By Doug Bandow
Saturday, January 30, 2021
One of the few issues on which Democrats and Republicans
agree is that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has turned back toward
Maoism. Xi Jinping’s regime is committed to eradicating the merest possibility
that someone might have an independent thought.
The economy remains a socialist-market hybrid, while the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has made little effort to limit personal autonomy
except where politics intrudes. However, just a hint of ideological
disobedience now brings down the full weight of a vast domestic-security regime
that spends more money than the People’s Liberation Army.
There are no easy policy answers for Washington.
Repression is an essential part of today’s Chinese political system. It’s how
current officials, starting at the top with Xi Jinping, retain their power,
perquisites, wealth, status, and everything else that sets them apart from
normal people. If there is an existential interest for the Chinese state, it is
maintaining repression. The regime isn’t going to yield, irrespective of
sanction, since its elites prefer power to anything else.
Violations of human rights are the norm in the PRC. In
practice, civil liberties, free speech, and political freedom simply don’t
exist there. China
has essentially returned to the era of Mao Zedong, one of the CCP’s
founders, who emerged atop the party after unceasingly brutal power struggles
that shaped the party’s evolution.
The rungs on the CCP ladder were slippery indeed, as many
once-dominant figures missed a step, plunging into the political netherworld
below. Even Mao’s rise was sometimes interrupted. But he mixed determination,
skill, and ruthlessness and ultimately outshone his rivals. He famously
announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China in Tiananmen Square on
October 1, 1949, and was responsible for virtually every brutal step taken by
the CCP in its early years.
Mao’s most famous murderous episodes were the misnamed
Great Leap Forward and the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It is impossible to know how many people
died owing to his misrule — estimates range out to 100 million, but
35 to 65 million is probably closer to the truth. The terror felt even by
his close colleagues, many of whom were exiled, imprisoned, or killed during
the Cultural Revolution, did not end until his death in 1976.
Associates cowed by the Great Helmsman, as he was known,
quickly moved against his widow and other radical associates, and summoned Deng
Xiaoping back from exile to the capital. As Deng rose to preeminence, he freed
an economy that once took socialism seriously. Equally important but less noted
at the time, the CCP loosened controls over personal life. People gained power
over their own lives.
There also was strong support for political
liberalization, including from CCP General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. However, he
opposed the bloody 1989 crackdown on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square and
ended up under house arrest for the rest of his life. China’s hope for
democratic reform faded, but otherwise the Chinese people remained far freer
than before. The system, though authoritarian, was loose. So long as one did not
challenge Communist rule, a certain amount of debate was allowed. There were
independent journalists who reported primarily on provincial misdeeds and
human-rights lawyers who fought repression in court. Foreign academic exchanges
were common. Nongovernmental organizations could carefully critique government
policies.
All of this began to change a decade ago and repression
accelerated under Xi Jinping, chosen as party General Secretary in 2012. He
focused on strengthening personal and party authority, and then on expanding
state control over virtually every aspect of Chinese political life.
Intellectual freedom has essentially disappeared.
The United Kingdom’s Conservative Party recently
addressed this state of affairs in its Human
Rights Commission (HRC) report on the full-scale, wide-ranging assault
against individual liberty in almost all of its aspects. Explained the U.K.
HRC: “The Chinese Communist Party regime has intensified an assault on all
human rights throughout China — not only the atrocity crimes perpetrated
against the Uyghurs and Tibetans, and the dismantling of Hong Kong’s promised
freedoms, but violations [of] all human rights affecting every group and
individual throughout the country.”
The breadth of the assault detailed by the report is
extraordinary:
·
Fear of Muslim Uyghurs has led to the
incarceration of a million or more people, mostly Uyghurs but some other
nationalities too, in reeducation camps. Whether the term genocide rightly
applies — the regime is essentially killing a culture, not a people — the
hardship suffered is immense.
·
“Repression in Tibet has intensified” as well.
Occupied in 1950 by the PRC, Beijing has sought to restrict the practice of
Buddhism, crush separatist sentiments, and control the Buddhist hierarchy. That
means “arrests of Tibetan activists, monks and nuns, and severe restrictions on
freedom of expression, freedom of religion or belief and other human rights.”
·
Hong Kong’s travails have been in the news over
the last couple of years. After slowly expanding Beijing’s authority in the
former British colony in recent years, the PRC last year imposed a brutal
national-security law “containing severe restrictions on basic freedoms” on the
roughly 7.5 million Hong Kongers. The result was to dismantle in surprisingly
short order “Hong Kong’s promised freedoms, human rights, the rule of law and
autonomy.” Censorship is fast descending upon what formally remains an autonomous
special administrative region.
·
“Torture is endemic, widespread, systematic and
conducted with impunity.” Brutal imprisonment is common around the world but
has extra impact when practiced in the world’s most populous state.
·
“Forced televised confessions are now
commonplace.” They are procured through threats of harsher punishment and
maltreatment of relatives. The practice has been used to discredit Westerners
who are ultimately released.
·
“The Chinese Communist Party regime’s silencing
of ‘whistleblowers,’ especially doctors and citizen journalists, at the
outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in serious human rights violations
and the spread of the virus.”
·
“Freedom of religion or belief in China is under
the most severe crackdown since the Cultural Revolution.” Only a few years ago,
in many provinces, churches were left alone if they avoided politics; in
Beijing I snapped a picture of a car with a Christian “fish” on its bumper.
Today, ministers are arrested, churches are closed or destroyed, members are
barred from bringing their children and forced to display communist agitprop,
and the CCP even wants to rewrite Scripture. Islam, Buddhism, and Daoism are
also under sustained attack.
·
The CCP is above the law. The regime emphasizes
rule by law and rejects rule of law as in the West.
·
“Arbitrary arrests and disappearances are
commonplace.” During the early stages of the coronavirus spread, citizen
journalists reporting on the pandemic were detained or even quarantined.
·
“The China Tribunal concluded ‘beyond a
reasonable doubt’ that forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience is
perpetrated in China and amounts to a crime against humanity.”
·
Forced labor is widely used, and not just in
Xinjiang. At least 83 Western brands may include such products in their supply
chains.
·
“The Chinese Communist Party regime is building
an all-encompassing surveillance state, and Chinese technology companies such
as Huawei are at the heart of this operation.”
The report offers individual chapters filled with
excruciating details on these and other examples of the CCP’s broad offensive
against independent thought and action. Nothing on this list is new, though
many of the problems are worsening. Moreover, the list is not exhaustive. For
instance, Beijing has essentially destroyed the human-rights bar, once made up
disproportionately of Christian attorneys. Most have been dispersed, disbarred,
and/or imprisoned.
Independent NGOs such as the Unirule Institute have been
shut down. Unirule was established in 1993. It advocated market-oriented
economic reform, publishing articles full of Ph.D.-speak and holding
conferences filled with academics and policy nerds, like me, while carefully
avoiding the red line of challenging CCP rule. When
I met with the staff in July 2019, their office had been closed, their
executive director had been prohibited from traveling to America, their books
had been banned from publication, and they were a month away from having their
business license pulled. Such was the fear of the great and powerful Xi Jinping
of any ideas about freedom being discussed by anyone anywhere in China.
Even noncontroversial academic cooperation is carefully
scrutinized, and speaking invitations must be approved by Beijing. I discovered
this when I showed up in Shanghai two years ago to speak at a maritime
conference, only to be told that the organizers had neglected the final step,
which had not been previously required. I spent the weekend playing tourist
rather than discussing American policy toward the Indo-Pacific.
The so-called social-credit system monitors behavior and
punishes those who do not faithfully follow regime dictates, including
political dissenters. Beijing has sought to export
this system. The PRC’s pressure has been growing on Taiwan, which China
wants to turn into another subservient
territory like Hong Kong.
For those interested in addressing the Chinese challenge,
there is both good and bad news. The latter is simple: There is very little
that the U.S. and West can do to force the PRC to change its internal policies.
Maintaining control is an existential interest of the CCP, which will
resolutely resist outside interference.
Specific targeted measures — barring suppliers from using
forced labor, for instance, and insisting upon reciprocal press access — can
achieve some positive results. Sanctioning specific Chinese officials delivers
emotional satisfaction but doesn’t change policy. For instance, Hong Kong’s
chief executive Carrie Lam, a CCP puppet, has had trouble finding a bank after
Washington threatened financial penalties against any institution doing
business with her. But the
destruction of Hong Kong liberties continues apace.
On the positive side, China
is a vulnerable not-yet superpower. Its weaknesses are manifold: hidden but
pronounced political division, profusion of inefficient state enterprises,
growing political interference with the economy, a rapidly aging population
with a decided and destabilizing male imbalance, massive income gaps between
coastal/trading centers and interior provinces, minimal soft power, absence of
friends and allies, growing third-world resentment of Chinese commercial
practices, and a vulnerable geographic position. It remains important not to
underestimate the PRC’s potential. However, it would be foolish to bet against
America and other free societies.
Most important may be the simple fact that what is will
not ever be. That is, today’s rapid race to totalitarianism is a product of one
man, Xi Jinping. At age 67, and with many enemies, he will not rule forever.
And when he is gone, “Xi Jinping thought” might disappear as rapidly as Maoism
dissipated after the Great Helmsman’s death. The Chinese couldn’t wait to dump
overboard the reality of the mad Red Emperor’s rule even while preserving his
image as the nation’s founder. Xi serves no similar foundational national role,
and therefore could be almost instantly consigned to obscurity.
The U.S. and West should play the long game by focusing
on expanding access to information in the PRC and appealing to rising
generations. This is one reason it is important, despite security concerns, to
keep American high schools and universities open to Chinese students. Young
Chinese like their personal freedoms but are nationalistic. They aren’t
interested in being told what to do or think, especially by the U.S. government.
(I feel the same way!) Frankly, the ostentatiously maladroit and sanctimonious
Mike Pompeo was no asset in this fight.
The PRC poses the greatest current international
challenge to U.S. policy. It is vital to get America’s response right. The
nature of the U.S.–China relationship will affect the rest of the world for
years and potentially decades to come. The last previous great-power
transitions — the rise of Germany and the Soviet Union — had catastrophic
consequences. A prolonged violent struggle between America and the PRC could,
in an unimaginable worst case, be even more costly.
Finding the right strategy is not just important for America. It also is important for the Chinese people. Before the pandemic, I visited China regularly. Set aside today’s totalitarian challenge for a moment: It is an extraordinary civilization and fascinating country. Once the PRC is free, it will be an even better place. Ultimately, only the Chinese people can transform the system that controls them and limits their future.
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