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The Atlantic article from 2012 discusses the protest and the state of human rights in China 23 years later.

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This article describes how Apple has agreed to share all its data with the Chinese authorities.

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Under the agreement, Apple seems to be absolving itself of responsibility for what the authorities may choose to do with personal data in G.C.B.D.'s hands. Users who refuse Apple's terms will be denied iCloud services. Users who accept run the risk of unwittingly provoking the ire of the aggressive police state, resulting in deleted data or accounts, or harassment and imprisonment.

This kind of partnership between an American company and a dictatorial regime is at odds with the image Apple has built as a company committed to privacy and a willingness to stand up to pressure from larger entities like the United States government. In a 2015 interview with NPR, the Apple chief executive Tim Cook emphasized that privacy "is a fundamental human right that people have," from a "values point of view," not "a commercial interest point of view."

Unfortunately, it now seems that such "values" are taking a back seat to profits.

In 2017, Apple also announced it was halting the sale of virtual private networks, apps that allow users inside China to get access to blocked content that is critical for activists and regular citizens. IPhones in China also no longer include some Western news outlets like The New York Times on the News app.

In response to criticism about these steps, Apple has blithely responded that it is obeying China's laws. Is this how American companies should respond to dictatorial demands and arbitrary, unjust legal codes?

The Chinese regime makes no apologies about its human rights violations and seems not to care whom it crushes in its quest for power and control, whether it is the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, who died last year in Chinese custody, or the many human-rights lawyers and activists who have been detained and tortured in recent years.

When dealing with the Chinese regime, American companies should likewise not apologize for their commitment to the fundamental values - human rights, democracy, freedom of information, the rule of law - that have allowed them to flourish. American companies should not follow practices in authoritarian countries that are illegal in the United States.

It's hard to believe that Apple is caving in to the regime like this. The only conclusion I am left to draw is that the company is O.K. with taking part in the suppression of freedoms abroad while espousing high-minded values at home.

To be fair, many American tech companies have been tripping over themselves to get into China. Facebook has reportedly been developing censorship software so that it can win approval to operate in China, while the company's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has long been courting the Chinese leadership. For such companies, the Chinese market is simply too big of a temptation when weighed against less quantitatively measurable things like human rights and freedom of expression.

Those companies, institutions and organizations that play an outsize role in society should not shirk their responsibility to uphold social justice. The Chinese people have been fighting for human rights for decades, including the rights to privacy, freedom of speech and democracy. Many have lost their lives doing so. Instead of aiding dictatorships and following a misguided path to the future, Apple should return to its core values and protect the rights of its users at home and abroad.

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Opinion | Apple Can't Resist Playing by China's Rules

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Under the agreement, Apple seems to be absolving itself of responsibility for what the authorities may choose to do with personal data in G.C.B.D.'s hands. Users who refuse Apple's terms will be denied iCloud services. Users who accept run the risk of unwittingly provoking the ire of the aggressive police state, resulting in deleted data or accounts, or harassment and imprisonment.

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China has a long list of state secrets - how many people it puts to death every year, and even the birthdays of its top leaders. But now, overseas researchers have uncovered another Chinese state secret: how much money Beijing gives in aid to other countries.

Not very long ago, China was a foreign aid recipient. Now, it rivals the United States as one of the world's largest donors, through traditional development aid or through financial loans.

For the first time, a large group of researchers outside China have compiled a major database detailing virtually all of China's financial money flow to recipient countries. Citing more than 5,000 projects found across 140 countries, it reveals that China and the US rival each other in terms of how much they offer to other countries.

However, "they spend those budgets in radically different ways. And the different compositions of those portfolios have far-reaching consequences", explains Brad Parks, the project's chief researcher.

He heads the AidData research lab at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, which teamed up with other researchers at Harvard University and the University of Heidelberg in Germany to complete the research.

How did they uncover the secret?

The AidData team had to develop its own methodology to answer the questions that weren't provided by the Chinese government. They tracked money flows from China to recipient countries using news reports, official embassy documents and aid and debt information from China's counterparts.

Piece by painstaking piece, the information came together to draw a relatively complete picture of where Chinese aid is going and what impact it's having.

"We think the methodology has revealed the known knowable universe," Brad Parks says. "If the Chinese government really wants to conceal something, we won't necessarily pick it up." But if there are sizeable money transfers going from China to a recipient country, "word is going to get out", he adds.

How does China hand out money?

One major finding from the study: China and the US, the world's biggest donor, have handed out similar amounts of money in the years covered in the database, but the countries distribute that money in radically different ways.

The vast majority (93%) of US financial aid fits under the traditional definition of aid that's agreed upon by all Western industrialised countries. That aid is given with the main goal of developing the economic development and welfare of recipient countries. At least a quarter of that money represents a direct grant, not a loan that needs to be repaid.

In contrast, only a small portion (21%) of the money that China gives to other countries can be considered as traditional aid. And the rest of that money? The "lion's share" of that money is given in commercial loans that have to be repaid to Beijing with interest.

"China wants to get attractive economic returns on its capital," Brad Parks explains.

And what does that money achieve?

The team's other major finding: when China gives out traditional aid, the recipient countries reap impressive economic rewards. For a long period, there were suspicions that Chinese aid projects were only set up to benefit China; infrastructure projects built by imported Chinese workers, for instance, that did little to improve the lives of people on the ground. However, this research shows that China is just as capable of managing development aid projects as Western donors.

Which countries are getting China's money?

Since 2000, African countries have captured a large slice of the aid and loans given by China.

However, China's wealth is distributed to points across the globe, from hospitals in Senegal to ports in Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In 2014, the most recent year covered by AidData, Russia topped the recipient list, followed by Pakistan and Nigeria.

In contrast, the US list in 2014 was topped by Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by Pakistan.

Politics plays a big part in how both China and the US decide to spend their money. Earlier studies by the researchers behind AidData show that both Beijing and Washington tend to offer money to countries which support them at the United Nations.

But for China, economics play a key role: the AidData researchers found Beijing is often focused on promoting Chinese exports or market rate loans where China wants to get the loan repaid with interest.

The North Korea factor

China is often cited as the main source of aid propping up the fragile North Korean economy. But the AidData researchers tracked down just 17 Chinese projects in North Korea over the 14-year period, totalling a measly $210m.

Brad Parks calls North Korea "an informational black hole", admitting that it's the only recipient country that truly evaded the researchers. To a large extent, the vast amounts of money and other kinds of aid that China is believed to give North Korea fall outside the global financial system.

Why is China's money so attractive?

In the 1960s to the 1990s, Western countries offered high-interest market-rate loans to developing countries. However, that strategy misfired when recipient countries could not begin to repay the interest on the debts they had acquired. Outrage ensued and the Western aid model was overhauled.

"There was a shared principle that we should not be offering market-rate loans to developing countries," Brad Parks says. "And now, here comes China, enter stage left. They're not part of that coalition. They haven't been socialised to that principle and they're very willing and able to provide loans near or at market rate.

"Increasingly, countries that don't want to go the IMF for a bailout when they're in trouble, they will go to China instead."

Will China continue to loan out money?

So far, the data shows that the countries that receive China's market-rate loans are not suffering economically, but they aren't experiencing economic growth either. Researchers fear that could change in 10 or 15 years, when countries build up debts because they can't repay the money they will owe to Beijing. At that point, China might have to rethink things.

"They may very well 10 years from now, or 15 years from now, encounter the same problems that Western donors and creditors encountered when loans are not getting repaid," Brad Parks explains. "If and when that point of reckoning occurs, then perhaps Beijing will revisit how it structures these loans."

China's prestige projects around the world

China pledges $60bn to develop Africa

Is China a brake on Africa's progress?

Already, researchers have uncovered signs that China's starting to shift its approach to lending, researcher Xiaojun Li from the University of British Columbia says. Increasingly, Beijing is lending through multilateral institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China's answer to the World Bank.

Why does it matter if China becomes a big global lender?

There is evidence that China's no-strings loans have had an effect on the entire global lending system, forcing traditional donors to stop placing so many requirements on receiving countries. Using AidData's database, economist Diego Hernandez revealed that China's role as a major lender has boosted competition between traditional donors.

"When an African country is also assisted by China," he writes, "the World Bank provides fewer conditions attached to its loans". For every 1% increase in Chinese aid, Hernandez found the World Bank lessened its typical demands for things like market liberalisation or economic transparency by 15%.

Critics have long charged that "rogue aid" from China allows some countries to avoid democratic reforms because they can simply turn to China for aid, dodging the scrutiny of traditional Western donors.

Cambodia is a recent example; independent newspapers and western NGOs have been shuttered, as Cambodian leaders' strengthening ties with China embolden them to turn away from Washington's demands to hold fair elections.

Xiaojun Li studied how Chinese aid has changed countries in Africa, arguing that democratic reforms have slowed as the developing countries concluded they could bypass the political demands of Western donors by turning to Chinese aid.

"Traditional donors have criticised China's approach to aid," he says, but "many African countries embrace the assistance from Beijing, or at least are glad to have more options".

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China has a long list of state secrets - how many people it puts to death every year, and even the birthdays of its top leaders. But now, overseas researchers have uncovered another Chinese state secret: how much money Beijing gives in aid to other countries.

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This article explains how China is looking for aliens.

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As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world's largest radio dish for precisely that purpose.

Jon Juarez

Last January, theChinese Academy of Sciences invited Liu Cixin, China's preeminent science-fiction writer, to visit its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country's southwest. Almost twice as wide as the dish at America's Arecibo Observatory, in the Puerto Rican jungle, the new Chinese dish is the largest in the world, if not the universe. Though it is sensitive enough to detect spy satellites even when they're not broadcasting, its main uses will be scientific, including an unusual one: The dish is Earth's first flagship observatory custom-built to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. If such a sign comes down from the heavens during the next decade, China may well hear it first.
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In some ways, it's no surprise that Liu was invited to see the dish. He has an outsize voice on cosmic affairs in China, and the government's aerospace agency sometimes asks him to consult on science missions. Liu is the patriarch of the country's science-fiction scene. Other Chinese writers I met attached the honorific Da, meaning "Big," to his surname. In years past, the academy's engineers sent Liu illustrated updates on the dish's construction, along with notes saying how he'd inspired their work.

But in other ways Liu is a strange choice to visit the dish. He has written a great deal about the risks of first contact. He has warned that the "appearance of this Other" might be imminent, and that it might result in our extinction. "Perhaps in ten thousand years, the starry sky that humankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent," he writes in the postscript to one of his books. "But perhaps tomorrow we'll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit."

In recent years, Liu has joined the ranks of the global literati. In 2015, his novel The Three-Body Problem became the first work in translation to win the Hugo Award, science fiction's most prestigious prize. Barack Obama told The New York Times that the book-the first in a trilogy- gave him cosmic perspective during the frenzy of his presidency. Liu told me that Obama's staff asked him for an advance copy of the third volume.

At the end of the second volume, one of the main characters lays out the trilogy's animating philosophy. No civilization should ever announce its presence to the cosmos, he says. Any other civilization that learns of its existence will perceive it as a threat to expand-as all civilizations do, eliminating their competitors until they encounter one with superior technology and are themselves eliminated. This grim cosmic outlook is called "dark-forest theory," because it conceives of every civilization in the universe as a hunter hiding in a moonless woodland, listening for the first rustlings of a rival.

Liu's trilogy begins in the late 1960s, during Mao's Cultural Revolution, when a young Chinese woman sends a message to a nearby star system. The civilization that receives it embarks on a centuries-long mission to invade Earth, but she doesn't care; the Red Guard's grisly excesses have convinced her that humans no longer deserve to survive. En route to our planet, the extraterrestrial civilization disrupts our particle accelerators to prevent us from making advancements in the physics of warfare, such as the one that brought the atomic bomb into being less than a century after the invention of the repeating rifle.

Science fiction is sometimes described as a literature of the future, but historical allegory is one of its dominant modes. Isaac Asimov based his Foundation series on classical Rome, and Frank Herbert's Dune borrows plot points from the past of the Bedouin Arabs. Liu is reluctant to make connections between his books and the real world, but he did tell me that his work is influenced by the history of Earth's civilizations, "especially the encounters between more technologically advanced civilizations and the original settlers of a place." One such encounter occurred during the 19th century, when the "Middle Kingdom" of China, around which all of Asia had once revolved, looked out to sea and saw the ships of Europe's seafaring empires, whose ensuing invasion triggered a loss in status for China comparable to the fall of Rome.

This past summer, I traveled to China to visit its new observatory, but first I met up with Liu in Beijing. By way of small talk, I asked him about the film adaptation of The Three-Body Problem. "People here want it to be China's Star Wars," he said, looking pained. The pricey shoot ended in mid-2015, but the film is still in postproduction. At one point, the entire special-effects team was replaced. "When it comes to making science-fiction movies, our system is not mature," Liu said.

I had come to interview Liu in his capacity as China's foremost philosopher of first contact, but I also wanted to know what to expect when I visited the new dish. After a translator relayed my question, Liu stopped smoking and smiled.

"It looks like something out of science fiction," he said.

A week later, I rode a bullet train out of Shanghai, leaving behind its purple Blade Runner glow, its hip cafés and craft-beer bars. Rocketing along an elevated track, I watched high-rises blur by, each a tiny honeycomb piece of the rail-linked urban megastructure that has recently erupted out of China's landscape. China poured more concrete from 2011 to 2013 than America did during the entire 20th century. The country has already built rail lines in Africa, and it hopes to fire bullet trains into Europe and North America, the latter by way of a tunnel under the Bering Sea.

The skyscrapers and cranes dwindled as the train moved farther inland. Out in the emerald rice fields, among the low-hanging mists, it was easy to imagine ancient China-the China whose written language was adopted across much of Asia; the China that introduced metal coins, paper money, and gunpowder into human life; the China that built the river-taming system that still irrigates the country's terraced hills. Those hills grew steeper as we went west, stair-stepping higher and higher, until I had to lean up against the window to see their peaks. Every so often, a Hans Zimmer bass note would sound, and the glass pane would fill up with the smooth, spaceship-white side of another train, whooshing by in the opposite direction at almost 200 miles an hour.

It was mid-afternoon when we glided into a sparkling, cavernous terminal in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou, one of China's poorest, most remote provinces. A government-imposed social transformation appeared to be under way. Signs implored people not to spit indoors. Loudspeakers nagged passengers to "keep an atmosphere of good manners." When an older man cut in the cab line, a security guard dressed him down in front of a crowd of hundreds.

The next morning, I went down to my hotel lobby to meet the driver I'd hired to take me to the observatory. Two hours into what was supposed to be a four-hour drive, he pulled over in the rain and waded 30 yards into a field where an older woman was harvesting rice, to ask for directions to a radio observatory more than 100 miles away. After much frustrated gesturing by both parties, she pointed the way with her scythe.

We set off again, making our way through a string of small villages, beep-beeping motorbike riders and pedestrians out of our way. Some of the buildings along the road were centuries old, with upturned eaves; others were freshly built, their residents having been relocated by the state to clear ground for the new observatory. A group of the displaced villagers had complained about their new housing, attracting bad press-a rarity for a government project in China. Western reporters took notice. " China Telescope to Displace 9,000 Villagers in Hunt for Extraterrestrials," read a headline in The New York Times.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (seti) is often derided as a kind of religious mysticism, even within the scientific community. Nearly a quarter century ago, the United States Congress defunded America's seti program with a budget amendment proposed by Senator Richard Bryan of Nevada, who said he hoped it would "be the end of Martian-hunting season at the taxpayer's expense." That's one reason it is China, and not the United States, that has built the first world-class radio observatory with seti as a core scientific goal.

seti does share some traits with religion. It is motivated by deep human desires for connection and transcendence. It concerns itself with questions about human origins, about the raw creative power of nature, and about our future in this universe-and it does all this at a time when traditional religions have become unpersuasive to many. Why these aspects of seti should count against it is unclear. Nor is it clear why Congress should find seti unworthy of funding, given that the government has previously been happy to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on ambitious searches for phenomena whose existence was still in question. The expensive, decades-long missions that found black holes and gravitational waves both commenced when their targets were mere speculative possibilities. That intelligent life can evolve on a planet is not a speculative possibility, as Darwin demonstrated. Indeed, seti might be the most intriguing scientific project suggested by Darwinism.

Even without federal funding in the United States, seti is now in the midst of a global renaissance. Today's telescopes have brought the distant stars nearer, and in their orbits we can see planets. The next generation of observatories is now clicking on, and with them we will zoom into these planets' atmospheres. seti researchers have been preparing for this moment. In their exile, they have become philosophers of the future. They have tried to imagine what technologies an advanced civilization might use, and what imprints those technologies would make on the observable universe. They have figured out how to spot the chemical traces of artificial pollutants from afar. They know how to scan dense star fields for giant structures designed to shield planets from a supernova's shock waves.

In 2015, the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner poured $100 million of his own cash into a new seti program led by scientists at UC Berkeley. The team performs more seti observations in a single day than took place during entire years just a decade ago. In 2016, Milner sank another $100 million into an interstellar-probe mission. A beam from a giant laser array, to be built in the Chilean high desert, will wallop dozens of wafer-thin probes more than four light-years to the Alpha Centauri system, to get a closer look at its planets. Milner told me the probes' cameras might be able to make out individual continents. The Alpha Centauri team modeled the radiation that such a beam would send out into space, and noticed striking similarities to the mysterious "fast radio bursts" that Earth's astronomers keep detecting, which suggests the possibility that they are caused by similar giant beams, powering similar probes elsewhere in the cosmos.

Andrew Siemion, the leader of Milner's seti team, is actively looking into this possibility. He visited the Chinese dish while it was still under construction, to lay the groundwork for joint observations and to help welcome the Chinese team into a growing network of radio observatories that will cooperate on seti research, including new facilities in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. When I joined Siemion for overnight seti observations at a radio observatory in West Virginia last fall, he gushed about the Chinese dish. He said it was the world's most sensitive telescope in the part of the radio spectrum that is "classically considered to be the most probable place for an extraterrestrial transmitter."

Before I left for China, Siemion warned me that the roads around the observatory were difficult to navigate, but he said I'd know I was close when my phone reception went wobbly. Radio transmissions are forbidden near the dish, lest scientists there mistake stray electromagnetic radiation for a signal from the deep. Supercomputers are still sifting through billions of false positives collected during previous seti observations, most caused by human technological interference.

My driver was on the verge of turning back when my phone reception finally began to wane. The sky had darkened in the five hours since we'd left sunny Guiyang. High winds were whipping between the Avatar-style mountains, making the long bamboo stalks sway like giant green feathers. A downpour of fat droplets began splattering the windshield just as I lost service for good.

Jon Juarez

The week before, Liu and I had visited a stargazing site of a much older vintage. In 1442, after the Ming dynasty moved China's capital to Beijing, the emperor broke ground on a new observatory near the Forbidden City. More than 40 feet high, the elegant, castlelike structure came to house China's most precious astronomical instruments.

No civilization on Earth has a longer continuous tradition of astronomy than China, whose earliest emperors drew their political legitimacy from the sky, in the form of a "mandate of heaven." More than 3,500 years ago, China's court astronomers pressed pictograms of cosmic events into tortoiseshells and ox bones. One of these "oracle bones" bears the earliest known record of a solar eclipse. It was likely interpreted as an omen of catastrophe, perhaps an ensuing invasion.

Liu and I sat at a black-marble table in the old observatory's stone courtyard. Centuries-old pines towered overhead, blocking the hazy sunlight that poured down through Beijing's yellow, polluted sky. Through a round, red portal at the courtyard's edge, a staircase led up to a turretlike observation platform, where a line of ancient astronomical devices stood, including a giant celestial globe supported by slithering bronze dragons. The starry globe was stolen in 1900, after an eight-country alliance stormed Beijing to put down the Boxer Rebellion. Troops from Germany and France flooded into the courtyard where Liu and I were sitting, and made off with 10 of the observatory's prized instruments.

The instruments were eventually returned, but the sting of the incident lingered. Chinese schoolchildren are still taught to think of this general period as the "century of humiliation," the nadir of China's long fall from its Ming-dynasty peak. Back when the ancient observatory was built, China could rightly regard itself as the lone survivor of the great Bronze Age civilizations, a class that included the Babylonians, the Mycenaeans, and even the ancient Egyptians. Western poets came to regard the latter's ruins as Ozymandian proof that nothing lasted. But China had lasted. Its emperors presided over the planet's largest complex social organization. They commanded tribute payments from China's neighbors, whose rulers sent envoys to Beijing to perform a baroque face-to-the-ground bowing ceremony for the emperors' pleasure.

In the first volume of his landmark series, Science and Civilisation in China, published in 1954, the British Sinologist Joseph Needham asked why the scientific revolution hadn't happened in China, given its sophisticated intellectual meritocracy, based on exams that measured citizens' mastery of classical texts. This inquiry has since become known as the "Needham Question," though Voltaire too had wondered why Chinese mathematics stalled out at geometry, and why it was the Jesuits who brought the gospel of Copernicus into China, and not the other way around. He blamed the Confucian emphasis on tradition. Other historians blamed China's remarkably stable politics. A large landmass ruled by long dynasties may have encouraged less technical dynamism than did Europe, where more than 10 polities were crammed into a small area, triggering constant conflict. As we know from the Manhattan Project, the stakes of war have a way of sharpening the scientific mind.

Still others have accused premodern China of insufficient curiosity about life beyond its borders. (Notably, there seems to have been very little speculation in China about extraterrestrial life before the modern era.) This lack of curiosity is said to explain why China pressed pause on naval innovation during the late Middle Ages, right at the dawn of Europe's age of exploration, when the Western imperial powers were looking fondly back through the medieval fog to seafaring Athens.

Whatever the reason, China paid a dear price for slipping behind the West in science and technology. In 1793, King George III stocked a ship with the British empire's most dazzling inventions and sent it to China, only to be rebuffed by its emperor, who said he had "no use" for England's trinkets. Nearly half a century later, Britain returned to China, seeking buyers for India's opium harvest. China's emperor again declined, and instead cracked down on the local sale of the drug, culminating in the seizure and flamboyant seaside destruction of 2 million pounds of British-owned opium. Her Majesty's Navy responded with the full force of its futuristic technology, running ironclad steamships straight up the Yangtze, sinking Chinese junk boats, until the emperor had no choice but to sign the first of the "unequal treaties" that ceded Hong Kong, along with five other ports, to British jurisdiction. After the French made a colony of Vietnam, they joined in this "slicing of the Chinese melon," as it came to be called, along with the Germans, who occupied a significant portion of Shandong province.

Meanwhile Japan, a "little brother" as far as China was concerned, responded to Western aggression by quickly modernizing its navy, such that in 1894, it was able to sink most of China's fleet in a single battle, taking Taiwan as the spoils. And this was just a prelude to Japan's brutal mid-20th-century invasion of China, part of a larger campaign of civilizational expansion that aimed to spread Japanese power to the entire Pacific, a campaign that was largely successful, until it encountered the United States and its city-leveling nukes.

China's humiliations multiplied with America's rise. After sending 200,000 laborers to the Western Front in support of the Allied war effort during World War I, Chinese diplomats arrived at Versailles expecting something of a restoration, or at least relief from the unequal treaties. Instead, China was seated at the kids' table with Greece and Siam, while the Western powers carved up the globe.

Only recently has China regained its geopolitical might, after opening to the world during Deng Xiaoping's 1980s reign. Deng evinced a near-religious reverence for science and technology, a sentiment that is undimmed in Chinese culture today. The country is on pace to outspend the United States on R&D this decade, but the quality of its research varies a great deal. According to one study, even at China's most prestigious academic institutions, a third of scientific papers are faked or plagiarized. Knowing how poorly the country's journals are regarded, Chinese universities are reportedly offering bonuses of up to six figures to researchers who publish in Western journals.

It remains an open question whether Chinese science will ever catch up with that of the West without a bedrock political commitment to the free exchange of ideas. China's persecution of dissident scientists began under Mao, whose ideologues branded Einstein's theories "counterrevolutionary." But it did not end with him. Even in the absence of overt persecution, the country's "great firewall" handicaps Chinese scientists, who have difficulty accessing data published abroad.

China has learned the hard way that spectacular scientific achievements confer prestige upon nations. The "Celestial Kingdom" looked on from the sidelines as Russia flung the first satellite and human being into space, and then again when American astronauts spiked the Stars and Stripes into the lunar crust.

China has largely focused on the applied sciences. It built the world's fastest supercomputer, spent heavily on medical research, and planted a "great green wall" of forests in its northwest as a last-ditch effort to halt the Gobi Desert's spread. Now China is bringing its immense resources to bear on the fundamental sciences. The country plans to build an atom smasher that will conjure thousands of "god particles" out of the ether, in the same time it took cern's Large Hadron Collider to strain out a handful. It is also eyeing Mars. In the technopoetic idiom of the 21st century, nothing would symbolize China's rise like a high-definition shot of a Chinese astronaut setting foot on the red planet. Nothing except, perhaps, first contact.

At a security station 10 miles from the dish, I handed my cellphone to a guard. He locked it away in a secure compartment and escorted me to a pair of metal detectors so I could demonstrate that I wasn't carrying any other electronics. A different guard drove me on a narrow access road to a switchback-laden stairway that climbed 800 steps up a mountainside, through buzzing clouds of blue dragonflies, to a platform overlooking the observatory.

Until a few months before his death this past September, the radio astronomer Nan Rendong was the observatory's scientific leader, and its soul. It was Nan who had made sure the new dish was customized to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He'd been with the project since its inception, in the early 1990s, when he used satellite imagery to pick out hundreds of candidate sites among the deep depressions in China's Karst mountain region.

Apart from microwaves, such as those that make up the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, radio waves are the weakest form of electromagnetic radiation. The collective energy of all the radio waves caught by Earth's observatories in a year is less than the kinetic energy released when a single snowflake comes softly to rest on bare soil. Collecting these ethereal signals requires technological silence. That's why China plans to one day put a radio observatory on the dark side of the moon, a place more technologically silent than anywhere on Earth. It's why, over the course of the past century, radio observatories have sprouted, like cool white mushrooms, in the blank spots between this planet's glittering cities. And it's why Nan went looking for a dish site in the remote Karst mountains. Tall, jagged, and covered in subtropical vegetation, these limestone mountains rise up abruptly from the planet's crust, forming barriers that can protect an observatory's sensitive ear from wind and radio noise.

After making a shortlist of candidate locations, Nan set out to inspect them on foot. Hiking into the center of the Dawodang depression, he found himself at the bottom of a roughly symmetrical bowl, guarded by a nearly perfect ring of green mountains, all formed by the blind processes of upheaval and erosion. More than 20 years and $180 million later, Nan positioned the dish for its inaugural observation-its "first light," in the parlance of astronomy. He pointed it at the fading radio glow of a supernova, or "guest star," as Chinese astronomers had called it when they recorded the unusual brightness of its initial explosion almost 1,000 years earlier.

After the dish is calibrated, it will start scanning large sections of the sky. Andrew Siemion's seti team is working with the Chinese to develop an instrument to piggyback on these wide sweeps, which by themselves will constitute a radical expansion of the human search for the cosmic other.

Siemion told me he's especially excited to survey dense star fields at the center of the galaxy. "It's a very interesting place for an advanced civilization to situate itself," he said. The sheer number of stars and the presence of a supermassive black hole make for ideal conditions "if you want to slingshot a bunch of probes around the galaxy." Siemion's receiver will train its sensitive algorithms on billions of wavelengths, across billions of stars, looking for a beacon.

Jon Juarez

Liu Cixin told me he doubts the dish will find one. In a dark-forest cosmos like the one he imagines, no civilization would ever send a beacon unless it were a "death monument," a powerful broadcast announcing the sender's impending extinction. If a civilization were about to be invaded by another, or incinerated by a gamma-ray burst, or killed off by some other natural cause, it might use the last of its energy reserves to beam out a dying cry to the most life-friendly planets in its vicinity.

Even if Liu is right, and the Chinese dish has no hope of detecting a beacon, it is still sensitive enough to hear a civilization's fainter radio whispers, the ones that aren't meant to be overheard, like the aircraft-radar waves that constantly waft off Earth's surface. If civilizations are indeed silent hunters, we might be wise to hone in on this "leakage" radiation. Many of the night sky's stars might be surrounded by faint halos of leakage, each a fading artifact of a civilization's first blush with radio technology, before it recognized the risk and turned off its detectable transmitters. Previous observatories could search only a handful of stars for this radiation. China's dish has the sensitivity to search tens of thousands.

In Beijing, I told Liu that I was holding out hope for a beacon. I told him I thought dark-forest theory was based on too narrow a reading of history. It may infer too much about the general behavior of civilizations from specific encounters between China and the West. Liu replied, convincingly, that China's experience with the West is representative of larger patterns. Across history, it is easy to find examples of expansive civilizations that used advanced technologies to bully others. "In China's imperial history, too," he said, referring to the country's long-standing domination of its neighbors.

But even if these patterns extend back across all of recorded history, and even if they extend back to the murky epochs of prehistory, to when the Neanderthals vanished sometime after first contact with modern humans, that still might not tell us much about galactic civilizations. For a civilization that has learned to survive across cosmic timescales, humanity's entire existence would be but a single moment in a long, bright dawn. And no civilization could last tens of millions of years without learning to live in peace internally. Human beings have already created weapons that put our entire species at risk; an advanced civilization's weapons would likely far outstrip ours.

I told Liu that our civilization's relative youth would suggest we're an outlier on the spectrum of civilizational behavior, not a Platonic case to generalize from. The Milky Way has been habitable for billions of years. Anyone we make contact with will almost certainly be older, and perhaps wiser.

Jon Juarez

Moreover, the night sky contains no evidence that older civilizations treat expansion as a first principle. seti researchers have looked for civilizations that shoot outward in all directions from a single origin point, becoming an ever-growing sphere of technology, until they colonize entire galaxies. If they were consuming lots of energy, as expected, these civilizations would give off a telltale infrared glow, and yet we don't see any in our all-sky scans. Maybe the self-replicating machinery required to spread rapidly across 100 billion stars would be doomed by runaway coding errors. Or maybe civilizations spread unevenly throughout a galaxy, just as humans have spread unevenly across the Earth. But even a civilization that captured a tenth of a galaxy's stars would be easy to find, and we haven't found a single one, despite having searched the nearest 100,000 galaxies.

Some seti researchers have wondered about stealthier modes of expansion. They have looked into the feasibility of " Genesis probes," spacecraft that can seed a planet with microbes, or accelerate evolution on its surface, by sparking a Cambrian explosion, like the one that juiced biological creativity on Earth. Some have even searched for evidence that such spacecraft might have visited this planet, by looking for encoded messages in our DNA-which is, after all, the most robust informational storage medium known to science. They too have come up empty. The idea that civilizations expand ever outward might be woefully anthropocentric.

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Liu did not concede this point. To him, the absence of these signals is just further evidence that hunters are good at hiding. He told me that we are limited in how we think about other civilizations. "Especially those that may last millions or billions of years," he said. "When we wonder why they don't use certain technologies to spread across a galaxy, we might be like spiders wondering why humans don't use webs to catch insects." And anyway, an older civilization that has achieved internal peace may still behave like a hunter, Liu said, in part because it would grasp the difficulty of "understanding one another across cosmic distances." And it would know that the stakes of a misunderstanding could be existential.

First contact would be trickier still if we encountered a postbiological artificial intelligence that had taken control of its planet. Its worldview might be doubly alien. It might not feel empathy, which is not an essential feature of intelligence but instead an emotion installed by a particular evolutionary history and culture. The logic behind its actions could be beyond the powers of the human imagination. It might have transformed its entire planet into a supercomputer, and, according to a trio of Oxford researchers, it might find the current cosmos too warm for truly long-term, energy-efficient computing. It might cloak itself from observation, and power down into a dreamless sleep lasting hundreds of millions of years, until such time when the universe has expanded and cooled to a temperature that allows for many more epochs of computing.

As I came up the last flight of steps to the observation platform, the Earth itself seemed to hum like a supercomputer, thanks to the loud, whirring chirps of the mountains' insects, all amplified by the dish's acoustics. The first thing I noticed at the top was not the observatory, but the Karst mountains. They were all individuals, lumpen and oddly shaped. It was as though the Mayans had built giant pyramids across hundreds of square miles, and they'd all grown distinctive deformities as they were taken over by vegetation. They stretched in every direction, all the way to the horizon, the nearer ones dark green, and the distant ones looking like blue ridges.

Amid this landscape of chaotic shapes was the spectacular structure of the dish. Five football fields wide, and deep enough to hold two bowls of rice for every human being on the planet, it was a genuine instance of the technological sublime. Its vastness reminded me of Utah's Bingham copper mine, but without the air of hasty, industrial violence. Cool and concave, the dish looked at one with the Earth. It was as though God had pressed a perfect round fingertip into the planet's outer crust and left behind a smooth, silver print.

I sat up there for an hour in the rain, as dark clouds drifted across the sky, throwing warbly light on the observatory. Its thousands of aluminum-triangle panels took on a mosaic effect: Some tiles turned bright silver, others pale bronze. It was strange to think that if a signal from a distant intelligence were to reach us anytime soon, it would probably pour down into this metallic dimple in the planet. The radio waves would ping off the dish and into the receiver. They'd be pored over and verified. International protocols require the disclosure of first contact, but they are nonbinding. Maybe China would go public with the signal but withhold its star of origin, lest a fringe group send Earth's first response. Maybe China would make the signal a state secret. Even then, one of its international partners could go rogue. Or maybe one of China's own scientists would convert the signal into light pulses and send it out beyond the great firewall, to fly freely around the messy snarl of fiber-optic cables that spans our planet.

In Beijing, I had asked Liu to set aside dark-forest theory for a moment. I asked him to imagine the Chinese Academy of Sciences calling to tell him it had found a signal.

How would he reply to a message from a cosmic civilization? He said that he would avoid giving a too-detailed account of human history. "It's very dark," he said. "It might make us appear more threatening." In Blindsight, Peter Watts's novel of first contact, mere reference to the individual self is enough to get us profiled as an existential threat. I reminded Liu that distant civilizations might be able to detect atomic-bomb flashes in the atmospheres of distant planets, provided they engage in long-term monitoring of life-friendly habitats, as any advanced civilization surely would. The decision about whether to reveal our history might not be ours to make.

Liu told me that first contact would lead to a human conflict, if not a world war. This is a popular trope in science fiction. In last year's Oscar-nominated film Arrival, the sudden appearance of an extraterrestrial intelligence inspires the formation of apocalyptic cults and nearly triggers a war between world powers anxious to gain an edge in the race to understand the alien's messages. There is also real-world evidence for Liu's pessimism: When Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast simulating an alien invasion was replayed in Ecuador in 1949, a riot broke out, resulting in the deaths of six people. "We have fallen into conflicts over things that are much easier to solve," Liu told me.

Even if no geopolitical strife ensued, humans would certainly experience a radical cultural transformation, as every belief system on Earth grappled with the bare fact of first contact. Buddhists would get off easy: Their faith already assumes an infinite universe of untold antiquity, its every corner alive with the vibrating energies of living beings. The Hindu cosmos is similarly grand and teeming. The Koran references Allah's "creation of the heavens and the earth, and the living creatures that He has scattered through them." Jews believe that God's power has no limits, certainly none that would restrain his creative powers to this planet's cosmically small surface.

Christianity might have it tougher. There is a debate in contemporary Christian theology as to whether Christ's salvation extends to every soul that exists in the wider universe, or whether the sin-tainted inhabitants of distant planets require their own divine interventions. The Vatican is especially keen to massage extraterrestrial life into its doctrine, perhaps sensing that another scientific revolution may be imminent. The shameful persecution of Galileo is still fresh in its long institutional memory.

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Secular humanists won't be spared a sobering intellectual reckoning with first contact. Copernicus removed Earth from the center of the universe, and Darwin yanked humans down into the muck with the rest of the animal kingdom. But even within this framework, human beings have continued to regard ourselves as nature's pinnacle. We have continued treating "lower" creatures with great cruelty. We have marveled that existence itself was authored in such a way as to generate, from the simplest materials and axioms, beings like us. We have flattered ourselves that we are, in the words of Carl Sagan, "the universe's way of knowing itself." These are secular ways of saying we are made in the image of God.

We may be humbled to one day find ourselves joined, across the distance of stars, to a more ancient web of minds, fellow travelers in the long journey of time. We may receive from them an education in the real history of civilizations, young, old, and extinct. We may be introduced to galactic-scale artworks, borne of million-year traditions. We may be asked to participate in scientific observations that can be carried out only by multiple civilizations, separated by hundreds of light-years. Observations of this scope may disclose aspects of nature that we cannot now fathom. We may come to know a new metaphysics. If we're lucky, we will come to know a new ethics. We'll emerge from our existential shock feeling newly alive to our shared humanity. The first light to reach us in this dark forest may illuminate our home world too.

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What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

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As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world's largest radio dish for precisely that purpose. Last January, theChinese Academy of Sciences invited Liu Cixin, China's preeminent science-fiction writer, to visit its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country's southwest.

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This page provides you with primary sources from dynastic China to Mao's China

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4000 - 1000 BCE

Ancestral Rites and Divination

* Oracle Bone Inscriptions of the Late Shang Dynasty [PDF]

Warfare

* Oracle Bone Inscriptions of the Late Shang Dynasty: On Warfare [PDF]

Women: Childbearing

* Oracle Bone Inscriptions of the Late Shang Dynasty: On Childbearing [PDF]

1000 BCE - 300 CE

Confucianism

Confucius/Kong Fuzi/Kong Qiu, 551-479 BCE
*Selections from the Confucian Analects [PDF]
*Selections from the Confucian Analects: On Humaneness [PDF]
*Selections from the Confucian Analects: On Confucius as Teacher and Person [PDF]

Xunzi/Xun Qing/Xun Kang, ca. 310-ca. 219 BCE
*Selections from the Xunzi: "Human Nature Is Evil" [PDF]
*Selections from the Xunzi: "Encouraging Learning" [PDF]
*Selections from the Xunzi: "A Discussion of Rites" [PDF]

Daoism

Zhou Dynasty Government: Confucius, Mencius, Laozi

Mencius/Mengzi/Meng Ke, 4th Century BCE
*Selections from the Mencius: On the Duty of Ministers to Reprove a Ruler [PDF]

Laozi, ca. 3rd Century BCE
*Selections from the Laozi (Daodejing): On Government [PDF]

Qin Dynasty Government: The Legalist Philosophers Han Fei and Li Si

Han Dynasty Government

Warfare: Zhou Period

Agriculture, Han Period

Women and Family

Confucius/Kong Fuzi/Kong Qiu, 551-479 BCE
*Selections from the Confucian Analects: On Women and Servants [PDF]
*Selections from the Confucian Analects: On Filial Piety [PDF]

Literature: The Classic of Odes (Book of Songs); Poetry from the State of Chu

Eastern Zhou, ca. 771 to 256 BCE
*Selection from the Classic of Odes: I Beg of You, Chung Tzu (Ode 8) [PDF]
*Selections from the Classic of Odes: "Quince" and "Big Rat" [PDF]

Literature: Sima Qian

300 - 600

Buddhism in China

Lotus Sutra, composed after 483 BCE
*Selection from the Lotus Sutra: "The Daughter of the Dragon King" [PDF]
*Selection from the Lotus Sutra: "The Buddha Preaches the One Great Vehicle" [PDF]

Women

Lotus Sutra, composed after 483 BCE
*Selection from the Lotus Sutra: "The Daughter of the Dragon King" [PDF]

Literature: "A Song of Seven Sorrows"; "Peach Blossom Spring"

600 - 1000

Buddhism in China: The Chan (Zen) School of Buddhism

Huineng, 638-713, Sixth Patriarch of the Chan (Zen) school Linji Yixuan, d. 867, founder of the Linji (Rinzai) school
* The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch [PDF]

* Seeing into One's Own Nature [PDF]

Buddhism in China: Reactions of Confucianists and Daoists to the influence of Buddhism during this period

Han Yu, 768-824
* Memorial on the Bone of the Buddha [PDF]

Emperor Wuzong, r. 841-846
* Emperor Wuzong's Edict on the Suppression of Buddhism: The Edict of the Eight Month [PDF]

Tang Dynasty Government: Effective Rulership, the Law, and Taxes

Reflections on War

Slavery in Tang China

* Deed of a Sale of a Slave [PDF]

Women & Family

* Record of Family Division [PDF]

Tang Poets: Wang Wei, Li Bo, Du Fu

Du Fu, 712-770
* Selected Poems: "On the River"; "I Stand Alone"; "Views in Springtime" [PDF]

1000 - 1450

Neo-Confucianism

Song Dynasty Government: Reform under the Neo-Confucianists

Ming Dynasty Government: Promotion of Social Order and Morality

* Village Ordinances: "Prohibition Ordinance" [PDF]

Military: The Northern Song Defeated by the Jurchen Jin

Agriculture; Growth of Cities and urban Life during the Song and Yuan Dynasties

Unknown Author, ca. 1235
* The Attractions of the Capital (Hangzhou) [PDF]

Women

Literature of Scholar-Officials and Military Officers

Su Shi (Su Dongpo), 1036-1101
* Rhyming with Tzu-yu's "Treading the Green" [PDF]* The Red Cliff, Part I [PDF]

Women Writers

* Poem to be Sung to the Tune of "Southern Song" (Nan-ge-zi) [PDF]

1450 - 1750

Neo-Confucianism during the Ming

Books of Moral Instruction, Ming and Qing

* Selections from The Twenty-four Exemplars of Filial Piety [PDF]

* Selections from Meritorious Deeds at No Cost [PDF]

Christianity Enters China

Provincial and Imperial Government under the Qing

Chen Hongmou, 1696-1771
* On the Duties of an Official [PDF]
* On Substantive Learning [PDF]

Women

* Selections from The Twenty-four Exemplars of Filial Piety [PDF]

Essays, Poems and Fantasy Tales of the Qing

1750 - 1919

"Self-Strengthening" and "Learning from the West"

Calls for Radical Social Reform

The May Fourth Movement (ca. 1916-1920s)

* Before and After the May Fourth Movement
The so-called "May Fourth" or "new culture" movement began in China around 1916, following the failure of the 1911 Revolution to establish a republican government, and continued through the 1920s. This unit includes a background reading and three primary-source readings [ Chen Duxiu's "Our Final Awakening" (1916) [PDF]; Chiang Kai-shek's "Essentials of a New Life Movement" (1934) [PDF]; Mao Zedong's "Reform Our Study" (1941)], plus discussion questions and suggested activities for students.

The Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864)

* Excerpts from The Land System of the Heavenly Kingdom (Tianzhao tianumu zhidu): "The Taiping Economic Program" [PDF]

* Excerpts from Ode for Youth [PDF]

The Years of Reform: Prologue to Revolution

* From Reform to Revolution, 1842 to 1911
After China's defeat in the Opium War of 1842, thinkers tried to understand what made the West so strong and how China could best respond. This unit traces the debates about reform from the mid-nineteenth into the early twentieth century, as arguments for more radical reform, including revolution, increased. Includes background readings, two primary-source readings ( Feng Guifen's "On the Adoption of Western Learning" [PDF] and Yan Fu's "Learning from the West" [PDF]) and brief discussions of Liang Qichao's ideas on democracy and Sun Yatsen's "Three People's Principles." Also see the Religion, Philosophy, Thought section, above, for more readings by these and other reformist thinkers.

International Relations: China and Europe (Macartney Embassy, Opium War)

* Macartney and the Emperor
The Qing dynasty's restrictions on foreign trade increasingly frustrated Europeans, especially the British. In 1792 Great Britain sent a diplomat, Lord George Macartney (1737-1806), to present its demands to the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1796). This unit includes an introductory note to teachers with suggestions for teaching about Macartney's mission; a student reading discussing European contact and trade with China prior to and on the eve of Macartney's mission to China; and the primary-source reading Two Edicts from the Qianlong Emperor, which were the Qianlong emperor's responses to the Macartney mission. With discussion questions and suggested activities for students.

* The Opium War and Foreign Encroachment
In the fifty years after Macartney's visit (see "Macartney and the Emperor," above), Western powers pushed their demands on China further, leading to war and the gradual shift from tribute to treaty relations. This unit examines the events surrounding the Opium War and the Treaty of Nanjing, which concluded that war, and the increasing foreign encroachments upon China during the nineteenth century. Included are two primary-source readings: Commissioner Lin Zexu's "Letter of Advice to Queen Victoria" (1839) and The Treaty of Nanjing (1842) [PDF]. With discussion questions and suggested activities for students.

Women

1900 - 1950

The May Fourth Movement (ca. 1916-1920s)

* Before and After the May Fourth Movement
The so-called "May Fourth" or "new culture" movement began in China around 1916, following the failure of the 1911 Revolution to establish a republican government, and continued through the 1920s. This unit includes a background reading and three primary-source readings [ Chen Duxiu's "Our Final Awakening" (1916) [PDF]; Chiang Kai-shek's "Essentials of a New Life Movement" (Speech, 1934) [PDF]; Mao Zedong's "Reform Our Study" (1941)], plus discussion questions and suggested activities for students.

Rebuilding China

Sun Yat-sen, 1866-1925
*Selections from A Program of National Reconstruction: "The Three Stages of Revolution" (1918) [PDF]
*"The Principle of Democracy" (1924) [PDF]

Mao Zedong (1893-1976) and the Chinese Revolution

* The Long March (1934-1936)

* Commonly Read Speeches and Writings of Mao Zedong (1927-1945)
With excerpts from three speeches and one article, all highlighting two important themes in Mao Zedong's thinking: voluntarism and selflessness. Includes excerpts from"In Memory of Norman Bethune" (1939); "Serve the People" (1944); "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains" (1945); and Report on the Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (1927).

* Mao Zedong on War and Revolution

* From "The Dictatorship of the People's Democracy": On Leaning to One Side (Speech, 1949) [PDF]

Communism in China

Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945)

* Japanese Ambassador Hiroshi Saito on the Conflict in the Far East [PDF]

Mao Zedong (1893-1976) on War and Revolution

* Mao Zedong on War and Revolution

* Report on the Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (March 1927) [PDF]

* Selections from On Guerilla Warfare (1927) [PDF]

Society and Family: Raising Children

Farmers and the Chinese Revolution

* Farmers and the Chinese Revolution
This unit looks at the plight of China's farmers in the twentieth century. With a background reading and two primary-source readings ["Spring Silkworms," by Mao Dun [PDF]; Mao Zedong's "Report on the Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" [PDF]].

20th-century Literature

1950 - 2000

"Hundred Flowers" Period

* Intellectual Opinions from the Hundred Flowers Period (1957) [PDF]

Land Reform, Socialized Agriculture, The Great Leap Forward

* From the People's Daily: "How China Proceeds with the Task of Industrialization" (1953) [PDF]

Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)

* The Sixteen Points: Guidelines for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966) [PDF]

Socialism and Democracy in China after Mao Zedong

* From the Office of the CCP Dehong Dai Nationality and Qingbo Autonomous Zhou Committee: "Several Questions in Strengthening and Perfecting the Job Responsibility Systems of Agricultural Production" (1980) [PDF]

* How Should the Criteria for Admission to the Communist Youth League Be Administered After Installation of the Production Responsibility System? (1981) [PDF]

* From the People's Daily: "Bourgeois and Socialist Democracies Compared" (March 1990) [PDF]

Tiananmen Square Demonstrations (1989)

* The May 13 Hunger Strike Declaration (1989) [PDF]

* Interview at Tiananmen Square with Chai Ling

China's Political System since 1949

* The Chinese Political System and the Communist Party
This unit provides an overview of the Chinese political system and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with excerpts from the constitutions of the Communist Party of China and of the People's Republic of China. These primary documents can highlight for students how the Communist Party is the real political power in China. A chart of the political structure of China is also included, to help students better understand the relationship between the party and the state in a communist system. Discussion questions also included.

China's Foreign Policy; U.S.-China Relations

* Taiwan and U.S.-China Relations Since 1949
This unit offers an historical overview of Taiwan and U.S.-China relations. An introductory reading is followed by two important primary-source documents ["Shanghai Communiqué" (1972) and Taiwan Relations Act (1979)] and discussion questions.

Literature

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Primary Sources with DBQs | Asia for Educators | Columbia University

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Asia for Educators (AFE) is designed to serve faculty and students in world history, culture, geography, art, and literature at the undergraduate and pre-college levels.

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With references to the Ancient Silk Road, this report discusses the New Silk Road.

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XIAN, China (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday China and Europe should work together on Beijing's "Belt and Road" initiative, a project aiming to build a modern-day "Silk Road" he said could not be "one-way".

Macron began his first state visit to China with a stop in Xian, an eastern departure point of the ancient Silk Road, hoping to relaunch EU-China relations often strained by Beijing's restrictions on foreign investment and trade.

"After all, the ancient Silk Roads were never only Chinese," Macron told an audience of academics, students and business people at the Daming Palace, the royal residence for the Tang dynasty for more than 220 years.

"By definition, these roads can only be shared. If they are roads, they cannot be one-way," he said.

Unveiled in 2013, the Belt and Road project is aimed at connecting China by land and sea to Southeast Asia, Pakistan and Central Asia, and beyond to the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

Xi pledged $124 billion for the plan at a summit in May but it has faced suspicion in Western capitals that it is intended more to assert Chinese influence than Beijing's professed desire to spread prosperity.

Macron, who pledged to visit China at least once every year during his mandate, said the new infrastructure and cultural projects promoted by China could also be in France's and Europe's interest if done in a spirit of cooperation.

"These roads cannot be those of a new hegemony, which would transform those that they cross into vassals," Macron said.

Alice Ekman of the Paris-based IFRI think-tank said: "For the moment, considering how extensive and unclear the Chinese project continues to be, several European countries including France have shown caution about it.

"For China, the new Silk Roads are also a tool to promote new international standards, rules and norms that are different from those currently used by France and other European countries,"

British Finance Minister Philip Hammond said in December Britain, which is quitting the European Union, wanted closer cooperation with China over the Belt and Road scheme.

Macron, 40, has said Europe should not be "naive" in its trade relations, pushing in Brussels for more stringent anti-dumping rules against imports of cheap Chinese steel.

In June, he urged the European Commission to build a system for screening investments in strategic sectors from outside the bloc, which drew criticism from Beijing.

In Xian, Macron said he hoped EU-Chinese relations could have a new start, based on "balanced rules", after acknowledging there had been mistrust and "legitimate questions" in China as well as fears amongst Europeans.

Europe was now united and ready to cooperate with China after years of crisis-management and economic stagnation, Macron said.

"What I came to tell you, is that Europe is back," he added.

The French president, who is travelling with a delegation of 50 businessmen, is hoping to gain more access for French companies to Chinese markets.

Reporting by Michel Rose; Editing by Paul Tait and Robin Pomeroy

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China's new 'Silk Road' cannot be one-way, France's Macron says

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XIAN, China (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday China and Europe should work together on Beijing's "Belt and Road" initiative, a project aiming to build a modern-day "Silk Road" he said could not be "one-way".

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Zhou Youguong: Economist, linguist and dissenter

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Zhou Youguong: Economist, linguist and dissenter

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This article chronicles the life of a remarkable man who made it possible for us to "read" Chinese.

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Zhou Youguang, known as the father of Pinyin for creating the system of Romanized Chinese writing that has become the international standard since its introduction some 60 years ago, died on Saturday in Beijing, Chinese state media reported. He was 111.

In recent decades, with the comparative invincibility that he felt great age bestowed on him, Mr. Zhou was also an outspoken critic of the Chinese government.

"What are they going to do," he asked bluntly in an interview with the BBC in 2012. "Come and take me away?"

In fact, they had already done that once before, long ago.

Adopted by China in 1958, Pinyin was designed not to replace the tens of thousands of traditional characters with which Chinese is written, but as an orthographic pry bar to afford passage into the labyrinthine world of those characters.

Since then, Pinyin (the name can be translated as "spelled sounds") has vastly increased literacy throughout the country; eased the classroom agonies of foreigners studying Chinese; afforded the blind a way to read the language in Braille; and, in a development Mr. Zhou could scarcely have foreseen, facilitated the rapid entry of Chinese on computer keyboards and cellphones.

It is to Pinyin that we owe now-ubiquitous spellings like Beijing, which supplanted the earlier Peking; Chongqing, which replaced Chungking; Mao Zedong instead of Mao Tse-tung; and thousands of others. The system was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization in 1982 and by the United Nations in 1986.

Yet for all Mr. Zhou's linguistic influence, his late-life political opposition - in 2015, the news agency Agence France-Presse called him "probably China's oldest dissenter" - ensured that he remained relatively obscure in his own country.

"Within China, he remains largely uncelebrated," The New York Times wrote in 2012. "As the state-run China Daily newspaper remarked in 2009, he should be a household name but is virtually unknown."

It took Mr. Zhou and his colleagues three years to develop Pinyin, but the most striking thing about his involvement was that he was neither a linguist nor a lexicographer but an economist, recently returned to China from Wall Street.

"We all thought that China had a very good opportunity to develop; we didn't expect the later turmoil," Mr. Zhou told The Guardian, the British newspaper, in 2008. "History misled us."

For the next few years he taught economics at Fudan University in Shanghai until, in the mid-1950s, Zhou Enlai intervened.

By then the Communist government was seeking to make Mandarin Chinese the national language and to boost literacy throughout the country. In 1955, it convened a committee to create an alphabetic system, based on Mandarin, that would be easier to use than existing Romanization systems.

Knowing that linguistics was a hobby of Mr. Zhou's, Zhou Enlai drafted him to come to Beijing and lead the committee. Mr. Zhou's protests that he was a mere amateur were to no avail.

"Everyone is an amateur," he was told.

So he set about studying languages, and the myriad systems used to write them down. Before long, amid the late-1950s purges of rightists by Mao Zedong, the Communist Party chairman, he came to realize that his new calling was literally lifesaving.

"Mao disliked greatly the economists - especially economic professors from America," Mr. Zhou told The Guardian. "By that time I had shifted to the line of language and writing. I was not considered a rightist. Very lucky. If I had remained in Shanghai teaching economics I think I certainly could have been imprisoned for 20 years. A good friend of mine was imprisoned and committed suicide."

In attempting to devise an alphabetic system with which to transliterate Chinese, Mr. Zhou was continuing an orthographic tradition that went back at least to the 16th century.

Javier C. Hernandez contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Zhou Youguang, Who Made Writing Chinese as Simple as ABC, Dies at 111. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Zhou Youguang, Who Made Writing Chinese as Simple as ABC, Dies at 111

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Zhou Youguang, known as the father of Pinyin for creating the system of Romanized Chinese writing that has become the international standard since its introduction some 60 years ago, died on Saturday in Beijing, Chinese state media reported. He was 111.

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Xi Jingping and the Chinese constitution

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Xi Jingping and the Chinese constitution

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This article explains Xi, the constitution, the communist party and the political process in China.

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"This is a way of trying to project his historic stature," said Wu Qiang, a political analyst in Beijing who formerly taught at Tsinghua University. "The congress report and the party constitution revisions both show that Xi wants to be a kind of peer with the past leaders. That doesn't mean he sees himself as rivaling Mao in importance, but I think it's intended to give him an ideological status that can't be challenged, like Mao in that sense."

Restoring China to greatness is a central message of Mr. Xi's philosophy. That goal already has guided Mr. Xi's policies of building up the military, strengthening domestic controls and raising China's profile in global affairs.

Approved by the party congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, which meets every five years, the change to the constitution adds a clunky new phrase - "Xi Jinping Thought for the New Era of Socialism With Chinese Special Characteristics" - alongside the hallowed names of Mao and Deng Xiaoping.

While the meaning of those 13 words - 16 Chinese characters - may seem opaque, they are freighted with significance for the future both of the party and of China.

The critical phrase is "new era," which Mr. Xi has used throughout the congress. He has described Chinese history since 1949 as divided into two eras - the three decades after Mao seized power in a revolution that established a unified People's Republic and ended nearly a century of civil war and foreign invasions, and the three decades after Deng took power in 1978 and refocused China on developing its economy.

In his report to the congress, Mr. Xi suggested that if Mao made China independent, and Deng made it prosperous, he would make it strong again - propelling the country into its "new era."

To underline that point, the congress also added a second mention of Mr. Xi's ideas to the constitution: his call to modernize and strengthen China's armed forces.

By enshrining Mr. Xi's ideas as "a new component of the party's guide for action," the party is putting Mr. Xi on a doctrinal pedestal alongside Mao and Deng. Until Tuesday, Mao and Deng were the only Chinese leaders whose names appeared in the constitution's list of fundamental doctrines.

Adding Mr. Xi by name raises him above his two most recent predecessors, the former presidents Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin: Their ideas are on the list of doctrines, but not their names.

Still, Mr. Xi's authority is not directly comparable to the almost godlike influence Mao commanded.

After Mr. Xi came to power in 2012, he surprised many by how quickly and forcibly he took control. This included putting his imprint on two of China's most powerful institutions, the party and the military, which he did using a sweeping anticorruption drive.

But both Mao and Deng were founders of the People's Republic, and hardened revolutionaries whose decades of fighting and self-sacrifice gave them a charisma and authority that Mr. Xi simply cannot replicate.

On the other hand, the Chinese economy, state and military are much more powerful now than they were under Mao, or even under Deng, which gives Mr. Xi far more global influence than his predecessors.

Further signs of Mr. Xi's political supremacy will be evident on Wednesday when other members of the party's top leadership, the Politburo Standing Committee, are publicly presented after the party congress has concluded. How many of those members are close allies of Mr. Xi will be another important barometer of his power and could provide insight into a possible successor years from now.

In the past five years, Mr. Xi has assembled his own earthy strain of Communist Party doctrine, overtly hostile to Western liberal ideas and suspicious of the intentions of the United States and other Western powers. Instead, Mr. Xi sees the party as the guardian of both Mao's revolutionary ideals and nationalist pride rooted in China's ancient traditions.

The congress finished on Tuesday with several other major steps. Most important, the delegates voted in a new Central Committee, a council of 204 senior central and local officials who usually meet once a year to approve broad policy priorities.

There was a notable absence on that list: Wang Qishan.

Mr. Wang, 69, was the enforcer in Mr. Xi's drive to root out corruption and strengthen discipline in the party. He has passed the usual retirement age for the committee, but party insiders said that Mr. Xi might try to keep him in a senior position. His absence from the list means he will likely retire.

The Chinese Communist Party has its own constitution, or charter, which is different from China's national Constitution. The party's constitution sets rules and principles for its members. It also lays out the party's vision of its history, and of how current and past leaders contributed to that heritage.

Changes to this constitution can be made only at the party congress, which usually meets every five years and has been meeting for the past week. Since the congress's 2,300 delegates are carefully chosen for loyalty, very few oppose changes once they are proposed by the leadership.

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China Enshrines 'Xi Jinping Thought,' Elevating Leader to Mao-Like Status

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"This is a way of trying to project his historic stature," said Wu Qiang, a political analyst in Beijing who formerly taught at Tsinghua University. "The congress report and the party constitution revisions both show that Xi wants to be a kind of peer with the past leaders.

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If anyone doubts that China retains an unreformed Leninist political system, then the goings-on inside the Great Hall of the People over the past few hours should put them straight.

Firstly, the president - and general secretary of the Communist Party - was seated alongside a nonagenarian former leader who is simultaneously thought to wield some political power while also frequently rumoured to be dead.

The appearance of Jiang Zemin, whose large glasses and wide smile lead his admirers to affectionately call him "The Toad," caused a ripple of excitement on Chinese social media.

"He's alive and well and chatting away!" said a typical post on Weibo - before the censors quickly got to work.

There is nothing quite so Leninist as a country blocking discussion about the appearance, in full view, of a former leader at a major set-piece event broadcast on national television.

Some comments, though, still find a way through.

"Why can't I forward a picture of a toad?" reads one. "Can't I think of a toad? I'm thinking about a toad."

For now, China cannot stop its citizens thinking about a toad, although the way things are going, some fear that day may come.

And then Xi Jinping spoke for the best part of three and a half hours.

How Chinese authorities censor your thoughts

The Chinese family in five charts

The human cost of China's economic reforms

Not quite a Fidel Castro length but enough to make another of Mr Xi's predecessors, Hu Jintao - also seated next to him on the opposite side to Mr Jiang - look like a study in brevity.

Mr Hu spoke for a mere one hour and forty minutes at his last Congress in charge.

And with Xi Jinping in full flow, journalists more observant than I counted at least ten occasions when the elderly Mr Jiang looked at his watch.

Mr Hu appeared to briefly tap his as a tired-looking Mr Xi took his seat again once the speech had finally ground to an end.

But of course, following the best traditions of Kremlinology, there are always things worthy of note in such speeches, regardless of the whopping duration, the predictable political rhetoric or the tight control of the message.

There were, perhaps, a few more moments of spontaneous applause than one might usually expect - for example when Mr Xi touched on issues like bringing real estate speculation under control, and for one of his driving obsessions, poverty reduction.

The language was slightly less formal than your average leader's speech and Mr Xi's deep and humble bow to delegates at the end was met with genuine warmth and approval.

These are signs of his appeal beyond his party's factional interests - to the country as a whole, in fact. He has been enormously successful in this throughout his first term, for which he is accused of building a cult of personality.

But as Mr Xi embarks on his next five years in power, the opening of this party congress is a good time to remind ourselves about the real nature of his project, something he has been making clear from the start.

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Xi Jinping - The president who lived in a cave

How China's Communist Party picks leaders

Anyone who ever thought that as China grew economically stronger it would inevitably become politically freer is wrong.

His abiding preoccupation is keeping the Communist Party in power.

So expect no short sound bites or shirt-sleeved attempts at working a crowd.

And definitely no chat-show appearances for ageing political leaders, especially ones who remain popular because they actually did seem to have a bit of personality, like Mr Jiang, "The Toad".

It's just not what these systems do. China's rigid political Leninism is here to stay.

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If anyone doubts that China retains an unreformed Leninist political system, then the goings-on inside the Great Hall of the People over the past few hours should put them straight. Firstly, the president - and general secretary of the Communist Party - was seated alongside a nonagenarian former leader who is simultaneously thought to wield some political power while also frequently rumoured to be dead.

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This is a report about a lawyer in China who is alleging human rights abuse by the authorities

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For Xie Yanyi it was not the physical abuse that was the hardest to endure - although his list of the deliberate cruelties inflicted upon him is long.

He was kept in a stress position, crouched on a low stool, from 06:00 in the morning until 22:00 at night.

After 15 days like this, he tells me, his legs went numb and he had difficulty urinating.

At times he was denied food and was subjected to gruelling interrogations for "dozens of hours" on end.

He was beaten.

And he was watched while he slept, with his guards insisting that he kept the same sleeping position all night.

But harder to bear than all of this, Mr Xie insists, was the time spent in solitary confinement.

"I was kept alone in a small room and saw no daylight for half a year. I had nothing to read, nothing to do but to sit on that low stool."

"People could go mad in that situation. I was isolated from the world. This is torture - the isolation is more painful than being beaten."

Although impossible to verify, his account tallies with other reports of the suffering endured under the so-called "war on law", launched during the Chinese Leader Xi Jinping's first five years in office.

Only in Mr Xie's case it is a rare, first-hand account.

Like the other lawyers involved, Mr Xie was, upon his release, warned not to speak to the foreign media but it is a prohibition he has chosen to ignore.

"It might be risky to do this interview," he tells me.

"But I feel it's my responsibility to speak out. I have no choice. I can't accept a society that arrests people for what they think and what they say."

China's 'war on law'

The crackdown on China's already beleaguered human rights field began in mid 2015, halfway through Xi Jinping's first term.

Now, anointed in office for a second term by the Communist Party Congress that ended this week, it stands as one of his most gloomy legacies.

In total, more than 300 lawyers, legal assistants and activists have been brought in for questioning, with more than two dozen pursued as formal investigations.

Two years on, some have been given long jail terms, others still await sentence and at least one appears to have disappeared completely.

Xie Yanyi, like the others targeted by the campaign, has spent much of his legal career representing clients involved in sensitive cases - victims of official corruption, police violence or religious persecution - and harassment and abuse have always been part of the job.

He was also a bold advocate for peaceful democratic reform, once having filed a lawsuit against the former Chinese Leader Jiang Zemin for refusing to step down from the Central Military Commission at the end of his presidency.

But it is under China's current president that things have taken a dramatic turn for the worse.

Shortly after Xi Jinping came to power, at the last Communist Party Congress in 2012, a leaked document began circulating online that outlined seven key ideological concepts that posed a threat to Communist Party rule and forbade the promotion of them in China's universities or in the media.

Issued by an office close to the senior Communist Party leadership, the list of forbidden ideologies included "Western constitutional democracy", "universal values" and "civil society".

In hindsight, the document now appears to have set the tone for much of what has followed.

Mr Xi has presided over a narrowing of the room for public discussion, tighter control over the media, new restrictions on foreign organisations and charities, a clampdown on the internet, and of course, the campaign against the human rights lawyers.

How Chinese authorities censor your thoughts

Human cost of China's economic reforms

China congress: The communist slogans praising Xi Jinping

Dashed hopes and expectations

It was never meant to be this way.

For decades, the mantra in the West was that ever increasing trade with China would bring political reform in its wake.

"Economic freedom creates the habits of liberty," former US President George W Bush once said in a speech on the subject of engagement with China.

And there was a time when that promise appeared to be bearing fruit.

Ahead of the 2007 Party Congress, the meeting at which Xi Jinping first emerged as a likely future leader, state media were openly, if tentatively, discussing incremental political change.

Even around the 2012 Congress - by which time any glimpses of optimism had already begun fading - open letters and petitions were being published calling for democratic reform in the shape of an independent judiciary and a bill of rights.

It would be a brave academic, journalist or lawyer who would put their signature to such a manifesto today.

Criticism = fake news?

Chinese state run media has dismissed at least one of the accounts of the torture of the human rights lawyers as "fake news" and has accused the foreign media, in its coverage of such cases, as being "great enthusiasts" for negative stories.

But even foreign observers can find themselves dazzled by China's skyscrapers, high-speed railways and its rising middle class millions.

The plight of a few lawyers and activists can seem to be a diversion from what really matters.

But Xie Yanyi's account of torture, and others like it, ought to tell us something very important.

As China grows in power, influence and confidence, it is determined to do so without any of the political freedoms that conventional wisdom had once thought of as a prerequisite to becoming a world leading, prosperous economy.

The message sent to 1.4 billion citizens has been clear: think very carefully before daring to challenge the authority of the Communist Party, even in the country's own, Communist Party-run courts.

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Xi Jinping - The president who lived in a cave

How China's Communist Party picks leaders

'Wake up and take action'

Xie Yanyi was released on bail after a total of 18 months in detention.

But he is not yet free of surveillance and intimidation.

Shortly after we recorded our interview with him in late August, he was visited by the authorities and warned again.

This time it was more specific: don't do anything that might upset the preparations for Communism's largest and most sacrosanct political gathering.

Out of concern for his safety we agreed to a delay and have waited until after the Party Congress to publish this story.

Even the recording itself - as viewers of the video on this page will see - was overshadowed by an ominous presence - a group of around a dozen men who surrounded Mr Xie's apartment.

As we watched them out of the window, I asked him if, as a father with three children, it might be better for him to keep a low profile and to stay quiet for a bit?

"I am always quiet," came the reply. "My family is kind to everyone. We are always sensible and peaceful."

"We are lawful citizens. We are using our lawful rights. We hope all people can live with dignity, respect each other and abide by the rule of law."

As the BBC team left, the men surrounded our car, banging on the window and angrily demanding we open the doors.

We refused to get out until, eventually, the police arrived.

After an hour or so we were told we were free to go.

It's a luxury that Xi Jinping's government does not afford to human rights lawyers and their families.

Or for that matter, anyone who dares to stand in its way.

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China lawyer recounts torture under Xi's 'war on law'

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For Xie Yanyi it was not the physical abuse that was the hardest to endure - although his list of the deliberate cruelties inflicted upon him is long. He was kept in a stress position, crouched on a low stool, from 06:00 in the morning until 22:00 at night.

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The country's radical plans to lift 43 million people out of extreme poverty in three years.

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If you control public communication you can control the way people think and how they behave. That's what Xi Jinping's government is counting on.

And it is never more true than at the time of major political gatherings.

The Communist Party Congress, held every five years, is set to begin next week: an event which will culminate in the revelation of the new leadership team behind General Secretary Xi.

So the censors here are poised to restrict with one hand and disseminate with the other.

What they're looking out for are key words and expressions popping up in social media. Anything signalling an intention to protest or ridiculing the country's senior political figures will be blocked and potentially see a user reported to the authorities.

For example, a message featuring the name of this country's ever-more powerful leader and his sometimes-used nickname "Winnie the Pooh" (小熊维尼) will simply not go through to group discussions on the messaging app WeChat.

Funny stickers featuring Mr Xi or previous Chinese leaders also can't be sent to chat groups.

Why China censors banned Winnie the Pooh

The military parade posts China censored

China has all the appearances of an increasingly open society: flashy new cities with Hollywood movies advertised on bus stops; digital currency taken up like nowhere else; cool kids getting around on hire bikes zooming through a gleaming modern existence.

And yet, since Mr Xi came to power five years ago, public discourse has been increasingly censored to try and control everything from political thought to sexual activity.

Olympic freedom

In the lead up to the Olympic Games in 2008, it felt as if freedom of expression was ever on the rise here.

New laws allowed foreign reporters to travel around the country without specific permission from local governments.

It's hard to believe it, but Google searches were not blocked then.

Investigative journalism from local Chinese publications - like the Southern Weekend newspaper and Caijing magazine - was becoming as good as anywhere in the world.

I remember being at a function where a group of journalists were speaking to one of the foreign affairs ministry spokespeople. We had some concern or other, and he was reassuring us that everything would be all right.

"Don't worry," he said, smiling as he pushed an imaginary truck gear into position. "In China we only have one gear, and it's forward."

It sometimes doesn't feel like that now.

The Great Firewall

"You can't control the internet," is something people would say in those years - part mantra, part celebration of a new global reality.

But Chinese officials have worked out that actually, you can.

Rather than connecting to the internet, this country has something more like an intranet within the boundaries of the Great Firewall of China.

Sites like Amnesty International, Facebook, and Twitter are unreachable for most Chinese, unless they have use of a virtual private network (VPN), which effectively punts their computer over the Great Firewall.

So, with the congress approaching, there's been an assault on VPN use. The government has ordered Apple to remove all VPNs from its Chinese app store.

The company has decided in favour of not being kicked out of this enormous market and is doing what Beijing wants.

Years ago Google was given a similar ultimatum: allow Chinese officials to censor search results or you're gone. Google didn't cave in, and was blocked.

Watching WeChat

China's most effective censorship tool is also the country's most widespread method of communication.

Pretty much everybody here uses the phone app WeChat. It has text messaging, group chats, photo sharing, location searching and electronic payments.

How social media is different in China

During periods of political sensitivity - like now - key words will trigger the blocking or monitoring of a post. If sensitive enough, they could even lead to state security knocking on your door.

New regulations also make a person who sets up a group chat responsible for what's said amongst the group.

As you can imagine, the administrators of football team chats might be feeling a little nervous about the content of late night posts from drunken players.

Some will wonder how this is all possible as the app is not owned by the government but run by the hugely-powerful Chinese company Tencent.

Well, under new regulations from the Cyber Administration of China, private entities which run these platforms are required to not only enforce content restrictions but also report those who violate them to the "relevant authorities".

For many Chinese people - even those overseas - WeChat has also become their main news feed. If you restrict this content you can close out certain news coverage.

Potential challengers to WeChat's virtual monopoly are also being reined in. WhatsApp is not 100% within the domain of the Chinese state.

So, at times in recent weeks, its use has been impossible to reach without a VPN.

Is WhatsApp being censored in China?

China disrupts WhatsApp messaging service

It is not clear whether the disruption of WhatsApp is a temporary measure to coincide with the congress or yet another restriction that's here to stay.

Tight grip on the press

It is no secret that every Chinese newspaper and television station is under the complete control of the Communist Party.

And yet last year, when Mr Xi visited the People's Daily newspaper, Xinhua wire service and state broadcaster CCTV, he still demanded the absolute loyalty of reporters who should follow the Party's leadership in "politics, thought and action".

A misty-eyed ode to China's leader from a deputy editor

But, just in case some journalists didn't get the memo, a set of rules have been sent around governing coverage of this year's congress, requiring all interviews with experts or scholars to be approved by the outlet's "work unit leadership" and the central propaganda department.

However, China's censorship and propaganda model is also going beyond sensitive political matters.

Online bookstores must now work under a rating system from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television which includes the promotion of "moral values".

Popular blogs focusing on celebrity scandals and the intrigues of the rich and famous have been forced to close.

To talk about such matters has been deemed to be not in keeping with "core socialist values".

No naughty dramas

For a time, cheap online video dramas were pushing out the boundaries of what could be viewed here. There was a gay sitcom, for example.

But digital platforms have been ordered to stop showing hundreds of foreign shows, and their locally produced material is expected to follow the same restrictions as television.

As it is, on Chinese TV you rarely see anything approaching a passionate kiss.

Two years ago a TV drama was forced to reframe and zoom in on its shots so as to crop out the generous cleavage of its 7th Century maidens, in order to remain on air.

Thus goes the creeping imposition of a state-sanctioned morality under Mr Xi's administration.

Last month, TV dramas were given notice of a new set of rules governing their content. They should "enhance people's cultural taste" and "strengthen spiritual civilisation".

Directors are supposed to come up with engaging characters beyond the realms of lewd behaviour, extra-marital affairs, gambling, drugs, homosexuality and other forms of "immoral" behaviour.

The notice suggested eulogising the Communist Party of China, the country, the people and also national heroes. And one figure is emerging via the propaganda machine to stand head and shoulders above all others.

The cult of Xi?

As the censors shut down dissent, the party is urging a way of thinking about all that's good in China and tracing it back to a single source - Xi Jinping.

An exhibition focusing on the recent achievements of the Chinese government has opened in Beijing.

Vast rooms are dedicated to science, transport, the military, the economy, sport, ethnic minorities, and they are all dominated by massive photos of Xi Jinping. There must be hundreds of them.

The English language newspaper China Daily has been rolling out a series of front page stories - one every day - about the "impact of" a visit from Mr Xi on various villages, towns and cities after the General Secretary passed on his advice.

"He asked people to protect the lake", "President Xi proposed moving people in the villages to the new settlement", "Xi emphasised the importance of afforestation", et cetera.

Some here are joking that this type of reporting is not all that far from what you might expect in the North Korean press describing its own god-like leaders.

When Chinese officials make speeches now, they refer to this or that aspect of what they're up to "with Xi Jinping at the core".

Xi Jinping's growing power in China

China's Xi named commander in chief

How China guards the Xi creation myth

It goes without saying that you cannot question "the core" without this nation's considerable censorship apparatus crashing down upon you.

But, short of such an obvious breach, the rules regarding what can and can't be said, broadcast, forwarded, analysed are thought to be kept deliberately vague.

In this way, everyone is on their toes and the authorities can shut down what they like at any time without having to give a reason.

Editors, cartoonists, reporters, directors, bloggers, comedians, administrators running social media platforms and ordinary Chinese citizens posting to their friends are all staying well clear of certain subjects just in case it lands them in hot water.

In short: Chinese censorship works, and plenty of other governments around the world are looking on with admiration.

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How Chinese authorities censor your thoughts

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If you control public communication you can control the way people think and how they behave. That's what Xi Jinping's government is counting on. And it is never more true than at the time of major political gatherings.

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And when China's most powerful leader in 40 years endorses a philosopher, even a long-dead Confucian one, people rush to take action.

The epicenter of Wang's revival has been this city of four million people perched on a plateau in China's mountainous south. When Wang spent three years in exile here in the early 16th century, Guiyang was a remote outpost on imperial China's southern border.

Today, as the capital of one of China's poorest provinces, it has high-speed rail service to the coast and is trying to position itself as a center of big data - and traditional culture.

Since Mr. Xi began promoting the philosopher three years ago, officials in and around Guiyang have built a Wang Yangming-themed park, constructed a museum to showcase his achievements, turned a s mall cave into a shrine in his honor and, yes, commissioned a robot to bring him to life.

"It's a way to promote moral behavior in society as a whole," said Larry Israel, a scholar at Middle Georgia State University in Macon who has written about the revival.

Restoring a sense of public morality has been a policy goal of Mr. Xi, who is set to be reappointed as Communist Party leader at the party's 19th congress starting Wednesday.

In his efforts to address the country's spiritual shortcomings, Mr. Xi has spoken favorably of Confucius, praised Buddhism and presided over a revival of traditional religious practices that were once condemned as superstitious.

But he has seemed most comfortable praising the life and works of Wang Yangming.

Born in 1472, Wang was a scholar with a promising career in the imperial court in Beijing when, in 1506, he spoke out against the cruelty of a well-known courtier. That offense earned him banishment to faraway Guiyang.

During his years here, Wang ran a post house on the edge of town. That gave him time to meditate on the philosophical problem that would define his legacy: understanding how people know right from wrong. His conclusion: People have an inborn conscience that they must act upon, regardless of the consequences.

It was this advocacy of moral action that apparently appeals to the no-nonsense Mr. Xi, who has cracked down on vice and corruption within the party's ranks. Mr. Xi frequently refers to Wang, who regained favor in 1509, and then loyally served the emperor as a military leader who quashed a rebellion.

However, some see Wang, with his emphasis on following one's internal moral compass, as a risky thinker for an authoritarian state to embrace.

"Wang Yangming can pave the way for a philosophy of autonomy - that standards don't come from outside. that they are inner," said Sébastien Billioud, co-author of a recent book on Confucian thought in today's China. "And of course autonomy is always dangerous for authoritarian regimes."

During the first decades of communist rule, Wang's works were banned as "bourgeois." Even into the 1990s, it was still risky to talk about him at academic conferences.

"We held small private meetings" to discuss Wang, recalled Zhang Xinmin, a philosophy professor at Guizhou University on the city's outskirts. "We were monitored the whole time," he said.

The ban on Wang began to lift around 2000 with a revival in the popularity of Confucian studies. Then, in 2014, Mr. Xi explicitly told local leaders to promote Wang's thoughts. Suddenly, Wang Yangming was China's hottest philosopher since Marx.

"It was completely unexpected," Professor Zhang said.

Wang's rehabilitation has turned Guiyang into a hive of activity. One reason is that until a recent promotion, the province was led by one of Mr. Xi's protégés, Chen Min'er.

Mr. Chen's loyalty is on display at the Guiyang Confucius Academy, a vast complex of museums, fountains, dioramas and lecture halls on the city's outskirts. When it opened in 2013, it made little mention of Wang. But now there is a museum devoted to him nearly as big as the hall to Confucius himself.

"Both Uncle Xi and Chen Min'er love him," said Xu Qi, the party official in charge of the museum.

Guiyang's embrace of Wang can also show how much work Mr. Xi still has before him.

On the city's north side is the Yangming Cave, where Wang taught and whose name he adopted as his own. (His name at birth was Wang Shouren.) The cave is now encircled by a cultural park that is the centerpiece of a 600-acre real estate project of luxury high-rises and malls.

A senior local official, who asked not to be identified because of the delicacy of the issue, said the project was being investigated for corruption. When asked what he intended to do about it, however, his answer didn't seem exactly in keeping with Wang's advocacy of independent moral action.

"We are waiting," he said, "until after the 19th Party congress to see how to proceed."

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Forget Marx and Mao. Chinese City Honors Once-Banned Confucian.

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And when China's most powerful leader in 40 years endorses a philosopher, even a long-dead Confucian one, people rush to take action. The epicenter of Wang's revival has been this city of four million people perched on a plateau in China's mountainous south.

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Rice Noodles from Guangxi to the East Village

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Rice Noodles from Guangxi to the East Village

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Jacob Ding, the owner and noodle chef (Yuteng Chen, from Guangdong Province, oversees the dim sum and entrees), grew up in Nanning, Guangxi's capital, and settled in Missouri with his family as a teenager. In the spring of last year he started moonlighting from his job as a real estate broker to sell mi fen from a food stall at LIC Flea & Food in Queens, a trial run before opening Yuan.

In Guilin, the dish is often eaten at bare-bones shops while you are half-crouched on tiny stools, the noodles heaped in metal bowls with nothing but meat and sauce. Everything else (pickles, chile, herbs) is a condiment, for diners to calibrate as they wish. Soup, too, may be added, ladled from a communal pot or poured from a tap. "It's kind of self-serve," Mr. Ding said.

Here, the stools are of comfortable height and polished wood, in a minimalist room with concrete floors and, on the walls, gauzily painted characters from the beloved wuxia (martial arts) novels of Jin Yong. Soup is delivered to the table as a side, a limpid broth of pork bones and ham with a warming lick of ginger. Some might pour it into the noodles halfway through the meal; I preferred it as a chaser and gentle comedown.

The rest of the menu is mostly peripheral, apart from cucumber rinsed in black vinegar and vegetable dumplings with a surprise of crunchy taro, a tribute to the taro-growing Lipu county in Guangxi. Loveliest is a mochi ball with a snow of coconut and, hidden within, red bean paste - no more than a thumbprint's worth, and just enough.

Mr. Ding offers a few variants on traditional Guilin mi fen, including a gloss of truffle oil, which brings a faint perfume and extra weight on the tongue: interesting, but unnecessary. Elsewhere the noodles, imported from China, recur in a hearty, straightforward hot-and-sour beef soup flaring with chile oil and black bean paste, and mired alongside the enormous Shanghainese meatballs called lion's heads, in what seems less a soup than a sweet glaze.

Better is lao you fen, translated here as "old-buddy style" noodles, street food from Mr. Ding's hometown, Nanning. The broth is clear but has a powerful, soul-deep funk, leaching from fermented bamboo shoots. Below are cakes of ground pork laced with rice wine. Stories of the dish's origins vary - a favorite tea shop, a swim in the river - but boil down to this: A friend falls ill. Soup restores him to life.

I believe it.

Recommended Dishes Cucumber salad; tri-color dumpling; purple yam pancake; classic dry Guilin mi fen; Old Buddy-style mi fen soup; coconut red bean ball.

Wheelchair Access Entrance is on the same level as the sidewalk. Restroom is equipped with handrail.

This information was last updated:

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Rice Noodles Stretching From Guangxi to the East Village

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Jacob Ding, the owner and noodle chef (Yuteng Chen, from Guangdong Province, oversees the dim sum and entrees), grew up in Nanning, Guangxi's capital, and settled in Missouri with his family as a teenager.

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To the Editor:
Re " The China Puzzle " (editorial, Sept. 17):

You suggest that the United States cooperate with China on terrorism. China has an expansive and unclear definition of terrorist actions - for example, sentencing Prof. Ilham Tohti to life imprisonment for discussing Uighur issues online, accusing him of encouraging students to join terrorist groups.

The Chinese government refuses to allow independent reporters to investigate the situation in the Uighur homeland and indiscriminately treats the Uighur Muslim minority as terrorist suspects. The situation is not comparable to concerns about ISIS.

China has produced no substantive evidence that militants have returned to China from the Middle East. The region is in the midst of a security crackdown and an expansion of arbitrary detention in re-education centers, including of Uighur students studying abroad forced to return home by threats to their families.

This is in addition to longstanding Uighur grievances, including infringement of linguistic and religious rights and exclusion from benefits of the region's natural resource wealth. The United States should not cooperate with the Chinese government's security campaign in the region.

OMER KANAT, WASHINGTON
The writer is director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project.

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human rights and human rights violations

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To the Editor: Re " The China Puzzle " (editorial, Sept. 17): You suggest that the United States cooperate with China on terrorism. China has an expansive and unclear definition of terrorist actions - for example, sentencing Prof. Ilham Tohti to life imprisonment for discussing Uighur issues online, accusing him of encouraging students to join terrorist groups.

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This article from the Guardian details China's efforts to move millions of its citizens in order to eradicate poverty.

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Xiao Ercha lives in a tumbledown shanty beside a pigsty, thousands of kilometres and a world away from the awe-inspiring skyscrapers of Beijing and Shanghai.

Tatty mosquito nets hang from the bamboo poles propping up its cracked asbestos roof; kittens and chickens scuttle across the shack's earthen floor. Xiao shakes his head when asked to name the leader of his nation, the second largest economy on earth.

"Xi Jinping who?" the 57-year-old farmer replies. "I recognise his face from the television - but I don't know his name."

That is about to change. For Xiao, who was born and raised in this tiny mountaintop hamlet near China's southwestern borders with Myanmar and Laos, is one of millions of impoverished Chinese citizens being relocated as part of an ambitious and politically-charged push to "eradicate" extreme poverty in the world's most populous nation.

Over the next three years Xi Jinping's anti-poverty crusade - which the Communist party leader has declared one of the key themes of his second five-year term - will see millions of marginalised rural dwellers resettled in new, government-subsidised homes.

Some are being moved to distant urban housing estates, others just to slightly less remote or unforgiving rural locations. Other poverty-fighting tactics - including loans, promoting tourism and "pairing" impoverished families with local officials whose careers are tied to their plight - are also being used.

By 2020, Beijing hopes to have helped 30 million people rise above its official poverty line of about 70p a day while simultaneously reinforcing the already considerable authority of Xi, now seen as China's most powerful ruler since Mao Zedong.

China's breathtaking economic ascent has helped hundreds of millions lift themselves from poverty since the 1980s but in 2016 at least 5.7% of its rural population still lived in poverty, according to a recent UN report, with that number rising to as much as 10% in some western regions and 12% among some ethnic minorities.

A recent propaganda report claimed hitting the 2020 target would represent "a step against poverty unprecedented in human history". In his annual New Year address to the nation last week Xi made a "solemn pledge" to win his war on want. "Once made, a promise is as weighty as a thousand ounces of gold," he said.

The current wave of anti-poverty relocations - a total 9.81 million people are set to be moved between 2016 and 2020 - are taking place across virtually the whole country, in 22 provinces. However, China's western fringes, which still lag behind the prosperous east coast, are a particular focus.

Last year, Guizhou, China's most deprived province, was aiming to move about 750,000 people to about 3,600 new locations. More than 1 million people were set to be moved in Gansu, Sichuan and Guangxi while Yunnan province hoped to move about 677,000 people to nearly 2,800 new villages.

One such community is Padangshang, an isolated hilltop hamlet in Yunnan's Xishuangbanna prefecture. Provincial officials describe Xishuangbanna, a tropical land of rolling, mist-shrouded hills and jaw-dropping amber sunsets, as one of four key anti-poverty battlefields.

Padangshang's 143 residents - tea, nut and coffee farmers from the Hani ethnic minority - began moving to their new, bright-pink homes in early November after abandoning a nearby hilltop where access to water was difficult.

"We used to have to carry water up from the bottom of the hill ... Now we've got running water at home," enthused the community's Communist party chief, Liu Hengde, during an interview in the lounge of his new home, which he had furnished with an L-shaped sofa and flat-screen TV.

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Liu Hengde, the 30-year-old Communist party village chief of Padangshang. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian

"The government is helping the ordinary folk to lead a good life," Liu, 30, added, before fastening a machete to the back of his navy blue uniform and offering a tour of the newly built village to which 13 families had already moved. "Xi Jinping always says that if we give the ordinary folk a better life, the whole country will be well off."

Relocated villagers gave Xi's war on poverty - and their new two-story homes - their backing.

"When I was a boy I lived in a thick forest. There were insects and leeches, everywhere. Transport was bad. The water supply was bad. The power supply was bad," said Li Ade, a 30-year-old farmer. "These days ... the Burmese [over the border] are living in the Mao era while the lives of the Chinese people have improved."

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New homes in Padangshang. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian

Mark Wang, a University of Melbourne scholar who studies Beijing's use of resettlements to fight poverty, attributed Xi's focus on the issue partly to the seven years he spent in the countryside during Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Xi was born into China's "red aristocracy" - the son of the revolutionary elder Xi Zhongxun - but was exiled to the parched village of Liangjiahe in the 1960s after his father strayed to the wrong side of Mao.

Wang claimed those years of rural hardship continued to shape Xi's political priorities: "From the bottom of his heart he knows the Chinese farmers ... He understands what they want ... He even knows the dirty language the people use in the fields when they are farming."

But hard-nosed political calculations also explained Xi's bid to paint himself as a champion of the poor - an effort undermined by a recent crackdown on migrants in Beijing which has reportedly seen tens of thousands of poor workers forced from the capital.

"How can you make sure a billion people trust you and say: 'This is our strong leader?'" asked Wang, who argued one answer was waging war on poverty.

"This is something that will really make people say: 'Oh, this is something new! At last somebody finally wants to fix this problem'."

The resettlements' political function is unmissable in Padangshang, where posters of Xi visiting another of Yunnan's ethnic minorities are plastered on virtually every new home. "The government gave it to me. Every family got one," explained Xiao Ziluo, a 50-year-old builder, as he showed off his, which bore the slogan: "Build a Chinese dream with one heart."

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Posters of Xi Jinping have been plastered on nearly all new homes in Padangshang. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian

Experts question Beijing's definition of poverty - the World Bank defines it as someone who lives on less than £1.41 a day - and whether permanently vanquishing poverty is a realistic goal in such a short period. Others believe more emphasis should be placed on fighting urban deprivation.

Xiao, however, declared himself a fan of his poverty-fighting president: "He's the chairman of China. That's why he is good." The village chief Liu, predictably, concurred: "He's the best."

Wang said he doubted Beijing would manage to completely defeat poverty in so short a time. But given Xi's daunting political stature, his decision to make the campaign a top political priority - and to make Communist party cadres individually responsible for the plight of poor families in their areas - would have bureaucrats across the country scrambling to succeed. "Every day local officials are thinking: '2020 is coming! Oh my god!'"

The resettlements are the latest chapter in a decades-old Chinese tradition of moving people. Countless millions have been asked - or ordered - to make way for major nation-building infrastructure projects such as the Three Gorges Dam, which displaced about 1.5 million, and the South-North water diversion, which dislodged at least 345,000. Development-related relocations have proved highly controversial, with villagers often forced out with little, if any, help or compensation.

Wang said poverty-related relocations, while not uncomplicated, were generally "the most friendly", with those moved mostly allowed to hang on their old homes and farmlands for a period of time. "[With] all other resettlements they need something from you: 'I need your land. I need you to move so I can build a reservoir. I need to convert your land into an industrial or urban [zone].' For poverty alleviation resettlement the government doesn't want anything."

That may be overly generous. Xiao Ercha, however, is thrilled with his new concrete-floored home, even if, lacking the funds to furnish it, he has yet to move in.

"It's good, good, good!" beamed the farmer, who estimated his annual income at about £220, as he guided the Observer up to the second-floor balcony of his recently completed abode, which boasts spectacular views over the surrounding countryside. "I've never seen a house like this before."
Additional reporting by Wang Zhen

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China to move millions of people from homes in anti-poverty drive

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Xiao Ercha lives in a tumbledown shanty beside a pigsty, thousands of kilometres and a world away from the awe-inspiring skyscrapers of Beijing and Shanghai. Tatty mosquito nets hang from the bamboo poles propping up its cracked asbestos roof; kittens and chickens scuttle across the shack's earthen floor.

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1978: The Beginning of China's Economic Reform

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1978: The Beginning of China's Economic Reform

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In 1978 Deng Xiaoping instituted the beginnings of economic reform, experimenting initially by lifting government regulation on the agricultural market. These experiments were beginnings of reform that would later expand to other industries and become known as a "socialist market economy" which really caught on in the 1990s in which individuals would be allowed to create their own enterprises and the state no longer determined market prices. Not only did private enterprises emerge from this but the communist party broke down its previous planned economy sectors into state owned enterprises.

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This is a collection of photos taken by a European photographer in China at the turn of the 20th century.

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This is Henri Cartier-Bresson's Photo essay of one of the most disastrous programs initiated by Chairman Mao

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MoMA | Interactives | Exhibitions | 2010 | Henri Cartier-Bresson

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The two most important developments in photography in the first half of the twentieth century were the emergence of lasting artistic traditions and the rise of mass-circulation picture magazines. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) was a leading figure in both domains.

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In a stern directive issued last month, the party ordered schools to intensify efforts to promote "Chinese traditional and socialist culture" - a mix of party loyalty and patriotic pride in China's past. Under this new formulation, the party is presented less as a vanguard of proletarian revolution and more as a force for reviving China and restoring it to its rightful place as a world power.

But the demands have run into opposition, and even mockery, from some parents and educators, and not just the so-called tiger moms. Many see political indoctrination as an anachronism in an era when China's more than 181 million schoolchildren need a modern education in math, science and liberal arts to get ahead.

They complain that Mr. Xi, who is expected to strengthen his hold on power at a party meeting this month, is turning public education into a self-serving propaganda exercise. Some say the president seems more concerned about defending the party's legitimacy than educating the skilled work force that China needs to compete in the global economy.

Such frustrations recently came to a head in Zhejiang, a wealthy coastal province, where parents protested a decision by education officials to make traditional Chinese medicine a required course for fifth-grade students.

Deng Zhiguo, 40, a software programmer who has two children in primary schools there, said he worried that the changes would come at the expense of instruction in subjects like biology and chemistry.

"It's like learning Darwinism in the morning and creationism in the afternoon," he said. "How do you expect children to process that?"

Mr. Xi's campaign has also extended to universities, where officials have banned textbooks that promote "Western values" and punished professors for straying from the Communist line. Some scholars describe restrictions on free speech in the classroom as the most severe since the aftermath of the massacre around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Critics say Mr. Xi may be raising the volume in patriotic education for fear that the party's message is getting drowned out in younger generations immersed in social media and the internet. But he faces significant challenges. A study this year by Chinese and American researchers found that students appear to be tuning out shrill propaganda.

The study, based on the results of a 2010 national opinion survey, found that the "incessant ideological indoctrination by the Chinese government turns out to be counterproductive," with trust in the government actually falling among those who received higher levels of education.

Carl Minzner, an expert in Chinese law and governance at Fordham University in New York, said the party's socialist rhetoric had become "water-cooler banter and fodder for jokes" among educated Chinese.

"The party of revolution is now the party of the wealthy and powerful," he said. "They've got to stand for something. They're worried about the moral void at the core of Chinese society."

Mr. Xi has passionately defended his push for positively portraying China's past, chastising schools for removing ancient poems from the curriculum and calling traditional culture "part of the Chinese nation's blood and genes."

This fall, the Chinese Ministry of Education began rolling out new textbooks in history, language, law and ethics across primary and secondary schools. The new books include studies of 40 revolutionary heroes, writings by revolutionary leader Mao Zedong like his 1944 speech " Serve the People" and lessons on China's territorial claims in the disputed South China Sea, a pillar of Mr. Xi's foreign policy.

Anti-Japanese sentiment also features prominently, part of Mr. Xi's efforts to glorify the early days of the party and its role in defending China from foreign invaders. A second-grade lesson tells the story of the "little hero" Wang Erxiao, a 13-year-old cattle herder who is said to have died in 1942 while trying to protect the offices of a Communist newspaper from Japanese soldiers.

Experts say the party is seeking ways to justify its hold on power in an era when its founding goal of proletarian revolution no longer seems relevant. While Mr. Xi is hardly the first Chinese leader to turn to patriotism as a substitute, he has pushed a version that plays up the party's role as a force for restoring China's greatness.

"The party's theories lack vitality and innovation," said Zhang Lifan, a historian in Beijing and a frequent critic of the party, "so the only thing they can do is to try to use the past to seize the next generation."

The government has set up 231 so-called Red Army schools as models for its approach. One is Ms. Xie's Workers and Peasants Red Army Elementary School, located in Yuqing County near the site of a former Communist revolutionary base in Guizhou, a mountainous southern province.

The school's curriculum recounts the experience of Mao's soldiers during the early years of the revolution, who are portrayed as heroically fighting to free China from rapacious warlords and Japanese invaders. As at some Red Army schools, students wear military uniforms around campus; in Ms. Xie's classroom, that is a privilege reserved for the best students.

Even math classes are infused with party history. Students are asked such questions as calculating the distance of the Long March, Mao's epic 1934-36 retreat across China. (The answer is about 6,000 miles.)

Teachers tell students that loyalty to the party can help them overcome personal difficulties and live a meaningful life.

"While other countries are suffering from war and people are still starving in Africa," Ms. Xie said during a recent lesson on perseverance, "please don't forget the sacrifices made by the Red Army soldiers."

Mr. Xi, himself the son of a Communist revolutionary, has hailed Red Army schools as a model for the nation. He and his mother, Qi Xin, have given the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars to the schools, records show. A Red Army school in northwestern China is also named for Mr. Xi's father, Xi Zhongxun.

The party sees the schools, which serve tens of thousands of students in its former revolutionary bases in 28 provinces, as charity projects that help the most disadvantaged children.

While the patriotic appeals have found fertile ground among working-class Chinese hungry for a sense of pride, some experts warn that placing too much emphasis on nationalistic education has its own risks.

Jiang Xueqin, an education consultant in Beijing, said fanning national pride could quickly "mutate into a fierce and militant nationalism" that is difficult to control.

Mr. Xi's vision of patriotic education is already in full bloom at the Workers and Peasants Red Army Elementary School, which was founded in 1788 but only became a Red Army school in 2012.

Classes begin with Red Army songs, and students take turns reciting revolutionary stories featuring Japanese spies as villains.

"The blood in the past gave us the life we have today," said Kuang Yanli, 11, a sixth-grade student. "A lot of other countries want to invade our country again, so we have to study hard and make sure that doesn't happen."

Local officials are sensitive to the idea that the school is indoctrinating students, and the police blocked journalists from The New York Times from reporting after being alerted to their presence.

Mr. Xi himself has also become a part of the curriculum. Several times a week, the school's more than 1,400 students line up in the cement-paved courtyard to sing an ode to Mr. Xi's signature phrase, the "Chinese dream":

Chinese dream for 1,000 years,
Chinese dream for 100 years,
The dream carries on, the dream embraces all,
For the revival of China, for the revival of China!

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To Inspire Young Communists, China Turns to 'Red Army' Schools

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In a stern directive issued last month, the party ordered schools to intensify efforts to promote "Chinese traditional and socialist culture" - a mix of party loyalty and patriotic pride in China's past. Under this new formulation, the party is presented less as a vanguard of proletarian revolution and more as a force for reviving China and restoring it to its rightful place as a world power.

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"Detailed" plots involving prostitution, rape and masturbation are also forbidden. So are displays of "unhealthy marital values," which the guidelines catalog as affairs, one-night stands, partner swapping and, simply but vaguely, "sexual liberation."

Despite the efforts of censors, the internet has long been the most freewheeling of China's mass media, a platform where authors and artists - as well as entertainment studios - could reach audiences largely free of the Propaganda Department's traditional controls on broadcasting, publishing, cinema and stage.

But the new restrictions - which expanded and updated a set of prohibitions issued five years ago - reflect an ambitious effort by President Xi Jinping's government to impose discipline and rein in the web.

They were issued by the China Netcasting Services Association, which includes as members more than 600 companies, including the official Xinhua News Agency, the social media giants Sina and Tencent, the dominant search engine Baidu and the news aggregator Jinri Toutiao.

David Bandurski, an analyst and editor for the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project, said the association's rules created the illusion of industry consensus as the company's acquiesced to what party officials call "self-discipline."

"Many of these companies are private, so it's important for the leadership to have a means of bringing them together and creating a means of applying pressure on the collective," he wrote in an email. "It is a tactic of co-option."

Writers, filmmakers, podcasters and others attributed the guidelines and other measures to a new prim and paternalistic ideology taking shape under Mr. Xi, who has called on party members to be " paragons of morality " in pursuit of what he calls the "China Dream."

Many also attributed the tightening of controls to official nervousness ahead of a major Communist Party congress scheduled for October. The congress is expected to reshuffle the country's leadership and consolidate President Xi's already formidable power.

"I feel like people say all the time that after the big congress, things will be O.K.," said Fan Popo, a documentary filmmaker whose work has run afoul of online censorship because it explores the country's conflicted views about homosexuality. But then he noted how online censorship has also spiked ahead of important state holidays and following unexpected events like the death of the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

"It's still going on," he said, "and it's getting worse."

In June, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television announced a new rating system for online bookstores and publishers based on criteria that included upholding moral values.

The powerful Cyberspace Administration - the ultimate authority over what is online in China - also shut down dozens of blogs and social media accounts for covering celebrity news and gossip that month.

Regulators also ordered two popular video streaming sites, AcFun and Bilibili, to stop showing hundreds of foreign television programs, while other state agencies issued a new rule this month prohibiting video sites from streaming even domestically produced shows without a license.

That essentially subjects online programs - often considered edgier - to the same restrictions governing what is broadcast on television, which critics say is dominated by trifles and propaganda.

The directive also ordered online producers to submit plans for creating new dramas between now and 2021 that "praise the party, the nation and heroes so as to set a good example."

The new industry regulations provoked outrage - online, of course.

The country's leading scholar of sexuality, Li Yinhe, wrote in a scathing commentary on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, that the new regulations violated two basic freedoms. "The first is a citizen's constitutionally protected right to freedom of creativity; the second is the constitutionally protected right to sexual freedom of sexual minorities."

When Ms. Li called on people to "work toward abolishing screening and censorship rules," her posts were deleted, too.

Much of the online discussion has focused on the new prohibitions of sexual content and the inclusion of homosexuality among a list of "abnormal sexual relations" that also included incest and sexual assault. Critics said the regulation appeared to contradict the government's own position on homosexuality, which it decriminalized in 1997 and removed from an official list of mental disorders in 2001.

China's censorship agencies exercise overlapping jurisdiction over the internet and often employ policies that create confusion. The result has been a layered system of control that begins with self-censorship by those who create online content, followed by policing by web platforms, which are often private enterprises, and finally, when necessary, intervention by government regulators or the police.

Some regulations are explicit - no depiction of killing endangered species or underage drinking, for example. Others are imprecise. One, for example, prohibits blurring the lines between "truth and falsity, good and evil, beauty and ugliness."

Critics say the rules are meant to be so vague that the authorities can justify blocking anything, as circumstances dictate.

"The tightening of content censorship is the general trend, but for content creators, they never know where exactly the lines lie," said Gao Ming, who until recently produced a satirical podcast on current affairs called Radio HiLight.

Like others, Mr. Gao acknowledged softening his commentaries to avoid trouble, trying to work around, or one step ahead of, the censors. For profit or in pursuit of art, many performers and producers have learn to live with the party's limitations.

Ms. Song, the writer, works mostly in a literary genre known as danmei that has become hugely popular among young women. Taking its inspiration from Japanese stories and manga, it typically involves homoerotic romances. Ms. Song's work is often serialized, with readers paying for new chapters as they are posted on one of the biggest publishing sites, Jinjiang Literature City.

"If I want to publish it," she said of her work, "then I need to follow the rules."

Ms. Song, who lives in Wuhan, an enormous city in central China, said some of her chapters have been blocked because "sensitive keywords appeared in high frequency." Usually, she then edits enough of those words out to get her writing past the censors and to her readers.

Ms. Song said she was not particularly worried about the new regulations. "Authors cannot use their works to encourage or incite criminal acts, especially among younger readers," she said. "Literature, after all, has a guiding effect."

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68 Things You Cannot Say on China's Internet

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"Detailed" plots involving prostitution, rape and masturbation are also forbidden. So are displays of "unhealthy marital values," which the guidelines catalog as affairs, one-night stands, partner swapping and, simply but vaguely, "sexual liberation."

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While the Communist revolution brought women more job opportunities, it also made their interests subordinate to collective goals. Stopping at the household doorstep, Mao's words and policies did little to alleviate women's domestic burdens like housework and child care. And by inundating society with rhetoric blithely celebrating its achievements, the revolution deprived women of the private language with which they might understand and articulate their personal experiences.

When historians researched the collectivization of the Chinese countryside in the 1950s, an event believed to have empowered rural women by offering them employment, they discovered a complicated picture. While women indeed contributed enormously to collective farming, they rarely rose to positions of responsibility; they remained outsiders in communes organized around their husbands' family and village relationships. Studies also showed that women routinely performed physically demanding jobs but earned less than men, since the lighter, most valued tasks involving large animals or machinery were usually reserved for men.

The urban workplace was hardly more inspiring. Women were shunted to collective neighborhood workshops with meager pay and dismal working conditions, while men were more commonly employed in comfortable big-industry and state-enterprise jobs. Party cadres' explanations for this reflected deeply entrenched gender prejudices: Women have a weaker constitution and gentler temper, rendering them unfit for the strenuous tasks of operating heavy equipment or manning factory floors.

The party at times paid lip service to the equal sharing of domestic labor, but in practice it condoned women's continuing subordination in the home. In posters and speeches, female socialist icons were portrayed as "iron women" who labored heroically in front of steel furnaces while maintaining a harmonious family. But it was a cherry-picking approach that focused exclusively on bringing women into the work force and neglected their experiences in other realms.

Visitors to rural areas saw peasant wives toiling around the clock: cooking, mending clothes and feeding livestock after finishing a day of work in the fields. Their plight shocked the urban youth who were sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, such that Naihua Zhang, a sociology professor at Florida Atlantic University who spent time in the countryside as a young woman in that era, equated rural marriage with a total erasure of women's identity.

Researchers also observed that after marriage factory women often experienced slower career advancement than men as they became saddled with domestic responsibilities that left them with little time to learn new skills and take on extra work, both prerequisites for promotion. State services that promised to ease their burden, like public child care centers, were in reality few and far between. Unlike their counterparts in developed countries, Chinese women didn't have labor-saving household appliances, since Mao's economic policies prioritized heavy industry over the production of consumer products like washing machines and dishwashers.

Some Western scholars have said these realities amounted to a "revolution postponed." Yet the conclusions of researchers were contradicted by none other than Chinese women themselves.

During her field study in China in 1970s, Margery Wolf, who was an anthropology professor at University of Iowa, was surprised by how effusive Chinese women were about the miracle of female emancipation in the very presence of their continued oppression.

"It was easy to take gender equality - an ideal that was widely promoted - as the reality and regard problems as reminiscent of old systems and ideology that would erode with time," said Professor Zhang, the sociologist.

The state rolled out propaganda campaigns aimed at not only enlisting women in the work force but also shaping their self-perception. Posters, textbooks and newspapers propagated images and narratives that, devoid of any particularities of personal experiences, depicted women as men's equal in outlook, value and achievement. For women in the workplace to adhere to this narrowly defined acceptable female image meant to see, understand and speak about their life not as it was, but as what it ought to be according to the party ideal.

It is a measure of the campaign's success that women who publicly described their experiences in the Mao era did so exclusively in official rhetoric. Elisabeth Croll, an anthropologist specializing in Chinese women, observed that all published accounts of Chinese women's lives during the early decades of the People's Republic followed the standard narrative of their rise from mistreated wives and daughters to independent, socialist workers; it had become the story of practically every woman.

Forty years after Mao's death, this aspect of his legacy is still understood through his famous pronouncement on gender equality, "Women hold up half the sky." It is a slogan my grandmother utters in the same breath as the chairman's other sins and deeds.

She does not mention the arduous work of managing a household and raising three children amid tumultuous revolutionary campaigns. Nor does she complain about how she couldn't join the party because of her husband's unpopular political affiliations. She gives only a chuckle when she recalls the exhortations she once received from party superiors to marry just as her career was taking off.

For all its flaws, the Communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big. When it came to advice for my mother, my grandmother applauded her daughter's decision to go to graduate school and urged her to find a husband who would be supportive of her career. She still seems to think that the new market economy - with its meritocracy and freedom of choice - will finally allow women to be masters of their minds and actions.

After all, she has always said to my mother, "you have more opportunities."

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Opinion | How Did Women Fare in China's Communist Revolution?

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While the Communist revolution brought women more job opportunities, it also made their interests subordinate to collective goals. Stopping at the household doorstep, Mao's words and policies did little to alleviate women's domestic burdens like housework and child care.