As China’s Troubles Simmer, Xi Reinforces His Political Firewall

With China mired in a trade war, economic slowdown and Hong Kong unrest, Xi Jinping will use an elite meeting to focus more on increasing his control over the Communist Party.

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING — Slowing economic growth. 

A rancorous trade war. 

Recalcitrant protesters in Hong Kong. 

A mass die-off of pigs and surging food prices. 

The frustrations are piling up for Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
But a gathering of the Communist Party elite this week will grapple with lurking risks that worry him more: dysfunction, divisions and disloyalty in the party.
Communist Party rule could eventually crumble if the party fails to constantly reinforce its grip on China, Xi said in a recently published speech, citing ancient emperors whose dynasties rotted from corruption, lax discipline and infighting. 

The Central Committee, a party conclave of about 370 senior officials, began meeting in Beijing for four days on Monday to approve policies intended to ward off such dangers.
“From ancient times to the present, whenever great powers have collapsed or decayed, a common cause has been the loss of central authority,” Xi said in the speech, which was given early last year but not issued till this month in a leading party journal, Qiushi.
“As I see it, we can be defeated only by ourselves,” he said. 

“Prevent strife starting from inside the family home.”
Xi has warned this year that China must prepare for “struggle,” an ominous term for domestic and external challenges, and has described his goal as building an authoritarian fortress against any shocks. 

The meeting this week, also called the plenum, will push efforts to sharpen China’s political defenses, likely including greater use of advanced technology to monitor and manage officials and citizens.
Xi laid out his proposals on the first day, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency, but no details were released.
“He’s looking at this from the viewpoint of the next 30 years,” said Tian Feilong, a professor of law at Beihang University in Beijing. 

“The system still isn’t strong enough for this struggle against all kinds of external forces, because it still has many holes.”
To critics, Xi’s drive to centralize power is not a cure for China’s policy missteps, but rather one of their chief causes. 

The intense pressure on lower officials to conform with the top leader has robbed them of room to debate, spot missteps, and alter course, they say.
Some have pointed to Xi’s misreading earlier in the year of how far he could push the Trump administration in trade talks, and China’s impasse in Hong Kong, where demonstrators have taken to the streets for 21 weeks.
“The principal problem stems from the nature of the political system which increasingly permeates all sectors of activity,” said Jonathan Fenby, China chairman of TS Lombard, a firm that advises investors. 

“The political constraints sap initiative.”

The Yangshan Deep Water Port in Shanghai. Chinese and American negotiators agreed to a provisional pause in their trade dispute this month.

‘Rumors of Displeasure’
For Xi, there is no issue more vital to his political survival than command of the party, and he appears anxious to stop setbacks from festering into wider doubts about his and the party’s capacity to rule.
Since 2012, he has repeatedly introduced offensives intended to rid officialdom of graft, factionalism and bureaucratic fragmentation, failings that he suggested weakened his predecessors. 

Last year, he swept away a term limit on the presidency, opening the way to an indefinite stay as president, Communist Party general secretary and chairman of China’s military.
“The plenum will be the latest step in this campaign,” Mr. Fenby from TS Lombard said. 

“It may bring institutional changes aimed at streamlining the transmission of orders and achieving further centralization of authority. But the main element is likely to be an intensification of Xi’s personal leadership.”
Two retired officials in Beijing and a businessman who talks to senior officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, described jitters in the party elite about Xi’s policies. 

Even so, that sentiment was far from coalescing into concerted opposition to him, they said.
“Rumors of displeasure — even animosity — toward Xi’s rule are rampant, but his hold on power appears firm,” said Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
A deeper worry for Xi and other top leaders is improving the effectiveness and morale of hundreds of thousands of junior officials who enforce their policies.
Many midranking officials resent Xi’s anticorruption drive, which has shrunk their income and influence, Ke Huaqing, a professor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing who studies the rules and workings of the party, said in an interview.
Cadres have also been punished for complaining about government policies, defying orders to move to other posts, or spreading rumors about leaders. 

When the party recently announced the punishment of Liu Shiyu, the former chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, it said his misdeeds included a “wavering” political stance and failure to rigorously enforce central leaders’ decisions.
“The Chinese Communist Party could get away without cleaning itself up,” Ke said, “but after a period of time it might collapse.”

A construction site in Beijing. The country has seen slowing economic growth.

‘Modernizing the System’
While the committee usually meets once a year at the walled Jingxi Hotel in western Beijing, this session has been unusually delayed — it has been 20 months since the last meeting.
That has led some to speculate that Xi feared rifts upsetting proceedings. 

Others have questioned why he has devoted the meeting to party organization issues when China faces many pressing problems.
“He would seek to delay a full gathering of the Central Committee until such time that he felt he had built a consensus,” said Mr. Blanchette from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who wrote an assessment of the speculation. 

“Xi can stand before his peers with some credible ‘wins.’”
He has had several of late. 

On Oct. 1, Xi presided over a military parade celebrating 70 years of Communist rule, basking in adulatory shouts of loyalty from 15,000 troops. 

Later in the month, Chinese and American negotiators agreed to a provisional pause in their trade dispute.
The group could discuss economic and foreign policy at the gathering. 

But often at this point in the leadership’s 5-year cycle of meetings, the Central Committee focuses on the party’s organizational and legal issues.
Some in Beijing have speculated that Xi could also use the meeting to elevate protégés as he lays the groundwork for a third term as party leader in 2022. 

Xi, though, was unlikely to signal a possible successor so soon, the three political insiders in Beijing said.
“Xi draws much of his strength from his careful cultivation of an air of implacable unassailability,” said Christopher K. Johnson, a former China analyst at the C.I.A. 

“Injecting that kind of uncertainty makes no political sense, particularly as his bid for a third term presumably is about to gear up.”

Soldiers during a parade in Beijing on Oct. 1 to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of communist China.

The official announcements at the end of the meeting on Thursday will most likely to focus on the official theme of “modernizing the system of governance.”
According to experts, the steps announced could include:

• Fleshing out the powers of the new party policy commissions that Xi has created to steer policy.
• Honing a shake-up of government begun last year that Xi said in July remains incomplete, creating gaps and poor coordination.
• Expanding the presence of party committees in businesses, organizations and neighborhoods to enforce policy and monitor potential discontent.
• Using high-tech monitoring to detect and extinguish sources of public ire, such as official misconduct, pollution or land disputes, before they ignite protests. China already leads the way in using collection of personal data, surveillance technology and online monitoring to stifle social threats, most notably in East Turkestan, the ethnically divided colony in western China.

China’s New Frontiers in Dystopian Tech

Facial-recognition technologies are proliferating, from airports to bathrooms.

By Rene Chun

Dystopia starts with 23.6 inches of toilet paper. 

That’s how much the dispensers at the entrance of the public restrooms at Beijing’s Temple of Heaven dole out in a program involving facial-recognition scanners—part of the president’s “Toilet Revolution,” which seeks to modernize public toilets. 

Want more? 

Forget it. 

If you go back to the scanner before nine minutes are up, it will recognize you and issue this terse refusal: “Please try again later.”
China is rife with face-scanning technology worthy of Black Mirror. 

Don’t even think about jaywalking in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province. 

Last year, traffic-management authorities there started using facial recognition to crack down. 

When a camera mounted above one of 50 of the city’s busiest intersections detects a jaywalker, it snaps several photos and records a video of the violation. 

The photos appear on an overhead screen so the offender can see that he or she has been busted, then are cross-checked with the images in a regional police database. 

Within 20 minutes, snippets of the perp’s ID number and home address are displayed on the crosswalk screen. 

The offender can choose among three options: a 20-yuan fine (about $3), a half-hour course in traffic rules, or 20 minutes spent assisting police in controlling traffic. 

Police have also been known to post names and photos of jaywalkers on social media.
The system seems to be working: Since last May, the number of jaywalking violations at one of Jinan’s major intersections has plummeted from 200 a day to 20. 

Cities in the provinces of Fujian, Jiangsu, and Guangdong are also using facial-recognition software to catch and shame jaywalkers.
Across the country, other applications of the technology are proliferating. 

Many exist somewhere in the range between helpful and unsettling: A “smart boarding system” from the tech giant Baidu reduces airport check-in to a one-second face scan; at KFC China’s “smart restaurant” in Beijing, customers stand in front of a screen, have their face scanned (again, Baidu is part of the joint endeavor), and receive menu suggestions based on their age, sex, and facial expression (“crispy chicken hamburger,” roasted chicken wings, and a Coke for a 20-something male’s lunch; porridge and soy milk for a middle-aged woman’s breakfast). 

A female-only university dormitory has even employed facial recognition to keep nonresidents out.
The technology’s veneer of convenience conceals a dark truth: Quietly and very rapidly, facial recognition has enabled China to become the world’s most advanced surveillance state. 

A hugely ambitious new government program called the “social credit system” aims to compile unprecedented data sets, including everything from bank-account numbers to court records to internet-search histories, for all Chinese citizens. 

Based on this information, each person could be assigned a numerical score, to which points might be added for good behavior like winning a community award, and deducted for bad actions like failure to pay a traffic fine. 

The goal of the program, as stated in government documents, is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

All sorts of data will feed into this new program, but facial recognition (along with gait analysis and voice recognition, also enabled by rapid advances in machine learning and cloud computing) has the potential to one day give it something like omniscience. 

China’s government and commercial sectors make available to each other the endless streams of personal information they gather. 

Because companies have access to vast amounts of consumer data, industry experts predict that in the coming months Chinese facial-recognition software will become even more accurate. 

Western companies may be exploiting the same machine-learning technology, but nobody is rolling it out like the Chinese.
According to Maya Wang, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, China’s domestic surveillance is far more advanced than most Chinese citizens realize. 

“People in China don’t know 99.99 percent of what’s going on in terms of state surveillance,” she says. 

“Most people think they can say what they want and live freely without being monitored, but that’s largely an illusion.”

Rogue Nation

China must be told to stop interfering in Australian affairs
By Graeme Smith

Chinese radio stations here deliver content identical to that of China's Ministry of Propaganda. 

Monday night's episode of Four Corners lined up an array of academics, bureaucrats and politicians expressing alarm about China's attempts to influence Australia through clandestine activities.
Australia's former ambassador to China, Geoff Raby, was a notable exception, observing that China's efforts were much like those of other nations, particularly Israel.
Some similarities between the external activities of Israel and China are striking.
Both are driven by contested identities, based on post-colonial politics dating back to the 1940s and beyond.
On this front, China is faring better than Israel: Taiwan's diplomatic isolation is almost complete, while more than 70 per cent of UN members now recognise the state of Palestine.
Both are well resourced, and because of language barriers, much of their work is outside the view of most Australians.
Both continue to have a take-no-prisoners approach to the espionage side of the influence game, with Israel known for its assassination operations, and China rolling up a network of CIA informants with ruthlessness worthy of an early John Le Carre novel.
Both attempt to enlist politicians to their cause, and on this front, Israel is more effective.
Few would question Michael Danby's longstanding commitment to Israel, while his Labor Party colleagues, from Sam Dastyari to Joel Fitzgibbon, have found pro-China activities do little to benefit their political careers.
Yet this is where the similarities end, and why no-one in ASIO is losing sleep over Israel's activities in Australia.
Israel is not our major trading partner. 

There are not one million people of Israeli descent living in Australia. 

Israel does not influence sea lanes to our immediate north. 

Israel is a democracy.
Beyond this, the purpose and nature of China's "influence operations" are quite different.

China working to 'persuade, manage, discipline and control'
As John Fitzgerald noted in an episode of the Little Red Podcast, "the Propaganda Bureau and others have given up on trying to persuade non-Chinese Australians … it couldn't care what they think. Rather it's messaging to them the consequences of what they think. Whereas within the Chinese community there's an effort to persuade, manage, discipline and control."
The first incident to alarm Australia's intelligence service — the sudden mobilisation and arrival of thousands of Chinese students to Canberra to protect the Olympic torch ("sacred flame" in Chinese media reports) from anti-China protesters — provided a perfect illustration of this difference.
For mainstream Australian TV viewers, the sight of Chinese students being arrested after shouting down and assaulting pro-Tibet protesters looked like a colossal soft power fail.
But the elaborately choreographed and expensively assembled protest wasn't staged for non-Chinese consumption. 

It sent an effective message that the party line extended well beyond China's borders.
The comparison also does little justice to the sophistication of Israel's public diplomacy, embodied by Australian-born Mark Regev, former chief spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister, now ambassador to Great Britain.
Will we ever see an Australian-born Chinese citizen arguing — in a reassuring drawl — for Australia to give China "a fair go" in Tibet or Xinjiang? 

It seems unlikely.
It also misses the point that Israeli citizens can choose from a range of political parties with different foreign policies.
Chinese citizens cannot remove their ruling party, or even mildly rebuke it abroad for failing to deal with air pollution.
Under Xi Jinping's assertive approach, Ministry of Foreign Affairs representatives even feel comfortable organising the disruption of international forums in Australia, and inciting other countries to join in.

Politicians can no longer claim ignorance
Against this background of renewed assertiveness brought by Xi's leadership, it is the zeal for controlling the message about China to Chinese Australians that is perhaps most difficult to fathom.
All 24-hour Chinese language radio stations in Australia now broadcast content identical to that delivered by China's Ministry of Propaganda. 

Yet Chinese consular officials visit the stations in person to vet talkback callers and instruct the stations on which guests are off limits.
The majority of print media outlets follow a similar line, and arms of the Chinese state actively pressure the holdouts.
All Chinese language media are instructed on what they should and should not run at "sensitive" times, such as the recent visit of  Li Keqiang.
As the child of Scottish migrants, it would be as if Nicola Sturgeon's Scottish Nationalist Party decided it had the right to act as the arbiter of what I heard, read and said about Scotland — and had the means to stop me criticising the weather or my countrymen's love of offal.
It is an absurd situation.
It is tragic that Chinese citizens live in what political theorist Stein Ringen has described as a "controlocracy", but we should not tolerate Chinese Australians being subject to the perfect dictatorship.
Our politicians can no longer claim that they don't know.
It is time to ask China to stop interfering in our internal affairs.

An Exiled Editor Traces the Roots of Democratic Thought in China

Xi Jinping wants to revive the personality cult and dictatorship of that era, so he’s particularly unwilling for people to reflect on the Cultural Revolution.

By LUO SILING

Hu Ping, seated, speaking at Peking University in 1980. He rejects the idea that democracy is a foreign concept in China and therefore inappropriate.

Hu Ping is the editor of the pro-democracy journal Beijing Spring, based in New York. 

But in 1975, he was 28 and living in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu, a recently returned “educated youth” who had been sent down to labor in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.
While waiting to be assigned to a new workplace, he wrote an essay that would become a classic of modern Chinese liberalism. 

The essay, “On Freedom of Speech,” could at first be circulated only through handwritten posters on the city’s streets. 

In 1979 it appeared in the underground magazine Fertile Soil, and it went on to influence a generation of democracy advocates.
Mr. Hu was admitted to Peking University in 1978 and in 1980 was elected as a delegate to the local people’s congress. 

In 1987, he began doctoral studies at Harvard, then moved to New York a year later to serve as chairman of an organization supporting China’s burgeoning democracy movement. 

The Chinese government canceled his passport, consigning him to exile.
In his new book — “Why Did Mao Zedong Launch the Cultural Revolution?,” published in Taiwan by Asian Culture — Mr. Hu argues that contemporary Chinese concepts of democracy and freedom are not imports from the West, but a response to political oppression at home and a growing appreciation of the need for restraints on state power. 

In an interview, Mr. Hu discussed how the Cultural Revolution shaped his thinking, the unexpected course of Xi Jinping’s career and why he rejects assertions that democracy is a foreign concept and therefore inappropriate for China.

How did the Cultural Revolution shape your political thinking?
My generation was imbued with official ideology from childhood. 

As a supporter of communist theory and the communist system, I enthusiastically participated in the Cultural Revolution at first. 

But I became very disillusioned by the extreme brutality that emerged during the movement, especially because the vast majority of victims were targeted merely for expressing alternative views. I myself was denounced more than once because I had different views stemming from my disgust at the persecution of people for speech crimes. 

This led me to gradually form a concept of freedom of expression.
Later I went to the United States and read Harvard Prof. Judith N. Shklar’s essay “The Liberalism of Fear.” 

Professor Sklar pointed out that modern Western liberalism arose from a revulsion against religious and political persecution and led to an insistence on protecting human rights and limiting political power.

“Why Did Mao Zedong Launch the Cultural Revolution?”

The Chinese rediscovery of liberalism was based on a very similar experience. 

The Cultural Revolution gave rise to a widespread and deep-seated horror that led a few people to formulate an explicit concept of freedom and gave the majority the desire and basis to accept this concept. 

Even quite a few Communist leaders developed an appreciation for freedom because of their personal suffering.

For example?
One example is Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, who was purged in a literary inquisition in the 1960s but re-emerged after Mao died [in 1976]. 

While serving as vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, Xi Zhongxun proposed drafting a “law protecting alternative views.” 

He said the history of the Chinese Communist Party demonstrated the disastrous consequences of suppressing dissident opinions.
The prevailing view at that time was that it was wrong to treat “opposing the party and opposing socialism” as a crime because there was no clear standard for what constituted opposition, and any alternative political viewpoint should be tolerated. 

Xi Zhongxun probably had never read John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin or Friedrich Hayek. 

His concept of tolerance and freedom arose mainly from personal experience, especially the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and his reflections on that experience.

How would you compare the liberalism of the 1980s with political thought after the suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen movement?
The failure of the 1989 democracy movement made ordinary people negative or indifferent toward politics, and cynicism ran wild. 

This created a strange phenomenon: The concept of liberalism spread much wider than before 1989 but carried far less power. 

In the years since 1989, although there have been quite a few liberal scholars, dissidents and rights defense lawyers making heroic efforts to practice and promote the concept of freedom — beginning with the concept of freedom of speech — harsh political suppression and an indifferent social climate have prevented a breakthrough and made it very difficult to build up the kind of social mobilization that existed in the 1980s.

Hu Ping, the editor of Beijing Spring, in New York in 2013. “I enthusiastically participated in the Cultural Revolution at first,” he said. “But I became very disillusioned by the extreme brutality that emerged during the movement.” 

With political reform now stalled or even in retreat, some people in China are worried about a recurrence of the Cultural Revolution. Why has Xi Jingping declined to follow the example of his father in promoting democratic change and instead concentrated power even further?
The Cultural Revolution in its strictest sense can never occur again. 

The fact that people are worried about its recurrence reflects how Xi Jinping has strengthened dictatorial rule, suppressed civil society and tightened controls over expression. 

In the past, many people thought that Xi Jinping might have inherited his father’s open-mindedness, little imagining that once he took power, his manner and actions would make him more like Mao’s grandson than Xi Zhongxun’s son. 

Xi Zhongxun proposed drafting a “law to protect alternative views,” whereas Xi Jinping has banned “improper discussion” [of central party policies].
Many people once believed that economic development and the growth of a middle class in China would be accompanied by progress in human rights. 

But by the logic of the Chinese government, economic development was built on the suppression of human rights, so how can it now abandon this suppression?
In other words, the Chinese government thinks: “We’ve only done so well because we’ve been so bad. If we hadn’t been so bad, things wouldn’t be so good.”

Your generation’s experience of the Cultural Revolution fostered the emergence of politically liberal ideas in China. Could remembrance of the Cultural Revolution contribute to the development of liberalism and political change today?
A sensitive topic such as the Cultural Revolution should become less sensitive with the passage of time, and the authorities should be expected to gradually relax restrictions on discussion of the Cultural Revolution. 

But the reality is just the opposite: The authorities are controlling discussion of the Cultural Revolution even more harshly than they did 10 or 20 years ago. 
Xi Jinping wants to revive the personality cult and dictatorship of that era, so he’s particularly unwilling for people to reflect on the Cultural Revolution.

Half a century has passed since the Cultural Revolution was set in motion, and the “young militants” of that time are entering their twilight years. 

As the authorities continue to suppress discussion of the Cultural Revolution, the average person, especially the young, has only the vaguest impression of that time. 

Throw in the events and changes China has experienced in recent decades, and the collective experience of the Cultural Revolution has become less of a force for promoting China’s liberalization. 

Even so, we have to keep at it.
It is a lack of freedom that allows us to understand what freedom is. 

It is in ourselves that we discover why people have been willing to risk so much for freedom. 

Taking a further step toward joint action, we discover that we are not alone and that our voices can resonate far and wide. 

We don’t start out believing that an unseen force guarantees freedom’s victory, but we fight for it all the same.