Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Authoritarian Schizophrenia

Episode Date: May 16, 2019

Right wing populists have stormed the world wide web. They even have a beachhead in China. Chenchen Zhang tells us about the racism and misogyny she found on the knowledge sharing platform Zhihu. And Leta Hong Fincher explains why patriarchal authoritarianism is central to the success of the Chinese Communist Party. Chapter six in the new ToE Failure miniseries.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Authoritarian Schizophrenia. International Women's Day 2015. Countries all over the world are celebrating with parades and marches, but not China. Feminist activists detained on the eve of International Women's Day. For picking quarrels and creating a disturbance. Members of China's Women's Rights Action Group plan to raise awareness about sexual harassment by distributing leaflets in several Chinese cities. The Chinese police in multiple cities just carried out a sweeping round of arrests. Arrested a lot of feminist activists.

And then they focused on these five young women, known as the Feminist Five, and jailed them all in Beijing for 37 days. This is Lita Hong Fincher, author of Betraying Big Brother, The Feminist Awakening in China. It's a book that tells the story of the five young women who unwittingly ushered in a new wave of feminism in China. These young feminists deliberately chose topics that they thought were not politically controversial

because they didn't want to be seen as subversive. But in the eyes of the Chinese government, organizing any form of protest to confront gender inequality, even sexual harassment, is, by definition, subversive. Because for them, it's a matter of political survival. This is a male-dominated party, and the thing that matters most to them is staying in power. Lita believes the government had no choice.

It had to make an example of the Feminist Five, because this new generation of middle-class, university-educated women lack a certain perspective. One of the ironies of the Chinese government censoring the Tiananmen massacre so much is that the young people don't know how horrific it was and so they're not that afraid. They're just not afraid of being bullied, jailed, or even beaten up because they don't have it in their bones

that the government can literally mow down hundreds of people. This perspective is not lacking anymore because the Chinese government has responded to this new feminist awakening with total force. The women who come out in China with their allegations of sexual abuse are doing so facing severe retaliation, which can include being jailed or being disappeared. But it wasn't always this way. Gender equality was a part of the Chinese Communist Party's first platform. One of Mao's most famous sayings was that women hold up half the sky. It was written into the Constitution of the People's Republic that women are equal to men.

When you look back at Chinese propaganda from this time, you'll find messages proclaiming that women can do whatever men can do. A feminist take on everybody's got to get to work. The Communist Party was now a planned economy, and it assigned women en masse to jobs in factories and in the fields, so they achieved this astronomically high female labor force participation, which was probably the highest in the world. In those early days of Chinese communism, the government failed everyone equally. Privileged men had somewhat more privileges than women did,

but the economic inequality between women and men was pretty negligible compared to what it is today. Everybody was poor. Market reforms were introduced in China in the 1980s, with a sprint to capitalism in the 1990s. All this brought gender inequality back into the mix. Nominally, it was still communist, but with those free market reforms, you saw a huge resurgence of gender inequality in many, many different ways. For example, the gender income gap just skyrocketed.

This huge gender wealth gap was created by the privatization of housing, when housing used to be just allocated almost for free by the state. And then it became a market commodity, and women were largely shut out of that, probably the world's biggest accumulation of property wealth. And also the female labor force participation really precipitously declined, and it continues to decline today. For Lita Hong Fincher, this growth in gender inequality is not a byproduct of Chinese capitalism or Chinese authoritarianism. It is something central to the party itself. The subjugation of women is a key part of China's

authoritarian control over its population, particularly in the last few decades, since the 1980s, since the onset of market reforms. And there are many, many ways in which you see that sexism and misogyny underpins what I call China's patriarchal authoritarianism. Because the Chinese government views all women as reproductive tools of the state. If you look at the bigger situation of China now, China's economic growth is slowing severely. The economy is slowing just as birth rates are falling and the population is aging and the workforce is shrinking. The government just a couple of years ago decided to abolish its so-called one-child policy and it started to implement a two-child policy and started to to push this very aggressive propaganda urging particularly urban Han educated couples to have two children instead of just one.

But it's not all women. Last episode we talked about some of the surveillance and repression that's taking place right now in Xinjiang. Uyghur women are still not allowed to have more than one child. It's just the complete opposite of the policy towards educated Han Chinese women. And you see reports about children being taken from weaker mothers and placed into orphanages. I mean, those stories are absolutely heartbreaking. It's definitely a policy of eugenics. In a way, Lita's book is an antidote to all of the super depressing news that's coming out of China right now.

Because the way she tells it, the story of the Feminist Five is also a story about how patriarchal authoritarianism is doomed to fail. Repression only leads to more activism. As it did on the first night that Wei Tingting, one of the Feminist Five, spent in jail. The first thing that security agents did when they were detained was to confiscate all of the women's glasses. And so when Wei Tingting's glasses were confiscated, she was virtually blind. She couldn't see anything without her glasses and it was also in the middle of winter in the middle of the night so it was below freezing and the agents also confiscated her snow boots and her coat she was terrified and disoriented and then she started to

hear the voices of other feminists and she put her ear up against the cell wall and listened and she could recognize the voices of some of the women that she knew and then she started singing to the other women and then some of the other women sang back to her. And they were singing this anthem of the feminist movement about breaking off your shackles and becoming free. In singing to each other, they knew that they weren't alone. She describes regaining her sense of hope and defiance as feeling joy at betraying Big Brother, the Orwellian surveillance state that is distinctly male, that is persecuting these women and trying to keep them down. But that in spite of the incredibly repressive nature of this authoritarian state, and it is the world's most powerful authoritarian regime, these incredibly brave young women are taking on this regime. and they are just beset by all of these obstacles,

just constantly being persecuted and harassed, interrogated. Some of them were jailed. But they are not daunted. Of all the women that I interviewed, none of them ever said that they were going to quit their activism. In fact, a lot of them became even more fervently committed to the women's rights movement after their experience in dealing with the state retaliation. That actually radicalized a lot of other young women

who had stood on the sidelines, who had not been attracted by the idea of feminism before, who are just undaunted. When we were plotting out this miniseries, I knew that we were going to spend the bulk of our time on YouTube, because this platform is the cesspool of racism and misogyny. And I think it's also home to the largest number of homicidal maniacs. But it's not just YouTube. We could have focused on Facebook or Twitter to make pretty much the same point. The fascists or populists or nutjobs, whatever you want to call them, they've taken control of the entire worldwide web.

But I have to confess, I was surprised when I learned that they've also gained a beachhead on the Chinese internet. In terms of issues, most frequently mentioned topics are immigration, refugees, Muslims, Islam, and race. In connection with these topics, you see mostly racist, xenophobic, anti-immigration, and Islamophobic narratives.

And after that, you have some discussion of the economy, the welfare state, and so-called post-materialist values. This is Chenchen Zhang, a researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She studies an online platform called Jihu, which is kind of like a Chinese version of Quora. Like Quora, it's a question and answer website, and in China it's known as the largest knowledge sharing platform. Chen Shen told me that she chose Ji Hu because like

Quora, the website where Jordan Peterson's 12 rules for life began, as an answer, this platform also has a large population of educated engaged users who post about things like the refugee crisis and Donald Trump.

Yeah, even Chinese right-wingers love Donald Trump. They find Trump is a figure that fits this image of authoritarian businessman. They like this strong man and very pragmatic image of Trump. And who do all of these Trump-loving Chinese internet users love to hate? The white left. Well, that's the PC translation of Baizu. It's similar to libtard. It's also kind of similar to social justice warriors.

Wait, you're saying libtard is a word that they're using on this platform? Yeah. I don't think it was invented as a translated term for libtard. It came up on its own. But now if you go to like Zhihu, there's a dedicated wiki page for Baidu or white left. And it's written there, this is similar to Liptard. It's used mainly to refer to those who endorse progressive values and new social movements in Western societies. But in most cases, it just means anyone right-wingers disagree with.

When Chen Chen published her research on open democracy, the internet went wild. Liberals were horrified by the idea of Trumpism thriving in China, and right-wingers like Tucker Carlson celebrated. One Chinese internet user described the white left as, quote, a spiritual epidemic that will destroy the West and destroy China too, if it were foolish enough to follow their lead. As Donald Trump once noted to the Chinese, they're laughing at us. He may have been more right than he knew. Sure, it might sound like these Chinese netizens are out to trigger the libs, but these attacks on the white left are attacks on both leftist progressive ideals and the idea of white supremacy. The term the white left is functioning as a rhetorical device

by framing progressive social movements as a conspiracy of privileged white elites. You effectively exclude people of color's struggles from left politics, and also mobilize the widespread resentment against the Western hegemony in Chinese society to advance racist and Islamophobic arguments. A lot of conspiracy theories, arguments, rhetoric, and vocabularies used in the Chinese discussion are borrowed from far-righties used in the Chinese discussion are borrowed from far-right discourses in the Western context. But for the Chinese netizens, it's very much about a problem of the other.

When it comes to the white, it's a very complex attitude of both admiration, appreciation and resentment. There's a deep frustration about white supremacy in Western societies where they feel Chinese people are being discriminated against. So there's a certain criticism of white supremacy, but then again, it's not against the racial hierarchy itself. It's about the Chinese people deserving a higher position in the hierarchy

because we are better than the rest. I've used the term anti-Western Eurocentrism to capture this. In a sense, it's anti-Western, but it's also a reproduction of Eurocentric ideas of modernity, development, race and nation. So if I'm following you then, the white left as a term really is about signifying this belief that Western democracy is failing. Yeah. It shows the weakness of Western democracy. They think China is probably a better version of the West.

There are paradoxes and inconsistencies in all right-wing populist ideologies. It's why they're so damn difficult to make sense of in the first place. But these paradoxes and inconsistencies are even more pronounced in China. Chen Chen calls it authoritarian schizophrenia. There's a disjuncture between principles applied to international and domestic politics here. They want to have plurality in the international system, though they are against

the idea of universal values and the projects of imposing such values onto other countries. But on the other hand, you don't want to have any kind of pluralism of ideas within the nation and you would be discrediting dissenting voices as influences of foreign powers so that's a strategy used both by these nationalist netizens and the chinese government to some extent i'd really like to hear what you think we can learn from a study of, you know, the Chinese version of schizophrenic authoritarianism, because, you know, this still is a global phenomenon, and it also is growing. We need to stop using the West versus China dichotomy to frame this global influence of right-wing ideas,

because you might have this Western populism versus Eastern authoritarianism dichotomy, but in the end, all these developments are interconnected and kind of mutually constitutive. In the European and American contexts, it's important to realize that right-wing populism and the far right are really not the opposite of liberalism. A lot of it has its roots within the liberal projects. In that sense, the anti-China forces and the Chinese Communist Party have a lot in common in terms of the logics. For example, if you look at border politics,

immigration policies, the liberal state has never been liberal. It has always been xenophobic to some extent. The illiberal aspect of a liberal state has been amplified by far-right forces, but it's always been there. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Autoritarian Schizophrenia.

This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway. It featured Lita Hong Fincher and Chen Chen Zhang. You can find links to both of their works on the Theory of Everything website, which is theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.