On May 16 and 17, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a state visit to China, where he met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

On the opening day of the 2022 Winter Olympics, just 20 days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the two leaders had met in Beijing and declared a “no limits” partnership. On March 22, 2023, at the end of a state visit to Russia, as Xi left the Kremlin he told Putin, “There are changes—the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years—and we are the ones driving these changes together.” The remarks were filmed and broadcast around the world.

China has not condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and China’s rhetorical and economic support for Russia has been rock solid. Bilateral trade rose 26.3 percent between 2022 and 2023, hitting a record $240.1 billion, with China buying enormous qualities of Russian fossil fuels, and selling products and commodities that Russia needs.

Putin came to Beijing this month with an entourage of senior officials, including the new Defense Minister Andrei Belousov and the man he replaced, Sergei Shoigu, as well as a host of other officials who have a long history of working with Chinese counterparts.

In 2023, Beijing issued a 12-point “Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis” that state media called a “peace proposal.” Before this month’s trip, China’s official Xinhua News Agency quoted Putin as saying, “We are open to a dialogue on Ukraine, but such negotiations must take into account the interests of all countries involved in the conflict, including ours.”

The Kremlin released a statement about the visit saying that the “leaders of Russia and China will have an extensive discussion of the entire scope of issues pertaining to the Russia-China overarching partnership and strategic cooperation,” and that they “will outline priorities for further practical cooperation between the two states and have an in-depth exchange of opinions on the most pressing international and regional issues.”

Xi has stood closely by Putin’s side since their announcement of the “no limits” partnership, and this does not look likely to change. But what has been the outcome of Putin’s trip? Did the two leaders make a serious attempt to negotiate on Ukraine, or were the optics of bilateral friendship the main aim? How should we expect the two countries’ trade relationship to change after this visit? What else came out of this trip?

—The Editors

Instruction began early on a November 2018 morning. This lesson was not taught in a classroom, but in a makeshift kitchen as part of Xinjiang’s “household school” program. There, a teacher stood before her class of adult women and asked: “What do you like to eat for breakfast?”

The students responded in unison, “nan and milk” or “nan and tea.”

“You don’t eat a bowl of hot congee?” the teacher interjected. This question sparked additional discussion and “even more curiosity” among the women in attendance.

As described in the official government social media account Xinjiang Women’s Voices, the teacher, affiliated with the Xinjiang branch of the All-China Women’s Federation, then offered hands-on tutorials for preparing fried dough sticks (youtiao), congee, onion pancakes, and steamed buns, among other side dishes. At the end of the workshop, one attendee remarked, “In the past, I only knew how to prepare nan and milk tea each morning; now, I am able to make scallion pancakes, fried dough sticks, and even rose buns. My family’s breakfast will now have more nutrition, vegetables, and congee as a staple, which children love to eat!”

This report—which implies that Uyghurs’ culinary traditions compare unfavorably to those of certain Han communities—exemplifies the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) approach to Uyghur culture generally. The CCP views many facets of Uyghur life as “backward,” so it seeks to refashion Uyghur cultural expression in a way it finds both intelligible and non-threatening, promoting a set of officially sanctioned “Han” tastes and habits as the standard for hygiene, modernity, and normalcy. In the case of food, Beijing often works to impose this standard through direct interventions with local women. Even when authorities extol the virtues of the cuisine of the region, they often speak not specifically of “Uyghur food” but of “Xinjiang food,” as though the dishes so many Han tourists enjoy have their origins in geography rather than the practices and culture of the Uyghur people. At the same time, officials consider ethno-cultural diets of Uyghurs—especially if they are shaped by Islamic law—as obstacles to ethnic unity at best and a gateway to extremism at worst. According to Mijit Qadir, a Public Security Bureau official in Kashgar, “Muslim halal customs create an unbridgeable gap between Uyghur and Han people and widen the distance between them as would an invisible wall.” He adds:

During my work in the PSB third division, some ethnic minority [Uyghur] police and auxiliary police have had persistent vices/outmoded habits [生活陋习, shenghuo luoxi]. They do not eat pork because they are not used to it; they do not use modern products because they are not used to them; and they are afraid if they do some things a religious dogma they did not choose for themselves will punish them. This outlook must change.

Qadir, himself Uyghur, connects “ethnic minority” culinary traditions with “dogma” and pits them against modernity, as represented by Han people. For the CCP, the wrong diet can obstruct modernization, which must be embodied in a unitary “modern” culture. Thus, in order to cast off the vestiges of their supposed cultural backwardness not only must Uyghur women replace their jilbab with pencil skirts, they must also now feed themselves as Han people do.

Postcard

10.24.18

China’s Government Has Ordered a Million Citizens to Occupy Uighur Homes. Here’s What They Think They’re Doing.

Darren Byler

The village children spotted the outsiders quickly. They heard their attempted greetings in the local language, saw the gleaming Chinese flags and round face of Mao Zedong pinned to their chests, and knew just how to respond. “I love China,” the...

Although some officials believe that Uyghur cuisine is insipid, reflecting the simple and religious mindsets of those who consume it, the food prepared and served in Uyghur homes and restaurants is as diverse as the communities that inhabit the oases of the Tarim and Junggar Basins. Dough-covered stews called mori yapmisi provide warming meals during Qumul’s short but frigid winters while toxurmiyen, a tomato-broth längmän noodle with beans, peppers, and a poached egg, is a hearty dish distinct to Yäkän. Despite regional diversity, common ingredients that help plate a “Uyghur cuisine” include wheat, rice, maize, sorghum, halal meat, and fruits and vegetables tolerant of arid climates, which are seasoned with various peppers, onion, and cumin. These ingredients combine in varieties of flatbread (in Uyghur, nan), pilaf (Uy. polu), steamed dumplings (manta), roasted dumplings (samsa), hand-pulled noodles (längmän), kebab (kawab), and many soups (such as shorpa, suyuq’ash, and chöchürä). The Uyghur Food Encyclopedia, published in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s capital, Ürümchi, provides recipes for more than 1,800 different dishes. The volume’s introduction reads: “Uyghur cuisine is valued domestically and abroad for its many varieties, complicated and meticulous [inchiklik] preparations techniques, high quality, and nutritional and medicinal benefits.”

But the political climate in the Xinjiang has changed vastly since 2007, when the Uyghur Food Encyclopedia was first published. Beijing no longer lauds the nutritional or medicinal benefits of Uyghur cuisine. Instead, the introduction of “Chinese cuisine” into Uyghur communities is a key part of the Party-state’s comprehensive “stability work.” In addition to the repressive and often violent mechanisms of control imposed on the region in recent years—including mass incarceration, invasive birth control, and religious repression—Beijing is attempting to remold Uyghur culture itself, combining intensive human surveillance with paternalistic “educational” efforts. For example, the “Visit the People, Benefit the People, and Bring Together the Hearts of the People” (fanghuiju), sometimes referred to as the “Becoming Family” campaign, dispatches government workers, many of whom are Han, to “live, study, and work” with Uyghurs throughout Xinjiang. According to 2018 figures, 56,000 work teams visited over 380 million people in the first four years of the campaign. Now in its third phase (2021-present), these workers not only serve as the eyes and ears of the government, reporting any “extremist” tendencies among the population, but also as transmitters of “healthy” culture.

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Xinjiang Women’s Voices via Sina Weibo

Women take part in a “household school” cooking class, in Xinjiang, November 2018.

From organizing fashion shows to delivering lectures on illegal religious activities, the Party-led All-China Women’s Federation helps to carry out fanghuiju work. The central role the All-China Women’s Federation plays reflects the CCP’s logic: a stable Xinjiang requires “liberated” women, rescued from what Beijing describes as a backwards, overly religious, and sometimes “extremist” local culture. Understood from this perspective, a woman’s place in the home makes her a key vector for the spread of healthy, or unhealthy, influences. According to the chairwoman of Kashgar’s Women’s Federation, Dilbär Imam, “Uyghur women must eliminate the environment in which religious extremist forces disseminate [their teachings] and propagate the ‘real’ Xinjiang . . . [and] as Uyghur mothers, we must remember that when the mother is good, the child will be good; when the child is good, the ethnic group will be good; and when the ethnic group is good, the fatherland will be good.”

In its ongoing efforts to rescue Uyghur women from “extremism” and propel them towards modern society, the Women’s Federation of Xinjiang also holds periodic “household school” (家庭学校, jiating xuexiao) intensive workshops as crash courses in “civilized” living. According to the Federation’s official website, household schools “advocate new-era women to change customs and improve the modern civilized qualities of rural women.” More specifically, the Women’s Federation tasks itself with training “a group of modern civilized messengers who, by demonstration, will lead [other] rural women to abandon ‘bad habits’ . . . and educate women to love the Party, love their country, and love their families.”

Household school events generally entail technical training during the day and policy lectures in the evening. Cooking classes are a focal point of household school workshops. Since “diets in southern Xinjiang are monotonous,” according to one Han Party cadre affiliated with the program, they provide hands-on instruction on meal preparation and guidance to cultivate “scientific and healthy” dietary habits. At a household school event in Konasheher county, members of the Xinjiang Women’s Federation led women towards “healthy eating habits,” which begin with breakfast foods such as scallion pancakes, fried dough sticks, dumplings, steamed rolls, cold dishes, and a variety of soups—dishes that, while maybe not all actually healthful, are more typically found at breakfast stands throughout cities in central and eastern China. Meanwhile in Maralbeshi county (Bachu), the more than 260 women attending the local household school training held the same month as in Konasheher learned how to prepare 13 breakfast foods, four entrees/staples, and eight other side dishes. In addition, participants practiced washing, cutting, stir-frying, pan-frying, deep frying, and braising, among other techniques.

For some work, changes in diet must start with breakfast. Villages in Yeken (Ch. Shache) and Khotan hosted household school trainings that provided instruction on preparing morning meals. Dishes included scallion pancakes, fried dough sticks, cold cucumber, fried eggs, congee, porridge, and milk tea. The goal: transform the monotonous “traditional” (i.e., Uyghur) breakfast of nan and tea.

But cooking classes aren’t only meant to teach Uyghurs how to better nourish their bodies. As is the case elsewhere, food and the manner in which it is consumed in China are important vehicles through which social and cultural identities are created and maintained. During the Qin dynasty, adopting rice and wine symbolized “barbarian” submission to Chinese rule. Meanwhile, popular lore has it that regional cuisines determine personalities: the spicy food of Sichuan makes its people fiery; the simple ingredients used in Shandong province explain residents’ humility.

Training Uyghurs to prepare “Chinese” cuisine also serves to create a more comfortable environment for the Han minders sent to “live, study, and work” in the region—who, despite wanting Uyghurs to alter their eating habits, have no intention of changing their own. A post on Mekit County’s official “Becoming Family” or fanghuiju site complained:

For someone who is not used to lamb like me, each meal [here] is “torture” [煎熬, jian’ao]. What’s more, most of the time we eat things I dislike such as carrots and cabbage. I also can’t tolerate using hands to eat to get [food] straight from bowls. I’m also not used to eating vegetables and rice from the same bowl. Even more, I am not accustomed to eating the same noodle or soup dish each evening and afternoon.

For this reason, the state has often provided many Han law enforcement personnel stationed in Xinjiang with a Han restaurant. In Shayar county, authorities opened a Chongqing-style cafeteria in one of the local prisons a mere 10 days after the idea was proposed. During the cafeteria’s opening ceremony, a provincial official celebrated the “bridge of friendship” the restaurant symbolized. The officers themselves reportedly embraced the cafeteria with open arms and heaped plates: an officer surnamed Lü said the opportunity to eat “delicious” Chongqing cuisine in distant Xinjiang allowed him to dedicate himself more fully to his job.

To ensure there are local chefs able to produce food for the Han workers stationed in Xinjiang, county- and township-level governments have subsidized vocational programs to train local Uyghurs in “Chinese” (中式, Zhongshi) cuisine—an ironic use of the term since the CCP claims Uyghurs to also be “Chinese.” Some newly trained Uyghur chefs are even placed in the service of fanghuiju work teams. This frees Han government minders from having to cook their own food and gives them more time for their intended tasks. In Aqchi county, Qizilsul prefecture, for example, the “Warming Stomach Project” (暖胃工程, nuan wei gongcheng) prepares locals to cook for for Han cadres stationed there. As one cadre explained, “In the past, work teams did not have a full-time chef, so every day one or two members who knew how to cook had to stay behind to prepare meals, which inevitably affected the village work. Now, Aqchi county provides chefs [from the Warming Stomach Project], which has easily solved this problem.” Once certified in “Chinese cooking”—a process that demands aptitude in creating Han-inspired dishes and passing a comprehensive examination—chefs can earn between 1,500 and 2,000 renminbi per month.

<a href="https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/assets/images/photo/system/chef.png" title="Warming Stomach Project Chef" class="colorbox" data-colorbox-gallery="gallery-node-55391-g4gG2wVxse4" data-cbox-img-attrs="{"title": "", "alt": ""}"></a>

Kezhou Zero Distance via Sina Weibo

A chef cooks in a kitchen as part of the “Warming Stomach Project,” in Aheqi village, Halaqi Township, Aheqi county, Xinjiang, 2018.

Han officials’ distaste for Uyghur dishes is a typical reaction in places where food becomes a site of colonial contact: the colonizer’s aversion to local cuisine reifies ethnic divisions. A Han civil servant sent to “live, study, and work” in Xinjiang can have friendly interactions with a Uyghur who lives in the village where he’s stationed. And yet, the Han cadre’s distaste for Uyghur food will always prevent him from viewing Uyghurs in the village as equals.

Introducing and encouraging the preparation of “Chinese” dishes devalues Uyghur food systems. According to Sam Grey and Raj Patel’s work on food sovereignty, teaching the cooking techniques of colonizers weakens and eliminates an important channel of indigenous knowledge. Applying this theory to Xinjiang, Party officials are telling Uyghurs their diets are bland, monotonous, and even unhealthy while they are teaching women how to prepare “healthy” and “modern” “Chinese style” food. These recipes not only require new ingredients, they demand different preparation techniques and etiquette for sharing meals.

Even as government work teams admonish Uyghur families for eating bland, unhealthy food and for adhering to Islamic dietary restrictions that can lead to “extremism,” the CCP seems to have no problem with tourists consuming it. Indeed, Han sightseers have arrived in Xinjiang in droves and devoured local cuisine. A November 1, 2023 Xinhua report indicates that over 7 million tourists visited the region in 2023 alone. Liu Quan, deputy director of the Xinjiang Department of Culture and tourism, notes the “famous local cuisine” as one of the main driving forces behind these high numbers.

How to explain this apparent contradiction in the government’s view of Uyghur cuisine? Simply put, the Party-state deems Uyghur food acceptable as long as it has been appropriated and re-branded as generic “Xinjiang” food. The Qing dynasty formally christened the region “Xinjiang,” which means “new territory,” in 1884. Under the auspices of this vague title, the modern Chinese state has sought to subsume distinct local cultures, including not only Uyghur but also Kazakh and Uzbek, into a broader “Xinjiang” identity, which is itself a part of what the CCP calls the “Chinese nation,” or Zhonghua minzu, a collective identity that recognizes China’s diverse populations but insists on their unity. Thus official media describe nan, the staple food of Uyghurs, as sharing a long history with people of all ethnicities in Xinjiang, implying it is fundamentally part of a broader Chinese culture and not a Turkic or Central Asian. The Party-state is simultaneously removing indigenous foods from Uyghur homes while serving up those same dishes as de-ethnicized “Xinjiang food” for hungry Han tourists.

In February 2024, African heads of state agreed to ban the trade of donkey skin, at the 37th African Union (AU) Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The killing of donkeys for their hides is now illegal across the continent. Africa has around 33 million donkeys, about two-thirds of the world’s estimated 53 million.

The unprecedented decision ended a hitherto fast-evolving China-Africa business. It also is the result of an unusual agreement between the 55 African Union member countries on a matter that affects rural development, women’s rights, and poverty alleviation. Perhaps most unusually, the ban arose from an implicit unified pushback against a profitable business with China, Africa’s largest trade partner and one of its major investors and financiers.

On a research visit in 2017 to Ethiopia—the country home to the world’s most numerous donkey population at more than 11 million—I was shocked to hear voice after voice in small towns and rural areas express dismay at the slaughter of donkeys for their skins.

The donkey trade story begins around 5,000 BC in East Africa when equus asinus, the donkey, was first domesticated. The donkey would go on to help build the pyramids in Egypt, and to carry Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, millions of low-income children around the developing world to school, and the sick to hospitals amid war and drought. The donkey’s domestication transformed not only trade and access to water, but also alleviated humans, women especially, from immense physical drudgery.

In China, other uses for the donkey evolved too. For example, as a substitute for horses in Tang dynasty polo matches for some female riders. During the Tang dynasty, donkey hides became a key ingredient of a Chinese medicinal treatment known as ejiao (阿胶), made by extracting collagen from donkey hides and mixing it with herbs, mineral-rich water, and other ingredients to create gelatin pastes, tablets, and pulp. Today, ejiao is sold as both a stand-alone medicine and infused into liquids and gels and added to snacks such as bars or sesame balls.

Used as an elixir of feminine vitality, as well as to treat ailments ranging from infertility to anemia to insomnia, ejiao was produced in small quantities until the late 20th century, in the winter months and under intensive and arduous labor conditions. Modernization and elevated prosperity meant that in recent decades companies began to produce a wider range of ejiao-containing concoctions in greater quantities. But it was a product placement in the 2011 television series Empresses in the Palace that really brought ejiao into widespread consumption in China, particularly among women.

As a result, the price of donkey hides, and donkeys, have increased substantially over the last decade or so, though identification of reliable price data can be a challenge. Beijing-based business and finance consulting firm Newsijie reported that by 2023 the ejiao industry’s market size had exceeded 58 billion renminbi (U.S.$8 billion).

But the industry faces a supply problem: Donkeys are troublesome to breed. Unlike chickens or pigs, which start breeding much earlier and more frequently, and give birth to multiple offspring at a time, a jenny (a female donkey) typically starts breeding only around the age of two or three, is pregnant for about 12 months, and then nurtures typically just one foal for four to six months.

According to statistics from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, China’s donkey population has declined dramatically since 1990, specifically from more than 8 million in 2004 to under 2 million in 2021. By 2014, when China’s donkey stock fell to just above 4 million, the ejiao industry began to experience hide shortages. Officials in Liaochang prefecture, the heart of Shandong province’s ejiao industry, responded by issuing the “Opinions on the Development of Donkey Farming in Liaocheng City (2015-2019),” outlining plans to develop the city’s donkey stock capacity and related financial support measures. In 2018, Shandong provincial authorities also began formulating measures to increase the donkey population, to little avail.

By 2021, the growth of the industry meant that it needed some 5 million hides per year, but domestic sources could provide only an estimated third to half of that requirement. The result is the relatively recent and sudden emergence of a global trade in donkey skins, primarily from Africa but also Mongolia, Pakistan, Brazil, and other countries. Roughly half of China’s imported donkey hides come from Africa, at 12 percent of the cost of Chinese hides.

It is hard to piece together the full picture of the legal (and illegal) donkey hide trade over the last decade. Since donkeys are mostly found in remote areas among the poorest, data on donkeys is limited. Data on the donkey trade is also incomplete. While the United Nations’ Standard International Trade Classification (SITC) data series lists categories related to the donkey hide trade, many of the related data lines do not actually contain any data.

Sina Finance reports, however, that 1,339,730 “unsplit whole equid skins” (raw or pre-processed skins) were imported by China in 2023, of which 784,221, or around 59 percent, were imported from African Union member states. There is also, however, an illicit donkey skin trade of unknown dimensions, linked to which are cases of donkey theft and illegal slaughter.

Both the legal and illegal trades have multidimensional and mostly adverse effects in the source countries. For example, the loss of a donkey often means that female household members are forced to do more household and physical farming labor. This includes carrying water and goods on their backs over what are often long distances. That in turn leaves less time for work outside the home, reducing total household income and female contribution to it. Not only does this reduce gender equality, but it also leaves children having to walk to school, and girls sometimes being forced to drop out of school altogether to support their mothers. Not having a donkey can lead to diminished access to clean water, as well as create added costs for transportation. Households that continue to own donkeys now must contend with the added expense of new security measures against theft. Ejiao-linked demand has contributed to increased trade, theft, and inflated prices, meaning that donkeys can be hard to replace.

For donkeys, the skins trade is often inhumane. Not only are donkeys typically killed without appropriate standards or systems, but they may also be transported across borders over long distances in cramped vehicles. It is animal welfare activists, primarily in Africa and the United Kingdom, who have led the charge to try to bring about a ban on donkey slaughter for their skins.

These impacts have made the donkey skin trade unpopular in some communities in rural Africa as well as among some government officials. But countries that sought to regulate or ban the trade and contain its adverse impact on the rural poor mostly failed because of implementation challenges at home and the cross-border donkey smuggling supplying burgeoning illicit trade.

A conference in December 2022 paved the way for continent-wide action. The inaugural Pan-African Donkey Conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, convened to discuss the theme of “Donkeys in Africa Now and in the Future.” Organized by the African Union’s Inter-African Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR), the government of Tanzania, and donkey charities within and outside of Africa, conference participants called for a continent-wide 15-year ban on the donkey skin trade. It is this call that the African Union historically opted to heed in February.

The AU’s historic February 2024 decision was widely reported by Chinese media and discussed online. That coverage generally had a pragmatic focus on the fact that Africa needs its own donkeys, and that losing them leads to substantive socioeconomic costs. On Chinese social media platforms, some users expressed disappointment that China’s trade had ever reached a point that necessitated such an AU undertaking, although others expressed shock and called the AU’s ban “Western.”

First Finance Media suggests that the future of China’s donkey supply lies mainly in Pakistan. Other reporters have questioned the fundamental efficacy of ejiao. Meanwhile, in April Shandong province called for public comment on a host of suggested measures for advancing the quality and direction of the ejiao industry.

Neither the Ejiao Industry Association nor its dominant member, Dong’e Ejiao (a multibillion dollar business and subsidiary of CR Pharmaceutical Group, a division of China Resources, a large state-controlled conglomerate), has formally responded to the ban. Since Dong’e Ejiao is the only ejiao producer with its own supply of donkeys, the ban may consolidate the industry around this nearly monopolistic supplier even further.

The triennial Forum on China and Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) summit, which Beijing will host later this year, is an opportunity for Beijing to take steps to support the ban. Chinese support in enforcing the ban will help to ensure that African donkeys can first serve the needs of rural African communities. Moreover, that support can simply be embedded into China’s established push to foster not only China-Africa people-to-people ties, but also to promote elevated agricultural productivity in, and agricultural trade with, Africa. Indeed, fostering a sustainable donkey supply for Africa and eventually the possibility of a well-regulated trade would appear to be an obvious area for deepening China-Africa collaboration.

Significantly, the African Union’s ban was not about China or China-Africa ties, but about Africa and the role of donkeys on the continent. At the Pan-African Donkey Conference of 2022, Representing the South African Institute of International Affairs, I was the only speaker to directly raise China’s links to the donkey skin trade, and to discuss the ejiao industry and China-Africa relations at the event, at all. Other speakers took great effort to ensure their campaign was not mistaken as a campaign against China, the continent’s largest trade partner and a leading financier, and instead about preserving African resources and rural communities. This feat of a pro-donkey rather than anti-China narrative may have helped win the African Union’s support, but also still awaits durable and lasting implementation.

What is also not yet clear is whether the coming together of the 55 African Union member countries to save the donkey, in the implicit face of Africa’s largest trade partner and major investor and financier, will come to mark a turning point in Africa’s agency in its relations with China and with the world. Perhaps this year’s FOCAC will give some indication. In the meantime, recent moves by Kenya to better regulate its livestock industry and South Africa’s decision this month to end the breeding of lions in captivity for trophy hunting or export of body parts for medicine suggest further animal protection measures are already taking place. Those who benefit from donkeys, as well as activists in Africa and beyond, are focused on supporting implementation of the ban and continuing to celebrate.

We updated our suite of graphics tracking the impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law. The law, which went into effect on June 30, 2020, and the allegation of “sedition,” have been used to arrest 292 individuals, charge 159, and convict 71 as of January 31, 2024.

Among arrests under the law in recent months, four individuals were arrested for signing up for paid subscriptions to Patreon accounts for Nathan Law and Ted Hui, Hong Kong politicians now living in the UK and Australia, respectively. Reasons cited for other recent arrests include posting on social media criticizing officials, as well as calling for protests and threatening the families of government officials, leading to charges of sedition.

In March, legislators passed a new security law in Hong Kong. Enacting a mandate in Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the territory’s constitution, the new legislation expands on the 2020 National Security Law to cover sedition (and increases the maximum sentence for this offense), collaboration with “external forces,” treason and insurrection, and other acts. We will be looking into how this new legislation will affect national security cases going forward.

You can see our full dataset and graphics here.

Thirty-five years ago, in April 1989, Chinese students from Beijing’s elite universities began their occupation of Tiananmen Square. Their issues were different from those of American students today. Chinese demonstrators voiced concerns about corruption, inflation, the effects of on-going market reforms, and lack of free press and participatory governance. Today’s students at Columbia, NYU, Harvard, Yale, University of Minnesota, University of Texas, Brown, USC, and other campuses are mounting an antiwar movement, calling on their institutions to divest from Israel in light of the unprecedented levels of civilian death in Gaza, and for the U.S. government to stop supplying Israel’s offensive war machine. Another big difference: as it turned out, Chinese students faced far more serious and long-lasting repercussions than seem likely for American students, even those violently arrested by police. At least so far.

Despite the evident distinctions, however, there are thought-provoking similarities between the springtime student movements of China in 1989 and those in the U.S. in 2024—in particular, in the excessive rhetoric about and reactions to both movements. In 1989 as now, the students ask for a lot, right away. To many in powerful positions, they seem impetuous, unruly, irresponsible, and unrealistic. But the issues they raise are weighty and can’t easily be denied. And the students speak with moral certainty borne of youth and the very fact that they are students: They have done everything we asked of them to gain admission to the most elite universities in the land. They have read the books we assigned them. And what they have learned leads them to conclude, with great clarity, that bad things are happening, and that these bad things must stop. But the students are persistently denied access to channels of influence; their organizations are suspended; their calls for justice are dismissed, censored, or declared impractical or illegal. So they camp out in the Square, on the Common, or in the Yard, where their voices, chants, and signs cannot be ignored.

To many, these student encampments are not just inconvenient, but amount to lèse majesté, a challenge to rightful authority. Though the students are managing their new al fresco communities pretty well, under the circumstances, many outsiders don’t see in them hope for a democratic, inclusive future, don’t see Jews and Muslims and people of all faiths praying and holding a Seder together. Rather, through narrowed eyes, such critics perceive only chaos. Efforts to discredit, intimidate, and disperse the students through the usual accusatory labeling (Black Hands! Tools of hostile foreign forces! Terrorist sympathizers! Anti-Semites!) aren’t working. Suspending or threatening to expel the students isn’t stopping them either—they aren’t the pliant, careeristic drones you thought they were, but put principle higher than pragmatism, some even above their personal safety (parents are panicking about this). Still worse, the students’ outcry is opening rifts within the power structure itself. Professors turn out in support of their students. Administrations and political parties split over how to deal with the kids, revealing deeper fissures across the system. A growing faction clamors for violence to “restore order,” using the students for their own political purposes.

It was when things had come to this point that Deng Xiaoping declared martial law and sent troops to clear Tiananmen Square with lethal force. University presidents, do not imitate Deng Xiaoping’s example! (Some in New York, Minnesota, Texas, California, and elsewhere already have, unleashing police on peaceful protesters in public spaces on the campuses they pay tuition to attend. How do those videos look to you?)

Universities should ignore the callous and disingenuous calls of pundits and right-wing senators and congressmen to deploy the military (which is what the National Guard is) against non-violent student antiwar protesters in their sleeping bags. That kind of “corrective action” will only make things worse. If nothing else, think of the lawsuits from these students’ parents when a bunch of them get hurt or killed. Deng was willing to shoot students and crush them under tanks to clear them away. Are you?

So what is to be done? Here is a solution. It requires compromise, but also offers benefits to both university administrations and student protesters: Form a committee.

Include elected representatives of activist student groups on that committee. This will require lifting those suspensions and campus bans you ineffectually imposed on some students before—but they are not ill-behaved children: They are the thought leaders you need to be talking to. Also include representatives of alumni, faculty, staff, administration, and trustees on this committee. Bring in the development officers and university lawyers, too. And let this committee, in transparent and deliberative fashion, consider ways in which you can reduce your institution’s contribution to the on-going lethality.

As you go through the portfolio, activist students and faculty will learn the many constraints under which a university functions. They will learn that divestiture can’t be done overnight, nor can it easily be complete. But you will find some low-hanging fruit: investments in firms directly connected to things you’d rather not be responsible for or see splashed across the front page of the campus paper. Start the process of reinvesting in a manner that better reflects your values and kills fewer people. (You could even think about climate change at the same time.) Would such divesting from war stocks really cost the university more than the cost of lawsuits, extra security, and bad PR?

Meanwhile, don’t worry about the campers on your lawn. In fact, help them out: Stop flying police helicopters over their heads all night, in return for negotiated quiet times with fewer songs and chants and a clear camp perimeter. Maybe bring in porta-potties and help out with trash pick-up. Make sure that no one harasses anyone on either side. Final papers are coming due; exams aren’t far off. If students feel there’s a process underway in which they are involved, they will start to strike camp on their own.

This may seem like giving into pressure—but you truckle to rich donors and grandstanding politicians all the time, so why not work with actual members of your own community, whom large majorities of your student body agree with? They, not cynical provocateurs and performative politicians, comprise your future alumni donor base, and they will be more inclined to give later if you refrain from cracking their heads now. By inviting passionate students into substantive discussions, you will drop the control rods into a reaction that’s getting too hot. It is a truth as old as bureaucracy itself that there’s no better way to slow things down than to commend it to a committee.

Students, you don’t want to slow things down, and may fear being co-opted by such a process. That is a valid fear, and you should resist committee stalling. Had Chinese leaders not panicked in 1989 that the Communist Party itself would split, they might have coopted Beijing students into the system, just as past emperors sometimes granted rebel leaders official posts to bring them into the fold. After 1989, the People’s Republic of China party-state essentially did that, by offering economic growth to garner the enthusiastic support of China’s intellectuals and middle class for nearly three decades without political liberalization (though that liberalization was needed, and China is now suffering from that delay).

But, students, the main impact of divestiture, at least from your one institution, will be at first symbolic, not economic. Just starting a process to consider how your university can divest from the most egregious war stocks will send a powerful message and encourage similar processes on other campuses and in other institutions around the U.S. and the world.

University presidents, confrontation may be your first impulse amidst all the outsiders goading you to violence, but no good will come of it. Compromise—and a committee—will serve everyone better than a bloodbath in the quad.

Authorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region rang in 2024 by announcing an update to the region’s strictures on religious practice. Changes include new rules to ensure that sites of religious worship, like mosques, look adequately “Chinese,” and to mandate the cultivation of “patriotic” religious leaders.

Officials have long levied restrictions on religious belief and practice in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), but the new provisions still represent a significant change. The XUAR enacted the first iteration of the Xinjiang Regulations on Religious Affairs in 1994 and amended it in 2015. Beijing has also been pushing for the “Sinicization” of Muslim religious buildings for the last several years. Therefore, the newest amendments to the religious regulations, which came into effect on February 1, 2024, do not represent a wholesale change in the government’s approach to the region, but rather the further codification of constraints on religious practice and the assurance of even harsher punishments for those who violate them. Despite enshrining religious freedom in its constitution and official pronouncements, China has seen a continued decline in the space available for religious practice.

While the Party-state’s restrictive approach to religious affairs has indeed intensified under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China’s leaders have not changed their general attitude towards religion since the early 1980s. Viewed from today’s perspective, the 1980s looks like a golden age of religious revival in China, especially in comparison to the denigration of religious practice during the Cultural Revolution. Nevertheless, the 1982 Party directive known as Document 19 clearly states that religion is a vestige of history, an instrument of oppression by feudalists, reactionaries, and capitalists, and that eradicating religion in China would be a lengthy endeavor. It appears that Xi’s administration hopes to expedite this process.

When the regional government first issued the Xinjiang Regulations on Religious Affairs in 1994, Beijing was increasingly concerned about rising anti-government sentiment among Uyghurs as well as the perceived threat of “radical” Islam flowing into China via Pakistan, particularly after the bombings in Ürümqi and Kashgar in 1992. The State Council issued the first Religious Affairs Regulations directed at the national level a decade later in 2004. However, the promulgation of distinct religious affairs regulations for the XUAR underscores the region’s significance to the central government; no other province or autonomous region in the People’s Republic of China has comparable regulations. Although the regulations apply to a specific geographical region, and not Islam per se, a quick glance at Xinjiang’s demographics shows that they predominantly impact Muslims. According to the 2020 census, Xinjiang’s total population of 25.9 million comprises a Han population of 10.9 million Han Chinese and 14.9 million “minorities,” most of whom are Uyghur and predominantly Muslim. (In 1994, these proportions would have been tilted even more towards Uyghurs.) However, it is worth noting that Articles 33 and 38 of the Regulations also explicitly address the inheritance and succession of living Buddhas, which might be surprising considering that Buddhism is not particularly prominent in the region.

Officials enacted an updated version of these regulations in 2015, almost certainly in response to violent incidents that occurred in Beijing and Kunming in the years prior. In both cases, what appeared to be isolated groups of Uyghurs attacked civilians in crowded, and in the case of Beijing, highly symbolic locations. The government labeled these attacks terrorism and attributed them to Muslim Uyghur separatists. Accordingly, the 2015 regulations contained numerous references to the so-called “three evil forces” of terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism.

Notes from ChinaFile

12.13.22

Planting the Flag in Mosques and Monasteries

Jessica Batke

Over the last few years, the Chinese Communist Party has physically remade places of religious worship in western China to its liking. This includes not only the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, but also other areas with mosques or Tibetan...

This year’s amendments to the Regulations place a heavy emphasis on the Sinicization of religion. Xi initially proposed this framing at the National Religious Work Conference in 2016, where he highlighted the need for China’s religions to “adhere to the path of Sinicization” and embody the nation’s unity, patriotism, and “excellent traditional culture.” The Party has since incorporated these ideas into its own doctrine: the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA), previously a government institution but formally folded into the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2018, has issued seven distinct management measures (管理办法, guanli banfa) addressing various aspects of religious affairs, nationally. These include measures related to religious groups (2020), the Hajj pilgrimage (2020), religious clergy (2021), religious educational institutions (2021), online religious information services (2022), and venues for religious activity (2022, 2023). Given this context, it is hardly surprising that some provisions from these measures appear in the 2024 Xinjiang Religious Affairs Regulations. Article 5 of the amended Regulations explicitly calls for religious institutions and individual adherents to “practice core socialist values” and “adhere to the Sinicization of religion in China.”

Viewpoint

12.28.18

‘Now We Don’t Talk Anymore’

Joanne Smith Finley

In an old Silk Road oasis town on China’s western border, these days a thirsty traveller can knock back a cold beer in a local mosque. The former place of worship is now a bar for tourists. And it is with the customers’ views in mind—and, perhaps,...

Article 26, one of the most extreme additions to the 2024 amendment, stipulates that “Religious activity sites that are newly built, renovated, expanded, or rebuilt should reflect Chinese characteristics and style in terms of architecture, sculptures, paintings, decorations, etc.” Its appearance follows years of reporting from across China documenting the Party-state’s removal of distinctive architectural features of mosques, such as domes, minarets, and even crescent symbols, which the Party-state views as reflecting foreign or even “radical” influence over domestic religious adherents. And it bears a striking resemblance to Article 50 of the 2023 SARA Administrative Measures for the Management of Religious Activity Venues, which states: “Religious activity venues should integrate Chinese culture and reflect Chinese style in terms of architecture, sculpture, painting, decoration, etc.” In this way, Article 26 of the new amendments illustrates a larger trend of the Party issuing its objectives in the form of “measures” which then make their way into state laws and regulations.

However, the 2024 XUAR regulations may not represent the culmination of this codification process. Xinjiang is often used as a testing ground for religious policies, which may eventually be incorporated into national-level regulations. The 2017 revision of the national-level Religious Affairs Regulations, for example, incorporated wording similar to that found in Article 5 of the 2015 XUAR regulations. In the newest national-level Regulations, Article 63 prohibits “advocating, supporting, or funding religious extremism, or using religion to harm national security or public safety, undermine ethnic unity, divide the nation, or conduct terrorist activities and separatism.” Prior to 2017, these Regulations did not explicitly mention separatism or terrorism.

This practice of ex-post codification of pre-existing practices is not a novel phenomenon in China. Authorities took similar action in 2018, when they amended Article 33 of the Xinjiang Regulations on De-extremification to refer to the so-called “vocational education and training centers,” a euphemism used by the Chinese government for the incarceration camps that began operating in the region in 2016.

The recent amendment to the Xinjiang Regulations on Religious Affairs introduces a new chapter dedicated to institutions providing religious education. Such schools must “reflect Chinese characteristics” and are tasked with nurturing “patriotic religious talents” who can reliably interpret religious doctrines. Comparable provisions can be found in the 2021 SARA Management Measures for Religious Education Institutions. Through these rules, the Party-state seeks to utilize religious education for its own goals, aiming to influence a substantial segment of China’s populace that might otherwise acknowledge the presence of an authority higher than the Communist Party of China: According to the 2019 State Council Information Office white paper “Seeking Happiness for People: 70 Years of Progress on Human Rights in China,” there are nearly 200 million religious believers in the country. In the same year, CCP membership was approximately 92 million.

The 2024 amendment also introduces new articles (Articles 51-52) specifically regulating “Internet religious information services.” These articles mirror provisions outlined in the 2022 SARA Measures for the Administration of Internet Religious Information Services, calling for religious affairs government departments to increase oversight over religious information services, prohibiting online proselytizing, and mandating that providers of online religious services register and verify the identities of their users.

The updated Regulations also exemplify the ways in which “national security” concerns have colored how the Party-state regulates all aspects of citizens’ lives. The Regulations represent an escalation in administrative oversight over religious affairs and threaten more severe penalties for non-compliance. For example, penalties for breaches of specific provisions, such as conducting large-scale religious activities without prior authorization, can lead to fines as high as 300,000 renminbi (U.S.$41,670), along with personal repercussions for the individuals involved.

The latest amendments to Xinjiang’s religious regulations take place in the context of the Party-state’s larger project to use the “rule of law” to validate and consolidate the leadership of the CCP. In the CCP’s telling, the Party itself is the guarantor of rule of law, or, more specifically, “socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics.” At heart, this project seeks to protect the dominance of the CCP’s ideology and prevent any challenges to its control, both internally and from external influences—including religion. Thus establishing a “rule of law” system involves enacting new laws and regulations that govern the conduct of religious activities within the country, functionally secularizing religion and restructuring religious groups’ organizational frameworks to reflect the Party-state’s own administration, while enumerating clearly defined tasks, responsibilities, and punitive measures. An illustrative example in the 2021 SARA Management Measures for Religious Education Institutions is the requirement for these institutions to “provide necessary conditions for Chinese Communist Party members among faculty and staff to establish grassroots Party organizations and carry out activities” and for these institutions to provide education on Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era, socialist core values, and “rule of law.”

By incorporating these non-religious elements into religions, stripping them of their remaining spirituality, and implementing management control systems within religious institutions, the CCP is intentionally trying to create an antithesis of religion. It aligns with Xi’s 2016 call at the National Religious Work Conference to develop a “Socialist Religious Theory with Chinese Characteristics.” This term echoes other concepts like “rule of law with Chinese characteristics” or “human rights with Chinese characteristics,” highlighting a pattern of significantly altering established terms by weakening their original meaning and challenging their universality.

The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China explicitly prohibits discrimination and oppression against any nationality, and guarantees all its citizens the freedom of religious belief. Despite these constitutional protections, a significant number of observers, including United Nations bodies, international NGOs, and think tanks have consistently highlighted a more troubling reality that Xinjiang’s new religious rules make official policy. Moreover, with each amendment to the religious regulations, the space for religious practice appears to shrink further. This raises concerns that China is gradually approaching its ultimate goal, set a few decades ago: to become an atheistic country with the CCP as the only authority.

On March 13, in a rare moment of bipartisanship, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that could result in TikTok’s being unable to do business in the U.S.

The bill is called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. Its proponents say that it’s not a ban, it just requires divestiture by ByteDance and the sale of TikTok within six months to a company that isn’t subject to the control of the Chinese Communist Party, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. But if the Senate passes the bill and it becomes law, TikTok and its parent company ByteDance will be in a very uncomfortable situation. Beijing may not allow ByteDance to sell China’s most successful international Internet service, and six months may not be enough time for a sale.

Although President Joe Biden has said he plans to sign the bill, it could very well get bogged down at the Senate, and Donald Trump this week said he would not support a TikTok ban (shortly after meeting with one of the major American investors in ByteDance).

What does the rapid passage of the bill in the House say about the state of Washington’s attitude to China? How would a potential sale work? How is Beijing likely to react? Is TikTok really a threat to the U.S.? What does the Act tell us about the state of the world and the global Internet in 2024? —The Editors

Sholpan Amirkhan and her aunt gasped when the guards carried her brother-in-law Nurlan Pioner into the Jimunai County People’s Court, on the border with Kazakhstan in China’s western region of Xinjiang. He was gaunt, and a fetid smell followed him. When she shouted his name, she did not see any recognition on his face. He trembled, barely able to maintain a sitting posture as the guards settled him into the seat in the defendant’s cage.

Here was a man that everyone in Amirkhan’s community adored and admired, a vital and eloquent religious leader wrecked by 14 months in detention. He was a kind of living Quran, giving voice to the sacred Arabic words that most in his Kazakh community couldn’t read. He was a molla, a religious scholar and cleric, who had studied how to recite Islamic texts in Arabic and how to conduct religious rituals in an official Chinese state-run Islamic training center. He conducted marriages, funerals, and circumcisions, pulling families together, the elderly into the afterlife, the young into the world. Their relationships to each other and to their ancestors flowed through him. And now, his limbs paralyzed, he sat in his own urine in the courtroom.

Pioner had just turned 50. Before public security officials took him into custody on June 10, 2017, as part of China’s ongoing crackdown on ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, he had been perfectly healthy, an active village representative of the Jimunai County People’s Congress. His status as a state-appointed community leader, however, did not stop the three judges, all ethnic Kazakhs, from describing him as a criminal who had led members of the Kazakh community into extremism. When the proceedings were over, Amirkhan and her aunt leaned on each other as they walked out of the courthouse. Amirkhan said she whispered to her aunt, “it would be better if they just killed him.”

On August 31, 2018, almost a month after Amirkhan had seen Pioner at his bail hearing, the court sentenced him to 17 years in prison on three separate counts: gathering a crowd to disturb social order, “using extremism to undermine law enforcement,” and “illegal possession of items propagating extremism and terrorism.” The court gave Pioner’s family a written copy of the official verdict soon after his sentencing. Amirkhan smuggled it across the Kazakhstan-China border when she managed to flee the region in 2018. It provides a rare glimpse into the mechanisms of power guiding the now years-long campaign of repression in Xinjiang. Since the crackdown began in 2017, court authorities have deemed verdicts and other case documents related to social stability “not appropriate” to make publicly available.

Pioner’s verdict is one of the most detailed official government accounts available of the way routine Islamic practice has been criminalized across Xinjiang. His case shows how prosecutors and judges reimagine the past activities of Muslim communities, once accepted by the state, as the behavior of “evil gangs.” The verdict presents evidence against Pioner and a Uyghur bookseller named Tokhti Silam, who the prosecutors say together led dozens of people in the community to practice extremism. It describes in granular detail activities labeled instances of extremism, books that foster extremist thought, how homes and devices were searched for extremist content, even who drove in which cars to religious events and the student status of young people who illegally fasted during Ramadan.

Most importantly, it shows in explicit detail how “crimes” committed before they were deemed illegal have been retroactively prosecuted. As the legal state-appointed defenders for Silam state in the verdict, “Judging from the year and a month of the criminal charges, all the crimes committed by the defendant occurred between 1994 and 1995 and between 2011 and 2015. At that time, the relevant laws and regulations had not yet been promulgated, and legal publicity work had not yet been implemented. Therefore, during this period there was a widespread lack of awareness of legal responsibilities in society. Every legal provision related to this case was announced and implemented after 2015.”

* * *

Since the start of the reeducation campaign in 2017, approximately a tenth of all adult Uyghurs and Kazakhs in Xinjiang have been sent to various forms of detention. This began with internment camps and pre-trial detention, but since 2018 has increasingly shifted toward mass imprisonment.

According to data released by the national and Xinjiang prosecutors’ offices, or “procuratorates,” more than 615,000 people have been formally prosecuted in Xinjiang since 2017, the year the reeducation campaign began. From 2014 through 2016, total prosecutions in Xinjiang averaged about 41,700 per year. In 2017, Xinjiang authorities prosecuted 220,000 individuals, representing a 437 percent jump over the year before. (Though sentencing figures are not readily available, historically, more than 99 percent of individuals prosecuted in China are convicted.) That same year, China prosecuted a total of 1,450,000 people nationally—meaning that Xinjiang, a region with merely 1.8 percent of the national population, comprised 15 percent of all prosecutions in the country. Prosecutions declined in subsequent years (almost certainly due to the large number of people already detained and the corresponding chill cast over the rest of society, rather than an easing of prosecutorial zeal). But even so, from 2017 to the end of 2022, 6 percent of all prosecutions in China took place in Xinjiang.

The shift in the role of the Xinjiang court system is apparent in statements from state procuratorates, that began to appear in 2017. A judge named Hasyati Muhetas from Jimunai, Pioner’s home county, wrote, “While punishing a very small number, we must unite to educate and strive to save the majority, while maximally protecting the basic rights of citizens from terrorism and religious extremism.” In order to do this, the judge added, the court must be firm in normalizing “prevention,” the “de-radicalization” measures which central Party leadership had mandated.

Prosecutors in Pioner’s home county also noted their embrace of the political campaign that targeted “gangs of evil.” In the region, they trained government employees to “walk into the village and enter homes” without warning in order to unearth evidence of “criminal” activity. In 2017, this campaign led to a mass confiscation of “illegal propaganda materials” from the homes of villagers who had been influenced by the “three Illegals” of “illegal religious activities, illegal religious materials, and spreading illegal religious networks.”

Prosecutors portrayed what had once been routine cultural and religious activity as an Islamist plot bent on the destruction of Chinese society.

In 2020, one prosecutor wrote that the “three forces” of extremism, separatism, and terrorism had infiltrated the community by “tampering with religious doctrines.” This in turn had resulted in a “fanaticization of their beliefs,” such that people no longer “practice religion itself, but instead perpetrate the serious crimes of violence and terror.”

* * *

In 2015, I witnessed what was then a routine social event: a Muslim wedding conducted according to Uyghur tradition. Young men from villages in southern Xinjiang were crowded shoulder to shoulder in the carpeted room of a banquet hall. They had their best shirts on; some had bought suits for the occasion. As an ethnographer living in Ürümchi, I was the only non-Uyghur in the room. A molla addressed the young men around me, speaking of the way Islam revealed truth about the world and banished ignorance and superstition. The molla then conducted a nikah ceremony for the couple who had legally applied for a state-issued marriage license, offering a Quranic blessing in Arabic on their future life together. Grins appeared on the faces of the young men around me; it was time for the food, the music, the dancing.

By 2017, such an event would likely be deemed an instance of “gathering a crowd to disturb social order.” I, and all of the young men around me, were, according to the coming prosecutorial campaign, guilty of having received illegal religious knowledge. Simply attending the event would have been enough for us to later be deemed untrustworthy and in need of reeducation. For the molla, a state-appointed religious figure, that 20-minute sermon and Quranic recitation could result in a five year prison sentence.

In his research on nikah ceremonies in Kashgar in 2013, before the mass detention campaign began, the anthropologist Rune Steenberg showed that messages from state-appointed mollas and imams as part of weddings were a common phenomenon in Uyghur society. During the summer months in particular—the “marriage season”—many Uyghurs attended a wedding in the home of a local community member every weekend. Since the Maoist period, and centuries before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, these semi-public events outside of the mosque have been important spaces for the transmission of Islamic tradition.

Prior to 2014, in some areas, Uyghurs and Kazakhs who had become more pious in their Islamic practice sometimes omitted the music and dancing that accompanied most weddings, instead emphasizing the nikah marriage ceremony and admonition from the molla himself. In some cases, people attended particular weddings because of the renown of the molla who had been invited to speak. These more charismatic mollas are the people state police documents would later refer to as “wild imams” and, at times, as ringleaders of extremist gangs.

In 2015, these ceremonies were normal, or at worst, in the gray zone of activities in China that were officially disapproved of but still routine. The United Front of the Xinjiang Communist Party Committee published a list of “75 Signs of Extremism” in 2014 that included traveling across counties to attend religious events and weddings without music and dancing, but no one I met at the time considered attending or conducting such an event to be a criminal offense. People generally believed that these events might result in an imam or molla being given a warning, yet already some were being detained.

In 2017, thousands upon thousands of Uyghurs and Kazakhs were detained for having participated in past ceremonies. In a 2021 survey of available data, the researcher Peter Irwin showed that a minimum of approximately 1,000 imams and mollas had been detained since 2014. In a dataset of internal police documents from Ürümchi that I have examined as part of an Intercept investigation, hundreds more religious figures are listed as detained. Having attended such gatherings is also cited as a primary reason for detention among non-leaders. Out of a sample of more than 45,000 detentions assessed by researcher Gene Bunin, state documents explicitly list religious activity, or other euphemisms for religious activity such as “disturbing social order” or “extremism,” as the reason for detention more than 50 percent of the time.

One of the key charges against Pioner was that he had led nikah ceremonies for at least 39 couples. In 13 cases, the verdict declares, the couples underwent the religious ceremony before receiving their state marriage license. In one case, a couple was first married and then divorced by Pioner, without state approval. All of this, the prosecution argued, was clear proof that Pioner was guilty of “obstructing law enforcement by means of extremism.”

In addition, because he had provided religious instruction on 17 different occasions, the prosecutors argued that he was guilty of disturbing social order. He was also accused of teaching students and women to recite parts of the Quran and to fast during Ramadan. For instance, in 2013 and 2014 during the Night of Power, or Night of Qadr, one of the most important evenings during the Ramadan fast, he allegedly led women in prayer. Amirkhan said he did this because, as in most Kazakh and Uyghur communities, women were excluded from formally attending the mosque due to gender prohibitions. “This is why they asked him to do this,” she said, “and he agreed because he believed that women should also be able to practice our traditions.”

As the ethnomusicologist Rachel Harris shows, in some communities women are led by female religious leaders known as büwi, but in their absence male community leaders are sometimes asked to take on this role.

Leading women in the Night of Power, Pioner would have helped them remain in a constant state of prayerful attention throughout the night, reading the Quran, making prayers of invocation on their behalf, repeating prayers according to strings of prayer beads, on a night when it is believed prayers are amplified a thousand-fold.

<a href="https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/assets/images/photo/system/empty_bookshelves_xj_byler.jpg" title="Empty Bookshelves" class="colorbox" data-colorbox-gallery="gallery-node-55126-RGh3KukQaQY" data-cbox-img-attrs="{"title": "", "alt": ""}"></a>

Darren Byler

Empty book shelves at the Xinhua bookstore in Ürümchi, April 2018.

* * *

In 2017, as judges and prosecutors began to work with the Public Security Bureau and Ministry of Civil Affairs to seize “illegal propaganda” from people’s homes, they confiscated 112 books in Nurlan Pioner’s possession, which he had previously stored in a neighbor’s home. Among these books, they deemed 55 to be illegal texts.¹

In 2015, the second floor of the Xinhua Bookstore on Yan’an Road in downtown Ürümchi was nearly always full of young people perched on the lowest level book shelves poring over the latest Uyghur historical novel or travelogue, such as Eset Sulayman’s travels to Europe in the 1990s. Many of these young people, the children of migrants to the city or farmers in the countryside, could not afford the three or four dollars the books cost, and so they treated the bookstore as a library, browsing without buying. In the big state-run store, the clerks left them alone, letting them read for hours at a time under the dingy fluorescent lights.

Many Uyghurs I spoke with while doing fieldwork in Xinjiang in 2015 said that they liked to read because it filled their imagination with other times and places. They often did not fully understand what life was like in 1960s Egypt or 1990s Europe, but it gave them something to talk about and, for some, offered a promise of a life that was different from the one they knew. None of them supposed that nearly all of the books they were reading—those explicitly about religion and those that touched on aspects of Uyghur culture or foreign history—would later be deemed illegal.

As the historian Rian Thum has shown, Uyghur-authored non-Chinese texts and oral storytelling are how Uyghurs have made sense of themselves and their own history for centuries. Historical tales of the bringers of Islam and the shrines where they are buried form a sacred landscape throughout the region. Novels about more recent history that present Uyghurs as heroic figures in fighting off the Manchus and driving the Chinese Nationalist Party to Taiwan, building the second East Turkestan Republic with the help of the Soviets, and then joining the People’s Republic of China have been read by millions of Uyghurs. For many Uyghurs, books themselves have a sacred quality. They feel as though destroying a book, particularly a book about religion, is an act of desecration. Having books gave one status, but also carried responsibility. The texts needed to be preserved and respected.

As Uyghurs became more interested in their place in the broader Muslim world, they also began to translate texts from the Middle East and Turkey that Hui scholars in Eastern China and Taiwan had translated into Chinese. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, these books, some of which were published by private presses, outside of the state Ministry of Culture publishing houses, were in wide circulation in Uyghur and Kazakh society, particularly in the personal libraries of religious scholars.

Books once held sacred have become dangerous. Sholpan Amirkhan, Pioner’s sister-in-law, told me that after Pioner was taken along with his books, people in her community began purging their households of all objects that could possibly be construed as Islamic. “We did not know which books were considered bad, so we just burned all of our Uyghur and Kazakh books page by page in the stove in our house,” she said. “We were too afraid to throw them away because we worried they could be traced back to us.” Contacts from Southern Xinjiang told me that irrigation canals were clogged with masses of soggy books that villagers threw away in the middle of the night. In his memoir, the Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil describes the way his panicked neighbors dumped religious articles into the sewer in their Ürümchi apartment complex in the middle of the night. They did not trust the local authorities to protect them, so they avoided handing them in in person.

One of the books Pioner possessed that was mentioned in his case was Garden of the Righteous, a collection of hadiths, or sayings of the Prophet Mohammad, translated from Arabic to Uyghur by the Uyghur scholar Muhemmed Salih Hajim and his daughter, Nezire Muhemmed Salih, who had studied Arabic as an international student in Qatar. After it was published through the Xinjiang People’s Publishing House in 2005, for the next decade this collection of hadiths was the standard edition used by nearly all state-sponsored imams and mollas throughout the region. Because the Uyghur translation was censored by the Ministry of Culture and excluded numerous passages the government read as problematic, it was much shorter than the original Arabic. Until Salih Hajim and Nezire Muhemmed Salih were arrested in 2017, likely on charges of “propagating terrorism and extremism, and inciting terrorist activities,” Uyghurs generally did not view this text as politically dangerous. It was only when Salih Hajim, who was 82 at the time of his detention, died less than 40 days after his arrest—one of the first known casualties of the mass internment campaign—that it became widely known that possession of his translation could result in arrest.

Many of the other titles deemed illegal were books that were translated from Chinese into Uyghur. For instance, Quotations from Indian Imams was a very widely known and commonly read book of religious scholarly opinions on family issues, composed of excerpts drawn from leading scholars of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, a large Islamic association in India that explicitly denounces terrorism and political violence as anti-Islamic. Another book titled Islamic Education instructed readers how to pray, perform ablutions, and practice their faith.

According to the verdict against Pioner, Islamic Education was deemed extremist by the Xinjiang Press and Publications Review Department in 2005, but according to my interviewees this was not widely known until 2017. Likewise, it was only after the authorities seized Pioner’s Kazakh translation of Quotations from Indian Imams that the Jimunai County Religious Affairs Special Review Committee determined it to be extremist. Hui Muslim contacts elsewhere in China confirmed that they still have the Chinese translations of these books on their bookshelves.

The verdict makes the largest claim regarding a memoir that Pioner translated into Kazakh. It’s not clear exactly which text this is. According to the verdict, the text, which the verdict refers to as Memoir No. 27, makes statements regarding the need to “liberate Israel from the Jewish people,” dictates that women wear modest clothes, and describes when children should begin their Islamic education. One theory put forward by Uyghur contacts who are currently outside of China is that the memoir could be a translation of the prison diaries of the Muslim feminist organizer Zaynab Al-Ghazali, who was imprisoned in Egypt in 1965 for organizing Muslim women to participate in democratic change.

The verdict deemed Pioner’s possession and translation of these texts to constitute the crime of promoting extremism—a crime that carried a five-year sentence. Taken together with the other crimes of disturbing social order and obstructing the function of law through extremism by conducting marriage ceremonies, his resulting sentence was 17 years. The dozens of witnesses named in the verdict have likely also been charged with prison terms or terms in the camps.

As Pioner’s own broken body and dozens of reports from other former detainees make clear, the evidence prosecutors presented at his trial was likely collected at a tremendous cost. While some witnesses may have openly confessed and named others as a way of protecting themselves, many were likely subjected to torture. Many people who have been held in pre-trial detention centers before being transferred to camps were also forced to wear heavy shackles. Bagdat Akin, a Kazakh exchange student, was detained after returning to Xinjiang after studying in Egypt. In his handwritten sentencing appeal, given to me by his relative, he describes interrogators beating detainees, depriving them of sleep, bringing their relatives to nearby cells and torturing them, and forcing detainees to listen to their screams. The screams of people in interrogation is something that former detainees I have interviewed mention over and over. Either they themselves were subject to such torture or they heard others scream.

Pioner’s verdict shows that in the rhetoric of the court, the “evil” of “criminal gangs” or religious Kazakhs and Uyghurs has been hiding in plain sight in the books, published by state presses, that had been on the shelves across the region for decades.

As the campaign in Xinjiang shifts from detention camps to formal imprisonment, Xinjiang society appears to be shifting to a new kind of normalcy. In some locations, obvious forms of surveillance are disappearing, though mosque entrances are still equipped with border control technologies that scan people’s faces and phones. Although a diminishment of state terror as new detention numbers fall is undoubtedly a positive sign, the new normal is not the same as what existed before. While Uyghur- and Kazakh-language books are reappearing on bookshelves at the Xinhua Bookstore, the new books are nearly all simply translations of Chinese texts. Community leaders have not been restored to their old positions of authority. Weddings and funerals are now conducted by Party officials.

1. In the Criminal Verdict of the People’s Court of Jimunai County, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the number of publications deemed illegal is listed as both 55 and 93. ChinaFile was unable to determine what accounts for this discrepancy.↩

The 1980s were an extraordinary time of hope in China, both for its citizens and for foreign visitors. Anne Stevenson-Yang first went to China in 1985, where she was enchanted by the lively cultural scene and what seemed to be the growing openness of the country’s political system. But there’s very little of that optimism left.

Stevenson-Yang worked in China as an entrepreneur, lobbyist for U.S. business, publisher, tech startup founder, business commentator, and financial analyst for about three decades, and she had a front-row seat to the events she describes in her new book: Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy. She has also just published a collection of short fiction set in China titled Hello, Kitty and Other Stories.

Stevenson-Yang discusses both books with ChinaFile Editorial Fellow Jeremy Goldkorn in this interview recorded in late February.

The U.S.-China relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world, but it is at its worst point since President Richard Nixon visited in 1972—more than 50 years ago. Getting the relationship right is not easy, but getting it wrong is not an option. Universities have an opportunity and a responsibility to help, but they face headwinds. COVID closed the borders for three years, with only a trickle of American university students finding a way to study in China between 2020 and 2023. But deteriorating U.S.-China tensions, which began well before the pandemic and are ongoing, are causing students, faculty, and administrators to think twice about engagement since the borders reopened last spring. Universities have a chance now to lead the way on re-engagement, but we have to get on a plane and demonstrate that it is both feasible and advantageous for faculty and students to return.

I have made scores of trips to China. I first went as a 17-year-old high school student in the spring of 1990. My career—as a Ph.D. student, NGO employee, U.S. State Department China specialist, and now as a senior administrator and adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania—has sent me back close to 100 times over more than 30 years. When China lifted its “dynamic zero-COVID policy” last winter, I was determined to return.

Immediately, doubts were raised. “Is it safe to go to China? Are you going to be detained at the border or put in a quarantine facility if you have a cough?” my Penn colleagues asked. “How should we factor rising tensions in the region into our student travel policy?” our university’s risk manager queried. “How can foreigners pay for things, now that China has shifted its economy to fully digital payment?” was another common question.

Walking up to immigration at Beijing Capital Airport in July 2023 made me nervous. Several scholars had been detained and even deported since the country reopened post-COVID, and I feared that I too would face questions from the authorities. My work has focused on human rights and democracy in China, and I have been critical of China’s pandemic management, which harkened back to the authoritarian social control reminiscent of the 1950s and ’60s and which many Chinese found distressing, even traumatizing. But after scrutinizing my 10-year visa that had been issued in 2015, the agent motioned me into the country with a stamp in my passport and a brusque nod of her head.

Beijing was bustling, but there were few foreign faces on the streets. Expats have been leaving the country by the thousands. Taking their place, it appeared, were hundreds of yellow-vested moped drivers making deliveries at all hours to contactless lockers sitting outside office and apartment buildings. Cash was obsolete, replaced by QR code readers for every transaction big or small. I looked for the swabbing stations and health code checkers that had been everywhere during the pandemic but found none.

China was deeply impacted by the COVID pandemic, with many in the country traumatized by their lockdown experience, but foreigners are now able to return. They haven’t. Foreign tourism in China has plunged 60 percent since 2019. The drop in the number of American students studying in China has been even more calamitous. In 2022-2023, the United States sent only about 350 students to China, down from a high-water mark of almost 15,000 in 2011-2012. The numbers are up slightly this year to about 800, according to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, but reversing the trend requires more than hand-wringing. We must take steps to send faculty and students back, to show not tell, as it were, that we are committed to resuming in-person research and teaching in China.

In January 2024, I led a Penn delegation of more than 30 deans, staff, faculty, researchers, and students to China to re-engage in scholarly discussions and classroom activities and meet with academic leaders across the country. The delegation included undergraduates studying traditional Chinese medicine as part of Penn’s China Education Initiative, which is aimed at giving students first-hand experience in China across a wide range of subjects. It also included four Penn deans, who were able to meet with their counterparts at leading institutions, and five Penn faculty, who were able to reconnect with scholars they had not met in person in at least four years. And it included a dozen China policy scholars, participating in a first-of-its-kind post-pandemic track two type discussion about the thorniest issues in the U.S.-China relationship, including nuclear policy and grand strategy, cyber and technology competition, human rights and democracy, economics and trade, and climate. The trip culminated in a 200-person daylong event discussing the importance of resuming Sino-U.S. connections in higher education and the challenges to that resumption.

It was a remarkable week. I was able, for example, to discuss with colleagues what a policy defined by competition means for America’s human rights policy in China. It is the kind of conversation that simply does not happen on Zoom.

Going to China is harder now than it was before the pandemic. There are fewer flights, it costs more, and visa policies are stricter. Study abroad programs are fewer now and the opportunities to intern, string, or get an English teaching gig have all but disappeared. Multinational companies are pulling out of China, meaning that China experience is less valuable for college graduates eager to get corporate jobs. American students interested in careers at the nexus of China and national security express concern that studying there will prevent them from getting security clearance down the road. In 2020, the United States shut down both the Peace Corps and Fulbright programs in China, committing what can only be considered an “own-goal” with regard to fostering the next generation of America’s China specialists.

On the Chinese side, the ongoing campaigns against “Western values” raise fundamental questions about how welcoming Chinese universities can be to continued academic engagement. To bolster their rhetorical efforts, the PRC has implemented strict data protection laws, closed or restricted access to archives, and erected more barriers to scholars doing research. Moreover, the decade-long backsliding on reform and opening up—as evidenced by the crackdown on civil society, rights lawyers, the media—not to mention the ongoing genocide in Xinjiang, repression of rights in Hong Kong and Tibet, and sabre-rattling against Taiwan, constitute hostile soil for academic collaboration to flourish.

There are many barriers to boosting the number of faculty and students engaging China. Still, we must try. In a December 2023 speech in Washington, D.C., U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns called for more American students to study and return to China, warning that a next generation of leaders “that is cut off from China, that hasn’t had an experience there, that doesn’t speak Mandarin” is not in the national interest. At a summit with U.S. President Joe Biden one month earlier, Chinese President Xi Jinping set a goal to bring 50,000 American students to China in the next five years. But given the anemic uptake of President Barack Obama’s 100,000 Strong Initiative in the mid-aughts, reversing the downward trend in Americans studying in China will take more than government pledges.

American universities have a chance to play an important role in reestablishing frayed academic ties at this critical juncture, but they need to keep a few things in mind when doing so. One, they should create their own classes and programs with curriculum developed by their faculty, perhaps in partnership with Chinese colleagues, but not wholly outsourced to Chinese organizations. Two, they can be sensitive to the thorny issues that are raised regarding China, but they should never censor course content because the Chinese government may consider it sensitive. Three, they need to work with the federal government to clarify boundaries for research collaboration so that their faculty members can resume conversations with Chinese counterparts without fear of finding themselves on the wrong side of national security boundaries.

There are many predictions of an inevitable crisis (or even clash) between the United States and China. It would be naive to argue that academic collaboration is by itself going to significantly alter whatever course history may take. But academic collaboration, which includes student exchanges, faculty interactions, and the development of courses that center China-related content, are key to compiling as thorough and comprehensive an assessment as possible of what China is today and what its goals might be in the future. Increasingly, we are dependent on digital tools to do this, parsing Chinese social media for clues about where the country is headed. This is not bad, but it is incomplete. A reviewer of U.S. Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew’s memoir about Japan in the 1930s concluded that one of the reasons the United States failed to anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbor was lack of access to people beyond the Embassy’s circle of interlocutors:

as the years passed and as the tension increased, the Japanese Government more and more closed in around the Embassy until the time came when the Ambassador was compelled to inform the Department of State that he was able to report little more than what met the eye. The persons who actually shaped the policy became obscure and in the last two or three years it would appear that the Department was not adequately informed as to Japanese affairs.

Going to China now is just as important—if not more important—than it was when China’s booming economy generated interest on our campuses. Universities did not shy away from studying the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and we should not shy away from studying China now.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is one of the major spokes of Beijing’s multi-trillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an ambitious attempt to remake global trade and transport infrastructure. CPEC’s terminus is Gwadar, a port city in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, near the Iranian border. The plan for CPEC is to connect Gwadar with Xinjiang, the enormous “Uyghur Autonomous Region,” through a network of highways, railways, and pipelines. CPEC would boost trade between Pakistan and China, and give China access to the Indian Ocean for exports as well as a shorter route for imports of Middle Eastern oil.

Despite growing local discontent and an insurgency that targets Chinese interests, Pakistani and Chinese officials continue to talk up Gwadar’s potential. During a press junket last year in Beijing that included journalists from Pakistan, Assistant Foreign Minister Nong Rong called Gwadar “the second Shenzhen,” likening it to the onetime southern Chinese fishing village that has become a symbol of China’s economic and technological success.

* * *

Next to the village of Gwadar is a developing port complex. China first began investing in its development in 2002 with an initial commitment of $248 million. More than 20 years have passed, but Chinese officials continue to evince optimism about its future: “Gwadar is the future, which has the potential to change the fate of the region with the help of CPEC,” said China’s Ambassador to Pakistan Jiang Zaidong in an interview in Islamabad. “It will take some time to develop Gwadar. However, we have already set up a vocational center so that the people of Gwadar may get some training and skills. Moreover, we have asked the local Chinese companies to hire the locals, as we want to help them through the CPEC projects, which is meant, among other things, to help the locals.”

But the locals themselves don’t all share the enthusiasm. Over the last two years, there have been frequent protests in Gwadar by local residents who feel their needs and rights are being neglected. A previously little-known politician named Maulana Hidayat-ur-Rehman has attracted national and international media attention by organizing protests by Baloch people in Gwadar. (The Baloch people live mostly in Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan and speak their own language.)

“Instead of resolving our woes, the CPEC projects and the arrival of Chinese in Gwadar have further doubled up our issues,” said Maulana Hidayat-ur-Rehman in an interview in Gwadar. One issue that is causing particular resentment is the security infrastructure that has been built up together with the port development: There are a number of security checkpoints that locals have to go through when moving around Gwadar port and the surrounding district. These checkpoints have had more impact on people’s daily lives than anything else. “There is no CPEC in Gwadar, except security check posts that exist in the name of CPEC in Gwadar. So, if you ask me, CPEC projects in Gwadar are the name of security check posts.”

Maulana Hidayat-ur-Rehman grew up in Surbandan, a small coastal town with a population in the thousands in Gwadar district, about 15 miles from the main port town. In 2021, five Chinese trawlers were spotted off of Gwadar, prompting local fishermen to take to the streets to defend their waters. Maulana Hidayat-ur-Rehman led a 32-day-long protest, and he would go on to lead more demonstrations throughout Gwadar in the months afterwards.

He does not, however, see himself as anti-Chinese: “I am not opposed to the CPEC projects,” he says. “I have always read about and admired China and the developments taking place in their own country. But I protest in Gwadar for the rights of fishermen, traders, and common people, among others, who are not included in CPEC and the development of Gwadar. So people follow me and come to my protests because I talk about the issues that confront them.”

Maulana Hidayat-ur-Rehman is a member of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) party, an Islamist political party that is not particularly popular in Gwadar, so he has gathered Baloch protestors under the banner of Gwadar Ko Huqooq Do Tehreek (Give Rights to Gwadar Movement). During his first protest in 2021, tens of thousands of Baloch people joined him to demand rights for Gwadar.

One of them was Maasi Zainab, 65, who has become the female face of the protests in Gwadar. She says she joined Maulana Hidayat-ur-Rehman because he had removed the “fear” from their hearts and minds to speak up for their rights, including the hardships many women faced after their husbands were prevented from fishing in the name of security.

According to Zainab, when important Chinese visitors arrive at the port town, Pakistani military personnel stop local fishermen from going out to sea. Those who have already set sail are not allowed to dock until the VIP movement ends, and they sometimes end up waiting as long as 12 hours. While waiting in their boats offshore near the town, they are unable to deliver their catch to market.

“Under these circumstances, how can we earn a livelihood for our children?” Zainab says.

The protests continued to take place, even after Maulana Hidayat-ur-Rehman himself was arrested along with some supporters in January 2023 following two months of protests in front of Gwadar port that stopped road traffic in and out of the port. Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered Maulana Hidayat-ur-Rehman’s release in May 2023. In early February, he was elected to the provincial assembly of Balochistan, representing Gwadar.

Chinese officials have taken notice. “Yes, we are concerned about the protests in Gwadar,” says Li Bijian, former Consul General of the Chinese Consulate in Karachi.

* * *

Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Balochistan Abdul Zahir Mengal says that aside from the protests in Gwadar, “the political uncertainty in Pakistan has made the Chinese unhappy about their increasing investments under CPEC.”

In October 2023, China held its Third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing, hosting leaders from all over the world. One of them was Pakistan’s interim Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar, who visited Beijing and Xinjiang. Kakar was welcomed warmly in Beijing, where he met Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan.

Kakar held several meetings and signed several agreements and memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with his Chinese counterparts. But Kakar is an interim prime minister who will hold the position only until the new leader takes office after the February 8, 2024 elections, and a new leader might revisit and re-negotiate these agreements. (On February 20, two of Pakistan’s political parties said they had reached an agreement to form a coalition government, after uncertainty in the wake of the elections.)

“When former Prime Minister Imran Khan assumed office in 2018 after the general elections, he too wanted to revisit the terms and conditions of CPEC with his Chinese counterparts,” Mengal says. “Khan was a rival of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who had welcomed President Xi Jinping in 2015 when he had to come to Pakistan” to formally announce the formation of CPEC.

CPEC was first mooted by the Chinese government in 2013, and Xi was originally supposed to visit Pakistan in 2014. But Xi’s trip was delayed until 2015 because of on-going protests in Islamabad led by Khan. Khan sought to overthrow Sharif’s government that year, alleging that Sharif had come to power through rigged elections.

Over the last several years, from one crisis to the other, political problems have taken priority over economic development.

* * *

Along with growing political uncertainty is growing political violence. In July 2023, China’s Vice Premier He Lifeng arrived in Pakistan to kick off a 10 year anniversary celebration for CPEC. He was greeted in Islamabad by Pakistan’s ministers for planning and the interior. But just a few hours before his arrival, a suicide bomber killed himself and 44 others at a political rally in northwestern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, about 100 miles north of Islamabad on the border of Afghanistan. A planned CPEC route will pass through the province’s capital of Peshawar.

“Besides the Baloch separatists targeting China, in Afghanistan, the Pakistan Taliban and their allies have also started regrouping in the Afghan region bordering Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. That has raised the threat level for CPEC,” Muhammad Safdar, an Islamabad-based researcher, says.

Perhaps of more concern to CPEC is that Chinese nationals and CPEC projects in Pakistan, particularly in Balochistan, have been increasingly targeted by militants.

“We have made a lot of effort to address the security issue for the Chinese and for CPEC projects,” says Pakistan’s former Ambassador to China Moin ul Haque, during an interview. “For instance, we established a force of 3,000, comprising two army divisions, for the purpose of protecting the CPEC projects. . . There are external forces that want to spoil the relations between Pakistan and China.”

“Terrorism has, of course, affected Pakistan’s national economy and other projects such as CPEC,” says Muhammad Feyyaz, a professor who researches violent behavior at the University of Management and Technology in Lahore, and who has taught counterterrorism studies at China National Defense University.

At a recent media briefing in Beijing, China’s Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs Nong Rong admitted that terrorists do not want to see CPEC and other cooperative projects succeed.

* * *

All of this political turmoil has affected CPEC projects, and there is growing doubt about China’s commitment. Recent Pakistan media reports suggest that only around $25 billion has actually been spent.

CPEC was valued at $46 billion when Xi first announced it in 2015. In 2017, then Governor of Sindh province Mohammad Zubair said the planned investment had increased to $62 billion, a figure that is frequently cited in English-language reports about CPEC in the last few years. But Chinese officials have never confirmed that number—one of the very few mentions of the new number in official Chinese documents cites Pakistani media. The Pakistani news organization Balochistan Voices reported that the total planned investment is $50 billion, not $62 billion, and backed up the claim with scans of documents from Pakistan’s Ministry of Planning, Development, and Special Initiatives.

Whatever the official and actual investment amounts are, local businesspeople have been disappointed. Shams ul-Haq Kalmati, president of the Gwadar Chamber of Commerce and Industry, says he had thought Gwadar would become the epicenter of Chinese business activities in Pakistan, as the port was supposed to be a major node of CPEC. But, he says, “The business is yet to come to Gwadar. . . CPEC projects have not benefited local businessmen and traders, and there is hardly any business in Gwadar these days, even though CPEC was launched back in 2013.”

Not everyone blames China for CPEC’s failure to meet expectations. “The problem lies on our side,” says Islamabad-based economist Sajid Amin Javed, who works as deputy executive director of research at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, an Islamabad-based think tank. “We have political, economic, and security issues. At the same time, China’s industries and priorities are shifting toward Vietnam, while we have not been able to increase our trade exports with China, despite the close relations between the two countries.”

There is also almost certainly a reassessment of CPEC happening in Beijing. Hasan H. Karrar, an associate professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences, one of Pakistan’s top universities, who has a Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from McGill University in Canada, says that after two decades of investing in developing countries, China is starting to reassess its strategy: “There is a reassessment in China happening as to whether these investments are successful or not. To my mind, Chinese investments are going to look quite different from now on, compared to the last 10 to 20 years.”

Even Chinese officials seem to be more willing to voice frustration with how CPEC is panning out. One Chinese diplomat said, under the condition of anonymity, that “in China decisions are taken once and for all by the central government, while in Pakistan it is not the case. There are federal and provincial governments who develop differences over matters related to CPEC projects.”

And there certainly is a limit to how much China is willing to invest if there are no returns. China’s ambassador to Pakistan Jiang Zaidong says that China knows Pakistan is going through economic challenges, and that “China is there to help their brother country Pakistan in any way possible.” But he quoted Mao Zedong and said: “Success requires you to stand on your own feet.”

Translator’s Introduction

Li Chengpeng (李承鹏, born in 1968), also known as “Big-eyed Li,” had a successful career as a popular sports reporter in Beijing. He enjoyed early notoriety for his reporting on corruption in soccer, which is a national obsession, and his political ambitions. In recent years, Li has come to be known for social commentary and his scathing essays on current affairs. For the most part, his work circulates in China unofficially and he also publishes a column in Yibao, an independent media site operating outside the People’s Republic of China.

In late 2022, Li published “Take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well,” a letter addressed to the year 2022. The title is a quotation from All Quiet on the Western Front, a famous anti-war novel by Erich Maria Remarque. In the letter, Li observes that:

In retrospect, a lot of the things that happened during 2022 seem ridiculous, even absurd. Upon closer inspection, however, they still reflect the irrefutable logic of power. When an organisation [like the Chinese Communist Party] is not constrained in any way and is under no pressure to respond to public opinion, it can easily claim to enjoy unquestioned moral authority. It can then go about brainwashing society and mobilizing people to go about doing evil with a sense of holy purpose, even when that evil is directed at oppressing themselves . . . [T]he upshot is to further entrench unrestrained power and enhance the belief among the power-holders that they are possessed of some kind of moral superiority. The cycle is self-perpetuating and it reinforces itself.”

The Xi Jinping era has variously been described as an “age of stagnation,” an “age of malaise,” and an “empire of tedium.” Likewise, Li Chengpeng’s abiding attitude is summed up in the letter: “when I think of 2022 I feel that even if we don’t deserve the kind of ‘red dignity’ [that the Communist Party bestows upon itself], at least we can hold on to our black humor.”

Similarly, the tenor of the letter that Li addresses to the year 2023, translated below, is suffused with black humor. The style is lapidary and Li punctuates his prose with references both to current affairs and to historical figures and incidents. Where necessary, explanatory material has been added in square brackets, although some references have required notes.

Li posted the essay online on January 2, 2024. It was widely reposted and, although scrubbed by China’s censors, PDF and other versions are still in circulation.

—Geremie Barmé

Year 202X: The Devilish Details in the Big Story

According to the traditional Chinese calendar, 2023 was a “Water Rabbit” year. People who read auguries predicted that the country would be prone to flooding.¹

A video shot during the Zhuozhou floods [in July-August] showed a man screaming as he desperately held onto a pillar, struggling not to be sucked into a whirlpool: “Where’s emergency rescue?” he screams. “Why aren’t they here yet. . ?” After a moment, the shouting stops as he’s swept away, and then you see him floating by a car that’s also caught in the rising floodwaters, along with tables and chairs from a restaurant. Then, he simply disappears.

Another video recorded a woman wading through the surging waters with her mother on her back. Turns out she’d been driving to the local hospital when the rising waters stalled her engine. She found shelter in a roadside shop just in time to see her car being swept away. The floodwater reaches her waist and you see her struggling to find higher ground. When the waters took the pair, her expression seemed to reflect a lifetime of indomitable struggle.

We’ll never know how many people drowned during the floods of 2023, although I’m sure no statistics would have dampened the buoyant message of the propagandists: “The will of the people is as solid as the Great Wall, love is everywhere,” was one line that they came up with. Another went: “The Heavens have opened up and the floodwaters may be a vicious beast, but the heroes fighting in Zhuozhou remain undaunted.”

They still think that by emphasizing the Big Picture, the “Grand Narrative,” they are feeding us the kind of aphrodisiac that will uplift the spirits of the suffering masses.

During the Tang dynasty, the commander Zhang Xun, in his efforts to feed the troops under his command who were protecting the capital Chang’an from a rebellion, sacrificed his beloved concubine. The wrenching decision was praised as a demonstration of loyalty to the court. This time around, so that the Xiong’an New Area could be kept safe, it didn’t matter that a few ants ended up being drowned.²

The newspaper Southern Weekly used to be classy like Lin Dayu [a melancholic yet thoughtful female character in the Qing novel Dream of the Red Chamber], but over time it turned into Pan Jinlian [a notoriously lascivious and opportunistic figure in the Ming novel The Plum in the Golden Vase]. That was bad enough, but today that paper is little better than Yu Dan [the author of soppy interpretations of traditional Chinese thought]. Its New Year’s Message this year went: “May the first rays of the new year’s sun well up in your depths, protect your inner well being, vouchsafe your lifestyle, and ensure you maintain your unwavering bottom lines. Even if the way ahead appears unclear, you should still choose to be the best you. You should be proactive in what you think and do and be open to what comes your way.”

It’s all pretty grubby.³

Given the fact that so many people had died [during the year] I thought that it was ill-judged for Southern Weekly to issue a call for its readers to “protect their inner well being.” It was also pretty rich to enjoin people to “vouchsafe your lifestyle and ensure you maintain your unwavering bottom lines,” as the economy was tanking. Other end-of-year retrospectives and essays that talked about the upcoming year were even more thoroughly Chicken Soup for the Soul in tone. They [the state media] talk about the [emotional and economic] scars that we’re covered in as though they are nothing more than decorative tattoos; they celebrate the trials and tribulations that people have experienced as though they are medals that we are supposed to wear with pride.

If you really want to put a positive spin on all of this, the best you could say is that it’s a kind of “spiritual massage therapy.” Unfortunately, a far more distasteful style of propaganda prose has reared its ugly head once more. It’s the kind of thing we saw back in the early 1990s and it was known as “embracing the positivity of the sun.” According to such boosterism, no matter how beaten down you were by hard work, you were always supposed to hold on tight to “the beam of sunlight” in your core being. The propagandists are like the eunuch scribes of dynastic China who, even before the emperor had an orgasm, were groaning in anticipation.

Since the zero-COVID restrictions were lifted [in late 2022], things haven’t really improved that much. The grim reality of our everyday lives has been laid bare and COVID can no longer be used as an excuse to cover it up. People see no reason to be hopeful. What’s even worse is that they have given up on the idea of hope itself. Confronted by all of the lies, they cooperate, collaborate, and even participate in planning for the next stage of [our national] wreckage. Even though everyone has a countdown clock ticking away in their heads, the only part that can be said out loud is summed up in that trite slogan “May the Fatherland Prosper, the Nation be Peaceful, and the People Content.” On the surface, friend groups are all harmonious and ideal. Whether it be in the corridors of power, in the theaters, or in the bars, it’s impossible to gauge just who is fooling whom.

But there I go giving in to my own “meta narrative.” Forgive me.

When it comes down to it, 2023 was also a year made for the dead.

Suddenly,Jiang Yanyong [the physician who exposed the official coverup of the 2003 SARS crisis] passed away. It never occurred to me that he might leave us; he was a permanent fixture at the 301 Hospital. He might not have been able to shine in his own right, but after a major snowfall, that lump you saw in the bland landscape reminded you that he was still there. At the end of 2020, before the pandemic was over, a nephew of his told me over a meal in Hangzhou that: “My uncle is doing okay. . .” After that big snow, people raised a glass to West Lake and also expressed their respects for that honorable man, a solitary hero like Wu Liuqi [of the Qing dynasty who is celebrated in literature].

It’s been so long now that not many people know about Jiang Yanyong anymore. They don’t know that 20 years ago he withstood tremendous official pressure and revealed the truth about SARS to the international media. His actions taken in the face of all of the official lies helped prevent that epidemic from spreading out of control. It also resulted in his spending his remaining years condemned to a form of “locked-in syndrome.”

Then, just as suddenly, Gao Yaojie [a gynecologist and AIDS activist who had called out provincial Party authorities for repressing information about the spread of AIDS through tainted blood supplies] also left us. For all intents and purposes, she’d been forced into exile and people were grieved to learn that she’d died in a dingy apartment in the suburbs of New York. They didn’t need to feel sorry about her denouement since, back in the day, Gao had suffered far worse in China. After all, back in the day the authorities had made her live in a mortuary for eight months. Then, her 13-year-old son had also been implicated [in her early work] and although he was too young to be put on trial, the authorities, ever mindful of legal niceties, devised an ingenious workaround: they added three years to his statutory age. As a 16-year-old, he was deemed to be legally culpable for his actions and so they meted out the punishment that he so richly deserved.

There’s often a dark elegance in the way they resolve things.

There were similar examples of such dark elegance in 2023, particularly in the way that the authorities dealt with other deaths and legal cases. Their mopping-up operations were finely wrought, akin to the craftsmanship of a traditional artisan, or the mastery of a chocolatier. To avoid the taboo of talking directly about the dead, let me just say that their machinations were as seamless as something produced by a cyborg.

Officially, no one paid any attention to Jiang Yanyong, a man of monumental stature, nor did they care about Gao Yaojie, even though she shone like a star. Instead, with their heads bowed, people continued to scrounge in the muck. Looking up at those exemplars might have proved to be far too costly.

So those deaths passed by in silence, and in China silent deaths don’t really count at all. Other deaths didn’t register either. There was Zhu Ling, the student at Tsinghua University, who didn’t really die from thallium poisoning, nor was that high-school student Hu Xinyu strangled with a shoelace. Nor, for that matter, was that other student at Shangqiu in Ningling county—they didn’t have their hands and feet broken, nor was their body punctured by numerous holes before they “fell” from a rooftop. As for the 11 members of the volleyball team buried alive when that gymnasium in that northeastern city collapsed on them, well, they didn’t count either. . .

I’ve always gotten Qiqihar and Jiamusi [two cities in Heilongjiang province] mixed up, and now I’m even more confused. Speaking of which, I’m also damned befuddled by the details of all of those “dead ants,” A-B-C-D, one-two-three-four—the list goes on. This year, the statistics included people at the pinnacle of the system [a reference to the death of former premier Li Keqiang] as well as those mired in the dust below. . . Then again, there’s really no need to work out who’s who. We’re all just digits, the carbohydrate underbelly of their digital currency.

By 2023, it really didn’t seem as though things could get any more absurd. But then, gradually, I got the feeling I was actually living in an AI-generated virtual world. Take this, for example: In May, a student in Wuhan was run over and killed by a teacher. When the grief-stricken mother went to the school demanding to know what had happened, the overwhelming tenor of online comments focused on the bereft woman’s appearance: she was criticized for wearing a Burberry heritage trench coat which “cost over 10,000 yuan,” for one thing, and people wrote things like “You’ve really gotta wonder how she makes her money, and how come she’s caked her face in so much makeup?” Then there was this line of attack: “She’s probably trying to extort money [out of the school].” Overwhelmed by the online abuse, the grieving mother killed herself by jumping off a building.

Human nature, human beings. . . Daresay every vile individual in Sodom also found a way to justify their appalling behavior. And appalling behavior is so commonplace these days that, ultimately, there’s simply no room for basic decency, no standard by which to judge moral behavior. The last shreds of humanity have been stripped away by the phony high dudgeon [of the official media]. That’s why so many people fled our Sodom during 2023. They “rùn” overseas without looking back, afraid that if they do [like the wife of Lot] they might turn into a pillar of salt.⁴

I’ll never forget that old aunty who chose to “walk the line,” and that determined expression on her face as she cast her luggage into the river before jumping in herself. She swam so desperately that it looked as though something or someone was chasing her. I couldn’t tell if the river was in Ecuador or Chile.⁵ Either way, I guess there weren’t any crocodiles in it, though I do know why she was so desperate to escape: She was fleeing her old life in China.

When she finally made it to the other shore, lots of people who saw the video on their phones let out a roar of celebration. She was no longer a desperate refugee, and that’s because she’d realized a dream that so many people secretly harbor, one that in the context of the Official Big China Story is a totemic representation of our piddling existence. There was an epic quality about it.

2023 really was a year marked by death in other ways. Apart from the ant-like commoners that I touched on in the above, there were also people like that premier [Li Keqiang] who’d famously said that the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers would never flow backward [that is, China’s economic reforms were unstoppable]. It’s hard to know just how the waters are flowing these days, though one thing is certain: that premier has been swept away.

His death made me think of some of China’s other famous historian premiers like Li Si [a brilliant courtier who served the First Emperor and was executed by his successor], Wang Anshi [the failed reformer of the Song dynasty], as well as Yu Qian and Zhang Juzheng [both of the Ming dynasty]. In my mind’s eye, it was as though I could see Zhang Juzheng [the famous reformist of the Wanli reign of the late-Ming] in a palanquin born aloft by 32 bearers [for which he was accused of hypocrisy, since he had imposed harsh austerity measures on the court] and I wondered if he ever wondered how things might turn out for him. [After his death, Zhang’s reforms were undone and his family fortune was confiscated.] The Empire remains unchanged, and today the rules of the game are just as they were. What’s different is that it’s all being done in the name of a different cause.

During the year, any perceived atmospheric change [in the nation’s political life] inspired revolutionary dreamers to imagine that perhaps this or that incident might have some significant impact on the future. All I have to say to those fantasists is no way and not a chance. The [party-state’s] fundamentals are solid and people are keeping their heads down and going about their business without concerning themselves with when the next deluge may hit.

To die in silence and unknown barely even counts as a death these days. But there’s another kind of death; it’s called “living death.”

I’m thinking of that video that circulated online that showed a group of ride-hailing drivers in Shanghai who, exhausted after having worked 16 hours straight, came up with a novel solution. They realized that going home after the last fare would not only be a waste of gas, it also ate into the limited time they had to sleep. If, say, their last fare was in Hongqiao, in the far west of the city, and they lived in Pudong, over in the east, the driver calculated that just to make it back home was the equivalent of two full fares. So, this one driver prepared his overnight gear—quilt, water kettle, and so on—and when he clocked out he found a parking lot so he could sleep in his car. . . Some drivers worked out that they were better off doing food delivery since it allowed them more free time. When you hit your middle years, to have more time to do what you want really matters. The focus on freedom was really unsettling. There’s been a 120 percent increase in the number of ride-hailing drivers. Before, they mostly had factory jobs and a middle-class income of a few hundred thousand; now, they’re little more than modern-day Rickshaw Boys. In reality, they’d always been like coolies, the only difference is that instead of running a computer with a keyboard, they find themselves behind a steering wheel.

Elon Musk claims that with advances in AI, human evolution will soon result in silicon-based life forms. In my opinion, that’s a fairly simplistic view. Here in China we have Marx, so we don’t need Musk; we’re already a highly evolved carbon-based AI life form—China has 1.4 billion obedient robots that follow orders, work 24/7, and dutifully pay their taxes. Because we take care of ourselves and don’t require maintenance, we are superior in every way to Musk’s silicon robots. We are also self-replicating and autonomously bring up the future generations that will replace us.

I have some good news, too. After his gym business went under, Hank, a buddy from my home town in Chengdu, lived off his wife for a while. He was a talented physicist and, back in the day, he’d even come second place in a bodybuilding competition at college. Now, overnight, he was unemployed. I told him not to take it to heart because he could always teach physics and tell his wife what E=mc2 really meant, that is to say: no matter how hard you try to outstrip the speed of light matter remains a constant, and no matter how hard the average shit-kicker works they can’t outstrip their lowly social status.

My knowledge of economics doesn’t extend beyond memorizing my bank card number and even then I can’t always remember it. In 2023, you could ask [the reformist economist] Wu Jinglian what he thought about China’s macro economic environment. There was also Zhang Weiying and Xu Xiaonian [both of whom were liberal economists with a public profile]. Or you could check out the statistics produced by Lao Man.He Jiangbing wasn’t too bad, either.

In retrospect, 2023 really was a year of trivial odds and ends, the devilish details in the Big Story that is China:

Three years ago, I repeatedly urged my buddy Haotao to sell off the property he has in Tongzhou [east of Beijing], but he wanted to hang on until he was sure he could make an extra 500,000 yuan profit. In 2023, even though he’d dropped his asking price by a million yuan, no one was interested. When he came running to me full of complaints, all I could say was that he’d been an “utter shit-head.” That hurt. “Hey, Peng,” he said, “when did you literary types start bad-mouthing people like me?” Weird, since although I’d been right all along he somehow thought that the onus was on me to “act in a civilized and uplifting manner” just like the propagandists tell us. But I’ll leave that kind of good behavior to the people in commercial real estate. Anyway, I’ve decided that from now on I’m not going to tell it like it is. Instead, I’ll applaud and support friends like Haotao at every turn and reassure them that every decision they make is correct.

Another friend, Tuode, is from Shenyang. He said his barber told him that people used to get their haircut around 10 times a year but now they’re letting go and getting it cut six or maybe seven times a year tops. Dye jobs and perms are even less popular. Having your hair cut is a necessity. Hair is just likegarlic chives, it grows back after each harvest. . . If people really want to cut back on expenses, there are lots of things they can do. After all, if you let your hair grow out for say three to five years, you’ll have it long enough to braid into a queue, just like in the Qing dynasty [when men were required to grow queues as a sign of submission to the emperor].

One online post says that fortune tellers suffered a major loss in income during 2023. People just weren’t interested in having someone foretell their fate because they’d decided simply to give in to fate. Having said that, fortune-telling has been enjoying a wave of popularity among younger people. Apart from a new fad for reading Tarot cards, the thing youngsters do is “seek the advice of one’s Spirit Guide.” According to this belief, we all have a Spirit Guide who follows us through life. When you can’t find a job or earn a living it’s because you’ve lost your Spirit Guide, but if you seek out an adept, they can help invite them back into your life—whether it be the Huang Daxian, the Green or White Dragon Sages, or a Great Fox Spirit. Business is booming among spiritualists and you have to make a booking even to get a reading. It’s about as popular as going to the hospital to deal with minor ailments.

It would appear that when you’ve lost faith in the state, you seek solace in the realm of spirits. That’s how the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice school of Taoism appeared in the first place [during the Three Kingdoms period of the 2nd century CE].

Of course, the state still has some big tricks up its own sleeve. When the Hebei district government in Tianjin ran out of money to pay its civil servants, it approached the Chan Temple of Great Compassion for a large loan. Although it kept the city going until July, they had to go back for more. This time the abbot complained: “Over the centuries, I’ve never heard of the government begging for alms from a temple.” That abbot had better watch his tongue, if you ask me. I’m pretty sure that it’s only a matter of time before the state decides to re-nationalize the finances of all the temples. When Wutai Shan [a sacred Buddhist site that includes one of the most holy Buddhist temple complexes in China and is also a major tourist attraction] is forced to hand over their offering box, the national budget will probably get a 440 percent shot in the arm.

Ultimately, it’s all in the planning: We live in a society where life is planned, as is death; we have a planned economy and planned beliefs. If you really want me to say what I think about the prospects for the year 2024, I’d venture the following:

In the old days, when they made a statue of the Buddha, they placed various propitious objects inside it, like the five grains or silver and gold ingots. In the future, I think they’ll put a Party membership card in the Buddha’s belly, so that devotees can both avoid making political errors and be confident that the Enlightened One will lead them on the correct path to salvation.

I’ve written all of this because friends urged me to offer some reflections on the year gone by and jot down a few thoughts for the upcoming year. But I didn’t want to waste my time looking up data points. Anyway, I don’t see that there was all that much difference between 1949 and 1979, nor for that matter can I detect how 1962 and 2022 were different.

My advice as this new year begins is, don’t just stand out on your balcony chanting “Embrace the New Year, a New Year and New Beginning.” And don’t be fooled into thinking that just because it’s a new year you’ll be paying off your mortgage any time soon, or you’ll be elevated to some new social status. You’re not passing the new year as much as the new year is already passing you by. It’s speeding along as if it were a runner in a relay race and, as the baton is passed on, you’re going to find yourself struggling between the pumping legs of the racers. What you have to do is “remember your mission and hold true to your original intentions” [the Party’s slogan for a national education campaign in 2019]—regardless of the year, people like you and me are just like a bunch of garlic chives; we are all “huminerals”! And, I know that no matter what university my kids end up studying at, in the end it is just another “mining college” [for the training of exploitable “huminerals”].⁶

My buddy Brother Hai has this architectural firm that employed a particularly energetic and ambitious young architect. A few years after graduating, he went on to establish his own business, which got to work on quite a few big projects with the support of the Evergrande property developers. It was all going gangbusters until Evergrande imploded, leaving them with a pile of debts. Now, this young fellow’s company was little more than a holding operation. To keep the show on the road he took out some high-interest loans, but before long he found himself in a vicious cycle of debt that landed him on the list of untrustworthy investments. Now he’s working in security down in Shenzhen.

Speaking of Evergrande, people seem to be obsessed with stories about Bai Shanshan, the lissome impresario in charge of Evergrande’s controversial performing arts troupe. She’s a celebrated beauty who is also noted for her acrobatic talent.⁷ You could say that she is a femme fatale in the mode of other traditional beauties. Remember, after all, the Ming dynasty was brought low by the concubine Chen Yuanyuan, and that beautiful women always seem to be involved in the end of empires.⁸ Nowadays, no one dares take on the state banks that gave Hui Ka Yan, the director of Evergrande, to task. Instead, they focus their smutty gossip on a woman who can do the splits. It’s really pathetic.

So many people crowded into commercial plazas in Shenzhen to watch the New Year’s shows on the massive LED screens that a few operators shut it all down [because they feared large gatherings might spark a mass disturbance]. Everyone was left to celebrate in the dark, and still no one wanted to go home. They chanted the countdown to midnight while making their New Year’s resolutions. Maybe they believed that under the cloak of darkness they had a better chance of attracting good fortune. Some people in the crowds prayed that real estate prices would rebound to pre-COVID levels; others prayed equally fervently for them to drop even further. Despite everyone’s wildly different hopes, they all gathered in front of the massive blank LED screens, all living in the same world but with vastly disparate dreams. I wonder if the failed young architect who now works in security in Shenzhen was in the crowd.

The year 2023 started out with a Grand Narrative [about economic recovery], but it ended up mired in trivial details—and the devil is in just such details. They say that back when the feel-good film “Amazing China” was all the rage [in 2018 when people felt that China had finally “made it” as a preeminent economic power], in aggregate the tech companies Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and Meituan had a market valuation in excess of Apple’s 50 billion USD. Today, however, if you combine the total value of the top 100 or so Chinese tech companies, you’ll realize that the figure doesn’t even match Apple. That’s the kind of devilish detail that I’m talking about.

Well may people ask: So what’s gone on over these last few years that’s landed us all here?

Forgive me if I quote that clichéd line from [the tragic character] Cheng Dieyi in the 1993 film Farewell My Concubine: “You just think that those vile types have brought disaster raining down on us? That’s not it, no. No way! We’ve done it to ourselves, bit by bit, step by step.”

It’s stagnation, or worse, rigor mortis. People are no longer confident that things can be resuscitated. Even worse, they don’t particularly care if it really is “game over.” It’s like when a skydiver jumps out of a plane only to discover that instead of carrying a parachute on their back, all they’ve got is a school satchel. That’s the way it is. So don’t go imagining that there’s going to be some “historical inflection point.” The inflection point came back in 1949, that’s when they wrote the final script for this particular production.

I just watched the New Year message [by Xi Jinping in which he admitted, among other things, that “Along the way, we are bound to encounter headwinds”]. When I did an online search, I found that this key message was a reworking of a famous line by Mo Yan, the Nobel Laureate:

“In life, storms are the normal state of affairs. A positive mental attitude will allow you to weather them with equanimity. The way you should approach things is to advance regardless of the conditions.”

I accept that winds and rain are the norm, but my advice and my wish is that things might be better if they don’t actually go around seeding the clouds.

Maybe we can gauge the direction the winds are blowing in China from those young people in Hunan [in Shaoshan, the birthplace of Mao Zedong]. On the night of Christmas Day [the eve of Mao’s birthday on 26 December] they marched with banners held high, chanting slogans like “Down with the Capitalists!” and “We Want to Return to the Mao Era!” I’d advise you to face the fact that they are by no means a small minority. They are giving voice to the sentiments of a large swathe of enthusiastic young people in China today. Back in the day, their parents celebrated the new year by marching around with red flags. And I get the feeling that these young people today want to fulfill the unfinished mission of their parent’s generation.

So, when it all comes down to it, China has no real “new year.” Every new year now passes by just like all the old years that have come before. As such, there’s never been any real “renewal of life,” and that’s why what I have written here is not really a summation of the year 2023, nor a prospectus for the year 2024. Moreover, I believe that from here on in, many new years in China’s future will be pretty much a repetition of the same old year. That’s why I’ve titled this essay “202X,” meaning “the year 202-whatever.”

In a New Year’s essay that [the celebrated novelist and essayist] Wang Xiaobo wrote in 1997, he said: “I hope in the new year all manner of odd things will pass us by and that everyone will be able to realize the full extent of their humanity.” Wang surprised everyone with this statement, but he wrote it because he was himself a fully realized human being. We, however, long ago became an integral part of all of the oddities of our age, and the most we can hope for is to be a little kinder to our families, even if only a little bit. The previous generation, our present generation, and the next generation might all have been born into the Grand Narrative, but ultimately we’ll end up mired in the myriad devilish details behind the Big Story.

Or, maybe we’ll all be like that old auntie in the all-weather jacket who cast her luggage into the river before diving in to swim “over the line,” desperate for another life. Her situation was completely different from that of the guy who was swept away by the flood waters of Zhuozhou, along with all of the tables and chairs of that restaurant. Poor bastard, he didn’t even count as a statistic.

—Li Chengpeng, January 2, 202X

1. An old adage says that “If the coming year is the Water Rabbit, you won’t see the sky from spring to autumn” 明年迎水兔，春秋不见天.↩
2. Xiong’an was created in 2017 as a “city of the future.” It is a hi-tech government town southwest of Beijing. Built on reclaimed marshlands, the area is prone to flooding. In the summer of 2023, a coordinated government effort to protect the Area only exacerbated the disastrous flooding in rural Hebei province. “Ants” (蝼蚁, lóu yǐ) is a widely used unofficial term for workers and average people.↩
3. Founded in the 1980s, Southern Weekly was once the most liberal newspaper in China and its annual New Year’s Message was regarded as being something of a political bellwether. It was also one of the first victims of the Xi Jinping era. In 2013, the paper’s Message addressed Xi Jinping’s keynote theme of “The China Dream” by controversially declaring that the nation was actually dreaming of constitutional rule, first promoted by the Republic of China in 1912 and realized in Taiwan starting in 1996. Reflecting the aspirations of liberal activists and professionals, this was a direct challenge to the Communist Party and Xi Jinping. At the last minute, the paper’s New Year’s Message was replaced by a bland editorial composed by the local propaganda authorities. This in turn led to many of the journalists going on strike. After the controversy died down, most members of the rebellious editorial staff of the newspaper were fired.↩
4. The term “rùn” (润) is a homophone for “run,” or to flee, a common term used to describe people who feel that they have no prospects in China and have relocated overseas.↩
5. Many immigrants to the U.S. pass through the Darién Gap in Panama. In Chinese, the journey is known as “zǒu xiàn” (走线), or “walking the line.” Most of these illegal immigrants come from a lower middle-class background.↩
6. “Garlic chives” (韭菜, jiǔcài) is a vegetable that continues growing after each harvest. It is a popular term used to describe the boundlessly renewable resource of young men and women of working age. In 2022, another old sardonic term for “The People” enjoyed renewed currency. Rén kuàng (人矿), literally “human mine”—also Huminerals, Renmine, Humine, and Humore—first coined in the early 1980s, was widely used to describe the expendable nature of working people.↩
7. The troupe is controversial, as is Bai Shanshan, because its creation was unrelated to the core real estate business of Evergrande and it was seen as an “influence operation” used by the company to curry favor with local Party bureaucrats.↩
8. Chen Yuanyuan was the concubine of the late-Ming-dynasty general Wu Sangui, who was in charge of the defenses at the Great Wall. Wu’s obsession with Chen led him to allow the invading Manchu troops through the Great Wall after which they occupied the Ming capital, Beijing.↩

At the end of January, a Hong Kong judge ordered the liquidation of the heavily-indebted Chinese real estate giant Evergrande. It was just the latest piece of bad news for China’s economy, after a year of disappointing growth, high youth unemployment, and various surveys and media reports that show a lack of confidence amongst China’s entrepreneurs and consumers.

Some observers have been predicting an economic collapse in China for decades. Others have long predicted that China would be stuck in a middle-income trap or some other type of economic stagnation. Might some of these predictions come true this time? What does the Year of the Dragon have in store for consumers, companies, and markets? What should we look out for this year to understand both China’s real economy and its financial sector? —The Editors

In January, Radio Free Asia reported that the Chinese Communist Party is “taking a direct role in the running of universities across the country” by merging the presidents’ offices with their Party committees.

Ideological controls on universities have been tightening for more than a decade. In 2013, a leaked Party directive, Document 9, warned against threats to the Party’s rule from “mistaken views and ideas . . . public lectures, seminars, university classrooms, class discussion forums,” and in the media and on the Internet. Last year, the Party’s General Office renewed the warning with a notice ordering legal theorists and educators to “firmly oppose and resist erroneous Western views of ‘constitutional government,’ ‘separation of three powers,’ and ‘independence of the judiciary.’”

This latest move may be even more dramatic: Although all universities have Party branches and committees, the Party has never directly controlled administrative offices.

How are China’s universities going to change under the new system? Why is the Party doing this now? —The Editors

Late last year, The New York Times reported on a new state-level bill in Florida that was creating unintended consequences for prospective Chinese graduate students.

The bill restricts universities from accepting grants from or participating in partnerships with seven “countries of concern,” including China. Now, it is creating confusion among Florida universities unsure where Chinese graduate students fall under the confines of that law. It may have already succeeded in scaring off talented students who could make important research contributions, and universities have refrained from making offers until the law is clarified, the Times reported.

It’s not just Florida. Several states, including Texas, Louisiana, Ohio, and Montana, have pursued laws aiming to limit foreign influence, particularly from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), by specifically targeting exchange and cooperation with students, researchers, and academic institutions.

On the national level, House lawmakers in December also voted to pass the DETERRENT Act, a bill that would bar universities from entering into any contracts with “countries of concern” and lower the reporting threshold of gifts from individuals or entities from those countries to $0.

These laws are contributing to what some academics describe as a “securitization” of China studies, a trend toward casting the study of China as a matter of national security. This can mean everything from a belief that the primary purpose of studying China is geostrategic to scrutinizing faculty, educational exchanges, and study abroad in order to thwart threats.

“Of course it makes sense if national security concerns drive student interest in China these days,” says Neysun Mahboubi, director of the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations. “But it would be unfortunate and distortive if that is the only lens through which we are incentivizing our students to study China.”

Laws like the DETERRENT Act are part of a wider trend of U.S.-imposed barriers on what are commonly referred to as “people-to-people” exchanges in China. Also playing a role is the heightened surveillance environment and further limits on academic freedom inside China, generally poor political relations between the two countries, and logistical issues like the low number and high cost of flights.

Many scholars and observers say that the decline in scholarship will only continue to damage the already fragile relationship between the U.S. and China at a time when more expertise is needed to deal with one of America’s most important relationships.

“The United States is in desperate need to train the next generation of Sinologists [to] . . . advise government, business, and academia,” says Denis Simon, former executive vice chancellor of Duke Kunshan University who has been conducting business and academic exchanges with China since the early 1980s. “If we don’t have a cadre of young people who are going to China . . . then we’re going to be in a difficult spot because we won’t have people who can really, as they say, speak the Chinese language.”

In 2011, nearly 15,000 American students were studying in China. By the 2018-2019 academic year, the last full year before the outbreak of COVID-19, that number had already declined to 11,639.

The State Department’s most recent statistics show that 382 American students were in China in 2020-2021, dropping to just 211 students in 2021-2022. (The number of Americans in China in the 2022-2023 academic year is not yet available.)

Enrollment of American higher education students in Chinese language courses was already on the decline before COVID-19, dropping by 21 percent between 2016 and 2020, while enrollment in Korean grew by 25 percent in the same period.

Meanwhile, roughly 290,000 Chinese students were in the United States last school year, a notable decline from the pre-COVID era (more than 372,000 in 2019-2020), yet still representing a significant deficit in exchange student numbers between both countries.

Amid the dramatic decline in numbers, some key State Department-backed, on-the-ground opportunities in China have disappeared. The Critical Language Scholarship, a summer-long language intensive program, now only offers mainland China programs digitally; Fulbright, a fellowship supporting research abroad, terminated its China exchange in 2020. A majority of the Confucius Institutes, Chinese state-backed language institutes at international schools, many of which provided study abroad opportunities to participating students, have also closed across the U.S. following individual reviews or due to new federal regulations seeking to curb CCP influence at U.S. institutions.

Montana recently passed a bill requiring universities to file detailed reports “on all existing collaborations, partnerships, contracts, donations, and contributions related to an entity or individual associated with a foreign country of concern.”

The University of Montana (UMT) was the first university in the state to restore educational exchange with China after China’s borders reopened following pandemic border closures, according to Andrew Person, executive director of the Max S. Baucus Institute, which facilitates the university’s exchanges. He says staff there have been “diligent in complying” with the new rules and requirements imposed by the new law.

Starting last summer, UMT began running short-term exchange programs in collaboration with the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), a Hong Kong-based nonprofit, and with the Wanxiang Group, a Chinese car parts conglomerate with a Chicago-based subsidiary that co-runs a technical college with the city government in Hangzhou.

In December, lawmakers called on UMT to cancel two CUSEF trips planned for next summer, citing the foundation’s connections with the CCP. CUSEF is “not a benign entity interested in the objective education of Montanans” the legislators wrote in a letter to UMT President Seth Bodnar. Rather, they wrote, it is “an organ of the [CCP’s] approach to influence operations, including those intended to shape Americans’ views toward the [CCP]-controlled People’s Republic of China government.”

<a href="https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/assets/images/photo/system/55176_sm.jpg" title="Columbia University students learn to write Chinese calligraphy in Chengdu" class="colorbox" data-colorbox-gallery="gallery-node-55191-Wl8JOS3QeRU" data-cbox-img-attrs="{"title": "", "alt": ""}"></a>

Wang Lei—China News Service/VCG via Getty Images

Columbia University students learn to write Chinese calligraphy during a China-U.S. student exchange program in Chengdu, Sichuan province, January 7, 2024.

CUSEF’s founding chairman, Tung Chee-hwa, is a former Chief Executive of Hong Kong and vice chair of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a People’s Republic of China (PRC) political advisory body and an organ of China’s United Front strategy. CUSEF is also registered in the United States as a foreign agent of China due to its financial backing by the Chinese government and ties to Tung, according to a Justice Department filing.

But Person says the Baucus Institute plans to continue its exchanges conducted through CUSEF and expand exchange opportunities with China despite the criticism.

“We think it is important for students to travel to China to make up their own minds,” Person says. “We invite anyone concerned about this to meet with some of these Montanans who have traveled to China to learn. . . Many of our students have said these exchanges have been a highlight of their higher education. It’s one thing to read about a foreign country, but something entirely different to go see it, get to know its citizens, eat the food, etc. It’s so important.”

Sara Newland, an assistant professor of government at Smith College, says that “a shared set of standards or a vetting process, akin to the CFIUS process for vetting foreign investment,” might be a better path forward when it comes to assessing partnerships with Chinese universities.

“I think it’s appropriate to think carefully about the possible security risks associated with academic partnerships, but a patchwork of different state laws does not seem like the most effective way to do this, especially when many appear to be responding to political calculations (e.g. that being anti-China makes for good politics) and when different states are coming down in really different places in response to similar purported threats,” Newland said in an email.

Besides state legislation, the State Department’s Level 3 travel warning in June for mainland China, which warns Americans to “reconsider travel,” has gotten in the way of some students’ study plans. According to the State Department, the travel warning was raised “due to the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions.”

Andrew Shea, a 22-year-old third-year student at the University of Iowa, eagerly looks forward to a future in academia and China-related research. But he’s still trying to figure out how he can study abroad in China before finishing his Bachelor’s degree.

The program Shea had intended to pursue, the university’s “Iowa in Tianjin” program, shut down in 2020 amid the outbreak of COVID-19 and still hasn’t resumed operation. The travel warning is the primary reason, according to Russ Ganim, associate provost and dean of International Programs at the University of Iowa. In order to resume exchanges with China, “The U.S. Department of State travel advisory must be labeled Level 1 or Level 2, and our third-party providers must resume programming,” he said via email. “When programming is operating normally, i.e., the State Department Advisory is at Level 1 or Level 2, there are options in addition to Tianjin, but resumption of all programming is contingent on State Department advisories and third-party program providers.”

Shea describes the process of trying to make it to China as “smashing your head up against a brick wall.” “Everybody collectively acknowledges the brick wall is there,” he says, “but they’re shrugging their shoulders like, ‘Oh well.’”

Many American universities have also yet to revive their study abroad programs in China. At least one other, Ohio State University (OSU), explicitly invokes the travel alert as a reason for the suspension of their China study abroad programs, which included short- and long-term cultural and language exchange opportunities. According to Simon, the former Duke Kunshan University chancellor, the chill the State Department’s guidance has cast on similar programs is likely more widespread. He says it’s a big problem, particularly for public land-grant universities which “find it difficult to operate in a way that is not consistent with the State Department protocols.”

Still, even if the State Department were to revise its travel alert, other obstacles might remain. Amy Gadsden, associate vice provost for Global Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, says interest in studying China among students remains high. “But the interest in spending a semester in China, that might take a while to recover.” Some are concerned that they will have trouble getting a security clearance in the U.S. if they engage in any travel or exchange with China, she says.

The precariousness of China’s COVID-19 policies and risk of arbitrary detentions has cemented many students’ doubts about their comfort and security there, Gadsden says. For other students, logistical issues like the high cost of flights to China remained an issue.

Those fears are not unfounded. In 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported that in private conversations, Chinese officials had warned their American counterparts they might detain U.S. citizens in China following the Justice Department’s prosecutions of Chinese scholars.

In 2021, six American students at New York University’s Shanghai campus were detained by Chinese plainclothes police in two separate incidents for unclear reasons, according to The Washington Post. Two of the students were physically assaulted by police, the Post reported. NBC News reports that the increased use of exit bans has had a particularly chilling effect on Chinese diaspora with familial ties to China—including scholars—raising fears that they might not be able to return to the United States following a visit.

Gadsden observes that the forces driving interest in China in recent years have changed: During the 2000s and early 2010s, Americans flocked to China in hopes of cashing in on its economy’s exponential growth. “Now, the driving force is, ‘China is our greatest competitor or greatest security threat,’” says Gadsden.

The political climate also affects researchers. University of Pennsylvania faculty have been reluctant to resume research relationships with counterparts in China due to the uncertainty of the political environment or future legal and security changes both in China and the United States, Gadsden says.

A recent study from the American Council of Learned Societies found that many schools, mainly small liberal arts colleges and some research institutions, have seen institutional support for their China programs slashed in favor of Western and American Studies, even though interest in studying China remains strong among students.

The study also found that many China scholars abandoned their research topics due to difficulty accessing research materials or concern about their or their research participants’ safety. Some are now conducting research from Taiwan, or have shifted their research focus to Taiwan itself; others have begun focusing on diasporic communities in other parts of the world.

Emily Baum, an associate professor of modern Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine and co-author of the study, wrote in an email that laws aimed at further securitizing academic exchange likely have a stronger impact on scholars rather than students, especially in STEM fields.

“Colleagues have noted their frustration at not being able to collaborate as freely with China-based colleagues as they were in the past and the difficulties involved in securing visas for PRC nationals to come to the United States,” she says.

For Simon, the restrictions on exchanges with China were too much to bear. In 2023, he took up a position as a professor of business and technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), where he taught courses on China and the global economy. He says for the first time in his career, he had to get university approval from five different offices to attend a speaking engagement in Beijing. In August, Simon invited Chinese embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu to the university for a dialogue on U.S.-China relations. He says he received a phone call from the provost stating that he was not authorized to invite foreign government representatives to the university, “especially from China,” without explicit approval. He was also not allowed to bring students to China or Hong Kong as part of a business class due to the Level 3 travel alert.

Simon stepped down from his position shortly after.

“I’ve had a 40-year career with China,” Simon says. “All of these things just baffled me and I said, this university just doesn’t get it. It’s lagging behind in terms of a vision of what the world is going to look like in the next 25 years.”

UNC did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.

Miles Yu, director of the Hudson Institute’s China Center and former policy advisor to then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said the idea that the United States is contributing to the widening gap in intellectual exchanges between the U.S. and China is “totally wrong” and “intellectually dishonest.”

“It is not the United States that politicized the process. The Chinese did that,” Yu said. He argued that new regulations in states like Montana and Florida, as well as the Level 3 travel warning, help American universities maintain transparency and academic integrity, abide by international standards, and keep students and researchers safe.

The U.S. has the opportunity to play a leading role in ensuring academic freedom in China, at least for American students, Yu said. “One of the best ways is to ask each university or academic institution that wants to do academic exchange with China to sign some kind of pledge to the public and American law enforcement agencies that when you conduct academic exchange with China, you promise you will not cooperate with the Chinese national security authorities to harm American citizens.”

Academic exchange with China of course has not completely disappeared. American scholars returning to China after the pandemic say their counterparts are eager to engage.

And despite the additional paperwork, the Baucus Institute at UMT sent 22 students to China last summer and plans to send another group this summer. U.S. diplomats have said they expect the number of American students in China to increase following the loosening of COVID-19 restrictions.

Pin Ni, president of the Wanxiang America Corporation, hosts high school and college students from the midwest on fully-funded exchange programs at the Wanxiang Polytechnic University campus, a vocational school run by the government of the city of Hangzhou and the Wanxiang Group. He says there are already set plans for exchanges with two universities next year, one of them UMT, but that partnerships with additional schools are still being finalized. “If you need to see China as your enemy, you still need to understand what the enemy is doing,” he said. “Isolating yourself from the world is very stupid.”

Notably, Xi Jinping announced following his meeting with President Joe Biden in November that China intends to welcome 50,000 American students to China in the next five years. China has not offered further details about this, and the Chinese embassy in the United States did not respond to an information request sent by ChinaFile.

Interviewees say this is a step in the right direction, but there will have to be significant change on both sides of the U.S.-China relationship for exchange to return to pre-COVID levels.

“Xenophobic rhetoric from both sides will need to be toned down,” says UC Irvine’s Baum. “More flights between the two countries will need to be restored. And educators will need to take pains to explain to their students why knowledge of China is valuable and necessary, not just for becoming more globally informed but also for being competitive in the job market.” Until that happens, students like Shea may continue to wait around for an opportunity to visit China on the ground, or just decide to pursue other opportunities elsewhere. As Gadsden put it, America has already lost a generation of potential China experts who missed the chance to establish roots of understanding with China in the isolated years of COVID-19. Under current circumstances, reversing that trend will be a tall order.

Late last year, The New York Times reported on a new state-level bill in Florida that was creating unintended consequences for prospective Chinese graduate students.

The bill restricts universities from accepting grants from or participating in partnerships with seven “countries of concern,” including China. Now, it is creating confusion among Florida universities unsure where Chinese graduate students fall under the confines of that law. It may have already succeeded in scaring off talented students who could make important research contributions, and universities have refrained from making offers until the law is clarified, the Times reported.

It’s not just Florida. Several states, including Texas, Louisiana, Ohio, and Montana, have pursued laws aiming to limit foreign influence, particularly from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), by specifically targeting exchange and cooperation with students, researchers, and academic institutions.

On the national level, House lawmakers in December also voted to pass the DETERRENT Act, a bill that would bar universities from entering into any contracts with “countries of concern” and lower the reporting threshold of gifts from individuals or entities from those countries to $0.

These laws are contributing to what some academics describe as a “securitization” of China studies, a trend toward casting the study of China as a matter of national security. This can mean everything from a belief that the primary purpose of studying China is geostrategic to scrutinizing faculty, educational exchanges, and study abroad in order to thwart threats.

“Of course it makes sense if national security concerns drive student interest in China these days,” says Neysun Mahboubi, director of the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations. “But it would be unfortunate and distortive if that is the only lens through which we are incentivizing our students to study China.”

Laws like the DETERRENT Act are part of a wider trend of U.S.-imposed barriers on what are commonly referred to as “people-to-people” exchanges in China. Also playing a role is the heightened surveillance environment and further limits on academic freedom inside China, generally poor political relations between the two countries, and logistical issues like the low number and high cost of flights.

Many scholars and observers say that the decline in scholarship will only continue to damage the already fragile relationship between the U.S. and China at a time when more expertise is needed to deal with one of America’s most important relationships.

“The United States is in desperate need to train the next generation of Sinologists [to] . . . advise government, business, and academia,” says Denis Simon, former executive vice chancellor of Duke Kunshan University who has been conducting business and academic exchanges with China since the early 1980s. “If we don’t have a cadre of young people who are going to China . . . then we’re going to be in a difficult spot because we won’t have people who can really, as they say, speak the Chinese language.”

In 2011, nearly 15,000 American students were studying in China. By the 2018-2019 academic year, the last full year before the outbreak of COVID-19, that number had already declined to 11,639.

The State Department’s most recent statistics show that 382 American students were in China in 2020-2021, dropping to just 211 students in 2021-2022. (The number of Americans in China in the 2022-2023 academic year is not yet available.)

Enrollment of American higher education students in Chinese language courses was already on the decline before COVID-19, dropping by 21 percent between 2016 and 2020, while enrollment in Korean grew by 25 percent in the same period.

Meanwhile, roughly 290,000 Chinese students were in the United States last school year, a notable decline from the pre-COVID era (more than 372,000 in 2019-2020), yet still representing a significant deficit in exchange student numbers between both countries.

Amid the dramatic decline in numbers, some key State Department-backed, on-the-ground opportunities in China have disappeared. The Critical Language Scholarship, a summer-long language intensive program, now only offers mainland China programs digitally; Fulbright, a fellowship supporting research abroad, terminated its China exchange in 2020. A majority of the Confucius Institutes, Chinese state-backed language institutes at international schools, many of which provided study abroad opportunities to participating students, have also closed across the U.S. following individual reviews or due to new federal regulations seeking to curb CCP influence at U.S. institutions.

Montana recently passed a bill requiring universities to file detailed reports “on all existing collaborations, partnerships, contracts, donations, and contributions related to an entity or individual associated with a foreign country of concern.”

The University of Montana (UMT) was the first university in the state to restore educational exchange with China after China’s borders reopened following pandemic border closures, according to Andrew Person, executive director of the Max S. Baucus Institute, which facilitates the university’s exchanges. He says staff there have been “diligent in complying” with the new rules and requirements imposed by the new law.

Starting last summer, UMT began running short-term exchange programs in collaboration with the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), a Hong Kong-based nonprofit, and with the Wanxiang Group, a Chinese car parts conglomerate with a Chicago-based subsidiary that co-runs a technical college with the city government in Hangzhou.

In December, lawmakers called on UMT to cancel two CUSEF trips planned for next summer, citing the foundation’s connections with the CCP. CUSEF is “not a benign entity interested in the objective education of Montanans” the legislators wrote in a letter to UMT President Seth Bodnar. Rather, they wrote, it is “an organ of the [CCP’s] approach to influence operations, including those intended to shape Americans’ views toward the [CCP]-controlled People’s Republic of China government.”

<a href="https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/assets/images/photo/system/55176_sm.jpg" title="Columbia University students learn to write Chinese calligraphy in Chengdu" class="colorbox" data-colorbox-gallery="gallery-node-55191-FVL8f4iAF0U" data-cbox-img-attrs="{"title": "", "alt": ""}"></a>

Wang Lei—China News Service/VCG via Getty Images

Columbia University students learn to write Chinese calligraphy during a China-U.S. student exchange program in Chengdu, Sichuan province, January 7, 2024.

CUSEF’s founding chairman, Tung Chee-hwa, is a former Chief Executive of Hong Kong and vice chair of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a People’s Republic of China (PRC) political advisory body and an organ of China’s United Front strategy. CUSEF is also registered in the United States as a foreign agent of China due to its financial backing by the Chinese government and ties to Tung, according to a Justice Department filing.

But Person says the Baucus Institute plans to continue its exchanges conducted through CUSEF and expand exchange opportunities with China despite the criticism.

“We think it is important for students to travel to China to make up their own minds,” Person says. “We invite anyone concerned about this to meet with some of these Montanans who have traveled to China to learn. . . Many of our students have said these exchanges have been a highlight of their higher education. It’s one thing to read about a foreign country, but something entirely different to go see it, get to know its citizens, eat the food, etc. It’s so important.”

Sara Newland, an assistant professor of government at Smith College, says that “a shared set of standards or a vetting process, akin to the CFIUS process for vetting foreign investment,” might be a better path forward when it comes to assessing partnerships with Chinese universities.

“I think it’s appropriate to think carefully about the possible security risks associated with academic partnerships, but a patchwork of different state laws does not seem like the most effective way to do this, especially when many appear to be responding to political calculations (e.g. that being anti-China makes for good politics) and when different states are coming down in really different places in response to similar purported threats,” Newland said in an email.

Besides state legislation, the State Department’s Level 3 travel warning in June for mainland China, which warns Americans to “reconsider travel,” has gotten in the way of some students’ study plans. According to the State Department, the travel warning was raised “due to the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions.”

Andrew Shea, a 22-year-old third-year student at the University of Iowa, eagerly looks forward to a future in academia and China-related research. But he’s still trying to figure out how he can study abroad in China before finishing his Bachelor’s degree.

The program Shea had intended to pursue, the university’s “Iowa in Tianjin” program, shut down in 2020 amid the outbreak of COVID-19 and still hasn’t resumed operation. The travel warning is the primary reason, according to Russ Ganim, associate provost and dean of International Programs at the University of Iowa. In order to resume exchanges with China, “The U.S. Department of State travel advisory must be labeled Level 1 or Level 2, and our third-party providers must resume programming,” he said via email. “When programming is operating normally, i.e., the State Department Advisory is at Level 1 or Level 2, there are options in addition to Tianjin, but resumption of all programming is contingent on State Department advisories and third-party program providers.”

Shea describes the process of trying to make it to China as “smashing your head up against a brick wall.” “Everybody collectively acknowledges the brick wall is there,” he says, “but they’re shrugging their shoulders like, ‘Oh well.’”

Many American universities have also yet to revive their study abroad programs in China. At least one other, Ohio State University (OSU), explicitly invokes the travel alert as a reason for the suspension of their China study abroad programs, which included short- and long-term cultural and language exchange opportunities. According to Simon, the former Duke Kunshan University chancellor, the chill the State Department’s guidance has cast on similar programs is likely more widespread. He says it’s a big problem, particularly for public land-grant universities which “find it difficult to operate in a way that is not consistent with the State Department protocols.”

Still, even if the State Department were to revise its travel alert, other obstacles might remain. Amy Gadsden, associate vice provost for Global Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, says interest in studying China among students remains high. “But the interest in spending a semester in China, that might take a while to recover.” Some are concerned that they will have trouble getting a security clearance in the U.S. if they engage in any travel or exchange with China, she says.

The precariousness of China’s COVID-19 policies and risk of arbitrary detentions has cemented many students’ doubts about their comfort and security there, Gadsden says. For other students, logistical issues like the high cost of flights to China remained an issue.

Those fears are not unfounded. In 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported that in private conversations, Chinese officials had warned their American counterparts they might detain U.S. citizens in China following the Justice Department’s prosecutions of Chinese scholars.

In 2021, six American students at New York University’s Shanghai campus were detained by Chinese plainclothes police in two separate incidents for unclear reasons, according to The Washington Post. Two of the students were physically assaulted by police, the Post reported. NBC News reports that the increased use of exit bans has had a particularly chilling effect on Chinese diaspora with familial ties to China—including scholars—raising fears that they might not be able to return to the United States following a visit.

Gadsden observes that the forces driving interest in China in recent years have changed: During the 2000s and early 2010s, Americans flocked to China in hopes of cashing in on its economy’s exponential growth. “Now, the driving force is, ‘China is our greatest competitor or greatest security threat,’” says Gadsden.

The political climate also affects researchers. University of Pennsylvania faculty have been reluctant to resume research relationships with counterparts in China due to the uncertainty of the political environment or future legal and security changes both in China and the United States, Gadsden says.

A recent study from the American Council of Learned Societies found that many schools, mainly small liberal arts colleges and some research institutions, have seen institutional support for their China programs slashed in favor of Western and American Studies, even though interest in studying China remains strong among students.

The study also found that many China scholars abandoned their research topics due to difficulty accessing research materials or concern about their or their research participants’ safety. Some are now conducting research from Taiwan, or have shifted their research focus to Taiwan itself; others have begun focusing on diasporic communities in other parts of the world.

Emily Baum, an associate professor of modern Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine and co-author of the study, wrote in an email that laws aimed at further securitizing academic exchange likely have a stronger impact on scholars rather than students, especially in STEM fields.

“Colleagues have noted their frustration at not being able to collaborate as freely with China-based colleagues as they were in the past and the difficulties involved in securing visas for PRC nationals to come to the United States,” she says.

For Simon, the restrictions on exchanges with China were too much to bear. In 2023, he took up a position as a professor of business and technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), where he taught courses on China and the global economy. He says for the first time in his career, he had to get university approval from five different offices to attend a speaking engagement in Beijing. In August, Simon invited Chinese embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu to the university for a dialogue on U.S.-China relations. He says he received a phone call from the provost stating that he was not authorized to invite foreign government representatives to the university, “especially from China,” without explicit approval. He was also not allowed to bring students to China or Hong Kong as part of a business class due to the Level 3 travel alert.

Simon stepped down from his position shortly after.

“I’ve had a 40-year career with China,” Simon says. “All of these things just baffled me and I said, this university just doesn’t get it. It’s lagging behind in terms of a vision of what the world is going to look like in the next 25 years.”

UNC did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.

Miles Yu, director of the Hudson Institute’s China Center and former policy advisor to then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said the idea that the United States is contributing to the widening gap in intellectual exchanges between the U.S. and China is “totally wrong” and “intellectually dishonest.”

“It is not the United States that politicized the process. The Chinese did that,” Yu said. He argued that new regulations in states like Montana and Florida, as well as the Level 3 travel warning, help American universities maintain transparency and academic integrity, abide by international standards, and keep students and researchers safe.

The U.S. has the opportunity to play a leading role in ensuring academic freedom in China, at least for American students, Yu said. “One of the best ways is to ask each university or academic institution that wants to do academic exchange with China to sign some kind of pledge to the public and American law enforcement agencies that when you conduct academic exchange with China, you promise you will not cooperate with the Chinese national security authorities to harm American citizens.”

Academic exchange with China of course has not completely disappeared. American scholars returning to China after the pandemic say their counterparts are eager to engage.

And despite the additional paperwork, the Baucus Institute at UMT sent 22 students to China last summer and plans to send another group this summer. U.S. diplomats have said they expect the number of American students in China to increase following the loosening of COVID-19 restrictions.

Pin Ni, president of the Wanxiang America Corporation, hosts high school and college students from the midwest on fully-funded exchange programs at the Wanxiang Polytechnic University campus, a vocational school run by the government of the city of Hangzhou and the Wanxiang Group. He says there are already set plans for exchanges with two universities next year, one of them UMT, but that partnerships with additional schools are still being finalized. “If you need to see China as your enemy, you still need to understand what the enemy is doing,” he said. “Isolating yourself from the world is very stupid.”

Notably, Xi Jinping announced following his meeting with President Joe Biden in November that China intends to welcome 50,000 American students to China in the next five years. China has not offered further details about this, and the Chinese embassy in the United States did not respond to an information request sent by ChinaFile.

Interviewees say this is a step in the right direction, but there will have to be significant change on both sides of the U.S.-China relationship for exchange to return to pre-COVID levels.

“Xenophobic rhetoric from both sides will need to be toned down,” says UC Irvine’s Baum. “More flights between the two countries will need to be restored. And educators will need to take pains to explain to their students why knowledge of China is valuable and necessary, not just for becoming more globally informed but also for being competitive in the job market.” Until that happens, students like Shea may continue to wait around for an opportunity to visit China on the ground, or just decide to pursue other opportunities elsewhere. As Gadsden put it, America has already lost a generation of potential China experts who missed the chance to establish roots of understanding with China in the isolated years of COVID-19. Under current circumstances, reversing that trend will be a tall order.

The Chinese Communist Party, an organization of over ninety million members, remains opaque to many outsiders, even within China. Wall Street Journal reporter Chun Han Wong spent years in Beijing documenting social, political, and economic changes as General Secretary Xi Jinping consolidated his power over the Party and country. Last year, Wong published Party of One, a portrait of the organization that rules China, and the man who rose to its top. Xi emerges in the book as a prisoner of the Party, and its history, as much as he is its leader. Wong spoke with Nick Frisch, a research fellow at Yale. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Nick Frisch: What misconceptions were you hoping this book would address?

Chun Han Wong: Talking about what kind of person Xi Jinping is, what he is trying to do, many people reach for this easy and simplistic reference to Mao Zedong. They just say Xi Jinping is doing a Mao. This comparison needs to be qualified. We do see some of the slogans, some of the tactics that we saw in the Mao era. But it’s too convenient to say that Xi Jinping is a second Mao, or Xi Jinping took this or that out of the Mao playbook. Of course there is some truth to the Mao comparison. Xi had little real education. His true education, throughout his early life, was political education. As a child, he had a front row seat to political drama, to Communist Party intrigue. He consistently learned up close how power was exercised, how power struggles evolve, the impact they can have on people. His own family suffered the negative consequences of such events.

But there are also important influences that not many observers note, and in my book I want to highlight those. Xi’s tactics have other influences. For example, [Mao’s rival Party leader] Liu Shaoqi, who was the arch Party-builder. Liu really believed in internal discipline, internal propaganda, internal political education. Liu wanted to ensure the Leninist hierarchy of the Party remained strong. Mao, by contrast, mobilized normal people to destroy the Party from the outside. This is something Xi Jinping would never do. The Party is his one true vehicle of power, the one instrument he has for implementing his vision. Xi is only powerful if the Communist Party is powerful. Xi’s internal purges, the internal Party inquisitions, emphasis on discipline, that’s from Liu Shaoqi. Xi Jinping doesn’t proclaim that theme loudly in public, but you can tell from the way he does things. Mao wouldn’t have done it that way.

Xi was born when the Party was a revolutionary movement that had just taken power. Now the Party has been a ruling institution for decades. How has the Party evolved over his lifetime?

It all goes back to Xi’s upbringing during the Mao era. Mao’s mobilizational approach, leaning heavily on ideology and messages, caused a lot of internal discord, dysfunction, violence. It was not good governance. We all know the worst excesses of the Mao era: the anti-Rightist campaign [in 1957], the Great Leap Forward [starting in 1958], the famine that resulted [killing an estimated 30 million people]. For the first two or three decades of the People’s Republic, Party rule was not conducive to nation-building, to what was envisioned before 1949. Much time passed between then and when Xi took power. His ideas of good governance would have been shaped by seeing what didn’t work during his childhood.

The years after Mao, the boom years, the Reform [and Opening] era [under Deng Xiaoping, from 1978], also had problems. Xi Jinping was reacting to those problems, trying to strike a balance between the two extremes. There was too much revolution in the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and then, in the decades before Xi took power, things went too far the other way [with corruption and disorder accompanying fast economic growth]. Party policy had swung too far towards development. Problems festered, to the point where the Party was struggling to control them. Xi wants to find an in-between: delivering good governance and economic results, but also with effective Party structures so top leaders can effectively execute their vision, rein in vested interests, and get all organs of the Party pointed in the same direction. That means ramping up the Leninist aspects of internal Party management.

You will often see [Xi’s] administration promulgating new rules and regulations, laws, Party guidelines. In the National People’s Congress, we haven’t historically seen such levels of legislative work. They have put down in black and white a lot of these things that might not have been considered necessary to say explicitly before, prescribing exemplary behavior for both citizens and Party members. Dangji [党纪, Party discipline] is stricter than guofa [国法, national law]. Party regulations are far more restrictive as a code of behavior. Some of the biggest changes introduced under Xi include new disciplinary regulations, clarifying processes, and penalties. In 2015, for example, he introduced this regulation against wangyi Zhongyang [妄议中央, speaking out of turn, or rashly, against the Party Center]. There is no room for freelancing when discussing matters of the Party Center.

How important is ideology today? 10 or 15 years ago, Marxism in China was considered a bit passé, almost a joke.

If you mean ideology like Marxist-Leninism, Party members have to be conversant with that, at least superficially. In 2018, on the [200th] anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, Xi led a propaganda push to study the Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, those early communist writings. People said, “Xi Jinping is leaning into the hardcore stuff.” He was, it’s true, the first leader in a long time to invest so much public effort in getting people to read such things. But in my experience, talking to people within the system, looking at the reading materials for their mandatory political study sessions, the people themselves are not necessarily ideological. They’re not studying it like academics, not engaging like a graduate student. That is not required. What is required is that people show their willingness to study. What really matters day-to-day is not so much Marx, but Xi Jinping Thought. That is the number one thing for these regular political study sessions that Party members must attend, whether ordinary SOE [state-owned enterprise] Party members or senior Politburo members.

Reading Xi Jinping Thought, there’s nothing essentially Marxist or Leninist about it. A lot of it is just about what makes China a strong country, and the things we must deliver to make China the great nation that we know it is. The student’s ability to regurgitate the mantras is key. Xi’s ideological emphasis is not so much making people good Marxists, it’s making people good cogs in the Leninist machine, showing willingness to participate in these rituals.

What are Xi’s economic policies? For decades, the Chinese state prioritized growth. Now, there’s concern that has changed.

From Xi’s perspective, he is not saying that we should not have growth, but he would argue that the growth China had was too focused on raw numbers, the blind pursuit of more GDP that doesn’t take into consideration distribution of wealth, benefit to the majority of people. You can argue there are elements of his Maoist upbringing that influence him: He frequently cites Maoist slogans about “common prosperity,” making sure that Chinese society is more egalitarian. He calls upon that spirit and nostalgia.

What Xi is trying to do is steer China closer to what it professes to be: a socialist state. It aspires to be a modern socialist power. Socialism, he’s actually serious about it. It’s not cynical. He believes China should be a more equal society. He thinks China has gone too far in one direction over the last few decades, and wants to recalibrate. He’s not an economist, so he sets the direction and entrusts delivery to his underlings. Xi Jinping doesn’t want to destroy the economy. He has gone to lengths to offer reassurances to the private sector, but signals that the private sector cannot blindly pursue its own narrow interests.

Because of how this message was implemented, a lot of private entrepreneurs and foreign investors are scared. They are realizing he’s serious. Private entrepreneurs are now rounded up for doing things that in the past the authorities would have tolerated or even actively encouraged. For a long time, foreign investors were welcomed with open arms. Now, they are expected to recognize that foreigners are guests of China, they’re on China’s terms. Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic [and Xi’s draconian pandemic management policies], where we saw the extent to which he’s willing to ride roughshod over private sector interests, many people are finally thinking they can’t work with this.

In China’s foreign policy, observers have noted a shift from Deng Xiaoping’s low-key “hide and bide” stance to a more assertive “wolf warrior” diplomacy. Is this one of Xi’s signature policies?

That shift started before Xi. Even under Hu Jintao, there were signs that China was trying to assert itself more abroad. In terms of economic statecraft, we saw use of trade pressure to exert leverage before Xi, for example with Norway [the suspension of salmon imports after Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010]. Elements of “wolf warrior” diplomacy were visible in moments when Chinese diplomats were truculent and brash about “core interests” like Tibet, when the Dalai Lama was at the peak of global prominence and influence. Under Xi, you see these displays more often on a wider range of issues. Chinese diplomats are taking up Xi’s spirit of struggle, using harsh language.

In diplomacy broadly, Xi himself is also leading from the front. He is the most traveled PRC leader ever, and he has welcomed the most foreign visitors to Beijing, at a greater frequency than any predecessor. He has invested more money in diplomatic outreach. The foreign affairs budget has increased; there are more Chinese embassies and consulates around the world than before. It flows from Xi’s core political agenda.

What kind of legacy does Xi want to leave?

Only he truly knows. I think you can take him at face value when he talks about things like the “China Dream” and the “Two Centenaries” goals [for certain policy achievements by the 100th anniversaries of the Party’s founding in 1921, and the PRC’s founding in 1949]. Often, these slogans are vague and amorphous goals, so you can never really fail, you can always redefine them.

Xi probably wants to be remembered as someone who restored China to its rightful place in the world, whatever that might mean in terms of concrete achievements. The general vibe—and he has already delivered on this part—is a China that gets global attention, a China that is recognized by governments around the world as an important political and economic power, and that is dealt with as such. You could even spin the perceived negatives of “wolf warrior” diplomacy as positives, because if the West is taking China seriously, then you know China is strong, because China is seen as a threat.

There are other issues where the legacy might be more mixed, domestic issues where Xi has set expectations of delivery and hasn't quite gotten there. Poverty alleviation, anti-corruption—those are as close to being clear victories as he has.

Then there are other things that you can’t dress up despite best efforts, like the Xiong’an economic region [south of Beijing], which hasn’t really taken off. The Belt and Road Initiative is not exactly a failure, but is not the resounding achievement that Xi would have liked. It will persist, but the limits of these projects, the limits of Xi’s ambitions, are becoming apparent. Some things you cannot will into reality.

There is a saying that Mao Zedong achieved jianguo [建国, founding the new Chinese republic], Deng Xiaoping fuguo [富国, enriching China], and Xi has presided over qiangguo [强国, strengthening China]. If we say Xi’s objectives are for China to be economically powerful, militarily powerful, internationally respected, you can argue he’s done much of these three elements, especially the last two.

A major part of legacy is succession. How much more time does Xi want on the job? When will he feel satisfied he did his best? It’s a dynamic problem, it’s not just about what you achieved, it’s about whether you can find someone to carry forward your vision. Xi has seen himself what happens when succession is botched.

Then there is Taiwan. This is one of those things everyone has an opinion on, but only Xi himself can answer. We’ve heard many anecdotes from people who have been in meetings with him, talked to him about Taiwan. He seems to hold this issue more closely and passionately than his recent predecessors. The language he uses creates a sense of urgency. But the realities of the situation are difficult. There’s a reason why Mao Zedong didn’t do it. There’s a reason why Deng Xiaoping didn’t do it.

The gap in relative strength of militaries across the Taiwan strait is big and probably going to grow bigger [in Beijing’s favor]. The sense of identity among people on Taiwan is drifting far from being “Chinese” or identifying with the mainland. This drift is a trend you can’t really reverse without taking military and political control of Taiwan. It’s not something you can change by force of will. Many issues in Taiwan now are seen through the lens of Beijing influence, so the more Xi does, the more it’s perceived negatively. In this respect, I don’t think Xi and the Party are better positioned than before. It’s arguably worse. You could put some of this on Xi himself. Can you resolve that peacefully? It’s hard to see. Is the alternative plausible? If you use force to take Taiwan back, that’s jeopardizing your achievements for 1.4 billion people on the mainland. The conditions for a war of choice undertaken by Xi are, at this moment, hard to foresee. You could end up in a war by accident, the lesser option of seizing Taiwan’s outlying islands [closer to the mainland China coast], or a blockade, to take political control by force.

On January 23, a large delegation of Chinese officials will appear at the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) to try to defend the indefensible. For the first time since 2018, China will undergo a Universal Periodic Review (UPR), in which UN member states evaluate one another’s human rights records.

When Xi Jinping took power just over a decade ago, China was already an authoritarian, one-party state, but since then he has tightened control so severely that persecution of dissidents and government monitoring of virtually all areas of life have become common. Xi’s assault on human rights inside and outside China, including arbitrarily detaining more than a million Uyghurs and issuing bounties for Hong Kong dissidents who have fled abroad, is now so pervasive that some veteran observers liken Xi’s rule to Mao Zedong’s extensive political control. Xi has also sought to decapitate the weiquan, or rights defense movement, using extensive jail sentences, forced disappearances, black jails, and ongoing persecution. In 2023, Chinese courts sentenced rights defenders Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi to 14-year and 12-year jail terms, respectively. Uyghur intellectuals Ilham Tohti and Rahile Dawut have also received life sentences.

Halting this downward spiral requires that all those with a stake in the strength of international human rights institutions pursue accountability.

But precisely because the UN’s review presents an opportunity for scrutiny, China’s government has worked to thwart it, limiting civil society input, submitting dishonest information, and encouraging allies to praise Beijing’s human rights violations. China rallies its allies, many of them with troubled human rights records themselves, to flood the proceedings with bland or adulatory statements on China. Since the time allotted for this procedure is only three and half hours, each of the more than 160 countries registered to comment will have only a moment to speak, essentially preventing countries with genuine concerns from meaningfully raising them. If this gambit succeeds, it won’t just have once again denied vast numbers of people in China a rare opportunity to bring international scrutiny to China’s human rights conditions, it will also mark Beijing’s progress in eroding the UN Human Rights Council’s capacity to hold China’s leaders accountable. Such an outcome could have repercussions beyond China’s borders.

Governments under review are supposed to consult widely inside their countries to develop a national report on human rights in preparation for a dialogue with other governments’ representatives at the HRC. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights also compiles two documents: one summarizing all UN scrutiny of the government under review, including, for example, the findings of experts who review human rights treaty obligations, and another summarizing reports from independent civil society groups.

The process not only involves an exchange in which representatives of the government under review make a presentation and answer questions from representatives of other governments. It also yields a set of recommendations made by other governments, which the government under review can accept or reject. The efficacy of the review depends almost entirely on whether the governments engage in good faith.

Chinese authorities manipulate the process in several ways. First, the national report is a work of fiction straight from government officials and propaganda authorities. None of the grave human rights violations raised through other UN reviews or international civil society groups—from crimes against humanity to torture to rampant censorship—get a mention in Beijing’s report. It asserts it is “fostering historic achievements in the cause of human rights in China.” The only problems it admits: “obstacles . . . to promoting high-quality development” and “our ability to innovate in science and technology is not yet strong.”

A second tactic supports this deception: In clear violation of the UPR guidelines, Chinese authorities prohibit independent civil society in the country from participating in drafting the report. Since China’s 2018 UPR, Chinese officials have detained, disappeared, or driven into exile the environmentalists, feminists, lawyers, and other peaceful activists who could offer input. In 2013, Beijing authorities arbitrarily detained a human rights defender, Cao Shunli, who was trying to travel to Geneva to learn about UN human rights processes; she died in police custody in March 2014. The organizations listed as contributing to the 2024 UPR national report are all either organized by or uncritical of the government.

Third, Beijing works to ensure its allies offer up gushing praise in their remarks at the dialogue. It also encourages those governments to make recommendations that are so vague as to make it easy for Beijing to accept them and claim progress. At China’s 2018 UPR, Azerbaijan recommended that Beijing “consider including measures aimed at ensuring the increased efficiency and accountability of public services.” The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an independent human rights group, points out that some “recommendations” actually effectively endorse ongoing human rights abuses, such as Iran’s proposing that Beijing “safeguard its political system.”

Last but not least, the credibility of reviews can be affected by the relentless pressure Beijing applies to UN institutions. During its 2018 review, Chinese authorities succeeded in temporarily removing critical submissions from Hong Kong, Tibetan, and Uyghur groups.

Scandalously absent from the 2024 UN compilation of its own China assessments for China’s upcoming review: the most damning finding of the Office of the High Commission of Human Rights’ own August 2022 report examining the Chinese government’s mass human rights violations targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic communities. That report concluded with a critical allegation that resonated globally: that Beijing’s policies “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”

The report relied on interviews with Uyghur survivors, used other primary sources, and verified many of the reports made by civil society groups since 2017 when Uyghurs started disappearing en masse. While the UN’s compilation does reference this August 2022 report, it omits this allegation—the most serious ever leveled by a UN body at the Chinese government. Inclusion of this allegation would help avert China’s efforts to whitewash its abuses.

China’s upcoming UPR is an opportunity for governments concerned about Beijing’s grim human rights record and the integrity of the UN human rights system to advance strong positions. They should ask the Chinese delegation about genocide, crimes against humanity, and other efforts to eradicate distinct ethnic identities, including government policy toward the Uyghur community to, as one Chinese religious affairs official suggested in 2017, “break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections and break their origins.”

They should demand explanations about the detention of specific human rights defenders, including Gao Zhisheng, Anya Sengdra, Joshua Wong, and Zhang Zhan, and ask why Beijing will not issue invitations to UN human rights experts who have asked for years to conduct visits to China. Volker Turk, the current UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, should also use the occasion of the review to recommit to investigations into Chinese government crimes against humanity.

The utility of the process on January 23 rests on rights-respecting diplomats making maximum use of an opportunity Beijing systematically denies to the people who need it most.

Lai Ching-te is now president-elect of Taiwan, after a hard-fought race in which Beijing made its preference for his opponents clear. Lai is an outspoken advocate for Taiwan’s sovereignty, though he has said he wants to keep the status quo with China and that there is no need to declare independence since it is already a de facto reality.

How can Taipei best negotiate another rocky period with China? What role should Washington play—and what should it avoid? —The Editors

We updated our suite of graphics tracking the impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law. The law, which went into effect on June 30, 2020, and the allegation of “sedition,” have been used to arrest 286 individuals, charge 156, and convict 68 as of the end of 2023.

Reasons cited for some of the arrests in the second half of 2023 include wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong” and sharing social media posts of the “Glory” protest anthem. 10 people were arrested in August for their connection to the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, which received donations to advocate for sanctions against Hong Kong and to assist organizations supporting people in exile.

You can see our full dataset and graphics here.

At the core of many EU Commission and member states’ recent discussions of China is the concept of “de-risking.” Distinct from “decoupling,” the concept focuses on mitigating risks and limiting strategic dependencies in Europe’s relationship with China. They would achieve this using the EU’s economic defenses more effectively and engaging in open and frank dialogue, while remaining open to targeted cooperation and economic ties that are considered “un-risky.”

On July 13, Berlin unveiled its long-awaited Strategy on China, which states that de-risking is “urgently needed.” Germany is China’s largest trading partner in Europe, it receives far more Chinese investment than any other EU member state, and the German automotive industry alone constituted more than 40 percent of the EU’s foreign direct investment into China in 2021. These deep economic ties mean that Berlin’s approach to Beijing has an outsized influence on those of its neighbors. The Strategy on China may best be described as a position paper, rather than an exhaustive policy blueprint, but it nevertheless serves as an important reference point for Brussels and European capitals as they consider recalibrating their approach towards Beijing.

As introduced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in March, “de-risking” includes not just economic but also diplomatic and geopolitical considerations. Yet in a missive from late June, the European Council—which, together with the European Commission, forms the executive arm of the European Union—only broached “de-risking” in economic security terms. In October, the Commission launched a risk assessment of, initially, four critical sectors (semiconductors, AI, quantum computing, and biotech) relevant in the context of the EU’s exports to China. The number of sectors assessed would likely have been higher had it not been for reluctance among some of the EU member states.

Discrepancies between the Commission and member states underscore the ongoing debate about what it means to “de-risk.” Even as many EU member states broadly agree on the challenges posed by contemporary EU-China relations, their post-pandemic approaches to re-engaging with Beijing have taken very different forms. What is the state of the de-risking China debate following the release of Germany’s China Strategy, and what will de-risking ultimately mean in practice? —Grzegorz Stec

Last May, in a meeting room at the United Nations in Geneva, I sat and listened as a delegate from my hometown of Hong Kong called me a liar. I was there as a representative from the civil society organization Hong Kong Watch, participating in a session on discrimination against women in China—which included the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR).

In her opening remarks to the assembled UN experts, Hong Kong delegate Shirley Lam, Permanent Secretary for Home and Youth Affairs, minced no words as she derided reports I had personally fact-checked. “Chairperson and members, apart from celebrating Hong Kong women’s achievements in the past decade, I would also like to take the chance to address certain comments against the HKSAR in some NGO (non-governmental organization) submissions to the Committee,” she said. “Many of the statements in these submissions are based on false information and distorted narratives regardless of the truth, with flawed comments on the situation in Hong Kong.”

As I listened to her speak, it seemed to me that she spent much more time denigrating NGO participation than on the topic of women’s rights. The message was clear: The HKSAR’s official narrative is the only acceptable one, and anyone who says otherwise will be attacked.

While this sort of behavior at the UN has long been the standard for delegates from mainland China, it represents a departure for delegates from Hong Kong. Since the People’s Republic of China (PRC) passed the Hong Kong National Security Law (NSL) in 2020, Hong Kong has fundamentally shifted its posture at the UN, even as its formal position within the UN system has not changed. (Except in very specific cases, Hong Kong does not have official, independent status within the UN network, and it regularly participates under the umbrella of the PRC.) As Beijing tightens its control over Hong Kong, official delegates from the HKSAR have not only begun speaking out more at the UN, but are doing so in a manner that takes inspiration from PRC playbook.

Where once HKSAR delegates to the UN sat silently through meetings and offered only brief replies to direct questions, they now serve as proactive cheerleaders for Beijing. The tone and substance of their contributions largely echo those of the PRC, effectively endorsing the PRC’s values, language, and behavior. However, Hong Kong’s ability to play the role of PRC booster is finite; under the terms of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, Hong Kong will become a “normal” Chinese city by 2047 at the latest. In the meantime, it seems Hong Kong and Beijing are taking advantage of an arrangement that allows them two voices with which to decry the international human rights law framework and global norms.

As recently as 2018, HKSAR representatives at the UN still comported themselves in a restrained manner. That year, at a review conducted by the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the HKSAR’s lead delegate made a factual, polite, and brief opening statement. Several civil society organizations criticized the HKSAR’s evasion of questions during the review in May; HKSAR delegates could be more direct and helpful in their responses to UN experts’ questions but, in my experience, their response is well within the limits of normal behavior at the UN.

By 2022, Hong Kong delegates had progressed from evasion to open combativeness. In July of that year, the UN Human Rights Committee reviewed the HKSAR for its compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. (As only the HKSAR, and not the PRC, is a signatory to this covenant, this was one of the rare occasions on which the HKSAR was not part of a larger PRC delegation.) After the review, the Human Rights Committee expressed concern about the National Security Law, which it deemed “overly broad,” recommending its repeal and a stay of application in the meantime. In response, the HKSAR Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau—a liaison office in Hong Kong that represents the PRC—issued a press release. It stated that the government “strongly objects” to the Human Rights Committee’s conclusions, which it called “unsubstantiated criticisms.” Notably, the Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau published this press release not on its own homepage but on the main HKSAR government website, implicitly speaking for all of the HKSAR.

HKSAR officials further sharpened their language in February of this year, when the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights found that the Hong Kong National Security Law had “de facto abolished the independence of the judiciary” and raised concerns about the NSL’s impact on the right to fair trial, trade union rights, academic freedom, and artistic freedom. The HKSAR responded that the Committee “made sweeping statements based on certain false information and distorted narratives regardless of the truth, and made one-sided and flawed comments on the human rights situation in Hong Kong in the so-called concluding observations, and even politicized its work in considering the report.”

By the time I was headed to Geneva for the May review of China’s implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the HKSAR had begun lobbing preemptive criticism. Taking aim at the information civil society representatives submitted to the UN in advance of the review, the HKSAR published multiple press releases lambasting those submissions as “untruthful biased commentary regarding the implementation of the Hong Kong National Security Law” and claiming that “Many of the statements in these submissions are based on false information and distorted narratives regardless of the truth, with flawed comments on the human rights situation in Hong Kong.” In general, states do not criticize NGO submissions made in this informal capacity. Beijing, however, often does so—and, apparently, the HKSAR now does too.

At the review session, mainland China delegates took photos of NGO representatives, during both the session and meal breaks; filed harassment complaints against the NGOs, which forced UN security to investigate; and sent a note verbale to UN Experts claiming the participating NGOs were lying.

After the Hong Kong delegate’s opening statement singling out and criticizing civil society participants, UN Experts asked targeted questions of the 51-member PRC delegation, trying to get a better handle on China’s policies towards women. After each set of questions, the PRC delegates whispered among themselves, flicking through their thick binders and typing furiously on their smartphones. Junior delegates looked inquiringly to more senior people at the table, waiting for nods of approval before providing the Experts with answers that were unhelpful, dismissive, or almost totally irrelevant. For example, when asked about the allegations of forced sterilizations of Uyghur women, the delegates responded with statistics on fertility rates in different regions, across different periods and ethnic groups, but did not address the human rights violations at the root of the question.

Among those offering answers were delegates from Hong Kong. When asked why the Hong Kong Police Force canceled the Hong Kong International Women’s Day March, one of the Hong Kong delegates said the march organizers had decided to cancel the event of their own accord, and that the Police had simply respected this decision. That account, however, contradicts the claims of some would-be marchers that National Security Police warned them not to participate in the march. Moreover, the march was canceled just one day before it was to have occurred, suggesting there was pressure on organizers.

The delegate’s response shocked me. Not only was he openly lying to UN Experts, but his statements suggested the HKSAR no longer felt it needed to maintain the facade of a consistent narrative.

Hong Kong delegates now display this “wolf warrior” attitude no matter which arm of the HKSAR bureaucracy participates in the UN sessions. At UN reviews in July 2022 and February 2023, Hong Kong was represented by an official from the Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau—that part of the HKSAR government most closely tied to Beijing, and the most likely to toe the PRC’s official line. In May 2023, however, the Hong Kong section of the delegation was headed by the Permanent Secretary for Home and Youth Affairs, a member of the Hong Kong civil service with no direct link to the mainland. Not only did she espouse a typical PRC position, she demonstrated an even more aggressive, pro-Beijing, and anti-civil society attitude than delegates at previous reviews.

The HKSAR is also following in the PRC’s footsteps by obstructing or drowning out genuine civil society participation at the UN. The HKSAR has established new “government-organized NGOs” (GONGOs), getting them accredited at the UN so they can make “independent” submissions to UN bodies—submissions which tend to endorse the HKSAR’s and PRC’s human rights record. Because the PRC can veto NGO applications, organizations like Hong Kong Watch will likely never receive such accreditation. (We must reapply for access to the UN building before each event, and we receive more limited permissions than accredited institutions.) Furthermore, as Hong Kong civil society continues to erode under the National Security Law, the space to serve as watchdogs is left to NGOs based abroad, which simultaneously face condemnation from the Hong Kong government for being located outside the country.

In just a few years, HKSAR representatives at the UN have morphed from restrained professionals to wolf warrior-style delegates. They actively promote the PRC’s agenda and copy its tactics, employing manipulative language with regard to human rights and attacking anyone who challenges their narrative, be they NGOs or UN human rights experts. As the HKSAR begins to speak up at the UN, it does so in language that echoes Beijing’s—such as by attacking NGOs who submitted information to the Women’s Rights Review and accusing them of providing “false information and distorted narratives regardless of the truth”—and seeks to discredit UN findings without substantively addressing any of the points they raise. Like the PRC central government, the HKSAR is presenting an alternative vision of human rights that actually enables rights violations. We should expect the HKSAR to further increase its use of these tactics at the January 2024 UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review, in which the UN will examine the PRC’s human rights record between 2018 and 2024—including Hong Kong’s.

The open question for me is whether delegates from the HKSAR will begin to display some of the most aggressive behavior that we already see from mainland delegates.

While U.S. anxiety about China’s resurgence has increased steadily since the end of the Cold War, it has coexisted with occasional waves of concern about the sustainability of China’s growth and the viability of its political model. In an April 7, 1999 speech, then-President Bill Clinton advised that “as we focus on the potential challenge that a strong China could present to the United States in the future, let us not forget the risk of a weak China.”

Few observers would characterize contemporary China as “weak.” It possesses the world’s second-largest economy, serves as the largest trading partner for more than 120 countries, and dominates global supply chains for many critical minerals. Its military abilities have advanced to the point that distinguished observers question whether the United States would win a war over Taiwan. Finally, as seen with its brokering of a normalization deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia and the recent expansion of the BRICS grouping, it is an increasingly active diplomatic player on the global stage.

But in light of China’s growth headwinds, observes Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security, “conventional wisdom seems to be flipping from a concern with the unstoppable rise of Chinese power to a worry about the irrevocable decline of China’s economy and population.” As such, a variant of Clinton’s formulation has come to shape the debate over Washington’s policy options toward Beijing: Does the United States have more to fear from a powerful China that continues to strengthen or from a powerful China that begins to decline?

While the question takes into account the economic, military, and diplomatic strides China has made over the past quarter-century—its starting point, after all, is that China is powerful—it seems to embed a questionable, two-part premise: that strategic competition between the United States and China will have a decisive resolution, and that Washington only has a narrow window in which to achieve that resolution on terms that it prefers or can at least accept.

If China is steadily resurgent, the thinking goes, then the United States, its allies, and its partners must move swiftly to forestall a power transition that would enable Beijing to render the international system safer for authoritarianism. If, on the other hand, China is on the cusp of systemic decline, then Washington and its friends must move with perhaps even greater urgency to dissuade Chinese aggression against Taiwan. Some observers argue that Beijing may be inclined to wage a war for reunification while it still believes that it can prevail.

Each hypothesis is analytically dubious. There are many reasons why China is unlikely to overtake the United States as the world’s preeminent power. Economically, it will be difficult for the yuan to develop into a global reserve currency unless China relaxes capital controls—a virtual impossibility in view of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) political prerogatives. And the Belt and Road Initiative, which debuted a decade ago, has been experiencing mounting financial woes and geopolitical pushback, prompting China to revamp it for the coming decade. Militarily, while China is an increasingly capable regional competitor to the United States, it is far from being a global peer. And even in the Indo-Pacific, the United States is actively strengthening security ties with its fellow Quad members as well as with ASEAN countries including the Philippines and Vietnam, making it harder for China to dominate. Finally, diplomatically, as seen with the reinvigoration of the Quad and NATO, as well as growing strategic connectivity between U.S. allies and partners in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, advanced industrial democracies are increasingly coalescing to contest China’s influence.

As for the second hypothesis, that China is on the brink of terminal decline, largely due to its economic challenges, there are indeed reasons to believe that those challenges may be more intractable today than they were ten or even five years earlier. As such, the possibility of a sustained slowdown no longer seems far-fetched. The Lowy Institute ventured last March that China’s gross domestic product (GDP) would increase by an average of 2-3 percent annually through 2050. A shrinking ratio between its working-age and elderly populations will increasingly constrain the scope of its potential economic growth, the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have intensified efforts on the part of advanced industrial democracies to “de-risk” and diversify away from its exports, and, as many observers have noted, Xi Jinping has made clear that growing the economy should not take precedence over enhancing the CCP’s control.

But there are at least four points of context to consider when weighing China’s economic outlook, which will play an important role in shaping its strategic one:

• First, the slowing of its growth rate is not surprising for a country the GDP of which grew from just under $397 billion in 1990 to almost $14.9 trillion in 2020, a roughly 37-fold increase.
• Second, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecasts that China’s GDP will increase by 5 percent this year and 4.2 percent next year. These are a far cry from the figures that China once posted, but not as disappointing when compared to the IMF’s projections that advanced economies’ GDPs will, overall, increase by 1.5 percent this year and 1.4 percent next year. Indeed, slower Chinese growth should be seen as part of a larger, little remarked trend that New York Times columnist David Wallace-Wells noted in August: that global growth has been decelerating for several decades.
• Third, China’s economy still has room to expand if one considers productivity sources that it has yet to harvest, especially in the domains of critical and emerging technologies where the government is looking to build greater self-reliance by developing “little giants” and “single champions.”
• Fourth, some of the socioeconomic challenges that confront China also confront many other countries. Thus, for example, while its demographic outlook is bleak, many core U.S. allies and partners have challenging demographic outlooks as well. The United Nations projects that China’s population will decrease by 8.4 percent between now and 2050; it projects that the respective populations of Germany, Italy, South Korea, and Japan will decrease by 5.2 percent, 11.2 percent, 11.6 percent, and 15.8 percent over the same time period.

On balance, explains Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ chief economics commentator, China has both “deep structural problems” and “significant strengths”; presenting them alongside each other is essential to rightsizing the competitive challenge that it poses to the United States.

As for the concern that slowing growth might induce China to attack Taiwan sooner rather than later, scholars including Jessica Chen Weiss, Taylor Fravel, and Minxin Pei have demonstrated that there is little historical basis for “diversionary war” theory. Importantly, while Xi and his advisors appreciate that China’s internal and external challenges are building, they do not appear to have concluded that its time horizon is narrowing; to the contrary, in his political report to the 20th Party Congress last October, he affirmed his aspiration for China to become “a great modern socialist country that leads the world in terms of composite national strength and international influence by the middle of the century.”

To that end, China is deepening its ties with Russia and Iran, which share its grievances against the extent of U.S. influence; making inroads with hedging powers, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey, which believe that they can leverage deteriorating U.S.-China relations to enhance their own agency; and building its influence across the developing world. And while China’s critiques of the present order betray the underspecification of its alternative conception, the CCP has made some progress in fleshing out a potential alternative. With a triplet of recent initiatives—the Global Development Initiative (introduced in September 2021), the Global Security Initiative (April 2022), and the Global Civilization Initiative (March 2023)—it is promulgating a system in which, respectively, human rights are conceptualized more in terms of economic development than political freedoms, security alliances play a less central role in shaping interstate relations, and developing countries do not regard the embrace of Western values as a precondition for modernizing. If one weighs both China’s accumulated and potential power, the relationships that it is cultivating across the world, and the ordering concepts that it is advancing, it is not self-evident that the CCP has—or discerns—a closing window of opportunity in which to accomplish China’s “great rejuvenation.”

The present U.S. debate over China policy is anchored in two prevalent narratives: one emphasizing the country’s competitive strengths, the other spotlighting its competitive liabilities. Ironically, both arise from a place of anxiety and are likely to induce U.S. defensiveness. As Ryan Hass and I argued in June 2021, there is a different, less time-bound, way to think of China: as a competitor that, while likely to endure, is constrained both at home and abroad. If one accepts this conception, the U.S.-China relationship is not a rivalry to be settled by an arbitrary deadline, but a condition to be managed over the long term. As National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan put it at the Aspen Security Forum in July: “We’re going to have to live with the People’s Republic of China as a feature of the international landscape indefinitely, and we will have to learn to live together as major powers.”

Indeed, it is unclear that either the United States or China will “win” their strategic competition. Each has significant structural advantages that it can bring to bear for a protracted contest that the other cannot readily replicate. And should the nightmare of great-power war come to pass, any “victory” would be Pyrrhic; it is not self-evident that the “loser” would be so thoroughly devastated as to recalibrate its strategic orientation vis-à-vis the “winner” or prove incapable of reconstituting its defense industrial base over time.

Debating whether a powerful China has an expansive window in which to realize commensurate ambitions or a shrinking one in which to achieve narrow objectives is more likely to generate analytical whiplash than prudent policy. America’s best bet for competing with China over the long haul is to renew itself, restoring the internal foundations of its strength and ensuring that its alliances and partnerships have affirmative purposes that endure no matter what steps Beijing takes.

This fall, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan noted that the Biden administration is “often asked about the end state of U.S. competition with China.” He argued that “we do not expect a transformative end state like the one that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Instead, the Biden administration has identified three lines of effort in U.S. relations with China: investing, aligning, and competing. Investing comprises domestic initiatives in the United States while aligning involves cooperation with allies and partners. Thus, the only portion of the Biden administration’s China strategy that explicitly centers on China is competition. Yet, competition does not amount to an objective in itself, but rather a description of current circumstances. As White House Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific Kurt Campbell has warned, “competition is not itself a strategy.” Indeed, before taking office, Campbell and Sullivan argued that an approach centered on strategic competition “reflects uncertainty about what that competition is over and what it means to win.” So the question remains: What is America’s vision of success?

The Allure of Steady States

In introducing his 2022 National Security Strategy, President Joe Biden promised to “win the competition for the 21st century.” But what winning means remains unclear. Indeed, senior officials within the Biden administration reject the notion that the United States should aim for a specific “end state”—which usually describes a situation following the completion of an objective—when it comes to China. Instead, Kurt Campbell and Jake Sullivan have advocated that the United States “seek to achieve not a definitive end state akin to the Cold War’s ultimate conclusion but a steady state of clear-eyed coexistence on terms favorable to U.S. interests and values.” They reject end states in favor of “accepting competition as a condition to be managed rather than a problem to be solved.”

There are three strong arguments against identifying an end state for U.S. strategy on China. First, “solving” the “China challenge” is a misnomer since even a change of governance in Beijing would bring about new challenges. If the Chinese people choose to make fundamental changes to their country’s political structures tomorrow, tensions over Taiwan and U.S. regional presence would no doubt remain. Political science research even suggests that a democratizing China could worsen tensions with the United States. As a result, some experts have endorsed the Biden administration’s focus on steady states, with Center for a New American Security CEO Richard Fontaine affirming that Washington “should manage global problems, not try to solve them.”

Second, bureaucratic disagreements could stymie efforts to select an ideal end state. Although there is growing concern about China in Washington, there remains little consensus on the strategy that U.S. policymakers should adopt. A debate about end states might therefore prove divisive since no single end state is likely to appeal to all stakeholders. Even within the Biden administration, it could be difficult to get democracy and human rights advocates on the same page with environmentalists and economists. Getting Congress on board would be another matter altogether. As a result, it might not be possible bureaucratically to agree on an end state.

Third, even if U.S. leaders could agree on what they ultimately want, doing so might alienate allies and partners. For example, if the United States sought to accelerate the collapse of the Communist Party, few if any U.S. allies and partners would be comfortable with that objective. Conversely, returning to a “new type of great power relations” would leave many worried about a great power condominium. Forcing a discussion on end states might thus weaken rather than strengthen the very coalitions that the United States needs to address the challenges that China poses.

The Necessity of End States

It is entirely reasonable, therefore, that Kurt Campbell has urged turning “the focus from end states to steady states.” Indeed, many in Washington agree that it might be wiser to sidestep the end states discussion, at least for the time being. The question is whether this approach is sustainable. Can policymakers build a lasting China strategy without an end goal in mind? Will the American people and friends abroad support a strategy predicated on an ongoing competition with no ultimate objective? In short, is managed competition a description of the current situation, or is it an actual strategy?

Advocates of identifying an end state counter their critics with three arguments of their own. First, without a clear objective, it is difficult to assess the success or failure of America’s current strategy. The Biden team sometimes says it is aiming for managed competition with China. But this simply implies competition without conflict, which already exists today. Strategy usually requires identifying an objective and then marshaling resources and plans to accomplish that goal. If the objective is simply maintaining the status quo of competition without conflict, then so long as deterrence holds, the administration’s strategy is working. This makes it nearly impossible to assess or measure progress, since the objective is already being accomplished.

Second, without a clear aim it is difficult to explain how the United States should make difficult strategic choices on everything from economic de-risking to deterrence posture to diplomatic engagement. Building political support for costly policies within the United States and among allies and partners requires a clear logic, which demands more than a hazy concept of competition. The vagueness of managed competition can justify almost any policy, from tough export controls and investment restrictions to deep dialogue with Beijing. Identifying an ultimate objective would help policymakers determine how to assess trade-offs strategically.

Third, the Biden team has been effective at describing what it does not want with China, but ineffective at describing what it does want. For example, Chinese media asserts that U.S. leaders committed privately to “four no’s and one no-intention” during last year’s Xi-Biden meeting in Bali, Indonesia. Regardless of the veracity of these claims, senior U.S. leaders have made a wide variety of statements asserting that they:

• “don’t want to contain China”
• “are not seeking a new Cold War”
• “do not see the relationship . . . through the frame of great power conflict”
• “don’t seek to block China from its role as a major power”
• “don’t seek to block China . . . from growing [its] economy”
• “[are] not seeking to decouple from China”
• “do not seek to transform China’s political system”
• “do not support Taiwan independence”
• “don’t want to see the status quo across that strait changed unilaterally”
• “are not looking for confrontation or conflict”

These statements lay out what Washington does not want, without presenting a positive vision. This is one reason that Chinese observers are so skeptical of American assurances—many seem to be substanceless platitudes at odds with American actions. Although the National Security Strategy and Indo-Pacific Strategy articulate some positive goals such as “strengthening democratic institutions, the rule of law, and accountable democratic governance,” these documents say surprisingly little about U.S. objectives vis-à-vis China. This leaves many American citizens, members of Congress, and foreign policymakers unsure about whether Washington actually has a vision for what managed competition entails. For all these reasons, it would be beneficial for the United States to identify an ultimate objective of its China policy.

The Impracticality of a Unifying Objective

A primary reason the Biden team has rejected end states appears to be that no single end state is simultaneously realistic and acceptable to two key audiences: the American public and policymakers in ally and partner countries. Administration leaders insist “neither collapse nor condominium are tenable end-states” and note that each suffers from fatal flaws.

The goal of bringing about the collapse of the Communist Party has some notable champions. When he was Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo suggested that “we, the freedom-loving nations of the world, must induce China to change.” Others have insisted that Washington should aim for Xi Jinping to be “replaced by a more moderate party leadership” and for the Chinese people to “challenge the Communist Party’s century-long proposition that China’s ancient civilization is forever destined to an authoritarian future.” Many Americans are tempted by these arguments. After all, the United States brought about its opponents’ downfall in two World Wars and then waited out the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Why should the United States not do so again?

Explicitly attempting to bring about the end of the Communist Party, however, poses numerous problems. Washington has few levers to alter China’s domestic governance model. Worse still, making such an objective explicit could actually strengthen the Communist Party’s hold on power. And a public U.S. goal of forcible regime change would be opposed by most, if not all, U.S. allies and partners. Finally, attempting to remove the Communist Party from power would usher in a zero-sum struggle, which could lead to a heightened risk of conflict. For all these reasons, the Trump White House asserted that its approach was “not premised on an attempt to change the PRC’s domestic governance model.” The Biden team has done the same, with Jake Sullivan noting the U.S. goal “is not to bring about some fundamental transformation of China itself.”

The other end state rejected by the Biden team is creation of what they have called a great power condominium—essentially, an agreement by Beijing and Washington to share global leadership. The basic logic of those who favor such a condominium is analogous to the common understanding of the “responsible stakeholder” concept promoted by Robert Zoellick almost 20 years ago when he was Deputy Secretary of State. He suggested efforts “to encourage China to become a responsible stakeholder in the international system. . . [to] work with us to sustain the international system that has enabled its success.” Along similar lines, Michael Swaine, Jessica Lee, and Rachel Esplin Odell have more recently advocated “ultimately integrating Beijing into inclusive economic and cooperative security mechanisms.”

Unfortunately, this end state is hard to imagine today. Julia Bowie has described the responsible stakeholder theory as resting on “the expectation that China would become a status quo power.” Indeed, Zoellick had asserted, “China does not believe that its future depends on overturning the fundamental order of the international system.” But now even the European Commission has publicly described China as a “systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance.” Beijing’s coercive actions against Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Lithuania, Canada, Norway, and others have driven a global reassessment of China’s behavior. Over 70 percent of respondents in a July Pew poll said that China does not contribute to peace and stability nor take into account the interests of countries like theirs. As a result, it is difficult to imagine a successful effort at engagement without some fundamental changes occurring in Beijing. The “era of engagement” appears to be over, at least for now.

So neither collapse nor condominium appears to be a practical end state around which to build consensus. They have something else in common: neither seems possible under Xi Jinping. Another concerted American attempt at engagement appears unlikely to shift Xi’s worldview, including his assessment that “Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-around containment, encirclement and suppression of China.” Even if American leaders could change Xi’s views of the bilateral relationship, there is no political appetite on either side of the aisle in Washington to test this proposition. U.S. officials from both parties appear to concur with Orville Schell, who has argued that it was “Xi’s aggressiveness that put a stake through the heart of ‘engagement’ as a viable US or Western policy.”

To say that engagement is now implausible as a strategy is not to imply that diplomatic meetings with Chinese leaders are unwise. The Communist Party is so opaque that American leaders are likely to learn more from their Chinese counterparts than vice versa. Yet, the objective of this diplomacy must change, even if its value remains. Leaders in Beijing and Washington now describe their aims in bilateral dialogues not as seeking to “improve” the relationship but rather to “stabilize” it. This is a much more limited objective predicated on continued competition, rather than an outright improvement in the relationship. In short, few on either side expect that these engagements will lead to any major change in behavior.

The Need for Phased Objectives

If end states are unattainable in the near-term and steady states are unsatisfying in the long-term, does that doom efforts to embrace a well-defined objective for America’s strategy on China? No. There is a third way: a phased approach. The United States could endeavor to maintain a stable steady state in the near-term while awaiting more fundamental change in China in the long-term. Doing so does not require American leaders to choose either collapse or condominium, but rather leaves the door open for either, depending on the choices of the Chinese people. If the United States is going to articulate an end state, this phased approach is the only approach likely to win support in both Washington and key allied capitals.

In the short-term, the Biden administration is right that America’s aim should be to establish a more durable steady state. Many of the administration’s actions have put the United States on a sounder path, particularly efforts to bolster cooperation with U.S. allies and partners while investing in the sources of American strength. Central to these initiatives will be reinforcing deterrence through adjustments to U.S. and allied military capabilities, posture, and planning. Unfortunately, efforts to make measurable progress with China on crisis management mechanisms have been slow going. Nonetheless, the Biden administration is right to try—and be seen trying—to push China to reduce the risk of conflict.

In the long-term, the United States should be clear that it is awaiting substantial changes in China’s behavior or governance. This is not a strategy of forceful regime change, but rather patience until the Chinese people themselves bring about a fundamental transformation in Beijing. Until then, the best Washington can hope for is to manage a risky competition and hope it does not spiral out of control. The Xi Jinping era will continue to be difficult and dangerous, so ultimately the American public and friends abroad should want a more durable end state. If this “patient but firm” approach sounds familiar, it is for good reason—it echoes U.S. strategy in the Cold War. Just as George Kennan foresaw the “break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power,” Washington should hope for the mellowing or break-up of Chinese power. Then as now, waiting for regime failure should not be equated with forcible regime change.

Raising parallels with American strategy in the Cold War is not to suggest that the challenges posed by Beijing today are the same as Moscow’s decades ago. China bears little resemblance to the Soviet Union. Beijing boasts a far larger and more globally integrated economy than Moscow ever had. Yet, the Chinese Communist Party’s governance model is less attractive internationally than the Soviet system was in the early Cold War. Beijing’s political appeal lags far beyond that of the Soviets, who benefited from the communist bloc of aligned sympathizers worldwide. To date, Xi Jinping has also been less willing to use force at scale abroad than Soviet leaders, although U.S. policymakers must be wary because Beijing’s behavior could change over time. Thus, China is far more economically engaged abroad than the Soviet Union was, but is also less threatening ideologically. Containment is therefore inapplicable; Washington should not challenge Beijing abroad in the same way that it confronted Soviet influence globally, particularly given China’s current economic headwinds.

It is ironic that American strategists have spent much of the last few years playing the “Kennan sweepstakes” by trying to develop a phrase akin to containment that might guide American strategy. A better strategy is simply to adopt Kennan’s own phased approach: patience and firmness today while awaiting the mellowing or break-up of the Communist Party tomorrow. This is no panacea. It will have critics in Washington, Beijing, and beyond. But combining these two concepts is not as radical as it might seem. Indeed, Robert Zoellick ended his responsible stakeholder speech by insisting that “We can cooperate with the emerging China of today, even as we work for the democratic China of tomorrow.”

The Biden team has done an able job executing the first phase of an enduring American strategy on China. In fact, the early portion of the phased strategy recommended here might look almost identical to the Biden administration’s approach. Where a two-phased strategy would differ is in the long term. The indefinite maintenance of an inherently risky and increasingly tense competition should not be the ultimate objective of American strategy. As the time nears to hand off the baton to a second Biden administration or a new Republican team, U.S. leaders should be discussing end states. Effective strategies require clear objectives, so it is time to go back to the future and embrace a phased approach.

In 2016, Chinese authorities began rounding up Uyghur intellectuals. Among those detained was Ababekri Muhtar, the founder of Misranim, a popular social media site used by Uyghurs to debate with and learn from each other. Muhtar relies on a wheelchair for mobility, but this did not exempt him from the brutal treatment authorities inflicted upon the Uyghurs they had detained. While he was later released without further explanation, his detention exposes an overlooked facet of China’s relentless persecution of Uyghurs. In its single-minded pursuit of cultural obliteration, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) targets all Uyghurs, leading to especially dire consequences for the most vulnerable, such as those with preexisting health conditions or disabilities.

Over the past several years, research and reporting have revealed the PRC’s systematic campaign of violence, arbitrary mass detention, torture, imprisonment, forced sterilization, forced marriage, and political indoctrination in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (the Uyghur region). Many democracies around the world have rightfully determined it genocide. Even so, we cannot fully grasp the extent of the atrocities without unrestricted access to the region, which PRC officials do not allow. So far, most of the available anecdotal evidence about carceral conditions has centered around the experience of able-bodied and neurotypical individuals, who survived their detention by adapting to their captors’ often excruciating demands. These survival stories, however, fail to capture the complete spectrum of suffering. The struggles faced by detainees with disabilities or medical conditions—invisible victims who often can’t comply with authorities’ demands—remain largely absent from the global discourse.

Information about disabled or otherwise physically challenged survivors remains scarce. In one of the few accounts we have, Amnesty International reported that camp guards beat a neurodivergent man they deemed inadequately compliant. According to a witness, “the guards [took him out of the cell] and beat him until his skin was broken.”

In another rare instance of such information leaking out, international journalists reported earlier this year that local prison authorities had released more than two dozen bodies, all detainees who had died while incarcerated. According to a report by Radio Free Asia, five of the detainees had been elderly individuals suffering from heart or lung problems exacerbated by prolonged detention. According to one local police officer, “It appears that most of them passed away due to ineffective medical treatments.” Yet, it can be difficult to trust even this information, given that state-appointed physicians are responsible for determining causes of death. This incident echoes previous genocides. During the Holocaust, Nazi-employed physicians and administrators falsified official records to conceal true causes of death. Similarly, it was only after the genocides in Darfur and Rwanda that the world discovered the extent of human rights violations, as many crimes concerning vulnerable populations were kept hidden.

Given such information gaps, the accounts of other survivors can help to shed light on how conditions within camps or prisons—PRC authorities hold Uyghurs in both extralegal facilities as well as in detention centers and prisons—can render them unlivable for those already in a weakened physical or mental state. Survivors have reported that camp guards restricted detainees’ bathroom breaks to one-to-three minutes. Such strict demand would only make life in the camps more difficult for individuals with different physical needs. Survivor Anar Sabit remembers an elderly woman who suffered severe gastrointestinal issues and, after using the bathroom, would have to quickly stuff her prolapsed colon back inside herself.

Camp survivor Gulbahar Haitiwaji remembers being chained to her bed for 20 days. She and others underwent “physical education” so harsh it caused some people to collapse from exhaustion. The guards would slap these prisoners back awake, and, if they collapsed again, drag them out of the room, never to be seen again. Haitiwaji also recalls how even minute deviations from instructions would provoke violent responses. When a woman in her 60s shut her eyes out of exhaustion during lessons on “the glorious history of China,” the teacher slapped her and guards took her away to be punished.

Chinese officials often subject detainees to a device called a “tiger chair,” which is designed to cause prolonged pain. The chair immobilizes an individual’s hands and feet, forcing them into a hunched-over position for extended periods of time. In any of these cases—from the 60-second bathroom breaks to the tiger chair—authorities’ severe strictures and use of torture has had outsized effects on Uyghurs with preexisting conditions or disabilities.

One of my own relatives, a woman in her 70s, faced the threat of detention while undergoing cancer treatment. Shortly after a surgical procedure, the government abruptly took her away, subjecting her to a year of incarceration. This prolonged detention while she was still recovering devastated her health, exacerbating existing medical issues and inflicting immeasurable pain upon her family.

My relative’s experience is not an isolated case. Yalkun Qurban, an accomplished 41-year-old businessman, was taken to a camp for being an “untrustworthy person.” According to the police notice, after 10 months in the camps, he was briefly let out and hospitalized for oral cancer treatment. By that point, he was already so ill that he died just days later. In a photo taken at the hospital, he is barely recognizable, cancer having ravaged his face. The same Chinese state that denied Qurban medical care now prevents his wife from openly mourning him or seeking justice on his behalf, for fear of retaliation, according to a family member residing abroad. According to a statement from the family member, the Chinese government exercised strict control over the funeral. In a stirring act of resistance, Qurban’s wife shared a picture showing half of her face wet with tears to silently convey her grief. Alongside this, she invited the local Uyghur community to join in commemorating his life. The image of her face, shrouded in sorrow and tears, has been etched into my memory and has motivated me to advocate for her and others like her.

A history of government actions in the Uyghur homeland demonstrates blatant disregard for the health of the local population in Xinjiang, including government campaigns that have caused chronic health issues and disabilities for people in the region. During the ’90s, China conducted nuclear tests in Xinjiang; Jun Takada, a scientist at Sapporo Medical University, has estimated that, at its peak, radiation was higher than that of Chernobyl’s nuclear reactor after it melted down in 1986. The radiation Uyghurs were exposed to resulted in long-term health issues and, Takada has estimated, may have caused the deaths of some 194,000 people. The PRC has largely ignored the toll of these tests, and although scientists are currently studying the genetic effects on current and future populations, as yet the full scale of damage is difficult to quantify. The government’s choice to conduct these tests in the Uyghur homeland reflects a disturbing disregard for the well-being and rights of the people there. The absence of transparency and the deliberate suppression of information concerning the nuclear tests mirrors the Chinese government’s attempts to mask its actions in the prison camps from the world. Such deliberate censorship hinders the international community’s understanding of the suffering endured by Uyghurs, while at the same time highlighting the government’s decades-long pattern of repression.

Ultimately, China seeks to eradicate Uyghur identity by criminalizing it. Within this context of dehumanization, authorities indiscriminately incarcerate sick and disabled Uyghurs without any consideration for their health conditions. Attention to the circumstances facing individuals with disabilities only recently came to the United Nations’ attention. Last August, the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities expressed concerns that the Chinese government had detained Uyghurs with disabilities without providing basic standards of care and necessary medical attention. Even before the current crackdown began, as early as 2008, reports from civil society highlighted the detention of disabled Uyghurs under the umbrella of “national security threats.”

More than seven years have elapsed since the genocide began. But China’s economic might, and its secrecy, keep international outcry to a minimum. The international community cannot allow China to continue to hide its most tender victims. The measures that China has taken to conceal the reality of the camps should compel us to understand the depths of the suffering they inflict.

In October, in front of leaders from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, Xi Jinping stood triumphant in a celebratory keynote address celebrating the tenth birthday of his Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The speech, delivered at the BRI Forum, championed the initiative’s successes and charted a path toward a version 2.0 that will be smaller, greener, and more focused on diplomacy. The speech depicted China as an alternative standards-setter for the developing world in artificial intelligence, climate resilience, and attainable modernization.

A white paper released in the run-up to the Forum more explicitly explains the Party’s read on the state of the world—and its origins. The paper distinguishes the BRI from the “old colonial path” taken by rich countries over much of the last century. The BRI, the white paper says, “will not transfer problems, use neighbors as beggars, or harm others to benefit itself.” Instead, it will create “win-win” opportunities and liberate developing countries from operating within the global system the Party sees as a creation of the U.S.

That leaders from more than 20 developing nations attended the celebration suggests they are at least somewhat wary of the U.S.-led global affairs status quo. That skepticism creates convenient space for China, a country that has long since retired its “hide and bide” approach to international relations, reframing itself as the leader of the developing world.

China’s leader Xi Jinping’s Global Civilization Initiative (GCI) is the most recent in a line of global development and outreach proposals, including the BRI as well as the Global Security and Development Initiatives. The GCI demonstrates that Xi wants China to lead not only in implementing global governance, but in conceptualizing why and how it should exist.

The GCI makes a direct argument against maintaining the current global power distribution by condemning the history behind it and the universal values it espouses. If “the West” won the original communist-capitalist battle for influence, more recently, frustration and mistrust toward institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and developed countries’ governments have created a reliability gap China can try to fill. Historically, Beijing has tried to do so practically, largely by providing solutions to development bottlenecks. The GCI’s emergence shows the same effort now taking on the more amorphous project of civilization-building.

Xi introduced the GCI in March, at the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Dialogue with World Political Parties, which gathered more than 500 international representatives to discuss the role of political parties in development. He made a case for deference to “national conditions” and self-rule, arguing China should “uphold the principle of independence and explore diversified paths towards modernization,” and that a country’s people should decide what kind of modernization works for them.

Xi’s position is that countries should be able to draw on their own historical experiences in assessing the U.S.-led liberal world order that blossomed after World War II. 20th century colonial subjugation, China’s leaders hope, is enough to ally developing countries today.

A claim of shared oppressive pasts and significant spending have been part of China’s global south strategy for the better part of the last 70 years. Over this period of time, China’s diplomatic goals for the developing world have not fundamentally changed. As Rana Mitter has written, “Looking out for a radical shift in the way that China defines the international order is unlikely to be fruitful; understanding how key terms are reimagined and reappropriated is far likelier to illuminate the nature of the Chinese project to adapt international order.” The People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to offer itself as an option, an undeniable power, but not a replacement for or inheritor of America’s boundless global role.

The GCI seeks to promote China from sympathetic financier to civilizational conceptualizer. The initiative attempts to create a common understanding of civilization that leaves room for sovereign, distinct application. Its aim is to spur unity between China and global south nations based on the argument that they are all developing. No one knows better than the CCP how quickly a consequential switch in economic output and, resultantly, geopolitical positioning can unfold. Future development will likely be driven by the world’s biggest and most populous economies, many of which are in developing countries. China does not want to miss the boat.

But Xi is contending with a formidable alternative: the United States’ leadership in international development, featuring the requirement that nations uphold Washington’s values, upon which foreign aid is often contingent. The U.S. Congressional Research Service describes foreign aid as a “particularly flexible tool” that can “act as both carrot and stick, and is a means of influencing events, solving specific problems, and projecting U.S. values.” The GCI eschews that quid-pro-quo by keeping its goals exclusively conceptual and rerouting tangible development aid through other projects like the BRI and Global Development Initiative (GDI).

Both countries employ moralistic tones and betray a sense of national exceptionalism. American exceptionalism comes from a push to get other countries to sign on to U.S. values and the institutions furthering them. The logic of American exceptionalism does not create a contradiction; instead, it projects a clear and moralistic offering to the world: “we have the best values and everyone should live by them.” In China’s case, merging global leadership with national superiority is more immediately paradoxical. This is epitomized by the GCI. “They’re tying themselves in knots to say ‘We reject universal values,’ but there are common values,” Robert Daly, director of the Wilson Center’s Kissinger Institute, said recently on the Sinica Podcast.

The GCI can be read as an attempt to “cash in” on the last decade of investment and labor China has put into global development projects. It’s difficult to directly compare the United States’ and China’s development spending, in part because China does not always label its contributions as “aid.” Rather, it prefers to frame such financing as “win-win.” Beijing takes that second “win” seriously. As Marina Rudyak, a Sinologist at the University of Heidelberg, noted in a report on the China International Development Cooperation Agency, “The Chinese aid model combines aid with commercially oriented trade and investment ventures. This approach is rooted in the idea that since China is (by definition) a developing country, its aid spending should be ‘mutually beneficial’ . . . ” This style may be gaining traction, partly due to the fact that it is distinct from the U.S. model of development financing based on altruism and value alignment. Researchers Salvador Santino F. Regilme and Obert Hodzi argue that “China’s combined aid and investment programs are becoming the new normal, challenging traditional [Official Development Aid] and offering a new model for development assistance.”

More than 140 countries have signed on to BRI projects, though the initiative’s popularity has waned over time: some countries, like Italy, have withdrawn from the BRI. The GDI, however, is steadily growing. According to the 2023 update from the Center for International Knowledge on Development, a Chinese think tank, the GDI has new ongoing or completed projects in areas such as food production, e-commerce, medicine, green energy, and vocational education, among many others.

Now that Beijing has proved to be a deep-pocketed investor, Xi wants to cultivate higher-level support for China’s concept of civilization. In the GCI’s framing, every country has its own version of civilization, and diversity in governance systems should be protected and encouraged. The pitch builds on the Party-state’s more than half-century-long effort to come up with a diplomatic framework that defends sovereignty yet empowers China as a leader among developing countries.

The GCI’s emphasis on self-determination is the stronger selling point. Smaller countries’ reactions to great power competition demonstrate it is dangerous for policymakers in the U.S. or China to assume nations are interested in picking—or mimicking—either side. In a 2019 speech defending ASEAN’s interests amid great power competition, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong noted that it would be unrealistic (and unreasonable) to expect every country “to adopt the same cultural values and political system.” But the GCI’s appeal hinges on whether world leaders believe that signing onto it does not override their own autonomy—and doesn’t necessarily represent “choosing” China between the two superpowers. Neither the U.S. nor China has made a strong case for why any third country would be interested in auditioning for what they both frame as a two-man show.

From Bandung to BRICS

China’s first premier, Mao’s foreign policy guru Zhou Enlai, prioritized developing countries as part of China’s 20th-century pitch for global Maoism. Zhou learned on the job that China had to gain the trust of developing countries before he could hope to influence their politics.

In the mid-20th century, Beijing showed growing interest in pursuing diplomacy without developed countries, most concretely epitomized by the 1955 Bandung Conference, which convened Asian and African states in Indonesia. Many participating nations had just exited colonial rule.

According to its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, China’s goal in attending the gathering was “to expand the united front for peace, to promote the national independence movement, [and] to create conditions for the establishment and enhancement of relations between China and some other Asian and African countries.” When some countries criticized communism, Zhou Enlai ditched his prepared remarks and took a more independence-oriented approach: “There exists common ground among the Asian and African countries the basis of which is that . . . their peoples have suffered and are still suffering from the calamities of colonialism.”

These 68-year-old comments echo today’s language. Li Xi, a Standing Committee member and secretary of the CCP’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, explicitly mentioned Bandung in a speech he delivered at the G77 gathering in September. He said developing countries had carried the “Bandung spirit”—a phrase that appears in many similar speeches, including a 2015 commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Bandung Conference. He added that China “will always be part of the developing world.”

Officials, then, are proposing that the categories of “developed” and “developing” are stagnant, bringing them closer to historical and geographical typologies like “non-colonial” and “non-Western”—and farther from evolving economic conditions. Invocations of Bandung complement the GCI, specifically in its attempt to redefine “development”—a term with a clear meaning and set of connotations—so that it aligns with Mao’s Three World Theory (which positioned China as part of the “third world”). Deng Xiaoping carried the torch; in 1974 he told the UN General Assembly that China belonged to the third world and would never become a superpower.

Upholding the CCP’s rule for 74 uninterrupted years in a changing China necessitates working through many contradictions. Grand narratives about China’s place in the world offer a useful, legitimizing consistency: China is and will be developing because, at the right moment during decolonization and global modernization, it was.

Colonialism’s value, meanwhile, is evergreen: “In history,” Zhang Jun, Chinese Ambassador to the UN, said in June, “colonial conquests and plundering driven by civilizational superiority and white supremacy wreaked such devastation in Asia, Africa, and Latin America . . . Today, interference, intervention, provocation, and incitement under the banner of ‘universal values’ are creating new conflicts and new confrontations.”

Communist Party leaders, then, condemn the notion of “universal values” even as the GCI touts its own “common values”: peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy, and freedom. Those sound a lot like China’s domestic-facing “socialist core values,” which attempt to make terms like “democracy” compatible with China’s one-party system. The Party does not consider these values “the exclusive hallmark of a liberal democracy,” write Delia Lin and Susan Trevaskes. But what might at first glance appear to be simple doublespeak carries consequences for the GCI.

The fact that the socialist core values include the same words as the “Western” universal values—but with different definitions—betrays Party leaders’ belief that the CCP can cultivate a globally available other option, provided by a fellow developing country rather than a member of the historically oppressive developed nation group. “This requires establishing the moral legitimacy of an authoritarian ‘China Model’ as an alternative to liberal democracy,” write Lin and Trevaskes.

Leveling Up: From Infrastructure to Civilization

When China in 1965 offered to finance the Tan-Zam Railway, which would run from copper mines in Zambia to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, “[it] was far more than a massive infrastructure project; it was also an integral part of the struggle for decolonization,” Julia Lovell writes in Maoism: A Global History. Lovell notes that, among international observers, “rumors began to circulate that the railway would be made of bamboo.” Comments like that were testament to the fact that developed countries were clearly not yet accustomed to powerful, public displays of solidarity among poorer countries.

PRC leaders are right to detect that world “power” is more complex—and dispersed—than it was in the last century. In a globalized economy, developing nations hold much more collective sway than they did in the Bandung era. American foreign policymakers, then, should internally acknowledge the significance, historical roots, and potential of the GCI. Washington needs an appeal that is somewhere between America’s “do it our way” approach and China’s convoluted, if superficially empowering, argument that historical conditions singlehandedly enable contemporary friendships.

For China, the GCI is ultimately a low-stakes gamble. Even if developing countries don’t totally buy it, they are unlikely to sever ties with China over what can be written off as a propaganda exercise. Lower-level diplomats will be motivated to promote the GCI to appear responsive to Xi’s calling; for example, in May, Chinese Ambassador to Dominica Lin Xianjiang published an article on the GCI. “China believes that delicious soup is cooked by combining different ingredients,” he wrote. “We need to stay inclusive and always seek nourishment from other civilizations.”

Until the United States has a plan that grapples with these dynamics, it will have to contend with China as both a development and conceptual competitor in most realms of its global south policy. The Global Civilization Initiative is the latest framework through which Chinese leaders have tried to revamp, if not entirely reimagine, their country’s status as a development leader. Meanwhile, China is itself still developing (and apparently, at least officially, always will be). Even if the strategy hasn’t changed since the Mao era, geopolitical and economic conditions have. That might be enough to tilt the scale in China’s favor.

This book will be denounced in Beijing. Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow is a novel based on the life of Sun Weishi, an adopted daughter of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, whose brilliant mind and intensive study in Moscow of the Stanislavski acting method brought her to the pinnacle of China’s theatrical world during the Mao years. Her beauty and effervescent personality attracted powerful men—not only Zhou, who doted on her, but also Lin Biao, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) leading general, who divorced his wife in order to propose marriage to her (unsuccessfully), and Mao, who apparently raped her during a long rail trip. She had several other suitors and eventually married the film star Jin Shan.

Ha Jin, a former soldier in the Chinese army who came to the U.S. in 1985 at age 29 to do graduate study, has written 10 novels in English as well as poetry, short stories, and essays. In The Woman Back from Moscow, he conveys in supple prose what Beijing inevitably will regard as too much truth about the history of the CCP. Perhaps anticipating trouble, Other Press offers a publisher’s note at the book’s beginning:

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

In an author’s note at the book’s end, Ha Jin lists five works of nonfiction that were his main sources. Although he imagines dialogue and invents some connective tissue, he writes, “Most of the events and details in this novel were factual. . . Reality is often more fantastic than fiction, so I did my best to remain faithful to Sun Weishi’s life story.” He calls her Sun Yomei, a name she used in personal correspondence, because the name Weishi “is hard to pronounce in English and might upset the cadence of sentences.”

<a href="https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/assets/images/photo/system/sun_weishi_1940s.jpg" title="Sun Weishi 1940s" class="colorbox" data-colorbox-gallery="gallery-node-55276-z6CnFh94rAM" data-cbox-img-attrs="{"title": "", "alt": ""}"></a>

(Wikimedia Commons)

Sun Weishi, 1940s.

Scandal is popular everywhere, of course, but in Communist China historical truth-telling carries special weight, because it questions the legitimacy of the regime. Although the CCP’s “red families” (offspring of the original Mao-era revolutionaries) heavily influence elite politics, they do not enjoy a formal right to rule of the kind that, in imperial times, was passed from father to son. Nor does legitimacy derive from elections, because the CCP does not allow them. Legitimacy depends crucially on the historical record of how the rulers have performed. Some observers, including Cui Weiping, a prominent Chinese public intellectual, have argued that history has taken on an almost religious significance in Chinese politics. Religions project ideals into the future and offer followers the hope of reaching them. China’s history-religion projects ideals onto the past and cites them as the reasons why a regime should continue. But a serious problem arises for this history-religion. The future has not yet happened, so religious promises cannot be falsified. The past has happened, so it can be.

It thus becomes a matter of utmost importance that the appearance of political virtue be preserved in accounts of events such as the Communists’ Long March to Yan’an in the mid-1930s, their establishment there of an idyllic community, their founding of a “people’s” republic in 1949, and much more. Of course there must be no mention of mass political executions or a huge famine. A whitewashed version of history becomes a kind of religious idol. It is placed beyond the public’s questioning and can be tweaked only when a leader needs support for a current policy.

Guarding official history becomes the métier of a group of state-sponsored “historians” who construct versions of the past and are not bothered by any discrepancies between their accounts and what actually happened. “It does not even enter their thinking,” says Cui Weiping. They and their superiors measure the quality of their work not by its degree of truth but by its likely effectiveness in selling the history-religion. This is why Beijing’s red royalty will see Ha Jin’s book rather as a convention of manicured cats might see an approaching bulldog. What he writes is fiction, but it is far closer to truth-telling than what the regime calls history.

* * *

Talk in China about elite politics has long made use of stage metaphors that originally come from popular opera. A leader gaining power “ascends the stage,” in losing it “leaves the stage,” and while on it plays roles. Actual life is covered up. “Mao” is a fabricated Mao, “Lin Biao” a fabricated Lin Biao. Ha Jin’s novel removes the masks. He presents human beings enmeshed in thoughts and emotions that other human beings will recognize.

The culture we glimpse in the novel is the special culture of the Communist superelite, which differs greatly from the way most ordinary Chinese live. For example, socialist ideology notwithstanding, members of the elite keep servants. From the dusty caves of Yan’an in the late 1930s to the red-hot “class struggle” of the late 1960s in Beijing, there are always maids to peel pears, orderlies to deliver lunch boxes, and guards to watch doorways, and when a child arrives the family goes out and hires a nanny. Ha Jin does not spotlight this aspect of life. I am doing that, plucking details from a narration within which they are unobtrusive, which adds to their credibility. We learn that Mao’s wife Jiang Qing enjoys a villa, a yacht, and a “flock of servants” in Hangzhou only because these facts happen to appear as Ha Jin is relating a story about her resentment of a rival.

The sufferings of the elite are of a special kind, different from the sufferings of “the masses.” Sun Yomei and her colleagues know about the attack in 1951 on the film The Life of Wu Xun, which Mao, in an apparent effort to control the film industry, instructs his underlings to denounce as a “model of reconciliation with feudalistic and reactionary forces.” His words are, to be sure, a harsh blow. But during the same years (1949-1953), putative “landlords” were being executed by the millions in a land reform campaign. Yomei and her artist colleagues make no mention of that. They likely are unaware of it. They also do not remark upon the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, in which hundreds of thousands of intellectuals were killed, jailed, or persecuted, or the Mao-induced famine of 1959-1961 that took at least 30 million lives, except when such events tangentially affect a person in their lives. They are ethical people; we trust that they would be concerned by such matters if they were aware of them.

<a href="https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/assets/images/photo/system/sun_weishi_zhou_enlai_in_moscow.jpg" title="Sun Weishi and Zhou Enlai in Moscow 1939" class="colorbox" data-colorbox-gallery="gallery-node-55256-z6CnFh94rAM" data-cbox-img-attrs="{"title": "", "alt": ""}"></a>

(Wikimedia Commons)

Sun Weishi (right) and Zhou Enlai in Moscow, 1939.

They live in a cocoon, but the culture inside is hardly protective. It is tense and bereft of trust. Familial affection is present, but it gives way to politics whenever necessary. President Liu Shaoqi is willing to derail the marriages of two of his children, who have non-Chinese partners, because of “revolutionary needs.” Zhou Enlai clearly cares for his adopted daughter. He coaches her in how to survive: “Just be careful about what you say in your letters. Always assume that some other eyes will read your letters before they reach me.” But during the Cultural Revolution, when Zhou is faced with the dilemma of whether to sacrifice Yomei in order to protect himself from Jiang Qing, he signs a warrant for her detention that leads to her torture and death in prison. An aunt of Yomei’s, observing Zhou’s maintenance of a suave exterior, calls him a “smiling snake.”

Zhou is no anomaly. He lives in an environment where, in the end, people can trust only themselves. The distinguished Australian Sinologist Simon Leys once observed that comparisons of the CCP elite to the mafia are in a sense unfair to the mafia, in which a certain loyalty to “brothers” does play a part. Losers of political battles at the top of the CCP generally are not relegated to comfortable retirements—they go to prison or worse. Zhou did not wish to seal Yomei’s fate; he was forced to when it became clear that it was either him or her.

Political power so infuses personal relations that the question “How might I use this person?” is almost always in the background. As Mao awakes in his railroad car, lying next to Yomei, whom he has raped during the night, he lights a cigarette, blows “two tusks of smoke out of the edges of his mouth,” and says, “I could tell you were not a virgin. . . Please join my staff. I need your help and will be considerate to you.” Shocked and in tears, Yomei bolts from the car, but not before Mao adds, “Even though you don’t want to work for me, keep in mind that I’ll be happy to help you when you need me.”

Many years later, she does need him. Red Guards are torturing her brother Sun Yang, who has written a laudatory biography of Zhu Deh, Mao’s rival in the claim to be the founder of the People’s Liberation Army. Yomei appeals in person to Mao to intervene for her brother. He listens and says that “we should look into” the matter. In fact he does no investigating, but neither he nor Yomei finds it extraordinary that a rape victim is asking her rapist for a favor.

This is within the culture. The “scar literature” that followed Mao’s death in the late 1970s offers many credible accounts of how victims had to defer to the very people who had once harmed them. This problem was not just in elite culture; it reached as deep into society as Party rule did. The writer Zheng Yi records the case of a woman whose preschool son was killed because his father had been a “class enemy.” Three men tied the boy by a rope to the tailgate of a truck and dragged him until he was dead. 15 years later, the three murderers visited the mother’s home, accompanied by a Party official, to perform a ritual “apology.” She was obliged to pour tea for them.¹

* * *

During Yomei’s final days—she died in prison in 1968—police grill her on her personal connections. It is their job to gather intelligence that can be useful in future political combat. Yomei is annoyed at one point with their persistent questions about sex. They wonder whether Zhou’s affection for his adopted daughter was in part sexual. To find evidence of this would neither raise nor lower Yomei’s political standing but would be immensely useful to Jiang Qing in her bitter rivalry with Zhou. Yomei asks her tormentors, “Why are you so interested in what happened inside the top leaders’ pants?”

For reasons that are unclear to me, under China’s Communist regime sexual misbehavior came to be considered a strong indicator of depravity. In imperial times, a man’s wealth could be measured by how many women (both wives and concubines) he accumulated and how many children they produced. Sexual prowess was admired. Dalliance outside the home was not exactly favored, but it was seen more as a profligate use of time—like chatting in teahouses or listening to singsong—than a moral transgression. In the Communist years, however, extramarital sex came to be seen as an unambiguous sign of foul character and was often used as a weapon in political struggle.

In 2016 Xu Zhangrun, a distinguished professor of law at Tsinghua University, began publishing essays that criticized Xi Jinping’s national policies in fundamental ways. Xu’s essays were erudite, broadly conceived, and written in an elegant semiclassical Chinese. Xi needed to fight back, but how? He was no literary match for Xu, so his weapons were limited to firing the professor from his post, depriving him of his pension, blacklisting him, and detaining him. And what else? Charging him with visiting prostitutes in Sichuan. The accusation was sufficiently aggressive that its falsity did not seem to matter.

Accusations of sexual excess could be potent weapons against the powerful as well as their victims. In the mid-1990s, after Mao’s personal physician Li Zhisui published his book The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Chinese people focused quickly on its revelations of Mao’s lifelong appetite for young women. Slower and more sober readings of the lengthy book showed in detail how Mao treated people heartlessly and caused the unspeakable suffering of millions. But what grabbed public attention was his rampant lust.

Was there no sign of Maoist ideals in Yomei’s milieu—of serving the people or building a new socialist China? In Ha Jin’s telling, such ideas rarely enter the thinking of top leaders. Jiang Qing wants to create a “new” Chinese opera, but her goals are personal fame and power, not benefit to society. Mao never mentions to Yomei any rationales for collectivizing agriculture, which his regime was pursuing in the 1950s, but when she shows him a Soviet film of an atomic bomb explosion he is smitten by the “typhoon of fire” and becomes obsessed with getting a bomb for himself.

* * *

And yet there were people who did embrace the new ideals and did devote their lives to them. The main theme of Ha Jin’s book is what happened to these people, and Yomei is his main example. Sent to Moscow in 1939 with Zhou Enlai, who needs medical treatment there, Yomei stays, learns Russian, studies theater, and becomes deeply enamored of Stanislavskian principles: actors must internalize the characters they play—their thoughts, feelings, and fears, both onstage and off—and must focus intently on the drama they are participating in whether or not they have speaking roles. She finds that the best way to pursue this approach is through directing, not acting, and after she returns to China in 1950 has great success as a director and eventually begins to write her own plays.

But she soon encounters a problem that only grows larger as her work continues. She directs Pavel Korchagin, a stage adaptation of Nikolai Ostrovsky’s classic 1936 Soviet novel How the Steel Was Tempered. The art flows from within her, the critical reception is enthusiastic, and the success leaves her euphoric. Then she hears Mao’s encomium, in which he states she has “won honor for China and for our Party.” This shocks and disappoints her. She had not felt a political motivation in staging the play and finds Mao’s assertion of state sovereignty over her work inappropriate and awkward.

Years later, she arrives at the view that “any extraordinary talent that emerged in arts would get noticed by the powers that be and would be harnessed to serve a cause or a political purpose.” In such circumstances, pursuit of creativity is futile. Worse, it could be dangerous. Innovation could cause a person to stand out from a group, whereas “in this country, it was always safer to remain common and average.”

I was reminded of an exchange I had with the Chinese writer Cao Guanlong in June 1980. Cao worked in a bicycle factory in Shanghai. When he asked me if American bikes were different from Chinese ones, I commented that most of ours had gears. I felt apprehensive that my words might embarrass him on behalf of his country and was surprised to hear his quick response:

We know how to install gears. I can do it. My friends can, too. But we don’t dare. Anyone who added gears would be stepping out of line, upsetting the uniformity. The leaders don’t like that. So we don’t do it. Not worth it.

During the Cultural Revolution, Yomei moves to an oil field in remote Heilongjiang province, where she lives among ordinary workers and learns of their lives and ordeals, especially those of the women. She writes a play called The Rising Sun that becomes a major success in Beijing and other cities. It is an excellent example of what Mao, ever since his famous Yan’an talks in 1942, has been demanding that Chinese writers do: go among the workers, farmers, and soldiers, “directly experience” their lives, and bring their struggles and triumphs into art. In the end, though, the political authorities reject Yomei’s work as “bourgeois and reactionary.” At the cost of her life, she learns that what Mao has actually wanted from artists all along is not the autonomous pursuit of ideals but political fealty. An artist’s job is to support the Party. Her or his work is to be poured into Party molds and presented as Party products.

* * *

In an art class at a primary school in May 1973, during my first trip to China, I saw a young boy drawing a picture of an airplane crashing in flames. The student sitting next to him was drawing the same thing. Then I saw that all the students in the class—30 or so—were drawing the same scene in the same way. The teacher had provided a model. The drawing showed the fate of Lin Biao, who in September 1971, it was said, had attempted a coup against Mao and fled to the Soviet Union, but died when his plane crashed on the way. The youngsters’ drawings were an example of how artistic effort from below fills molds prescribed from above. This was the system that stifled Yomei and ultimately destroyed her.

Yomei’s experience in the theater exemplifies a broad pattern in the fate of “new socialist art” in the 1950s. Writers and artists of many kinds supported the new regime and were eager to promote its ideals. If this meant changing their work, that was all right—it was a welcome challenge. China’s most popular performing art at the time was the comedic dialogue form known as xiangsheng. Long disparaged as low-class, xiangsheng performers were keen for the laurel of “socialist worker” and ready to work to deserve it. The regime’s instructions to them were to transform their intrinsically satiric art into one that praised the new society. But that was a puzzle: How could satire be used to praise? One could satirize class enemies, but that approach quickly grew dreary. One could satirize men who believed that “the new woman” could not drive trucks, but problems arose when audiences didn’t get the joke or laughed at the wrong things.

Despite the challenges, by 1956 a number of xiangsheng experiments had succeeded, and it appeared that a new socialist art indeed was at hand. But as with Yomei and the theater, the regime was not seeking autonomous efforts at anything. It wanted control. Independence of any kind was a threat. In 1957 He Chi, the most brilliant xiangsheng innovator to that point, was labeled a “rightist” and sent to a labor camp for 22 years. Others in the xiangsheng world noticed, and the experiments ended.

* * *

These examples from art illustrate a condition of life in Communist Chinese society that, although it is omnipresent and substantial, foreigners seldom notice. From the beginnings of the Communist regime until the present, there have always been popular thoughts, feelings, and initiatives that have been distinct from political labels and prescriptions. A concept like “ordinary life values” deserves a much larger scope in analyses of China than it normally gets. In the 1950s, when factories, schools, hospitals, and other institutions were converted into Party-led “work units,” people did not ask, “How can I contribute most to the collective?” but “How can I get the most for my family from the new system?” Today, a farmer getting out of bed in the plains of Gansu province will be thinking not about “the thoughts of Xi Jinping in the new era” but about things like the day’s weather and food, clothing, medicine, and shelter for his or her family. If a political thought does occur to the farmer, it will likely be about a local bully, not about the “cult” of Falun Gong or the traitorous Dalai Lama.

This distinction between unofficial and official life holds from the bottom of society to the top. The actual life of the red elite that Ha Jin depicts could hardly differ more from its officially projected images of giving speeches, doing inspection tours, and in other ways focusing on “service to the people.” The questions “What best fits the system?” and “What best serves my interests?” are asked in parallel by people at all levels, and they seldom have the same answers. In his memoirs, the dissident physicist Fang Lizhi recalls how Teng Teng, vice-chair of China’s State Education Commission in July 1989, summoned American Ambassador James Lilley to berate him about how the U.S. was allowing Chinese students who had spoken out against the Tiananmen massacre to remain in the U.S. indefinitely. An hour after returning to the embassy, Lilley got a telephone call from Teng Teng’s secretary asking him to give special attention to Teng’s wife and children, who were seeking that same “indefinite residence” status in the U.S. There are plenty of other examples like this. The “split consciousness” of Chinese people in recent times has been widely noted.

Increasing repression under Xi, who came to power in 2012, has made it difficult for Chinese writers to present unapproved history. A few try, though, and with admirable success. Ian Johnson’s Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future (2023) shows how a dozen or so writers and filmmakers, in loose association and using rudimentary tools, have been uncovering evidence of labor camps, famines, massacres, and other inglorious historical events that the government claims to be nonexistent. Johnson’s “underground historians” work as if with hand chisels in salt mines, digging out, with great effort and at great risk, empirical results that have unchallengeable solidity.

Ha Jin is a comrade in their mission but uses different tools and reaps a different kind of harvest. Replacing the hand chisel with a deft pen fueled by reading, imagination, and empathy, he reveals mental life. He and Johnson write of history that lies “beyond the seam,” as it were, and for Westerners this offers rare value. Most books by Western experts on China, including a few recent ones, are written as if there were no unofficial China to speak of.

People living inside China already know about the border between official and ordinary life, but they still could gain much from reading both these books. We should hope that good translations will appear. Ha Jin’s accounts of actual life at the top would come as revelations to many, especially the young. A centuries-old Chinese literary genre called yanyi—“historical fiction”—survived into the Mao years in oral storytelling and underground “hand-copied volumes.” These works recounted adventures, both true and imagined, of Mao, Zhou, Lin Biao, and other top Communists. Skulduggery abounds and the halos are gone, but the characters themselves are flat. There is no view into their inner lives—as there richly is in Ha Jin’s novel. A reader in China today might find his accounts explosive. Oddly, we might say that the most extraordinary achievement of the novel is its brilliantly credible evocation of the ordinary.

Of course the regime will ban any translation. But still it would reach many people. Today perhaps 80 million or more Internet users in China use virtual private networks to jump the government’s firewall—and that doesn’t count tens of millions of overseas Chinese.

1. See Liu Binyan, “An Unnatural Disaster,” The New York Review, April 8, 1993.↩

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the China in the World podcast, Carnegie China launched a series of lookback episodes, using audio clips from previous interviews to put current international issues in context. For the fifth and final episode in this series, the podcast looks back on 10 years of U.S.-China trade relations.

Trade ties between the U.S. and China have undergone significant changes since the launch of the China in the World podcast. In March 2012, the United States, the EU, and Japan filed a dispute with the World Trade Organization over China’s quota on exporting rare earth metals. That same year, China’s trade surplus with the U.S. reached an all-time high of $315 billion. In 2015, China became the largest bilateral trade partner of the U.S., surpassing Canada for the first time. In March 2018, the Trump administration announced tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports, kicking off the U.S.-China trade war. After bilateral negotiations with Beijing broke down in May 2019, the Trump administration raised tariffs from 10 to 25 percent on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. Finally, in January 2020, the “Phase One” trade deal was signed, relaxing some U.S. tariffs and requiring China to import an additional $200 billion worth of American goods for the next two years. After coming to office in January 2021, the Biden administration maintained the Section 301 tariffs on China and, after the Phase One trade deal expired at the end of 2021, U.S. officials stated that China failed to meet its commitments under the deal. In 2023, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo traveled to China and agreed to establish working groups on commercial and financial issues. However, negotiations over structural economic issues such as subsidies, investment restrictions, and non-tariff barriers remain at a standstill. This episode helps shed light on the evolution of U.S.-China trade relations over the past 10 years.

Bilateral trade between China and Saudi Arabia has surged in recent years. Since 2013, China has been the largest market for Saudi oil, last year accounting for 21.7 percent of the country’s oil exports. Despite a global trade surplus, China consistently runs a trade deficit with Saudi Arabia.

In recent years, Beijing has made efforts to facilitate the settlement of China-Saudi oil trade in renminbi (RMB) rather than in U.S. dollars, a move that would steel China’s trade from financial sanctions and disrupt the global market for oil. While the RMB represents only 7 percent of total global trade payments, it is used in 23 percent of China’s goods trade. This share has doubled since 2017, according to China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC). If RMB trade with Saudi Arabia is similar to the RMB’s global share of usage in Chinese goods trade, then, at a pace of almost 2 million barrels of Saudi oil per day, it is possible that about 100 billion RMB (U.S.$15 billion) worth of Saudi oil is already being settled in Chinese currency annually. Unfortunately, this calculation is hypothetical. The PBOC does not release a statistic precise enough to confirm the share—if any—of China-Saudi oil trade settled in RMB, and neither the PBOC nor Saudi Arabia’s central bank releases the composition of its foreign exchange reserves, which would offer more conclusive evidence. For 23 percent of all Chinese goods imports to be settled in RMB, it would be surprising if the country’s energy imports, its second largest overall import category, did not contribute to that share.

Regardless of whether China-Saudi RMB-settled oil trade currently totals 100 billion RMB or zero, Beijing has successfully erected the architecture to facilitate future RMB settlement.

De-dollarizing even a portion of Saudi oil trade would help China secure reliable energy flow even in the event of a future crisis, or under the stress of what China’s leader Xi Jinping has characterized as “extreme scenarios.” China’s leaders know that its dollar reserves, like Russia’s, can be frozen, and the holdings and transactions of Chinese firms frozen and blocked. Such moves, perhaps even more so than the similar sanctions on the Russian economy, would place extraordinary stress on China’s economy, which is more complexly intertwined with global trade than Russia’s. Without a reliable way to pay for imports, Beijing might struggle to access commodities useful in wartime.

If China can successfully develop a non-dollar oil trading architecture with Saudi Arabia in the coming years, Beijing may find itself able to withstand financial sanctions directed at China’s oil imports. The more that China-Saudi economic integration facilitates a durable, non-dollar RMB-trade settlement zone, the more insulated China-Saudi trade in oil can be from U.S. financial sanctions—even in a world where the dollar remains dominant globally, and price discovery for oil remains in dollars.

It is with this objective in mind that Xi explicitly asked Saudi leaders to accept RMB settlement. “The Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange platform will be fully utilized for RMB settlement in oil and gas trade,” he said in Riyadh in December 2022. “The two sides could start currency swap cooperation, deepen digital currency cooperation and advance the m-CBDC Bridge project,” the name for the platform designed to facilitate cross-border trade in China’s digital currency.

Saudi leaders have since noted that the Kingdom would consider accepting RMB as a payment currency. The RMB is the fifth most-used international payment currency, second-largest trade financing currency, and the fifth most common currency for FX spot transactions, according to SWIFT, the financial messaging service. The RMB’s share of usage in global trade finance has more than tripled over the past two years, to 5.80 percent of all trade finance, overtaking the euro in September 2023.

Although its total global use lags behind the dollar, euro, and yen, the RMB is easier to use as a settlement currency now than it was just five years ago. The People’s Bank of China has implemented various measures designed to facilitate oil trade in RMB, including opening a bank branch in Riyadh that clears RMB and establishing a commodities exchange, the Shanghai International Energy Exchange, that serves as a working forward market for oil to help traders hedge the RMB exposure necessary for transacting.

Gulf countries supply China with over 5 million barrels of crude oil per day, half of China’s oil imports. If, in the future, China were to pay for all these imports in RMB, Beijing would reduce its overall exposure to U.S. dollars by U.S.$173 billion each year, at the current dollar price of U.S.$90 per barrel. Since this figure is equivalent to 28 percent of China’s RMB-settled trade today, paying for Gulf oil in RMB would mark a notable increase in RMB usage. In other words, while $173 billion amounts to only 6 percent of China’s total annual goods imports, that sum would increase the overall share of Chinese trade settled in RMB from 23 percent to 29 percent, or almost a third of all goods imports.

Beijing and Riyadh would find their growing financial cooperation in RMB naturally reinforced by trade effects, too. As Riyadh settles more of its oil trade in RMB, the Saudi treasury will collect RMB that it will need to spend. Since the derivatives market for RMB is thin, risk management tools are minimal, and trade finance is limited, it would be risky for Saudi Arabia to hold RMB indefinitely. Instead, RMB accumulated from the oil trade must be spent on RMB-denominated Chinese goods and services. Chinese construction contracts would be one likely destination; Chinese firms have been solicited to build Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s new city in the desert, NEOM. This channel, which would facilitate Saudi Arabia’s recycling of RMB, is already well developed; China’s export of goods and services to Saudi Arabia has more than doubled by value since 2018, and China’s share of Saudi imports has increased from 15 to 22 percent over the same period. The need to spend accumulated RMB would provide self-sustaining logic for Saudi Arabia’s participation in Xi’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative, which in 2021 directed 28.5 percent of annual funds into the Middle East and North Africa.

Riyadh can also invest accumulated RMB in projects back in China via financial pathways that Chinese authorities are racing to streamline. Chinese regulators have reportedly approved the application of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund, the Public Investment Fund, for Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor status, which would permit the fund to invest directly in the Chinese stock market using RMB. In March of this year, Saudi Arabia’s largest company, oil giant Aramco, purchased a 10 percent stake in a Chinese petrochemicals company and is expanding its refinery footprint along China’s coast. The company may ultimately float a portion of ownership shares on Hong Kong’s exchange.

Development of this relationship will help Beijing financially secure its oil trade at the same time that China’s leaders pursue parallel efforts to secure physical supply lines. While academic consensus has adeptly concluded that it is not the intention of Beijing to seek to displace the dollar’s global role, establishing an RMB trade settlement network that can avoid the pain of U.S. financial sanctions on strategic imports is a priority. Only if Beijing believes its strategic trade is sufficiently insulated from any U.S.-led program of anti-China sanctions can China’s leaders confidently confront U.S. power in the Pacific.

ChinaFile and The New York Review of Books co-hosted a panel discussion with Chinese journalists working from abroad. Participants included reporter, editor, and digital media entrepreneur Annie Jieping Zhang, New York Times columnist Li Yuan, investigative journalist and essayist Jiang Xue, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ian Johnson. ChinaFile Editor-in-Chief Susan Jakes moderated the conversation.

The past several years have seen declines in both the number of Chinese students studying in the U.S. and U.S. students studying China.

We asked Chinese students studying, or who have recently completed their studies, in the U.S. why they chose to go to school in America and how the tense relationship between the U.S. and China has affected their studies and post-graduation plans. —The Editors

In the last several years, an under-appreciated element of China’s retreat from the global stage has been diminished educational exchange, and particularly that exchange’s impact on students. During the height of the pandemic, tens of thousands of students globally waited for official approval to enter or return to China for their studies, while countries such as the U.S., U.K., and Australia, among others, reopened their borders to foreign students. While some institutions were able to make special arrangements for student exchanges earlier, China fully resumed student visa processing as a part of full easing on immigration guidelines in January of this year. However, steep flight costs and logistical challenges have barred student exchange from returning to pre-pandemic levels. The Chinese government is yet to release data on the foreign student population from 2020 through 2023.

Those students able to travel to China during the COVID-19 pandemic experienced tremendous social and political changes in daily life, including the challenges of stringent zero-COVID restrictions and their eventual relaxation, President Xi Jinping’s securing of a third term, a major economic slowdown, and new classroom dynamics and challenges to academic freedom of speech, most recently in the backdrop of the Patriotic Education Draft Law.

What is often called “people-to-people” exchange is one of the last remaining areas that has not been completely submerged into competition. Similarly, it is also an area that enables generalizations and assumptions to be challenged by going to and experiencing a country directly. How detrimental would removing this integral part of cultural understanding be?

Considering these challenges and changes, are foreign students who study in China still able to form meaningful relationships with their Chinese counterparts, despite a tightening on educational channels? Are these students able to freely pursue their chosen areas of research? Are they experiencing a version of the country that best represents it? And how can China shape a more stable environment for international students and encourage greater student exchange, beyond that of senior scholars? —The Editors

In his article “Authoritarian Privacy” for the University of Chicago Law Review, Mark Jia writes: “Privacy laws are traditionally associated with democracy. Yet autocracies increasingly have them.” In this ChinaFile Q&A, Jia and Samm Sacks engage in an exchange about what has motivated the Chinese government to enact and enforce a range of laws on information privacy and the implications for understanding the role of privacy laws in non-democratic states.

Samm Sacks: Outside observers have commented that China appears to have a split identity when it comes to privacy: rules limit how firms handle citizens’ data, while the state has unchecked surveillance powers. Is this dichotomy accurate? What does privacy mean in China, particularly in the wake of COVID, when the scale and reach of government surveillance and the use of data-intensive technologies for tracking and monitoring appears to have intensified?

Mark Jia: I agree with the view that China’s privacy laws are meant to preserve a broad “exceptional zone” for state surveillance in areas like intelligence collection, law enforcement, and domestic stability maintenance. I agree too that a lot of the rules and their enforcement have focused on how companies handle citizens’ data. For example, the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL for short), China’s first comprehensive privacy law enacted in 2021, establishes greater compliance obligations for major Internet platforms, such as a requirement to establish an independent body to “supervise” their privacy protection work.

But I think the reality is more complex than a private-public dichotomy would suggest. Most notably, the PIPL explicitly applies to state organs. The aim is not just to discipline firms but also lower-level bureaucratic entities that are abusing or misusing citizens’ data. To take one somewhat mundane example, my article discusses a case in which a local prosecutor discovers that a county-level agricultural bureau has been disclosing information on machinery purchase subsidies online without removing the personal information of over 1,000 farmers. The local procuratorate (prosecutor’s office) initiated a procedure that essentially asked the bureau to fix these violations, and the bureau complied.

The application of privacy law to state entities stems from a realization that some of the most egregious instances of data abuses in recent years, especially during COVID, emanated from state or quasi-state entities, not just private individuals or market actors. Most famously, perhaps, local officials in Henan once assigned red COVID health codes to a group of citizens to prevent them from traveling to protest the freezing of their bank deposits. Authorities have been sufficiently alarmed by these practices that as early as 2020, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) issued a notice urging governments to follow personal information protection guidelines in their pandemic-control work. (At this point, the PIPL had not yet been enacted.)

I take this as supporting my general argument that China’s privacy laws were enacted in large part to highlight its responsive governance in the face of new vulnerabilities and dependencies that have arisen out of China’s data-driven society. If you look at how the national legislature and state media have framed China’s recent privacy laws, they have sought to position the central Party-state as a champion of individual privacy rights against incursion from various digital bad actors—individuals, firms, even local governments. Notably missing from this list of privacy intruders is the central Party-state itself, of course, despite its leading role as a surveillant. In this regard, privacy law may also be a means of distracting the population from the central Party-state’s own privacy incursions by redirecting attention to others.

You write that of the 130 countries that have enacted privacy laws, only about half are considered “free” by the nonprofit Freedom House. Why did you choose China as a case study for the role privacy laws play in these countries and to develop your theory of “authoritarian privacy”?

The most immediate aim of the piece is to explain China’s turn to privacy law. I do not claim that China’s situation is universal. But I do think that a close study of China’s privacy story can help draw out some hypotheses as to why authoritarian countries have been enacting privacy laws at their present speed and scale. In the article, I discuss four objectives that motivated the central government to enact privacy laws: to support its digital economy, to expand its geopolitical influence, to enhance its national security, and (most unappreciated in my view) to respond to data-related social grievances. Not all of these motivations apply to every authoritarian ruler. China’s geopolitical goals, for instance, are decidedly more ambitious than those of Saudi Arabia or Venezuela. But it’s also the case that at least some of these motivations likely present in other authoritarian examples. The government in Vietnam, for instance, has also been highly invested in growing its digital economy, deepening its surveillance state, protecting data security, and addressing digital abuses online. Vietnam is quite close, I believe, to enacting its own information privacy law.

Moreover, I think China is an interesting case because it is both the world’s leading surveillance state and a home to comprehensive personal data protections along lines inspired by the European Union’s Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is considered the gold standard in information privacy protection law today. Because China crystallizes that apparent paradox, I thought it could help suggest dynamics that might exist elsewhere.

We often talk about the Chinese government as a monolithic entity, especially when it comes to data. What are the ways in which Party-state actors at both central and local levels have responded to the so-called “datafication of China,” and what are some examples of their competing interests in datafication?

I draw on a definition of “datafication” as the process of “taking all aspects of life and turning them into data.” I think you’re absolutely right that central and local governments in China are not always 100 percent aligned in their data-related interests and priorities, including with respect to privacy. For example, some local governments that are highly invested in supporting local industry may be less willing to saddle those companies with the higher compliance costs associated with strict adherence to national data protection laws. On the other end of the spectrum, some localities may carry out central mandates more aggressively than central leaders might prefer. For example, a common pandemic-control measure implemented in residential communities required residents to use facial recognition to access their buildings. This became a sore spot for many. In 2021, the Supreme People’s Court included, in a legal notice clarifying the law on facial-recognition technology in civil cases, a provision explicitly calling on all people’s courts to “support” residents who request alternative methods of identification if their building managers mandate facial recognition technology for access. So here you see the center starting to reign in local practices that were initially implemented to carry out central mandates.

What has been the role of Chinese courts in enforcing privacy protections?

The PIPL provides for both administrative enforcement and judicial enforcement. The most prominent cases of enforcement, the ones we hear about in the news, tend to involve administrative processes. But courts have played an important role as well. It’s still early to draw general conclusions, as the PIPL is a relatively new law and legal disputes necessarily take time to work their way through the legal system. But early evidence on the ground suggests a few interesting trends.

First, in addition to what you might think of as ordinary civil suits against privacy violators or criminal prosecutions for data fraud and theft, we see a rise in public interest data protection suits brought by local prosecutors. In one Hangzhou case, for example, a local prosecutor brought a public interest suit against a short-video app for violating the privacy rights of minors. The court supervised a mediation agreement that required the firm to follow a compliance schedule, to pay out compensation to various children’s welfare groups, and to issue a public apology in a state-owned newspaper. Some of these prosecutor-initiated public interest suits have targeted state entities—usually for a failure to adequately supervise privacy rights protection in their jurisdictions, but sometimes for direct privacy violations too.

The second trend to note is more of a caveat. China’s law-enforcement apparatus may be mobilized now to carry out the privacy law’s socially protective mandate (and to boast about their success online), but these same agencies are also charged with balancing assertions of privacy rights against considerable state interests. In one case, for example, a Shandong court denied a plaintiff’s request for a pharmacy to delete her personal information because the pharmacy was not authorized to do so under local public health regulations devised for pandemic control. This shows that there are hard limits to how far law enforcers are willing to go.

Policymakers in Washington, D.C. have expressed concerns that Chinese-owned software applications threaten Americans’ data security and privacy—that Chinese laws compelling companies to cooperate with intelligence services mean Americans’ sensitive data could end up in Chinese government hands. Are Washington’s anxieties warranted based on your research into how Beijing has enacted privacy laws?

A key question for Chinese policymakers when drafting privacy legislation was how to further its various objectives (including predominantly domestic goals) while maintaining flexibility for state surveillance. It is well established that Chinese firms are required to share information with intelligence services under various laws, including the National Intelligence Law. The PIPL does not fundamentally alter these obligations, and I have seen no commentaries suggesting otherwise.

This replicates a broader pattern that fairly describes much of Chinese law generally: even as the Party-state has legislated in various areas to serve its national objectives, it has done so through a legal regime that is carefully crafted to keep its own hands untied in core areas of national interest, including state security. In other words, the Party-state has sought to extract the benefits of law while minimizing its costs. I would hypothesize that a similar calculus also helps explain the substance of privacy laws in other authoritarian settings.

It’s refreshing to hear a perspective focusing on domestic factors underpinning China’s privacy regime because so much discussion I hear about developments inside China look at everything through the lens of U.S. national security and great power competition. Why did you choose to frame your argument as a domestic legitimization story?

I do see this paper as offering a corrective to a troubling tendency now in our national discourse to understand China primarily through the lens of U.S.-China competition. This is evocative of the Cold War insofar as normative ideological and geopolitical frameworks are increasingly used to structure our descriptive understandings of reality.

Many analyses in the think tank literature frame the PIPL as a top-down effort to grow China’s digital economy, to enhance the country’s security, and to expand China’s data influence abroad. These explanations aren’t wrong for what they say, but they miss a critical part of the story: the Party-state’s perceived need to address data privacy incursions through socially protective legislation. This is how privacy law is discussed in Party reports, legislative documents, and state media, and it is how prosecutors, courts, and other agencies have framed their enforcement work as well. Party-state documents rarely shy away from boasting of geopolitical goals where they are relevant, and yet official PIPL-related documents scarcely mention them.

The reason why I think a lot of existing explanations miss or understate the domestic legitimation piece of the story is because those accounts tend to take a fairly reductionist view of China, either as a monolith that is locked in geopolitical competition with the West, or as featuring an all-powerful totalitarian government that can essentially impose its will upon its population. But not every major piece of legislation in China today is principally motivated by geopolitics, and despite Xi Jinping’s ascendance as paramount leader in China, his rule continues to require a high level of responsiveness. Consider, in this regard, Xi’s abrupt reversal of the country’s pandemic policies after the lockdown protests last fall.

How would you answer the question raised by Jamie Horsley (in a piece by this title): “How will China’s privacy law apply to the Chinese state?” How does the PIPL apply to state organs, and how does it apply to companies? Is it empowering security authorities to demand greater data access from the private sector because now they have a legal authority they can cite in making data requests?

While there is an entire section in Chapter II of the PIPL devoted to state organs, that section is fairly abstract. It states that the law generally applies to state organs’ handling of personal information, while enumerating several exceptions at fairly high levels of generality. The result is that much is left to implementation. From what I have seen so far, state organs in China have sometimes been disciplined for privacy violations, often for what you might think of as inadvertent publication of private information, rather than any sort of malicious abuse of personal data. I gave an example earlier from Jiangxi of an agricultural bureau that (accidentally, it seems) disclosed the personal information of farmers online in the course of reporting local subsidies. I’ve seen other cases where a government organ was disciplined for failing to remove identifying information from various documents posted in the “Government Information Disclosure” column of its website. I would guess that drafters of the PIPL envisioned enforcement of the law against state organs for more serious violations, given the kinds of national controversies discussed earlier that helped pave the way for the Law’s enactment. For now though, initial enforcement patterns as to state agencies seem to reflect a measure of institutional and political caution in the early days of the law’s implementation.

China’s technology firms have sometimes balked at sharing their data with government agencies, and have often cited a lack of legal basis as grounds for refusal. My impression is that this dynamic is beginning to change, not only because of the PIPL’s clearer specification of legal authorities, but because the state-led campaigns targeting the tech sector that started in late 2020 and 2021 have fundamentally shifted the relationship between the technology sector and the central Party-state. As Professor Angela Zhang has well documented, the Party-state had employed a relatively lax approach to tech regulation in the years before Jack Ma’s fateful address in late 2020. Now that the pendulum has swung the other direction, I would imagine technology firms are more willing to share data with central regulators when asked.

I agree that the space for companies to push back is shrinking as the Party institutionalizes its power over the private sector. I have wondered what this dynamic means for the longstanding push and pull between economic goals and national and domestic security goals of the leadership. Economic growth goals have long been a backstop against implementation of some of the worst or most hardline elements of China’s cybersecurity and data regulations because officials recognize pushing companies too hard could come at a cost to investment in their jurisdictions. We saw this with data localization, with data access requests, and other cybersecurity-related audits where companies sometimes had more space to maneuver. It sounds like you are somewhat pessimistic that this space will continue, but I do wonder about it given the economic pressure facing China’s leaders. How do economic imperatives impact the way China’s privacy law is implemented and enforced?

If China’s economic prospects worsen, it’s plausible to me that the center may decide to relax enforcement of not only its privacy standards, but other laws that create regulatory burdens for firms in areas like antitrust, consumer protection, and financial regulation. The costs to popular support associated with a deteriorating economy may be steeper than the legitimation and securitization benefits of a zealously enforced privacy law, especially at the margins. But I think the old days of completely lax regulations are over. Central leaders have come to appreciate more fully the political risks of overseeing unchecked technology firms helmed by ambitious entrepreneurs sitting atop mountains of sensitive data. They know too much now to turn back the clock completely.

On May 25, 2023, The New York Times published my guest essay “Like It or Not, America Needs Chinese Scientists,” on American higher education’s engagement with China in the STEM fields. The article was subsequently translated by the Chinese State-run Global Times newspaper without my prior knowledge or permission, appearing both in print and digital forms.

The Global Times omitted and altered key parts of the essay. While a few of the changes simply shorten the piece or cut passages that might not be as interesting to Chinese readers, most of the deletions and changes eliminate or blunt criticism of China, altering the tone of the essay. The Global Times also removed all of the links that appeared in my article, presumably because at least some of them led to sites that are generally inaccessible within China.

Fortunately, The New York Times also did a complete Chinese translation in both simplified and traditional characters.

Below, I offer an annotated English version of the original essay with notes on the changes the Global Times made in its Chinese translation. Language the Global Times did not translate is highlighted in purple; sections that were notably altered are in yellow, with annotated notes you can click on to read.

Presumably because of requests from The New York Times, the Global Times translation of the article was taken down from the Internet. However, documenting differences between the original and the Global Times translation can help us to understand what Chinese censors might find acceptable, although the standard of what can be published certainly changes over time and in different contexts.

Like It or Not, America Needs Chinese Scientists

May 25, 2023

By Dan Murphy

Mr. Murphy has been involved in fostering academic links with China for more than two decades.

The Chinese Communist Party has accomplished something rare in U.S. politics these days: uniting Democrats and Republicans around a common enemy.

Unfortunately, frenzied concern about Chinese influence threatens America’s ability to attract the top talent it needs to maintain global leadership in science and higher education.

The damage caused by the Department of Justice’s now-disbanded China Initiative still reverberates. Designed to counter economic espionage and national security threats from China, it resulted—in some cases—in researchers and academics of Chinese descent being placed under house arrest or taken away in handcuffs on charges of hiding ties to China, cases that ended in acquittal or were later dropped.

The program resulted in few prosecutions before being shut down last year. But it upended lives and careers, and created an atmosphere of fear. Some ethnic Chinese scientists disproportionately feel that their ethnicity and connections to China inhibit their professional progress and their chances of obtaining—and willingness to apply for—research funding in the United States. A survey of scientists of Chinese descent at American universities released last year found that significant percentages of respondents felt unwelcome in the United States, with 86 percent saying the current climate makes it more difficult for the United States to attract top international students than it was five years ago.

This should be setting off alarm bells in Washington. Economic and military advantage is contingent on superior science, technology and innovation—and the competition for talent is global.

Studies show that the best science is often done by international research teams, presumably because researchers can select from a broader range of potential partners. When we discourage international collaboration in the absence of clear concerns about national security, we limit the pool of possible collaborators, potentially weakening the research.

This is especially true when it comes to China, which has become a scientific power.

China was second only to the United States in total spending on research and development as of 2018, according to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Chinese publishing of research papers has grown, by one measure, to 25 percent in 2020 from less than 1 percent of the global total before 1990.

This work is of increasingly high quality. According to some calculations, Chinese papers are cited (an indication of a paper’s impact) by academics in their own work more often than those of any other country. Academics also choose their partners based on who can best help them to advance their work, and researchers at American universities have for years chosen co-authors from China more than from any other country, according to a report from the National Science Foundation. Questions have been raised about Chinese academic fraud and low-quality patents, but more work is needed to assess how widespread those problems are.

Concerns over academic collaboration with China are legitimate. Under the Chinese model, civilian organizations and businesses are sometimes obliged to support the country’s military apparatus. I’ve heard enough to believe that some Chinese students in America may be reporting what happens in class to agents in China and that some Chinese scholars may have undisclosed agreements to relay what they have learned back home.

China’s government has contributed to the deterioration of academic cooperation. Conducting research in China is harder than it has been in years because of an increased emphasis there on ideology and national security, an ever-widening scope of topics deemed sensitive, decreasing academic freedom and, until they were ended last December, the smothering effect of nearly three years of zero-Covid policies.

But let’s not race China to the bottom. If America fails to attract top international research talent, that harms U.S. prospects for scientific advancement and, ultimately, American economic and national strength.

There is no doubt that present circumstances call for more transparency among scholars. Universities need to lead this change, whereby scholars pay greater attention to the implications of collaborating with foreign scientists. For example, Sweden has developed frameworks for assessing risks through more structured due diligence of research partners, including assessing complications that might arise when collaborating with scientists from authoritarian countries.

But we can’t let this get in the way of ensuring that the United States remains the best place in the world to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics and entices graduates from abroad to remain here after completing their degrees. Yet the number of U.S. visas granted to Chinese students has plummeted. To reverse this, visa processes should be streamlined, backlogs cleared and talented individuals given expanded opportunities to obtain green cards. America is training and educating some of the world’s brightest people; we need to get more of them and keep them here.

Likewise, more Americans need to be learning about China. The number of American students studying in China was already declining from a peak of about 15,000 in 2011-12; during the pandemic that plummeted to less than 400. China is, and will continue to be, a critical global player; understanding its internal dynamics will be important for people operating in a range of fields. Yet we are at risk of having an entire generation of Americans who know little about China.

We should immediately restart the Fulbright program in China, which sent thousands of Chinese and Americans between the two countries for research and learning until it was halted during the Trump administration, and increase federal funding for Chinese studies programs at our universities.

Keeping American higher education open to the world is not about helping China to become strong, nor should we delude ourselves about Beijing’s intentions. It’s about exuding confidence in the strength and virtues of our system to ensure that America remains the best country in the world for learning and research.

Dan Murphy is executive director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School and former executive director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard.

Twenty days before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Chinese president Xi Jinping signed a remarkable joint statement with Vladimir Putin, which proclaimed that there were “no limits to Sino-Russian cooperation . . . no forbidden zones.” When Russian tanks began rolling through Ukrainian territory, China was at pains to signal that it had received no advance word about Moscow’s offensive, and it has sought ever since to avoid displaying any outright allegiance to the war aims of its no-limits friend. This has required Beijing to constantly, awkwardly evade stating its position on an attack that clearly violated international law and that has damaged China’s security interests by weakening its authoritarian partner, Russia, while drawing Europe and the United States dramatically closer together.

Xi’s characterization of a friendship without forbidden zones looks like a miscalculation, but it was surely the result of careful geopolitical deliberation. His strongly assertive rule since 2013, as well as China’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy since at least the Western financial crisis of 2007-2008, have been premised on the belief that the United States is in steep and probably irreversible decline as a global power, and that it is therefore ripe for a challenge.

The last time Beijing placed a major bet on the prospect of U.S. decline was a hugely significant turning point for both China and the world. American memories of the resumption of diplomatic contacts between Beijing and Washington in 1972 after a quarter-century without any are dominated by stories of Richard Nixon’s Machiavellian cleverness in sending Henry Kissinger to conduct secret talks with China’s top leaders. Their aim was to recruit the world’s most populous country into an opportunistic, tacit alliance against the Soviet Union, with which it had had a falling-out a decade earlier.

In seeking to partner with Washington, however, Beijing was following a different logic. As Frank Dikötter relates in China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower, it believed that the U.S., bogged down badly in Vietnam, was doomed to decline. This made it less of a long-term challenger to China, which gave Beijing all the more reason to consider the Soviet Union its greatest threat. Just three years earlier, the two countries had exchanged live fire in an ill-defined border area on the Ussuri River, with Moscow hinting at the possibility of a preemptive nuclear strike against China.

Like other authors of recent Western histories of this period, Dikötter attributes most of the early initiative in the reestablishment of diplomatic ties between Washington and Beijing to the Chinese, not to Nixon. Beijing’s preoccupation with Moscow did not fade quickly, either. Dikötter quotes one senior Chinese foreign policy official who said of the Soviets in 1977, “They are more imperialist than the worst imperialists.” As this view helps illustrate, the story of China in the post-Mao period—which came to be known as the era of reform and opening after long stretches of autarky and violent upheaval brought about by experiments varyingly aimed at producing socioeconomic egalitarianism and rapid economic growth—is as given to mythmaking by Chinese propagandists as it was to Westerners.

* * *

In condensed form, the more or less standard Western account of this era goes something like this. When Mao succumbed from a reported combination of Parkinson’s and Lou Gehrig’s diseases in 1976, after 43 years of rule during which his supreme authority was seldom seriously challenged, China lucked out with the elevation of Deng Xiaoping, a talented capitalist reformer and putative moderate, as his successor. The high-growth years of the 1980s and 1990s under the serenely smiling Deng, familiar to Western audiences from multiple Time magazine covers, are usually recounted with an air of breezy predestination. As he pursued sensible policies, the down-to-earth Deng spouted now-famous aphorisms—such as “One crosses the river by feeling for the stones” and “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches the mice”—that were meant to showcase his agreeable pragmatism.

Even better known was another statement attributed to Deng: “To get rich is glorious.” Could there be a pithier statement to capture the spirit of a time when China was blowing past one economic milestone after another? First, in places like Anhui and Sichuan provinces, peasants were freed from the rigid collectivism of the Mao era and allowed to sell crops from their own plots. Next, industrial workers began to receive bonuses incentivizing individual effort, marking a break with the era of the so-called iron rice bowl, when everyone had the same low wages and subsisted on ration coupons.

Deng then welcomed foreign investment, carefully at first, in a few places like Shenzhen that were designated as “special economic zones” (SEZs), which were like rocket boosters for the country’s GDP growth. In short order, Shenzhen went from an obscure fishing village to the country’s brightest economic success, growing at a 58 percent annual rate between 1980 and 1984. The SEZs churned out ever-larger quantities of textiles and light manufactured goods from children’s toys to simple electronics, and China’s exports increased fivefold between 1978 and 1988.

Next, Shanghai was redeveloped as a spectacular modern financial center and international showcase for the new China. In 2001 China joined the World Trade Organization, with American backing and enthusiasm from Western multinationals, and was well on its way to becoming a capitalist juggernaut.

The only hiccup—for that is how it is usually presented—was the mass student and worker protests centered on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, which ended when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ordered a crackdown in which probably more than two thousand people were killed. But after a halfhearted quarantine by Western countries and a challenge by old-line conservatives within the CCP over his embrace of capitalism, the 87-year-old Deng toured China’s industrializing south in 1992 to reinvigorate his reforms, and within a couple of years the economy took off once again. This is often offered as proof of another aphorism attributed, wrongly, to Deng: “Practice is the sole criterion of truth”—in other words, it’s the results that count. And from that perspective, who could argue with the results, since after Mao’s death China shot from an average annual income of less than $200 per person to $12,000 today, with an economy that rivals that of the U.S. in size?

* * *

Dikötter’s is one of a number of recent books arguing that this standard account of the post-Mao years gets a great many facts wrong. Getting them right is important not only for understanding that history but also for assessing a variety of intensely relevant contemporary concerns, from the sources of authority and the nature of politics in the CCP to how one might best understand Xi’s rule.

Two of these books, Dikötter’s China After Mao and Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s by Julian Gewirtz, reflect the complexity of such questions in how strongly they differ in their interpretations of this period. The focus of a third book, Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise by Susan Shirk, is much closer to the present, but the interpretational tensions that arise between Dikötter and Gewirtz on the one hand and the standard account on the other, as well as the different stresses offered by these two historians, further highlight the difficulties faced even by someone as deeply informed as Shirk in trying to assess today’s China. She is a longtime China scholar at the University of California at San Diego and a former deputy assistant secretary of state who first traveled to the country in 1971.

Both Dikötter and Gewirtz begin their accounts of the early post-Mao era with discussions of Hua Guofeng, a transitional figure who has been largely forgotten in China and receives little attention in the historiography of the period. While virtually on his deathbed, Mao banished Deng, who during his long career had risen to high positions in the Party, been purged by Mao during the Cultural Revolution, and been brought back to power in 1974. Almost at the same time, Mao elevated Hua, hitherto a nearly powerless and undistinguished premier—head of the government—to the position of first vice-chairman of the CCP, making him Mao’s designated successor.

In both these books, as well as in a valuable new biography, “Avec toi au pouvoir, je suis tranquille”: Hua Guofeng (1921-2008) by the French historian Stéphane Malsagne, Hua comes across as an important reformist in the early post-Mao years, experimenting with the loosening of central economic controls and engaging with the capitalist world in order to position China for rapid economic growth.¹ Deng usually receives sole credit for such things. Hua’s ambitions depended on the large-scale importation of Western industrial equipment, financed by borrowing from Western banks—China’s “foreign leap forward”—in order to jumpstart the country’s moribund socialist economy without radically overhauling its structure.

More interesting still is the depiction in both these books of the intense infighting at the highest level of Chinese politics. Mao’s death unleashed ambitions for power, and nearly all the major figures practiced vicious score-settling to obtain it, usually under cover of subterfuge. That is because virtually everyone, save perhaps the holdouts of the radicalism of the Cultural Revolution known as the Gang of Four, wanted to avoid a situation in which power would again be as highly concentrated as it had been under Mao.

It was Hua, ironically, who rehabilitated the banished Deng. But once he grasped Deng’s ambition, he quickly set out to discredit his more pedigreed rival as someone who had subverted the Party’s authority during Mao’s final year of life by secretly promoting large demonstrations at Tiananmen to channel popular disgruntlement following the death of Mao’s longest-serving lieutenant, Zhou Enlai.

Deng quickly repaid his rival in the same coin, using well-placed surrogates to ridicule Hua as an empty suit for having used an ill-chosen slogan known as the “two whatevers” to bolster his legitimacy. The phrase was intended to signal that in leading the country Hua would make decisions on the basis of whatever he believed Mao would have done. The impression of being a shallow copycat was reinforced by his emulation of Mao’s language, dress, and even propaganda portraiture, all of which Hua, without a strong power base, believed would help establish his authority. He was happy to spread the story that a dying Mao had told him, “With you in charge, I am at ease” (from which Malsagne’s book takes its title), but he moved swiftly away from many of the central precepts of Maoism. For a country that was in a mood for a break with the traumas of the late Mao era, though, Hua’s choice of style proved a politically fatal mistake.

* * *

Deng, a clever opportunist, inveighed against “feudalism” in China, by which he meant leaders remaining in office for life, choosing their own successors, and engaging in the highly personalized style of rule practiced by Mao. Criticism like this unmistakably targeted Hua and further bolstered Deng’s chances at taking over. Even though Hua retained his titles, by the end of 1978 Deng was recognized as the de facto head of the CCP, an ascension that Party propagandists trumpeted as the “Great Turning Point in History,” with China now embarked on the “correct path for socialist modernization.”

In plotting his rise, Deng had also tapped into the strong appetite for change he sensed in the country, and he encouraged talk about democracy, supporting a movement by citizens to post their thoughts about the need for reform in a part of Beijing known as Xidan, at what became known as Democracy Wall. The name derived from the fact that demonstrators were clamoring not only for what Deng and other Party leaders said were the country’s four needed great modernizations to agriculture, industry, defense, and science, but also a fifth: democracy.

“Even if a few malcontents take advantage of democracy to make trouble . . . the thing to be feared most is silence,” Deng said of the demonstrations in early 1979. But by the end of the year, with moves afoot to relieve Hua of any residual power, Deng shut down Democracy Wall and clamped down on free expression. The best-known promoter of this fifth modernization was a young electrician and former Maoist Red Guard named Wei Jingsheng. As Gewirtz notes, Wei had written that Chinese people need “the kind of democracy enjoyed by people in European and American countries,” and this included “the power to replace their representatives anytime.” As a result he was arrested amid Deng’s crackdown and jailed for 15 years.

The most important divergences in the accounts of Gewirtz and Dikötter become clear in this era, as Deng in effect became China’s supreme ruler, despite relinquishing his most important formal political title of vice premier in 1980. Gewirtz depicts the critical decade of the 1980s, when China began its economic takeoff, as a time of intellectual ferment and ardent experimentation driven for the most part by two ill-fated lieutenants of Deng, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. With Deng’s patronage, Hu became the head of the CCP and Zhao the country’s premier. Each fit a pattern of ambitious Chinese reformers since the late 19th century whose determination to restore their country to greatness made them not just willing but eager to adopt ideas from the West.

Gewirtz states flatly that the portrait of Deng as the fount of ideas, which the world has generally accepted, is nothing less than systematic hagiography. As a companion of Mao from early in the Communist movement as well as a survivor of Mao’s megalomania, Deng enjoyed great prestige and personal authority, but he had few original ideas about economic modernization and little inclination for a hands-on approach to running the country. According to Gewirtz, he “governed mostly by intuition and broad, sometimes vague utterances.” Even the celebrated SEZs, associated in the popular memory with Deng, had little to do with him.

* * *

The generation of ideas was mostly left to Hu and Zhao, who both came to tragic ends later in the decade after Deng washed his hands of them and a variety of lesser-known figures at the first signs of serious trouble brought on by their reforms. Gewirtz—whose previous book, Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China (2017), is a richly detailed history of how economic reform in China was shaped by foreign thinkers—writes that the SEZs were the result of Deng’s order to an aide to go study the recent successes of various Western European countries. Dikötter specifies that Ireland was the model and calls the scheme “far from daring,” saying that special export processing zones had been tried elsewhere as far back as the late 1950s.

In Gewirtz’s account, the 1980s come across as a time that was remarkably full of possibilities, when one could imagine dramatically different directions and outcomes for China prior to the foreclosure of greater liberalization by the protests and crackdown at Tiananmen in 1989. Prompted by Zhao, the country experienced a boom of voguish technological futurism centered on the best-selling books of the American author Alvin Toffler, such as Future Shock and especially The Third Wave. Zhao had them summarized, translated, and distributed to the political elite and eventually made available to the masses. With them spread a belief that China could overcome its late industrialization and catch up to or even leapfrog the West by embracing cutting-edge research fields such as computer and biological sciences. If it succeeded, one senior official said, “quite a few Third World countries which tried in vain to follow American or European ways [may] be swayed towards the Chinese model.”

The remarkable ferment of this era also brought an explosion of underground literature, increasingly daring publications, avant-garde art, feminist ideas, and student activism. As the tragic events at Tiananmen later attested, the CCP still had plenty of conservatives in high positions, but this seemed to be the time for reformists. Prominent officials advocated a complete separation between the Party and the state, turning the rubber-stamp National Assembly into an independent center of power and relaxing restrictions on expression.

Wan Li, a vice premier at the time, may have taken the calls for reform furthest among officials in 1986 when he said, “Allowing the broad masses of the people to discuss politics is not simply not contradictory to these [Four Cardinal Principles], but in fact is exactly what is required to adhere to these principles.” Gewirtz credits these trends to a call by Deng in 1980 for greater reform, while he was still brushing Hua aside. In 1986, the same year as Wan’s speech, Deng called for “decentralizing our power.” Two years earlier, sensing how fragile and tentative the new spirit of openness and experimentation was, Zhao had written to Deng to urge him to institutionalize some of the political reforms under consideration. It was important to do so while Deng and some of the other so-called immortals who had helped lead the Chinese Revolution under Mao were “still energetic and in good health,” enjoyed unassailable prestige, and could “personally inspect and seek compliance.” Gewirtz writes, though, that Deng “took no immediate action,” leaving the reform process fatally vulnerable.

Dikötter, by contrast, makes this period sound less like one of seriously considered, reform-minded experimentation than one of wild, lurching improvisation, with Deng more at the helm than Gewirtz suggests but still less directly involved than most standard accounts would have it. Deng in this view had just two priorities: positioning China to zoom ahead economically and catch up with the West, and never allowing anything to seriously threaten the power of the CCP. It is easy to imagine goals like these coming into conflict, and they did. In Dikötter’s account, Deng spent this decade zigzagging between fast-growth capitalist experimentation and conservative ideological reaction. That often meant siding with influential Party elders who were lifelong Marxist-Leninists and who instinctively favored strong central planning and tight controls on the economy—and on pretty much everything else.

Although specialists have always known that side of him, this Deng is less familiar in the sunny popular accounts of this era, which often depict him as someone who sought to gradually steer China toward some version of capitalism and maybe even liberalism. Deng inveighed constantly against what he called “spiritual pollution,” by which he meant Western political ideas and culture. He was committed, in his words, to “fight[ing] the United States, but not to the point where we break off the relationship.” And he was resolutely opposed to any notion of a “peaceful evolution” of China toward a more liberal political system. The glow of Western optimism—or naiveté—that free markets might cause China to do just that long survived Deng, who died in 1997. Dikötter quotes one scholar who predicted, after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, that by 2015 it would be a democracy. Even Human Rights Watch, he notes, surmised that its membership could “increase pressure for greater openness, more press freedom, enhanced rights for workers, and an independent judiciary,” none of which came about.

* * *

The biggest contrasts that arise between the assessments of Gewirtz and Dikötter, though, don’t concern Deng as much as his principal deputies, Hu and Zhao, prior to the killings at Tiananmen in 1989. In the dismissal of Hu in 1987 and the purge and house arrest of Zhao after Tiananmen, Gewirtz seems to see the foreclosure of possibilities for liberalizing reforms in China. He writes fascinatingly about Zhao’s bold promotion of River Elegy, a six-part documentary shown to enormous nationwide audiences on Chinese Central Television in 1988. It baldly depicts Chinese culture as stagnant and badly in need of openness and change. I recently watched a murky print of it online and was astonished by the bluntness of its insistence on shaking China out of its old imperial smugness and learning from the West. It also turned out to be stunningly bad politics, offending the nationalist sensibilities of Party conservatives and helping to galvanize their efforts to rein in experimentation and curtail reforms.

Hu and Zhao are almost invariably paired as the tragic reformists of this chaotic era. But with the economy overheating and inflation fueling both old-guard discomfort and popular ferment, Zhao was actively involved in the purge of Hu. During a brutal six-day session in which Hu came under withering criticism from Party leaders, Zhao, his supposed fellow reformer, helped seal his fate, saying, “I don’t think that I can continue to work with you.”

Dikötter makes both of these men sound less like committed reformers than combinations of careerists, dilettantes, and tinkerers, and Zhao in particular mostly comes off as an opportunist. In 1952, Dikötter notes, Mao sent him to Guangdong province to replace an official who was judged too lenient toward the local population:

Zhao Ziyang helped his boss carry out a ruthless campaign of repression. The slogan was “Every Village Bleeds, Every Household Fights,” with ferocious beatings and random killings taking place across the province. In some places suspects were trussed up, hung from beams, buried up to the neck and torched.

As late as 1985, Zhao visited the entrepreneurial city of Wenzhou and explained, Dikötter writes, “that capitalism would bring long-term contradictions among the people, which might cause social instability, and in turn could prompt political unrest.”

Dikötter occasionally shows another side of Zhao, such as his statement amid the political and social instability of 1989 that the corruption plaguing the country was at least partly due to “lack of openness.” When student and worker protests swept central Beijing the following year, Zhao was seen on television urging demonstrators to disperse peacefully, and he then pushed for the CCP to treat them leniently. But by this time his influence had completely dissipated, and Deng personally ordered troops to clear Tiananmen Square, which they did with live ammunition. While it had taken six days to dispose of Hu, Zhao was quickly dismissed and placed under house arrest until he died 16 years later, after which he was largely erased from history. Some official Chinese media didn’t mention his passing at all; others took brief notice but failed to mention that he had been one of the country’s top leaders.

* * *

Although Susan Shirk’s book retraces some of this past, it begins bracingly in the present and mostly concerns the rule of China’s two most recent leaders, Hu Jintao, who left office after 10 years in 2012, and the current head of the CCP, Xi Jinping. In most respects, Hu is treated as the last ruler of the Deng era, which for Shirk also includes his predecessor, Jiang Zemin. She argues persuasively that Xi has broken sharply with Deng and even worked to efface his memory in China. There are no perfect parallels to Xi among his predecessors, but Mao is the closest, in his overall command of the country’s political system.

“A new Cold War has already begun,” Shirk writes on her opening page.

With the former Soviet Union, the lines of separation were clear. With China they are not. China and the United States are economically and socially interdependent, more so than the Soviet Union and the United States ever were. Yet the interconnections haven’t prevented them from hurtling into hostility.

Paradoxically, given the line she draws between the Deng and Xi eras, the roots of the growing antagonism between China and the U.S. don’t lie with the assertive Xi but with the forgotten man of Chinese politics, the colorless Hu Jintao. That is not so much because Hu was personally unprepossessing, Shirk argues, but because more than any other Chinese leader, including Deng, he governed within the spirit of the system bequeathed by Deng: one of collective rule in which the chairman of the CCP, the most powerful position in the country, was nonetheless never more than a first among equals. The intellectual credit directly due to Deng for the economic boom of the reform period of the 1980s is, as we have seen, still open to vigorous debate. What is beyond dispute, though, is that Deng had firm, original, and even relatively durable ideas about renovating China’s political system following Mao’s death.

After he led China’s Communists to revolutionary triumph in 1949, Mao’s misguided policies repeatedly produced national catastrophes. The most famous of these were the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s and early 1960s and the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, each of which has been the topic of a monumental book by Dikötter.² The first was a crash industrialization program that caused the starvation of 30 million or more Chinese, and the second was a decade-long stretch of political and social turmoil cultivated by the aging Mao to eliminate potential rivals real and imagined, Deng among them, and to further his vision of radical egalitarianism. Shirk writes that Deng concluded that costly disasters like these and others under Mao were the result of “over-concentration of power [that] is liable to give rise to arbitrary rule by individuals at the expense of collective leadership.”

In a major speech to the Politburo in 1980, Deng spelled out his remedies, which involved eight structural changes to the political system that were soon codified. The most important of these was the end of lifetime tenure for senior officials, who were limited to a maximum of two five-year terms and mandatory retirement at 68. A regular calendar was instituted for the meetings of the highest bodies of the CCP, in descending order in power from the Politburo Standing Committee to the Politburo to the Central Committee, with approximately two hundred members. The latter was empowered to elect the Party’s higher leaders.

In practice, though, this intense focus on correcting the wild excesses of the past created a new set of systemic infirmities. Under Hu, each member of the Politburo Standing Committee, which then was made up of nine men, enjoyed broad discretion over funding and policy priorities in a given area, such as defense, foreign affairs, or domestic security. Shirk quotes a Singapore-based political scientist who observed that

the final outcome of the collective presidency is inevitably that there is no president, and the collective responsibility within the ruling party often turns into a situation of de facto collective irresponsibility.

* * *

The result was a state of nearly unbridled competition over resources that was often used to cater to deep currents of nationalist sentiment both within the state and among the general public. It also caused alarming levels of corruption. Deng had famously said that China should “hide its capacities and bide its time,” which meant indefinitely avoiding confrontation with the United States until it had become rich and powerful. Hu, as vividly depicted by Shirk, was formed in this mold and saw militarism and greater antagonism with the United States as dangerous for China, especially for its economy. But with no mechanism for supervising his fellow senior leaders, there was “nothing stopping them from overdoing their preferred policies.” In the spoils system Deng’s arrangement produced, members of the Standing Committee seldom opposed one another’s pet initiatives, whether alone or in tandem, because they feared being repaid in kind. One way or another, most of the top leaders behaved in ways that China’s neighbors and the U.S. would regard as assertiveness. This, Shirk writes, is because “muscle flexing is easier to sell than self-restraint in a country that is experiencing double-digit rates of economic growth.”

The geopolitical hallmark of this transformation of China’s domestic politics has been Beijing’s claim to sovereignty over almost the entire South China Sea. As I have written in my own book on this topic,³ this includes waters that come close to many states in the region, such as the Philippines, which lodged a case against China before an international tribunal and in 2016 won a unanimous ruling, without managing to alter China’s course. That is because nationalism sells in China and bolsters the legitimacy of the leaders, and because so many bureaucracies and their patrons on the Standing Committee, from the People’s Liberation Army Navy to the Agricultural Ministry, stand to gain from steadily enlarging the list of what China calls its “core interests.”

The policy hallmark of the Hu years was a strong reassertion of state control over the economy. Under Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, China’s private sector grew explosively. One might think this was good news, but it worried many in the leadership who harbored Deng’s old fear that too much capitalism would eventually threaten the CCP’s control. Under Hu, state capitalism boomed as a result of the forced consolidation of innumerable money-losing or low-productivity state-owned businesses, into which the government funneled enormous amounts of capital with the aim of producing national successes and internationally competitive companies. The former has proved easy, given state protection from foreign competitors, but there are still precious few globally preeminent Chinese corporations. Something this shift in economic strategy has produced instead, and a focus of both Shirk’s and Dikötter’s books, is enormous misallocation of public funds and vast corruption, as China props up state-owned companies that lag in innovation and return on investment, while starving the private sector of capital and using all kinds of rules to rein it in.

Shirk writes revealingly about the years leading up to the accession of Xi Jinping, when, as in the past, leaders incarnating the possibility of somewhat different paths for China briefly loomed on the scene. One of these was the populist Party secretary of Chongqing municipality, Bo Xilai, a politician of overweening ambition and made-for-Hollywood looks who sought to selectively revive Maoist ideology. He was arrested in 2012 for corruption and abuse of power, after it emerged that his wife was behind the sordid murder of a British business partner.

At the other end of the political spectrum and much less well known was the CCP leader of Guangdong province, Wang Yang, who campaigned for liberal reforms and urged government transparency and “emancipation of thought.” When Shirk quotes a speech in which he said, “We must eradicate the misconception that people’s happiness is a gift from the party and the government,” one is tempted to hear liberalizing echoes of Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang as they are depicted in Gewirtz’s book.

In the end the Party chose Xi, who figuratively buried this era by having Hu Jintao unceremoniously ushered out of a major CCP gathering in October 2022 on live television and by removing Wang and any other members who were not longtime Xi allies from the Standing Committee. Dikötter writes that Xi’s advantage was that unlike people like Bo and Wang, during his rise through the system he had demonstrated the

ability to say or do little of any consequence, thus avoiding closer scrutiny by potential rivals. He rarely took sides, cultivating a neutral persona and a benign smile which revealed nothing. He seemed harmless, and was therefore acceptable to different factions within the party.

Shirk offers a strikingly different view: “Xi Jinping didn’t steal power in a coup; power was willingly bestowed on him by China’s political elite that was fed up with Hu’s corrupt oligarchy.”

Given the near black-box nature of Chinese elite politics, it will be a long time before we fully know which is more accurate, if we ever do. What is already certain, though, is that Xi has completely dismantled the collegial system that Deng labored so hard to create. Even Mao sometimes had to wage strenuous public campaigns against rivals. With surprisingly little fuss, Xi has set himself up to rule for life if he likes and has surrounded himself with yes-men, some of whom have subsequently disappeared from view without any public explanation. Thus is life under the burgeoning cult of personality of Xi, who is on his way to becoming what many Chinese now call the chairman of everything.

1. This has been an unusually rich period for deeply researched books about Chinese politics. Other valuable titles include Joseph Torigian, Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China After Stalin and Mao (Yale University Press, 2022); and Yang Su, Deadly Decision in Beijing: Succession Politics, Protest Repression, and the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre (Cambridge University Press, 2023).↩
2. Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (Walker, 2010); reviewed in these pages by Roderick MacFarquhar, February 10, 2011; and The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976 (Bloomsbury, 2016); reviewed in these pages by Ian Johnson, October 27, 2016.↩
3. Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power (Knopf, 2017).↩

Swirling around in brightly-colored inflatables the shape of flying saucers, riders grin as they skid across the ice, bouncing off one another in a winter version of bumper cars. Nearby, more people pedal “ice bikes” and row sleds that look like dragon boats. Others steer snowmobiles along a go-cart-style track. Children glide along in “princess horse-drawn carts” pulled by diminutive steeds.

This winter amusement park, in China’s far northeast, about 100 miles from Vladivostok, comes stocked with snowmobiles and bumper sleds courtesy of the local United Front Work Department (UFWD). In most parts of the world, the UFWD is known—if at all—as a secretive Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organ conducting influence operations abroad. But in Gonghe Village, the local UFWD ponied up nearly one million renminbi in 2022 to purchase “snow sports equipment” for the recreation area, including not just sleds but also items such as safety nets and anti-slip mats. “Gonghe Village . . . takes the development of the ice and snow industry as an important opportunity,” said the village head in a video posted to Douyin, China’s version of Tiktok. “We are strengthening the lifeblood of the rural collective economy in the new era, and taking a solid step towards strengthening the village, enriching the people, and revitalizing the countryside.”

Given the United Front Work Department’s reputation abroad, funding an “ice and snow amusement park” might seem anomalous. This is the organization that has allegedly helped set up illegal Chinese police outposts in the United States, inserted talking points into Italian political discussions, and cultivated members of parliament in New Zealand to gin up support for China’s domestic policies, activities in line with what the U.S. Congress has described as the Department’s “goal of softening opposition to the Chinese Communist Party and its policies throughout the world.”

Yet despite its insidious cloak-and-dagger image in U.S. political debate, the United Front’s mission is neither particularly covert nor aimed solely at people outside China’s borders. “There’s no clear distinction between domestic and overseas united front work,” writes China researcher Alex Joske. “This is because the key distinction underlying the United Front is not between domestic and overseas groups, but between the CCP and everyone else.”

“Previous coverage of United Front work has given the impression that its main operations are overseas, which is the opposite of the truth,” says Neil Thomas, Fellow for Chinese Politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. “It’s primarily a domestic apparatus whose tentacles extend beyond China’s borders.” To better understand what “United Front work” means in the domestic context, ChinaFile reviewed some 2,500 procurement notices and related materials posted to the Chinese Government Procurement Network website between January 2018 and May 2023. (Information about Gonghe Village’s amusement park costs came directly from a procurement notice announcing the winning supplier.)

Whether the UFWD is buying 24,000 “ethnic unity enters the home” tea sets in Sichuan, or putting surveillance cameras outside 85 different places of religious worship in Shandong, it is pursuing a single mission: namely, to seek out individuals and groups in society outside the Party’s control and cement their status as friends rather than enemies. This mission speaks to the deepest needs and fears of the CCP. Rather than allow for an independent civil society that coalesces around common interests, the United Front aims to yoke influential sectors of society to the Party, reining in their behavior while harnessing their strength and momentum. In general, the Department proffers carrots, in contrast to the sticks wielded by the police and state security organs. Yet, for people whose identities the Party finds threatening, the United Front employs a heavier hand. Though the UFWD’s purchases cannot reveal the ultimate success or failure of any given initiative, they can tell us how the Department is spending its money—and thereby hint at where its priorities lie.

“People don’t appreciate how wide-ranging United Front work is, and it has continued to expand,” says Gerry Groot, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide, whose book Managing Transitions describes the UFWD’s historical role in easing the CCP through turbulent stages of China’s political and social development. “The nature of its work has expanded as China has changed with economic success. Now that they’re having problems, its importance will be stressed again. It will be used to manage frictions created by the economic downturn.” The Xi Jinping administration has emphasized united front work over the last decade, indicating how crucial this Bolshevik concept is to its vision of China’s governance.

The idea of the united front was born in 1917 during the Russian Revolution when the Bolsheviks allied with smaller factions of socialists to ensure their survival as they battled for control of Russia. Once in power, they quickly made contact with revolutionaries in China. Through most of the 1920s, the Soviets directed the nascent Chinese Communist Party to ally with its political rival, the much larger and much better-resourced Kuomintang, in order to serve the USSR’s own geo-political ends.

“If you look at it from Stalin’s perspective, he wanted to make sure the bourgeois party, the Kuomintang, would retain a pro-Soviet orientation, and this was done by infiltrating communists into the party,” says Sergey Radchenko, a historian of Russia and China at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Stalin’s idea was: a bigger party which we control through a smaller party.”

This cooperation came to a bloody end when the Kuomintang attacked the Communists and their sympathizers in the spring of 1927. But even after spending nearly a decade dodging Kuomintang assaults in the countryside, the CCP once again allied with the Kuomintang in 1936 to oppose invading Japanese forces. The CCP formed this “Second United Front” under pressure from Moscow, which wanted to prevent Japan from creeping too close to the Soviet border. It was in this context that Mao Zedong made his oft-cited comment describing the United Front as one of the Party’s “magic weapons,” along with military struggle and Party building, that would allow the CCP to triumph over its enemies.

After Japanese surrender at the end of World War II, and against Soviet wishes, the CCP pursued a “united front” with intellectuals and members of other political parties, aiming to isolate and defeat the Kuomintang, with which it was now engaged in a civil war. By the time the CCP emerged victorious in 1949, the United Front Work Department was already an established part of the Party’s governance firmament.

Since then, the UFWD’s political might has waxed and waned. “Mao himself lost interest in United Front work after 1956, favouring confrontation and ‘class struggle’ over conciliation,” writes University of Adelaide’s Groot. “It was nevertheless revived each time the Party had to recover from a Mao-induced crisis.” Upon Mao’s death, the leadership leaned on the UFWD to help reinvigorate foreign business and investment ties. For a brief moment after the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, it seemed as though the Party might grant more autonomy to United Front allies, such as the eight legally-sanctioned, if largely powerless, “minor political parties.” But as the reputational damage from Tiananmen faded away with time, so did the leadership’s attention to the UFWD.

That has changed under current Party General Secretary Xi Jinping. The Department’s clout has grown significantly in recent years, researchers studying the UFWD overwhelmingly agree. Xi, by dint of both his father’s and his own work experiences, has had a lifelong front-row seat to united front work and describes it as a means to “Chinese people’s great rejuvenation.” In 2015 alone, the Party convened its first high-level conference on united front work in nearly a decade, created a governance group to direct united front efforts and stacked it with high-ranking leaders, and released regulations to “strengthen and standardize” united front work and “consolidate and develop the patriotic united front.”

More recently, in March 2023, CCP ideological guru Wang Huning—one of the few individuals to work closely with each of the last three leaders of China—took charge of the united front portfolio in his new role on the country’s powerful Politburo Standing Committee. Wang now sits atop the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the government counterpart to the United Front Work Department, and oversees all united front work more broadly.

<a href="https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/assets/images/photo/system/wang_huning_sm.jpg" title="Wang Huning Tibet Visit" class="colorbox" data-colorbox-gallery="gallery-node-54961-gbsZ-aHg1uE" data-cbox-img-attrs="{"title": "", "alt": ""}"></a>

Yan Yan—Xinhua/Getty Images

Wang Huning, a Politburo Standing Committee member and Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, visits local residents during an inspection tour of Tibet in Nyingchi, southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, July 25, 2023.

Perhaps most importantly, a significant restructuring between 2015 and 2018 added a host of new bureaus to the United Front Work Department’s existing architecture. The Department went from seven bureaus to twelve, subsuming several state organs (and their funding) as well as streamlining the flow of power directly down from the Party center. The new formation reflected the increasing complexity and importance Beijing ascribed to the Department’s tasks.

The UFWD’s revamped org chart serves as a list of the social sectors it seeks to influence. The Department maintains at least one bureau for each of the following:

• Members of one of the eight officially-sanctioned, non-CCP political parties (a largely vestigial inclusion at this point; though these parties do conduct their own activities, they are not independent; the UFWD has long vetted all memberships in these parties)
• Participants in the “non-public economy,” which translates to entrepreneurs and private businesses, including companies with foreign investment
• Individuals in the “new social strata,” namely, the managers and technical staff working in the “non-public economy”; people working in new media; notaries, accountants, lawyers, auditors, industry associations, and chambers of commerce; and freelancers—basically, professionals and knowledge workers
• “Xinjiang,” both the geographical region itself, as well the people—most notably members of the Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz ethnic groups—that live there
• “Tibet,” similar to the Xinjiang bureau, covers the Tibet Autonomous Region as well as its inhabitants
• Other non-Han ethnic groups (besides Tibetans and Uyghurs, the Chinese state somewhat arbitrarily recognizes 53 additional groups)
• Religious believers (this work is split between two bureaus, one of which focuses on specific religions, the other of which has functional responsibilities, such as overseeing religious schools)
• People of Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan
• “Overseas Chinese,” a term (华侨, Huaqiao) that technically only includes Chinese citizens living abroad, but in practice also often includes former Chinese citizens, their offspring, or anyone with Chinese ancestry (华裔, Huayi); this work is also split between two bureaus, one of which has a geographical focus and the other of which specializes in media, culture, and educational efforts
• Intellectuals not affiliated with the CCP, as well as influential individuals who have made “positive contributions to society” and are not affiliated with any political party—essentially, people viewed as thought leaders and role models, but who don’t fit into any of the other categories

This list represents the sectors of society the Party deems both potentially dangerous and socially influential, requiring dedicated efforts to induce loyalty.

Within each of these sectors, the UFWD must identify people to approach individually. To make its outreach more comprehensive and efficient, the Department has long compiled detailed information about specific targets. In a secret missive from 1940, the United Front Work Department of the Central Committee (then only part of an upstart Communist Party fighting against both the Kuomintang and Japan) exhorted cadres to take a more methodical approach to their united front activities:

In the past there was a lack of conscientious investigation and deep understanding of the targets of united front work. We have to carry out a general analysis and have a general understanding of each party, group, stratum, friendly army, etc.; and we must carry out a many-sided, deep, and detailed investigation of the figures actually representative of each party, group, stratum, friendly army, agency, circle, and body. A detailed investigation and separate written record is to be made of these persons: name, age, native place, financial activities, history, changes in thought, political activities, habits, character, peculiarities, social relationships, etc. Without this kind of investigation and record, united front work will become empty and unrealistic.

Now, United Front offices throughout the country are bringing their dossiers into the Internet age. Procurement notices call for “smart” or “big data” platforms to “informatize” UFWD work, helping to identify “talents” in society and recruit them as “members” of the united front. In 2019, Beijing’s Dongcheng district spent 1.4 million renminbi on a “comprehensive management platform” that would, in part, “effectively support the four aspects of United Front talent work: ‘discovery, cultivation, utilization, and management’.” The platform would include a database of

basic information about members, as well as information about their familial relationships, educational background and degrees, specialized or technical positions, vocational qualifications, itinerant work or job changes, recruitment or probation, administrative or Party positions, job performance, assessments or inspections, religion (for religious figures), coming back to or returning to reside in China, and business (for individuals in the non-public economy and the new social strata).

The database would allow UFWD officials to generate “statistics on, or browse and query the information of, all types of united front members,” as well as “gather and sort united front members by performance.”

Whether or not such “science-ification, standardization, and intelligentification” efforts can ameliorate the UFWD’s longstanding recruiting problems is another matter entirely. According to Groot, the Department struggles to find individuals that can serve its interests over the long term. In some cases, this is because the Department doesn’t advance targets’ career paths; people with political ambitions will often just join the CCP directly, rather than submit to the supervision of the UFWD as a member of one of the eight “minor parties” or as a business representative. In other cases, such as individuals who belong to targeted ethnic or religious groups, contact with the UFWD taints them in the eyes of their communities, making them less useful to the UFWD. “In many cases, once the United Front Work Department IDs and recruits them, then these people immediately start losing their value,” says Groot. “They’re compromised through their connections with the United Front Work Department.”

Recruiting challenges aside, the Party clearly still finds the United Front a vital component of its governance strategy. Even though the CCP successfully vanquished rivals to the throne, morphing from a scrappy force conducting guerrilla warfare in the countryside to the ultimate authority over a major global power, it still sees a need to approach and co-opt any parts of society outside of itself. And the United Front Work Department is a key mechanism by which the revolutionary CCP hopes to forestall any further revolutions.

The United Front Work Department uses a variety of different tools to appeal to its selected targets. Its primary method simply involves outreach: holding events, trainings, media tours, and the like. Targets the Party regards as more persuadable may only come into contact with this side of the UFWD’s toolkit. Individuals in the “new social strata,” for example, might be treated to a “large-scale celebration to commemorate the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone’s 40th anniversary” like the one the UFWD bid out in 2020. Members of the “new generation of private entrepreneurs” might attend a multi-week training course, like the one the United Front contracted out to Northwest University in Xi’an, including three “study trips” to other provinces, tea and art salons, and athletic activities. UFWD outreach to target groups living abroad also involves some China-based activities: a leadership camp including university students from Taiwan, for example, or a summer camp for children of Chinese descent. The Department does conduct outreach to target groups it deems “sensitive,” such as religious adherents, or members of particular ethnic communities, but supplements this with a host of additional, sometimes more coercive means.

Another major undertaking, and one that is perhaps surprising to anyone who only knows the UFWD as a shadowy influence peddler abroad, is provision of basic goods and services. For example, local United Front offices have contracted out for at least 100 road improvement projects since 2018. Many of these projects took place in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, an area in southern China with a relatively high population of non-Han residents as well as high levels of poverty. Beyond just road improvements, local UFWDs issued hundreds of tenders for a wide variety of infrastructure and development projects, from expanding access to drinking water to promoting the raising of laying hens, from installing lighting in rural public spaces to building “supporting facilities” for a “macadamia nut industry base.”

Infrastructure projects like these make sense given the United Front’s larger mission, says Matt Schrader, an advisor for China at the International Republican Institute. “This is a core function of the UFWD—collecting the needs of target groups and translating them into policy. One clear throughline for United Front work, from its very early stages in the 1930s, is close attention to the needs of target groups and knowing what the Party can do for them. It’s a kind of customer service-oriented mindset. You see the phrase ‘fix their problems’ over and over again.”

Groot notes that “the downside of these policies is that they’re all part of assimilationist policies as well.” Building better roads, for example, “reduces the obstacles to making [non-Han people] more mainstream. Letting people more easily come in, letting people more easily go out—and marry out—allows for greater integration, breaking up local clans, and for greater assimilation.” Over the last decade, as the Party-state has solidified its intent to promote a single, overriding “Chinese” identity, rather than encourage the organic development of multifarious ethnic identities, it has called for “extensive contact, exchange, and blending of all ethnic groups,” including through “two-way migration and flow of the population” and living in “blended” communities.

Other United Front projects have similarly assimilative aims, sometimes with the paradoxical goal of highlighting the “characteristics” of non-Han ethnic groups. One 2021 procurement notice from Guangxi, for example, offered more than 8 million renminbi to help develop the tourism industry in the Xiaodubai “ethnic minority characteristic village,” through improvements such as a “night scene lighting system” and “ethnic wall paintings.” In China’s northeastern Heilongjiang province, where members of the officially-designated Korean ethnic group are concentrated, United Front officials wanted contractors to reconstruct a “Korean culture street.” The work described in many of these notices suggests the “Disneyfication” of the original village or street, as long documented in tourist areas across China, and more recently observed as part of the CCP’s campaign of surveillance and repression in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

According to Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and co-author of the book Hidden Hand, which describes the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to influence political and social life around the world, the Party-state does welcome some degree of cultural diversity among its population, “as long as it is toothless.” But for the Party to permit open displays of difference, it must first feel secure in the underlying sympathies of a community. “Disneyfication is great for that. You make money off tourism, you talk about how much respect you have for ethnic diversity, but you get rid of anything that can challenge Party control,” Ohlberg says.

A tender for the “Into the Li People: Large-Scale Cultural Documentary Fieldwork Event” in Guangxi explicitly highlights such aims. UFWD authorities sought to create propaganda emphasizing the Li ethnic group’s fealty to the Party. The project would “invite renowned contemporary literary figures to spend nearly a month in ethnic areas of our province . . . to look back on the Redness of the Li people . . . and promote exchange and blending between all ethnicities in our province, as well as promote a unity of ideals, beliefs, emotion, and culture in all ethnic groups.”

The United Front Work Department’s activities become more blatantly intrusive when targeting individuals the Party views as potentially threatening. This includes people in ethnic and religious minority groups, whose community affiliations may provide a sense of identity more potent than Chinese nationalism or love of the Party.

Hui people may comprise only 30 percent of the population of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, just south of Inner Mongolia. But the Party-state worries their Muslim religious adherence poses an inherent threat and so keeps close tabs on their houses of worship. UFWD authorities in at least three Ningxia localities sought contractors to audit the finances of or directly conduct bookkeeping for “religious activity sites,” in part to ferret out any non-reported income and to enumerate any of the sites’ fixed assets.

Throughout the country, local United Front Work Departments are making purchases so that they can better scrutinize the goings-on within religious communities. Multiple tenders solicited software that visualizes or otherwise “intelligently” manages religious sites. Authorities in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in southwestern Yunnan province, wanted a “religious work grid management information system,” explicitly applying the logic of grid management—a system widely used throughout China to monitor citizens’ activities, in which localities are divided into smaller, more controllable units and government workers catalog goings-on in their part of the “grid”—to the task of controlling locals’ everyday religious activity.

International media has documented the government’s use of cameras and other such surveillance equipment in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, including at places of religious worship. But procurement notices issued by UFWDs in Shandong, Jiangxi, Hebei, Henan, and Anhui provinces show that the Party-state is conducting visual monitoring at religious sites throughout the country. Some of the notices explicitly link these surveillance programs to broader provincial or national campaigns, while others simply seek “installation and networking of video surveillance at religious sites.”

Notes from ChinaFile

12.13.22

Planting the Flag in Mosques and Monasteries

Jessica Batke

Over the last few years, the Chinese Communist Party has physically remade places of religious worship in western China to its liking. This includes not only the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, but also other areas with mosques or Tibetan...

United Front officials are not content to merely observe religious proceedings. In some cases, they also seek to alter the physical structures in which they occur. Religious Affairs bureaus (government offices absorbed into the UFWD beginning in 2018) in some areas of Gansu, Qinghai, and Sichuan bought flags and flagpoles to install in mosques or temples, often citing the “four entrances” policy, which seeks to bring “the national flag, the constitution as well as laws and regulations, core socialist values, and China’s excellent traditional culture” into religious sites.

Several procurement notices called for contractors to “renovate” or “remodel” existing religious structures. Though the wording in most tenders left the nature of such renovations unclear, one 2021 notice clearly stated the aim of “rectifying the building style,” almost certainly a reference to the recent nationwide campaign to “sinicize” mosque architecture and remove “Arabic” elements. The mosque in question, located in northeastern Jilin province’s Huadian city, received a “historical building” designation in 2018, and Baidu Maps street view images from 2019 show it still sported the domes of the type later removed from mosques across the country, sometimes sparking local protest. That United Front officials in Huadian sought to “rectify” the mosque only three years after provincial officials granted it historic status illustrates how swiftly political dictates on religion have changed in the last decade.

The UFWD also tries to change the mindset and behavior of “religious personages.” Multiple procurement notices sought supplies, travel logistics support, and propaganda materials for a “Follow the Four Standards and Strive to be an Advanced Monk and Nun” campaign carried out across Tibet. The “four standards” refers to a campaign that since 2017 has demanded monks and nuns evince “political reliability,” “moral integrity capable of impressing the public,” and willingness to “play an active role at critical moments,” while avoiding the “control of foreign forces” and “unswervingly furthering the sinicization of religion.”

In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the United Front Work Department has abetted atrocities. As part of a campaign to install government minders in Uyghur villages and homes, one Xinjiang UFWD solicited both software and online cloud services for a management platform that tracked cadres’ efforts to build a “family of ethnic unity.” (The Department undoubtedly conducts more activities in Xinjiang than appear in the procurement notices ChinaFile reviewed; authorities have deleted many Xinjiang-specific tenders from the web and have likely stopped posting some notices publicly.)

Even innocent-seeming acquisitions can belie repressive aims. In 2022, one district-level UFWD in Tibet sought oxygen equipment for a local monastery. This purchase might appear ordinary, even compassionate, until one realizes the oxygen was meant for the “Temple Management Committee” dormitory. Throughout Tibet, state-mandated Temple Management Committees have set up shop inside monasteries and nunneries to better monitor and control religious activity. They are often staffed by cadres from elsewhere in China who are physically unprepared for the notoriously thin air on the Tibetan plateau—hence the need for oxygen. One can imagine a newly-arrived cadre, reviewing the roster of monks now under his authority, wheezing uncomfortably into an oxygen mask.

<a href="https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/assets/images/photo/system/bumper_mosque.png" title="UFWD Projects" class="colorbox" data-colorbox-gallery="gallery-node-54956-gbsZ-aHg1uE" data-cbox-img-attrs="{"title": "", "alt": ""}"></a>

Ruguo Douyin account (left); Baidu Maps street view (right)

The winter amusement park funded by a local United Front Work Department in Heilongjiang province (left) and a mosque in Jilin province that the UFWD sought to “rectify” (right).

Just how deeply the United Front Work Department truly influences Chinese society—beyond the many other Party and state organs with similar aims—is impossible to pin down. This is due to the largely intangible results of its work, a lack of publicly-available information, as well as a general dearth of recent research about united front work within mainland China. But, says the International Republican Institute’s Schrader, the importance of united front work tends to be underestimated. Speaking about the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the state counterpart to the Party’s United Front Work Department, Schrader quips that it “doesn’t really do a lot, practically speaking—but neither do country clubs, practically speaking. If it doesn’t matter, why is the person that runs it the fourth-most senior member of the Party?”

Perhaps united front work also remains unappreciated because, by definition, it is less likely to generate the kinds of brutal and shocking details that draw the attention of international observers. Party writing on united front work “highlights that this is the Party’s choice instead of violence,” says the German Marshall Fund’s Ohlberg. “Before you conquer somebody violently, you try the soft way. Only when that fails can you use harsher means.”

And yet, its relatively gentle tactics notwithstanding, the UFWD tacitly seeks a change in Chinese society that is all-encompassing and profound. The impact of this change may feel slight when it comes to how the UFWD relates to, say, an atheist Han businessman who lives a workaholic lifestyle in Shanghai. While the UFWD may target him as a member of the “non-public economy,” it views his identity (non-religious, Han, focused largely on economic rather than political or social concerns) as inherently more pro-CCP than a Tibetan, a Uyghur, or even a Han church-goer. The UFWD’s ambition—to align all citizens’ gods and traditions with the Party’s interests—implicitly aspires to sand away some of the natural human texture of Chinese society.

“You could say the United Front works (together with other Party organs) to create a massive CCP Theme Park of social life, devoid of any authenticity or spontaneous expression,” says Martin Hála, a sinologist with Charles University in Prague and founder of the China-focused website Sinopsis.cz. In a fully successful implementation of its program, “all social activity would be organized and directed by designated ‘mass organizations,’ ultimately controlled by the Party. There would be just the Party-state and the mass organizations masquerading as civil society. No other social activity allowed.”

Vera Liu provided research for this article.

On March 20, 2023, a Hong Kong court sentenced three people to prison for sedition. Police had arrested them in January, during and after a raid on a book fair in Mong Kok, for the purported crime of selling self-published books about the city’s 2019 protest movement. All three—Alan Keung Ka-wai, 31, Alex Lee Lung-yin, 52, and his wife, Cannis Chan Sheung-yan, 48—pleaded guilty, received sentences of between five and ten months and pledged to refrain from such acts in future.

Keung’s, Lee’s, and Chan’s sedition convictions illustrate the evolution in the government’s use of Hong Kong’s National Security Law (NSL) and sedition provision of the Hong Kong Crimes Ordinance, a British colonial-era law that officials revived after the 2019 protests. By spring 2022, nearly two years after the NSL came into effect, the government had largely succeeded in using national security laws to reshape political and civic institutions and life in Hong Kong. Opposition political parties were decimated, civil society groups closed down, and once-vibrant media outlets were shuttered. Scores of top pro-democratic figures had either been arrested or fled Hong Kong. Those who have not been arrested and who have chosen to remain have been forced to watch what they say, otherwise they too could be prosecuted for a national security crime.

Over the past year, the government has moved into a consolidation phase, one in which the law is used to maintain the newly-created status quo. In this context, national security arrests happen less frequently. (Unless otherwise specified, we apply the designation “national security” to arrests made in connection with the four NSL criminal provisions and the sedition provision of the Crimes Ordinance, as well as to arrests made by the Police Force's National Security Department for other crimes. “National security crimes” are those for which these three types of arrests are made.) Instead, the government generally relies on other tools—including administrative measures, public messaging, and self-censorship—to maintain overall control and to enforce now well-established political and social red lines.

However, the authorities are still using national security laws to arrest and prosecute those who have crossed red lines, or have otherwise engaged in acts that the government deems unacceptable. For the most part, the sedition provision of the Crimes Ordinance is now the government’s preferred criminal tool. According to national security arrest and prosecution data collected by the Georgetown Center for Asian Law (GCAL), sedition cases like Keung, Lee, and Chan’s now represent the vast majority of new national security cases.

The government’s definition of “national security” has proved almost infinitely elastic, and has included such “crimes” as holding a primary election, publicly chanting now-forbidden 2019 protest slogans, and even efforts by journalists to report on political developments in Hong Kong. As GCAL’s research on the implementation of the NSL has made clear, the vast majority of national security cases that have emerged over the past year would not be considered crimes in other, rights-respecting jurisdictions. Instead, they would be considered constitutionally-protected acts of free expression, association, and assembly.

The government’s new national security toolkit has achieved its desired effect: three years after the NSL went into effect, the government continues to boast a 100 percent conviction rate.

* * *

The NSL has depressed virtually all aspects of political life in Hong Kong since its inception in July 2020. Authorities have forced once-vibrant pro-democracy political parties to shut down, leaving Hong Kong’s legislature bereft of opposition figures for the first time in its history. The government has curtailed press freedom, and self-censorship runs rampant. Dozens of non-governmental organizations have been forced to shutter, and in some cases their leaders have been jailed or have left Hong Kong. Academic freedom is now in doubt: education officials have issued new guidelines calling on teachers to promote the new law, which suggests that criticism of the law is unwelcome or even potentially illegal. Some teachers who refuse to toe the line have been fired and forced to leave the profession.

08.08.23

Tracking the Impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law

These graphics are based on research by Lydia Wong, Eric Yan-ho Lai, Charlotte Yeung, and Thomas Kellogg. The graphics are regularly updated, and earlier versions of them, along with analysis of the data, appear in “New Data Show Hong Kong’s...

The NSL’s criminal provisions in particular have played a central role in the reshaping of Hong Kong’s core civic and political institutions. On January 6, 2021, for example, the government arrested several dozen top pro-democratic legislators, eventually charging 47 of them with subversion under Article 22 of the law. The Hong Kong 47 trial is ongoing, and a verdict in the case is expected later in the year. Media mogul Jimmy Lai, already in prison after being convicted of other, non-national security crimes, is currently awaiting trial for conspiracy to collude with foreign forces under Article 30 of the NSL, collusion with foreign forces, and for sedition. It’s unclear when Lai’s trial will end, but a not-guilty verdict seems highly unlikely.

Overall, arrest and prosecution numbers over the past three years show that the Hong Kong government has not hesitated to use new national security laws to crack down on its political opponents. According to GCAL data, as of July 1, 2023, 264 individuals have been arrested by the Hong Kong Police Force for national security crimes, the vast majority for NSL crimes or for sedition. Over the past three years, the government has arrested an average of 7.3 individuals per month, although, as discussed in more detail below, the pace of arrests and prosecutions has slowed over the past year. Of those, 148 were criminally charged, and 103 have either been convicted or pled guilty. 45 national security cases are currently ongoing.

As our analysis was being prepared for publication, the Hong Kong government opened a new front in its crackdown on dissent. On July 3, Hong Kong Police National Security Department (NSD) Chief Steve Li announced arrest warrants for eight prominent overseas Hong Kong activists, including former legislators Ted Hui and Dennis Kwok, and activists Nathan Law and Anna Kwok. (Also included was Kevin Yam, a former Hong Kong-based solicitor; Yam is a fellow at the Georgetown Center for Asian Law.) At the same time, Li also announced that the Hong Kong government was offering bounties of up to HK$1 million (approximately U.S.$128,000) for information that would lead to their arrest and prosecution.

Given that all eight reside in countries that are unlikely to refoul peaceful activists—who are in some cases citizens of the countries in which they now reside—it is unclear whether the move will lead to any additional arrests or prosecutions. Still, Li’s announcement shows that the Hong Kong government continues to target those who, in its view, represent a national security threat to Hong Kong—or, more accurately, a peaceful political challenge.

Shifting from the NSL to Sedition

Cases like those of Jimmy Lai and the Hong Kong 47 continue to work their way through the system, but they are no longer representative of the role that the NSL now plays in that system. With the work of reshaping Hong Kong’s institutions now largely done, the newly-constructed national security state has moved into a consolidation phase. The government now primarily uses the sedition provision of the Crimes Ordinance to preserve and enforce the status quo, and to ensure that the public remains aware that certain red lines, if crossed, will lead to criminal punishment. The NSL itself is used more sparingly, generally to go after new targets or to address more significant threats to the status quo, should they emerge.

Data collected by GCAL illustrates the shift in government strategy. Over the past year, the sedition provision of the Crimes Ordinance has become the government’s preferred tool for cracking down on peaceful political speech and activity: Nearly 60 percent of national security arrests were for sedition. Authorities arrested 28 individuals for sedition over the past year, with nine individuals either pleading guilty or convicted after trial. Another 15 individuals were released without charge. The cases of four other individuals are pending.

NSL- and Sedition-Related Arrests

Why has sedition come to play such a predominant role? As compared to NSL crimes, sedition carries lesser penalties. Individuals convicted of sedition can be sentenced to up to three years in prison, whereas crimes detailed in the NSL carry penalties of up to five years, or, in serious cases, 10 years to life. Sedition’s relatively light penalties are a better fit for the government’s goal of curbing relatively low-level speech crimes, like those committed by booksellers Keung, Lee, and Chan. The punishment in such cases is meant to be harsh enough to serve as a deterrent, but not so stiff as to alienate relative moderates inclined to support the government. At the same time, sedition’s lighter penalties may make it easier for the government to ensure judicial compliance—they are likely easier for the court system to swallow.

Sedition’s elastic legal definition also more readily applies to a broad range of speech crimes. Under the colonial-era provision, any individual who “excite[s] disaffection against” the government or “counsel[s] disobedience to the law” can be prosecuted for sedition. By contrast, the subversion provision of the NSL refers to “overthrowing or undermining the basic system of the People’s Republic of China,” or to “attacking or damaging” Hong Kong government facilities and rendering them “incapable of performing [their] normal duties and functions.” The bar is thus much lower for sedition, which can stretch to cover a range of peaceful criticisms of the government, from its failure to enact democratic reforms to its strict COVID-19 policies.

Finally, by using the colonial-era sedition provision, the government can deflect attention away from the NSL itself, which was imposed on Hong Kong by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee in Beijing. The U.K. government in particular may find it more difficult to criticize the Hong Kong government for cracking down on basic rights, when the law in question is one that British colonial rulers themselves put on the books several decades ago.

Our data also show that the pace of national security-related arrests and prosecutions has slowed dramatically over the last three years. During the first year of NSL implementation, Hong Kong police arrested 134 individuals on national security grounds, or an average of roughly 11.2 individuals per month. That figure dipped significantly in the second year: from July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022, the police arrested a total of 90 individuals, averaging 7.5 per month. In year three, arrest totals dropped even further, to 48 total individuals, or 4 per month. The implication is clear: having achieved its core objectives, the government is making fewer national security arrests on a month-by-month basis.

National security prosecutions show a similar downward trend, albeit from a lower base. From July 2020 to June 2021, authorities charged a total of 65 individuals with national security crimes, according to GCAL data, averaging 5.4 individuals charged per month. Charging numbers actually remained more or less constant from July 2021 to June 2022: a total of 66 individuals were charged over that 12-month period, averaging 5.5 individuals per month. Since July 2022, total charges and charges per month have plunged: from July 2022 to June 2023, just 21 individuals have been charged, a rate of 1.8 individuals charged per month.

Both arrest and charging data tell the same story: As of mid-2023, the government has less need to rely on the heavier artillery of national security criminal provisions, and can mostly use other tools—including administrative measures, public pronouncements and threats, and new legislation—to enforce and maintain effective control. When needed, criminal prosecution, primarily in the form of the sedition provision of the Crimes Ordinance, is being used to reinforce key red lines, but government officials likely hope that they will need to reach for that tool less and less often as time goes on.

Our data also tell two other important stories: First, an NSL arrest does not necessarily mean that an individual is destined for jail time. Out of 264 individuals arrested, authorities eventually charged only 148 with national security crimes, for a 56 percent charging rate. Though details remain scarce on the NSD’s handling of those cases in which individuals were not charged, it’s clear that a decision not to prosecute remains a real option in many lower-level cases. This in turn suggests that the government will forego prosecution when it believes that deterrence has been achieved by an initial arrest and detention. Yet, given the paucity of relevant journalistic reporting and academic research, we can’t be sure exactly how the NSD handles such cases or how prosecution decisions are made inside the Hong Kong government.

Finally, one data point speaks louder than any others about the impact of the new national security law regime: Three years into the national security era, the government continues to boast a 100 percent conviction rate. Of the 148 individuals who have been charged with NSL crimes, 103 have either pled guilty or have been convicted. 45 individuals either await trial or are in the middle of the judicial process, facing an all-but-certain outcome.

Notably, dozens of individuals have pled guilty to national security crimes. Hong Kong government officials would no doubt claim that this means the system is working: such guilty pleas demonstrate both the accuracy of the charges as well as the lawful authority under which they were brought. Yet, our examination of the public record in these cases suggests a very different conclusion: that many NSL defendants recognize it is impossible to get a fair trial under the NSL, and that if they plead guilty they are eligible for a one-third sentence reduction. For individuals accused of NSL crimes, a one-third sentence reduction can add up to a year or more being shaved off of a custodial sentence.

National Security Laws and the Courts: Time to Recalibrate?

The 100 percent conviction rate suggests that, thus far at least, the judiciary has not found a way to effectively deal with the enormous challenge to its independence posed by the NSL and the sedition provision. Instead of acting as a check on government and defending basic rights, the court system’s approach has been to bend to the enormous political pressure it faces, and to give the government more or less everything it wants in national security cases. Every substantive verdict has gone the government’s way, and the lion’s share of procedural rulings (bail decisions, decisions on the right to a jury trial, and so on) have been in the government’s favor as well. Simply put, the courts have not served as even a soft check on the government’s rollout of the NSL. Judges at every level have failed to mitigate the extensive damage done to human rights and the rule of law in Hong Kong.

To be sure, there are some in the judiciary whose political views align with the government. Those judges are all too happy to deliver guilty verdicts in national security cases that come before them. Others may be responding to the all-too-clear career incentives (and disincentives) that are emerging for judges who toe the line in national security cases. But many other judges—including those on the Court of Final Appeal, Hong Kong’s highest court—likely believe that any effort to even partially check the government’s national security agenda would lead to immediate moves by Beijing to curtail judicial authority and independence. In this context, the argument goes, discretion is the better part of valor: better to protect and preserve the court system’s institutional position, especially outside the national security realm, and live to fight another day.

This argument is not without merit. The courts are indeed under extreme pressure, and Beijing has clearly communicated its preferences, especially on high-profile cases. The Party expects the courts to deliver guilty verdicts in key cases, and almost certainly would receive a not-guilty verdict as a direct political challenge to its authority—a challenge that could not be tolerated.

However, this argument ignores the more than one hundred individuals put behind bars under the NSL and the sedition provision since the crackdown began. Almost all of those who have been found guilty of national security crimes were merely exercising their constitutional rights to free expression, association, and assembly. Hong Kong judges presided over these cases, and they bear some amount of moral responsibility for the lives interrupted, the freedoms lost.

As the NSL begins its fourth year on the books, Hong Kong’s judges need to ask themselves: is there truly no way to limit the damage being done by the new national security law regime? At what point does the price being paid—increasingly, by ordinary Hong Kong citizens like Alan Keung, Alex Lee, and Cannis Chan—become simply too great to justify the blank check being given to the government in each and every national security case? Has the time come for some modest assertion of judicial authority, at least in cases that are considered less politically sensitive? Are there ways to recalibrate, perhaps with procedural rulings or reduced sentencing, that might not draw Beijing’s attention and ire? In the months to come, some initial answers to these questions will emerge. One hopes that the coming year will be a better one for human rights and rule of law in Hong Kong than the last three have been.

This week, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced it would cease collecting data on youth unemployment. The news came after nearly a decade of poor job prospects for Chinese people ages 16-24, often reported on by international media as mainly a problem affecting recent college graduates. Earlier this summer, ChinaFile’s Jessica Batke spoke with sociologist Eli Friedman, who studies international labor, about the reasons for joblessness among China’s young people and how it is covered.

Jessica Batke: If you’re graduating right now in China, if you’re coming on the labor market, what do you see in front of you? What are you worried about?

Eli Friedman: Well, you’d be worried about getting a job! That structural reality is very much at the forefront of what college graduates in China are thinking about, and it is a big change from much of the past generation.

Since the violent suppression of the student-led movement in 1989, the state struck a basic deal with college graduates, as well as intellectuals and youth more broadly: If they stayed out of politics and they could get into college, they’d pretty much be guaranteed a decent job that would allow them to live a life significantly more materially comfortable than their parents’ or their grandparents’.

That worked really well in the 1990s, in the 2000s, through the turbulence of the 2008 crisis, and into the 2010s. Yet, even before COVID, we’d begun to see cracks in that system. COVID is its own unique moment in all of this, but coming out of COVID the underlying stresses on the system have become really apparent. The previous reality—that if you went to college, you’d be likely to graduate and get a job that allowed you to live a life that more or less matched your expectations—is increasingly not the case. People go to college and might not get a job at all. Or they might get a job but the pay, the conditions, and the hours mean that they are not going to be able to live a life that matches their aspirations. In some cases, the gap is dramatic. So there’s a lot of anxiety, and, in some cases, fear—or just “giving up.”

There is also the question of overseas students. For a long time, studying abroad in the United States, or in one of the other Anglophone countries, was seen as, if not a golden ticket, at least a pretty solid pathway to the middle class. That is no longer the case. We see that even students who have gotten into reasonably competitive universities in the U.S. or elsewhere are now worried about going back to China. There’s no guarantee that they will be able to get jobs either.

So studying overseas used to get you a little bit of an extra edge, and it really doesn’t do much for you anymore?

I think it does help some in certain industries, but a couple things have changed. One is that Chinese universities have gotten a lot better. The gap between a competitive school in the United States and a competitive school in China has shrunk. Chinese employers are seeing that and saying, “We can hire someone who went to one of the 211 or the 985 universities in China [which have been designated by the government as top-tier institutions], and they’re going to be just as well-trained, and possibly better trained, than if they went to a school in the U.S. or the U.K.” And in general, I think it’s better for students to be able to go to high-quality higher education institutions closer to home. It’s definitely a lot cheaper as compared to the United States, graduating with debt or having your family invest hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In terms of Chinese labor market dynamics, being able to say that you speak English is no longer the major mark of distinction that it might have been 20 or 30 years ago. And while the cachet of studying abroad has not been completely eliminated, I think employers are much more sensitive now. Looking at someone’s resume, they’re able to tell the difference between some very elite school like Harvard or Yale versus a fine-but-maybe-less-elite public school. So it’s a little bit more complicated than it was a generation ago.

So are more of the Chinese students studying overseas trying to stay abroad rather than return home? In the U.S., everyone’s talking about how hot the labor market is, which would suggest there are jobs available, but the government also maintains lots of visa restrictions. Do you have any sense of what these students are doing?

I don’t have any data on that, but I have seen data indicating the number of Chinese students coming to the United States has decreased. That’s for a number of reasons. Again, educational opportunities are better in China than they were a decade or two ago. In certain cases, U.S.-China hostility has made it more difficult administratively, or people have fears about being caught up in the China Initiative, which unfairly targeted people who are Chinese. But also, I think, because of a general sense of hostility; if you want to study something that’s potentially related to national security, why even bother? I believe, although I’m not 100 percent certain, that many Chinese students studying overseas have just gone to other Anglophone countries, like the U.K. So I don’t think it’s a general pulling back from study abroad, but specifically an issue with the U.S.

In terms of where Chinese students are going after they graduate: This is super anecdotal, but based on the students that I encounter here at Cornell, I’ve seen a clear shift towards more students wanting to stay in the U.S. This is part of a cultural shift that came out of COVID—so-called “runxue,” or “running away.” It includes people of that generation who are worried about what their futures will be like in China and are pretty eager to find ways to stay in other countries—the major challenges of staying in the United States notwithstanding, including visa restrictions and concerns about anti-Asian racism. Whether or not more people actually are going to stay in the U.S. after they graduate, I don’t know, I haven’t seen that data. But just in terms of my cultural currents, it’s clear to me more people are like, “If I can stay here, I would really like to do that.”

What is driving the change in unemployment for young people? You said COVID was kind of its own thing, but that we were seeing some cracks in the system even before COVID—so it seems like there are longer-standing issues at play here. It certainly feels to me like I’ve seen news articles every summer for the last 10 years about graduate unemployment in China. Is this year actually any different than the last five or 10 years, in terms of unemployment? Is it just an issue of degree? Or is there a qualitative shift that’s making this different than before?

The number for youth unemployment this year and last year is actually just about the same. If you go back and look at a year ago . . . I forget the exact unemployment figure, but it was also around 20 percent.

I should first say when I saw that number last year, I was shocked. My jaw dropped. For a long time, labor scholars had just assumed that unemployment numbers in China were manufactured. Unemployment rates going back for a couple of decades hover around 4 percent, with tiny little fluctuations. So I and most people thought, whatever, it’s one of the many manufactured numbers in China. And so when I saw this number I was like, OK, maybe China really had a very, very stable labor market for many decades. I mean, I don’t know, you never know with these things. But in any event, it was quite an acknowledgment of a systemic problem, if not a systemic failure.

This is speculation, but I think the youth unemployment issue has gotten even more attention this year because China is through with lockdowns. Last summer, China was still in the midst of all of the lockdowns, and so everyone knew that there was “artificial constraining,” particularly of consumption. It had a big effect on manufacturing as well. We saw it with COVID lockdowns in places like Foxconn and the Tesla factory and elsewhere. There was a sense that the state had taken extreme measures, restricting the economy and driving up unemployment. But we all knew that, at a certain point, the lockdowns were going to end, China’s economy would roar back to life, these problems would dissipate, and we’d go back to the previous three decades of the China boom. (I never thought that was going to be the case, but there was some hope, maybe some wishful thinking, that it would be.)

Fast forward to 2023. The lockdowns have ended chaotically, disastrously, and tragically. There was a brief burst of economic activity, or “revenge spending,” as well as increases in exports and what looked like some stabilization in the real estate market. But that very quickly petered out. It became clear by the spring that there was not going to be a return to pre-COVID assumptions about growth.

One of the reasons I think the numbers hit a little bit harder in 2023 than in 2022 is because we now understand there’s no easy fix. Last year the easy fix was to end the lockdowns, like the rest of the world had done, and get back to normal. That’s not true this year, and it raises a whole series of much more difficult questions about what ought to be done in order to address unemployment.

COVID, geopolitics, a lot of things that nobody could have predicted that put new pressures on the Chinese economy. But, if you look at the broad structural tendencies over the last 10 years, some very serious changes were always going to be necessary. That has only been intensified by contingent things like lockdowns and geopolitics.

What were the needed changes?

The main thing is the drivers of the Chinese economy, which have been exports and investment.

Exports are particularly important in the economically dynamic regions of the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta. They are in many ways the foundation of the China boom that took off in the 1990s—a model of growth predicated on wage suppression. The whole comparative advantage that China had, as identified by the leadership in the 1980s, was this large, relatively well-educated, very cheap workforce. It allowed them to conduct production on a scale that was unimaginable for the other East Asian Tigers, like Taiwan and South Korea, which couldn’t compete on scale, or, at that point, on the price of labor or land.

But then the cost of land and labor went up quite a lot—which I think is a good thing—but it meant that, purely on the basis of the cheapness of labor, China was no longer competitive. This was already true in the early 2010s. Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, places in Latin America—wages are all cheaper in those places. And wages are much cheaper in India.

So they needed to find new ways of competing and manufacturing. The state was very clear on the need to move from a so-called labor intensive form of manufacturing to a capital- and knowledge-intensive form of manufacturing. Rather than making toys, socks, and little gadgets, they want to be making high-end electronics, medical equipment, and cars. They want to be engaged in leading-edge technologies, like electric cars, which they’ve been pretty successful at. But making that switch means it’s less labor intensive. If you have a highly automated form of production that’s turning out something very expensive, like an electric vehicle, you’re absorbing less of the labor force.

The other piece is around investments. That’s the other thing that’s really driving growth. Especially after 2008, you saw much more employment going into construction—building infrastructure, building buildings, building real estate, and all of the associated industries related to the building of things.

Steel, concrete. . .

Steel, concrete, electric wiring, things like that. It touches on manufacturing as well, because as people are building houses, they have to buy furniture and dishware and all the things that people put in houses.

Manufacturing jobs in China peaked a long time ago, in the mid-2000s, even before the 2008 crisis. Employment in construction continued to go up because of all of the building, particularly after the 2008 crisis, when the state pumped $586 billion into the economy, which mostly ended up in infrastructure spending and the real estate boom.

Spending on infrastructure, which is debt-financed, has come up against some real limits. We see this with local government fiscal stress and their inability to service their debts. We also see it in the real estate market: [major property developer] Evergrande just announced losses of [$81 billion] for the last two years. That’s just one indicator of how badly the real estate market has [done], for all sorts of reasons. China’s population is shrinking. The cost of housing is just absolutely exorbitant.

To bring us back to the question of employment: the big economic drivers, which had been absorbing tens of millions of people migrating from the countryside into the city, are not really driving that much employment anymore. So the shift that China has to make, and that economists and the Communist Party have known about for two decades, is the shift to consumption-led growth. Premier Wen Jiabao was talking about it in 2004, almost 20 years ago. If you look at progress since 2004, consumption as a share of GDP is still down.

Services already do absorb a majority of employment in China, more than in the secondary industries of manufacturing and construction. But the kinds of service sector jobs that are being created are pretty menial. And this is another really important feature when we think about how this shift is playing out. And when we think about the college grads.

But if jobs are shifting away from manufacturing and towards services—knowing that some of the service jobs are menial—it still seems like there should be more jobs for college graduates. Why are there no jobs for these folks?

One point that is important, and is often missed in a lot of the media coverage: Media coverage is very focused on the college grads. I understand why that is. As a college professor, I think about college grads a lot.

But the number that is always cited, the 21 percent unemployment figure, Is for all 16-to-24-year-olds. Within that, the proportion of people who are college grads is actually quite small. In China, you have nine years of compulsory education. In the ninth year—that’s age 14 or so—you take the high school entrance exam, and then you get tracked out. Some people go on to the academic high school route—and most of the people tracked into the academic high school route do get into university nowadays—but most people don’t make it onto that track. They either stop education after Year 9 or they go get some supplementary technical education.

So, if you’re looking at ages 16 to 24, it’s only the 23 and 24 year olds that could conceivably be university grads. Everyone else in that age group are people who’ve already left school and are looking for work.

I actually didn’t piece that together when I first saw those numbers last year. But then when it hit me, I was like, “This is much scarier than I thought.” If you think of youth unemployment as just college grads, then you lean into the discourse—which is not untrue, but it’s only a partial truth—that college grads don’t want to take jobs in manufacturing, or they don’t want to get a job as a factory worker or in a restaurant. But, actually, the majority of these people did not go to university, and they’re still not getting jobs. That’s the thing that really worries me. It’s not just people turning their noses up at jobs that they think don’t befit a college-educated person. It’s people who are just not getting jobs at all.

Talking about the university grads more specifically: People take jobs because they need enough money to live the life that they want to live. But the gap between the life that they want to live and the jobs that are available is incommensurable right now. You can think about that in a couple of ways.

For one, the kinds of service sector jobs that are overwhelmingly being produced just don’t pay you enough to live in the big cities where most college grads want to live. The income-to-housing ratio in large Chinese cities is among the worst in the world. It makes New York City look kind of affordable. So if you take the jobs that are available, then you’re not going to be able to buy a house. If you can’t buy a house, you won’t be able to get your kid into school. That is because employment in the formal sector and home ownership are often required to access [residence permits known as] hukou—without establishing hukou you can be denied access to a range of social services including public education, health care, and pensions.

Now, there are other kinds of jobs which might pay you enough to live that kind of life. But these jobs raise the whole “996” issue—working 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., six days a week. You might have enough money to buy a house, buy a car, and maybe to pay so someone else can raise your child. But I think a lot of young people are not into that anymore. That was really dramatized when all of the 996 activism was happening among tech workers two or three years ago. And, there’s a kind of generational difference. Back when [Alibab founder] Jack Ma was still making public appearances in China, he was kind of berating young people, very dismissive of them, when he said it’s a “blessing” to be able to do 996 when you’re in your 20s—this is what you do when you’re a young person, you devote your entire life to working hard and you can enjoy life later. That fell really flat with young people in China who didn’t grow up in desperate poverty in the way that people who were in their 50s or 60s did. This idea that you have to eat bitterness for decades before you can take a breather . . . if you grow up living middle class life in a big city in China, you’re thinking, “Maybe there’s more to life than just working all the time.”

So, the jobs that are being created right now are either not paying young people enough to live in the city, or they do pay enough but people then can’t live the kind of life that they would like to live. That’s part of the challenge for the college grad specifically.

If you’re the Chinese government, what are your range of options to deal with this? Or what might leaders be thinking about to try to engineer this economic shift? I assume they don’t have infinite time to make the shift, that there will eventually come an inflection point?

There’s not an endless amount of time. If they don’t make a serious intervention, the vitality of growth will gradually be sapped, because they can’t depend on exports. We already see a reorganization of global supply chains away from China. Supply chains are not leaving China by any means, but China is going to be less central to the production of all kinds of commodities in the next few years.

The debt piece is also really important to the extent that households and governments are using their money to service debt rather than making productive investments. That’s also going to undermine the vitality of growth.

So it will be a long, slow decline. If I were a betting person, I would put my money on that, because the other options—which have been known for a long time, which are actually pretty clear, and not all that controversial for economists—are very difficult politically. They’re very difficult because the system of growth for the last 30 years has created very rich and very politically-connected constituencies that don’t want to change.

Let’s think about real estate and exporters as key groups in all of this. With respect to exporters, if you want to shift from the current wage repression model to one predicated on a virtuous cycle of higher wages and higher consumption, you have to do two main things. One is you have to raise wages, obviously. One way to deal with this is to allow unions to bargain and collectively push up wages above what the market would determine on its own. The Chinese state is not willing to consider unions, because it thinks they pose a threat to political stability. Another option is that the state could just dictate. It could say, “In this industry, here’s what wages are going to be. We’re going to have dramatic increases in the minimum wage.” There were significant minimum wage hikes during the 2010s, but those increases have slowed considerably since Xi Jinping came to power. The state hasn’t done that. And so the question is, if there is already a dictatorial state, why can’t it just say, “Pay the workers more”? Because doing so would be a political problem. Whole economies are organized around exports; exporters and associated industries are very politically powerful. They have said, “We don’t want that,” and the Party has more or less gone along with it.

The other side Is social protections: Health care. Pensions are particularly important. Education. If you talk to Chinese people about why they’re not spending money, their biggest concerns are about the future.

For example, “How much is it going to cost for me to educate my child?” Officially, compulsory education is free in China, and that is in a sense true. Increasingly, buying a house in the catchment area of a good school has become a more expensive proposition in the biggest cities. This is something Americans can certainly relate to. You’re not formally paying tuition for schools, but you are in essence paying for schools via the real estate market.

On healthcare, the state has increased investments in health insurance, but it remains extremely patchy, particularly for migrant workers. The subsidies offered in rural areas are wildly inadequate. Hundreds of millions of people fear they are one major illness away from bankruptcy. There’s no national healthcare system, and there’s no indication that they are considering the sort of comprehensive national system such as exists in many countries.

Finally, pensions are really a big issue, and they’re very, very politically complicated. Because society is aging, there are more and more people of retirement age. (China has a pretty low retirement age, 60 for men and 55 For women, which they have considered raising.) The pension is a whole separate, complex issue. It is pretty uneven between rural people and urban people, between residents and migrants. Suffice it to say that for hundreds of millions of people, their pension is completely inadequate to live on. That’s why people are dependent on their children. But they only have one child. That child is paying the mortgage, but they can’t really support it.

So the answer to making this shift is raising wages and increasing social protections. The policy prescription is really not complicated. But how to do it politically is extremely complicated. Even a man as confident in himself as Xi Jinping would have a hard time doing it.

I think there’s also an ideological component to this. Based on what Xi and other leaders say, I think that they’re just a little bit neoliberal in this respect. Xi was very explicit. He was like, we don’t want to have excessively generous welfare policies to support lazy people. Despite the fact that it is a Communist Party, they just don’t see that as their job.

In terms of real estate, it needs to be a less central part of the economy. You have to have a property tax so local governments can generate revenue to support all the welfare programs that we have just talked about. But again, the real estate companies don’t want it. They’re extremely powerful. And lots of otherwise sympathetic middle class people also don’t want it because Chinese people have a huge percentage of their wealth invested in real estate. They don’t have the same kind of options around equities and mutual funds that people and other wealthy countries have. And so they sink all their money into real estate. And for a long time, that was a really good deal. But if they sunk all their money into a house, and then all of a sudden it’s being taxed at whatever percent a year, they might not have the income to pay that in addition to everything else they need. So it’s politically very difficult.

I don’t want to do too much mirror imaging here, but I have been struck several times by things you've said that seem to suggest similar vibes in China and in the U.S. For example, Jack Ma berating people for not working enough felt very Elon Musk-y to me. Or young people, either “lying flat” in China or “quiet quitting” here in the U.S. And then you just mentioned Xi’s admonition against welfare for lazy people, which really reminded me of Paul Ryan’s welfare “hammock.” It’s striking how similar these sentiments seem.

I think there are a lot of similarities. Since you mentioned Elon Musk, he’s actually tried to use the Chinese example to break his American employees, to get them to burn the midnight oil. The reality of what was going on at Shanghai Tesla was that workers were put in the closed loop in the Tesla factory during the Shanghai lockdown. They went in being told that they might be there for a few days, and they ended up there for [eight weeks]. So that’s the model that appeals to guys like Elon Musk and Jack Ma. And I can tell you for a fact that the Chinese workers who were in there were not doing it because they’re more morally upright or more committed to increasing the wealth of the world’s wealthiest man. They just didn’t have a choice. I think we should commend Tesla employees in the United States for refusing to do that.

Your broader point about the similarities—not just between the U.S. and China, but also between China and many other countries around the world—is really important because sometimes amidst all of the geopolitical strife, we imagine these two societies as fundamentally different. Actually, I think that a lot of the same global pressures are being brought to bear on both societies. A lot of the particulars are different: The expansion of higher education in China has been much more rapid; the social change and the generational difference in experience between people in their 60s versus people in their 20s is different for sure.

I teach at a university that has lots of young people from the United States and from China. I think that the broader question—about how people can make a decent life for themselves given the structural conditions—is something that’s troubling to people in both places, and that is unfortunate. I wish it were grounds for solidarity between young people of our two great nations.

I’m a bit hesitant to ask this question, because there is a tendency on this side of the world to frame everything in terms of, “Is this going to be the thing that brings down the CCP?” But a Bloomberg article earlier this month quoted a report from advisors to Xi’s which said that if they don’t get a handle on youth unemployment it could cause serious political problems. Do you think this is becoming a more salient issue for the government? What might the government do to mitigate the possibility of serious political problems or unrest, if it won’t alter the economic status quo?

First of all, I think it’s a totally legitimate question to ask. What are the potential political consequences of this structural condition? I don’t think it spells the end of the Communist Party and I think that we shouldn’t speculate about that too much. But we should think through what those potential political effects are.

As I’ve already said, after 1989, the central deal between the state and educated young people was that if they stay out of politics, they can expect regular material improvements in their lives. The Communist Party sees educated youth as one of their core constituencies that they really want to keep happy. Part of the reason for that is because of the Communist Party’s own history. They were founded by educated young people. Mao was working in the Peking University library. Deng Xiaoping had studied abroad in France. They’re keenly aware that dissatisfied educated young people can present a political challenge to the existing state. And so if that deal—political acquiescence in exchange for material improvement—is unraveling, then they’re going to have to find another way of handling this group of people.

The tools that they have at their disposal are different for college graduates than they are for lots of other people in Chinese society who are dissatisfied. The Chinese state spends a lot of time thinking about risks to political stability. When it comes to Uyghurs, they have one set of tools, for overwhelming repression—camps, surveillance, all of that. They can’t use those tools on college graduates, for a whole variety of reasons.

But there are other things they could do around the margins. They could certainly do something with respect to housing. A robust public housing program wouldn’t necessarily require a complete overhaul of the economy. They could keep some of that capacity around construction going and allow people to feel a little bit less anxious about making a life for themselves in the city. We’ve seen some housing programs here and there, but it continues to be very piecemeal. And overall, urban real estate continues to be very market-driven.

The liquidation of the entire private tutoring industry—which is targeting young people before they graduate college—is an acknowledgment of sorts that young people in Chinese society feel like they’re under too much pressure, and they don’t want them to be going to all of these hours of tutoring. There have been efforts to restrict the amount of homework that schools can assign and to turn the temperature down a little bit on testing. All of that is an indicator that they’re interested in doing something to address some of these issues.

Assuming that they’re not going to be able to enact deep structural reforms that would really resolve this problem, which I don’t think is very likely, the question then is, if there are a lot of people with grievances, what are the likely political consequences going to be?

And I think that the political consequences will probably not be very serious. What will probably happen is that lots of people will suffer from depression and anxiety, and that what is a fundamentally social problem will be put on the backs of individuals to bear by themselves.

Sounds familiar.

Yeah, that’s true most of the time. As an educator, I see it very clearly, in rising rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental health problems among young people.

So I think that will largely be the extent of it. The avenues for political expression are pretty limited. You can’t join a political party, you can’t join a union, and you can’t form your own organization. There are online communities that pop up here and there, but if they get too big, they get censored and reined in. The state doesn’t have to use the kind of repression that they use against Uyghurs or Tibetans. They can use a more delicate form of oppression.

But in terms of political consciousness, I do think that there has been a significant shift among highly educated youth in China. I’ve seen this among my students here, and I’ve definitely seen it in the writing that students back in China are doing.

The clearest example of this was during the White Paper movement. The protests were not representative of youth in general; the total number of people who were actually out on the streets shouting, “Down with Xi Jinping!” was pretty small. So who’s to say what the majority of people are thinking. But the fact that it was even possible. . . I mean, saying “Down with Xi Jinping, down with the Communist Party” in public was unthinkable in October 2022, and in November 2022, it was happening all over the place, including here at Cornell, and in many places around the world.

During private conversations with many people, I’ve seen folks who were previously quite patriotic and pro-government say, “Wow, if the government can just lock me in my apartment in Shanghai for months—me, a relatively privileged, well-educated person—what else could they do to me?” Also, the things the government has promised about a better life—trust the Communist Party and your livelihoods will improve—that’s not really panning out anymore. That has effected a change. Whether that actually eventually translates into action is another question. But it is now another problem for the state to manage, in a way that they haven’t had to manage, coming from what had been a pretty solid base of support for them for a few decades. The Tibetans, the Uyghurs, and Hong Kong were always troublesome for them. But here in the core, in Beijing, in Shanghai, and in the big cities, they have this other concern and so they’ll have to pay more attention to it.

Xi Jinping has ruled China for over a decade, but the way he rules it is changing. Xi faces domestic and international environments that are markedly worse than when he took office in 2012. The economy is struggling, confidence is faltering, debt is looming, and strategic competition with the United States and its allies is endangering the future of China’s technological advancement and economic growth.

Many analyses still portray Chinese politics in relatively static terms, as either returning to growth-oriented practicality post-COVID, or as having discarded economic concerns to pursue authoritarian control and geopolitical dominance. But what such takes miss is that policymaking is becoming increasingly volatile, as China’s mounting challenges lead Beijing into deeper swings between the politics of its ideological agenda and the pragmatism of delivering a baseline of economic growth. This volatility will stem mostly from three balancing acts: 1. balancing growth with security in economic policy, 2. balancing diplomatic struggle against U.S. global leadership with avoiding economic decoupling from the West, and 3. balancing competition between different sub-factions in elite politics.

The defining theme of domestic policymaking in Xi’s third term could be the securitization of everything, especially economic policy. Xi’s report to the 20th Party Congress in October 2022—an authoritative policy document in the Communist Party system—said that national security should “permeate every aspect and the whole process” of governance, instructed the Party to “comprehensively strengthen the national security system” by 2035, and added a new section on national security to the report’s usually fixed structure. In May, Xi chaired the first post-congress meeting of his Central National Security Commission, the readout of which declared “the complexity and enormity of the national security issues that we are currently facing” to have “increased significantly.”

The Party leadership’s pro-growth sentiment this year has been undermined by raids of foreign firms, national security bans on Western chips, and amendments to the Anti-Espionage Law that expand its application to businesses. Sources in Beijing also suggest the government is planning to launch a Chinese equivalent to the U.S.’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which will escalate scrutiny of foreign investors in China.

Xi’s rising focus on security seems driven mainly by a belief that China must reduce its economic and technological dependencies on the United States and its allies in an era of intensifying geopolitical competition. In March, he described Western countries and especially the United States as “implementing comprehensive containment, encirclement, and suppression against China, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges for China’s development.” This is almost certainly a reference to the sanctions, export controls, and reshoring policies adopted by the Trump and now Biden administrations in Washington.

The official summary of a May meeting of Xi’s Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission said that Beijing will invest heavily in creating a “modern industrial system” built around manufacturing and innovation. Western high-tech firms will be welcome, but Xi hopes they will help boost China’s “self-reliance” on a “whole-nation system” of homegrown competitors.

The securitization of economic policy is likely to bring clearer Party leadership and stronger intervention in almost all areas of the Chinese economy. Recent years saw an uptick of ideological interventions in specific industries—for example, banning for-profit tutoring to ameliorate educational inequality, restricting video gaming to curb youth Internet addiction, and regulating platform technology companies to limit their market power and political clout.

The sense from Beijing now, by contrast, is more expansive: the Party needs to supervise the whole economy to protect its security. In April, the Central Comprehensively Deepening Reforms Commission (CCDRC), arguably Xi’s most influential policy coordination body, held a meeting whose readout said the Party should determine “for whom to innovate, who should innovate, what to innovate, and how to innovate” by “holistically planning the whole chain of technology innovation.”

Increasingly, firms will be expected to align with policy objectives. Some of this alignment will be coerced, through legislation mandating firms contribute to intelligence or military projects, for example, but the more prevalent mechanism will likely be firms proactively falling into line to avoid the fate of companies caught up in previous rectification campaigns. The CCDRC readout said the Party would “actively encourage and effectively guide private enterprises to participate in major national innovation.” Xi is not anti-business or anti-market, he is simply pro-Party; he wants to better harness private sector activity to advance his goals for the Party-state.

Security is not everything, however, as “development” formally remains ahead of “security” as a priority for Xi’s administration, at least in authoritative Party documents like last year’s congress report. Xi has directed authorities to balance development and security. This signifies that economic growth is still crucial, but he believes greater concessions must be made to safeguard national security. The worry both inside and outside China is that security policies will compound the surprisingly rapid slowdown in China’s post-COVID recovery and hamstring the country’s economic trajectory. Confusion will rise, with Beijing periodically switching its emphasis between growth and security, and Xi’s economic and security teams each vying for the upper hand.

Witness the bewilderment of foreign firms in China right now as local governments appeal for their investments while central authorities stifle the business services essential for such commitments. The continued centralization of power and tightening of policy execution mean that slight shifts in messaging will ripple through the bureaucracy even quicker, more frequently, and more damagingly than before. Uncertainty is already depressing private sector investment, dimming the prospects of the Chinese economy.

Mixed messages about growth and security will hit market confidence, but the biggest issue for business between China and the West is the momentum behind high-tech decoupling in the U.S. alliance system, which will likely be aggravated by Xi’s growing diplomatic pushback against Western global leadership in his third term. Xi helped broker a normalization of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, put China forward as a mediating party in any future peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, and offered to play a larger role in Israel-Palestine negotiations. He renewed efforts to promote a multipolar international order through his Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative, and Global Civilization Initiative. And he has eschewed provocation by sustaining dialogue with Western leaders, moderating some of the more extreme “wolf warrior” diplomacy, and telling his foreign policy team to improve global narratives about China.

Xi’s diplomatic push to position China as a vital economic partner, a political champion of the developing world, and an indispensable stakeholder in addressing transnational problems such as climate change and public health is partly to counterbalance the rising hostility of the United States and its allies. There is also a strong domestic angle, with Xi looking to shore up his legitimacy at a time of economic difficulty. Many analysts guess that Xi sees unification with Taiwan as a requirement to justify his extended tenure, because it would surpass the accomplishments of past paramount leaders. But another less risky, more rewarding way to do that would be for Xi to become a global leader on par with the U.S. president in his gravitas and his weight in international affairs—something that neither Mao Zedong nor Deng Xiaoping ever really achieved.

Notwithstanding the Biden administration’s desire to stabilize bilateral ties, China’s efforts to project diplomatic influence will probably enhance the perception of threat from Beijing in Washington and, to a lesser degree, in other Western capitals. The U.S. will likely push further policies designed to weaken China’s geo-economic power, particularly if Republicans win the White House in 2024. This could exacerbate Xi’s domestic growth troubles, but he can also invoke Western threats to stoke popular nationalism and highlight the importance of Party unity around his leadership. This dynamic could become a vicious cycle of short-term political gain but longer-term geopolitical pain.

As China’s economic and diplomatic challenges continue to grow, so too does Xi’s grip on the Party. He engineered the retirement of any lingering political rivals at the 20th Party Congress and filled high-ranking posts with loyalists. This situation may seem paradoxical, but what matters for Xi is not winning a popular vote but controlling key instruments of authoritarian power, namely the military, the security services, the anti-corruption apparatus, the personnel department, and the propaganda machinery. On this metric, surrounded by people he chose, Xi’s dominance has never seemed so pronounced.

Yet Xi’s ability to pick his own team does not necessarily mean that his people all get along with each other. The most significant development in Chinese elite politics during the next five years could be the emergence of “sub-factional” rivalry between various clusters of Xi supporters. Xi has assembled a leadership team with representatives from groups of officials who used to work for him in different provinces and rode his coattails into the Party center. This arrangement appears to help Xi ensure that no one else becomes too powerful, as he can play allies off against each other, even though such tactics may come at the expense of stable and predictable policymaking.

Xi is the decisive actor in personnel and policy decisions, but people on the ground suggest that a fierce competition is unfolding behind the scenes between networks of Xi-aligned cadres, especially those connected to him through Zhejiang province and Fujian province. These two sub-factions respectively trace their influence up to Politburo Standing Committee members Li Qiang and Cai Qi. Vice Premier He Lifeng is also a major Fujian powerbroker. Both groups are reportedly trying to maneuver their associates into lower-level positions in key institutions, including the General Office that manages Party business, the Organization Department that oversees personnel, and economic agencies like the National Development and Reform Commission.

Sub-factional jockeying under Xi differs from previous models of factional politics, which helped explain elite contention under Xi’s predecessors. Internal debates over the leadership and vision of the Party boss will be nearly absent, but what may seem like minor differences in policy implementation or ideological emphasis could come to serve as platforms and disguises for political battles between sub-factions. Such power fragmentation would inevitably impact Beijing’s already-weakened governance capacity and hinder the effective realization of central policies.

Xi has tough tasks ahead in his third term: balancing growth with security in economic policy, balancing ambition with restraint in foreign policy, and balancing competing sub-factions in elite politics. The base case outcome of this balancing act is that China will muddle through, continuing to build its national power while falling short of its full economic potential. But in the long term, slowing growth, less predictable governance, and an increasingly hostile external environment, if left unchanged, are making national stagnation more likely than national rejuvenation.

After more than one year of conflict, the Russia-Ukraine War continues to drag on. In May, China’s Special Representative for Eurasian Affairs, Li Hui, traveled throughout European capitals to discuss the potential for a “political settlement” of the Ukraine crisis. Meanwhile, Kiev has launched a counteroffensive in five areas along the front in Donetsk. In the background, China-Russia diplomatic, economic, and military relations remain robust. How is the Ukraine war impacting China-Russia relations? Are there limits to the China-Russia partnership? Will relations between Moscow and Beijing grow more or less asymmetrical in the years to come?

This China in the World podcast was recorded as a live Twitter Spaces discussion featuring Alexander Gabuev, Amy Chew, and Paul Haenle on the state of the Ukraine War and China-Russia relations. It was recorded on June 14, before the Wagner Group rebellion took place.

In a small Chinese town where unemployment has run high during the COVID-19 pandemic, the local government has embraced a surprising remedy to joblessness: public toilets.

Fugong Village, on the southwestern side of Guangdong province, usually sees nearly half of its small populace of 700 migrate to the Pearl River Delta to seek manufacturing jobs. But during the pandemic, the village has struggled as urban factories shuttered and migrant workers returned to their hometowns.

So village officials decided it was time to renovate the village’s public toilet system, using funds from a government relief program that aims to mitigate unemployment by hiring workers to build infrastructure.

While laying bricks and improving public sewage systems may not sound controversial, the Chinese government’s unemployment relief program (以工代赈, yi gong dai zhen), or “work as relief,” has come under fire on social media for its recent emphasis on manual labor. Earlier this year, the government announced revamped relief program guidelines that encourage local governments to “use human labor and not machines if possible,” sparking online debates about inefficient or unnecessary projects designed purely for the purpose of driving up employment.

“First hire 200 people to dig a hole, then hire another 200 to fill it up. That counts as creating 400 jobs,” joked one user on Weibo under a news post about the revised work as relief program guidelines.

“If you can’t use a shovel to dig dirt, then just use spoons,” wrote another, reacting to the program’s affinity for manual labor.

The idea of government-backed programs to tackle unemployment and alleviate poverty isn’t new to China, which launched the work as relief program in 1984. This came a few years after Beijing began market-oriented reforms that effectively ended the country’s highly centralized planned economy, where the government—not the labor market—had allocated workers to different jobs. The early version of the work as relief program facilitated the construction of infrastructure in impoverished areas.

The latest effort to revamp the program reflects the Chinese government’s growing concern about unemployment in rural and low-income areas following more than two years of harsh COVID lockdowns, as well as a slumping property sector and a slowing economy. In particular, migrant workers, who typically travel from the countryside to find work in major cities, have struggled with employment during the pandemic, as many of the jobs that such workers rely on, such as construction, manufacturing, and labor-intensive service jobs, have become scarcer due to lower demand and China’s zero-COVID policies.

On top of COVID, longer-term trends, such as increasing automation in China’s manufacturing sector and a deindustrializing economy, point to growing challenges that rural workers might face in seeking low-skilled work in cities, even if the economy fully recovers from the pandemic. Recent efforts to revamp the work as relief program highlight the complex and longstanding structural issues China faces in addressing rural poverty and unemployment, and how the range of policy tools China’s leaders are deploying could fall short.

“There are no easy answers to the problem of China’s increasingly underemployed rural workers,” says Scott Rozelle from Stanford University, who researches China’s agricultural policy and rural unemployment. China’s overall education rate is one of the lowest among middle-income countries, he says, which means it’s difficult for factory and construction workers to transition into higher-skilled employment. Instead, low-skilled workers are often pushed into the informal sector, with jobs that often lack healthcare and social security benefits. Under China’s nationwide household registration system, for instance, migrant workers registered as having a rural permanent residence, or hukou, have limited access to social services in urban areas, including pensions, healthcare, and education.

“China’s formal economy is leaving hundreds of millions of these workers behind,” he says.

Market-oriented reforms in the late 1970s through the early 2000s, when China joined the World Trade Organization, transformed the Communist Party-led country from a system where all productive assets were under state control to one that encouraged the formation of private businesses, loosened restrictions on foreign trade and investment, and privatized many state-owned companies. Prior to 1978, when the Chinese government kicked off “reform and opening” economic policies, the private sector was practically non-existent. Today, the private sector accounts for more than 60 percent of the country’s GDP and 80 percent of urban employment, according to official figures shared last year.

Such economic policies have powered China’s rapid rise into the world’s second-largest economy over the last three decades but have also contributed to growing levels of income inequality. From 1981 to 2021, China’s Gini coefficient—a widely used measure of inequality where zero represents perfect equality and a score of one means one household controls 100 percent of income—rose from an estimated 0.31 to 0.466. That’s lower than the U.S., which had a Gini coefficient of 0.494 in 2021, but higher than European nations like Germany, which had a score of 0.312.

And while China’s wealth distribution is less concentrated among elites than in the U.S. and countries like Brazil, Russia, and India, according to a 2021 Credit Suisse report that looked at the share of wealth owned by the top 1 percent in different countries, the gap between urban and rural incomes in China has continued to widen over the last decade. Meanwhile, China’s leaders have touted the country’s socialist system as being more equitable and less economically “polarized” than Western nations.

The issue of skewed development and wealth distribution has featured prominently in Xi Jinping’s recitations of his top priorities. Xi’s campaign to eliminate poverty has been one of his signature national policies, and he has overseen a regulatory crackdown on the country’s high-growth tech, property, and education sectors. Economic concerns appear to have slowed progress over the last year, but even so Xi has made repeated calls to realize “common prosperity,” such as through wealth redistribution and strengthening of regulation of high and “excessive” incomes.

“We must be clear-headed and aware that the problem of unbalanced and inadequate development in our country is still pronounced,” said Xi at a government conference in August 2021. “We need to prevent polarization and eliminate unfair distribution [of wealth] . . . and encourage high-income groups and enterprises to more fully repay society,” he said, adding that the “most arduous” task for common prosperity lies in rural areas.

Within this context, the latest work as relief program guidelines are another part of the government’s broader plans to mitigate the economic pains of uneven development that have been exacerbated by the pandemic and a slowing economy. The gap between rural and urban development, for instance, has fueled the country’s nearly 300 million migrant workforce. Rural residents who travel to major cities to earn higher wages in labor-intensive industries, such as construction and manufacturing, are a key target demographic of the revamped work as relief program.

The Chinese government doesn’t publish regular statistics on rural unemployment in part because those who own farmland are considered to be farming, even if they aren’t actively doing so or have never farmed. But according to China’s ministry of agriculture and rural affairs, the unemployment rate among migrant workers who have returned to the countryside was 9.3 percent at the end of last June. That July, the overall urban unemployment rate was 5.4 percent.

Employment in the country’s construction industry has also stagnated over the past five years, according to official statistics. In 2018, the number of people working in construction fell by 4 percent year-on-year. Since then, yearly changes have wavered between 1 to 2 percent and have been trending down starting in 2020, the start of the pandemic.

The line about using manual labor over machines in the new work as relief program guidelines is a “direct response to possible job losses in the construction sector,” according to Wang Dan, chief economist at Hang Seng Bank, in a January report on China’s economy.

Due to the low average level of education among workers in the construction industry, “once the industry shrinks, it will be very difficult to train the majority of workers to change jobs,” she wrote. This year, the most prominent employment issues will be in manufacturing and construction, Wang added.

And while China still accounted for about 29 percent of global manufacturing output in 2021, the production of certain product categories is shifting to other countries. According to 2022 data from transport economics firm MDS Transmodal, China’s global shares in clothing, furniture, footwear, and handbags exports have declined since 2016.

“It’s a broader trend, and those jobs will not come back to China,” Wang told ChinaFile, referring to China’s more labor-intensive manufacturing jobs, which are moving to Central and Southeast Asia, India, and Latin America.

* * *

For now, China’s work as relief program may serve as a temporary reprieve for unemployed rural workers, including those who have returned home after working in cities and must now find job opportunities in the countryside. The amount of funding available through relief projects, though, may be too limited for long-term effects, say experts.

In 2022, the central government invested 6.6 billion renminbi in work as relief initiatives, according to an article by official news agency Xinhua last May—a number that may or may not account for the totality of what China spent on the program that year. Part of that funding is to encourage local governments to mitigate the impact the epidemic has had on migrant workers, Xinhua reported. The money will also be allocated to rural revitalization, impoverished counties, and other low-income populations.

The Chinese government doesn’t publicize the yearly budget for the work as relief program. However, the amount of money the government announced it allocated last May is roughly in line with state media reports on past work as relief funds. For example, in 2020, 5.6 billion renminbi went to the program, according to a People’s Daily article published that year in April.

Most work as relief projects are modest, paying workers a few hundred renminbi per day to build roads, bolster dams, improve farmland, or work on other rural and agricultural infrastructure projects.

A road construction project in Zhangye city in northwestern Gansu province, for instance, planned to pay workers a daily rate ranging from 200 to 350 renminbi ($28 to $50) depending on their experience level—in line with the average wage of migrant workers in the construction industry—according to a 2022 procurement notice the local government posted. In Tiandong county in Guangxi province, a work as relief project employed 60 people and paid them a total of 1.3 million renminbi, according to China’s top economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission. The workers, including rural laborers unable to return to their jobs in cities due to epidemic controls, improved 11 kilometers of roads and built reservoirs, water collection wells, and other facilities.

Given the amount of funding allocated to the work as relief program reported by Xinhua last May, the program is unlikely to solve China’s rural unemployment issue, at least for now. Assuming laborers make 5,000 renminbi a month, for instance, the 6.6 billion renminbi would only provide at most one month of work for 1.32 million people.

In addition, the amount of income offered by the work as relief program cannot fully replace the income rural migrant workers have lost during the pandemic, says Kam Wing Chan, a professor at the University of Washington.

The work as relief program pays much less than what most migrant workers earn in cities. But export demand in 2022 and 2023 has remained sluggish, creating fewer manufacturing jobs, explains Chan, who has written about COVID’s impact on migrant workers and their income.

However, the work as relief program could help with social stability, says Rozelle. The government is thinking about how it can support unemployed rural workers at least temporarily and “keep these people happy.”

Not all of the funds go to workers, however, as the government often hires local companies to lead and oversee work as relief projects. According to the National Development and Reform Commission in February, responding to questions on the latest work as relief program guidelines, remuneration for workers can account for at least 30 percent of total funding for the program, meaning the rest can go elsewhere, such as to equipment and materials, as well as to the company’s bottom line.

That paired with the prioritization of manual labor over machines has generated discussion on social media about better ways to alleviate unemployment stress in rural areas. This includes some netizens who say the full amount of work as relief program funding should go directly to workers versus being funneled through infrastructure projects and local companies first.

Giving workers more free time “is the root of improving productivity,” wrote one Weibo user, reacting to a post slamming critics of the work as relief program as naysayers who will attack the system no matter what. “This stupid work as relief program just wastes the free time of workers, it’s a policy that dooms the nation.”

In response to such criticism, state and local media have published a spate of stories—with rhetoric familiar to anyone who has observed debates on welfare in the U.S.—warning citizens not to misread the latest guidelines and urging against “cultivating sluggards.” It’s a phrase that Xi too has used to dial back expectations of government support under “common prosperity.” Xi has discouraged “providing too much security” and pledged to “resolutely avoid falling into the trap of ‘welfarism.’”

“The main goal of ‘work as relief’ is not to improve production efficiency, but to alleviate poverty and solve employment problems,” said Su Jian, the director of Peking University’s National Economic Research Center, in a February interview with a Chinese finance media outlet.

Sending workers money can “solve the issue of their livelihood, but not employment,” said Su. “As a result, this encourages laziness. Work as relief gives them work to do and lets them make money diligently and with dignity.”

* * *

In addition to the development gap between rural and urban areas, low levels of education among migrant workers but also more generally in China constitute a key structural issue complicating the government’s efforts to reduce inequality and spur development in more impoverished areas, including via the work as relief program.

According to a 2022 report on migrant workers by China’s National Bureau of Statistics, about 69 percent have an education level of middle school or below. More broadly, just 37 percent of 25-to-64-year-olds in China had a high school degree in 2020, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, compared to 83 percent on average across OECD countries.

That makes the challenge of retraining low-skilled workers especially acute in China, though the issue of reskilling workers as automation and other technological advances disrupt the need for a human workforce is global. According to a 2020 report by the World Economic Forum, an estimated 85 million jobs will be displaced by technology in the next five years. For workers set to stay in their roles for that period, nearly half will need to learn new skills.

The Chinese government has framed the work as relief program as a way to train people to become self-reliant. The updated guidelines issued this year place much more emphasis on job training as a way to boost local employment than did the past two updated guidelines, issued in 2014 and 2005.

In the latest rules, training is aimed at helping workers participate in work as relief projects, namely building rural and agricultural infrastructure. While that could help workers with construction jobs, it may not prepare them for unemployment issues in the long term, as work as relief infrastructure projects tend to entail precisely the types of construction work at risk of further decline.

“The rural unemployment issue is not driven by lack of skill, particularly not a lack of manual work skills,” says Zhan Shaohua from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, who studies rural issues in China, explaining that land consolidation and mechanization in agriculture have also contributed to employment struggles, especially among older rural workers. “What is lacking is employment opportunity,” he says.

Outside of the work as relief program, the Chinese government has also rolled out an initiative to train a new generation of rural workers to be “high-quality farmers,” to be skilled in both agricultural production and technology as well as management, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. This program is aimed at a wide range of outcomes, from boosting rural entrepreneurship to improving local food security.

In Wanning city, in Hainan province, for example, the local agriculture and rural affairs bureau commissioned a set of courses to train 500 “high-quality farmers” in 2020, according to a government procurement document. The target demographic for the course included farmers’ cooperatives, family farms, leaders of impoverished villages, and migrant workers returning home due to the impact of COVID.

Part of the program aimed to teach attendees about planting and animal breeding technology, sales and marketing, as well as pest control. Other courses covered developing an agricultural brand and selling specialty agricultural goods on e-commerce platforms. This is in line with the government’s “one village, one product” campaign, encouraging villages to focus on one or several local specialty goods to promote and sell, such as chestnuts, mutton, or mangoes.

Still, by definition, the “high-quality farmer” training programs will only target certain segments of the rural workforce. They do not reach migrant workers or people living in rural areas who don’t farm and are struggling to find work, explains Wang from Hang Seng Bank.

Training workers to sell specialty agricultural goods online will “provide more jobs for sure,” she says. “It just doesn’t solve this big problem of all those excess construction workers.”

In the future, the Chinese government could create more public welfare jobs, such as those in forestry or environmental conservation, to help mitigate the seriousness of rural unemployment, says Zhan.

But to more effectively address poverty in China’s countryside, Beijing may have to take more drastic measures, such as increasing cash transfers to the rural elderly and poor, he says. “The Chinese state is reluctant to implement this, but in the future it might be forced to do so because population aging becomes such a serious issue.”

Measures to address rural underemployment are “complex, expensive, politically fraught, and their payoff will not be felt for years,” writes Rozelle from Stanford. Still, he writes, such investments are worth it if China wants to reach its goal of becoming a high-income and socially stable nation.

Jessica Batke provided research for this article.

The writer, Hao Qun, who publishes under the pen name, Murong Xuecun, has spent the past two decades exploring Chinese society through his literature. After studying at Beijing’s prestigious China University of Politics and Law, he worked in the private sector. He began his writing career in 2002 online, writing a series on gambling, sex, and drugs in China, which he later published as his debut novel Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu, the English edition of which was longlisted for Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008. In 2010, he won China’s People’s Literature Prize, which is presented by the state-affiliated China Writer’s Association, for his non-fiction book The Missing Ingredient. His acceptance speech was a critique of censorship in the publishing industry and of his own acquiescence to it, and when he was unable to deliver it at the prize ceremony, he delivered it instead at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong. In the years that followed, he faced mounting obstacles to speaking his mind in China. His Weibo account with 8.5 million followers was deleted in 2013. But he wrote frequently for The New York Times, on the limits on expression in China. In 2020, Murong traveled to Wuhan and documented the lives of eight ordinary people at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. He left China in order to safely publish the resulting book, Deadly Quiet City, which was released earlier this year in the United States. He now lives in Australia.

Angeli Datt spoke with Murong at the offices of the writers’ advocacy organization, PEN America, in New York City.

Angeli Datt: Tell me about your decision to travel to Wuhan at the height of the pandemic. Did you think that going to Wuhan would lead to exile? Were you scared to go, of both the virus and of the police?

Murong Xuecun: Since Xi Jinping came to power, 40 of my friends have been arrested. They are lawyers, professors, and journalists. They have become enemies of the state because they have said or done something the government doesn’t like. Some of them have been released, but many are still in prison. I’ve been a dissident writer for years and have been harassed, threatened, and put under house arrest by the secret police. When Clive [Hamilton, his editor] called me on April 3, for the previous two months I had been like all terrified Chinese—I almost never left my house. One day, I finally went outside and was frightened by what I saw; there was not a single person or car on the streets of Beijing. The whole city of 17 million people was like a ghost town. I couldn’t help wondering what kind of life the people of Wuhan were living at the time. This was when Clive called me. His suggestion that I should be in Wuhan struck a chord with me because I had always wanted to be a writer on the ground, witnessing a disaster firsthand. So I decided I must go. At the time, my biggest concern was not the virus but our government. Several citizen journalists had entered the city before me, like Fang Bin, Chen Qiushi, and Li Zehua, and they had reported on the tragic situation in Wuhan and criticized the government’s policies. It didn’t take long for them to disappear, one by one. So I knew that I might be disappeared or arrested by police like they had been. I was afraid the entire time I was there, always thinking I was being watched, followed, or bugged. Every time I left my room, I left a small piece of paper in the doorway so if anyone entered my room I would know.

The stories of the eight people you profile in your book—a doctor, a cleaner, a motorcycle taxi driver, a teacher, a citizen journalist, a writer, an entrepreneur, and a mother—show a snapshot of life in Wuhan for ordinary people during the pandemic. What do these eight stories tell us about China today under Xi Jinping?

What happened to them was what happened to all 1.3 billion Chinese people during the pandemic. Not long after Wuhan was locked down, so was Shanghai, Xi’an, even Beijing. So many people across China suffered what the people of Wuhan suffered. I always think about Jin Feng, the cleaner. At the end of my interview with her, I asked what her plans were for the future. She replied that her only hope was to get a disability certificate for her son Xia Lei so he would be able to survive after she dies. This being her only hope tells us a lot of things about China today. What kind of wish is this?

What is moving about the book is that sometimes when you talk about 1.3 billion people, each individual is an abstract. But a reader can really get to know these eight characters and witness what they are experiencing, their emotions and anxiety, fear and anger, and sadness, and the devastation of the pandemic. Three years later, we are not as afraid of COVID anymore, but the virus is still circulating.

In China, the censorship system is so extensive, with people dedicated to working to block terms like “virus,” “coronavirus,” “epidemic prevention policies,” “zero-COVID policy.” These terms are all gone online. People don’t dare discuss these issues now. When I look online, it seems like many people have forgotten about the painful past three years. People are talking about food, the movies, holidays, and travel, but what about all the people who died not that long ago? A friend of mine was a successful businessman in Shenzhen. During the painful three years, he lost almost everything financially, and his mother and an in-law died. He is so angry, but he won’t say anything [critical of the government]. He keeps silent. When I asked him why, he said, “I still need to live. I have a wife, I have a child, my father is elderly and ill, what should I do?” He knows if he stands up to raise his voice, the government will “deal” with him, and his wife and kid will face repercussions. People have lost so much but cannot say a word against the CCP. It’s worse than being a prisoner.

The story of Dr. Lin Qingchun evoked memories of Li Wenliang, the doctor who raised the alarm on COVID before dying of it. How often did Li’s story come up while talking to the residents of Wuhan?

Some of the interviewees mentioned Dr. Li Wenliang. Like Dr. Li Qingchun, Dr. Li Wenliang is just a normal person, a normal doctor. But to be a normal person in an abnormal world makes him a hero. Like Zhang Zhan, a lawyer turned citizen journalist who was detained for reporting from Wuhan about the pandemic, at the time she was maybe the most normal person in Wuhan, but China was so abnormal. Zhang Zhan was reporting the truth from the ground in Wuhan, and now some people in China will realize that she was right even though still very few will openly admit this.

Tell me about the process of writing the book.

After I had been in Wuhan for one month, I received a mysterious phone call from a person with a Beijing accent who asked, “What are you doing in Wuhan? You should be very careful, you don’t want to be infected with the virus.” It’s hard to describe how I felt at the time. It was an ordinary conversation, but it deeply scared me. The secret police were telling me, “Don’t play dumb. We know where you are, and we know what you are doing.” I worked intensely for a few more days then fled Wuhan. I didn’t go home to Beijing because I was afraid that the police would prevent me from finishing the book. I went to hide in the mountains in Sichuan for eight months to write.

I have some beautiful memories of that time. I wanted to live in a temple, but could not due to COVID restrictions. However, it would open daily for tea. So, I went there every day with my laptop and sat under a flowering tree and would order a cup of green tea and write, surrounded by monks and the mountains in the background. Different secret police called me several times while I was in Sichuan, asking me what I was doing. I told them I was writing a science fiction novel, sometimes telling them fake stories from my “science fiction” novel. In some ways, it felt true at the time that I was writing science fiction when writing about Wuhan during the pandemic.

I guess writers like me must learn to deal with the fear, and not let the fear control me and stop me from writing. That is what I learned while writing this book. The secret police could come take me away at any time, but I still needed to write. Sometimes we need to unsee the rest of the world and just focus on writing. Maybe they will come in the next minute, but this minute I need to focus on the book.

Do you think people in China will ever be able to read your book?

Some really want to read it, but it is very difficult to publish a Chinese version of this book. Before, we could try to publish in Taiwan, but that is even more difficult now since the arrest of Fu Cha [editor in chief of Gusa Publishing arrested in China this past spring]. Now, other publishers in Taiwan may be afraid that publishing a book like this which is critical of the Chinese government may cause them trouble.

Do you think the White Paper protests resulted from a buildup of anger over the lockdowns, but since COVID measures have been lifted, people are just going back to ordinary life?

Shortly before the White Paper revolution, I saw this video online about a woman surnamed Zhao who was working in a low paying job in Beijing. One day, Ms. Zhao posted some comments in WeChat that were critical of the government’s COVID policies, and the police called and warned her over her posts. Normally people like Ms. Zhao are very obedient and frightened of the police. But the video surprised me. Ms. Zhao was very calm, and then she told the police, “You all have salaries, you all get paid! But what about us? We don’t have money and my father is ill, my children don’t have food. How can I make a living? You get paid!” She was so angry, it made me realize that Ms. Zhao is a person who has nothing to lose. Who are the people who attended the white paper revolution? Many of them are people who have nothing to lose. Xi Jinping’s policies have created this population of people. People with nothing to lose are brave and will take to the streets and fight back.

How did you manage to leave China? You were already a very prominent writer, and it’s astonishing that you were able to leave.

In August 2021, Deadly Quiet City was about to be released. Hardie Grant, the publisher, urged me to leave. They were worried about what would happen to me if it was published while I was still inside China, and they called me every day urging me to leave. I wasn’t sure if the government would allow me to cross the border. I packed only one suitcase, containing two [pairs of] trousers, some jackets, two pairs of shoes, and some books. I went to Beijing International Airport, but officials didn’t ask many questions. I was so relieved when I landed in Hong Kong. It could have been a system mistake or human error, I don’t know, but I was so relieved. About six months later, a friend in Beijing was invited for tea [a euphemism for informal police questioning] with secret police, who asked him, “What happened? How was a person like Murong Xuecun allowed to leave?” Later, on New Year’s Day 2023, I received a phone call from a friend who called to warn me not to return to China because the secret police had interrogated him about our relationship and searched his home.

Since the book has been published, have you received any threats? Do you feel safe in Australia?

I used to have a Baidu page, about my life and books, but that page was deleted after the book was released. If you search my name on Baidu, the first website is a smear article attacking me. Many “little pinks” [online nationalists] have cursed me on Twitter as a “traitor.” I feel much safer in Australia. But my friends have warned me that when I travel I shouldn’t fly through certain countries and should be very careful.

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to China on June 18, after repeated delays of high-level meetings and amid ongoing tensions between the two countries. In November, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met in Bali, where they agreed to further talks aimed at mending ties. But a planned trip by Blinken was canceled in February after the U.S. military shot down a Chinese spy balloon over U.S. airspace, re-aggravating tensions. What are the stakes of Blinken’s trip, and what is its likely impact on the state of U.S.-China relations? —The Editors

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to China on June 18, after repeated delays of high-level meetings and amid ongoing tensions between the two countries. In November, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met in Bali, where they agreed to further talks aimed at mending ties. But a planned trip by Blinken was canceled in February after the U.S. military shot down a Chinese spy balloon over U.S. airspace, re-aggravating tensions. What are the stakes of Blinken’s trip, and what is its likely impact on the state of U.S.-China relations? —The Editors

China’s technological prowess is frequently invoked by U.S. policymakers hoping to get votes, attention, or enough bipartisan support to pass a bill. Competition with China was a central motivating factor in federal legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, not to mention the work of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. “Beating China”—specifically in science and technology development—is a key driver of U.S. governance and, ahead of the 2024 presidential race, elections.

George Washington University Assistant Professor of Political Science Jeffrey Ding published a recent article that explains why measuring a state’s scientific and technological power should include not only how many innovations a country can check off, but also the degree to which new technologies are integrated into the economy and society. Ding spoke with Johanna Costigan about his new paper. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. —Johanna Costigan

Johanna Costigan: Can you explain the distinction between innovation capacity and diffusion capacity?

Jeffrey Ding: Innovation capacity refers to a state’s ability to pioneer new-to-the-world breakthroughs in science and technology. Diffusion capacity refers to a state’s ability to spread those innovations across a wide range of productive processes in an economy. I argue in my paper that we tend to gravitate toward measures of innovation and pay insufficient attention to diffusion.

How did diffusion occur in the second Industrial Revolution in the U.S., and why does that example show diffusion is an essential metric?

In the late 19th century, the U.S. was not at the forefront of science and technology—our best and brightest went to Germany to study. Even though other nations were leading the way in fields like chemical engineering, the U.S. was much stronger in terms of diffusion capacity; it was better at applying those uses across a wide range of processes. If you only looked at which countries were winning the most Nobel Prizes or had the most advanced research institutes, you would be underestimating the scientific and technological prowess of the U.S.

Assessments that are more oriented around diffusion capacity would have predicted the U.S. to sustain its economic rise and become the preeminent economic power. Back then, there wasn’t a global innovation index, but the case study was to go back and see if we rank different countries based on this, only using the innovation indicators provides an incorrect view. Diffusion is central to a state’s ability to convert science and technology into economic strength.

You write that academic research in the U.S. was more closely tied to commerce than it was in Europe, which allowed American breakthroughs to spread more rapidly. Given the close relationship between government and industry in the PRC, why might that not be the case in contemporary China?

The government acts as a bottleneck within China’s scitech ecosystem, stifling organic industry-university collaborations. A lot of the research happens at government institutions as opposed to corporate-sponsored R&D [research and development]. The channels between universities and industry are not as robust, so some of that has to do with surrounding legal regimes and whether university research can be translated into a startup company. Unlike China, the U.S. has a really good set of legal rules that enable that to happen.

But Chinese companies are trying to address this; more AI companies, for example, are trying to set up labs in universities to foster that. But if you look at co-authorship rates in publications on AI (papers that have at least one author from a university and one from industry), those rates are very low in China compared to countries in Europe and the U.S. A lot of the story here is just the vestiges of central planning that are still in China’s scitech ecosystem and that just don’t foster the organic fast-acting processing that is required for diffusion.

How would you characterize American assessments of China’s science and technology power? What’s missing?

The consensus significantly overstates China’s scitech capability. One recent example from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which while it is not American has been used to justify more extreme China policy, says China is leading the U.S. in 37 of 44 considered technologies, all of which were focused on innovation. (I don’t even think that conclusion is accurate based just on innovation.) It reflects the United States’ obsession with innovation capacity when it comes to assessing scitech power. Even if you go back and review Biden’s first remarks to Congress, he argued that China is closing in quickly and that it’s a race to see who can dominate new innovations in these technologies.

The contribution of my paper is partly to argue that assumptions about innovation shape the perception that China is improving rapidly and has already taken over the U.S. in some critical technologies. Reorienting ourselves to a diffusion-centric framework is an important first step to having a more balanced understanding of what’s happening in China’s scitech ecosystem.

Members of the Biden administration like Jake Sullivan have described moves like export controls aimed at China as “narrowly focused on technology that could tilt the military balance.” What do you think of that depiction, and how do judgments of relative military strength fit into the diffusion/innovation breakdown?

When it comes to competition with China over military AI applications, I think the Biden administration’s approach is overly preoccupied with maintaining a lead in innovation capacity. Their theory of victory, in my view, seems to be all about preventing China from building the biggest and baddest autonomous weapon, trained on the largest amount of data using the most amount of computing power. If the history of military electrification is a useful guide for how AI will affect the military balance of power, as I argue in a recent article, then AI’s most substantial impact on military power will take decades as advances diffuse across a broad range of applications in logistics, decryption, targeting, and intelligence. Ensuring that the military is able to tap into a broad base of AI engineering talent is a more effective route to ensuring that AI’s effect on the military balance will favor the U.S.

You write: “A rebalanced evaluation of China’s potential for S&T leadership requires looking beyond multinational corporations like Huawei, first-tier cities like Beijing, and flashy R&D numbers to the humble undertaking of diffusion.” Why do you think such limited analyses are tempting? Why are they dangerous?

Firstly, it’s just a lot harder to get diffusion capacity indicators. Many metrics of innovation, like government R&D funding indicators, patent rates, and publication numbers are all tracked, whereas it takes more work to get indicators of diffusion capacity. Finding systematic and reliable numbers of diffusion capacity is crucial.

And misleading assessments carry a few dangers. Having an accurate sense of where you stand provides a solid foundation for science and technology policy. There is something to be said about having a true—or truer—understanding of the world. Additionally, overestimating China’s scitech capabilities may lead the U.S. to engage in more reckless policies and provide more momentum for containment-type measures that backfire on both sides. It could lead to the mentality we saw in the Cold War where the U.S. was concerned about the missile gap with the Soviet Union that turned out to be illusory and resulted in wasted expenditures, spiraling fears, and an arms race that put the two superpowers on a path toward conflict.

There are people in the U.S. government who probably agree with me in that a lot of assessments on China’s tech development are overhyped, but they think it’s necessary to pump up China’s prowess in order to motivate certain policies. But that could easily backfire and is a dangerous precedent to set. While that justification might in some cases be used to make sound decisions, in other cases it could be used to enact dangerous policies.

The Tiananmen Square crisis in 1989 was a turning point for China. Weeks of student-led demonstrations turned into the largest protest for political reform in the history of the People’s Republic. The bloody military crackdown that crushed the movement on the night of June 3-4, 1989, had far-reaching consequences, not only for China’s development, but for its relations with the rest of the world.

One reason was that Tiananmen Square was also a watershed moment in the history of the media. It generated unparalleled international coverage and became a defining moment in the Information Age: the first time a popular uprising in an authoritarian state was broadcast live across the globe. The images from that time—the Goddess of Democracy, the man in front of the tank—became enduring symbols of popular resistance to injustice. The coverage of Tiananmen redefined the relationship between the press, public opinion, and foreign policymaking and continues to influence both Chinese politics and international perceptions of China to this day.

I was CNN’s Beijing bureau chief in 1989. My new book, Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic, is based on interviews with more than 100 journalists who have covered China from 1945 to the present day. The excerpt below includes stories from reporters who covered the protests and bloodshed in Beijing in the spring of 1989.

The People’s Liberation Army assault began on the western side of Chang An Avenue. John Pomfret of the AP and Scott Savitt of UPI were watching at the Muxudi intersection.

John Pomfret, Associated Press: The military began to fire. I saw people falling.

Scott Savitt, United Press International: I can hear it right in my mind like I am reliving it—“pa pa pa pa pa.” And those are AK-47 [rifles] firing on semiautomatic.

On the balcony of CNN’s room at the Beijing Hotel, I had a clear view a few hundred meters down Chang An to the north end of the Square. We managed to keep a phone line open to CNN headquarters in Atlanta. I could see red tracer bullets, and hear the occasional crackle of gunfire, as I broadcast live, telling viewers, “The assault on Tiananmen Square is now underway.”

Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times: I hopped on my bicycle and hurtled toward Tiananmen. You could hear the gunfire and the crowds were rushing the other way. And I keep thinking this is a crazy job where there’s gunfire, everyone in their right mind is going the other way, and you’re going towards it.

Melinda Liu, Newsweek: The bullets are so close that you not only hear the percussion of the shot, you hear the “zing.” I could see people being shot, bloody bodies being put onto these three-wheel ambulance things, people shouting all kinds of stuff at soldiers, and just total fear and chaos.

Cynde Strand, CNN: Bullets would fly past us and you’d hear crying and screaming. There were moments of fear. There were moments of—what the hell are we doing here? But this is what you are a journalist for. This is right where we need to be. We are witnessing history. This is what makes a difference. There is no record unless you are standing there.

Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times: I was pretty scared. On the Square itself, I tried to keep a layer of people between me and the troops, but I remember realizing that I was a few inches taller than most of the Chinese, so it was a pretty critical part of my real estate that was exposed. There were people in the crowd who were getting shot. My notebook from that evening was damp with sweat just from fear. I ran to the Xiehe Hospital. There were lots of bloody people in the hallways and everywhere. One of the ambulance drivers showed me bullet holes in his ambulance. One of the things that shook me was a young man, roughly my age, who had been shot in the back and who was fighting for his life. He hadn’t done anything riskier than I had. His luck has just run out.

Jim Laurie, ABC News: We were never able to determine the extent of the deaths and injuries that night. All we knew was that there were tremendous numbers and that the hospitals were in a panic mode. My view is that whether it was a hundred or a thousand, it was incredibly devastating, not only for the people who were killed, but for the reputation of China.

While all of this was happening, I continued my live reporting. At mid-afternoon Washington time—around 2:00 a.m. in Beijing—Secretary of State James Baker appeared on CNN, having been previously scheduled for a weekend talk show. I did a quick phone update, talking about seeing bullets and bodies, and then host Charles Bierbauer turned to Baker and said, “Mr. Secretary, does the U.S. government now take a stronger demarche against the Chinese government?”

James Baker, Secretary of State: It caught me by surprise. I was on the air as it began to happen. I was very much caught on the spot. I do remember vividly thinking to myself, “How do I handle this one?” I remember being caught flat-footed.

Bernard Shaw, CNN: I think you could say that was the beginning of the “CNN effect,” whereby time is truncated, and reactions and decisions are made based on events as they’re happening in real time, which puts a lot of pressure on foreign capitals.

John Pomfret, Associated Press: I stayed in the center of the Square with the remaining students until they conducted their negotiations with the military, and I walked out with them. You were involved with the simple logistics of doing your job. But it was the most incredible experience I’ve ever had in my life.

Cynde Strand, CNN: We came off the Square with them. Some were dejected, crying. But some of them were still singing. Then there was the dilemma. We’ve got great tape. How are we going to get it back? This old man in a Mao jacket was driving one of those bicycles with a flat panel. He let us lay on that, and the students gave us blankets, and we covered everything over us, and he rode us back to the Beijing hotel.

The next morning, Monday June 5, AP photographer Jeff Widener was on the balcony of a room at the Beijing Hotel.

Jeff Widener, Associated Press: I see this long column of tanks, and I’m thinking, “Well, that’s not a bad picture. I’ve got a long lens. It’ll be a nice compression shot.” And then this guy with shopping bags walks out. I’m just waiting for him to get shot, but It’s too far away. I look back at the bed, and I had a lens doubler, which would make my 400 an 800. Do I gamble? Do I go back to the bed? Maybe I lose the shot, or do I just shoot this wider? So I took a chance. I ran to the bed, got it, put it on the camera, open the aperture up all the way. One, two, three shots. Then it was over. Some people came, grabbed this guy, and they ran off. I took the film and asked a foreign student if he could smuggle it in his underwear back to the AP office.

Liu Heung-shing, Associated Press: Another 45 minutes passed. An American guy with a ponytail and a backpack showed up with an AP envelope. Our Japanese photographer soaked the film. I looked at that frame—and that’s the frame. It went out.

John Sheahan, CBS News: No one who has ever seen that is going to forget that picture.

Jeff Widener, Associated Press: For a lot of people, this guy represents everything in our lives that we’re battling, because we’re all battling something. We still don’t know who this guy is. It’s almost appropriate because it’s almost like the Unknown Soldier. He’s really become a symbol for a lot of people. For me, it was just another assignment. It didn’t sink in till later that I had something really big.

Last month, a Chinese court sentenced the civil rights activists and lawyers Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi to fourteen and twelve years in prison for “subverting state power,” a charge arising from an informal gathering of fellow activists the two had put together in 2019 in the southern coastal city of Xiamen.

The following conversation, excerpted and translated by Geremie Barmé, comes from an episode of the podcast Bu Mingbai, of which ChinaFile’s editors are longtime admirers. In it, host and New York Times reporter Li Yuan interviews Ding’s wife, Luo Shengchun, and Xu’s close friend, law school classmate and fellow activist Teng Biao, about who these two men are, how they came to their activism, and why they persisted despite previous imprisonments and amid mounting signs of personal danger. —The Editors

Li Yuan: On April 4, 2023, a regional court in Shandong province sentenced Xu Zhiyong, a noted civil rights activist, to 14 years in jail for “subverting state power.” Ding Jiaxi, his fellow accused, was jailed for 12 years. Both men had been held in detention for more than three years. Commentators noted that both of these sentences were longer than the 11 years given to Liu Xiaobo for his role in drafting Charter 08 [which was a call for democratic reform].

Xu and Ding served previous jail sentences beginning in 2014 for four and three-and-a-half years, respectively, on charges of having “assembled a crowd to disrupt public order.” Following their releases they continued their activism on behalf of the New Citizens Movement.

In December 2019, Xu and Ding organized a gathering of activists in the coastal city of Xiamen, Fujian province, in south China. Participants discussed the state of Chinese politics and prospects for the country’s future. When authorities began rounding up participants, Xu went underground. Prior to being arrested in Guangzhou in February 2020, he released an open letter calling on Xi Jinping to step down.

The recent sentencing of Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi attracted international attention. Who are these men and why do the Chinese authorities see them as a threat?

As is the case with most political prisoners, the majority of people in China don’t know their names. “Although they are not far from us,” the dissident Guo Yushan wrote in 2013, “they are unknown. Because they have pursued justice they have been subject to constant persecution. . . These people, be they in the past or in the present, invariably ‘disappeared.’ Generally, people regard them as being ‘losers’—naive and simplistic. They are eliminated by the system, rejected by mainstream society, and forgotten by everyone else. The greater their resistance to the system, the more extreme the effort to eliminate all traces of their existence.”

I’ve invited Teng Biao, who co-founded the Open Constitution Initiative with Xu Zhiyong in 2003, and Luo Shengchun, Ding Jiaxi’s wife, to tell us who these men are, what they have done, and what inspires their opposition.

Teng Biao, both you and Xu Zhiyong became public figures when the Sun Zhigang case sparked a major public debate about the Custody and Repatriation system back in 2003. On May 14 of that year, as graduate students, you, Xu Zhiyong, and Yu Jiang submitted an appeal to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress calling for the abolition of [the system of extrajudicial detention known as] Custody and Repatriation. A month later, the State Council did actually abolish the system. In November that same year, Xu Zhiyong was even elected as an unaffiliated people’s representative by voters in the Haidian district of Beijing. In December, Xu, you, and Yu Jiang were named three of the 10 “Outstanding Figures in the Legal World” by China Central Television and the Ministry of Justice National Office to Promote Legal Awareness. How do you feel about all of that now?

Teng Biao: Xu Zhiyong and I have known each other for over 20 years. The Sun Zhigang case that you just mentioned is generally thought of as marking the starting point of a grassroots movement advocating for protecting civil rights in China. At the time, our lobbying proved to be relatively effective. In the years since then, Xu Zhiyong has continued the fight for greater freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. During the Hu Jintao era [2002-2013], there was a tolerance for a certain amount of activism, and a lot happened. But in the years since, all the room for movement has disappeared, so much that even the organizers of the gathering in Xiamen have been given stiff jail sentences. This is further evidence that under Xi Jinping there is zero tolerance for any form of civic activism. Of course, I’m deeply distressed that my dearest friend has been given such a long sentence; I’m distressed and outraged. Having said that, however, I should add that the verdict did not entirely take me by surprise. Ever since Zhiyong was detained in February 2020, many of us have feared the worst.

Li Yuan: Can you tell us about how you two met and perhaps say a few words about Xu Zhiyong himself?

Teng Biao: Since we had the same doctoral advisor at Peking University, we often discussed our work and, over time, we ended up eating, drinking, and debating together. Yu Jiang was also in our little group. We had weekly discussions about pressing legal issues such as the detention system, the reeducation through labor program, and how the authorities dealt with petitioners [who appealed to Beijing to redress local injustices]. We were obsessed with basic social and legal issues. One thing that struck me in particular was Xu Zhiyong’s idealism. All people in their 20s and 30s are idealistic to some extent, but Xu’s idealism was extremely intense and steadfast. He was willing to forego so much, so many of life’s pleasures, in the pursuit of his ideals. This included sacrificing his personal life, his family, and many other things he abandoned or was forced to abandon. For the sake of his ideals, his defense of human rights, his fight for the rule of law, he was repeatedly detained, beaten, held under house arrest, prevented from teaching classes at his university. But he never gave up. The more obstacles they put in his way, the braver he got. The more repression he endured, the more doggedly he persisted. This is what impresses me most deeply.

Li Yuan: Shengchun, Ding Jiaxi had a successful career as a commercial lawyer and in 2011 he was even given an award for being one of the “10 Best IP Lawyers” in Beijing. Can you tell us why he gave up a lucrative practice to become an advocate for human rights?

Luo Shengchun: From the time we got together, I knew his goal wasn’t to make money. He wanted to help change society. Shortly before he was arrested, he reviewed what he had been aiming to do—that is, he wanted to help people understand their rights as citizens under the constitution. He encouraged people to realize that the Party leadership should not have the last word and that even an average citizen could challenge local political leaders when things went awry. As he got to know more people involved in appeals to higher levels of government protesting against local abuses of the law, he realized that despite formal legal statutes, in practice it was still extremely difficult for people to stand up for their rights. After he met Xu Zhiyong, he was further emboldened to speak out in ways he felt could have a practical impact.

Although I understood what he was trying to do conceptually, my first real insight into the nature of the Chinese system only came after his first arrest [in 2013]. Originally, I’d thought since your constitutional rights were laid out in black and white, adjudicating right and wrong should have been relatively straightforward. But things become complicated as soon as you try to hold the system itself accountable. When Ding Jiaxi was detained, I still didn’t understand. I thought: How could someone like him be arrested? That’s when I set out on my own journey of discovery; it opened my eyes to what is really going on. Finally, I could see China clearly.

Li Yuan: Teng Biao, you, Xu, and Ding were all activist lawyers involved in advocacy on behalf of citizen’s rights. In recent years, lawyers like you have been subjected to particularly harsh repression. The most prominent example was the “709 Crackdown” on July 9, 2015 [when some 300 participants in the civil rights defense movement were detained for “subverting state power”]. Can you explain why the Party sees the legal profession, and civil right lawyers in particular, as such a threat?

Teng Biao: In China today, there are more than 600,000 lawyers. At the height of our movement, there were about 300,000. At best, only a few hundred were ever engaged in civil rights advocacy, although when we started out, there were only a few dozen of us.

The thing about the training of lawyers in China in the past was that, generally speaking, ideas related to freedom, the rule of law, and human rights were part of the university curriculum. Beginning in the 1980s, and right on through until the end of the first decade of this century, there was considerable space for the teaching of liberal ideas. . . There was also room for relatively open discussions in the classroom about social ideals, and in those discussions people often made comparisons between China and the West. These generally highlighted the limitations of the Chinese system. Another thing about the legal profession as a whole is that lawyers travel around the country as a matter of course. They come into contact with the underbelly of society, victims of the system, and marginal groups. They get to see for themselves what is really going on. Invariably, some empathize with the people they encounter and, as lawyers like that became actively involved with social causes, their influence spreads. This, in turn, makes them targets for official repression.

Li Yuan: Apart from his work as a human right lawyer, another reason that the authorities targeted Xu Zhiyong was that he founded the New Citizens Movement [in 2012, which promoted the rule of law, constitutional government, and democratic reform]. What’s your view of lawyers taking a stand on social and political issues?

Teng Biao: Initially, the rights activism of a group of lawyers focused on using the provisions of the Chinese constitution and various legal pathways to defend the basic civil rights of the individual. However, in the long run, people realized that without substantive democratic reforms to the system as a whole, regardless of the struggle there would be little meaningful change. For activists like me, the path from legal advocacy to social and even political activism was an obvious one. Without democracy, basic legal rights could not be protected. During the decade from 2003 to 2013 or so, there was enough space to pursue these ideals. Although it was still risky, the few who led the movement were both able and willing to withstand the pressure. That is to say, back then, they weren’t being threatened with 10 or more years in jail at every turn. Apart from a few who were jailed—and the jail terms were relatively short—state repression was mostly limited to people being stripped of the right to practice law, the imposition of house arrest, and repeated interrogations by the police. Most of us were prepared to put up with things like that.

Of course, since China’s courts are not independent, we also advocated for an independent judiciary. . . Given the fact that judges are not able to rule independently, when it came to some more sensitive legal cases we resorted to taking our activism outside the courts by appealing to the media and organizing street protests to pressure the system. We were particularly mindful of the people behind the scenes who manipulated the courts on behalf of the status quo. Given the situation, we had no other recourse.

Li Yuan: Shengchun, Ding Jiaxi only really got involved in these activities in 2011. He was first jailed in 2013 and then was active again for a few years following his release [in late 2016], yet this time the sentence he’s been handed is nearly as long as that of Xu Zhiyong, someone who has been an activist for more than a decade. What are your thoughts?

Luo Shengchun: I have given this a lot of thought. The people in State Security know full well that without Ding Jiaxi’s strategizing, many of Xu Zhiyong’s relatively abstract ideas could not have been put into practice. One of Jiaxi’s strengths is his charisma: He’s extremely personable and he was really good at bringing people together in a way that made Xu Zhiyong’s ideas relevant to people in cities throughout China. He built up a network of contacts in Jiangxi, Hunan, and Hubei provinces. Although he was a relative late-comer to activism, he had an impact because he devoted himself to it tirelessly—as a family member, I can honestly say that he was involved 24/7. He was constantly in touch with people and was always working on cases, offering advice and guidance as to how a plaintiff could engage legal representation. The authorities are very good at picking up on who is effective, and that’s who they go after.

Li Yuan: Zhu Zhengfu, a representative in the National People’s Congress, has long advocated for the abolition of the crime of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” In February this year, the media outlet Sichuan Observer carried out a poll via Weibo in which over 100,000 participated. Two thirds of those polled were in favor of keeping this crime on the books. Teng Biao, what do you think of that? Does it demonstrate a particular popular attitude toward the law in China today?

Teng Biao: In China today, information control, propaganda, and brainwashing are serious problems, and to a significant extent, they work. Take the case of Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi: The vast majority of Chinese have never heard of them and are entirely unfamiliar with their activities. The same is true of Liu Xiaobo, as well as the events of 1989. This is the case for most Chinese people and is even more evident among younger people.

<a href="https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/assets/images/photo/system/xu_zhiyong_and_teng_biao_map_photo.png" title="Xu Zhiyong and Teng Biao" class="colorbox" data-colorbox-gallery="gallery-node-54806-lgdWDarzoTs" data-cbox-img-attrs="{"title": "", "alt": ""}"></a>

Xu Zhiyong (right) and Teng Biao stand in front of a map of China wearing t-shirts that read “Blind Person, Cheng Guangcheng, Free,” 2006.

The charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” is a catchall crime. It’s a crime defined in the vaguest terms that should have been abolished long ago. Nevertheless, it’s very handy for the authorities and they’ve sentenced many rights activists and lawyers on the grounds of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Most Chinese have no idea that this “crime” is used to punish men and women of conscience, nor do they understand why legal scholars in China have long called for its abolition.

Li Yuan: It’s glaringly problematic that just about anyone can be charged with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” But, as you say, official propaganda has proven to be pretty effective; most people don’t feel that such laws have anything to do with them. That is, of course, if that straw poll was an accurate reflection of people’s views.

Li Yuan: Shengchun, can you tell us why you decided to leave China?

Luo Shengchun: It was after Jiaxi was arrested.

Li Yuan: You mean the first time he was arrested, back in 2013?

Luo Shengchun: He was taken away the day after we went to pick up our U.S. visas. He planned to return to China once we were settled in the States. I was lucky that my company was sending me here and, for about six months before that, Ding Jiaxi knew that State Security had its eye on him. He told me: “If you can return to your old job then you should go to America. Don’t stay in China.” He added: “The things I’ve been involved in will put you in danger. It’s not worth it.” At the time, I was still quite clueless and I asked what possible danger I could be in.

It was only after he’d been “invited to tea” [to be interrogated] twice that I realized what the term “State Security” really meant. Up until then, I was completely oblivious, in a state of innocence. I generally do whatever Jiaxi suggests, so in this case too, I got things ready without further question. It was only after he was taken away, after we’d collected our visas, that I realized how serious the situation was. At that point, I knew I really did have to get out.

I’m the kind of person who can’t tolerate bullying. At first, I was planning to stage a sit-in with my daughter and mother-in-law at the police station, but friends talked me out of it. They told me: “Don’t do anything. You need to get out of here as soon as possible.” They told me the story of Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia [who was kept under house arrest for years]. That’s right: I didn’t even know about them until 2013. I looked them up online.

Li Yuan: Really?

Luo Shengchun: That’s why what you said just now is so resonant for me. How has the Chinese government been so successful in maintaining a strict information blockade around average people like me? You simply have no idea about anything—Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize, the story of the empty chair [at the Nobel Prize award ceremony in Oslo]. We didn’t have a clue. That’s why I’m not at all surprised that hardly anyone knows what’s happened to Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi.

What I care about most at the moment is spreading news [about Xu and Ding] in China. If ordinary people knew the story, they would understand how truly messed up the Chinese government is. Most people would be completely astonished if they heard the actual ins and outs of their case. The most important aspect of it—and something this case has in common with similar instances of persecution since Xi Jinping got into power—is the way they torment detainees: They lock you up in a dark room and leave you to stew. It’s a form of torture. Only after some time do the police show you the warrant for your arrest.

From the “709 crackdown” until today, this pattern has been repeated time and again, not only when it comes to Ding Jiaxi, but also in dealing with young protesters in the White Paper Movement and the people who ran Terminus2049. Then there’s Niu Tengyu, Huang Xueqin, and Wang Jianbing. All of them were first locked up while the authorities set to work fabricating charges against them. It’s legal nonsense. If people really understood what was going on, they would realize that they’re living in a kind of mafia-state: anyone can be picked up and thrown into jail. Only then do they make up charges against them.

Li Yuan: Can you tell us what you know about the situation facing Ding Jiaxi and Xu Zhiyong in jail at the moment?

Luo Shengchun: The worst thing is that they are not allowed to sleep and are being kept underfed. They are also strapped to what’s known as a “tiger chair,” which is used to wear them down physically and mentally. They are hooded whenever they’re transferred from one place to another and they go for months without any daylight or knowing where they are. The authorities really want to push them to the limit of endurance and they only let them wash once every six months. I don’t know how Ding Jiaxi has survived this ordeal. I don’t know as much about Xu Zhiyong’s circumstances as he doesn’t go into the details. I only know about Jiaxi because when I do get to see him I ask about his treatment in detail.

As for Zhiyong, I guess his reticence reflects his personality. In the past, he always behaved as though such details were irrelevant; he hasn’t even described them to his own lawyer. I have a different perspective and have been determined to record exactly how they are being treated. I know that’s also what Jiaxi would want. Even if the authorities never have to answer for their actions, at least there’ll be a record of their criminal behavior. That’s how I know so much and why I can speculate about the way that Zhiyong has been treated. The main thing is that they are deprived of sleep and often subjected to long periods in a “tiger chair.”

Jiaxi was also subjected to a kind of punishment that I’d never heard of before—“noise torture.” They’ve subjected him to blaring documentary films about Xi Jinping in some kind of attempt to brainwash him. The soundtrack of the documentaries is broadcast from loudspeakers in his cell day-in, day-out for stretches of up to 10 days. I don’t know how they came up with this particular form of torture.

Li Yuan: Even though I know it’s a form of torture, it’s sort of ludicrous as well.

Luo Shengchun: Are they employing aural bombardment because they think they can brainwash him? Who knows what the reasoning is.

Li Yuan: Can you tell us something about your own life as the wife of a political prisoner? Have you ever regretted marrying Ding Jiaxi, if only for a second? Have you thought of trying to regain the kind of carefree existence that you enjoyed before all of this happened?

Luo Shengchun: I’ve quite honestly never had a moment’s regret. I’ve loved him from the start, and my love has never waned, even for a minute. It might sound surprising. Even my daughter thinks it’s pretty odd.

Li Yuan: How old were you when you met?

Luo Shengchun: I would have been 22; we got married when I was 23. You could say that it was love at first sight. My daughter says: “Mommy was born for daddy, she lives for daddy and she speaks out on behalf of daddy.” My elder sister and my relatives all think that it’s unfair. They think my love for Jiaxi is a hundred times stronger than his love for me. But that’s not the way I see it. Jiaxi loves in a particular way, a way that I appreciate. Of course, in our private life there have been any number of ups and downs, the same as everyone else, but our love has remained steady. That’s why I have absolute faith in him. Like when he told me that I should go back to America. I didn’t want to, but I knew that he was right. And so I came back here.

This year marks 10 years since he was first taken away. It’s been an agonizing time. But I’ve made it through. This is the way I see the meaning of life: If you are clear in your own mind why you are here and understand what you should do, then your life will have meaning. In that respect, Ding Jiaxi has turned me from being a fairly unthinking and ignorant person into someone who sees the world for just what it is. In the process, I have come to appreciate Ding Jiaxi’s significance and I love him all the more for it. I’ve also become more certain about the path I should take and more aware of the value of life itself.

Li Yuan: Have you seen him since he was jailed in 2013? Have you been back to China?

Luo Shengchun: I haven’t been back to China.

Li Yuan:. . . and you haven’t seen him either?

Luo Shengchun: He visited us here in the U.S. in 2017. He wasn’t preparing to stay and only brought a small bag with him. He thought he’d see what happened. Back then he still hadn’t been blacklisted, so we went crazy with joy when we learned that he could visit. It was like a dream come true. When I heard the news I said: “They really let you out?” None of us could believe it—him, me, my daughter, or any of my friends.

Li Yuan: How long did he stay and why did he decide to go back?

Luo Shengchun: He was here for two months. I begged him to at least stay for six months so he could spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with our daughter. So he could make up for lost time. But he was determined to return. In his mind, there were a number of factors at play: He was confident that the Party-state wouldn’t block him from leaving again. He felt that he hadn’t explained what he’d been through adequately to his friends and colleagues. That left him feeling at a loss. Of course, most of that could have been handled online, but that wasn’t the way he did things. He saw the path forward clearly. He believed that his actions and ideals should be of a piece. “I see what my line of action should be,” he’d say. “All that remains is for me to act.” Each time he decided on a plan of action, I would only gradually come to appreciate his reasoning. When he went back, everyone thought he was being completely unreasonable, inhuman. But we knew that simply wasn’t the case.

Teng Biao: That’s right. Ding Jiaxi was at my place at the time. . .

Luo Shengchun: Teng Biao also tried to persuade him to stay, as did everyone else during the two months he was here. Jiaxi spent that time catching up with friends and talking to people. He didn’t do anything related to the pro-democracy or citizen’s movements.

Li Yuan: Teng Biao, can you tell us what you advised Ding to do?

Teng Biao: When he came to my place, I said something to the effect of “Stay in the U.S. for a while so you can observe how things are going back in China. Apart from spending time with all of us, you’ll also have the space to do a few things that you’re interested in.” That was back in 2017, and the situation in China was quite different from how it is now. The gap between now and before 2013 [Xi Jinping’s first year in power] is even greater. Since the room for movement in China was already severely limited, I told him: “You really should take your time before deciding to go back.” But, as Shengchun just said, he had this overwhelming sense of duty and was determined to go back so he could make a contribution to the place that mattered most to him.

Luo Shengchun: He really thought he should be in constant contact with Chinese people in China, normal citizens. He didn’t usually discuss his reasoning; many people didn’t really understand him, and that includes me. But, in the final analysis, I knew that’s what he was thinking. He felt he needed to work with people on the ground in China.

Li Yuan: I get it. But, to follow up on what Teng Biao said earlier, the Xiamen meeting was really little more than an offline, real-time gathering of citizens’ groups. The legal case mounted against Xu and Ding at the court in Linyi, Shandong, claimed that they had organized activities of the long-banned New Citizens Movement. But the evidence presented related to that relatively innocent gathering in Xiamen in December 2019. As Teng Biao remarked, in the early 2000s such gatherings had been commonplace. Isn’t that so?

Teng Biao: You’re right. There were numerous gatherings of groups devoted to protecting citizens’ rights back then. In my case, for example, I’d choose a place like Shenzhen, Guangzhou, or Zhengzhou and, since I already had something of a reputation among activists, my local contacts would organize a get-together. It was an everyday occurrence.

Luo Shengchun: Completely normal, in fact.

Li Yuan: That was back in the days when people predominantly used Weibo. That was around 2010 to 2012, right? Then you could use Weibo to organize an event. I remember attending quite a few gatherings in Beijing around that time, as well as meetings of people from WeChat groups. Engaged intellectuals would debate all kinds of topics at meetings like that.

Teng Biao: That was where Xu Zhiyong was exceptionally effective. In the first place, his New Citizens Movement was decentralized and without formal leadership. Anyone who shared ideas related to civic engagement was free to regard themselves as part of the movement. It was a precept that Xu repeated constantly, in his writings and in his lectures. Meetings organized around meals were another integral part of the movement. The point wasn’t food, drinking, or having a chat. They were occasions on which people got together and, in keeping with Robert’s Rules, discussed issues of shared concern, be they individual legal cases in which a person’s basic rights had been violated, or larger topics like the future direction of China, the evolution of the practice of law, and so on. These were significant gatherings in themselves.

Of course, it wasn’t illegal for people to get together over a meal to discuss things like that, and criminal charges couldn’t be laid against participants. The thing is that Xu Zhiyong disseminated news of the gatherings so that more people could take part. At the height of the movement, people in more than 30 cities were gathering together to eat and talk. The meetings were coordinated so that they all took place at the same time every weekend. To meet, eat, and discuss was thus, in itself, a form of democratic practice. During the most lively phase of the movement, participants would share the discussions with each other on Twitter or Weibo so that a kind of feedback loop developed. It was a fantastic way of doing things.

Li Yuan: Though, in reality, it broke the most fundamental taboo of the Communist Party, that of creating autonomous organizations.

Teng Biao: That’s right. At first, however, it was all rather low-risk and no one thought it would necessarily create any problems. Engaging in conversation over a meal—what’s the big deal with that? But the inventiveness of that format really set off alarm bells for the authorities. Xu Zhiyong was engaging in unregulated organizational activities, even though the New Citizens Movement was quite different from the underground political parties formed in the 1990s like the China Democracy Party or the China Freedom Democratic Party. Xu Zhiyong’s movement was open and above board; it had no fixed organizational structure and no backing from so-called “invidious foreign forces.” It was entirely unencumbered by any of that.

Luo Shengchun: Nor did it have any political program as such. It did everything in accordance with the Chinese Constitution.

Teng Biao: It’s something that Xu Zhiyong repeatedly emphasized in the things he published. Anyone who had a shared view of their civil role and civic duty, upheld truth-telling, did not collaborate with the establishment or engage in nefarious behavior was automatically part of the movement. It was an uncomplicated and perhaps even a naive concept, but it was also one that appealed to a broad swathe of people. This moderate approach was both the source of the movement’s strength and the reason why it struck terror in the heart of the Party.

Li Yuan: I get the impression that Xu Zhiyong is a born politician, someone with both vision and charisma. He certainly had a considerable impact on China’s youth during the last years of the first decade of this century. Now, however, Chinese university students have no idea who he is, or who Ding Jiaxi is for that matter. We’ve already touched on the effects not only of brainwashing but also of the systemic form of censorship that prevents young people from learning about people like them and their ideas. The present generation simply doesn’t have the wherewithal to build on the experiences of the past. That means each generation has to start over from scratch. Could you say a few words about what people can do at a time like the present?

Teng Biao: You’re right; this is the most important yet also the most intractable issue. Back in 2014-15, it was relatively easy for Chinese netizens to use basic software to bypass the Great Firewall and get access to Twitter and Facebook. The software was circulated on USB drives or via email. Even when someone was caught, it was no big deal: at most you were “invited to tea.” It’s nothing like that these days; now it’s even difficult to find VPN software. The authorities have been going after people who develop and sell VPNs. Some have even been jailed. Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi had employed a different tactic—they had people get together offline, and through discussions they encouraged in them a kind of awakening, to nurture the refusal to forget, to make an effort to see what has really been going on. Both men demonstrated unwavering heroism. They were not daunted by the threat of jail, even though they could never have imagined that they’d end up being jailed for 14 and 12 years respectively for organizing that one gathering in Xiamen.

Li Yuan: When Xu Zhiyong was on the run in early 2020, he released “It’s Time for You to Go,” an open letter calling for Xi Jinping to resign. In it, he observed that Xi Jinping simply didn’t have what it took to be a political leader and that he lacked the ability to handle crises—remember that letter appeared just as the COVID-19 epidemic was spreading in China. Do you think that letter had any influence on the heavy sentence meted out to Xu Zhiyong?

Teng Biao: As soon as Xu and Ding were released from jail in 2017, they went back to their work on the New Citizens Movement. Of course, their tactics were different from 2012-13, when they had been able to organize street protests and demonstrations. By 2017, the spaces for civic activism had shrunk dramatically. But they persisted regardless. After participants at the Xiamen meeting were detained on December 26 [2019] and Xu was nabbed in February [2020], I had an inkling that they would be given heavy sentences. Eventually, they were arraigned as ringleaders involved in a conspiracy to subvert the state—that meant that they’d be looking at a minimum sentence of 10 years. We might speculate that Xu Zhiyong’s open letter contributed to the length of his sentence although, even without it, I was pretty sure he would have been given 10 or 12 years. The letter probably added a few more years. The Party goes about such things in a pretty formulaic fashion.

Li Yuan: In his court statement, Xu Zhiyong declared that he was confident that China will experience fundamental political change in our lifetime. In Ding Jiaxi’s statement, he wrote: “I see the day when the people of China wake up from their extreme slavery.” But then there’s no way young people in China can even learn their names. What do you make of such expressions of idealism?

Luo Shengchun: I guess you’d have to class me as an idealist as well. I’ve got lots of DMs from friends saying how inspiring those statements were. I, too, appreciate the idealism, but I’m also very practical. By profession I’m a project manager, and as such I’m interested in outcomes. If the right amount of groundwork has been done I’m confident that I’ll get results. Since I deeply trust these men and I believe that their understanding of the situation is fundamentally accurate, despite the fact that there doesn’t appear to be any sign of change in China itself at the moment, I still believe that things could change rapidly, more so than even the Communist Party can imagine. Of that I am certain. Despite the fact that I have not discerned any practical way to achieve change, I believe that if we are determined to find one then things are bound to happen.

Li Yuan: What about you, Teng Biao?

Teng Biao: Two points: The first is that although I’m an idealist, I’m also a doer. Moreover, I’m a scholar and observer, which means that I try my best to evaluate the future of Chinese politics in an academic and dispassionate fashion. I’ve made the point that the situation in China is highly unpredictable, in particular since the rise of Xi Jinping. The collapse of the Communist Party may prove to be a far more distant prospect than even the most pessimistic assessments. Then again, it could be far sooner than even the most optimistic speculation.

The second point is that Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi are important rights activists whose achievements, spirit, and ideas are already part of the historical record. Their influence on the world and the future, both as heroic figures and as members of the vanguard of change, will be profound and long-lasting. We may not know if someone who does something politically significant will have been influenced by Xu Zhiyong or even what they will have heard about him. You might not see an immediate effect of their long-term activism. After all, events unfold in a far more subtle fashion than that. Take the Tank Man on June 4, 1989, for example, or Peng Lifa’s protest at Sitong Bridge [in Beijing in October 2022].

Xu Zhiyong will continue to influence and inspire people. At some point in the future, his influence may affect the choice that someone makes, the plan of action they pursue. The old adage that “you’re only a hero if you’re successful” simply doesn’t apply here. Those two may be in jail now, but there are many other significant historical figures who didn’t live to see the victory of their cause. That isn’t the point. Neither Xu or Ding were working for an immediate result. They are men who acted out of conscience.

Chinese-owned social media app TikTok is a global phenomenon. In the United States, TikTok seems to have taken over public discourse, if not the public’s phones: policymakers continue to express concern over the app, trying to force the sale of the company to a U.S. entity or pushing to ban it entirely, while teenagers, unbothered by the fuss in D.C., use it to get beauty tips or try out the latest dance challenge.

Yet, for every TikTok, there is a WeChat, an app that is ubiquitous in China but that has failed to catch fire abroad. WeChat is just one of many Chinese apps incorporating financial technology (fintech), helping remake how more than one billion people think about banking and spending money. Yet, the rest of the world remains virtually unaware of these apps’ existence.

Still, as Peterson Institute for International Economics Senior Fellow Martin Chorzempa argues, Chinese fintech companies and their super-apps will still revolutionize global finance. In this excerpt from his book The Cashless Revolution: China’s Reinvention of Money and the End of America’s Domination of Finance and Technology, Chorzempa explains why Chinese fintech has thus far struggled to gain a foothold in the international market, but will likely inspire other companies to replicate the fintech super-app model in their home countries.

* * *

Both the good and bad sides of Chinese fintech are migrating to the rest of the world. For smaller fintech companies, tighter regulations [in China] combined with the domestic dominance of Ant Financial and WeChat are leading them to try their models elsewhere. Entrepreneurs like the Chinese founders of Ant-backed Indonesian fintech start-up Akulaku gained experience in China but started their company in Indonesia.

On the negative side, once peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms learned how to reach users on the Internet, they took their fraud to other countries, including India, Vietnam, and Indonesia, where it has become a real challenge to regulators, who have to resort to Chinese-style website blocking. P2P is symbolic of an important global shift: China is now too large and interconnected for its domestic issues to stay isolated there—they will eventually spill over. China’s inability to manage supply in its domestic steel market led to oversupply that caused global prices to crash and distorted markets around the world. Similarly, its inability to handle illegal P2P lenders has led Chinese problems to affect others.

* * *

In April 2017, Ant Financial was engaged in a fierce bidding war with Euronet, a U.S. payment company. The prize was MoneyGram, an American company with 350,000 agent locations in 200 countries for money transfers and cross-border payments. If it won, Ant would instantly turn into a global player with billions of clients and relationships with financial institutions outside China. Immigrants sending money from Florida to Venezuela and members of the U.S. military sending money back home to Arkansas would be part of a Chinese payment network. It would also scoop up licenses that would allow it to offer payments all over the United States, potentially taking on Visa and Mastercard on their home turf. Ant won with a last-minute $1.2 billion offer, but it still faced a U.S. national security review. Less than a year after the merger was announced, Ant gave up. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) was convinced that the deal would impair U.S. national security. Such a high-profile failure to complete a deal is a sign that going out may not be easy for Chinese fintech. Outside China, many of their home advantages either will not help or could be impediments.

<a href="https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/assets/images/photo/system/cashlessrevolution_chorzempa_book_cover.jpeg" title="The Cashless Revolution" class="colorbox" data-colorbox-gallery="gallery-node-54781-gsEn1D-GFbM" data-cbox-img-attrs="{"title": "", "alt": ""}"></a>

Courtesy of PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

WeChat tried to promote its domestic branded apps to users in overseas markets, but it lacked the user bases and ecosystems that served as anchors in China. Ant will face the same problem if it tries to promote Alipay for foreign users. Problems adapting to local markets are even harder to surmount when you need to start from scratch, before any network effects take hold. WeChat itself can attribute much of its success in China to QQ. People could easily add their existing QQ friends into the WeChat network, and users in turn helped lure in businesses as partners. To get off the ground, Chinese apps will need to wrest market share away from companies like Facebook, which is far ahead of WeChat in messaging and social networks around the world, and local e-commerce companies, which already have relationships with sellers, merchants, and logistics networks. So far, TikTok is the only Chinese contender that has managed to successfully take on Facebook in social media at a global scale, although it is primarily an entertainment short-video app with less of a clear path to becoming a super-app.

WeChat’s India launch has become a cautionary tale. In 2012, more than 20 million Indian users joined WeChat in the early months of an advertising campaign that featured Indian celebrities. The advertising was adjusted to Indian culture and conditions, but the app was not. WeChat was not as easy to use as WhatsApp, and the “people nearby” feature turned on location sharing that confronted women with a “stalking problem” of unwelcome messages from men. Indian smartphone users tended to have less advanced phones, as well as less reliable and more expensive data service than in China. The large memory requirements and costly data demands of a super-app thus made it less convenient than bare-bones WhatsApp, which dominates the Indian market today. WeChat’s challenges echo the issues that foreign giants like eBay had competing against Alibaba, especially the lack of adjusting the app design for another country. In this case, the U.S. company adapted better to the Indian market.

In June 2013, though, a greater challenge came—users realized the app was Chinese when India’s government leaked that it was considering banning the app on national security grounds. U.S. companies such as WhatsApp were also suspect, but local media reported at the time that “the security agencies are more worried because it is a Chinese company.” Active users fell to 6-8 million by October 2015, and most of the local team disbanded. Tencent then invested in a local player called Hike, which has also not had much success against Facebook and WhatsApp. It was not an auspicious start for a company used to dominance in its home market, and the security concerns in India would only get more severe. Most Chinese apps that were once popular in India are banned today.

WeChat expanded in South Africa in 2013 but could not dent the market dominance of WhatsApp, which has been owned by Facebook since 2014. Nor was WeChat able to do so in Brazil. It succeeded in China by starting with a successful chat app and then gradually adding functions to turn it into a super-app, but abroad the strategy was reversed, with Tencent trying to pull users into a chat product with super-app functions. It did not work. Tencent’s partner in South Africa admitted the difficulty: “Because there is so much competition for the chat product you need a certain audience engagement before any of those other products can become mainstream.”

Despite raising hundreds of millions of dollars, Tencent’s India investee Hike learned this the hard way. In January 2019, it announced it would reverse course from the super-app model and instead release separate apps for its key functions. Hike will “undo some of our experiments away from the Core to bring more focus and much needed simplicity to the product.” Tencent’s trouble abroad may be evidence that the super-app model can’t be built from the ground up or that it is just less suited to other markets than it is in China. It seems the super-app model is an all-or-nothing phenomenon that works only if you have a platform that is already dominant in other key markets. Therefore, until Chinese firms prove able to build out such a dominant platform abroad, Chinese fintech will pose a minimal threat to U.S. payment companies and the U.S. dollar.

The super-app model is designed to plug into as many parts of users’ lives as possible, harvesting and using sensitive data from real-time location and contacts to financial health, while connecting to a country’s critical financial infrastructure. If one Chinese app gains this much power over and information about its users, would it be in a position to refuse high-level Chinese government information requests for insights it is gleaning about the foreign country?

Ant also has many state-owned shareholders, making the Chinese government an indirect partial owner. Ant’s multi-billion-dollar fundraising rounds in 2015 and 2016, which in part aimed to give it the capital to expand abroad, included China’s sovereign wealth and social security funds, China Development Bank (one of the main funders of China’s Belt and Road Initiative), one of its largest state banks—China Construction Bank—and major state-backed insurers. As the Chinese Communist Party extends its reach into private companies, giving Party committees more influence and forcing the alignment of business with its priorities, Chinese companies may find it harder to pursue purely commercial interests. In 2018, Ant’s record-setting $14 billion funding round for “globalization and technology innovation” listed 14 foreign investors by name but said little about domestic participants downplayed as “mainly existing shareholders.” However, many are state-owned, almost certainly a liability when the U.S. national security review killed Ant’s MoneyGram acquisition.

On the other hand, the regulatory history of fintech shows that powerful companies like Alibaba and Tencent cannot be boiled down to pure tools of the Chinese state, even if their power has been curtailed significantly in the recent regulatory reset. They have neutered government regulations, and their thinking on technology has influenced government policy. Police officials say that companies like Alibaba push back on government requests for data they find unwarranted. The Party needs firms like them to thrive to achieve its economic goals and reach the frontiers of technology development. Alibaba and Tencent know that if they have a reputation of sharing foreign users’ private data with the Chinese state, then regulators and users abroad may block them. This tension between a status as national champions symbolizing China’s rise and the desire to be viewed as purely commercial entities abroad is becoming more difficult.

When China’s fintech giants expand abroad, they cannot rely on government protection from foreign competition. Other countries are protecting their own local fintech companies from stronger foreign competition. China’s experience has taught these nations not only the power of super-apps but also the value of ensuring that foreign giants cannot nip the progress of their local firms in the bud. In Indonesia, for example, a central-bank official said about Chinese fintech firms “that all global players can bring their payment instruments to Indonesia” but that Ant and WeChat are restricted to foreign users and the foreign-currency business, just as China has largely kept Visa, Mastercard, and American Express out of China’s domestic market.

Ant and China may get the same treatment in other countries that Yahoo! and Softbank got in China in 2010. If Chinese regulators were unwilling to allow their online-payment market to be controlled by Alibaba because of its large U.S. and Japanese equity holders, why should other countries allow theirs to be controlled by one with a major Chinese equity holder?

Protectionism may have also contributed to the failures in localization and international expansion that WeChat and Ant have faced. Companies like Facebook and Google are blocked in China, so Chinese tech has limited experience competing with them. The large, protected home market helped them reach an enormous scale, but they may have become like a species on an isolated island uniquely evolved to that environment. Just as WeChat has failed to attract foreign users for its chat products, Alibaba’s efforts abroad in e-commerce have floundered. In India, Amazon and Flipkart, owned by Walmart, are far ahead of PayTM’s Alibaba-invested e-commerce arm, which has struggled since its IPO despite all the help from Ant.

Although Chinese fintech giants and tech players have been adept at adapting foreign technologies and models to fit China, they are struggling to adapt Chinese technologies and models to foreign markets. Chinese fintech might be coming to the rest of the world only in its ideas and inspiration, rather than as a direct competitor.

Over the past several years, there has been an active debate about Chinese influence overseas. Amidst allegations that Beijing has influenced foreign elections and politicians, state newswire Xinhua has expanded into one of the largest news agencies worldwide, and state-linked media companies have taken over Chinese-language media sources internationally. Joshua Kurlantzick discusses this landscape in his newest book, Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World. Kurlantzick spoke with ChinaFile Editorial Fellow Abby Seiff about his book. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Abby Seiff: You write that China increasingly and openly wants to reshape the world and its image. What is behind this more assertive foreign policy shift?

Joshua Kurlantzick: The idea that China had a model of development of authoritarian capitalism plus supposedly very effective managerial governance started in the 2000s, with a lot of academics talking about it; but no Chinese leaders were willing to say it. Xi Jinping has decided that he is willing to openly embrace the idea that China has a model that it can export to other countries. He has said that on multiple occasions.

The reasons for that are: One, he is far, far more assertive in all aspects of his foreign policy than any Chinese leader since Mao. Two, at least until the zero-COVID problems, China’s model may have looked increasingly attractive to many countries, especially as—from 2007/2008 up until today—democracies have struggled a lot. They struggle with inequality, with authoritarian populism, with poor governance, and all sorts of things. I think it was fortuitous that he was doing this at the same time. And then third, some of the aspects of the model were being picked up. Certainly, aspects like the way that China controls its Internet have been replicated in places like Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Russia, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere. Then, the fact that China embarked on a massive aid program, BRI [the Belt and Road Initiative], backed up the idea that China’s model was potentially attractive.

<a href="https://www.chinafile.com/sites/default/files/assets/images/photo/system/beijings-global-media-offensive-cover_002.jpeg" title="Beijing’s Global Media Offensive" class="colorbox" data-colorbox-gallery="gallery-node-54736-AQ2QX-tR04E" data-cbox-img-attrs="{"title": "", "alt": ""}"></a>

(Courtesy of Oxford University Press)

That China has become an increasingly powerful player in geopolitical global affairs (the most recent evidence of which would be that China helped broker a deal of restored relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran) also added to the idea that China is a rising power and other countries should consider its model.

Now, the last three years have exposed some of the flaws of how Xi has shifted China from consensus authoritarianism, where a group of people in leadership worked together to make decisions and get genuine input from scholars and experts, to, really, one-man, almost Putin-esque rule. Zero-COVID exposed the follies of that and dented the idea that China has some great model of managerial governance. The fact that Xi is cracking down on the private sector, intensely and probably badly undermining China’s economy in doing so, also probably hurts that model of authoritarian capitalism. And the fact that China is driving away many of its most innovative young people is also a demerit for that model. But, that said, they continue to promote the model.

And putting aside the issues with the model, for the moment, how has China utilized media in its efforts to promote it?

In the book, I talk about several ways. One, they use their big state media outlets: China Global Television Network, their global state media TV network; China Radio International, which is their global radio channel; and Xinhua, which is their global news wire. I find that China Global Television Network and China Radio International, through my own research and studies by Gallup and others, have not been very successful. They haven’t gained a wide audience in most countries. Whereas Xinhua has been much more successful and has signed content-sharing agreements with local news outlets all over the world who use its content and translate it into local languages.

With Xinhua, China has been quite successful at getting its views of the world, what we would call discourse power, into news outlets all over the world.

The second way that they try to have discourse power and support their message is through Chinese language publications around the world. Those outlets have been almost exclusively taken over by Chinese state-linked companies or by individuals who have shifted the editorial coverage to basically pro-Beijing, non-independent coverage. There are some exceptions in Taiwan and a few other places, but most Chinese language media, including in the United States, is now essentially not covering Beijing independently. So that has been a success for China. In the book, I talk about other ways, like the use of disinformation and promotion of information on social media platforms, both based in the West and in China. And then I talk a little bit about what I call old-fashioned influencers: espionage, paying politicians influencing student groups, using the United Front Work Department to influence the diasporic community, etc.

All governments wage soft propaganda efforts and information campaigns. The CIA, for instance, has a well-documented history of using media to shape public opinion and promote anti-communist sentiment globally. I’m curious if you see China as doing something fundamentally different?

What China is doing is similar to what you’re talking about, with the CIA and U.S. state media outlets in the Cold War, where they were genuinely promoting propaganda—and often not necessarily accurate propaganda—about the United States and about issues of all sorts in the world. But since the end of the Cold War, that comparison doesn’t really fit. Since the end of the Cold War, VOA and RFA have operated under a clause of editorial independence. VOA produces tons of content that reports negative aspects of what’s going on in America, including with the American government. And the same thing would be true for the BBC and AFP, or other things that you would count as potentially state media, where the state has a stake in the media. They enjoy editorial independence. They produce articles critical of their own governments.

There’s no comparison between that and Xinhua or any other Chinese channel now. No Chinese channel would run stories like “China’s growth rate not likely to meet its 5 percent target,” or “Xi Jinping worries about his popularity,” let alone some prominent member of the Politburo going on Xinhua and eviscerating everyone else in the senior leadership. It is accurate that some of what China is doing is very similar to what the U.S. did during the Cold War. That is definitely true, and I talk about it in the book. But that’s not the case with these state media outlets from the U.S., France, Britain, South Korea, and so on anymore. They enjoy editorial independence.

Often, when we talk about Beijing’s soft power diplomacy or its “meddling” in other countries’ affairs, we’re looking at Southeast Asia or perhaps the broader Global South. What really interested me about your book is you’re getting into local government being cultivated in the U.S., or influence campaigns in Australia and New Zealand, or money flowing to federal officials in Canada. Could you share an example or two of the most egregious sorts of meddling you’ve recorded in these wealthy democracies?

Some of China’s influence efforts have been going on for a much longer time, obviously in Taiwan, which China believes is a province of China, and in some countries in Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, as well as Hong Kong. What’s different about the last 10 years is that China has expanded these influence efforts to virtually the whole world, including a lot of prominent liberal democracies, which you would have thought would have had higher barriers to some of the things China was doing.

In Australia, China has gained control of most of the Chinese language media. China has used a lot of disinformation. China was engaged in active, major foreign influence efforts in a whole wide range of areas. And then using the United Front Work Department and others to try to scare Chinese national students or anyone of Chinese ethnicity on Australian college campuses to encourage self-censorship, which they were quite effective in doing, at least for a time.

Very similar strategies were seen in New Zealand. The same taking over of Chinese language media, disinformation, putting money into universities, etc. There was a major scandal in New Zealand a few years ago in which a prominent member of parliament, who had a major role in the New Zealand parliament’s China policy, did not reveal when he entered the country or parliament that he had spent a fair amount of time teaching and working at a Chinese military academy, which probably should have disqualified him from these roles.

As these were exposed, there was an enormous backlash. The media in Australia exposed many of these things. And so Australia has passed a very, very tough foreign interference law in politics and there is extremely high scrutiny now of Chinese donations to universities. And some of the same things are happening or are going to happen in New Zealand, as well as have already happened in the U.S., and are likely to happen in Canada, the U.K., and most leading liberal democracies in Europe and in northeast Asia, like Japan and South Korea.

So China was successful, but at the same time, it created this massive backlash among liberal democracies, which is going to make it a lot harder for China and dents its public image. If you look at Pew polling, you see that China’s global public image among liberal democracies, and even among a number of countries that have historically had pretty warm relations with China, is really terrible. Overall, China’s influence efforts have gained it some successes, but also have led to a pretty substantial global backlash in a lot of areas.

What do you think liberal democracies are still failing to understand about what China is hoping to do in their countries?

There are ones that are farther ahead in terms of their responses. The U.S. has taken a pretty hardline position, which some would say is almost too hawkish. But other liberal democracies have lagged behind a little bit. Some countries in Europe, as well as New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea, are catching up.

There are still huge blind spots. Chinese language media is almost totally controlled in virtually every country by people who are pro-Beijing. That’s a huge blind spot. There’s nothing you can do about some of it. If a U.S. citizen buys a media outlet in the United States and decides that they want to fire all the reporters or editors who were doing independent coverage and replace them with people who are going to do pro-Beijing coverage, there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t tell a media owner how to run their publication if they’re a U.S. citizen. So there are some holes here.

A lot of liberal democracies have been slow, and they’re now catching up to realize that foreign investors in the media and communication sectors need to be given the same level of scrutiny that, in the past, the U.S. and other liberal democracies have given to foreign investors in sectors that could have defense implications—like semiconductors, steel, whatever. They need to scrutinize foreign investment in the media and communication sector at the same level.

Something akin to that is going on right now in Washington with the debate in Congress about what the U.S. should do about TikTok. That sort of application of stricter scrutiny to foreign-owned or foreign-invested major media and communications outlets is happening with TikTok; it needs to happen more broadly in liberal democracies.

One of your chapters is titled “Controlling the Pipes.” What are China’s goals when it comes to larger information infrastructure projects?

There’s information and then there’s the infrastructure through which information flows. That’s what I call the pipes. This includes 5G wireless networking infrastructure, which China has been very aggressive in trying to have Huawei and to a lesser extent ZTE build in a lot of developing countries. They haven’t been that successful in building them in prominent liberal democracies. They’ve been shut down by the United States and a lot of their partners. But they are building out a lot of the 5G infrastructure in Africa and to some extent in different parts of Asia. Will that mean that 5G infrastructure will somehow preference Chinese information media? Or will it perhaps serve as a backdoor for information to go back to China? We don’t know the answer to either. But those are obviously both concerns and reasons why the United States and many other liberal democracies have prevented Huawei and ZTE from building their infrastructure.

Other information pipes include undersea cables, which transmit information from one continent to another. China has been very aggressive in pushing to build those. It has been pushing its satellite TV networks, which have been increasingly popular in Africa and carry an increasing amount of Chinese content. And, finally, there are the social media platforms. WeChat, which is, I think, a little bit less worrisome. Its popularity outside of China isn’t enormous. But then you come to TikTok. TikTok is a huge issue that every liberal democracy is going to have to come to terms with. It’s going to be the most popular app in the world in a year. I don’t think that leading politicians in liberal democracies want to be the ones who banned TikTok. India is the only democracy I know of that’s banned TikTok. But Narendra Modi is in a very strong position to do whatever he wants. I don’t think Joe Biden, who is running for reelection next year, wants to be the guy who banned TikTok. Heavily dependent as the Democratic Party is on 18-to-35-year-old voters, I don’t think that’s a good selling point on the campaign trail.

Like most other liberal democracies, I think Biden and Congress are trying to negotiate some way for U.S. users’ data to be kept in the United States exclusively while TikTok continues to operate as an overseas company overseen by ByteDance, which is essentially a semi-Chinese-state company. And I think other liberal democracies are going to make the same demands for keeping TikTok users’ data in their countries. Whether TikTok is going to agree to that in 50 places, I don’t know. But I think in the U.S. they’ll be able to work something out.