"Four Civilizations" and the Evolution of Post-Mao Chinese Socialist Ideology

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) In the contemporary Chinese streetscape, "civilization" is everywhere. The Chinese rendering of civilization, wenming (...),1 has become ubiquitous on poster and billboard advertising, street-side banners and signage, building-mounted plaques and large-character slogans in rural and urban China.2 The volume of literature in China devoted to socialist civilization theory is immense. Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and academic journals, educational guides, ethics and citizenship handbooks, newspaper articles and websites-particularly since the mid-1990shave carried stories and commentaries covering myriad aspects of the CCP's formulation of what it means to be "civilized". A formidable Party-state apparatus in the form of Spiritual Civilization Offices and Standing Committees implements the promotion of the civilization narrative at provincial, district and work-unit level. While "civilizing" discourses as social and governing phenomena in China are receiving increasing scholarly attention, the discursive function of civilization within CCP ideology has not been given the attention that it warrants. Morality campaigns in the post-Mao period have been studied largely as theatres of factional struggle within the CCP leadership and as manifestations of a politicized control balance between social order and economic liberalization. While these campaigns have satisfied various political agendas, they have also been seen as attempts to fill the perceived inadequacies of China's moral culture in dealing with the unintended realities of contemporary market reform. For much of the post-Mao era, the promotion of a positive relationship between China's economic development and moral health has been effected through the binary framework of the "two civilizations"-material civilization and spiritual civilization.3 From the early 1980s, claiming a genealogy in classical Marxism, the idea of the two civilizations provided an ideologically palatable framework through which the CCP articulated the values necessary to achieve "balanced development" (pinghengde fazhan ...).4 While continued economic growth highlighted gains in "material civilization", regular morality drives promoting "socialist spiritual civilization" ostensibly attempted to instill within the Chinese citizenry a modern socialist morality robust enough to handle the new challenges of the socialist market economy. Such slogans as "to grasp with two hands"5 reinforced the idea that complimentary progress in both the economic and moral spheres was necessary if China was to achieve its developmental ends without losing its soul in the process. The two civilizations became necessary halves of a discursive coin, a unifying narrative representing the management of a multi-layered struggle between economic and moral progress, materialism and ideology, reform and conservatism, globalization and nationalism, cultural dissolution and the positive repackaging of China's cultural traditions. Importantly, the two civilizations proved to be a dynamic framework, allowing the promotion of the material and the spiritual to alternate, depending on which was considered in vogue at the time. Over most of the post-Mao period this dynamic presented itself as an evolution from an initial emphasis by Deng Xiaoping on material civilization to a subsequent emphasis on the spiritual under Jiang Zemin. Furthermore, the meaning and use of spiritual civilization itself was changeable, making it a durable-yet at times contested-concept. Although it represented an active departure from politically configured notions of progress such as class struggle, Deng's spiritual civilization was defined in socialist terminology, while under Jiang Zemin it found expression in the language of cultural nationalism. At the CCP's Sixteenth National Congress in November 2002, however, the twenty-four-year evolution of the two-civilization duality took an altogether unexpected turn with Jiang Zemin's introduction of a third civilization-"political civilization". …