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If there’s one thing that is vital to understanding the Chinese Communist Party, it’s that it’s a communist party. With all that that implies.
As former Australian politician John Anderson has remarked, we should never forget that a communist will do as a communist does. One thing that communist regimes throughout history have always done is lie. When tens of millions died in the Holodomor, the Soviets simply lied about it. When the Red Army massacred tens of thousands of Poles in the Katyn Forest, they lied and said the Germans did it. When the Chernobyl reactor blew up, the Gorbachev government lied about it until the vast cloud of radiation forced them to admit the truth.
The Chinese Communist Party has never been any different. Even today, no-one is able to accurately determine just how many millions of people died in the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, because most of the records remain tightly sealed. Even during those calamities, most Chinese themselves had no idea of the sheer scale of the horror: they were lied to that it was all “counter-revolutionary propaganda”. Chinese today are simply unaware that anything much happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989, other than that a few students attacked the People’s Liberation Army.
This simple fact — communists lie — is the background noise to any discussion of China. When pro-China shills have spent the last decade spruiking its “economic miracle”, I’ve always countered that, “that’s according to Beijing’s official figures, anyway”. Why would anyone believe them?
Finding the truth about communist China so often involves trying to impute from seemingly inconsequential, third-order data that seeps through the cracks. Why did 21 million Chinese mobile subscribers simply vanish, last year? Why did China scrub nearly all records of a virus researcher in Wuhan, in November 2019? Why has China built dozens of empty “ghost cities”? Why did China suddenly start rationing electricity, earlier this year?
More importantly, why has China’s “Great Firewall” suddenly gone even more opaque than before?
A new data-security law has made it harder for foreign companies and investors to get information, including about supplies and financial statements. Several providers of ship locations in Chinese waters stopped sharing information outside the country, making it hard to understand port activity there. Chinese authorities have restricted information on coal use, purged documents related to political dissent cases from an official judicial database, and shut down academic exchanges with other countries.
At the same time as China is slamming down even the smallest chink of light seeping under the bamboo curtain, it is being increasingly isolated from outside.
The US has also taken moves to partially decouple the world’s two largest economies, including limiting Chinese access to American technology and research universities through trade and visa restrictions.
But it is the once-Hermit Kingdom which is most obviously retreating in on itself again.
Faced with increasing antagonism from the US and other democratic governments, Mr Xi has reversed course from his predecessors’ emphasis on humility and openness to focus on national pride and self-sufficiency.
Once a frequent traveller, Mr Xi hasn’t left the country since he publicly acknowledged the severity of the Covid-19 outbreak in January last year.
Strict Covid-related border controls, including cancelled flights and weeks-long quarantines, have added a drastic drop in face-to-face interactions between Chinese citizens and the world, compounding the disconnect. Airlines carried about one million people in and out of China over the first eight months of this year, down from almost 50 million over the same period in 2019, according to data from the Civil Aviation Administration of China.
Some Chinese looking to travel abroad say they have been denied passport renewals or been pulled aside at the airport by border officials who tried to dissuade them from going, citing government directives to minimise travel.
Economic data, on everything from metals, financial, and shipping movements, to oil and coal supply and demand, is suddenly simply not available.
Politically sensitive data is also suddenly vanishing.
China’s government has moved aggressively to remove or hide data that foreign governments and news organisations have used to highlight alleged human-rights abuses in the country.
The Australian
China’s online court-document database has been purged of anything politically sensitive. “The disclosure rate of sensitive political cases is now zero,” according to one activist group.
What China is hiding is a “known unknown”. The big “unknown unknown” is — why?
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