Politics

posts on political issues relevant to Greater China

Battle over Li Rui’s diaries

by at

Source: BBC News (8/20/24)
US trial begins in battle for Mao secretary’s diaries
By Tessa Wong, BBC News, Reporting from Singapore

Getty Images Li Rui in an interview in 2006

Getty Images Li Rui was a former secretary to Mao Zedong and vocal government critic. Getty Images

A trial has begun in California to decide whether Stanford University can keep the diaries of a top Chinese official, in a case that is being framed as a fight against Chinese government censorship.

The diaries belong to the late Li Rui, a former secretary to Communist China’s founder Mao Zedong.

Following Li’s death in 2019, his widow sued for the documents to be returned to Beijing, claiming they belong to her.

Stanford rejects this. It says Li, who had been a critic of the Chinese government, donated his diaries to the university as he feared they would be destroyed by the Chinese Communist Party.

The diaries, which were written between 1935 and 2018, cover much of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rule. In those eight tumultuous decades, China emerged from impoverished isolation to become indispensable to the global economy.

“If [the diaries] return to China they will be banned… China does not have a good record in permitting criticism of party leaders,” Mark Litvack, one of Stanford’s lawyers, told the BBC before the trial began. Continue reading Battle over Li Rui’s diaries →

Video game seeks to curb ‘negative discourse’

by at

Source: NYT (8/20/24)
Hit Chinese Video Game Seeks to Curb ‘Negative Discourse’
Black Myth: Wukong tried to forbid influential overseas streamers from discussing “feminist propaganda,” Covid-19 and China’s video game industry policies.
By Daisuke Wakabayashi and Claire Fu

Two people walking by a promotional image for a character in a video game.

A promotional image of a character from the video game Black Myth: Wukong. It is considered China’s first “AAA,” big-budget game. Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Black Myth: Wukong is one of the most highly anticipated Chinese video games ever, a premium title with a blockbuster-worthy budget that underscores the country’s push to become a global cultural power.

But ahead of its debut on Tuesday, a company affiliated with the game’s China-based developer rankled some influential overseas players with a list of topics to avoid discussing while livestreaming the game.

The list of forbidden subjects laid out in a document under “Don’ts” — politics, “feminist propaganda,” Covid-19, China’s video game industry policies and other content that “instigates negative discourse” — offered a glimpse of the restrictions that content creators face in China as well as the topics deemed sensitive to Beijing.

“I have never seen anything that shameful in my 15 years doing this job. This is very clearly a document which explains that we must censor ourselves,” said Benoit Reinier, a prominent video game streamer on YouTube and a French journalist, in a YouTube video. Continue reading Video game seeks to curb ‘negative discourse’ →

China’s genocide tourism strategy

by at

Source: The Diplomat (8/19/24)
China’s Genocide Tourism Strategy
The use of tourism as a propaganda weapon is an old trick of authoritarian regimes
By Magnus Fiskesjö

China’s Genocide Tourism Strategy 

Credit: Depositphotos

A journalist based in Poland recently described a surprising find: a Nazi tourist guidebook from 1943 for tourists going to the so-called General Government, Nazi Germany’s most infamous dumping zone for deported undesirables on the ashes of occupied Poland. The region’s many sightseeing spots were recast as German heritage, which proud German tourists visited with the guidebook’s help.

This is exactly what we see today in China’s own genocide zone in Xinjiang (called East Turkestan by the native Uyghur population). Having suppressed all possible resistance – through a formidable surveillance apparatus, mass detention of anyone remotely suspect of pro-native sentiment, and mass forced labor for camp survivors – the Chinese government is now promoting both domestic and foreign tourism to the Uyghur region.

The campaign is accompanied by a propaganda blitz, hoping to thwart foreign criticism of the genocide launched in 2017. A major goal is also to recruit both domestic and foreign tourists into supporters who “see for themselves” that Xinjiang is safe and good.

Domestic tourists are lured to Xinjiang with new infrastructure, remodeled cities and new attractions, from fake dinosaur parks to wholly new faux-historical “mystery” sites that re-appropriate Uyghur culture while exoticizing and primitivizing it. Continue reading China’s genocide tourism strategy →

A disappearance in Xinjiang

by at

Did not see this gripping feature on our imprisoned anthropologist colleague Rahile Dawut, until today. It says her elderly 80+ mother was allowed a prison visit, only through a screen. Unclear when. The Chinese Communist regime is so profoundly cowardly, it is hard to grasp, no-one can make sense of it. –Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu

Source: Financial Times (4/26/24)
A Disappearance in Xinjiang
By Edward White

© Iris Legendre. Based on a portrait by Lisa Ross

A car pulls up outside an apartment building in Ürümqi. An elderly woman, in her eighties and frail, emerges and is helped into the vehicle. She is driven to a prison on the outskirts of the western Chinese city. She is taken inside a room where she is shown, via a screen, her 57-year-old daughter, the Uyghur anthropologist Rahile Dawut. Days later the old woman relays the encounter to her granddaughter, Akeda Paluti. “Your mother is doing well,” she says. “Try not to worry.”

Rahile’s life was devoted to the preservation of cultural diversity across the vast Xinjiang region, nearly three times the size of France and covering about one-sixth of modern China. For centuries, ancient Silk Roads wove past its mountain ranges, lakes, deserts and valleys. Today, officially called the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, it shares borders with Russia and Mongolia; Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan; and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Rahile insisted on conducting gruelling fieldwork. She regularly travelled hundreds of kilometres from the capital Ürümqi to isolated villages to research the local Mazar — the shrines and tombs, sometimes attached to mosques, where saints have been buried or where miracles happened — as well as the farmers and craftsmen to understand the traditions etched into their daily lives. She recorded the oral histories that local leaders had for centuries offered to pilgrims; their poetry, music, folkways and other traditions. Continue reading A disappearance in Xinjiang →

China warns students about anti-China rhetoric

by at

Source: China Digital Times (8/14/24)
China’s Spy Agency Warns Students Against Anti-China Rhetoric In College Application Essays
By 

China’s Ministry of State Security has issued a warning to students seeking to study abroad: don’t cast yourself as a regime opponent in your college application essay. An article shared by the WeChat account of the Ministry of Public Security, a top domestic policing body, but attributed to the powerful intelligence service the Ministry of State Security, warned about the alleged risk college consultancies pose to national security. In the MSS’ telling, college consulting services are illegally inserting “anti-China prejudices” into students’ application essays to make them more attractive to foreign universities. Specifically, the article claims that foreign universities want essays with “run” flavor to them, a reference to content encouraging emigration from China. The essay further claims that negative information about China is a result of the infiltration of “hostile foreign forces.” It offered an anonymized retelling of a purportedly true story, in which a young person named Zhang was tricked into including “false reactionary political speech” in his college application by an unscrupulous college consultancy:

In order to realize his dream of studying abroad, a student named Zhang purchased the VIP services of a study abroad consultancy, hiring a team of professionals to help him develop an optimized study abroad plan. The head of the consultancy, “Little Rui,” told Zhang that one foreign university had rolled out the red carpet for Chinese students, with their odds of acceptance greatly increased if their application essay had a sufficiently “run” flavor to it. Under the consultancy’s guidance, a great deal of rhetoric pandering to anti-China prejudices—including false reactionary political speech—was grafted onto Zhang’s essay. Zhang had unknowingly transformed from a young student with a simple background into an anti-China “crusader” in the blink of an eye. Zhang is a victim of the college consultancy’s illegal behavior. [Chinese] Continue reading China warns students about anti-China rhetoric →

China’s Great Wall of Villages

by at

Source: NYT (8/8/24)
China’s Great Wall of Villages
China has moved thousands of people to new settlements on its frontiers. It calls them “border guardians.”
By Muyi Xiao and Agnes Chang

Qionglin New Village sits deep in the Himalayas, just three miles from a region where a heavy military buildup and confrontations between Chinese and Indian troops have brought fears of a border war.

The land was once an empty valley, more than 10,000 feet above the sea, traversed only by local hunters. Then Chinese officials built Qionglin, a village of cookie-cutter homes and finely paved roads, and paid people to move there from other settlements.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, calls such people “border guardians.” Qionglin’s villagers are essentially sentries on the front line of China’s claim to Arunachal Pradesh, India’s easternmost state, which Beijing insists is part of Chinese-ruled Tibet.

Many villages like Qionglin have sprung up. In China’s west, they give its sovereignty a new, undeniable permanence along boundaries contested by India, Bhutan and Nepal. In its north, the settlements bolster security and promote trade with Central Asia. In the south, they guard against the flow of drugs and crime from Southeast Asia. . . [READ THE FULL ARTICLE, WITH IMAGES, HERE (Paywall)]

Xi’s ten-year bid to remake China’s media

by at

Source: China Media Project (7/24/24)
Xi’s Ten-Year Bid to Remake China’s Media
Outside China, the idea of “media convergence,” the joining together of communication technologies on handheld devices, is now so much a way of life that few even talk about it. But for China’s leadership it is a concept with era-defining significance — having far-reaching consequences for the current and future exercise of power.
By David Bandurski

Xi Jinping opens the Chengdu Universiade in 2023. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In recent years, the buzzword “media convergence,” or meiti ronghe (媒体融合), has abounded in official documents about public opinion and ideology in China. What does this term mean? And why is it important in a Chinese political context? The quick answer — it is about remaking information controls for the 21st century, and building a media system that is innovative, influential and serves the needs of the ruling party.

The idea of “media convergence” took off in official circles in China almost exactly 10 years ago as Xi Jinping sought to recast “mainstream media” (主流媒体) — referring narrowly in China’s political context to large CCP-controlled media groups, such as central and provincial daily newspapers and broadcasters — into modern communication behemoths for rapidly changing global media landscape. More insistently even than his predecessors, Xi believed it was crucial for the Party to maintain social and political control by seizing and shaping public opinion. To accomplish this in the face of 21st century communication technologies, built on 4G and eventually 5G mobile networks, the Party’s trusted “mainstream” media had to reinvent themselves while remaining loyal servants of the CCP agenda. Continue reading Xi’s ten-year bid to remake China’s media →

Why Chinese propaganda loves foreign travel bloggers (1)

by at

Good observations in this article. But somebody should write about the obvious, glaring parallels with Nazi tourism.

Just like China, the Nazis also organized foreigners to come and “see with their own eyes” to counter the accusations that the Nazis were doing anything wrong.

And huge numbers of foreign tourists did go to Goebbels Germany, which was similarly full of sightseeing spots, rich in cultural history, and helpful Nazis.

I wasn’t aware of just how striking these parallels are, but there are some outstanding books on this, such as Seeing Hitler’s Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich, by Kristin Semmens (2005), and Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism 1919-1945, by Julia Boyd (2018) which lay out in great detail how the Nazis purposefully organized the tourism, to cover up their crimes by luring in foreigners to play the fool, just like in China now — where we now see lots of Americans marveling about how great is the food, and the bridges and the Autobahns, etcetera.

On X/Twitter, all the usual Chinese “diplomats” as well as the armies of propaganda officers under cover have all be directed to talk about tourists and vloggers almost more than they mention the Olympics.

Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Why Chinese propaganda loves foreign travel bloggers

by at

Source: NYT (7/31/24)
Why Chinese Propaganda Loves Foreign Travel Bloggers
Videos by influencers documenting their trips have been widely promoted on Chinese media — if they tell a certain story.
By Vivian Wang, Reporting from Beijing

Spend some time browsing YouTube or Instagram and you might come across a growing new genre: China travel vlogs.

There’s the American who made a four-hour “vlogumentary” about eating dumplings in Shanghai. There’s the German traveler marveling at how quickly China’s bullet trains accelerate. There’s a British couple admiring colorful traditional clothing in the far western region of Xinjiang. All have hundreds of thousands of views.

The videos are even more popular on Chinese social media. YouTube and Instagram are banned in China, but Chinese users have found ways to reshare them to Chinese sites, to avid followings. The bloggers have been interviewed by Chinese state media and their experiences promoted with trending hashtags such as “Foreign tourists have become our internet spokespeople.”

The emergence of these videos reflects the return of foreign travelers to China after the country isolated itself for three years during the Covid pandemic. The government has introduced a slew of visa-free policies to attract more tourists. Travel bloggers have leaped at the chance to see a country to which they previously had limited access.

But for China, the videos do more than help stimulate its economy. They are a chance for Beijing to hit back at what it calls an anti-China narrative in the West. China in recent years has encouraged locals to treat foreigners as potential spies; expanded its surveillance state; and expelled or arrested journalists at Chinese and foreign media outlets. But it points to the carefree travel videos as proof — from Westerners — that criticisms about those issues are manufactured. Continue reading Why Chinese propaganda loves foreign travel bloggers →

Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio review

by at

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Leigh Jenco’s review of Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World, by Liang Qichao, edited and translated by Peter Zarrow. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/jenco/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio:
Essays on China and the World

By Liang Qichao
Edited and Translated by Peter Zarrow

Reviewed by Leigh Jenco
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2024)

Liang Qichao. Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World Edited and translated by Peter Zarrow. Penguin Classics, 2023. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780241568781 (paperback); 9781802060140 (ebook).

As a political theorist who works on Chinese thought within the notoriously Eurocentric fields of political science and philosophy, I have been waiting a very long time for a volume like this one. Peter Zarrow has finally undertaken the considerable scholarly effort to translate, masterfully and lucidly, key essays from Liang Qichao 梁啟超, arguably the most influential figure of twentieth-century Chinese thought barring only Mao Zedong. We can now easily include in our introductory courses several weeks of key readings from the greatest mover-and-shaker to come out of the late Qing period—the figure who “invented political journalism, promoted democratic reforms, and introduced Western political theory to Chinese readers,” and “led China’s break from tradition” (ix). This volume is a real milestone.

Zarrow begins the volume with a brisk and accessible introduction that sketches the historical context without becoming bogged down in irrelevant detail. His translator’s note explains how he chose the essays to translate: he focuses on those that mainly deal with questions we would consider closer to political theory than to historiography or journalism (the other contributions for which Liang is known), and that are representative of Liang’s thinking at distinct junctures in his life. These junctures also organize the volume’s four parts: Early Reformist Thought (1896-1898), Radicalism (1899-1903), Cultural Reform (1904-1911), and Syncretism and Progress (1912-1929).  Long known as a bit of a plagiarist, Liang’s Chinese translations of Japanese-language material published under his own name are also not included in this volume, nor are his writings on literature or history, which have been published elsewhere (and Zarrow helpfully provides a bibliographic list). Continue reading Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio review →

When Worlds Collide

by at

Soure: China Media Project (7/22/24)
When Worlds Collide
State media have released a short, AI-generated series on Douyin. It’s the meeting point of several tools the Party has been using to modernize media and propaganda.
By Alex Colville

Government and private tech have teamed up to create the first AI-generated sci-fi short-video series in China. “Sanxingdui: Future Apocalypse,” released on July 8, imagines a world far in the future where characters travel back to the Bronze Age Sanxingdui (三星堆) civilization of southern China. The series consists of 12 three-minute clips — generated with human guidance, edited through Douyin’s “Jimeng AI” (即梦AI) algorithm, and then released on their short video platform. The company has already reported views of over 20 million.

The series combines the slickness of Douyin tech with the media know-how of the State Council’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) and the Bona Film Group, one of China’s biggest production companies and a subsidiary of the state-owned mega-conglomerate Poly Group. At a press briefing, Bona executives explained how the Jimeng algorithm had generated video through the input of original images, responding to prompts on camera angles and movement speeds.

This production process is a convergence of trends that the Chinese Communist Party has been pushing forward for years to modernize the media. To look at the show is to look at some of the first sprouts of the Party’s long-term goals for communication. Continue reading When Worlds Collide →

Chinese student pleads guilty to violating US espionage act

by at

Is it naivete or negligence? The American law professor commenting in the article below, Mary Ellen O’Connell at Notre Dame, either really is, or pretends to be,  unaware of Chinese law requiring Chinese citizens to obey all orders to spy for the Chinese state intelligence services — and, not to reveal the circumstances. And it’s just not conceivable that a Chinese grad student in Minnesota takes off on his own initiative, with a drone, to a US naval base in Virginia, to make a spy film. He must have been pressed into it by agents of the Chinese state, just like those lab-thieving students at U. Florida a few weeks ago. On the circumstances of the Virginia case, see also here. –Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Source: Nikkei (7/9/24)
Chinese student pleads guilty to violating U.S. espionage act
Shi Fengyun is accused of violating rarely used provisions of the Espionage Act
By MARRIAN ZHOU, Nikkei staff writer

Chinese 26-year-old Shi Fengyun pled guilty to espionage misdemeanors for flying a drone near a U.S. naval facility.   © Reuters

NORFOLK, Virginia — A Chinese student pleaded guilty to misdemeanor espionage charges at a federal courthouse here on Monday for taking photographs of U.S. military infrastructure using a drone.

Shi Fengyun, a 26-year-old graduate student from the University of Minnesota, walked into the courtroom in a light green and gray jacket and sports pants. He appeared nervous, taking several deep breaths while shaking his legs before he entered his plea.

Shi pleaded guilty to two out of six counts of violations under two provisions of the Espionage Act, which prohibits the photography of military installations and the use of unregistered drones to do so in national defense airspace. The U.S. Department of Justice dismissed the remaining four counts. Continue reading Chinese student pleads guilty to violating US espionage act →

‘Ink Girl,’ alive or dead?

by at

The number of people detained by China’s authorities that even family members are not told for years, whether they are alive or dead, is enormous — they include my fellow Swedish citizen Gui Minhai kidnapped by China 8 1/2 years ago, as well as untold numbers of disappeared Uyghurs. Dong Yaoqiong, whose case is raised here below, is also one example from among Chinese people. This sort of targeted news blackout is a particularly cruel weapon deployed by the Chinese regime.–Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Source: Bitter Winter (7/8/24)
The “Ink Girl” Six Years After: Is She Alive or Dead?
Dong Yaoqiong sprayed with ink a portrait of Xi Jinping on July 4, 2018, and was taken to a psychiatric hospital. Her friends ask the CCP to prove she is still alive.
by Hu Zimo

Dong Yaoqiong and the portrait of Xi Jinping she sprayed with ink. From X.

Dong Yaoqiong and the portrait of Xi Jinping she sprayed with ink. From X.

Remember Dong Yaoqiong, the famous “Ink Girl” from Shanghai? If you don’t, this means that the CCP’s repression, which has tried to systematically erase any trace of her from the web, has been successful. We at “Bitter Winter,” however, do remember Dong Yaoqiong. Remembering may be the only way to keep her alive—unless she already died.

On July 4, 2018, Dong, a then twenty-nine-year-old woman who had come to Shanghai from Hunan and worked in a real estate agency, filmed herself in the act of spraying ink on a poster of Xi Jinping, calling for democracy, and posted the video on Twitter, which is banned in China but widely accessed through VPN, particularly by college students.

Dong was arrested a few hours after she had posted the video and later taken to a psychiatric hospital, reportedly with the complicity of her mother, who signed a statement that her daughter was mentally ill. It is rumored the mother was rewarded with a new and better home. The Ink Girl’s father, Dong Jianbiao, criticized his wife and insisted Dong Yaoqiong was not insane. As a result, the father was also arrested. On September 23, 2022, it was announced that he had died of “natural causes” in jail. His body was quickly cremated, but not before relatives had seen it, covered with bruises and other signs of violence. Continue reading ‘Ink Girl,’ alive or dead? →

Private Revolutions review

by at

Source: NYT (7/5/24)
6 Years, 4 Raw Human Stories From the New China
In “Private Revolutions,” Yuan Yang follows the lives of women in a rapidly changing modern superpower.
By Michelle T. King (Michelle T. King is the author of “Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food.”)

PRIVATE REVOLUTIONS: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order, by Yuan Yang. Viking | 294 pp. | $30

There’s an unforgettable moment in Yuan Yang’s new book, when an idealistic university student is tasked with conducting a survey by going door-to-door to random addresses in Shenzhen, China’s manufacturing megalopolis.

In one poor neighborhood, the female student asks a young man, living in a tiny apartment with four other adults and a baby, to rate his current job satisfaction. His immediate reaction is to ask whether she has been sent by the Communist Party.

Though she denies it, he responds, “I’m guessing they did send you, so let’s just say we are completely, utterly satisfied with everything in our lives.”

That story, which takes place in the early 2010s, highlights Yang’s concern with the fate of China’s laborers, as well as the class distinctions that structure the encounter.

In 2016, Yang returned to China, where she had spent her early childhood, to work as a journalist for The Financial Times. Over the next six years, Yang followed four young women as they navigated what she calls China’s “new social order.” All of them, like Yang, were born in the late 1980s and 1990s, coming-of-age after the “optimistic giddiness” of their parents’ generation, one characterized by increasing prosperity in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms in the 1980s. Continue reading Private Revolutions review →