In June 2025, a teacher at a middle school in Ruijin, Jiangxi, was reported to have made students kneel in a row to write self-criticisms (检讨). The video caused wide debate.
A commentary in the Yangtse Evening Post criticized such humiliating discipline. It also named the “absurd” rule found in some schools that a self-criticism with too few characters brings double punishment.
At a “democratic life meeting” (民主生活会), the members of a Party leadership team criticize themselves and one another. In 1990, the Party Center began to require Party organizations at county level and above, and especially their principal leaders, to hold these meetings properly. The Politburo itself held one on December 24 and 25, 2020.
The method goes back to Mao Zedong. His essay On Contradiction, first published in Yan’an in August 1937, says that contradictions within the Communist Party are resolved by “criticism and self-criticism.”
负荆请罪, to carry thorns and ask for punishment, comes from Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian. General Lian Po of Zhao was angry that Lin Xiangru, a man of humble birth, had been given a higher rank, although Lian Po had won great merit in battle. He announced that he would humiliate Lin if he met him. Lin avoided him for the sake of the state.
When Lian Po learned why, he was ashamed. He went to Lin carrying thorns and asked to be punished. The two became friends who would die for each other.
A zuiji zhao (罪己诏) was an edict in which a Chinese emperor admitted his own faults and changed his policies. Emperor Wen of Han issued the first formal one. The last came from the Xuantong Emperor of the Qing, after the 1911 revolution broke out.
The scholar Xiao Han counted these edicts in the Twenty-Five Histories. He found 79 emperors who had issued one.
In January 1962, 7,118 leading cadres met in Beijing for the largest central work conference the Party had ever held. Its main subject was the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward. On January 30, Mao Zedong told them: “Whatever mistakes the Center has made, I am directly responsible for them, and indirectly I also have a share.”
Mao and other leaders made self-criticisms at the conference. Afterwards, Mao withdrew for a time to the “second line,” and Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping ran the daily work of the Center.
坦白从宽，抗拒从严. “Leniency for those who confess, severity for those who resist.”
In October 2018, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress revised the Criminal Procedure Law. A main point of the revision was to strengthen the system of leniency for suspects who admit guilt and accept punishment (认罪认罚从宽制度).
In August 2017, a Beijing newspaper published a report on poor hygiene in the kitchens of two Beijing restaurants of the hotpot chain Haidilao. A reporter had worked there undercover. On August 25, Haidilao posted an apology letter on Weibo. “After investigation, the company believes that the problems disclosed in the media reports are true,” it said. They “exposed problems in our management.”
A second statement said the incidents came from deeper management problems and that the main responsibility lay with the board. Commentators summed up the response in three lines: “I carry the pot, I correct the mistake, I keep paying the staff.” The wording comes from commentators, not from the company’s statements.
过而不改，是谓过矣 To err and not correct it, that is truly an error. (Confucius, Analects)
吾日三省吾身 Each day I examine myself on three points. (Zengzi, Analects)
人谁无过，过而能改，善莫大焉 Who is without faults? To err and be able to correct it, there is no greater good. (Zuo Zhuan)
On June 27, 1981, the Sixth Plenum of the 11th Central Committee unanimously adopted the Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic.
It described the Cultural Revolution as “internal turmoil launched by a leader by mistake and used by counter-revolutionary cliques, which brought serious disaster to the Party, the state and the people of all ethnic groups.”
In September 2023, during a livestream, the star sales host Li Jiaqi rebuked viewers who said that a 79-yuan eyebrow pencil from the brand Florasis was expensive. “Where is it expensive?” he asked.
In the early hours of September 11, he posted an apology on Weibo. That evening, he apologized again during his livestream. The anger did not die down.