The Mass Line Education Programme

Abstract

In this chapter, we will present the Mass Line Education Programme as a set of techniques for governing the self. In this chapter, we will briefly review themes related to the governing of the self with regard to what we have developed in terms of the anti-corruption campaign and the anti-undesirable working styles programme in order to link the technology of governing others and the technology of governing the self under the Mass Line Education Programme. That is, we will address the problem and expectations with regard to governing the self included in the Mass Line Education Programme in order to explore how officials are expected to govern themselves and, in turn, are supposed to govern others. We will elaborate on how the dissemination of the Party’s precepts, as techniques of governing, has been institutionalized thus enabling us to link this institutionalization of techniques of governing to the techniques of the self. We will demonstrate that in many ways the Mass Line Education Programme is an attempt to form a series of technologies of governing the self, which can be interdependently divided into: reflexivity in the form of memory (gives access to the truth), meditation (carries out the test) and method (fixes the certainty that will serve as the criterion for all possible truth). By so doing, we will prepare readers for engaging with what we develop in the following chapters, with regard to the actual technologies of the self operating in this context.