Strittmatter - We have been harmonised: life in Chinas surveillance state

The China we once knew no longer exists. The China that was with us for forty years the China of reform and opening up is making way for something new. Its time for us to start paying attention. Something is happening in China that the world has never seen before. A new country and a new regime are being born. And its also time for us to take a look at ourselves. Are we ready? Because one thing is becoming increasingly clear: over the coming decades, the greatest challenge for our democracies and for Europe wont be Russia, it will be China. Within its borders, China is working to create the perfect surveillance state, and its engineers of the soul are again trying to craft the new man of whom Lenin, Stalin and Mao once dreamed. And this China wants to shape the rest of the world in its own image.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has placed its leader, Xi Jinping, where no one has been since Mao Zedong. Right at the top. Nothing above him but the heavens. China has a helmsman once more. Xi is the most powerful Chinese leader in decades, and he rules over a China that is stronger than it has been for centuries. An ambitious nation, readying itself to become even stronger economically, politically and militarily. The Wests self-destruction has fallen into this nations lap like a gift from the gods. With 21st-century information technology and its radical new possibilities for control and manipulation, the regime has instruments of power to which no previous autocracy has ever had access. Xi and his party are reinventing dictatorship for the information age, in deliberate competition with the systems of the West. And this has huge implications for the worlds democracies.

Even within China, the CCPs plans are ambitious, but one shouldnt underestimate the hold that an autocrat has over his subjects minds. The state has the ability to erase not just lives, but minds, in order to reformat them. The Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and the years that followed, provided a powerful demonstration of this fact. The date 4 June 2019 sees the 30th anniversary of the day the Chinese democracy movement was brutally crushed, and the Party has good reason to celebrate. In hindsight, its act of violence was a success a greater success than anyone could have imagined at the time. The blood-letting gave the Party new life, as well as an opportunity to show what its mind-control apparatus could do, long before the advent of the digital age. Inside China, the memory of the massacre has practically been wiped out; the state-ordered amnesia is complete. And he who controls the past the CCP understands this just as well as George Orwell did also controls the future.

This is a message from the future, if things dont go so well. At the moment, things really arent going well. Thats why I wrote this book. It was born on the night Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America, and was finished in the months that saw Xi Jinping chosen by history, in the words of the journal of the Central Party School in Beijing, Qiushi (Seeking Truth). History is often a sluggish tide on which we float without ever being aware that its moving. But that isnt the case right now: we are living through a time when the current of history seems almost physically tangible. Something is happening, to us and to China, and the two sides can no longer be separated.

The new age is one in which facts have been abolished; the Western world is suddenly mired in fake news and manipulated by alternative facts. For me, though, there is nothing new about it. Its a life Ive been living for twenty years, as a correspondent in Turkey (from 2005 to 2012), but above all in China. I studied in China in the 1980s, then worked there as a journalist from 1997 to 2005, and again from 2012 to 2018.

Government by lies is no doubt as old as the institution of government itself, yet we in the West are shocked by the return of autocrats and would-be autocrats to our midst, and with them the return of the shameless lie as an instrument of control. We had settled into the comfortable belief that these techniques and the political systems associated with them were obsolete. Then Donald Trump was elected as the most powerful man in a democracy that many had regarded as exemplary. A man who is serious about acting on his hatred and his ignorance, and who is setting out to destroy the foundations of the privileged lives we have been living over the past few decades. A man who may rub his rival China up the wrong way, but at the same time expresses overt admiration for the limitless power of its ruler. A man who wants to put the screws on Europe. And Trump is not alone. Autocrats everywhere are scenting an opportunity and joining hands with the populist agitators in our own countries. A perfect storm is brewing, for Europe and for democracies everywhere. And while everyone is talking about Trump and the Russians, not nearly enough people are talking about China.

Xi Jinping has promised his people and the world a new age and he is certainly building a new China. Both the Chinese people and the world at large have good reason to be nervous. Where Deng Xiaoping prescribed pragmatism, Xi Jinping has returned to revering ideology: he preaches Marx and practises Lenin with a force and dogmatism not seen for many years and because he senses that Marx no longer speaks to many people, he has added Confucius and a fierce nationalism into the mix. Where Deng preached opening up and curiosity, Xi is sealing China off again.

Not that Xi is trying to force something on his party that goes against the grain. The opposite, in fact: he is fulfilling its most hidden desires with speed and precision. Until recently, more than a few Party cadres were secretly asking themselves: what is it still good for, the Party a vehicle for a long-dead ideology from a long-dead age, almost a hundred years old? But where the Party was starting to smell of decay, Xi gave it new strength and discipline; where it was stagnant and directionless, he breathed a new purpose into it. It thanked him by elevating him into the pantheon of its greatest thinkers during his own lifetime, and endowing him with almost limitless power.

Xi is now reminding everyone that this country was once conquered by the Party in a civil war. China itself was the Partys spoils of victory. In China, the army still belongs to the Party rather than the state. The state, too, belongs to the Party. And the Party well, that seems to belong to him, now. It submits to the man who has given it a sense of purpose, and who is turning a one-party dictatorship back into a one-man dictatorship.