The Tragedy of Great Again Power Politics

(VOA News)

On March 3, at a speech to Republican donors in Florida, Donald Trump offered these comments on Xi Jinping’s accession to lifelong presidency:

“Don’t forget China’s great. And Xi is a great gentleman. He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great. And look: he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”

Imagine that Eisenhower had praised Mao in these terms.

Yes, George Washington is spinning in his grave, and yes, Trump is a fake American. From “lock her up” to president-for-life, Trump has daily attacked the liberal democratic values of the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the peaceful transfer of power. But why should Trump endorse dictatorship abroad?

Trump’s rejection of liberal democracy domestically corresponds to a rejection of liberal institutionalism in the realm of foreign policy. Just as we are America First, he says, so, too, should you all be Yourselves First. We will see to “our own”; you see to yours. We will protect ourselves militarily and economically; you do the same. We owe each other nothing. And to you oppressed people, wherever you are, we say—nothing. You’re on your own. You’re invisible. It is a foreign policy very much in line with the professed non-interventionist ideals of the Chinese Communist Party: the rights of states trump the rights of peoples and individuals.

In short, Trump’s foreign policy is a form of realism: the belief that states should look after their own security and nothing more. You might agree. You might think that groveling before the leader of the world’s other superpower is conducive to our security. Perhaps not, but you might ask whether or why America should have any interest in the accession of a new emperor to China’s throne. In answer, I here present two cases in which, in its relations with China, America did not adhere to its own values, and opted instead for mere realism, with disastrous results for both nations.

America supports the last would-be emperor

Word of the planned constitutional changes legalizing Xi’s life tenure was greeted with dismay by many of China’s citizens. As usual, few people publicly and directly stated their thoughts (though a brave few did), but in the wave of oblique, code-worded, and fast-deleted online protests, one particular comparison stuck out: Yuan Shikai, a warlord who is remembered for trying to roll back China’s republican revolution by seizing the presidency and declaring himself emperor.

Yuan Shikai being pompous (Public Domain)

In late 1911,* the Qing dynasty was wracked by series of military uprisings, mostly in South China, known as the Xinhai Revolution. On December 29, 1911, a provisional national assembly elected Sun Yat-sen first president of the Republic of China, which was declared on January 1, 1912. Lacking the military power to oust the remnants of the Qing dynasty in North China, Sun soon felt compelled to make a deal with Yuan Shikai, whose Beiyang Army, based in the North, was then the most powerful fighting force in the country. In exchange for the presidency, Yuan would force the last Qing emperor, Puyi, to abdicate. Sun thus stepped down after two months as president, and Yuan became the second president of the republic.

China’s first parliamentary election was held in 1912-1913, and Sun’s Nationalist Party won a majority. I feel that this election represented a genuinely hopeful moment in Chinese history. Despite no prior history of democracy or any sort of legal tradition similar to those which underpinned the development of democracy in the West, a parliament was democratically elected by a broad electorate. The parliament was set to elect Song Jiaoren, a leader of the Nationalist Party and a scholar of the American constitution, as prime minister. Song campaigned on a platform of the separation of powers and checks on the presidency in particular. This sat not well with Yuan Shikai. En route to Beijing on March 20, 1913, Song was shot and killed in Shanghai Railway Station. The evidence pointed to a hit carried out by the Shanghai mob at the instigation of Yuan, but the investigation into the murder was cut short by the assassinations of those involved.

Song Jiaoren (Public Domain)

Yuan, demonstrating some real savviness, responded to Song’s slaying by asking America to pray for his nation. The Americans ate it up: soon after, the US government become the first to declare its official recognition of the Republic of China, and a few months later, State Department officials in China suggested to Yuan that he seek American legal advice on crafting a constitution. The man chosen was Columbia professor Frank Johnson Goodnow, who turned out to be no friend to liberal democracy. In arguments which would later be echoed in later generations by intellectuals supporting Chiang Kai-Shek’s dictatorship and then that of the Communist Party, Goodnow claimed that the Chinese people, having no experience with law or self-government, were unprepared for democracy. He wrote the republic a constitution with few freedoms guaranteed for the people and a very strong executive branch whose powers included the ability to appoint the legislature.

In what was later called the Second Revolution, military uprisings against Yuan followed, and he took the opportunity to outlaw the Nationalist Party and pack parliament with allies. This parliament approved Goodnow’s constitution, and various American diplomatic and legal voices supported the move. When Yuan decided to declare himself emperor in 1915, Goodnow wrote him a memorandum approving of the restoration of the monarchy, reiterating his position that the Chinese national character was suited for nothing but despotism. Domestically, Yuan faced continual political and military resistance to his imperial ambition, and in 1916, he abandoned his claim to the throne before he could ceremonially accede to it. He died of illness shortly thereafter.

We cannot know that the republic would have been successful without American meddling, but consider: it was democratically elected Chinese political leaders who themselves opted for an American-style constitution, and it was American diplomatic attachés who declared that China must return to its autocratic traditions. What if America had supported the aspirations of China’s liberals and democrats instead of its would-be emperor? Would a robust system of liberal republicanism or liberal democracy have developed? Could the subsequent decades of warlordism, Chiang Kai-shek’s fascism, Japanese occupation, and Mao’s totalitarianism have been avoided? What we do know is that the national government was delegitimized in its infancy, a series of hapless presidents followed, the country fragmented into warlordism, and in the absence of central authority, Japan invaded.

Woodrow Wilson fails China

China was one of the Allies in World War One. Its contribution to the war effort was to send about 140,000 laborers, mostly impoverished men from Shandong Province, to the Western Front, where they worked in support positions for the British and French armies, building the infrastructure of war: trenches, railroads, airstrips, etc. Their labor, intended to free up British and French men for front-line service, was ill-compensated and to some extent resented by the Allied soldiers, but it made a substantial contribution to the war effort.

Japan also joined the Allies. The empire’s focus was on expanding its sphere of influence in Asia, specifically China, and gaining recognition as a Great Power. Early in the war, Japan occupied the territories which Germany had seized in Shandong Province in 1897, specifically the area around Qingdao, known as Jiaozhou.

As the war drew to an end,** Woodrow Wilson hoped that the concluding negotiations could cement liberal, idealist principals into international law. On January 8, 1918, he delivered a speech summarizing his Fourteen Points, primary among which were open agreements between states, anti-militarism, self-determination, free trade, and “a general association of nations”—what would become the League of Nations. The first point, a repudiation of secret negotiations, may strike readers today as hopelessly idealistic, but it was received with great acclamation worldwide at that time, particularly in China, which had long been the victim of imperialist collusion among the Great Powers and self-interested Chinese leaders. Indeed, the Fourteen Points were taken to heart by colonized and brutalized peoples across the globe, and expectations for the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference ran high. Many thought that with the guidance of Wilson’s vision, the War to End All Wars would do just that.

At the Paris Peace Conference, the Chinese negotiators initially hoped that, in keeping with Wilson’s stated principles of political and economic self-determination, all of the unequal treaties which the Great Powers had foisted upon China in recent decades would be overturned. When it became clear that this was impossible, they felt confident that they could at least secure the return of the Jiaozhou concession to China. Historically, geographically, and even spiritually (as it contained the hometown of Confucius), the Jiaozhou concession was rightfully Chinese.

Wilson, though giving no specific assurances, had made it clear to China’s minister to the United States, Wellington Koo, that China would have America’s support in the negotiations. In the end, however, the Japanese negotiators convinced the Americans as well as the representatives of the other Great Powers to support their claims on the basis of a secret exchange of missives which had occurred between the Chinese and Japanese governments—unbeknownst to China’s negotiators—just a few months before the conference. In these letters, the Chinese government specifically conceded to Japan’s demand for the Jiaozhou concession. Thus, as there had already been a bilateral agreement, the Japanese argued, the law was on their side. Koo argued that Japan’s position was premised on the old order of predatory, imperialistic diplomacy, and that in the age of the Fourteen Points, such secret agreements should hold no weight. It turned out, however, that both Britain and France had secretly promised to back Japan’s claim to Jiaozhou. Wilson finally instructed his negotiators to tell the Chinese to accept the transfer of the concession to Japan in exchange for a verbal promise from the Japanese that it would be returned at a later date. The Chinese countered that this should be in writing, but the Japanese—with truly remarkable cynicism—said that they would not brook the implicit assault on their integrity. Wilson, concerned with pleasing the European Allies and ensuring Japan’s participation in the League of Nations, ultimately overrode the objections of Edward T. Williams, the American delegation’s Sinologist, and the final text of the Treaty of Versailles, unsigned by China, recognized Japan’s claim to Jiaozhou.

The Paris negotiations were thus marked by precisely the sort of secret agreements which Wilson had repudiated in the first of the Fourteen Points, and anger with Wilson’s and America’s hypocrisy spread like wildfire through China, where news of the Paris conference’s results triggered a political earthquake: on May 4, 1919, about three thousand students protested in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing, condemning their own government for collaborationism and the Great Powers for their greed and power politics. The movement spread throughout China and ultimately led to the transformation of the entire character of Chinese thought in the New Culture Movement.

Students protesting the Treaty of Versailles (Public Domain)

One of the ideologies which took root in China in this area of disillusionment and soul searching precipitated by the Paris Peace Conference was Bolshevism. A young Mao Zedong took part in the May Fourth Movement, publishing a temporary magazine in which he condemned the cynicism of the Great Powers and suggested that Bolshevism, which he believed (wrongly) to be deeply involved in the anticolonial struggles in India and Korea, might present a worthwhile alternative to liberalism—an ideology in which he had previously shown interest. Mao was not alone. An entire generation of youth whose faith in liberalism was shattered by the Paris Peace Conference began to ponder Bolshevism as a better path toward national self-strengthening and resistance to imperialism. Wilson’s failure to uphold his own principles drove them into Lenin’s arms.

In allowing the transferal of Jiaozhou to Japan, America not only failed to live up to its ideals, but also failed to act in its own interests. Tensions between Japan and America had already been rising for years because of Japan’s relentless expansionism, and Sino-American relations had been strengthening. If Wilson had not allowed Japan to cynically manipulate the letter of international law, the empire might not have been so bold as to continue expanding in China. How much might this have reduced the likelihood of the Pacific War and the Second Sino-Japanese War? Furthermore, a young generation of Chinese, including Mao, might have stuck with liberalism rather than turning to Bolshevism, with all the disastrous results that followed.

A fake president applauds a coronation

Returning to Trump’s accolades for the new emperor on the occasion of his mounting the Dragon Throne: what, you may ask, would I advocate that Trump do instead?

The problem is not that Trump neglected to criticize a violation of what America previously contended to be universal human values. The problem is that he is praised it. It isn’t just a moral abdication; it is a strategic abdication. To endorse dictatorship in exchange for nothing at all represents a concession in exchange for nothing. At present, the language of values is still a form of leverage which America could wield if we had a president who had any values, but Trump doesn’t understand what America is or how diplomacy works.

The two historical examples above show that America doesn’t do realist foreign policy well. Liberal institutionalism has been America’s method of subduing the world, of drawing it into a peaceful and prosperous order which benefits America. And in both of these cases, abandoning liberal principles in China policy led to catastrophe.

China is not a nihilistic dictatorship in the vein of Putin’s Russia. Whether or not you believe that the leadership of the CCP personally cares about morality, they have always sought popular moral legitimacy. They have always sought to mold the character of the people in their own image. They have never ceased being dedicated to “thought work.” It isn’t enough that people fear them and tolerate their rule; they want people’s hearts. This has been a preoccupation of all lasting Chinese regimes since the Han dynasty. It hearkens back to Confucius: “One who rules through the power of Virtue might be compared to the Pole Star, which simply remains in place while receiving the homage of myriad lesser stars.”***

The CCP regards liberalism as a poisonous contagion, an infection which corrupts the hearts of people both simple and clever, and they are terrified of the appeal which liberalism holds for Chinese people. Ironically, they ignore the Western origins of their professed socialism and label liberalism as something inherently foreign to Chinese culture and therefore unfit for transplantation into Chinese soil. 

A major source of cognitive dissonance and frustration here is of course the success of liberal Taiwan and its reluctance to reunify with China. The CCP doesn’t just want to be loved by the Chinese people, but to accepted by the Taiwanese people. But China has something Taiwan does not: international prestige. They want not just to be accepted by Taiwan, but to be admired by the world. If they can’t have Taiwan’s admiration, they can perhaps buy some elsewhere, and the more admiration the win elsewhere, the more likely (they think) Taiwan will be to come around.

Even putting the Taiwan issue aside, the CCP desires the international moral prestige which used to flow to China through the tributary system, and so do the Chinese people. Both the Party and the people feel that this only befits China given its glorious history. The value of this international recognition in the formula of national rejuvenation should not be overlooked. 

The CCP’s desire for moral legitimacy gives their would-be tributaries leverage over them. It is entirely up to the international community whether or not to to give it to them. It particularly rests in the hands of America, which—for better or for worse and for a while yet, at least—remains the incumbent Pole Star. Wielding this leverage is as simple as making public statements. It is as simple as stating that dictatorship is a violation of human dignity. But such a statement could only be made by a leader who had a conception of dignity. By a president who didn't want to be a dictator.

---

*This section draws heavily on John Pomfret’s account in The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom, pp. 133-136.

**This sections summarizes Erez Manela’s account in The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, chapter 9.

***Ivanhoe & Van Norden. Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, p. 4.

Why China Can't Talk About Its Racism

CCTV

The 2018 CCTV Spring Festival (Chinese New Year’s) Gala featured a comedy sketch called “Shared Celebration and Happiness” (同喜同乐) which drew a firestorm of international social media criticism for its abundant use of African stereotypes—and blackface.

A four-hour extravaganza of song, dance, acrobatics, and comedy, the Spring Festival Gala is the world’s most-viewed annual television event. The show is performed live, but the script undergoes countless stages of censoring and revision. As the most prominent television event in China, the Spring Festival Gala is one of the Chinese Communist Party’s most important platforms for propaganda. In a sense, it informs the whole country what the Party line will be for the coming year. Sifting through the torrent of puns, one can discover what the CCP wants Chinese people to think: China’s ethnic minorities are childlike, feminine, and unthreatening. Corruption is bad. And China-Africa relations are good.

The sketch in question (which you can view with English subtitles and some critical commentary here) begins with Africans in tribal garb dancing to Shakira’s “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” with a bunch of wild animals in celebration of the opening of a new high-speed rail project built by China. One of the new employees on the train, a woman played by a Gabonese actress (credited under the Chinese name 周埃乐), asks her Chinese friend to pretend to be her boyfriend in order to escape her mother’s attempts to force her to go on a blind date. Then the mother appears: famed Chinese actress Lou Naiming in blackface, complete with prosthetic chest and butt and a fruit plate on her head. Her companion is a humanoid, basket-bearing monkey played by an actor from Cote d’Ivoire. The mom eventually figures out that her daughter’s Chinese friend is not really her boyfriend, but the young woman plucks up her gumption and declares her intention to work rather than marry quickly: “I want to go to China to study. I want to be just like the Chinese: I’m going roll up my sleeves and work hard to make the whole world like me!” Resounding applause. Her mom unexpectedly expresses her approval, saying that of course she doesn’t mind; after all, a Chinese doctor once saved her life. Then, in the ultimate flourish, this Chinese woman pretending to be an African woman faces the audience and bursts forth, “I love Chinese people! I love China!” Resounding applause.

CCTV

The past Chinese-calendar year included two notable controversies over racism in China: a photographic exhibition at a museum in Wuhan which juxtaposed portraits of Africans with shots of animals, and the discovery that WeChat was translating 黑老外 (“black foreigner”) as the n-word. On Chinese social media, in the past, the typical response to such controversies has been along these lines: “What? What’s blackface? Don’t be so sensitive. It’s not racism. Maybe it’s a little politically incorrect, but not racist. Anyway, we don’t understand why this stuff upsets you guys so much.” But  this time, there were signs of progress: a large number of responses on Weibo acknowledged the sketch as “racist” and “awkward.” Many posters pointed out how badly the skit would play before a global audience.

A common defense of Chinese racism is that since Chinese people have no firsthand exposure to black people (which is mostly true of rural Chinese, but not city-dwellers), their prejudices regarding black people are entirely derived from the depiction of black people on American film. There is some truth in this, but China has rich native traditions of racism dating back to the earliest written records, in which the names for peoples of non-Chinese ethnicity were written with ideographic elements otherwise reserved for animals. Rather than delve into the history of racism in China, however, let’s consider what this particular instance tells us about why racism cannot be a topic of discussion in China.

The international media discussion of this controversy has focused on signals of racism which are quite apparent to international audiences, namely the depiction of Africans as being in a default state of jamming out with safari animals, the blackface, the monkey companion, and the paternalistic tone of the dialog. What international media discussion does not delve into, however, is the rationale behind such a skit in the signal system of Chinese propaganda. Because its script receives thorough scrutiny in the state propaganda organs, it is entirely fair to understand the message being sent by the Gala as a message direct from the Communist Party. Regarding this particular incident, the discussion should not be about whether Chinese people are racist but rather what kind of message the skit was meant to send and why the state propaganda apparatchiks were unable to recognize or disinclined to care that the skit was offensive.

What the sketch reveals is the Party’s pitiful understanding of social discourse abroad and its desire for Chinese people to affirm the following: China-Africa relations are great. Why? Because China is oh-so-generous. In other words, the Party’s attitude toward Africa, as toward so much else, is fundamentally paternalistic.

The obliviousness to the potential reception of the international audience is unsurprising, because Chinese state propaganda is seldom if ever targeted to both Sinophone and international audiences simultaneously. Moreover, the Communist Party often evinces a poor understanding of international discourse on any number of topics. The official response to this incident is revealing. It brushes off the criticisms as a bad-faith effort by hostile foreign media to smear China-Africa relations (translation mine):

A foreign reporter raised the question of whether, in the CCTV broadcast of the Spring Festival Gala, a Chinese performer dressing up as an African could be considered racism. Ministry of Foreign Affairs Spokesperson Geng Shuang responded that China consistently opposes any form of racial discrimination, and that even if there are some people who try to make a fuss out of nothing and instigate disharmony in China-Africa relations, such attempts are destined to be futile: ‘The friendship between China and Africa has gone through trials and hardships but proven absolutely unbreakable. China-Africa cooperation is mutually beneficial and win-win, and its fruits have been substantial. The state of China-Africa relations, good or bad, is written in the hearts of Africans.’

The real question is why the Chinese Communist Party is incapable of allowing Chinese people to have a frank public discussion of racism in China—let alone to engage in open and honest discourse about racism with the international community. The answer, as with any number of other social issues, is that to admit there is a problem would be to invite criticism of Chinese society, and to invite criticism of Chinese society would be to invite criticism of the society which the Party oversees with the zeal of a helicopter parent on speed, and to admit criticism of this tightly controlled society is to admit criticism of the Party. To admit that China has social problems is to admit that the Party allows social problems to exist, because as a Leninist party, they aspire to insert themselves into every corner of society (debate the validity of this statement in regard to the Deng era if you will, but this aspiration has quite clearly recently been renewed).

The point is not so much that a racist skit was aired as that it was aired by the state propaganda machine. The point is not so much that the writers of the skit were insensitive or racist as that state response to the international media was dismissive, and the critical comments on Chinese social media were censored. In short: the CCP won’t let China be honest with itself about racism (or anything).

The discussion about racism in China cannot be informed by the transnational discourse on racism because China is effectively cut off from certain aspects of international discourse. Racism is an integral aspect of the story of global society. But history and society can only be publicly discussed in China in the officially approved way, and there is essentially only one officially approved discourse regarding power dynamics: the Marxist discourse. Whether within or without the country, the Party desires that competing social visions for or of China not exist. To allow social criticism from independent voices in China is hard enough for the Party (look at their treatment, for example, of the Feminist Five), but to admit to the legitimacy of a social criticism emanating from abroad is basically taboo unless it's a topic which the Party has designated as a legitimate target for criticism. After all, if foreign voices were right about racism in China, they might be right about other matters, such as Chinese human rights in general.

Racism in Chinese society won’t be discussed openly and honestly until the CCP decides that it needs to be discussed. And I see no reason why they would care. Perhaps if some incident truly affronted African nations to the extent that it harmed China’s interests in Africa. Even then, the Party would probably just roll out some slogans about how racism is bad and point to them as evidence that racism is nearly eradicated in China (Of course, Zhao Ziyang already claimed in 1989 that China is the only country in which racism is not a problem). The international community tends to just believe the things that the Party says to them in English, rather than looking to the discourse which exists within China, so people would probably swallow it. And Chinese society would continue on in utter innocence, because sin unrecognized is no sin at all, as long as you’re the sinner.

Cheer Up, China Bears

A recent, excellent episode of the Sinica podcast featured the economist Yukon Huang, and his words shone a ray of light into the cloud of geopolitical pessimism which generally hovers about me, such that as I write this, I feel somewhat more optimistic not only about China’s feature, but also about the future of US-China relations.

Like many foreign observers, I have been rather downcast about the general air of autocracy and xenophobia which has intensified during Xi Jinping’s tenure as paramount leader. I have, of course, been equally if not more pessimistic about the Trump presidency. And with the recent news of the Trump administration imposing unilateral sanctions, a trade war looms.

But I have lately wondered whether my thinking about the intentions of Party Central is rather mistaken. I generally begin with the premise that the primary goal of the Communist Party is self-preservation. I still think this is true, but the result is that one tends to assume bad faith in everything they do, when in fact, they may very well have a strong desire to benefit the Chinese people, because that’s how they’ll retain power.

As much as I deplore the Chinese state’s human rights abuses, I have to admit: I think they’re pretty good at running the economy. Many international economists and most of the international media are eternally bearish on the Chinese economy. Just google “China bubble.” Back in 2012, when I first moved to China, everyone talked about the housing bubble’s impending explosion. We’re still waiting. In the last few years, I’ve heard much more about China’s ostensible debt bubble. We’re still waiting. This isn’t to say that these are not bubbles and they’re not going to burst. Perhaps they will. Or perhaps the market fundamentalists want China to fail.

Huang’s analysis of the housing market is sunny: yes, housing prices have risen 500-and-some-odd percent in about a decade, but that’s fine. Why? Until recently, Chinese housing was entirely state-provided. The private housing market was only instituted in 2004 (per Huang), and prices are rising to meet the real market value of housing, which had not previously been determined—as they should. Regarding debt, Huang points out that China’s total debt-to-GDP ratio (257%) is higher than the average developing country, but lower than the average developed country. That’s exactly what we should expect, because China is, indeed, somewhere between developing and developed.

In short, Huang argues that the fundamentals of the Chinese economy are strong at present, and he seems to think they will remain so for the medium term. The most urgent question, to my mind, is how China’s economy can remain healthy in the long-term given its aging population. The Chinese government has, however, settled on a solution to that problem, namely, massive investment in AI and automation. Having followed arguments about AI for while now, here my learned opinion on it: no one knows what it is let alone what it will lead to.

In arguing about politics and policy and where they lead us, we try to make arguments by analogy with history. People tried this there and it didn’t work; people tried that then and it did work. Marxists insist on laws of history which allow us ironclad predictive power. Economists, likewise, tend to insist on the empirical rigor and validity of their models. People lose sight of the role of possibility; we think of low probabilities as not really being possible. As for me, my tendency to gloom impairs my ability to admit happy possibilities.

I often worry that China is moving toward totalitarianism, by which I mean a system in which the state attempts to insert itself into every aspect of life, which was already China’s situation in the fifties and sixties. It would be bad for Chinese people, bad for me personally, and bad for the world. Why do I worry about this? Because of Xi’s growing cult of personality, because of the breakdown of norms of leadership transition in the Communist Party, because of increasing state-sponsored xenophobia, because of the experiments in surveillance being conducted in Xinjiang, and because of the nascent social credit system. Yet as much as these are the things that preoccupy me, they are just elements which point toward possibilities. 

There are other trends, other indicators, and other possibilities. In comparative political economy, the historical evidence indicates that in order for a country to transition from middle-income to high-income, it must liberalize its political system. The only exceptions have been petrol-states such as those of the Persian Gulf, which have managed to attain high-income status while remaining authoritarian monarchies. For China-watchers, this means that the Communist Party must relinquish some power in order for China’s per capita income to continue rising; otherwise, the country will remain mired in middle-income authoritarian mediocrity.

To me, this simply means that China faces a rocky road either way. But Yukon Huang makes a startlingly optimistic statement in this regard. Comparing China with South Korea and Taiwan, historically similar East Asian developmental states, he points out that both countries made their transitions from authoritarianism to democracy at almost exactly the same time, exactly the same level of per capita income, and exactly the same level of urbanization; he then goes on to say that China will reach these same levels in 2025, the implication being that China will democratize or at least liberalize in that year.

Again, Huang’s optimism about the possibility of democratic transition in China is frankly shocking. Why? Because among China watchers—whether academics, journalists, or Western government officials—views of China have become increasingly dour since the years of the George W. Bush administration. Toward the end of the Obama administration, the US government found it increasingly difficult to accomplish anything in partnership with China. Xi Jinping and Obama did not get along. Military tensions have risen with China’s claims in the South China Sea and America’s belligerence toward North Korea. In 2016, the Trump campaign pushed conspiratorial views of the Chinese-American trade relationship, and now the Trump administration seems to be getting around to acting on them.

The US diplomatic community has even begun to question the fundamental nature of the US-China relationship. Ever since Nixon went to China, the guiding principle of American China policy has been engagement: the idea that being open to China is in America’s interest, because a China which trades with “the free world” will be less aggressive, because trade will make both sides prosper, and because American liberal democratic values will flow in the wake of trade, ultimately transforming China into a free society. As Nixon put it: “We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, and threaten its neighbors.” 

A significant part of the US diplomatic community has given up on the idea of engagement, because they feel that our efforts to strengthen China have proven harmful rather than beneficial to us: Relations with China may have helped us to balance against the USSR, but now China presents a military threat to the democracies and US allies in Asia. Having pushed very hard for China’s entry into the WTO, we now have a massive trade deficit with China. The American corporations which have ventured into the Chinese market have faced huge impediments put up by the Chinese government and have been bullied into tech transfers while the Chinese government runs a state-sponsored program of intellectual property theft via hacking. The list goes on, and even in the realm of values, perhaps it is we who begin to resemble the Chinese more than they have come to resemble us. In the last year, we have seen all manner of authoritarian, illiberal, mercantilist attitudes take over the US government. Trump’s behavior feels all-too-familiar to me. The CCP has been calling the American media fake news for decades.

Yet values are hard to define and perhaps difficult to see. For one thing, it is undeniable that engagement has helped to change the economic attitudes of the Chinese people. At this point, the youth of America are in love with Bernie, an avowed socialist, whereas the youth of China are acolytes of Dale Carnegie. The culture of Silicon Valley has now corrupted the minds of many more Chinese youths than American, and they undoubtedly quote Steve Jobs more frequently than Mao.

Liberal social attitudes, it seems, have yet to follow suit, in part due to the Chinese government’s vociferous resistance to civil society—particularly civil society with foreign ties. Yet what progress there may be is difficult to track. A #metoo-inspired movement, for example, has caught on to some extent in China, yet it is impossible to say how widespread support for such movements is, because anytime they flare up on Chinese social media, the censors quickly stamp them out.

At least we can say that rap music has received the Communist Party’s seal of approval, since Xi himself has featured in state-sponsored propaganda raps.

We are all caught up in dystopian thinking. If AI isn’t going to go all Skynet on us, the use of CRISPR on human DNA is going to result in a caste system or vampires. And it is in China that some of us expect these things to go wrong first. Yet society improves sometimes! How do we know this? Because the world has gotten much, much better since 1918. And this very much applies to China, where hundreds of millions of people have seen real improvements in their lives with the economic reforms since the 1970s.

What Huang has reminded me today is that the improbable is still, after all, possible. Try to imagine the world in 2100. The more reasonable you are, i.e., the more possibilities you consider and the more you try to assign them probabilities based on the evidence of the past, the more you must admit the utter impossibility of prediction. So why not take a moment to consider some things that could go right in China in the near-to-medium term?

One Belt, One Road could lead to faster economic growth throughout the developing world. China’s new anticorruption institution, the national supervisory commission, may finally systematize anticorruption efforts. The Party might finally get around to deeper State-Owned Enterprise reform. Urbanization is probably going to continue apace, which will mean more productivity growth. The welfare system is going to continue getting tweaked, and it might work out pretty well. The state’s massive investments in research will probably pay dividends of some sort eventually. Heck, rule of law might even become an actual thing!

But political liberalization in 2025? That would be a gargantuan, earth-shattering change. When one considers the amount of resources the Chinese state throws at social control—whether it be in policing, propaganda, censorship, surveillance, united front work, or the social credit system—it is just plain inconceivable to me. 

Maybe I’m short-sighted. There have always been multiple voices in the Party, and who they are and what they are advocating has seldom been apparent to outsiders until years later, when the documents are released. Xi Jinping does not appear to care about democracy, but then again, who predicted his intense anticorruption campaign? Democracy is one of the Socialist Core Values. Scoff at those if you want, but the Party has always professed an intention to implement some kind of democracy. Perhaps it begins with intra-Party democracy. Perhaps elections for cadres at the lower levels become both universal and genuinely competitive. Perhaps the success of the new anticorruption body convinces the central leadership of the usefulness of genuine rule of law. Perhaps an economic downturn sparks protests severe enough to convince the Party of the necessity of a more reliable form of public consultation. Perhaps Xi’s successor is a Hu Yaobang or a Zhao Ziyang. It seems unlikely now, but no one actually has any real idea who will succeed him anyway, so who knows?

We don’t see the big changes coming. That is reason for optimism as much as for pessimism.

Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and the Return of the Plan

If you want to know the future, imagine a vast, centralized superintelligence, feeding on big data about all manner of production and consumption, allocating resources throughout the economy in accordance with the dictates of a class of somewhat pudgy old men who dye their hair jet black, smile with all the comfort of cats in a bathtub, and believe themselves to be enlightened.

Wang Huning, the fifth-most-enlightened (Xinhua)

Certain observers have claimed ever since 2012 that President Xi Jinping’s long-term intention is to further open up the Chinese economy, i.e., downsize China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and allow more room for market competition, private enterprise, and free trade. According to this narrative, Xi has been accumulating the authority which will be necessary to overcome the bureaucratic vested interests who oppose free markets, waiting until his power is sufficient to push through the necessary changes. I feel that this claim is absurd, a naïve reiteration of the age-old myth of the well-meaning emperor surrounded by corrupt officials. It is no coincidence that the people making this claim are mostly Western businesspeople and financiers on the one hand and Communist Party members speaking to a Western audience on the other. I’m sure businesspeople are generally smart and all, but when it comes to China, they are too willing to delude themselves, tempted as they are by the prospect of a billion customers. And the Party is happy to string them along because it wants them to invest in China. Here’s my rule: if the Party says something directed at the foreign audience in a speech, disregard it; if the Party says something in internal documents, pay attention.

The party-state desires and has been implementing more control of the economy, not less. I would point to four pieces of evidence: one, the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s $4–8 trillion (allegedly) international infrastructure-building plan and Xi’s signature foreign policy initiative, is essentially a way of winning global goodwill while propping up China’s SOEs by providing them with markets to soak up their productive overcapacity; two, more and more enterprises in China are being required to host Party organizations inside their operations—now including jointly owned foreign-Chinese enterprises; three, the rollout of the social credit system represents a massive increase in party-state regulation of the economy; four, the Party has recently released a number of documents which explicitly call for increased planning in the economy—most intriguingly, the New Generation AI Development Plan.

Issued by the State Council on July 20, 2017, the New Generation AI Development Plan calls for the party-state to invest in AI research and nurture the AI industry, laying out various goalposts for its development. By 2020, China’s AI technology is to keep pace with the level of AI development globally, and AI and AI-related industries are to reach a value of $148 billion. By 2025, the goal is for AI to lead China’s economic growth and industrial transformation, reaching a value of $740 billion. By 2030, the target is for China to “occupy the commanding heights of AI technology” and become the world’s leader in innovation, with AI and related industries attaining a value of $1.48 trillion.

The plan also calls for the creation of laws, norms, ethics, and policies regarding AI, so don’t worry, friends, the Communist Party is going to be totally responsible about this. Of course, two of the big areas of planned use for AI are facial recognition and biometrics, but it will be, you know, responsible surveillance. It’s not like they intend to use it for prurient purposes—they just want the tools to track down thought criminals (by the way, thought-reading is also a thing now). The plan calls for AI to be “safe, reliable, and controllable,” but I can’t help but think that the Party’s concern here is not so much a Skynet scenario as the possibility that AI might enable disruption of China’s social order: they don’t want the AI to decide that the Party is an irrational factor in the equation.

Just as the CCP is banking on the potential of new surveillance technologies to address the trust deficit in Chinese society (via the social credit system), they hope that AI will enable China’s economy to escape the middle-income trap. As China’s economic growth slows down, the Party worries that the people will become restive, because ever since the 1979, the Party’s legitimacy has primarily rested on its ability to provide the people with higher material standards of living. If you buy the thesis that the Party’s only real goal is the perpetuation of its own power, then it is easy to explain the urgency of three initiatives which have been carried out under the aegis of Xi Jinping: the anticorruption campaign, the re-emphasis on socialist ideology, and now the push for AI-driven economic growth. These are all intended to boost the Party’s legitimacy.

It is entirely in keeping with the Marxist ideology that the Party should hope for technological solutions to its problems. Technological progress represents a disruption in the economic structure which lies at the foundation of society, and disruption and transformation of the economic structure is what brings about the movement of human society through the Marxist phases of history. More specifically, history is moved by technological breakthroughs which bring about productivity growth and economic growth (economic growth = population growth + productivity growth). According to orthodox Chinese historiography, farming brought about the transition from primitive communism to slave society, bronze-working brought about the transition from slave society to feudalism, the industrial revolution brought about the transition from feudalism to capitalism—and now, it is hoped, AI will bring about the transition from capitalism to socialism.

If this story strikes you as a bit lacking in detail, or omitting a certain socialist phase of Chinese society from 1949 to 1979, you’re right! The Party insists that at present, China is in the “basic stage of socialism,” a newly identified phase of history which it places between capitalism and socialism. The basic stage consists of a mixed economy: as a phase of transition, it includes both the market economy and the planned economy. Private enterprises “continue” to coexist alongside the SOEs, but eventually, the “socialist market economy” will have worn out its usefulness, and China will move on to socialism proper—that is, a fully planned economy. This narrative of course conveniently ignores the fact that there was already a phase under Mao in which there was no market, meaning China has already experienced the purely planned economy of socialism.

Certain thought leaders in China have now accepted the following explanation of the Soviet Union’s demise: the planned economy was less efficient than the capitalist economy because the capitalist economy was able to allocate resources in accordance with market signals (supply met demand), whereas the planned economy, in its attempt to process all economic signals through a central planner, was unable to identify the real needs of the economy. In other words, the planned economy couldn’t process data as well as the capitalist economy. Implicitly, the same critique applies to Mao-era China.

Jack Ma, for one, believes that big data will be able to replace market signals and allow for a planned economy more efficient than the market economy. As he told the China International Big Data Expo in May 2017: “With the help of artificial intelligence or multiple intelligence, our perception of the world will be elevated to a new level. As such, big data will make the market smarter and make it possible to plan and predict market forces so as to allow us to finally achieve a planned economy.”

Ultimately, the goal of socialism is to increase productivity to such a degree that economic growth nears infinity. This is because communism can only be attained when productivity is so great that humans are entirely free from want. Communism is an inherently utopian goal. It is the end of history. It is a society in which activity is entirely free from coercion. 

As Marx writes in The German Ideology, in all the phases of history after primitive communism and before communism—all the phases in which division of labor exists—a person “is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman, or critic.”

That is communism. The CCP of course does not claim that this is the picture of China at present. Communist parties are named after their aspiration, not their means. The means is socialism. And in the case of the Chinese Communist Party, the means is the “socialist market economy” of the “basic stage of socialism,” at least for now. Wisely, no date has been set for the realization of communism, but the stated goal of the party-state is to attain true socialism by 2049.

Since taking power, Xi has repeatedly stressed the Two Centenary Goals: China is to become a 小康社会 (“moderately prosperous society”) by 2021, the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, and “a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious” by 2049, the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. In the case of the first centenary, 2021, the Party has set some clear quantitative benchmarks: double China’s 2010 per capita income, achieve a 60% urbanization rate, and build a space station and an aircraft carrier. Such qualitative measures have not yet been set for 2049, but the transition beyond the basic stage of socialism and into socialism proper must by definition entail massive productivity growth; therefore, the Party is serious about the push for AI and, ultimately, an economy planned by AI. They believe (or at least Xi believes) in their own Marxist historiography and the incontrovertibility of its law: productivity growth advances human society through the stages of history. Hence, AI or some other, as-yet-unidentified supercharger of productivity is a necessity.

Xi himself has set this goal, so it is the standard by which he invites the Chinese people to judge him. Failure to reach this goal could represent a severe crisis of legitimacy for the party-state. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that by 2049, the party-state’s control of China’s information ecosystem will be so comprehensive that they could fully erase and rewrite the past with impunity (“Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia” and “China will be a modern socialist country by 2099”). But for now, I believe Xi is serious about the goals he has articulated. Whether the CCP are true believers or mere power-mongers, as they have staked their legitimacy to the Two Centenary Goals, it amounts to the same thing.

Look Beneath the Surface of "Nambia"

(Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

The substance of President Trump’s “Nambia” speech was a step in the right direction.

Trump’s mispronunciation of Namibia was not, but it was also unsurprising. It is no secret that most Americans are terrible at geography (which is, however—ahem—not a uniquely American shortcoming), and I don’t think anyone who likes Donald Trump likes him because of his presumed familiarity with the globe. I am sure his supporters feel indignant that we mean old coastal elites should mock him over a matter as piddling as this. But it is not a piddling matter, we anti-Trump folks instinctively feel, because it symbolizes his willful ignorance and privilege. Despite being a buffoon, he has the privilege of leading the world’s most powerful country and thereby obliging other world leaders to deal with his buffoonery. And the problem for America is that although ignorance, clownishness, meanness, and mendacity may play well with Trump’s fans, they are not a good look for the United States. Other countries see what we are now, and they are repulsed.

Or are they? Africans, apparently, took the speech in stride. As explained on the China in Africa Podcast, the response to the speech on African social media was mostly good-humored. Notably, Namibia’s President Hage Geingob said, “That ‘Nambia’ put Namibia on the map, huh? They have to explain, while they are—think they are teasing the president, they had to explain Namibia: where is it and so on, and so we got good publicity from that. So… and I was also very much impressed meeting the president. We had different expectations, but, uh, to tell you the truth he spent two hours with us at luncheon, and he listened.” The podcast’s Kobus Van Staden pointed out that throughout the continent of Africa, President Trump was largely regarded as a joke already, which may account for the lack of anger.

But the substance of Trump’s speech was a more important reason for the willingness of Namibians and other Africans to overlook his ignorance. The speech talked up increased American trade and investment in a variety of Africans countries, and that is good for Americans as much as Africans. The future of Africa matters for the United States because African economies are growing rapidly—more rapidly than most Westerners are aware. 

As for the specific manner in which Trump expressed America's economic interest in Africa, he again received criticism for saying, “Africa has tremendous business potential. I have so many friends going to your countries trying to get rich. I congratulate you. They’re spending a lot of money. But it does: it has a tremendous business potential—and representing huge amounts of, uh, different markets, and for American firms, it’s really become a place that they have to go, that they want to go.”* The tone is unmistakably paternalistic and classically Trumpian in its narcissism, but beneath that is a positive message: we want to trade with you. That is exactly what African governments want to hear. Earlier in the speech, he said, “In this room, I see partners for promoting prosperity and peace on a range of economic, humanitarian, and security issues. We hope to extend our economic partnerships with countries who are committed to self-reliance and to fostering opportunities for job creation in both Africa and the United States.” Boring and unspecific? Sure, but also respectful, and ritual affirmations of respect and vague commitments to cooperation are the essence of diplomacy.

Prior to the “Nambia” speech, Trump’s views on Africa hadn’t made any headlines during his presidency, except for headlines pointing out that he hadn’t expressed any. The fear among American foreign policy wonks has been that by completely ignoring Africa, Trump is letting the continent fall into China’s sphere of influence or at least—to put it in language less reminiscent of the Cold War—letting China alone take advantage of all the opportunities Africa offers.

In the last decade, China-Africa trade has grown much more rapidly the US-Africa trade, and China surpassed the US as the continent’s largest trading partner in 2009. Africans have long complained that America views Africa as a basket case and a recipient of aid rather than as a potential economic partner. Though the average Zhou also has something of that in his/her view of Africa, the Chinese state most assuredly does not. China’s emphatic official view is that Africa is an economic partner, and it shows in China’s actions. Besides titanic infrastructure investments, China is also building institutions with Africa, the most important being the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, formed in 2000.

On the whole, Africans seem to appreciate this respect. In the 2016 Afrobarometer survey of thirty-six African countries, 63% of Africans reported feeling that China was a positive influence in their countries. To be fair, 30% still reported that America “would be the best model for the future development of our country” versus 24% for the China model. But consider this: the concept of a “China model” didn’t really make its appearance on the world stage until the late 1990s. Since then, it has gained widespread currency and received much debate; the Washington Consensus, the American development model, has meanwhile come in for a great deal of criticism—particularly after 2008. To put it more candidly: since 2000, China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. What has America done other than destroy Iraq and tank the global economy?

If mere opinion polling doesn’t interest you, consider that more African university students now choose to study abroad in China than in England or the United States. What relationships are they forging? What values are they imbibing? With whom will this next generation of Africa’s leaders feel comfortable doing business? This is an extraordinarily important development. America’s closeness with global elites in the last few decades has depended enormously on the magnetism of American universities.

Considering that America’s educational and economic appeal has been weakening, why does our image there remain mostly favorable? No doubt we can thank Beyoncé for that. But democracy makes a difference, too. Democracy remains the most widely respected political concept globally (the list of political entities who deny believing in democracy is motley and short—even North Korea is actually the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). But it remains to be seen how long other countries will believe that America embodies democracy or other admirable values. 

Even if America does maintain the mantle of democracy’s champion, democracy itself is not without competition. At the very same time that regressive kleptocracy in a populist mask has been gaining ground in developed countries, the China model or the Beijing Consensus has been generating more and more buzz among economists and policy makers in developing countries. In a nutshell, this refers to a form of authoritarian capitalism, or the prioritization of economic development over human rights. In the next decade, however, if China’s economic growth slows down and the country fails to escape the middle-income trap (as expected), then the China model will doubtless lose some luster, and other developing countries, including those of Africa, will hesitate to follow China's path. But then again, if America falls into complete Trumpism, the authoritarian capitalism of the China model won’t really be an alternative, will it? In essence, we’ll share the same system.

*Addendum: 

A lot of progressive pabulum was tweeted about how money, rich people, Donald Trump’s friends, corporations, and colonialism are bad. Yet money, rich people, Donald Trump’s friends, corporations, and colonialism are all different things and therefore should not be conflated. Do Donald Trump’s purported friends have money? I’m sure. Do many of them run corporations? Seems likely. Do they want to make more money in Africa? It would seem so. Does that mean they want to pillage? No, not necessarily. Does any involvement of Euro-Americans in Africa constitute neo-colonialism? No.

Colonialism is a system wherein a state (the colonizer) seizes control of another state or region (the colony) by means of military force and occupation, and then extracts the raw materials of the colony, ships them back to the colonizer, uses them to manufacture finished goods, and then exports those goods to the colony.

Neo-colonialism is an ill-defined term, but it should refer to a system wherein the economic aspects of colonialism still obtain—that is, an economic relationship wherein a developed country (the neo-colonizer) traps a developing country (the neo-colonized) in a cycle of dependency wherein the developing country remains reliant on the export of raw materials to the developed country and bound in some way to rely on imports of high-value-added products from the developed country.

But this is by no means the essence of trade. It is but one system of trade. Is this what Donald Trump’s alleged friends intend to do? We don’t know. What we do know is that trade is indispensable for developing countries, so let us leave behind the patronizing assumption that Africans will inevitably be victimized.

Chinoptimism

In the 2012 movie Looper, Jeff Daniels imparts some advice to Bruce Willis in his juvenile form (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Upon hearing of his protégé’s study plans, he asks, “Why the fuck French?”

“I’m going to France,” Bruce Willis Gordon-Levitt replies.

“You should go to China.”

“I’m going to France.”

“I’m from the future: you should go to China.”

And so young Bruce-Joe goes and spends three decades doing drugs and dirty deeds in his über-minimalist apartment in an admittedly somewhat hitman-ridden but nevertheless comparatively secure and prosperous China.

This was but one of a number of upbeat Hollywood depictions of China that seem to have kicked off around 2009, when China saved the world in the apocalypse film 2012. China also saved the world that same year as it drove the global economic recovery from the Great Recession.

Admittedly, China receives positive depictions in Hollywood films not because Americans like China, but rather because Hollywood likes Chinese moviegoers. But even if these films aren’t reflecting public sentiment, it is possible that they may be influencing it. There has been a gradual generational shift in American perceptions of China. According to Pew, 55% of Americans ages 18-29 report a positive view of China, while only 41% of those ages 30-49 agree, and those ages 50+ are mighty suspicious at 27%. Perhaps media depictions don’t matter. Perhaps it’s simply that the more distant in one’s memory the Cold War is, the less one regards Communist states as a rival.

“What’s that?” you object, “China isn’t Communist!” Actually, I expect my intelligent and attractive readers are savvier than that, but if the thought did cross your mind, you’re not alone. I have met many people and—sad to say—read the Facebook comments of many more who are under the impression that China is a capitalist country now (sad because I’m reading Facebook comments, not because they’re wrong). This misperception is forgivable, but considerable. As the ruling Chinese Communist Party itself says, China is a “socialist market economy,” and the more you learn about China’s economy, the more you will find that is an accurate description (I will convince you in a future post).

Regardless of the actual degree to which China is capitalist or socialist, the market is (somewhat) open, and many young Westerners with positive perceptions of it have dived in. More hope to do so, and many people plan for their children to do so (Chinese nannies are in demand). Run across any of these aspiring foreign entrepreneurs in China, and you will find it isn’t just that they regard the Chinese people as one billion customers; in the minds of many, China is the future.

China is also the future in the minds of many Americans and Europeans at home, who may or may not regard this as a good thing. China also looks like the future to many Africans, Central Asians, Southeast Asians, and South Americans, because China is where investment is coming from, China is where you can get a scholarship, and China seems to be led by rational people. The futurism of Chinese cities has been acclaimed by one Paris Hilton who, on a 2007 visit, said, “Shanghai looks like the future!” Shanghai looks much more futuristic now than it did then, and it looks even more futuristic when Bruce Willis Gordon-Levitt arrives in 2044.

Super-Pudong 2044 (Source)

China is also the future in the minds of most Chinese. Optimism is said to be a trait in the Chinese character. Chinese kids, as so many envious American education writers tell us, have grit. They are taught that success comes not from innate talent, but from hard work, and I personally would attest that this truly shows in the attitudes of the Chinese people I know. And it is admirable.

It would be hard not to be optimistic, perhaps, when you experience wealth and security that your parents did not, when your grandparents lived through famine and civil war, and you have an iPhone—or even if you don’t have an iPhone, you are at least able to support your extended family by working in the factory that makes them.

There is another side to the coin, of course. Decades of bullet-fast economic growth produce externalities, as the air, water, earth, expropriated villagers, bewildered elders, and powerless promoters of civil society attest.

Yet money has a way of healing all wounds, and China’s pervasive atmosphere of optimism remains alluring. A few of my Chinese friends make cynical remarks about the government, but very few of them think their country is falling apart, and almost none of them think the world is about to end. It is deeper even than the economic. While America sighs with postmodernism, China enthuses modern: progress, enlightenment, socialism, science, education, improvement, prosperity!

I would wager that this is something inconceivable to American Millennials, unless they should have the opportunity to go a place such as China and experience it for themselves. American popular culture has overflowed with apocalyptic imagery for more than a decade now. This is what Confucius called 亡国之音, the pitiful cries of a doomed country. And why not? To progressives, humanity is a despoiler of the earth, and America is the bandit extraordinaire: climate change is going to destroy everything, and it’s all our fault. Or if not that, automation apocalypse or AI apocalypse or virtual reality apocalypse or colony collapse syndrome. As H. Bruce Franklin said, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” But regardless of their politics, most young Americans feel the truth of this: Millenials are the first generation in American history to experience less prosperity than their parents. This is entirely the opposite of young Chinese, and God bless them.

Yet here is the rub: today’s young Chinese will soon be crushed by the economic burden of the old. China is rapidly aging just as the economy is slowing down. It will get old before it gets rich. Not only will China not escape the middle income trap, it may not even surpass America as the world’s largest economy (in nominal GDP). Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian once told the New York Times, “People say we can be two to three times the size of America’s economy. I say it’s totally impossible. It will never overtake America’s, because of the decrease in the labor force and the aging of the population.” China’s population is expected to fall below one billion by 2060, at which time the US population will be over 400 million. By 2050, China’s median age will be 48.7, while America’s will be 40. Meanwhile, China’s GDP growth will continue to slow. The recently established pension system remains to be worked out, and lifestyle diseases are expected to spread. Chinese a few decades hence will probably remember the 1990s through the 2010s as a golden age of expanding prosperity in much the same way that Americans remember the 1940s through the 1960s.

Our national salvation (Source)

China is set to suffer the burden of an aging population (as are Europe and Japan), but America is not. America’s fertility rate remains high because of immigration, and as long as it keeps the door open, a continually rejuvenated population will ensure that its prospects for economic growth and national security remain equally high. At the moment, most Americans would agree that the nation seems hell-bent on committing suicide. To the Trump-right, immigration is that suicide; in reality, America's path to suicide would be to succumb to the nostalgic and racist authoritarianism that would lock us into a monochromatic, geriatric destiny. But bad presidents come and go, xenophobia ebbs and flows, and politics sway between left and right. If America can remember its better self, it may find reasons for optimism that most of the world will lack.

Anonymity's End

The Chinese government has sentenced anonymity to death.

On August 25, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) issued new regulations intended to tighten up real-name registration requirements for online forums. Real-name registration has been in the works for years, with gradually tightening implementation. According to the notice issued by CAC, beginning October 1, the burden will fall upon tech companies themselves to verify the identities of their users. The rules apply to all social media platforms, forums, comments on news websites, and “any other communication platform that features news or with the function to mobilize society.” The form which this registration takes usually consists of signing up for a service using one’s actual phone number, because phone numbers must be registered under one’s real name in China. Chinese service providers themselves will also be required to report any forbidden speech activities which take place, for a list of which see here. It’s a fairly comprehensive roundup (since the final listed activity is “violating any other laws and regulations”). One of the items, “spreading rumors and disrupting social order,” has seen quite wide-ranging and flexible use as a legal charge against presumed speech criminals in recent years.

Anonymity may be marching to the gallows, but it isn’t necessarily going to hang on the appointed date. As with all Chinese laws, we need to wait and see before we can make informed comments, because implementation may be slow and patchy. VPNs, the primary method for circumventing the Great Firewall, have long been illegal, but that hasn’t stopped people from using them. There has been a crackdown on VPNs in recent months, however. Apple has agreed to remove some of them from the Chinese App Store, and China’s three state telecom providers will be required to prevent individuals from accessing any and all VPNs beginning next February (or at least those whose existence they are aware of). Again, we must wait for the implementation, but if there are no more VPNs, make no mistake: the Internet and the Chinanet will become two different networks with, with the very little shared between them turning into less and less.

In The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the Twenty-First Century, Stein Ringen argues that China is a latently totalitarian dictatorship of an entirely new style. What makes the Chinese dictatorship “perfect”—or what will make it so if current trends continue—is the complement of thought control techniques employed by the Chinese Communist Party. The techniques of mental domination being pioneered by the CCP today are far subtler than anything practiced by totalitarian regimes of the past. According to Ringen’s argument, the key to CCP thought control is not censorship but self-censorship: as he sees it, the party aims to establish a society which needs no policing, because people will ultimately choose to comprehensively police themselves. This is a matter of setting up a society in which there are very clear incentives for cooperation. The Chinese state wins legitimacy by offering the Chinese people the chance to participate in economic prosperity. In this bargain, a free and just life is sacrificed in favor of a secure and comfortable one.

The CCP prefers to rely on soft incentives. A recent study of Chinese online censorship by Gary King of Harvard found that the prevalent method in recent years is not to delete criticisms but rather to drown them out with a flood of comments swelling with positive energy. The idea is to distract rather than engage. One advantage of this method is that defenders of the Party-state can point to the many critical comments which do indeed get posted as evidence of China’s freedom of speech. Nor are the posters of critical comments hunted down and jailed. Until now, the only kind of criticism which has been likely to result in a knock on your front door is that kind which moves beyond the mere airing of grievances to the point of actually advocating organized political activities of resistance (such as public protests). This is a noteworthy departure from old-fashioned methods of censorship, which consist of silencing critics.

Real-name registration places responsibility for one’s speech in one’s own hands. The new regulations make clear that there is a comprehensive list of forbidden speech acts for which one can be punished. But one still has a platform, one still has a microphone, one still has a voice. The internet is still there. The choice of what to do as a being with a voice is your own. Should you choose to speak, however, they know who you are. But self-censorship is more ingenious than the threat of consequences. The perfect dictatorship takes self-censorship to a new level. People are not only reminded of the consequences of criticism but are also given an example of what “good” public speech looks like. This good form of speech is referred to as “positive energy.” Positive energy is the quality of any speech act which praises the Communist Party or China (and conflates the two, ideally), and it is the crux of thought control in the perfect dictatorship.  You are not just told to shut up or else; rather, you are told, “This is how you should talk instead. And if you do, you might just go viral.”

In 2014, previously unknown netizens Yu Runze and Xu An released a music video about the love between President Xi Jinping and First Lady Peng Liyuan which, with some nudges from the state media, has racked up several hundred million views. You really must watch this video. Its lyrics, such as “Xi dada loves Peng mama, love like theirs is a fairytale. Peng mama loves Xi dada, a world with love is the most powerful,” are similar in structure to those of “The East Is Red,” a Cultural-Revolution-era song which praised Mao Zedong.

President Xi himself echoed Mao in his October 14, 2014 talk at the Beijing Forum on Art and Literature (whose name recalls Mao’s famous/infamous speeches at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. The bottom line of Xi’s speech was that “The arts must serve the people and serve socialism”—a message essentially the same as that delivered by Mao seventy-two years before. In the speech, Xi showered praise on Zhou Xiaoping and Hua Qianfang, two nationalistic young bloggers whose work he identified as being powered by positive energy. Their commentary typically consists of screeds against Japan and America, which country Zhou has accused, for example, of “opposing humanity,” seeking to “destroy Chinese beliefs,” and being engaged in a Cold War against China. Interestingly, the shout-out to Zhou was scrubbed from later transcriptions of President Xi’s speech after another prominent blogger pointed out factual inaccuracies in one of Zhou’s posts and Zhou subsequently faced widespread online ridicule.

The desire for positive energy also may partly explain why Chinese television is so boring. Satirical comedy does not transmit positive energy, nor do morally ambiguous dramas. Antiheroes who reflect social problems certainly do not embody positive energy. As Xi remarked at the aforementioned Beijing Forum on Art and Literature, “In some of their work, some artists ridicule what is noble, distort the classics. They subvert history and smear the masses and heroes. Some don’t tell right from wrong, don’t distinguish between good and evil, present ugliness as beauty, exaggerate society’s dark side.” Such artists are transmitting negative energy (a.k.a. critical thought). A good recent example of art which does transmit positive energy is the action film “Wolf Warrior 2,” whose poster reads: “Anyone who offends China, no matter how remote, must be exterminated” (by the way, with Chinese box office earnings of $867 million USD so far, it is the second-highest grossing film of all time in a single market). This line was paraphrased on a sign used by Chinese students at a protest in Sydney against India over the recent China-India border dispute.

In a recent online poll, netizens were asked to choose the news photos which best transmitted positive energy. The winners mostly include pictures of police in action, military parades, and disaster relief efforts.The Chinese media regularly put out Buzzfeed-esque, list-heavy articles about how great it is to live in China as compared to America or "the West," citing such advantages as Chinese cuisine, excellent public transportation, and the wide availability of dirt-cheap next-day delivery services. News stories in general, even when covering tragedies or crimes, tend to end on an upbeat note about how the police, the city government, the local Party secretary, or some other authority figure has taken vigorous measures to rectify the problem. But inasmuch as the media address goings-on abroad, they tend to emphasis the chaos of the outside world in contrast to the safety and orderliness of China. Censors have also urged economists to put out more stories with positive energy. 

Rampant self-censorship and positive energy don't result in the sort of drab, gloomy country which you picture the Soviet Union to be in your head. Chinese cities are full of color and light, hustle and bustle, advertising and entrepreneurialism. Shanghai is full of bikeshares, old streets lined with new cafes, and young people with disposable incomes experimenting with fashion. In other words, it often feels much the same as any other global city. And Chinese people do speak their minds about as much as any other people—at least in a one-on-one setting.

 

Yet I think of the people in my graduate program in Hong Kong, an autonomous region of China which, under the principle of “one country, two systems,” has legally protected freedom of speech and academic freedom. Our course was on Chinese politics, and in a society with freedom of thought, one expects graduate students in a political science course to have something to say. Yet extracting opinions from most of the mainland Chinese students was like pulling teeth. There were some who became more outspoken over time, but not before more than one professor admonished the class that “You can feel free to say anything here. No one is going to report on you.” (Nervous titters.) Those who did grow more outspoken certainly had insightful criticisms to share. So why did it take so long to draw them out? One might say that their reticence reflected fear, and that may be true to some extent, but I am afraid that in the case of many of my Chinese friends, their silence on political matters is not a matter of fear so much as apathy. Time and again have I heard variations of “Why should I worry about politics? I can live my own life.” There are, of course, plenty of people who would say the same in democratic societies. But I think the reticence of many of my classmates reflected something more than fear and apathy. One of those who did eventually speak up more often generally insisted on speaking English because “I want to think in English, not Chinese. I am in Hong Kong, and even though it is part of China, when I am studying here, I should try to think like a foreigner, not like a Chinese.”

Besides the promotion of positive energy and self-censorship, the Chinese state still relies quite heavily on cruder methods of social control. For years, China’s budget allocated more to “stability maintenance” (funds which are spent on state security police, censorship, surveillance, etc.) than to the military. The most recent year in which these figures were published was 2013, when stability maintenance received 769 billion RMB while the military received 741 billion. Since then, the central government has wisely ceased releasing comprehensive figures on stability maintenance. Old fashioned censorship thus chugs on, the recent Cambridge University Press scandal being a prominent example. And the fate of Liu Xiaobo reminds us that the Party-state is willing to straightforwardly crush freethinkers who get too popular. His death also reflects an old-school totalitarian reliance on the memory hole: thanks to pervasive targeted censorship, few Chinese people know who he was. It is therefore quite accurate to say that the Chinese state still relies on brute force and the traditional methods of social control.

But the CCP is also constantly innovating. Real-name registration will not be the last new censorship technique, and such techniques, combined with the incipient social credit system, will soon create an atmosphere so positive that certain people will find it difficult to breathe.