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However, not all cases related to national security since July 2020 involved the National Security Law itself. Prosecutors in Hong Kong have also revived the British colonial sedition laws against those who utter or publish anti-government slogans and publications.[4] It is ironic that a British colonial tool of repression is being deployed in this context, given that pro-China voices have spoken of the need for Hong Kong to be ‘decolonised’. This irony was particularly acute in the Hong Kong Court of Appeal case of HKSAR v. Tam Tak Chi,[5] in which the Court preferred a more draconian colonial case law precedent in relation to sedition laws from the 1950s to a more liberal and recent post-colonial case law in the common law world.

The Tam judgment

Tam Tak Chi was a Hong Kong democracy activist and Christian preacher. His activism post-National Security Law led to him being charged with a range of offences, including sedition. Broadly speaking, an act, verbal utterance or publication is considered ‘seditious’ if it intends to incite ‘hatred or contempt or excite disaffection’ against either or both the PRC and Hong Kong governments, raise discontent or disaffection’ among Hong Kong people, or to incite violence.[6] The substance of this statutory provision pre-dates China’s post-1997 rule over Hong Kong: before that time, this sedition offence was directed at verbal utterances and publications against the British and/or Hong Kong governments.

The sedition-related allegations against Tam related to various street stalls he held from January to July 2020. They included him having publicly shouted slogans from Hong Kong’s 2019 protests, including ‘Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times’, ‘Stand with Hong Kong. Fight for freedom’, and slogans critical of the police, as well as handing out leaflets critical of the Communist Party of China (CPC), accusing the Hong Kong government of being a dictatorship, and calling for self-determination for Hong Kong.[7]

Tam was convicted at trial and sentenced to a total of forty months imprisonment, twenty-one months of which related to convictions for sedition. He appealed on a number of different legal grounds, all of which failed. Of these, one of them would appear to be revealing insofar as concepts of colonisation and decolonisation may be applicable to Hong Kong. The issue in question concerned whether sedition as a statutory criminal offence can be made where there is no incitement to violence. The Hong Kong Court of Appeal in Tam made clear that it considered Canadian and English case precedents which said that incitement to violence is required for the common law (i.e. unlegislated) crime of sedition but that these precedents were not applicable in this case.[8] This was because Tam was charged with statutory sedition, which, according to the court, displaced common law sedition.[9]

But that still left the Hong Kong Court of Appeal to consider two other cases, which came to different conclusions, in the context of statutory sedition, which dealt with whether there is a need to prove incitement to violence. The first was Fei Yi Ming v. The Crown, a 1952 Hong Kong case from when the city was under British rule.[10] The court in Fei held, following Wallace-Johnson v. R, another sedition case involving the then British colony of Gold Coast (now independent Ghana), where the British Privy Council held that one can be convicted of statutory sedition without needing to prove incitement to violence.[11] The Hong Kong Court of Appeal in Tam kept its description of the facts of Fei to a minimum, mentioning only that a ‘proprietor-publisher and editor respectively of a newspaper’ was convicted of seditious publication.[12]

Such a description does not remotely begin to capture the irony of the court applying Fei as a basis for convicting an anti-CPC dissident. In fact, the newspaper in Fei was Ta Kung Pao, a pro-CPC newspaper in Hong Kong. The article the publication of which was held to be seditious was a republication of a People’s Daily editorial condemning a Hong Kong government crackdown on a pro-communist riot. The editorial repeatedly characterised the Hong Kong government as ‘British Imperialists’, praised the patriotism of the pro-communist agitators and warned the British and the government in Hong Kong of ‘consequences’ for their ‘outrages’.[13]

The second case cited by the court in Tam was much more recent, having been decided in late 2023. Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago v. Vijay Maharaj concerned a statutory sedition offence in Trinidad and Tobago similar to that being considered in Tam.[14] The case related to challenges to police search warrants over sedition allegations; it was not a criminal prosecution, and Maharaj died before any charges were laid. Nonetheless, the British Privy Council (which is Trinidad and Tobago’s final appellate tribunal) gave two reasons why there should be a need to prove incitement to violence in order for a person to be convicted for sedition.

Both these reasons involved the Privy Council in Maharaj discounting the precedential value of Wallace, on which the judgment in Fei relied. First, Wallace was decided at a time when what is now Ghana was a colony that was not ‘democratic, [or] self-governing’.[15] Second, Wallace came many decades before English common law recognised a concept called the ‘principle of legality’. This concept involved presuming that words in statutes are intended to be subject to basic individual rights, unless there is express language or necessary implication overriding such rights.[16]

Ultimately, the Hong Kong Court of Appeal preferred to follow the British colonial era case of Fei over a more modern narrative, which emphasises decolonisation and human rights that was presented by Maharaj. Even though the court acknowledged that the ‘principle of legality’ is applicable in Hong Kong, it claimed that the presumption of basic rights such as free speech has been overridden by the intent of Hong Kong’s statutory sedition offence. In support of this assertion, it cited a 1970 Hong Kong Legislative Council speech by the colony’s then attorney-general, Graham Sneath. He noted that even though sedition often involved incitement to violence, this had not in itself constituted sedition before its inclusion as a separate ground for finding seditious intent.[17]

China’s desire to ‘decolonise’ Hong Kong

Whatever the legal rights or wrongs of Tam, its approach can be considered against the background of China seeking to ‘decolonise’ Hong Kong following the handover in 1997. Hong Kong has been described as being like ‘a wandering prodigal child returning to the arms of his motherland’.[18] Its people are said to be caricatured by pro-CPC perspectives as having ‘lacked the enlightenment necessary to move beyond their colonial history’.[19] And the process is considered as mandatory by influential Chinese legal scholar Jiang Shigong, who said that ‘the central government’s resumption of sovereignty meant that Hong Kong was bound to experience the pain of the process of decolonization, namely, erasing to a certain extent the residual mental traces of British exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong [emphasis added]’.[20]

What does China’s vision of ‘decolonising’ Hong Kong involve? On a superficial level, it involves calls for symbolic changes such as wanting to change street names that reference the British colonial era or even arguing that Hong Kong was never a British colony in the first place.[21] More substantively, the PRC’s vision of the ‘decolonisation’ of Hong Kong involves the fundamental reshaping of policy and institutional settings. This would include ending the close relationship between British colonial-era businesses and the Hong Kong authorities, curbing ‘poisonous’ (namely, non-CPC friendly) Hong Kong media, and patriotic education in schools to prevent younger people from supporting Hong Kong independence or any return to British rule.[22]

All these objectives have been or are being achieved. Jardine Matheson and Swire, both stalwart Hong Kong companies during the British colonial era, no longer occupy positions of influence in Hong Kong’s executive government or its legislature, and Beijing has insisted on their political obedience in the way they run their businesses.[23] Media considered unfriendly Chinese and Hong Kong authorities, such as Apple Daily and Stand News, were forced to close in 2021.[24] In 2024, the Hong Kong government announced that it will introduce patriotic education ‘to enhance national identity and appreciation of the richness and beauty of the traditional Chinese culture among the people of Hong Kong, [and] laying a good foundation for national unity and solidarity’.[25]

When it comes to the law and its legal system, China made clear its expectations in the State Council’s 2014 White Paper on Hong Kong’s ‘One Country, Two Systems’ policy.[26] The document stated that China has ‘overall jurisdiction’ over a Hong Kong that ‘got rid of colonial rule’, under which Hong Kong ‘administrators’, including judges, must meet the ‘political requirement’ of ‘loving the country’ and act in accordance with China’s ‘sovereignty, security and development interests’. As for the actual content of laws, pro-Beijing Hong Kong legislator Maggie Chan has called for the removal of colonial terminology such as ‘Her Majesty’ and ‘Secretary of State’.[27] In addition, PRC state media have framed the National Security Law as being part and parcel of the territory’s decolonisation.[28]

‘Decolonised’ ends, colonial means

The Tam case concerned the propagation of a set of slogans and messages that are considered to be unsupportive of Chinese rule over Hong Kong. To the extent that the Hong Kong Court of Appeal has upheld the criminalisation of such public utterances even where no call to violence was involved, it ticks a number of boxes as regards China’s expectations regarding Hong Kong’s ‘decolonisation’. These involve pushing back against the expression of the desire for Hong Kong independence. Hong Kong judges have previously ruled that such slogans as ‘Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times’ have separatist connotations.[29] Such rulings are seen as consistent with Hong Kong judges ‘loving the country’ and acting in China’s sovereignty and security interests. Like the use of the National Security Law itself, the ruling involved using the law to advance China’s vision of Hong Kong’s ‘decolonialisation’.

Nonetheless, it is hard to avoid finding irony in ‘decolonising’ through charging its opponents with sedition, a convenient legal tool of oppression used by British colonial government. Before the National Security Law came into force, the Hong Kong authorities had not prosecuted anyone for sedition since the 1967 riots.[30] Its revival subsequent to the National Security Law smacks of recolonialisation rather than ‘decolonisation’. This in itself already sits uncomfortably with calls for Hong Kong laws to be ‘decolonialised’ by removing colonial-era references in legislation: what is the point of less ‘colonial’ language when the law itself replicates one of the oppressive aspects of British colonial rule?

In Tam, given the chance to adopt the post-colonial narrative so strongly suggested by Maharaj, the Hong Kong Court of appeal chose instead to ‘recolonise’ by following Fei. This is the stuff of black comedy when one considers that Fei was a case in which colonialists were seeking to oppress and persecute supporters of the Communist Party of China. Colonialism in the name of ‘decolonisation’ has now come full circle.

Notes

[1] James Lee, ‘Nat. security trial for Tiananmen crackdown vigil group members to begin November at earliest’, Hong Kong Free Press, 19 February 2024, online at: https://hongkongfp.com/2024/02/19/nat-security-trial-for-tiananmen-crackdown-vigil-group-members-to-begin-november-at-earliest/

[2] Jessie Pang and Edward Cho, ‘National security trial of Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai: what’s happened so far’, Reuters, 10 April 2024, online at: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/national-security-trial-hong-kong-media-tycoon-jimmy-lai-whats-happened-so-far-2024-03-04/

[3] Brian Hong, ‘Hong Kong 47: Who are the key defendants in national security trial over Legco primary and what do they claim?’, South China Morning Post, 10 December 2023, online at: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/3244511/hong-kong-47-who-are-key-defendants-national-security-trial-over-legco-primary-and-what-do-they

[4] Eric Lai, ‘Hong Kong’s sedition law is back’, Diplomat, 3 September 2021, online at: https://thediplomat.com/2021/09/hong-kongs-sedition-law-is-back/

[5] [2024] HKCA 231 (‘Tam’).

[6] Crimes Ordinance (Hong Kong), sections 9(1) and 10(1).

[7] Tam (note 5 above), paragraphs 13 to 36.

[8] Boucher v. The King [1951] 2 DLR 369; R v. Chief Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate, Ex parte Choudhury [1990] 1 QB 429.

[9] Tam (note 5 above), paragraph 82.

[10] (1936) 36 HKLR 133 (‘Fei’).

[11] [1940] AC 231 (‘Wallace’).

[12] Tam (note 5 above), paragraph 70.

[13] Fei (note 10 above), pp. 138–9.

[14] [2023] UKPC 36 (‘Maharaj’).

[15] Ibid., paragraph 43.

[16] Ibid., paragraph 45.

[17] Tam (note 5 above), paragraph 79.

[18] Law Wing Sang, ‘Reunification discourse and Chinese nationalisms’, in Gary Chi-hung Luk (ed.), From a British to a Chinese Colony? Hong Kong Before and After the 1997 Handover, Berkeley, USA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2017, p. 236.

[19] Gina Anne Tam, ‘Colonialism and nationalism in Hong Kong: Towards true decolonization’, Historical Journal, vol. 67 (2024): 169–77, at p. 169.

[20] 強世功, 中國香港: 文化與政治的視野, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2008; English translation published as Jiang Shigong, China’s Hong Kong: A Political and Cultural Perspective, Singapore: Springer, 2017, p. 194.

[21] Karen Cheung, ‘“Decolonise” Hong Kong street names, suggests member of Beijing’s top advisory body’, Hong Kong Free Press, 5 March 2018, online at: https://hongkongfp.com/2018/03/05/decolonise-hong-kong-street-names-suggests-member-beijings-top-advisory-body/. Priscilla Leung, ‘Was Hong Kong a colony? An international law perspective’, Hong Kong Lawyer, August 2022, online at: https://www.hk-lawyer.org/content/was-hong-kong-colony-international-law-perspective

[22] Fan Lingzhi, Wang Wenwen and Chen Qingqing, ‘Hong Kong has not acted enough to detach from colonial past, experts argue’, Global Times, 4 September 2019, online at: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1163630.shtml

[23] Leo Lewis, Primrose Riordan, Alice Woodhouse, Nicolle Liu and Stefania Palma, ‘Hong Kong’s historic businesses face an uncertain future’, Financial Times, 18 February 2021, online at: https://www.ft.com/content/3ab1091c-8ebc-47a9-b57c-0264ab75e677

[24] Helen Davidson, ‘Free media in Hong Kong almost completely dismantled – report’, Guardian, 26 April 2022, online at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/26/free-media-in-hong-kong-almost-completely-dismantled-report

[25] Hong Kong Government, ‘Government establishes working group on patriotic education’, 8 April 2024, online at: https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/202404/08/P2024040800562.htm

[26] Information Office of the State Council, People’s Republic of China, ‘The practice of “One Country, Two Systems” policy in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’, June 2014, official English version online at: https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/white_paper/2014/08/23/content_281474982986578.htm

[27] ‘Lawmaker urges authorities to speed up work on decolonizing Hong Kong’s laws’, Standard, 16 November 2022, online at: https://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking-news/section/4/197208/

[28] See for example Thomas Hon Wing Polin, ‘National security law for Hong Kong: Bane to subversives, boon for citizens’, Global Times, 30 June 2020, online at: https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1193021.shtml; James Smith, ‘NSL ends colonial legacy of Hong Kong whilst preserving its greatness’, Global Times, 30 June 2022, online at: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202206/1269415.shtml; Md Enamul Hassan, ‘National Security Law paves the way for more prosperous HK’, China Daily, 3 July 2020, online at: https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202007/03/WS5efe731ea310834817256e5e.html; Lau Siu-kai, ‘“De-decolonization” achieves remarkable results but is far from complete’, China Daily, 1 September 2022, online at: https://www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/288215

[29] HKSAR v. Tong Ying Kit [2021] HKCFI 2200.

[30] Lai (note 4 above).

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The editors

Kou Aizhe: Late in 2022, ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, made a sudden yet impressive debut, sparking a wave of discussion in 2023. Suddenly, the spotlight was on the world of generative AI technologies, which use artificial intelligence to generate speech, images, videos and more. These technologies, often referred to as AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generative Content), have also gained attention across various industries alongside ChatGPT’s skyrocketing popularity.

In the first six months of 2023, a wave of new technological advancement swept into the workplace. But what changes has this wave brought to the professional landscape? And how have these changes affected individuals within the workplace? We’ve invited four people from different industries to share some of the transformations they’ve experienced at work.

Our first speaker today, ‘Big Dragon’ (Da Long), is the founder of a small company. He was proactive in introducing AIGC tools to the workplace, which has already become the norm.

AI saves us money

Hello, everyone. My name is Zhu Bolong, and people around here call me Big Dragon. I’m the founder of a tech company, and we currently have about 20 employees. Our main business centres around dance-related fitness, games and training. Back in 2016, we switched from teaching dance offline to online. In 2020, we directed our focus towards motion-sensing dance
games that could be played on home TVs.

I majored in computer science at university. Although what I learned was not related to algorithms, I’ve always been interested in the tech industry. After just a week or two experimenting with ChatGPT, my business partner and I realised the huge potential of AI drawing tools.

We worried about facing competitors who could utilise AI more effectively and potentially push us out of the market. So, starting in February 2023, we made it a requirement for all our employees to start exploring the use of these AI tools. They had to learn even if they needed to put aside their regular tasks.

My business partner’s office is a few cubicles away from mine. One day, I was in my office when suddenly I heard him yell, ‘This is amazing!’ along with the F-word. I went over to his office to find out what was happening. I couldn’t see his face at first because his dual-monitor set-up blocked my vision. But as I got closer, I saw him kneeling in front of his computer.

Still facing the screen, he said, ‘You see this? It’s way better than what I can draw.’ My business partner started his career as a cartoon artist, and he’s worked as an animation director. He takes a lot of pride in his artistic ability. But on that day, it was like AI completely ‘broke’ him. He said, ‘There’s no way I can compete with this. I might as well team up with it.’ I told him, ‘All right. In the coming months, you can put most of your focus into exploring it and making it even better.’

Over the next month and a half, my business partner spent roughly 6 to 8 hours every day studying these AI drawing tools, often staying at the company until around 10 or 11 in the evening. They excited him immensely. Sometimes, I would also be in the office in the evening, and I’d hear him eating while the computer was busy creating pictures. He would often exclaim with surprise mid-mouthful.

Even before he familiarised himself with the use of prompts, plug-ins and so on, he achieved an impressive 50 percent or so increase in work efficiency. Now, several months on, we can almost generate what we want instantly, which is truly astonishing.

Initially, our colleagues from the technical team were quite dismissive of ChatGPT. When they heard that ChatGPT could assist with coding, they felt there were plenty of open-source codes online and that the code of ChatGPT didn’t necessarily adhere to coding standards better than theirs. However, once they mastered it, they realised that it could replace at least 30 percent of their workload, which is quite significant.

Our colleagues in the operations department initially attempted to use ChatGPT for writing, including articles for WeChat pages and video scripts. Similar to the initial experiences of our technical colleagues, when they didn’t know how to communicate effectively with ChatGPT, the generated content turned out overly artificial and formulaic. It lacked depth and substance.

I then showed them how to use AI to write about China’s 5,000 years of dance history with a summary of several important periods. I first used their method to ask AI to write on the topic and showed them the copy. Then I said: ‘This is your way of thinking. Let’s try it my way.’ I gave ChatGPT the prompt ‘Imagine you’re a stand-up comedian. Please summarise China’s dance history in a stand-up comedy style’, then it generated something quite different. My colleagues immediately understood that you can get ChatGPT to role-play, to write in a certain style and to word-count, paragraph and other requirements. This experience transformed their understanding of AI. It actually functions like a real human assistant. Once my colleagues learnt to communicate with it in the same way we communicate with humans, they were able to quickly put AI into effective use.

After that, my business partner and I have put ourselves in the position of the company’s managers and applied AI tools to our daily work to see what problems it can solve and how much efficiency it brings. Then we had to take action.

There was someone in our company who was responsible for design-related work. This does require a certain degree of originality, but his main job was to make poster images, characters and background effects. In February 2023, we discovered that AI could do this very well, and, unlike when using creativity tools such as Chuangkit, we don’t need to consider copyright issues with AI. When a colleague in the operations department discovered that he could complete this part of the design work through AI without designers, I contacted him directly to confirm whether he could complete the work by himself. After getting a definite answer, I went to the designer.

I called him to the stairwell to have a chat. At first, he thought I wanted to talk about something related to his current work. I said: ‘No. You know we are using AI now, and your position is consumption-oriented, not a revenue-generating one. What we need are employees who can bring in web traffic or profits to the company.’ Considering the optimisation of the personnel structure, I said to him, ‘I’m sorry. Your current position is no longer required. You can either transfer to another position or you can leave.’

He said that he needed some time to think. A day later, he came to me and said that he wanted to try a position in operations. But after another day, he said he’d decided to give up. He said, ‘I feel like even if I put in a lot of time on this new job, I still may not make much progress. I’d rather leave.’ The whole thing was brutal, and it was the first time I made a lay-off decision so quickly. Nonetheless, I still believe I made the right call because it was AI that replaced him.

Later, I heard from someone in the operations team that the sacked colleague was hit hard by the experience. He couldn’t find a new job for several months and stayed in his apartment every day. He was aware that he had been replaced by AI. Moreover, the apartment he rented was in the same building as our company, only a few floors above us, and he had just paid the rent. I felt really sorry, but there was nothing that I could do. We didn’t save a lot of money from his salary, but it was enough for a subscription fee to Midjourney [a generative artificial intelligence program], so now everyone else in our company can use it freely.

Later, we realised that we still needed a full-time UI designer to monitor the computer. It does seem cruel that we hired someone exclusively for the purpose of assisting the computer.

Only one week after the job was posted, we received close to 150 résumés, which was pretty scary. Our colleague responsible for recruitment interviewed approximately 20 to 30 of them. Almost all were high performers, but they lowered their salary expectations themselves. AI gives us advantages in recruiting people and negotiating salaries.

During the interviews, we told them that there was the possibility that their positions would be replaced by AI. Our current focus is on recruiting individuals who aren’t at the A level but are at the D level with the potential, with AI’s assistance, to do A-level work. In this way, our costs can be greatly reduced.

One of the candidates lowered his monthly salary requirement from RMB 12,000 to 8,000. He had previously worked in Beijing, where he could earn about RMB 15,000. Returning to Chengdu, he was hoping for RMB 12,000. I asked. ‘What is your salary expectation now?’ He replied, ‘RMB 8,000.’

Our colleagues’ PCs always have ChatGPT open, as they have become accustomed to using it as a search engine. Colleagues in the animation department always have Stable Diffusion or Midjourney open. As everyone’s productivity rises, it frees up a lot of time for breaks and even a little loafing on the job.

The first area we’re looking forward to is AI-generated animated videos, although the quality isn’t yet up to commercial standards. We think that will take three to six months.

Second, for dance-related products, we normally have to pay for the use of copyrighted music, a relatively big investment. There is a lot of music for which we cannot track down the copyright holders, and we have faced lawsuits in the past. But we expect that within the next three months AI will be able to produce any style of music we want. We do respect copyright, but when the creators charge an astronomical price for use of their work, say RMB 200,000, there’s no way we can use it. But AI can replicate their style, and it’s actually the musical style we’re after. So we hold great expectations for the ability of AI-generated music to subvert the music copyrights market.

My client is not at fault, and neither am I

Kou Aizhe: Our second speaker, A Li, works in the music industry. The law of demand and supply means that when companies like Big Dragon’s turn to AI-generated music, someone like A Li will begin losing customers.

My name is A Li. I’m 29 years old and live in Xi’an. I’ve been working in the music industry for six or seven years, doing things like soundtrack creation and song customisation.

I have a coding background and have always enjoyed learning new technologies. After I returned to work when the COVID-19 pandemic [restrictions] ceased at the end of 2022, I noticed a surge in AI-related content on the Internet. At the time, I was most interested in the emergence of AI ‘singers’: AI that could be trained to mimic perfectly a recorded human voice.

I joined a chat group on the subject. The shared document in the chat group was so long, even for someone like me with some coding experience, that it was tough to follow. I had to refresh my knowledge of coding, but after a week or so, I got the program running. I tried inputting my own voice first. I’ve done a lot of recording jobs in studios, so I uploaded the materials to the cloud processor for 20 hours of memory training. I kept the computer running overnight.

The next morning, I downloaded the generated voice. Both my partner and I were in shock because it sounded exactly like mine. My mind was racing, and the next thing I knew, I was sending it to my mother, who heard it and said, ‘You still sing so badly!’ It chilled me that my own mother couldn’t differentiate my voice from AI.

It was thrilling and terrifying at the same time. It occurred to me that AI singing is so developed that there must be AI-generated content and product in all fields related to music.

I’m self-employed. Normally, I get commissions from clients, and there’s a collaborative process. This part of the business has not been lost. The area where I have experienced a greater loss of business is in the customisation of songs and soundtracks. I used to get a dozen or so orders a month, but now I get none. After asking around, I discovered that [AI] is so cheap that human labour simply cannot compete. What would have cost thousands of yuan in the past now cost only hundreds or less. This is a very natural market selection process.

When I first began experimenting with AI for work, I couldn’t use it effectively. After a client heard a demo I sent, he asked, ‘Who wrote this song? It sounds like it’s by someone who has little experience arranging music.’

After a week of using AI, I sent the client a new demo, and he said, ‘That’s pretty good. Can you sell it to me?’ The transformation was interesting and scary. He couldn’t tell the difference between human and AI any more. When I told him that the demo was made by AI, he was so shocked that his pupils dilatated. ‘This is AI?!’ he asked. I told him it took only 30 seconds to
produce, and he fell silent. He was struggling to process this shocking piece of information.

What the market pursues is efficiency. Although what we produce [as humans] may be better, it is inefficient. If our clients can’t tell if a song is written by a human or not, it just proves that AI-generated content has reached commercial standards.

After showing the demo to the client, he stopped contacting me. When I asked him why, he was honest and said that he had found someone else who was willing to use AI to generate content. After all, he wants to receive products in the fastest and most efficient way. What I aim for is higher-quality content, so it’s all right for him to stop cooperating with me.

The impact of AI is comparable to the Industrial Revolution. Textile workers stormed the factories and smashed the steam engine, but progress cannot be reversed. If you can really get the unit price down through AI, it’s not necessarily a bad thing for the individual consumer. While it’s painful for us in the music industry, and our profits will go down, it’s actually a boost for the consumer to be able to get the product they are looking for at a lower price.

In the past, if the client didn’t like our demo, we had to start from scratch and rewrite everything. Now if we use AI to make a demo, and the client thinks the style and content is OK, I only have to customise it further based on the client’s demand. This reduces communication costs and improves productivity.

This situation will force us to step up our game. If we don’t raise the quality of our work and create something artistic and original, we’ll definitely be replaced in the future.

My boss asked us, ‘You’re using AI. How come you’re still slow?’

Kou Aizhe: Our third speaker, Xiao A, is a rookie with only a year of work experience.

Hi, my name is Xiao A, and I’m 24 years old. I work as a game concept designer in Xiamen. I design characters, patterns and special effects for online games. The company I work for specialises in art and design, with more than fifty employees in the design team.

I have been fond of drawing since I was a kid, and considered becoming an art student. However, I came from a less developed region, and there’s a preconception that only students who fail academically studied art. I ended up studying engineering. I didn’t enjoy the courses at university. After graduation, I learned about game concept design and enrolled in several training courses. About two years after graduation, I started to work in the industry.

I joined the company last March, just over a year ago. Early this year, I began hearing about AI-generated paintings, and thought ‘Here we go again’. Starting from March, I began seeing a lot of AI-generated paintings on the Internet. At that time, it was less developed-people drawn with a dozen or so fingers. But it learned really fast and corrected mistakes, so that after a
short while most people couldn’t tell which paintings were generated by AI.

Back then I was involved in a project. The demand for illustrations suddenly surged. All my other colleagues were busy, so the company hired another person. He was given a draft sketch that had already been approved by the client, and was asked to refine it into a full version. The new colleague asked me, ‘How long would it take for me to finish refining the drawing?’ I said, ‘A week or so.’ He sent me an emoji meaning ‘Wow’, and I wondered what he meant. Did he think a week was too short for the task?

The new colleague used AI. I was right next to him. After he finished, he showed me the drawing and asked, ‘Is this OK?’ I didn’t want to be overly critical, so I just pointed out a few problems and told him, ‘Change this and that, and then send it to the manager.’

The manager told him frankly that the quality of the drawing was bad. It was not a particularly difficult task. Since the clothing in the picture was single-layered, at the beginning it worked quite smoothly with AI. However, some of the finer accessories tended to trip up AI. After the colleague had his work rejected, he asked me, ‘What should I do now?’

I said, ‘Didn’t I send you a bunch of guidelines and reference drawings? Why don’t you revise it according to those?

‘Do you mean I need to draw it by hand?’ he asked. He was in disbelief. ‘What about AI? Can AI help me?’ I was speechless.

We use an AI image generator called Stable Diffusion, and I’ve been learning how to communicate with it. But I never get what I want. I think the quality is still pretty poor. There is also a very serious issue: characters drawn by AI don’t seem to have genuine human emotions. Their facial expressions are so dull, and there is always some inexplicable blush on their faces, probably because people have been inputting a lot of images of this kind.

Most gamers now are quite averse to seeing traces of AI in the games they play, so after using AI to generate the illustrations, we have to erase the traces of AI manually. It’s like putting the cart before the horse. People say AI is here to assist humans, but in fact I feel like it’s quite the opposite. It is humans who now have to wipe AI’s arse.

I think our boss’s judgement has already been clouded by AI. He thinks that what it does is good and what humans draw is bad. It is fine for him to criticise young team members like me, but he even criticises our team leader. Our team leader is a relatively senior artist who’s been in the industry for almost eight years. Sometimes when the team leader is editing AI’s work, the boss comes up and says, ‘I think the AI’s drawing looks better’ Our team leader must be furious, but he doesn’t dare to say anything. When the boss isn’t busy, he just sits in the office and uses AI. Because of this, he thinks he can draw too and that he can teach others how to draw.

Editing is a huge workload for us. AI has not reduced our workload by much. Yet our boss has laid off a few people. As a result, my colleagues and I had to work overtime until 10.30pm for more than 20 consecutive days! The overtime work made everyone very depressed, and we all felt like we were on the verge of collapsing. Our team leader was also working overtime, and he said to us, ‘If you want to quit, make sure you have another job lined up. The job market is really bad.’

I have a couple of colleagues who left their previous jobs, and their job-searching journeys haven’t been smooth. They are all much better at game illustrations than I am. If you search the hashtag #failedinterview on social media, you will see many talented artists and designers struggling to find employment. Browsing these posts has been making me increasingly depressed; for a while, I was staying up until two or three in the morning scrolling. Honestly, I have no idea what my future holds. What if I quit my job and can’t find another one and am forced to change careers? Truth is, I don’t have the courage to resign because of this economic environment. I hope that my company fires me because at least I could get some compensation.

Anyway, I have never stopped drawing all these years. After work, before AI and now, I draw for myself. I still hope that my drawing skills can improve.

We want to be ‘preachers’ of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC)

Kou Aizhe: Initially, the introduction of AI tools was meant to improve efficiency, but who actually benefits from this high efficiency? There is another group of individuals who have profited from the enormous technological transformations. The fourth speaker, Hu Bo, is one of them.

Hi, everyone. My name’s Hu Bo. I am a lead instructor of the AIGC program at Qieman Education. Our team is based in Beijing and consists of five members.

We discovered AIGC at the end of last year. Some AI drawing tools within the industry suddenly made headlines, and we believed at the time that this would affect the entire design industry in the future.

We already were doing online training, specialising in training graphic designers. So, initially, we integrated new materials, whether it’s how to use Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, as module supplements within our existing employment courses. It was only later that we separated them into a short course.

We stayed up for two nights and came up with the materials for the foundational course on AIGC: writing lesson plans, filming, recording and editing, all in two days. We needed to rush it because if we waited until everyone started doing this, we would have missed the boat.

At the beginning, the foundational course was relatively cheap, around RMB 300. We usually do live Q&A sessions with students on Douyin, and explain the contents of our courses on live stream. During one live session, we casually mentioned the pre-sale of this stand-alone foundational course, and in only about an hour and a half, nearly 80 people signed up for it.

Kou Aizhe: In the following month, Hu Bo gradually expanded and improved the course content, initially consisting of eight sessions focusing on the AI drawing software Midjourney. Eventually, this course was priced at RMB 1,099 and comprised more than 20 video lessons, a collection of software operation manuals and related materials, as well as guides on how to monetise contents on social media platforms like Xiaohongshu and Douyin.

Over the past few months, this new AIGC business line has generated several million yuan in additional revenue for his training institution.

Many companies have swiftly added proficiency in AIGC tools as a requirement in their job postings. But where do the eligible candidates come from? When universities are not responsive enough to provide new graduates with necessary skill training, after-school training institutions like Hu Bo’s seize the newly emerged opportunity and bridge the gap.

Many universities have invited him to give lectures on AIGC to students who are about to graduate.

For those big tech companies, the first requirement in their job descriptions is that candidates should be able to use Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. This means that AI operation skills have become a must. For example, a former student of mine worked for the ride-sharing app Didi. He told me that Didi is no longer hiring traditional designers; they only hire AIGC designers who can train AI using keyword descriptions. These positions are completely new. I’m not afraid of sharing what we teach: we study the job descriptions of companies and teach whatever the employer needs. To gain employment, students only need to complete their study accordingly.

Universities are forcing their students to learn about these new developments because they want their students to gain employment. This is brand-new and highly sought after. The students may have heard of things like ChatGPT or Midjourney yet have no idea of what they are.

My job is to get my students interested in AIGC. To achieve this I’ll have to keep up with industry developments. For instance, at Osaka University in Japan, researchers have successfully combined Stable Diffusion with MRIs in the hospitals to create a ‘human eye camera’; that is, AI can directly re-create what people see by reading their brain scans. The tremendous potential of AI is very intriguing for my students. This is also a topic for them to discuss in job interviews to give the interviewer the impression that they have a deep understanding of the industry. We pay attention to what is being researched in companies and universities, then we pass on the information to our students. Companies also see our students as ‘geeks’ who won’t need to be retrained after recruitment.

Kou Aizhe: According to Hu Bo, the employment rate of their students this year has increased by 30 percent compared to previous years thanks to the new AIGC content. He is so busy he now has time to research new developments in the industry only when travelling on trains and planes.

***

Translated by Master of Translation students Yuan Cai, Zhirui Chen, Yurun Dai, Yifan Li, Wenjing Liu, Jiaqi Tan, and Ke Wu at the University of Melbourne, under the guidance of Mr Yahia Ma. This translation has been edited by Annie Luman Ren and Linda Jaivin for clarity and length.

The post How AI Changed the Way We Work appeared first on The China Story.

You could say that [the dragon] is the symbol of our nation. But has anyone ever considered why the Chinese adore this terrifying monster?

As the only mythical creature among the twelve Chinese zodiac signs, the dragon occupies a unique position in the Chinese imagination. To this day, scholars cannot agree on whether the dragon was based on any real-life creature. Both pictographic evidence and archaeological discoveries seem to suggest that if the dragon was inspired by any real-life animal, it would have been either snakes or alligators. Though the Yangtze alligator is extremely endangered now (300 in the wild as of 2017), they once populated a region extending far beyond the lower Yangtze area, after which they’re named, to parts of present-day north and central China.[1]

In ancient writings found on tortoise shells or cattle scapula, known as oracle bone inscriptions, the dragon sometimes resembles a python, with a powerful jaw and sharp fangs (see figure 1). At other times, it has the look of an alligator with a long snout, muscular tail, and webbed feet (see figure 2).

In an ancient burial site in Erlitou, Henan province, dating back to 1900-1500 BC, archaeologists have unearthed a magnificent dragon-like artefact over 70 cm long and made up of 2,000-odd pieces of turquoise, coiled up like a python between the shoulder and the hipbone of a male body, who was believed to have been a nobleman (see figure 3).

Erlitou, located on the central plains of the Yellow River, was a large Bronze Age settlement covering approximately 300 hectares. At its peak, it was home to an estimated 18,000-30,000 people.[2] Remains of clustered tombs, pottery workshops, paved roads and what some archaeologists take to be palatial compounds, have led to the hypothesis that this site might have been a later capital of the legendary Xia dynasty. According to the government funded Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project, which was launched in 1996 and mobilised over 200 scholars for five years, the Xia (2070-1600 BCE) was conquered by the Shang dynasty (1600-1046 BCE), which in turn gave way to the Zhou dynasty (1046-771 BCE). For Du Jinpeng 杜金鹏, a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology in Beijing, the discovery at Erlitou was evidence that the dragon was a ‘symbol of royal rights and social status’, a cultural association that endured for several thousand years thereafter. However, this remains a controversial point. In an interview with Science in 2009, Xu Hong 许宏, who directed excavations at Erlitou for a decade, said that research has been overshadowed for too long by such preoccupations with the dynastic tradition. Xu further criticised the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project as ‘a kind of political propaganda’.

In an even older burial site in Xishuipo, also in Henan, that dates back to 4000-3000 BC, archaeologists found the body of tall adult male, thought to have a tribal chief or shaman, flanked by two elaborately formed shell mosaics (see figure 4). The one to his right depicted a tiger and the one on his left showed a dragon-like figure, which some scholars saw as having the sharp claws and long tail of an alligator.[3] This discovery generated great excitement for not just being one of the oldest representations of the ‘dragon’. The relative positions of the two mosaic animals were also taken by some scholars to be Neolithic origins of ancient Chinese cosmological symbols recorded only some 3,000 years later — with the Azure Dragon 青龍 representing the east and comprising stars from Virgo through Scorpius and the White Tiger 白虎 representing the west, and corresponding to Aries, Taurus and parts of Orion (see figure 5).[4]

Though we may never be certain of the animal inspiration behind the creation of the dragon, or whether it was indeed modelled on any real-life creature, one thing we know is that from as early as the Shang dynasty, the creature known as long 龍 — a term first translated into English as ‘dragon’ in the thirteenth century — had become associated with water and rainfall. Even today, we still find remnants of this belief. A faucet is called ‘the dragon’s head’ 龍頭 in Chinese and the dragon dance 舞龍, performed at Lunar New Year celebrations across the world, find its origin in ancient shamanistic rain dances.

In the Classic of Mountains and Seas 山海經, a ‘geographic survey and folkloric compendium’[5] dating back to the third-century BC, we find the following account of sympathetic magic:

The Yinglong 應龍 [often translated as the ‘Winged’ or ‘Responding’ Dragon] dwells in the Southern extremity. After he killed the gods Chiyou 蚩尤 and Father Kua 夸父, he could not return to the heavens. That is why down on earth there are so many droughts. When there is a drought, people make an image of Yinglong to obtain rain.[6]

We have no way of knowing what this Yinglong originally looked like. In an influential article on the religion and magic of the Shang dynasty, Chen Mengjia 陳夢家 (1911-1966), a poet, archaeologist, and foremost authority on oracle bones and bronze inscriptions, inferred that long was simply a ‘divine title’ 神號 for aquatic creatures used in Shang dynasty rainmaking rituals. According to Chen, the ‘Winged-Dragon’ was an elevated name for loaches and the ‘Hook-Dragon’ Goulong 勾龍, another mythical creature in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, referred to toads.[7]

Despite such humble origins, by the first century, the long had already assumed the form we now associate with the Chinese dragon. Wang Fu 王符 (circa. 85-163 AD), a scholar from the Han dynasty, described the dragon as having:

A camel’s head, a stag’s horns, a hare’s eyes, an ox’s ears, a snake’s neck, a clam’s belly, a carp’s scales, an eagle’s claws, and a tiger’s soles… When rain is to be expected, the dragons scream and their voices are like the sound made by striking copper basins…their breath becomes clouds which in turn conceal them…[8]

It was no coincidence that at around the same time, the dragon, the divine maker of rain, had come to symbolise the Son of Heaven 天子, or emperor. (Like the dragon, the sovereign is almost always male.) The Records of the Grand Historian Sima Qian 史記 (circa. 91 BC) referred to China’s first emperor, founder of the Qin dynasty, as the ‘ancestral dragon’ 祖龍. In a famous allegorical essay, the Tang dynasty statesman and exponent of Confucian rectitude Han Yu 韓愈 (768-824), lamented his unrecognised talents by comparing the emperor to the magnificent dragon, who nonetheless, relies on the clouds i.e. diligent officials like Han Yu himself, to exercise his supreme powers:

By roaring out his breath, the dragon forms the clouds. These clouds possess less spiritual power than the dragon. But it is by mounting these manifestations of breath that the dragon journeys to all corners of the empyrean. He presses close to the sun and the moon and obscures their radiance. He gives rise to thunder and lightning and brings about transformations of nature such that water pours down into the earth, submerging the hills and the valleys. How numinous are clouds![9]

By late imperial China, the dragon had become the most recognisable symbol of imperial power. The emperor alone wore the ‘dragon robes’, ruled from his ‘dragon throne’, and slept in his ‘dragon bed’. As a sign of imperial favour, ministers might be presented with the ‘python robe’ 蟒袍 with dragons pictured on them — but those dragons only had four-claws as opposed to the five-clawed dragon reserved exclusively for the emperor. Inside the Forbidden City, dragon motifs can be found on windows and doors, pillars and roofs, screens and walls. Even the drainage system consists of thousands of marble dragon heads that spout water from their mouths on rainy days. One incomplete count found some 14,986 dragons adorning the Hall of Supreme Harmony 太和殿, where emperors of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties hosted their enthronement and wedding ceremonies.

After the fall of China’s last imperial dynasty in 1911, the dragon did not simply fade into history. Instead, it was incorporated into the design of the national emblem of the new Republic of China (see figure 6). This marked the beginning of the dragon’s transformation from an imperial symbol to a national — and ethnonationalist — emblem. In the ensuing decades, patriotic Chinese intellectuals, fearing that their new-found nation may be on the brink of destruction at the hands of imperialist powers, turned to the dragon in their search for a unifying national, cultural, and one may also add, masculine identity.

In 1942, five years into the war of resistance against Japanese occupation, Wen Yiduo 闻一多 (1899-1946), a poet and authority on the collection of shamanistic poetry Songs of the South (Chu ci 楚辭), published his influential study on the evolution of the Chinese dragon totem:

The dragon was simply the name of a kind of snake. It used to be the totem of one tribe. When this snake tribe conquered other tribes, it assimilated their totems, thus the snake came to have a horse’s head, a stag’s horns etc. and became what we know as the dragon today… For thousands of years, we have called ourselves the Huaxia; this Huaxia culture is the culture of the dragon tribe. In the past, emperors have described themselves as the embodiment of the dragon and the dragon was therefore the symbol of the state… Now that democracy has replaced the monarchy, the dragon has come to symbolise every citizen of the Chinese nation.

Despite obvious logical flaws in Wen Yiduo’s argument, and lack of proof for his dragon totem theory, the feeling of ethno-nationalistic pride he invested in the dragon at the time of a national crisis galvanised a generation of young readers. In the words of Shi Aidong 施愛東, a renowned scholar on Chinese folklore, ‘In the short span of 150 characters, Wen laid out the four transitions of the dragon, from “tribal totem” to “imperial symbol” to “national emblem” and to “every Chinese citizen”. One cannot help but marvel at the immense power of his poetic language.’

Yet, just two years later, Wen Yiduo launched a surprise attack on the dragon, demoting it to ‘an extremely devious snake’. This change of attitude was prompted by the publication of China’s Destiny 中國之命運 by Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石, president of the Republic and leader of China’s Nationalist Party (KMT). This book, most likely authored by Chiang’s party theorist, T’ao Hsi-sheng 陶希聖, lamented the erosive effects of Western ideologies, particularly communism and liberalism, on the spirit and mind of China’s citizens, especially the youth, and called for moral regeneration through embracing traditional Confucian ethics.[10] For Wen Yiduo, an intellectual heavily influenced by the May Fourth Movement that denounced Confucianism and advocated for democracy and individual liberty, the book was an assault on the achievements of May Fourth. Concerned that the dragon could never be freed from despot traditions of China’s past, Wen sought to bring down this national totem he had so passionately helped to raise up.

On the morning of 15 July 1946, in the midst of a civil war between Chiang’s Nationalist Party and Mao’s Communist Party, Wen Yiduo delivered a fiery speech criticising the Nationalist Party’s reign of terror at the funeral of his friend Li Gongpu 李公朴, who had been assassinated by KMT secret agents three days earlier. That same afternoon, Wen himself became the victim of a KMT assassination. He was 48 years old.

Wen’s conflicted attitude towards the dragon foreshadowed some of the battles and debates that would play out in the latter half of the twentieth century. During the Cultural Revolution, the dragon was seen as a remnant of country’s feudal past and Red Guards attacked buildings and artefacts carrying dragon motifs; among the monuments they destroyed was a well-preserved Ming dynasty ‘Nine Dragon Wall’ in Anyang, Henan. With Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms, the rise of the dragon became synonymous with the rise of China in both domestic and international headlines. The ‘Heirs of the Dragon’ 龍的傳人, a popular song written by Hou Dejian 侯德健, then a university student in Taiwan, became the soundtrack of the 1980s, sung by those of Chinese descent around the world with a proud feeling that all belonged to the same ‘dragon tribe’.

As Linda Jaivin wrote at length in The Monkey and the Dragon, Hou Dejian, self-confessed ‘third-rate uni student, womaniser and bullshit artist’ had very different intentions when he originally wrote the song in 1979 after the US government severed diplomatic ties with Taipei to establish them with Beijing.[11] Likewise, Geremie Barmé has noted how Hou’s lyrics ‘describe a sense that many people have had of growing up…constricted by this snake-like totem and oppressed by its mighty claws’. Indeed, on Tiananmen Square in 1989, Hou would lead pro-democracy protesters to sing this song as a lament for the state of China and its inability to break away from autocratic traditions of its past.

Hou was not alone in his fight. Su Xiaokang 蘇曉康, one of the chief writers of River Elegy, described the 1980s as an era of ‘slaying the dragon’ 屠龍年代. For Su Xiaokang and his generation of intellectuals who grew up under Mao’s dictatorship, the dragon they were attacking was none other than Mao, who died in 1976, a year of the dragon. They believed that if the leadership under Deng would not thoroughly repudiate Mao’s legacy, there could be no real political reform, let alone democracy. Their fears proved right. Following the June 1989 crackdown on the pro-democracy movement, River Elegy was banned and blamed for helping to instigate the movement in the first place. Its creators, including Su Xiaokang, were either hunted down and detained, or forced into exile.

The ancient Chinese believed that in winter, the dragon sleeps curled up at the bottom of the sea. At the beginning of spring, it soars into the sky amidst whirling clouds and brings rainfall. The dragon’s cycles of ascent and descent find resonance in modern intellectuals’ affirmation and rejection as they attempt to create a better China. As we welcome the year of the dragon in 2024, we can expect that the dragon will be officially extoled — narcissistically and chauvinistically — as the unifying symbol of the Chinese state where all those of Chinese descent worldwide as well as all ethnic minorities within China fall under the same common identity of the ‘dragon tribe’. But already, Chinese netizens have begun picking apart this year’s theme for the annual Spring Gala: ‘Dragons take flight and the nation prospers’ 龙行龘龘, 欣欣家国. The character meaning ‘dragon taking flight’, da 龘, features a stack of three dragons 龍. Some thought it was a coded message about the need for everyone to have three children, i.e. little heirs of the dragon, while others saw a China where one dragon stands atop the others.

Notes

[1] John Thorbjarnarson and Xiaoming Wang, The Chinese Alligator: Ecology, Behavior, Conservation, and Culture, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, pp.25-30.

[2] Li Liu, ‘Urbanization in China: Erlitou and its hinterland’, in Glenn R. Storey ed., Urbanism in the Preindustrial World, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006, p.183.

[3] Thorbjarnarson and Wang, The Chinese Alligator, p.64.

[4] David W. Pankenier, Astrology and Cosmology in Early China: Conforming Earth to Heaven, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p.337.

[5] Richard E. Strassberg, A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways through Mountains and Seas, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, p.3

[6] Translation modified based on Strassberg, A Chinese Bestiary, p.210

[7] In The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion, James George Frazer also noted the widespread connection across different cultures between frogs or toads and rainfall.

[8] Translation modified based on Marinus Willem de Visser, The Dragon in China and Japan, Amsterdam: Muller, 1913, pp. 66;70.

[9] Translation slightly modified based on Michael Loewe, ‘The Cult of the Dragon and the Invocation for Rain’ in Charles Le Blanc and Susan Blader eds., Chinese Ideas about Nature and Society: Studies in Honour of Derk Bodde, Hong Kong University Press, 1987, p.196.

[10] As Geremie Barmé observed in his introduction to The China Story Yearbook 2014: ‘the countervailing elements of Confucianism that supported dissent, criticism of excessive power and humanity are quietly passed over’. Online at: https://www.thechinastory.org/yearbooks/yearbook-2014/

[11] Linda Jaivin, The Monkey and the Dragon, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2001, p.54.

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To achieve the first centennial goal the Party needed to address rural poverty since the highest concentrations of poverty were in the countryside. In 2013 Xi Jinping launched the ‘targeted poverty alleviation programme’ 精准扶贫 which shifted poverty targeting from regions to households.[1] Once target households were identified, each was allocated a government official who was tasked with lifting household members above the absolute poverty line of RMB 4000 (US$620) per person per year. Their careers depended upon it. Assigned Party members would try to help people find jobs, sell their produce, and sometimes simply gave people money. The Party also directed government agencies to invest in rural infrastructure and provide grants to rural areas where there were large numbers of poor households. Local government leaders who failed to eliminate poverty in their jurisdictions would not be eligible for promotion.

In 2021 Xi declared ‘complete victory’ in the struggle against extreme poverty, announcing that 99 million people had been raised above China’s official poverty line as a result of the targeted poverty campaign. The announcement enabled Xi to claim that his first centennial goal had been met, even though the livelihoods of many hundreds of millions of farmers remained very modest. China’s official poverty line of 4,000 yuan ($620) a year is equivalent to $1.69 a day, which is less than the World Bank’s threshold of $2.15 a day, and far below the World’s Bank recommended national poverty threshold for upper middle-income countries such as China, which currently stands at $6.85. If applying this threshold, barely half of China’s population would sit above it, as former Chinese Premier Li Keqiang observed at a 2020 press conference.

Following the 2021 declaration of victory, Xi Jinping set his sights on a new campaign — ‘rural revitalization’ 乡村振兴 — to consolidate the gains of the targeted poverty campaign and transform China into an agricultural superpower. Investment in rural revitalisation programs is intended to increase farmers’ still relatively low incomes, which will be essential if the Party is to achieve Xi’s second centennial goal. As Document No.1 (2023) noted, ‘the most arduous and heavy task of building a modern socialist country in all respects still lies in the countryside.’

Since its launch in 2021, the significance of rural revitalisation for China’s national development strategy has become increasingly apparent. Rural revitalisation matters for ‘dual circulation’ — China’s plan for future growth to be driven as much by consumer demand as by exports. It matters for employment – new rural enterprises are being touted as job-generators for new graduates. It also matters for ‘common prosperity’ — the need to address the still wide gap between rural and urban incomes. And in the wake of US-China tensions and heightened concerns in Beijing about China’s high dependence on food imports, rural revitalisation matters for food security. The program also intersects with the Xi Jinping administration’s economic policy slogans ‘green development’, ‘ecological civilization’ and ‘beautiful China’. Rural revitalisation envisions beautiful and sustainable villages where people will want to live and visit.

Xi’s second centennial goal includes a vision of China as an ‘agricultural superpower’ 农业强国. Party documents emphasise the need to modernise farming practices and develop new agricultural technologies. Document No. 1 (2023) outlined nine tasks for China’s ‘rural revitalisation’, including the stabilisation of grain supply, increased domestic production of key agricultural products such as soybeans, and the expanded use of modern agricultural technologies. Investments in rural infrastructure will continue under the program, but most government subsidies will be directed toward new local industries.

The Party’s plan for achieving its ambitious rural revitalization agenda is to put itself in charge. Document No. 1 (2023) emphasises the important role of the Party in rural governance, calling for full implementation of policies empowering the village Party branch to lead the village (in place of the elected village committee). Village Party secretaries are now required to take over the formerly separate position of village leader under a Party policy known as ‘two burdens on one shoulder pole’ 两副担子一肩挑. This policy requires township officials to orchestrate village elections to ensure that the village Party branch secretary wins. Because the village Party secretary frequently now stands unopposed in such elections, only minor positions, such as deputy village head or village accountant, are contested.[2]

The Party has also used a law-and-order campaign to chase ‘undesirable’ candidates out of consideration for village leadership. The campaign to ‘Sweep Away Black and Eliminate Evil’ 扫黑除恶 ran from 2018 to 2020 and has now been streamlined into local government and police work. In rural areas the campaign targeted ‘village tyrants’ 村霸 who had built their own independent kingdoms and amassed power outside of the ‘state governance system’. Villagers who had been ‘dealt with’ as part of the campaign typically became ineligible to run for village office.

During the week of 24-28 April 2023, the CPC’s Central Party School organised its first nation-wide training program for China’s village leaders. Offered via video link, and run through 3,568 classrooms across the country the training covered five main topics: ‘developing and strengthening the village-level collective economy’, ‘Party-building leading rural governance’, ‘doing in-depth and detailed mass work’, ‘strengthening village party organisation into a solid fortress’, and ‘building a beautiful, Red village’. A Xinhua news report of the training cited Kong Qingfan, Party secretary of Tongfa Village, Qing’an County, Heilongjiang. According to Xinhua, Party secretary Kong ‘believes that the village Party organization secretary must truly become the “leading goose” of rural revitalisation, and the grassroots party organisations must truly become the “backbone” of the people, shouldering their mission and responsibility in line with the [Party’s] original intention (i.e., original revolutionary spirit, chuxin 初心).’

To further strengthen Party organisation at the grassroots the Party has dispatched a plethora of cadres from government agencies and public institutions, including universities, banks and State-owned Enterprises (SOEs). Xi Jinping has revived and expanded the position of First Secretary 第一书记 who are deployed from outside the village and whose mission is to strengthen the leadership and management capacity of the village Party branch and village Party secretary. First Secretaries are meant to serve as trainers, mentors and ‘missionaries’ of the Party. According to the National Rural Revitalisation Commission, in 2023 more than 400,000 First Party Secretaries and supporting work team personnel were deployed across 26 provinces. The First Secretary is typically supported by a work team 工作队 — a mechanism the Party uses to support the rapid take-up of major policy initiatives, which means millions more public sector employees are being rotated into China’s villages to forge ahead with the Party-led rural revitalisation agenda.

By putting the Party back in charge, the Xi administration’s approach to governing the countryside is consistent with the Party’s wider recentralising agenda, but in the countryside it represents a break with four decades of rural governance in which self-governing village committees and directly elected village leaders played a lead decision-making role in village affairs. While Party secretaries remained a strong presence in some villages where they were known as the ‘first hand’ 一把手, the Party’s presence was otherwise much diminished in the post-collective countryside.

In reasserting its authority in China’s villages, the Party has created new risks and challenges for itself. For one, it will not be able to shift blame for policy failures to village leaders or village committees since Party representatives now control those positions. Although the Party has criticised corruption and cronyism by elected village leaders, it is not clear how village Party leaders, working in the same social and cultural milieu and under similar pressures and constraints, will be immune to such behaviours.[3] Second, the costs of grassroots Party building are staggeringly high- just the salaries of 400,000 deployed Party functionaries in 2023 alone would cost an estimated 24 billion yuan (US$3.4 billion) before costs of deployment and administration.[4] Millions of First Secretaries and work team members have been mobilised to strengthen the Party’s grassroots capacity to lead the rural revitalisation agenda, but effective capacity building will take years and the costs of deployment will place an increasing strain on fiscal resources, especially if China’s economy continues to tank as it did through much of 2023. The strain is felt most acutely by local governments that are heavily indebted and unable to raise new revenue through land sales as they did in the past.

Most importantly, rural revitalisation calls for innovation and entrepreneurship in agriculture and agribusiness. The last time the Party inspired such innovation in the countryside was in the 1980s when it disbanded the communes and got out of farmers’ way. Rural China then took off and kickstarted the Chinese economic growth miracle.[5] It is unclear how a centralised approach to governing the countryside will encourage private investment and cultivate innovation in rural business and technology. If the Party continues with the top-down grant-making schemes that were rolled out for previous rural campaigns farmers will absorb the funds, but it will not necessarily generate sustainable new initiatives.

In imagining China as an agricultural superpower, Xi Jinping and the Party leadership have dared to dream big. But in sending the Party in to take charge, they have followed a playbook that has become standard since Xi came to power. Whatever the political or policy problem — the Party organisation will fix it. To guide Party functionaries in their work, in October 2023 the Party Publicity (formerly Propaganda) Bureau released yet another book of quotations by Xi Jinping. Titled Extracts from Xi Jinping’s Discourses on Grassroots Governance, the book highlights the importance of Party intervention to ‘improve the system of governance in the countryside’.

With the Party in charge, the success of China’s ambitious rural revitalisation campaign will likely mirror the success of the country’s wider economic policies, over which the Party is asserting increasingly centralised control. It begs the same question that we might ask of the economy more broadly as China emerges from the ravages caused by COVID-19-related restrictions: can a centralised and tightly controlled political system provide the conditions necessary for the leap to high incomes and advanced economic development?

Notes

[1] For a discussion of earlier approaches to poverty alleviation in China see Ben Hillman, ‘Opening up: The Politics of Poverty and Development in Rural China’, Development Bulletin 61 (May 2003): 47-50.

[2] Zhao Tan, ‘First Democracy, Then Centralism’: The New Shape of Village Elections under the ‘One-Shoulder Pole’ Policy, paper presented at the Australian Centre on China in the World, 9 August 2023.

[3] On informal power and the limits of formal institutions in the countryside see Ben Hillman, ‘Factions and Spoils: Examining Political Behaviour within the Local State in China’, The China Journal 64 (July 2010): 1-18.

[4] This estimate is based on the assumption that each First Party Secretary and work team member earns a salary of 5000 yuan per month. Salaries are likely to be higher in many cases.

[5] Jean C. Oi, Rural China Takes off: Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform, University of California Press, 1999.

The post From Poverty Elimination to Rural Revitalisation – The Party Takes Charge appeared first on The China Story.

For most readers, the most puzzling thing about China’s local government debt might be why it is considered ‘hidden’ and why Local Government Financing Vehicles (LGFVs) are holding the bag for local governments. To understand this, it is necessary to understand what LGFVs are and why the collapse of the real estate sector has created such problems for them. The bigger question is why China’s powerful central government let this problem grow to this degree. Why didn’t Beijing do something about it earlier? LGFV debt skyrocketed during the zero-COVID policies, so is the pandemic to blame? Finally, what is Beijing doing about this crisis, and is it enough to solve the problem?

LGFVs and ‘Hidden’ Debt

While local government debt is common in all countries, China’s story is unique in several respects. First, if one looks at the on-the-books debt of local governments, the situation is manageable and relatively stable – one would not know there was a debt problem. What makes the China case so curious but also worrisome for Beijing is that the local government debt that has skyrocketed is ‘hidden’. But the adjective ‘hidden’ should not be construed as illegal but as off-the-books debt. Local governments do this off the books because Chinese law forbids them from bank borrowing. So local governments were allowed by Beijing to create institutional middlemen to borrow on their behalf – these are the special purpose vehicles, called local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), which incur and hold this ‘hidden’ debt. It is these LGFVs that now are teetering on default. Hence, while this debt is technically ‘hidden’, it is an expected and condoned outcome of a deal made between Beijing and the localities.

To understand why and how LGFVs are left holding the bag of local government debt, one needs to go back to the early 1990s when Beijing reformed the fiscal system, which had been in place since 1980. The need for the 1994 fiscal reform stemmed from the 1980 fiscal system, which was called a revenue sharing-system. The reason why that system proved to be such a potent incentive for local state-led development was that there was a category of taxes and fees, called Extrabudgetary Revenues, that localities did not have to share but could keep in their entirety. The most important and the fastest growing of these revenues was the collective and individual enterprise tax, which took off with the development of the Township and Village Enterprises, the TVEs. It was these TVEs that allowed China’s economy to take off. The problem was that all the new revenue from this sector was staying in the localities. By the early 1990s, Beijing was only receiving less than a quarter of total revenues.

To grab a bigger share of total revenues, in 1994, Beijing restructured the fiscal system by dividing taxes into those that would go exclusively to the centre, those that would go to the localities and those that would be shared; this is known as the ‘Tax-Sharing System’ 分税制. The hitch was that this 1994 fiscal reform would leave localities with insufficient tax revenues to meet their basic expenditures. Localities would face an annual fiscal gap – a shortfall between the amount of tax revenues left to them and their fiscal expenditures. The then vice premier of China, Zhu Rongji 朱镕基 and others, including the Minister of Finance Xiang Huaicheng 项怀诚, recognised the problem and knew that localities needed new incentives to pursue local state-led development to make up for the revenues that were taken away.

Zhu Rongji came up with a grand bargain that would allow Beijing to have its cake and eat it too. Beijing could recentralise tax revenues, and the localities would be given the rights and tools to raise new non-tax revenues that they could keep to replace the extra budgetary funds that were taken away. To make the bargain operable, localities were given the right to run local state banks and then establish LGFVs to circumvent the legal prohibition on government borrowing.^[1]

The Dependence of LGFVs and Local Governments on the Real Estate Sector

Local governments established LGFVs as middlemen to borrow on their behalf. LGFVs were also tasked with selling land to real estate developers, who then paid land transaction fees to local governments. Using land to generate revenue is known as ‘Land Finance’ 土地财政. This strategy allowed localities to fill the fiscal gap left by the 1994 fiscal reforms, which recentralised taxes to Beijing. Yes, localities had to borrow and incur debt, but the steady stream of revenues from land transactions allowed them to repay debt and have funds to drive growth.

Problems began with the Global Financial Crisis, when China implemented its stimulus package to keep the economy going. Nominally, the stimulus package provided RMB 4 trillion. In reality, however, the central government provided only 30 percent of that amount, and local governments were expected to find the rest.^[2] All of that borrowing created a huge debt burden for local government around 2013 when many of those loans started to come due. To help repay these debts, local governments started to issue bonds. Although debt was becoming more burdensome, it was manageable because land finance was still viable as the housing market continued to boom.

The current crisis stems from the collapse of the real estate sector, when the demand for land vaporised, rendering the land finance strategy inoperable. Because of their dependence on the real estate sector for revenues, its collapse left local government budgets with no incoming revenue stream. LGFVs must now borrow more on behalf of their local government to ensure the continued operation of public services and to service existing loans. Some localities have already had to cut back on social services or laid off government employees because of fiscal shortcomings. But the other options are also limited because there are now also restrictions on the ability of LGFVs to issue bonds if they are already holding too much debt.

COVID-19 and the Current Crisis

One might think that the local government debt problem can be blamed on COVID-19. The costs of testing, isolating and treating COVID-19 was borne almost entirely by local governments. Yet COVID-19 does not sufficiently explain the problem. While COVID-19 certainly raised expenditures for local governments, it was pandemic-era state policies, which enforced fiscal discipline and deleveraged the real estate sector that triggered the crisis of local government debt. The mountains of debt facing local governments across China are largely an unintended byproduct of these policies. A few factors came together, including COVID-19, to create a perfect storm that then magnified and made intractable an institutional problem that had its origins in the mid-1990s.

Before COVID-19, starting in 2016, Beijing had already begun to tamp down the real estate sector with a deleveraging campaign that tried to limit the sector’s borrowing and ensure that borrowers would have cash on hand to repay debt. The arrival of COVID-19 led Beijing to pause its efforts to enforce fiscal discipline. From about January to June of 2020, the central authorities provided substantial aid to localities to offset some of the costs to local governments during the initial phase of the pandemic, such as Special Low-Interest COVID-19 Bonds 抗疫特别国债.

Ironically, it was China’s success in tackling COVID-19 during the first six months that set it on the road that led to the local government debt problems. After a rocky start in Wuhan, Beijing was highly rated by the Nikei COVID-19 Recovery Index for its handling of COVID-19, as measured by case numbers, vaccination rates, mobility and functioning economic life. Beijing became so confident that in the summer of 2020, the central government returned to its pre-COVID-19 economic agenda to try to enforce fiscal discipline on the real estate section and curbing debt more generally, especially that of local governments.

Beijing implemented the ‘Three Red Lines’ policy三条红线, which prohibited real estate firms from borrowing beyond set limits. Overnight, the developers’ heretofore successful business model of borrowing to grow became inoperable. This left them with few or no new sources of funding to keep operating or repay debt, leaving many scrambling to sell assets for quick cash. Some stopped building, leaving construction sites empty or half built. Suppliers went unpaid. Some developers defaulted, but few were buying land from local governments. But the consequences did not stop with the developers not being able to get loans. Because homebuyers in China had start making mortgage payments before construction was complete, once they realised what was happening to the real estate developers, they went on mortgage strikes, refusing to make further payments out of fear that they would never get a finished apartment.

Ultimately, the failures of the real estate companies meant that revenues from land sales and preparation sank to almost nothing, leaving local governments cut off from the source of non-tax revenue that made up the gaps in funding of their local budgets each year. The impact of the loss of land sales revenues was made worse by the decrease in tax revenues after central authorities cracked down on the tech and the afterschool tutoring sectors during this same period.

The final factor that contributed to the perfect storm was the arrival of a new COVID-19 variant, Omicron, in January 2022. The lockdowns that followed further cost local governments as COVID-19-related testing, quarantining and treatment sent expenditures through the roof, even as revenues fell as most economic activity came to a halt. It became increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for local governments to repay their debts and cover rising expenditures. The real estate sector and housing market have yet to recover despite the end of zero-COVID restrictions at the end of 2022, as the economy – after a brief bump in activity – has remained in a slump.

To make matters worse for local governments, Beijing pushed aside concerns about curbing local debt. In an about-face, it instructed LGFVs to take up the slack from the demise of the real estate sector and make land purchases, even if it mean going into more debt, to provide revenues for local government coffers. It remains unclear what LGFVs are doing with this land. Reports suggest that few have actually used that land for new development. Recent reports reveal that although some LGFVs did buy land, others faked these transactions to comply with upper-level directives. These must have decided that they simply did not have the funds to do so, nor did they want to assume more debt. We await details of how local governments dealt with these directives, which are simply trying to make the on-the-books local government budgets look stronger even if the off-the-books borrowing skyrockets even further.

Why Did Beijing Not Stop This Hidden Debt Problem Earlier?

Since 2014, when the costs of the stimulus package loans became evident, Beijing has been trying to rein in local government debt. This included Beijing swapping out the LGFV bonds, which were most costly in terms of interest with shorter maturity dates, to longer maturing, lower-cost, centrally approved and guaranteed local government municipal bonds that could be more easily repaid. Importantly, these municipal bonds were strictly limited in the amounts issued and required approval by the upper levels. The assumption was that if they cleaned up these existing bonds and required approval for the municipal bonds, the centre could control local government debt. After the bond swaps, in 2018 another campaign was started to get rid of hidden debt, including having local governments sell assets or stakes in State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). But none of the many attempts were successful because none addressed the root of the problem: the flawed fiscal system instituted in 1994 that left localities with a fiscal gap. The approved municipal bonds were insufficient to cover local fiscal needs.

The point that must be understood is that LGFVs and their borrowing on behalf of local government was an expected outcome of the grand bargain to mobilise support from the localities for its 1994 fiscal reforms. Beijing even assured localities that they should not fear upper-level intervention in revenue-generating activities, as long as they sent up the requisite tax revenues. This also explains why Beijing had no official accounting of local government debt until 2011. Beijing had agreed that it would not seek to know the details.

What Beijing Is Doing to Resolve the Crisis

Allowing the establishment of LGFVs was an effective short-term workaround for local government borrowing. As indicated in the introduction, the terms ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ are useless in understanding their actions because they were condoned and created to get around official prohibitions against local governments borrowing from banks. But the grand bargain between the centre and the localities that allowed their creation also has created ambiguity around who is responsible for repaying LGFV debt and allows Beijing to pretend that local government finances are not in jeopardy.

As financial analysts around the world have become more rattled by the sheer size of this hidden debt and the possible consequences for the larger economy, Beijing has tried to calm markets by describing it as enterprise debt (LGFVs are state-owned enterprises) and denying that it counts as local government debt. As China’s Ministry of Finance has said, the liability for LGFV debt ‘lies with the entity that issued it’. It added, ‘local governments do not bear the responsibility to repay the debt of LGFVs and other state-owned enterprises’, citing the amended Budget Law in 2014. That means, however, that there is no explicit guarantee of payment; that is, local governments never promised to pay this debt. This ignores the fact that local governments also have what is called implicit debt, which is debt that they may pay if the original borrowing cannot pay. To thwart any hope of a central government rescue, the ministry has explicitly said: ‘If it’s your baby, you own it. There will be no bailout from the central government.’ Such statements seem at least implicitly to recognise that the problem will be the local governments’.

At the same time Beijing has taken steps to buy more time for LGFVs and local governments to repay their debt. Banks have been asked to give LGFVs new loans with ‘ultra-long maturities and temporary interest relief to prevent a credit crunch …’. Instead of the ten-year loans previously given to LGFVs, banks, including some of the big four such as ICBC and China Construction Bank, are now offering 25-year loans. But this strategy has moved huge risks onto the banks. As a result, Goldman Sachs downgraded its rating of China’s big banks, which led to a rout in bank stocks on foreign exchanges.

None of the above strategies solves the institutional problem of local government debt in China. The state can formally separate local governments from their LGFVs, but at the end of the day, somebody must take responsibility for their debts. But even if someone takes over existing LGFV debt, more local debt will reappear each year because of how the fiscal system is structured. Beijing must reconfigure the system or find an alternative source of revenue to plug the fiscal gap.

China realises that a property tax like that in the United States where the revenue would belong to the localities is a solution. A few cities have limited pilot programs, but Beijing keeps delaying its implementation. Such a tax would alienate a rising middle class, and in the current context it would further hurt a depressed housing market.

Ultimately, to end hidden debt, Beijing must address the fundamental flaws in the system established by the 1994 fiscal reforms. Without thorough fiscal reform, the problem of local government debt, hidden or not, will persist. It might be time for Chinese leadership to stop kicking the can down the road. There is no other sustainable solution.

Notes

[1] For details see Adam Y. Liu, Jean C. Oi and Yi Zhang, ‘China’s local government debt: The grand bargain’, China Journal, vol. 87 (2022): 40–71, online at: https://doi.org/10.1086/717256; and Adam Yao Liu, ‘Building markets within authoritarian institutions: The political economy of banking development in China’, doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, 2018.

[2] Liu, Oi and Zhang, ‘China’s local government debt’.

The post China’s Local Government Debt: Fallout from a Perfect Storm appeared first on The China Story.

On 4 January 1947, the ROC Navy minesweeper ROCS Yung-hsing 永興 and the Landing Ship Tank ROCS Chung Jian 中建 sailed into the South China Sea. They landed ROC troops in the French claimed Paracel Islands and continued on their way.[1] A month later, in February 1947, the Nanjing government published a map based on the voyage, and earlier maps and claims from the Qing dynasty and ROC period. The map had a U-line with eleven dashes that delineated the claim over the South China Sea.[2] The original maps accompanied the retreating ROC forces to Taiwan in 1949 and are now stored in the National Archives in Taipei.[3] The claimed territory and seas in the South China Sea was subsequently incorporated into the ROC Constitution as part of Chinese national territory.

To this day, Taiwan remains firm in its claims to the South China Sea. They have been historically justified on the basis that, as there was no United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in existence in 1947, it was legitimate for the ROC to claim the South China Sea territories and waters based on the historical connections of these with China. According to the Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR), a Taiwanese think tank, there was no legal impediment to the claim in 1947 and, for a long period, there were no challenges to the ROC’s claims from other countries.[4] They were largely ignored – except by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which concurred with them.

The ROC maps and claim to sovereignty constitute the basis of the PRC’s assertion of sovereignty over the South China Sea and their ‘Nine-Dash Line’ – the PRC deleted two of the ROC’s lines in the 1960s that were proximate to what was then North Vietnam. Like Taipei, Beijing’s claims are based on Chinese historic claims and possession of the islands. It was only in the 1970s that other countries started challenging these claims.

Other Claimants to the South China Sea

In 2013, The Philippines initiated an arbitration case against the PRC under Annex VII of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) concerning China’s claims in the South China Sea. The PRC refused to participate in the arbitration and Taiwan was excluded as it was not a member of UNCLOS. In the face of growing claims and actions by other claimant countries including Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines in the 2010s, the Ma Ying-jeou administration agreed to maintain a low profile and neither assert its claims openly nor walk away from them.[5] Taipei was aware that its claims displeased neighbouring countries and were not well received by the United States as they justified Beijing’s actions and claims. The Ma administration was at the time asserting its sovereignty over the Japanese administered Senkaku or Diaoyutai 釣魚臺 Islands, which were also claimed by Beijing (where they’re known as the Diaoyu 钓鱼 Islands). In June 2020, President Tsai Ing-wen reiterated Taiwan’s claims to sovereignty of the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands.

On 12 July 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration Tribunal ruled that the PRC’s historic claims over maritime areas inside the Nine-dash line had no lawful effect and there was no legal basis for China to claim historic rights to resources within the sea areas falling within the line. In addition, it ruled that UNCLOS did not provide for a group of islands such as the Spratly Islands (known in Chinese as the Nansha Archipelago 南沙群岛) to generate maritime zones collectively as a unit.

Although not a party to the case, the ruling had an effect on Taiwan’s claims and the islands it occupied such as Itu Aba/Taiping 太平 Island, the largest of the Spratly Islands, which is also claimed by the PRC, Vietnam and the Philippines. The ruling found it to be a rock, not an island. In response, the Tsai Administration asserted that Taiwan ‘holds sovereignty over the South China Sea islands and their surrounding waters’. It objected that it had not been given the opportunity to provide information to the tribunal. It insisted that Itu Aba/Taiping Island, which possesses freshwater wells, fertile soil, and on which grow bananas, coconuts and other crops and where livestock is raised to support the 150 to 200 members of the Taiwan Coast Guard who are stationed there, clearly satisfied the definition of an island under UNCLOS.

Following the 2016 Philippines South China Sea Arbitration, the United States put extra pressure on Taiwan to distinguish its claims to from those of China.[6] This was a clear recognition that the PRC’s claims were in fact established on the same basis as the 1946-1947 ROC claims. In recent times, the Philippines has also actively challenged Chinese claims around Scarborough Shoal and the submerged Second Thomas Shoal; Manila grounded a dilapidated Philippines vessel from World War Two at the latter, where it is guarded by Philippines marines.[7]

In 2015, Beijing invited Taipei to participate in joint activities in the South China Sea. The Ma administration declined the offer, not wishing to become too closely involved with the PRC in South China Sea. Nonetheless, there was an exhibition held in Taipei at the ROC Military College from 2015-2016 outlining the ROC’s claims to whole of the South China Sea.[8]

In 2016 following the election of Tsai Ing-wen as president, the Democratic Progress Party (DPP) transition to government team consulted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA), the Ministry of National Defence (MND), and government and academic legal experts concerning Taiwan’s claims to the South China Sea. As a result of the team’s investigation the Tsai Administration decided not to alter Taiwan’s claims and the ROC Eleven-Dash Line remains in place today, though as a senior DPP official confirmed in July 2023, it limits its low-key claims to islands and features and their surrounding sovereign territorial waters, not the whole ‘cow’s tongue’ inside the Eleven-Dash Line. The Taiwan government has moved away from emphasising the U-shaped line and its historical waters. Taiwan does not claim the whole sea as its territory as China does. Taiwan also welcomes freedom of navigation and aviation in the South China Sea and is willing to cooperate with other claimants in search and rescue missions as well as environmental protection.[9]

The PRC and Ownership of the South China Sea

The PRC has been firm in defending its claims to the whole of the South China Sea. It has built a series of military bases on reefs and shoals throughout the region and has reclaimed over 32,000 acres of land there.[10] Beijing views control of the South China Sea as essential to its defence, national security and to its trade routes.[11] The South China Sea could easily become a ‘choke point’ for China in the event of a conflict with the United States – approximately 80 percent of China’s exports travel through these waters. In addition, a significant portion of China’s surface and submarine fleets are based on the island of Hainan, which abuts the South China Sea.[12]

Beijing constantly warns off other countries’ vessels and aircraft that infringe on their claimed territory. There remains a possibility of conflict. A scholar from the Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR), a Taiwan defence think tank, said that in his view a clash between China and the United States or another country is more likely in the South China Sea than in the Taiwan Strait. In the Strait both the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) and the ROC military have protocols to avoid a military clash. The PLA is under strict orders not use force during its military actions around Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait. On the other hand, the interactions in the South China Sea are less structured and potentially more volatile. The Chinese forces regard themselves as defending their sovereign territory against  ‘provocative’ actions by foreign vessels or planes. The potential for something to go wrong and lead to a clash is therefore higher there than in the Strait.[13]

Washington does not recognise the PRC or ROC’s claims, or those of other claimant states such as Vietnam and the Philippines. The United States has taken the position that its ships can sail wherever they are legally entitled to sail and the US Navy frequently conducts Freedom of Navigation Operations in the South China Sea to challenge these claims.[14] The United States has largely remained mute on Taiwan’s extensive claims in the South China Sea, likewise with the claims of the other claimant states in the South China Sea such as Vietnam and the Philippines. The United States sees China as the problem and its adversary in the South China Sea. This suggests that US actions in the South China Sea are primarily part of its competition and confrontation with China as well as asserting the right of the US Navy to sail anywhere at any time. Australia does not recognise the Chinese claims and has criticised Chinese claims and actions. Australia’s actions in the South China Sea, while based on UNCLOS principles (Australia is a signatory to UNCLOS), in effect support the United States’ policy of confrontation and containment.

Who Owns the South China Sea?

According to senior Taiwan government officials, Taiwan has not relinquished its South China Sea claims — it controls Itu Abu/Taiping Island and the Pratas/Tungsha 東沙 Islands — partly because to do so would greatly anger Beijing. It would undercut their claims, which are based on the ROC’s historical claim, and potentially lead to action against Taiwan. Taiwan also adheres to the Nine-Dash Line claim because to give it up would be seen by China as a move away from a One China position. One Beijing official told a senior Taiwanese official that Taiwan abandoning its South China Sea claims would be worse than Taiwan declaring independence.[15] The PRC’s 2005 Anti-Seccession Law explicitly states that any move to change the ROC constitution or relinquish Chinese territory would met with force by the PRC to maintain ‘national unity’.

A scholar from INDSR said the PLA has no interest in seizing the ROC-held Itu Abu/Taiping Island in the Spratlys although it could easily do so. In China’s eyes, the ROC resence on Itu Aba/Taiping Island legitimises their assertion of the legitimacy of the Nine-Dash Line. Besides, if the PLA were to attack and seize Jinmen, Mazu and Itu Aba/Taiping Island, which it probably could do quite easily, this would not facilitate a military takeover of the main island of Taiwan but could trigger a declaration of independence by Taiwan and war. [16]

For Taiwan to relinquish its South China Sea claims would require amending the ROC constitution. This would challenge Taiwan’s political and constitutional identity as the ROC. Taiwanese domestic politics mean that any Taiwan government that gave up territory would be severely criticised by the Taiwanese public and media for setting a bad precedent regarding the rest of the territory under the administration of the ROC.[17]

Will Taiwan Stand By Its South China Sea Claims Long Term?

One of the paradoxes of the South China Sea disputes is that Taiwan maintains the same claims as the PRC. While it is less aggressive and limits the extent of its claim, like Beijing, Taipei still claims the whole of the South China Sea, the Spratlys and Paracels, and deploys its military to occupy the largest land mass in the Spratlys. Beijing’s claims are based on those of the ROC: both assert historical Chinese possession of the islands. Taiwan is geographically at the centre of the disputed area but due to its limited diplomatic and international political status it is largely ignored. The United States would probably like to see Taipei give up its claims, which would undermine those of Beijing, but will not push the latter at this time. There is little evidence that Taiwan itself would walk away from its claims either. National pride, the optics of domestic politics and potential problems with Beijing make it near impossible for Taipei to cede any of its claimed territory, and this is unlikely to change should another party occupy the Presidential Palace after the presidential elections of January 2024.

Notes

[1] Bill Hayton, The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia, (New Heavin: Yale University Press, 2014), pp62-63.

[2] Ibid, pp.58-60.

[3] The author was invited to inspect a copy of the original  maps in Taipei in 2013.

[4] Meeting with Dr Lee Chechuan from the Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR) on 5 July 2023.

[5] Meeting with Dr Lee Chechuan from the Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR) on 5 July 2023.

[6] Meeting with Dr Lee Chechuan from the Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR) on 5 July 2023.

[7] Brendan Taylor, The Four Flash Points How Asia Goes to War, (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 2018), pp.97-98; pp.104 -108; p.122.

[8] Meeting with Dr Lee Chechuan from the Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR) on 5 July 2023.

[9] Meeting with Senior Taiwanese Official on 9 July 2023.

[10] Taylor, The Four Flash Points How Asia Goes to War, p.107.

[11] Geoff Raby, China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New Global Order, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2020), pp.8-10.

[12] Taylor, The Four Flash Points How Asia Goes to War, pp.112-114.

[13] Meeting with Dr Lee Jyun Yi from the Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR) on 14 July 2023.

[14] Taylor, The Four Flash Points How Asia Goes to War, pp.114-116; pp.125-126.

[15] Meeting with Senior Taiwanese Official on 9 July 2023.

[16] Meeting with Dr Lee Jyun Yi from the Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR) on 14 July 2023.

[17] Meeting with Senior Taiwanese Official on 9 July 2023.

The post Taiwan’s South China Sea appeared first on The China Story.

This university took just twenty-four hours to build. Planning started one day in late June with a post on China’s major social media sites claiming that if every one of the some 3.43 million year twelve students from the provinces of Shandong, Shanxi, Henan and Hebei were to donate 1000 yuan each (roughly AU$200), then there would be enough money – 3.43 billion yuan (roughly AU$ 73.1 million) – to fund a new university. [1]

The post surfaced at a time when China’s high-school students, having survived the gruelling National Higher Education Entrance Examination (known colloquially as the gaokao) earlier that month, were applying for universities. What started as a light-hearted joke soon became a channel for students who felt locked out of China’s extremely competitive university admissions system to express their grievances.

Within a day, a website for the university was launched, designs and mottos were selected for the university’s logo, followed by drawings of the university’s main gates and dormitories. There was even a mouth-watering menu for the university canteen. Twenty-four faculties were created, offering over 430 majors, from standard STEM courses to niche subjects like pickle-making. The Tang dynasty poet Du Fu 杜甫, an illustrious native of Henan province, was chosen as the university’s first honorary vice chancellor. In the autumn of 761, after a wild storm had destroyed the roof of his straw hut, leaving his family shivering through the cold night, Du Fu penned lines that all Chinese schoolchildren now learn by rote:

If one could have a great house of a million rooms —

Sheltering all the empire’s shivering scholars, their faces lit up with joy —

A house not shaken by wind or rain, solid as a mountain —

Alas! When shall I see that house stand before my eyes?

Then, even if my own hut was destroyed, and I might freeze and die, I should be satisfied. [2]

For the creators of SHU, this verse of Du Fu’s perfectly encapsulates the goal of this fictional university, which, as a mock admission brochure makes it clear, is to ‘lift all students from the injustice they face, and to ensure every student from the four provinces has the opportunity to attend university.’ The injustice refers to the relative scarcity of higher education opportunities in the provinces of Shandong, Shanxi, Henan and Hebei, despite these provinces having some of the largest student populations in China. In 2023, the number of students from the four provinces made up about a quarter of the 12.91 million students taking the gaokao. And yet, the four provinces only house two of China’s thirty-nine elite universities (collectively known as ‘985 universities’, based on the date when the central government announced the building of a number of world-class universities in May – the fifth month – 1998). Both elite universities are located in Shandong, China’s second largest province. China’s third, sixth and eighteenth largest provinces (Henan, Hebei and Shanxi) do not have a single elite university. In comparison, a combined total of 100,000 students from Beijing and Shanghai sat gaokao this year, roughly 0.8 percent of the national total, and yet there are twelve elite universities in Beijing and Shanghai, nearly a third of the thirty-nine elite universities.

Because universities in China have admission quotas favouring local students, having a higher concentration of elite universities in places like Beijing and Shanghai means that students whose household registration or hukou 户口 is in one of these cities face much less competition. A study based on university admissions data from 2020 found that in order to be admitted into either Peking University or Tsinghua University (both located in Beijing), a student in Beijing had 48,450 competitors, while a student in Henan faced 1,157,600 competitors, making admission twenty-four times less likely.

A similar admissions system linked to one’s hukou exists for China’s high school entrance exam. In July this year, this triggered an angry protest in Xi’an province by parents of middle-schoolers against ‘returning students’ 回流生, that is, students who have studied in other parts of China, but returned to Xi’an where their hukou is located to compete with local students for admission to a good high school. In rumours circulating before and during the protest, parents have claimed 40,000 out of the 110,000 students that took the high-school entrance exam in Xi’an this year came from the neighbouring Henan province (where competition to get into good high schools is fierce). In response to the protest, an official report claimed that there were only 3,608 ‘returning students’ taking part in this year’s high school entrance exam.

Inequality in China’s education system is by no means new. A 2013 joke posted on Weibo was funny then as it is now:

In Beijing: ‘Dad, I got a 530 [on the gaokao], 53 points higher than the lowest qualifying score for top-tier universities!’ ‘Great job, son! Let’s go to Shanghai for our vacation!’

In Shandong: ‘Dad, I got a 530, 20 points lower than the lowest qualifying score for second-tier universities!’ ‘You’re not so bright … Don’t go [to college]. Get out of here and go become a migrant worker in Shanghai.’

In Shanghai: ‘Dad, I got a 330. Send me abroad.’ ‘Okay, son. Go get an MBA, then come back and help me. I got another group of migrant workers from Shandong this year.’ [3]

A decade later, this joke appears even closer to life given China’s rising youth unemployment rate. The difference is that it was still permitted to discuss the education gap openly back then. When former premier Wen Jiabao 温家宝 expressed his concern at seeing fewer students from a rural background attending universities and vocational colleges in 2009, it was headline news on Xinhua News, China’s official state news agency. In comparison, even though it was a joke, discussions relating to SHU were quickly censored on China’s major social media platforms and the mock website was shut down. When reporters brought up the topic during a press conference, Deputy Education Minister Wu Yan吴岩 responded with impenetrable officialese, promoting netizens to comment that AI could have done a better job:

We too have taken notice of the issues concerning ‘Shanhe University’. Faced with the new situation of higher education entering a new stage of popularisation, as well as new challenges and issues in serving regional economic and social development, the Ministry of Education will continually optimise the structure and layout of higher education resources. We will support the central and western regions, especially provinces with large populations, to expand the scale of higher education resources and optimise the type and regional structure…[4]

The harsh reality of China’s unequal university admissions system has stopped many students from even dreaming of attending a good university. Instead, they devoted their energy to imagining a university of their dreams. And yet, even as a fantasy, SHU’s vision appears somewhat distorted on a closer examination. Contrary to the humanistic spirit expressed in Du Fu’s poem, creators of SHU have made it extremely difficult for students from outside the four provinces to gain admission, stating that they will need to have scored at least 700 points (out of a perfect score of 750) in their gaokao. Moreover, despite its emphasis on democratic rule, the draft version of the university charter states that, ‘all decisions have to be made through democratic centralism’ 民主集中制, a concept first proposed by Lenin in 1921 and is best ‘translated’ by George Orwell as, ‘all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’. The Communist Party of China (CPC) continues to promote democratic centralism as their guiding principle. After SHU’s prototype website went down, a few new websites sprung up, one even replaced the university’s original motto from ‘erudition’ 博学 and ‘thirst for knowledge’ 求知 with the twelve ‘socialist core values’. Despite what some commentators may say about SHU being a powerful symbol of how people in China can still spontaneously organise online despite heavy censorship, posing a threat to the ruling authority, in truth, the authorities have little to fear. They have already moulded the way Chinese students dream.

Notes

[1] The initial post online made a mathematical mistake and claimed this scheme would raise 34.3 billion yuan.

[2] Translation slightly modified based on Florence Ayscough’s version, accessed online at: https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/thatched-house-unroofed-autumn-gale

[3] Translation by Yiqin Fu in ‘China’s Unfair College Admissions System’, The Atlantic, 19 June 2013, online at: https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/chinas-unfair-college-admissions-system/276995/

[4] This speech was translated using ChatGPT.

The post The University of Mountains and Rivers: Unequal Admissions System Fuels the Dream of an Ideal University appeared first on The China Story.

The situation is made worse by the rising number of college graduates. According to Global Times, higher education enrolment increased from 30 percent in 2012 to 57.8 percent in 2021. In 2023, a record number of 11.58 million students are expected to graduate from higher education institutions in China and entre the job market.

Disconcerted by the difficulty of finding employment despite working so hard for their degrees, China’s jobless graduates have turned to the internet to vent their frustration and find support among those experiencing similar hardships. In early March, a video went viral on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, of a graduate weeping and questioning the point of her university education after over 800 job applications, 30 job interviews — and still without a job. In the same month, a comment on Weibo resonated with millions:

People say education is a stepping stone towards something better, but lately I found it to be a high platform from which I can’t climb down. It is the scholar’s gown that Kong Yiji refuses to take off.

Kong Yiji is the title as well as the central character of a short story by Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881-1936), who is widely considered to be the greatest Chinese writer, essayist and polemicist of the twentieth century. Writing as someone who was schooled in China in the early 2000s, ‘’Kong Yiji’ was a text that we all had to read and memorise in the ninth grade, the last year of China’s compulsory education. Set in a tavern in a fictional country town called Lu (modelled on Lu Xun’s hometown Shaoxing in the coastal Zhejiang province), Kong Yiji stands out among the tavern’s regulars for being the only customer who wears a scholar’s ‘long gown’ 长衫 (a symbol of his elite status) but who also drinks yellow rice wine standing up, something only poor manual labourers (the ‘short-coated class’ 短衣帮) would do. Throughout the story, Kong is mocked for his refusal to take off his dirty and tattered gown as well as for his sham morality — Kong maintains that stealing books doesn’t count as theft. He is also ridiculed for his useless learning — Kong knows how to write one character in four different ways and can recite passages from the Confucian Classics yet he was never able to pass the imperial examination and obtain stable employment. Pathetic as Kong Yiji might be, we were nonetheless taught in class that he was a victim of both the ‘oppressive feudal society’ and the imperial examination system that stifled individual creativity and perpetuated social inequality.

‘Kong Yiji’ debuted in the April issue of La Jeunesse 新青年 (New Youth) in 1919, a magazine created by Chen Duxiu 陈独秀, one of the founders of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The goal of the magazine was to enlighten and educate a new generation of youth fit to create and govern a modern, democratic China. Strangely, however, this laughable character from China’s despicable and inhuman past that Lu Xun and his compatriots so vehemently mocked and sought to overthrow, would resonate with millions of young Chinese today. Following that post, a new genre of internet writing arose under the hashtag #孔乙己文学# or ‘Kong Yiji Literature’, used by those who see their university education as a burden that prevents them from taking jobs seen as beneath their qualifications. ‘Had I not gone to university, I’d be content to work at a factory, tightening screws at an assembly line…but there’s no “ifs” in life…’ wrote one netizen. ‘When I first read the story of Kong Yiji as a child, I didn’t know its meaning. Now I realise that I am Kong Yiji!’ exclaimed another.

State media quickly attempted to change the new narrative around Kong Yiji which, to their eyes, was overly negative in its depiction of opportunities open to educated young people in China today. On March 17, China Central Television (CCTV) published an online commentary entitled ‘We must look seriously at the anxiety behind “Kong Yiji Literature”’. The commentary, while acknowledging the stress and competition young graduates face, stresses that ‘Kong Yiji’s tragedy lies not in the fact that he was educated, but in his refusal to take off the scholar’s gown and work hard towards improving his circumstances. The gown is not just a garment, but ‘a shackle around his heart’ 心头枷锁. The piece ends with the usual boost of ‘positive energy’ 正能量, solemnly declaring that ‘those with ambition will not remain trapped by their scholar’s gown’.

Two related news stories filled with even more ‘positive energy’ soon appeared on various state media: one of a 28-year-old graduate who quit her tedious white-collar job and who now earns over ten thousand yuan (roughly AUD 2000) a month by collecting and recycling scrap. The other story is about a couple, both college graduates, making over 9000 yuan in one night as street food venders.

Netizens were quick to question the validity of these stories. ‘Surely the 9000 yuan is their income not net profit’ someone asked. But it is the condescending tone of the CCTV commentary that caused emotions to run high. ‘So [you’re claiming] Lu Xun wrote the story to criticise Kong Yiji? Weren’t we taught that it was to criticise old China?’ one netizen retorted. ‘It was you who made me put on the scholar’s gown in the first place, now you are telling me to take it off?’ wrote another, referring to the fact that for years, the Party-State has actively promoted success stories of young students from impoverished backgrounds improving their circumstances by studying hard and getting into a good university.

Enraged by CCTV’s commentary, Guishange 鬼山哥 (literally ‘Ghost Mountain Brother’), a content creator and singer on China’s video sharing platform Bilibili wrote a sarcastic song entitled ‘Sunny, Happy Kong Yiji’ 阳光开朗孔乙己 in which he recasts Kong as a present-day patriot whose sanguine outlook is nonetheless a mask for his helplessness. As the modern-day Kong tells his audience in the tavern:

I keep my face clean, but my pockets are empty

So I put on my gown and scribe for the powerful ‘n’ wealthy

I thought work would be easy, but it’s 996

Working six days a week, twelve hours a day

When I had the nerve to ask for my pay, they called me malicious and the cops dragged my sad arse away

…

Optimism’s my armour, but tears flow behind this mask

I’m sunny, happy Kong Yiji; sunny, happy Kong Yiji [1]

The song attracted over three million views before the censors took it down just one day later, while suspending Guishange’s account. Posting on another platform, Zhihu, Guishange later said his only means of making money has been cut off, his savings were previously used up to pay for his mother’s hospital bills. He had been planning to earn some money as delivery driver, but his car broke down. ‘They’ve forced me into a dead end, and for what? Just because I told the truth?’ he asked.

Nearly a century ago, Lu Xun had already observed that ‘When the Chinese suspect someone of being a potential troublemaker, they always resort to one of the two methods, they crush him, or they hoist him on a pedestal’.[2] The irony, of course, as pointed out by the eminent Sinologist Pierre Ryckmans (aka Simon Leys), is that Lu Xun himself was subjected to both treatments: ‘when he was alive, the Communist commissars bullied him; once he was dead, they worshipped him as their holiest cultural icon.’ [3]

An even greater irony is the rich afterlife that Lu Xun’s writing continues to enjoy — now through multiple medias — for a writer, who when he was alive, was constantly tormented by suspicion toward the act of writing. In fact, Lu Xun’s dying words to his son were ‘Don’t ever become a pseudo writer or artist’.

The fact that ‘Kong Yiji’ is still widely discussed and debated more than a century after it was originally written can be seen as a vindication of Lu Xun’s penetrating insight and the unrelenting frankness with which he depicted the China of his day. It is also, ironically, the consequence of the CPC’s feverish canonisation of Lu Xun as their patron saint of literature. During the Cultural Revolution, Lu Xun was the only author other than Mao Zedong whose works were allowed to be read in public. The ubiquitous phrases ‘Chairman Mao has instructed us…’ and ‘Mr Lu Xun once said…’ were political slogans synonymous with continuous revolution and political correctness.[4] Even until recently, students in China had to study at least one text by Lu Xun per semester. Both the text and its prescribed meaning also had to be carefully memorised and subject to repeated testing.

Lu Xun has been so forcefully drilled into the consciousness of multiple generations that it is no surprise people would turn to him for every new ordeal they experience. After the military crackdown on student-led protests against corruption and for democracy and free expression around Tiananmen Square in 1989, many recalled Lu Xun’s remarks on the March 18 shooting of student protesters by Beijing security forces in 1926: ‘Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood.’ During the hunger strike that was part of those protests, supporters hung a banner next to the young people refusing food and water painted with a famous line from Lu Xun’s short story ‘Diary of a Madman’: ‘Save the children!’

Lu Xun is thus the voice of both official and un-official China. During the COVID-19 pandemic, both state media applauding young volunteers trying to prevent rumours circulating about the virus as well as supporters of the ‘Blank Paper’ protests of late 2022 quoted the same message from Lu Xun to China’s future generation: ‘Ignore what the cynics have to say. Make your voice heard and your actions seen, like a firefly glowing in the darkness of night’.

Unlike other writers of the ‘leftist canon’, Lu Xun never painted a future utopia in his writing, he was far too sober to indulge in any form of day-dreaming or to embrace any sect or ideology that made promises of a brighter future. He only wrote about the China he knew. At first, this was the China of his childhood, a small country town within a giant empire that’s crumbling into pieces, filled with pitiful characters like Kong Yiji and strange tales of ghosts and murders told by his nanny A-Chang. Later, it was the nominal republic plagued by civil unrest, tyranny, as well as a cultural and literary tradition that, in Lu Xun’s eyes, was not only irrelevant but thwarted China’s modernisation. A true iconoclast, Lu Xun went as far as calling for the eradication of the Chinese writing system, declaring that ‘If Chinese characters are not exterminated, there can be no doubt that China will perish.’

To make way for a better, modern China, Lu Xun was painfully aware that his own writing would be doomed along with the rest of the tradition he so long detested. ‘Let the awakened man burden himself with the weight of tradition and shoulder up the gate of darkness. Let him give unimpeded passage to the children so that they may rush to the bright, wide-opened spaces and lead happy lives henceforth as rational human beings’ Lu Xun wrote in 1919. [5] In this scenario, the gate of darkness eventually drops, crushing the weight-bearing hero into pieces. [6]

The self-effacing aspect of Lu Xun’s thought produced some of the most haunting and passionate images in his writing. For instance, there are the nihilistic flames that reoccur in his collection of prose-poems Wild Grass:

A subterranean fire is spreading, raging, underground. Once the molten lava leaks through the earth’s crust, it will consume all the wild grass and lofty trees, leaving nothing to decay….[7]

Then, there is the image of a self-devouring serpent in the same collection:

There is a wandering spirit which takes the form of a serpent with poisonous fangs. Instead of biting others, it bites itself, and so it perishes…[8]

Had he been alive today, Lu Xun would have been horrified to discover all the ‘museums, plaster busts, spin-off books, dedicated journals, plays, television adaptations, wine-brands’ operating in his name. He would have been even more shocked that young people still felt the need to evoke his work. After all, a China that clings to the culture and language of its past is a wushengde Zhongguo 无声的中国, a ‘voiceless China’, as Lu Xun famously told an audience at the Hong Kong YMCA in 1927. Though he was mainly speaking about the need to move away from classical Chinese, an outdated mode of expression permeated with Confucian authoritarianism; Lu Xun, who received a traditional Confucian education, saw himself as part of that decaying tradition when he urged the youth to ‘push aside the ancients, and express their authentic feelings’ so as to transform China from its state of ‘voicelessness’.

When asked about Lu Xun in 1990, the exiled Chinese writer Zha Jianying 查建英 had said: ‘The fact that he’s so relevant is very sad.’ More than thirty years later, Lu Xun remains sadly relevant. There is still a long way to go before Lu Xun can be allowed to rest in peace.

Notes

[1] Translation modified based on Alexander Boyd, ‘Censors delete viral “Kong Yiji Literature” anthem’, China Digital Times, 30 March 2023, online at:  https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2023/03/censors-delete-viral-kong-yiji-literature-anthem/?ref=neican.org

[2] Simon Leys, The Burning Forest, London: Paladin, 1988, p.101.

[3] Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays, Collingwood: Black Inc., 2011, p.258.

[4] Yu Hua, China in Ten Words 十個詞彙裡的中國, Taipei: Rye Field Publishing Co, 2010, p.100.

[5] Tsi-an Hsia, The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in China, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1968, pp.146-147.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Lu Hsun, Wild Grass, Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang trans., Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1974, p.3.

[8] Ibid, p.44.

The post ‘Take Off Your Kong Yiji’s Gown’: Why Are State Media and Unemployed Youth Disagreeing Over Interpretations of Lu Xun’s Classic appeared first on The China Story.

The male hare wildly kicks its feet,

The female hare has shifty eyes,

But when a pair of hares run side by side,

Who can tell a buck from doe? [1]

The difficulty of distinguishing the gender of rabbits (and hares, for distinction between the two species was not clearly made in the Chinese language) has led some ancient Chinese to believe that rabbits are androgynous. They become pregnant, some thought, by sucking on their fur and gazing at the moon. The Chinese name for rabbit, tu 兔, is said to derive from the idea that rabbits spit out (tu 吐) their young.

For the best iteration of beliefs related to the rabbit, one need look no further than the Biography of Mao Ying, written by the Tang dynasty statesman Han Yu 韩愈 (768-824), a well-known Confucian pedant and poet, but a forgotten humourist. Written in the style of a conventional historical biography, his piece turns out to be a fictitious account of a rabbit-fur writing brush: Mao 毛, can be a common surname but also stands for fur; Ying 颖 means intelligence as well as the tip of a brush. Crammed with clever double entendre, Han Yu’s parody resembles a literary riddle, and is written for the amusement of the educated reader. [2] Thus, its meaning must be carefully decoded to shine light on the author’s erudition and wit:

Mao Ying was a native of Central Mountain.

Translation: The rabbit-fur brush came from a region in Hebei famous for producing the best rabbit-fur brush.

His ancestor Ming Shi helped Yu the Great govern the East. For rendering service in the nourishment of living things, he was consequently enfeoffed with the lands of Mao.

Explanation: Ming Shi 明视 (‘bright eyes’) is another name for the rabbit, relating to the belief that they have keen vision. Yu the Great is one of the three mythical rulers of ancient China. Mao 卯 is a homophone of mao 毛 (fur), as well as the fourth of the twelve ‘earthly branches’ 地支 in the Chinese calendrical system, corresponding to the direction east and the animal rabbit.

Translation: The rabbit-fur brush descended from a lineage of ‘bright-eyes’ that had flourished in the land of fur since antiquity.

On his death, Ming Shi became one of the Twelve Spirits. He once said, ‘My descendants will be the posterity of a spirit-illuminate and cannot be the same as other creatures. They shall be born by spitting.’ [3]

Translation: Rabbit is one of the twelve zodiac signs, which also correspond to the twelve ‘earthly branches’. They are special because people believe that they give birth to their young by spitting them out!

By Han Yu’s time, the rabbit had been firmly woven into the myth of Chang’e 嫦娥, a female mortal who, after consuming her husband’s elixir of longevity, flew to the moon and became its guardian spirit. In some accounts of the story, a ‘jade rabbit’ 玉兔 — named for its pure white fur — was the original inhabitant of the moon; in other versions, it joined the goddess’ company out of sympathy for her loneliness. [4]

The pictured Tang dynasty bronze mirror depicts the moon goddess on one side and the jade rabbit, pounding the elixir of longevity, on the other. There is also a toad at the bottom, which according to Han Yu, gave the rabbit a ride on its back as they travelled to the moon together. In 2013, China’s third moon lander, named after the goddess Chang’e, took the toad’s role and delivered a robotic rover called ‘Jade Rabbit’ to the lunar surface.

Sometime in the seventeenth century, the rabbit managed to cast aside its role as the moon goddess’ sidekick and transformed itself into a local deity — Lord Rabbit 兔儿爷 — beloved by those living in northern China, especially in areas surrounding the capital Beijing. Before the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, colourful figurines of Lord Rabbit, made from clay or stitched fabric would begin piling up like mountains at the marketplaces of Beijing in the months leading up to the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival. These figurines ranged from one to three feet tall, some were dressed in an official’s gown and cap, others in full armour with a military flag sticking up from the back. Parents would let their children choose one to take home. [5]

Although these figures of Lord Rabbit were anthropomorphically male in appearance; the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival — where offerings were made to the moon (associated with the feminine yin in Chinese cosmology), traditionally excluded adult men from participating in its rituals. As women made offerings to the moon, asking for its blessing and for the birth of (more) sons, their children knelt next to them, praying to the figurine of Lord Rabbit for protection from disease and plague. Then, the day after the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, the rabbit figurine was respectfully removed from the altar and given to kids to play with.

In the spoken dialect of Qing dynasty (1644-1911) Beijing, ‘rabbit’ became a slur for catamites, male actors (particularly those impersonating women on stage) and more generally, male prostitutes. (Interestingly, the same association between rabbits and homosexuals existed in ancient Rome. [6]) According to one elaborate theory, the association between rabbits and homosexuals came from the fact that, as previously mentioned, rabbit correspond to mao 卯, the fourth of the twelve ‘earthly branches’. The mortise and tenon joints commonly used in traditional Chinese architecture, meanwhile, are called sun mao 榫卯. Apparently, the practice of inserting one a piece of wood into a hole in another piece of wood became euphemism for anal sex. [7] A simpler explanation could be that the rabbit was still widely perceived as androgynous, and therefore a suitable metaphor for men who were in some way ‘feminine’. In modern-day speech, some still use the phrase ‘son of a rabbit’ 兔崽子 as an insult.

In 2006, a Daoist priest named Lu Wei-ming 卢威明 founded a shrine dedicated to the Rabbit God 兔儿神, patron saint of homosexuals, in Yonghe City, Taiwan. According to Lu, the Rabbit God is based on a historical person in the Qing dynasty, a man from Fujian province called Hu Tianbao 胡天保, who fell in love with a young, handsome imperial inspector. One day, the story goes, the inspector caught Hu peeping at his naked buttocks through a hole in the privy wall and had Hu beaten to death.

In eighteenth-century Fujian, which is just across the strait from Taiwan, there was indeed an organised cult centred on Hu Tianbao, believed to have the power in the afterlife to grant the wishes of men wanting have sex with younger men. However, according to Harvard professor Michael Szonyi, the association of Hu Tianbao with the Rabbit God was entirely invented by the poet, painter, and gourmet Yuan Mei 袁枚 (1716-1797). [8] In Yuan’s famous anthology of tall tales — What the Master Did Not Talk of  子不语, a reference to a passage in the Analects of Confucius: ‘The Master never talked of wonders, feats of strength, disorders of nature or spirits’ — we find the following account:

A month after Hu’s death, he appeared in a local man’s dream and said: ‘I certainly deserved to die for my feelings have violated propriety and my actions have offended an honourable man. But it was truly a feeling of love, a momentary obsession. This is not the same as causing harm to someone. Officials in the Netherworld all mocked and made fun of me; but none were angry with me. Now they have made me the Rabbit God, charged specifically with supervising the affairs in the world of men who appreciate other men. You may erect a temple for me, and call on the people to burn incense.’ [9]

We do not know whether Yuan Mei wrote this tale for his own amusement, or to express his sympathy for Hu, as hinted by the attitude held by ‘officials in the Netherworld’. Having spent nearly a decade in the capital as a student and official, and formed friendships with male actors, he may have been subverting dominant culture by fusing the popular Beijing deity Lord Rabbit, and the slur for homosexual, with the cult of Hu Tianbao, which he most likely heard from his friend, Zhu Gui 朱珪 (1731–1807), an official tasked with eliminating the cult in Fujian. [10] Regardless, Yuan Mei’s idea eventually found an audience in Taiwan through Lu Wei-ming, who elevated role of the Rabbit God to the protector of the LGBTQ community, as part of his greater fight for recognition and inclusion of LGBTQ into the Daoist faith, as well as Taiwanese society at large.

Just as the rabbit became a symbol for LGBTQ pride on Taiwan, it has also taken on an additional set of associations in mainland China. Around 2010, in a handful of online forums dedicated to military affairs and foreign relations, the word ‘rabbit’ became synonymous with the PRC. One explanation stipulates that this usage was originally employed by patriotic netizens to describe China’s international image as a cuddly bunny, ‘harmless to humans and animals alike’人畜无害. Another theory traces its origin to a viral video of a hare kicking an eagle as it tries to dodge an attack, which has since been interpreted to mean: China, minds its own business but will fight back if provoked by America, the predatory eagle.

In 2011, the year of the rabbit, a webcomic entitled Year Hare Affair 那年那兔那些事儿 became a sensation on the Chinese internet, attracting a total of one billion views. Drawing on historical events of the twentieth-century, It tells the story of the Rabbit family (representing the Communist Party of China and its supporters) working hard to defend their ‘flower-planting household’ (zhong hua jia 种花家: a homophone for 中华家, the family of the Chinese nation) against attacks and oppression from Chickens (Japan, vilified from the nation of the crane to that of the chicken), Bald Eagles (the United States) and Bears (the Soviet Union bear has the hammer and sickle of Communism on its stomach, while the Russia bear, featured later, has the number ‘1’ on its stomach, signifying that it is the eldest son of the Soviet Union. Ukraine is also represented by a bear with the number ‘2’ on its stomach, meaning that it is the ‘second son’.)

The creator of Year Hare Affair, Lin Chao 林超 told an interviewer that he was a huge fan of military aircraft as a child. When he became older, he loved chatting on military forums, and his comics was inspired by discussions in these forums. When asked why he chose to use the rabbit to represent China as opposed to the more obvious national symbol of the dragon, Lin replied, ‘There’s an old saying, “we must go through the year of the rabbit to get to the year of the dragon that follows”. This may be true for our country: only after going through a phase of being “rabbits” can we fully emerge as “dragons”.’

In 2015, Lin’s comic was adapted into an animation series by the same name, and was promoted by the official accounts such as Xinhua News Agency and the Communist Youth League on Weibo. As of 2020, the animation series has attracted more than 800 million views on video streaming sites in China. Lin won an award in 2018 for being a model of online ‘positive energy’, a term central to media and ideological control in the Xi Jinping era.

Sandwiched between the fearsome tiger, whose place it is taking in 2023, and the magnificent dragon, which is due to take over in 2024, the rabbit may seem rather common or garden. Nonetheless, ideas and beliefs relating to its image help bring to the fore some of the unorthodox and even queer aspects of the Chinese tradition. The inherent ambiguity of the rabbit, which traces back to its difficult-to-discern gender, suggests that symbols and meaning ascribed to it will constantly mutate and change. The rabbit thus stands for heterogeneity in a country that has always strived for the opposite. Whatever new meaning it takes on, we welcome the year of the rabbit, hoping that it is a year where ambiguities and multiple voices will flourish.

Notes

[1] Translation modified based on Wilt L. Idema in Shiamin Kwa and Wilt L. Idema trans., Mulan: Five Versions of a Classic Chinese Legend, with Related Texts, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2010, p.3.

[2] Von Herbert Franke, ‘A note on parody in Chinese traditional literature’, Oriens Extremus 18, no. 2 (1971): 247.

[3] Translation of Han Yu’s text and related notes modified based on two educated readers, sinologist William H. Nienhauser Jr. and James R. Hightower: see William H. Nienhauser Jr., ‘An Allegorical Reading of Han Yü’s “Mao-Ying Chuan” (Biography of Fur Point).’ Oriens Extremus 23, no. 2 (1976): 155-156; James R. Hightower, ‘Han Yü as Humorist’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, (1984): 10-11.

[4] Yang Lihui and An Deming, Handbook of Chinese Mythology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 88-89.

[5] There are ample records of Lord Rabbit in the ‘jottings’ 筆記 of the Ming and Qing. Here we base our descriptions from those mentioned in 侧帽餘譚 (1878) and 燕京歲時記 (circa 1900).

[6] John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, p.306.

[7] Zhang Jie 张杰, Investigation into Depictions of Homosexuality in Pre-modern China 中国古代同性恋图考, Yunan: Yunan renmin chubanshe, 2008, p.228.

[8] Arthur Waley, Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet, London: Allen and Unwin, 1956, p. 120.

[9] Translation modified based on Michael Szonyi, ‘The Cult of Hu Tianbao and the Eighteenth-Century Discourse of Homosexuality, Late Imperial China 19, no. 1 (1998): 6. doi:10.1353/late.1998.0004.

[10] Ibid.

The post How the Rabbit Became an Emblem for Both Gay Men and Chinese Nationalists appeared first on The China Story.