Die Endlösung der Uigurischfrage

How China Uses Hikvision and Huawei to Subdue Minorities

By Chris Buckley and Paul Mozur

Xi Jinping looming large on a screen in Kashgar, in the East Turkestan colony. As many as one million members of Muslim ethnic minorities are held in concentration camps in East Turkestan.

KASHGAR, East Turkestan — A God’s-eye view of Kashgar, an ancient city in western China, flashed onto a wall-size screen, with colorful icons marking police stations, checkpoints and the locations of recent security incidents. 

At the click of a mouse, a technician explained, the police can pull up live video from any surveillance camera or take a closer look at anyone passing through one of the thousands of checkpoints in the city.
To demonstrate, she showed how the system could retrieve the photo, home address and official identification number of a woman who had been stopped at a checkpoint on a major highway. 

The system sifted through billions of records, then displayed details of her education, family ties, links to an earlier case and recent visits to a hotel and an internet cafe.
The simulation, presented at an industry fair in China, offered a rare look at a system that now peers into nearly every corner of East Turkestan, the troubled colony where Kashgar is located.
This is the vision of high-tech surveillance — precise, all-seeing, infallible — that China’s leaders are investing billions of dollars in every year, making East Turkestan an incubator for increasingly intrusive policing systems that will spread across the country and beyond.
It is also a vision that some of President Trump’s aides have begun citing in a push for tougher action against Chinese companies in the intensifying trade war. 

Beyond market barriers, theft and national security, China is using technology to strengthen authoritarianism at home and abroad — and that the United States must stop it.

How China Turned a City Into a Prison. Children are interrogated. Neighbors become informants. Mosques are monitored. Cameras are everywhere.

Developed and sold by the China Electronics Technology Corporation (C.E.T.C.), a state-run defense manufacturer, the system in Kashgar is on the cutting edge of what has become a flourishing new market for technology that the government can use to monitor and subdue millions of Uighurs and members of other Muslim ethnic groups in East Turkestan.

Treating a city like a battlefield, the platform was designed to “apply the ideas of military cyber systems to civilian public security,” Wang Pengda, a C.E.T.C. engineer, said in an official blog post. “Looking back, it truly was an idea ahead of its time.”
The system taps into networks of neighborhood informants; tracks individuals and analyzes their behavior; tries to anticipate potential crime, protest or violence; and then recommends which security forces to deploy, the company said.
On the screen during the demonstration was a slogan: “If someone exists, there will be traces, and if there are connections, there will be information.”

Pictures from presentations by the China Electronics Technology Corporation at recent industry shows.

A New York Times investigation drawing on government and company records as well as interviews with industry insiders found that China is in effect hard-wiring East Turkestan for segregated surveillance, using an army of security personnel to compel ethnic minorities to submit to monitoring and data collection while generally ignoring the majority Han Chinese, who make up 36 percent of East Turkestan’s population.
It is a virtual cage that complements the concentration camps in East Turkestan where the authorities have detained a million or more Uighurs and other Muslims in a push to transform them into secular citizens who will never challenge the ruling Communist Party. 

The program helps identify people to be sent to the camps or investigated, and keeps tabs on them when they are released.
President Trump administration is considering whether to blacklist one of the Chinese companies at the center of the East Turkestan effort, Hikvision, and bar it from buying American technology. Hikvision is a major manufacturer of video surveillance equipment, with customers around the world and across East Turkestan, where its cameras have been installed at mosques and concentration camps. 

C.E.T.C. owns about 42 percent of Hikvision through subsidiaries.
“East Turkestan is maybe a kind of more extreme, more intrusive example of China’s mass surveillance systems,” said Maya Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch who has studied the technology in the region. 

“These systems are designed for a very explicit purpose — to target Muslims.”

Shoppers lined up for identification checks outside the Kashgar Bazaar last fall.

Virtual fences
In the city of Kashgar, with a population of 720,000 — about 85 percent of them Uighur — the C.E.T.C. platform draws on databases with 68 billion records, including those on people’s movements and activities, according to the demonstration viewed by a Times reporter at the industry fair, held in the eastern city of Wuzhen in late 2017.
By comparison, the F.B.I.’s national instant criminal background check system contained about 19 million records at the end of 2018.
The police in East Turkestan use a mobile app, made by C.E.T.C. for smartphones running the Android operating system, to enter information into the databases.
Human Rights Watch, which obtained and analyzed the app, said it helped the authorities spot behavior that they consider suspicious, including extended travel abroad or the use of an “unusual” amount of electricity.
The app, which the Times examined, also allows police officers to flag people they believe have stopped using a smartphone, have begun avoiding the use of the front door in coming and going from home, or have refueled someone else’s car.
The police use the app at checkpoints that serve as virtual “fences” across East Turkestan. 

If someone is tagged as a potential threat, the system can be set to trigger an alarm every time he or she tries to leave the neighborhood or enters a public place, Human Rights Watch said.
“The government’s arbitrary power is reflected, or coded, in the app,” Ms. Wang said, adding that the system “is programmed to consider vague, broad categories of behaviors, many of them perfectly legal, as indicators of suspiciousness.”
Intelligence agencies in many countries use sets of behavior to single out individuals for greater scrutiny. 

But China has taken that approach to an extreme, treating the Muslim population in East Turkestan as suspect from the start and defining suspicious behavior in sweeping terms, including peaceful religious activities such as making a donation to a mosque.
The Chinese government has defended the surveillance program, saying it has improved security in the region, and says the indoctrination camps in East Turkestan are job training centers. 

Hikvision has denied “any inappropriate actions in East Turkestan,” and C.E.T.C. declined to comment when reached by phone.
C.E.T.C. traces its roots to the military research labs that helped build China’s first nuclear bomb, satellite and guided missile. 

Established as a state defense manufacturer in 2002, it soon expanded into civilian security matters, working with Microsoft, for instance, to create a version of Windows that meets the government’s internal security requirements.
In recent years, it turned to East Turkestan.
The Communist Party, which took control of the region in 1949, has long been wary of the Uighurs, whose Turkic culture and Muslim faith have inspired demands for self-rule, and sometimes attacks on Chinese targets. 

State investment in surveillance took off a decade ago after anti-Chinese rioting in the regional capital, Urumqi, killed nearly 200 people.
The real bonanza of security contracts came after Xi Jinping took the helm of the party in late 2012. Spending on internal security in East Turkestan totaled nearly $8.4 billion in 2017, six times as much as in 2012, including funds for surveillance, personnel and the concentration camps.
Hikvision has received contracts in East Turkestan worth at least $290 million for its cameras and facial recognition systems. 

Another company tapping into East Turkestan’s security gold rush is Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that the United States has described as a security threat. 

It signed an agreement last year with the region’s police department to help officers analyze data.

A checkpoint in Hotan last year.

The multilayered program to harvest information from Uighurs and other Muslims begins on the edges of towns and cities across East Turkestan in buildings that look like toll plazas.
Instead of coins, they collect personal information.
On a recent visit to one checkpoint in Kashgar, a line of passengers and drivers, nearly all Uighur, got out of their vehicles, trudged through automated gates made by C.E.T.C. and swiped their identity cards.
“Head up,” the machines chimed as they photographed the motorists and armed guards looked on.
There are smaller checkpoints at banks, parks, schools, gas stations and mosques, all recording information from identity cards in the mass surveillance database.
Identification cards are also needed to buy knives, gasoline, phones, computers and even sugar. 

The purchases are entered into a police database used to flag suspicious behavior or individuals, according to a 2017 dissertation by a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences that features screenshots of the system in Kashgar.
Not everyone has to endure the inconvenience. 

At many checkpoints, privileged groups — Han Chinese, Uighur officials with passes, and foreign visitors — are waved through “green channels.” 

In this way, the authorities have created separate yet overlapping worlds on the same streets — and in the online police databases — one for Muslim minorities, the other for Han Chinese.

“The goal here is instilling fear — fear that their surveillance technology can see into every corner of your life,” said Wang Lixiong, a Chinese author who has written about East Turkestan as well as China’s surveillance state. 

“The amount of people and equipment used for security is part of the deterrent effect.”
A database stored online by SenseNets, a Chinese surveillance company, and examined by the Times suggests the scale of surveillance in East Turkestan: It contained facial recognition records and ID scans for about 2.5 million people, mostly in Urumqi, a city with a population of about 3.5 million.
“This can be pulled off by anyone, and that’s the part that worries me,” said Victor Gevers, a Dutch security researcher and co-founder of GDI Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes internet security.
According to Mr. Gevers, who discovered the unsecured database, the online records indicate that a network of about 10,000 checkpoints in Urumqi made more than six million identifications in 24 hours.
The authorities in East Turkestan also force residents to install an app known as “Clean Net Guard” on their phones to monitor for content that the government deems suspicious.
Kashgar and other areas of East Turkestan have in recent years systematically collected DNA and other biological data from residents too, especially Muslims. 

Officials now collect blood, fingerprints, voice recordings, head portraits from multiple angles, and scans of irises, which can provide a unique identifier like fingerprints.
These databases are not yet completely integrated, and despite the futuristic gloss of the East Turkestan surveillance state, the authorities rely on hundreds of thousands of police officers, officials and neighborhood monitors to gather and enter data.
“We risk understating the extent to which this high-tech police state continues to require a lot of manpower,” said Adrian Zenz, an independent researcher who has studied security spending in East Turkestan. 

“It is the combination of manpower and technology that makes the 21st-century police state so powerful.”

Security gates at the entrance to a Kashgar mosque in 2016.

Expanding beyond the colony
East Turkestan’s security and surveillance systems are already attracting admirers from the rest of China. 

Delegations of police officers from other provinces and cities have visited Kashgar and other cities to admire — and consider adopting — the measures.
They often visit police command centers where rows of officers peer at computers, scanning surveillance video feeds and information on residents on the C.E.T.C. platform.
“The digitalization of police work has achieved leap-like growth in East Turkestan,” Zhang Ping, a counterterrorism officer from Jiujiang, a city in southeastern China, said during a visit to East Turkestan last year, according to an official report on the website of the city’s police bureau.
East Turkestan’s high-tech policing, he added, was “something we should vigorously study.”
Zhejiang and Guangdong, two wealthy provinces on China’s southeastern coast, have been testing the C.E.T.C. surveillance system used in East Turkestan, “laying a robust foundation for a nationwide rollout,” the company said last year.
C.E.T.C. has also signed an agreement with the police in the southern city of Shenzhen to provide an advanced “command center information system” similar to the one in East Turkestan.
The technology has some way to go. 

Dust and bad lighting can hobble facial recognition on security cameras, which struggle to track large numbers of people simultaneously. 

Even the best systems can be accurate in less than 20 percent of cases, according to one study published by a journal linked to the Ministry of Public Security.
A technician who until recently installed and maintained computers for the authorities in East Turkestan said police surveillance centers relied on hundreds of workers to monitor cameras, an expensive and inefficient undertaking.
And outside urban centers, police officers often do not have the skills to operate the sophisticated systems, said the technician, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing repercussions for speaking to a journalist.
The spending spree on security in East Turkestan has left local governments across the region with staggering bills, raising questions about how the authorities can keep the systems running.
In Kashgar, for example, the county of Yengisar warned this year of a “huge shortfall” from spending on security and said that it had accumulated 1 billion renminbi, or about $150 million, in previously undeclared “invisible debt.”
“The pressure from ensuring basic spending for additional staff and to maintain stability is extraordinary,” it said.
Still, the region’s leaders told officials this year that they must not wind back spending.
“Preserving stability is a hard-and-fast task that takes priority over everything else,” the leadership said in the region’s annual budget report. 

“Use every possible means to find funds so that the high-pressure offensive does not let up.”

Make China Small Again

President Trump’s China Policy Is a Triumph.
The president's trade war is bringing Beijing to heel.
BY GREG AUTRY

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at a rally on February 22, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. 

U.S. President Donald Trump’s aggressive approach to China has been the most credible and consistent policy of an often-criticized White House.
The president’s assertions of Chinese malfeasance in trade matters are undeniably true.
Even CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, no fan of the president, has said, “Donald Trump is right: China is a trade cheat,” going on to praise the U.S. trade representative’s exhaustive report on China’s World Trade Organization noncompliance as a rare example of a quality document from this administration.
Despite dire warnings from establishment economists and media pundits that getting tough on China would damage the U.S. economy, we have seen nothing of the kind.
The United States is not simply surviving the trade war but has thrived through two years of global stagnation.
In the meantime, as best as can be told from highly unreliable and often-faked data, Chinese economic growth has stalled.
The hard-line U.S. policy has been effective and should be maintained until China demonstrates real, substantial behavioral change such as no longer requiring forced joint partnerships and ceasing its vast state-run cyberespionage program. 
Holding Beijing accountable for its treatment of its own citizens isn’t too much to ask either.
Then-President Bill Clinton’s fateful decision to disconnect U.S. human rights policy from trade deals in 1993 removed America’s most powerful instrument for producing good in the world. 
As George W. Bush and Barack Obama subsequently adopted Clinton’s “business is business” policy, the Chinese Communist Party learned to exploit a complacent Western media to whitewash its authoritarianism, militarism, and repression and greenwash its environmental depravation.
Lazy American journalists eagerly reprinted half-truths generated by D.C. think tanks funded by the multinational corporations growing rich on the China trade, as well as quotes from professors at universities addicted to foreign student tuition fees and wealthy Chinese donors. 
Those who criticized China, as I did, were marginalized, maligned, and censored. 
U.S. firms such as Google and Home Depot found their attempts to actually access the promised mega-market wrecked by a system tilted in favor of China’s domestic champions.
Still, the horrors of Tibet and Tiananmen were obscured by iPhones and corporate profits. 
Today, Americans enjoy movies from U.S. studios whose scripts are written to avoid offending the Communist Party and are blissfully unaware that over a million Chinese citizens are being brutalized in “re-education” camps designed to deprogram their religious identities.
President Trump holding China’s hypersensitive authoritarians accountable to international standards of decency in trade was a badly overdue act of bravery, and one that perhaps only an unabashedly indiscreet leader could pull off.
The very public shaming of Beijing over its blatantly closed markets, transshipment of products, export subsidies, abuse of joint partnerships, espionage, and technology theft has revealed the party’s claims as a sham. 
All of these facts are superbly documented in the aforementioned Office of the U.S. Trade Representative report and in the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing’s report on China’s economic aggression.
The emperor’s imaginary clothes vanished in a wink.
The promise implied by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and others that appeasing and enriching China’s brutal despots would align them with U.S. interests or liberalize them can no longer be defended with a straight face. 
Over the last two years, establishment pundits shifted from spouting nonsense about China’s inevitable progress toward capitalism and democracy to asking whether tariffs are the right way to confront a dangerous regime we all agree is built on lies and cheating.
The initial results are now in.
The current trade policy has demonstrated its effectiveness, and it is undermining the Communist Party’s only source of legitimacy: ill-gotten economic growth. 
And on the U.S. side, it’s going to be easier to maintain than most people think.
The U.S. market remains the most valuable economic prize on Earth, something this week’s annual Black Friday consumption-fest underscores.
It is, by far, the world’s largest economy, with a 2017 GDP of $19.4 trillion.
That’s at least 60 percent larger than China’s $12.2 trillion and probably a lot more, as China’s dubious GDP figures bend to fit official targets.
Since consumption forms a much larger part of American GDP, the U.S. market for goods is many times larger than China’s.
The United States is also the healthiest major economy, with robustly increasing GDP growth and the lowest unemployment rate in nearly 50 years.
China is not likely to catch up in our lifetimes.
Additionally, the United States has a much smaller population dividing those spoils—and being less burdened by taxes than their global counterparts, U.S. consumers can spend far more than the citizens of any large nation.
Most importantly, China is paying the lion’s share of America’s tariffs.
While advocates of "free" trade have worked hard to scare consumers with threats of huge price increases, these have not emerged.
This is because any additional cost incurred in the distribution of a product may be allocated to either the consumer, through higher prices, or to the producer, through lower margins.
The market determines this split as consumers demonstrate their tolerance for absorbing higher prices.
The elasticity of demand for products determines the price, and a recent European study by EconPol concludes, “A 25 percentage point increase in tariffs raises US consumer prices on all affected Chinese products by only 4.5% on average, while the producer price of Chinese firms declines by 20.5%.” 
And don’t forget that the entire 25 percent goes into the U.S. Treasury, feeding America’s economy, not China’s. 
If Chinese prices eventually do increase, the same system will force distributors and retailers to absorb the cost before consumers.
Their suppliers are already moving to non-China sources.
Significantly, none of this success is accidental.
Many of this administration’s political appointments have been criticized, and the president has removed several of them.
President Trump has even publicly expressed regret over his appointment of Steven Mnuchin as treasury secretary.
In contrast, the team at the White House National Trade Council, the Department of Commerce, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative have been brilliantly strategic in the face of a relentless, China-backed media attack on the trade policy. 
The EconPol researchers recognized this when they wrote, “The US government has strategically levied import duties on goods with high import elasticities.”
Whether or not you agree with the tactics crafted by White House trade advisor Peter Navarro (with whom I wrote a book), Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, this operation has been professionally planned and executed.
Knowing that China would quickly move to disguise its products in transshipments, the Trump team expertly renegotiated complex deals with South Korea, Mexico, and Canada in record time. 
A critical and disorganized Europe has been left scrambling to reassess its China relations, lest its market become the dumping ground of last resort.
Investors buying in to the media prattle that U.S. trade policy has been ill-informed or that soybeans are somehow more important to the United States than technology do so at great peril.
In the face of this success, free trade backbiters are now calling for negotiations.
If you are under any delusion that this time, the Chinese government will take a trade agreement with the West seriously, I encourage you to read Articles 33 through 41 of the Chinese Constitution, which reads like the U.S. Bill of Rights.
This document specifically protects human rights, freedom of religious beliefs, freedom from illegal arrest, freedom from unreasonable search, freedom of speech, and the right to vote and protest. 
None of these things actually exist. 
Like the regime’s official name, the “People’s Republic,” rule of law in China has always been a lie the West agreed to accept. 
The Chinese Communist Party does not respect the rule of law—it respects strength and power.
The U.S. president and his team should stay the course, both for America’s sake and for China’s. Reducing the economic influence of an aggressive authoritarian regime is the right thing to do for the world and, eventually, for the Chinese people. 
They shouldn’t bother with an agreement designed only to delay the other side and that will never be honored.
The new Democratic majority in the lower house of the U.S. Congress and establishment Republicans who otherwise oppose the president should re-evaluate the current trade policy in light of the positive empirical results and eschew the illusory arguments of those who benefit from enriching a dangerous and tyrannical regime.

China’s Master Plan: Exporting an Ideology

Spreading a model of authoritarian mercantilism. 

By Hal Brands

Spreading the doctrine. 

 
The 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2017 is sure to loom large in future accounts of China's relations with the world. 

It was then that the party cleared the way for Xi Jinping to rule indefinitely, and when Xi himself advertised China’s global ambitions by declaring that Beijing would now “take center stage” in world affairs. 

It was also when Xi threw down the gauntlet in an equally consequential way.
In his three-hour speech to the assembled delegates, Xi extolled the virtues of Chinese authoritarian capitalism, and offered Beijing as a model "for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence."
Xi’s speech, then, was not simply an announcement of China’s arrival on the global stage. 

It was a declaration of ideological competition -- the starkest we have yet seen from Beijing -- against the U.S. and the democratic community it leads.
In my last piece, I discussed how China’s expanding global military presence is posing new threats to U.S. interests. 

Yet as I argue in this ongoing series, there are multiple ways in which the challenge from a rising China has evolved in recent years.
Americans are used to thinking about China primarily as a challenge to U.S. global economic superiority and geopolitical primacy in the Asia-Pacific. 

What’s become clear, though, is that the ideological challenge an authoritarian China poses to democratic governance around the world is also quite serious.
Many observers have been slow to recognize that challenge, because any discussion of ideology is often dismissed as “Cold War thinking,” and because for so many years the free-market democratic model appeared incontestably dominant. 

Yet China is contesting that dominance, through a two-pronged offensive that involves promoting authoritarian governance while also undermining democratic practices in countries near and far.
China’s ideological assertiveness has been building for years. 

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, pundits began arguing that the “Beijing Consensus” -- the mix of state-directed capitalism and authoritarian political control -- was displacing a Washington Consensus that had been badly tarnished by the near-meltdown of the global economy. 

A decade later, some projections have China on a path to dominating global GDP within half a century.

Thus it's little surprise that China’s political-economic model has long seemed attractive to developing countries where economic growth is paramount and democratic institutions are often weak.
What has become impossible to ignore is that China is actively working to fortify authoritarian governments around the world.
This should not be surprising. 

If the U.S. has long sought to make the world safe for democracy, China’s leaders crave a world that is safe for authoritarianism. 

The best way of achieving that goal is to ensure that China is not a lone, isolated autocracy in a democratic world. 

Autocracy-promotion thus becomes an ever-larger part of Chinese foreign policy.
In recent years, Beijing has lent its expertise on blending economic openness with tight political control to countries in regions from Southeast Asia to sub-Saharan Africa. 

It has exported the techniques and tools of repression -- from riot control gear to tips on how to use the Internet to monitor and control dissent -- to fellow authoritarian regimes. 

It has provided isolated dictatorships and backsliding democracies with crucial economic support and diplomatic cover, a recent example being Beijing’s backing for Cambodia’s Hun Sen as he has steadily pushed his country deeper into authoritarianism.
More broadly, China provides loans, capital and trade to autocracies and semi-autocracies as far afield as Angola and Venezuela, making them less dependent on Western sources of credit and commerce -- and thus less susceptible to Western political pressure.

Chinese officials have also helped the autocracies of Central Asia guard against feared “color revolutions” that might spark ideological contagion within China’s own borders. 

Not least, Beijing has increasingly held up its own experience with authoritarian capitalism as an example for others.
To be clear, Xi’s China is not a crusading, messianic power in the style of Mao’s revolutionary regime, and China’s leaders would argue that they are simply conducting no-strings diplomacy in a way meant to be respectful of national sovereignty. 

But Xi and his advisers certainly understand that they will be safer in a world in which authoritarianism is more widespread, and their policies are working toward just that end.
This would be troubling enough for the U.S., were it not combined with the second prong of Beijing’s offensive -- efforts to undermine the democratic systems of its geopolitical competitors.
As a spate of recent reports makes clear, China is waging a concerted campaign to mute international criticism of its politics and policies, and to render countries from the Asia-Pacific to Europe more receptive to Chinese influence. 

Because democratic societies are naturally resistant to such efforts when undertaken by a brutal, authoritarian regime, Beijing is using an array of tactics to manipulate open debate in these countries.
These tactics have included efforts to buy influence through political contributions and other payoffs in Australia and New Zealand, and the use of front organizations, propaganda organs and other mechanisms to shape public debate in ways that suit Beijing’s interests.
Beijing has also bullied foreign news organizations that report unfavorably on China, and sought to compromise academic discourse by giving preferential treatment to friendly scholars and using donations and other forms of economic largesse to shape the agendas of foreign universities and think tanks.
In Europe, the Chinese government has used economic leverage to punish countries that speak out against Chinese human rights violations and to reward those nations that stay silent. 

Even in the U.S., the Chinese government has underwritten mouthpieces such as the Confucius Institutes that are present on many college campuses. 

There are also reports of Communist Party cells coordinating with Chinese students to push for curriculum changes that will portray China in a more flattering light.
In some ways, of course, these tactics are all part of the game of great-power politics. 

Yet more insidious in this case is that China is manipulating the open nature of democratic systems to distort public discourse, whether on human rights or Beijing’s behavior in the South China Sea. 

And when Beijing actively seeks to corrupt political actors or undermine the integrity of key social institutions, it crosses the line into political warfare against democratic systems.
The good news, from the perspective of the U.S. and other advocates of democracy, is that here as in so many cases Beijing’s growing assertiveness has engendered a degree of blowback. 

Support for corrupt dictators may endear Beijing to those rulers, but it hardly improves China’s image among the people they repress. 

Revelations of China’s influence operations in democratic societies have sparked concern and even outrage from Canberra to Washington.
But Beijing’s activities are nonetheless strengthening authoritarianism at a time when democracy is sagging around the world, and they are subjecting even established democratic systems to greater stress by clouding open political debate. 

China is waging the battle for the 21st century ideologically as well as economically and geopolitically, and the supporters of open societies around the world had best take note.

The Perfect Dictatorship: Seeing China With Fresh Eyes

The hard work and enterprise of China’s people—not Communist Party policies—have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

THE PERFECT DICTATORSHIP
By Stein Ringen
Hong Kong University Press, 191 pages, $25

More than two-thirds of the way into Stein Ringen’s slim, curious volume on contemporary China, he describes the sorts of conversations that Westerners who watch the country closely tend to have.
“Professor A: China is a dictatorship,” Mr. Ringen writes.
“Professor B: 500 million people have been lifted out of poverty.”
“Silence.”
Such indeed is the nature of a great deal of the back and forth about the world’s most populous country, whose economy has been utterly transformed over the past four decades but whose politics, for the most part, have not.
Mr. Ringen, a Norwegian emeritus professor at Oxford with a background in sociology and political science and a wide-ranging list of books to his credit, boasts of another credential for a book that reaches strong conclusions about China—and it is an unusual one. 

Before writing “The Perfect Dictatorship,” Mr. Ringen had no expertise on the topic and little exposure to the country. 

“I do not come from China studies and am not an authority on China,” he writes early on, seeking to make a virtue of this seeming weakness. 

“Where I do come from is state analysis, which I have been doing for forty years, and I have tried to bring that experience to bear on a new case.”

It is certainly possible that a fresh, nonspecialist approach will have value. 

When waxing ironic, scholars of China have long observed that the more one works at understanding this extraordinarily diverse and fast-changing country the less certain one becomes. 

For large chunks of “The Perfect Dictatorship,” however, Mr. Ringen labors over pedestrian observations—the telltale signs of a dilettante, expert readers might feel tempted to conclude. 

One of the most insistent of these observations is that China is something called a “party-state,” meaning that the government cannot be separated from the Communist Party. 

Another is that the country maintains effectively separate labor markets by restricting the movements of large numbers of rural citizens through a registration system known as the hukou.
Yet for all of this familiar material, Mr. Ringen also delivers up compelling arguments. 

Take the would-be debate-ending claim—a favorite of the Chinese government—that Beijing has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty (the precise number is always being adjusted upward). 

There are two reasons why this assertion has always grated. 

First, by late in Mao Zedong’s nearly three-decade rule, which ended in 1976, Chinese per capita income ranked only slightly ahead of Bangladesh, a fact that derives from disastrous policies under the same Communist Party that rules the country today. 

Second, if the Chinese stopped making colossal mistakes in economic policy beginning under Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, the country’s rapid growth has had less to do with any supposed “lifting” by the government than with the hard work and enterprise of the Chinese people once they were allowed to seek their fortunes.
Mr. Ringen explodes this favorite propaganda slogan even further and does so with the fresh eye he promises. 

China’s growth over the past few decades, he says, is far from unique and has been even less uniquely transformative. 

Many nowadays forget—and he reminds readers—that several other East Asian societies, including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, pulled off similar growth spurts over a roughly 40-year period before China did. 

Using South Korea as an example, Mr. Ringen argues that China’s recent achievements should be assessed in a much broader social context, one in which they begin to pale.
“In South Korea, in forty years, there were three monumental achievements: Poverty was turned to affluence (and to real affluence, making Korea a high-income country), dictatorship was turned to democracy, and a safety net was spread under the country so that no significant section of the population was excluded from the benefits of economic advancement,” he writes. 

“China’s reform and opening up has now been unfolding for nearly forty years but has followed South Korea in only one achievement, in economic growth. And in the time South Korea made itself a high-income country, China has made itself no more than a middle-income one.” 

Moreover, South Korea, like Japan and Taiwan shifted from authoritarianism to democracy by allowing non-state actors to organize and associate freely, something that Beijing solemnly forswears.
Much of “The Perfect Dictatorship” is given over to pondering the nature of the Chinese polity under the ambitious current leader, Xi Jinping, who speaks of making this the century of the Chinese Dream. 

Is China a new kind of welfare state, whose central preoccupation is attending to the well-being of the world’s largest population? 

Or is it a power state obsessed with strength, focused on a higher values-oriented purpose? 

Or should China be seen instead as a “trivial state,” a system with little purpose beyond “perpetuation of the regime itself and the protection of the country’s territorial integrity”?
Mr. Ringen turns these questions over and over, almost playfully, until finally addressing them inconclusively: “If the Chinese state continues to operate as a custodian of economic growth and political control, and does so effectively, it is likely to remain dictatorial but pragmatic. If it becomes dependent on ideology and embraces a narrative in which persons are subsumed in the nation, it will have made itself a totalitarian state of the most sinister kind, the kind in which persons are only ‘the masses’ and do not matter individually.”
Which path will China take? 

Unspeakable in public, this question resonates in the minds of more and more Chinese, especially the newly minted members of the middle class, who await an answer.