In January 2022, the discovery of the ‘woman in chains’, a mother of eight shackled and maltreated by her husband in a Feng county village there, generated fresh interest in Ma’s book.^[1] Shocked by the cruelty and indifference to her plight by local villagers and authorities, people turned to Ma’s book for causes of the region’s economic and moral impoverishment—even though the book’s historical scope ends in 1949, the year the People’s Republic of China was established. In 2023, a revised version of the book, now considered a classic in the field of regional socioeconomic history, was published in mainland China. The following is abridged highlights from his interview with the Shanghai Review of Books on 28 January 2024.^[2]

Editors’ introduction

Q1: Back in the Tang and Song dynasties [618–907; 960–1279], the Huaibei region used to be arable and prosperous; it was known as the ‘land of plenty’. But thereafter until the Republican period [1912–49], the region became a so-called inhospitable wasteland. How did this change occur, and why? What was the key turning point in this historical change?

This has to do with water control. Historically, regions were ranked according to their distance to the imperial capital. Every 500 li [roughly 250 kilometres] from the capital, the region’s ranking went down one level. At the centre was the Royal Domain 王畿 [the capital and its environs], then the core regions of the Sovereign Domain 甸服, the Noble Domain 侯服, the Peace-Securing Domain 绥服, the Restrained Domain 要服 and lastly the Wild Domain 荒服. In the past, dynasties focused on developing the Royal Domain and its surrounding core regions, in part because limitations in transportation and communication made it difficult effectively to manage regions further away.

Before the Northern Song dynasty [960–1127], imperial capitals were all located between the Yellow River and the Huai River. Therefore the central government had to ensure the prosperity and stability of the Huaibei area. During the Southern Song [1127–79], the centre of power shifted to Lin’an (contemporary Hangzhou) south of the Yangtze River. Then, in the Yuan dynasty [1271–1368], the capital was moved to Dadu [modern-day Beijing], north of the Yellow River. Huaibei was reduced from a core region to a marginal one. It became a battlefield with neither southern nor northern powers willing to invest in its development. In 1128, the year after Emperor Gaozong 宋高宗 moved his capital to Lin’an [Hangzhou], the imperial official Du Chong 杜充breached the dikes on the south bank of the Yellow River in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the enemy Jurchen army’s advance. Water from the Yellow River flooded southward. The broken dikes were never repaired.

In the Ming dynasty [1368–1644], during the Hongzhi period 弘治 [1488–1505], Liu Daxia 刘大夏, a water management official, blocked the main course of the Yellow River, forcing it to flow south into the Huai River, whose course was very narrow to begin with, and it flooded. Liu did this to protect the Grand Canal [a crucial water transport infrastructure in pre-modern China]. The Ming prioritised the north when it came to water management, including protection of the capital and its surrounding regions (today’s Hebei). The court offered flooded regions tax relief but did not concern itself greatly with the effect of the floods on the lives of the common people. In the early years of the Wanli period 万历 [1573–1619], the director-general of river conservancy Wan Gong 万恭 suggested breaching a levee at Tongwaxiang 铜瓦厢 in the lower reaches of the Yellow River to divert the waters into the Daqing River 大清河 instead. No action was taken, but in 1855, there was a breach at Tongwaxiang, and the Yellow River changed course exactly as Wan Gong had prescribed three centuries earlier.

Q2: We talked about the impact of water control in the Huaibei region earlier. Apart from water control, in your book The Sacrificed Land you also described in detail the effect of grain transport and salt production on the Huaibei region.

During the Ming and Qing dynasty, especially under the Kangxi Emperor [reign period: 1661–1722], grain transport, salt production and water control all centred on Huai’an in Huaibei. Water control was the most costly of all. Under an imperial autocracy, more spending naturally meant more corruption. Frequently, 90 percent of the funds for flood control were embezzled, leading to ineffective flood control. In the Qing dynasty, although eight provinces paid part of their taxation in grains, parts of Huaibei accounted for nearly 40 percent of the whole empire’s grain tribute. The common people had to bear the costs of both the taxes—including corvée labour and providing building materials for water control projects—and the corruption.

Q3: In The Sacrificed Land you used the ‘cult of power’ to explain various social–ecological transitions and transformations in the Huaibei region since 1680. You mentioned that this concept was greatly influenced by Marxist theory. Can you elaborate on it?

I think Marxist theory can explain many things about pre-modern China. It is very useful for us to understand Chinese society. The concept of the cult of power encapsulates Marx’s argument in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that ‘executive power subordinates society to itself’.^[3] In my view, pre-modern Chinese society had no religious traditions in the Western sense. Western religions emphasise the purification of the soul through self-reflection, whereas religious worship in Chinese society is pragmatic and self-serving: people pray to Confucius for good examination results, to the Goddess of Mercy Guanyin for more children and to Lord Zhao the Marshal for more wealth. In essence, religious worship in China is the worship of power. People worship gods and deities because they themselves have no power.

Confucianism assigned scholars the highest social status. But the purpose of studying is to become an official, and only by becoming a high official can you rise above other scholars and obtain power. Even Daoism and Buddhism have hierarchies. In Daoism, the Jade Emperor sits at the top, followed by other deities below him, ranked in a strict order. As for Buddhism, there is a story in the novel Water Margin where Lu Zhishen 鲁智深 [a violent man who eventually attained Buddhist enlightenment] declares his intentions of becoming an abbot, and a monk at the temple tells him that he has to begin by carrying water and looking after the vegetable patch, and work his way up. To sum up, before 1949, the only sacred thing in China was power, which people devoutly worshipped.

Q4: In The Sacrificed Land, you were critical in your analysis of power worship that was prevalent in traditional Chinese society, but you also showed great sympathy for ordinary people. How did this attitude come about?

When I was young, I read novels like Romance of the Three Kingdoms and imagined myself as a big shot like [the poet, general and statesman] Cao Cao 曹操 or Liu Bei 刘备 [founder of the Shu Han kingdom]. But around my third year at university, my perspective changed. After tracing my family genealogy I realised that my ancestors could not even compare to the lowest-ranking figures recorded in the Twenty-Four Histories. In fact, their likes were not recorded in any histories. Since then, I no longer viewed history from the perspective of powerful and famous men. Instead, I imagine myself as one of the corvée labourers building the Great Wall or one of those unfortunates described in a Tang poem about war as ‘bones lying by the banks of Wuding River’, a farmer, or the owner of some small business, squeezed by corrupt officials day after day. Ordinary people form the majority in history. This is also what Marxist historiography emphasises: to study history from the bottom.

I also study history from a regional perspective. Scholars outside China have devised many influential theories about Chinese history, but they are usually inapplicable to the Huaibei region, where I grew up. For example, the theory of ‘involution’ looks at the issue of diminishing returns per unit of labour in agriculture caused by overpopulation. However, the same theory cannot be applied to the Huaibei region. The Huaibei region historically had a relatively small population with a lot of land, but they could not farm it profitably because of constant flooding. During imperial times, the central government deliberately flooded the region again and again. This resulted in constant social turmoil and banditry. Peasants simply abandoned their land, which grew desolate. This had the greatest effect on the local middle class. Wealthy families could afford to keep private armies to defend themselves against bandits, while the poor had nothing to be robbed. The social structure of the Huainan region was dumbbell-shaped, with the richest families at the very top, the common people and bandits at the very bottom, and scant middle class in between. A middle-class household with an ox was the most desirable target for the bandits. A dozen people would rush into your house, snatch your ox, sell it the same evening and divide up the spoils. The common people also faced severe exploitation by officials and landlords.

Q5: You just used the reality of the Huaibei region to challenge the well-known theory of involution. This reminded me of a comparison you made in your book: some regions suffered from capitalism while Huaibei suffered from the absence of capitalism. Could you elaborate?

Capitalism developed relatively early in the Yangtze delta region. The harm caused by capitalist economic crises in that region has been well studied. However, scholars have failed to examine how places like Huaibei suffered from the lack of capitalism. Under a market economy, businesses experience profits and losses, and prices fluctuate. Farmers can decide whether to plant rice or mulberry according to the demands of the market. In contrast, in places where power is concentrated in the hands of the elite, like Huaibei, everything is subject to their arbitrary decision-making. People have no choice but to endure the greater losses and suffering that result.

In the Dictionary of Political Economy, edited by scholars including Xu Dixin 许涤新, a landlord is defined as ‘someone who rents out land’ while a worker is a ‘landless proletariat’. In reality, proletariats formed the majority of the landlords in the Yangtze delta region. According to research by economic historian Li Bozhong 李伯重, in the 1820s every household cultivated around ten mu [1.6 acres] of farmland in the Yangtze delta region. In many instances, the labour force of the household worked in factories and rented out the land to others to farm, making most landlords working class.

Q6: You used the novel Water Margin to support your research on the social and economic history of the Huaibei region, which reminded me of the book Water Margin and Chinese Society by Sa Mengwu 萨孟武. Can you talk about the reasoning behind it?

I refer to Water Margin in the context of a historiographical method called mutual verification between literature and history. I have two principles in historical research. The first is to identify and critically examine historical materials. The second principle is never use materials that I cannot verify elsewhere. As in a court trial, there must be a chain of evidence. Water Margin and other novels I refer to, like Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, can be classified as ‘social novels’, which supplement historical materials to serve in the chain of evidence.

Water Margin was written in the early Ming dynasty, with modifications and new versions appearing later in the dynasty. The theme song of the 1998 TV series Water Margin sings about ‘a friendship of life and death forged over a bowl of wine’. To offer one’s life in exchange for a bowl of wine or a meal indeed reflects the material scarcity of a famine-stricken society. This was also the social norm of Huaibei society. During an uprising at the end of the Yuan dynasty [1279–1368], a wealthy family only had to slaughter a few cattle and prepare a few jars of wine to incite a mob to murder the county magistrate.

Q7：Some have criticised you for showing too much personal emotion in your book. In the epilogue, you talked about your experiences growing up and studying in Huaibei in stark poverty, as well as the challenges of doing field research in your hometown. Is it right to assume that you brought your personal experience into this book and, to some extent, you wanted to tackle prejudices against the Huabei region and its people?

I do not think there is any historian who writes without any personal bias. Even choosing what to study and which materials to use is based on personal likes and dislikes. Scholars who claim to be purely objective are lying.

I studied at Soochow University in the 1990s. Back then I could barely afford proper clothing. For three-quarters of the year I would wear the same outfit: a khaki military jacket, a pair of track pants, and sneakers with holes in the toes. Poverty was one reason why I was drawn to this subject. Most of my classmates came from the relativity prosperous Yangtze delta region, and I stuck out like a sore thumb. I dared not attend the social dances that were popular at that time, or invite anyone to the movies. My classmates looked down on me, and I gradually discovered from my readings that people from Huaibei had been discriminated against for their poverty by those from the neighbouring Yangtze delta region since the Ming dynasty. However, if you look back further in history, things were different.

The more I read about the Huaibei region, the more perplexed I became: before the Northern Song dynasty, not only was my home region way more developed than the Yangtze delta region, it also produced many noteworthy figures, including the Han general Xiao He 萧何 [257–193 BC] and the Three Kingdoms military strategist Zhou Yu 周瑜 [175–210]. How come a thousand years later, by the time of Emperor Qianlong’s southern tour, he described Huaibei as ‘barren mountains and poor rivers, vulgar men and shrewish women’?^[4] Why have there been so many misunderstandings and prejudices against the Huaibei region? I began doing fieldwork in the region because I wanted to find an explanation for this historical change. I was dissatisfied with what existing history books, models and theories had to say about the Huaibei region.

My background is in history, and I have not received any formal training in anthropology or sociology. So I did not have a carefully formulated plan for field research. I just wandered around looking for answers to the questions that had piled up from my readings. At that time, I was living entirely off my scholarship. To save money, in winter, I lived in a public bathhouse because it was warm, and in summer, I stayed in any cheap guesthouse as long as it came with an electric fan. I was living among street performers and vendors.

The most unforgettable experience was when I went to Feng County for research. As soon as I entered a village, villagers began to follow me, cursing me from behind. I turned around to see what was happening, and I was immediately surrounded by people who started hitting me. More people joined in the beating, all shouting and cursing. It seemed like half the village had come running over. When I told this story to the director of the Xuzhou Salt Industry Bureau, who had also grown up around there, he shrugged and said that was nothing. Their division director had been stabbed by a mob before.

Because I grew up in the Huaibei region and conducted fieldwork there, my research focus and perspectives cannot be the same as those who write about the region while sipping coffee in their studies. For me, it is necessary through research and writing to reconstruct the ecology of the Huaibei society with which I am familiar. I hope my book can serve as a different point of reference and offer readers a new way of thinking.

Notes

[1] Joel Wing-Lun, ‘What have we learned from “the woman in chains”?’, China Story, 9 May 2022, online at: https://www.thechinastory.org/what-have-we-learned-from-the-woman-in-chains/

[2] ‘Interview with Ma Junya’ 马俊亚谈被牺牲的“局部”, Shanghai Book Review, 28 January 2024, online at: https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_26167117

[3] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm.

[4] When the Qianlong emperor visited Xuzhou, he reportedly uttered the phrase ‘poor mountains and rivers, untamed men and women’ 穷山恶水，泼妇刁民. Although lacking any historical record, the saying became popular when describing the Huaibei region.

The post The Sacrificed Land: Q&A with Historian Ma Junya appeared first on The China Story.

The editors

Kou Aizhe: The short happy Antarctic summer ends too soon and is followed by a long winter.

Many scientific researchers return home to China at the end of summer as most Antarctic research can only be done in the summer months. Only a small number of staff are left at the research station for what is known as 越冬 ‘winter-over’.^[1] Cao Jianxi used to be one of the team members wintering over at the research station, responsible for ensuring that the research station operated normally during the winter months.

‘Wintering over’: A gruelling experience

Once we are wintering over, everyone’s workload is much lighter. Someone like me, who is in charge of the kitchen, only has to make sure meat and vegetables are brought in from the storeroom and ready for cooking the next day.

We rise much later in winter as the sun only rises after ten o’clock in the morning, when it is almost time for lunch. Between lunch and dinner, we have plenty of time to ourselves.

I’d often sit by my bed, wrapped up in a warm blanket to play online games or watch movies. There was a particular actress, I can’t remember whether I saw her on TV or in a movie, but I was very fond of her at that time, and thought her very beautiful.

She has very oriental features, with a delicate ‘melon-seed’ oval face. She appeared wearing a crimson veil and appeared against a red background.

I took a photo with my mobile phone and would often stare at it, my heart heavy with loneliness and the yearning for a companion.

Although there were other people at the station, our interactions were minimal. In this sort of closed environment, the longer we stayed together the more silent and withdrawn we became, with no desire to connect with anyone, just amusing ourselves alone in our rooms.

Those who are more extroverted, especially the older ones, seemed less affected by the isolation. The younger team members tend to be more quick tempered, and would ignore the others if they were in a bad mood.

At times an older team member would walk into the dining hall and, sensing the negative vibe, would attempt to lighten the mood by telling jokes or asking people how they were going.

But the strange thing is, they would get no response from the others. As you can imagine, under such circumstances, that made most team members felt even more depressed.

It was also common to see conflict among team members. I personally experienced this: as the period of isolation grew longer, the more my relationship with my direct superior deteriorated. At the start, we got along well because we were polar research centre co-workers.

But later, because of the nature of our working relationship, he made more demands on me than others. Sometimes it was over small things like cigarettes or alcohol. I would get annoyed and feel like he is mistreating me or that he wasn’t looking after me. As time went by our relationship worsened with every such incident.

As a result, my relationship with the station master deteriorated as well. Even when winter was over, we could not repair our relationship. In normal life, if we run into problems at work, we can always go home or go for a drink or a meal with friends after work to relieve our stress. But in the extreme conditions of the South Pole, that isn’t an option. We are always together. If something goes badly today, tomorrow we still have to continue working together. Frustrations build up and never go away.

Food

Kou Aizhe: In Antarctica, growing crops is strictly prohibited.^[2] All crops are considered ‘exotic species’ that risk damaging its unique environment. Of course, the harsh conditions in Antarctica are not conducive to growing crops either, so supplies of food and other necessities are completely dependent on infrequent transport links to the station.

The popular Chinese saying goes, ‘Food is the people’s heaven’. Even when they are at the ‘end of the world’, those stationed in the Antarctica are determined not to compromise on their enjoyment of food. It is at times like this when culinary creativity is at its most prolific.

My job as a manager at the research station means I am like the ‘housekeeper’. I manage all the storerooms, especially the kitchen store. Every day, I would go to the kitchen to prepare supplies, like alcohol, other drinks, rice and flour. Our dishes mostly consisted of dried goods from the north-east of China because they could be kept for a long period of time. It was rare to have green leafy vegetables. Usually we’d eat bean curd strips, seaweed and other dried goods that had to be soaked in water first.

Among twelve of us who stayed behind in the winter months, there was a chef by the name of Old Zhu. He used to be the main chef on board the [icebreaker and resupply ship] Xue Long.

Before each meal, one of us rang the bell outside the dining hall. Sometimes it was me, sometimes the chef himself or one of the kitchen hands, and then everyone would come to eat.

At the station, big steel trays were used for serving meals, which usually consisted of three dishes, such as chicken or black fungus stir fried with sliced pork belly, and a soup, typically egg-based with seaweed, which was vacuum packed; all we had to do was to steep it in hot water first.

We also had desiccated vegetables, but no matter what we did with them, they were flavourless.

Sometimes we would have barbeques outdoors using large steel plates and long iron skewers. Barbeques were fun, especially after the tide receded and lots of abalones were left stranded on the rocks. We would barbeque abalones on a large metal plate as if they were lamb on skewers. Those abalones were the best I have ever eaten – extremely tender.

When celebrating festivals or birthdays, we would prepare more dishes, sometimes a dozen or so, in smaller portions and served on white porcelain plates. We would lay them out on a table covered with a white tablecloth, plus flowers for decoration. The flowers were plastic, but it looked pretty.

To celebrate the birthdays of our teammates, Chef Zhu would also bake a cake. The station manager would pass a birthday card around for everyone to sign. On each card would be twelve signatures, making it something worth keeping.

On special occasions like the Mid-Autumn Festival, I would also make banners that read ‘China’s 22nd Antarctic Scientific Expedition Team at the Great Wall Station Celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival’. I would print out the Chinese characters individually on A4-size sheets and pin them together on a scroll of red cloth to make a long banner.

End of winter

Kou Aizhe: The first time Cao Jianxi spent the winter at the polar research station, he had a calendar pinned up in his room and he would stare at it for ages every day, studying it minutely, counting down the days until his return home.

But as the end of wintering over drew nearer, Cao had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he was dying to see his family and friends. Over and over, he’d imagine the scenes of meeting them all again in detail.

On the other hand, human society became like a beautiful dreamscape. The long separation from society instilled a sense of anxiety in Cao, who worried whether returning to a normal life would ever be possible.

After more than a year’s wait, the day finally came for Cao to finish wintering over.

When I was in Antarctica, I never thought I’d go back. But back in China, I found myself having difficulties adapting to society. Like a prisoner who has been released after a long jail term of more than a decade or do, I found it hard to get used to a life of freedom and was nostalgic for the prison environment.

After many months of trying to adapt, I decided to return to Antarctica. Society was a little hard to fit into.

Life and death

Kou Aizhe: In 2007, Cao Jianxi boarded the icebreaker Xuelong, to join China’s 24th Antarctic Scientific Expedition to the South Pole. The first destination was Zhongshan Station. If Cao’s first ‘wintering over’ at the Great Wall Station had only subjected him to mental anguish, venturing into the interior of Antarctica was a severe ordeal that tested both his body and spirit.

Zhongshan Station was the second scientific research station that China built in the Antarctic. It is located in East Antarctica and is 4,986 kilometres away from Great Wall Station, making the distance between the two research stations even greater than that from Shanghai to Urumqi. What’s more, the climate in Zhongshan Station is much harsher.

It was during the 24th Expedition that Cao had the most dangerous experience of his life.

In Antarctica, you never know where the danger lies until you come face to face with it. The further you travel into the interior, the more dangerous it becomes. Accidents are common, especially for those venturing onto the endless plateau of snow, ice and glaciers for the first time.

When the icebreaker Xuelong arrived at Zhongshan Station with our research team, we had to start unloading 10 to 20 nautical miles from the station. This is because the Xuelong could only drive through ice up to 1.1 metres thick. We had to use snowmobiles and sledges to transport our cargo from the vessel to the station.

This zone is notorious for its haphazard formation of ice sheets, resulting from huge blocks of old ice bonding together and refreezing. This makes the structure of the ice non-uniformly thick, with some places thick and others thin.

As a precaution, having two drivers (a pilot and a co-pilot) operate an oversnow vehicle is the norm. This boosts safety because in an emergency, one person can radio in a report.

At the time, a very experienced chief mechanic, Mr Xu Xiaxing, decided to drive an oversnow vehicle on his own, so as to allow the other members of the team to rest. He didn’t take a sledge, which signified it was an empty vehicle. We’d put caterpillar treads on it while it was still in the hold, and it was the best equipped of all the vehicles. The crane moved it from the hold onto the ice.

Mr Xu wanted to move the vehicle to another spot and began driving.

Our assistant expedition guide Wang Hailang was on duty in the control room of the Xuelong. He witnessed the whole episode. The vehicle began moving forward when it suddenly stalled and began spinning. Then, suddenly, it started sinking.

When Mr Xu discovered his oversnow vehicle had stalled, he thought all he had to do was pump the accelerator to get the vehicle to lurch forward, as he had done before. But this was a totally different situation: the area’s ice layer was too thin. Underneath, it was already broken into ice debris. The vehicle started sinking rapidly, as if the wheels were shovelling up ice from below.

When the oversnow vehicle first started sinking, Mr Xu didn’t panic. He still thought that hitting the accelerator would solve the problem by propelling it forward and freeing it from the ice. But before he realised it, the vehicle had sunk to a considerable depth and a stream of bubbles began to burst forth from its interior. Only then did terror enter his heart, and he thought of his family. He realised the peril he was in and feared this would be the end of him.

Water gradually flooded the car. He prepared to escape but couldn’t open any of the windows or its sunroof owing to the pressure of the water. Pushing open the door would be futile for the same reason.

However, the window on the driver’s side could slide back and forth. By chance, Mr Xu managed to push that window open. Water rushed into the car and completely flooded the interior.

He then tried to escape through the sunroof.

The sunroof was like that of a family car, except it was not able to open fully. It could only be cracked open to a 5- or 10-degree angle at most.

Mr Xu decided to stand on the vehicle’s middle console and push up as hard as he could to force the sunroof open. The connecting rod of the sunroof gave way completely, opening the only possible escape route for him.

He tried to float to the surface, but he continued to sink. His boots were caught.

Those boots were specially designed to withstand a temperature of around minus 30 degrees Celsius so they were extremely bulky and heavy. But he eventually managed to free himself from them. He’d used up almost all his energy and swallowed another mouthful of ice-cold sea water.

After he had made his escape from the sunroof, he swam upward with all his might, until he heard his head bump against the ice debris, and knew he’d reached the top. He raised his hand and ascertained he’d found the ice hole.

The rescue team still hadn’t reached him, but he climbed his way out onto dry ice all by himself. He managed to make two steps before collapsing.

As a result of this, all the work of the research team came to a temporary stop. Everyone was at a complete loss. The whole team’s spirit sank to an all-time low.

Return to Antarctica

Kou Aizhe: After his fourth expedition to Antarctica, Cao Jianxi resigned from the Polar Research Centre. Not long after, he moved to Australia and began a new phase of his life.

After leaving China, I didn’t think about returning to Antarctica. I threw myself into an entirely new life. I got married and devoted my time and energy to raising a family.

At first, I wasn’t nostalgic or keen to think about those days. Nor did I want to dig out old photos and videos. However, with the passing of time, I began thinking more and more of the memories of those events.

In Antarctica, under such harsh conditions, a small group of us still managed to work together using our own skills to complete our mission. There is a sense of camaraderie in having been through thick and thin together, akin to that of having been comrades-in-arms on a battlefield.

I feel like this deep connection is too precious to be discarded or forgotten. It is so rare in one’s life to have relationships built on shared experiences of life and death.

By chance, a friend asked if I was interested in working on board a cruise ship specialising in tours to Antarctica. The steep increase in the number of Chinese tourists in recent years has raised the demand for people like me, who know Antarctica and speak English and Chinese.

At first, I didn’t take this opportunity seriously, but when night came, I thought more deeply and got very excited. Things big and small that happened when I was living and working in Antarctica, the friendship and connection with teammates, started to play out in my mind. If I returned, I would be return to my old circles.

I felt an urgent desire to go back, a bit like how I felt the first time I was bound for Antarctica after college. But before I ventured back, the cruise company decided that I should travel to the Arctic a few times first. As a result, I visited Iceland and Greenland several times. Some six months later, I was finally on my way back to Antarctica.

When the cruise ship arrived at Antarctica, the sight of the snow-capped mountains and glaciers in the far distance made me extremely emotional, and tears welled in my eyes.

When I went ashore, I felt that I knew every rock and stone was familiar. I also ran into a teammate who once wintered over in the same year with me at the research station. He was very happy to see me and cooked some noodles for us. I felt extremely happy and excited. I really hadn’t expected that.

In that distant place, I returned to where I first started, as if some mystical power is at work, or perhaps this is just what is meant to be. When Heaven opens a door for me, I linger hesitantly at the doorway, but when I finally decide to cross the threshold, I keep going.

Notes from the translator

[1] 越冬 or ‘winter-over’ is a specific term used to denote the process by which researchers in the South Pole steel themselves to pass through the long and often difficult winters. It implies a degree of tenacity on the part of the researchers to adjust their way of living in the research centre to wait out the winter season.

[2] Many research stations in the South Pole have, however, set up hydroponic gardens in greenhouses for research purposes as early as 1902. By 2015 there were at least forty-six different facilities in Antarctica where researchers had grown plants at some time or another as scientific experiments. Matthew Bamsey, Paul Zabel, Conrad Zeidler et al., ‘Review of Antarctic greenhouses and plant production facilities: A historical account of food plants on the ice’, Paper presented at the 45th International Conference on Environment Systems, Bellevue, WA, USA, 12–16 July 2015: 1–37. Accessed 15 September 2023. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280738927_Review_of_Antarctic_Greenhouses_and_Plant_Production_Facilities_A_Historical_Account_of_Food_Plants_on_the_Ice

The post Loneliness, Death and Desolation: Why I Return to Antarctica Time and Again appeared first on The China Story.

The editors

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

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

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

AI saves us money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My client is not at fault, and neither am I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

One year later, as China turned its back from its iron fisted zero-COVID policy, traumatic memories of lockdowns, mandatory quarantines, and medics in white hazmat suits were quickly smothered by nauseating celebrations of the ‘magnificent, glorious and infallible’ Communist Party of China and its ‘outstanding and decisive victory in containing the epidemic’. Here at The China Story, we commemorate the first year anniversary of the Shanghai Lockdown by publishing a series of translations of letters sent to a popular Chinese language podcast StochasticVolatility 随机波动. Some of these letters were read out loud by the show’s hosts, three female media professionals Zhang Zhiqi, Fu Shiye and Leng Jianguo. Their voices as well as the individual voices behind these letters served as a source of warmth and comfort during those long days of isolation and chaos. The letters featured here also represent voices of what scholar and creator of The China Story Geremie Barmé calls ‘The Other China‘,  a ‘China of humanity and decency, of quiet dignity and unflappable perseverance.’

The Editors

Dialectical Thinking and Genuine Concern Are All I have

Translated with an introduction by Huang Zichu

Translator’s Introduction

This letter, only slightly abridged, represents the view of a Shanghainese living overseas to the COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai. The author jokingly adopts the label ‘(hostile) foreign forces’ 境外(敌对)势力, a catch-all phrase for anybody or any viewpoint that deviates from the official doctrines of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The phrase is frequently employed by CPC officials and state media to allege foreign interference in China’s internal affairs. In the digital age, patriotic netizens have co-opted the term ‘foreign forces’ to denounce groups or individuals as traitors. This became even more pronounced in discussions of the CPC’s zero-COVID policy. Overseas Chinese are often perceived as outsiders, told by others in China to keep quiet since they either ‘do not understand the situation in China’ 不理解国情 or ‘are brainwashed by the West’ 被西方洗脑.

We do not know which recordings the author of this letter were referring to since many frustrated, angry, and desperate Shanghai citizens under the lockdown posted such recordings on social media, triggering both public concern and outrage. These recordings, together with the drone of loudspeakers telling people to stay at home, official press conferences, and the cries of citizens demanding food or medical aid, have been collated into audiovisual collages with titles such as ‘Shanghai Voices of April’ 上海四月之声.

******

Dear Zhiqi, Shiye and Jianguo,

I am a Shanghai native currently attending university in New York state. My entire family is ‘locked up’ in Shanghai right now. Drowning in a deluge of information about the lockdown, my first reaction was, ‘who am I in relation to this information? How should I engage with this information? And am I entitled to an opinion?’

One morning last weekend, a friend sent me two audio recordings. I was so angry after listening to them that I immediately sent a WeChat message to my parents asking, ‘have you heard these recordings?’ To my astonishment, they told me not to believe such crazy reports and that while I’m abroad, I should stay out of China’s internal affairs since ‘I wouldn’t understand’. ‘Oh, that’s right,’ I said ironically, ‘I’m a (hostile) foreign power!’ Even though I was being ironic, I couldn’t help but feel offended. A little recent observation tells me that there are two main arguments for ‘silencing the mic’ of so-called ‘foreign powers’. The kinder version – ‘You don’t understand the situation in China’. The radical version – ‘You have been brainwashed by Western media’. As an overseas Shanghainese, I don’t buy it.

I Don’t Understand the Situation in China?

My circle of fellow ‘foreign forces’ are all very concerned about Shanghai. During the early days of the Shanghai outbreak, when the situation turned bad very quickly, these friends shared on Wechat, articles, links, and documents describing the urgent pleas for help from people in Shanghai. Even though clearly, none of them were in China, and not all of them had family in Shanghai, they still saw themselves as taking part in Shanghai’s battle against the pandemic, rather than simply observing things from thousands of miles away – why?

My answer is that there is empathy between people. I can’t help but empathise with those individuals in the never-ending stream of news on social media; nor can I turn a blind eye to the real suffering expressed in their writings or voice recordings. While I may not understand what’s happening inside China or what the government is planning exactly, I can and ought to understand people. When I shared the news on Weibo about a son who lost his father [the father had kidney failure but couldn’t get treatment on time because he tested positive for COVID-19], I just wanted to support the son who had just lost his father in the hope that more people would not experience the agony of losing loved ones in that way.

I Have Been Brainwashed by the West?

Some of my more radical friends regularly post criticisms of China’s zero-COVID policy on social media and share commentaries from Western media. I don’t see a problem with them voicing their views, but I wouldn’t express myself in that way.

Since leaving China, I have definitely noticed some gradual changes in my ideological perspective, whether it was towards the pandemic, or political issues, or just my way of thinking. I am aware and wary of this change; I don’t want to become anyone’s puppet. I wanted to find some objective sources of information, but the harder I tried, the more my hope faded. I felt so desperate that I even thought that perhaps the only way to understand these issues would be for me to visit and speak to the people there.

Later I realised that ‘objectivity’ does not exist in many situations. All I could do amidst the flood of information was to approach each report dialectically, to see both sides. This is exactly what I attempted to do when approaching news on the Shanghai pandemic. If I couldn’t advance through the deluge of information, I’d just plant my feet down and refuse to be carried away by any of the swirling currents. At least I can say that I have not been brainwashed by any media.

I am only a university student in New York state. In stark contrast to the trials and tribulations experienced by those in Shanghai, I enjoy the luxury of peace and quiet in this university town while reading about the city in the news…I think that there is little I can do, except to approach information dialectically and maintain a genuine concern for others.

I will stop writing now. After reading what I have written thus far, I find that my ability to write has significantly weakened from a lack of practice. This letter seems to contain a series of tangled self-reflections, not at all what I originally intended it to be, namely an account of different point of views. Anyway – I am grateful for the Stochastic Volatility letterbox for giving me an audience, someone to talk to when I wanted to write.

Best wishes from snowy New York state,

Qiu Muzhi

10 April 2022

The post Letters From Lockdown II appeared first on The China Story.

One year later, as China turned its back from its iron fisted zero-COVID policy, traumatic memories of lockdowns, mandatory quarantines, and medics in white hazmat suits were quickly smothered by nauseating celebrations of the ‘magnificent, glorious and infallible’ Communist Party of China and its ‘outstanding and decisive victory in containing the epidemic’. Here at The China Story, we commemorate the first year anniversary of the Shanghai Lockdown by publishing a series of translations of letters sent to a popular Chinese language podcast StochasticVolatility 随机波动. Some of these letters were read out loud by the show’s hosts, three female media professionals Zhang Zhiqi, Fu Shiye and Leng Jianguo. Their voices as well as the individual voices behind these letters served as a source of warmth and comfort during those long days of isolation and chaos. The letters featured here also represent voices of what scholar and creator of The China Story Geremie Barmé calls ‘The Other China‘,  a ‘China of humanity and decency, of quiet dignity and unflappable perseverance.’

The Editors

In This Whirlpool of Chaotic Jumble, ‘Your World’ Is Also ‘My World’

Translated with an introduction by Peishan Yann

Translator’s Introduction

The COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai from April to June 2022 may seem remote for most people who only know about it from the news, which can convey the scale and magnitude of the lockdown, but not the pain it inflicted. For China’s biggest city of approximately 26 million people to descend into a full lockdown while the rest of the world is navigating away from it, is incomprehensible at best. Compounded by the lack of clear and transparent communication from the authorities and the redoubling of tough, senseless measures to contain people, Shanghai residents struggled through more than two months of turmoil with little recourse. Like other Chinese cities in lockdown, Shanghai came to a halt, but it was a halt like no other as China’s largest commercial engine ground to a stop, putting lives, livelihoods, and emotional and mental health at risk as the country stubbornly stuck to its zero-COVID policy, under which little else mattered.

In addition to the inconvenience and anxiety of being locked inside, and the fear of testing positive for the virus and being moved to a quarantine centre, the prolonged lockdown also prevented access to many daily necessities, including medicines, toilet paper, and even food. Hunger was real and immediate. Residents mostly relied on tuan gou 团购 or ‘community group-buying’ to procure daily essentials for entire residential compounds during the lockdown. These experiences have been brought to life by first-person accounts on various Chinese podcasts, including Stochastic Volatility 随机波动, which is hosted by three young women, who recently read out letters from Shanghai residents at breaking point. Listeners from mainly first-tier cities aged in their twenties to mid thirties found such downloadable podcasts that directly addressed their concerns deeply appealing, especially in long periods of isolation during the pandemic, when the intimacy and familiarity of the human voice became even more soothing and reassuring. Timely and lively discussions on the pandemic resonated with them, and they drew strength from them to bear the unbearable.

The following letter provides powerful insights into life during the lockdown. We hear about the discrimination suffered by nine male migrant workers crowded into a single rental unit when most tested positive for the virus, and their vulnerability in the face of their neighbours’ cold indifference and cruel criticisms. Another harrowing story is that of an eighty-eight-year-old woman crying out for help and being ignored by her residents’ committee as supplies of food and medicine ran critically low. But there are also glimmers of heart-warming kindness: younger residents looking out for their elderly neighbours and people feeding the stray cats in the longtang 弄堂 (‘laneway communities’).

Amid this whirlpool of chaos and uncertainty, people recorded their stories and the absurdities surrounding them. Their stories need to be heard, translated, and shared.

******

Dear Stochastic Volatility hosts, Zhiqi, Shiye, and Jianguo,

Most of the time, I’m inclined to assume the role of the listener and reader, very rarely willing to pick up my pen, and never have I voiced my opinions on a public platform. The power of language is all but weak. It’s such a heavy responsibility as well. I have no confidence I will be able to accurately express what I’ve seen in words. I’m even more scared that what I say will be misconstrued and others will get hurt. So, I’ve always just curled up inside my shell, unable to speak.

But living in Shanghai and being a part of what may be the greatest absurdity of the twenty-first century, there is always a flag waving from a small corner in my room and that flag says, ‘Cry out!’,[1] protesting my silence and my failure to record what I see. So, I thought, why not write something for the Stochastic Volatility’s letterbox, this semi-private and semi-public space.

This is the fifth week of working from home. Objectively speaking, life hasn’t been too bad. I have a source of income and know how to find information online. So, access to daily necessities is not a problem. But the familiar structure of my daily life is crumbling bit by bit. Moreover, I’ve a pessimistic inkling that life will never return to ‘normal’.

What I’m seeing is the weakness of the individual, and this lockdown has also fully exposed what lies beneath this weakness — the absurdity that we once considered ourselves unrelated individuals.

I live in an old longtang in downtown Shanghai, an alleyway community with a severely ageing population. Half of its residents are younger people from outside Shanghai, the other half elderly native Shanghainese. Until a month ago, these were like two parallel worlds. I feel ashamed that I have never attempted to remove the filter from my eyes to really observe the people who live around me, the human beings who are closest to me in the physical sense, until a month ago.

When the invisible barriers built around a ‘normal life’ were shattered by lockdown orders, the world revealed its original shape — real people of myriad and enormous differences, all equally fallen into this whirlpool of chaos. There is no longer a distinction between ‘your world’ and ‘my world’. Everybody is enclosed within the same fortress walls in the same physical space, in a closed circuit without an exit switch. All I can do is to record the little stories that happen in this closed circuit.

The Ones Who Lost Their Voice

There are nine of them in one unit, seven of whom have tested positive. The Neighbourhood Committee has not disinfected their apartment, given them supplies or conducted PCR testing. Neighbours, please take extra care to avoid them, they are going to break out at any moment!

This message suddenly appeared in my neighbourhood WeChat group.

This is the first time that I had become aware of this group of residents in my neighbourhood. Their cramped living conditions are unsuitable for self-isolation. They were not relocated to quarantine centres quickly enough and have cross-infected each other. Finding themselves in dire straits, they were robbed of a voice to cry out for help. I do not know what they look like or what they do for a living, but I do know they have been blindly condemned by the community as tenants engaged in illegal overcrowding.

Someone asked in the chat: ‘Nine people in a single unit. How could they possibly like Shanghai that much? Shared rentals are such a big problem, just wait until the pandemic is over, I’ll dob them in.’ Another person said: ‘So many positive cases and they still haven’t been shepherded out to quarantine centres. Their rubbish is piling up on the corridor day by day. What are others living in the same building supposed to do?’ Someone else commented: ‘Everyone steer clear of them, they are coming downstairs to dump their rubbish. Rubbish accumulated from nine people. It already stinks!’ Still, one person observed: ‘They have not joined any tuangou, the Neighbourhood Committee has not given them any supplies either, these boys must be starving.’

As for these nine people, they had no collective voice. They did not join any community group-buying or ask anyone for help. Neither did they respond to any suspicions or accusations. No-one knows why they came to Shanghai to live in such an overcrowded rental unit. No-one knows about their living conditions, or what help they need the most right now. They are simply labelled ‘tenants in shared rental with COVID-19’ — a collective identity that has been tossed out into the open for criticism and then dismissed.

Working by my window, I could occasionally hear shouts from the residential compound. A cry to the vast empty city, absorbed into the incessant rain that marks the change from spring to summer. I think, perhaps this is the only sound they can make, the only one I can hear.

Please Help Me!

They said that the lockdown would only last for four days. I only stocked up on some vegetables which cannot last long. The medication for a bedridden elderly person with dementia is running low. And my domestic helper has only two days’ worth of medicine for her high blood pressure. I rang the Neighbourhood Committee this morning and they said they were busy but would ring me back in the afternoon. I waited until past 3pm and still they did not make contact. I rang countless times afterwards but the number was always busy; this went on until 6pm. The two of them will die without their medicine. I am 88 years old myself and have difficulties with mobility. I’ve been on tenterhooks all day and can’t sleep at night. Will someone please help me!

This was another message from my neighbourhood WeChat group, posted by an eighty-eight-year-old resident. Police officers and volunteers in the community have since made contact with her and provided help. Hopefully she and her family can pull through this rough patch.

In the Weibo community page ‘Help Needed for Shanghai Pandemic’上海疫情求助, there are many similar cries for urgent assistance. I do not know how many of these pleas have been attended to, or how many of them have been swept away into this vast sea of information. Nor do I know the number of people out there who have no idea how or where to seek help.

I have no idea what I could do to help. In our residential compound, some concerned neighbours have left notices with their contact details on the ground floor of those apartment blocks mostly inhabited by senior citizens, so that those in need could reach out.

I met an old lady with silver hair when I was on my way to pick up some supplies. We stood by the side of the road watching a little black kitten eat. I asked if she had enough food at home and if she needed anything. She smiled sweetly and replied that she has enough. Everything is fine and she only wanted to come out for a stroll and see how her elderly neighbours were doing. She said that having a young person stop and show her concern has made her very happy. The old lady declined my material assistance. I am not sure if she was only trying to reassure me when she said she has enough to eat but I do hope my show of concern brought her some emotional solace.

In this great chaos, I have come to believe in the resilience of the people and have witnessed sparkles of kindness glimmering through this calamitous darkness. And yet, none of this should have happened in the first place.

Stray Cats

In my longtang there live around ten stray cats. In normal times, old grannies will come out and feed them at fixed mealtimes. The cats have their own food bowls and territory. But since all this huge uncertainty has swept over us, how are these stray cats supposed to live?

A week ago, I noticed their food supply had been completely cut off. Previously proud and uninterested in engaging with people, they started circling me, mewing loudly. It occurred to me that the apartment blocks where the cat-feeding grannies live were all under lockdown, and these cats had been without food for nearly a week. I opened my delivery apps and was relieved to find that while all the takeaway food businesses catering for humans had stopped operation, a pet store is still selling cat food and could deliver. Proper cat food was out of stock of course, but limited titbits and canned food were still available. I managed to snatch up two weeks’ worth of supplies. From then on in the lockdown, I took on a new routine of feeding the stray cats.

I must admit, human beings are very selfish animals. When I discovered that it was still within my power to do something for the cats downstairs, my anxiety and guilt seemed to have lifted a little. For all the talk about kind intentions, all I wanted was to avoid falling into the category of ‘not doing anything to help’. What I did really was merely pick the easiest task rather than the much more difficult ones that would require more time, effort, and commitment, such as becoming a community volunteer or speaking up on behalf of those who were suffering.

Later, I discovered that in the cats’ bowls, proper cat food was mixed in occasionally with the canned food I had provided. It seems there are others like me who are trying to not let the cats go hungry. I hope that neither the people nor cats living in my longtang go hungry.

I’ve written all this and still I have no idea how I am going to get through this spring. Perhaps spring has already slipped by. What I know is that such trivial stories as I have told here will continue to unfold in a ceaseless cycle, just as we will continue to experience fear, anger, despair, and helplessness. But I hope those who witness these stories don’t lose the courage to record them.

I end my letter with these lines from Baudelaire’s L’Avertisseur:

Whatever he may plan or hope,

Man does not live for an instant

Without enduring the warning

Of the unbearable Viper

From L’Avertisseur by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Lewis Piaget Shanks, in Flowers of Evil (New York: Ives Washburn, 1931)

Shanghai, 14 April 2022

Mesmalheurs

Notes

[1] The writer is most likely referring to a collection of essays by the famous essayist Lu Xun, A Call to Arms 呐喊, literally meaning to ‘Cry out!’. Lu took to writing to expose the ugliness of reality in the hope of awakening the spirit of his fellow citizens and bringing about hope for the future.

The post Letters From Lockdown appeared first on The China Story.

Dr Li had worked at Wuhan Central Hospital for over ten years. On the afternoon of December 30, 2019, he posted a message warning in a group chat of fellow graduates of Wuhan University, alerting his colleagues and former classmates that a ‘new virus similar to atypical pneumonia (SARS)’ was spreading significantly in Wuhan, but cautiously warning the group members to ‘not spread the word’. The following day, Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organisation about the mysterious illness, but didn’t acknowledge the seriousness of the outbreak. Dr Li was detained on 1 January and accused of ‘rumour-mongering’. On 3 January he was released after signing a ‘Letter of Discipline’ 训诫书 (see Figure 1) issued by the Wuhan Municipal Public Security Bureau. His original post had warned colleagues to wear masks and other protective equipment, but authorities refused to allow such measures to prevent panic. Then, on 11 January 2020, Dr Li, who had been treating infected patients, developed a cough and soon after, a fever. His condition rapidly deteriorated and he was placed in isolation in the Respiratory Department and Intensive Care Unit (ICU) just two days later.

On 30 January, a week before he passed away, Dr Li participated an interview with Caixin Media in which he said: ‘A healthy society should not have only one voice’ 一个健康的社会不应该只有一种声音 (see Figure 2). He thanked people on social media for their support, saying it made him feel a little more ‘relaxed in my heart’. In this interview, Li also released this Letter of Discipline, along with his account of the entire process of being interrogated by the police, to the public. This prompted wide public discussion on Weibo. However, the COVID-19 epidemic was in its earliest stages and officials were still trying to block information about the true extent of the infection. So some of the public identified him, like the police, as a rumour-monger. On the other hand, many netizens argued that if officials had confirmed Li Wenliang’s information from the start and had been transparent with the public, the epidemic would not have got so out of control, with so many infections and deaths, and would not have had such a chaotic impact on the social order. Nonetheless, as the outbreak rapidly spread, he finally become known as a whistle-blower. Dr Li Wenliang passed away on 7 February 2020.

Following Dr Li’s death, a massive outpouring of condolences erupted on Weibo, with the hashtag #DrLiWenliangDied# already having 1 billion views by the following day. People also took the campaign offline. In Figure 3, a Beijing resident wrote five Chinese characters in the snow to say ‘farewell to Li Wenliang’ 送别李文亮 and laid beside the last character to form an exclamation mark. The image received over a million likes on Weibo and became the origin of many memes, with people similarly making memes to express their condolences and anger.

Li Wenliang’s last blog post, published on Weibo 1 February 2020, became the site of what has become known as the ‘Wailing Wall’. As of October 2022 on Weibo, this blog had 281,000 re-posts, over 1 million replies, and 4.34 million likes. People are still writing comments there about their feelings, daily activities, and the impact COVID-19 has had on their lives. Yet, after three years, it appears that the authorities, who quickly claimed Dr Li for a martyr after his death, are gradually and artificially erasing his name from view. Moreover, people are themselves choosing to forget what Dr Li stood for, their initial anger at his death faded with time and turned into warm nostalgia and a sense of hope for the future.

The ‘Wailing Wall’ 

The ‘Wailing Wall’ originally referred to the remaining wall of the ancient Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where people come to pray, mourn for the ancient temple and the pain of exile. On Weibo, a platform which is highly regulated and censored, Dr Li Wenliang’s ‘Wailing Wall’ is a unique document in the sociocultural history of the epidemic in China over the last few years.

On the eve of the third anniversary of Dr Li’s death, the Chinese government implemented ‘Article 20’ 二十条 and ‘New Article 10’ 新十条 measures to improve the management of viral infections. This new policy, which came into effect on 8 January 2023, renamed novel coronavirus pneumonia as novel coronavirus infection and was accompanied by a significant relaxation of outbreak control policies. Since then, Chinese government propaganda has avoided COVID-19 and its related topics. One of the most obvious evidence of this is the 2023 Spring Festival Gala 春晚, the largest annual national celebration of the Chinese Lunar New Year. The gala usually features a number of comedic or other programmes summarising the lives of the people of the past year, but there is little mention of COVID-19-related topics, including Dr Li. One netizen also said in this regard in the comment section of Dr Li’s Weibo: ‘Not a word about COVID-19 at the Spring Festival Gala, an era that absurdly and inexplicably came to an end.’

Although many netizens still tweeted their condolences on the third anniversary of Dr Li’s death, the scale of the tribute has considerably diminished compared to the night three years ago. When searching for ‘Li Wenliang’ on Weibo, the latest blog posts are generally updated in days and are highly associated with the hashtag #2022isreallygone#.

As Li Wenliang’s Weibo account could be deleted at any time by the internet censorship authorities, the China Digital Times has been backing up a selection of messages left for him, and plans to do so until the account is closed. Within it, we can see thousands of people writing about their memories of their loved ones who lost their lives during the pandemic, how their lives have improved, and what they don’t want to forget about how their lives had been permanently changed by this pandemic.

The following comments are excerpts from the China Digital Times’ compilation of Dr. Li’s Weibo feed.

“世上没有从天而降的英雄，只有挺身而出的凡人。晚安。”

‘There are no heroes who appear out of nowhere, only mortals who step up to the plate. Good night.’

“李医生，感谢你，用温暖一直照亮人间。”

’Thank you, Dr. Li, for always lighting up the earth with your warmth.’

“生活基本回到了20年之前的样子，就像阳过后的身体，经过3年防疫，都需要些时间来恢复！看到这么多留言，很欣慰，大家没有忘记你，希望你在那里也好好的。”

‘Life is basically back to what it was before 2020, like a body that contracted COVID-19 and then recovered, after 3 years of battling the epidemic, it all takes some time to recover! It’s comforting to see so many messages, people haven’t forgotten you and I hope you are well in heaven.’

“李医生早，很久没来看你了，我二哥也在那边，你们都是善良可爱的人。”

‘Good morning Dr. Li, it has been a long time since I last visited you, my second brother has also gone to heaven, you were both kind and lovely people.’

“当我们谈论起你，反复回忆起你，你就在我们身边。”

 ‘When we talk about you and remember you over and over again, you never leave us.’

“你的评论区没有千篇一律的吹捧，没有陌生人间的恶语相向，不会担心被你拉黑，被删帖，现在还来这里的人大都是骨子里很善良且念旧的人吧，否则早就忘记了吧…善良的普通人在分享幸福、苦恼…希望这个夜里还没有睡的人明天都能顺利。”

‘Your comment section is free of a thousand blurbs, no bad language among strangers, no fear of being blocked by you or having their posts deleted…most of the people who still come here now are good and nostalgic at heart, otherwise they would have forgotten about it…good ordinary people sharing their happiness, misery…I hope all those who are still awake this night will have a good tomorrow.’

“有良心的人都聚在这里，如果这里被删，就是删了良心。”

‘People of conscience are gathered here, and if this place is censored, it’s censored conscience.’

The comments on the ‘Wailing Wall’ are a living historical record, as they convey a wealth of information about COVID-19 at different times and places. It’s notable that in contrast to the angry outpouring during the time of COVID-19, this year’s messages — including the shift in the official media following the policy, and the lower engagement of individual netizens with Li Wenliang’s third anniversary — were mostly centered around warm nostalgia ( memorials to the dead loved ones, lamenting the passage of time) and a sense of hope for the future. While people realise that Li Wenliang is inevitably being forgotten by the internet, they also have to accept the reality that anger that cannot bring about change can only fade with time and become part of the memory.

The post From Anger to Nostalgia: Dr Li Wenliang’s ‘Wailing Wall’ appeared first on The China Story.

• ‘,’ I message my friend, who is an LGBTQI+ activist in China, on WeChat.
• ‘I’ll be there in a minute!’, she answers to let me know that she is online and available to connect to a VPN and talk to me via an encrypted platform.

A clever code of rainbows and secret words that avoid online censorship is a must for talking to my LGBTQI+ activist friends in China these days. While a dictionary of this language does not exist and it is constantly changing, fluency in double-speak allows queer 酷儿 communities to communicate without directly mentioning ‘politically sensitive’ and increasingly banned phrases like ‘gender and sexual diversity’ or ‘LGBTQI’. Just like when Chinese feminists replaced the censored #MeToo hashtag with the homophonous #MiTu/米兔 which was then translated as #RiceBunny, double-speak helps LGBTQI+ people avoid direct censorship online.

Queer Activism on the Field

The majority of my own LGBTQI+ activism in China occurred between 2014 and 2017 when I contributed to establishing Diversity — a formally registered LGBTQI+ student society in a sino-foreign University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Over a period of three years, we ran workshops within the University, created a student support group, and engaged with staff and students through social awareness raising activities, such as celebrating the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia. Although Xi Jinping had been leader of China’s Party-State since 2012, many of his most restrictive policies had not yet been rolled out during that time. Living in a second-tier city with a relatively relaxed political atmosphere, our activities were only directly targeted once, when we planned to host a national gathering with twenty attendees to support the trans community. A volunteer loosely connected to our student group told us they were called by a police officer, who mumbled:

‘What… erm… do you know about this event that is set to happen over the weekend?’

‘I’m not a part of it, I’m not really sure what’s happening,’ they responded. Having inquired about the event, the police officer must have felt that his duty was complete and did not directly approach us.

It did, however, give us a big scare. While being invited to ‘drink tea’ 喝茶 — a euphemism for being asked to speak with police about something — is in some ways a badge of activist honour, the police interest prompted everyone to move their conversations to an encrypted platform and change venues. It was the sort of vaguely threatening encounter more common in first-tier cities that are political centres. Despite that isolated incident, those years were overall a flourishing time of community-building and raising awareness about LGBTQI+ issues in society.

Shrinking Digital Space under Xi Jinping

The current censorship landscape is dire: In July 2022 University administration at the top Tsinghua University in Beijing issued penalties to two students for placing handheld rainbow flags at an on-campus supermarket with notes encouraging passers-by to take them and celebrate #PRIDE. ‘Raising awareness’ 社会意识 is now a key term on the list for censorship. National legislation that is not LGBTQI+ friendly, such as the ‘sissy ban’ of 2021 that prohibited effeminate presentations of men on visual media, adds insult to injury. LGBTQI+ activists speculate that the goal of increased coercive control of LGBTQI+ communities and individuals through media, universities, and legislation is to silo queer individuals. If authorities discover evidence of my friends’ conversations with me, a researcher in a university outside of China, they will become a target of surveillance. Similarly, conversations among themselves about an LGBTQI+ group event or gathering is likely to draw attention from the ever-vigilant police, who monitor the digital communications of targeted groups and individuals as a matter of course.

The surveillance and censorship of LGBTQI+ activist and advocate groups is most intense in the Chinese digital space. For example, WeChat, the ‘everything app’ of China, is known to be a direct window for public security agencies to observe the activities of both informal LGBTQI+ groups and registered organisations. These agencies even use the collected data to map organisational relationships between activists, according to my recent research. No conversation on the app can be presumed to be private – a fact about which no repressed group can afford to be unaware.

In their recent book on China’s surveillance state, Josh Chin and Liza Lin unpack how surveillance on WeChat works in practice. The authors note that WeChat’s parent company Tencent ‘has vehemently denied suggestions that it gives police unfettered access to WeChat’s treasure trove of behavioural data’ [1]. However, numerous ‘coincidences’ that Chin and Lin uncover in the book suggest otherwise: for instance, in 2017, Hu Jia 胡佳, a civil rights activist and advocate for HIV-positive individuals, got a phone call from a state security agent who asked why he had bought a slingshot online using WeChat Pay the day before. Dr Li Wenliang, the COVID-19 whistleblower, had similarly been investigated on account of messages sent via WeChat to a private group of other medical practitioners to raise alarm over early signs that a highly infectious coronavirus was going around.

Other social media apps run by Chinese companies, including Weibo or Douban, are also required to monitor for ‘sensitive terms’ that entail censoring and cooperation with government authorities in other ways as well. In some cases, user accounts that are targeted by government agencies may also undergo ‘account bombing’, a practice where the authorities simply ‘bomb’ 炸号, or freeze, social media accounts which they consider sensitive for whatever reason at the time. Another covert means of online censorship is ‘shadow banning’—by which the authorities allow social media users to see their own posts while making them invisible to others. While significantly less harrowing than direct police harassment, such practices can seriously hamper online discourse.

My recent research suggests that, as early as 2020, COVID-19 became an excuse to justify extensive surveillance and police monitoring beyond subjects directly related to the pandemic itself. As many cities were sent into lockdown beginning in 2020 with Wuhan hitting the record with 76 days, LGBTQI+ communities – like many others – shifted their activities to the digital space. At the same time, the digital space allowed to LGBTQI+ communities started shrinking. Moving activities online also meant they became more susceptible to monitoring. Many activists I spoke to reported being repeatedly rung up and even threatened by police because of their online activity.

LGBTQI+ conversations on WeChat have been heavily restricted since July 2021 when hundreds of student-run LGBTQI+ public accounts on WeChat were shuttered overnight and replaced with a vague message:

In response to relevant complaints, all content has been blocked for violating the ‘Regulations on the Management of Internet User Official Account Information Services’, and the account has been suspended.

July 2021 was the end of relatively free online communication among the LGBTQI+ communities in China, which had been able to share queer content online. From then onwards, each LGBTQI+ group or individual posting about LGBTQI+ issues online could expect to be targeted for police monitoring and censorship. The situation is similar on Weibo, an online microblogging platform run by Sina. While LGBTQI+ groups in different geographic locations face unequal amounts of intrusive censorship and police attention, most agree that civil society under Xi Jinping’s leadership is extremely restrictive, unlike in the relatively tolerant times under the previous leader Hu Jintao.

Queer Double-speak

Developing double-speak, a set of linguistic codes and emojis that express meaning without triggering censorship, is now a crucial part of the queer activism and advocacy landscape. It plays two key functions of helping to dodge automated censorship against suspected banned keyword lists and re-appropriating language to protect LGBTQI+ community organising. Instead of an ‘awareness raising’ activity, it may be a call for a gathering of friends. An opaque rainbow background on an event poster, technically more difficult for censors to pick up than text, is a sufficient signal that a forthcoming event invites the LGBTQI+ community.

The practice of re-appropriated language to create queer double-speak is an established tradition. The word tongzhi 同志 (comrade), re-appropriated from Communist lingo by the queer community, is perhaps the most salient example. It was an approved form of address with a history dating back to 1950s when personally mandated by Mao Zedong and had been used widely up through the early reform period even to address waitstaff or salespeople. The term was first used at the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Hong Kong in 1989 and was quickly adopted by the LGBTQI+ community in mainland China. Because it was also the correct term by which fellow party members addressed one another, the it could not be easily censored. For example, in 2001, Peking University students organised a queer film festival that they named ‘the first Chinese Tongzhi Cultural Festival’; not familiar with the double-speak, the Youth League of the University approved the event, which went on for a couple of days before it was shut down by University authorities.

A queer double-speak dictionary is unlikely to be made available to the public anytime soon. Such attempt might risk placing a direct spotlight on words used to avoid online censorship, and if placed in the wrong hands, can be used as an actual censorship dictionary. Moreover, LGBTQI+ double-speak is fluidly moving with the needs of the community, emerging organically and spontaneously. As new political and social pressures develop under Xi Jinping’s leadership, new terms of queer double-speak are sure to emerge in the future.

Despite the fact that some groups avoid the risks of the online world altogether and rely on (offline) word of mouth to share information, including about events; LGBTQI+ communities are surviving — if not thriving — in the digital space under the current political climate. Queerness is not something that can be suppressed, including by censorship, and resistance inevitably follows control and surveillance.  A practice with historical roots when sexual and gender diversity was outlawed, double-speak is an important strategy for self-preservation of LGBTQI+ individuals, and to preserve their digitally connected communities. As one of LGBTQI+ activists and advocates put it in conversation with me, ‘even if lotus seeds are dormant for a hundred years, they will bloom when the conditions improve.’

References

[1] Josh Chin and Liza Lin, Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2022, p.111.

The post Double-speak as Resistance to LGBTQI+ Repression in China appeared first on The China Story.