The People’s Republic at 70

Good afternoon, and welcome to China Brief, Foreign Policy’s weekly roundup of news and analysis from the world’s most populous country. The highlights this week: China marks the 70th anniversary of Communist Party rule as Hong Kong revolts, new weapons revealed at Beijing’s military parade, and PayPal enters the Chinese market.

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Oct. 1 marked the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, meaning that it has outlived the Soviet Union. On Tuesday, Beijing was shut down for a celebration and a huge military parade. But as the country marches forward, what does its future hold?

Foreign Policy explores this question and more as it covers China’s national week. You can read our 70th anniversary coverage here. A few highlights: Jude Blanchette outlines five bad things that could lie in China’s near future, Frank Dikötter argues that the 1949 liberation made China less free, and Vicky Xiuzhong Xu describes what it means to be young, Chinese, and angry.

Xi’s speech. President Xi Jinping’s keynote speech on Tuesday was characteristically bombastic. While much of the Chinese public enjoys the event, to outside or dissident eyes the glorification of the military and Chinese Communist Party leaders can seem disturbing, especially when the Chinese army is being deployed to crush minorities. The giant portraits of Xi displayed at the parade did little to counter claims of his growing personality cult.

Hong Kong revolts. Hong Kong saw one of its “most violent days” of unrest yet on Oct. 1, with hundreds of arrests and riot charges—meaning possible 10-year sentences. The crackdown made people even angrier, as has the news that a teenage protester was shot by police and that a journalist was blinded by a rubber bullet. Public solidarity remains intact: Call and response chants between groups of strangers, from ferries to tower blocks, have become a regular occurrence. Some protesters have expanded their five demands to six, with a straightforward call to abolish the police force.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam attended the Beijing parade, looking more comfortable among mainland leaders than she did taking questions from the public last week. There appears to be no plausible route back to a peaceful Hong Kong, especially in the long term. Reuters reports that troop levels have been doubled and that the People’s Armed Police have quietly pushed into the city, as Hilton Yip predicted in FP in August.

Gray skies. One odd note from Oct. 1: The air quality index in Beijing, normally choreographed and kept to blue-sky levels for national events, was recorded at over 150, leaving the skies noticeably gray in aerial shots. It’s unclear why, given that traffic was limited and factories shut down for miles around the city. One possibility is agricultural straw burning.

Missiles on show. China’s military parades are always a showcase for new weapons, though the equipment actually on show is often fake or a mock-up. The biggest reveals at the Oct. 1 parade were the DF-17, an intercontinental ballistic missile officially deployed last year, and a hypersonic regional missile. As China’s military technology develops apace, the part that’s harder to evaluate is the logistics and training behind it.

Missiles in the air. North Korea has launched another missile test, this time from a submarine. China has protested North Korea’s weapons tests in the past, but as ties with the United States deteriorate, it has increasingly remained quiet. The military can’t be happy, though: There is awareness inside the armed forces that Beijing is closer to Pyongyang than Washington, and that the North Koreans are dubious allies at best.

Hui repression. There have long been fears that China’s crackdown on Uighur Muslims would mean increased persecution of Muslims across the country. Recent reporting shows that those predictions may be coming true: Authorities have cracked down on the Hui, China’s largest Muslim minority, instituting sweeping religious and linguistic restrictions. Muslim countries around the world have remained silent.

Alleged spy arrested. The espionage war between the United States and China has taken another turn, as it turns out the United States has run a double agent operation to catch Chinese spies in the United States—likely set up after the Chinese successfully wiped out the CIA’s assets in China between 2010 and 2012. This week, an alleged spy was arrested in California and accused of acting as a courier for Chinese intelligence.

PayPal enters the market. PayPal has become the first foreign digital payments firm authorized to operate in China after it acquired GoPay, a small Chinese payments provider. The move is a surprising concession from China, but success seems unlikely in a market where digital payments using services such as Alibaba’s Alipay have been the norm for years and are tightly integrated with the Chinese internet and surveillance systems.

Will the U.S. cut investment? The White House has denied reports this week that it was considering severely restricting U.S. investments in China. While markets were spooked by the initial news, they steadied after it seemed no such plan was imminent. But there are real questions about why Chinese firms that don’t meet Western transparency standards are listed on U.S. exchanges. Delisting, however, would be a huge step toward a broader decoupling.

Big newsletter, by Matt Stoller

As Chinese power starts to shape almost every issue worldwide, much of the most interesting coverage is coming from non-China specialists. Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, writes a newsletter focused on monopoly power and laissez-faire capitalism. He has a lot to say about China, such as this post detailing how a U.S.-China deal went wrong in the 1990s. He’s also written for Foreign Policy on the dangers of unregulated capitalism leaving the power to those willing to regulate it.

Abolishing the military over a glass of wine, 969 A.D.

As the People’s Republic of China celebrates its foundation, we look back to the birth of another empire after a period of chaos: the Song Empire (960 to 1279). The six decades after the waning Tang Empire finally fell in 907 A.D. were horrific, with local warlords given to cannibalism, vampirism, and increasingly elaborate torture. The noble families that had dominated the Tang Empire were destroyed.

Zhao Kuangyin, later the Emperor Taizu, was the warlord who put the new empire together by carrying out a coup in the kingdom he served and leading a series of military campaigns. That left him with a problem: what to do with his powerful generals and the men who followed them. The generals were lured to the capital, wined and dined, and offered a simple bargain: To keep the peace, the generals should all step down, receive extensive estates, and abolish their personal armies. They did so—while Zhao’s words were honeyed, the implied cost of refusal was likely to be extremely personal.

That’s it for this week.

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