An article titled "Take the Initiative in the Ideological Battlefield" appeared recently in Red Flag Manuscript, a main publication of the Central Committee of Chinese Communist Party. The article pointed to the importance of the Party’s ideology and also to the challenges the Party faces.
"Profound lessons should be learned from other countries and other political parties. For example, after Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, he gradually abandoned the guiding position of Marxism and switched to an ideology of pluralism, an abstract humanitarian philosophy, neo-liberalism in economics, nihilism in history, and freedom of criticism in literature, resulting in the wide spread of non-Marxist and anti-Marxist ideas. This was an important cause leading to the collapse of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. The recent color revolutions in West Asia and North Africa all began with the ruling party’s giving up control of the mainstream ideology."
"Ideological work faces challenges. The real danger from the Western anti-China hostile forces should not be underestimated. They vigorously promote Western-style democracy and the values of freedom and human rights and they maliciously attack the Party’s leadership in an attempt to disintegrate the Party’s ruling base in order to replicate the "color revolutions" in China. Some anti-China forces collude and support each other and do everything possible to rope in groups such as those advocating Tibetan separatism and Taiwan independence, the East Turkistanis, pro-democracy movements, and Falun Gong, in an attempt to foster a strategic alliance from within China. By seizing the hot issues in economic and social development, they have sentimentalized the theories of the failure of socialism, of the clash of civilizations, and the idea that human rights is above sovereignty. They have also deliberately hyped up the theories of China’s economic threat, energy threat, and military threat. The sinister intention of subverting and containing China is abundantly clear."
"Negative online information that confuses our common ideals and beliefs should not be underestimated. Although China’s Internet penetration rate is 42 percent and Internet users have reached 564 million, 80 percent of Internet information is provided by the United States, 90 percent is in the English language, and the export of China’s information is less than 1 percent of the global total. The passive pattern of ‘the West being strong and we being weak’ in online discourse rights is very prominent. Taking advantage of their network hegemony, Western countries cultivate and order some Internet "dissidents" and "opinion leaders" to speculate maliciously as to Party and military-related public opinion in order to concoct massive negative rumors and false information, so they can discredit the Party and the government’s image."
Source: Qiushi journal, October 23, 2013
http://www.qstheory.cn/hqwg/2013/201320/201310/t20131023_281706.htm