The Great Wall of China is more than thirteen thousand miles long, running roughly along the border between central China and Inner Mongolia.
As in the real world, freedom and order are both necessary in cyberspace.
—President Xi Jinping
The Great Wall of China is more than thirteen thousand miles long, running roughly along the border between central China and Inner Mongolia.
Chinese emperors always struggled to unite their disparate and divided fiefdoms into a unitary whole. President Xi Jinping is no different. He may not be called emperor, but his official titles give the game away—General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, President of the People’s Republic of China, Chairman of the Central Commission for Integrated Military and Civilian Development—the list goes on and on. In early 2018 he moved to abolish the rules limiting presidential tenures in office to two terms. He’s not just a Supreme Leader, he’s a Very Supreme Leader.
Everything about what he leads is vast, including the challenges. China’s five geographical time zones amount to an area the size of the USA. Within this space live 1.4 billion ethnically diverse people, speaking dozens of different languages; it’s a multiethnic empire with Communist Chinese characteristics. There may be five geographic time zones, but only one is official. The answer to “What’s the time?” is “Whatever time Beijing says it is.” This central rule has long been the case, but the twenty-first-century emperor has a luxury few of his precursors enjoyed. He can survey his empire from the air—not just the area encompassed by the Himalayas, to the Sea of Japan and the Gobi Desert, down to the South China Sea, but now the economic empire spanning the globe.
Xi is good at quietly projecting his power. He travels more than many of his predecessors. He flies to the world’s capitals, confident in the united economic power of the new China, but en route to the airport he will be reminded of how careful Chinese leaders must always be to ensure that the center holds.
As you drive northeast along the Airport Expressway out of Beijing toward the Great Wall of China, the divisions within the population are at first difficult for an outsider to identify, but then become increasingly easy. Xi can see these at a glance because many have arisen in his lifetime, some under his leadership.
From the city center, with its gleaming, neon-lit temples to consumerism and upscale apartment buildings for the well-off, the road leads on past miles of high-rise flats inhabited by the ever-burgeoning middle class. Farther out are the factory and industrial workers who, year on year, continue to flow in from the countryside to the capital and other big cities. A local can spot which apartment blocks house the better off, and which have been hastily thrown up to cope with the influx. Once one is out into the small towns and villages, there is little neon and less commercialization. In this part of China the towns are drab, colorless, spartan affairs with few amenities; to the foreign eye, the overwhelming sense is only of grayness. This is perhaps China’s greatest divide—that between the urban and rural, the rich and poor—and as we will later see, it worries the ruling Communist Party. It knows that the unity and stability of the People’s Republic depend to a great extent on bridging the gap, and that its iron grip on the people will slip if it fails to do so.
Unity has always been crucial to China’s success, and at the same time one of its biggest challenges. In the past, the one thing that played both a physical and symbolic role in unifying the country was the Great Wall of China. If Xi kept going along the expressway, straight past the airport, he’d end up on an eight-lane highway heading farther northeast, and from there arrive at a structure that has gripped the world’s imagination.
As you approach the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, the highway diminishes into a simple two-lane road; the buildings become fewer and the landscape increasingly verdant. A few miles away from the wall, the road leads to a parking lot where you must transfer to a coach to take you to where the road ends. Then it’s either a cable car to the top or a steep two-mile hike, possibly accompanied by a herd of goats. The unguided goat tour is not optional—if the goats want to follow you, they will; if they don’t, they won’t. Whichever route you choose, you will eventually see something that makes the effort more than worthwhile.
When I first gazed over the miles of brickwork snaking along the mountaintops, I was not as overawed as I had been at, say, the Grand Canyon. Nor did I feel overwhelmed, as I was by the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa, in Dubai. I did not feel political ideology emanating from it, as I did when I visited the Berlin Wall at the height of the Cold War. But there was something else. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that I understood China just a little bit better than before.
It didn’t make me any sort of expert—far from it—but in that moment I had a much better appreciation of phrases such as ancient culture and the greatest feat in human history, and of the concept that many in the People’s Republic still divide the world into those who are Chinese and those who are not. After all, the wall was built around a simplistic idea: on one side of it was civilization and on the other barbarity.
Behind me, to the south, lay the heartland of the Middle Kingdom, populated by the Han people. To the north, in the far distance beyond the mountains, was where the steppe and desert of Mongolia began, flanked on the right by Manchuria and on the left by the Xinjiang region.
Before the wall existed, some twenty-five hundred years ago, the northern mountains offered a degree of protection to the Han, who had developed settled societies in the fertile lands of the North China Plain. But raiding parties, and occasionally whole armies, from all three regions would find ways through the mountain passes into the flat agricultural lands of the feudal states and cities such as Beijing, Luoyang, and Kaifeng. So, over centuries, the Chinese would develop the quintessential symbol of “us and them.”
The great American sinologist John King Fairbank had perhaps one of the best descriptions of the Great Wall, calling it “a line of demarcation separating the steppe from the sown field, nomadism from agriculture, and barbarism from civilization.” This fits with the prevailing attitude of “Sinocentrism” at the time—the belief that China was the cultural center on earth, and the most advanced civilization. The Han also believed that China’s emperor was the only ruler on earth who was mandated by heaven itself, and thus the legitimate emperor of the world. It therefore followed that not only were all other rulers subordinate, but that all other civilizations were inferior. Near neighbors of different ethnicities were to be brought under the rule of the emperor, although they could have their own local leaders. Nearby barbarian states could have kings, but they had to recognize that they were lesser than the Chinese emperor. Even places farther afield, such as Xinjiang, Java, and Japan, were deemed “tributary states” and had to pay tribute to the Middle Kingdom. This was not a worldview designed to win friends, but it certainly influenced people, and for long periods it worked.
Over the centuries, the Great Wall enhanced China’s security, binding it as a political entity and providing the stability to develop farmland in western and northern regions. As the wall stretched westward, it also protected part of the Silk Road, thus furthering economic growth. At its longest, and including the parallel walls, the defensive system stretched for more than thirteen thousand miles. To give a sense of its magnitude, that is equivalent to four walls parallel to each other, each stretching from the East Coast of the USA all the way across to the Pacific Ocean, with a lot of bricks to spare.
Although the physical role it played in uniting the country diminished over the years, it remained an important symbol in the national consciousness. So much so that after the Communists came to power in 1949, Mao Zedong mentioned the wall in a poem about the Long March titled “Mount Liupan,” which includes the line: “If we fail to reach the Great Wall we are not true men.” The wording of this line has subsequently been adapted into a popular proverb that says, “One who fails to reach the Great Wall is no hero,” meaning “If you can’t overcome great difficulties, you’re no hero.”
The poem caused some problems in the new regime, as the Communists seemed to have conflicting views of the wall—many saw it as a symbol of the nation’s feudal past and believed it should be consigned to history, even encouraging people to vandalize it. But, given that Mao had written about it, other Communists wanted to visit it to show “Chairman Mao spirit.” If you go to the Mutianyu section, you can see written in gigantic white characters on the mountaintop, “Loyalty to Chairman Mao.” And the wall was mentioned in the national anthem, adopted in 1949, so the Party clearly recognized its cultural and historical importance. For the most part, they settled for ignoring it—to begin with, at least. During the Cultural Revolution, however, the most fervent of the Red Guards actively destroyed sections of the wall—to them it was a part of the “Four Olds,” which had no place in the new China: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas.
Mao died in 1976, and with him the Cultural Revolution. After 1978 the new leader, Deng Xiaoping, began a methodical reconstruction of the wall. He started slowly—the early post-Mao years were a time for caution—but by 1984 he was confident enough to pronounce, “Let us love our China and restore our Great Wall.” In this endeavor, Deng likely had one eye on tourism and foreign currency; the Communist leadership was beginning to embrace aspects of capitalism and was well aware of how far China had fallen behind other parts of the world. Laws were passed to make it illegal to damage, remove, or write graffiti on any part of the wall, alongside attempts at rebuilding (with mixed success) and a drive toward attracting visitors.
The Great Wall has played a huge role in the popular imagination of both the Chinese and the rest of the world—although some historians argue that the Europeans were more obsessed by it than the Chinese themselves and that this contributed toward awareness of, and identification with, the structure in China itself. So the wall has been instrumental in defining China from outside as well as within its own confines.
The wall was only ever partially successful militarily. Without doubt its early-warning system, fortifications, and strategic strongholds offered some protection, but these were hardly impregnable. However, its role as a symbol of defense, of dividing the Han from the “outsiders,” was invaluable; today it remains an icon of a great and ancient culture.
* * *
But what of the great and modern culture?
Qin Shi Huang, the founder of the Qin dynasty, succeeded in uniting seven warring states into one China in 221 BCE, but just because it has lasted twenty-three centuries does not automatically mean it will last another.
The Chinese do not like to talk to outsiders about the country’s problems or divisions. Whereas you’ll not have to go far to find people in Britain or France, say, who will happily tell you their country is going to the dogs, in China it is considered unpatriotic and a loss of face to criticize the state. It might also be risky given that China remains a one-party dictatorship.
Nevertheless, the twenty-three provinces, four municipalities, five autonomous regions, and two special administrative regions have problems and divisions. One of the biggest is that between the Han heartland and the non-Han areas that surround it in a semicircle. To the northeast is Manchuria, to the north Inner Mongolia, to the northwest Xinjiang, and to the west Tibet. These regions are crucial for security, natural resources, and trade, but they aren’t all in favor of Chinese rule. Manchuria is now totally dominated by the Han, but the other regions maintain their own identity, language, customs, and, in the cases of Xinjiang and Tibet, their own religions (Islam and Buddhism) and separatist movements.
China has tried to control Xinjiang and its Uighur people for several centuries, but the population has never fully accepted domination by Beijing. There were a series of uprisings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and even a short-lived Eastern Turkestan Republic in the 1930s. Mao annexed Xinjiang in 1949, and it now accounts for about one-sixth of China’s territory. To give an idea of how barren and sparsely populated Xinjiang is, it is about half the size of India but with less than 2 percent of its population.
The intervening years have seen a mass movement of Han settlers into Xinjiang, and in a few years’ time they are likely to compose almost half the population, currently at 22 million. This has not gone unopposed. The Uighurs complain that they are excluded from the better jobs and persecuted by militia formed within state-controlled construction industries, and there are occasional riots and ethnic clashes. Opposition is sometimes conducted through the legal system, but also via a small terrorist campaign, partially fueled by Muslim fighters who have returned from Iraq and Syria. Jihadist organizations in the Central Asian republics are thought to assist them with money and, if necessary, safe havens. Alarm bells began to ring when the IS terror group released a video showing Uighur men training in Iraq, vowing to plant their flag in China, and threatening that blood would “flow in rivers.”
In the spring of 2017 ethnic violence broke out in the area between Uighur and Han. This was followed by a massive show of force by heavily armed government troops. The regional Communist Party leader recommended that the soldiers “bury the corpses of terrorists in the vast sea of the people’s war.” President Xi was somewhat more restrained, contenting himself with a call for a “Great Wall of Iron” to be built to safeguard Xinjiang and a warning that ethnic division would not be tolerated—“Just as one loves one’s own eyes, one must love ethnic unity,” he said.
Despite the unrest, there is little chance of Beijing’s loosening its iron grip. The region is a buffer zone, is on the new Silk Road and so is crucial for trade, and has large reserves of the coal that energy-hungry China so badly needs. But even so, the authorities are seriously concerned about events there. Such divisions and dissension undermine the Communist Party’s image as the only source of power and protector of the people.
The same goes for Tibet. Strategically it serves as a buffer zone for the heartland, preventing India from dominating the high ground along its border with China—arguably, the Himalayas act as a barrier, which is perhaps why a major conflict has never emerged between the two nations. This also allows China to protect its water sources—Tibet is sometimes called the Asian Water Tower as so many major rivers flow out of the region.
If you measure Tibet by the three Tibetan provinces, it is about 965,000 square miles, or nearly four times the size of France, and thus equals about a quarter of China’s landmass. However, when Beijing refers to Tibet, it means the Tibet Autonomous Region, which was established after China defeated the Tibetan army in 1950. It is less than half the size of the original three provinces, as the rest of the area became absorbed by other Chinese regions, and it contains only a third of China’s ethnically Tibetan population.
As with the Uighur Muslims, the Tibetan Buddhists retain a strong sense of identity separate from the Han Chinese. But for both regions, any hope of self-rule has almost disappeared. In Tibet, it’s estimated that half the population are now Han. Accurate figures are difficult to obtain, but it’s thought that about 6 million Tibetans and 6 million Han live in the area as a whole. In the larger towns they live cheek by jowl, albeit often in different neighborhoods, although in the rural areas the Tibetans remain a majority.
The state believes it can handle the divisions between the ethnicities, as long as those within the Han are smoothed over. These divides may pose the greatest threat to the prospects of long-term prosperity and unity in China. The threat is taken seriously by the Communist Party. It has learned the lessons of history and knows what happens when the state is weakened by a fragmented population.
In the nineteenth century, China saw a major reversal in its trading patterns. Land trade routes through Central Asia had always been the economic priority, but now sea-lanes became primary. This reversal was not entirely by choice—the British and other foreign powers had used their military strength to force unfavorable trading terms upon China. As a result, the focus of trade shifted to China’s Pacific coast, which helped the communities in that region to develop, but it weakened the trading prospects of the interior, which in turn reduced the amount of money spent on its infrastructure. So while the coastal regions prospered, the dirt-poor farmers remained dirt-poor—and the foreigners became increasingly powerful. This undermined the central authority over the regions and was partly responsible for the splintering of the state. Given such a divided population, the center could not hold. A now thoroughly weakened China was helpless in the face of, first, the “barbarian” colonialists, then civil war, and finally invasion by the old enemy Japan, beginning in 1931.
After World War II, when the Communists had won the civil war, they knew they had to somehow bring the country back together. Communist regimes are not known for their liberal tendencies or their relaxed approach to rules and power sharing. Out went the foreigners and into the regional capitals went the Party cadres. Under Mao they brutally repressed any signs of dissent from the regions and centralized all power in the Party, based in Beijing, which from 1949 was again the capital of the country.
Many of the trade links with the developed world were cut, which partially resulted in that great Communist ideal—equality. Slowly the coastal areas became almost as poor as the interior, solving that imbalance between the regions. Aside from many of the Party bosses, most people continued to be poor for several decades as Mao consolidated power and brought the non-Han territories under his control.
Mao may have reunited the country, but it came at the cost of development, and at exactly the time when other nations in the region were emerging into the world economy and rapidly improving themselves. Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and others were all outpacing China economically, and some militarily as well. If this trend continued, it would threaten both China’s defensive security and its internal cohesion, once it became apparent to all how far behind the Chinese had fallen.
Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, took a deep breath and a gamble: if Chinese consumers were too poor to buy many of the goods China could produce, the economy had to be opened up to the outside world once more. This meant trading via the Pacific coast, so the coastal regions would again prosper more quickly than the interior, thus risking a repeat of the divisions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
It was, and still is, a race against the clock. The strategy also relies on the economy’s maintaining its relentless pace. China has to continue making things. The world has to keep buying these things. If demand drops, China cannot afford, as a normal capitalist system might, to stop making these things. It must keep up production, keep the factories open, subsidize the banks; no matter the surplus—try to dump some abroad at fire-sale prices, sell even more to the part of the domestic population that can afford them. Just don’t let the system stop because, if it does, so might the entire country.
This is a fascinating capitalist version of the old Soviet Communist system, which produced as many tractors as the government told it to, regardless of how many were needed. It has lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty—at the cost, however, of environmental damage and the renewed widening of the gap between the coastal region and the interior, the rich and poor.
The wage difference between rural and urban workers has narrowed slightly in the past few years, but even now someone in a city can expect to earn three times as much as a country worker. Levels of income inequality in China are among the highest in the world, leading to a feeling that China’s wealth-making machine has served the few, not the many—or in Chinese slang, it has served “the Zhao family,” an idiom similar to “the top dogs.” The expression has its popular roots in a 1920s novel, The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun, which includes the line “You think you’re worthy of the surname Zhao?,” referring to a wealthy clan. The phrase began to appear on the Chinese internet in 2015, and now the saying “Zhao and not Zhao” is equivalent to “the haves and have-nots.”
All countries have wealth inequality, and all have similar sayings, but the difference in China is the size of that gap, and the sheer number of people on the wrong side of it. A 2015 report from the China Family Panel Studies at Peking University exploring the “well-being of the Chinese population” concluded that, overall, wealth inequality was getting worse. It reported that a third of China’s wealth is owned by 1 percent of households, while the bottom 25 percent of households account for just 1 percent of wealth. The disparity can be traced back to the opening up of the economy in 1979.
The government is aware of the problems and dangers such division can pose, especially as an internet poll conducted in 2015 suggested that wealth inequality, with its effects on health and education, is the top issue that people want the government to address. In a news item on the report the People’s Daily newspaper commented, “These inequalities are growing steadily. If they cannot be effectively solved, they may very likely threaten social stability and thus become a bottleneck in future social development.”
Even the generations are divided, with some elderly people harking back to the days of Mao and “equality.” They look askance at the younger generation, more of whom are urban, better-educated, and consumerist, or at least seek to be. The Communist Party’s future is dependent on what it delivers to them and vice versa.
The developing fissures in Chinese society cannot be allowed to widen. One way the government intends to address the problem is to create a much bigger urban consumerist population, thereby offsetting the blows to the economy when exports abroad falter. Estimates vary, but at least 150 million people have left the rural areas this century, and the number is expected to increase. The younger generations move from the countryside, and within them are a disproportionate number of men—married men will sometimes travel to find work in the cities, leaving behind family members to maintain the fields. Despite this, it is crucial to remember that even now about 900 million Chinese live in rural areas and about 500 million in an urban environment.
Change has been quick and will quicken. By 2026 Beijing hopes to have moved another 250 million people, meaning that by then half the population will be urban. This involves a mass uprooting of people, along with the destruction of villages and the building of cities, megacities, roads, and high-speed railways. The majority of the movement continues to be from west to east, the west still tending to be more rural, with higher illiteracy rates; the east, especially toward the seaboard, is increasingly urban and oriented toward technology, industry, and business.
However, the mass migration to the cities reveals and exacerbates another gap within the urban population, again between rich and poor, created by the hukou system. This form of registration is rooted in the social structure of the country and has helped to entrench the perception of the rural population as second-class citizens.
The hukou system predates the Great Wall, going all the way back to the Xia dynasty (2070–1600 BCE), which started registering every member of every family. In 1953 the Communist Party continued to use the ancient system, but also started to classify people as rural or urban dwellers. This was not just another way to keep tabs on everyone; it was intended to stop people from migrating to urban areas, which could not absorb the influx, and to avoid a repeat of the inequalities between country and city of the previous century.
The system still exists, and everyone’s name, parents’ names, date of birth, spouse, etc., must be registered—which is normal in many countries. But in China, where you are registered determines where you live and, crucially, where you can receive state aid and in what form. The key divisions arise in the local versus nonlocal and agricultural versus nonagricultural categories.
Let’s say your family is registered as nonagricultural Shanghai. This immediately gives you access to a wide range of health and education services in the city. For example, according to a paper in the China Economic Review, funding per pupil in Beijing in 1998 was twelve times greater than in Guizhou Province, a ratio that increased to fifteen in 2001. On the other hand, if your family is registered as agricultural in a farming region a thousand miles west of Shanghai, the schools you have access to are way below the standard of those in Shanghai, as are the range of social services. Moreover, your work consists of backbreaking labor, which sometimes results only in a subsistence living.
So, you move to Shanghai to seek work in a factory. Your wages will immediately be higher, and you may be able to send some money back home. But you are registered as “rural agricultural,” so you do not qualify for social security or health care in Shanghai. If you marry and have a child, your child is also not registered to be educated in Shanghai. This has resulted in a massive urban underclass of migrant workers from rural areas who are completely cut off from social services. They were second-class citizens in the countryside, and now find that they are regarded as such in the cities too.
The government faces a quandary when trying to address this problem. One option is to initiate a revolution in social funding in the countryside and bring the rural areas up to the standards of the cities. But not only would that cost vast sums of money, it might also keep people in the countryside when the government knows it still needs to create an urban consumer population if its economic policy is to work. Worse still, some of those already in the cities might choose to go home. If that happens, the economic miracle goes bust, unemployment rockets, and social disorder follows.
Somehow Beijing needs to balance the books. It must fund a hukou system in the cities for those who have come from the rural areas, while also increasing the funding for social services in general as the cities continue to grow—then somehow, ideally simultaneously, raise standards in the countryside while still encouraging movement to the built-up areas, preferably creating new cities in the interior.
This is quite a challenge, and how to tackle it is not straightforward; quite apart from the vast expense, the creation of so many new urban environments, spread out around the country, is a logistical challenge. Beijing is toying with the idea of allowing regional governments more power to tax locally, to raise revenues through land sales, and to spend the proceeds as they see fit. It might work. But if it fails, Beijing will have to bail out the local governments. And even if it succeeds, it might fuel what the Party dreads—regionalism.
Deng appears to have known that his gamble would give rise to many of these issues. In a famous interview in 1986, Mike Wallace of CBS News asked the then eighty-two-year-old Communist leader about the startling phrase attributed to him from the late 1970s that “to get rich is glorious.” Deng replied, “According to Marxism, Communist society is based on material abundance. . . . So to get rich is no sin. However, what we mean by getting rich is different from what you mean. Wealth in a socialist society belongs to the people. To get rich in a socialist society means prosperity for the entire people. The principles of socialism are, first, development of production, and, second, common prosperity. We permit some people and some regions to become prosperous first, for the purpose of achieving common prosperity faster. That is why our policy will not lead to polarization, to a situation where the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.”
He was half wrong and half right, because the rich have gotten richer. However, although the poor have not gotten poorer, in relative terms they are less well-off because of the massive and increasing gap in wealth equality that has emerged.
China has created a middle class of about 400 million people and lifted hundreds of millions more out of abject poverty. It’s a work in progress, and you can’t rule out the possibility of things going backward, but enough Chinese still remember just how poor most people were before, with almost no chance of lifting themselves out of that poverty—after all, most of the grandparents of today’s mature adults were peasants in a feudal society. This buys the Party a little more time to address the problem; but if it cannot soon narrow the wealth gap, eventually the resentment from the “not Zhao” will grow.
Another problem the government faces is an aging population. This isn’t unique to China. But it is a particular issue for China because of the one-child policy, which means that the population is aging much faster than in other countries. In less than a decade the number of elderly will rise from 200 million to 300 million. Is the government prepared for such a change in demographics? Its economic policy has been reliant on a young and plentiful labor force. Proportionally, this pool of available laborers—and taxpayers—will get smaller at the same time as the financial burden of providing care to the aging population increases, putting economic progress at risk.
Again the solution is not clear. One option is to raise the retirement age by five years, but that simply postpones the problem and creates another: the college graduates the education system is churning out want jobs; unemployment and lack of promotion are already difficulties and will only be exacerbated if the older generation retires later. The alternative is to ensure that the social services can provide pensions and to drop the one-child policy. The latter was done in 2015, but the government is still looking for ways to fund the former.
These multiple divisions simmer within the Han population, all of which pose a potential threat to the government if they worsen. The authorities must retain control of China’s heartland if they are to keep its economic policy on track and the outlying regions in check. Their solution is to control the flow of information, to prevent dissenting ideas from spreading, to stop opposition from consolidating. They must divide in order to unite; and so, in the age of the internet, the Great Firewall of China came into being.
This creates contradictory policies: suppressing information while simultaneously creating a vibrant economy that is increasingly based on data exchange across the country and with the outside world. In the early days of the internet this was not a problem for a government hell-bent on protecting its position as China’s only source of power and information. Access was limited, so all internal mass communication was state controlled, and the few internet cafés or universities connected to the Web could be easily monitored, both physically and electronically. As late as 2005, only 10 percent of the population had access to the internet. Now, however, the figure is 50 percent—and rising. That’s about 700 million users, which is roughly a quarter of the world’s online population. And that is harder to control.
Keeping the Chinese people digitally cut off from the outside world has been easier than dividing them from each other. What the outside world calls the Great Firewall is known in China as the Golden Shield. This outward-facing firewall is supposed to protect the Chinese population from such damaging ideas as democracy, free speech, and unplugged culture. Despite some work-arounds such as virtual private network (VPN) services, which are designed to tunnel under the wall, most Chinese people do not have access to sites as diverse as Time, Dropbox, the Economist, Facebook, YouTube, Amnesty International, the Tibet Post, the Norwegian Broadcasting Company, Le Monde, or Pornhub.
The inner walls are to prevent potentially political cyber networks from emerging and to keep what is happening in one part of the country, for example, Xinjiang, quiet from the rest. The Party particularly fears social media’s being used to organize like-minded groups who might then gather in public places to demonstrate, which could in turn lead to rioting.
Rogier Creemers, professor of law and governance at Leiden University in the Netherlands, is one of the world’s leading experts on the Chinese internet. He argues that the outside world doesn’t fully understand the Chinese government’s attitude to the digital revolution: “I would say that in comparison we generally see the internet through a rose-tinted lens, that everyone’s free, there’s freedom of information, democracy, etc. China from the get-go was a lot more skeptical. They thought new technology would have new consequences and we need to deal with those consequences. When the Chinese talk about wangluo anquan—cyber security—they don’t just mean technological integrity [protecting the physical system, e.g., power lines, from damage] or cybercrime. They mean the entire role internet technology may have in destabilizing economic and social stability. So, things we may not see as cyber security such as, say, online rumors, they do.”
China has its own versions of companies such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter in the shape of Baidu, Renren, and Weibo, but they are heavily monitored. The level of censorship varies between the regions; for example, in Tibet and Xinjiang the firewalls are both higher and deeper. A university student in Shanghai might get away with using a VPN to access a banned foreign news source, but one in the Uighur capital of Ürümqi would probably receive an invitation to discuss the technology at the city police HQ. Who is using VPNs, and for what reason, can be traced, and the state wants to know all about it. It knows that some domestic and foreign companies, and indeed some individuals, will use the technology for business purposes, to which it largely turns a blind eye. But in 2009 Uighur activists gained access to Facebook, and the company’s continuing legal troubles in China can be traced back to that incident.
Until 2013 a succession of start-up media platforms saw the business opportunities the internet offered and some became quite popular but ended up in hot water and were banned. In August 2015, for example, the start-up news site Initium Media launched from Hong Kong. Just a week later, after an explosion in a chemical factory in the northern city of Tianjin, Initium’s reporters got past the security cordons. They discovered that 173 people had died and followed up by reporting on the factory owner’s high-level connections. Days later, with no official announcement, the site was blocked in mainland China, forcing the company to change its business model and concentrate on reaching Chinese people outside China—a somewhat smaller market.
The authorities were particularly alarmed in 2010 when smartphones became available and affordable, and people could spread information easily and quickly, 24-7. So, as Professor Creemers explains, the leadership used a number of policies and regulations to push social media into the private sphere: “For example it has tried to ensure that the Weibo [microblogging] platform has become less popular, but that WeChat is widely promoted. Why? Because WeChat is not public: if you share something within your chat group, it is not shared by massive numbers of people, and what is shared is shared slowly. This makes it easier to monitor—it’s divide and rule.”
The new Chinese cyber-security legislation, which came into law in 2017, has built the walls higher than ever, metaphorically speaking. The legislation, formulated to ensure “digital sovereignty,” includes classic catchall laws designed to mean what the Party interprets them to mean. For example, if a foreign company is involved in any part of China’s critical information structure, it must store all of its information on physical databases inside China. What constitutes “critical” has not been defined. This information can be accessed by the government and cannot be sent outside China without being checked by the intelligence services. Foreign and domestic social media companies must keep all registration details by would-be users, then track and record their online activity for at least six months and be prepared to hand over that data if the government demands it. The legal language is so loose that, theoretically, any foreign company that has offices in China could be required to store within China any information it has about a Chinese citizen. A company must also agree to actively assist any investigation into its data storage by the government.
All this costs money, which the domestic companies would rather be spending on other things and which foreign companies might balk at. With the added worry about the risk to their intellectual property, IT and new-technology firms especially might decide to invest in a more benign business environment instead. While this could in theory free up space for domestic companies to develop, they are in turn hampered by the restrictions on the free flow of information and ideas. Even before the legislation, in 2016, the Washington Post reported that, according to the American Chamber of Commerce in China, four out of five of its member companies had experienced a negative impact on business due to internet regulations and censorship.
Professor Creemers describes the Party as “the ultimate risk-management company,” constantly scanning the horizon for any signs of political unrest. He believes that when the internet first came to China, the authorities took a few years to work out how to deal with it, but now they are clear where to focus their efforts: “The most important tactic the government has developed is in forestalling organized opposition. They will not allow crosscutting interest to materialize. They believe they must keep people divided so that they can’t organize along lines of class, geography, or whatever. The traditional media were organized so that they were limited; for example, professional newspapers for the steel industry, which would only write about steel, provincial papers could only report about their region. So even if one outlet went rogue, there was limited damage. The internet spoiled that model. For the first time in recent history individual Chinese people have access to the tools of mass communication, and there were a few years where the internet ran amok. Some people think the government is paranoid; I’m not so sure, I think they are very soberly aware of everything.”
Aware of the growing risks to his monopoly on power, President Xi has personally led the push to overhaul China’s cyber strategy by ordering the groups crafting it to report directly to him. For the president, the propagation of communication is a potential threat, so the censorship starts at the top.
Xi is the first Chinese leader to come to power fully aware of the potential of the internet. Since assuming office in 2013, he has personally overseen all of China’s cyber strategies, both internal and external. All the major government cyber departments report directly to a committee he chairs. He has used this power not only to devise the policies, but also to help create something of a cult of personality around him. The Party has even “bestowed” upon him the title of Core Leader, which puts him in a pantheon occupied only by Mao and Deng and indicates something close to absolute power. The Core Leader’s face is now everywhere in China, gazing down on you from billboards, in offices, and on millions of products on sale in tourist shops across the country, from Beijing and Shanghai to the Great Wall.
At the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party in late 2017 the president further consolidated power. He ensured his supporters were elected to the Politburo, and they in turn now promote the concept of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.” This was the first time since Mao that a leader’s ideas were promoted as “thought,” which in Chinese political terms is the top of the tree.
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Yet another digital divide is between the minority of Chinese who speak English and those who do not. Type Tiananmen Square, uprising, tank into Baidu’s search box in German and you might possibly get back a link, in German, to the events of 1989. Type the same words in Chinese and you’ll probably see “According to relevant laws, regulations, and policies, some results are not displayed,” or, if you’re lucky, a nice photomontage of one of the great tourist attractions of the world.
David Bandurski, a writer at the China Media Project, has noted the introduction of a new term by the Cyberspace Administration of China—positive energy. This, he argues, is a euphemism for content that is acceptable to the authorities, but some Chinese scholars are “concerned about the possibility of a crackdown on ‘rightists’ under the guise of promoting ‘positive energy.’ ” Until 2016, the head of the administration was Lu Wei, who understands the power of information. Lu had worked his way up through the ranks of the Xinhua News Agency before taking up his cyber role. He was then promoted to deputy director of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China, which in essence means deputy head of all media control in the country. Lu said his country had “cyber governance with Chinese characteristics,” echoing Deng’s phrase “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Lu added that his country was “very hospitable to the outside world, but I can choose who will be a guest in my home.”
Internet censorship does restrict China’s economic potential. The country is still the world’s leader in e-commerce, with digital retail sales making up almost 40 percent of the global total, but retail internet sales and innovation are two different things. China wants not only to create a much bigger internal market but also to make high-end goods and develop cutting-edge technology. It is very aware that although iPhones are made in China, their design and technology come from far away in Silicon Valley.
The government believes this is a price worth paying for the time being; it is part of the balancing act and gamble with time. The Communist Party needs to ensure it can feed 1.4 billion people, find work for them, find things for them to make, and find markets to which they can sell those things. At the same time, it believes it must also crush the possibility of any organized opposition, be that democracy-loving students, independence-minded Tibetans, Falun Gong–practicing religious types, or even artistic expressions of freedom. If that means holding back the free flow of information at the expense of the economic miracle—so be it.
Qin Shi Huang knocked down the internal walls of the warring states only once he was confident in his ability to hold them together. More than two thousand years later, the power of the leadership, and the unity of the Han and the nation, still come first. Even if that unity is achieved through a digital wall that separates China from the rest of the world and divides itself.
