The Chinese leader seeks to restore an earlier era of ideological indoctrination and national unity—whether his society wants it or not.
The Marx and Confucius show is just one small part of Xi’s campaign to fashion a new ideological conformity in China. Its apparent aim is to foster unity in preparation for struggles at home and abroad—but with the ultimate purpose of tightening Xi’s grip on China.
Chinese leaders “want to have a very powerful, socialist, ideological framework that can congeal the population, and this is of course under the party’s control and guidance,” Wang Feng, a sociologist at UC Irvine, told me. “What’s a more powerful way to centralize power than to control people’s thought?”
Xi’s push for communist conformity might seem anachronistic in the age of social media and the global digital commons. But it’s only one way he is dragging China back into an older, darker time.
returned to Cold War–style confrontation with the West after a period of fruitful cooperation
reestablished one-man rule to a degree unseen since the days of Mao Zedong, the Communist regime’s founder. Now he is attempting to restore the intense ideological indoctrination of earlier years of Communist rule—the era of Mao’s Little Red Book
in March, Xi introduced the “Global Civilization Initiative,” a manifesto in which he advocates “respect for the diversity of civilizations” and that “coexistence transcend feelings of superiority.” Countries, he adds, should “refrain from imposing their own values or models on others.”
That’s Xi-speak for denying the existence of the universal rights and values that undergird the global primacy of democracy
strangled private education
Lol foreign investors get fucked
Chinese leaders have a long history of trying to control thought. In 213 B.C.E., the first emperor of the Qin dynasty became irritated with scholars
unlimited genocide on westoid "scholars"
If any china-watchers or xi-speakers want to unpack all the other bullshit 
To claim that China doesn't want people to compare past and present is absolutely absurd. They are constantly pointing to the warlords period or any other period of history in China going 'look whatever mistakes we have or are making it is nowhere near as fucking bad as that.' as well as pointing out that whenever China falls apart is exactly when outside forces come in and literally pillage the countryside. It's literally one of the bedrocks to understanding why China has continued to maintain political cohesion even with these massive economic changes that we've seen. They are well aware of what the consequences are if they fail, both from their own history and from the collapse of the USSR.
It also impossible for them not to be obsessed with the past because they literally descend indirectly from one of the oldest state government cultures ever and are literally surrounded by the artifacts of millennium of history. It is not like America where we will gladly sweep even the last decade under the rug to keep pulling the same scams over and over again. In a sane country, this article would be censored not because it's critical of the government, but because it is just blatantly factually incorrect.