Friday 30 September 2022

NYT – China’s ‘Absurd’ Covid Propaganda Stirs Rebellion



source https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/business/china-covid-propaganda.html#new_tab
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The Economist – The Prince: Searching for Xi Jinping



source https://www.economist.com/theprincepod#new_tab
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New Reports Detail Chinese Influence Operations in Foreign Media

A series of recent reports shows the variety of tactics employed to extend Chinese influence into foreign countries, particularly their information ecosystems. The reports outline the strengths and weaknesses of these influence operations and the resilience of their targets, and in many cases testify to the CCP’s growing desire and ability to control global narratives about China.

In a report released on Tuesday, Meta revealed that it had taken down two online networks originating from China and Russia that violated the platform’s policy against coordinated inauthentic behavior. (The removals follow similar moves against pro-U.S. operations reported in August.) While Meta did not have enough evidence to conclude precisely who in China was behind the operation, the methods used resemble the Chinese government’s past efforts to use Western social media platforms to promote the CCP’s agenda, and American officials expressed concern about intelligence reports of election interference by foreign governments. Meta’s Ben Nimmo, Global Threat Intelligence Lead, and David Agranovich, Director of Threat Disruption, summarized the influence operation from China:

We took down a small network that originated in China and targeted the United States, the Czech Republic and to a lesser extent, Chinese- and French-speaking audiences around the world. It included four largely separate and short-lived efforts, each focused on a particular audience at different times between the Fall of 2021 and mid-September 2022. In the United States, it targeted people on both sides of the political spectrum; in Czechia, this activity was primarily anti-government, criticizing the state’s support of Ukraine in the war with Russia and its impact on the Czech economy, using the criticism to caution against antagonizing China. Each cluster of accounts — around half a dozen each — posted content at low volumes during working hours in China rather than when their target audiences would typically be awake. Few people engaged with it and some of those who did called it out as fake. Our automated systems took down a number of accounts and Facebook Pages for various Community Standards violations, including impersonation and inauthenticity. [Source]

The Chinese influence operation employed a combination of over 90 accounts, pages, and groups across Facebook and Instagram that attracted hundreds of users. While its scope was relatively small compared to the Russian influence operation, Meta said this was the first targeted online campaign originating from China that attempted to interfere in U.S. politics. In September of last year, researchers uncovered a suspected Chinese state-affiliated online influence campaign across Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube that urged real-world protests in the U.S., although it was not directly related to politics. As Steven Lee Myers from The New York Times reported, the Chinese operation represented a new direction and cross-fertilization with Russian disinformation:

Ben Nimmo, Meta’s lead official for global threat intelligence, said the operation reflected “a new direction for Chinese influence operations.”

“It is talking to Americans, pretending to be Americans rather than talking about America to the rest of the world,” he added later. “So the operation is small in itself, but it is a change.”

[…] Meta’s report noted overlap between the Russian and Chinese campaigns on “a number of occasions,” although the company said they were unconnected. The overlap reflects the growing cross-fertilization of official statements and state media reports in the two countries, especially regarding the United States.

The accounts associated with the Chinese campaign posted material from Russia’s state media, including those involving unfounded allegations that the United States had secretly developed biological weapons in Ukraine. [Source]

While the Chinese influence operation taken down by Meta may have been small in scope and largely a flop, there have been signs elsewhere that the CCP has been honing its ability to deliver targeted propaganda for various groups abroad. A new report by Recorded Future, titled “1 Key for 1 Lock: The Chinese Communist Party’s Strategy for Targeted Propaganda,” detailed the CCP’s strategy of “precise communication,” which adapts advertising tactics to design content and dissemination methods that appeal to the preferences of a particular audience. The strategy is made possible through area studies research, in-country surveys, online behavioral data, and the aid of international firms, and it coheres with the CCP’s related patterns of increasing media localization, use of online influencers, global data collection, and social media differentiation. Here are some of the key judgments of the report, authored by Devin Thorne: 

Party-state media is almost certainly among the leading implementers of precise communication, but a wide range of actors are also very likely to be directly or indirectly involved; some Chinese academics argue that precise communication should entail selecting the right communicator for maximum effect given the target and content.

The precise communication concept is almost certainly intended to influence all of the CCP’s propaganda output, from news distribution through third parties, to TV show production, to the online and social media activities of party-state media and Chinese diplomats. 

The content disseminated by party-state media and other elements of the external propaganda apparatus is likely to become increasingly diverse, first according to country differences and then based on social strata and other community-level characteristics.

New forms of media that adopt different approaches are likely to continue proliferating, with recent examples including online lifestyle influencers and newsletters. [Source]

This week, the International Republican Institute also released a new report on a similar theme. “Coercion, Capture, and Censorship: Case Studies on the CCP’s Quest for Global Influence” analyzes a range of economic, political, and informational influence tactics by the Chinese government, and how they impact democracy and governance in 12 different countries. While the report finds that these tactics continue to threaten institutions of democratic governance, it highlights the strengths that allow democracies to be resilient in the face of autocratic influence. One of the reports notable themes is the growing efforts by the Chinese government to shape the global debate on China’s rise:

China continues in its comprehensive, well-resourced efforts to shape global opinion on its rise. In nearly every country examined in this compendium, authors identified robust efforts by the PRC partystate to guide public opinion on China. In Brazil, for example, Chinese ambassador Yang Wanming and other PRC diplomats used their platforms, including a series of op-eds published by one of Brazil’s most widely read newspapers, to promote outright disinformation. This push included a June 2020 statement that the U.S. created COVID-19. This disinformation was only the tip of an informational iceberg, as Ambassador Yang and his fellow diplomats leveraged a combination of content-sharing agreements and advertising, economic pressure, and co-optation of political and economic elites to shape Brazil’s information environment in a markedly pro-PRC direction, taking an increasingly confrontational tone in response to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s erratic behavior toward China. [Source]

Earlier this month, Freedom House released a report on China’s global media influence that examined the traditional, covert, and coercive tactics used by the CCP to influence foreign media outlets in 30 countries. Niva Yau, a senior researcher at the OSCE Academy, recently published a report on this sort of influence through an in-depth case study of Kyrgyzstan. Titled “Managing Sentiments in the Western Periphery: Chinese Information Operations in the Kyrgyz Republic,” the report investigates the tactics, narratives, and effectiveness of the PRC’s media engagement, and how journalist tours, content-sharing agreements, and Chinese government entities facilitate CCP propaganda in Kyrgyzstan’s social and traditional media. Here are some of the report’s main findings: 

There are three main characteristics of strategies employed by the PRC: 1) inserting content within Kyrgyz media, 2) local presence of PRC media, and 3) engagement on social media. There is a cross-cutting and mutually supportive relationship between all these strategies. For example, local presence of PRC media strengthens production capacity of locally tailored PRCfriendly materials, especially when combined with direct access to local PRC entities and local elites through diplomatic channels.

There are a total of 22 information platforms with high positive PRC engagement in the Kyrgyz Republic. Their PRC-friendly content is sustained and incorporated directly via sponsored trips and specific training programs in the PRC, and/or agreed and paid-for inserts from PRC media. Despite the absence of a strict condition to publish materials from trips to the PRC, it can be observed that most Kyrgyz journalists who participated in these visiting trips and specific trainings published on materials learned from the PRC instructors during or after their trips.

[…] At least 9 Kyrgyz media entities have signed cooperation agreements with PRC entities, with some dating back to the early 2000s. The scope of these agreements varies, from allowing Kyrgyz media organisations to freely reprinting published content as they see fit, committing to regularly publishing PRC-made domestic and world news, jointly producing specific content, including specific paid-for content in their reporting, and more. [Source]



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/09/new-reports-detail-chinese-influence-operations-in-foreign-media/
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Photo: Untitled, by Hsiuan Boyen



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/09/photo-untitled-by-hsiuan-boyen-11/
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Thursday 29 September 2022

Li Wenliang’s Wailing Wall, September 2022: “How to Voice This Desolation?”

Two years and four months after whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang’s death from COVID-19, the “Wailing Wall” that emerged in the comments under his last Weibo post continues to serve as a repository for the hopes, dreams, worries, and opinions of countless Chinese citizens. CDT editors regularly collect and archive Wailing Wall content, including the selection of comments translated below.

In September, many Wailing Wall comments referenced current events such as the deadly bus crash in Guizhou province that killed 27 people and injured 20; the death of Queen Elizabeth II; the protests in Iran; and pandemic lockdowns or restrictions in various Chinese cities. 

The Guizhou bus crash, which occurred in the early morning hours of September 18, was particularly galling to many because the 47 passengers being transported to a far-flung quarantine facility were not even COVID patients, but “close contacts” of COVID patients. Some netizens suspected that officials in Guizhou’s provincial capital of Guiyang, under pressure from higher-level authorities to quash COVID outbreaks before the CCP’s 20th Party Congress in October, were trying to “juke the stats” by transporting potentially infected individuals to locations outside their city. Online commenters pointed out the preventability of the accident, criticized state media silence and online censorship of the story, and commemorated the victims with words and artwork including the image below. A number of Weibo users noted that the accident occurred on China’s National Humiliation Day, which refers to the start of the Japanese invasion of China in 1931, and suggested that it gave a new layer of meaning to the day’s name.

The following Wailing Wall comments, selected and translated by CDT editors, were originally posted during the week of September 17-22, 2022:

雨虎2010_THU：Dr. Li, have you met the 27 people from Guizhou who died? That day, I wept in silence for a long time.

韬光养菲：Dr. Li, I’m back again. I finally understand why Iris Chang committed suicide after writing her book. Yesterday and today, I haven’t been able to extract myself from the suffering of those 27 people and the human misery in Tibet and Xinjiang. I feel a depression coming on, because there seems to be no solution to all this suffering. I used to believe in this country. I thought they wouldn’t allow the common people to suffer, because they loved the common people, but now, it is the common people who are paying the price for their actions. I’ve collapsed, and I don’t see the point of living anymore. // Bloodwitch585: My faith is slowly, slowly collapsing.

舞袖长夏：I’m terrified. We’re all on that bus. // Yiwwwwwwwww：Every one of us is a passenger.

兔军临天下：They’re always experimenting on the Chinese people, and they never take responsibility for it. Each of these experiments lasts a decade or more. How many experiments have they conducted over the last 70 years? The formulas differ, the distorted results vary, but the one constant is their monopoly on power!

第一个名字不知道该叫什么：All of us are on that bus, but the chief culprit offered only an apology, as if an apology could prevent such tragedies from recurring. The pilot was wrong, the navigator was wrong, but all they offered was a measly apology.

微笑的血精灵：Dr. Li, the rollover bus crash in Guizhou occupies only a tiny little spot in the bottom right-hand corner of page eight of today’s People’s Daily.

A screenshot shows a tiny little blurb about the bus crash circled in red at the bottom right-hand corner of page eight of the People’s Daily newspaper.

邹悦-墨尘：Dr. Li, I sincerely hope the Iranian people can fight for and win their rightful freedom and happiness. I never expected them to be so brave—unlike us, who have been made subservient by a few [PPE-clad] “big whites,” and who have only your last Weibo post as our Wailing Wall …

天命登前途：They limit the freedom of the people in the name of protecting the people.

江东小锦鲤：After you left us, those of us who survived didn’t make the world a better place, nor did we draw on your strength to protect our compatriots. We should be ashamed.

鲜花下牛粪：Dr. Li, it’s Monday, September 19, 2022, and this is my 24th day visiting you. Queen Elizabeth II is being buried today, and mourners queued for dozens of hours just to bow before her coffin, make the sign of the cross, and fold their hands in prayer. There is a monument to the late Queen at Westminster Abbey, and there is a monument to you in my heart. From now on, I want to come here every day to “clock in” and record the days of our “coexistence.” Number 24.

哈勃ddg：Dr. Li, I watched the Jiabiangou [1950s labor camp] documentary recently, and I feel like we’re either already in Jiabiangou, or on the path to Jiabiangou. This country is terrifying.

饭否的否：’Morning, Dr. Li. We’re all on the same bus. We did not resist their unlawful and unauthorized use of public power to violently break into private residences, kill pets and damage private property, or forcibly detain or quarantine us in the name of “potential infection.” We do not have the freedom to move about, the freedom to work, the freedom to live, or the freedom to speak. We have no right to be free from fear of the unknown. And forget about saying “May the dead rest in peace”—how can they possibly rest in peace?

兔子雨林110：September 18, 27 dead, a Day of National Humiliation—how to voice this desolation? (The last part is a line from Song Dynasty poet Su Shi/Su Dongpo.) [Chinese]

The Wailing Wall comments below are from the week of September 10-16, 2022:

邹悦-墨尘：Dr. Li, “dynamic clearing” has become a national policy. Did you ever think that this day would come? As someone who had the courage to speak up, as a resolute whistle-blower, what do you think of our docility?

You should come back and take a look at this world. It really sucks …

Photo of a man painting a question in red characters on a white wall: “Will this world ever get any better?” Below that, someone has added a note in black characters that reads: “Official announcement forthcoming.”

Montelena: Dr. Li, I just saw elderly people in Tibetan areas being hauled off to makeshift fangcang quarantine hospitals with extremely poor conditions. They were hobbling along, some unable to even straighten their backs. They’re always talking about [protecting] the elderly and children, and then this is what they do? I’m so bitter, and yet so powerless.

白與川_：Dr. Li, I saw that the WHO issued a statement today saying that the pandemic is coming to an end, but looking around me, I get the feeling that a very long [pandemic prevention and control] “chain” has already taken shape.

剥土豆时思考上帝：Freedom is like air: you’re only aware of its existence when you are suffocating. [Chinese]

CDT’s Wailing Wall archive, and selections here, compiled by Tony Hu.



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/09/li-wenliangs-wailing-wall-september-2022-how-to-voice-this-desolation/
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Photo: 鸭绿江风景 (Scenic Yalu River), by liuzr99

Stones are visible beneath the rippling surface of the Yalu River. On the opposite bank is a series of low, verdant hills.

鸭绿江风景 (Scenic Yalu River), by liuzr99 (CC BY-SA 2.0)



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/09/photo-%e9%b8%ad%e7%bb%bf%e6%b1%9f%e9%a3%8e%e6%99%af-scenic-yalu-river-by-liuzr99/
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Wednesday 28 September 2022

Despite Sentencing Tangshan Attackers, Authorities Ignore Violence Against Women

Three months after a group of men assaulted four women at a restaurant in Tangshan, a district court in Hebei sentenced the men to prison for a number of crimes. Their sentencing comes after authorities and state media attempted to quell public anger by sidestepping the underlying issue of gender-based violence and instead focusing on gang violence. Judging by reactions to the sentencing and other major #MeToo incidents that have recently surfaced, Chinese authorities continue to neglect, ignore, and censor the problem of violence against women.

Surprisingly, as George Washington University law professor Donald Clarke noted, “the sentences were apparently not mostly about the attack” on the women at the restaurant. Salina Li from the South China Morning Post reported that the sentencing was based largely on a variety of crimes unrelated to the attack itself:

A man who assaulted four women in a barbecue restaurant in China’s northern city of Tangshan has been sentenced to 24 years in prison for the attack, and for other crimes including robbery and organising a gambling ring.

The Guangyang District People’s Court in Langfang, Hebei province, said on Friday morning that the man, Chen Jizhi, 41, was a ringleader of a criminal gang and had conducted criminal activities since 2012. He was also fined 320,000 yuan (US$45,000).

Twenty-seven other people, some of whom also took part in the assault, were also sentenced to between six months and 11 years behind bars for a series of crimes, including operating casinos, robbery, assisting in cybercrimes, picking quarrels and provoking trouble. Nineteen of them were fined 3,000 to 135,000 yuan. [Source]

It was not clear from the court’s verdict, released on Friday, whether those sentenced included any of the 15 local officials investigated in August on suspicion of colluding with the attackers. (Eight officials in Tangshan were detained on suspicion of abuse of power and bribery.) Moreover, the court concluded that the women suffered only “second-degree minor injuries” and “slight injuries,” which China Daily described as “mild injuries,” despite photos showing one woman on a stretcher with her face and shirt covered in blood. Two of the women remained in the hospital for at least 11 days after the attack. Local authorities obstructed journalists reporting on their condition, and despite an outpouring of public concern that continues even months after the incident, there has been scant news about the health of the women, and no public comment from the women or their families. Cao Li and Liyan Qi from The Wall Street Journal described how the government has tried to steer public opinion about the nature of the assault by focusing on gang violence rather than violence against women:

Despite the brutality of the attack, the four women suffered minor injuries, the court’s post said. By convicting the perpetrators as part of a criminal gang and charging them with other crimes committed over years, the court was able to hand down sentences that would satisfy the public, lawyers unconnected to the case said. Still, they said, the opaque nature of the investigation and trial left it unclear how much of each sentence was connected to the restaurant assault and how much to the other offenses—or if the jail terms were appropriate punishment for what each defendant had done.

[…] “Diverting the public’s attention from gender-based violence to violence related to gang members showcases the Chinese officials’ ability to manipulate public opinion,” [Human Rights Watch’s Yaqiu Wang] said before the sentencing was published. “Many in the future may only remember it as some gang violence.” [Source]

Many feminist groups and netizens believe that the government’s response to the Tangshan attack shows that it is unwilling to confront violence against women or to protect those who intervene. Referencing the attack, one comment on Li Wenliang’s “Wailing Wall” read: “How can they expect women to give birth to three kids while at the same time, not doing anything to protect women?” Rhoda Kwan at NBC News described how women have demanded that the government address the root cause of the Tanghan attack, not merely punish the aggressors: 

“When women advocated for that case, they never merely called for the punishment of a few criminals; rather, they demanded a change in the culture of violence that deprives women of a sense of safety,” Lü Pin, a Chinese feminist activist, told NBC News.

The censorship of online discussion about the attack, she added, reveals the authorities’ true attitude toward women’s rights.

“If the government had taken gender violence seriously, it would have at least permitted people to discuss it,” Lü said. “However, numerous social media accounts discussing this case have been deleted on the grounds of ‘promoting gender strife.’” [Source] 

At The New Yorker, Han Zhang described how the Tangshan incident is but the latest example of the government’s censorship machine quelling the storm of public opinion and quashing feminist organizing:

A crackdown on civic discourse and activism has trapped the storm in a box. Though individual cases like the one in Tangshan create fleeting moments for people to express their anger, feminists’ voices are increasingly marginalized. “The Tangshan incident indirectly reflects the conundrum of MeToo,” Lu Pin, a longtime advocate for Chinese women’s rights, told me. “MeToo was empowering. Women wanted to speak up and to change the way things were. They achieved a bit. But, four years later, Tangshan made people realize that there is not much you can do, even when you make some very loud noise.”

[…] Two days after the incident, Weibo announced a zero-tolerance policy toward users who spread “harmful speech,” including comments that “attacked state policy and the political system” or that “incited gender conflict.” In forty-eight hours, the platform removed more than fourteen thousand posts, suspended eight thousand users, and permanently banned another thousand. On Weibo and other platforms, like WeChat, where hundreds of millions of people in China get their news, feminists are often called “women’s fists,” which sounds like the Chinese phrase for “women’s rights.” Popular words that refer to gender discrimination, such as “hunlu,” which means “marriage mules”—a sarcastic term about the thankless labor of married women—have been banned. Even the phrase “MeToo” is heavily censored, making it impossible to make new public complaints with the signature hashtag. [Source]

Last week, another major incident of violence against women surfaced, with netizens fighting censors for control of the narrative. In what is becoming one of the biggest #MeToo cases in China, at least 21 women have accused Du Yingzhe, principal of Yinglook acting and film tutoring school in Beijing, of sexual abuse over a period of 15 years. Rachel Cheung from Vice reported on the wave of accusations that has emerged against Du:

“Du exploited our fears and anxiety as teenage girls, who left our homes for the first time to prepare for the art exam,” Shi Ziyi, an influencer and a freshman at the prestigious Beijing Film Academy, wrote in a social media post on Monday accusing Du of exploiting his students. “He insinuated that by sleeping with him, we could enter good universities, be approved by the entertainment industry and achieve our dreams.” 

“He boasted that he has slept with more than a hundred students and even called himself the godfather of China’s film industry,” Shi added.

Following her public accusation, 19 former students or staff have come forward with allegations of sexual harassment and exploitation. In a social media post on Tuesday, they described a pattern of abuse enabled by Du’s stature in the school. Six of the accusers used their real names in the statement while the others were anonymous.

And in a separate post this week, Dong Shuang, a novelist, accused Du of raping her when they were both students at the Beijing Film Academy in 2005. [Source]

Shi Ziyi, whose WeChat post inspired other victims to come forward, wrote that one 17-year-old student was forced to drop out of school after Du impregnated her after non-consenual sex. Several accounts also stated that Du’s wife, Chen Xin, also a teacher at the school, allegedly helped lure students to Du’s apartment or hotel and then intentionally left them alone with him. Shi was inspired to share her story after another another case went public: Zhao Weixian, a student director at Beijing Film Academy and one of Du’s former students, was recently accused of sexually harassing over 30 female teenage students by pressuring them to change into swimsuits and taking private videos of them. Beijing police detained Zhao for questioning on Wednesday, and detained Du on the following day.

On Weibo, the hashtag #TeacherAtWell-KnownActingAcademyAccusedOfRapingMinors (#知名艺考机构老师被曝诱奸未成年) has received over 770 million views, although some netizens pointed out that it suspiciously did not appear in the list of trending topics. Li Hang from Caixin highlighted some netizen comments criticizing authorities for taking action only after the public outcry surfaced:

Du’s detention was cheered by social media users on Weibo, with one saying, “I hope he can be punished strictly and heavily, and the victims can get a satisfactory result.”

“(Du) takes advantage of the young girls’ dreams to intimidate and seduce them. He left the darkest shadow over the best years of their life. Let him rot in jail! ” a Weibo user wrote.

Another commenter said: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here,” quoting a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

“I am glad that the villain has finally fallen into the hands of the law, but sadly, it was only achieved after an uproar was caused online,” read a comment. [Source]

Du denied the accusations, calling them “exaggerated and inaccurate.” Shi said that she and her friends had been harassed in retaliation for her social media post, and that her mother had received phone calls demanding that Shi delete the post or be held “criminally responsible.” Shi said that she has since dropped out of school. Her treatment is similar to that of Liu Jingyao, a Chinese student at the University of Minnesota who suffered PTSD, constant fear of retaliation, and an onslaught of misogynist attacks on social media after accusing Liu Qiangdong (Richard Liu), the billionaire founder of Chinese e-commerce site JD.com, of sexual assault in 2018. Her civil trial against Mr. Liu begins next week in the U.S.

Summarizing their recent study, “#MeToo in China: The Dynamic of Digital Activism against Sexual Assault and Harassment in Higher Education,” Sara Liao and Luwei Rose Luqiu wrote for The Diplomat about how Chinese authorities leverage digital platforms to silence #MeToo accusations:

Chinese authorities and powerful (male) players are resilient in exploiting the same digital affordances that powered #MeToo to counter the negative impact of online allegations, essentially drowning out victims of sexual violence. Returning again to the example of higher education, our study has demonstrated that, while digital media lowered the barriers to collective action for a variety of causes, grassroots activism must negotiate with various state institutions and system insiders to move forward with anti-sexual harassment campaigns. For example, a Chinese university can leverage its resources and power to influence social media content. While news media, especially state media, can bypass the universities and cover sexual scandals associated with them, their respective administrative rankings impact the outcome. In addition, offline collective activities would be suppressed even more quickly to prevent forming a movement. [Source]

Chinese authorities have even censored online discussions about violence against women that occurs abroad. During the mass protests in Iran over the police killing of Mahsa Amini, hashtags, images, and comments about her death have been removed from Duoyin and Weibo, and searches for her name on CCTV and Xinhua websites yielded no results. What was initially a topic about women’s rights ultimately devolved into a discussion about American meddling in Iran’s internal affairs. But some activists, cartoonists, and netizens who managed to elude the censors have drawn parallels between state violence against women abroad and the same sort of violence in China:

Connecting feminist struggles across national borders and social strata can help forge solidarity in the face of violence against women and censorship thereof. CDT Chinese has republished an August 2018 article from 土逗公社 (literally “potato commune”) about efforts to reduce sexual harassment of female workers and to provide support and services for workers who have experienced such harassment. The article profiles feminist organizations such as 绿色蔷薇 (The Green Rose) and 尖椒部落 (Pepper Tribe), the latter of which shut down in August of 2021, and argues that an intersectional approach to China’s #MeToo movement can create greater solidarity and collective action:

Speaking out is not just about talking, it’s about forming alliances. We believe that this sort of attentive listening will imbue #MeToo with even greater significance. The significance of the #MeToo movement lies not only in individual victims talking publicly about their personal experiences in order to raise individual awareness among other women; it is also a call for all women, as victims of structural injustice, to form a self-aware collective, thus opening a new door to mutual solidarity and concerted, collective action. [Chinese]



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/09/despite-sentencing-tangshan-attackers-authorities-ignore-violence-against-women/
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Coda Story newsletter – Chinese censors working overtime to silence dissent on zero-Covid lockdowns in Xinjiang and Tibet



source https://www.codastory.com/newsletters/china-xinjiang-lockdown-ghulja-covid/#new_tab
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Photo: Furong ancient town, Hunan, China, by Catherine Poh Huay Tan

Traditional Chinese tile-roofed buildings perch atop high cliffs over a dark green body of water in the ancient town of Furong, Hunan province, known for its verdant hills and abundant waterfalls.

Furong ancient town, Hunan, China, by Catherine Poh Huay Tan (CC BY 2.0)



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/09/photo-furong-ancient-town-hunan-china-by-catherine-poh-huay-tan/
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Tuesday 27 September 2022

Interview: Lynette Ong on “Outsourcing Repression” in Demolitions and Land Seizures

Lynette Ong, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, joins CDT to discuss her new book Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China. In Outsourcing Repression, Ong investigates the methods by which the Chinese state has deployed nonstate actors, both violent and nonviolent, to seize farmland and demolish urban homes when it lacked the legitimate authority to do so. During fieldwork in Yunnan, Zhengzhou, and elsewhere, Ong examined the sticks, carrots, and persuasive methods through which the state exerts its influence on society without introducing its formal agents. Ong found that the state’s deployment of anonymous thugs-for-hire was an expedient way to “accomplish dishonorable and dirty work” while maintaining plausible deniability about its connections to low-level violence. The book also investigated the role of “social brokers” who mobilize their neighbors into complying with the state’s demolition goals by drawing on their social capital. Her findings have implications beyond China’s contentious urbanization process, shedding light on China’s “People’s War” against COVID-19, the “Sweeping Black” campaign against organized crime, and its future political trajectory. Ong concludes her book with a rumination on the state of fieldwork in China, which has been imperiled by China’s “authoritarian turn.”

China Digital Times: When a local government wants to demolish a village or a housing block, what tools do they have at their disposal to achieve their goals? Could you give a brief overview of the methods you researched in your book? 

Lynette Ong: The two strategies that are described in the book are, number one, outsourcing violence to thugs-for-hire. This sort of violence is low-level violence, as well as the threat of violence. You’re not seeing a bloodbath but very low-level violence. It is often intimidation that amounts to almost using violence. The other strategy is outsourcing nonviolent repression to grassroots brokers. Nonviolent repression refers to persuasion; trying to mobilize the masses through nonviolent means.

CDT: Who are these thugs-for-hire? 

Ong: These thugs look like they’re portrayed on the book cover. These are anonymous people. It could be anyone on the street. These are not individuals that we can identify. They are zhangsanlisi (张三李四, or “any Tom, Dick, or Harry”) who is willing to sell his muscle power for profit. These people usually don’t have regular jobs, or they are unemployed, and therefore they do odd jobs and get engaged in demolition projects. This is the nature of the thugs. They are very different from, let’s say, organized mafias in Russia.

CDT: What does low-level violence actually mean? 

Ong: Low-level violence usually means threat of violence, often short of actual violence. 

CDT: One of your findings is that even though thugs-for-hire are most associated with violent acts, in extreme cases causing bodily harm or even death, their deployment does not cause citizens to mobilize through street protests as much as other agents do. Why is this the case?

Ong: This is my key statistical finding. Drawing from over 2,000 cases, I found that even though thugs were most engaged in causing bodily harm and death, they’re actually not likely to mobilize street protests. My rationale is that, unlike the public security and unlike the police, they don’t wear any uniform. Unlike government officials, village officials, township government officials and other agents, they don’t have a government identity. So if they do bad things, they are not seen as part of the system. This provides the authorities who hire them plausible deniability. I think because of that, it doesn’t provoke public anger to the extent that abusive officials’ behavior would. 

CDT: Is that because abusive officials’ behavior is viewed as a violation of Chinese citizens’ rights?

Ong: If government officials were to use similar means to demolish houses, this would be seen as a conflict between state and society—a predatory state, right? But if you have this anonymous person wearing black with no identity doing this to society it is just another form of crime. 

CDT: Another one of your findings is that violent cases peaked in 2013, two years after the passage of a national ordinance governing demolitions on state-owned land. Has the use of thugs correspondingly gone down?

Ong: The national ordinance has clearly played a role in that. The law says that no entity other than government officials can be directly involved in urban housing demolition. Superficially, it removed real estate developers from being directly involved [in demolitions]. When local governments get involved, their reputation is at stake. Even though the developer might be doing the job behind the scenes, they are being more careful of the tactics they use, which is why I think we see less violence and less conflict overall after the ordinance was passed. 

CDT: You describe three types of brokers in your book: social brokers, political brokers, and economic brokers. Who are social brokers and what role do they play in mobilizing the masses?

Ong: Social brokers draw on their social capital to conduct persuasion, that is to mobilize the masses to obtain compliance without violence. They are different from political brokers because political brokers have some degree of affiliation with the state, such as the people who work in the neighborhood committee. Those people have some degree of state affiliation. Social brokers are people who draw on their own social capital to conduct persuasion. Economic brokers, on the other hand, are the individuals who are out to make a profit by connecting the state and society. They are akin to “ticket scalpers”, thus very different from social brokers. 

CDT: Can you give me an example of your stereotypical social broker? 

Ong: Social brokers are primarily volunteers who do a range of tasks for the government such as patrolling alleyways to prevent crime or delivering food to their neighbors.

CDT: When the government decides it wants to demolish a housing block, what role do social brokers play in that process?

Ong: The government mobilizes volunteers, first of all, to obtain information about families. It can be very detailed and intimate information about families, such as the relationship between a husband and wife or a father and son. This information can be important because it allows the state to design a package that is more acceptable to the family and gives the state an idea as to what pressure points local governments can use to press the families to give in to government demands.

CDT: Let’s discuss Chengdu, which innovated the zigaiwei (自治改造委员会/自改委, or “self-governed renovation committee”). What are zigaiwei and how did they transform the nature of conflict in demolition projects?

Ong: Zigaiwei bring together various actors such as political and social brokers, as well as families who are willing to relocate. These people will then go persuade, or mobilize the masses, those who are unwilling to relocate to sign papers [agreeing to demolition]. In a way, that allows the local government to divorce itself from actual implementation, giving the impression that the demolition is initiated, as well as carried out, by the community—with the implication that any sort of conflict that arises from demolition, and any sort of pressure that the committee puts on the unwilling, becomes a conflict between society members. That allows the state to stay away from it. Zigaiwei transformed the nature of conflicts from state and society to society and society. If anything goes wrong, it has got nothing to do with the state. This is the essence of outsourcing repression.

CDT: Has this model been adopted by other cities across China?

Ong: It was first adopted in Chengdu. Other cities then sent teams of government officials to visit and try to learn from that experience. Zigaiwei is probably the most publicized sort of non-state demolition model, but different local governments have come up with their own schemes that take the essence of zigaiwei. I wrote about monichaiqian (模拟拆迁, or “simulated demolition”) in Chapter Six, which also follows the same idea. It’s about the community initiating demolition and the community itself doing the mobilization which used to be done by the state at great effort and cost. Early bird benefits, or carrots, are given to those who are willing to move. These people have the incentive to do the mobilization on behalf of the state because if everyone agrees, then they get a payout. 

CDT: Who are huangniu, literally “cattle,” and how are they different from social brokers?

Ong: Huangniu are economic or market brokers that connect the state and society. They are entrepreneurs who want to make money and they do it by establishing relationships with the state demolition office and with their clients, who are people who want to bargain for more compensation. They bring these two people together. In between, they provide a suite of other services like fake certificates—of divorce, marriage, etc.—that allow their clients to get more compensation legitimately. They enable corruption that allows for better compensation. This is what they contribute to the transaction; [without them,] state and society wouldn’t agree with each other and the project would be held up. 

CDT: Why do some citizens employ huangniu, while others eschew their services?

Ong: Some citizens who refuse to relocate or refuse to sign papers, do not do so because of compensation issues. They might think their rights are not being respected, procedures are not being followed, or that government officials are being corrupt—a whole range of reasons that have nothing to do with compensation. These people have no reason to engage with huangniu. Even if they want better compensation, they might not want to participate in corrupt deals because there are risks involved. Some people just do it out of principle, they think: “My neighbors with similar conditions are getting X amount of money, I want to get the same amount of money. This is a matter of principle. Why should I share my profit with someone else to engage in the market?” So people don’t do it for a range of reasons. 

CDT: Let’s look at this in a comparative perspective. How do Chinese thugs-for-hire differ from goondas in India. In India, you write that goondas hinder the state’s penetration of society whereas thugs-for-hire actually bolster state capacity in China. Why?

Ong: Because thugs-for-hire in China are much weaker violent agents than goondas or Russia’s mafias. The goondas are so powerful in some areas, the colonies or slums of India, that they become the local governance in a sense. They themselves govern the slums. There’s an absence of state in the slums. But in China, thugs-for-hire can never grow to be that powerful. Why? Because the state is extremely powerful. The CCP is extremely powerful. In a way, the “middle layer” in India is much thicker and more powerful than in China. My book really talks about the middle layer between state and society in China, which is my contribution. But in a comparative sense, this middle layer in China is actually so much weaker in comparison with countries such as India.

CDT: Whereas the Indian middle layer can exercise political autonomy…

Ong: Correct … to the extent that the state actually has to listen to them because they deliver votes to local politicians.

CDT: Is that just a product of democracy? Goondas are able to control local elections so the government must listen, whereas in China there are no meaningful local elections? You deal with this issue in your book when discussing Xi Jinping’s “Sweeping Black” campaign, “village tyrants,” and local elections. 

Ong: I think elections give society a better capacity to organize itself. The goondas’ capacity to organize voting blocks gives them power, compared to an autocracy where such mechanisms would not exist. Fundamentally, China is a powerful state. I’m not saying Singapore is a good comparison with China but if you look at Singapore’s elections, the state is also very powerful. The ruling political party is very powerful. So even with elections, it’s difficult to imagine any societal organization that is able to organize society into a block that could hold the state ransom. Democracy has something to do with it but it is not the only explanation and it is no guarantee.

CDT: So this “middle layer,” I think it’s a very interesting concept. How is this different from civil society? Is this a form of Chinese civil society? 

Ong: Civil societies are organized societies. They are registered societal groups to the extent that in China the state can regulate them. But, the middle layer that I talked about is the informal middle layer between state and society. They are not organized in any way, shape, or form. The difference between thugs-for-hire and the mafia is that they are not organized. Social brokers, they are not organized. They are volunteers.

CDT: And there’s no connection between, let’s say, a social broker in one neighborhood and another neighborhood. These are people who don’t know each other and don’t share the same political goals. 

Ong: Correct. The strength of social brokers is embedded within their particular community. They can only be effective in that particular community. If they go to the next community, they don’t know the people. They don’t have social capital. They become a nobody.

CDT: You wrote about residents who are not local—migrant workers—who complain that they are never invited to join zigaiwei or join efforts to mobilize the masses just because they have no local standing—even though they might have interest in joining. Why do communities not invite these people to join?

Ong: Imagine you’re in a chengzhongcun, (城中村, or a village-in-the-city) … migrant workers are merely renters. If houses get demolished, they can move to another chengzhongcun, even though it’s mafan (麻烦, or “an annoyance”) for them. In a way, they have no stake in the game. They don’t own property. They don’t lose any money if they do not get compensation. They can simply move away, although they can also be called upon to support certain campaigns.

CDT: Thugs-for-hire are disorganized. They’re just informal. You have a great list of descriptors calling them ruffians, hooligans, people recently released from jail, etc. But you also say the “Sweeping Black” campaign was, in some ways, potentially an effort to prevent thugs-for-hire from turning into organized mafias or to break up thugs-for-hire that had already successfully made the transition into powerful criminal syndicates. Could you elaborate on that?

Ong: I would word it slightly differently in the sense that I think the “Sweeping Black” campaign targeted a range of underground, violent, “black” actors ranging from, at the very bottom of the ring, thugs-for-hire up to very sophisticated mafias—sophisticated meaning they’re actually organized heishehui (黑社会, or “mafias”). They actually belong to heishehui factions. They have rules which govern how the organizations work. They operate casinos. They operate businesses. They sometimes try to bribe and sometimes try to do it legitimately. They collude with the state, with local governments. The “Sweeping Black” campaign is trying to sever the relationship between criminal, violent actors and local governments. In a way, thugs-for-hire sit at the very bottom of the range of actors that they are trying to target. I see the “Sweeping Black” campaign as a vindication of my argument about thugs-for-hire because Xi Jinping saw these people at the bottom who could evolve into more sophisticated mafias. I’m sure there are sophisticated mafias around in China but that is not what my book is about. Xi Jinping is trying to sever the ties between local governments and these thugs-for-hire. He saw that they could pose a threat to the party’s legitimacy.

CDT: It could turn into a situation like India. 

Ong: Correct. These people have the potential to become more powerful than local governments. 

CDT: In your conclusion, you write that ethnographic research in the Xi era is nearly impossible, whereas in the Hu-Wen era you were free to roam the streets and walk into government offices, although you did face barriers as well. Can you provide any specific instances?

Ong: I can’t provide a specific example but I can talk about how I think the Chinese studies field has changed, which is the key message. I think China studies is undergoing a structural shift. For the past 30 years, our main primary source of data has actually been the field, China. That has more or less closed off now. The pandemic has made it worse in the short- and the medium-term. Part of this book draws on data from media but media is also increasingly censored, [with a corresponding increase in] self-censorship. Robust research relies on accurate data. If you don’t have data, how do we then produce research? This is a question that I think China scholars will have to grapple with. I’m lucky that my book is done. This is a big question that I need to think about as far as my next book is concerned. I think China scholars will have to grapple with it. 

CDT: Your book is dedicated “to all those who received the short end of the stick in the state’s ambitious scheme.” Any final thoughts you wish to share on the plight of those you got to know during the course of your research?

Ong: I think China’s ambitious urbanization scheme is the envy of many people. It has enriched a small number of Chinese citizens, including real estate developers, local government officials, and some urban households, those who engage with huangniu for instance. But I think a lot of people were made worse off because they didn’t have the power to bargain with the state and they didn’t have the power to organize themselves—into collective actions, for instance.



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/09/interview-lynette-ong-on-outsourcing-repression-in-demolitions-and-land-seizures/
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