On August 30, 2021, China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism issued a directive requiring literary and artistic workers to study a series of articles by the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping.
The directive was issued to address the current violations of laws, regulations, and moral failures in the entertainment business, to further strengthen the control of education and to cultivate and promote the core values of socialism.
The first item in the directive is to “strengthen study and education.” Specifically, it refers to studying Xi Jinping’s series of important expositions on literary and artistic work in depth. The directive calls for a deep understanding that the cause of entertainment is an “important cause for the party and the people” and that the entertainment front is an “important front of the party and the people.”
On August 29, 2021, the CCP media, China Youth Daily, posted a commentary entitled “Everyone Can Feel that a Profound Change Is Underway!” More than 30 state media at the central, provincial and municipal levels in China have since prominently re-posted the commentary.
The commentary calls China’s recent crackdown measures “profound reforms” or “profound revolutions.” From censoring entertainment stars to suspending Ant’s Initial Public Offering, to Alibaba’s fine of 18.2 billion yuan, to the investigation of Didi and to the “common prosperity” policy, all measures show that a profound reform or revolution is taking place in the economic, financial, cultural, and even political arena. A profound “revolution” or “revolution” is returning capital to the people, to the CCP’s original goal, and to socialism. Those who attempt to block this reform will be “abandoned.”
The commentary continues that this “profound reform” is to counter the “barbaric and ferocious attack” of the United States against China. The commentary implies that China’s capitalists are the “fifth column” of the United States in waging a color revolution in China. “The United States is imposing increasingly severe military threats, economic and technological blockades, financial strikes, political and diplomatic containment and the suppression of China.” “The United States is more aggressively waging a color revolution through the fifth column within China. If this time, we still have to rely on those big capitalists as the main force of anti-imperialism and anti-hegemony,” China will not need enemies to fight. “It will fall first by itself,” just like the Soviet Union back then. That’s why China is reforming the “capital circle” and the “entertainment circle.”
Sources:
1.) China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, August 30, 2021
https://www.mct.gov.cn/whzx/whyw/202108/t20210830_927427.htm
2.) People’s Daily, August 29, 2021
http://politics.people.com.cn/n1/2021/0829/c1001-32211523.html
3.) Radio France Internationale, August 31, 2021
https://tinyurl.com/6p54dc87