 |
| Pix credit here (1964, "We Want to Become Red Revolutionary Successors) |
The latest edition of Red Flag Manuscript is now online: 《红旗文稿》2026年第16期 Highlights include op-eds on upholding the Party's innovative theories; understand investment work under the new circumstances;understanding of the three major relationships in comprehensively governing China according to the rule of law; strengthening sports development under the 15th Five-Year Plan; and seeking practical results by upholding and adhering to the rule of law. The able of content (Chinese language) follows below.
I am interested in the initial article Yang Mingwei, Persisting in Using the Party's Innovative Theory to Forge Unity of Mind and Soul [坚持用党的创新理论凝心铸魂 /杨明伟] (Red Flag Manuscript (红旗文稿) 2026/16). The original Chinese and an English translation of the essay follow below.
Yang Mingwei's essay represents a paradigmatic specimen of what I have elsewhere described as the CCP's project of constitutionalizing Marxist-Leninist ideology through inner-Party normative systems rather than through Western-style constitutional texts. The article articulates—with considerable doctrinal precision—the architecture of the Party's ideological discipline regime as it has evolved under Xi Jinping. But to read it only as doctrine is to miss what it actually does: this is Marxism-Leninism in motion, and it must be understood semiotically—through the traces and structures its movement inscribes—and phenomenologically, as the textual residue of a forward-progressing process of managed ideological guidance, leadership, and control.
First, the essay presents ideological unity as a structural prerequisite of governance legitimacy by reaching backward to the foundational template of Yan'an Rectification (延安整风). The metaphor of the "master switch" (总开关) is not new doctrine; it is the re-articulation of the rectification logic that Mao established in 1942—the proposition that ideological consolidation is the precondition for organizational coherence and revolutionary effectiveness. Yang's innovation is to frame this inheritance as simultaneously the basis for self-revolution (自我革命) looking forward and social revolution (社会革命) as its external expression. The relationship between self-revolution and social revolution—the Party purifying itself in order to transform society—is the animating dialectic of the entire essay, though it operates more as structural grammar than as explicit argument.
Second, Yang develops the relationship between theoretical correctness and political reliability by drawing on a distinctly Chinese genealogy of praxis (实践). The concept of the unity of knowledge and action (知行合一)—originating in Wang Yangming's Neo-Confucian philosophy, appropriated by Sun Yat-sen as a principle of revolutionary governance, and subsequently absorbed into Mao's "On Practice" as the Sinified expression of Marxist praxis—is not ancillary to Yang's argument but constitutive of it. This is the crucial point: what Yang describes is not merely Marxist-Leninist insistence on the unity of theory and practice in its Western articulation, but a specifically Chinese conceptual architecture in which 知行合一 operates simultaneously as Confucian ethical imperative, Sun Yat-sen's republican-revolutionary methodology, and Mao's epistemological foundation—all overlaid and integrated within the New Era's Sinicized Marxism-Leninism. The essay elevates this layered genealogy into a causal chain: theoretical clarity (知) produces political firmness, which produces correct action (行), which feeds back into theoretical refinement—a self-reinforcing loop that Yang presents as the distinctive operational logic of the CCP.
Third, the essay addresses what it terms "competency panic" (本领恐慌)—the Party's institutional awareness that ideological conviction without practical governing capability produces revolutionary stagnation. Here again, the concept of praxis in its Chinese articulation is determinative. The problem Yang identifies is not the routinization of charisma in the Weberian sense, but the specifically Marxist-Leninist (and specifically Chinese) danger that theory detached from practice becomes scholasticism—what Mao called 本本主义 (book worship)—while practice detached from theory becomes empiricism (经验主义). The resolution Yang proposes is not balance but coordination: the managed integration of theoretical armament and practical capability through continuous cycles of study, application, and rectification. This is the New Era expression of the mass line methodology: from the masses, to the masses, refined through theory.
The essay's semiotic structure is itself significant. Read in the original Chinese, it operates through a dense network of four-character formulations (凝心铸魂, 思想过硬, 政治坚定, 本领高强) that function less as propositions than as compressed semiotic markers—nodes in a system of cross-referencing Party discourse that accumulates meaning through repetition and institutional context rather than through logical exposition. This is Leninist phenomenology rendered as textual practice: meaning is not argued but performed through the accretion of doctrinal reference, creating what amounts to an ideological blockchain—each formulation validated by its linkage to prior authoritative utterances, forming an immutable chain of legitimated discourse whose authority derives from its unbroken sequential integrity rather than from independent verification of any single node.
Yang Mingwei's essay demands engagement on its own terms—not as propaganda to be dismissed, but as constitutional theory to be interrogated, and more fundamentally as a performative text whose meaning inheres as much in its semiotic operations as in its propositional content. Reading it through the theoretical frameworks I have developed in my work on Chinese Communist Party constitutionalism and the Party's distinctive normative order, several critical observations emerge—but they must begin from within the conceptual universe the essay itself inhabits.
The essay's foundational gesture is backward—to Yan'an—and this backward reach is simultaneously its claim to revolutionary futurity. In my work on Party constitutionalism ( Party, People, Government and State: On Constitutional Values and the Legitimacy of the Chinese State-Party Rule of Law System, 2012; The Constitutional Foundations of the CCP as a Party-State, 2014), I have argued that the CCP operates as a constitutional order unto itself, with its own normative hierarchy, enforcement mechanisms, and legitimacy claims. Yang's essay confirms this analysis but also deepens it: the Yan'an Rectification is presented not as a historical episode but as a permanent template—the structural grammar of self-revolution (自我革命) that must be continuously re-enacted. This is the distinctive temporality of New Era Leninism: the past is not superseded but re-activated as the mechanism of forward motion. Mao's 1942 rectification logic is the blockchain's genesis block; each subsequent campaign of ideological consolidation—including the present essay's doctrinal program—constitutes a new block validated by its linkage to this origin. The Party's innovative theory is presented not merely as intellectual content but as constitutional supreme law: the meta-norm from which all other Party norms derive validity. The "master switch" is the mechanism by which this chain maintains its integrity.
What makes this architecturally significant is the relationship between self-revolution and social revolution that Yang's essay inscribes as axiomatic. The Party purifies itself ideologically (self-revolution) in order to transform society (social revolution); but social revolution simultaneously generates the conditions requiring further self-revolution. This dialectic—which has deep roots in Sun Yat-sen's conception of the revolutionary party as both educator and transformer of society, and which Mao adapted through the mass line—is the engine that prevents the system from ossifying into mere orthodoxy. Yang presents it as perpetual motion: the Party's innovative theory evolves precisely because it must continuously resolve the contradictions generated by its own practical application. Self-revolution is the internal combustion; social revolution is the forward motion; and 凝心铸魂 (forging unity of mind and soul) is the mechanism that converts the energy of one into the directed force of the other.
The essay's treatment of praxis reveals its deepest conceptual ambition—and its most significant intellectual contribution. The concept of "competency panic" (本领恐慌) is not merely an institutional anxiety about bureaucratic capacity. It is the New Era articulation of a problem that has occupied Chinese revolutionary thought since the late imperial crisis: how to unify knowledge and action (知行合一) in conditions of revolutionary transformation. Wang Yangming's original formulation—that true knowledge is inseparable from action—was appropriated by Sun Yat-sen (who reversed it: 知难行易, knowledge is difficult but action is easy) and subsequently by Mao, who in "On Practice" (1937) synthesized both into a Marxist epistemology grounded in revolutionary praxis. Yang Mingwei's essay inherits all three layers simultaneously: the Confucian ethical imperative, Sun's revolutionary methodology, and Mao's dialectical epistemology—overlaid with the specifically Leninist demand that theory must guide and be validated by practice.
This layered genealogy of praxis is what distinguishes Yang's essay from a merely Leninist text. The "competency panic" he describes is not the gap between ideology and technocratic skill (as a Western reading might suppose), but the specifically Chinese danger of 本本主义 (book worship)—theory that has lost its connection to transformative practice—and its complement, 经验主义 (empiricism)—practice that has lost its theoretical orientation. The resolution Yang proposes is not balance or separation but coordination: the hallmark of New Era Leninism. This is the crucial analytical point that my earlier work on dual-track governance ( Chinese Characteristics in Context: Governance Coherence and Norm Integrity in the Chinese Constitutional Order, 2019) must now accommodate. The New Era does not operate through the separation of governance apparatus from governance theory—permitting pragmatic heterodoxy beneath ideological orthodoxy—but through their progressive coordination. Yang's essay articulates a system in which theory and practice are brought into ever-closer alignment not by collapsing one into the other but by establishing continuous feedback loops: study—application—rectification—refined study. The managed coordination of these cycles is what Yang means by 凝心铸魂.
The phenomenological dimension of the essay is perhaps its most innovative element, and the one most easily missed by readers trained in Western analytical traditions. Yang's text does not merely describe Marxism-Leninism; it performs Marxism-Leninism in motion. The essay's structure—its progressive movement from ideological foundation (Part I: the master switch) through political activation (Part II: firmness and struggle) to practical capability (Part III: competency)—replicates the very process it describes: the forward-progressing, managed phenomenological guidance that constitutes Leninist leadership. The reader is not positioned as an observer of a static doctrine but as a participant being led through a sequence of ideological consolidation. This is the Leninist concept of 引导 (guidance) rendered as textual architecture.
Read semiotically, the essay's dense network of four-character formulations (凝心铸魂, 思想过硬, 政治坚定, 本领高强, 知行合一) operates as something more than rhetorical ornamentation. Each formulation is a compressed semiotic node that derives its meaning not from internal propositional logic but from its position within a chain of prior authoritative utterances—Xi's speeches, Mao's writings, the historical resolutions. The meaning of any single node is validated by its linkage to preceding nodes; the system accumulates authority through sequential integrity rather than through independent verification. This is, in effect, phenomenology transformed into blockchain with an object: each doctrinal formulation is a timestamped, validated block whose legitimacy depends on the unbroken chain connecting it to the genesis block (Yan'an), and whose object—unlike a purely self-referential chain—is the transformation of material reality through revolutionary practice. The "object" is what prevents the chain from becoming merely circular or self-validating: it is anchored to the demand for demonstrated practical results (实践效果), which is why "competency panic" is not an afterthought but the system's built-in self-correction mechanism.
The critical question this raises for constitutional theory is not whether the system can accommodate dissent, but whether its self-correction mechanism is adequate to its own claims. Yang's framework provides for correction through practice—theory is tested against results, and refined accordingly. But who determines what constitutes a successful result? The same center that articulates the theory. The feedback loop Yang describes is closed: theory generates practice, practice validates theory, and the authoritative interpretation of both resides in the same institutional locus. The self-revolution dialectic is meant to prevent this closure from producing stagnation—by continuously generating new contradictions that demand new theoretical responses—but whether this internal dynamism can substitute for the external challenge that pluralism provides remains the fundamental open question. This is not, however, the Western liberal's objection that the system "lacks checks and balances." It is the more precise question of whether a system that has transformed phenomenology into blockchain can accommodate a hard fork—a fundamental disagreement about the validity of the chain itself—without system collapse. Yang's essay, characteristically, does not address this question. The very concept of 凝心铸魂 (forging unity of mind and soul) presupposes that unity is the telos and fragmentation is pathology. Whether this presupposition is the system's greatest strength or its ultimate vulnerability depends on whether the self-revolution mechanism can generate genuine theoretical innovation or merely produce variations on an increasingly rigid theme. The answer, I suspect, lies not in Yang's text but in the practical outcomes of the system he describes—which is, after all, precisely what a theory of praxis would demand.
 |
| Pix credit here (1995, Zhang side) |
