{"id":51225,"date":"2019-10-14T14:44:53","date_gmt":"2019-10-14T03:44:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=51225"},"modified":"2019-10-23T21:04:14","modified_gmt":"2019-10-23T10:04:14","slug":"the-chinese-communist-partys-confected-outrage-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-chinese-communist-partys-confected-outrage-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"The Chinese Communist Party\u2019s confected outrage machine"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

A basketball official<\/a>, a big gaming company<\/a>, Tiffany<\/a> jewellers and Apple<\/a> have all apparently \u2018hurt the feelings of the Chinese people<\/a>\u2019 by either saying something in support of the Hong Kong protesters or allowing their products to be used by protesters or people who support them. It\u2019s all so petty and yet so important.<\/p>\n

We need to notice the sheer ridiculousness of this claim.<\/p>\n

The notion of 1.4 billion Chinese people having a single set of feelings is simply nonsensical. So is the idea that 1.4 billion Chinese people are all taking the time to notice what a gamer playing Hearthstone<\/em> thinks about Hong Kong.<\/p>\n

The \u2018hurt feelings\u2019 of Chinese people is merely a subtext of the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s core narrative, carrying resonances of the century of humiliation. The CCP acts as the self-appointed mouthpiece of a citizenry it has rendered voiceless.<\/p>\n

Despite basketball\u2019s popularity in China, it\u2019s insane to believe that 1.4 billion people without extensive internet access are fixated on and outraged by a Houston Rockets administrator\u2019s tweets. Let alone that this mass of people are taking the time to think through how a Tiffany ad with a model holding one hand in front of an eye might pose a risk to Beijing\u2019s rule and getting just plain mad as a result.<\/p>\n

Yet, the American individual and companies responded as if it\u2019s perfectly rational that their actions\u2014and inactions\u2014outraged and offended \u2018the Chinese people\u2019. It\u2019s not. It\u2019s insane.<\/p>\n

We need to bell this cat and call out the sheer chutzpah of the Chinese authorities and state-owned media outlets that are channelling and stoking these claims.<\/p>\n

There do indeed seem to be many Chinese ultra-nationalists who have been deeply immersed in the CCP\u2019s decades-long ideological patriotic education program<\/a> and who receive distorted, state-curated perspectives on Hong Kong and on the perfidy of Western companies and individuals. In the echo chamber that\u2019s inside Chairman Xi Jinping\u2019s Great Firewall, these radicalised Chinese ultra-nationalists have their angers and anxieties stoked and channelled by the state.<\/p>\n

The NBA, Blizzard Entertainment, Tiffany and Apple all may well lose business and revenue in China because of this ridiculous yet palpable outrage, so it\u2019s a serious business issue\u2014which is exactly what the Chinese authorities want it to be.<\/p>\n

However, Xi and his CCP are culpable for deliberately and cynically creating a population that reacts in this way when told that foreigners\u2014or their own people in Hong Kong\u2014are \u2018hurting China\u2019.<\/p>\n

Their anger and \u2018hurt feelings\u2019 are not somehow natural products of humans responding spontaneously to their environment. They are artificially cultivated behaviours fostered, encouraged and enabled by the Chinese state. In effect, they\u2019re an extension of the CCP\u2019s power. The result is a new form of economic and political power that serves the purposes of the CCP. Xi has created another magic weapon that is at least as dangerous as his united front.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s only true if those against whom this power is used don\u2019t push back in two ways\u2014over the sheer ridiculousness of the claim, and, more importantly, over CCP information control and propaganda that is creating this mass of motivated outrage in its own citizens, and then using it to great effect.<\/p>\n

The only good news here is that the case of Hong Kong makes it pretty straightforward to sketch out how the CCP has curated and manipulated the information environment that got us here. The CCP has controlled how the mass protests in Hong Kong are portrayed in mainland China, labelling protesters as radical and violent\u2014terrorists acting against the Chinese people. This has set the scene for Chinese citizens to react to the Rockets official\u2019s tweet as if he were openly encouraging terrorism and violence in Hong Kong. And it also allows Chinese officials to denounce companies that are supporting the protesters\u2014or even not actively working against them by disabling functionality on various apps and systems\u2014on the grounds that they are also enabling violence.<\/p>\n

We all seem to be forgetting that the reason there are increasingly violent protests in Hong Kong is that Beijing and its Hong Kong authorities are simply stonewalling very reasonable demands by Hong Kong\u2019s people for an independent inquiry into police violence and arrests, and equally reasonable demands to have a system of government in Hong Kong that listens to the voices and views of the citizens who live there.<\/p>\n

On top of this, Xi and Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam are also escalating police and paramilitary violence against the young, the old, the peaceful and the violent seemingly indiscriminately. So, the real enablers and creators of violence in Hong Kong are Xi and Lam. They are the ones outrage should be directed against.<\/p>\n

The Hong Kong people\u2019s demands are about universal issues of human freedom and rights that must be protected\u2014including from abuse by their own governments.<\/p>\n

The culprits here are not companies or individuals who cave in to this Chinese-state-driven pressure for fear of losing access to \u2018the China market\u2019. The real culprits are the 89\u00a0million members of the CCP who are weaponising their citizens\u2019 emotions and then professing to represent their people when they denounce foreign companies and individuals.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s been a lot of talk recently about whether China is a developed market economy or not, but this cynical manipulation of citizens\u2019 views and emotions shows that it is actually not so much a developed market as a disturbed and distorted one.<\/p>\n

No World Trade Organization reform will sort this out. This is a deep political and ideological problem for the 6.2 billion people and their governments who live and operate outside Xi\u2019s Great Firewall to confront.<\/p>\n

As we\u2019ve seen with other cases of Chinese state pressure against companies\u2014from airlines to clothing manufacturers\u2014if they\u2019re left on their own they are simply overmatched. It is the job of other governments\u2014which are the homes and bases of the increasingly large number of companies being cynically silenced and browbeaten by the CCP and its weaponised population\u2014to speak up and stand up against this corrosive and cynical abuse of market power.<\/p>\n

Doing so is about much more than protecting companies\u2019 bottom lines and shareholders\u2019 returns. It\u2019s about stopping the kind of thought control and self-censorship that is so prevalent and effective in the CCP\u2019s domain from spreading into our own societies.<\/p>\n

We must not allow the CCP to create a world beyond its borders in which we all feel compelled not to think\u2014and so not to say\u2014what Beijing doesn\u2019t want to hear. And we need to see this paranoid CCP behaviour for what it is: weakness and anxiety masquerading as power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A basketball official, a big gaming company, Tiffany jewellers and Apple have all apparently \u2018hurt the feelings of the Chinese people\u2019 by either saying something in support of the Hong Kong protesters or allowing their …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":766,"featured_media":51226,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1383,52,981,1372,204],"class_list":["post-51225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-ccp","tag-china","tag-hong-kong","tag-ideology","tag-xi-jinping"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Chinese Communist Party\u2019s confected outrage machine | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-chinese-communist-partys-confected-outrage-machine\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Chinese Communist Party\u2019s confected outrage machine | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A basketball official, a big gaming company, Tiffany jewellers and Apple have all apparently \u2018hurt the feelings of the Chinese people\u2019 by either saying something in support of the Hong Kong protesters or allowing their ...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-chinese-communist-partys-confected-outrage-machine\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/ASPI.org\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-10-14T03:44:53+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2019-10-23T10:04:14+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/GettyImages-1174702501.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1024\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"717\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Michael Shoebridge\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@ASPI_org\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@ASPI_org\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Michael Shoebridge\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/\",\"name\":\"The Strategist\",\"description\":\"ASPI's analysis and commentary site\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-AU\"},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-AU\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-chinese-communist-partys-confected-outrage-machine\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/GettyImages-1174702501.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/GettyImages-1174702501.jpg\",\"width\":1024,\"height\":717,\"caption\":\"BEIJING, CHINA - OCTOBER 09: A display is seen near a logo outside the NBA flagship retail store on October 9, 2019 in Beijing, China. 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