On April 9, 2021, the Chinese Cyberspace Administration’s Central Network Information Office Reporting Center for Illegal and Undesirable Information promulgated a circular letter concerning the pervasive and unwelcome presence of “harmful information involving historical nihilism” on the internet. Citing the Qing-era poet Gong Zizhen’s astute observation that “to exterminate a country, one must first destroy its history [灭人之国，必先去其史],” the communiqué warned of efforts by ideological saboteurs, driven by “ulterior motives,” to spread “historical nihilistic misrepresentations on the internet, maliciously distorting, denigrating, and negating the history of the Party, the state, and the military, in an attempt to confuse.” Such misinformation could “distort ideas,” “bewilder the people’s minds,” and erode the “Four Matters of Confidence [四个自信]” — confidence in the Party’s chosen path, its guiding theories, its political system, and its culture. So-called historical nihilism was therefore to be treated as an existential threat to the regime. (READ MORE: This Exposes the Chinese Communist Party’s Deep Insecurity)
Red China has been described as a “perfect dictatorship” predicated on omnipresent surveillance and zero tolerance for political dissent, but even the heavily censored Chinese internet is far too vast for the Cyberspace Administration’s thought police to monitor effectively. As has always been the case with totalitarian states, this shortfall in state capacity is being rectified with the help of domestic informants. The Reporting Center for Illegal and Undesirable Information has called upon members of the Chinese public to help “maintain a clean cyberspace” and “create a good atmosphere of public opinion” by “taking the initiative to play a role in social supervision,” and reporting nefarious bourgeois historical fabrications and other forms of harmful information has become nearly effortless — all you need to do is visit www.12377.cn, text 12377, or download the Central Cyberspace Administration’s easy-to-use “Network Reporting” app, and you too can do your part to keep the internet free of opinions that might distort, negate, or disparage the apparently unblemished history of the Chinese Community Party, “new China,” “revolutionary culture,” and “advanced socialist culture.” (Standard message and data rates may apply.)
The mobilization of digital domestic informants has proved an astounding success for China’s modern-day answer to Oceania’s Ministry of Truth, with the agency proudly announcing that in April 2023 alone some 17.6 million “illegal and undesirable information reports” were accepted nationwide, an increase of 5.4 per cent month-over-month, and 9.9 percent year-over-year. George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, described a dictatorship in which
Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it…All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.
That same ferocity can now be directed at Chinese thought-criminals with a few keystrokes or thumb-swipes, by informants eager to “play a role in social supervision.” No doubt the submission of a report of illegal and undesirable information is accompanied by that particular frisson often associated with the exercise of power over one’s fellow man.
China’s reliance on informants is not limited to cyberspace. University lecture halls are increasingly filled with xuesheng xinxiyuan [学生信息员], or student informants, who assiduously monitor the political attitudes of their teachers and classmates. “In addition to the high-tech cameras that are already installed in classrooms for monitoring lectures and discussion,” writes Jue Jiang in her recent study “Academic Freedom in China: An Empirical Inquiry through the Lens of the System of Student Informants,” those ubiquitous “student informants are viewed by authorities as key information nodes for a bottom-up, masses-based form of surveillance and control … students are now publishing and circulating their reporting on professors online, doing so with pride, using their real name, and demonstrating their (officially approved or commended) ‘right political sense.’”
To take one notorious example, on March 9, 2023, the Communist Party Committee of the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics announced an investigation into the heterodox political opinions of Chen Saibin, a lecturer at the university’s school of economics and management. Chen was accused of “moral misconduct” by an informant who had sounded the alarm over a series of “inappropriate remarks” by the economist, namely the observation that “China was currently dependent on food imports from the United States and Europe.” It should be noted that since 2004 China has indeed been a net importer of agricultural products, importing more cereals and more dairy products than any other country on earth. As Zongyuan Zoe Liu of the Council on Foreign Relations has demonstrated, “between 2000 and 2020, the country’s food self-sufficiency ratio decreased from 93.6 percent to 65.8 percent. Changing diet patterns have also driven up China’s imports of edible oils, sugar, meat, and processed foods. In 2021, the country’s edible oil import-dependency ratio reached nearly 70 percent, almost as high as its crude oil import dependence.” This is the sort of thing a Chinese student of economics should be expected to know and perhaps work to ameliorate, but to teach it to them, in Xi Jinping’s China, now constitutes “moral misconduct.”
Digital domestic informants and xuesheng xinxiyuan are by definition willing participants in China’s surveillance state, but sometimes participation in this system is unwitting. Bitter Winter’s He Yuyan has recently reported on the implementation of a Buddhist and Taoist Clerical Personnel Information Query System, which has been joined by a similar Information Query System for Islamic, Catholic, and Christian Clergy. These databases allow users to check whether a given priest, monk, imam, or other type of cleric is a verified member of the government-controlled China Buddhist Association, China Taoist Association, Patriotic Catholic Church, China Islamic Association, or Three-Self Church (all other faiths operating outside these authorized religions are considered xie jiao [邪教], or heterodox teachings). As He Yuyan has cleverly pointed out, such queries are inherently dangerous for both the target object of the search (if the cleric is unauthorized), but also for the user, for “if the person claiming to be a priest, pastor, or imam is not found in the data base, the system will inform the user accordingly. But of course, the authorities will know about the request and may easily identify both the ‘illegal’ clergy and the person reporting them.” Users who find out that their cleric is unsanctioned will have essentially told on themselves, admitting to some form of contact with a heterodox religious figure.
Religious organizations in particular have been subjected to heightened governmental scrutiny in recent months, as the Xi regime’s sinicization campaign enters full swing. The Administrative Measures for Religious Schools, which went into effect in 2021, require theological seminaries to devote a minimum of 30 percent of classroom time to the study of Marxism–Leninism and Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, the latter of which is so superficial that 30 minutes should more than suffice. Article 24 of the Administrative Measures mandates that “religious colleges and universities shall establish reward and punishment systems for faculty members,” while Article 48 mandates inspections to “assess the ideological and political performance of the teachers, ethics, professional level, and work performance of teachers and administrators, and the results of the assessment shall be used as the basis for appointment or dismissal, promotion, reward, or punishment.” In order to reinforce these new rules, Christian professors from all over China were summoned to the Central Institute of Socialism in early June of 2023 for an indoctrination session on “advanced Socialist culture” and the “sinicization of Christianity.” Enhanced bureaucratic oversight, coupled with the omnipresent threat of student informants, heralds the end of Chinese seminaries as anything other than propagandistic arms of the oppressive state.
Organized religions and “evil cults” are not, however, the only institutions being subjected to this kind of scrutiny. On May 21, 2023, the National Art Museum of China, the repository of so much of the nation’s cultural heritage, received a seemingly innocuous letter from Xi Jinping praising the museum on the 60th anniversary of its opening. The first half of the letter is full of the usual politesse, providing “warm congratulations” for the NAMOC’s “positive results in the fields of collection, exhibition, public education, foreign exchange, etcetera” and its role in the “vigorous development of the art industry in New China.” Yet things took an ominous turn in the second half of the letter, as Xi added that “it is hoped that the National Art Museum of China will adhere to the correct political direction, adhering to the concept of the People First, and practice the core values of socialism” as part of the “the creation of a new glory of socialist culture.” It is inevitable, warns Hu Zimo, that the museum “will lose its purpose and nature as a museum. It will become just another propaganda center,” just like the ancestral temples that have been gutted and festooned with poor-quality images of Mao and Xi, the theological seminaries that must spend their time discussing “new era socialist ideology,” and the universities where professors live in fear of unknowingly committing “moral misconduct” by describing the world as it is.
The Beijing regime brooks no dissent, or even the slightest semblance of dissent. During a May 13, 2023 show in Beijing, the comedian Li Haoshi joked about the sight of his two adopted shelter dogs chasing a squirrel: they “displayed excellent conduct, capable of winning their battles [作风优良，能打胜仗].” Li’s joke is predicated on an inversion of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s slightly clumsy motto, provided by General Secretary Xi himself: “to be capable of winning battles with excellent conduct [能打胜仗，作风优良].” Li’s comedy act caught the attention of the Beijing Cultural Law Enforcement Team and the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism, and the comedian was promptly detained, forced to apologize, and now faces a prison sentence of three years, while the company he was working with, Shanghai Xiaoguo Culture Media, was fined an astounding 13 million yuan (around $1.8 million). Some of those who defended Li on the Sina Weibo social media platform were tracked down and punished with administrative detention. As the Xinhua New Agency set forth, “every person must hold the Army in awe,” and “no offense to any single character [of its motto] is allowed!’” Journalists like Qiu Ziming and Luo Changping have likewise been imprisoned for “infringing the honor and reputation of heroes and martyrs,” in their cases not for humorous comments but for questioning the number of Chinese casualties during the 2020–2021 border clashes with India and questioning China’s role in the Korean War, respectively.
As informants fan out across the internet and educational institutions, as cultural law enforcement agencies monitor what is left of the sphere of Chinese public opinion, and as “predictive policing” powered by artificial intelligence allows the authorities to know the second a banner is unfurled in public, it is clear that the Chinese Community Party has entered a new phase of internal repression. The writing has been on the wall for some time. Back in 2004, the influential Chinese legal scholar Jiang Shigong (b. 1963), a professed devotee of the German political theorist Carl Schmitt, responded to the Ukrainian democratic Orange Revolution with a warning to China’s leadership:
The crucial questions in politics are not questions of right and wrong, but of obedience and disobedience. If you do not submit to political authority, then “If I say you’re wrong, you’re wrong, even if you’re right”…The most important question in politics is making a clear distinction between friends and enemies. Between friends and enemies, there is no question of freedom, only violence and subjugation. This is the reality of politics.
Jiang, now one of the most prominent exponents of Xi Jinping Thought, has served as the regime’s top adviser on Hong Kong affairs, even being described as Xi’s “black hand” or “dark force” (黑手). He has successfully advocated for a policy of authoritarian intervention on the part of the mainland toward an increasingly beleaguered Hong Kong.
“There is no question of freedom, only violence and subjugation.” Here Jiang has provided an altogether fitting description of China’s scientific socialist dictatorship. Mao Zedong, in his 1942 “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art,” declared that the Communist Party’s purpose in the cultural arena was “to ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people fight the enemy with one heart and one mind.” The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was designed to forge that machine, and reduce the Chinese people to single-mindedness by force, but it failed spectacularly. Xi Jinping’s new Cultural Revolution has the advantage of digital surveillance, artificial intelligence, and a new cadre of willing executioners, but it fail in the end just the same.
The internal contradictions of China’s new socialism are too glaring to survive for long. Consider the Central Network Information Office’s system for reporting “historical nihilism.” Users are urged to report any information that
(1) Distorts the history of the Party, the history of New China, the history of reform and opening up, and the history of socialist development; (2) attacks the Party’s leadership, guiding ideology, principles, and policies; (3) slanders heroes and martyrs; (4) denies China’s excellent traditional culture, revolutionary culture, and advanced socialist culture.
The so-called heroes of the Party were the ones who endeavored to destroy China’s “excellent traditional culture” before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution, as they destroyed temples, smashed gravestones, shattered statues and friezes, burned books, and murdered intellectuals and clerics alike, accusing them of being “ox demons and snake spirits,” “bad elements,” “capitalist roaders,” “traitors,” “stinking old ninths,” and other dysphemisms. While the Cultural Revolution ostensibly came to an end in 1976, Xi’s regime carries on its legacies, seizing ancestral and folk religion temples, destroying Buddhist statues, shutting down churches, burning religious texts, and imprisoning publishers. While warning of the existential dangers posed by historical nihilism, the communist government positively revels in it. For the Chinese Cyberspace Administration to cite Gong Zizhen’s maxim that “to exterminate a country, one must first destroy its history” indicates a total and almost exquisite obliviousness toward Red China’s self-destructive, generations-old war on its own history.
It was the renowned philosopher and diplomat Hu Shi (1891–1962) who sounded some of the earliest warnings about the fundamentally “un-Chinese” and ahistorical nature of the Chinese Communist Party. Hu remained confident, however, in the imperishability of Chinese culture. “Culture itself is conservative,” he wrote, adding that:
There is always a limit to violent change in the various spheres of culture, namely, that it can never completely wipe out the conservative nature of an indigenous culture. This is the “Chinese basis” the destruction of which has been feared by numerous cautious people of the past as well as the present. This indigenous basis is found in the life and habits produced by a certain indigenous environment and history. Simply stated, it is the people — all the people. This is the “basis.” There is no danger that this basis will be destroyed.
The Chinese government realizes this and has attempted to cast itself as the guardian of Chinese culture, all the while seeking to radically transform or, failing that, to destroy it. Yet scientific socialism is unable to grapple with the essential nature of culture.
Friedrich Nietzsche, in his 1874 essay “Schopenhauer as Educator,” provided what he called the “secret of all culture” — “it does not give artificial limbs, wax noses, or spectacles for the eyes — a thing that could buy such gifts is but the base coin of education. But it is rather a liberation, a removal of all the weeds and rubbish and vermin that attack the delicate shoots, the streaming forth of light and warmth, the tender dropping of the night rain.” Culture is not a revolutionary machine that imposes “one heart and one mind.” It is the constant production of delicate shoots, cotyledonary germinations that adorn the intellectual and spiritual life of the people — all the people, as Hu Shi maintained. Xi Jinping and his apparatchiks are only able to trade in the “base coin of education,” or rather the base coin of indoctrination. They can provide neither light nor warmth, only violence and subjugation, anonymous accusations and administrative detention, ransacked temples and sprawling concentration camps. The Four Matters of Confidence cannot erode fast enough.
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