The CCP’s Culture of Fear

By Perry Link on October 21, 2021

One way to measure China’s urge to transform itself is to note how often the word new has been used by Chinese leaders. In 1902, the concept of the “new citizen” took hold in Liang Qichao’s New Citizen Journal. 20 years later, the May Fourth Movement came to be known as the New Culture Movement. In 1934, Chiang Kai-shek launched his New Life Movement. The Communist takeover in 1949 was the advent of New China, and the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s touted a “new socialist man.” After Mao Zedong died in 1976, the next few years were called “the new period.” Today, Xi Jinping’s watchword is “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” It is important to note that new in these cases never refers to the same thing; each is a new new.

Tightening Up

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Xibai Xu, Jude Blanchette & more on October 20, 2021

In what many observers have termed a “regulatory crackdown,” a wave of new legal restrictions and bans on business, technology, and entertainment has broken across China over the past several months, with what appears to be escalating velocity and force. Their rapid enactment has led many analysts—including those connected to the Chinese state—to view them as part of a single campaign. What is the best way to understand the connections among these new strictures? How do they relate to Xi Jinping’s leadership, how should they be understood to relate to governance goals in China more broadly, and to what extent will they succeed in achieving their intended ends?

Xibai Xu

on October 18, 2021

Xibai Xu is formerly a D.Phil. candidate in Politics at the University of Oxford. He is currently completing his doctoral thesis on how the Chinese state regulates social organizations through the increasing use of market mechanisms and tools, including direct procurement of social services and indirect control over private charitable foundations. He has translated four books in political science into Chinese, most recently Sebastian Veg’s Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals. He is also a regular columnist for Chinese-language media such as Initium Media, The Paper, Caixin, and Jiemian News.

ChinaFile Presents: In the Camps—China’s High-Tech Penal Colony

Video and Transcript

By Darren Byler, Susan Jakes & more on October 15, 2021

Darren Byler joined ChinaFile’s Susan Jakes and Jessica Batke to discuss his new book, In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony. Evidence has mounted in recent years that China’s government has incarcerated more than one million Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minorities in a network of detention facilities across Xinjiang, while subjecting millions of others in the region to severe religious and cultural repression and an unprecedented level of technologically enhanced surveillance. Byler examines thousands of government documents and many hours of interviews with both detainees and camp workers. Their stories describe a surveillance that overwhelms the lives of Xinjiang’s residents, pushing Byler to examine how technological tools are being adapted to create forms of intrusive and often oppressive control of vulnerable people around the world.

The Man Behind Xi Jinping’s Foreign Policy

An Excerpt from ‘China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy’

By Peter Martin on October 6, 2021

The daunting task of keeping up with Xi Jinping’s foreign policy ambitions fell to Wang Yi. Born in Beijing in 1953, the same year as Xi, Wang also spent a good chunk of his adolescence as a “sent down” youth during the Cultural Revolution, when he spent eight years laboring on a farm in the northeast. Always a harder worker than others, Wang taught himself literature and history, a former classmate told the Christian Science Monitor. He was “quite open minded. He did not just accept what he was told,” the classmate remembered.

Peter Martin

on October 1, 2021

Peter Martin is a political reporter for Bloomberg News. He has written extensively on escalating tensions in the U.S.-China relationship and reported from China’s border with North Korea and its far-western region of Xinjiang. He previously worked for the consultancy APCO Worldwide in Beijing, New Delhi, and Washington, D.C., where he analyzed politics for multinational companies. In Washington, he served as chief of staff to the company’s global CEO. His writing has been published by outlets including Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, The Guardian, China Brief, The Diplomat, and The Christian Science Monitor. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford, Peking University, and the London School of Economics.