Does Xi Jinping Want to Bring Back the Cultural Revolution?

I remain pretty well amazed at how Xi Jinping so openly wants to destroy the Chinese economy in order to bring back a Maoist cult of personality based around him. It seems that you don’t have to destroy the economy to do that, but that is evidently not Xi’s bag. I grant that he probably does not want to bring China back to the 1970s, but he sure wants that cult of personality and is evidently willing to just set aside the last four decades to see it through.

Gloria Li is desperate to find a job. Graduating in June with a master’s degree in graphic design, she started looking last fall, hoping to find an entry-level position that pays about $1,000 a month in a big city in central China. The few offers she has gotten are internships that pay $200 to $300 a month, with no benefits.

Over two days in May she messaged more than 200 recruiters and sent her résumé to 32 companies — and lined up exactly two interviews. She said she would take any offer, including sales, which she was reluctant to consider previously.

“A decade or so ago, China was thriving and full of opportunities,” she said in a phone interview. “Now even if I want to strive for opportunities, I don’t know which direction I should turn to.”

China’s young people are facing record-high unemployment as the country’s recovery from the pandemic is fluttering. They’re struggling professionally and emotionally. Yet the Communist Party and the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, are telling them to stop thinking they are above doing manual work or moving to the countryside. They should learn to “eat bitterness,” Mr. Xi instructed, using a colloquial expression that means to endure hardships.

Many young Chinese aren’t buying it. They argue that they studied hard to get a college or graduate school degree only to find a shrinking job market, falling pay scale and longer work hours. Now the government is telling them to put up with hardships. But for what?

“Asking us to eat bitterness is like a deception, a way of hoping that we will unconditionally dedicate ourselves and undertake tasks that they themselves are unwilling to do,” Ms. Li said.

People like Ms. Li were lectured by their parents and teachers about the virtues of hardship. Now they are hearing it from the head of state.

“The countless instances of success in life demonstrate that in one’s youth, choosing to eat bitterness is also choosing to reap rewards,” Mr. Xi was quoted in a front-page article in the official People’s Daily on the Youth Day in May.

The article, about Mr. Xi’s expectations of the young generation, mentioned “eat bitterness” five times. He has also repeatedly urged young people to “seek self-inflicted hardships,” using his own experience of working in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

I am very far from an expert on China, so I can’t really add much except wonderment. But once Xi decided to tank the Chinese economy through holding onto to the zero-Covid policy long after it made any sense at all, I wondered what his ultimate end game was. And while there’s little reason to believe that anyone in the Chinese leadership actually cares what any young people say about their government, to simply tell an entire generation of highly educated young people who grew up in a society that seemed to have left suffering behind for American colleges for lots and Maseratis for the real elite that being sent to remote China to work on collective farms circa 1969 is their future seems….unwise and unstable?