China’s Purges Are Working as Designed

A billboard of Chinese leader Xi Jinping behind People's Liberation Army soldiers, Beijing, August 2015 Reuters / Damir Sagolj ANDREW MERTHA is George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. More & Download Print unlock this feature or Sign in. Save Sign in and save to read later Copy This is a subscriber-only feature. or Sign in. Chicago MLA APSA APA Chicago Cite not available at the moment MLA Cite not available at the moment APSA Cite not available at the moment APA Cite not available at the moment Request reprint permissions here. But what the CCP has also done, and what is unique to its continued rule, is not a purge in the traditional sense. CCP leaders often turn to a different method of discipline: rectification. Rectification aims to keep a person inside the party, even if sometimes at a greatly diminished status. Whereas the traditional idea of a purge seeks to eliminate enemies in the ranks (the Chinese term qingdang means to “cleanse the party”), rectification aims to retain and remold cadres while keeping them in the party’s orbit. Throughout its history, the CCP has sought to rectify cadres far more frequently than it has sought to eliminate them. In December 1929, in the village of Gutian, in Fujian province, Mao put forward a resolution called “On Correcting Mistaken Ideas in the Party” that asserted the party’s control of the military. The resolution also included clues as to how the party understood internal discipline: it described its targets not as enemies but as people who had deviations in their thinking. Cadres might suffer from ailments such as having a “purely military viewpoint” (a perspective untethered from politics), promoting ultrademocracy (a political system lacking party authority), and supporting individualism. Mao’s resolution treated each of these as a sickness that could sometimes be cured through a regimen of criticism and self-criticism in front of peers. And it attached a promise to the cure: if party members submitted to the process, the CCP would retain them rather than destroy them. In the northern Chinese area of Yan’an, where Mao and his followers set up a wartime base camp starting in the mid-1930s, leaders turned rectification into doctrine. Party membership exploded from roughly 40,000 in 1937 to 800,000 by 1940, which meant that almost everyone in the organization was new and not yet trustworthy in the eyes of party leaders.