London Review of Books China

London Review of Books: on China
These 3 reviews seem full of interesting connections with "overview" possibilitiesLRB
London Review of Books
Vol. 43 No. 10 20 May 2021
A Singular Entity
Peter C. Perdue
What Is China?: Territory, Ethnicity, Culture and History
by Ge Zhaoguang, translated by Michael Gibbs Hill.
Harvard, 224 pp., £31.95, March 2019
In the 1950s, Western scholars and Chinese émigrés were writing extensively on the classical tradition in China, but historians in the People's Republic were constrained by a Marxist framework that sorted the major thinkers of the past into 'materialists'(good) and 'idealists' (bad). This impasse lasted until Mao's death in 1976, but classical scholarship continued to be neglected into the 1980s, as a flood of translations entered China and with them a vast body of Western thought. During the Mao era, Chinese scholars had access to Soviet culture, which invoked classical learning from the Greeks through to Hegel and Marx, but they knew little or nothing of non-Marxist developments since the late 19th century. As Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and many others became available, this 'culture fever', which reoriented intellectuals in China towards the West, seemed to rule out any widespread reappraisal at home of classical Chinese thought. Since the turn of the century, however, the classical philosophers and their underexamined legacy have seized the Chinese imagination, and a domestic 'culture fever' has gained ground in academic circles and beyond. Intellectuals in mainland China have resumed a conversation with their counterparts in Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong and the West, restoring the international discourse ended by Mao.
Ge Zhaoguang (b. 1950), a professor of history at Fudan University in Shanghai, is one of the foremost — and most prolific — historians of Chinese thought. His work covers a vast range of Chinese writing from ancient times to the present, but it's only in the last eight or nine years that a handful of his books have been made available in English. All of them bear on the issues that preoccupy Chinese intellectuals today. Ge is not the only PRC scholar to publish ambitious, wide-ranging surveys (with detailed commentary) on the classical Chinese tradition, but his approach to the field is distinctive and modulates from one book to the next. His Intellectual History of China is a monumental, two-volume conspectus of two thousand years of classical Chinese scholarship. Here in 'China'I Dwell consists of eight essays about cultural exchange, and includes, among other subjects, readings of Japanese and Western historiographies of China. What Is China? addresses the larger themes of Chinese identity — questions of territory, ethnicity and intellectual genealogy. It is Ge's most daring attempt at an account of Chinese classical learning, presenting the scope of a long intellectual tradition and pointing up its limitations. Perhaps inevitably, it leaves out too much to be wholly persuasive.
His two volumes on China's intellectual history leave him far more room for manoeuvre. They describe the formation of an intellectual community in the second millennium BCE and its continuation until the end of the 19th century. The founding figures (not a single female writer is mentioned) were ritual specialists attendant on kings. Over time they became an aristocracy of scholars who shaped the intellectual development of China for more than two thousand years. They called themselves shi, or 'knights', but they weren't warriors — or priests — but thinkers, who debated the nature of the cosmos, the precepts of the virtuous life, good governance and the paths to spiritual transcendence. In short, the preoccupations we associate with Karl Jaspers's Axial Age, roughly 750-400 BCE, the time of Confucius, the Upanishads, the Buddha and Socrates. But in Ge's understanding of Chinese history, the Axial Age was not a time of radical transition from unselfconscious practice to philosophy; in China, uniquely in world civilisation, philosophy was already inherent in the day to day practice of kings and their subjects, and went on to develop organically. He is in no doubt that social transformations have a determining influence on scholarly arguments, but social historians will be frustrated by how little he has to say about the susceptibility of Chinese scholars to shifts in the world of politics and elite social relations. His attitude is closer to that of Keynes, stressing the gradual encroachment of ideas rather than the power of vested interests.
The first Chinese intellectuals about whom we know anything emerged during the Eastern Zhou period (around 770-256 BCE), a time of political chaos. Dozens of kingdoms vied for power, while 'one hundred flowers bloomed and one hundred schools contended.'Confucianists, Daoists, Legalists, Mohists (followers of the philosopher Mozi), military strategists, prognosticators, shamans and medical practitioners all competed for royal patronage. This moment of disorder and rivalry was also the time of China's greatest intellectual ferment (a pattern that recurred in all the major dynasties). The conquest of China's core territories — the states of Han, Zhao, Yan, Wei, Chu and Qi — by the First Emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, in the third century BCE was followed by more than four hundred years of consolidated rule by the two Han dynasties (202 BCE-220 CE). In the early Han dynasty, led by the towering scholar Dong Zhongshu (179-104 BCE), followers of Confucianism, which had never been the dominant school, made a decisive bargain with the state. Following Confucius' injunction that rulers should be advised to act for the benefit of their subjects, Confucians entered government service, while maintaining a disinterested pursuit of what they saw as the search for philosophical truth. Confucianism was 'transformed into a state ideology'. If we think of Aristotle, the tutor to Alexander, rather than Socrates, say, or Augustine, we have an idea of the way the Confucians situated themselves. Scholars with practical advice to offer could change policy, if they were lucky enough not to be purged, but only at the cost of their intellectual independence. Those who stood on principle, rejecting political machinations, were prey to solipsistic musing. This dialectic drives Ge's account, and there were powerful arguments for both tendencies. He almost never, however, discusses the abundant literature on political economy, which he regards as tainted by compromise.
The tortured scholastic engagement with the world of ideas and the world of action was challenged by Daoists from within the classical tradition of Chinese writing and Buddhists from without, as the Confucianists themselves balanced in between. Far from Weber's image of the complacent mandarin, Ge's Confucians are afflicted with doubts as deep as those of Martin Luther. His most original section describes the crisis of the Confucian programme following the introduction of Buddhism from India. The struggle for ascendancy lasted from the second century CE until at least the ninth century. Buddhists brought two radical new paradigms to China: Indian metaphysical speculation, and the advocacy of detachment from a world of suffering. Confucius himself had avoided any discussion of gods, spirits and ontology. After the collapse of the Han dynasty no unified state ruled China for almost five hundred years, and it was precisely gods, spirits and ontology whose absence was mourned in the articulation of public life. Buddhists and Daoists rushed to fill the gap. Yet, according to Ge, the Confucian programme held its ground so successfully that it was able, ultimately, to transform Buddhism from a self-centred faith into a doctrine of brotherhood, dedicated to good works and open to lay believers (including women). It also managed to convert Daoism, with its critiques of organised ritual, into another bureaucratised religion.
The early eighth century, five hundred years after the fall of the Han dynasty, saw the start of a long neo-Confucian revival, culminating in the work of the great synthesiser Zhu Xi (1130-1200), the Aquinas of middle period China. No figure in Ge's account, except Confucius, receives more attention. Zhu gave Confucian thought a new, metaphysical cast; redirecting the attention of Confucian scholars from 'ritual' to the study of 'principle', and changing their understanding of 'matter-energy' in the universe, known as qi. (Qi persists in the contemporary concept of qigong and the martial arts.) For Zhu Xi, the way to become an enlightened person, a junzi, was to study the rational, systemic relations between abstract 'principle'(li) governing the natural and human world, and the matter-energy 'stuff' (qi) of which it consisted. Techniques of meditation and seclusion, adapted from Buddhism, combined with the 'investigation of things', or empirical research, would lead to sageliness. The chief Confucian virtue of ren, or 'benevolence', governed not only human interpersonal relations, but the connections of all sentient beings. Buddhists might call this universal 'compassion', but neo-Confucianists insisted that true understanding of ren would still serve to reinforce the existing social order based on orthodox ritual. This reorientation gave serious thinkers — ;and not just Confucians — much to consider for the next two hundred years.
But the middle period was also a time of political fragmentation and social upheaval, known as the Tang-Song transition. The collapse of the great Tang empire into regional kingdoms and the Song loss of north China to Central Eurasian dynasties radically transformed the Chinese socio-economic order. The population almost doubled, rice production boomed in the south, huge cities gained populations of up to a million people, and old class barriers broke down. And yet, the same paradoxes, anxieties and tensions reasserted themselves. Although Ge is familiar with the literature on social transformation in the Tang-Song period, he doesn't subscribe to the view that the changing intellectual landscape was determined by social relations. While many Neo-Confucian pragmatists chose to work with the Song state, dampening metaphysical speculation, others dedicated to spiritual goals imported dangerous Buddhist and Daoist ideas into neo-Confucian discourse.
Zhu Xi had claimed that a true Confucian followed the proper moral Way (Dao) while at the same time intensively cultivating his mind-heart (Xin, the unity of reason and emotion). But his disciples diverged on how to balance the two. Some said that, if the Way — the moral code — was what really mattered, self-centred navel-gazing only distracted the sage from acting in the world. Others replied that if human nature was essentially good, a benign component of a harmonious cosmos, why bother to engage in intensive study or practical action? Why not just find the Way within the Mind itself? All religions sometimes swerve towards interiority, or devotionalism, but just as the Sufis challenged Sharia Islam, Vaishnavites the Vedic ritualists, or Christian mystics the authority of the pope, this move threatens the guardians and interpreters of scripture. In Ge's account, Zhu Xi is a cantankerous, embattled figure, far from the plaster saint he later became, vigorously defending engagement with the world as the only true method for discovering the Way. Modern neo-Confucians who invoke his authority make the same effort to shore up the classical tradition against existentialist and postmodern critiques.
Global historians like Timothy Brook and Pamela Crossley view the short but tumultuous reign of the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), when China was under Mongol rule, as constituting an epochal shift: China's rulers for the first time claimed it as a 'Great State' with pretensions at universal empire, spreading its influence over Russia, India, Korea, the Middle East and Europe. These conquerors brought Central Eurasian concepts of heaven, and encouraged religious debates between Muslims, Daoists, Confucians, Buddhists and shamans, but they mostly excluded the Han literati from power. Leading scholars turned to other pursuits. This was the great period of the development of the classical dramas we know as 'Peking Opera', of important mathematical treatises, the importation of Persian artistic styles in ceramics, metallurgy and Mongolian horsemanship. Marco Polo and many other travellers delighted in descriptions of Kublai Khan's Xanadu and his 'stately pleasure dome'. But Ge mentions none of this, because it lies outside the domain of classical scholarship.
Neo-Confucianism prospered under the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911), as it became the prescribed orthodoxy in the examination system that selected scholars for official posts. Daoism and Buddhism went into decline (although Ge neglects some important figures), but as scholars memorised rote answers and wrote standardised essays, Neo-Confucian thought degenerated into sterility.
In the 16th century, Wang Yangming (1472-1529), the second most important figure in the Confucian tradition, revived the vigorous controversy of the Song about the relative importance of Mind-centred cultivation v. Way-centred moral practice, focusing on mental concentration and — anticipating Marx by four hundred years — the 'unity of theory and practice'. Wang, who was a popular local official, held that intellectuals could perform useful work in the realms of philosophy and statecraft at the same time. He believed in close contact between officials and the people, promoting open lectures in front of mass audiences, although he usually kept within orthodox bounds. But many of his followers, oddly termed 'left-wing'Confucians, went further down the road of open resistance to autocratic rule. They preached in the streets to mixed audiences of men and women, they argued that common people could find the Way just as easily as eminent scholars and officials, and, in the eyes of their critics, they introduced 'wild Chan Buddhist' — i.e. Zen Buddhist — ideas into the staid canon. A true Chan practitioner had no use for rituals and ancient texts; he could achieve Enlightenment just by obsessing over a single word: 'Nothing'. Unfortunately Ge omits one of the strangest and most fascinating figures of the late 16th century, Li Zhi (1527-1602), who violently denounced the corruption, hypocrisy and pretensions of scholars and officials alike, while asserting the fundamental significance of individual profit.
Qing dynasty (1644-1911) thought was haunted by the alien Western tradition. Once again, as with Buddhism, scholars, encountering Jesuit concepts of theology or the techniques of Western science, attempted to incorporate these newcomers without giving up their basic principles, and once again, the classical tradition was 'fundamentally transformed' without actually disappearing. Ge admits that the school of empirical research opened up new arenas, but takes much too disparaging a view of Qing intellectual life. Like the scholars he discusses, he has a strange disdain for poetry and belles-lettres. At one point he calls the shift from classical studies to poetry a descent into 'triviality'. Philosophy can be just as trivial. The vast territorial expansion of the Qing generated a profusion of genres: travel writing, diaries, frontier poetry and incipient ethnography. The Qing was also a golden age of political economy, inspiring debates on subjects such as mining, agricultural production, hydrology, currency regulation, famine relief, taxation and foreign affairs. Writers on statecraft attained a level of discourse not seen since the Song dynasty. But Ge is not interested in such practical questions.
What matters to him is the way the intellectual class maintained its autonomy from the autocratic state, now ruled by Manchus, who were paranoid about the opinions of the Han literati. Yet he skims over the work of Huang Zongxi (1610-95), the most important writer of the period, who directly addressed the issue of autocratic power. Huang argued that the Ming collapsed because of unrestrained imperial control over property and people. For him, a dynasty could endure only if it protected individual property rights by giving power to hereditary elites who held local office. Although he didn't read Locke or Montesquieu, like them he aimed to shore up the position of what we might call the gentry. Others, like the great modernist Wei Yuan, followed Huang's lead. Their writings, neglected at the time, undergird William Theodore de Bary's argument that China had a 'liberal tradition' of constitutional thought. The legal theorist Xu Zhangrun, who was dismissed from Tsinghua University in July last year for his criticisms of Xi Jinping's regime, invokes this tradition — and the PRC's constitution — in his essay 'Imminent Fears, Imminent Hopes', an attack on corruption in the communist party-state. The 17th century still echoes today.
But Ge's omissions show us the limits of the kind of intellectual history — or sixiangshi — he has undertaken. In the classical period, by contrast, Chinese did not make distinctions between philosophy, religion, political economy and popular culture. It was all part of wen, culture itself, and becoming cultured. Ge's English terms, 'knowledge, thought and belief', provide too broad an interpretation of sixiangshi, which is the province, strictly speaking, of one fraction of a literate community, continuing a powerful tradition of commentary derived from ancient times, but one that is under constant siege from new currents and dissenters, both within and without. Confucius himself called for resistance to 'deviant thoughts' that departed from his 'single thread', and his followers knew that the struggle would continue.
In 1895, China suffered a crushing military defeat at the hands of the Japanese and then came under assault from its own intellectuals, who were heavily influenced by the Western thought that had arrived with the conquerors. The result was an almost complete rejection of the Confucian tradition over the next ninety years. Ge ends his Intellectual History of China in 1895, the year in which Yan Fu, the famous translator of Darwinist thought, wrote of the extreme 'nervous anxiety' afflicting intellectuals of his time. Ge does not follow the story into the next two decades, when genuine faith in the classical tradition almost completely collapsed. As he writes, by 1895, the loss of territory, cultural confidence, unity and common historical identity had 'undermined the integrity of the classical tradition'. The abolition of the examination system in 1905 and the collapse of the dynasty in 1911 sealed its fate. But China had faced foreign invasion and cultural challenges before without the collapse of the Confucian tradition.
Was what Ge calls the 'anger and humiliation' of this period any more severe than that experienced during the Manchu conquest, or the embattled Song? This is the central issue for all students of modern Chinese thought. I can only offer a few hints here. The concurrent onslaught of military power, commercial competition, ideological challenges and global geopolitics eventually destroyed all the large enduring agrarian empires: Russian, Ottoman and Chinese. But Chinese intellectuals, those venerable old moles, also sabotaged the tradition from within. The hidden tensions of classical thought, between individual self-cultivation and state service, between progress and respect for the past, between external and internal dynamics, could no longer be balanced. The centre could not hold. In the words of Philip Kuhn, 'nobody mourns the old Chinese bureaucracy ... Yet its nature impeded zealotry of any sort ... Without that great sheet-anchor, China yaws wildly in the storm.'The shattered alliance of scholars and the state left China without any moral guidance for the entire 20th century.
The Republican era (1912-49), marked by civil war, imperial invasion, famine and rapid industrialisation, was a terrible moment for Confucian agrarianists; but the Maoist era was even worse. China rebuilt itself on a ruthless Stalinist industrial model; its farmers, the favoured class of Confucius, suffered the worst manmade famine in world history as a result. Mao is never mentioned in Ge's work, an omission that has proved essential to the wider post-Maoist effort to revive 'learning' (xue) on the mainland, after nearly a hundred years of unrelenting assault. After Mao, Chinese endorsed cowboy capitalism of the most corrupt, environmentally destructive kind. Like all of us, they struggle to restrain capitalist greed with moral or legal norms; many of them, amazingly enough, have turned to Christianity for answers, but others search for guidance in Buddhism, Daoism, popular cults, and even Confucius. Where is the unified moral community of the past, if it ever existed, to be found?
Ge admits that Chinese culture contains multitudes, that it has adopted many concepts from abroad and that it has changed over time. Yet he holds firm to the belief that however we define it, China is a singular entity, unique in world history for its coherence, continuity and distinctiveness. Critiques of this unitary notion in recent Western, Japanese and Taiwanese scholarship tend to emphasise regional cultures, or embrace the idea of a larger East Asian or Asian framework; some point to the distinctiveness of Taiwan, others focus on non-Han influence; all cast a sceptical postmodern eye on received narratives of the nation-state. What Is China? is a response to these positions. To Ge's mind, they have all narrowed historians' views by directing them away from the central state; crucially, they have 'diluted the dominance of China within Asia'. The unified Chinese cultural sphere was shared not only by elites, he argues, but by the common people. Several historians — Ge included — have investigated the ways in which intellectual communities construct culture and shape historical continuity to ideological ends. He nevertheless insists that core elements of something called 'culture' existed in a real 'China'. Culture is not purely a socially constructed phenomenon: for Ge, there is a there there.
There are problems with his account, including his criticisms of other scholars. Just because someone carries out a study of a single Chinese region doesn't mean they think that China is a tapestry of ill-assorted fragments. G. William Skinner argued that Qing China is best viewed as an assemblage of macro-regions rather than a single economic entity, but he did not deny the existence of common elements. No one today would deny that China has played a dominant role within the region, but the subcontinental region we now call China, with more than three thousand years of recorded history, is too vast to be subsumed under a single rubric. Perhaps Ge knows this and has attempted this feat of imagination in the Confucian spirit of zhi buke er wei (doing the impossible). One difficulty is that many of his concepts don't correspond exactly to English terms. He often conflates China (Zhongguo) as a unified political structure with China — Huaxia or Zhonghua — as a cultural concept. He knows that for much of its history China was politically divided, but insists that a unified cultural community — wenhua gongtongti — persisted. For him, 'China'usually refers to a civilisational frame rather than a territory occupied by the contemporary Chinese state or its predecessors. Yet Huaxia is plagued with ambiguities. And Ge's new expression, 'cultural community', which may sound natural to English readers, has a strange ring in Chinese. The term gongtongti derives from an early 20th-century Japanese neologism, kyōdōtai, which in turn has echoes of the German Volk, or national community. Its use in modern Chinese is recent and rare. (It may come from the Chinese translation of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities). The term guojia is another headache. It combines two key concepts — nation and state —— that Western scholarship is careful to distinguish. Sometimes Ge's translators use 'nation', sometimes 'state' and sometimes 'nation-state'. But these are three different concepts wrapped up in one Chinese term. Ge adds yet another, minzu guojia, translated here as 'ethnic nation-state'.
He asserts that the Qin-Han period (220 BCE-220 CE) marked the start of a single Chinese civilisation, based on Han ethnicity and 'forming a clear and distinct cultural identity and cultural mainstream'. During times of conquest foreign cultures 'melded' with Han culture, but Han culture itself remained intact, even if it was transformed in the process. But who belonged to the Huaxia cultural sphere, and how was it constituted? For Ge, the Song dynasty marked the emergence of a true consciousness of ethnicity — minzu — centred on the Han people. And it was during the Tang-Song transition, he argues, that a new 'early modern'era began.
But identifying the moment of Chinese cultural formation during the Song raises many questions. Clearly this 'culture' did not include Mongols, Tibetans, Muslims or many non-Han peoples. (Ge doesn't discuss the complex case of Chinese Muslims.) And where did this formation take place? Neither the northern nor the southern Song controlled the area around modern Beijing. During the Song-Liao-Jin era (916-1234 CE) China was a place of divided sovereignty, or as Morris Rossabi called it, a 'China among equals': this was not a period in which one dynasty ruled uncontested over most of the territory.
A history of China that only includes the Han cultural core will provide a narrow account of what is now a vast, modern nation-state. And that conjectural 'core' is smaller than the territory of the Ming dynasty: much of south-west China during the Ming was occupied by a handful of military garrisons; the 'common people' of these regions did not embrace Huaxia values. Then too, a history of China that includes the territories conquered by the Qing dynasty can't hope to do justice to Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongols, Manchus and Han alike. I'm reminded of Anderson likening the Western imperial project to 'stretching the tight skin of the nation over the gigantic body of empire'.
In An Intellectual History of China, Ge tells us that Chinese thought evolved in a continuous, connected fashion from the Shang period (1600-1046 BCE) through the Qing, blending and incorporating in syncretic fashion. At the same time, he recognises that the Song dynasty was a crucial moment of economic development, which saw the rise of 'nationalist'— minzu — ideologies and the consolidation of neo-Confucian thought. Neo-Confucians, of course, incorporated and responded to the challenge of Buddhism. How does he reconcile the claim that the cultural ideals of Huaxia persisted with the claim that they changed radically during the Song? What distinguishes China from other civilisations, Ge argues, is the deep continuity of Chinese philosophical thought, based on enduring ideals: of tianxia ('all under heaven'), harmony, cosmic order and so forth. But Western philosophers invoked Greco-Roman concepts throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, just as Indian writers continued to refer to the Vedic tradition. China had a classical language, but so did Europe and India; they also had cosmic ideals and rituals. In the 2000s some Indian villages were still carrying out a version of Vedic rituals that dated from at least the first millennium BCE. No specific Chinese ritual can be traced back that far.
Clearly Ge, like many others, feels that the modern world threatens the coherence of Chinese culture, just as the Western challenge in the 19th century led to a serious reconsideration of the classical tradition. It was at that time, the historian Joseph Levenson argued, that Chinese scholars ceased to write within a 'tradition' and began to write instead as 'traditionalists', vainly asserting the validity of a culture that would soon die out. Intellectuals who aim to restore the study of the classics are bound to reject Levenson's view, and for them the stakes are high. In the 20th century China lived through the most intensive assault on tradition known to history. From the start of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 through the Maoist era, scholars, fiction writers and politicians systematically attacked the ideals of Confucius, the family system, the family farm, the concepts of harmony and equilibrium, the pillars of classical civilisation; there were purges, repression, upheaval and famine, for farmers and intellectuals alike. Now, surveying the wreckage of a century, Chinese people struggle to find moral guidance in a world of rapacious capitalism, unconstrained by rule of law or moral norms. Religions of all kinds have flourished as a consequence. The Chinese state now invokes the once despised Confucius as the bedrock of native values. What role can the intellectual historian of the classical period have in such a confusing period? Asserting cultural continuity keeps the past alive and it can shape thought in the present. But using the past for the present — gu wei jin yong — risks distorting what thinkers in the past themselves intended, and plays down the real divergences in their approaches.
Is an alternative intellectual history of China possible? If so, it would not seek to define the unity of Chinese civilisation, but to celebrate its multiplicity. It would look to centrifugal forces, marginal figures and frontier contacts as sources of innovation, not threats to order. It would include women, non-Han peoples and non-elite traditions without trying to co-opt them into an orthodoxy. There is more to the culture of China than the efforts of a small literate male elite to define itself as both distinct from and in partnership with the imperial state, or indeed the modern state. No single study can embrace the vast diversity of the cultures that have emerged at the eastern end of the Eurasian continent, but we need to recognise their mutual interaction as a positive force. We will never stop writing and thinking about 'China', whatever it means. The concept is too useful to be abandoned. But we may need to take a detached view of certain Han intellectual perspectives and acknowledge their many entangled interactions with other literate elites and other peoples within and beyond the Sinitic sphere. The typical temple of Chinese popular religion contains multiple areas devoted to many gods, more like a circus model of culture than like the Temple of Heaven, where a single officer performed the sacrifice. Is such an intellectual history an even more impossible project than the search for a single China? Perhaps we should proceed in the spirit of zhi buke er wei.
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Vol. 43 No. 6 18 March 2021
Growing Pains
Laleh Khalili
The Emperor's New Road: China and the Project of the Century
by Jonathan E. Hillman.
Yale, 294 pp., £20, October 2020
In a short story called 'The Chinese Road' written in the 1970s by the Yemeni-Ethiopian Mohammad Abdul-Wali, a Yemeni man befriends a Chinese construction worker on the new road from the port of Hodeida on the Red Sea, 'cutting through the mountain', to the capital, Sanaa, more than two hundred kilometres away. Abdul-Wali describes the competent and friendly Chinese labourers who live in tents with the Yemenis. They all learn Arabic, unlike an earlier group of foreigners: the British, sweaty and florid, with their colony in Aden, who remained aloof from the locals, and departed 'leaving nothing behind but the hatred of [the] people'. The Chinese construction workers, by contrast, leave a lasting legacy.
The completion of the first paved road in Yemen in 1961 was commemorated in a series of stamps that also celebrated the building of a modern port in Hodeida with the help of Soviet engineers. By that point 1100 Chinese construction workers and engineers were building roads in Yemen. Work on the Sanaa-Hodeida road had begun in 1959, the same year China started blasting through the Himalayas to build the Karakoram Highway to Pakistan. In 1967, China completed the sky-high 'friendship road' between Lhasa and Kathmandu, and between 1970 and 1975 it built a railway between Tanzania and Zambia. Chinese railway experts were remembered respectfully by their local counterparts for passing on their skills.
These postcolonial Chinese construction programmes were intended to be different from the European schemes of the preceding decades, which were launched by colonial powers to enable the transport of extracted raw materials. As the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney wrote in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), roads and railways were not constructed in the colonial period so that Africans could visit their friends. More important still, they were not laid down to facilitate internal trade in African commodities. There were no roads connecting different colonies and different parts of the same colony in a manner that made sense with regard to Africa's needs and development. All roads and railways led down to the sea.
In the exuberant but brief period immediately after decolonisation most postcolonial states looked to the Soviet Union or China to help with industrialisation and infrastructure, often trying to play these countries off against the US and Europe in order to secure better deals with fewer strings attached. At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet and Chinese politics of aid resulted in the construction of hydroelectric dams, steel mills, cement factories, ports and airports, as well as road and rail networks across Asia and Africa. There were more direct forms of aid too. After the Bandung Conference's call in 1955 for Afro-Asian solidarity, China granted $4.7 million in hard currency to Egypt just as Britain, France and Israel were attacking it over the Suez Canal. China extended credit to a number of recently independent African states — Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, Kenya, Guinea — and gave millions to Nepal, Ceylon (soon to become Sri Lanka), Indonesia and Cambodia. It also provided military aid and armaments to anticolonial guerrilla groups across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
At the same time, the US Army Corps of Engineers was building roads, communication systems, airports and other infrastructure in Libya, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. These were always designed to meet US military and strategic needs, often connecting US bases to major transport facilities. In the 1970s I lived in Mashhad in northern Iran, in a neighbourhood next to the recently opened Cento Road. The road was funded by the Central Treaty Organisation, formed in 1955 and modelled after Nato. Its founding members were Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and the UK, with the US pulling the strings in the hope of preventing southward Soviet expansion. The US was happy to fund transport routes because, as the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Curtis LeMay, put it in 1962, 'inadequacies of road and rail facilities in Iran' limited the ability of the US military to travel easily near Iran's border with the Soviet Union. We understood, as other collateral beneficiaries of such roads did, that the US never built a road unless its forces might one day travel along it.
There is a temptation in Washington policy cliques to see China's Belt and Road Initiative as a continuation of Cold War politics. The BRI, which was launched with great fanfare by Xi Jinping in 2013, has two components. On land, multiple train routes are planned to cross the Eurasian landmass via Central Asia, Russia and Iran, with termini in Singapore, Isfahan and Budapest, from where it would connect to the railways of Western Europe. The maritime branch wraps around South-East and South Asia and from there extends to East Africa or through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean.
The numerous road, rail, port and airport projects that form the spine of these new Silk Roads are certainly strategic vectors of alliance like their mid-20th-century counterparts, but there is much less of the discourse of South-South solidarity that emerged out of Bandung, and more of an economic calculation. The China of the 1950s and 1960s was very different from the China of the 21st century. In 1959, when work began on the Karakoram and Hodeida-Sanaa highways, China had a GDP of $55 billion and was in the throes of famine. In 2013, when the BRI was announced (initially under the name One Belt, One Road), its GDP approached $9.5 trillion. In real terms, the Chinese economy grew twentyfold over that half-century.
After China opened up to foreign direct investment in the 1970s, first from Japan and later from Europe and North America, it quickly became the world's factory. In the last decade of the 20th century, numerous new manufacturing centres grew up along its coasts. Its ports expanded in number and capacity to receive raw materials — coal, oil, ore, bauxite, copper — from all over the globe, and to dispatch in turn huge container ships laden with manufactured goods. By the early 2000s, Chinese ports dominated every top-twenty maritime list.
China's response to the global crisis of capital in 2008 was a massive stimulus programme. Its central planners encouraged the movement of capital inland and used the state-owned banking system to cultivate manufacturing centres along China's long land borders with South-East, South and Central Asian states. They also invested in extensive land transport infrastructures, accumulating expertise and manufacturing capacity in railway technologies, which are now being deployed in building the rail components of the BRI. This alternation between mobile capital and its immobilisation in infrastructure — a 'spatial fix', in the words of the geographer David Harvey— is one progenitor of Xi's grand initiative. China's treatment by the US is another.
In October 2011, Obama's then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, announced the birth of 'America's Pacific Century 'in an article for Foreign Policy, and boasted that the Asia-Pacific region was 'eager for our leadership and our business'. Although the Clinton manifesto made gestures to allay China's fear of a new Cold War, only a few months later the Pentagon issued Defence Strategic Guidance which included a 'pivot to Asia'. To the jubilation of armchair and actual generals, the strategy document declared the end of the boots-on-the-ground counterinsurgency era and warned of 'the growth of China's military power'. The document's familiar jargon — it called for 'credible deterrence' and the need to 'project power despite anti-access/area denial challenges'— was followed up with action in the region: new military exercises with Japan, the decision to base US Marines in Australia, arms sales to the Philippines, and a range of other activities. All this built on the Clinton and Bush administrations' placement of additional naval and air weapons systems in Japan and Guam, the deployment of another aircraft carrier to the Pacific and the construction of a naval base in Singapore.
Trump's trade wars against China and his unabashedly racist response to Covid showed a US itching for a revival of Cold War rivalries. In his first days in office Biden declared that the term 'China virus' would be expunged from federal documents, but while criticising Trump's approach, Biden's new secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said that the former president 'was right in taking a tougher approach to China'; the new secretary of commerce, Gina Raimondo, has said that she will continue Trump's policy, using 'the full toolkit at my disposal ... to protect America and our networks from Chinese interference'. Such attitudes have become firmly entrenched among US policymakers.
All this means we should be grateful that a long-established Washington think-tanker like Jonathan Hillman is downplaying the threat of China's projects to US interests. Hillman is a senior fellow at the centre-right Centre for Strategic and International Studies. His research for The Emperor's New Road included visiting a number of countries where BRI projects are underway in order to measure the gap between promise and reality. He aspires to a tone of gravity even when his fieldwork largely consists in finding out whether the trains run on time. The effect is disconcerting: in places, his reports read like stories from a Lonely Planet travel guide — trains are missed, there are troubles with Russian border guards, ferries don't depart from their advertised docks.
Predictably, the book's cover has a red star on it, and there are further clichés inside: from the travels of Marco Polo, to Central Asian Muslims who both pray to Allah and drink vodka, to the multiple urban centres branded 'the new Dubai'. He sees China as undergoing an 'education as a rising power'; it is in need of instruction, presumably from more experienced imperialists. But the imperialists that should serve as paragons and warnings, he thinks, are France and Britain, not the US. The Persian kings Xerxes and Darius are mentioned several times, but the pivot to Asia is not. He portrays the US as a well-meaning, bumbling giant whose best efforts are undermined by its being too nice, too concerned with democratic institutions, arriving too late on the scene in places like Pakistan, not understanding the locals, and not spending enough dollars to compete properly with China. On the 'dangers' of China to US national interests, Hillman is equivocal. While the overall message of the book is that the Chinese are too incompetent and their Asian clients too venal to endanger US ambitions in these contested spaces, we nevertheless hear about violent smuggling gangs in the port of Piraeus, Huawei's supernatural reach, the Chinese military presence in the South China Sea, the Horn of Africa and Central Asia, and the corrupting influence of Chinese money wherever BRI projects are found.
Where Chinese infrastructure projects seem to have failed, Hillman tends to blame corruption and the machinations of local actors. He contends that it was a lack of principles and foresight on the part of Djiboutian politicians that led them in 2018 to invite the Chinese to take over the container terminal of Doraleh after they had seized control of it from the Dubai-based company DP World, which had held the concession. There is nothing here about DP World's predatory practices in Indian Ocean ports, which resulted, for example, in Yemen buying back the concession for the port of Aden (only for it to be decimated by the Saudi-Emirati coalition's war on Yemen). Hillman portrays China's expansion in Piraeus as the Asian hordes at the gates of Europe, but doesn't tell us that the European troika's forcible privatisation of Greek state enterprises in the wake of the financial crisis offered the port on a platter to China's Cosco Shipping. (During the same fire sale, airports on many Greek islands were sold to the German airport management company Fraport AG.)
Belt and Road investments are leading to the development of infrastructure long denied to African and Asian countries. China lends money on favourable terms to its allies, including states that otherwise fail to secure such loans as a result of unforgiving US sanctions. As well as investing in roads, railways and ports, China now manufactures technologies — especially in the field of telecommunications — that challenge US and European hegemony. Its less costly products are easier for countries of the global South to afford. And China's 'no interference' policy means that it has largely avoided the crude regime-change politics emanating from Washington; its military expenditure is still only a third of America's, and much lower still as a percentage of GDP. China is now at the centre of global capitalism. No longer economically peripheral and with no pretence of being a communist state, China uses its BRI projects to consolidate and expand capitalism 'with Chinese characteristics'.
Data from Boston University's Global Development Policy Centre show that between 2008 and 2019, China extended overseas development credit of $462 billion, only slightly less than the $467 billion provided by the World Bank in the same period. The money advanced by the China Development Bank and the Export Import Bank of China reached a peak in 2016, half of which was spent on infrastructure projects. Ten countries ——including Venezuela, Pakistan, Russia, Angola, Brazil, Ecuador and Iran — received the lion's share of the loans.
The terms under which these loans have been offered, and their economic effects, have differed from place to place. To finance development in the Pakistani port of Gwadar, China offered loans at zero interest, perhaps because of Pakistan's strategic importance. In Sri Lanka, it signed a 99-year lease on the port of Hambantota, in which it has a 70 per cent stake. Hillman isn't alone in regarding the Hambantota concession as a coercive debt-equity swap: China gets control of the port in return for forgiving some of Sri Lanka's debt. But the story is more complicated. In 2016, Sri Lanka owed financiers $65 billion, $8 billion of which was owed to China. But 75 per cent of the debt was in government bonds bought up primarily by funds in the US, and much of that debt was accrued not to build infrastructure but to finance the counterinsurgency war against the Tamil Tigers. Ports, airports and other facilities that were built were the vanity projects of the then president, Mahinda Rajapaksa: they were badly situated, poorly designed and overpriced. The money from China intended for the port concession went instead to service interest payments. Rajapaksa, who was booted out of office largely because of the strength of popular feeling against the port, found his way back to power as prime minister in his brother Gotabaya's administration. The reduction in China's financing of projects in 2016 was perhaps influenced by its embarrassment over Sri Lanka.
Leaked documents show that, in 2013, Kenya used the port of Mombasa as security on loans taken out with China's Exim Bank to finance the construction of a railway from Mombasa to Nairobi, with a branch — some of it as yet unbuilt — to the Rift Valley and the Ugandan border, a project that involved murky deals between different factions of the Kenyan elite. The loans Kenya has received from China amount to nearly $5 billion. Given that the railway is yet to turn a profit, Kenya may be forced to cede the port to China. More likely, China will renegotiate the debt, extending the repayment schedule.
Transport infrastructure has historically served to bind fractious peripheral territories to the centre. America's Pacific Railroad, built in the 1860s, allowed businesses protected by US government troops to expand into Indigenous territories in the West. Where infrastructure goes, commerce follows — but so, often, does war. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which terminates at Gwadar on the Gulf of Oman, crosses Balochistan, where the Pakistani state has for decades disappeared or assassinated activists and waged a brutal war of pacification against those fighting for the region's autonomy. In Myanmar, the corridor passes through Shan and Rakhine states, where counterinsurgency measures have led to mass killings and the expulsion of minority communities. This year the Shanghai International Port Group will take over the running of the port of Haifa, with the full co-operation of Israel's security state. In China itself, the BRI train routes across Central Asia pass through Xinjiang, where millions of Uighurs are interned in re-education camps and forced to work in textile and electronics factories.
Although China has a large number of citizens working overseas, it has just one military base beyond its own periphery, in Djibouti. (The former French colony also hosts military personnel from France, the US, Italy, Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.) China has relied on private security firms to protect personnel and facilities in Africa and Asia. Chinese logistics firms in East Africa or South-East Asia can secure the assistance of, among others, the Frontier Services Group, a Hong Kong-based company backed by the Chinese state-owned CITIC Group, with offices in Kenya and Dubai. The founder and chairman of Frontier Services is Erik Prince, whose firm of mercenaries, Blackwater, became notorious for killing civilians in Iraq. Frontier Services is rumoured to have set up training camps in Xinjiang and has acted for Chinese firms working in the oilfields of South Sudan and Mozambique, the jade trade in Myanmar, aviation in Kenya and coltan mining in Congo.
Most accounts of the BRI focus on its geopolitics or geoeconomics. But large infrastructure projects have wider ramifications: lives are affected, connections forged and knowledge circulated. Chinese workers have a long history in Africa and Asia, going back well before the postcolonial period. At the end of the 19th century, the British Empire relied on Chinese labour to keep many of its mines and plantations going. From the 1850s onwards, Chinese workers toiled in South African gold and diamond mines, tapped rubber and extracted tin in Malaya, harvested Cuban sugar plantations, traded and farmed in Java and Sumatra, extracted guano on islets off the coast of Peru, and prospected for gold and built railroads in the US and Canada. Chinese merchants were, and still are, everywhere in the Indian Ocean basin. By the mid 20th century, China was spreading its engineering knowhow across Asia and Africa and making its presence felt through sheer force of numbers. As Abdul-Wali wrote in 'The Chinese Road', many thousands of Chinese workers lived with and trained local labourers.
The Belt and Road Initiative has had a more mixed reception. Praise for its transformative effects is met by criticism of its meagre impact on local capacity building and knowledge transfer. Authorities in areas where projects are in progress often disagree with central administrations over the implementation and efficiency of the schemes. Unless the BRI host countries have the capacity to negotiate, the percentage of local workers on many construction sites is relatively small, relationships are hierarchical, and the interactions between local and Chinese workers are often fraught. The capitalist system of labour management has travelled along the Belt and Road. In Zambia, Kenya and Tanzania, Chinese administrators manage casualised and precarious African labour in mines and on construction projects, with workers' collective bargaining rights recognised only in cases where mass protests have eventually led to state intervention. Decisions made by lower courts in favour of local workers have often been overruled by central governments. The lack of transparency in contracting and employment on the Mombasa-Nairobi railway project has led many Kenyans to complain not only about being shut out of well-paid, skilled jobs, but also about outright racism. In many places where Chinese construction firms employ both Chinese and local workers, the Chinese have better living quarters and don't interact with the locals outside work. Something has changed since the age of anti-colonial solidarity. Trouble along the Belt and Road reflects the transition from state-led co-operation to the international public-private partnerships so characteristic of this era.
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Vol. 41 No. 19 10 October 2019
Document Number Nine
John Lanchester
The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet
by James Griffiths.
Zed, 386 pp., £20, March 2019
We Have Been Harmonised: Life in China's Surveillance State
by Kai Strittmatter.
Old Street, 328 pp., £9.99, May 2019, 978 1 913083 00 7 The People's Republic of China had its seventieth birthday on 1 October. 'Sheng ri kuai le't o the world's biggest and most populous example of ... of ... well, actually, that sentence is hard to finish. There's no off-the-shelf description for China's political and economic system. 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics' is the Chinese Communist Party's preferred term, but the s-word makes an odd fit with a country that is the world's most important market for luxury goods, has the second largest number of billionaires, stages the world's biggest one-day shopping event, 'Singles'Day', and is home to the world's biggest, fastest-expanding, spendiest, most materially aspirational middle class. Look at the UN's Human Development Index: after seventy years of communist rule, China's inequality figures are dramatically worse than those of the UK and even the US. Can we call that 'socialism'?
It's equally hard to claim China as a triumph of capitalism, given the completeness of state control over most areas of life and the extent of its open interventions in the national economy — capital controls, for instance, are a huge no-no in free-market economics, but are central to the way the CCP runs the biggest economy in the world. This system-with-no-name has been extraordinarily successful, with more than 800 million people raised out of absolute poverty since the 1980s. Growth hasn't slowed down since the global financial crisis — or, as those cheeky scamps at the CCP tend to call it, the Western financial crisis. While the developed world has been struggling with low to no growth, China has grown by more than six per cent a year and a further eighty million mainly rural citizens have been raised out of absolute poverty since 2012. There is a strong claim that this scale of growth, sustained for such an unprecedented number of people over such a number of years, is the greatest economic achievement in human history.
Since Deng Xiaoping instituted the policy of 'reform and opening' in the early 1980s, there has been a general view in the West that the gradual encroachment of capitalism in China would lead to a turn towards democratic government. This reflected a deeply held, largely unexamined belief that capitalism and democracy are interlinked. The collapse of the Soviet Union confirmed the West's victory; an equivalent process would inevitably result in political change coming to China. The 'butchers of Beijing', as Bill Clinton described them in 1992, would be swept away by history. The arrival of the internet made this inevitability seem even more inevitable. 'Liberty will be spread by cell phone and cable modem,'Clinton said. 'We know how much the internet has changed America, and we are already an open society. Imagine how much it could change China.'As James Griffiths tells us in The Great Firewall of China, his detailed and compelling account of Chinese online censorship, this was an applause line for Clinton in 2000. 'Now there's no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet,'Clinton went on. 'Good luck. That's sort of like trying to nail jello to the wall.'This perspective on the internet sees it as an informational form of manifest destiny. In the words of the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the internet is a 'nutcracker to open societies'. This view has adherents in China too. Liu Xiaobo — the first Nobel laureate to die in prison since Carl von Ossietzky in Nazi Germany — said the internet was 'God's gift'to a democratic China. The celebrity dissident artist Ai Weiwei says: 'The internet cannot be controlled. And if it is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It is that simple.'
The CCP doesn't agree. Its position is the diametric opposite of the Western received wisdom that the internet is necessarily and in its essence a threat to the authoritarian state. The Chinese government favours the doctrine of 'cyber-sovereignty', in which countries have control over their own versions of the internet. Kai Strittmatter was for many years the Beijing correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and his excellent We Have Been Harmonised is an eye-opening account of this issue. ('Harmonised' is a euphemism for 'censored'.)
The days when the party eyed the internet with fear and anxiety are long gone. The regime has not only lost its fear; it has learned to love new technologies. The CCP believes it can use big data and artificial intelligence to create steering mechanisms that will catapult its economy into the future and make its apparatus crisis-proof. At the same time, it intends to create the most perfect surveillance state the world has ever seen.
To understand the Chinese government's view of these matters, the simplest technique is to hold on to that idea of diametric opposites. Gorbachev? 'Gorbachev was once widely praised by the West and his political reform even won much admiration in China,'an editorial explained in the People's Daily in 2010. 'But, it was Gorbachev that finally ruined the Soviet Union. Therefore, China must not follow the Western world's practice on crucial issues such as internet control and supervision.'Donald Trump? The People's Daily again, via Twitter this time: '@realdonaldtrump is right. #fakenews is the enemy. China has known this for years.'Tiananmen was a disaster for China, no? Au contraire: in Griffiths's words, 'it was argued, even by those who had recognised the horrors experienced in Beijing, that China's subsequent prosperity and modernity justified the crackdown; that without Deng's firm hand in 1989, he would not have been able to oversee subsequent reforms that led to an economic boom.'
The most important of these diametric opposites concerns Western liberal values. In 2013, an amazing paper from the highest reaches of the CCP, catchily known as 'Document Number Nine', or 'Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere', came to light. (The journalist who leaked it, Gao Yu, was sentenced to seven years in prison and is currently under house arrest.) Document Number Nine warned of 'the following false ideological trends, positions and activities': 'promoting Western constitutional democracy'; 'promoting “universal values”'; 'promoting civil society'; 'promoting neoliberalism'; 'promoting the West's idea of journalism, challenging China's principle that the media and publishing system should be subject to party discipline'; 'promoting historical nihilism'(which means contradicting the party's view of history); 'questioning Reform and Opening and the socialist nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics'. The paper, which is cogent and clear, takes direct aim at the core values of Western democracy, and explicitly identifies them as the enemies of the party.1 It sees the internet as a crucial forum for defeating these enemies. The conclusion speaks of the need to 'conscientiously strengthen management of the ideological battlefield', and especially to 'strengthen guidance of public opinion on the internet' and 'purify the environment of public opinion on the internet'.
Document Number Nine is thought to have been either directly written by, or under the auspices of, President Xi Jinping. It marked a new turn in the history of China, and quite possibly the history of the world: the moment at which a powerful nation-state looked at the entire internet's direction of travel — towards openness, interconnection, globalisation, the free flow of information — and decided to reverse it. In effect, it was a decision to prove the Western boosters of the internet &mdasdh; holders of Friedman's nutcracker view —wrong.
Between them, Griffiths and Strittmatter tell the story of how China arrived at this point, and what happened next. China took to the internet relatively late and relatively slowly: in 1994 there were only about 1500 internet users in China, most of them academics, with, according to Griffiths, 'the entire country sharing the equivalent of what was a home connection in the US'. Today, the number of internet users in China is 830 million and counting, with most of them accessing it via smartphones. The party has fought many battles against internet freedom over the course of that quarter-century.
The first fights were mainly to do with news, in the form of newsletters such as Da Cankao ('big reference') or news sites such as China Digital Times. Overseas websites such as the New York Times and BBC were blocked, and Google was allowed into China on the condition that it censor itself, until the resulting inner torment caused the company to withdraw in 2010. Facebook has never been allowed into China, despite Mark Zuckerberg's increasingly tragic attempts to suck up to the CCP: by prominently announcing that he was learning Mandarin, being photographed jogging in Beijing's reeking, toxic smog, asking Xi Jinping to name his daughter (Xi declined) and — my favourite — making sure he has a copy of Xi's arse-numbingly tedious The Governance of China on his desk when Chinese journalists visit Facebook. ('I've bought copies of this book for my colleagues as well,'Zuck says. 'I want them to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics.')
The biggest internet companies in China can be seen as knock-offs of American originals, though because China is so big, the Chinese versions are now in many cases larger than their US templates, and as they have grown they have added many distinctive features of their own. Baidu is Google, Alibaba is Amazon (they're the ones behind 'Singles'Day'), Tencent is sort of Facebook plus Netflix. These three giants together are known as BAT, analogous to Silicon Valley's FAANG of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. Sina Weibo, usually referred to just as Weibo, is Twitter, which has been blocked in China since 2009. The story of the Chinese internet pivots around Weibo, because it was that company that came closest to embodying the opening up of information that internet advocates see as the main transformational point of the technology.
Weibo launched in August 2009 and over the next few years was the site of an unprecedented new freedom for Chinese citizens. People used it to connect and communicate and, increasingly, to complain — about pollution, corruption and government scandals. As Striütmatter puts it, 'for the first time since the People's Republic was founded in 1949, there was a public space that belonged to citizens, where their language was spoken. The germ of a civil society began to grow.'In July 2011, a train derailment on China's high-speed network killed forty people in Wenzhou, but, as Griffiths says, 'did not make the front pages of the following day's national newspapers'. Officials on the scene almost immediately ordered the wrecked carriages to be broken up and buried underground; several hours later a two-year-old girl was found alive in the wreckage, after the official search had been stopped. Weibo users latched on to the story as a symbol of misgovernance. 'This is a country where a thunderstorm can cause a train to crash, a car can make a bridge collapse, and drinking milk can lead to kidney stones,'Griffiths quotes one user saying. 'Today's China is a bullet train racing through a thunderstorm — and we're all passengers.'
Weibo was both a symbol of and a medium for change. 'The Wenzhou train crash was the Weibo generation's coming-out party to the world, showing how, far from being cowed and brainwashed by years of propaganda, young Chinese were sick of corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude, and clamouring for change.'The outrage of Weibo users did not spare the CCP itself. In 2012, another Weibo storm blew up when a party functionary from Shanxi was photographed doing the usual boring party-functionary stuff, while visibly wearing Rolex and Vacheron Constantin watches worth more than $100,000. 'Watch Brother' symbolised the self-enriching, out of touch, corrupt side of the CCP.
This was the context for Document Number Nine, and it was also the point at which the CCP launched its counterattack. First, the Weibo accounts of prominent critics were 'harmonised'— in other words, deleted overnight. Then a conference was called for 'Big Vs', people with well-followed verified accounts, analogous to Twitter's blue tick. At the conference, the newly formed Cyberspace Administration of China reminded the assembled big shots about their 'social responsibility' to the 'interests of the state' and 'core socialist values'. Two weeks later, on 23 August 2013, the prominent investor and Weibo activist Charles Xue was arrested. He turned up shortly afterwards in a Chinese Central Television interview from his prison cell, weeping and apologising for his irresponsibility and vanity.
Such TV interviews have become a staple feature of the CCP's internet crackdown, helped by a new law, passed in September 2013, which threatens three years in prison to anyone who shares a rumour that 'upsets social order' and is shared five hundred times or clicked on five thousand times. For people with Weibo followings well into the millions, the law effectively banned the posting of anything even potentially controversial. 'Ever since, Weibo has been dead as a politically relevant medium,'Griffiths writes. 'Once, debate had raged there: sometimes wild, often polemical, clever if you were lucky — but always lively. Today, it's as silent as the grave.'Weibo continues to grow, mind you; it's just that it's now the usual entertainment news and celebrity bollocks.
The party's new focus on internet censorship was given its first big test by the Umbrella Protests in Hong Kong, which kicked off in September 2014 — the name comes from the fact that protesters used raised umbrellas to ward off tear gas. The protests drew almost no attention in mainland China, thanks to the blocking of news and messages from Hong Kong, and also thanks to the systematic use of counter-propaganda by a new 'fifty-cent army' of paid bloggers, trolls and subject-changers ('fifty-cent' because that's the amount allegedly paid per helpful post).
The structure for CCP control of the internet was by now fully in place. The popular term for the structure, the Great Firewall of China, is catchy, but as both Griffiths and Strüitmatter point out, it's misleading as a guide to how the system actually works. Yes, there is a firewall restricting access to the outside world, and yes, the firewall automatically blocks access to certain sites and certain subjects. Griffiths:
When a user in China tries to load a web page, their ISP pings a list of forbidden URLs and types of content. If the page is not banned, the request is passed to an internet access point which handles routing traffic to servers all over China and around the world. It's at this stage that packet inspection takes place, looking for keywords and suspicious flags. When the destination server sends the webpage data back to the user, it is inspected again. Only if it clears all these hurdles is the internet browser able to load anything.
That is the most firewally part of the Great Firewall. But it isn't the most important component of the censorship: 'The centrepiece of the Great Firewall is the system of internal controls that operates within the country's borders.'Most Chinese users of the internet focus their use on China, and would barely notice if the rest of the world were permanently cut off. For the censorship and control of the Chinese internet, one of the most useful tools is the app WeChat, which is one of the wonders of the internet world. WeChat — a subsidiary of Tencent — is a chat app similar to WhatsApp, but it also incorporates China's biggest system of payments.2 Hundreds of millions of people use WeChat to pay for stuff, do their banking, call minicabs, find movies, book appointments, order takeaways and, of course, to communicate with one another, via phone or text or social network. No more than five hundred people are allowed to take part in any one chat — you can communicate with your family and your mates, but not broadcast across the entire platform on a Weibo-like scale.
WeChat is WhatsApp plus Uber plus Deliveroo plus Facebook plus online banking, and it is also god's greatest gift to the Chinese surveillance state, since the authorities have access to all this information. People have gone to jail for things they have said in WeChat messages, and the service is penetrated both by targeted surveillance and by the automated blocking of specific terms. There are moments when WeChat exchanges suddenly stop making sense, because messages have been blocked as a result of the algorithmic censorship of particular words; the list of prohibited words changes according to circumstances. When Xi Jinping broke with the term limit system introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1982, and made himself president for life, Weibo brought in a block on terms such as 'emperor', 'accession', 'don't agree', as well as any reference to Animal Farm. 'Winnie the Pooh'is blocked because it has become a metonym for Zuckerberg's hero Xi, who has admittedly put on a couple of pounds since acceding to high office. A man from Shangdong went to prison for 22 months for calling Xi a 'Maoist thug' and 'baozi'— a round dumpling. Tiananmen is an especially touchy subject. Every year around the anniversary, 'that day' is blocked, as is '35 May' (a clever-clogs way of referring to 4 June); so is the word 'mourn'. Baidu Baike, the Chinese version of Wikipedia, says it is 'an open and free online encyclopedia'; it has entries for the years 1988 and 1990 but not for 1989, the year of the protests.
If anything unwelcome does get past the multiple layers of censorship and blocking — more like a Giant Onion than a Great Firewall — it runs into the fifty-cent army, the wumao. The effort involved is extensive. An American university study of the Chinese internet counted 448 million fake social media posts in one year, 2016, with the preferred tactic of the fifty-cent army being not to pile on to critics — though they do that too— but to deflect attention, ideally by 'cheerleading' for pro-government news. Griffiths quotes the research:
They do not step up to defend the government, its leaders and their policies from criticism, no matter how vitriolic; indeed, they seem to avoid controversial issues entirely. Instead, most posts are about cheerleading and positive discussions of valence issues. We also detect a high level of co-ordination in the timing and content in these posts. A theory consistent with these patterns is that the strategic objective of the regime is to distract and redirect public attention from discussions or events with collective action potential.
These are the pillars of the Chinese internet: ferocious laws; public humiliation as a tool of coercion; a firewall blocking external sites and independent sources of information; a huge, and hugely expensive, army of censors, backed by algorithms and unprecedented levels of surveillance, adding up to the Giant Onion; and a fifty-cent army of trolls and handwavers to pile on, distract and deflect.
The point of the state apparatus is not to silence all debate, but to prevent organisation and co-ordination; the ultimate no-no is the formation of any kind of non-party group. The CCP's goal is not silence but isolation: you can say things, but you can't organise. That is why the party has cracked down with such ferocity on the apparently harmless organisation Falun Gong, whose emphasis on collective breathing exercises wouldn't normally, you would think, represent much of a challenge to CCP control of China. But Falun Gong grew popular, too popular — seventy million by 1999, as many as the CCP itself — and had an unacceptable level of collective organisation. So the party set out to destroy it. Two thousand members of Falun Gong have died in custody since the crackdown began.
Given all this, it is frequently the case that outsiders are surprised by the apparent freedom of the Chinese internet. People do feel able to complain, especially about pollution and food scandals. As Strittmatter puts it, 'a wide range of competing ideologies continues to circulate on the Chinese internet, despite the blows struck by the censors: Maoists, the New Left, patriots, fanatical nationalists, traditionalists, humanists, liberals, democrats, neoliberals, fans of the USA and various others are launching debates on forums.'The ultimate goal of this apparatus is to make people internalise the controls, to develop limits to their curiosity and appetite for non-party information. Unfortunately, there is evidence that this approach works: Chinese internet users are measurably less likely to use technology designed to circumvent censorship and access overseas sources of information than they used to be.
Technology doesn't stay still, though, and the story of the CCP and the digital revolution will not end here. The party sees its engagement with the net as a success, and plans to make a success of the next stage too. Liu Qiangdong, the boss of JD.com, the world's biggest manufacturer of drones, reports that in 2017 he was thinking about the progress of AI and 'suddenly discovered that communism can actually be realised in our generation'. That might seem a startling claim — indeed, it is a startling claim. But he is in the mainstream of party thinking on this. Big data and artificial intelligence are the next big thing in computing.3 The party's plans for it, as set out in the State Council's 'next generation artificial intelligence development plan', published in 2017, are the most ambitious of any government in the world. (It's noteworthy that this paper, which is fully as alarming as Document Number Nine, was freely published by a government press. The CCP is proud of what it has in mind.)
'Digitalisation has brought the Chinese people the historic opportunity of the millennium,'the plan says. What does that mean? It means that China feels that it fell behind the West by missing out on the industrial revolution, and intends not to repeat the mistake with this coming wave of technological change. When it comes to AI the party really, really isn't messing around. 'The widespread use of AI in education, medical care, pensions, environmental protection, urban operations, judicial services and other fields will greatly improve the level of precision in public services, comprehensively enhancing the people's quality of life.'Oh, and by the way: 'AI technologies can accurately sense, forecast, and provide early warning of major situations for infrastructure facilities and social security operations; grasp group cognition and psychological changes in a timely manner ... which will significantly elevate the capability and level of social governance, playing an irreplaceable role in effectively maintaining social stability.'This is as pure a dream of a totalitarian state as there has ever been — a future in which the state knows everything and anticipates everything, acting on its citizens' needs before the citizen is aware of having them. It is an autocratic fantasy, a posthumanist dream, hiding in the plain sight of a Chinese government white paper.
An early example of what that AI paradise might look like in operation has arrived in the field of facial recognition. This is an area in which increased computing power has delivered a new ability for machines to recognise faces in real time. From the point of view of security and privacy this has been transformational: it means that the people operating the cameras know whom they are looking at right here, right now. The arrival of AI has turned the hundreds of thousands of cameras in our cities from passive recording devices into a connected network offering real-time surveillance and supervision. Add facial recognition to this and we have something new. The cute, customer-friendly side of this is effortless check-in at Chinese airports: the passenger simply stands in front of a camera and is identified, her boarding pass printed, without any action on her part. The slightly less cute version comes, say, in Beijing's Temple of Heaven, where a machine in the toilet, designed to crack down on excessive use of loo paper, 'releases 60 cm of paper per face'; you can get more paper but you either need to grow a new face or wait nine minutes. And then there are the uses which aren't cute at all: a street crossing in Fujian where jaywalkers are identified and have their face, name and address appear on a video screen beside the road; a school in Hangzhou where facial recognition technology monitors students to see when they are bored or distracted (the scanners are also used to pay for food and borrow books from the library); a state surveillance network, Skynet (yes, that's the same as the evil computer system in the Terminator movies), which is capable of identifying any one of China's 1.4 billion citizens within a second. Skynet is part of what's been called the 'police cloud', in which police gather and synthesise all the information they can: 'medical histories, takeaway orders, courier deliveries, supermarket loyalty card numbers, methods of birth control, religious affiliations, online behaviour, flights and train journeys, GPS movement co-ordinates and biometric data, face, voice, fingerprints — plus the DNA of some forty million Chinese people'.
This progress in facial recognition and big data is all part of the other development in the Chinese digital world, the social credit system. This is a credit score analogous to those which are run in the West by credit reference agencies such as Experian and Equifax. The complete view of our lives and finances owned by these firms seems largely to escape attention in the West, but it hasn't escaped the attention of the CCP, which has multiple trials running of social credit systems that build on and expand the existing Western model. The Chinese pilots look not at consumer creditworthiness but at social behaviour, with the criteria for desirable behaviour defined by the party. Strittmatter cites a pilot in Rongcheng, where citizens get points — not a metaphor, they actually are awarded points — for helping aged neighbours move house, giving calligraphy lessons and offering use of their basement for a CCP singalong. Conversely they lose points for pouring water outside their house so it turns into ice, letting their dogs shit on the pavement, driving through red lights and so on. In some versions of these schemes, your social credit is affected by the social credit of the people you hang out with; a bad reputation is contagious.
At the moment, the main impacts of people's social credit are on activities such as travel: people with bad social credit can't fly, can't book high-speed train tickets or sleeper berths; they have slower internet access and can't book fancy hotels or restaurants. It isn't difficult to project a future in which these sanctions spread to every area of life. The China-wide version of social credit is scheduled to go live in 2020. The ultimate goal is to make people internalise their sense of the state: to make people self-censor, self-monitor, self-supervise. Strittmatter quotes Discipline and Punish: 'He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.'The Chinese version of social credit is the closest thing we've ever seen to Foucault's system in action at a national level.
Put all this together. Imagine a place in which there's a police post every hundred metres, and tens of thousands of cameras linked to a state-run facial recognition system; where people are forced to have police-owned GPS systems in their cars, and you can buy petrol only after having your face scanned; where all mobile phones have a state app on them to monitor their activity and prevent access to 'damaging information'; where religious activity is monitored; where the state knows whether you have family and friends abroad, and where the government offers free health clinics as a way of getting your fingerprint and iris scan and samples of your DNA. Strittmatter points out that you don't need to imagine this place, because it exists: that's life in Xinjiang for the minority population of Muslim Uighurs. Increasingly, policing in Xinjiang has an algorithmic basis. A superb piece of reporting by Christian Shepherd in the Financial Times recently told the story of Yalqun Rozi, who has ended up in a re-education camp for publishing Uighur textbooks in an attempt to preserve the language. One of his crimes was using too high a percentage of Uighur words. The system allows a maximum of 30 per cent from minority language sources; Rozi had used 60 per cent Uighur, and 'China'had appeared only four times in 200,000 words. Uighurs get into trouble for attending mosque too often or too fervently, or for naming their children Mohammed, or for fasting during Ramadan. There are about 12 million Uighurs in Xinjiang: 1.5 million of them have either spent time in a re-education camp or are in one right now.
China has been a dictatorship for seventy years. The idea that prosperity and the internet would in themselves make the country turn towards democracy has been proved wrong. Instead, China is about to become something new: an AI-powered techno-totalitarian state. The project aims to form not only a new kind of state but a new kind of human being, one who has fully internalised the demands of the state and the completeness of its surveillance and control. That internalisation is the goal: agencies of the state will never need to intervene to correct the citizen's behaviour, because the citizen has done it for them in advance.
We have no need to reach a conclusion about the prospects for this new China — there's plenty of time for that, and the chance of averting this future for China by wringing one's hands about it is exactly zero. One point which stands out for me, though, draws on Bran Ferren's immortal observation: 'Technology is stuff that doesn't work yet.'In other words, when technology is introduced, it doesn't quite function as it's supposed to; by the time it really does work, we stop noticing that it is technology and just accept it as part of the furniture of life. With the side of the new technology that concerns 'security', it doesn't necessarily matter whether the surveillance really works or not. Of course, it matters deeply for the individual citizen: facial recognition currently has an error rate as high as 15 per cent; combine that with a judicial system that has a conviction rate of 99.9 per cent and some law-abiding people are going to run into problems. However, from the state's point of view, that matters less than the deterrent and coercive power of omnipresent surveillance combined with social credit. People will change their behaviour because they know they're being watched. It doesn't need to work in order to work.
The other side of the AI revolution is different. The CCP has always used rumblings from below to tell them what people are thinking, and where the party's next problem is coming from — one reason the party likes the internet is because it's a means of finding out what is on people's minds, not just for the purposes of surveillance but for governance too. Precisely because it is authoritarian, the state must listen to its citizens. The idea is to replace the listening system with AI, in order accurately to 'sense, forecast and provide early warning of major situations for infrastructure facilities and social security operations; grasp group cognition and psychological changes in a timely manner'. Great, if it works perfectly. But it won't, because new technology never does. China is facing problems linked to rising inequality. The world's most populous country and leading greenhouse gas emitter (and leading manufacturer of solar technology) is also at severe risk from climate change. This might be the ideal time to experiment with a new kind of government by AI and big data; or not. It is one of the paradoxes of this moment that the world's biggest and most effective dictatorship is taking such a big step towards an unprecedentedly technocratic form of government.
From the perspective of the West, we have a lot to learn from China, in particular about the scale and potential consequences of this new industrial revolution. Much if not all of the technology currently developed in China already exists in the West, in forms that are just as intrusive. The difference is that the technology is almost all in the hands of private companies. AI, big data, facial recognition: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and any number of smaller and emerging companies are deeply invested in these fields. Add what these companies know about you to the colossal amount of data held by the credit reference agencies, and we are as fully open to surveillance in the West as are the citizens of the People's Republic. There is a touch of bathos to this: the technologies which are being used in China to invent a new form of the totalitarian state are being exploited here to make us click on ads and buy stuff.
Facial recognition is as we speak going live all over the developed world, and doing so in a manner that is fragmented, erratic and not at all thought through. Example: the Metropolitan Police has recently been running trials of live facial recognition. One pilot took place in Romford, where cameras were set up to film and identify passersby without their knowledge or consent. Four people were arrested for hiding their faces from the cameras. Is that how we want our policing to work? A London wine bar called Gordon's, well known to anyone who has ever looked for a cheapish and non-horrible place to have a drink in the area around the Strand, turns up in an FT headline: 'How one London wine bar helped Brazil to cut crime'. Eh? What? It turns out the management of Gordon's, previously best known for the invention of an oxymoronic 'pork pie salad', also came up with a facial recognition system to catch pickpockets and bag-snatchers, many of whom are repeat offenders, and has made money selling the system to shopping malls in Brazil. I mention this not because Gordon's is an existential risk to democracy but just to make the point that this technology is becoming mainstream, and fast.
The big players in the area are the existing big players in technology, especially Facebook. Do we want facial recognition technology to be in the hands of the least scrupulous technology giant? If we don't, we're too late — it already is. Facebook has changed its terms of service over 'tagging' people's photos a couple of times, from opt-out to opt-in, but the gist is that it is too late: Facebook already owns your 'faceprint', the algorithmic representation of your face. How much do we think we can trust them with it? Put it like this: Facebook owns a patent on how to recognise patterns of friendship association through identifying the spots of dust on your phone camera — in other words, if two people had their photo taken by the same camera, then those two people probably know each other. That's important to the company, because the 'People You May Know' feature is one of Facebook's strongest drivers of growth and engagement. Facebook also owns a patent on a system that interprets people's facial expressions as they walk around a shop looking at the merchandise, and another on a system that recognises shoppers' faces and assigns them a 'trust level' derived from their Facebook profile. The trust level might unlock special deals, if it were positive, but if it were negative — who knows? Why on earth would we trust Facebook?
The risk for the developed world is that all the apparatus of surveillance and manipulation that the CCP is developing as a matter of deliberate policy, we develop inadvertently, and end up adopting through negligence, or nescience, or because we're thinking about other things. In 2013, at the behest of Alan Rusbridger, I spent a week reading the Snowden papers that the Guardian had to destroy in the UK but kept a copy of in New York. They provided a striking portrait of the security services' attitudes to the huge boon given them by new technology. After all, it wasn't as if democracies collectively decided to give the security services an exponentially greater and ever growing level of access to their citizens' private lives. It was just that new technologies came along and changed the way people lived, and those changes just happened to open their lives up to new levels of surveillance and scrutiny. This new bounty just fell into the lap of the secret services, and they accepted it gleefully.
That's how it would be with facial recognition and AI and big data too. It wouldn't be a Dr Evil move on the part of Western democracies to access all the new information; they would just take it because it was there, because it suddenly became available. And this, I think, is something we can't allow to happen. In the developed world, the discourse around the internet is beginning to shift away from the idea of a deregulated, extra-governmental space and to acknowledge the need for legislation and accountability. China has repeatedly done the diametric opposite of us; this time we should live up to the values excoriated by Document Number Nine, and do the exact opposite of them. We should take China's example seriously, and learn from it, and begin with a complete ban on real-time facial recognition. We should retain that ban unless and until we understand the technology and have worked out a guaranteed way of preventing its misuses. And then we need to have a big collective think about what we want from the new world of big data and AI, towards which we are currently sleepwalking.