Hours after attending a 4 June vigil, a Chinese student overseas is contacted by her father, bearing a message from the security services: do not participate in activities that might harm China’s reputation. In a London theatre, three British actors starring in May 35th, a play about the 1989 Tiananmen killings, keep their identities secret and use pseudonyms. They take this step after actors drop out of a previous Tiananmen-related production in Arizona due to perceived risks to family in China.
Thirty-five years have passed since the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on the Chinese people, yet Beijing seems more determined than ever to suppress acts commemorating the deaths of 4 June – even small ones far beyond China’s own borders. Such repression appears irrational: its targets are not influential political figures, their actions are limited in reach and the acts of suppression affect basic freedoms in other countries far from China. Yet it is illustrative of the sea change at the heart of Xi Jinping’s China. The man dubbed “the chairman of everything” is transforming China into a security state whose top priority is the securitisation of everything, all the way down to the individual.
National security now lies at the heart of Xi’s governance, or, as he puts it, is “the bedrock of national rejuvenation”. In the eyes of China’s Communist party, national security now encompasses 20 different sectors including food security, cybersecurity, ecological security and polar security. The expanding purview of national security has effectively swallowed up all other policy areas. In his 2022 speech to the all-important 20th party congress, Xi mentioned security more times than reform, the economy or even socialism itself. The message is clear: the era of reform and opening up is over. The age of national security has begun.
As such, the once-secretive ministry of state security has emerged from the shadows with billboards on the streets, its own WeChat account and an annual National Security Education Day. This year the ministry debuted a slick video, showing a bearded spy in action photographing state institutions, recording commercial secrets with a gadget in his shirt collar, even receiving a secret message nestled on top of the sliced cucumber in his takeaway meal. This morality tale ended with the spy getting his comeuppance from a phalanx of black-booted, balaclava-wearing police. The video shows how citizens reported their suspicions over the spy’s activities through a special hotline and an app, to a thundering voiceover: “As long as there are 1.4bn of you and me, we can build 1.4bn lines of defence!”
So why is China becoming more paranoid as it gets more powerful? One answer lies in the psychology of the architect of these changes. Xi’s preoccupation with the fall of the Soviet Union – a “tragedy too painful to look back upon” – is well documented. His aim is regime security and protecting Communist party rule. To achieve this, his foundational doctrine may be Document 9, a secret 2013 communique outlining seven ideological threats to the party, including the promotion of constitutional democracy, western neoliberalism and “nihilistic” views of history. For decades, the received wisdom has been that China’s Communist party oscillates between hard and soft authoritarianism, cycling through periods of tightening or shou, followed by periods of loosening or fang. But the years since Xi’s 2012 ascension have been characterised by tightening followed by more tightening.
Domestically, the national security focus serves as distraction to a population grappling with economic woes. Until recently, China’s Communist party has relied on rapid economic growth and improvements to the standard of living for its legitimacy. But with growth slowing, it needs another rallying point. Fortress China complements the siege mentality that is second nature to a population steeped in the wounded nationalism of a century of humiliation.
For one case study, look no further than Hong Kong, whose position as an economic powerhouse has been sacrificed in the interests of national security. Foreign businesses and local residents fled in droves after the imposition of draconian national security legislation that has transformed the legislature, the executive, the judiciary and civil society.
Fourteen democracy activists were convicted last week on national security charges for holding an unofficial primary poll, while the first arrests under the tough new security law known as article 23 were made for “offences in connection with seditious intention”. These were for postings on a Facebook page for the lawyer Chow Hang-tung, in custody since 2021 on subversion charges for her role as the organiser of Hong Kong’s annual 4 June vigils.
Chow has used the courtroom as her stage, noting that it is “a venue that cannot be abandoned” in a world where places of free expression are disappearing. She has defended herself, wearing a T-shirt bearing a Mickey Mouse picture, as provided by the correctional service, which would not allow her to wear her own clothes since they carried political slogans. The words of her mitigation plea, from 2021, bear a warning for the security services, even as they clamp down on overseas Tiananmen memorials. The meaning of remembering Tiananmen, she wrote, is in evolution: “No longer is it some far-away suffering whose relevance wanes as each day passed. Now it is a suppression shared across time, across distance, across identities.”
Louisa Lim is the author of Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, and The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited. She is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Melbourne
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