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- Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
CHINA TODAY. TOMORROW, THE WORLD? In China's shiny new 'Smart Cities', citizens can scarcely cross the road or buy an orange without the Party knowing, and posting a satirical online comment about President Xi's Winnie-the-Pooh-like features can land you in jail. A generation after the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square, China's autocratic leaders are using powerful new technologies to create the largest and most effective surveillance state the world has ever seen. This is a journey into a land where Big Brother has acquired a whole new set of toys with which to control and cajole -- 'harmonise' -- the masses. It is also a warning against Western complacency. Beijing is already finding eager buyers for its 'Operating System for Dictators' -- in Africa and Asia, Russia and the Middle East. And with China's corporate giants -- all ultimately under Party control -- being offered a place at the heart of Europe's vital infrastructure, it is time we paid attention.
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‘Terrifying… This chilling book reveals just how far China has already gone in monitoring and controlling its citizens digitally… China is attempting a shift unprecedented in global politics. It wants to combine the powers of a strong authoritarian regime with cutting-edge technology to create the most sophisticated surveillance state in history… A warning call.’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘The most accessible and best-informed account we have had to date of China’s transition from “networked authoritarianism” to what is now a form of networked totalitarianism…The more one reads, the more pressing one conclusion becomes: almost everything we thought we knew about contemporary China is wrong.’ OBSERVER (BOOK OF THE WEEK)
‘Accessible yet hard-hitting… will find an audience with policymakers and general readers alike. A frightening, vital wake-up call: the West ignores the rise of an Orwellian China at its peril.’ KIRKUS REVIEWS (STARRED REVIEW)
‘In this fine-grained and alarming portrait of modern-day China, Strittmatter details how President Xi Jinping’s “thirst for power” and the tools of big data and artificial intelligence are paving the way for “the return of totalitarianism under digital garb”… Drawing on a wealth of experience in China, Strittmatter stuffs the book with telling details and incisive analysis. Even veteran China watchers will be impressed and enlightened.’ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (STARRED REVIEW)
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WE HAVE BEEN HARMONISED
Life in China's Surveillance State
Kai Strittmatter
TABLE OF CONTENTS
NEW CHINA, NEW WORLD
A PREFACE
The China we once knew no longer exists. The China that was with us for forty years – the China of ‘reform and opening up’ – is making way for something new. It’s time we paid attention. Something is happening in China that the world has never seen before. A new country and a new regime are being born. And it’s also time for us to take a look at ourselves. Are we ready? Because one thing is becoming increasingly clear: over the coming decades, the greatest challenge for our democracies and for Europe won’t be Russia, it will be China. Within its borders, China is working to create the perfect surveillance state, and its engineers of the soul are again trying to craft the ‘new man’ of whom Lenin, Stalin and Mao once dreamed. And this China wants to shape parts of our world in its own image.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has placed its leader, Xi Jinping, where no one has been since Mao Zedong. Right at the top. Nothing above him but the heavens. China has a ‘helmsman’ once more. Xi is the most powerful Chinese leader in decades, and he rules over a China that is stronger than it has been for centuries. An ambitious nation, readying itself to become even stronger, economically, 2politically and militarily. The West’s self-destruction has fallen into this nation’s lap like a gift from the gods. With 21st-century information technology and its radical new possibilities for control and manipulation, the regime has instruments of power to which no previous autocracy has ever had access. Xi and his party are reinventing dictatorship for the information age, in deliberate competition with the systems of the West. And this has huge implications for the world’s democracies.
In recent years, there has been a mixture of complacency, naiveté and a certain degree of blindness in the West towards the radical new ways in which the Communist Party has been reshaping itself and the nation over which it rules. It seems this is changing now. Recent events have shone a sharp light on Xi’s new China. The revelations concerning a huge network of re-education camps in China’s West have made headlines across the world. So has the subjugation of Hong Kong with a draconian new National Security Law that effectively ends its status as an autonomous city. This latter step in particular, with its blatant disregard for international law – it came 27 years before the date agreed in the treaties signed by the UK and the people of Hong Kong – has provoked outrage around the world.
Then came the pandemic. China itself seemed to have been put under a microscope: suddenly, the world could see the systemic changes that had taken place, the return of repression and the culture of silence inside a nation we’d fondly believed was becoming more like us. We witnessed the Party’s turn to digital technology and AI-powered social media propaganda, as it fought to retake control both of the public health situation and of public opinion. And we watched as a new brand of ‘Coronavirus diplomacy’ came into being: an aggressive propaganda and influence effort by China’s 3diplomats, state media and loyal social media operators all over the world. Some in the West had remained unconvinced up to this point; it was only when China targeted several European countries with its hearts-and-minds mission, that there was a backlash, and a growing awareness of the truth and intentions that might lie behind the gestures.
Even within China, the CCP’s agenda of control and domination is ambitious, but one shouldn’t underestimate the hold that an autocrat has over his subjects’ minds. The state has the ability to erase not just lives, but minds, in order to reformat them. The Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and the years that followed, provide a powerful demonstration. The date 4 June 2019 saw the 30th anniversary of the day the Chinese democracy movement was brutally crushed, and the Party has good reason to celebrate. In hindsight, its act of violence was a success – a greater success than anyone could have imagined at the time. The blood-letting gave the Party new life, as well as an opportunity to show what its mind-control apparatus could do, long before the advent of the digital age. Inside China, the memory of the massacre has practically been wiped out; the state-ordered amnesia is complete. And he who controls the past – the CCP understands this as well as George Orwell did – also controls the future.
This is a message from the future, if things don’t go so well. At the moment, things are not going well. That’s why I wrote this book. It was born on the night Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America, and was finished in the months that saw Xi Jinping ‘chosen by history’, in the words of the journal of the Central Party School in Beijing, Qiushi (Seeking Truth). History is often a sluggish tide on which we float without ever being aware that it’s moving. But that isn’t the case right now: we are living 4through a time when the current of history seems almost tangible. Something is happening, to us and to China, and the two sides can no longer be separated.
The new age is one in which facts have been abolished; the Western world is suddenly mired in ‘fake news’ and manipulated by ‘alternative facts’. For me personally, though, there is nothing new about it. It’s a life I’ve been living for twenty years, as a correspondent in Turkey (from 2005 to 2012), but above all in China. I studied in China in the 1980s, then worked there as a journalist from 1997 to 2005, and again from 2012 to 2018.
Government by lies is no doubt as old as the institution of government itself, yet we in the West are shocked by the return of autocrats and would-be autocrats to our midst, and with them the return of the shameless lie as an instrument of control. We had settled into the comfortable belief that these techniques and the political systems associated with them were obsolete. Then Donald Trump was elected as the most powerful man in a democracy that many had regarded as exemplary. A man willing and able to act on his hatred and his ignorance, a man setting out to destroy the foundations of the privileged lives we have been living over the past few decades. A man who may rub his rival China up the wrong way, yet openly expresses admiration for the limitless power of its ruler. A man who wants to put the screws on Europe. And Trump is not alone. Autocrats everywhere are scenting an opportunity and joining hands with populist agitators in our own countries. A perfect storm is brewing, for Europe and for democracies everywhere. How does China fit in? Is it observing from the sidelines, or an active participant? While the West has been preoccupied with Russia, and Trump’s real or imagined relations with that country, too few of us have been looking at China.5
Xi Jinping has promised his people and the world a ‘new age’ – and he is certainly building a new China. Both the Chinese people and the world at large have good reason to be nervous. Where Deng Xiaoping prescribed pragmatism, Xi Jinping has returned to ideology: he preaches Marx and practises Lenin with a force and dogmatism not seen for many years – and because he senses that Marx no longer speaks to many people, he has added Confucius and a fierce nationalism into the mix. Where Deng preached opening up and curiosity, Xi is sealing China off again.
Not that Xi is trying to force something on his party that goes against the grain. On the contrary, he is fulfilling its most hidden desires with speed and precision. Until recently, more than a few Party cadres* were secretly asking themselves: what is it still good for, the Party – a vehicle for a long-dead ideology from a long-dead age, almost a hundred years old? But where the Party was starting to smell of decay, Xi gave it new strength and discipline; where it was stagnant and directionless, he breathed a new purpose into it. It thanked him by elevating him into the pantheon of its greatest thinkers during his own lifetime, and endowing him with almost limitless power.
Xi is reminding everyone that the country was once conquered by the Party in a civil war. China itself was the Party’s spoils of victory. The army still belongs to the Party rather than the state. The state, too, belongs to the Party. And the Party – well, that now seems to belong to him. It submits to the man who has given it a sense of purpose, who is turning a one-party dictatorship back into a one-man dictatorship.
6The Party calls Xi ‘the saviour of socialism’ – by which it really means ‘the saviour of our power’. The fate of the Soviet Union seems to trouble Xi deeply. He is quoted as saying that ‘what they lacked was a real man!’ Not China, though. China has Xi Jinping. For life. Today, hardly anyone is still prophesying the impending collapse of this system, and the Party can once again afford to think long-term. The year 2024 will be an epochal year for the Party. At that point, it will have overtaken the CPSU, its failed Soviet sister party, and the CCP will have become the longest-reigning Communist Party in history.
It is time for the West to let go of that form of wishful thinking that one wise author exposed as a ‘China fantasy’1 some years ago: the idea that a more open economy and increasing prosperity would automatically bring political liberalisation to China. For a long time, despite all the evidence to the contrary, people clung to the reassuring notion that if we traded with China, it would start to resemble us. After all, there was no precedent. This Communist Party was like none the world had ever seen. It simply assimilated capitalism and passed it off as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.2 It was an entity of phenomenal adaptibility. It never gave up its autocratic core, but in the past few decades, deep in the country’s innards and even in the Party itself, there have been reform movements, debates, surprising experiments and brave taboo-breakers.
In Xi Jinping’s China, this is no longer the case. He has brought unorthodox movements to a standstill. Xi the taskmaster is setting out to prove that an autocracy is better suited to making a country like China great and powerful; that the realisation of his ‘China dream’ requires a strong Party dictatorship. Xi is dispensing with the premises of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of reform and opening up; his China is no 7longer a state where everything is subordinate to economic success. Now, political control is at the heart of things. His Party no longer devolves tasks to the state, to companies, to civil society, to the media, all of which fought to carve out their own small freedoms, and saw them snuffed out by Xi in an instant. During a single term in office, he has managed to get an iron grip on a nervous Communist Party stricken by a mood of crisis. He took on a diverse, lively, sometimes insubordinate society and did everything in his power to ‘harmonise’ it, as they say in China, stifling the voices of those who think differently and subordinating every last corner of society to the command, and the watchful gaze of the Party.
Events on the edges of the Chinese ‘empire’ have accelerated the new intransigence and addiction to control. In Hong Kong, hundreds of thousands of residents, fearing the permanent loss of their liberties, took to the streets – a challenge that the Party answered with a National Security Law, doing away with many of the rights and freedoms Hongkongers had enjoyed in the past. This move ‘killed Hong Kong as we know it’, according to Nathan Law, the youngest parliamentarian ever to hold office in the city, who was forced to flee his hometown for London days after the law was enacted in July 2020. In Xinjiang, the party’s abduction and indoctrination of what’s likely to be over a million Muslim Uighurs in a network of re-education camps is the largest internment of an ethnic-religious minority since the Nazi era. In China itself, the planned re-programming of a whole people is evoking memories of the Cultural Revolution.
With one foot, then, Xi is taking a huge step backwards into the past. Leninism is in his bones. And so is the thirst for power. Some compare him to Mao Zedong, but this comparison falls at the first hurdle: Mao was the eternal rebel, 8who thrived in chaos. In many respects Xi Jinping, who has a fetish for control and stability, is the antithesis of Mao. Xi is no revolutionary; he’s a technocrat, albeit one who navigates the labyrinth of the Party apparatus with tremendous agility. But one experiment from Mao’s legacy is currently making a comeback: the CCP is once again practising total mindcontrol, once again trying to produce ‘new men’. Only this time, the Party believes that – at the second attempt – its chances are much better: China’s dictatorship is updating itself with the tools of the 21st century. Because, with the other foot, Xi is taking a giant step into the future, to a place many dictatorships have sought, but none have yet found. The days when the Party eyed the internet with fear and anxiety are long gone. The regime has not only lost its fear; it has learned to love new technologies. China is staking more than any other country on information technology. The Party believes it can use big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to create steering mechanisms that will catapult its economy into the future and make its apparatus crisis-proof.
At the same time, it intends to use this technology to create the most perfect surveillance state the world has ever seen. Ideally, one where you can’t even see the surveillance, because the state has planted it inside the heads of its subjects. This new China won’t be a giant parade ground characterised by asceticism and discipline, as it was under Mao, but an outwardly colourful mix of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people devote themselves to commerce and pleasure and submit to surveillance of their own accord. Still, for the vast majority of subjects, the potential threat of state terror will remain everpresent, the background radiation in this Party universe.3
A central component of this new China, for example, will be the ‘Social Credit System’, which from 2020 is intended 9to record every action and transaction by each Chinese citizen in real time and to respond to the sum of an individual’s economic, social and moral behaviour with rewards and penalties. In this vision, omnipresent algorithms create economically productive, socially harmonised and politically compliant subjects, who will ultimately censor and sanction themselves at every turn. In the old days, the Party demanded fanatical belief; now, mute complicity will suffice. If the plans of Xi and the Party are successful, it will mean the return of totalitarianism dressed in digital garb. And for autocrats all over the world, that will provide a shortcut to the future: a new operating system that they can order in from China, probably even with a maintenance agreement.
Can this vision ultimately be realised in a country whose society is more diverse today than it has ever been, where the aspirations and consumer dreams of the new middle classes now hardly differ from those in other countries? Materially, at least, the Communist Party has delivered over the years. Under its rule in the past few decades, urban China has seen an unprecedented rise in prosperity. For a long time, the Party has been making these middle classes into the country’s most satisfied citizens, and therefore its greatest allies. Soon they may even be able to breathe easy: Xi Jinping has ordered the clean-up of the poisonous fog that passes for air in China’s cities. But the challenges are huge. Chinese society is ageing rapidly, and Xi has not yet seen fit to try to bridge the country’s divide between rich and poor. China, which calls itself communist, has long been one of the most unequal societies in the world. The number of billionaires in its capital, Beijing, overtook that of New York a few years ago, and its citizens are not blind to the fact that most of the extra money has been lining the pockets of a shameless kleptocracy4 closely tied to the Party.10
Xi’s one-man rule comes with its own risks. A system that was until recently surprisingly adaptable is being made rigid once more, unreceptive to criticism and new ideas. His rule has created enemies and desires for revenge within his own ranks. Xi is aware of the problems. That is partly why he is giving his people the dream of China becoming the superpower that it was always supposed to be. He is also reintroducing an ideological enemy: the West. Of all the ways to unite a nation, nationalism is the cheapest. It’s also the one that should cause the West most concern, because something else too is now a thing of the past: the principle of restraint in foreign policy. Xi Jinping has a message for the world: China is retaking its position at the head of the world’s nations. And the Party media cheer: Make way, West! Make way, capitalism and democracy! Here comes zhongguo fang’an, the ‘Chinese solution’.
After years on the defensive, under Xi Jinping the CCP is once more proudly proclaiming its system’s superiority. China’s democracy, says Xi, is ‘the most genuine democracy’, and the most efficient to boot. The propaganda press crows that the liberal West is swamped by ‘crises and chaos’.5
Has China really found a unique magic formula in its blend of autocracy and economic miracle? Those who think so point, for example, to the high-speed rail network – already by far the world’s largest. Or they contrast the giant airport in Beijing, built in record time, with the farce of the eternally unfinished airport in Berlin. They call it the China model, lauding it as the model that will beat us nambypamby democracies in the new systems competition, and in the end dominate the world. When, at the beginning of 2020, China built entire hospitals for coronavirus patients in just a couple weeks, you could feel a fresh upsurge of admiration for the legendary efficiency of the Chinese system. After all, 11the country had, with a strong hand, managed to control the spread of the disease outside the crisis region around the city of Wuhan and Hubei province. Quite a feat, especially when you contrast it with the lethal chaos of Donald Trump’s approach.
The truth is, the coronavirus crisis fed both these competing narratives. For those who wanted to see it, there was China as the state unparalleled in mobilising masses and resources for the common good, governed by a meritocracy drilled for efficiency. Sceptics saw an internally brittle regime whose true nature was revealed once again; a state that sacrificed without hesitation the welfare of its citizens to the Party’s interests, with catastrophic consequences for both China and the world; bureaucrats in Hubei who turned out to be as irresponsible as they were clueless; and a Communist Party whose obsession with control and secrecy recklessly encouraged the spread of the disease, especially in the critical early stages.
‘It is time for a change!’ The self-destruction of the USA under Donald Trump is God’s gift to the CCP in Beijing. So is a Europe that has spent years absorbed in navel-gazing and family therapy sessions, no longer even noticing its shrinking significance on the world stage. We’re not fighting a new Cold War yet, but competition between rival systems is back with a vengeance. Xi Jinping is now offering the world the ‘wisdom of China’, by which he means the economic and political model over which he presides.
Mao Zedong, they say in China, vanquished the nation’s enemies; Deng Xiaoping made the nation rich; and now Xi Jinping is making it strong, restoring it to its rightful position at the centre of the world. With its ‘Made in China 2025’ plan, the CCP wants to make China’s economy a world leader in innovative technologies. And its ‘New Silk Road’ 12project – the propaganda bureaucrats prefer the name ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) or ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) – is not just a global infrastructure and investment project, it’s also part of a plan for a new international order more in line with the Party’s ideas. China’s goals are breathtakingly ambitious, it’s true, but this country has taken our breath away before. China has long been the world’s largest trading nation. In ten or fifteen years it will be the largest national economy on earth. In what other ways will China change the face of the world?
Most crucially, how do we deal with it? I had an idea a while ago. It was inspired, in part, by the lemming-like behaviour of many citizens of Western democracies, as they followed the pipes of right-wing populists and new would-be autocrats. It was also inspired by the naive and blinkered attitude of many of my fellow Europeans, who seemed to regard the comfort of their old world as God-given and everlasting. My solution was to send them all away. People should be thrown out into the big, uncomfortable world, whether they like it or not. It should be mandatory for all Europeans to spend a year living outside their comfort zones. They could be sent to Turkey, where democracy is being dismantled at lightning speed. Or to Russia, where lies and cynicism have long been the modus operandi of the state and of daily life within it. In my dream, people would begin to recognise things that are happening around them right now. And they would be brutally confronted with the logical end-point of those things: tyranny.
Best of all would be to send them to China. In China, these Europeans would be lost for words at the ambition, the reckless pace of life and the unshakeable belief in the future, at the merciless competition of everyone with everyone else, and the untrammelled desire for wealth and power. The place would take their breath away, but perhaps also 13jolt them out of their lethargy and ignorance. It might give them the shock they need to stop allowing people in their own countries to divide them. In my fantasy, this experience provides them with courage, strength and new ideas for the future in a humane, fair and democratic Europe. As an added bonus, these travellers would eat incomparably better food in China than they do at home, and meet a whole range of wonderful, warm people, whose drive, energy and courage is twice as impressive for the fact that it exists under a system like China’s.
It’s time for the democracies of the West to recognise China as the challenge that it is. A confident, increasingly authoritarian China, that is changing the rules of the game every day. This is not the China that the optimists once dreamed of: a country that might go down the same route as South Korea or Taiwan and, having reached a similar stage of economic development, set out along the path to democracy. It is a Leninist dictatorship with a powerful economy and a clear vision for the future. This China wishes to reshape the world order according to its own ideas, to be a model for others, to export its norms and values. And make no mistake: these norms and values are not ‘Chinese’ – they are the norms and values of a Leninist dictatorship. China is creating global networks, increasing its influence. And liberal democracies are being confronted with this new China just when the West is showing signs of weakness, and the world order it has constructed over the past few decades is sliding into crisis.
Europe needs to open its eyes. Of course the world can and should continue to cooperate and do business with China. But Europeans need to proceed in the knowledge of China’s internal workings and its possible intentions. The Chinese model – the neo-authoritarian appropriation 14of the internet and new technologies – is not only working brilliantly, it’s spreading: countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Cambodia have long regarded Beijing as a role model, a trailblazer in the sophisticated manipulation of both the internet and its citizens. It was once said that capitalism would bring freedom to China. It didn’t. Then it was said that the internet would subvert China’s Party rule. At the moment, it looks as though China is subverting capitalism and the internet along with it.
We have good reasons to believe that our own system is better and more humane than China’s. But people often seem to forget one important thing: that although we Europeans may be living in the best of all times and the best of all places, such a life, free of violence and despotism and fear, is far from being the ordinary state of affairs in the long history of humankind. It was – and still is – an unlikely exception. Throughout human history, the overwhelming majority of people have lived in tribes, clans, kingdoms and nations where chicanery and tyranny, corruption and despotism, persecution and state terror were part of everyday life. A vague sense that ‘it’ll be okay’ is no longer enough. In the past it has very often not been okay, and things are not okay on a lot of fronts right now. We in Europe should remind ourselves every morning: ‘It wasn’t always like this. And it won’t necessarily stay this way.’
This book is for those who are unable to spend their prescribed year in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chengdu or Shenzhen. It is divided into three broad sections, though these sometimes overlap.
The first section explores the classic mechanisms of dictatorship: how it disconnects citizens from truth and 15reality, and how in the process it invents its own language. How it employs terror and repression when necessary, though propaganda and mind-control are its preferred methods, and why it must repeatedly inveigle its citizens into a collective amnesia. How it learned to love the internet: a first foretaste of the 21st century’s possibilities.
The second section describes the reinvention of dictatorship in China. How the Party is creating a state the like of which has never been seen before, with the help of technologies designed to give the economy a turbo-boost and at the same time to dissect people’s brains, exposing their darkest corners. How China may soon overtake the USA in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, and where it has already done so. Why the Party believes that, thanks to AI, it will soon ‘know in advance who is planning to do something bad’ – as the Deputy Minister for Science and Technology puts it – even if the perpetrator in question may not know it yet. Especially then. How the Party uses a ‘system of social trustworthiness’ to divide people into trustworthy and untrustworthy, and plans to ensure that soon ‘all people will behave according to the norms’. How it is already denying those who have betrayed its trust access to planes and high-speed trains. How, since time immemorial, dictatorship has produced warped minds rather than honest people.
Finally, the third section asks whether all this will work, and if so, what it means for us. It outlines the growing influence exerted by China’s Communist Party upon the world, and how it is profiting from the weakness of Western democracies. And it explains why, in the end, the future will come down to whether we can rediscover our strength in time.
* In its most general, military sense, a cadre is a unit of soldiers or officers. In the language of communism, however – and particularly the language of Chinese communism – a cadre is an individual Party official.
THE WORD
How Autocrats Hijack our Language
‘Enlightened Chinese democracy puts the West in the shade.’
Xinhua News Agency, 17 October 2017
I live in a free, democratic country governed by the rule of law. I live in China. Yes, that’s what it says on the banners and posters lining the streets in my city: Freedom! Democracy! The rule of law! I read this on every street corner in Beijing, every day. These are the ‘core socialist values’ that the Party has been invoking for years.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the US President cries out ‘Believe me!’ to the masses a dozen times a day. Trump likes to place this ‘Believe me!’ after a statement in which he has once again declared that black is white and white is black. In the first year of his presidency, the bizarre still seemed bizarre, the bafflement was still general, and the numbing effect hadn’t yet set in. Unfortunately, though, our historical memory of lies and deception being used in this way had long since faded. We had forgotten that in human history, Trump and his lies are nothing out of the ordinary. Far from being a pathological trait unique to one political clown, these lies are and always have been the common 18currency of autocrats and would-be autocrats everywhere. Anyone who has lived under emerging dictatorships – in Turkey, Russia or China, for instance – will be only too familiar with Trump’s deliberate, systematic and shameless perversion of facts. It is taken straight from the autocrat’s handbook, in which lies are first and foremost an instrument of power. Fake News? Alternative Facts? To billions of people on this earth, they’re an everyday, life-long experience. I’ve spent two decades in China and Turkey: nations where left can suddenly mean right, up suddenly morphs into down. I was there as an outsider, an observer, always with the luxury of distance and astonishment at each new outrage. It’s a luxury that a subject born into such countries can scarcely afford if he wants to get through life unmolested.
The Chinese have plenty of experience of rulers reinterpreting the world. Over 2,000 years ago, in 221 bc, Qin Shi Huangdi united the empire for the first time. His son ruled as emperor from 209 to 207 bc, with a feared and power-hungry imperial chancellor named Zhao Gao at his side. One day, in an audience with the emperor, the chancellor had a stag brought into the court. ‘Your majesty,’ he said, pointing to the beast: ‘A horse for you!’
The emperor was as taken aback as his ministers, and asked his chancellor to explain, if he pleased, how antlers could be growing out of a horse’s skull. ‘If your majesty doesn’t believe me,’ Zhao Gao replied, indicating the gathering of dignitaries around him, ‘then just ask your ministers.’ Some of the ministers were smart or scared enough to corroborate: ‘It really is a horse, your majesty.’ Of course, there were also those who stubbornly insisted that the animal standing in front of them was a stag. Later, the chancellor had them put in chains and executed. But he didn’t stop there: whoever had remained silent in surprise or fear was also put to death. 19From then on, the stag was a horse. And a population had learned its lesson. Zhi lu wei ma – ‘to call a deer a horse’ – is an expression in China to this day.
Western societies have grown comfortable in the certainties of the last few decades, and for the most part forgotten their experiences of the totalitarian systems of fascism and socialism. Thus the aspiring autocrat, equipped with an unscrupulous nature and a thirst for power, is always a step ahead of today’s naive and unschooled democrats. In the USA, this became clear shortly after Trump’s inauguration, when a debate arose as to whether you should still call a lie a lie if it came from the mouth of the president. As if power might have the right to rename the world. Eventually, the New York Times was the first newspaper to call him out, and having consulted their dictionaries, many people applauded them. The paper was right to use the word, they acknowledged, because if ‘the intention to deceive’ was present, then yes, that was indeed a lie.
When it comes to authoritarian personalities and systems, though, the primary intention is not to deceive, but to intimidate. That’s why the lies of autocrats are often shameless and outlandish. During Trump’s inauguration, the whole world saw the sparse gathering of onlookers in Washington’s great public space with their own eyes. It was captured on film, and you can still call up the images on the internet whenever you like, with a few clicks. But the president, undeterred, continues to boast about ‘the greatest crowd of all time’, the hundreds of thousands, the millions who came to honour him. In this respect, Washington is no different from Ankara. In a fully-fledged autocracy, they would bus in those adoring hundreds of thousands; but whether the crowds are forced to come, or a pure fantasy, the autocrat ultimately doesn’t care whether people believe him. He doesn’t want to convince 20everyone – but he does want to subjugate everyone. One essential feature of power is that, however great it becomes, it is never completely sure of itself. This paranoia, the fear of losing power, is part of the powerful man’s nature. It’s why he feels compelled to subdue the masses again and again. Above all, the lie serves this purpose.
If China’s ruling party insists to this day that its country is communist, and if it is once again forcing teachers, professors, civil servants and businessmen to make public commitments to Marxism, it isn’t because it seriously thinks the population still believes in Marx. In the Swiss legend of William Tell, all the peasants were forced to salute a hat placed on a post by the imperial governor, Hermann Gessler. Marxism is China’s version of Gessler’s Hat: it is the gesture of submission that matters. This is how the autocrat deploys his lies – and refusing to swallow them marks you out as an enemy and a target.
But intimidation is only half the story. It’s just as important to sow confusion, to disrupt the rationality and reality that give people a frame of reference, to take the compass away from the nation and the world. If you’re a liar and a cheat, there’s no way for you to win in a world that is repelled by these things, a world that differentiates between truth and lies. So you have to make everyone else a liar and a cheat, too. Then you will at least be their liar.
Hannah Arendt, who studied totalitarian regimes, said as much in an interview in 1974: ‘If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.’6 But a population that no longer believes anything is robbed of its ability to think and to judge, and ultimately of its capacity to act. As Arendt says, ‘with such a people, you can then do what you please.’ These are the ideal subjects – or the ideal opponents. 21
The mirror image of the liar’s shamelessness is the shame of the person being lied to, at least while he remains aware of the nonsense that he himself is bolstering every day, in chorus with everyone else. The act of repeating obvious untruths binds him to the liar with a rope of complicity. In the end, the ruler’s lies breed cynicism among the people being ruled, who make their peace with the powerlessness of their situation and ultimately cling to just one thing: the leader’s power. At that point, the leader no longer has to account for anything, because there is no truth left outside his fabrications.
In a world where the distinction between truth and lies has been abolished, there are just facts and alternative. The dominant values are not morality and a sense of responsibility, but usefulness and profit. If you do see the truth, it will do you no good to tell it; in fact, it’s dangerous. Best of all is to acknowledge the lie as true and embrace it passionately – that’s what the fanatics do. But they will only ever be a very small group. The next best thing is deliberately to avoid learning the truth, to live a life of benumbed ignorance –and if you do happen upon the truth, keep quiet and pretend you haven’t. These two groups represent the majority of the population. Anyone who speaks the truth is either stupid or suicidal. The smart people in such a world are not the clear-sighted and wise; the smart people are the cunning and shrewd. There’s no room here for common sense, or rather, ignorance is the new common sense, necessary for survival or used to justify opportunistic advancement.
Of course, the whole business of truth – recognising it and communicating it through language – is philosophically difficult. ‘The name is only a guest in reality,’ said Zhuangzi, one of the forefathers of Taoism. Over 2,000 years later, the Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller wrote: ‘The sound of the 22words knows that it has no choice but to beguile, because objects deceive with their materials, and feelings mislead with their gestures’; what counts when you write is ‘the honesty of the deceit.’7 Müller’s ‘deceit’ is well-intentioned; it participates in a free exchange with others’ experiences, in full knowledge of the imprecision inherent in its claims.
Similarly, in a community, people make an effort to come closer to what is true, to gain a shared understanding of a world that looks slightly different to every individual. But the autocrat who claims sunshine when it’s raining outside deliberately takes the world off its hinges. He creates a world according to his will, a world where things often mean the opposite of what they used to, a world in which balance can only be maintained if everyone huddles tightly around the leader. And this leader often wants to create new men to go with his new world. From the outside, this world really does seem unhinged, in every sense of the word. Internally, though, it is structured in such a way that in the end, the last person to still believe that the earth turns around the sun will start wondering whether, after all, he’s the madman. He will have to stop trusting his eyes, his ears and his memory, and simply chew the cud of the information he’s been force-fed.
For this reason, the free press is the autocrat’s natural enemy. Where alternative facts are a badge of power, research and fact-checking by the free press equate to ‘ideological subversion’ (as it says in the extraordinary ‘Document Number Nine’, a battle plan of the CCP from 2013 to combat ‘Western values’, to which we will return later). Or else they are a declaration of war: think of Trump’s statement, made during a visit to the CIA’s headquarters, that he was fighting a ‘running war with the media’.8
Take, for example, the ‘harmonious demolition’ of 23houses by the city authorities to make way for property developers. In my little side-street in the centre of Beijing, the city authority gave just a week’s notice before it bricked up the windows and doors of all the snack bars, restaurants, hairdressers, newsagents and vegetable sellers, some of whom had been earning their living there for twenty years. The aim was to drive out the operators, since hardly any of them came from Beijing. This campaign was overseen by a dozen uniformed police officers, who protected the bricklayers from the displeasure of the street’s inhabitants, beneath large banners that proclaimed: ‘We are improving the quality of life for citizens’.
When China’s president defended globalisation at the 2017 World Economic Forum in Davos, he spoke of the increasing ‘opening-up’ of China, while in fact his country was steadily sealing itself off. He invoked ‘global connectivity’ while at that very moment China’s censors were plugging the final gaps in the information blockade. What’s more, he was applauded for it, because there is great confusion at the moment, all over the world. Some believe Xi, and some want to believe him. Some are blinded by his power. Some applaud because it is politically expedient, and serves their own interests to do so. China’s power to twist words does not end at the country’s borders.
It’s a tried-and-tested tactic: steal your enemies’ words and make them your own. As George Orwell taught us, freedom then becomes slavery, and ignorance becomes strength. And China is a democratic state under the rule of law. That’s what the Party’s propaganda says. And it’s true: China does have a constitution, Article 35 of which guarantees citizens of the People’s Republic ‘the freedom of speech, of the press […] and of demonstration’. There is a ‘parliament’ in China, too: the National People’s Congress. 24There are ‘elections’, and citizens are regularly exhorted to make use of their ‘sacred and solemn right’ to vote.
A long time ago, Lenin invented ‘democratic centralism’: a system in which – so the theory went – democratically-elected functionaries should, once elected, have the privilege of dictating policy without opposition. Mao Zedong later preached the ‘democratic dictatorship of the people’. In practice, centralism and dictatorship always ruled; democracy was a dead husk of a word that stuck in the throats of the population. The subjects of the regime thus experience their ‘elections’, their ‘sacred right to vote’ and their ‘freedom’ as an eternal farce. The words lose all meaning; they have been discredited. In this way citizens are inoculated against subversive influences. When they come into contact with other worlds (a normal part of life for many Chinese people in our globalised age), they will not become infected by dangerous words that represent dangerous ideas. This perverted language makes the population immune. And mute.
The belief of the language-poisoners in the efficacy of their methods is by no means vain. Thought steers language, yes, but language can also steer and corrupt thought. ‘Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic,’ wrote Victor Klemperer, who explored the language of the Third Reich in his study LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii): ‘They are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.’ The language of dictatorship ‘changes the value of words and the frequency of their occurrence, it makes common property out of what was previously the preserve of an individual or a tiny group, it commandeers for the Party that which was previously common property and in the process steeps words and groups of words and sentence structures in its poison. Making language the 25servant of its dreadful system, it procures it as its most powerful, most public and most surreptitious means of advertising.’ In the end the Germans didn’t need consciously to avow their belief in Nazism, because it had ‘permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.’9 The autocrat’s aim is to occupy and control the mind through language. The highest goal of the Communist Party’s propaganda is to ‘unify thinking’. But this is a process that has to be carried out over and over again. ‘We need to unify the thoughts and actions of all Beijing people,’ said Cai Qi, the Party Secretary for the capital, appealing to the propaganda press a few weeks before the CCP’s 19th Party Congress in autumn 2017.10 The totalitarian apparatus aims to unify all thought and action; every piece of ‘thought work’ has this purpose. The goal is to flay the individuality from every individual, from his feelings, his judgement, his dreams. Only the ‘China Dream’ is permitted now, with the Party as its artistic director. Individuals are supposed to merge in the great utopia, and their minds are being pressed into a new shape. Thus it was under Mao Zedong, and thus it is again in the China of Xi Jinping. It is no coincidence that one of the Chinese concepts to have made it into Western languages is ‘brainwashing’ – xi nao in Chinese – invented by Mao Zedong’s apparatchiks. To unlock brains, you need the right words. Stalin called writers ‘engineers of the soul’. Like Confucius before him, Mao also knew that ‘one single (correct) formulation, and the whole nation will flourish. One single (incorrect) formulation and the whole nation will decline.’
Of course, it isn’t enough just to occupy the words of 26others. By the 1940s at the latest, China’s Communist Party began creating its own new language for its new humans. Words that had fallen into disfavour were weeded out, and others invented to replace them. Immediately after the People’s Republic was founded, Party linguists started work on the Xinhua Zidian, the New China Dictionary. Newly-minted politically- and morally-laden slogans and phrases have never stopped being fed into both the Party discourse and everyday language.
The language practice developed at that time still forms the foundation for what the sinologist Geremie Barmé calls ‘New China Newspeak’11 – the jargons of various decades have been laid down in sedimentary layers, one on top of another. First the Marxist-Leninist imports were blended with the missionary, military swagger of the Maoist canon. Later, the wooden diction of Party bureaucracy was mixed with the technocrats’ pseudo-scientific jargon. With Deng Xiaoping’s politics of ‘reform and opening-up’ and the increasing role of Chinese business in world trade, some bits of linguistic flotsam and jetsam from the worlds of commerce, advertising and globalisation floated into Party discourse – sometimes deliberately, sometimes by osmosis. And in the last few years, words plucked from the spheres of the internet and high-tech have been showing up to edify readers of leading articles in the People’s Daily.
The emissions from the propaganda machine have become so saturated with this hermetic, opaque language that they have become indigestible to the people. Xi Jinping is not the first Party leader to combat ‘formalism’ and ‘empty talk’ in the ranks. In a famous speech in February 1942, Mao reprimanded his comrades for their ‘stereotyped Party writing’ – they were filling ‘endless pages with empty verbiage’. Such articles, Mao said, were like the ‘foot bindings’ 27in which old women wrapped the broken bones of their tiny, bound lotus feet: they were ‘long as well as smelly’.12
The very first thing betrayed was the language of everyday life and common sense. ‘We were no longer humans,’ a former Red Guard soldier, now a lawyer, told me during an interview. ‘We were feral children, raised by wolves. A whole country, a whole generation that had suckled wolf’s milk.’ His first name, Hongbing, means ‘Red Soldier’. The most famous member of the Red Guard was the schoolgirl Song Binbin, a general’s daughter who in August 1966, before the eyes of a million other young people, climbed the steps to the Gate of Heavenly Peace to be received by Mao himself. Song Binbin – thick glasses and plaits – was permitted to fasten her red armband with its three characters, hong wei bing, Red Guard soldier, onto Mao. Mao asked the girl for her name; Binbin, as in polite and elegant? Yes, she said. ‘That is not good,’ said Mao. ‘Yaowu would be better: warlike.’ From then on, that was the 17-year-old’s name. Poisoned milk, sucked in with poisoned words.
Some woke from the madness earlier than others. Young people like Gu Cheng, Mang Ke, Bei Dao or Yang Lian were city-dwellers sent into the countryside by Mao. They knew nothing of each other, yet they were united by a common desire: to purify the language that had been beaten and gutted by propaganda, and fill it with new life. They did something unheard of, writing poems that used words like sun, earth, water and death. The public, fed with nothing but slogans for ten years, was taken aback. Sun? Earth? Water? The young writers became renowned as the ‘Misty Poets’ (menglong pai). In their poetry at least, the Chinese language was reborn in the People’s Republic. 28
The gulf between official and non-official language is wider in authoritarian societies than in others. But because the private sphere is deprived of oxygen in totalitarian systems, people who live under them have official language forced on them at every turn. As a result, they develop split personalities – all the more so when the language of propaganda is the language of lies – and end up adopting what George Orwell perceptively called Doublethink and Doublespeak in 1984: ‘To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy’.13 Each subject acts a part, to his neighbours, his colleagues, the political apparatus – and as long as he is aware of this, he can still laugh or sigh about it in secret. For most people, though, the part they act quickly becomes flesh and blood, and because it is impossible to keep the two spheres perfectly separate, the language of the political apparatus always winds up corrupting the language of the people.
Writers have especially bemoaned the brutalisation of the Chinese language by the militaristic, revolutionary battlecry of Maoist times, the effects of which can still be felt today. Essays by the American literary scholar and sinologist Perry Link and the sociologist Anna Sun, for example, have looked at the legacy of Maoist jargon in the books of Mo Yan, China’s first Nobel literature laureate. Anna Sun speaks of a ‘diseased language’, one that Mo Yan, along with most of his contemporaries, has never outgrown.14
In everyday usage, the vocabulary of propaganda can 29travel a winding road. In the China of the late 1990s, xiao zi (or petit bourgeois), a group against which Mao had railed, suddenly became an aspirational term among the new middle classes: everyone wanted to be a xiao zi. In the new China, this was someone who could order a cappuccino in one of the recently-opened Starbucks; who knew that red wine should be drunk neat and not mixed with Sprite (as most of the Party functionaries and the nouveau riche did at their banquets); who sometimes took holidays to London and Paris. To be a xiao zi was suddenly cool.
From time to time, both words and citizens fight back. Many of the Party’s ‘warlike’ words have fallen prey to irony. Tongzhi, for example – comrade. Suddenly it wasn’t just China’s ardent communists who were addressing each other as comrade: it was also members of the gay community. Or the phrase I have been harmonised. For many years now, this has meant: I have been caught by the censor, and my online comment – even my entire account – has been deleted. When the police invite someone in for a cup of tea, it is interrogation rather than a hot beverage that awaits them. Sometimes a well-known intellectual, author, lawyer or other inciter of unrest might be travelled: this creative verb-form denotes a person’s involuntary removal from the city, while the Party has its conference or the foreign leader pays a visit.
China’s propaganda incessantly spits out new words and phrases. Today’s China is a fantastical realm of contradictions, a society rapidly branching out and exhibiting a pluralism that goes against the unification of all things and all actions so vehemently pursued by the Party. For such a country, the Party attempts to create terms that unite all contradictions, and thereby do away with them. ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ is one of these. Or the ‘socialist market economy’. These formulations contain left and right, up 30and down, Maoist and neo-liberal all at once. Language has overruled logic and in doing so believes itself untouchable. Of course, in reality it is becoming ever more empty and absurd, but in a country where what matters is power and not letters, that doesn’t really make a difference. Here, more often than not, the function of words is to convey an order rather than a meaning: Nod! Swallow! Forget! Kneel! And so the propaganda machine feels perfectly free to compare the Dalai Lama with Adolf Hitler, and at the same time to warn the country’s newspaper editors never to confuse ‘truth and lies, good and evil, beauty and ugliness’. The true, the good and the beautiful are always the Party and its Word.
Naturally the Party doesn’t stop at interpreting reality; it also creates it. ‘There are no dissidents in China.’ All you have to do is say it often enough. These words were spoken in 2010 by a foreign ministry spokesman in connection with the writer Liu Xiaobo, who had just been sentenced to 11 years’ prison. In 2017, Liu became the first Nobel Peace Prize winner to die in prison since Carl von Ossietzky at the hands of the Nazis in 1938.
For over a decade Liu Xiaobo was the most famous dissident in China. In official statements, though, he was always a ‘convicted criminal’, not a dissident. As the spokesman elaborated to journalists, on 11 February 2010, ‘In China, you can judge for yourself whether such a group exists. But I believe this term is questionable in China.’15
At the time, the artist Ai Weiwei was one of the most active Chinese micro-bloggers on Twitter. His analysis of this declaration appeared on his account:
1. Dissidents are criminals
2. Only criminals have dissenting views
3. The distinction between criminals and non-criminals is whether they have dissenting views31
4. If you think China has dissidents, you are a criminal
5. The reason [China] has no dissidents is because they are [in fact already] criminals
6. Does anyone have a dissenting view regarding my statement?16
However, as Ai Weiwei was at that point a dissident himself, his blogs on China’s own social networks had long since been deleted, and so hardly any of his fellow countrymen could reply. Twitter is blocked in China. Just one year later, Ai Weiwei spent three months in prison himself, supposedly for ‘economic crimes’.
It seems fitting to conclude with a quote from Confucius, newly rehabilitated by Xi Jinping. Here’s the philosopher’s response to a pupil who asked what he would do first if he were handed political power: ‘He who would create order in the state,’ replied Confucius, ‘must do one thing: correct the names.’17
THE WEAPON
How Terror and Law Complement Each Other
‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’
Mao Zedong18
This is one of Mao’s most-quoted pronouncements. But what people often forget is that, alongside and equal to the barrel of the gun, Mao and his people always had the barrel of the pen – propaganda. The Maoists used to mention the two in the same breath: ‘The Revolution relies on guns and pens.’ One stands for the threat of physical violence and terror; the other for mind control. As wu (the military; force of arms) and wen (literature, culture), these two instruments have served the rulers of China as far back as the classical period.
Once victory had been achieved in the civil war, the pen quickly became the weapon of choice. Today’s Party still commands both: the pens and the guns – and in China, as I have mentioned, even the People’s Liberation Army answers to the Party, not to the state. The Party has the monopoly on authority, and it exercises this authority over the life of every individual. The people’s awareness of this fact is refreshed on a regular basis, not least with broadcast images of massed troops. For months after the event, on the screens of every metro carriage in Beijing, the video of the great 34military parade that took place in the heart of the capital in September 2015 played on a continuous loop from early morning to late at night.
