and even voicing opposition to the central leadership’s policies was permitted.

The chief of the officials’ bureau spoke first, confessing that he was “a little hasty and might push others too hard,” recalled one attendee who asked not to be identified to avoid retribution. When it came time for the rest of those present to speak, each carefully imitated the chief’s innocuous critique in a pantomime of remorse that conveniently left everyone unscathed.

“There’s no guarantee what you say in the meeting won’t be used against you in the future, so the best way to avoid problems is to follow the leader,” the official explained afterward in a phone interview.

Wielded with often violent results in the days when Mao Zedong was China’s paramount leader, “criticism and self-criticism” sessions have been resurrected by President Xi Jinping as “the most powerful weapon” for rallying the Communist Party and the Chinese people behind his push to liberalize the economy while fortifying the party’s control over this nation of 1.3 billion people.

The sessions are officially known as “democratic life” meetings for their ostensibly open atmosphere — though they take place behind closed doors. The meetings, a crucial element of Mr. Xi’s so-called mass-line campaign, are intended to bolster the party’s legitimacy among a public increasingly disgusted by official graft, gross mismanagement and unseemly activities that involve sex, overpriced liquor or luxury watches, or sometimes all three. In the year since Mr. Xi came to power, cadres have been encouraged to “experience the grass-roots” difficulties of everyday life while yielding to a crackdown on extravagance and other perks of officialdom, according to pronouncements in the state news media.

Resolutely opposed to subjecting the party to the rule of law and potentially undermining its hold on power, Mr. Xi, analysts say, is selling the self-criticism campaign as a substitute capable of taming official malfeasance and inoculating the party against the possibility of political unrest.

“It’s using an ideological tightening to prevent the kind of explosion of political participation that could be triggered by a more relaxed environment,” said Xiao Gongqin, a history professor at Shanghai Normal University.

But critics say the campaign is at best superficial, and at worst a dangerous revival of Maoist tactics that in an earlier era brought the nation to its knees. For many Chinese of a certain age, criticism and self-criticism sessions are synonymous with public humiliation and brutal punishment. The party has sporadically revived the practice in a more casual form, though not since the decade-long Cultural Revolution that ended in 1976 has a Chinese leader invested so much political capital in such patently ideological pageantry.

“For Xi to pick up the method used by Mao 40 years ago shows how desperate he is to keep party members under control,” said Huang Jing, a professor at the National University of Singapore who specializes in Chinese politics. But in refusing to liberalize politically as he attempts major economic changes, President Xi could scuttle his chances for long-term success, Mr. Huang said. “You can’t walk with one leg going north and one leg going south,” he said.

Despite Mr. Xi’s decree that officials use self-criticism sessions to “look in the mirror, straighten their attire, take a bath and seek remedies,” as he said last June, according to the state news agency Xinhua, some say the meetings offer officials a way to avoid any of that.

In an interview, one former official from eastern Jiangxi Province said participants described the campaign as an excruciating effort to appear repentant without seriously damaging their colleagues or themselves. “You learn to make criticisms that sound serious but don’t really threaten anybody,” the former official recounted a colleague as saying.

A number of unauthorized Chinese websites offer helpful suggestions for weathering the sessions, advising officials to “act sincere” and even providing them with handy self-criticism scripts. The official in southwestern China offered a similar account. “There’s no honesty involved; everyone is simply putting on a show,” he said.

By contrast, reviews in the official news media praise self-criticism sessions as a panacea for the party’s ills. In September, the state broadcaster China Central Television aired footage of Mr. Xi presiding as 25 senior officials in a northern province, Hebei, abjectly confessed to excessive pride, opulent feasting and spending roughly $74 million on government cars during the previous year.

Sun Ruibin, the provincial capital party chief, acknowledged being smitten with his official vehicle. “I knew it was excessive, but I really enjoyed riding in that S.U.V.,” he said during the broadcast. Not to be outdone, the Hebei propaganda chief, Ai Wenli, expressed regret for the $500,000 in public money spent on celebrity entertainers during a lavishly catered Chinese New Year’s gala. “There was too much eating and drinking,” he said, ruefully describing the banquet as “a big waste of money.”

Since then, the self-criticism campaign has picked up steam. In years past, such sessions quietly occurred perhaps once a year, but the official in southwestern China said that his bureau held four such meetings in the two months after the session in Hebei.

In the state news media, reports of meetings across the nation have become increasingly common. But the reports omit the most important details: the names of the confessors and their sins, especially those that might amount to serious crimes, like embezzlement and abuse of power.

Instead, the news accounts skip right to the positive results. “The meeting was like a bath that made everyone’s face blush, made everyone sweat and got rid of all the toxins,” said an article in China Meteorological Weekly last month, referring to a session held by the China Meteorological Administration.

Such coverage has reinforced perceptions that self-criticism sessions remain an empty political ritual, widely mocked as “group massage.” Critics say they have no way to verify whether officials are changing their wayward behavior or facing punishment.

That, of course, may be the point. “It’s a very reassuring signal to the elite that essentially not much is going to change if you play the game,” said Minxin Pei, a professor of Chinese politics at Claremont McKenna College in California.

Last month, the People’s Liberation Army announced that it had uncovered more than 8,100 apartments and 25,000 vehicles illicitly kept by military personnel. The discovery and self-criticism sessions that followed were framed as proof of the success of the government’s drive to clean up the four “undesirable work styles” of formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism and extravagance.

But the only visible result was a vague statement from the military saying that various army units promised to give up illegal housing and to regulate the use of military vehicles.

Many Chinese say they are skeptical that the party is willing or able to truly police itself. As the official from southwestern China said, “You can’t pull yourself up by tugging on your own hair.”