Oriental Despotism

China’s Communist Party is as shadowy and repressive as when it took power 70 years ago

By YAQIU WANG

On Sept. 23, the wife of 38-year-old Chinese activist Wang Meiyu learned that her husband had died in a detention center in Hunan province, less than three months after the police detained him there. Wang had staged lone protests calling for Xi Jinping to step down and allow democracy in China.
“He was a healthy, normal man when he went in there,” Wang’s widow told Radio Free Asia. 

“When I saw his [dead] body… he was totally unrecognizable.”
Those who rely on Chinese media for their news are unlikely ever to hear about Wang’s death — or about the hundreds of thousands of other Chinese citizens who have run afoul of the government. Controlling information has always been central to Chinese Communist Party rule, and as the 70th anniversary of that rule approaches on Oct. 1, the propaganda machine is in overdrive. 

What Chinese people hear are Xi’s speeches extolling the party’s achievements and interviews with people expressing their national pride. 

They see images of government-produced high-speed trains, state-of-the-art weaponry, and high-tech mega projects.
“There are actually two Chinas,” Chinese scholar Qian Liqun said in a speech. 

“One is the China amplified by the historical narrative and propaganda machinery, a China that strides triumphantly and is unstoppable. The other is the China ravaged and denied, perishing in the darkness.”
As a China researcher for Human Rights Watch, I know something about that other China. 

It’s one where people are routinely imprisoned for speaking out for a more just and free society, where a critical comment online about the president can get someone forcibly disappeared, and where a person can be declared mentally ill and sent to a psychiatric hospital for seeking compensation for expropriated land.
It is the China where a million Turkic Muslims in the East Turkestan colony are now being detained solely because of their ethnic identity, while many of their children are forcibly housed in state-run boarding schools. 

It is the China where millions of women have suffered the trauma of forced sterilizations and abortions, and where children cannot go to school because they were born outside of the One-Child or Two-Child policies.
“The other China” is the one whose existence the Communist Party denies and forbids anyone to speak about.
The other day I came across an anonymous posting by a woman based in Shanghai who had found her way to some Human Rights Watch’s research on East Turkestan — presumably using a virtual private network, or VPN, to circumvent the state censorship that prevents internet users in China from reading uncensored news of the region. 

She described how her “heart sank” and her “body trembled” as she learned of the government’s brutal repression. 

She wrote that her daily life in the first China was “good and vacuous,” but when reading censored news websites about “the other China” she feels “uncontrollably frightened” and “powerless.”
Most Chinese people, at least for now, can live their lives untroubled by “the other China.” 

But there are no guarantees of not being suddenly engulfed by it. 

The billionaire Xiao Jianhua and the former vice minister of public security and president of Interpol, Meng Hongwei, now live in “the other China,” incarcerated since 2017 and 2018, respectively. 

Once you are pulled into that shadowy world, it is difficult to get out. 

Actress Fan Bingbing only reemerged from months of house arrest after making a groveling public apology.
People understand the message of these cases, and do their utmost to protect themselves.
Last year, the writer Yangyang Cheng, tweeted about how, at the age of 8, she learned to be careful about expressing dissent. 

After a “lively dinner” at her grandmother’s, Cheng said in her tweet, she wrote in her diary about the night’s political discussion. 

“My mother blocked out the lines with the darkest of ink,” Cheng tweeted, “and told me to never write such things again.”
This is not just the impulse of intellectuals. 

Even at a time of strong nationalistic sentiment and high tension with the West, many hope to immigrate to Western countries. 

In 2017, nearly 90% of the applicants on the waiting list for America’s investment-based green cards were from China. 

Many Chinese have chosen to store their assets abroad—so much so that the massive wave of capital flight in recent years has prompted the party to resort to extreme measures to control it.
After all, no one would want to meet the same fate as Xiao Jianhua or Wang Meiyu.
Seventy years into the Chinese Communist Party’s rule, millions of people now live in the China that promises material comfort and convenience, and projects political unity. 

But they all live in fear of “the other China”— a reality the party’s top brass relies on to maintain control.

China's Law of the Jungle

Democracy Activist Who Called For Xi Jinping's Resignation Dies in Police Custody
By Wong Siu-san and Sing Man

Activist Wang Meiyu calling on Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang to resign, in undated photo.

A rights activist who called publicly for the resignation of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has died in a police-run detention center in the central province of Hunan, rights groups said.
Wang Meiyu's widow received notification of her husband's death in the Hengyang Detention Center on Monday.
Wang, 38, was detained two months ago after holding up a placard in public calling on Xi to step down, and for democratic elections in China.
"Wang Meiyu died in the detention center," his mother, who declined to give her name, told RFA. "Wang Meiyu was only 38 years old. His father passed away 20 years ago, and now my only child is dead too."
Wang's widow Cao Shuxia said Wang was initially detained on July 8, and had been in normal health when his detention began.
Then, he was reported as having died suddenly in a military hospital. 

Cao said Wang's body was "unrecognizable" when she went to identify it.
"He was a healthy, normal man when he went in there," she said. 

"Then, at 4.00 a.m. on Sept. 23, I got a call from the village [ruling Chinese Communist] Party secretary, who told me that Wang Meiyu was dead."
"I asked how he died, and he said he didn't know, and that he had been informed by his superiors," she said. 

"He didn't even know the time of death. Later, I found out when I called up to enquire that he had died in the emergency room of Hengyang 169 Hospital."
"When I saw his body, it was like another person; he was totally unrecognizable," Cao said. 

"They wouldn't let me take my cell phone in with me, and there were a lot of police officers there with us, and they stopped me from getting too close."

Solitary confinement
Cao said Wang had received two visits from a lawyer after being detained. 

During these meetings, the lawyer heard that he was initially held in a large cell along with dozens of other inmates.
But by the time the lawyer visited again at the end of August, Wang had been transferred to solitary confinement, she said.
She said Wang's death was a huge blow to his family, especially to his two children, the older of whom is just 11. 

The couple had already lost their jobs as a result of Wang's activism, she said.
"My husband didn't commit any crime: he did nothing wrong," Cao said.
An acquaintance of Wang's surnamed Chen said Wang had been campaigning for democratic elections in China, which was why he had called on Xi and Premier Li Keqiang to resign.
"Last year, he held up a placard outside the gates of the Hengyang Normal University in Hunan, and he did it again last July, outside the Hunan provincial police department, where he was detained," Chen said.
"He was already under very tight surveillance and had no source of income, and relations with his family were already strained," he said.
The authorities had already been in touch to warn off anyone thinking of showing support to the family, or speaking out on Wang's behalf, he said. 

"I will likely have to go and meet with state security police tomorrow."

'Step down and enable general elections'
In November 2018, Wang wrote on the social media platform WeChat that he had been visited by five officers of the state security police from Hengyang's Zhoushi county.
"They accused me of making random comments online, calling on Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang to step down and enable general elections," Wang wrote at the time.
"They said this was attacking our national leaders and told me to ... write a letter of repentance and a guarantee [of future good behavior]."
"Morons: it never occurred to them that three days and three nights of torture with dripping water and electric batons until I was spitting blood and my soul had nearly left my body wouldn't bring about my surrender," he wrote.
"What have I done wrong? I didn't give these state security morons the time of day: eventually, they went away with their tails between their legs."
An employee who answered the phone at the Hengyang People's Liberation Army 169 Hospital declined to comment, saying she wasn't on duty when Wang died, and that nobody was discussing the incident at work.
Repeated requests to the Hengyang police department for comment went unanswered at the time of writing.