China’s new plan to fill the God-shaped hole
by N S Lyons, UnHerd:
The CCP is building ‘civilisation centers’ to create a ‘collective soul’.
New structures have been seen sprouting up in towns and cities across China. But these aren’t the usual overproduced apartment blocks. They are “New Era Civilization Practice Centers,” hubs from which a vast army of volunteers will host movie nights and vocational education classes, sort trash, visit the elderly, and generally inculcate more “civilized behavior” in Chinese citizens. Their stated mission: to “solve problems for the masses, so that every family can feel the warmth of the Party and the government.”
As detailed in a new report by the website ChinaFile, thousands of these centres have appeared and started providing social services since they first began being trialled in 2018.
Conceived by the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Guidance Commission on Building Spiritual Civilization — devoted to fostering “ideological, moral, and cultural” progress in the population — the centres represent an attempt to develop an alternative approach to social control. If they can only help nudge the masses toward a new era of self-monitoring and self-regulation, the thinking goes, traditional heavy-handed “stability maintenance” measures may someday no longer be required at all.
So the Party is not slacking on implementation. At least $110 million is estimated to have already been spent on pilot projects by the centres since August 2018. And government directives propose each county centre enlist 10-13% of the local population as “volunteers” to carry out their mission — a figure suggesting at least 140 million such conscripts if the programme were to be expanded to encompass the whole of China.
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