https://lucid.substack.com/p/as-china-disappears-people-and-histories
'Authoritarian states often silence critics of their policies by jailing them
or forcing them into exile. Yet they also aim to create a unified narrative
about the nation's history, and any past event that threatens the established
power structure can be subject to disappearance or revision. This can also mean
removing individuals associated with past dissent from public circulation and
public memory, so that future generations will ideally not know that such
dissent ever existed."
"Communist China is instructive in this regard. After the Chinese government
cracked down in 2019 on Hong Kong protesters who opposed the new National
Security law, they also arrested dissidents at those protests who had been
active in earlier decades, so the memory of resistance in Hong Kong would be
extinguished as well. Scrubbing all references to this history and its
protagonists on websites and search engines ensures that China's digital world
mirrors these physical removals.
As Chinese President Xi Jinping has become more draconian, disappearing more
"unacceptable" people and cultural artifacts, he has tellingly grounded his
expanding cult of personality in the precedent set by master silencer Mao
Zedong, who erased tens of millions of people and animals and targeted China's
entire high culture heritage for destruction.
"Disappearances, of one kind or another, have become the backbeat of Chinese
public life under Xi Jinping," Evan Osnos concludes in a sobering 2023
New
Yorker article. And yet we may not associate China with such disappearances,
and democracies which are dependent on and enmeshed with China in areas of
trade, manufacturing, and education have usually chosen to look the other way.
As of Jan. 2025, over one million Muslims (Uyghurs, ethnic Hui, ethnic Kazakhs,
ethnic Kyrgyz, ethnic Tajiks, and ethnic Uzbeks) have been abducted and
detained in over 1,200 camps in the Xinjiang region of China, with many subject
to forced labor and others never heard from again as they vanish into the
infrastructure of repression.
Major figures in Chinese political and business life have also continued to
vanish, the fate of each one proving the maxims:
in an authoritarian state, you are powerful, until you are not.
Everyone but the strongman must be seen as dispensable.'
Via
What Could Go Right?: Architects of Our Own Meaning
https://theprogressnetwork.org/global-well-being/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
