How to interpret the Marxist re-indoctrination of Chinese society in the 21st century?

 How to interpret the Marxist re-indoctrination of Chinese society in the 21st century?

Igor Parra

This commentary could occupy several chapters of a political-military essay, however we will limit it to the essential and the concise, the practical and the urgent. At some point, some of the kind readers, who read me in different countries, will realize what this hypothesis I am presenting below means in the short and medium term.

First of all, the stage has been set by Chinese President Xi Jinping himself and has been reported in the international press. Indeed the president declared the reintroduction of Marxism in the national education plans at different levels and grades. In some Western press it has been interpreted as a step towards the arteriosclerosis of the regime of the Asian country.

However, in the Asian press, in the countries neighboring China, there have been no excessively negative comments. What is most interesting from my point of view is that it is in the Vietnamese press where there is no trace of negative commentary, only a relative vacuum since they limit themselves to reproducing summaries of press agencies. At least in the newspapers and journals that we can access from the West via the web.

From a purely Asian, and especially Vietnamese, military strategy point of view, this re-indoctrination could only mean that the Chinese leaders are deeply convinced that they will be attacked by a US-led alliance in the not too distant future. Perhaps no more than 5 years (the latter is a derivative of the main hypothesis).

Indeed, when the functioning of the communist armies is known, an aspect that has never been well understood in the West is the utmost importance of the political indoctrination of the troops at all levels of the military echelon. Otherwise it would be difficult to explain the Soviet Russian triumph not only in the Second World War but also in the civil war against the interventionism of all its near and remote neighbors. It would be equally difficult to understand the Vietnamese triumph over the Americans, and along the same logical line, that of the Vietnamese against the French and Japanese colonial power. Likewise, it would not be possible to understand the triumph of the Chinese communists over the Japanese invaders and the direct and frontal confrontation against the Americans in Korea.

The communist ideological component goes far beyond the classic indoctrination and morale of troops typical of Western armies, which has been practiced for several centuries, especially as a moral religious component, for example the text engraved in metal on the belts of German soldiers in various wars: Got mit Uns (God with us).

Who has written best about this in depth is the Vietnamese strategist Vo Nguyen Giap. The titles of his works clearly indicate the fundamental role given to Marxist ideology in the organization of anti-imperialist guerrilla warfare, whether Japanese, French or American. These texts on the one hand summarize the military writings of Marx himself, as well as those of other revolutionary thinkers, but they contribute a very characteristic vision of the relationship not only of the corps or combat echelon, whichever it may be, with coordination and strategic movement, something that Mao succeeds in synthesizing and improving in a notable way, but he adds a particular accentuation to the political relationship between the military political cadre and its own instrument of defense and attack. It is perhaps the best operational compilation of the enormous importance of the political education of a military cadre; its conclusion is that without deeply assimilated ideological content the enormous difficulty of modern warfare from the revolutionary camp cannot be executed in spite of any technologically superior military instrument or complex. Only political superiority operationally projects sufficient willpower to the body of combatants armed no longer with material weapons, but with conceptual weapons.

Having said the above, which is known to scholars of the political indoctrination of modern armies, it is worth proposing that we can interpret as a clear sign of readiness for war the fact that Chinese society activates its Marxist political indoctrination in a transversal way. This has several operational implications far greater than incorporating this or that aircraft carrier, or developing this or that super sonic missile system. 

If we read Mao and his best pupil Vo Nguyen Giap carefully, the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China is preparing for a new kind of revolutionary war. We will continue to comment on this in future posts. In the meantime, readers who lack a Vietnamese revolutionary military education would do well to start reading Vo Nguyen Giap very carefully.

The Mao's super synthesis

  The Chinese Clock (Part One): Mao's super synthesis

 I.

In line with my a-periodic commentaries on this blog on the situation in Egypt, the Middle East (Syria, Israel, Palestine, Turkey), I accentuate those sporadic analytical visits even further east. 

When we approach China we are imbued with a sense of entering a space where strategic thinking has been not only conceptualised but efficiently put into action, over several groups of hundreds of years summing up millennia, almost in a continuous way through time and space. There, the greatest strategic change emerged at Mao's death with the development of an unprecedented and far-reaching action, which was not initially understood in the West: the operational synthesis of successful Western capitalism with a local form of war communism, in fact a variant of the one triumphantly imposed by the Bolsheviks around 1922 on the ruins of the defeated Tsarist Empire, and on the defeated Western alliances to wipe out communism militarily.

II.

Mao conceived years before his death the fundamental theoretical principle used by the political-military leadership of the Chinese system during the post-Mao transition. This Maoist concept, his main contribution to political theory, is based on how to overcome the "classical" Hegelian, Marxist and Leninist debate on "reality". Until Mao, the highest level of the socio-economic historical process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis ended with "the change of reality" which arises from an organised political will, oriented towards the seizure of power in order to precisely "change the reality" of the living conditions of the population. Mao proposes something radically different, going beyond the classical synthesis, which he criticises as "weak": it is no longer enough to interpret reality, nor to change reality... but: a new reality must be created.

Thus, the successors of the "great helmsman" did not deepen the errors of the war communism practised by the Soviet Union and its satellites, for they did as their leader had written: the chinese did not reinterpret or change reality... they created another reality. They made the most innovative strategic synthesis since the Council of Nicea, 1694 years ago, when the Roman Empire converted to Christianity. The Maoist synthesis can be called the Super Synthesis because it surpasses the previous level of strategic analysis and practice. It was Mao's political adversary, Deng Xiaoping, who launched the experiment, but conceptually it was totally in line with the political-theoretical line that Mao had created. Thus, all political-military and civilian cadres of any rank were perfectly familiar with that part of Mao's theoretical legacy. In the West, only the few communists who had seriously read Mao understood the profound meaning of this concept, of this Super Synthesis, when the profound economic transformations in China began 10 years later. What was mistakenly seen from the West as the partial or complete westernisation of a communist regime, for millions of senior cadres, Chinese communist party militants and ordinary citizens, it was actually the creation of a new singular reality , not a mere change of reality. The gang of 4 belonged to the past with their criticism of this radically new policy for a new reality, they still were  about changing reality, thus they totally lost their ticket to the big scenario.

In the Western we tend to operate under pre Maoist rationales , just doing a simplistic kind of taxonomy when we say that the Chinese are just summing up capitalist market concepts and practices within a communist formal dictatorship. I dare to say that this is a weak analysis of what is really happening in China.

Igor Parra, Vitacura-Lebu 2021