As reports of such events trickle out, each may be shocking in its own right but all too easy to dismiss as an outlier to more positive trends. Taken together, however, the dots connect to present a clear—and distressing—picture of China’s course under President Xi Jinping. For all its talk of moving forward, the country is in many ways returning to the past, with its officials and leaders displaying a new brazenness in their crackdown. Rounding up five to ten percent of an entire ethnic group, as the government has in Xinjiang, is a method that seems to belong in the last century, not this one.
But these heavy-handed measures have not simply rolled back the reforms and opening of past decades. Beijing is widening the geographic scope of such measures, extending them from its Western border regions into areas that once seemed relatively free by comparison, and employing cutting-edge methods in service of old totalitarian ambitions. What we are witnessing, in short, is not a continuation of China’s oppressive status quo but the onset of something alarming and new.
REPRESSION'S NEW FRONTIERS
If Xinjiang demonstrates how Beijing’s repression is intensifying, Hong Kong indicates how it is spreading to new geographies, even ones without large ethnic minorities. Citizens of semiautonomous Hong Kong have enjoyed a host of civil and political freedoms absent on the Chinese mainland. And yet the Hong Kong National Party, a small organization founded in 2016 that explicitly calls for full independence from Beijing, has been outlawed on the grounds that its beliefs are dangerously subversive. Opposition groups have long been routinely shut down on the Chinese mainland, but for Hong Kong the ban was a stunning first in 21 years of independence from British control. The controversy also stood out for officials’ efforts to vilify the HKNP’s leaders as “separatists” who, although nonviolent, were no better than “terrorists.” In Tibet, Chinese officials have long used this rhetoric to discredit supporters of the Dalai Lama; in Hong Kong, such language is unprecedented.
What we are witnessing is not a continuation of China’s oppressive status quo but the onset of something alarming and new.
Meanwhile, foreign journalists traveling to Beijing have long known that their visas may be revoked if their reporting becomes a thorn in the side of officials. This had never happened in Hong Kong—until October, when Financial Times Asia editor Victor Mallet had his visa revoked. Authorities refuse to explain the decision, but the obvious explanation is that it was an act of retaliation against Mallet for moderating an event with the head of the just-outlawed Hong Kong National Party at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club.
Until recently, authorities did not apply mainland laws within Hong Kong, but this is also changing. At an immigration checkpoint at West Kowloon Station in Hong Kong, from where a high-speed rail line runs to the mainland, for instance, mainland security officials apply mainland rules.
Beijing is exporting pressure elsewhere, too. In 2015, the state began preventing parents in Xinjiang from giving their children names associated with Islam. Now, this type of cultural policing is spreading to the neighboring province of Ningxia, which has traditionally been ruled with a softer hand. In September, authorities in Ningxia announced that they would rename a local river to strip it of any potential reference to an Islamic past. Because the river’s old name, Aiyi, was suspected to allude to A’isha, the wife of the prophet Muhammad, it will now be called Diannong.
No need even to travel to these far-flung provinces on the country’s western periphery: in late September, officials called on teachers in the southeastern city of Xiamen to hand over their passports ahead of the October National Day break, preventing them from traveling to nearby Hong Kong or overseas without official permission. This is a tactic known from Tibet and Xinjiang, but it is new in mainland cities on the east coast.
RETURN OF THE PAST
Together these stories, along with others that have emerged in the five years since Xi took power, show that the Chinese state is responding to modern discontents and political tensions with repressive tools it had begun to discard. The country has made massive strides in technology and economic development over the past few decades. on the political front, it is walking in circles.
Move aside, Little Red Book—this is the era of Xi Jinping Thought.
Xi is no Mao Zedong. Where Mao used mass movements to rile things up, Xi emphasizes stability and order. Mao reviled Confucius as a “feudal” figure whose beliefs had held China back; Xi extolls traditional Confucian values. And yet the past is making some notable comebacks. Reeducation camps, a favorite mechanism of social control in the 1950s and 1960s, had gradually fallen out of use. These days, they are in vogue again. Political prisoners were once barred from going abroad for medical treatment, but by the 1990s, imprisoned dissidents like Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan were granted medical parole and allowed to leave China. When the late Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo fell ill with cancer in 2017, Beijing’s refusal to let him to seek treatment abroad felt like an ominous throwback to pre-reform times. Xi’s predecessors had introduced term limits for the country’s leader; Xi came in and dismantled this guardrail. Move aside, Little Red Book—this is the era of Xi Jinping Thought.
The other complete reversal from recent decades is the way techniques once reserved for more tightly controlled parts of the country have migrated to hitherto less tightly controlled regions. Previously, enclaves of relative freedom seemed to be expanding: newspapers in places just across the border from Hong Kong, for instance, began to operate more and more like their counterparts in the former British colony. In some cities in Tibet and Xinjiang, everyday life began to resemble, at least on the surface, life in any other mainland city. Now, by contrast, the flow is in the other direction.