Bubble tea or Boba, which originated in Taiwan in the 1980s, was adopted by China and the Chinese companies made it a global craze, a $16 billion industry. Like all Chinese bubbles, it too turned out to be ephemeral and in May 2024, the BBC carried a story, “Is China’s tea bubble about to burst?” The bane of excessive competition, plummeting prices and mass closures hit the Boba too. The BBC article erred on one count; Chinese bubbles do not burst. These are more like leaking balloons, deflating slowly, till they lose relevance.

The foundation of China’s present regime is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Party ideology has, over decades, evolved from a coherent doctrine to a flexible system of governance, a stabilising narrative. It is now adaptive and selective and has become increasingly detached from the economic and social realities. The CCP ideology itself has become a form of ephemeral bubble; not entirely false but inflated and sustained for political utility rather than doctrinal integrity.

The transformation occurred across three distinct phases, corresponding to the Mao, Deng and Xi eras. Under Mao Zedong, ideology was rigid, totalitarian, and deeply embedded in both governance and society. Marxism-Leninism, filtered through Maoist interpretation, dictated not only economic policy but also social organisation, cultural contours and individual identity. Political campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution reflected an ideological inflexibility in which deviation was treated as an existential threat. The system’s coherence came at immense human and economic cost; more than 50 million Chinese starved to death during the Great famine and more were killed during the Cultural Revolution.

More than human deaths, lamentable as these are, the events created distrust and heavily eroded the social contract that people had formed with the CCP during the original Communist revolution. What was initially an enthusiastic participation by the young Chinese in the massive social experiment, became in the later years of Mao, a change imposed heavy-handedly. In a society with a very strong concept of filial piety, the Party sought to turn children against their parents and denounce them as reactionaries. The fact that filial piety survived those events shows that the Party ideology had become a mask, at divergence from the core values of the society, in short, a bubble sustained by the hot air of propaganda, surveillance and coercion.

The post-Mao era under Deng Xiaoping marked a decisive shift. Ideology was not abandoned, but subordinated. Deng’s formulation, “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice,” captured the emergence of pragmatic governance. Market reforms, foreign investment, and decentralization were justified not as departures from socialism, but as its evolution. This marked the beginning of what can be described as the shift from Marxian rigidity to “ideological elasticity”: the capacity of the Party to reinterpret doctrine in order to accommodate policy shifts. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” became less a defined model and more of a legitimizing umbrella under which contradictory policies could coexist.

During the Deng era, economic liberalisation and the emergence of millionaires and billionaires coexisted with events like the Tiananmen Square massacre of protesting students by the tanks of the People’s Liberation Army. During this period, it became increasingly clear that China was focussed on becoming economically, militarily and geopolitically powerful and for that goal, the social contract with the Chinese was not a necessity. People had signed on the dotted line while accepting Communist rule and now that was unerasable, notwithstanding the fact that the current generation had no role in that acquiescence. The state claimed that the social contract now was that the Chinese had bargained their political freedom for economic prosperity.

Under Xi Jinping, ideology has reasserted its visibility but not its rigidity. “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” has been elevated into the Party constitution, accompanied by intensified propaganda, enforced Party-discipline, and ideological education. However, this revival differs fundamentally from Maoist orthodoxy. It is less about prescribing a fixed ideological line and more about consolidating political authority. Ideology, in this phase, operates as what may be termed “narrative infrastructure”: a system of symbols, slogans, and frameworks that provide coherence to policy after the fact, rather than guiding it beforehand.

This distinction is critical. In a traditional ideological system, doctrine is a check on decision-making by defining acceptable boundaries. In contemporary China, those boundaries are fluid. The state can simultaneously promote market competition and suppress private capital, advocate globalization while preparing for economic decoupling, and invoke socialist principles while tolerating significant inequality and a weak welfare-umbrella. These contradictions do not represent ideological evolution in the classical sense; they reflect a system in which ideology has become instrumental rather than foundational.

The consequences of this shift are two-fold. In the short term, ideological flexibility enhances regime adaptability. The CCP can recalibrate policy without appearing inconsistent, as new directions are framed as natural extensions of existing doctrine. This capacity has been central to China’s economic rise and its ability to navigate crises. However, in the long term, this same flexibility erodes ideological credibility. When doctrine can justify any policy, it ceases to provide meaningful guidance or belief.

The pretence-of-ideology bubble under Xi Jinping has a bigger leak; the economic bubble is leaking due to off-the-cuff policy shifts. Whether it was the marginalisation of the iconic billionaire Jack Ma because he was becoming too big for comfort, or the destruction of the real-estate sector by Xi’s three red lines, the direction was clear; nothing else shall be allowed to grow big enough to influence Chinese society in competition with the CCP. The 1989 crackdown by Jiang Zemin on Falun Gong was ideological; no thought-process or belief system could be allowed to stand and stare at the Party, eye to eye. Xi’s crackdown is personal, any manifestation of power - political, military, economic or religious, is perceived as a threat to Xi’s totalitarian control and his everlasting rule and hence, it has to be eliminated.

An ideological bubble, when the economy too seems to be a slowly leaking bubble, has the potential to create the metaphorical last nail in the coffin. Today, ideology in China has expanded beyond its underlying substance, sustained only by belief and repetition and has to be constantly reinforced by coercively persuasive instruments of the state. The Party continues to invest heavily in the increasingly fragile ideological bubble through education campaigns and ‘re-education’ when the former fails, as was done on a massive scale in Xinjiang. Yet, media narratives and political rituals like the meetings of the 2,878-member National People’s Congress or of the 2,296 delegates at the CCP Congress, where even clapping has to be synchronised, have to strive ever harder to keep the ideological bubble inflated, with leaks being constantly facilitated by the social media.

The ideological bubble is not going to burst anytime soon in spite of signs of collapse, visible in the increasing frequency of purges at the highest level of the Party and Military. Unlike the Soviet Union’s implosion, the CCP has so far demonstrated a greater economic adaptability, a factor on which the Soviet Party had failed; if its people have lost the urge to spend, it has boosted exports, keeping the state economically powerful. Yet, the Party is worried, talking increasingly in its internal documents, about the dangers of “historical nihilism,” condemnation or devaluation of any hero, foundations of the party or its putative achievements. While dangers to Party stability and economic growth are all too visible, the Chinese state’s dependence on mere narrative control and on the assumption that belief can be managed indefinitely, will need ever-increasing effort to sustain the ideological bubble. / DAILY WORLD /

( R N prasher is a former IAS officer. The views expressed are his personal.)