Official China Discussion Thread

BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s foreign ministry said on Friday that seeing the plight of Americans suffering in a severe winter storm that hit the state of Texas this week reinforced a belief among Chinese citizens that their country is “on the right path”.

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying made the comments in response to a question from a state media journalist on calls by western countries for an investigation into alleged human rights abuses in its western Xinjiang region.

During her lengthy response, made at a regular ministry news conference, Hua repeated China’s denials of abuse of Muslims in the region, and said that Australia, Canada and the United States had histories of genocide.

But she also contrasted the vulnerability of many Texans with the festive experience of Chinese during the recently-completed Lunar New Year holiday. State and social media in Communist Party-led China frequently draw attention to crises in the United States and other western countries.

“Not to be wanting of food or clothing, not to be hungry or cold, this is the fundamental human right that is the most real,” she said.

“In the meantime in Texas ... millions of people found themselves caught in the terrible situation of not having electricity and heating at home, a few tens of people even lost their lives because of this,” she said.

“This gave the Chinese people a deeper appreciation for what is the real human right, and made us believe more strongly that China is on the right path. We are fully confident about our future,” she said.

The bitter cold spell in the United States has killed at least 21 people in Texas and knocked out power to more than four million people in the state, with more than 13 million Texans seeing interruptions in their water services.

Since U.S.-China relations worsened during the previous administration of Donald Trump, many Chinese diplomats have taken to social media with an aggressively nationalistic posture known as “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy.

A province in eastern China has scrapped household registration restrictions in a bid to bridge the urban-rural population divide, the first such initiative since China introduced its hukou system in the 1950s.

Earlier this week, authorities in Jiangxi announced that people from rural areas would be able to obtain household registration in the cities they’ve moved to with no restrictions. Previously, such people were required to live and work in a particular city for a set period of time before this document was granted.

In China, one’s household registration, or hukou, is linked to various social benefits including access to health care, public education, and even property.

Jiangxi’s reform, though groundbreaking, is also in line with a national urbanization plan from 2014 that called for the country’s 100 million rural residents to be living in cities, with urban hukou, by 2020. As of last year, 60.6% of China’s population was living in urban areas, though only 44.4% held urban hukou.

China’s hukou system came into effect in 1958, with the government seeking to industrialize cities while ensuring that people from the countryside stayed in their villages to maintain a stable food supply. The system has been in place ever since, despite growing attention to the often fraught situations of migrant workers, left-behind children, and other marginalized groups it creates.

“This is a bold step in the right direction to reform the hukou system’s restrictions of labor mobility,” Fei-Ling Wang, a professor of international affairs at Georgia Institute of Technology and the author of “Organization Through Division and Exclusion: China’s Hukou System,” told Sixth Tone. “It is very much in line with the general trend of localization of the hukou administration, signaling a progressive relaxation of the control of domestic migration and a welcome effort of reducing the urban-rural barriers, at least within a province.”

In recent years, demand for urban hukou has not only widened rifts between people and the services they’re eligible to receive, but also led to corruption. Those desperate to obtain household registration in coveted metropolitan areas such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen have gone as far as to enter into fake marriages or bribe officials.

According to Wang, though Jiangxi’s policy could be adopted by other regions with similar socioeconomic conditions, hukou restrictions are likely to continue in major urban centers, including first- and second-tier, cities as well as some third-tier cities and more “attractive” provinces.

In recent years Chinese authorities have introduced a series of increasingly relaxed hukou policies. In December 2019, the central government scrapped residency requirements for cities of fewer than 3 million people, with plans to raise the bar to cities of 5 million or less. In addition, many second-tier cities already offer lower hukou barriers for the well-educated or professionally successful.

There has long been a fallacy at the heart of much analysis of Chinese security policy in Central Asia that China is focused on economics in the region, and Russia on security. This is built on the odd assumption that Beijing is willing to simply delegate its security concerns to others: something that clashes with the increasingly strong China that President Xi Jinping has been projecting. In fact, China has long had a security footprint in Central Asia. What is new, however, is Beijing’s increased willingness to demonstratively flex its muscle in the region.

The most obvious recent example of this and the problems it can generate occurred in December last year in Kabul, when it was reported by Indian media that Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, had arrested a cell of about ten Chinese nationals at various locations in the Afghan capital. While the exact details of what took place have not been confirmed, the principal Afghan accusation appears to have been that the cell was establishing contacts with extremist networks and trying to build an artificial Uighur cell to draw in militant Uighurs of concern to China in Afghanistan.

The incident was cause for great awkwardness on both sides, and concluded with the reported repatriation of the Chinese agents on a private jet back to Beijing. The story was only covered by Indian media, through leaks clearly calculated to embarrass Beijing and highlight nefarious Chinese activity in Afghanistan. The Chinese government did not comment, while the Afghan authorities publicly claimed nothing had happened. Yet if the contours of the reported story are accurate, then the plans by the network had a level of ambition that is novel for Chinese security services. It was also an odd plot to hatch in a country which has been broadly supportive of Chinese goals and which sees itself as fighting the same Uighur networks, given their proximity to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

Until now, Chinese security activity in Afghanistan was largely thought to be limited to sealing off China from security threats that might emanate from the country. Investment focused on helping to build and strengthen Tajikistan’s border posts with Afghanistan, increasing the capability of Gilgit-Baltistani security forces in Pakistan, and building a base for Afghan mountain forces in Badakhshan, near the mouth of the Wakhan Corridor that connects China to Afghanistan. China’s People’s Armed Police even went so far as to establish their own dedicated counterterrorism base in Tajikistan, and there are rumors of an additional Chinese base in Afghanistan. Yet none of this activity was aggressive, and rather seemed focused on cauterizing the dangers that might flow from the physical links between Afghanistan and China.

The incident in Kabul, however, shows a new level of Chinese activity that suggests a desire to tackle security issues head on. It comes amid the growing presence of Chinese private security firms in Central Asia, as well as growing pressure on local authorities to accept their presence, in contravention of local legislation. This pushiness has encroached further into the public domain in other ways, too. Du Dewen, the Chinese ambassador to Bishkek, made boosting the security of Chinese nationals and companies a priority issue during her inaugural meeting with new Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Ruslan Kazakbaev late last year. The usually staid transcript from the meeting released by the embassy highlighted both ambassador Du’s complaint and the emphatic and acquiescent response from the minister.

The other notable point about China’s security engagement with the region is that it is done for the most part by People’s Armed Police (PAP) forces, rather than the People’s Liberation Army. PAP is reportedly responsible for shoring up the border posts in Tajikistan and performing joint patrols with Afghan and Tajik forces. It has also signed agreements and carried out patrols with its counterparts in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. In December 2018, a female cadre of elite PAP Falcon Commandos provided training for their Uzbek counterparts, while in August 2019, they hosted their Kyrgyz counterparts for counterterrorism exercises in Urumqi, Xinjiang.

The appearance of PAP at the forefront of engagement with Central Asia highlights the degree to which China sees the security issues in those countries as inextricably tied to domestic security concerns. As a gendarmerie force whose primary responsibility is domestic, the PAP’s growing presence on China’s periphery raises questions about Chinese thinking on how to manage security problems in its neighborhood.

Central Asia has also become a conduit through which China has increasingly sought to target its perceived dissident Uighur community. Reports emerged in 2019 of Uighurs being arrested in Turkey, given Tajik travel documents, and placed on planes to Dushanbe, from where they were immediately flown back to China. Central Asian complicity is further suggested by the Kazakh authorities’ decision to clamp down on anti-China protesters within their own country.

In some ways, none of this is particularly new. Uighurs in Central Asia have long been a major Chinese concern. When it was officially inaugurated in 2001, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization used fighting the “three evils” of terrorism, extremism, and separatism as its foundational credo. During his famous tour of the region in 1994, which laid the groundwork for the current Silk Road visions across the region, then premier Li Peng highlighted concerns about Uighurs at every stop. Over subsequent years, rumors circulated about the Chinese pursuing Uighurs across Central Asian borders, while any dissident networks that existed in Central Asia were clamped down upon. Occasional attacks against Chinese businessmen or officials in Bishkek served as a reminder of the dangers that existed in the region, but the Chinese response largely involved pressuring local officials to do more to protect their people and go after people they did not like.

Now, however, China appears to be starting to change tack. Rather than relying on local law enforcement agencies or passing on responsibility for security to Russia, China is stepping forward with its own forces to deal with its own concerns. Locals are still expected to do their bit, but China is now establishing a footprint that will allow it to deal with matters as it would like fit in Central Asia. The fact that a growing number of regional security forces are buying high-end technical equipment from China—while their cyber infrastructure is increasingly built using Chinese hardware—gives Beijing growing leverage.

Beijing’s rise as a security actor in Central Asia is not aimed at displacing Russia from its perceived sphere of influence in some contemporary replay of the Great Game, but rather at guaranteeing Chinese interests. In many ways, it’s not a surprising move: what country is not interested in securing its own interests? It is, however, a change in China’s external behavior, which has traditionally been to pay lip service to local autonomy and Chinese non-interference. China is getting involved, and stepping ever further into the breach.