Oppression: Police charge at protesters during a
rally in Hong Kong against a new security law. Posters of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the late communist leader Mao Zedong. Photos: Anthony Wallace/AFP
& Greg Wallace/AFP
A new ideological smear has crept into our public discourse — “sinophobia”.
The term dishonestly conflates rejection of China’s authoritarian political system, and its alleged intrusion in South Africa through a billionaire cat’s paw, with prejudice against Chinese people. It is an extension of the fringe left’s howls of “racism” to discredit its critics.
Accusations of “sinophobia” arose during the New Frame closure, when the tech tycoon and the publication’s funder, Roy Singham, and his paid acolytes were linked to China’s propaganda outreach.
An amaBhungane investigation spotlighted Singham’s admiration of China, where he lives and has business interests, and his many contacts with the Chinese state.
He is suspected — this is hotly denied — of channelling money to the faction around Irvin Jim, the divisive general secretary of metalworkers’ trade union Numsa.
This is not “sinophobia”; if the CIA was accused of covertly bankrolling union divisions, there would be an equivalent uproar.
George Orwell complained in the 1940s that “crypto-communists” in the parliamentary Labour Party “kiss Stalin’s arse” — and Singham and his South African hangers-on can be seen as offering a similar tribute to China’s President Xi Jinping.
South Africa’s relationship with China is of much wider concern, because some local nationalists apparently view it as politico-economic model to be emulated and our government acknowledges a special relationship through Brics, a group of emerging economies comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
To some extent this is Global South posturing, and the trade figures show it. China may be South Africa’s single biggest export market, absorbing 11% of the total, but Europe and the United States account for more than four times that much.
The fundamental divide in world affairs is not, as some insist, between the slippery categories of “capitalism” and “socialism”. It is between countries that embrace the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, to use Karl Popper’s distinction, enemies of the open society.
China is the foremost global representative of the latter. In effect, those who favour transplanting its methods to South Africa are calling for the scrapping of our liberal-democratic Constitution.
The point is that, like Russia, China has never experienced democratic governance or the non-violent transfer of power between contending interests; it moved from empire to the dictatorship of Yuan Shikai, rule by warlord Chiang Kai-shek and the mass-murdering autocracy of Mao Zedong.
As a consequence, its rulers are reflexively hostile to pluralism and its institutional expression, party politics. China is effectively a one-party state, with eight other small parties playing an advisory rather than oppositional role, according to Human Rights Watch.
Beyond encouraging harmless touristic outlets such as basket-weaving and folk dancing, it is highly intolerant of ethnic and regional divergence.
Lenin termed Tsarist Russia “the prison-house of nations” and, in a scaled-down form, China matches this description. Culturally distinct Tibet was invaded in 1949 and an uprising by Tibetans — China calls it an “armed rebellion” — 10 years later was crushed with great loss of life.
In majority-Muslim Xinjiang a million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims have reportedly been detained or imprisoned, many in re-education camps, amid allegations by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of crimes against humanity including systematic mass surveillance and religious persecution.
The Chinese government defends these as anti-terrorism measures, echoing the rhetoric of apartheid. In Tibet and Xinjiang there are claims of large-scale immigration by Han Chinese to dilute the indigenous population.
China’s authoritarian-hierarchical political culture, the antithesis of South Africa’s, has been highlighted by the erosion of human rights in Hong Kong since its takeover of the former British colony.
What do South Africa’s neo-Maoists think of the city’s elections, where the “chief executive” is chosen by a committee representing professional and business interests, rather than the citizenry? Of Beijing’s ruling that only “patriots who respect the Chinese Communist Party” may contest elections? That only 20 of the 90-member legislature are directly elected and the rest appointed?
Under a 2020 security law that effectively criminalised dissent, hundreds of pro-democracy activists, lawmakers and journalists have been arrested, public protests banned, thousands of demonstrators held, and the media restricted. The legislation disqualifies pro-democracy candidates from standing for office and allows Beijing to influence the selection of judges to try security offences.
Pro-democracy news media including the Daily Apple have been closed after journalists were harassed and detained, and anti-government websites blocked.
Conditions in wider China are not markedly better. In its 2021-22 report, Amnesty International complained of the harassment and intimidation of human rights lawyers and activists; unfair trials; arbitrary, lengthy detentions; and torture and other ill-treatment of those exercising human rights, including free expression.
Amnesty reports that the authorities use “residential surveillance in a designated location” — secret incommunicado detention that allows police to hold individuals for up to six months outside the formal detention system, without access to their chosen legal counsel or their families.
It has also denounced the continued drafting and enactment of “sweeping national security-related laws and regulations” that enhance the power to silence dissent, censor information and harass and prosecute rights campaigners.
As China showed during the coronavirus lockdown, when it deployed drones and CCTV cameras to monitor quarantined people, the country has mass surveillance tools and is quite willing to mobilise them.
It stands 175th of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which describes it as “the world’s largest prison for journalists”.
RSF notes that the media industry is almost entirely controlled by the state and the Communist Party, and that each day the party’s propaganda department sends detailed notices to all media that include editorial guidelines and censored topics.
The Chinese constitution guarantees freedom of speech and the press, but RSF notes that “the regime routinely violates the right to information in total impunity. To … silence journalists it accuses them of ‘espionage’, ‘subversion’, or ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’, three ‘pocket crimes’ … that are so broadly defined they can be applied to almost any activity.”
Former New Frame editor Richard Pithouse is not a journalist but let him put himself in a journalist’s shoes. Where would he prefer to practise his “craft” — in Beijing or Washington, the heart of the beast?
The South China Morning Post reports that a Mao-like personality cult revolves around Xi, whom the politburo now refers to as lingxiu, a reverential term for “party leader” last used for Mao and his successor Hua Guofeng three decades ago.
The party octopus also smothers labour. Only the All-China Federation of Trade Unions and affiliates are tolerated, and independent unionism is banned. The union frankly describes itself as “a bridge and link between the … party and the masses of workers, [and] an important social pillar of state power”.
Under Xi, political repression has been matched by social conservatism. Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1997 but same-sex marriages and adoptions remain outlawed.
Shanghai’s annual Pride Week was cancelled in 2020, while 2021 was reportedly marked by a gathering stream of anti-gay measures, including school gym classes to “cultivate masculinity” and the scrutinising of video games to curb homosexual themes and effeminate characters.
No one would deny China’s giant economic strides in the post-Mao era and its effect on poverty.
But the suggestion that rapid growth and poverty alleviation could only have been achieved through Maoism is nonsense. The unfettering of the private sector and constitutional protections for private property have been integral to China’s post-Mao economic rise.
The question is: did Mao — like Stalin, his idol — promote development, or criminally obstruct it?
Using a sharply contrasting economic model, South Korea and post-war Japan have made even greater leaps — without the famine and violence that scarred Mao’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
“Liberalism” is another swearword used by those who wrongly equate it with free market fundamentalism and romanticise totalitarian systems.
Respect for basic freedoms does not mean the untrammelled reign of predatory capital. Nordic social democracy and its close relative, the democratic socialism of Orwell and Jeremy Corbyn, are extensions of classical liberalism that uphold human rights and the use of state power to regulate, tax and reapportion private wealth.
They have also been historical allies of the Global South. The single biggest financial backer of the anti-apartheid movement was not China — it was social democratic Sweden.
Non-economic human rights are not an exercise in “bourgeois democracy” and people are not, as Orwell puts it, mere “bags for food”.
In many parts of the world, including South Africa, they are the hard-won fruit of struggle. The right to choose one’s leaders, of habeas corpus and a fair trial, and to hold, explore and express one’s beliefs, are the basic stuff of human dignity.
Drew Forrest is a former political editor and deputy editor of the Mail & Guardian.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.