For example, inmates often are isolated when they first arrive in prison and then are gradually reintegrated into the group. They are slowly coerced into obeying prison personnel, thug-like cell bosses and reformed prisoners. Various tactics are deployed to that end, both inducements (more food, sleep or human contact) and punishments (deprivation, torture, ostracization). The experience of shame, guilt, remorse and confession is supposed to bring about the prisoners’ conversion and renewal. This process is intentionally destructive: It is, the contemporary philosopher Tu Weiming has explained, a necessary journey of “pain and suffering” in the pursuit of human improvement.

In theory, the harshness of the process was supposed to be tempered by the voluntary desire to improve oneself and by the expression of empathy toward people who fell short. But C.C.P. apparatchiks, in their pursuit of authoritarianism, have sidelined those mitigating factors. Their forging efforts have largely relied on coercion rather than moral persuasion, and their often ruthless methods have killed tens of millions of Chinese citizens over the years.

Many of the people the C.C.P. has tried to reform were subjected to “administrative sanction” (行政处罚) rather than criminal proceedings and placed in camps where they underwent “re-education through labor” (laojiao, 劳教). The laojiao system was formally abolished in 2013 after it was criticized for violating individual rights, yet re-education continues today — and not only in Xinjiang — under the guise of compulsory legal and moral training or tutelage. Both the ordinary and the famous can be subjected to it, often against their will and without legal recourse.

In 2014, the actor Huang Haibo underwent six months of “custody and education” after he solicited a prostitute. The star actress Fan Bingbing disappeared for several months this year — then publicly confessed that she had committed tax fraud and praised the C.C.P.

It’s a grass-roots effort, too. In the name of “rural revitalization,” C.C.P. officials in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang are calling for “the standardization of peasant thought and behavior.” The program is just one part of a national, three-year action plan by the party’s Central Committee “to raise the ideological and moral suzhi of Chinese peasants in order to refresh and revise their simple and honest character.”

When applied in Xinjiang, Tibet or other borderlands, ganhua seems to amount to a “civilizing project,” as the anthropologist Stevan Harrell has said, which aims to create a uniform populace under the banner of a single “Chinese nation” (中华民族). But it is more than that. In the 1960s, the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called Chinese-style thought control — with its dogmatic belief in absolute truth and compulsion to mend the incorrigible — “ideological totalism.”

As Lifton noted, ideological totalism in China is not a continuous process, but a cyclical phenomenon. It elicits a mix of emotions. Some subjects comply, others withdraw; a few may even be enthusiastic at first. But over time the suffocating nature of repression also tends to breed resentment and resistance, and those in turn can bring about even more repressive methods of control.