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. It enjoyed sudden, renewed fame after 2017, when Mr Xi wrote to one of the oldest troupes and urged it to “carry forward the fine tradition of the Ulan Muqir, put down roots and serve the herders”. Quickly, officials scrambled to create new troupes, eventually dispatching 3,500 performers in 75 Ulan Muqir groups to all corners of Inner Mongolia. More than a mere public service, these “grassroots cultural teams” represent “heart, sincerity and warmth”, according to the People’s Daily, the party’s official mouthpiece. Today Ulan Muqir troupes perform in town squares and retirement homes, army bases, schools and mines. Most outdoor shows are packed into the short Mongolian summer, before winter temperatures plunge to -40°C. In Yakeshi, a forestry town, a battered Jiefang (Liberation) lorry was being used as a mobile theatre. Tough enough to reach remote encampments of gers (as Mongolians call the round tents some foreigners call yurts), the Ulan Muqir’s lorry has sides that unfold to make a canopy and stage.
As official media tell it, Ulan Muqir troupes are rugged propaganda workers bringing cheer to the rural poor, and as such capture the essence of Mr Xi’s “New Era”. Today’s party presents itself as a selfless, mission-driven organisation, inspired by the hardships and dangers that its members endured in the pioneering early years of the People’s Republic. Ambitious young officials are encouraged to “serve the people” by spending time in poverty-stricken rural areas.
The ideological content of Ulan Muqir shows is all of a piece with Mr Xi’s New Era. Under him, the limited autonomy once granted to regions with large ethnic populations, including Inner Mongolia (home to 4.2m ethnic Mongolians), has been replaced with coercive assimilation. Ulan Muqir performers increasingly sing in Mandarin Chinese, not Mongolian. Lyrics are strictly policed by party ideologues and reflect official slogans, for instance about ethnic unity or the dangers of non-approved religious sects.
Revealingly, it is unclear that official praise for Ulan Muqir troupes is matched by actual grassroots popularity. Your columnist caught up with a troupe at a half-empty mountain resort outside Yakeshi. Dancers capered round the stage in Mongolian silk robes, pretending to ride horses like grasslands nomads. For all their energy, it was a distinctly generic performance. Few of the dancers were ethnic Mongolians, and Yakeshi’s local minorities were by tradition forest dwellers, not herders. The crowd of mostly Han Chinese tourists was small and increasingly skittish.
Impoverished families from the area are sometimes treated to Ulan Muqir shows, a local resident explained. In fact, the local went on, the poor “don’t want this sort of entertainment” and would rather have free rice, flour and cooking oil.
Back in Yakeshi a retired lumberjack, encountered playing music in a park, praised the “genuine” Ulan Muqir of his youth for entertaining “common people” in hard-to-reach pastoral areas. In contrast, today’s troupes play for “mayors and officials”, he growled, adding: “Serve the people? Fuck that.”
Sometimes, low-key is best
Not all grassroots party work is unpopular. This July an open-air stage in Yakeshi hosted several concerts to mark the party’s 103rd anniversary. A children’s choir rehearsed a song about winter sports and a mostly Han Chinese crowd of pensioners prepared to dance in red Mongolian robes. A middle-aged spectator asserted cheerily that the pensioners had gathered “by themselves” to organise the dance. In reality this was a party event, as confirmed by an official from a local neighbourhood committee. But the ideological content was hard to detect and the prevailing atmosphere was festive, not bossy.
Amnesia about the party’s history in Inner Mongolia also helps. In 1957, when the first Ulan Muqir troupe was formed, many ethnic Mongolians were angry about the recent collectivisation of their herds. In the late 1960s, as the Cultural Revolution raged, Maoist zealots and Red Guards accused ethnic Mongolians of separatism and of spying for the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of Mongolians were killed, some of them burned to death. In Mr Xi’s China, such grim history is outlawed. The party likes to boast about its deep historical roots, not have them examined.
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