Chinese censors losing control, Russian self-delusion and Ireland’s Holodomor dilemma
“Pro-democracy protests in China” was not a phrase I expected to be writing this year but what can I say? 2022 just keeps on giving. Chinese state media is doing its absolute best to either ignore the largest and most widespread demonstrations in the country for decades, or blame them on (mostly banned) Western media. Government censors are working overtime to erase any mention of the mass protests which began in Urumqi, capital of the Uyghur heartland Xinjiang, before spreading to other major cities including Beijing and Shanghai. Al Jazeera reports that censors are frantically scrubbing search results, including for such seemingly innocuous phrases as “I saw it.” The latter phrase became popular after the Sitong Bridge protest in October as a way for people to express that they had seen the video despite the best efforts of Chinese censors and sympathized with the spirit of the protests.
The protests in China cannot be explained as “just pent up frustration from three years of Covid lockdowns,” writes Politico Europe’s editor-in-Chief Jamil Anderlini. Or as just the fruits of a decade of steadily worsening repression. The protests are “also the result of a propaganda and information control system that has been all too successful until now.” The emphasis on control, Anderlini argues, is working against “Xi and his minions.” Anderlini, who spent two decades reporting on China, writes that by “turning the Chinese internet into a giant, sanitized, intranet, and without the ultimate barometer of public opinion – elections – they deny themselves proper intelligence on the mood of the masses.”
It’s not just in China, where authoritarians, as Anderlini puts it, “get high on their own supply.” This year, Russia became a potent example of how a state’s propaganda efforts can lead to self-delusion. For the past decade, much of the Kremlin’s propaganda has been focused on building an image of a state-of-the-art Russian army. It helps sell Russian weapons. But maybe the Kremlin started to believe its own propaganda, the lies that have been shattered in Ukraine. Its response has been to pump out more lies, isolating itself from the public mood and hampering its own ability to acknowledge and learn from failure.
“Between Iran, China and Russia, I am hoping for a better era,” a friend messaged me this morning from Beirut, looking for signs that the end of authoritarianism in these three countries is nigh. The message came just as I finished reading an opinion piece (link in Russian) that expressed a hopefulness that mirrored my friend’s — except from the polar opposite viewpoint. The author of the piece, a Kremlin-based analyst, saw signs in the protests in China and Iran of an end to “Western hegemony.”