Trotting out the tried and true

The argument it must be 'outsiders' in China....

The protests in China are real and extensive. Twitterdom, in what many fear its dying days, is alight with video links to protests in Shanghai, Wuhan, Beijing, Urumqi (site of a horrible fire where Uighurs could not exit locked doors in their apartment flats), Guangzhou, and many other cities. The anger mobs call for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to resign and even name Xi Jinping himself as a target for mounting frustration over COVID restrictions and generalised repression in the People’s Republic.

Some analysts breathily explain the Party’s 73 year tenure is teetering. Could be but probably not as the CCP has vast internal repression resources at its disposal. China’s dictatorship uses history to its advantage, learning from each and every instance where it confronts its citizens. The result is a regime that has refined its brutality substantially since it sent People’s Liberation Army tanks to mow down students on Tiananmen Square in early June 1989. Whatever the CCP’s many problems, it proves remarkably resourceful and agile in responding to turmoil once it begins to mobilise.

I suspect that what the protestors see as a hopeful delay in fact indicates the gathering of all instruments of repression to move in a coordinated manner once they are unleashed. I hope I am wrong but that’s what we have seen before. This is a variation on an old Chinese adage of ‘crossing the river by feeling stones’. China’s leaders adjust to any situation confronting them with a single end: keeping the Party in power in perpetuity.

One tool the Party, and all authoritarians around the world, invoke is claiming that the root of the problems is not the current governance policies but the disruption conducted by amorphous but ubiquitous ‘foreign elements’. That narrative is already spilling out across some parts of China.

This is not accidental nor is it merely a response to the past 48 hours. Xi Jinping’s decade in power has included a systematic assault on China’s links with foreigners. Foreign investment is regulated, not uncommon around the world, but more tightly over the past decade to keep the foreigners off balance in the bilateral relationship. The laws prohibiting China’s non-government organisations (NGOs) from having foreigners too closely involved in their activities restrict genuine exchange of ideas on how NGOs can challenge Party control. The list of legal restrictions aimed at subtly or not driving a wedge in between Chinese and foreigners lengthens annually as part of Xi’s drive for great national ‘rejuvenation’.

The General Secretary’s moved to stiffle studying English a year ago by urging schools not to offer final exams on the language.Li Yuan, "'Reversing Gears': China Increasingly Rejects English, and the World", NYT.com, 21 October 2021 Without English, Chinese students have a hard time enrolling in many foreign programs even if they desire to ignore the message that Xi is sending. As the state-run news service Xinhua said several years ago, China ‘must resist the infiltration of Western ideology and crackdown on its agents and spokespersons’.Mark Eades, 'Chinese Nightmare: Education and Thought Control in Xi Jinping's China', Foreign Policy Association, 5 April 2016 . Xi has long said that Chinese students would do well to study Chinese classics and culture, and oh, yes, ideology of the Party where appropriate. Xi clearly supports people being Red over expert if English is part of cultivating expertise.

CCP anxiety about foreigners most repeatedly over the past decade with censors on the internet purging references to topics seen as anti-Chinese. The so-called ‘colour revolutions’ referred to movements to oust repressive regimes in the former Soviet sphere in the mid-2000s, such as 2003 ‘rose revolution’ in Georgia or the ‘orange revolution’ the following year in Ukraine. No matter that these mass movements did not lead to sustained democracies but still threaten the Chinese (Russian and Middle Eastern, in addition) leadership so fearful of outsiders leading their people astray. Indeed, fully a generation later Xi exhorted the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in 2022 to be on alert for these subversive foreign movements aiming to overthrow like-minded regimes across the authoritarian Central Asia."China's Xi Says 'Colour Revolutions' Must be Prevented", VOA News, 16 September 2022 Imagine how much effort is underway today, 27 November 2022 in China both to prevent any suggestion that these current protests represent popular sentiment while promoting a line that foreigners must be the root cause of the protests themselves. These are both patently absurd arguments but China is a vast country where the internet’s role is different from the one it plays here.

Or is it? Will China use the ‘foreigners are at it again’ narrative to attempt conspiracy theories to proliferate online? The United States is hardly the only place where conspiracies result from people either being uneducated on what is going on in a particular place or they reject outlandish, demonstrably false assertions of ‘the other’ being the cause. Anti-Japan riots in China over the past twenty years have shown the power of conspiracies and popular mobilisation. Indeed, Chinese citizens continue arguing that the 1999 mistaken bombing of the Belgrade Embassy was deliberate on the part of the United States, even after countless rebuttals from Washington.

Indeed, ultimately the Uighurs, the Islamic adherants predominant in Xinjiang province in the west, are clearly foreigners living among the overwhelming Han population in the Middle Kingdom. The Uighurs have a different physical appearance, they increasingly live apart (most often forceably) from the Han who moved in to ‘settle’ the province beginning in the 1950s and 60s, and they are overwhelmingly observant Muslims. The incarceration of Uighurs in ‘re-education camps’ aims to bring them into line with Han values, language, and everything else yet they will never be racially Chinese which seems a fundamental inconsistency in the argument. The fire earlier this week which resulted in the death of at least ten Uighurs who could not escape their bolted apartments is only a small part of the national protest movement but a particularly heartbreaking one. Yet, the CCP seems no less likely to continue the COVID lockdowns in Xinjiang after this horrible event.

Perhaps the regime will become too absorbed in addressing the protests to continue blaming foreigners. But the CCP, especially the General Secretary himself, has been laying the groundwork to say this is really caused by outsiders rather than the Party’s behaviour. This is a tried and true argument from countless repressors and one we are likely to see repeatedly.FIN