Nationalising Thought in Iran and China

Below is a eye-catching piece of web journalism by the The NYT's Lede Blog, put together by Robert Mackey It compares the Iranian and Chinese responses to and media management of two very different revolts. The main thrust is a focus on the changing nature of authoritarian regimes. There are two points that stick out.

The first is that Iran and China have traded complete control for limited freedom. The main way of doing this is to convert their captive minds to consuming ones. That being free to choose your partner, your brand of shoes etc led to people in the Balkans wanting to choose their national identity must worry Tehran and Beijing. Which is probably why nationalism and a strong sense of historical victimhood is strongly cultivated by both Iran and China. This is in a sense an attempt to control the past.

The second deals with how to control the present. The mass organisations that run the two ancient states have a keen sense of the propaganda war within. In both Iran and China the game is to nationalise thought - to control the processes by which information is moulded into shape and therefore define the contours of the debate. They are not falling into the trap of Soviets who tried to battle the west by saying they were the real democrats or trading human rights abuses.

Instead it is about creating a real time narrative to events and hence a beginning, middle and end to the news cycle. In Iran the Supreme Leader says the result is final, has a faux investigation and ends by declaring a few irregularities but the President is Ahmadinejad. The keep matters simple he authorises deadly force to be used against protestors. In Xin Jiang it is by painting the Han as victims of criminal minds spurred by a rebel terrorist group of Uyghurs. There are guided tours and media centres set up for visiting journalists. All dissidents will be struck hard. Nasty stuff but it is designed to make sure bad elements capitulate to the demands of state propaganda.






July 8, 2009, 6:48 pm
Managing Dissent in China and Iran

Just weeks after the disputed presidential election in Iran, outside observers find themselves in a somewhat familiar situation: trying to piece together a sense of what is happening in China’s Xinjiang Province in the aftermath of anti-government protests that turned violent. In China, as in Iran, state-controlled media has called the protesters “rioters” and the violence on the streets “terrorism” rather than characterizing it as a spontaneous reaction by demonstrators confronted by security forces.

As my colleague Michael Wines reported on Monday, getting a clear sense of what is happening on the streets of Urumqi is not made easier by the fact that China’s government, like Iran’s, has made a concerted effort to control information about the unrest by placing restrictions on the foreign press and limiting access to the Internet for government opponents. So once again we find ourselves reading reports from news outlets controlled by or sympathetic to the state, relying on what foreign reporters who have been given strictly limited access to the area can learn and following the Twitter feeds of bloggers who reflect on and translate some of what is being said inside the country.

Beyond the way they manage dissent, Communist China and the Islamic Republic of Iran are obviously very different countries, with very different cultures and systems of government. One person who has thought about the parallels that do exist between the way the two regimes try to control their populations is the journalist Steve Coll. In a discussion of Iran’s government with Dorothy Wickenden and Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker two weeks ago, Mr. Coll argued that the Iranian regime had studied the way China’s government responded to the pro-democracy movement in 1989 and “tried to construct” what he called a “post-Tiananmen China model” system of control.

In the discussion, recorded for The New Yorker’s Web site two weeks ago, Mr. Hertzberg suggested that it is not clear “what kind of society and regime Iran really is.”

“It’s not a simple dictatorship,” he said “The models that we have to tell us what kind of a place Iran is from the past are not particularly useful.”

That led to this exchange between Ms. Wickenden and Mr. Coll:

Dorothy Wickenden: Many people have been reminded of Tiananmen Square as they’ve watched this, as it’s become more and more brutal. What lessons do you think the authorities in Iran have drawn from the Chinese government’s successful crackdown?

Steve Coll: That you have to be decisive and that you have to be unified at the state level and to manage your commands in the security forces very carefully, because the Chinese almost cracked up under the pressure of routing those students from Tiananmen. But I think Rick’s right: this is not China 1989, or Iran 1979… this is an unusual hybrid state with a lot of resilience in its authoritarian and security structures. [...]

It’s a weird pluralistic dictatorship because they’ve been trying to follow what they think of as the Chinese model post-Tiananmen, where you create enough space culturally — rock concerts: good; jobs and businesses and entrepreneurship: good; defiance of state edicts, state power to be responded to brutally. So in creating this weird pluralistic dictatorship, I don’t think anybody in the state, at the top or in the street, quite understood where the balance might have shifted in this attempt to sort of both accommodate and control, especially in reference to young people, and they’re the ones that the state has always feared, in this kind Chinese model way: let them blow off steam listening to their strange music, let the women in north Tehran show a little ankle on the street if that’s really what they want to do, but there are bright lines. Part of what’s going on here I think is a kind of testing on both sides of where those lines might have shifted, given the accommodations that the regime has sponsored and the pluralism it has sponsored.

On Wednesday The Guardian’s diplomatic editor Julian Borger reported that Iran’s feared Basij militia is under the direct control of Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — which suggests that Iran’s leadership is indeed exhibiting strong control of the security forces.

Mr. Coll’s description of the post-Tiananmen China model recalls a comment the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic made in the 1990s about the Yugoslav Communists - that their decision to grant people freedom to travel and buy consumer goods helped keep the population from resenting the regime and pressing for dramatic political change. While the harsher form of authoritarianism in Czechoslovakia, for example, produced a coherent opposition whose frequently jailed leaders were ready to take over running the country communism collapsed, in Yugoslavia a less resentful population was content to stick with its former communist leaders after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with disastrous consequences. As Ms. Drakulic wrote in her book The Balkan Express:

Recently an American friend asked me how it happened that the most liberal and best-off Communist country was the one that now had the war. . . . The answer is so simple that I’m almost ashamed of it: we traded our freedom for Italian shoes.

The recent crackdown on the Internet in the immediate aftermath of the Xinjiang unrest came just after the protests in Iran were self-reported by members of the opposition with Twitter, YouTube and Facebook accounts. That might seem to be a case of China learning from Iran’s experience. But, as David Bandurski of the China Media Project wrote last month, before the violence in Urumqi, China’s government seems to have been learning how to deal with unrest in the Internet age based on its own experience with protests in the past year:

Not so long ago, the suppression of any and all information about mass incidents in China was a matter of virtual certainty. But Chinese officials have surprised over the past year. They have often been right on top of strikes, riots and opinion storms. And crisis management has been, at least on the surface, more about press conferences and press releases, and less about police muscle. At CMP, we have used the term Control 2.0 to talk about an emerging new order of information management and control in China, something more nuanced and clever, and something altogether more Hu Jintao. [...]

The difference with Control 2.0 is that the party is moving from a defensive position, as passive controllers and censors, to a more active position. That is to say, they are now on the offensive.

Control 2.0 is control that makes a shrewdly realistic assessment of China’s new information environment — the result of the Internet, predominantly — and recognizes there are some events that cannot be entirely controlled. So the core of Control 2.0 is reporting at the first possible moment those news events that cannot be concealed, getting the government’s official explanation and version of the facts out first. This pre-empts other media, including international media.

By getting the information out, officials can get the “peripheral media” (especially influential portal news sites, but also commercial newspapers) to work for them. These media feed off of the original Xinhua reports, amplifying their effect. Those same reports, with only slight permutations in many cases, become AFP, Reuters and AP reports. Finally, using those methods that create the smallest stir, you kill the information it is most critical to keep under wraps, keeping rabble-rousing professional media away, and punishing those media that “don’t listen.”

Mr. Bandurski notes that in June 2008, in an address to the People’s Daily newspaper, President Hu himself outlined the need to develop a “new pattern of public opinion guidance,” explaining:

In the age of the Web, everyone can potentially be a source of information and a wellspring of opinion. It is as though everyone has a microphone before them. This has raised the bar on the need for public opinion channeling. Faced with sudden-breaking issues, it is not sufficient for the government and mainstream [official] media to release information. They must also move quickly to understand the pulse of new information emerging on the Internet, reacting quickly to public doubts. This requires that governments, and especially propaganda offices, be equipped with the ability to rapidly and accurately compile and analyze public opinion.

Given the speed with which Twitter accounts were set up by members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards last month, to taunt and hunt down opposition bloggers, it seems that President Ahmadinejad may be paying close attention to President Hu’s lectures.

Evolutionary politics

A terrific piece in the FT by the man who taught a generation of teenagers to scribble.

It is time to update the ancient constitution

By Larry Siedentop

Published: May 24 2009 22:10 | Last updated: May 24 2009 22:10

Alexis de Tocqueville remarked that the British see things very clearly but can see only one thing at a time. He had a point. The storm over MPs’ expenses and the issue of their accountability has led to talk of a “constitutional crisis” – understood as a loss of confidence in the political class. But the crisis is more profound than that.

It is not just the mores of the political class but the political system as a whole that is in crisis. For Britain has reached an impasse. The process of piecemeal reform – at which the nation excelled historically – is no longer adequate to the problems it faces. Britain needs a new constitutional settlement.

Has reliance on piecemeal reform, however, impaired the ability to think constitutionally in the very country that inspired liberal constitutionalism in the l8th century?

To talk of a constitutional crisis in a country with a codified constitution is one thing – illustrated in the US by threats to “the separation of powers” revealed by the Watergate affair. But in a nation without a codified constitution – in which the political system rests on precedent and an appeal to “common sense” rather than the idea of fundamental law – a constitutional crisis becomes more far-reaching.

Britain has reached the point where the structure of society can no longer sustain its traditional political culture. To see this, one has only to look at the appeal to “common sense” that looms so large in political rhetoric. For what happens when “sense” is no longer “common” – that is, when the attitudes and habits creating a political class able to mobilise and shape consent can no longer be taken for granted.

At that point a traditional political culture dissolves. Take, for example, arrangements for the dispersal of power. Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s assault on local government it has been clear that the British constitution offers no adequate safeguards against centralisation. Local autonomy, we can now see, rested on good manners or common sense not fundamental law.

Something similar can be said about central government. The separation of powers has become more formal than real. Later 19th-century reform bills led to the emergence of a party system that created, first, cabinet control of the House of Commons and, then, prime ministerial control of the cabinet. Of late, the stranglehold of the executive has been further increased through Treasury control. It is now hard to think of a democratic political system more centralised than Britain’s. Only the judiciary has, at times, struggled against this trend.

What social changes have contributed to this? And why do they spell the doom of a traditional political culture, the so-called “unwritten constitution”.

The first is the erosion of the class system and the virtual disappearance of deference. For all of the injustices it involved, the system helped to create a political class that had the confidence and wealth to limit the centralising of power. They took much for granted – too much. But they were not careerist politicians in the contemporary sense. Their assumption of a “right to govern” also had an impact locally, where they had no interest in seeing local government replaced by local administration directed from Whitehall.

A parliament made up of people with more modest means combined with the rapid growth of prime ministerial patronage has changed all that. It has revealed how manners rather than constitutional law underpinned the British political system – giving it an extraordinary flexibility but also making it vulnerable to social change.

To the erosion of a class system has now been added massive immigration, the development of a multicultural society. That has only compounded the challenges facing a traditional political culture, reducing the plausibility of appeals to “common sense”. And it raises the question of what can create consensus, in a diverse society lacking a clear normative framework.

Britain’s problem is not so much the violation of norms as their absence.

What can people hold on to? The asymmetrical devolution introduced by New Labour has made the system of government even less easy to grasp. Arguably, it also confuses expediency with justice. What are people to make of a system that makes it possible for European Union students, like Scottish students, to attend Scottish universities without paying fees while students from England are required to do so?

Membership of the EU has been the final nail in the coffin of the ancient constitution. For attempting to integrate a common law culture – with its emphasis on precedent rather than rational coherence – into political cultures shaped by Roman law and statute has introduced serious difficulties. Implementing human rights legislation has not been easy. The absence of a codified constitution also makes it harder for Britain to assert itself in the EU. There is nothing here like the German Constitutional Court’s opinion setting limits on the EU’s jurisdiction.

A new constitutional settlement is imperative. It must include a British charter of rights, a parliament reformed by serious bicameralism (which would transform the party system and make executive control of the legislature far more difficult) and symmetrical devolution. The ancient constitution was a wonderful thing in its time. But its time is over. It created the attitudes and habits of a free people, but it is now undermining them.

The writer is Emeritus Fellow, Keble College, Oxford

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Would You Choose to Live in Tory Britain?

Eh no. Unfortunately I don't have the casting vote in any British election. It is going to be pretty difficult to go back and have to put up with the smugness of David Cameron's Tory party.

If he does make it to No 10, it will be on the back of a slick media campaign and the tiredness of a Labour government. I interviewed "Dave" in Delhi in September 2006 and he was not the great triangulator, straddling left and right to come through the middle. He came across as a upper class public school boy on the make, resembling all those PR guys you'd meet in the 90s who were, to paraphrase Paul Keating, "shivers looking for spines to run up".

I hope this is just the public's way of saying shape up Labour.