As in every other part of the world, the traditional media in China have long since lost their central place in the news cycle. The Party is now seizing on every channel it can to try and reach young people. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t – though many of the video clips are now strikingly well-made, often with help from professional PR firms. For a while, the ‘vocaloid’ Luo Tianyi was a hit with teenage girls: the virtual singer appeared onstage as a holographic projection and filled huge stadiums. Luo reached millions of fans on social networks, and the Communist Youth League recruited the digital pop star – programmed by a Japanese company – as its ‘youth ambassador’. The Youth League went on to fill her lyrics with ‘positive values’ to ‘inject young people with correct thinking,’ as the Party newspapers proclaimed with great pride.
Luo has genuine fans, but other attempts by propagandists to appropriate parts of youth culture have been rather painful to watch. The hip-hop scene popular among China’s young people has always been viewed with a degree of mistrust by the state censors; they find it ‘improper, vulgar and obscene’. According to their censorship decrees, the artists and their lyrics (Sex! Drugs! Justice!) often have ‘moral failings’ and go against ‘the core values of socialism.’35 So the Party has begun to produce its own rap songs. A few years ago, it started putting out raps to cute animated videos, with titles like ‘Let us look to the Central Committee for Comprehensively Deepening Reforms’ (sample lyrics: ‘The reform group is two years old now / and it has already done quite a lot / Reform! Reform! Reform! Reform!’) Now the next phase has been launched: the Party press is calling it ‘harmonisation of hip-hop’, and it is bringing genuine rappers into line. The ‘CD Rev’ (Chengdu Revolution) Crew, for example, have rapped their way into the Party’s good books with songs like ‘This is China’ (‘The red dragon is not evil / it is a land of peace’). They have even been allowed to perform to the troops in the South China Sea. Then there’s the rapper Sun Baiyi, whose song ‘Splendid China’ begins: ‘We all know the original vision and the mission of the CCP; it works tirelessly for the happiness of the people and the resurgence of the nation.’ Politically correct, but so far winning little applause from the target market.
A much cleverer move has been a wave of action films bringing China’s new global relevance and the nationalism fuelled by the CCP to the big screen as entertainment, using Hollywood methods for the first time. Take Operation Mekong and its sequel, Operation Red Sea. They feature warlike heroes who are quite obviously modelled on Rambo, but who tie the Chinese flag round their arms at key moments. With fight scenes, explosions and pursuits through exotic landscapes far outside China’s borders, they battle the evil in the world – especially when it lays its hands on Chinese citizens. These films capitalise on the contemporary zeitgeist within the country: China is a powerful nation, its companies and soldiers now operate worldwide, and Chinese heroes help justice to triumph.
In 2017, Wolf Warrior 2 used this formula to become the most successful Chinese film of all time, giving the Chinese audience, in the words of one observer, ‘waves of nationalistic orgasms.’36 Its hero, Leng Feng, has gone to Africa to avenge the murder of a woman he loved, but he quickly finds himself duty-bound to rescue a group of Chinese countrymen from a murderous troop of white mercenaries. The film is a paradigm for a new alliance of commerce and propaganda: it was privately financed, but sailed in the slipstream of Party propaganda and was advertised with the PR line: ‘Anyone who attacks China will be killed, no matter how far away he is.’
The film hit cinemas just weeks after the Chinese People’s Liberation Army opened its first overseas base in Djibouti, and just a few days before the Army’s 90th birthday. It was ‘a metaphor for the era of China’s rise’ wrote one cultural studies expert in Beijing, a ‘collective manifestation of the China dream’. ‘Perhaps the Chinese have buried their patriotism for too long,’ said the director and lead actor Wu Jing. ‘The passion had dried out like wood – and my film is the spark that will reignite it.’ The final scene shows the image of a Chinese passport, onto which are projected the words: ‘Citizens of the People’s Republic of China! If you encounter dangers overseas, do not despair! A strong motherland‡ stands behind you.’
In the first quarter of 2018, China overtook the USA to become the country with the highest box-office revenue in the world. Well-produced Chinese films increasingly outstripped the Hollywood blockbusters in terms of sales. ‘Until about 10 years ago, in the absence of a well-articulated set of national and cultural values, Hollywood stories and the ethics they promoted were aspirational to many Chinese,’ the Shanghai online publication Sixth Tone commented. ‘But now, we’re tired of them.’37 The ‘American Dream,’ writes Sixth Tone, is just a cliché, and Western individualism and liberalism are ‘simply not seductive to Chinese audiences, who are increasingly embracing a markedly different form of national pride. In China, the ideals of the American Dream are paling into insignificance as the country’s self-styled Chinese Dream produces the growing wealth and status of large numbers of people while promulgating different values: collective effort, patriotism, and self-sacrifice for the cause of national rejuvenation.’
The English-language website Sixth Tone quoted here, and its Chinese-language sister-publication The Paper, founded in 2014, are themselves the creation of a professional propaganda machine well aware that its message needs urgent repackaging. They are Party-owned websites, but they have a fresh, modern look, and sometimes push the boundaries of censorship with original, well-researched stories. These stories convey the message – which at its core always affirms the system – much more skilfully than the People’s Daily and its ilk.
The hard-working oxen in the propaganda apparatus have two principal tasks to carry out. The first is to formulate the Party’s message to convey it into the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people. Classic propaganda. The other is censorship: controlling the flow of information to the people and then stemming and channelling the opinions the people express. The Chinese are even fonder of hydraulic metaphors than my fellow Germans. ‘To stop the mouths of the people is more dangerous than damming a river,’ goes a saying that originated over 2,500 years ago.
When The Paper interviewed the director of the Party School’s magazine Seeking Truth, he likened this control of public opinion to the mission of the Great Yu, the mythical ancient emperor who tamed the huge river in the Chinese legend. The Great Yu had learned from the catastrophic experiences of his predecessors, who could come up with no better solution than simply damming the river, though the dams soon broke again. ‘But the Great Yu relied on a combination of damming and channelling; he stopped the flow in one place and let it go again in another. That brought him success. And this is even more necessary with public opinion.’38 Free speech is a natural force that requires clever taming.
In the old world, that was a simple matter. Then the internet arrived, and suddenly even ordinary citizens had a chance to be heard – by thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people.
‡ Other translations have preferred the word ‘nation’, but I wanted to convey some characteristics of the Chinese term. The word 祖国 is best rendered as ancestral land/homeland, and is neither male nor female; like ‘the ancestors’ themselves, the ancestral land is an object of veneration in Chinese culture. Motherland seems the most convenient translation, because mothers share obvious life-giving and life-sustaining qualities with the land, and because there are similar concepts such as 母亲河, and 母语 in Chinese, meaning the mother river and the mother tongue. However, it would be wrong to suggest that the Chinese view their ‘motherland’ as a female, or to overlook the importance attributed to both ancestors and the ancestral land in China’s culture.
THE NET
How the Party Learned to Love the Internet
‘The old and the new conspire to shut us in. When will we stop adding new stones to the wall? The Great Wall of China: a wonder and a curse!’
/> Lu Xun, 1925
New forms of media always promise to empower the powerless, and from the outset, this was also the dream of the internet. But such dreams always threaten the status quo. China’s attempt to censor the web, as the former US president Bill Clinton joked, was like ‘trying to nail Jell-O to the wall’. That was in the year 2000. The Chinese listened to the prophecy, and swiftly built a new great wall: the Great Firewall. They banged a few nails into the cracks, and look: the jelly is staying put.
The prophets of freedom didn’t let that discourage them. In November 2013, Eric Schmidt added his voice to the chorus of stubborn optimism. It was a foregone conclusion, a race between the hare of censorship and the tortoise of netizens: ‘First they try to block you; second, they try to infiltrate you; and third, you win.’ The then-chairman of Google predicted the defeat of web censors all over the world within a decade. Speaking in the same year, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, said: ‘The Berlin Wall tumbled down, the great firewall of China – I don’t think it will tumble down, I think it will be released.’ Piece by piece, website by website. ‘The agility of a country which allows full access to the web is just greater; it will be a stronger country economically as well.’
For a while the net optimists were able to bolster their confidence with stories of the Twitter uprising in Tunisia, the Facebook revolution in Egypt, the YouTube agitation of the Maidan activists in Kiev. Then there was the summer of 2014 in Hong Kong, when the people, especially young people, occupied the city streets. Firechat, Telegram, WeChat: the smart, self-organising students’ arsenal of apps taught awestruck Europeans a whole new vocabulary of rebellion. For the media, the fight for freedom and its technological foundations often go together.
It may seem surprising, then, that Beijing doesn’t seem to fear the net at all. More than 830 million Chinese people currently use the internet, the overwhelming majority of them via their smartphones. And the government is working full tilt to extend the infrastructure. The Hangzhou online marketplace Alibaba reports higher revenue and profit figures than Amazon and eBay put together, and it now operates in more than 200 countries worldwide. In November 2017, the Shenzhen internet giant Tencent overtook Facebook as the world’s highest-valued social-network company. Both now number among the ten largest and most valuable companies in the world. Party leader Xi Jinping has celebrated China as a ‘cyber-power,’ proclaiming: ‘Let us climb aboard the express train of the internet.’ The Xinhua News Agency speaks in glowing terms of China’s ‘power of innovation’, which is thanks to a globally ‘unique method of managing the internet’ – commerce and control united to extremely fruitful effect.
The World Internet Conference was initiated by China and has taken place annually since 2014 in Wuzhen, in the country’s south. In December 2017, it greeted delegates in almost euphoric fashion: ‘China has […] countless internet gurus,’ writes Xinhua, ‘but none can measure up to the “wise man of the internet” Xi Jinping.’39 Xi is not only transforming China into an ‘internet superpower’, he is simultaneously making sure that everyone can sleep soundly again. ‘Should we simply invite burglars into our houses? Of course not! And what do we do when they arrive at the door uninvited? We build high walls and use large padlocks. What we do with our homes, we must of course do with the great, wide internet.’
There is no doubt that China loves the net. And the Party really loves it. Until quite recently, though, even in China itself more than a few people shared the optimism of the West’s net prophets. Liu Xiaobo, the late Nobel peace laureate, called the internet ‘God’s gift for a democratic China,’ and the artist Ai Weiwei prophesied a fatal blow for censorship: ‘The people will always have the last word – even if someone has a very weak, quiet voice. Such power will collapse because of a whisper,’ he wrote in a euphoric essay. ‘The internet cannot be controlled. And if it is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It is that simple.’
Ai Weiwei wrote these words in 2012, shortly before the Party showed the Chinese people and the world at large that, yes, it was very simple – only not in the way most people had imagined. The following year Xi Jinping took office, and he lost no time in showing the world how one goes about taming the internet.
The four years leading up to 2013 may well lodge in Chinese popular memory as the years when, for the first time, people felt that they belonged to a society. When citizens learned to pool their knowledge; to connect with each other; to have public discussions about the things that determined their lives. All for the first time. Unheard-of phenomena in a country where the Party had always sought, if not to forbid, then to collectivise and supervise all cooperation, down to the smallest village, the smallest business, the smallest club. For this Party, words like ‘society’ and ‘the people’ had been merely useful weapons with which to castigate shameless foreign countries: for instance, when they had ‘hurt the feelings of the Chinese people’.
But now society had awoken, and it was escaping the confines of the Party’s narrative. The free word had fallen into citizens’ laps, and the result was a spontaneously growing network of independent-minded citizens. Thanks to the internet. More precisely: thanks to social media, and in particular Weibo. Sina Weibo went online on 14 August 2009, as China’s answer to the American platform Twitter – which the Party had banned as soon as it emerged, along with Facebook. During those four years, Weibo acquired a vast importance in this country where traditionally all media had been firmly in the Party’s grip. A good way to tell this story is using the case of the blogger and ‘word criminal’ Murong Xuecun. He is the writer to whom, in the previous chapter, a schoolfriend, now a Party functionary, had explained the message behind the walls of propaganda: ‘We can cover the walls with this stuff. Can you?’
Just a few months prior to that conversation, Murong Xuecun could have replied: ‘Yes, I certainly can!’ At that time one of his Weibo blogs had four million followers. This was before the deletion brigade arrived and gave him a good talking-to. Before he became the first major blogger in China to be forced back into darkness and silence. You can see why he was the first one they tackled. Murong Xuecun, born in 1974, is one of the country’s most sharp-eyed social critics – certainly one of the most sharp-tongued – and he had Weibo to thank for allowing him to become these things. It was the internet and social media that first gave the country the figure of the public intellectual, who could spark debates before an audience of millions.
This was the second online rebirth of Murong Xuecun. The first had occurred in 2002, when he was working as a freshly-appointed executive at a cosmetics company. He had been sitting in his office, bored, surfing the internet, when he discovered that other people were posting little novels they had written there, untroubled by paranoid editors and over-zealous censors. I can do that too, thought Murong Xuecun, whose name then was still Hao Qun; and I can do it better!
So he began to write about the tragicomic experiences of three young men trying to make their way in Chengdu, a story of drinking and gambling and bribery and betrayal and whoring in modern China. He posted it online one chapter at a time, and eventually accumulated five million readers, got his first book contract, won his first literary prize and was chosen as ‘personality of the year’ by the glossy magazine New Week. The internet had made the 28-year-old a literary star. Murong Xuecun was the figurehead of a development that turned China’s literary landscape upside down: all the new discoveries, all the literary trends of that decade came from the internet. Suddenly readers were hearing voices they’d never heard before.
Murong Xuecun gave up his day job and carried on writing wild, comic, bleak novels about the excesses of the new China, about greed, sex and violence, and he went on being successful. But the reality of the non-virtual China also quickly caught up with him. This was a realm where the old autocrats and bureaucrats still held sway. In China, as in other countries, the way writers earn money is still with the traditional publishing houses, who fish authors out
of the net and then straighten them out: enfants terribles with Chinese characteristics.
Murong Xuecun started breaking off works-in-progress because he knew they wouldn’t get past the censors. Things finally came to a head when he had spent three weeks conducting an undercover investigation of a fraudulent pyramid scheme in Jiangxi Province and produced a reportage book out of it, China: In the Absence of a Remedy, which was only published in Chinese. The book won him the high-profile ‘People’s Literature Prize’ in 2010, but interventions by his editor had made him so angry that his acceptance speech was an act of reckoning with the Chinese censor. ‘It stuck in my throat like a chicken bone, I just had to spit it out,’ he told me. The propaganda minister was in the audience. Just before the author went on stage, his editor begged him not to read out the speech. And when he went out to receive the prize, one of the people on stage with him actually blocked his way to the speaker’s lectern. ‘I really thought that was ridiculous. I’m actually quite an affable character. But I don’t bow and scrape to anyone.’ The prize winner turned to the audience and moved two fingers slowly across his lips, as if zipping them shut. The gesture instantly increased his fame still further.
Afterwards he posted the speech online, in full. ‘I don’t want to call myself a writer,’ it said. ‘I’m just a word criminal.’ Ultimately there was only one truth in China, the speech went on, and that was: ‘We are not allowed to speak the truth.’ Murong Xuecun spoke of the shame of self-censorship. ‘Why isn’t China producing any great writers?’ Because they are all, himself included, ‘castrated eunuchs’, castrated by their own hand in over-hasty obedience, ‘before the surgeon can even raise the scalpel.’
The third life of Murong Xuecun, as a political essayist and public intellectual, began at that moment. ‘It wasn’t an easy decision,’ he says. ‘In this country, it’s risky.’ Especially when you think things through to their logical conclusion, as the blogger Murong Xuecun did from the beginning; when you don’t practise the art of beating about the bush like everyone else. Like other critical voices, he set up one, two, three, four accounts on Weibo: when one was blocked, he quickly moved on to the next. He became part of the emerging Weibo Revolution. He wrote about power without limits: ‘A monster on the loose’. About corruption: ‘In this country, it’s the norm, the unwritten law. You don’t need to get involved in corruption, it gets involved in you. It follows you everywhere. No one stays clean.’ About the system: ‘For six decades now, the Chinese have been living in a system that dulls their minds and makes them hate each other. In this system everyone is a criminal, so no one ever needs to regret anything.’
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