When the first CIs were founded, I welcomed them as a chance for foreigners to learn the wonders of Chinese language and culture. I rather like Confucius. I’ve studied his works in the original and done calligraphy of some of his Analects.
I hoped the CIs would not turn political. But I was not surprised when they did. They are political with a very nasty twist. Pressure on universities to hew to Chinese policy and the Chinese world view: eg on Xinjiang and Tibet. Punishing China’s overseas students who step out of line; punishing their families at home in China. Communal guilt: very fascist.
This is happening all over the west. The vehicle of transmission to the CIs and CSSAs is the China United Front Works Department, not mentioned in this article, but established during the revolutionary wars and since grown into the largest covert propaganda body in the world.
Professor# Kaplan and Metz give a good account of what’s going on:
Shortly before the Winter Olympics in Beijing this past February, students at George Washington University (GWU) put up posters criticizing the Chinese government’s policies. The posters decried the internment and cultural genocide of Uyghurs, the crackdown on freedoms in Hong Kong, and China’s lack of transparency during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. They were quickly removed and would have gone largely unnoticed had it not been for the firestorm ignited by the university’s response to a student petition.
In the petition, which was sent directly to GWU’s president, Mark Wrighton, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) demanded that the university remove the posters, identify the students responsible, and “punish them severely” for “insult[ing] China.” In a leaked email response, Wrighton wrote that he was “personally offended” by the posters and promised to have them removed. Then, almost casually, he committed to “determin[ing] who [was] responsible.” There was a swift backlash both online, where freedom of expression advocates like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) condemned the email, and among GWU students, who organized a protest in response. Within days, Wrighton issued a statement promising not to punish the students involved.
Given the freedoms typically touted on college campuses, GWU’s reactionary effort to limit student criticism of the Chinese government might stand out as unusual. But it is part of a larger pattern — one linked to a multipronged effort by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to influence and control its image abroad. That image is particularly vulnerable now because, as the U.S. Department of State and numerous other countries have concluded, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is committing genocide against the Uyghur people, among other human rights abuses.[Read on…]
Melissa Chan says the same, in an article I missed when it came out. She thinks we have to update from “Authoritarian” and I agree. Fascist is more accurate.
She says:
...consider the hallmarks of fascism: a surveillance state with a strongman invoking racism, nationalism and traditional family values at home, while building up a military for expansion abroad.
She misses “Dirigisme”. That is, the State direction of the economy and society. Which China does: socially by, eg, saying men can’t be “sissy boys”; people can’t be “lying flat”, and so on. And in the economy, directing, even the private companies, to its aims. Like stopping imports from Australia, because we had the gall to ask about the origin of the coronavirus.
Having made it to Zhengzhou, the capital, they were met with uniformed police, plain clothes police and these white-shirted mystery men circled above — probably hired thugs. We had the same sort of thugs here in Hong Kong back in mid 2019, when they came to a subway station and beat the crap out of some demonstrators. I don’t think they were ever caught. Hmmmm…
So here we have the latest in government-sponsored thuggery. First it was il Duce’s Black Shirts, then Adolf’s Brown Shirts. Now Henan's White Shirts. Circled in red above.
By the way, I think it’s interesting, and for now encouraging, that the SCMP is reporting this issue in some detail. The above is its full back page, today’s print edition. Plus an inside article, noting that in China they’re warning not to publish stuff from “hostile” western forces, which is basically anyone reporting the issue at all. Like today’s Post.
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| Yoof, in Trafalgar Square, proud members of the Communist Party of GB, Marxist-Leninist. They’re also "anti-fascist" they say. But today's CCP is fascist. It's one or the other, lads |
It's in Kotkin's "How the Democrats fell for Mussolini":
Indeed, Mussolini’s idea of an economy controlled from above, with generous benefits but dominated by large business interests, is gradually supplanting the old liberal capitalist model. In the West, for example, the “Great Reset,” introduced by the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, proposes an expanded welfare state and an economy that transcends the market for the greater goal of serving racial and gender “equity”, as well as saving the planet.
Wherever it appears, whether in the early 20th century or today, fascism — in its corporate sense — relies on concentrated economic power to achieve its essential and ideological goals. In 1922, for instance, large corporations and landowners helped finance Mussolini’s Black Shirts for their March on Rome. Confindustria, the leading organisation of Italian industrialists, was glad to see the end of class-based chaos and welcomed the state’s infrastructure surge.
Elsewhere, the German cartels and Japanese zaibatsu both kowtowed to and benefited from fascist state support and contracts. Even today, China, in many aspects the model fascist state of our times, follows Il Duce’s model of cementing the corporate elite into the power structure. Since 2000, a hundred billionaires sit in the country’s Communist legislation, a development that Mao would never have countenanced.
More here
There's been a lot of talk in recent years -- from the likes of Eric & Bret Weinstein -- about how we are ruled not by a fair and decent democracy, but by an entitled oligarchy. And who can argue that there's not an elite, that see themselves as our righteous rulers? And to centralise, centralise. Or is that all horrid right-wing paranoia, hard-right talking points?
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| Cathedral of Light, Berlin 1937 |
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| Cathedral of Light, Beijing 2021.Link |
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As are the steampunk solarpunk solar panels synchronised to pay homage to the Chinese Communist Party’s 100th birthday the other day. Which party, on reflection, is better called what it is, the Fascist Party, i fascisti. For it ticks all the boxes of the Cambridge definition of “fascist”.
And the only thing to celebrate about the CCP, and its 100 years of, mostly, mayhem, is when they’ve withdrawn from any area of public life things have gone better. When they’ve withdrawn from the economy, it’s boomed. That’s the reason for the miraculous 40 years of growth and lifting 600 million out of poverty. The private sector. Not the Communist Fascist Party.