National Review
Chinese Apartheid and the Fragile Communist State
The Chinese Communist Party’s forced encampment of nearly 2 million members of minority groups in western China’s Xinjiang province is perhaps the largest coerced collectivization of humanity since the Soviet Union dissolved its Gulag prison system. Torture, forced sterilization and forced labor are trademarks. The world has realized: global companies and foreign leaders are raising concerns and there is a growing movement to boycott next year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing. But while the world recognizes the undeniable scale of this tragedy, it is not paying much attention to another 20th century method of totalitarian domination that the CCP is emulating. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has institutionalized discrimination by an elite, a relatively wealthy minority, against the rest of the population on a scale and with a degree of deliberation never seen since the apartheid era in South Africa. The apartheid system of China is based on the longstanding practice of hukou, a relentless permanent caste system maintained vigorously by the party. Hukou has in common with South African apartheid decades of social and economic domination by an entrenched minority – in this case, the Chinese Communist Party’s urban political and economic class – over the majority of the population. South African apartheid has enabled generations of white African leaders in government and business to maintain economic and social control over the majority of the (black) population. Likewise, in China, the CCP relies on hukou to control the 900 million rural poor while relying on its cheap labor to keep so-called first-tier cities afloat. The urban elite and the middle class in Beijing, Shanghai and other top-tier cities accept the system without reservation or even much recognition, as do their South African counterparts. Apartheid in China depends on an internal passport system that follows the holder for life. The system is straightforward: you are born urban or rural and carry it with you until you die. This designation is applied through an intricate quota system and restricted access to schools, jobs, health care and social safety net (such as the one in the PRC). The government uses the restrictions to control urban migration, strangling it to ensure sufficient labor for fast-growing cities. Hundreds of millions of rural migrants to cities form a permanent subclass, with access to services – health, education, unemployment assistance – only at the level available for their rural hukou status. In his book China Invisible, Stanford University scholar Scott Rozelle and researcher Natalie Hell write that the system created two Chinas: the Republic of Urban China and the Republic of Rural China. Although citizens of rural China can travel to urban China, they write, “even if rural parents move from their villages to large cities on business. . . they have no legal right to send their children to urban public schools or to access urban public hospitals. ”Since there is not enough access to jobs or urban services for about two-thirds of China that has rural hukou status, migration to cities often divides rural families. Fathers or mothers or older children can migrate to the city, leaving daughters and grandparents behind. Chinese apartheid, therefore, supports the vast income gap between cities and the countryside, where the World Bank estimates – and the CCP generally recognizes – that hundreds of millions live on about $ 5 a day. Although the wealth gap in the United States is condemned by progressive politicians, it is no accident that a recent analysis of OECD data for Wall Street 24/7 and USA Today placed South Africa and China – the first apartheid practitioners of it was modern – in No. 1 and No. 2 on the list of the top 15 countries with the greatest disparity between rich and poor. Both systems depend on systemic chauvinist policies of a prosperous and privileged minority against an impoverished majority. But what South Africa abandoned, China continues. The hukou works in conjunction with another program known as dibao. Initiated as a tested basic income for resources for low-income urban residents, the system already exists across the country. In the hands of Xi Jinping’s CCP, dibao is just another form of economic and social control, helping to maintain the apartheid system. According to a recent analysis on SupChina by Alexis Smith, the government intrusively monitors each stipend recipient, relying on neighbors and others in the community to report whether the individual is living beyond their means. This affects the recipient’s ability to accept a higher-paying job, pursue an education, or seek other ways to improve his or her position in life. The system also contributes to the widespread practice of neighbors spying on neighbors to obtain favors from local government officials. Chinese apartheid is also instrumental in projecting the CCP’s Chinese strength to the world. Beijing created the perception that it can control economic and social mobility, manage its growth in an orderly manner and sustain its prosperity. In fact, China’s apartheid is a sign of profound weakness and fragility, as was South Africa. Maintaining such tight control over the majority of the population for the benefit of the party’s urban officials and its vast network of acolytes – including and especially the entire business class and civil servants at all levels of government – requires constant vigilance and guarantees, in return, constant lies and deception. Economic projections are a web of disinformation from local party leaders to the top, each layer determined not to be the only layer to suggest that its part of the manipulated system is failing. The danger this represents takes many forms. For example, which bridge or railroad inspector would dare to recognize that a hastily built project that relies on cheap migrant labor may be defective? As a result, building collapses, rail and bridge disasters, dam disruptions and other infrastructure tragedies are common in China. Given the CCP’s strict control over publicly available information, such disasters are generally not reported. In a 2015 New York Times article entitled “Watch out for the China Security Registry”, Chinese writer Murong Xuecun wrote that when such disasters occur, “the only governmental competence on display is with information control: withholding facts , ban media reports and quickly close social media accounts suspected of spreading ‘rumors’. Or consider the so-called Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This is China’s subsidized infrastructure diplomacy, which the CCP wants the world to see as a projection of global soft power and a sign of Beijing’s global influence. A feature of the program, however, is that the hukou and its endemic corruption are being exported. Many BRI projects in partner countries require the use of Chinese labor imported cheap as a condition for business. This suggests that the BRI is not a soft power, but a projection of China’s weakness, with potentially dangerous results. Reuters reported in 2019 that the deals BRI s predict that around 30 nuclear power plants will be built by 2030 in dozens of countries around the world by Chinese state-owned companies. But Murong noted in the New York Times that, “of everything we know about Chinese construction and supervision practices, an accident at a Chinese nuclear power plant is just a question of when and where.” It is clear that the United States and its allies and democratic partners have their challenges and imbalances. But transparency, responsibility and the capacity for self-correction are hallmarks of democratic capitalism. These remedies do not exist in China and trends are in the other direction. Technology is allowing the CCP to have even greater control over the daily lives of its citizens in all dimensions. On the other hand, there is concern in the United States and elsewhere about the harmful impact of Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social media on democratic norms. This will be managed through the democratic process that will try to strike a balance. As always, this will involve an act of legislative balance. In the end, voters will hold leaders accountable. In China, this cannot happen because all of these platforms are banned and there is no voice for the voter, even when the CCP depends on facial recognition, data capture, monitoring of digital banking activity and other forms of techno-totalitarianism. While this may reflect the state’s power, it shows no strength, but weakness and fear – fear of its own people. South African apartheid was brought down by its own inconsistencies, by courageous internal reformers and by the global consensus that apartheid was in the same class as slavery and piracy and had to end. Ultimately, it failed because it was a profound source of real weakness in South African politics and society. The same applies to Chinese apartheid.