China’s Brand of State-Censored Totalitarian Nationalism should have us deeply concerned
“The masses take a long time to understand and remember, thus it is necessary to repeat the message time and time and time again. The public must be conditioned to accept the claims that are made…no matter how outrageous or false those claims might be.”
– Adolph Hitler
“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
– George Orwell
If we take any sobering message from the Chinese Government’s recent military and media clampdown of Tibet, it is that all of us should be deeply frightened by the fact that a fifth of the world’s population lives in a nation in which free press does not exist and state controlled media shapes — and has been shaping for the last 50 years — the people’s view of world events.
Truth is a precious commodity, and our right to live in a world in which truth is available freely to all citizens has come at a very great price. Humanity has endured many centuries in which access to truth was the right of the privileged few – generally those of royal bloodline, or, in the case of Medieval Europe and Ancient Sumeria — that class of intellectuals with strange haircuts and the ability to read and write. The battle to create international norms that allow all citizens free access to truth has been terribly bloody. And the result has been a very narrow window of light, in which most of the world’s citizens can now study true history, receive fairly unbiased accounts of world events, and use their own intellect to shape their opinions based on available information.
Although the current Western Empire – forged chiefly by the victors of World War II— has its faults and has played its fair share with the manipulation of truth, as far as access to basic historical information and leniency on state control of domestic matters, it is historically far ahead of the game. We are indeed living in an age of enlightenment, and should be under no illusion how precious that enlightenment is.
Survivors of the last century’s fleeting experiment with Communism in Poland and the Czech republic have been eloquent and outspoken about the effect of living under 50 years of propaganda. The accounts of fear, paranoia, distrust, and the total lockdown on information that have come from Stalinist Russia and East Germany are terrifying. But most of us take solace in the fact that the general global trend is toward a more open society with a free flow of information.
Among world powers, the government of China is the giant, glaring exception. While we’ve been actively courting the PRC’s billion member market and marveling at the neon lights of the new Beijing and Shanghai, we’ve been overlooking the giant elephant in the room. Beijing controls the information available to its citizens and is shaping a global view among its populace that is very troublesome. It does this very simply, the same way other regimes have. Create enemies; fan nationalist sentiment; paint anything that is critical of the nation as a fabrication or as reverse propaganda. So even if your citizens manage to gain access to information, they distrust it, as its source is ‘the enemy.’
The Chinese government’s communist-era rhetoric is clearly reminiscent of the governments of late 20th century Eastern Europe. But the big difference is that for the most part, those nations’ economies were in shambles and their citizens were miserable, so while their governments pumped propaganda over the airwaves, very few people believed it.
The big experiment here is what happens when a totalitarian nation is economically propped up by freer nations to the point that its citizens are increasingly prosperous, at the same time that its leaders still maintain totalitarian controls on information.
We played this experiment before. In Germany.
I’m usually incredibly reticent to throw around the word ‘fascist’ or to draw parallels to one of the darkest periods in human history. But as someone who has studied the situation in China and Tibet for a very long time, I am legitimately frightened by the venomous rhetoric that the Chinese government hurls at the Dalai Lama. I am even more alarmed to see a dramatic rise in nationalist vitriol emanating from the Chinese people — and especially young Chinese students — towards Tibetans, who, with rare exception over the last 50 years, have been, though discontent, peaceful. Until last week, Tibetans had not been involved in a serious outbreak of violence since 1959. And yet the Chinese government and the Chinese people are behaving as if they are – in the words of one Beijing official ‘engaged in a fierce battle of blood and fire with the Dalai clique, a life-and-death struggle between the foe and us…’
It is genuinely starting to reek of the frenzied rants of fascists, in which already disenfranchised minorities are castigated as the cause of all social ills. And that is a disturbing trend indeed. What is to prevent the Chinese government from issuing Tibetan ‘ID cards?’ ahead of the Olympic games? What is to prevent them from sequestering Tibetans — as they basically have this week — into militarily locked down ‘ghettos’? And in the long term, the bigger question is what happens when an increasingly nationalistic population buys into the frenzy that they’ve been handed by a ruling one party system?
I’m in no hurry to find out. The international community must relentlessly pressure this nation to change. Fail to do this, and that window of light may be narrower than we think.
Josh Schrei is Producer of Tibetan Freedom Concerts and former Chair, Students for a Free Tibet
