Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
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Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption China’s version of its past is a story of prosperity, progress and sacrifice for the common good
China’s extraordinary rise was a defining story of the 20th Century, but as it prepares to mark its 70th anniversary, the BBC’s John Sudworth in Beijing asks who has really won under the Communist Party’s rule.
Sitting at his desk in the Chinese city of Tianjin, Zhao Jingjia’s knife is tracing the contours of a face.
Cut by delicate cut, the form emerges – the unmistakable image of Mao Zedong, founder of modern China.
The retired oil engineer discovered his skill with a blade only in later life and now spends his days using the ancient art of paper cutting to glorify leaders and events from China’s communist history.
“I’m the same age as the People’s Republic of China (PRC),” he says. “I have deep feelings for my motherland, my people and my party.”
Image caption For people like Zhao Jingjia, China’s success outweighs the “mistakes” of its leaders
Born a few days before 1 October 1949 – the day the PRC was declared by Mao – Mr Zhao’s life has followed the dramatic contours of China’s development, through poverty, repression and the rise to prosperity.
Now, in his modest but comfortable apartment, his art is helping him make sense of one of the most tumultuous periods of human history.
“Wasn’t Mao a monster,” I ask, “responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of his countrymen?”
“I lived through it,” he replies. “I can tell you that Chairman Mao did make some mistakes but they weren’t his alone.”
“I respect him from my heart. He achieved our nation’s liberation. Ordinary people cannot do such things.”
On Tuesday, China will present a similar, glorious rendering of its record to the world.
Beijing will tremble to the thunder of tanks, missile launchers and 15,000 marching soldiers, a projection of national power, wealth and status watched over by the current Communist Party leader, President Xi Jinping, in Tiananmen Square.
An incomplete narrative of progress
Like Mr Zhao’s paper-cut portraits, we’re not meant to focus on the many individual scars made in the course of China’s modern history.
It is the end result that matters.
Image copyright XINHUA/AFPImage caption Mao Zedong pronounces the dawn of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949
And, on face value, the transformation has been extraordinary.
On 1 October 1949, Chairman Mao stood in Tiananmen Square urging a war-ravaged, semi-feudal state into a new era with a founding speech and a somewhat plodding parade that could muster only 17 planes for the flyby.
This week’s parade, in contrast, will reportedly feature the world’s longest range intercontinental nuclear missile and a supersonic spy-drone – the trophies of a prosperous, rising authoritarian superpower with a 400 million strong middle class.
It is a narrative of political and economic success that – while in large part true – is incomplete.
New visitors to China are often, rightly, awe-struck by the skyscraper-festooned, hi-tech megacities connected by brand new highways and the world’s largest high-speed rail network.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Those in China’s glittering cities may accept the trade-off of political freedom for economic growth
They see a rampant consumer society with the inhabitants enjoying the freedom and free time to shop for designer goods, to dine out and to surf the internet.
“How bad can it really be?” the onlookers ask, reflecting on the negative headlines they’ve read about China back home.
The answer, as in all societies, is that it depends very much on who you are.
Many of those in China’s major cities, for example, who have benefited from this explosion of material wealth and opportunity, are genuinely grateful and loyal.
In exchange for stability and growth, they may well accept – or at least tolerate – the lack of political freedom and the censorship that feature so often in the foreign media.
For them the parade could be viewed as a fitting tribute to a national success story that mirrors their own.
But in the carving out of a new China, the knife has cut long and deep.
The dead, the jailed and the marginalised
Mao’s man-made famine – a result of radical changes to agricultural systems – claimed tens of millions of lives and his Cultural Revolution killed hundreds of thousands more in a decade-long frenzy of violence and persecution, truths that are notably absent from Chinese textbooks.
Image copyright GETTY/TOPICALImage caption Tens of millions starved to death under Mao, as China radically restructured agriculture and society
After his death, the demographically calamitous One Child Policy brutalised millions over a 40-year period.
Still today, with its new Two Child Policy, the Party insists on violating that most intimate of rights – an individual’s choice over her fertility.
The list is long, with each category adding many thousands, at least, to the toll of those damaged or destroyed by one-party rule.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Beijing still regulates how many children families can have
There are the victims of religious repression, of local government land-grabs and of corruption.
There are the tens of millions of migrant workers, the backbone of China’s industrial success, who have long been shut out of the benefits of citizenship.
A strict residential permit system continues to deny them and their families the right to education or healthcare where they work.
And in recent years, there are the estimated one and a half million Muslims in China’s western region of Xinjiang – Uighurs, Kazakhs and others – who have been placed in mass incarceration camps on the basis of their faith and ethnicity.
China continues to insist they are vocational schools, and that it is pioneering a new way of preventing domestic terrorism.
The stories of the dead, the jailed and the marginalised are always much more hidden than the stories of the assimilated and the successful.
Viewed from their perspective, the censorship of large parts of China’s recent history is not simply part of a grand bargain to be exchanged for stability and prosperity.
Getty
Timeline of modern China
1949 Mao declares the founding of the People’s Republic of China
1966-76 Cultural Revolution brings social and political upheaval
1977 Deng Xiaoping initiates major reforms of China’s economy
1989 Army crushes Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests
2010 China becomes the world’s second-largest economy
2018 Xi Jinping is cleared to be president for life
It is something that makes the silence of their suffering all the more difficult to penetrate.
It is the job of foreign journalists, of course, to try.
‘Falsified, faked and glorified’
But while censorship can shut people up, it cannot stop them remembering.
Prof Guo Yuhua, a sociologist at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, is one of the few scholars left trying to record, via oral histories, some of the huge changes that have affected Chinese society over the past seven decades.
Her books are banned, her communications monitored and her social media accounts are regularly deleted.
“For several generations people have received a history that has been falsified, faked, glorified and whitewashed,” she tells me, despite having been warned not to talk to the foreign media ahead of the parade.
“I think it requires the entire nation to re-study and to reflect on history. Only if we do that can we ensure that these tragedies won’t be repeated.”
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Can progress really be attributed to the leadership?
A parade, she believes, that puts the Communist Party at the front and centre of the story, misses the real lesson, that China’s progress only began after Mao, when the party loosened its grip a bit.
“People are born to strive for a better, happier and more respectful life, aren’t they?” she asks me.
“If they are provided with a tiny little space, they’ll try to make a fortune and solve their survival problems. This shouldn’t be attributed to the leadership.”
‘Our happiness comes from hard work’
As if to prove the point about how the unsettled, censored pasts of authoritarian states continue to impact the present, the parade is for invited guests only.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Mao’s portrait will, as it always is, be watching over the events in Tiananmen Square
Another anniversary, of which Tiananmen Square is the centrepiece, is also being measured in multiples of 10 – it is 30 years since the bloody suppression of the pro-democracy protests that shook the foundations of Communist Party rule.
The troops will be marching – as they always do on these occasions – down the same avenue on which the students were gunned down.
The risk of even a lone protester using the parade to mark a piece of history that has largely been wiped from the record is just too great.
With central Beijing sealed off, ordinary people in whose honour it is supposedly being held, can only watch it on TV.
Back in his Tianjin apartment, Zhao Jingjia shows me the intricate detail of a series of scenes, each cut from a single piece of paper, depicting the “Long March”, a time of hardship and setback for the Communist Party long before it eventually swept to power.
“Our happiness nowadays comes from hard work,” he tells me.
It is a view that echoes that of the Chinese government which, like him, has at least acknowledged that Mao made mistakes while insisting they shouldn’t be dwelt on.
“As for the 70 years of China, it’s extraordinary,” he says. “It can be seen by all. Yesterday we sent two navigation satellites into space – all citizens can enjoy the convenience that these things bring us.”
Media caption What was China’s Cultural Revolution?
“Mallory not only put our country at great risk, but he endangered the lives of [people] who put their own safety at risk for our national defence,” US attorney Zachary Terwilliger said in a statement.
“This case should send a message to anyone considering violating the public’s trust and compromising our national security,” he added. “We will remain steadfast and dogged in pursuit of these challenging but critical national security cases.”
The Justice Department said Mallory held a number of sensitive jobs with government agencies.
He had worked as a covert case officer for the CIA and as an intelligence officer for the Defense intelligence Agency (DIA).
“This case is one in an alarming trend of former US intelligence officers being targeted by China and betraying their country and colleagues,” Assistant Attorney General John Demers said following the sentencing.
He attempted to pass on information and received at least $800,000 (£600,000) for acting as a Chinese agent, the justice department said at the time.
CIA spy operation in China: Key dates
Image copyright AFPImage caption Chinese police guard the US embassy in the capital, Beijing
2010: Information gathered by the US from sources deep inside the Chinese government bureaucracy start to dry up
2011: Informants begin to disappear. It is not clear whether the CIA has been hacked or whether a mole has helped the Chinese to identify agents
2012: FBI begins investigation
May 2014: Five Chinese army officers are charged with stealing trade secrets and internal documents from US companies. Later that same month, China says it has been a main target for US spies
2015: CIA withdraws staff from the US embassy in Beijing, fearing data stolen from government computers could expose its agents
April 2017: Beijing offers hefty cash rewards for information on foreign spies
May 2017: Four former CIA officials tell the New York Times that up to 20 CIA informants were killed or imprisoned by the Chinese between 2010 and 2012
June 2017: Ex-CIA officer Kevin Mallory is arrested and charged with giving top-secret documents to a Chinese agent
January 2018: Former CIA officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee is arrested
June 2018: Former US intelligence officer Ron Rockwell Hansen is charged with attempting to spy for China
Image copyrightAFPImage captionYang Fenglan was a leading figure in business circles at the time of her arrest
Tanzania has sentenced Yang Fenglan, a Chinese businesswoman nicknamed the “Ivory Queen”, to 15 years in jail for smuggling hundreds of elephant tusks.
Yang was accused of operating one of Africa’s biggest ivory-smuggling rings, responsible for smuggling $2.5m (£1.9m) worth of tusks from some 400 elephants.
Two Tanzanian men were also found guilty of involvement in the ring.
Ivory poaching is said to have caused a 20% decline in the population of African elephants in the last decade.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a global environmental body, says the population of African elephants has fallen to 415,000 – a drop of 110,000 over the last 10 years – as a result of poaching.
The illicit trade is fuelled by demand from China and east Asia, where ivory is used to make jewellery and ornaments.
Yang was convicted on charges relating to the smuggling of around 800 pieces of ivory between 2000 and 2014 from Tanzania to the Far East.
The Tanzanian men were also jailed for 15 years on similar charges.
The court in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s main city, has ordered Yang’s property to be repossessed.
She had been under investigation for more than a year when she was arrested in 2015, following a high-speed car chase.
At the time of her arrest, Yang was a prominent businesswoman, operating a Chinese restaurant as well as an investment company in Dar es Salaam.
Fluent in Swahili, she had lived and worked in Tanzania since the 1970s, and had served as vice-president of the China-Africa Business Council of Tanzania.
Environmental campaigners welcomed the arrest because she was seen as playing a pivotal role in the illegal ivory trade. Most arrests tend to involve minor players.
Image copyright YONGSHAN POLICE
Image copyright YONGSHAN POLICE
Image copyright YONGSHAN POLICE
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 