Late last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) led his subordinates on a “northern inspection tour” to northeastern China to encourage agricultural production and address the food import crisis caused by the country’s trade war with the US.
Chinese state-owned media have reported that Xi visited Chagan Lake in Songyuan, Jilin Province, to learn more about ecological conservation in the area.
In Mongolian, Chagan Lake is called White Lake or Holiness and Purity Lake. It is the largest freshwater lake on China’s northeastern plains, rich in marine life and a main habitat for migratory birds.
Chinese Central Television’s report that day showed the catches of the local fishers, and all the fish were big and fat.
Standing on the shore was Xi, beaming with joy and giving “important instructions” to the fishers who were busy catching fish, repeating two auspicious idioms that play on the Chinese homophones for “surplus” or “abundance” (餘) and “fish” (魚) — “every year brings a surplus” (年年有餘), and “an abundance of good fortune” (吉慶有餘) — to show the depth of his erudition.
However, a Twitter user exposed the whole thing as a sham, saying that the footage was fake and that when the user “visited Chagan Lake the day before, the whole city of Songyuan was sealed off, police had been on guard for several days, fish had been bought and released in the lake, and rehearsals had been going on for days.”
The jumping fish that Xi saw came from other lakes. It takes quite the man and quite the country to rule even fish within the system of “democratic centralism.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has never left the excesses and deceptions of the Mao Zedong (毛澤東) era behind. Xi, who grew up during the time, of course understands that the era’s main characteristic was deceiving one’s superiors and concealing things from one’s subordinates.
Today, he is happy to be deceived, as he sees himself as another Mao and derives pleasure from being deceived. He is well aware that local officials deceive him because they are afraid of him, and that is proof that he is number one and that what he says goes.
In stark contrast to this, US President Donald Trump is met with protesters holding up signs when he visits a disaster area and there would be no local officials or residents creating a festive atmosphere to please him. With the complete lack of face given to Trump, how could he even be compared to Xi?
Toward the end of the 1950s, officials all over China reported grain yields of more than 10,000 catties (6,000kg) per mu (about 667m2) to please Mao.
In August 1957, when Mao was visiting Xushui County in Hebei Province on an inspection tour, he saw what were known as “high-yield fields” and he told then-CCP secretary of the province Xie Xuegong (解學恭): “In the past few thousand years, the yield was no more than 100 or 200 catties per mu, but all of a sudden it is up to thousands, and even 10,000 catties.”
With obvious pride, he asked Xie: “How can you even eat that much? What do you do with the surplus?”
The local officials answered: “We will have to think about how to eat grain.”
Mao then said: “Five meals a day is enough. If the yield is too high, then plant less from now on. You can work for half a day, and in the other half you can promote culture, study science, entertain yourselves, and set up universities and high schools.”
When Mao visited the province again in October the same year, Wang Renzhong (王任重), first secretary of the Hubei Communist Party Committee, took him to a high-yield rice paddy that would yield 10,000 catties per mu. The rice was so dense that it would not bend even if you stood on it.
Afterward, Li Zhisui (李志綏), Mao’s private doctor, found that rice from paddies covering a dozen mu had been replanted into that single-mu paddy only for Mao to see.
Xi’s fish is no different from Mao’s rice. There might be more than a half-century between the two events, and China is littered with high rises and long lines of private cars, but the innate totalitarian character of the CCP remains unchanged.
Yu Jie is an exiled Chinese dissident and writer.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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