Shirley Xinyi Cai is a researcher in comparative politics and political theory, pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science at McGill University. One of her ongoing projects is about the caili (彩礼, i.e. bride price or betrothal gift), a deep-rooted marriage custom that calls on the family of the groom-to-be to pay a sum of money to the bride’s family.
This year, I returned to a Beijing I hardly recognized. It was not the capital I first glimpsed as a child in the 1980s, when groups of men in thin jackets stood smoking in the cold, and tides of cyclists seemed ready to carry me away. Nor was it the city of the 1990s, when the muzak of Kenny G poured out of the loudspeakers of Tiananmen Square, or the Beijing of Hu Jintao, when frat boys drank themselves into oblivion under the green skies of Sanlitun, while in hotel ballrooms Western professors conducted seminars on the rule of law. The old poor of the city appear to have been swept out of the picture, and the blaring engines of aproned motor bikers are softened by the silence of Teslas and BYDs. When I approached the Great Hall of the People this time, a guard smiled in a way that faintly suggested: Why do you bother coming here anymore?
Hurtling down the Third Ring Road in her Chevrolet Cruze, the Beijing playwright Si’an Chen told me about the latest tolls on literary life in China. “Traditional publishing platforms have become ineffective and some in-depth media has been shut down,” she said. “There are not that many real readers left.” Earlier this year, a play of hers was not permitted to open. The theater speculated that it was related to the pandemic elements in the story. “It’s a game where they never explicitly tell you what is off-limits, but you figure out where the line is,” she said. “At first we did really well in the pandemic. Now the pandemic didn’t really happen.” We stopped to buy a bottle of douzhi, the fermented mung bean drink, and I asked her why she stayed in Beijing despite offers from abroad. “Writing in Chinese and living on this land, experiencing all the good and bad that happens, is what my art is about.”
There used to be a time when Chinese writers, if asked about foreign literature, would say a few nice words about William Faulkner.
When I met the writers Zhang Yueran and Shuang Xuetao for dinner in Beijing, tall mounds of Yunnanese delicacies between us, the sense of China’s connection with international literary currents was unmistakable. They spoke of Clarice Lispector, John Cheever, Sally Rooney, Ben Lerner, Javier Marías, and J.M. Coetzee with easy familiarity. Traces of Roberto Bolaño in Zhang’s story “Speedwell” show that Chinese fusion often bypasses the Anglosphere altogether. Much of the consumption of literature in contemporary China happens on the phone, where books are discussed on the platform Douban and serial novels are produced at a staggering rate. It’s a literary world that seems at once incredibly vast and incredibly small. Yueran contacted each Chinese writer I mentioned in seconds on WeChat while we spoke, and wrote down the contacts of the writers I still needed to read.
The most thrilling development in Chinese fiction has come out of Dongbei, in the northeast. The leading writer of the scene, Shuang, told me how his love of writing was born out of trying to capture the down-and-out characters spit out by his deindustrializing hometown, Shenyang. He’s particularly attracted to losers, who are, in some sense, the heart of modern Chinese literature, which is filled with failed exam-takers, unconvinced revolutionaries, disenchanted bureaucrats, disgraced husbands, bereft women, unlucky gangsters, wistful repairmen, and utterly routed ne’er-do-wells. From Lu Xun’s stubborn rogue Ah Q, who thrives off his own humiliations, to Qian Zhongshu’s fake-diploma-bearing Fang Hung-chien, to the wife-beating gambler-turned-mourning pauper Fugui in Yu Hua’s To Live, the 20th-century Chinese canon presents a sharp contrast to the plucky red-cheeked heroes of China’s blockbuster films and television serials. The figures of Chinese fiction not only brim with resentments, but they take their revenge out on the language itself, disfiguring it and remaking it with their corrosive dialogue. They mock themselves along with their enemies, in some kind of grim acknowledgment that mutual degradation is the way of the world.
* * *
If ever a nation was forged by literary writers, it was the People’s Republic of China. In the years following 1911, a band of Chinese literati determined that the country required a complete overhaul of its culture. The Xinhai Revolution, they believed, had foundered because it put too much trust in an abstract constitution and arid declarations of rights. It did not reach deep enough into the lives of ordinary people. Centered around the magazine New Youth, a set of young critics made demands that seemed at first peripheral to the main action of the warlord era: the use of vernacular Chinese, rights for women, a critical examination of Confucianism, the banishment of superstition, and the consecration of science. In short stories, poetry, and novels, the writers described a future in which peasants could read and hierarchies were unwound. They imagined putting patriarchs and landlords against the wall. In a few years’ time, many of them would be.
Not even the Soviet Union, where Stalin burned nights editing poets, could boast of such a focus on literature. The founders of the Chinese Communist Party, many of them trained literary scholars, included Chen Duxiu, the editor of New Youth; Li Dazhao, a librarian; and Mao Dun, a novelist and chronicler of Shanghai society.
Mao Zedong, no mean poet himself, proclaimed that writers in the Communist country of the future should serve the people. “The thoughts and feelings of our writers and artists should be fused with those of the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers,” he insisted in his famous speech at Yan’an in the middle of the Chinese Civil War. “To achieve this fusion, they should conscientiously learn the language of the masses.” But as a pared-down literary style was encouraged in the 1940s, political guidelines also tightened the scope of Chinese literature. Great writers such as Eileen Chang left the country. Qian Zhongshu—China’s Evelyn Waugh—was tasked with editing Mao’s collected works until he was dispatched to work as a janitor during the Cultural Revolution. As literacy skyrocketed, Western literature became hard to come by. There were only eight novels a year published between 1949 and 1966, and that figure fell lower in the decade 1966-1976. China became a people of the book, Mao’s little red one.
The calibrated opening of China’s markets in the 1970s under Deng Xiaoping was also an opening for foreign literature. One of the repeated scenes in Chinese novels and stories of the period is writers gloating over their fresh access to this bounty. Printers in China pumped out cheap versions of whatever they wished, and carpets of foreign literature lined streets in Beijing (Chinese editors like to tell the story of how the country’s joining of the Universal Copyright Convention in 1992 was precipitated by Gabriel García Márquez’s horror at finding how many pirated copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude were for sale). In The King of Trees (1985), Ah Cheng delivered a satire of the literary-discovery scene in which a sent-down intellectual lugs around a precious chest of books that turns out to contain the collected works of Mao that he’s held on to for sentimental reasons.
Having officially declared the Cultural Revolution a catastrophe, Deng at first did nothing to block the rise of the “Scar” literature that appeared in the late 1970s. The movement took its name from Lu Xinhua’s short story “The Scar” (1978), which was written in a single night and posted on a door at Fudan University. It told of a young woman who renounces her petit-bourgeois mother, leaves home for nine years during the Cultural Revolution, and returns only to find her mother is dead. For some Western critics, like Perry Link, Scar literature never ran hard enough against Maoist excess, with the lone exception of the Taiwanese writer Chen Ruoxi. But the next generation of Chinese writers were less keen to participate in try-outs to be the next Solzhenitsyn. Western liberal demands to be on the right side of history smacked too much of the old Maoist drives for purity. Scar literature, with its repetitive, flat-footed tales of tragedy and hardship, rarely rose to the level of literature. Yu Hua once said he first started writing fiction out of his loathing for it.
The “Roots-Seeking Literature” of the 1980s was something else entirely. It grew out of concerns expressed by Han Shaogong and Ah Cheng that a degree of nihilism had crept into Chinese culture. In its incessant drive to modernize along or against Western lines, they believed both the May 4th movement and the Cultural Revolution had lost sight of the riches of China’s regional cultures. Lu Xun once counseled Chinese writers to only read foreign books—and through the process of “hard translation” even to import foreign grammar—but now the time had come for the opposite: to self-isolate from Western literature. Writers like Mo Yan and Jia Pingwa scavenged older peasant traditions, local lore and knowledge, even old recipes, which had been run roughshod in China’s pulverizing race to industrialize. They took some pride in being difficult to translate into English. The Western canon could not be dismissed completely, but it could be manipulated. While working on a state farm without electricity on the Laotian border during the Cultural Revolution, Ah Cheng recited the story of Anna Karenina, refitting it with Chinese characters and customs for his listeners.
In 2014, Xi Jinping reprised Mao’s Yan’an Talks with a speech about the place of literature in Chinese society. “Our country’s writers and artists should become the prophets, pathfinders, and heralds of the mood of the age,” he declared, and “inspire the people of all ethnicities in the entire country to become full of vigor and vitality and march towards the future.” But the stakes were nowhere near as high as in 1942. Like elsewhere in the world, literature in China—once more central to its culture than anywhere else—has become a niche industry indistinguishable from others. This is not necessarily a bad thing. For decades, Western publishers have treated Chinese literature like a koi pond from which to pluck Chinese Havels and Kunderas. Yet when relieved of domestic pressure to speak for the people, and foreign pressure to be paragons of dissidence, Chinese fiction and poetry enters a much more fertile terrain. Despite increasing censorship under Xi, much of the literature of China still breathes easier today. More fully connected to the outside world on its own terms, it no longer seems as burdened to unfurl local color or stories whose shape we already know.
* * *
At a time when China has become a unifying specter of menace for Western governments, it has become a virtual requirement for foreign policy experts in the American and British governments to publish tracts against China. With titles like The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, the argument they lay out is simple: China wishes to rid the world of democracy and to impose an authoritarian form of governance. Yet the projection says more about the West, and America in particular, than it does about China. The blunt fact remains: Of all of the major powers in the world today, China was the first to withdraw its world-historical ambitions from the geopolitical scene. Already in the 1970s, Mao was determined to cool down Communist networks which sought to spread peasant revolution in his name to Africa and Asia and beyond. In 1971, Mao’s right-hand man, Zhou Enlai, went so far as to offer weapons to help put down a Maoist uprising in Sri Lanka. Later in the decade, the country was humiliated when it fought Vietnam in an attempt to back Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia. China, in other words, was already done exporting utopia two decades before the Soviet Union disbanded. That leaves the U.S. today as the last great power whose leaders still think, though perhaps with less certainty than before, that their system is the one to which the rest of humanity should aspire.
In the 1990s, it was still possible to think that the elites of China, the U.S., Russia, and Europe were in the process of stabilizing the world order at the expense of their working-class populations. The so-called “war on terror” was the pinnacle of coordination in which each of these powers pursued punishing—and mutually endorsed—campaigns against Muslim populations in particular: the U.S. and Europe in the Middle East and Africa; Russia in Chechnya; China in Xinjiang. As the promise of globalization splintered national populations, and popular revolts developed against the cosmopolitan mutual enrichment program, new forces and old demons came to the fore. In Chongqing, a charismatic People’s Republic of China (PRC) bureaucrat, Bo Xilai, saw an opportunity to channel frustrations into a kind of neo-populist, retro-Maoist political theater that challenged the prevailing Western-oriented consensus in Beijing. Bo was brought down, but Xi appears to have learned something from this episode. In Xi’s time in power, the Party has been less willing to tolerate rampant inequality as the price of prosperity and more willing to exercise repression in the service of ideological values. With an eye to how the Soviet Union broke down, the Party has struck back against the business class; purged corrupt officials on an enormous scale; reined in control of the press; and shut down the English tutoring industry, itself an engine of inequality.
While Washington congratulated itself on the biggest climate investment in American history—$369 billion over a 10-year period—China, in 2022 alone, invested $546 billion. Its status as the leader of the “green transition” can no longer be questioned, though its record in extractive zones certainly can be. In foreign policy, meanwhile, Beijing strives to retain room to maneuver. It backs Russia just enough for it to make advances in Ukraine, while worrying that the U.S. and NATO are using the theater as a rehearsal for China’s own encirclement. About the massacre of Palestinians, Beijing has spoken of armed struggle as a “legitimate” response to the oppressor, while doing a brisk trade in spyware with Israel. In many ways, the lack of ideology in China’s relations abroad allows it to concentrate on ideology at home, where the ideals of socialism, though sometimes strayed from and often contradicted by policy, nevertheless remain real.
In Shanghai, some of the tensions of Xi’s China were on display. The city is recovering its status as an international mecca. Inhabitants include everyone from Dilma Rousseff to Nick Land to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s son, Yermolai, who works for McKinsey. In a mansion in the French Concession, I visited one of China’s so-called “Red capitalists,” a media mogul with close connections to the government, who regularly defends the PRC in the Western press. Cultural Revolution slogans were scrawled on the outside wall, and peacocks roamed the garden. The Red tycoon greeted me with a merry sense of supremacy. “What will your American oligarchy do if the populists take the White House again?” he asked. “You know it’s bad for you when the Chinese students going to America become more pro-Chinese after their time there!” The quips kept coming. “At the age Barack Obama was writing The Audacity of Hope, Xi was writing a treatise on forest management! Who got the better deal?”
The next day, I visited the local Writers’ Association, housed in another mansion nearby. Down one hallway the staff of the youth literary magazine Mengya were busying themselves giddily with their new issue, while down another, reclined, chain-smoking, and admirably strung out, the editors of Harvest, China’s hallowed literary quarterly, gazed into the void. Later, I walked down the Bund with the Shanghai writer Yun Sheng. We visited a series of Shanghai bookshops. “This one is a temple to our version of Instagram,” she told me in a giant cavernous shop, where many of the books lined unreachable shelves. I entered a room full of red and white covers. “You’re in the Party literature section, and over there, that’s the Henry Kissinger section.” “If we dress up the Chinese issue of Granta as a Party pamphlet, what are the chances they stock it here?” I asked. “Don’t count on it,” she said.
The scholar and journalist Kejia Wu is the author of A Modern History of China’s Art Market, a fascinating book that examines the relationship between the Chinese government’s push for cultural “soft power” and its desire for control. In the book, Wu looks at the rise of contemporary art and a market for it after the end of the Cultural Revolution; the oddity of China’s parallel art systems: one highly ideological, censored, and state-organized market, and the other market-oriented; and five Chinese artists from different generations whom she profiles.
Jeremy Goldkorn spoke to Kejia Wu in 2023 about her book, and then edited and updated this Q&A with her by email in 2024.
Jeremy Goldkorn: Your book looks at the market for Chinese art going back to the Cultural Revolution. But I first want to talk about the 1990s and the 2000s, when you and I were both in Beijing, and I was tangentially involved in the art scene.
It’s not just that we were there, it was also the period when China’s art market went from basically nonexistent in the ’90s to taking up 30 percent of the global art and antiquities market by 2011, surpassing the U.S. and becoming number one in the world.
How did you land in the middle of the art scene?
Kejia Wu: I went to college in Beijing at Renmin University from ’94 to ’98. My major was real estate management.
Great timing! Just before the real estate industry boomed! But not the usual entry into the art world.
Yes. No.
After graduation, I joined COSCO Real Estate Development Company. And the project I got involved in was on land owned by one of the largest textile factories in Beijing, just near the East Fourth Ring Road. With the government restructuring state-owned enterprises, and the downfall of the textile industry, the factory had to sell the land and move production somewhere else.
And just for context, COSCO is China Ocean Shipping Company, right, and this was the real estate division they launched in the 1990s?
Yes. And I was on the project development team for the takeover of the textile factory site. The factory had been one of the largest state-owned enterprises in Beijing, which contributed a lot of employment to the city. We were thinking, what can we give back to the community?
A gallery at the 789 Art Zone in Beijing, August 9, 2008.
At the time, there was news about a “loft culture” in New York and London, where large warehouses and industrial spaces with high ceilings and big windows were being converted to contemporary art spaces. I was on a development team working together with a marketing team and we felt like we could do something similar for Beijing. As the residential real estate project was being developed, we decided to keep the textile factory building and turn it into a contemporary art center, and offer free space for painters and dancers to do contemporary projects for free. That was before the 798 project—the idea was still new in Beijing.
There were many artists, including dancers, performing artists, and painters, who were desperate to find a place that was more modern and contemporary for them to exhibit or showcase their performances. And there was nowhere else like that space, a large-scale industrial space with high ceilings.
But since there was nobody at the company who was interested in such an endeavor, the general manager at the real estate company asked me to run it as a contemporary art center. So at the end of the ’90s, and early 2000s, I got the chance to oversee 50,000 square feet of space, and work together with architects and artists and dancers to put together programs for the space. That was the East Modern Art Center (远洋艺术中心).
One of the opening shows was Dancing with Farmworkers, in which I worked together with Song Dong, Yin Xiuzhen, Wen Hui, and Wu Wenguang. They invited migrant construction workers to do an improvised dance performance. The final performance was quite a huge deal in Beijing because of word of mouth. There was not much of an Internet or social media presence back then, but tons of people came.
Yeah, I remember that. What year was it?
The final performance was in August 2001. And there were a few weeks of improvised rehearsals which you may have visited. There was no script. Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen and Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang just worked and danced with construction workers on a daily basis, purely based on improvised movement.
That’s such an interesting way to get into the art world—via real estate! Such a story of China’s reform and opening era!
Yes.
And at that time, there was no censorship or review process. The whole idea of the dance with the construction workers came up in a brainstorm over the summer. I was sitting on the roof of the Drum Tower [a tower in central Beijing built in 1272] with Song Dong, Yin Xiuzhen, Wen Hui, and Wu Wenguang, just chatting, drinking beer, and eating peanuts. And they’re like, “Why don’t we do something together with construction workers, because they contributed a lot to the urban development of the city but were always the marginalized community and through this collaboration with dancers, they will be put at the center stage.”
Beijing was full of such opportunities.
We didn’t try to plan far in advance. It was all based on this feeling: “Oh, why don’t we do this, this will be exciting.” We just made a decision, we decided to do it then and there. We didn’t have to go through any cultural bureau for a censorship review, or write a memo to get their approval. At that time, you could just think about an idea, you start to do it, and a lot of people come to see the rehearsal. Maybe because of that, the word of mouth got out really quickly, and lots of people came for the final performance.
What did you do next?
There were no alternative spaces like that, so the East Modern Art Center got famous very quickly, and many artists and dancers came to apply for the opportunity to do a show or performance for free.
But then from the management point of view, the brand-building purpose was achieved, and they wanted to focus on growing the business and generate more profit. And I think it was too edgy, too avant-garde, and the concept of having something like 798 that would last for decades, that didn’t really occur to them. They felt that the mission was accomplished within a short period of time and decided to demolish the art center and build residential buildings on the land [in 2003].
So I left. For a time, I ran the communications department for Dow Jones. Then I joined a British firm called Brunswick, which had an art advisory practice. I was advising foreign institutions like the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum on their China programs. Then I got my business degree at Yale, and then I joined Sotheby’s, the auction house in New York City, and subsequently taught at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in NYC and Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles.
And based on all those experiences and quite a bit of research, I wrote the book. But I think everything that got me interested in this topic can be traced back to the end of the 1990s and early 2000s. Because that experience at that time cannot really be replicated, anywhere in the world.
Such an exciting time. And as you said or hinted, if you operated outside of the official cultural system, or in my own experience the publishing and Internet systems, you didn’t really have any censorship. It was the age of not asking for permission but saying sorry later if you got into trouble.
That started to change quickly, as the government started to figure out that people were doing cultural things beyond their control, but also, as your book documents, that there was money to be made.
So can you explain how art systems developed? Your book describes the evolution of two separate, parallel art systems: the private market system and the state system. What does that look like now?
The state system has a structure where the leadership on content is by the Ministry of Propaganda and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. They basically will review and make sure the message is right. It must be in line with “Cultural Construction” (社会主义文化建设) and “the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation,” and everything defined clearly as “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture” [introduced in October 2023]. The whole trend started when Xi became Party General Secretary in 2012.
So pretty much that means under the leadership of Xi Jinping, there is the Party, the Propaganda Department, and the administrative infrastructure, including the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the universities, like the Central Academy of Fine Arts [CAFA], and then the Chinese Artists Association. Everyone in these organizations has to abide by guidelines instructed by Xi Jinping to “tell China’s story well.”
How does it function as a market? If you do the officially approved type of art, how do you get paid?
The state has funding to support artists to do those officially-approved creative projects. For example, in 2021, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] History Museum was officially launched in Beijing. At the time, the government allocated funds to the top academies, including the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. They selected “reliable” faculty members and commissioned them to create art works to be displayed in the CCP History Museum as educational tools.
There’s a China National Arts Fund. It’s a grant-making fund which has been funding a variety of projects. If you look at the list of the projects [such as those] discussed in my book, you see they are pretty much restricted to works which promote traditional Chinese culture, or that tell attractive, good China stories, or endorse “the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation.” Artists who need to get paid and want to advance their career in the state system are willing to compete for those opportunities.
A statue depicting the former Chinese leader Mao Zedong stands at the 798 Art Zone, as the country prepares for leadership change, in Beijing, February 29, 2012.
Visitors sit in front of a sculpture titled “Arresting Sex Worker” during the 2007 Beijing 798 Art Festival, at 798 Art Zone in Beijing, May 5, 2007.
What about the market system that used to be almost completely separate? How did the private art market develop and what does it look like now?
In the late 1990s to mid-2000s, artists like Zhang Xiaogang, whom you mentioned before we started recording, that kind of artist became popular with foreign collectors. At that time, the Chinese contemporary market was starting to do very well, driven by new demand from international collectors, people like Guy Ullens and Uli Sigg. Very soon, Chinese artists like Zhang Xiaogang were represented by blue chip Western galleries like Pace.
Artists like that are often not part of the official state system. They make their living by having shows through their galleries, and galleries often bring the artists’ work to art fairs. The galleries help generate sales for them. Artists can survive outside of the state system by being represented by commercial galleries.
However, now the authorities review all their exhibitions (unless the Chinese artist creates their work outside of the country and it is exhibited overseas), including gallery shows, domestic public and private museum shows, and any artworks sent abroad. If these artists have shows in New York, all their paintings will have to be reviewed. And the review process can take three months, but it’s very hard to predict, it can take longer.
How strict is it now? When I was writing about art in the late 1990s, I remember the Post-Sense Sensibility exhibition that had works with human body parts. Crazy stuff with dead babies and animals. And there were plenty of artists who totally lacked the “positive energy” the government asks of its artists today: Fang Lijun, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhu Wei, and everyone in the Life exhibition.
I can’t imagine anything like that would pass muster today. How much stricter has it got?
There are no clear official guidelines of art exhibitions that say, oh, you can’t show this or that. But you can discern some basic rules over the years from seeing what was actually regulated.
When you and I were in Beijing art circles in the late ’90s, the criteria were quite simple. Nothing pornographic, nothing clearly anti-socialism, but everything else was pretty much okay.
Workers prepare giant woodblock-print hanging scrolls by artist Fang Lijun to be auctioned by Sotheby’s, in Hong Kong, April 5, 2008.
Artist Xin Ba presents a performance art piece calling for the release from house arrest of blind human rights activist Chen Guangcheng, at the 798 Art Zone in Beijing, January 9, 2012.
But it’s been getting stricter and stricter, especially in recent years. In 2016, the Ministry of Culture issued a regulation with 11 clauses [about] visual artworks forbidden from exhibiting/exporting. Let me quote them, from chapter six of my book:
Look at this list, it’s very ambiguous. For example, nudity in the past was tolerated, but now is a taboo subject. Anything related to nudity will be taken out, although it is still at the discretion of the local Culture Bureau officials and in very rare cases may still be shown.
Visitors pass by statues in a gallery in the 798 Art Zone, May 25, 2008.
For example, Taikang [Space] art museum, which is owned by Chen Dongsheng who founded China Guardian Auctions. They just opened their private museum in Beijing last year. There was at least six months of review process for the opening show. First they had put what they intended to include in the exhibition on a list, and sent it to the Cultural Bureau for at least three rounds of reviews. After that, they put the approved paintings on the wall, and then officials from the local Cultural Bureau will show up in person for the last time before the show can open to the public.
What happened to Chen Dongsheng’s Taikang Art Museum? [He is supposed to be] a “safer” entrepreneur because his wife is the granddaughter of Chairman Mao, right? You would think that after all the paperwork, this private museum should be okay. But what I heard was, on the VIP preview day before the exhibition opened to the public, the cultural bureau officials showed up in person. And they were pointing at a number of paintings, including a Zeng Fanzhi painting, which, despite the fact it had the paperwork review, had to be taken down because of nudity, and a Zhang Xiaogang painting had to be taken down because the government officials felt the ambiance of the painting was negative, it didn’t tell a good China story. There is just so much ambiguity, the decision was completely up to the government officials who were standing in the gallery space, making the decision right there.
All of Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings are negative! That’s kind of the whole point, that you don’t know what’s going on in the paintings, and it’s never 100 percent good, right?
For example, he had his show last year in spring at the Long Museum in Shanghai, which was a recap of his experience during the pandemic because he was in lockdown, including being put into a fangcang hospital [temporary hospitals designed to be set up quickly in existing spaces to isolate COVID-19 patients] multiple times. During the pandemic, he was in pretty tough lockdowns for a total of more than 40 days. He wrote a quarantine diary and described those experiences in his paintings.
Six months after the show, his catalogue was still being reviewed. He said words like “pandemic” and “quarantine” and “death”; all these words had to be removed from the catalogue. The catalogue went through multiple publishers—some of them decided to give up because the review process was so long. The catalogue finally came out at the end of 2023 but none of the catalogue essays included words like “pandemic,” “quarantine,” and “death.”
It sounds like there’s not going to be a meaningful difference between the private and state systems, with this level of scrutiny and censorship?
There are a number of examples that can help us to see where things are going. There are certain artists, for example, Qiu Zhijie: he was quite edgy, avant-garde. He did calligraphy on his body and those early works were included in numerous international museum collections. But now he’s the President of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, one of the state-run art academies in China. He’s an example of an experimental contemporary artist who sees the benefit of being in the state system, and he would like to advance his career within the system. Maybe from his perspective, he has a desire to elevate his social impact. And being in China with funding from the government, he can do a lot of things, which might be hard to do overseas, even though he’s very famous among international museum curators.
There are artists who are like Liu Xiaodong, whose paintings have become much less critical. He even went to the National People’s Congress [NPC] as a representative. And then he would share his experiences at the NPC in lectures at CAFA. The state system has grown so powerful, if you become a director or deputy director at a university or at CAFA, you have so many international exchange opportunities, and government funding. For ambitious artists, that could be very attractive.
CAFA recently chose a new president, Lin Mao, born in the mid-70s, one of the youngest ever appointed. Initially, a group of old professors at CAFA jointly wrote a collective open letter to the Ministry of Education to say “please reconsider, we need somebody who has better credentials because CAFA has a long history of choosing well-established, renowned artists as its president, including Xu Beihong, Wu Zuoren, etc.” The Ministry of Education wrote back to those professors who complained and said Lin Mao is very loyal to the CCP, we believe he’s committed and he’s a good choice. And I heard those professors who wrote the letter were investigated. So very soon, everyone became pretty obedient to this decision. The dean of CAFA’s architecture school, who was one of the professors who wrote and signed the letter of complaint, joined the new President Lin Mao to meet the celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas—he went to Beijing to meet with the faculty and talk about collaboration. That kind of social status is really attractive for a lot of people. [Koolhaas’ firm designed the iconic CCTV building.]
On the other hand, artists who don’t want to be part of the system will stick to collaboration with their galleries or independent art institutions (including international museums). And hopefully, those galleries, particularly Western galleries, can help them generate more sales overseas or create exhibition opportunities outside of China. So the two trajectories are happening at the same time.
What about the Chinese world outside of the People’s Republic of China? People like Ai Weiwei. He is unusual in that he has made a global career, he’s part of a global art market that doesn’t really have anything to do with China anymore. Are we going to see more exiled Chinese artists like Ai Weiwei?
In the next five to 10 years, definitely more artists will establish studios overseas, some people might decide to immigrate to another country, depending on their family situations.
The censorship is getting so much worse. For example, there is an artist whose work is based on Buddhist philosophy, and often incorporates elements of human limbs and bodies—nudity. Before 2019, she often had artworks shown domestically, but now her figurative artworks that reference nudity would not pass the censorship review domestically. She has a studio in Austria, and is trying to create a studio in Berlin. [She is not named to protect her identity as she is still working in China.]
And then there is one artist I described in my book who has already established a studio in Tokyo, Lu Yang. Although he has a studio in Shanghai, he pretty much creates all his artworks in Tokyo now. Because he’s a Buddhist, and almost all of his artworks are related to Buddhism, he likes to explore subject matter such as the concept of hell, death, and bardo. That’s not a positive kind of story from the official arts and culture rhetoric perspective. When I was writing the book, around the time when the pandemic broke out, he still had videos being exhibited in China, but now, many of his videos cannot be shown in China.
Everything got worse after the pandemic, I guess.
This year is the 35th anniversary of the 1989 mass demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and elsewhere around China, and their brutal suppression on June 4. The memories of these events are receding into the past, a process greatly aided in China by censorship. And even when remembered, the crackdown that ended the optimistic 1980s in China is viewed by some Chinese government supporters as justified.
We updated our suite of graphics tracking the impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law. The law, which went into effect on June 30, 2020, and the allegation of “sedition,” have been used to arrest 292 individuals, charge 159, and convict 71 as of January 31, 2024.
Among arrests under the law in recent months, four individuals were arrested for signing up for paid subscriptions to Patreon accounts for Nathan Law and Ted Hui, Hong Kong politicians now living in the UK and Australia, respectively. Reasons cited for other recent arrests include posting on social media criticizing officials, as well as calling for protests and threatening the families of government officials, leading to charges of sedition.
In March, legislators passed a new security law in Hong Kong. Enacting a mandate in Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the territory’s constitution, the new legislation expands on the 2020 National Security Law to cover sedition (and increases the maximum sentence for this offense), collaboration with “external forces,” treason and insurrection, and other acts. We will be looking into how this new legislation will affect national security cases going forward.
You can see our full dataset and graphics here.
Thirty-five years ago, in April 1989, Chinese students from Beijing’s elite universities began their occupation of Tiananmen Square. Their issues were different from those of American students today. Chinese demonstrators voiced concerns about corruption, inflation, the effects of on-going market reforms, and lack of free press and participatory governance. Today’s students at Columbia, NYU, Harvard, Yale, University of Minnesota, University of Texas, Brown, USC, and other campuses are mounting an antiwar movement, calling on their institutions to divest from Israel in light of the unprecedented levels of civilian death in Gaza, and for the U.S. government to stop supplying Israel’s offensive war machine. Another big difference: as it turned out, Chinese students faced far more serious and long-lasting repercussions than seem likely for American students, even those violently arrested by police. At least so far.
The Chinese Communist Party, an organization of over ninety million members, remains opaque to many outsiders, even within China. Wall Street Journal reporter Chun Han Wong spent years in Beijing documenting social, political, and economic changes as General Secretary Xi Jinping consolidated his power over the Party and country. Last year, Wong published Party of One, a portrait of the organization that rules China, and the man who rose to its top. Xi emerges in the book as a prisoner of the Party, and its history, as much as he is its leader. Wong spoke with Nick Frisch, a research fellow at Yale. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Nick Frisch: What misconceptions were you hoping this book would address?
Chun Han Wong: Talking about what kind of person Xi Jinping is, what he is trying to do, many people reach for this easy and simplistic reference to Mao Zedong. They just say Xi Jinping is doing a Mao. This comparison needs to be qualified. We do see some of the slogans, some of the tactics that we saw in the Mao era. But it’s too convenient to say that Xi Jinping is a second Mao, or Xi Jinping took this or that out of the Mao playbook. Of course there is some truth to the Mao comparison. Xi had little real education. His true education, throughout his early life, was political education. As a child, he had a front row seat to political drama, to Communist Party intrigue. He consistently learned up close how power was exercised, how power struggles evolve, the impact they can have on people. His own family suffered the negative consequences of such events.
But there are also important influences that not many observers note, and in my book I want to highlight those. Xi’s tactics have other influences. For example, [Mao’s rival Party leader] Liu Shaoqi, who was the arch Party-builder. Liu really believed in internal discipline, internal propaganda, internal political education. Liu wanted to ensure the Leninist hierarchy of the Party remained strong. Mao, by contrast, mobilized normal people to destroy the Party from the outside. This is something Xi Jinping would never do. The Party is his one true vehicle of power, the one instrument he has for implementing his vision. Xi is only powerful if the Communist Party is powerful. Xi’s internal purges, the internal Party inquisitions, emphasis on discipline, that’s from Liu Shaoqi. Xi Jinping doesn’t proclaim that theme loudly in public, but you can tell from the way he does things. Mao wouldn’t have done it that way.
Xi was born when the Party was a revolutionary movement that had just taken power. Now the Party has been a ruling institution for decades. How has the Party evolved over his lifetime?
It all goes back to Xi’s upbringing during the Mao era. Mao’s mobilizational approach, leaning heavily on ideology and messages, caused a lot of internal discord, dysfunction, violence. It was not good governance. We all know the worst excesses of the Mao era: the anti-Rightist campaign [in 1957], the Great Leap Forward [starting in 1958], the famine that resulted [killing an estimated 30 million people]. For the first two or three decades of the People’s Republic, Party rule was not conducive to nation-building, to what was envisioned before 1949. Much time passed between then and when Xi took power. His ideas of good governance would have been shaped by seeing what didn’t work during his childhood.
The years after Mao, the boom years, the Reform [and Opening] era [under Deng Xiaoping, from 1978], also had problems. Xi Jinping was reacting to those problems, trying to strike a balance between the two extremes. There was too much revolution in the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and then, in the decades before Xi took power, things went too far the other way [with corruption and disorder accompanying fast economic growth]. Party policy had swung too far towards development. Problems festered, to the point where the Party was struggling to control them. Xi wants to find an in-between: delivering good governance and economic results, but also with effective Party structures so top leaders can effectively execute their vision, rein in vested interests, and get all organs of the Party pointed in the same direction. That means ramping up the Leninist aspects of internal Party management.
You will often see [Xi’s] administration promulgating new rules and regulations, laws, Party guidelines. In the National People’s Congress, we haven’t historically seen such levels of legislative work. They have put down in black and white a lot of these things that might not have been considered necessary to say explicitly before, prescribing exemplary behavior for both citizens and Party members. Dangji [党纪, Party discipline] is stricter than guofa [国法, national law]. Party regulations are far more restrictive as a code of behavior. Some of the biggest changes introduced under Xi include new disciplinary regulations, clarifying processes, and penalties. In 2015, for example, he introduced this regulation against wangyi Zhongyang [妄议中央, speaking out of turn, or rashly, against the Party Center]. There is no room for freelancing when discussing matters of the Party Center.
How important is ideology today? 10 or 15 years ago, Marxism in China was considered a bit passé, almost a joke.
If you mean ideology like Marxist-Leninism, Party members have to be conversant with that, at least superficially. In 2018, on the [200th] anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, Xi led a propaganda push to study the Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, those early communist writings. People said, “Xi Jinping is leaning into the hardcore stuff.” He was, it’s true, the first leader in a long time to invest so much public effort in getting people to read such things. But in my experience, talking to people within the system, looking at the reading materials for their mandatory political study sessions, the people themselves are not necessarily ideological. They’re not studying it like academics, not engaging like a graduate student. That is not required. What is required is that people show their willingness to study. What really matters day-to-day is not so much Marx, but Xi Jinping Thought. That is the number one thing for these regular political study sessions that Party members must attend, whether ordinary SOE [state-owned enterprise] Party members or senior Politburo members.
Reading Xi Jinping Thought, there’s nothing essentially Marxist or Leninist about it. A lot of it is just about what makes China a strong country, and the things we must deliver to make China the great nation that we know it is. The student’s ability to regurgitate the mantras is key. Xi’s ideological emphasis is not so much making people good Marxists, it’s making people good cogs in the Leninist machine, showing willingness to participate in these rituals.
What are Xi’s economic policies? For decades, the Chinese state prioritized growth. Now, there’s concern that has changed.
From Xi’s perspective, he is not saying that we should not have growth, but he would argue that the growth China had was too focused on raw numbers, the blind pursuit of more GDP that doesn’t take into consideration distribution of wealth, benefit to the majority of people. You can argue there are elements of his Maoist upbringing that influence him: He frequently cites Maoist slogans about “common prosperity,” making sure that Chinese society is more egalitarian. He calls upon that spirit and nostalgia.
What Xi is trying to do is steer China closer to what it professes to be: a socialist state. It aspires to be a modern socialist power. Socialism, he’s actually serious about it. It’s not cynical. He believes China should be a more equal society. He thinks China has gone too far in one direction over the last few decades, and wants to recalibrate. He’s not an economist, so he sets the direction and entrusts delivery to his underlings. Xi Jinping doesn’t want to destroy the economy. He has gone to lengths to offer reassurances to the private sector, but signals that the private sector cannot blindly pursue its own narrow interests.
Because of how this message was implemented, a lot of private entrepreneurs and foreign investors are scared. They are realizing he’s serious. Private entrepreneurs are now rounded up for doing things that in the past the authorities would have tolerated or even actively encouraged. For a long time, foreign investors were welcomed with open arms. Now, they are expected to recognize that foreigners are guests of China, they’re on China’s terms. Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic [and Xi’s draconian pandemic management policies], where we saw the extent to which he’s willing to ride roughshod over private sector interests, many people are finally thinking they can’t work with this.
In China’s foreign policy, observers have noted a shift from Deng Xiaoping’s low-key “hide and bide” stance to a more assertive “wolf warrior” diplomacy. Is this one of Xi’s signature policies?
That shift started before Xi. Even under Hu Jintao, there were signs that China was trying to assert itself more abroad. In terms of economic statecraft, we saw use of trade pressure to exert leverage before Xi, for example with Norway [the suspension of salmon imports after Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010]. Elements of “wolf warrior” diplomacy were visible in moments when Chinese diplomats were truculent and brash about “core interests” like Tibet, when the Dalai Lama was at the peak of global prominence and influence. Under Xi, you see these displays more often on a wider range of issues. Chinese diplomats are taking up Xi’s spirit of struggle, using harsh language.
In diplomacy broadly, Xi himself is also leading from the front. He is the most traveled PRC leader ever, and he has welcomed the most foreign visitors to Beijing, at a greater frequency than any predecessor. He has invested more money in diplomatic outreach. The foreign affairs budget has increased; there are more Chinese embassies and consulates around the world than before. It flows from Xi’s core political agenda.
What kind of legacy does Xi want to leave?
Only he truly knows. I think you can take him at face value when he talks about things like the “China Dream” and the “Two Centenaries” goals [for certain policy achievements by the 100th anniversaries of the Party’s founding in 1921, and the PRC’s founding in 1949]. Often, these slogans are vague and amorphous goals, so you can never really fail, you can always redefine them.
Xi probably wants to be remembered as someone who restored China to its rightful place in the world, whatever that might mean in terms of concrete achievements. The general vibe—and he has already delivered on this part—is a China that gets global attention, a China that is recognized by governments around the world as an important political and economic power, and that is dealt with as such. You could even spin the perceived negatives of “wolf warrior” diplomacy as positives, because if the West is taking China seriously, then you know China is strong, because China is seen as a threat.
There are other issues where the legacy might be more mixed, domestic issues where Xi has set expectations of delivery and hasn't quite gotten there. Poverty alleviation, anti-corruption—those are as close to being clear victories as he has.
Then there are other things that you can’t dress up despite best efforts, like the Xiong’an economic region [south of Beijing], which hasn’t really taken off. The Belt and Road Initiative is not exactly a failure, but is not the resounding achievement that Xi would have liked. It will persist, but the limits of these projects, the limits of Xi’s ambitions, are becoming apparent. Some things you cannot will into reality.
There is a saying that Mao Zedong achieved jianguo [建国, founding the new Chinese republic], Deng Xiaoping fuguo [富国, enriching China], and Xi has presided over qiangguo [强国, strengthening China]. If we say Xi’s objectives are for China to be economically powerful, militarily powerful, internationally respected, you can argue he’s done much of these three elements, especially the last two.
A major part of legacy is succession. How much more time does Xi want on the job? When will he feel satisfied he did his best? It’s a dynamic problem, it’s not just about what you achieved, it’s about whether you can find someone to carry forward your vision. Xi has seen himself what happens when succession is botched.
Then there is Taiwan. This is one of those things everyone has an opinion on, but only Xi himself can answer. We’ve heard many anecdotes from people who have been in meetings with him, talked to him about Taiwan. He seems to hold this issue more closely and passionately than his recent predecessors. The language he uses creates a sense of urgency. But the realities of the situation are difficult. There’s a reason why Mao Zedong didn’t do it. There’s a reason why Deng Xiaoping didn’t do it.
The gap in relative strength of militaries across the Taiwan strait is big and probably going to grow bigger [in Beijing’s favor]. The sense of identity among people on Taiwan is drifting far from being “Chinese” or identifying with the mainland. This drift is a trend you can’t really reverse without taking military and political control of Taiwan. It’s not something you can change by force of will. Many issues in Taiwan now are seen through the lens of Beijing influence, so the more Xi does, the more it’s perceived negatively. In this respect, I don’t think Xi and the Party are better positioned than before. It’s arguably worse. You could put some of this on Xi himself. Can you resolve that peacefully? It’s hard to see. Is the alternative plausible? If you use force to take Taiwan back, that’s jeopardizing your achievements for 1.4 billion people on the mainland. The conditions for a war of choice undertaken by Xi are, at this moment, hard to foresee. You could end up in a war by accident, the lesser option of seizing Taiwan’s outlying islands [closer to the mainland China coast], or a blockade, to take political control by force.
We updated our suite of graphics tracking the impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law. The law, which went into effect on June 30, 2020, and the allegation of “sedition,” have been used to arrest 286 individuals, charge 156, and convict 68 as of the end of 2023.
Reasons cited for some of the arrests in the second half of 2023 include wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong” and sharing social media posts of the “Glory” protest anthem. 10 people were arrested in August for their connection to the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, which received donations to advocate for sanctions against Hong Kong and to assist organizations supporting people in exile.
You can see our full dataset and graphics here.
In his article “Authoritarian Privacy” for the University of Chicago Law Review, Mark Jia writes: “Privacy laws are traditionally associated with democracy. Yet autocracies increasingly have them.” In this ChinaFile Q&A, Jia and Samm Sacks engage in an exchange about what has motivated the Chinese government to enact and enforce a range of laws on information privacy and the implications for understanding the role of privacy laws in non-democratic states.
Samm Sacks: Outside observers have commented that China appears to have a split identity when it comes to privacy: rules limit how firms handle citizens’ data, while the state has unchecked surveillance powers. Is this dichotomy accurate? What does privacy mean in China, particularly in the wake of COVID, when the scale and reach of government surveillance and the use of data-intensive technologies for tracking and monitoring appears to have intensified?
Mark Jia: I agree with the view that China’s privacy laws are meant to preserve a broad “exceptional zone” for state surveillance in areas like intelligence collection, law enforcement, and domestic stability maintenance. I agree too that a lot of the rules and their enforcement have focused on how companies handle citizens’ data. For example, the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL for short), China’s first comprehensive privacy law enacted in 2021, establishes greater compliance obligations for major Internet platforms, such as a requirement to establish an independent body to “supervise” their privacy protection work.
But I think the reality is more complex than a private-public dichotomy would suggest. Most notably, the PIPL explicitly applies to state organs. The aim is not just to discipline firms but also lower-level bureaucratic entities that are abusing or misusing citizens’ data. To take one somewhat mundane example, my article discusses a case in which a local prosecutor discovers that a county-level agricultural bureau has been disclosing information on machinery purchase subsidies online without removing the personal information of over 1,000 farmers. The local procuratorate (prosecutor’s office) initiated a procedure that essentially asked the bureau to fix these violations, and the bureau complied.
The application of privacy law to state entities stems from a realization that some of the most egregious instances of data abuses in recent years, especially during COVID, emanated from state or quasi-state entities, not just private individuals or market actors. Most famously, perhaps, local officials in Henan once assigned red COVID health codes to a group of citizens to prevent them from traveling to protest the freezing of their bank deposits. Authorities have been sufficiently alarmed by these practices that as early as 2020, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) issued a notice urging governments to follow personal information protection guidelines in their pandemic-control work. (At this point, the PIPL had not yet been enacted.)
I take this as supporting my general argument that China’s privacy laws were enacted in large part to highlight its responsive governance in the face of new vulnerabilities and dependencies that have arisen out of China’s data-driven society. If you look at how the national legislature and state media have framed China’s recent privacy laws, they have sought to position the central Party-state as a champion of individual privacy rights against incursion from various digital bad actors—individuals, firms, even local governments. Notably missing from this list of privacy intruders is the central Party-state itself, of course, despite its leading role as a surveillant. In this regard, privacy law may also be a means of distracting the population from the central Party-state’s own privacy incursions by redirecting attention to others.
You write that of the 130 countries that have enacted privacy laws, only about half are considered “free” by the nonprofit Freedom House. Why did you choose China as a case study for the role privacy laws play in these countries and to develop your theory of “authoritarian privacy”?
The most immediate aim of the piece is to explain China’s turn to privacy law. I do not claim that China’s situation is universal. But I do think that a close study of China’s privacy story can help draw out some hypotheses as to why authoritarian countries have been enacting privacy laws at their present speed and scale. In the article, I discuss four objectives that motivated the central government to enact privacy laws: to support its digital economy, to expand its geopolitical influence, to enhance its national security, and (most unappreciated in my view) to respond to data-related social grievances. Not all of these motivations apply to every authoritarian ruler. China’s geopolitical goals, for instance, are decidedly more ambitious than those of Saudi Arabia or Venezuela. But it’s also the case that at least some of these motivations likely present in other authoritarian examples. The government in Vietnam, for instance, has also been highly invested in growing its digital economy, deepening its surveillance state, protecting data security, and addressing digital abuses online. Vietnam is quite close, I believe, to enacting its own information privacy law.
Moreover, I think China is an interesting case because it is both the world’s leading surveillance state and a home to comprehensive personal data protections along lines inspired by the European Union’s Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is considered the gold standard in information privacy protection law today. Because China crystallizes that apparent paradox, I thought it could help suggest dynamics that might exist elsewhere.
We often talk about the Chinese government as a monolithic entity, especially when it comes to data. What are the ways in which Party-state actors at both central and local levels have responded to the so-called “datafication of China,” and what are some examples of their competing interests in datafication?
I draw on a definition of “datafication” as the process of “taking all aspects of life and turning them into data.” I think you’re absolutely right that central and local governments in China are not always 100 percent aligned in their data-related interests and priorities, including with respect to privacy. For example, some local governments that are highly invested in supporting local industry may be less willing to saddle those companies with the higher compliance costs associated with strict adherence to national data protection laws. On the other end of the spectrum, some localities may carry out central mandates more aggressively than central leaders might prefer. For example, a common pandemic-control measure implemented in residential communities required residents to use facial recognition to access their buildings. This became a sore spot for many. In 2021, the Supreme People’s Court included, in a legal notice clarifying the law on facial-recognition technology in civil cases, a provision explicitly calling on all people’s courts to “support” residents who request alternative methods of identification if their building managers mandate facial recognition technology for access. So here you see the center starting to reign in local practices that were initially implemented to carry out central mandates.
What has been the role of Chinese courts in enforcing privacy protections?
The PIPL provides for both administrative enforcement and judicial enforcement. The most prominent cases of enforcement, the ones we hear about in the news, tend to involve administrative processes. But courts have played an important role as well. It’s still early to draw general conclusions, as the PIPL is a relatively new law and legal disputes necessarily take time to work their way through the legal system. But early evidence on the ground suggests a few interesting trends.
First, in addition to what you might think of as ordinary civil suits against privacy violators or criminal prosecutions for data fraud and theft, we see a rise in public interest data protection suits brought by local prosecutors. In one Hangzhou case, for example, a local prosecutor brought a public interest suit against a short-video app for violating the privacy rights of minors. The court supervised a mediation agreement that required the firm to follow a compliance schedule, to pay out compensation to various children’s welfare groups, and to issue a public apology in a state-owned newspaper. Some of these prosecutor-initiated public interest suits have targeted state entities—usually for a failure to adequately supervise privacy rights protection in their jurisdictions, but sometimes for direct privacy violations too.
The second trend to note is more of a caveat. China’s law-enforcement apparatus may be mobilized now to carry out the privacy law’s socially protective mandate (and to boast about their success online), but these same agencies are also charged with balancing assertions of privacy rights against considerable state interests. In one case, for example, a Shandong court denied a plaintiff’s request for a pharmacy to delete her personal information because the pharmacy was not authorized to do so under local public health regulations devised for pandemic control. This shows that there are hard limits to how far law enforcers are willing to go.
Policymakers in Washington, D.C. have expressed concerns that Chinese-owned software applications threaten Americans’ data security and privacy—that Chinese laws compelling companies to cooperate with intelligence services mean Americans’ sensitive data could end up in Chinese government hands. Are Washington’s anxieties warranted based on your research into how Beijing has enacted privacy laws?
A key question for Chinese policymakers when drafting privacy legislation was how to further its various objectives (including predominantly domestic goals) while maintaining flexibility for state surveillance. It is well established that Chinese firms are required to share information with intelligence services under various laws, including the National Intelligence Law. The PIPL does not fundamentally alter these obligations, and I have seen no commentaries suggesting otherwise.
This replicates a broader pattern that fairly describes much of Chinese law generally: even as the Party-state has legislated in various areas to serve its national objectives, it has done so through a legal regime that is carefully crafted to keep its own hands untied in core areas of national interest, including state security. In other words, the Party-state has sought to extract the benefits of law while minimizing its costs. I would hypothesize that a similar calculus also helps explain the substance of privacy laws in other authoritarian settings.
It’s refreshing to hear a perspective focusing on domestic factors underpinning China’s privacy regime because so much discussion I hear about developments inside China look at everything through the lens of U.S. national security and great power competition. Why did you choose to frame your argument as a domestic legitimization story?
I do see this paper as offering a corrective to a troubling tendency now in our national discourse to understand China primarily through the lens of U.S.-China competition. This is evocative of the Cold War insofar as normative ideological and geopolitical frameworks are increasingly used to structure our descriptive understandings of reality.
Many analyses in the think tank literature frame the PIPL as a top-down effort to grow China’s digital economy, to enhance the country’s security, and to expand China’s data influence abroad. These explanations aren’t wrong for what they say, but they miss a critical part of the story: the Party-state’s perceived need to address data privacy incursions through socially protective legislation. This is how privacy law is discussed in Party reports, legislative documents, and state media, and it is how prosecutors, courts, and other agencies have framed their enforcement work as well. Party-state documents rarely shy away from boasting of geopolitical goals where they are relevant, and yet official PIPL-related documents scarcely mention them.
The reason why I think a lot of existing explanations miss or understate the domestic legitimation piece of the story is because those accounts tend to take a fairly reductionist view of China, either as a monolith that is locked in geopolitical competition with the West, or as featuring an all-powerful totalitarian government that can essentially impose its will upon its population. But not every major piece of legislation in China today is principally motivated by geopolitics, and despite Xi Jinping’s ascendance as paramount leader in China, his rule continues to require a high level of responsiveness. Consider, in this regard, Xi’s abrupt reversal of the country’s pandemic policies after the lockdown protests last fall.
How would you answer the question raised by Jamie Horsley (in a piece by this title): “How will China’s privacy law apply to the Chinese state?” How does the PIPL apply to state organs, and how does it apply to companies? Is it empowering security authorities to demand greater data access from the private sector because now they have a legal authority they can cite in making data requests?
While there is an entire section in Chapter II of the PIPL devoted to state organs, that section is fairly abstract. It states that the law generally applies to state organs’ handling of personal information, while enumerating several exceptions at fairly high levels of generality. The result is that much is left to implementation. From what I have seen so far, state organs in China have sometimes been disciplined for privacy violations, often for what you might think of as inadvertent publication of private information, rather than any sort of malicious abuse of personal data. I gave an example earlier from Jiangxi of an agricultural bureau that (accidentally, it seems) disclosed the personal information of farmers online in the course of reporting local subsidies. I’ve seen other cases where a government organ was disciplined for failing to remove identifying information from various documents posted in the “Government Information Disclosure” column of its website. I would guess that drafters of the PIPL envisioned enforcement of the law against state organs for more serious violations, given the kinds of national controversies discussed earlier that helped pave the way for the Law’s enactment. For now though, initial enforcement patterns as to state agencies seem to reflect a measure of institutional and political caution in the early days of the law’s implementation.
China’s technology firms have sometimes balked at sharing their data with government agencies, and have often cited a lack of legal basis as grounds for refusal. My impression is that this dynamic is beginning to change, not only because of the PIPL’s clearer specification of legal authorities, but because the state-led campaigns targeting the tech sector that started in late 2020 and 2021 have fundamentally shifted the relationship between the technology sector and the central Party-state. As Professor Angela Zhang has well documented, the Party-state had employed a relatively lax approach to tech regulation in the years before Jack Ma’s fateful address in late 2020. Now that the pendulum has swung the other direction, I would imagine technology firms are more willing to share data with central regulators when asked.
I agree that the space for companies to push back is shrinking as the Party institutionalizes its power over the private sector. I have wondered what this dynamic means for the longstanding push and pull between economic goals and national and domestic security goals of the leadership. Economic growth goals have long been a backstop against implementation of some of the worst or most hardline elements of China’s cybersecurity and data regulations because officials recognize pushing companies too hard could come at a cost to investment in their jurisdictions. We saw this with data localization, with data access requests, and other cybersecurity-related audits where companies sometimes had more space to maneuver. It sounds like you are somewhat pessimistic that this space will continue, but I do wonder about it given the economic pressure facing China’s leaders. How do economic imperatives impact the way China’s privacy law is implemented and enforced?
If China’s economic prospects worsen, it’s plausible to me that the center may decide to relax enforcement of not only its privacy standards, but other laws that create regulatory burdens for firms in areas like antitrust, consumer protection, and financial regulation. The costs to popular support associated with a deteriorating economy may be steeper than the legitimation and securitization benefits of a zealously enforced privacy law, especially at the margins. But I think the old days of completely lax regulations are over. Central leaders have come to appreciate more fully the political risks of overseeing unchecked technology firms helmed by ambitious entrepreneurs sitting atop mountains of sensitive data. They know too much now to turn back the clock completely.
On May 25, 2023, The New York Times published my guest essay “Like It or Not, America Needs Chinese Scientists,” on American higher education’s engagement with China in the STEM fields. The article was subsequently translated by the Chinese State-run Global Times newspaper without my prior knowledge or permission, appearing both in print and digital forms.
The Global Times omitted and altered key parts of the essay. While a few of the changes simply shorten the piece or cut passages that might not be as interesting to Chinese readers, most of the deletions and changes eliminate or blunt criticism of China, altering the tone of the essay. The Global Times also removed all of the links that appeared in my article, presumably because at least some of them led to sites that are generally inaccessible within China.
Fortunately, The New York Times also did a complete Chinese translation in both simplified and traditional characters.
I offer an annotated English version of the original essay with notes on the changes the Global Times made in its Chinese translation.
Presumably because of requests from The New York Times, the Global Times translation of the article was taken down from the Internet. However, documenting differences between the original and the Global Times translation can help us to understand what Chinese censors might find acceptable, although the standard of what can be published certainly changes over time and in different contexts.
This week, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced it would cease collecting data on youth unemployment. The news came after nearly a decade of poor job prospects for Chinese people ages 16-24, often reported on by international media as mainly a problem affecting recent college graduates. Earlier this summer, ChinaFile’s Jessica Batke spoke with sociologist Eli Friedman, who studies international labor, about the reasons for joblessness among China’s young people and how it is covered.
The writer Hao Qun, who publishes under the pen name Murong Xuecun, has spent the past two decades exploring Chinese society through his literature. After studying at Beijing’s prestigious China University of Politics and Law, he worked in the private sector. He began his writing career in 2002 online, writing a series on gambling, sex, and drugs in China, which he later published as his debut novel Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu, the English edition of which was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008. In 2010, he won China’s People’s Literature Prize, which is presented by the state-affiliated China Writer’s Association, for his non-fiction book The Missing Ingredient. His acceptance speech was a critique of censorship in the publishing industry and of his own acquiescence to it, and when he was unable to deliver it at the prize ceremony, he delivered it instead at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong. In the years that followed, he faced mounting obstacles to speaking his mind in China. His Weibo account with 8.5 million followers was deleted in 2013. But he wrote frequently for The New York Times about the limits on expression in China. In 2020, Murong traveled to Wuhan and documented the lives of eight ordinary people at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. He left China in order to safely publish the resulting book, Deadly Quiet City, which was released earlier this year in the United States. He now lives in Australia.
Angeli Datt spoke with Murong at the offices of the writers’ advocacy organization PEN America in New York City.
China’s technological prowess is frequently invoked by U.S. policymakers hoping to get votes, attention, or enough bipartisan support to pass a bill. Competition with China was a central motivating factor in federal legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, not to mention the work of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. “Beating China”—specifically in science and technology development—is a key driver of U.S. governance and, ahead of the 2024 presidential race, elections.
George Washington University Assistant Professor of Political Science Jeffrey Ding published a recent article that explains why measuring a state’s scientific and technological power should include not only how many innovations a country can check off, but also the degree to which new technologies are integrated into the economy and society. Ding spoke with Johanna Costigan about his new paper. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. —Johanna Costigan
Johanna Costigan: Can you explain the distinction between innovation capacity and diffusion capacity?
Jeffrey Ding: Innovation capacity refers to a state’s ability to pioneer new-to-the-world breakthroughs in science and technology. Diffusion capacity refers to a state’s ability to spread those innovations across a wide range of productive processes in an economy. I argue in my paper that we tend to gravitate toward measures of innovation and pay insufficient attention to diffusion.
How did diffusion occur in the second Industrial Revolution in the U.S., and why does that example show diffusion is an essential metric?
In the late 19th century, the U.S. was not at the forefront of science and technology—our best and brightest went to Germany to study. Even though other nations were leading the way in fields like chemical engineering, the U.S. was much stronger in terms of diffusion capacity; it was better at applying those uses across a wide range of processes. If you only looked at which countries were winning the most Nobel Prizes or had the most advanced research institutes, you would be underestimating the scientific and technological prowess of the U.S.
Assessments that are more oriented around diffusion capacity would have predicted the U.S. to sustain its economic rise and become the preeminent economic power. Back then, there wasn’t a global innovation index, but the case study was to go back and see if we rank different countries based on this, only using the innovation indicators provides an incorrect view. Diffusion is central to a state’s ability to convert science and technology into economic strength.
You write that academic research in the U.S. was more closely tied to commerce than it was in Europe, which allowed American breakthroughs to spread more rapidly. Given the close relationship between government and industry in the PRC, why might that not be the case in contemporary China?
The government acts as a bottleneck within China’s scitech ecosystem, stifling organic industry-university collaborations. A lot of the research happens at government institutions as opposed to corporate-sponsored R&D [research and development]. The channels between universities and industry are not as robust, so some of that has to do with surrounding legal regimes and whether university research can be translated into a startup company. Unlike China, the U.S. has a really good set of legal rules that enable that to happen.
But Chinese companies are trying to address this; more AI companies, for example, are trying to set up labs in universities to foster that. But if you look at co-authorship rates in publications on AI (papers that have at least one author from a university and one from industry), those rates are very low in China compared to countries in Europe and the U.S. A lot of the story here is just the vestiges of central planning that are still in China’s scitech ecosystem and that just don’t foster the organic fast-acting processing that is required for diffusion.
How would you characterize American assessments of China’s science and technology power? What’s missing?
The consensus significantly overstates China’s scitech capability. One recent example from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which while it is not American has been used to justify more extreme China policy, says China is leading the U.S. in 37 of 44 considered technologies, all of which were focused on innovation. (I don’t even think that conclusion is accurate based just on innovation.) It reflects the United States’ obsession with innovation capacity when it comes to assessing scitech power. Even if you go back and review Biden’s first remarks to Congress, he argued that China is closing in quickly and that it’s a race to see who can dominate new innovations in these technologies.
The contribution of my paper is partly to argue that assumptions about innovation shape the perception that China is improving rapidly and has already taken over the U.S. in some critical technologies. Reorienting ourselves to a diffusion-centric framework is an important first step to having a more balanced understanding of what’s happening in China’s scitech ecosystem.
Members of the Biden administration like Jake Sullivan have described moves like export controls aimed at China as “narrowly focused on technology that could tilt the military balance.” What do you think of that depiction, and how do judgments of relative military strength fit into the diffusion/innovation breakdown?
When it comes to competition with China over military AI applications, I think the Biden administration’s approach is overly preoccupied with maintaining a lead in innovation capacity. Their theory of victory, in my view, seems to be all about preventing China from building the biggest and baddest autonomous weapon, trained on the largest amount of data using the most amount of computing power. If the history of military electrification is a useful guide for how AI will affect the military balance of power, as I argue in a recent article, then AI’s most substantial impact on military power will take decades as advances diffuse across a broad range of applications in logistics, decryption, targeting, and intelligence. Ensuring that the military is able to tap into a broad base of AI engineering talent is a more effective route to ensuring that AI’s effect on the military balance will favor the U.S.
You write: “A rebalanced evaluation of China’s potential for S&T leadership requires looking beyond multinational corporations like Huawei, first-tier cities like Beijing, and flashy R&D numbers to the humble undertaking of diffusion.” Why do you think such limited analyses are tempting? Why are they dangerous?
Firstly, it’s just a lot harder to get diffusion capacity indicators. Many metrics of innovation, like government R&D funding indicators, patent rates, and publication numbers are all tracked, whereas it takes more work to get indicators of diffusion capacity. Finding systematic and reliable numbers of diffusion capacity is crucial.
And misleading assessments carry a few dangers. Having an accurate sense of where you stand provides a solid foundation for science and technology policy. There is something to be said about having a true—or truer—understanding of the world. Additionally, overestimating China’s scitech capabilities may lead the U.S. to engage in more reckless policies and provide more momentum for containment-type measures that backfire on both sides. It could lead to the mentality we saw in the Cold War where the U.S. was concerned about the missile gap with the Soviet Union that turned out to be illusory and resulted in wasted expenditures, spiraling fears, and an arms race that put the two superpowers on a path toward conflict.
There are people in the U.S. government who probably agree with me in that a lot of assessments on China’s tech development are overhyped, but they think it’s necessary to pump up China’s prowess in order to motivate certain policies. But that could easily backfire and is a dangerous precedent to set. While that justification might in some cases be used to make sound decisions, in other cases it could be used to enact dangerous policies.
The Tiananmen Square crisis in 1989 was a turning point for China. Weeks of student-led demonstrations turned into the largest protest for political reform in the history of the People’s Republic. The bloody military crackdown that crushed the movement on the night of June 3-4, 1989, had far-reaching consequences, not only for China’s development, but for its relations with the rest of the world.
One reason was that Tiananmen Square was also a watershed moment in the history of the media. It generated unparalleled international coverage and became a defining moment in the Information Age: the first time a popular uprising in an authoritarian state was broadcast live across the globe. The images from that time—the Goddess of Democracy, the man in front of the tank—became enduring symbols of popular resistance to injustice. The coverage of Tiananmen redefined the relationship between the press, public opinion, and foreign policymaking and continues to influence both Chinese politics and international perceptions of China to this day.
I was CNN’s Beijing bureau chief in 1989. My new book, Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic, is based on interviews with more than 100 journalists who have covered China from 1945 to the present day. The excerpt below includes stories from reporters who covered the protests and bloodshed in Beijing in the spring of 1989.
The People’s Liberation Army assault began on the western side of Chang An Avenue. John Pomfret of the AP and Scott Savitt of UPI were watching at the Muxudi intersection.
John Pomfret, Associated Press: The military began to fire. I saw people falling.
Scott Savitt, United Press International: I can hear it right in my mind like I am reliving it—“ pa pa pa pa pa.” And those are AK-47 [rifles] firing on semiautomatic.
On the balcony of CNN’s room at the Beijing Hotel, I had a clear view a few hundred meters down Chang An to the north end of the Square. We managed to keep a phone line open to CNN headquarters in Atlanta. I could see red tracer bullets, and hear the occasional crackle of gunfire, as I broadcast live, telling viewers, “The assault on Tiananmen Square is now underway.”
Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times: I hopped on my bicycle and hurtled toward Tiananmen. You could hear the gunfire and the crowds were rushing the other way. And I keep thinking this is a crazy job where there’s gunfire, everyone in their right mind is going the other way, and you’re going towards it.
Melinda Liu, Newsweek: The bullets are so close that you not only hear the percussion of the shot, you hear the “zing.” I could see people being shot, bloody bodies being put onto these three-wheel ambulance things, people shouting all kinds of stuff at soldiers, and just total fear and chaos.
Cynde Strand, CNN: Bullets would fly past us and you’d hear crying and screaming. There were moments of fear. There were moments of—what the hell are we doing here? But this is what you are a journalist for. This is right where we need to be. We are witnessing history. This is what makes a difference. There is no record unless you are standing there.
Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times: I was pretty scared. On the Square itself, I tried to keep a layer of people between me and the troops, but I remember realizing that I was a few inches taller than most of the Chinese, so it was a pretty critical part of my real estate that was exposed. There were people in the crowd who were getting shot. My notebook from that evening was damp with sweat just from fear. I ran to the Xiehe Hospital. There were lots of bloody people in the hallways and everywhere. One of the ambulance drivers showed me bullet holes in his ambulance. One of the things that shook me was a young man, roughly my age, who had been shot in the back and who was fighting for his life. He hadn’t done anything riskier than I had. His luck has just run out.
Jim Laurie, ABC News: We were never able to determine the extent of the deaths and injuries that night. All we knew was that there were tremendous numbers and that the hospitals were in a panic mode. My view is that whether it was a hundred or a thousand, it was incredibly devastating, not only for the people who were killed, but for the reputation of China.
While all of this was happening, I continued my live reporting. At mid-afternoon Washington time—around 2:00 a.m. in Beijing—Secretary of State James Baker appeared on CNN, having been previously scheduled for a weekend talk show. I did a quick phone update, talking about seeing bullets and bodies, and then host Charles Bierbauer turned to Baker and said, “Mr. Secretary, does the U.S. government now take a stronger demarche against the Chinese government?”
James Baker, Secretary of State: It caught me by surprise. I was on the air as it began to happen. I was very much caught on the spot. I do remember vividly thinking to myself, “How do I handle this one?” I remember being caught flat-footed.
Bernard Shaw, CNN: I think you could say that was the beginning of the “CNN effect,” whereby time is truncated, and reactions and decisions are made based on events as they’re happening in real time, which puts a lot of pressure on foreign capitals.
John Pomfret, Associated Press: I stayed in the center of the Square with the remaining students until they conducted their negotiations with the military, and I walked out with them. You were involved with the simple logistics of doing your job. But it was the most incredible experience I’ve ever had in my life.
Cynde Strand, CNN: We came off the Square with them. Some were dejected, crying. But some of them were still singing. Then there was the dilemma. We’ve got great tape. How are we going to get it back? This old man in a Mao jacket was driving one of those bicycles with a flat panel. He let us lay on that, and the students gave us blankets, and we covered everything over us, and he rode us back to the Beijing hotel.
The next morning, Monday June 5, AP photographer Jeff Widener was on the balcony of a room at the Beijing Hotel.
Jeff Widener, Associated Press: I see this long column of tanks, and I’m thinking, “Well, that’s not a bad picture. I’ve got a long lens. It’ll be a nice compression shot.” And then this guy with shopping bags walks out. I’m just waiting for him to get shot, but It’s too far away. I look back at the bed, and I had a lens doubler, which would make my 400 an 800. Do I gamble? Do I go back to the bed? Maybe I lose the shot, or do I just shoot this wider? So I took a chance. I ran to the bed, got it, put it on the camera, open the aperture up all the way. One, two, three shots. Then it was over. Some people came, grabbed this guy, and they ran off. I took the film and asked a foreign student if he could smuggle it in his underwear back to the AP office.
Liu Heung-shing, Associated Press: Another 45 minutes passed. An American guy with a ponytail and a backpack showed up with an AP envelope. Our Japanese photographer soaked the film. I looked at that frame—and that’s the frame. It went out.
John Sheahan, CBS News: No one who has ever seen that is going to forget that picture.
Jeff Widener, Associated Press: For a lot of people, this guy represents everything in our lives that we’re battling, because we’re all battling something. We still don’t know who this guy is. It’s almost appropriate because it’s almost like the Unknown Soldier. He’s really become a symbol for a lot of people. For me, it was just another assignment. It didn’t sink in till later that I had something really big.
These datasets list the official names of all the places (political units) in China. This information is openly available on the Chinese government’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) website, but not in an easily downloadable or searchable format. We compiled these lists in CSV format and we’ve published them here in the hopes they may be of use to other researchers.
Over the past several years, there has been an active debate about Chinese influence overseas. Amidst allegations that Beijing has influenced foreign elections and politicians, state newswire Xinhua has expanded into one of the largest news agencies worldwide, and state-linked media companies have taken over Chinese-language media sources internationally. Joshua Kurlantzick discusses this landscape in his newest book, Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World. Kurlantzick spoke with ChinaFile Editorial Fellow Abby Seiff about his book. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
We updated our suite of graphics tracking the impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law. It now includes information on the 248 individuals arrested between July 2020, when the law went into effect, and March 31, 2023. Information on these individuals’ cases, compiled by our partners at the Georgetown Center for Asian Law, includes grounds for arrest, and, where applicable, resulting charges and convictions.
In January 2023, police arrested six individuals for selling books about the 2019 protests at a book fair.
In a recent working paper, scholars Yutian An and Taisu Zhang argue that local urban governments in China emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic with far more muscle and clout than they have ever had before. Unlike in the past several decades, the sub-district (jiedao, 街道, the lowest formal level of government) and the neighborhood community (shequ, 社区, technically self-governing entities below even the sub-district) now function as robust units of social control.
Though the central government had long considered—and vacillated over—giving more authority to the jiedao and shequ, the onset of the pandemic definitively tipped the balance in favor of providing these entities with greater resources and allowing them to act with more agency. This shift means that the Party-state is more present in people’s everyday lives, able to both provide services and conduct surveillance at a highly granular level.
Taisu Zhang recently spoke with ChinaFile’s Jessica Batke about this momentous change in how the Party-state interacts with its citizens. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Gulchehra Hoja is a longtime broadcaster with Radio Free Asia’s (RFA) Uyghur Service. She grew up in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and was a successful TV personality and journalist with Chinese state media there. She later left China to join RFA and provide uncensored news coverage from the United States. ChinaFile’s Jessica Batke spoke recently with Hoja about her new memoir, A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs. The book describes Hoja’s upbringing in a rapidly changing society and political environment, her work as a TV host in China, her decision to leave her homeland, reporting on the ongoing crisis there, and the process of building a new life in a foreign country. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Jessica Batke: In some ways, your story is a remarkable one: you come from a long line of cultural luminaries. But in other ways, your story is unfortunately typical for a Uyghur living abroad: you are separated from your loved ones, who are undergoing persecution and oppression back in your homeland. Your book opens with a horrible statistic: 24 members of your family were taken away by the state. Do you have a sense of how common that kind of mass detention within a single family is?
Gulchehra Hoja: I am not the only secondary victim of this genocide. We live in another country, and starting in 2016, [all of us] lost contact with our family members back home. Not only me, but all of us. We didn’t know anything about our family for a year, or two years. Even right now, many Uyghurs still don’t know where their loved ones are. Their homes were destroyed. Phone calls cannot go through. You cannot find your relatives, or your neighbors, or your friends. There’s nobody there. So I am just one example.
I was able to learn the news about my family because the Chinese government intentionally wanted me to know and wanted to silence me by using this information to damage me. I think this is the way they want to give journalists a signal: If you don’t stay quiet, your family is going to be in trouble. So it’s not only me. It’s very common, the devastation we’re facing.
A few of my coworkers didn’t know what had happened to their families. And then some of them used their contacts with embassies to learn from the Chinese government, four or five years after the fact, that all their family members had been sentenced to 10 or more years because [their relatives] live in a free country. Even if [these relatives abroad] hadn’t said anything against the Chinese government’s policy.
It’s unimaginable for people living in a free country. But for the Uyghurs, that’s the situation for all of us.
It seems like Chinese authorities are especially targeting anyone they think is good at communicating and getting information out.
Yes, you can say I am a special target. Because they didn’t stop after they arrested my family members. In 2021, they accused me openly, saying I’m a terrorist. So they’re still using these kinds of tools and tactics to try and keep us silent. I don’t know what could happen to me or to my family. What can they do? I don’t know.
But I want to let them know: We will die proudly. We aren’t afraid of dying. We aren’t. We’re afraid of losing our freedom and our hope and our dignity. We don’t give up. This is all we have right now.
I wrote the book specifically for this reason. I just want to say to the world: We are not merely victims. We are so much more than that. We are beautiful people, just like you. Because we are different from the Chinese people, because we don’t obey the Chinese government—that’s why they want to destroy us.
In the book, you, and everyone around you, lived in this constant state of choosing, because anything that you did or said could be interpreted as political. Even if you didn’t mean it to be political, even if you just wanted to speak your language, or dance, it could be seen as political.
We were very careful, very careful. Even at home, we were raised with warnings from our parents: “Don’t say these kinds of things in school, don’t say those kinds of things when you’re playing with Han Chinese kids.”
Hearing that all the time reminded us we were different. And we were constantly facing discrimination in school, and society, and the workplace. We all knew it was because we were Uyghurs that we were facing that kind of pressure. So it was actually training you to be smarter in choosing your words, in communicating with people, in choosing what kind of people you should communicate with.
This is actually almost exactly what my next question was about. I feel like in the book you hinted at this sort of duality, in what you knew and how you were allowed to exist. For example, you wrote about the knowledge that you could get from history books, but also a whole other set of knowledge that could only be acquired “in private settings and in low voices.”
That’s why one of my professors in the university said, “Do you know how lucky you are?” I said, “Why?” He said, “You just can learn things sitting at the dining table that a lot of other people cannot learn even in university or reading a book. You are just so lucky because you are your father’s daughter, Abdulqeyyum Hoja’s daughter.” [Abdulqeyyum Hoja was a prominent archaeologist focused on the history of the Uyghur region.] Because I was young, I didn’t really understand it. After I grew up and this stuff was happening to us, then I realized . . . all this memory, you know, it comes back to you. So I was so fortunate, a fortunate girl.
How much do you think the knowledge from your father contributed to your decision, when you did finally go abroad, to stay abroad? Because that seems like such an extraordinary decision to make, leaving behind your family and your career. Do you think it’s because you had knowledge that other people didn’t have?
I dedicated this book to my beloved father, Abdulqeyyum Hoja, who taught me how to love myself, love my people, love my country, and human beings, and dignity, and freedom. So, the hardest part of my life was two decades of time during which I was forbidden to see my father. Conversely, this separation also trained me. It taught me that the love of human beings is unstoppable, regardless of time and space, and that such a misfortune would tighten the bonds of missing hearts.
My father used to tell me that even a stone is precious in the place where it drops. That’s the name of my book as well, “Tash chüshkän yeridä äziz.” We said that all the time. I lived through the deep values of this proverb, which is often used among Uyghurs who are separated from their birthplace.
When I was in the Uyghur region with my father, I always asked his advice when I had to make a decision. And I strongly believe that afterwards, when I was alone, he was inside of me. It wasn’t only me anymore. It was about my father, about my grandpa. The power coming from what they taught me, that’s why making those decisions was not that hard for me. Actually, it was like a cage opened for me. I was flying, carrying their hope. This is not my decision. I feel that they wanted me to make this decision. The cage opened suddenly, just for me. They stayed for other people, for their people, for the land.
You know, all Uyghurs have only one wish: that when they die, they are buried in their birth place. It’s a huge thing. Maybe I still have that hope. But if there’s no chance for me to go back, at least I have the stone from my dad [a rock from his yard he managed to send to her in the U.S.]. I will write to my kids to ask them to bury me with the stone so that I will be with part of my country, my land. This stone is most precious. It is there in my bookcase. I can show you.
Please.
[Hoja retrieves the stone and holds it up.]
This is very special. It smells like home. I don’t know why, but it really smells like home. You know, like after rain touches the soil. It’s the fragrance I love the most. I wish someone could create this fragrance! It’s the most delicious smell in the world. I feel that it heals your soul. How my father found this and sent it to me is magic. And it actually gave me the inspiration to write this book. Yep, this is my treasure. Priceless.
As in many other aspects of public life in China under Xi Jinping, the space for independent inquiry and discussion within the academy has shrunk significantly in recent years. The Xi administration has released a slew of guidelines and communiques cementing the Party’s control over the classroom; state media have criticized university professors for “lacking a sense of identity with the Party’s theories, policies, and sentiments.”
As part of the newly-published compendium New Threats to Academic Freedom in Asia, Jue Jiang, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at SOAS, University of London, examines this change through the system of student informants within China’s universities. “In addition to the high-tech cameras that are already installed in classrooms for monitoring lectures and discussion, student informants are viewed by authorities as key information nodes for a bottom-up, masses-based form of surveillance and control,” writes Jiang. “In this sense, the system of student informants provides a crucial lens for examining academic freedom in China under the leadership of Xi Jinping.”
Jiang interviewed 10 professors working in mainland China, Hong Kong, or Macau about their experiences with student informants. One chilling conclusion: that instructors fortunate enough or obedient enough to avoid getting informed on can develop “a demeaning or nihilistic attitude toward those who do not toe the line or those who challenge the official line eroding academic freedom.”
What follows is an excerpt from Jiang’s chapter in the book, describing (anonymized) interviews with mainland professors about the student informant system. Professors 1 and 2 had been reported on by student informants; the other professors Jiang quotes had not.
Regarding the impact of this system, both Professors 1 and 2 expressed their deep sadness and dismay about the consequences this system has brought to themselves, their teaching, and the wider context—although they were accused of having “immoral” or “unethical” speeches or acts. Also, both professors talked about taking a nonserious and irresponsible attitude toward teaching (e.g., simply reading the textbook or even asking the students to read the textbook themselves) as self-protection. Professor 1 stated that:
They were going to fire me, and I was so depressed—I nearly jumped off a building. There is nothing wrong with what I said, but they simply said, “You had evil thoughts.” That is a political crime, like in the Cultural Revolution, they accused you of bad political performance. Now they accuse me of degraded morality (dexing buhao). What is virtue? Is their morality good? They are poor in academics and even poorer in character (renpin), but they can reckon on this word of “morality” to bully you to death.
I think Hu Shi [a diplomat and scholar of Republican-era China] once said, when a country talks about morality every day, this country is particularly immoral. I really feel the degeneration of this country now—this country is hopeless. As so many people have profited from such a degraded environment, they are very supportive of such a system. A bad environment is where good people cannot do good things, so that you can only fall.
I feel that I myself am a little degraded now, because my classes are just water classes (shuike) [i.e., I teach in a perfunctory way]. I am safe only in this way, otherwise, I would be snitched on by student informants. My mistake in the past is that I was too serious; I even risked my life.
Likewise, Professor 2 said:
Several professors have been reported on by their own postgraduate students. I do not want to be complicit. I just want to listen to my heart. But I cannot be like that now. The scars inside me are so deep that I am really very disheartened when you ask me this question, and it hurts me so much talking about it. Nowadays, civility has fallen to such a level. Universities have degenerated to such a level (sigh).
There are plenty of “water classes” (shuike) in the university. Students and teachers are all irresponsible. I have been especially cautious in class this semester, and it is especially scary to see students. Nowadays, we teachers are all like this and students are not serious. We used to get angry when we saw students not being serious with study, but now we do not feel angry anymore—you snitch! Why should I be so dedicated to you?
* * *
The professors who had no such experience with student reporting and [as quoted elsewhere in the chapter] who voiced their justification for this system said they were not affected by student informants. For example, Professor 4 said:
I do not have any problems. Maybe those teaching the Constitution would have some problems? But I never talked with them, thus know nothing.
Professor 6 said:
I believe that the classroom is not a private space—it is public. So I do not think it matters if it is recorded or taped, and I will not be affected by it. The content of my classes is all discussions within the academic context, and we will also talk about the problems and shortcomings, but of course we will certainly talk about the progress and the positive aspects of the law first.
The pedagogical philosophy of teaching “within the academic context” seems to be recognized by these professors as the most crucial factor for not being impacted by student informants. They seem to believe that they will never “cross the line” and touch upon the “forbidden zones.” Perhaps most importantly, they identify themselves with the official restraints [imposed by the Party-state] and disapprove of “dissidents.” For example, Professor 3 stated:
The [classroom surveillance] technology is so advanced; thus, you know what you say may be filmed or recorded. You cannot say it forms pressure, but you would know it does—do not talk loosely (luan shuohua). If it is not necessary to say, you do not say it. Anyway, we professors are not critics (fenqing, 愤青), right?
Professor 5 also mentioned his pedagogical philosophy as categorizing officially banned topics as “politics” and leaving “politics” outside the classroom:
I do not think there is any problem with the content of my lectures, so I am not particularly worried. I do worry a little when I see reports about it [i.e., the student informant system]. But looking back at what those professors said in class after we saw the punishment, I felt that what they said in class was not quite the same as what I think Max Weber contends in Science as a Vocation (Wissenschaft als Beruf) [i.e., that politics should not have any place or role in the classroom and that teachers should not talk about their political attitudes or teach anything from a political perspective], and I agree that is not what a scholar should say in class. I am pretty sure that I will not talk about those issues myself, so I would not feel worried or nervous.
