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Xi Jinping has excelled with his tyrant credentials this year. Earlier this year, a controversial United Nations‘ report said that “serious human rights violations” have been committed in Xinjiang while Xi’s government is behind moves to repress Uyghurs living in Europe.
Xi has also now started a third term in power, after a 2018 change to the country’s laws to end the previous two-term limit. Tyrants just love to rip up the rule book when it comes to clinging to power.
“My nomination for Tyrant of the Year 2022 goes to the man who somehow made us all feel sorry for Hu Jintao when he snubbed the former Chinese Communist Party leader back in October, a remarkable feat given that Hu isn’t exactly an ally when it comes to human rights and free speech,” says Index on Censorship’s editor-in-chief Jemimah Steinfeld.
Xi’s policies are increasingly being called into question.
“His Zero Covid policy is as barmy as it is draconian. It’s led to the deaths of many who have not been able to get urgent medical treatment, been locked in their apartments when they’ve caught fire, have taken their own lives out of desperation,” says Steinfeld.
The protests against his policy (and indeed his legitimacy) showed a kink in Xi’s armour but he responded in true autocratic style – arrests, arrests and more arrests (plus a raft of other silencing measures).
“The CCP’s unofficial promise to make people’s lives materially better in exchange for fewer political freedoms has been broken,” says Steinfeld. “Unemployment is high and people are miserable and yet his merciless reign shows no signs of getting easier.”
“If a painting can overthrow a government, then the government must be very fragile”
- Lumli Lumlong
Since its inception, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has sought to exert influence over every component of Chinese society, including the world of art. Art is perceived by the CCP as a tool to legitimise its systems of government, not as an expression of human creativity. This project has taken on global relevance as the CCP has sought to utilise art and culture to counter international criticism on a range of topics including the state’s treatment of Uyghurs and Hong Kong’s independence, and assuage concerns about its growing influence in the world economy and international institutions.
The CCP sees itself as the single arbiter of Chinese culture. By the CCP’s definition, being “Chinese” encapsulates not only Chinese nationals but the entire global diaspora. As a result, even artists living in Europe but originally from mainland China, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere can be subject to attempts at censorship if their art does not toe the party line. The tactics used to achieve this goal are diverse: from physical violence and the leveraging of financial ties over European galleries to the threatening of family members. Fear of repercussions for themselves or their families is enough to silence many artists even if they now live in Europe.
The extra-territorial nature of CCP censorship should concern anyone wishing to ensure artistic expression is protected. The perpetual threat of violence against artists and their family members in Europe is a stark reflection of the challenge to freedom of expression that the CCP poses across the world. The ability of the CCP to silence critics and curate conversations about themselves globally is unprecedented.
However, the CCP’s struggle against dissident artists also reflects its weakness. Lumli Lumlong, a Hong Kong painting duo based in the UK, told Index “We really want to expose the cruelty of the CCP. They are fragile, their hearts are made of glass.” While the CCP’s soft power operations in Europe have struggled to influence the artistic landscape in Europe, artists have played a crucial role in raising awareness in Europe of the CCP’s human rights abuses.
To investigate the current state of artistic freedom in Europe, and whether and how the CCP attempts to undermine it, Index on Censorship has submitted over 35 Freedom of Information requests and has conducted interviews with more than 40 artists, curators, academics and experts from 10 European countries. The report demonstrates how art can be used by states to extend the reach of censorship into cities across Europe, while also offering a powerful way for artists to challenge state power.
You can download the report here
It is now three days since protests erupted across the country after 10 people died in an apartment fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang. Protesters, both on the streets and online, have blamed the country’s strict Covid-zero policy, closely associated with leader Xi Jinping. Millions have joined a call to find out whether the building’s fire escapes were blocked as a result of the policy.
The protests have been wide-ranging – and has the crackdown. Already Wulumuqi (Urumqi) Middle Road in Shanghai has been cordoned off, police present on every corner. There have been arrests of protesters around the country. A BBC journalist has been assaulted and detained. An elderly woman in Hong Kong has been beaten. As for China’s internet, the censorship machine is in overdrive with searches blocked or diverted and state-approved pundits are blaming the protests on foreign influence.
And yet still the protests continue. It is remarkable.
Contrary to many people’s assumptions about China and protest, the two are not wholly unhappy bedfellows. There have been many big protest movements since the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949. Tiananmen in 1989 is of course the most oft-cited and arguably the largest both in terms of how long it went on for (well over a month) and the sheer numbers who headed to the capital’s square and the other protest sights across China. But there have been others both before and after, as well as those in Hong Kong. On occasion Beijing even welcomes a protest – they can be a handy distraction and forum for people to vent, just not at the CCP. In 2012, for example, as news continued to swirl about the arrest of popular Chinese politician Bo Xilai and his wife, hundreds of thousands took to Beijing’s streets in anti-Japanese protests.
So what makes these remarkable then? Well firstly they offer a glimmer of hope. This isn’t hope in the “CCP will collapse” way – there have too many false dawns in the past to believe that might happen. But hope in a way that makes us start to believe that China’s incredibly extensive censorship machine is not quite so well-oiled as we imagined. Since Xi Jinping came to power 10 years ago, the amount of control he has amassed has been terrifying. What the last few days have shown is that it’s far from absolute. News of the deaths in Urumqi have reached people across the country: attempts to censor the information came too late.
People were outraged, perhaps in part because they’d also heard news of the awful treatment of Uyghurs over the years – news that the Chinese government has tried hard to crush or manage – and they felt the sense of injustice.
A more likely reason for the rage is that many who have been locked down have had their own fire escapes blocked. The Urumqi deaths spoke to their greatest fears. And they spoke to these fears at the very time people were most angered – when lots of the country was locking down, again, against a backdrop of smiling, mask-less crowds at the World Cup.
The protests are also remarkable because of how widespread they are. Most protest movements in China are in one geographic area or on one issue. Workers strike about poor factory conditions; young parents about tainted milk. Here people across the country and in Hong Kong are all uniting. Their irks might sometimes differ – some want Xi Jinping to resign, while others just want to be able to leave their house and watch a movie. But there is a common thread – a desire for more freedom and free expression. You can see this in the photos of people holding up blank sheets of paper (a form of protest that incidentally first happened in Hong Kong) to protest censorship – saying nothing at all is the only safe thing to say. You can see it online. “When can we have freedom of speech? Maybe it can start at Beijing’s Liangmahe [an area of the city],” one person wrote on Weibo. Another said: “Before going to sleep I saw what was happening in Liangmahe on my WeChat Moments and then I looked at Weibo and saw that the Xicheng area had added 279 new Covid cases. I started thinking about my own everyday life and the things I am doing. I can’t help but feel a sense of isolation, because I can’t fight and do not dare to raise my voice.” The examples could go on and on.
Have we overstated just how much control the party have? Perhaps. We’ve always known Chinese social media users are in a constant battle of cat-and-mouse with the censors and so it’s no surprise that people did find out about Urumqi (as for World Cup envy, that probably just caught officials off-guard). Or maybe it’s the Chinese state themselves who have slipped up, in this instance in underestimating the bravery and fury of the population, and in creating the conditions for more widespread dissent ironically through their Covid-zero policy. The policy has kept people locked away yes, and the now ubiquitous health QR codes are excellent tracking devices. But people have bonded with those who they’ve spent inordinate amounts of time either literally inside or online and created the very thing the authorities fear – networks.
The question will be whether this dissent will be violently silenced by the CCP, will just peter out over the coming weeks or whether the growing and more united number of voices can bring about long-lasting change. We really hope for the latter.
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