Mr. Xi’s China, thrust into an ideological tightening with echoes of the Cultural Revolution, wasn’t supposed to look like this. But like a spring that recoils after it has been squeezed too tightly, some are fighting back, giving rare voice to internal dissent in an increasingly authoritarian state. It’s far from a revolution. Yet the past few weeks have seen a remarkable succession of challenges to China’s authoritarian tack under Mr. Xi, which has included detaining hundreds of human-rights and labour advocates, proscribing religious freedoms, scrubbing homosexual and other “immoral” content from television, aggressively censoring social media and demanding that traditional media fall into line with Communist Party dictates. “Enough is enough. It’s bound to trigger some kind of reaction,” said Bao Pu, a publisher in Hong Kong whose father is a high-ranking Communist official turned political prisoner and dissident after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. “What you see is just the tip of the iceberg of discontent.”
It has come from unexpected places. Jiang Hong, a professor at the Shanghai University of Finance, is a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, which makes him political high society. But during meetings of China’s rubber-stamp Congress this month, Prof. Jiang struck a defiant tone. “The rights to speak freely must be protected,” he told Caixin, a financial publication. The comments were deleted, as was a subsequent article documenting the censorship. Prof. Jiang has refused to be cowed. “I think it’s necessary to talk about this topic,” he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. “A citizen’s right to free speech and right to speak out are very important to a healthy, harmonious and legal society. Without them, it will be hard for us to supervise the government, and manage government so that it can work for the people.”
It’s not a new cause for Prof. Jiang. Two years ago, he proposed a bill to enshrine those rights entitled “Only Democracy Can Radically Cure Corruption.” At the time, party press covered the proposal. Over the previous decade, a loosening environment had made critical commentary more routine. Now, however, “it has reached a kind of extreme state, which involves simply deleting comments and barring you from speaking,” Prof. Jiang said. “The degree of change is striking.” He struggles to understand what he has done wrong, saying he has broken no rules or regulations. China’s own constitution says, “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech.” What is happening today is “a new phenomenon. In the past, only ordinary Netizens were censored like this,” said Qiao Mu, an associate professor of journalism at Beijing Foreign Studies University.
Prof. Qiao has himself been caught in the clampdown. An advocate of Western-style journalism, he has been barred from teaching and research, relegated instead to translation and book reviews in the university’s library. He stood before his last class in June, 2014. “They think you have dangerous thoughts,” he said. “It’s a minor Cultural Revolution. They control people’s minds, their speech, their writing and publications. He referred to Document No. 9, an internal party document from 2013 that listed “seven no’s” for China, including Western-style democracy, the promotion of universal human-rights values, and Western philosophies on media and civil society. The Chinese President is reinstating a “patriarchal, hierarchical, traditional autocratic culture where the emperor – the leader of the Communist Party – rules all,” Jasmine Bernstein Yin, a Columbia University student, wrote in The Australian in March, in another public call for change. She was raised in China but educated mostly abroad since the age of 12, and her writing has attracted attention because of her lineage: She is the granddaughter of Ye Jianying, a Mao-era general and former Chinese head of state.
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