MCLC: from surveillance to elimination

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Paul Mooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: from surveillance to elimination
***********************************************************

Source: China Change (6/22/14):
http://chinachange.org/2014/06/22/beyond-stability-maintenance-from-surveil
lance-to-elimination/

Beyond Stability Maintenance – From Surveillance to Elimination
By Teng Biao

June 4th has passed, but the arrests continue, and every day brings bad
news from China. While scholar Xu Youyu, artist Chen Guang and others have
been released “on probation,” many are still being held and others have
been formally arrested, including Jia Lingmin (贾灵敏) and two others in
Zhengzhou, Henan, and lawyer Pu Zhiqiang (浦志强) in Beijing. On June 20 in
Guangzhou, lawyer Tang Jingling (唐荆陵) and activists Wang Qingying (王清
营) 
and Yuan Xinting (袁新亭) were formally arrested on subversion charges.
Earlier this week, three New Citizens Movement participants Liu Ping (刘萍),
Wei Zhongping (魏忠平) and Li Sihua (李思华) were harshly sentenced for
fictitious “crimes.”

Some people explain these arrests as an increase in stability maintenance
before the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre on June 4th. Others
explain the arrests as the misuse of police power by the political and
legal systems and a loss of control over the police forces. Still others
explain them as the result of factional infighting among the Central
leadership. I’m afraid all these explanations are wrong.

This wave of large scale repression of civil society did not start with
the arrest of the “Five for  Commemorating June 4th on May 3rd,” but
rather, it started last year with the arrest of the “Beijing Xidan Four.”
On March 31, 2013, Yuan Zhong (袁冬), Zhang Baocheng (张宝成), and two
others 
gave a speech at Beijing Xidan in which they called on government
officials to make public their property holdings. They were arrested on
the spot. This was the official prelude to the authorities’ repression of
the New Citizens Movement and the civil society. Within a year, throughout
China no fewer than two hundred human rights activists were arrested and
incarcerated. These included: Xu Zhiyong (许志永), Wang Gongquan (王功权),
Guo 
Feixiong (郭飞雄), Li Huaping (李化平), Chen Baocheng (陈宝成), Zhang Lin (张
林), 
Ding Jiaxi (丁家喜), Liu Ping (刘萍), Yuan Fengchu (袁奉初), Ilham Tothi (伊
力哈木), 
and others. Among these human rights activists, the authorities tortured
to death the noted activist Cao Shunli (曹顺利). Suppression has increased
markedly not only against human rights activists but also against
dissidents, underground churches, Falun Gong adherents, petitioners,
activist netizens, and liberal scholars. Meanwhile we have been witnessing
a marked tightening of information dissemination and ideological control.

Although this wave of repression did not take the same form as the
repression during the period of the “Jasmine Revolution” in the spring of
2011, a period of repression that saw kidnappings, secret detentions, and
torture (all of which are an escalation of stability maintenance under a
state of emergency),  it surpasses that of the Jasmine Revolution in
duration, scope, number of people arrested, and the severity of
punishments.

It is clear that, after Xi Jinping assumed power, he has been trying to
change the mode for dealing with civil society. We can consider the
incident of the “Beijing Xidan Four” in 2013 as the beginning of this
shift. The authorities, in the process of cracking down, collected
information, watched for reactions to the process, accumulated experience,
and continued to deepen and strengthen this new mode for dealing with
civil society. We could call this “a shift from surveillance mode to
elimination mode.”

This new mode is not an emergency response and not directed at individual
incidents. No, this new mode is planned and undertaken step by step. It is
not aimed at specific individuals, but rather at the whole of civil
society. Previously, they arrested those who crossed red lines, stood out,
took street actions, or appeared to be organized, and so on. Now, however,
the authorities are making a clean sweep of all of civil society. Those
who are active, influential, or action-oriented probably have their names
on a list of people to be arrested. A certain person arrested during a
given incident does not necessarily mean that this person was arrested
because of the incident. Arrest is just an excuse, an opportunity to
settle old scores, to have a reckoning.

Before, the goal was primarily to punish those who crossed the line, and
to retain the advantages of strong stability maintenance. Now, however,
the goal is simultaneously to eliminate the nodes of civil mobilization,
eradicate emerging civil leaders, and disperse the capacity for civil
resistance. From the spring of last year until the present, we can see
from the large scale of the arrests and the fierceness of the crackdown
that the intent of the authorities is the total elimination of civil
resistance. At a minimum, the authorities want to curb the momentum of the
last ten years in which civil society has been quietly but steadily
growing and flourishing.

Xi Jinping is no Gorbachev. He is a Maoist. From his position as a member
of the “Princelings’ Party,” from his educational experiences, his
schooling in the Party’s culture, and from the speeches he has made both
before assuming power and since, we can see that there is no such thing as
“democracy” or “constitution” in his mindset. Through speeches and
official documents, suchas “no exporting of revolution,”¹ the “two periods
that cannot be used to negate each other,”² the “seven don’t mentions,”³
“Document No. 9,”⁴ the “August 19th speech,”⁵ and political moves such as
Mao worship on December 26, 2013, and the formation of the National
Security Committee, the Party Secretary has been rattling his sabers. And
no more harboring illusions on the part of the public intellectuals.

The discerning magazine, the Economist, put Xi Jinping on the cover
wearing emperor’s robes. Compared to Mao’s power, however, imperial power
was negligible. Maoism, the one party system, an eternally red China –
these are the “universal truths” to which Xi adheres. In fact, the
differences between Hu Jintao’s way of thinking and Xi Jinping’s are not
that great, but Xi is more motivated, more forceful,more confident with
fewer constraints. Xi flaunts his power in the “five black categories
<http://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/New_five_black_categories>” (human
rights lawyers, underground religion, dissidents, internet opinion
leaders, and disadvantaged social groups), and has gone after them with
real weapons. Even more importantly, in the eyes of the leaders of the
party-state, if the regime does not align its forces against the civil
power represented by the “five black categories,” and does not use
“unconventional deterrence” against these opposition forces to deal them a
devastating blow, then these forces will be a “real and imminent danger”
threatening the party’s political power and interests (or the so-called
“interests of the people and social stability”).

China’s civil society, however, has already developed the basis on which
to repair itself and to grow steadily. On the one hand, there is
development in China’s internet, marketization, globalization,
legalization, and civil consciousness, as well as an accumulation of
social movements. On the other hand, the present regime lacks legitimacy,
the present political system continuously violates civil rights, and
continuously creates contradictions and conflicts, while the present
ideology continues to lose its hold on people, the ecological environment
continues to deteriorate, and the present development model continues to
show cracks. Against this larger social and economic context, the upward
trend of civil society and liberal democratic force is all but impossible
to stop by the will of a few individuals.

Invariably, this process will be tortuous, frustrating, with low points
and sacrifices. Even more people will have to pay a heartbreaking price.
The bad news will continue to come. The context of the times and the
society described above, however, is both the reason that the authorities
have shifted their mode of suppression and also the reason that the new
mode of suppression in the end cannot achieve its purpose.

Endnotes (by translator):

¹Xi Jinping’s anti-foreigner speech
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/4637039/Chinas-next-l
eader-in-hardline-rant.html> in Mexico in 2009: “China does not export
revolution, hunger, poverty, nor does China cause you any headaches. Just
what else do you want?”

²In a January 2013 speech <http://baike.baidu.com/view/10567448.htm>
(Chinese), Xi Jinping said that “one cannot use the historical period
after the ‘reform and opening up’ [of 1978] to deny the historical period
that came before ‘reform and opening up;’ likewise, one cannot us the
historical period before ‘reform and opening up’ to deny the historical
period after ‘reform and opening up.’”

³The ‘seven don’t mentions
<http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1234453/seven-subjects-limits-teach
ing-chinese-universities-told>’ are: universal values, freedom of the
press, civil society, civil rights, the historical mistakes of the
Communist Party of China, the bourgeois elite, and an independent
judiciary.

⁴Document No. 9 
<http://www.chinafile.com/document-9-chinafile-translation> addressed
several political trends that, if not suppressed, the party leadership
felt could force the party from power. These trends include: western
constitutional democracy, universal values, civil society, neoliberalism,
a western perspective on the news, historical nihilism (i.e. denying the
role of the party in creating the new China), and doubts about reform and
opening up.

⁵In his August 19, 2013 speech
<http://cpc.people.com.cn/n/2013/0821/c64094-22636876.html> (Chinese),
made to a Nation-wide Propaganda and Ideological Work Conference, Xi
Jinping stressed the leading role of Marxism, and that propaganda and
ideological work units had to defend Marxism against a small group of
reactionary intellectuals who use the internet to attack, slander, and
foment rumors about the party.

Teng Biao (滕彪)

Teng Biao (滕彪) is a legal scholar, human rights lawyer, a pioneer and a
leader of China’s rights movement.