SinoInsight 1
On May 12, Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a press conference to announce the release of the 2020 International Religious Freedom Report. Blinken said, “China broadly criminalizes religious expression and continues to commit crimes against humanity and genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and members of other religious and ethnic minority groups.”
Blinken also designated Yu Hui, the former Chengdu Leading Group on Preventing and Dealing with Heretical Religions (“610 Office”) head, “for his involvement in gross violations of human rights, namely, the arbitrary detention of Falun Gong practitioners.” The designation means that Yu and his family are not allowed to enter the United States. Meanwhile, the 2020 International Religious Freedom Report mentions “Falun Gong” 43 times, as compared to 25 times in the 2019 Report (published in 2020) and 35 times in the 2018 Report (published in 2019).
The CCP appeared to entirely ignore the Biden-Harris administration’s prominent censure of a former city-level 610 Office chief and the communist regime’s persecution of Falun Gong in China. During a regular press conference on May 13, PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying rolled out stock propaganda phrases (“disregard of facts and full of ideological bias,” “seriously interfered in China’s internal affairs,” etc.) in condemning the 2020 International Religious Freedom Report without commenting on its details. Hua also vigorously defended the CCP’s Xinjiang policies. But Hua and the CCP propaganda apparatus were completely silent on Blinken and his bringing up the Falun Gong issue.
OUR TAKE
1. The CCP’s silence over the Biden-Harris administration calling attention to its persecution of Falun Gong in China stands in stark contrast to its bellicose rebuttals when confronted over Xinjiang, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. Scrutiny of this phenomenon is warranted as it offers insight into how Beijing currently views Washington and foreshadows Communist China’s geopolitical activity in the near future. The CCP’s lack of response when prodded by America over the Falun Gong issue also has implications for the Xi-Jiang factional struggle in the Party elite.
2. The persecution of Falun Gong in China may have been largely overlooked by the international community in the past two decades, but it remains one of, if not the most crucial and existential issues for the CCP.
At one level, the CCP’s inability to crush Falun Gong represents a serious loss of “face” and prestige for the Party. Before then-Party boss Jiang Zemin launched the Falun Gong persecution campaign in July 1999, the CCP had succeeded in squashing all its designated “enemies.” At the time, Jiang even vowed to “defeat” Falun Gong within three months. Today, however, the CCP is caught up in what one scholar calls a “never-ending war of attrition” against Falun Gong both at home and abroad. Overseas Falun Gong practitioners have founded media outlets that have “grown to rival China’s state media in their reach abroad” according to The Economist, established a world-class classical Chinese dance troupe (Shen Yun), created software to help the Chinese people and dissidents circumvent the “Great Firewall of China,” and kept up a popular movement to “quit the Party” (Tuidang) that has seen over 300 million people submitting statements renouncing the CCP and its two youth organizations. Given the success of Falun Gong practitioners outside China, it is understandable why the CCP does its best to avoid even mentioning the spiritual discipline—the Chinese people will realize that the self-proclaimed “great, glorious, correct” (偉光正) Party is failing to vanquish Falun Gong, and worse, pay attention to what Falun Gong practitioners have to say about the CCP.
What Falun Gong practitioners have been saying about the Party represents an existential threat to the PRC. Practitioner-run media outlets like The Epoch Times have taken aim at Marxism-Leninism and the CCP’s totalitarian system in books like “Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party” and “How the Specter of Communism is Ruling Our World.” Those media outlets have also continually reported on PRC scandals and cover-ups (SARS and COVID outbreaks, forced organ harvesting, fraudulent data, corruption, etc.) that the CCP-friendly mainstream media have airbrushed, glossed over, or ignored entirely for most of the past twenty years. Most noteworthy is The Epoch Times’ coverage of the CCP’s forced organ harvesting, which brought global attention to an issue that the Party had been fervently denying and paved the way for an independent tribunal to conclude in March 2020 that such “crimes against humanity against the Falun Gong and Uyghurs has been proved beyond reasonable.”
The messaging of Falun Gong practitioners and media outlets they run challenges the CCP’s internal and external influence operations and deconstructs its painstaking-built “Red Matrix.” Falun Gong’s anti-communist stance and embrace of a form of universal values (“truthfulness, compassion, tolerance”) also mark the spiritual discipline as a natural ideological opposite of the atheist CCP and its malign culture (“deceit, perniciousness, struggle”). Put another way, as long as the Falun Gong community continues its efforts to expose the Party, the latter will struggle to market Communist China as a “normal,” rules-abiding country as opposed to a brutal Marxist-Leninist regime. Its goal of survival and domination likewise becomes impossible to carry out effectively both at home and abroad.
Finally, Falun Gong continues to be a core issue in CCP elite politics and factional fighting. Jiang Zemin’s anti-Falun Gong campaign was unpopular from the get-go, with six out of seven Politburo Standing Committee members at the time initially opposed to it, according to sources familiar with the matter. And since taking office in 2012, Xi Jinping has been struggling to erode Jiang’s political legacy and influence as he strives to get an edge over the Jiang faction in the Xi-Jiang factional struggle. Puzzling Falun Gong-related developments in Hong Kong in recent months suggest that Xi is still playing the “Falun Gong card” against the Jiang faction.
3. For the CCP, discourse about Xinjiang is far less concerning as compared to Falun Gong for the following reasons:
a) Xinjiang is located in the far western part of China and the Uyghurs are an ethnic minority. In other words, the majority of Han Chinese on the mainland are unaware of the Uyghurs’ plight and are less likely to be concerned with what is going on in Xinjiang. This makes it easier for the CCP to “sell” its Xinjiang propaganda to the Chinese people.
In contrast, Falun Gong was very popular across China when it emerged in the 1990s, with a plurality of the Han Chinese population having relatives, friends, or colleagues who took up the practice. Thus, many Chinese people are aware of the persecution of Falun Gong to varying degrees, which makes calling attention to the topic very uncomfortable for the CCP and its propaganda apparatus.
b) Unlike Falun Gong practitioners, the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang do not have their own media operations and are reliant on foreign media and governments to tell their story. The CCP knows from its history of dealing with foreigners in the past four decades that profit-oriented media can be won over eventually and is currently focusing on shaping the information environment with propaganda and disinformation in preparation for that eventuality. The Falun Gong experience shows that CCP information warfare operations should never be underestimated; the CCP labeled Falun Gong as an “evil cult” early in Jiang Zemin’s persecution campaign, a characterization that mainstream media outlets still repeat today even when reporting on the Biden-Harris administration’s recognition of gross human rights violations perpetrated against Falun Gong.
c) The Uyghurs do not represent an ideological threat to the CCP, unlike Falun Gong practitioners. Therefore, calling attention to Xinjiang and the Uyghurs in refuting foreign media and governments does not directly threaten Party survival. In contrast, denouncing Falun Gong brings attention to what its practitioners are saying and doing to expose the CCP, to the latter’s detriment.
d) The Xinjiang persecution campaign, while justified by CCP ideology, leaves a deep stain on Xi Jinping’s political legacy, and Beijing hence has strong incentive to “defend” it. The anti-Falun Gong campaign, however, is Jiang Zemin’s negative political legacy, and Xi has less incentive to “own” his chief factional rival’s pet project by “defending” it from external criticism.
4. The CCP has a “recipe” for dealing with “sensitive” issues like human rights that it does not want discussed. To secure silence on “sensitive” issues from other parties, the Party will first try intimidation and coercion or cooperation and co-option (the order may differ). For example, Beijing dangled the prospect of economic cooperation with China to get the U.S. and the West to clam up on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and recently attempted to intimidate and coerce companies who spoke up against the use of Xinjiang cotton through boycotts and “wolf warrior” diplomacy. When the CCP has exhausted all the aforementioned tactics but still fails to squash dissenting voices, as in the case of Falun Gong, it “pretends” that the problem does not exist and refrains from mentioning it where possible in mainland media.
We see the CCP’s “sensitive” issue problem-solving “recipe” in action when it tried to stop the Trump administration from broaching the Falun Gong issue. In July 2019, the PRC foreign ministry mentioned Falun Gong in criticizing President Donald Trump for meeting with representatives of persecuted groups in China, the first time the CCP publicly brought up Falun Gong in a high-profile manner in a very long time. When it became clearer that the Trump administration was not buying into the CCP’s intimidation, coercion, cooperation, and co-option tactics (then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave his landmark “China Challenge” speech later that year), the CCP switched back to near-radio silence on the Falun Gong issue whenever it was publicly brought up by Washington. Instead, the CCP focused its attacks on Secretary Pompeo in particular and the Trump administration in general, while keeping the content of its criticism broad and avoiding mention of Falun Gong.
However, the CCP’s “silent treatment” is only workable when foreign media and governments are willing to go along with Communist China and minimize attention to the “sensitive” issue at hand, as in the case of Falun Gong. In the case of Xinjiang, the “silent treatment” is simply not an option because foreign media and governments have shown themselves willing to prominently and frequently call out the persecution campaign.
5. The CCP’s lack of response to the Biden-Harris administration calling attention to Falun Gong could be a carry-over of its policy from the Trump era and its overall Falun Gong policy in general. However, it may be noted that the Party has not bothered to criticize Secretary Blinken the way it criticized his predecessor Pompeo, and neither has it extended such criticism to the Biden-Harris administration, a suspicious development (or rather, lack of development). Previously, the CCP seemed to resort to attacking Pompeo or the Trump administration as a means of indirectly responding to Washington’s spotlighting Falun Gong. The fact that the CCP had earlier deployed “fiery” rhetoric at the Sino-U.S. meeting in Alaska also suggests that it could be operating under a different logic by deciding not to censure the Biden-Harris administration over Falun Gong.
Another possible reason for Beijing’s silence on the Falun Gong issue could be the CCP observing that the essence of the “China challenge” has changed under President Joe Biden to become less ideological and more accommodating of the PRC. And if so, the CCP does not need to get overly confrontational or concerned about the Biden-Harris administration mentioning Falun Gong because it knows that whatever the latter does with regard to China will be far less of a threat to regime survival and its quest for global domination as compared with the Trump administration.
It should be noted that both reasons mentioned in this point could be valid at the same time. But things could be even more complicated for the U.S. and the world if the CCP is operating under the assumption that the Biden-Harris administration will be much softer on China. For instance, the CCP could be emboldened to pursue its geopolitical agenda more aggressively in the near future, including increasing militaristic activity in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and the East China Sea; heightening border tensions with China’s neighbors; ramping up “wolf warrior” antics and coercive economic practices; and meddling in Middle East turmoil via Iran and its proxies. That said, the CCP’s capabilities are also constrained by its domestic troubles, including the 20th Party Congress in 2022 and other Party elite political considerations; the COVID-19 pandemic; and a pandemic-hit economy, mounting debt woes, and potential financial difficulties.
To reverse the CCP’s impression that Washington is soft on China and to better deter Beijing from overseas aggression in the near term, the Biden-Harris administration should revisit the Trump-era Sino-U.S. ideological paradigm of “Communist China versus the free world” instead of the toothless “autocracies versus democracies” framing. The Biden-Harris administration should also adopt the Trump administration’s broader defense of religious freedoms and pressure the CCP over its persecution of Falun Gong, house Christians, and other religious minorities in China, while sustaining its current focus on Xinjiang. When the CCP is frequently forced to defend all of its human rights abuses and is in constant fear of “regime change,” it will be naturally inclined to curb its aggressive geopolitical activities as Party survival takes priority over global dominance.
5. The Biden-Harris administration calling attention to the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong has the indirect effect of pinning Jiang Zemin’s negative political legacy on Xi Jinping. Xi will look to avoid being held accountable for his chief rival’s crimes, while the Jiang faction will gladly have Xi “take the fall” for Falun Gong so that they can better oppose his push for a norm-breaking third term at the 20th Party Congress and eventually marginalize Xi.
Factional tensions over negative political legacies could lead to political Black Swans in China this year.
SinoInsight 2
On May 18, The Financial Times reported that Liu Tianran, the son of PRC vice premier and Xi Jinping ally Liu He, was involved in big-money deals for his investment firm Skycus Capital after his father came to his current post in 2018.
FT said that Liu Tianran stepped down as Skycus Capital chair in April 2017, or six months before Liu He became vice premier. Liu Tianran also transferred his shares to another executive a year later. After stepping back, the younger Liu continued to work for his company, and had a “central role in lucrative transactions involving Tencent and JD.com units,” according to FT sources.
According to FT, “Under Chinese government rules, children of senior officials are prohibited from managing companies in industries regulated by a parent, but they can be employed by such firms in lower-level positions or advisory roles.”
The FT’s report on Liu Tianran was the lead article on the FT homepage for a period.
OUR TAKE
1. From FT’s own reporting, Liu Tianran does not appear to have broken any rules. However, the report gives people the impression that Liu Tianran and his company could be profiting from his connections to his father or other less legitimate channels. And if the younger Liu is making big money, people will believe that the elder Liu will have benefited somehow. After all, rampant corruption in the PRC causes observers to automatically suspect senior CCP officials of malfeasance whenever stories such as the one by FT emerge.
Of the assumptions mentioned above, the one that is the most certain is Liu Tianran indirectly securing benefits by virtue of him being his father’s son. However, Party princelings and the relatives of high-ranking officials have long benefited obliquely from familial associations, and this form of low-level corruption is still tolerated and technically legal in Xi Jinping’s PRC. What Xi frowns upon is naked nepotism and corruption that saddles the regime with the personal risks of individual officials or princelings, like Jiang Zemin handing over state-owned enterprises to his son Jiang Mianheng (China Unicom, Shanghai United Investment Corporation, etc.).
Liu Tianran’s investment firm is a private venture, and the scale of its operations pale in comparison to the big tech firms like those founded by Jack Ma. Put another way, Liu He and his son are unlikely to run into trouble over the FT report regardless of the impression of corruption that is created.
2. We believe that the sources behind the FT report have similar intentions to the sources behind a recent Wall Street Journal piece about Hu Chunhua and Liu He that we previously analyzed. The FT report ultimately benefits Xi’s factional rivals because its “damaging information” casts Liu He, a close Xi confidant, in a bad light, and tarnishes Xi by association. In reading the FT and Journal reports together, observers are also led to believe that there may be splits in the Xi camp and Liu could be sidelined, an impression that benefits the Jiang faction and the “anti-Xi coalition.”
In March, we wrote that Xi faces “extreme opposition” to his rule, and “Western establishment elites and Xi’s factional rivals will almost certainly do their best to undermine the Xi leadership around ‘sensitive’ periods for the regime (CCP centennial celebrations in July, key political conclaves, major persecution dates, etc.) with the goal of weakening his ‘quan wei’ and tainting his legitimacy and legacy in the lead up to the 20th Party Congress.” With the CCP’s 100th anniversary celebrations less than two months away, we expect to see more “leaks” of “damaging information” concerning the Party elite emerging in the overseas press.
3. Liu He will be 70 when the 20th Party Congress is held in 2022, and is slated to step down if CCP retirement norms are observed. We previously noted the possibility of Xi having Liu step down as vice premier early, so as to have a preferred candidate fill in Liu’s spot, giving him time to be groomed to eventually replace premier Li Keqiang.
If Xi believes that he has sufficient “quan wei,” he could potentially “break” the “six[ty-six] up, [sixty-]seven down” (七上八下) retirement norm for high-ranking officials to have Liu He succeed Li Keqiang and join the Politburo Standing Committee. This is not an outcome Xi’s rivals would want to see happen, but if they suspect this possibility, then this would be another reason to explain the recent “leaks” of “damaging information” about Liu He; generate enough bad press for Liu, and Xi has no choice but to abandon any plan to circumvent Party norms and retain his close ally.
If Xi still lacks sufficient “quan wei” by the 20th Party Congress, then Liu He could either retire or move to the National People’s Congress to serve as a vice chairman overseeing financial matters following the 20th Congress.
