by E. John Gregory
The Chinese Communist party-state recently ordered international airlines to change their website destination lists to convey the false impression that the democratic bastion of Taiwan is part of Communist China. Faced with the possibility of losing access to one of the world’s largest and fastest growing markets for international aviation, the airlines complied .
Being able to control what comes out of foreigners’ mouths is fundamental to the Party’s current multibillion-dollar push for what it has coined its international “ discourse power (huayu quan) ,” an effort the Chinese State Council has identified as a multifaceted strategic imperative. Translating this Foucauldian-soundingneologism huayu quan as “discourse power” reflects the Party’s internationalization of its domestic discourse-practice.
The threats to international liberal-democratic norms from the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) push for “discourse power” are vastly underestimated because foreigners generally fail to understand the fundamental place of deliberate, persistent discourse construction within the grand Chinese political project. This starts with dismissing the mind-numbingly jingoistic official Chinese domestic political and social discourse as “propaganda” without the least appreciation of its comprehensive and centrally-coordinated workings as well as its long-term effectiveness. Those committed to liberal-democracy must understand the functioning of discourse construction within the Chinese political project (Part I); the tragedy of the Party’s largely-successful zombification of Chinese civil society to host its discourse (Part II); and how China has now turned to enlisting major purveyors of U.S. soft power—the American IT industry, media powerhouses and educational institutions—as its new host organism for its international discourse power efforts (Part III). Americans have been rightfully proud that U.S. soft power has contributed to the universalization of liberal-democratic values. Now, the Party is attempting to turn this same soft power into its host organism and enabler to de-universalize the norm of free expression itself as well as to weaken other liberal-democratic norms.
Since the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre , China has doubled-down on its use of direct state power to discursively construct a China-wide safe space whose internal logic renders the Party indispensable and inseparable from the Chinese state (thus, “party-state”). Any criticism of the Party is unpatriotic, subversive and dangerous. Understanding the existential centrality of this safe space to the Party’s domestic project is critical to understanding how it intends to accomplish the international version of “discourse power.” This requires making a clear distinction between Chinese discourse-construction and the run-of-the-mill falsehoods encountered in liberal-democratic politics at the very level of the nature of truth. It requires an awareness of the historical lessons that the party-state draws upon in setting its resolve as well as ideas of discursive legitimacy that subsist deep within Chinese sociopolitical culture. It requires knowledge of the centralized and dispersed mechanisms of discourse formation that are completely incomprehensible to foreigners but widely accepted as part of everyday Chinese life. Finally, it requires wide-eyed realism as to the diligence and fastidiousness exercised by the Party in guarding a discursive safe space as wide as China itself as well as the Party’s unwavering resolve to do what it takes—including mass murder and cultural genocide—to maintain a discursively-legitimate world for the Party.
Those committed to free-expression as a universal norm must not underestimate the paradigmatic differences between the liberal-democratic versus the Chinese party-state on individual freedom of expression. China has no historical or present commitment to free expression as intrinsically valuable let alone as an inalienable individual right fundamental to human dignity and necessary to the rational functioning of the political process; rather it uses the state’s economic and coercive power to monopolize speech and expression to “ remain in power .” Other voices are allowed to speak in a confirmatory or amplifying role only. On matters of concern to the Party, it is not unlike Unity the Collective Hivemind who serves as the single brain for a whole planet of people on the animated series Rick and Morty . There may be many speakers but in reality, it is only one voice that is speaking. Within the China-wide safe space , dignity flows not from individual autonomy articulated as inalienable rights; rather, dignity comes from being one small part of a prosperous, consensus society that is only achievable under stern but loving Party leadership.
One must avoid false equivalencies between the party-state’s single-voice obfuscations and the myriad truthiness challenges that habitually arise among individual self-serving politicians or political parties within liberal-democracies. The latter’s falsehoods are (most of the time) challenged domestically by a free society (ideally) soon after they appear. By contrast, within the party-state’s discursively-constructed safe space, Tiananmen victims must still today be understood as “ counterrevolutionaries.” Hardly a single one of China’s 1.3 billion people—including academics and journalists—openly challenges this view, and if put on the spot, most would mimic it.
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