There are usually two sides to every story, but reading Raffi Khatchadourian's "Ghost Walls" in the New Yorker (April 12, 2021) if only a small sliver of the truth is contained within this report, the story is beyond the worst nightmare of George Orwell, the most dystopian dreams of Rod Serling.
What Khatchadourian does is to present the case of a single woman from a province called Kuytun, which borders Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Siberia and the Gobi desert and he juxtaposes her single life against the political decisions all the way up to the supreme leader of China, Xi Jinping, and he traces how Xi's perception of religious dissidents as "rats scurrying across the street" has been translated into a force which reverberates down the bureaucratic chain, executed by ambitious men trying to impress Xi and embracing efforts at control which are almost beyond imagining.
Katchadourian does reveal some startling things I had no idea about: In China mass attacks, with mass casualties are frequent. While the favored weapons may not be guns, random attacks on train stations, public gatherings, markets with explosives, knives, axes or even toxic sprays provide the rationale for imposing state control.
Mr. Xi may well have an idea that by imposing the power of the state he is actually benefiting the Chinese people, but as Mr. Katchadourian builds his case, the horror wells up.
In America, of course, the 2nd amendment freaks have spun a great hobgoblin of "government coming to take your guns" but their imagination is embryonic compared to what government can actually do, if a state is completely in the control of an all powerful leader. All the guns in private hands in America would be swatted aside like so many fleas in Xi's China.
Xi manages, through his underlings, to turn an entire province into an open air prison, through the use of tens of thousands "assistant police officers" and a vast network of huge prisons, prison guards and enforcers. The whole province became a state controlled organ, and though that means millions of people, that's still only a small percentage of China's population of a thousand five hundred million citizens.
The description of the prison, the determination to establish thought control are excruciating and the snatches of official dogma, "Stability is about liberating man, standardizing man, development man," are all you need to know. The emphasis in that sentence is on "standardizing."
The woman we follow is Anar Sabit, who is sucked into the maw of the machine, and given so little information about what her offense has been that for the first months of her captivity the real agony emanates from not knowing why she has been swept up, what she has done, what or who she has offended. Her story makes Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" look like a school girl's tea party with Christopher Robin.
At one point she hears some guards say, "Her name is on the list...nobody can save her."
What makes the narrative especially wrenching is her description of her captors, many of whom are exhausted, almost as terrified as she is and thoroughly dehumanized, and they know it.
But where Xi out does Orwell is in the use of high tech: facial recognition, identity cards which are swiped through machines and we wait with breath held to see if an alarm will bring police and guards running.
And the high tech control is not limited, in China, to just this one region, or to prisons. It is pervasive in a way which exceeds London's CTV cameras or the red light cameras in American intersections:
"At toilets in Beijing's Temple of Heaven Park, facial scans insured that users could take no more than seventy centimeters of toilet paper at a time."
Along the way, in the various prisons Ms. Sabit passes, she meets old friends, the father of a school chum who knew her well, and he tries with facial expressions and a brief, furtive phrase to warn her what not to say or do.
Her guards are clearly as terrified as she, fearful if they allow her to sit down or walk across a yard, it will be their heads on the spike.
Her hopes are raised repeatedly--she will be freed, allowed to leave the prison, only to be crushed every time. She tells herself not to allow herself to believe what she has been told about her next date for release will ever happen, but she cannot resist. The women prisoners are warned they must not cry when inspectors come, but must laugh and smile, which they can hardly manage.
There is even the echo of enterprise in the prisons: Just as the Nazis culled gold teeth from the dead in their concentration camps, the Chinese cut the long hair of the women and sell it abroad.
This is a 21 page article, and each page is a struggle, but I was pulled along by the same sale espoir of the inmates--hoping there might be escape in the end.
China clearly is not content to control thought at home, but abroad, as Xi Jinping has threatened Western academics who criticize his regime: "They will have to pay a price for their ignorance and arrogance."
In a global economy, Americans have to deal with all sorts of people we do not understand, or sometimes, when we do understand them, we loathe them.
There are Afghanistan "allies," military officers who chain village boys to their beds in the barracks and rape them, because that is Afghan custom.
There are Saudi princes who murder newspaper men and who do not allow women to venture outside the house without a male relative to chaperone.
There are Russians who poison their political opponents.
There are British prime ministers who refer to Black children as "picaninnies."
There are African dictators who deny the existence of AIDS and who condone murder of homosexuals.
There are Iranian zealots who send suicide bombers to market places.
There is a Brazilian president who refuses to believe in COVID.
The world is filled with deranged and malevolent people who consider themselves virtuous.
Always has been.
And America has Jim Jordan, Mitch McConnell and the entire Republican party and Qanon.
Having said all that, China is one place I am happy not to live.
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