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

The Tam judgment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China’s desire to ‘decolonise’ Hong Kong

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

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

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

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

‘Decolonised’ ends, colonial means

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

[5] [2024] HKCA 231 (‘Tam’).

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

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

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

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

[10] (1936) 36 HKLR 133 (‘Fei’).

[11] [1940] AC 231 (‘Wallace’).

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

[13] Fei (note 10 above), pp. 138–9.

[14] [2023] UKPC 36 (‘Maharaj’).

[15] Ibid., paragraph 43.

[16] Ibid., paragraph 45.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[30] Lai (note 4 above).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

[4] This speech was translated using ChatGPT.

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Tactical Caution

Despite sharing many of the China policy objectives of its predecessor, the Albanese government has taken a cautious approach to implementation. This is apparent in its handling of Confucious Institutes and Chinese investments in critical minerals. Like the Coalition before them, Labor has sought to mitigate the perceived security risks associated with exposure to Chinese investors and education links. But, unlike their predecessor, the Albanese government has pursued this in ways that minimise Beijing’s ire.

Under the Foreign Relations Act (FRA) legislated in 2020 by the Morrison government, Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong could have expelled Confucius Institutes from Australian universities. The Albanese government instead sought to achieve its national security goals without diplomatic fallout by opting for ongoing scrutiny. With the Albanese government ‘concerned about foreign interference and potential risks to academic freedom’, they’ve pledged to ‘keep these arrangements under review’ and ruled out the establishment of new Confucius Institutes.

Likewise, the securitisation of the critical minerals industry appears to have been finessed to avoid antagonising Beijing, which has longstanding concerns about Australia’s treatment of Chinese companies. The Albanese government has twice in the last six months rejected investments from Chinese or China-linked firms in Australian rare earth elements and lithium mining companies. Yet both decisions coincided with Canberra approving large Chinese investments in parts of the mining industry deemed to be less sensitive, including iron ore and nickel. Coincidence can’t be ruled out. But the pattern of rejections coinciding with approvals and the political dimension of investment decisions suggest that the Albanese government is seeking to simultaneously keep Chinese and China-linked companies out of the critical minerals industry, while also sending a welcoming message to Chinese investors more broadly and reducing the likelihood of getting Beijing offside.

Might the Coalition have charted such a tactically cautious course on Confucius Institutes and investment decisions had they retained government? Maybe, although their use of the FRA to veto Victoria’s Belt and Road Initiative agreements in 2021 and the Coalition’s criticism of the Albanese government’s conditional acceptance of existing Confucius Institutes suggests not. On two sensitive bilateral issues, the Albanese government has acted tactically: opting to put Confucius Institutes on notice and yet avoid the blunt trauma of expulsion, and soothing the sting of critical minerals investment rejections with the balm of approvals in other industries.

Policy Compromise

The Albanese government’s approach to China is defined not just by the tactics employed, but also the decisions not taken. Most conspicuously, the Albanese government has decided not to sanction Chinese officials and entities implicated in severe and systematic human rights abuses. Even though Magnitsky-style sanctions were legislated in 2021, Australia has declined to use these powers against China as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have done. Despite 82 percent of Australians supporting such targeted sanctions against China and credible reports of ongoing mass incarcerations, forced removals of children and cultural erasure in Xinjiang, Tibet and other regions, the Albanese government is unwilling to deny the perpetrators the freedom to travel to Australia and take advantage of financial opportunities here.

Morality aside, the case for sanctions is far from clear-cut when viewed from the perspective of the national interest. Imposing sanctions on officials and entities implicated in human rights abuses is unlikely to change the Chinese government’s behaviour. It might also have unintended negative implications for a wide range of Australian priorities, including trade. It’s likely that China would respond with reprisals such as tit-for-tat countersanctions, arbitrarily detaining (more) Australian citizens, prolonging the detention of Australians already imprisoned in China, and blocking further normalisation of the bilateral diplomatic and trade relationship.

Having levelled numerous sanctions against Iran, Myanmar, and Russia since taking office, the Albanese government has shied away from targeting China. Yet not only did Minister for Foreign Affairs Wong tentatively support targeted sanctions against China when in opposition, but the Albanese government has committed to ‘employ every strategy at [Australia’s] disposal towards upholding human rights, consistent with our values and with our interests.’ Taken together, this makes the Albanese government’s unwillingness to sanction Chinese officials and entities look like a calculated compromise.

The response to Beijing’s anti-dumping and countervailing duties on Australian barley similarly points to the role of policy compromise in Canberra’s China strategy. Rather than pursuing Australia’s World Trade Organization (WTO) case against China to its likely successful conclusion, Canberra chose to discontinue legal proceedings in exchange for the removal of duties. Although Australia lost an opportunity to highlight China’s trade malfeasance via the outcome of the WTO proceedings, the decision gives Australian barley exporters access to the Chinese market, which pursuing the legal route might not have delivered. But it remains a textbook definition of compromise, involving as it does mutual concessions from both Canberra and Beijing to settle a dispute.

Invidious Choices and the Costs of Compromise

Some looming policy dilemmas don’t seem to permit the kind of supple tactical gymnastics that the Albanese government has pulled off to date. These include whether to leave Chinese company Landbridge Group’s 99-year lease of Darwin Port in place, and the choice between the Chinese and Taiwanese bids to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade pact. But Canberra could still avoid being wedged by binary choices on these issues.

Prime Minister Albanese’s definitive past opposition to Landbridge Group’s lease and the growing importance of Darwin and surrounds for the Australian and US militaries likely make the politics and diplomacy of leaving the lease unchanged untenable for Labor. But that doesn’t mean that Canberra needs to anger Beijing by tearing up the lease. A range of different possible arrangements for Darwin Port could allow the Albanese government to put Landbridge Group under scrutiny without affronting Beijing by booting the company out of the Top End. These might include adding additional security oversight or limiting the length and/or geographic scope of the lease.

Meanwhile, Canberra is likely to be shielded from making any tough CPTPP choices. Yes, Beijing will heap pressure on Canberra and other capitals to back its bid just as Taipei also lobbies for support for its candidature.  Yet the slow-moving and consensus-based CPTPP decision-making process and the trade pact’s diverse membership mean that Australia may be able to sidestep taking any public positions on China’s and Taiwan’s competing bids. With Japan, among others, wary of China’s membership and smaller CPTPP members unlikely to back Taipei’s accession for fear of frustrating Beijing, there’s every chance that Canberra will be able to avoid having to cast the deciding vote.

The Albanese government’s formula of China policy consistency and diplomatic decorum combined with a side of tactical caution and policy compromise will continue to be pressure tested. Reports of Chinese state-owned firms sending dual-use technology to sanctioned Russian defence companies point to how much strain the formula might come under as the case grows for punishing Beijing’s support for Moscow’s war effort. But if Canberra’s shrewd manoeuvrings to date are a guide, there’s good reason to think that the Albanese government will continue to find ways to combine tough China policy settings with ongoing relationship repair.

Still, as China’s systematic and severe human rights abuses continue, past policy compromises will become difficult to defend. Statecraft doesn’t allow much space for saintliness. Principled measures to punish human rights abusers might simply entail too much risk for the national interest. But we should at least honestly and openly recognise the moral impost of the Albanese government’s so-far successful China strategy.

The post Caution and Compromise in the Albanese Government’s China Strategy appeared first on The China Story.

Australia’s federal ministers are back on talking terms with their PRC counterparts, visits to the PRC are resuming from Canberra and by state premiers, our longsuffering ambassador in Beijing, Graham Fletcher, is finally getting to meet appropriate Chinese peers, and some of the commodities that Beijing had barred are starting to reach PRC markets again.

Win.

The PRC’s ambassador Xiao Qian envisions a ‘new frontier’ of productive relations, as Chinese students return to Australian campuses, trade resumes on a broad basis, and Chinese investors succeed in taking over Australian targets.

Win.

At the same time, Canberra has been praised in both Western and regional countries for standing up for Australian and broadly liberal democratic values and interests in the face of PRC pressure, through a range of measures such as denying Huawei access to the 5G roll-out, and the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme.  The Economist has lauded how ‘Australia has stood up to Chinese bullying and thrived.’

Win.

Such a win-win-win presents a case for this being an especially brilliant hour for Australian foreign policy. But relating to the PRC continues to present unique challenges. And less widely discussed, are concomitant successes for the PRC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA).

For instance, it is now more than a decade since Craig Emerson became the last Australian trade minister to visit Taiwan. Yet in the decade to 2002, under Labor and coalition administrations, twelve federal government visits took place—seven at the ministerial level and five at the level of assistant minister or parliamentary secretary. The decline coincides with the ramping-up by Beijing of its efforts to ‘reunify’ with Taiwan.

Australia can do a great deal with Taiwan short of diplomatic recognition, which Taipei – favouring the status quo – doesn’t seek, including building closer cultural and commercial connections. Yet except in Queensland (which has the highest population of Taiwan-born residents), Taiwan’s representatives or businesspeople are rarely granted a meeting with anyone senior in a state government. This is not a party issue – it’s no different in Tasmania, the sole Liberal administration, than in Labor-run states, Queensland excepted. State governments do not discuss openly why this is so. But pressure from Chinese consulates, which maintain substantial, routine contacts with state governments and officials, would be a factor.

Taiwan has recently become Australia’s fourth largest export market, but the only one in the top ten with which Australia lacks a free trade agreement. Tokyo has explicitly welcomed Taiwan’s application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), while Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says: ‘We will deal with applications that are dealt with by consensus for economies applying to join the CPTPP.’

Deakin University Associate Professor Lennon Chang, President of the Australasian Taiwan Studies Association, told the Australian parliamentary inquiry into expanding CPTPP membership that Taiwan, as a leading ICT developer in the Indo-Pacific region, would be a responsible partner, its membership aligning with Australia’s cyber strategy ‘for a safe, secure and prosperous Australia, Indo-Pacific and world, enabled by cyberspace and critical technology’.

The removal of space for Taiwan and Taiwanese companies and individuals to operate internationally is a key goal for PRC diplomats, and they have enjoyed considerable success with it.

Ambassador Xiao wrote in a widely-published commentary that ‘Taiwan is part of China’s territory. Taiwan has belonged to China since ancient times’ – which are both standard and historically disputable claims, the first dynasty to exercise any form of rule over the island being the Qing, in the 17^th century. Again, echoing the Communist Party’s longtime playbook Xiao called Taiwan one of China’s ‘core interests, which brooks no foreign interference and allows no political manipulation.’

In December 1972, within the core diplomatic statement that established formal ties with the PRC, Canberra said it ‘recognises the government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government of China, and acknowledges the position of the Chinese Government that Taiwan is a province of the PRC.’  The Taiwan government has long abandoned any pretence or interest to rule China, while Australia simply ‘acknowledges’ Beijing’s claim to rule Taiwan. These days, Taiwan is a vibrant democracy with a similar sized population to Australia, and a world-leading tech industry. It slid into technical recession in the first quarter of 2023 as global tech demand slowed, with semi-conductors comprising 38 per cent of all Taiwan’s exports. But a rebound into positive growth is widely forecast by analysts for the year as a whole. Most Taiwanese are fed up with being viewed through the lens of China’s ambitions or China-US rivalry. Polling by National Chengchi University’s Election Study Center in 2022 underlined the strength of Taiwanese desire to maintain the status quo. Only 1.3 percent of respondents wanted unification with the mainland ‘as soon as possible’, while just 5.1 percent desired immediate formal independence.

Canberra’s reluctance to pursue closer relations with Taiwan can be seen as a form of collateral damage of its fear of being returned to Beijing’s ‘sin bin’. Yet Benjamin Herscovitch of the ANU’s School of Regulation and Global Governance notes that ‘Beijing claims that the Taiwanese government isn’t entitled to join groupings like the CPTPP because the world shares China’s view that Taiwan is simply part of the PRC.’ He argues that ‘these claims misrepresent the supposed international support for China’s preferred one-China principle, gloss over the diversity of one-China policies, and ignore how commonplace it is for free trade agreements and other groupings to include entities that aren’t recognised as de jure sovereign states.’

Taipei has long requested the exchange of military attaches, but Canberra has not agreed. According to Richard McGregor of the Lowy Institute, ‘Australia won’t have the luxury of keeping its head down on Taiwan indefinitely.’

For Australian politicians to be able to speak to their PRC counterparts, and the slow return of trade affected by the 2020 sanctions, is a relief – but it cannot be perceived as an advance in terms of where the relationship stood only eight years ago, when the Australia-PRC FTA came into force, or before that, when mutual visits by political leaders were common. Xi Jinping, last visited Australia in 2014, when his side-trip to Tasmania completed his travels to every state over the years.

The PRC ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, said in March in Brisbane: ‘We have basically stabilised the relationship between the countries… There is not a single area where China and Australia have to confront each other… (China’s) policy towards Australia is a friendly policy.’ He spoke of working together towards a ‘new frontier’ of economic relations and on climate change, and said that ‘we are open to welcome Australia to come back to the Belt and Road (Initiative)’ to which the Victorian government committed itself in 2018, but which the federal coalition government required it to leave under the Foreign Arrangements Scheme of December 2020.

And yet… much remains problematic in the relationship. The straightforward access for Australian goods and some services that was agreed with the signing of an FTA, whose core aim is to shelter commerce from political swings, has yet to be fully restored, although current moves are in the right direction. Trade Minister Senator Don Farrell’s Beijing visit on May 11-12 comprised such a step, but the resulting progress was more rhetorical than practical, except for timber exports. Australians Cheng Lei and Yang Hengjun have been incarcerated since August 2020 and January 2019 respectively, without any public trial or even a clear account of why they were arrested in the first place. So much official pressure was placed on Australian journalists covering China that the last ones left in 2020, so that there is now no direct coverage of events or trends there by Australian media.

Ambassador Xiao readily obtains non-curated access to Australia’s mass media and social media, as well as live audiences, in a way unavailable in China to our ambassador Graham Fletcher – although this has long been the case, and is not unique to Australia. A majority of Chinese Australians regularly use the strictly censored WeChat platform, owned by Chinese giant Tencent.

The European Union, Canada, Britain and the US have applied the Magnitsky Accords, or similar sanctions against those responsible for human rights abuses against Chinese citizens responsible for oppressive actions in Xinjiang. Canberra has held back from following suit. However, greater distance from the PRC is now entrenched in the strategic space, with AUKUS and the Quad becoming core Australian commitments.

Most of the Australian population remains concerned about the PRC. Lowy Institute polling last year found 75 per cent of respondents thought it somewhat likely that China would pose a military threat to Australian in the next twenty years. China was described as more security threat by 63 per cent and 33 per cent as more economic partner. At the same time, a perception has grown among Australian politicians and political analysts, that voters of ethnic Chinese background will penalise parties that are deemed to be ‘anti Chinese.’ The Communist Party of China (CPC), which claims that it represents China’s history, culture and population (including people of Chinese ethnicity living outside China), fosters the perception that to criticise it, or its policies, is racist.

Recent statistics show that although people born in the PRC comprise the second largest group of permanent migrants to Australia, they come only tenth among those groups to have taken the opportunity to become citizens, with just 36 percent doing so. Voting trends among people of Chinese ethnicity remains a complex and little explored issue. But insofar as the perception is becoming entrenched among politicians and their advisors in Canberra and the state capitals that public criticism of the PRC or CPC can provoke electoral pain, this will impact Australian political behaviour.

While priority is given to full restoration of relations with the PRC, the question remains as to whether security and trade can be considered separately. The risk remains, that further – perhaps even inadvertent – political infringements as perceived by Beijing, may see markets again blocked. If Beijing over-extends its ambitions to seize Taiwan, the resulting sanctions would replicate – at least – those that have hit Russia and its commercial partners since the Ukraine invasion. It appears especially important now for corporations and governments – both federal and state – to audit their economic vulnerability.

A related question is whether interests can or should be disconnected from values. For Xi himself, for whom the party encapsulates every corporate virtue and who focuses fully on the ideological landscape, that is impossible: ‘Government, military, civil society, schools, north, south, east, west, and the centre – the party leads all.’

In the immediate term, perhaps the most elevated goal is for Prime Minister Albanese to tread, 50 years on, in the footsteps of his predecessor Gough Whitlam’s ground-breaking visit to the PRC from October 31 to November 4, 1973, presumably with the aim of engaging with Xi in the Great Hall of the People. Kevin Magee, a former representative of Australia in Taiwan, has summarised: ‘In order to get this far with Beijing, the Albanese government has dialled down its rhetoric on China but has also provided concessions on sensitive issue for China such as Taiwan, Magnitsky sanctions, Port of Darwin review etc.’ [1] Visits and meetings are important, though their significance can understandably be over-weighted in the diplomatic world.

What is less clear is the bigger-picture aim, where the relationship with the PRC is ultimately headed. It’s a conundrum, in both policy and rhetoric terms. But might the framework of a ‘new Australia-China accord,’ as China expert John Fitzgerald describes it, be already falling into place, unselfconsciously? [2] One that might be emerging from a ‘Fear of Abandonment’ as the late and much lamented Allan Gyngell’s influential book of foreign policy history and analysis is titled – only not, as originally framed, fear of abandonment by Western partners Britain or the US, but now by the PRC?

An important element in such framing, a core goal of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is the successful deployment of discourse power.

Much relief has been evinced at the claimed end of ‘wolf warrior’ rhetoric from PRC spokespeople. That’s probably as true for MFA’s many professional diplomats, as for those who had been on the receiving end. But harsh words remain part of the armoury, as demonstrated recently by the PRC ambassadors to the Netherlands and France.

Two years ago the PRC’s Politburo held a study session at which General Secretary Xi emphasised the need ‘to form international discourse power that matches our comprehensive national power and international status,’ creating a favourable ‘external public opinion environment.’

Recent remarks by Paul Keating appear to have given permission for a new wave of criticism of Australia and its Asian friends and Western allies, while taking less note of what is said and done by the PRC/CCP or its leaders. Such debates are natural in transparent societies, and they underline a core difference from the Cold War era, when Soviet engagement with Australia and rhetoric favouring the USSR were negligible. But longer term complexities are mounting as China’s ‘rise’ – perceived formerly as inexorable – instead flatlines as its economy matures and demographic decline comes into play. For prosperity, which was until COVID-19 a sufficient domestic legitimising force for the CCP in itself, is now sublimated beneath security issues by Xi and his team, in both policy and presentational terms.

Australian Labor politicians have rightly been commended for the discipline of their PRC discourse. It is also important, however, to reserve the right to speak up for Australian values and interests as their leadership roles require.

Tone matters. But if the tone adopted by Australia morphs into one which is perceived to defer to PRC discourse power, that will be time for a review before it becomes a habit.

Consul-General Zhou Limin described ‘a correct understanding’ as ‘the prerequisite for the sustainable development of China-Australian relations.’ He is right, of course, about understanding. The problem is that while Australia sustains myriad versions of political correctness, Beijing’s perspective, especially under Xi, is singular.

It’s sad that such reservations are inevitable when grappling with a polity as pervasive and ambitious – and important, of course – as Xi’s CPC. Roll on the day when we can enjoy less conditional, unclouded relationships with our many friends, and their businesses, universities and other organisations in China. That day may come, and Australians will applaud it, but it’s not going to dawn as a result of Canberra’s efforts alone, welcome as they may be.

References

[1] Kevin Magee, Australia China Relations Brief, February 15 2023

[2] Cited with John Fitzgerald’s permission from a post by him on the private Chinapol platform

The post Australia-China Relations Need Re-thinking, Not Re-set appeared first on The China Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I keep my face clean, but my pockets are empty

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

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

Working six days a week, twelve hours a day

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

[6] Ibid.

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

[8] Ibid, p.44.

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

This was not the first time that Kuomintang 國民黨 (KMT, or Nationalist Party) political heavyweights have visited mainland China for the sake of paying respects to their forebears. Lien Chan 連戰, who served in positions ranging from chair of the KMT to premier and is widely viewed as one of the key architects of the ‘1992 Consensus’, the current formula by which Taiwan and China are claimed to be part of the same polity, has visited China a number of times since 2005 on this basis.

Destinations visited by Lien, whose family has been in Taiwan since the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), included his ancestral tomb in Fujian as well as his grandmother’s grave in Xi’an, where he himself was also born. In 2018, Lien Chan met Chinese President Xi Jinping during a trip to China that Lien claimed was for ‘ancestor worship’.

Previously, as a gesture toward local Taiwan identity, Ma himself was in the practice of visiting a village in Taiwan where all the residents were surnamed ‘Ma’. He did this although he had no actual family roots there. The village deliberately courted him for tourism purposes, and Ma would eventually claim that he believed they shared common ancestors.

Visiting ancestral graves can serve as a form of political messaging. Ma visiting China under such auspices was seen as a means of emphasising cultural and historical links between China and Taiwan, whose ethnic Han residents are descended from individuals who originally came from China, many of them in the seventeenth century or other prior waves of migration that predated the KMT’s retreat to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949). No surprise, then, that Ma would emphasise his view of Taiwanese as Chinese during the trip, stating that ‘We are all Chinese’. Ma’s statement provoked outrage, particularly at a time when the historically independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is in power, and in which polling shows Chinese identity is on the decline in Taiwan.

A speech given by Ma at his ancestral tomb, delivered in Hunanese, was among the events on Ma’s trip that attracted a great deal of international attention. Yet most of the stops on Ma’s trip had to do with the history of the Republic of China (ROC) on the mainland of  China, where the KMT were in power until the founding of the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. The focus was on the Sino-Japanese War. As such, Ma visited Sun Yat-Sen Mausoleum and the former Presidential Palace in Nanjing, which served as the ROC capital from 1927 to 1937. He also traveled to Changsha, Chongqing, Hunan, Shanghai, and Wuhan, visiting key sites in those cities that had to do with the Sino-Japanese War, such as the Sihang Warehouse in Shanghai, the site of a historic battle, and the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders. Ma’s stopover in Wuhan provoked some outrage in Taiwan, after the mainland press reported him visiting an exhibition about the city’s fight against COVID-19 at which he praised China’s efforts against COVID-19.

Ma claimed before the trip that he would not meet with any high-ranking Chinese government officials while in China, and Beijing was not on the itinerary. He did meet, however, with Taiwan Affairs Office director Song Tao 宋涛 during the trip. KMT vice chair Andrew Hsia 夏立言 has similarly claimed no intention to meet with Chinese officials during trips to China after Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022, and yet such meetings still happened.

It’s likely that the current DPP administration of Tsai Ing-wen 蔡英文required Ma, who travelled to China with a group of students and aides, to turn in an itinerary of his intended destinations before the trip. Yet it is possible that Ma did not state that he intended to meet with Chinese officials. The Tsai administration had, in fact, blocked some travel by Ma after the end of his presidency, such as refusing to allow him to travel to Hong Kong shortly after he left office. They cited the security risks of allowing someone who had until recently had access to classified information to travel to China.

The KMT has increasingly leaned into the narrative that the DPP is politically persecuting its opponents, carrying out a ‘Green Terror’ worse than the White Terror, in which the KMT executed tens of thousands in the name of fighting Communism. Even if, quite obviously, there are no mass killings in Taiwan today, it is likely that the Tsai administration wishes to avoid furthering this perception. The KMT has amplified criticisms of the Tsai administration for actions such as not renewing the broadcast license of KMT-leaning television network CtiTV, whose owner Tsai Eng-meng 蔡衍明 has been open about his interest in promoting positive views of China in Taiwan in past years, and which is widely watched among members of KMT and affiliates in the broader pan-Blue camp. This is probably one of the reasons why Ma could meet with Song Tao without any consequences.

In 2015, Ma had been the first Taiwan leader since the Chinese Civil War to meet with his Chinese counterpart, when he met President Xi Jinping in Singapore. Some speculated he would meet Xi again, but this didn’t happen, likely because of the potential damage to the KMT’s 2024 election campaign. Cross-strait issues loom large and the KMT cannot afford to be seen as overly friendly with the CCP leadership, even if it wishes to engender the perception that it can conduct relations with the CCP in a way that the DPP cannot.

The DPP and its political affiliates, known as the pan-Green camp, would have likely been outraged had such a meeting taken place. On the other hand, the pan-Green camp, has pushed the narrative that Ma’s trip involved a number of indignities in which Ma was not treated with the respect that a former head of state should be accorded. For example, his security detail was not allowed to carry firearms on the trip despite no such restrictions on Lien Chan’s entourage.

The pan-Green camp has also framed Ma as himself denigrating the nation. Ma did bring up the name ‘Republic of China’ numerous times during his trip, including claiming to a group of Chinese students that the ROC constitution applied to the Chinese mainland. But the pan-Green camp criticised Ma for the occasions in which he declined to refer to the ROC or the Minguo calendar that counts the number of years since the establishment of the ROC (it is currently Minguo 112). Most of all, they mocked Ma for referring to the historical ROC president Sun Yat-sen and saying ‘I also became “that”’ to avoid specifying his job title and upsetting his hosts, who don’t recognise the legitimacy of the ROC or the office of its President today.

There had also been speculation that Ma might meet with CCP chief ideologist Wang Huning 王沪宁, as Andrew Hsia had done, to hammer out a new cross-strait consensus to supersede the 1992 Consensus. Such speculation also accompanied Hsia’s meeting with Wang in February, though the final result of that meeting had been a doubling down on the 1992 Consensus.

Ma did not meet with Wang, and he also emphasised the importance of the 1992 Consensus after returning to Taiwan. However, it has been noted that during the Ma-Xi meeting in 2015, the two leaders’ ranks far exceeded those of the representatives involved in the 1992 meetings, such that it was possible to speak of a new ‘2015 Consensus’, but no such concept gained traction at the that juncture.

KMT leaders seem to have been cognisant for some time that the 1992 Consensus needs an update. Current chair Eric Chu 朱立倫 and preceding chair Johnny Chiang 江啓臣 both originally suggested dropping the 1992 Consensus after taking office, then quickly reversed course in the face of opposition from party heavyweights such as Ma who had played key roles in cementing it. Either way, Ma’s trip to China demonstrates that the KMT is still leaning into the claim that it is the only party in Taiwan able to conduct stable cross-strait relations with the People’s Republic of China, and communicate with the CCP. The timing of the trip, by design or by coincidence, coincided with a visit to the US by Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, during which she met with US Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy.

Given that China launched military drills around Taiwan after the Tsai-McCarthy meeting, as it did after Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, the KMT has claimed that Tsai’s meeting with McCarthy recklessly endangers Taiwan’s future. By contrast, Ma’s trip to China is positioned as an earnest attempt to dial back tensions. With missiles falling just offshore, however, the DPP could easily retort that the KMT’s actions are useless.

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Australia is increasingly concerned about China’s military ambitions. The Defence Strategic Review 2023, released on 24 April 2023, suggests that ‘China’s military build-up is now the largest and most ambitious of any country since the end of the Second world War’. Whether the statement is true or not, it warns that China’s military rise, ‘without transparency or reassurance to the Indo-Pacific region… threatens the global rules-based order…that adversely impacts Australia’s national interests’. According to the Lowy Institute Poll 2022, 75 percent of Australians believe that China is very likely or somewhat likely to become a military threat to Australia in the next twenty years; 88 percent said they were either very or somewhat concerned about China potentially opening a military base in a Pacific Island country.

The governments of the United States (US) and its allies are certainly responding to China’s military rise. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD), a diplomatic and security network consisting of Australia, the US, India and Japan, was revived in 2017 to promote ‘an open, stable and prosperous Indo-Pacific that is inclusive and resilient’. Since 2015, the US Navy has been patrolling in the South China Sea. By 23 March 2023, the US Navy has conducted 43 reported freedom of navigation operations in the area. Particularly, during the Trump administration, it navigated once every two months between 2018 and 2020. Moreover, in September 2021, Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), and the US announced a trilateral security pact, known as AUKUS. On 13 March 2023, the three countries agreed to increase nuclear submarine (SSN) port visits and training in Australia. More significantly, Australia will purchase at least three Virginia-class SSNs from the US in the 2030s and build its first SSN with technical support from the two countries in the 2040s.

Some media outlets have been hyping up the possibility of war with China, suggesting China will invade Taiwan by 2026 or engage in a war with the US over freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. However, many China analysts have argued these claims are exaggerated and ‘devoid of concrete analyses on China’s intention and capability’. So, how much should Australia and its allies fear the PLA? While there are numerous intelligence and defence reports available, mostly from Washington, the public needs more context to understand China’s military rise.

Military Transformation Under Xi Jinping

Amidst China’s economic development, it has steadily increased its defence spending and military capability over the past three decades. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), China’s military budget has increased by an average of 13 percent annually, with spending around 5 percent of the government’s total budget throughout the last decade.[1] The PLA has developed numerous new types of military equipment, including the J-20 fighters, Jin-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, Shang-II-class SSNs, aircraft carriers, DF-41 Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), and other materiel researched, designed, and built in China.[2]

China’s military rise appears to have become more ambitious during the mid-2010s. The country has been in the thrall of the ‘strong army dream’ 强军梦, an integral part of the goal of national rejuvenation. Xi Jinping, who is the Chairman of the Central Military Commission, also made a few speeches on China’s military modernisation. For instance, in 2013, he advocated building armed forces that would ‘obey the Party’s command, that are able to fight and to win, and that maintain excellent conduct’ in order to ‘safeguard national sovereignty, security, and development interests’. In a series of speeches around 2016, he described the goal of PLA modernisation as being to ‘achieve the goal of a strong army’ and ‘build a world-class military’. In 2017, he set out the three milestones for PLA development: basic mechanisation and major progress in ‘informatisation’ 信息化 by 2020, modernisation of national defence by 2035, and building an all-round world-class military by mid-century. As a political rhetoric, the military’s three milestones echo the Party’s ‘Two Centennial Goals’; as military objectives, Chinese commentators and scholars describe the world-class military as having world-class operational theories, personnel, training, weapons and equipment, law-based management, combat power, innovation abilities. Some also use these milestones to address the military’s shortcoming in mechanisation, informatisation, intellectualisation and operation.

The PLA has undergone several significant reforms during this period. In 2015, the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) was established to coordinate China’s arsenal of land-based ballistic missiles, including nuclear weapons. In 2016, the PLA reorganised its seven theatre commands into five, each designed to counter different security threats: Eastern Theatre Command is responsible for Taiwan, Southern Theatre Command for the South China Sea, Western Theatre Command for the Sino-Indian border, and Northern Theatre Command for North Korea. In 2019, the Central Military Commission adopted a new military strategy for the PLA titled ‘Military Strategic Guidelines for the New Era’ to address the shift of strategic assessment outlined in the 2019 National Defence White Paper aimed at countering growing threats from the US and Taiwan. However, as Joel Wuthnow and M. Taylor Fravel have suggested, this ‘new’ strategy was proposed against the backdrop of Xi’s ideological consolidation and indicated little operational or strategic changes. Concepts from previous military doctrines, such as ‘near sea active defence’, ‘informatisation war’ and ‘integrated joint operations’, are still included in the 2019 military doctrine.

Xi’s speech at the Two Sessions merely summarises China’s continual military development, rather than signifying substantial changes in the timeline of national defence modernisation. The PLA is still gradually addressing its technological and operational limitations. The State Council Institutional Reform Plan 2023 unveiled significant steps to restructure the Ministry of Science and Technology, including the establishment of a Central Commission on Science and Technology 中央科技委员会 to enhance the Party’s leadership over scientific and technological development.

The reform intended to ‘[push] forward the building of a national innovation system and structural scientific and technological reform, [study] and deliberating major strategies, plans and policies for the country’s sci-tech development, and coordinat[e] efforts to resolve major issues of strategic, guiding and fundamental significance in the sci-tech sector’. Although the PLA’s structure is not affected by the reform, the goal of the reform, including to address the limitation of technological self-reliance and promoting integrated research between civil and the military, falls in line with some of the PLA’s objectives in its military modernisation. Defence science and technology has been crucial in China’s technological innovation, so institutional reform in science and technology is relevant to national defence modernisation. Following the State Council reform focused on the sci-tech sector this year, we should see further reforms within the PLA to ground force, logistics and maintenance support, military staff training, and integrated warfare.

Will China Wage a War?

The large-scale military exercises around Taiwan in early April (as a response to President Tsai Ing-wen’s meeting with US Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy) suggest that the PLA has become more capable in integrated warfare and deployment of aircraft carriers. Nonetheless, military capability building is a gradual process. While the PLA has the budget and resources for research development, personnel training lags behind technological advances. For instance, a report from the US Naval War College suggests that the Chinese navy has ‘faced tremendous pressure to keep pace with the rapid expansion and modernisation of the [naval] surface fleet and its growing mission set’. According to an article published in a Chinese military magazine last year, the PLA Navy needs at least 200 pilots for its aircraft carriers, but it lacks of a fighter trainer specifically designed for carrier-based operations. Therefore, although the PLA Navy built its third aircraft carrier last year, construction of the fourth one was stalled. More importantly, apart from the a border skirmish with Vietnam in 1979 and a minor naval battle at the Johnson South Reef in 1988, also against Vietnam, the PLA has not fought in a war for more than four decades. It still lacks experience in warfare.

Multiple organisations in the US, including the US Air Force and the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), have already simulated few war games of the PLA pursuing military operation against Taiwan, but with varying results. Some suggest that in a war between China and Taiwan, China would likely win. However, we should factor in US domestic political consideration in the hype of a war scenario. The outcome of those war game simulation needs to be weighed against the fact that there are often intentionally skewed in favour of US forces in order to strive for more resources for national defence.

Whether China has the capability to wage war, and whether China will go to war are two different questions. As the US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the House Intelligence Committee, ‘It is not our assessment that China wants to go to war’. The concept of a world-class military, as Taylor Fravel, an expert in Chinese military strategy, argued, does not ‘illuminate the PLA’s global ambitions or how it envisions using force’. It has limited geopolitical implication of where China would project its military power. Rather, it expresses ‘China’s aspiration to become a leading military power in the world’. It is essential to distinguish the differences between China’s military ambition and policy outcomes.

Launching a war in the Indo-Pacific is complicated. Strategically as well as politically, the PRC would prefer to win Taiwan without fighting. It needs to consider the consequences of sanctions and sea lane supply blockages from the West if there is a war across the Strait.

Will AUKUS Help to Deter China’s Military Rise?

There is no doubt China’s military capability is on the rise. The AUKUS security pact has been described as a ‘demonstration of unity and resolve is as powerful deterrence signal to the region’. To the US, AUKUS indicates its commitment in maintaining its pivotal role in the Indo-Pacific. To Australia, AUKUS suggests Australia is more likely to rely on ‘the US committing to the “integrated deterrence” approach that the Biden administration set out in its 2022 Indo-Pacific strategy’. As Ben Herscovitch suggests, ‘if Australia chooses to deploy its nuclear-powered submarines in support of a US-led effort to defend Taiwan, then AUKUS will have made China’s military goals harder to achieve’.

However, it is important to note that the submarines themselves do not serve as a deterrent. The AUD 368 billion deal is a long-term process, and the first of the new submarines are not expected to be delivered until at least the 2040s. By that time, it is likely that the PLA will have developed sufficient means for countering the AUKUS-class submarines, such as anti-ship missiles, SSNs, and ballistic missile nuclear submarines, which China is currently building. In fact, the US Congress Research Service report suggested in 2022 it is likely China will have a new class of SSN by the mid-2020s. Furthermore, China’s naval development consists of an aspiration to expand its influence globally, beyond the close water of Taiwan, in which a submarine deal is simply incapable to deter.

What, then, is AUKUS for? Since the deal was announced in March 2023, Australian experts have debated its strategic implications.[3] As the Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen submits, there is a bigger question the Albanese government must answer: ‘how exactly will these submarines make Australia safer’? Australia must take China’s military rise seriously, but it is not helpful to assume this will lead to war. Instead, Canberra should approach this comprehensively and cautiously, and develop a clearer understanding of China’s military rise under Xi Jinping as well as its strategic goals and institutional reforms. There also needs to be a wider and more constructive public debate about the best ways to respond to China’s rise and safeguard Australia’s security in the broadest sense of the term.

References

[1] However, the official defence budget in China can sometimes be misleading, as some research and development may fall under the category of science and technology. See: China Power Team, ‘Making sense of China’s government budget’, China Power, 15 March 2023, online at: https://chinapower.csis.org/making-sense-of-chinas-government-budget/

[2] For China’s naval capability building, see: Chan, Edward Sing Yue (2021), China’s Maritime Security Strategy: The Evolution of a Growing Sea Power. Routledge. Congressional Research Service (2022), China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities—Background and Issues for Congress, RL33153.

[3] See: Rory Medcalf, ‘The AUKUS debate needs clear reasoning, not hot air’, Australian Financial Review, 24 March 2023, online at: https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/the-aukus-debate-needs-clear-reasoning-not-hot-air-20230322-p5cugo; Stephen Nagy and Jonathan Ping, ‘The end of the normative middle power ship’, Australian Outlook, 13 March 2023, online at: https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/the-end-of-the-normative-middle-power-ship/; Matthew Sussex, ‘Time to grow up: Australia’s national security dilemma demands a mature debate’, The Conversation, 24 March 2023, online at: https://theconversation.com/time-to-grow-up-australias-national-security-dilemma-demands-a-mature-debate-202040; and Sam Roggeveen, ‘What “Utopia” got
wrong about China and defence policy’, The Interpreter, 6 April 2023, online at: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/what-utopia-got-wrong-about-china-defence-policy

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One of the most fertile grounds for such personalised speculation in recent years has been the regulatory offensive against the platform economy. Why, for instance, did Jack Ma 马云 disappear from public view for three months after the Ant Financial IPO — slated to be the largest in history – was cancelled? Did Xi Jinping personally axe the deal because Jiang Zemin’s grandson, Jiang Zhicheng, was a major investor through Boyu Capital, a private equity firm he co-founded, as one shot in a larger, internecine battle? Did Tencent get into trouble, as an academic colleague attempted to convince me at a conference, because it had been prominently posting information favourable to Li Keqiang in the run-up to the 20^th Party Congress? What happened to Bao Fan 包凡, the rainmaker for big tech investment deals, who resurfaced in early March after being reported as missing by his firm in late February; it was subsequently revealed that he is assisting authorities with an inquiry into Cong Lin the former president of Renaissance Holdings, an investment company he founded.

The standard story presented by foreign news media of what became known in the West as the ‘tech crackdown’ is as follows: Xi Jinping got angry with Jack Ma after the latter gave a speech, in October 2020, to the good and the great in China’s financial sector, at the ‘Bund Summit’ of China Finance 40, a leading economic think tank. Ma belittled regulators and government banks as being behind the times, directly opposing the message of greater regulatory prudence delivered by Wang Qishan at the same meeting, that same morning [1]. Seeing an opportunity not just to take an uppity Ma down a peg, but also to take a swing at the interests of the Jiang family, Xi killed off the Ant Financial IPO and, for good measure, fired off a barrage of rules to constrain other platform companies and ensure absolute Party control over the digital sector. Predictably, this ‘crackdown’ has gone too far. Faced with catastrophic consequences in the platform economy, and economic malaise across the board, the leadership is now seeking ways to roll it back and return to growth.

This common narrative attempts to provide an explanation for something Western observers have found difficult to fathom: why would China inflict so much damage on the most innovative sector of its economy? Moreover, it’s an explanation that confirms our prior assumptions: authoritarian states are going to do authoritarian things, Xi Jinping is the puppet master of the entire Party apparat, Chinese policy decisions are primarily taken in view of top leaders’ personal political interests, and as long as those decisions diverge from the dictates of neoliberal market economics, they are predictably misguided and incompetent.

The problem with that story, however, is that it is highly selective in many instances, and plain incorrect in others. This regulatory wave was not a sudden whim of Xi Jinping’s, but had been in preparation for quite some time. The drafting of the Personal Information Protection Law 个人信息保护法, for instance, started in 2018. In 2019, the State Council published a document outlining the problems and abuses it saw existing within the platform economy, and listing the regulatory tasks intended to be undertaken, as well as the ministries to which those would be assigned. In other words, anyone claiming the regulatory offensive came out of nowhere simply wasn’t paying attention.

The problems identified in this 2019 document and elsewhere are real. For example, the success of platform companies depends on legions of immiserated delivery drivers and gig workers, as well as overworked programmers and software engineers. Third-party merchants, reliant on platform firms for their businesses, suffer from onerous contract obligations and monopolistic practices. Telecommunications fraud, enabled by platform firms’ lax data protection practices, is rife. Poor risk management practices in fintech had already caused the meltdown of the P2P lending industry, evaporating the savings of millions of retail investors.

Those elements are, however, far less dramatic and eye-catching than the disappearance or detention of high-profile CEOs or gossip about palace intrigue. Moreover, to assess them requires consistent engagement with the drudgery of analysing Chinese policy and regulatory documents — a calvary the great Belgian Sinologist Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans) memorably described as ‘akin to munching rhinoceros sausage, or to swallowing sawdust by the bucketful’. Doing so reveals a stack of dozens of texts, issued by multiple Party and government organs, which paint a somewhat more complex picture, where there is no single discernible cause or motivation, nor even clear evidence of much interagency coordination. Regulations in fintech, for instance, have evolved nearly in parallel with interventions in the realm of competition, or protection for consumers and workers more generally. Some of the fintech rules resemble market regulation initiatives undertaken elsewhere, most notably in the European Union. The Personal Information Protection Law, for instance reproduces many of the General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR) terms, concepts and mechanisms, defining largely similar legal grounds for personal information processing, introducing similar procedures for data transfer abroad and imposing similar levels of punishment for violations. New Chinese regulations on competition in the platform sector contain similar definitions for large-scale ‘gatekeepers’ to Europe’s Digital Markets Act.

Traversing the turgid prose of such documents is time-consuming. Journalists, think tank experts and even academics are rarely able to concentrate on tracing single policy areas across time, beholden as they are to the demands of their editors, to news cycles and the demands of immediate hot takes. The Chinese written language, too, forms a layer of encryption: many non-native readers (myself included) simply process Chinese documents far more slowly than texts in English. In those circumstances, it’s easier to reach for a standard narrative, spice it up with details of the latest scandal, and serve while it’s piping hot. Deep engagement with the matter at hand doesn’t necessarily carry a reward: ‘Chinese Regulators Attempt Incremental Improvement of Working Conditions for Gig Workers’ is a far less attractive headline than ‘Xi Jinping Assaults Jack Ma’s Empire’.

Doing the work requires taking Chinese policy thinking around certain questions seriously, and recognising that it might diverge from Western instincts for reasons other than the wielding of blunt authoritarian power. Consumer-oriented online services may be seen as the pinnacle of innovation in the United States, but policymakers in Beijing disagree somewhat. Beijing recognises that big tech has contributed in no small way to enhancing the convenience of Chinese citizens’ daily lives, but at the same time, does not believe it makes a durable contribution to the fundamental qualities of the Chinese economy. Instead, China’s techno-industrial policy under the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) focuses on upgrading the efficiency and productivity of the manufacturing industry. Platform firms are expected to support that effort, for instance by providing innovative services in logistics and supply chain management. Cryptocurrencies, in the eyes of Chinese regulators, moreover, are mere vehicles for non-productive speculation and law-breaking, and consume vast amounts of electricity to boot. No wonder they have now been banned completely.

Beijing’s willingness to damage the fintech sector, which has lost over US$ two trillion in market capitalisation, for instance, becomes a lot more explicable when it is recognised that nearly all publicly traded Chinese fintech companies are listed on stock exchanges outside of mainland China. The shareholders receiving a haircut are, therefore, far less Chinese than one might initially think. However, to admit Chinese authorities might have good reasons for acting in the way they do implies that the Western political and economic model is not universally applicable, and undermines an easy dismissal of Chinese policy solutions. The fact is that China acts in many ways similar to, say, the EU, and the bureaucracy in Beijing is beset by the same pathologies that trouble Washington, Brussels, Canberra or any other capital.

A similar problem lies in discussions of the ‘end of the crackdown’. This phrase seems to imply the regulatory campaign was temporary, and the normal order of business will resume. This is incorrect: it is better to understand what happened as a ‘rectification’: the introduction of a new governance paradigm for a sector that Chinese authorities view as highly important and therefore in need of effective and strict regulation. Safety requirements in cars aren’t an effort to stop people driving, but to ensure they are not killed or maimed as often while doing so. Not only are the new rules here to stay, so are the structures designed to enforce them. The State Administration of Market Regulation, China’s relatively new competition regulator, has established a new Anti-Monopoly Bureau and hired scores of new enforcement personnel. Multiple recent policy releases suggest satisfaction with progress thus far, and there is no evidence that any department intends to roll back any of the measures that were introduced. If that results in the sector’s profitability being permanently depressed, so be it: those profits would have come from unsustainable or undesirable practices anyway. One can reasonably disagree with that logic, but we need to recognise why it exists in the first place.

The inability or unwillingness of much Western commentary and analysis to engage with the drudgery of deep policy analysis relate both to our human fondness for a good yarn, as well as a predisposition for making sense of China in ways that are psychologically comfortable to those of us who closely identify with the Western liberal order. However, that comes at a cost: we are less able to make sense of the Communist Party of China’s motivations and actions. This not only impacts our direct engagement with China, but also the broader world with which it is inextricably intertwined.

[1] See, for instance, The Economist, ‘China’s tech crackdown starts to ease’, The Economist, 19 January 2023, online at: https://www.economist.com/business/2023/01/19/chinas-tech-crackdown-starts-to-ease; Giulia Interesse, ‘Is China’s ‘Tech Crackdown’ over? Our 2023 regulatory outlook for the sector’, China Briefing, 22 February 2023, online at: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/is-chinas-tech-crackdown-over-our-2023-regulatory-outlook-for-the-sector/; Coco Liu, Zheping Huang and Sarah Zheng, ‘China’s tech giants lost their swagger and may never get it back’, Bloomberg, 24 June 2022, online at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-23/china-tech-crackdown-eases-but-startups-worry-xi-may-up-regulatory-pressure 

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The Taiwanese Government recorded twenty-three times more cyberattacks than usual on 2 August. Government websites, including the Office of the President and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, came under especially serious attack. It has been reported that a significant number of attacks came from IPs located in Russia and China.

One popular type of attack that occurred during Pelosi’s visit, but also happens with less intensity in normal times, is the Distributed Denial of Service. Through sending a huge number of messages to a website at the same time, a DDoS attack can be used to shut down the website. This happened to the websites of the Office of the President, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of National Defense multiple times during this period. For example, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website received, within a single minute, more than 8.5 million requests to access their site, which is significantly over the site’s capacity. This leaves the government unable to communicate to its people through their websites.

Website defacement is another popular approach by hackers, and one used intensively during the period of Pelosi’s visit. Hackers even replaced the webpages of some government and universities and the screens at train stations were replaced with messages such as ‘There is only one China’ 世界只有一個中國 and ‘The old witch’s visit to Taiwan is a serious provocation to the Chinese government’ 老巫婆竄訪台灣，是對祖國的嚴重挑釁.

Significantly, screens at convenience stores also came under attack, their content replaced with similar messages. This caused serious concern since cyber-defense for Taiwan’s private sector not in the critical infrastructure list has not previously been seen as a priority but now emerges as a worrying vulnerability.

The timing and intensity of these attacks raise a concern that what has previously been thought of as ‘cybercrime’ or isolated ‘cyberattacks’ should instead be seen as a concerted strategy of ‘cyberwarfare.’

The Blurred Line Between Cybercrime and Cyberwarfare

The use of DDoS and website defacement as tactics of cyberwarfare can go further than simple disruption of business. These measures can also facilitate the dissemination of fake news and even enable extended disinformation campaigns.

War in the digital era can be very different from traditional warfare in that it can be launched without its victims even being aware that they are being targeted. Indeed, as outlined in the Australian Government’s 2022 Defence Strategic Update, disinformation campaigns have already been used to achieve strategic goals without provoking conflict. In Australia and the Indo-Pacific region, especially among democratic nations, there is growing concern about disinformation campaigns, especially those believed to originate in China and from the Chinese Government.

Some people might associate a disinformation campaign with ‘fake news’ or ‘misinformation’. However, it is not synonymous with either of these things, which are better thought of as ‘misinformation’. In a misinformation campaign, people share false or misleading information that they think is true, without intention to mislead others. But a disinformation campiagn is different. As defined by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, it is ‘the intentional creation and dissemination of wholly or partly false and/or manipulated information that is intended to deceive and mislead audiences and/or obscure the truth for the purposes of causing strategic, political, economic, social, or personal harm or financial/commercial gain.’ The purpose of disinformation is to mislead others deliberately. The creation and distribution of disinformation can cause great harm to a society or government.

The information distributed in the disinformation campaign may not necessary be entirely fake news, either. Even verifiable information can be presented in a misleading way to target certain groups of people. An example of a disinformation campaign of this sort involves allegations that the Taiwan government paid NT$94 million lobbying Pelosi to visit Taiwan. Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarified that money was paid to a lobbying company to expand ties with the US government, not to lobby Pelosi to visit Taiwan, nor to pay for her trip to Taiwan.

We see disinformation disseminated not only through state-owned Chinese official channels, including official Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, websites, TV and radio, but also in collaboration with individuals, political and civil groups. Some examples of such collaboration include the voluntary participation of ‘little pinks’ 小粉紅, typically young self-identified Chinese patriots, including students; the so-called ’50 cents party’ 五毛党 – predecessors of the ‘little pinks’ alleged to receive a small payment for each post or repost of desired content; and ‘content farms’, organised groups that receive support from companies to disseminate information to the public but also to create content.

Humour over Rumour

The crucial lesson is that war might already have appeared in a new guise, one that we do not even think of as war. Psychological operations – PSYOPS – are an integral part of the contemporary military strategy of many countries including the United States and Australia. Through influencing public opinion, encourating political polarisation, and otherwise causing conflict within a country, hostile objectives can be accomplished with less effort and bloodshed. Taiwan has long been a target of PSYOPS over the past dacades and has built good counter-measures to tackle PSYOPS. However, technology-facilitated PSYOPS are spreading faster and wider than before. While it is important that Taiwan’s government continues to improve its measures against PSYOPS, it is also crucial that it adopt new technologies and ideas in providing correct information in real-time. The tactic ‘humour over rumour’ used by the Taiwanese Governemnt during the COVID-19 pandemic successfully reduced fear and panic buying by the public for items such as toilet paper.  However there is a risk in times of disaster that the use of humour as a tactic might not be appropriate and careful consideration needs to be given to its design and content to ensure its effectiveness. In order to protect the country, it is important to study how disinformation compaigns are created and disseminated, and how people are influenced by disinformation, with particular attention to the role of culture and language.

Countering cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns will need to involve the public and private sectors, as well as individual effort. That is, co-production is critical to tackle cyber attacks and disinforamtion campaigns.

*The article was based on a previous paper presented at the inaugural ANU Taiwan Update at the Australian Centre on China in the World.

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But is China really on track for the ‘collapse’ that Gordon Chang famously first predicted in his 2001 book, The Coming Collapse of China, one he still thinks is imminent in 2022? Or is Tom Orlik, author of the 2020 book China: the Bubble that Never Pops, more likely to be correct, writing in October in Bloomberg that although the ‘China bubble is losing air’, it’s ‘not going to pop’ – because of the nation’s ‘unparalleled record of surmounting crises’?

The question of whether China can keep rising looms large in the reporting and analysis published in Foreign Affairs. It’s a theme they return to time and again, presenting competing narratives, with no obvious bias. In October 2021, an article by Michael Beckley and Hal Brands, was titled ‘The End of China’s Rise: Beijing is running out of time to remake the world’. The authors begin by asserting that, despite China ‘moving aggressively to forge a Sinocentric Asia and replace Washington atop the global hierarchy,’ there is little for the West to worry about because ‘China’s government is concealing a serious economic slowdown and sliding back into brittle totalitarianism. The country is suffering severe resource scarcity and faces the worst peacetime demographic collapse in history.’ China is, in short, ‘running out of people’ and the ‘economic consequences will be dire.’ This, combined with the government’s ‘force-feeding capital through the economy since 2008,’ leads Beckley and Brands to argue that ‘China is tracing an arc that often ends in tragedy: a dizzying rise followed by the spectre of a hard fall.’

A second article by Jude Blanchette in November 2021 conjures up a very different picture: ‘Xi’s confidence game: Beijing’s actions show determination, not insecurity.’ Blanchette challenges the ‘Collapsing China Syndrome’ head on.  Blanchette argues that, while the ‘doomsayers’ are not entirely wrong in identifying the factors that constrain China’s growth, they fail to weigh these up against Beijing’s potential and actual strengths.

Perhaps Blanchette’s most contentious point is that Beijing’s biggest strength is its ‘effective authoritarianism’: its ability to mobilise and channel resources with ‘remarkable speed.’ The efforts to minimise the economic impacts of COVID in 2020 is one example. While acknowledging that this ‘disregards the rights and freedoms of Chinese citizens,’ he contends that the ‘CCP in 2021 has been stronger, more capable, and in command of more resources than at any other time in its 100-year history’.

This chapter reflects on some of the topics that obsessed the English-language press reports on China in 2022, alongside other topics that perhaps should have received more attention, to identify the key challenges affecting that nation’s economic health. Assessing these challenges based on evidence and fact – rather than fear and fiction – is essential for understanding where the Chinese economy is headed, and what might prevent it from getting there.

‘Running out of people’?

For decades, I travelled around China asking people what they thought the country’s biggest challenge was. Time and again they would say ‘Too many people’. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mao Zedong had pushed the narrative that ‘many people would make China strong.’ This ‘population optimism’ fed into China’s population boom during that time (from just under 544,000 people in 1949 when the People’s Republic was founded to 929,000 in 1976 when Mao died). Chinese demographers had already started to think this was a serious problem, but the fate of economist Ma Yinchu 马寅初, who warned in 1957 of the dangers of overpopulation and was attacked as trying to ‘discredit socialism,’ served as a cautionary tale for those who would say so out loud.

Deng Xiaoping, who oversaw Ma’s political ‘rehabilitation’, including a formal apology to him from the CPC in 1979, adhered to a different narrative. He was ‘population pessimistic’, believing that reducing China’s population growth was key to increasing per capita income. He launched the One-Child Policy in the early 1980s, aiming to bring population growth to zero and quadruple per capita income by the year 2000. He didn’t quite get to zero population growth, but per capita income did quadruple by 1996.

While fertility decline wasn’t the only driving factor, it was a significant one. According to Cai Fang 蔡昉, former Director of the Population Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, around one quarter of the increase in China’s per capita income during its ‘growth miracle’ years from 1978 to 2010 can be explained by declining fertility. There is a simple logic behind this demographic dividend: a reduction in fertility leads to a reduction in youth dependency and a surge in the working age population, and because there are now relatively more workers and fewer dependents in the population, output or income per person increases.

Fast forward to the introduction of the two-child policy in 2016, and the three-child policy written into law in 2021. Cai Fang strongly advocated for this policy relaxation and I, too, on non-economic terms support it. But in purely economic terms, if reducing fertility was so important for raising per capita income, how could increasing fertility also be a good thing? Would it be catastrophic if – as looks likely to be the case – China is headed for a ‘low-fertility trap’ as, despite the freedom to have more, many Chinese couples now choose to have one child only?

I argue it wouldn’t be. China’s working-age population is projected to decline by 18 percent between 2020 and 2050. If labour force participation rates don’t change, its workforce will also decline by the same amount. Yet, taking into account labour’s contribution to aggregate output (currently around 60 percent), in terms of the impact on average annual GDP growth, that amounts to a reduction of just 0.35 percentage points per year through to 2050.

Having more babies now won’t change these figures much at all, because those babies won’t join the workforce for about twenty years. Investments in education are one obvious way to boost productivity in the long run. But other policy changes could produce a faster, positive boost to GDP growth and per capita income gains. One is raising the retirement age. Back in 2015, there was talk of new policies that would gradually raise the ages from sixty for men, and fifty and fifty-five for white- and blue-collar women respectively. These changes were touted to begin in 2022, and true to its planning word, this year the State Council announced a gradual extension of retirement ages to be achieved by 2025 – although the details on how high they’ll go are scant, apart from noting that it will vary with age. Equalising the retirement age for women – the gender with universally higher life expectancies – with their male peers could readily extend China’s workforce with the stroke of a pen. (Political leaders are expected to retire at 68, but the rules don’t seem to apply to Xi Jinping, who is 69 and about to begin his third five-year term in office.)

Another policy to offset population ageing would be to increase labour force participation rates, especially among women. The record on this is even less positive, with just 62 percent of women over the age of fifteen engaged in the labour force in 2021. While high by developing-country standards, this is a three-decade low for China, and on a declining trend, having fallen steadily from 73 percent in 1990. With China’s global gender gap ranking at 102 this year – a sharp decline since its peak rank of 5 in 2008 – and the number of women on the previously 25-person (now 24-man) strong Politburo Standing Committee falling from just one to zero, there is little reason to think Xi will act to boost the number of women workers more generally. Indeed, given the high youth jobless rate, due to a record number of university graduates seeking limited jobs in an economy beset by COVID uncertainties, Xi may continue to undermine the female workforce, focusing on raising participation among young men instead. Either way, under- and unemployment among youth and women counter the argument that China is ‘running out of people’. They do, however, reveal other challenges for China’s long-term growth prospects.

Returning to Mao and Deng, I think they were both at least partially right. High fertility rates in the Maoist era did help China become powerful, because in power terms, size matters. Lower fertility then made Chinese people richer. It is true that China is ageing more rapidly than other countries of comparable levels of development, and that comes with problems. But fertility decline also leaves its citizens much better off, on average at least.

 ‘Common Prosperity’: Rhetoric or reality?  

In 1985, in pursuit of his goal of quadrupling per capita GDP, Deng Xiaoping famously said that some regions and people could become prosperous before others, and that would help others gradually achieve common prosperity. He insisted that there must ultimately be ‘no polarisation of rich and poor’ because ‘that’s what socialism means’. Those waiting patiently for some of China’s immense wealth to trickle their way have been doing so for four decades. In 2021, disposable income per capita in rural households was just 40 percent of their urban counterparts – an improvement from 32 percent a decade earlier, but still a substantial income gap. By 2022, China’s 539 billionaires were collectively worth nearly US$2 trillion, while the World Inequality Lab reported that the top 10 percent of its population earned 14 times more than the bottom 50 percent. Despite official claims that poverty was completely eradicated in 2020, studies since then have revealed a new pandemic-induced poverty wave, taking the poorest Chinese people further backwards. Could Xi Jinping’s latest solution finally give those people reason to hope?  Since 2021, ‘Common Prosperity’ 共同富裕, has become a signature policy goal in Xi’s ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics for a New Era’.  Yuen Yuen Ang has written in Foreign Affairs that ‘common prosperity’ is not just rhetoric but ‘a set of instructions for government officials who are tasked with implementing Xi’s vision.’ This vision ‘is not a call for egalitarianism’: it is instead a commitment to ‘encouraging wealth creation through diligence and innovation.’ Among other things it involves ‘proactively leveraging the important role of the state-owned economy in advancing common prosperity’ and calling on those who ‘got rich first to voluntarily share their wealth.’

Yet, for all the billionaires rushing to prove that they were listening by donating money to various charities, philanthropy cannot solve rural-urban inequality in China today, which stems from gross underinvestment in health and education in the countryside. In their 2020 book Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise, Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell write that to address these inequalities, which relate to ‘structural issues within China’s political system,’ China first needs to reform the hukou system (of residence permits), which has ‘maintained and reinforced inequality through law’. Secondly, it must recentralise the fiscal system so that poor areas are able to fund better education and health outcomes; and shift the focus from short- to long-term growth, to prepare for the future. Should the Chinese government carry out these three reforms, Rozelle and Hell contend the country can escape the ‘middle-income trap’ (when countries develop to a certain point but then growth plateaus) and deliver sustainable, inclusive growth for decades to come. If it doesn’t, in the worst-case scenario, the results would be ‘catastrophic.’

China’s track record offers little cause for optimism. For example, reform of the hukou system has been ongoing for several decades now, and has stepped up in recent years, especially in small- and medium-sized cities. Yet, by October 2022, just one ‘megacity’ – Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province, with a population of twelve million – has plans in place to abolish all restrictions. In June, Shanghai announced a relaxation of its regulations: its coveted hukou would now be granted to ‘non-locals who’ve graduated from the world’s top 50 universities and work in the city’. This smacks of a fragmented and elitist authoritarianism – as opposed to Blanchette’s ‘effective’ kind – in which wealthier provinces and cities implement policies that counteract Beijing’s equalising ambitions, ensuring that wealth continues to trickle up, not down. The impacts on China’s long-term growth prospects could be profound.

Chains of debt

China’s overseas and internal debt ‘crises’ were an ever-present topic in Western media throughout 2022. The former is invariably linked to accusations of ‘debt-trap diplomacy,’ a phrase ubiquitous in Western discourse about the Chinese government’s Belt and Road Initiative and other global investments. Deborah Brautigam, a scholar of China-Africa relations, has described how within twelve months of the first appearance of the phrase ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ in 2017, nearly two million search results could be found on Google. The concept, she says, somehow began ‘to solidify into a deep historical truth’. Yet Brautigam draws on a database of more than 1000 Chinese loans to Africa to argue that she ‘has not seen any examples where … the Chinese deliberately entangled another country in debt, and then used that debt to extract unfair or strategic advantages.’ Other scholars support this finding, including in the oft-cited case of Sri Lanka, as in Shahar Hameiri and Lee Jones’ report on ‘Debunking the Myth of China’s debt-trap diplomacy’ in which they, like Brautigam, conclude that the debt-trap narrative is ‘simply incorrect.’

This isn’t to say that the Chinese government is innocently and only pursuing ‘win-win’ development in its global economic engagements. Of course, it is pursuing power and influence as well. And some of its multinational companies – state-owned and otherwise – behave badly in the process. Again, this is indicative of a less-than-entirely effective authoritarianism: not all domestic actors behave in accordance with the wishes of the centre. It is also true that countries across the globe have taken on substantial Chinese (and other foreign) loans that could cause them – and their Chinese lenders – significant problems in the future. The full facts in this particularly complex zone, where geopolitics, economics and grand strategies intertwine, can be impossible to ascertain. But we should at least rule out the fictions.

This is harder to do when talking about China’s internal debt challenges, including in the real estate sector. According to one narrative, the Evergrande crisis that began in August 2020 (when it was revealed that the country’s second largest property developer was over $300 billion in debt) has now spilled over to the industry to the point where there is ‘a total collapse in confidence, and only [more] government intervention can save the day’. A Financial Times report in October characterised China’s ‘property crash’ as a ‘slow-motion financial crisis’.

In the same month, writing in Bloomberg, Tom Orlik pointed out that: ‘For more than a decade, analysts have warned that excesses in borrowing and building have pushed China’s property sector onto an unsustainable trajectory.’ And yet when policymakers ‘get ahead of the problem by cutting off sources of financing to overleveraged developers,’ it is those same analysts that cry out for more intervention, not less. Orlik sees it differently, describing the history of China’s real estate sector as a ‘series of exuberant booms and near-disastrous busts. Every time it appears the end is nigh, policymakers have tweaked the dials on down-payment requirements, mortgage rates, and financing for developers to get things back on track. They’re doing so again, though this time their goal isn’t engineering another boom, but moderating the pace of decline.’

Crises are, by definition, unpredictable events and economists are notorious for mis-predicting them. Simply put, the risks are high and rising, and there’s contention over how well the Chinese government can mitigate them.

Conclusion

Tom Orlik has used the term ‘Sinophrenia’ to describe a ‘condition of modern commentary that combines the belief that China will imminently collapse with the belief that it is taking over the world.’ The article by Beckley and Brands above falls into this category. In contrast, Jude Blanchette’s article might seem ‘Sinophoric,’ although placed in the broader context of his writings, this would be inaccurate. He had previously described how Xi’s gamble on consolidating power in his own hands has set him on a ‘current course [that] threatens to undo the great progress China has made over the past four decades.’ In October 2022, he observed that ‘authoritarian systems and authoritarian leaders always appear solid on the outside—until suddenly, they don’t.’

No-one doubts that the lockdowns in response to Xi’s zero-COVID policy have made 2022 a very rough year for China’s economy (and its people). With the Russia-Ukraine war, rising tensions in the Taiwan Strait and the ever-escalating rivalry between the US and China, the geopolitical headwinds are getting stronger. Add to these the economic headwinds identified here, and it is certainly possible to construct a narrative of crisis or collapse. But it is also possible that the Chinese government will demonstrate more flexibility than it has in recent times, adopting effective policies that not only stave off crisis, but also set the country on the path for long-run, sustainable and inclusive growth.

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