Supressing Dissent in China: Some Random Thoughts

I was alerted to a couple interesting pieces pertaining to suppression of freedom of speech in China. For sure the CCP still relies on brute force and fear to silence its critics. But the CCP as of late seems to be relying on softer approaches of repression, using ideological education and propaganda in conjunction while curbing information and stymieing freedom of speech. The use of such soft tactics are employed against perpetual activists as well s ethnic and religious minorities (notably the Uighyurs in Xinjiang). Below I present (random) thoughts about free speech, civil society, and democratic change with parallels to North Korea.

The first article is a story by Jianying Zha in the New Yorker about the CCP's use of vacations to keep Chinese dissidents from spoiling high profile international summits hosted by Beijing. They call this bei lüyou, which means “to be touristed.” Here is an excerpt from Zha describing the practice as used against her brother, democracy activist Jianguo Zha:

The Beijing police took my brother sightseeing again. Nine days, two guards, chauffeured tours through a national park that’s a World Heritage site, visits to Taoist temples and to the Three Gorges, expenses fully covered, all courtesy of the Ministry of Public Security. The point was to get him out of town during the 2018 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, held in early September. The capital had to be in a state of perfect order; no trace of trouble was permissible. And Zha Jianguo, a veteran democracy activist, is considered a professional troublemaker.

While President Xi Jinping played host to African dignitaries in the Great Hall of the People, the police played host to my big brother at various scenic spots in the province of Hubei, about a thousand kilometres away. A number of other Beijing activists and civil-rights lawyers, including several whom Jianguo knows well, were treated to similar trips. 

Vacations sound a lot better than beatings. Moreover, bei luyou fulfills two functions. It prevents dissidents from creating disturbances, and in the long run political instability.  Sending activists on vacation in close quarters with their government minders might even convince dissidents that the CCP is not all that bad with relationships formed between police and activists. Indeed, Zha wonders if her brother has gone soft, even if he holds onto his core beliefs about democracy. At the same time, bei luyou is used to reward police and security officials. Policing is not easy - it's probably a demoralizing job. Thus sending agents on these plum vacation assignments might help boost morale, as Zha argues. 

On the CCP's war against democracy and the suppression of speech, Zha highlights formidable obstacles. Here's another excerpt describing the extent of Chinese censorship and greater sophistication of China's "Great Firewall."

A day later, he opened a new account, with the name BeijingZhaJianguo6, but a line had been crossed. After five shutdowns, as the police had warned him, he was blocked from large online groups. This is how all Chinese companies, including giants like Alibaba and WeChat’s owner, Tencent, defer to the police state. Savvy Chinese Internet users, with or without the aid of a V.P.N., employ all sorts of techniques to break through the Great Firewall, and Jianguo has definitely learned a few tricks to evade the censors. But lately the situation has deteriorated. On certain days, even after all the camouflaging maneuvers, a fresh opinion piece of his would vanish mysteriously, with no error message. Neither the sender nor the recipients would even know that something had gone amiss unless they checked with one another.

This is bei hexie, “to be harmonized,” a form of virtual erasure. Bent on transforming the global Internet into a Chinese Intranet, official censors have made deft and extensive use of the method. You may know about Vice-President Mike Pence’s recent speech on the Trump Administration’s China policy, viewed by many as a declaration of a new cold war. But in China very few saw the actual text; it was met with swift bei hexie. The current arms race between the censors and the censored in China can be summed up in an old proverb: The monk grows taller by an inch, but the monster grows taller by a foot.

Chinese society has transformed since Deng's marketization efforts in the 1980s. "Liberals," or at least those sympathetic to liberal reforms have emerged. Distinguished from more "radical" dissidents (i.e. professional activists), these "liberals" are part of the upper crust in Chinese society. Zha describes them as "educated urbanites who generally embrace Western ideas of democracy, want the rule of law, and are critical of the party-state." Yet unlike the "radicals," they also fear deviating from the status quo.  These urbanites themselves do not seem keen on holding a revolution like the radicals of the past. This is where I draw a few parallels to North Korea's nouveau riche. North Korea's new "money masters" and those of the rising middle class may think about greater openness (in terms of economic and political liberalization). However, they may not want to upend the system which they likely benefit from through corruption or ties to state elites, or by simply profiting from government ineptitude (i.e. they meet private demands through markets which the government cannot adequately provide)

Zha writes that the CCP fears Chinese activists because they might further infect or incite broader opposition against the state. But the CCP seems to have held such forces in check thus far:

Back in the late nineteen-nineties, the Democracy Party of China was a fringe group of radicals whom the government could easily quarantine. Reformist intellectuals, who supported a path of incremental change, viewed men like Jianguo as politically naïve and their mission as suicidal. Few people even knew that his party existed. But now, using social media, Jianguo has accomplished something that his old comrades never could. He has reached the much larger camp of Chinese liberals—educated urbanites who generally embrace Western ideas of democracy, want the rule of law, and are critical of the party-state. Although they have flourished in China’s “reform era”—decades of fast growth that have brought them apartments, cars, holiday travels, study abroad for their children—they are mostly convinced of the superior vitality of the multiparty system. In a joke they liked about the 2016 U.S. election, a bunch of eunuchs are so appalled by the bawdy quarrels among the married folk that they congratulate themselves: “How fortunate we are to be castrated!” Yet many Chinese liberals doubt that the Western system is feasible in their country. They fret about the burden of history, about the prospect of chaos and mob rule. In their own lives, they avoid radicals and former political prisoners, for fear that such association might jeopardize their personal freedom. They shun the sort of political action that could put their comfortable life style at risk.

The second article is from Darren Byler, a recent anthropology graduate about surveillance of the Uighurs population in Xinjiang Province. I had just read a memo from another ethnomusicology graduate student about the roadblocks she faced conducting research among the Uighurs which corroborate observations in this piece.

The CCP has a policy of sending thousands, if not millions of ethnic Han Chinese (mostly civil servants) to live with Muslim families and build relationships with them. As the Global Times reported,  "The regional Party committee of Xinjiang has asked officials and government staff at all levels to live in the local villages and communities they represent, in an effort to spread the spirit of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC)." This is done in part to monitor, and in part to reeducate Uighurs so that they can appreciate the Chinese state (and its power) and hopefully integrate into Chinese society. Here's an excerpt from Byler:

The “relatives” have been essentially conscripted into service in three separate waves. The first campaign started in 2014, dispatching some 200,000 Party members, including minority Party members, to “Visit the People, Benefit the People, and Bring Together the Hearts of the People” (fang minqing, hui minsheng, ju minxin, 访民情、惠民生、聚民心)—through long-term stays in Uighur villages. In 2016, a second wave of 110,000 civil servants were sent into Uighur villages as part of a “United as One Family” (jie dui renqin, 结对认亲) campaign which focused on placing “relatives” in the homes of Uighurs whose family members had been imprisoned or killed by the police.

In 2017, the third wave of visits began as part of an extension of the 2016 campaign. This third phase of the campaign assigned more than one million civilians to Muslim “relatives” in villages for a series of week-long homestays—often focusing on the extended family of those who had been detained in the drastically-expanded “transformation through education” program

Taken as a whole, these three waves of the village-based cadre team program that paired civilian workers with adopted Uighur and Kazakh families bore a resemblance to other programs that “sent down” state workers and students to learn from the “common people” during the Maoist period of the 1960s and 1970s. What differentiates this state intervention from these similar forced visits is that, in this case, power is flowing urban civilians as representatives of the state and Han values to rural Uighur and Kazakh “masses,” as training manuals put it...

The “relatives” were given written guidelines on how to conduct themselves. Based on reports from Uighur contacts in Urumchi and Khotan, such manuals provided guidelines and forms that needed to be filled out and then digitized for security databases. In a manual that was used in Kashgar prefecture, relatives were given specific instructions on how to get their “relatives” to “let down their guard.” The manual, which was posted on the Internet but taken down just as this story was going to press, advised “relatives” to show “warmth.” “Don’t lecture right away” it suggested, and show concern regarding their families and bring candy for the children. It provided a checklist that included questions such as: “When entering the household, do family members appear flustered and use evasive language? Do they not watch TV programs at home, and instead only watch VCD discs? Are there any religious items still hanging on the walls of the house?”

The whole program feels a bit like proselytization: Christian evangelization or Mormon missions. The Han "relatives" may feel that they are breaking ground, and "connecting" with Uighurs. Some Uighurs may warm up to their "relatives'" and perhaps mutual understanding and genuine companionship develops in a few cases. But misunderstanding and rejection are also seem common. As Byler uncovers:

The “relatives” I interviewed often failed to understand the way their hosts viewed their role. Perhaps because they had not observed Uighur life before their arrival, they did not realize how fear, anger, and sadness had gripped the villagers who they were hoping to teach Han secular values.

In their stories about what they had done, visiting civil servants often did not note that the security institutions that they supported were one of the primary causes of Uighur poverty.

One young Han woman I spoke with who grew up in Urumchi but had not been sent down herself noted that the team she was familiar with was puzzled by the way that Uighur families simply placed the gifts the “relatives” gave them in the corner of their house. They said that when they came back weeks later, it appeared as though the gifts had not been used. They did not understand why their gifts were rejected.

Two of the workers I interviewed said that they hoped that their interactions with Uighurs and Kazakhs would foster genuine friendships. They said they were saddened by the lack of “openness” on the part of their Muslim counterparts.

Finally, Byler argues that the program not only violates the freedom and ethical rights of Uighurs, but also imposes directives which make public servants complicit in unethical actions (although this depends on whose ethic standards one makes such determination):

The tyranny that is being realized in Northwest China pits groups of Chinese citizens against each other in a totalitarian process that seeks to dominate every aspect of life. It calls Han “relatives” into coercive relations with their Uighur and Kazakh hosts, producing an epidemic of individualized isolation and loneliness as families, friends, and communities are pulled apart. As new levels of unfreedom are introduced, the project produces new standards of what counts as normal and banal. The “relatives” I spoke to, who did the state’s work of tearing families apart and sending them into the camp system, saw themselves as simply “doing their jobs.”

Are such "soft tactics" such as "vacationing", re-education, and cohabitation better alternatives to violent repression? Are they more effective? It does appear that authoritarians are getting smarter in how they attempt to control civil society, information, and freedom of speech.  For instance, in Russia, there's evidence of "weaponizing misinformation": in addition to posting untruths to incite fringe groups like the American alt-right, Russians might aim at more "mainstream" groups (i.e. Democratic party members, disarmament groups) which might help promote Russian interests.

Peace, Denuclearziation, and the Gap Between Liberal and Progressive Security Policy

One of my former students, Van Jackson, put together a roundtable on the future of progressive foreign policy in the Texas National Security Review. On his Facebook, I weighed in on a discussion in which someone questioned whether there was enough diversity of views on "progressive" f.p., especially since the writers were all established foreign policy scholars. These progressive ideas are not new, but have been articulated by peace activists. However, the foreign policy/security views of peace activists are generally dismissed as radical, naïve, or unrealistic by mainstream policymakers (what Walt calls the establishment).

I was reminded of the roundtable (which I still haven't read but should) when I saw this clip of activists Sung-hee Choi, an activist I might call a friend, interrupting a peace and denuclearization conference hosted by the ROK government and the UN. In the video, she demands how such a conference could be held on Jeju Island without inviting or hearing the input of the local villagers who live by a naval base which permits nuclear submarines to port. In her rant, she criticizes the President Moon's policies and refers to his government as a puppet of the US.

What I find interesting, if not mildly puzzling, is how progressive activists criticize a president who's staked so much capital in building peace with North Korea and taking the engagement path towards denuclearization. In this case, I want to argue that there might be a distinction between liberal vs. progressive policy views. The established left support liberal foreign policy, whereas activists support progressive foreign policy. Of course, this may just be another name for the mainstream (or center) left and the radical (or far) left so no need to reinvent the wheel. Is it possible, though that policymakers are picking up some of the ideas of the radical left. If liberals are still part of the foreign  policy establishment, they are in cahoots with conservatives. Thus if someone wants to break the mold of the establishment, they have to enter the territory of progressives.

Sewol Ferry Protests, Four Years Strong, and Youth Protests

I was at Gwanghwamun Square to do some sight-seeing with family. As a researcher, however, I was quickly distracted by the large display in remembrance of the Sewol Ferry victims. The structures looked temporary, so my first question was how long the memorial would be up on Gwanghwamun Square? Then I wondered how long the memorial had been up. Wasn't the Sewol Ferry incident more than 4 years ago?

I found out the memorial, referred to as Sewol Plaza, has been on display since at least 2016, if not longer  It sounds like the memorial may not be up that much longer though with the possible establishment of two permanent memorials: the 416 Life Safety Park in Ansan, the city where many student victims were from, and the actual Sewol Ferry sitting in Mokpo. A good article in Korea Expose describes the memorial and people's reaction here. 

A recurring theme about the Sewol Ferry protests, and also the candlelight protests in 2016 against President Park Geunhye is the awakening of political activism among Korean youth. Here's an insightful first person account exploring this awakening across campuses. Apparently, there was a big student movement at Seoul National University (where I'm teaching for the summer) a couple years ago against the administration's decision to establish a new campus without student input. 

Not having conducted field research on social movements in Korea for over a decade, I feel out of touch with the latest issues. I also saw peace (or anti-US) protests across the street from the US Embassy. I know Korea had its own "me too" movement that lit on fire this spring. Relatedly, there's been protests against the use of women's spycacm porn.

Smaller conservative counter-protests led by groups like the Taeguki Citizens’ Revolutionary Movement and the Association of Patriotic Culture have also emerged. 

How to Address Human Rights in US Foreign Policy

My splendid co-author (Danielle Chubb) and I published our piece in today's Washington Post Monkey Cage blog: Will raising human rights issues really derail nuclear negotiations with North Korea?

I happened to see a similar sort of argument for raising human rights with China as well, titled "4 ways the U.S. can raise human rights issues with China."

And I found out my colleague at Catholic University and director of IPR, Bob Destro, was nominated as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor

Where do you stand on the declining liberal order debate? More bad news for liberal international order

More on declining liberal international order I've dug up.

So if one guy can blow up the liberal international (institutional) order, than the order is not all that its cracked out to be. I've been making a similar argument in my book on Asian regional architecture, but from the angle that the liberal international order is more resilient precisely b/c it rests on norms and institutions.  Dan Drezner raises this point channeling a tweet presents the following.

As President Trump continues to wreak havoc, questions are being asked about the resiliency of the rules-based liberal order. Adam Elkus is a smart guy I follow on Twitter; maybe you should, too! But in response to much gnashing of teeth in the past week over this question, he tweeted the following: “If the Rules-Based Liberal Order can be blown up by one man within a 4-year time span then people can’t still unironically talk about institutions and the binding power of norms.”

If Elkus is correct, then it’s a pretty damaging blow to liberal institutionalists. It would turn out that all of the trappings of the postwar global order rested not on rules or norms, but on raw American power. Is he correct?

Foreign Affairs posted this interesting poll of foreign policy experts last year (May/June 2017) on whether they agreed/disagreed with the idea that the postwar liberal order is in "grave danger" The forecast looked gloomy. A year later, the prognosis is probably worse. There's a slew of new pieces discussing how Trump is destroying the liberal international order:

Dan Byman in Lawfare, stating that even if Trump exits after one term, the damage may not be easily reversible. In particular, the Trump years have signaled to the world the messiness of US domestic politics and the possibility that a substantial number of Americans may not want a liberal order.  As Byman argues, "A successor to Trump can try to renew these commitments but must do so with the world recognizing that a sizeable share of Americans oppose these traditional components of the world order and that a leader championing these Americans might again gain power." This was similar to Drezner's comments.

Robbert Kagan discusses the US as a rogue superpower that's not only rejected the liberal order, but is "milking it for narrow gain, rapidly destroying the trust and sense of common purpose that have held it together and prevented international chaos for seven decades."

Fareed Zakaria argued that the main headline of the US-North Korea summit last week was not the praise lavished onto Kim Jong Un, but the cancellation of military exercises and his allusion to reducing US troop commitment. China ended up being the big winner out of the summit.

In a CATO report, Patrick Porter finds policymakers nostalgic for the liberal order. Is it time to move on?

G7, Trade Disputes, and the Decline of Liberal Internationalism

“What worries me most is the fact that the rules-based international order is being challenged — quite surprisingly not by the usual suspects, but by its main architect and guarantor, the U.S.,” - European Council President Donald Tusk.

"When does a feud become a separation? A separation a divorce? When do arguments, sharp-tongued put-downs and perceived betrayal among allies become the collapse of the Western-dominated order that has ruled the world, under U.S. leadership, for the past seven decades?" - Karen DeYoung, Washington Post.

Washington Post June 10 2018 (Photo Credit: AFP)

These are the headlines underlining (or undermining) the 2018 G7 Summit in Canada,  capped by President Trump's early departure from the G7 and decision to withdraw US support joint statement. At the center of this debate is the Trump administration's threat to the international trade architecture as President Trump threatens to slap tariffs on goods - steel, aluminum, and automobiles in particular - of our closest allies in the name of national security. These allies include Canada, Germany, and Japan. Although there might be some "nuggets of truth" to Trump's claims on trade, most analysts believe the US will bear a significant economic cost in a trade war, translating into the loss of millions of jobs.  I don't have the economics or math background to prove to what extent Trump's trade policies would help or hurt the US economy, but if there's anything I learned from my IPE class in graduate school, it's that international trade always carries winners and losers. Steel and aluminum producers in the US may get their jobs back as Trump rises tariffs on foreign imported metals. But what about all the US manufacturers who rely on lower cost materials to make their products? What about the US pork and dairy farmer who will face retaliatory tariffs in Europe. The Washington Post had a great feature story on a sausage-making manufacturer in Ohio who will potentially lose millions of dollars b/c of Trumps steel tariffs. Here's an excerpt:

Bill Adler was invited last year to bid on a contract to make commercial sausage stuffers for a company that wanted to replace its Chinese supplier. The customer had just one non­negotiable demand: Match China’s price.

Adler, owner of metal-parts maker Stripmatic Products, thought he could. But even as he readied his proposal, talk of President Trump’s steel tariffs sent the price of Stripmatic’s main raw material soaring.

In April, with prices up nearly 50 percent from October and the first wave of tariffs in place, Adler’s bid failed. His costs were too high.

Today, instead of taking business from China, Adler worries about hanging onto the work he has. He hopes that the president’s tariffs are just a negotiating tactic.

Washing machines are another product in which trade tariffs, initially put in place to reduce competition from foreign competitors such as LG and Samsung, have backfired as those companies have continuously moved production to avoid tariffs, and ultimately moving production to the United States itself, complete with tax breaks and subsidies while creating US jobs. Here's a PBS video exploring if trade tariffs actually help US workers.

A looming trade war with China also stands to have the US losing billions, particular among US farmers as demonstrated in this clip from Vice News.

This is not only about trade. The rift at the G7 has broader implications for the liberal international order. The Trump administration has battled its allies on other issues including climate change (the US pulled out of the Paris Accords);  non-prolilferation (the US pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal). Some questioned whether Trump was looking after US or Russian interests as Trump called on the G7 to reinstate Russia as part of the G8. Max Boot headlined an article stating the US turned the G7 into the G6 vs. the G1.

In his PostEverything colum, Dan Drezner is circumspect about the possible long term damage of Trump's "bad-cop/bad-cop" approach to global affairs. Perhaps the most likely pathway linking Trump to a longer US withdrawal from the liberal order is increasing polarization in the US which promotes Trump's nationalist/anti-liberal policies. He ends the piece by stating. "Trump could get reelected. if that happens, the tombstone for the current order can safely be planted."

If there's any optimism, though, we need to remind ourselves that America has faced worse, and has tended to rebound from tumultuous periods (i.e. Civil War in the 1860s, the 1930s depression, riots of the 1960s). There is always recourse to head back to the political center - or return to some consensus. 

Strategic Narratives

I've been thinking a lot about foreign policy narratives - and in particular the rise of "restraint" and the decline of "liberal internationalism" as dominant narratives. Beyond U.S. foreign policy, however, one might consider global narratives. A piece in Foreign Affairs by Ian Bremmer and Joe Kennedy III gets at this:

Today, however, non-Western powers are gaining political and economic influence, and no longer feel that the global architecture created in the late 1940s fits their purposes and their ambitions. They’re right. But in response, the Trump administration seems content to let the old order collapse—and even help accelerate that process—while seeming unwilling to use American power to create a new and better one.

In a slightly different twist on how narratives influence foreign policy - more at the domestic than the grand strategy level -  CSBA published a piece on how authoritarian states have used information warfare as a means to alter narratives within domestic politics. The title is "Countering Comprehensive Coercion: Competitive Strategies Against Authoritarian Political Warfare."

And in a  piece by Aaron Friedberg on visions of international order, the author gives much more attention to ideas and ideology. Friedberg writes:

If they wish to respond effectively to these new realities, American and allied policymakers cannot afford to downplay the ideological dimension in their own strategy. Beijing’s obsessive desire to squelch dissent, block the inward flow of unfavourable news and discredit ‘so-called universal values’ bespeaks an insecurity that is, in itself, a form of strategic vulnerability. China’s rulers clearly believe the ideological realm to be a crucially important domain of competition, one that they would be only too happy to see the United States and the other Western nations ignore or abandon....


... Last but not least, the experience of the past century suggests that, if America’s leaders are serious about mobilising and sustaining the bureaucratic focus, domestic political support and economic resources necessary to wage a protracted strategic competition against a powerful and determined rival, they are going to have to cast the challenge, at least in part, in ideological terms. Geopolitical abstractions and economic statistics may be important, but historically what has moved and motivated the American people is a recognition that the principles on which their system is founded are under threat. There is an undeniable risk here of fear-mongering and overreaction, but at this point excessive caution and a continuing refusal to face facts may be an even greater danger. What is needed instead is a sober assessment of the challenge in all its dimensions, a clear articulation of the measures necessary to meet it, and leaders in Congress, the executive branch and the private sector who are capable of conveying both to the public.

The attention given to ideology leaves the door wide open for research on narratives.