Not long ago the ideal Chinese communist man was humble, soft-spoken, devoted to helping others and religiously faithful to the Party. Probably the most famous example of this was Lei Feng, whose story was wildly exaggerated by state propaganda.
What we know for sure is that Lei Feng was a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army who became celebrated for his devotion to Mao Zedong. The official Party narrative says he died at age 21 when an army truck hit a telephone pole and the pole fell on him.
Lei was known for his kindness, selflessness, modesty and, above all, his love of chairman Mao. As the propaganda campaigns that capitalized off his death often said, “Learn from comrade Lei Feng.”
But China isn’t learning from Lei Feng anymore.
Last week The Economist published an article with the headline “China’s defeated youth” and the subhead “Young Chinese have little hope for the future. Xi Jinping wants them to toughen up.” The article begins:
In the southern city of Huizhou an electronics factory is hiring. The monthly salary on offer is between 4,500 and 6,000 yuan (or $620 and $830), enough to pay for food and essentials, but not much else. The advertisement says new employees are expected to “work hard and endure hardship.”
The article says this doesn’t resonate with young Chinese today. Yeah, no shit. Imagine picking up your copy of China Daily and reading about the boosted Hubei economy, the boosted digital economy, the invigorated capital market then turning to the classifieds and reading a bunch of job postings that say, “we barely pay, but at least you’ll suffer.”
With China’s 40-year economic boom now finished and a demographic collapse on the horizon, China is preparing the next generation for the coming storm with toughen-up rhetoric. But there are myriad ways to prepare people for hardships ahead. China is choosing this rhetoric for reasons that have to do with fascism.
Yes, China is fascist. Not because it puts an ethno-religious minority in concentration camps. Not because Chinese scholars and top CCP thought leaders use Nazi legal theory to justify their actions in Hong Kong and elsewhere—specifically, they have become so obsessed with Hitler’s “crown jurist” Carl Schmitt that the phenomenon has become known as “Schmitt fever.” Rather, it is because China adheres to all three of the fundamental features of fascism that I outlined in my post “What is fascism?”
Namely, the people exist to serve the state while revolutionary violence is top-down, a single group is taken as the national identity and every aspect of society is politicized.
And while it is not fundamental to fascism, another typical feature is the celebration of the masculine. In fact, this is so common some scholars consider it essential. In his 1980 text Fascism: Comparison and Definition, Stanley Payne, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert in European fascism, includes the emphasis of the masculine as a key element in his definition of fascism.
My post “What is fascism?” was in response to a video by
in which he argued, and I disagreed, that Trump is fascist. Reich made his argument by defining fascism and his definition includes “Extolling brute strength and heroic warriors,” which is another way of talking about the emphasis on the masculine.We see this of course with the Nazis, who celebrated hyper-masculinity and the idea of the “new German man” along with a heavy militarized society.
In 2016, Daily Mail reported on a class at Xincheng Middle School in Jiansgu province that taught “delicate” boys to man up. Parents were supportive, the article noted, adding that this came just months after a textbook was released in Shanghai that intended to make boys more masculine.
Telling youth to toughen up is not the only example. China now has a generation of “wolf warrior diplomats,” named after the Chinese action film Wolf Warrior 2, which is basically a Rambo movie on steroids except China is Rambo and the Americans are the Soviets. So you have Chinese diplomats acting in arrogant and undiplomatic ways, notably former Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, and then this being framed as tough-guy talk rather than what it is—assholery.
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