28 Apr 21 | China, Magazine, News and features, Volume 50.01 Spring 2021
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Sometimes, from the most trivial event or seemingly insignificant interaction, you can gauge the health of a society and decide: “This is a place I’d like to live, a place conducive to happiness.”
A few years ago, while in Taiwan for a literary festival, I went to a night market to look for tangyuan – the sticky rice dumplings that are traditionally eaten on the final day of Chinese New Year. As their name is a homophone for the word “union”’, Chinese families eat them on this day to ensure that during the coming year they will remain united. As I’d recently been cast into exile from mainland China, I thought the dumplings could assuage my longing for home.
After a long search, I found a small dumpling stall and asked the elderly owner if she had any. She told me she’d sold out, but that if I bought a bag of frozen ones from the supermarket across the road she would boil them up for me on her stove. I did as she suggested and she served them to me in a big bowl, handed me a spoon and invited me to sit at one of her rickety tables. She fervently refused my offer of payment. As I sat there savouring the hot, translucent dumplings stuffed with sweet black sesame paste, I felt closer to home than I had done in years.
It was not the dumplings themselves or the memories they evoked that made me feel close to home. It was the simple act of kindness from this old woman who didn’t know me. Her kindness struck me as peculiarly Chinese. It was imbued with what we call renqing: a sentiment, a human feeling that inspires one person to perform a favour for another simply because they can, with no thought of recompense.
Traditional Chinese society was glued together by such sentiments. Their roots lie in Confucian values of benevolence, righteousness and propriety. At the heart of them all is the idea that to lead a good life you must treat others with compassion, that each human being has the potential to be good and is worthy of dignity and respect. Almost 500 years before the birth of Christ, Confucius devised his own Golden Rule: “When you leave your front gate, treat each stranger as though receiving an honoured guest … Do not do to others what you do not wish for yourself.”
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But in China, these ancient values have been bludgeoned by 70 years of Chinese Communist Party rule. Since the days of Mao, the CCP has clung to power through violence, propaganda and lies, viewing its subjects as senseless cogs that it can blind with promises of a future Utopia while confining them to a present hell. How easy it is for humans to be stripped of reason by a tyrant’s deceit and malice. At 13, having survived the Great Famine caused by Mao’s reckless Great Leap Forward campaign, when my siblings and I had had to eat toothpaste and tree bark to stave off starvation, I nevertheless longed to join Mao’s party. When he launched his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, I was incensed that the class background of my grandfather, who had perished in a Communist jail, disqualified me from joining Mao’s Red Guards. The deepest hope of my generation was that after purging China of bourgeois elements, we could travel to Britain and the USA to liberate their populations from the yoke of capitalist oppression and welcome them into the CCP’s revolutionary fold.
Slowly, as I witnessed horrific scenes of mob violence, I began to see this march to Utopia for what it was: a dehumanising nightmare that divided people into class categories, pitting one against the other in constant struggle, “rightist” against “leftist”, neighbour against neighbour. Time-honoured values of family loyalty and respect for elders were shattered as sons were encouraged to betray their fathers and daughters their mothers. No thought other than Mao Zedong Thought was allowed. Anyone who, however inadvertently, strayed from party orthodoxy was branded a class enemy and destroyed.
At least 45 million people are estimated to have died in Mao’s Great Famine. Millions more were killed or persecuted in his Cultural Revolution. Mao’s ideas and values caused catastrophic suffering and death, and corroded the hearts of the nation.
In the 40 years since Mao’s death, the Chinese have been forbidden to reflect on their traumatic past or contest any current injustices. Like a cunning and obdurate virus, the CCP has mutated. While other communist regimes around the world have fallen, it lives on, still suppressing free thought, still whitewashing history, but embracing, with increasing vigour, the capitalism Mao strove to eliminate. The party has loosened tethers it itself placed on the economy, and the Chinese have got rich. Although it continues to spout Marxist-Leninist jargon, its overarching obsession is power, and how to cling on to it. It still views the Chinese people as senseless cogs it can manipulate or flatten as it pleases. It still tells them that the material life is all that matters and that happiness is the China Dream of wealth and national glory conceived by the party’s current leader, Xi Jinping. Freedom, democracy, human rights, the desire to become master of one’s own fate: all of these are unnecessary, absurd, dangerous, it says. The Chinese people have no need for them!
In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston is told that if he wants a picture of the future, he must “imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever”.
This totalitarian nightmare is not some fictional future, though. Published in 1949, the year Mao rose to power, the novel prophetically describes China’s fate under CCP rule.
For moments, sometimes for days or weeks during the dark decades of China’s recent history, a hand has pushed the boot aside and the human face has looked up. It looked up with hope and joy during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, when millions gathered across the nation to call for freedom and democracy. In 2008, it looked up when 303 Chinese dissidents signed Charter 08 that argued for an end to one-party rule and asserted that freedom and human rights are universal values that should be shared by all humankind. In Hong Kong, the human face has looked up defiantly as the territory bravely struggles to retain what few freedoms it has left. And last year, back on the mainland, the face looked up for a few short hours when, after Dr Li Wenliang was reprimanded for raising the alarm about Covid-19 and then died of it, Chinese social media became flooded with the courageous hashtag #IWantFreedomOfSpeech.
Every time citizen journalists like Fang Bin upload independent reports on social media, civil rights activists like Xu Zhiyong call openly for political reform, dissidents like Gao Yu shine a light on the secret workings of the oppressive state, the human face looks up and proclaims: “without freedom of speech we are all enslaved”.
But each time, the CCP boot stamps back down again. In 1989, it sent the tanks to Tiananmen Square to crush the unarmed protesters. In 2009, it imprisoned the leading dissident Liu Xiaobo who co-authored Charter 08, banned him from collecting the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded the following year, and in 2017, humiliated him even in death by stage-managing his funeral, forcing his family to drop his ashes unceremoniously into the sea. Fang Bin has been disappeared, Xu Zhiyong is in prison, Gao Yu and countless other dissidents like Ding Zilin, who courageously persists in dragging the Tiananmen massacre from state-imposed amnesia, are under intense surveillance. In Hong Kong, the party has violated the Sino-British Joint Declaration, beaten protesters and arrested every prominent critic. In Tibet, decades of CCP oppression have driven 156 Tibetans to set fire to themselves in anguish.
“But look how much richer the Chinese have become!” CCP apologists cry out. “Western democracies like the USA and Britain are a sham, corrupt and incompetent – see how they failed to contain the Covid-19 epidemic! Does this not prove the superiority of China’s authoritarian regime?”
They ignore that the CCP’s obsession with secrecy caused the initial outbreak’s catastrophic spread, and that democratic Taiwan far outperformed China, recording only 10 Covid deaths, without the government having to imprison whistleblowers or weld Covid patients into their homes.
It’s true that UK prime minister Boris Johnson and US president Donald Trump failed disastrously to contain the virus. (Is it a coincidence that both leaders share Xi’s disregard for the truth?)
But Trump could be voted out, Johnson can be vilified in the press, and no one loses their freedom of speech. This is the power of democracy – however embattled it may become, it guarantees, more than any other system yet invented, that every citizen can have their say and that political change is always constitutionally possible.
“The Chinese just aren’t suited to democracy, though – it’s not in their culture,” the apologists retort. But Taiwan destroys this argument – it proves that the Chinese can be both prosperous and free.
“It’s different on the mainland,” the apologists insist. “Look at the popular support for the party!” But the apologists fail to understand that when people have been governed by lies and fear, their gratitude to their leaders is little different from the affection some hostages develop for their captors.
The truth is, everyone in China is a hostage. Some may be wealthier than others, some more aware than others of the prison bars that surround them, but everyone is spiritually incarcerated by the CCP. They have all been denied the most fundamental human right: the right to form independent thought. Without freedom of thought, one loses respect for oneself and the ability to respect and feel compassion for others. China may be rich, but 70 years of CCP rule has plunged the country into an ever-deepening moral abyss.
It is impossible to make a hierarchy of misery, to judge the death and persecution of one person or of one people as worse than those suffered by others. But the horror of the current situation in Xinjiang seems to be in a category of its own. The images of Uighur convicts, handcuffed and blindfolded, heads shaven and bowed, being herded onto trains; of hastily-erected internment camps with watchtowers, barbed wire fencing and high perimeter walls; of inmates forced to smile and sing to foreign inspection teams, despair welling in their eyes; the accounts of torture, rape, forced sterilisations and indoctrination from the few Uighurs who have managed to escape. These images and accounts recall the worst atrocities of the 20th century. In the name of “anti-terrorism”, a people and a culture are being annihilated. Determined to eradicate any perceived threat to its rule, the CCP is stamping its boot down on an entire ethnic group, aiming to extinguish the Uighurs “root and branch”.
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Ma Jian
When reports first emerged of the Xinjiang camps, I found the images too dreadful to bear. Wanting to convey my grief and solidarity, I sought out a Xinjiang restaurant in London, which has now closed. After I paid for my meal, I asked the owner to join me outside, so that we could speak without being overheard. I asked him about the camps, and whether he still had family in the province. It turned out he was not a Uighur but a Han Chinese who had moved to Xinjiang in the 1990s. “Those Uighurs – they deserve what’s happened to them!” he said with a smirk. “Good thing they’ve been locked up in the camps. My family say the streets are much quieter now.”
His words were abhorrent, but he was expressing views many Han Chinese on the mainland share. These Chinese mainlanders are not evil, of course. The corrupted moral view that some of them may have is the tragic product of an evil regime.
On the hundredth anniversary of its founding, the CCP will reassert that ‘Without the Communist Party, there is no New China!’ Xi wants his model of authoritarian capitalism to be applauded and replicated by the entire world. He wants the UN to move its headquarters to Beijing – the ultimate validation of his ideas and values.
For anyone who cherishes human rights and freedom of speech it is repugnant that, while hundreds of millions of victims of the CCP’s man-made disasters lie rotting in their graves, while Chinese dissidents continue to be jailed and disappeared, while Hong Kong turns from a place that once offered refuge to mainland dissidents into a place from which its own citizens flee, while Tibetans continue to set themselves on fire, and while a genocide is taking place right now in Xinjiang – it should be repugnant to everyone that in the face of such unending injustice, some Western commentators could suggest that the CCP is winning the battle of values and ideas in the world.
But more appalling still is that for the sake of some grubby trade deals with China, the political leaders of Western democracies are doing little more than offering asylum to Hong Kong citizens and expressing “concern” at China’s human rights abuses. As China’s economy grows and CCP values spread across the nation’s borders, freedom of speech, liberal values and renqing – that essential human capacity for kindness and compassion – will become increasingly endangered. Unless Western leaders defend, not with gunboats or empty rhetoric but with unwavering commitment, the enlightenment values of liberty, fraternity and reason that should form the foundation of every civilised country, then there will soon be very few places left in the world that are conducive to human happiness.
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24 Mar 21 | 50 years of Index
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”116444″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Philosopher Stuart Hampshire knew evil was real. He had seen it, written about it and, perhaps, it had driven him to do something about it.
He was 25 by the time the Second World War broke out and he spent his formative years in a position in military intelligence.
His job was to interrogate, and it was this that brought him face to face with Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the high-ranking Austrian SS officer who was a key figure in the Holocaust.
Nancy Cartwright, Hampshire’s second wife and fellow philosopher, told Index, “He interviewed, as a young man, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. I think that had a real effect.”
Cartwright suggested that much of Stuart Hampshire’s personality reflected the work he was passionate about and he surrounded himself with revered thinkers and writers, including his closest friend, the political theorist Isaiah Berlin.
He was well-liked by his peers and was deemed to be warm-hearted and polite. Or, as Cartwright fondly describes him, “terribly English”.
As Cartwright remembered, he would sometimes sit in restaurants with Nancy and their two daughters and make up stories about the people sitting next to them, imagining who they were and what they were about in detail.
Stories, clearly, were important to him and people and the challenges they faced were significant too.
“I think he had a vivid sense of what it was like to be someone else. He could think of himself as being someone else,” said Emma Rothschild, the economic historian and Hampshire’s goddaughter – although this was never formalised at a font.
Hampshire was seen as a “cautious, honest and meticulous thinker” according to the philosopher Jane O’Grady, writing his obituary in The Guardian.
Free speech ranked highly among his values.
Cartwright said: “He had a sense that there is real evil and it needs to be combated. I think that was relevant to his work on Index. He was as much concerned about the people being censored and what was happening to them as he was about the issue in general.”
Hampshire, author of the acclaimed book Thought and Action, was a keen supporter of the post-war Labour government but never referred to it as such, instead preferring to say “the good Mr Attlee”.
“He always was distressed at inequality and poverty,” said Cartwright and he welcomed the wealth of social changes that Attlee oversaw: the foundation of the National Health Service and the expansion of the welfare state.
Hampshire also played a role in the implementation of the Marshall Plan, the financial rebuilding of Europe after the Second World War.
After the war, he became a senior research fellow at New College, Oxford before taking a domestic bursarship at his alma mater of All Souls. He later joined Princeton in its Department of Philosophy.
By the time the idea for the Writers and Scholars Education Trust, and Index, was being discussed, he had returned to Oxford as warden of Wadham College. Backing the idea of the trust and Index was natural to him.
“He was so keen on Index and it doing important things,” said Cartwright.
Emma Rothschild said his character was well-suited to setting up a free speech magazine.
“He was extremely involved with and excited about starting Index and I remember vividly seeing the first issues. It was one of his important steps into public life. He had been very involved in the great world of politics and international relations during and after the Second World War and then had been a bit more remote from it,” she said.
“I think Index was his way of moving back into large public questions. It was something he was extremely excited about and at the same time he found thinking about public life very stimulating for his philosophical writing.”
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26 Feb 21 | Opinion, Ruth's blog, United Kingdom
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”116315″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Legal but harmful speech – what does it even mean and why is every government body so insistent that the best way to deal with hate is to legislate against it?
So, you may guess from my tone that I am getting a little irked. There seems to be a pattern emerging in the UK, that rather than genuinely tackling some of the thornier issues–we’re seeing calls for more laws and regulations as the quick fix. Seemingly so people can say they are doing something, anything, rather than tackle the root causes of the problems at hand.
This week was a case in point. Building on the Government’s plans to create a new designation of unacceptable language for our online conversations in the Online Safety Bill – legal but harmful – we saw yet more headlines outlining the latest initiative from a well-intentioned quasi-government body seeking legislation to regulate speech in order to protect us from extremists.
The Centre for Countering Extremism published a paper calling for a new legal framework to tackle extremism – or rather extremist language which is creating an environment conducive to building new extremist groups. In principle, this is something that is difficult to knock and I have huge admiration for many of the people involved, but this is a slippery slope.
Let me be clear. I am not suggesting (nor would I ever) that all is well in our online world. It isn’t – there are too many examples of toxic abuse. Political and ideological extremism seems to be on the march; bullying, trolling, hate speech and threats are becoming far too normalised online. I should know, after all I still seem to attract a little too much of it…
But the question is can you or even should you regulate speech. Would that even work? Is regulation going to make people be nicer to each other online – or is there something more sinister at play that we need to focus our efforts on. As Taylor Swift said “haters gonna hate”.
So surely the real challenge here is how we balance dealing with the minority who choose to incite hatred and create a toxic environment which is attacking our very value system without undermining one of our basic fundamental rights – free speech.
Reaching for the statute book as a legislator is the easy option – politicians can say they have done something – even if that something hasn’t fixed the problem. They can point at a law and say job done. But let’s be honest, you can’t legislate culture and you can’t regulate language and nor should we be trying to.
People aren’t stupid, extremists aren’t stupid, recruiters to terror groups aren’t stupid – they are abhorrent, evil and wrong – and while some may not be that bright, the most effective tend not to be stupid.
If you change the law to restrict what they can and can’t say – all they will do is moderate their language, introduce coded phrases and push extremism into spaces that can’t be monitored. Suppression of language simply will not defeat the dangerous ideology at play. But what you will have done is create an environment where certain communities feel that they can’t speak at all – a chilling effect which will both create martyrs and undermine community cohesion.
Moving the line of legality will simply result in extremists developing a new vocabulary to achieve the same outcomes as they did before. And then we enter a dangerous period of cat and mouse where restrictions become even tighter, ensnaring legitimate debate and discussion in order to catch those purveyors of hate.
Someone famous once said, “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” and that mantra should be the starting point for any government on this issue. I have always said that speech should be free but not free of consequences.
The penalty for incitement should be severe – severe enough to be a deterrent but, and it’s a big but, the same level of resource, if not more, should be used to meet the continually emerging challenges of political extremism through education, engagement and community investment.
Empowering people to challenge hate speech and building a society where debate is celebrated but extremism is rightly ostracized. I know that for many that may be a naïve aspiration – but the alternative is a world where silence becomes the norm – because speech is too difficult.
Postscript. Just a note to thank Hannah who, in between doing her schoolwork yesterday, helped type my blog this week.
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15 Dec 20 | News and features
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Justice for Assange campaign protester outside a court hearing in 2010. Photograph: Nadia Cosentino
Assange’s partner, Stella Moris, is remaining resolute despite his extradition hearing decision being less than a month away and him being held in a prison that has recently had a Covid-19 outbreak.
Speaking over the phone to Index, Moris discusses the hearing’s details and what it could mean for the future of freedom of expression. And she talks about the deep implications it has had for her and her young family.
“Obviously it is very difficult. I speak to Julian on a daily basis unless there is a problem. [But] he is in prison. Soon to be for two years. He has been there for longer than many violent prisoners who are serving sentences. All in all, he has been deprived of his liberty for ten years now,” she told Index. She adds:
“The kids speak to their father every day; we try to normalise it as much as we can for them. But of course, this is not a normal situation and our lives are on hold. It is inhumane and shouldn’t be happening in the UK.”
The current hearing – which will decide whether there are grounds for Assange to stand trial in the USA – should reach a conclusion on 4 January. A trial in the USA (should the decision go against Assange) will have major ramifications for free speech and whistleblower journalism.
The WikiLeaks founder is charged with conspiring with US intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning and hackers from groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec to obtain and publish classified information. Each of the 18 charges laid by US authorities, if Assange is extradited and convicted, carry a maximum penalty of 10 years. The allegations brought forward under the 1917 Espionage Act, alongside one other under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, mean Assange could face up to 175 years in prison – effectively a life sentence. Manning was initially sentenced to 35 years, but under the Obama administration her sentence was commuted to less than seven years.
It is easy to get sidetracked about the current extradition hearing and get into arguments about whether Assange is a journalist, whether he is guilty of other crimes or whether the publication of the documents brought harm to anyone involved. Instead people’s attentions should focus on the precedent that will be set should the case go to trial in the USA.
As it stands the case is unprecedented. No publisher has ever been tried under the Espionage Act, which itself was essentially created for spies imparting official secrets either for profit or otherwise. This is perhaps a direct contradiction of rulings of the courts in the UK. In December 2017, the UK’s information tribunal recognised WikiLeaks as a media organisation, in direct contradiction to the view of the US State Department. Australia’s media union, the Media, Arts and Entertainment Alliance, also presented an honorary member card to Assange’s Melbourne-based lawyer.
Amidst the noise of the separate matters around the case, Moris insists people need to “forget what they think they know” and assess the issues involved.
“There are a lot of assumptions being made over what this case is really about. There are all these sideshows. It is not about people being harmed because the US has admitted it has no evidence to make this argument. It comes down to the fact that the material published was classified. People who care about free speech and press freedom need to forget what they think they know about this case and look at it afresh and understand Julian is in prison for publishing. This is not something that democracies do.”
“Are they saying what he published was not in the public interest? They say that is irrelevant. They can’t deny [what he published] wasn’t in the public interest because he was publishing information and evidence of state crimes, of state abuse, torture, of rendition, blacksites and of illegal killings. What they are arguing is that Julian published information that was secret and therefore he can be prosecuted over it.”
Journalists publishing secret information is not new (nor is pressure for them not to publish) and can often be key to upholding democracy and ensuring states act properly. The Watergate revelations relied heavily on news organisations pressing on with publication despite attempts by the USA to stop them, including the threat of jail time. It proved a significant victory for free speech.
If Assange is extradited and tried the case will impact journalists and the media “for years to come”, says Rebecca Vincent, director of international campaigns at Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
“It feels like many in the media do not see the implications of this case as something that will possibly affect them,” she told Index. “This case will have ramifications on the climates for journalism and press freedom internationally for years to come.”
“This is the first time we have seen the US government prosecute anybody for publishing leaked information. If they are successful, they will not stop with Assange and WikiLeaks. This could be applied, in theory, to any media outlet.”
It’s common for journalists and publishers to cite a public interest defence for disputed documents. It is a centrepiece of a defence case against libel, for instance.
“The information published was certainly in the public interest; it served to inform extensive public interest reporting that exposed war crimes and other illegal actions by states,” said Vincent.
“The Espionage Act lacks a public interest defence. He cannot use it if he is sent to the United States and tried.”
Essentially, what this means is that Assange is being treated as a spy not a publisher. If Assange is extradited and loses his case against the US government, any time classified information is published by a journalist there will be a precedent set that they can be charged and tried as a spy in the same way.
“These sorts of cases are really highlighting the need for more robust legislation that cannot be manipulated to be used against journalists, whistleblowers and other sources. Ultimately, it is the public’s right to access information that is being impacted,” Vincent added.
“You can see this for what it is; this very much feels like a political prosecution by states that are not meant to engage in this behaviour. The reason our states can get away with this is because of a lack of public pressure. A lack of public sympathy has resulted in a lack of widespread public pressure to hold our governments to account.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
