Jekyll2023-10-15T13:22:10+00:00https://jessicabatke.com/feed.xmlJessica BatkeJessica BatkeHolding Sway: China’s United Front Work Department, Known for Its Influence Operations Abroad, Is Even Busier at Home2023-09-29T00:00:00+00:002023-09-29T00:00:00+00:00https://jessicabatke.com/research&writing/UFWD_Holding_Sway<p><strong>By Jessica Batke</strong></p>
<p><strong>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/features/united-front-work-department-domestic">ChinaFile</a> and was republished on <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/03/china-united-front-ccp-religion-sports-influence-operations/">Foreign Policy</a>.</strong></p>
<p>— <br /></p>
<p class="dropcap">Swirling around in brightly-colored inflatables the shape of flying saucers, riders grin as they skid across the ice, bouncing off one another in a winter version of bumper cars. Nearby, more people pedal “ice bikes” and row sleds that look like dragon boats. Others steer snowmobiles along a go-cart-style track. Children glide along in “princess horse-drawn carts” pulled by diminutive steeds.</p>
<p>This winter amusement park, in China’s far northeast, about 100 miles from Vladivostok, comes stocked with snowmobiles and bumper sleds courtesy of the local United Front Work Department (UFWD). In most parts of the world, the UFWD is known—if at all—as a secretive Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organ conducting influence operations abroad. But in Gonghe Village, the local UFWD ponied up nearly one million renminbi in 2022 to purchase “snow sports equipment” for the recreation area, including not just sleds but also items such as safety nets and anti-slip mats. “Gonghe Village . . . takes the development of the ice and snow industry as an important opportunity,” said the village head in a video posted to Douyin, China’s version of Tiktok. “We are strengthening the lifeblood of the rural collective economy in the new era, and taking a solid step towards strengthening the village, enriching the people, and revitalizing the countryside.”</p>
<p>Given the United Front Work Department’s reputation abroad, funding an “ice and snow amusement park” might seem anomalous. This is the organization that has allegedly helped set up illegal Chinese <a href="https://jamestown.org/program/the-long-arm-of-the-lawless-the-prcs-overseas-police-stations/" target="_blank">police outposts</a> in the United States, <a href="https://sinopsis.cz/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/it0.pdf" target="_blank">inserted talking points</a> into Italian political discussions, and <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/article/magic_weapons.pdf" target="_blank">cultivated</a> members of parliament in New Zealand to gin up support for China’s domestic policies, activities in line with what the U.S. Congress has <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1214/text" target="_blank">described</a> as the Department’s “goal of softening opposition to the Chinese Communist Party and its policies throughout the world.”</p>
<p>Yet despite its insidious cloak-and-dagger image in U.S. political debate, the United Front’s mission is neither particularly covert nor aimed solely at people outside China’s borders. “There’s no clear distinction between domestic and overseas united front work,” <a href="https://www.aspi.org.au/report/party-speaks-you" target="_blank">writes</a> China researcher Alex Joske. “This is because the key distinction underlying the United Front is not between domestic and overseas groups, but between the CCP and everyone else.”</p>
<p>“Previous coverage of United Front work has given the impression that its main operations are overseas, which is the opposite of the truth,” says Neil Thomas, Fellow for Chinese Politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. “It’s primarily a domestic apparatus whose tentacles extend beyond China’s borders.” To better understand what “United Front work” means in the domestic context, ChinaFile reviewed some 2,500 procurement notices and related materials posted to the <a href="http://www.ccgp.gov.cn/" target="_blank">Chinese Government Procurement Network</a> website between January 2018 and May 2023. (Information about Gonghe Village’s amusement park costs came directly from a procurement notice announcing the winning supplier.)</p>
<p>Whether the UFWD is buying 24,000 “ethnic unity enters the home” tea sets in Sichuan, or putting surveillance cameras outside 85 different places of religious worship in Shandong, it is pursuing a single mission: namely, to seek out individuals and groups in society outside the Party’s control and cement their status as friends rather than enemies. This mission speaks to the deepest needs and fears of the CCP. Rather than allow for an independent civil society that coalesces around common interests, the United Front aims to yoke influential sectors of society to the Party, reining in their behavior while harnessing their strength and momentum. In general, the Department proffers carrots, in contrast to the sticks wielded by the police and state security organs. Yet, for people whose identities the Party finds threatening, the United Front employs a heavier hand. Though the UFWD’s purchases cannot reveal the ultimate success or failure of any given initiative, they can tell us how the Department is spending its money—and thereby hint at where its priorities lie.</p>
<p>“People don’t appreciate how wide-ranging United Front work is, and it has continued to expand,” says Gerry Groot, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide, whose book <em><a href="https://www.routledge.com/Managing-Transitions-The-Chinese-Communist-Party-United-Front-Work-Corporatism/Groot/p/book/9780415860949" target="_blank">Managing Transitions</a></em> describes the UFWD’s historical role in easing the CCP through turbulent stages of China’s political and social development. “The nature of its work has expanded as China has changed with economic success. Now that they’re having problems, its importance will be stressed again. It will be used to manage frictions created by the economic downturn.” The Xi Jinping administration has emphasized united front work over the last decade, indicating how crucial this <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/26892605" target="_blank">Bolshevik concept</a> is to its vision of China’s governance.</p>
<p class="dropcap">The idea of the united front <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/26892605" target="_blank">was born</a> in 1917 during the Russian Revolution when the Bolsheviks allied with smaller factions of socialists to ensure their survival as they battled for control of Russia. Once in power, they quickly <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/189387" target="_blank">made contact</a> with revolutionaries in China. Through most of the 1920s, the Soviets directed the nascent Chinese Communist Party to ally with its political rival, the much larger and much better-resourced Kuomintang, in order to serve the USSR’s own geo-political ends.</p>
<p>“If you look at it from Stalin’s perspective, he wanted to make sure the bourgeois party, the Kuomintang, would retain a pro-Soviet orientation, and this was done by infiltrating communists into the party,” says Sergey Radchenko, a historian of Russia and China at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Stalin’s idea was: a bigger party which we control through a smaller party.”</p>
<p>This cooperation came to a bloody end when the Kuomintang attacked the Communists and their sympathizers in the spring of 1927. But even after spending nearly a decade dodging Kuomintang assaults in the countryside, the CCP once again allied with the Kuomintang in 1936 to oppose invading Japanese forces. The CCP formed this “Second United Front” under pressure from Moscow, which wanted to prevent Japan from creeping too close to the Soviet border. It was in this context that Mao Zedong made his <a href="https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/article/magic_weapons.pdf" target="_blank">oft-cited</a> comment <a href="https://archive.ph/wip/pO3xG" target="_blank">describing</a> the United Front as one of the Party’s “magic weapons,” along with military struggle and Party building, that would allow the CCP to triumph over its enemies.</p>
<p>After Japanese surrender at the end of World War II, and against Soviet wishes, the CCP pursued a “united front” with intellectuals and members of other political parties, aiming to isolate and defeat the Kuomintang, with which it was now engaged in a civil war. By the time the CCP emerged victorious in 1949, the United Front Work Department was already an established part of the Party’s governance firmament.</p>
<p>Since then, the UFWD’s political might has <a href="https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p328871/pdf/book.pdf?referer=1777" target="_blank">waxed and waned</a>. “Mao himself lost interest in United Front work after 1956, favouring confrontation and ‘class struggle’ over conciliation,” writes University of Adelaide’s Groot. “It was nevertheless revived each time the Party had to recover from a Mao-induced crisis.” Upon Mao’s death, the leadership leaned on the UFWD to help reinvigorate foreign business and investment ties. For a brief moment after the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, it seemed as though the Party might grant more autonomy to United Front allies, such as the eight legally-sanctioned, if largely powerless, “<a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3136835/communist-party-not-chinas-only-political-party-there-are-eight" target="_blank">minor political parties</a>.” But as the reputational damage from Tiananmen faded away with time, so did the leadership’s attention to the UFWD.</p>
<p>That has changed under current Party General Secretary Xi Jinping. The Department’s clout has grown significantly in recent years, researchers studying the UFWD overwhelmingly agree. Xi, by dint of both his father’s and his own <a href="https://jamestown.org/program/united-front-work-19th-party-congress/" target="_blank">work experiences</a>, has had a lifelong front-row seat to united front work and <a href="https://jamestown.org/program/united-front-work-department-magic-weapon-home-abroad/" target="_blank">describes it</a> as a means to “Chinese people’s great rejuvenation.” In 2015 alone, the Party convened its first high-level conference on united front work in nearly a decade, created a governance group to direct united front efforts and <a href="https://www.thechinastory.org/yearbooks/yearbook-2015/forum-ascent/the-expansion-of-the-united-front-under-xi-jinping/" target="_blank">stacked</a> it with high-ranking leaders, and released <a href="https://archive.is/5R61r" target="_blank">regulations</a> to “strengthen and standardize” united front work and “consolidate and develop the patriotic united front.”</p>
<p>More recently, in March 2023, CCP ideological guru Wang Huning—one of the <a href="https://www.palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/the-triumph-and-terror-of-wang-huning/" target="_blank">few individuals</a> to work closely with each of the last three leaders of China—took charge of the united front portfolio in his new role on the country’s powerful Politburo Standing Committee. Wang now sits atop the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the government counterpart to the United Front Work Department, and oversees all united front work more broadly.</p>
<p>Perhaps most importantly, a significant restructuring between 2015 and 2018 <a href="https://jamestown.org/program/reorganizing-the-united-front-work-department-new-structures-for-a-new-era-of-diaspora-and-religious-affairs-work/" target="_blank">added</a> a host of new bureaus to the United Front Work Department’s existing architecture. The Department went from seven bureaus to twelve, subsuming several state organs (and their funding) as well as streamlining the flow of power directly down from the Party center. The new formation <a href="https://jamestown.org/program/the-rise-and-rise-of-the-united-front-work-department-under-xi/" target="_blank">reflected</a> the increasing complexity and importance Beijing ascribed to the Department’s tasks.</p>
<p>The UFWD’s revamped <a href="https://www.aspi.org.au/report/party-speaks-you" target="_blank">org chart</a> serves as a list of the social sectors it seeks to influence. The Department maintains at least one bureau for each of the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>Members of one of the eight officially-sanctioned, non-CCP political parties (a largely vestigial inclusion at this point; though these parties do conduct their own activities, they are not independent; the UFWD has long <a href="https://archive.is/piC0e" target="_blank">vetted</a> all memberships in these parties)</li>
<li>Participants in the “<a href="https://baike.baidu.com/reference/3186062/86f4ScOiX0ugOFBGkoatBYu0AFe4IVEf-HVpkAG2wlTyB-vB006O6Yv9P-tGbg_eSCQ_De3WfHwBtZD-09ZlZn2Ay9XT4w" target="_blank">non-public economy</a>,” which translates to entrepreneurs and private businesses, including companies with foreign investment</li>
<li>Individuals in the “<a href="https://archive.is/jDNb2" target="_blank">new social strata</a>,” namely, the managers and technical staff working in the “non-public economy”; people working in new media; notaries, accountants, lawyers, auditors, industry associations, and chambers of commerce; and freelancers—basically, professionals and knowledge workers</li>
<li>“Xinjiang,” both the geographical region itself, as well the people—most notably members of the Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz ethnic groups—that live there</li>
<li>“Tibet,” similar to the Xinjiang bureau, covers the Tibet Autonomous Region as well as its inhabitants</li>
<li>Other non-Han ethnic groups (besides Tibetans and Uyghurs, the Chinese state somewhat arbitrarily recognizes 53 additional groups)</li>
<li>Religious believers (this work is split between two bureaus, one of which focuses on specific religions, the other of which has functional responsibilities, such as overseeing religious schools)</li>
<li>People of Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan</li>
<li>“Overseas Chinese,” a term (华侨, <em>Huaqiao</em>) that technically only includes Chinese citizens living abroad, but in practice also often includes former Chinese citizens, their offspring, or anyone with Chinese ancestry (华裔, <em>Huayi</em>); this work is also split between two bureaus, one of which has a geographical focus and the other of which specializes in media, culture, and educational efforts</li>
<li>Intellectuals not affiliated with the CCP, as well as influential individuals who have made “positive contributions to society” and are not affiliated with any political party—essentially, people viewed as thought leaders and role models, but who don’t fit into any of the other categories</li>
</ul>
<p>This list represents the sectors of society the Party deems both potentially dangerous and socially influential, requiring dedicated efforts to induce loyalty.</p>
<p>Within each of these sectors, the UFWD must identify people to approach individually. To make its outreach more comprehensive and efficient, the Department has long compiled detailed information about specific targets. In a secret missive from 1940, the United Front Work Department of the Central Committee (then only part of an upstart Communist Party fighting against both the Kuomintang and Japan) exhorted cadres to take a more methodical approach to their united front activities:</p>
<blockquote><p>In the past there was a lack of conscientious investigation and deep understanding of the targets of united front work. We have to carry out a general analysis and have a general understanding of each party, group, stratum, friendly army, etc.; and we must carry out a many-sided, deep, and detailed investigation of the figures actually representative of each party, group, stratum, friendly army, agency, circle, and body. A detailed investigation and separate written record is to be made of these persons: name, age, native place, financial activities, history, changes in thought, political activities, habits, character, peculiarities, social relationships, etc. Without this kind of investigation and record, united front work will become empty and unrealistic.</p></blockquote>
<p>Now, United Front offices throughout the country are bringing their dossiers into the Internet age. Procurement notices call for “smart” or “big data” platforms to “informatize” UFWD work, helping to identify “talents” in society and recruit them as “members” of the united front. In 2019, Beijing’s Dongcheng district spent 1.4 million renminbi on a “comprehensive management platform” that would, in part, “effectively support the four aspects of United Front talent work: ‘discovery, cultivation, utilization, and management’.” The platform would include a database of</p>
<blockquote><p>basic information about members, as well as information about their familial relationships, educational background and degrees, specialized or technical positions, vocational qualifications, itinerant work or job changes, recruitment or probation, administrative or Party positions, job performance, assessments or inspections, religion (for religious figures), coming back to or returning to reside in China, and business (for individuals in the non-public economy and the new social strata).</p></blockquote>
<p>The database would allow UFWD officials to generate “statistics on, or browse and query the information of, all types of united front members,” as well as “gather and sort united front members by performance.”</p>
<p>Whether or not such “science-ification, standardization, and intelligentification” efforts can ameliorate the UFWD’s longstanding recruiting problems is another matter entirely. According to Groot, the Department struggles to find individuals that can serve its interests over the long term. In some cases, this is because the Department doesn’t advance targets’ career paths; people with political ambitions will often just join the CCP directly, rather than submit to the supervision of the UFWD as a member of one of the eight “minor parties” or as a business representative. In other cases, such as individuals who belong to targeted ethnic or religious groups, contact with the UFWD taints them in the eyes of their communities, making them less useful to the UFWD. “In many cases, once the United Front Work Department IDs and recruits them, then these people immediately start losing their value,” says Groot. “They’re compromised through their connections with the United Front Work Department.”</p>
<p>Recruiting challenges aside, the Party clearly still finds the United Front a vital component of its governance strategy. Even though the CCP successfully vanquished rivals to the throne, morphing from a scrappy force conducting guerrilla warfare in the countryside to the ultimate authority over a major global power, it still sees a need to approach and co-opt any parts of society outside of itself. And the United Front Work Department is a key mechanism by which the revolutionary CCP hopes to forestall any further revolutions.</p>
<p class="dropcap">The United Front Work Department uses a variety of different tools to appeal to its selected targets. Its primary method simply involves outreach: holding events, trainings, media tours, and the like. Targets the Party regards as more persuadable may only come into contact with this side of the UFWD’s toolkit. Individuals in the “new social strata,” for example, might be treated to a “large-scale celebration to commemorate the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone’s 40th anniversary” like the one the UFWD bid out in 2020. Members of the “new generation of private entrepreneurs” might attend a multi-week training course, like the one the United Front contracted out to Northwest University in Xi’an, including three “study trips” to other provinces, tea and art salons, and athletic activities. UFWD outreach to target groups living abroad also involves some China-based activities: a leadership camp including university students from Taiwan, for example, or a summer camp for children of Chinese descent. The Department does conduct outreach to target groups it deems “sensitive,” such as religious adherents, or members of particular ethnic communities, but supplements this with a host of additional, sometimes more coercive means.</p>
<p>Another major undertaking, and one that is perhaps surprising to anyone who only knows the UFWD as a shadowy influence peddler abroad, is provision of basic goods and services. For example, local United Front offices have contracted out for at least 100 road improvement projects since 2018. Many of these projects took place in the <a href="http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-12/09/c_137661448.htm" target="_blank">Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region</a>, an area in southern China with a relatively high population of non-Han residents as well as high levels of poverty. Beyond just road improvements, local UFWDs issued hundreds of tenders for a wide variety of infrastructure and development projects, from expanding access to drinking water to promoting the raising of laying hens, from installing lighting in rural public spaces to building “supporting facilities” for a “macadamia nut industry base.”</p>
<p>Infrastructure projects like these make sense given the United Front’s larger mission, says Matt Schrader, an advisor for China at the International Republican Institute. “This is a core function of the UFWD—collecting the needs of target groups and translating them into policy. One clear throughline for United Front work, from its very early stages in the 1930s, is close attention to the needs of target groups and knowing what the Party can do for them. It’s a kind of customer service-oriented mindset. You see the phrase ‘fix their problems’ over and over again.”</p>
<p>Groot notes that “the downside of these policies is that they’re all part of assimilationist policies as well.” Building better roads, for example, “reduces the obstacles to making [non-Han people] more mainstream. Letting people more easily come in, letting people more easily go out—and marry out—allows for greater integration, breaking up local clans, and for greater assimilation.” Over the last decade, as the Party-state has <a href="https://epicenter.wcfia.harvard.edu/blog/assimilation-new-norm-chinas-ethnic-policy" target="_blank">solidified its intent</a> to promote a single, overriding “Chinese” identity, rather than encourage the organic development of multifarious ethnic identities, it has <a href="https://archive.ph/tjJJu" target="_blank">called for</a> “extensive contact, exchange, and blending of all ethnic groups,” including through “two-way migration and flow of the population” and living in “blended” communities.</p>
<p>Other United Front projects have similarly assimilative aims, sometimes with the paradoxical goal of highlighting the “characteristics” of non-Han ethnic groups. One 2021 procurement notice from Guangxi, for example, offered more than 8 million renminbi to help develop the tourism industry in the Xiaodubai “ethnic minority characteristic village,” through improvements such as a “night scene lighting system” and “ethnic wall paintings.” In China’s northeastern Heilongjiang province, where members of the officially-designated Korean ethnic group are concentrated, United Front officials wanted contractors to reconstruct a “Korean culture street.” The work described in many of these notices suggests the “Disneyfication” of the original village or street, as long <a href="https://archive.is/GYrai" target="_blank">documented</a> in tourist areas across China, and more recently <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alison_killing/xinjiang-china-mass-detention-tourism" target="_blank">observed</a> as part of the CCP’s campaign of surveillance and repression in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.</p>
<p>According to Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and co-author of the book <em><a href=https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Hidden-Hand/Clive-Hamilton/9780861540280 target=_blank>Hidden Hand</a></em>, which describes the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to influence political and social life around the world, the Party-state does welcome some degree of cultural diversity among its population, “as long as it is toothless.” But for the Party to permit open displays of difference, it must first feel secure in the underlying sympathies of a community. “Disneyfication is great for that. You make money off tourism, you talk about how much respect you have for ethnic diversity, but you get rid of anything that can challenge Party control,” Ohlberg says.</p>
<p>A tender for the “Into the Li People: Large-Scale Cultural Documentary Fieldwork Event” in Guangxi explicitly highlights such aims. UFWD authorities sought to create propaganda emphasizing the Li ethnic group’s fealty to the Party. The project would “invite renowned contemporary literary figures to spend nearly a month in ethnic areas of our province . . . to look back on the Redness of the Li people . . . and promote exchange and blending between all ethnicities in our province, as well as promote a unity of ideals, beliefs, emotion, and culture in all ethnic groups.”</p>
<p>The United Front Work Department’s activities become more blatantly intrusive when targeting individuals the Party views as potentially threatening. This includes people in ethnic and religious minority groups, whose community affiliations may provide a sense of identity more potent than Chinese nationalism or love of the Party.</p>
<p>Hui people may comprise only 30 percent of the population of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, just south of Inner Mongolia. But the Party-state worries their Muslim religious adherence poses an inherent threat and so keeps close tabs on their houses of worship. UFWD authorities in at least three Ningxia localities sought contractors to audit the finances of or directly conduct bookkeeping for “religious activity sites,” in part to ferret out any non-reported income and to enumerate any of the sites’ fixed assets.</p>
<p>Throughout the country, local United Front Work Departments are making purchases so that they can better scrutinize the goings-on within religious communities. Multiple tenders solicited software that visualizes or otherwise “intelligently” manages religious sites. Authorities in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in southwestern Yunnan province, wanted a “religious work grid management information system,” explicitly applying the logic of grid management—a system widely used throughout China to monitor citizens’ activities, in which localities are divided into <a href="https://theasiadialogue.com/2018/04/27/grid-management-and-social-control-in-china/" target="_blank">smaller, more controllable units</a> and government workers catalog goings-on in their part of the “grid”—to the task of controlling locals’ everyday religious activity.</p>
<p>International media has documented the government’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/world/asia/china-surveillance-xinjiang.html" target="_blank">use of</a> cameras and other such surveillance equipment in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/state-surveillance-china" target="_blank">including</a> at places of <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/c610c88a-8a57-11e8-bf9e-8771d5404543" target="_blank">religious worship</a>. But procurement notices issued by UFWDs in Shandong, Jiangxi, Hebei, Henan, and Anhui provinces show that the Party-state is conducting visual monitoring at religious sites throughout the country. Some of the notices explicitly link these surveillance programs to broader provincial or national campaigns, while others simply seek “installation and networking of video surveillance at religious sites.”</p>
<p>United Front officials are not content to merely observe religious proceedings. In some cases, they also seek to alter the physical structures in which they occur. Religious Affairs bureaus (government offices <a href="https://jamestown.org/program/reorganizing-the-united-front-work-department-new-structures-for-a-new-era-of-diaspora-and-religious-affairs-work/" target="_blank">absorbed into</a> the UFWD beginning in 2018) in some areas of Gansu, Qinghai, and Sichuan bought <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/notes-chinafile/planting-flag-mosques-and-monasteries" target="_blank">flags and flagpoles</a> to install in mosques or temples, often citing the “four entrances” policy, which seeks to bring “the national flag, the constitution as well as laws and regulations, core socialist values, and China’s excellent traditional culture” into religious sites.</p>
<p>Several procurement notices called for contractors to “renovate” or “remodel” existing religious structures. Though the wording in most tenders left the nature of such renovations unclear, one 2021 notice clearly stated the aim of “rectifying the building style,” almost certainly a reference to the <a href="https://bitterwinter.org/chinese-government-spends-millions-to-rectify-mosques/" target="_blank">recent nationwide campaign</a> to “sinicize” mosque architecture and remove “Arabic” elements. The mosque in question, located in northeastern Jilin province’s Huadian city, <a href="https://archive.is/ufHiZ" target="_blank">received a “historical building” designation in 2018</a>, and Baidu Maps street view images from 2019 show it still sported the domes of the type later <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/10/24/1047054983/china-muslims-sinicization" target="_blank">removed</a> from mosques across the country, sometimes <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/05/31/1179241485/the-plan-to-remove-a-mosques-domes-in-china-sparks-rare-protest" target="_blank">sparking local protest</a>. That United Front officials in Huadian sought to “rectify” the mosque only three years after provincial officials granted it historic status illustrates how swiftly political dictates on religion have changed in the last decade.</p>
<p>The UFWD also tries to change the mindset and behavior of “religious personages.” Multiple procurement notices sought supplies, travel logistics support, and propaganda materials for a “Follow the Four Standards and Strive to be an Advanced Monk and Nun” campaign carried out across Tibet. The “four standards” refers to a campaign that since 2017 has demanded monks and nuns <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/10/30/china-new-political-requirements-tibetan-monastics" target="_blank">evince</a> “political reliability,” “moral integrity capable of impressing the public,” and willingness to “play an active role at critical moments,” while <a href="https://archive.is/j4ILw" target="_blank">avoiding</a> the “control of foreign forces” and “unswervingly furthering the sinicization of religion.”</p>
<p>In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the United Front Work Department has abetted <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/85qihtvw6e/the-faces-from-chinas-uyghur-detention-camps" target="_blank">atrocities</a>. As part of a campaign to install government minders in Uyghur villages and homes, one Xinjiang UFWD solicited both software and online cloud services for a management platform that tracked cadres’ efforts to build a “family of ethnic unity.” (The Department undoubtedly conducts more activities in Xinjiang than appear in the procurement notices ChinaFile reviewed; authorities have <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/features/what-satellite-images-can-show-us-about-re-education-camps-xinjiang" target="_blank">deleted</a> many Xinjiang-specific tenders from the web and have likely stopped posting some notices publicly.)</p>
<p>Even innocent-seeming acquisitions can belie repressive aims. In 2022, one district-level UFWD in Tibet sought oxygen equipment for a local monastery. This purchase might appear ordinary, even compassionate, until one realizes the oxygen was meant for the “Temple Management Committee” dormitory. Throughout Tibet, state-mandated Temple Management Committees have set up shop inside monasteries and nunneries to better <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/01/25/china-new-controls-tibetan-monastery" target="_blank">monitor and control</a> religious activity. They are often <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/07/06/prosecute-them-awesome-power/chinas-crackdown-tengdro-monastery-and-restrictions" target="_blank">staffed by</a> cadres from elsewhere in China who are physically unprepared for the notoriously thin air on the Tibetan plateau—hence the need for oxygen. One can imagine a newly-arrived cadre, reviewing the roster of monks now under his authority, wheezing uncomfortably into an oxygen mask.</p>
<p class="dropcap">Just how deeply the United Front Work Department truly influences Chinese society—beyond the many other Party and state organs with similar aims—is impossible to pin down. This is due to the largely intangible results of its work, a lack of publicly-available information, as well as a general dearth of recent research about united front work within mainland China. But, says the International Republican Institute’s Schrader, the importance of united front work tends to be underestimated. Speaking about the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the state counterpart to the Party’s United Front Work Department, Schrader quips that it “doesn’t really do a lot, practically speaking—but neither do country clubs, practically speaking. If it doesn’t matter, why is the <a href="https://english.news.cn/20230925/8b953ba0ead54a068954eb60f8fb1401/c.html" target="_blank">person that runs it</a> the fourth-most senior member of the Party?”</p>
<p>Perhaps united front work also remains unappreciated because, by definition, it is less likely to generate the kinds of <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/10/24/inside-chinas-internment-camps-tear-gas-tasers-and-textbooks" target="_blank">brutal</a> and <a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/01/29/china-uyghur-muslim-surveillance-police/" target="_blank">shocking</a> details that draw the attention of international observers. Party writing on united front work “highlights that this is the Party’s choice instead of violence,” says the German Marshall Fund’s Ohlberg. “Before you conquer somebody violently, you try the soft way. Only when that fails can you use harsher means.”</p>
<p>And yet, its relatively gentle tactics notwithstanding, the UFWD tacitly seeks a change in Chinese society that is all-encompassing and profound. The impact of this change may feel slight when it comes to how the UFWD relates to, say, an atheist Han businessman who lives a workaholic lifestyle in Shanghai. While the UFWD may target him as a member of the “non-public economy,” it views his identity (non-religious, Han, focused largely on economic rather than political or social concerns) as inherently more pro-CCP than a Tibetan, a Uyghur, or even a Han church-goer. The UFWD’s ambition—to align all citizens’ gods and traditions with the Party’s interests—implicitly aspires to sand away some of the natural human texture of Chinese society.</p>
<p>“You could say the United Front works (together with other Party organs) to create a massive CCP Theme Park of social life, devoid of any authenticity or spontaneous expression,” says Martin Hála, a sinologist with Charles University in Prague and founder of the China-focused website Sinopsis.cz. In a fully successful implementation of its program, “all social activity would be organized and directed by designated ‘mass organizations,’ ultimately controlled by the Party. There would be just the Party-state and the mass organizations masquerading as civil society. No other social activity allowed.”{chop}</p>
<p><em>Vera Liu provided research for this article.</em></p>
<p><em>Neil Thomas, who is quoted in this article, works at Asia Society, ChinaFile’s publisher.</em></p>Jessica BatkeChinaFile / 2023-09-29Transatlantic Currents: China’s “surveillance state”2023-09-27T00:00:00+00:002023-09-27T00:00:00+00:00https://jessicabatke.com/research&writing/Transatlantic_Currents<style>
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<p><strong>This episode of the <a href="https://www.fiia.fi/en/">Finnish Institute of International Affairs</a>’ Transatlantic Currents focuses on China’s use of advanced technologies for social control. The discussion covers the origins, evolving strategy and future applications of what some experts have called a “model of digital authoritarianism.” The event recording can also be viewed on <a href="/www.youtube.com/watch?v=reVTzOqwQB4&t=36s">YouTube</a>.</strong></p>
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</div>Jessica BatkeFinnish Institute of International Affairs / 2023-09-27What’s Behind the Youth Unemployment Statistics Beijing Just Decided to Stop Publishing? A Q&A with Eli Friedman2023-08-17T00:00:00+00:002023-08-17T00:00:00+00:00https://jessicabatke.com/research&writing/Youth_Unemployment<p><strong>By Jessica Batke</strong></p>
<p><strong>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/notes-chinafile/whats-behind-youth-unemployment-statistics-beijing-just-decided">ChinaFile</a>.</strong></p>
<p>— <br /></p>
<p class="dropcap">This week, China’s National Bureau of Statistics <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/15/china-economy-youth-unemployment-rate" target="_blank">announced</a> it would cease collecting data on youth unemployment. The news came after nearly a <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-28062071" target="_blank">decade</a> of poor job prospects for Chinese people ages 16-24, often <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/01/china-graduates-jobs-market-youth-unemployment" target="_blank">reported</a> on by international media as mainly a problem affecting recent college <a href="https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/3216182/chinas-graduates-set-another-difficult-year-job-market-heats-firms-never-want-candidates-no" target="_blank">graduates</a>. Earlier this summer, ChinaFile’s Jessica Batke spoke with sociologist <a href="https://www.ilr.cornell.edu/people/eli-friedman" target="_blank">Eli Friedman</a>, who studies international labor, about the reasons for joblessness among China’s young people and how it is covered.</p>
<hr />
<p><strong>Jessica Batke: If you’re graduating right now in China, if you’re coming on the labor market, what do you see in front of you? What are you worried about?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Eli Friedman:</strong> Well, you’d be worried about getting a job! That structural reality is very much at the forefront of what college graduates in China are thinking about, and it is a big change from much of the past generation.</p>
<p>Since the violent suppression of the student-led movement in 1989, the state struck a basic deal with college graduates, as well as intellectuals and youth more broadly: If they stayed out of politics and they could get into college, they’d pretty much be guaranteed a decent job that would allow them to live a life significantly more materially comfortable than their parents’ or their grandparents’.</p>
<p>That worked really well in the 1990s, in the 2000s, through the turbulence of the 2008 crisis, and into the 2010s. Yet, even before COVID, we’d begun to see cracks in that system. COVID is its own unique moment in all of this, but coming out of COVID the underlying stresses on the system have become really apparent. The previous reality—that if you went to college, you’d be likely to graduate and get a job that allowed you to live a life that more or less matched your expectations—is increasingly not the case. People go to college and might not get a job at all. Or they might get a job but the pay, the conditions, and the hours mean that they are not going to be able to live a life that matches their aspirations. In some cases, the gap is dramatic. So there’s a lot of anxiety, and, in some cases, fear—or just “giving up.”</p>
<p>There is also the question of overseas students. For a long time, studying abroad in the United States, or in one of the other Anglophone countries, was seen as, if not a golden ticket, at least a pretty solid pathway to the middle class. That is no longer the case. We see that even students who have gotten into reasonably competitive universities in the U.S. or elsewhere are now worried about going back to China. There’s no guarantee that they will be able to get jobs either.</p>
<p><strong>So studying overseas used to get you a little bit of an extra edge, and it really doesn’t do much for you anymore?</strong></p>
<p>I think it does help some in certain industries, but a couple things have changed. One is that Chinese universities have gotten a lot better. The gap between a competitive school in the United States and a competitive school in China has shrunk. Chinese employers are seeing that and saying, “We can hire someone who went to one of the <a href="http://www.china.org.cn/china/2021-06/23/content_77580638.htm" target="_blank">211 or the 985 universities</a> in China [which have been designated by the government as top-tier institutions], and they’re going to be just as well-trained, and possibly better trained, than if they went to a school in the U.S. or the U.K.” And in general, I think it’s better for students to be able to go to high-quality higher education institutions closer to home. It’s definitely a lot cheaper as compared to the United States, graduating with debt or having your family invest hundreds of thousands of dollars.</p>
<p>In terms of Chinese labor market dynamics, being able to say that you speak English is no longer the major mark of distinction that it might have been 20 or 30 years ago. And while the cachet of studying abroad has not been completely eliminated, I think employers are much more sensitive now. Looking at someone’s resume, they’re able to tell the difference between some very elite school like Harvard or Yale versus a fine-but-maybe-less-elite public school. So it’s a little bit more complicated than it was a generation ago.</p>
<p><strong>So are more of the Chinese students studying overseas trying to stay abroad rather than return home? In the U.S., everyone’s talking about how hot the labor market is, which would suggest there are jobs available, but the government also maintains lots of visa restrictions. Do you have any sense of what these students are doing?</strong></p>
<p>I don’t have any data on that, but I have seen data indicating the number of Chinese students coming to the United States has <a href="https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Education/Chinese-students-in-U.S.-plummet-as-COVID-tensions-create-barriers" target="_blank">decreased</a>. That’s for a number of reasons. Again, educational opportunities are better in China than they were a decade or two ago. In certain cases, U.S.-China hostility has made it more difficult administratively, or people have fears about being caught up in the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/02/23/1082593735/justice-department-china-initiative" target="_blank">China Initiative</a>, which unfairly targeted people who are Chinese. But also, I think, because of a general sense of hostility; if you want to study something that’s potentially related to national security, why even bother? I believe, although I’m not 100 percent certain, that many Chinese students studying overseas have just gone to other Anglophone countries, like the U.K. So I don’t think it’s a general pulling back from study abroad, but specifically an issue with the U.S.</p>
<p>In terms of where Chinese students are going after they graduate: This is super anecdotal, but based on the students that I encounter here at Cornell, I’ve seen a clear shift towards more students wanting to stay in the U.S. This is part of a cultural shift that came out of COVID—so-called “<em><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/24/business/china-covid-zero.html" target="_blank">runxue</a></em>,” or “<a href="https://www.cfr.org/blog/runology-how-run-away-china" target="_blank">running away</a>.” It includes people of that generation who are worried about what their futures will be like in China and are pretty eager to find ways to stay in other countries—the major challenges of staying in the United States notwithstanding, including visa restrictions and concerns about anti-Asian racism. Whether or not more people actually are going to stay in the U.S. after they graduate, I don’t know, I haven’t seen that data. But just in terms of my cultural currents, it’s clear to me more people are like, “If I can stay here, I would really like to do that.”</p>
<p><strong>What is driving the change in unemployment for young people? You said COVID was kind of its own thing, but that we were seeing some cracks in the system even before COVID—so it seems like there are longer-standing issues at play here. It certainly feels to me like I’ve seen news articles every summer for the last 10 years about graduate unemployment in China. Is this year actually any different than the last five or 10 years, in terms of unemployment? Is it just an issue of degree? Or is there a qualitative shift that’s making this different than before? </strong></p>
<p>The number for youth unemployment <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/01/china-graduates-jobs-market-youth-unemployment" target="_blank">this year</a> and <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/conversation/chinas-record-urban-youth-unemployment" target="_blank">last year</a> is actually just about the same. If you go back and look at a year ago . . . I forget the exact unemployment figure, but it was also around 20 percent.</p>
<p>I should first say when I saw that number last year, I was shocked. My jaw dropped. For a long time, labor scholars had just assumed that unemployment numbers in China were manufactured. Unemployment rates going back for a couple of decades hover around 4 percent, with tiny little fluctuations. So I and most people thought, whatever, it’s one of the many manufactured numbers in China. And so when I saw this number I was like, OK, maybe China really had a very, very stable labor market for many decades. I mean, I don’t know, you never know with these things. But in any event, it was quite an acknowledgment of a systemic problem, if not a systemic failure.</p>
<p>This is speculation, but I think the youth unemployment issue has gotten even more attention this year because China is through with lockdowns. Last summer, China was still in the midst of all of the lockdowns, and so everyone knew that there was “artificial constraining,” particularly of consumption. It had a big effect on manufacturing as well. We saw it with COVID lockdowns in places like Foxconn and the Tesla factory and elsewhere. There was a sense that the state had taken extreme measures, restricting the economy and driving up unemployment. But we all knew that, at a certain point, the lockdowns were going to end, China’s economy would roar back to life, these problems would dissipate, and we’d go back to the previous three decades of the China boom. (I never thought that was going to be the case, but there was some hope, maybe some wishful thinking, that it would be.)</p>
<p>Fast forward to 2023. The lockdowns have ended chaotically, disastrously, and tragically. There was a brief burst of economic activity, or “revenge spending,” as well as increases in exports and what looked like some stabilization in the real estate market. But that very quickly petered out. It became clear by the spring that there was not going to be a return to pre-COVID assumptions about growth.</p>
<p>One of the reasons I think the numbers hit a little bit harder in 2023 than in 2022 is because we now understand there’s no easy fix. Last year the easy fix was to end the lockdowns, like the rest of the world had done, and get back to normal. That’s not true this year, and it raises a whole series of much more difficult questions about what ought to be done in order to address unemployment.</p>
<p>COVID, geopolitics, a lot of things that nobody could have predicted that put new pressures on the Chinese economy. But, if you look at the broad structural tendencies over the last 10 years, some very serious changes were always going to be necessary. That has only been intensified by contingent things like lockdowns and geopolitics.</p>
<p><strong>What were the needed changes?</strong></p>
<p>The main thing is the drivers of the Chinese economy, which have been exports and investment.</p>
<p>Exports are particularly important in the economically dynamic regions of the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta. They are in many ways the foundation of the China boom that took off in the 1990s—a model of growth predicated on wage suppression. The whole comparative advantage that China had, as identified by the leadership in the 1980s, was this large, relatively well-educated, very cheap workforce. It allowed them to conduct production on a scale that was unimaginable for the other East Asian Tigers, like Taiwan and South Korea, which couldn’t compete on scale, or, at that point, on the price of labor or land.</p>
<p>But then the cost of land and labor went up quite a lot—which I think is a good thing—but it meant that, purely on the basis of the cheapness of labor, China was no longer competitive. This was already true in the early 2010s. Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, places in Latin America—wages are all cheaper in those places. And wages are much cheaper in India.</p>
<p>So they needed to find new ways of competing and manufacturing. The state was very clear on the need to move from a so-called labor intensive form of manufacturing to a capital- and knowledge-intensive form of manufacturing. Rather than making toys, socks, and little gadgets, they want to be making high-end electronics, medical equipment, and cars. They want to be engaged in leading-edge technologies, like electric cars, which they’ve been pretty successful at. But making that switch means it’s less labor intensive. If you have a highly automated form of production that’s turning out something very expensive, like an electric vehicle, you’re absorbing less of the labor force.</p>
<p>The other piece is around investments. That’s the other thing that’s really driving growth. Especially after 2008, you saw much more employment going into construction—building infrastructure, building buildings, building real estate, and all of the associated industries related to the building of things.</p>
<p><strong>Steel, concrete. . .</strong></p>
<p>Steel, concrete, electric wiring, things like that. It touches on manufacturing as well, because as people are building houses, they have to buy furniture and dishware and all the things that people put in houses.</p>
<p>Manufacturing jobs in China peaked a long time ago, in the mid-2000s, even before the 2008 crisis. Employment in construction continued to go up because of all of the building, particularly after the 2008 crisis, when the state <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-china-economy/china-okays-586-billion-stimulus-idUKTRE4A817E20081109" target="_blank">pumped</a> $586 billion into the economy, which mostly ended up in infrastructure spending and the real estate boom.</p>
<p>Spending on infrastructure, which is debt-financed, has come up against some real limits. We see this with local government fiscal stress and their inability to service their debts. We also see it in the real estate market: [major property developer] Evergrande just <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/18/chinas-evergrande-posts-81-billion-loss-over-the-past-two-years.html" target="_blank">announced losses</a> of [$81 billion] for the last two years. That’s just one indicator of how badly the real estate market has [done], for all sorts of reasons. China’s population is shrinking. The cost of housing is just absolutely exorbitant.</p>
<p>To bring us back to the question of employment: the big economic drivers, which had been absorbing tens of millions of people migrating from the countryside into the city, are not really driving that much employment anymore. So the shift that China has to make, and that economists and the Communist Party have known about for two decades, is the shift to consumption-led growth. Premier Wen Jiabao was talking about it in 2004, almost 20 years ago. If you look at progress since 2004, consumption as a share of GDP is still down.</p>
<p>Services already do absorb a <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.SRV.EMPL.ZS?locations=CN" target="_blank">majority</a> of employment in China, more than in the secondary industries of manufacturing and construction. But the kinds of service sector jobs that are being created are pretty menial. And this is another really important feature when we think about how this shift is playing out. And when we think about the college grads.</p>
<p><strong>But if jobs are shifting away from manufacturing and towards services—knowing that some of the service jobs are menial—it still seems like there should be more jobs for college graduates. Why are there no jobs for these folks?</strong></p>
<p>One point that is important, and is often missed in a lot of the media coverage: Media coverage is very focused on the college grads. I understand why that is. As a college professor, I think about college grads a lot.</p>
<p>But the number that is always cited, the 21 percent unemployment figure, Is for <em>all</em> 16-to-24-year-olds. Within that, the proportion of people who are college grads is actually quite small. In China, you have nine years of compulsory education. In the ninth year—that’s age 14 or so—you take the high school entrance exam, and then you get tracked out. Some people go on to the academic high school route—and most of the people tracked into the academic high school route do get into university nowadays—but most people don’t make it onto that track. They either stop education after Year 9 or they go get some supplementary technical education.</p>
<p>So, if you’re looking at ages 16 to 24, it’s only the 23 and 24 year olds that could conceivably be university grads. Everyone else in that age group are people who’ve already left school and are looking for work.</p>
<p>I actually didn’t piece that together when I first saw those numbers last year. But then when it hit me, I was like, “This is much scarier than I thought.” If you think of youth unemployment as just college grads, then you lean into the discourse—which is not untrue, but it’s only a partial truth—that college grads don’t want to take jobs in manufacturing, or they don’t want to get a job as a factory worker or in a restaurant. But, actually, the majority of these people did not go to university, and they’re <em>still</em> not getting jobs. That’s the thing that really worries me. It’s not just people turning their noses up at jobs that they think don’t befit a college-educated person. It’s people who are just not getting jobs at all.</p>
<p>Talking about the university grads more specifically: People take jobs because they need enough money to live the life that they want to live. But the gap between the life that they want to live and the jobs that are available is incommensurable right now. You can think about that in a couple of ways.</p>
<p>For one, the kinds of service sector jobs that are overwhelmingly being produced just don’t pay you enough to live in the big cities where most college grads want to live. The income-to-housing ratio in large Chinese cities is among the worst in the world. It makes New York City look kind of affordable. So if you take the jobs that are available, then you’re not going to be able to buy a house. If you can’t buy a house, you won’t be able to get your kid into school. That is because employment in the formal sector and home ownership are often required to access [residence permits known as] <em><a href="https://blogs.worldbank.org/peoplemove/chinas-hukou-reform-remains-major-challenge-domestic-migrants-cities" target="_blank">hukou</a></em>—without establishing hukou you can be denied access to a range of social services including public education, health care, and pensions.</p>
<p>Now, there are other kinds of jobs which might pay you enough to live that kind of life. But these jobs raise the whole “996” issue—working 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., six days a week. You might have enough money to buy a house, buy a car, and maybe to pay so someone else can raise your child. But I think a lot of young people are not into that anymore. That was really dramatized when all of the 996 <a href="https://www.protocol.com/china/china-996-overtime-era-ended" target="_blank">activism</a> was happening among tech workers two or three years ago. And, there’s a kind of generational difference. Back when [Alibab founder] Jack Ma was <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65084344" target="_blank">still making public appearances</a> in China, he was kind of berating young people, very dismissive of them, when he said it’s a “<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/15/alibabas-jack-ma-working-overtime-is-a-huge-blessing.html" target="_blank">blessing</a>” to be able to do 996 when you’re in your 20s—this is what you do when you’re a young person, you devote your entire life to working hard and you can enjoy life later. That fell really flat with young people in China who didn’t grow up in desperate poverty in the way that people who were in their 50s or 60s did. This idea that you have to eat bitterness for decades before you can take a breather . . . if you grow up living middle class life in a big city in China, you’re thinking, “Maybe there’s more to life than just working all the time.”</p>
<p>So, the jobs that are being created right now are either not paying young people enough to live in the city, or they do pay enough but people then can’t live the kind of life that they would like to live. That’s part of the challenge for the college grad specifically.</p>
<p><strong>If you’re the Chinese government, what are your range of options to deal with this? Or what might leaders be thinking about to try to engineer this economic shift? I assume they don’t have infinite time to make the shift, that there will eventually come an inflection point?</strong></p>
<p>There’s not an endless amount of time. If they don’t make a serious intervention, the vitality of growth will gradually be sapped, because they can’t depend on exports. We already see a reorganization of global supply chains away from China. Supply chains are not leaving China by any means, but China is going to be less central to the production of all kinds of commodities in the next few years.</p>
<p>The debt piece is also really important to the extent that households and governments are using their money to service debt rather than making productive investments. That’s also going to undermine the vitality of growth.</p>
<p>So it will be a long, slow decline. If I were a betting person, I would put my money on that, because the other options—which have been known for a long time, which are actually pretty clear, and not all that controversial for economists—are very difficult politically. They’re very difficult because the system of growth for the last 30 years has created very rich and very politically-connected constituencies that don’t want to change.</p>
<p>Let’s think about real estate and exporters as key groups in all of this. With respect to exporters, if you want to shift from the current wage repression model to one predicated on a virtuous cycle of higher wages and higher consumption, you have to do two main things. One is you have to raise wages, obviously. One way to deal with this is to allow unions to bargain and collectively push up wages above what the market would determine on its own. The Chinese state is not willing to consider unions, because it thinks they pose a threat to political stability. Another option is that the state could just dictate. It could say, “In this industry, here’s what wages are going to be. We’re going to have dramatic increases in the minimum wage.” There were significant minimum wage hikes during the 2010s, but those increases have slowed considerably since Xi Jinping came to power. The state hasn’t done that. And so the question is, if there is already a dictatorial state, why can’t it just say, “Pay the workers more”? Because doing so would be a political problem. Whole economies are organized around exports; exporters and associated industries are very politically powerful. They have said, “We don’t want that,” and the Party has more or less gone along with it.</p>
<p>The other side Is social protections: Health care. Pensions are particularly important. Education. If you talk to Chinese people about why they’re not spending money, their biggest concerns are about the future.</p>
<p>For example, “How much is it going to cost for me to educate my child?” Officially, compulsory education is free in China, and that is in a sense true. Increasingly, buying a house in the catchment area of a good school has become a more expensive proposition in the biggest cities. This is something Americans can certainly relate to. You’re not formally paying tuition for schools, but you are in essence paying for schools via the real estate market.</p>
<p>On healthcare, the state has increased investments in health insurance, but it remains extremely patchy, particularly for migrant workers. The subsidies offered in rural areas are wildly inadequate. Hundreds of millions of people fear they are one major illness away from bankruptcy. There’s no national healthcare system, and there’s no indication that they are considering the sort of comprehensive national system such as exists in many countries.</p>
<p>Finally, pensions are really a big issue, and they’re very, very politically complicated. Because society is aging, there are more and more people of retirement age. (China has a pretty low retirement age, 60 for men and 55 For women, which they have considered raising.) The pension is a whole separate, complex issue. It is pretty uneven between rural people and urban people, between residents and migrants. Suffice it to say that for hundreds of millions of people, their pension is completely inadequate to live on. That’s why people are dependent on their children. But they only have one child. That child is paying the mortgage, but they can’t really support it.</p>
<p>So the answer to making this shift is raising wages and increasing social protections. The policy prescription is really not complicated. But how to do it politically is extremely complicated. Even a man as confident in himself as Xi Jinping would have a hard time doing it.</p>
<p>I think there’s also an ideological component to this. Based on what Xi and other leaders say, I think that they’re just a little bit neoliberal in this respect. Xi was very explicit. He was like, we don’t want to have excessively generous welfare policies to support lazy people. Despite the fact that it is a Communist Party, they just don’t see that as their job.</p>
<p>In terms of real estate, it needs to be a less central part of the economy. You have to have a property tax so local governments can generate revenue to support all the welfare programs that we have just talked about. But again, the real estate companies don’t want it. They’re extremely powerful. And lots of otherwise sympathetic middle class people also don’t want it because Chinese people have a huge percentage of their wealth invested in real estate. They don’t have the same kind of options around equities and mutual funds that people and other wealthy countries have. And so they sink all their money into real estate. And for a long time, that was a really good deal. But if they sunk all their money into a house, and then all of a sudden it’s being taxed at whatever percent a year, they might not have the income to pay that in addition to everything else they need. So it’s politically very difficult.</p>
<p><strong>I don’t want to do too much mirror imaging here, but I have been struck several times by things you've said that seem to suggest similar vibes in China and in the U.S. For example, Jack Ma berating people for not working enough felt very <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63648505" target="_blank">Elon Musk</a>-y to me. Or young people, either “<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60353916" target="_blank">lying flat</a>” in China or “<a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/09/13/1122059402/the-economics-behind-quiet-quitting-and-what-we-should-call-it-instead" target="_blank">quiet quitting</a>” here in the U.S. And then you just mentioned Xi’s admonition against welfare for lazy people, which really reminded me of Paul Ryan’s welfare “<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna42642600" target="_blank">hammock</a>.” It’s striking how similar these sentiments seem.</strong></p>
<p>I think there are a lot of similarities. Since you mentioned Elon Musk, he’s actually tried to use the Chinese example to break his American employees, to get them to burn the midnight oil. The reality of what was going on at Shanghai Tesla was that workers were put in the closed loop in the Tesla factory during the Shanghai lockdown. They went in being told that they might be there for a few days, and they ended up there for [<a href="https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3180898/shanghai-reopening-teslas-gigafactory-3-exit-closed-loop?utm_source=rss_feed" target="_blank">eight weeks</a>]. So that’s the model that appeals to guys like Elon Musk and Jack Ma. And I can tell you for a fact that the Chinese workers who were in there were not doing it because they’re more morally upright or more committed to increasing the wealth of the world’s wealthiest man. They just didn’t have a choice. I think we should commend Tesla employees in the United States for refusing to do that.</p>
<p>Your broader point about the similarities—not just between the U.S. and China, but also between China and many other countries around the world—is really important because sometimes amidst all of the geopolitical strife, we imagine these two societies as fundamentally different. Actually, I think that a lot of the same global pressures are being brought to bear on both societies. A lot of the particulars are different: The expansion of higher education in China has been much more rapid; the social change and the generational difference in experience between people in their 60s versus people in their 20s is different for sure.</p>
<p>I teach at a university that has lots of young people from the United States and from China. I think that the broader question—about how people can make a decent life for themselves given the structural conditions—is something that’s troubling to people in both places, and that is unfortunate. I wish it were grounds for solidarity between young people of our two great nations.</p>
<p><strong>I’m a bit hesitant to ask this question, because there is a tendency on this side of the world to frame everything in terms of, “Is this going to be the thing that brings down the CCP?” But a Bloomberg article earlier this month <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-03/china-s-jobless-youths-may-pose-political-risk-top-adviser-says" target="_blank">quoted a report</a> from advisors to Xi’s which said that if they don’t get a handle on youth unemployment it could cause serious political problems. Do you think this is becoming a more salient issue for the government? What might the government do to mitigate the possibility of serious political problems or unrest, if it won’t alter the economic status quo?</strong></p>
<p>First of all, I think it’s a totally legitimate question to ask. What are the potential political consequences of this structural condition? I don’t think it spells the end of the Communist Party and I think that we shouldn’t speculate about that too much. But we should think through what those potential political effects are.</p>
<p>As I’ve already said, after 1989, the central deal between the state and educated young people was that if they stay out of politics, they can expect regular material improvements in their lives. The Communist Party sees educated youth as one of their core constituencies that they really want to keep happy. Part of the reason for that is because of the Communist Party’s own history. They were founded by educated young people. Mao was working in the Peking University library. Deng Xiaoping had studied abroad in France. They’re keenly aware that dissatisfied educated young people can present a political challenge to the existing state. And so if that deal—political acquiescence in exchange for material improvement—is unraveling, then they’re going to have to find another way of handling this group of people.</p>
<p>The tools that they have at their disposal are different for college graduates than they are for lots of other people in Chinese society who are dissatisfied. The Chinese state spends a lot of time thinking about risks to political stability. When it comes to Uyghurs, they have one set of tools, for overwhelming repression—camps, surveillance, all of that. They can’t use those tools on college graduates, for a whole variety of reasons.</p>
<p>But there are other things they could do around the margins. They could certainly do something with respect to housing. A robust public housing program wouldn’t necessarily require a complete overhaul of the economy. They could keep some of that capacity around construction going and allow people to feel a little bit less anxious about making a life for themselves in the city. We’ve seen some housing programs here and there, but it continues to be very piecemeal. And overall, urban real estate continues to be very market-driven.</p>
<p>The liquidation of the entire private tutoring industry—which is targeting young people before they graduate college—is an acknowledgment of sorts that young people in Chinese society feel like they’re under too much pressure, and they don’t want them to be going to all of these hours of tutoring. There have been efforts to restrict the amount of homework that schools can assign and to turn the temperature down a little bit on testing. All of that is an indicator that they’re interested in doing something to address some of these issues.</p>
<p>Assuming that they’re not going to be able to enact deep structural reforms that would really resolve this problem, which I don’t think is very likely, the question then is, if there are a lot of people with grievances, what are the likely political consequences going to be?</p>
<p>And I think that the political consequences will probably not be very serious. What will probably happen is that lots of people will suffer from depression and anxiety, and that what is a fundamentally social problem will be put on the backs of individuals to bear by themselves.</p>
<p><strong>Sounds familiar.</strong></p>
<p>Yeah, that’s true most of the time. As an educator, I see it very clearly, in rising rates of depression, anxiety, and other mental health problems among young people.</p>
<p>So I think that will largely be the extent of it. The avenues for political expression are pretty limited. You can’t join a political party, you can’t join a union, and you can’t form your own organization. There are online communities that pop up here and there, but if they get too big, they get censored and reined in. The state doesn’t have to use the kind of repression that they use against Uyghurs or Tibetans. They can use a more delicate form of oppression.</p>
<p>But in terms of political consciousness, I do think that there has been a significant shift among highly educated youth in China. I’ve seen this among my students here, and I’ve definitely seen it in the writing that students back in China are doing.</p>
<p>The clearest example of this was during the White Paper movement. The protests were not representative of youth in general; the total number of people who were actually out on the streets shouting, “Down with Xi Jinping!” was pretty small. So who’s to say what the majority of people are thinking. But the fact that it was even possible. . . I mean, saying “Down with Xi Jinping, down with the Communist Party” in public was <em>unthinkable</em> in October 2022, and in November 2022, it was happening all over the place, including here at Cornell, and in many places around the world.</p>
<p>During private conversations with many people, I’ve seen folks who were previously quite patriotic and pro-government say, “Wow, if the government can just lock me in my apartment in Shanghai for months—me, a relatively privileged, well-educated person—what else could they do to me?” Also, the things the government has promised about a better life—trust the Communist Party and your livelihoods will improve—that’s not really panning out anymore. That has effected a change. Whether that actually eventually translates into action is another question. But it is now another problem for the state to manage, in a way that they haven’t had to manage, coming from what had been a pretty solid base of support for them for a few decades. The Tibetans, the Uyghurs, and Hong Kong were always troublesome for them. But here in the core, in Beijing, in Shanghai, and in the big cities, they have this other concern and so they’ll have to pay more attention to it.</p>Jessica BatkeChinaFile / 2023-08-17For China’s Urban Residents, the Party-State Is Closer than Ever: A Q&A with Taisu Zhang2023-03-30T00:00:00+00:002023-03-30T00:00:00+00:00https://jessicabatke.com/research&writing/Party_Urban_Residents<p><strong>By Jessica Batke</strong></p>
<p><strong>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/notes-chinafile/chinas-urban-residents-party-state-closer-ever">ChinaFile</a>.</strong></p>
<p>— <br /></p>
<p>In a <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4356026" target="_blank">recent working paper</a>, scholars Yutian An and Taisu Zhang argue that local urban governments in China emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic with far more muscle and clout than they have ever had before. Unlike in the past several decades, the sub-district (<em>jiedao</em>, 街道, the lowest formal level of government) and the neighborhood community (<em>shequ</em>, 社区, technically self-governing entities below even the sub-district) now function as robust units of social control.</p>
<p>Though the central government had long considered—and vacillated over—giving more authority to the <em>jiedao</em> and <em>shequ</em>, the onset of the pandemic definitively tipped the balance in favor of providing these entities with greater resources and allowing them to act with more agency. This shift means that the Party-state is more present in people’s everyday lives, able to both provide services and conduct surveillance at a highly granular level.</p>
<p>Taisu Zhang recently spoke with ChinaFile’s Jessica Batke about this momentous change in how the Party-state interacts with its citizens. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.</p>
<hr />
<p><strong>Jessica Batke: The thesis of your working paper is that the Chinese government’s reach into urban citizens’ lives expanded drastically over the course of the pandemic. The main way this happened is that the central government dictated that districts, which sit just below municipal governments in the administrative hierarchy, delegate many of their tasks and responsibilities down to the lowest levels of government, the <em>jiedao</em> and the <em>shequ</em>. But what were the <em>jiedao</em> and <em>shequ</em> empowered to do before COVID?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Taisu Zhang:</strong> The paper’s thesis is that COVID was, we think, a qualitative change, but also that there was quite a bit of buildup to COVID. Without the buildup, COVID likely would not have had this big an effect on the way local governments actually operate.</p>
<p>Prior to 2010, the Chinese government’s reach into local affairs was not terribly expansive. In urban centers, everything substantial was operating at the district level. And especially all of the rule enforcement [entities], including the <em>chengguan</em> [the Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureau, a sort of supplemental, unarmed police force in urban areas, charged with keeping order on the streets], were operating at the district level as their main command center. They had a presence below the district level, but that presence reported up to district-level authorities.</p>
<p>Right around the time that the current regime came into place [in 2012 and 2013], it began exploring ways to “descend” the overall power and influence of the government further, especially in urban centers. It began thinking, “Can we give more direct law enforcement powers to sub-districts?” And this became a common theme in top-down directives and policies over the next couple of years.</p>
<p>But we would also argue that actual implementation on the ground was pretty uneven. And there was a visible hesitation to do this too fully. The government had a vision of going all the way down, but it had resource constraints. Not all city governments and district governments were terribly happy to do it either, because then they would lose some of their own power.</p>
<p><strong>If the central government had wanted more of this “descent” to happen, what else had been preventing it?</strong></p>
<p>There are various layers of principal-agent problems [whereby a lower-level power, or agent, can take action on behalf of a higher-level power, or principal—sometimes not to the principal’s liking]. The most direct one is, if you begin delegating powers to sub-districts in this more robust fashion, districts and cities are going to have a harder time managing their agents on the ground, and they’re going to have to be more comfortable with more discretion being wielded at a lower level. And it was not clear that all city governments liked that; some of them quite visibly didn’t want to invest too much in doing so.</p>
<p>At the central level, they too have a control and monitoring problem. This is true of every single central government in Chinese history. They always have an uneasy relationship with their agents on the ground, because they’re always worried that the agents are going to abuse their powers, or be corrupt and cause problems that are going to come back to the center at some point. So they want control and monitoring over local agents. But the further you descend, obviously, the monitoring problems go exponential. If you go from district to sub-district, the overall costs of monitoring might triple or quadruple.</p>
<p>This meant that prior to COVID, even though this kind of law enforcement delegation to sub-districts was constantly being discussed, or partially in progress, or in extra experimentation in some localities, there was also always a visible hesitancy—not just on the behalf of some city governments, but also even on behalf of the center—of how far they wanted to actually push it.</p>
<p>The second part of the narrative is what to do with <em>shequ</em>, the neighborhood communities, which are the absolute lowest level of governmental presence. Basically everyone has encountered these entities. If you live in any kind of neighborhood compound in any major city, there’s going to be a <em>shequ</em> in there somewhere. When I was a kid, you ordered milk delivery from the <em>shequ</em>, and that was basically it. It seemed to have no other substantial powers, except they might be responsible for helping you repair a faulty power line or something like that.</p>
<p>Part of the reason for that kind of functional ambiguity is that the <em>shequ</em> are defined nominally in the law as local self-governance entities. So in theory, they shouldn’t be used as units of government administration. In practice, of course, that was never true. The government always knew that it had the capacity to tap the <em>shequ</em> if it really needed to. But prior to 2011 or so, first of all, there wasn’t much top-down demand for doing so. And second, if you think the principal-agent problem is bad at the sub-district level, then going all the way down to the neighborhood communities makes it 10 times worse.</p>
<p><strong>I’m thinking of different ways to describe what the <em>shequ</em> were doing before the COVID-related changes took place. And the way you talk about it makes it kind of sound like 311 in New York, which you call if your garbage didn’t get picked up or something.</strong></p>
<p>I think that describes most neighborhood communities. That said, in places that have a record of social unrest or local activism, like homeowner activism, it’s not hard to imagine that a higher-level state apparatus would tell the local <em>shequ</em> they needed to be on the watch and report back, and so on. But even then, the <em>shequ</em> isn’t supposed to enforce any rules, but mostly just report certain things upward. I think even that reporting function was pretty marginal in most places up until about the mid-2010s. Up until the mid-2010s, every single <em>shequ</em> I had ever encountered in Beijing was staffed by retirees who were 65 years old or older. And if you want to use <em>shequ</em> as really robust monitoring entities, that’s not the way to go.</p>
<p>Then around 2015, that began to transform as well. There was more talk in central-level policy documents about this thing called <em>wanggehuaguanli</em> (网格化管理, <a href="https://chinamediaproject.org/the_ccp_dictionary/grid-based-management/" target="_blank">grid-like management</a>), which envisioned using these neighborhood communities more as public security and social control nodes. There began to be talk of giving them more expansive monitoring powers, having them assist in law enforcement, and so on and so forth.</p>
<p><strong>Is there a reason why this started happening around 2015?</strong></p>
<p>Well, they had talked about it, and even experimented with it in various places from 2010 onwards. The first mention that we found actually goes all the way back to 2007. So it was a slow trickle; we’re talking about a top-down, centralized bureaucratic state here. They always wanted more information-gathering at the local level, but, given the level of staffing, and given the legal embarrassment of using these things too aggressively, and given the massive escalation problems they would have to incur if they really began to power the <em>shequ</em>, they never took that plunge.</p>
<p>But around 2010, that began to change. I think it’s mainly because this current regime is much more about overarching systemic control than the previous ones. Also, perhaps it’s their general insistence on stronger, more uniform, more systemic law enforcement. So we have a lot of things going on at the same time. But in terms of actual investments, whether they were going to send down the material resources—either money, personnel, or equipment—to actually make <em>shequ</em> somewhat powerful, or even whether there was a consistent rhetorical commitment to expanding the role of <em>shequ</em> in central policy documents, it really wasn’t all that clear.</p>
<p>There were stronger signals sent in 2015. And then somehow, in 2017 and 2019, in some of the central policy documents, the language weakens a little bit on how much they want to empower the <em>shequ</em>. Clearly, this has all been envisioned, and had been experimented with in various places, but a full-blown decisive commitment to this vision was still not completely there prior to 2020.</p>
<p>So then we get COVID. And with COVID, everything just fundamentally changes almost overnight. Within a year of COVID, there has been full-blown delegation to sub-districts as full law enforcement entities. They’re getting command powers over law enforcement personnel and over <em>chengguan</em>, especially at the <em>jiedao</em> level.</p>
<p>And then, at the neighborhood organization level . . . this is what everyone was really experiencing during the lockdowns in China. The <em>shequ</em> became completely activated as a unit of control. They gained coercive power. They were charged with enforcing rules and enforcing lockdowns. They were charged with enforcing <a href="https://hongkongfp.com/2022/07/13/explainer-chinas-covid-19-health-code-system/" target="_blank">health codes</a> wherever you entered. So these guys go from being pretty invisible 10 years ago to now being the way in which you encounter governmental authority on a day-to-day basis.</p>
<p>Some of my friends and I have been arguing about how gradual this change was. Some of them think that I’m overselling how dramatic it was, that the buildup was more gradual than I’m allowing. Others actually think the opposite, that I’m underselling the functional change. So there’s not a ton of agreement, partially because there hasn’t been a ton of attention paid to this yet.</p>
<p><strong>I thought your swim gear analogy was really helpful in thinking about this. You and your co-author write, “Imagine a person who changes into swim gear, walks up to a river, and then hesitates over whether to actually jump in. A strong gust of wind knocks him into the river, and he swims across. Without the gust of wind, there was at least a substantial chance he would not have jumped in at all, but without the preparations beforehand, he almost certainly would have climbed back onshore after being knocked in, instead of swimming across.” This analogy doesn’t resolve the question of how drastic or gradual the change was, but it helps underscore the necessity of the pre-COVID preparation in making the change possible.</strong></p>
<p>I talked with urban governance scholars, and other urban planning scholars, and a couple of legal scholars, and the one thing that everyone realized was that if it hadn’t been for the preparation before COVID, COVID would have likely had the same effect as . . . you must remember SARS, right?</p>
<p><strong>Yes, of course.</strong></p>
<p>So SARS didn’t have any lasting impact, I think, on the way that local administration runs in China—not in any kind of institutionally permanent way or in any observable fashion. Without any preparation, COVID might have looked a lot more like SARS [from a governance standpoint]. Which also means that we might have had less zero-COVID, and not for as long. I do think that the government’s full-blown commitment to this for three years was on the back of quite a bit of preparation. They didn’t know they were preparing for COVID, but without that slow institutional buildup, they wouldn’t have been able to make use of COVID in the way that they did.</p>
<p>{quote, 2}</p>
<p>Looking at local governance in China right now, compared to, let’s say, 2011—in the final years of the previous regime—I think no one can deny that the difference is really dramatic. The feeling of how close the state is to you has just fundamentally changed.</p>
<p>Back in 2010, I was still running around trying to do ethnographic research there. And I don’t know if people even remember this now that China’s become a big state regime, but back then, especially in like 2008, 2009, the complaint was that the state wasn’t aggressive enough. There was just no rule enforcement in all kinds of localities. There was randomness, there was lack of uniformity. In a lot of places, public order was pretty poor. Public security was pretty poor. You couldn’t count on the police to actually do anything. So back then, a lot of the complaints were that China just didn’t have much of a local rule enforcement apparatus. Everything was ad hoc at the local level.</p>
<p>And now everything is formalized and institutionalized. I took a trip to China in 2019 and then in summer 2022, and it just hit me in the face last summer how big the change was. Previously, I hadn’t even known where my neighborhood committee was. I didn’t know who was staffing it. If I needed any kind of documents, or new licenses, or anything, I went to district-level offices. The only business I ever had with my sub-district office, sub-district government, was getting my personal ID renewed, and that was a long time ago. These were not entities in your everyday life. And all of a sudden, you’re dealing with them all the time.</p>
<p><strong>You say in the paper that the zero-COVID level of daily surveillance and monitoring isn’t going to continue on in the same way it has been (though the government can ramp back up at any time they choose to). But you also seem to think that these new local government powers are not going to be rescinded. Why is it likely that the <em>jiedao</em> and <em>shequ</em> will retain their new social control functions?</strong></p>
<p>On the most facial, shallowest level, these powers are created by documents that are not limited to the COVID context. Throughout our paper, we distinguish between documents that speak directly to the COVID context and documents that speak a more generalized language. And all these things [we’ve been talking about], from the descent of law enforcement down to sub-districts, to the activation of <em>shequ</em>, these are in general documents. They’re meant to be durable at least until they’re overturned. They don’t just automatically run out with the end of zero-COVID. They’re not tied to COVID in any shape or form. COVID makes no appearance in any of these documents. Clearly, for right now at least, the plan is to keep these policies in place.</p>
<p>Politically, the basic fact of the matter is that the Party-state’s relationship with the population got quite strained at the end of last year. The tensions were higher than they had been for quite some time, and on a much larger scale. So if you’re wondering, “What is a good time to give up my monitoring powers?” This is not the time. Unless China somehow enters a surprise period of great economic prosperity, I doubt the government is going to feel comfortable enough to take its foot permanently off the gas.</p>
<p><strong>And you think that’s true despite the cost, right? Not only the cost of staffing and supplies at the local level, but also the cost to the higher levels of government to train and monitor the lower levels and make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. That sounds really, really expensive. And it sounds like you think they’re willing to keep making that investment.</strong></p>
<p>I think they have to at this point. Because again, if they take their foot off the gas right now they’re running the risk of losing information access to an urban population that is probably quite a bit unhappier at the moment than what it has been for some time. So they can’t risk it.</p>
<p>{quote, 3}</p>
<p>Of course, what makes this super awkward is exactly as you said—that this is such a huge cost. For every dollar you spend directly injecting capacity into local governments, you have to spend at least another dollar, or possibly two, at the higher level, monitoring that dollar on the ground. Your costs are always doubled or tripled, and if you’re going right down to the neighborhood level . . . how many neighborhood organizations are there in China? The precise number is something like two million. The cost is just astronomical. And it’s also happening at the same time that local government finances are in a tighter crunch than they’ve been in recent decades. You’re escalating administrative costs at the same time that you’re going into a fiscal crunch.</p>
<p>So it has to be very uncomfortable. But I also think that there’s an overall sense of vulnerability, a sense that things are not going terribly swimmingly at the moment, which will strengthen the government’s resolve to go down to local levels. You might call it a vicious cycle, where the tenser the situation is, the more you want to monitor, but at the same time, the more you monitor, the more you can see how tense it is. It escalates.</p>Jessica BatkeChinaFile / 2023-03-30‘A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs’: A Q&A with Gulchehra Hoja2023-03-17T00:00:00+00:002023-03-17T00:00:00+00:00https://jessicabatke.com/research&writing/Stone_Precious<p><strong>By Jessica Batke</strong></p>
<p><strong>This article originally appeared on <a href="hhttps://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/notes-chinafile/stone-most-precious-where-it-belongs">ChinaFile</a>.</strong></p>
<p>— <br /></p>
<p>Gulchehra Hoja is a longtime broadcaster with Radio Free Asia’s (RFA) Uyghur Service. She grew up in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and was a successful TV personality and journalist with Chinese state media there. She later left China to join RFA and provide uncensored news coverage from the United States. ChinaFile’s Jessica Batke spoke recently with Hoja about her new memoir, <em><a href="https://www.hachettebooks.com/titles/gulchehra-hoja/a-stone-is-most-precious-where-it-belongs/9780306828843/" target="_blank">A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs</a></em>. The book describes Hoja’s upbringing in a rapidly changing society and political environment, her work as a TV host in China, her decision to leave her homeland, reporting on the ongoing crisis there, and the process of building a new life in a foreign country. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.</p>
<p><strong>Jessica Batke: In some ways, your story is a remarkable one: you come from a long line of cultural luminaries. But in other ways, your story is unfortunately typical for a Uyghur living abroad: you are separated from your loved ones, who are undergoing persecution and oppression back in your homeland. Your book opens with a horrible statistic: 24 members of your family were taken away by the state. Do you have a sense of how common that kind of mass detention within a single family is?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Gulchehra Hoja:</strong> I am not the only secondary victim of this genocide. We live in another country, and starting in 2016, [all of us] lost contact with our family members back home. Not only me, but all of us. We didn’t know anything about our family for a year, or two years. Even right now, many Uyghurs still don’t know where their loved ones are. Their homes were destroyed. Phone calls cannot go through. You cannot find your relatives, or your neighbors, or your friends. There’s nobody there. So I am just one example.</p>
<p>I was able to learn the news about my family because the Chinese government intentionally wanted me to know and wanted to silence me by using this information to damage me. I think this is the way they want to give journalists a signal: If you don’t stay quiet, your family is going to be in trouble. So it’s not only me. It’s very common, the devastation we’re facing.</p>
<p>A few of my coworkers didn’t know what had happened to their families. And then some of them used their contacts with embassies to learn from the Chinese government, four or five years after the fact, that all their family members had been sentenced to 10 or more years because [their relatives] live in a free country. Even if [these relatives abroad] hadn’t said anything against the Chinese government’s policy.</p>
<p>It’s unimaginable for people living in a free country. But for the Uyghurs, that’s the situation for all of us.</p>
<p><strong>It seems like Chinese authorities are especially targeting anyone they think is good at communicating and getting information out.</strong></p>
<p>Yes, you can say I am a special target. Because they didn’t stop after they arrested my family members. In 2021, they <a href="https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/smear-04132021191322.html" target="_blank">accused me</a> openly, saying I’m a terrorist. So they’re still using these kinds of tools and tactics to try and keep us silent. I don’t know what could happen to me or to my family. What can they do? I don’t know.</p>
<p>But I want to let them know: We will die proudly. We aren’t afraid of dying. We aren’t. We’re afraid of losing our freedom and our hope and our dignity. We don’t give up. This is all we have right now.</p>
<p>I wrote the book specifically for this reason. I just want to say to the world: We are not merely victims. We are so much more than that. We are beautiful people, just like you. Because we are different from the Chinese people, because we don’t obey the Chinese government—that’s why they want to destroy us.</p>
<p><strong>In the book, you, and everyone around you, lived in this constant state of choosing, because anything that you did or said could be interpreted as political. Even if you didn’t mean it to be political, even if you just wanted to speak your language, or dance, it could be seen as political.</strong></p>
<p>We were very careful, very careful. Even at home, we were raised with warnings from our parents: “Don’t say these kinds of things in school, don’t say those kinds of things when you’re playing with Han Chinese kids.”</p>
<p>Hearing that all the time reminded us we were different. And we were constantly facing discrimination in school, and society, and the workplace. We all knew it was because we were Uyghurs that we were facing that kind of pressure. So it was actually training you to be smarter in choosing your words, in communicating with people, in choosing what kind of people you should communicate with.</p>
<p><strong>This is actually almost exactly what my next question was about. I feel like in the book you hinted at this sort of duality, in what you knew and how you were allowed to exist. For example, you wrote about the knowledge that you could get from history books, but also a whole other set of knowledge that could only be acquired “in private settings and in low voices.”</strong></p>
<p>That’s why one of my professors in the university said, “Do you know how lucky you are?” I said, “Why?” He said, “You just can learn things sitting at the dining table that a lot of other people cannot learn even in university or reading a book. You are just so lucky because you are your father’s daughter, Abdulqeyyum Hoja’s daughter.” [Abdulqeyyum Hoja was a prominent archaeologist focused on the history of the Uyghur region.] Because I was young, I didn’t really understand it. After I grew up and this stuff was happening to us, then I realized . . . all this memory, you know, it comes back to you. So I was so fortunate, a fortunate girl.</p>
<p><strong>How much do you think the knowledge from your father contributed to your decision, when you did finally go abroad, to stay abroad? Because that seems like such an extraordinary decision to make, leaving behind your family and your career. Do you think it’s because you had knowledge that other people didn’t have?</strong></p>
<p>I dedicated this book to my beloved father, Abdulqeyyum Hoja, who taught me how to love myself, love my people, love my country, and human beings, and dignity, and freedom. So, the hardest part of my life was two decades of time during which I was forbidden to see my father. Conversely, this separation also trained me. It taught me that the love of human beings is unstoppable, regardless of time and space, and that such a misfortune would tighten the bonds of missing hearts.</p>
<p>My father used to tell me that even a stone is precious in the place where it drops. That’s the name of my book as well, “<em>Tash chüshkän yeridä äziz</em>.” We said that all the time. I lived through the deep values of this proverb, which is often used among Uyghurs who are separated from their birthplace.</p>
<p>When I was in the Uyghur region with my father, I always asked his advice when I had to make a decision. And I strongly believe that afterwards, when I was alone, he was inside of me. It wasn’t only me anymore. It was about my father, about my grandpa. The power coming from what they taught me, that’s why making those decisions was not that hard for me. Actually, it was like a cage opened for me. I was flying, carrying their hope. This is not my decision. I feel that they wanted me to make this decision. The cage opened suddenly, just for me. They stayed for other people, for their people, for the land.</p>
<p>You know, all Uyghurs have only one wish: that when they die, they are buried in their birth place. It’s a huge thing. Maybe I still have that hope. But if there’s no chance for me to go back, at least I have the stone from my dad [a rock from his yard he managed to send to her in the U.S.]. I will write to my kids to ask them to bury me with the stone so that I will be with part of my country, my land. This stone is most precious. It is there in my bookcase. I can show you.</p>
<p><strong>Please.</strong></p>
<p>[Hoja retrieves the stone and holds it up.]</p>
<p>This is very special. It smells like home. I don’t know why, but it really smells like home. You know, like after rain touches the soil. It’s the fragrance I love the most. I wish someone could create this fragrance! It’s the most delicious smell in the world. I feel that it heals your soul. How my father found this and sent it to me is magic. And it actually gave me the inspiration to write this book. Yep, this is my treasure. Priceless.</p>Jessica BatkeChinaFile / 2023-03-17Planting the Flag in Mosques and Monasteries2022-12-13T00:00:00+00:002022-12-13T00:00:00+00:00https://jessicabatke.com/research&writing/Planting_Flag<p><strong>By Jessica Batke</strong></p>
<p><strong>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/notes-chinafile/planting-flag-mosques-and-monasteries">ChinaFile</a>.</strong></p>
<p>— <br /></p>
<p>Over the last few years, the Chinese Communist Party has physically remade places of religious worship in western China to its liking. This includes not only the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, but also other areas with mosques or Tibetan Buddhist temples and monasteries. Eight Chinese government procurement notices, issued between 2018 and 2021, show local officials seeking to sinify religious sites in Gansu, Qinghai, and Sichuan provinces, as well as in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.</p>
<p>In most cases, the notices cite the “<a href="https://www.dw.com/zh/%E9%99%A4%E4%BA%86%E5%9B%BD%E6%97%97-%E8%BF%98%E6%9C%89%E4%BB%80%E4%B9%88%E8%A6%81%E8%BF%9B%E6%B8%85%E7%9C%9F%E5%AF%BA/a-43869341" target="_blank">four entrances</a>” policy, which seeks to bring “the national flag, the constitution as well as laws and regulations, core socialist values, and China’s excellent traditional culture” into religious sites. Accordingly, several of the local government purchasers sought flags and 12-meter-high flagpoles for mosques or temples. One notice from a county in Ningxia listed the books authorities hoped to “enter” into “religious activity sites,” including <em>Xi Jinping Talks about Governing the Country</em> and <em>An Explanation of Religious Affairs Regulations</em>, among others.</p>
<p>In one instance, a town government in Sichuan province wanted to architecturally alter the local mosque. The procurement notice calls for purging <a href="https://zh.bitterwinter.org/islam-sinicized-further-after-president-xis-visit/" target="_blank">“sanhua” (三化)</a>, or “the three -izations,” referring to “Saudi-ization,” “Arab-ization,” and “halal-ization.” Given government-imposed architectural changes <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/10/24/1047054983/china-muslims-sinicization" target="_blank">elsewhere in the country</a>, this likely means that the town wished to remove domes, minarets, or any other such features deemed insufficiently “Chinese.”</p>
<p>Below are the details of the relevant procurement notices, as translated by ChinaFile:</p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Launching the “Four Entrances in Religious Activity Sites” Activity to Procure and Install Promotional Window Display Boards (开展“四进宗教活动场所”活动宣传橱窗展板采购及安装)</strong>
<ul><li>Location: Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Wuzhong City, Tongxin County</li>
<li>Purchaser: Tongxin County Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau</li>
<li>Year: 2018</li>
<li>Final Purchase Amount: 1,072,184 renminbi</li></ul></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>“Four Entrances Activity” Procurement (“四进活动”采购)</strong>
<ul><li>Location: Gansu Province, Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, Linxia City</li>
<li>Purchaser: Linxia City Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau</li>
<li>Year: 2018</li>
<li>Final Purchase Amount: 1,103,500 renminbi</li>
<li>The tender included 70 12-meter-high flagpoles, 10 9-meter-high flagpoles, 80 flagpole platforms, and 80 flags.</li></ul></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>The Second “Four Entrances Activity” Procurement (第二批“四进活动”采购)</strong>
<ul><li>Location: Gansu Province, Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, Linxia City</li>
<li>Purchaser: Linxia City Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau</li>
<li>Year: 2019</li>
<li>Final Purchase Amount: 1,108,000 renminbi</li>
<li>The tender included 80 12-meter-high flagpoles, 80 flagpole platforms, and 80 flags.</li></ul></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Maqu County Religious Sites “Four Entrances” Activity, Constructing Flagpole Platforms in 11 Monasteries (玛曲县宗教场所“四进”活动,11座寺院修建国旗台)</strong>
<ul><li>Location: Gansu Province, Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Maqu County</li>
<li>Purchaser: Maqu County United Front Work Department</li>
<li>Year: 2019</li>
<li>Final Purchase Amount: 434,115 renminbi</li>
<li>The tender included 11 9-to-12-meter-high flagpoles and flagpole platforms.</li></ul></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Guinan County Tibetan Buddhist Monastery “The National Flag Enters the Temple” Construction (贵南县藏传佛教寺院“国旗进寺院”建设)</strong>
<ul><li>Location: Qinghai Province, Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Guinan County</li>
<li>Purchaser: Guinan County Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau</li>
<li>Year: 2019</li>
<li>Final Purchase Amount: 620,362 renminbi</li></ul></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Pengyang County “Four Entrances” Religious Activity Sites Book Procurement (彭阳县“四进”宗教活动场所图书采购)</strong>
<ul><li>Location: Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Guyuan City, Pengyang County</li>
<li>Purchaser: Pengyang County Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau</li>
<li>Year: 2019</li>
<li>Final Purchase Amount: 625,552 renminbi</li>
<li>The tender included 130 different books, purchased in quantities of 126 each. The <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/node/54476" target="_blank">full list of books</a> comes from a previous iteration of this procurement notice, which was tendered and canceled twice for technical reasons before finally being awarded out in 2019.</li></ul></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>National Flag Entering Religious Activity Sites Activity National Flag Flagpole and Installation Procurement (国旗进宗教场所活动国旗旗杆及安装采购)</strong>
<ul><li>Location: Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Wuzhong City, Tongxin County</li>
<li>Purchaser: Tongxin County United Front Work Department</li>
<li>Year: 2020</li>
<li>Final Purchase Amount: 4,698,759 renminbi</li>
<li>The tender included a <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/node/54466" target="_blank">list of 225 religious sites</a>, many of them explicitly mosques, where flagpoles were to be installed. The tender was ultimately canceled in mid-2021 because the bidding process hadn’t been conducted according to standard procedures, thereby “affecting the fairness of the bidding process.”</li></ul></p>
<p><br /></p>
<p><strong>Project to Remove <em>Sanhua</em> Style from the Qingchuan County, Qingxi Township Mosque (青川县青溪镇清真寺去三化风貌工程)</strong>
<ul><li>Location: Sichuan Province, Qingchuan County, Qingxi Township</li>
<li>Purchaser: Qingchuan County, Qingxi Township People’s Government</li>
<li>Year: 2021</li>
<li>Initial Tender Amount: 423,416 renminbi</li>
<li>Though local authorities posted an initial announcement and modification announcement for this tender, ChinaFile has been unable to locate a final announcement verifying the purchase was actually completed.</li></ul></p>Jessica BatkeChinaFile / 2022-12-13ChinaFile Presents: Nury Turkel, No Escape2022-11-07T00:00:00+00:002022-11-07T00:00:00+00:00https://jessicabatke.com/research&writing/No_Escape<p class="dropcap">In his recent book, <em><a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/no-escape-nury-turkel?variant=39665176772642" target="_blank">No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs</a></em>, attorney and activist Nury Turkel tells his personal story—his birth in a re-education camp in China, his journey to the United States, and his career working to end the ongoing human rights crisis in his native Xinjiang.</p>
<p>On November 1, Turkel spoke with ChinaFile Senior Editor Jessica Batke.</p>
<p>Video available on <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/media/chinafile-presents-nury-turkel-no-escape">ChinaFile</a>.</p>Jessica BatkeChinaFile / 2022-11-07Elections? No Thank You. Performance Reviews? Maybe.2022-09-29T00:00:00+00:002022-09-29T00:00:00+00:00https://jessicabatke.com/research&writing/Polling_Performance_Reviews<p><strong>By Jessica Batke</strong></p>
<p><strong>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/features/elections-no-thank-you-performance-reviews-maybe">ChinaFile</a>.</strong></p>
<p>— <br /></p>
<p>In 2018, a local government office in the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing set out to gauge the local population’s satisfaction with their place of residence. Chongqing’s Yongchuan District Statistics Bureau would field what it termed a “<a href="https://www.chinafile.com/node/54286" target="_blank">social conditions public opinion survey</a>,” with questions tailored to both the district’s urban and rural residents.</p>
<p>From the city-dwellers, the survey would solicit thoughts on the area’s environmental situation.</p>
<p>Question one: “How clean is the city or town you live in?”</p>
<p>Question five: “How good is the air quality in the place where you live?”</p>
<p>Rural residents would be asked to opine on their access to water and the condition of public roads.</p>
<p>Queries put to both groups, “Do you think your local cadres are still living extravagant lifestyles?” and “Do you think the cadres around you have handled their work according to the law?” prompted them to question what, in China, is often treated as unquestionable.</p>
<p>In recent years, both Chinese state and Communist Party (CCP) organizations have fielded thousands such public opinion polls, on subjects ranging from hospital services, to rural revitalization, to food safety. Yet, much of the information gleaned from these surveys remains inaccessible to anyone else. And, since the mid-2010s, non-governmental entities, particularly foreign ones, have found it increasingly difficult to conduct their own surveys in China. Several new regulatory measures, as well as a tightening political environment, make it harder than ever for foreign universities and researchers to field randomized, representative public opinion surveys. Though researchers <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357896878_Chinese_Public_Opinion_about_US-China_Relations_from_Trump_to_Biden" target="_blank">do conduct</a> online, opt-in polls, this method <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2018/08/06/video-explainer-what-are-nonprobability-surveys/" target="_blank">reduces</a> their ability to create representative samples and therefore to accurately reflect public opinion across China more broadly.</p>
<p>Domestic institutions such as universities also face hurdles when polling the public. They must keep their survey questions politically kosher, and they have less and less ability to work with counterparts abroad. Though pollsters both foreign and domestic have long had to <a href="https://www.economist.com/china/2020/10/22/apparatchiks-and-academics-alike-struggle-to-take-chinas-pulse" target="_blank">avoid</a> questions China’s leaders deem “sensitive,” the current situation often prevents them from asking any questions at all.</p>
<p>In this way, China’s state-sponsored public opinion polls typify General Secretary Xi Jinping’s model of governance, in which Beijing exercises ever-greater levels of control over the production and dissemination of knowledge. From <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/31/china-media-freedom" target="_blank">curbs</a> on foreign press, to <a href="https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3182204/china-tighten-grip-social-media-comments-requiring-sites-employ" target="_blank">tightening controls</a> over social media, to laws that <a href="https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-china-data-privacy-1d3fcbac4549c6968c07897900c96cc3" target="_blank">limit</a> all but the Party-state’s access to citizen data, Xi’s administration clearly takes seriously the notion that “<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220921181336/http://www.scio.gov.cn/zhzc/8/5/Document/1431758/1431758.htm" target="_blank">whoever controls information and the network owns the whole world</a>.” Beijing has always restricted information flows, but previously common exchanges between scholars, citizens, journalists, and pollsters have dwindled in recent years. The outside world has less and less insight into the views of average Chinese people—a population that makes up one fifth of humanity. The Chinese government, on the other hand, works to stay well-informed of the public’s thoughts.</p>
<p>Media reporting in recent decades has <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB116277606902914084" target="_blank">noted</a> the government’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-china-government-mines-public-opinion/2013/08/02/33358026-f2b5-11e2-ae43-b31dc363c3bf_story.html" target="_blank">interest</a> in polling its citizens, but details about those polls are often <a href="https://www.economist.com/china/2015/04/11/the-critical-masses" target="_blank">sparse</a>. While some offices release the results of their surveys—like those from a <a href="https://archive.ph/3EwAC" target="_blank">2020 citizen satisfaction poll</a> conducted by the Gansu Justice Department—many more are never made public. As the Beijing Municipal Statistics Bureau noted in a <a href="https://archive.ph/FUvaH" target="_blank">description</a> of its 2021 “Beijing Smart City and Digital Life Public Opinion Survey,” “survey data is for internal use and for statistical purposes only, and is not for public release.”</p>
<p>Now, a collection of Chinese government procurement notices, posted to the <a href="http://www.ccgp.gov.cn/" target="_blank">Chinese Government Procurement Network</a> website between 2016 and early 2022, offers a more detailed look at the public opinion polls central and local government offices around China are commissioning. A review of some 1,400 of these notices highlights Beijing’s preoccupation with popular threats to the Party’s rule. The poll topics, and the individual poll questions included in a handful of notices, show how China’s unelected leaders seek performance reviews from their fellow citizens—whether or not those reviews are heeded.</p>
<p>A wide range of Party and state entities commission public opinion polls. The Ministry of Public Security (MPS), for example, contracted out an anti-drug survey in late 2021. More than 200,000 residents throughout the country <a href="https://archive.ph/qMhQK" target="_blank">received</a> a telephone call asking them what they thought about their government’s anti-drug efforts. Based on the procurement notice they issued, the MPS had pollsters pose the following questions:</p>
<p>“Overall, are you satisfied with the anti-drug work your local authorities are carrying out?”</p>
<p>“If you discover illegal or criminal drug-related behaviors, would you report them to public security authorities?”</p>
<p>“Which of the following statements about drug use do you agree with?
<ol><li>Using drugs is illegal in our country</li>
<li>Drug users are victims</li>
<li>Using drugs harms one’s health</li>
<li>Just trying a drug doesn’t mean one will become addicted to it</li>
<li>New types of drugs are confusing, and it’s hard to tell them apart.”</li></ol></p>
<p>In recent years, central and local offices representing justice, cultural, health, market regulation, science, education, and propaganda interests, among many others, have sought contractors to run their polls.</p>
<p>Throughout the country, the “masses’ sense of security” appears to be a perennial concern of local public security bureaus as well as their Party overseers, Politics and Law Commissions. Some version of a “sense of security” poll, sometimes combined with related topics such as “satisfaction with law and order” or “<a href="https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/criminal-procedure-2/%E6%89%AB%E9%BB%91%E9%99%A4%E6%81%B6%E4%B8%93%E9%A1%B9%E6%96%97%E4%BA%89/" target="_blank">clearing out the underworld</a>,” appear repeatedly in procurement notices from the last decade. It is no surprise that the CCP would be sensitive to whether or not citizens feel safe; the Party’s ability to provide a minimum level of economic and physical security forms the bedrock of its legitimacy. These polls can extend beyond simple measures of safety, however, to include evaluations of policing and criminal justice generally. In a 2014 “whole-province survey on the masses’ sense of security and degree of satisfaction with politics and law work,” the Guangdong Province Politics and Law Commission wanted respondents to rate the work of public security, the procuratorate, and the courts on a scale of one (“unsatisfied”) to five (“satisfied”).</p>
<p>“They’re collecting data from civilians and treating them more like citizens,” says Suzanne Scoggins, an associate professor at Clark University who researches policing and state legitimacy in reform-era China. “And they do care what people think. It’s about prevention and control, before they actually have to deploy law enforcement.”</p>
<p>A review of the topics and questions from public opinion surveys, as revealed in procurement notices, shows authorities trying to gauge popular sentiment as well as evaluate the effectiveness of certain policies or bureaucracies. Early this year, the Daxing district propaganda bureau in Beijing hoped to field a household survey to assess its efforts to “create a civilized urban area.” In 2021, Sichuan province’s Mianyang city wanted to know what residents, including both rights holders and the general public, thought about how it regulated intellectual property (“How transparent do you think our city’s intellectual property protection administrative enforcement and criminal justice is?” “How do you think our city’s intellectual property protection management services are compared to last year?”). Also in 2021, the Municipal Education Commission of Shanghai sought to survey recent college graduates about their job satisfaction, to feed into its higher education classification and evaluation index.</p>
<p>Though poll questions may have become more specialized over time, China’s leaders have shown a general interest in public opinion polling for more than four decades. In the 1980s, Beijing was particularly concerned about citizens’ thoughts on social and economic reforms. Indeed, pollster Yang Guansan, working for a government-affiliated think tank, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200130075512/https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/7571/1/Ren042009.pdf" target="_blank">warned</a> leaders in an internal report published just before the Tiananmen Square tragedy in 1989 that the public discontent revealed in his surveys presaged social turmoil. Old political habits die hard: the government would <a href="https://www.economist.com/china/2020/10/22/apparatchiks-and-academics-alike-struggle-to-take-chinas-pulse" target="_blank">later jail</a> Yang for allegedly inciting the protests.</p>
<p>But Tiananman proved only a speed bump in the development of public opinion surveys in China. By the mid-1990s, all manner of institutions <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200130075512/https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/7571/1/Ren042009.pdf" target="_blank">were conducting polls</a>—even as those polls avoided politically risky topics—including commercial firms and academic institutions, as well as government and government-affiliated offices. Since 2004, the National Bureau of Statistics and its local-level equivalents have <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220322204801/http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjgz/tjdt/200906/t20090624_17129.html" target="_blank">regularly conducted</a> public opinion surveys; by 2009, 25 provinces had established their own “Social Conditions Public Opinion Survey Centers,” asking the same types of questions that the Chongqing government put to its residents in 2018. Indeed, in the late aughts, government officials <a href="https://archive.ph/yXrYN" target="_blank">suggested</a> that such surveys would help guide policymaking, and at least a <a href="https://archive.ph/IUuD7" target="_blank">few</a> localities <a href="https://archive.ph/HnGVM" target="_blank">incorporated</a> public opinion polling results into their cadre evaluation systems. More recently, in January 2022, the national Statistics Bureau <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220506194355/http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjfw/dftjxmgl/dfspgg/202202/t20220209_1827282.html" target="_blank">approved</a> the establishment of “ecology and environment mass satisfaction survey systems” in Hainan, Yunnan, Hebei, and Jiangxi provinces, hinting at the ways in which local governments are regularizing the use of specific, topical surveys.</p>
<p>And yet, despite the proliferation of both public and private polling services, the space to conduct independent polls has narrowed. Foreign researchers who had previously worked with domestic Chinese partners, including both universities and private companies, to conduct public opinion polls in the mainland have found it increasingly difficult in the last five years.</p>
<p>“The idea that you can buy a service and write a check for a company to ask questions that are not purely about toothpaste and soap? That is not happening anymore,” says Pierre Landry, an expert on Chinese politics and survey research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. George Washington University’s Bruce Dickson, who researches popular support for the Chinese government, agrees. “Post-Xi, everything became more difficult with field research.”</p>
<p>2021’s <a href="https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/translation-data-security-law-of-the-peoples-republic-of-china/" target="_blank">Data Security Law</a>, which restricts where data collected from Chinese citizens can be stored, as well as enhanced oversight of financial transfers, implemented after <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2016/1/27/analysis-behind-the-global-stock-market-plunge-of-2016" target="_blank">domestic stock market turbulence in 2015 and 2016</a>, have both affected foreign researchers’ ability to field public opinion surveys or access the results, say scholars and experts who have worked in the field. <a href="https://archive.ph/d4L8J" target="_blank">2017 regulations</a> for implementing the national Statistics Law also include specific provisions for any foreign entities seeking to “carry out any statistical survey within the territory of the People’s Republic of China.” Even domestic pollsters, who have a relatively freer hand, must still coordinate with authorities to ensure they stay within ever-changing political redlines.</p>
<p>Despite the state’s monopoly on politically-charged survey questions, commercial Chinese firms are intimately involved in government public opinion polling. Government offices award a fair number of polling contracts to state-run statistics bureaus, but corporate firms also survey citizens on behalf of local authorities. For its 2018 “social conditions public opinion survey,” the Yongchuan District Statistics Bureau awarded the bid to the local company Listen (Chongqing) Marketing Research. Dataway Horizon, a firm <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-china-government-mines-public-opinion/2013/08/02/33358026-f2b5-11e2-ae43-b31dc363c3bf_story.html" target="_blank">well-known</a> under its previous moniker of Horizon Research Consultancy Group as a <a href="https://www.economist.com/china/2015/04/11/the-critical-masses" target="_blank">key partner</a> for both <a href="https://www.academia.edu/35999302/Characteristics_Problems_and_Suggestions_of_Using_Public_Opinion_Survey_in_Local_Governments" target="_blank">Chinese government clients</a> as well as <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2012/10/16/survey-methods-42/" target="_blank">foreign</a> <a href="https://www.thechicagocouncil.org/about-us/press-room/survey-americans-japanese-koreans-favor-strong-relationships-chinese-wary-us" target="_blank">researchers</a>, has won hundreds of government survey tenders in the last five years.</p>
<p>Though they offer a window into the Party-state’s governance concerns, procurement notices cannot reveal how public opinion polling results are actually deployed in internal policy debates, leadership decision-making, or the promotion of local officials. The hopeful rhetoric in the late 2000s, that suggested such polling results would be rigorously incorporated into local governance processes, has not materialized into concrete standards 15 years on. Reviewing 99 local government public opinion surveys conducted between 2011 and 2014, a researcher at the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences <a href="https://www.academia.edu/35999302/Characteristics_Problems_and_Suggestions_of_Using_Public_Opinion_Survey_in_Local_Governments" target="_blank">found</a> that the vast majority of surveys asking about specific policies had actually been fielded after the relevant policies had already been formulated or implemented. The “<a href="https://archive.ph/PMQxg" target="_blank">Regulations on the Assessment of Leading Cadres in the Party and Government</a>,” issued by the CCP’s General Office in 2019, say only that cadre assessments should not “simply be determined by regional GDP or growth rankings, or by scores from democratic evaluations or opinion polls.” But the regulations do not say how public opinion polls could or should be used instead. The CCP Organization Department’s 2020 “<a href="https://archive.ph/w852f" target="_blank">Notice on Improving Performance Appraisals to Promote High-Quality Development</a>” does say that cadre evaluations should “make good use of ‘positive and negative reviews’ of government services, the public ecology and environment satisfaction survey, and the basic public services satisfaction survey”; it does not specify what “good use” entails or how many points a cadre might be docked if the public expressed dissatisfaction on these surveys.</p>
<p>In some ways, this is not surprising. Authoritarian governments have an inherent disincentive to codify public opinion as a mechanism of accountability. “If they do incorporate the polling formally into cadre evaluations, it’s like them saying, ‘We acknowledge the importance of bottom-up, semi-democratic measures,’” says <a href="https://gufaculty360.georgetown.edu/s/contact/0031Q000025mabOQAQ/ning-leng" target="_blank">Ning Leng</a>, an assistant professor at Georgetown University who focuses on the unintended consequences of nondemocratic institutions in China. “That’s not going to happen.”</p>
<p>Beijing also has <a href="https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/second-quarter-2017/chinas-economic-data-an-accurate-reflection-or-just-smoke-and-mirrors" target="_blank">well-founded</a> concerns <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/2098007/two-more-chinese-provinces-found-faking-economic-data" target="_blank">about</a> the reliability of data local officials feed up to it. The 2014 Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences <a href="https://www.academia.edu/35999302/Characteristics_Problems_and_Suggestions_of_Using_Public_Opinion_Survey_in_Local_Governments" target="_blank">study</a> argued that government-run polls lacked credibility: “Presently, some local governments and departments have impure motivations for using public opinion polling,” the study’s author wrote. “For political gain, they conduct polls that they plan and execute themselves, and that deceive their superiors and dupe their subordinates.” Procurement notices suggest that this phenomenon may still occur. In the <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/node/54286" target="_blank">multiple-choice questionnaire</a> for Chongqing’s “social conditions public opinion survey,” most questions offered respondents two “positive” response options (for example, “Good” and “Relatively good”) but only one “negative” response option (“Not good”). Such framing skews poll results in a direction beneficial for the government requesting them.</p>
<p>And yet, even if Beijing’s own governance structures prevent it from accurately collecting or meaningfully using public opinion data, its desire for this data—and its desire to convert this data into popular legitimacy—cannot be wholly dismissed. Beijing still has a very real interest in keeping enough people satisfied enough that they continue to accept CCP rule. In late 2021, the Changping district government in Beijing specifically wanted to conduct a survey in order to</p>
<p><blockquote>“understand the satisfaction of all government services recipients, all residents, and all enterprises regarding the Changping district government’s improvement of people’s livelihoods and optimization of service management, . . . incorporate the satisfaction score into the district’s annual government evaluation results, and inform government departments and localities of the problems the public reported so they can rectify their performance, . . . continue to enhance the government’s credibility and execution, and continuously strengthen the people’s sense of identification [with the nation] and sense of having benefited.”</blockquote></p>
<p>Procurement notices show that at least some of the government’s public opinion surveys demand polling methodologies commensurate with the gravity of the undertaking. While some tenders do include opt-in online polling as the partial or primary mode of surveying, others specifically request telephone or in-person surveys—a method which <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2018/08/06/video-explainer-what-are-nonprobability-surveys/" target="_blank">allows</a> for more rigorous sampling techniques and helps ensure the survey results will be more representative of the population as a whole. Such specifications reflect a level of sophistication in the entities commissioning the surveys, suggesting they are seeking high-quality data broadly representative of public opinion in the area. For example, one 2019 notice, jointly tendered by Guangdong’s provincial Public Security Bureau and Politics and Law Commission, sought two contractors to run its “sense of security” polls, directing each firm to conduct either a telephone survey or an on-site survey in the first half of the year, and then to swap these tasks for the second half. At the same time, however, not all localities or offices require such gold-standard methods, and even rigorously-conducted polls don’t matter if an ambitious cadre decides to quash the results.</p>
<p>Of course, China’s leaders have other means of collecting information on their citizens. Landry, the survey research expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, wonders if public opinion might be more efficiently determined simply by harvesting personal data online: “If you have data on all the billion people, you don’t need a sample. Are surveys that useful when you have all this other stuff to supplement the data? Doing surveys is slow, it’s costly, people don’t talk, they don’t tell the truth, they’re hard to find, and you have to go back to them multiple times.” Indeed, the CCP may simply decide that their unprecedented ability to surveil their citizens both <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/features/message-control-china" target="_blank">online</a> and <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/state-surveillance-china" target="_blank">offline</a> precludes the need for old-fashioned public opinion polling.</p>
<p>For now, though, the country’s leaders appear convinced that, loath as they may be to be held accountable, it still behooves them—occasionally—to ask for feedback.</p>Jessica BatkeChinaFile / 2022-09-29ChinaFile Presents: Surveillance State—Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control2022-09-22T00:00:00+00:002022-09-22T00:00:00+00:00https://jessicabatke.com/research&writing/Chin_Lin_Book_Launch<p><strong>On September 8, <em>Wall Street Journal</em> reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin discussed their new book with ChinaFile Senior Editor Jessica Batke and Arthur Ross Director of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations Orville Schell. <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250249296/surveillancestate" target="_blank"><em>Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control</em></a> explores the political and social control the Chinese Communist Party is building by collecting and harnessing personal data from facial recognition, personal genomes, digital footprints, AI, and other forms of surveillance. Video available on <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/features/chinafile-presents-surveillance-state-inside-chinas-quest-launch-new-era">ChinaFile</a>.</strong></p>Jessica BatkeChinaFile / 2022-09-22In Xinjiang’s Tech Incubators, Innovation Is Inseparable from Repression2022-02-28T00:00:00+00:002022-02-28T00:00:00+00:00https://jessicabatke.com/research&writing/Xinjiang_Repression_Technology_Innovation<p><strong>By Jessica Batke</strong></p>
<p><strong>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/xinjiangs-tech-incubators-innovation-inseparable-repression">ChinaFile</a>.</strong></p>
<p>— <br /></p>
<p class="dropcap">In 2017, the <a href="http://www.uhdz.gov.cn/ywb.htm" target="_blank">Urumqi High-Tech Industrial Development Zone</a>, in the capital of Xinjiang, published a catalogue of the “entrepreneurial and innovative” projects underway in its jurisdiction. The Xinjiang University Information Technology Innovation Park Co., Ltd. aimed to improve capacity for “grassroots makerspaces.” Another company was using blockchain “to establish an Asia-Europe big data trading platform.”</p>
<p>But the catalogue also heralded innovation of a very different kind. Also listed on the site was an “integrated grid management platform” that would “discover abnormalities, control the enemy’s social conditions, and maintain social stability.” <a href="https://theasiadialogue.com/2018/04/27/grid-management-and-social-control-in-china/" target="_blank">Grid management</a>, a state-imposed surveillance infrastructure that employs civilians to monitor their neighbors, exists across China. It divides cities and towns up into smaller units, with local neighborhoods serving as a mainstay of social control. In Xinjiang, however, where authorities have detained millions of Uyghur and other ethnic minority citizens, razed religious and cultural spaces, and otherwise criminalized indigenous identity, surveillance conducted through the grid management system has higher stakes. The Xinjiang government assumes the local populace contains “enemies” in need of extensive, and intrusive, monitoring. The “integrated grid management platform” featured in the catalogue would help grid management officers keep track of an intensive surveillance regimen of “visiting low-threat households once every two months, visiting basic households once a month, visiting key work households once every three days, and visiting key control households once a day” and “realizing precise positioning, precise personnel selection, and precise assignment of responsibilities.”</p>
<p>The High-Tech Zone’s grid management platform suggests the degree to which invasive surveillance and control systems have become embedded in Xinjiang’s efforts to promote technological innovation. Regional authorities praise projects sporting blockchain and O2O (online to offline) almost in the same breath as they commend technologies specifically designed to enhance control over ethnic minority populations.</p>
<p>Innovation and its benefits to society in Xinjiang have come to encompass both the use of big data to enhance cross-border trade and the use of big data to monitor people inside their own homes. Official documents promoting innovation in Xinjiang make no distinction between tools to help facilitate ethnic and religious repression and those designed to advance good governance. The broad use of the term “innovation” to embrace such seemingly incompatible intentions also reveals why they are not incompatible at all: To the Party-state, generating efficient, high-tech ways to control the behaviors of religious and ethnic minorities is innovative, it is modern and progressive, it is a moral good. Both domestic and foreign companies choosing to engage with the Xinjiang authorities on “innovative” projects and technologies should understand this mindset, even if the collaborative projects themselves have no obvious connection to repression in the region.</p>
<p>Two resources offer insight into Xinjiang officials’ definition of “innovation.” The first is China’s national “entrepreneurship and innovation” website, the online hub for the country’s <a href="http://www.lawinfochina.com/display.aspx?id=29124&lib=law" target="_blank">larger effort</a> to modernize its economic system and boost job growth. The site contains information on 120 “demonstration bases” around the country, including the High-Tech Zone in Urumqi. The second resource, the website for the Xinjiang Science and Technology Achievement Management Network, lists projects and organizations to which the government has awarded science and technology prizes.</p>
<p>The 2017 Urumqi High-Tech Industrial Development Zone work plan listed projects included in its “entrepreneurship and innovation support system.” The first six projects on a list of 60 included a “local color” town, <a href="https://archive.md/fIrSI" target="_blank">described</a> by Xinjiang’s official news website as a “cultural tourism” site designed to highlight local “folk customs”; a platform to help organize information gleaned from reports by government officials assigned to live with and monitor ethnic minority families; a “one-stop” government procurement platform; a “low-altitude drone industry service system” integrating research, training, maintenance services, and big data; a “Central and Western Asia gene-detection technology application demonstration base”; and a “Geekspace” providing “a new type of low-cost, convenient, total-factor makerspace for geeks.”</p>
<p><strong>The first six projects listed in the 2017 Urumqi High-Tech Industrial Development Zone work plan’s “entrepreneurship and innovation support system”:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="https://jessicachinafile.github.io/viz/innovation/project_table1.html" frameborder="0" width="100%" height="750"></iframe></p>
<p>While some of these projects, like the “Geekspace,” seem of a piece with tech incubators worldwide, others facilitate surveillance of local ethnic minority populations. The “<a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/26/china-big-data-fuels-crackdown-minority-region" target="_blank">Visit the People, Benefit the People, and Bring Together the Hearts of the People</a>” platform, designed to help cadres manage information gleaned from their <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/postcard/million-citizens-occupy-uighur-homes-xinjiang" target="_blank">long-term stays</a> in predominantly ethnic minority areas, stands out as a technology that enables exceptionally intrusive government surveillance. Other efforts, like the low-altitude drone system or the project to sequence genes specific to Uyghurs and other central Asian populations, also have potentially repressive applications, given the regional use of <a href="https://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/china-said-to-deploy-drones-after-unrest-in-xinjiang/" target="blank">both</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/business/china-dna-uighurs-xinjiang.html" target="_blank">technologies</a> to surveil or identify individuals targeted by authorities. Even the “local color” town likely entails forms of coercion. While the Chinese government has ramped up its efforts to stamp out <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/25/world/asia/xinjiang-china-religious-site.html" target="_blank">genuine expressions</a> of Uyghur culture in recent years, it has also boosted propaganda <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/world/asia/china-uyghurs-propaganda-musical.html" target="_blank">showing</a>, as <em>The New York Times</em> described it, “Uyghurs and other minorities . . . singing and dancing happily in colorful dress” as a means to hide the grim effects of its policies from both the outside world and from Han Chinese citizens. “Anningqu Local Color Town” likely serves yet another effort to define, standardize, control, and commodify indigenous behaviors—the sort of project one expert has called the “<a href="https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-china-health-travel-7a6967f335f97ca868cc618ea84b98b9" target="_blank">museumification</a>” of Uyghur culture.</p>
<p>Likewise, on the Xinjiang Science and Technology Achievement website, the government lauds “innovative” projects that treat coal and chemical industry wastewater alongside those that assist cadres surveilling people in their own homes, such as the “Ethnic Unity One Family” campaign, which <a href="https://archive.md/C2TYl" target="_blank">mandates</a> that government employees stay in the homes of assigned Uyghur charges. Unsurprisingly, given the extent of state <a href="https://www.chinafile.com/extensive-surveillance-china" target="_blank">monitoring</a> of Uyghur and other Turkic populations, the site also contains quite a few projects focused on video surveillance analysis software.</p>
<p>The Science and Technology Achievement website also celebrates a number of language-focused projects. In 2018, the site commended “a multilingual, real-time voice translation device” to assist Mandarin-speaking cadres stationed in Xinjiang. Though the cadre homestay programs had successfully “strengthened ethnic exchange and fusion,” in southern Xinjiang, “an area inhabited by ethnic minorities,” language barriers made it “difficult to interact with the ethnic minority masses or accurately communicate the Party’s policies.” Essentially, the project involved developing a gadget that allowed government minders living in residents’ homes to more effectively tell them how to behave.</p>
<p>In 2016, an article on the website extolled a suite of “key technologies for content monitoring on targeted Uyghur-language websites” that would help “strengthen counter-terrorism and stability maintenance, and battle against the forces of domestic and international religious extremism, the forces of ethnic separatism, and the forces of international terrorism” (what the government calls the “<a href="https://www.cecc.gov/publications/commission-analysis/xinjiang-government-intensifies-campaign-against-the-three-forces" target="_blank">three forces</a>”). Advanced technologies, both foreign and local, would be needed to provide a “scientific safeguard” against terrorist and extremist threats. Specifically, this meant developing software that could analyze written Uyghur text, including name and emotion recognition capabilities. Similarly, another 2018 project aimed to develop a “multilingual public opinion information monitoring system” specifically because the “three forces” had “ideologically infiltrated our region” through the use of “minority languages.” Both of these projects took as their premise that Uyghur and other minority languages are a key threat vector.</p>
<p>In some cases, it can be impossible to disentangle the different strands of tech-enabled social control woven into a single project. In 2020, the Xinjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, along with other research institutes, developed a technique to prevent certain types of disease among the region’s cotton plants. To more widely disseminate this finding, “456 trainings were given to a total of 94,000 people (including through the ‘Visit the People, Benefit the People, and Bring Together the Hearts of the People’ program, villager <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/09/09/eradicating-ideological-viruses/chinas-campaign-repression-against-xinjiangs#_ftn156" target="_blank">night schools</a>, and ‘relatives’ <a href="https://archive.md/5xnrN" target="_blank">embedded</a> in locals’ homes).” That is, authorities utilized existing coercive mechanisms—some of which were themselves abetted by “innovative” technology—to teach Uyghurs and members of other ethnic minority groups how to improve cotton yields. That this particular project revolved around cotton makes it all the more egregious; the region’s local authorities have a <a href="https://uhrp.org/docs/Discrimination_Mistreatment_Coercion.pdf" target="_blank">long</a> history that <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/nz0g306v8c/china-tainted-cotton" target="_blank">continues</a> today of forcing Uyghurs to pick cotton against their will.</p>
<p>To a certain extent, the Chinese government’s lack of differentiation between seemingly neutral and obviously invasive technology accords with how governments the world over think about and interact with technological innovation. Cities throughout the United States have snapped up technology <a href="https://www.kqed.org/news/11828568/a-technical-fix-may-not-help-address-systematic-racism-in-predictive-policing" target="_blank">purporting to</a> help stop or prevent crime, without fully appreciating (or even much caring) about the very real privacy and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html" target="_blank">human rights</a> implications of their purchases. Individuals, too, engage with new technologies without much thought about how those same technologies might be used in nefarious ways. An Apple AirTag may keep a person from losing their car keys, but it could also allow someone else to track their movements at a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/apple-airtags-stalking/" target="_blank">disturbingly granular</a> level. As Darren Byler, who studies technology and politics, <a href="https://longreads.tni.org/stateofpower/from-xinjiang-to-mississippi-terror-capitalism-labour-and-surveillance" target="_blank">puts it</a>, “information infrastructures make the intimacy of social behaviour and daily movement available to the gaze of the state and technology companies.”</p>
<p>In the context of Xinjiang, however, such “innovation” supports a much more intentionally crafted ecosystem of repressive policies, infrastructure, and technology. The Party-state has deployed cutting-edge technologies from the research and commercial sectors to fashion an unrivaled system of population monitoring, assessment, and control. It has rewarded companies and universities that create products closely aligned with its goals, welding together more benign notions of “progress” and “innovation” with the goal of re-making the population of Xinjiang in its desired image. </p>Jessica BatkeChinaFile / 2022-02-28