The Return of the Show Trial: China’s Televised “Confessions”. By Magnus Fiskesjö
Abstract: This article investigates the recent wave of staged confessions in China in
historical perspective. Currently, the authorities “disappear,” detain, and
parade people, both Chinese and foreigners, on state television, forcing them
to incriminate themselves by making abject confessions prior to legal
proceedings. This is a clear break with years of efforts to build the rule of
law in China. It also reverses multiple solemn declarations to prohibit police
torture and forced confessions, both longstanding practices in China. The new
extrajudicial show trials, which are staged spectacles outside courts of law,
suggest a return to Mao-era praxis, and have been criticized by many, including
leading Chinese judges and lawyers. Despite the painstaking choreography, the
TV confessions are widely regarded both in China and internationally as fake - not least because of several new witness accounts provided by former detainees
which emerged during 2016. Elements for a historically grounded interpretation
emerge from examination of Soviet Communist, Christian, and various East Asian
parallels. Kafka's allegory in The Trial exposes how the
powerful frame the innocent by forcing them to “confess,” in order to
perpetuate their power.
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Introduction
The spectacle of
forced confessions frequently seen on Chinese TV in the last few years is part
of a wider trend in China: The Party-State is silencing alternative and
dissident voices, with a new wave of censorship, intimidation, disappearances,
arrests, and imprisonments. This current trend is
not unique to China. Instead, sadly, it is part of a worldwide authoritarian
turn. In many countries around the world, as in similar conjunctures of times
past, authoritarians are taking power either by force, or, where elections
exist, with a constituency of voters longing for a strongman.
Today's authoritarians
share many things, especially their contempt for the truth, for freedom of
expression, and for equality before the law, without which there can be no
democracy. They congratulate each other on their purported efficiency in
“telling it like it is,” and in “getting things done.” They seek to censor and
to “guide” public opinion. Authoritarian China currently seems ahead of all
others in monitoring, censoring, and managing public opinion, especially in the
successful harnessing of a new digital universe of technologies to suppress
dissent.
China’s forced TV confessions
are closely related to one key element in this authoritarian turn - to go
beyond the mere silencing of alternative voices and opinions, and “shape
reality.” In China this post-truth manufacturing seems to be not just about
silencing dissent, but also - after the loss of faith in Communist ideology - about shaping a certain new kind of predictably obedient society sometimes
framed as the harmonious society. Scripting, forcing, and disseminating these
TV confessions, then, is one element of this project.
The Disappeared
Hong Kong Booksellers
Gui Minhai, a Swedish
citizen, a Hong Kong publisher and owner of a popular bookstore for political
books banned in mainland China, was disappeared from his vacation home in
Thailand on October 17, 2015. Cameras in the building and testimony from locals
show that he was taken away by several Chinese-speaking men, likely agents from
one of the Chinese state or Communist Party security services, although neither
their actions nor their identity has been acknowledged by the Chinese
authorities - or indeed by Thailand. A number of Chinese citizens have
been similarly repatriated from Thailand against their will, including Uighur
asylum seekers and two Han Chinese political dissidents who had been recognized
as political refugees by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees
(UNHCR), which called their sudden, preemptive repatriation to China “a serious
disappointment.”
But Gui Minhai had no
such designation. He evidently believed he had sufficient protection against
arbitrary disappearance as a Swedish and EU citizen, a Hong Kong resident,
publisher and bookstore owner, and as a visitor to Thailand, where he owned the
vacation apartment from which he was abducted. When, subsequently,
four more of his bookstore associates and co-owners were disappeared, either
while visiting Shenzhen, or in Hong Kong itself, the case caught the attention
of world media, especially the Hong Kong public. The trigger
for the wider publicity was when the fifth bookseller, Mr. Lee Bo, disappeared
from one of the Causeway Bay Bookstore's facilities in Hong Kong, on December
30, 2015. If indeed he was abducted, as it seems, this would directly violate
China’s 1997 promise to let Hong Kong have judicial autonomy until the year
2047.
When Gui Minhai, also
known as a poet and writer under his pen name Ahai, suddenly appeared on
Chinese state TV on January 17, 2016, “confessing” that he had
voluntarily returned to face charges supposedly outstanding from a decade-old
traffic accident, it became clear that this was another
installment in the series of staged confessions presented with increasing
frequency since 2013.
These confessions are
coerced - the detainees have no opportunity to challenge their detention
or argue their case, and, being under obvious duress, can only comply. The
format is an extralegal means for intimidating and silencing anyone whose
speech, writings, or activities are deemed undesirable by unidentified powers.
They are of course also directed at the general public, as targeted audiences,
at home and abroad.
The increasing use of
this format may be partly due to a certain Jiang Jianguo, deputy director of
the Communist Party’s propaganda office, who is said to have argued for a
revival of the approach at an internal government meeting, saying “[This way,]
the educational effect will be the greatest.” According to
this unconfirmed account, the campaign is orchestrated in collaboration between
the police, which apprehends and works over the victims, and the Party
propaganda office, which takes overall charge and directs the choreography of
the staged confessions.
Later, in February
2016, Gui Minhai was presented once again, this time alongside three fellow
booksellers all made to confess they smuggled prohibited books into China. Meanwhile,
their bookstore changed hands in obscure circumstances, and the bulk of the
printed books in storage was destroyed. At the same time, in Hong Kong, some of
these books, which purport to reveal secret details about Chinese Communist
leaders, have been sold publicly as a form of protest by Hong-kongers eager to
defend the right to free expression, which at least formally still is current
there, under the “One Country, Two Systems” promise. But the chilling effect on
the publishing industry is already evident, with other bookstores closing or
self-censoring their stock, as may have been the goal of the
targeted attack.
Tragically, over a
year after his kidnapping from Thailand, Gui Minhai alone among the four
booksellers continues to be held without trial and without any justification of
his apprehension - in disregard of international law, and in obvious contempt
of my own country, Sweden, and the European Union, where he is a fellow citizen…
read more:
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Will reinstate articles to which it blocked online access in China in the face of international protests
