Rogue Nation

China's arrest of innocent Canadians sends a chilling message to investors
By Elise von Scheel and Katie Simpson 

Canadian entrepreneur Michael Spavor, left, and former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig were taken into custody by Chinese authorities last month. 

China is sending the wrong message to the international investment community with its recent move to arrest and detain two Canadians on suspicion of endangering national security, says the employer of one of the detained men.
"I'm focused on getting him out and one thing I can say for sure, the one thing he wasn't doing is endangering China's national security," said Robert Malley, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group. 

Former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig was in China working for the Brussels-based think-tank when he was taken into custody by Chinese authorities last month.
"China's economy is facing some headwinds and so is going to want to attract businesspeople, is going to want to show it's open for normal business," Malley told CBC News. 

"Now is not the time to have a little asterisk near that 'Open for business' [sign] saying, 'Open for business, but you can't be sure what's going to happen to those of you who come here.'"
Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor were taken into custody separately in early December, shortly after Canadian officials arrested Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer for Huawei Technologies. 

Meng was detained in Vancouver on Dec. 1 for extradition at the request of U.S. officials, who accuse Huawei — a leading global supplier of telecommuncations equipment — of using a Hong Kong shell company to sell equipment to Iran in violation of American sanctions.
Canadian officials were quick to push back against the detentions of Kovrig and Spavor. 

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said the government is deeply concerned by the arbitrary detention of the two men.

Robert Malley, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group, shares his thoughts on the detention of his employee Michael Kovrig and the message China is sending. 

Malley said his company is working to secure his employee's freedom.
"Michael [Kovrig] was not doing anything that other people would not have been doing," he said.
Malley said Kovrig was in China to talk to officials and members of the diplomatic community about the situation on the Korean peninsula and China's investments in Africa.

Wrong message, wrong time
Malley said he wouldn't comment on whether China is a safe destination for business travelers, but argued the Chinese are playing this situation badly.
"This is not the message they want to be sending," he said, adding that if the two men were to be released soon, it would send a reassuring signal to the international business community.
According to Statistics Canada, Canada imported $45.4 billion in goods and services from China in 2017, while exporting $28.8 billion to China.
While Freeland wouldn't say whether the Canadians' detentions look like retaliation for Meng's arrest, she said it would be "highly inappropriate" if that were the case.

Orwellian China

Thousands of low-wage workers in “censorship factories” trawl the online world for forbidden content, where even a photo of an empty chair could cause big trouble.
By Li Yuan

Li Chengzhi had a lot to learn when he first got a job as a professional censor.
Like many young people in China, the 24-year-old recent college graduate knew little about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

He had never heard of China’s most famous dissident, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in custody two years ago.
Now, after training, he knows what to look for — and what to block. 

He spends his hours scanning online content on behalf of Chinese media companies looking for anything that will provoke the government’s wrath. 

He knows how to spot code words that obliquely refer to Chinese leaders and scandals, or the memes that touch on subjects the Chinese government doesn’t want people to read about.
Li, who still has traces of youthful acne on his face, takes his job seriously. 

“It helps cleanse the online environment,” he said.
For Chinese companies, staying on the safe side of government censors is a matter of life and death. Adding to the burden, the authorities demand that companies censor themselves, spurring them to hire thousands of people to police content.
That in turn has created a growing and lucrative new industry: censorship factories.
Mr. Li works for Beyondsoft, a Beijing-based tech services company that, among other businesses, takes on the censorship burden for other companies. 

He works in its office in the city of Chengdu. 

In the heart of a high-tech industrial area, the space is bright and new enough that it resembles the offices of well-funded start-ups in tech centers like Beijing and Shenzhen. 

It recently moved to the space because customers complained that its previous office was too cramped to allow employees to do their best work.
“Missing one beat could cause a serious political mistake,” said Yang Xiao, head of Beyondsoft’s internet service business, including content reviewing. (Beyondsoft declined to disclose which Chinese media or online companies it works for, citing confidentiality.)
China has built the world’s most extensive and sophisticated online censorship system. 

It grew even stronger under Xi Jinping, who wants the internet to play a greater role in strengthening the Communist Party’s hold on society. 

More content is considered sensitive. 

Punishments are getting more severe.
Once circumspect about its controls, China now preaches a vision of a government-supervised internet that has surprising resonance in other countries. 

Even traditional bastions of free expression like Western Europe and the United States are considering their own digital limits. 

Platforms like Facebook and YouTube have said that they would hire thousands more people to better keep a handle on their content.
Workers like Li show the extremes of that approach — one that controls what more than 800 million internet users in China see every day.
Beyondsoft employs over 4,000 workers like Li at its content reviewing factories. 

That is up from about 200 in 2016. 

They review and censor content day and night.
“We’re the Foxconn in the data industry,” said Yang, comparing his firm to the biggest contract manufacturer that makes iPhones and other products for Apple.
Many online media companies have their own internal content review teams, sometimes numbering in the thousands.
They are exploring ways to get artificial intelligence to do the work.
The head of the A.I. lab at a major online media company, who asked for anonymity because the subject is sensitive, said the company had 120 machine learning models.
But success is spotty.
Users can easily fool algorithms.
“The A.I. machines are intelligent, but they aren’t as clever as human brains,” Mr. Li said.
“They miss a lot of things when reviewing content.”
Beyondsoft has a team of 160 people in Chengdu working four shifts a day to review potentially politically sensitive content on a news aggregating app.
For the same app, Beyondsoft has another team in the western city of Xi’an reviewing potentially vulgar or profane content.
Like the rest of the world, China’s internet is rife with pornography and other material that many users might find offensive.
In the Chengdu office, workers must put their smartphones in hallway lockers.
They can’t take screenshots or send any information from their computers.
The workers are almost all college graduates in their 20s. They are often unaware of, or indifferent to, politics. 
In China, many parents and teachers tell the young that caring about politics leads only to trouble.
To overcome that, Yang and his colleagues developed a sophisticated training system.
New hires start with weeklong “theory” training, during which senior employees teach them the sensitive information that they didn’t know before.
“My office is next to the big training room,” Mr. Yang said.
“I often hear the surprised sounds of ‘Ah, ah, ah.’”
“They didn’t know things like June 4,” he added, referring to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. 
“They really didn’t know.”
Beyondsoft has developed an extensive database based on such information that Yang calls one of its “core competencies.”
It also uses anti-censorship software to regularly visit what it calls anti-revolutionary websites that are blocked by the Chinese government.
It then updates the database.
New employees study the database much like preparing for college entrance exams.
After two weeks, they have to pass a test.
The screen saver on each computer is the same: photos and names of current and past members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the Communist Party’s top leadership.
Workers must memorize those faces: Only government-owned websites and specially approved political blogs — a group on what’s called a whitelist — are allowed to post photos of top leaders.
Workers are briefed at the beginning of their shift on the newest censoring instructions sent by clients, which the clients themselves receive from government censors. 
Workers then must answer about 10 questions designed to test their memory.
The results of the exam affect the workers’ pay.
One question on a recent Friday: Which one of the following names is the daughter of Li Peng, China’s former premier?
The correct answer is Li Xiaolin, a longtime target of online ridicule for her expensive fashion taste and for being one of many children of senior officials who come into high positions or wealth.
That’s a relatively easy one.
A tougher test is parsing the roundabout ways that China’s internet users evade stringent censorship to talk about current affairs.
Take, for example, a Hong Kong news site’s 2017 commentary that compared the six Chinese leaders since Mao Zedong to emperors during the Han dynasty.
Some Chinese users started using the emperors’ names when referring to the leaders.
Beyondsoft’s workers have to know which emperor’s name is associated with which leader.
Then there are the photos of an empty chair. 
They refer to Mr. Liu, the Nobel laureate, who wasn’t allowed to leave China to attend the award ceremony and was represented by an empty chair.
References to George Orwell’s novel “1984” are also forbidden.
Beyondsoft’s software trawls through web pages and marks potentially offensive words in different colors.
If a page is full of color-coded words, it usually requires a closer look, according to the executives.
If there are only one or two, it’s pretty safe to let it pass.
According to Beyondsoft’s website, its content monitoring service, called Rainbow Shield, has compiled over 100,000 basic sensitive words and over three million derivative words.
Politically sensitive words make up one-third of the total, followed by words related to pornography, prostitution, gambling and knives.
Workers like Li make $350 to $500 a month, about average pay in Chengdu.
Each worker is expected to review 1,000 to 2,000 articles during a shift.
Articles uploaded to the news app must be approved or rejected within an hour.
Unlike Foxconn workers, they don’t work much overtime because longer hours could hurt accuracy, said Yang, the executive.
It’s easy to make mistakes.
One article about Peng Liyuan, China’s first lady, mistakenly used the photo of a famous singer rumored to be linked to another leader.
It was caught by someone else before it went out, Yang said.
Li, the young censor, said the worst mistakes were almost all related to senior leaders.
He once missed a tiny photo of Xi on a website not on the whitelist because he was tired.
He still kicks himself for it.
When asked whether he had shared with family and friends what he learned at work, such as the Tiananmen massacre, Li vehemently said no.
“This information is not for people outside to know,” he said.
“Once many people know about it, it could generate rumors.”
But the massacre was history.
It wasn’t a rumor.
How would he reconcile that?
“For certain things,” he said, “one just has to obey the rules.”

Chinese expansionism

Vietnam Dares What Philippines Didn't
By Panos Mourdoukoutas

In the South China Sea disputes, Vietnam dares to do what the Philippines didn’t: challenge China’s mission to turn the vast waterway into its own sea.
That’s according to a recent Reuters report, which claims that Vietnam is pushing for a pact that will outlaw many of China’s ongoing activities in the South China Sea. 

Like the building of artificial islands, blockades and offensive weaponry such as missile deployments; and the Air Defence Identification Zone—a conduct code China initiated back in 2013.
This isn’t the first time Hanoi is challenging China’s claims in the South China Sea. 

Back in July of 2017, Vietnam granted Indian oil firm ONGC Videsh a two-year extension to explore oil block 128, according to another Reuters report.
And that’s something Beijing loudly opposed.
In recent years, China has considered the South China Sea its own. 

All of it, including the artificial islands Beijing has been building in disputed waters, and the economic resources that are hidden below the vast sea area. 

And it is determined to use its old and new naval powers to make sure that no other country reaches for these resources without its permission.
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte understands Beijing’s determination very well. 

Back in April of 2018 he reversed his earlier decision to raise the Philippine flag in disputed islands, following Beijing’s “friendly” advice.
A year before that incident, the Philippines and its close ally, the U.S., won an international arbitration ruling that China has no historic title over the waters of the South China Sea. 

Yet Duterte didn’t dare enforce it. 

Instead, he sided with Beijing on the dispute, and sought a “divorce” from the U.S.
Duterte’s flip-flops saved peace in the South China Sea by changing the rules of the game for China and the US, at least according to his own wisdom.
That doesn’t seem to be the case with Vietnam– which also claims parts of the waterway.
And it has a strong ally on its side: the US, which has been trying to enforce the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, and save peace, too!
So far, financial markets in the region do not seem that concerned, at least for now. 

Instead, they have been focusing on the economic fundamentals rather than the geopolitics of the region; and on the rising interest rates in the US.

China, Vietnam, and Philippines Shares

But things may change in the future, as an escalation of South China Sea disputes could add to investor anxieties fueled by the US-China trade war.

Bill Gates' nuclear venture hits snag amid US restrictions on China deals

Reuters

TerraPower LLC, a nuclear energy venture chaired by Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates, is seeking a new partner for early-stage trials of its technology after new U.S. rules forced it to abandon an agreement with China, company officials told the Wall Street Journal.
TerraPower reached an agreement with state-owned China National Nuclear Corp in 2017 to build an experimental nuclear reactor south of Beijing. 

But Gates wrote in an essay published late last week that TerraPower is unlikley to follow through on its plans in the face of new U.S. restrictions on technology deals with China.
The Bellevue, Washington-based company is now unsure which country it will work with to conduct trials of its technology, which is designed to use depleted uranium as fuel for nuclear reactors in a bid to to improve safety and costs, company officials told the Journal.
“We’re regrouping,” Chief Executive Chris Levesque told the Journal in an interview. 

“Maybe we can find another partner.”
The U.S. Department of Energy in October announced new restrictions on nuclear deals with China, in keeping with a broader plan by the Trump administration to limit China's ability to access U.S-made technologies of strategic importance.
Gates, who co-founded TerraPower, said in his essay that regulations in the United States are currently too restrictive to allow the reactor prototype to be built domestically. 

China’s Gulag for Muslims

In modern-day “re-education” prisons, Beijing is forcing ethnic Uighurs to forsake their religion. Why don’t Muslim governments rise up in anger?
By Mustafa Akyol

An Acehnese Muslim woman cries as she takes part in a protest rally in support of ethnic Uyghur Muslims in China, in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, 21 December 2018.

One of the darkest episodes of the 20th century was the gulag — the Soviet system of forced labor camps where dissidents were imprisoned in terrible conditions, often to perish. 

The camps were established by Lenin, expanded by Stalin and finally exposed to the world by the great Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, with his 1973 masterpiece, “The Gulag Archipelago.”
“Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of Archipelago,” he wrote, and “it is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold, and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides.”
Today, Russia’s gulags are long gone, as is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that operated them. 

But now another dictatorship, ruled by another Communist Party, is operating a new chain of prisons that evoke memory of the gulags — more modern, more high-tech, but no less enslaving.
These are China’s “re-education camps,” established in the far-western East Turkestan colony, where up to a million Uighurs are imprisoned in order to be indoctrinated. 

People are forced to listen to ideological lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write “self-criticism” essays. 

Survivors also tell about military-style discipline, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.
The target of this mass persecution is China’s Muslim minorities — especially the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people based in East Turkestan. 

They follow a mainstream, moderate interpretation of Sunni Islam. 

But that is enough of a “mental illness” for Chinese Communists, whose ideology considers all religions, including Christianity, to be backward superstitions that must be diluted and nationalized. 

That is why they go as far as forbidding people from having beards or fasting during Ramadan, and forcing them to consume pork and alcohol, both of which are forbidden in Islam.
Chinese authorities say they are alarmed about extremists among the Uighurs — and, in fact, a handful of extremists have carried out attacks against government targets over the years. 

But those extremists arose in response to a decades-old policy of subjugation, along with ethnic colonialization, that Beijing has pursued against the Uighurs. 

That history suggests that Beijing’s current “counterterrorism” campaign will be only counterproductive — deepening a vicious cycle that authoritarian minds are often unable to understand, let alone break.
And here is the strangest aspect of this story: China’s “re-education” policy is a major attack on Muslim people and their faith, Islam, yet the Muslim world has remained largely silent. 

While the policy has been condemned by human rights groups and the liberal news media in the West, along with Uighur organizations themselves, only a few Muslim leaders, like the Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim and Pakistan’s minister of religion, Noorul Haq Qadri, have raised some public concerns. 

Not until last month did the Organization of Islamic Cooperation finally express concern about “the disturbing reports on the treatment of Muslims” by China.
That is all very meek given how grim the situation is — and how it compares to what we would have seen if the same persecution had been carried out by some other country, such as, say, Israel.
Why is that? 

Why are Muslim leaders, especially those who love to be the champions of oppressed Muslims, so lenient toward China?
There are three answers. 

One is that coziness with China, the world’s second-largest economic power, pays. 

China is the top trading partner of 20 of the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. 

Its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, a huge path of commercial and transportation infrastructure intended to pass through much of the Middle East, holds a lucrative promise for many Muslim nations.
Moreover, China does not shy away from offering its economic assistance as hush money. 

In July 2018, The Global Times, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, ran an interesting editorial suggesting that China’s government would help Turkey secure its “economic stability” — but only if Turkish officials stopped making “irresponsible remarks on the ethnic policy in East Turkestan,” which means stop criticizing China’s human rights violations. (At about the same time, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, was also promising to help the Turkish economy, but only if Turkey corrected its own human rights violations. In other words, Turkey was being pulled in opposite directions, and, sadly, the dark side has proved stronger so far.)
A second reason for Muslim silence is that the Chinese government crackdown on Uighurs is based on a premise that law and order can be restored by eradicating enemies of the government and traitors within a society.

This is authoritarian language that most Muslim leaders understand well. It is their own language.

The third reason is that most Muslims who are likely to feel solidarity with their oppressed coreligionists think of the oppressors as “the West,” defined as the capitalist, hedonist, Zionist civilization led by the Great Satan. 

These Muslims, particularly the Islamists, believe that all of their coreligionists should unite with other anti-Western forces — a stance that evokes Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a “Confucian-Islamic” alliance against the West in his 1993 article in “Foreign Affairs” titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”
For Muslim autocrats and Islamists, a Confucian-Islamic alliance may still be alluring. 

China can look like a great model, in which the economy grows without Western nuisances like human rights, free speech or limited government. 

For Muslim societies, however, the Uighur crisis must be a wake-up call. 

It shows what can happen to Muslims when authoritarian governments embrace Islamophobia as state policy.
Islamophobia exists in the liberal democracies of the West, too — but there it can be criticized by the news media, checked by the courts and constrained by liberal institutions and traditions. 

Muslims can still practice their religion freely, and can even become lawmakers by being elected to bodies like the United States Congress.
For Muslim societies, in other words, a choice between freedom and dictatorship should not be too difficult. 

In freedom, you can live as a Muslim in safety and dignity. 

Under dictatorship, as China shows us, you end up in a re-education camp.

Hong Kong independence

Hong Kong democracy camp kicks off 2019 with protests, braces for confrontational year

AFP-JIJI

A pro-independence supporter raises an umbrella with British flags as she takes part in an annual New Year's Day march in Hong Kong Tuesday.

HONG KONG - Hong Kong’s embattled democracy advocates kicked off 2019 with a large street rally on Tuesday, lamenting what they said had been a grim year for freedoms and steeling themselves for fresh battles with Beijing.
A thousands-strong crowd — including independence activists — protested over disappearing political freedoms, rising inequality and the local government’s coziness with big business and Beijing.
Semi-autonomous Hong Kong currently enjoys liberties unseen on the mainland including freedom of expression and the press under a deal struck with Britain before the 1997 handover.
But concern is growing that those rights are being eroded by an increasingly assertive China ruled by Xi Jinping.
Last year city authorities made a series of unprecedented moves that caused alarm among activists and prompted rare criticism from Western governments.
In September a pro-independence political party was banned under an obscure national security law designed to target triad gangs.
Soon after a Financial Times journalist who chaired a talk with that party’s leader at a press club found himself effectively expelled after officials refused to renew his visa.
Authorities also continued to bar political candidates from standing for local elections if they held pro-independence views.
“We have experienced a lot in 2018 — society, politics and people’s livelihood have all regressed. I can’t see hope in 2019,” protester Kwan Chun-pong, a 47-year-old production line manager, told AFP.
The majority of Hong Kong’s democracy advocates want people to have a greater say in how their city is run, such as the ability to directly elect their leader.
Mass pro-democracy demonstrations in 2014 blockaded parts of the city for 79 days but failed to win any meaningful concessions.
A group of independence activists emerged from the failure of the 2014 protests, rattling local and mainland authorities.
Independence activists — some of them masked — attended Tuesday’s rally, followed by police officers with video cameras.
“We are still coming out today because we still love this place, we want it to change, we want the next generation to feel proud of Hong Kong’s identity,” activist Wayne Chan shouted through a loud-hailer.
The Hong Kong government rejects the suggestion that rights are slipping and says campaigning for independence contravenes the city’s mini-constitution.
The Civil Human Rights Front, which organized Tuesday’s march, does not support independence but argues the city’s free speech laws should allow others to campaign for it.
Activists face new challenges in 2019 with the government hoping to table new national security legislation and laws that would ban disrespecting China’s national anthem.
A number of 2014 protest leaders will also find out in April whether a court will jail them after they were prosecuted under a slew of little-used public order offenses.

A Photographer’s Quest to Reverse China’s Historical Amnesia

By Amy Qin

A rally at a stadium in Harbin, China, in 1966, attended by the photographer Li Zhensheng. A Communist Party secretary and the wife of another official were denounced and splattered with ink.

HONG KONG — The photographer Li Zhensheng is on a mission to make his fellow Chinese remember one of the most turbulent chapters in modern Chinese history that the ruling Communist Party is increasingly determined to whitewash.
“The whole world knows what happened during the Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Li said. 

“Only China doesn’t know. So many people have no idea.”
Clad in a dark blue photographer’s vest, Mr. Li, 78, spoke in a recent interview in Hong Kong, where the first Chinese-language edition of his book “Red-Color News Soldier” was published in October by the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong.
Blending history and memoir, the photo book compiles images taken by Mr. Li in the 1960s when he was working at a local newspaper in northeastern China. 

Since 2003, the photos have been exhibited in more than 60 countries, bearing witness around the world to the Cultural Revolution — the decade-long turmoil that unfolded from 1966 and turned students against teachers, sons against fathers, and friends against friends.
With the new edition of his book, Mr. Li joins the small ranks of Chinese who survived the excesses of Mao Zedong’s rule and are determined to challenge the official historical narrative at a time when a new dictator -- Xi Jinping -- has pushed to suppress criticism of his party’s traumatic past. 

Under Xi’s rule, the authorities have waged a broad ideological crackdown on dissenting voices, making efforts to objectively chronicle history fraught with risk.

A 5-year-old girl, Kang Wenjie, center, performed a “loyalty dance” for Red Guards in Harbin in 1968.

In China, the Cultural Revolution has become a taboo topic and officials there have repeatedly blocked Mr. Li’s attempts to publish the photos. 

The new edition of his book can be distributed only within the semiautonomous city of Hong Kong, but that has not dampened his hopes of getting copies of it into the Chinese mainland.
“We’ll bring the books into the mainland one by one,” Mr. Li said. 

“It’ll be like ants moving house.”
After Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution, what began as a political campaign aimed at reasserting control at the top soon became a sweeping nationwide movement that shook all levels of society. 

Rival groups of militant youth known as Red Guards fought against one another and against perceived “class enemies,” including intellectuals, officials and others.
Tens of millions of people were persecuted. 

Up to 1.5 million died as a result of the campaign. 

Many were driven to suicide.
“No other political movement in China’s recent history lasted as long, was as widespread in its impact, and as deep in its trauma as the Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Li said.
He added that he was concerned that without a deep historical reckoning, something similar could happen in China again. 

Already, Xi’s efforts to elevate himself to the status of Mao and extend his rule indefinitely have for many evoked the days of one-man rule, when Mao was worshiped like a god, culminating in the disaster that was the Cultural Revolution.

Pilots in the People’s Liberation Army reading from “Quotations From Chairman Mao Zedong,” also known as “The Little Red Book.”
Mr. Li’s collection of photos from that time is a nuanced portrayal of both the pain and the passion that the movement generated. 

At a time when cameras were scarce, he was given rare access to official events, taking more than 30,000 photos, many of which he carefully stashed under the floorboards of his home in the city of Harbin.
Among those are scenes of Red Guards forcing monks at a temple to denounce Buddhist scriptures and tearing out an official’s hair because he was deemed as too closely resembling Mao. 

There are people shouting praises to Mao as they swim in the Songhua River. 

There are many images of officials and ordinary folk, some standing on chairs, some splattered with black ink, many bowing their heads, and all at the mercy of massive crowds denouncing them for supposed crimes, sentencing them to hard labor or taking them away for execution.
Mr. Li’s photos first gained widespread attention abroad in 2003, when he worked with Robert Pledge, the director of Contact Press Images in New York City, to publish “Red-Color News Soldier.”
Almost immediately, publishers in China began reaching out to Mr. Li, who had moved to New York to be closer to his children. 

Knowing that the photos had only a slim chance of receiving approval from China’s official censors, Mr. Li and his editors in China made plans for a Chinese-language version of the book that would bury the contentious photos in a sea of text.
But censors rejected the nearly finished book with no explanation.
Livid, Mr. Li sent letters of protest to China’s top leaders. 

One of his main points of contention: In 2000, Deng Xiaoping’s daughter had published a book about her father titled “Deng Xiaoping and the Cultural Revolution: A Daughter Recalls the Critical Years.”
“I was so angry,” Mr. Li recalled. 

“Why can Deng Xiaoping share his Cultural Revolution experience and not Li Zhensheng?”

People swimming in the Songhua River in Harbin in 1967 while shouting praise for Mao.

Now, more than a half-century after the Cultural Revolution began, there is little public discussion of that period in China. 

The nation’s collective amnesia has only gotten worse in recent years as leaders have walked back efforts to reckon with the country’s modern history.
Last year, the South China Morning Post reported that a state-run publisher had evidently revised a middle-school history textbook to omit references to Mao’s “mistakes” in stirring up the Cultural Revolution. 

And a recent exhibition at the Capital Museum in Beijing featuring historical images taken by photographers for the official news agency Xinhua made no mention of the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was not always off limits. 

In 1988, the organizers of a nationwide photography competition approached Mr. Li with a request that would be almost unimaginable in China’s current political climate.
“We can’t have an entire decade of history missing in a competition as big as this,” Mr. Li recalled one of the organizers saying. 

So would he consider submitting his photos to the competition?
Mr. Li won the competition. 

The local news media and observers were stunned by the images, which depicted the Cultural Revolution more completely than had been seen before.
Seeing how the atmosphere has changed since that time, Mr. Li has only become more hardened in his resolve to see his photos published in China.

The execution in 1980 of Wang Shouxin, far left, a rebel during the Cultural Revolution. A guard, right, is handing a single bullet to Wang’s executioner.

“Some people have criticized me, saying I am washing the country’s dirty laundry in public,” he said, using a Chinese idiom that refers to the belief that a family’s problems should not be aired in public. “But Germany has reckoned with its Nazi past, America still talks about its history of slavery, why can’t we Chinese talk about our own history?”
Though his photos cannot be published in the mainland, Mr. Li has given lectures on the Cultural Revolution at several Chinese universities, including Tsinghua University and Peking University.
In 2017, a new museum dedicated to Mr. Li’s life and photography was opened in a small town in Sichuan Province. 

It was part of a cluster of private history museums opened by Fan Jianchuan, a property developer and history buff who, like Mr. Li, has become well-versed in the push and pull of China’s censorship system.
But walking the line has meant making compromises. 

Sitting in his hotel room in Hong Kong, Mr. Li mentioned a new book he had been preparing using photos he had taken in Beijing during the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Asked if he had plans to publish the book, the normally opinionated photographer went quiet. 

He was hesitating, he said, because he was concerned the museum in Sichuan could get shut down by the authorities in retaliation.
“Let’s not talk about the Tiananmen book,” he said. 

“One story at a time.”