Oriental Despotism

Coming soon to a Hong Kong near you: creeping totalitarianism Chinese style

By Hemlock

Ten years ago in Hong Kong, any citizen could run for legislative elections with minimum fuss. 

It didn’t matter if new lawmakers added radical slogans to their oath of office. 

Activists and protesters generally accepted that law enforcement was impartial. 

Immigration officers allowed overseas human-rights activists into the city with no problem.
While some self-censorship was apparent in media and entertainment, the press was free, and no-one seriously claimed that expression of a mere opinion might be illegal.
Today in 2018, this is all changing. 

Hong Kong people are gradually losing rights they once took for granted. 

Another way of looking at it is that the sovereign power – the People’s Republic of China under the Chinese Communist Party – is reasserting and resuming its rights.

2014 – a turn for the worse
In retrospect, the rights situation for the first 15 years after the 1997 handover was fairly stable: Hong Kong made no meaningful progress towards democracy, but nor did it see its freedoms seriously deteriorate.
This changed in June 2014 when Beijing issued a ‘white paper’ on Hong Kong concerning the concepts of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ and ‘high degree of autonomy’. 

Ever since the 1980s, Hong Kong officials had encouraged the notion that these phrases meant free and pluralistic Hong Kong would be insulated from the tightly controlled mainland system of government.
The white paper explained the correct understanding: that they were not fixed, absolute guarantees of Hong Kong’s constitutional status, but optional add-ons that China could adjust or remove at will. 

This was a restrictive new definition of their meaning (and local officials modified their use of the slogans accordingly).
This was followed up a few months later by an edict that Hong Kong could elect its chief executive only if Beijing chose who was on the ballot.
Pro-democracy opposition figures bitterly complained that Beijing was breaking past promises enshrined in the Basic Law. 

They missed the whole point of these imperial proclamations: that Hong Kong ultimately comes under and within the mainland system.
Indeed, when “interpreting” the Basic Law on several occasions since 1997, the Chinese government had established the principle that it could change the meaning of the law on a whim. 

Hong Kong had been under Communist-style “rule by law” all along, though Beijing had applied it sparingly.

A woman protests Beijing’s White Paper on Hong Kong at the July 1st pro-democracy march, 2014. 

Since 2014, the trend of “mainlandisation” has been unmistakable, though incremental. 

While the local administration implements the process (and insists nothing is really changing), it is obviously following directions from Beijing officials.
Some moves, like promoting patriotism in schools or banning disrespect for the national anthem, have been controversial but are arguably compatible with Hong Kong’s freedoms. 

The weakening of lawmakers’ powers (which were being “abused by troublemakers”), has even been popular.
But other measures clearly point to creeping authoritarianism. 

The once-impartial police and prosecutions services have started to arrest and prosecute opposition activists on protest-related charges that would not have been brought in earlier years. 

Radicals are disqualified from the legislative council and the ballot on political-test grounds.
By picking on radicals in ones or twos for apparently isolated transgressions, Beijing has chipped away at rights without creating much stir among the general public.
The Andy Chan/Hong Kong National Party affair is another step on this road, using the same tactic – attacking rights and freedoms by demonising and suppressing a “public menace” that uses them. 

But this specific case looks likely to represent a milestone.

The ‘Hong Kong independence’ scare
No-one doubts Chinese leaders’ phobia about separatism, but the HKNP issue is so contrived as to be visibly embarrassing to local officials.

By picking this particular target, Beijing’s Liaison Office and other officials are in the awkward position of trying to convince us that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is genuinely petrified of this geeky not-very-inspiring Hong Kong kid.
Assuming we don’t buy that, we must conclude that the whole exercise (extensive police surveillance, faux outrage from top officials) is a pretext for measures to curtail freedom of expression for everyone – an unprecedented step.
Most local media blandly echo the official rationale about “red lines” and national security threats. But by attacking the Foreign Correspondents Club for hosting Chan, Beijing’s people have made it an international story.
For the first time, the wider world perceives a threat to Hong Kong as a free society with rule of law – an image the local administration tries hard to protect.
The decision to create a panic out of the HKNP looks misjudged and potentially humiliating for the Hong Kong authorities. 

However, if we look at the wider context, we can see why Beijing is prepared to use the Andy Chan independence issue to tighten control over Hong Kong.

It’s not about Hong Kong
The year 2014 is associated with Hong Kong’s Occupy/Umbrella protest movement, and many observers see Beijing’s subsequent clampdown in the city as a response to that. 

This confuses – or at least oversimplifies – cause and effect
The prime mover here is Xi Jinping, who became general secretary of the CCP in 2012 and head of state and of the military in 2013. 

Foreign analysts initially welcomed the new leader as a likely moderniser and reformer (glamorous wife, and family suffered Cultural Revolution purging).
But as a son of a senior revolutionary and Mao-era figure, Xi is self-consciously of the CCP aristocracy. 

His policies since assuming power suggest that he sees himself as the saviour of a party that had become stagnant and lax and must now reassert far tighter control across an unruly society or fall from power. 

He can be seen as a counter-reformist.
Xi grew up in an era when there was essentially one newspaper, one radio station, and the whole Chinese population stayed put and were assigned jobs, homes and rations.
He seems to believe that he can restore that ideologically purer and regimented order and take China forward in terms of economic and technological progress and emergence as an Asian – if not global – superpower.
Xi has purged political rivals and tamed China’s murky uber-tycoons. 

The country is now several years into an ongoing clampdown on religion, the media, academia, civil society, independent lawyers, and other centres of power and incorrect thought and identity.
Hong Kong is a relatively small item on the list of Things to Rectify. 

But judging from policies like the East Turkestan re-education camps and hubristic propaganda efforts, Xi and his underlings are comfortable erring on the side of overkill. 

We can assume that the campaign against Hong Kong dissidents and the legal and constitutional rights that protect them will continue.

What next for Hong Kong?
The main player in Hong Kong is the Chinese government’s Liaison Office, which manages local United Front activities and guides the local administration of Carrie Lam. 

Its current priority is to use the ‘independence’ scare to restrict freedom of expression.

The China Liaison Office. 

The local administration, which must do the dirty work, comprises bureaucrats hand-picked by Beijing for their lack of ideas. 

While smugly indifferent to the city’s social problems, they take on the air of frightened hostages when reciting the Beijing line on sensitive issues. 

It may be that behind the scenes they urge their mainland overseers to go easy, but to no end.
The structure does not accommodate meaningful opposition. 

Interestingly, a few business and other pro-establishment figures are voicing concerns about overseas “misconceptions” that Hong Kong’s freedoms and rule of law are in decline – a coded warning that CCP heavy-handedness could harm business confidence.
Local representative politics is increasingly just ceremonial – Beijing obviously aims to make the legislative council a mainland-style rubber-stamp body. 

Older pro-democracy figures who work within this system are powerless. 

Radicals who are outside it face increasingly harsh treatment.
Some “moderates” are hinting that Hong Kong can have universal suffrage if it also finally passes the overdue national security laws required under Article 23 of the Basic Law. 

This linkage is absurd: Beijing has left no doubt that it cannot allow anything other than a phony election in Hong Kong.
The government could float the idea to entertain the mainstream pan-democrats, who can’t resist bickering over constitutional small-print, and to distract media attention.
But given Beijing’s apparent impatience, it is more likely that the government will just move ahead within a year or so to ban pro-independence talk and other thought-crimes. 

It could be via an Article 23 national security law, though this branding is toxic.
In practice, Beijing can impose whatever it wants by fiat – through Basic Law ‘interpretation’ or the sort of National People’s Congress edict used to legitimise the extension of mainland jurisdiction at the West Kowloon rail terminus. 

It makes little difference.

The idea that the courts can be a bulwark of local freedoms is sadly mistaken. 

If necessary, Beijing can use the interpretation loophole to override the judiciary. 

From Xi Jinping’s point of view, there is no reason why CCP-style “rule by law” should stop at the Shenzhen border. 

There is only one source of power in the PRC.
So this points to the banning of organisations for their views and formal curbs on freedom of expression in Hong Kong. 

The initial targets will no doubt be young radicals like Andy Chan. 

But once Beijing’s officials start declaring dangerous ideas off-limits, they will surely see redefining “red lines” as a necessary tool of control over the city.

There’s more to come
An obvious example would be to criminalise calls for the downfall of the CCP. 

Patriotic “grassroots” groups will loudly demand more such action against national "traitors". 

To ease the slide into censorship, we expect local telecoms companies to ‘voluntarily’ censor undesirable online content.
Institutions that are already bending with the wind in various ways – like the media, academia, professional associations, faith groups, even financial analysts – will continue to adapt through pre-emptive self-discipline.
How far does this go? 

Will Hong Kong media outlets be punished or closed for endangering national security? 

Will troublesome lawyers be arrested for subverting state power? 

Will we see outspoken student leaders making televised confessions? 

Will we be monitored by a “panopticon” internal security apparatus online and through facial recognition systems in public places (no doubt already installed in parts of the West Kowloon rail station)?
All we can say is that what sounded unthinkable 10 years ago is happening now.

Establishment optimists trust that mainlandisation will stop at damaging the business environment. Certainly, local bureaucrats cling to the city’s image as a global business hub.
But this is one area where the local administration and Beijing are not on the same wavelength. 

The Chinese leadership puts its own control before the reputation of an ex-colony’s courts and bureaucracy – or foreign companies’ confidence.
That said, corporate interests that Beijing wants to co-opt or reward (probably owned by ethnic Chinese) may find new opportunities arising from Hong Kong’s ‘integration’ with the mainland. 

The Chinese elites do value Hong Kong as a zone under PRC sovereignty that has no capital controls, but the CCP has no special affection or need for many of the city’s clusters of international professional skills.
Indeed, all the international, Cantonese and pre-1949 Chinese characteristics that make Hong Kong distinct from the mainland must ultimately give way to CCP-approved quasi-Confucian Han culture. Mandarin in schools or goose-step marching by uniformed groups are just a start.
Beijing’s long-term intention should be clear from the ongoing influx of mainland immigrants, the opening of new cross-border transport links, the pushing of a ‘Greater Bay Area’ conurbation and the growing campaign to encourage young Hongkongers to move north.
This is about symbolic, psychological and actual merging of Hong Kong and the mainland. 

If it sounds grandiose, it is just a small-scale version of the top-down demographic, cultural and infrastructural strategies that the CCP has used for decades to “Sinicise” the mainland’s Muslim, Tibetan and ethnic Korean regions.

A brief optimistic conclusion
The end point, in theory, is Hong Kong as another secure CCP-controlled part of the PRC. 

This implies that Xi Jinping’s vision for China as a whole becomes reality. 

And that assumes that tighter centralised control in such a vast nation is a sustainable model that will succeed – that you can have a modern and innovative and thriving society in which the state controls the allocation of capital, decides what news and opinions everyone hears, and tells the population how many children to have.

Whether China’s economy is fundamentally sound or frail right now is a state secret known only to a perhaps-tellingly paranoid leadership. 

But history strongly suggests that a dictatorship, Leninist/state-capitalist/strongman or otherwise, is not durable.
Hong Kong’s younger people – and their counterparts throughout China – will surely see a freer future one day. 

As the venerable Jerome Cohen recently said: “I’ve been studying China for almost 60 years. This too shall pass.”

‘It is about Xi as the leader of the world’: Former detainees recount abuse in Chinese re-education centres

Many of those detained are Muslim Uyghurs and Kazakhs accused of ‘incorrect thinking’ in the midst of a campaign that has treated what authorities consider ‘radical tendencies’ as a public-health crisis that must be expunged
By NATHAN VANDERKLIPPE

Police patrol on a scooter as an ethnic Uyghur boy stands in his doorway on June 27, 2017 in the old town of Kashgar, East Turkestan.

Authorities in East Turkestan have made loyalty to Xi Jinping a central part of an extensive political re-education campaign that requires detainees to swear allegiance to the Communist Party while forswearing a Muslim faith that they are told to repeat is “stupid.”
Large numbers – researchers estimate the total in the hundreds of thousands – of people have been placed in Chinese facilities known as re-education centres, where they are forcibly indoctrinated. Many of those detained are Muslim Uyghurs and Kazakhs accused of “incorrect thinking” in the midst of a campaign that has treated what authorities consider “radical tendencies” as a public-health crisis that must be expunged.
Now, interviews with people who have been in those centres show that China’s current leader, who has orchestrated a personalization of power not seen in China since the days of Mao Zedong, occupies a place of singular importance in China’s efforts to rectify what it deems errant thinking.
“Xi Jinping is great! The Communist Party is great! I deserve punishment for not understanding that only President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party can help me,” was one of the refrains that a Uyghur woman who was in a centre last fall, was forced to regularly repeat.
The woman, whose name is not being used by The Globe and Mail for her protection, was put through regular self-criticism sessions. 

Part of the content was cultural. 

“My soul is infected with serious diseases,” she would repeat. 

“There is no God. I don’t believe in God. I believe in the Communist Party.”
Other content was more explicitly political. 

Day after day she would say out loud that she was a traitor, a separatist and a terrorist.
“I am so blind not to see the greatness of our strong country’s laws. I am so stupid that I was not thankful for our President Xi Jinping,” she would be told to recite.
Her recollections add to the growing number of accounts from people who have been inside the re-education centres that have proliferated in East Turkestan since 2017. 

Chinese officials have denied their existence, and refused to accept diplomatic entreaties from foreign countries, including Canada, expressing concern over human-rights violations. 

But a growing body of evidence shows that such centres are widespread and being used for practices that critics call abusive violations of human rights.
The Globe and Mail interviewed several people who have been in the centres. 

They described intense attempts to indoctrinate large numbers of people in settings that resembled military prisons, with armed guards and tight security. 

Cameras followed every move, even into toilets. 

Some detainees received unknown medicines; others attempted suicide.
The long days were filled with instruction “about Xi Jinping, no one else,” said Kayrat Samarkan, 30, who was in a re-education camp last year before being allowed to go back to Kazakhstan, after diplomatic pressure for the release of detained Kazakhs. 

“It is about Xi as the leader of the world. The new China is best. All other countries, especially the U.S., are evil. Capitalism is evil, wrong and failed. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is the best.”
The inculcation extended to mealtimes.
“Before breakfast we had to say repeatedly: ‘Long live Xi Jinping! May he live for 10,000 years!’” Mr. Samarkan said.
“After eating, we had to say the same thing.”
Every day began at 6 a.m., with time allotted to cleaning up sleeping quarters – little more than blankets on cement floors – before breakfast. 

From 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. detainees memorized red songs and slogans, some of them dating to the era of the Communist Revolution. 

From 10 a.m. to noon, they wrote down the texts they had just memorized.
Afternoons were devoted to studying Communist Party propaganda and policies, as well as lessons about the dangers of being “infected” by going abroad. 

They wrote self-criticism late into the night, noting “anything we did wrong, or any negative thoughts about China or the Chinese people,” Mr. Samarkan said.
The personalization of political indoctrination in re-education centres comes amid a broader effort that, according to former detainees, includes attempts to weed out religious observance.

Xi Jinping is great! The Communist Party is great! I deserve punishment for not understanding that only President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party can help me.

— One of the refrains that a Uyghur woman who was in a centre last fall, was forced to regularly repeat.

Occasionally, authorities would appear to test those being held, Mr. Samarkan said.

In the middle of one night, the centre was filled with the sound of the morning call to prayer. 

People who woke up were taken away, Mr. Samarkan said. 

Authorities appeared to think that being roused by the call was evidence of persistent religious tendencies.
At one point, Mr. Samarkan smashed his head against the wall in an attempt to kill himself. 

Instead, he fainted. 

He was taken to hospital and threatened with eight years in prison if he tried again.
“I didn’t do anything,” he told the people at the hospital. 

“Just kill me. I don’t want to be alive.”
In the re-education centre, he saw another person rip up pieces of towel and eat them, another attempt at suicide. 

That person was discovered by authorities and punished. 

“If they find out, they won’t let you commit suicide,” Mr. Samarkan said. 

The Globe spoke with him from Kazakhstan, where he is living after being released.
Detainees were divided into three groups, he said: religious people; those who have either travelled overseas or had overseas contacts; and those who broke rules, which could include failing to respect Beijing time (East Turkestan is far west, and Uyghurs commonly set clocks back two hours), missing compulsory flag-raising ceremonies or failing to speak Chinese.
Some people were given pharmaceutical injections and pills, Mr. Samarkan said, describing the marks on the arms of those who had been given unknown medicines. 

“They forgot things, couldn’t focus, looked numb.”
His account was confirmed by two other former detainees in re-education centres.
Reports on the use of medicine for psychological purposes in Chinese detention are less common, although enough exist “to indicate a systematic abusive practice by the police,” said Michael Caster, who works with Safeguard Defenders, an international human-rights group.
In recent years, at least five human rights defenders, including detained lawyers, said they were forced to take medicine.
In East Turkestan, re-education activities are being conducted in a variety of settings and centres, some less formal – operating as schools, with students in class either during the day or at night – while others are sprawling complexes with high walls that resemble prisons.
Authorities call them centres for “vocational training” or “transformation through education.” Scholars have called it “co-ercive isolated detoxification.” 

A report earlier this year from East Turkestan scholar Adrian Zenz estimated that, at a minimum, several hundred thousand people have been placed in re-education.

A security guard stands watch in a Uyghur neighbourhood in Aksu, in East Turkestan, in April, 2015.

The Uyghur woman who was held in the centre last fall had a foreign passport. 

She was brought to a smaller re-education camp after landing at the airport in East Turkestan. 

She says she was taken away at gunpoint with other relatives and placed first in a local re-education centre, then transferred to another such place in the East Turkestan town where she grew up. 

The Globe is not disclosing its location, or other details relevant to her case, because her other relatives have not yet been released. 

The woman, who was allowed to leave less than two weeks after her husband persuaded foreign authorities to intervene, does not know where those relatives are today.
She was placed in re-education with her baby, not yet a year old. 

They were watched by surveillance cameras and workers took her baby when it cried. 

Other mothers also had young babies, she said.
In re-education, she was not allowed to wear underwear or a bra and her hair was completely shaved off, as was that of other women. 

She was not told why, although it may have been to prevent lice, since the women were sleeping in crowded conditions.
Elsewhere, detainees have said authorities appear to have cut the hair of women in re-education as a reprimand to the traditional long hair they maintained, a message that “now you are going to have a modern hair style,” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.
In some ways, the forced praise for Xi Jinping inside re-education centres is being done in a similar vein – taught as the modern political fashion in China.
“Many aspects of East Turkestan today bear a resemblance to the Cultural Revolution,” Ms. Wang said. 

“So some kind of worshipping of Xi would be the expected conduct of a loyal subject of the Chinese Communist Party, which is what these political education facilities are supposed to cultivate.”
Re-education is being used “to create loyal subjects by force,” said Rian Thum, a historian at Loyola University in New Orleans who has frequently visited East Turkestan since 1999, most recently last year.
“The minorities of East Turkestan are just a group of people that the authorities think are in need of a stronger dose of indoctrination in an outlook that the party is deploying more gradually elsewhere,” Mr. Thum said.
Indeed, the push to inculcate Xi Jinping thought is taking place across China. 

High-school textbooks have been edited to include lengthy explanations of a philosophy credited to Xi, and dozens of universities across China have opened centres devoted to its study.

In East Turkestan, meanwhile, authorities have inaugurated a Xi Jinping thought lecture campaign in early June, under the banner of “10 million teachers and students having the same class to study new thoughts.” 

Instruction will take place at colleges and universities across the region. 

The lectures will also be aired on television and streamed online.
“Especially in East Turkestan, people need to learn the new thoughts and Party’s strategy on governing East Turkestan,“ Xiong Kunxin, a professor at Tibet University, told the Global Times, a nationalist tabloid published by the Communist Party.
Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Washington, has collected videos that have been circulating online showing demonstrations of fealty to Xi outside of re-education camps. 

In one, a woman speaks in Uyghur to a toddler: “My child, go and kiss your grandfather Xi Jinping.” The toddler runs and kisses an image of Xi on a large framed poster.
In another, a man changes the lyrics of a popular Uyghur folk song to say “Xi Jinping is my father, the Party is my mother. We are so safe under the shadow of the party. We are against evil forces. We burn religious people in fire.” 

The man is surrounded by others who appear to be drinking beer and baijiu, a Chinese-made hard liquor. 

It is an image at odds with Muslim dietary practices, “everyone is now drinking and smoking as a way of proving they do not need re-education,” said Mr. Byler, who has done extensive study of the re-education system.
Xi, meanwhile, “has become an open symbol of Chinese national sovereignty,” Mr. Byler said.
“When Uyghur children are taught to treat his image as the image of the grandfather, they are being trained to attribute benevolence and respect to Chinese national sovereignty,” he said. 

That political ideology is reshaping everyday speech. 

Instead of “inshallah,” or “God willing” as a reference to future plans, Mr. Byler said, many Uyghurs “now say ‘Party willing.’”

China’s Marxist Tyranny Shouldn’t Be Ignored

It’s time the West stopped treating Beijing with kid gloves.
By J. J. MCCULLOUGH
A Chinese soldier outside the Tiananmen Gate in Beijing.
It is a curious and depressing thing that in this age of hyperactive vigilance against creeping tyranny, the regime running China sits mostly in afterthought. 

Amid an expansion of dictatorship’s definition to include everything from border enforcement in Texas to court reform in Poland, China’s Xi Jinping — who has made strengthening totalitarianism the explicit purpose of his rule — receives analysis that’s calm and nuanced.
The unjustified moderation through which we conceptualize China’s leaders is a destructive legacy of the 1990s and early 2000s, when Western politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and businessmen chose to believe a string of fantasies about just how much reform the Chinese regime had undergone. 

A string of truisms became popular to mindlessly spout — China was not really Communist anymore, it was basically an American ally, daily life had become modern and Westernized, and the country was on track to become more prosperous than anyone dared imagine. 

These conclusions helped rationalize the integration of the West’s commercial economy into the Chinese manufacturing sector, with Congress’s 2000 decision to bestow the country with “permanent normal trade relations” status representing a critical moment of normalization, as Reihan Salam recently noted.
Today, our culture of Chinese normalization has become so smothering that encountering unvarnished information about how the regime actually works can be a jarring experience.
Canada’s Globe and Mail recently published a horrifying exposé on the persecution of China’s Uyghur minority. 

As Jay Nordlinger summarized for National Review last May, the Uyghur are a Muslim ethnic minority who constitute a plurality in China’s enormous eastern province of Xinjiang. 

Beijing considers them an Islamist menace waiting to happen, and perhaps those Westerners who worry about Islamism will be inclined to sympathize. 

Yet the Stalinist measures employed in response make even the most hardened American Islamophobe look tame.
Citing exceedingly dubious suspicions, the Chinese state has detained, by some estimates, hundreds of thousands of Uyghur for forced indoctrination. 

The Globe described the testimony of a typical victim:
The woman, whose name is not being used by The Globe and Mail for her protection, was put through regular self-criticism sessions. 

Part of the content was cultural. 

“My soul is infected with serious diseases,” she would repeat. 

“There is no God. I don’t believe in God. I believe in the Communist Party.”
Other content was more explicitly political. 

Day after day she would say out loud that she was a traitor, a separatist and a terrorist.
“I am so blind not to see the greatness of our strong country’s laws. I am so stupid that I was not thankful for our President Xi Jinping,” she would be told to recite.
The piece describes Beijing’s brainwashing techniques in lurid detail. 

In cult-like fashion, prisoners are housed in barren conditions and forced to perform grueling, repetitive tasks from morning till night. 

Surveillance is constant, with the smallest disobedience viciously punished. 

Sometimes the detainees are drugged into submission.
Anything distinctive about the inmates — which is to say, anything making them more identifiably Uyghur than Chinese — is forcibly sacrificed. 

Women tell of getting their long hair cut short (“now you are going to have a modern hairstyle,” one recounts being told) or shaved off entirely. 

Speaking the Uyghur language is forbidden, as is the practice of Islam. 

Round-the-clock exaltation of the Chinese system and denunciation of its enemies — “Capitalism is evil, wrong, and failed. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is the best” — is the only acceptable pastime. 

Eventually, people are supposed to break.
Assimilating pious Uyghurs into obedient, atheist automatons is but an especially grotesque manifestation of a Chinese political system that remains like nothing else on Earth. 

Nearly three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, Beijing still believes deeply in totalitarianism as a workable philosophy of government, in which the state can and must assert crushing power over the individual to mold his mind and micromanage his life. 

Theirs is not an incidental dictatorship, but rather one forged in the context of a Marxist revolution that continues to chase the dream of a centrally planned paradise.
Xi Jinping pursues this dogma with a zealousness his recent predecessors lacked. 

In 2013, his administration explicitly identified seven sinister ideas it was most eager to crush. 

There was no subtlety. 

Basically everything Westerners take for granted as an essential component of their liberty was framed as a demon to be slain: universalist philosophy, constitutional democracy, independent media, civil society, free markets. 

All, in turn, are subject to their own targeted campaigns of suppression and destruction, from word bans on state-run social media to tearing crosses off church steeples. 

A command economy, we were told, was bound to soon resemble our own remains in the bottom tier of global economic freedom.
Because totalitarianism is often imagined as a decidedly 20th-century phenomenon, the notion that it can exist in a place as outwardly modern as China — with its skyscrapers and flat-screen TVs and high-speed rail lines — is sometimes hard to process. 

Yet the great totalitarian regimes of the past existed in what once seemed impressively futuristic societies, too. 

Indeed, this was a key element of their appeal.
America’s conservative movement has been historically skilled at articulating its values through contrast with totalitarian alternatives, particularly the Soviet Union and radical Islam. 

In doing so, it has helped give a sense of purpose not only to U.S. foreign policy, but their own desired form of an ideal society.
The fashionable storyline that our once-dominant liberal-democratic ideals face unprecedented danger today from alternative doctrines is not wrong, but the threat must not be misidentified. 

It is the powerful Chinese regime governing a billion people, not populist movements in the West, that should serve as a contrast with all who value freedom in the current era.
That Beijing is protected by a powerful coalition of apologists and disinformation only emphasizes the importance of fighting to make this truth prominent in our political conversation.

Chinese Golem: Globalization Has Created a Chinese Monster

Xi Jinping's dictatorship isn't what the end of history was supposed to look like.
BY EMILE SIMPSON 

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping speaks at the opening session of the 19th Communist Party Congress in Beijing on Oct. 18, 2017. 

On Sunday, the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee recommended ending the two-term limit on the presidency, paving the way for Xi Jinping to stay in office indefinitely. 

This surely marks the end of an era — and not just for China, but also for the West.
For the West, the era in question started with the end of the Cold War, as old enemies became “emerging markets.” 

China had already started opening its markets to foreign investment since 1978 under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. 

But only in the 1990s did the private sector take off there, and Western firms promptly rushed in to profit from the breakneck speed of Chinese economic growth.
The beauty of the post-Cold War emerging market story was that it was apolitical. 

Recall the famous identification of the leading emerging markets by Jim O’Neill in 2001 as the “BRICs” (Brazil, Russia, India, China) — four states from different groupings during the Cold War now viewed together as the leading protagonists in a new era of peaceful globalization under the Pax Americana. 

Some called it the end of history.
But this apolitical approach was premised on the assumption, inherited from the Cold War, that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand, and that the extension of free markets would bring global convergence to the Western economic model, as the Washington Consensus predicted.
Confidence in globalization saw massive amounts of Western capital and intellectual property flow to emerging markets, above all to China. 

But few in the West registered the geopolitical significance of this at the time. 

Instead, they praised the economic growth story. 

And not without good reason: the integration of China into global markets lifted a billion people out of poverty. 

It remains a testament to the material benefits of removing geopolitical obstructions from the development of global business.
But this story of global cosmopolitan peace has been on the rocks for some time. 

Russian privatization in the 1990s ultimately produced a mafia state controlled by an oligarchy. 

More broadly — with a few exceptions, mainly in Eastern Europe, where democracy did take hold (current problems notwithstanding) — capitalism has expanded since the end of the Cold War in spite of democracy, not alongside it.
And nowhere is this more evident than in China. 

It’s now abundantly clear that despite the West’s pious belief in the transformative power of free markets to encourage “reform,” China is headed toward more, not less autocracy. 

Indeed, China has broken a path toward a new form of totalitarianism in which one man will sit atop a police state with access to ubiquitous data gathered about citizens by social media and online shopping platforms and a vast human and electronic surveillance apparatus to track their every move. 

Look no further than the ghastly “social credit score” system that Beijing wants to roll out by 2020 to get a sense of how wrong the idea has proven to be that free markets will bring about democratic change, or even minor liberalizing reform in China. 

A billion people may have been lifted out of poverty, but only to find themselves living under cyber-totalitarianism.
The geopolitical consequences of this realization could be very profound indeed. 

In the Cold War, the West faced totalitarian communist regimes whose economic model and political system were both alien to what the “free world” claimed to stand for. 

Of course, the link between capitalism and democracy was always tenuous, not least given the reality that many of the West’s allies were not democratic. 

But now, if it was ever in doubt, we know for sure that capitalism and democracy don’t have to go together: Capitalism is up for grabs, and you don’t even need to support the Pax Americana to plug into it

How does this end? 

We don’t yet know, but the question may well come to be the defining feature of a new geopolitical phase the world seems to have entered. 

Note how far removed from the happy story of liberal globalization is the language of the Trump administration’s December 2017 National Security Strategy: “China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.”
Admittedly, this comes in the context of a presidency that bizarrely refuses to carry out U.S. congressional sanctions on Russia for interference in the U.S. 2016 elections. 

But the more important point is that Western states and their citizens are becoming increasingly alert to the need fundamentally to reappraise the value of the integrated global capitalism they have more or less promoted since the early 1990s. 

I am not talking about a reappraisal in light of the inequality that economic growth has produced, or the massive outsourcing of manufacturing jobs that created rust belts on both sides of the Atlantic, which is a separate discussion. 

Rather, this reappraisal concerns the inconvenient truth, which surely now is undeniable, that the West’s own economic policy has encouraged, if unwittingly, the rise of deeply illiberal regimes in much of the former communist world.
What practical effect this produces in the foreign and economic policies of the West depends, on the one hand, on the extent to which the West is prepared to sacrifice material wealth in support of its public values; and, on the other hand, on the extent to which authoritarian states, above all Russia and China, attempt to export their values abroad. 

One could list any number of areas where this dilemma will play out, but the most important near-term litmus test will be whether the West responds to China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a benign economic project, or as a geopolitical threat.