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.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.
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.
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.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)
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.
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.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):
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.
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.
