China's Final Solution

East Turkestan: China's actions could be precursors to genocide

Campaign group urges foreign governments to halt ‘business as usual’ relations with Beijing until action is taken
By Kate Lyons

A gate of what is officially known as a ‘vocational skills education centre’ in Dabancheng, in East Turkestan

Uighur leaders have called on democratic governments to confront China over its treatment of ethnic minority Uighur Muslims, saying the government’s actions against the ethnic minority group are “precursors to genocide”.
On a visit to Australia, leaders of the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), based in Washington, said governments, businesses, academics and thinktanks all had a responsibility to stop “business as usual” relations with China.
They also warned of China’s “extra-territorial reach”, which saw coercion and threats against Australian Uighurs, who were unable to escape the reach of the Chinese state.
“It’s time for action, something horrific is happening on our watch,” said Nury Turkel, chair of the board for the UHRP.
An estimated one million Muslims are being held in detention camps in East Turkestan by the Chinese government as part of a sweeping crackdown on the rights of the minority group.
The authorities in Beijing call the camps “vocational training centres”, saying those detained within them are taught language, culture and vocational skills.
In August, the UN called for the immediate release of people from the camps, saying they had received many credible reports that a million ethnic Uighurs were held in what resembled a “massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy”.

Mass murder cannot be ruled out
Turkel cited James Millward, a historian at Georgetown University, who called cultural cleansing of Uighurs “Beijing’s attempt to find a final solution to the East Turkestan problem”. 

Turkel said: “those of us who are students of history know what that means. We’ve seen how it ends when a government or an authoritarian leader promotes that sort of ideology”, saying the Communist party of China had likened Uighurs to “a cancerous tumour”.
Asked whether he thought the Holocaust was the best historical comparison for the situation in East Turkestan, Turkel said: “The Chinese have not publicly shown any sign of gassing Uighurs” but that the few reports coming out of the camps suggested people were dying inside them. 

He added: “We may see mass murder.”
Louisa Greve, director for external affairs for the UHRP, said: “Academics believe that when you look at the progression of policies that dehumanise ethnic groups, you have to say that mass murder cannot be ruled out. We see many, many of the precursors of cultural and physical genocide.”
Thomas Cliff, research fellow at the ANU college of Asia and the Pacific said what was going on in East Turkestan was “a form of genocide, although it’s not killing everybody”.
“The objective seems to be to wipe out all traces of what’s distinct about being a Uighur,” he said.
Some people are coming out of the camps and saying ‘kill me, I don’t want to bear this anymore’,” he said.
Greve said government action needed to be taken in response to the repression of Uighurs, which included forcible separation of children from their parents, reports of forced marriage between Uighurs and Han Chinese, and the banning of Uighur language and culture.
Greve said Uighurs, including herself and fellow panellists, had received threats and coercion from the Chinese government to infiltrate or spy upon members of the Uighur community in the US and had been threatened with reprisals against their families in China if they didn’t stop their activism.
Australian Uighurs told the Guardian of China’s extra-territorial reach, with one woman saying a Chinese spy came to her business in Sydney where he quizzed her about her political views, her opinion on the situation in East Turkestan and the ethnicity of her employees.
Another Australian permanent resident said she is required by Chinese police to take a photo of herself holding her passport and the day’s paper and send it to them every few weeks.
Sultan Hiwilla, a prominent Australia-Uighur activist based in Sydney, said he had not been able to speak to his family in East Turkestan since 2014 and does not know what has happened to them, but a message reached him a few months ago through a friend telling him to stop his activism because it was affecting his family.
But he said he could not stop his work: “It’s not only affecting my family it’s affecting all Uighur people, if I stop, it will keep going, some one needs to make this sacrifice.”

Chinazism: The Next Holocaust

China’s Mass Internment Camps Have No End in Sight

1 million Uighurs have disappeared without trial. Worse may come.
BY RIAN THUM

Local police patrol a village in Hotan prefecture, in China's East Turkestan colony, on Feb. 17. The Uighur area has become one of the most terrorized places in the world.
Last summer, online links between China’s East Turkestan colony and the rest of the world began to go dark.
Uighurs, who make up the largest ethnic group in East Turkestan, started cutting friends and family members abroad from their contacts on WeChat, the dominant online communication platform in China.
Many asked their family members not to call them by phone.
One family I spoke to smuggled a final communication through the chat function integrated into a video game.
In 2009, the government had shut down the internet entirely for almost a year, but this was something different.
Entire minority groups were cutting themselves off from the outside world, one contact deletion at a time.
As Uighurs were disappearing from cross-border conversations, distinctive new building complexes began cropping up throughout the region: large construction projects surrounded by double fences and guard towers, all clearly visible on satellite imagery. 
Hundreds of thousands of minority men and women, mostly Uighurs but also others, have disappeared into these compounds in the last year, usually with no notice to family members and no charges of illegal activity.
As police have struggled to round up enough Uighurs to meet internment quotas, the tiniest signs of potential disloyalty to the authorities, such as giving up drinking or not greeting officials, have become grounds for disappearance. 
Contact with the outside world is one of those signs of purported untrustworthiness.

Given the dark consequences for communication with foreigners, it is surprising how much those of us outside of China have been able to discover about the mass-internment program for minorities in East Turkestan.
Based in part on leaks by an unusually forthcoming police official in Kashgar (now himself incommunicado), scholars have estimated that about 5 to 10 percent of the adult Uighur population has been interned without criminal charge. 
In one township, police told reporters from Radio Free Asia that they were expected to send 40 percent of the population, including nearly 100 percent of men between the ages of 20 and 50, to the internment system.
For international audiences, the Chinese state has denied the existence of what have come to be known as “re-education camps,” but local officials continue to build new compounds, and openly call for construction contracts online, providing details on everything from camp sizes (up to 883,000 square feet) to the types of materials (“bomb-proof surfaces”) required. 
A few internees have been released for one reason or another and shared their stories of camp life with reporters, with conditions ranging from uncomfortable to literally torturous.
But questions remain, including the crucial matters of what the internment network is designed to do and what is in store for its victims.
The range of interpretations is wide.
Local media in East Turkestan present the camps as short-term rehabilitation facilities.

The Next HolocaustUighurs with family members and friends now gone for six months and more fear much worse.
And the appearance of a recruitment notice for 50 “stouthearted” guards at a crematorium outside of Urumqi, the regional capital, has fed fears that the Chinese government is preparing for mass killing.
While the intent behind policy choices is never fully knowable, particularly in an opaque state like China, the last year has produced leaked data, online traces, and eyewitness reports that provide clues about the motives of decision-makers in East Turkestan.
Viewed in the context of the long history of resistance to Chinese rule in East Turkestan and the Chinese attempts to eliminate it, some motives become clear.
Since the Qing dynasty’s conquest of the region in 1759, China-based states have confronted the difficulties of outsider rule in the region they dubbed Xinjiang—the “new frontier”—including rebellions in 1864, 1933, and 1945 that led to the establishment of short-lived independent states.
At the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, only 6 percent of East Turkestan’s population was Han Chinese, and the Chinese authorities tended to view the indigenous inhabitants, particularly the majority Uighur ethnic group, with condescension and suspicion.
By 1982, pro-settler policies had increased the proportion of ethnic Chinese in East Turkestan to 40 percent, but authorities continued to worry about indigenous resistance as a threat to their state’s territorial aspirations.
Even after two centuries of China-based rule, the indigenous inhabitants of East Turkestan had more in common culturally with Central Asia and the Middle East than with China, and resistance, both peaceful and violent, was common.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made sense of this resistance in different ways over the years.
In the 1990s, it was mostly seen as ethno-nationalist “separatism” fueled by pan-Turkic ideology. After 2001, when the PRC aligned itself with the U.S. “global war on terror,” authorities began to speak more often of “terrorism” supposedly bred by religious “extremism,” borrowing heavily from Islamophobic discourses in the West. 
What the two approaches share is an assumption that belief systems and ideas are what cause people to resist, not restrictive cultural policies, economics, or relative status within society, and certainly not unfair treatment by a colonizing state.
Until recently, official explanations for acts of resistance dealt with the unsettling prospect of discontent by insisting that only a handful of bad apples held beliefs opposed to CCP rule.
Authorities in East Turkestan invested their energy in controlling those “evil forces” through security measures.
This approach peaked in the response to the deadly protests-turned-riots of 2009.
In July of that year, Uighurs in Urumqi protested the deadly beating of Uighur factory workers outside Shenzhen.
When police tried to break up an initially peaceful protest, it degenerated into rioting, and Uighurs murdered almost 200 bystanders, mostly Han Chinese.
State media blamed a purported plot by Uighur exiles in Europe and the United States.
The People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary security force, flooded the region, setting up checkpoints and fortified guard posts throughout East Turkestan.
Convoys of olive-green troop transports paraded continuously around town centers.
Not forgetting the importance of Uighur hearts and minds, they bore banners promoting “ethnic unity.”
In the following years, authorities blanketed cities with security cameras and placed restrictions on travel for rural Uighurs.
The early 2000s had seen a steady tightening of state controls on Uighur movement, religious practices, and expression, but the fallout of the 2009 uprising accelerated the transformation of East Turkestan into a full-bore racist police state.
Today’s internment camp system reflects a shift in official ideas about the scale of ideological threats. Under Chen Quanguo, East Turkestan’s top official since August of 2016, state policy treats all Uighurs as inherently opposed to the party, an implicit recognition that huge numbers of Uighurs are not, in fact, grateful for Chinese rule. 
In this view, not only are wrong beliefs the root of Uighur dissatisfaction with the party, but those wrong beliefs are endemic to Uighur, Kazakh, and other minority groups.
It is not surprising, then, that the most common officially cited purpose for the internment camps is to purify people’s thoughts, “eliminating extremism” and instilling a love for the party.
A recorded announcement leaked this month from East Turkestan’s Communist Party Youth League, designed to calm rampant fears about the re-education camps, explained that camps “treat and cleanse the virus from their brains.” 
The names used for camps have varied widely, both for the same camp over time and from one camp to the next, but most have included the word “transformation”—for example, “concentrated education transformation center.”
The handful of people released from the camps and able to share their stories describe a variety of indoctrination techniques aimed to instill love for the Communist Party of China and its leader, Xi Jinping.
“Teachers” and guards compel internees to chant slogans, watch videos on how to identify Islamic extremism, study Confucian texts, give thanks to Chairman Xi Jinping before meals, renounce Islam, write self-criticisms, and denounce fellow internees. 
Some of these, particularly self-criticisms and denunciations, are staples of CCP indoctrination programs as old as the People’s Republic itself, techniques that gave the English language the word “brainwashing,” a direct translation of the Chinese xi nao.
These go-to CCP techniques are combined with what are presented as modern psychological approaches, as re-education centers recruit staff with psychological training.
The content of the indoctrination reflects a new emphasis on nationalism throughout the PRC.
State media outlets tout the party as China’s savior as they always have, but “China” is now more tightly linked to the culture of the ethnic majority, the Han Chinese. 
In this view, religions deemed foreign, for example Islam and Christianity, are seen as threats, as is the purportedly Chinese religion of Buddhism when it is practiced by non-Han people such as Tibetans. 
More than any leader since Mao Zedong, Xi Jinping has promoted the idea that he himself is the embodiment and protector of the Chinese nation.
Outside of China, it is difficult to find informed observers who think that forced indoctrination, limits on cultural expression, and restricting religious practice are likely to do anything other than breed anger at the party.
In East Turkestan however, faith in these techniques seems to run high, and there is very little room for those officials who doubt them to voice concerns.
Before 2016, local officials enjoyed some room for improvisation as they attempted to implement central policies.
In many counties they created programs clearly aimed at compelling ideological transformation.
The strangest of these were the coerced line-dancing competitions that spread across the region in 2014. 
These were supposed to move people away from “extremist” forms of Islam that forbid dance. 
In other places they pushed children to sign promises not to believe in God and arranged public ceremonies for pledging loyalty to the CCP.
But the internment camps play other important roles. They allow police to physically remove whole classes of people from society. 
In at least three counties, police have reported that they interned all Uighurs born between 1980 and 2000, calling them an “untrustworthy generation.” 
Interned Uighurs are physically unable to engage in public resistance to CCP rule.
Physical removal also bolsters CCP programs to assimilate Uighur children to Chinese culture, by removing them from the care of their parents. 
One Kashgar-area county alone has seen the construction of 18 new orphanages over the last year to accommodate children left behind by interned parents, where they will be taught entirely in Chinese.
At a wider scale, the camps serve as the punitive threat behind the state’s cultural and ideological re-engineering of Uighur society.
Without the need for legal charges, authorities can arbitrarily disappear any member of an ethnic minority group for the smallest perceived disobedience. 
In January, an instructor at a daytime re-education course told his students that they would be sent to the internment camps if they could not memorize both the oath of allegiance to the Communist Party and the national anthem in Chinese within three days, according to village police who spoke to Radio Free Asia.
The day before the deadline, a class member in his 40s who was having difficulty memorizing the text hanged himself.
The threat of internment is magnified by a surveillance apparatus of unprecedented scale, marrying old-fashioned manpower—such as armed police and neighborhood committees of the sort that fueled East Germany’s police state—with high-tech, networked surveillance equipment.
Uighurs are subject to regular mandatory home visits by “work teams” composed of party members and other “loyal” state representatives. 
These visits range in duration from daytime visits to multi-day stays, during which the visitors interview their hosts about their thoughts and habits and inspect their homes for prohibited items. 
The results of these interviews are normally kept secret, but in one case a visiting team boasted online of their effectiveness: they sent one-fifth of a village population for internment and indoctrination. 
Children assist in the policing of private spaces, as schools encourage them to report on their parents’ religious practices in the home.
Cities are blanketed with surveillance cameras. 
Checkpoints at market entrances, train stations, and even book stores scan people’s faces and check them against their identification cards using facial recognition software.
Smartphone owners are required to install government spyware that reports on content stored in the phone. 
According to a report by Human Rights Watch, the enormous amounts of data generated by these electronic monitoring systems are combined with the information from work teams’ home visits and entered into an “integrated joint operations platform” that employs big-data analysis to predict which individuals will engage in acts of disloyalty.
Police at checkpoints regularly check phones for “illegal” content.
Attempts to drop out of this surveillance web are dangerous; one police station reported interning people who stopped using their phones.
The near-complete eradication of privacy and the massive scale of internment appears to be changing Uighurs’ behavior.
Ten years ago, bans on the Uighur language in schools, popular novels (often printed by government-run presses), and private prayers and rituals seemed unenforceable.
Local teachers ignored rules about language use, banned books were easy to find in private bookstores, and illegal rituals like Sufi dance remained common.
Today Uighurs rush to burn their books and strain to guess what will make their home visitors view them as loyal, out of fear that they will join the many family members and friends whom they have personally seen disappear over the last 18 months.
The re-education camps also cast their shadows beyond East Turkestan and even China’s borders.
East Turkestan security personnel have been calling Uighurs working in the rest of China back to their hometowns, where, more often than not, they disappear. 
Police track the activities of Uighurs from their locales even when they reside abroad, demanding photographic evidence of their presence at universities or offices. 
Some are commanded to return home to certain detention.
Uighurs comply out of fear for their families.
Some who have spoken out about the situation in their homeland have seen large numbers of relatives disappear. 
Depression is rampant among Uighur exiles.
All known cases of Uighurs returning to China in the last year have resulted in the returnee’s disappearance.
Across the world, Uighurs with expiring passports or visas are currently weighing whether to claim asylum in foreign lands and never see their families again, or to face near-certain internment upon their return to East Turkestan.

A Uighur woman walks by a closed Islamic school in the old town of Kashgar in China’s East Turkestan colony on July 1, 2017. 

The most widely circulated estimate of the number of people interned in re-education camps—several hundred thousand to just over 1 million—was developed by Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology from leaks that surfaced in January and February.
In the half-year since then, Uighurs, Kazakhs, and others have continued to disappear.
Uighurs with family in East Turkestan and academics who have visited in the past few months have only rarely reported individual releases, usually of older people with health problems.
Officials in one Kucha district have told reporters that none of the approximately 5,000 to 6,000 residents sent to the camps over the last two years have been released. 
Tellingly, the state has continued to invest in camp construction.
In response to growing global scrutiny, the Chinese state has deleted its existing online bid solicitations for re-education camp construction and ceased posting new announcements. 
Even so, public solicitations from March and April suggest that new camps will open later this year or early next year.
The expanding re-education internment system is interconnected with the ordinary prison system, which has seen its own expansion.
Last year, East Turkestan accounted for 13 percent of China’s indictments, despite having only 1.5 percent of the country’s population.
The number of arrests is even larger, accounting for 21 percent of China’s total. 
For many detainees, the first stop is a kanshousuo, a temporary detention center.
Shawn Zhang, a Chinese graduate student in Canada who has used Google satellite images to document the “construction boom” of re-education centers and other detention facilities across East Turkestan, notes that the kanshousuo account for many facilities.
Google imagery from April 22 shows one such structure near Khotan being expanded by 150 percent.
An official in Karakash explained that re-education camps also act as gateways to the formal prison system.
He reported that some districts have quotas for a percentage of internees who must be sent to prisons after evaluation of their performance at re-education camps.
The construction of new re-education camps suggests that the space freed up by the prison transfers is not sufficient to house the continued influx of internees sent for forced indoctrination.
The February numbers may have been eclipsed in the months since, but they are historically significant nonetheless.
At the upper end of the Zenz estimate, East Turkestan’s re-education camp population exceeds the peak daily inmate numbers of Nazi concentration camps (714,211 in 1945, according to Nikolaus Wachsmann’s 2015 book, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps), is several times the number of the Japanese citizens interned by the United States during World War II, and amounts to about half the capacity of the Soviet gulag system, which held around 2 million people.
It remains to be seen which of these precedents the massive East Turkestan internment infrastructure will ultimately most resemble.
The permanent construction style of the re-education camps, visible in satellite images that clearly document their building process, suggests that the Chinese state, left to its own devices, intends to maintain the camp system for the foreseeable future. 
Barring a complete abandonment of the camp system, the most moderate plausible outcome is that at some point authorities dramatically reduce the number of internees, maintaining recalcitrant inmates in the camps, and preserving the capacity to return huge numbers to extrajudicial internment.
In this outcome, the camps would continue to uphold East Turkestan’s racist police state and support the CCP’s assimilationist program of cultural and ideological cleansing.
Such a dire prediction could, however, turn out to be optimistic.
Historically, extrajudicial internment systems have often deviated from their original purposes.
A lack of due process, combined with the immense power that mass-internment programs give states to control the fates of minority populations, makes camps like those in East Turkestan easy to adapt to new goals.
The eruption of war, acts of violence by oppressed minorities, guards’ long inurement to abusive treatment of prisoners, and ideological shifts at the top of the bureaucracy all have the potential, alone or in interaction, to turn the camps to darker purposes.

The Final Solution
Local officials have already expressed dehumanizing outlooks on the role of the re-education camps as “eradicating tumors” and “spraying chemicals on the crops to kill the weeds.” 
Should authorities decide that forced indoctrination has widely failed, much of East Turkestan’s minority population will be framed as irredeemable.
And with the state-controlled Global Times claiming, in response to the recent U.N. condemnation of China’s racist policies in East Turkestan, that “all measures can be tried” in the pursuit of China’s “stability,” mass murder and genocide do not look like impossible outcomes.

China’s Hidden Massacres: An Interview with Tan Hecheng

The mass murder of nine thousand Chinese by explicit order of regional Communist Party officials during the height of the Cultural Revolution. 

By Ian Johnson

Tan Hecheng, author of The Killing Wind, on China’s Cultural Revolution, at Widow’s Bridge where many were murdered in the fall of 1967, November 2016

Tan Hecheng might seem an unlikely person to expose one of the most shocking crimes of the Chinese Communist Party. 

A congenial sixty-seven-year-old who spent most of his life in southern Hunan province away from the seats of power, Tan is no dissident. 

In fact, he has spent his career working for official state media and trying to believe in Communism.
But in a meticulously detailed five-hundred-page book released in English this week, he lays out in devastating detail one of the darkest, and least known, episodes in Communist Chinese history: the mass murder of nine thousand Chinese citizens by explicit order of regional Party officials during the height of the Cultural Revolution. 

Tan’s subject is specific to one county, but documents suggest that similar such massacres in the countryside were widespread, leading to as many as 1.5 million deaths.
In fact, it was the government itself that introduced Tan to these crimes. 

In 1986 while covering factory life for state media in Hunan province, a reform-minded magazine gave him an unusual assignment: to go to Dao County in a rural part of the province to write about a government investigation of killings that had taken place there during the Cultural Revolution. 

It was a time of reform and growing openness in China, and as an official journalist he was given full access to its tens of thousands of pages of documents. 

The idea was that Tan would write a positive piece about the Party’s efforts to deal with the past and punish the perpetrators.
But by the end of 1986 the political climate in China had shifted, and Tan’s article was never published. 

Still, Tan couldn’t let go of the explosive information he had found about the mass killings, and twenty-five years later he published his findings in Hong Kong. 

Now his book is coming out in English as The Killing Wind: A Chinese County’s Descent into Madness During the Cultural Revolution. 

Our conversation took place this fall, when I traveled with Tan to Dao County, where the massacres he writes about took place.

Ian Johnson: Let’s start with some specifics about the book. Why were you allowed to do your investigation in the 1980s?
Tan Hecheng: This was a time when [the reformist Communist Party leader] Hu Yaobang was in charge. 

He sent 1,300 officials to Dao County to investigate what had happened in the Cultural Revolution. 

I was working for Kaituo, which back then was the most courageous magazine in China. 

So I got to write it and in a big way do the interviews.
But then things didn’t go as planned.
When the first round of interviews was over, the political atmosphere was already turning. 

Forces in the Party opposed what was called “bourgeois liberalization.” 

So my article couldn’t be published. 

And the more time went on, the more impossible it became. It got tighter and tighter.

But why didn’t you give it up?
That’s simple. 

To speak frankly, in the past I didn’t really understand the Communist Party and its peasant revolution. 

It was like a blockage in my thinking. 

But suddenly in a short period of time my thinking became clear.

What triggered this understanding?
I’d kept asking one question: Had any one of the 9,000 people killed in the region been planning a counterrevolutionary event or said something unlawful? 

In the end the answer was: No.

Not one?
Not one. 

There wasn’t one who was counter-revolutionary in thoughts or deeds. 

Not one said anything against the revolution. 

They found a lot of cases of “counterrevolutionaries” and they killed them all, but they were all fake. 

When I understood this, I was heartbroken. 

I began to realize that the Party had a history of violence. 

Already in 1928 it organized violent peasant revolts that killed masses of people. 

And land reform [shortly after the Party took power in 1949] was incredibly violent. 

It was one mass killing after another. 

All of a sudden it became clear. 

There was no justification for what happened. It was just terror.
So I felt that situation really needed me. 

I had to write it. 

All those people [survivors, family members, and reform-minded government officials] who gave me information, I had pledged to them that I wasn’t taking this for personal gain, but for our children and grandchildren’s descendants—so that a massacre wouldn’t happen again.

In your book, you describe how the killings radiated out of the cities and towns into the countryside. You described it as a “pestilence.”
I mean it spread at foot speed. 

It spread like an old-fashioned plague, with carriers bringing it from one place to the next. 

At that time, transportation, information wasn’t developed. 

The massacre’s spread relied on individuals walking and delivering the message. 

When someone arrived with the orders, the killing started.

The killers were all young. You wrote that most were in their twenties. Were they brainwashed by the Maoist propaganda?
Yes. 

The young people kept talking about exploitation by the landlord class. 

But for all this talk, all the exploitation was by the same four landlords: Huang Shiren, Zhou Baopi, Liu Encai, Yang Bapian. [Four landlords whose alleged crimes were constantly repeated by Communist Party propaganda across the nation in movies, posters, and textbooks.] 

And it turned out that their crimes were all fake. 

But this is all they knew and they thought that anyone who owned any land in China was a horrible landlord who deserved to die. 

In fact, the people who owned land were mostly just the country’s middle class. 

Especially in Hunan, big landlords were very rare. 

But they were all classified as landlords. 

They were declared to be subhuman, and when the orders came down, people found it easy to kill them. 

They had been conditioned to think of them as not human.

Dao County, China, 2016

But this is all half a century ago. Things have changed.
No. 

It is rooted in this soil. 

Around the time of the [1989] Tiananmen Square massacre I raved about this at a meeting and put it like this: I said that according to my research the Communists were triumphant not because the Nationalists [their opponents in the civil war] were backward; it was because the Communists were even more backward. 

Their brutality and backwardness allowed them to succeed. 

The Nationalists still had a few enlightened ideas so they lost.

What about today? Can these ideas be published today?
It’s even stricter than before. 

In the past you could play an edge ball [a term from ping pong referring to hitting a ball right on the edge of the table—a risky strategy but one that allows a talented player to score points]. 

Now they don’t let you play that. 

Now they’ve drawn the demarcation line even tighter.

Why?
Some leaders aren’t very educated. 

They have just a middle school level. 

And then you add in the autocratic system that China has and you have policies that are moving against rather than toward greater openness.

What’s the reaction of local leaders in Dao County?
Their greatest desire is to avoid trouble. 

The county is not run by the same people as before. 

Several decades have passed. 

The people who wielded power then are now in their 80s. The new people in power don’t want trouble or unrest. 

Even in the 2000s it was risky to go there to do research because those in power were the children. But even they have retired.

When I traveled with you to Dao County you were quite cautious to avoid attracting attention.
Why were we so prudent? 

It’s because of higher-ups—of the new emperor [Xi Jinping]. 

His ways of doing things isn’t the same. 

Hu [Jintao, the party secretary from 2002 to 2012] is gone, so is Jiang [Zemin, party secretary from 1989 to 2002]. 

Hu and Jiang were more flexible. Xi is hard. 

The lower-downs don’t dare do otherwise, so they are hard too.

Do you think that people are still traumatized by memories of the killings?
Most people who witnessed it have died off, but the scar hasn’t healed. 

Because those who were killed and who suffered were the weakest members of society, the most marginal. 

They couldn’t get justice.

But some killers were brought to trial and compensation was paid.
According to the commission, 15,050 people were directly implicated in the killings, including one half of the Party’s cadres and members in the county. 

But only fifty-four people were sentenced for their crimes and another 948 Party members were disciplined. 

In addition, families only received 150 yuan for each person killed. 

This was equivalent to about 5,000 or 6,000 yuan [about $1,000] in today’s currency.

Couldn’t they fight or protest?
You can only have a conflict if the two sides have equal power. 

If one side is overwhelmingly more powerful, then there is no conflict. 

These poor farmers are so pitiable. 

If you give them 300 yuan [about $50], or 500 kuai, or find them a temporary job somewhere, then they won’t speak up. 

Poverty chills ambitions.

The current leadership seems trying to move back to the 1950s, when officials were thought to be clean and the Party had broad support.
Exactly. They think that that era was good. 

But that era led to the Cultural Revolution. It wasn’t a good time. 

It was just because Mao had not laid bare his plans. 

I don’t mean the Cultural Revolution will repeat itself exactly. 

The methods won’t be the same but all socialist systems end up like that. 

It’s like inheriting a wife from your dead brother, or a father passing on knowledge to his son. 

The leaders just appoint their successors. It’s just a small circle. 

The soil—it’s so deep.

That makes change hard.
Look at it like this: the Qing [dynasty from 1644 to 1911] deteriorated into a complete mess [in the mid-nineteenth century] but still muddled through for fifty years. 

Now, look at the assets the current government has in its hands. 

You want to change it? 

It’s laughable.

The very last chapter of your book is a single, very striking line. You write, “The Buddha said: Lay down your butcher’s knife and become a buddha”—fangxia tudao; lidi chengfo. This is a well-known expression about repenting one’s sins. Why did you use it here?
I had three intentions. 

One is as the Buddha says, that people should put down their killing swords. Only then can they be absolved of their sins. 

The others is that I wish the Communist Party would really put down its killing sword—to reform. And the third, well it’s not about the knife in your hand. It’s the knife in your heart. 

Wang Yangming [the neo-Confucian philosopher who lived from 1472 to 1529] said it is easy to defeat the bandits in the mountains but hard to defeat the bandits of the heart. 

This applies to the entire population. 

It’s not aimed at the Communist Party but all of us: we have to lay down the knives in our hearts. Only then can we move toward a democratic path. 

So in the future if we have troubles, we won’t have to solve it through massacres and murders or clashing of fists, or whoever is stronger wins.

Why hasn’t the Party put down its sword?
It can’t. 

The benefits enjoyed by this privileged class are too great. 

If you put down your butcher’s knife you have to lay down your privileges. 

Because this whole state power is based on power coming from the barrel of a gun. 

Right now the Communist Party can’t really cheat anyone anymore because they are [ideologically] bankrupt. 

In the past they relied on deception and violence. Right now it’s entirely on violence. 

Think of all the arrests and detentions. This is the only way it rules. 

Lay down your knife and repent!

Tan Hecheng’s The Killing Wind: A Chinese County’s Descent into Madness during the Cultural Revolution has just been published by Oxford University Press.