What the Hong Kong Protests Are Really About

By Jimmy Lai

Riot police firing tear gas during clashes with protestors outside the Legislature in Hong Kong, on Monday.

When hundreds of thousands of my fellow Hong Kongers took to the streets to demonstrate last month, most of the world saw people protesting provocative legislation that would allow extraditions to mainland China.
But the Chinese government, which supported the extradition measure, had a much broader view of the protests. 

It recognized them as the first salvo in a new cold war, one in which the otherwise unarmed Hong Kong people wield the most powerful weapon in the fight against the Chinese Communist Party: moral force.
In much of the West, moral force is underestimated. 

Communists never make that mistake. 

There is a reason Beijing will never invite the pope or the Dalai Lama for a visit to China. 

The government knows that whenever its leaders must stand beside anyone with even the slightest moral legitimacy, they suffer by the comparison. 

Moral force makes Communists insecure.
And for good reason. 

As China was reminded this week, as riot police officers used pepper spray and batons on demonstrators in Hong Kong, the protests have been holding a mirror up to China. 

What rattles Beijing is that it sees in that mirror what the rest of the world sees: a monster.
Since his ascendancy to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has made no secret of his goal to purge the Western influences that he believes are contaminating China. 

In Hong Kong, he has been working to erode the limited political freedoms and rule of law that make Hong Kong the special region of China that it is — and that have long made Hong Kong economically valuable to China, ironically enough.
Nearly all us in Hong Kong are refugees or the descendants of refugees from China. 

We have no illusions about what happens to people when they come up short in the eyes of the Communist Party. 

Everyone in Hong Kong knows that introducing the possibility of imprisoning us in China, as the extradition treaty does, would signal the end of life in Hong Kong as we know it.
In Beijing’s view, of course, Hong Kong’s colonial past undermines its legitimacy as a Chinese society. 

Never mind that the system of limited freedoms that the British introduced to Hong Kong existed long before Communism was established on the mainland. (Communism is itself a Western import to China, by the way.)
The inconvenient truth is that people in Hong Kong (and in Taiwan) live better than any Chinese in Chinese history. 

This gives moral force to our way of life. 

It also shows the extraordinary things people can accomplish when given the freedom to do so.
Hong Kong’s moral force has also been economically good for China, since the moral force of our free society cannot be separated from its prosperity. 

It is not likely that Beijing agreed to have the government of Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, suspend consideration of the extradition bill just because a lot of people marched against it. 

No doubt Xi Jinping learned much about capital flight and jittery investors during those protests and saw how badly China still needs a prosperous and functioning Hong Kong.
This is Xi’s great weakness: If he crushes the soul of Hong Kong, he will lose the Hong Kong he needs to make China the global power he envisions.

It should be possible for the West and China to trade freely, while at the same time competing as opposing value systems.

People at protests against changing Hong Kong’s extradition law sat outside the Legislative Council building in Hong Kong, on June 21.

The values war is the real war. 

For the West to prevail, it must support the tiny little corner of China where its virtues now operate: Hong Kong. 

These values may be a legacy of Western rule, but for Hong Kongers who have grown up with them, they feel as natural as any part of our Chinese heritage.
Our struggle with Beijing, if successful, can help China’s leaders begin to accept the need for authority earned through the moral admiration of the world, not through the barrel of a gun. 

But if Beijing’s approach prevails, when China becomes the world’s biggest economy; the West will face a far greater monster.
The West’s moral authority is its most powerful weapon. 

Moral authority is where China is most vulnerable to humiliation, at home and abroad. 

Beijing has no weapons save for force, which gets harder to rely on, the more the world can see that for itself.

Chinese Golem

Red China redux: pariah among nations, enemy of its people

BY JOSEPH BOSCO

At this week’s G-20 meeting, Xi Jinping, like the other 15 male leaders except the Indian and Saudi representatives, will be dressed in traditional Western business attire. 

But the coat-and-tie garb should not disguise the nature of the regime he represents. 

It will be conveniently easy to forget the fundamental linear identity of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of today with that of its founder, Mao Zedong.
When Richard Nixon looked at the problem of “Red China” as he began his successful 1968 run for the presidency, he saw an angry, resentful communist regime that was determined to “nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.” 

The world had much to worry about, he warned, from the ideologically-driven, viscerally anti-Western party that had seized control of a vast Asian territory and its 750 million inhabitants.
Less than a year after its creation, the new communist state already had been condemned as an aggressor by the United Nations for encouraging and joining North Korea’s invasion of South Korea. Simultaneously, it subjugated Tibet and East Turkestan and began a campaign of cultural genocide in both places.
Nor was it just non-Chinese cultures the Communist Party sought to destroy. 

Mao launched his Cultural Revolution against the ancient Han civilization itself, ending with the banishment, imprisonment and deaths of tens of millions of Chinese.
The CCP’s aggression extended beyond populations within China and along its borders. 

It went “abroad in search of (Western) monsters to destroy” and supported “wars of national liberation” to overthrow existing “imperialist” or “puppet” governments throughout Asia, Africa and the Third World.
That was the dangerous, hostile rising power that Nixon warned could not be allowed to remain on its maniacally destructive path: “China must change,” he wrote in his seminal Foreign Affairs article anticipating the policy he would pursue as president. 

He examined the risks of alternative approaches to the China problem.
“Conceding to China a ‘sphere of influence’ embracing much of the Asian mainland and extending even to the island nations beyond … would not be acceptable to the United States or to its Asian allies.”
Equally undesirable and highly imprudent, Nixon concluded, would be an effort to “eliminate the threat by preemptive war … a confrontation which could escalate into World War III.”
On the other hand, Nixon did not favor over-eager accommodation with China. 

“[A]s many would simplistically have it, rushing to grant recognition to Peking, to admit it to the United Nations and to ply it with offers of trade — all of which would serve to confirm its rulers in their present course.”
Instead, U.S. policy “must come urgently to grips with the reality, … recognizing the present and potential danger from Communist China” by applying a combination of deterrence and dissuasion. 

“For the short run … this means a policy of firm restraint, of no reward, of a creative counter-pressure designed to persuade Peking that its interests can be served only by accepting the basic rules of international civility.”
Yet, Nixon argued, “containment without isolation” was necessary but not sufficient. 

“Along with it, we need a positive policy of pressure and persuasion, of dynamic detoxification … to draw off the poison from the Thoughts of Mao.” 

Integrating China into “the family of nations” was the only practicable solution he foresaw. 

“There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation.” 

Thus was born the idea of engagement that he undertook with his opening to China, with the purpose of normalizing the communist regime.
At first, Nixon seemed to heed his own caveat that the Americans not appear too eager for a deal, lest China sense weakness and exploit it. 

He cautioned his junior partner, national security adviser Henry Kissinger, “We cannot be too forthcoming in terms of what America will do. We’ll withdraw [from Taiwan], and we’ll do this, and that, and the other thing.”
Yet, in the end, he and Kissinger did just that, by acceding to Beijing’s demands on Taiwan. 

The U.S. removed the Seventh Fleet from the Taiwan Strait, then began the first phase of a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Taiwan — even before Nixon made his visit to China. 

The preemptive concessions violated not only Nixon’s self-imposed restraint but also Kissinger’s academic teaching: “We [Americans] have a tendency to apply our standards to others in negotiations. We like to pay in advance to show our good will, but in foreign policy you never get paid for services already rendered.”
In the deal struck by the two consummate realists, Taiwan would be left to Beijing’s tender mercies. In exchange, America would be allowed a graceful exit after abandoning Vietnam as well. 

But China reneged on that commitment and continued its flow of arms, material and Chinese soldiers in support of North Vietnam’s final conquest of South Vietnam and America’s humiliating retreat.
Kissinger noted with pride, before the arrival of the Trump administration, that all Nixon’s successors followed the original engagement policies. 

And he was right. 

By comparison with the ragings of the Mao period, and even after the Tiananmen massacre, other Chinese leaders have appeared on the surface to be conventional national leaders — as long as we were willing to look away from their brutal policies to suppress dissent: imprisoning and torturing to death a Nobel Laureate, forcing abortions and infanticide, organ harvesting from dead and living persons, mass internments of ethnic and religious populations, and other moral outrages.
Despite the historical record, U.S. leaders accepted the pronouncements of academics and other experts that Beijing’s foreign policies were benign and that the only way China would become an enemy of the West is if we treated it as such. 

So, for decades, China treated us as its ultimate adversary, while proclaiming its peaceful intentions.
Now Xi has pretty much ripped off the mask, and even invokes the very Thoughts of Mao that Nixon had hoped to “detoxify” from China’s policies. 

But Nixon said, years later, that his policies might have “created a Frankenstein” — and the family of nations he hoped would domesticate China finally has begun to take notice of the monster that has arisen in its midst.

The Example of Hong Kong

National Review
Protesters hold placards at a demonstration demanding Hong Kong’s leaders to step down and withdraw the extradition bill in Hong Kong, China, June 16, 2019. 

If you need an example of man’s desire to be free, and his willingness to resist tyranny, look to the streets of Hong Kong. 

Some 2 million residents of the city gathered there, in protest. 

The population of the city is only 7.3 million. 

It was a stirring sight — one of the most stirring the world has seen in recent years.
The protests in Tiananmen Square were stirring, too. 

That was exactly 30 years ago. 

It ended in a massacre of protesters by the Communist authorities. 

Every Hong Konger in the streets this year knew that.
The immediate object of their protest was an extradition bill, which would have sent Hong Kongers accused of a crime to the mainland, for trial. 

On the mainland, there is nothing like justice. Instead, there is torture, a sham trial, and a gulag (called laogai).
Yet the protest in Hong Kong had a more general object. 

Citizens are intent on keeping their freedoms, or not letting them go without a fight.
When the British turned over the city to the Chinese Communist Party in 1997, the promise was “one country, two systems,” for 50 years. 

This was always chimerical. 

Year by year, month by month, the CCP has been chipping away at Hong Kong’s autonomy. 

The Party will not tolerate Hong Kong’s brash, uppity independence until 2047.
Five years ago, democratic protests broke out. 

These were dubbed the “umbrella movement,” because people used umbrellas to shield themselves from pepper spray. 

Earlier this year, eight leaders of the movement were sentenced. 

One of them, Chan Kin-man, a retired sociology professor, said, “In the verdict, the judge commented that we are naïve” (naïve to believe that a protest movement can attain, or retain, democracy). 

“But what is more naïve than believing in one country, two systems?”
In Taiwan, there were street protests in behalf of the umbrella-movement leaders sentenced. 

Why? 

Because Taiwanese know that their fate, and their democracy, is linked to Hong Kong.
In the wake of the extradition bill, the umbrellas came out again, as people tried to shield themselves from pepper spray, tear gas, and rubber bullets. 

Faced with this massive demonstration, which caught the attention of the world, Hong Kong officials backed down. 

The chief executive, Carrie Lam, announced the suspension of the extradition bill, and even offered an apology for its introduction.
Some protest leaders demanded her resignation. 

Others pointed out that whoever followed her would be in the same position — a servant of Xi Jinping, the PRC’s supreme leader (for life).
“Hong Kong’s bravery has bought it some time.” So said Edward Lucas, the British foreign-affairs analyst, and he put it well. 

We think back to “Finlandization,” which is often misunderstood.
Finlandization was the process by which Finland was rendered essentially neutral in the Cold War. The Finns did not set out to be Finlandized; they wished to be with the Free West. 

They fought like hell to avoid Sovietization, which resulted in their (mere) Finlandization.
In a similar vein, Hong Kongers are fighting like hell to keep the noose relatively loose around their necks. 

They are fighting to retain a little breathing space.
The ruling Communists in Beijing hate the example of Hong Kong, as they hate the example of (even worse) Taiwan. 

They don’t want other Chinese — more than a billion of them — to get ideas: ideas that Chinese people, in some places, can live freely and democratically. 

News of the drama in Hong Kong was blocked on the mainland.
Asked to comment on this drama, autistic Trump said, “I hope it all works out for China and for Hong Kong.” 

The United States can do better than this. 

People look to us for leadership, for moral support, and we should provide it whenever possible.
Maybe Hong Kongers are doing nothing more than delaying the inevitable — their eventual subjugation by the PRC. 

If so, they are still doing something inspiring, right, and brave.

Guerrillas for God

How Hong Kong’s Pastors Are Delivering the Message to China’s Christians

By LAIGNEE BARRON / HONG KONG

An altar server holds a text during a celebration of the Feast of the Ascension at the "underground" Zhongxin Bridge Catholic Church in Tianjin, China on May 24, 2015.

Rev. C. has nearly finished his latest book, a compilation of daily devotions for pastors in China. 

To get his manuscript from Hong Kong into the hands of his students on the Chinese mainland he’ll have to — well, for his safety that can’t be published. 

Neither can his name, since he agreed to speak to TIME on condition of anonymity. 

So let’s just say this slight and soft-spoken Protestant has spent years giving Chinese authorities the slip to deliver his spiritual message to Chinese Christians.
Rev. C. is convinced that Christianity alone can shake the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) indomitable grip. 

He’s willing to go jail for this conviction. 

In fact, he already has.
“It’s a blessing to go to prison,” he says, “to suffer for Jesus.”
He’s not alone. 

While Hong Kong’s pastors are not allowed to proselytize, sermonize or establish churches in mainland China without official permission, many defy these prohibitions to cultivate a network of underground “house churches” in homes and workplaces.
Hong Kong has historically served as the springboard for evangelizing on the mainland. 

But as Xi Jinping kicks off a renewed crackdown to bring Christianity under state control by instituting new religious regulations, pastors in Hong Kong — since 1997 a semi-autonomous Chinese territory — are finding themselves in the crosshairs.
“The Communist Party of China is afraid of this thing. They want to control the Christians,” says Rev. C.

Christianity, he says, has grown too big in the eyes of Beijing, which has historic reason to fear the politicization of religion.
One hundred and sixty-eight years after Christian-inspired rebels nearly brought China’s Qing Dynasty to its knees in the Taiping Rebellion, communist China looks set to host the largest population of Christians in the world by 2030 — a development that is no small source of anxiety for the officially atheist country’s authoritarian leaders.

The Gateway Into China
Proselytizing may be forbidden on the mainland, but step off Hong Kong’s iconic Star Ferry and into the audio and visual assault of ticket touts, digital billboards, souvenir hawkers and street acrobats and you’ll find Christians come to spread the gospel. 

As selfie-stick wielding masses jostle in front of the city’s harbor and glass skyline, leaflets attesting to Jesus’ love and eternal redemption are pressed into the hands of mainland tourists.
Hong Kong, with its greater freedoms and religious liberties, has played a vital role in oxygenating the growth of Christianity on the mainland.
Unlike in many parts of the West where Christianity is waning, a religious gold rush has swept through China since the Cultural Revolution and its fierce suppression of religion ended in 1976. Scholars estimate there are now as many as 80 to 100 million Christians, compared to 89.5 million communist party members. 

As more and more Chinese seek a spiritual alternative to political repression, Christianity continues to gain ground, increasing by an estimated 10% per year.
While Christianity is undoubtedly thriving in mainland China, faith is permitted only in official, “patriotic” churches; unregistered houses of worship may be prolific, but they are also subject to periodic crackdowns. 

According to Christian advocacy group China Aid’s most recent statistics, 1,800 house church leaders were detained in 2016.

Celebrating Easter in China Where Faith Is Curtailed

Parishioners clutch fir branches in place of palm fonds as they pray at an underground Palm Sunday service run by dissident Catholic Priest Dong Baolu in the yard of a house in Youtong village, Shijiazhuang, China, March 20, 2016. 

For these underground congregations — which are illegal, if often ignored — the Hong Kong Christian establishment offers a vital lifeline, supplying everything from monetary support, to Bibles, to blacklisted Christian literature, to training and assistance founding new churches. 

The gospel is smuggled over the border in every format imaginable: broadcast on pirate radio waves and disseminated through USB flash drives.
“They need our help because we are in the freer world and they are not,” says Hong Kong’s retired Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen.
For evangelicals eager to sustain this fount of converts, Hong Kong serves as “the stepping stone into mainland China,” says Rev. Wu Chi-wai, general secretary of the Hong Kong Church Renewal Movement.
More than 60% of Hong Kong’s churches engage in work on the mainland, illicit or otherwise, including preaching and theological training, according to the Church Renewal Movement’s most recent, 2014 survey. 

They do so armed with Bibles, sermons, and, if the work is not officially sanctioned, an arsenal of disguises and convoluted transportation plans to counter omnipresent state surveillance.
Such business can be risky, resulting in anything from police harassment to deportation or detention in “re-education” centers. 

But as Rev. C. says, “Many church leaders believe that if you have not yet been to prison you are not committed enough in your faith.”
While China’s faithful have rapidly multiplied in number, they lack experienced leadership and qualified pastors. 

So Hong Kong has become a central hub for short-term theological intensives, distance Bible seminaries and networking conventions.
“Hong Kong’s role is to help them become a self-propagating, self-administrating establishment,” says another Hong Kong missionary, who, like Rev. C., could not be named for safety reasons.
But the future of this relationship is threatened by a revision of the 2005 religious regulations which came into force last month. 

The 77 vaguely worded provisions indicate the government’s priorities as it doubles down on extralegal worship amid a broader push to cement party-state authority.
For the first time, religious exchanges with Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau have become a target. 

China’s house churches were previously barred from “foreign affiliations,” but now any religiously motivated trips abroad must be vetted by Beijing.
“According to the new regulations, believers from mainland China are forbidden to attend unauthorized overseas religious conferences or training, or serious penalties will be imposed. Hong Kong is part of the overseas areas,” says Bob Fu, president and founder of China Aid.
Many Hong Kong pastors are suspending or outright canceling their work for fear of endangering their followers.
“Now is a sensitive time. Many pastors tell me they will have to wait and see how [the regulations] are enforced,” says Rev. Wu.

A “Subversive Seabed”
Many pastors say Beijing’s interference in their work is symptomatic of China’s encroachment on Hong Kong’s political autonomy.
“Beijing sees Hong Kong as place of insurgency, a place that needs to be brought under control,” says Brynne Lawrence, an associate at China Aid.
From China’s perspective, Hong Kong needs to be reintegrated into the mainland, political economist and Hong Kong transition expert Michael DeGolyer writes in The Other Hong Kong Report, a Hong Kong-based academic journal. 

While Hong Kong enjoys greater liberties than the mainland under the “one country, two systems approach” instituted after the 1997 handover from British to Chinese sovereignty, DeGolyer describes this agreement as a temporary transition period during which differences generated during 150 years of separation are to be respected, and overcome.
Rev. Wu says Hong Kong has long been seen as the “subversive seabed” from which provocative ideas — religious or secular — seep into the tightly controlled mainland.
In 1923, nationalist revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen defined Hong Kong as ground zero for resistance.
“Where and how did I get my revolutionary and modern ideas? I got my ideas from this very place, in the colony of Hong Kong,” said Sun, who attended the first independent Chinese church, founded in Hong Kong.

Members of a house church meet for Sunday service May 15, 2011 in Beijing, China.

The enclave has long served as a harbor for agitators and insurrectionists. 

It was a hotbed of communists during the 1920s and ‘30s, a base for Japanese imperialism in the Second World War, a sanctuary for nationalists fleeing the PRC, a refuge for Russian émigrés fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, a home in exile for Indonesia’s national hero and communist leader Tan Malaka, a source of funding, supplies, and ideological encouragement for the Tiananmen Square protesters, a safe haven for NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden and, most recently, the birthplace of the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement. 

Beijing’s flag-waving state media did not fail to note that several Christian leaders helped spearhead those 12-week Occupy protests in 2014.
“[Nobody is] allowed to use Hong Kong for infiltration subversion activities against the mainland to damage its social and political stability,” Zhang Xiaoming, the head of China’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong, said during a state media interview last year.
The admonition appears to extend to Christian evangelizing.
“They do no want the water from the well poisoning the river,” says Cardinal Joseph Zen.
The Chinese Communist Party has long associated Christianity with subversive Western values, which are perceived as antithetical to Xi’s push for conformity to orthodox party thinking. 

Xi has even said the government “must guard against overseas infiltrations via religious means and prevent ideological infringements by extremists.” 

He advised religions to Sinocize by accepting Chinese traditions and socialist core values, which really means submitting to state authority.

Growing Crackdowns
Religious leaders say hostility toward Christianity peaked under Xi, who became party leader in 2012 and has presided over a crackdown on civil society to quash dissent and establish what academics have termed his complete “controlocracy”.
“They don’t want to totally restrict religion, they want to bring it fully under their control,” says the Hong Kong missionary.
Christian groups say sporadic persecution has intensified and campaigns to demolish unregistered churches, tear down crosses, raid homes for unauthorized gospel literature, arrest church leaders and monitor congregants have all become more common. 

Last November, local authorities in Jiangxi province told residents to take down Christian iconography inside their homes and replace it with portraits of Xi.
The sweeping new religious regulations “try to legitimate the repressive measures adopted in the past few years,” and provide a legal framework for future crackdowns, says Yang Fenggang, director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University.
Aiming to curb unregistered religious activities, the regulations give underground churches an ultimatum: join the official, antiseptic Three-Self Patriotic churches where faith is subordinate to party dogma, or face criminal repercussions left to local enforcers’ interpretation — traditionally anything from fines, to detention or even enforced disappearances.
“In the U.S., the citizens could say that the law protects us, the first amendment protects our religious freedom. In China it’s the other way around. The law is just to help the government crackdown on the churches,” says Rev. Wu.

A believer prays during a weekend mass at an underground Catholic church in Tianjin in Nov. 10, 2013.

To cope in such a hostile environment, China’s underground churches have adopted guerilla-like tactics. 

Rev. C. described Christians who use balloons to obscure their faces from CCTV cameras while they walk to church, shops that act as fronts for Sunday schools, and coded conversations that allow pastors to talk openly about planting new churches.
“China’s Christians have endured decades of persecution,” Rev. C. says. 

“They know how to deal with the Chinese government.”
Plus, he adds, “Beijing can’t arrest them all. There are too many Christians now and not enough jails.”
It’s Hong Kong’s future, and the ability to adapt to unfamiliar oversight from Beijing that he worries about. 

“We’ve been safe here for the last 20 years. In the coming years? We just don’t know.”
Few religious leaders were optimistic in their forecast for the metropolis.
Cardinal Zen said those who believe in the perpetuity of Hong Kong’s sovereignty under the “two systems” approach are blind to its steady erosion. 

“Here we have no future unless we want to be Beijing’s slaves,” he put it bluntly.
One Christian academic, who asked not to be named, tells TIME that Hong Kong’s liberties — including free expression — are withering fast under the unfavorable attentions of Beijing.
“My worry is that some church leaders in Hong Kong are surrendering,” the academic says. 

“They just obey the government and do whatever they are told, keeping their mouth shut and not daring to criticize policies. You can already see this happening.”

Party vs. Pulpit
Trouble began brewing even before the rollout of the new regulations. 

Mainland Christians were sporadically barred from attending conferences and conventions in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong pastors have increasingly paid a price for trying to spread the gospel beyond the territory’s border.
In 2016, China Aid held a training in Hong Kong attended by over 400 mainland Christians. 

Not long after the event, Fu said three facilitators from the Chinese University of Hong Kong faced repercussions when they tried to visit the mainland: in some cases they were beaten, and in others warned.-
“The authorities have their lists. If you are on the list, you have become a target, and you are not allowed to cross the border,” says Rev. Wu.-
In an unprecedented incident portending the tightening restrictions to come, in 2015, Rev. Philip Woo was summoned from his Hong Kong office across the border. 

Religious affairs authorities there instructed him to stop teaching mainland students, and to stop posting online advertisements offering to ordain mainland pastors. 

Since then, he says he’s also been warned by Hong Kong’s authorities to call off trips to the mainland, where he has been unable to return for over a year.-
“The Chinese government should not be trying to interfere,” he says.-
But for the Communist Party, there are practical reasons to clamp down, says Fenggang, from Purdue University.
Christians, drawn to the faith’s moral compass, “have shown the will to challenge the injustice of the party-state,” he wrote by email. 

“Their presence is a challenge to the moral authority of the party-state. The more the party-state feels the lack of moral authority, the more it [will] try to suppress Christianity.”

Participants raise their hands in prayer during the first Global Chinese Alpha conference in Hong Kong, April 10, 2007.

Yet paradoxically, the more severe the persecution, the more people are drawn to Christianity.
“By clamping down on it, the Communist Party has multiplied it,” says Carsten Vala, chair of the political science department at Loyola University.
He also noted that while most Chinese Christians are not interested in seizing political power, Christianity and communism are inherently at odds, competing over the souls and loyalties of the people.
“Protestants have arguably created the most sustained structural challenges to the Chinese Communist Party’s ordering of society,” Vala says.
Rev. C. says he is motivated by the belief that if Christianity continues to grow in China, it’s conceivable that 20-25% of the country could be Christian. 

At that point, he says, “the Communist Party will not be able to handle it.”
“With Christianity [there will be] morals, ethics, just laws, and a will to enforce it,” he says.”

Only Christianity can change this country.”

How the West got China wrong

It bet that China would head towards democracy and the market economy. The gamble has failed.

The Economist

LAST weekend China stepped from autocracy into dictatorship. 

That was when Xi Jinping, already the world’s most powerful man, let it be known that he will change China’s constitution so that he can rule as president for as long as he chooses—and conceivably for life. 

Not since Mao Zedong has a Chinese leader wielded so much power so openly. 

This is not just a big change for China (see article), but also strong evidence that the West’s 25-year bet on China has failed.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West welcomed the next big communist country into the global economic order. 

Western leaders believed that giving China a stake in institutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) would bind it into the rules-based system set up after the second world war (see Briefing). 

They hoped that economic integration would encourage China to evolve into a market economy and that, as they grew wealthier, its people would come to yearn for democratic freedoms, rights and the rule of law.
It was a worthy vision, which this newspaper shared, and better than shutting China out. 

China has grown rich beyond anybody’s imagining. 

Under the leadership of Hu Jintao, you could still picture the bet paying off. 

When Xi took power five years ago China was rife with speculation that he would move towards constitutional rule. 

Today the illusion has been shattered. 

In reality, Xi has steered politics and economics towards repression, state control and confrontation.

All hail, Xi Dada
Start with politics. 

Xi has used his power to reassert the dominance of the Communist Party and of his own position within it. 

As part of a campaign against corruption, he has purged potential rivals. 

He has executed a sweeping reorganisation of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to ensure its loyalty to the party, and to him personally. 

He has imprisoned free-thinking lawyers and stamped out criticism of the party and the government in the media and online. 

He is creating a surveillance state to monitor discontent and deviance.
China used to profess no interest in how other countries run themselves, so long as it was left alone. Increasingly, however, it holds its authoritarian system up as a rival to liberal democracy. 

At the party’s 19th congress last autumn, Xi offered “a new option for other countries” that would involve “Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind.” 

Xi later said that China would not export its model, but you sense that America now has not just an economic rival, but an ideological one, too.
The bet to embed markets has been more successful. 

China has been integrated into the global economy. 

It is the world’s biggest exporter, with over 13% of the total. 

It is enterprising and resourceful, and home to 12 of the world’s 100 most valuable listed companies. It has created extraordinary prosperity, for itself and those who have done business with it.
Yet China is not a market economy and never will be. 

Instead, it increasingly controls business as an arm of state power. 

It sees a vast range of industries as strategic. 

Its “Made in China 2025” plan, for instance, sets out to use subsidies and protection to create world leaders in ten industries, including aviation, tech and energy, which together cover nearly 40% of its manufacturing. 

Although China has become less blatant about industrial espionage, Western companies still complain of state-sponsored raids on their intellectual property. 

Meanwhile, foreign businesses are profitable but miserable, because commerce always seems to be on China’s terms. 

American credit-card firms, for example, were let in only after payments had shifted to mobile phones.
China embraces some Western rules, but also seems to be drafting a parallel system of its own. 

Take the Belt and Road Initiative, which promises to invest over $1tn in markets abroad, ultimately dwarfing the Marshall plan. 

This is partly a scheme to develop China’s troubled west, but it also creates a Chinese-funded web of influence that includes pretty much any country willing to sign up. 

The initiative asks countries to accept Chinese-based dispute-resolution. 

Should today’s Western norms frustrate Chinese ambition, this mechanism could become an alternative.
And China uses business to confront its enemies. 

It seeks to punish firms directly, as when Mercedes-Benz, a German carmaker, was recently obliged to issue a grovelling apology after unthinkingly quoting the Dalai Lama online. 

It also punishes them for the behaviour of their governments. 

When the Philippines contested China’s claim to Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, China suddenly stopped buying its bananas, supposedly for health reasons. 

As China’s economic clout grows, so could this sort of pressure.
This “sharp power” in commerce is a complement to the hard power of armed force. 

Here, China behaves as a regional superpower bent on driving America out of East Asia. 

As with Scarborough Shoal, China has seized and built on a number of reefs and islets. 

The pace of Chinese military modernisation and investment is raising doubts about America’s long-run commitment to retain its dominance in the region. 

The PLA still could not defeat America in a fight, but power is about resolve as well as strength. Even as China’s challenge has become overt, America has been unable to stop it.

Take a deep breath
What to do? 

The West has lost its bet on China, just when its own democracies are suffering a crisis of confidence. President Donald Trump saw the Chinese threat early but he conceives of it chiefly in terms of the bilateral trade deficit, which is not in itself a threat. 

A trade war would undermine the very norms he should be protecting and harm America’s allies just when they need unity in the face of Chinese bullying. 

And, however much Mr Trump protests, his promise to “Make America Great Again” smacks of a retreat into unilateralism that can only strengthen China’s hand.
Instead Mr Trump needs to recast the range of China policy. 

Putting up with misbehaviour today in the hope that engagement will make China better tomorrow does not make sense. 

The longer the West accommodates China’s abuses, the more dangerous it will be to challenge them later. 

In every sphere, therefore, policy needs to be harder edged, even as the West cleaves to the values it claims are universal.
To counter China’s sharp power, Western societies should seek to shed light on links between independent foundations, even student groups, and the Chinese state. 

To counter China’s misuse of economic power, the West should scrutinise investments by state-owned companies and, with sensitive technologies, by Chinese companies of any kind. 

It should bolster institutions that defend the order it is trying to preserve. 

For months America has blocked the appointment of officials at the WTO. 

Mr Trump should demonstrate his commitment to America’s allies by reconsidering membership of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as he has hinted. 

To counter China’s hard power, America needs to invest in new weapons systems and, most of all, ensure that it draws closer to its allies—who, witnessing China’s resolve, will naturally look to America.

Xi’s thirst for power has raised the chance of devastating instability. 

He may one day try to claim glory by retaking Taiwan. 

And recall that China first limited the term of its leaders so that it would never again have to live through the chaos and crimes of Mao’s one-man rule. 

A powerful, yet fragile, dictatorship is not where the West’s China bet was supposed to lead. 

But that is where it has ended up.

Rogue Nation

Xi Jinping’s Strongman Rule Raises New Fears of Hostility and Repression
By JANE PERLEZ and JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

Xi Jinping’s efforts to indefinitely extend his rule as China’s leader, announced on Sunday, raised fresh fears in China of a resurgence of strongman politics — and fears abroad of a new era of hostility and gridlock.
Xi, who has been president since 2013, has tried to cultivate an image as a benevolent father figure who is working to promote China’s peaceful rise.
But the ruling Communist Party’s decision to open a path to a third term for Xi heightened a sense of resentment in China among academics, lawyers, journalists and business executives. 

Many have watched warily as Xi has used his power to imprison scores of dissidents, stifle free speech and tighten oversight of the economy, the world’s second largest.
Wu Qiang, a political analyst in Beijing, said the change to the Constitution would turn Xi into a “super-president.”
“He will have no limits on his power,” he said.
Government censors rushed to block criticism of the decision. 

Internet memes depicted Xi as an emperor with no regard for the rule of law and showed a portrait of Xi replacing Mao’s hallowed image in Tiananmen Square. 

Another repurposed an ad for Durex condoms, adding a tag line — “Twice is not enough” — to poke fun at the idea of Xi angling for a third term.
The party’s move comes as Xi has proclaimed an era of China’s greatness, when the country, he says, will take what he sees as its rightful place as a top global power. 

Already, it is establishing military bases in the Western Pacific and Africa, building infrastructure across Asia, parts of Europe and Africa, and running what Xi hopes will be the world’s No. 1 economy within two decades or sooner.
“China feels it is on the road to great power status and they want to perpetuate the trajectory they are on,” said David Finkelstein, director of China Studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Va.
Analysts outside China said they worried that allowing Xi one-man rule might worsen an increasingly tense relationship between the United States and China.
After years of efforts by the United States to engage China on issues from market reform to climate change to human rights, the Trump administration turned on Beijing last December and called China a strategic competitor in its first national security document.
Washington policymakers are preparing plans to impose tariffs on some Chinese imports, limit Chinese investments in the United States, particularly in technology, and spend more on the United States military to sustain its big advantage over the People’s Liberation Army.
In Congressional testimony earlier this month, the director of the F.B.I., Christopher Wray, described China as “not just a whole of government threat but a whole of society threat.”
Trump may well see Xi’s consolidation of power as part of a global trend toward increasingly influential leaders, in which he might include himself along with Xi and Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian leader, said James Mann, the author of “The China Fantasy,” which contradicted the popular view that increasing prosperity would lead to political liberalization in China.
“I’m guessing he will not deplore the lack of democracy in China, because that’s the sort of thing he rarely if ever does,” Mr. Mann said of Trump.
Mr. Mann also said Trump might not have much problem with what Xi had accomplished.
“Over the past 14 months in office, Trump has almost never voiced the sort of support for our constitutional system that has been a staple in the statements of past presidents,” Mr. Mann said. 

“He does not respect the dignity or integrity of political opponents. He does not express support for the independence of the courts or the freedom of the press.”
So if anything, he said, “I think Trump is probably jealous.”
From Clinton to Bush to Obama, the prevailing belief was engagement with China would make China more like the West.

Donald J. Trump and Xi Jinping walking off stage after a meeting with business leaders in Beijing last year. 

Instead, as Mr. Mann predicted, China has gone in the opposite direction.
Shi Yinhong, professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said Xi likely did not care how the world would interpret his designation as a potential ruler in perpetuity.
With an unlimited term in office, Xi would almost certainly be in office beyond 2024, the year Trump would leave the White House if he won a second term.
“This objectively makes him stronger than Trump, who has no reason to like the change,” Mr. Shi said.
At home, Xi will likely have considerable support for a third term, the result of a yearslong campaign to sideline political rivals and limit dissent. 

And nationalists cheered the decision, describing Xi as a singular force who could restore the glory of the nation.
But as the news spread, readings of Hannah Arendt who wrote about the evils of totalitarian rule, and passages from George Washington, who retired after two terms as president, were discussed on social media in Chinese legal circles.
Douglas H. Paal, a China expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the sudden move, before Xi even starts his second term next month, suggested that things were not “normal” within the Communist Party.
“This looks like forced marching, not normal order, so something is going on,” Mr. Paal said. 

“Xi is winning, but it will take sleuthing to find out what. These are not ordinary times.”
A series of visits by senior Chinese officials to Washington in the past month to try and persuade the Trump administration to slow down plans to introduce punitive measures that could result in a trade war had failed, Mr. Paal said.
“This could get complicated when U.S. initiatives meet unconventional times in China,” he said.
Still, Xi is popular in many areas — his fans affectionately call him “Uncle Xi” — and his brand of folksy nationalism wins accolades, especially in rural areas. 

Experts said Xi would likely benefit from the perception in China that the rest of the world is chaotic.
“With a population amazed at the incompetent mess in much of the rest of the world, and intoxicated by nationalism, for Xi to effect this change will be seen as reasonable,” said Kerry Brown, a professor of Chinese politics at King’s College, London.
But Xi’s assumption of unfettered power may not work out the way he thinks, said Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and a former senior Australian defense official.
“The risks to his personal fortunes are huge,” he said. 

“What if the People’s Liberation Army decides he should be cut loose?”

And, he added, “What if growth slows more than expected?”
If Xi comes under pressure at home or abroad, he could become unpredictable, and even dangerous, Mr. Jennings said. 

The reach for more personal power could be the start of his downfall.
“The West can take no comfort in that because Xi’s situation means he may take more risks in the South China Sea or over Taiwan,” he said. 

“He has nothing to lose and everything to gain by engaging in more Putin-like brinkmanship.”
Moreover, he added, “Where does one ever see the ‘president for life’ model end well?”

Subversion: China is infiltrating U.S. colleges

Penn State is among those that have closed their Confucius Institutes
By JOSH ROGIN

China’s massive foreign influence campaign in the United States takes a long view, sowing seeds in American institutions meant to blossom over years or even decades. 

That’s why the problem of Chinese financial infusions into U.S. higher education is so difficult to grasp and so crucial to combat.
But at last, the community of U.S. officials, lawmakers and academics focused on resisting Chinese efforts to subvert free societies is beginning to respond to Beijing’s presence on America’s campuses. 

One part of that is compelling public and private universities to reconsider hosting Confucius Institutes, the Chinese government-sponsored outposts of culture and language training.
With more than 100 universities in the United States now in direct partnership with the Chinese government through Confucius Institutes, the U.S. intelligence community is warning about their potential as spying outposts. 

But the more important challenge is the threat the institutes pose to the ability of the next generation of American leaders to learn, think and speak about realities in China and the true nature of the Communist Party regime.
“Their goal is to exploit America’s academic freedom to instill in the minds of future leaders a pro-China viewpoint,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., co-chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. 

“It’s smart. It’s a long-term, patient approach.”
This month, Mr. Rubio asked all Florida educational institutions that host Confucius Institutes to reconsider doing so in light of a growing body of evidence that China seeks to constrain criticism on American campuses, exert influence over curriculum related to China and monitor Chinese students in the United States.
One of the schools Mr. Rubio contacted, the University of West Florida, had already decided not to renew its contract with Hanban, the Chinese government entity that manages the institutes. 

Western Florida joins a growing list of universities that are rejecting the Faustian bargain that comes with accepting Chinese government funding and management for programs meant to expose students to China, including the University of Chicago, Penn State University and Ontario’s McMaster University. 

West Florida President Martha Saunders told me the decision was primarily due to a lack of student interest, but the rising concerns also contributed.
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray articulated those concerns in testimony last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee. 

He said the FBI is “watching warily” and investigating Confucius Institutes. 

He said academic sector naivete was exacerbating the problem and called out the Chinese government for planting spies in U.S. schools.
“They’re exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have, which we all revere. But they’re taking advantage of it,” Mr. Wray said.
For Rep. Christopher H. Smith, R-N.J., that’s a long-awaited acknowledgment. 

The majority of the institutes’ activity may be benign, and it’s difficult to determine how much self-censorship participating institutions engage in, Mr. Smith said. 

He has commissioned a study of the institutes by the Government Accountability Office to collect data to support his call for their closure.
“They are nests of influence, reconnaissance,” he said. 

“They keep tabs on Chinese students, and those who attend their classes are getting a Pollyannaish take on what China is about today.”
To understand what Confucius Institutes are really about, it’s necessary to understand their connections to the Communist Party and its history. 

Peter Mattis, a former U.S. intelligence analyst now with the Jamestown Foundation, said Confucius Institutes can be directly linked to the Communist Party’s “united front” efforts, still described in Maoist terms: to mobilize the party’s friends to strike at the party’s enemies.
For example, Liu Yandong, the Communist Party official who launched the Confucius Institutes, was head of the United Front Work Department when the program began. 

“They are an instrument of the party’s power, not a support for independent scholarship,” Mr. Mattis said. 

“They can be used to groom academics and administrators to provide a voice for the party in university decision-making.”
At a minimum, Confucius Institutes must be required to provide more transparency, yield full control over curriculum to their American hosts and pledge not to involve themselves in issues of academic freedom for American or Chinese students. 

If they don’t do this voluntarily, Congress will likely act to compel them. 

Mr. Rubio and Mr. Smith are working on new legislation to do just that.
More broadly, if we as a country don’t want Confucius Institutes to control discussion of China on campus, we must provide better funding for the study of China and Chinese languages. 

If we are headed into a long-term strategic competition with China, there is no excuse for not investing in educating our young people about it — or for letting the Chinese government do it for us.

Europe needs to step up vigilance on China’s influence

Beijing’s authoritarian brand presents a direct challenge to liberal traditions 
By Thorsten Benner and Kristin Shi-Kupfer

Complacency with Chinese tyranny: French President Emmanuel Macron with Xi Jinping in Beijing in January

Mike Pompeo, the director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, said last month that Beijing’s efforts to exert influence in liberal democracies are just as concerning as those of Moscow, citing China’s “much bigger footprint”.
Indeed, China’s rapidly increasing political influencing efforts and the self-confident promotion of its authoritarian ideals present a fundamental challenge to western democracies. 
 Drawing on its economic strength and a Communist Party of China apparatus that is geared towards strategically building stocks of influence across the globe, Beijing’s efforts are bound to be much more consequential in the medium to long term than those of the Kremlin. 
Nowhere is the gap between the scale of China’s efforts and public awareness of the problem larger than in Europe.
EU member states urgently need to devise a strategy to counter China’s authoritarian advance. 
 As we detail in a new report, Beijing pursues three related goals.

• First, it seeks to weaken western unity within Europe and across the Atlantic. One aim of this is to prevent Europe from challenging China’s human rights record and its hegemonic ambitions in the South and East China seas. 
•  Second, it aims to build European support on specific issues such as market economy status and a free pass for Chinese investments. 
•  Third, Beijing pushes hard to create a more positive global perception of China’s political and economic system as a viable alternative to liberal democracies. 

To further these goals, China commands a comprehensive and flexible influencing toolset in Europe, ranging from the overt to the covert and strategically deployed across three arenas: political and economic elites, media and civil society & academia. 
 Beijing uses investments in infrastructure and public utilities to create political leverage in Europe’s periphery. 
In Greece, for example, it controls the port of Piraeus, leading the government in Athens to torpedo a joint EU resolution on human rights in China in the Human Rights Council. 
In the Czech Republic, it placed an adviser in the president’s office. 
Across Europe, it buys the services of former politicians such as Philipp Roesler, the former German vice-chancellor who was hired by HNA, the Chinese conglomerate, and David Cameron, the former UK prime minister, who has signed up to lead a joint UK-China investment fund. 
Many smaller eastern and southern EU members align with China in fits of “pre-emptive obedience”. 
They try to curry favour with China and lure investment by supporting China’s political positions. 
Some illiberal governments, such as that of Viktor Orban in Hungary, do so all too happily.
They see China’s authoritarian model as attractive and a convenient source of leverage against Brussels and western EU members pushing back against their illiberalism. 
Orban has already played the China card to put pressure his EU partners who are considering reducing structural funds in response to his authoritarianism and a post-Brexit recalibration of the EU budget. 
“Central Europe needs capital to build new roads and pipelines. If the EU is unable to provide enough capital, we will just collect it in China,” Orban said in Berlin this year.
To sweeten the deal for China, Orban is gladly working to prevent a strong EU stance on China’s territorial advances in the South China Sea. 
In parallel, Beijing has invested in shaping the narrative on China.
Across central and eastern Europe, China-supported Confucius Institutes, as well as China-linked think-tanks and university scholars dominate discussions, while an increasing number of journalists go through training programmes designed and funded by the Chinese Communist party. 
In Brussels and other capitals, China funds think-tanks and pays lobbyists to project a favourable image. 
It spreads Chinese official views and creates subtle dependencies by paying for inserts in European quality newspapers. 
It uses the lure of the Chinese market to encourage self-censorship in film, art, and academic publishing. 
Springer Nature, the German group that publishes Scientific American, has removed content in China that was deemed politically sensitive by the party. 
China even went as far as demanding that Germany ensure that its visiting football teams are not met by protests about Tibet during paid friendly games on German soil. 
In part, China uses covert methods, such targeting German lawmakers and government employees via fake social media profiles. 

But most influencing comes through the front door.
Beijing takes advantage of the EU’s one-sided openness. 
Europe’s gates are wide open whereas China seeks to tightly restrict access of foreign ideas, actors and capital. 
Beijing profits from willing enablers among European political and professional classes who are happy to promote Chinese values and interests. 
They do so mostly for financial or other advantages but at times also out of genuine political conviction or convenience.
Rather than only China trying to actively build up political capital, there is also much influence courting on the part of those political elites in EU member states.
China has already made significant progress toward a more fragmented and pliant Europe that better serves its authoritarian interests. 
If Europe intends to stop the momentum of Chinese influencing efforts, it needs to act swiftly and decisively.
In responding to China’s advance, European governments need to make sure that the liberal DNA of their countries’ political and economic systems stays intact.
 Some restrictions will be necessary, but Europe should not copy China’s illiberalism.
While staying as open as possible, Europe needs to address critical vulnerabilities to Chinese authoritarian influencing through a multi-pronged strategy that integrates different branches of government, businesses, media, civil society, culture/arts as well as academia. 
 To better leverage the collective weight of EU member states, larger member states, such as Germany and France, need to take serious steps towards putting their privileged bilateral relations with China in the service of common European interests.
Complaining about the 16+1 format China uses to interact with smaller EU members in central and eastern Europe while engaging in 1+1 formats with Beijing undermines a common EU response to challenges from China. 
In addition, European governments need to invest in high-calibre, independent China expertise. Raising awareness about and responding to China’s political influencing efforts in Europe can succeed only if there is sufficient impartial expertise on China in think-tanks, universities, NGOs and media across Europe. 
 Furthermore, the EU needs to continue providing alternatives to the promises of Chinese investments in European countries.
It also needs to enable EU members and third countries in the neighbourhood to properly evaluate, monitor and prepare large-scale infrastructure projects, including those financed by China.
 The EU and its members must be able to stop state-driven takeovers of companies that are of significant public interest.
In addition to high-tech sectors as well as key parts of public infrastructure, this notably includes the media, as an institution of critical importance to liberal democracies.
 Foreign funding of political parties from outside Europe, not least from China, should be banned across the EU. 
European intelligence services urgently need to enhance co-operation on Chinese activities to arrive at a common understanding of the threat and to deliver joint responses. 
 EU members should put additional awareness-building measures in place sensitise potential targets of Chinese intelligence activities. 
In particular, decision makers and scholars should be briefed more systematically about common patterns of contact-building and approaches by Chinese intelligence agencies or related actors.
 For the wider public to get a full picture of authoritarian influencing, liberal democracies need to leverage one of the key assets of open societies: the power of critical public debate.
Implementing transparency requirements concerning collaboration with Chinese actors for media agencies, universities and think-tanks, among others, would help raise awareness of the various influencing mechanisms Chinese state actors employ. 
 “Vigilance is wise; confidence a useful adjunct,” the Economist counselled recently in a piece on China’s influence in Europe.
With the necessary defensive mechanisms in place, confidence should come more easily.