Tag Archives: Xi Jinping

China, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Under China’s watchful eye

ORWELLIAN CHINA

Intro: The reality of modern China is no longer Orwellian science fiction. Every face and every move are being tracked. ‘Wrong’ political thoughts punished. All citizens’ lives are being controlled by the State. There are chilling implications for us all

TROUBLE in Hong Kong began earlier last month. Police ruthlessly beat protesters with batons and showered them with pepper spray in violent running battles. Rounds of rubber bullets and tear gas were fired into the crowds of angry but until then peaceful demonstrators.

The scenes in Hong Kong were as shocking as any seen there since the former British territory was handed over to China in 1997.

The handover was supposed to guarantee Hong Kong considerable autonomy and democratic rights under a “one country, two systems” agreement. But now its China-friendly parliament is debating plans to allow the extradition of Hong Kong citizens to mainland China, and a very different legal system. Which is why thousands have continued to besiege government buildings in the city, prompting the brutal crackdowns that have become more prevalent.

Hong Kong is the only spot on Chinese soil where any such protest is still imaginable. But for how much longer?

Be under no illusion, Hongkongers are protesting not in an act of hope but of desperation. With the new extradition law looming over them, they feel that this is their end game.

Beijing’s aim is clear: to turn Hong Kong into a Chinese city like any other. In the new China that means a place with harsher and vastly more efficient repression than we have seen in recent memory.

There are several reasons the Chinese Communist Party deeply distrusts Hong Kong and its way of life and is intent on destroying it.

One is the ability of Hong Kong to remember. In China remembering events the Chinese Communist Party chooses to erase from history is a subversive act and thus forbidden and punished.

Take Tiananmen Square. It was 30 years ago that a brave demonstrator carrying nothing more than a plastic grocery bag was photographed as he stood in front of a tank during protests in the Beijing square against China’s Communist government.

The starkest of images, it encapsulated in one potent frame the struggle for freedom against dictatorial oppression.

 

BUT the courage of this man, whose identity and fate has never been discovered, was to no avail. The regime of Deng Xiaoping cracked down on the revolt, beginning with a massacre of the Tiananmen protesters, followed by the widespread suppression of liberties.

The bloodshed, bullets and bayonets of Tiananmen Square in June 1989 only served to strengthen the Chinese Communist Party, cementing its grip on power and laying the foundations of the China we know today – a China which is now more determined than ever to eliminate all memories of Tiananmen.

In the two decades after the massacre, the Beijing Government pursued a twin-track policy of political authoritarianism combined with economic liberalism. Essentially, the nascent urban middle-classes were offered a deal: share in prosperity and keep your mouths shut.

But this dual approach, while fuelling record growth, gradually began to undermine the authority of the communist regime, as its guiding ideology decayed, and corruption spread. All that changed in 2012 with the arrival in power of the new Party chief and President Xi Jinping, an apparatchik who has turned out to be a ruthless autocrat.

Now effectively President for life, Xi has overseen the return of a merciless Leninist dictatorship, complete with relentless state propaganda, the eradication of dissent and the domination of civic life by the Communist Party.

What makes this development even more forceful is that his Government is using today’s high-tech tools, such as mass video surveillance powered by artificial intelligence, to enforce its rule.

The internet and the cyber revolution have been often hailed as instruments of liberation, but in the hands of Xi Jinping’s state, they have become instruments of repression, mind control and political manipulation.

Communist dictatorship has been given a digital rebirth.

This is not the story we are usually told in the West. Politicians in Europe tend to focus on the threat of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. They all but ignore the reality of the far greater challenge from the evermore ambitious China.

Many Westerners have, indeed, long clung to the delusion that a more open economy and increasing growth will automatically bring political liberalisation to China.

The argument went that if we engaged and traded with China, the country would slowly start to resemble us. But that was nothing more than wishful thinking. Domestic repression is accelerating, while the regime seeks greater global influence.

The inability of officialdom to effectively face up to this threat is perfectly illustrated by the explosive controversy over the British Government’s plan to allow the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei to play a key role in the creation of the new generation 5G network here, despite the profound reservations of allies like the United States and Australia, who remain gravely concerned about the security implications.

Trying to downplay such anxieties, Huawei’s boss Ren Zhengfei has given assurances that his company “will never cause damage to a nation or an individual”. But this ignores the fact that an intelligence service law from 2017 obliges all “Chinese organisations and citizens” to “support, aid and co-operate with the work of the national secret service”.

There is breathtaking naivety and complacency about the true nature of Xi Jinping’s China. Far from being more pluralistic, China’s structure as a one-party state has been reinforced.

“The party rules everything,” says Xi, a chilling statement of fact that embraces every institution from the universities and the media to the civil service. Indeed, the party is now an organisation with no fewer than 89 million members, more than the entire population of Germany or, indeed, Britain.

In this climate, a new cult of Xi’s personality is accompanied by the punishment of any deviation from the ruling orthodoxy. The lives of China’s 1.4 billion citizens are saturated in Communist propaganda, including patriotic songs in nursery schools, banners on urban buildings, posters of Xi and output in the state-controlled media. Some taxis carry LED screens on their roofs showing party slogans.

Chairman Mao had his little Red Book. Xi has his Little Red App, launched in January this year, whereby citizens can collect reward points while reading socialist texts.

More aggressively, through show trials and arrests, the Communist regime aims to strike terror into anyone who still dares challenge the state.

This quest for ideological control has seen bloggers, journalists, campaigners and civil rights lawyers silenced; some have disappeared all together, others are forced to appear on TV, confessing to misdeeds. According to Xi, the Chinese legal system is “the handle in the knife of the party”.

 

A KEY element of Chinese propaganda is, as stated above, the rewriting of history. “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past,” wrote George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984 – a stance the Beijing regime has eagerly adopted.

A permanent state-run exercise in collective amnesia is under way, as shown by the way any reference to the Tiananmen Square atrocity has been gradually eradicated.

Over the years, the “counter-revolutionary riots” became known first as “the riots”, then “the political storm” and eventually just “the incident”. In the end even the “incident” dissolved into silence, as if an old photograph had faded until only a meaningless silhouette remained. Many of those under 30 years of age have no idea that it ever took place.

Chairman Mao once said that the Chinese Communist revolution “relies on guns and pens.” Guns and pens also go together in the case of Tiananmen Square. The state’s troops murdered the protesters; the state’s writers murder the truth.

By promoting freedom of expression, modern technology was meant to be an antidote to the poison of oppression. But it has not worked out like that in China.

Under Xi’s regime, this sophisticated technology has been harnessed as a weapon for the classic Communist Party tactics of intimidation, indoctrination and censorship. What we are witnessing is the return of totalitarianism in digital guise. When he was first installed in power, Xi gave the order to “win back the commanding heights of the internet”, a task that Westerners might have thought impossible given the web’s reputation for anarchic freedom.

But the Communists did it. They intimidated dissident bloggers, deleted accounts and demanded ideological compliance and censorship from providers.

Users of one of the most lively and popular social media tools, Weibo – China’s version of Twitter – were brought to heel in 2013 by the simple device of threatening jail sentences for “spreading rumours”. Political discussions were quickly dropped by Weibo, with the site confining itself to entertainment, commerce and propaganda.

Perhaps even more stunning is the Chinese state’s exploitation of monitoring techniques and facial recognition systems powered by artificial intelligence to impose strict conformity on its citizens.

Unlike much of the West, China is unencumbered by concerns about data protection and privacy, so it is using its cyber-expertise to forge ahead in this field.

The process is fuelled by the state placing a priority on cutting edge research and the population’s enthusiasm for mobile technology – no less than 60 per cent of all the world’s cashless transactions in 2017 took place in China, while the country is the world’s biggest market for e-commerce.

A new society is being born, one dominated by the all-seeing, all-powerful eye of the Government. By next year, China plans to have 600 million CCTV cameras, strengthening the apparatus of the surveillance infrastructure.

Already, the impact on individual life is phenomenal. At railway stations in cities like Guangzhou and Wuhan, for instance, entry is only allowed to people once their faces have been scanned and checked against a police database. And this is just the beginning.

The citizens of Hong Kong understand the extent of the state’s reach. During the initial protests there were long lines at the metro ticket machines because people didn’t want to use their rechargeable Octopus cards for fear of leaving a digital trail that could connect them to the protest.

A central component of the new China is the planned “Social Credit System”, which will gather data on the behaviour of each citizen to ensure, through rewards and penalties, adherence to the state’s rules on personal responsibility.

It is being trialled in places such as Rongcheng, where residents start with 1,000 “social credit” points, then earn bonuses or reductions according to their conduct, like obedience at traffic signals or remarks about the party on social media.

Digital technology even dictates the supply of lavatory paper in some of Beijing’s public facilities, with users given a restricted number of sheets in their allotted time once their faces have been recognised by the dispenser.

In China’s bold new vision, omnipresent algorithms create economically productive, socially harmonised and politically compliant subjects, who will ultimately censor and sanction themselves at every turn. In the old days, the party demanded fanatical belief; now mute complicity will suffice.

Of course, China’s plans are not just for domestic consumption. The country is exporting its surveillance and artificial intelligence technology all over the world.

And other autocracies are eager buyers, keen to ape China’s authoritarianism. Western democracies are also supplicants – as Britain proves with its courting of Huawei, hailed by Chinese police as being a “close partner” in “technological” and “digitalised” police work.

 

THE technological export drive is part of China’s concerted effort to expand its global influence. Until the recent past, the Beijing Government was deeply reluctant to play any role on the international stage, preferring to concentrate on domestic problems. But again, all that has changed under Xi Jinping, whose outlook combines socialist ideology with nationalistic pride.

The latter impulse is demonstrated in a host of initiatives: in the massive expansion of China’s military; in the funding of Chinese institutes in Western universities and think tanks; in the control of Chinese student associations overseas; in the creation of global propaganda machines like the television’s “Voice of China” whose European headquarters was recently set up in London; in the vast Chinese investments in Africa and South America; in the support for colossal infrastructure projects like Britain’s new nuclear power plant at Hinckley Point; any in the ferocity of response to any attacks on Xi’s regime.

The brave and proud Hongkongers out in the streets are a living rebuttal for the party’s claim that the Chinese aren’t cut out for democracy. And that is exactly why our governments should stand by them.

Xi’s regime has shown that it sees itself in ideological competition with us. Through its slide back to totalitarianism, it has rejected our values and tries to undermine them. For the sake of our own future, we must be willing to defend them.

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China, Economic, United States

America’s economic battle with China risks global slump

GLOBAL ECONOMY

PRESIDENT Trump continues to show no mercy in his dealings with China. Emboldened by the robust American economy and the continuing rally on Wall Street, Donald Trump is convinced that tariff barriers will do more damage to Beijing than Washington, and that eventually his approach will force concessions.

The U.S. President’s decision to impose a 10 per cent tariff on £150bn of goods from China means almost half the products shipped from the People’s Republic to America – with the notable exception of some Apple items – are subject to tariffs, raising prices for US businesses and consumers.

These new measures are in addition to the £38bn of tariffs imposed in July and August.

China, led by President Xi Jinping, lost no time in retaliating by finding another £45bn of US goods to penalise. And the country’s best-known entrepreneur, Jack Ma, founder of digital champion Alibaba, said his promise to create up to 1m jobs in the US was no longer viable because of tensions.

 

DESPITE the threat of higher prices for Americans on goods ranging from textiles to electronics, Trump’s tough line will play well in “rust-belt” states as the Republicans seek to seize back the political initiative ahead of November’s mid-term elections.

The White House’s choice of trade as a weapon to curb Chinese influence and expansionism has been met with horror by the International Monetary Fund in Washington and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Geneva.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have also joined the chorus of critics, warning that world economic output was “hitting a plateau” because of US-China trade wars and fragility in emerging markets.

As the apostles of free trade, it argues that much global prosperity, notably in Asia and emerging markets, has been built on an open trading system.

The Great Depression of the 1930s was the result of nations imposing ever-higher barriers on vital trade such as commodities and farm produce. Despite the criticism there is a conviction in the White House that America’s hardline policy will produce dividends.

Larry Kudlow, the White House’s chief economic adviser, declared: “We are open to talks, if there are serious talks.” In May, China agreed to reduce the tariffs on imported American cars from 25 per cent to 15 per cent, to ease strained relations.

Mr Trump has also been encouraged to act tough after his success in bullying Mexico into accepting new rules for trading. Mexico now has to show that products it assembles contain at least 70 per cent of US content before they can move across borders.

The U.S. President has been able to take on China with some impunity because the American economy is going great guns. Growth has exceeded wildest expectations in the second quarter, at an annual rate of 4.1 per cent, creating jobs.

Farming communities have been hardest hit by Chinese retaliation, which has targeted soya bean production, pig products and beef. Trump has bought farmers’ silence with an increase of £9.1bn in subsidies.

So, what does this chest-beating machoism mean for other Western nations?

The big concern is that if the tit-for-tat war carries on for any length of time, Beijing might flood other countries with cheap goods. Complaints of Chinese dumping of cheap steel and aluminum on international markets have led to swingeing penalties being imposed by the countries where the steel is sold – while the cases are examined at the WTO.

The difficulty for Beijing is that it doesn’t import anything like £150bn of goods from the US though it can slow supply chains – such as components for the iPhone and personal computers.

The importance of better trading relations with neighbours has never been more critical. China recently sealed a far-reaching trade deal with India. In Europe, it reinforces the need for Britain to connect to the EU’s market of 500m people and not allow Brexit to damage relationships.

The biggest concern is that the US-China trade war comes at a moment of potential peril for the global economy. Rising US interest rates allied to domestic political upheaval are driving several market economies, including Turkey, Argentina and South Africa, to the brink.

When the financial inducements of Donald Trump’s tax cuts wear off and American retail prices rise – because of the higher costs of Chinese goods – economic conditions could deteriorate rapidly. The trade fracas might just prove to be the start of the next global slump.

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China, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Essay: The West can no longer be complacent with China

CHINA

WHEN Xi Jinping was a child, his father – then, a high-ranking government minister – fell out of favour with the founder of the People’s Republic, Chairman Mao.

As part of his family’s humiliation, Xi, as an eight-year-old, was paraded on a school stage in a metal dunce’s cap. The audience raised their arms and shouted, “Down with Xi Jinping!” Even Xi’s mother was forced to join in the chanting.

Later, Xi was sent to be “reformed” in an impoverished, rural commune.

Earlier this week, in an extraordinary reversal of fate, that humiliated schoolboy was affirmed as the most powerful man in China since Mao when the People’s Congress in Beijing rubber-stamped a constitutional amendment. In effect, it abolishes the legal limit of two terms on China’s presidency. Xi is now the country’s leader in perpetuity – or as some might have it, dictator.

With cunning ruthlessness, he worked his way through the ranks of the party that treated his family so abhorrently, from local to national politics, and saw off rivals while establishing political and popular support with his war on corruption. And as a former peasant who toiled hard labour in the fields, his “man of the people” credentials have done him no harm.

He has already decreed that his own name and ideas are written into the nation’s constitution, as “Xi Jinping Thought” – an honour he shares only with Mao. We in the complacent West would do well to wake up to the vaulting ambition of the leader of the world’s most populous state. The lingering question now is whether power will go to his head.

We have become used to expansionist threats and sabre-rattling from countries such as Russia and North Korea, but we don’t really expect it from China, which is traditionally insular and inward-looking. It is, after all, the country that built a Great Wall around its borders to keep out foreign influences.

Xi is intent, however, on reversing that centuries-old trend. China has established itself as a global player in trade, is massively expanding its military and now wants global political influence to match. In some ways, this can benefit the West. For example, Xi has put pressure on North Korea’s unstable leader, Kim Jong-un, to halt his erratic missile tests and even to roll back Pyongyang’s nuclear programme. Donald Trump’s boastful remarks recently of a diplomatic breakthrough (with arms talks to come), would have been impossible without Xi’s influence.

If the world becomes a safer place in the short-term as a result of this new willingness on China’s part to play the role of a global power-broker, we should all sigh a sense of huge relief. But as this week’s declaration reveals, Xi isn’t interested in the short-term. His plans are for the much longer-term. He certainly has had several opportunities to get the measure of Trump: First at a meeting last April in Florida at the President’s Mar-a-Lago resort, later at the G20 talks in Hamburg, and then again when the two met in Beijing last November. Whilst they did seem to hit it off on strategic issues, the relationship between them is a strange one. Neither will feel comfortable in a partnership of equals.

President Trump has already asserted his independence by announcing serious trade restrictions on Chinese steel and other imports. Yet, China is not only a major trading partner of the US, but a colossal underwriter of American debt. The government in Washington could not function without borrowing hundreds of billions, financed largely by Chinese loans. If China withdraws that support, in direct retribution for Trump’s trade blockade, what will happen to the US economy?

And, if Xi stops applying pressure on North Korea, what happens to Trump’s much vaunted peace talks? The Chinese President has manoeuvred himself, not just into one commanding position, but into a whole array of them.

It is not only America that is suddenly uncomfortably aware of Chinese strength. India, too, is eyeing its immense neighbour with unease after Xi sent China’s new navy into the Indian Ocean. This none-too-subtle display was prompted by a dispute over international policies concerning the Maldives. China, which has committed huge investment into developing its naval fleet, knows the world will take notice of a fleet of modern battleships. Meanwhile, across Eurasia, Xi has been the driving force for a new Silk Road linking China’s factories to Western Europe via Putin’s Russia, making Moscow the willing junior partner of Beijing.

All this confirms Xi Jinping as the most powerful and ambitious man in Chinese politics since the death of Chairman Mao more than 40 years ago – with one significant difference. Mao wanted to break completely with China’s cultural past – the hallmark of the bourgeoise – Xi has a different strategy and wants to celebrate it.

XI is determined to restore the country’s links to its heritage and arts by fostering a new creed of nationalism in place of Communism. Chinese artworks and treasures, which were scattered to the winds during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, are being brought back from the West by Chinese multimillionaires who see themselves as nationalist champions. Xi’s own wife, Peng Liyuan, a singer who entertained the troops after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, is at the forefront of this movement.

From the arts to geopolitics, trade wars to nuclear peace talks, Xi seems to have thought of everything. His carefully constructed powerbase may have one weak point: If he is president for life, then the ambitions of the country’s rising stars below him could be thwarted. That would risk political stagnation and infighting.

But for now, the West cannot risk complacency, especially now that China is controlled by the Thoughts of President Xi. If Mao gave China independence, and former leader Deng Xiaoping rebuilt the economy, then Xi is dedicated to making it a force to be reckoned with once more.

 

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