The Chinese Communist Party at 100: Dinner Table Digest № 14
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
With China always at the forefront of world news, it is important to keep track of what is going on in Asia. The late 20th century global order with the United States on top followed, loosely by Europe, Russia and then China has toppled, becoming a three-sided die, with only one of the three countries considered, at least nominally, a democracy. The UK is no longer part of Europe, NATO faces challenges on the European eastern front, and the United States is reeling from its own brush with an authoritarian leader. Meanwhile, in China, Xi Jinping, the 9th Chairman of the People’s Republic of China and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has become the de facto dictator of an increasingly totalitarian state. As it happens, 2021 is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CCP, an institution that is synonymous with the state of China itself. Here are four stories that look at the tightening noose of a totalitarian Communist Party of China.
Reconsidering the History of the Chinese Communist Party - The New Yorker
Tony Saich, the author of a new book, From Rebel to Ruler: 100 Years of the Chinese Communist Party, (In the Waterloo Region, order from Wordsworth Books) talks with Isaac Chotiner at The New Yorker about some of the shifts that he has identified in the party over the past century, particularly in the coming of Xi Jinping:
For Xi, I think Hong Kong could be a crowning achievement. Mao unified China with the exception of Macao, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Deng Xiaoping set a framework for bringing back Macao and Hong Kong, but I think Xi Jinping will be seen as the person that really brought Hong Kong back under the fold of the mainland. I think it also influences his attitude toward Taiwan.
Operation Fox Hunt: How China Exports Repression Using a Network of Spies Hidden in Plain Sight - Propublica
All my recent reading about totalitarian and fascist systems indicates that maintaining a hold over citizens even when they are not physically present in the totalitarian state is one of the most effective weapons a strongman leader has of keeping their grip on power over the long term. Propublica, the Illinois-based investigative journalism juggernaut, spent 3 years tracking just how Xi Jinping is able to use the state surveillance system, along with “emotional bombs” to track Chinese dissidents living abroad. Notably, urban centres and university communities are most affected - whether there are Chinese spies in my home community of the Waterloo Region, Ontario shouldn’t be controversial. The only real question is how many spies and what are they doing here?
Fox Hunt, experts say, is part of a calculated offensive to send a message that no one is beyond the reach of Beijing. As the Chinese Communist Party builds the largest police state in history, it is exporting repression. A report by Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights group, concluded that China conducts “the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world.” With the West preoccupied by other threats such as terrorism, Chinese spies have saturated diaspora communities with conscripted agents.
“This is the one thing that Chinese dissidents most fear,” said Teng Biao, a human rights lawyer and visiting professor at the University of Chicago. “Almost every Chinese overseas has at least one family member living in mainland China. Our fear is that our family will be targeted, they will have trouble. We have to worry about the personal safety of family members in China. That’s why we have to practice self-censorship.”
One by One, My Friends Were Sent to the Camps - Tahir Hamut Izgil - The Atlantic
If you hang out in leftist spaces long enough, you'll know that genocide denial is, unfortunately, a reality. It won't take you long to find people who claim that the genocide of Uyghurs in China is a nefarious Zionist plot perpetrated by a single evangelical named Adrian Zenz, intended to discredit the Chinese Communist Party. They point to videos on YouTube intended to look natural, but that, with a little push, follow a familiar pattern that maps on exactly with Chinese propaganda.
If you run across such folks, treat them the same way you would a Q-Anon/Pizzagate follower - they're likely not open to the actual evidence, even if it is put in front of them. Instead, educate yourself on what is happening. Read these words of Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil, who lives today in exile in the United States. Go onto Google Maps, turn on Satellite mode, fly down to Xinjiang, and look for the concentration camps. You'll find them easily. Then talk to your elected officials, ask them to speak up and speak out against the cultural genocide in Xinjiang.
The next day, Kamil texted again. “They’re taking me to Kashgar,” he wrote. He was still texting in Chinese, presumably at the insistence of the police. “Please bring me a few changes of clothes.” In an hour, she should come to the front gate of a courtyard near the headquarters of the state-security office. A police officer would come out to meet her. Munire asked what else Kamil needed, but he didn’t reply.
(China’s constitution guarantees minority peoples the right to use their own language in private and public life. However, over the past two decades the government has gradually restricted the use of Uyghur in education, administration, and publishing. Since 2017, Uyghur children have been sent to mandatory boarding schools, where they are punished for speaking their native language.)
Munire brought the clothing. Kamil was being held in an apartment inside the courtyard. The moment he saw Munire, he started crying. He couldn’t bring himself to speak. The police told Munire to trust that the government would resolve the situation fairly. They told her not to inquire with them about Kamil, and that if necessary they would get in touch with her. Then they sent her home.
After that, Munire lost all contact with Kamil. She had no idea what had happened to him.
Beijing Calling: Suspicion, Hope, and Resistance in the Chinese Rock Underground - Rolling Stone
In the west, rock music has lost its popularity, and along with it, its rebellious image. With the vast majority of western hard rock and metal acts coming from Europe, North America’s rock music scene has been on the decline for years now. In China, however, rock music still retains an air of rebellion through art, its musicians grinding away in small clubs off the beaten path, subject to constant surveillance by the state.
So why were Liu and Winston really arrested? Ask each of them and you get two different answers.
“Being a band from the underground, we were getting too much attention,” Winston insists. “When we started, we were presenting something that had never happened before in China. We were covered in tattoos and young. Some of us had dropped out of school. Our music struck the critical mind: that you can do things by yourself, think by yourself, and you don’t need to follow the traditional path.
“I think it was seen as an excess of freedom,” he concludes. “And if you observe the history of China, every time the government feels something is out of their control and getting too big, they try to suffocate it.”
Liu disagrees. “We’re nobody to them,” he says. “It’s just about the drugs. They don’t like that, so because [we were associated with them], they punished us. Of course they know what we’re doing musically, but we were quite small for them.”
One attitude — fixated on suppression, on the iron fist closing around contrarians — seems idealistic, and comes from someone raised in the West. The other — the assumption of insignificance, of being swept into greater momentum — is pragmatic, from someone born in the East. The motive could also be somewhere in between: that the government was tipped to the band’s alleged drug use, but the punishment of them was an attempt to punish dissent — because what is drug use if not dissent on productivity, on stability, on the conformity essential to an upwardly mobile society?
Ultimately, the band’s different interpretations divided them. “I’d already felt before that, every time we played, we had heavy surveillance,” says Winston. “Now it was clear: We’d reached the ceiling and there was nowhere for us to go in China. We had to leave the country to move forward.”
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