China pushes censorship on students abroad
It’s a story about the way the Beijing regime bullies people far beyond its borders, with a few amusing twists and several disgusting instances of corporate cowardice, but it begins innocently enough, with a 28-year-old student at the University of British Columbia and a post he put up on Twitter last Wednesday.
Shawn Zhang, a Peking University alumnus who came to Canada on a student visa two years ago to study law, posted an image of the Tibetan flag below a tongue-in-cheek announcement on the Twitter account of Friends of Tibet, a solidarity group based in India that keeps an eye on China’s brutal occupation of the exiled Dalai Lama’s Himalayan homeland.
Zhang immediately found himself swept up a frenzy that had gripped Chinese authorities a few days earlier and had quickly escalated into a manic bonspiel of website blocking and webpage scrubbing willingly performed by several corporations in order to expunge descriptions of Tibet, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan that had hurt the ruling Communist Party’s delicate feelings.
In one particularly bizarre turn of events, a panic erupted over a handful of hollow decorative boxes made to look like copies of the banned book “Bloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for Their Organs,” by Canadian human rights campaigners David Matas and David Kilgour.
AS CHINA PUTS PRESSURE ON STUDENTS AND CORPORATIONS ABROAD, DEMOCRACY FALLS BACK
The fake books were found in a hotel lobby in Chongli, a ski resort northwest of Beijing.
But back to Zhang’s Twitter post — the Tibetan flag, with the words “Free Tibet” above it. Within hours, public security police were putting the heat on Zhang’s schoolteacher parents back home in Wuyi, in the coastal province of Zhejiang, just south of Shanghai. The cops wanted Zhang’s parents to tell their son to shut the hell up.
“It’s like they are holding my parents hostage there, so that I can’t say things,” Zhang told me. “It is not just Chinese, but many non-Chinese are under this censorship. People in Canada and the United States have to censor their own statements if they want to get business inside China, so they don’t say anything. They surrender to censorship.”
The Friends of Tibet Twitter post that Zhang decorated with an image of the Tibetan flag was a satirical congratulations to the Marriott International hotel chain “for listing #Tibet as a country along with #HongKong and #Taiwan.” The post was referring to an uproar set off by a rewards program customer survey the Marriott chain had circulated that referred to Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan as countries. Marriott complied with an order to shut down its website for a week as penance, and further agreed to kowtow with a grovelling apology, disavowing any sympathy for “separatist groups that subvert the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China.”
A Marriott employee was then found to have “wrongly liked” the sarcastic Friends of Tibet congratulations, thereby “misleading the public,” which prompted Marriott to apologize again, vowing to fire the worker involved. Then those fake, cardboard versions of Matas and Kilgour’s Bloody Harvest — true copies of which document the Beijing regime’s organ-pillaging of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience — turned up in the lobby of a Marriott property in Chongli, setting the local Public Security Bureau on high alert and causing Marriott bosses to be embarrassed again. Beijing considers the mildly religious Falun Gong movement to be a dangerously wicked cult.
While all this was going on, it came to the attention of the authorities that several other foreign companies working in China were also referring to Taiwan and Tibet as countries. Taiwan is a thriving liberal democracy, an island republic that Beijing considers a renegade, breakaway province. Tibet is an ancient monastic redoubt of an esoteric form of Buddhism that was overrun by Mao Zedong’s communists in 1950. These are not “countries,” Beijing insists, so over the past few days, several companies have been obliged to follow Marriott’s low example and they have apologized for using the word “countries.” Qantas Airlines grovelled. Delta Airlines grovelled. The Galician fashion retailer Zara grovelled.
Zhang refused to take down his tweet, and he does not expect this will result in any serious repercussions, for four reasons. The first is that he expects he will never be able to return to China, and hopes to obtain permanent resident status here in Canada after he graduates from UBC. The second reason: Twitter is banned in China, and the censors have little cause to fret about a tweet that Chinese people can’t see. The third reason involves a concession of sorts that appears to have placated the police in Wuyi, arranged through an intermediary in the local propaganda bureau.
The propaganda official told Zhang’s parents that everything would likely blow over if Zhang agreed to remove two posts he’d put up on Weibo, the popular Chinese social-media platform. One mentions a rumpus at a soccer match in Germany last November, where the Chinese Under-20 team suspended its tour because of the feelings-hurting presence of protesters waving Tibetan flags in the stands. The other is a photograph of a man in a grocery store holding up an English-language copy of Communist Party strongman Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China in one hand, and a package of steamed pork buns in the other. Xi’s nickname is Xi Baozi. Steamed Bun Xi.
Zhang’s online impudence came to the attention of Wuyi’s public security police thanks to an editor at Global Times, a Communist Party disinformation and propaganda organ that launched its English-language editions eight years ago with a $6.6-billion budget. An editor with the Chinese-language editions noticed the Tibetan flag Zhang posted and dashed off a snitch on Weibo that posed a series of questions about Zhang. Is he really Chinese? What will his parents think? Maybe his whole family has emigrated?
“In Canada, in general, most Chinese students are not willing to express any opinion about China, or to talk about China. Even my Taiwanese friends are worried about getting in trouble with the Chinese government — they have friends and family, and they don’t want to express opinions. The situation is very disturbing,” Zhang told me.
On Monday, Freedom House issued its annual report on the state of freedom in the world, and it makes for terribly grim reading. “Democracy faced its most serious crisis in decades in 2017 as its basic tenets — including guarantees of free and fair elections, the rights of minorities, freedom of the press, and the rule of law — came under attack around the world.” Last year marked the 12th straight year of declines in global freedom. Declines in political rights and civil liberties were noted in 73 countries. Only 35 countries registered gains. It was only a quarter of a century ago that the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended. Police states were on the way out. Now they are resurgent. “Today, it is democracy that finds itself battered and weakened.”
The U.S. has been withdrawing from the world for a decade. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is on the rise. Steamed Bun Xi’s China is on the rise. Liberal democracies are rudderless, leaderless and weak.
The situation is, as Zhang put it, very disturbing.
EVEN MY TAIWANESE FRIENDS ARE WORRIED ABOUT GETTING IN TROUBLE WITH THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT.