China: Not your typical “Party School” or the use and abuse of ideology

Blogger and author Chen Xingzhi on Bokee talks about his experiences at the Chinese Communist Party School, where they study Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Deng, and Jiang Zemin. He is, of course, a Party Member and no doubt in some kind of leadership position. He spent four months as in the Party School, attending lectures, taking part in discussions, reading, writing reports, etc. This essay is a philosophical reflection on his experiences there, and I found out it to be one of the most moving things I’ve read, in Chinese, in a while. It gets to the heart of the political culture of the Party, but goes beyond that—that is, one reads it and realized how deep the problem is. I hope everyone gets a chance to read it, and if you read Chinese, I hope you read the original. I unreservedly recommend it.

The writer starts off with some light-hearted banter about how dead-boring some of the lecturers and their lectures are:

不感觉出乎预料的不仅我一人，课堂气氛很沉闷，有人在记录，有人在打盹，有人在想事情，有人在整理手机，有人在发短信……来回走动上厕所的人越来越多，或许因为排泄太多的原因，越来越多的人需要补充水分，供开水的女服务员忙得不可开交，结果形成了一种恶性循环，厕所与会议室之间几乎形成人流。也有的干脆到会议室外面的走廊喷云吐雾，低声聊一些匪夷所思的话题，相互传看留在手机里的五花八门的图片……我从一位同志手机里竟然看到很多大自然巧夺天工生长成为男女性器官形状的山峰和凹洞的照片，感到极为诧异——不是诧异图片新奇，而是诧异这位司局级领导干部的趣味竟然如此有趣味。当然，我不能把这种诧异表达出来，因为我看到他极为珍重这些照片，就像我们任何人都极为珍重人间一切美好事物一样。

Rough translation: These lectures were boring enough that people would get up to take “toilet breaks” quite often, sometimes meander around the hallways, talking to each other, swapping mobile phone pictures, etc. One comrade had a bunch of photos of objects in the natural world—rock formations and such—that were shaped like human genitalia, both male and female.

He describes one of the teachers, a sixty-something female, a prime example of the dessicated who doesn’t even believe or care about what they are teaching:

不知道为什么，我从女教员的语气和眼神中，从她的精神状态中，总感觉即使是她自己也不相信她所讲述的东西。这就是说，促使她坐在这里的最重要缘由与思想无涉，与信仰无涉，仅仅是一种职业行为以及与这种行为对应存在的物质关系。从年龄看，老人家一定是一位长期从事马列主义研究的专家、教授，退休以后在这里谋了一个差使，如果没有物质利益驱动，她有什么理由非要在这里与大家一道忍受这种枯燥无味之苦呢？

Rough translation: the feeling I get from this lady is that she doesn’t really believe in what she’s saying. Judging from her age, she had probably done some Marxism-Leninism research in her day, and now, retired, she was doing this simply as a job, as her profession, and nothing more—why else would she be here with everyone, suffering this through this tedious material?

Another interesting passage deals with this state of being completely immersed in ideology:

我们就像广口瓶中的标本一样被浸泡在意识形态液体里，与意识形态形成一种相互依存、共有共无、共生共死的关系，意识形态液体与我们的精神体液消失了界限，消失了差别，交融在一起，我们甚至很难想象倘若脱离开意识形态液体将如何生存？我们还有自己的生命吗？如果有，它在什么情况下显现为实呢？在休息室喷云吐雾的时候？欣赏男女性器官照片的时候？还是与家人团聚的时候？一个人独处的时候？

Rough translation: Being immersed like this is like being one the samples that scientists preserve in formaldehyde-filled bottles; we are immersed and surrounded by the liquid of ideology, we have dissolved and melted into it, and are one with it. Do we still have our own lives, our own selves? And if so, when does that life or self manifest itself? When we are chatting and smoking in the lobbies, or appreciating pictures of genitalia, when united with our families, or when we are alone?

Later on he goes on to quote Havel on ideology, from The Power of the Powerless, and then goes on to say that our relationship with ideology resembles a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, where one begins to empathize which is supposed to harm you (derived from 1973 incident in Stockholm when the hostages sympathized with the hostage-takers and began resisting rescue attempts, refused to testify against their captors, etc.)

He postulates a theory about how ideology imposes itself on human consciousness in various stages. His description of the second stage is brilliant and dead-on:

于是事情进入到第二个层级：在他的精神世界里将出现两个自我，一个是原始的真实的具有内在精神的自我，一个是具有某种技艺性的虚假的自我。真实的自我被深深掩藏在深处，只有这个人独自面对它时才它显现为实；虚假的自我则控制着他参与的全部公共生活——就是在这种状态下，女教员枯燥地述说着老生常谈，学员们尽管既无诚心又无恭敬之意却能够展开积极热烈的讨论和交流，尽管所有人都在说假话，所有人都知道所有人都在说假话，但是假话仍然在所有人中作为正常语言被使用……人成形了。

Rough translation: at some point, the self is divided in two, a real self and a fake self. The real self is hidden somewhere deep in the heart, and appears in solitude, but the fake self is the public self—and that this self in our female lecturer that spouts these tired nostrums, and it is this self that makes us students talk and discuss things in the same manner,without any sincerity, without any real respect or reverence for the topic at hand. Everyone is being fake, and everyone knows it, and yet all these fake words are taken as real words. And this is how “ideological man” is formed.

He then likens the insatiable human desire for power and wealth to the bloodlust of wild animals and claims that under ideology, such desires get wrapped and repackaged as “justice”, fairness, and and truth.

I might as well translate the rest of the article directly:

In the he still of the night, you ask yourself whether or not power and wealth can really bring happiness, you can only answer: this is meaningless, truly meaningless … and then you suddenly notice something stirring deep in your heart, a “real self”, and you want to talk to it, and say somethings that you could never say to anyone else, but it seems so distant and you can’t seem to catch up to it, and you give up, abandon hope of ever reaching it, and instead resign yourself to living life as it was before and always will be, you return to your well-worn and familiar social roles, become our regular, busy, selves.

It’s like a black-hole, the way that it sucks in everything around it. Nothing can escape. We’ve all become part of it, and can no longer discern and understand the real relationships between things any longer. We are unable to raise ourselves out of these depths, and humanity moves blindly through its own history much as animals do in nature.
….

On the third day of classes, a nondescript person showed up on the lectern. Being seated near the back row, I could barely make the person out. They were a mere abstraction. I took out an Ernst Cassirer book and began to read it, while everyone else got out their lecture outlines and were prepared to take notes.

The nondescript lecturer spoke: “Don’t bother with your lecture notes and outlines. What I am going to talk about isn’t going to be there.”

Everyone was silent. This teacher began talking and all the sudden, we felt as if were elementary school children again. We listened, enraptured. It felt like we were leaving all that fakery behind, and reentering the world of the real. It’s like something that had long since been dead or dormant inside suddenly came back to life.

What the teacher had been talking about was the difficult juncture that China now faced: because of the sluggish pace of political reform, China had now entered a stage of “dirty Capitalism”. This wasn’t something he pulled out of nowhere, he had facts, figures and studies on the culture, economy, and society to back him up. His conclusions were quite pessimistic: without increased societal pressure, the Party would never really put greater democratization on their agenda, and this would mean that the entire nation’s politics, economy, and cultural situations are going to take a turn for the worse. And yet the country is still blithely going down this path, a path of potential ruin.

This isn’t stuff that you can talk about lightly, much less in a school that is supposed to be training high-level cadres for the Communist Party. We were terribly excited; heated discussions commenced where students exchanged opinions, offered evidence for and against certain arguments the teacher had made, and, as many of them were in leadership positions already, many eye-opening personal experiences and anecdotes were shared as well.

These normally staid leaders and cadres were suddenly behaving normally, like their real selves, and were saying things they normally could never say—which is to say that almost by chance, they found a way of leaping over the wall of ideology, and returning to their real selves, their original selves.

And what, in this world, is more brilliant than that!

Out of all the teachers that we had, about one-fourth of them left as deep an impression as that one. You can imagine that with these teachers, I left aside and forgot all the other books that I brought and totally immersed myself in listening to lectures and participating in discussions.

I thought to myself, how is that teachers like these can survive in a collectivist ideological atmosphere. Aren’t they afraid of what consequences their actions might have? I privately asked the teacher this, and he calmly replied: “if you go over too much, of course they will find out, some of the teachers here have been removed or transferred, though most of the time nothing happens … right now things are pretty flexible.”

At this point you realize that even under the tight grip of ideology, something is growing, and it makes you want to embrace this age, these times we live in, makes you want to embrace those people that dare to really talk seriously about ideas. This fundamentally changed the way that I thought about the Party School. I very much respect and admire those kinds of teachers.

An intellectually even more courageous teacher told me about his beliefs: “No matter how serious the consequences, as long as I am standing on the lectern there will be no phony words: I will, in accordance with my conscience, speak truthfully and honestly.” This kind of unwavering integrity is so rare I would compare it with a soldier “saving the last bullet for myself”—because it’s just about as serious. To put these words into actions is very difficult and takes courage, wisdom, and technique.

The psychologist Maslow warned us that there is no conflict between religion/faith and science, but there is a conflict between stupid faith and stupid science.” (Note: I don’t have the original quote and I am too lazy to look it up now, but Maslow did write a lot about religion, faith, and science, so the gist if not the quote should be easy to find in his books.)

We could take Maslow’s point and extend it this way: there are no conflicts between truths and no conflicts between falsehoods, but when they get mismatched—when truths live alongside falsehoods, there maybe dire, palpable and serious consequences. Each one of us lives with this kind of tension and conflict, but what kind of attitude we have towards it determines its scope and delimits its effects.

We received a hundred lecture outlines and from a certain perspective, they were all legitimate and conventional, but during the lectures these were thrown aside and people spoke with their hearts and souls.
These are two overlapping worlds that mutually eclipse and cover each other, and only people who have experienced this know what is real and what is phony, what is truth and what are lies.

….

Four months later, we all submitted study reports，and during our tests we used stock phrases and terms to give conventional answers. All of was entered into our records and one day might help you get a promotion. We all return to our jobs and positions, and all that we have thought about, considered, and learned these last four months might end up locked away in our hearts. We won’t talk about much of what we learned or discussed with our colleagues, and we might still have lead others in the study of the “Three Represents” theory, scientific development. Everywhere you go you have to be part of that political program again.

And there’s more.

Time takes with it everything, and if you are not one of those people that takes ideas and the life of the mind seriously, you are going to forget those ideas that stimulated and excited you，and you are going to lapse back into doing things the conventional ways, and you are going to say things that you could never even believe, but after awhile, you are going to start thinking they are true, because falsehoods are a necessity of your life and development… and after awhile longer, even the memories are going to fade, and it will be as if nothing happened, everything will be as if it existed in some plush fantasy world, and only a rare few will continue to search for their real selves as if it mattered.

This is to say, I am still going to be a two-faced person, because I am still partially living a lie, and falsity is intrinsic to society, and is the basis and foundation for how it works. Without it, the whole thing would collapse, nothing would exist, and therefore in order to retain some purchase on this thing we call “reality” we must choose to lead these double lives, where you act out a false life, while your real self lies somewhere deep, very deep, inside you.

This isn’t some inference I am making, this is the essence of real life. Not long ago, I heard that one of my classmates at the Party School had been arrested for corruption, and I heard that others had been transferred, or gained more power and status, and of course, there are those that for whatever reason left their positions… the fellow with the genitalia pictures, I wonder what he’s gained? Were those people that once so heatedly discussed their views of the world now laughing at their own innocence? And those holding keen insights into society, are they going to have to conceal that side of them and keep laughing, smiling, and playing the game?

I don’t know, I really don’t know.

What I do know that is that sometimes those of us that were together in the Party School still sometimes get together, but those topics that we once so discussed so enthusiastically could never the focus of our conversations; those on more familiar terms might talk about their own political situation in low voices, advise each other on how to obtain more power, and even more of us have completely sealed off our hearts or covered them as if with some shell. Phony words have once again become our lingua franca, our way of adhering to acceptable social standards, our way of knowing that all of this is real.

Are there any who have tried to remain true to themselves? There, but unfortunately, they tend to be quite sensitive and weak in terms of social survival skills, get lost in their own search, consigned to life outside the mainstream, lamenting their fate and never finding a place or niche of their own. There aren’t many of these kinds of people—in fact you could say they are exceedingly rare.

In conclusion, we tend to see the people that we can see everyday, or in other words, we are back to what Zhuangzhi said: “the mushroom knows not the alternation of day and night. The cicada knows not the alternation of spring and autumn”—if the mushrooms cannot live until the night, and the cicadas will never see the autumn, then everything just remains the same.