We Have Been Harmonised

by Kai Strittmatter

  The rule of fear has returned under Xi Jinping. Before 2012, the regime tried to keep its repression hidden, but when Xi took the reins the weapons went proudly back on display. The new leader also sowed fear within the Party: his anti-corruption campaign has been impressively long and harsh, but in the end it is still just that – a campaign. It hasn’t ushered in constitutional reforms, and it doesn’t dare grasp the root of the evil. There is no prospect of independent oversight – by the media or the judiciary, say – of a Party apparatus that continues to treat the country as a giant self-service store where nothing has to be paid for.

  The source of Xi’s power over his own ranks remains intimidation. And that is certainly effective in the short term: during his first term in office, Party functionaries all over the country were paralysed with fear of the dreaded Central Commission for Discipline Inspection – one of the country’s most secretive and powerful organisations – and the suicide rate among CCP workers doubled. Between 2009 and 2016, according to a study by the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 243 Party officials took their own lives (140 jumped to their deaths, 44 hanged themselves, 26 took poison, 12 drowned themselves and six slit their wrists).21 These figures are likely to fall short of the true number.

  The Discipline Inspection Commission doesn’t just fight corruption; it also investigates comrades’ ideological loyalty. Its inspectors have the power to end careers and to spirit people away into secret interrogation rooms for months. Like a modern-day Spanish Inquisition, it has hunted down dissent in the country’s ministries and state companies, in the universities and think tanks. Formerly noisy advocates of passionate and controversial arguments have suddenly started to keep a low profile. Many who can afford it are going abroad or at least trying to send their money overseas, so that their families – and especially their children – have a way out.

  The Commission also goes after dissidents in society at large. Civil rights lawyers, for example, must live with the constant surveillance and intimidation of family members, friends and landlords. They are regularly summoned for interrogation, placed under house arrest, put into secret or official prisons. Some vanish without a trace for long periods, are tortured, or locked away in psychiatric hospitals.

  Beijing’s paranoia that the ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in the Arab world might spill eastwards sparked the first wave of repression against human rights lawyers in 2011. Even at that time, arrested lawyers were made to ‘confess’ and ‘repent’, sometimes using torture. Eva Pils, a legal scholar and China expert, quoted one victim as saying: ‘Not only did they want to make you say that black was white, you also had to explain why black was white.’22

  The Party feels the need to strike terror into anyone who challenges the state – even when that challenge simply means taking it at its own word, by pointing to the country’s laws and its constitution. At the same time it likes to keep the level of fear among the general population topped up, so that everyone understands that the single, weak act of dissent permitted in China is the sigh, the shrug, and the murmured words mei ban fa – what can you do?

  This is the reason behind all the public spectacles, and it can be summed up by the Chinese expression ‘killing the chicken to scare the monkeys’. For decades, these have included the show trials of political opponents and dissidents that have become a regular feature on the national evening news. Now President Xi Jinping has given his security and propaganda apparatus a new weapon: the televised confession. The public shaming sessions which were a central part of the Cultural Revolution’s reign of terror have been reinvented for the media age.

  Since the summer of 2013, the state broadcaster CCTV (China Central Television) has been delivering to its viewers a never-ending parade of people who have been arrested or previously ‘disappeared’. In the course of ‘interviews’ mostly filmed in prison, they play the role of the repentant sinner confessing to their misdeeds – long before they ever get to see a lawyer, let alone the inside of a courtroom. These people might include a weed-smoking pop star, a murderous cult leader, or an economics journalist like Wang Xiaolu. In the wake of the stock-market crash of 2015 – and the government’s embarrassment over its rash, panic-stricken reaction – Wang was set up as a scapegoat. On television, the penitent journalist confessed that by writing a ‘sensationalised’ article, he had been single-handedly responsible for the panic on the financial markets.

  There have been appearances by a popular liberal blogger, a critical publisher and an employee of a Swedish NGO who advised human rights lawyers. They all display repentance and humility before hundreds of millions of viewers, make tearful confessions about their ‘criminal’ activities, denounce their former colleagues, expose their backers in ‘hostile foreign countries’, thank the Party for its benevolence, and beg for a second chance. The scripts are often the same, right down to individual phrases.

  In a book published in 2018, twelve former prisoners tell the story of how these interviews happened.23 One was first forced to take medication, before being filmed through the bars of his cell reciting sentences he had learned by heart. Another recounted how officials would instruct him when it was time for him to weep. Wang Yu, one of the country’s best-known civil rights lawyers, reports how the officials at her interrogation showed her a photo of her son, who was 16 at the time. He had been labelled ‘suspect’. Wang fainted, and when she came round, an interrogation officer was standing beside her:

  He told me that my son had been captured by anti-China forces but that luckily the police had found him and he was currently in Yunnan. He said my attitude would decide whether my son would be saved. I didn’t know what to feel. I asked: how could I save him? He said that I should record a video for the PSB† boss to demonstrate my [good] attitude. I asked: What kind of video? What kind of attitude? They wrote down everything that I had to say on a piece of paper and asked me to memorise it. I don’t remember clearly what it said, just that it was about denouncing certain anti-China forces.24

  At no point did Wang Yu have any idea that her ‘confession’ would later be aired on television.

  For some in China, the practice awakens memories of dark times. ‘This is an echo of the Cultural Revolution,’ Beijing lawyer Si Weijiang told me. The breaking and public humiliation of dissidents, the self-criticism and regret displayed before the masses – all this was a daily reality for the Chinese people during the terrible decade of the Cultural Revolution. At that time, the ‘struggle sessions’ would take place on public streets and squares; a teacher once tormented in this way compared the experience to a gang rape. The CCTV confession is the resurrection of this practice; less bloody, it’s true – during the Cultural Revolution, some did not survive their run-ins with the mobs summoned to humiliate them – but effective nevertheless.

  Civil rights lawyers have been among the groups hardest hit by this media humiliation: the unprecedented arrest of lawyers in the summer of 2015 was accompanied by perhaps the largest smear campaign in recent history. In the eyes of the Party, the lawyers were a growing problem. Their number had increased nationwide to two or three hundred; they were connected; they were pooling their resources and know-how; and they were savvy in the way they used their online audience to press their cases.

  Following the arrest of almost all the lawyers from the busy Beijing Fengrui law firm – really a ‘criminal organisation’, so the presenter revealed – CCTV offered viewers an extraordinary spectacle. The lawyers paraded before the cameras not only incriminated themselves; they also vied with each other to denounce the others. Assorted video clips were interspersed to spice the whole thing up with a hefty dose of sex and character assassination. The lawyers, who had often acted for ordinary people – mostly the victims of state officials’ despotism – were portrayed as morally bankrupt, greedy hustlers. The head of the practice, Zhou Shifeng, CCTV revealed, had enjoyed six lovers at the same time. It even created an infographic that displayed them all from one to six.


  The message is clear. The Party can transform any lawyer into a criminal overnight, any hero into a nobody. And the underlying motives are also clear: as always, the goal is both to intimidate the target group, and at the same time discredit them in the eyes of the rest of society. Does it work? ‘I’m afraid so,’ says the lawyer Si Weijiang. ‘I’m sure most viewers believe what they see.’

  The tactic works even on those who don’t fall for the spectacle, and see it for the theatre of the absurd that it is. The staged confessions are so hair-raising and make such a mockery of every last semblance of the rule of law, that they serve as a persuasive demonstration of the all-powerful, despotic state. Only a lunatic would dare go up against it.

  Lawyers like Si Weijiang who are still free, and have not yet had their licence to practice revoked, call the CCTV confessions a ‘travesty of the constitutional state’. Yet this description assumes that there is a constitutional state to be travestied – that China should be measured according to the same yardstick as countries with a functioning justice system and a genuine separation of powers.

  For a few years, it’s true, there were great hopes, including among China’s jurists themselves, that the country’s justice system might move in this direction. Hope spread to the West, too, with phenomena such as the German-Chinese ‘rule of law dialogues’, which have taken place annually since the year 2000 (providing, among other things, a convenient screen behind which a Western political establishment primarily interested in business opportunities can hide). Today this hope is buried deep, though seldom has a Party leader mentioned the rule of law so often as the present one. Xi has publicly scolded Party functionaries who don’t give proper attention to the law. ‘We will spread the rule of law throughout the country,’ he once announced. For the CCP, though, the rule of law means something completely different to what it means to most citizens of Western democracies.

  The Chinese word for rule of law is fa zhi, and is made up of the words fa (law), and zhi (rule). China-watchers spent many years puzzling over where the Party might take this idea. Would they tread a slow path towards the ‘rule of law’ in our sense? Or was the destination to be ‘rule by law’ – with laws mere tools in the service of power? The riddle has long since been solved. Xi Jinping himself has compared the role of laws to the ‘handle of a knife in the hand of the Party.’ In summer 2015 the lawyer Zhou Shifeng, head of the above-mentioned Fengrui practice, explained to me his interpretation of the Party’s ‘rule of law’: ‘What they mean by that is: “I will take my laws and rule you with them.”’ Less than four weeks after our conversation, Zhou was in prison. Shortly afterwards he made a forced confession on state television, where he was shamed as the mastermind of a ‘criminal gang’; and a year later he was sentenced to seven years in jail for ‘subversion’. To be subversive in China, it is often enough that you have tried to take the Party and its laws at their word.

  China’s legal authorities have travelled a long and remarkable route to reach this point. After the murderous chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the CCP under Deng Xiaoping made a public commitment to build a functioning justice system. In 1982, the country drew up a new constitution for itself. The CCP always made it clear that it would not tolerate any direct challenge to its power, but little by little Chinese society became freer and more confident. Economic development brought with it not just prosperity but myriad new conflicts. More and more citizens were becoming aware of their rights, and more and more lawyers were prepared to defend them, including against the despotism of officials. They made use of their freedoms, and sometimes they stretched them. Barely a decade ago, the media in China – including the state media – was still celebrating people who are today in prison, hailing them as heroes in the fight against injustice. Of the fourteen Chinese lawyers whom the Hong Kong-based magazine Asia Weekly crowned ‘people of the year’ in 2005, not one has since managed to escape arrest or mistreatment by the authorities.

  Meanwhile, China has passed a slew of wonderful new laws in a range of areas. It’s just that no one pays any attention to them. ‘Being denied access to the court files, and to my client, is an everyday occurrence,’ says one lawyer. A report by a Beijing insider says that justice staff are often ‘rude, arrogant, overbearing and disinterested’. During interrogations, ‘rules are broken’ and ‘force’ is often used. The judges ‘don’t abide by the law; they don’t even listen to the victim and the lawyers.’ They also ‘take bribes and pass their judgements on the basis of relationships.’ The author of this damning account is no outspoken critic of the regime, but a senior civil servant within the highest state prosecutor’s office in Beijing.25

  In criminal trials, China has a conviction rate of over 99.9 per cent: if you’ve been arrested and charged, you’ve pretty much already been found guilty. Acquittals are as rare ‘as the feather of a phoenix and the horn of a unicorn’, because the police and the state prosecutors are infallible. In this system, lawyers standing up for the civil rights of their clients have always had a hard time. A report published in Hong Kong documented dozens of cases between 2006 and 2015 in which imprisoned lawyers had been tortured.26 Among other things, the victims reported suffering electric shocks, burns, maltreatment of sexual organs and sleep deprivation. And yet their numbers continued to grow – until Xi Jinping’s wave of repression rolled over them.

  Once upon a time, say those who are still at liberty and willing to talk, they put China’s lawyers behind bars. Then it was the lawyers’ lawyers. Now they’re locking up the lawyers’ lawyers’ lawyers. In the end, what has happened under Xi Jinping is more than just an attempt to keep these lawyers in check: it’s an attempt to discredit the entire movement for legal reform, and ultimately to wipe it out.

  Xi Jinping himself has sent out seemingly contradictory signals on the matter. On the one hand, in his speeches he acknowledges that a modern economy and society require an effective justice system. On a local level, he wants to suppress the influence of Party functionaries on courts. In addition – following a years-long campaign by those very lawyers he is now persecuting – he has done away with the lao jiao re-education camps, into which people could vanish for up to four years without ever seeing a judge or a lawyer.

  At the same time, the Party chief is a hostage of the system he has sworn to defend. Instead of re-education camps, unpopular citizens are now vanishing into other facilities. A genuinely independent justice system is a thing of horror for Xi. And so, on the same day the Xinhua News Agency praises the ‘rule of law’, it runs a story saying that even to discuss ‘whether the Party or the constitution is the higher authority’ is ‘absolutely forbidden’.27 One might as well call it blasphemy, in fact, given that the Party stands god-like above everything.

  Ah yes, the constitution. Article 35 states: ‘The citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy the freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession, and of demonstration.’ In reality, though, Article 1 is the only one that matters: ‘The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship.’ And: ‘Sabotage of the socialist system by any organization or individual is prohibited.’ The very first group of citizens to fall victim to Xi Jinping’s autocratic instincts, at the very start of his first term in office, was the movement headed by the rights activist Xu Zhiyong. It had demanded something unprecedented from the state: namely that it abide by its own constitution, including all the fine-sounding articles that came after the first. That demand led to show-trials, house arrests and custodial sentences of several years.

  The Party’s schizophrenic tendencies were on full display when it declared 4 December 2014 to be ‘Constitution Day’. Yet Weiboscope, a project set up by Hong Kong University to document censorship, found that the most blocked and deleted word on China’s social networks on Constitution Day 2014 was ‘constitution’! It was fundamentally ‘wrong to say “rule of law” contradicts the Party rule’, wrote Wang Zhenmin
, dean of the law faculty at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, in the People’s Daily. ‘Law in China,’ he explained with striking honesty, was ‘nothing but the codification of the directives of the Party.’28

  The debate around the need for an effective judiciary during the reform years focused on China’s judges as well as the lawyers. Here, professionalisation was the buzzword: judges should be better paid and properly trained. In judicial circles, Western standards began to be discussed, often approvingly. The ideal of independent courts was mentioned with growing frequency in official documents. Some judges openly declared that political interference in important judgements had to stop.

  For many years, China’s highest judge, Zhou Qiang, was among the campaigners. By the start of 2017, though, even this long-standing reform optimist could see the writing on the wall, suddenly launching an attack on the independence of the judiciary and warning that China must not fall ‘into the trap of a false Western ideology’. China’s judges and legal minds must ‘draw their swords’ against harmful influences such as ‘the separation of powers’ or ‘the independence of the judiciary’.29 On Weibo, the largest Chinese micro-blogging service (Twitter has been blocked since 2009), China’s supreme court added helpfully: of course there is judicial independence in China – but ‘only under the leadership of the CCP’. Which is not unlike telling a prisoner to enjoy his freedom, just as long as he stays within the prison walls.

  Under Xi Jinping there has been a flood of significant new laws, whose main purpose seems to be to give a post-facto legal underpinning to earlier acts of despotism. ‘Once I was walking out of the office with a colleague,’ the Beijing lawyer and civil rights activist Li Xiongbing told me, ‘and he was dragged into a car by police officers, interrogated and beaten for seven, eight hours and released again the next day. And they didn’t give him a single reason why. That doesn’t happen anymore. Of course, they still take people away just like they used to – but now they have to think up an excuse, name an article of the law.’ You might call that progress. But you might also be reminded of Joseph Stalin’s assertion that ‘We need the stability of the laws now more than ever.’ That was in 1936, in the midst of the purges that have gone down in history as the ‘Great Terror’.