Dissidents, journalists and other perceived troublemakers are snatched off the streets in faraway places and forcibly repatriated to face what are widely considered trumped-up charges.
A prominent women's legal aid center is forced to shut down as tough new restrictions are imposed on all non-governmental organizations. A foreign journalist is expelled. Scores of lawyers are rounded up and jailed.
These events bear some of the hallmarks of Vladimir Putin's Russia, and are throwbacks to the worst excesses of Mao Zedong's brutal Cultural Revolution during which public self-criticisms and ritual humiliations were the norm. But this is 21st-century China, the world's second largest economy and an emerging global superpower, whose regime is now engaged in a months-long crackdown on all avenues of dissent and against some perceived, nebulous threat to the Communist Party's total control.
For the six decades since the Communists came to power in 1949, China has endured cycles of harsh repression followed by brief periods of limited reform, liberalization and controlled political openness. But longtime China-watchers see this current phase as one of the most intense, coordinated and sweeping crackdowns since the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.
Peak of power
Paradoxically, this crackdown comes as China is at the pinnacle of its power and influence on the world stage. It is extending its global reach through institutions like the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which was largely funded by Beijing. China has become Africa's largest trading partner and is showering the continent with aid, infrastructure and offers of debt relief. And China's audacious "One Belt, One Road" scheme has led some Central Asian, Middle Eastern and European countries to fall at its Beijing's feet, hoping to benefit from the recreation of the ancient trade route.
The current crackdown might seem needless since President Xi Jinping, in office since the end of 2012, has a firmer grip on all the levers of power than any Chinese leader in decades, and outwardly appears to face no internal challengers to his rule. Ironically, in the year before Xi ascended to the presidency, many Chinese I spoke with in Beijing believed that he might institute long-stalled political reforms, in contrast to the hardline apparatchik then in charge, former President Hu Jintao. The younger Xi was seen as more self-assured and much worldlier - he had spent a few nights with a family in rural Iowa in the 1980s, a time when few Chinese had ventured out of the country.
Now, Xi is seen as far more uncompromising than his predecessor.
"He's not a progressive reformer. He's an authoritarian reformer," said Nicholas Bequelin, the East Asia director for Amnesty International, based in Hong Kong "I think they are doubling down on authoritarianism. This is a new way of ruling China," he added.
What accounts for this latest cycle of repression? Why now, when China is so powerful?
From the princeling set
One reason is Xi himself. He is the son of one of China's Communist revolutionary founders, Xi Zhongxun, considered one of the country's "Eight Immortals." The younger Xi spent part of his childhood in the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai in Beijing and is considered a member of the red "princeling" class, at ease with power and authority.
Xi was groomed for a top leadership position from an early age, following a stint in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. By contrast, his predecessor, the bland Hu Jintao, was born relatively poor in hardscrabble Jiangsu province. Later on as president, he was never a strongman and had to rely on a collective leadership of similarly bland technocrats. Conversely, Xi has centralized power more rapidly than most observers expected, and has presided over what amounts to a modern-day personality cult rivaling only Mao's.
The second reason is reactive. Xi and the current Politburo comrades saw how the party temporarily lost control of the narrative in the period from 2009 until 2012 - the period, coincidentally, when I was covering China for The Washington Post.
The social media platform Weibo, a leading chinese social networking site, exploded on the scene in 2009 and for the first time, gave the average Chinese a public space to vent their views, including criticisms of the regime. A proliferation of independent newspapers and magazines led to more serious investigative reporting, so that even the state-owned newspapers, concerned about losing market share, had to keep pace.
During this brief spell of relative freedom, NGOs flourished, filling voids left by the government -- some operating with foreign advice and money. Chinese lawyers began using new online platforms to raise publicity for their cases. Examples of rampant corruption suddenly became public, often pushed by new "citizen journalists" posting online photos of corrupt provincial officials sporting their expensive wristwatches and designer clothes. "Human flesh searching" became a term used by internet vigilantes naming and shaming targeted local officials.
Fight for justice
Public anger grew in this period, particularly about the perceived lack of justice - social justice, as evidenced by the huge gap between rich and poor, and criminal justice. In one highly publicized case, the Netizens made a hero of Xia Junfeng, a street vendor in Shenyang, who was executed for stabbing two uniformed local officials who harassed and beat him for not having a license.
Today's crackdown is in many ways a reaction to the 2009-12 period, when Weibo first became a force for mobilizing public opinion, and the government was caught flat-footed.
But there was an earlier crackdown in 2011, in the days after the advent of the Arab Spring protests in the Middle East, amid Chinese official worries about possible copycat protests in Beijing and Shanghai, which never materialized. Back then, sensitive words, like "Egypt" and even "jasmine," for "Jasmine Revolution," were blocked from Chinese internet search engines. Several bloggers and activists were rounded up and detained.
"What happened in 2011, you could call it a dress rehearsal," said Joshua Rosenzweig, an independent human rights researcher and China scholar based in Hong Kong. The 2011 crackdown, he said, "was a response to a sudden emergency, responding to the Arab Spring and rumors that something could happen in China."
"Under Hu Jintao, the party lost control, in many ways," Rosenzweig said. "What I think is really different since Xi Jinping took power -- with the party's response to civil society, the lawyers, the internet -- is, it's much more of a coordinated strategy."
Economic trigger
The Arab Spring five years on appears to have fizzled out after its initial promise, and the generals are back in power in Cairo. But China's leaders, under Xi, now see a new and even more worrisome threat on the horizon -- a collapsing economy, and its potential for igniting social unrest. And that fear provides the third and most compelling rationale for the current tightening of control.
Since June last year, share prices on the Shanghai Stock Exchange have been in sustained meltdown; the yuan has lost value; and most economic indicators suggest the country's once vaunted double-digit growth has been slowing faster than forecasters had predicted. Each attempt by officials to intervene and calm the markets only led to more jitters, further share price declines and capital flight. Total capital outflows from China are estimated to have reached $676 billion last year. The government burned an estimated $120 billion trying in vain to prop up the yuan.
Since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Chinese leaders have enjoyed an implicit compact with the people: let the Communist Party rule uncontested, and the party would allow more personal freedoms and wealth creation. The compact has largely worked well for the last 25 years. But slowing growth, an aging population and shifting demographics now put that arrangement at risk -- and increases the chance of what the party fears most, social instability and unrest.
"A lot of the reason you see such a coordinated, comprehensive and seemingly desperate response to all these threats is there really is a sense of vulnerability," Rosenzweig said. "The Chinese economy has tanked, or it's showing signs of being terribly mismanaged."
He said with economic problems mounting, the government now fears losing its legitimacy, particularly among the crucial urban middle class. "Their actions appear to be motivated by fear," he said.
Bequelin said he saw worrying parallels to Putin's Russia. "Once you've gagged civil society completely, then you really have an unhinged regime," Bequelin said. "That's because you don't have this invisible counterweight of civil society. I am pretty worried about what this can do to the political system."
Foreign governments are growing worried too. There have been congressional calls in the U.S. for the administration to push back against the restriction on NGOs. There have also been calls to sanction Chinese state-run media companies, such as CCTV, that take part in the repression by broadcasting confessions believed to be coerced.
But so far, the response from Washington and European capitals to this latest crackdown has been muted. Foreign governments realize their leverage over Beijing is limited and their economies are inextricably linked. Most countries are more anxious to sign trade deals with Chinese leaders than to lecture them about the treatment of dissidents, lawyers and NGOs. And for the U.S., China is too important -- on issues from North Korea to Syria to cybersecurity -- to isolate.
With no outside pressure, and no real space for any internal dissent, the world can expect this cycle of repression to continue unabated. It will ease only when China's leadership feels secure, when civil society has been asphyxiated and all potential threats contained. With an economic slowdown coming, and a society growing more individualistic and pluralistic each day, the next cycle of reform seems a long way off.
Keith B. Richburg was foreign editor of The Washington Post from 2005 to 2007 and served as the paper's bureau chief in Paris, Manila, Nairobi, Hong Kong and Beijing.
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