How the CCP took its ‘positive energy’ ideology from a British self-help book
Early this month in Changzhou, China, a ten-year-old girl jumped to her death from a school window, after her writing teacher accused her of lacking ‘positive energy’. Her death has sparked a debate in China about the widespread use of this term, especially as a weapon of ideological control by the state.
As this excellent essay by Chen and Wang explores, the Chinese Communist Party has used the term ‘positive energy’ more and more over the last few years:
“positive energy” appears frequently in official speeches, especially concerning public opinion management. As indexed by an official database, its mentions in major state media reached 5,318 in 2017 and 4,427 in 2018.’
Number of mentions of ‘positive energy’ in Chinese state media
The term first caught on as a hashtag in the London Olympics in 2012, when ten unknown citizen heroes took part in the torch relay. Many influential Weibo [Chinese Twitter] users cheered the torch relay with the hashtags “light up positive energy and explode your microcosm” (#点燃正能量，引爆小宇宙#, #DianranZhengNengliangYinbaoXiaoYuzhou) and “light up positive energy and good luck cannot be stopped” (#点燃正能量，运气挡不住#, #DianranZhengNengliaingYunqiDangbuzhu).
Then, in August 2012, a self-help book by British psychologist Richard Wiseman called Rip It Up became a Chinese best-seller. The English version never mentioned ‘positive energy’ but the Chinese publisher (Hunan Literature and Art Press) decided
to take advantage of the trending positive energy fervour to boost the Chinese version’s popularity. The editing team retitled the book Positive Energy, and added concluding remarks at the end of many paragraphs highlighting the coined keyword “positive energy.” ..The main idea of the book, which would soon spread across public discourses, is that make-beliefs can become self-fulfilling prophecies: you are happy when you act as if you are happy. “People never smile because they are happy, but rather always feel happy because they are smiling.”
Positive Energy was then seized as an ideological concept by the president, Xi Jinping. In 2012, President Xi called on Sino-US relations to “accumulate positive energy” during a meeting with former US president Jimmy Carter.
Positive energy seems to have been made an official ideological campaign by Lu Wei, former head of the Cyberspace Administration Office.
On 30 October 2013, Lu Wei set the tone of the positive energy discourse for years to come by making a keynote address at the annual Forum of Chinese Cyber-Media. He urged that “to build the China Dream, we need to inspire positive energy, pass on positive energy, gather positive energy, and keep enhancing the common ideological ground of the Party and the people.” The purpose of “positive energy” is to “dissolve the hostility (戾气 liqi) of the society.”
Lu Wei, who seems to have masterminded the ‘positive energy’ campaign, photoed meeting the heads of Apple and Facebook in 2014. He’s since been arrested and jailed by the CCP
Lu also outlined the gospel of positive energy in a speech in London in September 2013, called “Liberty and Order In Cyberspace.” Lu declared that the internet should be managed by the state in order to protect order and promote positive energy:
“Positive energy is meant to give people confidence and hope, encourage people to love their country, society and life, as well as to pursue nice things. Everything we do is ultimately for the sake of spreading positive energy. Positive energy knows no boundaries. If everyone were to spread positive energy on the Internet, the world would be a much better place.’
Managing public emotions
The ‘positive energy’ campaign is the CCP’s response to a challenge for governments around the world. How to manage and police public emotions in the anarchic digital age? We can see from the West’s present difficulties how hard this is, how quickly negative emotions like rage and shaming can spread online, and how easy it is for hostile foreign powers to harm western democracies by stirring the shit online.
Chinese and Russian state-controlled Twitter and Facebook accounts have been running riot before and during the pandemic, spreading conspiracy theories and fostering polarization so that western citizens can’t even agree whether to wear a mask or not. Russian trolls have stoked both pro and anti BLM attitudes online — they don’t mind, as long as western societies are shouting at each other.
The CCP has long taken a much more proactive approach to public emotion management than western powers. The previous regimes of Jiang Zemin and Wen Jiabao, for example, focused on celebrating suffering and sacrifice. These attempts at managing the emotions of 1.6 billion people are not always successful. A previous campaign — ‘harmonious society’ — was Hu Jintao’s attempt to weaponize Confucian concepts to promote social stability.
Despite heavy investment [write Weng and Chang], the outcome of “harmony” turned out inharmonious. Chinese netizens subverted the discourse with the famous homonymic joke that transformed “harmony” (和谐, hexie) into “river crabs” (河蟹, hexie). This parody represented a popular political satire culture called egao (恶搞), which caused the propaganda organs much trouble.
Positive energy seems to be working better:
Following the guideline of positivity, the state has launched many projects and campaigns to develop a culture of “positive energy.” Typical propaganda slogans include “China is awesome” (中国很赞, Zhongguo henzan), “the new era is awesome” (赞赞新时代, zanzan xinshidai), and so on. During the NPC, the Weibo account of People’s Daily uploaded a finger tutting music video themed “China is awesome” (中国很赞, Zhongguo henzan), and joyfully invited pop stars and ordinary netizens to perform the “finger tutting challenge” and share the video on Weibo. Netizens responded enthusiastically, especially fans who appeared more than happy to see their idols on the video.
[Below, I don’t know if these vids are part of the state’s ‘finger tutting challenge’, they may be just citizens’ homegrown finger tutting!]
The flipside of the CCP’s promotion of ‘positive energy’ is the shaming of ‘negative energy’:
there is an antagonistic dichotomy between positive energy and what is known by the Chinese public as “negative energy” (负能量, fu nengliang). Like its counterpart, “negative energy” also works as a floating signifier, which can include anything the state dislikes, especially those that cannot be regulated by clear-cut legislation. The following case exemplifies how this dichotomy regulates public discourses. In January 2018, the SAPPRFT announced that TV programmes and online media should not feature people “who have tattoos, who are related with hip-hop culture, sub-cultures (non-mainstream cultures), and the sang culture” (culture of despondency, Zhou, 2018). “Sub-cultures” (亚文化, ya wenhua) have commonly been perceived as rebellious against the mainstream, tattoos and hip-hop being two representative examples of them.
Chen and Wang note that, unlike the times of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, ‘positive energy does not depict a utopian future that requires sacrifice, but tells people that they are living in a utopia, as long as they conform to the “positive” norm.’
China’s relations with the West have cooled significantly in the last two months, over concerns the CCP misled the WHO and the world in the first weeks of the pandemic, over its aggressive policing of Hong Kong activists and the Muslims of Uighur Province, and over concerns about the West depending on Huaweii for 5G internet.
But Chinese ambassador to the UK Liu Xiaming has been radiating positive energy. In a speech to the EU, he called for positive energy. In a speech to the UK, he noted China’s positive energy. And when a British interviewer showed him a video of Uighurs in Xinjang, shaven-headed and forced to kneel before being put on a train to a concentration camp, he replied: ‘Xinjang is the most beautiful province in China.’ Such positive energy!
What are we to conclude from this? One possible conclusion is that the West is engaged in an asymmetric info war and meme war with Russia and China. These countries have medias that are carefully controlled by the state. At the same time, they have invested significant amounts in manipulating western media, through TV stations like Russia Today, but even more easily and cheaply, through Twitter and Facebook troll farms (or ‘web brigades’). Their campaigns to stoke confusion and polarization have been remarkably successful. How can western societies protect themselves, while retaining free speech and not becoming ‘positive energy’ dystopias?