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The Great Suppression: Social Resistance in Xi Jinping’s China · China Considered

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[MUSIC]
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>> Elizabeth Economy: Welcome to China Considered, a podcast that brings fresh
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insights and informed discussion to one of the most consequential issues of our time,
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how China is changing and changing the world.
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I'm Liz Economy, Hargrove Senior Fellow and Co director of the US-China and
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the World Program at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
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Today I have with me Dr. Diana Fu.
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She's associate professor of political science at the Munk School at
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the University of Toronto and
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a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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She's also an award-winning author,
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her area of expertise is social activism and political repression in China.
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She's just putting the finishing touches on a new book that looks at how
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the Chinese government seeks to manage or control the Chinese diaspora.
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That's Chinese who are living outside the country, and so
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we're gonna be able to talk today about social activism and
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political repression both inside and outside China.
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So, Diana, welcome, and to get us started,
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let me ask you to take us back to the pre Xi Jinping era.
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I think for many of us,
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we've become somewhat consumed with China over the past 12 years.
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And we're beginning to develop a collective amnesia about what China was
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like during the Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao eras, the sort of 1990s and 2000s.
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So take us back and help us understand what did Chinese society look like then?
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What was front and center in the minds of the Chinese people in terms of issues
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that they wanted the government to address?
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And did they write letters to the Chinese government,
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did they step out onto the streets to protest?
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Give us a sense for what social and political activism looked like back,
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more than a decade ago.
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>> Diana Fu: Yes, thank you so much for having me on your show and for
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asking this first question, which we actually don't think about a lot.
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Because there's so much emphasis on the Xi era that we've almost
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forgotten about the era that just preceded him, which was the Hu when era,
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which ran from about 10 years from 2002 to 2012.
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And at that time, during that period, I was a grad student at Oxford University
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and I had witnessed firsthand the changes in state society relations in the Hu era.
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Which then the leaders touted as a harmonious society, which it wasn't,
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but perhaps more harmonious than the decade that we're living in now.
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So when Xi was still in his first term from 2012 to 2017ish,
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I co-authored an article on this exact topic for
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the China Journal on what changed, if anything,
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in terms of grassroots political participation.
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And the gist of what that article was saying was that from the Hu era you
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had what we called fragmented control.
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Which is that Beijing more or less allowed local states to deal with local
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unrest in whatever way they saw fit, so long as it was kept under control.
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And this changed in the Xi era, where you have centralized control,
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that Beijing really took reins into its own hands to make
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sure that unrest was kept at bay in a specific way.
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So let me give you some examples, so back in 2009 to 2011,
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when I was doing my dissertation research in China in the Hu era.
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I was spending about 18 months conducting political ethnography on networks
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of illegal grassroots organizations across the Pearl River Delta and
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the Yangtze River Delta.
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Which are really the two manufacturing hubs of China.
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And these labor organizations were very small,
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they were operated by migrant worker leaders themselves.
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And what they would do is they would coach other migrant workers on how to
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get their wages back, how to contend with the local state for injury payment.
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And they were illegal because the state only allows one
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official union to represent all workers in China, and
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that's the All China Federation of Trade Unions.
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So my 2018 book really theorized how it was possible that
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these weak organizations could not only survive in the Huwen era,
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but also mobilize workers under that regime.
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And I called that type of mobilization mobilizing without the masses,
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now what changed?
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So these groups are emblematic of the type of grassroots civil society that had been
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operating in the Huwen era, under the radar, but still surviving.
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Now, when Xi took power and 2012, 2013,
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he took very swift actions against all kinds of grassroots civil
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society that had been operating in these gray zones.
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He arrested labor organization leaders, he detained feminist activists, he shut down
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long operating legal aid organizations, he cracked down on underground churches.
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Basically, he broke the backbone of grassroots civil society
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that had been allowed to not flourish, but allowed to exist under the Huwen era.
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And I think that is one of Xi's legacies, and to date, these grassroots
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civil society haven't really been able to resuscitate under Xi Jinping.
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Many of the leaders, as you know Liz, have fled abroad and
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are now part of the diaspora.
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And when I've spoken to them more recently,
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they characterized the Xi era as a very long and harsh winter.
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Possibly even harsher than the winters that we experience here in Canada.
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For which they are currently under hibernation, but are not dead, and
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that's a very important point.
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Is that I don't think civil society and activism is dead under Xi,
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they're merely in hibernation.
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>> Elizabeth Economy: Okay, so, but
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let me ask you again just a little bit more about the Hu Jintao era.
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Did they just tolerate most of these illegal migrant labor organizations?
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I mean, certainly there were legal organizations,
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I did a lot of work myself on China's environment.
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And there were masses of legally recognized NGOs that worked on
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the environment, you mentioned feminist organizations.
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So in that space between what we would call government organized non-governmental
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organizations and what you're terming illegal, small scale kinds of NGOs.
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That are operating in ways that are just antithetical to what
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government believes to be its interests, there's a broader space.
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There was a broader space certainly for recognized activism, right?
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That sometimes then turned into not just small scale protests,
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but mass protests with 10, 20, 30,000 people around
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issues like the environment, or you had pensioners, right?
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Who would complain about not getting their money, or state owned
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enterprises that shut down and didn't pay the wages that workers were owed.
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So there's a lot of different kinds, I think, of dissent,
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can you fill in the gaps for what people had in their heads during that period?
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It was a period of very active economic reform,
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I think there was a sense in some cases people being left out or left behind or
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you had, as you mentioned, Hu Jintao's harmonious society, right?
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Which was in many respects an effort to rebalance what were considered
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to be some of the externalities of the Go Go economic growth.
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And so what were some of the other issues that you saw when you were there?
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I know you focused on the labor but what were some of the other
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issues that people cared about back in the 2000s?
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>> Diana Fu: Yeah, you're right to bring up environmental organizations,
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which your work and your first book addressed in great detail.
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I think a lot of the issues that people cared about in the Hu-Wen era were
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bread and butter issues.
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So the exact issues that you mentioned.
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So not only did you have workers protesting for unpaid wages or
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going on strike.
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You also had peasants, farmers whose land had been stolen
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by property developers in cahoots with local authorities,
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they would file petitions up the chain of command.
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And you also had middle-class people protesting, for example,
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the building of chemical plants in their backyard.
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And they were upset about that, and that was a huge incident with PX plants, right?
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That instigated huge protests in China.
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And you also had homeowners cheated by develop developers.
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So these were all these kinds of bread and butter issues that you would find really,
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they weren't particular to China, they still aren't particular to China.
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They're the bread and butter issues that protesters everywhere protest about.
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But I think what distinguished these forms of protests in the Hu
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era from perhaps protests on bread and butter issues elsewhere
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in the liberal democracies is actually the framing that protesters of that era used.
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In the sense that you'd find protest slogans back in the days that
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lambasted the local authorities for being corrupt and wicked and
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in cahoots with local property developers for taking away peasants lands.
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But then it would immediately be followed by slogans such as long live
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the Chinese Communist Party, long live the Chinese Communist leaders.
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You wouldn't never find, almost never find a slogan that used the words freedom or
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citizens, or out with so and so leader.
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And I think that's what distinguishes the sort of the framings,
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if you will, to borrow a term from social movement scholarship.
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The framing of protests from liberal western protests
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that are also around those bread and butter issues.
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And I think that framing suggests that Chinese protesters are savvy.
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And they knew and they know that the central authorities would be more likely
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to intervene on their behalf if they just blamed the local authorities.
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So back then, I remember talking and interviewing local authorities from
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this municipal level all the way down to the city street level.
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And they had a very tough time,
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it was a very tough job because they felt pressure from both ends from the top.
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They had to meet this criteria that you and I know as the one veto system,
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[FOREIGN].
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Which stipulates that even if they had one outbreak of mass incidents,
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such as a protest in their area and their jurisdiction,
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that would negatively affect their career trajectories.
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And then from the bottom, if the local authorities often had to deal with very
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angry citizens, reporting them upward to the central authorities, right?
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So then, remember when I was talking to local authorities in the Hu-Wen era,
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they would tell me that their strategy for handling disturbances was big
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disturbances, big solutions, small disturbances, small solutions.
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[FOREIGN] Which basically meant a strategy of dealing with protests as they come.
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They used somewhat flexible techniques that sometimes involved coercion and
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detainment and arrest.
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But they also used things like just paying people off with cash or
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giving other concessions.
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And I think this is all in the big picture of the Hu-Wen era's promotion of
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harmonious society and in dealing with social conflict in a much
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more flexible and fragmented way than the Xi era.
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>> Elizabeth Economy: I think it's really interesting, sort of the divergence in how
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officials chose to deal with different kinds of problems.
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So, I know it's hard to make an assessment for the entire country, but
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just based on your experience, I mean, how successful do you think the local
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officials were in actually addressing the issues that were brought before them?
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I mean, was it just, here, take some money and deal with this pollution, or was it,
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here, take some money and I will deal with this pollution?
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And then I did deal with that pollution.
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I mean, in terms of really resolving the issues at hand,
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do you have the sense that the officials were particularly effective?
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>> Diana Fu: That's a really hard question to answer because empirically, as we know,
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China is such a fragmented state that it really varies based on issues, and
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it really varies based on the locality.
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And so I would say that in the case of labor, which I looked at more closely,
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most of the time these were band-aid redress, right?
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So for example, the type of mobilization that I was describing
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is when NGO actually coaches a worker to challenge the state as an individual
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rather than as a collective, because that way it's less risky.
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So one of the things that workers used to do is to say,
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I'm going to threaten to jump off the dormitory building if
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you don't help give me my wages back or to give me compensation.
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Now that's an individual challenge to an individual problem.
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But there's hundreds of millions of people who facing the same problem.
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So those structural issues were not resolved.
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But at the same time, it didn't mean that the type of mobilization that these NGO's
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were doing was meaningless just because those structural issues weren't there.
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Because they laid the groundwork for an infrastructure of grassroots civil
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society that was then dismantled by Xi Jinping.
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>> Elizabeth Economy: Right, so let's talk a little bit about Xi Jinping.
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Everybody's [LAUGH] favorite leader to talk about, I think.
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So what changed?
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I mean, I remember back in 2010, 2011,
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I think the figure came out in 2011, it was a professor at Beidaihe,
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I think, who said there were 180,000 protests in China in 2010.
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And I think that's the last sort of number I've seen publicly released in that way.
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I think we've had other numbers come out since then, but this made a big splash,
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of course.
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Since then, I think you could look at China and
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think there's one protest every three years.
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I mean, for everything that we see, I think in the media.
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And part of that is just, as you say,
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he dismantled the infrastructure of both, legal and illegal NGOs.
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Really cut back in terms of sort of ability of foreign non-governmental
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organizations to engage with Chinese counterparts through
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the law in 2017, and put in a much more repressive apparatus.
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So, is it the case that, in fact, really social protest has shrunk so
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greatly, have Chinese people found different ways
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to express sort of activism and their discontent?
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What's new, what's different now in the Xi Jinping era?
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>> Diana Fu: This is again a hard question to answer precisely
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because we don't know the stats anymore, right?
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At some point we never really knew if the stats that
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were published by the state were accurate, they probably weren't.
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But then at some point they just stopped publishing stats altogether,
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even official stats on the number of protests.
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So it's really hard, I think,
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to pinpoint changes in terms of, Empirically, how many?
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What are the numbers of protests?
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Have they gone up?
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Have they gone down?
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Have they shifted in terms of issues?
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But I think that you can also look at this question through qualitative changes,
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not just in terms of quantitative changes in terms of the number of protests.
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And one of the interesting dynamics in terms of the qualitative changes and
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protests that I've noticed in the past ten years is what I would call
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a feminization of protests in China today.
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Feminization both in terms of gender issues being a focal point, but
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also in terms of the large number of young female, non-straight people.
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Who are at the front lines of pushing for social change on all kinds of issues,
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not necessarily just on gender issues.
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So take for example the fledgling #MeToo movement in China.
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You might recall, Liz, that in November of 2021,
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Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai had posted on Chinese social media Weibo,
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that she had been sexually assaulted by one of the former vice premiers of China.
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And I think she said something like, like a moth drawn to a flame,
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I know this is self-destructive, but I have to say it.
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And her words unleashed a firestorm online.
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Her post was taken down within 30 minutes by the authorities, but
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was searched for 6.75 million times after it was censored.
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And then the tennis star's own name became a sensitive censored word.
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Now, what's interesting is that Peng herself,
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I don't think is an avowed activist.
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I mean, she's a sports star, she's a tennis player.
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But her act of defiance and coming out against not just anyone but
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a central leader, a former central leader who had been in the top
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leadership circle was, I think, indicative of a broader shift.
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And that is that women sexual minorities in China are much more vocal in terms of
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their discontent and more vociferous under Xi Jinping than they previously were.
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And they have been inserting this sort of feminist agenda,
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feminist perspective into other kinds of non-gender movements.
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For example, in the #WhitePaperMovement against the harsh COVID policies,
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I remember that there were feminist activists in,
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I think, based outside of China even who had said,
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let's not think of this as just a anti-COVID movement.
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We also have to tackle the history of patriarchy and social movements and
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seeing men as social movement leaders.
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But just as we are against autocracy, we also need to be against patriarchy.
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And so I think that's a very interesting qualitative shift in the types
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of movements and in the types of people that emerge to participate in
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social movements in China under Xi Jinping.
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>> Elizabeth Economy: That is interesting.
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And I think it also speaks to one of what was one of the greatest fears within
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the Chinese leadership when it comes to sort of civil society activism.
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Which is linkage of different kinds of issues and
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different sets of sort of activists that you would end up with something
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that would be the environment and feminists, right?
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And something, and COVID, that you would end up with activists
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from across several different domains coming together and
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seeing this as a broader push for political reform or social change.
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I think that's also, and
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I think given the sort of male dominance in particular of the Xi era, right?
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The fact that you have no women in the politburo and
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such a small percentage, 4 or so percent of the central committee women.
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And we see, I think a much Xi Jinping talking about
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not wanting effeminate men to be in movies.
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All of this, I think is a spur to what you've raised, and
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I think is really quite interesting.
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So you have a different sort of set of actors,
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I think is what you're saying, bringing together issues in
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interesting ways is one significant difference from before.
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Talk a little bit- >> Diana Fu: That's right.
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And Liz, if I may interrupt for a second, I think you're absolutely on point
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in saying that this is inadvertently what the state did.
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By shutting down civil society is that,
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they were the most afraid of civil society developing into these cross-cutting,
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cross sectoral networks with environmental activists working
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alongside feminist activists working alongside labor activists.
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But by shutting all these pockets that had been previously
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segmented, by shutting those channels down.
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It inadvertently gave rise to actors who, because they have no other channels,
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they've arisen to actually push for cross-cutting issues.
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>> Elizabeth Economy: And let me ask you too,
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it seems to me that a little bit of a shift has taken place.
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In the Xi era, you made the point earlier about the sort of the dominance of local
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officials as the sort of culpable official during the Hu Jintao era that people
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complained most about local officials and sought intervention from Beijing, right?
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A belief, especially outside Beijing,
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that officials in Beijing must not know what's happening
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out here where I'm suffering from this local official who,
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as you said, has stolen the money from my land sale.
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But now it seems maybe with COVID and other issues, perhaps there is a greater
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sense of responsibility being attributed to central government leaders.
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Is that an accurate assessment that there's been a little bit of a shift or
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maybe within just some segments?
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That the central leadership in Xi Jinping himself are being held more accountable
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for some of the challenges that people believe that they're facing today?
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>> Diana Fu: Yes, absolutely.
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And I think that the emblematic change that is observable is
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the anti-COVID protest that broke out just a couple of years ago.
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And I say it's a emblematic change because it's so
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different in its messaging in terms of comparing to prior,
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not just to the prior era, but also to pre-COVID era protests.
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So what happened in the White Paper movement is
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that the discourse that I talked about earlier,
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that had been dominant in terms of blaming the local officials.
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But showing deference and showing loyalty to the central officials,
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that was completely dismantled in the White Paper movement.
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In the White Paper movement, Chinese protesters were shouting, we don't want
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masks, we want freedom, we need human rights, we need freedom, we are citizens.
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And some went so far as to say, down with the CCP,
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down with the Chinese Communist Party, and down with Xi Jinping.
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When I saw those words, Liz, I said, you know what?
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We are in a different era now.
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We had a breakthrough.
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We're in a Vaclav Havel moment in China, right?
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That these slogans may seem quite commonplace in any other country,
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especially in liberal democracies.
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Where people invoke freedom for any kind of demands they have.
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But this kind of language is very, very unusual in China.
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Freedom, rights, citizen, we're citizens, not slaves.
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These are considered to be extremely politically sensitive language that
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protesters prior to the COVID era would have never dared to use.
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And they're particularly challenging to the Chinese Communist Party
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because they consider these ideas to be perilous Western values.
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It's so when the Chinese protesters were using those words and their slogans,
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they knew it was like playing with fire.
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But they didn't care, that was their point.
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They were trying to denounce not only the lack of basic rights,
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the lack of housing, the lack of freedom of movement, the lack of food.
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There was in Shanghai, one of the richest cities in China,
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they were not only denouncing those lack of bread-and-butter issues that
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the state wasn't providing during COVID because of their zero COVID policy.
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But they were also making a link between those bread-and-butter issues to
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political issues.
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What I mean by that is the reason why the White Paper movement is called
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the White Paper movement is because people were holding up blank sheets of A4 paper.
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Which is symbolic of what they want to say, but what they cannot say.
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So, it was symbolic of not only that, yes,
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we are suffering in terms of our livelihoods.
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But we can't even say, we can't even express that we are suffering,
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that we don't have food, that we can't move around,
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because if we say anything like that, we will be censored by the state.
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So, that was a moment in November of 2022 when the language of Chinese protest and
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the demands that people were making shifted dramatically from just holding
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the local authorities accountable to also directly holding Beijing accountable.
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And I think that was what was particularly threatening to Xi Jinping, and
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that was why his administration took a U-turn within weeks by uplift,
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by just basically doing away with the zero COVID policy.
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>> Elizabeth Economy: So have we seen since then any sign that,
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I mean, we can imagine, right?
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Having seen it once sort of explode in the way that we did.
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Those feelings, those sentiments, don't disappear,
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simply because the Chinese government made a U-turn on this one policy.
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What you're talking about is something far more profound than simply,
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as you said, just the lockup, which is, of course traumatic.
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But it's about the ability to express your views, right?
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And to freely express your views.
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So since then, have we seen any signs of similar kind of activism,
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or should we just understand that this is all beneath the surface and
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it may just take another kind of crisis issue to provoke another outburst.
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But we're unlikely to see that sort of discontent burbling
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up at sort of an elevated level in a consistent way.
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>> Diana Fu: I think it's the latter, I think since COVID it's only been a couple
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of years, we haven't seen anything quite like the White Paper movement.
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But let's not forget that the White Paper movement lives on.
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And in fact, I was just listening to a number of Chinese people talk on
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the New York Times Liyuan's podcast, in Wu Ming Bai, in Chinese.
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To talk about people's memories of the White Paper protests and
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how that the memory of having done that, it lives in people's consciousness.
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Once you break the lie, right?
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To go back to Vaclav Havel when he was describing people living under
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a lie under Communist Czechoslovakia.
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But they were living largely as the green grocers who put up a sign to
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support the regime's policies just to participate in that lie.
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But once you have the breakthrough, once people stop,
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have a taste of what it means to not be the greengrocers who support that lie,
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then I think that memory lives on.
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And it is infused in the consciousness of at least those people who participated or
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perhaps observed the White Paper movement.
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And I think that does leave a discursive legacy and a consciousness legacy
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that is likely to be brought back once the political opportunity opens again.
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>> Elizabeth Economy: I think it's a really important point.
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So, I wanna reserve a little bit of time to talk about your new work.
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And in part, I think we have seen over the past several years
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a number of Chinese leaving the country,
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going to places like Tokyo or Amsterdam or even Washington, DC.
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Leading intellectuals, people, liberals, in a kind of a Western context
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of a liberal sort of people who might have participated in this White Paper movement.
29:14
Entrepreneurs, others who color outside the lines on a regular basis,
29:20
leaving the country and adding, I think, a new dimension to the Chinese diaspora.
29:27
Talk a little bit about what that diaspora is looking for and
29:32
what it is that Xi Jinping is trying to do in terms of controlling and
29:38
managing the voices of Chinese outside of the country's borders.
29:44
>> Diana Fu: Yeah, that's right.
29:45
So this new book, which is co-authored with my colleague Dr.
29:50
Emile Dirks at the University of Toronto, is tentatively titled
29:55
How Global China Controls Its Diaspora Abroad, Coercion and Consent.
30:01
And I wanted to write this book for both personal and
30:04
intellectual reasons, because personally,
30:06
I'm a part of this vast Chinese diaspora that you just talked about.
30:10
That are scattered across every single continent and is one of the largest
30:15
in the world, I believe surpassed only by India and Mexico.
30:19
And throughout the years that I've lived, now, I'm not a political dissident and I
30:23
came with my parents as a first-generation immigrant when I was younger.
30:26
But having lived in various, various parts of the world with large
30:31
Chinese diasporas, including Canada, the US and the UK.
30:35
I've noticed throughout the years how different Chinese, different
30:41
kinds of Chinese people abroad, who we in total call Huaqiao, the Chinese abroad.
30:47
But we're very diverse population,
30:49
how they maintain their connections to China culturally and politically.
30:55
And this is not by accident and not purely by based on ethnic connections
31:00
that Chinese abroad feel a deep sense of intimacy and connection to China.
31:06
This connectedness to China is actually part of a long standing, historic,
31:12
continuous and well-funded project on the part of the Chinese government
31:16
to cultivate ties, to continue to cultivate ties with the diaspora.
31:21
And in other words, it's a part of what academics would call statecraft.
31:26
It's a part of Chinese statecraft.
31:28
And so, this book aims to unpack what this statecraft entails to
31:32
win over the hearts and minds of those that are abroad.
31:37
So, the main argument is that if you look at the strategies that Beijing
31:42
uses to govern the diaspora abroad, it's very much the same playbook that
31:47
they use domestically, which is a combination of coercion and consent.
31:52
And I think it's useful to think of the diaspora as being divided into
31:57
three categories in the eyes of Beijing.
31:59
Enemies, though those are the people that you just mentioned,
32:03
the political dissidents, the agitators that have fled abroad and
32:07
are now living in all kinds of liberal democracies.
32:10
Also in countries that are closer to China, so
32:12
that's easier to stay connected to those that are still in China.
32:16
So those are the people that the state would consider as enemies
32:21
because they promote liberal democratic values.
32:24
And then you've got the agnostics, or are a large swath of people who may
32:29
somewhat identify with Beijing's policies but are unhappy.
32:33
Perhaps with gender inequity and
32:35
perhaps with the way that people were treated under the coded policy.
32:40
You've got a large swath of people who are agnostic and
32:43
then you've got loyalists, people who are what we call the little pinks, right?
32:48
The patriotic, ultra, national patriotic youth that are not just limited to youth,
32:53
they're also middle age and older people who really feel this connection to
32:57
everything that the party says.
32:59
Every party position on Taiwan, on the US on anything,
33:04
they will speak with the same voice as the party.
33:09
And so if you look at these three categories, or we find that the party
33:14
obviously applies different strategies to control these different groups.
33:19
And for the enemies, they use what is now termed transnational repression,
33:25
which is repression that reaches beyond
33:27
one's sovereign borders to target the enemies abroad.
33:31
For the agnostics, they use a combination of persuasion and
33:35
propaganda and emotional propaganda, right?
33:39
Including like Chinese New Year, that we're looming,
33:42
we're about to go into the year of the snake, right?
33:46
This Chinese associations everywhere, just building and
33:50
emphasizing the connections to the 5,000 years of history in China,
33:56
so those are for the agnostics in the middle.
33:59
And then the party also rewards the third group, the loyalists who are abroad,
34:04
both symbolically and materially, who vociferously speak for Beijing's agenda.
34:10
And so I think it's important, this book, as a follow up to my first book,
34:15
which is exclusively on domestic change makers in China.
34:20
To look at this playbook that is similar between domestic China and
34:25
what the CCP carries on outside of its borders.
34:28
And the book also examines, and
34:30
this is the intellectual puzzle that interested me and my co author.
34:34
Which is that what, if anything, distinguishes the Chinese playbook
34:39
from other states such as India, Russia, Iran, Turkey.
34:43
Because only through comparison, and
34:45
I hear I'm speaking as a comparativist, right?
34:48
Can we really tease out what is empirically different about things that
34:52
are on the minds of policymakers?
34:54
Like foreign interference and influen from different countries,
34:58
cuz China is not the only country who's doing that.
35:00
>> Elizabeth Economy: That sounds fascinating and
35:03
I definitely wanna have you back on the show when your book comes out.
35:09
I'm gonna ask you one little question here, and that is, I mean, you're at
35:13
the University of Toronto and presumably there are a lot of students from China.
35:18
I mean, have you seen any efforts either at the sort of the outside
35:23
on the propaganda, and little pink side of things, or on the coercive side?
35:29
Have you witnessed personally any of this kind of behavior by Beijing?
35:34
>> Diana Fu: I have, and I think in Toronto is one of those interesting places
35:38
where we have all three categories of people.
35:41
And just a super,
35:43
super diverse classroom where you have students from Hong Kong sitting alongside
35:48
students from mainland China sitting alongside students from Taiwan.
35:53
And then within the mainland Chinese students, you have the regular people, or
35:57
they would call themselves Lao Dxing.
35:59
And then you would also have the [FOREIGN], which are the nouveau riche,
36:03
the sons and daughters of really, really rich Chinese people.
36:07
And so one interesting anecdote was that during the pro democracy
36:13
movement that really apexed in about 2019, 2020.
36:18
In Hong Kong, there were all these Hong Kong diaspora people who
36:23
are also joining in on the protests and trying to raise same issues.
36:28
And Toronto and Canada actually being the home to one of the largest
36:33
Hong Kong diasporas, was a hotbed of that kind of activism.
36:37
And so what you had in response to this kind of activism is largely nouveau
36:43
rich Chinese students from a particular campus of the University of Toronto.
36:49
They drove down the highway in their Ferraris and BMWs and Mercedes and
36:55
probably some other brands of cars that I don't even know about.
37:01
And all of those cars had Chinese flags waving on them, and
37:06
that was their symbolic protest against the diaspora from Hong Kong.
37:12
And their supporters that look, they're speaking and
37:14
they didn't have to say anything, they didn't have to shout.
37:18
They were just showing this, their symbolic economic weight,
37:21
right, that we made it, and what are you guys complaining about?
37:25
Look at what the regime has done for us and
37:29
look what it can do to Hong Kong if it wants to.
37:33
And you guys should just shut up because of the symbolic goods that
37:38
China has brought, that Beijing has brought to all of us, right?
37:43
And so I think that's emblematic of that interesting
37:47
tensions within the diaspora that I witnessed at in Toronto.
37:52
>> Elizabeth Economy: Yeah, it might be interesting to look to see how many of
37:55
those students,
37:56
the really wealthy students, ended up going back to China, actually.
38:01
>> Diana Fu: Right.
38:01
>> Elizabeth Economy: And making their lives there, and
38:04
how many of them sought to stay, in Canada or come to United States or UK or
38:08
other places and to continue to enjoy sort of the benefits of both the money.
38:14
That their parents earned from the mainland and the freedoms that
38:19
they can enjoy outside, but I guess that's a different book.
38:24
So I always finish with a couple of quick questions, so
38:28
three for you, first, must read book or article on China.
38:33
>> Diana Fu: Yeah, so I'm gonna go old school and
38:38
just refer a 2008 article.
38:43
So I guess not super old school, but
38:45
a 2008 article by Elizabeth Perry that I've referenced over and
38:50
over again, both in my teaching, but also to unpack headlines.
38:55
And that article is called Chinese Conception of Rights from
38:59
Mencius to Mao and Now.
39:01
And I won't do justice to describe it in a couple of sentences, but
39:06
it basically from a tradition that goes way beyond the CCP itself,
39:11
way beyond the establishment of the People's Republic of China.
39:16
How subsistence rights, the rights to livelihoods, the rights to eat,
39:21
the rights to have housing has always been prioritized before political rights.
39:27
Political rights such as the right to protest,
39:31
the right to associate, the right to the right to assemble.
39:36
And I think that's really important when we're unpacking what's happening in China,
39:41
including the official discourse that.
39:44
Well, China protects human rights because we lifted millions of people out or
39:50
hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
39:53
Right, and so I think that would be my go to article.
39:56
>> Elizabeth Economy: Okay, great, she's a tremendous scholar, so thumbs up for that,
40:00
okay what China issue do we not know enough about?
40:04
In addition to the one that I think that you've talked about today,
40:09
what else is out there you think that is underappreciated,
40:13
in the United States, in Canada, about China?
40:17
>> Diana Fu: I think that we focus, we as China scholars, and
40:20
especially in the policy world focus so much on geopolitical tensions like Taiwan,
40:25
supply chains, critical minerals tariffs.
40:28
That we often forget about exactly what we were just talking about which is people,
40:33
and especially young people, cuz young people drive public policy.
40:37
And even in an authoritarian regime where leaders can't get voted out of power,
40:42
they're very attuned to public opinion.
40:45
So I think one issue or one group of people that we should pay more attention
40:49
to is actually the younger generation of Chinese who are now in college.
40:53
Both in China and outside of China, and
40:56
will be the leaders in the next five to ten years.
40:59
And I just wanna give a brief anecdote of some of the things
41:03
that young people are doing.
41:06
Which is that there was a recent phenomenon of university students
41:11
in China, just taking to the streets at night to ride around in bicycles.
41:17
Hundreds of thousands of them just flocking to the streets to
41:22
ride bikes around at night.
41:25
So, you might think well, that seems like pretty good, it's healthy, it's safe.
41:30
They not shouting any slogans, so why would the government care?
41:34
But the government actually did care and wanted and put a stop to this phenomenon.
41:39
And the reason why they were so attuned to this phenomenon is because,
41:45
what young people are facing now it's very threatening to
41:50
the regime because of the high rates of youth unemployment.
41:56
So the unemployment rate among 16 to 24 year old's
42:01
in the urban areas of China hit about 21.3% in June,
42:06
and had been rising ever since.
42:09
And until recently when the government just stopped publishing statistics on it,
42:15
and then republished statistics that looked better, right?
42:20
So the reason why this is important because we know from
42:24
history that youth led movements have been a political
42:29
threat to the power of the state, of the party state.
42:33
From Tiananmen 1989-2022, White Paper Movement,
42:38
a lot of it was led by young people.
42:40
So if you have economic slowdown where one out of five young people in urban
42:45
areas can't find a job, that's very threatening to political legitimacy.
42:50
And it's things like that, domestic trends like that,
42:54
that actually have a direct impact on foreign affairs and foreign policy and
42:58
on the regime itself that I think we should pay more attention to.
43:02
>> Elizabeth Economy: Excellent I completely, as a fellow comparativist,
43:05
I completely agree with you.
43:06
Understanding what's going on inside China is incredibly important for
43:11
understanding how it's foreign policy and sort of opportunities for us.
43:17
I think to both engage and potentially exploit tensions inside the country,
43:22
but basically just to understand.
43:25
And then finally on a scale of one to ten, now you live in Canada, but
43:29
you are also a non resident fellow at Brookings and
43:33
I know also think a lot about the US and US foreign policy.
43:37
How likely do you think it is that we're gonna see a breakthrough in the US China
43:42
relationship in the next decade?
43:44
And if you think there will be one, what do you think it'll look like?
43:47
>> Diana Fu: Yeah, I feel like, Liz, you're more of an expert on this than me
43:50
and I'm actually teaching your 2022 policy essay and
43:54
the China questions 2 book on whether engagement with China is still viable.
43:58
So I think to pivot, that I think to the extent that we'll see
44:02
a breakthrough in US China relations, whether under Trump or
44:07
under the next president, it has to really involve people to people exchange.
44:13
And it sounds like such a mundane phrase, but it's so
44:16
important that these people to people exchanges not only happen but
44:20
that they're organic in addition to the top level exchanges.
44:24
Which remain important but are not always possible due to,
44:27
due to politics on both sides of the pond.
44:30
And a recent phenomenon reminded me that these organic encounters are sometimes
44:35
unwittingly introduced by policies that either Beijing or Washington makes.
44:40
So for example, as we just saw with the TikTok refugees
44:45
going over from TikTok to the Chinese app Xiaohongshu.
44:50
>> Elizabeth Economy: That was incredible.
44:51
>> Diana Fu: Yeah [LAUGH], I mean it's just young Americans discovering and
44:56
Canadians and others, but Americans primarily.
44:59
Discovering perhaps for the first time that those Chinese people over there
45:04
have the same interests in cats, in video games and Taylor Swift, you name it.
45:10
And that may provoke them to think, and they are an important voting bloc,
45:15
they're an important electorate.
45:17
They might provoke them to think well, is China such a bad national security threat?
45:23
If I have so much in common with the people over there, and I think these kinds
45:28
of people that people encounters that are organic, not always planned.
45:33
Sometimes unwittingly introduced are exactly the types of breakthroughs
45:38
that might lead to a broader break breakthrough in the next decade.
45:42
>> Elizabeth Economy: That's a great and
45:44
more optimistic note than I'd hoped for to end on.
45:48
So, Diana let me thank you once again for
45:51
taking the time out of your very busy schedule to speak with us.
45:56
And again I look forward to having you back when your next book comes out it's
46:01
a really important topic and
46:02
I know it's gonna be full of really fascinating insights.
46:06
>> Diana Fu: Thank you so much Liz, this has been very enjoyable.
46:09
>> Elizabeth Economy: If you enjoy this podcast and want to hear more reasoned
46:12
discourse and debate on China, I encourage you to subscribe to China Considered via
46:17
the Hoover Institution YouTube channel or podcast platform of your choice.
46:21
In our next episode, I'll be speaking with Dr. Adam Segal, who heads the Digital and
46:25
Cyberspace Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations.
46:28
And was the principal drafter of the US International Cyberspace and
46:32
Digital Policy Strategy that just came out last spring in the Biden administration.
46:36
We'll talk about China's cyber hacking and what the US is, and
46:40
more importantly should be doing to respond.
46:42
Thank you.
46:43
>> [MUSIC]