WE HAVE BEEN HARMONIZED

A chilling warning that China’s authoritarian rule is only growing more insidious.

In this highly relevant, frequently revelatory book, originally published in Germany in 2018, journalist Strittmatter, who has studied China for 30 years and was stationed in Beijing for a decade, argues that the opened-up China of Deng Xiaoping is an illusion. The state has used its new prosperity to essentially bribe the enlarged middle class to abide by increasingly autocratic measures, and the Chinese Communist Party has placed its leader, Xi Jinping, in a “godlike” position. “Both the Chinese people and the world at large have good reason to be nervous,” writes the author. Reintroducing an ideological mix of Mao, Marx, and Confucius, Xi is a brilliant technocrat who has engineered an authoritarian state. The election of Donald Trump, notes Strittmatter, has been a gift to China: confirmation of the West’s demise. While the West believed that China would gradually adopt democratic tendencies, that has not happened under Xi, who has strengthened the CCP and its ability to control the behavior and thought of the Chinese people: “He took on a diverse, lively, sometimes insubordinate society and did everything in his power to ‘harmonize’ it, as they say in China, stifling the voices of those who think differently and subordinating every last corner of society to the command of the Party.” In a systematic, well-written narrative, the author precisely examines the means by which China has achieved this “perfect storm…for democracies everywhere.” These include widespread censorship; the violent crackdown in Hong Kong; the continued persecution of the Muslim Uighurs minority, who have been subjected to a network of “re-education camps” not seen since the Nazi era; the misuse of technology to spread disinformation; the rewards system of “social trustworthiness” to keep citizens in line; and the use of terror and forced confessions. Strittmatter’s accessible yet hard-hitting narrative will find an audience with policymakers and general readers alike.

A frightening, vital wake-up call: The West ignores the rise of an Orwellian China at its peril.