COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIPS ARE LIKE THAT: Life Has Gotten Surreal in China.
This past November, in the town of Zhuhai, in southern China, a man named Fan Weiqiu got into his car and plowed into a crowd at a sports center, killing 35 people and injuring 43. Apparently distraught over a divorce settlement, the 62-year-old Fan was found inside the car with severe self-inflicted knife wounds to his neck.
The incident immediately became a political problem. Such a tragedy should never have happened in the happy, harmonious society that Xi claims to have created, free of the violence and divisions that plague other, inferior countries. China’s vast security state quickly got to work making sure it hadn’t: Censors scrubbed videos, articles, and comments about the incident from social-media platforms. Workers at the sports center cleared away the bouquets of flowers that mourning residents had laid there. Police chased off curious visitors. Fan was executed two months later.
Disappearing inconvenient truths has always been a feature of Communist rule in China. In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer and the family visit Beijing, and as they pass through Tiananmen Square, they find a plaque that reads On this site, in 1989, nothing happened. But Xi has lately taken his efforts to convince people that they live in a socialist utopia to a new extreme.
The Chinese people are content, the state’s propaganda organs insist, as they feed the public good news and suppress discussion of the country’s many economic and social problems. The result is a surreal environment, where public discourse is ever more detached from everyday life, and the government is ever less responsive to the concerns and difficulties of its people.
At the same time, the state intrudes more and more into daily life. My wife and I have experienced this directly. Over the past year, teams of police have made regular visits to our Beijing apartment—four of them just this month. Officers check our passports and visas while recording the interaction with small video cameras. We have already provided this information to the police, as required by local regulations; these repetitive visits are likely meant simply to intimidate.
The resulting atmosphere is a throwback to an earlier era of Chinese Communist rule, before the economic-modernization program of Deng Xiaoping.
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