Sense Hofstede

Category: Analyses

  • China is klaar met het Westen, maar niet met Europa

    Terwijl het Westen een existentiële crisis doormaakte, was in Peking de jaarlijkse parlementszitting. Zorgvuldig uitgekozen afgevaardigden hoorden hoe de Chinese regering doorgaat met haar ambitieuze plannen voor een nieuw tijdperk.

    Xi Jinping heeft het nooit zo op het Westen gehad. Nu ziet hij het Atlantische bondgenootschap uiteenvallen terwijl zijn investeringen in industrie vruchten afwerpt. Het ‘Mondiale Zuiden’ lonkt. Toch kan Peking nog niet zomaar zonder Europa.

    Om te begrijpen welk wereldbeeld in het Nationaal Volkscongres tentoon werd gespreid, is de persconferentie van buitenlandminister Wang Yi instructief. Na de verplichte loyaliteitsuitingen aan Xi was de tweede vraag gelijk voor het Russische staatspersbureau TASS.

    Wangs antwoordde dat de vriendschap tussen China en Rusland dient als baanbrekend voorbeeld voor een ‘nieuwe soort grootmachtbetrekkingen’. Wang wees op de noodzaak van een ‘correcte’ blik op de geschiedenis van de Tweede Wereldoorlog, die Peking en Moskou samen vochten en wonnen. De naoorlogse orde en het VN-systeem die daaruit voortkwamen moeten worden beschermd.

    Wat hij daaronder verstaat, werd duidelijk bij een vraag over Taiwan. Pekings claim op het onafhankelijke eiland in twijfel trekken zou niet alleen „absurd en gevaarlijk” zijn, maar ook het gezag van de VN en de naoorlogse orde ondermijnen. Zijn nadruk op steun van het Mondiale Zuiden voor Chinese initiatieven die deze orde zouden verbeteren, illustreerde hoe Peking de Westerse visie op internationaal recht achterhaald vindt.

    De huidige trans-Atlantische spanningen zullen voor Xi een bevestiging zijn, dat het Westen ondertussen zelf wel uit elkaar valt. Peking richt zich op de VN – waar het Mondiale Zuiden een meerderheid heeft – en op het bouwen van eigen structuren. Toch lonkt Peking nog wel steeds naar samenwerking met Europa, ook in de persconferentie van Wang.

    Verschillende media berichten van een diplomatiek charmeoffensief richting Europa. Onderministers bezoeken Europese hoofdsteden. Chinese diplomaten steunen Europese betrokkenheid bij de gesprekken tussen Oekraïne en de Verenigde Staten. Veelzeggend is echter dat Peking geen concrete nieuwe toezeggingen doet richting de Europese Unie.

    Het Chinese leiderschap ziet de geopolitieke omwenteling als bevestiging van het eigen gelijk. Wang Yi is niet de enige die duidelijk maakt, dat Peking hoopt dat Europa de gang naar Canossa maakt. Men vindt het tijd dat Europa handelt naar het inzicht, dat China altijd al gelijk had over het gevaar van vertrouwen op de Verenigde Staten.

    Europa had echter gegronde zorgen over China. Die zijn niet minder geworden. Sander Tordoir wijst er in Foreign Policy terecht op dat, in vergelijking met de meer uitgeholde Verenigde Staten, Europa nog een sterkere industriële basis heeft. Deze industrie is wat Europeanen aan het werk houdt en herbewapening mogelijk maakt.

    Naast Trump is een grote bedreiging voor dit Europese machtsfundament de groeiende dominantie van Chinese fabrieken en de daardoor afnemende vraag naar Europese producten. Deze situatie zal alleen maar erger worden: hij is het doel van economische plannen die ook de afgelopen weken weer bevestigd werden. 

    China blijft bovendien dicht bij Rusland staan. Sommige mensen vrezen dat Trump en Poetin elkaar vinden in denken in invloedsferen. Peking sprak vanaf het begin van de volledige invasie echter al in termen die Russische inmenging in Oost-Europa legitimeerden.

    Xi wil dat China de meest geavanceerde technologische industriemacht in de wereld wordt. Peking is een eind op weg. Het probleem voor het vervolg is, dat de Chinese consument zelf te weinig besteedt. Ook het Mondiale Zuiden kan die dure producten niet allemaal absorberen.

    Nu de Verenigde Staten op slot gaan achter Trumps tariefmuren, is de rijke Europese gemeenschappelijke markt de belangrijkste uitweg voor de hoogwaardige Chinese productie. Dat geeft Brussel macht. De geopolitieke situatie van Europa is benard. Maar gelijk toegeven, dat onderkent onze vele belangen én sterktes.

  • Xi Jinpings Chinese Droom maakt handelsconflict met Europa onvermijdelijk

    Elektrische auto’s zijn de inzet van oplopende handelsspanningen tussen China en de Europese Unie. Chinese staatssteun zou een bedreiging zijn voor de Europese auto-industrie, een essentiële pijler van de Europese economie. Brussel is een onderzoek begonnen. In juni kwamen er al voorlopige invoerheffingen. Daarop nam Peking al cognac, brandy en varkensvlees uit Europa in het vizier.

    Dat weerhield Brussel er niet van door te gaan. Nu reageert China op de volgende stap in het EU-onderzoek door zijn pijlen te richten op Europese zuivelproducten. Dreigende geluiden in de richting van Europese auto’s met verbrandingsmotoren worden ook concreter. Een handelsconflict lijkt nog lastig te vermijden. Tegelijkertijd moet Europa niet onderschatten welke troefkaart het in handen heeft dankzij de gemeenschappelijke markt. 

    Het is duidelijk dat Peking een gerichte campagne is begonnen. Doel is om een meerderheid van EU-lidstaten te overtuigen tegen te stemmen, wanneer in de herfst de definitieve beslissing genomen moet worden genomen over het onderzoek naar elektrische auto’s. Duitsland was vooraf al tegen. Nederland moet er echter vanuit gaan, dat de meeste EU-lidstaten niet anders kunnen dan doorzetten.

    De economische botsing is namelijk structureel. Subsidies waren altijd al ingebouwd in het Chinese politieke systeem. Nu vereisen de plannen van president Xi Jinping dat buitenlanders nog meer delen van hun industrieën opofferen aan goedkope producten uit China. Daarmee brengt hij zijn land op ramkoers met de halve wereld. Nu gaat het conflict namelijk om de lucratiefste, hoogwaardige producten.

    Xi Jinping introduceerde in 2012 de Chinese Droom. Doel is de ‘terugkeer’ van China naar zijn ‘historische’ rechtmatige positie als grootmacht. Voor rechtgeaarde marxist Xi is een fundament van economische kracht hierbij essentieel. Juist aan dat fundament schort het de laatste tijd. De Chinese consumptie is zwak sinds de coronapandemie. Dat komt boven op de vastgoedcrisis, begonnen met maatregelen om onhoudbare speculatie een halt toe te roepen.

    Stimulans blijft echter uit. De communisten in Peking menen dat ‘gratis geld’ de Chinese burger net zo lui zou maken als de decadente Europeanen al zijn. Volgens hen is een economie die tastbare producten maakt in plaats van ongrijpbare diensten consumeert een vereiste voor de macht die de Chinese Droom mogelijk maakt.

    Het ‘nieuwe ontwikkelingsparadigma’ (xīn fāzhǎn géjú 新发展格局) van Xi uit mei 2020 voorziet hiertoe in de zogenaamde ‘dubbele circulatie’ (guónèi guójì shuāng xúnhuán 国内国际双循环), twee onafhankelijke economische sferen. Een onafhankelijke ‘binnenlandse circulatie’ moet de Chinese economie beschermen tegen sancties en schokken. In de ‘internationale circulatie’ moeten de mondiale leveringsketens juist afhankelijk worden van China, wat Peking geld en macht oplevert.

    Het zijn de technologieën van de toekomst die de werelds afhankelijkheid van China moeten versterken. Dat staat bekend onder weer een ander xiïsme als de ‘nieuwe productieve krachten’ (xīn zhí shēngchǎnlì 新质生产力). Dit zijn de technieken achter elektrische auto’s en kunstmatige intelligentie – niet om streaming en spellen. Brussels subsidieonderzoek is een bewijs van Pekings succes.

    De Wall Street Journal legt uit hoe dit er in de praktijk uitziet. Onder de noemer van „eerst maken, dan breken” (xiān lì, hòu pò 先立后破) zet Peking in op high-tech industrieën waarin China graag dominant wil worden. Ondertussen moeten de oude ‘laagwaardige’ maakindustrieën nog behouden blijven. Het gevolg is dat overheden elkaar overtreffen in subsidies voor nieuwe producenten terwijl verlieslijdende fabrieken ook in de lucht worden gehouden.

    Teruglopende bouw is echter funest voor de vraag naar bijvoorbeeld staal. Onzekere consumenten hebben minder geld voor nieuwe auto’s. De buitenlandse markt moet daarom uitkomst geven. Als China niet meer consumeert maar wel meer produceert, dan zullen buitenlanders de spullen moeten kopen die Chinese fabrieken maken. Als die buitenlanders niet plotseling veel rijker worden, betekent dit dat de rest van de wereld minder moet produceren.

    Handelsblatt schrijft dat de Duitse industrie een nieuwe China Shock wacht. Westerse bedrijven hebben lang veel geld verdiend door de laagwaardige stappen in hun productieproces naar Chinese fabrieken te verplaatsen. Chinese producenten leerden vlug en konden al snel zélf goedkope producten te maken die het al langer goed doen in ontwikkelingslanden. Nu zijn Chinese techbedrijven en automerken echter opgeklommen naar het hogere segment.

    Chinese merken vormen nu een directe bedreiging voor Westerse kampioenen. Berlijn én Brussel kunnen Pekings succes niet langer negeren. Europa zal de eigen industrie niet helemaal kapot laten gaan om alles vervolgens uit China te importeren. De kortermijnbelangen van Duitse automakers met fabrieken in China wegen uiteindelijk niet op tegen de langtermijnbelangen van het continent. Het begin van die botsing zien we nu.

    Ons voordeel is, dat de Europese markt essentieel is voor het slagen van China’s transitie naar de ‘nieuwe productieve krachten’. De minder kapitaalkrachtige consumenten in ontwikkelingslanden vormen (nu nog) een te kleine markt voor de afzet die de Chinese industriële opwaardering nodig heeft. De Amerikaanse markt is hermetisch gesloten. Consumptie in eigen land blijft achter. De enig overgebleven rijke markt van serieuze grootte is de Europese.

    Bij de exportcontrolemaatregelen die ASML treffen valt nog te twisten of het de Chinese voortgang effectief bevriest. Dit handelsconflict is echter geen complex technisch vraagstuk, maar een simpele economische afweging. Een open vraag is of Peking uit wanhoop aan gaat sturen op een totaal handelsconflict, of dat het uiteindelijk te afhankelijk is van Europese vraag (en componenten) om veel meer dan kaas en cognac tegen te houden. Wat het ook wordt, Nederland kan zich maar beter toeleggen op de juiste uitvoering dan het stoppen van dit onvermijdelijke conflict.

  • The politics of Beautiful Taiwan

    Taiwan’s excellent public broadcaster PTS (公視 gōngshì) has a four-part series on YouTube called ‘Island of Mountains’ (群山之島與不去會死的他們). Thanks to its bilingual English/Mandarin subtitles it is a great way to practice your Chinese. It is also a nice example of a certain stream in Taiwanese politics that is about treasuring and caring for the Ilha Formosa, the Beautiful Island (美麗島 měilì dǎo).

    People who have watched aerial photography film ‘Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above’ (看見台灣) by Chi Po-lin (齊柏林 Qí Bólín) might have recognised the same political message on the need to care for a vulnerable Taiwan. ‘Island of Mountains’ also follows a conservationist in its third episode. But the series also portrays mountaineers back from abroad who get emotional over the realisation that Taiwan too contains magnificent sights.

    Getting to know the Taiwanese landscape is a salving experience for the people presented in the movie. It is also a journey with a long political pedigree. Formosa or the Beautiful Island is not only a common name invoked by pro-Taiwan groups in a show of nationalism. Its discourse is also a political act of breaking with the impositions of orthodox Republic of China (ROC) nationalism that forced Taiwanese to care about China and neglect their own island.

    During the martial law era, state-sanctioned education, literature, and media forced Taiwanese to imagine themselves on a map of China, memorise the sights and wonders of China, appreciate poetry on the natural beauty of China, and care about the suffering caused by the communists in China. Under such circumstances, appreciating the beauty of Taiwan became a radical act. Caring about Taiwan, its people, culture, history, and nature became a way to express one’s opposition to ROC nationalism when open political fights were banned.

    Even now Taiwan still faces the legacy of decades of forced Chinese nationalism, the lingering cultural power of elite Mainlanders from the Blue Camp, and distortions forced on Taiwan by Beijing and other, misunderstanding foreigners. Putting Taiwan front and centre continues to be a political act of defiance against these pressures. Documentaries such as the one by PTS do not only provide us outsiders with an opportunity to practice Mandarin listening skills, but also to practice discerning Taiwanese political history.

  • In Taiwanese politics, the DPP is taking over the KMT’s stable narrative niche

    Now that the DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has begun her second term as President of Taiwan and her defeated KMT opponent Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) has successfully been recalled as Mayor of Kaohsiung, it is useful to look at the changes in the Taiwanese political landscape in recent times. Six years after the Sunflower Movement protests against then President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) over his rapprochement to China and four years after the Democracy Progressive Party (DPP, 民主進步黨) captured the majority in the Legislative Yuan for the first time in history, it seems that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT, 中國國民黨) is no longer the risk-free default choice during elections. In its early years, the DPP had to fight against a negative reputation of its members as provincial rabble-rousers seeking to overthrow the state, more skilled at throwing chairs in the legislature than steering Taiwan’s development. But things have changed. The dynamics of the January 2020 presidential elections and the unrest in Hong Kong only confirm that a sovereign Republic of China Taiwan (中華民國台灣 zhōnghuá mínguó táiwān) is now the status quo in Taiwanese politics. Moreover, the Tsai government‘s globally praised response to the Covid-19 pandemic is the last step in the KMT losing its monopoly on the claim to providing reliable governance, even facing the first successful recall of a mayor. I argue that, in terms of political narrative, it is no longer the case that the DPP’s goals that ask Taiwanese voters to support radical change, but rather that the KMT’s views of Taiwan now require the reporters to risk an uncertain future.

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  • The year of Taiwan’s separation from China is 1895, not 1949

    Apart from the incorrect ‘breakaway province’ cliché, another favourite of the press when writing on Taiwan is to mention that the island was separated from China in 1949, at the end of the Chinese Civil War. In this piece I argue that this is wrong. Taiwan was separated from China in 1895, when the Treaty of Shimonoseki ceded Taiwan to the Japanese Empire. There has been a distinct Taiwanese society ever since. The chaotic 1945–9 period during which it was part of a Nanjing-based Republic of China (ROC) was too short and tenuous to undo this. The post-1949 period was indeed initially dominated by refugees from the Mainland, but they were migrants making a new home in an existing society. The fact that they brought their Chinese cultural background with them and sought to remould Taiwanese society in that light does not change the fact that the end-product was something new and different. The real point of divergence for Taiwan was 1895.

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  • Timeline of the Covid-19 outbreak

    This is my timeline of the outbreak of a novel coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2 that first appeared in Wuhan, China and led to a global Covid-19 pandemic. Besides the events in China, it may be also somewhat slanted to places I take a professional and personal interest in, mostly Singapore, Taiwan, and the Netherlands. Among the many articles previously shared on my Twitter account I rely on, I want to single out the China Change translation of the censored article ‘The Regret of Wuhan’ of China Newsweek, as well as the translated The Initium article ‘Fighting COVID-19 in Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong’. Reporting from AP, Caixin, Reuters and SCMP, and a newsletter by Natasha Loder have been very helpful in understanding the early days. One caveat is that you have to ask yourself what was the content of the ‘report’ when certain persons or institutions warned others, not just note that a report was made.

    I will continue to update this post as more becomes known and as people point out errors and gaps. Updated: 2021/09/14

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  • Stop comparing countries’ Covid-19 numbers!

    As the Covid-19 pandemic rages around the world, we should not let our desire for clear hard numbers blind us for the pitfalls of public health statistics. The havoc caused by SARS-CoV-2 is increasing every day since its terror began in Wuhan, China. Understandably, the public wants something to chart this novel coronavirus’ terrifying progress around the globe and to hold to account their leaders. Several massive failures compare abysmally to some success stories. Numbers help quantify that difference and give a feeling that you can grasp what is going on. Sadly, things are not so simply. Countries’ numbers of Covid-19 cases and fatalities are a tempting source of clarity. However, the raw numbers are false prophets. You should not compare country numbers directly. Journalists who continue to do so are misleading their audience.

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  • The China Model for the world: the real revisionism is trying to stop the ‘inevitable historical trend’, according to Beijing

    Earlier in 2019, Jessica Chen Weiss wrote a well-considered article for Foreign Affairs in which she argues that China does not seek to export authoritarianism, but merely wants to make the world safer for itself. There is indeed no National Endowment for Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, nor has Beijing set up a Peaceful Co-existence Radio seeking to help liberate people from the tyranny of political bickering and mediocre economic growth rates. The question whether a rising China is a revisionist power has been debated many times before. People often point to official rhetoric to support the claim that China supports the status quo, and that it benefits from the status quo. But before we can make such definite claims, we first have to establish how ‘revisionism’ is defined in China. When doing so, we cannot ignore the ways the legacies of Marx, Lenin, and Mao continue to shape the thought of those in power. That makes clear that from the CCP’s perspective the status quo is not a snapshot of the current situation frozen in time, but the current historical trend as it is developing over time. Supporting this process is not revisionist. China’s ‘rejuvenation’ is part of the current historical trend. What is revisionist in Beijing’s view is trying to stop this.

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  • Summarising Zhao Dingxin’s lessons from 1989 for the Hong Kong protests: protest ecology and conflicting state legitimation

    Talking about the on-going protests in Hong Kong, pundits love to invoke the 1989 Movement that famously centred around Tiananmen Square in Beijing. I myself have previously argued that it might be more useful to compare the overall effect on Hong Kong of the ‘Hard Had Revolution’ to the effect that the February 28 Incident had on Taiwan. But even then serious scholarship on what happened in the run up to and during the June 4th Incident can still provide us with tools to understand the ‘leaderless protests’ in Hong Kong.

    In this post I want to summarise a book by entomologist-turned-sociologist Dingxin Zhao in which he tries to provide an empirical sociological explanation for what happened in Beijing in 1989:

    Dingxin Zhao. 2001. The Power of Tiananmen: State-Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    The most important contribution Zhao makes to understanding the events in 1989 is to describe it in terms of what he calls ‘state-society relations’: the way the logics of the state and of society and the nature of their linkage determine how the movement comes into being and unfolds. Although this is a path-dependent process, it is undetermined and highly contingent.

    Besides by ‘the authoritarian and democratic dichotomy’, Zhao argues that the nature of a statue is determined by its source of state legitimacy. He highlights three types (putting charismatic legitimacy aside): legal-electoral legitimacy, ideological legitimacy, and performance legitimacy (which has economic, moral, and nationalist components) (p. 22). Since China is a one-party state, only the latter two matter.

    Two legacies from the Maoist era led structures which in Western liberal democracies are conformist radicalise Chinese society: the lack of ‘heterogenous intermediate organisations’ meant that there was nothing to channel grievances. Everybody’s attention was focussed on the state (pp. 25–30). Although in Western countries universities work to reproduce the elite, transplanted to non-Western countries they introduce radical ideas with outside legitimacy (p. 98).

    The radicalisation was unleashed by the slow accumulation of grievances during the reform period after 1978. Simultaneously, starting from the Cultural Revolution onwards, as far as the people were concerned, the ideology-based legitimation of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime transformed into performance-based legitimation. The continued dominance of the authoritarian regime, however, meant that people kept looking to the state to fulfil its responsibilities (pp. 47–51).

    Zhao spends a lot of time unpacking the various intellectual fevers that swept the newly opened intellectual scene in China and discusses the intellectuals’ and students grievances, as well as the continued relevance of marxism’s linear view of history. There is also a discussion of how the system that previously served to control the students now had the opposite effect. This is more specific to that particular moment and place. What they have in common is that the root cause of the ineffectiveness of government attempts to deal with unhappiness ‘resulted from the presence of conflicting views of state legitimacy’ (p. 209). Both sides were talking different moral languages.

    His largest critique of the narratives of 1989 common in the West concerns the commonly referenced ‘factionalism’ theory that pits hardliners in the Party against reformers. I find this flawed understanding of the party reflected in the contemporary debate on ‘engaging’ China, where some argue in favour of taking actions that strengthen the mythical reformers in the CCP. These reformers have never materialised in the present era and Zhao argues convincingly why they did not exist as such in the 1980s either (p. 211).

    ‘What has been neglected is the fact that the majority of the group had one thing in common—they were absolutely loyal to the CCP and believed in the current political system.’ (p. 213–214) The Party elite, especially the elders, had been through the ferocious battle for control over China together. No one of them was about to follow the path of the Central and Eastern European regimes and lose their hard-won power. Zhao Ziyang was unique in his willingness to compromise, but even in his case—no matter later ruminations while under house arrest—the main point of disagreement, as it was everywhere within the elite, was about the best way to make the problem go away (p. 219).

    What the CCP leaders had in common was an absolute ideological commitment to their right to rule. This clashed with the return of moral and ritual performance as the source for state legitimacy among the intellectuals, students, and workers. In this climate, high-handed justifications of state actions based on CCP ideology did not strengthen the Party but only antagonised the people (p. 224).

    The PRC system also messed with the information flows in ways that aggravated the movement. On the side of the state elite, ‘[w]ith no adequate information and with a rigid mindset, many movement activities could only be understood as organized conspiracies’ (p. 223). When the state media liberated itself from censorship, its open reporting quelled rumours, thereby stabilising the situation (p. 313). But rumours returned as the main source of information when the Party cracked down and that escalated matters (p. 321).

    One element that hallmarked the relatively leaderless movement was what Zhao calls ‘spontaneity’. With that he means that many people did many different things and that it depended on their resonance with the logic of the crowd to what extent they influenced the direction of the movement. Even though several people tried to lead the protests through a variety of organisations, their ability to steer it was limited and the tiger would no longer let them ride if they went against the mood. Because their form invoked traditional cultural values, the failure of the government to respond appropriately to the kneeling petition on 22 April and the start of hunger strikes on 13 May led to great moral outrage. It was this performance failure that empowered the 1989 Movement. One major factor in this process is what Zhao describes as ‘ecology’: the way people were living and what they saw led to certain outcomes.

    The logic of ‘ecology’ applied especially to campus: the way dorms were set up with people grouped in rooms, the way students all had to cross the same places, and the way the campus walls kept them in their closed community greatly helped mobilisation (p. 240). There is also the matter of groups getting a mind of their own, one that needs to build courage before it dares to flout the rules by—for example—marching in circles across campus before growing numbers and heightened emotions allow the students to force their way through the barricaded gates.

    Hunger strikes by young students, kneeling petitions, and (alleged and real) police beatings had powerful effects because of two reasons: the above-mentioned return to moral performance as a way to judge the legitimacy of the state, and the tendency of people to fall back to familiar, traditional behavioural codes when they are acting emotionally (p. 285). Moral issues resonated more than the high-profile calls for democracy (p. 289). The common people seeing vulnerable young students weak with hunger (real or fake) caused great anger at the unmoved state.

    However, because the state elite and the protestors operated in such different moral logics, finding common ground was impossible after the state-society interactions had escalated the movement. Initially, the 1989 Movement was about certain grievances held by the intellectuals and students, but in the end it fundamentally challenged the ideological legitimation to which the Party leaders were absolutely committed. Ideological surrender ruled out, to maintain the coherence of their own legitimation their only solution was a brutal crackdown.

    Lessons for Hong Kong in 2019

    Hong Kong, too, is facing distorted state-society relations. Whereas the people expect a certain moral, democratic, economic, localist performance from their local government, it in its stead has been co-opted by Beijing into its ideological legitimation of Party-rule.

    As I have written before, this creates alienation among a public that hears its elite put out statement after statement invoking justifications people does not subscribe to. Because of inadequate information provision by the police and SAR government, rumours swirl. Riot police brutally beating up and arresting young protestors and bystanders go against the moral code of the Hong Kong public, escalating the movement with every viral incident. When your judgement of the SAR government depends on its compliance with PRC ideology, a group of gangsters beating up protestors in Yuen Long is unfortunate but not really damaging to the government’s legitimacy, since that is based on something else. If you judge the government on its moral performance, the obvious police collusion is damning.

    Hong Kong has its own unique ‘ecology’, which helps the movement develop as well. Lennon Walls in highly-trafficked places probably function somewhat like the big character posters at Peking University’s famous Triangle. Fruitful studies could be made of the way the road layout and the MTR system shape the marches. Ecology is also at work in protests that develop out of residents coming down to scold the police gathering below their flats in dense neighbourhoods. Besides a lack of democracy, Hong Kong has built up a large reservoir of economic grievance.

    Zhao Dingxin’s account should make us worry about the future of Hong Kong. In the end, thanks to the PLA, the Party elite was secure enough materially to securely hold on to its ideological legitimation. With the PRC behind it, the Hong Kong SAR government also has no reason to waver in its ideological commitment. Those in positions of power who have risen to the top since 1997 have been thoroughly inducted in a system where their commitment to the PRC ideology was a requirement for their rise. At the same time, the ordinary people live in a different moral universe. Under the current mode of state legitimation in Hong Kong, real compromise is not possible. In the case of the 1989 Movement, honest state media reporting and concessions by Zhao Ziyang were enough to halt the progress of the movement. Radicals only managed to fire it up again by initiating the 13 May hunger strikes, helped by the Party creating moral outrage by not responding to them and a pushback in the elite and law enforcement to Zhao Ziyang’s conciliatory tone.

    If a hunger strike-like action manages to create a similar moral outrage in Hong Kong, the movement could escalate to such a level that a brutal crackdown will replace the slow-motion crackdown that is currently underway. As Mainland China proves, you can afterwards restore government control and assuage society by delivering on most of the output demanded by performance legitimacy, but absent political reform the dormant volcano created by the chasm of legitimacy remains, waiting.

  • Hong Kong shows that ‘communism’ is the most efficient creator of alienation

    As Hong Kong is gripped in chaos and violence, there is something interesting about the ‘strongly condemn’ statements that Hong Kong SAR Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor (林鄭月娥) puts out at her rare press conferences. Completely in line with the rules prevalent on the Mainland, the first thing she condemns is always the harm done to national symbols of the People’s Republic. A stained national crest or flags thrown into the harbour get precedence over the violence and disorder that has parents dragging their tear-gassed children into lifts to escape the mayhem around their own homes. Much has been written in the recent weeks about the causes of Hongkongers’ disaffection with Beijing and their local government. However, besides the economic and political fundamentals that are not going away, one more problem prevents the people from getting closer to a resolution: total alienation from their leaders.

    Every time they turn on their television, the average Hong Kong citizen is faced with the surreal alternative world inhabited by the local elite. There is a strong disconnect between what people see on their streets and the statements coming from officials, pro-Beijing politicians, mainstream celebrities, and the pro-Beijing press. The Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to bring the elite in line with its ideological orthodoxy is creating radical alienation. This is something that happens everywhere the Party aims to expand its control, but the extreme situation makes Hong Kong a good example of the difficulty of totalitarian soft power without totalitarian hard power.

    As Václav Havel has pointed out, when a classically totalitarian country changes into a post-totalitarian system, the all-powerful dictator is replaced with that of a self-contained structure of lies: the ‘ideology’. No longer do the commands and wishes of the Dear Leader run the state and fight off challengers. Instead, the self-replicating system of lies maintains power for the Party. Statements such as ‘serving the proletariat’—which formerly had at least some substance—have by now become signalling devices that indicate submission to the Party. The Leninist vocabulary that people have to internalise serves only to prolong its hold over power.

    In the uttering of Hong Kong’s elite, the words ‘One Country Two Systems’ and ‘rule of law’ have become unrelated to their original substance; now they make the leaders complicit in the lie. They are shibboleths that signal the person who utters them submits to the system. In return for surrendering their credibility to a logic that only works within the system, they get to partake in its benefits.

    But since in Leninism the power of the Party trumps everything else, you cannot burst the bubble of its self-contained logic of lies. A post-totalitarian state has to ‘falsify’ everything: all actors have to live within its lies that reproduce its power at all levels of society. People who, as Havel put it, ‘live within their truth’ are dangerous, because they bring in a logic that the Party cannot control. The plot of reality has its own, uncontrollable direction that has no sympathy for the Party’s supposed infallible and sacrosanct power. It has to be kept at bay.

    Under direct rule, the Party can impose a truth under the threat of violence and using its monopoly on media and education. However, outside its direct rule, it cannot use hard power to deal with people living their own truths. This is a problem, because its system depends on forcing compliance with the CCP’s own reality. As a good Leninist party, it uses the United Front to co-opt groups outside the Party. What the United Front does is take over or found groups and force them into the party reality. That is how you get groups for Chinese overseas in New Zealand waxing lyrically about Xi Jinping (习近平)’s great diplomatic acumen and the wonderful benefits of the Belt and Road Initiative. It does not matter how far divorced from the daily life of the average Chinese-Newzealander such party-speak is. This is how the organisation reproduces the Party’s power, which then allows the Party to use similar newspeak to instruct them to undertake certain actions.

    However, this takes the Party’s agents out of the target population’s truth. In the case of such overseas Chinese business groups they can ameliorate that by having all businesspeople repeat the lies, but they still only capture the elite. Merchants have hard financial interests in playing along. Normal people can only be reached with soft power. But it is hard to build soft power on lies. If you are dealing with large populations, that leads to problems. More recent migrants might still be plugged into the alternative universe on WeChat or Weibo, but in the other cases, it leads to alienation. You have effectively walled off the co-opted elite from the people and their daily reality.

    Karl Marx coined the term alienation to point out how far factory work controlled by capitalists removed the worker from what had meaning to themselves. They became tools whose inner consciousness was no longer required. Under the planned economies of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, this alienation was taken to an extreme when the state—now in total control of all productive factors—determined the everyday lives of its workers with absurd detail. Party secretaries even had to sign off on marriage partners. Your entire life had become a tool for the glory of the socialist economy. A similar situation is the case with the post-totalitarian system: you do not live according to your own convictions, but according to the lies the system tells you to make your own.

    Since the PRC began preparing for the return of Hong Kong to a Chinese government, the Party has moved to get the city’s elite in line. It becomes clearer every day how many heavy-handed CCP attempts there are to force in line community leaders, unofficial organisations, media, publishing, mainstream celebrities, and local politicians. The result is double blindness. When Beijing turns on official television, it will only hear the reality it has itself created. Real Hongkongers love China, One Country Two Systems is the best, rule of law depends on following the government, the people of Hong Kong are upset by the damaging of national symbols, the police is only fighting rioters, there was no gang attack. Local elite starts spreading non-sense about foreign agents instigating protests, because they seemingly cannot conceive a reality where these protests come from genuine popular sentiment.

    Meanwhile, the common people of Hong Kong—no matter to what degree they support protest and democratisation—see a surreal spectacle when they look at their own leaders. Rather than a serious appraisal of the teargassed reality outside their own window, they hear their Chief Executive and celebrities echo inane CCP-approved speaking points. There is no official actor left in Hong Kong that has not been reduced to spreading the official lies.

    How can Hong Kong reconcile the conflict in its society when the people are worse off than lacking representation? The daily observations of an average city-dweller are so out of the CCP-approved reality that they cannot even be mentioned by those in charge. The Party’s ontology is such that every ‘fact’ has to comply with the Party’s unquestioned correctness or it cannot be observed. The result is that the PRC’s only solution will be suppression. Admitting the equal standing of the truth in which Hongkongers live will damage the lie that upholds the system.

    We saw a different iteration of this problem on Taiwan under then-President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The KMT’s platform now consists of the promise that only its appeasement of the PRC can give Taiwan safety and dignity. With this agenda, President Ma sought to increase economic integration with China, most notable under the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA). However, this led to great alienation among the Taiwanese public. As part of its appeasement of Beijing, the government in Taipei had to make statements about Taiwan’s international situation that were obviously at odds with its de facto independence. Moreover, both the KMT and CCP were ontologically unable to admit the reality of continued Chinese aggression against Taiwan. All of this came to head during the violence of police and unidentified gangsters against peaceful demonstrators during the Taipei visit of the mainland’s Taiwan Affairs Office head Chen Yunlin (陈云林), which also saw the government remove ROC symbols along Chen’s route. This made a mockery of the KMT’s claim that only accepting the 1992 Consensus would give Taiwan respect, driven home once more by the public humiliation of Taiwanese K-Pop star Chou Tzu-yu (周子瑜) for daring to wave an ROC/Taiwan flag on a live broadcast in South Korea.

    In 2016 the people of Taiwan resoundingly rejected the KMT and its presidential candidate Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), who had gone so far into accepting the CCP’s system of lies that she seemed to be speaking about a different Taiwan altogether. However, the CCP’s United Front tactics have since continued to gain ground in Taiwan, even giving it some hard power. Most notably, it shapes public discourse in Taiwan through Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明)’s Want Want China Times Media Group. Both Reuters and the Financial Times have argued that the Taiwan Affairs Office (partially) controls the coverage of part of the popular press. Because of this, the lies of KMT presidential candidate Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) might not be as alienating to some members of the public, since so many have already been drawn into the falsity.

    However, polling data shows that Han Kuo-yu is not universally popular on the island. Although many Taiwanese are eager for the economic benefits of cooperation with China, they are not ready to suspend belief in reality. Similarly, survey data from Hong Kong shows that over the past years—when Beijing’s control of the SAR’s elite only increased—the number of Hongkongers identifying as Chinese only has decreased. Its heavy-handed attempts at exporting its version of reality has only fed alienation. Without complete hard power, elite capture in Hong Kong and elsewhere only works to estrange the public from its rulers. That is dangerous, because it leaves few people to control the resulting popular dynamic. It is the cause of what Western press agencies call China’s ‘restive regions’. Xinjiang and Tibet show that once a separate identity has taken root, even inhumane usage of extreme hard power is often not enough to make the people follow their subjugated elites.

    If you are not used to it, to understand what it is like to live under a system so radically different as the PRC’s, you have to read widely, preferably authors who do have that direct experience. Some suggestions:

    Armstrong, J.D. 1977. Revolutionary Diplomacy: Chinese Foreign Policy and the United Front Doctrine. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Havel, Václav. 2010. ‘The Power of the Powerless’. In The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by Steven Lukes and John Keane, translated by Paul Wilson, 10–59. London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203857229.

    Salecl, Renata. 1996. ‘National Identity and Socialist Moral Majority’. In Becoming National: A Reader, edited by Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, 418–24. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Scott, James C. 1998. ‘Chapter 5: The Revolutionary Party: A Plan and a Diagnosis’ in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

    Selznick, Philip. 1952. The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics. New York: McGraw-Hill.

    Walder, Andrew G. 2015. China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.