The redefinition of liberal values in Chinese propaganda
When, in February 2022, the world suddenly awakened to the reality of Russia’s authoritarian regime and got acquainted with its propaganda, many were surprised by its use of a liberal-leaning narrative to legitimise its war on Ukraine. The accusation to the Ukrainian government of being nazi, and the idea that Russia intended to free people in Ukraine instead of conquering them, was coupled with an even more authoritarian shift within Russia, with increasingly harsh measures against independent media, protesters and foreign social networks.
It may appear as a schizophrenic move, and in part it is, but it’s not an isolated phenomenon. A similar effort by authoritarian regimes to use a liberal narrative to serve a non liberal agenda is seen elsewhere. A prime example of this can be found in Russia’s biggest neighbour: China.
A totalitarian regime struggling for global legitimacy
After keeping a somewhat low profile for decades, China has adopted a new, much more aggressive approach with its current president Xi Jinping, both in internal and international matters.
Inside China, the level of surveillance and control of people’s lives has increased dramatically, with more internet and media censorship, an unprecedented deployment of face tracking cameras across the country and an increased number of arrests of political dissidents and journalists. With the COVID crisis, new tools were added to the regime’s surveillance and control toolkit, such as a the installation of a mandatory mobile phone app that tracks everybody’s movements across the country.
These are the living conditions of the general population. For Tibetans and Uighurs, things are much worse. Tibet is now considered to be the least free region in the world together with Syria (Freedom House Report, 2021), less free than countries such as North Korea and Afghanistan. As for Xinjiang, over one million innocent Uighurs have been forcibly detained in reeducation camps for what the Chinese government calls ‘radical thoughts’.
In the meantime, abroad, China’s actions couldn’t be more detached from its words. With Chinese diplomats promoting a narrative which sees China as a peace-loving country, respectful of international law and the sovereignty of other countries, China pursues a ruthless policy of building and militarising artificial islands in South China Sea international waters, while the Chinese air force violates regularly the Taiwanese airspace, just as China advances illegitimate claims over significant parts of the national waters of Philippines, Vietnam, Japan and Indonesia, and with China invading Indian territory and causing clashes. Add to this that China’s wolf warrior diplomacy made extensive use of economic coercion and blackmail, in an attempt to silence media and politicians in Europe, Africa, America and Asia.
All this has had a negative impact on the perceived image of China abroad, which China addresses by doubling down on its narrative. This renewed rhetorical effort has not been discussed much in the West, despite its great geopolitical importance. In this article I am going to shed light on one of the main directives of the Chinese narrative: its attempted redefinition of liberal values.
Human rights and democracy, but ‘with Chinese characteristics’
In the last two decades, China’s propaganda went from a mildly confrontational narrative that depicted the country’s system as a mere alternative to the liberal-democratic model, to a more openly aggressive narrative, exemplified by the article ‘Chinese Model and Chinese Narrative’s Global Meaning’, published in 2016 by pro-Chinese regime political scientist Zhang Weiwei. Here is an extract:
“We sometimes have a lot of channels to spread our voices, but the voices are constrained by the Western narrative. The result is that voices do not have much strength. For example, American people tell us that China’s human rights conditions are deteriorating, we respond that we are still a developing country. This kind of language is weak. A better way is to question the U.S. preemptively. We should say the gravest violation of human rights in this century is the U.S. war against Iraq. If Americans cannot explain this as clearly as possible, why would they have the qualification to talk about the human rights situation in China?” (https://uscnpm.org/2021/06/09/who-is-zhang-weiwei/)
In line with this more assertive approach, China started to engage in an unprecedented effort of redefinition of core liberal values, such as human rights and democracy, to make them fit its own political and social agenda. This effort, while certainly not new, has increased in energy and scope during the last decade, and it is now an essential part of the propaganda that China produces, especially for international audiences. This can be seen everywhere, from Chinese government-controlled international media outlets such as the Global Times and CGTN, to official documents and speeches given by Chinese diplomats.
By using the same language of liberal democracies while altering its semantics, China is trying to compete with them for the moral high ground of human rights protection, democracy and social fairness.
This redefinition effort by China follows three main cornerstones
- The rejection of the universality of liberal values. According to the Chinese redefinition, human rights and democracy are to be declined in different ways to fit different cultures and traditions, and those tasked with deciding how to decline them are the governments of each individual country, without external interference. Under this new relativist definition, human rights stop being based on human nature and become instead government policies that supposedly reflect ‘national conditions’ to be set by the state. The evident side effect of this is that individuals have no tools to defend themselves from what has been, historically, the main violator of human rights: authoritarian regimes. This, of course, is in direct contrast with how human rights are defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which sets the universality of those rights as one of its foundational pillars. Needless to say, there is no mention in Chinese propaganda of the fact that the Chinese government is not allowing Tibetan, Uighur and Mongolian people, under its rule, to determine their own sets of human rights.
- The redefinition of human rights as economic and infrastructural developments on one hand, and as security on the other. Chinese official reports and documents on human rights are full of data about poverty reduction, employment levels, access to food and water, per capita income and crime rates. (See for instance the ‘Human Rights Action Plan of China (2021-2025)’. Full Text available here: english.scio.gov.cn.) What is missing from these documents and reports is any mention of things such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s political representatives, rights to privacy etc…
- The focus on ‘collective rights’ instead of ‘individual rights’. These collective rights, often vaguely defined, are to be protected from the abuses of individuals instead of the other way around. Individual rights (e.g. freedom of speech) need to be restricted in the interest of collective rights (e.g. the rights of the Chinese people, the rights of the workers etc.) By redefining human rights as collective, the Chinese government is factually giving itself freedom from the need to respect individual human rights. By refusing their universality and rejecting foreign interference on the issue, it is making individuals defenceless in front of its authoritarian rule. Finally, by focusing on selected economic indicators, it is shifting the attention of the public away from its widespread human rights abuses.
While in official documents and speeches tailored to an international audience, the focus is on security and economic development as proxies for human rights, Chinese internal propaganda is less concerned with the need to be palatable to people familiar with the original meaning of human rights, as defined by the UDHR.
In a recent speech (Xinhua, 28-02-22,) China’s president Xi Jinping highlighted the six main features of China’s concept of human rights. Among these there are things that sound less like human rights and more like constraints for those rights: things such as ‘upholding the Party’s leadership’, ‘proceeding from national realities’ and ‘human rights [need to be] in accordance with the law’ (italic is mine) are all mentioned as core features in Xi’s speech.
One week before that speech, while addressing the 46th session of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi made it very clear that the Chinese definition of human rights does not fit what has been their accepted definition for the last 70 years. To do so, however, he used a language more palatable to an international audience. He stated that “China pursues a people-centred vision, regards the rights to subsistence and development as the primary, basic human rights, and works hard to promote the comprehensive and coordinated development of economic, social, cultural rights as well as civil political rights.”
China’s emphasis on ‘economic rights’ as taking precedence over ‘political rights’ is evident when we look at the amount of economic statistics contained in its human rights reports. Concentration camps and mass surveillance in Xinjiang are justified, for example, at least within the frame of Chinese narrative, by economic growth in the region and counter terrorism (never mind that over one million people have been detained in those camps, only a tiny fraction of whom was involved in terrorist activities).
But in his speech, Wang did cite civil political rights. To understand what he means by that, we can look at the latest ‘Human Rights Action Plan of China (2021-2025)’ (Full Text available here: english.scio.gov.cn.) This is a report by the government of China that sums up its goals for the coming five years in terms of ‘human rights protection’.
Under the section ‘civil and political rights’ we don’t find any mentions of things that we would normally associate with the concept. Instead, we find things that sound less like an individual right and more like a security policy to counter what the Chinese government perceives as criminal activities. Among those listed as political rights there is one titled ‘punishing soft violence, a form of crime’. In the same paragraph, soft violence is defined as anything that “infringe[s] upon personal rights by acts of soft violence such as stalking, harassing, and gathering a crowd to create pressure” (underlining is mine).
Pervading the entire document is the idea that a human right is not something that an individual has the freedom to do or not to do, but rather something that an individual is forced to do or not to do by the state to safeguard his or her well-being (as defined, of course, by the state). One example is the right listed as “resisting religious extremism”, which is described as follows:
“China opposes extremist religious thought, and helps to protect religious believers from such thought. It punishes those engaging in illegal and criminal acts such as violent terrorist and ethnic separatist activities in the name of religion in accordance with the law” (underlining is mine).
The document does not say what is an extremist religious thought, but the long history of harsh cultural and religious repression in Tibet, and more recently in Xinjiang, as well as the persecution of the Falun Dafa movement, gives us a good idea of what it might be.
Significantly, in the entirety of the section of the document dedicated to civil and political rights, there is no mention of individual rights or freedom of choice. The focus, instead, is on protecting ‘people’ from things that (the government thinks) may harm them, by reducing their individual rights and their freedom of choice.
International appeal of the Chinese narrative on human rights and democracy
While most people in North America and Europe may be immune to the current Chinese narrative on human rights and democracy, parts of the electorate of populist extreme right (and extreme left) parties in western democracies could find this new collectivist, anti-universalist formulation appealing. This is a risk that needs to be assessed in the future, as it has profound implications on the ability by western democracies to resist Chinese influence.
But the main risk is perhaps another. China’s redefinition of human rights and democracy is very attractive for many authoritarian governments which, on top of being influenced by the economic prowess of China, are now starting to find its political and social model to be a better way of safeguarding their own grip on power than the liberal-democratic alternative. This synergy between the economic and cultural appeal of the Chinese model could potentially extend and strengthen China’s sphere of influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
This comes at a moment of deep cultural and political crisis in the West, with the resurgence, in recent years and on both sides of the Atlantic, of populism and political divisions, fuelled by widely disseminated disinformation and conspiracy theories. Needless to say, this fits very well with the Chinese narrative. Western Democracies are depicted by Chinese propaganda as chaotic, inefficient and characterised by lack of trust in the institutions. What Chinese propaganda never mentions is that they are chaotic because people are allowed to express their opinions, that efficiency is the price to pay for democracy and freedom and that the trust in institutions is low because in a liberal democracy, problems are openly discussed, making everybody constantly aware of any shortcomings.
The Chinese ‘democracy’, on the other hand, appears as tidy and smooth, because political conflict is kept below the surface, out of the media’s reach, in private struggles within the party, with social tension harshly suppressed by censorship, forced ‘reeducation’ and arrests. The sad irony is that in such a system people are far less aware of problems, and thus their trust in the institutions and the government is higher.
What can we do to counter the Chinese narrative?
This is an open question. What is certain is that so far, liberal democracies have done very little to address this issue. The general focus of political debate in the western world has been on the democratic part of the idea of liberal-democracy. There is much more talk about the importance of the will of the majority and the idea of representation and not enough about the importance of defending individual freedoms and rights from the will of the majority. Of course these ideas are enshrined in our constitutions and in our laws, but they are worryingly absent from our cultural life. They are there, but they remain unstated. Whatever the reason, this helps greatly the Chinese narrative. Chinese propaganda pushes hard on the fact that there is a high degree of consensus in favour of the government, confirmed by empirical evidence. However, it was the same in Nazi Germany before the start of the second world war and it is true for many other authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.
The truth is that democracy by itself is little more than another form of dictatorship. It is the defence of human rights, of individual freedoms and the rule of law that elevates democracy to become something valuable: a liberal democracy. Democracy is the fortress that protects the treasure of liberalism. If we remove the treasure, the fortress becomes an empty shell, if not a prison. The definition of human rights as universal and individual, and not relative and collective, is what prevents authoritarian regimes from using a ‘will of the majority’ built on propaganda and censorship to legitimise their abuses against minorities and individuals. More focus on the liberal part of liberal democracy in our media, education and political debate could help us develop the cultural antibodies needed to counter the Chinese narrative, if not on the global stage, at least in our backyard. I may not be enough, but it would definitely be a step in the right direction.
Author Profile
- Enrico Fode is a journalist who over the years worked for several blogs and newspapers, focusing on human rights and geopolitics. He is convinced that only a united, federal Europe can preserve liberal-democracy in the continent.
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