China’s book-burning a sign of regime’s legitimacy crisis?

     

FPRI

Library officials in northwestern China recently hoped to demonstrate their ideological fervor and loyalty to the Communist Party by purging politically incorrect books and religious materials in emphatic fashion: They burned them. Then they uploaded a report — and a photo — to showcase their work, Gerry Shih writes for the Washington Post: 

The book-burning incident, with all its dark historical precedents from this country and Nazi-era Germany, has heightened alarm at a time when Chinese intellectuals see their society tipping further into authoritarianism. …On Twitter, which is accessible in China using special software, many remarked that the first Chinese emperor burned books and buried intellectuals alive — a practice immortalized in the idiom “fenshu-kengru” — to cement his grip after uniting the country in 221 B.C.

Others drew comparisons with 1930s Germany, where Nazi student groups burned “un-German” books before the regime targeted ethnic minorities. Still others pointed out an anecdote nearer to home: The founder of modern China, Mao Zedong, joked to colleagues at a 1958 Communist Party conference that he buried 46,000 scholars compared with the Qin emperor’s 460.

National Endowment for Democracy

The burning of subversive literature is a telling sign of regime fragility, observers suggest. Similarly….

The targeting of the NGOs is also telling because it reveals a deep insecurity within the Chinese Communist Party. Since the 1990s, desperate leaders have made scapegoats of organizations such as Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy. This is almost always a response to internal challenges to an autocrat’s legitimacy, Bloomberg’s Eli Lake writes. The tactic has two purposes: to make U.S. programs that support democratic opposition toxic; and to make popular unrest appear to be the result of U.S. meddling.

 

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