Musing on the Middle Kingdom & More: Document Number 9

Making the world safe for autocracy

It’s been an interesting week as the new administration settled in, and I can’t help comparing it to watching Xi Jinping take up the reins of power in 2012-2013. One of the major windows into his priorities came from Document Number 9, which may bring up odd echoes of the Beatles’ song, Revolution 9. I can only guess that the similarity was inadvertent.

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Document Number Nine

Sometime in 2013, as I was going about my business in Shanghai, I began to hear whisperings about something called “Document #9.” I asked some of my acquaintances in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) what it was, and no one was forthcoming. It was a state secret, they said; neither I nor any other foreigner was supposed to know anything about it, and I would be wise never to ask about it again.

Even though I’d only been in the country for about two years, I knew enough about China by then to tell that something big was afoot to require so much disavowal. Some tides were changing.

In November of 2012 Xi Jinping had become the General Secretary of the CCP and, less than six months later, in March 2013, President of the People’s Republic of China. During his first year in office, there was much speculation about the direction he would take the country. My memories of his first year in office include the following: First, he talked a lot about the “China Dream.” Initially, it was unclear to me what that actually meant. In 2014 my wife and I visited the National Museum of China on the eastern side of Tiananmen Square in Beijing. One wing was devoted to the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese People. A large plaque placed at the entrance to that wing bore the following inscription:

The Chinese nation is a great nation whose people are industrious, courageous, intelligent and peace-loving and have made indelible contributions to the progress of human civilization. For generations and generations, the Chinese people have been pursuing a dream of national strength and prosperity.

"The Road of Rejuvenation" is a permanent exhibition showcasing the explorations made by the Chinese people from all walks of life who, after being reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society since the Opium War of 1840, rose in resistance against humiliation and misery, and tried in every way possible to rejuvenate the nation.

The exhibition also highlights the glorious history of China under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), in which all the ethnic groups joined forces to achieve national independence and liberation and strove to build a strong and prosperous country for the well-being of the people. The exhibition therefore clearly demonstrates the historical course of the Chinese people of choosing Marxism, the CPC, the socialist road and the reform and opening-up policy, and China's firm determination in building socialism with Chinese characteristics through adherence to this great banner, this special road and this theoretical system.

Today, the Chinese nation is standing firm in the east, facing a brilliant future of great rejuvenation. The long-cherished dream and aspiration of the Chinese people will surely come to reality.

This, I gathered, was what was meant by the “China Dream.”

The second thing I remember was Xi’s concerns about corruption in the Party. As soon as he became the General Secretary of the CCP in November 2012, he began to talk about the corruption he observed, how it threatened the longevity of the Party, and what he intended to do about it. During his first decade in office, he prosecuted over 2 million cadres (members of the party). Everybody was on pins and needles, waiting to find out if they would be implicated. To be a high-ranking member of the CCP was to be, if not necessarily corrupt, at least in a position to act in a corrupt way and strongly tempted to do so. In retrospect, many people believe that Xi’s anti-corruption campaign had a dual purpose: both cleaning up the Party to help ensure its longevity and getting rid of potential threats to Xi’s power base.

And the third thing I remember was the early whispering about something this mysterious “Document Number Nine.” In the fullness of time, various cadres leaked it, and by sometime in 2014, it was widely available on Google. Nonetheless, the CCP maintained the fiction of its being top secret, to the extent that in 2014, a now-famous Chinese journalist, Gao Yu, was found guilty of leaking Document Number Nine sometime during the prior year. Early in 2015, she was sentenced to seven years in prison even though she was 71 years old at the time.

So, what exactly is Document Number Nine? Its official name is something like “Briefing on the Current Situation in the Ideological Realm.” It lists seven “noteworthy problems:”

1. Promoting western constitutional democracy

2. Promoting universal values

3. Promoting civil society

4. Promoting economic liberalization, privatization, and marketization

5. Promoting western-style journalism

6. Historical nihilism (which means contradicting the official history of the CCP and the PRC)

7. Questioning the concept of socialism with Chinese characteristics

In time, I would learn that the people in our joint-venture bank who were members of the CCP were all studying this document in the monthly meetings of their Party cells, as were all the other 90-plus million Party members in China.

Learning this frightened the heck out of me, because either directly or indirectly, many of the beliefs and behaviors that I was encouraging in our bank and attempting instill in our corporate culture were direct examples of the “seven problems.” If I had not been diligent about trying to figure out what these problems were, I might not have even realized that my behavior was fundamentally “illegal” (in a sense—there were no actual laws to that effect, but China tends to operate on pronouncements from the top, rather than actual laws).

What was Xi trying to accomplish, and why should it matter to us in the West?

Xi believes that Western ideals, such as human rights, freedom of the press, and independence of the judiciary, represent a challenge to CCP ideology and undermine the authority of the CCP.

Furthermore, he believes that these ideals contributed significantly to the demise of the Soviet Union.

And why should we care? Because one of the most important goals of the CCP is to make the world safe for autocracy. That does not mean that the CCP wants to rule the entire world. But it does mean that it would like its ideology to be dominant around the globe.

I do not think that most Americans would want to live in a world in which the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party was dominant.