Mao’s Politics of Compliance

by James Lindsay

Mao Zedong took over China with a strategy that will sadly feel unsettlingly familiar to us. Because he was able to mobilize hundreds of millions of people to comply, often enthusiastically, with his catastrophic programs, an adequate name for that strategy would be the politics of compliance. Understanding the basic premises and mechanisms of the politics of compliance is necessary for us today because these same methods are being used maliciously on us, thus require resisting, and because familiarity with these tactics at least partially inoculates a person from their powerful effects.

In general, regarding a politics of compliance strategy, there are three segments of the population. First, there are those who comply. Second, there are those who resist compliance. Third, there are those who aren’t sure what to do. The politics of compliance targets all three groups in different ways with a single set of tactics. The goals of the politics of compliance are simple: to get as many people to comply as possible and to justify the dehumanization and demonization of anyone who refuses to comply.

Mao’s politics of compliance begins by dividing the population not into three but into two. Those who comply are “the people.” Those who resist are “the enemies of the people.” Those in between are treated as representatives of both depending on the circumstances. Everything is done in the name of “the people,” and everything that isn’t working is blamed on “the enemies of the people.” The objective is to force people to see things from the perspective of “the people,” which is to say from the perspective of compliance.

Those who comply have the psychology of their compliance weaponized into hatred for those who refuse to comply and even for those who merely drag their feet. They become the most savage weapon in the hands of the tyrants. The mechanism is essentially hatecraft. They have complied. They have done things they wouldn’t otherwise have done. They have willingly sacrificed their liberties for a cause or a “greater good” defined on the terms of the Regime. They did so because they were promised the bad things would stop, or a better future will arrive, when people comply. The problem is those who won’t comply, especially those who refuse to comply. They are led through these half-bogus promises and the psychology of their own compliance to hate the people who are keeping the promises from being fulfilled.

Take the example of the pandemic, though we have a dozen to choose from. There were those who socially distanced, locked themselves down, wore masks, avoided plausible treatments, wore masks, cleaned everything they owned, and eventually started taking experimental shots. They were promised “two weeks to slow the spread,” and when that didn’t work, it was because not enough people took it seriously or did it right. The suffering of “the people” was caused by the allegedly selfish enemies of the people who refused the new program. This dynamic multiplied through each successive stage, culminating with the shots. Society has to stay closed even after a year and a half, they were told, because too many people refused to get their shots, and the new variants were always coming. Their lives were completely upended, often destroyed, and it wasn’t the Regime’s fault for (deliberately) mishandling the situation; it was on the people who wouldn’t comply with the dictates of mismanagement.

Mao described the application of this formula with the structure “unity, criticism, unity.” “That means,” he said, “starting from the desire for unity, resolving contradictions through criticism or struggle, and arriving at a new unity on a new basis.” In the pandemic, we were told “we’re all in this together,” a message of unity. “We can get through this.” Or, we would be able to, but some among the population refuse to comply. They’re not masking, they’re not staying home, they’re not locking down, they’re taking off-label drugs, they won’t get their shots, so the nation has to stay closed. They need to be criticized and struggled for their selfish attitudes so we can “move forward together.” We can move into a new unity on a new public-health basis in which the public health authorities and then eventually the World Health Organization have total sovereignty over all “health emergencies” going forward. Only then will things go back to normal, or even become a new, better normal.

The compliant become obsessed in these conditions. They’ve done their part, so others need to do theirs. Things are bad, but there’s a bright future when enough people—maybe everyone—complies. The feet-draggers are pressured into high rates of compliance, at which point many are converted into the compliant zealots. The resistance needs to be crushed. Mao said the full power of the “People’s Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat” was to be unleashed on them, stripping them of their rights to speech, to vote, and to property until they complied. The Biden Administration and a majority of American state governors did and/or threatened exactly this to their people to the fullest extent they were able to do so under the law, and sometimes well outside of it.

This is the essence of the politics of compliance. It’s mechanism is primarily the relentless application of the message of hatecraft through a Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus and a Vertically Integrated Institutional Array. The first of these is the propaganda machine. Every institutional outlet says the same thing, often in the same words, from offices of politics to institutional authorities to media and even education on all levels. There’s only one truth, one “sacred science,” and we all have to agree to it—or else. The second of these is similar but enacts consonant policy in lockstep as broadly, rapidly, and simultaneously as can be achieved. These forces create the power of the politics of compliance.

There is a hope, however. That hope is actually rather simple. A manipulation exposed is a manipulation no longer trusted. A manipulative agency exposed is an agency no longer trusted. A manipulative institution exposed is an institution no longer trusted. Without trust, there is less compliance. Without sufficient compliance in the mobilized segment of the population, there is no successful politics of compliance. It all falls apart.

That’s our role. Our role is to love, seek, share, and defend the truth. It is to expose the mechanisms of hatecraft and the Maoist evil of the politics of compliance. It is to chip away at the trust those institutions no longer deserve until it all collapses around them. It isn’t just that this can be done, either. It’s happening at scale already. It’s our job to keep this fire of truth and liberty burning and spread it as far and wide as possible.

Author’s note: These comments are derived from my remarks given at the fifth International Crisis Summit, held in Washington, D.C., on February 23, 2024.