Xi’s child policy reveals his sinister goals
The complete article appears at:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/xi-s-child-policy-reveals-his-sinister-goals-kpncdgdtm
Chinese clampdown on tutoring is designed to show the state knows what’s best for families
Roger Boyes
Wednesday August 11 2021, 12.01am, The Times
Is Xi Jinping a friendly autocrat, a benign dictator, a crafty strongman we can do business with and share a pint with at The Plough? Or is he steering China relentlessly towards a totalitarian society? These are questions not just about the blurry gradations of authoritarian rule but also about the limits of our relationship with China.
We have been avoiding the “T” word, totalitarian, for so long because it seems to put Beijing in the same dark boxes as national socialism and the Soviet Union at their grisly worst. Of course we condemn the treatment of the Uighurs herded into their “re-education” camps but stop short of calling them gulags. Our jaws drop when a Hong Kong speech therapist is charged with subversion for writing a kids’ book about a sheep who dares to answer back. But we quietly accept, too, that the Chinese Communist Party brought literacy to hundreds of millions of people.
As for the cutting-edge face-recognition technology, its human tracking — well, who knows? It could prove handy here, too. We cut the “paramount leader” a great deal of slack.
And we haven’t quite abandoned the idea that President Xi will increasingly take on some of the global responsibilities that come with being the second-largest economy in the world. All we have to do, it seems, is look away, suppress our public criticism, and the Chinese regime will become altogether less threatening.
Yet China already ticks five out of the six criteria for admission to the totalitarian country club set out by the late, great Zbigniew Brzezinski. It has an official ideology, a single-party administration led by one man, an intrusive secret police, party control over mass communications and the military. The only exception is the space that it gives for private enterprise, and it is this economic opening that has allowed westerners to dream that one day the regime can come to accept political competition in a way the 20th-century despotisms could not…..
Some clues to what may lie ahead for China’s buffeted pupils can be glimpsed on National Security Awareness Day in April when seven-year-olds are sometimes shown a film describing how to spot if one of their family members is a foreign spy. That’s an echo of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union when the regime created a hero out of a boy called Pavlik Morozov for bravely denouncing his father.
It’s difficult to see how this is going to end well for China or the world…..
And, thanks to world-leading surveillance technology, it knows more about their movements, their friendships and their indiscretions. These are becoming the vital ingredients for Xi Jingping’s New Totalitarianism.
