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.
