The conventional wisdom about China's government is that it is made up of pragmatists concerned mainly with encouraging economic growth and preserving their own power. The more ideological aspects tend to get ignored or discounted by outside observers as either cynical measures to maintain the fiction of communist beliefs or amusing quirks of China's modernization.
There's plenty of evidence, though, that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) still takes its role as guardian of the people's morals seriously. Today, the national drug control agency announced plans to track drug addicts nationwide. This week, the government announced new measures to monitor individuals online; the move seemed aimed mainly at net-addicted youth. Last week, Passport noted government meddling in the name and content of China's extremely popular American idol knock-off. Newspaper stories, movies, and blogs constantly draw the censors' ire, but much more often it's for bad morals, not bad politics. Occasional "morals campaigns" still sweep the country, targeting pornography, hair dye, discos, and art.
In its totalitarian Maoist days, of course, such campaigns were the CCP's bread and butter. But economic growth now seems to have sent society spinning out of their control. Trusting individual initiative to create a strong and cohesive society on its own would be completely out of character for the CCP. President Hu Jintao, after all, spent nine years running the Central Party School, the main repository of the party's ideological work.
Concern for public morals, moreover, has long held a place in Chinese political thought. China's continued emphasis on its nanny state would be a familiar sight to Confucius, after all, who said of the people:
If they are led by virtue, and uniformity sought among them through the practice of ritual propriety, they will possess a sense of shame and come to you [the ruler] of their own accord.
China's repeated harping on public morals and the proper development of society probably should be taken at face value. These concerns are not mere rhetorical gloss. They are an integral part of what the Chinese Communist Party thinks its job, and the job of any ruler of China, should be.
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