Introduction to ST Riley's China Encounters
What this publication is about. What it aims to reveal.
Imagine a world where a faceless public health care official calls you out of the blue one evening and tells you that you may have been exposed to a deadly virus, to pack your bags, and to be prepared to be transported within the hour to an unnamed medical facility for two weeks to be monitored, “just in case you get sick”.
Imagine being disconnected, suddenly and without explanation, from the processes of civilization that support you.
Imagine a world where authority shifts from humans to algorithms, where a ruling oligarchy combines business with the interests of the State and sees the ruled as part of an all-encompassing data-processing system to be monitored, mapped and monetized.
Imagine a world where your employer behaves like the State, protects its vested interests at all costs, and fires you after you resign because you insisted they honor your duly-signed employment contract.
Imagine this “aggrieved” employer uses the legal system against you to exact punishment for calling into question their “right” to define their employees’ “common good.”
Imagine taking to the street to protest a world like this -- a world where an all-powerful political party permeates the private and public sectors and polices its citizens’ pursuit of self-interest to assure its primacy in society.
This is not the stuff of John Lennon’s imagination, the one which envisions a world where there are no countries, “no hell below us, above us only sky”.
Rather, it’s closer to the surveillance regime described in George Orwell’s 1984, where “every sound you made was overheard, and, except in the darkness, every movement scrutinized”.
So tell me: If you were a writer that used encounters to tell the story of how one nation’s political elite asserted their power in such a world, would you be inclined to hide the identities of those involved?
It isn’t an easy answer to come by, the vagaries of an author’s ego notwithstanding. In this world, Winston Smith -- Orwell’s 1984 protagonist -- couldn’t hide, even if he tried.
But the world recounted in these pages isn’t fiction.
It’s China and Hong Kong today.
And my name is not ST Riley -- even if this Substack offering is penned under that name.
It’s a pen name -- as are virtually all the names that populate the pages that follow. It saddens me that pseudonyms are being used in this book. But chronicling this moment in history demands certain discretions, not least as a means of protection -- however futile it may prove to be. The Chinese these days can be inflexibly precious when it comes to how they are perceived or described, so certain precautions are best taken. It is a sign of the times. More precisely, it is the “better part of valor”, just as “rashness is the characteristic of youth and prudence that of mellowed age” -- all of which are in ample display in today’s Hong Kong. The territory is proof positive of the wisdom of Cicero’s -- and Shakespeare’s -- ancient warnings.
Some Chinese might reject my refusal to disclose identities as cowardly and inauthentic. They would dismiss my discretion as Western drivel and possibly quote Confucius in retort as fair warning to any reader: “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.”
That is the ruse of the despotic, alas. All I will offer in response is that I will labor to relay accurately what I have seen and experienced in the pages that follow. I will cite references wherever pertinent to assure proper context. I will seek to fairly account in each and every encounter how the ascendance of Chinese power and influence affects each individual who is chronicled.
The truth is, trouble only starts when language loses its meaning -- when discretion prompts ambiguity over clarity, not anonymity over disclosure. The use of the pseudonym ST Riley is animated by a fear that someone somewhere in the firmament of Chinese power might notice and take umbrage at what is written here; that they might see it as politically insidious.
But that’s how Soviet some things have become in today’s China. Not all things, mind you -- and not all the time, either. The pages that follow illustrate a world where the conduct of business -- and life -- is far from the stolid hopelessness that characterized so much of daily existence in the now-defunct USSR -- a country in which I have roots and lived. On most any day, the likes of a Hong Kong can be as dynamic a city as it ever was for the majority of its inhabitants -- or, for that matter, as can be found presently on the globe.
Perhaps that’s what makes these encounters so terrifying. What makes Hong Kong like the old Soviet Union is how arbitrarily petty tyranny can emerge in everyday existence. It can happen with a suddenness that shocks. It can be prompted, even if inexplicably so. The roots of affront are uniform, however -- and they are always political. Anything that calls into question the mandate or method of China’s ruling elite, no matter how trivial the perceived impertinence, can be dire -- for oneself, one’s family, one’s friends, one’s business or one’s well-being. As a reader of an early-days’ version of this manuscript commented: “It just isn’t worth to be seen mooning the Chinese Communist Party.”
What follows attempts to reveal anecdotally why this is so. It shows how, through the worst of protest and Covid, the social contract Beijing has assembled to govern its people operates. To get rich in China is still glorious, to borrow the famous phrase allegedly invoked in the early-1980s by former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping -- and to this day vigorously pursued by citizens across Greater China, not least in cities like Hong Kong. The party cultivates the entrepreneurial. It can use its wealth to mother the enterprising, underwrite initiative and nurture the pursuit of self-interest in society to sow and reap contributions to national growth and economic development.
But wealth and success can be chased only within a framework of uncontested Communist Party authority. Beijing’s authority must be recognized -- and honored -- as inviolable.
Call into question that authority -- call into question the party’s ruling legitimacy -- as Hong Kong’s protestors did in the streets of the territory for almost a year, and you court repression, or worse.
That the arrangement can trap citizens on a proverbial gerbil wheel of self-awareness and vigilance lest they provoke Beijing’s -- or, more specifically, the ruling bureaucracy’s -- ire should not surprise. These pages are filled with the anxieties that such oversight engenders. But that is what happens when everyone navigates a world that forever seems to be reconciling the irreconcilable, where the rulers chase the certainties of central control and the dynamism of free enterprise, but without the sclerosis of centralism or the uncertainties of freedom.
When boundaries are kept, the arrangement can be tidy. It even permits all sides to benefit from the dividends their mutual investments accrue. But call into question the rulers’ political legitimacy and their singular right to define what constitutes the common good and punishment can be severe and arrive swiftly.
It has to be this way, after all. By Beijing’s thinking, to risk violating the party’s centrality in society is to risk discord and from there everything can descend into a rabbit hole: discord can court factions and factions can court opposition and opposition can court contention. Contention in Chinese politics is the worst because it risks undermining authority -- and to lose authority risks losing Heaven’s mandate. If Chinese history teaches anything, it’s that heaven can be hard to rely on.
The encounters relayed in this book also show how the deeper features of a nation’s life -- how society is organized, what its people believe, the stuff that fuels the daily conduct of life and make it meaningful -- can and do exert persistent and powerful influences on behavior. Irrefutably, the politics of a place like China can be unpredictable and rough. But for those willing to operate within fairly well-defined limits and play by the rules, China illustrates how the precise form of governance in society can matter less than its culture.
I concede this might be a conclusion some in the West these days will be reluctant to accept. But to Beijing’s credit, it gets it -- even if cynically so. As economic reform progressed in the wake of the Cultural Revolution’s wreckage, China’s leaders saw first-hand the benefits of entrepreneurial free-booting in its society -- free-booting that more often than not was driven by individuals and their families. They also saw, in full, that what drives history is not class struggle but ever accelerating change. Perhaps it’s an irony to be savored by Marxists, who pride themselves on having deciphered the laws of history, that in such an environment Darwinian laws of evolution would apply. The adaptable organism survives and heavy-handed, overly centralized and over-weaning governments can be the T-Rexes of adaptability.
This is not to say that democracy and freedom are inevitable in a place like China, of course. The people of Hong Kong are proof of that, sadly. But in the few times it has been confronted with political protest since Deng Xiaoping implemented economic reform in the 1980s, it is telling that Beijing and its communist party oligarchs have chosen to tack commercially to favor business in the wake of political discord; to reassert accommodating the social benefits of the free market as a public good.
In part, surely, they did this because this was where their bread got buttered. To get rich is glorious is a governing precept that has made the Chinese Community Party very rich. But Beijing has come to know another truth about governance in the modern era, as well: that modernity itself, which is defined by its relentless exponential pace of change, renders the command society a prescription for instability. They have come to know -- indeed, arguably to appreciate -- that economic efficiency is the consequence of making the right decisions. Or, better put perhaps, permitting the right decisions to be made.
To accommodate this, China’s leadership implemented, wherever possible, the right policies to underpin the pursuit of self-interest: paying heed to market signals; maintaining a realistic exchange rate and positive real interest rates; resisting the temptation to discriminate against exports; promoting risk-taking by forswearing heavy taxation; refusing to allow special interest groups to guide the market. Some of it has come about by design. Some by happenstance. But in exchange for the social construct that animates the millions of cash-cows that result from the pursuit of self-interest, the oligarchs in Beijing expect in return its citizenry to swallow political grievance.
To be honest, after seeing what transpired in Hong Kong over recent years, I didn’t always know how much of this Faustian Bargain was imposed or chosen. It’s as possible a political reckoning for Beijing’s crackdown could be nigh as simmering grievances are put off to another day.
What I do know, what I have relayed in the encounters that follow, is that when push came to shove in Hong Kong after months of protest and Covid, it was irrefutable that a goodly portion of the territory’s population concluded it was better, for now, to pursue the good life than to court disaster by challenging the ruling oligarchy and its attendants in the bureaucracy. To borrow an observation from Margaret Thatcher, Beijing bet and won that the “living tapestry” of men and women in Hong Kong -- and the quality of their lives -- depended on how much each individual in the territory was prepared to take responsibility for themselves as individuals. A wider audit on why events came to pass would come, if at all, down the line -- the stuff of the next book of encounters on the path to Chinese ascendancy.
Where does that leave Hong Kong and China now as we begin to emerge from the ravages of pandemic? Things are slowly opening up. Coronavirus Gulags in the territory thankfully have been phased out, replaced by mandatory quarantines in government-designated hotels; the protests have dissipated; clergy have returned to pulpits as churches have re-opened, albeit with some Covid restrictions still in place. Global corporatists from the private and public sectors continue to court one another for myriad ulterior purposes, even if they do so as often as not in working groups convened on Zoom calls. The courts have re-opened as has business generally. And China’s diplomats in Hong Kong and beyond have returned to advance Chinese President Xi Jinping’s entreaty to build a “trustworthy, loveable and respectable” image to court friends and allies to common purposes in the wake of pandemic.
Perhaps this diplomacy is the most terrible irony of all about this moment in history, too. That whatever reckoning emerges from all the messes involving protest and pandemic, Beijing’s calculation that everyone has too much skin in the game not to cut back to the middle -- to return to a semblance of the status quo that allows the oligarchs everywhere to get on with business -- will turn out to be true beyond China. After all, the Faustian Bargain struck in Hong Kong -- as well as in the mainland -- allowing statists in China’s leadership and their bureaucracies to turn the instrumentalities of public affairs and governance against civil society arguably has been true in parts of the West.
Think about it: Thousands of unelected bureaucrats assumed enormous power not usually accorded to them because of the lockdowns everywhere. Which commercial pursuits were permitted to remain open came by their fiat, as did the rules setting social discourse and penalties for violations of ordinances. Politicians unveiled numerous multi-trillion-dollar spending measures, as often as not aimed at solving issues scarcely related to the effects of the pandemic. Governments globally mobilized to assure the crisis did not go to waste, frequently seeing it as an opportunity to “re-imagine” governance and their citizens’ relationship to the State.
Of course, the US, Britain and the developed nations of the Anglo-Saxon West are not like China. Using QR codes to access menus in London restaurants is some way short of Xi Jinping's digital surveillance. We in the West like to think that, almost uniquely in the world, we cherish our personal freedom. We resent being bossed around and told what to do.
But the story of the Covid era has undertones that can be tellingly uncomfortable for even the most casual libertarian. After all the talk of our exceptionalism, we pulled on our masks and stood dutifully six feet apart in line at the post office, just like everybody else on the planet.
This is not meant to be a rant against the lockdowns. No one knew what was going on at the onset of the virus’s spread, not least governments globally. But knowing what we know now -- history never issues an invitation, unfortunately -- is it possible we may have occasionally acquiesced too much? Like some in Hong Kong, is it possible we might be sleepwalking into a more authoritarian future as a result? Today it was Covid. Might tomorrow bring another pandemic, a terrorist incident, a cybersecurity scare that challenges again the boundaries between citizens -- and between rulers and the ruled?
If Hong Kong in the wake of protest and Covid teaches anything, it might be how subtly the ascendancy of the oligarchs and their bureaucratic attendants can arrive -- how soft-footed their appearance at your apartment can be.
They don’t always show up at the door in Hugo Boss black leather overcoats and jackboots.
They can show up dressed in hazmat suits insisting they are acting in the name of public health and safety.
They can appear as middle-aged nurses with care-worn faces wearing a pained expression and insisting compliance is for your own good.
Think about that as you read the encounters that follow.