This is the balancing act of clever censorship: giving people sufficient space for expression that they retain the illusion of freedom – but never so much that it allows them to grow too confident. Censorship is never perfect. There will always be loopholes, slip-ups, fine cracks in the Great Firewall, stubborn people and free spirits who peer through the holes and cracks and glimpse the outside world. But this doesn’t matter. Censorship works, and it keeps working even when it isn’t perfect – as long as it’s embedded within a system of life-long mind control and manipulation. As long as the overwhelming majority of people don’t even want to look at what’s on the other side of the wall. As long as social controls and intimidation go hand in hand with material rewards, and people are encouraged into consumerism. As long as they have the feeling that they’re enjoying more freedom than ever before.
And is that not true? The Chinese net may be flooded with sterilised information and images, but you can still drown yourself in it a hundred times over. The top ten most visited websites in China are all Chinese¶. For most people, it makes no difference that the government has erased certain topics from the country’s memory and banished them from public consciousness. They aren’t bothered that the only news and comment you can find on government corruption, civil society, food scandals, the tensions in Tibet and Xinjiang, protests in Hong Kong, democracy in Taiwan, major natural disasters and man-made accidents follow the government line. Many don’t even notice; others just shrug and accept it.
After a few weeks in Hong Kong during that summer of umbrellas, when the people occupied the centre of their city, intoxicated by their new-found strength and solidarity, I flew back to Beijing. I went straight from the airport to a party held by a painter friend in the north of the city. A few artists had turned old chicken coops into studios there; they were barbecuing skewers of lamb and there was beer and wine. Hong Kong dominated the conversation, and the question of why almost all Chinese people were blithely parroting their government’s propaganda, declaring that the students in Hong Kong were being ungrateful to their fatherland, and dancing to the tune of shadowy foreign powers.
Most of those present were in their fifties and had lived through the Cultural Revolution – an experience that turned many of their generation into lifelong sceptics. Just before the party, one of the guests, a painter from the Songzhuang artists’ quarter, had received the news that some of his friends had been arrested that morning for planning to attend a poetry reading in support of the Hong Kong students. He spoke of the nationalistic and militaristic education system that the Party had rolled out across the country in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, which was now being developed further under Xi Jinping. It was having the desired effect, the painter said. ‘People born in the 1980s and afterwards are hopelessly lost. The brainwashing starts in nursery school. It was different for us. They called us a lost generation because schools and colleges were closed back then, and many of us were denied an education. But in reality we were probably the lucky ones. We fell through the cracks. The brainwashing didn’t get us. Mao was dead, and everyone was desperate for China to open up, for reform, freedom.’
David, a 28-year-old native of Beijing who teaches English at an elite grammar school there, says of his 17- and 18-year-old students: ‘They’re incredibly tech-savvy. And they use tunnel software and other technologies to get past the censors much more than we do. They also use it to access banned sites like Facebook and YouTube – but they do so purely for entertainment, to follow celebrities.’ David tells me that he sometimes gives them English books to read in his lessons, especially works of history, and sometimes articles from the New York Times. ‘But they look at me helplessly. Their thinking isn’t joined up any more, they don’t have any background knowledge.’ This is a generation who with just a few more clicks could access all the information in the world. But they don’t do it. They don’t want to.
‘My students say they haven’t got time. They’re distracted by a thousand other things,’ says David. ‘And although I’m only ten years older than them, they don’t understand me. They live in a completely different world. They’ve been perfectly manipulated by their education and the Party’s propaganda: my students devote their lives to consumerism and ignore everything else. They ignore reality; it’s been made easy for them.’
As the cultural critic Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, once wrote: ‘What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.’50 Weibo still exists. It’s bigger than ever: with more than 460 million active users a month in 2019, it is even bigger than Twitter with its 330 million – and it’s still growing. But people aren’t reading, watching and commenting on the same things they were a few years ago. The most-shared Weibo post of all time dates from September 2014: ‘I am 15 today, and so many of you are on my side. Thank you for always being with me these last few years.’ It may well be the most-read social media post in the world, with more than 100 million shares.
Its author was one of the TFBoys, Wang Junkai. The TFBoys, a manufactured boy-band, are probably the most popular group amongst China’s young people over recent years. Three lads with an image somewhere between chorister, K-pop and communist Young Pioneer, with any hint of rebellious youth carefully blow-dried out of them. They sing about working hard at school, being a team player and serving the motherland. In one video, they dress up as Young Pioneers and sing: ‘We are the heirs to communism’. They have 30 million followers on Weibo; add in the songs, the TV series and the films, plus merchandise, and these coiffured and primped Marxist pop-princelings are netting the equivalent of several million US dollars every month. This is what China’s social media looks like today.
Every year there is one day that pushes China’s internet to the limits of its capacity; a day when people all over the country sit in front of their screens from midnight until midnight, clicking for all they’re worth. ‘Singles Day’ is a marketing coup by the online marketplace Alibaba. In the space of just a few years – with the help of enticing discounts and bargains – those 24 hours have been turned into one of the most important holidays in China. It is the most unbridled celebration of consumerism anywhere in the world.
‘Singles Day’ – 11 November – was launched as a joke by frustrated girlfriend-less Nanjing students, but Alibaba has converted it into a day-long orgy of online shopping, which has long since overtaken its precursor and role model – the USA’s Black Friday. On 11 November 2018, Alibaba turned over the equivalent of almost 31 billion US dollars; Amazon’s turnover for Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined was less than half that amount, at just over 14 billion dollars. Nicole Kidman and Mariah Carey have both appeared at the annual Alibaba galas in Hangzhou which kick off the day. In the aftermath, China’s postal service has to deliver a billion parcels. The Beijing branch of Greenpeace may have called Singles Day a ‘catastrophe for the environment’, but it hasn’t stopped the nation descending into its annual 24-hour frenzy. Global communism is dead, and – thanks to the net – global consumerism has opened its new HQ in China.
How far China has come from the days – not so long ago – when food was rationed and you needed special coupons to buy a bicycle or a typewriter. Today consumption is a pleasure that the Party not only permits but encourages its subjects to exercise without restraint. Capitalism has shown them the way: consumption brings growth, consumption is a sedative. This logic is applied even more deliberately and shamelessly in China than elsewhere. ‘The world’s stable now,’ says the Controller in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. ‘People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get.’ The perfect totalitarian state, Huxley wrote in a 1946 preface to his book, is one in which the all-powerful caste of rulers ‘control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude.’
Huxley felt that the ear
liest advocates of universal literacy and a free press had lacked imagination, envisaging ‘only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what… has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies – the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned… neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’51
As Huxley wrote these words, he was witnessing the first excesses of modern capitalism. Donald Trump’s America and Xi Jinping’s China are a testament to his great prophetic power.
At the start of 2018, Stanford University published a fascinating study that supported the conclusions reached by David, the teacher quoted above.52 The authors David Yang from Stanford and Chen Yuyu from Peking University studied the internet usage of more than 1800 Beijing students between 2015 and 2017. Before the start of the project, 80 per cent of the students had never tried to beat the Great Firewall – some of them partly for reasons of cost. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) allow you to get past censorship and restrictions on the internet using ‘VPN tunnels’, but many VPN providers charge for their services. Across the whole country, the authors estimate, only between 1 and 8 per cent of internet users regularly use this software. (Bear in mind that this research took place before the Party’s vigorous campaign against VPN services in spring 2018.) In order to address this issue, the researchers gave the participants cost-free access to tunnel software for 18 months.
Even after being reminded six times, only 53 per cent of the students activated the software. The authors of the study were well aware that fear could be a factor in the choices the students made. So they deliberately muddied the waters by offering free access to a permitted movie-download site alongside censored domains; this helped to cover up the true focus of their study. One of their interests was to see how many students would take the opportunity to read foreign news websites blocked in China. Would they, for example, take a look at the Chinese-language edition of the New York Times? Those who did so made up less than five per cent of those students who had activated their VPN tunnels.
This result had nothing to do with inadequate foreign-language skills: Taiwan, Hong Kong and the USA have thousands of Chinese-language websites offering information outside the Beijing propaganda matrix. But fewer than one in forty of these young people felt the need to access such information. And this was a group of students at one of the most famous and formerly most liberal universities in China. The best-educated young people in the country; China’s future elite. Censorship doesn’t just work because the regime makes it difficult to access free information: ‘Rather, it fosters an environment in which citizens do not demand such information in the first place’.53
How could the researchers be sure, though, whether the subjects of their study were incurious, as a result of the sterile, censored world in which they’d been raised, or afraid of what would happen if they dared to look beyond it? The second phase of the study was designed to address this point. For one group, the researchers devised quiz questions that they could only answer by reading the New York Times and other sites, rewarding each correct answer with a small cash sum of around £2 (this was deemed unlikely to sway students genuinely frightened of the secret police).
So if these students responded by spending time on uncensored Western sites, then something other than cash must be motivating them. And they did indeed spend time. By the end of the study, the percentage of waking hours the group spent on websites like the New York Times was nine times greater that it had been at the start. After a while the students began to search for information the researchers hadn’t requested; and they started making regular use of Wikipedia, which is blocked in China.
As soon as the students were confronted with the fact that something exciting and valuable was hiding on the other side of the wall, their interest grew rapidly. Among the students who were now regularly consuming information that was banned in China, the researchers saw ‘broad, substantial, and persistent changes to students’ knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and intended behaviors.’54 Their trust in China’s government and its institutions fell significantly, and they displayed a growing scepticism and mistrust. They became more pessimistic in their assessment of China’s economic development. Many expressed a belief that China’s political and economic systems needed a fundamental overhaul.
So the study held good news and bad news for the Party. The bad news was that it really does need to fear the free flow of information. The good: as long as it continues to tailor its system of mind-and-information control to developing technologies and make use of them for its own ends, it has nothing to fear for the time being. Its censorship doesn’t have to be perfect; most citizens will not go looking for the loopholes.
The researchers from Stanford and Beijing concluded that the demand for free information ‘is not low by nature, and that it also is probably not the fear of being punished by the authorities that leads to students not demanding sensitive information.’ It was their ‘failure to value uncensored information’ that dampened their curiosity. People don’t feel like they’re missing out. They’re like the frog in the Chinese fable, who thinks his well is the whole world and the small circle of sky that he can see from the bottom is the entire firmament. And when the turtle happens upon the well one day and tells him of the boundless sea, the frog looks at him with incomprehension: he can hop about on the edge of the well, rest in the cracks, take a mud-bath at the bottom – doesn’t the frog already have every happiness the world can offer? What does he want with this funny sea-thing the turtle is talking about?
A good proportion of the people existing under such a system remain immune to information and arguments from outside, even when they do get through. Just as a mayfly cannot discuss ice and a narrow-minded scholar cannot discuss life, said Zhuangzi, the philosophical forefather of Taoism, a well-frog cannot talk about the sea.55 Perfect mind control has been achieved when the frog carries his well around with him. He can walk out into the world and stand beneath the vast skies, and still see only the small circle in which he grew up.
§ The Chinese term – ‘big character poster’ – is more precise, referring to the size of the lettering used on these principally hand-painted, visual protests. They have a pedigree stretching back, beyond the brief flowering of freedom and debate in 1978-9 known as the Democracy Wall movement (also called the Beijing Spring), to the dawn of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when Mao Zedong himself created one, urging students to ‘Bombard The Headquarters’.
¶ For comparison: in 2017, that figure was four out of ten in Hong Kong; in Taiwan it was five, and in South Korea three.
THE CLEAN SHEET
Why the People have to Forget
‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’
William Faulkner
The Party has good reason to celebrate. 4 June 2019 is the thirtieth anniversary of the massacre on Tiananmen Square. This wasn’t just the end of the democratic movement, it was also the end of a great festival, a Happening at which millions of citizens got high on their new-found freedom and their dream of a better China. ‘I don’t know what we want,’ one of the students in the square had shouted exuberantly. ‘All I know is, we want more of it.’ What they got, on the night of 3–4 June 1989, were bullets and bayonets. Tanks rolled in and made the night shudder. Students, workers and bystanders were crushed, shot and stabbed in their hundreds or thousands; we still don’t know the exact figure. In hindsight, and from the Party’s point of view, it was a success. A greater success than anyone could have imagined at the time.
‘The Chinese had to learn to forget, in order to survive,’ said one man who decided to remember. The painter Zhang Xiaogang is a survivor. The period leading up to 1989 was the freest time the People’s Republic of China had ever known. The people had escaped the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, and Deng
Xiaoping, the new strong man, threw the windows to the world wide open. To start with, he didn’t care whether ‘a few flies’ came in with the fresh air, to use his own phrase. Zhang Xiaogang remembers that time well. ‘There was suddenly so much hope, so much illusion, so much beauty. It was the most poetic time. A time when the people queued outside the Xinhua bookshops to buy a novel.’
1989 was a remarkable year. Zhang was working on a painting of a red woman on the banks of the classical river Lethe. In the Greek myths, the waters of Lethe give anyone who drinks them the gift of complete forgetfulness. In January of that year, the now legendary ‘China/Avant-Garde’ exhibition opened in Beijing’s national museum, bringing China’s new art out from the underground for the first time. The exhibition opened its doors at 9am, and by 3pm they were being closed again by the police: nervous culture-department bureaucrats had seen something too unfamiliar and wild for their liking. A new generation of artists was speaking a language they simply didn’t understand. And yet: ‘We were there now,’ says Zhang. ‘We thought China would inevitably become more open and freer.’ For just a few more precious months, they would hang onto their beliefs, their idealism, their innocence.
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