We Have Been Harmonised

by Kai Strittmatter

  Human Rights Watch has revealed that the Chinese telecoms company ZTE set up a telecommunications system for the government of Ethiopia, helping it to monitor activists, journalists and members of the opposition.203 Manufacturers of facial-recognition cameras and other AI technologies are increasingly exporting their wares. At the start of 2018 the company Yitu announced that Africa was the next big market, and as early as 2017 Huawei was claiming that its Smart City concept was active in more than 200 cities in 40 countries. Customers can order their Smart City with or without surveillance components – though the company’s sales presentations suggest strongly that, in the interests of security, they should buy the whole package: ‘A safe city is the foundation of a smart city.’204

  There are also plenty of willing buyers in South America. According to a glowing feature in Xinhua, the China Electronics Corporation (CEC) has set up surveillance networks for the governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.205 CEC is a state-owned company that also makes products for the Chinese army. In Ecuador, CEC has installed a camera network on its integrated ECU911 security system, along with a system of smartphone surveillance. The crime rate immediately dropped by a quarter. The president of Ecuador at the time, Rafael Correa, thanked China for generously donating some of the surveillance equipment.

  In 2018, China was once again named by Freedom House as the world’s ‘worst abuser of internet freedom’. According to the report, ‘global internet freedom declined for the eighth consecutive year in 2018’ – and this decline could be traced directly back to the international spread of ‘the Chinese model of extensive censorship and automated surveillance systems’.206 Of the 64 countries investigated, China had sold 38 its internet and telecommunications infrastructure, and it had exported surveillance technology with AI capabilities to 18. It had carried out training in the management of the internet and new information technology in 36 countries, and in Vietnam, Uganda and Tanzania, among other places, this had led directly to new legislation based on the Chinese model.

  In Zimbabwe, for example, Freedom House reports that the Chinese firm CloudWalk is creating a nationwide system of surveillance and facial recognition. As part of the deal, Zimbabwe has agreed to send the biometric data of millions of its citizens to servers in China, where CloudWalk can then train its algorithms to recognise faces with darker skin tones. ‘These trends present an existential threat to the future of the open internet and prospects for greater democracy around the globe,’ writes Freedom House. At the Party Congress in 2017, Xi Jinping presented his plan to turn China into a ‘cyber superpower’. In the same speech, he said that the Chinese model was ‘a new option for other countries and nations that want to speed up their development while preserving their independence.’

  Any technology, including artificial intelligence systems and surveillance cameras, can be used for good or ill. But its increasing sophistication and efficacy make it a temptation for rulers of all stripes – and the Chinese export drive that is just beginning comes at a time when freedom and democracy are under threat, all around the world.

  THE FUTURE

  When all Roads Lead to Beijing

  ‘If Europe was a person, I would have to charge off and fight for her now. For my heroine, who has given me 70 years of peace.’

  Klaus Maria Brandauer, actor

  ‘Carry China’s voice everywhere,’ Xi Jinping urges his country’s propaganda machine. The West’s power in the ‘global debate’ must be challenged, and the window of opportunity is wide open. The 2018 Freedom in the World report published by Freedom House sees democracy in the ‘most serious crisis for decades.’ Every year the World Values Survey conducts research to determine the proportion of citizens in individual states in favour of a strong leader ‘who does not have to bother with parliament or elections’. Between 1990 and 2014, the figure nearly doubled in some countries; in 2014, it was just over 20 per cent in Germany, and in Spain it was 40 per cent.

  All over the West, the CCP is finding willing helpers. Together with the New York billionaire and ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Chinese think-tank, the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, is putting on its own Davos. The New Economy Forum is billed as an alternative to the long-standing annual event in Switzerland. ‘Davos has been around for a long time: it is a very big conference and it is focused on lots of world problems. This conference is focused on the world and China as an emerging power and how we all work together,’ Bloomberg told the Financial Times.207 The inaugural New Economy Forum was hosted by Singapore in November 2018.

  For some time, the narrative of the munificent ‘New Silk Road’ has been doing sterling service for Xi Jinping. It would be more accurate to talk about a whole network of new Silk Roads, running in every direction, and all with one thing in common: they begin and end at the imperial palace in Beijing.

  One branch links China by rail to the DP London superport at Tilbury. Since January 2017, the ‘London-Yiwu’ train has been plying the 7,500-mile route, laden with British and Chinese goods. It’s just one limb of Xi’s vast signature project, which the propaganda department renames every so often, so that it is also known as One Belt, One Road (OBOR) or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). New roads, railways, ports, airports and pipelines are to be built; new trade corridors to connect China with central Asia and Europe – but also to turn South America and Africa towards Beijing. So far, more than 80 countries have agreed to participate.

  The plan is part economic program for Chinese industry, part global infrastructure project. First and foremost, though, it is a geo-strategic vision for a new world order determined by China. Long before the first building projects were begun, the propaganda was already working nicely. ‘China’s “One Belt, One Road” will be the new World Trade Organisation – whether you like it or not,’ said the Siemens boss Joe Kaeser at the World Economic summit in Davos, once again standing out among his fellow German captains of industry for his skill in saying exactly what the Chinese authorities want to hear. Naturally he would like his company to get a slice of the pie…

  Elsewhere in the EU, alarm bells are ringing. In spring 2018, 27 of the 28 EU ambassadors in Beijing produced a report arguing that the Belt and Road Initiative was China’s plan to shape globalisation according to its own design.208 Not that China is denying it: the People’s Daily optimistically prophesies a ‘globalisation 2.0’.209 The diplomats’ report warns, however, that the new system will be to Europe’s disadvantage: the New Silk Road threatens EU interests and standards. Even when it comes to infrastructure projects, Beijing prioritises political interests over economic considerations. The deals are negotiated exclusively through bilateral government summits – a tactic that enables China to exploit the ‘unequal distribution of power’, write the ambassadors. So far, the tendering process has been as un-transparent as one might expect, and has shown a bias towards Chinese state firms. Companies that abide by European environmental, employment and social standards are at a disadvantage. China is also demanding that states who want to participate acknowledge its ‘core interests’, among which Beijing counts its territorial claim on the South China Sea.

  It is telling that one of the 28 EU ambassadors refused to give his signature to the report. Not for the first or last time, Hungary was the country breaking ranks. For some time now, as China pursues its own interests, it has been deliberately sowing dissent among Europeans and the European Union. This is causing a growing sense of indignation in Brussels and in the national governments of the major EU states. In the last few years, China has succeeded in getting several joint declarations by the EU overturned or watered down – in particular via Greece, Hungary and the Czech Republic, who have repeatedly acted as proxies for Beijing. In 2017, for example, at a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Greece overturned an EU declaration that criticised China’s rapidly worsening human rights record. It was the first time the EU had failed to get its members to agree a joint declaration, and came just a year after the
International Court of Justice in the Hague had ruled China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea negligible.

  Hard cash (or the tantalising prospect of it) is helping to smooth China’s entry into the heart of European affairs. The ‘16-plus-1’ initiative, for example, has assembled a bloc of sixteen central and east European countries into a kind of ‘China, please invest in us’ club. The ‘16-plus-1’ countries – in China the project is known more honestly as ‘1-plus-16’ – meet once a year, when the participating states have an audience of a few minutes with China’s head of government, hoping for billions in Belt-and-Road investment. The home of the 16-plus-1 general secretariat is the foreign ministry in Beijing – it is here that the deals are drawn up for the European members to then wave through. Some countries are still waiting in frustration for Chinese money, but others have begun to receive investment. Under Chinese management – and following more than four billion dollars of investment – the Greek port of Piraeus has become the fastest-growing container port in the world. In Hungary, China is intending to build a high-speed train, and the Czech Republic has been promised more than eight billion Euros in investment by 2020.

  Miloš Zeman expressed his thanks in an interview with China’s state broadcaster CCTV, in which he bizarrely promised to put an end to the Czech Republic’s ‘subservience to the USA and the EU’. Zeman referred to Xi Jinping as his ‘young friend’, and the Belt and Road project as ‘the most remarkable initiative in modern human history’. Even so, of the 3.5 billion Euros promised to the Czech Republic by China in 2016, only 362 million were delivered. By comparison, the Czech Republic receives 5.7 billion Euros a year from Brussels, making it the second-largest net beneficiary in the EU. Nevertheless, Zeman won the presidential election again in January 2018 after a campaign in which he repeatedly mouthed off about the EU, while painting China and Russia as more suitable partners.

  Shortly after the vote in the Czech Republic, Zeman’s Chinese confidant and influencer Ye Jianmin, head of the distinctly opaque energy company CEFC, met the fate of so many Chinese company bosses: the Chinese security apparatus spirited him away due to ‘legal violations’. Prior to this, however, he had managed to buy a Czech airline, a brewery, a football club and a media company – and, most notably, created a number of well-paid posts for current and former Czech politicians and advisors to Zeman. ‘As it turns out, CEFC’s main investments in the Czech Republic weren’t economic, they were about buying up the loyalty of Czech officials,’ writes Martin Hála, a Czech sinologist and director of a project called Sinopsis, which studies China’s growing influence in the Czech Republic and neighbouring countries. Instead of innovation, says Hála, China has given Europe ‘a new take on age-old crony capitalism.’210

  Meanwhile Hungarian diplomats, as their EU colleagues report, are reading out statements on Beijing’s human rights record that sound as if they were written by China’s foreign ministry. ‘There is probably no other country that uses economic influence so directly to pressurize countries into political compliance,’ a European diplomat in Beijing told me. ‘With countries like Hungary and Greece, China is now practically sitting round the table in Brussels on these issues. There is no longer any central issue relating to China on which the EU can still agree.’

  China’s Communist Party has shown again and again that it believes it can flout the rules of the old world order if they aren’t in its interests. It has simply ignored the decision from the Hague on the South China Sea, continuing to creating new islands and enlarging existing ones into potential naval bases, as the militarisation of its waters proceeds apace. The autonomy of Hong Kong, which China guaranteed in 1997 for fifty years, in treaties with the former colonial ruler Great Britain and with Hong Kong itself, is being suffocated after just twenty years because it is inconvenient.

  The Party is feeding on the weaknesses of the West. Many Chinese people once viewed the West as a model of economic success and principles – both reputations have taken a hit in the last few years. The 2008 financial crisis was one watershed moment; Brexit, Trump’s election, and the recent successes of right-wing populists in other Western countries have been others. The Arab Spring and Ukrainian revolutions, upon which the West looked so favourably and which finally failed so spectacularly, also provided rich fodder for Chinese propaganda: ‘Countries that copy Western democracy end up with hunger, poverty, chaos and bloodshed,’ the Party press warned its readers.211

  The West’s betrayal of its own ideals has also played a part – and since long before the election of Donald Trump. The US soldiers who tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib; the prisoners in Guantánamo stripped of all rights; Edward Snowden’s revelations: all this has been music to the ears not just of conspiracy theorists but also, more importantly, of the world’s dictators. The USA was once a self-declared beacon of freedom and democracy, a vocal supporter of transparent government, checks and balances, the free flow of information. Was it now using the same police-state tactics as the regimes it always condemned? Naturally, Washington claimed it was only trying to protect its people from terrorists – but that’s what Beijing says, too. A stabbing in the Uighur province of Xinjiang? Terrorism! The Dalai Lama praying for Tibetans who have set themselves on fire? Terrorism in disguise!

  On it goes, week after week. The USA wants all visa applicants to hand over their social media passwords? Bravo, cries the state press in Beijing, and thank God the world is increasingly ‘united’ on the subject of internet management.212 Donald Trump going on about fake news again? The People’s Daily bows in gratitude – and it does so on Twitter, so that he can read it too: ‘@realDonaldTrump is right. #fakenews is the enemy. China has known this for years.’

  Cynics everywhere are rubbing their hands: isn’t this what we’ve always said? Aren’t they all the same: Washington, Beijing, London, Berlin, Moscow? Of course they aren’t – but must we make it so easy for the lazy thinkers and the autocrat-appeasers? Is it really necessary to betray the cause of freedom and human rights ourselves, a little at a time?

  Barack Obama and his government defended the surveillance practices of their secret services with the argument that they were legal. As if that very fact were not scandal enough: all the things that have become legal in our countries. Look at what US governments before Donald Trump’s have considered lawful. The imprisonment of suspects without charge and without trial. The torture of prisoners. The killing of suspects in other countries using unmanned drones. What will the USA do, and what will we do, when the first Chinese drones start killing Tibetan ‘terrorists’ in Nepal or northern India?

  It may be one of the great ironies of human nature that – imperceptibly at first – we often become more and more like our enemies. But we don’t have to capitulate. We must preserve our sense of alarm, not allow ourselves to be numbed by our daily horror at what is happening around us. We must try not to dodge the fist that punches us in the guts first thing in the morning as we read the news.

  In the end, rather than just pointing the finger at China, we need to look at ourselves. Yes, China is trying to divide Europe, but you can only divide something that is already divisible. We need to wake up: pinch ourselves, open our eyes and take a hard look in the mirror – paying special attention to the nasty bits which are disfiguring us beyond recognition. We need to be aware of the dangerous attractions of the hi-tech future, tempting us to betray ourselves and our values.

  China, with its AI and big data projects and its Social Credit System, can serve as a useful example. Developments in China are being replicated here – so far in a rudimentary way here and mostly in commercial contexts – whether in the realm of facial recognition, behaviour prediction, or online reward-and-punishment ecosystems. China can be a mirror in which we see our dark selves reflected; and the single-minded ruthlessness with which the Party is putting these new technologies to use is giving many a CEO in Silicon Valley, London or Berlin wet dreams. (For years the suggestion that we urgently need to emula
te the Chinese in one area or another, or we will fall terribly behind, has been a standard complaint from a certain type of executive for many years.)

  It’s crucial, too, that we are clear-sighted about all the ways in which the CCP is trying to influence and change us. Russia currently dominates the conversation in the USA and Europe – but the greatest challenge to liberal democracy will come not from a stagnant Russia. It will from the economic powerhouse of China.

  Of course, the West will keep talking to Beijing, and continue to do business with China, but it is our responsibility to keep our eyes open as to the true nature of this regime. Every country has a right to promote itself and to fight tooth and nail for its own interests. Why should China be shut out of the global exchange of ideas? Yet we should remember the differences. China’s leadership exploits the opportunities afforded by an open society to extend its reach, but does not act in an open and transparent way itself. Where it exerts its influence, it is in the service of an authoritarian system, whose values and practices it aims to spread beyond its own borders. It attempts to infiltrate other countries’ institutions and weaken them, where that serves its own interests. It often works covertly to undermine pluralism and freedom of opinion. And it does all these things with the conviction that it is fighting an ideological war with the West.

  Beijing relies on the weaknesses and disputes afflicting our democracies, so preoccupied with their own navel-gazing that they have almost stopped seeing what is going on around them. The betrayal of democratic values by Daimler, Apple and Springer Nature are just the beginning. Many more will follow, often so banal that they will pass unnoticed, but they will be no less poisonous for that.