In recent years, international media has shone a spotlight on the human rights violations by the Chinese government in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. These violations include the mass incarceration of the Uyghurs, forced labour, birth controls, and language oppression.

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied that these policies constitute human rights violations. Instead, Beijing claims it is fighting against what it labels as “three evils” (三个势力) of terrorism, religious extremism and separatism. And according to Beijing, Xinjiang is the hotbed of the “three evils”.

Due to the extensive media coverage of Xinjiang, religious freedom and oppression there has become widely discussed internationally (even as such discussions are censored in China). Let’s contextualise what’s happening by looking at the history of religious freedom in the PRC.

After the Cultural Revolution, Chinese citizens again enjoyed limited freedoms of religious belief, as religion per se was no longer criminalized. However, the protection of religious freedoms as stipulated in the Constitution is not more than a “pretend world of official language”, in the words of Sinologist Perry Link.

In fact, the perceived relaxation and liberalisation after the Cultural Revolution was a part of the Party’s strategy to gradually eliminate religions. Document 19, issued in 1982 by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, explains the official attitude towards religious affairs. It argues that eradicating religion is a lengthy process, but it is attainable after achieving a high level of material wealth, at which point religion will lose its appeal and disappear from the daily lives of people. Document 19 also asserts that speeding up the process with coercive measures would do more harm than good.

The importance of Document 19 was reiterated by Document 6 issued in 1991 by the Central Committee and the State Council. Document 6 led to more constraints and governmental control on religious activities, by calling for “administering religious affairs in accordance with the law” (依法对宗教事务进行管理), which in reality meant increased number of repressive measures towards “illegal and disruptive” religious activities, such as proselytizing and religious fund-raising.

Today, under Xi Jinping, the spirit of Document 19 and Document 6 lives on. For example, many Chinese academics see the principles outlined in these documents as the “foundation of the socialist religious theory with Chinese characteristics” (中国特色社会主义宗教理论的奠基之作).

In an article published last year, I examined two recent Chinese documents: the Regulations of XUAR on Religious Affairs revised in 2014, and the Religious Affairs Regulations revised in 2017. The amendments to the Xinjiang Religious Affairs Regulations preceded and likely inspired the revision of the national religious affairs regulations three years later, implying that Xinjiang served as a testing ground for religious policies before they became national.

Both documents aim to centralise and bureaucratise the management of religious affairs and use more coercive measures to manage religion. Vague formulations of many legal provisions give the local authorities the power to interpret them at their discretion.

Both documents criminalise religious practices in the name of fighting the “three evils”, thereby gradually uprooting religion from peoples’ everyday life. The Xinjiang regulations go further by banning minors from religious activity sites and from religious home-schooling. They also attempt to isolate religious groups from foreign influences and funding.

The current hard-line religious policies under Xi Jinping don’t deviate from the long-term Party objectives set in the 1980s. What is different is the intensity and political determination to speed up the process and reach the final goal. The so-called “patient persistence in Party policies of co-optation and control” is no longer Beijing’s strategy towards the religious in China.

The reasons behind this change of tactics might relate to the legitimacy of the Communist Party of China and its emptied ideology, the slowing of economic growth, and increased social instability. There might also be more symbolic reasons, such as the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China and the goal of Xi Jinping to achieve what his predecessors did not: the homogenised Chinese Nation run by “staunch Marxist atheists” (坚定的马克思主义无神论者).

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Population and birth rate were the main focus of last week’s census release. The census showed that the number of births continued to fall, marking last year the lowest official number of births since 1961 (in the middle of the Great Famine).

China’s total fertility rate in 2020 was only 1.3 births per woman. However, China’s figure is affected by the pandemic, and may not represent a long-term trend. The average fertility rate for upper middle income countries in 2019 was 1.9 and for high income countries in 2019 was 1.6.

The Chinese Government expected the population growth to decline. After all, it’s their objective in implementing the “One-Child Policy” in the 1980s (later relaxed to Two Child). Deng Xiaoping and the newly empowered reformists saw China’s big population at the time as a problem holding back China’s economic growth. This is in contrast to Mao’s earlier belief that a larger population would make the country powerful.

China is now moving to relax fertility restrictions due to concerns about declining population growth. This “relaxation” is coupled with eugenics, where the Government prioritises an educated urban population for birth encouragement. The educated population is seen as essential for China’s economic power, so it is unsurprising that under Xi, the pursuit of a more powerful China has led to a more active pro-birth policy for certain “desirable” segments of the population.

2. Human rights in Xinjiang

While the Chinese Government is encouraging more births, especially among the Han majority, a report authored by Nathan Ruser and James Leibold for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute concluded that:

While the Chinese government argues it has adopted a uniform family-planning policy in Xinjiang, the county-level natality data suggests these policies are disproportionately affecting areas with a large indigenous population, meaning their application is discriminatory and applied with the intent of reducing the birth-rate of Uyghurs and other religious and ethnic minorities.

This adds to the existing evidence that the Chinese Government is committing human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Past international efforts aimed at pressuring countries to change their policies to improve human rights have yielded mixed results. In cases where the abuser is a great power or has the support of great power, they have been largely ineffective.

This is starkly demonstrated by the example of Israel. Despite decades of efforts by human rights activists, Israel has continued to commit human rights abuses as well as changing facts on the ground by evicting Palestinian residents, making a two-state solution increasingly untenable.

But Israel has the support of its great and powerful friend, the US. The US has even passed laws to combat the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, with some claiming that the BDS movement is a form of antisemitism. Magnitsky sanctions by Five Eye countries against Israel are highly improbable.

China, a rising great power, believes it should be able to act in a similar way as befitting its great power status. It cites its actions in Xinjiang as “anti-terrorism”; it is changing facts on the ground by encouraging Han migration to Xinjiang, and it declares any forms of boycott or sanctions for human rights reasons as Sinophobia. As a bonus, unlike Israel, it is operating in a territory internationally recognised as within its borders.

Since China is a competitor and not ally of the US, the West can choose to not turn a blind eye to its human rights abuses, including through issuing strong condemnations and enacting Magnisky sanctions. However, the West’s inconsistency on human rights is seen by many in China as evidence that the criticisms are just part of great power competition. And unlike smaller powers, China is assured that no country would start a war with it using human rights as a justification.

3. COVID conspiracy

The Australian, one of Australia’s largest newspapers, published an exclusive last week pushing the Wuhan lab bio-warfare theory.

This article insinuates that COVID is a weapon developed by the Chinese military. It cites as evidence a 2015 book, The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons (非典非自然起源和人制人新种病毒基因武器), by Chinese military university and civilian researchers. This book pushes the discredited theory that the SARS virus was weaponised by foreign powers and introduced into China.

It is one thing to believe that the theory of accidental release from a lab cannot be ruled out based on existing evidence; it is something entirely different to believe that the virus is a Chinese military bioweapon.

The latest theory pushed by The Australian article is just the latest misinformation about China, Chinese scientists, and COVID. It reflects poorly on the author of the article, The Australian’s editorial oversight, and those analysts and politicians that have eagerly suspended their critical judgement and jumped on this bandwagon.

Peddling such misinformation is grossly irresponsible. Misinformation about China can complicate diplomatic relations. Last May, Trump administration officials Peter Navaro and Mike Pompeo both condemned China, citing Australian media reports as evidence for the Wuhan lab leak theory. These media reports, originally thought to be based on secret US intelligence, turned out to be speculations based on open-source information.

Second, misinformation about China can fuel xenophobia. The latest misinformation taps into a history of racist othering by portraying the Chinese people as criminal threats to the West. Chinese Australians have been particularly concerned about how COVID is contributing to racism. In a recent Lowy Institute survey, two-thirds of Chinese Australians who have recently experienced discrimination said that COVID was a contributor.

4. COVID propaganda

The International Federation of Journalists published a report by Louisa Lim, Julia Bergin and Johan Lidberg titled The COVID-19 Story: Unmasking China’s Global Strategy. You can also hear two of the authors discussing China’s global propaganda push on the Little Red Podcast.

The report found that “China is coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic with more positive global coverage of its actions and policies than pre-pandemic.” The report detailed some of China’s efforts to push its narrative in other countries, ranging from benign means such as “increased provision of Chinese entertainment” and medical aid to problematic ones, including disinformation and the expulsion of journalists.

Here are our thoughts on this issue:

One, the increased positive coverage is unlikely due entirely to China’s propaganda push. There is no doubt China’s propaganda efforts played a significant role. But other countries’ COVID responses have also made China’s response seem relatively favourable. And the global scramble for, and hoarding of, vaccines has made China appear more reasonable. This can increase positive coverage even in the absence of China’s propaganda efforts.

Two, Associate Professor Erin Baggott Carter found that American news organisations that accepted official trips to China subsequently “made a pivot from covering military competition to covering economic cooperation”. We don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing if it means journalists’ coverage of China became more comprehensive. After all, economic cooperation is an important aspect of a bilateral relationship. What would be a concern is if the reporting becomes less comprehensive as a result, that is, focusing only on the positive side of the relationship and ignoring the negative side.

Three, in the report, China’s efforts in pushing its narrative is compared to “China’s island-building efforts in the South China Sea”, with the narrative landscape being drawn “story by story”. We think this framing is alarmist and unhelpful.

Overall, the report provided useful case studies on China’s tactics in “telling the China story well”. Journalists as well as their audience should be more aware of the power of government in influencing media and public discourse.

5. May 16

On Sunday (May 16) we had the 55th anniversary of the May Sixteenth Circular (五一六通知). This was the document that kicked off the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

The Cultural Revolution years are fundamental in shaping China of today. For millions of Chinese, the 1950s (Great Leap Forward and Great Famine) and the Cultural Revolution decade were cataclysmic. Yet Chinese society has not been allowed to reflect on this history free from Party interference.

The misrule of the CCP since 1949 has created and exacerbated tensions between different groups within Chinese society. These tensions would explode in 1966 and lead to a decade of political, economic and social upheaval.

Mao catalysed the Cultural Revolution, but the upheaval would have not spun out of his control if not for the deep tensions accumulated since the CCP seized political power in China.

Today, under Xi, the Party is streamlining the official telling of China’s modern history. As part of this effort, the Cultural Revolution is increasingly being reinterpreted, shifting the focus away from its terrible consequences to highlighting its achievements.

The terrible tragedies of the Mao era have become, in today’s official narrative, the inevitable cost and worthy sacrifice of socialist China’s “exploration”.

Cultural Revolution, thus has become another sanitised leg of China’s unceasing march from its “century of humiliation” to “national rejuvenation”.

As readers of Neican would know, the CCP is currently conducting a party history campaign while cracking down on “historical nihilism”. Its propaganda machinery is also working full time in the lead up to its 100th anniversary in July.

But, as Lu Xun wrote:

Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood.

墨写的谎言决掩盖不了血写的事实。

The post Neican: census, human rights, conspiracy, propaganda appeared first on The China Story.

Beyond the relationship itself, the state of Australia’s China debate is also increasingly toxic. Those who recognise the risks of engaging with China but still advocate for continued engagement have been excoriated as “craven,” or worse. Those sounding the alarm bells about Beijing’s malign intentions, in turn, have been accused of sowing a “China panic.”

The demonstrable shift toward a more adversarial relationship – a “new Cold War” defined by “extreme competition” – between China as Australia’s largest trading partner, and the United States as Australia’s main ally, has further sharpened these divides under both the Trump and Biden administrations.

Nowhere is this division more unhelpful than in the context of Australia’s response to the ongoing human rights abuses of Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Unfortunately, the handling of this issue in Australia’s China debate is increasingly held captive to broader concerns about Australia’s role in the increasingly overt Sino-US strategic competition.

The evidence that large-scale human rights abuses are occurring in Xinjiang has been clear for some time. Analysis based on Chinese government procurement contracts for construction of these centres and Google Earth satellite imaging has revealed the existence of hundreds of large, prison-like facilities throughout Xinjiang. One of the largest detention centres, Dabancheng, near the regional capital Ürümqi alone is estimated to have a capacity to hold up to 130,000 people. There remains debate about how many people are actually detained in these facilities. However there is no doubt that they exist and are part of a systematic effort to “re-educate” Turkic Muslim minorities. This is a fact now openly celebrated by the Chinese authorities through official policy documents, and a spate of documentaries aired on China Global Television Network.

Witness and survivor testimonies have also provided accounts of what occurs within the detention centres. Although framed by Beijing as “transformation through re-education” centres, the testimonies of such witnesses and survivors reveal them to be facilities in which individuals are subjected to deeply invasive forms of surveillance and psychological stress as they are forced to abandon their native language, religious beliefs, and cultural practices, and in some instances, endure sexual abuse.

Outside of the detention centres, the Turkic Muslim population of the region exists in a “carceral state” where they are subjected to a dense network of high-tech surveillance systems, checkpoints, and interpersonal monitoring which severely limit all forms of personal freedom.

Yet this evidence has been used and interpreted in fundamentally different ways in Australia’s China debate. Two broad trends are apparent here.

One reflects the influence of the so-called “Wolverines,” a group of MPs with hawkish views on China, supported by more bellicose voices in the commentariat. They have used human rights abuses in Xinjiang as a cudgel to rhetorically beat not only Beijing but also those in Australia deemed to be “soft” on China. For such observers, Beijing’s “program of genocide in Xinjiang” is but further proof that Australia confronts a “fascist power that is crushing human liberty at home” and “using brute force to make illegal territorial grabs abroad,” thus justifying heightened “national security” measures such as the Foreign Interference Transparency Scheme. To do anything else would be to yield Australia’s “independence to a rising fascist power.” The shrill nature of debate – punctuated by inflated panic over the “hidden hand” of Chinese influence and interference – has also harmed societal cohesion by casting doubt on the loyalty of Chinese-Australians.

On the other side, a dangerous “what-aboutism” has begun to permeate a segment of the other side of the China debate. It attempts to deflect the “Wolverine” discourse by pointing to human rights abuses by Australia and the United States or to anti-China geopolitical motivations or both. The conclusion of a recent article by former diplomat and long-term activist Alison Broinowski neatly encapsulates each of these elements.

According to Broinowski, before “Australians join the Western pile-on over the Uyghur ‘genocide’,” the country should consider comparing its “‘concentration camps’ in Nauru and Manus Island with China’s ‘education’ centres in Xinjiang” or the fact that, Australia doesn’t “allow Australian foreign fighters or their families to return from Syria, as China does.” This is a classic example of what-aboutism: seeking to distract consideration of an uncomfortable reality – in this case the Chinese Communist Party’s mass repression of an ethnic minority – with counter claims about the malign actions of others.

Broinowski’s article also includes a second theme in Xinjiang crisis denialism: that those researchers and commentators highlighting abuses in Xinjiang are simply either active agents of the United States and the CIA, or “share far-right religious convictions and enmity towards China.” Even a cursory examination of the many academics, researchers, and journalists who have published material on the current crisis in Xinjiang would reveal this characterisation to be, at best, misleading and, at worst, actively mendacious.

Each of these dynamics are entirely unhelpful. They do nothing to inform public discourse on what Australia’s policy response should be. This is because they are primarily concerned with rhetorical point-scoring rather than establishing an evidence base for policy prescription. A healthy debate should be encouraged, but Australians ultimately deserve better than the cheap bifurcated rhetoric they are currently forced to endure.

The article was originally published in Australian Outlook on 30 April 2021.

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There are currently two Australians detained in China on national security grounds: Yang Hengjun and Cheng Lei. Both of them were arrested for national security reasons by Chinese authorities. How did bilateral friction play into their detention? What message was Beijing trying to send? While the answers to these questions remain somewhat unclear and debated, we asked three observers of Australia-China relations for their thoughts on how the Australian Government should approach such cases.

Melissa Conley Tyler, Asia Institute, University of Melbourne

The Australian government should keep advocating strongly on behalf of detained Australians even though in reality there is little it can do.

Consular cases are among the most challenging for diplomats. This is because there is a mismatch between public expectation and demand and the very limited tools available at the disposal of consular officials. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s consular charter states clearly that it cannot intervene in another country’s court proceedings or legal matters, and it tries to manage expectations by stating: “We do what we can to ensure Australians arrested or detained overseas are treated fairly under the laws of the country where they were arrested.”

Occasionally there will be a case like Kylie Moore-Gilbert, where Australia’s diplomats pull off a miracle. With China, however, this is less likely because Australia doesn’t have much to offer in the way of a bargaining chip.

China has been accused of using detention of foreign citizens as a political weapon. For example, Canada’s 2018 arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou appears to have led directly to the arrest of two Canadians in China who were recently put on trial.

The Australian government has warned Australians that if they travel to China they may face arbitrary detention under China’s national security laws. Indeed, Australians in China can be detained and tried by a judicial system that lacks independence and has a staggeringly high conviction rate of 99 per cent.

But that doesn’t mean Australia’s diplomats should stop trying. Particularly where detainees are Chinese-Australian, it is vital that Australia demonstrates that it will be equally strident in demanding fair treatment and trial for all its citizens.

Detained Australian writer Yang Hengjun has said that one taunt in his interrogations was that Australia wouldn’t care about him because he is of Chinese background. Australia has shown this not to be true, through repeated public statements and requests, including from Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Prime Minister.

Even if all Australia can do is protest, it should continue to do so. It shows that Australia does not abandon its citizens – and may give China pause the next time.

Han Yang, Former PRC diplomat now residing in Sydney

We don’t know the details of the charges against the two Australians detained in China yet, but it is probably a safe bet that just like the crippling tariffs against Australian wines and barley, China is leveraging the detention as punishment for Australia’s various perceived diplomatic “transgressions”.

With China’s extremely broad national security laws and prevalent self-dealing and corruption in government and business, foreigners can be technically breaking Chinese laws everyday without knowing, and become pawns in China’s escalating strategic chess game with the West.

In the short term, there is not much Australia can do to help the detainees. The power imbalance between the two countries means it is futile for Australia to engage in trade sanctions against China as retaliation. And Australia’s constitutional democracy and independent judicial system won’t allow Canberra to arbitrarily detain Chinese nationals as tit-for-tat counter measures.

But over the long term, perhaps a more strategic approach to maintain our relationship with China could be effective.

First, avoid gratuitous confrontation and megaphone diplomacy with Beijing. Yes, we should always stand up for democratic values and human rights. But as a middle power Australia doesn’t have the political and economic clout to lead the global fight against tyranny and dictatorship. This is not appeasement, but simply an acknowledgement of the reality of dealing with Australia’s largest trading partner. After all, no business can prosper by constantly insulting its best customers.

Second, keep the “China threat” in perspective. China is no Nazi Germany or Soviet Union bent on world domination. The legitimacy of the Chinese Communist regime lies in continued economic growth for the country’s populace. Unlike the Soviets, China’s economy is intricately linked to the global supply chain, consumer demand and financial system. A peaceful coexistence with the West is in China’s strategic interest.

Third, build alliances and seek safety in numbers. Countries such as Canada and Australia whose citizens got caught up in China’s power game should join together and lobby the US and the European Union to form a “united front” in countering China’s hostage diplomacy and economic coercion. The new Biden administration’s public statement that Australia will not be left alone in the field is a welcoming sign in this regard.

Elena Collinson, Australia-China Relations Institute, UTS

Authoritarian governments have long resorted to national security as a legitimising gloss spread thick over restrictions of freedom of expression and association.

There is an emerging trend in which Chinese authorities take increasingly liberal recourse to Article 111 of the country’s criminal code (supplying state secrets) to target foreign citizens. The article seems to be intentionally ill-defined in order to allow for broad application, including to cases that may aid the achievement of political goals.

The Australian government is alive to the fact that it needs to allow for some flexibility in how it responds. It is critical to strike a balance between public statements and back-channelling, bearing in mind that public denunciation may at times hinder work towards the release of detainees despite acting as a salve for the domestic conscience.

But this is not to say that Australia must cleave to ‘quiet diplomacy’ at all costs. With Beijing reluctant to furnish Canberra with any information about charges pertaining to Australian citizens Yang Hengjun and Cheng Lei, and with all proceedings conducted under a shroud and limited or no access to legal representation, it seems that in these matters, quiet diplomacy has run its course.

Working towards consolidating more international support, as well as furnishing the broader public with more information about the risks that travel to China presents may be useful. Australia recently delivered a joint statement with 34 countries against arbitrary detention at the UN Human Rights Council; joined 57 countries in endorsing Canada’s ‘Declaration against arbitrary detention in state-to-state relations’; and showed support to the Canadian detainees, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig.

The Australian government could make more frequent its mentions of its detained citizens in major speeches by senior ministers. Canada, for example, has been particularly active in this regard. Surely when relations are where they are – rock bottom – there is little to lose if the Australian government were to insist on pressing the cases of its citizens in its public-facing rhetoric. More information could also be added to Australia’s current Smarttraveller China travel advisory highlighting more clearly the ramifications of China’s national security laws for prospective Australian travellers.

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The US, the EU, the UK and Canada, in coordination, imposed sanctions last week on Chinese officials and state entities over human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The US has previously sanctioned Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), Xinjiang Public Security Bureau (XPSC) and six officials in July 2020. Last week, the US added two more officials to the sanction list.

In the same week, the EU, the UK and Canada imposed sanctions on four Chinese individuals and XPSC. Notably, they did not impose sanctions on Chen Quanguo, who is a Politburo member and the Communist Party Secretary of  Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Chen is the most senior Chinese official sanctioned by the US.

In retaliation, China then imposed counter-sanctions on a long list of individuals and entities. The list includes two US individuals, one Canadian individual, one Canadian entity, nine UK individuals, four UK entities, ten EU individuals and four EU entities.

Unlike the UK, EU, UK and Canadian sanctions, China’s sanction targets included people that are not politicians or government officials as well as non-government organisations. For example, the list included a lawyer, a law firm, three scholars, and an independent think tank.

Targeted sanctions for human rights

There are ongoing debates on whether targeted sanctions are effective in combating human rights abuses, especially against a big and powerful country like China. Certainly, such coordinated and public sanction sends a strong message to Beijing. But these targeted sanctions together are unlikely to be enough to change Beijing’s calculus in its policies towards Xinjiang.

However, targeted sanctions may be the best tool that countries have available in sending a message to China. After all, a general sanction would significantly damage diplomatic relations as well as being detrimental to these countries’ own economic interests.

For sanctioned individuals, their incentives lie in carrying out directives from the Party Centre. These targeted sanctions are unlikely to deter them from doing that.

Human rights abuses in Xinjiang are occurring under the watchful eyes of Xi Jinping and the Politburo Standing Committee, the highest decision-making body in China. Yet, no one has sanctioned Xi or any Politburo Standing Committee members. This is unsurprising, as sanctioning a head of state or a head of government would be seen as an extremely hostile action.

So this is what we are left with — an action that is unlikely to be effective in changing the human rights situation in Xinjiang. But there are not many alternatives.

Unsurprisingly, China retaliated with its own list of sanctions. From Beijing’s perspective, it doesn’t really care what the sanctions are for. What it sees is that some countries are imposing sanctions on it, so it must retaliate in kind in order to appear strong internationally.

Researchers and think tanks

Among those sanctioned by China include German scholar Adrian Zenz, Swedish scholar Björn Jerdén, UK scholar Jo Smith Finley and German think tank Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS). Adrian Zenz and Jo Smith Finley are scholars working on Xinjiang while Björn Jerdén has conducted research on Confucius Institutes.

As for MERICS, according to the nationalistic Global Times, MERICS’s sins include publishing on human rights in China and refusing to be interviewed by Chinese media. MERICS has released a statement expressing regret for China’s decisions and rejecting the allegations. Four senior personnel from the US think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) released a rather substantial statement supporting MERICS.

Even before this latest sanction, as the CSIS statement notes, China researchers were already working in an increasingly restrictive and sometimes hostile environment:

But in the last few years, China has gone significantly further in obstructing independent research and constructive scholarly exchange. China has been more restrictive in issuing visas for scholars, particularly those who work on topics that could reflect negatively on China’s claims of good governance. Field research is increasingly risky, even for those focused on topics like economics and business.

…

Chinese officials now routinely and publicly criticize researchers whose work they do not agree with, and we also personally know of instances in which Chinese officials and visitors have threatened U.S. experts on China when visiting the United States. There are also cases of Chinese officials going so far as to threaten Chinese-born scholars with the punishment of their families in China for publishing opinions abroad that do not align with those of Beijing.

Needless to say, the harassment of these scholars is unacceptable. Furthermore, such actions only turn people away from pursuing China studies. China may believe this will lead to less negative reporting and public opinion of China. But in fact, the reverse is likely to be true.

Scholars and researchers working on China contribute to a fuller and more nuanced understanding of China. Without this nuanced and contextual background, reporting and public opinion of China is likely to be even more simplistic and caricatured.

If China wants a more “positive” coverage by scholars and researchers, then it should try to improve its soft power rather than relying on the blunt instrument of coercion. It should fund more exchanges and loosen restrictions rather than trying to stop exchanges.

For universities and other research institutes, they should be mindful of the pressure that China researchers are under, and ensure that these researchers are not penalised for the restrictions they are facing. This may include sponsor and host dissident scholars and consider how to support researchers when they’re unable to do fieldwork in China.

Xinjiang cotton

Amidst all this, “supporting Xinjiang cotton” has become a viral movement on Chinese social media. There is currently a boycott of movement of several clothing brands, including H&M, Nike, and Burberry. Many celebrities have joined in, severing their relationship with these brands. Regina Ip, Hong Kong Executive and Legislative Council Member, also joined the act.

The timing of this “consumer boycott” is highly suspicious. The statement by H&M was from September last year, but was recently dug out by the Communist Youth League on Weibo after the sanctions were announced. H&M happens to be a European (Swedish) company.

The consumer boycott has gained momentum. Many people online are angry that Western brands are “boycotting Xinjiang cotton”. So the battlelines have been drawn between “boycotting” and “supporting” Xinjiang cotton, while the underlying reason for the “boycott” (i.e. any human rights concerns) is usually overlooked.

However, the overwhelming voices online “supporting Xinjiang cotton” is partly a result of censorship. Some have tried to voice their support for “Xinjiang people” instead. But their posts, and even their accounts, were banned afterwards.

Yet such attention on Xinjiang could backfire for the government, as people become curious about the reason behind the “boycott” in the first place. Authorities will likely try to tone down the online excitement soon.

This “consumer boycott” follows on from similar consumer boycotts in China, including over the designation of Taiwan in 2018. Companies are again being caught in the middle of a geopolitical stoush.

The main focus of companies is profit maximisation. In the last few decades, companies have also pursued corporate social responsibility (CSR). But this is often done to enhance the company’s reputation and brand, with the view of improving the bottom line (a cynic’s perspective).

In this instance, companies may have to consider whether using or abandoning Xinjiang cotton is better for profit, by taking into account the likelihood, the scale, and the length of possible consumer boycotts in different countries. This is on top of other considerations, such as government action, which are likely to have more impact on the business.

In the long run, if similar incidents happen more regularly, then it may lead to a bifurcation of global businesses, in a similar vein as we are already seeing in technology platforms (FAANG and BAT).

2. Beijing’s friends

The rise in friction and tension between the West and China in recent years has given Beijing added impetus to bolster ties with non-Western countries. Last week was a big week in this regard.

On 23 March, foreign ministers of China and Russia issued a joint statement of solidarity against the West. A few days later, on 27 March, Beijing and Tehran signed a 25-year strategic cooperation agreement.

Both Beijing and Washington are trying to coordinate partners against each other. Since becoming President, Biden has emphasised coordinating China policy with allies and partners. And indeed, we have seen evidence of increased coordination and consultation between the US and its allies and partners in the lead-up and following the US-China Alaska summit (e.g., QUAD meeting).

Similarly, Beijing has also been working hard at coordinating with its partners. There are four main drivers pushing Beijing to bolster ties with non-Western countries. First, Beijing wants to ensure that it is not isolated, both strategically as well as diplomatically on issues such as human rights.

Second, against the increasing coalescence of Western pressure on China, Beijing is trying to cement existing relations with like-minded countries in support of values and principles that it purportedly advocates, such as the sanctity of sovereignty and territorial integrity, and non-interference.

Third, China’s economic relationship with the US and others have taken a hit due to political tensions. The conditions for foreign investment and research collaborations between China and the West have deteriorated in recent years too. Economic and technology partnerships with non-Western countries are assuming greater importance in China’s economic strategy.

Finally, Beijing is looking for partners to work with on multilateral, including regional issues. This is especially so because China is trying to assume a greater role in global governance. Emerging regional powers, including countries in the BRICS grouping, are increasingly relevant to China’s expanding global ambitions.

With this very brief background, let’s get into recent developments!

Beijing and Moscow

On 22 and 23 March, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Guilin, China. The result was a joint statement by Beijing and Moscow.

Both China and Russia have come under criticisms from the West on human rights issues and their increasing assertiveness. Both have felt the pressure of Western criticism and sanctions. The joint statement rejects the values that the West purportedly upholds. It is a rebuke of  universal values, Western-style democracy, rules-based order, and US unilateralism.

The joint statement starts off by stating that “[t]he world has entered a period of high turbulence and rapid change”, and urged the international community to work together in establishing “a fairer, more democratic and rational multipolar world order”. In the world imagined by Beijing and Moscow, the West (and US in particular), would be displaced from its dominant position in the international system. China, Russia, and other emerging powers would expand their relative influence.

Following this, the document addresses four issues: human rights, democracy, international law, and multilateral cooperation.

On human rights:

All human rights are universal, indivisible and interrelated….The promotion and protection of human rights is a common task for the international community, which means its members should pay equal attention to a systematic implementation of all categories of human rights. It is time to stop attaching a political agenda to the topic of human rights and abandon the practice of using it as a pretext for interfering in the internal affairs of other states and applying double standards…

(bold emphasis added)

On democracy:

[T]here is no single standard for a democratic model. The legitimate right of sovereign states to independently determine their own trajectory of development needs to be respected. Interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of “promoting democracy” is unacceptable.

On international law:

All states, without exception, should make efforts to maintain the inviolability of the international relations system, in which the United Nations plays a central role, and of the world order formed in accordance with international law…In the context of the escalating global political turbulence, there is a need to hold a summit of the permanent members of the UN Security Council in order to establish a direct dialogue between them on ways to resolve common problems facing humanity, in the interests of maintaining global stability.

On multilateral cooperation:

Countries must jointly respond to challenges and threats of a global nature; jointly uphold the authority of multilateral platforms and improve their efficacy; help optimise the system of global governance; jointly protect peace and strategic stability…the main instrument that should be used in international affairs is a dialogue aimed at rapprochement of all countries, not disunion; at cooperation, not confrontation.

Given the convergence of interest, the cooperation between Beijing and Moscow will likely become deeper in the years to come. The two have already agreed to build a permanent lunar base together. What more can you want!

But in all seriousness, US pressure on Moscow and Beijing is driving the two closer strategically despite the competitive aspects of their relationship, including in the Far East and Central Asia.

At the media appearance with Wang Yi announcing the joint statement, Sergey Lavrov remarked:

all has been quiet on the Western front, whereas the East offers a very intense agenda, which is getting more varied every single year.

All Quiet on the Western Front is the English title of the 1929 novel Im Westen nichts Neues by German WWI veteran and novelist Erich Maria Remarque. The novel told of the senselessness and brutality of war, and its soul-destroying effects. Wittingly or unwittingly, Lavrov conjures a sense of an impending clash with the West in the same breath in which he talked about a bright partnership with China.

Beijing and Tehran

On 27 March, Beijing and Tehran signed a 25-year strategic cooperation agreement during Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit to the Middle East. This deal aims to build closer economic and political ties between the two countries, and includes cooperation in energy and infrastructure sectors. There is very little public information on the specifics, with some reports putting the dollar figure of this deal at $400 billion.

We have three observations on this deal. First, some of the same drivers that are driving China and Russia together are also driving China-Iran collaboration, namely, a common opposition in a West that is pressuring both countries.

Second, the deal undermines US efforts to isolate Iran politically. Beijing is against US unilateral sanctions on Iran, and has urged the Biden Administration to return to the negotiating table without preconditions. During his meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, Wang Yi stated that:

In view that the [US’] unilateral sanctions against Iran violate international law and cause harm to the Iranian people, the international community should work together to oppose any acts of bullying by powers…

The unilateral withdrawal of the former U.S. administration from the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] JCPOA [that is, the Iran nuclear deal] created a bad precedent for non-compliance with international agreements, which was condemned by the international community. The new U.S. administration hopes to return to the JCPOA, and we welcome it. China believes that upholding the JCPOA means upholding multilateralism and upholding the authority of the UN Security Council. The JCPOA, not a revolving door, can’t be willfully withdrawn from and joined in by the United States. The United States should reflect on the damage to regional peace and international stability caused by its withdrawal of the JCPOA, and reflect on the losses it has caused to relevant countries. The unilateral sanctions on Iran should be lifted as soon as possible, and the long-arm jurisdiction on relevant countries, including China, should be lifted.

Third, no, China is not about to supplant the US power in the Middle East. While it is true that China is expanding its influence in the region, it is also trying to balance its relations with Iran on one hand and Saudi Arabia on the other, and that balancing act has just became harder with the latest deal with former.

The post China Neican: 31 March 2021 appeared first on The China Story.

China’s ageing population received some important attention in the 14th Five Year Plan (FYP) that will run from 2021 to 2025. China has a rapidly ageing population. By 2025, one-fifth of the population will be over 60. By 2050, China’s dependency ratio is projected to reach 70 per cent. Chinese and international experts have been warning about a demographic time bomb in China for decades — that China will grow old before it grows rich and powerful.

The 14th FYP makes it clear that this is a priority issue that needs to be tackled by the implementation of a “proactive national strategy on ageing population” (积极应对人口老龄化国家战略). In contrast, the 13th FYP (that ran from 2016 to 2020) did not use the term “national strategy”, and merely stated that: “[China] will respond to population aging, strengthen top-level design, and establish a system for addressing population aging”.

Beyond that, the 14th FYP has some noticeable differences to the 13th FYP on the framing of the issue of demography. The 13th FYP still emphasised “family planning” (计划生育), a term that used to mean one-child policy, then changed to two-child policy just before the 13th FYP in 2016. The 14th FYP instead focused on “enhance the inclusiveness of fertility policy” (增强生育政策包容性).

The change in language indicates that policy is moving in a more “pro-birth” direction. This is not surprising. Countries wanting to reverse an ageing population must either take in more migrants or put in place policies to raise the birth rate. Most governments put more effort into the latter, as that tends to be more politically popular. We previously wrote that:

The Chinese Government does not consider an individual’s fertility as a personal choice, but attempts to control it. The targets of control are overwhelmingly women rather than men — forced IUD and sterilisation rather than forced vasectomy. When the local enforcement is more lenient, fines are issued. When the enforcement is more strict, forced late-term abortions can be the result.

That passage described what happened in most parts of China in the 1990s under the strict implementation of the one-child policy, but is now happening to a particular group of people (such as the Uyghurs). Just as Beijing is trying to restrict fertility in some groups, it is also encouraging fertility in other groups, namely, among Han urban dwellers.

One reason for that is the concept of “优生优育”, meaning “superior birth and raising” — it comes very close to eugenics. The attitude towards eugenics among the wider population in China is often rather positive. And that attitude to eugenics and Social Darwinism (mixed with sexism) produces a rather toxic attitude towards fertility and gender.

Governments can encourage fertility in at least two ways. One is to remove impediments for individuals or families to have children. These are usually “progressive” policies, such as better support for childcare and removing sex discrimination at work. Another way is to foster a more “conservative” social attitude, such as shaming single women and penalising working women. China appears to be doing both.

On the conservative social front, some recent policies have become quite controversial. Recently we wrote about concerns around the “feminisation of young men”. A new “cooling off” period for divorce has also been implemented this year. While the “cooling off” period is also in force in other countries (in Australia, divorce requires one year of separation), the concern in China is that this is another way for Beijing to encourage “traditional family values”.

Indeed, Xi himself has been quite vocal in reinforcing “traditional family values” or ‘traditional virtues”. Xi has frequently alluded to Confucian ideals of family and gender roles, for example, 妻贤夫安，母慈子孝 (amiable wife and secure husband, compassionate mother and filial son). Such emphasis on the traditional family has resulted in denying single women access to egg freezing services, despite wanting to encourage fertility.

The socially conservative focus on families is perhaps reflected in the new section in the 14th FYP on “strengthening family development” (加强家庭建设). The FYP also contains some more “progressive” aspects. It promotes gender equality (促进男女平等), including “eliminating sex discrimination in employment” (消除就业性别歧视).

Despite recent policies to encourage more births, people in China appear to continue to favour fewer children. The birth rate dropped 15 per cent in 2020 compared to 2019, the lowest point since the founding of the People’s Republic.

2. Hukou reform

Hukou, also known as the household registration system, was introduced in the 1950s. It was used to control internal migration, essentially preventing mass migration from the countryside to cities. It basically divides PRC citizens into two groups: rural and urban. Those born with an urban hukou have a much higher chance of attaining middle-class income than those born with a rural hukou. The hukou system also indicates the place of residence, which then determines the welfare benefits an individual receives.

Since the 1980s, millions of migrants have moved from the countryside to the cities. These people are the labour force that has been driving China’s economic development and urbanisation.

Yet these migrants do not enjoy the social welfare benefits that the urban residents enjoy, including, for example, schooling for children. As a result, many of the migrant workers’ children were “left behind” in the countryside. Despite their contribution to the cities that they worked and lived in (some for years if not decades), these migrant workers are often discriminated against, and derogatively called “peasant workers” (农名工).

In recent years, China has gradually relaxed restrictions of the Hukou system. This is done at different paces in different jurisdictions — not uniform across the country. However, the national policy provided direction and support for this effort. For example, in the 14th FYP:

Liberalise and relax restrictions on settlement of household registration/hukou in cities other than several mega-cities, and pilot implementing a system of registration of household registration/hukou based on place of permanent residence on a trial basis. Completely abolish restrictions on settlement of household registration/hukou in cities with a resident population of less than 3 million, and ensure equal treatment of domestically migrating and local rural migrants in terms of the criteria for settling in cities. Completely relax the conditions for settling in Type I large cities with a permanent population of 3 million to 5 million.

放开放宽除个别超大城市外的落户限制，试行以经常居住地登记户口制度。全面取消城区常住人口 300 万以下的城市落户限制， 确保外地与本地农业转移人口进城落户标准一视同仁。全面放宽城区常住人口 300 万至 500 万的 I 型大城市落户条件。

(translation by Pekingnology)

While changes are gradual, the direction is towards fewer restrictions and discriminatory treatments. For example, Jiangxi recently relaxed restrictions for changing/converting hukou.

A personal anecdote: after I (Yun) moved to Australia, many people in China asked whether I cancelled my Shanghai hukou, and was surprised when I answered in the affirmative. This shows the value that a Shanghai hukou holds in people’s mind.

3. Lei Feng and the moral order

Last week, on 5 March, was China’s Learn from Lei Feng national memorial day (学雷锋纪念日).

The stories of Lei Feng should be familiar to most people educated in China. Lei Feng was a CCP member and PLA soldier who shot to fame in the 1960s as the paragon of Communist virtues: a selfless good samaritan and a loyal soldier of Chairman Mao.

The propaganda about Lei Feng would reach feverish pitches following Mao’s call in March 1963 for the whole country to “learn from Comrade Lei Feng”. Lei became, for a time, a Communist saint. It was convenient, of course, that Lei died in a work-related accident (falling telegraph pole) in August 1962 before Mao made him into a national hero. After all, dead heroes are easier to manage than living ones.

It was convenient also that his virtuous deeds and thoughts were so meticulously recorded in his diary, and he had the good fortune (unlike the rest of us) of having reporters and photographers with him when he did good deeds.

Essentially, Mao needed a hero, and Lei Feng was that hero.

The propaganda surrounding him highlighted the Communist-Maoist moral order, one in which fierce loyalty to the leader, ultra-altruism, and selfless dedication to the revolution was seen as virtues. Lei Feng had proudly proclaimed himself a “rustless screw” in the communist revolution machinery.

You may wonder what Lei Feng has to do with China today. Lei Feng is a symbol of the bygone Communist-Maoist moral order. Today, the Party-state is trying to regain its control over China’s pluralising moral landscape.

The Communist-Maoist moral order collapsed after the end of the Cultural Revolution. The party-state continued to hang on to the remnants of that moral order even as massive social and economic transformation had opened up the moral landscape to pluralisation. Individualism, the pursuit of happiness and material wealth, and critical thinking became acceptable and even desirable. Remember the tumultuous decade of the 1980s when the horizon of possibilities had been wide open for China?

In any case, in the Mao era, you achieved social esteem and material betterment by being politically astute. Today, you can also gain social status and material wealth by becoming a financier, tech entrepreneur or online celebrity. You have more choices in life.

China’s economic liberalisation and its accompanying changes have led to a perceived moral crisis in Chinese society, especially among social conservatives. Corruption, financial scams, fake food, social distrust, are seen as evidence of moral corruption. Individualism and the pursuit of profit are often blamed for these. But such discourses often overlook their benefits.

Today, the CCP is trying to regain its moral leadership by recasting the remnants of the old moral order through the Core Socialist Values (社会主义核心价值观). These are the values of “prosperity”, “civility” and “harmony”; the social values of “freedom”, “equality”, “justice” and the “rule of law”; and the individual values of “patriotism”, “dedication”, “integrity” and “friendship”.

Old heroes, like Lei Feng, have made somewhat of a comeback in the 2010s. In March 2012, the General Office of the CCP Central Committee issued a guidance document on learning from Lei Feng《关于深入开展学雷锋活动的意见》, stating that:

To carry out activities studying Lei Feng under the new situation is highly significant. We must vigorously carry forward the spirit of Lei Feng to stimulate people’s enthusiasm for ideological and moral construction, advocate a new style of civilisation, correct moral failures, correct the lack of integrity, improve the moral level of society, guide people traditional virtues of the Chinese nation, practice socialist moral code, and create good social morals. We must carry forward the spirit of the nation and the spirit of the times, to promote the construction of the core socialist value system, the striving spirit of the nation; and for the cadres and masses of will and strength to build a moderately prosperous society, and to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

新形势下深入开展学雷锋活动，大力弘扬雷锋精神，对于激发人们思想道德建设热情，倡导文明新风，匡正道德失范，矫正诚信缺失，提升社会道德水平，引导人们做中华民族传统美德的传承者、社会主义道德规范的实践者、良好社会风尚的创造者；对于弘扬民族精神和时代精神，促进社会主义核心价值体系建设，形成全民族奋发向上的精神力量；对于凝聚干部群众的意志和力量，全面建设小康社会，实现中华民族伟大复兴，具有十分重要的意义。

This is an example of recasting old heroes to the needs of the “new era”. Except that heroes such as Lei Feng have lost some of their appeals. This perhaps explains why in recent years the propaganda system has been creating new heroes instead of only reinforcing the old ones.

Who are these new heroes, you may ask? They are the grassroots cadres on the forefront of poverty alleviation; they are China’s astronauts; they are patriotic captains of industry from the past and present; they are the frontline medical staff fighting COVID; and they are the “martyrs” who died fighting Indian troops in the Galwan Valley.

Like Lei Feng, these new heroes are patriotic to the nation and loyal to the Party. But unlike Lei Feng, they are more suited to the sensibilities of Xi’s new era.

4. Uyghur genocide

A new report by the US-based Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy concludes that China’s ongoing treatment of Uyghurs constitutes genocide under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention).

This report is one of the first non-government legal examinations applying the Genocide Convention to Beijing’s conduct in Xinjiang with contributions from 33 experts, including specialists in law, China studies, and Xinjiang.

Through the evaluation of publicly available information, the report concludes that Beijing is in breach of each and every one of the five prohibitions listed in Article II of the Genocide Convention:

Article II

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with

intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as

such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its

physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

In short, under Article II, there are two requirements for conducts to constitute genocide under international law. First, the conduct needs to be carried out with the “intention to destroy…a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Second, the conduct falls within one or more of the categories listed.

On intent, the report cites as evidence high-level statement and general plan by Beijing, including the 2014-launched “People’s War on Terror” and the use of dehumanising language targeting Uyghurs in the context of so-called “counter-terror” (e.g., “wipe them out completely,” “round up everyone who should be rounded up,” “break their roots, break their connections”).

In addition, it cites a pattern of state conduct and policy that have destroyed Uyghur communities and culture, including:

1. Government-mandated homestays where Han cadres reside in Uyghur homes as monitors, leading to the fracturing of family bonds;
2. Mass detention of Uyghurs in internment camps;
3. Mass birth-prevention strategy targeting Uyghur women, including with forced sterilisation, abortions and IUD placements;
4. Forcible transfer of Uyghur children to state-run facilities, especially in cases where both parents are held in internment camps;
5. Eradication of Uyghur identity, community, and domestic life by destroying Uyghur education, architecture, and religious and sacred sites.
6. Selective targeting of Uyghur intellectuals, and community and cultural leaders.

The evidence that the latest report is based on is not new. Since 2017, we have seen a trickle, followed by a torrent, of information about Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang and its effects on Uyghurs and other minority peoples. There is very little doubt at this point that Beijing has, and still is, engaged in a systematic campaign of surveillance, oppression, and cultural destruction in Xinjiang.

So far, three countries (the US, Canada, and the Netherlands) have characterised Beijing’s ongoing campaign against the Uyghurs as amounting to genocide. This number will likely rise as awareness and political pressure builds.

Legally, the other 151 signatories of the Genocide Convention have a responsibility to act to prevent and punish China’s alleged genocide against the Uyghurs. However, the Genocide Convention does not list specific penalties or punishments.

In cases involving alleged genocides in the past, such as in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, special international criminal tribunals have been set up by the UN Security Council. Given that China is one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, it will certainly veto any resolution to establish a tribunal on its conduct in Xinjiang.

Despite the limits of international law, there are a number of things countries around the world can do. First, countries should explicitly characterise Beijing’s conduct as “genocide” if they believe the evidence supports this allegation.

Second, they should try to influence Beijing’s cost-benefit calculus by raising the cost of human rights abuses. This means prioritising human rights relative to other interests, such as diplomatic relations and economic interests.

Third, they should be consistent in their advocacy for human rights — both at home and abroad — by preventing violations by themselves and calling out all abuses.

Fourth, they should give refuge to those who have escaped from Xinjiang, and other places where human rights violations are occurring.

Chinoiserie

This week, we look at sources on Beijing’s ongoing human rights abuses in Xinjiang:

• Xinjiang Victims Database documents the people that have been incarcerated in internment camps with testimonies and publicly available information.
• Breaking Down the Xinjiang Crisis by @BadChinaTake is an in-depth reading/resource guide.
• Xinjiang Documentation Project is a repository of resources offering a range of perspectives on the ongoing events in Xinjiang, including timelines, key documents and translations.

The post Neican: Demography, Hukou, Lei Feng, and Uyghur genocide appeared first on The China Story.

China’s BRI involves 138-countries with an upward cost estimate of one trillion dollars. But China’s ambitions with the BRI has particular significance for the Middle East, as the region lies at the heart of the European, Asian and African continents, and is a crucial link for China’s overland Silk Road Economic Belt.

This has translated into significant investment by China in Middle Eastern countries. Most countries, with the exception of Syria, Jordan, Israel and Palestine, have signed documents relating to the BRI, and there has been a notable uptick in trade between Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries and China since the early 2010s.

Crackdown in Xinjiang

During the 2010s, the decade that China shifted its MENA policy to engage key countries to support the BRI, it also became clear that China has launched a campaign of oppression against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Citing national security, China began a fierce crackdown on Uyghur communities — a campaign that is still ongoing today.

In recent years, the measures have become increasingly oppressive and arbitrary. In 2018, it became clear to the international community that China was holding as many as one million Uyghurs in ‘re-education’ camps. More than 30 countries, including the United States, Germany, Canada, and Australia, have condemned the imprisonment of Uyghurs. Many of the Uyghurs in the camps are kept there extrajudicially, with some being used as forced labour for major international fashion labels.

MENA countries have largely been silent.

Reasons for silence

One explanation for the uncomfortable silence from MENA countries is their desire to avoid shining a light on their own human rights violations. In its annual report, Human Rights Watch outlined a host of human rights infringements by MENA countries, most notably the continued restrictions of freedom for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

While this may certainly be a contributing factor, MENA countries are not afraid to criticise human rights abuses in countries like the United States and Israel when it suits their political agenda. Similarly, the argument that Muslims in Xinjiang are too culturally and ethnically different to Muslims in MENA for these countries to care about does not hold much water. For example, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation called for United Nations intervention in the genocide against Muslims in Myanmar in 2017. In contrast, its member states have ‘spoken positively’ about China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims.

The responses of Egypt and Turkey serves to illustrate the dynamics at play.

Egypt

Egypt is one of the key countries for the BRI. Not only does the country possess key locations on international trade routes, such as Port Said and the Suez Canal, it also holds historical significance as one of the countries along the old ‘Silk Road’, signifying the two countries’ long history of trade and commerce.

In early 2017, Egyptian Interior Minister Magdy Abd al-Ghaffar and Chinese Deputy Public Security Minister Chen Zhimin met to discuss ‘extremist organisations’. A month later, dozens of Uyghur students were arrested in Cairo with some of them eventually deported to China. That same year, Egypt signed a US$1.2 billion deal with two Chinese state-owned companies to build a light rail around Cairo.

The two countries signed a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ in 2014, one of only five MENA countries to have such a high-level agreement with China.

Turkey

Perhaps the best country to exemplify the complacency, or complicity, with Beijing’s oppression of Uyghur Muslims, is Turkey. Under pressure from Turkey’s large Uyghur community, president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been very vocal about China’s treatment of its Uyghur population. In early 2019, Turkey’s foreign ministry even went as far to call China’s policy “a great cause of shame for humanity”.

However, in 2019, under diplomatic pressure from China on one side, and fiscal pressure from a crumbling domestic economy on the other, Erdogan went back on his previous statements. He provided tacit support for China’s policy by taking a notably softer tone, and claimed that it was possible to find a solution by ‘taking into account the sensitivities on both sides’. It was also around this time that Turkey began to push for a ‘Middle Corridor’ on the Belt and Road that would connect Asia and Europe. Beijing would pump millions of dollars into the Turkish economy through infrastructure projects and trade routes.

An important distinction should be made in this context — that silence, or even implicit support, from the top levels of government in MENA countries does not mean the citizens in these countries are unconcerned about what has been happening in Xinjiang. In December 2019, thousands marched through Ankara in support of the plight of Uyghur communities in China. But these protests are becoming increasingly rare. China’s soft power, wielded through Arabic Chinese-state media, are having an impact on public opinion and narratives. As many Western countries are reconsidering their relationships with China, pressure will build on the governments of MENA countries on their silence over China’s human rights abuses against Muslims in return for economic benefits. On multiple occasions, MENA countries have been willing to call out abuses being committed against Muslims. On Beijing’s oppression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, silence from MENA countries speaks volumes.

Photo credit: 維基小霸王, Wikimedia Common

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The known practices of the ‘re-education’ facilities clearly resonate with the worst totalitarian precedents of the 20th century. Many of these facilities resemble prisons complete with hardened security and surveillance features including barbed wire, guard towers and CCTV cameras. Further, within them detainees experience a regimented daily existence as they are compelled to repeatedly sing “patriotic” songs praising the benevolence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and study Mandarin, Confucian texts and Xi Jinping Thought. Those detainees who resist or do not make satisfactory progress “risk solitary confinement, food deprivation, being forced to stand against a wall for extended periods, being shackled to a wall or bolted by wrists and ankles into a rigid ‘tiger chair’, and possibly waterboarding and electric shocks”. More recently, evidence of sexual assault, forced contraception and sterilization of Uyghur women has also emerged.

Beijing’s defence of these policies ― that they are measures to prevent ‘terrorism and extremism’ amongst Uyghurs through the provision of ‘education’ and ‘training’ ― while easily dismissed as a mendacious justification for mass repression, nonetheless hints at the nature and ambition of the Party-state’s undertaking in Xinjiang.

The intersection of technologically-enabled surveillance with the CCP’s evolving efforts at ideological ‘remoulding’ of certain categories of the XUAR’s population arguably emerges as a defining characteristic of what two theorists, Ding Wang and Dan Shan at the Xinjiang Police University, described in 2016 as the ‘Xinjiang mode’ of counterterrorism. This ‘Xinjiang mode’ combines what they define as the ‘war model’ of counter-insurgency adopted by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan with China’s own ‘public security model’ and ‘governance model’. This fusion has resulted in the development of a new technology of control that seeks the negation of the very possibility of societal resistance to the Party-state.

While the Party-state’s securitisation of Uyghur identity has long been evident, it was intensified by several orders of magnitude with the appointment of Chen Quanguo and Zhu Hailun as XUAR party chief and deputy party chief respectively in 2016. Chen himself had accumulated experience in Tibet, where he had been party secretary from 2011 until his transfer to Xinjiang. In Tibet, Chen had implemented a policing system of ‘grid style management’ that segmented ‘urban communities into geometric zones’ policed by ‘convenience’ police stations connected to CCTV cameras and police databases enabling greater surveillance capabilities.

Once in Xinjiang, Chen has implemented ‘grid management’ and integrated it with the surveillance systems established under his immediate predecessor, resulting in a multi-tiered policing system based on exponential recruitment of contract police officers to man ‘convenience’ police stations.

The purpose of such a system was explicitly detailed by Chen in a speech on 18 August 2017 in which he gave instructions for the ‘party, government, military, police, soldiers and civilians’ of Xinjiang to ‘unite closely’ to ‘build a wall of copper and iron against terrorism’ and to implement a mechanism of ‘comprehensive, round-the-clock and three dimensional prevention control’ to ensure that ‘terrorists’ were caught ‘before they appear’.

The technological edge of this ‘three dimensional prevention control’ is the aggregation of data provided by the XUAR’s use of facial recognition scanners at checkpoints, train stations and petrol stations, collection of biometric data for passports, and mandatory apps to cleanse smartphones of subversive material. This data is then fed into the ‘Integrated Joint Operations Platform’ (IJOP) ― an app used by XUAR public security ― to report ‘activities or circumstances deemed suspicious’ and to prompt ‘investigations of people the system flags as problematic’.

This, as the two Xinjiang Police University theorists Wang and Shan note, provides the basis of the ‘public security’ model, as this ‘anti-terrorism intelligence system’ provides security forces with ‘the ability to obtain information on signs, tendencies…related to violence and terrorism’ and thereby enhance ‘social prevention and control capabilities’.

Yet surveillance, as Richard Jenkins reminds us, is but ‘a means to an end’ ― i.e. the ‘protection’ and ‘management’ of either the population-at-large or specific segments thereof. And it is here that the ‘public security’ model intersects with what Wang and Shan term the ‘governance model’ to create the ‘Xinjiang mode’ of counterterrorism. The ‘governance model’, they note, is focused on the long-term ‘resolution of ethnic and religious ideological issues’ that give rise to ‘extremism’ and ‘terrorism’. Here, Wang and Shan assert that as religious ‘extremism’ is an ‘ideological’ problem, it must be solved ‘by ideological methods’. These include sustained ‘education’ of the population in order to ‘reject the brainwashing of distorted religious views’ and thereby increase their ‘immunity to extreme terrorism’.

The ‘anti-terrorism intelligence system’ erected in Xinjiang permits the Party-state to undertake ‘social sorting’ ― the ‘identification and ordering of individuals in order to “put them in their place” within local, national and global “institutional orders”’.

The XUAR surveillance apparatus thus enables the authorities to not only identify and categorise particular populations as prone to ‘distorted religious views’ but to ascribe to them particular penalties, constraints or sanctions according to their categorisation. Thus for example, the surveillance apparatus may track and document ‘48 signs of extremism’ that can then determine the detention of Uyghurs (and other Turkic Muslims) to ‘re-education’ centres.

In a broader perspective, the ‘Xinjiang mode’ of counterterrorism is highly suggestive of processes of ‘high modernism’ described by James C. Scott in which the state seeks to legitimise the ‘rational design of social order’ through the centralisation, collection, and processing of information. As Scott noted, however, most previous such projects of the modern state to reduce the chaos and disorder of social reality ‘to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations’ have proven to be not only ‘utopian’ but ‘continually frustrated’.

Xi Jinping and the CCP appear to remain undeterred by such precedents. According to Xi’s report to the CCP Central Symposium on Xinjiang-related work on 26–27 September 2020 the Party’s Xinjiang policy is ‘100 per cent correct’. He goes further to say that ‘education on the sense of Chinese identity should be incorporated into the education of officials and the younger generation in Xinjiang as well as its social education’ to ‘let the sense of Chinese identity take root in people’.

While it has arguably been the technologically-enabled ‘anti-terrorism intelligence system’ that has captured much of the world’s attention, this apparatus is but a means to an end. The ‘Xinjiang mode’ of counterterrorism amounts to a coercive instrument of social management and re-engineering designed to compel the assimilation of the Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims to the Party-state’s vision of what it means to be a ‘modern’ Chinese citizen.

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1. Chinese national consciousness

A fortnight ago in Neican, we argued that Beijing’s assimilationist policies in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia are driven by its agenda to “forge a common [Chinese] identity” and as a result, “minorities are being forced to melt in a Han-dominant mainstream culture through state policies” This week, let’s look at the ideological, intellectual and historical foundations of this project.

The CCP talks about its identity project in terms of building a “national consciousness”. With its diverse cultures and traditions, ethnicities, faiths/creeds, and collective memories, forging a common national identity/consciousness among the peoples of the People’s Republic is an imposing task.

Qing and Republican eras

First, some context…the Great Qing was a multi-ethnic empire ruled over by a Manchu dynasty allied with the Han elite. Nationalism (in the Western sense) was foreign to most denizens of the Qing Empire. People then had multiple identities and affiliations depending on their clan/family, locality/region, ethnicity, faith/creed and profession, instead of an overriding one based on the nation-state.

Chinese national consciousness started to develop in the late-19th and early-20th century in response to Western encroachment. For reformist thinkers and revolutionaries alike, a common national consciousness was deemed necessary for China’s very survival. For example, the first principle of Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People (三民主義) is the Principle of Minzu (民族主義), that is, nationalism. In fact, civic nationalism (as opposed to ethnic nationalism) was deemed to be so important that the first flag of the Republic of China was designed to symbolise the coming together of five major peoples (Han, Mongols, Tibetans, Manchus, and the Muslims) under one new nation. The irony was, of course, that the republican revolutionaries were staunchly anti-Manchu.

Chinese national consciousness was given a massive boost in the 1930s and 1940s during the war against Japan. As Rana Mitter’s Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945, vividly illustrates, the colossal efforts involved in mobilising the entire Chinese populace for war led to the coalescence of Chinese national consciousness where little of it was evident before the war.

CCP’s identity project

Under Xi, the political lingo for its identity project is the “Consciousness of Chinese National Community” 中华民族共同体意识. This project has similarities to national identity projects of Western countries in the 19th and 20th centuries in so far as they are exclusionary, coercive, state-driven, and assimilationist. Despite the lack of overt racism in Beijing’s idea of national consciousness, discrimination against ethnic minorities is inherent in its assimilationist underpinning, which amounts, in the eyes of some, to cultural genocide.

“Consciousness of Chinese National Community” is an idea that has been under development for some years. This formulation was first raised by Xi during the Second CCP Central Symposium on Xinjiang-related Work 第二次中央新疆工作座谈会 in May 2014 in the context of Beijing’s Xinjiang strategy.

The scope of this formulation expands to include work related to all ethnic minorities later that year at the CCP Central Work Conference on Ethnic Minorities 中央民族工作会议.

The concept was elevated in importance again three years later in October 2017 at the 19th Party Congress when it made it into Xi’s work report to party delegates. This time it was framed as part of the CCP’s United Front strategy:

统一战线是党的事业取得胜利的重要法宝，必须长期坚持…找到最大公约数…全面贯彻党的民族政策，深化民族团结进步教育，铸牢中华民族共同体意识，加强各民族交往交流交融，促进各民族像石榴籽一样紧紧抱在一起…全面贯彻党的宗教工作基本方针，坚持我国宗教的中国化方向，积极引导宗教与社会主义社会相适应。

The United Front [strategy and system] is the key to victory for the Party’s cause, and must be maintained over the long term… [we must] find the greatest common ground…comprehensively implement the Party’s ethnic policy, deepen education on national unity and progress, forge a firm sense of the Chinese national community, strengthen exchanges and intermingling among all ethnic groups, and promote all ethnic groups to cling to each other like pomegranate seeds…Comprehensively implement the Party’s basic policy on religious work, persist in the sinicization of China’s religions, and actively guide religions to adapt to socialist society.

(emphasis added)

The concept was further clarified and expanded upon in October 2019 when Beijing issued a document titled Opinions on comprehensively progressing ethnic unity work and forge and consolidate the Chinese national community 《关于全面深入持久开展民族团结进步创建工作铸牢中华民族共同体意识的意见》. The document explains why national identity is crucial in the following way:

中华民族共同体意识是国家统一之基、民族团结之本、精神力量之魂…铸牢中华民族共同体意识…是推进民族团结进步事业发展的必然要求，也是实现中华民族伟大复兴中国梦的必然要求。

The consciousness of the Chinese national community is the foundation of national unity, the foundation of national solidarity and the soul of spiritual strength…[We must] forge the consciousness of Chinese national community…[because] it is an inevitable requirement for advancing the cause of national unity and progress, as well as for realising the Chinese dream of the great national rejuvenation.

A “national consciousness” fashioned by the CCP is seen as critical to maintaining the Party’s rule. This idea influences Beijing’s policies with respect to ethnic minorities, religion, education, media, and internal security across the length and breadth of China. It has real ramifications for hundreds of millions of people in China, from Muslims in political re-education camps, to school students in Inner Mongolia, to protesters on the streets of Hong Kong.

2. Lamu and domestic violence

Lamu was a Tibetan social media celebrity on Douyin, which is TikTok in China. She was known for showcasing her life around her Tibetan village (in Sichuan), spreading smiles and positive energy despite her simple life. Last month, in the middle of her livestream, her ex-husband appeared, stabbed her, doused her in petrol, and set her on fire. She died two weeks later.

This incident again reignited uproar on domestic violence issues in China. According to reports, the perpetrator has continuously harassed, threatened and beaten Lamu in recent years. However, when these incidents were reported to the local police, it was met with a dismissive attitude.

According to official statistics, around a third of Chinese women have experienced physical domestic violence. On average, a Chinese woman experiences domestic violence 35 times before she calls the police. And no wonder, because 80 per cent of women calling the police for domestic violence are ignored. In Lamu’s case, despite the history of (public) domestic violence, Lamu’s ex-husband was given custody of their children. In another case last year, a court denied an application for divorce for a woman who was paralysed after jumping out of a window to escape domestic violence. As a result, around two-thirds of women who commit suicide in China do so due to domestic violence.

China passed the Anti-Domestic Violence Law only in 2016, finally criminalising domestic violence. However, the issue of domestic violence is not only a legal issue but also a social and enforcement issue. Domestic violence is still considered by many law enforcement officials as a “family matter” rather than a crime. As elsewhere, police is a male-dominant occupation in China. Without proper training and socialisation, the attitude of police usually mirrors the patriarchal attitude in society. Therefore, police can be more sympathetic to the perpetrator of domestic violence, with officers occasionally reprimanding the victim.

The conversation around domestic violence in China is still focused mostly on physical abuse. Attention probably won’t be given to other types of domestic violence recognised in countries such as Australia (e.g., psychological, emotional or financial abuse) before more is done to address physical abuse.

Unfortunately, in some respects, gender inequality has increased since the beginning of “reform and opening up”, for example, a widening pay gap. Yet grassroots feminist movements, like other social movements not sanctioned officially, are faced with crackdowns by authorities in China. This makes bottom-up change difficult. Meanwhile, top leadership in China are overwhelmingly male-dominated, making gender issues a low priority.

3. Unfavourable views of China

Recent Pew Research Centre data shows that public opinion of China has deteriorated in 14 developed economies, especially in this year. Out of these countries, negative views of China are the highest in Japan, Sweden, and Australia. The surveys were conducted in June and July with 14,276 respondents in total.

In those countries, confidence in Xi to do the right thing regarding world affairs has also decreased. The negative evaluations of Xi are the highest in Japan, South Korea, and Sweden. Other world leaders including, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Boris Johnson, came out way ahead vis-a-vis Xi. However, confidence in Xi was still higher than in Trump.

Concerns about China are not only rising in countries with developed economies. In January, the State of Southeast Asia 2020 survey found that among countries in the region:

China is seen as the most influential economic and political-strategic power in the region, and outpaces the US by significant margins in both domains. However, China’s growing influence is not well-received by the region. Among respondents who view China as the most influential economic power, 71.9% are worried about its expanding influence. This negative sentiment is echoed by respondents who consider China to be most influential in the political and strategic sphere, with 85.4% expressing their concern.

Data from recent surveys are not surprising, as China appears to have abandoned Deng’s low-profile approach of “hiding capacities and biding time”. Under Xi, China has become increasingly assertive internationally and more prone to the use of coercive instruments of statecraft to achieve its foreign policy objectives. As we wrote back in April:

China’s rising power and stature certainly has something to do with its new-found diplomatic assertiveness. But there are at least two other possible drivers. First, the rising pressure on the Chinese bureaucracy to respond forcefully to external criticism. Xi’s lofty promises of national rejuvenation require China to be respected on the international stage. Perceived disrespect, that in Beijing’s perception based on “incorrect” views, biases, and malign intent, requires an aggressive rejoinder.

The second is the increasing nationalistic tone of public discourse in China. The empirical evidence for the linkage between China’s rising popular nationalism and its foreign policy is unclear. But popular nationalism constrains Beijing’s spectrum of foreign policy options since perceived weakness and inability to defend China’s interests and dignity has costly public opinion ramifications.

While internal drivers are giving rise to “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy which plays well with the domestic audience, the aggressive tone of Chinese diplomats is damaging China’s standing abroad.

Love and fear

All else being equal, China would prefer people in other countries to have a more positive perception of it. However, international public opinion is only one consideration among many in Beijing’s calculus. Sometimes other strategic objectives override the need to be seen as affable. And to further illustrate that international image and power do not necessarily go hand-in-hand: while global perception of the US has fluctuated, its power still stands.

Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince muses on the interplay between love and fear in the exercise of political power:

It is much safer to be feared than loved because…love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.

To achieve its strategic objectives, China needs to balance love with fear. Right now, among the international community, there is neither enough “love” for, nor enough “fear” of, Beijing. Until its coercive power becomes more advanced, it would be wise for Beijing to try and patch its international image.

This week on China Story:

Michiko Weinmann, Rod Neilsen and Sophia Slavich, Politicisation of teaching Chinese language in Australian classrooms today: The politicisation of Chinese language study in Australia promotes the idea that learning Chinese is useful to Australians for purely practical economic reasons, such as being able to conduct business or trade. This has particular implications for Languages teaching and learning, as it reduces multilingualism and its associated benefits—intercultural competence, literacy, language awareness and critical thinking—to a strategic resource.

China Neican is a weekly column on the China Story blog edited by Yun Jiang and Adam Ni from the China Policy Centre in Canberra. Neican 内参 or “internal reference” are limited circulation reports only for the eyes of high-ranking officials in China, dealing with topics deemed too sensitive for public consumption. But rest assured, everyone is welcome to read what we write. You can find past issues of Neican here.

The post Neican: 11 October 2020 appeared first on The China Story.

Thanks to our contributor this week: John Lee (data security)

1. Ethnic policies: melting into the Han

Research this week has revealed more about China’s programmes towards ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) launched the Xinjiang Data Project. The project uses satellite imagery, which has become an important and necessary data source, as there are severe restrictions on travel and access to relevant sites in Xinjiang. The project is currently focused on two aspects: Xinjiang’s detention centres and the destruction of cultural sites such as mosques.

ASPI has documented 380 possible detention facilities with Nathan Ruser noting that: “available evidence suggests that many extrajudicial detainees in Xinjiang’s vast “re-education” network are now being formally charged and locked up in higher security facilities.”

On the destruction of cultural sites, the ASPI team found that: “approximately 16,000 mosques across Xinjiang (65% of the total) destroyed or damaged as a result of government policies, mostly since 2017.”

For Tibet, China has set quotas for the “mass transfer of rural laborers within Tibet and to other parts of China”. Researcher Adrian Zenz concludes that:

In both Xinjiang and Tibet, state-mandated poverty alleviation consists of a top-down scheme that extends the government’s social control deep into family units…Both regions have by now implemented a comprehensive scheme that relies heavily on centralized administrative mechanisms; quota fulfilment; job matching prior to training; and a militarized training process that involves thought transformation, patriotic and legal education, and Chinese language teaching.

…

In the context of Beijing’s increasingly assimilatory ethnic minority policy, it is likely that these policies will promote a long-term loss of linguistic, cultural and spiritual heritage.

Beijing, why?

Why is Beijing carrying out assimilationist and coercive ethnic minority policies when it knows the cost (both in terms of money and international reputation) was going to be extremely high.

A big part of the answer is that the CCP is trying to forge a common identity for all the ethnicities in China. A strong common identity as envisioned by the Party-state guards both against subversion and fragmentation, so it is thought. The problem is that this identity is dictated by the Party and Han-centric; it takes little account of what the minorities actually want. Instead of a genuine “melting pot,” the minorities are being forced to melt in a Han-dominant mainstream culture through state policies. China scholars Gerald Roche and James Leibold characterises this brutal process in the following way:

This process involved vast and violent processes of merging and melding, lumping together disparate groups on the basis of their ‘ethnic potential’. Cherished identities were rendered nonexistent. Groups that were caretakers of centuries of collective memory were suddenly obliterated in the eyes of the state and, in order to make their claims legible, were required to represent themselves in the state’s terms—regardless of the language they spoke, identity they professed, customs they practiced, and affinities they felt.

Roche and Leibold reminds us that this is not a recent process targeted only at Uyghurs, Tibetans and Mongols in China, but rather an approach that have targeted numerous smaller ethnic groups since the establishment of the People’s Republic:

Unrecognised groups in China have never protested the removal of their languages from schools, because their languages have never been used in schools. As the state and its institutions were built around them, these groups and their languages were excluded every step of the way.

…

[We] should also look to the unrecognised groups of China, and see how paper genocide has led to cultural genocide. What Mongols fear to lose, most languages in China have never been granted. The situation in Inner Mongolia rightly raises concerns about the assimilatory intent of second-generation ethnic policies. The PRC’s unrecognised peoples show us how warranted these fears are, because they have been living with these policies since 1949.

Doubling down

Despite international condemnation, Beijing has doubled down on its ethnic policies. In Inner Mongolia, the Party is in the process of replacing Mongolian language as the main language of instruction in bilingual schools with Mandarin Chinese. This will push the already fragile Mongolian language in China to the brink of extinction, leading to a wholesale cultural loss, and very likely sow the seeds for ethnic and social divisions for decades to come.

Regarding Tibet, in August, the CCP Central Symposium on Tibet-related work affirmed the direction of China’s Tibet policy under Xi. According to the outcomes of the Symposium, Beijing will accelerate patriotic education and economic development plans in Tibet in the coming years.

In Xinjiang, the Party continues to run detention facilities and carry out mass human rights abuses in the name of maintaining social stability. Just last week, Beijing released a white paper on employment and labour rights in Xinjiang (Chinese | English) in another effort to portray its policies in Xinjiang as advancing human rights and material standards of living instead of as policies that involve broad scale violations.

This week, we have a stronger signal that the CCP is unlikely to change course on its direction on Xinjiang. At the just concluded CCP Central Symposium on Xinjiang-related work, Xi explicitly endorsed the Party’s recent “achievements” in Xinjiang:

实践证明，新时代党的治疆方略完全正确，必须长期坚持

Practice has proven that the Party’s strategy for governing Xinjiang in the new era is entirely correct and must be adhered to over the long term.

He further stressed:

要…将中华民族共同体意识教育纳入新疆干部教育、青少年教育、社会教育，教育引导各族干部群众树立正确的国家观、历史观、民族观、文化观、宗教观，让中华民族共同体意识根植心灵深处。

[We] need to integrate the education of Chinese national consciousness into the education of cadres, youth and society in Xinjiang, educate and guide cadres and masses of all ethnic groups to establish correct national, historical, ethnic, cultural and religious outlooks, so that Chinese national consciousness can be rooted in the depths of the soul.

The world has been warned.

2. Ren Zhiqiang: silencing “Big Cannon”

Ren Zhiqiang (任志强) is not a typical Chinese property tycoon. A son of the red aristocracy and a beneficiary of the nexus between political power and money in China, you’d think that he has every incentive to defend the system, or at least not go against it publicly. Alas, not the case, and that is why Ren’s case is revealing in many ways, and deserves our attention.

Referred to as the “Big Cannon Ren” (“任大炮”) by Chinese netizens, Ren is (in)famous for his blatant and blistering criticism of the Party. But this week, the “Big Cannon” has finally been silenced.

On Tuesday, a court in Beijing sentenced Ren to 18 years in prison on the charges of embezzlement, taking bribes, misusing public funds and abusing power during his time as an executive of Huayuan Group (北京市华远集团有限公司), a state-owned property conglomerate. His fate was sealed in July when he was kicked out of the Party for stepping out of the line politically.

What finally led to his demise appeared to be an essay written by him during the height of China’s COVID-19 crisis in March. In that essay, Ren lambasted Xi’s leadership and the Party system for failing the people. He points the sharp end of his critique directly at Xi’s naked ambition for power and duplicity:

皇帝可以骗自己是穿了衣服了，但连孩子们都知道皇帝是光着屁股的，那些不敢说皇帝没有穿衣服的人，都知道什么是穿着新衣，什么是没穿衣服。齐奥塞斯库以为人民仍然会相信他的谎言欺骗时，却不知道船已调头了！

The Emperor [Xi] can lie about being clothed, but even the children know that the Emperor is naked, and those who are afraid to say that the Emperor is not clothed [knows]…When Nicolae Ceaușescu still thought the people would believe in his lies, little did he realise that the tide is already turning.

Beyond Xi himself, Ren highlighted the fundamental flaw in the Party-state system:

所有在讲话中存在的这些党的组织中的问题，其根源都来自于一个不受人民监督，一个不受法律约束的执政党，只忠于皇权与维护核心的体制，来自只讲对党负责在前，而将人民于后的责任关系的必然结果。

All of these problems in the Party’s organisation…have their roots in a ruling party that is not subject to the people’s oversight, a ruling party that is not bound by the law, a system that is loyal only to the monarch [Xi] and the preservation of its core, and the inevitable result of a relationship of responsibilities that puts duties to the Party before duties to the people.

This fundamental contradiction has been pointed by a number of people in their own ways in recent months, including Tsinghua University law professor Xu Zhangun (fired from his job), citizen journalist Chen Qiushi (disappeared) and former Party School professor Cai Xia (stripped of Party membership). Ren now adds his name to a growing list of critics that have been punished for daring to speak out against a power that is trying to reassert and reinforce its supremacy over Chinese society.

In addition, Ren’s case shows that a red background and connections no longer suffice to protect you from the wrath of the paramount leader. This is Xi’s way of sending a warning to the red aristocracy that he will not put up with dissent against his personal authority. In the past, members of the Party elite were given more leeway to criticise the system since there is the assumption that they, being the most direct beneficiaries of the system, would be the last people plotting for its overthrow. There were always winners and losers of political struggle, e.g., Xi vs Bo Xilai, but that is seen as the nature of the game. Whereas now, the stake is getting higher for everyone as Xi continues to centralise power.

As for the implications of Xi’s centralisation of power, firstly, Chinese political elite will become increasingly insecure about their position in the system. If Party norms and rules can no longer effectively constrain Xi’s will, what can they rely on for protection? Indeed, historically, insecurity is one of the basic drivers of the endemic and ruthless way that political competition is carried out in the party system. Added insecurity will make the system more volatile in the long run.

Second, those around Xi will be less inclined to speak out because of the added risk. Will any Party cadre stand out and contradict Xi’s policy views on China-US relations, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, or Taiwan? Doubt it.

Third, local party cadres will become more conservative and less likely to deviate from central directives from Beijing. This creates the problem of formalism, gaming of the system, inefficiency and policy inflexibility. If you were a local cadre your first instinct would be to tick the boxes (of the current political line) instead of actually solving long term problems.

Maintaining political authority of Xi and the Party core is now the top priority of the whole Party-state system. According to Ren, Xi, during a speech on the public security system, said:

全国的公安系统要为了“政治第一”而行动起来。拿起刀，扛起枪，坚决消灭一切借机恶毒攻击的势力，为维护社会稳定而不惜一切代价！

The public security system throughout the country should act for the sake of “politics first”. Take up the sword and the gun and resolutely eliminate all forces that take advantage of this [COVID] opportunity to attack [the Party] viciously, and to pay any cost to maintain social stability.

To that, Ren asked:

你愿意成为这个代价吗？代价能让你从梦中清醒吗？

Are you willing to be that cost? Will the price you pay wake you up from your dreams?

3. Global Data Security Initiative

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi outlined a new Global Data Security Initiative (DSI) earlier this month. Presently a rhetorical platform rather than a detailed agenda, the DSI offers a ‘blueprint for the formulation of international principles on data security’, to build an open and mutually secure international cyberspace.

The DSI reflects long-standing Chinese positions on global cyberspace governance, including respect for national sovereignty over data management, non-militarisation, and the dominance of  states in rule-making (over private entities). It advocates respect for multilateralism, simultaneous pursuit of security and development, and handling data security ‘on the basis of facts, laws and regulations’.

This rhetorical emphasis on an equitable and rules-based approach is contrasted with ‘politicizing data security issues and applying double standards’. Although Wang did not name the United States, the DSI addresses issues where the US is vulnerable to criticism, such as mass surveillance across borders and exercise of jurisdiction over data held by US firms abroad.

The DSI’s advocacy of international openness and ‘objective’ treatment of data security is a clear response to recent US measures that seek to exclude Chinese interests in the name of data security, such as the Clean Network program or pending bans on the Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat. The DSI’s opposition to ‘use of information technology to damage other countries’ critical infrastructure’ reflects continuing Chinese concern over US superiority in network exploitation and attack capabilities.

This rhetoric of a rules-based approach draws some advantage from China’s expanding legal regime for data governance, although many laws remain in draft form and key terms such as ‘important data’ still lack clear definition. Wang Yi dismissed concerns about the Chinese state’s behaviour in practice, asserting that China ‘strictly follows data security protection principles…and will not require Chinese companies to violate the laws of other countries’. As Beijing has always denied allegations that it steals important data from other countries, the DSI is unreserved in opposing such activities.

The DSI seems to have been pitched especially towards the European Union, the world’s third potential ‘data superpower’. At least in form, China’s approach to data governance now more resembles the EU’s centralised regulatory model than does the fragmented and laissez-faire US approach. The DSI’s language targets existing European concerns about intrusive data access by the US government, which recently led a European court to invalidate the regime governing personal data transfers between the EU and the US. Wang Yi’s announcement of the DSI occurred days before the inaugural EU-China High Level Digital Dialogue.

From the European viewpoint, this dialogue was needed precisely to discuss divergences with China over data protection and fundamental rights, with particular concerns raised about China’s big data-enabled surveillance of ethnic minorities. General distrust of China engendered by events in Hong Kong and Xinjiang as well as the coronavirus pandemic have made Beijing’s diplomatic overtures on governance an increasingly hard sell. The DSI’s real litmus test will rather be in the developing world, where priorities when it comes to data governance often seem closer to Chinese rather than Western practices.

4. China and climate change

In an address to the UN General Assembly, Xi Jinping made a surprise announcement that China will aim to hit peak emissions before 2030 and for carbon neutrality by 2060.

Until now, China has been unwilling to commit to a long-term goal, claiming that as a developing country, development is more important. Instead, it looked to developed countries (which generated the most emissions historically) to do more on emission reduction.

But now it seems that China is willing to acknowledge the important role it plays in current and future emissions. In its speech, Xi referred to China as the world’s biggest developing country. He is framing this as another aspect of his oft-repeated “Community with shared future for mankind” (人类命运共同体), and emphasised international cooperation and peaceful development.

So what does it mean for other countries and the international community?

First, climate change and carbon emissions has been a major sticking point between the US and European countries, ever since the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in 2017. The EU has also been pushing hard on China for carbon neutrality, and this announcement is likely to placate some of the EU’s concerns. On the other hand, it would be harder for the US to use China as a reason for not doing much on climate change.

Second, countries most concerned about climate change such as Pacific island countries may look more favourably to China as a result. Australia’s lacklustre climate change stance has been significantly detrimental to its relationship with the Pacific. In the meantime, it is concerned about the rising influence of China in the Pacific. It would be hard for Australia to maintain influence in the Pacific when it is not seen as contributing much to alleviate the very real and serious existential threats these countries face.

Third, for countries and companies that have historically relied on fossil fuel export to China, such as Australia, some future planning and proofing may be necessary. Until now, China’s appetite for fossil fuel meant that it was reliant on imports from few suppliers. This meant that China is reluctant to punish these countries for perceived slights against China. This may change if China is able to successfully transition its energy base from fossil fuel to renewables.

Of course, it is far from certain that China will be able to pull it all off. There are no detailed plans yet and climate policy in China has been two steps forward and one step back. It is currently building yet more coal power plants, throwing its commitment to renewables in doubt. Concrete action plan under the Paris Agreement or its Five-Year plan next year is necessary to track how serious China’s commitment is.

Quote of the week

人怕出名猪怕壮

People fear getting famous like pigs fear fattening up

While it seems everyone is trying to get famous these days (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok), this Chinese saying sounds a warning about fame. And fame can be risky indeed, especially in China. For example, if you made Hurun China Rich List, the likelihood of you being under investigation has just gone up.

For China scholars and commentators, public fame can bring a few problems too. First one is trolls. These may or may not be state-directed. As China-related issues have become more divisive in many countries, trolls and personal attacks based on very minuscule things have become more common. This problem is exacerbated for people of Chinese heritage. On the one hand, accusations of “disloyalty” to the country of citizenship or residence, accompanied by calls for them to “go back to China”. On the other hand, accusations of “race traitors” or “forgetting roots”, accompanied by some kind of family shaming.

Second one is official responses. We have seen recently with the cases of Li Jianjun, Chen Hong, Clive Hamilton, and Alex Joske. But there are also many other unreported incidents where authorities exert pressure on people and their families in order to stop them from speaking out. And more people have refrained from speaking out in the first place for fear of repercussions, whether it’s visa or safety.

Because it’s Mid-Autumn Festival on Thursday, we leave you with this famous poem by Song Dynasty’s Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037-1101 CE), which is often recited for the festival, to express the sentiment that although people are far apart, at least they can gaze upon the same moon (very pertinent to migrants):

明月幾時有，把酒問青天，不知天上宮闕，今夕是何年。

我欲乘風歸去，唯恐瓊樓玉宇，高處不勝寒；起舞弄清影，何似在人間。

轉朱閣，低綺戶，照無眠；不應有恨，何事長向別時圓。

人有悲歡離合，月有陰晴圓缺，此事古難全；但願人長久，千里共嬋娟。

How long will the full moon appear?

Wine cup in hand, I ask the sky.

I do not know what time of year

It would be tonight in the palace on high.

Riding the wind, there I would fly,

Yet I’m afraid the crystalline palace would be

Too high and cold for me.

I rise and dance, with my shadow I play.

On high as on earth, would it be as gay?

The moon goes round the mansions red

Through gauze-draped windows to shed

Her light upon the sleepless bed.

Against man she should have no spite.

Why then when people part, is she oft full and bright?

Men have sorrow and joy, they meet or part again;

The moon is bright or dim and she may wax or wane.

There has been nothing perfect since the olden days.

So let us wish that man

May live long as he can!

Though miles apart, we’ll share the beauty she displays.

(Translation by X.Y.Z (许渊冲) in Bilingual Edition 300 Song Lyrics (2004))

Chinoiserie

• Why Progress Doesn’t Guarantee the End of Patriarchy: why are so many Chinese women embracing patriarchal values? with research by Chinese sociologist Xu Qi.
• The China Economic Risk Matrix by CSIS/Rhodium Group.

This week on China Story:

• Ryan Manuel, Domestic concerns shape China’s policy strategies, In the US–China relationship, ideology now trumps interests. In July, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech on China at the Nixon Library repeatedly referred to Chinese leader Xi Jinping as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (‘the Party’) rather than as the president of China. Referring only to Xi’s power over the Party in this way is part of a US government drive to appear anti-Party rather than anti-China. It is a fundamental mistake to treat relations with China as an ideological mission. Viewing China as an ideological threat — rather than just a big power competitor — focuses too much on Xi Jinping and overlooks how his power is constrained by the Party apparatus and China’s sheer size. It also inaccurately interprets Xi’s personal leadership style as Chinese ideology.
• Ivana Karásková, Eastern Promises 2.0: Goodbye Beijing, Here Comes Taipei, The recent official visit of the Czech Senate President Miloš Vystrčil to Taiwan sparked a diplomatic row between the Czechia and the People’s Republic of China. Beijing has long considered any official visit to Taiwan by foreign politicians as tantamount to challenging its core interest. The war of words has extended beyond Chinese and Czech diplomats, with other European officials weighing in. This saga may have far-reaching consequences, including by creating a new norm for politicians regarding their official visits to Taiwan. 
• Michael O’Keefe, Should we be racing towards a New Cold War in the South Pacific? Within the defence and security establishments it is now a commonplace proposition that a new Cold War is dawning. In that context, key elements of Australian strategic culture, including support for the US alliance in distant theatres such as the South China Sea, will remain uppermost in the minds of strategic planners in Canberra. However, closer to home in Australia’s area of primary strategic concern — the South Pacific — there remains an opportunity to maintain conditions akin to the strategic status quo rather than the dramatic rebalancing that has been occurring in Northeast Asia and the South China Sea. The lesson borne from the Cold War is that superpower strategic competition needn’t play out in the South Pacific. Canberra may be able to play a two-level game whereby China’s interests in challenging US hegemony elsewhere do not result in local threats to Australia’s interests in the South Pacific. Furthermore, Pacific leaders have agency in preventing a new Cold War in the South Pacific, and Canberra should leverage its advantages built over years of engagement to ensure that the South Pacific remains pacific.

The post Neican: 27 September 2020 appeared first on The China Story.