Now Executive Director of the China Media Project, leading the project’s research and partnerships, David originally joined the project in Hong Kong in 2004. He is the author of Dragons in Diamond Village (Penguin), a book of reportage about urbanization and social activism in China, and co-editor of Investigative Journalism in China (HKU Press).
Xi Jinping’s first political report, delivered today at the opening of the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, is a monster that must be carefully dissected through many painful hours of reading — turning it constantly against the mirror of political reports past. So we do not presume to offer a reading here.
But we can point to a few aspects and look at how the congress is being reported through Chinese media, which on this story are naturally dominated by official state media.
The October 18, 2017, edition of the CCP’s official People’s Daily, with an image from the “preparation conference” of the 19th Party Congress the previous day, and a list of delegates.
A number of the initial media reports, like this one from Caixin (which is basically Xinhua, as we can expect of most “reporting”), focus on Xi Jinping’s statements about the “Two Centenary Goals” as a key point of significance. Basically, this is the idea that China is heading into a phase in which it can anticipate, and “struggle” toward, the full creation of a “moderately well-off society” (the first goal), and at the same time push actively and confidently (Xi has spoken of “Four Confidences”) toward the creation of a fully modernized socialist nation (the second goal).
Xi’s report essentially suggests at the 16th, 17th and 18th national congresses of the CCP have focussed on the first of these goals, while the 19th congress and the 20th will focus primarily on the latter (while consolidating the former). Xi Jinping calls this the “new journey toward the building of a comprehensively modernized socialist nation” (全面建设社会主义现代化国家新征程).
So the 15-year period from 2010 to 2035 will be devoted, we are told, to the project of building this “modernized socialist nation.” What is that, you ask? Well, the answer to that question is of course extremely complicated — seeing as it is fundamentally about reading Chinese politics, the business many of us are always imperfectly on about. But part of the answer will be about reading Xi’s political report and the media coverage around it over the next weeks and months. And we do of course know that the “modernized socialist nation” is about the power and prestige of the Party and its governance system, and about China’s place in the world (security, cybersecurity, etc.).
That is very unsatisfying, I know. But let’s be honest enough not to pretend there are easy answers here.
Turning to today’s People’s Daily, the front page news is about yesterday’s “preparation conference” for today’s big meeting. Think of it as coverage of the dress rehearsal. We can expect the political report to be highlighted in tomorrow’s edition. But there is one piece that is perhaps worth our attention today, which sets the tone and offers some hints about language and emphasis — and that is the lead commentary, or shelun (社论), which is highlighted on page one and run on page two, alongside a graphic treatment of all of the superb achievements the Party says it has made in the past 5 years.
This commentary, “Opening New Horizons in Socialism With Chinese Characteristics” (note the clear reference to the second “centenary goal”), also gets the prime spot today at the top of People’s Daily Online.
The commentary stinks of confidence. Does it stink more than usual? That is hard to say. But I found it particularly interesting that it argues that China’s achievements over the past 5 years have offered an example to be emulated by developing nations. At one point it says that “socialism with Chinese characteristics has expanded the path for developing nations in progressing toward modernization, gifting Chinese knowledge to humankind and offering China’s plan.”
The idea of “China’s Plan” (中国方案), which Xi Jinping introduced in July 2014 in a meeting with leaders from Central and South America, might be worth keeping an eye on. As newly prosperous China seeks, under these two overlapping “centenary goals,” to become globally influential China, maintaining and propagating what it sees as its native innovation of socialism — and “Chinese Marxism,” another interesting term in this commentary — will no doubt be central to the project. We might bear in mind the Xinhua commentary yesterday about the “doddering democracy” of the West, and Xi’s remarks today about the success of “socialist democracy.”
The People’s Daily commentary closes with the image of the “ship of great dreams,” which the Party guides bravely through the waves, on to brighter shores. This seems to be a widespread metaphor surrounding the congress, and there is even a short official video making the rounds called “Navigating the Ship” (领航), which might also be translated simply “Navigator,” referring to Xi Jinping himself. Xinhua wrote about the Party and Xi as navigators just a couple of days back, and this idea emerged too in July around Xi’s role as “navigator” of China’s military.
There may be more to this image than stilted Party poetry. Ships, after all, travel away from the shore and out into the wider world.
Our full translation of today’s lead commentary in the People’s Daily follows:
Opening New Horizons in Socialism With Chinese Characteristics (开辟中国特色社会主义新境界)
— Warmly Welcoming the Opening of the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party People’s Daily, October 18, 2017
The tapestry of history is always opened through grinding forward progress; the chapter of the age is always written in new struggles.
Today, the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party opens ceremoniously in Beijing. This congress is an extremely important congress opening at a critical phase in the comprehensive building of a moderately well-off society (小康社会) and in a key period in the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics (中国特色社会主义). Our Party will raise a program of action that is overarching, strategic and forward-looking concerning what [ideological] banner we uphold, what path we take, what spiritual attitude we maintain, what historic mission we bear, and what goals we struggle toward. The success of this conference concerns the past and future business of the Party and the government, concerns the fate of socialism with Chinese characteristics, concerns the fundamental interests of the broad masses of the people — and it has major political, theoretical and practical import for the victory of the comprehensive building of a moderately well-off society, winning great victories for socialism with Chinese characteristics and realizing the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.
“The yearning for a good life, that is the goal toward which we struggle.” Looking back on a five years past that were anything but ordinary, the Central Committee of the CCP with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core (习近平同志为核心的党中央), and with great political courage and a fierce sense of responsibility, carried out great struggles with many new historical characteristics, facing challenges head on as they climbed, breaking new ground in pushing forward the agenda, discarding old ways and introducing new. [The Party] advanced the overall plan of the “Five In One” (五位一体) [NOTE: this term from the 19th Congress refers to: 1. economic development; 2. political development; 3. cultural development; 4. social development; and environmental development], coordinating with the advancement of the strategic arrangement of the “Four Comprehensives” (四个全面), achieving along with the people a clear raising of national economic strength, technological strength, national defense strength, comprehensive national power (综合国力) and international influence. On the foundation of the advancements made since the founding of the new China, and particularly since the commencement of economic reform and opening, [the Party has] advanced socialism with Chinese characteristics to a new phase of development. The achievements of the past 5 years are omni-directional [comprehensive] and innovative (开创性的). The changes of the past 5 years are deep and fundamental in nature. These historic achievements and historic changes mark the fact that our country now stands at a new historical juncture, and they have deep and major significance for the business of our Party and the state.
The leadership of the Party is the most fundamental character of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and it is the greatest advantage of the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics. In the past 5 years, opening and reform and the construction of socialist modernization (社会主义现代化) have made historic achievements, and socialism with Chinese characteristics has achieved new brilliance and vitality most fundamentally because of the firm leadership of the Chinese Communist Party with Comrade Xi Jinping as the core. In the grinding advance of the past 5 years, the ingenuity, cohesion, fighting strength, leadership strength and rallying power of the Party has risen constantly, and its core leadership role in maintaining overall control and coordinating various aspects [of governance] has been fully at play — and this is the fundamental reason we have made deeply significant achievements, progress and development. Of particular importance has been the spirit of the series of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important speeches (习近平总书记系列重要讲话精神) and his new concepts, thoughts and strategies on the governance of the nation (治国理政新理念新思想新战略). [These] have raised to a new level our Party’s principles for holding power (执政规律), principles for building socialism (社会主义建设规律), and principles for developing human society (人类社会发展规律), and they constitute a full and scientific theoretical system (科学完整的思想理论体系) — amounting to the newest fruits of the sinicization of Marxism (马克思主义中国化), and opening up new horizons for the development of contemporary Chinese Marxism (当代中国马克思主义).
The question of [development] path is an arch question that concerns the success or failure of the Party’s work; path determines destiny, and path is the life of the Party. It is by cleaving to the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics that the Chinese people have, through long struggle, achieved the historic leap of standing up, then becoming prosperous and finally becoming powerful. In the grinding advance of the past 5 years, socialism with Chinese characteristics has achieved new brilliance and vitality and opened constant new horizons in its development, and socialism with Chinese characteristics has expanded the path for developing nations in progressing toward modernization, gifting Chinese knowledge to humankind and offering China’s plan (中国方案) [NOTE: This is a concept Xi Jinping apparently first raised in a meeting with leaders from South and Central America in July 2014].
At this new historical juncture,in an era of rapid transformation, if our Party wishes to win the [advantage] of initiative and to make new victories in the great struggle, [we] must be ever firm in the “Four Confidences” (四个自信) [NOTE: This is: confidence in [the Party’s] path; confidence in [the Party’s] theory; confidence in the system; and confidence in [Chinese] culture], firmly grasping the characteristics of our country’s development phase, firmly grasping the yearning of the people for beautiful lives. We look forward to this congress, with a broad and far-seeing vision, considering and grasping a series of major challenges facing the future development of our country, [and look forward to it] opening new theoretical horizons, taking new practical steps, leading the whole of the Party and the various peoples of the nation to a new attitude of striving, carrying out the great struggle, building great projects, advancing great deeds, achieving great dreams, steadily advancing socialism with Chinese characteristics.
All great achievements are the result of continued struggle, and all great tasks require moving forward as we build a bridge between the past and the future. Today, we are closer to achieving our goal of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people than at any stage in our history, and we are more confident than at any period in history that this goal can be achieved.
[We must] realize the first centenary goal of winning a comprehensively well-off society, and for the second centenary goal, starting off on the journey toward the building of a modernized socialism nation, our great Party will move ahead, not veering from our original intentions (不忘初心再出发), bravely bearing this heavy responsibility, guiding the ship of the Chinese peoples great dream through the waves, toward even brighter shores.
We wish the congress full success!
From the outset of his first term as general secretary in late 2012, state media in China made much of Xi Jinping’s down-to-earth style. The new leader, we were told, had demanded less jargon of his fellow officials, and had poo-pooed public speeches burdened with boilerplate.
The China Daily, published by the Information Office of the State Council, ran a related piece under a headline that was almost brusque by official standards: “Plain Talk and People First Style.” But that headline, too, bent awkwardly under the weight of the Party’s stiff and colorless discourse — as though state media and the system they reflected lacked even the vocabulary to talk about plainness.
In any case, the demand to talk straight tangled very quickly with tightening internal Party discipline. Party officials were instructed to fall in line, and to avoid “improper discussion of [the policies] of the central Party,” or wangyi zhongyang (妄议中央). With officials big and small, the tigers and the flies, falling under the roving eye of Wang Qishan and his powerful anti-corruption investigators, it was absurd to suppose now was the time for anyone to ad-lib or be candid.
Like M.C. Escher’s ants, there’s no getting off the self-referential strand of CCP discourse. Source: cea+, posted to Flickr.com under Creative Commons license.
Any observer of China with a working knowledge of the country’s political culture should understand that talk of plain talk is just another way to make official talk. Straight talk, in Chinese politics, is always meta-straight talk. Strive as it might to escape its own twisted self-referentiality, Party language is held back by the necessity of its roots in the power of the Party-state. It would take a true political outsider to speak a plainer political tongue — and it’s no secret at all that the CCP does not take kindly to political outsiders.
Xi Jinping’s supposed plainness was only ever a luxury to be enjoyed by a leader who had managed to cement his power to an unprecedented degree.
Let us not forget that the most important measure we will have of Xi Jinping when the 19th National Congress of the CCP is held in less than two week’s time will not be what is plainspoken on the sidelines — (there are no sidelines) — but how the Xi-era discourse is hard-stamped into the political report, and precisely what imprecise terminology becomes enshrined in the Party’s charter in order to form Xi’s legacy.
Speculation is rife over what Xi Jinping’s “banner term,” or chief political slogan, will be. He certainly cannot be given his own “-ism,” something only Marx has ever been allowed in Chinese. And he might not achieve his own “thought,” which would set him on equal historical footing with Mao Zedong. But he could very well get his own “Xi Jinping Theory,” bringing him right up alongside Deng Xiaoping. Or he might be “crowned” (his name used) with something fresh, like “the Xi Jinping Concept.”
From the outside, this discourse game seems plainly absurd. But its supreme importance tells us a great deal about the workings of Chinese politics, in which language is a complex chess game marshalling pieces of discourse that go in and out of vogue across the playing board of history.
Despite a professed distaste for embellished political language, Xi Jinping will no doubt become the most embellished Communist Party leader of the reform era. His status has already been elevated substantially in the Party discourse, a clear reflection of his consolidation of power. At the 6th Plenum of the 18th National Congress one year ago, he was designated “the core” (习核心), something neither of his predecessors in the post-Deng era managed.
In the coming weeks, as China’s game of lingua-politics enters its phase of greatest intensity, it will be a great time for all China observers to remark and explore its obscure language rituals — including the state manufacture of “plainness.”
____________________
On a related note, about the interesting ways the political system in China is designed to perpetuate and amplify the Party’s discourse, I thought I would also share a partial translation of a recent interview with Li Changping, an official at the State Ethnic Affairs Commission. The “interview,” done by the commission itself to promote its own work ahead of the 19th National Congress, is an excellent example of how even the act of explanation/clarification of policies and programs must generate yet more formalistic language. If I were to give my own title to this official post, I would call it: “How Not to Conduct an Interview.”
Reporter: Hello! For the State Ethnic Affairs Commission, what is the status of ideological work within the context of overall work? How does the Ethnic Affairs Commission grasp and implement ideological work? Li Changping: General Secretary Xi Jinping has pointed out that ideological work concerns the fate and future of the Party, and the long-term peace and stability [of the government], that it concerns the cohesiveness of our ethnic groups, and that it is a task of first-level importance in the work of the Party. Only by considering the general situation, grasping the overall trends, focussing on the major matters, accurately finding the entry points and points to focus energy, planning in line with conditions, and accommodating conditions, can we effectively uphold our responsibility to revolve around the central Party leadership as we serve the general situation.
Owing to the ubiquitous, long-term, complex, international and important nature of ethnic issues, this means ethnic issues are an important part of ideological work. Since the Party’s 18th National Congress, the State Ethnic Affairs Commission has placed a high priority on ideological work, obtaining step-by-step results through strengthening of the Party’s leadership of ideological work, implementing a responsibility system for ideological work, and fully advancing the Party’s theories, directives and policies — greatly advancing new developments in ethnic unity. It can be said that the extent of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission’s attention to ideological work is such as we have never before seen! Specifically, this is happening in the following areas:
First, faced with new stage-by-stage characteristics in ethnic work, the State Ethnic Affairs Commission has clarified the priorities of ideological work, upholding and improving the degree of autonomy in ethnic regions, upholding the joint and united struggle of ethnic groups and their common prosperity and development, upholding, consolidating and developing the equality, unity, mutuality and harmony of socialist ethnic relations — resolutely, determinedly and with full effort serving the ethnic regions and minorities.
Second, facing the changing and developing nature of ethnic work, our focus will be on deepening propaganda and education work according to the new governance concepts, ideas and strategies of Comrade Xi jinping as the core, steadily firming up the leadership position of Marxism within the ideological field, firming up the common ideological foundations for mutual struggle by the whole Party and the whole people. . .
Third, . . . [We have spared readers this lengthy section] Reporter: The global system is undergoing profound change, and economic globalization has brought interaction, exchange and competition with different cultures that has grown ever more fierce; the comprehensive deepening of reform has entered a key strategic moment and deepwater point, social change has accelerated, interest patterns have shifted, psychological understandings, value concepts and social consciousness all now show many new characteristics, and tides of thought in society have shown many new trends. Lately, the people of all ethnic groups in China eagerly await the victorious opening of the 19th National Congress of the CCP, so how will the cultural propaganda units of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission further their ideological work and make a concrete show of force? Li Changping: . . . . [Well, we’ll spare you — supposing you get the point.]
This phone could be yours. The only price: your enthusiastic involvement in censorship of your fellow citizens. Photo by Julian Gong Min available at Flickr.com under Creative Commons license.
The ad offered performance bonuses for those who “effectively reported the most,” and even promised monthly “material rewards” including iPhones and tablets.
Free gear, in other words, for those young internet users who could demonstrate an aptitude and appetite for systematic snitching. And the iPhone, the device that perhaps more than any other symbolizes the idea of mobile empowerment, becomes a carrot inducing constraints on this very power.
The Weibo advertisement further illustrates the way internet censorship in China — increasingly the heart of censorship, period — has become an open and to some extent legitimised endeavor in recent years. Gone, it seems, are the days when media control thrived on secrecy, and the undocumented phone call from the propaganda official to the newspaper editor was the nature of the beast.
It’s difficult to gauge, in a closed information environment like China’s, how people actually feel about constraints on expression and information, but it does seem that the notion of “cybersecurity,” which points to real and personal threats to citizens everywhere in the world, has helped to mask the more insidious forms of political censorship designed to buttress the Party’s dominance over the whole society. Who, after all, doesn’t want to be safe?
Here, in any case, is a translation of the Weibo advertisement for “Weibo Supervisors,” followed by a translation of the text on the first 3 slides accompanying the post.
Weibo Manager
September 27, 12:05 from 360 Security Browser
[We seek] #Weibo Supervisors#
In order to implement our company’s responsibilities, strengthen netizen supervision, clean up the Weibo community environment and effectively handle indecent, illegal and harmful information. Under the leadership of the Beijing Municipal office of the Cyberspace Administration of China, Weibo has established a special community supervision mechanism, and we announce publicly to all users that we are seeking 1,000 Weibo Supervisors. Weibo Supervisors use a special reporting mechanism to report and handle indecent, illegal and harmful information, and the website issues online subsidies to licensed Weibo Supervisors on the basis of reporting statistics, and presents these [subsidies] to Weibo members. At the same time, we offer material rewards monthly to those Weibo Supervisors who have effectively reported the most [cases], with prizes including iPhones, domestically produced phones or tablets, etc. We invite all web users to actively register to participate as Weibo Supervisors. For registration methods and other relevant information please see the following: SUPERVISING AND CLEANING UP WEIBO TOGETHER
[Weibo Supervisor] 01 What is a Weibo Supervisor?
In order to implement our company’s responsibilities, strengthen netizen supervision, clean up the Weibo community environment and effectively handle indecent, illegal and harmful information. Under the leadership of the Beijing Municipal office of the Cyberspace Administration of China, Weibo has established a special community supervision mechanism, and we announce publicly to all users that we are seeking 1,000 Weibo Supervisors. Weibo Supervisors use a special reporting mechanism to report and handle indecent, illegal and harmful information, and the website issues online subsidies to licensed Weibo Supervisors on the basis of reporting statistics, and presents these [subsidies] to Weibo members. 02 What are the conditions?
A: Registration for at least one year [on Weibo]
B: A social creditworthiness score of at least 80%
C: A binding mobile phone number
We invite all who are willing and enthusiastic to take part in the management of the community, and those users who have experience monitoring to register as supervisors. 03 What is the Working Mechanism?
Weibo Supervisors use 业余时间 to conduct effect reporting against indecent, illegal and/or harmful information on Weibo on the condition of fairness and impartiality. [They must] take part in online trainings and offline events as organized by the site.
Knowing Deeply: Loving Keenly, a collection of Xi Jinping’s speeches and writings from the 1980s.
The idea of the “China story” as a coherent narrative reflecting the Party-state agenda, as a product of centrally conceived “soft power,” is not so new. The phrase appeared in the Party’s official People’s Daily as early as 2004, and a 2010 piece in the newspaper under the pen name “Guo Jiping” (国纪平), short for “important commentary on international affairs,” or you guanguoji de zhongyao pinglun (有关国际的重要评论), was adamant that “China’s story must become a world story.”
But what distinguishes Xi Jinping, or so we are told, from the wooden general secretaries of the recent past, is his gift and penchant for the telling of stories.
Following the release in June this year of Xi Jinping Tells A Story (习近平讲故事), a collection of stories and parables drawn from Xi’s public and private addresses, Yang Zhenwu (杨振武), the publisher of the People’s Daily, was dazzled by the profound messages Xi managed to get across through simple and relatable anecdotes:
Telling stories well has been a common characteristic of celebrated statesmen and thinkers in China and beyond since ancient times — and it is a clear characteristic of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s leadership style. Whether in his conference addresses, in conversation during his inspection tours, in his speeches during his overseas visits, or in his printed articles, he proves to be adept in using stories to convey deeper meanings and to move people. Woven through these stories is the tao (way) of Chinese history and culture, the tao of Chinese reform and development, the tao of Chinese participation in global governance. They convey the general secretary’s profound thoughts on internal and foreign affairs, on national security, on the governance of the Party, the nation and the military. They are concrete and vivid, relatable and profound, opening a window on the study of the spirit of [Xi’s] series of important speeches.
Xi has said repeatedly that “telling stories is the best form of international dissemination” when it comes to telegraphing China’s messages to the world. So how are Xi Jinping’s stories faring beyond the captive audience of his own state media, and those fellow statesmen whose job it is to be obsequious?
While the “going out” of Chinese media and Chinese publishing remains an important priority for officials, much of it now wrapped up in the idea of “One Belt, One Road,” there is little evidence that foreign audiences are buying — off the bookshelves, anyway — this line about Xi and the profundity of his visions. Despite the endorsement by Mark Zuckerberg, the English-language edition of Xi’s The Governance of China is ranked #220,000 among books at Amazon; that compares, just consider, to a #107,391 ranking for Minxin Pei’s latest, China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay.
China Daily, published by the Information Office of the State Council, dusts off the Reslan blood donation story earlier this year.
As for those engaging yarns that we are told animate Xi’s “important speeches,” they tend to be played up by Chinese state media alone. One oft-cited example, noted by Caixin two years ago in a piece on the president’s storytelling chops, came in a speech at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University in 2013. It was the story of Tulenov Ruslan, an exchange student from Kazakhstan who was said to have donated five liters of blood in China (not all at once, thankfully) after learning that his relatively scarce blood type, rhesus negative (known in Chinese as “panda blood”), was in urgent need.
Ruslan’s sacrifice for the sake of the Chinese people was amplified across the various foreign channels of China Daily and Xinhua News Agency. But it appeared nowhere else.
As for “using stories to convey deeper meanings,” we might inquire what message Xi Jinping’s story of Kazakhstan blood sacrifice is supposed to convey. Couldn’t the “panda blood” story actually come across as a crass yarn about China’s demand for Kazakh oil and gas, implying that China’s continued economic well-being requires that it sap Central Asia of its precious resources?
The problem with parables, you see, is that their meanings have to translate.
Which brings me to another core question when it comes to Xi Jinping’s visibility as a global storyteller: Who is it that translates, prints and distributes the general secretary’s stories outside of China? And when this does happen, is it a matter of appeal, or a matter of pulling strings?
In fact, if we dig a bit deeper into state media coverage of the president’s latest collection, Xi Jinping Tells A Story, we find interesting backstories that make the international release of the general secretary’s profound stories seem a great deal more like vanity publishing on a grand scale. Xi Jinping Tells A Story has recently been back in the headlines. The People’s Daily reported on the front page of its September 19 edition that close to 1.5 million copies of the book had been distributed, and that it had been “widely praised.” The praise, in fact, was a familiar rehashing of the kudos Xi received back in June. Xu Jiong (徐炯), a press control official in Shanghai, echoed the remarks of publisher Yang Zhenwu, saying Xi’s book deftly used storytelling to convey “the way,” or tao, of Chinese development.
Yang Jingjie (杨镜洁), a student at Beijing Foreign Languages University who attended a public discussion event for the book explained to those gathered that she had discovered in Xi Jinping’s book the “golden key” to bring together China and the outside world, and she hoped that more and more young people in China would discover this key too, becoming “convincing tellers of China’s story.”
“A single story can beat out a dozen arguments,” she said.
Finally, the People’s Daily noted that as soon as the book had been released, “the renowned international publisher Springer contacted the People’s Publishing House wanting to buy world English rights for the book.” Springer Nature confirmed in an e-mail to CMP that they “have signed a letter of intent with the People’s Publishing House,” but could not offer further details.
But Russian and Japanese versions were also touted by Chinese state media as examples of the book’s broad appeal.
Rights to the Japanese edition of Xi Jinping Tells a Story were reportedly snatched up by Duan Press (侨报社), which Japan’s Kyodo News has described as “a publishing house in Japan that specialises in books on Sino-Japanese relations, many of which are written by Chinese authors and translated into Japanese.”
The publishing outfit is run by Duan Yuezhong (段跃中), who founded it in 1999. Duan has consistently over the past two decades published books in Japanese that mirror very closely the mainstream official view. He is a regular guest appearing in Chinese official media to discuss the challenge of “telling China’s story in Japan,” and the way he understands that story aligns perfectly with China’s own external propaganda, to the point of parroting its latest official vocabularies. Currently, the personal introduction on Duan’s Weibo account reads, in a nod to a propaganda buzzword Xi Jinping introduced back in 2012: “Gathering positive energy for China-Japan, spreading good voices for Japan-China.”
The homepage of Duan Yuezhong’s Weibo account, with an introduction at bottom left invoking the Xi Jinping term “positive energy.”
At a public signing ceremony two years ago, Duan and his press obtained the Japanese rights to a series of Chinese-language books including The Eastern Battlefield (东方主战场), an edited volume accompanying an official China Central Television documentary commemorating the 70th anniversary of the victory against fascism, and How the CCP Makes Progress — both books published by New World Press (新世界出版社), a division of China International Publishing Group (CIPG), the central-level publisher responsible for the overseas distribution of Party and government publications as part of its overseas propaganda efforts.
The Chinese-language website for Duan Press is full of articles from Xinhua News Agency and the People’s Daily about recent Japanese releases, and interviewing Duan about his work promoting China’s voice in Japan. Duan is apparently getting a lot of attention for its release of Chinese books onto the Japanese market — but this attention is coming almost exclusively from the familiar Chinese state media outfits, which makes this look very much like an inside job.
Russia is another interesting case of apparent self-dealing. At the Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) in August, a signing ceremony for the foreign editions of Xi Jinping Tells a Storywas held in the exhibition area of the People’s Publishing House, and it was announced that the Russian edition of Xi’s book would be published by Chance International Group (尚斯国际集团). Roman Gerasimov (far right) attends the signing ceremony for the Russian rights to Xi Jinping Tells a Story at the Beijing International Book Fair.
Chance, in fact, was quite active at this year’s BIBF, its general manager, Roman Gerasimov (the guy with the dark beard), attending several signing events at the fair. There was the signing of the deal over Xi Jinping Tells a Story, and with Beijing Publishing House signing of Russian-language rights to In the Name of the People, the book produced from the 55-episode hit propaganda series on the anti-graft drive orchestrated by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (and which television regulators praised as a must-see propaganda flick ahead of this fall’s 19th National Congress of the CCP.) The book was also cited by state media as a bright point of success in the strategy of “going out” for Chinese publishing. Finally, with Joint Publishing, Chance signed a deal for the Russian edition of a book about the Analects by Beijing Normal University professor Yu Dan (于丹).
During the BIBF events, Gerasimov, which Chinese state media variously called editor-in-chief and general manager of “the Russian publisher Chance International Group,” was a visible representative of Russian interest — and no doubt his face, so suitably foreign, was a welcome addition to signing panels advertising the foreign appeal of Chinese books.
But to call Chance a “Russian publisher” is to gloss over a very colorful story — and, as I advertised from the beginning, this piece is about colorful stories.
According to a report from the official China News Service, Chance was created back in 2010 by a retired People’s Liberation Army soldier by the name of Mu Ping (穆平), a native of China’s Shaanxi province. Mu started small, he says, by selling Russian translations of Chinese books overseas. When he found he could make a bit of money this way, he sold off two properties he owned, borrowed a bit, and used this to support his fledgling press. The news report picks up the story:
The transition came in 2013. That year, General Secretary Xi Jinping raised his call for “One Belt, One Road.” Very quickly, as this call deepened in the countries and regions of the Silk Road, demand started for Chinese books just as for Chinese manufacturing, and the market was opened overseas.
At that time, the demand for Chinese books overseas started to increase. Publishing houses back home, says Mu Ping, started seeking them out, and business picked up.
In July 2016, Mu and his Russian publishing company linked up with Zhejiang Publishing United Group (浙江出版联合集团) to open what they advertised as Russia’s first Chinese bookstore, Chance Books (尚斯博库). Mu Ping’s new bookstore was located right in the heart of Moscow, with the goal, he says, of “providing a window on Chinese culture in Russia.”
But this was no ordinary partner. Zhejiang Publishing United Group was an enterprise directly under the Zhejiang provincial government — and from there the crystal stairs led straight up to Beijing, for the top leader of Zhejiang at the time, Party Secretary Xia Baolong (夏宝龙), had served as deputy party secretary in Zhejiang under Xi Jinping from 2003 to 2007 and was regarded as a member of the group of Xi loyalists referred to as the “New Zhijiang Army.”
The opening of Chance Books on July 5, 2016, was to all appearances not just a lively affair, but a very senior one diplomatically. Attending the ribbon-cutting ceremony was Vice-Premier Liu Yandong (刘延东), who has travelled to many countries preaching the virtues of “One Belt, One Road,” and who recently told a gathering in Hungary (English here) that the two sides must “continue to deepen cooperation” in a range of areas, including media and think tank development, “working together to tell our bilateral story of ‘One Belt One Road.'”
Marking what was billed as a landmark occasion for relations between China and Russia in the publishing field, Liu told Sputnik News:
Today is the 20th anniversary of the strategic partnership between China and Russia, and the 15th anniversary of the signing of the Sino-Russian Friendship Treaty. And so, on this day to remember, the opening of the first Chinese bookstore in Russia is also cause for celebration.
Back in July this year, the Global Times ran a photo profile of Chance founder Mu Ping, giving every impression this was a bootstrap story about a guy who just wanted to open a bookshop, never mind his backing from a powerful state publishing enterprise. Screenshot of Global Times coverage of the Chance bookstore in Moscow, showing founder and owner Mu Ping.
Mu was pictured holding holding up Russian writer Yuri Tavrovsky’s 2015 monograph about Xi Jinping, a book so uncritical in its portrayal that its Chinese-language edition was snatched up by none other than the publishing house run by the CCP’s Central Party School — as was, incidentally, Tavrovsky’s more recent book on “One Belt, One Road.” The shelves behind Mu Ping, meanwhile, were stocked with Russian editions of Xi’s The Governance of China.
Another image in the Global Times profile series showed a promotional placard, in both Russian and Chinese, for Xi Jinping Tells a Story. Appearing also, at least seven weeks ahead of the Beijing International Book Fair, was Mr. Gerasimov, editor-in-chief and general manager — though here, as he was pictured fiddling with the stock, his title was given only as a “salesclerk.”
When I mentioned the story of Chance International Group to a friend from the Czech Republic recently, he was not the least bit surprised. Xi Jinping’s book, he noted, had also been published in his country in what he called a “weird underground manner.”
I suspect that as China’s official story, and Xi Jinping’s copious works, fan out over the “New Silk Road,” there will be many such stories from Xinhua News Agency, China Daily and the Global Times about the “Russian,” “Hungarian” or “Latvian” publishers who have snatched up the publishing rights.
What an interesting fable indeed. And there must, surely, be a moral in there somewhere.
Over the weekend, Liu Yunshan, China’s propaganda chief, attended a ceremony at Shanghai’s Xijiao Conference Center to provide the official kickoff for China Cybersecurity Week, a nationwide push to implant knowledge about the risks of internet technology “deep in the hearts of the people.”
The official theme of this year’s conference: “Cybersecurity for the People, Cybersecurity Depending on the People.”
Attending the conference were officials from various government departments — including the Ministry of Education, the Public Security Bureau and the Office of the State Commercial Cryptography Administration (OSCCA) — and representatives from internet companies, many (like Li Xuyang of Tencent’s Anti-Fraud Lab) dealing in some way with content regulation or data security.
Here is a quick translation of the gist of the cybersecurity event as reported by Xinhua News Agency via Caixin :
Liu Yunshan said that since the 18th National Congress of the CCP, General Secretary Xi Jinping has accurately grasped the trends of the times, standing firmly in our country’s experience developing and governing the internet, and surrounding the question of what is an internet power, and how to build an internet power, [he] delivered a series of new ideas, viewpoints and demands, leading cybersecurity and informatization in our country to important achievements. [We] must continue to direct our experiences of cybersecurity according to General Secretary Xi Jinping’s internet power strategy, steadfastly traveling a path toward development of an internet with Chinese characteristics (中国特色网络发展道路) . . .
Liu Yunshan pointed out that cybersecurity is for the people, and cybersecurity relies on the people. We must persevere in raising the consciousness of the people, and technical training, about cybersecurity issues, and we must use the platform of China Cybersecurity Week to energetically spread knowledge about cybersecurity . . .
Liu Yunshan emphasized that both Party and government at all levels must faithfully implement a responsibility system for cybersecurity, establishing local responsibility for cybersecurity. . . Internet enterprises must strengthen their social responsibility and moral responsibility, playing their necessary role in the preservation of cybersecurity. The masses of internet users must abide by the law in going online, acting in a civilised manner online, being positive practitioners of our nation’s cybersecurity. We must strengthen construction of online content, foster a positive and healthy online culture, and develop and expand online positive energy, further cleaning up the online space.
The appeal for the active involvement of Chinese citizens is more than rhetorical. As the Global Times reported last week, in the midst of a separate cybersecurity conference in Beijing, China is putting great effort into “mobilizing its masses of internet users” against a range of cyber threats. According to the Global Times, China will launch a national campaign later this year to beef up cybersecurity education in the country’s universities. And many local governments are already recruiting teams of volunteers to help police live-streaming and other online content. David Bandurski is a Richard von Weizsäcker fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
In December 2012, just weeks after Xi Jinping took the reins of the Chinese Communist Party, the official People’s Daily ran a front-page editorial called, “The Internet is Not a Land Outside the Law.” While it is “unrealistic,” the piece said, to demand that “everyone say the correct thing in the correct way,” all Chinese “must have consciousness of the law, being responsible for their words and actions.”
The People’s Daily article came months ahead of a crackdown on influential “Big V” users on Weibo. It predated by more than a year the creation of Xi Jinping’s Central Leading Group on Cyberspace Affairs, and its powerful new Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). Looking back, however, the editorial appears to have presaged an era of obsessive law-making on the internet — until these days, it seems, there is no end to the regulations governing the hills and valleys of Chinese cyberspace.
On China’s internet today, there truly is no land outside the law. The myriad laws governing cyberspace are designed not to delineate the rights and security of Chinese citizens, but to re-consolidate and legitimize the Party’s dominance over public opinion as a matter of political necessity.
Make no mistake: however “unrealistic,” the demand is most certainly what the People’s Daily disavowed back in 2012, that “everyone say the correct thing in the correct way.” And this demand is borne out quite explicitly in the most recent law to drop from the CAC.
Front page of the December 18, 2012, edition of the People’s Daily. The editorial on the internet and the law is at the bottom of the page, to the right of the image.
Regulations released last week on the management of chat groups on social media services like WeChat, QQ and Baidu Post Bar, show us the extent to which media controls are now centered not, as they were in the past, solely on the gatekeeping media, but on users — which is to say, citizens — themselves. As others have reported, the regulations require that those operating chat groups set up credit rating systems for the online conduct of users. But most worrying is the way the regulations extend to individual users political controls that once targeted Chinese media, and were the bane of reporters, editors, publishers and website monitors alone.
Let’s take a quick look. The regulation first defines, in Article 3, the two groups toward which the rules are directed: the “service providers,” those platforms that operate group chat services, and the “users,” who include “those who set up chat groups, those who manage them, and those who are members.” Users are, in short, everyone.
And what obligations do we have, all of us, if we are chatting on China’s internet? Here is Article 4:
Article 4 Providers of information services through internet chat groups on the internet, and users, must adhere to correct guidance, promoting socialist core values, fostering a positive and healthy online culture, and protecting a favorable online ecology.
This piece of devilry is one of the most specific indications we have yet of the Party’s atomization and personalization of censorship, of the way the relationship between propaganda and the public is being transformed by digital communications.
Since 1989, it has been incumbent principally on Party media to abide by “correct guidance,” and to lead the policy of discipline of public opinion. In the traditional media age, this project was exercised through the Central Propaganda Department, which dispensed orders and bans, and actively disciplined journalists, in order to maintain “correct guidance of public opinion.” In this old regime of “guidance,” the Party media played the dominant role in setting the tone, as far as possible, for commercial and internet media that at many points in the past two decades straggled away from the Party line.
In the age of mobile technology, when we are all, quite literally, hooked on cyberspace, the game has fundamentally shifted. The digital technologies many thought might disrupt the Party’s dominance of the agenda (“That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.”) have given the Party a direct line to the individual consumer — a line that can be controlled and manipulated. The internet, as enjoyed especially through those portable personal computers we call smartphones, brings a bounty of convenience, empowering us in a hundred different ways. But it is also now a Trojan Horse, inviting the state into our most intimate conversations.
We talk still, when we refer to China’s vast system of technical and regulatory controls on the internet, about a “Great Firewall” meant to insulate China from the contagion of the outside. It is probably more suitable now to think instead of a Great Hive of firewalls around the individual, a buzzing nest of connections from which users may be insulated at will. All may share in the collective illusion that they are part of a thriving, humming space, but all are joined to the Party’s re-engineered project of guidance and managed cohesion — and all are buzzing more or less at the same frequency.
In a hardline speech on media and public opinion policy in February last year, President Xi Jinping said that “all media must be surnamed Party,” that all media must “love the Party, protect the Party and serve the Party.”
Here’s a little buzz you may not have heard. He was talking about you.
As anyone whose profession it is to parse the language of Chinese Communist Party can tell you, reading Chinese discourse is a frustrating and bewildering exercise, full of rigid and ritualistic formulations that come and go, ebb and flow. Sum up Party-speak with a jingle and it might go something like this: Deng Xiaoping had Four Basic Principles,
Jiang Zemin, Three Represents
Xi Jinping has Two Undeniables.
And nothing at all makes sense.
Given the opaque nature of Chinese politics, however, the official language of the CCP is one of the best clues we have to the internal dynamics of the leadership. Which people, or which ideas, can we see being advanced or elevated in official-speak?
Whether or not Xi Jinping is referred to a “the core” may seem trivial to your average news reader — but it can be a very real reflection of the power he commands internally, as is the question of whether or not he will get a “banner term” (旗帜语) that includes his name, something that has not happened since the days of Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory.
With the 19th National Congress of the CCP just around the corner — though we still don’t know how far around the corner — it is prime time for China’s official discourse. In the coming weeks at CMP, we will be watching the discourse closely for any possible signs.
But let’s start first with the language coming out of President Xi’s “important speech” (a label familiar to discourse watchers) on July 26, 2017, just before top leaders headed off to the seaside resort of Beidaihe to consult, confabulate and contrive — in what more than one Western media outlet referred to as China’s “game of thrones.”
That speech, made at a two-day gathering in Beijing, was all about preparations for the 19th National Congress. And the official Xinhua News Agency reported that General Secretary Xi Jinping had “pointed out that socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new development phase,” and that he “profoundly laid out a series of major theories and practical questions in adhering to and developing socialism with Chinese characteristics under new historical conditions.”
Zzzzzz . . . Are you asleep yet?
Well, suffering students of Chinese discourse, I’m here to tell you that there are CliffsNotes versions of these befuddling speech acts. China’s official state media understand that official-speak is here to stay — despite official pledges , even by Xi himself, to tone it down — and that it is a dialect of Chinese that few, even well-read, Chinese can understand. Enter state media products like “Xi Speak in Pictures” (习语图解), which set out to demystify (sort of) official speeches like that Xi Jinping made on July 26.
In this case, the magic numbers are: 2, 3, 5, 9, 8, 3, 2. And here is what they add up to, according to Xinhua News Agency.
A graphic text representation of the “2 Tight Grasps,” produced by the official Xinhua News Agency. The 2 Tight Grasps
1. Tightly grasping the special characteristics of our country’s development
2. Tightly grasping the yearning of the masses for a good life
The “3 Concerns.” Source: Xinhua News Agency. The 3 Concerns (Profoundly Describing the Important Meaning of the 19th National Congress) The 19th National Congress that will soon open is an important and major meeting held during a stage of the building of a moderately well-off society that will determine victory, and a critical period in the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
………
Whether or not a plan of action that is comprehensive, strategic and forward-looking:
1. Concerns the historical transitioning of the undertakings of the Party and the government
2. Concerns the fate of socialism with Chinese characteristics
3. Concerns the fundamental interests of the greatest number of people.
The “5 What’s.” Source: Xinhua News Agency.
The 5 Whats (profoundly showing the basic nature of the Party) Our Party must make a clear pledge as to:
1. What banner it raises [ideologically]
2. What road it travels
3. What spirit it upholds
4. What historical mission is bears
5. What objective it struggles toward
The “9 We’s.” Source: Xinhua News Agency.
The 9 We’s (Profoundly outlining the historic changes to the undertakings of the Party and the government over the last 5 years) Over the last 5 years, the Central Committee of the CCP has scientifically grasped the development trends in the world today and in contemporary China, has resolved many difficulties that had long been awaiting resolution but had not been resolved, and has done a number of major things that were intended but not accomplished in the past.
1. We have comprehensively strengthened the leadership of the CCP, greatly enhancing the Party’s cohesiveness, fighting strength, leadership power and rallying power.
2. We have resolutely implemented a new development concept, strongly promoting higher quality, more efficient, more equal and more sustainable development for our country.
3. We have resolutely and fully deepened reforms, shown full force in promoting reforms, making many breakthroughs, and pushing deep advancement of a new dimension [in China’s development].
4. We have resolutely and fully advanced governance of the nation in accord with the law, clearly enhancing our Party’s capacity to use of legal methods to lead and govern the country.
5. We have enhanced the Party’s leadership of ideology, firming up the unity and solidarity of the entire Party and the entire society.
6. We have resolutely promoted the building of an ecological civilization, making important strides in promoting the building of a beautiful China.
7. We have firmly and resolutely advanced the modernization of defense and the armed forces, promoting historic breakthroughs for national defense and the military.
8. We have firmly and resolutely promoted major power diplomacy (大国外交), creating a peaceful international environment and a favorable regional environment for our country’s development.
9. We have firmly and resolutely promoted full disciplined governance of the Party, working hard to resolve the most salient problems voiced by the people, that are most threatening to the Party’s foundation of power.
The “8 Mores.” Source: Xinhua News Agency.
The 8 Mores (The desires of the people are the objective of the Party’s struggles)
[The people desire:]
1. More quality education
2. More stable employment
3. More acceptable incomes
4. More dependable social security
5. More quality healthcare and sanitation
6. More comfortable living conditions
7. A more beautiful environment
8. A more abundant spiritual and cultural life.
The “3 Means That’s.” Source: Xinhua News Agency.
The 3 Mean That’s (A high assessment of the great achievements made by socialism with Chinese characteristics)
[The great achievements of socialism with Chinese characteristics . . . ]
1. Mean that the Chinese, who in modern times have endured great suffering, have now made an historic flying leap from standing up, to becoming prosperous, to becoming strong.
2. Mean that socialism in China has shone strong vitality and has constantly opened new horizons of development.
3. Mean that socialism with Chinese characteristics has expanded the path through which developing nations can move toward modernization, offering China’s knowledge, and providing Chinese proposals, for the resolution of problems facing humanity.
The “2 Musts and 2 Needs.” Source: Xinhua News Agency.
The 2 Musts and 2 Needs (Profoundly describing how to adhere to the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics under new historical conditions) More accurately grasping the nature of the constant changes in our country in the primary stage of socialism,
Adhering to the Party’s basic line,
As we continue to promote economic development,
better resolving various societal problems emerging in our country,
better achieving the comprehensive development of various undertakings,
better promoting the comprehensive development of the people, and comprehensive social progress. [We] Must
Place great emphasis on the utility of theories, raising our theoretical self-confidence and strategic focus. [We] Need
To grasp the priorities, address the shortcomings and strengthen the weak points in various demands for building a comprehensively well-off society as raised at the 16th, 17th and 18th national congresses. [We] Must
Unshakably uphold and improve the leadership of the Party, unshakably promoting new projects in the building of the Party. [We] Need
To adhere to the guidance of issues, maintaining strategic focus, promoting the deep development of comprehensive and strict Party governance, making our ideas and actions on comprehensive and strict Party governance more scientific, more rigorous, and more effective, ensuring that the Party stands with the people in thoughts and in actions throughout.
I think everyone would agree that none of the formulas above get us down to the specifics of the upcoming 19th National Congress. But they do offer us a snapshot of what the leadership 1) believes the Party must stand for (the 5 what’s); 2) sees itself as having accomplished in the past 5 years (the 9 we’s); 3) ascertains as its contribution historically to China and to the world by virtue of its guiding ideology, “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (the 3 means that’s); and 4) what it understands its chief obligations toward the people to be (the 8 mores).
When it comes to CCP discourse, we need CliffsNotes for the CliffsNotes. But at least we have a start.
In the first clear example of China’s new Cybersecurity Law being cited to target major social media platforms, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) issued a notice today saying that WeChat, Sina Weibo and Baidu Tieba — a popular online community linked to Baidu’s search services — were under investigation for violations of the new law, which took effect on June 1 this year.
The investigations will be carried out, the notice says, by the CAC’s Beijing and Guangdong offices. While Weibo and Baidu are based in Beijing, Tencent is based in Shenzhen.
Image by Sinchen Li available at Flickr.com under Creative Commons license.
The notice suggests the investigations were prompted by “reports made by web users” (language not uncommon in the enforcement of online controls), and that the three platforms “host content including violence, fabrication and rumor, obscenity and pornography, and other information shared by users that harms national security, public safety and social order.”
A translation of the notice follows:
Tencent’s WeChat, Sina Weibo and Baidu Tieba Under Investigation for Violations of the Cybersecurity Law
Cyberspace Administration of China / August 11, 2017, 10:00
Recently, the Cyberspace Administration of China directed its authorities in both the city of Beijing and Guangdong province to carry out investigations of Tencent’s WeChat, Sina Weibo and Baidu Tieba in accord with the law. According to reports made by web users, with preliminary investigations made by CAC authorities in Beijing and Guangdong, the three websites WeChat, Weibo and Tieba all host content including violence, fabrication and rumor, obscenity and pornography, and other information shared by users that harms national security, public safety and social order. The three website platforms are in violation of the Cybersecurity Law and other laws and regulations, and did not fully take on their management responsibilities toward information posted by users that are prohibited by laws and regulations. Follow ups on the cases will be issued by the local CAC authorities.
A spokesperson for the CAC said that the offices of the CAC will seriously implement the Cybersecurity Law and other laws and regulations, further expanding the vigor of enforcement and supervision of information on the internet, investigating in accord with the law various forms of illegal online conduct. [The agency] welcomes tips about violations of laws and regulations from the expanse of web users, and the online report center for harmful information operates 24 hours a day. Telephone for reports: 12377. Reports web address: www.12377.cn, e-mail [email protected].
A near tragedy unfolding earlier this year on the outskirts of the bustling Chinese business hub of Shenzhen offered both a promise and a stark warning about the power of big data.
At roughly 4PM on January 26, a man walked into the local police station in Shenzhen’s Longgang District to report that his three-year-old had gone missing. The child, it was feared, had been abducted by child traffickers — a frightfully common problem in China, where it is estimated that tens of thousands of children are kidnapped and sold every year. Police leapt into action. They quickly obtained video footage, captured by an unspecified surveillance camera, showing a middle-aged woman making off with the child. Next, they isolated an image of the suspect’s face, which they ran through a facial recognition program, “locking down [the woman’s] identity,” as Chinese media later reported. Finally, learning that the woman had boarded a train for the city of Wuhan, police were able to intercept her upon arrival, rescuing the child. The entire saga, from the first police report to the location of the abducted child, lasted just 15 hours.
Naturally, we should breathe a sigh of relief, along with the child’s parents, at this happy outcome. At the same time, however, we should read between the lines, recognising the immense potential for abuse in these 21st century reservoirs of big data that can be trawled for information about each and every one of us. Sure, criminals might be exposed — but then, so might we all be.
In many respects, China leads the world in the application of big data and machine learning to questions of law enforcement and social control. The above success story tells us that local police in China have expedient access not just to residential and other surveillance cameras, but also to national identity databases that can be matched in real time against train or other ticket purchases requiring identification. This, in fact, is just the tip of the iceberg. China is now applying a big data approach to every manner of problem, betraying a dangerous faith in the liberating power of technology, with no public discussion whatsoever about how these assumed advances might entrap citizens within the all-seeing lens of state-controlled machine data.
China is certainly not alone in the development of such technologies. But it stands apart in their actual deployment, which is happening quickly and in the utter absence of scrutiny.
In April this year, Intellifusion, the company whose facial recognition technology was behind the child abduction breakthrough, worked with traffic police in Shenzhen to install a new jaywalking detection system exposing pedestrians who cross the street in violation of traffic laws. The system, based on facial recognition technology, apparently maintains a database of pedestrians — so that it can search out, instantly, repeat offenders. Shenzhen traffic police are also trialing the use of sonar imaging technology that could help combat what the China Daily newspaper calls the “annoying misuse of car horns” in heavy traffic by isolating the offending vehicle and capturing images of both the vehicle plate number and the driver, who may receive surprise notification of a fine of around 65 Euros.
In an interview earlier this year, Intellifusion co-founder and CEO Chen Ning gleefully reported that his firm was now working on technologies to predict criminality. “Some clients, as they come to understand Intellifusion’s technology system, will raise a concept from science fiction: prediction of criminality,” said Chen. “A few months ago, we began research in this area, which is basically about digging clues out of big data and then setting a number of behavioral parameters. In fact, right now we can do this to a certain extent, making predictions about behaviour.”
Screenshot of the website for Intellifusion, a Shenzhen-based start-up offering facial recognition and other services. The caption at bottom reads: “Creating science fiction-style sky-eye [surveillance] systems, allowing cities to be filled with a sense of security.”Screenshot of the website for Intellifusion, a Shenzhen-based start-up offering facial recognition and other services. The caption at bottom reads: “Creating science fiction-style sky-eye [surveillance] systems, allowing cities to be filled with a sense of security.”The promise made on Intellifusion’s website sums up well the company’s darkly utopian vision of artificial intelligence and big data analysis. “Creating science fiction-style sky-eye [surveillance] systems, allowing cities to be filled with a sense of security,” it reads.
But Intellifusion’s vision is little more than an echo of the much grander vision of China’s government and its public security apparatus. The country’s most ambitious, and most chilling, application of big data comes with its plans for a comprehensive national “social credit” system that by 2020 that would rate all citizens on the basis of wide-ranging data parameters, including spending patterns, personal behavior (like running red lights or honking too loudly) and online and social media activity. The plan, first outlined in 2014, would assess the credit-worthiness of citizens across four areas, including commercial activities, judicial records, administrative affairs and social behavior.
Building of the system was accelerated in 2016 as more than 40 institutions — including the police, the courts, the land and transport ministries, the railway ministry and the People’s Bank of China — agreed to the broad sharing of information about citizens within their respective systems. In one documented case this year that illustrates the implications, a Shenzhen resident was denied purchase of a plane ticket because his father had defaulted on a debt for a company in which the son owned shares.
Increasingly, private companies are joining the push for information cross-sharing. Back in April, 10 bike-sharing companies in China signed a pledge to share information on their consumers with the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the agency responsible for overall strategies of national economic and social development, and a key force behind the development of the social credit system. Bike parking behavior and misbehavior could now be just one more data point in China’s social credit universe. Never to be outdone on innovative social control, the city of Shenzhen announced already last year that it was drafting plans to link illegal bicycle parking to personal credit records, and that data from bike-sharing companies might be part of that plan.
In a common refrain, one NDRC official told state media recently that a national social credit system is in the interests of everyone. Official state media constantly push the moral dimension of these tech-driven initiatives, which they say are about building a “sincerity culture.” The overriding interest, though, is that of the government. The national blueprint introduced three years ago states clearly that the strategy is about, in addition to building the “socialist market economy,” achieving “social harmony and the long-term peace and stability of the nation.”
But how, ultimately, can you ensure the integrity of a government-designed and operated system of imposed integrity when the government implementing the system faces no scrutiny from those being watched and monitored?
The answer, almost certainly, is that you can’t. The apparent offer on the black market of highly personal information already housed in government and police-run databases, exposed through a rare Chinese newspaper investigation last year, suggests that when integrity is digitised, it is just as quickly commoditized.
But China’s answer, for now, to this fundamental question for citizens of the 21st century is: Watch us and see. This article previously appeared in Germany’s Die Tageszeitung newspaper.
Digital disruption has been the name of the game in China’s media space for several years now. The same technology wave that has inundated everything from transportation to brick-and-mortar retail has hit traditional media hard, leaving wreckage in its wake.
Late last year, the Beijing Times newspaper closed its doors after more than 15 years of operation, and on January 1, Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post, long one of the country’s leading commercial newspapers, also closed up shop. More such extinctions are to be expected, diminishing choice at the Chinese news stand.
But another important element of digital disruption is the radical re-envisioning of choice itself. Why browse the newsstand or fumble through the inky metro tabloids when algorithms can do the work for you? Show an inclination to check out real estate content through a news app like Toutiao (今日头条), or “Today’s Headlines,” and the app will pre-select for you, modelling your behavior to generate customized news feeds.
Toutiao and other apps powered by artificial intelligence technologies have been a space of fevered activity in China since around 2012. For Chinese authorities, however, this type of disruption apparently has its limits.
On July 6, the Party’s official People’s Daily ran a commentary piece called “News Must Not Be Hijacked By Algorithms.” The piece was read by many as a direct attack on Toutiao, the industry leader in the field of AI news.
The piece attacked news apps “promoting low quality content” to the detriment of “truth, comprehensiveness, objectivity and independence.” Recalling that the notion of “guidance of public opinion,” or ensuring social and political stability through media control, is the true value underlining the Party’s approach to information in China, one must wonder whether one of the perceived dangers in the rise of AI news apps is the way they might allow readers to select out the sorts of messages authorities would like them to absorb.
Perhaps China’s propaganda authorities are coming to realize that the selection methods now being advanced through these apps might be undermining the Party’s own efforts to “guide” the information and ideas to which the public is exposed.
A translation of the People’s Daily piece follows:
“News Must Not Be Hijacked By Algorithms”
By Lu Hong (吕洪) / July 6, 2017
Recently, news apps drunk on technologies and algorithms have become more and more “basic and coarse.” Just open a single article and they will rapidly flood your screen with related content, without even extending you the right of refusal. Some people even elected these news distribution algorithms to the plane of artificial intelligence, suggesting they are a major development trend representing the future of text, the future of content, and even the future of media.
What is artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence is the simulation of the information process of human thought. These algorithmic technologies based on social networks and click rates, and especially these small-time mechanisms of machine selection and their hard-pushing of content, cause users great annoyance.
Algorithms can have some positive impacts on news production. On the one hand, they can induce content producers to pay greater attention to content of interest to audiences, approaching content production from the reader’s perspective — so that no longer do they talk to themselves alone. On the other hand, they have diminished the time investment required of consumers and raised the efficiency of reading, to the benefit of enriching information and knowledge.
However, a number of apps, keen on news delivery and indulging in algorithms, have had a very negative impact on the future of news. Taking the so-called “free ride” of the algorithm, some news apps that were previously quite rich informationally are more and more bland, some content producers that were previously impartial are now rather biased, and the once broad reach of some news media has been increasingly narrowed.
In recent years, there have been many advancements in artificial intelligence in various sectors, but these have remained somewhat detached from ordinary people. Why is this? Because artificial intelligence to date has been unblemished to achieve breakthroughs in non-linear thinking, this mode unique to human beings. We click into a piece of horrific social news out of instinctual human curiosity — but instinct is not intelligence. When different viewpoints interact, or even face off, this potentially leads to greater thought or knowledge. To be introspective about our instincts, and to surpass them, is a development of human nature. A number of news apps, relying only on parsing people’s clicking habits and promoting low quality content, can only cause them annoyance.
But are we to be held captive by algorithms, traffic and hits, only showing those parts of the world that readers want to see — or do we uphold the truth, comprehensiveness, objectivity and independence, using quality content to shape our style? This is the question media people must think deeply about.
Traditional media must not act like so many Don Quixotes, being blind to algorithms and technology and avoiding progressive trends. But they cannot at the same time rely on these entirely, becoming slaves to algorithms and technology. Traditional media must actively strategise and must actively participate in the process of [media] transition and convergence. But in the process of media convergence, they must maintain their own styles and standards, safeguarding their own values and independent spirits, injecting the soul of traditional media in the online space — allowing algorithms and technology serve news of true value.
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