24 Oct 22 | News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Former Chinese leader Hu Jintao. Credit: Roman Kubanskiy/Wikimedia Commons
Footage of China’s last leader, Hu Jintao, being removed from Beijing’s Great Hall stage during the twice-a-decade Communist Party Congress on Saturday has drawn global attention. It was a moment of drama in an otherwise tightly choreographed event. Hu, who had been seated at the front next to China’s current leader Xi Jinping, looked visibly confused as he was escorted away by two men. At one stage he tried to speak to Xi and even take some papers that were in front of him, only to be gently but firmly batted away. People quickly asked, what exactly just happened? Here is what we know:
Who exactly is Hu?
The man at the centre of the action, Hu Jintao held the highest office of the Chinese Communist Party between 2003 and 2013. While some aspects of free expression did constrict under his rule, he was largely seen as a moderate force, open to new ideas and the outside world. LGBTQ+ and women’s rights certainly gained ground under Hu. Xi Jinping’s rule has been markedly different, defined by anti-corruption campaigns sniffing out past cronyism and a sweeping attack on the central pillars of civil society.
What did Hu say to Xi?
The key to unlock the mystery. Sadly, no Mandarin-language lipreaders have come to the fore.
Was Hu ill?
Many people were quick to ask whether Hu, 79, was just poorly. It’s also the line that China’s official news agency Xinhua has run with. He had appeared slightly unsteady the Sunday before, during the opening ceremony of the congress, when he was assisted on to the same stage. But the evidence stops here. Beyond looking a bit confused as he walked away (fair enough), he had no visible signs of illness. There were also no paramedics, and no one made any effort to help him. One of the people pictured ushering Hu out is also believed to be Xi’s own bodyguard.
If he wasn’t ill, what happened?
Most people now suspect it was orchestrated by Xi to send a message: any challenge to my rule – real or figurative – will not be tolerated. This is a new era. The old guard, whose influence had still somewhat lingered, are now well and truly out. And no one represented the old guard more than Hu, who incidentally obeyed the two-term limit which Xi has since overturned.
Would Xi be that ruthless?
Yes, he’s purged his party of all but loyalists, presided over the biggest crushing of dissent since Mao Zedong and has orchestrated a genocide against the Uyghur people. He doesn’t play nice.
Can you be certain this was what happened to Hu?
No, and we probably never will fully know. China’s elite party politics have always been defined by opacity and the broader environment is censored to the max. Any mention of the incident has been quickly scrubbed from online and people inside the room won’t talk.
What does this all mean then?
It’s not good. What little freedoms are left in the country look more precarious by the day. As author of The Great U.S.-China Tech War, Gordon G. Chang, commented straight after: “Hardliners are in and reformers are out of the #CCP’s Central Committee. #HuJintao, #XiJinping’s predecessor, was escorted out of the 20th National Congress, apparently against his will. If you’re still in #China, whether you are #Chinese or a foreigner, you should leave, now.” That might sound like hyperbole, but as mentioned above Xi is a ruthless leader.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
21 Oct 22 | Hong Kong, News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”119624″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]On the east coast of the USA around 100 children have sent postcards to a man they do not know who is incarcerated over 8,000 miles away. The man is Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong media mogul and activist.
The postcards have provided a brief ray of light in an otherwise dark chapter for a man locked up for his political beliefs, and the city state of Hong Kong which is currently in the ever-tightening grip of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Lai is imprisoned on charges most us will, hopefully, never have to face. The billionaire publisher and founder of Apple Daily has been jailed since December 2020 after he lit a candle during a public commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
The charges were related to this and his other pro-democracy protests. He is perhaps the most high-profile victim of the National Security Law, which was passed in the summer of 2020 with the precise aim of punishing and stifling dissent. This month he faces a trial without jury, where he will plead not guilty to the national security charges.
April Ponnuru’s daughter with the postcards.
April Ponnuru has organised the campaign on behalf of The Committee For Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation (CFHK). It was her idea for children at her daughter’s school, in Virginia, to send supportive postcards to Lai after learning he is a devout Catholic.
“My children are in a Catholic school and are Catholic, and I was thinking about how Catholics believe in the idea called corporal works of mercy, and they are these physical acts we do for people that import a lot of grace and mercy, and one of those is visiting the imprisoned,” she said.
She explained how Lai being persecuted for his ideas and belief – not only political but also regarding his faith – inspired her to contact her children’s school.
“This is a great example for these kids of somebody who stood up for their faith and is suffering unjust consequences for that. I thought they could write postcards to Jimmy and tell him they know a little bit of his story, and they’re praying for him and admire him.”
Lai is currently held at Stanley Prison, a maximum-security facility in Hong Kong where he has spent time in solitary confinement. Already a believer, he has found strength through his faith. A drawing of Jesus Christ on the cross done by Lai from prison was printed on the postcards the children sent.
This drawing was originally published in Index on Censorship’s spring 2022 magazine, alongside letters of his, many of which reference his faith.
Ponnuru said: “We thought it would be nice to include some religious art by Jimmy, and it would be a really meaningful thing that this art he sent out in the world would come back to him from a lot of children. For the children it was a great way to participate in corporal works of mercy that they ordinarily wouldn’t be able to do so. By sending him a card and message, they are visiting him.”
Jimmy Lai’s drawing of Jesus Christ.
She is eager to point out that she wants any child to have the opportunity to send a postcard, as the message of the project should not be defined just by Catholicism.
“This isn’t limited to Catholic schools. We would love any child to participate, children of all faiths and no faith. It’s about understanding the injustice of what is happening to Jimmy and others in Hong Kong. This pilot programme is just the beginning, and we would be very happy to create a postcard that would be appropriate for students at public and other schools to send as well,” Ponnuru said.
“Overall, a number of people have said to me they would love to bring it to their school, and priests have told me they are interested in copying the programme. We are going to write to other schools to encourage them to join the project.”
It’s understood the postcards were received in prison within three months of being sent, and that Lai is being allowed to read one daily, enabling him to have regular contact with the outside world.
If you would like more information about the project, and to request postcards for Jimmy Lai, please contact [email protected].[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
21 Oct 22 | China, Opinion, Russia, Ruth's blog, United Kingdom
BBC Broadcasting House. Photo: Peter Hastings, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
This week I had planned to write about the importance of public service broadcasting. To focus on and celebrate 100 years of the world’s oldest national broadcaster, the BBC. I wanted to talk about my favourite programmes and highlight their successes and importantly their failures – because we should always have an honest appraisal of even those entities which we rely upon. But there is a bigger issue at play – in a world of disinformation and misinformation, where conspiracy feels like it’s becoming the norm we have never needed independent and publicly funded news outlets more.
Call me biased but the BBC is the best in the world and needs to be cherished and protected. Its journalists have been on the frontline of every new story for a century. They have documented every joy and every horror, without fear or favour. Because of them we have historical evidence of war crimes, of the Holocaust, of protests, of the rise and fall of governments in every corner of the world and of course the moments of global jubilation and joy.
I, for one, will always defend the institution of the BBC – it’s central to my daily life and I trust their output. I make no apologies for loving the BBC – but it’s not just the institution – it’s the promise of independent journalism, of being able to hold the powerful to account and of documenting events for posterity.
This week we have seen the value of public service journalism. In Manchester the BBC documented a democracy protester being dragged into the Chinese consulate by CCP officials. He was beaten. His story is now known and the subject of a diplomatic incident because the BBC covered the news. Bob Chen will have justice, or at least be protected because his story was told by independent journalists.
Contrast that with events in Russia. Protest is banned. Independent journalism all but crushed. Dissidents are arrested every day. Challenge is not tolerated. Their leaders never questioned.
I am so lucky to live in a democracy. To be blessed with a free press. To be able to hold my politicians to account.
Public broadcasting is integral to that – so Happy Centenary BBC – we’re lucky to have you.
06 Oct 22 | News and features
I had my first taste of Chinese censorship in 2007. I was living in Shanghai and working at a lifestyle magazine. In the journalistic world the gig was about as uncontroversial as it gets – a calendar of spa treatments and interviews with restaurateurs. But there was a features section and – keen to work on something meatier – I pitched an article on the rise of obesity in line with the rise of US fast-food outlets. The editor gave me the thumbs-up and I spent the next month working on it. Only it never got printed. Because the magazine was published from within China, all material had to go through a censor and this censor was not happy. He told the editor that while the article might blame US chains for the problem, ultimate responsibility lay at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. How will it reflect on them if they can’t control their nation’s waistlines?
Little did I know then that this uncommon experience, which felt like dealing with the world’s most pernickety censor, would be fairly typical by 2022. We have, after all, just seen children’s book publishers in Hong Kong sent to jail merely for publishing a series about a flock of sheep resisting a pack of wolves (the series could spread separatist ideas, apparently).
But this was the China of Hu Jintao. Everything felt freer then. Facebook was in its nascence and adopted with enthusiasm, foreign visas were easy to get, VPNs were rarely needed. There were taboo topics to be sure, “the Ts” for example – Tiananmen, Tibet and Taiwan. I read a copy of Wild Swans in a café, its front cover wrapped in a scarf, because the book was officially banned in China. Superficially, though, it felt open.
But superficiality is the enemy of nuance. Beneath the surface CCP China was always controlling, even under the more “benevolent” leadership of Hu. Shanghai was exhilarating – what I’d imagine New York must have felt like in the 1970s. All promise and enterprise. And yet injustice was everywhere: in the rickshaw drivers hauling goods in 30-degree heat next to those driving their air-conditioned Mercedes; the construction workers who slept in makeshift villages on the outskirts of the ever-expanding city. My friend wanted to send a parcel to someone in Xinjiang Province. She wrote the address in the Roman alphabet and at the post office was ordered to rewrite it in Chinese characters. She pushed back arguing that the language of the Uyghurs was a Turkic one, so numerals made more sense than characters. It got heated, she backed down. We met for lunch after and she was reeling, about the incident as well as the general ill-treatment of Uyghurs. Days later I read about a baby girl who had been left on a doorstep a few miles away from where I was living, a victim of the One-Child Policy. Not the first victim, nor the last. I started to write about these injustices, only by this stage I had wised up – it would have to be with foreign press.
A few years later, in 2011, I was living in Beijing. China’s capital was and is, by many measures, a harder city to live in than Shanghai and I knew that. Brutally cold winters, an urban sprawl that’s unsuited to walking. But the real challenge about Beijing then was how quickly the country’s politics had moved on in just a matter of years. If Facebook was my early barometer of openness, then its blocking in 2009 was a sign that China’s doors were closing. Gmail ran at a sluggish pace, if at all. Communicating with those outside China was seamless one day, impossible the next.
As for the attitude towards foreigners, which was once warm, this too was starting to change. One night I was locked inside a bar – police officers were outside demanding papers of foreigners. In a dispatch I wrote following the event long-time expats told me they’d never been treated with such hostility.
Most memorable of all was the Bo Xilai scandal in the spring of 2012. With the mysterious death of a UK national, a “love nest” traced to Bournemouth, a security officer seeking refuge in Chengdu’s US consulate, and a Chinese power couple and their Harvard-educated son at the centre, it was little wonder the news gripped people outside China. Inside China it was a different matter. Details were tightly controlled and spun. Bo was charged with corruption in a resoundingly clear message – a new era was starting and favouritism would no longer be tolerated. The charismatic figure’s dramatic fall from grace was, if anything, the first real taste of how Xi would treat his opponents – ruthlessly. Today Bo remains in prison, serving a life sentence.
I left China, this time for good, just after Xi Jinping took office. Despite some early warning signs, the mood was still somewhat hopeful as I departed. Maybe the creeping authoritarianism that had come to define the end of the Hu era would recede under Xi? Such hopes were quickly dashed. From the get-go Xi has put in a level of energy to crush dissent that is dizzying to say the least. Ten years on, the ways in which he has attacked civil society is substantial. Here are some headlines:
– In the treatment of Uyhgurs, of which over one million are currently in concentration camps, he has presided over arguably the largest genocide the world has seen since the 1940s. In fact, oppression of minorities is so intense under his leadership that people struggle to keep up. Tibet, once a hot topic for the rights-minded, has dropped off the list – people are too overwhelmed and distracted by the other things the CCP are doing.
– Scores of activists, lawyers, writers, publishers, scholars and employees of NGOs have been rounded up and imprisoned. Many of those detained have also appeared on state-run TV confessing to “crimes” ahead of their trial. The treatment of the “Feminist Five”, a group of women who were arrested in 2015 for simply speaking out against the country’s sexual harassment problem, is just one example in an exhaustive list.
– The number of independent journalists in China has been significantly wheedled down. Foreign reporters have been driven out, either because their visas weren’t renewed or because they couldn’t operate anymore in an environment in which access to information is tightly controlled. Foreign news sites have been blocked, while Chinese sites have been closed. In 2016, for example, news services run by some of China’s biggest online portals, such as Sina’s News Geek, Sohu’s Click Today, and NetEase’s Signpost, were all shut for publishing independent reports instead of official statements.
– Indeed, getting information out of the country has become much harder, almost impossible. I used to report for Index from China. Then I worked at Index with reporters from China. Today I struggle to get anyone to write for us on the ground, let alone talk to us on the record.
– Under Xi’s term, one of the most vibrant and liberal cities in the world – Hong Kong – has been gutted of freedoms. Hundreds are in jail, including high-profile figures like Jimmy Lai and Joshua Wong. Thousands more have fled.
– The tools of repression have spilled beyond China and Hong Kong’s borders. Across the globe, CCP spies harass and threaten dissidents, as highlighted in our Banned By Beijing reports. It’s not just dissidents in Beijing’s firing line. Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets, found himself in hot water in 2019 when he tweeted in support of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters. Several Chinese businesses suspended ties with the basketball team, including China’s major sports networks who stopped broadcasting their matches. Basketball is big business in China, with hundreds of millions of fans watching NBA matches. Morey quickly deleted his original tweet and apologised.
As said, these are just the headlines.
In 2018 Xi took the unprecedented move of overturning the two-term limit for the presidency, in place since 1982. On 16 October the 20th Party Congress will be hosted in Beijing in which the leadership will be decided for the next five years. After rounds of purges to sweep up his political rivals, the assumption is Xi will retain the top job. Embarking on his third term in power will make him the longest serving leader in the CCP since Mao Zedong. Ever an optimist I hope that when I reflect on Xi Jinping’s next five years in power I can point to more positive things. Being realistic, the trend of the last 15 years under Hu and Xi would suggest that’s unlikely.
At this moment in time it’s not safe for me to return to China. I hope that changes. I’d love to visit the country again and I’d love my kids to go too. More than my own small hopes of returning are my hopes for those 1.4 billion people from there, alongside the seven million residents in Hong Kong. Living in a pluralistic society that tolerates dissent, that is free and transparent, should be a basic right not a geographical privilege.
It’s poignant thinking back to the fast-food article anecdote from the viewpoint of 2022. The city of Shanghai, which pulsated with life 15 years ago, has been brought to its knees over the last few years. Lockdown after lockdown after lockdown has shown that not only can the CCP control the nation’s waistlines if they want to, they can control just about anything. People have literally been locked in their homes and starved by their government – that is how much control the CCP has amassed under Xi Jinping. I wish we were ushering in a new leader and a better era this weekend. That day will come and until then myself, alongside my colleagues at Index, will continue fighting.
