Martin K. Dimitrov

In China, as in all communist regimes, there exist two types of media: one is publicly available and the other is restricted and accessible only to regime insiders who possess the proper clearances. This second type of media, known as neibu 内部 or for ‘internal circulation’, has received less attention from scholars. The puzzle as to whether a Mao-era institution like internal-circulation media has survived into the twenty-first century stems from a theoretical uncertainty about the role of internal publications in an age when so much information is accessible to regime insiders via the Internet and social media. This article provides a theoretical argument about the function of neibu publications in China. It then argues that these media have retained their original functions and are still of central importance as conduits for transmitting sensitive information to Party leaders in the digital age.

What are neibu publications?

In contract to the publicly accessible media, neibu publications are restricted to individuals holding the appropriate rank within the Chinese party-state. The classifications of these media range from neibu 内部 (internal circulation) to mimi 秘密 (confidential), jimi 机密 (secret), and even juemi 绝密(top-secret). Here, neibu is used as a synonym for internal publications at all levels of classification. The general principle is that those materials are available to regime insiders, with the circle of recipients becoming progressively smaller as we move up the ladder of confidentiality. For example, Neibu cankao 内部参考 (Internal Reference) was issued as a secret 机密 serial originally limited to Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee members and provincial CPC Standing Committee members. Top-secret materials have an even narrower distribution list, generally being aimed at CPC Politburo members and provincial Party secretaries.

In terms of type, neibu publications are mirror images of the kinds of media that circulate publicly. They include books on technical matters like policing or military affairs; detailed government reports, yearbooks, and almanacs; documentaries on politically sensitive issues; academic research reports; and, finally, periodic bulletins containing news and analysis on both domestic and international politics. The same individuals write for both neibu and the publicly accessible media, with final decision about which of the two publication streams is the more appropriate outlet resting with the editors at Xinhua, the major news outlets (which all have neibu publications), the major publishing houses, and so on. The range of these sources is truly extensive.

Internal media under Mao

Scholars of Maoist China have an extraordinary resource that allows them to trace systematically the content of internal media: the secret-level classified serial Neibu cankao, which is available at the Universities Service Centre at the Chinese University in Hong Kong in its entirety for the 1949–1964 period. Analysis and detailed coding of the 3,612 issues published between September 1949 and December 1964 reveals that this serial meant for the top leadership contained a rich array of negative news.[1] Readers were apprised of alarming phenomena such as episodes of famine, shortages of goods, and incidences of bureaucratic corruption, theft, and waste as well as ethnic and religious minority unrest. In addition, Neibu cankao tracked various anti-regime and enemy activities, such as the creation of counterrevolutionary organisations or the infiltration of different parts of China by foreign spies. Most frequent were reports on hostile reactions, opinions, and views concerning the Party and its policies, including occasional dispatches on superstitious rumours. This coverage stood in sharp contrast to that in the officially accessible media, such as People’s Daily, which focused on the Party’s achievements and praise.

Other classified publications have survived from the Maoist period include the initially classified Reference News (Cankao xiaoxi 参考消息), which began as neibu but radically expanded its circle of recipients in 1957 and by the late 1970s had become a newspaper that was readily available both on a subscription basis and through newspaper kiosks.^[2] There are also individual issues of serials, bulletins, and government documents at all levels of classification, as well as Xinhua almanacs that discuss internal reference publications. Cumulatively, these sources, which can be accessed at various archives in Hong Kong and in the West allow us to claim that internal media persisted during the darkest chapters of China’s political history such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, despite arguments put forward by orthodox supporters of the Cultural Revolution that they should cease publication. The reason for their survival is that top leaders found them valuable. As Vice-Premier Chen Yi 陈毅 opined in 1966, the neibu Reference Materials (Cankao ziliao 参考资料) is ‘our daily bread’ and ‘we cannot work without it’.[3] For their part, Mao and Zhou Enlai insisted on reading Reference Materials and Important News of the Day (Meiri yaowen 每日要闻) right before going to bed.[4]

Internal reference materials under Xi

Multiple sources point to the continued importance of neibu publications in the present age. Anecdotally, Chinese academics say that the internal reports they write can lead to bigger bonuses and faster promotions than publications in openly circulating academic journals.[5] Internal reference books and government publications persist, especially in the highly sensitive areas of public security and ethnic affairs.[6] There is also evidence of the screening of classified documentaries on the Soviet collapse to Party cadres.[7] Most importantly, internal reference news bulletins continue to be published. Relevant evidence is provided by the 2014 Jiujiang 九江prefecture Propaganda Department surprise data leak, which revealed the persistence of both central-level and grassroots classified bulletins into the Xi Jinping era. One example from the central level is the Xinhua weekly Public Opinion Observation (party and government edition) 舆情观察(党政版), which contains reports on official Weibo 微博; on social media posts by famous personalities; on the top news items; most frequent keyword searches; most viewed photos, cartoons, and videos; as well as analytical reports on Internet public opinion.^[8] The content of this bulletin suggests that this is the primary way in which the leadership understands the Chinese Internet and social media.

At the grassroots level, Xinhua prepares bulletins on Internet public opinion that are generated through the Xinhua public opinion management system舆情管理系统, consisting of over 700 popular print media from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as over 300 major websites and over 300 discussion forums. This system enables keyword searches that can be used to produce reports about public opinion expressed in different localities in China. For example, public opinion about Jiujiang prefecture in one week in October 2014 consisted of 159 items from the traditional print media; 908 items from the online media; and 509 items from discussion forums.^[9] Once identified, these items can be scored in terms of their tone (positive, neutral, negative), with negative public opinion highlighted for additional attention. In general, over the last decade there has been a proliferation of internal reporting tailored for cadres at various levels of the political system.[10]

Do these reports matter? A cliché about communist regimes is that leaders ignore the intelligence they receive.^[11] One feature of the Chinese internal reporting system allows us to test this assumption: leaders have the option to discount the information, to read it, or to read it and to issue instructions (pishi 批示). We have evidence that in 2005 central leading cadres中央领导issued instructions on 1,460 internal reference reports prepared by the Xinhua News Agency; by 2011, the number of reports prompting instructions by the top leadership had risen more than threefold to 4,557.^[12] Since then, attention to these documents has grown further.[13] This rapid increase attests both to the value that leaders attach to internal reporting and to the frequency with which these reports inform policy decisions: according to the internal rules of the Chinese bureaucracy, a report that has received a pishi automatically acquires the status of a policy document.^[14] In sum, internal journalistic reporting remains indispensable to decision makers in the age of social media. These reports allow leaders to react to online and offline public opinion crises quickly and to thus fulfil the paramount goal of Stability Maintenance 维稳.

Why neibu publications still matter

In the eyes of the party, the most important distinction between internal media and publicly available media is the function they serve. Internal periodicals have to contain factual information 信息, while publicly available outlets carry appropriate news 新闻, opinions, and most importantly, propaganda messaging.[15] Xi Jinping for example, called for the public media to ‘correctly guide public opinion’ 正确舆论导向 by ‘emphasising positive publicity’ 正面宣传为主.^[16]

This distinction goes back many decades. During the Mao period, when the People’s Daily avoided reporting on sensitive topics like famine or popular criticism of the regime, Xinhua instructed journalists writing for internal publications to collect information on important events and provide objective, factual reporting not suitable for publicly accessible media. Specifically, this included the political attitudes expressed by ordinary people of different walks of life and their opinions about important domestic and international events. In addition, internal media contributors were expected to track people’s opinions about life and work problems and monitor their views about the leading party and government organs. Finally, internal media had to cover natural disasters and ‘counterrevolutionary’ activities. In sum, such publications were entrusted with a very broad mandate of reporting on negative developments, while the publicly available media carried propagandistic and politically vetted content.^[17]

Academic studies of internal publications have focused on the Mao period.^[18] Given the difficulty of accessing a substantial body of such publications, most research is based on relatively small samples. Nevertheless, it’s clear that under Mao, reporting on domestic news was an important focus of internal media, which covered a wide spectrum of issues from popular reactions to the death of Stalin to the circulation of rumours and the incidence of riots.^[19] Internal bulletins served as a key source of information for the leadership during the Mao period and potentially up until the 1989 pro-democracy protest movement.^[20]

In the post-1989 period, foreign scholarship has centred on investigative reporting in the publicly available print media, including commercialised media, and on citizen journalism in social media.^[21] The implicit (and sometimes explicit) assumption is that internal journalistic reporting has either become extinct or has greatly receded in importance due to the rise of useful reporting in commercial media, where investigative journalism of the sort that reveals public attitudes and concerns helps make publications competitive.^[22]

And yet, a leaked 2011 directive on writing internal reports for the party and the government reveals the distinct requirements for internal information that validate the persistence of internal publications into the digital age.^[23] Because internal information reports are supposed to help leaders reach decisions, they need to be presented in an objective and clear writing style. By contrast, publicly available news and reports serve multiple functions: to entertain, propagandise, educate, and guide public opinion and so may use literary devices like metaphors and analogies. This document also specifies the kinds of information (regarding disasters, epidemics, and unexpected incidents), whose casual release to the public could have a negative impact on social stability; such information can appear in the public media with prior approval from the senior leader at the relevant level.^[24]

One theory is that investigate journalism thrived precisely because the regime needed more information.[25] However, given that the regime has abundant sources of information that are not publicly disseminated, investigative reporting may better serve other regime goals such as appearing accountable.²⁶

In July 2024 Beijing News 新京报 published a front-page report on tankers being consecutively used to transport coal-to-liquid fuels 煤制油 and edible oils 食用油 without being cleaned in between.[26] Widely hailed as ‘investigative journalism’,[27] the report acknowledges that this practice is a well-known ‘open secret’ 公开的秘密.[28] What was the purpose of this report? By the end of August 2024, two truck drivers had been arrested and three companies penalised. Most important were the draft regulations laid down in August 2024 by the National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration, which stipulated that containers used for transporting non-edible oils should not be used for cooking oils.[29] Thus, instead of investigative reporting, we most likely have a strategically placed report that aimed to portray the government as responsive and accountable to citizen concerns. Whenever the relevant neibu documents become available, we can check on when a report on unclean cooking oil first emerged in the internal media. This author’s strong suspicion is that this happened months and perhaps even years prior to the Beijing News publication.

In sum, internal publications continue to deliver negative information to the leadership in the Xi era, apprising it of popular dissatisfaction.

[1] Martin K. Dimitrov, Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China, New York: Oxford University Press, 2023, p. 132–135.

[2] Xinhua News Agency, Chronicle of Important Events at the Xinhua News Agency, 1950-1976,新华社大事记, 1950-1976, Beijing: Xinhua News Agency, 2002, p. 41; Xinhua News Agency, Cankao xiaoxi: Commemorative Booklet for the 55^th Anniversary of Its Creation (1931-1986) and the 30^th Anniversary of the Expansion of Its Circulation (1957-1987) 参考消息–创办五十五周年(1931-1986)扩大发行三十周年(1957-1987)纪念册, Hefei: Anhui Xinhua Yinshuachang, 1987.

[3] Xinhua News Agency, Chronicle of Important Events at the Xinhua News Agency, 1950-1976新华社大事记, 1950-1976, Beijing: Xinhua News Agency, 2002, p. 88.

[4] Ibid., p. 112.

[5] Author’s conversations with academics in China, 2023–2024.

[6] Third Department of the Ministry of Public Security, Compendium of PRC Household Registration Regulations, 1950–2014 中华人民共和国户口管理资料汇编, 1950–2014, Beijing: Zhongguo Renmin Gong’an Daxue Chubanshe, 2015; Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region Local Gazetteer Editing Committee, Xinjiang Gazetteer, 1986–2005, vol. 7: Politics 新疆通志 1986–2005, 第七卷:政治, Beijing: Fangzhi Chubanshe, 2022.

[7] Author’s conversations with academics in China, 2023–2024.

[8] Public Opinion Observation (party and government edition)  舆情观察(党政版), Nr. 16 (17 October 2014).

[9] Jiujiang Public Opinion Assessment Weekly 九江市舆情监测周报, Nr. 40 (6 October–10 October 2014).

[10] Tao Wu and Bixiao He, ‘Intelligence for Sale: The “Party-Public Sentiment, Inc.” and Stability Maintenance in China’, Problems of Post-Communism 67:2 (2020), 129–140.

[11] Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962, New York: Walker & Co., 2010.

[12] Calculated from Xinhua News Agency, Xinhua Yearbook 2006 新华社年鉴2006, Beijing: Xinhua News Agency, 2007, p.198 and Xinhua News Agency, Xinhua Yearbook 2011新华社年鉴2011, Beijing: Xinhua News Agency, 2012, p. 259.

[13] Xinhua News Agency, Xinhua Yearbook 2016 新华社年鉴2016, Beijing: Xinhua News Agency, 2017.

[14] Wen-Hsuan Tsai, ‘A Unique Pattern of Policymaking in China’s Authoritarian System: The CCP’s Neican/Pishi Model’, Asian Survey 55:6 (November/December 2015), 1093-1115.

[15] Martin K. Dimitrov, ‘The Political Logic of Media Control in China’, Problems of Post-Communism 64: 3–4 (2017), 121–127.

[16] David Bandurski, ‘Under Xi, the Media has Turned from a ‘Mouthpiece of the Masses’ to the Party’s Parrot’, Hong Kong Free Press, 21 June 2016, online at https://www.hongkongfp.com/2016/06/21/under-xi-the-media-has-turned-from-a-mouthpiece-of-masses-to-the-partys-parrot/

[17] ‘Central Committee Regulation for Xinhua Journalists Writing Internal Reference Materials’ 中共中央关于新华社记者采写内部参考资料的规定, July 1953.

[18] Michael Schoenhals, ‘Elite Information in China’, Problems of Communism 34 (September-October 1985), 65–71; Jennifer Grant, ‘Internal Reporting by Investigative Journalists in China and Its Influence on Government Policy’, International Communication Gazette 41 (1988), 53–65; Huai Yan and Suisheng Zhao, ‘Notes on China’s Confidential Documents’, Journal of Contemporary China 2:4 (1993), 75–92.

[19] For a piece based on the systematic analysis of 30 reports published in Neibu cankao in March 1953, see Hua-yu Li, ‘Reactions of Chinese Citizen to the Death of Stalin: Internal Communist Party Reports’, Journal of Cold War Studies 11:2 (Spring 2009), 70–88. On rumours and superstitions in Neibu cankao, see S. A. Smith, ‘Talking Toads and Chinless Ghosts: The Politics of “Superstitious” Rumors in the People’s Republic of China, 1961-1965’, American Historical Review 111:2 (2006), 405-427. For an overview of sensitive issues covered in Neibu cankao, see Dimitrov 2017.

[20] Andrew J. Nathan, Chinese Democracy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, p. 152–157; Zhang Liang, Andrew J. Nathan, Perry Link, and Orville Schell, comps., The Tiananmen Papers, New York: Pacific Affairs, 2002; Daniel Leese, ‘The CCP Information Order in the Early People’s Republic of China: The Case of Xuanjiao Dongtai’, Modern China 49:2 (2023), 135–158.

[21] Zhou Yuezhi, ‘Watchdogs on Party Leashes? Contexts and Implications of Investigative Journalism in Post-Deng China’, Journalism Studies 1:4 (2000), 577–597; David Bandurski and Martin Hala, eds., Investigative Journalism in China: Eight Cases of Chinese Watchdog Journalism, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010; Jingrong Tong, Investigative Journalism in China: Journalism, Power, and Society, London: Continuum, 2011; Marina Svensson, Elin Saether, and Zhi’an Zhang, eds., Chinese Investigative Journalists’ Dreams: Autonomy, Agency, and Voice, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014; Jingrong Tong, Investigative Journalism, Environmental Problems, and Modernization in China, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Haiyan Wang, The Transformation of Investigative Journalism in China: From Journalists to Activists, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016; Jonathan Hassid, China’s Unruly Journalists: How Committed Professionals Are Changing the People’s Republic, New York: Routledge, 2016; Maria Repnikova, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017; Rongbin Han, Contesting Cyberspace in China: Online Expression and Authoritarian Resilience, New York: Columbia University Press, 2018, esp. p. 77–100.

[22] Peter Lorentzen, ‘China’s Strategic Censorship’, American Journal of Political Science 58:2 (April 2014), 402–414; Daniela Stockmann, Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013; Xin Xin, How the Market Is Changing China’s News: The Case of the Xinhua News Agency, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012; Susan L. Shirk, ed., Changing Media, Changing China, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011; and Yuezhi Zhao, Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. For an exception to this line of thinking, see Dimitrov, Dictatorship and Information.

[23] ‘Some Pointers on Writing Reports for Party and Government’ 党政信息写工作的几点体会, online at http://www.zk168.com/fanwen/fanwenxinde_274744

[24] Ibid.

[25] Lorentzen, ‘China’s Strategic Censorship’.

[26] Dimitrov 2017; Haiyan Wang, ‘A Dog That No Longer Barks: Role Performance of Investigative Journalism in China in the Digital Age’, Journalism Practice 18 (2024), 2240–2257.

[27] Han Futao (韩福涛), ‘An Investigation of Tanker Truck Transport Chaos in Unloading Coal Oil and Loading Edible Oil’ 罐车运输乱象调查卸完煤制油又装食用油, Beijing News, 2 July 2024, online at https://m.bjnews.com.cn/detail/1719878490168127.html

[28] ‘A Rare Exposé’, China Media Project, 10 July 2024, online at https://chinamediaproject.org/2024/07/10/rare-front-page-report/#:~:text=Reporters%2C%20for%20example%2C%20trailed%20one,of%20the%20tank%20in%20between.

[29] https://m.bjnews.com.cn/detail/1719878490168127.html

[30] ‘Chinese Cooking Oil Scandal Prompts New Safety Rule for Transporting Products’, South China Morning Post, 30 August 2024, online at https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3276586/chinese-cooking-oil-scandal-prompts-new-safety-rules-transporting-products

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In this show, Nymphia displayed the same queer high as Taiwan’s sci-fi writers have done since the 1990s. Although this time Taiwan’s queer imagination gained global intelligibility outside literature and on TV, both Nymphia and Taiwanese queer science fiction writers before her shared a common goal: dreaming of a different future.

Dreaming of a different future

In 1995, writing in the technical journal Wanglu Tongxun 網路通訊, the Taiwanese gothic sci-fi writer Hong Ling 洪凌 wondered what it could mean to exist in cyberspace, a concept at the core of contemporary literary science fiction:

I just returned from a place where that which can be comprehended is not set by three-dimensional physics. Saying ‘returned’ violates the normal course of current physics, because I have not moved. Actually, I have been sitting still in my little attic, with my keyboard on a cushion over my knees and my gaze never moving away from an 87 cm monitor… Somehow, the me of a few minutes ago is not the me who is now frenziedly striking the keys on their keyboard; they are indeed in two different places.

Amid a fear of the pervasive spread of the internet in the 1990s and its consequences for freedom and civilisation, the title of Hong Ling’s contribution ‘A Fatal and Magnificent Surreal Realm’ 致命華美的超現實境域 announced a hopeful perspective for the future. It is one that has permeated queer science fiction in Taiwan: the perspective of existing differently.

Sci-fi is not a popular genre in Taiwan. Anyone who visits a bookstore in the island, either now or in the 1990s when sci-fi first appeared, would realise that these texts lack a shelf of their own. The elements used by Taiwanese sci-fi writers in the 1990s are of the most varied, making it difficult to create a rigid corpus of Taiwanese sci-fi without stepping into the genres of fantasy or general literature.

Theorists in the field of science fiction have long argued that one of the central elements of sci-fi as a genre is the concept of cyberspace. It is accepted that cyberspace represents an opportunity to fulfil the fantasy of leaving the ‘prison of the meat’ in the future.^[3] However, Taiwanese queer sci-fi writers like Hong Ling dealt with the uncertainty of the future in a holistic way. They saw technology not as a way out of the problems of the present world but as central to their hopes for survival in a non-normative way. In their works, cyberspace and technology do not mean a departure from material embodied concerns, neither do they entail an adoption of a more abstract, transcendent self. In these texts, technology mediates between our fragile existences and the threats posed to human survival in order to invent queer futures.

Such is the centrality of the body in 1990s Taiwanese sci-fi that it is a genre full of desire, thirst and lust as well as blood, thinking of Hong Ling’s collection of lesbian vampire stories, Heretic Vampire Biographies 異端吸血鬼列傳, or their story ‘Fever’ 發燒, where lesbian vampires and werewolves dwell in post-apocalyptic cities following nuclear or environmental catastrophes.^[4]

Technology has allowed Taiwanese queer sci-fi writers to imagine self-expression free from sexual prejudice by embracing future uncertainty. As Hong Ling wrote: ‘Let’s meet each other online! Even if that means to encounter with fatally alienated identities and get entangled in relationships far different from the ones we already know.’^[5] As anarchic as this invitation to the future might sound, it locates technology as the means to actualise the unknown and speaks of a need to make a change in a spoiled present. Technology was not only an abstract source of inspiration for queers’ stories; it was also the means to actualise an uncertain yet desired future, and queer sci-fi writers were high on it.

In 1995, when Microsoft Word and the internet were still novelties, Chi Ta-wei 紀大偉 published what has been labelled the first modern Sinophone queer sci-fi novel and seemingly the first featuring a trans protagonist: The Membranes 膜, translated into English in 2021 by Ari Heinrich. It portrays a world where humanity has fled the surface of the Earth and found refuge at the bottom of the ocean. This novel, which has already been translated into several European languages and adapted into theatre, was written in just one month, only two years after its author learned to use Microsoft Word – a clear example of how technology was not only a fictional element but also a real tool with which to invent the future.

In a 2021 interview, Chi spoke of the high in the writing process of The Membranes as an unequivocally embodied experience mediated by technology: ‘I did not feel the adrenaline rush when writing on paper, but with a computer I felt that my writing experience was suddenly enhanced and made euphoric. I enjoyed the high a lot back then.’^[6] This is reminiscent of the passage by Hong Ling, revealing an important characteristic of Taiwanese queer sci-fi writers: their future as queer people had been foreclosed by an authoritarian present, but with the lifting of martial law in 1987 and a keyboard at hand, the horizon of possibilities for politics, culture and self-expression suddenly broadened, together with the arrival of the internet and mass electronic communications. This generation of queer writers inevitably started imagining their survival as queers in intimate relation with technology.

Other Taiwanese writers of sci-fi feel their survival threatened for different reasons not related to their sexuality, including climate collapse. Wu Ming-yi’s 吳明益 The Man with the Compound Eyes 複眼人 (2011) shows how all lives face the same fatal risk of ecological catastrophe. In the novel, Atile’i, the second son of a family on the imaginary island of Wayo Wayo, is offered as a sacrifice to the Sea God, as tradition requires. Unexpectedly, he survives. Caught in a trash vortex, Atile’i arrives on the coast of Taiwan, where he meets Alice Shih. Alice, who has just lost her husband and son in an accident in the mountains, and Atile’i, who has left behind his civilisation and everything he knew, both feel their world is over and are in need of imagining a future different from the one they could have foreseen. This situation of finding each other as the world collapses from climate change bonds them as they are forced to reimagine their lives afresh.

Wu Ming-yi first published a short story with the same title in 2002 in the journal Chung-wai Literary. In the story, a researcher employed by a tour company must film a nature reserve and replicate it virtually. While filming, he meets a man with compound eyes who advises him to set up cameras to record how purple crow butterflies (which also have compound eyes) see the world, telling him: ‘If the gaze with which animals see the world is not understood, everything will come to an end.’^[7]

In this seminal work, two key elements of 1990s Taiwanese queer science fiction are evident: a need to imagine the future afresh after undergoing a life-threatening situation (ecological disaster in this case), and technology (filming) as the mediator between humans and their possibility of a different future.

Although Wu did not write from a queer perspective or for a queer audience, one can trace his writing back to previous experiments of 1990s queer sci-fi, propelled by a similar feeling of urgency for a different future and with technology as the facilitator of that future.

The novel that developed from Wu’s short story has been translated into more than ten languages, and the acquisition of the rights for an English translation at the 2011 Frankfurt Bookfair by American publisher Vintage Pantheon was spurred precisely by the urgency and global intelligibility of its ecological message.^[8]

While the sense of emergency in The Man with the Compound Eyes is visible, the key role of technology as mediator, although present at the seminal work that served as its blueprint, is lost in the time lapse of the decade that separates the publication of the two texts.

The realistic turn of contemporary Sinophone sci-fi

After the 1990s, the role of technology seemed to have gradually lost its ability to ‘wow’ Taiwanese sci-fi writers, and its role in Sinophone sci-fi might be changing altogether.

In the popular saga The Three Body Problem 三體 (2008) by mainland Chinese writer Liu Cixin 刘慈欣, a world on the edge of alien invasion strives to save itself. The Redemptionists put all their efforts into finding a solution, via technology, to their seemingly doomed future while the Adventists welcome the invaders’ goal of taking over the Earth. Unlike Taiwan’s queer sci-fi, in this trilogy, technology does not serve as a mediator to overcome humankind’s mistakes, nor to make human life on Earth more inclusive, or at least give it an option for survival after an apocalyptic disaster. In The Three Body Problem, technology is represented in what can be read as realistic terms: as a locus where power is contested in line with current geopolitics.

Mimicking real life and no longer speculating about the future, some contemporary science fiction portrays technology as a frontier to be controlled to attain power. The United States blocking China’s access to some technological improvements can be read as analogous to the real-life Sophons; those subatomic particles in The Three Body Problem saga sent by the enemy to foreclose technological advances on the Earth. Even the poisoning and murder in real life of Lin Qi, one of the promoters of the TV adaptation of The Three Body Problem, defies the limits of fiction, taking a Hollywood murder plot into reality.^[9]

China’s global ambitions and the logistics and politics surrounding the international flow of semiconductors put unique pressures on Taiwan. This might affect Taiwan’s future artistic production and push it to take a more realistic turn following the example of mainland Chinese writers like the aforementioned Liu Cixin or Chen Qiufan 陈秋帆.

Nymphia Winds’s performance at the Presidential Office serves as an illustrative example of the distinctive Taiwanese queer imagination that emerged in the 1990s: one that uses technology as a mediator, reaches global audiences, and does not resort to realism to invent the future. Nymphia’s performance of Huang Fei’s 黃妃 ‘zhui, zhui, zhui’ 追追追 [‘Chase, chase, chase’], a classic Taiwanese diva song, at the otherwise formal setting of the Presidential Office serves to evoke the uniqueness of Taiwanese queer spirit that is so pervasive in 1990s queer sci-fi. It is a spirit that strives to find a way, from a seemingly hopeless atmosphere, to imagine a queer glittering future that, like Nymphia’s dress, blooms like it has gone bananas

Notes

[1] ‘Best of Nymphia Wind’, YouTube, retrieved 24 September 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE2gsHaIDpI

[2] Hong Ling, ‘Zhiming Huamei de Chaoxianshi Jingyu’, Wanglu Tongxun, 1995, p. 114.

[3] Sherryl Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, pp. 102–3.

[4] Paola Zamperini (trad.), ‘Fever’, in Patricia Sieber (ed.), Red is Not the Only Color, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001, p. 149.

[5] Hong Ling, ‘Zhiming Huamei de Chaoxianshi Jingyu’, p. 117.

[6] Chris Littlewood, ‘Never prosthetic: An interview with Chi Ta-Wei’, Paris Review, 13 October 2021.

[7] Wu Ming-yi, ‘The man with the compound eyes’, Chung Wai Literary Quarterly vol. 31, no. 4 (2002), p. 205.

[8] Pei-yin Lin, ‘Positioning “Taiwanese literature” to the world’, in Bi-yu Chang and Pei-yin Lin (eds), Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019, p. 22.

[9] David Pierson, ‘The bizarre Chinese murder plot behind Netflix’s “3 Body Problem”’, 1 April 2024, online at https://www.nytimes.com

The post Hopefully Going Bananas: Taiwan’s Sinophone (Queer) Science Fiction appeared first on The China Story.

Life in prison was difficult. Food was lousy. The temperature there was unbearably hot summer and chilly in winter. There were hundreds of rules regulating prison life. Sharing food and books or keeping an orange overnight could be punished by solitary confinement without books, snacks, radio and television. Inmates were deprived not just of freedom but also of dignity, constantly scolded by the officers and exposed naked in front of surveillance cameras.

I vowed to keep a sane mind and good spirits. I saw the courtroom and prison as a stage for explaining to the public the cause of our struggle. After all, the purpose of civil disobedience is to arouse public awareness of an unjust situation through self-sacrifice. I trust that a ‘community of suffering’ can become collective resistance to dictatorship.

The anti-extradition protests changed the course of Hong Kong history. But they were part of the long struggle for democracy in Hong Kong. I will compare it with the older democracy movement that started in the mid-1980s and the Umbrella Movement of 2014 in terms of leadership styles, strategies and the framing of local identities.

Leadership: from collective actions to connective actions

In the 1980s, the movement for direct election of the Legislative Council was organised under a centralised leadership with the school principal and politician Szeto Wah, himself a member of the Legislative Council from 1985 to 2004, at the core. The first rally for democracy featured a ‘chairperson panel’ 主席台 on the stage with representatives from different civil society groups – including the Professional Teachers’ Union, Christian Industrial Committee and others – was not much different in style from the formal meetings held by the Communist Party of China (CPC).

As a student, I was stunned by this scene. Mr Szeto, as he later wrote in his autobiography, was once a member of Hok Yau Club (revealed in his book as a subsidiary group under the CPC) but was not admitted to the party.[1] He later established the most powerful teachers’ union in the territory, Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union. He adopted communist organisational tactics to fight for democracy by building strong central leadership, establishing branches and cells in different districts and schools, and recruiting members through services and material benefits.

Younger generations of social activists attacked this leadership style as the movement evolved following the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. They criticised the rigid organisational hierarchy as discouraging individual initiative and being incapable of reaching people who were not members of civil society organisations.

From 2003 to 2019, the Civil Human Rights Front had organised marches for freedom and democracy on 1 July, the day of the handover from British to Chinese sovereignty. The massive turnout of 500,000 people that year, in response to proposed anti-subversion legislation, demonstrated the effectiveness of mixing organisational and network mobilisations.[2] According to a survey, only 34.3 percent of participants were drawn in by appeals from groups they belonged to. Most of them joined the march with family members (26.6 percent) or friends (45.2 percent) after hearing about it on radio or receiving emails from colleagues or friends. Only 4.7 percent marched with other members of the same civil society groups.[3]

During the mobilisational period of the Occupy Central Movement in 2013, the leaders of the ‘Occupy Trio’ – Professor Benny Tai, the Rev. Chu Yiu-ming and myself – attempted to incorporate some bottom-up initiatives such as ‘Deliberation Day’ (a series of forums discussing democracy and related issues) and a ‘civic referendum’ (an unofficial referendum organised by the Occupy Trio to let people choose a constitutional reform package to be submitted to the government). But when the occupation erupted to support the student strike and became the Umbrella Movement, student leaders took over the leadership with the Occupy Trio and opposition party leaders providing support. Internal splits between the Occupy Trio and student leaders regarding the duration of occupation and negotiation tactics became so serious that they ended in deadlocks. The protesters who occupied the site for seventy-nine days were left confused by the lack of coherent leadership.

In the 2019 anti-extradition protests, participants demonstrated a much higher degree of flexibility in terms of leadership and strategies, as reflected in their motto: ‘Be water’. Rejecting the notion of centralised leadership, they formulated their goals and strategies through an internet forum. The decisions were made and disseminated through Facebook, Telegram channels and other apps.

Instead of occupying a specific place for a long time, people organised human chains, singing the newly written protest anthem ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ in places like shopping malls, and staging unadvertised protests during lunch breaks in different business districts. These diffused mobilisations turned out to be extremely effective and hard to suppress, given that no prominent leaders could be identified.

Strategies: from legal, peaceful protest to mixed strategies

Before the Umbrella Movement, the pro-democracy movement organised protests only within legal boundaries, seeking permission for rallies and marches from police.

The Umbrella Movement was a watershed in adopting the idea of civil disobedience, involving violations of law while upholding the principle of non-violence. Although some of participants advocated more confrontational tactics during the seventy-nine-day occupation, this ‘militant faction’ 勇武派 was marginalised by the dominant faction of peaceful demonstrators known as the ‘peaceful, rational and non-violent’ faction 和理非.

The ‘militant faction’ came to the fore during the ‘Fishball Revolution’ 魚蛋革命 of 2016 when Hong Kong Indigenous, a group promoting Hong Kong independence, confronted the police when they went to support some illegal hawkers on Lunar New Year’s eve. While there was widespread sympathy for the hawkers, and condemnation of police violence, there were mixed reactions to the violence on the part of the protesters.

The Anti-Extradition Movement, however, demonstrated an unprecedented tolerance within the movement towards different protest strategies, including violence. Besides massive rallies and other peaceful protests in schools and shopping malls, young protesters also set up roadblocks to block police deployment. When police used tear gas, pepper spray and even bullets to disperse protesters, they returned fire with Molotov cocktails. They took justice into their own hands by beating up antagonists when the police themselves were not respecting the law.

Although the majority of protesters supported peaceful struggle, surveys found people were sympathetic to violent demonstration.[4] Around 40 percent of the interviewees in a survey done from June to October in 2019 by the Chinese University of Hong Kong believed that the extent of violence on the part of protesters was excessive, but 56 percent indicated their understanding of why people had to resort to violence. Some 72 percent believed that police had used excessive force, and half of the interviewees maintained that the government was responsible for the escalation of violence.

More and more people believed that the protesters’ physical violence was a response to the structural violence of an authoritarian regime.

Identity framing: from Hong Kong Chinese to Hongkongers

As Hong Kong was a British colony populated mainly by ethnic Chinese for more than a hundred years to 1997 and is currently a Special Administrative Region under Chinese sovereignty, its people have long possessed dual identities. For a long time, Hong Kong people saw themselves first as Hongkongers but did not see that as being in conflict with the Chinese identity. However, after the 2014 Umbrella Movement and especially during the Anti-Extradition Movement, the younger generation in particular showed a strong sense of local identity. They increasingly saw themselves purely as Hongkongers, refusing to identify as Chinese.

Leaders of the pro-democracy movement in the mid-1980s held a banner with the words ‘I love China, I love Hong Kong and I love democracy’. The sense of patriotism demonstrated by this generation of democratic leaders could be seen as defiance to colonial rule. ‘Democratic reunion with China’ 民主回歸 was the dominant discourse within the pro-democracy movement. Even the organisation holding the annual candlelight vigil commemorating the Tiananmen Square crackdown bears the word ‘patriotic’ in its name.

The Umbrella Movement was also careful not to denounce Chinese sovereignty. The Occupy Trio and student leaders simply urged Beijing to honour its promise of giving Hong Kong universal suffrage as stipulated in the Basic Law. The failure of the movement to achieve democracy after such a massive showdown created a moral vacuum in the community. In an extremely depressing atmosphere, the strategies and goals of the movement were debated. We saw the rise of localism in the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement. More young people argued that for Hong Kong to become a sovereign state was the only hope for democracy, which was not possible under the present arrangement within China of ‘one country, two systems’.

While people were still debating the ideas advocated by the localists, the government attempted to impose the Extradition Law on Hong Kong, creating tremendous fear among people. The law, once passed, would enable criminal suspects to be sent from Hong Kong to China for trial, which has no rule of law in the eyes of most Hong Kong people. Overstepping these legal boundaries would render the ‘one country, two systems’ formulation meaningless. The growing Beijing-directed repression of protests by Hong Kong police further eroded people’s already faint identification with China. People therefore felt more comfortable chanting the slogan ‘Hong Kong is not China’, which is not necessarily equivalent to ‘Hong Kong independence’.

According to a survey conducted by the Hong Kong Public Opinions Research Institute during the high tide of the protest in late 2019, 67 percent of Hong Kong people still did not support Hong Kong independence.[5] But another survey conducted by Gary Tang found that more than 60 percent of protesters on the front line of the extradition movement believed that ‘Hong Kong independence was the only way out’.[6] I believe that truly reflects the sentiment of the younger generation.

Strengths and weaknesses of networked movements

The Anti-Extradition Movement, as a classical case of a ‘networked social movement’, achieved remarkable results despite the huge costs paid. A ‘networked social movement’ is a movement mobilised through new information and communications technologies. According to Manuel Castells, in networked social movements, the internet not only decentralises our communication routines but also liberates individuals to shape a new autonomy as people no longer need to rely on traditional political parties, civil society organisations or media to advocate their ideas and mobilise others for support. Social media such as Facebook and Instagram and self-media such as YouTube provide convenient channels with which to shape people’s mindsets. Since communication is power, acquiring this power by ordinary people will shake the political scene and lead to social change. As Castells argued: ‘Power is more than communication, and communication is more than power. But power lies on the control of communication, as counterpower depends on breaking through such control.’[7]

After reviewing a series of networked social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring/Jasmine Revolution and even our Umbrella Movement, Castells found that this kind of movement was usually powerful in creating social and cultural change but not systematic political change.[8]

Yet the Anti-Extradition Movement succeeded in many fronts. It forced the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government to withdraw the bill, persuaded the United States Congress to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act and helped pro-democracy candidates to win a landslide victory in the District Council election in late 2019. Unlike the Umbrella Movement, which experienced internal conflicts regarding goals and strategies, the networked protesters were able to settle on their Five Demands: withdrawal of extradition bill; retraction of the word ‘riot’ to describe rallies; release of all arrested demonstrators; an independent inquiry into perceived police brutality; the right for Hong Kong people to choose their own leaders democratically and other specific goals through online deliberation.

Backlash from China and the future of Hong Kong’s democratic movement

Perhaps the success of the Anti-Extradition Movement in mobilising such a huge proportion of the population provoked Beijing’s ruthless crackdown. Some 10,000 protesters were arrested and prosecuted, accused of participating in riots. Blatantly violating the Basic Law, which specifies that Hong Kong should make its own national security laws, Beijing imposed China’s National Security Law directly on Hong Kong on 1 July 2020. Many pro-democracy leaders for example Benny Tai was prosecuted for conspiracy to commit subversion by organising the primary and vowing to veto the government budget if the prodemocracy law makers secured a majority in the Legislative Council. Tonyee Chow was prosecuted for refusing to provide information on the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China. She was also charged for inciting subversion as the alliance was responsible for organising the annual candlelight vigil commemorating the 4 June crackdown. Many political groups were forced to close. Their leaders were either arrested or escaped into exile.

Independent mass media such as the Apple Daily 蘋果日報 and Stand News 立場新聞 were banned, and their owners and chief editors were arrested and charged with collusion with foreign forces or incitement. The authorities revised the school curriculum to eliminate a compulsory course Liberal Studies and make National Security Education mandatory at all levels of schooling, including university.

Elected pro-democracy district councillors were disqualified, and the rules of election were amended so that only pro-China candidates would be allowed to be nominated for the election.

Human rights–related civil society groups, including some prominent trade unions and university student unions, were forced to dissolve. Some international NGOs such as Amnesty International decided to leave because they found Hong Kong was no longer safe for their staff to carry out their mission.

Everyday resistance: from a community of resistance to a community of suffering

Open opposition has become impossible in Hong Kong unless you are willing to face the repercussions, which could mean long imprisonment. This does not mean that people’s level of rage and their urge for freedom and democracy have died down. But they can express their grievances only through subtle resistance in everyday life. ‘Yellow Economic Circles’ emerged to provide people with an arena to express their political stands through daily consumption, by patronising restaurants or shops that supported the movement, including by hanging pro-democracy posters on the wall or protest slogans printed on the receipts during the protests.

A group of dedicated Hong Kong citizens spent many days a week in court giving support to defendants charged for political reasons. When the defendants were found guilty and sentenced to jail, these citizens would chase the prison van taking them to prison to bid them farewell. Early in the morning, they waited in the queue outside the prison to visit the political prisoners. Many also wrote letters to them. We call these people ‘professional’ court auditors, van chasers, prison visitors and letter-writers owing to their exceptional devotion.

By sharing the pains of these political prisoners, people are morally and socially connected in a community of suffering. Hong Kong has thus turned from a community of resistance to a community of suffering.

The authorities are aware of the power of this moral force. They forced NGOs providing support to political prisoners such as letter-writing to dissolve. Two ‘professional’ court auditors were charged for chanting slogans in a courtroom and for making ‘inciting’ statements with ‘seditious intention’ online.[9] People were worried but still attended courtroom hearings. They were encouraged by exemplary figures like Jimmy Lai and Tonyee Chow, who stood firm to defend their rights and challenge the legitimacy of the court. However, these ‘professional’ court auditors now refrain from making noise during trials and avoid being followed when leaving the courthouse.

Faced with diminishing freedoms, people of Hong Kong still uphold their free minds. They shunned the 2023 district council election, with voter turnout sharply dropping to 27.5 percent compared to 71 percent in 2019, despite relentless efforts by the government to boost the numbers.[10] Courageous individuals still quietly brought flowers to commemorate political victims in some particular dates. This form of covert resistance will continue to inspire people to maintain rage and hope until darkness falls to dawn.

Notes

[1] Szeto Wah, The Great River Flows East: Memoirs of Szeto Wah 大江東去: 司徒華回憶錄. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2011.

[2] Chan Kin-man, ‘Civil society and the democracy movement in Hong Kong: Mass mobilization with limited organizational capacity’, Korea Observer 36, no. 1 (2005).

[3] Joseph Man Chan and Robert Ting-yiu Chung, ‘Who could mobilize 500,000 people on the streets? The paradigmatic shift of public opinions politics’ 誰能發動五十萬人上街? 民意政治範式的改變, in Interpreting July 1七一解讀, ed. Joseph Man Chan, Hong Kong: Mingpao Press, 2004.

[4] Ma Ngok, ‘The community of resistance: The 2019 Anti-Extradition Movement in Hong Kong’ 反抗的共同體: 2019年香港反送中運動, New Taipei: Left Bank Publishing, 2020, pp. 129–30.

[5] Ibid., pp. 313–14.

[6] Gary Tang’s study quoted in ibid.

[7] Manuel Castells, Communication Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 3.

[8] Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015.

[9] Kevin Yam, ‘“Decolonising” Hong Kong by embracing colonialism’, China Story, 17 June 2024, https://www.thechinastory.org/decolonising-hong-kong-by-embracing-colonialism/

[10] Kenji Kawase, ‘Hong Kongers shun patriots-only polls as turnout plummets to 27.5%’, 11 December 2023, Nikkei Asia, https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Hong-Kong-security-law/Hong-Kongers-shun-patriots-only-polls-as-turnout-plummets-to-27.5

The post Hong Kong’s Long Struggle for Democracy appeared first on The China Story.

Research since the 1990s reveals two distinct generations of left-behind children. The first generation consisted of children born in the 1980s and 1990s. During this period most rural migrants were male, and both migration distances and duration were relatively short. In addition, parents typically did not leave the village until their children were at school. The second generation are children born after 2000. Since then, more women, including mothers, have migrated out of the villages, and migration distances and durations have also been longer than with the parents of the first generation. As a result, more left-behind children are being raised by grandparents or other relatives. In addition, parents are separating from their children at an earlier age. For instance, the percentage of zero-to-two-year-olds who remain in a village without their parents has sharply increased from the first to second generation.^[2] Compared to the first generation of left-behind children, the second generation has access to higher levels of technology and communications such as the internet and cell phones. This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, children and caregivers enjoy greater communication with migrant parents; on the other hand, unrestrained use of social media and online gaming can have a negative influence on the left-behind children.

The generational differences of left-behind children have many variations. We focus here on the age of children when parents migrate and duration of parental migration, the make-up of caregivers (single parents, grandparents, other relatives and schools) and the availability of social media and the internet for children, caregivers and migrant parents.

Leaving them younger, staying away longer

The parents of the second generation leave them when they are younger and for longer periods. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, both parents tend to be at home for the first year or two of a child’s life, and it was typically fathers who left the village for work.^[3] In addition, those who left tended to seek off-farm employment closer to home. This was due to the strict hukou (household registration) system that limited migration to cities, as well as the country’s greater reliance on agriculture. Yet, after 2000, central and local party governments began to enact limited hukou reform that allowed rural people greater employment opportunities in cities. As a result, both men and women started to migrate greater distances and for longer periods. They tended to leave younger children in the village while bringing older children with them to the cities for better educational opportunities.^[4]

Parental absence at an earlier age can have an adverse effect on early childhood development. Studies find that the absence of the mother in particular has a negative effect on the cognitive development and nutrition of rural children younger than two.^[5] Rural children have delayed development outcomes compared to their urban counterparts, but it is more pronounced when mothers separate from their children within their first two years. Many studies find that parental migration has a significantly negative impact on the children’s education, resulting in lower test scores, worse school enrolment and fewer years of schooling overall.^[6] Children’s middle-school academic performance improves when migrant parents return home.^[7] More second-generation children migrate with their parents to the cities for better educational opportunities and attend urban high schools.

Stay-behind caregivers

The first generation of left-behind children typically stayed with their mother and grandparents. The women who remained in the village looked after the children as well as grandparents, the house and the farmland. During this period, almost every village had an elementary school, and there was a middle school in a nearby town or county. As more rural women entered the urban workforce, more fathers stayed behind, caring for both children and grandparents. The roughly 20 million left-behind children in 2000 represented 13 percent of rural children between the ages of 0 to 17.^[8] By 2010, 47 percent of the left-behind children did not live with either parent.^[9] In 2020, it was 46 percent.^[10] However, those living only with their father rose from 17 percent in 2010 to 24 percent while those living only with their mother fell from 36 percent in 2010 to 30 percent ten years later. The largest spike was for children living alone or with other children: from 3 percent in 2010 to 13 percent in 2020.

More students of elementary-school age, some as young as 7, have had to live in school dorms since rural elementary schools have closed or consolidated, a trend that started in the early 2000s and escalated after 2010. The boarding school experience is correlated with poorer educational and health outcomes for these rural students.^[11] Compared to non-boarding rural students, boarders tend to have lower test scores, higher rates of anaemia and higher levels of learning anxiety and loneliness. When both parents are living in a distant city or even another province, the effect is even more exacerbated. Interviews with students in boarding schools reflect this problem. An 11-year-old who lives in a dorm, sleeps in a room with 15 classmates and shares a bed says, ‘It is hard to concentrate, and I have to ask the older classmates for help with my studies.’ Moreover, he cannot visit his parents every weekend like most of his classmates in the dorm.^[12]

Left-behind children and the digital revolution

The rapid development of telecommunication technology has transformed the experience of both left-behind children and their parents. For the first generation, and into the early 2000s, landlines and mobile phones helped children connect with their migrant parents, but many poor rural migrant families, especially in inland provinces, had to rely on occasional calls put through to a school office phone or neighbour’s mobile.^[13] Local governments, with support from non-profit organisations, sponsored ‘family-connection phone rooms’ 亲情电话屋 in rural schools or villages.^[14] In contrast, the second generation has had wider access to mobiles, including smart phones, and the internet. A survey by the Research Centre for Rural Affairs (RCRA) at Wuhan University revealed that 40 percent of left-behind children have their own mobile phones, while 49 percent use their caregiver’s phone.^[15] Migrant parents can contact their children regularly using text, voice and video calls or even closed-circuit television.^[16] While distant parenting is not ideal, the technology allows for a greater emotional connection. Recent interviews with children who have parents living away from home suggest that the frequency of calls can make a difference. One girl tells us that she talks to her parents by video phone every day and feels close to family. Yet another boy rarely talks with his parents over the phone, and he feels he has no connection with his parents.^[17]

Although frequent contact is positive, the use of the internet and smartphones presents new challenges for migrant parents and caregivers. Watching short videos and playing games are the main online entertainment activities for these children, accounting for 69 percent and 33 percent, respectively. According to the Research Centre for Rural Affairs (RCRA) report, more than half the students in a sixth-grade class in Jiangxi Province spend more than ten hours on their smartphones at home during weekends. A middle-school teacher in the same province notes that students spend weekends on their smartphones instead of studying, often leaving homework incomplete. Many teachers report that students are ‘staying up late for two days at home and sleeping for five days at school, with no intention to learn’. Rural left-behind children are more than twice as likely to develop internet addiction than their counterparts with parents at home.^[18] The RCRA also found that 67 percent of migrant parents worried that their children were addicted to their mobiles, with 21 percent of parents considering the situation to be ‘very serious’.^[19] As elsewhere, studies show that smartphone dependence can adversely affect left-behind children’s physical and mental health and negatively influence their academic performance.^[20]

Hukou reform and rise of urban left-behind children

Since the inception of the hukou system in 1958, rural people living in cities have faced institutional discrimination in areas including employment, access to public education, health care and housing. The hukou reform that began in the early 2000s has had a significant influence on migrant parents and their children, offering increasing access to public education. Starting in 2000, the State Council has given rural migrants increased opportunities to convert their household registration status from rural to urban and enjoy the associated social benefits. However, these policies have been unevenly adopted at the subprovincial and municipal levels. Although the central government has emphasised that local governments provide migrant children with access to public education, many cities have set up barriers that make access difficult, such as requiring various forms of registration or fees.^[21]

Another way municipal governments control migration and education is through home ownership. High school education in China is not compulsory, and to enrol, students must take an entrance exam. To qualify for the exam, there is an official registration process that may require an urban hukou as well as proof of their parents’ home ownership.^[22] Many migrant parents have therefore left younger children behind in rural areas until they can afford to purchase an urban apartment to meet such requirements. Even then, it is challenging for migrant students to compete for a limited number of places with urban peers who have enjoyed better primary and secondary education and then, if accepted into an urban high school, to keep up with their classmates.

The hukou reforms have contributed to a generational shift in the number of urban left-behind children, from 3 million in 2000 to more than 20 million in 2010 and 25 million in 2020, the last out of an estimated total of 67 million.^[23] Since 2000, we have observed a new generation of urban left-behind children who generally belong to one of two categories: children who were born in smaller cities (county seats) with one or both parents migrating to larger cities for work, or children born in the countryside who have moved to a smaller county seat but whose parents work in larger cities.

While urban children traditionally have access to better health care and education than children in rural areas, recent studies find that urban children who are living with caregivers instead of their parents or just living with one parent experience greater mental health problems and substance abuse than urban children living with both parents.^[24] The reasons include greater isolation and lack of parental supervision. In addition, studies suggest that the children of migrant workers in cities are more likely to be bullied as well as bully other children.^[25] For numerous reasons, compared to other urban children, those with migrant worker parents exhibit poorer physical and mental health, lower test scores and weaker school attachment, and they are more prone to smoking and drinking. They also tend to have more mental health problems and higher rates of substance use than their rural counterparts.

Overall, the disadvantages left-behind children face, combined with lower cognitive and educational outcomes, can have serious consequences, including the propensity to engage in risky behaviour and to commit crimes.^[26] A 2018 prison survey of 2,670 inmates conducted by the Center for Experimental Economics in Education (CEEE) at Shaanxi Normal University shows that 23 percent of the inmates surveyed were the children of migrant workers. The data also suggests that inmates who had been left behind as children were more likely to have committed crimes in their youth as well as more violent crimes as adults than inmates who grew up with both parents. In fact, statistics show a rise in violent crime among juveniles as well as several high-profile cases of heinous crimes in which the perpetrators and victims are under 16 years old.^[27] Of course, most children who were raised by grandparents or one parent have not committed serious crimes or are incarcerated, but now, as researchers, we are observing how this experience influences adults and even their own children.

Conclusion

The first generation of left-behind children are now adults, many with their own children. While previous research examined the emotional, cognitive and health differences between children living with both parents as opposed to single parents or other caregivers, recent research is exploring how the experience of being left behind influences the behaviour and opportunities of adults. This includes types of employment, unemployment and incarceration. Recent research suggests that adults whose parents were migrant workers are more likely to have less schooling and lower cognitive test scores as well as significantly poorer socioeconomic status.^[28]

Future research may focus on several areas. First is on how the experiences of urban dwellers compare with those in rural families, especially in the context of continued urbanisation. Second is how the experience of left-behind children influences their health and behaviour as adults and whether there are any gender differences. For instance, most of the prison studies that examine the left behind experience tend to use male inmate samples and interviews. One future area of study is to include female inmates and the left behind experience. Third, given that male left-behind children come from poorer rural areas, and enjoy less or poorer quality education and limited employment prospects, they are more likely to become involuntary bachelors (‘bare branches’ 光棍), exerting greater pressure on rural social welfare systems in the future. Finally, the perspectives of migrant parents, caregivers and the children themselves should be incorporated into future studies.^[29] For instance, a recent interview with rural children of elementary school age, whose parents have migrated out of their village for most of the year, illuminates some of the feelings around bullying from the child’s perspective.^[30] ‘When your parents are away, you can feel timid, lonely and afraid’, says a sixth-grade stay-behind girl. These children may be easy targets for bullies. Moreover, she says that ‘these children are afraid to tell their caregivers or parents that they are being bullied’. When bullies think they can get away with tormenting another child, it might continue until it is too late. When asked how to resolve the situation, she said, ‘Students and teachers need to be more proactive in letting children with migrant parents know it is OK to tell teachers and other relatives what is happening.’ Thus, even for national discussions on bullying and left-behind children, including the most vulnerable voices could contribute to a solution.

Notes

[1] National Bureau of Statistics of China, UNICEF China and UNFPA China, ‘What the 2020 census can tell us about children in China: Facts and figures’, April 2023, online at: https://www.unicef.cn/en/reports/population-status-children-china-2020-census

[2] Ibid.

[3] Biao Xiang, ‘How far are the left‐behind left behind? A preliminary study in rural China’, Population, Space and Place, vol. 13, no. 3 (2007): 179–91.

[4] National Bureau of Statistics of China, UNICEF China and UNFPA China, ‘What the 2020 census can tell us about children in China’.

[5] Ai Yue, Yu Bai, Yaojiang Shi, Renfu Luo, Scott Rozelle, Alexis Medina and Sean Sylvia, ‘Parental migration and early childhood development in rural China’, Demography, vol. 57, no. 2 (2020): 403–22.

[6] Ming-Hsuan Lee, ‘Migration and children’s welfare in China: The schooling and health of children left behind’, Journal of Developing Areas, vol. 44, no. 2 (2011): 165–82. Minhui Zhou, Rachel Murphy and Ran Tao, ‘Effects of parents’ migration on the education of children left behind in rural China’, Population and Development Review, vol. 40, no. 2 (2014): 273–92.

[7] Zhiqiang Liu, Li Yu and Xiang Zheng, ‘No longer left-behind: The impact of return migrant parents on children’s performance’, China Economic Review, vol. 49 (2018): 184–96.

[8] National Bureau of Statistics of China, UNICEF China and UNFPA China, ‘What the 2010 census can tell us about children in China: Facts and figures’, October 2014, online at: https://www.unicef.cn/en/reports/census-data-about-children-china-2013

[9] Ibid.

[10] National Bureau of Statistics of China, UNICEF China and UNFPA China, ‘What the 2020 census can tell us about children in China’.

[11] Aiqin Wang, Alexis Medina, Renfu Luo, Yaojiang Shi and Ai Yue, ‘To board or not to board: Evidence from nutrition, health and education outcomes of students in rural China’, China and World Economy, vol. 24, no. 3 (2016): 52–66.

[12] Interview, October 2015, Shaanxi province.

[13] Janice Hua Xu, ‘Media discourse on cell phone technology and “left-behind children” in China’, Global Media Journal, vol. 9, no. 1 (2016): 87–102.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Research Centre for Rural Affairs (RCRA) Wuhan University, ‘Nongcun Liushou Ertong Shouji Chenmi Wenti Diaocha Yu Duice Jianyi’ [Rural left-behind children’s mobile phone addiction: Problem investigation and countermeasure suggestions], 10 February 2023, online at: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/zzHnpW0fRZ1gWCUw6tTMHw

[16] Jiamei Tang, Ke Wang and Yuming Luo, ‘The bright side of digitisation: Assessing the impact of mobile phone domestication on left-behind children in China’s rural migrant families’, Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 13 (2022): 1003379; and Na Liu, ‘CCTV cameras at home: Temporality experience of surveillance technology in family life’, New Media and Society (2024): 1–21.

[17] Interview, July 2024, Elementary School in Shaanxi province conducted through the CEEE.

[18] Jingjing Cai, Yun Wang, Feng Wang, Jingjing Lu, Lu Li and Xudong Zhou, ‘The association of parent–child communication with internet addiction in left-behind children in China: A cross-sectional study’, International Journal of Public Health, vol. 66 (2021): 630700.

[19] Research Centre for Rural Affairs (RCRA) Wuhan University, ‘Nongcun Liushou Ertong Shouji Chenmi Wenti Diaocha Yu Duice Jianyi’ [Rural left-behind children’s mobile phone addiction: Problem investigation and countermeasure suggestions].

[20] Ibid.; and Rui Zhen, Lu Li, Yi Ding, Wei Hong and Ru-De Liu, ‘How does mobile phone dependency impair academic engagement among Chinese left-behind children?’, Children and Youth Services Review, vol. 116 (2020): 105169.

[21] Jia Wu and Junsen Zhang, ‘Suiqian Zinv Ruxue Xianzhi, Ertong Liushou yu Chengshi Laodongli Gongji’ [Barriers to school education for migrant children, being left behind and urban labor supply], Jingji Yanjiu [Economic Research Journal], vol. 55, no. 11 (2020): 138–55.

[22] Tiantian Liu, ‘Real‐estate boom, commodification and crises of social reproductive institutions in rural China’, Development and Change, vol. 54, no. 3 (2023): 543–69; and Eli Friedman, The Urbanisation of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022.

[23] National Bureau of Statistics of China, UNICEF China and UNFPA China, ‘What the 2010 census can tell us about children in China’. National Bureau of Statistics of China, UNICEF China and UNFPA China, ‘What the 2020 census can tell us about children in China’.

[24] Feng Wang, Leesa Lin, Jingjing Lu, Jingjing Cai, Jiayao Xu and Xudong Zhou, ‘Mental health and substance use in urban left-behind children in China: A growing problem’, Children and Youth Services Review, vol. 116 (2020): 105135; Nan Lu, Wenting Lu, Renxing Chen and Wanzhi Tang, ‘The causal effects of urban-to-urban migration on left-behind children’s well-being in China’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, vol. 20, no. 5 (2023): 4303.

[25] Yoichiro Otake, Xiaoqun Liu and Xuerong Luo, ‘Involvement in bullying among left-behind children in provincial Chinese cities: The role of perceived emotional support’, Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma, vol. 28, no. 8 (2019): 943–57; Huiping Zhang, Peilian Chi, Haili Long and Xiaoying Ren, ‘Bullying victimisation and depression among left-behind children in rural China: Roles of self-compassion and hope’, Child Abuse and Neglect, vol. 96 (2019):104072.

[26] Lisa Cameron, Xin Meng and Dandan Zhang, ‘Does being “left–behind” in childhood lead to criminality in adulthood? Evidence from data on rural–urban migrants and prison inmates in China’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organisation, vol. 202 (2022): 675–93.

[27] Nanfang Metropolis Daily, ‘Shinian Shuju Kan Wei Chengnianren Fanzui: Shezui Shaonian He Tezheng? Xiaoyuan Qiling Duolema?’ [A decade of data on juvenile crime: What are the characteristics of offending youth? Has school bullying increased?], 27 March 2024, online at: https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1794641555396609242&wfr=spider&for=pc

[28] Xiaodong Zheng, Zuyi Fang, Yajun Wang and Xiangming Fang, ‘When left-behind children become adults and parents: The long-term human capital consequences of parental absence in China’, China Economic Review, vol. 74 (2022): 101821.

[29] For an excellent example see: Rachel Murphy, The Children of China’s Great Migration. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020; Rachel Murphy, ‘What does “left behind” mean to children living in migratory regions in rural China?’, Geoforum, vol. 129 (2022): 181–90.

[30] Interview, July 2024, Elementary School in Shaanxi province conducted through the CEEE.

The post China’s Second Generation of Left-behind Children appeared first on The China Story.

Less noticed was what Sogavare—and the Pacific more broadly—received in return. A host of memorandums of agreement (MOUs) was signed, including the controversial security agreement, which was first leaked online by a provincial government adviser in 2022, but the final text, which covers military and police cooperation, has never been made public. China–Pacific relations also got their first policy slogan: the Four Fully Respects 四个充分尊重.^[3] Much of it was boilerplate doggerel around ‘win–win results’ and ‘shared benefits’, but it also touched on ‘cultural traditions of Pacific Island nations’ and the need to support the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent—a regional strategy agreed on by Pacific Island Forum nations in 2019 to tackle climate change against the background of geostrategic competition.^[4]

Unpromising beginnings

Less than a decade ago, China’s knowledge of and interest in the Pacific was rudimentary at best. Back in 2013, I worked with a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation (CAITEC), the think tank affiliated with China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM). One of their team was tasked with coming up with China’s five-year plan for its relations with the Kingdom of Tonga, which would map out China’s strategies for aid, investment and trade with the one Pacific nation never to have been colonised. It looked to be a sensitive mission. Tonga already figured large in fears about China’s intent in the region, with some analysts arguing that the kingdom might ‘fall’ to China as a result of debts owed to China Exim Bank dating back to 2006.^[5]

I had expected the researcher, fresh from a posting in Pakistan, to be familiar with the history of China’s engagement with the kingdom, which switched its diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan in November 1998 as part of its confusingly named ‘Look East’ policy.^[6] There was no shortage of entertaining detail for him to become familiar with: a 1996 deal brokered by the Tongan princess Pilolevu to lease Tonga’s satellite spots to China after the kingdom – with the help of a colourful American businessman—had acquired the world’s last 16 unoccupied orbital slots. Another deal that should have caught his attention was the origin story of China’s ‘debt trap diplomacy’ in the Pacific, where the construction company China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) brokered a China Exim Bank loan to rebuild Tonga’s capital, Nuku’alofa, following anti-Chinese riots in 2006, breezily promising (never in writing) that the debt would be forgiven one day. China still holds nearly two-thirds of the Kingdom’s external debt.

To my disappointment, the researcher, flown out on the tab of United Nations Development Program (UNDP) China to write his country report and assess sectors where Australia and China might team up on aid projects,^[7] was not fully familiar with his brief. A week before heading to Shougang Airport for the long trip via Australia and New Zealand, he expressed surprise that he was not heading to Africa. He had assumed that he was off to Togo (duoge 多哥) rather than Tonga (tangjia 汤加).

Ten years since this unpromising start, a transformation has taken place. The Chinese government has invested in the teaching of Pacific languages—at Beijing Foreign Studies University, it is possible to study all the languages of China’s Pacific diplomatic partners, even Cook Islands Maori. The field of Pacific studies is still relatively small,^[8] although there are already six main research centres, led by the early mover: Sun Yat-sen University’s Center for Oceania Studies, and the heavily funded Research Centre for Pacific Island Countries at Liaocheng University. The last benefits from a whole-of-university approach—even the vice chancellor at Liaocheng is engaged in Pacific studies – and institutional links to both the Shandong Provincial Government and the International Liaison Department, a Party agency charged with managing relations between the Communist Party of China (CPC) and foreign political parties.^[9]

The quality of historical and political research coming out of China on the Pacific is still mixed. At one end, there are serious scholars equipped to engage in extended archival and field research in the Pacific and to conduct sophisticated analysis of how the Pacific is portrayed in China.^[10] At the other end, I can recall an international conference in 2015 where participants sitting in the shade of the Great Hall Fale at the National University of Samoa silently exchanged incredulous glances as a senior academic from Liaocheng University shared her knowledge of an alleged secret plan by Banimarama’s Fijian military to invade New Zealand.

Weaponising Pacific history

Despite such misfires, Chinese research on the Pacific has laid the foundations for strengthening ties with Pacific Island countries.

The Chinese state—and particularly its propaganda organs—is beginning to apply Mao’s famous aphorism ‘using the past to serve the present’ (gu wei jin yong 古为今用) to the Pacific. Since the Chinese state had very little to do with the Pacific before the 1970s, it is using the West’s Pacific colonial past to serve the present.

Although the Pacific was once relatively neglected—Mao’s shorthand for the developing world was ‘Asia-Africa-Latin America’ (ya fei mei 亚非美)—PRC academics with knowledge of the region are in high demand to provide comment for outlets like the Global Times, China’s influential nationalist tabloid. Such researchers as Yu Lei 于镭, from Shandong University, provide critical commentary about Western colonialism in the Pacific. In 2023 Australia agreed to resettle the entire population of Tuvalu under the Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union treaty,^[11] which had neocolonial overtones,^[12] particularly Article 4, which required: ‘Tuvalu shall mutually agree with Australia any partnership, arrangement or engagement with any other State or entity on security and defence-related matters. Such matters include but are not limited to defence, policing, border protection, cyber security and critical infrastructure, including ports, telecommunications and energy infrastructure.’ Commenting in the Global Times, Yu Lei argued the treaty demonstrated that ‘former colonial powers’ wanted these countries to remain ‘politically subservient … and economically reliant’ on them through ‘instructions and manipulation’.^[13]

Although in its early stages, the popular deployment of historical narratives is likely to provide focus to China’s discovery of Pacific colonial histories, as China—which has no historical baggage in the Pacific— looks to ‘tell its story well’ 讲好中国故事 in the Pacific. Part of that story is that unlike three of the other permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, the United Kingdom and France), China has not conducted any nuclear tests in the Pacific.

Chen Hong 陈弘, another prominent academic at East China Normal University, who gained the distinction in Australia of having his visa cancelled for allegedly trying to influence a NSW government backbencher,^[14] was among the first to examine the deplorable nuclear legacy of the United States. His work has highlighted Operation Castle Bravo, the first of a series of tests on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, the first fusion nuclear bomb tested anywhere and still the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated by the United States.^[15] The United States, the United Kingdom and France detonated 315 nuclear devices in the Pacific over three decades, including twelve in Australia.^[16]

There are entire swathes of colonial history that China’s commentariat have yet to exploit, presumably because they have yet to come across them. The practice of blackbirding, whereby Pacific islanders were often taken either by force or under false pretenses, to provide slave labour for Queensland’s sugar plantations, has yet to feature in the Global Times.

The frontiers of China’s narrative competition

Future Chinese criticism of blackbirding, which began in the 1840s and was banned by law only in 1904, might not cause many current Australian politicians to lose sleep. But it would not hurt our standing in the region to make an official apology for the practice. The renaming of New South Wales’s Ben Boyd National Park—named for Australia’s first blackbirder—as Beowa National Park in 2022 was a good first step. But apologising for running a slave trade that tore tens of thousands of Pacific islanders from their families should not be a hard sell in Australia’s parliament.

Australia’s relations with Pacific Island counties have begun to evolve. If there is a moment we can look back on as a shift in Australia’s relationship with the region, it might well be 18 October 2023, when the Pacific Engagement Visa (PEV) finally passed the Australian Senate with the support of the Greens and the crossbench. Bipartisan support for the PEV once looked likely, but the Coalition walked away from an initiative they once championed, objecting to the use of a lottery system.^[17] The lottery element is why New Zealand’s Samoa Quota and Pacific Access Visa (which the PEV is modelled on) are so popular—everyone can agree a random lottery is fair.

The significance of the PEV lies in its potential to transform Australia into a nation that looks more like the Pacific. When politicians turn their minds to the needs of Pacific constituents, as we see in New Zealand, the game will change. That is some way down the track, but the PEV is a start. Reams of research show that access to permanent migration is more effective than development assistance for Pacific islanders—and the gains to Pacific families are almost immediate. As Fiji’s Deputy Prime Minister Biman Prasad argued, ‘This is part of a broader strategy to integrate the region in the long term. And given the geopolitics as well, uniting the region in this way will benefit the whole of the region.’^[18] Welcoming Pacific migrants is something that China cannot and will not do.

Despite the easy win represented by the PEV, bilateral competition in defence, economic ties and aid will continue to frame China and Australia’s relations in the Pacific, with Australian governments of both stripes vying to be the ‘partner of choice’ for Pacific nations. Yet all three fields of contestation come with historical complications. Military needs—be they an airfield, a naval base or semi-automatic weapons— can be acted on much more quickly than economic or developmental needs. Nonetheless, Australia’s military spending in the region continues to be shaped by historical concerns about the presence of a hostile power in its immediate vicinity, raised by political leaders as far back as 1883, and the need for Papua New Guinea to be a ‘shield’ against Asia, be it imperial Japan or newly independent Indonesia.^[19] This reinforces a longstanding perception that Australia is more interested in securing the region’s territory for its own safety than contributing to the well-being of Pacific peoples.

The American public might romanticise the United States’ defining Pacific conflict, the battle of Guadalcanal, but it reminds Solomon Islanders of the problem of unexploded ordinance—a danger that remains to this day. This critique was made by a Solomon Islander who, as reported in the Global Times,^[20] responded to US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy’s declaration: ‘We’re coming back’ with the words, ‘But for what?’

Despite the tendency of the Australian and American publics to view our World War II engagement in the region positively—with Australian tales of the Kokoda Trail or the US focus on the battle of Guadalcanal—the conflicts of the past provide ammunition for China’s anti-colonialist barbs.

Recent events in New Caledonia show the Chinese state delivers these barbs selectively. Faced with the chance to back an anti-colonial struggle against a power that only last year criticised China’s ‘new imperialism’,[21] China’s media has gone deathly silent. Less than a year after mocking Macron for suggesting independence in New Caledonia could mean “a Chinese naval base tomorrow,”[22] the Global Times has posted just a single, neutral sentence to accompany a photo: “Law enforcement still on the front lines on May 19, 2024 around Magenta Tower where law enforcement and rioters clashed throughout Saturday night into Sunday in Noumea, New Caledonia.”[23] While neighbouring Vanuatu rails against ‘the unfinished business of decolonisation’, China’s state media has chosen to look away.

Unlike China, Australian and US governments cannot direct their companies to invest in the region, even though this is what Pacific leaders from Rabuka to Marape are most keen on (Telstra’s purchase of Digicel Pacific is the lonely exception^[24]). While much ink has been spilt on the leverage provided by China’s ‘sky high debts’,^[25] the source of Beijing’s sway over Pacific leaders is past and present investment and the promise of future projects. Qian Bo, China’s abrasive Special Envoy to the Pacific, is known to regale his Pacific counterparts with derisory observations about Australia’s economy and its inability to meet the Pacific’s needs, either as a destination for Pacific exports or as a source of investment.

Although China’s Pacific aid has plateaued since 2016,^[26] China grounds its critique of other powers competing for influence in the region in its self-image as a developing nation, the provider of ‘South–South cooperation’ rather than ‘aid’. On this front, Australia has a history of jumping at shadows. In 2021 the then Foreign Minister Marise Payne flew to Daru in Papua New Guinea in response to a (highly unlikely) proposed Chinese state-backed investment in a fish-processing plant on Australia’s northern border. After this, China’s representatives in Papua New Guinea suddenly started to mention the project in their talking points, having previously said nothing about it. With some glee, the Global Times cited a Facebook post by local governor Taboi Awi Yoto in the wake of her visit, claiming Australia wants ‘us to be subsistence farmers and fishermen and maintain the status quo’.^[27] With a bit of due diligence, the fuss could have been avoided. There was a reason MOFCOM had said nothing about the project. The company, which consisted of a couple of guys from Fujian kicking around Port Moresby, had no capacity to get the project off the ground.

The uptick in Australia’s diplomatic relations with China might offer some protection from China’s envoys snarking about Australia’s colonial history, but China’s political winds can change quickly. The best way to brace for a future narrative assault on Australia’s Pacific history is to deal with it honestly, make reparations where appropriate, and encourage the United States, the United Kingdom and France to do the same. More importantly, Australia should continue on the path of becoming a nation that looks more like the Pacific. When Australian history becomes Pacific history, doing right by the region will not seem such a big ask.

Notes

^[1] CGTN Global Watch, 9 July 2023, online at: https://twitter.com/GlobalWatchCGTN/status/1677950717695254531

^[2] CGTN, Exclusive with Solomon Islands PM Manasseh Sogavare, 15 July 2023, online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4i4xABX-x4

^[3] Xinhua, ‘Xi Jinping: China’s policy on Pacific Island countries adheres to the “Four Fully Respects”’ 习近平：中国的太平洋岛国政策秉持’四个充分尊重’, Gov.cn, 10 July 2023, online at:  https://www.gov.cn/yaowen/liebiao/202307/content_6890928.htm

^[4] Ibid.

^[5] Susannah Luthi, ‘Meth, vanilla and “gulags”: How China has overtaken the South Pacific one island at a time’, Politico, 29 August 2021, online at: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/08/29/tonga-china-south-pacific-influence-506370. Taina Kami Enoka, ‘China insists Tonga loans come with “no political strings attached”’, Guardian, 29 June 2022, online at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/29/china-tonga-loans-no-political-strings-attached-pacific

^[6] Most Pacific nations refer to their strategies of engaging with China – and Asia more broadly – as the ‘Look North’ policy.

^[7] Graeme Smith, George Carter, Mao Xiaojing, Almah Tararia, Elisi Tupou and Xu Weitao, The Development Needs of Pacific Island Countries, Beijing: UNDP China, 2014.

^[8] Denghua Zhang, ‘Pacific studies in China: Policies, structure and research’, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 55, no. 1 (2020), 80–96.

^[9] Shandong is one of three provinces heavily involved in distant-water fishing. Graeme Smith, ‘Fishy business: China’s mixed signals on sustainable fisheries’, in Linda Jaivin and Esther Sunkyung Klein with Sharon Strange (eds), China Story Yearbook: Contradiction, Canberra: ANU Press, 2022, p. 220.

^[10] See for example Shuo Luan, ‘Chinese pacificism: Exploring Chinese news media representation of Pacific island countries’, Pacific Studies, vol. 45, no. 2 (2022), 157–86.

^[11] Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union treaty, November 2023, online at: https://www.dfat.gov.au/geo/tuvalu/australia-tuvalu-falepili-union-treaty

^[12] Jessica Marinaccio, ‘The Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union: Tuvaluan values or Australian interests?’, DevPolicy blog, 15 November 2023, online at: https://devpolicy.org/the-australia-tuvalu-falepili-union-tuvaluan-values-or-australian-interests-20231115/

^[13] Editor, ‘Do not make the resettlement offer to Pacific a geopolitical chess move’, Global Times, 14 November 2023, online at: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202311/1301824.shtml

^[14] Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop and Echo Hui, ‘Australia revokes Chinese scholar visas and targets media officials, prompting furious China response’, ABC News, 9 September 2020, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-09/chinese-scholars-have-visas-revoked-as-diplomatic-crisis-grows/12644022

^[15] Kyle Hill, ‘The Castle Bravo disaster’, youtube.com, 23 January 2021, online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew064gt2thY

^[16] Nic Maclellan, Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons: A Pacific Priority, Melbourne: ICANW, online at: https://icanw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/Pacific-Report-2017.pdf

^[17] Stephen Howes, ‘The Opposition’s opposition to the Pacific Engagement Visa’, DevPolicy blog, 8 March 2023, online at: https://devpolicy.org/the-oppositions-opposition-to-the-pacific-engagement-visa-20230308/

^[18] Stephen Dziedzic and Dubravka Voloder, ‘Parliament clears path for Pacific visa and opens the door to 3,000 annual immigrants’, ABC News, 19 October 2023, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-19/labor-expands-pacific-immigration-with-new-visa/102997646

^[19] Bruce Hunt, Australia’s Northern Shield? Papua New Guinea and the Defence of Australia since 1880, Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2017.

^[20] Frank Sade Bilaupaine, ‘US geopolitical point-scoring means little to Pacific Island countries’, Global Times, 4 August 2022, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202208/1272183.shtml

[21] Guardian staff and agencies, Emmanuel Macron denounces ‘new imperialism’ in Pacific on historic visit to Vanuatu, The Guardian, 27 July 2023, online at:   https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/27/emmanuel-macron-vanuata-visit-pacific-imperialism

[22] GT staff, Macron’s ‘new imperialism’ narrative ‘an empty concept and desperate effort’ to save France’s marginalized status in South Pacific: experts. Global Times, 28 July 2023, online at:  https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202307/1295252.shtml

[23] VGC, Chaotic Aftermath. Global Times, 19 May 2024, online at:  https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202405/1312600.shtml

^[24] Renju Jose, ‘Australia’s Telstra completes Digicel Pacific buyout’, Reuters, 14 July 2022, online at: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/australias-telstra-completes-digicel-pacific-buyout-2022-07-14/

^[25] Alexandre Dayant, Meg Keen and Roland Rajah, ‘Chinese aid to the Pacific: Decreasing, but not disappearing’, Lowy Interpreter, 23 January 2023, online at: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/chinese-aid-pacific-decreasing-not-disappearing

^[26] Ibid.

^[27] Editor, ‘Canberra’s arrogance won’t block planned fishery project’, Global Times, 27 January 2021, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1214169.shtml

The post The Frontiers of History: China Discovers the Pacific’s Dark Colonial Legacy appeared first on The China Story.

As years passed, Sydney’s original Chinatown no longer served as a community hub, gradually becoming a cultural attraction for local and international visitors alike. At the same time, Burwood grew to become one of the suburbs where large numbers of the Chinese diaspora live, along with Sydney’s Chatswood and Melbourne’s Box Hill.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 48.8 percent of the population in Burwood is of Chinese ancestry, with 29.9 percent born in China.^[2] With 16.6 percent of the population aged 25 to 29 years, more than three times higher than the New South Wales average, the suburb is dominated not just by recent migrants from mainland China but also by students and young working professionals.^[3] The demographic skew of Burwood has led to its vibrant Chinatown and paved the way for one of the most rapidly developed sectors in Australia: online food delivery.

Since 2016, the online food delivery sector has gone through exponential growth in Australia, accelerated by COVID-19 lockdowns. In 2023, the sector recorded AU$1.3 billion in revenue, up 180 percent over seven years, despite an ongoing cost of living crisis in the country.^[4] Yet the market is highly concentrated in the hands of a few multinational companies. After the exit of UK-based delivery giant Deliveroo in November 2022 citing tough competition,^[5] Australia’s food delivery market was left with three big players: UberEats (54.5 percent), Australia-founded Menulog (27.5 percent) and DoorDash (15.0 percent). Other players make up 3 percent.^[6] Both UberEats and DoorDash originated in Silicon Valley.

At Burwood Chinatown, every food vendor collaborates with food delivery platforms, evident from the colourful placards of delivery platform logos at their counters and from the large posse of delivery riders in yellow or blue jackets and helmets standing and waiting in front of the food stalls, scrolling their phones, with their vehicles parked outside the plaza. However, the platforms that dominate Burwood Chinatown are not from Silicon Valley or Australia but two Asian food delivery apps: HungryPanda 熊猫外卖, which originated in the UK, and Fantuan 饭团, which originated in Canada. HungryPanda offers a choice of languages, including English, Chinese (a choice of simplified or traditional characters), Japanese and Korean, while Fantuan offers choices of English, French and Chinese (simplified or traditional characters). Despite the language options, the two platforms are dominated by Chinese-language users.

Like the physical, concrete Chinatowns that served as a one-stop community hub for the Chinese diaspora, these food delivery apps have shaped the daily experience of newly arrived Chinese migrants in Australia, especially during the pandemic. However, these delivery apps face distinctive challenges as Chinese diaspora-oriented digital platforms operating in the West, including questions about the treatment of their delivery drivers and the sustainability of the diaspora economy.

The non-Silicon Valley apps born in the West

Launched in 2017, HungryPanda was first created in the United Kingdom by former Chinese international student Eric Liu, who saw the potential of developing an online Chinese food delivery platform tailored to the needs of the Chinese diaspora community in Britain.^[7] The platform expanded to France and New Zealand the following year, and in 2019 it was launched in the United States and Australia. As the app expanded, it incorporated more cuisines and languages, with Asian food as its core business. The app has also attracted venture capital, including US$130 million in its Series D funding round in 2021. Today, HungryPanda claims more than six million users worldwide, partnering with more than 100,000 merchants and 80,000 delivery riders.

Despite its achievements, HungryPanda did not have a smooth start in Australia, as the country had had its own online Asian food delivery app, EASI, since 2014.^[8] The Melbourne-based business claimed it had 1.5 million Australian users, worked with around 20,000 vendors and partnered with 25,000 delivery riders.^[9] In March 2022, HungryPanda acquired EASI for AU$50 million, making it a leading player in specialist online food delivery service, available in nine cities and towns.

But the same month the HungryPanda–EASI deal was completed, a Canadian Chinese food delivery app also entered the Australian market. Fantuan was founded in 2014 in Vancouver, where almost 20 percent of the population are of Chinese heritage.^[10] Besides Canada and Australia, the app is also available in the United States and the United Kingdom. Its Australian business mainly operates in Sydney and Melbourne. In December 2023, Fantuan secured US$40 million in Series C funding from a US grocery e-commerce company as well as investors from the United States and China.^[11] The deal, along with HungryPanda’s in 2021, shows optimism from the sector about the potential of these Asian food delivery platforms and confidence in consumers from diaspora communities.

Despite roots in the West, HungryPanda and Fantuan are on a different path from Silicon Valley rivals such as Uber and Doordash. They built their businesses by specifically offering Chinese diaspora communities modern, authentic Chinese food that tastes like home. Their focus on offering services in Chinese won them loyalty from new migrants and international students still adapting to an English-speaking environment. Their growing number of users in turn helped them accumulate an increasingly long list of Chinese food vendors that also rely on the specific customer groups targeted by these delivery apps. They grew strongly during the COVID-19 lockdowns when dining out was impossible.

As elsewhere, following their initial success, they expanded their focus in Australia from Chinese food to Asian cuisine more broadly as well as local fast food chains. As specialist delivery apps they proactively court restaurants well known in the communities with the hope of being the first one to secure contracts—especially exclusivity contracts—with the restaurants, according to the food vendors I talked to.^[12] Like their Silicon Valley competitors, which expanded their delivery services to grocery shopping, both HungryPanda and Fantuan have launched similar services for Asian grocery stores. In Burwood, one Asian gourmet snack shop that sells bags of marinated duck neck and other traditional Chinese snacks told me they joined these two delivery platforms ‘for convenience’, as ‘everyone is using them now’. They also actively support community events and traditional cultural festivals through sponsorships and advertising.^[13]

A stepping stone for new migrants

In a Hong Kong café in Burwood, Joe and Qing (not their real names) sat with me after they finished their deliveries for the day. It was the winter of 2023, and both Joe and Qing had heard predictions of extreme heat in the upcoming months. Joe recalled that a couple of years before, during a hot summer in Sydney, he suffered damaging sunburn on his face even though he had applied sunscreen and covered his face while doing his deliveries.

Both men were in their fifties and spoke Mandarin with a strong Malaysian accent. Although news reports often describe food delivery riders as young international students and backpackers on working holiday visas,^[14] a proportion of riders for these specialist delivery apps are middle-aged men like Joe and Qing who came to Australia to support their families in Malaysia, China or Taiwan. However, the size of the proportion remains unknown as there is no accurate data available. As Australia does not offer low-skill work visas, some of the riders I talked to were in complicated ‘visa-hopping’ situations in which they secure and keep their work rights through various types of temporary visa. Their visa conditions plus their poor English skills limited their employment options to farm work and other low-skill jobs. Food delivery became their stepping stone to other work.^[15] The process of becoming a food delivery rider is simple: download the app, sign the job application, demonstrate valid work rights in Australia and go through road safety training on the app. Chinese-language delivery apps like HungryPanda and Fantuan are the first choice for newly arrived migrants with limited proficiency in English. Unlike international students, whose work hours are capped as part of their student visa requirements, riders like Joe and Qing deliver food as a full-time job with no limits on working hours. Many riders sign up for several platforms as they are considered contractors, not employees.

As a full-time rider, Joe told me that during the pandemic—when there was a huge shortage of migrant workers as a result of the border closures—he could earn around AU$300 for eight hours of work. Income consists of delivery fees from each order plus bonuses from the platforms for reaching a certain number of orders. Both Joe and Qing came to Australia with the hope of making more money than staying at home. Their incomes as delivery riders in Australia could not only cover their daily expenses but also support their families in Malaysia.

But making a living as riders can be challenging. Because not all orders are of the same value, to maximise their income, many riders will take several orders at a time. They might engage in ‘order-grabbing’ 抢单, by which, in addition to the orders allocated to them, riders also lay claim to unallocated orders while still in transit. Order grabbing has sparked concerns about road safety, as many riders were found scrolling their phones while riding on the road. In an interview with me, HungryPanda confirmed that they no longer allow riders to take unallocated orders along the way. They also confirmed that they have adopted a computerised system to allocate orders that avoids unfair arrangements, with human coordinators stepping in when the riders report an error.

Despite all these measures, road safety for delivery riders has been a major concern in Australia, with at least 13 riders killed on the roads since 2017 and frequent major accidents.^[16] The need to complete the delivery within the required time to avoid penalties and get new orders is the main reason riders take risks on the roads.^[17] Riders and labour advocates also raise questions about the speed and simplicity of the sign-up procedures.^[18] When fatal accidents occur, the employment status of delivery riders as contractors makes it difficult for victims’ families to seek compensation from delivery platforms. In September 2020, HungryPanda delivery rider Xiaojun Chen died on the job in Sydney. After a two-year legal battle, his widow was finally granted AU$830,000 compensation.^[19] The landmark case later pushed HungryPanda, UberEats and other key food delivery players to announce stricter road safety policies, to launch mandatory safety training sessions for new riders and to extend riders’ insurance schemes.

In October 2023, in the wake of the Labor government passing new workplace legislation that imposes minimum wage standards on gig work, Uber warned that customers would have to pay 85 percent more for food deliveries, although commentators said the claim demonstrated how badly they were underpaying their delivery riders.^[20] In February 2024, Parliament approved the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Act, which said that gig workers could receive minimum wages if they demonstrate that they are engaged under a services contract and work for a digital platform with low bargaining power under the contract.^[21]

While the Closing Loopholes Act sparked hopes among delivery riders for improving their working conditions, for many of them, it is too difficult to advocate for themselves in conflicts with delivery platforms. Some of them have joined the Transport Workers’ Union—the national advocacy organisation for transport workers – to defend their rights, including around safe practices. There have been protests and organised meetings with the delivery apps management, and the union has helped members to lodge fair work dismissals.

But mobilising workers unfamiliar with Australia’s legal system comes with challenges. Joe and Qing, who are both members of the Transport Workers’ Union, told me they had ‘very positive’ experiences with the union. When the union organised protests, they would share the information in the WeChat groups with other delivery riders, but only a few would end up joining them.^[22] In my interview with the National Secretary of the Transport Workers’ Union, Michael Kaine, he told me his organisation actively approached migrant workers to support them.^[23] However, due to the fact that they were constantly on the road, it was challenging to mobilise them compared to those who work in the physical venues.

The sustainability of diaspora economy

Despite being created for the Chinese diaspora community, delivery apps like HungryPanda and Fantuan have so far avoided the ownership and data-sharing controversies that dog TikTok. While they were to some extent inspired by the success of China’s own food delivery apps Meituan 美团 and E Le Ma 饿了吗,^[24] both HungryPanda and Fantuan were founded in Western countries in accordance with the laws of the United Kingdom and Canada. Although they have investors from China, their influence is limited in comparison to TikTok’s Beijing parent ByteDance.

But these specialist delivery apps might face consequences from changes in immigration policies. In December 2023, the Australian Government released a migration review that set higher barriers for international students to stay after graduation and cracked down on the abuse of student visas as a pathway to work in Australia. The review also targeted the phenomena of ‘visa-hopping’—a tactic that several of my interviewees have adopted in order to keep working in Australia legally – to prevent visa applicants from exploiting the temporary visa system.^[25] It remains unknown to what extent the new migration review will affect the supply of delivery riders—where the majority of them are visa holders—in Australia. Noticeably, due to the rise of cost of living, there has been an increase of English-speaking delivery riders using and joining HungryPanda, even though the app’s primary language option is Chinese.^[26] The surge echoes the growing trend of Australians working two or more jobs—including food delivery—to ease their financial burdens amid the continuous rises of interest rate in 2022 and 2023.^[27] As government policies gradually put in place while Australia’s per capita recession is estimated to extend, there may be significant changes in the future of both delivery riders in Australia and the sector.^[28]

Notes

^[1] Burwood Chinatown, ‘Our story’, Burwood Chinatown homepage, retrieved 29 March 2024, online at: https://burwoodchinatown.com.au/

^[2] Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘2021 Burwood (NSW)’, ABS, 2021, online at: https://abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/quickstats/2021/120031678

^[3] Ibid.

^[4] IBIS World, ‘Online food ordering and delivery platforms in Australia – market size, industry analysis, trends and forecasts (2024–2029)’, IBIS World, August 2023, online at: https://www.ibisworld.com/au/industry/online-food-ordering-delivery-platforms/5538/#IndustryStatisticsAndTrends

^[5] Praveen Menon, ‘Britain’s Deliveroo exits Australia, citing tough competition’, Reuters, 16 November 2022, online at: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/britains-deliveroo-exits-australia-citing-tough-competition-2022-11-16/

^[6] IBIS World, ‘Online food ordering and delivery platforms in Australia’.

^[7] HungryPanda, ‘About us’, HungryPanda, retrieved 29 March 2024, online at: https://www.hungrypanda.co/

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] Anthony Macdonald and Kanika Sood, ‘UK’s HungryPanda buys Melbourne food delivery business Easi’, Australian Financial Review, 10 January 2022, online at: https://www.afr.com/street-talk/uk-s-hungry-panda-buys-melbourne-food-delivery-business-easi-20220109-p59mwb

^[10] Justin McElroy, ‘Majority of metro Vancouver residents now identify as visible minority, census data shows’, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 26 October 2022, online at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/2021-census-minority-demographics-metro-vancouver-bc-1.6630164

^[11] Fantuan, ‘Fantuan raises $40 million series C round, led by e-commerce platform GrubMarket’, PR Newswire, 5 December 2023, online at: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fantuan-raises-40-million-series-c-round-led-by-e-commerce-platform-grubmarket-302006255.html

^[12] Wing Kuang, ‘Chinese delivery riders in Australia: They worked hard during the pandemic, then got replaced by new immigrants during post-COVID’ 澳洲華裔送餐員：疫情時用命搏，疫情後卻被新移民取代, Initium Media 端傳媒, 29 September 2023, online at: https://theinitium.com/article/20230929-international-delivering-food-in-austrilia

^[13] HungryPanda, ‘HungryPanda supports Dragon Boat Festival celebrations in Australia’ 熊猫外卖HugryPanda助力澳大利亚端午节活动, HungryPanda, 24 June 2023, online at: https://www.hungrypanda.co/zh-hans/hungrypanda-xszq/

^[14] Lydia Feng, ‘Death of latest Sydney food delivery rider Adil Abbas prompts calls for reforms to overseas licence rules’, ABC News, 21 August 2023, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-21/calls-nsw-driver-licence-reform-after-delivery-rider-death/102746298

^[15] Wing Kuang, ‘Chinese delivery riders in Australia’.

^[16] Edwina Storie, ‘“I can barely survive.” We ask delivery riders if they feel safe on the job’, SBS News, 28 August 2023, online at: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/the-feed/article/i-can-barely survive-we-ask-delivery-riders-if-they-feel-safe-on-the-job/qd8wysl06

^[17] Ibid.

^[18] Samantha Hawley and Lydia Feng, ‘The delivery riders at risk for your dinner’, ABC News Daily, 7 September 2023, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/abc-news-daily/the-delivery-riders-at-risk-for-your-dinner/102823264

^[19] Isabel Roe and Issac Nowroozi, ‘Family of food delivery driver Xiaojun Chen, who died at work, granted $830k compensation’, ABC News, 23 June 2022, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-23/compensation-for-xiaojun-chen-food-delivery-driver-died-on-job/101176062

^[20] Jordyn Beazley, ‘Uber warning that food delivery prices could spike 85% shows gig workers are underpaid, experts say’, Guardian, 17 October 2023, online at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/17/uber-warning-of-85-meal-hikes-under-labors-new-laws-shows-how-underpaid-gig-workers-are-experts-say

^[21] Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, ‘Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Act 2023’, Australian Government, 26 February 2024, online at: https://www.dewr.gov.au/closing-loopholes

^[22] Jason Om, ‘This food delivery rider spoke up against Hungry Panda. Then they called the police on her’, ABC News, 18 March 2024, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-18/food-delivery-rider-spoke-up-against-hungry-panda/103561144

^[23] Wing Kuang, ‘Chinese delivery riders in Australia’.

^[24] Fantuan, ‘Fantuan raises $40 million series C round’.

^[25] Nick McKenzie et al., ‘Trafficked’, Age, November 2023, online at: https://www.theage.com.au/topic/trafficked-6frg

^[26] Wing Kuang, ‘Chinese delivery riders in Australia’.

^[27] Greg Jericho, ‘A record number of Australians are now working more than one job to make ends meet’, Australia Institute, 8 September 2023, online at: https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/in-the-past-year-the-number-of-people-working-more-than-one-job-has-risen-7/

^[28] Michael Janda, ‘“Tepid” GDP extends Australia’s per capita recession, hinting November’s interest rate rise may have been “unnecessary”’, ABC News, 6 March 2024, online at: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-06/gdp-december-quarter-2023-meets-low-expectations/103553062

The post Stepping Stone for Migrants? The Reality of Chinese Food Delivery Apps in Australia appeared first on The China Story.

Such collective, aggressive attitudes towards women’s rejections and criticism resemble the dominant sentiments in the Incel Movement in Western countries. Incel refers to ‘involuntary celibate’; the term started life as the name of an online safe space for women struggling to find romantic partners, but later became a self-referential term among young men who express rage at women for denying them sex.[1] Incels discuss their misogynist beliefs in online forums, where they might become radicalised by the manifestos of ‘incel heroes’ like Eliott Rodger, the son of a Hollywood filmmaker who killed six people and himself in 2014, and injured fourteen others, declaring himself ‘the true victim in all of this’. Andrew Tate, the American–British self-proclaimed misogynist influencer currently facing trial in Romania for rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women, is another exemplar.

Incels have developed their own memetic narrative system, categorising women as either Becky or Stacy, while men who have no difficulty finding sexual partners are Chads.^[2] Chad represents the supposedly desirable masculinity in American society: muscular and sexually attractive due to their genetically masculine features. Stacy is hyperfeminine, attractive and only dates Chads, while Becky is the average-looking feminist. These categories originated on Reddit but have been popularised in recent years.[3]

Online misogyny has been on the rise in China due to a number of factors. A crucial one is the underlying strong patriarchal attitudes and an increasingly gender-conservative media and educational system under Xi. This trend is signalled by Xi’s speech on the Women’s Congress in November 2023, in which he emphasised the importance of ‘love and marriage, fertility and family’ without discussing women as work forces. Another factor is the gender imbalance caused by the one-child policy and preference for male heirs, leading to uncounted female infanticides and nearly 34 million more males than females (the general sex ratio of 105.07 male to every 100 females). Social and economic stagnation over the last decade means that many have no hope of finding a girlfriend or wife, especially given that prevailing ideas around gender and marriage still uphold men as the main breadwinner, and women are perceived to have their desire for a man who has a wealthy background, higher education and property.

Research has shown that men from prefectures with a greater gender imbalance, and under pressure in the competitive marriage market to be able to offer a woman financial security, more likely to commit crimes with financial reward such as robbery, burglary, drug dealing and illegal business dealings. China’s most gender-skewed cohort – in 2021, the 15-to-19-year-old age bracket, with a male: female ratio of 116: 100 – coincides with those most inclined to misogynistic and anti-feminist views similar to those of Western incels.

While there is no equivalent Chinese term for ‘incel’, some comparable terms include the relatively outdated, playful and self-deprecating term diaosi 屌丝 (literally ‘pubic hair’), referring to young men who are disadvantaged in romantic or sexual relationships compared to those who are gaofushuai 高富帅 (‘tall, rich and handsome’), a term with echoes of ‘Chad’. Misogyny, including the blanket sexualisation and objectification of women, can be observed in the diaosi narrative and public discussion – such as scoring women based on their appearance, feminine traits and sexual experience – but the violence that characterises Western incel culture is mostly absent, with some exceptions, discussed below.

After Yang Li’s popular punchline ‘so ordinary yet so confident’, many Chinese women started using pu nan 普男 (‘ordinary men’) or pu xin nan 普信男 (‘ordinary yet confident men’) to describe average, misogynist and overly sensitive men. For example, a female user shared the screen shot of her WeChat conversation with a blind date, captioned ‘Let me show you a pu xin nan’. In the conversation, the man listed the traits he deemed attractive about himself, and after the woman did not reply to him for a few days, he asked her: ‘Are you worried that you don’t deserve me?’ . Similarly, Chinese women have also used words like zhi nan ai 直男癌 (‘straight-men cancer’) and guo nan 国男/蝈蝻 (literally ‘this country’s men’; the second way of writing the characters further belittles Chinese men as insects 虫) to criticise misogynist men.

Unlike in the United States and other Anglophone countries, there are no specific forums or platforms where misogynist men in China gather for the sole purpose of discussing their hatred of women. Instead, they manifest themselves on most of China’s social media platforms, including Sina Weibo, in different ways and for different reasons, often in response to reports of gender-related violence or other incidents. On Zhihu, the most popular user-generated question-and-answer website in China, questions related to gender issues tend to generate polarised debates, with misogynist answers and responses often dominating. For example, many users use ‘easy girl’ or ‘slut’ to answer the popular question ‘How do you feel about or understand the women who date or marry foreigners?’ Other sites where misogynistic discussion and interaction is common include the video-sharing site Bilibili, which hosts a subculture around Japanese anime consisting largely of young men, and Hupu, China’s most popular forum for sports fans, with more than 90 percent male users, who rank female celebrities on their appearances and discuss relationship issues in addition to chatting about sports. All of these platforms accidently evolved into sites with a significant presence of misogynist men because of their large male user bases and the attention economy; that is, a tendency for the most extreme or sensationalist content to attract the most attention.

There are high-profile KOLs (key opinion leaders) among the anti-feminist influencers and incel heroes. One is Zhu Zhou 煮肘 (often referred to as Teacher Zhu 煮老师 and Teacher Precious 宝宝老师). Zhu Zhou had around 495,000 followers on Sina Weibo in 2023. In his posts, he shows off his wealth, criticises feminists and the idea of female independence, promotes the practice of ‘successful men’ spreading ‘good genes’ by producing children with as many ‘high-quality’ women (younger than 23 years old, B-cup breasts, model-level beauty, more than 165 centimetres or pretty virgins more than 162 centimetres tall) as possible and, worst of all, claims that men should attack women who do not fulfil their ‘reproductive duties’ with sulphuric acid. Such violent threats against ‘non-cooperative’ women are not censored by platforms unless there is a mass reporting from platform users.

Different from the Western incel narrative begrudging women’s preference for the physical masculinity of ‘the Chads’, misogynist men on Chinese social media begrudge women for their desire to date or marry wealthy men, yet typically express envy rather than hatred against such men.

The combination of sexual and economic frustration is illustrated in comments made after the suicide of Su Xiangmao 苏享茂, founder of a successful Beijing IT company. Men on social media quickly shamed Su’s ex-wife Zhai Xinxin 翟欣欣 as ‘greedy and vicious’ for demanding a large divorce settlement; they blamed her for Su’s suicide, doxed and harassed her online. Such narratives of ‘gold-diggers’ harming ‘innocent men’ support their argument that Chinese women are greedy and evil.

Misogynist men on Chinese social media also take issue with feminists and the rise of feminism in China (despite acknowledging that at least feminists don’t ask for a bride price). They regard feminists’ speech and campaigns as ‘stirring conflicts between two genders’ 挑起性别对立 and ‘organised by “foreign agents” 境外势力 to subvert China’. Such antagonism against feminism is conveniently combined with nationalism and chimes with the Communist Party’s hyper-vigilance against social instability, its tendency to blame dissent on foreign agents and its own hostility to feminism. Influencers on Sina Weibo such as ‘God’s Eagle’ 上帝之鹰 and ‘Meridian Knight’ 子午侠士 repeatedly use such narratives to justify their trolling, harassment and reporting 举报 of feminists. For example, Meridian Knight wrote a series of posts accusing Chinese feminists, including Lü Pin 吕频 and other #MeToo activists, of being manipulated by ‘Western forces’ to destablise and destroy China. Due to their close alignment with the party-state’s nationalist, anti-Western and anti-liberal narrative, such speech is usually condoned and even promoted by mainstream state-run media outlets. For instance, in 2020 April, Beijing Evening News – an official media outlet operated by the Publicity Department of the Beijing Municipal Committee – issued an editorial that called out feminists as toxic and harmful to Chinese society. The state’s efforts to keep Chinese society stable in its family-based social structure and solve the issue of low birth rates also provides a supportive environment for sexist and misogynist opinions and statements.

As elsewhere, cyber bullying and online aggression also encourage offline violence. In 2020 December, a male university student attacked three female classmates with sulphuric acid in a class. While the exact reason for this attack was never publicised, in the comments section under the relevant news story, many assumed the victims were to blame for being ‘unattainable’ – meaning refusing their attacker’s advances – and celebrated the ‘punishment’ they got. Then there was the incident in June 2022, where four women were violently assaulted by a group of men in a barbecue restaurant in Tangshan, Hebei province, after these women rejected one of the men’s sexual advance. Similarly, in September 2023, two women were violently attacked by a drunk man in Yiyang, Hunan province, after they refused to share their contact information with him. In both cases, the violent and graphic security footage where these men repeatedly and brutally dragged down, hit and kicked the women was shared widely on Chinese social media and shocked many Chinese citizens, especially women. Online public discussions demonstrated Chinese women’s anger and fear when facing the rise of misogynistic male violence. Due to the obvious brutality, there were hardly comments supporting the attackers, but the attackers were blamed for their gangster-like violence instead of the gendered violence they imposed on the women. However, there were comments blaming the women for ‘being stupid to fight back and infuriate the attackers’.

An increasing gender imbalance, decreasing social mobility and the dominant misogynist ideologies and discourses left flourished by the party-state means that more young men are likely to express their grievances online in misogynist discourses and that there will be more conflict around gender issues on Chinese social media. This is alarming because the social consequences are real and severe. While there is an official attempt to tamp down online violence in general, the misogynist discourses do not receive any special attention. Xi’s crackdown on civil society and the mainstream narrative of fearing ‘feminism as Western ideology’ means that feminist voices in opposition to misogyny are either silent or silenced. More research is needed to investigate this phenomenon, and governments and civil societies should work together to slow down, stop and reverse this trend.

Notes

[1] Debbie Ging, ‘Alphas, betas and incels: Theorizing the masculinities of the manosphere’, Men and Masculinities, vol. 22, no. 4 (2019): 638–57.

^[2] Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018.

^[3] Lisa Cameron, Xin Meng and Dandan Zhang, ‘China’s sex ratio and crime: Behavioural change or financial necessity?’, Economic Journal, vol. 129, no. 618 (2019), 790–820.

The post Chinese ‘Incels’? Misogynist Men on Chinese Social Media appeared first on The China Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The Dragon and the Fate of China appeared first on The China Story.

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

LGFVs and ‘Hidden’ Debt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COVID-19 and the Current Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Did Beijing Not Stop This Hidden Debt Problem Earlier?

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

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

What Beijing Is Doing to Resolve the Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

One possible explanation for the progress on barley focuses on foreign policy drivers. The barriers may have been removed due to warming bilateral relations under a new Australian government and a transition to a bargaining phase in the relationship. Another possibility is that Beijing dismantled the tariffs to avoid the potential reputational costs that might stem from the public release of a panel report adverse to China by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Here, we consider the logic of these two arguments, and introduce a third explanation that is largely missing from current analyses: the vested interests of groups within China, both government and non-government, and especially industry associations.

Examining the factors driving the removal of the barriers to Australian barley imports provides insight into a wider question which has received scant attention: when and why China removes sanctions. Although a burgeoning scholarly literature examines the termination of Western economic sanctions, it has not considered China. New insights on this issue may have significant policy implications. Most immediately, they are relevant to ongoing negotiations about the removal of China’s barriers on Australian wine. Many expect that the ‘template’ used in the barley negotiations — combining warming diplomatic relations with the concession of withdrawing a WTO case — will be successfully applied a second time. This appears to be playing out at the time of writing. On the back of some recent Australian decisions that may have sweetened the deal, Beijing has agreed to conduct a five-month review of its wine tariffs, and Canberra has temporarily suspended its WTO case. Unlike the case for barley, however, Beijing’s review may be complicated by substantially different underlying domestic political economy dynamics in the wine industry which could well determine whether the tariffs ultimately stand or fall.

The Imposition and Removal of the Barley Tariffs

The origins of China’s barriers on Australian barley go back to 2018. In October that year, the China Chamber of International Commerce (CCIC, 中国国际商会) requested that the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM, 商务部) investigate the dumping of Australian barley on the Chinese market. MOFCOM began its investigation in November. On 28 May 2020, after China-Australia relations had slipped into free fall, MOFCOM handed down its ruling and applied tariffs of 80.5 percent (73.6 percent anti-dumping, 6.9 percent anti-subsidy) on the import of Australian barley. The barriers reduced a trade of US$1 billion in 2018 to zero in 2021.

Against the advice of some commentators, the then centre-right Coalition government took the matter to the WTO dispute settlement system in December 2020. After two and a half years of deliberation, the WTO issued its draft panel report confidentially to the parties. This appeared to expedite bilateral negotiations for a resumption of trade, where Australia agreed to suspend its WTO complaint in April 2023 while MOFCOM undertook to conduct a three-month review of its tariffs. After extending the review to four months, China removed the barriers in August 2023. The WTO case was subsequently settled and within weeks large shipments of barley set sail from Australia for China.

What enabled this to happen?

Explanation One: Warming Bilateral Relations

The first explanation focuses on the state of the bilateral relationship between Australia and China. If imposition of the barriers, or at least a failure to negotiate their removal, stemmed from a range of political grievances on the part of Beijing, something was needed to enable a warming of the relationship. In this case, the election of a centre-left Labor government in May 2022 created the opportunity for both sides to move beyond positions hardened over the previous two years, first to resume high-level talks (previously rebuffed by Beijing) and later to negotiate the tariff’s removal. Critical of their Coalition predecessors’ rhetorical hostility toward China, the Labor government under Anthony Albanese stressed a change in tone even as it made clear there was no change in underlying interests. The goal was to ‘stabilise’ the relationship without making substantive concessions on any of the grievances believed to be motivating China’s sanctions. Canberra has, however, refrained from adopting new policies that may have been seen by Beijing as provocative, and which would have disrupted relations and the resolution of the trade disputes. A change in government and tone, and the resulting resumption of high-level contact, were likely major factors in causing Beijing to remove sanctions. However, the stabilisation of the political relationship alone cannot explain the removal’s timing and sequencing, nor does it provide confidence that the remaining barriers will be removed.

Explanation Two: the WTO Dispute and Aversion to Hypocrisy Costs

A second explanation is specific to barley itself and relates to the confidential draft panel report that was released to the Chinese and Australian governments shortly before the parties announced the suspension of the WTO dispute and Beijing’s review of the duties. The content of the draft report is not known and unlikely ever to be released. However, the decision was likely favourable to Australia due to significant weaknesses in China’s arguments that Australia had been dumping barley on its market.[1]

This explanation, also rooted in foreign policy logics, attributes Beijing’s removal of the barriers to the impending adverse decision. But why would the Chinese government be so reluctant for the panel report to be released? After all, China has lost WTO disputes in the past.

One possibility is that policymakers were particularly sensitive about this case given it related to measures which had openly been characterised as coercive sanctions. Although China is alleged to have deployed economic coercion in multiple cases over the past two decades, none of the underlying measures have ever been formally ruled upon by the WTO. The only case to come close — one concerning Canadian canola — was also resolved via negotiation before a panel report was issued.

The panel report would not have ruled on whether China’s measures were ‘coercive’ or ‘sanctions’, but rather likely presented a detailed critique of the compatibility of China’s approach with WTO anti-dumping rules. Nevertheless, Beijing may have wished to avoid a formal rebuke of its measures, which would give even more ammunition to critics arguing that the tariffs were ‘blatant economic coercion’, rather than legitimate trade measures. In other words, it may have sought to avoid ‘hypocrisy costs’. Chinese officials have annually denounced the use of sanctions — so-called ‘unilateral coercive measures’ — as a violation of international law at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and other international forums since the 1990s. Policymakers may have had concerns that to be seen to be using sanctions might damage China’s credibility and reputation in world politics (especially with states who sign onto its anti-sanction UNGA resolutions).

According to this explanation, the draft WTO panel report created the space for a negotiated solution. It generated additional incentive for Beijing to find an alternative and avoid a formal and public ruling against it, thereby aligning with the goals of Australian industry and government to resume exports as soon as possible. Both sides preferred an outcome in which barriers were amicably removed.

One might think this explanation would generate optimism about wine, given Beijing agreed to conduct a similar review in tandem with Australia suspending its WTO case. However, it is possible that leverage from the WTO ruling alone was insufficient in achieving this outcome for barley, as we explain in the next section.

A Third Factor: Domestic Drivers of China’s Barrier Imposition and Removal

One factor that is often overlooked in analyses of China’s use of politically motivated trade barriers is the role of domestic interest groups and domestic policy objectives. As we have argued elsewhere, these factors are key to understanding the logic of the sanctions imposed on Australia. Likewise, they may help explain their removal.

The Imposition of Barriers on Barley

Policymakers: While China’s barley tariffs may have been partly motivated by a coercive objective when they were imposed in 2020, the original 2018 anti-dumping investigation was driven by agricultural protectionism. In particular, as revealed in legal case documents and other substantive reports on the issue, Chinese policymakers were acutely concerned with issues of food security or the ‘choke point’ 卡脖子 in China’s barley supply.

From a peak in the mid-1990s, China’s domestic barley production has undergone a long-term decline. By the period of anti-dumping investigation (2017–18), domestic supply accounted for an exceptionally low 11 percent of total barley supply. At the same time, barley imports for brewing and livestock feed accelerated, especially after 2015, with Australian companies accounting for 75 percent of all imports in some years (Figure 1). Chinese officials argued the imports led to losses in farmers’ incomes in the less developed areas of China where most barley is grown.

The barriers appear designed to arrest these trends, driven by a range of party and state units that have an interest in food security, including the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA, 农业农村部), which assisted with the investigation.

Industry associations: Like other products, barley is grown both as an agricultural commodity and an industrial input (for brewing and livestock feed). This brings into competition sectoral interests which need to be adjudicated at a higher level. Industry associations and chambers of commerce are key players, both as representatives of their industries and conduits for the interests of the party-state.

While there is an array of industry organisations in China, the more established and influential organisations are a vestige of the central planning era, where government departments with specialised economic functions managed the operations of state-owned enterprises under their control. During administrative reforms in the 1990s, many specialised economic departments were devolved to become industry associations, comprised of enterprise members that pay membership fees for representation and services. Reforms starting in 2016 and implemented through to 2019 aimed to further administratively decouple associations and chambers of commerce from the party-state, with caveats. The key powers of party-building in associations were to be centralised and led by the Party Committee of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC, 国务院国有资产监督管理委员会), while foreign affairs were more clearly placed within the purview of the relevant (party-state) organs. A framework of state corporatism has been used to describe the ties that bind the party-state to associations and their enterprise members.

Barley provides an interesting case study in industry representation. Barley is grown in China by a multitude of individual households not represented by any industry organisation and so, by default, by government. Jurisdiction over barley production and farmer incomes from agricultural activities like barley lies with MARA. The ministry has long been concerned about China’s balance of production, consumption, and trade for barley.

Government units rarely make anti-dumping applications.[2] The organisation chosen to apply for the dumping investigation on Australian barley was the China Chamber of International Commerce (CCOIC), which has a mandate to represent the interests of Chinese enterprises in international trade and investment. CCOIC falls under the umbrella of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT, 中国国际贸易促进委员).[3] CCPIT has a vast network of branches within China, a legal affairs department and a network of overseas law firms used for dealing with anti-dumping, subsidy and safeguard issues. It also runs the Economic and Trade Friction Early Warning System 中国国际贸易促进委员会经贸摩擦预警管理系统, which includes an international agricultural branch 中国国际商会农业行业经贸摩擦预警中心.

While the CCOIC notionally represents enterprises with foreign interests, the barriers on Australian barley are contrary to the interests of enterprises that use it for brewing and livestock feed. This is particularly the case for beer brewers that are members of the China Alcoholic Drinks Association (CADA中国酒业协会). CADA has origins as a department within the former Ministry (and then Bureau) of Light Industry before being moved into SASAC. It gained more administrative independence in the 2016–19 association reforms but retains links to the party-state.

CADA has been a participant in at least five international trade cases, either to support trade barriers (Australian wine, EU wine, US distillers’ grains) or oppose them (Australian barley, US sorghum). The differing positions reflect differences in the characteristics of alcoholic drinks including the inputs and outputs used in manufacturing and the relationship with adjacent products (ethanol and various livestock feeds). Different interests are expressed through branches within CADA, representing at least eight types of alcohol including baijiu, beer and wine. Barley is of primary concern to the CADA Beer Sub-Association (CBSA, 中国酒业协会啤酒分会) and the Beer Raw Material Expert Committee 中国酒业协会啤酒原料专业委员会. With seventy-three members, CBSA is powerful and has a strong interest in maintaining supplies of Australia’s malting barley. The attraction of Chinese brewers to Australian barley was not just access to consistent supplies of high-quality malting barley, but also access to a lower-priced grade of barley (‘Fair Average Quality’) permitted under China’s food laws for use in food (including beer) rather than being relegated to feed use.

CBSA made a forceful submission against the tariffs on Australian barley in the initial anti-dumping investigation in 2020, but to no avail. Policymakers concerned with agriculture and food security and the foreign policy preferences of the central government held sway in the initial round leading to the imposition of barriers. There was no prospect for an early reversal in 2020–22, a period of high tensions from COVID-19, strained international relations, the dual circulation policy to promote self-reliance and heightened concerns about food security, including for non-staple foods.

The Removal of Barriers on Barley

For Chinese policymakers, the tariffs had generated mixed success by 2023. As shown for the period 2020-22 in Figure 1, the tariffs successfully stopped Australian barley imports, forcing brewers and livestock companies to diversify inputs to other sources (Argentina, France, Canada, Ukraine). However, total imports in the period increased significantly, mainly for livestock feed. The trade barriers on Australian barley did not in themselves provide the protection that would generate an increase in Chinese barley production. China did however use the period to pursue new domestic policy measures including breeding, research and revised industry standards as well as the building of new barley production areas for breweries in China.[4]

Official statistics report a doubling of Chinese barley production over the period in which Australian barley was blocked (2019 to 2022) but this is a statistical quirk. From 2020 onwards, reporting on Chinese barley production (damai 大麦) included a different variety, highland barley (qingke 青稞) grown in Tibet, Sichuan, Yunnan and Qinghai: this doubled the reported planted area and production of ‘barley’. Nevertheless, with increased reported domestic production and diversification away from Australian barley, policymakers may have concluded that the barriers had served their purpose. Accordingly, when discussion of relaxing the barriers occurred in 2023, there could be expected to have been less resistance from interests within the Chinese party-state.

Simultaneously, domestic industry groups continued their opposition to the barriers. In fact, a submission made by CBSA earlier in the year became the centrepiece of the MOFCOM review. The submission argued China’s domestic barley production programs were unsuccessful and that, with the barriers in place, international supplies were expensive, inconsistent and did not meet requirements, all of which hurt the viability of Chinese beer companies. It also argued the tariffs were counter-productive to China’s own policy objectives in three areas: industrial upgrading and international competitiveness; increasing consumer confidence and spending; and meeting national standards (guobiao 国标) on beer and malting barley. The MOFCOM ruling to drop the barriers also included consideration of submissions from the China Feed Industry Association and Australian industry organisations. Chinese industry groups have similarly been active in government decisions to drop barriers on US sorghum and on lucerne, an item subject to China-US tariff escalations from 2018.

To sum up, in 2020, opposition to the barriers on Australian barley from domestic industry groups was overridden by the preferences of the central government and parts of the Chinese bureaucracy that favoured the introduction of the tariffs — either to achieve domestic agricultural policy objectives, or foreign policy objectives vis-à-vis Australia. By 2023, there was a realignment of interests in favour of the removal of the barriers, which helps to explain when and why the tariffs were dropped.

Implications for Australian Wine

The three conditions that allowed for the lifting of barriers on Australian barley — improved bilateral relations, leverage from WTO proceedings, and an alignment of industry and policy interests in China — provide some guidance on prospects for a similar outcome for Australian wine, on which China has applied similar anti-dumping tariffs. Certainly, negotiations are occurring within a similarly conciliatory bilateral environment. Moreover, given China’s case for imposing tariffs on wine appears even more tenuous than barley, the recently issued confidential draft panel report may motivate Beijing to settle if it is deemed to raise the spectre of hypocrisy costs.

However, unlike barley, there is no alignment of domestic interests in China against the barriers on wine. To the contrary, both industry associations and industry-oriented policymakers have vested interests in continuing the ban.

In the case of barley, the users of Australian product had close links to the state system and a strong stake in the resumption of the trade. But the buyers of Australian wine — importers, retailers and consumers — are not an organised group. Wine is also a luxury product that is not a priority for the party-state.

China’s wine growers, meanwhile, are in an influential position. China has for many years sought to develop a large domestic wine sector as a pillar industry with high potential for value-adding, to raise farmer incomes including in rural and undeveloped areas with grape-growing potential (Ningxia, Xinjiang and Gansu) and to promote ‘ecological’ land use and eco-tourism. Importantly, Chinese wineries are represented by an established industry organisation that falls under the same parent association that opposed the barriers on Australian barley — CADA — but a different branch, the CADA Wine Sub-Association (CWSA, 中国酒业协会葡萄酒分会). CWSA — which comprised 119 domestic wineries in 2022 — was the applicant in the investigation into the dumping of Australian wine and compiled the information for the case. In the lead-up to the investigation, the association said that imports were ‘robbing’ Chinese wineries of the domestic market, especially in the higher-value, cold-weather reds. Thus, unlike the breweries of the CBSA that benefit from Australian barley imports, the wineries of the CWSA compete with Australian wine imports and have an interest in establishing and maintaining the barriers.

The barriers on Australian wine may not have fully allayed the concerns of Chinese industry and policymakers. Chinese wine production and consumption continued to decline in 2022 and the proportion of domestic production in total supply decreased (to 54 percent, see Figure 2). China’s Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao 王文涛 relayed concerns about the production and profitability of the Chinese wine industry as a potential obstacle to his Australian counterpart in discussions about lifting the trade barriers on wine. The potential for this to be a snag was also reflected in a cautious statement from the peak Australian industry group earlier in the year. As a way of addressing the concerns of Chinese industry and interest groups, the largest Australian exporter of wines to China entered into a joint venture in 2022 to produce Australian wine in China. The venture involves an agreement with CWSA, which sees the venture as an opportunity to transfer expertise and build China’s domestic industry.

Nevertheless, the process used to resolve the barriers on Australian barley appears under way for wine. Following the circulation of the WTO panel’s draft report on the wine dispute in October, China and Australia reached an agreement to suspend the panel while Beijing conducts a five-month review of its barriers. It is unclear where the review will land, though the expectation in Canberra on the eve of Prime Minister Albanese’s visit to Beijing in early November was for a favourable outcome. Chinese policymakers may again wish to avoid a potentially adverse WTO ruling and signal their commitment to improving the bilateral relationship. However, it may also be possible that the relationship is sufficiently ‘stabilised’ and instead in a ‘bargaining’ phase, with Beijing therefore adopting a more transactional logic where it looks to extract concessions from Canberra as quid pro quo.

One possible concession is closing a separate WTO dispute with Australia. In September it was reported that Canberra had rejected a proposed ‘package deal’ in which the wine barriers would be removed if Australia dropped anti-dumping duties it had earlier imposed on Chinese wind towers. A statement from China’s Ministry of Commerce in October, however, linked the new wine review to progress on that exact issue. Canberra denied this linkage, and anti-dumping duties are normally determined by an independent Anti-Dumping Commission that would not consider foreign policy interests in its decision. However, even if coincidental, the timing is hard to ignore — the commission released a preliminary report indicating a willingness to let the wind tower duties expire in the same week that Canberra decided not to cancel a lease held by a Chinese company over the port of Darwin, just prior to the announcement of the deal on wine. Furthermore, the week prior Australian citizen Cheng Lei had been allowed to return to Australia following three years in detention. Both sides pocketing ‘wins’ in the month prior to the first visit by an Australian prime minister in seven years speaks to a new phase in the relationship.

At the same time, unlike the barley case, the fact that there remains robust support for the wine barriers within China suggests the policy calculus is more complex. The fact that the wine review period is longer than that for barley might suggest Beijing anticipates a longer internal debate to reconcile unaligned interests, although it may also be designed to coincide with the expiration of the wind tower duties. It may be that domestic concerns are ultimately overruled, not merely by the shadow of a potentially adverse panel report, but a broader deal in an increasingly transactional relationship. In the end, if China does eventually remove the barriers, it will indicate the prioritisation of foreign policy goals and other equities over the preferences of the affected domestic industry and interest groups.

Broader Implications

It is well-recognised that domestic interest groups play an important role in trade formation, processes, and the resolution of trade conflicts. While this is borne out in the case of China-Australian barley and wine, analysis of interest group representation has largely been absent from commentary both inside and outside of China on Beijing’s politically motivated trade barriers. Such analysis can be challenging given the sprawling and opaque nature of party-state and societal linkages in the Chinese ‘leviathan’, but is nevertheless crucial for informed public debate.

More generally, our analysis has implications both for policy and emerging research on the political economy of China’s power in world politics. Concerned about China’s apparent use of international trade as a ‘weapon’, several governments have recently announced plans to coordinate their responses to Beijing’s behaviour. If these coalitions are serious about influencing when and how China uses different international economic policies, they need to pay attention to the domestic micro-foundations that underpin them.

Since the Australia episode, China has continued to impose trade restrictions during political disputes. Notable instances have involved Lithuania, Taiwan and Japan. In each case, as with Australia, governments have looked to WTO dispute settlement as a mechanism to have the barriers removed. Brussels, Taipei and Tokyo should carefully study the domestic politics behind the when, how, and why of China’s removal of barriers in earlier cases — including those involving Australian barley and wine — and look for any parallels that could help them resolve their own disputes.

In terms of research, our findings illustrate the importance of exploring the mechanics and consequences of ‘fragmented authoritarianism’ in the trade domain. It is well understood that the Chinese party-state is not unitary — even in the Xi era. But there remains considerable scope to further illuminate the mechanisms and conditions by which domestic interest groups shape China’s international economic policies.

The authors are grateful to Pru Gordon, Benjamin Herscovitch and Paul Hubbard for helpful comments.

Notes

[1] Such as using the price of Australian shipments to Egypt — a very minor export market — to determine the ‘normal value’ of Australian barley, and the claim that Australian barley imports damaged Chinese barley production, even though it had been in decline for decades (see Figure 1).

[2] One exception was on sorghum from the United States.

[3] In 2022, the spokesperson of the CCPIT was the Secretary-General of the CCOIC.

[4] Wary of the distortions caused from previous interventions in the corn market from 2015, China has since refrained from large-scale, direct interventions in feed grains.

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