Xi Jinping has purged China of hope – but he can’t stamp out small acts of resistance
The country has been changed utterly under its ‘red emperor’. Now I fear we’ll give up on imagining an alternative
Chinese President Xi Jinping this week, at the Great Hall of the People, Beijing. Photograph: Andy Wong/AP
The
messages are scrawled on the toilet walls and across stall doors, on
the tiles and next to the holders for paper. In Chinese characters, with
the occasional English phrase, they echo the words of the protest banner
that was unfurled across a busy overpass in Beijing: “No to
confinement, we want freedom! No to lies, we want dignity! No to the
great leader, we want to vote!”
The stunning act of defiance at the bridge took place on the eve of the 20th Communist party congress,
when Xi Jinping officially embarked on a custom-breaking third term as
China’s supreme leader, surrounded by a politburo stacked with his loyalists. The party’s narrative of confidence and triumph was nevertheless punctured by one man’s disobedience.
Like the rumblings of thunder that follow a flash of lightning, the daring proclamation has reverberated
across the country, despite the bridge protester’s forced
disappearance. Public restrooms, one of the last physical spaces in
China beyond the government’s watch, have emerged as an unexpected venue for dissent.
Replicas of the original banner have been spotted in London across
Westminster Bridge and outside the Chinese embassy. Overseas Chinese
students have also put up posters in solidarity on telephone poles and
university noticeboards.
I
click through the images from campuses across North America and Europe.
I try to picture the anonymous young faces behind the handwritten notes
and hastily designed placards, and catch glimpses of myself from a
decade ago. I was one of these students, making sense of a new country
while for ever tied to the old home, sizing up newly gained freedoms and
wondering how to best exercise them.
When I
left China for graduate school in the US in 2009, it still seemed
possible to navigate the world with a map of conventional wisdom. My
birth country has now become so unrecognisable that I sometimes wonder
if the past was a figment of my imagination. With the benefit of
hindsight, one can clearly see the trajectory of Beijing’s authoritarian
ascent, as the tightening of control began before Xi’s reign. Now, the
speculation about how long the red emperor might rule carries the same
whiff of denial as the old talk of “Xi the reformer” when he first took office, and the recurring fantasies of a palace coup. The obsession with an individual tyrant overlooks the system that enables that tyranny.
In
Xi’s latest address at the party congress, there was no mention of
“political reform”, a key phrase that had appeared in all previous
reports since the early 1980s. The significance of this shift is not so
much that the party has changed, but that it no longer needs the
pretence – just like the all-male,
24-member politburo that was unveiled last week, breaking another
decades-old convention where one or two women held token seats (though
never on the standing committee).
From the very
beginning, gestures to “democracy” and “reform” were in service to the
Chinese leadership. After the disasters of the Mao era, the party needed
new legal and institutional scaffolding to reclaim legitimacy, and to
facilitate the transition from a planned economy to integration with the
capitalist market. Before Xi consolidated power, competing factions at
the top and opaqueness within the bureaucracy meant there was limited
flexibility to question and experiment. Individuals and civil society
groups manoeuvred this fragile space in order to push for social
progress.
Yet the party has never relented on
the issues that are central to its power, or hesitated to use force
against perceived challenges. A periodic loosening of controls is
wielded as an effective tool to gather information and maintain control.
With the end of performative deference to legal rules and institutional
norms, a party that governs by fear and patronage will embolden the
worst instincts of the bureaucracy, where loyalty is rewarded over
competence, power is rarely held accountable, and mistakes in policy
become exceedingly difficult to correct.
The
future is grim, not just for China and its people. Many in the west who
have been drumming up a “new cold war” with China take every instance of
Beijing’s abuses as proof of a “China threat”
and justification for expanding the national security state. The new
cold warriors are not so different from their counterparts a generation
ago, who preached that marketisation and free trade would usher in
political liberalisation. Both narratives stem from an unabashed belief
in the supremacy of their own system: the “end of history”. Shifting
blame to a faceless foreign other is a convenient diversion from raging
crises at home.
The primary struggle in the world today is not the essentialist framing of China
versus the US, east versus west. Nor is it the reductionist idea of
democracy versus autocracy, freedom versus captivity. The rights and
liberties taken for granted in the ostensibly democratic west have been
subsidised by cheap labour and imports from authoritarian countries. The
free flow of capital demands that toiling bodies be kept in place.
The
fundamental choice is between clinging to an old order crumbling under
its own weight, and forging a new world while there’s still time. We’re
all exiles from a past we thought we knew, stranded on an ice cap amid
warming seas. We can fight each other for the receding higher ground, or
build lifeboats together: alternative futures of mutual care in which
value is not conditional on exclusion or domination.
I
cannot recall when I entered a state of perpetual mourning. I grieve
for the country I left with no certain prospect of return, the direction
it’s heading in, the plight of the world, the foreclosed possibilities.
Sorrow tears into my organs and gnaws at my bones. But what I fear more
than pain is numbness: to give in to the powers that be, and give up on
imagining otherwise.
I remind myself that for a
Chinese woman, learning how to read and moving to a foreign country
were once revolutionary acts conceived in fugitive spaces. No control is
absolute. Power at its most menacing and totalising is also insecure
and unsustainable. I hold no illusions about the long night ahead, but
each refusal of injustice preserves an opening. Every act of rebellion,
however spectacular or humble, is a reclamation of the self and a love
letter to a stranger. Across the darkness, another searching gaze
catches the flicker, and a sacred bond is cast: I see you. I feel you.
We are still here.