Red State

By Hannah Beech / Chongqing Monday, July 25, 2011
    • Matthew Niederhauser / Institute for TIME

    Pledge of allegiance Residents of Chongqing take patriotic oaths at the city's Geleshan Martyrs' Cemetery

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    If politics explains Bo's zeal, he's chosen just the place to demonstrate it. Chongqing is a sprawling municipality of 30 million, and shares with only Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin a special status as a centrally run municipality. During World War II, Chongqing served as both the capital of the Nationalist government run by Chiang Kai-shek and as a base for the communists who were supposedly allied with Chiang in a popular front against the Japanese. (Chongqing's top red tourist attraction commemorates former jails where departing Nationalist agents executed imprisoned communist rebels.) Today, the river port is the investment gateway to China's underdeveloped hinterlands, and it is booming. Chongqing added 63 million sq m of new construction in 2010, 66% more than the year before. But with such growth have come social tensions. "Secretary Bo realized that people wanted more spirituality as Chongqing developed so quickly," says a Chongqing official who declined to be named. "So he gave them red culture in which they can sing songs and feel good."

    Given that Chongqing has sold itself as China's reddest city, it's all the more puzzling that another city official I meet does not want to be named either. But I can see why when he begins his rhetorical somersaults. "There is a mistaken impression that red culture is just about the Chinese Communist Party," he begins. "That's not true. It also includes Confucius, democratic culture, Einstein, Shakespeare, even Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream.'" He then goes on to vaguely connect red culture to Michael Jackson. I question the Chongqing government's decision, then, to name its campaign after a color so associated with communism. With a smile, the bureaucrat, in his well-made clothes and expensive-looking watch, answers: "Well, you can't call it 'purple culture,' can you?" he says. "Or 'blue culture'? Other colors are not suitable."

    Indeed not. But it is not only Chongqing officials who are searching for a guiding ideology — or hue. For all its successes, the CCP may be in the midst of a crisis. One day, China's long economic boom will, at the very least, slow down — planning chiefs are already scaling back expectations to 7% growth this year, after years of 8% or more. The risk for China's leaders is that, someday, they will not be able to depend on continuing increases in prosperity to buy acquiescence in CCP rule. Given that truth, it is little wonder that Bo and others who hope to one day lead China have fixated on a red-tinged spirit to unify the masses in these uncertain times.

    And the times are uncertain. Even as Hu presided over a lavish 90th anniversary ceremony for the party in Beijing, he acknowledged serious problems. "The whole party," said Hu, "is confronted with ... lack of drive, incompetence, a divorce from the people, a lack of initiative, and corruption." From the leadership's standpoint, that does not bode well. Last year China saw 180,000 "mass incidents" ranging from labor protests to village riots, according to a sociologist at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University — a significant increase from the 74,000 officially reported in 2004.

    For a nostalgic faction in the Chinese leadership, it is the market-oriented economic reforms of Mao's successor Deng Xiaoping — which turned China into the world's factory — that are responsible for having allowed ills such as graft and income inequality to flourish. In national surveys from 2005 onward, Chinese have expressed progressively less satisfaction with their lives, even as their incomes have surged. "We can't stop divisions in society completely, but we can try to lessen the pain," says Fang Ning, director of the Institute of Political Science at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. "The central theme of red culture is to promote unity and equality in society. China has had economic growth. Now we want to pay attention to social growth as well."

    The Elite Snickers
    In Chongqing, Bo has introduced various social reforms, including a comprehensive public-housing plan and a tree-planting effort that is greening a foggy, gray city. But his red crusade is unabashedly old-style. Under the party secretary's orders, 200,000 government officials are being sent to the villages to listen to farmers' wishes and learn from their struggles, though it is not clear that the program has been a hit. "When government officials came to our area, they just played poker in the field," said one online commenter. Another alleged: "You have to offer the officials good wine, good food and good women."

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