Big Brother lives in Beijing and monitors all Chinese, including those in Montreal and Vancouver. Zhang Zhulin lives in Paris, from where he examines and dissects this Orwellian system extended to the planetary scale.
The journalist from International mail has been tracking Chinese news for years for the French media. He has just published a large survey entitled The surveillance company made in China (editions de l’Aube), on the generalized censorship under the dictatorial regime of Xi Jinping, which extends its surveillance to the communities of the diaspora.
Mr. Zhang is obviously familiar with recent reports of alleged Chinese interference in Canadian elections, as well as the active presence of underground police stations to spy on ethnic Chinese communities in British Columbia, Ontario and the Montreal area. And banning the use of the social network TikTok by Canadian and Quebec civil servants and elected officials seems reasonable and prudent to say the least.
“What we are learning about China’s surveillance in Canada does not surprise me,” said the journalist in an interview. Beijing wants to control everything and thinks it can do it. It is very painful for the Chinese abroad, who are constantly watched so as not to damage the image of China. They are afraid to express themselves. Even in a private WhatsApp group, they dare not speak openly about politics; they fear being summoned by the police. »
The reporter who emigrated to France at the beginning of the century says that one of his Chinese friends had dinner last year, in a restaurant in his community in Paris, with a sinologist from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO). Their conversation was about politics in China when his friend realized another restaurant customer was filming them with his phone. ” It’s frightening ! We are watched everywhere. »
The safest country
The great investigation of the book multiplies the anecdotes, the meetings and the testimonies which shed light on this daily reality made up of coping, tracking, threats, arrests. The patient and attentive work also exposes the complex and ambiguous feelings aroused by this incessant tutelage among individuals in mainland China as well as those overseas.
The idea that China is “the safest country in the world” runs through the demonstration like a leitmotif. Beijing has made it its watchword, basing it on constant patriotism. Social networks and the media pick it up and disperse it, including exacerbating problems of insecurity elsewhere in the world. Communities feed on propaganda and in turn regurgitate it everywhere.
The social contract stipulates that the population agrees to be monitored in exchange for security and national peace. The reality rather hides a paradoxical situation: the citizens of the supposedly safest country in the world live with fear in their stomachs, constantly afraid of being boarded at the slightest prank.
Any discordant voice is therefore muzzled. The book cites the sad story of doctor Li Wenliang, one of the coronavirus whistleblowers, abused by the authorities, accused of lying, who died on February 6, 2020. His sentence “A healthy society should not have only one vote” then became “a national motto, dangerous in the eyes of the regime”, writes Mr. Zhang. He adds in an interview that for a decade, under the era of Xi Jinping, criticism has become almost impossible, even for the diaspora.
A technototalitarianism
“The party controls everything. Mao’s famous formula now applies with capabilities increased tenfold by surveillance technologies. The pandemic has given a new twist to the mechanics of monitoring and punishing. The Middle Kingdom has more than two billion surveillance cameras, half of all those deployed in the world. This Big Brother’s eye sees everything, even in remote rural areas.
The system kējì qiangguó, describing the alliance of technology and power, is based on the collection of personal data permitted by the absence of laws protecting privacy. Facial recognition now makes it possible “to identify in real time, with accuracy, the clothing, gender and even the age of a passer-by, not to mention the model of his car”, summarizes the book. It provides data for the city of Jinan alone: 6,000 pedestrians and bicycles ran a red light in May 2017; three million faces captured three months later during a beer festival resulted in the arrest of “25 fugitive criminals and 19 drug addicts”.
A whole system of conditioning stimulates the voluntary submission of the population. The propaganda continues from kindergarten to university. “The children of my friends in China are encouraged by teachers to report their peers,” says Mr. Zhang. It’s becoming normality, whereas for my French friends, it’s an unspeakable disaster. »
The media stays on the payroll of the government, announcing the views of the Communist Party, worsening the reporting of disasters and unrest in democracies. “Censorship is exercised to the core, writes the reporter, even entertainment programs cannot escape it. »
Newspeak and propaganda
Everything becomes a matter of suspicion and propaganda. The book gives the example of the lyrics of a simple popular song dating from 1992, by Taiwanese artist Zheng Zhihua, modified by a Chinese interpreter 40 years later to replace a sky described in the original version as “threatening” by a sunny sky. The devil hides in these chinoiseries. Censorship actually disguises failures of the system of exponential economic growth throughout the territory, from wealth gaps to urban or environmental destruction.
Newspeak also spreads like a virus; China amplifies its Orwellian nature. The fine knowledge of the language and culture of his country of origin allows Zheng Zhulin to dissect official speeches, which constantly divert the meaning of words like “morality”, “democracy” or “freedom”.
” We are in 1984, in a corruption of language, says the journalist and essayist. For some years, groups of official researchers have been trying to reinterpret these universal themes. I am very pessimistic for the future of China. For me, there is no possibility of transforming the current authoritarian regime into a democratic system. The Chinese can no longer hide anything. Even overseas Chinese are monitored, including their private conversations. »