The general discourse on China’s future role in the world has begun to shift. What began as a hope that China would reform not just economically but subsequently politically, has evolved into an increasingly unmuted concern of Chinese dictatorship, repression, and influence abroad.
Kai Strittmatter’s We Have Been Harmonised documents and analyses the Orwellian path China has taken since President Xi Jinping (習近平) took the reigns of the People’s Republic. It reads like a dossier, a revelation of conventional and unconventional tactics the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used to condition and revise their vision of China.
One most striking method was the use of the “Study (Xi) Strong Country” mobile app. The app enabled users to read state media, study Xi’s essays and speeches, send money to friends and take weekly quizzes on “Xi Jinping Thought” to gain points.
A Little Red Book 2.0. Strittmatter’s central argument is that China’s political system, since Mao Zedong (毛澤東), has changed little. Despite the efforts of Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) reforms — term limits for future leaders, opening up of civil society (albeit only until 1989) — China’s political progressivism has made significant regressions since Xi’s rulership. The CCP, while maintaining all its true colors, has thus used technology to enhance their rule and methods of repression.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recognizes the power embedding technology can have in their ability to control the country; their methods both encourage and discourage “good behavior.”
“The Party doesn’t just use threats; it also buys the loyalty of university teachers,” Strittmatter writes.
Of two friends of his lecturing at a large Beijing university have “received 40,000 Yuan and the other 50,000” as a “maintaining stability bonus.”
The desire for greater power over society is masked by the quest to “harmonize” Chinese society. Borrowing from Confucian rhetoric, Xi has made it his new “China Dream” that the country would be at one with itself — the people, docile and satisfied at the bottom, and the CCP at the top.
The title of the book is a reference to the new language that has developed in China to avoid censorship. When social media censors were blocking terms like “arrested” or “censored,” users who have been threatened by authorities and silenced would state that they have been “harmonized.”
This ‘utopian,’ rather dystopian, vision is made possible not just with the technologies available and being developed. Strittmatter recognizes this and spends the first few chapters of his book establishing the pre-existing methods and psychology that go behind how totalitarian states function and brainwash.
Strittmatter quotes Chinese writer and blogger Murong Xuecun (慕容雪村): “You don’t need to get involved in corruption, it gets involved in you. It follows you everywhere. No one stays clean.”
The CCP leaves all laws ambiguous and their fists ready to clamp down on anything that breathes. Its authority needs criminals to survive, it makes all of China’s people complicit of any crime.
But surely this is not sustainable — an alternative must be developed. In comes the Social Credit System. Your actions monitored and tracked. Every good decision made (defined by the CCP) is rewarded, while every wrong step (once again defined by the CCP) made is punished.
In Rongcheng, Shandong province, a citizen starts with 1,000 points.
“You can be a triple-A citizen (a ‘Role Model of Honesty,’ with more than 1,050 points)... But you can slip down to a C, with fewer than 849 points (‘Warning Level’), or even a D (‘Dishonest’) with under 599 points.”
Litter? Minus five.
Teach calligraphy to your neighbours? Plus five.
Skip a traffic light? Minus 10.
Post a picture of Winnie the Pooh? Minus 50.
BRAVE NEW WORLD
The rules are boundless and it plays well into the CCP’s hands. Zhao Ruying, department head of implementing the Social Credit System in Shanghai, tells Strittmatter: “Wouldn’t it be the best of all worlds if, in a few decades we didn’t have to talk anymore about the system and its rules? ... where no one would even dare to think of committing a breach of trust, a point where no one would even consider hurting the community… When we reach this point, our work will be done.”
Will the Social Credit System supersede the traditional methods of policing law-breakers? Will the CCP no longer need to clamp down on criminals when citizens essentially police themselves? Is this not what Fredrich Engels claimed that when Marxism is achieved there would be a “withering away of the state”? If the road to utopia is paved with tears, fear, and oppression, what is really at the end of the road?
“If you want people to stop at a red light, there are two ways of doing it,” writes Strittmatter. “You can persuade them with total surveillance, cameras, big data and the sanctions doled out by a Social Credit System. Or you can give people responsibility for themselves and let a society make the rules it considers necessary for smooth day-to-day co-existence.”
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