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 The Chinese Communist Party seeks total control over the Chinese people’s lives. This means economic control, it means political control, it means physical control, and, perhaps most importantly, it means thought control.

“In Classical Chinese statecraft,” Garnaut has noted, “there are two tools for gaining and maintaining control over ‘the mountains and the rivers’: the first is wu (武), weapons and violence, and the second is wen (文), language and culture. Chinese leaders have always believed that power derives from controlling both the physical battlefield and the cultural domain.” “For Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Xi,” Garnaut writes, “words are not vehicles of reason and persuasion. They are bullets. Words are for defining, isolating, and destroying opponents.”

Propaganda plays a central political role for the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing’s efforts to dominate political thought are stated openly and pursued aggressively. In 1989, the party began organizing itself around ‘ideological security,’ a term repeated frequently since then by Chinese Communist Party leaders. More recently, in April 2013, the Party issued a policy on what they call the “current state of ideology.” It held that there should be “absolutely no opportunity or outlets for incorrect thinking or viewpoints to spread.”