Aggressive Outbursts Mar Xi's Plan to Raise China on the World Stage

Beijing rewards diplomats that are aggressive advocates of China’s views and scorns those that it perceives as overly timid

Bloomberg News

China’s diplomats aren’t being very diplomatic.
In the past few months, its envoy to Canada publicly accused his hosts of “white supremacy,” its ambassador in Sweden labeled the Swedish police “inhumane” and blasted the country’s “so-called freedom of expression,” and its chief emissary in South Africa said President Donald Trump’s policies were making the U.S. “the enemy of the whole world.”
“I don’t think we are witnessing a pattern of misstatements and slips of the tongue," said Ryan Hass, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who previously oversaw China affairs at the U.S. National Security Council. 

“We seem to be watching China’s diplomats matching the mood of the moment in Beijing. Beijing rewards diplomats that are aggressive advocates of China’s views and scorns those that it perceives as overly timid.”
That may be damaging Xi Jinping’s efforts to win friends abroad and capitalize on Donald Trump’s international unpopularity. 

While China has seized on the trade war and U.S. disengagement abroad to pitch itself as a champion of globalization, 63 percent of respondents to a 2018 Pew poll in 25 countries said they preferred the U.S. as a world leader, compared with 19 percent for China.

Backlash Builds
At stake is China’s avowed goal of establishing itself as a global superpower with influence over a network of allies to balance U.S. influence. 

China is pouring billions into global efforts such as Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative to forge stronger links with countries around the world.
But China’s increasingly strident diplomatic approach could do more harm than good. 

Anti-China sentiment has played a pivotal role in election surprises across Asia, and more countries around the world are becoming skeptical of Chinese investment -- particularly in telecommunications, with fears growing about using its equipment in 5G networks due to concerns about espionage.
China’s foreign ministry didn’t respond to faxed questions about the more aggressive language from diplomats. 

After Trump took office, China has sought to portray itself as a supporter of the international order, with Xi himself defending globalization at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. 

His charm offensive stood in contrast to Trump, who has reshaped public discourse with regular insults of other world leaders on Twitter.
Even so, foreign diplomats in Beijing say that the behavior of Chinese officials has become far more aggressive and assertive in private meetings in recent years. 

Their discussions have become more ideological, according to one senior foreign envoy, who described the behavior as a strong sense of grievance combined with increasing entitlement about China’s international role and rights.
China’s reported behavior at the APEC summit in November highlighted the shift. 

Papua New Guinea police were called after Chinese officials attempted to “barge” into the office of the country’s foreign minister to influence the summit’s communique, according to the Agence France-Presse news agency. 

Chinese officials later denied the report, calling it “a rumor spread by some people with a hidden agenda.”

Huawei Advocacy
Chinese diplomats’ advocacy for the country’s embattled tech giant, Huawei Technologies Co., has even riled heads of government. 

After the Chinese ambassador to the Czech Republic, Zhang Jianmin, announced in November that the Czech cyber security body’s decision to ban Huawei did not represent the view of the Czech government, Prime Minister Andrej Babis said, “I do not know what the ambassador is talking about," according to Czech Radio. 

One European ambassador in Beijing said China’s aggressive advocacy for the company has been prevalent across the 28-nation bloc.

Zhang Jianmin

In some regions, China’s overseas rhetoric has been hardening for years. 

Foreign officials noticed an increasingly strident tone from Beijing following the global financial crisis. 

At a 2010 meeting hosted by Southeast Asian nations in Hanoi, then foreign minister Yang Jiechi famously dismissed some of China’s neighbors as “small countries” when challenged over Beijing’s stance in the South China Sea.
Foreign diplomats said the outbursts have increased in both frequency and intensity since Xi took power in 2012. 

In the last few years, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia and now Canada have all incurred Beijing’s wrath, with diplomatic barbs often accompanied by economic pressure through import restrictions, store inspections and safety warnings to Chinese tour groups.
In a speech at the 2017 Communist Party conclave that saw Xi appointed for a second term as party chief without an apparent successor, Xi described China as “standing tall and firm in the East” and pledged to make the country a global leader in innovation, influence and military might. 

At a conference for Chinese ambassadors at the end of that year, Xi urged diplomats to play a more proactive part in an increasingly multipolar world -- a speech China’s ambassador to the United Kingdom described as a “mobilization order,” or “bugle call.”

‘Crags and Torrents’
China’s diplomatic corps has been quick to show its loyalty to Xi. 

In a 2017 essay in the party’s theoretical magazine Qiushi, top diplomat Yang Jiechi pledged to study and implement Xi’s thought on diplomacy in a “deep-going way.” 

And Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently praised Xi for “taking the front line of history” and “braving 10,000 crags and torrents.”
“Chinese ambassadors always feel they have to speak to the leaders in Beijing more than to the local public. Their promotions depend on it,” said Susan Shirk, a former U.S. deputy assistant Secretary of State for East Asia. 

“If today what they say is more overtly anti-American or anti-Western then that reflects the changing foreign policy line.”
In line with national “party-building” campaigns, Chinese diplomats regularly engage in “self-criticism” sessions at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to people familiar with the meetings. Last month, the former deputy head of the party’s powerful Organization Department, Qi Yu, was appointed as the foreign ministry’s Party Secretary despite a lack of diplomatic experience. 

One foreign ambassador said Chinese diplomats are increasingly “scared.”
China has seen this kind of ideology-driven diplomacy before. 

During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese diplomats in London videotaped themselves fighting protesters on the streets of London, according to the book China’s Quest by historian John Garver. 

In Beijing, British and Soviet diplomatic missions were besieged or invaded and other diplomats were threatened on the streets.
The new wave of truculence is also affecting how foreign envoys are treated in China. 

Detained Canadian citizen and former diplomat Michael Kovrig has been questioned about his work as a diplomat, according to people familiar with the discussions. 

The move is a violation of Article 39 of the Vienna Convention, which explicitly covers the past work of former diplomats. 

China is a signatory.
Foreign diplomats visiting China’s far western colony of East Turkestan have been followed, temporarily detained and forced to delete photographs from their phones, while Swedish citizen Gui Minhai was grabbed by Chinese authorities in front of Swedish diplomats.
The shift in mood, and tensions with the U.S., have altered the tone of discussions inside China’s bureaucracy. 

One Chinese trade diplomat said that while it’s never been easy to be a dove in China, all but the most senior officials now refrain from publicly voicing moderate positions toward the U.S.
“Beijing has established a pattern of making examples of middle powers in hopes that doing so deters others from challenging China’s interests,” said Hass at the Brookings Institution. 

“Some in Beijing also seem to be growing frustrated that China’s rising national power is not yet translating into the types of deference from others that it seeks.”

Film Set in China’s Cultural Revolution Is Pulled From Berlin Festival

By Amy Qin

The Chinese director Zhang Yimou, second from left, receiving an award at the Venice International Film Festival last year. His film “One Second” has been pulled from the Berlin Film Festival for “technical reasons.”

BEIJING — A Cultural Revolution-era film by a celebrated Chinese director has been withdrawn from the 69th Berlin Film Festival, where it was set to show in the festival’s main competition.
A statement posted Monday on the film’s official Weibo account said the film by Zhang Yimou, “One Second,” had been pulled for “technical reasons,” a term often used in China as a euphemism for government censorship. 

Festival organizers confirmed the withdrawal, stating that the film had been pulled from the competition “due to technical difficulties encountered during postproduction.”
The sudden withdrawal of Zhang’s film is a major setback for the 68-year-old filmmaker, who is best known for directing art house classics like “Raise the Red Lantern” and for being the creative force behind the dazzling opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.
While China’s strict oversight of films is well known, it is rare to see a film pulled so close to its festival premiere. 

The abrupt reversal caused a stir within film circles in China, and it added to worries about the Chinese Communist Party’s broadening crackdown on dissent and discussion of sensitive subjects.
Neither Zhang nor the film’s producers could be reached for comment on Wednesday. 

Festival organizers declined to offer more details.
The withdrawal of the film has left many wondering how such a fate could have befallen a veteran filmmaker like Zhang, who is intimately familiar with the complex workings of China’s film bureaucracy and what passes muster with censors.
Some have pointed to the political sensitivity of “One Second,” which tells the story of a man who escapes a Chinese prison farm during the Cultural Revolution in search of a newsreel and encounters an orphan girl along the way.
The Cultural Revolution — the tumultuous decade that roiled China from 1966 to 1976 — has long been a delicate subject for the Communist Party. 

Nonetheless, over the years, filmmakers have found ways to portray the era. 

Notable examples include Wang Xiaoshuai’s “Red Amnesia” (2014) and Zhang’s “Coming Home” (2014).
The difference this time is that the film bureaucracy has undergone a major shift since oversight of the industry shifted last year to the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department. 

The change was part of a broader government effort to tighten controls on the media and the internet in China.
Another factor may have been new requirements that films get an official “dragon seal,” or certification of approval by censors, as well as a travel permit to show at international film festivals.
As a result, people with knowledge of the industry say, many films — particularly those that deal with delicate topics — are having a harder time getting through China’s byzantine bureaucracy.
“Supervision has become stricter,” said Zhang Xianmin, one of China’s foremost independent film producers. 

“The space for independent films is shrinking.”
While Zhang Yimou is arguably China’s most acclaimed filmmaker, he has also been in and out of the good graces of the authorities. 

In 1994, his film “To Live” was banned in China. 

In 2014, Zhang and his wife were ordered to pay a $1.24 million fine for violating the one-child policy by having three children.
Xi Jinping has himself been critical of  Zhang. 

According to a 2007 WikiLeaks cable, Xi, who was then party secretary of Zhejiang Province, criticized Chinese filmmakers for not promoting the right values, and cited Zhang in particular.
“Some Chinese moviemakers neglect values they should promote,” Xi said, according to the cable.
Zhang’s film was withdrawn just days after another Chinese film, “Better Days,” was pulled from the Berlin festival’s Generation section. 

Producers of the film, which tells the story of disaffected youth, said it hadn’t been finished in time to get approval from censors. 

But Variety, citing industry sources, said the film had failed to receive the necessary permissions from the Chinese authorities.
Despite the last-minute withdrawals, Chinese filmmakers are still making a strong showing at this year’s Berlin festival. 

Wang Xiaoshuai’s “So Long, My Son” and Wang Quan’an’s “Öndög” are both in contention for the Golden Bear award, the festival’s top prize, while Lou Ye’s “The Shadow Play” is being shown in the Panorama section.
Speaking at a news conference at the Berlin festival on Monday, Lou said the process of getting “The Shadow Play” past Chinese censors had been longer and more complex than he had ever faced before in his career. 

“My attitude toward censorship in the movie industry has never changed,” said Lou. 

“Movies should always be free.”
Instead of “One Second,” festival organizers said they would screen Zhang Yimou’s 2002 martial-arts epic “Hero” out of competition. 

Zhang was the first Chinese director to win the Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival, in 1988, for the film “Red Sorghum.”
Accustomed to censorship, some Chinese were quick to see through the explanation that “One Second” had been pulled for “technical difficulties.”
“This film was about the Cultural Revolution,” one person wrote on Weibo. 

“Seems like that decade is now having some ‘technical difficulties.’ ”

Chinese State Terrorism

Chinese-Australian Writer Yang Hengjun Disappears in China

By Damien Cave and Chris Buckley

Yang Hengjun in San Diego in 2012.

SYDNEY, Australia — A well-known writer and former Chinese official with Australian citizenship flew from New York to China on Friday despite warnings from friends who told him it was too dangerous.
Now, he is missing and appears to have been detained by the Chinese authorities.
The writer, Yang Hengjun, did not answer his Chinese cellphone despite repeated attempts to reach him on Tuesday and Wednesday. 

Nor did he answer messages on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media service.
Deng Yuwen, a Chinese journalist and current affairs commentator who knows Mr. Yang, said that the writer appeared to have vanished shortly after landing in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
“We don’t know what Yang Hengjun did that would prompt the Chinese government to detain him,” Mr. Deng said by telephone from New York. 

“In recent years, he’s been very low key and hasn’t published anything that could be construed as antigovernment.”
Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed that the government “is seeking information about an Australian citizen who has been reported missing in China.”
A spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry said she had no information about the case. 

American officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Yang was detained in 2011, but his disappearance now carries additional risk.
China’s relationship with the United States and its democratic allies continues to deteriorate. 

A trade war between the two countries is rattling the Chinese economy. 

Xi Jinping has pushed the country toward a more muscular brand of authoritarianism. 

And the December arrest in Canada of a senior executive from Huawei, China’s most important telecommunications company, has led to tit-for-tat retaliation from China.
Last month, the Chinese police detained two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, as officials in Beijing pressed Canada to free Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei executive who was held for extradition to the United States on fraud charges.
If Mr. Yang’s detention is prolonged, he could become another strain in Australia’s volatile relations with China. 

Australia’s economy has been buoyed by raw material exports to China, especially iron ore. 

But in recent years relations between the two countries have been troubled by Australian complaints of political interference from Beijing.
In August, Australia rejected potential participation by Huawei in developing the country’s 5G telephone network, a step that angered the Chinese government.
Mr. Yang, 53, a novelist and commentator who worked for the Chinese foreign ministry before moving to Australia and becoming a citizen in 2000, has spent the past two years with his family in New York, where he works as a visiting scholar at Columbia University.
In his writing, he has been critical of the Chinese government. 

But in recent years he has eschewed interviews with the news media and avoided outright opposition to the Communist Party.
In December, he retweeted one of his earlier articles about rule of law in China, which said: “I have faith in the future, but without today’s endeavors and sacrifices, the future will never come. For people like me, the goal, the dream is for the future to arrive earlier.”
Friends of his said they had told him that none of his calibrated caution mattered, and that his Australian citizenship would not act as a deterrent because the Chinese government sees anyone of Chinese descent as under the jurisdiction of the country’s Communist Party.
“The intention of his writing is clear — he wanted to educate people about democracy and universal values, and has influenced many young people,” said Weican Meng, a friend of Mr. Yang’s and the founder of Boxun News, a Chinese-language website in the United States.
“Before he went back to China, we had a meal together and a number of friends told him it’s not a good time to go,” added Mr. Meng, whose pen name is Wei Shi. 

“The situation in China right now is like during the Cultural Revolution: People are being punished for talking about very minor things.”
On Thursday, China’s minister of public security, Zhao Kezhi, told a meeting of police commanders in Beijing to guard against political subversion and attempts to foment “color revolution” against the government.
Mr. Yang’s family and friends believe Mr. Yang is being held in Beijing.
Feng Chongyi, a friend of the writer’s and an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney who was himself detained by the Chinese authorities in 2017, said he had spoken to Mr. Yang’s relatives. 

They told him that Mr. Yang had landed in Guangzhou early Friday morning, but that he did not make his planned connection to Shanghai, Mr. Feng said.
According to Mr. Feng, Mr. Yang went to China in part because his United States visa was to expire in a few months and he was waiting for a residence visa in Australia for his wife and stepdaughter. They had traveled with him to China on this trip.
According to Mr. Feng’s conversations with the writer’s relatives, Mr. Yang and his wife were interrogated for over 12 hours — probably at the airport in Guangzhou — before Mr. Yang’s wife was then allowed to go to Shanghai to drop off her daughter.
“At home in Shanghai,” Mr. Feng added, “she was in tears and asked relatives to not contact them again, but said she would post their whereabouts.”
The writer’s wife, Yuan Rui Juan, posted a picture on her Weibo page on Saturday from Beijing’s main airport, with the caption “It’s been a long time, my eyes are filled with tears.”
Mr. Feng said that family members were fearful and appeared to have been silenced about Mr. Yang’s status. 

“When asked about Yang’s situation, they say that they’re not in a position to discuss the matter,” he said. 

“And they implored us not to ask.”
Mr. Feng said he had been talking to security sources in China and believes that Mr. Yang could be charged with espionage, a broad charge in China that can include simply discussing matters that the government deems sensitive.
In Mr. Yang’s last blog post on his website, he praised President Trump for trying to close “loopholes” that Mr. Yang said had allowed other governments and migrants to Western countries to take advantage of these societies’ tolerance and hospitality.
Mr. Yang developed a large following as a blogger in China in the previous decade, and then an equally avid audience on WeChat, where he also advertised lectures and classes for which he charged a fee.
One of his last announcements on WeChat invited readers to sign up for his classes on studying and living in the United States, Australia and other Western countries, lessons that would also include his “thoughts on history, economics, culture and politics.”
Since Friday, his account has been silent.

A Photographer’s Quest to Reverse China’s Historical Amnesia

By Amy Qin

A rally at a stadium in Harbin, China, in 1966, attended by the photographer Li Zhensheng. A Communist Party secretary and the wife of another official were denounced and splattered with ink.

HONG KONG — The photographer Li Zhensheng is on a mission to make his fellow Chinese remember one of the most turbulent chapters in modern Chinese history that the ruling Communist Party is increasingly determined to whitewash.
“The whole world knows what happened during the Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Li said. 

“Only China doesn’t know. So many people have no idea.”
Clad in a dark blue photographer’s vest, Mr. Li, 78, spoke in a recent interview in Hong Kong, where the first Chinese-language edition of his book “Red-Color News Soldier” was published in October by the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong.
Blending history and memoir, the photo book compiles images taken by Mr. Li in the 1960s when he was working at a local newspaper in northeastern China. 

Since 2003, the photos have been exhibited in more than 60 countries, bearing witness around the world to the Cultural Revolution — the decade-long turmoil that unfolded from 1966 and turned students against teachers, sons against fathers, and friends against friends.
With the new edition of his book, Mr. Li joins the small ranks of Chinese who survived the excesses of Mao Zedong’s rule and are determined to challenge the official historical narrative at a time when a new dictator -- Xi Jinping -- has pushed to suppress criticism of his party’s traumatic past. 

Under Xi’s rule, the authorities have waged a broad ideological crackdown on dissenting voices, making efforts to objectively chronicle history fraught with risk.

A 5-year-old girl, Kang Wenjie, center, performed a “loyalty dance” for Red Guards in Harbin in 1968.

In China, the Cultural Revolution has become a taboo topic and officials there have repeatedly blocked Mr. Li’s attempts to publish the photos. 

The new edition of his book can be distributed only within the semiautonomous city of Hong Kong, but that has not dampened his hopes of getting copies of it into the Chinese mainland.
“We’ll bring the books into the mainland one by one,” Mr. Li said. 

“It’ll be like ants moving house.”
After Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution, what began as a political campaign aimed at reasserting control at the top soon became a sweeping nationwide movement that shook all levels of society. 

Rival groups of militant youth known as Red Guards fought against one another and against perceived “class enemies,” including intellectuals, officials and others.
Tens of millions of people were persecuted. 

Up to 1.5 million died as a result of the campaign. 

Many were driven to suicide.
“No other political movement in China’s recent history lasted as long, was as widespread in its impact, and as deep in its trauma as the Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Li said.
He added that he was concerned that without a deep historical reckoning, something similar could happen in China again. 

Already, Xi’s efforts to elevate himself to the status of Mao and extend his rule indefinitely have for many evoked the days of one-man rule, when Mao was worshiped like a god, culminating in the disaster that was the Cultural Revolution.

Pilots in the People’s Liberation Army reading from “Quotations From Chairman Mao Zedong,” also known as “The Little Red Book.”
Mr. Li’s collection of photos from that time is a nuanced portrayal of both the pain and the passion that the movement generated. 

At a time when cameras were scarce, he was given rare access to official events, taking more than 30,000 photos, many of which he carefully stashed under the floorboards of his home in the city of Harbin.
Among those are scenes of Red Guards forcing monks at a temple to denounce Buddhist scriptures and tearing out an official’s hair because he was deemed as too closely resembling Mao. 

There are people shouting praises to Mao as they swim in the Songhua River. 

There are many images of officials and ordinary folk, some standing on chairs, some splattered with black ink, many bowing their heads, and all at the mercy of massive crowds denouncing them for supposed crimes, sentencing them to hard labor or taking them away for execution.
Mr. Li’s photos first gained widespread attention abroad in 2003, when he worked with Robert Pledge, the director of Contact Press Images in New York City, to publish “Red-Color News Soldier.”
Almost immediately, publishers in China began reaching out to Mr. Li, who had moved to New York to be closer to his children. 

Knowing that the photos had only a slim chance of receiving approval from China’s official censors, Mr. Li and his editors in China made plans for a Chinese-language version of the book that would bury the contentious photos in a sea of text.
But censors rejected the nearly finished book with no explanation.
Livid, Mr. Li sent letters of protest to China’s top leaders. 

One of his main points of contention: In 2000, Deng Xiaoping’s daughter had published a book about her father titled “Deng Xiaoping and the Cultural Revolution: A Daughter Recalls the Critical Years.”
“I was so angry,” Mr. Li recalled. 

“Why can Deng Xiaoping share his Cultural Revolution experience and not Li Zhensheng?”

People swimming in the Songhua River in Harbin in 1967 while shouting praise for Mao.

Now, more than a half-century after the Cultural Revolution began, there is little public discussion of that period in China. 

The nation’s collective amnesia has only gotten worse in recent years as leaders have walked back efforts to reckon with the country’s modern history.
Last year, the South China Morning Post reported that a state-run publisher had evidently revised a middle-school history textbook to omit references to Mao’s “mistakes” in stirring up the Cultural Revolution. 

And a recent exhibition at the Capital Museum in Beijing featuring historical images taken by photographers for the official news agency Xinhua made no mention of the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was not always off limits. 

In 1988, the organizers of a nationwide photography competition approached Mr. Li with a request that would be almost unimaginable in China’s current political climate.
“We can’t have an entire decade of history missing in a competition as big as this,” Mr. Li recalled one of the organizers saying. 

So would he consider submitting his photos to the competition?
Mr. Li won the competition. 

The local news media and observers were stunned by the images, which depicted the Cultural Revolution more completely than had been seen before.
Seeing how the atmosphere has changed since that time, Mr. Li has only become more hardened in his resolve to see his photos published in China.

The execution in 1980 of Wang Shouxin, far left, a rebel during the Cultural Revolution. A guard, right, is handing a single bullet to Wang’s executioner.

“Some people have criticized me, saying I am washing the country’s dirty laundry in public,” he said, using a Chinese idiom that refers to the belief that a family’s problems should not be aired in public. “But Germany has reckoned with its Nazi past, America still talks about its history of slavery, why can’t we Chinese talk about our own history?”
Though his photos cannot be published in the mainland, Mr. Li has given lectures on the Cultural Revolution at several Chinese universities, including Tsinghua University and Peking University.
In 2017, a new museum dedicated to Mr. Li’s life and photography was opened in a small town in Sichuan Province. 

It was part of a cluster of private history museums opened by Fan Jianchuan, a property developer and history buff who, like Mr. Li, has become well-versed in the push and pull of China’s censorship system.
But walking the line has meant making compromises. 

Sitting in his hotel room in Hong Kong, Mr. Li mentioned a new book he had been preparing using photos he had taken in Beijing during the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Asked if he had plans to publish the book, the normally opinionated photographer went quiet. 

He was hesitating, he said, because he was concerned the museum in Sichuan could get shut down by the authorities in retaliation.
“Let’s not talk about the Tiananmen book,” he said. 

“One story at a time.”

‘Human impulses run riot’: China’s shocking pace of change

Thirty years ago, politics was paramount. Now, only money counts. Yu Hua examines a nation that has transformed in a single lifetime. 

By Yu Hua

Souvenirs featuring portraits of Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping, Beijing. 

When I try to describe how China has changed over the past 50 years, countless roads appear in front of me. 

Given the sheer immensity of these changes, all I can do is try first to follow a couple of main roads, and then a few smaller ones, to see where they take us.
My first main road begins in the past. 

In my 58 years, I have experienced three dramatic changes, and each one has been accompanied by a surge in suicides among officials. 

The first time was during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966. 

At the start of that period, many members of the Chinese Communist party woke up one day to find they had been purged: overnight they had become “power-holders taking the capitalist road”. 

After suffering every kind of psychological and physical abuse, some chose to take their own lives. 

In the small town in south China where I grew up, some hanged themselves or swallowed insecticide, while others threw themselves down wells: wells in south China have narrow mouths, and if you dive into one headfirst, there is no way you will come out alive.
In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, many people from the lowest tiers of society formed their own mass organisations, proclaiming themselves commanders of a “Cultural Revolution headquarters”. 

These individuals – rebels, they were called – often went on to secure official positions of one kind or another. 

They enjoyed only a brief career, however. 

Following Mao’s death in 1976, the subsequent end of the Cultural Revolution and the emergence of the reform-minded Deng Xiaoping as China’s new leader, some rebels believed they would suffer just as much as the officials they had tormented a few years before.
Thus came the second surge in suicides – this time of officials who had clawed their way to power as revolutionary radicals. 

One official in my little town drowned himself in the sea: he smoked a lot of cigarettes first, and the stubs littering the shore marked the agony of indecision that preceded his death. 

This was a much smaller surge in suicides than the first one, because Deng was not out for political revenge, focusing instead on kickstarting economic reforms and opening up to the west. 

This policy led in turn to China’s economic miracle, the downside of which has been environmental pollution, growing inequality and pervasive corruption.
In late 2012 came the third dramatic change in my lifetime, when China entered the era of Xi Jinping. 

No sooner did Xi become general secretary of the Communist party than our new leader launched an anti-corruption drive, the scale and force of which took almost everyone by surprise. 

The third surge in suicides followed. 

When officials who had stuffed their pockets during China’s breakneck economic rise discovered they were being investigated and realised they could not wriggle free, some put an end to things by suicide. 

In cases involving lower-ranking officials who were under investigation but had not yet been taken into custody, the government explanation was that their suicides were triggered by depression. 

But, if a high-ranking official took his own life, a harsher judgment was passed. 

On 23 November 2017, after Zhang Yang, a general, hanged himself in his own home, the People’s Liberation Army Daily reported that he “had evaded party discipline and the laws of the nation” and described his suicide as “a disgraceful action”.
These three surges in suicide demonstrate the failure and impotence of legal institutions in China. 

The public security organs, prosecutorial agencies and courts all stopped functioning at the start of the Cultural Revolution; thereafter, laws existed only in name. 

Since Mao’s death, a robust legal system has never truly been established and, today, law’s failure manifests itself in two ways. 

First, the law is strong only on paper: in practice, law tends to be subservient to the power that officials wield. 

Second, when officials realise they are being investigated and know their position won’t save them, some will choose to die rather than submit to legal sanctions, for officials who believe in power don’t believe in law.
These two points, seemingly at odds, are actually two sides of the same coin. 

The difference between the three surges in suicide is this: the first two were outcomes of a political struggle; framed by the start and the end of the Cultural Revolution. 

The third, by contrast, stems from the blight of corruption that has accompanied 30 years of rapid economic development. 

Of course, the anti-corruption campaign is conducted selectively, with the goal of purging Xi Jinping’s political opponents. 

And the underlying problem is: how many officials are there today who are truly clean? 

A few years ago, an official from China’s prosecutorial agencies put it to me this way: “If you were to stick all of today’s officials in a line and shoot every one of them, that would be unfair to some. But a lot would slip through the net if you only shot every other one.”
When I turn onto the second main road that stretches from the China of my childhood to the present day, what I see before me is the declining importance of the family and the growing importance of individualism. 

In Mao’s China, the individual could find no fulfilment in ordinary social life. 

If one wanted to express a personal aspiration, the only way to do so was to throw oneself into a collective movement such as the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. 

Mind you, in those grand campaigns, the individual’s aspirations had to conform entirely to whatever the “correct” political line happened to be at that moment – the slightest deviation would cause disaster.
To use an analogy current at the time, each of us was a little drop of water, gathered into the great flood of socialism. 

But it wasn’t so easy to be that drop of water. 

In my town, there was a Cultural Revolution activist who would almost every day be at the forefront of some demonstration or other, often being first to raise his fist and shout “Down with Liu Shaoqi!” (Liu, nominally the head of state, had just been purged.) 

One day, however, he inadvertently misspoke, shouting “Down with Mao Zedong!” instead. 

Within seconds he had been thrown to the ground by the “revolutionary masses”, and thus he began a wretched phase in life, denounced and beaten at every turn.

Students wave copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Beijing, 1966. 

In that era, the individual could find space only in the context of family life – any independent leanings could only be expressed at home. 

That is why family values were so important to Chinese people then, and why marital infidelity was seen as so intolerable. 

If you were caught having an extramarital affair, the social morality of the day meant that you would be subjected to all kinds of humiliation: you might be paraded through the streets with half your hair shaved off or packed off to prison.
During the Cultural Revolution, there were certainly cases of husbands and wives denouncing each other and fathers and sons falling out, but these were not typical – the vast majority of families enjoyed unprecedented solidarity. 

A friend of mine told me her father had been a professor at the start of the Cultural Revolution, while her mother was a housewife. 

Her father, born to a landlord’s family, became the target of attacks, but her mother, from a humbler background, was placed among the revolutionary ranks. 

Pressed by the radicals to divorce her father, her mother outright refused – and not only that: every time her father was hauled off to a denunciation session, she would make a point of sitting in the front row and, if she saw someone beating her husband, she would rush over and start hitting back. 

Such brawls might leave her bruised and bleeding, but she would sit back down proudly in the front row, and the radicals lost their nerve and gave up beating her husband. 

After the Cultural Revolution ended, my friend’s father told her, with tears in his eyes, that had it not been for her mother he might well have taken his own life. 

There are many such stories.
After Mao’s death, the economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping brought dramatic changes to China, changes that permeated all levels of Chinese society. 

In a matter of 30 years, we went from one extreme to another, from an era where human nature was suppressed to an era where human impulses could run riot, from an era when politics was paramount to an era when only money counts.
Before, limited by social constraints, people could feel a modicum of freedom only within the family; with the loss of those constraints, that modest freedom which was once so prized now counts for little. 

Extramarital affairs have become more and more widespread and are no longer a cause for shame. 

It is commonplace for successful men to keep a mistress, or sometimes multiple mistresses – which people often jokingly compare to a teapot needing at least four or five cups to make a full tea set. 

In one case I know of, a wealthy businessman bought all 10 flats in the wing of an apartment complex. 

He installed his legally recognised wife in one flat, and his nine legally unrecognised mistresses in the other flats, one above the other, so that he could select at his pleasure and convenience on which floor of the building he would spend the night.
Having taken a couple of main roads that trace China’s journey over the past half-century, it is time to travel down some smaller ones. 

The first begins with Buddhist temples. 

During the Cultural Revolution, temples were closed down and some suffered serious damage. 

In my little town, Red Guards knocked off the heads and arms of every Buddhist sculpture in the local temples, which were then converted into storehouses. 

Afterwards, the damaged temples were restored and they all reopened, typically with two round bronze incense burners in front of the main hall: the first to invoke blessings for wealth, the second to invoke blessings for security.
When I visited temples in the 1980s, in the first censer I would often see a huge assembly of joss sticks, blazing away furiously, while in the second, a paltry handful would be smoking feebly. 

In those days China was still very poor, and, as most people saw it, when you didn’t have money, being safe didn’t amount to much. 

Now China is rich, and when you go into a temple you see joss sticks burning just as brightly in the security censer as in the wealth one – it is when you are rich that security acquires particular importance.
In China today, Buddhist temples are crowded with worshippers, while Taoist temples are largely deserted. 

A few years ago, I asked a Taoist abbot: “Taoism is native to China, so why is it not as popular as Buddhism, which came here from abroad?” 

His answer was short: “Buddhism has money and Taoism doesn’t.”
His explanation, although it rather took me aback, expresses a truth about Chinese society: money, or material interest, has become the main motivating force. 

In the 1980s, there was a series of student protests in China, culminating in the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989, when not just students but city dwellers all across the country joined the rallies. 

Back then, the demonstrations were largely motivated by concern for the fate of the nation and a desire to see democratic freedoms put in place. 

Today, people still demonstrate, but on a very small scale, and these demonstrations – “mass incidents” in official parlance – are completely different from the protests in the 1980s. 

Protests today are not geared towards transforming society – they are simply designed to protect the material interests of the group involved.
A few years ago, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, the education authorities announced that universities would be reserving more places for students from poor areas in west China. 

This triggered an uproar among the parents of Jiangsu high-school students preparing for the university entrance examination. 

Concerned that this new policy would reduce their children’s chances of getting into university, they marched in the streets to protest. 

Something similar happened a few years ago in Shanghai, when retirees took to the streets, worried that if welfare funds were allocated to poor areas, their own retirement benefits would be slashed.
These constant “mass incidents”, I should point out, reflect real issues. 

In recent years, for instance, many retired military veterans have gathered together across the country in protests against the stingy benefits and pensions they receive from the state. 

Back in the 1980s, they argue, veterans used to be more generously rewarded, relative to the cost of living. 

Today, even though China is richer, they receive little. 

Unsurprisingly, veterans feel shortchanged and disrespected.

A reconstructed traditional shopping street in Beijing, 2008. 

Other mass incidents, such as the widespread demonstrations by truck drivers in June, have been sparked by the fierce economic competition that now characterises life in China. 

In numerous industries, it has become common practice to try to secure more business by pushing down prices as low as they can possibly go. 

I was struck by this new reality a few years ago, at the end of a trip I had taken to South Africa for the World Cup. 

At the airport, I bought a vuvuzela in the airport as a souvenir, paying more than 100 yuan (£11). 

It was only when I got back to Beijing that I realised it was made in China. 

At the start, Chinese manufacturers had set their factory price at over five yuan a piece, but they soon found themselves being underbid. 

Some factories ultimately set their price as low as 2.2 yuan, when the production cost was 2 yuan per unit. 

The result of all this ferocious competition is that the profit margin keeps getting slimmer and slimmer, and those who suffer most are ordinary workers, who often see no increase in their salary even as their work hours are extended.
Now I need to take two other roads – the road of innovation and the road of nostalgia. 

Innovation first. 

Given the speed at which new technologies become dominant, you sometimes feel that there is no gap at all between new and old. 

Take mobile payments: in the space of just a few years, Alibaba’s Alipay mobile app and Tencent’s WeChat Pay app have been loaded on to practically every smartphone in the country. 

From big shopping malls to little corner shops – any place where a transaction can be made will have the scannable QR codes for these two payment platforms displayed in a prominent location. 

People just need to take their phone out of their pocket, do a quick scan and the payment is made. Even Chinese beggars have to keep up with the times: sometimes they too have a QR code handy, and they will ask passersby to scan it and use the mobile payment platform to dispense some spare change.
I recently went for more than a year without using cash or a credit card, because it is just so convenient to pay by phone instead. 

This July, though, when my English translator came to Beijing and my wife and I took him out for dinner, I went to scan the restaurant’s QR code but the transaction failed to go through. 

Instead of trying a second time, I suddenly felt an urge to pay in cash. 

When I pulled some banknotes out of my pocket, handed them to the cashier and received change in return, I felt a pleasant tingle of novelty.
This novelty is all the more remarkable given that just 30 years ago, when Chinese people went on business trips, they would worry so much about their money being stolen that they would hide cash in their underpants, the safest place for it. 

They would have a little pocket sewn on the inside, with a button for extra security. 

When a bill needed to be paid they would reach a hand into their underwear, grope around a bit, and pull out the requisite five-mao or one-yuan note, distinguishable by feel because one was smaller than the other. 

Women would withdraw to a secluded spot to retrieve their cash, but some men would have no such inhibitions and would rummage about in their underpants quite unabashedly.
When I turn to the road of nostalgia, I think of how my home county of Haiyan has transformed. When I was a boy, Haiyan had a total population of 300,000, with only 8,000 living in the county town itself. 

Now, the county has a population of 380,000, of whom 100,000 live in the county seat. 

Urbanisation has created a lot of problems, one of them being what happens after farmers move to cities. 

Local governments have expropriated large swathes of agricultural land to enable an enormous urban expansion program: some of the land is allocated to industry in order to attract investment, build factories and boost government revenues, but most of it is sold off at a high price to real-estate developers. 

The result is that high-rise apartment buildings now sprout in profusion where once only crops grew. After their land and houses in the countryside are expropriated, farmers “move upstairs” into housing blocks that the local government has provided in compensation. 

In wealthy counties, some farmers may be awarded up to three or four apartments, in which case they will live in one and rent out the other two or three; others may receive a large cash settlement.
But the questions then become: how do they adjust to city life? 

Now disconnected from the form of labour to which they were accustomed, what new jobs are there for them to do? 

Some drive taxis and some open little shops, but others just loaf around, playing mahjong all day, and others take to gambling and lose everything they have. 

Every time a community of dispossessed farmers settles into a new housing project, gambling operations will follow them there, because some of the residents will be flush with cash after the government payouts. 

In China, it is forbidden to open gambling establishments, but this doesn’t stop unlicensed operators from cramming their gambling accessories into a few large suitcases and lugging them around these new neighbourhoods, where they will talk their way into the homes of resettled farmers. 

The gambling outfits play hide-and-seek with the police, setting up shop here today, shifting to a new spot tomorrow.

Shanghai’s Pudong financial district, 2013. 

What is the situation back where the farmers came from – the houses in the countryside now expropriated but yet to be demolished? 

Peasants often have dogs to protect the home and guard the property. 

When peasants move to the cities, they no longer need guard dogs, so they leave them behind. 

And so you see poignant scenes in those empty, weed-infested farm compounds, as those abandoned dogs, all skin and bones, faithfully continue to perform sentry duty, now rushing from one end of the property to the other, standing on a high point and gazing off into the distance, their eyes burning with hope, longing for the past to return.
Wishing the past could return is a mood that is spreading through today’s society. 

Two patterns are typical. 

The more widespread of the two reflects the yearnings of the poor. 

China’s enhanced status as the world’s second largest economy has brought them few benefits; they continue to lead a life of grinding hardship. 

They cherish their memories of the past, for although they were poor then, the word “unemployed” was yet to exist. 

What’s more, in those days there was no moneyed class in a real sense: Mao’s monthly salary, for example, was just 404.8 yuan, compared to my parents’ joint income of 120 yuan. 

There was only a small gap between rich and poor, and social inequalities were limited.
A different form of nostalgia is prevalent among successful people who, having risen as high as they can possibly go, now find themselves in danger of tumbling off the cliff. 

Someone reported to me an exchange he had had with one of Shanghai’s ultra-rich, a man who had relied on bribery and other underhand methods to transform himself from a pauper into a millionaire. Realising he would soon be arrested and anticipating a long prison term, he stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of his huge, lofty, luxurious office and looked down at the construction workers far below, busy building the foundation of another skyscraper. 

How he wished he could be one of those workers, he said, for though their work was hard and their pay was low, they didn’t have to live in a state of such high anxiety. 

Faced with the prospect of losing everything they have gained, such people find themselves wishing their spectacular career hadn’t happened at all, wishing they could reclaim the past.
If the past were really to return – that past where you needed grain coupons to buy rice, oil coupons to buy cooking oil, cotton coupons to buy cloth, that past of dire material shortages, where the supply of goods was dictated by quotas – would those people who hanker for the past be happy? 

I doubt it.
As I see it, when the poor pine for the past, this is not a rational desire – it is simply a way of venting their feelings, the voicing of a frustration that is rooted in their discontent with current Chinese realities. 

And when that other, smaller group of people who have been successful in government or business realise they are going to spend the rest of their life behind bars and wish they could reclaim the past, this sentiment springs only from a wistful regret: “If I had known this was going to happen, I wouldn’t have got myself into this mess.”
I’m reminded of a joke that’s been doing the rounds. 

Here is what’s unfair about this society:
The pretty girl says: “I want a diamond ring!” She gets it.
The rich guy says: “I want a pretty girl!” He gets her.
I say: “I want a shower!” But there’s no water.
That last situation, I myself have experienced. 

In my early years, more often than not, water would cut off just as I was having a shower – sometimes at the precise moment when I had lathered myself in soap from head to toe. 

All I could do then was hammer on the pipe with my fists, at the same time raising my head so that the final few drops of water would rinse my eyes and save them from smarting; as for when the water would come on again, I could only wait patiently and hope heaven was on my side. 

Back then, nobody would have seen water stoppages at shower-time as a social injustice, because in those bygone days, there were no rich guys, and so pretty girls didn’t get diamond rings and rich guys didn’t get pretty girls.
It is often said that children represent the future. 

In closing, let me try to capture the changing outlook of three generations of Chinese boys as a way of mapping in simple terms China’s trajectory over the years. 

If you asked these boys what to look for in life, I think you would hear very different answers.
A boy growing up in the Cultural Revolution might well have said: “Revolution and struggle.”
A boy growing up in the early 1990s, as economic reforms entered their second decade, might well have said: “Career and love.”
Today’s boy might well say: “Money and girls.”

Die Endlösung der Uigurischfrage

Uighur children and parents are being ripped apart on a massive scale. It robs an entire generation of their Muslim identities.

By SIGAL SAMUEL

A Uighur family rides a scooter through Kashgar, East Turkestan.

Tahir Imin is the type of father who likes to take a video of his daughter each and every week. 

His phone is full of clips and photos of her: in a tutu, holding up a drawing, on a merry-go-round. Even at age six, she would ride piggyback on him as they made-believe she was a princess and he, a king. 

She’s seven years old now, and he’d probably still carry her aloft on his back if he could. 

But she’s in China. 

He’s in the U.S. 

And the last time they talked, about six months ago, she told him he’s a bad person.
Imin and his family are Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority concentrated in China’s East Turkestan colony.

The country has long suppressed Uighur religious identity, claiming it fuels separatism and extremism, and in the past year its crackdown has grown increasingly harsh. 

China has sent one million Uighurs to internment camps for what the government calls “re-education,” according to estimates cited by the UN and U.S. officials. 

The Independent and other media outlets have reported, based on interviews with former inmates, that camp administrators try to force Uighurs to renounce Islam—which the Communist Party has characterized in one official recording as an “ideological illness” and a “virus [in] their brain”—and get them to identify with the Chinese government rather than with the Uighur people.
The mass internment system doesn’t only affect the Uighurs incarcerated in it. 

It also involves family separation, which impacts thousands of children. 

When Uighur parents are sent to the camps, their children are taken away to state-run orphanages, which are proliferating to accommodate the growing demand, Emily Feng of the Financial Times has reported. 

Under state care, isolated from their relatives, the children are cut off from Uighur culture and language. 

Ultimately, Uighurs and experts told me, such assimilationist policies may enable China to reshape the identity of an entire generation of Uighurs.
“This is achieving the sinicization of children better than previous attempts,” said Rian Thum, a historian of Islam in China. 

“There was an attempt in the early 1900s to force all of what we would now call Uighur children to go to Chinese school. And it just failed miserably. Rich people would pay poor people to send their kids in their own kids’ place. All the education just got undone back in the home. But now, when you take the parents out of the picture, suddenly that sinicizing education can actually take root.”

Imin worries about what might happen to his daughter in such an environment. 

As an academic who promotes Uighur culture and a vocal critic of China’s policies toward his people, he remains in the U.S. because he fears he will be sent to an internment camp if he goes home. 

He said he first left China to go to graduate school, and that his wife and child can’t join him because the Chinese government took their passports. 

He added that several of his family members are already in the camps, including his brother and sister. 

His other relatives have deleted him as a social-media contact and refuse to be in touch, he said, because communicating with a Uighur abroad could make them look suspicious to authorities. 

Since arriving in the U.S. last year, he has had to content himself with weekly phone calls to his daughter. 

But during a call in February, she asked him to stop contacting her and her mother.
“You are a bad person. The Chinese police are good people,” he recalled his seven-year-old saying—under psychological duress, he believes. 

He said he hasn’t been able to reach her since.
Now, Imin has nearly no way of knowing where she is or whether she’s safe. 

His wife divorced him last year because staying married to him put a target on her back, he said, and since then they haven’t exchanged so much as a hello. 

The lack of contact has left him prone to panic. 

The day he and I were slated to talk, he sent me an apologetic email around 5:00 a.m., asking to reschedule: “I could not sleep the whole night wondering about my family back home and trying to contact them to know whether my wife and daughter are safe or not. Today is Eid [al-Adha] for Uighurs at home, when every family joins together to celebrate.” 

In the small hours of the night, he’d resorted to posting on Chinese social media, asking strangers if anyone had seen his wife or daughter in the street, but to no avail. 

Had his wife been rounded up and sent to a camp? 

If so, had his daughter been placed in an orphanage?
When parents are interned, younger children are sent to de facto orphanages known as “child welfare guidance centers” and older children are sometimes sent to state-run vocational schools, Feng reported. 

One former teacher told her: “The child is forbidden to go to school with the normal children because the parents have a political problem.” 

Children have been taken by the state even when grandparents pleaded to be able to keep them, according to Feng. 

She cited local media reports that East Turkestan has been building dozens of new, typically massive orphanages, with 18 popping up in a single county in the city of Kashgar last year. 

A worker at one East Turkestan orphanage described serious overcrowding and “terrible” conditions there, telling Radio Free Asia that children aged six months to 12 years are “locked up like farm animals in a shed.”

A Uighur man plays with his grandson in Kashgar, East Turkestan,

China’s crackdown has some Uighurs in East Turkestan worried that their own children will incriminate them, whether accidentally or because teachers urge kids to spy on their parents, according to Thum. 

“Everybody’s just scared to death of their children,” he told me. 

“They’re scared that their children will tell their teachers in school something about their religious habits that will get them singled out for punishment or internment in the camps.”
Imin recalled a phone call with his daughter last December, when they were joking about what he’ll be like when he gets old. 

His daughter said, “Maybe you will do the namaz practice just like my grandmother!” Namaz refers to Islamic prayer—a risky thing to mention, since Chinese authorities are known to surveil calls. 

“At that time,” Imin recounted, “her mother took away the phone and stopped the conversation. Maybe she scolded her after: ‘Why do you say about namaz, why do you say the name of the religious practice?’ Any kind of religious name, even salaam aleikum, everything was being considered very sensitive and could lead to us being sent to camps.”

A 24-year-old Uighur student in the U.S. told me a similar atmosphere of fear permeated his childhood in East Turkestan. 

He asked to remain anonymous for fear that his father, who he said is in an internment camp, would be tortured. 

“When I was in elementary school, I remember that people came to our classroom and tried to question us: ‘Do you guys have a Quran at home? Do your parents do some religious activities?’” the student said. 

“I lied to them. I said my parents don’t do any religious activities.” 

He also recalls his parents fearfully pleading with him not to go to mosque. 

“If I commit any ‘crime,’ I’m not the only one who could go to jail,” he explained. 

“Almost my entire bloodline will be in trouble.”
The climate of fear has only grown more intense in recent years—and it’s reminiscent of a time in the country’s more distant past. 

“It’s like the Cultural Revolution in terms of the particular effects on people: turning neighbors and family members against each other, making people think that a small slip-up in what they say can ruin their life forever,” said Thum. 

“It’s going to leave a massive social trauma for people to deal with for decades.”
That comparison resonates deeply with Murat Harri Uyghur, a 33-year-old doctor from East Turkestan who now lives in Finland, and who said both his parents were recently taken to internment camps. 

“During the Cultural Revolution, they took my father from my grandfather’s house,” he said. 

“They sent my grandfather to a labor camp because he was an educated person with a different ideology. And they took my father from his house to a Han Chinese couple’s house. He was six or seven. He stayed with them for years, until the Cultural Revolution ended. This is why my father speaks better Chinese than Uighur.”
He paused, then added, “I guess a similar thing is going on now. They forcefully took my father from his own home to put him somewhere where he doesn’t belong.”
China’s attempt to assimilate Uighur parents through internment camps and Uighur children through orphanages fits into what human-rights groups see as a broader campaign to reshape the Uighur family unit, all in the name of promoting social stability. 

In 2016, the government launched the Becoming Family Campaign, which has since expanded into a huge system of “home stays,” whereby officials temporarily move in with families in East Turkestan to surveil and report on them. 

A Human Rights Watch report explains it this way:
In December 2017, East Turkestan authorities mobilized more than a million cadres to spend a week living in homes primarily in the countryside. … 

In early 2018, East Turkestan authorities extended this “home stay” program. 

Cadres spend at least five days every two months in the families’ homes. 

There is no evidence to suggest that families can refuse such visits.
The visiting cadres observe and report on any “problems” or “unusual situations”—which can range from uncleanliness to alcoholism to the extent of religious beliefs—and act to “rectify” the situation. 

They teach the families Mandarin, the Han majority language; make them sing the Chinese national anthem and other songs praising the Chinese Communist Party; and ensure families participate in the weekly national flag-raising ceremony. … 

[Photos] show scenes of cadres living with minority families, including in the most intimate aspects of domestic life, such as cadres and family members making beds and sleeping together, sharing meals, and feeding and tutoring their children.
The Chinese government, Thum said, encourages Uighurs and the Han officials who stay with them to refer to each other as siblings, to foster a sense of kinship and project a benign image for the program. 

He saw this cross-ethnic assignment of fictive relatives on display last December when he visited the city of Turpan in East Turkestan. 

A kilometer-long outdoor walkway, the “Ethnic Unity Corridor,” was plastered with photos of Uighurs engaged in activities with their “relatives,” like playing sports and exchanging gifts. 

As recently as two weeks ago, the East Turkestan Justice Administration was still publicly promoting the meetings between “relatives” as a great success.
Taken together, the evidence suggests China is aiming to weaken Uighur identity through a series of interlocking policies. 

These policies have the calculated feel of mathematical operations: addition (of fictive relatives), subtraction (of parents from their children), and translation (of children from the home space to the state space).
A father like Imin can only hope that, in the end, all this will total something he can still recognize, something not all that different from the family he once knew.
For now, he’s holding onto a shred of hope: Someone has replied to his social-media post, assuring him that his ex-wife and daughter were recently seen walking in the streets. 

Knowing they were still together and relatively safe filled Imin with relief, he told me. 

“I said ‘oh my god!’ and deleted those posts very quickly. I got the news, I got the news they are safe,” he said, his voice breaking.
Asked how he thinks his seven-year-old girl understands her own identity now, he said, “I taught her that we are Uighur and we have a very special culture. Our food, language, clothes, history—everything is different. I taught her to be proud of that. Now she is being taught the Chinese culture... so maybe she lost a lot of things, or forgot everything I taught her. But she has a sense in her heart that she is different: She is Uighur. I believe that.”

The last Maoists in China find refuge in capitalist Hong Kong

Suppressed on the mainland, Mao Zedong’s torch-bearers head to the southern city to mark the anniversary of the Cultural Revolution
By Jun Mai, Choi Chi-yuk

Hong Kong may be the heartland of capitalism but it is also the improbable last redoubt of the unlikeliest of Chinese dissidents – China’s band of Maoists.
The city has become the only place where the self-proclaimed holdouts of Mao Zedong’s cause and staunch opponents of market economics can keep the revolutionary flame burning in public.
The Maoists claim to be the true keepers of the late chairman’s faith and are nostalgic for the Cultural Revolution, a destructive decade that the Chinese government now describes as a period of “turbulence”.
Chen Hongtao, one of dozens of mainland Maoists who headed across the border last week for a demonstration to mark the 52nd anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution, said the Chinese authorities had suppressed such gatherings.
The march was organised by Hong Kong’s Mao Zedong Thought Society, an organisation registered in Kowloon City district.
“This [march] is approved and protected by the Hong Kong police. But it’d be impossible to think of doing the same on the mainland,” Chen said.
“Some comrades from the mainland have failed to make the trip due to all sorts of pressure and restrictions.
“It’s very peculiar for a country that claims to be a socialist nation ruled by the Communist Party.”
Those who did make it crossed the border in blue Mao-era military uniforms and waving hammer-and-sickle flags, according to a video circulating on social media.

Despite Beijing’s official line that Maoism is a central part of its ideology, hardline Maoists are very critical of the central government’s policies, blaming the market reforms launched after Mao’s death for widening the country’s wealth gap and rampant corruption.
Chen also lashed out at Beijing’s high-profile commemorations of the bicentenary of Marx’s birth, which included Xi Jinping saying in a speech the party had inherited and innovated with Marxism.
“[The government] never mentions that the core of Marxism is class struggle, or the ultimate mission of the Communists is to bring an end to private ownership,” Chen said.

'My hair turned white': report lifts lid on China's forced confessions

Those coerced into confessing are dressed by police, handed a script and given directions on how to deliver lines
The Guardian

 Chinese courts have a conviction rate over 99% and cases rely heavily on confessions.

China must stop airing forced confessions from human rights activists, a campaign group has said in a report that details how detainees are coerced into delivering scripted remarks.
There have been at least 45 forced televised confessions in China since 2013, according to the report from Safeguard Defenders, a human rights NGO in Asia. 

The group called on the international community to put pressure on the Chinese government to end the practice and recommended imposing sanctions on executives at China’s state broadcaster, including asset freezes and travel bans.
Those coerced into confessing describe being dressed by police and handed a script they are required to memorise, and even being given directions on how to deliver certain lines or cry on cue, the report says. 

One person described enduring seven hours of recording for a television piece that ultimately amounted to several minutes. 

Others reported police ordering retakes of confessions they were unhappy with.
Some occur in jailhouse settings, with the accused wearing an orange prison vest and sometimes seated behind bars, while others are made to look more neutral. 

The confessions are almost always aired before a formal conviction, violating Chinese law asserting a presumption of innocence.
Chinese courts have a conviction rate over 99% and cases rely heavily on confessions. 

Five of the 37 people described in the report who have confessed on Chinese television have since publicly retracted their confessions.
Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 there has been a wholesale crackdown on civil society and dissent, leading to hundreds of arrests targeting human rights activists and the lawyers that defend them. 

The practice of forced confessions was especially prominent during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, a decade of political upheaval during which “counter-revolutionaries” were paraded through the streets and forced to confess to their alleged crimes.
“[The police] threatened that if I did not cooperate with them they would sentence me to jail time, I’d lose my job, my family would leave me and I’d lose my reputation for the rest of my life,” said one person quoted in the report, identified only as Li. 

“I was only 39 years old, my hair turned white with the enormous pressure and torture of it all.”

Peter Dahlin, a former China-based NGO worker from Sweden, was forced to say he had violated Chinese law in a televised confession in 2016. 

He said the purpose, especially when foreigners were involved, was to shape the conversation from the beginning and preempt any international criticism.
“This goes to show this is not done simply by police for murky propaganda purposes but directly by the state as a part of foreign policy,” he said.
Confessions by a range of suspects have been aired on China Central Television, the nation’s official broadcaster, including those by a British corporate investigator, a Chinese-born Swedish book publisher and dozens of Chinese activists who agitated for change.
Gui Minhai, the bookseller, has been paraded in front of media outlets on three separate occasions. He went missing from his apartment in a Thai resort town in late 2015 only to reappear months later in a Chinese jail, confessing to a traffic incident from 2003.
“These ‘confessions’ are about the crushing of dissent wherever it may arise,” David Bandurski, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project, said in a conversation on the website China File last year. 

“The supposed crimes are of middling importance relative to the act of submission itself, the knuckling under to authority. In a word, then, this is political bullying.
“As Xi Jinping trumpets the principle of rule of law, these clearly forced admissions telegraph exactly the opposite message.”

The Great Dictator

Xi Jinping should heed the lessons from history, former official says
By Simon Denyer

Bao Tong, the most senior Communist party official to be jailed for sympathizing with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, at his apartment in Beijing. 

BEIJING — Twice Bao Tong rose within the Chinese Communist Party’s hierarchy, and twice he was dramatically cut down. 

He has endured long spells in jail and “re-education” for failing to fall into line behind the hard-liners holding power.
So it is perhaps no surprise that this 85-year-old views the Chinese president’s latest attempt to impose his dogma on the entire nation — under the banner of Xi Jinping Thought — with a considerable degree of skepticism.
“In China’s history of more than 3,000 years, there were other leaders who tried to use their own thoughts to regulate the thoughts of others,” he said in an interview in his modest Beijing apartment. “But none were successful. There were only failed attempts.”
Bao was the most senior Communist Party official to be incarcerated for sympathizing with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, thrown into jail May 28, a week before a military crackdown that left hundreds if not thousands dead.
He was to remain in solitary confinement for seven years, and even today lives under constant surveillance, with three agents following him on foot and others in a car whenever he leaves his home. 

Yet he still manages an occasional interview with the foreign media, his manner affable, his opinions trenchant, and with a cigarette never far from his lips.
In the late 1980s, Bao had worked as a top aide to Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, helping push China in a more liberal, reformist direction — until the June 4 crackdown ended that dream. 

Zhao was demoted, purged and placed under house arrest for expressing sympathy for the students’ demands and opposing Deng Xiaoping’s decision to send in the troops.
Bao was thrown into Beijing’s maximum-security Qincheng Prison, a destination for many of the nation’s most important political prisoners.
Today, a photograph of Zhao sits proudly on a shelf in his apartment, and he talks affectionately of a man who “treated everyone as equals” and wanted to turn over decision-making power from the party to the people.
There is no such affection in his comments about Xi Jinping, whom he describes as a “hard-liner” and a throwback to Mao Zedong.
Last month, the Communist Party enshrined Xi’s name in its constitution as it granted him five more years in power: Xi Jinping Thought now sits alongside Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory in the party’s ideological canon.
“It is called Xi Jinping Thought, the new thought, but they are just old ideas, not new ideas,” said Bao. 

“Ideas like ‘the party leads everything’ — they are exact quotes from Mao Zedong. Why call them new ideas?”
Bao knows only too well the madness that can be unleashed when one man rises to absolute power over the Chinese people, and when officials are too scared to tell him when he is wrong.
“The mistakes Mao made were all huge,” he said. 

“Mao didn’t recognize his mistake when the Great Leap Forward led to a famine that caused millions of deaths; he didn’t recognize his mistake in the Cultural Revolution in which tens of millions were purged.”
In 1966, only days after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Bao, who was working as a bureaucrat, was denounced as a “capitalist roader.”
Barred from his office, he spent a year cleaning toilets, another year doing hard labor in a re-education camp and the better part of a decade working the fields of rural China. 

He was only rehabilitated, like millions of others, after Mao’s death in 1976.
“There was only one slogan at that time — ‘Down with anyone who opposes Chairman Mao,’ ” he said. 

“But in the end Mao failed, too. He failed so badly his wife was labeled a counterrevolutionary, and so he himself became part of a counterrevolutionary family.”
Mao’s widow Jiang Qing was arrested after his death for her role in the Cultural Revolution and sentenced to life imprisonment, finally committing suicide in 1991.
Bao also draws lessons from much further back in his nation’s history to warn of the dangers of unchecked power, starting with King Li of the Zhou dynasty, who ruled in the 9th century B.C. 

The General History of China, an 18th-century text by French Jesuit historian Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, describes Li as proud, conceited and cruel.
Indeed, so conscious was he of how much he was hated, he forbade his subjects “on pain of death to converse together, or even whisper to one another,” Du Halde wrote, so that people could be seen walking the streets with downcast eyes, “in mournful silence.”
Eventually, peasants and soldiers rose up against Li, and he died in exile.
Emperor Qin Shi Huang is remembered as the first ruler of a united China in the 3rd century B.C., and for his mausoleum guarded by the Terracotta Army, but he also banned and burned books, and executed scholars.
The Hongwu Emperor, who established the Ming dynasty in the 14th century, expected total obedience from his subjects, inflicting torture and death on those who opposed him, including, it is said, some of his own advisers.
But in the end, Bao said, these rulers’ dynasties foundered and were overthrown.
“If you want to imitate Chairman Mao, that’s okay, but the problem is whether you will succeed,” Bao said, referring to Xi. 

“I can’t say whether his attempt will succeed or not. Only time will tell.”
Bao blames Deng for ending the dream of political change in China, and for instigating an era of corruption and growing economic inequality that “broke” Chinese society.
But he has no faith in Xi’s anti-corruption campaign, which the government says has led to some form of punishment for more than a million officials.
“It’s a selective anti-corruption campaign. Its nature is the selective protection of corruption,” he said. 

“When you purge some corrupt officials, you are protecting the others. You protect the corrupt system, and you protect corrupt people who support you.”
Bao was one of the first signatories of Charter 08, a manifesto for democratic changes issued in late 2008. 

The only way to fight corruption properly, he says, is for independent supervision of the effort.
“Power tends to corrupt,” he said, quoting Britain’s Lord Acton, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Academic prostitution: Cambridge University Press sells its soul over Chinese censorship

Academics decry publisher’s decision to comply with a Chinese request to block more than 300 articles from leading China studies journal

By Tom Phillips in Beijing

A list of the blocked articles, published by CUP, shows they focus overwhelmingly on topics China’s one-party state regards as taboo.

The world’s oldest publishing house, Cambridge University Press, has been accused of being an accomplice to the Communist party’s bid to whitewash Chinese history after it agreed to purge hundreds of politically-sensitive articles from its Chinese website at the behest of Beijing’s censors.
The publisher confirmed on Friday that it had complied with a Chinese request to block more than 300 articles from the China Quarterly, a leading China studies journal, in order “to ensure that other academic and educational materials we publish remain available to researchers and educators” in China.
A list of the blocked articles, published by CUP, shows they focus overwhelmingly on topics China’s one-party state regards as taboo, including the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, Mao Zedong’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong’s fight for democracy and ethnic tensions in East Turkestan and Tibet.
They include articles by some of the world’s top China specialists including Columbia University’s Andrew Nathan, George Washington University’s David Shambaugh, and Harvard University scholars Roderick MacFarquhar and Ezra Vogel.
A piece by Dutch historian Frank Dikötter and a book review by the Guardian’s former China correspondent, John Gittings, about the Cultural Revolution were also censored.
In its statement, CUP insisted it was committed to freedom of thought and expression and had been “troubled by the recent increase in requests of this nature” from China. 

The publisher vowed to raise the issue with the “revelant agencies” in Beijing at an upcoming book fair.
But on Saturday, as reports of the publisher’s move spread, it faced a growing outcry from academics and activists who called for the decision to be reversed.
“Pragmatic is one word, pathetic more apt,” tweeted Rory Medcalf, the head of the national security college at the Australian National University.
John Garnaut, a longtime China correspondent and former adviser to the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, described it as “an extraordinary capitulation” to China.
Renee Xia, the international director of the Chinese Human Rights Defenders network, accused the publisher of having “sold its soul for millions of Chinese govt dollars”.
Andrew Nathan, whose name appears three times in the list of censored articles, told the Guardian: “If the Press acceded to a Chinese request to block access to selected articles, as I gather is the case, it violated the trust that authors placed in it and has compromised its integrity as an academic publisher.”
Nathan, the editor of a seminal work on the Tiananmen crackdown, added: “I imagine [CUP] might argue that it was serving a higher purpose, by compromising in order to maintain the access by Chinese scholars to most of the material it has published. This is similar to the argument by authors who allow Chinese translations of their work to be censored so that the work can reach the Chinese audience. [But] that’s an argument I have never agreed with.”
“Of course, there may also be a financial motive, similar to Bloomberg, Facebook, and others who have censored their product to maintain access to the Chinese market. This is a dilemma, but if the West doesn’t stand up for its values, then the Chinese authorities will impose their values on us. It’s not worth it.”
In an open letter two US scholars, Greg Distelhorst and Jessica Chen Weiss, complained that CUP’s move meant Chinese academics and scholars would now only have access to a “sanitized” version of their country’s history.
“To me the problem is pretty straightforward: the problem is publishing a politically-curated version of Chinese history and doing so in the name of Cambridge University,” Distelhorst, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Guardian.
“This makes Cambridge University Press an active participant in rewriting history … When a government asks you to censor a piece of scholarship, that request is fundamentally opposed to a principle of academic freedom that I believe to be important to Cambridge and to many universities.”
In a statement the editor of China Quarterly, Tim Pringle, voiced “deep concern and disappointment” at the tightening controls in China. 

“This restriction of academic freedom is not an isolated move but an extension of policies that have narrowed the space for public engagement and discussion across Chinese society.”
Distelhorst said he sympathised with CUP and particularly the editors of China Quarterly: “Receiving censorship requests puts them in a really difficult position and forces a lot of hard trade-offs ... [But] I hope they will reconsider their decision to selectively censor articles and then present the censored version of the journal to the Chinese public.”
Since Xi Jinping took power nearly five years ago Beijing has dramatically stepped up its efforts to control Chinese academia, with the president last year calling for universities to be transformed into Communist party “strongholds”.
A growing number of intellectuals – the majority political scientists or international relations and law experts – have sought refuge in the US. 

“It is not as dramatic as the refugees from Hitler; not as dramatic as the enormous number who turned up [after Tiananmen] and we had to deal with. But it is growing and I am seeing them,” the veteran China expert Jerry Cohen, who has been helping some of the refugee scholars, said in an interview last year.
Foreign academics have also been targeted, with Chinese authorities denying visas to academics deemed to be focusing on unwelcome topics. 

Until now, however, foreign academic journals appeared to have largely avoid scrutiny.
Nathan said China’s list of censorship demands to the CUP appeared to have been generated “by a naive machine search of article and review titles” which had targeted key words and names deemed sensitive. 

He called the move “a useless overreach” by Beijing.
“What can it accomplish? I’m sorry to say that information control often works. But if you have so much money, staff, and time, that you can burrow down to the level of censoring academic publications in a foreign language that could only be used by your own academic community, then I think your censorship organs are over funded and you would do well to cut their budgets. As the saying goes, this is lifting up a stone only to drop it on one’s own foot.”
One of the censored China Quarterly articles captures the kind of material China’s authoritarian leaders would prefer to see buried.
In his 2016 contribution, The Once and Future Tragedy of the Cultural Revolution, Harvard’s MacFarquhar writes about the burgeoning Mao-esque personality cult around Xi and ponders “the vigorous attempt by the regime to consign the Cultural Revolution to the dustbin of history by discouraging research and teaching on the subject”.
MacFarquhar writes: “The dangers of inducing national amnesia is encapsulated in George Santayana’s famous dictum: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’”