This was embarrassing – and not just to the many ordinary Chinese people who posted comments on social media. It also made official China uneasy. The state broadcaster, CCTV, published a comment piece calling Chinese compatriots to order: ‘No one who displays an unseemly “Wolf Warrior”-style patriotism and yells out “China!” whenever he feels like it is going to earn any sympathy in a foreign airport, or from his countrymen at home. Just because the motherland is there to support you when you have problems does not mean that it will play the scapegoat for you.’91
Within China, a noisy minority has adopted an aggressive form of nationalism, and its ugly face keeps appearing in the public sphere. It could be seen in Beijing in 1999, at demonstrations against the NATO bombardment of Belgrade’s Chinese embassy. During the demonstrations, correspondents from CNN and the German channel ARD were physically assaulted. Or at the anti-Japan riots of summer 2012, when placards on the streets of the Chinese capital called for Tokyo to be wiped out and demonstrators in Xi’an beat up the Chinese drivers of Japanese cars.
You will find it online, too, where the Xiao Fenhong (‘little pink ones’) react to any hint of criticism of the motherland and the Party’s patriotic myths by fire-bombing forums with ultra-nationalistic commentary. The Xiao Fenhong gather in places like the ‘emperor forum’, which has almost 30 million registered members, and from there launch organised attacks on websites outside the Great Firewall. Thousands of these pink trolls suddenly appear on Instagram when Lady Gaga meets the Dalai Lama; they flood Taiwan’s news sites with obscene tirades against the Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen; and when students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong make a case for their city’s autonomy or independence, the Xiao Fenhong take over the university website’s comment pages, posting threats such as ‘Tonight the emperor forum will find you’.
The ‘pink ones’ are so called because they originated on the pink forums of the popular women’s fiction website Jinjiang City. In 2008, their debates moved from literary to nationalistic matters: it was the time of the Olympic Games, which had been planned as a celebration of unadulterated pride in Party and motherland, and were being overshadowed by the violent unrest in Tibet’s capital Lhasa and lengthy human rights debates in the Western media. At that time, internet forums saw an especially powerful surge of vituperative nationalism.
‘Who sent you all that money from the motherland?’ one person asked the ungrateful Tibetans: ‘Have you forgotten about all that?’ Another applauded the violent way in which the demonstrations in Lhasa were put down. The government did a good thing, he said, by ‘cutting out this cancerous tumour’. Someone else warned, ‘If you behave badly, then we’ll take your culture and stick it in a museum,’ while another commenter asked: ‘Why are we even talking? Separatist scum should be killed’. Meanwhile, a blogger lamented the fact that foreigners had all been ‘brainwashed’. It was a reminder that the devastation wreaked by the communists takes many forms and will no doubt be borne by future generations. The poisonous seeds being sown by the Party today will still be sprouting decades from now.
The Party knows how dangerous this angry nationalism is; that it might one day turn against them. The propaganda machine advocates a ‘rational patriotism’, yet time and again Xi Jinping adds rhetorical fuel to the flame of national feeling, invoking China’s ‘sacred territory’, of which not ‘a single inch’ will be surrendered.
China’s nationalism is based around three specific issues: firstly, Taiwan, the island that has to all intents and purposes been a separate state since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, although the CCP leadership makes its return to the Chinese motherland seem more urgent with every year that passes. Taiwan is the subject that excites emotion most easily on the mainland – and at the same time, it’s the problem least likely to be solved. Taiwan has been a vibrant democracy for more than three decades, and its 23 million citizens don’t show the slightest inclination to submit to the yoke of the CCP. The nationalists’ second holy grail is the chain of islands in the East China Sea which the Japanese call Senkaku, and the Chinese know as Diayutai. It was these islands that sparked the anti-Japanese riots in the summer of 2012. Thirdly, China has staked a claim to the South China Sea in its totality, basing its claim on dubious historical arguments dismissed by its neighbours as nonsense, while in China itself they have attained the status of sacred truths.
Xi is the first Party leader in decades who doesn’t stop at words. Xi acts. He might make trite speeches in which he declares the extraordinary finding that Chinese blood contains ‘no gene for hegemony or invasions’ (the Xinhua News Agency calls this the Chinese people’s ‘Historical gene of peace-loving’).92 But he is pouring vast sums into remodelling the army – it must be able to ‘win wars’ – and, above all, into strengthening the navy. It is the Chinese navy that is busily creating a fait accompli in the South China Sea: building artificial islands in disputed locations, enlarging coral reefs into navy bases, intimidating the fishermen and coastguards of neighbouring countries. In July 2016, when the International Court of Justice in the Hague declared China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea to be largely void, China declared the judgement itself ‘null and void’ – and simply carried on reclaiming land and militarising the waters.
This escalating aggression in word and deed is not without danger for China’s leadership and for the world. Xi Jinping is fuelling expectations, not all of which he will be able to meet. Nationalism can easily grow into a monster that even its creator can’t fully control. What if Xi’s own rhetoric manoeuvres him into a corner during some future conflict, preventing him from making any kind of compromise that could be seen as weakness at home? What would happen if, after nearly four decades of growth, China’s economy found itself in crisis? What if one of the Party’s legitimating pillars – endless economic growth and increasing prosperity – threatened to crumble, leaving only the other: nationalism? How would the CCP, and how would Xi Jinping, distract the people from this state of affairs? Today, you can already meet people in China (especially among the younger generation) who believe that war with the USA is inevitable.
Some acquaintances from Beijing told me a story about their eleven-year-old son. A few days previously they had announced with great excitement that the family would be able to afford a foreign holiday that year, and that he could celebrate his twelfth birthday in Europe. ‘No!’ the son cried. ‘I’m not going abroad! I will only celebrate my birthday in the motherland!’ The father’s bafflement was still evident on his face as he related the incident. ‘It’s madness,’ he said. ‘What are they doing to my little boy?’
THE EYE
How the Party is Updating its Rule with Artificial Intelligence
‘The perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary.’
Michel Foucault
In University College London, on a chair behind a pane of glass, sits the skeleton of the philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham, dressed in a shirt and frock coat. Before his death on 6 June 1832, Bentham had left his body to the university, instructing that his mortal remains be put on public display. His friend Thomas Southwood Smith performed the dissection of the body during a public lecture. But the mummification of the head, using techniques learned from observing Maoris in New Zealand, didn’t quite go to plan. It was soon decided to spare the public the sight of it, and a more appealing wax head was placed atop Bentham’s skeleton.
The students hurrying by cast fleeting glances at the philosopher. A few take selfies; many ignore him. For a while, you could watch all this live: Bentham was not merely stared at; he stared back. A webcam positioned above his skeleton picked up curious admirers and people rushing past, and streamed the images live on Twitter. The team behind the PanoptiCam Project, which was set up to research surveillance algorithms, among other things, called it: ‘Watching you watching Bentham’. Jeremy Bentham was the founder of utilitarianism, as well as one of the leading expon
ents of the British Enlightenment, an advocate of rationality and freedom, and a pioneer of democracy and the liberal society. He was also the inventor of the panopticon prison, which to this day remains one of the most illuminating metaphors for the surveillance state. This state achieves perfection when it can stand by and watch as its subjects take over the job of surveilling themselves.
The invisible authority, which sometimes praises and sometimes punishes, which has the power to crush a person yet which shows how generous it is by not crushing them: organised religion has been working with this concept for thousands of years. You can’t see it, but it can see you. At every moment, day and night. Which means that it might not be looking at you right now, but that doesn’t matter. You only need to know that it could fix its gaze on you at any time, and you will begin to monitor yourself. Bentham’s panopticon was an architectural attempt to bring this form of surveillance to the world of the Enlightenment, to perfect and rationalise it. He himself thought it both efficient and humane, and spoke of ‘a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example’.93 He could imagine his panopticon being used as a school, a factory or a hospital, but above all it seemed to make the perfect prison. Bentham called it ‘a mill for grinding rogues honest’.94
The panopticon is both simple and brilliant: a ring-shaped building with many floors, all opening inwards onto a central courtyard. Each of these floors is made up of a continuous row of small cells. The cells each have two windows: one looking out, to let in light, and one looking inward, into the courtyard, at the centre of which is a slender watchtower. This tower has windows facing out in all directions, placed so that the watchman can see into every cell in the large outer ring, but can never be seen himself. Nor can the inmates of the cells see each other. ‘All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of back-lighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery,’ writes Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish.95 ‘They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone.’
Bentham died in 1832, and the panopticon in the form that he envisaged it was never built. Yet it was such a powerful idea that the philosopher Michel Foucault used it as a metaphor for the constrictions of modern society. If an individual is completely isolated, but most importantly, completely visible, says Foucault, then power functions automatically. ‘[T]he surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; […] the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary.’ The watchman, in other words, doesn’t even have to be there. The inmates of the cells merely have to believe he might be present: ‘So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations. Bentham was surprised that panoptic institutions could be so light: there were no more bars, no more chains, no more heavy locks.’ All you have to do is isolate individuals effectively, and guarantee their visibility. According to Foucault: ‘He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.’ Those who are naked before this eye take over surveillance of themselves.
Foucault wrote Discipline and Punish in 1975. At that point, no one could have guessed that technological progress would one day allow for the total surveillance of every single subject. One of the projects through which China wants to link up surveillance cameras and databases nationwide is called Xueliang. It is a play on the word for ‘sharp’ – as in the sharp eyes of the masses, a slogan from the Mao era, when the entire population was spying on each other. The all-seeing eye, observing a population of 1.4 billion people from a watchtower looming above and seeing into everything, has finally become a real possibility. China’s security apparatus is thrilled.
15 March 2016 will become one of those dates that the human race will always remember. On that day, in a ballroom in the Seoul Four Seasons Hotel, machines defeated man in a way no one had expected. It was a competition not unlike that between IBM’s chess computer Deep Blue and the then world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, when the computer won. Only this time, the stakes were much higher. The competitors were playing Go.
Go is one of the world’s oldest boardgames, invented more than two and a half thousand years ago in ancient China, where it was called weiqi. For a long time, gentleman scholars regarded it as one of the four arts that every cultivated man should master – alongside calligraphy, painting, and playing the Chinese zither. Go, which is played on a board of 19 x 19 intersecting lines, is infinitely more complex than chess. Even world-class players often have to rely on intuition rather than linear thinking. After the first two moves in a game of chess, ther are over 400 possible permutations; In Go, that number is around 130,000.
The Chinese gentleman-scholar Shen Kuo, a famous astronomer, mathematician, geologist, pharmacologist, cartographer, hydraulic engineer and general of the 11th century, estimated the number of possible positions in a game of Go at 10171. The figure, cited in his Dream Pool Essays, is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. On that 15 March, South Korean Lee Sedol, the strongest player of the past decade, sat down at the board to play against AlphaGo, the machine developed by the London DeepMind laboratory, now owned by Google. It was the fifth and last match of the tournament, and it was the final blow. AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol 4:1.
To produce AlphaGo’s algorithm, its creators had used two artificial neural networks that would train each other. To start with, they fed in 30 million moves by skilled Go players; then they made slightly different versions of the machine play millions of games against each other – and from these games AlphaGo learned entirely new strategies unknown to human players. AlphaGo’s triumph in Seoul surprised many and shocked some; few of those watching had expected such an outcome for at least another decade. The victory triggered remarkably emotional reactions as, all over the world, suspicion hardened into certainty (even among laymen): the future is here. The technologies at the heart of AlphaGo are going to transform our world to a degree we haven’t seen since the industrial revolution two hundred years ago.
Artificial intelligence is ‘the new electricity.’96 These are the words of Andrew Ng, the one-time head of AI research at Google and Baidu, who now teaches at Stanford. AI is not just one of many new technologies – it’s the force used by algorithms working with all kinds of digital data, and in the future it will power every branch of industry as well as many aspects of our private lives. It will help reinvent everything that can be captured or supported digitally, whether in education, medicine, the world of finance, scientific research, transport, or the city we live in. It is also reinventing the authoritarian state.
Nowhere in the world was the fascination and the surprise at AlphaGo’s triumph as great as it was in China, the game’s original home. And nowhere else reacted to it with such resolve and speed. China’s leaders must have felt like the USA did on 4 October 1957, when it was caught off guard by the news that its great rival, the Soviet Union, had just launched the first man-made satellite into space: Sputnik 1. ‘Control of space means control of the world,’ Lyndon B. Johnson warned in 1958, when he was the majority leader of the US senate. It was one of the key speeches of the Cold War. The future, he said, was ‘not as far off as we thought’, and whoever won the space race would then have ‘total control, over the earth, for purposes of tyranny or for the service of freedom.’ Two AI advisors to the Chinese State Council described AlphaGo’s victory in Seoul as China’s very own ‘Sputnik moment’.97 And the Chinese state reacted in much the same way as the USA ha
d in 1957: with a sudden change of tack, and a financial and strategic effort that almost overnight led to the funnelling of huge resources into artificial intelligence.
‘AlphaGo’s victory fundamentally changed our thinking,’ says Zhang Bo, a well-known mathematician and AI expert from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I saw Zhang Bo speak at an AI seminar in the modern conference centre in Wuzhen, during the World Internet Conference at the end of 2017. Earlier that year, in this same city, in the southern Chinese province of Zhejiang, the DeepMind machine AlphaGo had given a repeat performance of its feat before a Chinese audience, beating the twenty-year-old Chinese player Ke Jie (then at the top of the Go world ranking table) by three games to nil. After the match, the defeated Ke Jie, who is a celebrity in China, looked somewhat baffled. He later described AlphaGo as the ‘Go God’.
The undisputed star of the conference was not the Apple boss Tim Cook, who was in attendance; nor was it China’s chief ideologue Wang Huning, who brought greetings from his party leader Xi Jinping and announced that the digital economy was going to become the driving force behind China’s economy as a whole: ‘We will not let this opportunity pass us by’. The star was not even the internet itself – it was the miracle of artificial intelligence. ‘We will build a strong China with big data and artificial intelligence,’ said Wang Huning.
The euphoria of their Chinese hosts was echoed by the foreigners present in Wuzhen. The American IT expert John E. Hopcroft could be heard prophesying a third great revolution for humanity: there was the Neolithic revolution ten thousand years ago, when humans first became settlers; then came the industrial revolution; now the information revolution was upon us. Hopcroft had two main messages to give his rapt audience. Firstly: thanks to AI, in future only a quarter of the population would be required to produce and provide the sum total of all goods and services. And secondly, Hopcroft said, only two nations were going to profit from the AI revolution: the USA and China. Everywhere else lacked the infrastructure: when it came to AI, the threshold for entry was simply too high.
We Have Been Harmonised Page 15