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The Sunday Paper – In Public or in Private: Repressing Dissidents in China

Perhaps, with the National Congress still in full flow, this isn’t the most appropriate time to look at the dark underbelly of the Magic Kingdom?

Let’s do it anyway. In the paper highlighted this week from Dimitar D. Gueorguiev, Assistant Prof. of Political Science, Syracuse Univ., Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, he uses China as a lab-rat to see if authoritarian regimes exhibit reliable patterns in their process of repression.

China makes an especially suitable case for study as the researcher notes “The Chinese Communist Party has proven to be one of the most resilient and sophisticated authoritarian regimes in modern history…  [And] Its capacity to repress and to calibrate the disclosure of repression is arguably unmatched.”

He divided dissent into three categories: Identity (Falun Gong, Tibetans, Uighurs and etcetera), Political (human rights agitators and friends) and Welfare (environmental activists and so on). What the paper is most interested in is not how these groups are repressed but to what extent the authorities publicize their action.

The hypothesis is the government will make a lot of noise about action taken against political and welfare agitators but will be much more circumspect with regards to publicizing action against the identity malcontents. Why so? There’s a deterrent effect in publicizing punishment handed out to welfare and political dissidents but doing so with regard to identity related troublemakers runs the risk of a galvanizing-opposition backlash.

Chillingly, this is exactly what was observed. Despite the fact the government is in a state of open warfare with the Falun Gong very little of this appears in the Chinese media. Cases of civil rights lawyers and environmental activists being punished, by comparison, are much more prominently covered.

The conclusion is that China is doing exactly what an intelligent repressive regime should do. Kill the odd chicken to frighten the monkeys but try not to create martyrs among groups that could fight back with greater force and cohesion.

As efficient as the paper suggests China is in managing dissent I doubt, among achievements to be celebrated at the Congress next week, ‘Accomplished Repressor’ will be one of them?

You can access the paper in full via this link In Public or in Private.

Happy Sunday.

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