We Have Been Harmonised Read online




  WE HAVE BEEN HARMONISED

  Life in China’s Surveillance State

  Kai Strittmatter

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  New China, New world

  A PREFACE

  The Word

  HOW AUTOCRATS HIJACK OUR LANGUAGE

  The Weapon

  HOW TERROR AND LAW COMPLEMENT EACH OTHER

  The Pen

  HOW PROPAGANDA WORKS

  The Net

  HOW THE PARTY LEARNED TO LOVE THE INTERNET

  The Clean Sheet

  WHY THE PEOPLE HAVE TO FORGET

  The Mandate from Heaven

  HOW THE PARTY ELECTED AN EMPEROR

  The Dream

  HOW KARL MARX AND CONFUCIUS ARE BEING RESURRECTED, HAND IN HAND WITH THE GREAT NATION

  The Eye

  HOW THE PARTY IS UPDATING ITS RULE WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

  The New Man

  HOW BIG DATA AND A SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM ARE MEANT TO TURN PEOPLE INTO GOOD SUBJECTS

  The Subject

  HOW DICTATORSHIP WARPS MINDS

  The Iron House

  HOW A FEW DEFIANT CITIZENS ARE REFUTING THE LIES

  The Gamble

  WHEN POWER STANDS IN ITS OWN WAY

  The Illusion

  HOW EVERYONE IMAGINES HIS OWN CHINA

  The World

  HOW CHINA EXERTS ITS INFLUENCE

  The Future

  WHEN ALL ROADS LEAD TO BEIJING

  Thanks

  Endnotes

  About the Author

  Copyright

  NEW CHINA, NEW WORLD

  The China we once knew no longer exists. The China that was with us for forty years – the China of ‘reform and opening up’ – is making way for something new. It’s time for us to start paying attention. Something is happening in China that the world has never seen before. A new country and a new regime are being born. And it’s also time for us to take a look at ourselves. Are we ready? Because one thing is becoming increasingly clear: over the coming decades, the greatest challenge for our democracies and for Europe won’t be Russia, it will be China. Within its borders, China is working to create the perfect surveillance state, and its engineers of the soul are again trying to craft the ‘new man’ of whom Lenin, Stalin and Mao once dreamed. And this China wants to shape the rest of the world in its own image.

  The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has placed its leader, Xi Jinping, where no one has been since Mao Zedong. Right at the top. Nothing above him but the heavens. China has a ‘helmsman’ once more. Xi is the most powerful Chinese leader in decades, and he rules over a China that is stronger than it has been for centuries. An ambitious nation, readying itself to become even stronger – economically, politically and militarily. The West’s self-destruction has fallen into this nation’s lap like a gift from the gods. With 21st-century information technology and its radical new possibilities for control and manipulation, the regime has instruments of power to which no previous autocracy has ever had access. Xi and his party are reinventing dictatorship for the information age, in deliberate competition with the systems of the West. And this has huge implications for the world’s democracies.

  Even within China, the CCP’s plans are ambitious, but one shouldn’t underestimate the hold that an autocrat has over his subjects’ minds. The state has the ability to erase not just lives, but minds, in order to reformat them. The Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and the years that followed, provided a powerful demonstration of this fact. The date 4 June 2019 sees the 30th anniversary of the day the Chinese democracy movement was brutally crushed, and the Party has good reason to celebrate. In hindsight, its act of violence was a success – a greater success than anyone could have imagined at the time. The blood-letting gave the Party new life, as well as an opportunity to show what its mind-control apparatus could do, long before the advent of the digital age. Inside China, the memory of the massacre has practically been wiped out; the state-ordered amnesia is complete. And he who controls the past – the CCP understands this just as well as George Orwell did – also controls the future.

  This is a message from the future, if things don’t go so well. At the moment, things really aren’t going well. That’s why I wrote this book. It was born on the night Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America, and was finished in the months that saw Xi Jinping ‘chosen by history’, in the words of the journal of the Central Party School in Beijing, Qiushi (Seeking Truth). History is often a sluggish tide on which we float without ever being aware that it’s moving. But that isn’t the case right now: we are living through a time when the current of history seems almost physically tangible. Something is happening, to us and to China, and the two sides can no longer be separated.

  The new age is one in which facts have been abolished; the Western world is suddenly mired in ‘fake news’ and manipulated by ‘alternative facts’. For me, though, there is nothing new about it. It’s a life I’ve been living for twenty years, as a correspondent in Turkey (from 2005 to 2012), but above all in China. I studied in China in the 1980s, then worked there as a journalist from 1997 to 2005, and again from 2012 to 2018.

  Government by lies is no doubt as old as the institution of government itself, yet we in the West are shocked by the return of autocrats and would-be autocrats to our midst, and with them the return of the shameless lie as an instrument of control. We had settled into the comfortable belief that these techniques and the political systems associated with them were obsolete. Then Donald Trump was elected as the most powerful man in a democracy that many had regarded as exemplary. A man who is serious about acting on his hatred and his ignorance, and who is setting out to destroy the foundations of the privileged lives we have been living over the past few decades. A man who may rub his rival China up the wrong way, but at the same time expresses overt admiration for the limitless power of its ruler. A man who wants to put the screws on Europe. And Trump is not alone. Autocrats everywhere are scenting an opportunity and joining hands with the populist agitators in our own countries. A perfect storm is brewing, for Europe and for democracies everywhere. And while everyone is talking about Trump and the Russians, not nearly enough people are talking about China.

  Xi Jinping has promised his people and the world a ‘new age’ – and he is certainly building a new China. Both the Chinese people and the world at large have good reason to be nervous. Where Deng Xiaoping prescribed pragmatism, Xi Jinping has returned to revering ideology: he preaches Marx and practises Lenin with a force and dogmatism not seen for many years – and because he senses that Marx no longer speaks to many people, he has added Confucius and a fierce nationalism into the mix. Where Deng preached opening up and curiosity, Xi is sealing China off again.

  Not that Xi is trying to force something on his party that goes against the grain. The opposite, in fact: he is fulfilling its most hidden desires with speed and precision. Until recently, more than a few Party cadres* were secretly asking themselves: what is it still good for, the Party – a vehicle for a long-dead ideology from a long-dead age, almost a hundred years old? But where the Party was starting to smell of decay, Xi gave it new strength and discipline; where it was stagnant and directionless, he breathed a new purpose into it. It thanked him by elevating him into the pantheon of its greatest thinkers during his own lifetime, and endowing him with almost limitless power.

  Xi is now reminding everyone that this country was once conquered by the Party in a civil war. China itself was the Party’s spoils of victory. In China, the army still belongs to the Party rather than the state. The state, too, belongs to the Party. And the Party – well, that seems to belong to him, now. It submits to the man who h
as given it a sense of purpose, and who is turning a one-party dictatorship back into a one-man dictatorship.

  The Party calls Xi ‘the saviour of socialism’ – by which it really means ‘the saviour of our power’. The fate of the Soviet Union seems to trouble Xi deeply. He is quoted as saying that ‘what they lacked was a real man!’ Not China, though. China has him now: Xi Jinping. For life. Today, hardly anyone is still prophesying the impending collapse of this system, and the Party can once again afford to think long-term. The year 2024 will be an epochal year for the Party. At that point, it will have overtaken the CPSU, its failed Soviet Union sister party, and the Chinese Communist Party will have become the longest-reigning Communist Party in history.

  It is time for the West to let go of that form of wishful thinking that one wise author exposed as a ‘China fantasy’1 some years ago: the idea that a more open economy and increasing prosperity would automatically bring political liberalisation to China. For a long time, despite all the evidence to the contrary, people clung to the reassuringly pragmatic notion that if we engaged and traded with China, it would start to resemble us. After all, there was no precedent. This Communist Party was like none the world had ever seen. It simply assimilated capitalism and passed it off as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. It was an entity of phenomenal adaptability.2 It never gave up its autocratic core, but in the past few decades, deep in the country’s innards and even in the Party itself, there have been reform movements, original debates, surprising experiments and brave taboo-breakers.

  In Xi Jinping’s China, this is no longer the case. He has brought unorthodox movements to a standstill. Xi the taskmaster is setting out to prove that an autocracy is better suited to making a country like China great and powerful; that the realisation of his ‘China dream’ requires a strong Party dictatorship. Xi is dispensing with the premises of Deng Xiaoping’s policy of reform and opening-up; his China is no longer a state where everything is subordinate to economic success. Now, political control is at the heart of things. His Party is no longer one that devolves tasks to the state, to companies, to civil society, to the media, all of which have fought to carve out their own small freedoms. Xi has snuffed out those freedoms once again. During a single term in office, he has managed to get an iron grip on a nervous Communist Party stricken by a mood of crisis. He took on a diverse, lively, sometimes insubordinate society and did everything in his power to ‘harmonise’ it, as they say in China, stifling the voices of those who think differently and subordinating every last corner of society to the command of the Party. Xi, who claims to be incorruptible, is cleansing the country and the Party, including its ideology. He wants every last speck of land in China to be under his watchful gaze. Under Xi, the Party is becoming more godlike than it has ever been before.

  With one foot, then, Xi is taking a huge step backwards into the past. Leninism is in his bones. And so is the thirst for power. Some compare him to Mao Zedong, but this comparison falls at the first hurdle: Mao was the eternal rebel, who thrived in chaos. In many respects Xi Jinping, who has a fetish for control and stability, is the antithesis of Mao. Xi is no revolutionary; he’s a technocrat, albeit one who navigates the labyrinth of the Party apparatus with tremendous agility.

  But one experiment from Mao’s legacy is currently making a comeback: the CCP is once again practising total mind-control, once again trying to produce ‘new men’. Only this time, the Party believes that – at the second attempt – its chances are much better: China’s dictatorship is updating itself with the tools of the 21st century. Because, with the other foot, Xi is taking a giant step into the future, to a place many dictatorships have sought, but none have yet found. The days when the Party eyed the internet with fear and anxiety are long gone. The regime has not only lost its fear; it has learned to love new technologies. China is staking more than any other country on information technology. The Party believes it can use big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to create steering mechanisms that will catapult its economy into the future and make its apparatus crisis-proof.

  At the same time, it intends to use this technology to create the most perfect surveillance state the world has ever seen. Ideally, one where you can’t even see the surveillance, because the state has planted it inside the heads of its subjects. This new China won’t be a giant parade ground characterised by asceticism and discipline, as it was under Mao, but an outwardly colourful mix of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people devote themselves to commerce and pleasure and in so doing submit to surveillance of their own accord. Still, for the vast majority of subjects, the potential threat of state terror will remain ever-present, the background radiation in this Party universe.3

  A central component of this new China, for example, will be the ‘Social Credit System’, which from 2020 is intended to record every action and transaction by each Chinese citizen in real time and to respond to the sum of an individual’s economic, social and moral behaviour with rewards and penalties. In this 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. If the plans of Xi and the Party are successful, it will mean the return of totalitarianism dressed in digital garb. And for autocrats all over the world, that will provide a short-cut to the future: a new operating system that they can order in from China, probably even with a maintenance agreement.

  Can this vision ultimately be realised in a country whose society is more diverse today than it has ever been, where the aspirations and consumer dreams of the new middle classes now hardly differ from those in other countries? Materially, at least, the Communist Party has delivered over the years. Under its rule in the past few decades, urban China has seen an unprecedented rise in prosperity. The Party has for a long time been making these middle classes into the country’s most satisfied citizens, and therefore its greatest allies. Soon they may even be able to breathe easy: Xi Jinping has ordered the clean-up of the poisonous fog that still passes for air in China’s cities. But the challenges are huge. Chinese society is ageing rapidly, and Xi has not yet seen fit to try to bridge the country’s divide between rich and poor. China, which calls itself communist, has long been one of the most unequal societies in the world. The number of billionaires in its capital, Beijing, overtook that of New York a few years ago, and its citizens are not blind to the fact that most of the extra money has been lining the pockets of a shameless kleptocracy4 closely tied to the Party.

  Xi’s one-man rule comes with its own risks. A system that was until recently surprisingly adaptable is being made rigid once more, unreceptive to criticism and new ideas. His rule has created enemies and desires for revenge within his own ranks. Xi is aware of the problems. That is partly why he is giving his people the dream of China becoming the superpower that it was always supposed to be. He is also reintroducing an ideological enemy: the West. Of all the ways to unite the nation, nationalism is the cheapest. It’s also the one that should cause the West most concern, because something else is also now a thing of the past: the idea of restraint in foreign policy. Xi Jinping has a message for the world: China is retaking its position at the head of the world’s nations. And the Party media cheer: Make way, West! Make way, capitalism and democracy! Here comes zhongguo fang’an, the ‘Chinese solution’.

  After years on the defensive, under Xi Jinping the CCP is once more proudly proclaiming its system’s superiority. China’s democracy, says Xi, is ‘the most genuine democracy’, and the most efficient to boot. The propaganda press crows that the liberal West is swamped by ‘crises and chaos’.5 ‘It is time for a change!’ The self-destruction of the USA under Donald Trump is God’s gift to the CCP in Beijing. So is a Europe that has spent years absorbed in navel-gazing and family therapy sessions, no longer even noticing its shrinking significance on the world stage. We�
�re not fighting a new Cold War yet, but all of sudden, competition between rival systems is back. Xi Jinping is now offering the world the ‘wisdom of China’, by which he means the economic and political model over which he presides.

  Mao Zedong, they say in China, vanquished the nation’s enemies; Deng Xiaoping made the nation rich; and now Xi Jinping is making it strong, restoring it to its rightful position at the centre of the world. With its ‘Made in China 2025’ plan, the CCP wants to make China’s economy a world leader in innovative technologies. And its ‘New Silk Road’ project – the propaganda bureaucrats prefer the name One Belt, One Road (OBOR) or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – is not just a global infrastructure and investment project, it’s also part of the plan for a new international order more in line with the Party’s ideas. China’s goals are breathtakingly ambitious, it’s true, but this country has taken our breath away several times before. China has long been the world’s largest trading nation. In ten or fifteen years it will be the largest national economy on earth. In what other ways will China change the face of the earth?

  And, crucially: how do we deal with it? In view of the lemming mentality with which many citizens of Western democracies have followed the pipes of right-wing populists and new would-be autocrats; and in view of the naivety and the blinkered attitude of many Europeans, who regard the comfort of their old world as God-given, I had an idea a while ago. People should be thrown out into the big, uncomfortable world whether they like it or not. It should be mandatory for all Europeans to spend a year living outside their comfort zones. They could be sent to Turkey, where democracy is being dismantled at lightning speed. Or to Russia, where lies and cynicism have long been the modus operandi of the state and of daily life within it. In my dream, people would then suddenly start to recognise things that are happening around them right now. And they would be brutally confronted with the logical end-point of these things: tyranny.