Is China at war with the West? Hu Jintao, China’s leader, evidently thinks so, and to go by his recent words and actions, the greatest threats are blockbuster movies and reality TV. While the state has been increasing its restrictions on outside cultural products and keeping old barriers in place—limiting the number of foreign movies to 20 a year, for instance—Hu brought the scaremongering to a new level in a recent essay. “We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,” he writes in Qiushi, the leading Communist Party magazine.

Hu deserves credit for recognizing that the standing of his country’s culture—and, more particularly, its influence abroad—is “not commensurate with China’s international status.” What he misses is that the root of the problem isn’t foreign infiltration, but China’s own repressive government, which has forfeited its claim to soft power by acting increasingly repressive at home and belligerent abroad. Hu’s very essay is a contradiction in terms: Why would a government that is so bullying as to demand an end to “excessive entertainment” expect that its own cultural offerings would be welcomed with open arms?

In his Qiushi essay, Hu Jintao did not discuss, among other things, censorship. And that omission highlights the most important problem with Mr. Hu’s slogan-filled rant. Communist leaders these days give the impression of being an especially insecure lot, an indication of the increasing volatility in Chinese society. There may have been as many as 280,000 “mass incidents” in China in 2010, way up from the 80,000 or so in the middle of last decade. Yet it is not the growing number of demonstrations that must worry officials—it is the increasing violence. China is not only seeing increased protests and strikes, but also insurrections, riots, and bombings. This is what Hu Jintao is trying to get at with his calls for ideological warfare against outsiders. There is, as he suggests, a struggle going on in the minds of the population, and he’s right that Communist and authoritarian ideals are losing ground to democratic principles and Western values.

But what does any of this have to do with popular TV? In the minds of Communist Party functionaries, these shows are corrupted irredeemably by their Western origins. A few shows, like Super Girls, have incorporated audience voting, a daring concept for a dictatorial state. Moreover, this “vulgar” programming has been growing so fast that it is crowding out more ideologically inspiring fare. But Beijing authorities put an end to that. Among other changes earlier this month, dating show Take Me Out was replaced by Ordinary Hero, which promotes socialist virtues.

China has seen the same dynamic at work at movie theaters, with Hollywood blockbusters drawing far larger audiences than Beijing’s lavishly funded historical productions, such as last September’s Xinhai Revolution, to commemorate the fall of the Qing dynasty, and The Founding of a Party, released last June to mark the 90th anniversary of China’s leading political organization. It is not that these films fail to resonate with China’s audiences—for many people they do tap into a deep reservoir of national pride—but it is that, after a lifetime of incessant propaganda, the Chinese bristle at being told what to watch.