Finalist: Staff of The Wall Street Journal

Early hopes that Xi Jinping would want closer integration with the U.S.-led global order have become one of the biggest strategic miscalculations of the post-Cold War era

By Jeremy Page

BEIJING—In the two years before Xi Jinping became China’s leader in 2012, U.S. officials tried to size him up through a series of face-to-face meetings.

During talks in China in 2011, Mr. Xi, then vice president, asked about civilian control of the U.S. military, shared his thoughts on uprisings in the Middle East and spoke, unprompted, about his father, a renowned revolutionary. When he visited the U.S. in 2012, he was relaxed and affable, chatting with students and posing for pictures with Magic Johnson at a Los Angeles Lakers basketball game.

The U.S. officials’ conclusion: Although Mr. Xi was far more confident and forthright than Hu Jintao, the stiff and scripted leader he would succeed, he likely shared his commitment to stable ties with Washington and closer integration with the U.S.-led global order. Some even hoped Mr. Xi would kick-start stalled economic reforms.

It was one of the biggest strategic miscalculations of the post-Cold War era.

In the eight subsequent years, Mr. Xi has pursued an expansive, hypernationalistic vision of China’s future, displaying a desire for control and a talent for political maneuvering. Drawing comparisons to Mao Zedong, he has crushed critics and potential rivals, revitalized the Communist Party and even scrapped presidential term limits so he can, if he chooses, rule for life.

Promising a “China Dream” of national renewal, he has mobilized China’s military to enforce territorial claims, forced up to a million Chinese Muslims into internment camps and curbed political freedoms in Hong Kong.

Now, with Covid-19 under control in China but still widespread across the U.S., he is promoting his self-styled, tech-enhanced update of Marxism as a superior alternative to free-market democracy—a “China solution” to global problems.

“It was clear he was not going to be a second Hu Jintao,” said Danny Russel, who as a senior Obama administration official attended several meetings with Mr. Xi, including in 2011 and 2012. “What I underestimated about Xi Jinping was his tolerance for risk.”

Mr. Xi’s swift reversal of more than three decades of apparent movement toward collective leadership and a less intrusive party has surprised both U.S. officials and much of the Chinese elite. In hindsight, though, the roots of his approach are visible in key episodes of his life.

They include his father’s purge from the top party leadership, his teenage years in a Chinese village, his induction into the military and his exposure to nationalist and “new left” undercurrents in the party elite.

Mr. Xi’s autocratic turn also was catalyzed by a 2012 political scandal that upset the balance of power among the party elite and emboldened advocates of stronger, centralized leadership. It gave Mr. Xi the justification he needed to sideline rivals, rebuild the party and revamp its ideology.

Today China follows a new political doctrine known as “Xi Jinping Thought,” which combines many attributes of different 20th-century authoritarians. It reasserts the party’s Leninist role as the dominant force in all areas, including private business. It revives Maoist methods of mass mobilization, uses digital surveillance to replicate Stalin’s totalitarian social controls and embraces a more muscular nationalism based on ethnicity that makes fewer allowances for minorities or residents of Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Above all, Xi Jinping Thought aims to grant Mr. Xi the legitimacy to remain in power and continue his quest to make China a rich, truly global power by 2049, the centenary of Mao’s victory.

Mr. Xi has been a popular leader, bolstered in part by positive coverage in state media. Under his leadership, China has posted robust economic growth and eradicated extreme poverty, as well as curbing Covid-19 within its borders. The nation’s growing international stature also has become a source of national pride.

“His goal is to make the whole world see China as a great power, and him as a key figure in making it great,” said Xiao Gongqin, a leading figure among scholars who advocate so-called enlightened autocracy in China. “At heart, he’s a nationalist.”

Mr. Xiao, based in Shanghai, counts himself a supporter. But like many in China’s elite, he said he worries Mr. Xi “lacks a spirit of compromise. That’s his shortcoming….And there is no mechanism to correct him.”

China’s government press office declined to comment, but arranged interviews with two professors at the Central Party School, the party’s top think tank and training academy.

Both said Mr. Xi hadn’t abandoned collective leadership, but declined to predict whether he would retire in 2022, when his current term is scheduled to end. They described Xi Jinping Thought as “21st-Century Marxism,” saying his political thinking was shaped, in part, by his experiences in his youth.

“When he was young, his life was a little tortuous, but these twists and turns made comrade Xi Jinping what he is today,” said Han Qingxiang, one of the professors, who has conducted a study session on Marxism for top leaders. “Only those who have suffered can achieve great things.”

One mistake many in China and abroad made about the new Chinese leader was hoping he would emulate his father, Xi Zhongxun, as a pioneer of economic reform and opponent of one-man rule after Mao’s death.

People who have spoken with Xi Jinping say he talks with pride about his father, who commanded Communist guerrillas in China’s northwest and became a vice premier after Mao’s 1949 victory.

What instead honed his political instincts, they say, were his austere upbringing and his family’s suffering after his father was purged from the leadership in 1962 and banished to central China for 13 years, mostly to work at a tractor factory, for supporting publication of a controversial book.

That set him apart from other leaders’ offspring, known as princelings, who in most cases endured less hardship. It also left him fearful of disorder, determined to clear his family’s name and distrustful of China’s elite.

Like many other princelings, Xi Jinping, who is now 67 years old, spent his earliest years in exclusive schools and housing compounds, where he was raised to believe he was one of China’s future leaders.

His mother lived and worked at the Party School, so he and three siblings were mostly cared for by their father. Xi Zhongxun was unusually strict and frugal, forcing his two sons to wear their elder sisters’ castoff clothes and shoes, and often lecturing them about his role in the revolution.

The father was prone to depression and bouts of violent rage, according to Joseph Torigian, an American University professor who is writing a book about Xi Zhongxun. “The standout characteristic of this family was a father who was exceptionally disciplinarian and brutal,” Mr. Torigian said.

The Xi family was denounced and shunned by many peers after Xi Zhongxun’s purge from the leadership in 1962. The abuse intensified after Mao launched his Cultural Revolution in 1966, unleashing Red Guard youths who assaulted and often killed teachers and other “class enemies.” Among those who died was Xi Jinping’s half sister.

Many princelings formed their own Red Guard unit. Xi Jinping, too young and tainted by his father to join, spent his time roaming the streets and reading books taken from deserted schools and libraries, including Charles de Gaulle’s memoirs and Richard Nixon’s autobiography, according to a family friend.

He rarely speaks of those years, but in interviews before taking power, he said they hardened his view of politics. He recalled denouncing his father, being jailed three times and having Red Guards threaten him with execution.

“People who have little contact with power, who are far from it, always see these things as mysterious and novel,” he said in 2000. “But what I see is not just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the bullpens”—a reference to Red Guard detention houses—”and how people can blow hot and cold. I understand politics on a deeper level.”

Like his father, he maintained faith in the party, blaming his family’s ordeals on Mao’s security chief, according to people who know the family. At the same time, they say, he learned from the misfortunes of his father, who was rehabilitated in 1978 and helped establish China’s first Special Economic Zone to attract foreign investment, then was sidelined again in the late 1980s.

One conclusion Xi Jinping reached, these people say, was that politics is a winner-take-all contest. Another was that he should conceal his own views until he had real power.

Once he was in office, his controlling instincts and distrust of peers became clear as he moved away from consensus decision-making and targeted potential rivals in an anticorruption campaign. His desire for control trumped an early pledge to allow the market a “decisive role” in the economy.

“He reached a conclusion that unrestrained markets were in fact going to present a massive problem for long-term party control,” said Kevin Rudd, a former Australian prime minister who has met Mr. Xi several times, most recently in November 2019. “The party’s in his veins. He does not buy any argument, direct or indirect, about any form of peaceful transition to something else.”

Today, his father is lauded primarily for his unwavering loyalty to the party. His grave in northwest China is now part of a “patriotic education base” where officials often gather to renew their oaths to the party and bow before a statue of Xi Zhongxun. Carved in granite in front of the statue is a Mao quote: “The party’s interests come first.”

Mr. Xi was expected to have conflicted views of Mao, having learned to revere him but also having suffered because of him. The surprise has been the extent to which he has sought to resurrect Mao as a source of legitimacy for the party and himself.

In 1968, Mao tried to restore order by sending millions of young people into the countryside to be “educated.” That is how Mr. Xi, at age 15, wound up in Liangjiahe, a cluster of about three dozen homes, mostly traditional cave dwellings, 220 miles northeast of his father’s birthplace.

Conditions were brutal. Flea-ridden and often hungry, he spent much of the next seven years building wells, digging fields and herding sheep. There was no school.

Many in his generation had similar experiences and, after Mao’s death in 1976, returned home disillusioned.

Since taking power, Mr. Xi has deliberately cultivated comparisons with Mao, and used his Liangjiahe years as the centerpiece of his political origin story. Today, tour guides in the village depict Mr. Xi being transformed from a weak, confused teenager into a hardy man of the people.

Recently, inside one cave, a guide pointed out the raised brick platform that Mr. Xi and five others used as a bed. The guide gave a selective account of Mr. Xi’s stay: He found it tough at first, but soon won over villagers through his hard work and ended up as local party chief, the guide said.

Local officials tailed a visiting Wall Street Journal reporter and stopped every attempted interview.

People who speak with Mr. Xi or study his record say his time in the village was transformative. They say he developed an affinity and sense of duty to China’s rural poor, and a pragmatism through dealing with village life. Villagers turned to him for advice, feeding his self-image as a born leader.

He brought two suitcases of books with him and borrowed many more, reading them obsessively and absorbing ideas, according to people who have spoken with him. Some of the frayed volumes are displayed in one cave, including “Lenin on War and Peace,” Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” two books on foreign policy by Henry Kissinger and the collected writings of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who pioneered Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg tactics.

Years later, he would mention his reading frequently, quoting from foreign or Chinese classical works and boasting that he mastered the core tenets of Marxism in the village.

Some who know him see that as a conscious emulation of Mao, who prided himself on his literary prowess. Others detect a sensitivity about his lack of formal schooling. A former secretary to Mao, after meeting Mr. Xi in the 2000s, described him as having “elementary school level” education.

Mr. Xi won a place to study chemical engineering at a university in Beijing in 1975, but as a “worker-peasant-soldier,” selected before competitive entry exams and regular teaching resumed.

After China’s market-opening reforms began in 1979, most of Mr. Xi’s contemporaries, including his siblings, focused on improving their lives, often going into business. Mr. Xi was one of the few princelings who chose a political career and often complained to friends about the corruption and materialism around him.

Some familiar with those princelings believe they never lost their reverence for Mao. Mr. Xi, as leader, has adopted many of Mao’s titles, rhetorical terms and political techniques, and declared Mao’s achievements to be on par with the reform era that followed.

He had pragmatic reasons as well. In the years before he took power, he came to believe that criticism of Mao was undermining the party’s foundations, just as condemnation of Stalin eroded faith in its Soviet equivalent.

Mr. Xi saw how Bo Xilai, another princeling, became hugely popular as party chief in the city of Chongqing with a campaign to revive strongman rule and egalitarian Maoist ideals.

Liberal-minded Chinese, appalled at the rehabilitation of a man who many historians believe caused the death of more than 40 million people, now warn of a new Cultural Revolution.

Cai Xia, a former Party School professor in exile in the U.S., accuses Mr. Xi of making the party into a “political zombie” and warns of major chaos in the next five years.

Mr. Xi, however, appears to believe he can use digital censorship and surveillance to achieve the political control Mao aspired to, without upending society.

“The legacy I think he is drawing on is not Mao the revolutionary, the radical,” said Jude Blanchette, a Chinese politics expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and author of a book on China’s neo-Maoist movement. “It’s a nation-building Mao, the Mao who fought the U.S. to a draw in the Korean War.”

In the spring of 1979, shortly after Mr. Xi graduated from the university, he got a job, with his father’s help, as a secretary to Geng Biao, then a vice premier responsible for national defense. It gave him a three-year crash course in elite politics, international relations and military affairs.

He gained an inside view of U.S.-China relations, learning to see the U.S. as both a partner and a potential threat. He traveled abroad for the first time, visiting Europe with Mr. Geng. He also learned the political importance of the People’s Liberation Army and built a network of military contacts.

“I have an insoluble bond with the army,” Xi Jinping said in a speech last year. “From a young age, I learned a lot about our military history and witnessed the demeanor of many older generation army leaders.”

Mr. Geng was an army veteran who had served with Mr. Xi’s father, been ambassador to six countries and led the International Liaison Department, which managed ties with Communists abroad. When Mr. Xi joined him, he was vice premier and secretary-general of the Central Military Commission, which controls the armed forces. In 1981, he became defense minister.

It was a big change for Mr. Xi. He wore a military uniform, accompanied Mr. Geng to most meetings and handled confidential documents, according to accounts from Mr. Geng’s relatives and biographer. The two men often rode together in Mr. Geng’s Mercedes-Benz—an extraordinary luxury then—and regularly unwound playing Go, a Chinese board game.

Mr. Geng was demanding and security-conscious, insisting that Mr. Xi memorize meetings’ proceedings rather than take notes, according to those accounts. To this day, Mr. Xi memorizes large portions of speeches and rarely uses notes in private meetings.

China had just normalized relations with the U.S. and fought a short war with Vietnam that ended in stalemate, a humiliation that still haunts the PLA. Mr. Geng’s priority was to build military ties with Washington to counterbalance Soviet power, and in 1980 he went to the U.S. to try to negotiate the purchase of American weapons.

The U.S. arranged a display of top-tier weaponry, plus a White House screening of “The Empire Strikes Back.” But it offered to sell only nonlethal equipment, and it pledged to continue arming the island of Taiwan, which Beijing sees as a rebel province.

“In developing China-U.S. relations, we can’t be too excessive or hasty,” Mr. Geng warned in his report on the trip, according to his biography. “On some questions, the U.S. is going to maintain unreasonable positions, and we should conduct necessary and appropriate struggle against it.”

The lesson for Mr. Xi was that while cooperation with the U.S. could potentially benefit both countries, their long-term strategic interests weren’t aligned, people who study that era say.

Through his contact with military officers, he became sensitive to territorial issues, especially Taiwan and the South China Sea, and a mind-set that from the 1990s increasingly viewed the U.S. as China’s adversary.

He also witnessed firsthand how Deng Xiaoping courted support from the military during a power struggle between 1979 and 1981 that resulted in his emergence as China’s top leader.

More than three decades later, Mr. Xi would use similar tactics, first establishing firm control of the military, then consolidating his power elsewhere.

“He saw how central politics really worked: The most important thing is to seize actual power,” said Deng Yuwen, a former editor at a newspaper published by the Party School.

Mr. Geng remained a mentor, and when he died, Mr. Xi helped to collect his ashes, an honor usually reserved for the eldest son.

After leaving Mr. Geng’s office, Mr. Xi went into local government for the next 25 years. Following his promotion in 2007 to the Politburo Standing Committee, the top decision-making body, he was increasingly exposed to a debate between advocates and opponents of liberalization, which intensified after the global financial crisis.

That’s when he got to know Wang Huning, a former academic who became his top political adviser. Mr. Wang, now 65, emerged in the mid-1980s as a leader among “neo-authoritarian” scholars who argued that China needed enlightened autocracy, rather than liberalization, to modernize.

“He believed China needed a leader who is pragmatic and farsighted, who knows the country well, and who has the necessary powers to guide it,” said Ren Xiao, a former student of Mr. Wang at Shanghai’s Fudan University. “He’s been quite consistent in that.”

In 1995, Mr. Wang joined the party’s Central Policy Research Office, which gives advice and writes speeches for top leaders. He became its director in 2002 and, from 2007, worked alongside Mr. Xi, including on a team responsible for party building.

When Mr. Xi took power, he relied primarily on Mr. Wang to revamp party ideology in a way that married Mr. Xi’s instincts with countercurrents that were bursting into view on new social media platforms.

Ultranationalists were calling for a more aggressive stance toward the U.S. Other scholars were calling for a revival of Confucianism, a philosophy that advocates strict obedience to social hierarchy. China’s state-sector reforms and 2001 World Trade Organization entry gave rise to “new left” thinkers who railed against corruption and inequality.

Mr. Xi rarely expressed views on those debates. After the global financial crisis, however, he became less guarded as many in the Chinese elite became convinced that free-market democracy was in decline.

Visiting Mexico as vice president in 2009, he took a thinly veiled swipe at the U.S. “Some foreigners, with full bellies, who have nothing better to do, point fingers at our affairs,” he said. China didn’t export revolution, poverty or hunger, he added: “What else is there to say?”

In 2010, he visited Chongqing and endorsed the Maoist revival championed by Mr. Bo, the city’s party chief, which included mass performance of revolutionary songs.

In 2011, he met with then U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in China. Mr. Xi talked at length about the Soviet collapse and how authoritarian leaders in the Middle East were recently overthrown because they lost touch with their people and failed to control corruption, according to people familiar with those conversations.

“He really clearly signaled that the party faced some existential challenges, in his view, and that things had to change,” said Mr. Russel, the former U.S. official. “What I took away was: There were too many power centers, and not only does the country need a strong hand, the party needs a strong hand.”

The following year, the party was thrown into turmoil when a former Chongqing police chief fled to a U.S. consulate in China and alleged that Mr. Bo’s wife had murdered a British businessman. She was convicted and jailed for life. Mr. Bo got a life sentence for graft and abusing power.

The scandal eliminated from contention for the Standing Committee the one person with comparable clout to Mr. Xi’s, and gave him an opening to target other powerful individuals in coming years for allegedly conspiring with Mr. Bo to seize power.

It also brought to a head the internal debate over China’s future. Critics of liberalization, especially among princelings, prevailed, arguing that only a strongman could save the party.

That gave Mr. Wang, who became his top political adviser and joined the 25-member Politburo in 2012, a unique opportunity to influence a leader whose instincts and circumstances aligned with his statist views on how to improve China’s governance.

Mr. Wang, who accompanied Mr. Xi to most meetings and on foreign visits in his first term, is widely considered the architect of the “China Dream” concept and Xi Jinping Thought, which was written into the party constitution in 2017, when Mr. Wang joined the Standing Committee.

Party School professor Han Qingxiang described Mr. Wang as a “great theorist” whose policy-making clout “should not be underestimated.”

Mr. Xi “is definitely influenced in some ways by comrade Wang Huning, but Wang Huning is influenced even more by the general secretary,” Mr. Han said.

Mr. Xi and his advisers describe his doctrine primarily in Marxist terms, and, while pledging not to impose it on other countries, portray it as a model for them that proves the superiority of socialism over capitalism.

Xin Ming, a Party School professor, said in an interview arranged by the government press office that Mr. Xi’s Marxism was an updated version that incorporated some Western and traditional Chinese thinking, and considered Communism a distant, yet-to-be-defined ideal that would not be realized even by the centenary of Mao’s victory in 2049.

Other scholars studying Mr. Xi’s doctrine say its Marxist content is limited, noting that he doesn’t advocate class struggle or eliminating private property, and that he has cracked down on both Marxist student activists and liberal voices.

They see it as a fusion of Mr. Wang’s thinking with new left, neo-Confucian and other illiberal ideas in an attempt to unify the party, legitimize Mr. Xi’s concentration of power and forge a new model of authoritarian government.

Some detect the influence of Carl Schmitt, a German legal theorist whose ideas the Nazis used to justify unlimited executive power. Chinese scholars who advise the government have invoked Mr. Schmitt in recent years, including Jiang Shigong, a Peking University law professor who helped devise Beijing’s policy on Hong Kong.

In a recent essay, Mr. Jiang described Xi Jinping Thought as a “new system for comprehensive party leadership of the state,” arguing that the introduction of the rule of law in China after 1979 had undermined the party’s authority.

“This new party-state system is undoubtedly an important organizational part of the China solution” whose ultimate goal was “creating a new order for human civilization,” he wrote.

Mr. Jiang declined to comment.

China’s containment of the Covid-19 pandemic within its own borders has made Mr. Xi more confident in his governance model, people who speak with him say. In November, he pledged to double China’s gross domestic product by 2035. China’s aging society and debt problems will make that challenging.

Mr. Xi faces a mounting backlash abroad, especially from democracies alarmed by his Muslim internments, Hong Kong crackdown and aggressive diplomacy.

Even some in the party think he has overreached and may face resistance to any effort to continue ruling after 2022. Few people, inside or outside the party, would bet against him though.

“There’s something about Xi Jinping’s political schoolcraft which suggests to me that he is capable of navigating what I think will still be a stormy period ahead,” said Mr. Rudd, the former Australian prime minister. “There’s a steeliness to him.”

Push driven by a conviction that markets and entrepreneurs are not to be fully trusted; ‘the market-reform camp is all but gone’

By Lingling Wei

Xi Jinping, long distrustful of the private sector, is moving assertively to bring it to heel.

China’s most powerful leader in a generation wants even greater state control in the world’s second-largest economy, with private firms of all sizes expected to fall in line. The government is installing more Communist Party officials inside private firms, starving some of credit and demanding executives tailor their businesses to achieve state goals.

In some cases, it is taking charge entirely of companies it regards as undisciplined, absorbing them into state-owned enterprises.

The push is driven by a deepening conviction within the country’s leadership that markets and private entrepreneurs, while important to China’s rise, are unpredictable and not to be fully trusted. The view that state planners are better at running a complex economy has gained currency this year, with Beijing relying heavily on state directives to engineer a V-shaped recovery from the shock of Covid-19.

Mr. Xi has made his priorities especially clear in recent months. In September, the party issued new guidelines for private companies, reminding them to serve the state and vowing to use education and other tools to “continuously enhance the political consensus of private business people under the leadership of the party.”

Just a few weeks later, Mr. Xi personally intervened to block the $34 billion initial public offering of one of China’s biggest private firms, Ant Group, partly out of concerns it was too focused on its own profits rather than the state’s goal of controlling financial risk.

The message isn’t lost on entrepreneurs, who are reorienting their businesses to appease the state or giving up on private enterprise altogether.

“For us small businesses, we have no choice but to follow the party,” says Li Jun, a 50-year-old owner of a fish-farming business in the eastern Jiangsu province. “Even so, we’re not benefiting at all from government policies.”

Mr. Li recently closed down a seafood-processing plant because it couldn’t get bank loans—a persistent problem for private firms, despite Beijing’s repeated pledges to make credit more available for them.

The risk for China is that Mr. Xi’s vigorous assertion of statist prerogatives will dull the kind of innovation, competitive spirit and unbridled energy that powered China’s explosive growth in recent decades. The economic policies that helped nurture e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., tech conglomerate Tencent Holdings Ltd. and other global success stories seem to be at an end, say economists inside and outside China. As a result, they say, Chinese companies are becoming less like American ones, which are driven by market forces and depend on private innovation and consumption.

The information office of the State Council, China’s cabinet, didn’t respond to written questions for this article.

The percentage of Chinese manufacturing and infrastructure investment coming from private companies, after growing in recent decades, peaked in 2015 at more than half of total fixed-asset investments and has been shrinking since then.

China’s economy as a result has become less efficient. The amount of capital input needed to generate one unit of economic growth has nearly doubled since 2012, when Mr. Xi rose to power, according to the China Dashboard, a data project between research firm Rhodium Group and the Asia Society Policy Institute, a think tank. That is partly because China’s state-owned enterprises, which have swollen in size, are often less productive than private businesses, official data shows.

Party officials, for their part, see an opportunity to rein in the excessive risk-taking, debt and graft that accompanied the rapid rise of private businesses. Mr. Xi’s brand of state capitalism, which mixes markets with stepped-up state intervention, has survived a trade war with the U.S. and outperformed free-market economies recently, based on economic growth rates.

In one of the clearest signs of China’s direction, more state firms are gobbling up private companies, redefining a government initiative called “mixed-ownership reform.” The original idea, dating back to the late 1990s, was to encourage private capital to invest in state firms, bringing more private-sector acumen to China’s often-bloated state-owned enterprises.

Now, under Mr. Xi, the process often works the other way around, with big state companies absorbing smaller ones to keep them going, and reconfiguring the smaller firms’ strategies to serve the state.

Transactions involving state firms buying into private ones exceeded $20 billion last year, more than double the 2012 level, in industries including financial services, pharmaceuticals and technology, disclosures by publicly traded companies show.

“State-owned enterprises must play a leading role and important influence on the healthy development of private enterprises,” says a new central-government action plan for the next three years, which calls for more mergers between state and private firms.

Beijing OriginWater Technology Co. , a provider of sewage-treatment services that competes with the likes of General Electric Co. , was one of the target firms. It was started in 2001 by Wen Jianping, an engineer who had studied in Australia. He was eager to help clean up China’s polluted water supply and take advantage of the country’s increasingly open business environment.

As demand for water purification grew, Mr. Wen’s business thrived. An initial public offering in 2010 helped turn him into a billionaire. In 2018, he made Forbes magazine’s list of China’s richest people, with a reported net worth above $1.1 billion.

Over time, Mr. Wen took on more risk, pledging his shares to borrow more and finance bigger projects. A government “deleveraging” campaign launched under Mr. Xi to curb excessive risk-taking forced companies to pare back on debt and caused stock markets to swoon, sending the value of Mr. Wen’s shares down. His lenders started calling in loans.

Adding to Mr. Wen’s problems, the government in 2018 started to reverse an initiative that teamed private investors with local governments to build big-ticket infrastructure projects, citing fears of overspending. Companies like Mr. Wen’s were left with unfinished projects and debt that was maturing fast.

A subsidiary of China Communications Construction Co. , a big state contractor for Beijing-led infrastructure projects overseas, swooped in, buying a controlling stake in Beijing OriginWater for more than $440 million. Mr. Wen’s stake was reduced to around 10%, from 23%.

Now, instead of focusing on the domestic market, Beijing OriginWater says it plans to help facilitate the party leadership’s Belt and Road Initiative, a huge infrastructure program promoted by Mr. Xi to pull Asian, European and African nations into Beijing’s orbit.

Several longtime board members were replaced with appointees approved by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, which regulates and holds majority stakes in big state companies, including China Communications Construction.

A notice posted on the website of the company’s regulator late last year, when the China Communications Construction subsidiary began acquiring shares in Beijing OriginWater, lays out qualifications for project managers. Among them: Candidates must disclose their political affiliations and should have “unyielding fighting spirit.”

In response to questions, China Communications Construction described the acquisition of Mr. Wen’s firm as an “alliance of the strong.” Mr. Wen declined to comment.

In an interview with a Chinese weekly, China Times, last year, Mr. Wen likened state companies to trees and private firms to shrubs. “In the future, the trees may become larger and larger, absorbing more soil, water and sunlight,” he said. “The shrubs will be transformed, becoming either a branch on the tree or an herb, and the herb will die.”

Zhuji Water Group Co., a water utility run by a city government in the coastal province of Zhejiang, last year spent $147 million for a 28% stake in Zhejiang Great Southeast Co., a publicly listed plastic-packaging firm, after that firm ran into debt troubles.

The government of Zhuji has been trying to make Zhuji Water a conglomerate of sorts by having the company take over hotels, real estate and other assets. Its acquisition of the Great Southeast is also a way for Zhuji Water to get itself listed, a Zhuji official says.

Most often, though, government officials just want to make sure large private companies are adhering to the state’s goals and policies. To that end, the state is installing more Communist Party committees in corporate offices and encouraging them to play more assertive roles in decision-making.

Sanyue Industrial Co., a private maker of electronics in the southern city of Dongguan, in October formed the first party committee in the company’s 11-year history. It did so after the government told the company it needed to, says company executive Huang Shengying.

The committee, which is made up of five party members who were already working at the company, including two from management, plans to meet often to “study the spirit” of government policies and Mr. Xi’s speeches, Ms. Huang says. “We need to understand the policy better to survive. Party building, we’re told, is good for corporate development.”

Three other private companies in Dongguan also set up party cells recently, including an electronics maker, an auto-parts manufacturer and a chemical company. A Dongguan official, Zhao Zhijia, calls the party committees “red charging stations” saying that “these companies will integrate party building into their corporate culture. It’s a win-win.”

Such party committees often trump the decision-making of corporate management and boards. A party cell at Baowu Steel Group, a state-owned company that is China’s largest steel producer, held 55 meetings in the past two years and reviewed some 137 business and other proposals submitted by management, according to company filings. It revised 16 of the proposals before sending them on to Baowu’s board of directors.

It also turned down some, including one involving a fundraising proposal for a company subsidiary, saying the need for more capital was unclear, according to an article posted on Baowu’s website.

The party committee has directed the company to set aside more funds to help the poor even though the profits of Baowu’s listed arm declined 42% in the previous year. Eliminating poverty is a top political objective of Mr. Xi.

Chinese officials say Mr. Xi doesn’t intend to crush entrepreneurship or eliminate market forces. He has promised to support the private sector, which contributes half of the government’s tax revenues and employs 80% of urban workers.

Unlike his predecessors who steadily expanded the private economy, Mr. Xi focuses on bringing entrepreneurs into the party’s fold.

Chinese officials close to the leadership say Mr. Xi’s thinking has been influenced by excesses that emerged under predecessors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, when corruption and environmental degradation were rampant, and by market disruptions that rattled Mr. Xi in the early years of his rule.

Initially, Mr. Xi had been open to advancing market reforms that began in China under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s. In late 2013, Mr. Xi’s leadership vowed to give market forces a “decisive role.” He blessed market-minded regulators who talked up stock investing and relaxed government control over China’s currency. His administration even pondered a proposal to have professional managers rather than party apparatchiks run state companies.

One after another, those reform plans led to chaos. In the summer of 2015, a big stock-market selloff pounded markets and embarrassed Mr. Xi. The central bank’s move to set the Chinese yuan freer spooked the public further.

In closed-door meetings with underlings, Mr. Xi made his displeasure clear, according to the officials close to the leadership, and unleashed state forces to fix what he saw as the market’s woes.

Senior state-sector officials successfully lobbied Mr. Xi’s leadership to scratch plans to bring more market-oriented managers to state companies.

Beijing now directly supervises 128 state firms. Although that is down from about 140 in 2012, the enterprises have grown larger, encroaching more on the private sector, amid government-led consolidations aimed at creating national corporations. Local governments manage thousands more of the firms.

Until last year, Xu Zhong was head of the research department of China’s central bank. He publicly blamed China’s poor governance and market distortions on the state’s hand in allocating credit, which had caused private firms to be deprived of financing.

“The first institutional problem that leads to financial chaos is unclear boundaries between government and the market,” he wrote in an article published in December 2017. In a high-level economic forum in February 2019, he called for accountability of the government when it came to market reforms.

Shortly after that, he was moved to a new role outside the central bank in an association of market dealers.

“The market-reform camp is all but gone,” says an economist who advises the government. “By now, it’s pretty clear what kind of reform the top guy really wants.”

There was no mistaking the shifting winds in September, when Liu He, the leadership’s top economic adviser with a reputation for supporting market reforms, summarized Beijing’s plans for the state sector for the next three years.

“State-owned enterprises,” he said, “must become the competitive core of the market.”

After one man was snatched off the street for tracking protests online, he spent four years in custody and remains under close police watch

By Chun Han Wong

On a summer day in 2016, a posse of men surrounded Lu Yuyu on a street in China’s southwestern city of Dali. He said they wrestled him into a black sedan and slid a shroud over his head. His girlfriend was pushed into a second car, screaming his name.

Mr. Lu had for years posted a running online tally of protests and demonstrations in China that was closely read by activists and academics around the world, as well as by government censors. That made him a target.

While China’s Communist Party has long punished people seen as threats to its rule, government authorities under Chinese leader Xi Jinping have engaged in the most relentless pursuit of dissenters since the crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, according to academics and activists.

“Over the past eight years under Xi, authorities have become hypersensitive to the publicizing of protests, social movements and mass resistance,” said Wu Qiang, a former politics lecturer at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

“Lu’s data provided a window into social trends in China,” Mr. Wu said, and that made him a threat to the party. China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based group that promotes worker rights, used Mr. Lu’s posts as the primary source for its “Strike Map,” an interactive online graphic tallying worker unrest.

Mr. Xi’s crackdown has snared women planning protests against sexual harassment, human-rights lawyers once given leeway and Marxist students advocating workers’ rights. Many have endured lengthy detentions and various forms of psychological pressure.

“Their goal is to make you feel helpless, hopeless, devoid of any support, and break you down so you begin to see activism as something foolish that doesn’t benefit anyone, and gives pain to everyone around you,” said Yaxue Cao, a Washington-based activist who runs China Change, a news and commentary website advocating for human rights. “In so many cases, they are successful.”

After Mr. Lu was snatched off the street, he spent four years in custody, his girlfriend left him, and, since his release in June, he said he has been kept under close watch by police. He struggles to find steady work, he said, and suffers from depression. His landlord recently asked him to move, he said, citing pressure from authorities.

The experience keeps him far from his past documentation work. “If you’re lucky, they’d detain you within a month, or if you’re unlucky, within a week,” said Mr. Lu, 43 years old. “There’s no point.”

For years, the Communist Party grudgingly allowed a limited role for NGOs and activists, from environmentalists to labor organizers, to contribute policy ideas and tackle social problems. Under Mr. Xi, such work became solely the party’s domain. Modern surveillance has made it easier to hound anyone trying to perform that role outside of party control. China’s annual national spending on public security has nearly doubled since Mr. Xi took power in late 2012, reaching the equivalent of about $211 billion in 2019 at current rates, according to government figures.

Mr. Lu recounted his life in interviews with The Wall Street Journal, giving a detailed picture of the government’s tactics. The Journal corroborated much of his story through court documents and interviews with his friends and lawyers involved in his case. His account is consistent with other cases documented by human-rights activists.

Mr. Lu, who considers himself a record-keeper rather than an activist, said speaking up was a way to resist government censorship and to protect himself. “Being silenced would mean they can act brazenly and lock you down,” he said.

Police and judicial authorities connected with Mr. Lu’s detention, trial, imprisonment and subsequent surveillance didn’t respond to queries about his case.

Internet explorer

Mr. Lu was born in the impoverished southwestern province of Guizhou, where his father ran a seedling farm. He was a shy boy, and his parents sent him to live with different families to learn how to better interact with people. He was bullied in school, he said, and struggled with his studies. At 19, he went to prison for about six years after stabbing and wounding someone. He said he was standing up for a friend who had gotten into a fight.

After his release in 2002, Mr. Lu drifted from job to job, working in factories and construction. He discovered “dark folk,” music that mixed folk and industrial styles, and devoted hours online following his favorite Finnish and German bands. His moniker, “Darkmamu,” paired his musical interest with the Romanization of the Chinese word for numbness.

“I saw no hope in anything and had no direction in life,” he said.

That began to change in 2011, when he tuned into social-media chatter about such Chinese activists as dissident artist Ai Weiwei. Censorship on China’s Twitter -like Weibo microblogging platform was relatively loose at the time, allowing more open discussion about social issues and criticism of government policies.

In April 2012, Mr. Lu raised a banner along a Shanghai thoroughfare calling for China’s leaders to publicly declare their personal assets, a way to curb corruption. He also called for the right to vote. Police chased him out of the city, he said, and when he returned, they detained him for 10 days.

Demonstrations flared across China that year, including high-profile protests against power and copper plant projects. Mr. Lu, who moved to the southern city of Fuzhou, scoured social media and began to realize the scale of national unrest. He said he decided to document as many demonstrations as he could.

“It wouldn’t change the broad trajectories of history,” he said, “but for me, I felt like I was doing something that meant I haven’t lived in vain.”

Mr. Lu sifted through online chatter, images and videos of public unrest, posting his findings on Weibo, he said. He sharpened his abilities to cross-check information. He quit his job at a plastics factory, he said, and started a blog with a university student, Li Tingyu, who admired his work before she became his girlfriend and collaborator. They raised donations that supported full-time research, and their work drew attention abroad.

Police showed up at the couple’s apartment in the southern city of Zhuhai, Mr. Lu said, to warn them against continuing to publish their findings. Mr. Lu said he believes what followed was government-directed harassment: Their landlord refused to renew their lease. Strangers knocked on their door and claimed they were the new tenants. One day, they lost running water.

The couple moved to Dali in southwestern China, where they isolated themselves from family, friends and acquaintances. Authorities eventually found them there.

On June 15, 2016, the couple posted a tally of 94 demonstrations, including 27 protests by workers airing such grievances as unpaid wages. Later that day, they were picking up an online-shopping delivery at a courier station when they were captured by police and hustled away in separate cars, Mr. Lu recalled.

Days later, friends and supporters sensed trouble. Human-rights lawyers learned Mr. Lu and Ms. Li had been accused of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” The charge was commonly used for disorderly conduct such as damaging property. In 2013, it was expanded to include online behavior by defining the internet as a public space.

The couple had compiled a data set comprising 67,502 protests that spanned June 2013 to June 2016, according to a 2019 research paper by Zhang Han, now an assistant professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Jennifer Pan, a Stanford University assistant professor who studies authoritarian governance.

Through their blog, Mr. Lu and Ms. Li drew broad attention to protests in China, Ms. Pan said, “which is precisely the information government censors want to suppress.”

After Mr. Lu’s arrest, investigators waved copies of his social-media posts at him. “Why do you collect and publish this information? What’s the purpose?” Mr. Lu recalled an official asking him. He said he was documenting history.

Through the weeks of interrogation, Mr. Lu said, his thoughts often drifted to his girlfriend. He worried about who would take care of their pet, a tomcat named “Little Yellow Fur.”

Prosecutors and police pressed Mr. Lu to plead guilty, which typically is rewarded with a lighter sentence. He said officials brought his father to the detention center hoping to persuade Mr. Lu, but he refused to acknowledge wrongdoing.

In November 2016, the journalist advocacy group Reporters Without Borders and French television broadcaster TV5Monde jointly awarded Mr. Lu and Ms. Li a press-freedom prize for “their commitment to freely and independently-reported information in China,” work the couple did at a high personal cost.

Officials visited Mr. Lu the following April, he said, to let him know Ms. Li had been convicted and given a suspended sentence. Mr. Lu said officials hoped he, too, would plead guilty. A copy of a Chinese court document related to Mr. Lu’s case, viewed by Journal, said Ms. Li had confessed.

Mr. Lu stood trial in June 2017. Prosecutors accused him of spreading false information. Mr. Lu, who denied wrongdoing, was convicted and sentenced to four years. His appeals were denied, according to court records.

In prison, Mr. Lu lived in a 12-man cell and worked 10-hour shifts sewing jeans, skirts and other apparel. He was paid the equivalent of a few dollars a month, he said.

Prison life wore on Mr. Lu. Last year, he suffered hallucinations and bouts of paranoia, he said. Prison officials offered counseling, but his symptoms persisted. About two months before his release, Mr. Lu said, he received a judicial notice forbidding him from setting foot in Beijing, Shanghai or Xinjiang.

No escape

After leaving prison, Mr. Lu moved in temporarily with his brother in their hometown. Police showed up to get his cellphone number. An official with the police department’s political-security arm would call him to ask where he was and what he was up to.

Mr. Lu moved to an apartment in the city of Zunyi, near his home village. Local police found him within a week, he said. He returned to social media with a new Twitter account, circumventing Chinese internet controls that block the platform. He listed his location as “hell” and posted an account of his detention and trial.

Mr. Lu tried to track down Ms. Li and eventually reached her mother. She said her daughter had married. Mr. Lu insisted on speaking to Ms. Li, and that night she called, sobbing as she apologized and said she had a new life, Mr. Lu recounted. She couldn’t be reached for comment.

In early August, police issued Mr. Lu a warning for using a virtual private network to circumvent Chinese internet controls. They seized his mobile phone and computer, which were later returned. He said police told him not to speak to news media.

Mr. Lu said he no longer felt safe in Zunyi. A couple of weeks later, he began traveling, first within Guizhou. He posted photos from his trips on social media, including shots of the lush cliffs along Guizhou’s Wuyang River and cattle on a grassy mountain in Fujian province.

Zunyi police kept close track of his whereabouts. An official would call him and ask, “What are you doing?” The phone calls and questions were repeated every time he reached a new city. Mr. Lu knew it was pointless to lie.

In late September, while Mr. Lu was staying at a friend’s apartment in the southern city of Guangzhou, officers called the friend and asked to meet. Mr. Lu then moved to a second friend’s apartment. The following day, police called the second friend who alerted Mr. Lu. It was too late. The officers were already at the door. They had made the call from downstairs.

The officers told Mr. Lu he had to leave Guangzhou. When he refused, they drove him to a police station, collected data from his phone and hauled him to the train station, he said. Hours later, the police texted a request: Send a selfie to prove he had reached his destination.

Police and justice-bureau officials in Zunyi regularly summon Mr. Lu to ask about his plans and warn him against circumventing internet controls.

While Mr. Lu has enough savings to survive for several months, he said he hopes he can secure a job soon. Police surveillance makes it tough to leave his hometown, where job opportunities are limited. Depression at times keeps him from sleeping more than a couple of hours a night, he said. In late October, his landlord, under pressure from authorities, told him he had to move.

Mr. Lu is comforted by his work documenting tens of thousands of protests, even if he can’t return to that role. “I’d just end up in jail again,” he said. “You can tell people how brave you are, but in reality you wouldn’t achieve anything.”

Jonathan Cheng contributed to this article.

Slick videos on social media with a nationalistic message are notching millions of views

By Liza Lin

In the era of Mao Zedong, China used propaganda posters to urge young people to create a great socialist nation. After the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, the Communist Party rewrote textbooks to deliver its version of history and to steer its young away from Western ideas.

Today, China is embarked on another campaign to re-educate its young people. The message is more blatantly nationalistic than anything in recent decades, with President Xi Jinping’s image often at the center. And it is far more sophisticated than anything Beijing has attempted in the past.

Slick videos on social media are notching millions of views. One episode of a popular video series called Year Hare Affair, co-produced by a Communist Party organization, featured a bald eagle dressed in an American flag plotting with talking cockroaches to create chaos in Hong Kong. Cute Chinese rabbits show up to fight off the cockroaches.

Pan Borui, a 19-year-old freshman at a Beijing college, got hooked last year on the cartoons, which he said will “shape the thinking of the next generation of Chinese.” He said he knew they were made with party support, but said most Chinese still considered them very accurate and more accessible than traditional news reports.

Chinese leaders have always tried to encourage patriotism. In Mao’s era, young people learned about “Mao Zedong Thought” and class struggle and sang revolutionary songs. Curriculum changes in the early 1990s began spreading the narrative that China was suffering at the hands of the West.

Yet polls of university students about a decade ago showed that many saw those efforts as clumsy and transparent. Many identified themselves as holding liberal or Western political views.

Previous leaders such as Hu Jintao, Mr. Xi’s predecessor, were wary of pushing propaganda too hard, fearful it could inflame nationalism in ways that might destabilize China. They wanted to speed economic development and were willing to allow some debate over Western ideas.

Under Mr. Xi, patriotic education has become sharper and more widespread. Chinese authorities learned from recent unrest among teenagers and young adults in Hong Kong that indoctrination has to start young, according to Stanley Rosen, a Chinese politics professor at the University of Southern California.

“We need to seize this critical period that determines and forms teenagers’ values and guide them so they can do up life’s first buckle,” Mr. Xi explained in one August 2018 meeting.

Beijing’s ambitions are laid out in a document published by the State Council, China’s cabinet, in November 2019, which said “patriotism is the most natural and simple emotion of the Chinese. We must insist on starting from when they are babies, focusing on consolidating the roots, concentrating on the soul.”

The 9,000-word document includes instructions for government and party officials to promote movies, news and classroom lessons with Mr. Xi’s ideology and his plans for China’s rejuvenation. It calls on authorities to capitalize on teenagers’ interests in online games, animation and short videos “so that patriotism can fill the internet space.”

The Military Correspondent, a news journal sponsored by the People’s Liberation Army, has said China’s military must increase use of social-media platforms, which it calls “gathering places for younger users.”

Surveys suggest younger Chinese people today are fiercely patriotic and more loyal to their country than previous generations. Academics, parents and teenagers said in interviews that young people have many reasons to be proud of China, including its economic growth and success in containing Covid-19.

One kindergarten in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou interspersed its lessons in September with four days of what it called “military training” for its 5- and 6-year-olds. The children, dressed in military fatigues, held Chinese flags and performed salutes, according to the school’s official WeChat social-media account.

The school’s principal said in a speech that the goal was to encourage children to be strong and to persevere like young Chinese soldiers.

The roots of the current patriotic campaign reach back to 2013, soon after Mr. Xi ascended to power. That year, party leaders wrote a policy memo, Document No. 9, which warned of seven threats to the party, including the rise of Western notions of civil society and a free press. It called on party members to strengthen resistance to infiltration by outside ideas.

In 2016, the government appointed a new education minister, Chen Baosheng, who pushed for more patriotic teaching. Mr. Chen was a party veteran whose main academic experience was serving as vice president of the Communist Party’s Central Party School, which trains party cadres. Mr. Xi was the school’s president during most of Mr. Chen’s tenure there.

In a speech that year, Mr. Chen warned that “hostile forces” versed in “internet language” were trying to subvert China’s education system to weaken the party and spread the wrong kind of thinking. “Once the students come into contact with it, they are easily deceived, and is the equivalent to the white cloth entering the dye vat,” he said.

The Chinese government reversed a policy that allowed provincial governments to choose their own textbooks, and required any learning material dealing with national sovereignty, ethnicity and religion to be approved by authorities.

It also rewrote textbook sections, including extending the length of China’s war with Japan in the 1930s and ’40s by six years to include what it has described as earlier Japanese acts of aggression, amplifying China’s sacrifices. High-school students were required to study a new politics volume, “Socialism in the New Era with Chinese Characteristics,” that focuses on Mr. Xi’s accomplishments. His name appears in the book at least 46 times, compared with 16 mentions of Mao.

Three Chinese teachers described in interviews what they said were efforts to silence debate in schools over the party’s achievements. They said they were asked to give poor grades to exam essays if students took unapproved stances, such as portraying the government’s handling of Covid-19 in a negative light.

In Beijing, authorities introduced a program with compulsory student visits to museums with nationalist and revolutionary messages. One features an exhibition devoted to Mr. Xi, with a painting of youths admiring him, echoing Mao-era images of that leader surrounded by adoring young people.

A preschool in the city of Yueyang had students dress in army-green Communist Party suits and walk in a nearby national park to commemorate the Long March, a yearlong, 5,600-mile trek made by Red Army soldiers to escape Nationalist forces during the civil war. The children stopped to harvest sweet potatoes and wild vegetables for lunch, just like during the 1930s march, according to a website run by China’s propaganda ministry.

The education ministry also made changes at the university level, including requiring universities to boost Marxist education. The charters of some prestigious universities were amended to place absolute adherence to party rule over academic independence.

This year, China updated its Law for the Protection of Minors, striking “independent thinking” from the list of assets schools are meant to cultivate.

In 2016, the party issued what it said were reform guidelines calling on its Communist Youth League to help lead on social media. The Youth League began opening accounts on platforms including Douyin, China’s version of TikTok. It also started an official account on Bilibili, a video-hosting platform akin to China’s YouTube whose users are mainly under 25. The Youth League and its regional arms now have almost 11.5 million followers there.

A graduate student from China’s Inner Mongolia University analyzed 541 Communist Youth League videos published between March 2018 and March 2020 and found that the videos, which focused mostly on patriotic or otherwise pro-party content, attracted 130 million likes. Some logged more than 100,000 comments.

One of the most effective video efforts has been Year Hare Affair, launched in 2015, initially without government involvement, by illustrator and self-professed military geek Lin Chao.

The animated series uses talking animals to represent world political events, with a pro-China spin. The British are represented as bulls, the French as chickens. They are often seen doing the bidding of the American eagle, who is sometimes seen chomping on a cigar and issuing orders.

One episode in the first season featured Chinese rabbits, wearing green Communist hats and red stars on their bellies, finishing development of an atomic bomb, to the surprise of the eagle. The cartoon said the development “helps Chinese people to finally stand up straight.”

Mr. Lin, the creator, has said in interviews that he wasn’t always sure the government would like the series, because some episodes might offend foreigners. But it attracted at least 100 million views in its first season, and authorities quickly got on board.

At first, the Youth League helped promote the work on social media and organized public events to introduce people to Mr. Lin. Later, the Youth League, China’s military and the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, a party committee that oversees the police, co-produced episodes.

The Youth League has tied up with celebrities, including Chinese rock stars and national athletes, to attract more eyeballs.

Mr. Lin, the Youth League, the military and the commission didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Some Chinese parents said in interviews that they didn’t mind the rise in patriotic content. Unlike in Hong Kong, where some parents are unnerved by an increase in patriotic behavior in schools and changes in textbooks, many in mainland China are apathetic about it.

One teacher said her students recognize propaganda and often sigh or make faces when encountering political texts. One study, though, suggests that at least some students are embracing the message.

The study, published in September by researchers from Shanxi University, found that Chinese teens born after 1998 are more patriotic than their predecessors. They cited an online survey of more than 580 teenagers in which more than 90% used terms such as “lucky” and “satisfied” to describe how they felt about growing up in China.

Young people realize China’s power and are proud of it, the academics wrote, unlike earlier generations, who regarded China as a backward country and believed Western values could change it. Many even dreamed of moving to the West.

Charlie Hong, a schoolteacher in Chongqing, said that is no longer the case. When he asked his students if they would like to immigrate to a different country, he said, all except one said no.

Yoko Kubota and Jonathan Cheng contributed to this article.

With a push from the government, angry mobs online have swarmed any perceived disloyalty to their country

By Chao Deng and Liza Lin

The wave of nationalism sweeping through China, amplified by party propaganda, the political ambitions of Xi Jinping and the country’s success in containing Covid-19, is taking a darker turn, with echoes of the country’s Maoist past.

Angry mobs online have swarmed any criticism of China’s leaders or a perceived lack of loyalty to the country. Targets are being harassed and silenced. Some have lost their jobs.

Among those who have been attacked this year are public figures who have raised questions about officials’ early handling of the coronavirus. They include a writer from Wuhan named Fang Fang, who wrote online about the struggles of local residents and accused government officials of being slow to respond to the outbreak.

Thousands of Chinese internet users called her a traitor. An anonymously written poster hung at a Wuhan bus station told her to “shave your head or kill yourself to atone for your sins against the people”—and a photo of it spread widely online. A famous tai chi master called on allies to assault her, using their “clenched fists of justice.”

Fang Fang later issued a plea to her fellow citizens on the Twitter -like platform Weibo: “China cannot return to the Cultural Revolution.”

Chinese politics researchers say surging nationalism is in part a natural response to the country’s rising stature around the world. Some Chinese people say their feelings are rooted in genuine pride for their country.

The government has also taken a heavy hand in stoking the sentiment. Officials frequently censor critical discussion online and—through internet rules and hundreds of thousands of state-run social media accounts—have built an online ecosystem favoring content promoting the country and the Communist Party.

Mr. Xi, China’s strongest leader in decades, is one of its most nationalistic. Vowing to achieve a “China Dream” of national rejuvenation, he has appealed to patriotic pride in all aspects of life, to bolster support for the Party as it confronts slowing economic growth and widening conflict with the U.S.

This is the China Mr. Xi is building: a new type of great power that combines autocratic government and high-tech social control with a pervasive hyper-nationalism to drown out dissent.

In the past, China’s internet censors allowed for limited debate around social issues. During Mr. Xi’s eight years in power, fears among liberal-minded Chinese have grown over a return to the feverish politics of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong’s war on “counterrevolutionary elements” that brought the country’s society and economy to the brink of collapse in the 1960s and 1970s.

Back then, more than a million died. While today’s dynamics are less desperate, Geremie R. Barmé, a longtime China historian now based in New Zealand, said they combine “the vitriol, hysteria and violent intent of its Mao-era ancestor with the forensic detail afforded by digital surveillance.”

Intolerance for opposing views in China often exceeds that in the West, he added. “If America or Europeans think they have ‘cancel culture,’ they don’t have a clue.”

Virus diary

Fang Fang, whose real name is Wang Fang, started her diary in January, shortly after Chinese authorities put Wuhan on lockdown to stop Covid-19. She is a mainstream literary figure who previously served as president of the government-funded Writers Association for Hubei province, where Wuhan is located.

With Chinese media coverage of the virus tightly controlled, her writings offered another window into the unfolding outbreak. She mostly focused on the everyday experience of being under lockdown, but at times criticized officials, including for obscuring the truth. Her diary entries attracted millions of views.

Attacks against her multiplied after news circulated in April that an English translation of the diary would be published in the U.S. Internet users questioned Fang Fang’s motivations and accused her of “handing a dagger” to foreigners to attack China.

The bus-stop poster that went viral online accused her of “eating steamed buns dipped in human blood”—an allusion used in the past to attack those seen as disloyal to the masses. The author said he was a Chinese farmer.

People lobbed rocks over the wall of her house. Eventually the volume of abuse led her to shut off comments on her Weibo posts. She said that publishers in the Chinese mainland and in Hong Kong have declined to publish her work, including a Chinese version of her diary entries.

The online vitriol drew support from people with ties to the government, including Hu Xijin, editor in chief of the Global Times, a nationalistic Communist Party tabloid, who posted that Fang Fang’s fellow Chinese would suffer consequences for her fame in the West. He wrote the Chinese public had a “full moral right” to express dissatisfaction.

In a presentation in May, Zhang Boli, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, called out Fang Fang along with two other critics of the pandemic response.

“To love one’s own country, one’s own motherland” is fundamental, he said. The video has been viewed more than two million times online.

Segments of the video were circulated by state media and government agencies on Chinese video app Douyin.

Those posts sparked attacks in more comments.

Fang Fang said in an email exchange that she believes Dr. Zhang and Mr. Hu can influence opinions because they’re seen as representing the official line.

“Going up against the gangsters alone, especially those backed by the government, is futile,” she said.

Global Times’ Mr. Hu denied inciting attacks, and said Fang Fang’s unwillingness to accept criticism tipped public opinion against her. A spokesman for Dr. Zhang declined to make him available.

In Fang Fang’s orbit, Liang Yanping, a professor of Japanese art and culture at Hubei University in Wuhan, fell under attack after praising the writer online for her empathy. Critics dug through Ms. Liang’s internet history, with the goal of portraying her as loyal to Japan and a supporter of Hong Kong independence.

In June, Hubei University announced it was suspending her, saying she had made “erroneous remarks” that disturbed the public order.

Ms. Liang denied she was a Japan loyalist and had supported Hong Kong independence, and declined to comment further. A university spokesman said the school was following regulations from China’s education authority.

Qin Qianhong, an adviser to Wuhan’s government, said that unfettered nationalism is preventing people from reflecting on how China could have handled the coronavirus better.

“Right now the feeling being given is that we’re 100% perfect,” said Mr. Qin, who was critical of Wuhan officials for playing down the outbreak in the early days. Without reflection, he said, China could repeat its mistakes next time.

Propaganda

Academics focused on Chinese cyberspace estimate there are millions of Chinese internet users posting pro-Beijing content who are hired by the government or are state officials. Government departments and agencies run almost 240,000 social-media accounts, according to 2019 data by the China Internet Network Information Center, part of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The People’s Liberation Army, the State Council and the Party’s Central Committee all take part in organized information operations on domestic or international platforms, said Alicia Fawcett, a researcher at the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

While much of that content may be relatively harmless propaganda, it helps whip up nationalistic sentiment that can boil over into harassment campaigns. In some cases, researchers say, government accounts or bots participate in the attacks, though pinpointing their precise involvement is difficult.

When Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted his support for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters last year, he was hit with a coordinated harassment campaign. The Wall Street Journal reported a state-affiliated troll operation was likely involved because it involved thousands of users who attacked him using brand-new Twitter accounts.

Within China, nationalist commenters appear more unified and coordinated than their liberal counterparts, according to Yinxian Zhang, a sociology professor at Queens College, City University of New York. She has observed cliques of nationalists on Weibo working closely together to amplify each other’s messages.

Fang Fang’s Weibo account was suspended in February, and then brought back. That, plus the scale of online attacks, suggests a government-sanctioned campaign to drown out the writer, without silencing her completely and risking a backlash, said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist who studies the Chinese internet at the University of California, Berkeley.

Weibo and the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s central internet regulator, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

On Douyin, an app for short videos, state- and party-linked accounts posted some of the most popular videos criticizing Fang Fang, altogether attracting more than 42 million views. They include a branch of the Communist Youth League of China, state broadcaster China Central Television and local government agencies. Neither CCTV nor the Communist Youth League responded to requests for comment.

Chinese social-media companies, which are expected to conform to government directives around content, intensify the nationalism.

At the end of 2019, China’s internet regulator passed new rules that encouraged posts promoting “Xi Jinping Thought” and required platforms to adjust their algorithms to favor party propaganda from state-run media and other government agencies. Some companies push the material to users’ home pages or add it to most-popular lists. Content that defames government institutions’ reputations must be removed.

Staff at ByteDance Ltd., which runs Douyin, say government officials often request them to play up certain content from politicians or stir up the “right atmosphere” among Chinese citizens ahead of national events. Before China’s Oct. 1 National Day, Douyin introduced a sticker pack allowing users to create videos where they lip-sync a patriotic song and superimpose “[Heart] China” on their cheeks. ByteDance didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Many people now share nationalistic content in hopes of driving traffic to their accounts, helping them sell advertising or products.

‘Positive energy’

The Chinese government and social-media platforms have promoted the idea of “positive energy” in content—a term that includes material that reflects well on the Party’s leadership.

Shang Zijian, a 37-year-old theater director in Beijing who goes by “uncontrollable positive energy dude” on his Douyin profile, was among the critics of Fang Fang. “Can you even call yourself human?” he wrote.

Mr. Shang, who has 3.6 million followers on the platform, sees himself as a patriot and not a nationalist. “When other countries were trying to blame China for the coronavirus, she sold this negative impression overseas,” he said.

An online jewelry shop run by Lao Lishi, who won gold and silver medals for diving at the 2004 Olympics, came under attack by nationalists after she took to Weibo to post a state-media article in May about a Wuhan nurse who had died from Covid-19. She had found it on Fang Fang’s feed.

Some accused her of selling counterfeit goods. “How did an Olympics champion rot into a party hater?” read one comment.

Over the summer, Ms. Lao announced that Weibo had suspended her main account for a year because her posts violated unspecified regulations. A private chat group for her supporters fizzled after members worried they could be exposed by nationalist trolls.

Ms. Lao declined an interview request. “To say anything right now wouldn’t be right, please understand,” she wrote.

Xiong Qingzhen, a 39-year-old drone engineer from Wuhan, became a target himself after he contracted Covid-19 and stayed in a hospital dedicated to traditional Chinese medicine in February.

As he was leaving the hospital, a crew from state broadcaster CCTV asked about his treatment. Authorities have celebrated the purported benefits of traditional medicine, a source of national pride.

“I’m a traditional medicine skeptic,” he said in his interview, streamed live online. “I can’t accept the principle of it, so I didn’t drink it.”

Over the next few days, nationalists hounded Mr. Xiong on Weibo, calling him ignorant and thankless. Weeks later, the local television station he worked for called him to say it had received reports he had accepted bribes, which he denied. Mr. Xiong said online attackers had latched onto a video he had posted of himself in front of a large suburban house his family owned. They questioned how he could afford such a place.

Mr. Xiong is a Communist Party member. In an echo of Cultural Revolution practice, when party members were made to confess political sins, the station demanded Mr. Xiong type up two self-criticisms of his behavior. He relented. Mr. Xiong declined to share details of his letters.

He didn’t change his opinion of Chinese traditional medicine, however.

“People have lost the ability to think independently,” he said in an interview. “If a nobody like me cannot speak up, people like Fang Fang will be fighting alone.”

Qianwei Zhang contributed to this article.

Illustration and graphics by Vivien Ngo.

China has taken an aggressive approach to melding the nation’s many groups into a national identity

By Eva Xiao, Jonathan Cheng and Liza Lin

To realize the China of his dreams, Xi Jinping wants to meld the nation’s dozens of ethnic groups into a singular national identity.

The program of aggressive cultural assimilation—or “ethnic fusion,” as it’s called in government documents and speeches—has gone to extremes in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, home to the largest mass detention of a minority group since World War II. The campaign has begun to spread and intensify in other ethnically diverse areas.

In Inner Mongolia, a plan to expand Mandarin-language education and mandate the use of national textbooks over local versions sparked protests and school boycotts among students and parents concerned that the Mongolian language was in danger of being erased.

Part of the assimilation campaign relies on security infrastructure built to keep watch on and control over the population. It includes the rollout of high-tech police surveillance in areas with large minority populations—a strategy used in Xinjiang to keep constant watch on Turkic Muslims. The local government has said the approach is necessary for security in the area.

Those methods have now spread eastward to sedate regions like southwestern China’s Guangxi, home to the country’s largest minority group, the Zhuang, who follow an animist-based faith, and have little recent history of ethnic conflict.

In Tibet, where controls are already strict, local authorities launched a new program of “military-style” vocational training for rural Tibetans and passed new regulations to promote ethnic unity and patriotism in the region. Previously unreported government documents show that Chinese security forces are seeking to install cutting-edge surveillance and predictive policing systems that can forecast the activities of “people of interest.”

The United Front Work Department, the Communist Party organization in charge of ethnic policy, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

China has 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities, and for decades, the ruling Communist Party believed they would gradually integrate into the country’s dominant Han Chinese culture.

Under Mr. Xi, the party has run out of patience with that model. The country’s strongest leader in decades, Mr. Xi aims to build China into a dominant economic and technological power on par with the great dynasties of the country’s past. His nationalist China Dream rests on the notion that the country’s 1.4 billion people share a common identity.

“Forging a collective consciousness of the Chinese nation is central to achieving the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” Mr. Xi said at a government conference on ethnic policy last year.

China already is among the world’s most homogeneous countries, with Han Chinese accounting for more than 90% of the population. It also has millions of traditionally nomadic Tibetans and Mongols, Turkic Muslims, groups with cultural links to Southeast Asia, and others, each with their own separate languages, beliefs and customs.

Several of China’s largest minority groups—and those most culturally distant from Han Chinese—live along the country’s periphery, in resource-rich border regions that have historically slipped in and out of Han Chinese control. Just as he has taken a harder line on Hong Kong, Mr. Xi sees controlling China’s ethnic minority regions as central to shoring up the nation’s territorial integrity.

Earlier this month, Mr. Xi replaced the ethnic Mongolian head of the government agency in charge of ethnic affairs with a Han Chinese official. It was the first time a nonminority person was appointed to lead the agency in more than half a century.

“Under Xi Jinping, the China Dream is the dream of Han-centric cultural nationalism,” said James Leibold, a professor who specializes in China’s ethnic policy at La Trobe University in Australia. Chinese leaders believe “the party needs to be involved in manufacturing this stability and this national belonging.”

Autonomy vs. assimilation

China took a different approach under the Leninist system adopted by Mao Zedong in 1949, when ethnic minorities were seen as needing extra space and assistance before they could overcome their economic backwardness and join the proletarian revolution.

Although the Communist Party always retained ultimate control, Mao set up a system of autonomous regions, prefectures and counties that granted minorities important posts in local governments. Many benefited from state investment. Members of minority groups also got exemptions from China’s one-child policy and extra points on the country’s all-important college entrance exam.

Public opinion took a turn against the system between 2008 and 2009, when violent ethnic riots hit the capitals of Tibet and Xinjiang. That sparked discussions about the fairness of preferential policies for minorities, with increasing numbers of Han Chinese describing Tibetans and Xinjiang’s Uighurs as ungrateful.

A renowned Chinese economist named Hu Angang and a counterterrorism researcher named Hu Lianhe channeled those frustrations, pushing for what they called a second generation of ethnic policies that would actively eradicate ethnic differences.

The two Hus, who aren’t related, took inspiration from the American idea of a melting pot, which they said helped “maintain the U.S.’s national unity, development vitality, and social order” by minimizing cultural divisions and creating a shared identity. Citing the collapse of the Soviet Union, they cast the “fusion” of ethnicities as a matter of national security.

Others argued the government should focus instead on reining in the discrimination, heavy-handed policing and economic exploitation they said were fueling ethnic strife.

Mr. Xi initially kept quiet on the debate, at least in public, but became more vocal following deadly terrorist attacks in Beijing and in the southwestern city of Kunming in 2014 that police attributed to Uighur separatists from Xinjiang.

During a government conference on ethnic affairs following the Kunming attack, Mr. Xi rejected calls to do away with China’s system of minority autonomous regions, which is enshrined in China’s constitution, but doubled down on ethnic fusion.

Participants at the meeting resolved to “bury the seed of love for the Chinese nation deeply in every child’s heart.”

In a written response to questions, Hu Angang, the Tsinghua University economist, said that compared with other countries, “China’s policies towards ethnic minorities and ethnic regions have all been the most successful.”

Hu Lianhe didn’t respond to questions submitted through the United Front Work Department, his employer.

Spreading elsewhere

The shift in policy has transformed Xinjiang. Since late 2016, authorities there have built thousands of new police stations, installed billions of dollars in advanced surveillance technology, razed religious sites and constructed a regionwide network of internment camps in an unprecedented effort to monitor and control the region’s Turkic Muslim population.

Mr. Xi has pushed back against critics of the party’s actions in Xinjiang, pronouncing Beijing’s strategy in the region “completely correct” at a conference in September.

One element of the approach now being replicated elsewhere: small “convenience police stations” that offer public amenities like wireless internet and emergency medicine while also serving as surveillance collection depots and staging points for rapid responses to security threats. The stations aren’t publicly identified as targeting ethnic minorities, though areas with large minority populations have been among their most prominent adopters.

In Nanning, the capital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southeast China, authorities rolled out more than two dozen “police work and service stations” in 2019 that, similar to their counterparts in Xinjiang, are connected to the city’s digital security-management system, according to local police, which described the stations as “counterterrorism bridgeheads.”

Qinghai province’s Golmud city, which sits on the Tibetan plateau and where ethnic minorities account for more than 30% of the population, put 13 convenience police stations into service in 2019, in what local police describe as an “innovative” upgrade to their ability to ensure social stability and harmony.

In northwestern China’s Gansu province, home to roughly 13 million Muslim Hui, the capital of Lanzhou has upgraded police posts into a network of convenience police stations that house combat teams from the city’s “police tactical unit,” a dedicated counterterrorism force, according to the local Communist Party law-enforcement commission. “Small police stations build great peace,” the commission said in an online article in May.

None of the three cities has been the site of terrorist attacks or serious ethnic violence in recent years.

The Nanning, Golmud and Lanzhou governments didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Evidence suggests the Communist Party’s ethnic fusion campaign is intensifying in Tibet.

Since the start of the year, local officials have put more than half a million rural and nomadic Tibetans through a vocational training program to improve their Mandarin and address their “backward thinking,” according to research by Adrian Zenz, a scholar and critic of Chinese ethnic policy. The program, which ships newly trained workers around the region, “shows a disturbing number of close similarities” to policies carried out in Xinjiang, Mr. Zenz wrote in a September report based on public Chinese government documents.

Tibet’s local government introduced a statute in January outlining the transformation of the autonomous region into a “model area of ethnic unity and progress,” which requires weaving ethnic fusion into a swath of Tibetan life, including religious teaching and activities.

Government procurement documents posted in November show Tibet’s Public Security Bureau joining Xinjiang’s security forces in pursuing a new phase of surveillance and criminal investigation system upgrades provided by Beijing-based technology firm Founder International Co. Details in the public version of the Tibet contract were sparse, but contracts that Founder signed with other local police departments to install the same system describe its ability to sift data—including from bank accounts, social media and cellphones—to create portraits of targets’ lifestyles and social circles.

Founder didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Procurement documents issued the same month show that Tibet police were seeking to develop a database of “people of interest” as part of a national “sweep away the evil” anticrime campaign that human-rights activists say has been used to target dissidents in the region. According to the documents, authorities want to pair the database with a predictive surveillance system that “through a variety of fine-grained graphical reports, offers the ability to forecast criminal activity by gangsters and evil forces while providing definitive data for crackdowns and prosecution.”

The Tibetan government didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Next generation

Chinese authorities still celebrate the appearance of diversity, including at major political gatherings, where state media lavish attention on minority delegates in full ceremonial dress. But that tolerance for cultural difference is superficial, according to Dilnur Reyhan, a Uighur sociologist at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris.

Through a mix of assimilation and appropriation under Mr. Xi, China is “creating a new form of colonial identity,” she says.

In some instances, compulsory assimilation efforts have led to pushback—a rarity under Mr. Xi.

Officials on the tropical island province of Hainan stirred outrage in September when they attempted to ban young female members of the Utsuls, a local Muslim ethnic group with a population of around 10,000, from wearing head coverings in school. The government reversed course after public anger and class boycotts, according to several Utsuls. Construction on one prominent mosque funded by community donations has been halted for months over its dome and other non-Chinese architectural features, they said.

Inner Mongolia’s local government announced the plan to push Mandarin-language instruction and phase in national textbooks in August. Thousands of students across the region boycotted classes and took to the streets in response, according to residents and Mongol rights activists.

The Inner Mongolian and Hainan governments didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In Tongliao, a heavily Mongol city of more than three million in eastern Inner Mongolia, residents said the new education policy was implemented despite the pushback.

A young mother said Mongols in the city were still upset at the changes, but felt helpless. “It’s government policy,” she said. “How do we fight it?”

Chun Han Wong contributed to this article.