We Have Been Harmonised

by Kai Strittmatter

  As we have seen, the Party also has its eye on the West’s academic publishing houses. Doing business in China is risky, especially when the coin you are trading with is academic freedom. Cambridge University Press (CUP), which describes itself as the world’s oldest publisher, hit the headlines in summer 2017 after performing the Beijing censors’ job for them. In response to questions from journalists, CUP confirmed that, at the request of the Chinese government, it had removed more than 300 academic articles and book reviews from the website of the high-profile publication China Quarterly. All of a sudden, many of the best-known sinologists in Europe and the USA found their work blacklisted. In a statement, CUP said it was cooperating with the censors in Beijing in order ‘to ensure that other academic and educational materials remain available to researchers and educators in this market.’190 A lucrative market, one might add: like other publishing houses, CUP earns good money from selling its publications to China.

  At first, the Chinese Studies community was stunned into silence. Then came an outcry. Condemnation poured in from all over the world. Academics, journalists and civil rights activists called the publisher’s actions ‘disgraceful’ – a ‘capitulation’. ‘Pragmatic is one word,’ one professor tweeted; ‘pathetic more apt’.191 The general feeling was that CUP had sold its soul. ‘Scholarship does not exist to give comfort to the powerful,’ wrote MIT’s Greg Distelhorst and Cornell’s Jessica Chen Weiss in an open letter. ‘The censored history of China will literally bear the seal of Cambridge University.’192 James A. Millward from Georgetown University argued: ‘This is not only disrespectful of CUP’s authors; it demonstrates a repugnant disdain for Chinese readers.’193

  In the end, CUP reversed its decision and released all the blocked material. It made a statement praising academic freedom as the highest good, and stating in its defence that the censorship had been a ‘temporary decision’. Even after the furore had died down, though, the suspicion remained that this would happen again. Along with the premonition that each time it did, the outrage would become a little more muted, as censorship slowly became the new normality.

  A few months later, the whole rigmarole was played out again in Berlin, at Springer Nature, one of the world’s largest academic publishers.194 On websites accessible from China, more than 1,000 articles featuring keywords like Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Cultural Revolution or Tiananmen Square had been blocked. Springer Nature reacted rather differently from its British counterpart, shrugging off criticism from its own authors and maintaining its blockade on the articles that had offended Beijing. A few days later, Chinese state media celebrated the agreement of a ‘strategic partnership’ between Springer Nature and the Chinese internet giant Tencent. Berlin responded to enquiries with a dry press release: ‘The blocking of content in China on the one hand and the cooperation with the Chinese internet company Tencent on the other are entirely unrelated.’ As of May 2018, according to its website, Springer Nature publishes more than 110 academic journals in cooperation with Chinese partners.

  China is more than happy to shell out cash if it helps buy the cooperation of Western elites. It is constantly creating new foundations so that ‘friends of the Chinese people’ can be given honorary titles and well-remunerated positions. ‘Elite capture’ is the Royal United Services Institute’s term for the mechanism by which these highly-paid consultants ‘risk becoming more amenable to CCP aims’.195 Among the recipients of CCP generosity are Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the ex-premier of France, and Bob Carr, Australia’s former foreign minister, who heads the Australia China Relations Institute (which aims to spread ‘a positive and optimistic view’ of Australia-China relations). Germany’s former Vice Chancellor Philipp Rösler caused a stir when he turned up at the helm of a New York foundation part-owned by the mysterious company HNA, said to have close ties to the Beijing’s ‘red aristocracy’. And of course there is David Cameron, who as Prime Minister proclaimed the ‘golden age’ of British-Chinese relations, and since 2018 has run a British-Chinese investment fund which intends to put a billion dollars into ‘supporting the “Belt and Road” initiative’ aka the ‘New Silk Road’.196 Clearly there is no shortage of willing cheerleaders for Beijing.

  At the same time, the Party has mounted a global media offensive. Its foreign broadcasters such as CGTN (television) and CRI (radio) have been allocated huge long-term budgets. In spring 2018, they were amalgamated with the national broadcasters CCTV and CNR to form a new entity: ‘Voice of China’. The name bears witness to the continuing influence of the USA: first, the American dream became the China dream; now Voice of America has its counterpart in Voice of China. The new organisation is one of the world’s largest propaganda machines, and it is directly controlled by the CCP. According to Xinhua (which is itself increasing its overseas presence), its mission is to ‘propagate the theories, aims, principles and policies of the Party’, as well as, most importantly, to ‘tell good stories about China.’ As of December 2018, the European headquarters of the new propaganda station CGTN in London had advertised more than 350 new jobs for experienced TV journalists. According to media reports, the salaries were ‘a long way above’ the London average.

  CGTN claims to reach an audience of 1.2 billion in English, Russian, Arabic, French and Chinese, which would make it the biggest broadcaster on earth. In video released in 2017, it argued that many outside China had been ‘brainwashed’ by the ‘Western values of journalism’ – a process that must be resisted. This from the country that currently occupies position 176 out of 180 on the Reporters Without Borders index of press freedom.

  Year after year, hordes of African journalists are flown into China for ‘training’. China provides many African editors with news content, technical equipment and financial help in digitising radio and TV channels. It is also laying fibre optic networks outside its own borders, opening data centres and launching TV satellites into space as part of its ‘digital Silk Road’. In the USA, the propaganda department has bought airtime on the Discovery Channel for the three-part celebratory documentary Time of Xi, which according to the Party press ‘focuses on what China has to offer the world’. The Beijing-based China Daily has also paid huge sums to include the propaganda supplement China Watch in high-profile Western newspapers like the Washington Post, Le Figaro, and (once) in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. The UK’s Daily Telegraph reportedly earns £750,000 a year from it.

  On German television, ‘Nihao Deutschland’, a feel-good programme co-produced by Xinhua, has recently aired its 500th episode. ‘Renting the boat to cross the ocean’ is what they call such a strategy in China. Better still, says propaganda chief Liu Qibao, is buying the boat outright. Like the Beijing-loyal entrepreneur who has bought the Hong Kong South China Morning Post, or the others who are quietly purchasing shares in a radio network covering Washington and the surrounding area, as a Reuters investigation discovered.197

  In central and eastern Europe, too, Chinese companies are bidding on several media consortia. The politburo member Liu Qibao oversees many of these activities. He is the head of the powerful Party organisation that for many years was known as the ‘Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the CCP’ – and has now been re-christened the ‘Publicity Department’ for the benefit of foreign ears. (In Chinese it still goes by its old name: xuanchuanbu.) Aware that changing the label wouldn’t do the trick on its own, Beijing has also drafted in professional help from the West. PR firms like Hill+Knowlton, Ketchum and Ogilvy are just a few of the big names who have helped the Chinese government spruce up its messaging.

  The best investment of all is in Hollywood, which has seen not only a wave of co-productions with China, but also a purchasing frenzy by Chinese firms, foremost among them Dalian Wanda Group. In 2012 the company bought AMC, the largest chain of cinema operators in the USA – then four years later, it bought Legendary Entertainment, the Hollywood Studio that has produced films including the Batman and Jurassic Park franchises. Wanda’s founder Wang Jianlin became Ch
ina’s richest man through real estate – and, like many other business magnates, he is very well connected with the Party leadership. In an interview, Wang put on record that his company naturally sees itself as contributing to China’s ‘cultural influence’.

  Of course, the CCP would also love its domestic film industry to conquer the West with its artistic charisma – to go up against Hollywood’s soft power. In spring 2019 the head of the National Film Bureau, Wang Xiaohui, set a high target for his country’s directors: by 2035, China should have become a ‘strong film power’ on a par with the USA. Wang showed his awareness that the quality of contemporary Chinese productions was sorely lacking: ‘Our ability to tell stories lags a long way behind Hollywood and Bollywood’s,’ he told the assembled great and good of China’s film industry. Yet this is unlikely to change any time soon – not because of a lack of talented Chinese directors and actors, but because of bureaucrats like Wang Xiaohui himself and the system he represents. The new generation of Chinese film, he told the artists as a parting shot, should be filled with ‘patriotic stories’, and China’s filmmakers must not ‘challenge the political system.’198 Here, as so often, the Party’s paradoxical message is: castrate yourselves and be fruitful!

  In the Western film world, Chinese money remains more effective than Chinese charisma. Despite some sobering recent experiences (deals falling through, films flopping), today Hollywood is targeting blockbusters at the Chinese market and playing by its rules. The sheer size of that market makes temptation irresistible: the number of Chinese cinema-goers has grown by double-digit percentages in almost every year of the past decade, and at the start of 2018, China’s box-office turnover outstripped that of the USA for the first time.

  Hollywood has begun to take Chinese censorship into consideration, and this has certain concrete ramifications. The National Film Bureau in Beijing bans imported films from showing any content that attacks China’s national pride, threatens its social stability, unity and sovereignty, or shows the personalities of its leaders in a bad light. On co-productions, the NFB’s regulations expressly require ‘positive Chinese elements’.

  When the Chinese director Jia Zhangke returned from a promotional tour for A Touch of Sin, he told me about a conversation he’d had with film journalists in New York. They had asked him if he had any tips for Hollywood producers on the smartest way to come to an arrangement with China’s censors. ‘I was speechless,’ said Jia. ‘It churned me up inside’. The actor Richard Gere, who is known as a critic of China and a friend of Tibet, told the Hollywood Reporter that he’d been kicked off projects because the Chinese side didn’t want to work with him. Chinese baddies are cut from scripts, and invading Chinese troops (as in the remake of ‘Red Dawn’) are hastily transformed into North Koreans in the digital cutting room. At an earlier stage in the process, writers are increasingly adding Chinese heroes and heroines to their screenplays.

  In Ridley Scott’s 2015 film The Martian, for example, the China National Space Administration gets to help the American NASA out of a desperate situation with a supply rocket, saving the astronaut stranded on Mars (played by Matt Damon) from starvation. The Martian brought in 94 million dollars in China. In real-life Beijing, Xu Dazhe, head of CNSA, cited the film as proof that ‘our American counterparts have high hopes that they will get to work with us.’ Regrettably, however, there were ‘a few obstacles’ in the way of this cooperation – an allusion to the decision of the US Congress is 2011 to ban NASA from collaborating with Beijing in any way whatsoever, for reasons of national security.

  Unlike Russia, China goes well beyond feeding nuggets of disinformation into the public discourse – it is turning its attention to infrastructure and institutions. The ‘thought work’ perfected in China itself is to be outsourced on every imaginable level. The goal is a new world order.

  China is pursuing its aims on the grandest global scale. Its diplomats are increasingly active on the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. In April 2018, for only the second time, they managed to get through one of their own resolutions – giving some of their harmonious-sounding, home-grown propaganda a place on the world stage. The resolution advocated a ‘community of shared future’ and ‘mutually beneficial cooperation’ in the field of human rights, and its sponsors included Syria, Egypt, Myanmar, Burundi and Eritrea.199 The wording sounds harmless enough, if a little flowery, but human rights activists see the resolution as a first step in an attempt to rewrite international human rights norms. ‘The Communist Party of China (CCP) has always strived to pursue happiness for the people and development for […] mankind,’ wrote China’s ambassador to South Africa in an article for the English edition of the People’s Daily. ‘Today, the 1.3 billion Chinese people are enjoying their life of peace, freedom and happiness, free of fear of war or conflict. China, with its fastest human rights progress and best practices of human rights protection, is setting up a new model for the world cause of human rights.’200

  This ‘community of shared future’ is something the Party also wants to create online. The global internet, it believes, urgently needs reinventing. It should be secure. Orderly. Obedient. This is the purpose of the World Internet Conference in the southern town of Wuzhen. Every year since 2014, it has gathered politicians, academics and business executives from all over the world, with the aim of spreading its vision of an internet that ‘serves national security’ and ‘respects national sovereignty’ around the globe. Wuzhen is the perfect venue: an old, painstakingly restored southern Chinese water town, with picturesque canals and bridges. Ancient China has been reborn here, as a lucrative theme park aimed at the tourist industry, cleansed not only of its former inhabitants, but also of dirt, rubbish and any kind of life. It is separated from the outside world by a long wall, several guarded gates and a wide canal. Today, it is a pretty, empty shell waiting to be filled with commerce and propaganda – every bit as open and vibrant as China’s internet itself.

  The conference, hosted by China’s cyberspace authority, the CAC, is avoided by Western politicians. They have no real interest in the ‘community of shared future in cyberspace’ advocated by Wang Huning, the Communist Party’s chief ideologue in his opening speech in December 2017. The deputy leaders of Mongolia, Pakistan and several southeast Asian countries, on the other hand, were all listening carefully. For them, China’s ‘effective internet security management’ is a source of admiration – and potentially ‘of use to all our countries,’ as the delegate from Thailand’s military junta put it in his address.201

  Their politicians may be absent, but Wuzhen has become a place of pilgrimage for the Western tech elite: they are invited here by the regime, which offers them a gateway to the legendary Chinese market. In 2017, Apple boss Tim Cook found words of praise for his hosts; there was, he said, a ‘vision that we share’. That same week, the Washington-based NGO Freedom House once again crowned China ‘world’s worst abuser of internet freedom,’ ahead of Syria and Ethiopia.202 No doubt what Cook had in mind was the part of Wang Huning’s speech where he said: ‘Let us make the pie of the digital economy larger!’ Other attendees included top executives from Cisco, IBM, Google and Facebook: the enticing aroma of this pie lures plenty of Silicon Valley giants with witty speeches in their luggage – even those whose products are blocked and banned on the Chinese market.

  While the executives talked about networking, openness and – water-town metaphors being extremely popular in Wuzhen – building bridges, another event was taking place next door. In the Jingxing conference room, the Ministry of Public Security co-hosted a discussion on ‘International cooperation in combating the misuse of the internet for criminal and terrorist purposes’. Unfortunately, said Professor Zhang Jinping, foreign media often used ‘the language of the terrorists’. China needed to make more of an effort to fight back: ‘We must oppose it everywhere in the world with our own language. Our own narrative must gain the upper hand.’

  Professor Mei Jianning from Shanghai went
on to illustrate the problem with an example: he named three reasons why the World Congress of Uighurs – based in Munich and recognised by the German authorities as a peaceful organisation of exiles – should be classed as a ‘terrorist organisation’. Firstly: ‘They twist the facts and use a polluted language.’ Secondly: ‘They say negative things about the national “One Belt, One Road” project.’ And thirdly: ‘They collaborate with other anti-China organisations.’ Professor Mei recommended that the Chinese government put more pressure on Twitter and other Western social media companies to block the accounts of the World Congress of Uighurs and other similar ‘terrorist’ organisations.

  The foreign guest speakers that day included a Turkish police officer from Ankara and a liaison officer from the Iranian embassy in Beijing, who identified the US government as the greatest terrorist threat on the web. ‘It will be a bitter battle,’ the chair summarised at the end. ‘We need to catch up quickly.’

  Beijing already has some partners on board. Russia has proved to be a particularly keen student. Several creators of the Chinese censorship system have travelled to Moscow to pass on their experience. In 2016 the former head of the Cyberspace Administration, Lu Wei, and the architect of the Great Firewall, Fang Binxing, took part in the 7th International Safe Internet Forum. The forum is hosted by the Safe Internet League set up by the oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, a man with close ties to the Kremlin, the GRU (Russia’s military secret service) and the orthodox church. Not long afterwards, President Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping held a summit at which they agreed to cooperate more on the internet and cyber security. For the Russians, acquiring cutting-edge new technology is the main prize: the Chinese firm Huawei, for instance, is to help the Kremlin create data storage systems.