When party propaganda falls flat

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. China’s Communist Party has an Astroturf problem. For a decade, the party has worked to revive grassroots networks that withered during the me-first, get-rich-quick years of the 1990s and 2000s.

Under Xi Jinping, China’s leader since 2012, vast resources have been deployed to make the party a growing presence in everyday life. Alongside lessons in Xi Jinping Thought, Maoist campaigns and slogans have been resurrected, tapping into popular nostalgia for a time when China was poor but more equal. Alas for propaganda chiefs, some grassroots are more organic than others, and the Chinese public can tell the difference.

This is notably true when the party co-opts local traditions for aggressively ideological ends. This produces something at once artificial and rootless, or Astroturf, to borrow a term used by American political campaigns to denote fake grassroots activism. The cynicism provoked by some—though not all—grassroots party work was revealed when Chaguan visited Hulun Buir, a huge swathe of grasslands, birch forests and conifer plantations in the far-northern region of Inner Mongolia.

His ambition was to see an Ulan Muqir troupe perform. Founded in 1957, early Ulan Muqir teams (their name means “Red Bud" in Mongolian) would journey for weeks by horse-cart and army-grade lorry, carrying news and party ideology to far-flung herding families and border posts, in the form of simple songs and dances. This Mao-era propaganda tool was all but forgotten in the boom decades that followed China’s embrace of capitalism.