Xi smacks down China’s propagandists – for being insufficiently propagandist

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Two weeks ago, an aging Chinese scientist put up his hand at a conference and begged for some leniency. For researchers whose access to information is limited by the country's draconian Internet controls, "the losses from strict network monitoring are very large," he said, according to an account on a Chinese scientific news site.

Without proper access to the world's knowledge, "it will be very difficult," he warned, for China to reach the top in global science and technology, as the country's leaders have demanded. The room applauded, and other scientists stepped forward with similar complaints.

But the plaintive request for a little more freedom – one that had echoed across a media sphere that in recent months had begun to once again push boundaries – fell on deaf ears.

This week, China's powerful anti-corruption body revealed results of an inspection on the Communist Party's propaganda department.

The dark conclusion: China's censors and shapers of public opinion aren't doing enough to suppress information and promote Party ideology, an admonishment delivered only days after the country's Foreign Minister berated a Canadian reporter for questioning China's human rights record.

"The effect of guiding art and literature to serve socialism and the people was not obvious enough and the news propaganda is not targeted and effective enough," inspection leader Wang Haichen said, in quotes from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection translated by the South China Morning Post.

The anti-graft inspectors also took aim at the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television for being too weak in guiding and influencing news and entertainment.

China's anti-corruption commission is led by Wang Qishan, who is seen as tightly allied with president Xi Jinping, and the scathing public reprimand furthers suspicion that China's top political elites are in the midst of a bruising power struggle.

A month ago, an article quoting an unnamed "authoritative person" appeared in the state-run People's Daily that delivered a blistering rebuke of the country's economic management. That was widely seen as a broadside against Li Keqiang, the Premier, and comes amid a jostling for power ahead of the Party Congress next year, when party leadership will be chosen for the next half-decade.

The call for a stricter approach by the country's already potent censorship apparatus also suggests an amplification of the harsh new tone in China, which under Xi Jinping has already engaged in a protracted campaign to curtail free speech, human rights advocacy and Western values.

It appears to herald an end to a slight opening that had emerged in recent months. Not only had scientists been able to publicly call for a weakening of Internet censorship, but the country's news media have produced a series of eye-opening reports on police brutality. Authorities strictly curtail the ability by media to question uniformed authority.

Several anonymous letters, whose authors claimed to be Communist Party members, were also published with pointed questions about Mr. Xi's leadership.

And state media recently backed off on some elements of a campaign to burnish Mr. Xi's power. They stopped calling him "Xi Dada" and a "core" leader.

The changes amounted to "weird little cracks in the system that tell us just how complicated things are," said David Bandurski, an expert in Chinese media at the University of Hong Kong, asked by The Globe and Mail a week ago.

But the demand this week for propaganda officials to tighten their work suggests Mr. Xi is moving quickly to cement those cracks.

"Internet freedom, like freedom of the press and freedom of association, would make the Communist Party of China lose the legitimacy of its single-party rule, and trigger a collapse of the whole system," said Qiao Mu, an associate professor of journalism at Beijing Foreign Studies University.

"So they will not do that, particularly in Mr. Xi's time."