Here’s what a Google Search on “china weblog” yields, I’m looking forward to seeing ours at the top soon!

China’s online population at the start of that year was nearly 60 million. Ten years later, it was fast approaching 600 million, and now, after 20, it is well over a billion. This new completely revised and hugely expanded update to our ebook series, formerly known as “the Grass Mud Horse Lexicon,” aims to capture something of the enormous explosion of online speech that accompanied this growth, with a particular focus on efforts by authorities to tame it, and by others to push back. It contains 104 of the terms that have resonated most strongly in this arena, from official slogans and their irreverent appropriations to protest cries and nationalist accusations.

The CDT Lexicon is available in PDF format on a “pay what you want” basis, with a US$5 minimum. We are grateful for all donations, which help support our work.

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Leta Hong Fincher was the first American to receive her PhD in Sociology from Tsinghua University in Beijing. She has worked as a journalist and, in addition to Leftover Women, has published Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, a portrait of the feminist movement in China and its participants. She is also a Research Associate at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Read previous CDT interviews with Hong Fincher about the first edition of Leftover Women, and Betraying Big Brother. She spoke to us recently about her new book and developments in women’s rights in China over the past ten years.

China Digital Times: This updated edition of the book seems like a natural and inevitable progression from the first edition, largely because so many of the nascent trends you spotted have become more or less full-fledged social change in the past 10 years. In particular, you revealed fears and doubts among Chinese women towards marriage and childbirth. And in the past 10 years since the book was published, marriage and childbirth rates have plummeted. Have you been surprised by the speed with which attitudes towards these institutions have changed? 

Leta Hong Fincher: I am certainly not surprised at the direction because I was very confident when I wrote this book about everything that I put in it. And I knew, and I wrote in the book, that if women’s rights in China don’t improve, that it’s quite likely that you’re going to see more and more of these young women just turning away from marriage. Even just talking about the turn away from marriage, that’s a dramatic development, in terms of the size, the impact on nationwide birth rates and marriage rates. Now, that has been a surprise to me, because it’s such a seismic change, a really stunning development. It’s so large that last year, China’s population shrank for the first time, and now India has surpassed China as the world’s most populous country. So that in itself is a huge change. I’m surprised by the dramatic speed and the magnitude of the change, but not by the direction. 

In fact, even in the original version of the book, I have quite a lot of interviews with young women in their 20s, some even in their early 20s, who were extremely radical in their rejection of marriage. And I was really taken aback at the time, meeting these young women who were so militant, and they said, “There is no way I’m ever going to get married. Marriage is a living hell in China,” and all sorts of things. I tell a lot of these women’s stories. So I could see, there were definitely young women over 10 years ago who felt this way, but you just couldn’t see that attitude in the statistics. The statistics at the time showed that virtually all women in China were still getting married, although the average age of first time marriage was increasing somewhat. So I haven’t been surprised that more and more young women are turning away from marriage. My second book, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, went into the birth of what I described as a major political feminist movement, with a real awakening among especially young women in China, about how sexist society is. I was so struck by that new consciousness of sexism and consciousness about their own rights and wanting to speak up more about their rights that I wrote another book about it. 

But it is really still stunning to see literally, when you look at the statistics, millions and millions of young women just saying no to marriage and childbirth. I’m really heartened by that. In the new edition in particular, I write about how when I was conducting a lot of those original interviews over 10 years ago, I would get so demoralized. Of course, there were the women who said, “There’s no way in hell I’m going to get married.” But really the majority of the women I interviewed, at the time, were not saying that. They were just passively accepting a blatantly unequal relationship, unequal in so many ways. And these were really young women, in their early to late 20s, in many cases, sometimes in their early 30s. And it made me very sad to hear how unhappy they were in their relationships, even before they married, and yet they would go into the marriage anyway. Or they would accept this outrageously unequal situation where they handed over their life savings to their boyfriend, to finance the purchase of a marital home. And the property deed would exclude the woman’s name, so then she would be completely shut out of that enormous source of wealth, which is the biggest asset, by far, of Chinese people today. There are many, many stories like that in this book. And that really made me sad. I would try time and time again, talking to these women, I would ask them, “Do you really think this is fair, the way you’re being treated?” And, “Why are you going through with this marriage?” But as a researcher, I wasn’t their friend, I was interviewing them. I felt quite sad a lot of the time because I wanted to say, “Please don’t go through with the wedding. You don’t have to do it. You’re so young.” But a lot of these young women also explained to me, they felt the pressure to marry was so intense. They also described why they decided to go ahead with the marriage anyway. At the time, this was going back to 2011, 2012, 2013, there wasn’t a real feminist discourse that was mainstream at that time. These women felt privately, very desperate and very unhappy about their situation, really unhappy about the injustice of it, but thought there was nothing they could do about it. Obviously, there’s a range of opinions. There were women who initially fought back, fought with their boyfriends or fiancés, fought with their husbands and tried to get their name on the property deed. But then they would end up giving up because all of the different societal pressures, including from the government, including from their own parents, who discriminated against their daughters in so many ways, that the pressure was just too intense, and they would give up. And so in revisiting this book later, in spite of this overall deterioration in women’s rights, particularly within the institution of marriage, overall I am so much more hopeful, because I see individual women really taking charge of their destiny and saying, “No, I don’t have to get married. I don’t want to and I don’t want to have a child.” That gives me a lot of hope, in spite of all of the bad things that have been happening under Xi Jinping.

CDT: Speaking of the pressure that women feel from society and their parents and the government, your book title Leftover Women is taken from a disparaging term that’s used, especially by the government, to describe and shame women who are in or past their late 20s, who haven’t married. Has the propaganda changed in its attitudes toward women and marriage in the past 10 years? You’ve touched on this a little bit, but have attitudes in broader society changed, especially among the women themselves?

LHF: That term [“leftover women”] is still widely used in propaganda. It’s not as prominent in headlines, I think because it’s so old. The government first started propagating the term all the way back in 2007. So that’s 16 years ago. So the term itself has lost its potency as something really poisonous. One thing that surprised me about the propaganda was when I was looking it up, just doing a refresher on what’s the latest pro-marriage, pro-natalist propaganda, I looked up all of the examples of the propaganda from my original book. And with very, very few exceptions, they are still being circulated today, by state media, almost verbatim—with slight changes in wording, the headline is different. So the pro-marriage push is still very, very strong. Xi Jinping just said himself, at this every five-year conference of the All China Women’s Federation, that China needs to embrace a new culture of marriage and childbearing. So that’s coming straight out of his mouth. But really, this has been going on ever since 2007 which I originally documented. The propaganda has the same goal, but in addition to being strongly pro-marriage today, it’s also strongly pro-natalist. 

When I originally wrote this book and was doing interviews for it, China was still officially under the one-child policy. The propaganda was really focused on pushing women into getting married, and there was the pro-natalist element there that once these women get married, they’re supposed to have a baby. But back then, when I was doing my interviews, 2011 through 2013, the propaganda couldn’t say, “Now you need to have three babies,” it was, “You need to have your baby during your, ‘best childbearing years,’” which are ideally, according to propaganda, between 24 and 29. So there was already this scare element. It’s all scare-mongering, scaring women into thinking they have to hurry up and get married, or no man will ever want them. And then also the scare-mongering around birth defects, that if you don’t have your baby while you’re still in your 20s, then your baby’s going to have a birth defect. Today, it’s very heavily pro-natalist because of course China has now adopted a three-child policy. Marriage is definitely a part of it because China’s population engineering program still is not encouraging single women to have babies at all. You have to go through the marital process, because marriage is seen as a politically stabilizing institution. It’s also just heterosexual; same-sex marriage is still illegal. This is a way the government can promote political stability by pushing men and women into these marital relationships, and then only in the marriage institution, are you really allowed total freedom to have babies and now you’re very strongly pushed to have three babies. So there’s a lot of that propaganda. 

I would say that in general, the tone is still shockingly misogynistic. But there is also a lot more positive propaganda–which is ridiculous–showing how happy you can be as a young woman. People’s Daily sometimes runs pieces about young women who can actually have babies while they’re still in college. That’s just preposterous, absolutely preposterous. “Look how happy you’re going to be, if you become a mother early. You can do it while you’re still in school!” But there’s still the punitive element that “You better hurry up, or you’re going to miss out, you’re never going to be able to get married.” But the term 剩女 [shèngnǚ, leftover women]  itself, because it’s been around for so long, doesn’t have as prominent a scaremongering roll in the headlines. It’s just kind of naturalized. 

As you can see from these stunning statistics on birth rates and marriage rates falling for so many years—consecutively, the marriage rate has fallen every single year since 2013 and the birth rate has been falling since 2017—young women are increasingly ignoring the propaganda. They have a lot more of a sense of solidarity with other like-minded women. And I would add, there’s a lot of content in the book as well about LGBTQ+ communities, there’s a lot of overlap there. I have quite a lot of interviews with queer young women and men as well, and how they’re affected by this pro-marriage, pro-natalist policy and propaganda. But more and more young people are rejecting the propaganda. That’s really good, and that gives me a lot of hope. 

However, what is incredibly ominous is that the pressure from the central government is intensifying, and it’s going to get a lot worse. A lot of the propaganda is aimed more at the older generation now, the parents, and so of course, the most effective form of pressure for daughters in particular to get married comes from their parents. Some of the examples I give in the book are the most heartbreaking, like one example of a mother threatening to throw herself off a building if her daughter doesn’t get married, and the daughter wasn’t even 30 years old yet. That’s just heartbreaking. Yes, young men come under marriage pressure and pressure to have children as well. But in my research, the pressure is so much greater on young women, and the propaganda is as well. And the pressure from parents—it’s very, very difficult to shrug that off if you’re a daughter, and your own parents whom you really love, and you want to honor, and they’re just telling you, “You’ve got to get married, stop my suffering, it’s your fault that I’m suffering.” It’s very personal, that is incredibly intensely emotional. The younger generation can ignore the propaganda, but it’s very hard to completely ignore your own parents and your family. So that pressure is just intensifying, and it’s going to get a lot worse. 

Another thing is that in addition to having this new three-child policy, the government has made it much more difficult to get a vasectomy now. And there is little by little slight changes in wording about the availability of abortion. This is a big concern of mine: what restrictions on abortion may be introduced? I don’t think that there would be a nationwide ban on abortion announced. I think that the pushback would be really extreme coming from especially young Chinese people. But things are going to be very difficult for women, especially young women, who are in their 20s and early 30s, who are coming under that kind of pressure. I expect that pressure and that kind of intervention from local government officials, intervention into private lives of families and young people, is going to increase.

CDT: With this switch from the one-child policy to the three-child policy, can you discuss how eugenics has played a role in the implementation of the policy change, especially for Uyghur and other minority women?

LHF: Yes, that’s another really huge change since I first wrote this book. I did write about eugenics in the first book, because when I was looking at this whole propaganda campaign using the term “leftover women” it was stigmatizing, specifically, college educated Han Chinese women who are in the [ethnic] majority, targeting this demographic of educated Han Chinese women in their 20s and early 30s, pushing them into getting married. The language and the imagery around the propaganda makes it very clear that that’s who they’re targeting. They use the term “high quality” (高素质, gāo sùzhì), saying that these women need to get married and have babies. I made the argument through my analysis of the situation in my interviews. I believed that this propaganda campaign was aimed not only at pushing these educated women into getting married, but also aimed at “upgrading population quality,” because right after the 2007 propaganda campaign about leftover women began there was the State Council decision, saying that China has a severe problem with the, “low quality of its population,” that China’s going to have a lot of trouble competing globally and it needs to, “upgrade population quality.” It has to do with developing a skilled worker base of the future. 

At the time, there wasn’t this mass targeting and oppression and mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and that changed under Xi Jinping. 2017 was a turning point where not only did you have the mass detention of Uyghurs, but you also had this huge campaign across Xinjiang targeting especially Uyghur and Kazakh women, forcibly sterilizing a lot of them, forcibly inserting IUDs if the women had already had three children, because at that time, they were supposedly allowed to have three children. Minorities were allowed to have one child more than Han Chinese families. I added a section to the new book talking about this, and I interviewed one woman with just a really harrowing story about being a Uyghur woman who managed to escape China. She described being forcibly sterilized. And before she was forcibly sterilized, she was actually arbitrarily detained as well. 

At the national central government level in 2017, when the Chinese government had ended their one-child policy, they announced that all married couples in China would now be allowed to have two children. So that’s a relaxation of birth restrictions for Han Chinese married couples. But for ethnic minorities, that was a tight restriction on their reproductive rights, because prior to 2017, you were allowed as an ethnic minority to have three children. And in fact, local officials turned a blind eye to a lot of ethnic minority families that had many more than three children. It’s clear eugenics is a part of China’s population engineering policies. It’s very clearly stated in fact. It used to be more clearly stated, but it’s still there, optimizing population. 

When the government is really alarmed at the falling birth rates, in general, they’re speaking about the majority Han Chinese population where the birth rate is plummeting. But if you look at the birth rates in Xinjiang, they have really even more dramatically fallen since 2017. A lot of people have done research on this. That’s the result of forcible intervention, including forced abortions, or sterilizations. And that is just the eugenics population planning in action because these women are seen as perceived troublemakers and seen as “low quality.” The Chinese propaganda says that high birth rates in Xinjiang are a threat to social stability. But then when they’re talking about low birth rates among the Han Chinese majority, low birth rates are seen as a threat to social stability. Because you have all these millions of men who don’t have women because of the sex ratio imbalance—there are around 30 million more men in China than women, and all of these millions of men are not going to be able to find a wife. So it’s always this obsession with social stability. That’s another major change over the last decade.

CDT: Shifting the topic a little bit, your book largely focuses on women’s low rate of real estate ownership to demonstrate other economic and social inequalities they face. And in this new edition, you acknowledge that women’s homeownership has increased in the past 10 years, but say that they’ve already missed out on the greatest growth period in the real estate market in China. Right now, real estate in China is facing a crisis, with several major developers defaulting on their debts and the real estate bubble imploding. How has this housing crisis affected women in China in particular?

LHF: There’s no question women have missed out on this gigantic accumulation of wealth in the form of property because they were shut out of that real estate boom, in all these different ways, through gender discrimination, through government policy, discrimination from their own families, those kinds of things. But now that the real estate boom is over, there are surveys indicating that there are more single women who are buying homes in their own name. I can’t say this very scientifically, but I fear that basically now these housing developers are having trouble finding people to buy housing, single women are the ones who really want to buy. They’ve been wanting to buy for more than a decade, but they were shut out by unaffordable prices. So yes, you see more single women buying homes in their own name, and that’s good for the women, as long as the real estate market doesn’t completely crash, which I don’t think it will because it is, after all, not a totally free market, it’s supported by the state. The state doesn’t want real estate, certainly not residential real estate, to completely crash. 

It’s certainly an indication of this big demographic shift where young women are thinking more about how to lead the lives they want—they want more independence, they don’t want to marry, and they don’t want to have children as much as they used to. They want more economic independence, and they want a home of their own. There are real estate developers who clearly see an opportunity to market to single women who want economic independence and want their own home. And so they’re targeting that demographic. But at the same time, if you look at the housing restrictions that are still in place for consumers buying housing, you still generally will have a much easier time buying a home if you’re married. There’s still a real bias towards men buying. And it’s still very difficult. If you don’t have a hukou [household registration] from that city, it’s still very difficult, in some of the biggest cities like Beijing and Shanghai, to buy a home. As we speak, in Shanghai, if you don’t have a Shanghai hukou, you’re still not allowed as a single woman to buy a home. Maybe that policy will change. The fact that there are more single women buying homes is another indication of how young women are really trying as hard as they can to take control of their lives. And it’s something that gives me hope. 

CDT: In the preface to your book, you discuss that your initial research and essays based on it were pretty widely circulated in China initially, and that they had a significant impact there. In addition, a Chinese version of your first edition was published, albeit a censored one. It’s hard to imagine today any of those publications being allowed to circulate in China. Can you discuss how increased censorship over the past 10 years has impacted your ongoing research? And also more generally, how it’s affected the ability of women in China to express themselves, to access information, and to find solidarity online over the past 10 years?

LHF: There are really two parts to that. One, there is no question, I could not do this again, if I went back to China and tried to duplicate this entire study. First of all, I would require enormous resources, because it was a massive study, where I interviewed many hundreds of people and I did a lot of face to face interviews. But I also relied initially on Weibo to advertise the survey. I had about 1000 people getting back to me, and then I had to cut it off there because that was too many people. Then I directed them to an email account that I created. The people I couldn’t interview face to face, I did online interviews with. But then some of the discussions I had were also just through private messages on Weibo, which I just can’t even imagine being able to do today. It is just so aggressively surveilled. If you’re not an academic based in China, then your access is also really heavily restricted. And if you are an academic based in China, you’re even more closely monitored by your university, by the Communist Party. They monitor you much more tightly than they did when I was doing my PhD at Tsinghua. I don’t even know if I would be accepted to the PhD program if I applied. I can’t even imagine being able to write my dissertation on this topic at Tsinghua. So that’s one element of it. I did a lot of new interviews with people who were outside China. But also I hired a couple of research assistants to do some interviews for me. I didn’t want to put anybody at risk with the new interviews. But all of the old interviews that I did stand up really well. 

With regard to the censorship online in China, there is a massive anti-feminist crackdown going on. Individual feminist accounts have been deleted en masse. Feminist discourse is heavily censored, much more so than it was all the way back to when I started my research in 2011. At that time, Weibo was only just taking off. And so at that time, it was in the Weibo Spring, when people were discussing their ideas more freely, even though there was of course censorship at the time. In 2011, 2012, even 2013, there was still a lot of vibrant discussion happening online. Today, what is so interesting, and this is one of the fascinating things about contemporary China, is that in spite of this incredibly aggressive censorship, and surveillance from the government, that there is still space for conversations among young feminists who identify themselves online as feminists, in spite of the anti-feminist crackdown. It’s less of a public identification as feminist than just discussing things like, “I really don’t want to marry.” Then it’s much easier to reach out and find your online community of other young women who don’t want to get married: How do you deal with pressure from your parents to marry? How do you deal with all that family pressure when you go home over the Lunar New Year, and your entire extended family is nagging at you, “Why aren’t you married yet?” Those kinds of discussions are still pretty vibrant. That shows you that civil society hasn’t been completely killed. 

Another interesting thing is that even though discussions of feminist topics about China specifically are much more heavily censored, you have somebody like this Japanese sociologist, the feminist Chizuko Ueno, whose books have been translated into Chinese. And her books are best sellers in China, books about everyday feminism. Her books do not explicitly talk about problems with women’s rights in China. She’s talking about Japan and abstractly about gender inequality. That is just another indication of how feminism in general has become more popular in China, even as the government persecutes individual feminist activists and throttles overtly feminist discourse. When you’re not talking about the internet, you can’t have street displays of feminist performance arts, as the activists call it, which is something that I also wrote about even in the original book. There were these feminist activists doing what they called performance art on the street, drawing attention to things like domestic violence or sexual harassment. They can’t do that on the street anymore. So these are the gray areas where I still have hope for the younger generation in China, amid an otherwise really gloomy political environment.

CDT: You have mostly answered my next question, but just in case you have anything to add: are there other changes that you’ve seen in the past ten years that mark progress for Chinese women and give you hope? 

LHF:  Another thing that is really important, the so-called White Paper protests at the end of last year. That was really extraordinary. Even though overall it wasn’t a huge number of people who took to the streets, the fact that these protests took place, in all these different cities across China. All these young people took to the streets, and some of them were calling for Xi Jinping to step down. One thing that is incredibly striking, and I noticed a lot of people have reported on this, is how many young women were on the front lines of those protests. That is another indication of the depth of the frustration experienced by young women in China at gender discrimination, at sexism, and injustice. And these women have less to lose in taking political risks than their male counterparts. The young people who are taking big risks, politically, are increasingly young women, and on the one hand, this gives me a lot of hope. It’s inspiring to see. On the other hand, of course, I really worry about what’s coming next from the government. 

Another major development as well is that the diasporic feminist community has just grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. That’s another way in which the internet comes into play, that social media still is a vehicle for communication across geographical boundaries. When you have a lot of young Chinese people who are studying abroad or leaving—there are these indications that more young people want to leave China, or runxue 润学, “runology.” Then you run into problems with other countries giving them visas. Increasingly in recent years, there are young Chinese and LGBTQ+ people who’ve really not shied away from being in the limelight, leading protests, and building up a feminist movement that has a lot of activity outside China, but that also interacts a lot within China. It’s such a large community of feminists now. This is something that makes young women as a whole, and feminists, very hard for the Chinese government to control, because it’s not like in the past, where you would have individual, largely male dissidents, who would become quite well known, and then they might be kicked out of the country and then lose relevance, like the Tiananmen protest generation. This new generation of feminist activists who do believe in a lot of tenets of feminism, they believe in equal rights and LGBTQ rights, but also human rights. They’re much more complicated a challenge for the Chinese government. 

This is another thing that gives me hope, because of course, the government can be obviously extremely brutal. They could carry out another mass jailing of young feminist activists to try to scare young women in general, but I don’t see how that would be effective at all. Because the government is trying to co-opt largely educated Han Chinese women in their 20s, mainly in their 20s and early 30s, trying to persuade them to marry and have babies. How do you do that, while also conducting mass jailings of feminists? So I do think that there is real room for resistance in the future. You just don’t know what the next trigger might be for another event, like the White Paper protests from the end of last year, thanks to this younger generation that is much more aware of the need to take control of their lives and speak out and take some risks. That is something that the central government has to take into consideration to some extent. And that gives me hope. Whereas getting back to the situation of Uyghurs, unfortunately the Uyghur people are in the distinct minority, and unfortunately, most Han Chinese still don’t really care about Uyghurs, and so that means that the central government is able to get away with really egregious violations of the rights of all the Uyghur people. But I don’t see how it could do that with the entire population of China, or especially the young generation of educated Chinese people.

When he came to power in 2012, Xi Jinping intensified a policy of Sinicization and assimilation, whereby the languages, religions, and cultures of ethnic minority groups are subsumed into the larger Chinese historical narrative. In Tibet, this is partnered with intense securitization and pervasive surveillance. Family members of those who defy authorities are punished. Any behavior that asserts Tibetan identity is seen as a political act. Local schools have been replaced with colonial boarding schools where at least 80% of Tibetan children are cut off from their families, language, and culture. At the same time, a targeted censorship and propaganda campaign has sought to erase Tibetan identity and advocacy from global consciousness. Freedom House has ranked Tibet the least free region in the world.

In such a repressive environment, how do Tibetans in Tibet hold onto their cultural identity? How does the world find out what is happening there? How do exiles stay connected with their families and homeland? Where can we find hope for the future of Tibet and Tibetans? CDT has launched this interview series as a way to explore these questions and to learn more about current conditions in Tibet, efforts to preserve Tibet’s religious and cultural heritage, and the important work being done every day by activists, writers, researchers, and others to help and support Tibetans inside and outside the region. Read all interviews in the series.

Tsering Yangzom Lama was born in Nepal to Tibetan refugee parents, and later moved to Vancouver. She received her B.A. from the University of British Columbia and a MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Her debut novel, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, tells a multigenerational story of a Tibetan family over the course of 50 years. Opening with the invasion of Tibet by Chinese forces in 1950, the story then follows two sisters as they flee their country with their family, establishing a new home in Nepal and later Canada. It is a rich, lyrical story that touches on issues of displacement, colonialism, cultural preservation, and the struggles of life in exile. One of the first novels by a Tibetan author to be published by a major English-language publisher, it has received numerous awards and accolades and has been translated into eight languages so far (with a Tibetan version in the works).

Lama is also politically active in support of Tibet and is the founder of Lhakar Diaries, a website that platforms the voices of Tibetan youth. She recently spoke with CDT about her book, about the struggle to protect and promote Tibet’s cultural and religious heritage, and about the importance of sharing the stories of Tibetan exiles. The interview has been edited for length and clarity:

China Digital Times (CDT): Tibetan traditions and cultural and religious customs play an important role in your book. Did you grow up hearing and learning about this history and these customs? How much research did you do when crafting the story?

Tsering Yangzom Lama (TYL): I grew up in a Tibetan household, surrounded by family and relatives, going to the monastery, speaking Tibetan at home. So I think I grew up around a lot of Tibetan rituals, religious and otherwise – Tibetan food, Tibetan songs, Tibetan dance, the whole thing. But some of the things I’m writing about in my book are a little more, I guess, esoteric. The Terma tradition, which is a tradition of texts that have been buried all over the land of Tibet by Guru Rinpoche and Yeshe Tsogyal, this tradition is basically a way of having a line of connection from the beginning of Buddhism in Tibet to the present day, to have this authorship be all connected to Guru Rinpoche and Yeshe Tsogyal. This is a really interesting and esoteric tradition that I don’t think most Tibetans would be thinking about. It’s kind of like if you are really interested in Kierkegaard. It’s not everyday stuff. And that I did not know about just from my upbringing, although my father was very interested in Buddhist philosophy and would often teach us philosophy. And my mother, who is still alive, is Buddhist in the sense of being very compassionate and very interested in doing right. In a sense, Tibetan Buddhism has both of these channels, the intellectual and just in the sense of being compassionate. Both are legitimate vehicles for being a practitioner of that faith. So I had that example, but again this is a little more historical and academic, like Tibetan Buddhist monks would know about this tradition, and academics would, but I don’t think most lay people sit around thinking about this tradition. And I had certainly not known about it until I was studying Tibetan literature and Tibetan history at Columbia University, and before that, at the University of British Columbia.

And then there are other things, in terms of the trade and the smuggling of Tibetan artifacts. That is certainly not something that is widely known about. It’s also not discussed a ton among Tibetans because it’s just really frowned upon. As a writer, like most writers, we want to go to the places that are taboo, or the places that are not ordinary conversation. So I was really interested in the ways Tibetans had participated in the extraction and the trade of our material culture, and really deities and sacred objects are what I am talking about when I say material culture. And the ethics of that and the politics of that. And then also the history of Tibetan refugees, and what they went through living in refugee camps and living on the border. These are things that are not really discussed that much in my family and in many Tibetan families that I’ve encountered. So a lot of that came from research, and a lot of oblique research, like looking at records of aid agencies, like the Swiss Red Cross, to find out about how Tibetans lived, because it’s not recorded that much in traditional historical record. So, yes, a lot of it was research.

CDT: The story begins with the invasion of Tibet by Chinese forces, and the subsequent fleeing into exile of one family. So while much of the story takes place outside Tibet, it also tracks the history of Tibet post-colonialization. Do you feel like that history is well known and understood by your generation and by younger Tibetans?

TYL: It depends. Most Tibetans in exile are born with the knowledge that we lost our country. Most Tibetans in exile my age or younger have never seen Tibet, but we know of it as a place that belonged to our families and where we should be able to go, but we are denied that. For Tibetans in Tibet, the young generation who have never known Tibet to be free, I think it’s a different situation. And in 2008, the uprising that happened all across historical Tibet was a real big surprise for a lot of westerners, because it showed that a lot of people who had never seen Tibet free still were unhappy and still wanted their rights and their dignity and their freedoms, and saw themselves as distinct from the Chinese government and Chinese state and the identity that has been placed upon them. They saw Tibet as something distinct. So I think that was really striking. The relationship with Tibet is an interesting one for me because it’s a place that I know only mostly through stories, and through photos I see online and videos I watch online. I think this novel was a way for me to get closer to Tibet, because I really spent so much time really entering into the minds of children who had to flee, and what that experience might have been like, which was a way for me to get closer to people of my parents’ generation as well.

CDT: Among people living in exile who are younger than you, have you seen an interest in learning Tibetan culture, language, and traditions as a means of cultural preservation? Have you seen a shift in recent years in this interest and concern?

TYL: I think preserving Tibetan culture and language has always been really important to the Tibetan exile community, especially when they were based in India and Nepal and people ended up living together in small refugee settlements that the Tibetan government and other aid organizations helped set up. It was really important to keep Tibetans together in that sense, just to keep us alive as a community and a civilization. I think now more and more Tibetans live abroad in the U.S., in France, in Canada. There was a generation, that was probably my generation in the mid-90s and early 2000s, and earlier, who when they moved to the West didn’t have all of the structures that are now available, like Sunday schools where children can gather and learn Tibetan, or learn how to do Tibetan song and dance, and play Tibetan instruments. That’s really proliferated in the last, I’d say, ten years that I’ve noticed, and I think that’s been really important. I understand that as an effect of immigration, and now there are enough Tibetans in certain parts of the world that they can come together and form these things.

The thing with my novel that I keep hearing over and over from non-Tibetans over the past year, I’ve heard it so many times, that people have said, “I had no idea that this happened to Tibet,” which is really shocking to me, because I feel like it’s one of those world events, not that long ago. We all know the basics of many things that happened around the world, and in my mind, the invasion of Tibet is one of those events. But for many people, the coverage of Tibet and the general awareness of Tibet has completely gone down or been forgotten. And then for Tibetans ourselves in exile, I think many Tibetans have not seen our struggles in exile be portrayed or given attention. We are often so focused on the suffering of Tibetans in Tibet, and we place a lot of pressure and importance on highlighting that, and that’s really important. I just don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. Our stories are all so important. Many of us do not even have the language to describe what it is that we have experienced or continue to experience, what our parents experienced, that they were not just ordinary children, that they are children of war, that they fled, that they lost everything. These are things we don’t talk about as a community, because we have been so focused on our struggle. And our struggle is for the sake of liberating a nation and a people. But I think it’s so important for us to talk about all of our experiences, because all of it encompasses the story of Tibet.

CDT: When you were writing this book, who did you have in mind as your audience?

TYL: I wanted it to be read by everybody who wanted to read it. It was really important to me that the book be available to a major publisher, most of all because I wanted distribution not to be an issue, and that’s often an issue for small Tibetan presses that do exist and do publish English language books. They are so important, but like with any independent small presses, distribution is a problem. So I wanted everyone to read it. But it was really really important that this book not some sort of Lonely Planet guide to the Tibetan exile experience. I wanted it to really resonate and ring true to young Tibetans who, like me, might have wanted a book like this. So it was most important for me to make this as real and as honest as possible for them.

CDT: You seem to make a deliberate effort in the book to avoid using the word “China” instead using the Tibetan term “Gyami.” Can you explain that decision a bit?

TYL: I think words are really powerful, and they have a lot of associations. And also I wanted this book to be very much from the perspective of the characters, because this is a first person novel, so I’m really thinking of, how would they present it? What would be the feeling of their voice? So it begins with a young Tibetan girl’s perspective, who’s 12 years old, and I think she would use the Tibetan word for it. So I said, “Gyami.” Later on, the term China does come in, but I also wanted the beginning of the book to not have the heaviness of that word, “China,” and all that is associated with it. I wanted this book primarily to be about Tibet and Tibetan people. So you’ll notice, for example, there are very few non-Tibetan characters in my book, and the focus is almost entirely on Tibetan lives.

CDT: Your book has been really well received all over the world, it seems. What has the response been among Tibetans of different generations? And has this response surprised you at all?

TYL: Overwhelmingly it’s been excitement, and people have been really really supportive and have come out to events. For many of them, it’s their first literary event. Many of the Tibetans who come are not native speakers of English and would probably not read my book even, or they would struggle to read it, and they still come and they buy five copies. I’ve noticed there is a sense of ownership and pride that a Tibetan book has come out and been received in this way, which I certainly did not expect. I did not even imagine such a thing. But it makes sense because I think I would feel the same way if I was a bit older and some young Tibetan girl showed up with a novel, I’d be thrilled. A lot of older Tibetans I have met have asked me for advice for their children, which is really funny, too. Like, “My kid wants to be an artist,” or “My kid writes stories,” and I’m just like, “That is amazing, please encourage them!” because I think so many immigrant communities don’t tend to encourage the arts, and it’s understandable why, but I’m out here saying there is so much in the arts that is important and fulfilling.

And then younger Tibetans who have read the book have been really great at telling me about their feelings and sending me messages and emailing me and coming to events. Sometimes they’re very emotional, and I think there is a sense of us recognizing each other. Even if I’m a little older than them, we still understand the very specific nature of our generation’s experience.

CDT: Has it been translated into Tibetan or are there plans to translate it?

TYL: There are plans, yes. The Tibetan Government in Exile has a press, the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, the LTWA. I have signed with them and they will make a translation into Tibetan.

CDT: What about a Chinese version, maybe from a publisher in Taiwan?

TYL: That would be great. It’s available if there is somebody who wants to translate it.

CDT: Have you gotten much response at your events or otherwise from Chinese readers?

TYL: Yes, I’ve had a few personal messages, and on social media, from Chinese readers – I would say probably Chinese-Canadian or Chinese-American. One message that really stuck with me was somebody who talked about that they felt some guilt and some shame for not knowing the history of Tibet and China. And I thought that was really generous of them to say that, and it gave me some hope. Not that I want them to feel shame, but that there are people who want to learn and want to listen. I think that’s really important.

CDT: In addition to being a writer, you also are politically active working to support Tibet. When did you develop that political awareness and interest?

TYL: Really it was during university, during college. Once I started attending undergraduate, I really got involved with Tibet activists. Many of them were non-Tibetan, but they had either been to Tibet or learned about Tibet and were very engaged in raising awareness for Tibetan political prisoners and against, for instance, Canadian mining companies and other Canadian corporations like Bombardier that were helping with China’s railway into Tibet, which has been devastating as a tool of settler colonialism. We were campaigning against that in the mid-2000s. So this has been a lifelong pursuit, but I think the real activation happened in college.

CDT: I believe you helped found Lhakar Diaries, a website which platforms the voices of Tibetans, both inside and outside the country. Could you talk a little bit about the goals in starting that site, and the work you do there now?

TYL: It started out in 2009, right after the Beijing Olympics and the uprising in Tibet. Things had become so locked down because once the Tibetan people started protesting, the Chinese government clamped down in a way that was really really intense, and so there was even less space for any form of protest. Tibetans in Tibet started this tradition called Lhakar Wednesdays. Lhakar means white, so White Wednesdays is essentially the meaning. And that’s the day that for His Holiness the Dalai Lama is considered an auspicious day for him. And so every Wednesday, Tibetans in Tibet were doing something to assert their identity that was really covert, and really coded. So for instance they would wear Tibetan clothes, or they would speak Tibetan purposefully more than Chinese, or they would go to only Tibetan restaurants or Tibetan shops. And this is significant, because of that railway I mentioned and the settler colonialism China has pushed in the last 20 years, Tibetans are and have been second-class citizens in many parts of Tibet, including the major cities, where they are often minorities. This was a way to assert their identities against extreme pressures. So me and some of my friends in exile saw this and thought, what’s cool about this is that it’s not a typical protest, it’s not just “Free Tibet!” There is something about it that feels like the political meaning in how we live, and how we behave, and how we talk. So we wanted to have a website in which we could present other forms of resistance that don’t look like simple protest—so that’s, again, stories of people learning Tibetan, how to read and write it, learning to cook Tibetan food. So Lhakar Diaries just became this place with a much more expansive way of engaging with Tibetan resistance.

CDT: What kind of response have you gotten to Lhakar Diaries? Who are your main readers?

TYL: Our main audience is young Tibetans across the diaspora followed by scholars of Tibetan studies. I think Lhakar Diaries has been important for building community and as a way of discussing important questions around identity, authenticity, and the politics of being a Tibetan living in exile. For scholars of Tibet studies (many of whom are not Tibetan, by the way), I think it has challenged existing narratives about Tibetans, and perhaps helped push for the much-needed decolonization of Tibet studies.

CDT: Is there much opportunity for exchange between writers inside Tibet and outside, or is that too risky at the moment?

TYL: I think it’s quite difficult to do this openly. Things in Tibet have really become very tight, as with other regions of China. I like to read Tibetan writers from Tibet, and once my book is translated, I hope that Tibetans in Tibet can read my books as well, covertly. But I don’t think anything can really openly happen in terms of exchange without endangering those in Tibet.

CDT: There is a quote I read by the writer Woeser, who said in an interview: “There used to be two opposite approaches to Tibet, demonizing it and seeing it as sacred. They both had the same consequences: Tibet and Tibetans were not seen as real.” Elsewhere in the interview she also said, “Tibet is the same as every other place on Earth. It is a place where people live.” Your book does a beautiful job of showing Tibetans as real people with all the depth and complexity of human experience. What do you wish the world understood better about Tibetans’ lives, both in exile and inside Tibet?

TYL: I wish and hope that the world understands just what is at stake for Tibetans at this moment. There are many communities that are struggling, but we have been up against one of the most powerful and brutal dictatorships in the world. And Tibet is regularly known to be and judged as, if not the least free, among the least free places in the world by watchdog organizations like Freedom House, for instance. So I think people don’t quite understand just what Tibetans are dealing with. I feel like sometimes people don’t even really consider Tibet as being a colonized place. I think that is really difficult for a lot of Tibetans. We are trying to assert the basic history of our community and our existence and our perspectives, while trying to take on this behemoth. Then I think also when people read Tibetan fiction or watch Tibetan movies made by Tibetan people, I hope they get to understand what that looks like on the level of an individual, those forces and those histories, what it takes to survive as a Tibetan person right now. I just think people really have no idea what Tibetans have been through and continue to fight through.

CDT: What Tibetan writers should the world be paying attention to?

TYL: Woeser, who you quoted, has been a fearless voice of truth and courage. She was living under house arrest for years. She’s inside, and she’s saying these things. So I hope more and more people are reading her. And I hope more and more people are seeking new Tibetan voices. I don’t mean me, I mean just new voices, there are lots of them – what I see among Tibetan writers, especially ones that haven’t been translated. I just hope more publishers will translate Tibetan writers who write in Tibetan or Chinese. There’s a whole lot of them. There’s a huge literary tradition, the Tibetan canon is large. So I think there are many more stories to come.

CDT: In your talk in Berkeley, you referred to “the long silence about Tibet.” What can CDT and our readers do to support Tibet and help break that silence?

TYL: I’ve met many readers who have traveled to Tibet. They seem to feel a bit guilty knowing that I and many other Tibetans cannot travel there. But I tell them, now that you’ve seen what’s happening, please don’t keep it to yourself. It’s important to keep talking about Tibet — with each other, with political representatives. This is not a struggle that Tibetans can or will give up. Allies can help by listening to Tibetans and helping to amplify our voices. If you know anyone who’s Tibetan in your area, see if they want to share their stories. Perhaps they can speak at your school, your church, your union. Bring us into the discussion whenever you can.

CDT: What are you working on now? Is there going to be another book?

TYL: I’m at the beginning stages of writing what I hope will be the next novel. But I’m really trying to have fun right now, and play. I’m dabbling with this main idea but also another idea. After spending ten, twelve years really focusing on one project, and especially now that the tours and the promotional stuff are starting to slow down a little bit more, I’m finding that I have more capacity, and I’m also more ready, to just be a writer again, and just have fun.

Tsering Yangzom Lama’s book is available in major bookstores and via Audible. To read more from Tibetan voices, she recommends the site High Peaks Pure Earth.

CDT has extensively covered Chinese media engagement in the international arena, particularly in the Global South. In the Pacific Islands, Chinese delegations have attempted to sideline local journalists in order to evade scrutiny. In the Horn of Africa, China has leveraged local media outlets to circulate positive narratives about Chinese conflict-mediation efforts and “palace diplomacy.” Across the African continent, Chinese media forums and other people-to-people exchanges have promoted collaboration between Chinese and African journalists. A combination of carrots and sticks has accelerated the dissemination of Chinese state-media content (often falsely or misleadingly attributed) to local African media outlets. As China prepares for increasing confrontation abroad during Xi’s third term, the CCP is deploying a growing number of resources and tactics to shape its global image through the media.

Joining CDT to discuss this topic is Joshua Kurlantzick, author of the recently published Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World. Kurlantzick is a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. He focuses on China’s approach to soft and sharp power, including state-backed media, and previously worked as a correspondent in Southeast Asia. Our interview explores the history of China’s influence campaigns, the features that make other countries vulnerable, the power of localization and content-sharing agreements, Xi Jinping’s priorities, and how to ethically report on these issues. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and continuity. 

China Digital Times (CDT): How has your background in journalism informed the way you approach analysis of the Chinese government’s foreign influence operations via the media?

Joshua Kurlantzick (JK): My background as a journalist definitely helped me find sources for the project. That included finding sources who had worked for Chinese state media, as well as a wide range of journalists who had interacted with Chinese state media over the years and signed content-sharing agreements with them. I think it also made it easier for me to understand some of the appeal of some Chinese media, like Xinhua, since I knew that the journalism job market was and has been terrible, and that many publications are struggling around the world. As a result, many, particularly in developing countries, are turning to Xinhua as a viable newswire, for news, since Xinhua is cheaper than other, more credible wires like the AP or Reuters, etc.—and sometimes Xinhua is free. Also, as a journalist I knew a fair amount about the Freedom of Information process in the U.S., which helped me in my research. 

CDT: You describe how the Chinese government’s “charm offensive” in the 1990s and 2000s provided a blueprint for its modern global influence efforts. What went wrong in the earlier campaign, and what lessons does that provide for assessing the current one?

JK: I think what went wrong with the earlier “charm offensive,” which I wrote about in an earlier book, was that China moved away from its idea of itself as a power that did not interfere in other states’ affairs, which is clearly untrue now. That undermined its earlier charm offensive. The growing authoritarianism in China also badly undermined the charm offensive, since it killed most of China’s soft power emanating from the Chinese private sector, which has been decimated by Xi’s increasing authoritarianism and statism—even to the point of undermining China’s most globally successful private-sector firms. And China just got bigger, more powerful, and more assertive regionally, and it became harder for it to wield soft power, while it was also scaring its neighbors with its diplomacy and military activity.

CDT: How does democratic backsliding provide opportunities for influence operations, notably through sharp power?

JK: Democratic backsliding provides opportunities for China and other authoritarian states to wield sharp power, since democracies are focused on their own internal problems, and many do not have the resources or time to deal with sharp power and other types of influence activities. 

CDT: What patterns appear to make countries particularly vulnerable to influence operations through the media? Are there certain regions that stand out above others?

JK: What makes countries vulnerable to influence operations are places that have not adopted tough laws on foreign investment in media and information sectors, as well as tough laws (like Australia, Singapore, or the U.S. has, or like Europe is considering) on foreign interference in politics in those countries. In addition, countries can be vulnerable to influence operations when they lack independent media that could expose influence operations; Taiwanese and U.S. and Canadian and Australian independent media proved critical in exposing alleged influence operations. Also, countries are vulnerable if their citizens have low levels of digital literacy, and if there is limited or no independent Chinese-language press.

CDT: Among all of the forms of influence in foreign media ecosystems, which do you feel is the least understood and the most effective in Western countries? How about for countries in the Global South?

JK: Among developing countries, Xinhua has been probably the most effective media influence tactic for Beijing, since many media outlets in developing countries are picking up Xinhua and using it as a normal newswire, even though it is owned by Beijing. Rich democracies have not yet used Xinhua much in this way. In richer democracies, probably the most effective tools have been Beijing’s near-total control of Chinese-language media in most rich countries, as well as non-media influence tactics like gaining control of student groups, and some diaspora community organizations.

CDT: Content-sharing agreements between local media outlets and Chinese state media such as Xinhua have proven attractive for local outlets, especially those unable to afford Western newswires. How can these local outlets and their readers insulate themselves from Xinhua content-sharing agreements and the potentially-skewed information that is subsequently disseminated?

JK: I don’t think they can insulate their readers, if they are signing these content-sharing deals with Xinhua, which is only going to speed up in the future. They do however need to clearly label that the content comes from Xinhua, which often does not happen in outlets in developing countries, and such labeling might allow some readers to understand that the content is coming from Xinhua, and ask questions about Xinhua’s fairness in covering issues related to China.

CDT: What was your most surprising finding in the course of writing this book?

JK: I think I entered the project expecting to find that China had been highly successful in its influence offensive around the world and the most surprising result was finding that Beijing actually had not been that successful—that it had had very mixed success with many of its efforts.

CDT: Chinese state media operating abroad have found it difficult to overcome the tension between their need to attract local readers by producing cutting-edge stories on sensitive topics, and their need to please bosses back in Beijing by producing sterilized content that strictly adheres to the Party line. How do you view the evolution of their efforts to overcome this tension? Are there ways in which these outlets have managed to succeed in achieving both goals, or may do so in the future?

JK: I don’t think most Chinese state media have overcome this tension, although they have a huge number of reporters and have done a decent job at producing a great deal of local content, which then gets recycled back into the local press. This is especially true in developing regions, where they produce so much locally-relevant content that it does sometimes get picked up by local press, although they still have to be careful not to alienate Beijing, which can make their stories more boring and more turgid than necessary.

CDT: From Xi Jinping’s perspective, which forms of Chinese soft power or sharp power in the media realm are most important, and therefore likely to be expanded over the next five years?

JK: I think Xi was, before zero-COVID, focused on expanding the big state-media outlets, using the United Front to drastically expand China’s sharp power efforts, and advertising China’s model of development and governance—he is really the first Chinese leader since Mao to advertise that China has a model of development and governance that could challenge liberal democracy. But right now, I think Xi is just trying to hold on at home and abroad. China’s image ratings are disastrous abroad, in leading liberal democracies and even in many countries in Asia. Xi’s partnership with Vladimir Putin is a disaster. Xi has to focus on the dramatic shift away from zero-COVID and what that will mean for China, and also hope it doesn’t result in widespread, mass death, especially among the elderly, and so basically he is mostly consumed right now with domestic problems—which he needs to solve if China is going to wield the type of global influence it desires.

CDT: How should the global media report on influence operations in a way that conveys the gravity of the threats involved without inflaming xenophobia and racism against the Chinese diaspora and people of Chinese descent?

JK: The global media should report on influence operations stemming from the Chinese state, the CCP, the United Front, etc., without in any way suggesting that these operations are necessarily supported by people of Chinese descent. After all, it is people of Chinese descent who are often the targets of such operations, from Taiwan to Canada to the United States to Southeast Asia.

CDT: What scholars and other sources do you recommend our readers consult to learn more about China’s global media initiatives and to hear impacted communities’ perspectives on this topic?

JK: I would strongly recommend books on China by Susan Shirk (about China’s strengths and weaknesses), Maria Repnikova (about China’s soft power), and a forthcoming book by Vivien Marsh about CGTN, the BBC, and China’s global media in general. 

China Digital Times: How did the government approach statistics under Mao’s rule?

Jeremy Wallace: Numbers, like everything else, were radically politicized under Mao. Mao had strong opinions about the correctness of different types of methods of counting. I would highly recommend that those who really want to dive into this topic read Arunabh Ghosh’s Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China. 

Mao liked censuses. He liked investigating particular cases in an almost ethnographic fashion—as opposed to randomized sample surveys or probability sampling that we think of as “modern” or “normal” techniques. This was a real debate pitting socialism versus capitalism. Mao saw surveys as tainted by capitalism; that they framed people’s experiences in particular directions and were pro status quo. Of course, Mao also had very strong ideas about what the answer should be. It wasn’t an open investigation into what was going on. The “correct answer” needed to be provided. This led to many problems throughout the regime, most famously, dramatically, and calamitously the Great Leap Forward and the famine. I think that scarred the generation that followed, at least to some extent.

CDT: At the end of Mao era, there’s a general sense that “maybe this didn’t work so well.” How did that shift away from Maoist ideology—but not the total negation of it—change what the state wanted to know?

Wallace: In some ways the title of the book comes from this. Deng Xiaoping used a classical expression that Mao had used: “Seek truth from facts.” It’s using Mao against Maoism. It’s hard to fight against the political vocabulary that you’re all steeped in and that everyone pledged fealty to yesterday. It’s very hard to immediately transition and be like: “That wasn’t working. I know we all said it was yesterday, but ….” It takes time, and Deng’s use of Mao against Maoism was a particularly savvy technique.

The way this connects to numbers in my mind is that this aphorism is along the lines of pragmatism: “We need to care less about what is correct, theoretically, and focus more on the facts of the matter—outcomes.”

CDT: You describe how, in 1978, Deng called for Party cadres to be rated on their individual performance, which was a step away from Communist collectivism. Just as he used Mao to attack Maoism, he used Lenin to attack Communist collectivism. You quote Deng quoting Lenin: “to refer to collegiate methods as an excuse for irresponsibility is a most dangerous evil.” Why did the Party central feel a need to start evaluating cadres differently than during the Mao era? What was it looking for?

Wallace: This is Deng appropriating authorities in the Communist lexicon to attack what had become Communist practice in the PRC. The phrase that I use throughout the book is “limited, quantified vision.” One of the things Deng truly believed was that the Chinese people had a lot of energy and excitement about improving their lives. Unlike Mao, who thought he knew the correct way to move the population forward, Deng was a little bit more circumspect and thought that what he needed to do was step back. Deng wanted to unleash initiative, to allow individuals to move forward on their own. He thought that giving them targets—giving them individual performance grades and bonuses connected to that—was the way that you would improve performance.

This is his limited and quantified vision. Quantified, because if you don’t count things—if it’s all about Communist spirit—then is that actually going to improve outcomes? That was too flimsy, even if it was rhetorically used. The emphasis was instead on quantified outputs and outcomes. Limited, because it was about not paying as close attention—focusing on particular things rather than having everyone being in everyone else’s business all the time.

China is a very diverse place, and different communities have different ideas about what might work in their communities. So stepping back and allowing individual leaders to initiate and kind of move things as they will, including maybe in policies or actions that could be construed as capitalist. Deng didn’t want to say, “what we need to do is capitalism,” because that would have been a political fight (and maybe he didn’t even believe it). He wanted to step back and not have to specify. 

A second level is that the center wouldn’t necessarily know [about events taking place in the provinces]. If there was resistance to capitalistic policies in the center, they would just see what the facts are and then seek truth from there.

The third was to not demand that everyone do [everything] at the same time. The people that were more excited or interested in this direction could move in that direction and we could see the outcomes from it. Then maybe people would change their minds. So if you’re in the northeast of China, and your agricultural production is doing relatively well, you maybe don’t feel as much of a need to immediately shift [how you organize] agricultural production. Whereas in other parts of the country, maybe you do.

For all those reasons, this limiting vision made political and economic sense to Deng. It’s also cheaper. It’s hard for the center to manage huge numbers of people going down and investigating everything.

CDT: In 1978, the Party was experimenting with all sorts of liberalization and modernization. Why did it reject the “fifth modernization,” democracy?

Wallace: Calling for change is an acknowledgment that the status quo has failed, but the Party was in charge of the status quo, too. It highlights the danger of political reform because once you open that can of worms, drawing the line about where change ends is quite difficult. The Four Modernizations versus the Four Cardinal Principles—that’s kind of the ‘78-‘79 story. For me, it points to the contingency of big political moments and political changes. This is something I tried to emphasize again when talking about Xi’s neopolitical turn [discussed further below]. These were moments of huge debate when the shapes of China-to-come were open questions. How far are we willing to go? How far are we not willing to go? Democracy was always a line that the party prevented. It did not want to give up its monopoly on authority.

CDT: Democracy is not how you get promoted within the Party. You get promoted through the cadre evaluation system. What is it?

Wallace: The cadre evaluation system is a central piece of the machinery of China’s limited, quantified vision. It’s the way higher-level officials evaluate lower-level officials. It’s usually done on an annual basis and is based on lots of key performance indicators (KPIs). Especially earlier in the period, these criteria were relatively concrete things like: “Did you improve the growth of industry?” and so forth. Over time, it became gross domestic product (GDP), which became the über statistic.

Cadres do everything they can to perform to those numbers, just like good lower-level employees try to hit KPIs. There’s different aspects of these. There are veto targets like: you can’t have major protests or social instability incidents. For a while, family planning was a major indicator. Cadres worked really hard on those. The things that are not measured are not cared about as much. These are negative externalities. [Take steel for example.] No one is counting the pollution that steel plants produce in your evaluation. They’re looking at how much steel you’re producing—not even how profitable the steel plant is, but solely output. 

CDT: So the Party realized: “Okay, we’re building all this steel, but people’s lives are getting worse with smog and all that.” So they try to create new KPIs: Green GDP and PM2.5 are among the most famous. Why did one work and the other not? 

Wallace: GDP is this number that tries to encapsulate everything but it clearly doesn’t and everyone knows it doesn’t. Famously, if I look after your kids and you pay me and you look after my kids, and I pay you that will get counted in a way that it wouldn’t if we just look after our own children. Another thing that GDP doesn’t count is the environmental costs of action. Green GDP was a recognition that we need to incorporate sustainability into thinking about GDP as a broad global effort.

It basically failed everywhere, so its failure in China is not particularly surprising. It’s not like Sweden or the United States are using Green GDP. No one uses Green GDP. But I think one of the particular reasons it failed in China was, if you look at some of the pilot [projects], they found that there was no growth in the area if you actually try to think about the environmental costs of what was going on—and that was just unacceptable. GDP was too central to the political game to be completely undermined by trying to think about the environment. It’s also very abstract. GDP itself is really abstract but then to try to shift GDP to think about the environmental costs becomes extremely esoteric, whereas PM2.5 is not. The actual particulate matter that gets deep into your lungs and deep into your blood is really problematic and can be measured very simply. PM2.5 became a topic of conversation after the airpocalypse. It became a convenient number because it was a problem that could be solved as opposed to one that would undermine the whole system, like Green GDP. PM2.5 was a slice of a problem to be solved and so it fit this engineering mentality.

CDT: Limited, quantified vision had major successes but also downsides. It was liable to be manipulated, and didn’t count everything. One example of manipulation you show is that cities cluster slightly above 100 million RMB GDP because it makes them eligible for subway funding. How did limited, quantified vision work? Where did it struggle?

Wallace: Basically, the system worked, right? The reason we’re talking about it, the reason CDT gets the number of hits that it does on its website, the reason that the number of people in the China sphere has grown remarkably over the 40 years of the Reform Era, is that focusing on development was successful. Some of that has Maoist legacies: education helped there. I don’t want to say “Deng caused growth,” but I do think that the focus on modernization was very successful. China was a desperately poor country in 1976. That it is not now is a remarkable success. A large part of that success, I think, is tied to this developmental mindset and in particular, the quantified vision of the state.

In the beginning this was a project about the manipulation of data, GDP manipulation in particular. I think people are inherently interested in manipulation because we live in a world of numbers. Whenever people play games and you can identify people cheating, it’s extremely interesting to humans. Whether that’s kind of an unnatural clustering right above a particular number where you get access to funding or everyone is kinda above average. (China’s national GDP number will actually be lower than almost all the provincial averages because the provinces are all trying to push up their numbers and the center knows that and so pushes down growth.) When you focus on particular numbers, you’re gonna get incentives to manipulate. So this is how I came into the project. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I did find evidence of manipulation.

The difficulty in the project was, if you’re using official data all up and down the project, how do you actually find manipulation? I tried to look for moments when you might expect more manipulation than others: that is, particular moments of political turnover. When one leader is leaving and one is coming in—that’s the time. The data is usually about differences between electricity consumption or production. It’s highly correlated with GDP but not the same as GDP. I can’t claim credit for this. You can see Li Keqiang on Wikileaks explicitly saying he thinks about electricity data, railroad data, and loan data.

What I find is: there is more falsification during times of political turnover in China. This was a period where growth is around eight or nine percent per year for provinces. People weren’t going around doubling or tripling the number. You don’t want to be found out. You want to be just a little bit higher than the other guy. I found manipulation or distortion of about ten percent. So reporting ten- instead of nine-percent growth.

I was never that interested in naming names because in the end, I don’t really know what’s happening in a given year in a given province. The fact that across hundreds of province years you find this pattern that GDP is systematically higher in moments of political turnover [confirmed, to me, that this pattern was real]. Party officials have had to fess up to this, and we find our falsification index is much higher in those localities that have reported falsification themselves. So that gives us real confidence that we are capturing this falsification.

CDT: Is fudging the stats a bad thing?

Wallace: The Center [the central government in Beijing] is not thrilled about the practice of manipulated data at any level. It would prefer it if that were not a possibility. If we could go to a world before the invention of lying, I think they would prefer that. That being said, that’s not the world we’re in. I think that they’re all playing very persuasive political games with each other. Communicative games about: “I understand what you want. I understand the political system. I can get my bureaucrats to do this, but not that.” Li Keqiang knows that this manipulation is happening. People are not necessarily pulling the wool over the eyes of central leaders.

It’s not all fake. There are real limits to falsification because once you really erode trust, in the overall sense of the numbers reflecting reality, then what can you trust? What do you do? Do you make investment decisions? How do you make them? That being said, in very particular moments of political danger, economic expectations and people’s confidence is super important. If you can fudge a number and make things seem a little bit more stable during a particular rough patch, you might find that it’s worth it—even if it does erode trust over the long run! Confidence for trust is something that, at particular moments, you might be willing to trade off. They’re not reporting ninety-nine percent growth every year. There are real limits. It’s not the Sputnik harvests of the Great Leap Forward. Those days are gone.

CDT: One of the things you write about is that you can have both falsification and better outcomes. You specifically wrote about the campaign-style drive for coal mine safety.

Wallace: To be clear, this is me reporting other people’s research. China’s development is a story of success that had real negative externalities. Focusing on performance in particular narrow slices, whether that’s PM2.5 or coal mine accidents and deaths, actually did produce real improved performance—many fewer people die in coal mines now than they used to—but it also produced clear evidence of falsification in that data. There’s vast underreporting. There’s a lot of accidents under the threshold of what is acceptable before you have to report higher up. Once you’re above the threshold, almost nothing happens. Real data doesn’t really work that way. That fits the broader idea that the system was quite successful in what it was performing, but had these problematic side pieces.

CDT: By the time Xi got to power, China was no longer an impoverished backwater governed by Maoist ideology. But there was a sense that Hu Jintao’s years had been a “lost decade”, and Xi Jinping himself thought that all was not well. What is Xi’s “neopolitical turn” as you describe it? And does it spell the end of the limited, quantitative vision of the Chinese state?

Wallace: In 2022, I think a lot of the China-watching set have a pretty strong sense about what I call the neopolitical turn, or Xi’s “new normal.” I think we have a strong sense about the personalization, the Partyization of various things.

One interesting piece that I think is less well understood—and this is something that Susan Shirk says a little bit about in her new book Overreach—is that a lot of the festering problems outside of the limited, quantified vision of the Hu-Wen regime needed to change. So the Party expanded the cadre evaluation system and tried to count more things like environmental data. But they failed. And I think in large part, they failed for reasons that they’re not really that responsible for—because there was a global financial crisis and the sense was “now is not the time to worry about PM2.5, tens of millions of people are out of work!” So they just stimulated and built, running up huge debts. Between 2008-2012, there were real debates about all these problems. Some people saw them as  growth problems and the solution as more capitalistic reforms. Some people saw them as political problems and the solution as a strong leader and an anti-corruption campaign. Some people saw these problems and said “democracy.” There were huge, interesting, fascinating debates in that period and a general recognition that problems exist.

When Xi Jinping came into power, he clearly had some ideas that he thought were right. Centralization of authority—they reduced the size of the Politburo Standing Committee to seven instead of nine. It’s a lot easier to get four people on your side than five. There’s anti-corruption campaigns and interesting political movements. That entire first year in office, if you go back and really look at that year as I tried to do, it’s really topsy-turvy. Yes, there’s censorship but there’s also going to Shenzhen. Then the Third Plenum document came out and it was seen as getting the state out of the economy. 

That’s not the way it turned out. It turned out that it was actually the “Leading Small Groups” and all this other Party stuff that ended up being important but it didn’t have to be this way. It almost wasn’t. [2013] is a fascinating moment, just like the 1978 story is kind of this jumble where lots of things are happening and it could have turned out very differently. As someone who doesn’t like concentration camps for Uyghurs, the complete decimation of civil society, shutting out of the West, and an aggressive foreign policy … I’m saddened by this.

CDT: Can we talk about COVID? China built a system after SARS to track emerging diseases. Why didn’t it work, initially? What were its blind spots? Because it worked in some ways but not in others—of course, the same story happens in Singapore and, obviously, the United States. How did China see COVID? And how did it miss it?

Wallace: It’s important to remember that the virus is SARS-CoV-2. China literally saw this problem before and prepared for this problem. They say, “You never get the same crisis twice,” and yet China got exactly that. Yet, it failed initially in Wuhan because the local leadership swept it under the rug because it was inconvenient politically. This was the moment the local Party Congresses and local People’s Congress [were in session]. They did not want this story to go anywhere. They thought it was just some pneumonia at a wet market—these things happen—but not like this. The fact [that Party Center] had to send in three central inspection teams before they got the data they wanted shows that even under Xi’s centralization, local officials still hide data.

The center sat on the data for a week. [Xi has stated that he “issued demands during a Politburo Standing Committee meeting on January 7 for work to contain the outbreak,” but the head of the National Health Commission only instructed provincial health officials that human-to-human transmission was occurring on January 14.] It’s hard for me not to think that if they had gone a week earlier, that this might have been SARS II, and then forgotten in the way that SARS was. No one in the United States has a personal experience with SARS. I’m pretty sure South Park made an episode making fun of SARS as a thing that [wasn’t real]. It was a real thing—we got very lucky that time. This time, we didn’t.

China only succeeded for a couple reasons. The timing was very precarious. [It was near Chinese New Year,] generally the biggest annual migration in the world, and that could have gone very, very badly. Instead, it seems like what happened was because people are used to businesses shutting down at that moment, the virus didn’t really spread much beyond the core Wuhan, Hubei area. People just went home and everyone was told to stay in place. Outside of a few institutions like a prison here or there, outside of Hubei there was not a lot of community spread in 2020. There was still huge frustration inside of China politically—about the secrecy, about the whistleblower, especially when [Li Wenliang], the doctor who was a whistleblower, died [of] the virus himself.

The Singapore example is interesting. They don’t see their migrant population. They don’t think about their migrant population as full members [of society]. [Migrant workers] are living in dorms and it becomes a dangerous population for them. Even though the city overall is relatively safe for a long period of time, [COVID] explodes when it is exposed in these areas that they just did not think about as closely. It’s akin to the hukou issues of China: thinking about urbanization in China; thinking about who’s counted, who’s not counted, and so forth; the migrant as a peripheral person, someone who’s not considered fully when governments make decisions.

Among these abuses, forced labor has played a particularly vital role in catalyzing global condemnation, not only due to moral revulsion and potential breach of China’s international legal obligations, but also by revealing how these human rights issues tangibly relate to international actors. Consumers and shareholders alike have gradually discovered that their own consumption and investments substantially contribute to these abuses. As research has shown, the majority of global supply chains in the cotton and solar panel industries are tainted by forced labor emanating from Xinjiang. However, despite this well-documented evidence, it remains unclear to what extent international actors are willing to put people over profits, what impediments they face, and how their efforts might change the situation on the ground. 

Joining CDT to discuss the issue of forced labor in Xinjiang is Laura Murphy, Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery at the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. She is a co-author of the following reports on this topic: “Laundering Cotton: How Xinjiang Cotton Is Obscured in International Supply Chains”; “In Broad Daylight: Uyghur Forced Labour and Global Supply Chains”; and most recently, “Financing Genocide: Development Finance and the Crisis in the Uyghur Region.” Our interview touches on the evidence and motivations around forced labor in Xinjiang, the complexity of international supply chain due diligence, the relevance of global cases of forced labor, and the methodological challenges of documenting human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The interview was lightly edited for length and clarity. 

China Digital Times (CDT): How and when did you begin working on forced labor in Xinjiang? Have you worked on issues related to forced labor in China before?

Laura Murphy (LM): I’ve been working on forced labor globally for over 15 years. I turned my sights to researching forced labor in Xinjiang as soon as news broke in December 2018 that the PRC had started including factory work in internment camp settings. I lived in the Uyghur Region in the 2000s, so I felt compelled to shift my focus to that region when this news emerged. But I want to be sure to mention that I worked with a team of extraordinary researchers from around the world on this report, all of whom brought their own indispensable expertise and skill sets to the work.

CDT: If you could have one person in the world read your reports on forced labor in Xinjiang, who would it be, and why? More broadly, who’s your audience for these papers? What’s their intended use?

LM: Our intended audience for our reports is a combination of corporations, investors, legislators, Uyghur community activists, and others concerned about forced labor. We try to make the reports useful for academic and general audiences alike. We hope that the reports will raise awareness of the issue, provide an evidential base for understanding forced labor in the region, exemplify the way Uyghur forced labor affects global supply chains, and influence both corporations and governments to stop supporting human rights abuses in the region.

CDT: Can you describe the range of evidence you assembled, from prisoner testimonies to state media reports and corporate PR claims? How did you assess the credibility of this evidence?

LM: In this report, we addressed four different kinds of questions with different types of evidence to provide a more complete portrait of forced labor in the cotton industry in XUAR [Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region]. We assembled first-person testimonies of people who (or people whose family members) have been forced to work in the sector to better understand the individual experience of forced labor. We then reviewed Chinese government and corporate publicity campaigns and annual reports to understand the larger strategies that make forced labor possible in the region, and the ways the government justifies it. We then analyzed trade and customs data to see how Uyghur forced labor affects our supply chains. And then we analyzed the current legal context to understand what protections we can rely on globally to fight this.

CDT: Can you describe how “poverty alleviation” programs in Xinjiang differ from those elsewhere in China, and how despite their benevolent-sounding name they are actually coercive?

LM: While the PRC operates poverty alleviation and labor transfer programs all over China, in the Uyghur Region, refusing to participate in those government programs can be punishable by internment. It is the specter of the internment camps that makes government programs in the Uyghur Region coercive and nearly ubiquitous. It’s the worst system of contemporary forced labor I’ve ever encountered—in terms of scope, scale, and severity. 

CDT: One prominent response to accusations of forced labor has been to highlight the level of mechanization in Xinjiang’s cotton industry, arguing that this simply leaves no need for forced labor. What’s wrong with this argument?

LM: Mechanization has left farmers without jobs. This renders them “surplus labor” in the eyes of the state, and that status leaves them subject to coercive state-sponsored labor transfers. Minoritized citizens in the region are not allowed to refuse such transfers. When they hesitate, they are “educated” to “want” to go, until they finally relent. [The Laundering Cotton report addresses this question in greater depth (pp. 12-13), citing official statistics and regional differences to argue that “the majority of cotton grown in the Uyghur Region”—particularly for export—“is still hand-picked.”]

CDT: Could you draw out the capitalist underpinnings of forced labor in Xinjiang? The CCP might have been satisfied by detaining ethnic minorities and subjecting them to a pervasive surveillance state in order to neutralize a perceived threat, but why impose a further punishment of forced labor?

LM: It’s not so much capitalist as ideological, political, and cultural. Government directives clearly indicate that the purpose of the programs is to transform the Uyghur people from supposedly being “backwards” and “lazy” to being more like Han Chinese people. It is meant to “urbanize” the population and to move them to cities where the state can better control their behaviors and religious practices. It is designed to control Uyghurs and to make them docile workers in the larger project of industrialization and Sinicization of the region. 

CDT: What are some of the most interesting or overlooked findings you have come across in your research on Xinjiang forced labor so far? Has anything surprised you?

LM: I think the most surprising result of our work is actually the responses companies have provided to our findings. Many of them simply take their suppliers’ word that they are not using forced labor. Many of them choose to believe, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that their company is the one exception, or that their suppliers couldn’t possibly be engaged in forced labor. Many companies prefer to look away. And both companies and their auditors are often unwilling to investigate aspects of supply chains that would force them to face the reality of their complicity in forced labor, or that would put them in bad standing with the Chinese government. 

CDT: What are some ways international companies attempt to conceal their connections to Xinjiang forced labor in their supply chains, even while proclaiming to perform what on the surface sounds like due diligence?

LM: Companies often accept simple self-answered questionnaires, protocols, and codes of conduct as proof that suppliers don’t use forced labor, without doing the due diligence to investigate thoroughly. Most companies do not know where the raw materials for their products come from, and so it can be less about concealing and more about plausible deniability. Our work is aimed at removing some of the plausibility of those denials. 

CDT: Before international companies take a stand on the issue of forced labor in Xinjiang, they must determine to what extent they are actually connected to the issue. What are some impediments that international companies face in auditing their supply chains for connections to Xinjiang forced labor? Could you describe some impediments that are universal to all regions, and others that are unique to Xinjiang?

LM: The primary impediment to auditing supply chains is the auditing process itself. The audits that are currently in place are inadequate. And there’s no way to conduct a legitimate audit in the Uyghur Region or conduct interviews of Uyghurs transferred to other parts of China because they are not allowed to speak freely about their grievances. Furthermore, the Chinese government created a law last summer that prohibits people and organizations from assisting in the implementation of a foreign sanction, which has kept many auditors and Chinese companies from speaking about Xinjiang connections. This has made China a very hostile environment for those who are seeking the truth about their supply chains. 

CDT: On the power map of major international actors related to the problem of Xinjiang forced labor, there are human rights activists, governments (executive and legislative branches), apparel companies, their suppliers, consumers, etc. In your view, which among these holds the most leverage to mitigate the problem? How should that actor best use its leverage, and what is stopping them?

LM: The power to stop forced labor in the Uyghur Region lies in a complementary relationship between corporations and government. Most companies will not take due diligence and supply chain tracing seriously unless they are required to. But the only way for us to root out forced-labor-made goods is if they do so. So it is incumbent upon governments to require companies to trace their supply chains and make them public, as well as to ensure that forced-labor-made goods are not allowed to be imported. Without those laws, companies can continue to use forced-labor-made goods without any concern at all. 

CDT: Have your findings affected your own behavior as a consumer? (Of clothes, primarily, but also solar panels, if applicable.) Do you have advice for people concerned about avoiding Xinjiang cotton and other products, given the current murkiness of these supply chains?

LM: Honestly, I buy almost nothing aside from food anymore. My research has shown me that Uyghur forced labor affects supply chains far beyond clothing—electronics, household appliances, pharmaceuticals, supplements, cosmetics, spices—the list goes on and on. I research anything I do need to buy to see if there is an option that is not made in China, since the local provenance of goods is rarely identified and raw materials could often be sourced in Xinjiang. I try to buy used goods as much as I can. This is not only good for addressing forced labor, but it’s good for the planet and for my own finances. So I have made some serious life changes to accommodate what I now know. 

CDT: Xinjiang, and China more broadly, are far from being the only places in the world plagued by a significant amount of forced labor. There are an estimated eight million people living in conditions of contemporary slavery in India alone, and about 40 million people living in those conditions globally. What lessons can we learn from the successes and failures of combating forced labor in other regions, and how can these be applied to Xinjiang?

LM: This is such an important question. Unfortunately, much of what we know about combating forced labor is not particularly useful in a situation of state-sponsored forced labor at this extraordinary scale. The power China wields in the global economy and politics means that it is difficult to persuade it to end human rights abuses through the typical channels such as the UN. Companies are terrified of losing business in China, so they don’t act as swiftly to stop engaging with problematic suppliers as they usually would. We can’t work with suppliers to remediate the problem because it’s a government program. We don’t usually recommend boycotts or sanctions for forced labor⁠—we’d rather remediate the problem and improve working conditions. But this is an entirely different situation that calls for significant action on the part of governments. 

CDT: How can the successes and failures of the world’s response to forced labor in Xinjiang inform attempts to address forced labor in other parts of the world?

LM: New legislation that has been written to address the crisis in the Uyghur Region will have a long-lasting impact on what we expect of companies in terms of due diligence and supply chain transparency. Companies will no longer be able to say they can’t know where their goods come from. They’ll be required to know. That will be important to rooting out forced labor wherever it may be.

CDT: As international scrutiny of forced labor in Xinjiang continues to grow, the CCP may find ways to conceal the coercive nature of its minority policies in the region. Already, it has pushed Uyghurs and other minorities out of re-education camps as more detainees “graduate,” and labor transfer schemes disperse Xinjiang minorities to factories around the country. What implications does this evolution have for researchers’ longer-term strategy of tracking and combating Xinjiang forced labor?

LM: Researchers are constantly developing our skills at identifying programs meant to oppress minoritized citizens in the PRC. It’s not easy to do, and some of our sources do disappear on us. We have to read a lot of government and corporate documents and keep informed about new policies and speeches. We know we have to stay up to date on these programs to be able to continue the research. 

CDT: Your reports are based largely on open-source and documentary research, rather than on-the-ground fieldwork. Other researchers have conducted similar groundbreaking investigations on human rights in Xinjiang using publicly available data and without needing to be physically in China (Adrian Zenz, Shawn Zhang, Megha Rajagopalan, Alison Killing, et al). Using these sorts of open-source, remote methodologies, what are some other ways to investigate Xinjiang forced labor, beyond what you have already done in your reports? What are some research questions that sound most interesting to you?

LM: Many of us researching this issue wish we could go to China to conduct research, but it is not possible at this time. In fact, just recently, the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs accused us of not doing any on-the-ground research—it was laughable because of course we would prefer to go back to the Uyghur Region and have the freedom to talk to people without fear of repercussions for ourselves or for the people we talk with, or for our own friends and family members. Several of the people you named have been banned from the country. Some others have been beaten up or detained while doing research on this issue. An auditing firm was kicked out of the country. I’d love to be able to talk to workers who have experienced forced labor in the Uyghur Region. I’d be interested in going to see factories and spending time with companies that claim that they have created labor recruitment strategies that circumvent coercive state-sponsored programs. But I’m not allowed to do those things. For now, we use all of the information available to us online. This is what makes researching a human rights crisis in the 21st century both incredibly challenging, but also much more feasible than in times past. 

CDT: What scholars, NGOs, or other sources do you recommend our readers consult to better understand Xinjiang forced labor and the complexity of global supply chains involving China?

LM: I think Darren Byler, Adrian Zenz, Megha Rajagopalan, Alison Killing, and Amy Lehr are the stars in this arena. Their research has really inspired and assisted ours.

It’s also important to note that all of the work I do is conducted with a team, of varying membership, and of varying interest in being named. Nyrola Elimä is my co-author on nearly all of the work I do, but there are many others who also work on these projects who prefer to remain anonymous. But it’s important to me that I make it clear that I do not do this work alone.

However, Western scorn for China’s soft power efforts may overlook relative successes. These initiatives have achieved varying results in different regions, particularly in the developing world, where Confucius Institutes have surged in popularity and hundreds of thousands of international students have flocked to Chinese universities. Increasingly, China is experimenting with new strategies of localization and decentralization to attract greater audiences and disseminate a more relatable but still controlled image to the world. These regional differences and recent strategies have produced varying degrees of success, driven by different actors each with different motivations.

Maria Repnikova is a Professor at Georgia State University, and a close observer of Chinese media and soft power, particularly in Africa. She joined CDT to discuss her new book, “Chinese Soft Power,” which describes the various conceptions, instruments, and motivations of Chinese soft power, both on its own terms and in comparison to other states, to help readers better understand its contradictions and complexities.

This interview was edited for both length and clarity. An unabridged transcript will be published soon on China Digital Space, containing full responses and additional questions.

China Digital Times (CDT): Could you discuss the Chinese conception of soft power: its main features and differences with the Western conception of soft power?

Maria Repnikova (MR): Some of the ideas of Chinese soft power are similar to the conception by Joseph Nye⁠—in particular, the notion of wanting to improve one’s image, having a positive national image internationally, attracting global publics, and having a positive resonance to foreign policy and culture. But at the same time, there are some differences. 

First, there is a major difference in the motivations behind improving soft power. There is a global motivation, but there’s also a domestic one. In Joseph Nye’s conception, it’s mostly a global orientation, that we have to improve our image in order to basically have a more successful foreign policy, maintain the US prowess in the world, and so forth. But for China, it’s also about domestic cohesion. Maintaining domestic legitimacy and improving cultural confidence is very significant. By improving China’s image globally, one also creates, potentially, more respect for the Chinese Communist Party’s rule domestically. 

Also, in Nye’s understanding, hard and soft power are quite distinct, but in Chinese writings, scholars often question and critique this distinction. They say it’s a forced distinction, and that U.S. soft power is very much riding on its hard power, whether it’s military, commercial infrastructure, markets, and so forth, which reinforces U.S. cultural attraction. So that suggests that perhaps there’s more fluidity, that hard and soft power are more intertwined than separate. 

Thirdly, there’s this idea of so-called resources of soft power. I mentioned that hard and soft are fused, but if you look in more detail at the sources of soft power in China, the key argument is that it’s culture. This idea of culture is also very eclectic. It’s traditional culture, Chinese morality, but also some argue it’s technology, arts, and citizens’ behaviors. It’s almost like anything that can improve China’s image counts as its cultural soft power. So it’s a lot more inclusive of other elements. 

CDT: Why is it important to assess Chinese soft power on its own terms? 

MR: The current literature and the current thinking about Chinese soft power often tends to adopt Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power and measure China against it, and as a result, I think most conclusions come out as quite negative: China is basically failing, because it doesn’t have the attractive values that the United States originally does, or doesn’t have the strong cultural power when it comes to bottom-up culture, popular culture versus top-down, sale or export of culture. When you look at it this way, you end up with a pretty quick conclusion that it’s basically not working. 

But when you assess it on its own terms, you delve into the motivations behind it, the differences in domestic and external motivations, which can lead to very different conclusions. If you look at it on its own terms, you also see more regional variety, that maybe in some regions it’s working better or more effectively than others. And then you also see that some of its potential challenges or contradictions emerged not necessarily from the fact that it’s just a failure by default, but because it’s implemented sometimes in a very conflicting way. For instance, motivations of implementers on the ground at the local level, ambassadors of Chinese soft power, may differ from those of the high ranking officials in Beijing. So when you look at it on its own terms, you find a lot more nuance, you find more richness, and you also may end up questioning this binary of success versus failure.

CDT: You also discuss the need for a comparative approach to Chinese soft power. Why is a comparative approach often overlooked, and why is it important?

MR: I think the comparative approach speaks to the larger study of China, because it’s often tempting to say China is unique, and in some ways it is really distinctive and challenging to compare to any other context. But that also leads to some essentializing of China and Chinese practices. Even though we perhaps can’t find a completely comparable case, we can still find some comparative avenues for research. For instance, soft power can be seen as a practice, so we can compare how it’s implemented across different cases and see what’s distinctive about China, and maybe what’s more generalizable or similar to other cases. In both the US and China, there are some similar practices, like cultural centers, education, fellowships, public diplomacy summits, media narratives, etc.

Another form of comparison could be more focused on cultural context: for instance, implementing soft power in a similar cultural context versus a divergent one, and seeing whether there is more potential for success. And of course, one could also potentially look at more authoritarian versus democratic contexts to see whether a political system makes a difference in how China is perceived. So there’s a lot of room for different comparative work, but I think all of the different comparisons can illuminate different aspects of how China is performing, whether it’s what China is actually envisioning, or how effective it is. And these comparisons are not impossible. One can actually do them, not necessarily through fieldwork, but also through looking at narratives, media analysis, official speeches, intent and motivations. 

CDT: Let’s jump into some of the instruments of Chinese soft power that you analyzed in your book, so that we can highlight the contradictions and complexity. One main instrument that you focus on is Confucius Institutes, drawing from your fieldwork in Ethiopia. Could you unpack your description of Confucius Institutes in Ethiopia as tools of “pragmatic enticement”?

MR: By pragmatic enticement I mean that Confucius Institutes in Ethiopia attract core participants through various practical benefits. 

For instance, educators end up being enticed by the idea of Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms because they provide jobs for the graduates. They’re also at times enticed by this notion of creating more global connectivity for their universities. There is a sense that China provides a window into the global—global education flows and global education exposure. And it maybe has other benefits, including potential scholarships for students and staff, and maybe some resources for research and so forth. 

For students who end up signing up for Chinese language studies, it’s primarily the idea of getting a fellowship scholarship to study in China, but also getting a job, as the prime motivation. Most of them get employed as translators to Chinese state-owned enterprises or private companies. 

Then for teachers, for educators coming from China, there’s a sense of practical mission. For the most part, it’s about professional advancements and personal fulfillment. Professionally, advancing and practicing one’s English language skills, and teaching Chinese language to foreigners for the first time, can be very useful in deciding for young volunteers what trajectory they want to take on in their careers. It’s also in terms of just taking time off from China, because China is very fast paced, and society is extremely stressful. 

For all the participants, it’s less about the cultural encounter per se, but more so about “What can we gain from this? What’s the practical outcome?”

CDT: Another instrument you discuss is China’s global media. Could you elaborate on the ever-present tension between, on the one hand, China’s growing need to innovate in order to improve its media credibility and attract foreign audiences that might otherwise be repelled by what appears to be state propaganda, and on the other hand, China’s need to project a top-down, CCP-approved global image in order to maintain political authority?

MR: This is an interesting tension that underpins all of Chinese global media expansion. In some ways, it also mirrors the domestic tension between telling interesting, exciting stories that at times carry critical elements or some controversy, versus controlling the message. But internationally, perhaps it’s even more vibrant or visible because global publics have other access to information about China. They have other sources, they’re more discerning, and they often come with pre-existing prejudices that these stories are state propaganda. So in some ways, these outlets are going to have to prove themselves due to their pre-existing reputation.

On the one hand, to attract global publics one has to convince the public that you are reputable to begin with. But also I think the public is looking for exciting, dynamic, lively, and oftentimes also controversial stories. If you look at it from the commercial point of view, it’s about getting clicks and views. Stories that are very balanced and very positive don’t tend to really attract the public as much. 

At the same time, there’s also increasing pressure on journalists who work for these outlets and who are telling the China story for global audiences. There’s just more censorship, more directives, a much more tense political climate for domestic journalists, so they face more pressure. So they’re sometimes not actually able to compete with global outlets that are based outside of China and often not constrained by the same censorship. So they end up telling a story that’s not necessarily competitive with the global story, or Western story, that’s being told about China. 

Also, there are not a lot of professional motivations to tell more creative stories, at least at outlets like Xinhua, because a lot of these stories are co-authored by, say, six authors, and even if you end up being the one who gets a lot of clicks, you still have six authors that are sharing it with you. So there’s not a lot of enterprise to say, “You should go ahead and do something different.” And those jobs can be very comfortable. They pay quite well. They give benefits to journalists, and they don’t want to give that up to take risks on telling more critical or more exciting stories. 

CDT: You describe the localization or decentralization of China’s global media push as an attempt to maintain equilibrium in that tension. Some examples that you mentioned in your book are the use of local journalists to write stories, content-sharing agreements between media organizations, and Chinese acquisitions of foreign media outlets. How “successful” do you think these strategies will be, going forward?

MR: It’s always hard to predict success with some of these initiatives, but there are some trends. For example, hiring local journalists is a relatively promising strategy because it allows for local voices to tell that story. We see this in the West. CGTN has offices in Washington and London. They hire mostly western correspondents. That means, potentially, the story is a little bit more convincing, more lively. Maybe some angles will be covered that otherwise aren’t visible through Chinese storytellers. This is something that still needs more empirical study to determine to what extent it actually shifts perceptions. We know that the storytelling is changing, but are people engaging with the Chinese media differently as a result of that?

Direct acquisitions or having stakes in local outputs is seen as potentially effective because it’s invisible. One creates a stake in an outlet and can potentially, quietly, push for certain narratives or constrain others. It’s a little bit too new to say how effective it is, but it seems like it’s potentially a persuasive, interesting avenue for Chinese expansion. 

The somewhat less effective avenue has been inserting Chinese media [content] into newspapers and other local papers. I think that’s been effective for diasporic media outlets where they already may be interested in Chinese news content, but much less effective for Western news outlets. Also in Ethiopia, I found that they did do inserts for a while, but nobody really read them. It doesn’t really have much of a value in terms of shaping public opinion. Maybe it’s effective for domestic consideration. So it depends how one calculates or conceives of effects.

CDT: Another instrument of soft power that you focus on is education. Could you describe the political and economic motivations for China’s role as an education hub for international students?

MR: There are several motivations. For the political one, it goes back to the Mao period of inviting these foreign students and treating them really well. In China, oftentimes foreign students get better benefits or treatment on campus, they get better dorms, or they’re taken care of almost as “foreign guests.” And that creates a certain perception of respect, partnership, friendship, and benevolence towards China. When they go back to their home countries, some end up writing very positive stories about China, or working with China in some capacity, or maybe they’ll become government officials and influence China policy. So there is some hope, at least at some level, that this is part of soft power: building up China’s image and localizing persuasion. 

Economically, we see a neoliberal restructuring of Chinese universities, whereby they’re less dependent on or less driven by government funding. Just like other institutions, many universities in China have been cut off from government subsidies and they have to survive on their own. Foreign students bring in a lot of income. Many of these students are self-funded. Actually, the majority of students from developing countries are not necessarily coming on government scholarships. Also, there’s some strategic recruitment of students and researchers who are supposed to help with China’s developmental agenda, like “Made in China 2025.” They’re scientists or engineers or other strategic talents, representatives that would help in some ways to collaborate on an agenda. 

CDT: I’m curious about how all this is experienced by those in the Global South, and Africa in particular. In what ways do Chinese soft power initiatives in Africa empower or disempower locals, and how might that compare to the effects of Western soft power initiatives in the region?

MR: From what I’ve seen, I think there’s several overlapping themes. One thing is exposure to new information and inspiration. From what I gathered from journalists and officials I spoke to, their experience in Chinese training programs wasn’t so much deeply knowledge-enhancing in terms of capacity-building—for example, how to be a better journalist or how to deal with digital transitions of the media. The “how-to” was absent, or maybe submerged under the storytelling about China. A lot of the program materials are just literally about what China has accomplished. They take a particular media outlet, and they’ve done this incredible digitalization transition, and now they’re earning a lot of money, and they’re attracting public opinion, and they have all this advertising revenue. A lot of it is really showing off China’s success and immersing people in that success. 

I got a sense that this is about inspiration towards self-determination, the “we can do it ourselves,” or “we can be successful,” or “China has done so much in 30-40 years. We can also accomplish a lot if we are as hardworking or diligent or committed to this accomplishment.” There’s also just this immersion, feeling the speed of how much China is accomplishing. It’s in this mindset that anything is possible. But I don’t think it necessarily translates into very specific tools. 

From what I gathered, a lot of these participants themselves do a sort of co-performance of soft power exercises. They come in and they will say very positive things about China to their hosts and to local media. But at the same time, when you privately speak to them, they say, “Obviously, this is a public diplomacy exercise. I’m here in that capacity representing my country.” So they wouldn’t say anything critical because it’s not meant to be expressed in that space. But then in a private space, they said, “Well, actually, it would have been nice to learn a bit more.” So participants go on a tour and make the most of it, but they don’t treat this as a particularly knowledge-enhancing trip.

There’s also this element of symbolic co-optation. They’re performing publicly, but privately they may not necessarily have the same opinion. So they have very critical reflections, but some people end up writing very positive articles about China when they go back and publish stories. These opinions or views can coexist within these individual participants very easily.

There’s also a sense of brain drain when it comes to journalists and students at Confucius Institutes. The graduates end up working for Chinese companies. Many are translators. As translators, they actually represent the interest of Chinese capital, back in Ethiopia. Most of them don’t become educators or government officials, because that pays a lot less. So in this sense, they are co-opted by money itself. 

But is it necessarily a weakness? Well, if you ask individuals, they’ll say no. They’re actually very happy to be in this position, because they make more money, and they see themselves as empowering maybe their spouse, their families, and some local community members as well. But if you look at it from the big-picture point of view, the education still is primarily in the hands of Chinese Confucius Institutes. The officials who end up negotiating with China are less knowledgeable about China and maybe less trained, or they don’t speak the language. But the ones who are well trained and sophisticated in their knowledge end up being translators, brokers, or negotiators for Chinese companies. So in the big picture, if you look at this in the long term, perhaps there is some weakness there. But from the individual perspective, I think they probably see this as empowering. 

There is discursive co-optation through the media lens, too. Ethiopian media, for instance, doesn’t publish many investigative or critical stories about China in Ethiopia, in part because it’s being disciplined by some of these Chinese interests. Also, some of these journalists that come back from training programs write more positive stories, too. So there’s co-discursive solidarity between Chinese and Ethiopian narratives when it comes to China-Ethiopia relations. Does this co-optation necessarily mean something negative? Not necessarily, but it does mean that perhaps there’s less pushback, and less direct public questioning of what China is doing.

CDT: That’s fascinating. And it’s interesting to see that tension between the individual level versus the broader country or societal level when it comes to empowerment. 

MR: Yeah, because I think it’s easy to judge and say, “Oh, this is just disempowering.” But it would also be condescending as someone coming in from outside and saying, “Well, you’re being disempowered.” But if the individuals themselves see it as empowering, that has to be taken into account. This is not a clear-cut picture from the individual perspective. 

CDT: Let’s move on to another instrument of soft power that you discuss, which is public diplomacy. How does China’s public diplomacy target both foreign and domestic audiences? How are public diplomacy spectacles “captured” by each of these audiences? 

MR: The audience with diplomatic spectacles is both domestic and international. It was really fascinating to see this at the China-Africa trade fair in Hunan before the pandemic. The majority of visitors were actually local residents from Changsha. They were very excited to see this. It was entertainment for the weekend. There’s this curiosity about the world and hunger for seeing China as a center of global interactions. And some of it is also showcasing how much China has accomplished. So there was a dual-audience perspective playing out in the spectacles. 

When it comes to being captured by different audiences, that’s also something that takes place when it comes to major events in particular. During the last Olympics, different actors, like Western journalists, activists, or NGOs, captured the Olympics for their own agendas. For instance, journalists wanted to cover the “real” China story, which means a story of injustices and all kinds of different human costs that were involved in hosting the Olympic Games, and showcase how the Olympics symbolize inequality, bad governance, and so forth. In this upcoming Olympics, we’ll see similar, maybe differently-phrased, narratives around Xinjiang. 

So there is this idea that these events are so widely mediatized that they present a really interesting channel for pushing one’s interests and exposing some aspects of China. China is in everybody’s view and is more vulnerable, because it’s creating a spectacle, so everybody’s invited to participate and they’re participating in their own ways. I think domestically, too, there is some contestation of the spectacles, maybe not as radical or as critical, but still there are a lot of critiques and some protests around people being relocated in order to build the Olympic villages and set up the Games. 

There’s also the idea of cultural belonging and national identity. What does it mean to be Chinese? Some artists redefined that and created very different artworks in parallel to the Shanghai Expo to showcase more complex ways of being a Chinese citizen. They show different facets of identity that are not represented through state propaganda. So that’s what I meant by being captured, that those events are both potentially very persuasive and effective for public image making. But they also open up all kinds of channels for contestation from different groups, including domestic groups. 

CDT: Are there any important questions that I forgot to ask in this interview that you’d like to address?

MR: You addressed a lot of important ones! But I guess there are two questions that I think are often asked in this conversation about China. One is whether soft power is even a useful concept. Is it even useful to talk about it, because it’s such a broad, vague, fluffy thing? So is it even worthwhile to even use that term? I see a lot of frustration in the academy, but also just in the public discourse, because everybody seems to be deploying it for their own purposes. The other one is what is often misunderstood about soft power, and what are some of the biggest misunderstandings?

CDT: Finally, what scholars and other sources do you recommend our readers consult to learn more about China’s soft power and to hear perspectives from the Global South on this topic?

MR: Sure. Emeka Umejei is one. He writes about media relations between China and Africa and he brings in a lot of perspectives from African journalists who work for Chinese media. [CDT published an interview with Dr. Umejei in November 2021.] I also really like the work by Danny Morales, who’s written a lot about Chinese media as well. He often co-authors with Herman Wassermann. And Pablo Morales works on Chinese media in Latin America, which is also a fascinating angle. When it comes to training and education, Lina Benabdallah’s recent book on training programs, knowledge production, and network formation is very interesting. She comes at it from the international relations and political theory perspective. 

There’s also a lot of space for still examining this much more empirically and examining other channels, whether it’s Confucius Institutes or non-state soft power initiatives, like Chinese companies on the ground or Chinese communities. How do they end up contributing to but also damaging the Chinese image? These shape the Chinese image in a different way. Those spaces are fascinating, and I hope some U.S. readers will engage in them. 

China Digital Times: So, let’s start out from a bird’s eye view. Why did you take on this topic? What gaps does it fill in the existing historiography, or lack thereof, of 1989? Why study June 4?

Jeremy Brown: I was 12 years old in June of 1989 and was aware of what was going on but with no idea that I would learn Chinese, that I would go to China, that I would devote my career to studying and explaining and understanding things about Chinese history. But I was aware at the time [of the protests], through a Western/American liberal framework, that this was a moment of great hope, and happiness, and joy. We saw that on TV from my home in Iowa, watching the news. Then we saw the tremendously tragic dashing of those hopes when the massacre occurred on June 3 and June 4. So for me, that was maybe the first time I’d ever paid attention to China. Although I had no real personal connection to it, I remembered it.

I went to China in 1997. I was interested in journalism at the time. I was editor of my college newspaper at Lewis and Clark College, so I was paired for a one-on-one tutorial with a journalism professor in a language program in CET Harbin. The professor who I was matched with was retired. I’m reflecting on it now for the first time in a long time, actually, because he clearly was a survivor of the Cultural Revolution. Journalists who cared about publishing what they saw (instead of what they were told to publish) had a moment when they actually could, for several weeks. There was freedom of the press in China in 1989. That must have actually been quite personal to him, but I didn’t know at the time. So I got a very bland, cautious lesson that was basically propaganda from the Communist Party’s perspective. Now, looking back on it, I can understand that I wasn’t really sensitive to the history there—and it must have made him quite uncomfortable. That was my first halting step of just talking to people. 

Once my Chinese got better, and I was able to understand things with more sensitivity, [I found that] you can talk to people inside China about 1989. In fact, people are waiting to tell their stories. They want to tell their stories, as long as you’re in a safe space. So I started hearing stories: what they saw, what they experienced, what happened. And you get all kinds of happy stories. I think that’s what’s missing from a lot of the historiography. One of the main gaps that I’m trying to fill is to highlight the hope of those 56 days of happiness and joy, camaraderie and comradeship, friendship and romance, music and debate—the basic elements of deliberative democracy among a group of people who hadn’t had the chance to practice that in real life. That was one thing that I wanted to capture. But in fact, that’s pretty well known if you read the materials from immediately after, the day-by-day or memoir accounts of the student movement. I wanted to bring that to the fore because the massacre and the forced amnesia about the massacre has drowned out a lot of coverage of that hopeful time. So that was one goal of mine: to remind people of why the massacre was so tragic. That goes back to how high people’s hopes had been raised, and how happy they were to really talk and think hard about how to improve the political system in China and the communication system and the education system. So that’s one gap. 

Then the other gaps in terms of historiography [and] scholarly work on 1989 would be: there’s very little about what happened outside of Beijing. There’s very little attention to what non-Han people experienced and what it might have meant for ethnic minorities. So I make a big point in the book of paying attention and looking for patterns and trying to explain what was happening outside of Beijing, and how that was in relation to what was happening in Beijing. So that’s a major gap that I am starting to fill. You could write a whole book about that, in fact, and I hope somebody does. I hope that the small amount that I was able to uncover will inspire others to study the broader history of what happened in 1989 outside of Beijing. 

The other new thing that I cover is really the aftermath of the massacre in the second half of 1989, going into 1990. Asking how people were punished, what kind of things they confessed to, how they protected themselves, how they protected others. There was such a letdown after the massacre. It was so depressing and so tragic. So many foreigners and observers had to leave China immediately after June 4. Because of that, they didn’t know what happened. They were concerned about their safety. So the story of the second half of 1989 is not very well known. I was able to get my hands on some documents and talk to people who experienced it and do some new things there. 

So the third part of your question: Why study June 4? I think that when a Party-state like the PRC led by the Chinese Communist Party spends so much money and time and labor-power trying to suppress the history and memory of an event, that makes it important to study for me. I want to look there. If you’re in power and you’re telling me I can’t look there, it makes me curious. It means, “Oh, this is important because you don’t want me to look there.” It’s not just me, right? It’s everybody. Something that a government says we’re not allowed to study and know about … that tells us that the truth about what happened: the details, the facts, the memories, are threatening or dangerous somehow. That’s worth studying. That’s worth understanding. I think “job one” for historians is to gather as much evidence as we can from as many angles as we can to get a narrative out there about what happened. So that’s one reason.

The second reason is it affected so many people’s lives and changed so many people’s lives and changed the course of Chinese history in such a major way, that it has to be a huge part of the story. The amnesia campaign, you know, was fairly effective. It’s not effective in terms of actually making people forget what happened. It’s the fear that is affecting the kind of topics that graduate students study for their thesis, the kind of topics that even tenured professors choose to pursue. The fear is what’s making the gap so prevalent. But that’s changing, too, right? I mean, I think enough people outside of China recognize that it was a major turning point in Chinese history, and so many people inside China remember that it was a major turning point in Chinese history. I had such tremendous encouragement from anybody I talked to in China, or any Chinese people outside of China, who said, “Please do write this book.” I have no fear. I don’t have family in China. I don’t have to worry about not getting a PhD finished because something falls through. So I was able to do it. And others are doing it too. On that note, Julian Gewirtz has written a book about the 1980s, and he has another one coming out. Joseph Torigian has a book coming out about elite politics. Yen-lin Chung in Taipei has been writing about the politics of the 1980s. I think we can expect more. That’s good. I think it’s good that June 4 will continue to be a topic of focus for scholars.

CDT: Let’s dive right in. The majority of this is not going to focus on the student movement in Beijing, but just to set our scene here: Why did students in Beijing protest after the death of Hu Yaobang? What were they protesting for, or against?

JB: There was a group of activists, students and scholars in Beijing and other parts of China who were unhappy about campaigns against “spiritual pollution” and “bourgeois liberalization.” These were code words for liberal thought and trends, and they became associated with Hu Yaobang, who was purged as General Secretary at the end of 1986, and the very beginning of 1987. There were a number of political prisoners who had spoken out for more liberalization and democratization. In the lead-up to the anniversary of the May 4 movement (May of 1989 would have been the 70th anniversary), students and professors in Beijing were getting ready to write letters to Deng Xiaoping, petitioning for more transparency and for the release of political prisoners. So there was already a movement happening; a lot of it was in reaction to the more repressive turn that China had taken since 1987. They just moved it up in time after Hu Yaobang died. That became a clear and obvious opportunity for activists to issue these demands. It was only half a month earlier than they had planned.

If you look at the earliest student demands in April after Hu Yaobang’s death, they’re partly about Hu Yaobang as General Secretary. They wanted his reputation to be restored and for him to be remembered as a great leader who was pushing China in the right direction. Probably the most interesting and the strongest demand was for freedom of the press and an end to censorship. Students were asking for newspapers independent of Party control and free of censorship. And that’s a big deal, right? That’s not what newspapers are supposed to be under communist control. Newspapers are supposed to guide opinion rather than report news in a sort of active way. Their other demands were about better funding for education and more respect for intellectuals. Then they also had demands about the protests themselves. As soon as the protests started, protests became about the protests. That’s a really important thing to think about. When we think about protests in Hong Kong in 2019, so much of those protests were about dissatisfaction with the way that the police or officials or leaders were handling or suppressing the protests. And that started happening very early on in Beijing in 1989. You see it consistently through those almost two months of protests. The students are upset that the government is making wrong assumptions about their motives, making accusations that they’re counter-revolutionaries, or that they’re causing turmoil. The students wanted to be listened to and respected as rational individuals who wanted the best thing for China’s future, and so much of the government response was not in line with that. That led to a lot of anger and actually a lot of support from other people in Beijing and outside of Beijing for the students because they saw that the students are not violent. They’re not chaotic. They’re asking to talk—why is the government responding in a not-so-receptive way?

CDT: So one thing that you just touched upon is the student demand for freedom of the press. You also have tons of survey data of what democracy means to students and they all said freedom of expression, of the press. Why did Beijing residents join in with what was originally a group of activists and students protesting? Why was this call so attractive? And when Beijing residents joined in, how did the entirety of the protest movement change?

JB: Beijing residents, like the students, and like everybody else in China, read and heard the April 26 editorial declaring the protests “turmoil”—basically Deng Xiaoping’s words saying we must take a clear-cut stand against turmoil. They hadn’t seen any turmoil yet. So that was an outrage for the students and it was an outrage for the people around them to see the government use this sort of black and white Mao-era class-struggle [language]: “You’re either a friend or an enemy of the Communist Party.” It was clear that the government was saying these students are an enemy of socialism. That’s exactly what the editorial says. There was outrage about that because nobody in Beijing had seen any evidence of turmoil or anti-socialist activity. They saw people mourning Hu Yaobang and asking for some things that sounded pretty reasonable and moderate. 

When the biggest demonstration, up to that point, happened on April 27, in reaction to that People’s Daily editorial, crowds lined streets, gave the students drinks and snacks and cheered them on. So that’s when the groundswell of support happens. It ebbed until the hunger strike declaration in May, when more than a million people in Beijing hit the streets to support the students who were hunger-striking because it was such a clear example of self-sacrifice in a non-violent way, asking for dialogue with the government. The cold response from the government was so offensive to so many people that people just wanted to go out. Journalists were protesting, officials were protesting, teachers, retirees, workers … the protests in May really did include a real cross section of Beijing society. It just became fun, right? It was a carnival. It was a fun carnival of “everybody’s going out.” It was this contagious positive energy—nervous energy, because people were worried about the students health—but positive in a sense of “Wow, if everybody …” It actually was not everybody. If I’m saying a million, the population of Beijing is much larger than that, so many people were still going to work, many people were too scared to go out. But the scale of that protest was quite large in May.

CDT: Why did the May 20 declaration of martial law propel the workers’ movement, where others were deterred?

JB: You have to think about what types of workers got involved more actively after the declaration of martial law. They were overwhelmingly younger workers, who had brash and loud personalities, who felt personally offended that the government would declare martial law. At least half of it was just anger at martial law and wanting to support and protect the students from what the government was threatening, which was a violent end through military force. There had been an autonomous workers’ organization on the corner of the square, just outside the square, since April, that provided a place for workers to go read their independently written handbills or posters and talk to each other. Those were overwhelmingly young, activist workers who were unhappy with how impotent the All-China Federation of Trade Unions had been, and wanted a more independent voice in factories. Workers had a pretty loud voice in factories up until the mid-1980s. Reforms in the factory leadership structure in the mid-1980s put a lot more power into the hands of factory managers and Communist Party officials. [Previously] there had been more consultation in these staff and worker congresses. Joel Andreas has a book about this called “Disenfranchised” where he charts this change to the mid-1980s. So I think that led to some grievances that probably led workers to get involved. But overwhelmingly, when students thought about workers, they thought about them as not central to the movement, [but rather as] maybe supporters who they would need. If students wanted to escalate the movement, they could have called for a general strike and hoped that workers would get involved in that. 

Large-scale ties between students and workers didn’t materialize in the short course of the movement. They might have if there had been more time for students to build those ties, but older workers were very reluctant to get involved and did not want students to come into their factory compounds. My reading of the newspapers, and most of these newspaper articles are actually after the crackdown, so you have to understand that workers are saying, “We didn’t want the students to come to our factories,” but we don’t see any evidence of successful organization inside factories on a scale that would be really notable, but you see just a gradual growth of worker involvement over time. 

I think martial law was a key turning point there, just because it seemed like an outrageous overreaction on the part of the government, and workers with fiery personalities were mad. They were angry. Elizabeth Perry and Li Xun have a book called “Proletarian Power” in which personality is one of the key explanatory factors for why workers became rebels [during the Cultural Revolution]. That’s persuasive to me. And you can see it in 1989 as well. Prickly personalities, energetic personalities that are quick to take offense at injustice. Those are the kind of folks who got really active in 1989. It’s usually not a majority of the worker population, right? But because they’re loud and they’re interesting, we can see what they had to say.

CDT: A theme in the book is that, due in part to the short duration of the movement, the students were unable to build coalitions across class boundaries. You pick out a scene from “The Gate of Heavenly Peace,” when Wang Dan and a group of rural petitioners arrive at a leadership compound to petition at the same time, but Wang does not interact with them. The students were able to win national sympathy, but they weren’t able to translate that into broader collective groups. Why was that?

JB: It’s true that the students were elitists. It was an elitist movement. They were the elite of China, so they weren’t wrong to think of themselves as special. In order to get admission to the best universities in Beijing, you have to be the top student in your high school of several thousand people, likely the top student in your county or in your city of a million people, right? That’s who’s getting into Peking University, into Tsinghua University, into Renmin University. Even the less famous universities in Beijing are quite competitive and don’t have that many seats. So the students were elite and the Beijing residents supported them because they saw them as special and smart and worth listening to. [They thought] the future leaders of China are going to come out of these universities. But that led it to be a quite insular movement, not receptive to listening to or asking what other sectors of society thought about what they were doing, and that included factory workers. It included villagers, who [had what was called] a feudal agricultural mentality, which had been the official explanation, the intellectual explanation, for why China had suffered so much during the Mao period and needed to cast that aside in the 1980s. There was a sort of anti-rural ideology in the 1980s that definitely affected the students and made it difficult for them to imagine that they would want to have a democracy where one person had one vote. Because if China’s 80% rural at that time, that’s not what the students wanted, right? They were not calling for every farmer in China to get the vote, and not even imagining that. The democracy that the students were imagining was what they saw as a meritocracy, in which there would be freedom of the press but students would be respected. 

I think the key issue is they just ran out of time. It was such a short movement and so much of the movement was dedicated to reacting to everything that the government did. That means you don’t have time to think about, “What kind of rural outreach are we going to do?” Or: “We really need to focus on reaching out to the workers.” When you look at the memoirs of student leaders like Shen Tong and Wang Chaohua, you see that they were thinking about such things. They were originally opposed to the hunger strikes because they saw that it was a real provocation and a radicalization of tactics that would make it difficult to sustain the movement longer-term. I think the main split in the student movement was between those like Shen Tong and Wang Chaohua, who wanted to think longer-term and build coalitions strategically and slowly, and students like Chai Ling who thought, “This is our chance. We have to take it right now, really quickly, otherwise we’re not going to get anything. We’ll just go back to the way things were.” You see the logic and the value of each of those approaches and you can see why the radical approach won out. It’s easier to excite people to escalate [than to say], “Slow down, be careful.” It was such an emotional time and you have to account for people’s emotions when you’re analyzing their choices. It’s harder to convince people if you’re saying, “Slow down, be careful.” I think that context is key to explaining why there weren’t coalitions more broadly. There might have been if the movement had been able to last longer …

CDT: … if it hadn’t been violently repressed. I would like to talk about the sexual, or reproductive, politics of the 1980s because I think it ties Chai Ling [a student protest leader] and Lu Decheng [who threw an egg at Mao’s portrait in Tiananmen Square] together. What is the similarity between a “working class rabble rouser” like Lu Decheng and Chai Ling? 

JB: I’m really indebted to Denise Chang, who wrote “Egg on Mao,” who interviewed and got to know Lu Decheng quite well, and told his story in a really effective way in her book. Her book blew my mind. The publisher sent it to me for free to my office. I looked at it and I thought: “Why does this book exist? Why is there a book about these guys who vandalize Mao’s portrait?” I had internalized the student movement’s version of that incident. That version said that these guys might have been saboteurs sent by the government to incite a crackdown by doing such an outrageous act—by vandalizing Mao’s portrait. The students actually seized them and brought them to the police station. Those three egg throwers, including Lu Decheng, suffered greatly. I had internalized that narrative. I thought, “What, a book about these guys who threw the eggs, who actually had no impact on the movement at all?” I didn’t understand why anybody would want to throw eggs. But I cracked the book open and I’m glad I did. 

A lot of thought went into [Lu and his two friends’ decision] to go to Beijing. Their plan was not to throw eggs. Their plan was to try to persuade the student movement to be even more radical and overthrow the Communist Party. Lu Decheng hated the Communist Party because of the one-child policy and the way that it affected him personally. His child died because he was in an illegal marriage that was not sanctioned. They had to lie about their age in order to get married, and they didn’t have permission to have a baby. They were too young. They didn’t have the approval. You had to get a certificate in order to have a pregnancy approved and give birth. They couldn’t get that. They had to have the baby underground and they were afraid to bring their sick child to the hospital, and they brought him too late and the baby died. That was the source of Lu Decheng’s anger. It went back to the unimaginable choice that you have to make when you want to have a child but you’re not allowed to. So he blames the Communist Party for that, and you can see why he did. 

Chai Ling is also really useful to think about, and so I give her a ton of credit for writing her memoir in the way that she did. Her memoir is called “A Heart for Freedom.” She sent it to me and many other Chinese history professors. Her memoir is less an attempt to rehabilitate herself—there is some of that, of course, every memoir is self serving and she wants us to accept her truth as the truth, which you can’t do in any memoir because it’s one person’s perspective—but her memoir is a Christian tract that is attempting to convert the reader to Christianity if they haven’t yet accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior. That’s what the book is trying to do at the beginning and at the end, and that theme runs all the way through it. So it’s quite difficult, as a scholar, using it as a primary source. As an interested reader, if you’re not into that or you don’t want to be confronted with that, it’s easy to dismiss the book. But you can’t dismiss the book, because of Chai Ling’s pain and the effects of the one-child policy on her life. 

By one-child policy, I mean what you call the sexual and reproductive politics of the 1980s. There’s basically no sexual education. There are not condoms in every hallway of every dormitory at the universities like there were at Lewis and Clark College when I went. University students might not even know what a condom is or what it’s for. Or, if they do, they don’t know how to get one or they’re scared to get one because they’re gonna get shamed by the pharmacist if they look like they’re a university student who wants to have sex. Because university students are not even supposed to be dating, let alone having sex or thinking about sexual relationships. Of course, they are having sex. So Chai Ling discusses those details. Because of her strong Christianity at the time she’s writing that book, she feels compelled to confess and tell the full story of her multiple pregnancies followed by multiple abortions, because abortion was basically used as birth control in China during the 1980s as a way to end unwanted pregnancies that were, you know, unimaginable. First of all, they’re illegal. You’re not allowed to give birth to a child without permission. Second of all, they’re considered shameful. These were secrets that she confesses in her memoir. 

You can understand why she does and she has a goal to talk about the one-child policy in a really personal way. She’s formed an NGO called All Girls Allowed. That goal led her to write things in her memoir that she would not have written if she had written it in 1991 or 1992, like many student leaders did. The delay and her evolution as a person, as a religious person, as a thinker, I think led to tremendous insights that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Why was she upset? What grievances did she have? What traumas had she experienced? Tremendous trauma, right? She experienced tremendous traumas and sadness that she chose to share in her memoir that I think helped to explain why she wanted to get involved in changing a system that had been so harmful to her. 

When I sent this book proposal to Cambridge University Press, I said, “I’m writing about the 1980s and I’m going to put the one-child policy front and center because I think the one-child policy helps to explain why people were upset in the 1980s.” If you’re upset, you might want to join a protest movement that wants to change the system and make it more responsive and transparent. One of the anonymous referees on that proposal said, “No, you can’t. There’s no causal relationship between the one-child policy and the protests of 1989. You can’t do that.” So I thought, “Well, I think I can [based on] the testimony that we get from Lu Decheng and Chai Ling and from so many people who I’ve talked to about their experiences as a human being in China in the 80s, 90s, even 2000s, all the way through the mid teens, 2015.”

I would have friends tell me, “I’m a victim of the one-child policy.”

“Oh, what do you mean?” I would say.

They’d say, “I wanted to have two children. My child never got a sibling. That’s wrong. I wanted them to have a sibling.”

So just at that level, anybody who has a sibling in the world, or anybody who has been a sibling or anybody who’s ever been a parent … I’m a parent now, so when you think about, “I guess I would only have one child,” you can start to understand the incredible trauma and, in many cases, violent trauma of the one-child policy in terms of invading the bodies or doing harm and doing violence to the bodies of so many people. That’s a huge part of the story of the 1980s. 

CDT: How could it not be connected to the protests, right? This is probably the single most determinative national policy experienced by people across the country, both men and women, especially women. Let’s take it outside of Beijing. In May 1989, there were massive protests across a lot of the Muslim areas of China about the book “Sexual Customs.” You have a great anecdote about a protest march with two banners: one reading, “Support the Communist Party,” and the other reading, “Execute China’s Rushdie.” So can you tell me a little bit more about these protests among China’s Muslims and how they were, and were not, related to the student protests? Or pro-democracy protests at the time?

JB: “Sexual Customs” was written by two authors. I don’t know who they are. They published under pseudonyms—it sure would be interesting to find those authors and ask them what they were thinking because it’s a book that is insulting to Muslims. I suppose that’s not surprising, because there’s a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment in many countries in the world, including the countries that you and I are in right now, and including in China. That was quite inflammatory to Muslims who are officially recognized as an approved religion and able to make demands for respect. When they saw students marching in the streets, it seemed like a good idea—or certainly acceptable—for Muslims to march in the streets and demand the punishment of those authors, to demand the pulping of that book, the banning of that book. That’s exactly what happened. The book was pulled from circulation and pulped. The authors were punished fairly lightly, not to the satisfaction of Muslims who were angry about it. 

There was not a whole lot of cross-pollination or contact between the student protesters and the Muslims. It was just protesting almost simultaneously in the same towns in the same places. Although in Urumqi in Xinjiang, that’s where you see larger protests by Muslims who were angry about the book, and also a lot of people who are protesting for the same things that the students were protesting. There was vandalism of a Communist Party compound in Urumqi, and the Uyghurs who were caught were punished way more severely than college students who did the same things in other towns and cities throughout China.

CDT: Let’s talk about the massacre of hundreds of Tibetan protesters in Lhasa in March of 1989. How did that inform the party’s decision to use violence in Beijing and Chengdu? Why did Beijing citizens and protesters generally discount the possibility of similar violence being deployed against them?

JB: There were protests by Tibetans in March of 1989, the anniversary of the uprising in Tibet in 1959, when the Dalai Lama was forced to flee. So [the protests were] really a commemoration of that traumatic event in Tibetan history. The Communist Party declared martial law in Lhasa, Li Peng signed off on it, and all the citizens of China could read about it in the pages of People’s Daily. There was no secret that shots were fired and that people were killed. That was reported in People’s Daily. We know from eyewitness reports that several hundred people died. It looks like security forces, police, were doing the shooting in March. When the PLA came into Sichuan to impose martial law in Lhasa, the shooting was done by that point. The army was coming in and arresting people and taking them away. That’s a difference from what happened in Beijing. [In March in Lhasa,] the security forces, police with guns, were doing the shooting and the army was doing the imposition of control after that. 

What happened in Lhasa follows a pattern that the Communist Party and the PLA have been following since the 1950s. When ethno-religious groups in frontier regions rise up to make demands, and sometimes use violence to make those demands by occupying party compounds or taking control of local areas that they are indigenous to and had control of before the Communists came, the PLA would come in and use violence and guns to put down that unrest. That happened in Tibet. That happened in Guizhou. That happened in Yunnan in 1975, when the Hui town of Shadian was leveled by the PLA, and thousands of people were killed in a clash between the PLA and Muslims who wanted to practice their religion. There’s a pattern of the PLA using violence in frontier regions. 

That just seemed unimaginable to Han people in Beijing, in China proper, in coastal regions, because that’s really on the periphery of their attention. Many Han people supported martial law in Tibet, to the extent that they paid attention to it, because they were convinced that Tibet is a part of China, that Tibetans should be thankful for the development that the Communist Party has brought to them, that the Dalai Lama is supposedly trying to secede, and that foreigners are trying to interfere. For all those reasons, there was no sense that Han people might want to sympathize with or listen to the demands of Tibetans, and certainly no sense that this might happen to us. [Violence] was part of the Communist Party’s playbook when they didn’t know what else to do and when they ran out of options. Sending in the PLA has always been a last resort for Communist Party leaders. They don’t like to do it. They don’t want to do it. That was what happened in Lhasa and that was what happened in Beijing. So it’s not that surprising from the standpoint of Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng, who had seen how martial law seemed to work fine for them and helped them to meet their goals in March of 1989. So why not try it again when things seem out of control in Beijing? I think if Han people had thought more empathetically or with more curiosity about why Tibetans were protesting or why Muslims were protesting, the use of real bullets wouldn’t have been so surprising to them when the bullets started to fly in June of 1989.

CDT: Let’s move back to Beijing. Not all PLA units complied with presumed orders to use lethal force. What does this tell us about the inevitability, or otherwise, of the massacre?

JB: One of my main arguments in the book is that the massacre was not inevitable. The use of violence and the use of the PLA was not necessary at all. The way [the military] took control of the square was for the 38th Group Army and for the 15th Airborne to use their machine guns to shoot through crowds and barriers and then actually strafe fairly indiscriminately into buildings. That was totally unnecessary. There were already 25,000 troops inside the Great Hall of People, stationed right near the square, that could have easily cleared the square. In terms of just the numbers, if you’ve got 25,000 against a couple of thousand people in the middle of the night, they could have cleared the square without shooting and without bloodshed—if that was really the goal. I don’t think people who were sympathetic to the student movement would be happy with that, but for those who lost their loved ones, I’m sure they would rather have had a less brutal crackdown that didn’t just shoot people who were out and about trying to watch what was happening, or not even involved at all. There were innocent bystanders who were shot. 

But I’m not quite answering your question. There were many military units that did not actually open fire. Most of the troops did not do so. In some cases, commanders, like the commander of the 39th Group army, just pretended that he didn’t get the order. They wandered around the outskirts of Beijing and didn’t get to the square. On the morning of the Fourth, after the square had already been cleared, the two commanders of the 28th Group Army had a face-off with angry civilians, and they were ordered to advance at all costs by a helicopter that was hovering above them. They decided not to. So you can sense that inside the PLA, commanders did not want to shoot at civilians. We also know that the original general who was commanding the 38th Group Army, Xu Qinxian, refused to obey the martial law order and was removed from command. I think [the reason] why the 38th Group Army shot and killed so many people, and was so energetic in using deadly force to make it to the square, is that their leader got his position by replacing somebody who refused, and therefore knew what his job was going to be. It actually could have been a lot worse. If you have almost 200,000 troops with tanks and machine guns and armored personnel carriers, facing off against large crowds of angry protesters trying to protect the students and block the way to the square and then, after the shooting starts, just engaged in a battle for survival and totally outraged that the military is shooting … it could have been a lot worse. It’s really sad to think that so many soldiers felt compelled to shoot and it’s quite heartening that some decided they weren’t going to shoot.

CDT: The anecdote about the two 28th Group Army commanders who ask each other, “Do you want to go in front of the military tribunal, or should I go?” after refusing to shoot is quite a story. 

You take on one of the central myths of Party propaganda, which relates to Feng Congde and [the vote to leave the square], that nobody was killed in the clearing of the square, that everyone left peacefully, and that the army exercised the greatest of restraint. What actually happened during the clearing of the square and then how does [your account] contradict the accounts of the Party and non-Party related eyewitnesses?

JB: I have to give a lot of credit to the Tiananmen Mothers who did the research to discover the names of victims, and where they were and what they were doing when they died. I also have to give a lot of credit to Wu Renhua, an independent researcher who has written three books on 1989. Putting together the testimony from the Tiananmen Mothers and Wu Renhua’s research, also his eyewitness report—he was there until the end in the square with the students, he was a teacher—tells us that students died inside the square as the military was arriving at the square. As the 38th Group Army arrived from the west, and as the 15th Airborne arrived from the south, they were shooting. That’s how Li Haocheng, Dai Jinping, Cheng Renxing, Zhou Deping, and Huang Xinhua [died]. Those are the names that we have of students who were shot inside the square. We have testimony that those five individuals died inside the square close to midnight or just past midnight as those soldiers were approaching the square. That was not during the final clearing of the square, which happened closer to dawn when the army forced people to leave. The 27th Group Army was inside the Great Hall of The People. They came out and they were prepared to use force, but Hou Dejian and other late-stage hunger strikers did go to negotiate a withdrawal of the students. They got an agreement that the students could leave the square, but they were moving too slowly for the Army’s liking. As those students were retreating from the square, they were being beaten and hit and kicked and hit by weapons and injured and bloodied. It was not a quiet peaceful retreat. 

I use the term “Beijing Massacre” in the title of the book because I think it’s more accurate. I think it respects the victims who were killed on the way to the square, between Muxidi and the square, and in the Qianmen area. Those were overwhelmingly workers and ordinary civilians, and I think it’s really important to recognize that most of the people who died, died outside of the square. But I’m okay with [the term] “Tiananmen Massacre” because we do have evidence that those five students did die inside the square, and I think it would be disrespectful to their memories and to their families to accept the claim that nobody died inside the square. That’s just not accurate. 

CDT: I’d like to ask about connecting with the Tiananmen Mothers and their work doing historical research on who passed away, and what sort of role they’ve played in getting to the truth about Tiananmen. 

JB: The Tiananmen Mothers have endured the unimaginable. They’re mothers, they’re fathers, whose children died—and they’re treated as enemies. They’re punished. They’re forced to leave Beijing every May of every year. They’re surveilled. They have plainclothes policemen outside of their doors. They’re not allowed to talk to the press. Imagine having a child die because of a military invasion of your hometown, and then imagine that your child who was maybe just going out to see what was happening, maybe a protester, is then labeled a counterrevolutionary rioter. Your family’s going to have that scar over you for your entire life. 

The way that the victims’ families reacted is quite diverse. I think that’s why we don’t have more names of victims. We only have a few more than 200 names of victims, even though it seems clear that more people died—could have been 700+, could have been 1000+, maybe even up to 2000. But we only have 200 names. I think that’s because a lot of families chose not to talk about it. It just sparks the trauma over and over again if you’re going to be harassed and arrested and detained for remembering the death of your loved one.

Ding Zilin and some of the other mothers didn’t care about that. They cared about the memory of their children and letting the world know what their child was like, what their child was doing, and where their child died. I think that’s one of the things that my book does that’s different from previous accounts of the massacre. Because of the work of the Tiananmen Mothers, I’m able to look at patterns and who died, what they were doing, where they died. The patterns that we find are: people with cameras seem to be targeted, people who didn’t get the memo that they shouldn’t go outside. People commuting to work or peddlers trying to sell things, people who felt like their job was so essential, they had to go to work, encountered the army and got shot and killed—not protesters at all. That was a pattern that the Tiananmen Mothers exposed. As the massacre continued, people were getting shot and killed on June 5 and June 6—the Tiananmen Mothers uncovered that as well. 

What they’re doing is considered anti-Party, anti-socialist, but they got permission from families to tell their stories and a lot of their sources and interviews are available online. Human Rights in China has archived a lot of that material. There’s interviews on YouTube with the parents of the victims and it’s just tremendously valuable. I’m really grateful for the work they’ve done, and the work Liao Yiwu has done in amplifying the voices of the Tiananmen Mothers, and Liu Xiaobo as well. Liu Xiaobo looked at the victims and saw the same patterns that I saw as well, so I should give him credit. He wrote an essay in tribute to the Tiananmen Mothers and had tremendous survivor’s guilt himself, as Chai Ling did as well. Without the Tiananmen Mothers’ work and without Liu Yiwu’s compiling and republishing of their work in his book “Bullets and Opium,” I wouldn’t have been able to write that massacre section with the same comprehensive view of seeing those patterns. 

CDT: How did a movement that at one point had a million people marching, and earned the sympathy of probably even a broader section of society, become taboo? How did work units move to impose the Party’s version of events in Chinese society? 

JB: After June 6, the police and army worked together to identify and arrest those who were identified as rioters, people who fought back against the soldiers and inflicted harm on soldiers. There’s one guy who urinated on an armored personnel carrier, who Liao Yiwu interviewed. Amazing work Liao Yiwu did to talk to these bàotú (暴徒), these rioters, and understand the rage that they felt, the instinct that took over the overwhelmingly working-class young men to fight back and light military vehicles on fire. Those folks were arrested and sentenced to very long prison sentences for counterrevolutionary violence or arson. But that was a fairly small group of people. 

A much larger group of people, starting in July and then August of 1989, had to go through “purging-and-sorting-out work” (qīnglǐ qīngchá gōngzuò, 清理清查工作). This is happening not only in Beijing but in any place that so-called “turmoil” occurred. Students in universities and people in work units where lots of people went out to march were asked to confess. There were standardized forms that every work unit in Beijing had to have every employee fill out, and they had to confess what they did. Often, this included: “Well, I went out to look,” or “I went out to march,” or “I thought the students were patriotic at first and then I realized that I was wrong, that they were actually rioters.” 

I was able to see a few of those forms from one work unit: those are held at the Stanford East Asia Library. They’re really interesting because nobody really confesses to doing anything meaningful, anything that could have actually gotten them in trouble. If you protested, or even gave a little bit of your own money or shouted some slogans before the imposition of martial law, before May 19, you just confess and you’re fine. If you had done those things after the imposition of martial law, then you’re going to be punished more severely. That’s what the rules and documentation governing this “purging-and-sorting-out work” say. 

The other part of this purge work was the re-registration of every Party member at the provincial or central level, and in any city where turmoil supposedly occurred, including all the urban districts of Beijing. Every Party member had to re-register as a way to reaffirm their loyalty to the Party. It’s interesting because what all of these people said was, “I didn’t do anything and I support Party center.” That was the minimum that you had to say and many people were unwilling to say anything in more detail than that. If you had to say that it was a counterrevolutionary riot or rebellion … it so clearly wasn’t, that many—especially the students who were there—were unwilling to write anything like that. It was very much a pro forma performance to just recognize that the Party had won, Deng Xiaoping had won by sending in the military, by terrorizing people, because if you stood up loudly and protested against that, you would be arrested. Fear ruled the day. Deng Xiaoping won by [using the army to] terrorize the capital city of China. 

It was mostly pro forma in universities and work units but in the media organs, especially Xinhua and People’s Daily, there was a much more rigorous purging, because so many of the journalists and editors had reported sympathetically on the protests and had protested themselves that there was a major reshuffling of the leadership of the media in the aftermath.

CDT: You wrote that, “While the survival strategy of lying persisted in 1989, another vestige of the political movements of the Mao years–informing on others–was remarkably rare during the purge.” However, in the People’s Daily newsroom, it was a political knife fight. That brings us back to freedom of the press, which was one of the [protesters’] key desires. Was it viewed as much more dangerous because even the official media had begun to indulge in freedom of the press? Why was it so much more intense in official media, when you could imagine that in work units, where you had tons of people participating, it could have been just as intense?

JB: It was an amazing impulse, among people who had protested, to protect each other. That’s heartening to me. I think it says something about the legacy of the positive, hopeful aspects of the protests–that people remembered that and didn’t want to get their friends in trouble. That was just really pervasive, people protecting each other. 

The stakes were quite high in these central press agencies, like People’s Daily. There were a few folks in each of those offices who refused to protest, who refused to support the protest. Maybe they were just scared, maybe they genuinely thought the protests were a bad idea. There were folks like that, who then saw their opportunity to denounce their colleagues and get promoted. So they were the big winners. The people who hadn’t protested or who took advantage of the purge to criticize other people, they would then get promoted and rise up the hierarchy of the media, and in the military as well.

CDT: Final questions. You write that the post-June 4 purge was a bridge between Maoist campaigns and 21st century stability maintenance. How does it reverberate in the governance of China today? 

JB  The purge in People’s Daily and Xinhua was like a Maoist campaign, or close to it, in terms of the fear and the denunciations. I suppose in a really high-stakes environment like Xinjiang, where there are these campaigns against “two-faced officials,” and where even Han officials might be sympathetic with Uyghurs and not like the internment camps—that kind of high-stakes environment—you might say there’s something Maoist about those campaigns of just utterly destroying your rival. [ASPI’s recent report “The Architecture of Repression,” which CDT translated into Chinese, further explores Maoist “campaign-style governance” in Xinjiang.] I think that’s one characteristic of Maoist campaigns: dehumanizing them, and making sure that they fall so low that it’s gonna be really hard for them to come back. You see that in Xinhua, People’s Daily and, sadly, we’re seeing that in Xinjiang today. But overwhelmingly, that’s not really the way the Communist Party maintains control, or runs its politics and China. 

Now we have stability maintenance—spending a huge amount of money and resources on domestic security to surveil and censor and impose fear on people. The most obvious example connected to June 4 is that people who talk about June 4, or try to commemorate June 4, are arrested and sentenced, like Pu Zhiqiang was a few years back. He tried to hold a commemorative seminar, along with several other people, and he was arrested after that. The Tiananmen Mothers are detained and taken away in Beijing. There’s a woman, who I talked about in the book, who is a villager living on the outskirts of Beijing and her husband was a driver who got killed. She gets visited and harassed and told to stop talking every year in May. So that’s stability maintenance—the government security organs coming to you and telling you that it’s really not in your interest to raise this, that if you do, it will affect your livelihood and your freedom. Victims are revictimized every year.

CDT: You say one of the reasons you wrote this book was that you want to tell stories about “the happiness, and joy, camaraderie and comradeship, friendship and romance, music and debate, argument, the basic elements of deliberative democracy” that pervaded Beijing [and the country] in the first half of 1989. How does that legacy continue today, both in China and globally, among the global diaspora?

JB: It’s hard to see it in China today because it’s so dangerous to discuss or organize in a democratic way. But I see it among Chinese students who come to study with me at Simon Fraser University or come to other universities in North America and Europe to study Chinese history. Just the fact that they’ve come means that their families see some value in an education outside of the Chinese system. The fact that they sign up for a Chinese history course means that they want a version of history that is different, that is not subject to the same censorship and amnesia. There’s a hunger among students to know what happened and I think a lot of those students are influenced by their parents, who may have given them a more critical take on Chinese politics and Chinese history privately inside the household. That’s happening inside many Chinese households—just as inside many other Chinese households, there’s just immense caution and a genuine nationalism that leads people to not criticize the Party or to support the Communist Party. That diversity is reflected in the students who come and take Chinese history classes in Canada. But what a wonderful opportunity to talk and debate and just lay the evidence out in front of people and try to spark their curiosity. Once that curiosity is sparked, students want to learn more. So that gives me a lot of hope that when spaces do open up for learning and for looking at evidence, I’m confident that the smarts and the curiosity of students will lead them to want to learn more and remember the hopefulness of that time, and think about what hopeful paths they might have in their futures or in their futures connected to China.

Africa is an ideal setting for Chinese media to reach foreign audiences, since China’s success stories may particularly resonate with the African public. China’s economic transformation from a poor country to a leading economic power provides a potentially attractive model to other developing countries in Africa. Similarly, the vociferousness of Chinese global media has inspired some African journalists to replicate the Chinese formula as a way to create alternative narratives of the global south to those propagated by dominant Western media. 

Chinese media initiatives on the continent attest to the important relationship between China and Africa. In April, China Media Group, which owns CCTV, CGTN, and China Radio International, opened a new headquarters in Nairobi, where CGTN had previously established its own African headquarters. China Daily has run its weekly Africa edition, ChinAfrica, for almost a decade. Chinese media company StartTimes has cultivated over ten million subscribers in over 30 African countries. The China-Africa Press Center was the first Chinese-international press center established, and Chinese journalist training programs source heavily from African countries. Official media collaboration began in the 2006 edition of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), a triennial summit whose 2021 edition kicks off this weekend in Dakar, Senegal, and since the 2015 edition China has committed to training over 1,000 African journalists per year.

Emeka Umejei is a lecturer at the University of Ghana’s Department of Communication Studies, and a close observer of China’s media expansion into Africa. His most recent book is titled “Chinese Media in Africa: Perception, Performance, and Paradox,” which engages with African journalists working in Chinese media organizations to explore the paradoxical nature of Chinese media on the continent: simultaneously preaching equality with Africa and promoting Chinese hegemony in the media. Umejei joined CDT for an interview that is published below.

China Digital Times (CDT): How does China play a role in the contra-flow of media to, from, and within Africa? What implications does that have for democracy on the continent?

Emeka Umejei (EU): Chinese media is expanding in Africa and China is seeking to entrench its narrative of the new world order in Africa through collaboration with local media organizations on the continent. So, China is using the platform of the Belt and Road News Network (BRNN) to channel its narrative of the new world order in Africa. The Belt and Road Initiative has necessitated a rethink of China’s media engagement in Africa. The new approach seeks to use local media organizations on the African continent to frame the narrative of China’s version of the world. In terms of contra-flow, the presence of Chinese global media corporations on the continent provides African audiences an opportunity to have a different view of African events on the global stage. For instance, when events happen on the continent that make it to the global stage, African audiences are likely to gauge the true narrative of the event using both Chinese and Western media framing of the event. In this instance, Chinese media organizations tend to help African audiences reach a middle-ground view of events on the continent. Hitherto, the Western media enjoyed a dominance of framing of events on the continent but Chinese media organizations are recalibrating the dominance of Western media on the African continent.

CDT: In what ways do Chinese media in Africa not tell the “true” African story? How does that compare with shortcomings in Western media accounts?

EU: One of the promises of China’s state-led media is that it will provide an African narrative of global events, but this is not entirely true. Instead, what Chinese media organizations provide is a Chinese narrative of African events. This means that Chinese media organizations frame African events to suit Chinese perspectives even when such narratives do not represent an African narrative. In my book, I used the example of the Catholic Pontiff’s visit to Kenya and the blocking of African journalists [working at Chinese media outlets] from covering the visit because the CCP does not recognize the Pontiff. If China actually believed in an equal and win-win partnership with Africa, Chinese media organizations should gladly allow African journalists an opportunity to cover events that are central to African humanity, such as the visit of the Catholic Pontiff to Kenya.

CDT: What findings stood out or surprised you during your research for Chinese Media in Africa?

EU: The fact that despite China’s promises of mutuality and equality, Chinese media organizations in Africa promote an “unequal equal” relation between African journalists and their Chinese counterparts.

CDT: In your book, you documented several factors that create an unequal relationship between China and Africa when it comes to Chinese media on the continent. It seems like actors on the Chinese side are content to maintain their advantages, so what steps can African journalists, governments, and citizens take to bring about a more equal relationship?

EU: As aptly described by the former president of Tanzania, China-Africa relations is a relationship of “unequal equals.” This also manifests in Chinese media organizations in Africa; the hierarchy is the Chinese first, white Westerners second, white South Africans and lastly, black Africans. Unfortunately, African governments cannot do much because they are all waiting for handouts from China; African journalists are also limited because local media organizations in much of Africa are not remunerating as much as Chinese media organizations. The implication is that it is better to have half bread than no bread at all. For African citizens, they don’t seem to count much because African governments tend to depend on China to provide infrastructure that affects its citizens. So, inequality happening within Chinese media organizations weighs less on the agenda of African citizens, not even when they think China is providing funding for the minuscule infrastructure they are enjoying in much of Africa.

CDT: How do you imagine Chinese media outlets in Africa will evolve over time? How popular will they become among African audiences, and why?

EU: I would imagine Chinese media outlets will become popular when they privilege African narratives of African events over Chinese narratives of African events. If this happens, Chinese media could gain traction in Africa. As it stands, Chinese media still lags behind Western media organizations in Africa in terms of popularity with African audiences.

CDT: Considering the likelihood that China’s media engagement in Africa will continue for the foreseeable future, what aspects of the Chinese orientation to media may be beneficial to African media and development, and how can they be integrated in a sustainable way that protects African interests?

EU: First, we need to come to terms with the reality that China and Africa are two different contexts, entirely. This means that media orientation in China is more suited to the Chinese lived reality than it is to Africa. For instance, “positive reporting” is good for China because China has attained a certain level of development which is absent in Africa. For instance, I don’t think China is looking to gain stable electricity or basic social amenities. This is not the same in Africa, where there is the need to continue to keep African political actors on their toes, else they forget about delivering the dividends of democracy to the African people. In this sense, I would not suggest that Africa should adopt the Chinese media model, but African journalists and media organizations may benefit from China’s technological advancement in media developments. For instance, algorithmic journalism or computational journalism could become the game changer in Africa if well-adopted. Again, development journalism could also be useful, but the problem is that it could be abused by political actors on the continent who may abuse it and undermine Africa’s fragile democracy.

CDT: What fears about China’s impact on the future of the African media landscape are overblown? What fears are overlooked?

EU: The fears that the Chinese journalism model of “positive reporting” will supplant the legacy of libertarian journalism in Africa [are overblown]. However, there is the possibility that both Chinese and Western journalism models will coexist on the African continent. Policymakers and political actors in Africa overlook the fact that Chinese media is reproducing the “unequal equal” relationship existing between Africa and China in the media in space in Africa.

CDT: Many voices in the Western debate on China’s media influence in Africa tend to project already-held biases and omit African perspectives. How can we amplify African voices and incorporate their perspective into the debate in the West?

EU: I think this is what China Digital Times is doing by speaking to an African scholar, who studies Chinese media in Africa. Even though there are few scholars from the continent researching Chinese media, debates in the West on Chinese media in Africa should allocate spaces to African voices, including scholars as well as African journalists working in Chinese media organizations on the continent.

CDT: How do you assess the current and future impact of the Belt and Road News Network? How might it evolve over time?

EU: This is the elephant in the room that nobody in Africa and the West seems to be talking about. This is likely to provide China with the greatest traction in the media space in Africa. There is the likelihood that more African media organizations will join the network and afford China’s narrative of the new world order. This means that more local media organizations in Africa will become platforms through which China channels its narrative of the new world order and it is likely to gain much traction with African audiences.

CDT: What projects related to China-Africa media engagement are you currently pursuing? What questions or topics are you most interested in investigating in the future?

EU: I am studying Chinese influence operations in the African media space through the platform of the Belt and Road News Network (BRNN). In this study, I am interested in how African media organizations on the BRNN report on critical issues such as Taiwan, Uyghurs, and Hong Kong protests in the African media space. I have also expanded my research to focus on the implications of the US-China rivalry for everyday life and political participation in Africa. For instance, how do African political actors draw upon the Chinese rhetoric of development to promote a model of political governance in Africa?

CDT: Which scholars do you recommend our readers consult for more information on China-Africa media engagement and for African perspectives on this topic?

EU: Iginio Gagliardone, Herman Wasserman, Dani Madrid-Morales, and Bob Wekesa.

In November, the push to define the past culminated during the 6th Plenum of the 19th Party Congress in a new resolution on the Party’s history, only the third of its kind. The full text of the resolution, released on Tuesday, is primarily an exercise in the elevation of Xi’s personal glory, but deals with real history as well. It defends Mao, embraces Reform and Opening, and points bluntly at the Party’s endemic corruption in the new century. Yet one episode remains glaringly absent from the great machinations of CCP history-making: the 1989 Beijing Massacre. 

Referred to euphemistically as the “political turmoil” of the spring and early summer of 1989 in this latest resolution on history, the nationwide pro-democracy movement and the Beijing Massacre on June 4 were seminal moments in modern Chinese history that continue to resonate in Chinese society and politics. The Party endeavors to stifle all discussion of the events of that year. Social media sites—including Western sites operating in China—censor all mention of the protests and crackdown. Such forcible amnesia is increasingly encroaching on Hong Kong, which has previously been a bastion of commemoration. An annual June 4 vigil in Hong Kong has been banned. The University of Hong Kong ordered the Pillar of Shame, a sculpture commemorating the victims of the massacre, removed from campus. Despite such suppression, the memory of 1989 persists on both the mainland and in Hong Kong.

Jeremy Brown, a historian at Simon Fraser University, joins us to discuss his new book, “June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989,” and to provide insight into the events in China in 1989 and why they still matter today. See Jeremy Brown’s earlier interviews with CDT on how the Party handles accidents and the CAC’s list of historically nihilist rumors.

This interview was edited for both length and clarity. An unabridged transcript of the interview will be published soon on China Digital Space, containing further discussion of the workers’ movement, student elitism, protests by Muslims over the book “Sexual Customs,” the Tiananmen Mothers, and the post-massacre editorial purge at People’s Daily and Xinhua. 

China Digital Times: Why did you take on this topic? What gaps does your book fill in the existing historiography, or lack thereof, of 1989? Why study June 4?

Jeremy Brown: One of the main gaps that I’m trying to fill is to highlight the hope of those 56 days of happiness and joy, camaraderie and comradeship, friendship and romance, music, debate and argument—sort of the basic elements of deliberative democracy among a group of people who hadn’t had the chance to really practice that in real life. The other gap in scholarly work on 1989 is there’s very little about what happened outside of Beijing. There’s very little attention to what non-Han people experienced and what it might have meant for ethnic minorities. So I make a big point in the book of paying attention, and looking for patterns and trying to explain what was happening outside of Beijing and how that was in relation to what was happening in Beijing. The other new thing that I cover is the aftermath of the massacre in the second half of 1989, going into 1990: asking how people were punished, what kind of things they confessed to, how they protected themselves, and how they protected others. There was such a letdown after the massacre; it was so depressing and so tragic. The story of the second half of 1989 is not very well known. 

Why study June 4? I think that when a Party-state like the PRC, led by the Chinese Communist Party, spends so much money, time, and labor trying to suppress the history and memory of an event, that makes it important to study. 

CDT: Let’s dive right in. Why did students in Beijing protest after the death of Hu Yaobang? 

JB: There was a group of activists, students and scholars in Beijing and other parts of China who were unhappy about campaigns against “spiritual pollution” and “bourgeois liberalization.” These were code words for liberal thought and trends, and they became associated with Hu Yaobang, who was purged as General Secretary at the end of 1986, and the very beginning of 1987. In the lead-up to the anniversary of the May 4 movement (May of 1989 would have been the 70th anniversary), students and professors in Beijing were getting ready to write letters to Deng Xiaoping, petitioning for more transparency and for the release of political prisoners. They just moved it up in time after Hu Yaobang died. That became a clear and obvious opportunity for activists to issue these demands. 

If you look at the earliest student demands in April after Hu Yaobang’s death, they’re partly about Hu Yaobang as General Secretary. They wanted his reputation to be restored and for him to be remembered as a great leader who was pushing China in the right direction. Probably the most interesting and the strongest demand was for freedom of the press and an end to censorship. Students were asking for newspapers independent of Party control and free of censorship. Their other demands were about better funding for education and more respect for intellectuals. And then they also had demands about the protests themselves. 

As soon as the protests started, protests became about the protests. That’s a really important thing to think about. When we think about protests in Hong Kong in 2019, so much of those protests were about dissatisfaction with the way that the police or officials or leaders were handling or suppressing the protests. And that started happening very early on in Beijing in 1989. 

CDT: Why did Beijing residents join in? When Beijing residents joined in, how did the protest movement as a whole change?

JB: Beijing residents, like the students, and like everybody else in China, read and heard the April 26 editorial declaring the protests “turmoil,” basically Deng Xiaoping’s words saying we must take a clear-cut stand against turmoil. That was an outrage to see the government use this sort of black and white Mao-era class-struggle [language]: “You’re either a friend or an enemy of the Communist Party.” It was clear that the government was saying these students are an enemy of socialism. There was outrage about that because nobody in Beijing had seen any evidence of turmoil or anti-socialist activity. They saw people mourning Hu Yaobang and asking for some things that sounded pretty reasonable and moderate. 

When the biggest demonstration, up to that point, happened on April 27, in reaction to that People’s Daily editorial, crowds lined streets, gave the students drinks and snacks and cheered them on. So that’s when the groundswell of support happens. It ebbed until the hunger strike declaration in May, when more than a million people in Beijing hit the streets to support the students who were hunger-striking because it was such a clear example of self-sacrifice in a non-violent way. The cold response from the government was so offensive to so many people that people just wanted to go out. Journalists were protesting, officials were protesting, teachers, retirees, workers…the protests in May really did include a real cross section of Beijing society. It was this contagious positive energy—nervous energy because people were worried about the students health—but positive.

CDT: A theme in the book is that, due in part to the short duration of the movement, the students were unable to build coalitions across class boundaries. You pick out a scene from “The Gate of Heavenly Peace,” when Wang Dan and a group of rural petitioners arrive at a leadership compound to petition at the same time, but Wang does not interact with them. The students were able to win national sympathy, but they weren’t able to translate that into broader collective groups. Why was that?

JB: It was such a short movement and so much of the movement was dedicated to reacting to everything that the government did. That means you don’t have time to think about, “What kind of rural outreach are we going to do?” Or: “We really need to focus on reaching out to the workers.” When you look at the memoirs of student leaders like Shen Tong and Wang Chaohua, you see that they were thinking about such things. They were originally opposed to the hunger strikes because they saw that it was a real provocation and a radicalization of tactics that would make it difficult to sustain the movement longer-term. I think the main split in the student movement was between those like Shen Tong and Wang Chaohua, who wanted to think longer-term and build coalitions strategically and slowly, and students like Chai Ling who thought, “This is our chance. We have to take it right now, really quickly, otherwise we’re not going to get anything. We’ll just go back to the way things were.” You see the logic and the value of each of those approaches and you can see why the radical approach won out. It’s easier to excite people to escalate [than to say], “Slow down, be careful.” It was such an emotional time and you have to account for people’s emotions when you’re analyzing their choices.

CDT: I would like to talk about the sexual, or reproductive, politics of the 1980s because I think it ties Chai Ling [a student protest leader] and Lu Decheng [who threw an egg at Mao’s portrait in Tiananmen Square] together. What is the similarity between a “working class rabble rouser” like Lu Decheng and Chai Ling? 

JB: I’m really indebted to Denise Chang, who wrote “Egg on Mao.” I had internalized the student movement’s version of that incident, which said that these guys might have been saboteurs sent by the government to incite a crackdown by vandalizing Mao’s portrait. The students actually seized them and brought them to the police station and those three egg throwers, including Lu Decheng, suffered greatly. I thought, “What, a book about these guys who threw the eggs, who actually had no impact on the movement at all?” But I cracked the book open and I’m glad I did. 

A lot of thought went into [Lu and his two friends’] decision to go to Beijing. Their plan was not to throw eggs. Their plan was to try to persuade the student movement to be even more radical and overthrow the Communist Party. Lu Decheng hated the Communist Party because of the one-child policy and the way that it affected him personally. 

His child died because he was in an illegal marriage that was not sanctioned. They had to lie about their age in order to get married and they didn’t have permission to have a baby. They had to have the baby underground and they were afraid to bring their sick child to the hospital, and they brought him too late and the baby died. That was the source of Lu Decheng’s anger. 

Chai Ling is also really useful to think about. I give her a ton of credit for writing her memoir in the way that she did. Her memoir is called “A Heart for Freedom.” Her memoir is a Christian tract that is attempting to convert the reader to Christianity, so it’s quite difficult as a scholar using it as a primary source. But you can’t dismiss the book because of Chai Ling’s pain at the effects of the one-child policy on her life—and by one-child policy, I mean, kind of what you call the sexual and reproductive politics of the 1980s. 

There was basically no sexual education. A university student might not even know what a condom is or what it’s for. Or they’re scared to get one because they’re going to get shamed by the pharmacist if they look like they’re a university student because university students are not even supposed to be dating, let alone having sex. But of course, they are having sex. Chai Ling discusses those details. Because of her strong Christianity, she feels compelled to confess and tell the full story of her multiple pregnancies followed by multiple abortions because abortion was basically used as birth control in China during the 1980s. Unwanted pregnancies were unimaginable. First of all, they’re illegal. Second of all, they’re considered shameful. These were secrets that she confesses in her memoir. The delay [Chai’s memoir was published in 2012] and her evolution as a person, as a religious person, as a thinker, I think led to tremendous insights that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Why was she upset? What grievances did she have? What traumas had she experienced? She experienced tremendous traumas and sadness that she chose to share in her memoir. That helped to explain why she wanted to get involved in changing a system that had been so harmful to her. 

When I sent this proposal to Cambridge University Press, I put the one-child policy front and center because I think [it] helps to explain why people were upset in the 1980s, and if you’re upset, you might want to join a protest movement that wants to change the system and make it more responsive and transparent. So many people who I’ve talked to about their experiences as a human being in China would tell me, “I’m a victim of the one-child policy.” “Oh, what do you mean?” I would say. They say, “I wanted to have two children, my child never got a sibling.”  When you think about [it] you can start to understand the incredible trauma, and in many cases violent trauma, of the one-child policy, that’s a huge part of the story of the 1980s. 

CDT: Let’s talk about the massacre of hundreds of Tibetan protesters in Lhasa in March of 1989. How did that inform the Party’s decision to use violence in Beijing and Chengdu? Why did Beijing citizens and protesters generally discount the possibility of similar violence being deployed against them?

JB: There were protests by Tibetans in March of 1989, the anniversary of the uprising in Tibet in 1959, when the Dalai Lama was forced to flee. So [the protests were] really a commemoration of that traumatic event in Tibetan history. The Communist Party declared martial law in Lhasa, Li Peng signed off on it, and all the citizens of China could read about it in the pages of People’s Daily. There was no secret that shots were fired and that people were killed. That was reported in People’s Daily. We know from eyewitness reports that several hundred people died.

What happened in Lhasa follows a pattern that the Communist Party and the PLA have been following since the 1950s. When ethno-religious groups in frontier regions rise up to make demands, and sometimes use violence to make those demands by occupying party compounds or taking control of local areas that they are indigenous to and had control of before the Communists came, the PLA would come in and use violence and guns to put down that unrest. That happened in Tibet. That happened in Guizhou. That happened in Yunnan in 1975, when the Hui town of Shadian was leveled by the PLA and thousands of people were killed in a clash between the PLA and Muslims who wanted to practice their religion. 

That just seemed unimaginable to Han people in Beijing, in China proper, in coastal regions, because that’s really on the periphery of their attention. Many Han people supported martial law in Tibet, to the extent that they paid attention to it, because they were convinced that Tibet is a part of China, that Tibetans should be thankful for the development that the Communist Party has brought to them, that the Dalai Lama is supposedly trying to secede, and that foreigners are trying to interfere. For all those reasons, there was no sense that Han people might want to sympathize with or listen to the demands of Tibetans, and certainly no sense that this might happen to us. [Violence] was part of the Communist Party’s playbook when they didn’t know what else to do and when they ran out of options. Sending in the PLA has always been a last resort for Communist Party leaders. They don’t like to do it. They don’t want to do it. That was what happened in Lhasa and that was what happened in Beijing. So it’s not that surprising from the standpoint of Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng, who had seen how martial law seemed to work fine for them and helped them to meet their goals in March of 1989. So why not try it again when things seem out of control in Beijing? I think if Han people had thought more empathetically or with more curiosity about why Tibetans were protesting or why Muslims were protesting, the use of real bullets wouldn’t have been so surprising to them when the bullets started to fly in June of 1989.

CDT: Let’s move back to Beijing. Not all PLA units complied with presumed orders to use lethal force. What does this tell us about the inevitability, or otherwise, of the massacre?

JB: One of my main arguments in the book is that the massacre was not inevitable. The use of violence and the use of the PLA was not necessary at all. The way [the military] took control of the square was for the 38th Group Army and for the 15th Airborne to shoot through crowds and barriers and then actually strafe fairly indiscriminately into buildings. That was totally unnecessary because there were already 25,000 troops inside the Great Hall of People. They could have cleared the square without shooting and without bloodshed, if that was really the goal.

There were many military units that did not actually open fire. Most of the troops did not do so. In some cases, commanders, like the commander of the 39th Group army, just pretended that he didn’t get the order. They wandered around the outskirts of Beijing and didn’t get to the square. On the morning of the Fourth, after the square had already been cleared, the two commanders of the 28th Group Army had a face off with angry civilians, and they were ordered to advance at all costs by a helicopter that was hovering above them. They decided not to. So you can sense that inside the PLA, commanders did not want to shoot at civilians. We also know that the original general who was commanding the 38th Group Army, Xu Qinxian, refused to obey the martial law order and was removed from command. I think why the 38th Group Army shot and killed so many people, and was so energetic in using deadly force to make it to the square, is that their leader got his position by replacing somebody who refused, and therefore knew what his job was going to be. It actually could have been a lot worse. If you have almost 200,000 troops with tanks and machine guns, and armored personnel carriers facing off against large crowds of angry protesters trying to protect the students and block the way to the square and then after the shooting starts, just engaged in a battle for survival and totally outraged that the military is shooting…it could have been a lot worse.

CDT: The anecdote about the two 28th Group Army commanders who ask each other, “Do you want to go in front of the military tribunal, or should I go?” after refusing to shoot is quite a story. 

You take on one of the central myths of Party propaganda, which relates to Feng Congde and [the vote to leave the square], that nobody was killed in the clearing of the square, that everyone left peacefully, and that the army exercised the greatest of restraint. What actually happened during the clearing of the square and then how does [your account] contradict the accounts of the Party and non-Party related eyewitnesses?

JB: I have to give a lot of credit to the Tiananmen mothers who did the research to discover the names of victims, and where they were and what they were doing when they died. I also have to give a lot of credit to Wu Renhua, an independent researcher who has written three books on 1989. Putting together the testimony from the Tiananmen mothers and Wu Renhua’s research, also his eyewitness report—he was there until the end in the square with the students, he was a teacher—tells us that students died inside the square as the military was arriving at the square. As the 38th Group Army arrived from the west, and as the 15th Airborne arrived from the south, they were shooting. That’s how Li Haocheng, Dai Jinping, Cheng Renxing, Zhou Deping, and Huang Xinhua [died]. Those are the names that we have of students who were shot inside the square. We have testimony that those five individuals died inside the square close to midnight or just past midnight as those soldiers were approaching the square. That was not during the final clearing of the square, which happened closer to dawn when the army forced people to leave. The 27th Group Army was inside the Great Hall of The People. They came out and they were prepared to use force but Hou Dejian, and other late-stage hunger strikers, did go to negotiate a withdrawal of the students. They got an agreement that the students could leave the square but they were moving too slowly for the Army’s liking. As those students were retreating from the square, they were being beaten and hit and kicked and hit by weapons and injured and bloodied. It was not a quiet peaceful retreat. 

I use the term Beijing Massacre in the title of the book because I think it’s more accurate. I think it respects the victims who were killed on the way to the square, between Muxidi and the square and in the Qianmen area. Those were overwhelmingly workers and ordinary civilians, and I think it’s really important to recognize that most of the people who died, died outside of the square. But I’m okay with [the term] “Tiananmen Massacre” because we do have evidence that those five students did die inside the square and I think it would be disrespectful to their memories and to their families to accept the claim that nobody died inside the square. That’s just not accurate. 

CDT: How did a movement that at one point had a million people marching and earned the sympathy of probably even a broader section of society become taboo? How did work units move to impose the Party’s version of events in Chinese society? 

JB: After June 6, the police and army worked together to identify and arrest those who were identified as rioters, people who fought back against the soldiers and inflicted harm on soldiers. There’s one guy who urinated on a armored personnel carrier, who Liao Yiwu interviewed—amazing work that Liao Yiwu did to talk to these rioters and understand just the rage that they felt, the instinct that took over the overwhelmingly working-class young men to fight back and light military vehicles on fire. Those folks were arrested and sentenced to very long prison sentences for counterrevolutionary violence or arson. But that was a fairly small group of people. 

A much larger group of people, starting in July and then August of 1989, had to go through “purging-and-sorting-out work.” This is happening not only in Beijing but in any place that so-called “turmoil” occurred. Students in universities and people in work units where lots of people went out to march were asked to confess. There were standardized forms that every work unit in Beijing had to have every employee fill out, and they had to confess what they did. Often, this included: “Well, I went out to look,” or “I went out to march,” or “I thought the students were patriotic at first and then I realized that I was wrong, that they were actually rioters.” I was able to see a few of those forms and they’re really interesting because nobody really confesses to doing anything meaningful, anything that could have actually gotten them in trouble. If you protested, or even gave a little bit of your own money or shouted some slogans before the imposition of martial law, before May 19, you just confess and you’re fine. If you had done those things after the imposition of martial law, then you’re going to be punished more severely.

The other part of this purge work was the re-registration of every party member at the provincial or central level. And in any city where turmoil supposedly occurred, including all the urban districts of Beijing. Every Party member had to re-register as a way to reaffirm their loyalty to the Party. It’s interesting because what all of these people said was, “I didn’t do anything and I support Party center.” That was the minimum that you had to say and many people were unwilling to say anything in more detail than that. It was very much a pro forma performance to just recognize that the Party had won, Deng Xiaoping had won by sending in the military, by terrorizing people, because if you stood up loudly and protested against that you would be arrested. Fear ruled the day. 

It was mostly pro forma in universities and work units but in the media organs, especially Xinhua and People’s Daily, there was a much more rigorous purging, because so many of the journalists and editors had reported sympathetically on the protests and had protested themselves that there was a major reshuffling of the leadership of the media in the aftermath.

CDT: Final questions. You write that the post-June 4 purge was a bridge between Maoist campaigns and 21st century stability maintenance. How does it reverberate in the governance of China today? 

JB: The purge in People’s Daily and Xinhua was like a Maoist campaign, or close to it, in terms of the fear and the denunciations. I suppose in a really high-stakes environment like Xinjiang, where there are these campaigns against “two-faced officials,” and where even Han officials might be sympathetic with Uyghurs and not like the internment camps—that kind of high-stakes environment—you might say there’s something Maoist about those campaigns of just utterly destroying your rival. [ASPI’s recent report “The Architecture of Repression,” which CDT translated into Chinese, further explores Maoist “campaign-style governance” in Xinjiang.] I think that’s one characteristic of Maoist campaigns, just dehumanizing them, and making sure that they fall so low that it’s gonna be really hard for them to come back. You see that in Xinhua, People’s Daily and, sadly, we’re seeing that in Xinjiang today. But overwhelmingly, that’s not really the way the Communist Party maintains control, or runs its politics and China. 

Now we have stability maintenance—spending a huge amount of money and resources on domestic security to surveil and censor and impose fear on people. The most obvious example connected to June 4 is [that] people who talk about June 4, or try to commemorate June 4, are arrested and sentenced, like Pu Zhiqiang was a few years back. He tried to hold a commemorative seminar, along with several other people, and he was arrested after that. The Tiananmen mothers are detained and taken away in Beijing. There’s a woman, who I talked about in the book, who is a villager living on the outskirts of Beijing and her husband was a driver who got killed. She gets visited and harassed and told to stop talking every year in May. So that’s stability maintenance—the government security organs coming to you and telling you that it’s really not in your interest to raise this, that if you do, it will affect your livelihood and your freedom. Victims are re-victimized every year.

CDT: You say one of the reasons you wrote this book was that you want to tell stories about “the happiness, and joy, camaraderie and comradeship, friendship and romance, music and debate, argument, sort of the basic elements of deliberative democracy” that pervaded Beijing [and the country] in the first half of 1989. How does that legacy continue today, both in China and globally, among the global diaspora?

JB: It’s hard to see it in China today because it’s so dangerous to discuss or organize in a democratic way. But I see it among Chinese students who come to study with me at Simon Fraser University or come to other universities in North America and Europe to study Chinese history. Just the fact that they’ve come means that their families see some value in an education outside of the Chinese system. The fact that they sign up for a Chinese history course means that they want a version of history that is different, that is not subject to the same censorship and amnesia. There’s a hunger among students to know what happened and I think a lot of those students are influenced by their parents, who may have given them a more critical take on Chinese politics and Chinese history privately inside the household. That’s happening inside many Chinese households…just as inside many other Chinese households, there’s just immense caution and a genuine nationalism that leads people to not criticize the Party or to support the Communist Party. That diversity is reflected in the students who come and take Chinese history classes in Canada. But what a wonderful opportunity to talk and debate and just lay the evidence out in front of people and try to spark their curiosity. Once that curiosity is sparked, students want to learn more. So that gives me a lot of hope that when spaces do open up for learning and for looking at evidence, I’m confident that the smarts and the curiosity of students will lead them to want to learn more and remember the hopefulness of that time and think about what hopeful paths they might have in their futures or in their futures connected to China.

China Digital Times: You wrote that the feminist movement in China has “tapped into broad discontent among Chinese women and developed a level of influence over public opinion that is highly unusual for any social movement in China.” Given the strict censorship in both the media and online discussions, as well as tight restrictions on public gatherings and organizing, where do you see this influence being felt most strongly?

Leta Hong Fincher: Most strongly I would say it’s pretty clear on university campuses, among university students and recent university graduates. This increased discussion of women’s rights issues was obviously happening prior to the jailing of the Feminist Five in 2015 and I’m sure contributed to the decision by authorities to jail these women, because they noticed that this was increasingly being discussed on social media. That was the real demarcation point, the jailing of the Feminist Five and then after that the really systematic aggressive censorship of feminist issues online. Prior to that it was a much more freewheeling discussion where you have more and more young women identifying themselves publicly as feminists online or changing their Weibo or WeChat handles to include the word feminist. But I have not done a quantitative study so can’t provide numbers. One useful somewhat quantitative study is to look at University of Hong Kong’s WeChat Scope. One of the most censored topics on WeChat last year was #metoo and issues related to sexual harassment. That is really extraordinary given the long list of pretty sensitive topics, so it really stands out.

CDT: What do you think it is about this generation of university students that has made them attach themselves to the feminist label, or made it an issue that they are discussing, compared to prior generations?

LHF: I can only hypothesize because I myself have been wondering. There is no question that gender inequality in general has become a lot worse in recent years, so that’s certainly a very big factor. That’s the context in which you have this new feminist movement that has arisen and then also just more of a willingness to speak out. For example, most recently the global #metoo hashtag movement led to #metoo inside China, where in April of 2018 there were thousands of petitions being signed by university students and alumni at dozens of universities. Although censorship of the internet has increased, it’s not a total blackout. And so the #metoo hashtag was being censored but discussion of sexual violence or harassment is hard to pinpoint with keywords. So feminism itself has become a more aggressively censored keyword, but it’s not a total blackout on discussion, unlike discussion of the Tiananmen massacre, for example. I don’t even know how they would be able to completely wipe out discussion of women’s rights on the internet without just shutting down the internet completely.

Just to give some examples, there are university programs that discriminate quite blatantly against female applicants and require young women to score higher on the gaokao entrance exam than their male counterparts in order to gain admission. This is a topic that the feminist activists in China have taken up. Once the women graduate it’s much, much harder for them to get a job than their male counterparts. There is extensive documentation now of routine gender discrimination in hiring, and so all of these women who are about to graduate from university and look for jobs are directly experiencing blatant gender discrimination. It’s very common for employers to explicitly say they are not considering female candidates even though technically that is illegal. So that’s the general backdrop.

As to why women are more keen or more courageous to stand up and speak out and vocalize their desire for more rights, I think it is a gradual process that has built up over several years, and it certainly started in 2012 or even at the end of 2011. It relates to Feminist Voices, which was founded by Lü Pin in 2009, just when Weibo was founded. Feminist Voices really took off and became much more popular in 2011, so that certainly had an impact on anybody who was online, on Weibo and then WeChat. So a lot of credit is due to that outfit and Lü Pin, and all of those feminists who were starting to post a lot online.

But the censorship wasn’t really aggressive at all until the jailing of the Feminist Five in 2015. There was a period of chill in the immediate aftermath of [their] jailing where feminists were in hiding and censorship was extremely aggressive for quite a few months. And then toward the end of 2015 the censorship wasn’t quite as aggressive anymore. But there’s still been a real systematic increase in censorship of feminist issues, issues related to sexual violence. Feminist Voices itself was banned last year on the night of International Women’s Day, on Weibo and WeChat. There is an overall tightening across the board on women’s rights activities, [such as] the closure of a women’s rights center that was run by Wei Tingting, who was also one of the Feminist Five, last year. So there is individual persecution and harassment of activists who are not just feminists but taking an active role in #metoo on campus.

Last year, a lot of attention was surrounding a young senior at Beida [Peking University], Yue Xin, which you translated, and that was all heavily censored. It was surprising how much support she received in spite of the censorship, with her classmates trying to express solidarity and getting around the censorship. All across the board, all university campuses have really tightened their ideological control in relation to any discussion of gender and feminism, and I have heard anecdotally, though I don’t have as much knowledge about this, that controls around discussions of gender have tightened at high schools.

CDT: You mentioned Yue Xin and I’m interested in the overlap of the workers’ movement which has recently gained a lot of steam also among university students and recent graduates, and how that movement and the feminist movement overlap and intersect. Some of the young activists like Yue Xin who have been working in solidarity with workers in Shenzhen and elsewhere are also active in the feminist movement. And labor activist Wei Zhili, the husband of Zheng Churan, one of the Feminist Five, was recently detained. So could you talk a little bit about the intersectionality between these two movements and how and whether their goals are aligned?

LHF: The feminist movement is not monolithic. There are some activists, notably Zheng Churan, who have been very heavily involved in labor rights, going back quite a few years, to 2013 at least. So if you’re just talking about the rights activism in its overlapping with feminism, there are many ways to look at it. One is to simply look at the increasing number of women workers who are on the frontline of labor related protest or collective action. But a lot of those workers are not naturally thinking about feminism. Zheng Churan is one prominent feminist who made this her main focus. She is particularly interested in advocating for working class women and she has a years long history of working to advocate for these women workers in particular and highlighting the fact that women workers have their own needs and concerns such as pregnancy discrimination, or sexual violence on the job from male supervisors or colleagues. There are other feminists who haven’t been directly advocating for such a long time for workers in particular but they’ve been very active on university campuses. Sometimes the feminist activism on campus has had nothing to do with the rights of workers. And then at the same time, other university students have only been looking at workers’ rights and haven’t been paying attention to gender. But I would say the level of activism has been higher with regard to feminist issues, and that has been going on for several years. And that is what the police have really been cracking down on.

In recent months, there has been a new burst of activism among elite university students advocating for workers’ rights. And some of those activists who are quite prominent and are now in detention have also been feminists. Yue Xin is probably the most prominent example. But there are some others as well who were focusing on the rights of women workers, like Shen Mengyu, who has a Masters degree from Sun Yat-sen University, which is really striking because after she got her masters degree from a very prestigious university she then got a job as a factory worker to better understand the working conditions. And she was working inside the factory and paying close attention to pregnant women workers in particular. She was detained before even Yue Xin was, so before the much broader crackdown, and is still in detention. And there are other activists combining their feminism with advocacy for workers and labor rights activism who are in detention as well. Most recently, Wei Zhili, known as Xiao Wei, Zheng Churan’s husband, has long been very supportive of feminism and working on the unique needs of women workers on top of just generally advocating for labor rights. And of course his wife is a very prominent feminist, so there is this intersection but it’s all very slippery. It doesn’t mean that every feminist is also really strongly advocating workers’ rights in general. Some of them are, some of them are not.

CDT: Aside from these individual activists you mentioned, who work on both labor and gender rights, have you seen any efforts from the feminist movement to include women from different classes and economic backgrounds? Is that something they are trying to do or is it not on their radar?

LHF: I would say that some of the activists, like Zheng Churan, really strongly pushed for greater attention to the needs of working class women. Usually those women are working in cities, so the emphasis has really been on urban women. With regard to feminist activism, there isn’t a lot of focus on women still living in the countryside. First you have to consider that all of the feminist activists themselves are being persecuted and closely monitored, and they are living in cities, not in the countryside. That’s where they are located so that’s one reason why they are not focusing so much on, say, rural women. When you consider working class women and where the jobs are, the jobs are in the cities. A lot of the feminist activists themselves actually grew up in the countryside and then went to university in the city, so this rural-urban divide is not as sharp as it was in the past. A lot of the women working in urban centers, whether in factories or in the service industries, their hukou, or household registration, is in a rural area so they are migrant workers. So those concerns overlap as well. It’s not only a focus on elite women at all. The focus is very much on women living in cities, but China as a whole is urbanizing rapidly.

CDT: What about members of ethnic minorities, like Tibetans or Uyghurs who are also in their own fight to preserve their own ethnic identity and autonomy? Are there examples of women in the movement working in solidarity with them or other ethnic groups?

LHF: There were Tibetan women who were starting their own WeChat groups discussing their rights. There were also Uyghur women starting WeChat groups related to their rights, but then there was a real crackdown on those groups, particularly in 2016, a very harsh crackdown. Cross-ethnicity solidarity, that is not at all public. Particularly with regard to Xinjiang, you could make the argument that that may be the most politically sensitive issue in China at the moment, given the mass incarceration of Uyghurs.

Because the feminist activists that I have been observing are Han Chinese, and they are already heavily persecuted and monitored, I am not aware of any public organizing in collaboration with women who are ethnic minorities. But that’s totally understandable and it doesn’t mean it’s not happening, it’s just that I’m not aware of it and they have to be extraordinarily careful. The feminist activists have already been jailed. I would like to say that there are foreigners who are not in China, who have criticized feminist activists in China for not paying sufficient attention to ethnic minorities. I think this is really wrong-headed, it shows a complete lack of understanding of the hostile environment for activism of any kind. To blame these feminist activists for not publicly expressing solidarity with Uyghur women or Tibetan women, I think is extremely judgmental and shows no understanding for how difficult it already is. Why should they show public evidence of any kind of collaboration? That would be the death-knell for them.

CDT: Looking back historically a little bit, because this year is of course the 30th anniversary of the June 4th crackdown: From your conversations with those activists, have you found that the protest movement of 1989 or its aftermath retain any legacy for the current generation of activists? Is it something they think about and have as context for their own movement, or is it not on their minds at all?

LHF: It is on their minds. I can’t speak for every single feminist, but I definitely heard feminists talk about what happened with the Tiananmen massacre and it is on the minds of quite a few activists. One characteristic of this feminist movement is that they are not calling for the overthrow of the Communist Party. All of their activism is about women’s general rights, about very pragmatic issues, like tackling the epidemic of sexual harassment and sexual violence, tackling gender discrimination in its various forms. They are deliberately avoiding publicly attacking the Communist Party. That’s one of their strategies and they thought that by confining their activism to issues relating to gender and women’s rights and not mentioning the Communist Party they might be able to avoid persecution. Clearly that didn’t happen because of the jailing of the Feminist Five in 2015. But that continues to be their approach.

I have to say that that is a real component of the endurance of the movement. It’s been more than four years since the jailing of the Feminist Five and the movement has not been wiped out. One of the reasons why it has such broad resonance for women all across China is because the activists deal with issues that are of direct relevance to the lives of ordinary women. So many women themselves personally experience sexual harassment or rape, or they have personally experienced gender discrimination of some kind. So they feel aggrieved, they feel a deep sense of injustice. In fact, even when I was doing my PhD research, I wrote about this in my first book, “Leftover Women.” That study did focus on more elite women who were middle class, experiencing this intense pressure to marry and buy homes. I started that research in 2010, so throughout that period, these women that I interviewed described a feeling of real suffering and deep injustice. But at that time, those women did not feel they could stand up for their rights so by and large they were keeping their grievances to themselves. So what has really changed is there has been a critical mass of women who express their grievances publicly, you can see it on social media, that has coincided with the feminist movement, which really got underway in 2012. All these different phenomena have happened at the same time so today you have more and more of the women who kept their unhappiness to themselves, and now they can look around and see other women voicing their unhappiness and so there is definitely strength in numbers. More and more of these women are stepping forward and going public and expressing their dissatisfaction with sexism in general.

CDT: Going back to what you said about the movement not directly taking on the Communist Party and just focusing on very pragmatic issues, some of the members like Yue Xin have spoken very eloquently about the ideals of socialism, and a lot of the activists working in both the labor movement and feminist movement would appear to support that ideology. In the early days of the Communist Party, gender equality was a big part of their ideology even though it was never realized in practice. You’ve argued that the longevity of the Communist Party has been built on the back of a patriarchal society. Do you feel that there’s room within this current governing structure in China to create a society where true gender equality exists?

LHF: I believe that if the Communist Party wanted to actually adhere to their expressed belief in gender equality, then it could. But that’s just not what we’re seeing. So to me, all of the evidence suggests that the male Communist Party leaders of China have decided that in their interests it is critical to the survival of the Communist Party that they subjugate women and relegate women to very subservient roles, within the family to being a dutiful wife and mother, to being responsible for upholding so-called harmony in the family, in the household. It’s very complicated and I write about it in my book but it’s essentially related to the idea that the Chinese nation-state can only maintain harmony and political stability when the families themselves are so-called harmonious – and a harmonious family in the view of the Communist Party today is very explicitly one in which the man is the head of the household and he’s the one who is making money, and the woman is in charge of the family itself. So all of these really traditional gender norms are being aggressively pushed in Chinese propaganda today. And there’s been a real resurgence of Confucian ideology in the propaganda today. So the claim is that this is just Chinese culture and that women should behave according to Chinese culture. But of course Chinese culture itself was uprooted violently with the Communist revolution. Feminism itself has played a very important role throughout Chinese history, in the Communist revolution, the May Fourth movement, through the revolutionary era at the turn of the century when revolutionaries were trying to bring down the Qing empire, which they did successfully. But that aspect of Chinese history has been erased by the male leaders of the Communist Party today.

Given all of the evidence, if you are just looking at government policy, I don’t hold out much hope for women’s rights. However, what does give me hope is this grassroots political movement, and not just feminists but even ordinary women across China who are increasingly speaking out about women’s rights. That is what is going to be decisive going forward for the future of women’s rights. No one can predict the future, but I think the Chinese government has to be very careful to accommodate and listen to the demands of women – and men, by the way, because there are like-minded men who are supportive of women’s rights.

One of the Chinese government’s most urgent priorities is to boost the plummeting birthrate, so with this new two-child policy, it’s really trying to push particularly Han Chinese women to have babies while they are in their twenties, so it has a very complicated task. On one hand, it wants to eliminate this women’s rights movement; on the other hand, it’s trying to persuade women of that exact demographic–urban, educated, Han Chinese women–to get married and have more babies. If it were to jail hundreds or more feminist activists, it would alienate so many of the women it is trying to co-opt. That is one of the reasons why I believe the movement has been able to survive, because the government itself is reluctant to crack down too hard.

CDT: That’s interesting, because if you look at any of the other grassroots movements that have sprung up in China over the past recent decades, with the 1989 movement and then various labor strikes, independent environmental activism, rights lawyers, political dissidents, we can look at any of those kinds of movements and see that they have been crushed. And then new national security laws that criminalize a broad range of activity, increasing surveillance, all of these things make it incredibly hard for any grassroots movement to survive at all. But you believe the feminist movement is a little different in that the government wants to maintain their relationship with Chinese women in order to reach their own ends, and won’t be willing to crack down as hard as they have on other groups?

LHF: So far, that’s the case. Look at it – it’s been more than four years since the beginning of a systematic crackdown on feminist activity in 2015. That’s a long time. And the movement still survives. Obviously it’s increasingly difficult but it’s very far from being crushed. In fact, it grew, pretty dramatically after 2015. I don’t know if it can continue to grow, but it certainly still exists. And the feminist community is quite large, certainly in the thousands, if you are only talking about activists who identify themselves as feminists. That’s not even getting into tens of millions of women who are not calling themselves feminists but are speaking out more about gender discrimination of various kinds, or sexual harassment, or whatever particular injustice they have experienced in their personal lives. So part of the reason why the movement hasn’t been crushed is because it’s so slippery, it has extremely broad appeal. Other movements have been more narrow, they don’t necessarily resonate with as many people across the country. But the issues the feminists are talking all directly relate to the lives of literally hundreds of millions of women.

CDT: Is there anything else about the feminist movement in China that hasn’t been adequately covered in recent media reports that you think people should know?

LHF: Media coverage of women’s rights in general in China is terribly inadequate. Obviously there aren’t a lot of foreign reporters in China. I really wish the news media would pay more attention. It’s a real flashpoint in Chinese politics and in society. It’s ongoing, this confrontation. There is so much happening that needs to be reported on regarding women’s rights in general and is not being reported. And of course it can’t be reported by and large in the Chinese media because there is no real press freedom. That’s one of the reasons I wrote this book. Not only is it really interesting, it is incredibly critical to the future of China, and the future of the entire world. This is an issue of international security because it relates to the future of the Communist Party in China. China is the world’s most powerful authoritarian regime, yet these women’s rights activists have been able to pose this incredibly strong, complicated, and resilient challenge to this regime. That is something that really needs to be closely watched. I only wish more people would pay attention to it.

There has been media attention to the latest round of detention of labor rights activists, but so many of the media reports erase the feminist side of this new activism. Because the new activism has grown from the years long women’s rights movement, it’s kind of an offshoot of that. I’m very disappointed by a lot of the media coverage. It’s not the fault of the reporters on the ground because there simply aren’t enough of them. But I would say news agencies and news media in general are very male-dominated and this is a big problem not only in China but for women around the world. To that I might add that I write about patriarchal authoritarianism in China and how the patriarchy underpins authoritarian rule in China, but that is true in virtually any authoritarian regime around the world. If you look at any autocracy around the world, they are all oppressing women, they are all misogynistic. So obviously the dynamics are not exactly the same as in China but we need to pay much greater attention to women’s rights and to the resistance of women in China. This is not a marginal issue, this is a central security issue of importance to the entire world.

CDT: Aside from journalists and the media, what do you think is the most effective way people outside China can support the feminist movement in China?

LHF: One thing that is really important is to invite and welcome Chinese — and this goes beyond just women — intellectuals and activists to various countries. So the U.S. needs to be more open to all these incredibly talented but also persecuted Chinese. There are Chinese feminists who are in the U.S., Lü Pin is one very prominent example of a visionary intellectual activist and feminist who started the Chinese Feminist Collective based in the U.S. There is a community of Chinese feminist activists in other countries as well, in the U.K. and in Canada most notably. All of these countries need to be more welcoming. The governments need to grant more visas to these people because they are fleeing an incredibly hostile environment, yet we are not welcoming them sufficiently. So that’s one very obvious way in which more governments around the world could support these activists.

On the individual level there are these organizations and if you speak Chinese you can get involved in these groups. As Lü Pin said, the main reason she started the Chinese Feminist Collective in the U.S. was she feared the environment in China was too hostile and that the feminist movement would not be able to survive without another frontline in the struggle. So that global diaspora and global exchange of ideas and people is absolutely critical to sustaining the women’s rights movement inside China, to supporting women’s rights in general.

The Last Secret: The Final Documents from the June Fourth Crackdown (2019)

Ian Johnson writes in the New York Review of Books:

The most recent example of history’s persistence is the publication in Hong Kong of The Last Secret: The Final Documents from the June Fourth Crackdown. It is the record of a meeting of roughly thirty party elders and senior leaders that took place two weeks after the massacre. Officially known as the Fourth Plenum of the Thirteenth Party Congress, it was called by China’s top leader, Deng Xiaoping, to force other party leaders to retroactively endorse his decision to use force on the protesters and to fire the Communist Party’s general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, who had opposed using the military to stop the demonstrations. The officials’ statements of fealty were read out loud and then printed up and distributed at another meeting a few days later for nearly five hundred party officials to “study”—in other words, to internalize as the truthful version of events. At the end of that meeting, the documents, all stamped “top secret,” were collected in order to maintain their secrecy.

Now, three decades later, one copy has surfaced in Hong Kong and has been published by New Century Press, whose publisher, Bao Pu, has made it his calling to explain the inner workings of the party. Over the past fourteen years he has published several important works on Chinese politics, including Zhao’s secret memoirs and the diaries of then premier Li Peng, who stepped in when Zhao refused to endorse force.

Bullets and Opium: Real-Life Stories of China After the Tiananmen Square Massacre (2019)

From the book blurb:

For over seven years, Liao Yiwu—a master of contemporary Chinese literature, imprisoned and persecuted as a counter-revolutionary until he fled the country in 2011—secretly interviewed survivors of the devastating 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Tortured, imprisoned, and forced into silence and the margins of Chinese society for thirty years, their harrowing stories are now finally revealed in this gripping and masterful work of investigative journalism.

Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang (2009)

The Washington Post reviews this posthumously published memoir by then Party Secretary, who was expelled from the Party and put under house arrest during the protests, where he stayed until his death in 2005:

Now, in “Prisoner of the State,” a book timed to appear precisely 20 years since his purge, Zhao speaks from beyond the grave. He flouts the unspoken rule against public blame of others of the group. He skewers Li Peng, Li Xiannian, Yao Yilin, Deng Liqun, Hu Qiaomu and Wang Zhen repeatedly and by name. He complains that the meeting at which martial law was decided was in violation of the Party Charter because he, the general secretary, should have chaired any such meeting but was not even notified of it.

The book is based on about 30 audiotapes he discreetly recorded at home during 1999 and 2000. Clips from the tapes are to be released simultaneously with the book, and a Chinese-language transcription is supposed to appear around the same time. The material is largely consistent with what is already known from the “The Tiananmen Papers,” an unauthorized compilation of government documents published in 2001, and from “Captive Conversations,” a Chinese-language record of conversations between Zhao and his friend Zong Fengming, published in 2007. But the up-close-and-personal tone of the present book stands out.

Read more about the book via CDT.

The Tiananmen Papers: The Chinese Leadership’s Decision to Use Force Against Their Own People-In Their Own Words, by Zhang Liang, Andrew J. Nathan, Perry Link and Orville Schell (2001).

From Foreign Affairs:

For the first time ever, reports and minutes have surfaced that provide a revealing and potentially explosive view of decision-making at the highest levels of the government and party in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The materials paint a vivid picture of the battles between hard-liners and reformers on how to handle the student protests that swept China in the spring of 1989. The protests were ultimately ended by force, including the bloody clearing of Beijing streets by troops using live ammunition. The tragic event was one of the most important in the history of communist China, and its consequences are still being felt.

Read Chapter One of the book via the New York Times.

Cries for Democracy: Writings and Speeches from the 1989 Chinese Democracy Movement by Han Minzhu (1990).

From Princeton University Press:

“Han Minzhu” and her assistant editor, “Hua Sheng,” both writing under pseudonyms to protect their identities, present a rich collection of translations of original writings and speeches from the 1989 Chinese Democracy Movement–flyers, “big-character” posters, “small-character” posters, handbills, poems, articles from nonofficial newspapers and journals, government statements, and transcriptions of tapes. Linked by a commentary setting the documents in the context of the movement’s history and of Chinese social and political life, these expressions–indeed, cries–of the participants in the passionate demonstrations in Beijing and other Chinese cities powerfully convey the atmosphere of this extraordinary protest. In the face of the ensuing campaign of intimidation and repression in China, this book enables Western readers to see through the eyes of Chinese students, intellectuals, workers, and other citizens the realities behind the reports and visual images that flooded the media during the spring of 1989.

Neither Gods Nor Emperors : Student and the Struggle for Democracy in China, by Craig Calhoun (1994)

From the book’s description on Powells.com:

“We want neither gods nor emperors”, went the words from the Chinese version of The Internationale. Students sang the old socialist song as they gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in the Spring of 1989. Craig Calhoun, a sociologist who witnessed the monumental event, offers a vivid, carefully crafted analysis of the student movement, its complex leadership, its eventual suppression, and its continuing legacy.

Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China’s Democracy Movement, George Black and Robin Munro (1993)

From Foreign Affairs:

This is a largely descriptive account of the lives of three of the leaders of the Chinese democracy movement who were jailed for their participation in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The authors provide some limited new sources of understanding of the origins and course of the democracy movement and help to place it in a meaningful analytical context.

See also “Who Died in Beijing, and Why,” by Robin Munro in The Nation (1990).

Quelling the People: The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement, Timothy Brook (1992)

From Publishers Weekly:

Eyewitness reports, hospital records and student documents buttress this authoritative study of the birth, development and sudden death of the 1989 Democracy movement in China. The book’s centerpiece is a detailed reconstruction of the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 3 and 4, 1989. Brook explains the catalytic effect of General Secretary Hu Yaobang’s death, defines the rationale behind the student hunger strikes and the goverment’s imposition of martial law, and describes the styrofoam statue of the Goddess of Democracy as a “brilliant gesture” on the students’ part. Brook establishes that between two and three thousand citizzens of Beijing were slaughtered by the People’s Army, which was acting on orders from the highest civilian authority (i.e., Deng Xiaoping), and that at one point China was on the brink of civil war as army units threatened to turn against one another. Brook has uncovered detailed material revealing how government propagandists attempted to whitewash the bloody events of Tiananmen Square even as the long process of arrests and repression began. Brook is associate professor of history at the University of Toronto.

Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China (Palgrave Studies in Oral History), by Rowena Xiaoqing He and Perry Link (2014)

From the book’s description on Powells.com:

This moving oral history interweaves He’s own experiences with the accounts of three student leaders exiled from China. Here, in their own words, they describe their childhoods during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, their political activism, the bitter disappointments of 1989, and the profound contradictions and challenges they face as exiles. Variously labeled as heroes, victims, and traitors in the years after Tiananmen, these individuals tell difficult stories of thwarted ideals and disconnection that nonetheless embody the hope for a freer China and a more just world.

Read more about the book from CDT.

The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, by Louisa Lim (2014)

From the book’s description on Powells.com:

In The People’s Republic of Amnesia, NPR’s award-winning China correspondent Louisa Lim offers a new account of this seminal event, detailing the enormous impact the tragedy had on China and the reverberations that followed. Interweaving portraits of eight individuals whose lives have been shaped by the events of June 4–including a soldier who took part in the suppression, a diplomat at the scene, a student involved in the protest and a young student in China today–Lim provides a window into Tiananmen Sqaure unlike anything written before. Based in Beijing, Lim conducted hours of first-hand interviews and on-the-ground research into materials that have only recently come to light. With fluid prose and an eye for detail, she presentsTiananmen from the perspective of the survivors and student leaders; discusses the quarter-century campaign on the part of Chinese officials to control memory of the event; and considers the legacy of Tiananmen in China today.

Read more about the book via CDT.

Tiananmen and After, Foreign Affairs (2014):

From Foreign Affairs:

Tiananmen and After spans the nearly twenty-five year period since the standoff between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), then led by Deng Xiaoping, and student protesters, which resulted in the death of hundreds of civilians. The nineteen articles range from real-time analysis of the events that fateful June, to recent assessments of the protests’ long-term impact, to China’s ascension as a geopolitical and economic superpower, to what the future holds. The collection includes the landmark “Tiananmen Papers,” originally published in 2001 in Foreign Affairs, which exposed for the first time leaked CCP documents of the secret debate inside the party over whether to use violence against its own citizens.

[This post was first published in June 2014, and was updated on June 2, 2019]

In an email interview with CDT, Miller discussed the experiences he had working within China’s censorship regime, and offered his opinions on the tightening of media controls in China since his departure. 

CDT: As the title of your book hints, its major theme is how censorship authorities leverage fear to do their work for them in the form of self-censorship—and how you acutely felt that even in the editorial room of a monthly English magazine for Shanghai expats. You mention that, coming to China with very little prior cultural and political context, you caught on fast, and that “much of it was acquired through osmosis.” Can you explain what that process was like for you?

JFK Miller: The osmosis starts as soon as you begin to occupy the censorship space. It’s like being in a church or courtroom, say, in that you quickly realize that the place itself dictates that you exercise a certain degree of circumspection. In truth, this feeling is palpable as soon as you enter China, but it intensifies dramatically once you begin working in a censorship environment. Your alter ego—the self-censor—makes his appearance at this earliest stage. You also pick up what you can from colleagues with censorship experience, but really these are just the broad brushstrokes. The rest you must figure out for yourself by reading widely, especially websites like CDT which translates leaked diktats from state censorship authorities.

You really have no option but to learn censorship this way. It’s not as if the censorship authorities go out of their way to instruct you. Chinese journalists are required to pass a Marxist ideology exam to earn their press credentials. But foreigners working on listings magazines simply aren’t in the same league. There’s no induction course, no manual, no how-to guide—nothing by way of useful instruction whatsoever. On the contrary, the censorship authorities do all they can to prevent you from learning the ropes by blocking the mere mention of censorship behind the Great Firewall. Like the first rule of Fight Club there is a meta prohibition on the thing itself.

CDT: I very much appreciated your self-deprecating writing style. A point you continually return to is your complicity in the regime of censorship in which you found yourself Shanghaied—you at one point quote free speech advocate Hu Ping to admit your role as an “accomplice to authoritarianism.” You also remind the reader multiple times of your lowly status as a chief editor at a free English-language entertainment magazine, and contrast your own ignoble position to the risky situations of Chinese investigative beat reporters. Are you being too hard on yourself? Is it in an expat entertainment magazine’s duties or capabilities to speak truth to power in an authoritarian society?

JM: I never bought into the conceit that we were publishing anything more than froth and bubble. We produced a good magazine, but it was pure gloss. We were a glorified listings magazine with the occasional pretentious outbreak of sober journalism—nothing more. So, no, I never saw it as my place to speak truth to power. It would have been laughable, really.

The other point is that there is simply no comparison between foreign media workers and our Chinese counterparts. Censorship was an imposition we chose to accept. We were not coerced. We could have left our employment, and China, at any time. We held a sort of anti-Green Card—we had the right not to work there. Chinese journalists simply don’t have that freedom. Censorship is something they must endure if they want to remain in their profession in their own country. It’s hardly surprising that Chinese journalism has one of the highest burnout rates in the world. Those who do push the boundaries beyond what is permitted face enormous censure and often jail time for exposing truths that ought to be exposed. It’s easier just to keep your head down, take your hongbao and moonlight with other work. Perhaps even as a censor—one of my own censors was a longtime columnist for China Daily.

If I used humor in the book, it’s because I could afford to. Some Chinese writers, like Murong Xuecun, have taken the perilous path of criticism through ridicule and paid the price for it. He has been detained and interrogated by authorities several times for mocking the system. Unlike Murong, I will never have to face the retaliation of those I write about.

CDT: Reading your final chapter—especially the part where you poke a bit of fun at the departed laowai’s tendency toward memoir writing—I couldn’t help but wonder: was this book in any way a cathartic exercise, an attempt to absolve residual guilt you may feel for your erstwhile position as a cog in the Chinese censorship regime?

JM: I don’t want to overplay the guilt. It didn’t eat away at me incessantly or play constantly on my mind. But every time I read of a dissident being jailed or a journalist being persecuted I knew that I was complicit in the system which permits this. Even if that was as the tiniest cog in the censorship machinery.

Writing the book was more dialysis than catharsis. China gets in your blood, but there comes a time when you need a transfusion. It was also a bookend of sorts. My China odyssey began when I went to live in Shanghai in 2005 and ended when I left the country in 2011. I needed to get it out of my system. I also wanted to record censorship as experienced by someone to whom it was entirely alien—a Westerner raised on a diet of free speech who could say, and write, whatever he wanted without question.

CDT: You left China just prior to Xi Jinping’s ascension to the highest ranks of Party and state leadership. Under Xi, we’ve seen a hefty reinforcement of state censorship as the president has made sure that the “media bears the Party surname,” handing out harsh sentences to dissenting journalists, and substantially tightening internet controls. You mention towards the end of the book, “Today, China seems even further away from abolishing censorship than it did when I first came.” Have you kept in touch with your former colleagues or your replacement at That’s Shanghai? Have things stayed largely the same, or gotten worse, as far as you can tell?

JM: It’s worth recalling that it was only a few short years ago that Beijing was losing the battle over free speech. Its nadir was the 2011 Wenzhou train collision where you had Chinese editors and journalists openly defying censorship authorities by reporting on the crash and demanding answers. At that time, Beijing was struggling to respond with the free-for-all on Weibo. But they’ve since reined it in through repressive measures, including those appalling public “confessions” for recalcitrants which hark back to the Cultural Revolution. The winding back started with the last administration, and has intensified—I think cruelly—under the current one.

Most of my former colleagues have now left, but I’ve heard that the screws have tightened at expat magazines, which is no surprise given the broader trend in Chinese media. I can’t see this easing while Xi Jinping is still channeling Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong. I’m pinning my hopes on the next administration to swing back a little the other way.

CDT: Judging from your book, of the many lessons about China your six years in country made available, an understanding of the nation’s system of censorship seems to be the starkest you walked away with. Imagine if you had taken a different editorial position, either as a foreign correspondent, or an editor for an English-language state media outlet. How do you think your frontline education would have been different?

JM: Censorship was my formative experience so, yes, I tend to view China through that prism. If I’d had a different occupation then perhaps I would have a different take. But it would depend on what that experience was. If I’d worked for a foreign NGO then I think my view of China would have been dismal. If I’d been a foreign correspondent and had my visa kept in limbo for months on end I can’t imagine I’d be a happy camper either. Work for the Global Times? I think I would have died of shame. But if I’d worked in, say, banking and finance, especially during the glory days of double-digit growth before the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, then I would probably have come away with a rosier perspective. There are many different Chinas, just as there are many different Americas. But I would say that seeing China the way I did, which was through censorship, was not such a bad way to get to know it. Understanding what can’t be spoken about is one way of understanding the country. It also gave me a firsthand experience of how ordinary Chinese relate to Party members, especially those in positions of censorship authority. A simple telephone call from a Party official is enough to spook an ordinary Chinese citizen. The whole system runs on fear—the people fear the government, and the government fears the people.

CDT: One thing that stood out to me—likely due to the work we do here at CDT, but possibly also to changes in authorities’ priorities over the past few years—was learning that your censors didn’t have any “control” over the That’s Shanghai website. By that, do you mean they had no pre-publication control? Would they ever request digital articles be deleted after posted, or did they generally seem unaware of That’s Shanghai’s online publications?

JM: They simply didn’t know the website existed. State censors may be pervasive, but they’re not the all-seeing Eye of Sauron. Had my own censors known they would certainly have asked my proprietor to moderate our website. All of the material our print censors disallowed went up, uncensored, on the Web. It was our resurrection ground for articles they’d nixed. It was only when we posted an interview with Richard McGregor about his book “The Party” that we attracted attention from the cyberpolice. My proprietor received a phone call from the local bureau telling us to take it down. But our own print censors knew nothing about it. There was no attempt at duplicity on our part here. Our web content simply wasn’t in their purview so there was no need for us to run it past them. And what they didn’t know didn’t hurt them—they had plausible deniability.

CDT: In one chapter, you describe your first experience meeting your censors face-to-face, and you also hint that some of them gained a degree of understanding, if not outright respect from you. However, you also offer the caveat: “I’m sure I’m meant to insert some charitable comments here about my censors, to say I had nothing but the most profound respect for them […]. But I would not only be a hypocrite, but a rare individual.” Reading this recalled Peter Hessler’s essay “Travels With my Censor,” in which the celebrated author and former China correspondent does seem to present some genuine charitable and understanding opinions on his censor/publisher after getting to know him and learning of his attempts to preserve as much original intent as politically expedient. Are you familiar with the essay? Any thoughts on it?

JM: Yes. Censors and censorship experiences vary. It’s tempting to think of Chinese censors as automatons in lockstep with one another and Party orthodoxy, but it just isn’t so. Peter Hessler’s censor comes across as far more progressive than my own, which is perhaps why he was more charitable in his comments. I also think there’s an appreciable difference between being subjected to censorship on a single occasion and being subjected to it for a prolonged period like I was. Extended exposure to censorship tends to drain your spirits and whatever charity one might have had towards one’s overseers. I respected my own censors, but in an odd way. After all, they were merely doing a job. I never loathed them, but neither did I develop Stockholm Syndrome. Hence, my lack of charity. I would say that, on the whole, any editor who wants to do their job well is going to have an uneasy relationship with their censor. It has to be this way because our functions are frequently in opposition to one another. Writing is an act of creation. Censorship is an act of destruction. But it was never personal. I met my censors on a single occasion for a period of about two to three hours, including a lunch, and they were pleasant enough. The takeaway for me was the message they wished to impress upon us foreign editors. It was this: “China has come a long way since Reform and Opening Up. Chinese media has never been freer. You can now mention things that would have seemed unimaginable even a few years ago. You can criticize, but not too much. Don’t push things too far or too fast.” Mao had famously written that, “A revolution is not a dinner party.” But what our censors told us was the exact opposite. Their kind of revolution was leisurely, temperate and restrained. No insurrections, no violent upheavals, no crash-through-or-crash politics. But measured, incremental, moderate revolution: a dinner-party revolution.

CDT: In that essay, Peter Hessler also talked about the growing tendency for criticism of American authors willing to accept state-sanctioned changes for Chinese publication, a topic he touched on more detail later, and debated with Evan Osnos, his successor for the New Yorker in Beijing. If you were invited into the Osnos/Hessler conversation, how would you weigh in?

JM: It depends how desperate you are to reach your audience. I can hardly blame those Western authors who compromise their material so that at least some of it gets into the Chinese public domain. In a post-truth world, one must take what one can get. And some truth is preferable to no truth at all. The high-minded approach of refusing to submit to censorship is also open to you. It’s a principled stand—bravo—but it will cost you precisely nothing except perhaps more book sales. Foreign authors are able to make such decisions because we have no skin in the game. Any choice we make is done so in the comfort and security of being outside the arena. Now, compare that to a Chinese writer or filmmaker. An artist who comes to mind is the film director Li Yang who we interviewed for the magazine. His first film, 2003’s “Blind Shaft,” shone the spotlight on the underworld of China’s unregulated mines. It was denied a theatrical license by censors. His follow-up, 2007’s “Blind Mountain,” was about bride abduction. Li was given a theatrical release for that film, but only after he agreed to more than 20 cuts and an alternative ending which saw the abducted bride rescued by the police. Was he wrong to agree to this, or should he have taken the principled approach to not submit to censorship at all because it might give a false reflection of his source material? Personally, I don’t think Li was wrong. That such an in-your-face film got into the public domain at all is a victory, even if the director’s vision was somewhat compromised.

If I had to make the choice myself, my greatest fear wouldn’t be censorship per se, but that they’d make such a hash of it. I just wouldn’t trust state censors to have the finesse that a judicious censorship excision would require. My own censors often took a spoiled-batch approach on account of what they saw as one bad apple. They would ask us to take out an entire paragraph or an entire article even, but when we queried them we’d find it was simply a word or a phrase they objected to. And they didn’t care at all if their ham-handed censorial interventions left the piece totally unworkable. They were butchers, not surgeons.

CDT: Finally, I can’t help but inquire: You mention that Li, your former employer, left you with parting words expressing fear that you might get him in trouble: “I hope you’re not planning to write a book.” Have you talked to Li since your book came out? If so, how did that go?

JM: I heard he was not best pleased. But I felt I was fair to him and that I’d honestly portrayed him in the book. Apart from his personal eccentricities, he really was no different to any other Chinese publisher trying to make a profit in a business with low margins, and I can hardly hold that against him. He saw censorship as merely something to be managed like any other business risk, and was entirely pragmatic and unemotional about it. It was only we writers who got incensed by it. I can’t blame him for his paranoia either. Susan Shirk calls paranoia “the occupational disease of authoritarian regimes.” And I know from my own personal experience how contagious this disease is. You begin to think as your censors think, which is to see danger everywhere. China’s leaders are paranoid, my censors were paranoid, my proprietor was paranoid, and after a while I, too, became paranoid. It’s no way to live.

Read JFK Miller’s “Trickle-down Censorship” in its entirety for more insight into the Chinese censorship regime as experienced at the That’s Shanghai editorial desk. Miller is also the founder and curator of Whyiwrite.net, a collection of interviews—many by Chinese and China-focused authors—inspired by George Orwell’s 1946 essay by that name. See also an interview with Miller on the Los Angeles Reiew of Books blog, and a review of “Trickle-down Censorship” from the Asia Sentinel. 

Han is also famed as a rally car driver, and the writer with a gift for dodging both death and censors does himself down throughout much of the new book. Still, he has succeeded in both careers, thanks to a willingness to keep testing his mettle, irrespective of the risk. The Problem with Me is partly dedicated to every car he has ever struck.

[…] Born in 1982 to middle-class parents, Han describes him­self as a “rural loser” who started with nothing: no power or influence. His first essay, titled Unhappy Days, was publish­ed when he was attending junior middle school. He later won entry to Shanghai’s Songjiang No 2 High School, because of his sporting prowess and an urge to impress his girlfriend.

[…] In 1999, during his first year at high school, he won top prize in a writing contest, with an essay on the national character titled Seeing Ourselves in a Cup. Yet, when examinations rolled up, he failed seven subjects and was kept in school for another year. His predicament made him think about China’s education system, which he criticises in another essay, titled The Problem With Teachers.

“The Chinese education system is terrible because the teachers are terrible,” he writes. If they were attractive or had good grades themselves, they would shun the profession, Han adds. He’s probably exaggerating but it’s often hard to tell. […] [Source]

Bard College professor Ian Buruma earlier reviewed the new English-language anthology at The New York Times, where he referred to the young writer and racer as the “Pied Piper of the post-Tiananmen generation”:

Han Han is the Pied Piper of the post-Tiananmen generation. With the shaggy-haired looks of a teenybopper star and the cool sassiness of an intellectual punk rocker, he is an idol and a social media guru who has been compared with Lu Xun, the most famous Chinese satirical writer and essayist of the 20th century.

The success is indisputable. But judged by the essays published in this collection, the comparison with Lu Xun, perhaps the greatest stylist in modern Chinese, is silly. Han Han is not a great writer, nor a profound thinker. His philosophy, if that is what it is, can be summed up in one sentence, written in a blog in 2012: “Life as I know it means doing things you like and taking care of yourself and your family.”

No Jean-Paul Sartre, then. But this may not be an entirely bad thing. For what Han Han offers is not original thought, or indeed great prose, but attitude, perfectly attuned to blogs and tweets and other forms of social messaging. And his attitude is often attractive, even refreshing, in a blogosphere that is so full of cant and vitriol. […] [Source]

In a more recent interview with Han Han, The New York Times’ Karoline Kan talks to Han Han about being labeled “rebellious,” his thoughts on his early fame, and censorship and nationalism in China:

The theme of your book seems to be you making trouble. You’re still being called a rebellious troublemaker. How do you feel about that? 

I don’t think I am or was rebellious. I don’t disagree for the sake of disagreeing, as the word “rebellious” suggests. I do whatever I think is right, whatever I like and want to do. If others see me differently from the way I see myself, there’s nothing I can do about it. Media always wants to stick a label on people to make it easier for readers to remember.

[…]

Do you think Chinese millennials don’t care enough about history and politics? 

In the West, a lot of people have the wrong idea that, because of the “Great Firewall,” Chinese don’t know what’s going on in the world. The West imagines that young Chinese are much less informed than they actually are. In China, especially in mid-sized and large cities, people know much more about politics, history, the news than many Westerners realize.

Of course, Chinese people’s views on many issues are very different from those in the West, but that’s not the result of a lack of information. Even if every American website could be accessed here in China, Chinese would be just as nationalistic, or even more so. […] [Source]

Han Han’s “The Problem With Me, and Other Essays About Making Trouble in China” is now available for purchase. For more coverage of Han Han throughout the years—including several original translations—see prior coverage via CDT.

On her blog, Leta Hong Fincher published a set of redactions from her book “Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China” on Sunday. As she explained on Twitter, they had been made by the publisher without her approval: “According to my contract with the Chinese publisher, they were supposed to give me the manuscript for 15 days before publication, but they just published it without notice and I didn’t even know what was in it until I read it later.” She told CDT:

I was dismayed to discover that my book came out in the mainland without my having a chance to approve the translated manuscript, since my contract stated that I was supposed to have the final say. Yet in spite of the censorship, I do not regret the publication of my book in the mainland.

Here are some passages from the prologue to my Chinese edition, and this part was not censored:

“I dedicate this Chinese version of my book to the women of China: whether single, married or divorced. May you break free of the shackles of tradition and culture and live a life that is true to yourself.”

“To those Chinese women who are still single and considering marriage, I have two pieces of advice:

1) If you decide you must marry and buy a home, make sure that you register your name on the property deed. Do not forfeit ownership of the most valuable asset you will ever have in your life.

2) Do not marry just for the sake of marrying. There are many paths to happiness in life and you may find the greatest self-fulfillment if you remain a single woman, surrounded by like-minded friends who support you in your aspirations.”

These messages are resonating in China and I am glad to be able to play a role in encouraging women to fight back against intense pressure to marry, and to stand up for their economic rights when they marry and buy a home.

The cuts include several references to the machinery of “a one-party state intent on social engineering, with a massive propaganda apparatus that maintains a tight grip on information.” A single sentence cut from a longer quote on deliberately shunning marriage states that “the government has inserted itself into the tiniest, most minute details of an individual’s life.” Statements that “the political space for women’s rights activism – or any form of rights activism – appeared to have contracted,” or that “the political environment is so repressive,” are missing. A lengthier censored passage highlights the extent of China’s spending on “hard” tools for “maintaining stability,” such as “police, state security, armed civil militia, courts and jails.” Another describes the use of some state organs to control the very people they are supposed to represent:

[…] Literary critic Lydia H. Liu writes that the Women’s Federation functioned “in reality very much like other hegemonic apparatuses used by the Party,” while historian Tani Barlow says the Women’s Federation used its power to “subordinate and dominate inscriptions of womanhood.” In fact, the peculiarity of a Women’s Federation that contributes to bolstering male supremacy is matched only by the ways that the country’s official Labor Federation often serves more to control than to empower workers. [Source]

Also excised is a reference to a media directive published in 2011 by CDT on cheerleading regulation of the real estate market.

While defending the Party’s current role in protecting women’s rights, the censors also removed two historical references that undermine its exclusive claim to have swept away feudal prejudice and liberated China’s women. (Italicized text was not cut, but is included for context.)

In today’s China, when some parents prefer to give money to their nephew rather than to their own daughter to buy a home, they are reverting back to the practice from the Ming dynasty, when, in the absence of sons, daughters had less of a claim to property than nephews. (See Chapter 3 for more on parents favoring sons and sometimes nephews over daughters in buying property.) […] [Source]

[…] In 1907, [anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen] inaugurated the feminist journal Natural Justice (Tianyi bao), which she edited in Tokyo with her husband, Liu Shipei. The authors point out that the earliest Chinese translation of the first chapter of Marx’s The Communist Manifesto was published in Natural Justice. Therefore, rather than the Communists bringing feminism to China, as is the narrative in official Party history, feminism first introduced Communist ideas to China through Japan, observe Liu, Karl and Ko. [Source]

Mentions of some challenges to the Party’s authority were also deleted. Artist Ai Weiwei’s name was cut from a description of online campaigning inspired by activist Ye Haiyan, for example. Also censored is an account of the chilling effect that the demolition of the New Citizens’ Movement—“a coalition of academics, lawyers, and liberals calling on Chinese officials to disclose their assets and curb corruption”—had on activists like Li Tingting (aka Li Maizi)—one of the “Feminist Five” whose bail conditions were recently lifted after a month-long detention last spring.

By far the lengthiest redaction is a multi-page interview with Zeng Jinyan, an activist, writer, and filmmaker. Zeng’s estranged husband is fellow activist Hu Jia. She tells Hong Fincher about the emotional and financial burdens of living and raising a child under house arrest, travel restrictions, and constant monitoring. “Control is tightening on the whole of civil society,” she says, “so I don’t think there’s any possibility of a real women’s movement in mainland China.” The deleted passage concludes with Hong Fincher’s observation that:

The voices of women are obscured in many contemporary depictions of China, not just in media reports about rights activism. Zeng Jinyan’s experience as a persecuted dissident and single mother is obviously not representative of all women. Yet in some ways her heavy domestic burdens are common to wives and mothers throughout China, who work hard to support the household but whose contributions are invisible and unrecognized. [Source]

Read more on women’s rights in China and Leta Hong Fincher’s work, including a 2014 interview on “Leftover Women,” via CDT.