Orville Schell - Crackdown in China: Worse and Worse / From China to Jihad? by Richard Bernstein
What is most striking about these new
tactics is their boldness and unrepentant tone. Instead of denying or
apologizing for them, the CCP seems to proudly proclaim them as part
of a new Chinese model of development, albeit one that has no use for liberal
values from the West. In the new world of resurgent Chinese wealth and power,
what is valued is strong leadership, short-term stability, and immediate
economic growth.
“As a liberal, I no longer feel I have a future in China,” a prominent Chinese think tank head in the process of moving abroad recently lamented in private. Such refrains are all too familiar these days as educated Chinese professionals express growing alarm over their country’s future. Indeed, not since the 1970s when Mao still reigned and the Cultural Revolution still raged has the Chinese leadership been so possessed by Maoist nostalgia and Leninist-style leadership.
As different leaders
have come and gone, China specialists overseas have become accustomed to
reading Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tea leaves as oscillating cycles of
political “relaxation” and “tightening.” China has long been a one-party
Leninist state with extensive censorship and perhaps the largest secret police
establishment in the world. But what has been happening lately in Beijing under
the leadership of Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping is no
such simple fluctuation. It is a fundamental shift in ideological and
organizational direction that is beginning to influence both China’s reform
agenda and its foreign relations.
At the center of this
retrograde trend is Xi’s enormously ambitious initiative to purge the Chinese
Communist Party of what he calls “tigers and flies,” namely corrupt officials
and businessmen both high and low. Since it began in 2012, the campaign has
already netted more than 160 “tigers” whose rank is above or equivalent to that
of the deputy provincial or deputy ministerial level, and more than 1,400
“flies,” all lower-level officials. But
it has also morphed from an anticorruption drive into a broader neo-Maoist-style
mass purge aimed at political rivals and others with differing ideological or
political views.
To carry out this mass
movement, the Party has mobilized its unique and extensive network of
surveillance, security, and secret police in ways that have affected many areas
of Chinese life. Media organizations dealing with news and information have
been hit particularly hard. Pressured to conform to old Maoist models requiring
them to serve as megaphones for the Party, editors and reporters have found
themselves increasingly constrained by Central Propaganda Department diktats.
Told what they can and cannot over, they find that the limited freedom they
had to report on events has been drastically curtailed.
The consequences of
running afoul of government orders have become ever more grave. Last August,
for instance, a financial journalist for the weekly business magazine Caijing was
detained after reporting on government manipulation of China’s stock markets
and forced to denounce his own coverage in a humiliating self-confession on
China Central Television (CCTV). And more recently media outlets were reminded
in the most explicit way not to stray from the Party line when Xi himself
dropped by the New China News Agency, the People’s Daily, and CCTV.
“All news media run by
the Party [which includes every major media outlet in China] must work to speak
for the Party’s will and its propositions, and protect the Party’s authority
and unity,” Xi warned. In front of a banner declaring “CCTV’s family name is
‘the Party,’” Xi urged people who work in the media to “enhance their awareness
to align their ideology, political thinking, and deeds to those of the CCP Central
Committee.” Then, only days later the Ministry of Industry and Information
Technology announced new regulations banning all foreign-invested media
companies from publishing online in China without government approval.
But the crackdown has
hardly been limited to the media. Hundreds of crosses have been ripped from the
steeples of Christian churches, entire churches have been demolished, pastors
arrested, and their defense lawyers detained and forced to make public
confessions. And even as civil society has grown over the past few decades, a
constraining new civil society law is now being drafted that promises to put NGOs
on notice against collaborating with foreign counterparts or challenging the
government.
At the same time,
independent-minded researchers at think tanks and outspoken professors at
universities worry about the “chilling effect” of Xi’s policies on academic
life in both China and Hong Kong. Feminist activists demonstrating against
sexual harassment have been arrested for “picking quarrels and provoking
trouble,” while human rights lawyers have been swept up in a mass wave of
arrests for “creating public disorder,” and even for “subverting state power.”..
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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/crackdown-in-china-worse-and-worse/From China to Jihad? by Richard Bernstein
Among the many recent stories concerning foreigners setting out to fight in Syria, the allegations about the Uighurs arrested in Songkhla stand out. In fact, these people, along with another couple hundred recent Uighur escapees from China, most of them seized near the Thai-Cambodia border, signal something new in the movement of refugees around the world. China’s Uighurs, who now number some ten million and are concentrated in western China, are a mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking people that has been increasingly restive under Chinese rule.
The signs are that more and more of them, escorted by well-paid people smugglers, are making the long, arduous journey south, escaping what they say is harsh Chinese repression in Xinjiang. They are like other refugees in this sense, but with one major difference. The Uighurs arriving in southeast Asia have triggered a tense, mostly behind-the-scenes tug of war between China, which is pressuring Thailand to send the Uighurs back, and the West, including the United States, which has entreated the Thais to reject China’s demand, arguing that giving in to it would subject the Uighurs to savage mistreatment.
Most of the Uighurs
who were detained in March are being held at a center run by Thailand’s Immigration
Police near Songkhla, where they have been cordoned off from the rest of the
world. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has not been able to
register them. Early on, Chinese officials got permission to visit some of
them, but the detainees reportedly refused to talk, claiming that they were not
Uighurs but Turks. My own requests to the Thai government to interview some of
them, which I made during a trip to Thailand in July, went unanswered.
Xinjiang, the
traditional Uighur homeland, making up one-sixth of China’s total area, has
emerged as a kind of Muslim Tibet, an unstable territory in China’s deep
interior. To Chinese leaders, Xinjiang may be even more worrisome than Tibet,
since they clearly believe that its large Muslim population is susceptible to
Islamic extremism that they claim is seeping in from neighboring Central Asia.
And there has been serious violence. Since last fall about one hundred people
are known to have died in Uighur-related violence, which China blames on what it
refers to as “the three evils” of separatism, extremism, and terrorism. In
March, eight knife-wielding Uighur men and women attacked commuters in the
Kunming train station, far from Xinjiang, killing twenty-nine people. And in
May, a group of Uighurs killed forty-three people in the Xinjiang capital of
Urumqi when they drove explosives-laden SUVs into a morning market.
Amid such violence,
the Chinese police have stepped up repressive measures. Last year, the heads of
Xinjiang’s universities announced that only “politically qualified” students
would be allowed to graduate, and instructed education authorities to exercise closer supervision of
their students, including monitoring them during their vacations and making
sure they don’t wear “religious clothing.” Meanwhile, numerous alleged
troublemakers have been jailed. In May, for example, Xinjiang public security
officials arrested 232 people for “dissemination of violent or terrorist
videos.” China has also been enforcing its strict birth-control policies on
Uighurs, who, if they live in cities, are subject to forced abortions if they
try to have more than two children. At the same time, large-scale ethnic Han
migration to Xinjiang has turned the Uighurs into minorities in many places.
Following the arrests
of the Uighurs who turned up in Thailand, some Thai newspapers,
citing Thai police officials, reported that they were jihadists seeking to go
to Syria. No evidence has been presented to support this claim, which seems
flimsy given that a substantial majority of the Uighurs are women and children,
including a number of toddlers. Far more plausibly, they are families who were
following the example of thousands of other Uighurs who have left Xinjiang in
recent years.
The charge that they
are Syria-bound terrorists comes straight from China’s Ministry of Propaganda.
Several years ago, Chinese newspapers began reporting that some one hundred
Uighurs had gone to Syria to join the jihadist rebellion there. This claim is
dubious, given that hardly any Uighurs have been reported captured or killed or
even observed in Syria, not even by the Syrian government...
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