We Have Been Harmonised

by Kai Strittmatter

  Xi Jinping isn’t giving anyone room to breathe. But rigid systems become brittle, and absolute power not only corrupts – it can also obscure. In 2017, an academic journal in Beijing published a paper entitled ‘The Application of Marxism in the Analysis of Ozone Levels in Beijing.’ The paper is not (yet) representative of scholarship in China as a whole, but it is a sign of the times all the same: the last time academics bent over backwards to produce this kind of nonsense was under Mao.

  Many disillusioned Chinese citizens will try to emigrate. In terms of numbers, this won’t cause the Party any pain – and after all, it will be easier to preserve stability if dissatisfaction goes elsewhere. But what if emigration starts to take away the brightest and the best? Xi’s speeches have long insisted that ‘innovation’ and ‘creativity’ are indispensable to China’s future. Among the frustrated and disappointed emigrés will be many innovative, creative minds – in a closed system like Xi’s, they are the first to come up against limitations. Such a system soon stifles the flow of energy and ideas that it has recognised in theory as central to its plans. This is an even greater risk in a country with a rapidly ageing population: at the start of 2019, China’s National Office for Statistics counted more people aged over 60 (249.5 million) than under 15 (248.6 million) for the first time.

  Xi’s one-party state is strong, and the Party leader is doing everything he can to make it even stronger. The Party has the tools of repression and the financial means to nip any political alternative to its rule in the bud. For the most part, these things ensure the loyalty of the elites and the support – or at least the resigned indifference – of the masses. In public, Xi exudes tremendous self-confidence, but the level of repression, the unprecedented rise in surveillance, and the strengthening of the security apparatus tell a different story. The Party knows that the acquiescence of the people is a wavering thing. ‘The ruler is the boat, and the people are the water,’ wrote the influential Confucian philosopher Xunzi in the third century BC. ‘The water can bear the boat up, and the water can capsize it.’ The Party is well aware that the support of citizens rests on increasing prosperity first and foremost, but also on information control, mind control, and the suppression of dissent. If there is one lesson to be learned from the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989, from the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe and from the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is that the boat can tip quickly – the instant that rulers show signs of weakness. The current of resentment that is always beneath the surface will then become a force to be reckoned with.

  Dangers lurk along the path that Xi Jinping is now taking. The future is likely to hold increasing repression, and an even more elaborate personality cult. But when a leader ceases to tolerate any opposition, even from loyal friends, leaving himself surrounded by flunkeys and yes-men, he makes the system susceptible to mistakes which, with no mechanism to correct them, can have serious consequences. The silence of the intellectuals and academics, the many civil servants paralysed with fear, means that important feedback from the provinces and counties, from social and economic interest groups, only reaches the Party leadership slowly and in a distorted form – or else not at all. The AI evangelists theorise that algorithms will fill this gap, beaming any signs of an approaching crisis all the way up to Xi’s headquarters. In practice, though, AI machines are only as good as the input they receive: if algorithms are fed rubbish at the bottom, they will spit out rubbish at the top. Local functionaries and executives in China are past masters at data manipulation.

  When it takes its logic of repression too far, the system often trips itself up. That could be seen twenty years ago, with the example of the Falun Gong. In 1999, the then Party head Jiang Zemin launched a campaign of merciless persecution against the sect. The result was that, in the space of a few years, what had been a well-organised religious group inside China whose followers were mostly of retirement age, became a network of noisy activists spread across the world. Today, Falun Gong runs a global media empire with a single primary aim: to topple the Communist Party.

  Like his predecessors, Xi Jinping prefers ad hoc campaigns and popular mobilisation to stable policies and laws. As a result officials across the country vie with each other in their eagerness to divine the ruler’s will and get into his good books. If Xi wants to clean up the air in Beijing, overhasty cadres will remove the coal-stoves from millions of Beijing residents’ homes in the middle of a bitterly cold winter. If Xi wants to see the capital ‘civilised’, then overnight they will throw tens of thousands of migrant workers out of their apartments and tear down the roofs over their heads. This zealotry is not only inhuman, it also poses a threat to those in power.

  More and more, you get the feeling that the system is needlessly making enemies. When it locks up feminists protesting against sexual harassment. Or when the Party decides to take on humour – by banning puns, for instance. This happened in 2014, when the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television in all seriousness issued a ban on wordplay, declaring that the playful alteration of old sayings led to ‘cultural and linguistic chaos’. It was a particularly absurd move because Chinese, with its many ambiguous homophones, is better suited to wordplay than almost any other language. For thousands of years the Chinese people have played with their language, with a relish seldom encountered elsewhere in the world.

  In 2018, the radio and television authority ordered a company called Bytedance to withdraw its popular humour app Neihuan Duanzi; at the time 17 million users were exchanging funny images and videos, sketches and jokes. The censors called the app ‘vulgar’ and ‘inappropriate’. They had already conducted a campaign against online celebrity gossip, and forbidden not just the country’s rappers but also its professional footballers from showing off their tattoos. In early 2019, they took the legendarily popular period drama Story of Yanxi Palace (300 million viewers) off air, after Party organisations complained that all the intrigues and luxury of the imperial palace were corrupting the good souls of the thrifty and hard-working Chinese people. Under Xi Jinping, the state apparatus can come across as having an almost Calvinist hostility towards fun, a zealous rigour that is as much moral as political – and which was unknown in previous decades. It has put noses out of joint, not just because people are being denied harmless pleasures, but also because the Party’s double standards are so plain to see.

  Every power carries within it the seed of its own destruction, and China’s past leaders were well aware of this. It’s dangerous for any regime to become so intoxicated with its own power that it loses sight of this fact. If the CCP ceases to tolerate fun, it will also have ceased to understand its people – with or without artificial intelligence to help. And if it ceases to understand its people, the model that has served it so well in recent years – the subjects focus on getting rich, buying things and having fun, while submitting to surveillance of their own accord – is under threat.

  For the time being, though, the rule of the CCP is in no danger. There is no reason to doubt the Party’s ability to create the most perfect surveillance state the world has ever seen over the next few years. But the question remains: in the end, will this be a state capable of overtaking the West and sprinting ahead to lead the world?

  THE ILLUSION

  How Everyone Imagines their Own China

  ‘Whoever talks about China talks about himself.’

  Simon Leys (1935-2014)

  The sinologist and author Simon Leys was one of the cleverest and most clear-sighted observers of China. In the 1970s he found himself up against a particularly deluded type of China fantasist: the European Maoist.

  For centuries, ever since Marco Polo first sparked mercantilist fantasies of the Far East with his writings about distant Cathay, Europe’s seekers of meaning and profit have been gripped by an overblown enthusiasm for the country. ‘Who would have believed,’ wrote the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in 1697, ‘that there was a people on this earth who […] still surpass u
s in comprehending the precepts of civil life?’ For us, China has always been blank sheet of paper: virgin territory for our projections. Sometimes China was heaven; sometimes hell. The Yellow Peril. Rarely have there been shades of grey. The China Show is at its most rewarding when you don’t even watch: then you can usually find exactly what you were looking for.153

  In recent decades the West has had a particularly distorted image of China. Under Deng Xiaoping, a brand new type of autocratic state emerged – one that blended Leninist repression with a turbo-charged super-capitalism and the gleam of commerce and consumption. The world had never seen anything like it, which meant many people refused to believe it could exist. It had to be merely a transitional step on a path of transformation. In the end, China will become like us, they whispered.

  China confuses people. More than a few seek comfort in the popular illusion that economic growth will automatically make the country more democratic. Wandel durch Handel – ‘change through trade’ – as the catchy German phrase has it. Proponents of this theory have included European leaders, the International Olympic Committee and most foreign businesspeople visiting Beijing. Who knows how many really believed it, and how many merely found it expedient. In any case, right from start the argument had a serious flaw. It wasn’t true.

  ‘China’s success story is […] the most serious challenge that liberal democracy has faced since fascism in the 1930s,’ wrote the China expert Ian Buruma more than a decade ago.154 Communism might be dead in China, but the Party’s rule was still very much alive. Yes, the colour of power had changed. A regime with a quasi-religious leader-cult, outbreaks of ideological ecstasy and parade-ground drills had become a regime in which the old Party elite and a new business class joined forces to plunder the nation’s wealth, and bought the goodwill of the urban middle classes by offering them a share in the prosperity.

  China’s leaders have always been adept at pulling the wool over outsiders’ eyes – and they are only too happy to be deceived. Spectacular economic growth and a successful drive to combat hunger have made their task even easier. Didn’t the residents of Beijing and Shanghai now drive Audis? Didn’t they sit in Starbucks drinking cappuccinos, watch MTV, and go on city breaks to Bangkok, Paris and London? Westerners looked for what was familiar – and found the Chinese caught up in a frenzy of consumerism. These people were just like us, after all!

  Among China correspondents there has long been a running joke about the columnist from Washington, the banker from London or the CEO from Frankfurt, who flies into Beijing or Shanghai. After a day, he has formed a lasting opinion on China; after a week, he gives the world the benefit of that opinion in a guest article for the New York Times, the Financial Times or the Handelsblatt; and after a month, he has enough material for a book. This character is still very much alive and well; like so many other clichés, he simply refuses to die out.

  ‘CHINA IS LEAVING DONALD TRUMP’S AMERICA BEHIND’ is the headline above one of these opinion pieces in the Financial Times, by the venture capitalist Michael Moritz. The article begins with a striking claim: ‘A week in China is enough to persuade anyone that the world has spun back to front.’155 The final paragraph is even better: Moritz urges Donald Trump to ‘send the managers of his pocket-sized portfolio of hotels to visit the best hotels in Beijing and Shanghai’. There, they would find ‘a level of service unparalleled in New York, London or Paris’. The view of China from the windows of luxury hotels is always a particularly pleasing one.

  More than a few Westerners fall for the Party’s line that China is unique among the world’s nations. Those with a certain level of prominence are flattered and cultivated as ‘friends of the Chinese people’. They might be given a consultancy post in one of the state’s countless decorative committees, for example, where they will talk about the ‘open and honest communication’ they enjoy with their Chinese counterparts. At the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, I met Werner Zorn, the man who first brought the internet to China when he was a computer scientist at the University of Karlsruhe. As a gesture of thanks, the retired professor still gets to sit on a ‘High Level Advisory Council’ and is invited to China twice a year. According to Zorn, Xi Jinping was ‘a stroke of luck for the Chinese’. The action he was taking to combat corruption was unprecedented. In any case, said Zorn, ‘Just look at the revelations at home about offshore companies, in the Paradise Papers. We’re no better than they are.’ As for the Party’s tightening grip on China – well, it was ‘a large state holding’ after all. The Western system would be no good for China: ‘An opposition here who said, “No, you can’t do that,”’ – the professor shook his head – ‘No. They need a wise leader, and you can certainly call Xi Jinping that.’

  One hears the fairytale of the wise dictator somewhat less often these days, but the myth of China as an exotic land that can’t be grasped using Western logic is alive and kicking. It’s nonsense, of course, if only on the grounds that contemporary China has taken as much from the West – communism, capitalism, entertainment, music, clothes, city planning, science and technology – as it has from ancient China. And much of what still sets us apart today – family and clan structures, say – is less down to innate differences than to the fact that, until very recently, China was an agrarian society. Anyone who parrots the CCP mantra that China’s ‘national characteristics’ mean that it requires exactly the kind of dictatorship the Party has given it, has fallen for a form of orientalism devised by Chinese communists. The cultural relativism that says the Chinese aren’t ready for democracy, and don’t share our desire for human rights, smacks of Western racism. The remedy is a trip to Taiwan to see Asia’s most vibrant democracy in action: the people there are Chinese, too.

  Surprisingly, many Western observers are reluctant to describe China as a ‘dictatorship’ – though the Party itself has never made any secret of it. Or else they might buy the attractive – and false – idea of the hyper-efficient ‘developmental dictatorship’, which is superior to our own system. Not infrequently it’s in their own political or economic interests to do so. Michael Moritz, for example, went on to produce a second essay, in which he urged Silicon Valley to give up its lazy ways and start emulating China’s predatory capitalism.156 Moritz – a venture capitalist, remember – reports with great excitement that in China, people work seven days a week for start-ups, from eight in the morning until ten at night. In their breaks they re-use their teabags, and if ever they want to lay eyes on their spouses, they invite them along on business trips.

  Self-interest, though, is not the whole explanation; naivety is also to blame. It’s part of the reason why Western politicians and businesspeople spent so long clinging to the belief that China’s leaders had the best intentions, for decades taking their fine words at face value. And when there were no actions to follow the words, they gave them the benefit of the doubt and blamed deficiencies in the state apparatus charged with making the plans a reality. Or they simply forgot all about them, instead bathing in the endless stream of fresh promises gushing out of Beijing and into the world.

  Sometimes their contortions have been painful to watch. Step forward, David Cameron, who had incurred the wrath of the Party for meeting with the Dalai Lama on his May 2013 visit. When he was permitted to return with a trade delegation in December of the same year, gave a performance described by one European diplomat sarcastically as fitting the legal definition of prostitution. Cameron spoke of Britain and China’s ‘deep complementary economics’, of his desire to ‘help deliver the Chinese dream’ and of Britain’s unique advantages as a broker between China and the EU. In return, the Chinese premier was at pains to mention Cameron’s ‘respect for China’s core national interests and major concerns’. Or to put it another way – well done for not mentioning Tibet or human rights this time.

  Cameron’s trip was the target of not a little mockery from sections of the domestic press: his co-travellers from UK plc included such global heavyweights as the Cambridge Sat
chel Company and Westaway Sausages of Devon. Regardless of how those particular enterprises are faring almost six years later, it must be noted that the former British PM is now leading a UK China investment fund heavily engaged in Xi Jinping’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’. So some things worked out well. For some.

  Yet Cameron is not alone. Beijing has always made skilful use of the China-blindness of the West, and with the election of Donald Trump as US president, Xi Jinping has been gifted an unprecedented opportunity. Trump’s alarming isolationism and revolting conduct are in marked contrast with Xi’s well-mannered appearances on the world stage – the smooth speeches where he presents himself as the saviour of globalisation – and make it easy for Europeans to applaud. It is remarkable. The same people who – rightly – pore over every syllable uttered by Donald Trump and shout ‘Lies!’ are prepared to take Xi on trust when he preaches free trade at the World Economic Forum in Davos; when he invokes the international order; or when he promises that China will open up, and sings the praises of a networked globe.

  In reality, he is a far greater protectionist than Trump.

  In reality, he is subverting the existing international order on many fronts.

  In reality, he is sealing his country off.

  In reality, he is severing China’s last remaining internet connections to the outside world.

  Xi is no Maoist, but he has picked up a few tricks from Mao. His recipe for guerrilla warfare, for instance: The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy encamps; we harass; the enemy tires, attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.