11 Nov 2022 | Magazine, News and features, Volume 51.03 Autumn 2022, Volume 51.03 Autumn 2022, Volume 51.03 Autumn 2022 Extras
The near coincidence of two events this autumn – the World Cup in Qatar and the 20th National Party Congress in Beijing, where Chinese leader Xi Jinping will likely assume an unprecedented third term in power – represents an appropriate moment to reflect on one of Xi’s signature initiatives. Not the Chinese Dream, the Belt and Road Initiative, poverty alleviation or his anti-corruption campaign, but football.
Legend holds that a soccer-mad young Xi was so aggrieved by the “humiliation” inflicted on the Chinese national team by English club Watford at an exhibition game he attended at the Workers’ Stadium in 1983 that he determined he would redress China’s weakness in football. Decades later he declared, shortly before assuming power, that China would host and ultimately win the World Cup.
As a means to overcoming the country’s historical “national humiliation”, it was probably overly ambitious.
Nonetheless, in his first term Xi put football reform and development squarely on the national political agenda through three major policy documents promulgated between 2014 and 2016. Together they represented an overarching framework for developing a domestic sports economy, facilitating mass participation and creating an effective training ecosystem from youth levels to the national team. The long-term objective was to transform China into a “world class football nation” by 2050, a timeframe and scale of ambition that aligned with broader national objectives such as the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.
Common to Chinese policymaking, broad top-down objectives were delegated to many different institutional and private actors to design and implement, leading to much experimentation, messy ad hoc adjustment and competing interests.
Compared with many other initiatives associated with Xi’s tenure, football is a benign sector. Many concerns raised at the height of the football craze a few years ago have, as yet, proven unfounded. Chinese companies’ global sponsorship deals and the elevation of Chinese officials within international governance bodies have not made the global game any more corrupt or susceptible to parochial interests.
Chinese investors’ rush to demonstrate fealty to Xi’s football plans (or merely to secrete money offshore) led to a brief, and now largely divested, scattergun acquisition of European football clubs and assets, but the clubs and leagues survived and even though many were in globally strategic locations it did not result in additional “geopolitical influence”. Nor did the funding and construction of stadiums in Africa, though there may have been marginal “soft power” gains in facilitating the hosting of several Africa Cup of Nations tournaments.
Imposing Xi’s favourite sport across Chinese school curricula might appear heavy handed, but encouraging China’s sedentary youth to exercise and head off a public health timebomb is hardly a pernicious objective.
Football is Xi’s pet project, but criticism of the underperforming national team, the hapless Chinese Football Association (CFA) or broader reforms are subject to no more stringent censorship than anything else on the Chinese internet (contained criticism is OK, demands for systemic change or encouraging collective action is not).
It is true that Chinese football reproduces class and place-based disparities, with migrant workers, for example, less able to participate. And, prior to Covid, match-going fans were already facing increasingly strict security at stadiums, fickle owners and idiosyncratic regulatory interventions by the CFA. And yet while we should be mindful of the progressive circumscription of freedoms across Chinese society under Xi, many of the problems faced by Chinese fans are common to supporters everywhere.
That said, we should pause for a moment on the question of ethnicity, given the unprecedented crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang that has come to define Xi’s 10 years in office. On the surface, football has become a site for advances in representation. China’s best player, Wu Lei, is a member of the Hui (Muslim) ethnic minority group. In March, Chinese-Nigerian Huang Shenghao became the first bi-racial player to represent the country (at under-17 level). Mirahmetjan Muzepper became the first Uyghur to play for the men’s national team in 2018.
The treatment of another Uyghur player, Erfan Hezim, demonstrates the systemic repression of young Uyghur men. Hezim spent almost a year in a detention camp in Xinjiang, apparently for unauthorised travel overseas to participate in football training camps, before being allowed to resume his career in 2019. Uyghurs coming through the ranks can face many forms of discrimination, partly explaining the negligible number of players in the Chinese Super League despite the popularity of football in Xinjiang. The region could be a significant source of playing talent, but the conditions there are so severely circumscribed that it is impossible to realise.
As for those from outside China’s official borders, the expedient decision to bring several naturalised Brazilians into the national team during World Cup qualifying met with only muted criticism from grassroot nationalists, even after the players’ efforts proved futile. The handling of naturalised talent, though, demonstrates an enduringly awkward official embrace of foreignness.
The CFA’s provisional regulations oblige clubs to teach naturalised foreigners Chinese language, culture and history, in addition to the fundamental political positions of the CCP. Party cadres attached to every professional club monitor, supervise and submit regular reports on players’ performance, behaviour and attitudes, reproducing the party’s longstanding “foreign affairs” system for handling foreigners. By all accounts, the naturalised Brazilians have been exemplary. But all this shows that some aspects of football’s development reflect the trajectory emerging across other social sectors during Xi’s tenure – one of a controlled society subject to the regime’s circumscriptions and vision for a desirable China.
In line with the requirements of the reform policies, infrastructure has been built and facilities rolled out on an impressive scale. But football has so far failed to become an elective mass participation sport like basketball or badminton. The popularity of gaming and the exponential growth of professional e-sports in China suggests football has its work cut out appealing to young people.
China has its fair share of dedicated supporters and “transnational fans” who are as knowledgeable and passionate about foreign clubs they will never visit as locals are. Yet the kind of intangible “football culture” that manifests in ubiquitous pick-up games on Brazilian beaches or English playgrounds has not taken root. Football schools and academies have not (yet) produced a “Chinese Messi” or even a supply of more prosaic talent, although it is premature to write off long-term efforts to build up the talent pool.
Youth participation has run afoul of resistant parents who prefer their children to focus on academics, which is intense, uber-competitive and almost certainly a better investment in the future than football. Short fee-paying football camps are the preserve of cosmopolitan middle-class parents, while serious football academies offering talent-based scholarships are mainly an option for poor families whose children are unable to compete for academic advancement. Football as a leisure activity and signifier of middle-class lifestyles embodying China’s desired “mildly prosperous” modernity has so far failed to capture imaginations.
And then came Covid and continuing “dynamic zero” restrictions to burst football’s bubble economy. With the Chinese Super League (CSL) mothballed for a time, expensively-acquired foreign players departed, and China gave up its hosting rights for the 2023 Asian Cup due to the ongoing uncertainties. Owners facing economic headwinds created by the pandemic were unable to service the continual cash injections needed to sustain clubs.
The property sector, which has become intimately entwined with football, was hit by a debt crisis and state interventions associated with Xi’s new preoccupation of ‘Common Prosperity’. Evergrande, the over-leveraged real-estate developer and owner of China’s most successful club, was forced to sell the land for its half-built new mega-stadium back to the local government. Since 2015, more than 20 clubs across the top divisions have folded, often due to insufficient organisational experience and unsustainable business models. Jiangsu FC disbanded soon after winning the CSL in 2020 when its owner, indebted retailer Suning, decided it could no longer afford it.
There is no reason why Chinese football shouldn’t find a sustainable niche as a spectator and participant sport, and a national team that can compete in Asia and qualify for international tournaments. Some of the ambitions set out in Xi’s reforms are not currently realistic, but long-term plans should be given time to unfold. A hypothetical Chinese bid to host a future World Cup, would, given Fifa’s interests and track record, prove irresistible.
The hosting of a World Cup would be a significant boost to football development in the country. But the attendant potential for “sportswashing” and requisite self-censorship have already been demonstrated on a small scale by European clubs and leagues desperate to access the Chinese market. Take the example of midfielder Mesut Özil, who was sidelined by Arsenal, which has a huge following in China, after speaking out against the persecution of Uyghurs.
The Chinese national team will not compete in Qatar later this year, but China will be present through Fifa’s signature sponsorship deal with Wanda, and Chinese fans will watch en masse, attracted by the spectacle, the conversation and the opportunities for offshore sports-betting.
Jonathan Sullivan is a Chinese specialist and an associate professor at the University of Nottingham.
This article appears in the autumn 2022 issue of Index on Censorship. To subscribe click here
6 Oct 2022 | 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.
19 Sep 2022 | China, News and features
Huang Xueqin (left) and Wang Jianbing (right)
Today, 19 September 2022, marks one year in detention for two young Chinese human rights defenders: Huang Xueqin, an independent journalist and key actor in China’s #MeToo movement, and Wang Jianbing, a labour rights advocate.[1]
We, the undersigned civil society groups, call on Chinese authorities to respect and protect their rights in detention, including access to legal counsel, unfettered communication with family members, their right to health and their right to bodily autonomy. We emphasise that their detention is arbitrary, and we call for their release and for authorities to allow them to carry out their work and make important contributions to social justice.
Who are they?
In the 2010s, Huang Xueqin worked as a journalist for mainstream media in China. During that time, she covered stories on public interest matters, women’s rights, corruption scandals, industrial pollution, and issues faced by socially-marginalized groups. She later supported victims and survivors of sexual harassment and gender-based violence who spoke out as part of the #MeToo movement in China. On 17 October 2019, she was stopped by police in Guangzhou and criminally detained in RSDL for three months – for posting online an article about Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement.
Wang Jianbing followed a different path, but his story – like Huang’s – demonstrates the commitment of young people in China to giving back to their communities. He worked in the non-profit sector for more than 16 years, on issues ranging from education to disability to youth to labour. Since 2018, he has supported victims of occupational disease to increase their visibility and to access social services and legal aid.
Arbitrary and incommunicado detention
On 19 September 2021, the two human rights defenders were taken by Guangzhou police; after 37 days, they were formally arrested on charges of ‘inciting subversion of state power’. Using Covid-19 prevention measures as an excuse, they were held for five months in solitary confinement, and subject to secret interrogation, in conditions similar to those of ‘residential surveillance in a designated location’, or RSDL. After months of delays and no due process guarantees, their case was transferred to court for the first time in early August 2022.
We strongly condemn the lengthy detentions of Huang and Wang. In a Communication sent to the Chinese government in February 2022, six UN independent experts – including the Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders and the Working Group on arbitrary detention (WGAD) – raised serious concerns about Wang’s disappearance and deprivation of liberty. They asserted that Wang’s activities were protected and legal, and that Chinese authorities used a broad definition of ‘endangering national security’ that runs counter to international human rights law.
In May 2022, the WGAD went one step further, formally declaring Wang’s detention to be ‘arbitrary’ and urging authorities to ensure his immediate release and access to remedy. Noting other, similar Chinese cases, the WGAD also requested Chinese authorities to undertake a comprehensive independent investigation into the case, taking measures to hold those responsible for rights violations accountable.
We echo their call: Chinese authorities should respect this UN finding, and immediately release Huang Xueqin and Wang Jianbing.
Risks of torture and poor health
In addition to the lack of legal grounds for their detention, we are also worried about conditions of detention for Wang and Huang. Using ‘Covid-19 isolation’ as an excuse, Wang was held incommunicado, during which he was subject to physical and mental violence and abuse. His physical health deteriorated, in part due to an irregular diet and inadequate nutrition, while he also suffered physical and mental torment and depression. UN and legal experts have found similar risks, possibly amounting to torture and cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, in other Chinese detention practices – including RSDL. According to the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the ‘Mandela Rules’), prolonged solitary confinement – solitary confinement lasting more than 15 days – should be prohibited as it may constitute torture or ill-treatment.
Even more concerning are detention conditions for Huang Xueqin, because during the year she has been deprived of her liberty – again, without formal access to a lawyer or communication with her family – no one, including a legal counsel of her choosing, has received formal notification of her situation. We are deeply worried about her physical and mental health, and reiterate that incommunicado detention is a grave violation of international law.
Lack of fair trial guarantees
Given the circumstances, many brave Chinese lawyers may have stepped up to defend Huang Xueqin. But we are alarmed that Huang has been prevented from appointing a lawyer of her choice. In March 2022, her family stepped in, appointing a lawyer on her behalf; she was not allowed to meet her client or see the case file. Nonetheless, that lawyer was dismissed – according to authorities, with Huang’s approval – after just two weeks. The right to legal counsel of one’s choosing is not only a core international human rights standard, but a right guaranteed by the Criminal Law of the PRC.
Chilling effect on rights defence
As is too often the case in China, the authorities’ ‘investigation’ into Huang’s and Wang’s case has had concrete impacts on civil society writ large. Around 70 friends and acquaintances of the two defenders, from across the country, have been summoned by the Guangzhou police and/or local authorities. Many of them were interrogated for up to 24 hours – some for several times – and forced to turn over their electronic devices. The police also coerced and threatened some individuals to sign false statements admitting that they had participated in training activities that had the intention of ‘subverting state power’ and that simple social gatherings were in fact political events to encourage criticism of the government. The Chinese government has been repeatedly warned by UN experts that the introduction of evidence stemming from forced or coerced confessions is a violation of international law and that officials engaged in this practice must be sanctioned.
A call for action
One year on, we call on the Chinese authorities to respect human rights standards, and uphold their international obligations, in the cases of Huang Xueqin and Wang Jianbing. Until Chinese authorities implement UN recommendations and Huang and Wang are released, the relevant officials should:
- Ensure that Huang and Wang can freely access legal counsel of their own choosing, and protect the rights of lawyers to defend their clients.
- Remove all barriers to free communication between Huang and Wang and their families and friends, whether in writing or over telephone.
- Provide comprehensive physical and mental health services to Huang and Wang, including consensual examinations by an independent medical professional, and share the findings with lawyers and family members, or others on request.
- Guarantee that Huang and Wang are not subjected to solitary confinement or other forms of torture or cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, and that the conditions of their detention comply with international human rights standards.
- Cease actions that aim to intimidate and silence members of civil society from engaging in advocacy for the protection of rights, and ensure that no evidence from coerced confessions is permissible in Huang’s and Wang’s – or anyone else’s – court proceedings.
Signed:
ACAT-France
Amnesty International
Center for Reproductive Rights
Center for Women’s Global Leadership, Rutgers University
Changsha Funeng
China Against the Death Penalty
China Labour Bulletin
CSW (Christian Solidarity Worldwide)
International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), in the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders
Frontline Defenders
Hong Kong Outlanders
Hong Kong Outlanders in Taiwan
Human Rights in China
Human Rights Now
Index on Censorship
International Service for Human Rights
Lawyer’s Rights Watch Canada
Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders
NüVoices
Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
Safeguard Defenders
台灣人權促進會 Taiwan Association for Human Rights
Taiwan Labour Front
The Rights Practice
Uyghur Human Rights Project
World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), in the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders
[1] As their cases are deeply connected, their friends and supporters refer to them as a single case called the ‘Xuebing case’, using a portmanteau of their first names.
1 Jun 2022 | China, Hong Kong, News and features
There was a time when Zhou Fengsuo wanted to change his name. It had become synonymous with the Tiananmen Square protests, which he had an instrumental role in leading. He’d helped with general organisation, he’d delivered speeches in the square, he’d provided medical help for those during the hunger strike –just a few of the hats he wore. For this Zhou was named as number five on the Chinese government’s most wanted list and was arrested shortly after the crackdown. He spent a year in Qincheng Prison, a maximum-security prison in Beijing, after which he was exiled to Yangyuan in Hebei province, a poor, rural area to be “re-educated”. Constant monitoring and police harassment became a part of his life and he struggled to earn a living. He couldn’t even get a passport to leave the country.
“I wanted to change my name to have a normal life,” he told Index ahead of the 33rd anniversary of the protests and the massacre that brought them to a terrifying and devastating end.
“But that was then,” he added.
Today the importance of keeping his name is paramount. The Chinese government would gladly erase it, alongside all memory of the massacre.
“We do whatever we can to preserve the memory and preserve the truth,” Zhou said, who has remained a staunch advocate for human rights in the years since, including being president of Humanitarian China and the Chinese Democracy Education Foundation. When we speak he is working on a Tiananmen museum in the town where he now lives in the New York metro area (he was finally given a passport and left for the USA in 1996).
Zhou is understandably proud of his role in the protest movements, which called for greater freedoms, especially in relation to freedom of speech and the media. They had been happening in pockets of China for several years by then and built to a crescendo in the spring of ‘89, described as like a “volcanic eruption” by Zhou. The main ones that took place in Tiananmen Square from April through to June were “China’s version of a festival of freedom” he said.
“It was exhilarating because for the first time people could have a taste of freedom. These were very joyful, hopeful moments, even though there was a sense of defiance,” he added. He has a particularly fond memory of 18 April 1989.
“I made a speech at the monument of the People’s Heroes where I compared the US Bill of Rights to the Chinese constitution. For me it was the first time I could speak out on these issues. These were my own views that I felt really strongly about and I had had to keep them to myself and all of a sudden, I was there in an important place with thousands listening. There was such a powerful feeling of freedom in the air. I was overwhelmed by the passion that people showed.”
Zhou said that even the most marginalised people felt there was hope. They even joked that thieves stopped stealing.
Zhou remembers the run-up to 4 June 1989 as one of the most peaceful times. He spoke of how people made homemade meals to send to the protesters and that “Coca Cola had just arrived in China and was considered a luxury – people would buy it for the students as a way to show support. It was incredible the feeling of solidarity.”
But then came the tanks.
“It was like an invasion of Beijing by armed troops,” said Zhou, who reckons there were around a quarter of a million soldiers by the time they turned on the students on the evening of 3 June.
“It was brutally senseless.”
Many of Zhou’s friends died on that fateful night and in the following days, with plenty of others arrested and put in jail.
“The government are guilty of murdering their own people,” he said.
No-one knows for certain exactly how many people were killed. Shortly after, the Chinese government said just 200 civilians had died. Other estimates place it in the region of thousands. In 2017, documents from the British ambassador to China at the time, Sir Alan Donald, said that as many as 10,000 had actually died.
The Chinese government has gone out of its way to erase the exact figure and surrounding memories. Any references to Tiananmen are carefully removed from books and the internet. The country’s censors work overtime to stay ahead of the game, blocking anything from obvious references like #tank to more obscure ones (#35 for 31 May plus four days; #6+si for the sixth month and si meaning four in Mandarin). Sometimes they even block the words “today” and “tomorrow”. Commemorative events – well-nigh impossible to hold in mainland China – are now off the agenda in Hong Kong too, which for years hosted a large memorial event in Victoria Park. Also in Hong Kong, the Pillar of Shame statue to honour those killed in the square was recently removed. There is a rumour it might reappear in Taiwan.
Despite the dangers, when it was the 25th anniversary of the massacre, Zhou returned to China, albeit briefly. He snuck back in due to a change in China’s immigration policy that allowed people in transit to enter for 72 hours without a visa. During that trip he was interrogated by the police who had also been in Beijing in 1989 but he was allowed to leave for the USA again.
Thirty-three years on and China remains as jumpy about the event as if it was yesterday.
As China’s long arm stretches further overseas, the attempts to eradicate its memory have arrived on distant shores. Just two weeks ago Zhou was in Prague on a panel with the Chinese dissident artist Badiucao. When there the event’s curator received a call from the Chinese embassy. The person who called her said that if she continued with the event it would hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and would damage Czech-Chinese relations. She ignored the call, but it left her and Zhou spooked.
“It was strange because Michelle didn’t publish that number and was not sure how they got hold of it,” he explained.
The Chinese government has found willing participants in this erasure game in the form of companies with close ties to China. Two years ago, for example, Zoom closed Zhou’s paid account a week after he held an event discussing the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. He also had a run-in with LinkedIn, who temporarily blocked his page and posts from being seen within China.
Zhou says that “US companies who do business with China will try to stay away from people like me.”
“Global trade and digital communications have enabled China to exert control even in the US. This wasn’t possible before, even in Nazi times. But China is much more dangerous now than Nazi Germany,” he said, revealing that over the years it’s become harder to stay in touch with his family back in China. He has tried to distance himself “so they don’t get in trouble”, calling it a “price I have paid for my conscience”.
There’s no doubt that Tiananmen matters, whether it be a year ago, 20 years ago, 50 or 100. But it feels particularly relevant looking at the current Chinese landscape. Thirty-three years after students took to the square, the very same universities that they came from have erected fences in response to students protesting draconian Covid measures; in Shanghai, the lockdown has been so extreme that some people have jumped out of their own windows to their death. Traces of these recent events are being scrubbed from the internet as we speak. The path that the leaders chose when they sent the tanks in is one that we are still walking today, but it’s sadly narrower. Control is near absolute.
“No matter how rich, people can lose their freedom and be prisoners in their own home,” said Zhou. “They can be starved to death. Shanghai has amongst the highest house prices in the world but the government can use technology to control the people.”
And just like Tiananmen, we might never know how many people will have died as a result of the government’s ruthless Zero Covid policy.
“This is why Tiananmen is so important,” he added. “There’s no limit to what the government can do to violate human rights. It’s beyond the worst imagination.”
Zhou holds on to the one major positive that came out of the Tiananmen protests though.
“They demonstrated to the world that the Chinese people loved freedom. We were willing to fight for it and many people lost their lives for it. It showed the world what a different China could be. Today’s China is a nightmare. There could be a different China.’
