We Have Been Harmonised

by Kai Strittmatter

  The powerful National Commission for Development and Reform is overseeing the introduction of the system, and is currently weighing up the idea of a central database, Zhang Zheng tells me. ‘We think that’s dangerous,’ he says. Who does he mean by ‘we’? ‘Academics’, the professor says. But, he adds, there are ‘also other voices’. These would be the voices of the security apparatus – and in a regime like China’s, they may carry more weight than academics’. ‘Our biggest problem is that we don’t have anything to model our system on. We’re breaking new ground,’ says the professor. ‘But this is precisely what makes the whole thing so exciting.’ He leans forward, almost overcome now by his enthusiasm. ‘There has never been such a system in the history of humankind. And it still doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. We’re the first. It’s exciting.’

  The first. It will serve as a warning to all democracies where companies and public authorities are dreaming their own big data dreams. And, no doubt, as a temptation to others: according to the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), ‘China’s IT-supported authoritarianism will become an attractive role model and technology provider for other authoritarian countries.’ The former MERICS chief Sebastian Heilmann calls it ‘digital Leninism’.131

  We are witnessing the return of totalitarianism in digital guise. The People’s Republic of China has always been a dictatorship. But it was only for a few years under Mao that it was a totalitarian state, which tried to creep into every last corner of its subjects’ brains, its eye watching over their bedrooms and their closest relationships. The new totalitarianism will be much more sophisticated than the versions that Mao and Stalin gave us, with undreamed-of possibilities for access and mind-control, now that we have all stored our minds in smartphones – now that we record every step we take and every thought we think digitally. Best of all, the new totalitarianism has the luxury – unimaginable in the past – of being able to dispense with terror as an everyday tool. It’s enough if the violence remains at a subliminal level, as an ever-present threat. In this way the new regime insinuates itself, quietly and imperceptibly at first, making citizens into its accomplices.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be the best of all worlds if, in a few decades, we didn’t have to talk anymore about the system and its rules?’ Zhao Ruying asked me. She is the department head in charge of implementing the Social Credit System in Shanghai. ‘We may reach the point where no one would even dare to think of committing a breach of trust, a point where no one would even consider hurting the community.’ She beamed with delight at the thought. ‘When we reach this point, our work will be done.’

  Then the new man will have been born.

  THE SUBJECT

  How Dictatorship Warps Minds

  ‘How easily we can become slaves, and still be very contented with our fate.’

  Lu Xun, 1925

  Some people are losing the plot.

  A day labourer, in the interior, somewhere near Chongqing. One of tens of millions. With a son who is a stranger to him, and an even more estranged mother. He gets his hands on a gun, steals a motorbike, robs a bank. Someone gets in his way. He reaches for the gun.

  A woman in the heart of China, in Hubei Province. Her lover is married; his angry wife beats her up. She works in a sauna. A customer hits her with wads of cash, humiliates her. She pulls a knife.

  A young migrant worker in a southern city. Dongguan. With no money, no friends (he’s betrayed them), no family (his mother despises him for having made no money), no love (the woman he loves offers herself to other men in a brothel, right in front of him). He climbs up to the top floor of his hostel (which is called ‘Oasis of Growth’) and jumps out of the window.

  A labourer in Shanxi, coal-mining country. The bosses once promised to share the mine’s profits with the workers. Now they’re pocketing the money themselves. The labourer wants justice and instead receives a public beating, in front of everyone. The mafia-like bosses spit on him. His colleagues, though they have all been betrayed just like he has been betrayed, laugh at him. He gets hold of a shotgun.

  There is a great deal of bloodshed.

  These are dark tales. But, says the storyteller, they are ‘like a match that shines a light on us’, dispelling the shadows of oblivion and denial. The torch-bearer is Jia Zhangke, and his film is called A Touch of Sin. It’s a feature film rather than a documentary, but the violent acts he describes are all based on real events in China. The young man really jumped, the woman really stabbed someone. All that blood really flowed.

  It was the internet that washed all these stories up at Jia Zhangke’s desk. The director fished them out of Weibo’s mighty river just before the Party closed the floodgates of censorship in 2013, assembling them into a grand panorama. In traditional Chinese art, such landscapes – grand, bold, expressing something about the state of the nation – are known as paintings of ‘rivers and mountains, ten thousand miles across’.

  ‘It’s something I always wanted to do,’ says Jia Zhangke. ‘Make a film that summarises the current state of China.’ It is one of the best films to come out of China in recent years – and one of the gloomiest. A Touch of Sin shows a new emptiness behind the new prosperity. A country without justice, a society without morals, people who turn to violence because they think it’s the only way they can retain a last shred of dignity. The film borrows from wuxia, the Chinese martial-arts genre, in terms of both its aesthetic and its storytelling. The classic wuxia novels with their robbers and rebels, the films with their fearless heroes, were fables told by desperados who reached for their swords when they were forced to the edges of society, when there was no other escape. But Jia’s heroes are broken, with no hope of comfort or catharsis.

  Jia Zhangke grew up in Shanxi Province, a soot-covered coal-mining area. He was the son of a teacher and a shop assistant, in a very ordinary neighbourhood. First he studied art, and in 1993 he went to the Film Academy in Beijing, where he studied the theory of film and greedily devoured the entire history of the medium. ‘The Academy was a place of freedom, with no taboos,’ he says. ‘I arrived and the first thing I did was borrow a Japanese porno. It was a happy time, it freed me.’ Like other filmmakers of his generation, Jia Zhangke deliberately set himself apart from role models like Chen Kaige or Zhang Yimou. The young director adopted a new realism, in contrast to the opulent images and historical parables of the film-makers of the older generation. ‘Films of today should tell stories of today,’ he says. After all, China is bursting with them. Xi Jinping allegedly once said that he liked Jia Zhangke’s laconically realistic films. Mind you, that was before A Touch of Sin was released.

  Jia Zhangke is sitting in his office in the north of Beijing, with Mao Zedong on the wall behind him: the French poster for his film Platform, released in 2000. On the original poster, the image of Mao is upside down, but Jia has turned him the right way up. He talks about the culture of violence with which many Chinese people have grown up, thanks to Mao. In a different China, his film wouldn’t have had to be an outpouring of violence outburst (he could have made courtroom dramas, he says) but he wants to show the damage done by this period of history. A society that has lost empathy and humanity. Corruption and self-enrichment by the powerful. People without hope, humiliated, who resort to violence not because it promises a solution, but as a final act of self-determination. ‘It’s the only way they can tell the story of their despair,’ says Jia Zhangke. ‘They’re under great pressure, and all other channels, all other vents, are closed to them. That’s dangerous.’

  In truth China isn’t being overtaken by an epidemic of murders and attacks – the country is probably still one of the safest in the world. Yet there are regular, disconcerting outbreaks of violence: a wheelchair user who detonates a bomb in Beijing airport; an impoverished street trader who blows up a bus in Xiamen, killing 47 people; a dozen petitioners from the provinces who swallow poison together near Tiananmen Square, because collective suicide is the last available mean
s of protest. Something is festering beneath the stability so often invoked by the Party.

  ‘In the past, before Weibo existed, when people heard these stories they thought they were one-offs,’ said Jia, when I visited him in the summer of 2013. ‘But since we’ve had Weibo, we can see that these things are happening all the time, all over the country. They’re part of our reality, there’s no denying them any longer.’ Jia Zhangke’s film was a window. Just as Weibo was a window, for a short while. Not long after my visit, the authorities informed Jia that his film, which the censors had already rubber-stamped, could not now be shown in the country’s cinemas after all. A new wind had begun to blow. At the same time, Xi Jinping’s people put the shackles on Weibo. Denial was back.

  It is China’s dramatic transformation, and the fate of ordinary people who are losing themselves and each other as a result of it, that haunts Jia Zhangke. Some critics see Jia as an activist for the ‘underclass’, but the director dislikes this characterisation: ‘It’s funny how everyone in this country, no matter whether they’re farmers, workers or intellectuals, always talks disparagingly about the “underclass”, and how none of them think they belong to it themselves. But in China we all live under an authoritarian regime. That means we’re all the same. There are those to whom the power belongs – and then there’s everyone else. We’re all the underclass.’

  ‘Blissful ignorance’ – the ideal state in which an autocracy strives to keep its subjects. They submit to a policy of infantilisation, which treats adult citizens like small children, incapable of thinking or taking responsibility for themselves; always prepared to be chided and educated for spitting in the street, queue-jumping, talking loudly in public places, insolence and disobedience. For years the censor was successful in keeping much of the Chinese population in this state of ignorance. Then the authorities made the mistake of allowing wild and free debate to flourish on Weibo.

  This accidental four-year gift of freedom was all it took for cracks to appear in the picture painted by the propaganda machine. A few courageous intellectuals, artists and writers looked behind the glittering façades and the new prosperity, to spy an entirely different society. ‘When I look at contemporary China, I see a nation that is thriving yet distorted,’ wrote the author Yan Lianke. ‘I see corruption, absurdity, disorder and chaos. Every day, something occurs that lies outside ordinary reason and logic. A system of morality and a respect for humanity that was developed over several millenniums is unravelling.’132

  Almost everyone I spoke to in the first two years after my return to China in 2012 – friends and interviewees, typical representatives of the new urban middle classes who had profited from the Chinese miracle – had one wish: to get out of China. There was a surge in searches containing the term ‘emigrate’ on Baidu. ‘One hour on Weibo is enough to make you depressed for a week,’ a Beijing friend told me. People thrilled at the flood of information on Weibo. And soon, they despaired. A sense of hopelessness began to spread. So this was the future they had been promised?

  It was at this time that Xi Jinping took office and revealed his ‘China dream’ of the rebirth of the glorious nation. But people all over the country were finding common ground for the first time through the new social media – and they were telling each other about their own personal dreams. ‘We used to dream the dreams of our state,’ a prominent academic told me. ‘But now people are saying: these dreams have nothing to do with me.’ He talked about his daughter, who was studying English. ‘My dream is for her to have a good future.’

  These were precarious years for the Communist Party and its project of limitless and eternal rule. Large sections of society were beginning to wake from the hypnotic trance in which Party propaganda had kept them for decades. There were three sentences I heard time and again:

  Mei you anquangan.

  ‘There’s no feeling of security here.’

  Mei you xinren.

  ‘There’s no trust here.’

  Mei you daode.

  ‘There’s no morality any longer.’

  There are brave, passionate, sympathetic people in China – people with a sense of solidarity, who don’t hesitate to help others. But this isn’t as easy as it is in some other societies; such people are often viewed with suspicion by their fellow citizens. They may also find themselves in the cross-hairs of the state apparatus. For example, in the cold winter of 2017 there was a pitiless campaign to drive non-Beijingers out of Beijing, when the city authorities literally took the roof from over the heads of many migrant workers. A lot of Beijing citizens were shocked and outraged. Some offered help to those who had been made homeless overnight – only to feel the might of the security apparatus themselves as a result. Yang Changhe from the district of Tongzhou, who gave the homeless a room in a Beijing suburb to store their possessions, got a visit from the police, who then made sure that he lost his own flat. The painter Hua Yong, who captured the forced evictions on film, had to flee Beijing and was hunted for days before being arrested in Tianjin.

  To give another example: the first time the civil rights activist Hu Jia was arrested, it was because of his efforts on behalf of the sick in the AIDS villages of Henan Province. ‘Why is it so often the good people who are targeted in this country?’ asked Hu Jia. Here is the logic of a corrupt regime, which views all kinds of idealism as suspect.

  Every autocracy seeks to destroy solidarity and sympathy among its citizens. Today’s China is seething with mistrust, and complaints about moral decline have reached a new pitch of intensity. There are several reasons for this. One is the trauma of the Cultural Revolution, which is still unhealed. Another is the vacuum where faith in communism used to be. When that went to its grave along with Mao, people were left with nothing they could believe in. There was only the Party’s rallying cry: Get rich! Greed is the imperative in this new China.

  ‘My generation has no values and no principles,’ said Charles Zhang, who was born in 1964 and is now the head of the internet company Sohu, which makes him one of the stars of the new China. ‘And so the laws of the jungle rule. You can be successful for a whole range of reasons here. Instead of sticking to your principles, you start just exploiting everything. You exploit to a huge degree.’

  When the market research organisation Ipsos conducted a global survey in 2017 on what worried people most, the majority of countries placed unemployment, corruption and inequality at the top of their list.133 China was the only country where people’s top concern was ‘moral decline’. Life under an autocracy corrupts society, poisoning individuals and their relationships with others. ‘Wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man,’ Hannah Arendt writes of the totalitarian state.134 China’s society is sick, even if at first glance that isn’t always apparent to outsiders.

  The law of the jungle. The worship of money and power. A brutal pragmatism, distilled from those long years when basic survival was the only value that counted. One of the most remarkable phenomena during Donald Trump’s election campaign and the first months of his presidential term was the growth of his fan club in China. Trump’s anti-Chinese diatribes were far less important to these fans than his shameless campaign against all forms of political correctness. They applauded his attacks on the welfare state and other countries’ refugee policies. In their minds, these things were the work of misguided and despicable Baizuo.

  Baizuo are ‘white leftists’. For a while the word was a popular insult among certain Chinese online communities. It’s what they call Western liberals like Hillary Clinton or Angela Merkel (for whom the sarcastic term shengmu, ‘holy mother’ was also invented because of her stance in the refugee crisis of 2015) – and, more broadly, anyone who speaks up for asylum-seekers, the underprivileged or LGBT rights. Such people are branded hypocrites and weaklings. Everyone is responsible for his own life, the mantra goes, and for getting himself out of difficulties.

  In a 2018 study, Norwegian researchers were surprised to discover that, among the Ch
inese people they had surveyed, the proportion who held right-wing libertarian ideas, accepted social inequality as the natural order, and opposed higher taxes on the wealthy, was far larger than it was in the USA. One in five Chinese people thought the state should stop all redistribution of wealth. ‘Chinese are more right wing than Americans,’ Science Nordic announced on its website.135

  ‘Many Chinese people don’t hate the rich; they want to be rich themselves. Instead, they hate morality. So much has gone wrong here,’ Li Chengpeng told me in Chengdu. The former sports reporter and liberal bestselling author is among the celebrity social critics silenced in the 2013 campaign against independent bloggers and authors. Social Darwinism, which transposes the ideas of natural selection and survival of the fittest from the natural world onto society, has long since taken hold in China, says the historian Cheng Yinghong: ‘Social Darwinism and autocratic politics are natural bedfellows. It ignores the injustice inherent in the unequal distribution of rights and resources. And it protects the violence, deceit and exploitation on which these things are based.’136

  ‘We live in an age when dust blocks the sky. Politics is dirty, the economy is dirty, and even culture smells like it’s rotten,’ the author Murong Xuecun writes.137 ‘Our heart is supposed to be clear like the water in the autumn and the unending sky, but if we place it in the dust for a long time, then it can’t help but get dirty and frangible.’ This is an essay written in the tradition of the great Lu Xun, and it’s one of the most clear-sighted analyses of modern Chinese society around. On the day it was published, it was one of the most shared posts on Weibo, and of course it was deleted as quickly as it appeared. Murong Xuecun describes the devastation that an autocracy wreaks in the souls of its subjects. He identifies several states of mind, foremost among them numbness, blindness to reality, and slavish subservience. All are the result of generations of people for whom basic survival has been a consuming struggle.