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Arab Spring, Chinese Winter
Just after the streets of Tunisia and Egypt erupted, China saw a series
of "Jasmine" protests--until the government stopped them cold. Its
methods were subtler than they had been at Tiananmen Square, and more
insidious. Was the regime's defensive reaction just paranoia? Or is the
Chinese public less satisfied--and more combustible--than it appears?
IFRAME: f1e670274
By James Fallows
[fallows-wide.jpg]
Image credit: Adam Dean/Panos Pictures
Something big is happening in China, and it started soon after the
onset of the "Arab Spring" demonstrations and regime changes first in
Tunisia and then in Egypt: the most serious and widespread wave of
repression since the Tiananmen Square crackdowns 22 years ago. Of
course, "worst since Tiananmen Square" does not mean "as bad as
Tiananmen Square." As the government has taken pains to ensure, there
have been no coordinated nationwide protests so far, and troops from
the People's Liberation Army, in their instantly recognizable green
uniforms, have not played the major role that they did then in
containing dissent. Instead, enforcement around the country has been
left mainly to regular police, typically in their dark-blue uniforms;
the much-feared "urban management" patrols known as chengguan, also in
dark blue; large reserve armies of plainclothesmen; and many other less
visible parts of the state's internal-security apparatus, which now has
a larger budget than China's regular military does.
Special Reports: Chinas's Rise
Unlike in 1989, for most people in most of the country, life and
business since the beginning of the Arab Spring have hummed along
relatively normally. The main domestic concerns in China at the moment
are rapid inflation, especially in food prices; a severe long-term
nationwide drought (broken by occasional severe localized flooding),
which has threatened farms in the country's normally wet southern
provinces and brought Dust Bowl conditions to parts of the normally dry
north; and widening scandals and public fear about tainted food
supplies. In May, a report based on figures from the Chinese Ministry
of Health showed that cancer had become the country's leading cause of
death, which is an unusual and revealing distinction. In poorer
countries, infectious diseases are usually the main killers; in richer
ones, heart disease and other consequences of a sedentary, wealthy
lifestyle. The rising prevalence of cancer, including in "cancer
villages" near factories or mines in China's still-poor countryside,
was taken even by Chinese commentators as another indication of the
urgency of dealing with the environmental consequences of the country's
nonstop growth. For modern China, though, all of these are familiar
concerns.
A set of less familiar problems developed with amazing speed early in
the year. In mid-January, Hu Jintao met Barack Obama in Washington, on
what would be Hu's last official visit to the United States. In a
little more than a year, Hu will finish his second five-year term as
president and relinquish the job, presumably to anointee/Vice President
Xi Jinping. The meetings in Washington were as constructive and
positive-toned as such events can be. Obama gave Hu the gala White
House state dinner (which my wife and I attended) that he had notably
not received on his previous American visit: five years earlier, George
W. Bush had offered Hu only a lunch at the White House, an omission the
more startling given the standard Chinese practice of building even the
most trivial business meeting around a celebratory banquet. Officials
from both sides noted their areas of political and economic
disagreement (arms sales to Taiwan, status of the Dalai Lama, etc.) but
also signed numerous cooperative agreements, in fields ranging from
clean-energy research to student exchanges and increased military
interactions. President Ben Ali had been forced from power in Tunisia
just days before Hu Jintao traveled to Washington. The Tahrir Square
protests against Hosni Mubarak in Egypt began just after Hu returned to
Beijing, and were soon followed by the uprisings in Jordan, Yemen,
Syria, and Libya. The spread of protest from one Arab-Islamic country
to its neighbors might have seemed predictable. Less so was the effect
in China.
__________________________________________________________________
Video: James Fallows discusses the recent crackdowns with China analyst
Damien Ma.
__________________________________________________________________
On Sunday afternoon, February 20, while Muammar Qaddafi's troops were
shooting into unarmed crowds in Benghazi, a handful of Chinese staged
the first of a projected series of weekly "Jasmine" protests designed
to extend the spirit of the Arab Spring protests to several major
Chinese cities. The demonstration in Beijing was held in front of a
McDonald's restaurant at the Wangfujing intersection, not far from the
Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. That day, several dozen
demonstrators were matched by about the same number of foreign
reporters, plus large numbers of passersby and onlookers (Wangfujing on
a weekend is one of Beijing's most jammed areas) and larger groups of
uniformed and plainclothes police.
Among the onlookers was Jon Huntsman Jr. with his family. Huntsman,
then in his last weeks as the U.S. ambassador to China before returning
to run for the presidency, looked like a Chinese pop-culture caricature
of a cool-cat American. He was wearing sunglasses--the day was cold but
brilliantly clear--and a Top Gun-style brown-leather aviator jacket
with a big American-flag patch on the left shoulder. He had become a
well-known figure in Beijing, from his bike rides around town and his
command of spoken Mandarin, and he was quickly picked out by Chinese in
the crowd and captured on camera phones in photos and a video that soon
spread across the Internet.
Special Reports: Democracy
Even though Huntsman maintained that he'd been out on a family stroll
and happened by the protest inadvertently, no one in China believed
that, and the video of him with two strapping sons, misidentified as
bodyguards, quickly circulated in China as proof that the United States
was engineering the protests. I don't know whether Huntsman's presence
was an accident. I do know that having America's senior representative
on the scene was damaging, given the hypersensitivity of the Chinese
government and many citizens to the merest hint of foreign meddling in
domestic affairs. (On the most-circulated video, a Chinese man yells at
Huntsman, "You want chaos for China, don't you?") It also illustrated
the awkwardness of Huntsman's staying on as ambassador to America's
most important partner/rival country while publicly contemplating a run
against the president who had appointed him.
Within two days, the street outside the Wangfujing McDonald's had been
almost entirely blocked by out-of-nowhere "street repair" construction
hoardings. The following Sunday, when the next Jasmine march was
supposed to take place, almost no demonstrators appeared in Wangfujing.
Instead there were large numbers of foreign reporters and tourists, and
countless hundreds of security forces. Jasmine demonstrators in
Shanghai mustered a larger showing that day, but that turned out to be
a high-water mark. By late February, the Jasmine "movement" was on its
way to being decisively shut down.
My wife and I were in China, mainly Beijing, through February and
March, so we had a chance to see how this movement tentatively built
itself and was then quelled, at least for a while. One of the realities
hardest to convey about modern China (and Atlantic readers know that I
certainly have tried over the years) is how life there can be
simultaneously so wide-open and so tightly controlled. In most of the
country and for most people's pursuits, this Chinese Winter that
followed an Arab Spring left life looking normal. The economy kept
growing; farmers worried about their crops and students about their
tests; engineers designed new high-speed rail lines. I was in China
mainly to report on the country's big high-tech ambitions, and there
was absolutely nothing about my interviews or factory visits that was
not business as usual.
Yet for those in China who defined their business as involving politics
of any sort, the pressure was intense. First, in February, a large
number of the country's human-rights and public-interest lawyers (yes,
they exist) were arrested or detained, or were disappeared, in the
style of Pinochet's Chile. Once they were gone, people they might have
represented and defended--writers, professors, bloggers, activists of
many sorts--were arrested or made to disappear too. The Nobel Committee
expressed concern not just that the most recent recipient of the Peace
Prize, the civil-rights activist Liu Xiaobo, was still imprisoned but
that they had not heard anything from him for months. "Signs of
tightening control have been visible for several years," Joshua
Rosenzweig, a human-rights official in Hong Kong, wrote in March. "But
the authorities are now employing a range of new, illegal methods to
silence their critics ... Most terrifying of all is the way in which
enforced disappearance appears to have become almost routine."
Apart from Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese activist best known around the world
is the artist Ai Weiwei. Inside China he had, among other causes,
sought investigations into the lax building standards that led to
thousands of schoolchildren's deaths in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008.
On April 3 of this year, as he was about to board a plane in Beijing
for Hong Kong, he was detained too. Eventually he was charged with tax
evasion, and remained in legal jeopardy even after his release in June.
"If the authorities can detain a figure of such stature arbitrarily and
hold him incommunicado as long as they want with no access to family or
legal counsel, then no one in China is safe from the whims and
anxieties of those in power," Wei Jingsheng, who himself had served 15
years in prison for political crimes before being released to the
United States in the 1990s, wrote in the Christian Science Monitor
after the arrest.
I realize that a chronicle of such cases becomes tedious, especially
with unfamiliar names. But every day, new names appeared--on foreign
news sites, not in the Chinese press--along with other illustrations of
a society politically closing up and cracking down. Conferences with
international attendees were canceled at the last minute. So too, with
one day's notice, was a prestigious annual debate tournament, among
teams from 16 leading Chinese universities. The topic, a
reconsideration of the ideals set out for China a century ago in the
revolution that overthrew the last Qing emperor, in 1911, was deemed
too sensitive. Foreign journalists were one by one called in "for tea,"
code for a cautionary talk with security officials. Usually the
officials warned that the journalists would be expelled if they
violated "rules"--some newly imposed, some long on the books but not
enforced--requiring advance official permission before interviewing
Chinese citizens.
Church meetings were disrupted. Members of "sensitive" ethnic
groups--Tibetans, Muslim Uighurs, Inner Mongolians, all of whose home
districts had been scenes of ongoing protest--came in for special
scrutiny. One day in March, major boulevards in Beijing suddenly were
lined with older women, bundled up in overcoats and with red armbands
identifying them as public-safety patrols, who sat on stools at 20-yard
intervals and kept watch for disruption. They had no practical effect
except as reminders that the authorities were on guard and in control.
During the earliest stages of the Arab Spring, the mainstream Chinese
media virtually ignored its existence. Then, as the drama in Egypt
became un-ignorable, coverage in China emphasized the dangerous chaos
and excesses. Then the theme became: whether or not such upheaval made
sense for anyone else, it was the wrong way for China and would
jeopardize the country's hard-won gains. Global Times, a nationalist
paper, said of Western protests about Ai Weiwei's arrest: "The West's
behavior aims at disrupting the attention of Chinese society and
attempts to modify the value system of the Chinese people."
In a way, the most surprising and thoroughgoing change in Chinese daily
life was in access to the Internet. As I wrote in these pages three
years ago ("The Connection Has Been Reset," March 2008), the genius of
China's Internet censorship has been its flexible repression. The
filtering system known officially as Golden Shield and unofficially as
the Great Firewall made finding unauthorized material just difficult
enough that the great majority of Chinese citizens wouldn't bother.
Meanwhile, enough loopholes and pressure valves remained open that
people who really cared about escaping its confines always could. A
very significant loophole took the form of the government's blind eye
toward VPNs--"Virtual Private Networks," which gave anyone willing to
spend a dollar or two a week safe passage through the Great Firewall.
You signed up for a VPN service, you made your connection, and from
that point on you prowled the Internet just as if you were logged on
from London or New York.
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