Propaganda ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday shows Xi Jinping firmly in charge of everyone and everything. But he has pointedly refused to leave Beijing. Rural officials in the hinterland are warned to implement Xi's blueprint for overhauling the countryside, or else. Xi's "rural revitalization" in this year's 5-year plan is meant to retain the peasants' loyalty. But it could be backfire if massive spending, bank loans, carving up of rural land, and building construction breed corruption and mismanagement that undermine villagers' support for Party rule.
This week's cheerful propaganda shows Xi Jinping visiting grassroots officials in Beijing to extend Spring Festival greetings and hype high-tech AI and robots as the key to China's future. The captions of each carefully staged photo began with a list of Xi's titles--General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee, Chairman of the State, Chairman of the Central Military Commission--to cement the idea that he is fully in charge of all people within China--no matter what their ethnicity--and to all people of Chinese ethnicity all over the world. Interestingly, Xi did not venture outside Beijing.
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| Xi extended "best wishes for the Spring Festival to all people of all ethnic groups across the country, our compatriots in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, and overseas Chinese." |
Ministry of Agriculture propaganda ahead of the Spring Festival is also featuring the Minister's convivial visits with retired cadres from the agricultural system and courtyard gardening--also in Beijing.
Meanwhile, the Agriculture Ministry held a "United Front" Spring Festival meeting with representatives from 6 "democratic parties," returned overseas Chinese and their family members purportedly to solicit opinions on rural work from "non-Party members." The meeting's gist was that General Secretary Xi Jinping has ordered Party organizations to mobilize non-Party members to implement the Party's rural revitalization policies during the 15th 5-year plan with "united hearts and minds" and "pooled strength."
An Agriculture Ministry meeting on January 27 had a less cheerful tone, ordering rural officials to wring corruption and graft out of the system as they implement the 15th 5-year plan in the countryside this year. Minister Han Jun ordered Party officials in the central Ministry and Provincial offices to "align [their] thoughts and actions with the spirit of Xi Jinping's remarks to the Central Disciplinary Inspection Commission." The first command was to focus on the "two safeguards": (1) "The core" intertwining of Party and Government is critical to China's destiny and (2) everyone must ensure the "unified" command, coordination, and decision-making of the Party's Central Committee. In brief, Xi must remain in charge.
The January 27 session demanded thorough implementation of Xi's important instructions and strict political discipline and rules. It emphasized the need to more "scientifically and effectively confine power within institutional cages." The meeting demanded a "clean and honest culture" in the "new era" by unifying the authorization, exercise of power and control in rural work, by combating corruption, punishing graft, and regularly conducting disciplinary legal and warning education.
While not mentioned, warnings to rural officials are surely backed up by last year's delayed death sentence given to previous Agriculture Minister Tang Renjian for violating party discipline.
Rural plans involve billions of RMB in bank loans and intergovernmental transfers and taking charge over rural land and building assets, presenting a cornucopia of opportunities for corruption and slipshod work that undermines confidence in the Party's leadership and perpetuates despair and chaos in the countryside. The January 27 meeting mentioned initiatives to prevent a return to poverty, rectifications of rural collective asset management, and addressing problems with construction of high-standard farmland. The document's final command is to "Deepen the fight against corruption and misconduct in the field of rural revitalization" and obey the 8 rules of discipline introduced by Xi when he took power in 2012.
The "Number One Document" on the "Comprehensive Revitalization of Rural Areas" that serves as a blueprint for the 15th 5-year Plan calls for earmarking budgetary funds and ultra-long bonds for construction in rural areas and encouraging banks to lend to rural areas (Paragraph 23). In the same paragraph is an exhortation to severely investigate and punish falsification of reports, favoritism (in awarding funds), embezzlement, and misappropriation of funds.
Faith in Xi's leadership could be undermined by failure to solve chronic problems in the countryside reflected in the Document's exhortations to clean up sewage, trash, "black and odiferous" bodies of water, and heavy metal-contaminated farmland. The Document also orders a clean-up of social breakdown in the countryside by promising to lead creation of a moral atmosphere in rural areas, "establish correct views on marriage, childbirth and family," ban exorbitant wedding dowries, prevent juvenile delinquency, improve the rural funeral system, and manage rural cemeteries.
Elsewhere the document calls for campaigns against organized crime, curbing the proliferation of "village bullies" and family-based criminal gangs, crackdowns on gambling, drug trafficking, infringement of the rights of children, women, and the disabled, telecommunications fraud, and illegal financial activities. Churches, mosques, and monks cannot be trusted to clean up society: the Number One Document promises strong "management of religious affairs." It also promises to deploy unified management of border regions.
Paragraph 27 demands rectification of "weak and disorganized village Party organizations." The misalignment of incentives that leads to rural brain drain is reflected by orders to shore up the rural management workforce, recruit civil servants to work in the countryside, prohibit temporary transfers of county and township staff, and boost salaries for village cadres. These reflect the strong incentive for rural officials to move up to municipal or higher-level jobs asap and the tendency for officials to parachute into a rural post just long enough to burnish their credentials without gaining a real stake in the success of programs they manage or initiate. The Document calls for deepening efforts to address formalism and to reduce the "burden" on rural officials -- the growing number of responsibilities heaped on them that prompts them to just go through the motions by filing paperwork and checking boxes. The same paragraph adds another responsibility by ordering officials to effectively implement the decennial agricultural census that begins this year.
The "Number One Document" begins with an order to "adhere to the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era" and it closes with an exhortation to "unite even more closely around the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core," bringing agricultural and rural modernization to a new level and making strides toward becoming an agricultural power.
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