Long term global challenges are posed by walled-in China

The Great Leap Forward of Mao and the Rise and Fall of China: How Communistism Becomes Popular in the West and How Xi Wanted to End the Civil War

Mao is regarded by many in the West as a flawed patriot and a brutal dictator. The Great Leap forward of 1958 to 1962, his misguided attempt at rapid industrialization contributed to the death of tens of millions of Chinese. So intent were ordinary Chinese on raising steel production that they melted down hoes, plows and other iron implements in crude backyard furnaces, leaving them nothing to work the fields.

Nobody outside of historians would pay much attention to play acting if it was the entire extent of Mao’s emulation. It is more than that. Xi, like Mao, asserts the primacy of the Communist Party. He’s bearing down on or squeezing out private enterprises and foreign-owned businesses. He keeps his people from having access to foreign sources of information. He harbors bitterness towards nations that humiliated China in the past, such as Japan, Britain and the US, which he believes aim to prevent its rise to greatness today. And he is intent on completing Mao’s civil war with the Nationalist army of Chiang Kai-shek by absorbing Taiwan, where the Nationalists fled in defeat in 1949.

This potent mix of propaganda and control under Xi appears to have had its desired effect on a large segment of Chinese society, creating a buffer for the leadership by convincing enough people of the superiority of China’s system even as millions of their fellow countrymen grow resentful of “zero-Covid.” While this approach and a long border closure provides fertile ground for xenophobia, there is also more to it.

Back then, many in the West had concluded that it was merely a matter of time before China was restored to its ancient place as the world’s dominant civilization and largest economy. China has a growth rate of over 10 percent every year, putting our own growth rate in the shade. In one industry after another — telecommunications, banking, social media, real estate — Chinese companies were becoming industry leaders. A number of foreign nationals resided in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai; well-to-do American parents enroll their children in mandarin classes in Hong Kong.

During China’s National Day holiday in early October, several expatriate friends and I took our young children – who are of mixed races and tend to stand out in a Chinese crowd – to the Great Wall on the outskirts of Beijing.

A few families on their way down walked past us as we climbed a restored but almost deserted section of the ancient landmark. One of their kids exclaimed, “WOW foreigners!” With Covid? Let’s get away from them. The adults remained quiet as the group quickened their paces.

The Great Wall: A Year in the Life and Times of the Xi-Chinese Cyber Police and the Observed Downfall of the Great Wall

Understanding the big picture is timely as Xi is poised to break convention to assume a third term as the head of the Chinese Communist Party – the real source of his power instead of the ceremonial presidency – at the ruling party’s twice-a-decade national congress, which opened in Beijing on Sunday.

The Great Wall, a top tourist attraction that normally draws a lot of visitors during holidays, stood almost empty when we went thanks to the zero tolerance policy on Covid infections that Xi implemented three years into the global epidemic.

Most international travelers have not been allowed into China since March 2020, and many foreigners who once called the country home have decided to leave.

Authorities discouraged domestic travel with the Omicron variant raging around, ahead of the National Day holiday. They are sticking to a strict rule of confinement, mass testing and contact tracing, which leads to the locking down of entire cities of millions over a few cases.

Unsurprisingly, holiday travel plummeted during the so-called “Golden Week” along with tourism spending, which fell to less than half of that in 2019, the last “normal” year.

The projection of outward power and China’s sense of beingsiegement in a US led world order are related. Until that happens, though, the Chinese strongman’s instinct and demand for total control at home seem to have meant the erection of ever-higher barriers – in the real world and cyberspace – to keep out pesky outsiders, the perceived source of dangerous viruses and ideas.

Before Covid, China had more security cameras than any other country. In the age of phones, the government can check people’s Covid status and keep track of their movements in real time. Authorities can easily confine someone to their home by remotely switching the health app to code red – and they did just that on several occasions to stop potential protesters from taking to the streets.

For years, Xi’s cyber police have been fortifying the country’s so-called “Great Firewall” – perhaps the world’s most extensive internet filtering and censorship system that blocks and deletes anything deemed “harmful” by the party. It’s supported by artificial intelligence, which allows censors to quickly scrub posts that are contrary to the party line.

The local child’s remarks on the Great Wall reflected that. The true danger of blaming the foreigners comes when adults in powerful positions take advantage of it in the face of mounting domestic pressure.

A history paper released recently by a government-run research institute has gone viral as it, like Xi, upended a long-held consensus. Instead of denouncing the isolationist policy adopted by China’s last two imperial dynasties as a cause of their backward turn and eventual collapse, the authors defended its necessity to protect national sovereignty and security when faced with Western invaders.

As you prepare to embark on your third term as the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, my country wishes you well. It may not be obvious, but we believe your reign will one day be seen as one of the great unexpected blessings in the history of the United States and other free nations.

There were many ideas about economic and political reform during the 1970s to early 1990s covered in the slim volume. Those half-formed ideas towards liberalization that were abruptly thrown out as the party closed flanks following the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. Where Dikötter’s book is a roadmap of how we got here, Gewirtz looks at the road not taken — and a tantalizing glimpse, perhaps, at the political possibilities that remain still.

Precedent suggests the party will prevail, once again — though the odds look increasingly stacked against its favor as it holds its party congress. The Communist Party had to find a way to address structural issues without giving up its monopoly over power and means of production, says Diktter. It seemed to me to be a dead end.

In recent years, Beijing has extended its crackdown on dissent to the foreign platform, detaining and jailing Chinese Twitter users who criticized the government. But through Li, these anonymous voices of dissent were converged and amplified.

As people took to the streets to call for greater freedoms and an end to zero-Covid restrictions, the account “Teacher Li is Not Your Teacher” live-tweeted the demonstrations in real-time, offering a rare window into just how quickly and widely the eruption of dissent reverberated across the country.

Behind the account is Li, a bespectacled 30 years old painter who spent the majority of his waking hours resting in a chair in front of a curved monitor and a neon colored keyboard hundreds of thousand of miles away from the protests in Italy.

For days on end, he waded through an endless flood of private messages in his Twitter inbox, sent by people across China with updates to share about the demonstrations and their aftermath. He posted them on their behalf, shielding the senders from the scrutiny of Chinese authorities.

I did not have the time to think about it. My only thought at the time was to document what was happening,” Li said. “The influence is beyond my imagination. I didn’t expect billions of clicks on my feed in such a short period of time.”

Looking back, Li said he found absurdity in the fact that China’s stringent censorship of the press and the internet has made him, a painter as far away as Italy, a key documenter of the country’s most widespread protests in decades.

Their first police visit of the day came later that day. A few police officers called on Li’s parents in the morning. They accused Li of attacks on the state and the Communist Party and then showed him a list of his social media posts.

They phoned my parents to tell me to stop posting right after I started keeping up with what’s happening. At midnight they went to our house to intimidate my parents.

Li told his parents he wasn’t working for anyone, and no money was involved. His father asked him to pull back from the brink.

He was admitted to a college as a worker-peasant-soldier student, but instead of earning a degree, he became an art teacher.

In China’s largest cities, from the eastern financial hub of Shanghai to the capital Beijing, the southern metropolis of Guangzhou and the west’s Chengdu, slogans against Covid tests and lock downs were shouted. A group of young people held up sheets of white paper in a symbolic protest, demanding the government give them back freedom of speech, the press, movies, books and arts.

The Xi-Mills of the China: When Communists and Artists First Meteorized China and Their Social Issues

When Li was growing up, China seemed freer and more open to the world than it does now, and he was learning how to paint and watch foreign cartoons and films.

“I was someone who painted and scribbled cringy love stories,” Li wrote in a statement addressed to Chinese officials on November 28. “All of this is supposed to be far away from me. With your control of speech, you made me who I am.

Chinese social media was not free of restrictions. BeforeXi came to power, the suppression of free speech and outspoken commentators only intensified.

Liberals, lawyers and journalists, as well as other commentators, used to lead critical discussions on social issues and issue stinging criticism of officials.

By 2012 Li became more critical of society. A budding artist at 19 years old held his first exhibition in the eastern city of Jinan. The introduction of the event said that it was named “Picasso at the Circus” tomock this absurd society which is like a circus filled with funny animals.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/china/china-twitter-teacher-li-profile-intl-hnk/index.html

Lost My Last Weibo Account: A Portrait of a 15-Year-Old Uyghur Girl in Detention

He lost his last Weibo account by retweeting a photograph of a 15-year-old Uyghur girl in detention, who was featured in the BBC’s investigation on the Xinjiang Police Files. “I wanted to be brave for once, for her. He said it was well worth it. I can not fall asleep tonight if I just sit by and not look at her face.

After exhausting all the methods to create new accounts, Li decided to go with retweeting. He said that it was great because they no longer need to use code names.

And so on November 26, when Li saw in his Twitter inbox a video showing crowds openly chanting “Xi Jinping, step down!” On the streets of China, he was bewildered by the close supervision of police.

“I’m a little embarrassed to tell you that I froze for a second when I heard the slogan. If they dare to shout it, I should be brave enough to document it. So I wrote it out word by word (in a Twitter post),” he said.

Among the thousands of direct messages Li received in his inbox were death threats. He said he gets many anonymous harassment threats, saying that he knows who you are and will kill you.

He focused on processing the protesters’ updates rather than ignoring them. He would come back to haunt him when he stepped away from his computer.

“This account is more important than my life,” he said. I will not stop it. I’ve arranged for someone else to take over if something bad happens to me.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/china/china-twitter-teacher-li-profile-intl-hnk/index.html

How American journalists have dealt with the Communist regime in Tianan: A book on assignment china: an oral history of American journalists in the People’s Republic

The demonstrations mostly dissipated by the first week of December. Some protesters received phone calls from the police warning them against taking to the streets again, others were taken away for questioning – and some remained in detention.

The China government scrapped some of the strictest restrictions in the world, a sign it is moving away from its zero-compliance policy, in a major victory for the protesters.

He said he had to sacrifice something of himself when people took to the streets holding pieces of white paper. “I’m mentally prepared, even if authorities won’t let me see my parents again.”

His Twitter name is a self-mockery of his own accent: people from his home province cannot differentiate the pronunciations of “Li” – his surname – and “ni”, meaning “You.”

And his Twitter handle @whyyoutouzhele is a dig at Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lejian’s comments last year that foreign reporters should “touzhele,” or “chuckle to themselves,” for being able to live safely in China during the pandemic. The phrase has since been used widely on Chinese social media in a sarcastic way to criticize zero-Covid.

The cat has become known to the Chinese diaspora around the world. It has become the most dangerous cat in China, at the same time.

The tension between American journalists seeking to understand Chinese reality and the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to control the narrative — the central theme of my new book “Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic” — dates back to the earliest days of the Communist revolution.

Yu confessed that most of the things he saw during his first visit had been an illusion, when local officials were out of earshot. He told me that in fact, conditions then were terrible, and that even the food I had so enjoyed had been trucked in from the city by local officials the day before — just to impress the foreigners.

Since then, covering China has become for many an increasingly tense game of cat and mouse with the authorities, as reporters have found themselves regularly tailed, harassed, blocked and even beaten.

There was no American correspondent present to cover the establishment of the People’s Republic in Tiananmen Square.

The decline of the number of China-based correspondents continues to severely hamper the ability of reporters to obtain a better understanding of China’s society by digging under the surface and talking to people.

After US and Chinese diplomatic relations were established in 1979 the door opened, and it was only then that American news organizations were allowed to set up offices in Beijing.

When the People’s Republic became accessible to American and other foreign journalists, there were always obstacles and limitations.

Conditions improved for foreign journalists following Deng Xiaoping’s program of economic reforms in the 1990s. It became easier to get around, and local officials were more accessible. Instead of chasing them away, they usually asked American correspondents for advice on how to attract foreign investment.

China began to change its domestic political climate after the Beijing Olympics. The financial crisis in the West in 2008 made Chinese leaders realize that the US was no longer the unquestioned leader and that Beijing should be more assertive. The foreign media was treated that way.

Our knowledge of the inner workings at the highest levels of power is less than it used to be, despite the fact that China is more accessible now, and that we can attend many things like the World Economic Forum.

The Wall Street Journal expelled Josh Chin in 2020 because he said that the coverage of China was going to become more divided and less nuanced. It’s become almost impossible to write a story about China that is about people.”

Still, for reporters in these and other locations, the number one tool remains, as it was decades ago, looking for clues in the Chinese media, trying to decipher the real meaning of the rhetoric, slogans, obscure historical references and dubious statistics put out by the Chinese Communist Party.

One recent example: tallying the number of media references to Xi being “at the helm” of the Chinese ship of state, during the just-concluded session of the National People’s Congress. The term previously was only used for Chairman Mao, and the growing number of similar references to Xi provided an important sign of his strengthened grip on power.

But there are resources now that were not available to the China-watchers of old. These include following the Chinese Internet, which, despite censorship, can still provide critical insights.

Satellite imagery helped reporters confirm that the Communist Party has held thousands of Uyghurs in internment camps. Such aerial images of crowding at crematoriums also provided evidence of a much greater death toll than the Communist Party was willing to admit following the ending of the country’s zero-Covid policy late last year.

What is increasingly missing is the ability of journalists to convey the richness and complexity of the world’s most populous nation — the shared humanity we also need to understand, especially as the US and China lurch ever closer to confrontation.