Many legal or propagandistic developments in the People’s Republic of China seem to merely state or restate what has long been the case, perhaps to eliminate wiggle room and remind everybody who’s boss. This was true of the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress promulgated in September 2025—this Law did mark the start of suppressing Tibetan culture and language, for instance—and it is true of two manifestos that have appeared in the CCP rag People’s Daily (Bitter Winter, May 29, 2026).
Carrying the bylines of Xi Jinping and the Central Party School, these texts
lay out a comprehensive blueprint for what Beijing calls an “autonomous knowledge system.” The autonomy in question, however, is not “from” power but “for” power. It is a project to detach Chinese scholarship from global academic standards [better: “objective academic standards”] and reattach it firmly to the Party’s ideological needs.
Xi’s message is that China must accelerate the construction of a social science system that is “self-generated,” “self-confident,” and “self-directed”—terms that appear lofty until one reads the fine print. The “self” in question is not the scholarly community but the Party itself. The new system must be guided by Xi Jinping Thought, must “uphold and strengthen the Party’s overall leadership,” and must ensure that research remains aligned with the political formulations of the Central Committee. The goal is to free Chinese scholarship not from foreign influence but from the possibility of dissent.
The Party School’s companion article is even more revealing. It argues that Western theories—liberalism in particular—are inherently incompatible with China’s “people-first” values, and that using them “without discrimination” weakens China’s “spiritual and political independence.”… The CCP intends to turn political slogans into academic paradigms.
The Party School describes a vast institutional effort to reshape the entire research ecosystem….
The result is a system in which the distinction between research and propaganda collapses by design.
This latest push reminds us of how the CCP uses philosophical and moral terms like “rule of law,” “justice,” and here “autonomy,” “self,” and “self-directed,” to mean the opposite of what they mean in a sane context.
To our minds, these terms denote objective legal process guided by facts and constraints on government, giving individuals their actual due, the self as individual, and the individual’s practice of choosing his own course and pursuing his own train of thought. The Party wants to extirpate any remnants of a rational individualist approach to life and governance. Its goal is to wipe out the individual as an individual and make him nothing more than a self-abnegating, parroting particle of the collective with no hope of living or thinking for his own sake.
Some Chinese people are in the streets telling Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party to go to hell. Will academics do the same?
