The Great Suppression: Social Resistance in Xi Jinping’s China

>> Elizabeth Economy: Welcome to China Considered, a podcast that brings fresh insights and informed discussion to one of the most consequential issues of our time, how China is changing and changing the world. I'm Liz Economy, Hargrove Senior Fellow and Co-director of the US-China and the World Program at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Today I have with me Dr. Diana Fu. She's an associate professor of political science at the Munk School at the University of Toronto and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution. She's also an award-winning author, her area of expertise is social activism and political repression in China. She's just putting the finishing touches on a new book that looks at how the Chinese government seeks to manage or control the Chinese diaspora.

That's Chinese who are living outside the country, and so we're gonna be able to talk today about social activism and political repression both inside and outside China. So, Diana, welcome, and to get us started, let me ask you to take us back to the pre Xi Jinping era.

I think for many of us, we've become somewhat consumed with China over the past 12 years. And we're beginning to develop a collective amnesia about what China was like during the Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao eras, the sort of 1990s and 2000s. So take us back and help us understand what did Chinese society look like then?

What was front and center in the minds of the Chinese people in terms of issues that they wanted the government to address? And did they write letters to the Chinese government, did they step out onto the streets to protest? Give us a sense for what social and political activism looked like back, more than a decade ago.

>> Diana Fu: Yes, thank you so much for having me on your show and for asking this first question, which we actually don't think about a lot. Because there's so much emphasis on the Xi era that we've almost forgotten about the era that just preceded him, which was the Hu when era, which ran from about 10 years from 2002 to 2012.

And at that time, during that period, I was a grad student at Oxford University and I had witnessed firsthand the changes in state society relations in the Hu era. Which then the leaders touted as a harmonious society, which it wasn't, but perhaps more harmonious than the decade that we're living in now.

So when Xi was still in his first term from 2012 to 2017ish, I co-authored an article on this exact topic for the China Journal on what changed, if anything, in terms of grassroots political participation. And the gist of what that article was saying was that from the Hu era you had what we called fragmented control.

Which is that Beijing more or less allowed local states to deal with local unrest in whatever way they saw fit, so long as it was kept under control. And this changed in the Xi era, where you have centralized control, that Beijing really took reins into its own hands to make sure that unrest was kept at bay in a specific way.

So let me give you some examples, so back in 2009 to 2011, when I was doing my dissertation research in China in the Hu era. I was spending about 18 months conducting political ethnography on networks of illegal grassroots organizations across the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta.

Which are really the two manufacturing hubs of China. And these labor organizations were very small, they were operated by migrant worker leaders themselves. And what they would do is they would coach other migrant workers on how to get their wages back, how to contend with the local state for injury payment.

And they were illegal because the state only allows one official union to represent all workers in China, and that's the All China Federation of Trade Unions. So my 2018 book really theorized how it was possible that these weak organizations could not only survive in the Huwen era, but also mobilize workers under that regime.

And I called that type of mobilization mobilizing without the masses, now what changed? So these groups are emblematic of the type of grassroots civil society that had been operating in the Huwen era, under the radar, but still surviving. Now, when Xi took power and 2012, 2013, he took very swift actions against all kinds of grassroots civil society that had been operating in these gray zones.

He arrested labor organization leaders, he detained feminist activists, he shut down long operating legal aid organizations, he cracked down on underground churches. Basically, he broke the backbone of grassroots civil society that had been allowed to not flourish, but allowed to exist under the Huwen era. And I think that is one of Xi's legacies, and to date, these grassroots civil society haven't really been able to resuscitate under Xi Jinping.

Many of the leaders, as you know Liz, have fled abroad and are now part of the diaspora. And when I've spoken to them more recently, they characterized the Xi era as a very long and harsh winter. Possibly even harsher than the winters that we experience here in Canada.

For which they are currently under hibernation, but are not dead, and that's a very important point. Is that I don't think civil society and activism is dead under Xi, they're merely in hibernation.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Okay, so, but let me ask you again just a little bit more about the Hu Jintao era.

Did they just tolerate most of these illegal migrant labor organizations? I mean, certainly there were legal organizations, I did a lot of work myself on China's environment. And there were masses of legally recognized NGOs that worked on the environment, you mentioned feminist organizations. So in that space between what we would call government organized non-governmental organizations and what you're terming illegal, small scale kinds of NGOs.

That are operating in ways that are just antithetical to what government believes to be its interests, there's a broader space. There was a broader space certainly for recognized activism, right? That sometimes then turned into not just small scale protests, but mass protests with 10, 20, 30,000 people around issues like the environment, or you had pensioners, right?

Who would complain about not getting their money, or state owned enterprises that shut down and didn't pay the wages that workers were owed. So there's a lot of different kinds, I think, of dissent, can you fill in the gaps for what people had in their heads during that period?

It was a period of very active economic reform, I think there was a sense in some cases people being left out or left behind or you had, as you mentioned, Hu Jintao's harmonious society, right? Which was in many respects an effort to rebalance what were considered to be some of the externalities of the Go Go economic growth.

And so what were some of the other issues that you saw when you were there? I know you focused on the labor but what were some of the other issues that people cared about back in the 2000s?

>> Diana Fu: Yeah, you're right to bring up environmental organizations, which your work and your first book addressed in great detail.

I think a lot of the issues that people cared about in the Hu-Wen era were bread and butter issues. So the exact issues that you mentioned. So not only did you have workers protesting for unpaid wages or going on strike. You also had peasants, farmers whose land had been stolen by property developers in cahoots with local authorities, they would file petitions up the chain of command.

And you also had middle-class people protesting, for example, the building of chemical plants in their backyard. And they were upset about that, and that was a huge incident with PX plants, right? That instigated huge protests in China. And you also had homeowners cheated by develop developers. So these were all these kinds of bread and butter issues that you would find really, they weren't particular to China, they still aren't particular to China.

They're the bread and butter issues that protesters everywhere protest about. But I think what distinguished these forms of protests in the Hu era from perhaps protests on bread and butter issues elsewhere in the liberal democracies is actually the framing that protesters of that era used. In the sense that you'd find protest slogans back in the days that lambasted the local authorities for being corrupt and wicked and in cahoots with local property developers for taking away peasants lands.

But then it would immediately be followed by slogans such as long live the Chinese Communist Party, long live the Chinese Communist leaders. You wouldn't never find, almost never find a slogan that used the words freedom or citizens, or out with so and so leader. And I think that's what distinguishes the sort of the framings, if you will, to borrow a term from social movement scholarship.

The framing of protests from liberal western protests that are also around those bread and butter issues. And I think that framing suggests that Chinese protesters are savvy. And they knew and they know that the central authorities would be more likely to intervene on their behalf if they just blamed the local authorities.

So back then, I remember talking and interviewing local authorities from this municipal level all the way down to the city street level. And they had a very tough time, it was a very tough job because they felt pressure from both ends from the top. They had to meet this criteria that you and I know as the one veto system.

Which stipulates that even if they had one outbreak of mass incidents, such as a protest in their area and their jurisdiction, that would negatively affect their career trajectories. And then from the bottom, if the local authorities often had to deal with very angry citizens, reporting them upward to the central authorities, right?

So then, remember when I was talking to local authorities in the Hu-Wen era, they would tell me that their strategy for handling disturbances was big disturbances, big solutions, small disturbances, small solutions. Which basically meant a strategy of dealing with protests as they come. They used somewhat flexible techniques that sometimes involved coercion and detainment and arrest.

But they also used things like just paying people off with cash or giving other concessions. And I think this is all in the big picture of the Hu-Wen era's promotion of harmonious society and in dealing with social conflict in a much more flexible and fragmented way than the Xi era.

>> Elizabeth Economy: I think it's really interesting, sort of the divergence in how officials chose to deal with different kinds of problems. So, I know it's hard to make an assessment for the entire country, but just based on your experience, I mean, how successful do you think the local officials were in actually addressing the issues that were brought before them?

I mean, was it just, here, take some money and deal with this pollution, or was it, here, take some money and I will deal with this pollution? And then I did deal with that pollution. I mean, in terms of really resolving the issues at hand, do you have the sense that the officials were particularly effective?

>> Diana Fu: That's a really hard question to answer because empirically, as we know, China is such a fragmented state that it really varies based on issues, and it really varies based on the locality. And so I would say that in the case of labor, which I looked at more closely, most of the time these were band-aid redress, right?

So for example, the type of mobilization that I was describing is when NGO actually coaches a worker to challenge the state as an individual rather than as a collective, because that way it's less risky. So one of the things that workers used to do is to say, I'm going to threaten to jump off the dormitory building if you don't help give me my wages back or to give me compensation.

Now that's an individual challenge to an individual problem. But there's hundreds of millions of people who facing the same problem. So those structural issues were not resolved. But at the same time, it didn't mean that the type of mobilization that these NGO's were doing was meaningless just because those structural issues weren't there.

Because they laid the groundwork for an infrastructure of grassroots civil society that was then dismantled by Xi Jinping.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Right, so let's talk a little bit about Xi Jinping. Everybody's favorite leader to talk about, I think. So what changed? I mean, I remember back in 2010, 2011, I think the figure came out in 2011, it was a professor at Beidaihe, I think, who said there were 180,000 protests in China in 2010.

And I think that's the last sort of number I've seen publicly released in that way. I think we've had other numbers come out since then, but this made a big splash, of course. Since then, I think you could look at China and think there's one protest every three years.

I mean, for everything that we see, I think in the media. And part of that is just, as you say, he dismantled the infrastructure of both, legal and illegal NGOs. Really cut back in terms of sort of ability of foreign non-governmental organizations to engage with Chinese counterparts through the law in 2017, and put in a much more repressive apparatus.

So, is it the case that, in fact, really social protest has shrunk so greatly, have Chinese people found different ways to express sort of activism and their discontent? What's new, what's different now in the Xi Jinping era?

>> Diana Fu: This is again a hard question to answer precisely because we don't know the stats anymore, right?

At some point we never really knew if the stats that were published by the state were accurate, they probably weren't. But then at some point they just stopped publishing stats altogether, even official stats on the number of protests. So it's really hard, I think, to pinpoint changes in terms of, Empirically, how many?

What are the numbers of protests? Have they gone up? Have they gone down? Have they shifted in terms of issues? But I think that you can also look at this question through qualitative changes, not just in terms of quantitative changes in terms of the number of protests. And one of the interesting dynamics in terms of the qualitative changes and protests that I've noticed in the past ten years is what I would call a feminization of protests in China today.

Feminization both in terms of gender issues being a focal point, but also in terms of the large number of young female, non-straight people. Who are at the front lines of pushing for social change on all kinds of issues, not necessarily just on gender issues. So take for example the fledgling #MeToo movement in China.

You might recall, Liz, that in November of 2021, Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai had posted on Chinese social media Weibo, that she had been sexually assaulted by one of the former vice premiers of China. And I think she said something like, like a moth drawn to a flame, I know this is self-destructive, but I have to say it.

And her words unleashed a firestorm online. Her post was taken down within 30 minutes by the authorities, but was searched for 6.75 million times after it was censored. And then the tennis star's own name became a sensitive censored word. Now, what's interesting is that Peng herself, I don't think is an avowed activist.

I mean, she's a sports star, she's a tennis player. But her act of defiance and coming out against not just anyone but a central leader, a former central leader who had been in the top leadership circle was, I think, indicative of a broader shift. And that is that women sexual minorities in China are much more vocal in terms of their discontent and more vociferous under Xi Jinping than they previously were.

And they have been inserting this sort of feminist agenda, feminist perspective into other kinds of non-gender movements. For example, in the #WhitePaperMovement against the harsh COVID policies, I remember that there were feminist activists in, I think, based outside of China even who had said, let's not think of this as just a anti-COVID movement.

We also have to tackle the history of patriarchy and social movements and seeing men as social movement leaders. But just as we are against autocracy, we also need to be against patriarchy. And so I think that's a very interesting qualitative shift in the types of movements and in the types of people that emerge to participate in social movements in China under Xi Jinping.

>> Elizabeth Economy: That is interesting. And I think it also speaks to one of what was one of the greatest fears within the Chinese leadership when it comes to sort of civil society activism. Which is linkage of different kinds of issues and different sets of sort of activists that you would end up with something that would be the environment and feminists, right?

And something, and COVID, that you would end up with activists from across several different domains coming together and seeing this as a broader push for political reform or social change. I think that's also, and I think given the sort of male dominance in particular of the Xi era, right?

The fact that you have no women in the politburo and such a small percentage, 4 or so percent of the central committee women. And we see, I think a much Xi Jinping talking about not wanting effeminate men to be in movies. All of this, I think is a spur to what you've raised, and I think is really quite interesting. So you have a different sort of set of actors, I think is what you're saying, bringing together issues in interesting ways is one significant difference from before. Talk a little bit-

>> Diana Fu: That's right. And Liz, if I may interrupt for a second, I think you're absolutely on point in saying that this is inadvertently what the state did.

By shutting down civil society is that, they were the most afraid of civil society developing into these cross-cutting, cross sectoral networks with environmental activists working alongside feminist activists working alongside labor activists. But by shutting all these pockets that had been previously segmented, by shutting those channels down. It inadvertently gave rise to actors who, because they have no other channels, they've arisen to actually push for cross-cutting issues.

>> Elizabeth Economy: And let me ask you too, it seems to me that a little bit of a shift has taken place. In the Xi era, you made the point earlier about the sort of the dominance of local officials as the sort of culpable official during the Hu Jintao era that people complained most about local officials and sought intervention from Beijing, right?

A belief, especially outside Beijing, that officials in Beijing must not know what's happening out here where I'm suffering from this local official who, as you said, has stolen the money from my land sale. But now it seems maybe with COVID and other issues, perhaps there is a greater sense of responsibility being attributed to central government leaders.

Is that an accurate assessment that there's been a little bit of a shift or maybe within just some segments? That the central leadership in Xi Jinping himself are being held more accountable for some of the challenges that people believe that they're facing today?

>> Diana Fu: Yes, absolutely. And I think that the emblematic change that is observable is the anti-COVID protest that broke out just a couple of years ago.

And I say it's a emblematic change because it's so different in its messaging in terms of comparing to prior, not just to the prior era, but also to pre-COVID era protests. So what happened in the White Paper movement is that the discourse that I talked about earlier, that had been dominant in terms of blaming the local officials.

But showing deference and showing loyalty to the central officials, that was completely dismantled in the White Paper movement. In the White Paper movement, Chinese protesters were shouting, we don't want masks, we want freedom, we need human rights, we need freedom, we are citizens. And some went so far as to say, down with the CCP, down with the Chinese Communist Party, and down with Xi Jinping.

When I saw those words, Liz, I said, you know what? We are in a different era now. We had a breakthrough. We're in a Vaclav Havel moment in China, right? That these slogans may seem quite commonplace in any other country, especially in liberal democracies. Where people invoke freedom for any kind of demands they have.

But this kind of language is very, very unusual in China. Freedom, rights, citizen, we're citizens, not slaves. These are considered to be extremely politically sensitive language that protesters prior to the COVID era would have never dared to use. And they're particularly challenging to the Chinese Communist Party because they consider these ideas to be perilous Western values.

It's so when the Chinese protesters were using those words and their slogans, they knew it was like playing with fire. But they didn't care, that was their point. They were trying to denounce not only the lack of basic rights, the lack of housing, the lack of freedom of movement, the lack of food.

There was in Shanghai, one of the richest cities in China, they were not only denouncing those lack of bread-and-butter issues that the state wasn't providing during COVID because of their zero COVID policy. But they were also making a link between those bread-and-butter issues to political issues. What I mean by that is the reason why the White Paper movement is called the White Paper movement is because people were holding up blank sheets of A4 paper.

Which is symbolic of what they want to say, but what they cannot say. So, it was symbolic of not only that, yes, we are suffering in terms of our livelihoods. But we can't even say, we can't even express that we are suffering, that we don't have food, that we can't move around, because if we say anything like that, we will be censored by the state.

So, that was a moment in November of 2022 when the language of Chinese protest and the demands that people were making shifted dramatically from just holding the local authorities accountable to also directly holding Beijing accountable. And I think that was what was particularly threatening to Xi Jinping, and that was why his administration took a U-turn within weeks by uplift, by just basically doing away with the zero COVID policy.

>> Elizabeth Economy: So have we seen since then any sign that, I mean, we can imagine, right? Having seen it once sort of explode in the way that we did. Those feelings, those sentiments, don't disappear, simply because the Chinese government made a U-turn on this one policy. What you're talking about is something far more profound than simply, as you said, just the lockup, which is, of course traumatic.

But it's about the ability to express your views, right? And to freely express your views. So since then, have we seen any signs of similar kind of activism, or should we just understand that this is all beneath the surface and it may just take another kind of crisis issue to provoke another outburst.

But we're unlikely to see that sort of discontent burbling up at sort of an elevated level in a consistent way.

>> Diana Fu: I think it's the latter, I think since COVID it's only been a couple of years, we haven't seen anything quite like the White Paper movement. But let's not forget that the White Paper movement lives on.

And in fact, I was just listening to a number of Chinese people talk on the New York Times Liyuan's podcast, in Wu Ming Bai, in Chinese. To talk about people's memories of the White Paper protests and how that the memory of having done that, it lives in people's consciousness.

Once you break the lie, right? To go back to Vaclav Havel when he was describing people living under a lie under Communist Czechoslovakia. But they were living largely as the green grocers who put up a sign to support the regime's policies just to participate in that lie. But once you have the breakthrough, once people stop, have a taste of what it means to not be the greengrocers who support that lie, then I think that memory lives on.

And it is infused in the consciousness of at least those people who participated or perhaps observed the White Paper movement. And I think that does leave a discursive legacy and a consciousness legacy that is likely to be brought back once the political opportunity opens again.

>> Elizabeth Economy: I think it's a really important point.

So, I wanna reserve a little bit of time to talk about your new work. And in part, I think we have seen over the past several years a number of Chinese leaving the country, going to places like Tokyo or Amsterdam or even Washington, DC. Leading intellectuals, people, liberals, in a kind of a Western context of a liberal sort of people who might have participated in this White Paper movement.

Entrepreneurs, others who color outside the lines on a regular basis, leaving the country and adding, I think, a new dimension to the Chinese diaspora. Talk a little bit about what that diaspora is looking for and what it is that Xi Jinping is trying to do in terms of controlling and managing the voices of Chinese outside of the country's borders.

>> Diana Fu: Yeah, that's right. So this new book, which is co-authored with my colleague Dr. Emile Dirks at the University of Toronto, is tentatively titled How Global China Controls Its Diaspora Abroad, Coercion and Consent. And I wanted to write this book for both personal and intellectual reasons, because personally, I'm a part of this vast Chinese diaspora that you just talked about.

That are scattered across every single continent and is one of the largest in the world, I believe surpassed only by India and Mexico. And throughout the years that I've lived, now, I'm not a political dissident and I came with my parents as a first-generation immigrant when I was younger.

But having lived in various, various parts of the world with large Chinese diasporas, including Canada, the US and the UK. I've noticed throughout the years how different Chinese, different kinds of Chinese people abroad, who we in total call Huaqiao, the Chinese abroad. But we're very diverse population, how they maintain their connections to China culturally and politically.

And this is not by accident and not purely by based on ethnic connections that Chinese abroad feel a deep sense of intimacy and connection to China. This connectedness to China is actually part of a long standing, historic, continuous and well-funded project on the part of the Chinese government to cultivate ties, to continue to cultivate ties with the diaspora.

And in other words, it's a part of what academics would call statecraft. It's a part of Chinese statecraft. And so, this book aims to unpack what this statecraft entails to win over the hearts and minds of those that are abroad. So, the main argument is that if you look at the strategies that Beijing uses to govern the diaspora abroad, it's very much the same playbook that they use domestically, which is a combination of coercion and consent.

And I think it's useful to think of the diaspora as being divided into three categories in the eyes of Beijing. Enemies, though those are the people that you just mentioned, the political dissidents, the agitators that have fled abroad and are now living in all kinds of liberal democracies.

Also in countries that are closer to China, so that's easier to stay connected to those that are still in China. So those are the people that the state would consider as enemies because they promote liberal democratic values. And then you've got the agnostics, or are a large swath of people who may somewhat identify with Beijing's policies but are unhappy.

Perhaps with gender inequity and perhaps with the way that people were treated under the coded policy. You've got a large swath of people who are agnostic and then you've got loyalists, people who are what we call the little pinks, right? The patriotic, ultra, national patriotic youth that are not just limited to youth, they're also middle age and older people who really feel this connection to everything that the party says.

Every party position on Taiwan, on the US on anything, they will speak with the same voice as the party. And so if you look at these three categories, or we find that the party obviously applies different strategies to control these different groups. And for the enemies, they use what is now termed transnational repression, which is repression that reaches beyond one's sovereign borders to target the enemies abroad.

For the agnostics, they use a combination of persuasion and propaganda and emotional propaganda, right? Including like Chinese New Year, that we're looming, we're about to go into the year of the snake, right? This Chinese associations everywhere, just building and emphasizing the connections to the 5,000 years of history in China, so those are for the agnostics in the middle.

And then the party also rewards the third group, the loyalists who are abroad, both symbolically and materially, who vociferously speak for Beijing's agenda. And so I think it's important, this book, as a follow up to my first book, which is exclusively on domestic change makers in China. To look at this playbook that is similar between domestic China and what the CCP carries on outside of its borders.

And the book also examines, and this is the intellectual puzzle that interested me and my co author. Which is that what, if anything, distinguishes the Chinese playbook from other states such as India, Russia, Iran, Turkey. Because only through comparison, and I hear I'm speaking as a comparativist, right?

Can we really tease out what is empirically different about things that are on the minds of policymakers? Like foreign interference and influen from different countries, cuz China is not the only country who's doing that.

>> Elizabeth Economy: That sounds fascinating and I definitely wanna have you back on the show when your book comes out.

I'm gonna ask you one little question here, and that is, I mean, you're at the University of Toronto and presumably there are a lot of students from China. I mean, have you seen any efforts either at the sort of the outside on the propaganda, and little pink side of things, or on the coercive side?

Have you witnessed personally any of this kind of behavior by Beijing?

>> Diana Fu: I have, and I think in Toronto is one of those interesting places where we have all three categories of people. And just a super, super diverse classroom where you have students from Hong Kong sitting alongside students from mainland China sitting alongside students from Taiwan.

And then within the mainland Chinese students, you have the regular people, or they would call themselves Lao Dxing. And then you would also have the which are the nouveau riche, the sons and daughters of really, really rich Chinese people. And so one interesting anecdote was that during the pro democracy movement that really apexed in about 2019, 2020.

In Hong Kong, there were all these Hong Kong diaspora people who are also joining in on the protests and trying to raise same issues. And Toronto and Canada actually being the home to one of the largest Hong Kong diasporas, was a hotbed of that kind of activism. And so what you had in response to this kind of activism is largely nouveau rich Chinese students from a particular campus of the University of Toronto.

They drove down the highway in their Ferraris and BMWs and Mercedes and probably some other brands of cars that I don't even know about. And all of those cars had Chinese flags waving on them, and that was their symbolic protest against the diaspora from Hong Kong. And their supporters that look, they're speaking and they didn't have to say anything, they didn't have to shout.

They were just showing this, their symbolic economic weight, right, that we made it, and what are you guys complaining about? Look at what the regime has done for us and look what it can do to Hong Kong if it wants to. And you guys should just shut up because of the symbolic goods that China has brought, that Beijing has brought to all of us, right?

And so I think that's emblematic of that interesting tensions within the diaspora that I witnessed at in Toronto.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Yeah, it might be interesting to look to see how many of those students, the really wealthy students, ended up going back to China, actually.

>> Diana Fu: Right.

>> Elizabeth Economy: And making their lives there, and how many of them sought to stay, in Canada or come to United States or UK or other places and to continue to enjoy sort of the benefits of both the money.

That their parents earned from the mainland and the freedoms that they can enjoy outside, but I guess that's a different book. So I always finish with a couple of quick questions, so three for you, first, must read book or article on China.

>> Diana Fu: Yeah, so I'm gonna go old school and just refer a 2008 article.

So I guess not super old school, but a 2008 article by Elizabeth Perry that I've referenced over and over again, both in my teaching, but also to unpack headlines. And that article is called Chinese Conception of Rights from Mencius to Mao and Now. And I won't do justice to describe it in a couple of sentences, but it basically from a tradition that goes way beyond the CCP itself, way beyond the establishment of the People's Republic of China.

How subsistence rights, the rights to livelihoods, the rights to eat, the rights to have housing has always been prioritized before political rights. Political rights such as the right to protest, the right to associate, the right to the right to assemble. And I think that's really important when we're unpacking what's happening in China, including the official discourse that.

Well, China protects human rights because we lifted millions of people out or hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Right, and so I think that would be my go to article.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Okay, great, she's a tremendous scholar, so thumbs up for that, okay what China issue do we not know enough about?

In addition to the one that I think that you've talked about today, what else is out there you think that is underappreciated, in the United States, in Canada, about China?

>> Diana Fu: I think that we focus, we as China scholars, and especially in the policy world focus so much on geopolitical tensions like Taiwan, supply chains, critical minerals tariffs.

That we often forget about exactly what we were just talking about which is people, and especially young people, cuz young people drive public policy. And even in an authoritarian regime where leaders can't get voted out of power, they're very attuned to public opinion. So I think one issue or one group of people that we should pay more attention to is actually the younger generation of Chinese who are now in college.

Both in China and outside of China, and will be the leaders in the next five to ten years. And I just wanna give a brief anecdote of some of the things that young people are doing. Which is that there was a recent phenomenon of university students in China, just taking to the streets at night to ride around in bicycles.

Hundreds of thousands of them just flocking to the streets to ride bikes around at night. So, you might think well, that seems like pretty good, it's healthy, it's safe. They not shouting any slogans, so why would the government care? But the government actually did care and wanted and put a stop to this phenomenon.

And the reason why they were so attuned to this phenomenon is because, what young people are facing now it's very threatening to the regime because of the high rates of youth unemployment. So the unemployment rate among 16 to 24 year old's in the urban areas of China hit about 21.3% in June, and had been rising ever since.

And until recently when the government just stopped publishing statistics on it, and then republished statistics that looked better, right? So the reason why this is important because we know from history that youth led movements have been a political threat to the power of the state, of the party state.

From Tiananmen 1989-2022, White Paper Movement, a lot of it was led by young people. So if you have economic slowdown where one out of five young people in urban areas can't find a job, that's very threatening to political legitimacy. And it's things like that, domestic trends like that, that actually have a direct impact on foreign affairs and foreign policy and on the regime itself that I think we should pay more attention to.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Excellent I completely, as a fellow comparativist, I completely agree with you. Understanding what's going on inside China is incredibly important for understanding how it's foreign policy and sort of opportunities for us. I think to both engage and potentially exploit tensions inside the country, but basically just to understand.

And then finally on a scale of one to ten, now you live in Canada, but you are also a non resident fellow at Brookings and I know also think a lot about the US and US foreign policy. How likely do you think it is that we're gonna see a breakthrough in the US China relationship in the next decade?

And if you think there will be one, what do you think it'll look like?

>> Diana Fu: Yeah, I feel like, Liz, you're more of an expert on this than me and I'm actually teaching your 2022 policy essay and the China questions 2 book on whether engagement with China is still viable.

So I think to pivot, that I think to the extent that we'll see a breakthrough in US China relations, whether under Trump or under the next president, it has to really involve people to people exchange. And it sounds like such a mundane phrase, but it's so important that these people to people exchanges not only happen but that they're organic in addition to the top level exchanges.

Which remain important but are not always possible due to, due to politics on both sides of the pond. And a recent phenomenon reminded me that these organic encounters are sometimes unwittingly introduced by policies that either Beijing or Washington makes. So for example, as we just saw with the TikTok refugees going over from TikTok to the Chinese app Xiaohongshu.

>> Elizabeth Economy: That was incredible.

>> Diana Fu: Yeah I mean it's just young Americans discovering and Canadians and others, but Americans primarily. Discovering perhaps for the first time that those Chinese people over there have the same interests in cats, in video games and Taylor Swift, you name it. And that may provoke them to think, and they are an important voting bloc, they're an important electorate.

They might provoke them to think well, is China such a bad national security threat? If I have so much in common with the people over there, and I think these kinds of people that people encounters that are organic, not always planned. Sometimes unwittingly introduced are exactly the types of breakthroughs that might lead to a broader break breakthrough in the next decade.

>> Elizabeth Economy: That's a great and more optimistic note than I'd hoped for to end on. So, Diana let me thank you once again for taking the time out of your very busy schedule to speak with us. And again I look forward to having you back when your next book comes out it's a really important topic and I know it's gonna be full of really fascinating insights.

>> Diana Fu: Thank you so much Liz, this has been very enjoyable.

>> Elizabeth Economy: If you enjoy this podcast and want to hear more reasoned discourse and debate on China, I encourage you to subscribe to China Considered via the Hoover Institution YouTube channel or podcast platform of your choice. In our next episode, I'll be speaking with Dr. Adam Segal, who heads the Digital and Cyberspace Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations.

And was the principal drafter of the US International Cyberspace and Digital Policy Strategy that just came out last spring in the Biden administration. We'll talk about China's cyber hacking and what the US is, and more importantly should be doing to respond. Thank you.