What’s black and white and red all over? Books by Xi Jinping, of course.
The top story in the April 23 Xinwen Lianbo news program is Xi Jinping’s banal injunction to the people of China: Read more books!
Sounds legit. After all, books are good, right? Not reading books is kind of bad, right? How better to impart to China with a “whiff” of fragrant knowledge in the eyes of the world than to claim that more Chinese are reading, and reading more than ever.
Not just any books, of course—there are poisonous weeds, banned books and dangerous Western influences that must be contended with, if not ruthlessly rooted out. Apparently, it’s the volume that counts. And Xi’s Collected Works, of course.
If you are not sure what kind of books the Chairman has in mind when he suggests you read more and read more of the right books, you can be reasonably safe in restricting your reading to the carefully-vetted, arfully presented, heavily-censored holdings of state-run bookstores. The dozens, nay, scores of books by the illustrious, industrious, intellectual giant Xi Jinping himself would be a great place to start, and of course you could read for weeks on end without putting much of a dent in his voluminous corpus alone, but prolific though he is, and as much time he devotes to writing his own books,he also has a country to micro-manage in his spare time.
And busy though he is, one suspects the book-lover in chief is a voracious reader, too, since his “study,” or at least the make-belief studio as shown on TV, is lined wall-to-wall with a carefully curated collection of books. The Chairman’s study contains the desk where the buck stops in China. It also contains numerous framed photographs of the modest Xi himself, pointing at things from childhood to middle age, but that’s another story.
What’s interesting about how CCTV illustrates the day’s top story (about you-know-who’s injunction to read, read, read) is that it tells a story about reading that sounds exactly like the fantasy of someone who doesn’t read and never did read might make up about reading as they imagine it to be.
It’s all about style, size, scope and volume. Books are all about looks.
The fireworks that go off when you open a book are hard to illustrate, but CCTV does its best by stressing the locations where books are promoted, if not actually read. There are the big state-book stores and state modeled libraries which celebrate reading in the abstract, putting more attention on eye-grabbing design, with mult-storied reading rooms so voluminous and with such vertiginous sheer drops that a suicide watch would not be out of place. Showy showrooms with impossible to reach books are simply not the sort of place a real book lover would like, and not just because the design is angular, badly lit and overly flashy, but because the books, what books there are, are treated as part of the decoration, part of the wow factor.
So many books! Stacked so high! And so cleverly arranged that to remove one book might send the whole edifice tumbling down!
Books are put on display splayed and spread open, for visual effect, but the visual effect backfires. There are all kinds of bibliophiles, of course, some scribble in the margins, others don’t, but I would wager that most book-lovers don’t feel comfortable contorting a book and stressing its spine just for visual pizzazz.
In short, between the heavy-handed censorship, impossibly high stacks, disconcerting visuals and the increasing tempo of injunctions as the segment goes on to stress that only “good” reading of good books is being encouraged, the whole book-loving project takes on an Orwellian tone suggesting it means exactly the opposite of what it says.
By posing so publicly as a self-professed book lover, by virtue signaling that more and more people should read more and more books, and by instructing his propaganda apparatus to employ superficial sheen, crass promotion and clumsy injunctions, Xi Jinping has inadvertently exposed himself as a poorly-read man who wants to be smarter than he is, and thinks books might have something to do with it, but doesn’t “get” books at all.
Now, it’s not the Chairman’s fault he had a lousy education, and it’s not to say he doesn’t possess a wily kind of will to power, but he’s simply not a well-educated man What broken, limited, piecemeal education he did enjoy was cruelly interrupted and put on hold, and while it’s admirable that he should want to make up for that gap later in life, that’s not to say he’s going about it the right way.
And he’s not alone among Chinese leaders dealing with this problem. Mao’s education was limited, but he was well self-taught, if only for reading the popular classics backwards and forwards. Despite his knack for self-instruction, Mao was slighted by prominent scholars in his youth, and he never forgot it. Mao was a master of the art of revenge-served-cold even before the mafia, and few prominent scholars survived his long-simmering wrath.
Xi is a Chinese Boomer, his age puts him at the demographic center of that post-Liberation generation of lives turned upside during the destructive course of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Xi, a lifelong student, and sometime emulator, of Mao’s example, could not be unaware that Mao was by all accounts a voracious reader. Mao was also quick with the quip and fairly skillful with the pen, yet as much as Xi would like to be like his unseemly mentor, he is no Mao. He’s a Mao wannabe, at best, and if that’s the case, it’s kind of sad because Xi’s own family suffered grievously under Mao’s ever-shifting whims, taunts and wanton tests of loyalty.
Like a survivor with a bad case of the Stockholm syndrome, China’s current leader can’t shake himself free of that which oppressed him. More ominously, inasmuch as he aspires to and rises to Mao levels of manipulative control, media-induced hero worship and self-deification as the star of his own personality cult, the country is in for another rough ride.
What better way to teach young people to love books than to force them to spend days on end perfecting a North Korean style mass pageant using human beings as pixels?This one spells out the words: “Book Fragrant China”
Reading widely can increase one’s sense of agency, self-confidence, respect for the language and respect for others, but not so with fixed slogans. Clumsy, wooden, marble-mouthed injunctions have the opposite effect, even Xi’s latest slogan to the effect that reading good books is good.
Teaching the masses that reading is good because, and only because, Xi says so sets a dangerous precedent. Today’s exhortation is milquetoast in the sense that the pronunciamento is banal and there’s not much danger in reading dull, state-approved reading, (leaving aside pressing questions of censorship, intolerance towards diverse views, outright lack of free expression, inability to criticize social superiors and other inbred problems) but the logic of doing something because the paramount leader says so IS a danger.
Today the message is: read more books and particularly the books Chairman Xi approves of. Why? Because Xi says so.
Tomorrow, it could be, at least theoretically speaking, much more serious. If Xi should decide in all his unquestioned wisdom that China must go to war, then it follows that the masses must support this effort, even if it doesn’t make sense, even if it is unnecessary, even if it means ruination, because Xi says so.
It happened with Putin, and look what happened. It could happen to Putin’s most powerful Chinese friend, and it could happen out of the blue.
The eye-catching facilities and massive structural plant devoted to book-related activities impresses the viewer at first glance, but it can’t make up for the dampening effect of state censorship, banned books and curtailed expressive freedom. The slogan on the bottom right is about reading “good” books which is not a literary criterion but a political one.
The money spent putting on a drone show to promote a library would be better spent on expanding the book collection not just in quantity but in quality.
Up until this point, CCTV seemed to be telling a story about importance of books, but in reality it’s just a lead-up to introducing the man who wrote the book on pretending to like books. If you haven’t heard about Xi’s recently-released “Collected Works” which are now being semi-involuntarily read by cadre across the country, then you haven’t been paying attention to one of the most important domestic news developments in China. Xi is making Mao noises, as if he wants to be the new Mao.
Here Xi is shown thumbing through several books, not once consulting the title page or table of contents, let alone footnotes or bibliography, but jumping to the pictures (of him?) in the middle. In the footage that follows, culled from the archives, Xi is shown mentioning books and the importance of reading.
CCTV trots out some statistics for the decade that just happens to correspond with the tenure of China’s book-lover in chief, and lo and behold, reading went up, and continues to rise, as Xi took the reins of power and began to tighten his grip.
The segment on the importance of reading includes these rather sterile, if not entirely superfluous images of the Red Flag, which is itself a red flag in the other sense of the word.
Whatever you think today’s top news story is about, it’s not about books.
It’s about a man telling people to read because he thinks it makes him look smart, it’s about an undemocratic leader pretending that all books are equal, especially books vetted by the state.
So go ahead and read the right books but even then, one would be wise not to read too much! Xi’s China is all about loyalty to the party, love for the leader and praise for CCP right or wrong, and they’ve been wrong often.
Books make you think. Thinking gets you in trouble. You start to take the world too seriously. In Xi’s people’s paradise, the party does your thinking for you.
Therein lies the difference.