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.
(more…)Tag: china
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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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Bekijk Taiwan niet steeds door een Chinese lens: vier misverstanden voor de komende verkiezingen
Op 11 januari zijn er in Taiwan verkiezingen voor de president en voor het parlement, de Wetgevende Yuan. In de korte geschiedenis van deze jonge democratie zijn dit de meest cruciale verkiezingen tot nu toe. Kiest de bevolking voor weerstand bieden aan Peking of voor langzame integratie? Het eiland komt meestal in het nieuws in verband met de Volksrepubliek China, en hoezeer ook vele Taiwanezen het liefst een normale democratie zouden zijn, is ook nu de houding tegenover Peking het belangrijkste punt in het politiek debat.
China claimt Taiwan en heeft in de afgelopen jaren de druk langzaam opgevoerd. De keuze de de Taiwanese kiezer in januari maakt zal voor een groot deel bepalen in welke mate Taipei hier weerstand tegen zal kunnen bieden. De DPP van de huidige president Tsai Ing-wen is voor uiteindelijke onafhankelijkheid en werkt aan het versterken van defensie en de economie. De KMT doet altijd vaag rondom verkiezingen, maar een bevriende journalist sprak met een hoge adviseur van Tsai’s uitdager Han Kuo-yu, die defaitistisch zei dat China uiteindelijk toch wel wint, dus dat Taiwan maar beter kan gaan onderhandelen nu het nog enige invloed heeft. Als China de controle over Taiwan verwerft, zal dat niet alleen het einde betekenen van een bloeiende democratie in een vrije samenleving, maar ook een geopolitieke aardverschuiving in de regio veroorzaken die ook voor Europa gevolgen zal hebben.
De komende dagen zullen er veel nieuwsberichten over de aanstaande verkiezingen in de pers verschijnen die de nadruk zullen leggen op de Chinese factor. Helaas is daarbij de neiging groot om China-experts te gebruiken. Maar om de politieke situatie in Taiwan echt te begrijpen, moeten we eerst de sinocentrische bril afzetten. In dit stuk wil ik vier misverstanden weerleggen, misverstanden die vaak het gevolg zijn van het feit dat men verslaggeving over Taiwan te vaak als onderdeel van verslaggeving over China beschouwt. Echter, bij het beoordelen van nieuws uit Taiwan is het belangrijk om in het hoofd te houden hoe de Taiwanezen zelf denken.
Het eerste punt betreft Taiwans ‘onafhankelijkheid’. Wanneer de pers het heeft over de strijd voor ‘onafhankelijkheid’ van ‘zelfbesturend’ Taiwan, dan lijkt men er van uit te gaan dat het gaat om het verklaren van de onafhankelijkheid van de Volksrepubliek China. Het klopt dat juridisch gezien de status van Taiwan gecompliceerd is. Officieel houdt Taipei de naam ‘Republiek China’ aan, terwijl het standpunt van Peking is dat die staat ophield te bestaan toen Mao Zedong op 1 October 1949 de Volksrepubliek uitriep. Maar Taiwan is geen ‘afvallige provincie’ van dit Nieuwe China. De eilanden die onder het gezag van Taipei staan zijn nooit door de Chinese Communistische Partij geregeerd. Voor Taiwanezen betekent onafhankelijkheid in de meeste gevallen dan ook het verklaren van een Republiek Taiwan ter vervanging van de Republiek China, de regering die pas in 1945 naar het eiland kwam en door sommige Taiwanezen ook als buitenlandse macht werd gezien. Peilingen laten een overweldigende meerderheid zien voor óf te zijner tijd een formeel onafhankelijk Taiwan, óf het handhaven van de status quo. Die status quo is vanuit het Taiwanees perspectief de huidige situatie van de facto onafhankelijkheid onder de naam Republiek China. Peking speelt hierbij geen formele rol.
Dit brengt mij bij het tweede punt, dat van ‘hereniging’. Het is een mooie aanleiding voor een nieuwsbericht als Peking weer eens maatregelen uitrolt om Taiwanezen naar het Chinese Vasteland te lokken, of als een ondoordacht harde uitspraak van President Xi Jinping een boze reactie van Taipei uitlokt: wat zal dit wel niet betekenen voor de steun in Taiwan voor hereniging?! Los van het feit dat een deel van de Taiwanezen de term ‘hereniging’ verwerpt — als Taiwan nooit onderdeel is geweest van de Volksrepubliek, dan is er eerder sprake van ‘annexatie’ — is ook zo’n vraag nogal sinocentrisch. In Taiwan is samengaan met China geen serieuze optie. Volgens de cijfers van de NCCU Election Survey Centre (ESC) uit juni 2019 is slechts 10,4% van de bevolking voor ‘hereniging’ nu of op een later moment. 57,5% is voor het behouden van de status quo. 25,7% is voor formele onafhankelijkheid nu of later. Werk uit eind 2016 van Emerson Niou en anderen van de Taiwan National Security Survey laat zien dat steun voor formele onafhankelijkheid een duidelijke meerderheid krijgt als je voorwaarde toevoegt dat Peking niet aanvalt. Wat men bedoelt met ‘status quo’ in de ESC-peiling is dus niet per se de betekenis die Peking er aan geeft en steun voor de status quo is soms ook pragmatisch.
De voorstellen die China doet zijn niet populair. Een peiling die Taiwans Mainland Affairs Council in oktober liet uitvoeren liet zien dat 89,3% tegen ‘Een Land, Twee Systemen’ is, de oplossing die Xi Jinping steeds voorstelt. Zelfs de kandidaat van de China-vriendelijke KMT spreekt zich er actief tegen uit. Het politieke debat in Taiwan gaat er over hoe nauw de economische banden tussen China en Taiwan moeten zijn. Maar — afgezien van een kleine groep oudere politici en academici die vanwege historische redenen een buitenproportioneel groot podium hebben — is politieke samenvoeging met de Volksrepubliek voor de gewone Taiwanees geen optie, of deze nou voor ‘Taiwan’ is of voor de ‘Republiek China’.
Dat is ook hoe we het derde punt moeten zien, dat van de nationale identiteit. Het is inderdaad waar dat nog niet iedereen op Taiwan zich identificeert als ‘Taiwanees’ alleen. Uit hetzelfde onderzoek van het Election Study Centre blijkt dat 56,9% zich identificeert als ‘Taiwanees’ bij een keuze tussen ‘Taiwanees’, ‘Chinees’, of ‘beide’. Er zijn er ook veel die zich identificeren als ‘Taiwanees én Chinees’, 36,5%. Maar slechts 3,6% ziet zichzelf als enkel ‘Chinees’. Alleen moeten we dat ‘Chinees’ niet gelijk zien als Pekings definitie van ‘Chinees’. Een deel van de klompendansende conservatieve Republikeinen uit Holland, Michigan noemt zich ook ’Nederlander’, maar geven daar een andere inhoud aan dan wij in Europees Nederland. Hoe Chinees of niet Taiwanezen zich voelen, de meerderheid heeft weinig affiniteit met de Volksrepubliek van Xi Jinping.
Het vierde en in mijn optiek belangrijkste misverstand over Taiwan gaat er dan ook over hoe de huidige staat is ontstaan. Het vaakst vertelde verhaal gaat over de Nationalisten. De KMT kwam onder leiding van Chiang Kai-shek in 1949 naar Taiwan, nadat ze de Chinese Burgeroorlog hadden verloren van de communisten en vanaf toen ging Taiwan als ‘Vrij China’ zijn eigen weg. Dit beeld is versterkt doordat tijdens de periode van dictatuur deze zogeheten Vastelanders alle goede banen in handen kregen en ook vaak degenen waren die in het Engels over Taiwan schreven en die met buitenlanders in contact kwamen. Het past ook het beste bij het beeld dat Peking heeft van Taiwan: tijdelijk ontnomen aan het Vaderland door een vluchtende kliek verliezers. Op die manier hoeft men niet onder ogen te zien hoe lang Taiwan al erg anders is.
Taiwan namelijk niet pas in 1949 van China afgescheiden, maar al in 1895. In dat jaar moest het keizerlijk hof in Peking het toen nog achtergebleven eiland Taiwan afstaan aan het Japanse Keizerrijk nadat het een oorlog over de controle over Korea had verloren van Tokyo. Het is Japan dat Taiwan over de daaropvolgende 50 jaar moderniseerde. Juist in die periode ervoer China de bepalende hervormingen, protestbewegingen en revoluties die de moderne Chinese identiteit vorm hebben gegeven. Dit alles ging voorbij aan de Taiwanezen, die naar Japanese scholen gingen en binnen het Japanese Keizerrijk aan het strijden waren voor zelfbeschikkingsrecht. De Vastelanders die in 1949 aankwamen op Taiwan waren een groep van ongeveer één miljoen vluchtelingen op een bestaande bevolking van zes miljoen. Hun invloed was groot, maar ze kwamen aan als ontheemde minderheid in een bestaande samenleving met een eigen identiteit. Het was deze lokale identiteit die de decennia-lange strijd voor democratie en ‘Taiwanisering’ voedde. Afgezien van de roerige burgeroorlogjaren 1945–49, toen de problematische voormalige kolonie werd bestuurd als een bijzondere regio, is het eiland nooit onderdeel geweest van een moderne Chinese staat. De politieke strijd op Taiwan ging altijd over zelfbestuur, tegen de Nederlandse kolonisator in de 17e eeuw, later tegen de Japanse koloniale overheid, en ten slotte tegen de Nationalisten die de bestuurlijke en sociale rol van de Japanners over hadden genomen.
De campagne voor de verkiezingen in januari gaat nu voor een deel over de rol die ‘China’ speelt in de Taiwanese identiteit. Nog nooit is het zo duidelijk geweest waar welke partij voor staat. In 2007 benadrukte de toekomstige President Ma Ying-jeou nog zijn Taiwanese identiteit, voorheen ondenkbaar voor een kandidaat van de voormalige dictatoriale KMT. Maar in de huidige campagne heeft de verdedigende President Tsai Ing-wen van de DPP het altijd over ‘Taiwan’, terwijl haar uitdager Han Kuo-yu van de KMT het heeft over de ‘Republiek China’, een populistisch appèl op nostalgie voor het autoritaire tijdperk. Han beschuldigt Tsai ervan niet van de Republiek China te houden. Tsai beschuldigt Han ervan Taiwan in gevaar te brengen door teveel toe te willen geven aan Peking.
Taiwan is al de facto onafhankelijk vanaf 1949. ‘Hereniging’ met China is geen serieuze optie voor de gemiddelde Taiwanees, zelfs voor diegenen die nauwere economische betrekkingen voorstaan. De meerderheid van de Taiwanezen identificeert zich namelijk nauwelijks met ‘China’ als land, laat staan met de communistische Volksrepubliek. Dat is logisch, want Taiwan is al op zichzelf vanaf 1895. De vraag die verslaggevers zich moeten stellen bij de politieke ontwikkelingen in Taipei is dus niet of het Taiwan lukt onafhankelijk te worden, maar om onafhankelijk te blijven.
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Fretting over systemic tension while ignoring the substantive reasons for worry: China is run by people not by ‘forces’
Recently, a friend attended a conference on Sino-American relations in Singapore. He perceptively remarked that, amid all the talk of rising tension, no one seemed to dare to mention why countries around the world are getting wary of China. Although there are plenty of reasons to highlight systemic causes for tension between a declining United States and a rising China, I argue here that the stress on the systemic can turn into a pretext not to have to talk about the substance.
We can find enough Chinese academics who anxiously remark on the risks of structural tensions as Beijing grows more powerful in a world hitherto dominated by the Washington consensus. The problem here is that many of the answers that this kind of analysis suggests in response to the question posed by a resurgent PRC consist of encouraging various forms of temperance and self-discipline. But this view treats the development as natural and something to be managed by virtuously restrained behaviour. Such an approach is obviously in the interest of the rising power. It also conveniently excuses the scholars from having to seriously engage with the reasons why, not just the US, but many different countries are rather wary of China these days.
Because, there are plenty of substantive reasons to be scared of China under the Chinese Communist Party, reasons that go beyond systematic tension. Beijing is currently ruled by an authoritarian regime that continually stresses the importance of strengthening the control of the Party over ever greater parts of life. China runs concentration camps in Xinjiang that hold more than one million Uighurs and other muslims in an effort that can be described as cultural genocide. The CCP regime has not only refused to denounce its totalitarian past, but is bringing back historical lessons from the Mao period as its oppression continues to expand nationwide. In economics and international trade, it applies different rules to Chinese and to foreign firms. Abroad, Beijing maintains its irredentist ambitions, with a list of territorial claims not limited to Taiwan, the South China Sea, and large parts of India. At home, the Party hones an aggressive and entitled nationalism, fed by revanchist narratives of National Humiliation.
Many people have good reasons to be scared in the prospect of a more powerful China, beyond fearing for their relative power.
China’s nationalism brings us to a second point. For all the systemic causes that might compel China to expand its role in the world, it also stems from policy. No matter if you dress it up as ‘peaceful rise’, there is a contradiction when Beijing claims to want to maintain and protect the current international system and at the same to want to ‘democratise’ the international system by offering the miracle concept of a community of common destiny for mankind. Regardless of the content, regardless of the claims that it is not revisionist, there is an active policy in place whose goals cannot but include an aim to change the international system. China’s behaviour is not merely passive, there is an active element to it. It does no good to cover up this agency.
Sacrificing the Uighurs on the altar of your grand theory might make you an admirably restrained realist, but it turns international politics into an abstract game of chess. For too many Chinese and Americans who live in ‘Chimerica’, the main problem seems to be to suppress the ‘irrational’ squabbles between both sides. But, in the battle for humanity there is not such an abstract thing as chess. At the same time, an obsession with the systemic tension of the ‘power transition’ lets nationalist Chinese International Relations scholars get away with too much. It allows them to naturalise China’s ‘rise’. By stressing the American or Western responsibility to not be too anxious about China, they avoid having to deal with the unpleasant reality of the current regime in Beijing. Instead, they get to place the onus of restraint on the ‘West’. But China is a country too, with its own agency.
When we discuss the ‘Rise of China’, it is easy to fall into tropes and abstractions. Let us not forget that in the end, the world is made up of people. We should care about their suffering and our analysis should concern their actions. Systems shape the people, but people also shape the system.
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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.
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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.
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The Hard Hat Revolution will not be Hong Kong’s Tiananmen Square, it might be its February 28 Incident
Tension had been building for a long time. The former colonial power had returned the island to China a while ago already, but rather than act as happy patriots, the local inhabitants were increasingly chafing under what they saw as a breakdown in orderly government, encroachment on their economic opportunities, and discrimination against locals in favour of recent arrivals from the Mainland. Finally, one incident of aggressive policing set the people aflame and they turned on the symbols of China with great violence. Retribution, however, would be shift.
This was Taiwan in the year 1947. On the evening of 27 February, one and a half year after the Republic of China had taken over control of the island from the defeated Japanese Empire, agents of the Tobacco Monopoly Bureau seized the goods of a widow peddling illegal cigarettes and beat her. Bystanders gathered. As things got heated, one of the officers fired a gun into the crowd, killing one person. The next day, tension that had been building up burst and turned into rabid violence. Riots filled the streets. Soldiers fired into groups of people protesting outside government buildings, killing several. Taiwanese lynched a number of Mainlanders, especially outside Taipei. Over the following weeks, citizens’ committees took over in many locales, while the embattled Governor Chen Yi (陳儀) sought to negotiate with the public after cabling the central government in Nanjing for help. His attempts at defusing the situation were ineffective. The police was unable to maintain order. Eventually, National Army troops arrived from the Mainland to take back control, shooting from the ships as they were still sailing into port. The Nationalist Party (KMT) began a murderous crackdown on what it perceived to be traitors, often blaming the Japanese legacy for insufficient patriotism. Thousands of Taiwanese were killed in the ensuing terror, which often targeted local notables.
This was the February 28 Incident, known in Mandarin simply as 2.28 (二二八事件). Scholars pinpoint it as the starting point of modern Taiwanese nationalism. In the eyes of many Taiwanese the event and the ensuing period of White Terror cemented the view that the arrival of the shambolic KMT regime was not a return to the ‘Motherland’, but a corrupt and violent colonial regime replacing another harsh but effective colonial regime. Its present symbolic importance to the young nation can be gleaned from the fact that the large park next to the Presidential Office Building on Taipei’s main ceremonial boulevard has been turned into the 228 Peace Memorial Park (二二八和平紀念公園), the site of the annual Peace Memorial Day commemoration on 28 February and home to the Taipei 228 Memorial Hall. Taiwan’s civic nationalism contrasts the island state’s present freedom and democracy with the KMT’s terror and indoctrination of the 1947–87 martial law era. However, in the first period after the February 28 Incident, what dominated was a Taiwanese ethnic nationalism that cast the local Taiwanese (本省人 běnshěng rén) as victims of the ‘invading’ Mainlander (外省人 wàishěng rén) colonisers, who needed to be expelled back to China.
During the height of the Hong Kong protests in the summer of 2019, many Anglophone observers fretted over potential military or paramilitary intervention by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The statements and videos Beijing released show it was eager to reinforce the fears of this threat at the time, even though it is already exercising plenty of violence through the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF). This intimidation leads people to invoke the memory of the violent and bloody suppression by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of the nation-wide protests that rocked China in 1989. However, the ‘Hard Hat Revolution’ is no Tiananmen Square protest. Rather than almost the whole of Chinese society finding itself in opposition to the Party leadership and its rural army, we have a much more confident and powerful government in Beijing backed by a solidly nationalist Chinese public facing a small, recently-recovered former colony. The comparison with post-war Taiwan is much more apt, not in the last place because the protests are leading shaping what Hong Kong is and who Hongkongers are. Just as in Taiwan’s case, the violence is solidifying a separate identity.
The reaction to events during the occupation of Hong Kong International Airport in the night of Tuesday 13 August 2019 are instructive. Two Mainland men were captured by protestors and roughly tied up, supposedly on the mob’s suspicion that they were police spies or working for the Party. This event sent shockwaves through the public. People inside and outside Hong Kong felt something nasty had emerged from this unguided mass movement. However, responses differed based on where observers were from. For foreign observers, the two attacks were mostly regrettable excesses against likely pro-CCP people, one of whom in fact was a propaganda worker for the nationalist tabloid Global Times. On the contrary, many Mainlanders—also those critical of the CCP—saw it much more as an anti-Mainlander attack. Their lives in Hong Kong often take place amid a background of powerful nativist sentiments.
This is complicated by diverging perspectives on what Hong Kong is. For many of the people in Hong Kong protesting on the streets, Hong Kong is special city in a Greater China; since 1949 it has become a distinct community that has unfortunately been governed by outsiders for the outsiders’ benefit throughout its history, first from London and now from Beijing. If you see the PRC as a hostile, outside power, growing numbers of Mainlanders moving into the cramped city—often bringing a Chinese nationalist view—might create some unease. Add to this a dose of condescension to and fear of the Mainland’s system of government (which might be justifiable, but obviously feels insulting to Chinese primed for humiliation by their patriotic education), and Hongkong’s post-1997 fears compare to the Taiwanese worry in 1945 about losing the ‘harsh but effective’ Japanese colonial overlords in return for the questionable governance of a regime that had for decades been wrecked by domestic strife and accusations of incompetence and corruption.
However, if your perception of Hong Kong is that it is just a special Chinese city, things change. In that case, it makes sense that you should be free to move within your own country; a visceral reaction to this by the obviously also Chinese people in Hong Kong is arrogant discrimination. After a century and a half of unjust separation of part of China by Western imperialists, now that Hong Kong has finally returned to the motherland, the former colonial subjects seem to feel superior to other Chinese almost precisely because they were once colonised. Many Mainlanders who have spent time in the SAR can tell you stories of smaller and bigger slights they have experienced. Mainland Chinese sometimes could show a bit more awareness of the balance of power in China and within Hong Kong. Moreover, Chinese nationalists living outside Hong Kong demanding subservience of its 7.3 million inhabitants on behalf of 1.2 billion Chinese can hardly portray themselves as victims of a stronger party. Nevertheless, the rejection and exclusion of Mainlanders in Hong Kong is often appalling and alienates many people, including those who would otherwise have been more sympathetic or Mainlanders who also see Hong Kong as its own place.
Ideally, Hong Kong would have ‘returned’ in 1997 to an increasingly peaceful and democratic China and the 50 years of Two Systems guaranteed by the 1984 Joint Declaration would grant time for the SAR and the Mainland to grow together as One Country. However, the chance for such an ending was crushed with the crackdown of 1989 and the patriotic education that the Party initiated afterwards. The Chinese Communist Party presides over an authoritarian state fuelled by increasingly aggressive and entitled nationalism. Meanwhile, the socio-economic situation in Hong Kong seems to put Mainlander arrivals in competition with the squeezed locals, while pro-Beijing factions prefer Mandarin-speaking Party-loyalists. This already was a recipe for disaster. The abhorrent violence coming from the anti-riot police and the waves of hatred Chinese officials and Mainland nationalists direct at Hongkongers have amped up the alienation. The resulting antagonism does not help Hong Kong develop an identity as a democratic Chinese space that can include ‘non-natives’. The way events are currently going only increases the perception of Mainlanders as outsiders to Hong Kong. In May 2020, the bubble burst. The Central People’s Government is now forcing through state security legislation for Hong Kong while the National Anthem Law pushed by pro-Beijing politicians in the city’s Legislative Council (LegCo) is only the start. The HKPF has lost all self-control and seems intent on violently crushing the protests forever. The end of Hong Kong’s freedoms now appears to be only a matter of time. In response, growing numbers of young Hong Kong protestors have begun chanting for Hong Kong independence, once an unthinkable fringe idea.
In Taiwan, the February 28 Incident dampened the enthusiasm that may have been there for ‘China’. Taiwanese national identity developed in opposition to Chinese ‘colonialism’ and the KMT-ROC regime oppressing it. The rift between Taiwan and China has only expanded since then and now cannot be healed, as the trends in various identity surveys make clear. Taiwan, of course, has been separate from China since 1895, has been its own country since 1949, and is geographically separated from China by 160 km of sea. Hong Kong is different. Throughout its history, it has always remained connected to China. However, the risk for those who care about One Country is that the Chinese party-state’s response to the Hong Kong protests will do the same for that special city’s identity as 28 February did for Taiwanese identity. Hong Kong is developing its own self-understanding. A June 2019 survey showed a collapse of Hongkongers identifying as Chinese. Already, the verbal and physical violence is hammering away in the forge of an even more distinct identity. Pro-Beijing elite figures alienate much of the public. In addition to the escalating violence and suppression from increasingly brazenly pro-Beijing nationalist Hong Kong officials and police, the new national security law would allow Mainland state security to deploy to Hong Kong. The biggest expression of care about China in Hong Kong, the annual 4 June vigil, may be banned in the future. The battle lines are getting clearer every day. Hongkongers see clearly that they are suppressed by those calling themselves Chinese. As the KMT experienced during the period of martial law in Taiwan, after such an assault in the name of Chinese nationalism, you can try to force people to see themselves as ‘Chinese’, but once they have learned through sacrifice of blood to see ‘China’ as their oppressor it is hard to change that.
Updated: 2020/05/27
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Party Not Required: nationalism’s long-term threat to the Chinese Communist Party
Xi Jinping’s well-documented attempts to become ‘chairman of everything’—as several observers have argued before me—are in fact a testament to his need to shore up weak central power. The Chinese party-state works through broad project campaigns, launched through the apparatus of party committees and propaganda organs. Local leaders take the cue to come up with actual policies, of which the centre then picks a few to serve as example. This works under leninism-enforced ideological unity. However, the fundamental shift in Chinese society since the Opening and Reform period has cast the ship of party-state on unruly seas. Local authorities’s power and responsibilities have grown while discipline of thought has slackened. In response to this uncertainty the leadership’s party reflexes have brought about the authoritarian turn of the past decade. The old story of Mao’s revolution discredited, the Chinese Communist Party’s hold over is now first of all material. The Party needs a new legitimising tale to mobilise its people. It better be convincing. So now it attempts to equalise the Party with the State with the Nation with the People. But by turning to traditional nationalism, the formerly revolutionary replace a self-written story with an older narrative that does not necessarily require the Party.
These narratives matter. People make sense of the world through stories they tell themselves. These stories have their own internal logic, a plot that explains how we got here and points to the future. We cast the people and groups we encounter as characters in this story, allowing us to quickly make sense of everyone’s (and everything’s) place and extrapolate from there. The Cold War was such a powerful frame, because it was a good story. For the people on both sides the two camps of good and evil made it easier to place countries and individuals, and decide how to behave towards them.
Xi Jinping’s tenure has sped up the post-1989 nationalist turn in Chinese politics. The CCP’s shift in legitimising narrative—away from communist revolution of the workers of the world, to a nationalist rejuvenation of the Chinese ethno-nation—means that the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. continued rule by a leninist vanguard party, is not longer absolutely essential to the official goal. Instead, the main actor has now become the Chinese Nation, an old and familiar character. The new story is the Chinese Dream, which in full is the ‘Chinese Dream of the Grand Rejuvenation of the Chinese (Ethno-)Nation’ (中华民族伟大复兴的中国梦 zhōnghuá mínzú wěidà fùxīng de zhōngguó mèng).
To an orthodox marxist-leninist communist narrative the revolutionary party is fundamental. The vanguard has supposedly achieved awareness of the laws of history, and use their understanding to lead the proletariat to victory. Party cadres and other government officials in China still learn the theories of marxism-leninism-maoism in the party schools they have to regularly attend for training and retraining. This socialises them in party thought: the goal is for them to learn there is how to think, speak, and write in terms of the latest ideological orthodoxy. However, even for the average bureaucrat, the future of China is less about achieving communist utopia than it is about national revival, albeit phrased in terms of historical materialism. It seems less obvious that the continued existence of communist party rule in China is an essential requirement of the nationalist narrative of the Great Rejuvenation.
This does not mean that the CCP has been weakened already. Short-term, nationalism probably boosts the Party’s popular support. Leninist systems provide immensely powerful organisational tools that few Chinese nationalists would discard lightly. After all, the defeated Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, attempted to use the same organisational model. However, this strategic legitimising shift has knocked out a few key supporting beams in the narrative structure. For an orthodox bolshevik revolution, one absolutely needs a vanguard party. Its continued monopoly of power is required for the eventual transition to communism. The marxist-leninist one-party state is at the centre of this well-worn plot. But national revivals can take many forms. Already, mainland New Confucians are reviving talk about ‘national religion’ and reintroducing the old Chinese-barbarian distinction. Far right commentators seem to care little beyond whatever can provide national power. If, amid escalating censorship, it has not become much easier to talk about a China without the Party in official discourse, it has at least become possible.
When the era of high maoism came to its end, the CCP under Deng Xiaoping began updating the Party’s ideological justification: the need to sacrifice consumer welfare for the eventual achievement of communism was replaced with economic growth in the now. After the brutal crackdown on the June 4 movement in 1989 that famously centred around the Tiananmen Square protests, the Party’s ability to achieve nationalist goals and material benefits became the key to make people forget about politics. Even then Deng maintained that the eventual goal of communism was still the Party’s target. But—as with any millenarian faith forced to deal with the failure of the end-time to arrive within the promised timespan—the leader now held that this was still generations away. Still, the goal was maintained, if only formally. Xi Jinping, descendent of a revolutionary hero and allegedly a true believer in the Party, has given this idea a new lease of life. Last April, Qiushi, the theory journal of the CCP, republished an expanded version of a 2013 speech by him that stressed that China is still a socialist country and that it still aims to (eventually) achieve ‘the lofty ideals of communism and the common ideals of socialism with Chinese characteristics’.
This reverses a decline in the importance given to the revolutionary narrative of the CCP’s right to rule. Under Xi Jinping the CCP is pursuing ideology at the cost of economic growth. Party control and the dominance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) goes above trade and private companies. The flexibility offered by sleights of hand such as ‘XX with Chinese characteristics’ and updating the ‘primary contradiction’ does reduce the distance between ideology and reality that Václav Havel identified as post-totalitarianism’s weakness. But the communist ideology still might only appeal to the Party bubble.
Deng Xiaoping limited his Reform to what was required for economic growth, leaving the constitutional system and the elite layer largely intact. For the average Chinese the period of Opening and Reform was a massive change. But the party nomenklatura still live their separate lives in the system. Party schools, cadre housing, preferential health care, and for some even a separate food supply mean that they live in a different world, even into retirement. Privileged cadres read internal newspapers and socialise with their own. In the past, the whole of society was integrated into the communist system through the hierarchy of work units. Now, most people no longer follow the same logic. Even the recently arrested marxist students do not subscribe to the CCP’s official ideology, but act outside the Party.
The leadership is in fact aware of the problem. The Politburo stresses the critical need to improve effectiveness of political education in schools for a reason. Propaganda campaigns strive to bring home the orthodoxy all the way to your apartment’s lift. But for most—for as far as they pay attention—the main take-away from this onslaught consists of the two remaining sources of party legitimacy: economic well-being and Chinese nationalism. The improvement in Chinese living standards has been so substantial and is so recent that the Party’s claim to the credit would probably survive a recession. Moreover, the political system allows control over the fiscal and monetary levers, as well as the statistics. The Belt and Road Initiative, backed by state policy banks, guarantees that the debt-fuelled model of growth through infrastructure will go on for a while, just as China’s work on building higher-level domestic manufacturing are showing results. The narrative is clear: China’s growth was made possible through the Opening and Reform policies, an achievement of the Chinese Communist Party. The risk is not that this narrative turns against the Party, but that it fades away as the middle classes become accustomed to regarding their middling wealth as the norm.
The problem is the nationalist narrative. The Chinese Communist Party propaganda and the ‘patriotic education’ that began in the schools in 1990s base themselves on an old narrative: the idea of cleansing the shame of the ‘Century of National Humiliation’ (百年国耻 bǎinián guóchǐ). The Century refers to the period of Western and Japanese despoliation of the country, roughly starting with the First Opium War in 1839 and ending after the Second World War. This is a powerful story, but not one that was written by any particular party.
Work by William Callahan traces the first National Humiliation Day to 1915. In late May the National Teachers’ Association picked 9 May to commemorate the shame of the Japanese imperialist Twenty-One Demands that were put to the government on that date. The May Fourth movement of 1919— the centennial of which just passed—called for wholesale modernisation to end the nightmare of impotence. When the Kuomintang got hold of the Republic of China in 1927–8 it made National Humiliation Day a national holiday. Just as the Chinese Civil War picked up again, it declared the national shame ‘cleansed’ by its efforts: the Western powers had given up their extraterritorial rights in 1943 and Japan was defeated in 1945. Soon they would be swept aside in a ‘humiliation’ their propaganda blamed on the imperialist Soviets. In their turn, the communists claimed to have cleansed the nation’s shame with their victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, when Mao Zedong proclaimed from the rostrum of the Forbidden City that China had finally ‘stood up’.
But after 1989 the narrative made a comeback with the nationalist turn in propaganda. National Defence Education Day is now a public holiday. Cleansing the shame of national humiliation is linked explicitly to the Chinese Dream of the Grand Rejuvenation of the Chinese Ethno-Nation that the Party is supposed to bring about. The end of British colonial rule in Hong Kong was a major cause for celebration. Controlling the South China Sea, achieving great power, and ‘returning’ Taiwan status are all markers of this revival.
But the Party should be careful what it awakens. The narrative of national humiliation has roots in late-19th century nationalism. Its main concern was to, before anything, create a Chinese nation, and then find a means to defend it. It did not matter what means. In fact, this utilitarian approach is what brought many Chinese intellectuals to communism in the first place: without having read much marxism they put their hopes on bolshevism to salvage ‘China’ after the October Revolution in Russia had proven its power. The history of China until 1949 is one of ministers and governments who were seen as weak and unable to stop the humiliation becoming the target of irate nationalists one by one. Some of the most successful CCP propaganda in the 1930s and 1940s was based on accusing Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party of selling out to the Japanese and Western imperialists. Chiang, in turn, accused the CCP of being a pawn of the equally foreign Soviets.
The main point is that the logic of the story has changed. The old nationalist narrative, now revived by the Party, has a different plot: rather than a revolutionary narrative of making China communist, this story is about saving the Chinese nation. The quest it has always contained within itself is to find a method that can finally achieve this. The CCP still has good grounds to argue that it has found the solution. But in reality history does not progress in simple linear fashion. The narrative now no longer absolutely requires a revolutionary vanguard party to safeguard the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the proletariat is now merely a means to be judged on its efficacy. When some unforeseen setback to the nationalist project makes it appear that the CCP is but a necessary evil or even a hindrance, inconsistencies will begin to pop up. A narrative can persist with such contradictions for a long time, but a crisis can force a reevaluation of the ‘logical’ conclusion of the plot. Thus weakened, the building of legitimation may prove to be unable to withstand next time a storm comes about.
If Beijing notices that this starts to happen, it will have to devise ways to make sure people do not think for themselves too much. This is why Xi Jinping is so obsessed over ideological control. The more the lower ranks lose faith in communism, the more he needs to centralise power to the core holdout of remaining faithfuls. But such moves weaken the effectiveness of the leninist organisation model. Leninist parties operate in a modular fashion with a great deal of de facto decentralisation. This is possible because its people have been moulded into its ideology and submit to the party, which they see the indispensable means to a shared (often millenarian) goal. When that is no longer the case, its authoritarian instincts will induce the party elite to pursue a project of centralisation that unavoidable reduces government effectiveness.
Of course, one solution to this problem would be for the CCP to come up with a new, coherent narrative of which it is an integral part and force it on the whole of society into it. After all, in Singapore, the ‘leninist-inspired’ PAP still manages to sell itself as indispensable, despite the absence of a revolutionary narrative. However, achieving this is exceedingly difficult, especially in a country much larger and much more diverse. The rhetoric of Chinese socialism is still the only way party cadres are taught to think about politics, even as nationalism dominates the propaganda outside the Party. Just as a growing part of the Singaporean population feels increasingly detached from its leaders’ policy-speak, so do many Chinese simply brush off Xi Jinping’s New Thought. Cynical compliance because of material inducement is a paltry replacement for true faith in the Cause. A switch to a properly neo-fascist nationalism would probably require a war of aggression. A radically new narrative often needs a Big Event to gain hold. But not only would that have dire consequences for China’s neighbours, the current creeping inconsistency in the narrative also means it could have unexpected consequences for he who is for now still safely ensconced in the Forbidden City as the Chairman of Everything.
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The question of banning Chinese ‘academics’
Twitter today lit up with condemnation and partial praise over a report in the New York Times about the growing number of Chinese academics banned from the United State and having their long-term visas cancelled by the FBI. This is understandable, as innocent Chinese-Americans have been swept up by espionage paranoia in the past, and the West in general has a history of racial profiling. Without knowing who exactly have been targeted by the FBI, though, it is impossible to judge the programme as it is implemented. Still, I think there is plenty of justification to change our attitude towards at least some of the supposed academics from the People’s Republic.
As a leninist party-state, a lot of things in China are not what their name claims. The party newspapers are not newspapers, but devices to steer the party machine. Courts do not function truly as part of a truly independent judiciary, but as part of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s mechanism of ‘stability maintenance’ (维稳 wéiwěn). Similarly, although China has genuine universities with genuine scholars, a large number of ‘academic’ institutes are anything but that.
The marxist epistemology that the CCP still instills in all its members through mandatory training and retraining holds that there is no objective opinion, but that power determines who holds sway over commanding heights of public discourse. To secure the PRC’s sovereignty, the Party actively strives for ‘discourse power’ (话语权 huàyǔ quán) in the world. Propaganda outfits such as CGTN and China Daily are a part of that, but so are think-tanks and academic institutions. It is naturally right that Western scholarship should not be the only thing defining China, and quality academic work would also increase China’s soft power. With that, nothing is wrong. But in this case the Party sees a zero-sum game, one where it needs to replace what it regards as threatening scholarship with discourse that supports the CCP’s hold on power.
Albeit within the narrowing constraints of Xi Jinping’s New Era, real academic work does take place. There are genuinely interesting people in Chinese educational institutions whose ideas Western countries such as the United States are missing out on when they do not engage with them. Even when these academics write work that argues for the current political system, these exchanges are fruitful and help deepen mutual understanding (although we should not exaggerate the impact on world peace of a group of academics in a conference room).
That said, not all people that in the PRC carry the label of ‘academic’ do in fact engage in scholarly work. An example is the person mentioned in the New York Times article, Zhu Feng. He is the Director of the Centre for Collaborative Studies of the South China Sea at Nanjing University. The title is classic leninist newspeak: of course the myriad South China Sea institutes found across China in recent years are anything but collaborative. These organisations have been set up with a clear goal as part of the CCP’s battle for discourse power: provide a case for the PRC’s control over the South China Sea, dressed up in academic clothing. This is not scholarship, this is propaganda work.
There are of course people—also outside China—who provide badly argued cases for Chinese policies that are difficult to support, but are still independent academics. It is difficult to decide when someone turns from an academic into a propagandist who dresses up as an academic. That is no reason not to make an attempt, however. Because part of the CCP’s struggle for discourse power consists of the struggle for legitimacy in the eyes of the world. This is something that we—the world—have to give them. There is a reason why Xinhua hires white Westerners to do its English-language propaganda. People who work for such obvious factories of fabrication as the South China Sea Centre do not produce scholarly work. They do not even try to; they work backwards from what they are supposed to prove. But by treating them as academics anyway, we give the impression that we do think of their propaganda as scholarship. Thereby we strengthen the Party’s discourse power.
It is not necessary to ban these people. Unless they are actively engaged in foreign influence campaign—such as Huang Jing was accused of in Singapore—these talking heads are not a threat. But they also do not deserve to be treated as academics. That would in fact be wrong, for it legitimises their propaganda. Therefore, if they have been given invitations or long-term visas on the condition that they are academics, those should be cancelled. After all, they are not.
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Avoiding Yellow Peril amid PRC infiltration
With legislation introduced in Australia’s parliament which Prime Minister Turnbull has explicitly said is meant to counter Chinese interference, the efforts of Beijing to shape the world have been brought to the fore like they haven’t in quite some time. Across the Western world, governments and companies are realising that behind Chinese acquisitions and investment might be a conscious influence-building agenda that transcends economic rationale. The accusations that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) depends on projects that are economically not viable seem less important now. Sri Lanka’s inability to pay back loans led to it handing control over the Chinese-built Hambantota port to Beijing. The power China has over Venezuela and Zimbabwe has been in the press as well.
However, the creeping global influence of the regime in Beijing should not lead us in the West to condemn ‘the Chinese’ en bloc. The West has a long history of ‘Yellow Peril’ narratives and while addressing the very serious issue of Communist Party of China (CPC) abusing the openness of Western countries we should take care to distinguish between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and ‘the Chinese’. Already, reports by Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) about the danger of Chinese infiltration has led to some unease in the Chinese community in Australia. Not all ethnic Chinese are a threat. Reporting should take care to reflect this.
This might be even more necessary because often the first target of PRC overseas operations are overseas Chinese communities. Every PRC embassy has an officer for Overseas Chinese Affairs (华侨事务 huáqiáo shìwù, shortened to 侨务 qiáowù) who concerns themself with bringing the local Chinese community in line with the CPC. This includes ensuring joyful flag-wavers whenever Chairman Xi Jinping or another Chinese leader makes a foreign visit, but also organising angry nationalists to, for example, shout over pro-Tibet demonstrations and allegedly to beat up demonstrators. It moreover includes overseeing Chinese Scholar and Student Associations (CSSAs) that keep tabs on Chinese students and impel them to inform on each other. Often, the poorer students are encouraged with financial rewards to do so. Lastly, it tries to keep the local business community in line.
Chinese embassies have this power because of the enormous economic importance of China, especially to Chinese business communities that distinguish themselves based on their ties to the PRC. Perhaps it were these business interests that made ethnic Chinese businessmen in Kuala Lumpur in 2015 happy to welcome the PRC ambassador to tour Petaling Street after Malay riots. Recently, the Chinese ambassador even accompanied an MP of opposition party DAP on house visits. Ambassador Huang’s remarks about anti-Chinese racism and separate remarks declaring the safety of ethnic Chinese a national interests of the PRC only fuel racists in UMNO who still see the ethnic Chinese as foreigners under foreign tutelage.
The year 2016 saw the PRC’s claim of ownership over ethnic Chinese wherever they live in the world also hit Singapore. Various issues—including the remaining military links of the Republic with Taiwan and its pro-international law stance in the South China Sea—had been grating Beijing for a while, and it was probably this older unhappiness that caused such an outburst that year. Talking to people at Peking University, I got the impression that the root of this cause is the supposed ‘Westernisation’ of the Singaporeans, who are losing their Chineseness—no matter that the ancestors of ~25% never had any ‘Chineseness’ to begin with. When Lee Kuan Yew passed away in March 2015, on the Chinese internet several nationalists saw it fit to call him a 汉奸 (hànjiān), traitor of the Chinese race, for selling out ‘his’ Chinese to the West.
Increasingly, as the CPC turns to traditional culture as its source of legitimacy, Beijing has to present itself as the guardian of Chinese civilisation. In a speech to overseas Chinese I have looked at earlier, Chairman Xi Jinping implied that their Chinese heritage ought to lead ethnic Chinese to staunchly support the ‘motherland’ and with that of course the Party. In Chinatowns across the world, Chinese businessmen with links to the PRC take over papers and Chinese schools. A granny who has read her local Chinese-language news for decades suddenly finds her trusty source of news following the Party line, no matter that she herself might actually have fled from that Party. Chinese community organisations abroad are reminded by the local qiáowù official where their business interests lie and need not much further instruction.
The danger of ‘infiltration’ is then much more serious and much further along already for ethnic Chinese communities across the world. This has real-life consequences, especially when ethnic Chinese find themselves in PRC (or Hong Kong) jurisdiction. Australian
citizenpermanent resident, professor Feng Chongyi, discovered this as he was barred from leaving the PRC, but we can also see this in much more severe punishment for ethnic Chinese businessmen who find themselves in trouble with the law as compared to other businesspeople with foreign nationalities.That we have to deal with this issue is clear. As the CPC refines its methods, we will see more stories like the current Australian saga pop up. However, it is essential that we do not chalk this off to interference by ‘the Chinese’. It is true that Beijing seeks to mobilise overseas Chinese communities—in the case of Australia the PRC embassy in Canberra shockingly threatened the government to instruct the Chinese community to vote against the Australian Labor Party—but by talking about the Chinese as one monolith we only give the PRC the ownership it wants. What we need to do is recognise the experiences of ethnic Chinese around the world, since they have battled with this issue for much longer.
The Century of National Humiliation narrative that shapes Chinese nationalism bemoans the loss of Chinese dominance. This is said to have not only lead to the lamentable loss of geographical bodies, but also to the humiliating loss of human bodies. Rejuvenation or restoration (复兴 fùxīng), the core of Chinese ambition, would in the eyes of nationalists include restoration of Chinese control over ‘Chinese’ bodies. Other countries thus have to spend more attention to protect those among their citizens who happen to be of ethnic Chinese descent. This requires distinction between the country and the civilisation.