New technologies, new totalitarians

Thanks to smartphones, social media, and globalization, liberalism faces a new and terrifying kind of opponent.

Art by GPT-4. Prompt: “Techno-totalitarianism”

“You judge yourselves against the pitiful adversaries you've encountered so far - the Romulans, the Klingons. They're nothing compared to what's waiting.” — Q

A couple of years ago, I tried listening to an audiobook of The Poppy War, a fantasy novel by R.F. Kuang (a fellow Texan who immigrated from China as a kid). For some reason I couldn’t really get into it, and I quit. But I’m going to give it another chance. The other day I walked to my local bookstore and bought a physical copy of The Poppy War.

Why? Because of something that happened at the Hugo Awards. The Hugos are an annual award for the best science fiction and fantasy of the year, given out at an annual convention called Worldcon. The convention attendees — sci-fi fans — get to vote for the Hugo winners. This year, for the first time, Worldcon was held in China, in the city of Chengdu. But a number of authors, including Kuang, were arbitrarily excluded from the Hugos this year, with no explanation. Leaked emails revealed that the convention organizers gave these authors the boot because they were worried that their writings were offensive to the Chinese Communist Party.

Of course because the Worldcon organizers do not employ a large team of censors that combs over every work of fiction with a sensitive eye to what might offend the CCP, it’s pretty much certain that the CCP called the Worldcon people up and gave them a list of authors they didn’t like. And Worldcon bent the knee and obeyed. As a result, this year’s Hugo awards should come with an asterisk.

This is why I went out and bought a copy of Kuang’s book. Any writing that scares the CCP is of interest to me.

The Hugo disaster is an example of what the international affairs people are now calling “sharp power” — basically, a government’s attempts to coerce private actors in foreign countries. The term was only coined in 2017, because so far, it refers mainly to things China is doing in the Xi Jinping era.

Sharp power is a full-spectrum attack

If you want to learn about how China is wielding “sharp power” around the globe, a good place to start is Bethany Allen’s book Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World.

This book is basically an overview of various ways China tries to influence the world covertly. It includes a chapter on traditional espionage, highlighting Christine Fang, the spy who slept with a large number of U.S. mayors, and with Congressman Eric Swalwell. It discusses China’s coverups in the early days of Covid, and its attempts to control Zoom through that company’s China office. It covers China’s attempts to influence foreign politics through massive clandestine social media campaigns. It explains China’s illegal overseas “police stations”. And it also discusses how the Chinese government bullies U.S. companies and NGOs into toeing the CCP line on various political matters, usually by threatening to revoke access to China’s huge domestic market.

As wide-ranging as Allen’s book is, though, it can’t hope to cover all the ways that China is covertly trying to influence the rest of the world. It doesn’t talk much about China’s massive campaign of scientific espionage via U.S. universities. It doesn’t give an in-depth treatment of China’s massive and pervasive digital surveillance apparatus (for a good treatment of that, I recommend Surveillance State, by Josh Chin and Liza Lin). It doesn’t cover China’s hacking of Apple’s AirDrop, its manipulation of TikTok content, or its attempts to subvert leaders in Western countries. Etc., etc. Beijing Rules could use a sequel, or maybe two sequels.

The sheer diversity of ways that China is trying to control, influence, and subvert actors in democratic countries is staggering — it’s a true multi-modal, full-spectrum effort. Individually, these things could be viewed as innovative extensions of traditional spycraft, propaganda, and information operations. Taken together, they represent a new kind of digital, global totalitarianism.

Liberalism has successfully faced down many opponents over the past four centuries. Reactionary monarchism, colonial imperialism, fascism, and communism (or at least, the 20th century variety) all fell by the wayside, and I’m pretty sure Islamism is in the process of doing so as well. But that’s no guarantee that every illiberal system will inevitably fall. I can’t rule out the possibility China’s might be the authoritarian system that finally wins.

One reason is sheer size, of course; China has four times as many people as the U.S., and enough manufacturing capacity to match all the developed democracies combined. But an even more important might be fundamental shifts in technology. The combination of smartphones and social media might alter the fundamental kinds of relationships that can exist between governments and the people they govern.

Big Brother is in your pocket

The internet’s inventors thought it would be a force for human freedom, enabling regular people to speak up from a position of relative privacy without getting government permission or paying large fixed costs. And for a while, in the 1990s and 2000s, that’s more or less how it turned out.

Then two things happened. First, internet users migrated from the Web (where attempts at tracking can be detected and blocked) to apps, which watch and record pretty much everything you do in the app. Second, internet use switched from PCs to smartphones, which are far easier to track in physical space, and far easier to link to a user. Together, these changes turned the internet into a technology for universal surveillance. A sufficiently powerful government can use your phone, and the apps on your phone, to track where you are and what you’re doing at all times.

Big Brother exists, and you put him in your pocket of your own free will.

But although the internet is now a tool of universal surveillance, it’s still a locus of social upheaval. Internet discussions — or at least, discussions about politics and public affairs — have become concentrated on a small number of platforms like TikTok and Twitter. In democratic countries, those platforms are hotbeds of dissenting views, amplifying ambitious chaos agents and spreading viral rage on a daily basis. But China exerts fine-grained control over what gets said on its own centralized discussion platforms.

Social media may thus create instability in democracies while leaving autocracies untouched.

In other words, the rise of smartphones and social media means that the internet is now a powerful centralizer of both personal information and public discussion, rather than the decentralizing force that the creators of the Web intended it to be. And centralization plays into the hands of those who seek to control every aspect of other people’s lives — i.e., totalitarians.

Most of China’s “sharp power” methods are fundamentally enabled by the smartphone-and-social-media internet — and/or by globalization itself. Manipulation of TikTok, attempted control of Zoom, and social media misinformation campaigns give China a propaganda reach that the USSR could only dream of. The unprecedented surveillance state China has built — superior to anything the Nazis or Soviets had — relies crucially on smartphones. Meanwhile, a globalized economy makes it much easier for China to order American companies around, to steal technologies, to install its surveillance technology around the globe, and so on.

Liberalism has not yet evolved an effective defense against these methods of control. Our companies, venal and fragmented, are prostrate before China’s economic coercion. Our social media chaos is self-sustaining — it drives political polarization that prevents us from taking steps to rein in the chaos. Our attempts at digital privacy laws so far have been cack-handed and largely ineffectual. Our cybersecurity has been thoroughly penetrated.

Totalitarians don’t just have an advantage in manufacturing capacity now. Their power has thoroughly penetrated democratic societies; in the language of the old internet, we have been p0wned. Figuring out effective defenses is a crucial task if liberalism wants to prevail in the 21st century the way it prevailed in the 20th.

China as a global racial empire

The other novel thing about China’s variety of totalitarianism is the uses to which the CCP applies its power. Domestically, China under Xi Jinping is behaving more or less like a typical totalitarian state — trying to exert fine-grained control over its people’s daily lives. But so far, China’s international actions are a different story; despite its methods being so broad, the scope of what it wants from its overseas operations has been curiously narrow. Whereas Russia will try to destabilize foreign countries’ politics across the board in order to weaken them, China up to now has focused very tightly on three things:

• Stealing technology

• Controlling the narrative about China itself in foreign media and discussions

• Controlling the Chinese diaspora

The third of these is especially new and unique to China. The Economist lays it out:

Xi Jinping, China’s supreme ruler, has instructed the Communist Party to recruit ethnic-Chinese nationals of other countries in a quest to build international support and stymie political enemies. In 2018 responsibility for relations with the Chinese diaspora was handed to the…united front department…In South-East Asia above all, Chinese embassies and state-security organs reach out to ethnic-Chinese businessmen, clan associations and grassroots organisations. Mr Xi’s approach confers primacy to blood rather than to citizenship: no matter how long ago their forebears left China, ethnic Chinese are considered to have a duty to their ancestral land.

Distinguishing little between the Chinese state, Chinese culture and Chinese ethnicity is bound to sow questions about the loyalty and identity of the tens of millions of ethnic-Chinese citizens of South-East Asian countries.

The “united front department” the Economist refers to is the United Front Work Department. Basically, the UFWD handles the “assimilation” of minorities within China, pushes propaganda overseas, and — most infamously — tries to recruit the Chinese diaspora to serve the People’s Republic of China. For example, Beijing Rules recounts how the UFWD organized massive efforts to buy up masks in America and ship them to China in the early days of Covid.

But the CCP doesn’t just try to recruit its diaspora; it also tries to discipline it. The overseas “police stations” China operates clandestinely within democratic societies are there to abduct and threaten Chinese nationals or ethnically Chinese people who speak up — or who might speak up — against the Chinese government. At the recent APEC summit in San Francisco, China sent agents to attack Chinese Americans who protested against Xi Jinping’s policies. It’s no coincidence that two of the four authors that China excluded from this year’s Hugos — Kuang and the Canadian author Xiran Jay Zhao — are ethnically Chinese.

Nor is citizenship a barrier. In America, if you have U.S. citizenship, you’re an American. But to China, what matters most is your blood, not your birth certificate:

The State Department [urged] Americans to “reconsider travel” to mainland China because of “arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions.”

U.S. citizens of Chinese descent “may be subject to additional scrutiny and harassment,” the advisory reads…

Beijing believes the global Chinese population have a “shared cultural background, irrespective of their nationality anywhere else” and they “owe a debt of cultural obligation to China,” according to David Lampton, a professor emeritus at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

These people feel “particularly vulnerable” to arbitrary action by China, which feels “perfectly unconstrained to do with you what they want — irrespective of what other nationality documents you may hold,” he said. People with “dual travel documents don’t necessarily know what the rules are,” he added. “You can think you’re subject to American consular protection and so on but that may in fact not be the case.”

People argue all the time about whether China wants to rule the world. But it’s already pretty clear that it wants to rule all the ethnically Chinese people in the world.

That’s something new in the history of totalitarianism. No other empire has made a serious attempt to be the global ruler of all the individuals of one particular race. Hitler would have certainly liked to do this — he certainly tried to get ethnic Germans on his side when he took over neighboring countries — but he lacked the technology and the global economic reach to bend German Americans to his will, so he didn’t even try. Russia tries to harass or even assassinate people who protest against it in foreign lands, but its lack of economic heft and its lower technology level mean that it doesn’t have nearly the reach that China does.

Once again, new technology is the great enabler. It’s through social media and smartphone apps that China can keep track of ethnic Chinese people who criticize the CCP (or who might criticize it someday), no matter where they are in the world. Because of social media and smartphones, dissidents and their descendants can’t just move to a new country and disappear anymore; the world has shrunk, and the Old Country knows where they live.

How can the U.S. and other democracies fight that sort of cross-border imperialism? The liberal principle of sovereign national borders is at stake, as is the liberal belief that nationhood and citizenship matter more than race. But unless democracies figure out a solution to the general problem of techno-totalitarian “sharp power”, it’ll be an uphill battle to protect our citizens from the long arm of the United Front Work Department.

Anyway, it’s clear that the 21st century holds dangers and challenges for liberal democracies unlike any we’ve faced before. And those dangers have been created, and those challenges enabled, by the very same technologies that we invented in the name of upholding freedom. Against the accidental monsters of our own creation, we must now create a defense.

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