Chinese political slogans often mean more than they say. ‘Smash the Four Olds’ drove Red Guards to upturn society during the Cultural Revolution while ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ signalled the end of decades of Maoist policies. Today, Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has inaugurated vast policy agendas under phrases such as the ‘China Dream’, ‘One Belt One Road’, and ‘Community of Shared Future for Mankind.’ But these slogans are more than catchphrases; they are windows into the ideologies, strategies, and sentiments of the people and leadership of the second most-powerful country.
While analysts incessantly grapple with the meanings of Xi’s slogans, they often fail to consider the historical roots behind these pithy yet revealing statements. What is more, slogans themselves are often ill-defined and rarely describe specific, concrete policies. Nonetheless, they are good windows into the wider strategies of China. As Jinghan Zeng argues, slogans allow the CCP to specify an intended global strategy and gradually ‘fill’ these phrases with the tactics to achieve such strategies. Much like the CCP’s rehabilitation of Confucius, Xi’s heavy use of slogans forms part of a wider attempt to buttress his policy agendas with appeals to China’s long, historical traditions.
The scholars Jialin Song and James Paul have identified slogans and ‘proto-slogans’ in Chinese discourse as far back as the Zhou Dynasty (1050–221 BC). Thinkers such as Confucius and Mencius expressed their philosophies through concise, clear aphorisms, seeking ‘the richest connotations with the least words’. These writings naturally lent themselves to being used like slogans throughout Chinese history. As simple but effective phrases, they could transmit philosophical teachings and values to wide audiences.
Political movements also used slogans. The White Lotus Movement, which rebelled against the Qing Dynasty in 1794, encapsulated their aims as ‘Oppose the Qing and Restore the Ming’, tapping into wider Han dissatisfaction with their ethnically Manchu rulers and nostalgia for their Han predecessors. Later, in 1900, the Boxer rebels reversed this into ‘Revive the Qing and Destroy the Foreigners’ to drum up support for then-ailing Qing Dynasty against Western interference in China. Xi’s nationalist rhetoric, much like his frequent citations of Confucius, draws on a long-established tradition of slogans.
The strongest influence on Xi’s slogans, however, lies not in the closing decades of the Qing Dynasty but rather in the early years of CCP rule. Xi’s sloganeering is more openly nationalist than his immediate predecessors’ and is particularly reminiscent of Mao’s revolutionary catechisms. These slogans both shaped and were shaped by the upheaval of the years following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Consistent with communist ideology, Maoist messaging targeted the peasant and working classes. ‘Dare to Think, Dare to Act’ encouraged peasants to follow Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958–62) and drive for collective farming. Meanwhile, ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’ was, unsurprisingly, intended to build up his personality cult. These words formed a part of everyday life, with ordinary Chinese expected to repeat Maoist slogans on a daily basis as a ‘measurement of political correctness’. Repetition forged these slogans into action, driving the revolutionary agenda, strengthening the nascent communist regime, and castigating its enemies.
Following Mao’s death in 1976, his pragmatic successor Deng Xiaoping propagated a new slogan to drive China away from Maoism. His often-marked saying, ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, attempted to articulate a vision of Marxism which was supposedly malleable to the interests of the Chinese people, but more accurately, malleable to the necessities for the CCP to stay in power. In practice, this new ‘socialism’ meant encouraging economic growth through limited private enterprise, international trade, and state capitalism.
By contrast, Xi’s sloganeering features a nationalistic worldview that took root among ordinary Chinese under Deng and his successors. Decades of CCP patriotic education campaigns successfully propagated a politicised history which emphasised the grandeur of Chinese civilization and the ‘Century of Humiliation’ at the hands of Western powers while lionising the Communist takeover. Therefore, by adopting a nationalistic, historically oriented tone, Xi seemingly plays to domestic audiences. His slogans are not simply top-down creations which are imposed on the public but are designed with the masses in mind. As such, Xi’s wordcraft can reveal much about nationalistic sentiment both within the Chinese government and the wider public.
His appeals to Mao and early CCP history reveal many of these aspects in both their content and their tone. Compare the ambitious, far-reaching slogans of the Mao era, such as the ‘Great Leap Forward’, ‘The Chinese people have stood up!’ and ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’ to Xi’s ‘China Dream’ and ‘Great changes unseen in a century’. He promotes ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ to match ‘Mao Zedong Thought’. As no other Chinese leader had done, it is apparent that Xi seeks to position himself as a similarly consequential leader.
Likewise, contrast Xi’s slogans with the more prosaic ones of his predecessors, such as Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Reform and Opening Up’ and Hu Jintao’s ‘Harmonious Society’. Whereas Hu and Deng emphasise stability and gradual change, Xi’s slogans appeal to Mao’s legacy by emphasising wide-reaching change.
A prime example of Xi’s Maoist revival is the ‘China Dream’. Whereas many media outlets have assumed this phrase is a surface-level challenge to the ‘American Dream’, it actually has far deeper historical connotations. As the scholar Ryan Mitchell writes, the phrase has been used to encapsulate the desire to recapture the lost splendour of former dynasties and eras. According to him, it could refer to the famous Song Dynasty poet Zheng Sixiao who, when lamenting the loss of Song territory to northern Jurchens and invading Mongols, wrote he had ‘a heart full of the China Dream’—a vision that one day one day China would be reunited and restored to its former glory.
Mitchell also pointed out that this poem line was directly quoted by former premier Wen Jiabao following a question from a journalist about China-Taiwan relations. Far from seeking to mimic the American Dream (as foreigners may assume), the domestic appeal of the ‘China Dream’ is that it seeks to recapture the country’s historical ‘splendour’—which millions of Chinese have inculcated through the ‘patriotic education’ campaigns.
The full form of the ‘China Dream’ slogan makes this historic mission explicit. In his first address as paramount leader in 2012, Xi called on his country to ‘achieve the Chinese dream of great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’. National rejuvenation is another oft-used propaganda term that captures how the CCP is supposedly raising China to its ‘former glory’, which it had lost during the ‘Century of Humiliation’. This is what CCP narratives call the roughly hundred-year period between the Opium Wars to Mao’s rise, which was characterised by humiliation and defeat at the hands of Western powers and Japan.
Much like Zheng Sixiao anticipating a future beyond the Mongol and Jurchen invasions, Xi positions himself as fulfilling today’s ‘China Dream’ by ‘restoring’ the country’s preeminent place in the world order. In practical terms, this will entail a number of policy goals ranging from unification with Taiwan, economically out-competing United States, and challenging the norms underpinning the current liberal international order.
With only a few words, Xi’s slogans can therefore reveal a great deal about his strategies and the sentiments underpinning his foreign policy. In tone and style, he seeks to distance himself from his immediate predecessors and draw closer to the ‘Great Helmsman’ himself, Mao. He, thereby, positions both himself and China as more assertive and perhaps even revolutionary. In substance, Xi plays to the nationalistic sentiments of a domestic audience that has undergone decades of ‘patriotic education’ by appealing to a specific reading of China’s pre-Communist past.
To take his slogans at face value (or as something indistinct from the rhetorical flair of American politics) risks misinterpreting China’s strategic objectives. By viewing the China Dream as just that, a dream, or as parody of the American Dream, ignores the monumental transformations to world order that fulfilling it could entail. Far from being mere catchphrases, slogans reveal deeper meanings behind their words; they encapsulate traditions, history, and philosophy. Peering into the thought process behind these slogans provides a pertinent window into Chinese politics, and politics in general, for that matter.
This article was originally published in OPR’s Issue 13: Language.
Jonas Balkus is a student at the University of Oxford, studying for a master’s in international relations. He writes on a wide range of topics, including both foreign domestic policies, as well as fiction and non-fiction.