Cheng Ping: An Analysis of Factors Influencing Superstition Among Certain Officials
In recent years, incidents of superstition among officials have frequently appeared in the press. For instance, the incident in Gaoyi County, Hebei, where an airplane blocked the road in front of the county Party committee compound [1]; the renaming of "Luoma Lake" in Suqian, Jiangsu; the "evil-warding sword" incident at a court in Changchun; and the "Daihu Bridge" incident in Tai’an, Shandong... These absurd superstitious events all reflect the various ugly facades of our country’s corrupt officials. They reveal that individual leading cadres have relaxed their ideological cultivation, leading to spiritual emptiness and a loss of faith. More importantly, these actions have corrupted the conduct of the Party, the government, and society, becoming a spiritual breeding ground for corruption.
Primary Causes of Superstition Among Certain Officials
The factors influencing superstition among certain officials are extremely complex, involving various fields such as politics, economics, society, and culture. Considering the logical progression of these relationships, there are three primary reasons for "superstition" among officials: first, the deep-rooted negative influence of thousands of years of traditional Chinese culture; second, a crisis of faith; and third, the fear of losing vested interests. These three points directly influence their worldviews and codes of conduct from the perspectives of historical-cultural origins, realistic background, and personal interest. Faced with historical debates, cultural inheritance, the loss of value norms, and the gain or loss of personal interests, some officials have fallen into an idealist worldview. Lacking a scientific spirit and experiencing a dislocation of cultural tradition, they have stepped into the pitfalls of superstition.
1. The Complex Evolution and Influence of Traditional Chinese Culture
Looking back at China’s thousands of years of civilizational and cultural history, essence and dross coexist, as do rationality and superstition. For example, regarding the I Ching (Book of Changes), which is hailed as the "head of all classics and the source of the Great Way," [2] few people can clearly explain the difference or connection between its profound predictions and divination, or between fortune-telling and drawing lots. Yet terms and related activities such as astrology, dream interpretation, feng shui, seeking divine lots, physiognomy, glyphomancy, choosing auspicious days, and incantations have spread widely among the people. They have settled into secular life and the human psyche, exerting a deep and far-reaching influence.
Superstition is directly related to certain cultural phenomena, which are in turn closely linked to economic development. In the process of developing a market economy, some local officials have overemphasized GDP growth while overlooking the emergence or resurgence of abnormal cultural phenomena within the process of economic development. For example, various localities use "culture to set the stage" to drive tourism and develop the economy. Guided by this thinking, they excavate cultural resources, bringing forth Bodhisattvas, immortals, and even ghosts to create a local "characteristic" culture. Under the banner of economic development, the essence and the dross of traditional Chinese culture are being rediscovered and repackaged on a large scale. While traditional culture is being carried forward, it is inevitable that the "dregs will rise to the surface," [3] leading to the inappropriate promotion of superstition to varying degrees.
2. The Catalysis of "Hidden Rules of Officialdom" and High Psychological Pressure
Superstition among certain officials is directly related to a lack of faith and is inextricably linked to the broad background of China’s social transformation. In the tide of the market economy, some individuals are tempted and corrupted by power and money, coming to believe in the "supremacy of money." They abandon the pursuit of lofty ideals and the adherence to noble morality, leading to a crisis of faith, spiritual emptiness, and eventual degeneracy.
On the other hand, due to the requirements of their duties, leading cadres and civil servants must be responsible both to their superiors and, more importantly, to the common people. Both work pressure and psychological pressure are immense. Psychologists have pointed out that they belong to a typical high-psychological-pressure group. Within this group, when facing unavoidable contradictions and pressures in their work, they sometimes find it difficult to extricate themselves. Finding no spiritual way out, some turn to believing in ghosts and gods, attempting to find a means of release for themselves.
Unhealthy tendencies in the system of selecting and appointing personnel are among the important causes of superstition among officials. In some localities and departments, the exchange of power for money suppresses uprightness, leading some officials to feel deeply that they cannot grasp their own future and destiny. "Doing a good job is not as good as boasting well," and "Rules of the game" [4] such as "If you don't pull strings or give gifts, you stay in place; if you only pull strings but don't give gifts, you get a lateral transfer; if you do both, you get promoted and held in high regard"—these "hidden rules of officialdom" [5] operate both overtly and covertly. Under the suggestion of these unhealthy tendencies, some officials develop a heavy sense of anxiety, confusion, and powerlessness, placing their hopes for promotion on ghosts and gods, following the logic of "it's better to believe they exist than not."
3. Anxiety and Fear Over the Loss of Vested Interests
There are two completely different interpretations of vested interests. First are normal, reasonable vested interests. Whether they are general civil servants or leading cadres at various levels, their duties bring them corresponding political power and economic benefits. To maintain and protect these reasonable and legal vested interests, there should originally be no need for excessive concern; however, some officials constantly feel threatened by risks. Dominated by this psychology, they hope for the protection of spirits to ensure they suffer little or no harm.
More seriously, there is an inevitable causal relationship between corruption and superstition; corruption is the root of superstition among officials. For those corrupt officials, as the constraints of Party discipline and national law—along with the intensity of the state's crackdown—continue to increase, "safety" becomes another major demand alongside the acquisition of illegal material interests. Whether one can ensure not being caught after committing corruption is a highly uncertain conjecture. Therefore, corrupt officials have a very strong motivation for superstition, hoping that those mysterious forces can be used for their own ends to help them escape punishment.
Two Countermeasures for Resolving Official Superstition
Solving the problem of superstition among officials requires both spiritual reconstruction and, more importantly, institutional reconstruction. It must be approached from two levels: strengthening ideological and ethical progress and strengthening institutional development.
1. Strengthening Ideological and Ethical Progress: Attaching Equal Importance to Constraint and Education to Build an Ideological Great Wall against Corruption and Superstition
"Constraint" means implementing strict disciplinary requirements for civil servants. For leading cadres who are Party members in particular, we must take Party discipline and national law as the basis and use clean governance and moral integrity as the norms. We must establish and improve systems for constraint and management, and increase the intensity of investigation and punishment for corruption cases; both "rats" and "tigers" [6] must be struck, with absolutely no indulgence or toleration. At the same time, leading cadres who use feudal superstitious means to manipulate Party and government work or who affect the image of the Party and government must be seriously investigated and dealt with, making more leading cadres and civil servants recognize the harms of superstition and stay away from its erosion.
"Education" means using large-scale, multi-form "main-themed" [7] propaganda to ensure that leading cadres who are Party members establish communist ideals, noble values, and outlooks on life, and develop moral qualities of integrity, self-discipline, and law-abidingness, consciously resisting the erosion of feudal superstitious thinking and "nipping problems in the bud." At the same time, we must increase the intensity of cadre education and training, enhancing the sense of responsibility and mission for ideological and political education of cadres under the new situation. We should establish long-term mechanisms and adopt various forms to unify the quantitative requirement of "large-scale training" with the qualitative requirement of "greatly improving" cadre quality. Ideological and ethical progress, education in public servant awareness, and the cultivation of noble interests should be treated as important contents of cadre training to comprehensively improve the political quality, cultural literacy, and moral cultivation of leading cadres and civil servants.
2. Deepening the Reform of the System for Selecting and Appointing Cadres: Insisting on Using the System to Manage Power, Affairs, and People, and "Confining Power within the Cage of the System," Is the Key to Eradicating Superstition Among Officials
The report of the 18th Party Congress proposed "improving the system for the constraint and supervision of the exercise of power" and "insisting on using the system to manage power, affairs, and people." This is not only the key to eradicating superstition among officials but also the fundamental guarantee for rectifying the conduct of the Party and government and consolidating the Party’s governing position. Various corruption cases and incidents of official superstition that have emerged in recent years have repeatedly proven that a lack of effective constraint on power is dangerous and is the fundamental cause of the abuse of power. Only by "confining power within the cage of the system" and exposing ugliness to the "sunlight" of mass supervision is it possible to truly form a punishment mechanism where officials "dare not" be corrupt or superstitious, a prevention mechanism where they "cannot," and a guarantee mechanism where it is "not easy" to be so.
Faced with the generation of a new ecological environment for social public opinion under new media conditions and increasingly complex and pluralistic social trends and behaviors, strengthening institutional development primarily means deepening the reform of the cadre selection and appointment system. We must use the system to select people and truly achieve openness, fairness, and justice in selection and appointment. Secondly, we must deepen the development of systems for punishing and preventing corruption, establishing and improving a legal and institutional system that combats corruption and evil. By ensuring that "he who reaches out will be caught" and "he who is caught will be punished," corrupt officials will find no need to consult ghosts and gods; they will know what they must do to ensure their own safety, and superstition will thus lose the soil in which it survives.