The Chinese Communist Party at 100 - Part II: Dinner Table Digest № 15
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!
After I published my most recent Dinner Table Digest on the centenary celebration of the Chinese Communist Party, a few more stories landed on my to-read list that I felt were worth highlighting. One features the ever-present question of the Island of Formosa, otherwise known as the Republic of China / Taiwan, while another looks at the rise of the Wolf Warrior Chinese diplomat and its implications for the west in its dealings with China. I finish with a fascinating look at the reasons why membership in the Party has been on the decline since Xi Jinping took over as President of China in 2013.
The Man Behind China’s Aggressive New Voice - Alex Palmer, New York Times Magazine
In this piece, Alex W. Palmer takes a deep dive into the Chinese diplomat known as the Wolf Warrior, named after a Chinese action movie that sees the Chinese special forces defeat generic American forces in an invasion. After a stint in the Chinese Embassy in Washington during Obama’s second term, Zhao Lijian was posted to Pakistan, a country which has long had a friendly relationship with China. There he discovered an online tool that few Chinese diplomats had made use of before, partly because it was banned in China: Twitter. Zhao went all in with a forceful, provocative and outright hostile approach, first with full-throated support of the Chinese-Pakistan Economic Cooperation, before aggressively challenging Australia over their treatment of Afghan refugees:
“…the tweet, posted by a diplomat named Zhao Lijian, represented a different kind of aggression. “Shocked by murder of Afghan civilians & prisoners by Australian soldiers,” he wrote. “We strongly condemn such acts, & call for holding them accountable.” Attached was a digital illustration of an Australian soldier restraining an Afghan child with a large Australian flag while preparing to slit the boy’s throat. “Don’t be afraid,” the caption read, “we are coming to bring you peace!” When the tweet appeared online that morning, there were audible gasps in Australia’s Parliament House.”
Starting with this tweet, the west was dealing with a new foe. No longer would China tiptoe around diplomatic affairs, content to build ‘soft power’ in the west. Now they were going full-on ‘hard power,’ unafraid to tell the world that China was back on the world stage, and it was not going to take any more lectures from the west about anything, let alone human rights.
Already, [Xi Jinping] has delivered more speeches on foreign affairs than any previous general secretary in Communist Party history. Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy — the idea that the international system should have “Chinese characteristics,” with more of a leadership role for the country — is now the guiding diplomatic doctrine of China.
Xi’s foreign-policy vision is inextricably wedded to a sense of his own role in China’s rejuvenation. “He wants to leave his name on Chinese history,” Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, said. “He compares himself to Mao and Deng. In his narrative, Mao made China free and Deng made it rich. What can he do? The only option he has left is to make it strong.” For Xi and the rest of the party leadership, strength goes beyond traditional hard power to include dominating the information space abroad in order to “spread China’s voice,” a concept the party calls “discourse power.”
Xi’s best diplomatic tool to accomplish this seems to be a young, aggressive diplomat attacking the world on Twitter. When you put it that way, that’s kind of what global politics is these days, isn’t it?
Is Taiwan Next? - Sarah A. Topol, New York Times Magazine
Another longread, this piece explores the reality that the Chinese reunification process, started under Mao and continuing through Deng and now to Xi Jinping, is a serious project, with the long-term goal of reclaiming Taiwan, known internationally as the Republic of China, as part of the People’s Republic of China. With the subjugation of Hong Kong complete, China knows that the west will stand by and watch as it moves into a territory once considered the bastion of British democracy in the east. From its colonial roots through to the present day, Hong Kong has always done things different. For Taiwan, however, things are more complicated. There many of the older folks identify as Chinese, not as Taiwanese. They remember the escape from mainland China to the island, supporters and fighters with the nationalist KMT, who opposed the Communists during their capture of broader China. There are also a considerable number of people who identify as Japanese, holdovers from the Japanese occupiers who were displaced when the KMT fled to the island in 1945, after the Japanese surrendered in WWII. This piece traces the story of a young Taiwanese woman born of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother, who undergoes a political awakening as she watches Hong Kong fight for its life. After spending years travelling to and from Hong Kong supporting her friends there, she is now no longer allowed to travel there, put on the Chinese no-fly list. So, she turns her attention to her own island, knowing that the dragon across the strait is simply biding its time, waiting for an opportune time to pounce.
A friend escorted Nancy to the relative safety of a pedestrian overpass nearby, where she watched the chaos as protesters broke into the LegCo that evening. Inside, in graffiti, someone wrote: “Hong Kong is not China yet” and “It was the government who taught us that peaceful protest is useless.” It was a radicalization that was perhaps inevitable. If we burn, you burn with us! the protesters said, quoting “The Hunger Games.” The next morning, Nancy flew home feeling helpless. She was worried. This would not end well for the Hong Kongers, she thought.
When she was back in Taipei, she couldn’t leave the movement behind. At work, it dominated the on-air discussion. After work, she would come home and watch livestreams of the protests. She couldn’t stop herself. It reminded her of Taiwan’s period of White Terror. She’d always found it hard to imagine the acts of brave defiance she’d read about, but now her friends in Hong Kong were doing the same things. It was almost unbelievable.
When she was with her Taiwanese friends, she felt lonely. She didn’t mind meeting up and complaining about the high cost of Taipei rents, lack of job prospects or the brain drain in which many of her dynamic peers went overseas to pursue careers. But they never discussed the things she was concerned about — human rights, politics, the C.C.P. She reasoned that perhaps her friends didn’t understand the stakes because they were too comfortable. They voted in free elections already. The threat of China was ubiquitous; everyone had stopped paying attention. Besides, Taipei’s Michelin-starred night-market stalls, connoisseur coffee shops, crowded bars, Japanese izakaya restaurants and infinite variations on bubble tea were so far removed from the struggle for freedom in Hong Kong.
She wanted her Taiwanese friends to pay more attention to what was happening, to value their own democracy and maintain their independence from China. Sometimes she tried to explain it to them: “To you guys, this is just something on the news, but to me it’s not. These are my friends. They are actually experiencing these things.”
Xi Jinping only wants the most devoted Chinese Communist Party members. His tough membership rules could backfire - Julia Hollingsworth, Nectar Gan and CNN staff - CNN
One of the more interesting elements of the CCP’s centenary is the change in membership qualifications since Xi Jinping took over as President. In particular, Xi thought that membership to the party was too easy to obtain, and that many people who successfully became members simply wanted it for the economic security that it provided, with greater access to state jobs. He wanted a more loyal membership, one that was ideologically and materially committed to Xi and his leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. This CNN piece provides an easy-to-understand guide to becoming a member of the Chinese Communist Party, alongside some of the challenges that Xi Jinping may run into with the membership over the next while. For those that might want to dig deeper, I wanted also to highlight a piece that examines more closely the available data on CCP membership over time.
By way of a quick update to the Part I of this Digest on the centenary of the Chinese Communist Party, Bejing is planning a massive crackdown on Karaoke Bars, where they plan to add more than 100 songs to the ban list.
Under the plan, karaoke venues would be responsible for policing their song lists and deleting any songs that: “endanger national unity, sovereignty or territorial integrity, or harm national security, honour or interests”. It will also ban songs that “incite ethnic hatred”.
Read Part I here:
SUBSCRIBE TODAY!
All FREE subscribers have access to Dinner Table Digests and to any past content that has been pulled from behind what I’m calling Peter’s Support (Pay)Wall.
Content behind Peter’s Support (Pay)Wall will include Special Edition Digests like the recent Sex Edition, original essays, and acerbic social commentary. Substack also has the option of publishing smaller tidbits in a one-off manner, so there will likely be the occasional joke or two in the mix. If there is interest, I may also create video content.
What I do know is that I am grateful for your support, and your eyeballs; I look forward to producing interesting and engaging content in the future. I would be especially honoured if you would consider donating $5 per month so that I can continue to create more excellent work in the future. If you would like to donate $3.50 or $8/mth, you can do so at my Patreon page. And, of course, if you have any ideas about what you would like to see among the special content, I am all ears!