TheWriting on theWall: National and Global Implications of the Ruling Chinese Communist Party's Domestic and Foreign Policies

Abstract

The December 2015 crackdown on labour activists was the culmination of a year of the Chinese Communist Party regime's war on China's civil society kicked off by of the arrests of the "Feminist Five" in March followed by the infamous crackdown on civil rights lawyers that began on 5th July and lasted till August. At around the same time, from mid-October to end of December 2015, five owners and staff members of Hong Kong's Mighty Current publishing company and Causeway Bay bookshop which respectively publishes and sells politically dissident books banned by China disappeared under mysterious circumstances (including one while vacationing in Pattaya, Thailand, and another while inspecting warehouse in Hong Kong) and reemerged in mainland China under the custody of the Chinese authorities. While these volatile incidents were unfolding domestically, the year also witnessed the continued rise of China's economic might in the global system. With specific focus on the latest events unfolding from year 2015 to the present, this paper attempts to interpret such developments especially in terms of government policies with respect to the State's relations with the civil society since the leadership transition from Hu-Wen to Xi-Li administration, the implications of the global reach of China's economic might and soft power in this regard, as well as the current nature of the governing regime of the Chinese Communist Party.

Headnote

Abstract

The December 2015 crackdown on labour activists was the culmination of a year of the Chinese Communist Party regime's war on China's civil society kicked off by of the arrests of the "Feminist Five" in March followed by the infamous crackdown on civil rights lawyers that began on 5th July and lasted till August. At around the same time, from mid-October to end of December 2015, five owners and staff members of Hong Kong's Mighty Current publishing company and Causeway Bay bookshop which respectively publishes and sells politically dissident books banned by China disappeared under mysterious circumstances (including one while vacationing in Pattaya, Thailand, and another while inspecting warehouse in Hong Kong) and reemerged in mainland China under the custody of the Chinese authorities. While these volatile incidents were unfolding domestically, the year also witnessed the continued rise of China's economic might in the global system. With specific focus on the latest events unfolding from year 2015 to the present, this paper attempts to interpret such developments especially in terms of government policies with respect to the State's relations with the civil society since the leadership transition from Hu-Wen to Xi-Li administration, the implications of the global reach of China's economic might and soft power in this regard, as well as the current nature of the governing regime of the Chinese Communist Party.

Keywords: China, Chinese Communist Party, State, civil society, dissent, dissidents, weiquan, rightsdefence lawyers, labour activism, liberal democracy, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, Fascism

JEL classification: D73, D74, F52, H12

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)

1. Introduction

Recent years have witnessed several momentous developments in the political economy of the People's Republic of China (PRC) both on the domestic front and in her foreign relations. The astonishing economic performance of the country in the past four decades has truly transfixed the world, and has resulted in the astonishing projection of her financial strength around the world through her foreign special issue, IJCS, 201 4), Taiwan: Democracy, crossStrait relations and regional security (edited special issue, IJCS, 201 4) and China: Developmental model, Statecivil societal interplay and foreign relations (edited volume, 745 pp. + xxi, Institute of China Studies, 201 3). His latest research projects include the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education/University of Malaya High-Impact Research (HIR) Grant project "The China Model: Implications of the contemporary rise of China" (201 3-201 6, principal investigator) at the Department of Administrative Studies and Politics, Faculty of Economics and Administration, University of Malaya, and Suntory Foundation/University of Tokyo international research grant project "Beyond 'China threat theory' : Dialogue with China experts on the rise of China" (201 4-201 5, Malaysian component). <Email: [email protected], emileyeo@gmail. com; website: http://emileyeo5.wix.com/emileyeoh> direct investments (FDIs) especially in Africa, her "softpower" offensive including through the establishment of the Confucius Institutes across the world, and her recently pushed initiative for the setting up of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) that started operation on 25th December 201 5 with a capital of US$1 00 billion and the "One Belt, One Road" (OBOR, ... ) proposal that saw continued progress with the creation of the State-owned Silk Road Fund on 29th December 201 4 for which the Chinese government has pledged US$40 billion. Concomitantly, China's increasing military and foreign policy assertiveness in the East and South China Seas has brought her into different degrees of conflict and confrontation with her perennial nemesis Japan and her smaller Southeast Asian neighbours and their powerful Western ally, the United States ofAmerica (US).

Deriving correct interpretation of such fast-paced developments and changes has pre-occupied much of the circles of China-watchers these days, with political scientists, economists, sociologists and international relations experts focusing their respective attention on either the domestic transformation occurring within the PRC or on her foreign relations. This paper attempts to interpret such developments especially in terms of government policies with respect to the State's relations with the civil society since the leadership transition from Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao ... to Xi Jinping-Li Keqiang ... administration, and in addition, the implications of the global reach of China's economic might and softpower in this regard. While having specific focus on the latest events unfolding from year 201 5 to the present, the paper also delves into the history of imperial China in deriving its interpretation of the current nature of the governing regime of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)1 .

2. Return to the Iron Fist

In what looks like a retrogression from the trend that William Dobson observed in his book The dictator's learning curve: Inside the global battle for democracy (201 2), there is a general trend since 201 4 "that authoritarian regimes were beginning to abandon the quasi-democratic camouflage that allowed them to survive and prosper in the post-Cold War world"2, according to Freedom House's report Freedom in the World 2015 - Discarding democracy: Return to the iron fist. As discussed from Section 2 to Section 7 of this special issue's introductory article, "Political Governance and Strategic Relations: : Domestic- Foreign Policy Nexus and China's Rise in the Global System", the CCP regime led by Xi Jinping, who has projected an image of himself as an admirer of Mao Zedong ... despite what Mao did to his father Xi Zhongxun ... during the Cultural Revolution, has resorted to campaigns against dissidents reminiscent of the Mao era, including televised confessions, as the latest ones by the abducted publishers and book distributors Gui Minhai ..., Lui Por ..., Cheung Chi-ping ... and Lam Wing-kei ... (owners and staffof Hong Kong ...'s Mighty Current publishing company ( ) and Causeway Bay Books (...) owned by Mighty Current since 201 4) somberly or tearfully admitting to smuggling illicit dissident books into China (and in the case of Gui Minhai also to a hit-and-run case a decade ago), and Swedish activist Peter Dahlin who was arrested in January 201 6 for his activities in China with his human rights group, the Chinese Urgent Action Working Group (CUAWG), offering training and support to Chinese human rights lawyers who were trying to provide justice to the country's disenfranchised and downtrodden. Peter Dahlin was paraded on China state television confessing that "I violated Chinese law through my activities here [...] I have caused harm to the Chinese government. I have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. I apologise sincerely for this and I am very sorry that this has happened."3 Several other "suspects" have also been made to confess their crimes on television recently, including Beij ing rights-defence lawyer Zhang Kai ... who admitted on TV his crimes of "violating state law, disrupting social order, harming national security" (...).4

Besides, the CCP regime is "also resorting to criminal and administrative detention to restrict activists instead of softer tactics like house arrest or informal interrogations", and according to FIW 2015, has "made use of one of the Cold War's most chilling instruments, the placement of dissidents in psychiatric hospitals". This infamous and inhuman Soviet instrument of repression has also made a comeback in today's Russia.5 Whether Gui Minhai, Peter Dahlin, Gao Yu ... or various others in the spate of televised self-incriminations since President Xi Jinping took power three years ago represents an adaptation of the kind of forced public confessions by "enemies of the state" in the Mao era - especially during the tumultuous period of Cultural Revolution - to new technology that now makes it possible for everybody to see this on prime-time television, as New York University's Professor Jerome Cohen, a foremost scholar on China's legal system, observes. Recalling that Xi Jinping's father Xi Zhongxun, Mao's close comrade during the Chinese Soviet period, Long March and the Civil War era, who was publicly abused and humiliated during the Cultural Revolution, in fact advocated in 1 983 the enactment of a law that would guarantee everyone in China the right to express differing opinion, Professor Cohen told CNN, "I hope Xi follows his father's advice rather than continuing along this path. But I don't have my hopes too high."6

3. PRC the Racketeer State

Analysing historical European experience, the late Professor Charles Tilly in his 1 985 paper "War making and state making as organized crime" postulates that "a portrait of war makers and state makers as coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs bears a far greater resemblance to the facts than do its chief alternatives: the idea of a social contract, the idea of an open market in which operators of armies and states offer services to willing consumers, the idea of a society whose shared norms and expectations call forth a certain kind of government." (p. 1 69) While Tilly warns of the "faulty implicit comparisons between today's Third World and yesterday's Europe", one can nevertheless argue that a Third World country like China which is not post-colonial has like the European countries her military development and apparatus for protection developed from within rather than inherited from any colonial masters.

According to Tilly, a "racketeer" government exists ifwe

[...] consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction. Governments' provision of protection, by this standard, often qualifies as racketeering. To the extent that the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary or are consequences of its own activities, the government has organized a protection racket. Since governments themselves commonly simulate, stimulate, or even fabricate threats of external war and since the repressive and extractive activities of governments often constitute the largest current threats to the livelihoods of their own citizens, many governments operate in essentially the same ways as racketeers.

(Tilly, 1 985: 1 71 )

This is the governance model of a ruling political party whose paramount concern being its own perpetual unchallenged rule is resorting to all means, both State-dictated legal (anti-subversion laws, sedition acts, internal security acts, social harmony laws, anti-terrorism laws, anti-secession laws etc. which are further twisted in practice to serve the purpose of muzzling free speech and harassing or jailing dissidents) and extra-judiciary (using agents or unidentified thugs to harass, beat up and kidnap and even attempting to murder dissident writers, editors, publishers, book distributors, journalists and even civil rights lawyers) and a combination of both to provide its criminal action with a legal topping, or in official parlance, to "preserve social harmony" of its "glorious era of peace and prosperity" (taiping shengshi ... ) against the threat of "a small group of people" (yi xiaozui ren ... ) who are in complicity with foreign enemies to try to discredit the CCP government and to disrupt social harmony or to split the nation.

3.1. A CCPdefined Social Contract

The CCP government-defined threats to the country and people, internal and external, are identified, whether they be non-governmental civilsocietal groups like the New Citizens' Movement (Zhongguo Xin Gongmin Yundong ... ), or worker's groups independent of the State-sanction All-China Federation ofTrade Unions (ACFTU), or outspoken academics or activists engaged in ethnic minority rights advocacy, civil rights lawyers who take up cases which the government wish the society to ignore, or any individual writers, artists and grassroots activists who become too vocal in criticising CCP government's policies, not to mention those more outright democracy activists who directly challenge CCP's self-declared moral right to deny Chinese citizens free political choice through multi-party elections. Continuous crackdowns, like Mao's campaign against the "five black types" (hei wu lei ... , i.e. landlords, wealthy peasants, antirevolutionaries, bad elements and rightists) during the Cultural Revolution, have to be conducted to protect the Chinese nation from such threats, and in this process, the Party asks for the unquestioning loyalty and support from the Chinese people - not as a choice, but as an obligation, a CCP-defined social contract.

Like the great emperors in China's past, whether they be Ch' in Shih-Huangti ... (Qin Shihuangdi, the "First Emperor of Ch' in" whom Chairman Mao idolized, whose dynasty name "Ch' in" gave rise to "China", the name by which the country has since been known to the West, and whose self-invented title huangti ("emperor") would continue to be borne by Chinese rulers for the following two millennia), Han Wuti (Han Wudi, whose dynasty name "Han " became the major autoglossonym7 of China's dominant ethnic group that constitutes 92 per cent of the country's population today), T'ang T'ai-tsung (Tang Taizong), Sung Tai-tsu ...(Song Taizu) or Genghis Khan8 (Yüan Tai-tsu ..., Yuan Taizu) whom Mao Zedong evoked in his celebrated poem Snow (...), or the Ch' ing ... (Qing) Dynasty emperors K'ang-hsi ... (Kangxi), Yung-cheng ... (Yongzheng) and Ch' ien-lung ... (Qianlong) in famed writer Eryue He ... 's novel trilogy and the phenomenal television series adapted therefrom, or First Emperor of Ch' in again in celebrity director Zhang Yimou ... 's national-glory-through-unity-is-all-that-counts epic film Hero (Yingxiong ...), today's CCP demands to be considered a modern sage-king, a truly benevolent dictator that has brought renewed glory and prosperity, unity and stability to the long-suffering Chinese nation, and a harbinger of future hope of China, and it asks, as a moral right, that all dissenters and nonconformists, domestic and overseas, to be silenced and let it do its good work.

3.2. State Racketeerism with Fascist Moral Rectitude

The CCP regime, in other words, embodies the late Professor Charles Tilly's concept of a racketeer government, par excellence, yet with a professed pretension of moral rectitude absent in private racketeer syndicates. One could say that the term could be applied to any other authoritarian regimes - in Russia, in Thailand, in Zimbabwe, etc. - but these regimes lack, and are conscious of lacking, a moral legitimacy in maintaining and prolonging authoritarian rule. Hence these authoritarian regimes have to manuoevre within a constitutionally promised multiparty liberal democratic system which exists at least in writing in a general format, as generally described in William Dobson's The dictator's learning curve: Inside the global battle for democracy (201 2). While Dobson includes China too, the Leninist backbone of this "degenerative totalitarian" regime (see Hsu, 2003) run by arguably the most successful triad in Chinese history nevertheless provides it with a Fascist moral rectitude for its authoritarian rule and hence there needs not be a pretension of free political choice or a multiparty electoral system wherein to manuoevre. In this ultimate realm of State racketeerism, anyone who complains about the price of protection (denial of civil liberties and political freedom) has to be a "subversive" (bending on subverting State power) who are often accused of committing another crime (as in the high-profile case of Gao Yu) - leaking State secrets by connecting with foreign human rights organisations or journalists, akin to the ultimate sacrilege of breaking the code of omertà in the world of the most well-known private protection racket, La Cosa Nostra - the Sicilian Mafia.

Such fear bordering on outright political and ideological xenophobia towards presumed "collusion with outside forces" which has become part of the common charges against journalists and academics whom the Party-State is coming after was even loudly expressed against the country's highly respected and influential government think tank, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in the early period of the Xi Jinping administration's intense crackdown on liberal intellectuals and activists, and tightening of its grip on the media, amidst his high-profile sweeping anti-corruption and ideological campaigns targeting the civil service and state-owned enterprises, when a senior party discipline inspector accused CASS of being "infiltrated by foreign forces" and "conducting illegal collusion during [politically] sensitive times". During a session on Xi Jinping's thoughts on party discipline at CASS in June 201 4, Zhang Yingwei who ...headed a group sent to CASS by the Communist Party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) said the academy had "ideological problems" including "illegal collusion" between CASS experts and foreign interests at sensitive times, allowing undue foreign influence in sensitive issues, using the Internet to promote theories that played into the hands of foreign powers and using academic research as a guise for other purposes.9 This represented the same rationale behind the action taken against the supposedly politically harmless "Feminist Five", the most sustained crackdown on the NGOs and civil rights lawyers witnessed in two decades and the arrest of Peter Dahlin, notably sets the stage for the Xi Jinping administration to pass a controversial new law with a key element to cut foreign funding to Chinese NGOs and possibly stricter governing of foreign NGOs in the country on grounds of national security.1 0

To the extent that the threat - towards social harmony, towards national unity and towards PRC's sovereignty claim over almost all of East and South China Seas - that the Party-State implicitly or explicitly evokes to justify its repressive actions to "protect" its citizens are fabricated, exaggerated or entirely the consequences of its own activities in the sense that the "threats" are challenges against Party-defined "democratisation with one-party leadership under socialism with Chinese characteristics" - supposedly a new path of democratisation that China has created and ushered in in its role as a new-model democratising country (Zhou, 201 3: 11 3-11 4) - the Party-State, in Charles Tilly's model, operates in essentially the same ways as a protection racket (Tilly, 1 985: 1 71 ).

4. From "Degenerative Totalitarianism" to Fascist Nationalist Leninist State Corporatism

Representing an ideology, "Fascism" has always been a controversial term on whose exact nature historians, political scientists and scholars in other fields have long engaged in heated debate. George Orwell, in his As I Please column essay "What is Fascism?" for Tribune on March 24, 1 944, a day when the Nazi's SS were murdering 335 political prisoners in the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome, describes the word "Fascism" as "almost entirely meaningless", and being used in conversation even more wildly than in print, for he had "heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bullfighting, the 1 922 Committee, the 1 941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else."11 Yet, he did admit that

[...] underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic [...] even the people who recklessly fling the word 'Fascist' in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By 'Fascism' they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist' .

That said, Orwell did recognise Fascism as "also a political and economic system" while lamenting that:

Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one - not yet, anyway. [...] All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.1 2

The late Bertram Myron Gross, American social scientist and Professor of Political Science at Hunter College of the City University of New York, in his provocative book Friendly fascism: The new face of power in America (1 980) gave a more specific description for "classic Fascism" (as in Benito Mussolini's Italy and Adolf Hitler's Germany) as depicted in Table 1 .

Nevertheless, the definitional conundrum remains. "For much of the U.S. left, fascism is little more than an epithet - simply another way to say 'bad' or 'very bad' applied loosely to quite different social movements as well as to various aspects and elements of capitalist reaction", says Don Hamerquist in "Fascism & anti-fascism" (2002), "But for those with more of a ' theoretical bent' fascism in essence is, and always has been, a 'gorilla' form of capitalism. That is, fascism is a system of capitalist rule that would be more reactionary, more repressive, more imperialist, and more racist and genocidal than current 'normality' of ruling class policy."1 4 In opposition to that position, Hamerquist is of the opinion that Fascism "is not a paper tiger or a symbolic target but a real and immediate danger" whose nature, though, is not self-evident a thus requires clear explanation and the rejection of some conventional wisdom. "Fascism is not a danger because it is ruling class policy or is about to be adopted as policy. Not even because it could have major influences on this policy", says Hamerquist with regard to the danger of today's (neo-)fascism for the left, "The real danger presented by the emerging fascist movements and organizations is that they might gain a mass following among potentially insurgent workers and declassed strata through an historic default of the left. This default is more than a possibility, it is a probability, and if it happens it will cause massive damage to the potential for a liberatory anti-capitalist insurgency."1 5

Without seeing Fascism too specifically from the perspective of the left, a workable definition of Fascism today, instead of simply using it as a label for some movement or governing model one considers "bad" or "very bad", comes from Mathews N. Lyons. Lyons, an independent scholar who studies reactionary and supremacist movements, describes Fascism's approach to politics as "both populist - in that it seeks to activate ' the people' as a whole against perceived oppressors or enemies - and elitist - in that it treats the people's will as embodied in a select group, or often one supreme leader, from whom authority proceeds downward."1 6

Placed in the context of China's ruling CCP, there is no lack of perceived enemies. There is always Japan, about whose war atrocities in World War II the CCP has never pulled back from reminding its compliant subjects (including the fenqing ... - literally "angry youths" - who are never hesitant to take to the streets or resort to cyber bullying to defend national glory as far as their actions would not get them into trouble with their CCP overlords) while the CCP imposed a forced public amnesia over its own atrocities committed in its 1 989 crackdown, and whose leaders' expression of regret over war atrocities would never satisfy the demand for apologies the CCP has never forgotten to stoke up while the CCP itself has never apologised for all the atrocities it inflicted on China's citizens during Mao's years of horror and in the 1 989 Beij ing massacre and submitted them to the citizens' judgment through the ballot box. There is America, who is meddlesome, imperialist, hegemonic and always bending on supporting the splittists working to break up the great Chinese nation. And there is any party who has the audacity to insist that Taiwan (ROC) is an independent, sovereign country, Chinese or non- Chinese, or to support the Tibetans' , Uyghurs' or Hong Kong people's struggle for freedom and autonomy, and thus "hurts the feelings of the Chinese people". And among members of the ethnic minorities, anyone who expresses ingratitude towards the Han-dominated central State by demanding real autonomy, political and economic, beyond the ostensible representation of "chairmanship" of an ethnic "autonomous" region, and the exercise of the right of ethnic self-determination to resist internal colonialism and assimilation to the dominant Han ... Chinese culture and language, i.e. to resist to be just politically-correct "exotic" minorities1 7.

Lyons states further that Fascism "seeks to organise a cadre-led mass movement in a drive to seize state power [...] to forcibly subordinate all spheres of society to its ideological vision of organic community, usually through a totalitarian state [and both] as a movement and a regime [...] uses mass organizations as a system of integration and control, and uses organised violence to suppress opposition, although the scale of violence varies widely."1 8 Though seems to have undergone tremendous transformation in image and essence since the Mao days, the Leninist nature of CCP's governing model can never be doubted or ignored. As Lenin was sometimes said to have stood Marx on his head (in an analogy to Marx's claim that he had stood Hegel on his head), Lenin's main ideological contrast vis-à-vis Marx in the former's support of the idea of a dictatorship (in contrast to Marx's view of the state as a feature of class society to be used by a politically conscious working class to bring about the transfer of power from the bourgeoisie and then be abolished) has clearly remained the ideological mainstay from the Maoist era to the present post-economic reform era of the CCP:

Now we are repeating what was approved by the Central EC two years ago ... Namely, that the Soviet Socialist Democracy is in no way inconsistent with the rule and dictatorship of one person; that the will of a class is at best realised by a Dictator who sometimes will accomplish more by himself and is frequently more needed.

(Lenin's "On Economic Reconstruction" speech on 31 st March 1 920, in V.I. Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 1 7, p. 89. First Russian Edition)1 9

Or dictatorship of a Party which would not in any way tolerate any real or potential challenge to its monopoly of political power through demand for multi-party competitive elections that it labels as a foreign ploy to bring about a "colour revolution" or "peaceful evolution" to destabilise China, to "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people".

While being hostile to Marxism, liberalism, and conservatism, yet borrowing concepts and practices from all three, Fascism, as Lyons points out further, "rejects the principles of class struggle and workers' internationalism as threats to national or racial unity [...] rejects the liberal doctrines of individual autonomy and rights, political pluralism, and representative government [and] often romanticises the past as inspiration for national rebirth."20

5. Romanticising Dynastic Glory: Projecting Taiping Shengshi (Era of Peace and Prosperity) of a Continued CCP Future

On a recent evening at an arts center by the Thames, one young Chinese man stood up, glaring at the author [Ma Jian, the dissident novelist forced to leave China in 1 987] on the podium. Eyes brimming with self-righteous earnestness, he said: "You can praise democracy as much as you like, but how can you ignore that China has lifted 300 million people out of poverty in the past 1 5 years? That is a major human-rights achievement. Russia and India have democracy, but look where they are," he exclaimed, turning to the rest of the audience.

(Salil Tripathi, 2008b: 37)21

The "young Chinese man" referred to by London-based writer Salil Tripathi is today archetypical of a world-wide club of Sinophiliac cheerleaders - businesses, corporate leaders, diplomats, academics, overseas Chinese businessmen and community leaders. Just a proof of how money and/or nationalistic glory can buy loyalty, obedience, sycophancy, and indifference to or oblivion of the trampling on human rights, freedom and human dignity. As mentioned, a cultural element cannot be ignored, neither can historical experience. To judge the average Chinese citizens' and overseas Chinese community leaders' attitude, outlook, worldview and behaviour from the point of view of the Western world with its deep-rooted Renaissance values and the French revolutionary ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité is futile. The cultural gap between these and the millennia-long dogmatic imperial-sanctioned Confucian worldview is wide.

5.1. The "Peace of Suppression": An Existential Choice?

Chinese writer Mo Yan ... (meaning "don't speak", nom de plume of Guan Moye ... ), also vice-chairman of the Communist Partybacked, State-run Chinese Writers' Association, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature of 201 2 was heavily criticised by many Chinese dissident writers and artists including, among others, Ma Jian ... , Yu Jie ..., Ai Weiwei ..., Wen Yunchao ..., Mo Zhixu ... and Zhang Yihe ... for a complete lack of solidarity with and support for other Chinese writers and intellectuals who were punished or detained by the CCP regime for exercising their rights of free expression, and more specifically for being a member of a team of a hundred prominent writers in 2011 to hand-copy Mao Zedong's influential "Yan'an Talks on Literature and Art" (... ) in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the speech Mao delivered on 28th May 1 942 that forced writers to put their talent in the service of the Chinese Communist Party. This is a speech wherein Mao described the writer's responsibility to place politics before art, how art should serve Communism - a speech that began decades of government control over Chinese writers and artists, a speech that served as the intellectual hand shackles on Chinese writers and artists throughout the Mao era, then again being held up for adulation by the CCP regime after the 1 989 Beij ing massacre, a speech with which Mo Yan not only publicly agreed but has gone further to justify as a historical necessity that played a positive role in its time. This is not a surprise in view ofMo Yan's role as the vice-chairman of the CCP Staterun Chinese Writers' Association, an instrument of thought control over China's writers, his defending State censorship on writings as something as necessary as airport security checks22, and his walking out of a literary symposium at the Frankfurt Book Fair of October 2009 along with Chinese officials to protest the presence of two dissident writers, Dai Qing ... and Bei Ling ...23.

The dedicate position of the "State writer" Mo Yan has resulted in a series of embarrassing events three years earlier at the 2009 Frankfurt book fair, in addition to his infamous walkout, as The New York Times's correspondent Didi Kirsten Tatlow who covered the event relates24:

After his opening speech at Frankfurt, Mr. Mo seemed to disappear. My notes record: "Things went downhill from there. Mo skipped his first public reading, where he had been due to inaugurate a new stage. I arrived five minutes early to find long faces at the stand of Horlemann Verlag, German publisher of 'Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out,'" Mr. Mo's new book.

"Fifteen minutes ago, according to a tight-lipped man with a company name tag on his lapel, someone rang to cancel. He didn't identify himself, but said he was with the Chinese delegation. No reason given. A slight? The man shrugged. His face said it all. Later, Mo would skip a major event at the Blue Sofa, hosted by German state television broadcaster ZDF," my notes continue.

According to literary agents and publishers, Mr. Mo was irritated by the endless political questions and, along with many delegation members, deliberately avoided events. Mr. Don't Speak became Mr. No Show.

Mo Yan's acquiescence on CCP's brutal suppression on dissent in fact led to a joke circulating after Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 201 2: "China has three Nobel Prize winners. The first can't get in [referring to dissident writer Gao Xingj ian who took French citizenship. laureate of Nobel Prize in Literature, 2000] , the second can't get out [referring to still-jailed dissident writer and democracy activist Liu Xiaobo, laureate of Nobel Peace Prize, 201 0] , and the third is 'Don't Speak'"25

It is probably too easy for people not living under the boot of this ruthless authoritarian regime to heap harsh criticisms on those intellectuals who have chosen to censor themselves and work with their overlord, as Perry Link concludes his article "Does this writer deserve the Prize?" in The New York Review of Books (6th December 201 2):

Chinese writers today, whether "inside the system" or not, all must choose how they will relate to their country's authoritarian government. This inevitably involves calculations, trade-offs, and the playing of cards in various ways. Liu Xiaobo's choices have been highly unusual. Mo Yan's responses are more "normal," closer to the center of a bell curve. It would be wrong for spectators like you and me, who enjoy the comfort of distance, to demand that Mo Yan risk all and be another Liu Xiaobo. But it would be even more wrong to mistake the clear difference between the two.

As Mo Yan himself put it bluntly, "A lot of people are now saying about me, 'Mo Yan is a state writer.' It's true, insofar as like the authors Yu Hua [...] and Su Tong [...] , I get a salary from the Ministry of Culture, and get my social and health insurance from them too. That's the reality in China. Overseas, people all have their own insurance, but without a position, I can't afford to get sick in China."26 As Salman Rushdie, the thirteenth on The Times's 2008 list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1 945 and the literary world's most well-known fugitive from dogmatic terror, said in an interview by writer Salil Tripathi (2008a)27, "Defending free speech in absolute terms may take us into a turbulent, hurtful arena. If we say nothing, we will have peace. But it is the peace of suppression, and that's the choice we have to make." It is also a choice of safety via ignorance and selective amnesia, as so many intellectuals in imperial China had long learned as a safe way to live and how the Sung dynasty poet Su Shih ... (Su Shi, also Su Tung-p'o ..., Su Dongpo) lamented in his poem On the birth of a son (...):

...

Translation28:

Families when a child is born

Hope it will turn out intelligent.

I, through intelligence

Having wrecked my whole life,

Only hope that the baby will prove

Ignorant and stupid.

Then he'll be happy all his days

And grow into a cabinet minister.

Some, like Mo Yan and myriad others, have chosen the peace of suppression. But as Lao Tzu ... (c. 571 -471 BC) said, " ... " [The people do not fear at all to die; / What's gained therefore by threat'ning them with death?] (Tao Te Ching ..., Chapter 74), some rare breed like Liu Xiaobo ... or Ilham Tohti and other dissidents past and present have made an unusual choice and opted for personal turbulence in defending their rights and dignity as writers, academics, citizens and those of their fellow citizens.

However, in hand-copying Mao's "Yan'an Talks on Literature and Art", Mo Yan was just a new scholar following the line of venerated Chinese scholars over the dynasties flashing their loyalty for the infallible Son of Heaven while lamenting the poor masses plight in the hands of the corrupt officials. Thus was drawn the line in the sand going beyond which to challenge the emperor's divine right to rule, his mandate from heaven, would be to bring doom on oneself. It is easy to attribute the scholars "blind" loyalty to the emperor as Confucian culture, but in practical terms, it all boils down to basic survival - a compromise in principle that they have to make while trying to work within the system to sort out problems and injustices faced by the masses. After all, what can a dead scholar or one who is rotting in jail do for the betterment of the world?

The CCP's argument - one which the cheerleaders are rallying around - is simple: it is demanding the people to abide by a basic compromise - a governing principle some call "market-Leninism", as described by Nicholas Kristoffand Sheryl WuDunn (1 995), or capitalism with Chinese characteristics: what Bertolt Brecht described as "Erst kommt das fressen und dann die moral" [morality can only follow food] or Salil Tripathi summed up pithily, "rice bowl 1 , free speech 0".29

Culture-based arguments have their limitations, of course. While not denying that external factors (and American foreign policy post-World War II or during the Cold War) were playing in the democratisation of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, the fact that these three East Asian countries are able to sustain their human rights- and free speechrespecting vibrant, stable liberal multi-party democratic systems ever since despite their similarly imperial absolutist Confucian past, seems to be flying in the face of such cultural determinism. On the other hand, the fact that another Asian giant, India, a multi-party liberal democracy, has also been able to liftnearly 1 00 million people out of absolute poverty since the country's own economic reforms began in 1 991 - without having to curb civil liberties and political freedom or to suppress dissent - is also clearly flying in the face of the great Chinese compromise that CCP is trying to convince everyone as inevitable.30

However, Mo Yan was not alone in this expression of sycophancy and servility at their best. With him hand-copying Mao's "Yan'an Talks" were a hundred of China's other prominent writers and artists, including well-known personalities like He Jingzhi ..., Wang Meng ..., Eryue He and Jia Ping'ao ... .

5.2. Imperial Glory Redux: The FeelGood Factor?

Eryue He (nom de plume of Ling Jiefang ...) is best known for his biographical novels of three Ch' ing-Dynasty emperors - K'ang-hsi, Yung-cheng and Ch' ien-lung - which have all been adapted into awardwinning television series in China. Both the books and the television series had turned into quite a phenomenon in China and Overseas Chinese communities outside China and made Eryue He some sort of a celebrity writer. Like celebrated director Zhang Yimou's star-studded, national-unity-is-all-that-counts 2002 epic film Yingxiong (Hero), the success of Eryue He's "three emperors" series of books (1 988-1 996) and television series (1 997-2002) adapted from them significantly reflects today's newly revived pride coming with rising economic and military strength which the CCP has effectively exploited to promote a new mix of patriotism-induced nationalism to mobilise loyal support for the Party-State.

The intelligentsia and masses have indeed responded well - witness the continuing great success of the sedulously crafted films and television series on China's past great emperors that coated brutality and despotism with beautiful set, scenery and choreography, intoxicating audience with the prime sense of national greatness by pushing the judgment of social justice and the masses' freedom and dignity into negligible importance (Liu, 2009: 203-204), as a Sicilian proverb says, "Cu è surdu, orbu e taci, campa cent'anni 'mpaci" [he who is deaf, blind, and silent will live a hundred years in peace] . In this regard China's prisoner of conscience and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo in Daguo chenlun ... [great nation drowning] (2009) sees the present wave of rising nationalistic daguo jueqi ... (the rise of a great nation) sentiments that the CCP is riding on as not simply a result of CCP's ideological indoctrination but rather rooted in the traditional Great Han-ism and the egocentrism of t' ienhsia ... ("under the heaven", tianxia) mentality (Liu, 2009: 201 -202) which was related to the worldview of "..." ("all land under the heaven belongs to the Emperor and all people on the land extending to the coast are subjects of the Emperor", from the classic Tso Chuan (Zuo Zhuan) compiled c. 389 BC).

5.3. Political Culture in Transformation

One of the earliest definitions of political culture is: "the system of empirical beliefs, expressive symbols, and values, which defines the situation in which political action takes place" - that given by Harvard professor Sidney Verba (1 965: 51 3). It has been observed how Marxism was transformed when it came into contact with traditional Chinese political culture and turned into the dynastic, semi-Confucian political hybrid of Maoism and other brands in Confucian East Asia (e.g.., Vietnam, but especially North Korea), or in the religious domain how Buddhism was transformed when it merged with traditional Taoist- Confucian tradition and gave rise to Mahayana Buddhism in China or how it meshed with traditional Tibetan beliefs and gave rise to Lamaism. Back to political development, it has been observed how the transplanted liberal democracy brought in and imposed by the American victors on post-World War II Japan merged with the local Confucian-Shintoist tradition and worldview and the vestiges of the former feudal class system to give rise to the distinctive deferential political culture and reverence for authority which students of the East Asian developmental model note with theoretical enthusiasm in trying to explain the economic success of Japan and the four East Asian Tigers.

Today's CCP's success in not only keeping its citizens cowed but actually in convincing most of its economically contented, patriotically fulfilled deferential subjects of their fortune to finally have an enlightened ruler (mingjun...) cannot be fully grasped without looking back into the long dynastic imperial history ofChina that shaped the deep-rooted political culture of the country, as we have seen earlier in the paper. After all, as Martin Jacques stressed, China is not a nationstate, but more than that, a civilisational state.31

5.4. Imperial Heritage

It is not too far offif we say that the PRC embodies the real essence of the traditional Chinese civilisational state. PRC is the real inheritor of the Chinese political tradition maintained through the millennia, whether in terms of the CCP State's interaction with its citizens, its dealings with the minority-inhabited frontier regions, or its foreign policy. The ROC on mainland is but an aberrational interlude whose original ideals had never been realised. China watchers in the West love to comment that despite admitting the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and the failure of Mao Zedong's radical collectivist economic policy today's new leaders of the CCP would not discredit Mao because to do so would be shaking the foundation of the CCP's legitimacy. The implication is: what Mao represents is in all practicality dead. In reality, is this really so?

There is one most celebrated poem ofMao Zedong, Snow ( ...)32, in which Mao compared himself to the founding emperors of Ch' in (Qin), Han, T'ang (Tang) and Sung (Song) dynasties and Genghis Khan, the founder of the ancient Mongol empire that included Yüandynasty China. The poem was most often seen as an expression ofMao's self-aggrandisement:

...

Translation33:

Look at the landscape of northern China:

The vast frozen land is covered with ice,

And the snow flits far-flung in the sky.

On both sides of the GreatWall,

The empty wilderness survives;

From upriver to downstream,

The roaring currents disappear.

The mountains dance like silver snakes,

The highlands slither like huge wax elephants,

As though they would like to compete with the heavenly God to see

who is higher.

When one glances at it on a fine day,

The land turns into a fair lady, who'd make-up with rouge, and

garmented in white -

That is extremely elegant and charming.

The territory is so gorgeous, and enchantment

That had lured countless heroes to rush in, bend and bow.

What a pity, the First Emperor ofCh' in and EmperorWu ofHan

Were men lack of literary grace;

Emperor T'ai-tsung ofT'ang and Emperor T'ai-tsu of Sung

Were short of spirit and strength.

That proud son ofHeaven,

Genghis Khan,

Knew only how to stretch the bow to shoot huge eagles.

Alas, they are now gone as history:

The real great hero,

Is coming up now.

It is notable that all of these great emperors - First Emperor of the Ch' in Dynasty (..., ruling his unified China from 220 to 21 0 BC), Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty ( ..., ruling China from 1 40 to 87 BC), Emperor T'ai-tsung of the T'ang Dynasty ( ..., ruling China from AD 626 to 649), Emperor T'ai-tsu of the Sung (Song) Dynasty ( ..., ruling China from AD 960 to 976) and Genghis Khan (founder of the Mongol Empire that included Yüan-dynasty (AD 1 271-1 368) China; posthumously declared the founder of the Yüan Dynasty as Emperor T'ai-tsu (...)) - whom Mao compared himself to and aspired to surpass in achievement were empire builders and/or dynasty founders who no doubt contributed to how China looks today. Nevertheless, one should not ignore the fact that each of them was also murderer of hundreds of thousands of innocent people through military campaigns and conquests which often bordered on the genocidal, and in the case of Genghis Khan, a genocidal maniac whose trail ofmurder through Asia to Europe took at least forty million lives - a feat surpassed in the league of murderous dictators only by Mao himself and the CCP he led through the disastrous Great Leap Forward (dayuejin ...), the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (wuchanjieji wenhua dageming ...) years ofmadness and various other murderous political campaigns for which the CCP till today has never apologised to the people or submitted to the judgement of the people through the ballot.

However, re-reading it from a broader perspective, this poem of Mao, definitely reflecting the outlook that CCP represents or rather what Mao would want it to represent, shows us a CCP that equates its era of governance to the greatest heights of the Chinese dynasties. After all, the era of a founding emperor (as referred mostly to in Mao's poem Snow) was usually the strongest part of a dynasty - Ch' in Shih-huangti, Han Kao-tsu ... (Han Gaozu), T'ang T'ai-tsung (second emperor of the T'ang Dynasty but also the co-founder of the dynasty), Sung T'ai-tsu, Kublai Khan34 (Yüan Shih-tsu ..., Yuan Shizu), Ming T'ai-tsu ... (Ming Taizu) ... but sometimes the second or third emperor's reign too like those of Yung-cheng, K'ang-hsi and Ch' ien-lung of the Ch' ing Dynasty - before the dynasty began to go into decline (although in the case of Han Wu-ti, he was the seventh and longest-reigning emperor of the Han dynasty).

5.5. A Global "Chinoiserie" Revival

Such image of grandeur is selling well too beyond China's borders further feeding the unending adulation of the universal Sinophiles, which Dirlik and Prazniak (201 2) compare to the Western Chinoiserie during the 1 7th and 1 8th Centuries, and dampening any criticism of the CCP regime's brutal repression of dissent at home:

[...] criticism of the PRC seems perfunctory when compared to threats of embargoes and wars against comparable dictatorial regimes. Power relations, economic interests, and a long standing culturalist fascination with China combine to set China apart from other such regimes. Indeed, there has been an ongoing celebration of the PRC's development under the leadership of the Communist Party that recalls memories of the Chinoiserie that took Europe by storm three centuries ago.

(Dirlik and Prazniak, 201 2: 290)

Nevertheless, while these ages of national grandeur were eras when China reached its highest glory in the ancient world, they also represented ages of great political brutality as shown in the next two subsections below.

On the other hand, Mao had an anti-Confucian streak and he clearly preferred the Legalism (fajia ... ) and this flavour is obvious in CCP's policies till now (e.g. the sometimes brutal implementation of one-child policy). Mao revered the First Emperor of the Ch' in Dynasty who reportedly burned Confucian canons and buried Confucian scholars alive.35 This Maoist political-philosophical line has not changed in the CCP (e.g. Zhang Yimou's epic movie Hero, set during the reign of Ch' in Shih-Huangti) although that does not hinder today's CCP from exploiting Confucius' name where it find it useful, e.g., the Confucius Institutes, to project itself as a true guardian ofChinese traditions.

5.6. Repression during the Shengshi (Era of Prosperity): The Imperial Chinese Tradition of Literary Inquisition

The most important weapon in my arsenal is the dictionary. Let me choose the words ... by which you think and I will tell you what and how to think.

(Joseph Stalin (...), Words, n.p., n.d., quoted in Sleeper, 1 987, p. 1 91 )

K'ang-hsi's, Yung-cheng's and Ch' ien-lung's reigns did bring about long-term peace, stability and prosperity after years of war and chaos, but they were also eras of ruthless suppression of dissent. K'ang-hsi is considered one of China's greatest emperors who managed to bring all of Han China proper, Taiwan, the Manchuria region as well part of the Russian Far East also known as Outer Manchuria, both Inner and Outer Mongolia (today's Republic of Mongolia), and Tibet proper under Ch' ing Empire's control, and began the "Prosperous Era of K'ang-hsi and Ch' ien-lung" (...) or "Prosperous Era of K'ang-hsi, Yungcheng and Ch' ien-lung" (...) or "High Ch' ing" (1 683-1 839), which outlived him. Yung-cheng's reign (1 722 till his death in 1 735) while much shorter than that of his father (K'ang-hsi, 1 661 till his death in 1 722) and of his son (Ch' ien-lung, 1 735-1 796 but retained ultimate power as emperor emeritus until his death in 1 799), represented the continuation of the era of peace and prosperity (taiping shengshi) initiated by his father, further establishing Ch' ing-Dynasty China as the most powerful empire in Asia and extending the Pax Sinica began under his father's reign later known as the "Prosperous Era of K'ang-hsi, Yung-cheng and Ch' ien-lung". Ch' ien-lung's reign saw the continuation of the era before decline set in towards the end of his rule.

Nevertheless, largely ignored by the masses who are mesmerised by the image of national glory promoted in today's commercialised popular culture is the ruthless and gruesome suppression of dissent during that era of Pax Sinica under the three Ch' ing emperors, not to mention the human miseries inflicted upon people in the frontier regions in Ch' ing China's military campaigns to expand and maintain its empire. Among China's dynastic rulers, the Ch' ing emperors are particularly notorious for their use of literary inquisitions (wenziyu ... , or speech crime / yi yan ruzui ... - referring to imperial Chinese courts' official persecution of intellectuals for their writings).

Literary persecution has been recorded since the Ch' in Dynasty over two thousand years ago, and has been practiced by almost all successive dynasties ruling China. While there are records of literary persecutions during the Ming Dynasty which were most severe at the beginning when Chu Yüan-chang ... (Zhu Yuanzhang), i.e. Hongwu Emperor ( ..., temple name "Ming T'ai-tsu"), first founded the dynasty, literary inquisition was most severe during the Ch' ing dynasty which began with isolated cases during the reigns of the founding emperor Shun-chih ... (Shunzhi, actually the third emperor of the Ch' ing Dynasty but the first Ch' ing emperor to rule over China) and K'ang-hsi, and then evolved into a pattern, reaching its zenith during the reign of the last emperor (Ch' ien-lung) of the "Prosperous Era of K'ang-hsi, Yung-cheng and Ch' ien-lung". An estimated 1 51 ,723 volumes of about 3,000 literary titles were destroyed by the inquisition during the Ch' ien-lung period, and censorship, deletion and modification were conducted upon many of those volumes that had been categorised into the Ssuk'u Ch'üanshu (Siku Quanshu, the Complete Library in Four Branches of ... Literature officially commissioned by Ch' ien-lung Emperor). In these campaigns of literary inquisition, if the authority decided that any words or sentences were derogatory or cynical towards the ruling regime, a search for copies (sometimes thousands) of the offending work would be conducted to destroy them, and the author or artist could be executed by beheading or the even more gruesome lingch'ih ... (lingchi, or ..., the lingering death by slow slicing) - an extremely gruesome punishment of torture and execution practiced in imperial China from around AD900 until it was banned in 1 905, in which the convict had portions of his/her body cut away piece by piece over an extended period of time as a process of execution. If the convict in a literary inquisition was already dead, their corpses would be dug out and mutilated as punishment.

The fate of these authors and their relatives who fell victim to literary inquisition "well illustrates the dangers of publishing in an empire where the ruler had almost unlimited power even over the world of knowledge, particularly when the ruler happened to be so insulated from the realities of life in his empire as Ch' ien-lung was"36, as Professor R. Kent Guy comments in the section "The Growth of the Literary Inquisition (1 776-1 782)" in his 1 987 work The emperor's four treasuries: Scholars and the State in the late Qianlong period. The gruesome imperial Chinese practice of execution of relatives ( ... ) often extended wide - from First Emperor of Ch' in's execution of three clans (...), the punishment turned more and more cruel through the dynasties - to the execution of five, seven, nine ( ... , i.e., in addition to oneself, all family members and relatives including also children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-greatgrandchildren), and in the case of the Ming-Dynasty Confucian scholar Fang Hsiao-ju ... , ten clans (including also his students), with the execution of 873 in total, plus the exile to remote frontiers (fapei chongjun ... ) of over a thousand more distant relatives.

5.7. Era of Conquest and Genocide

Besides ruthless and gruesome suppression of dissent, this "Prosperous Era of K'ang-hsi, Yung-cheng and Ch' ien-lung" was also a period of empire consolidation with military campaigns, like those of the earlier empire builders whom Mao Zedong compared himself to and aspired to surpass in his own coming imperial exploits, bordering on the genocidal.

For instance, to exert full and formal control over Ch' ing empire's "new dominions"/Hsinchiang ... (Xinjiang), it took Emperor Ch' ienlung a brutal campaign of ethnic genocide to deliberately exterminate the Dzungars and it has been estimated that close to a million people, about 80 per cent of the Dzungar population, were slaughtered or died from diseases in that military campaign from the year 1 755 to 1 757, a gruesome episode historically known as the "Dzungar genocide" (... ).

5.8. Distrust of Intellectuals

Ruler's distrust of intellectuals is hence deep-rooted in Chinese history, and it was in fact well justified. While uprisings do not occur by themselves from the masses at the bottom, they could occur if intellectuals (literati) set their minds and commit themselves in organising them - in the modern era whether they be law graduates Lenin and Fidel Castro and his guerrilla comrades, medical doctors Che Guevara and Sun Yat-sen (...), or the philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán who led Peru's Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path, Partido Comunista del Perú) guerillas until his capture in 1 992 by the Peruvian government that sentenced him to life imprisonment. The brutality of Chairman Mao's campaigns against intellectuals was often attributed to his cold reception by intellectuals frequenting the Peking University library while he was an assistant to the Peking University librarian Li Ta-chao ... (Li Dazhao, who co-founded the CCP with Ch'en Tu-hsiu ... (Chen Duxiu) due to his rural Hunan origin, but the fact is that Mao was simply following what has traditionally been the practice by all great emperors of the Chinese dynasties in their literary inquisitions (yi yan ruzui, wenziyu) - the same fear and distrust of the intellectuals' ability to foment and galvanise dissent right from the First Emperor of Ch' in Dynasty whom Mao revered most. This tradition has continued till today with the new leadership ofCCP.

Intellectuals may act to galvanise the masses who want change, define the goal clearly and provide necessary leadership for mobilisation and strategy (which according to the Albert Einstein Institution's founder Gene Sharp, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, multiple-time nominee for Nobel Peace Prize since 2009 and guru of non-violent action, consists of mainly four immediate tasks: strengthening determination, self-confidence, and resistance skills; strengthening the independent social groups and institutions; creating a powerful internal resistance force; developing a wise grand strategic plan and implementing it skillfully), but revolutionary movements are still movements of the masses whose initial "fire in the minds of men", as James Hadley Billington, the Librarian of Congress Emeritus, once called37, leads to the "revolutionary faith" of the intellectuals. This is the faith that Thomas Paine referred to in his 1 776 call to revolution, Common sense: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." (Appendix to the Third Edition) Or more appropriately, as Samuel P. Huntington put it, the economically deprived masses (the poor peasants or the exploited workers) provide the "numbers", the urban, educated intellectuals provide the "brains", and the confluence of these two forces is that which makes revolutions.38 Joseph Stalin understood that best when he said, "Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?"39

5.9. Today's Racketeer State and Culture of Fear: Making Relatives Pay

In September 201 5, Burma arrested Bao Zhuoxuan ..., the son of human rights lawyer Wang Yu ... and activist Bao Longjun ... already being held incommunicado in China, and sent him back to China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, where he is then placed under house arrest.40 As Bao Zhuoxuan's case shows, turning the screws on dissidents by persecuting their family members has become common practice by the CCP. Though no doubt much less cruel than the punishment or even execution of a persecuted subject's extended family and entire clan in imperial China (...), this strategy of persecuting dissidents' families to exert pressure on the dissidents clearly marks CCP's PRC as the true heir of the millennialong Chinese culture of imperial despotism.

For Anastasia Lin ..., a vocal supporter of China's human rights, the first sign of trouble came shortly after she won the Miss Canada crown in May 201 5, when security agents began visiting her father, who still lives in China, and pressuring him to put pressure on his daughter, who has made clear she would use her crown to continue promoting her Chinese human rights advocacy, to be silent.41

Since the release of Uyghur rights advocate and democracy leader Rebiya Kadeer, who was arrested in 1 999 and jailed since 2000, from a Chinese prison in March 2005 on medical grounds into the United States' custody in advance of a visit by the then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region, her continued Uyghur rights advocacy has been met with an intense campaign on the part of the Chinese authorities to persecute her family members in China's Xinj iang Uyghur "Autonomous" Region. While Rebiya Kadeer's family has already been targeted by the Chinese government since she was detained in 1 999, the harassment of her family members intensified after she was released on medical parole in March 2005 and leftChina for the United States, and a year later, her son, Ablikim Abdiriyim, was detained in June. On 27th November 2006, the day after Rebiya Kadeer was elected president of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), a court sentenced another two of her sons in China, Alim Abdiriyim and Kahar Abdiriyim, to fines amounting to millions of US dollars, and Alim Abdiriyim also to seven years' imprisonment on charges of tax evasion.42 In April 2007 Ablikim Abdiriyim was sentenced to nine years in prison for "instigating and engaging in secessionist activities", amidst his family's claim that he was not given the right to legal representation of his choice and his "confession" was likely to have been made under torture. When his relatives visited him in prison on 1 3th December, he told them that he had been tortured and also had been held in solitary confinement since 3rd November after witnessing an incident on which the prison authorities wanted to keep quiet and after he refused to sign a document denying that he had witnessed the controversial incident in the prison.43

Gao Yu, the well-known journalist accused of leaking state secrets, according to her lawyer Mo Shaoping ... who also represents Liu Xia ... , initially maintained her innocence and only confessed on camera after officials threatened the safety of her son.44

After Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 11 years' imprisonment on the charge of subversion for his role in co-authoring and distributing the 2008's call for democratic freedoms in China, Charter 08, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 201 0, his wife Liu Xia has since been kept under house arrest although she has not been charged with any crime. This lawless confinement appears to be taking a toll as Liu Xia was admitted in 201 4 to a Beij ing hospital, apparently suffering from a heart ailment and depression.45 As though putting pressure on Liu Xiaobo through persecuting his wife was not enough, the CCP regime also brought fraud charges against Liu Xia's brother, Liu Hui ..., who also was given an 11 -year prison sentence.

Since 9th September 201 0 after having served his jail term of four years and three months - ostensibly for the destruction of public property and traffic disruption, after his revelation of the brutal implementation of population control policy by the government of the prefecture-level city of Linyi ... in Shandong Province, involving women's forced abortion and sterilisation - blind civil rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng ... together with his family had been placed under tight round-the-clock house arrest and complete seclusion during which weiquan ... (rights-defending) activists who were coming to visit him to render help were repeatedly beaten up by local thugs who were guarding his house. At least a hundred local thugs were paid to enforce a watertight round-the-clock surveillance of his residence - a structure that Chen himself in dry humour referred to as the "Chen Guangcheng Economic Zone", though probably some local villagers were under duress and threat to themselves and their families to be paid to guard Chen. After publicizing an image recording he secretly made of his house arrest ordeal, Chen and his wife Yuan Weij ing ... were cruelly beaten up by a mob who broke into their house on 1 8th February 2011 , according to a letter sent out by Yuan. The terrorising and intimidation continued, she said, with their windows being sealed up with iron sheets on 3rd March, television antenna broken on 7th, and the intrusion of a large crowd of thugs who took away their computer and certain handwritten materials. According to another weiquan activist Liu Shasha ..., Cheng Guangcheng's 6-year-old daughter Chen Kesi ... was denied her right to schooling because of her parents' house arrest although she had reached the school age.46

After Chen's incredible escape from his Shandong confinement into the American embassy in Beij ing with the help of Her Peirong ... ("PearlHer"/Zhenzhu ... ), Guo Yushan ... and other weiquan activists and some of Chen's fellow villagers and even allegedly some conscience-stricken guards enforcing his house arrest, in late April 201 2, to get Chen to leave the American embassy, his wife was reportedly tied on a chair for two days and threatened to be beaten to death. Activists and friends who were trying to visit Chen at the Beij ing hospital where Chen was after he leftthe American embassy were beaten up too. Wellknown weiquan lawyer Jiang Tianyong ... was brutally beaten to deaf in his leftear by the guobao ... (national security officers). Others who came to the hospital to support Chen, such as artist Liu Yi ... and weiquan activist Wang Lihong ..., were also beaten up or detained. Back in Shandong Province, police beat up Chen's eldest brother Chen Guangfu ..., reportedly chained his feet, slapped him, and struck him with a belt.47 Police also beat Chen Guangfu's wife and also his son, Chen Kegui ..., who in self-defence caused minor injuries to the police officers. After Chen, his wife and two children were allowed to leave for the US on 1 9th May 201 2 on "studies" ground, Chen Guangfu fled his family's captors in the tiny Dongshigu village in Shandong and arrived in Beij ing to seek help for his son. In November 201 2, Chen Kegui was sentenced to over three years in prison.

Making relatives pay with the implicit threat of the worse has always been an effective tactic for the CCP regime to silence dissidents in exile as in the case of Chen Guangcheng, demoralise them and discourage other, potential, dissidents from following in their footsteps.48

6. Mesmerised by the Dragon: The Chinese Road to Fascism

Money does buy loyalty and acquiescence. With a full treasury to dispense benefits and good feelings, the modern CCP State is adept in playing the role of a benevolent dictator. Helped by the proliferation of movies and TV series on imperial glory that mesmerise a contented people, the CCP State is resurrecting a proud image of a taiping shengshi (era of peace and prosperity) - a replication of the eras of T'ang T'aitsung, K'ang-hsi, Ch' ien-lung when China was a sort of international superpower too. But as we have seen, a hidden subtext is: these were also eras of brutal despotism. Prosperity and national glory under a brutal dictatorship: here lies the Faustian bargain. Economic success and increased military might overshadowing its Asian neighbours, especially its destined nemesis, Japan, in what can be called this century's turning of the tables, have fed rising nationalism with a heavy dose of vainglory in the PRC. This explains why the present authoritarian capitalist model ofChinese development smells Fascist.

There is indeed a great similarity between the present CCP corporatist elite's political method and those used by the European Fascists over eighty years ago:

Imagine Italy 50 years after the fascist revolution. Mussolini would be dead and buried, the corporatist state would be largely intact, the party would be firmly in control, and Italy would be governed by professional politicians, part of a corrupt elite, rather than the true believers who had marched on Rome. It would no longer be a system based on charisma, but would instead rest almost entirely on political repression, the leaders would be businesslike and cynical, not idealistic, and they would constantly invoke formulaic appeals to the grandeur of the "great Italian people," "endlessly summoned to emulate the greatness of the ancestors."

Substitute in the "great Chinese people" and it all sounds familiar.

(Ledeen, 2008: 8)

Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, who gave the above analogy, provides further evidence - today's PRC's enthusiasm for, even compulsive embrace of, the glories of China's long history and passionate reassertion of the greatness of past dynasties (State-promoted and popularly received books like Er Yue He's dynastic novels, Zhang Yimou's grandeur epic movies, and other similar movies and TV series) as compared to similar invocation by Mussolini and Hitler of architecture and history to resurrect the feeling of ancient Roman glory and the Third Reich's supposedly mythical past (Ledeen, 2008: 9).

6.1. Nationalism the Quintessential and Ultimate Ideology

The power of nationalism today in PRC is unmistakable. It is a tool - the ultimate ideology after the demise of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinism and Maoism. Or rather after moving away from Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist- Maoism proper, the nationalism component - formerly a hidden background force - came out in full view in the open and became the major driving force in the Party's quest for political survival.

Indeed, according to Dirlik and Prazniak (201 2), the real nature of the Chinese Communist Party-State and with it the so-called "China Model" of development can only be understood in terms of the central role played by nationalism right from the early revolutionary days:

The legacies of the revolution and Bolshevik structure of the Communist Party are no doubt important elements in structuring Chinese politics [...] Criticism that focuses on the legacies of revolution and socialism are misleading most egregiously in ignoring that it is nationalism, not socialism, that accounts for the behaviour of the regime. After all, the Chinese Revolution was a national revolution for autonomous development against "semi-colonialism", with socialism as its vehicle. The vehicle gave the nationalism its particular flavour, but with the retreat from any operative vision of socialism, the latter seems more than ever merely a front for the national pursuit of wealth and power - under the leadership of the Communist Party.

(Dirlik and Prazniak, 201 2: 291 -293)

6.2. From Nationalism to Fascism, from Legalism to Fake Confucian Revival

And let us not forget, in the first half of the last century in Italy and Germany, it was fervent nationalism that eventually grew into Fascism. Like Mussolini's transformation from a socialist firebrand into a fervent nationalist, the CCP State has also removed itself from its former socialist ideological base into embracing hard-core nationalism in rallying support for its monopoly of political power. We see the demand for undivided loyalty to the perpetually ruling CCP - an "advanced, selfless and united ruling group" (...), according to the teaching material "China Model National Conditions Teaching Manual" of the Moral and National Education (MNE, ...) school curriculum proposal which the Hong Kong Professional Teachers' Union has accused as being a brain-washing political action - which is presiding over, as noted earlier, a new "era of peace and prosperity" reminiscent of the great T'ang T'ai-tsung era or that of K'ang-hsi and Ch' ien-lung (K'angCh'ien shengshi ...), and for the observance of CCP-instituted ideological uniformity and discipline.

Presuming that Mussolini had really made Italian trains run on time, moving far from the old days of austere Maoist autarchy to today's embracing in full fervour rugged capitalist efficiency, we see high-speed trains are running faster and faster too in today's PRC. There are a lot more similarities - talk of sacrifices for the Great Fatherland, and blind belief in legal coercion for social engineering reflecting the anti- Confucian Legalist (fajia) heritage of Mao who was himself a great admirer of the First Emperor of Ch' in who governed with Legalism and suppressed Confucianism along with all other non-Legalist philosophies in his time. In fact, new research and the latest experimentation with dandu er tai ... which then led to the new two-child policy have shown how the unnecessarily coercive one-child policy has done more to wreck the Chinese society and caused untold miseries, while there has been no evidence of the so-dreaded population explosion in other countries like India which has allowed the fertility trend to take its natural cause while interacting with modernisation and urbanisation. "As a symbol of the coercive state - an authoritarian government dictating the most intimate decisions a person can make - not much could surpass the People's Republic of China's one-child policy", as a recent Newsweek report describes, "But for all the ostensible success of the policy - some demographers claim China's population growth would have flattened out even without it - the draconian rule leftemotional, social and economic scars the country and its citizens will be dealing with for years. Its consequences are felt throughout China, particularly in poorer rural areas, where its enforcement was often particularly brutal."49

While ditching the Maoist central-command economy and austere socialistic-communistic practices, the continuing ruling CCP with its leaders now in CEO-style suits and ties is still intrinsically a Maoist party which inherited the Maoist reverence for the Legalist tradition - though against Mao's anti-Confucian injunctions, now going with a fake revival of Confucianism which Yu Ying-shih ..., Emeritus Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Princeton University and the third recipient (2006) of the John W. Kluge Prize for lifetime achievement in the study of humanity, calls an exploitation for commercial and political convenience, referring to the Confucius Institutes, and what the CCP has been selectively promoting is the eraspecific imperial dynasty-serving decadent feudalistic component of Confucianism that constituted the "Confucian shop" (Kongjiadian ...) that the May Fourth Movement (1 91 9) had aimed to destroy, while the Confucian insistence on the critique of political power and the contingent nature of political mandate, as well as the emphasis on the voice of the people in governance and the importance of public discourse and individual responsibility for social action have to be conveniently ignored or given a warped reinterpretation.50 The Party State centre has made two most important basic policy parameters for local authorities concerning the management of Confucian revival, as a research found, namely, "replacing Confucianism by an ambiguous notion of ' traditional Chinese culture'" and "co-opting preferred Confucian fragments into the official ideology", and "does not approve inheriting Confucianism without deleting elements that are incompatible with its rule" (Pang, 201 4: 636-637).

7. Negative SoftPower: How the Rise of China Today Is Affecting Civil Liberty and Political Freedom around theWorld

Voltaire once said: "The Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman, nor an Empire."51 By the same token, the "People's Republic of China" has always been a travesty of language. Whatever the original idealism underlying the fight for the "people's" brighter future that spurted the young Chinese Bolsheviks to launch a peasant revolution against the established order, or establishing order, in the early 1 900s has already been corrupted by gaining absolute political power in 1 949, by the brutal political campaigns through to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to preserve the absolute dominance of a small elite led by Chairman Mao, and by the sheer single-minded determination of the new brutally dissent-intolerant political elites of the "reformed" authoritarian capitalist mercantilist CCP in the new governance mode of a "degenerative totalitarianism" (Hsu, 2003)52 bending on perpetuating the absolute one-party dominance of its political-industrial-business complex. In this process, Sun Yat-sen's original liberal democratic republican ideal of separation of five powers has long been betrayed. The only thing that remains is probably "China". If we could see the present CCP's brutal authoritarian capitalist regime as the real modern manifestation of historian Karl Wittfogel's "oriental despotism"53, despite all its modern trappings, the contemporary CCP's bureaucraticmercantilist totalitarian regime is merely the latest imperial dynasty to rule China with the same brutal technique as practiced by the former emperors through the Middle Kingdom's millennia of despotic rule.

The new twist is that today, through PRC's economic success, brutal suppression of dissent, and enforced amnesia upon its people, supported by the mesmerising eulogies of its cheerleaders across the globe, its "softpower" backed by huge lucrative market and financial strength has presented the Asian giant as an irresistible model to the developing world. The writing is on the wall, and there seems little the beleaguered advocates of civil liberties, political freedom and social justice around the world could do about it except to rue so: A spectre is haunting the masses of the developing world. The spectre of the China model.

7.1. CrossBorder "SoftPower" Silencing of Dissidents

On 26th November 201 5, Anastasia Lin, the vocal supporter of China's human rights and the winner of the Miss Canada beauty contest we referred to earlier, was barred from boarding her flight from Hong Kong to China's island province of Hainan, the host of 201 5's Miss World contest. Due to her human rights advocacy related to China, she being declared a "persona non grata" by the Chinese government can be expected, but it is the particular circumstance in this case which is intriguing. Miss Canada was barred from attending the Miss World contest in China because of her human rights advocacy and no protest was raised from the pageant organisers. "Miss World didn't even try to contact me," as Lin told the global digital business news publication Quartz, "These international organisers just give in to whatever China wants to do, so China continues to do it."54 Any sane person would think that the Miss World pageant would have the self-respect to insist that China as the host nation admit every legitimate contestant, otherwise the contest would naturally have to move to another venue. But we no longer live in a sane world where common logic still prevails. "We do not have any control over who is issued a visa. Although regrettable the event would still continue under these circumstances." A pageant official in London reportedly so answered The Washington Post's query, said the paper in an editorial on 7th November titled "Miss Kowtow 201 5".55 Just another example of the kind of pathetic, pusillanimous response that has become increasingly common as China's "softpower", backed by lucrative market and investment opportunities it can provide in a world of economic despair, increases in leaps and bounds.

The CCP regime's ability to stifle debate abroad is today as successful (including in the cash-trapped overseas academia where Confucius Institutes and joint programmes in China can come as much needed rescue) as its increasingly aggressive campaigns in locking up domestic dissidents and silencing critics at home. A blatant example of such extraterritorial attack on dissent is reflected in the exiled blind Chinese civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng's accusation that he was being forced to leave New York University for "as early as last August and September, the Chinese Communists had already begun to apply great, unrelenting pressure on New York University, so much so that after we [i.e. Chen and his wife and son] had been in the United States just three to four months, NYU was already starting to discuss our departure with us."56 Despite N.Y.U.'s denial of the allegation and its law school's claim that the fellowship as that given to Chen was always to be for one year, it is probably difficult not to link that turn of events to the then newly opened New York University Shanghai (NYU Shanghai), the first university jointly operated by China and the U.S., and part of a major initiative the NYU law school calls its Global Network University.57

7.2. Exporting Repression of Dissent

Such cross-border "soft-power" silencing of dissidents backed by PRC's present ability to offer lucrative opportunities through market, trade and investment (see Figure 4 and Figure 5 in this special issue's introductory article "Political Governance and Strategic Relations: : Domestic-Foreign Policy Nexus and China's Rise in the Global System") has reached worrying proportions. The exiled dissident Chinese cartoonist, Jiang Yefei ..., who fled to Thailand in 2008 after being imprisoned and tortured by the Chinese authorities for criticising their handling of the deadly 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, was arrested by police in Thailand for illegal immigration on 28th October 201 5 and put on a plane chartered by the Chinese government back to China on 1 3th November, despite the fact that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had recognised his refugee status and Canada had offered to take both him and his family in. Besides Jiang Yefei, deported by the Thai government back to China together with him on the plane on 1 3th November were Dong Guangping ..., a dissident and human rights activist who had refugee status, and Gui Minhai, the previously mentioned publisher of books critical of the Chinese government who was born in China but had acquired Swedish nationality and worked at a publishing house in Hong Kong.

The Thai government's policy choice to please the Chinese government by helping the latter to export its domestic repression across its borders has been long recognised. In July 201 5, Thailand deported nearly 1 00 members of Muslim Uyghur illegal migrants who were wanted by China back to the PRC, drawing condemnation from the United States and human rights groups and sparking protests in Turkey, home to a large Uyghur diaspora. New York-based Human Rights Watch said the Uyghurs faced "grim" maltreatment back in China, and Sophie Richardson, China director for HRW stated that "Thailand should make it clear it won't further violate international law by immediately announcing a moratorium on additional deportations of Turkic people to China."58

Thailand is not the only member of ASEAN to do so, though, nor she is the first. In 2011 , Malaysia detained 1 6 Uyghur illegal immigrants and deported 11 back to China, while the other five managed to register with the UN refugee agency UNHCR and were released into its custody. HRW said a Uyghur forcibly returned to China by Malaysia in 2011 was sentenced to six years in prison on charges of separatism, the same charge invoked to sentence the economist and ethnic Uyghur rights advocate Professor Ilham Tohti to life imprisonment in 201 4. Then on 31 st December 201 2 Malaysia deported six more Uyghurs back to China. HRW said the men registered with UNHCR in Kuala Lumpur while in detention and were to have their claims reviewed when they were deported, and the UNHCR said in a statement that it had sought the men's release into its custody while their claims were being assessed and regretted that they were deported despite its intervention. HRW said the forced return of these Uyghurs to the PRC was a grave violation of international laws and Muslim minority Uyghurs repatriated to China from elsewhere in the past have expressed fear of torture, long jail terms or the death penalty.59 Cambodia, another ASEAN member country, also forcibly deported back to China 20 Uyghur asylum-seekers, nineteen of whom had fled to Cambodia from Xinj iang in the wake of the July 2009 riots in the city of Urumqi, fearing persecution by the Chinese authorities. UNHCR was in the process of reviewing their applications for refugee status when Cambodia succumbed to pressure from the Chinese government to deport the 20 individuals, including two children. The Cambodian government's action to deport them back to China attracted international condemnation as fears mount that these individuals would suffer severe human rights violations upon their return.60 For a further elaboration of such phenomenon of China's domestic repression going global, see the earlier discussion in Section 6 of this special issue's introductory article, "Political Governance and Strategic Relations: : Domestic-Foreign Policy Nexus and China's Rise in the Global System". On the claim of China's rising softpower projection abroad, see Section 7 of the introductory article, and diagrammatic depiction of her global economic might in that article's Figure 4 and Figure 5.

8. Conclusion

From the first night of the Chinese New Year celebration on 8th February 201 6 to the early morning of the 9th, Hong Kong's famed busy residential and commercial district of Mong Kok ( ... , the transliteration being from the older names ...) descended into chaos when city authorities' efforts to clamp down on street food vendors ended up with unprecedentedly violent clashes between the people and police in riot gear culminating in warning shots being fired by officers. The clashes, being dubbed the "Fishball Revolution" in an allusion to the "Umbrella Revolution" of 201 4, resulted in 44 police injuries and 24 arrests.61

While even Hong Kong residents were shocked by the violent and bloodied nature of the street battle in a city where people pride themselves on a long history of peaceful protest including prodemocracy demonstrations like 201 4's Occupy Central campaign a.k.a. Umbrella Movement where the only defense against police teargas and pepper spray was umbrellas, the unprecedented ferocity of the clashes can be portentous. As the global digital business news publication Quartz comments on the night of the clashes, "the scale and the ferociousness of the fighting [...] point to motivations that go far beyond the plight of a few hawkers. Instead, the violence appears to be borne out of a deep-seated mistrust about the direction Hong Kong is headed, under the leadership of a government that too often looks like it listens to Beij ing more than its own people."62

The last observation above is reflected in a researcher's take, in ruminating on whether Hong Kong's chief executive should "be a political leader, in its full sense, or just an administrator", regarding Donald Tsang Yam-kuen ..., Hong Kong's second chief executive (2005-201 2):

That Tsang saw his appointment as a job he would strive to get it done is widely seen as indicative of the mind-set of civil servants [...] His "boss-servant" mind-set has been manifested in his body language when he met with mainland Chinese officials and leaders in Beij ing. Television news footage of him listening attentively and taking down notes carefully on what state leaders such as President Hu Jintao had to say has reinforced the public perception of him being a loyal servant. It is also open secret that he had addressed to the former Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office Director Liao Hui as "laoban", or boss, when they met although they enjoyed a similar rank in the Chinese hierarchy.

(Yeung, 201 3: 1 63-1 64)

The sad implication of this situation is that, sighs the observer,

The excessive show of humbleness of Tsang when dealing with Beij ing officials has weakened his role and position as a champion of the interest of Hong Kong people when it comes to issues such as democratic development where the city and the central government do not see eye to eye.

(ibid.: 1 64)

Thus, behind the violent events in Mong Kok are desperation, frustration, disappointment and fear for a grim future, especially after the violent crackdown on Occupy Central movement of 201 4, subsequent persecutions, increasing pressure on the media and latest outrageous episode of the disappeared Causeway Bay Five, for this once vibrant, free-wheeling city transferred since 1 997 to be under the boot of a ruthless totalitarian regime which is at the moment showing no shortterm prospect of giving way to a liberal democratic governance model.

8.1. Après Nous, le Déluge ...

And this is not just about Hong Kong. Like the title of the Quartz report, "Hong Kong's 'fishball revolution' is about a lot more than just street food", the violent and bloodied event in the first night of 201 6's Chinese New Year on the western part of Kowloon ... Peninsula, like the increasing volatile situation in Xinj iang and Tibet, reflects the inevitable responses of the people to the repressive policies of the increasingly Fascist racketeer central State in Beij ing.

It would be unrealistic to think that none in the present CCP ruling echelon can foresee the dire consequences for future generations that would result from the continuation of the blatantly anachronistic Communist Party repression including that upon China's vast restive frontier regions despite temporarily prolonging CCP's political power monopoly while bypassing all opportunities of liberalisation and democratization, and national reconciliation related to the frontier ethnic regions, brought about by the never-came-before Zeitgeist of the egeneration. Après nous, le déluge ... nonetheless, seems to be the prevailing modus operandi of a too-deeply-entrenched ruling party at this moment.

8.2. Political Reform: Lack of Urgency?

Some "nothing more to lose" uprisings are not guaranteed to happen even in times of general abject poverty so one could surmise that they are even more remote in today's PRC of modest prosperity. However, the trigger of revolution is not poverty per se, as the authority on political conflict and instability Professor Ted Robert Gurr in his 1 970 book Why men rebel emphasises, but relative deprivation. Perception of unfairness and inequality in the distribution of resources, opportunities and benefits and a non-level playing ground is what really spurs the economic left-behinds, the dispossessed in the marketplace, those bypassed by economic growth to anger, bitterness and rebellious action. But these are, as the American historian of France and ideas Professor Clarence Crane Brinton notes in his 1 938 work The anatomy of revolution, "not unprosperous people who feel restraint, cramp, [and] annoyance" at the existing governing regime and its cronies of patronage through government-business collusion (referred to as guanshang goujie ..., in China) that are seen to be trampling on their right for a fair share of resources, opportunities and benefits from economic progress and wealth-generation. Revolutions "are born of hope" rather than misery, according to Brinton. As also observed by French political thinker and historian Alexis de Tocqueville in L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1 856), while Louis XVI's reign was the most prosperous period of the monarchy, it was this very prosperity that served to hasten the outbreak of the 1 789 Revolution. That explains why the March-June 1 989 student-led demonstrations on Tiananmen Square (...) in Beij ing, which gradually drew in participation of Chinese citizens from all walks of life and turned an initially small-scale anti-graftprotest into a gargantuan movement for political freedom and civil liberties for which the Beij ing residents were eventually willing to sacrifice their lives, had occurred at a time when economic life and even political atmosphere in China were liberalising and improving under Deng Xiaoping ... and Zhao Ziyang ...'s reform programmes, not when things were getting worse.

With expectations rising faster than actual improvement in life as economic growth takes hold, a previously mainly rural, pre-industrial or pre-reform moribund economy (traditional society beyond the far leftside of the graph in Figure 1 ) going through reform, industrialisation and urbanisation (modernisation began, in the form of central command to free market economy, in the middle of graph) may eventually reach a stage when a variety of forces internal and external produce an economic downturn resulting suddenly in a big gap opening up between what people want to achieve and what they actually get in life - an unhinged "want:get ratio" that leads to a "revolution of rising frustrations" (Lerner, 1 958, 1 964: vii) as expectations outraced actual attainments like what happened in the Beij ing of 1 989 (see Figure 1 ). The sometimes seemingly baffling expression of insecurity on the part of the CCP in its oppressive actions in this era of relative prosperity is actually well justified.

Nevertheless, Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol argues in her book States and social revolutions (1 979) that revolutions can only occur beginning from the top with "state crisis" when governments are caught in situations they can no longer deal with; revolutions, in other words, do not just bubble up from the masses below. Lenin's success in taking over Russia was due to the collapse of the Romanov dynasty after its defeat in the hand of the Germans in the First World War; Mao's success in taking over China was mainly attributed to the invading Japanese army wrecking Kuomintang ...'s ability to rule. Today's ruling CCP does not face such crisis at the moment.

8.3. A Taste of Old Wine in a New Bottle

The late Jeane J. Kirkpatrick in her Commentary magazine essay "Dictatorships and double standards" (November 1 979) argued that authoritarian regimes are different from totalitarian regimes in that the former (e.g. formerly junta-ruled Argentina, Chile and Brazil) can reform their politico-economic systems but the latter (the Communist- Party-ruled Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist/Maoist countries) cannot, and indeed later development had borne witness to her prediction:

[...] the history of this century provides no grounds for expecting that radical totalitarian regimes will transform themselves. At the moment there is a far greater likelihood of progressive liberalization and democratization in the governments of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile than in the government of Cuba; in Taiwan than in the People's Republic of China; in South Korea than in North Korea; in Zaire than in Angola; and so forth.63

While many might find distasteful this "Kirkpatrick Doctrine", which advocated US support of anti-Communist governments including authoritarian dictatorships around the world during the Cold War based on Jeane J. Kirkpatrick's conviction that democracy could be restored easier to authoritarian states which were more amenable to gradual reform in a democratic direction than to totalitarian states, her argument does seem to have been borne out by later events in the Soviet bloc with political system collapse in the Soviet Union, followed by disintegration, as the end result of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost, and the rest of Eastern Europe plus the USSR's Asian satellite state of Mongolia, now without USSR's military-security power of terror to back up their ruling Communist Party regimes and defunct central-command economies simply bolting away from the old system formerly imposed on them by the Soviet Red Army.

However, events did not transpire that way in the case of the PRC. In China, the Party-regime succeeded in reforming itself and remained entrenched in political control as a modernised totalitarian State, and as we have seen before, transitioning into a new form of Fascist corporatist system. If we look at David Easton's application of the systems theory (see Section 2 and Figure 1 in this special issue's introductory article, "Political Governance and Strategic Relations: : Domestic-Foreign Policy Nexus and China's Rise in the Global System"), different organs of the biopolitical system would seem to have metabolically undergone renewal while the top-level ruling class has been preserved (Easton, 1 965). This is like the capitalist states reforming themselves into welfare state, introducing measures to protect workers' rights and the poor in the early part of the 20th century and thus preempting the Marxist prediction of proletarian revolution. Different from the Eastern European case is also the local-borne nature of the Chinese Communist movement - though representing in a way a strange hybrid ideologically foreigninspired in its Marxist form, like the earlier Taiping Rebellion by the Christian millenarian movement of Hung Hsiu-ch'üan ...'s T'aip'ing T'ienkuo / Heavenly Kingdom of Peace (..., Taiping Tianguo), described as a "strange upheaval" in Jonathan Spence's 1 996 book God's Chinese son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (see page xxiv of his "Foreword"), which itself was a modern manifestation of the oft-occurring peasant uprisings throughout China's long dynastic history.

On the other hand, the reason that the Party-State may no longer opt to rule by just brute force like old-style dictators but choose to use more subtle forms of coercion beneath a coat of democratic trappings, including grassroots elections, modern free market, politically censored but otherwise free access to Internet and other social media and "evolving" rule of law, is simply that it has grown smarter with experience to realise that the old-style autocratic "thuggish repression" no longer works in this globalised Internet age, as William J. Dobson analyses in his book The dictator's learning curve: Inside the global battle for democracy (201 2).

Having evolved with the times into a much more public relationssavvy technocratic clique, operating by consensus at high levels while enhancing economic efficiency at the lower tiers of government, the modern Party-State thus presents a uniform face of a government that delivers to the citizens and the world to dissuade attempts to challenge or destabilise its political monopoly which is today, of course, no longer purely a matter of politics and governance, as the Party-State has grown into a complex nexus of politico-pecuniary interests, a gargantuan structure of interfeeding power, favour and lucre with simply too much to lose. In other words, the once ideal-driven Chinese Communist Party is today

[...] no longer just a political but also an economic class which has a direct interest in the accumulation of capital. It has so far been more successful than its predecessors in the twentieth century in convincing the population that its interests are also the national interest, but how long it can do so is anybody's case. One of the particularities of the PRC is that the organizational apparatus that has enabled its development is equally efficient as an instrument of repression so long as it retains its coherence, which it has done successfully so far through the distribution of economic rewards and privileges throughout the organization. We should remember that the Communist Party and its auxiliary organizations make up around 20 per cent of the population.

(Dirlik and Prazniak, 201 2: 297-298)

While kidnapping publishers and sellers of tabloid-style sensationalistic political books from Hong Kong to Mainland for interrogation seems remarkably civilised in comparison with the Islamic State's 7th January 201 5 massacre of Charlie Hebdo's editorial team for religiously sacrilegious cartoons, the racketeer-State action of the CCP regime has so far seemed to be far more successful than ISIL/Daesh's terrorist tactics in instilling a sense of White Terror in the targeted society. Outside Hong Kong's dissident community, there has not been a society-wide broad-based response equivalent to the post-massacre "Je suis Charlie" campaign - it looks as if for most Hong Kong people, out of fear, indifference, resignation, or among supporters of Beij ing, exultation, and overseas Chinese communities too, the feeling is "Je ne suis pas Causeway Bay" or "Je ne suis pas Mighty Current".

8.4. "Cheerleader Syndrome" and "Mirrorimage" Selfdeceit

Looking at the responses of international cheerleaders and China's younger generation, the tactic - backed by strong economic performance, improved living standards and mesmerising investment opportunities - has seemed to be very successful both domestically and beyond the country's borders.

No nation in history has ever done so much so fast. If the [...] leaders tell us that the control of information was necessary to get this job done, we can afford to take their word for it for the time being. We who know the power of free speech, and the necessity for it, may assume that if those leaders are sincere in their work of emancipating the [...] people they will swing around toward free speech - and we hope so soon.64

One can be forgiven today for thinking that the two ellipses in the passage above both stand in place of the word "Chinese". But no, the passage above is from a 1 943 Life editorial about the Soviet Union under Stalin - the two ellipses there stand for "Soviet" and "Russian" respectively in the original passage. Life's optimistic opinion about the Stalinist totalitarianism in 1 943 unfortunately can today describe well the general view of CCP's worldwide cheerleaders about the PRC, who never hesitate to act as devoted, ardent apologists for PRC's human rights excesses, attempting to convince the world that anyhow the CCP leaders are gradually embracing the more "mature" concepts of the West (which admittedly the CCP leaders sometimes do pay lip service to as "universal values") and as this genuine invention by the CCP of a freemarket "socialism with Chinese characteristics" gradually "matures", they will think more and more like the liberal democratic West - now a popularly accepted outlook Professor Raymond Sleeper called "the mirror-image syndrome" (Sleeper, 1 987: 1 93). The end result of this adaptation process will not be a direct copy of the Western liberal model, but a Chinese improvement. For instance, Professor Xu Xianming ... , president of the China University of Political Science and Law ( ... ), posited in 2005 the hexiequan .. (i.e. "harmony rights", apparently in line with the official "construction of a harmonious society" policy of the CCP) which according him is to "supersede the earlier three generations of human rights (i.e. rights of freedom, rights of survival and rights of development)".65

On China's "democratic model", here goes a standard apologist's statement: "China's practice and theory have shown that 'democracy with one-party leadership under socialism with Chinese characteristics' has been explored and practiced for over 90 years since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. The institution of the National People's Congress (...), the system of multi-party cooperation and political negotiation under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, 'democratic centralism' (minzhu jizhong zhi ... ) and the Communist Party's work style of criticism and self-criticism together represent the role model of democracy under one-party leadership, which has transcended the scope of what liberal democracy could explain [...] Liberal democracy is not universal; it is merely a special manifestation ofWestern civilization." (Zhou, 201 3: 11 3; my translation) By this reasoning, such "democratisation under one-party leadership" (ibid.: 1 38) should be the future system of democracy for the world to replace the Western liberal democracy which has proven not to be universally suitable, to have failed in the developing countries, and have even been questioned in the Western countries themselves, according to the apologist. After all, one can argue that if Marx could legitimately stand Hegel's idealist dialectically dynamic model of nature and of history on its head and Lenin could do the same to orthodox Marxism by his more absolutist, doctrinaire perspective, his elevation of the role of violence as a revolutionary instrument and his belief in the absolute necessity of a dictatorship of the proletariat, why can't today's "new CCP" do the same to these weary Western notions with its genuine invention of a perfect system of market-socialism and people-first (Hu Jintao's "yi min wei ben ...") democracy with Chinese characteristics?

Such a "perfect" system, much superior to Western liberal democracy and which by Zhou's criteria represents an unprecedented contribution to human civilization and a model of mankind's political future, was succinctly and confidently described by Chen Xiqing ... , the deputy head of United Front Work Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China ( ...), at a press conference in which he unreservedly declared that China's "multiparty" system was already perfect, hence there was no need to establish new political parties.66 The CCP, according to Chen, has been absorbing the workers, peasants, soldiers as well as members of the intelligentsia as party members, while the eight existing "democratic parties" (minzhu dangpai ...) are focusing mainly on recruiting people from the middle and upper social strata, including those in the fields of technology, culture and sports, as their party members. In China's socalled "multi-party cooperation" (duodang hezuo...) system, these "democratic parties" are neither "non-ruling parties" (zaiyedang ) nor "opposition parties" (fanduidang ...), but "participating parties" (canzhengdang ...). Besides that, according to Chen, there are also "party-less" (wu dangpai ...) people in the system, comprising those who are not members of these nine political parties.

8.4. The Road to Fascism Classic

Actually regardless of one's take on the apologist's statement, one has to admit that the road of democratisation may not be smooth for this Asian giant which had not seen a functioning liberal democratic era in its two thousand years of imperial and republican history (and in this context, today's best-case liberal democratic island state of Taiwan (ROC) is not typical representation of China's destiny, but rather a unique aberration67). Curiously date-exact, following Professor Zhou Tianyong from the Central Party School, China's authoritarian one-party political system will and should remain unchanged until at least 2037 (Zhou, Wang and Wang (eds), 2007: 2, 6, 45-46)68. This is in line with what Deng Xiaoping stated in 1 987, that direct general elections could only be held after half a century had passed in the 2000s, and at the moment the country had to make do with indirect elections above the county level and direct elections only at county and below county level, given the colossal population and inadequate level of cultural quality of the people (Hu, Hu, He and Guo, 2009: 1 9-20)69. Even if the all-powerful authoritarian regime of China is willing to embark on a certain extent of democratization at its own pace in a best-case scenario for the democracy advocates, as Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter (1 986) opine, while a transition from authoritarian rule could probably produce a democracy, it could also terminate with a liberalized authoritarian regime (dictablanda) or a restrictive, illiberal democracy (democradura) (O'Donnell and Schmitter, 1 986: 9)70. While shadows of the remnants of her ghostly past still linger to haunt the one-party State, there are already telling signs that the continuing transformation from a dictadura (dictatorship) into a dictablanda (and for the cautious optimist, possibly leading further to a highly restrictive democradura in the near future) is the most possible direction the CCP regime is heading to and indeed planning to head to, given the fact that the Western, "bourgeois liberal" multi-party competitive electoral democracy (democracia), together with its notion of separation of powers, has already been ruled out of the cards, or at least not until mid-2000s according to Deng Xiaoping.

Nevertheless, as this paper has argued, given the political realities that constitutes the essence of today's CCP-ruled China, one can be forgiven for being overcome by some sentiment of angst and pessimism. Being obsessed with maintaining stability in order to perpetuate its grip on power, the CCP regime is today committing every conceivable violation of human rights - brutal suppression of free speech and political dissent with the harassment, physical abuse and torture, legal and extralegal detention and tight surveillance and house arrest of civil rights campaigners, democracy activists, civil rights lawyers, civil society association leaders, and ethnic minority activists like Ilham Tohti who are simply voicing aspirations for regional autonomy and protection of ethnic rights. The case of Ilham Tohti's life sentence is a good example of how the CCP regime is justifying harsh prison sentences even against nonviolent Uyghur rights activists and related Internet users by invoking today's global War on Terrorism.71

As this paper and the earlier introductory article of this special issue have shown, if the intensification of repression in the past year both in the domestic and global context could be a sign of what is to come for China under continued uncompromising political monopoly of the increasing authoritarian post-reform-era CCP, even a further liberalized authoritarian regime (dictablanda) or a restrictive, illiberal democracy (democradura) seems to be increasingly fading from the horizon, but that may no longer be the heart of the matter, for heading out there into the uncharted waters, standing out ominously against the fading light of a liberal democratic future for China is the dark silhouette of a towering CCP navigating the country along a Chinese route to Fascism - not today's varieties of neo-fascism in Europe and America, but full corporatist, classic Fascism of Benito Mussolini, il Duce del Fascismo e Fondatore dell'Impero, later il Duce della Repubblica Sociale Italiana, ofAdolf Hitler, der Führer und Reichskanzler des deutschen Volkes, and (though inconclusively among scholars of Fascism)72 of Francisco Franco, el Caudillo de la Última Cruzada y de la Hispanidad - and worse, pulling the rest of the developing world, mesmerised by the "China model", along a repressive, authoritarian capitalist path.

Footnote

Notes

1 . Or officially the "Communist Party ofChina" (CPC, ...).

2. Freedom House's report Freedom in the World 2015 - Discarding democracy: Return to the iron fist, p. 5.

3. "Swedish activist Peter Dahlin paraded on China state TV for ' scripted confession'" (by Tom Phillips), The Guardian (UK), 20th January 201 6. <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/20/swedishactivistpeterdahlinparadedonchinastatetvforscriptedconfession>

4. ODN, 3rd March 201 6. (... /Oriental Daily News/ODN is a Malaysian daily in Chinese, with China news sources mainly from the Hong Kong and Taiwan media.)

5. Freedom House's report Freedom in the World 2015 - Discarding democracy: Return to the iron fist, p. 5.

6. "Trial by media? Confessions go prime time in China" (by Steven Jiang), CNN (Cable News Network), 26th January 201 6. <http://edition.cnn.com/ 2016/01/26/asia/chinatelevisionconfessions/ index.html>

7. People in southern China, especially among the speakers of either Cantonese/Yue ... or Hokkien/Fuj ianese/Min ...regionalects (whose combined population is larger than the number of speakers of either Polish or Ukrainian, the two East European/Slavonic languages with most numerous speakers except Russian, or the speakers of Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish combined) actually refer to themselves T'angjen ... (Tangren, in their respective varied local pronunciations) instead of Hanjen ... (Hanren), as noted here by George Moseley (1 966):

The contradistinction between Han Chinese and national minorities repeatedly made [...] suggests that the Han Chinese constitute a homogeneous, discreet community from whom the national minorities are readily distinguishable. In fact, however, the cultural gap between "Han Chinese" and "minority" is often no greater than that between Han Chinese of different regions. There is an almost continuous ethnocultural spectrum extending from the northern, wheat-eating, Mandarin-speaking Chinese at one end to, at the other, the dark-skinned K'awa in the south who are primitive food-gatherers and speakers of a language of the Mon- Khmer family. In between are the more than 1 00 million "Han" Chinese of south-coastal China who speak dialects other than Mandarin and who, in fact, sometimes refer to themselves as T'angjen (men of T'ang, after the T'ang dynasty, seventh to tenth centuries) rather than as Hanjen (after the Han dynasty, third century B.C. to third century A.D.) and the more than ten million persons of the "national minorities" in south China who have been to varying extents acculturated to Chinese ways - to the point, in some cases, that they had no awareness of being different, of being a "minority," until they were informed of the fact by workers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences who came to their areas after 1 949.

(Moseley, 1 966: 8-9)

8. In Mongol "Chinggis Khagan" or "Chinggis Khaan" (aehdej nbbh).

9. "Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is ' infiltrated by foreign forces' : anti-graftofficial" (by Adrian Wan), South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), 1 5th June 201 4 <http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1533020 /chineseacademysocialsciencesinfiltratedforeignforcesantigraft>. These warnings to CASS were posted in an article on the website of a research institute for modern Chinese history which Zhang Yingwei visited on 1 0th June 201 4. The article was removed a few days later on 1 4th June after the news began circulating online.

1 0. "Trial by media? Confessions go prime time in China" (by Steven Jiang), CNN (Cable News Network), 26th January 201 6. <http://edition.cnn.com/ 2016/01/26/asia/chinatelevisionconfessions/ index.html>

11 . George Orwell (Eric Blair). What is Fascism? Tribune (democratic socialist fortnightly newspaper founded in 1 937, published in London), 24th March 1 944. <http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc>

1 2. George Orwell (Eric Blair). What is Fascism? Tribune, 24th March 1 944. <http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc>

1 3. "Classic fascism versus 'friendly' fascism", Third World Traveler. <http:// www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Classic_Friendly_Fascism.html>

1 4. Don Hamerquist (2002). Fascism & anti-fascism. In: Mark Salotte, J. Sakai and Don Hamerquist, Confronting fascism: Discussion documents for a militant movement. Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing. <http://www.kersp lebedeb.com/mystuff/books/fascism/fashantifash.php>

1 5. Don Hamerquist (2002). Fascism & anti-fascism. In: Mark Salotte, J. Sakai and Don Hamerquist, Confronting fascism: Discussion documents for a militant movement. Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing. <http://www.kersp lebedeb.com/mystuff/books/fascism/fashantifash.php>

1 6. Matthew N. Lyons (undated). What is fascism? Some general ideological features. Political Research Associates (PRA). <http://www.publiceye.org/ eyes/whatfasc.html> (The article represents paragraphs adapted from Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Too close for comfort: Right wing populism, scapegoating, and fascist potentials in US politics, South End Press, Boston, 1 996.)

1 7. In the context of the political economy of ethnic relations, it should be noted that the dominant group may perceive a subordinate group as "exotic" rather than "real" (Hoetink, 1 973: 1 77-91 ). An example of such an "exotic" minority in Malaysia, besides the Orang Asli (i.e "aborigines"), is the small Gente Kristang community (autoglossonym, from Portuguese "Gente Cristã") in the state of Melaka, descended from the 1 6th-Century Portuguese settlers and occupiers. Defined as "deviating in somatic and/or cultural respects, without being conceived subjectively as a menace to the existing social order" (Hoetink, 1 967), "exotic" groups (or Cox (1 948)'s socioracial "strangers") are not perceived as "real", because they are not subjectively comprised within the "societal image" of the dominant. Thus they do not attract the latter's hostility, as do "real" subordinate groups viewed as a menace. The case of the Ainu (...) and the "burakumin" (...) in Japan and that of the Amerindian natives and Afro-Americans in the United States today are good examples of these two polar subordinate situations - the Ainu and Amerindians being in some way viewed as "exotic" vis-à-vis the other two "real" minorities; instead of bitterness and hostility, they are met with "a mild benevolence, a condescending philanthropy" on the part of the dominant society (Hoetink, 1 973: 1 79). Such distinction between the two types of subordinate groups was vividly described by DeVos in his study of the "burakumin": "The basic attitudes held [by the dominant Japanese society] toward the Ainu are not as pejorative as towards the outcastes [i.e. the "burakumin"] [...] the Ainu have been treated ambivalently very much as the American Indians have been, in contrast to the caste distinctions which underlie the treatment of American blacks." (DeVos, 1 972: 326) Paradoxically, China's largest minority, the Zhuang (...) in Guangxi Province, could actually be more "exotic" than "real". Being the most assimilated of minorities, the Zhuang's ethnic consciousness was virtually created by the Han-dominated central Communist Party-State in the early 1 950s (see, for instance, Kaup, 2000). Similarly for many small ethnic minorities in adjacent Guizhou and Yunnan. The same cannot be said for the "real" ethnic minorities of the Uyghurs in Xinj iang and Tibetans in Tibet and Qinghai, many ofwhom are strongly resisting Han dominance, assimilation and internal colonialism.

1 8. Matthew N. Lyons (undated). What is fascism? Some general ideological features. Political Research Associates (PRA). <http://www.publiceye.org/ eyes/whatfasc.html> (The article represents paragraphs adapted from Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Too close for comfort: Right wing populism, scapegoating, and fascist potentials in US politics, South End Press, Boston, 1 996.)

1 9. Richard Montague (2001 ). Marx and Lenin's views contrasted. Socialist Standard, No. 11 69, December 2001 . <http://www.worldsocialism.org/sp gb/socialiststandard/ 2000s/2001/no1169december2001/ marxandleninsviewscontrasted> (The Socialist Standard is a monthly socialist newspaper published without interruption since 1 904 by the Socialist Party ofGreat Britain.)

20. Matthew N. Lyons (undated). What is fascism? Some general ideological features. Political Research Associates (PRA). <http://www.publiceye.org/ eyes/whatfasc.html> (The article represents paragraphs adapted from Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Too close for comfort: Right wing populism, scapegoating, and fascist potentials in US politics, South End Press, Boston, 1 996.)

21 . Salil Tripathi (2008). The conscience of a forgetful nation. Far Eastern Economic Review, Vol. 1 71 , No. 5, June 2008, pp. 37-40 (see p. 37).

22. "Mo Yan: Censorship is good" (Books Blog by Alexander Nazaryan), Daily News (New York), 6th December 201 2 <http://www.nydailynews. com/blogs/pageviews/moyancensorshipgoodblogentry1.1639562>; "Nobel Prize winning author Mo Yan says censorship is necessary", The Telegraph (UK), 7th December 201 2 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/asia/china/9728801/NobelPrizewinningauthorMoYansayscensorshipisnecessary. html>.

23. "The Writer, the State and the Nobel" (by Didi Kirsten Tatlow), The New York Times, 1 2th October 201 2. <http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/20 12/10/12/thewriterthestateandthenobel/>

24. "The Writer, the State and the Nobel" (by Didi Kirsten Tatlow), The New York Times, 1 2th October 201 2. <http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/20 12/10/12/thewriterthestateandthenobel/>

25. "The Writer, the State and the Nobel" (by Didi Kirsten Tatlow), The New York Times, 1 2th October 201 2. <http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/20 12/10/12/thewriterthestateandthenobel/>

26. "The Writer, the State and the Nobel" (by Didi Kirsten Tatlow), The New York Times, 1 2th October 201 2. <http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/20 12/10/12/thewriterthestateandthenobel/>

27. Salil Tripathi (2008). To tell and listen: Salman Rushdie. Far Eastern Economic Review, Vol. 1 71 , No. 4, May 2008, pp. 24-27 (see p. 27).

28. Translated by Arthur Waley (Source: Poetry (January 1 91 8)). <http://www. poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/3155>

29. Salil Tripathi (2008). The conscience of a forgetful nation. Far Eastern Economic Review, Vol. 1 71 , No. 5, June 2008, pp. 37-40 (see p. 39).

30. Salil Tripathi (2008). The conscience of a forgetful nation. Far Eastern Economic Review, Vol. 1 71 , No. 5, June 2008, pp. 37-40 (see p. 37).

31 . Martin Jacques (2009). When China rules the world: The rise of the Middle Kingdom and the end of the Western world. London: Allen Lane. See also Martin Jacques, "Civilization state versus nation-state" (1 5/01 /11 - Süddeutsche Zeitung), Martin Jacques - Official Site <http://www.martin jacques.com/articles/civilizationstateversusnationstate2/>.

32. Mao first composed the poem in 1 936 but only published it when he went to Chungking ... (Chongqing) in 1 945 to hold peace talks with Chiang Kai-shek .... The poem became quite an instant sensation among Chinese intellectuals at that time.

33. This translation is a mix of Johnson K. Gao's and Zhao Hengyuan and Paul Woods's versions. Johnson K. Gao (Dallas, Texas, USA) translated the poem into English in 2008 <http://www.scribd.com/doc/3986613/TheEng lishtranslationofthepoemtheSnowbyMaoZedong# scribd>. Gao had composed a song for this poem which was selected in a CD titled For Love, For Snow and For Echo <http://cdbaby.com/cd/johnsongao2>. An earlier translation was that by Zhao Hengyuan ... and Paul Woods (1 993): ...[the poetry of Mao Zedong (Chinese-English bilingual edition)] ... , Tianj in, pp. 66-69.

34. In Mongol "Khubilai Khagan" or "Khubilai Khaan" (`lcegbf nbbh).

35. The first Emperor of Ch' in (Qin) reportedly buried 500 to 11 00 Confucian scholars alive, though scholars including Michel Nylan and Martin Kern doubted the fact or the extent and pointed to possible biased Han-dynasty scholars' exaggeration or fabrication.

36. R. Kent Guy (1 987). The emperor's four treasuries: Scholars and the State in the late Qianlong period. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, page 1 76 (under the section "The Growth of the Literary Inquisition (1 776- 1 782)". <https://books.google.com.my/books?id=bFA6a60_5LgC&pg=PA 78&dq=The+Emperor%27s+Four+Treasuries:+Scholars+and+the+State +in+the+Late+Ch%27ienlung+ Era.&hl=en#v=onepage&q=The%20Em peror's%20Four%20Treasuries%3A%20Scholars%20and%20the%20State %20in%20the%20Late%20Ch'ienlung% 20Era.&f=false>

37. Billington, James H. (1 980). Fire in the minds of men: Origins of the revolutionary faith. New York: Basic Books / New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers (new edition with new introduction by the author, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1 999).

38. Huntington, Samuel P. (1 991 ). The third wave: Democratization in the late Twentieth Century. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. / Huntington, Samuel P. (1 996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

39. Robert G. Torricelli (2001 ). Quotations for public speakers: A historical, literary, and political anthology, p. 1 21 - "Contemporary witnesses". <http://izquotes.com/quote/268865>

40. Ibid.

41 . "Miss Kowtow 201 5" (editorial), The Washington Post, 7th November 201 5. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/misskowtow2015/ 2015 /11/07/ca15cc7284a211e5a7ca6ab6ec20f839_ story.html>

42. "China urged to release Uighur activist allegedly tortured in prison", Amnesty International UK / Blogs, 21 st December 201 0. <https://www.am nesty.org.uk/blogs/countdownchina/ chinaurgedreleaseuighuractivistallegedlytorturedprison>

43. Ibid.

44. "Trial by media? Confessions go prime time in China" (by Steven Jiang), CNN (Cable News Network), 26th January 201 6. <http://edition.cnn.com/ 2016/01/26/asia/chinatelevisionconfessions/ index.html>

45. "China turns the screws on dissidents by persecuting their families" (editorial), The Washington Post, 26th February 201 4. <https://www.wa shingtonpost.com/opinions/chinaturnsthescrewsondissidentsbypersecutingtheirfamilies/ 2014/02/26/1aa191f89e6811e3a050dc3322a94fa7_ story.html>

46. ODN, 1 8th June 2011 , 5th September 2011 .

47. "Chen Guangcheng brother escapes to tell of beatings and reprisals" (by Tania Branigan), The Guardian (UK), 24th May 201 2. <http://www.the guardian.com/world/2012/may/24/chenguangchengbrotherfleescaptors>

48. "China turns the screws on dissidents by persecuting their families" (editorial), The Washington Post, 26th February 201 4. <https://www.wa shingtonpost.com/opinions/chinaturnsthescrewsondissidentsby persecutingtheirfamilies/ 2014/02/26/1aa191f89e6811e3a050dc3322a94fa7_ story.html>

49. "Even with one-child policy lifted, China becoming 'world's largest oldage home'" (by Bill Powell), Newsweek (US), 31 st October 201 5. <http:// www.newsweek.com/2015/11/13/itsonechildpolicyliftedchinabecomingworldslargestoldagehome389059. html>

50. [Confucius Institutes: a special interview of Yu Ying-shih] , [China overview] , 8th April 201 2.

51 . Voltaire, Essay on the Customs (1 756).

52. Despite the smokescreen of rhetoric, basically what we are witnessing in the PRC is the resiliency of what Hsu Szu-chien ... called "degenerative totalitarian polity" (t'uihua chich'üan chengt'i ... ) since mid-1 990s which while having lost the original totalitarian regime's ideology, power of political mobilisation and monopoly over the economy, still not only continues with but tenaciously maintains the absolute monopoly of the "Party" over political power and State machinery and control over media of propaganda and social organisations (Hsu, 2003: 1 68). The major characteristic of such a degenerative totalitarian regime is, according to Hsu, just like many authoritarian and post-totalitarian regimes, by sourcing its legitimacy from economic development, and with the unchallengeable national power inherited from its totalitarian past is now playing the role of a developmental State to drive economic development, while at the same time continuing to prohibit political pluralism, freedom of political association and the existence of independent mass media. Moreover, a degenerative totalitarian regime does not need to worry about justification for long-term survival that used to plague authoritarian regimes from the perspective of the ultimate value legitimacy, for not only that the degenerative totalitarian regime has inherited totalitarianism's self-justification of political monopoly, it is also carrying forward and strengthening the reign of terror and State machinery of repression that it inherited from its totalitarian past (ibid.: 1 68-1 69). Such an ingenious combination of the capability for national development and that for repression has served to continue a mode of governance which is justifying repression (in the name of weiwen ..., i.e. "maintaining stability") with economic development, observes Hsu, as long as the benefits of development surpass the costs of repression, as development (which has replaced ideology and social reconstruction in its totalitarian past) is now main aim of this degenerative totalitarian regime as the key to the paramount raison d'être of maintaining the status quo of monopolistic political governance. Unlike under an authoritarian government, even limited pluralism and self-organisation of societal interests to any meaningful extent are absolutely prohibited lest they jeopardise this degenerative totalitarian regime's absolute monopoly of all political power (ibid.: 1 69).

53. Karl Wittfogel (1 967). Oriental despotism. New Haven: Yale University Press (see Chu, 201 3: 80).

54. "China barred a human rights activist from a global beauty contest - putting her squarely in the spotlight" (by Richard Macauley and Heather Timmons), Quartz (qz.com), 27 November 201 5. <http://qz.com/560703/ chinabarredahumanrightsactivistfromaglobalbeautycontestputtinghersquarelyinthespotlight/>

55. "Miss Kowtow 201 5" (editorial), The Washington Post, 7th November 201 5. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/misskowtow2015/ 2015 /11/07/ca15cc7284a211e5a7ca6ab6ec20f839_ story.html>

56. Quoted in "N.Y.U., China, and Chen Guangcheng", Letter from China - Dispatches from Evan Osnos. The New Yorker, 1 7th June 201 3.

57. Ibid.

58. "Thailand deports 1 00 Muslim Uighurs to China", The Wall Street Journal, 9th July 201 5 <http://www.wsj.com/articles/thailanddeports100muslim uighurstochina1436451320>; "Thailand says rejected China request to deport all Uighurs - decision draws criticism from the U.N. and sets offprotests in Turkey", Borneo Post online, 11 th July 201 5 <http://www.the borneopost.com/2015/07/11/thailandsaysrejectedchinarequesttodeportalluighurs/>.

59. "Malaysia accused over deporting Uighur asylum seekers to China", The Guardian (UK), 5th February 201 3. <http://www.theguardian.com/world/ 2013/feb/05/malaysiauighurasylumseekerschina>

60. "China urged to release Uighur activist allegedly tortured in prison", Amnesty International UK / Blogs, 21 st December 201 0. <https://www.am nesty.org.uk/blogs/countdownchina/ chinaurgedreleaseuighuractivistallegedlytorturedprison>

61 . "'Fishball revolution' : Hong Kong comes to terms with brutal New Year street battle" (by Finbarr Bermingham), The Week (UK), 11 th February 201 6 <http://www.theweek.co.uk/69474/fishballrevolutionhongkongcom estotermswithbrutalnewyearstreetbattle>; "Bristling under Beij ing: Hong Kong's 'fishball revolution' is about a lot more than just street food" (by Richard Macauley and Heather Timmons), Quartz, 8th February 201 6 <http://qz.com/612813/hongkongsfishballrevolutionisaboutalotmorethanjuststreetfood/>.

62. "Bristling under Beij ing: Hong Kong's 'fishball revolution' is about a lot more than just street food" (by Richard Macauley and Heather Timmons), Quartz, 8th February 201 6 <http://qz.com/612813/hongkongsfishballre volutionisaboutalotmorethanjuststreetfood/>.

63. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick (1 979). Dictatorships & double standards. Commentary, 1 st November 1 979. <https://www.commentarymagazine. com/articles/dictatorshipsdoublestandards/>

64. Raymond S. Sleeper (ed.). Mesmerized by the bear: The Soviet strategy of deception. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, p. 1 74 (in the chapter "Political pilgrims", selected by David Martin, pp. 1 69-1 75, with most of the quotations reproduced from the collection put together by Paul Hollander in Political pilgrims. New York: Oxford University Press, 1 981 (hardcover) / New York: Harper and Row, 1 983 (paperback)).

65. "..." [Let the hexie spirit transcend the confrontational spirit of the three generations of conventional human rights, to cultivate and produce a new generation of human rights - the hexie rights (rights of harmony). Hexie rights will become the foundation stone and key element of the building of the hexie shijie (harmonious world). ] (See "...", , 22nd November 2006 <http://news .qq.com/a/20061122/002038.htm>.)

66. ODN, 1 st July 2011 .

67. "The island ofTaiwan only achieved a peaceful transition from martial law and dictatorship to democracy roughly two decades ago, with 1 990 student protests known as the Wild Lily movement [that] took place just one year after the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations were violently crushed in China", as The Washington Post's China bureau chief Simon Denyer reminisced in a reportage on the recent Taiwanese general elections, "Twenty-five years later, as China moves in a more repressive direction, harassing and arresting not only dissidents, lawyers and journalists but also feminists and LGBT-rights activists, the island at its side is moving ever more confidently on the opposite path." ("'Progressive, tolerant and diverse' : How Taiwan is moving ever farther from China" (by Simon Denyer), The Washington Post, 1 9th January 201 6 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/01/19/progre ssivetolerantanddiversehowtaiwanismovingeverfartherfromchina/>) Indeed, through one-person-one-vote free and fair popular elections on 1 6th January 201 6 Taiwan elected its first female president Tsai Ing-wen (..., an LSE PhD, who is part-aboriginal, "the first woman to run an Asian country who is not the child of a political dynasty"). The fact that female candidates won 43 out of 11 3 seats in Taiwan's parliament, and legislators from Taiwan's Austronesian aboriginal inhabitants who make up just 1 .5 per cent of the population took up 7 per cent of seats in the parliament (ibid.), further consolidated Taiwan's unique position not only as the only vibrant, fiercely democratic, proudly progressive, tolerant and diverse Chinese-speaking polity, but also in sharp contrast to the increasingly autocratic and ruthless CCP autocracy in Mainland China (cf. Taiwan's being progressive, tolerant and diverse, besides her vibrant liberal democracy, especially in view of the new president having publicly supported LGBT rights and endorsed same-sex marriage, a position she publicly expressed when the biggest gay pride parade in Asia was held in Taipei on 31 st October 201 5). ("As Taiwan celebrates gay pride, presidential hopeful Tsai Ing-wen comes out for marriage equality" (by Kenneth Tan), Shanghaiist Daily, 1 st November 201 5. <http://shanghaiist.com/2015/11/01/tsaiingwengaytaiwan. php>; "Taiwan crowds march in Asia's biggest gay pride parade" (by Agence France-Presse), Mail Online (Daily Mail, UK), 31 st October 201 5 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article3298008/ TaiwancrowdsmarchAsiasbiggestgayprideparade. html>)

68. See Bo (2009: 1 0-11 ).

69. Cited from ...[selected works of Deng Xiaoping, volume 3] , Beij ing: Renmin Chubanshe ... 1993 ... 220~221 ....

70. Cited in Diamond (2002: 24).

71 . Freedom House's report Freedom in the World 2015 - Discarding democracy: Return to the iron fist, p. 4.

72. Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses (2001 ) argues that Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco Bahamonde "was not a fascist. There is an element of revolutionary politics in fascism, of wanting to provoke a dramatic change in society. That was not Franco's intention: on the contrary, he wanted to preserve Spain from change ... the debate as to whether Franco was a fascist is in many ways irrelevant, since the denial of Franco's fascism has often been an essential part of attempts to legitimise his actions. The fact remains that his brutality matched or even exceeded that ofMussolini." (p. 87) Similarly Raymond Carr (1 980) states that: "In spite of the Fascist trimmings of the early years - the goose-step and the Fascist salute - Francoism was not a totalitarian regime. It was a conservative, Catholic, authoritarian system, its original corporatist features modified over time. It came to have none of the characteristics of a totalitarian state: no single party parallel to the state administration; after the early years, no successful attempt at mass mobilization." (p. 1 65) However, Paul Preston (1 995) disagrees strongly with such an approach, saying that "in the last twenty years [since the 1 970s] , scholars have dwelt on the fact that Francoism was not Hitlerism ... resulting in an increasingly widespread consensus that Francoism was never really fascism ... Such an approach is understandable and unfortunate ... An eagerness to exonerate the Franco regime from the taint of fascism can go with a readiness to forget that, after coming to power through a civil war which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and forced hundreds of thousands more into exile, the dictatorship executed at least quarter of a million people, maintained concentration camps and labour battalions, and sent troops to fight for Hitler on the Russian front ... the confident exclusion ... of the Franco regime from a discussion of fascism cold only be justified if fascism is taken to be synonymous with Nazism at its most extreme, complete with racialistic bestiality. Such a view, since it leads logically to the suggestion that Mussolini's Italy was not really fascist, is so rigid as to be useless." (pp. 1 0-11 ) Going into details on characteristics of the Caudillo's regime, Andrew Forrest (2000) similarly find Francoism fascist: "The teoria de caudillaje was a defining contour of the Franco regime, and with it came a flourishing personality cult ... this bureaucratic state learned much from the economic policy of Fascist Italy. These lessons also included autarky, the Labour Charter establishing rights and duties of workers (1 938), the 'Battle for Wheat' and the INI, a source of state investment for industry (1 941 ). The Falangist Seccion Femenina ... ' reeducated' women in their traditional roles, analagous to the Nazi Kinder, Kirche, Kuche ... Franco regime banned not only divorce but, along with all Catholic countries, contraception. As in Mussolini's Italy and the Third Reich, awards were given as incentive to produce large families ... Through the voluntary Youth Front founded in 1 940 (Pelayos aged 7-1 0, Flechas 11 -1 4, Cadetes 1 5-1 8) Falangists instilled political doctrine ... [and] occupied top positions in the Franco propaganda machine, press, radio, film, theatre, and ... orchestrated parades and rallies affirming mass support for the Caudillo with their fascist salute and conspicuous blue shirts." (p. 11 6, p. 11 8) Some observers, though, have opted for a mid-way approach, calling the Franquist regime "semifascist": "Falangists never played a major role in the new state. Most of the key leaders of the Falange did not survive the Civil War, and Franco moved quickly to subordinate the fascist party, merging it as well as more conservative and traditional political forces into the broader and vaguer National Movement under his direct control ... Thus, while there was a definite fascist element during the first decade of Franco's rule, most analysts have concluded that early Francoism can more accurately be described as semifascist." (Solsten and Meditz (eds), 1 988) (The quoted passages in this note came from the compilation in "Was Franco a fascist?", International School History <http://internationalschoolhistory.net/western_europe/spain/194553_ was_franco_a_fascist.htm>.)

References

References

Berlet, Chip and Matthew N. Lyons (1 996). Too close for comfort: Right wing populism, scapegoating, and fascist potentials in US politics, Boston: South End Press. (Paragraphs adapted in Matthew N. Lyons (undated). What is fascism? Some general ideological features. Political Research Associates (PRA) <http://www.publiceye.org/eyes/whatfasc.html>.)

Billington, James H. (1 980). Fire in the minds of men: Origins of the revolutionary faith. New York: Basic Books / New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers (new edition with new introduction by the author, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1 999).

Bo Zhiyue (2009). The future development of China's elite politics. Paper presented at the International Conference "China's Future: Pitfalls, Prospects and the Implications for ASEAN and the World", Institute of China Studies, University ofMalaya, Kuala Lumpur, 5th-6th May 2009.

Brinton, Crane (1 938). The anatomy of revolution. New York, Vintage Books (revised edition, 1 965).

Carr, Raymond (1 980). Modern Spain: 18751980. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Chu, Ben (201 3). Chinese whispers: Why everything you've heard about China is wrong. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Cox, Oliver C. (1 948). Caste, class and race: A study in social dynamics. New York: Monthly Review Press (repr. 1 970, New York and London: Modern Reader Paperbacks).

Davies, James C. (1 962). Toward a theory of revolution. American Sociological Review, Vol. 27 (February), pp. 5-1 9.

de Meneses, Filipe Ribeiro (2001 ). Franco and the Spanish Civil War. London: Routledge.

DeVos, George A. (1 972). Japan's outcastes: The problem of the Burakumin. In: Ben Whitaker (ed.), The Fourth World: Victims of group oppression. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, pp. 308-327.

Diamond, Larry (2002). Elections without democracy: Thinking about hybrid regimes. Journal of Democracy, Vol. 1 3, No. 2, April, pp. 21 -35.

Dirlik, Arif and Roxann Prazniak (201 2). Social justice, democracy and the politics of development: The People's Republic of China in global perspective. In: Emile Kok-Kheng Yeoh (ed.), State, governance and civil societal response in contemporary China: Critical issues in the 21st Century (special issue, International Journal of China Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3, December 201 2), pp. 285-31 3.

Dobson, William J. (201 2). The dictator's learning curve: Inside the global battle for democracy. New York: Doubleday (paperback edition published by Anchor Books, New York, 201 3).

Easton, David (1 965). A systems analysis of political life. New York: John Wiley.

Forrest, Andrew (2000). The Spanish Civil War. London and New York: Routledge.

Gross, Bertram Myron (1 980). Friendly fascism: The new face of power in America. Boston: South End Press / New York: M. Evans and Company, Inc.

Gurr, Ted Robert (1 970). Why men rebel. Princeton: Princeton University Press (revised edition, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 201 0).

Guy, R. Kent (1 987). The emperor's four treasuries: Scholars and the State in the late Qianlong period. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hamerquist, Don (2002). Fascism & anti-fascism. In: Mark Salotte, J. Sakai and Don Hamerquist, Confronting fascism: Discussion documents for a militant movement. Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing.

Hoetink, Harmannus (1 967). The two variants in Caribbean race relations: A contribution to the sociology of segmented societies. Translated by Eva M. Hooykaas. London: Oxford University Press.

Hoetink, Harmannus (1 973). Slavery and race relations in the Americas: Comparative notes on their nature and nexus. New York: Harper & Row.

Hsu Szu-chien ... (2003).... [limited reform under degenerative totalitarian polity] . In: Lin Chia-lung ... (ed.), ... [future China: degenerative totalitarianism] . Taipei: ... (China Times Publishing Company).

Hu Lianhe ..., Hu Angang ..., He Shenghong ... and Guo Yong ... (2009), Dangdai Zhongguo shehui wending wenti baogao ... ... [report on contemporary China's social stability] , Beij ing: Hongqi Chubanshe ...

Huntington, Samuel P. (1 991 ). The third wave: Democratization in the late Twentieth Century. Oklahoma: University ofOklahoma Press.

Huntington, Samuel P. (1 996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Jacques, Martin (2009). When China rules the world: The rise of the Middle Kingdom and the end of the Western world. London: Allen Lane.

Jacques, Martin (2011 ). Civilization state versus nation-state (1 5/01 /11 - Süddeutsche Zeitung). Martin Jacques - Official Site. <http://www.martin jacques.com/articles/civilizationstateversusnationstate2/>

Kaup, Katherine Palmer (2000). Creating the Zhuang: Ethnic politics in China. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Kirkpatrick, Jeane J. (1 979). Dictatorships & double standards. Commentary, 1 st November 1 979.

Kristoff, Nicholas D. and Sheryl WuDunn (1 995). China wakes: The struggle for the soul of a rising power. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

Ledeen, Michael A. (2008). Beij ing embraces classical fascism. Far Eastern Economic Review, Vol. 1 71 , No. 4, May 2008, pp. 8-11 .

Lerner, Daniel (1 958). The passing of traditional society: Modernizing the Middle East. New York: Free Press (paperback edition, 1 964).

Link, Perry (201 2). Does this writer deserve the Prize? The New York Review of Books, 6th December 201 2. <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/12/06/ moyannobelprize/? pagination=false&printpage=true>

Liu Xiaobo ... (2009). Daguo chenlun - Xie gei Zhongguo de beiwanglu ... [great nation drowning: a memorandum for China] . Taipei: ...

Montague, Richard (2001 ). Marx and Lenin's views contrasted. Socialist Standard, No. 11 69, December 2001 . <http://www.worldsocialism.org/sp gb/socialiststandard/ 2000s/2001/no1169december2001/ marxandleninsviewscontrasted>

Moseley, George (1 966). The Party and the national question in China. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology.

O'Donnell, Guillermo and Philippe C. Schmitter (1 986). Transitions from authoritarian rule: Tentative conclusions about uncertain democracies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Orwell, George (Eric Blair) (1 944). What is Fascism? Tribune, 24th March 1 944.

Paine, Thomas (1 776). Common sense. Issued at Philadelphia (edited with introduction by Isaac Kramnick, published by Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1 976, reprinted 1 986; included in The life and major writings of Thomas Paine, collected, edited and annotated by Philip S. Foner, New York: Carol Publishing Group/Citadel Press, 1 993).

Pang, Qin (201 4). The "Two Lines Control Model" in China's State and society relations: Central State's management of Confucian revival in the new century. International Journal of China Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3, December 201 4, pp. 627-655.

Preston, Paul (1 995). The Politics of revenge: Fascism and the military in 20thcentury Spain. London and New York: Routledge.

Puddington, Arch (201 5). Freedom in the World 2015 - Discarding democracy: Return to the iron fist. Freedom House. <https://www.freedomhouse.org/ sites/default/files/01152015_FIW_2015_final.pdf>

Sharp, Gene (201 0), From dictatorship to democracy: A conceptual framework for liberation, 4th U.S. edition, Boston, MA: The Albert Einstein Institution (originally published in Bangkok in 1 993 by the Committee for the Restoration ofDemocracy in Burma; 1 st U.S. edition, 2002).

Skocpol, Theda (1 979). States and social revolutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sleeper, Raymond S. (1 987). Soviet deception through words. In: Raymond S. Sleeper (ed.), Mesmerized by the bear: The Soviet strategy of deception. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, pp. 1 89-207.

Solsten, Eric and Sandra W. Meditz (eds) (1 988). Spain: A country study. Washington, D.C.: Government Publishing Office (GPO) for the Library of Congress.

Spence, Jonathan D. (1 996). God's Chinese son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Tilly, Charles (1 985). War making and state making as organized crime. In: Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State back in. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1 69-1 91 .

Tocqueville, Alexis de (1 856). L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution. Translated by Stuart Gilbert as The Old Regime and the French Revolution, New York: Anchor Books, 1 955.

Tripathi, Salil (2008a). To tell and listen: Salman Rushdie. Far Eastern Economic Review, Vol. 1 71 , No. 4, May 2008, pp. 24-27.

Tripathi, Salil (2008b). The conscience of a forgetful nation. Far Eastern Economic Review, Vol. 1 71 , No. 5, June 2008, pp. 37-40.

Vander Zanden, James Wilfrid (1 988). The social experience. New York: Random House.

Verba, Sidney (1 965). Comparative political culture. In Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba (eds), Political culture and political development. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 529-542.

Wittfogel, Karl (1 967). Oriental despotism. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Yeung, Chris (201 3). Leadership - Job done, leadership pledge unaccomplished. In: Joseph Y.S. Cheng (ed.), The second chief executive of Hong Kong SAR: Evaluating the Tsang years 20052012. Kowloon, Hong Kong: City University ofHong Kong Press, pp. 1 39-1 69.

Zhou Tianyong ... , Wang Changj iang ... and Wang Anling ... (eds) (2007). Gongjian: Shiqi Da hou Zhongguo zhengzhi tizhi gaige yanjiu baogao ... [attack the fortress: research report on China's political reform after the 1 7th Party Congress] , Wuj iaqu ... , Xinj iang: Xinj iang Shengchan Jianshe Bingtuan Chubanshe ...

Zhou Zhifa ... (201 3). Rongcuoxing minzhu: Zhongguo tese minzhu lilun yanjiu ... [mistake-tolerant democracy: a theoretical study on democracy with Chinese characteristics] . Kunming ...: Yunnan Daxue Chubanshe ...