China’s material successes, as evidenced in the gleaming skylines of some of its cities, its huge foreign currency holdings, and improved figures on caloric intake for many of its people, suggests a government whose top priority is economic growth. And the increasing diversity in Chinese society, certainly compared with 30 years ago, suggests a regime that seeks liberalization.

Both of these are dangerous misconceptions. The top priority of the CCP remains today what it always has been: maintaining absolute political power. No other goal—be it economic, military, diplomatic, or nationalistic—trumps this aim. Indeed, the recent economic downturn is of great concern to the CCP precisely because it threatens the party’s hold on power.

During the rule of Mao Zedong, an important tool in inducing popular obedience to the party was “thoughtwork” (sixiang gongzuo). This ideological enforcement effort was pursued openly, explicitly, and without apology. Today thoughtwork remains extremely important to the maintenance of CCP power, but is done in subtler ways. It is covert—accomplished, for example, through confidential telephone calls to newspaper editors, rather than in banner newspaper headlines. And it is targeted: whereas the Mao-era campaign aimed to transform all of society and even human nature, thoughtwork today focuses on political issues that are vital to CCP rule, and lets the rest go. But the effects remain far-reaching.

Censorship, as normally understood, involves restraints. A government or other authority intervenes to prevent the expression of proscribed views. Viewed by this standard, the CCP’s thoughtwork is certainly censorship, but that is only half of its role. The other half entails the active cultivation of views that the government favors. This assertive side of thoughtwork, which has been part of the CCP system from the outset, has been especially important in recent years. Working in tandem, the push and pull components have a powerful influence on public opinion.

The CCP has always relied less on mechanical or administrative censorship (expunging offensive words or pulling books off shelves) than on the use of fear to induce self-censorship. In the Mao years and their immediate wake, self-censorship was stoked by the announcement of broad and vague prohibitions. Directives like “Criticize Confucius” or “Annihilate Bourgeois Liberalism” might leave people wondering what exactly was meant, but it was abundantly clear that violations would come a hefty price. People had to look inside themselves, and at others around them, to guess at what the government might not like. A safety-in-numbers mentality kept individuals from asserting themselves. Anyone who dared to venture outside the safe area was said to “break into forbidden zones.” Such people were sometimes admired, and sometimes regarded as foolhardy.

The same fear-induced self-censorship continues today, except that the relationship between safe and forbidden areas has in a sense been reversed. In Mao’s day, expression had to stay within certain bounds, while everything outside was forbidden. Today, one can explore anything beyond certain forbidden topics: the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, the Falungong movement, the China Democratic Party, Taiwan independence, Tibetan or Uyghur autonomy, the Great Leap famine, corruption among top leaders (plenty is said in private on this topic, but not in public), and certain other “incorrect” views on national or international affairs. The list may now include perceptions of government responsibility for the economic slump. Everyone is aware that violation of the forbidden zones, or any other action that touches the vital interests of the regime, remains extremely dangerous. But the prohibited areas are small enough—especially compared with the large open areas of fashion, sports, entertainment, travel, commerce, and the like—that most people sidestep them easily and come to accept their status. Fear is much less constant and palpable than during the Mao years, and the surface of society seems unaffected.

This appearance of ordinariness disguises a “soft” yet ubiquitous police state. It is not a unitary apparatus of control but a looser network in which central authorities announce policy goals and leave it to local party officials and their hired thugs to pursue those goals as they see fit. There is, accordingly, considerable variation from place to place in the degree and techniques of coercion. Moreover, many people, if they properly self-censor, do not encounter the police state at all. Individuals who do cross a leader or step into a forbidden zone initially receive verbal correction. If that fails, they often face harassment by plainclothes police, including telephone and e-mail surveillance. The next step is job loss and blacklisting, followed if necessary by labor camp, prison, torture, or execution. Not many people slide all the way to the bottom of this slope, but everyone knows where the bottom is. This explains not only why self-censorship works but also why the formation of a true civil society has been impossible under the CCP. There are countless nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in China, but almost without exception they are controlled or subject to control by the CCP. Any other group whose membership grows to 10 or 20 people is repressed.

The closest thing to a bright spot in this picture is the internet, the first medium in the history of CCP thoughtwork that has proven—so far, at least—impossible to tame. Though there has been no lack of trying. The CCP has established a bureaucracy of eavesdropping internet police that has been estimated in size at 30,000 officers or more. Using technology purchased in developed countries, it has set up filters to block commentary on sensitive topics and even to expunge dangerous terms. It has banned the use of pseudonyms in cyberspace and instituted collective-responsibility mechanisms whereby a whole website can be closed, and its operators held responsible, if errant commentary appears on its pages. The regime has also set up electronic mailboxes to which any citizen can secretly report the wayward words of another. It employs agents-provocateurs, and uses hackers to plant viruses. Despite all this repression, China’s netizens continue to use pseudonyms in huge numbers; some mention banned topics by substituting synonyms; others expose real-life scandals by pretending it is fiction. The cat-and-mouse game is as fluid and interminable as the internet itself. Foreign media services—especially Radio Free Asia, Voice of America, and the British Broadcasting Corporation—have been important not only for their traditional broadcasts but for the uncensored news they provide via the internet.

The CCP’s Department of Propaganda (recently renamed the Department of Publicity) regularly issues secret guidelines to journalists and editors on what news and ideas should be “stressed.” In the early 1990s, when Deng Xiaoping was trying to reassure Hong Kong residents about the impending takeover by Beijing, he pledged that “Hong Kongers will rule Hong Kong” under a formula of “one country, two systems.” Later, amid concerns that the phrase “Hong Kongers rule Hong Kong” might open the door to too much democracy, a new guideline instructed journalists to downplay that slogan. The “one country, two systems” phrase should be stressed, the guideline said, with emphasis on the “one country” portion. In recent years, much of the government’s guidance of opinion has been aimed at stimulating patriotism and identifying it with the CCP. Textbooks stress China’s history of humiliation by the West, while the news media claim that the West wants to “keep China down” and that its talk of human rights is only a tool for this purpose. The audience is told that Japan refuses to acknowledge its war crimes in China, and warned that the Dalai Lama wants to “split the motherland,” as do certain people in Taiwan and Xinjiang. This kind of manipulation has been especially effective among young urban elites, a portion of whom are known as fenqing, or angry youth. The impassioned and chauvinist expressions of fenqing on the internet are one of the more worrisome omens of China’s possible future. Many other voices are less extreme but still show clear signs of guidance by CCP thoughtwork.

An important element in this guidance is the selective erasure of history. The disasters of late Maoism—the Great Leap famine and the Cultural Revolution—left a powerful legacy that continues to influence Chinese values and public ethics. (Much of this influence comes in the form of recoil, from extreme asceticism and public idealism to extreme materialism and public cynicism, for example.) Yet today it remains difficult or impossible to discuss the Mao era forthrightly in any public context. In the spectacular review of Chinese history that formed part of the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the world’s gaze was led across the ancient dynasties to the triumph of the Communist revolution in 1949, only to skip abruptly to “reform and opening” in the late 1970s. The true history of the Mao era—like the histories of Tibet, Taiwan, World War II, and the CCP itself—is routinely airbrushed from textbooks and other media, replaced only by names, dates, and manipulative slogans. Young Chinese today may be very well educated in mathematics, engineering, or foreign languages and yet live with badly warped understandings of their own country’s past. Even worse, they could remain entirely unaware of how they have been cheated.

Thoughtwork is performed through language, and the language it employs would be recognizable to George Orwell. Political pressure on an individual is called help; the violation of rights is described as the protection of rights; the state controls workers through what are nominally labor unions; suppressing the Uyghur population is called counterterrorism; authoritarianism is dubbed democracy; real democracy movements are denounced as counterrevolutionary rebellions; and a system of servile courts is hailed as the rule of law. The language of CCP thoughtwork adheres to the concept of the Big Lie, a gross falsehood that is repeated without challenge until it is accepted as truth—or something that, for political purposes, is just as solid as truth. Political power in China depends upon maintaining a certain moral pose even if everyone involved knows on some level that the pose is hypocritical.

CCP thoughtwork has been highly successful in the past few years. The desire of the Chinese people to express national pride is deep and has been pent up for about two centuries. The growth of the economy, the rise of China’s international stature, the glory of Olympic medals, and other shining new avenues for the release of patriotic sentiment have been opened, and the CCP has managed to take credit for many of them. It claims, for example, to have “lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty.” Ordinary Chinese know what actually happened. They remember that the CCP, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, lifted its foot off their necks with respect to economic matters, while keeping the pressure on when it came to political matters. Finally offered freedom in at least one sphere of their lives, ordinary people channeled an immense surge of hard work into the economy and lifted themselves by the hundreds of millions out of poverty. At the same time, they hoisted many CCP leaders into a stratosphere of opulent wealth. But in CCP thoughtwork this story reads the other way around: the party created everything, achieved everything, stands for everything. Foreigners, where possible, can be blamed for domestic ills, as the current layoffs in China are attributed to the misdeeds of U.S. bankers.

Many Chinese continue to complain about pressing problems like corruption, land grabs, worker exploitation, the wealth gap, disappearing pensions, ad hoc taxes, air and water pollution, and thuggish repression. The closed political system, lacking the independent watchdogs and corrective mechanisms of a democracy, is inherently ill-equipped to deal with the substance of such complaints, but CCP thoughtwork counters them in two ways. One is to encourage the belief that the central leadership remains pure and all of the problems are local deviations. A large number of people cling to this hopeful view. The other device is simple distraction. Demands for clean air are answered with 52 Olympic gold medals, and displaced homeowners are dazzled with a space program.

The CCP sometimes fabricates or exaggerates national-level fears precisely for the purpose of distracting attention. Most Chinese people, left to themselves, care much more about their own daily lives than about distant places like Taiwan or Tibet. They wake up in the morning worried more about a corrupt local official than about the Dalai Lama. But when CCP propaganda tells them repeatedly that the wolf-hearted Dalai Lama is splitting the motherland, they tend to embrace the view that it is bad to split the motherland and that the CCP is the standard-bearer in opposing this splitting. The stimulation of a fear that did not previously exist has less to do with actual danger than with the CCP’s need to strengthen its popular image and divert attention from popular complaints. In recent years the CCP has used incidents involving Japan, Tibet, Taiwan, and the United States for this purpose. In the case of Tibet there is evidence that the triggering incidents themselves have been manufactured for the cause.

Much is at stake for China, and indeed for the world, in the degree to which the push and pull of CCP thoughtwork continues to succeed. Further gains could lead to aggressive chauvinism in a future population whose understanding of its place in history is both narrow and twisted. This possibility suggests parallels with Japan or Germany in the 1930s, or China in the 1960s. Still, there is good cause for hoping that this pattern will not take root. Popular awareness of legal and human rights has been growing in recent years. So have lawsuits and protests, both individual and collective. The CCP’s hypersensitivity to this trend is telling evidence of its potential. The slightest sprout of an independent labor union, church, or political discussion group gets noticed and, if possible, either crushed or infiltrated. The anniversary of the 1989 massacre was still so sensitive 19 years later that groups of plainclothes police were sent to accompany 72-year-old Professor Ding Zilin, founder of the Tiananmen Mothers group, as she went to buy vegetables. If the men who command the largest standing army in the world are so leery of an old woman, one can be sure that they do not feel secure in their power.