National overview
Chinese apartheid and the fragile communist state
The Chinese Communist Party’s forced camp of nearly 2 million members of minority groups in the western province of Xinjiang in China is perhaps the largest forced collectivization of mankind since the Soviet Union disbanded its Gulag prison system. Torture, forced sterilization and forced labor are the characteristics. The world has taken note: global companies and foreign leaders are raising concerns, and there is a burgeoning move to boycott next year’s Beijing Winter Olympics. But while the world acknowledges the unmistakable magnitude of this tragedy, it does not pay much attention to another method of 20th-century totalitarian domination that the CCP pursues. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has institutionalized discrimination by an elite, relatively affluent minority against the rest of the population on a scale and with some deliberation since the apartheid era in South Africa. China’s apartheid system is based on the years-long practice of hukou, a ruthless permanent caste system maintained by the party with force. In common with South African apartheid, Hukou has decades of social and economic domination by a entrenched minority – in this case the urban political and economic class of the Chinese Communist Party – over the majority population. South African apartheid allowed generations of white Afrikaner leaders in government and business to maintain both economic and social control over the majority (black) population. Similarly, in China, the CCP depends on hukou to control the 900 million poor in the countryside, while relying on their cheap labor to keep so-called first-class cities going. The urban elite and middle class in Beijing, Shanghai and other first-one cities accept the system without reservation or even much recognition, just as their counterparts did in South Africa. China’s apartheid relies on an internal passport system that the wearer follows for his or her life. The system is simple: you are born urban or rural, and you carry it with you until you die. This designation is enforced by a complex system of quotas and limited access to schools, jobs, health care and the social safety net (as it exists in the VRC). The government is using the restrictions to control urban migration and limit it to ensure adequate labor for the fast-growing cities. Hundreds of millions of rural migrants to the cities form a permanent underclass that provides access to services – health care, education, unemployment benefits – only at the level available for their rural hukou status. In their book Invisible China, Stanford University scholar Scott Rozelle and researcher Natalie Hell write that the system created two Chinese: the Republic of Urban China and the Republic of Rural China. While citizens of rural China can travel to urban China, they write, “even though rural parents move from their villages to the big cities for work… They are not legally entitled to send their children to urban public schools or to gain access to Since about two-thirds of China with rural hukou status do not have enough access to urban work or services, migration to cities often divides rural families. Fathers or mothers or older boys can move to the city and leaving daughters and grandparents behind, so Chinese apartheid maintains the huge income gap between cities and rural areas, where the World Bank estimates – and the CCP generally acknowledges – that hundreds of millions live on about $ 5 a day, while the wealth gap in the United States States rejected by progressive politicians, it is no coincidence that a recent analysis of OECD data for 24/7 Wall Street and USA Today South Africa and China – the fashion rne era’s premiere practitioners of apartheid – on No farm not. 1 and no. 2 on the list of top 15 countries with the biggest difference between rich and poor. Both systems depend on systemic chauvinist policies by a prosperous minority versus an impoverished majority. But what South Africa has abandoned, China continues. The hukou works with another program known as dibao. The system was started as a proven basic income for lower-income urban residents, and the system is now nationwide. In the hands of Xi Jinping’s CCP, dibao is just another form of economic and social control that helps maintain the apartheid system. According to a recent analysis in SupChina by Alexis Smith, the government monitors each recipient closely, relying on neighbors and others in the community to report whether the individual is living beyond his or her ability. It affects the ability of the recipient to take a higher paid job, pursue an education or look for other ways to improve his or her life station. The system also contributes to the widespread practice of neighbors spying on neighbors to enjoy favor with local government officials. Chinese apartheid is also instrumental in the CCP’s projection on China’s strength to the world. Beijing has created the perception that it can control economic and social mobility, manage its growth in an orderly manner and maintain its prosperity. In fact, China’s apartheid is a sign of deep weakness and fragility, just like that of South Africa. Maintaining such a strict tile over the majority of the population for the benefit of urban party officials and their extensive network of acolytes – including and especially the entire business class and public officials at every level of government – requires constant oversight and ensures, in return, constant lies and deception. Economic projections are a web of misinformation from local party officials to the top, and every layer is determined not to be the one to point out that its part of the rigging system is failing. The danger it poses takes many forms. For example, what bridge or rail inspector would dare to admit that a fast-paced project that relies on cheap migrant labor can be flawed? As a result, building collapses, rail and bridge disasters, dam failures and other infrastructure tragedies are common in China. Given the CCP’s strict control over publicly available information, such disasters are often not reported. In a 2015 issue of the New York Times entitled “Beware of China’s Security Record”, Chinese author Murong Xuecun wrote that when such disasters occur, “the only power of government is to control information: to hide facts. to ban media reporting and to quickly close social networks to media accounts suspected of having spread ‘rumors’. ‘Or consider the so-called Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It is China’s subsidized infrastructure diplomacy, which the CCP wants the world to see as a global projection of soft power and as a sign of Beijing’s global influence. A feature of the program, however, is that hukou and its endemic corruption are carried out. Many BRI projects in partner countries require the use of cheap imported Chinese labor as a condition for the transactions. This suggests that BRI is not soft power, but a projection of China’s weakness with potentially dangerous results. Reuters reported in 2019 that BRI agreements require that by 3030 about 30 nuclear power plants be built by Chinese state-owned enterprises in dozens of countries around the world. But in the New York Times, Murong noted that, from all we know of Chinese construction and surveillance practices, an accident at a Chinese nuclear power plant is only a question of when and where. ‘Of course, the United States and its democratic allies and partners have their challenges and imbalances. But transparency, accountability and the ability to self-correct are characteristics of democratic capitalism. These corrections do not exist in China, and the trends are in the other direction. Technology provides even greater control by the CCP over the everyday lives of its citizens in every dimension. In contrast, there are concerns in the US and elsewhere about the detrimental impact of Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social media on democratic norms. It will be governed through a democratic process of finding balance. As always, this will involve a legislative balancing act. Ultimately, voters will hold leaders accountable. In China, this cannot happen because all platforms are banned and there are no voting votes, even if the CCP relies on face recognition, data capture, monitoring of digital banking activities and other forms of techno-totalitarianism. Although it may reflect the power of the state, it does not show strength, but weakness and fear – fear of its own people. South Africa’s apartheid, through its contradictions, courageous internal reforms and worldwide consensus that apartheid was in the same class as slavery and piracy, had to end and had to end. Eventually it failed because it was a deep source of true weakness in the South African body and society. The same goes for Chinese apartheid.