We Have Been Harmonised

by Kai Strittmatter

  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 jolt 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 they would eat incomparably better food in China than they do at home, and get to 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 the 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 do this in the knowledge of China’s internal workings and its possible intentions. The Chinese model – the neo-authoritarian appropriation of 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 very much 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 – a rather 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.’ Another reason to look to China.

  This book is for those who, for whatever reason, 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 reality, 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 even their darkest corners. How China may soon overtake the USA in the areas of 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 person 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 increasing influence that China’s Communist Party has in 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 currency 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 gr
owing 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. From 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 in both cases the autocrat ultimately doesn’t care whether people believe him. He doesn’t want to convince everyone – 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.

  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 words 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 by 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

  The autocrat who wants to create his own truth needs to conquer the word. In China there is no repression; there is simply ‘maintaining stability’ (weiwen) and a ‘harmonious society’ (hexie shehui). In the past decade, harmony has been one of the Party’s favourite words: the harmony between orders and obedience. Harmony is when ordinary people don’t make a fuss.

  Take, for example, the ‘harmonious demolition’ of houses by the city authorities to make way for property developers. In my little side-street in t
he 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. There are ‘elections’, and citizens are regularly exhorted to make use of their ‘sacred and solemn right’ to vote.