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 servant 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 others. 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’ in which old women wrapped the broken bones of their tiny, bound lotus feet: they were ‘long as well as smelly’.12
From time to time large sections of the population have enthusiastically adopted the Newspeak as their mother tongue, using it in private as well as public utterances. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976 was one such period. It was a cynical and brutal theatre of power, set in motion by Mao, who was being marginalised by his rivals within the Party. He called on the country’s young people to ‘storm the headquarters’, to rebel against their teachers and professors, their parents, and the Party functionaries who cared more about orderly administration and a functioning economy than they did about permanent revolution. China’s boys and girls burned for their messiah Mao, and they were ready to throw off all those trappings of civilisation that were left to them: love of their fathers and mothers, and the last vestiges of feeling for their fellow man. By the time they had finished, China lay in ruins.
The very first thing they 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.
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 battle-cry 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 travel 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 and 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 in 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 more than a decade Liu Xiaobo was the most famous dissident in China. In official statements, though, he was always a ‘convicted criminal’. What do you mean, dissident? ‘In China, you can judge for yourself whether such a group exists,’ the spokesman told journalists on 11 February 2010. ‘But I believe this term is questionable in China.’15
At the time, the artist Ai Weiwei was still one of the most active Chinese micro-bloggers on Twitter. His analysis of this declaration appeared on his Twitter account:
1. Dissidents are criminals
2. Only criminals have dissenting views
3. The distinction between criminals and noncriminals is whether they have dissenting views
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 military 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.
The actual use of force against political undesirables is limited to exceptional personalities such as human rights lawyers and prominent dissidents, and to exceptional situations, such as crushing severe unrest in the provinces (most often Xinjiang or Tibet) or the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Millions of students, workers and citizens from all walks of life had spent months demonstrating against corruption and abuse of power, before the tanks rolled through Beijing on 4 June.
Mao Zedong had no equal when it came to terror, whether inflicting it on the people or the Party. The climax of this policy came with the Cultural Revolution, when Chinese people had to fear not only the ruler’s henchmen but each other – their own husbands, wives and children. In the decades of reform and opening-up that followed under Deng Xiaoping, courage gradually returned to society, and fear of the omnipotent, despotic Party receded. People could breathe again, and they enjoyed new freedoms. Yet the Party made sure the memory of its power never completely disappeared. When it
discovered to its horror that emancipation was generating independent thought and actions, that the seed of something like pluralism was germinating in China, with nature conservation societies and religious charities, feminist circles and legal aid groups springing up, the Party took fright – and once again brought out the instruments of repression and enforcement.
Even in the years before Xi Jinping took office, one could observe how the apparatus of repression was being reinforced. In 2012 – the year I returned to China – the government presented the third budget in a row in which spending on internal security outstripped the national defence budget. That included funds for the police and the courts, as well as the state security apparatus, which had expanded hugely under Zhou Yongkang. Under Xi Jinping, spending rose again: the German sinologist Adrian Zenz calculated that in 2017, the budget for internal security outstripped military spending by almost 19 per cent.19 The state and the Party are now arming themselves more against domestic than foreign enemies – and with an astounding attention to detail, as became evident before the festivities for the 65th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. ‘10,000 pigeons go through anal security check for suspicious objects,’ reported the People’s Daily on its English-language Twitter page, beneath a photo of an innocent-looking white pigeon.20
Under Xi Jinping, the Party’s re-inflamed hysteria over security has assumed entirely new proportions. Immediately after taking office, Xi got to work ploughing back into the ground all those colourful shoots of civil society that had sprouted over the preceding years. He silenced the internet once more, and the press, which had begun to develop opinions of its own. Large numbers of bloggers, authors and intellectuals fell silent; some disappeared altogether. Xi had draconian new laws drawn up, while purging with ruthless efficiency those who over the preceding years had tried to use China’s legal code to protect its citizens from the state. Civil rights lawyers became the focus of a campaign in which they were terrorised, slandered, locked up, broken and then paraded before the public.
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