We Have Been Harmonised

by Kai Strittmatter

  It is nothing new for China’s autocrats to view the law mainly as a method of control: a way to subjugate the population and to keep them down. Nearly 2,500 years ago, philosophers like Shang Yang and Han Feizi founded a school of government on the idea that strict control of the people through laws was the necessary basis for a united empire and central state. All of China’s subsequent emperors have drawn on these ideas, outwardly acting in accordance with Confucianism and paying lip service to morality and virtuous governance, while in reality the machinery of state was driven by a draconian catalogue of laws, decrees and threats of punishment. When they need to justify authoritarian rule, the propaganda merchants still like to quote Sun Yat-sen, father of the 1911 Revolution. The Chinese, he wrote, are ‘like a heap of loose sand’: billions of little grains with nothing holding them together.

  But this reasoning is the wrong way round. Chinese society does not eternally require a strong state because of some inherent inability to govern itself. It’s the reverse. The Chinese state deliberately keeps society crippled. ‘When the people are weak, the state is strong; when the people are strong, the state is weak,’ goes a saying from The Book of Lord Shang. ‘Hence the state that possesses the Way devotes itself to weakening the people’.30 Before he can turn to his enemies, writes Shang Yang, it is a ruler’s first task ‘to overcome his own people.’ He goes on: ‘The root of overcoming the people is controlling the people, as the metalworker controls metal and the potter clay. When the roots are not firm, the people will be like flying birds and running animals. Who will then be able to regulate them? The root of the people is law. Hence those who excel at orderly rule block the people with law.’31

  This concept of law and order is still useful to the autocratic rulers of today. But even in China’s hybrid system, where an elaborate apparatus of laws provides for the efficient administration of a modern state, despotism remains at the core. The corridors of power may be wallpapered with legal documents and articles, but they can be torn down at any time. The autocrat has no interest in the genuine, consistent rule of law; his ideal is to keep his subjects in suspense at all times, always uncertain and afraid.

  Laws in regimes like China’s are formulated in terms so vague and contradictory that practically every citizen breaks one of them at least once a day. For the overwhelming majority of people and in the overwhelming majority of cases, there are no consequences to this habitual – and often necessary – law-breaking. Under a system where such hypocrisy is rife, it isn’t surprising that most citizens take a somewhat jaded view of the law. But if the state has set its sights on you, then whenever it wants to strike, it has the appropriate article and clause ready for use at any time. These clauses are the hooks upon which it hangs disobedient citizens for all to see.

  † Public Service Broadcasting: in other words, Chinese state television.

  THE PEN

  How Propaganda Works

  ‘History has proved and will continue to prove that the Communist Party of China is great, glorious and correct.’

  People’s Daily, 11.4.2016

  In everyday life, propaganda is the principal instrument of government for the Party. It would be a mistake to believe that this propaganda, which to outsiders often comes across as crude, vacuous and absurd, doesn’t work. Much propaganda is crude and vacuous – and it works surprisingly well. Most importantly, it is omnipresent.

  Just a few months after Xi Jinping took power, new posters appeared everywhere. On the large crossroads near my house, propaganda posters suddenly lined the streets for hundreds of metres. The design of the posters was unusually fresh and colourful; many were based on the aesthetics of traditional folk art and peasant painting.

  One of these posters showed three young, cheerful peasant girls decked out with flowers. Above the image, in bold characters, were the words ‘Sing the Party a folk song’. It’s the title of a song that became popular during the Cultural Revolution, but was taught to generations of children afterwards, too. ‘The Party is a mother to me,’ read the other lines on the poster – another verse from the song. It continues: ‘My mother only gave me my body, but the Party lights up my heart.’ Notice the word ‘only’: it tells you that the Party deserves greater thanks than your own mother. The Party protecting the people and feeding them at its maternal breast is a trope that has been kept alive to this day. ‘Know the goodness of the Party, feel the goodness of the Party, follow the Party and ensure stability,’ says a banner a few metres further down the street.

  The Communist Party is not just Big Brother. It’s Big Mother too, according to German expert on China Bernhard Bartsch. Thousands of speeches over the decades have been made on the ‘warm-and-full question’: that is, the Communist Party’s stated aim that every Chinese citizen should be able to eat his fill and dress himself in warm clothes. This, the Party proclaimed, was the highest human right, and all other human rights would have to wait in line until that had been achieved. One of the most-quoted passages from the great Party conference speech by Xi Jinping is the sentence: ‘No one must be left behind.’ Every last person in China should feel the generosity of the Party.

  If the Party is given the role of mother, then the Party leader fulfils the role of father. In this household, the regime’s subjects are children who enjoy a claim to protection and affection, but also require instruction and a firm hand. The Chinese language itself reinforces this narrative: the word for the state, guojia, literally means the ‘state family’.

  At the start of Xi Jinping’s second term in 2017, state television put out a short video entitled ‘family, state, world’. The word they used for ‘world’ was ‘everything under the heavens’, tianxia, the term once used to describe the geopolitical sphere controlled by the son of heaven, the emperor. Xi appears in this video as a benevolent patriarch, who lets those under his protection share in his charisma and his care, by passing on ‘the warmth of love with his two hands’. The whole empire is a family, and Xi is the just, self-sacrificing head of the household. At one point in the film, he is sitting with elderly peasants in their hut, and as he takes the hand of one peasant woman, a blazing beam of light shoots from her heart to his hand. ‘The family is the smallest state,’ CCTV captions the image. ‘And the state is made up of millions of families.’

  This is a direct reference to the Confucian classic Daxue (The Great Learning), written more than 2,000 years ago. It not only places a duty on the ruler to govern virtuously and remain in touch with the people – it also places a duty on subjects to play their part in helping the world function. Ultimately, every individual is responsible for the order of the universe. Only he who cultivates himself and who lives honestly and virtuously will bring his personal life into order; and only then can he regulate his family. And only when families are regulated can the country be governed well. As long as everyone plays his part, peace will reign on earth – tianxia taiping.

  It’s an old idea among Confucians: that shaping people through education serves state order, which in turn serves heavenly order. People can learn to be good, to think, speak and act correctly. They learn from role models, ideally from a virtuous ruler; they can perfect their personalities through tireless work on themselves; but they can also be shaped by ‘rites’. (The work canonised by the neo-Confucians of the Song dynasty as The Great Learning was originally a part of the Book of Rites.) The Soviets, too, wanted to create ‘new men’, but Mao Zedong drove the project forward in China with an even greater passion. He set about putting his subjects – and not just the ones in the re-education camps – through what he called ‘thought reform’. And as he prepared to give socialism the gift of his new men, free of all ties and ready to serve the revolution selflessly, he was able to draw on the ideas of the Confucians he so hated.

  At first glance the brightly-coloured posters that transformed public spaces over the whole of China shortly after Xi Jinping took power looked very different to the ever-present red slogan banners of the previous dec
ade. Some praised Party Leader Xi Jinping’s ‘China dream’, while others warned people in good Confucian style to respect their aged parents. The majority, though, drew the reader back to the People’s Republic of yesterday via the familiar, stale slogans that were printed across the cheerful images. In this land, ‘the people are happy’ (thanks to the Party) and ‘China is strong’ (thanks to the Party), and ‘harmony’ reigns, even among geese and chickens (thanks to the Party).

  Unlike other propaganda campaigns, however, this one had a long tail; the posters are still there years later, even as I write. They are regularly replaced and occupy new building-site fences and neighbourhood walls every day. Their images have now made it onto Air China’s on-board screens. Before take-off, passengers are reminded to obey their elders and to recall other Chinese virtues. The propaganda posters have multiplied, while commercial advertising, which was still dominant until recently, has noticeably retreated from the streets of Chinese cities. Power is now showing its true colours; urban spaces have turned red again.

  After their initial surprise, most people simply ignored the flood of posters, but some were quite baffled by them. The writer Murong Xuecun, for example, tells the story of how he met an old friend, a Party functionary, and asked him if his Party knew what year they were living in now. Did they really think they could still get through to people with such hackneyed slogans? Of course the posters were stupid, his school-friend acknowledged. ‘But that doesn’t matter.’ Then he explained the real message: ‘We can cover the walls with this stuff. Can you?’

  The implication was: ‘This is how great our power is. The whole world around you belongs to us. We are going to wallpaper your heaven and your earth. And you are only a guest here by our grace.’ This isn’t about the words, it’s about overpowering people. Haifeng Huang, a political scientist at the University of California, calls it ‘hard propaganda’. He carried out a field study in China which came to the conclusion that such propaganda could ‘worsen citizens’ opinion of their regime’ while at the same time fulfilling its purpose: ‘signalling the state’s power and reducing citizens’ willingness to protest.’32

  The lives of China’s 1.4 billion citizens are saturated in the Party’s teachings. The indoctrination starts with the counting rhymes and patriotic songs they hear at nursery; it is the corset into which the school curriculum is laced, and it forms the basis of the political training that staff in the civil service, universities and state-run companies all have to attend on Friday afternoons, to explore the latest twists and turns in ‘Xi Jinping Thought’. In rural villages, it appears in large characters painted on walls; city-dwellers encounter it on the noticeboards of their street or estate, on the red banners that hang from apartment blocks and road bridges, and in some cities even on scrolling LED screens mounted upon the roofs of taxis, which repeat the Party’s latest slogans again and again: ‘Do not forget our original mission!’ The message of the CCP reaches you in the country’s museums and on the old sites of the Revolution, which have been restored over the last few years to serve ‘Red Tourism’, and to which schoolchildren, workers and company employees are now bussed in their millions. It permeates the radio, newspapers, internet, television and cinema.

  In a post on the messaging service WeChat (Weixin) – swiftly deleted – the sociologist Sun Liping from Beijing’s Tsinghua University identified three techniques for ‘mind control’.33 One central technique is the control of news sources: ‘The meal you cook can never be better than the rice you cook it with.’ The system successfully blocks information from outside and replaces it with ‘patriotic education’. Hence, for example, the ubiquitous narrative in which China’s ‘special national circumstances’ have made the country into a unique place unlike anywhere else in the world, and which requires the Party to rule in the precise way China’s subjects are currently experiencing.

  Secondly, the system starts building the parameters for your thought when you’re very young, changing the way in which you ask questions and steering you into predetermined channels. Once you have swallowed and internalised what the Party has fed you, says Sun Liping, you can’t even ask certain questions: they lie outside your realm of experience and powers of imagination. And thirdly, the system inspires the kind of fear that suppresses awkward questions: ‘If you don’t swallow all this, you’ll be punished.’

  The incessant bombardment of people with these messages is a crucial mind-control technique. ‘How else,’ asks Sun Liping, ‘are people supposed to accept an idea which is quite obviously ridiculous?’ Fatiguing tactics break down every last shred of the mind’s resistance: you lose all curiosity and all ability to defend yourself, and you allow them to stuff you full of ‘rubbish’. ‘In the end,’ writes Sun, ‘something fundamental is destroyed, namely your will and your ability to throw this rubbish back out.’

  Meanwhile the Party’s central propaganda authority watches over everything. Qiao Mu, a Beijing professor of journalism and one of the few outsiders to have seen inside its offices, tells of a motto displayed on the wall of the conference room:

  Responsibility as heavy as a mountain

  As hard-working as an ox

  Precise as a hair

  Lips sealed as tight as a bottle

  United as one

  The Communist Party was, in its own estimation, never anything but ‘great, glorious and correct’ (wei guang zheng). Since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, the Party has exhorted China’s media to be its ‘throat and tongue’ and to make sure that every last subject internalises the deeper truth of this assertion. Even today, there is still not a single newspaper, website or radio station that doesn’t officially answer to a Party organisation. The Party calls its own press the ‘mainstream media’ (zhuliu meiti). In this country, ‘mainstream’ is not defined by the people – it’s what the Party sets before you.

  Censorship and propaganda never rest. Beijing sends out daily directives stating what topics are taboo and which words are forbidden. And yet in the three decades of reform and opening-up, the media landscape was transformed. From the 1980s, Chinese journalism was supposed to start financing itself, just like in the rest of the world. The newspapers had to become more commercial and more professional; a few even dared to print hard-hitting investigative articles. Soon after Xi Jinping was inaugurated as Party leader in November 2012, though, the climate for such journalism became noticeably cooler and the freedoms it had enjoyed were restricted. Overly headstrong reporters and editors-in-chief were fired, and some ended up in jail.

  In 2016, shortly after banning the cadres in his own party from having ‘inappropriate’ political discussions, Xi Jinping launched a campaign to completely homogenise the media once again. He visited some of the country’s large newspaper offices, bearing a single message: from now on, all media organisations must ‘have “Party” as their surname’. Without exception, everyone now had to fall in line with ‘the will, the views, the authority and the unity of the Communist Party’. A subsequent comment piece published by the Xinhua News Agency said that ‘guiding the public is a great tradition of our Party’. ‘The media has to restore the people’s trust in the Party,’ said China Daily, Beijing’s English-language propaganda paper for foreigners – especially now, when ‘the economy is growing more slowly’. The Party papers were quite open about why the leadership felt it had to take this action: many people in China strongly mistrusted the CCP and its propaganda. According the People’s Daily, this was due to the rise of social media, which had opened up a growing divide: ‘And if this divide remains, it will undermine the legitimacy of the Party’s rule.’ Xi and the Party now demanded one thing above all from every newspaper editor: they had to spread ‘positive energy’.

  The process of homogenisation has now essentially been completed. Newspapers like the Southern Weekend, which were once astonishingly courageous within the limits placed on them, have been brought in line. Many of the dedicated and brave journalists who contributed
to the brief blossoming of their craft have either been sacked or have given up their jobs. One of them is Luo Changping, until recently the country’s most famous investigative journalist, whose articles once even brought down a minister. He was sidelined by his publication, the economics magazine Caijing, and eventually left. During his active period at Caijing, he had been able to publish between 90 and 100 per cent of his material, he said afterwards. ‘Now, they can only publish about 10 percent. And they are the media outlet with the most freedom.’34

  A few years earlier, in 2011, Hu Zhanfan, then head of the state television network CCTV, had warned people like Luo Changping: ‘A number of journalists no longer see themselves as Party propaganda workers; they have redefined themselves as professionals – but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of their identity.’ The internet was quickly awash with parodies: ‘A number of people no longer see themselves as slaves; they have redefined themselves as human beings – this is a fundamental misunderstanding of their identity.’ It was the time before the web had been completely ‘harmonised’.