Three times a week, Hu Meiying meets with other retirees in a park near the centre of this heaving Yangtze River metropolis to warble nostalgically through the songs of their youth, and fondly recall what Ms. Hu calls the “inspiring time” of the Cultural Revolution.
Ms. Hu has come to Sha-Ping Park to sing songs such as Three toasts to the Motherland and The glory of Chairman Mao for three years now. In that time, her little red choir has grown from a dozen hard-core members to being regularly triple that size.
And they have competition: In Sha-Ping Park, which is home to one of the few cemeteries in China that lionizes Mao’s murderous Red Guards, there were another 10 groups gathered on benches and under trees to sing the songs of the Cultural Revolution.
The revival got a boost last month by a decree from the Chongqing government that sounded straight out of the 1970s: Chongqing residents were urged to learn and sing 36 newly written “red songs” to prepare for the coming 90th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party.
A return to what supporters call the positive and less materialistic values of Mao Zedong’s era is just one facet of the “new left” politics on the rise here in Chongqing, a district that, including the surrounding countryside, is home to some 32-million people. The “red revival” also includes sending high-ranking officials to spend time in the countryside, another throwback to Mao’s policies, as well as a widespread ban on billboard and television commercial advertisements.
But while the political planks of what’s being dubbed the “Chongqing model” are drawing most of the attention, local Communist Party secretary Bo Xilai
Depending on whom you ask, the Chongqing model is either a much needed reinvention of Communist Party rule, or the beginning of a dangerous backslide toward an ideologically-driven era akin to the one the country all-too-gladly abandoned three decades ago. Supporters and opponents alike agree much of the Chongqing model could soon be adopted on the national stage by a Communist leadership unsettled by the popular uprisings in the Middle East and looking for a way to reconnect with its own people.
In the eyes of many, the Chongqing model is Mr. Bo’s campaign to be named to China’s most powerful political body, the nine-member standing committee of the Politburo, seven members of which are due to soon retire. After being passed over 10 years ago, it would be a shock if Mr. Bo was again not selected. There’s growing speculation he will be named vice-president or vice-premier as early as this fall, putting him on a course to eventually inherit one of the country’s top posts.
“Mr. Bo is just doing things that the Communist Party used to do in order to gain the trust of the masses. He’s using them again so that the government thinks what the ordinary people think and the government stands in the same place as the ordinary people. My hope is that the whole country can go this way,” said Chen Zhonglin, dean of the law faculty at the University of Chongqing and a member of the National People’s Congress, China’s rubberstamp parliament.
But applying the Chongqing model elsewhere would be difficult, Prof. Chen said, because applying Mr. Bo’s anti-crime campaign – known as “Strike The Black” – at the national level would threaten the fiefdoms that bureaucrats around China have built and guard jealously. (The campaign neatly suits Mr. Bo’s political interests, since it spotlights the corruption that was allowed to flourish under his predecessor Wang Yang
