Senior Chinese officials—including sedulous censors—who have enjoyed routine access to literature forbidden to everyone else may now, like everyone else, also be stuck with only officially approved fare.
In the name of consistency with the dreary tenets of party propaganda, they are to be denied the “more global education” that their privileged positions have until recent years permitted them (“China targets high-ranking officials who read banned books,” Radio Free Asia, September 21, 2024).
Now it appears that President Xi Jinping is coming for their personal libraries and private browsing habits in a bid to instill the same ideas in all party members regardless of rank….
“Interestingly, a lot of officials in the political and legal system, national security and prison systems, which are responsible for maintaining stability and persecuting dissidents, are also keen on reading banned books,” [political commentator Yu Jie] wrote in a recent commentary for RFA Mandarin, citing the case of former state security police political commissar Li Bin.
In Hubei province, the commission went after one of their own in party secretary Wang Baoping, accusing him of “buying and reading books that distorted and attacked the 18th Party Congress.”
“Monitoring what people are reading shows the authoritarian system’s determination and ability to maintain its power and to destroy any resources that could be subversive and any doubts about the legitimacy of the authorities’ rule,” Yu wrote…
“Xi Jinping’s…goal is to turn more than 80 million party members into marionettes or zombies, and follow him, like the Pied Piper, in a mighty procession that leads to hell,” he said.
Not all goals of totalitarian states are achieved, however. People resist. Even oppressors resist. And despite the risks, at least the most determined of the senior Chinese Communist Party officials looking for something more than propaganda and cereal boxes to read may still find a way to get their fix. The stuff will be under the floorboards.
