A November 24 apartment fire in Urumqi, the capital of China’s northwestern Xinjiang province, killed at least 10 people and injured at least nine more. Reports that zero-Covid measures delayed firefighters from reaching the blaze prompted unprecedented protests around the country.

State media in China have been blaming foreign forces and trying to distract viewers, which are typical strategies, said Joshua Kurlantzick, the author of a new book, “Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World.” 

Chinese media outside the country have had a more interesting response.“They’re not trying to make a major effort to spin it, since it’s pretty hard to spin for foreign audiences,” said Kurlantzick, who is also a senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. Instead, they appear to be flooding social media platforms like Twitter with “massive amounts of spam to make it harder for reporters and independent observers to access information about what’s going on.”

In his new book, Kurlantzick analyzes how China is working to become a global media and disinformation superpower through an arsenal of tactics, including through state media, disinformation campaigns and digital infrastructure. 

China’s information efforts “could give Beijing more influence over the information that publics in many states consume — on the internet, through social media, on television, and on the radio,” he writes. Beijing’s investments have paid off in some areas — but far from all of them, Kurlantzick found.

I recently spoke with Kurlantzick about his new book. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you give me your book’s elevator pitch? 

I started out thinking that China was building a very large disinformation and state media influence apparatus and was becoming fairly successful at influencing the domestic politics and societies of other countries over the past decade, which it hadn’t really focused on doing except in a few places like Taiwan. That was my original thesis. 

I had seen a big growth in China’s efforts to build up its media and wield information tools and disinformation. Pro-Beijing entrepreneurs were buying up the local Chinese-language media so that there were very few non-pro-Beijing options for Chinese media. 

And what I found is they have had some success, but in reality a lot of the funds and time spent to expand state media, making it credible and wielding disinformation and influence in other countries, has actually not worked and in many cases has backfired. China has developed this massive effort to influence other countries, but it has failed as often as not. 

What are the main elements of China’s media offensive? 

One element is actual state media, like CGTN, China Radio International and Xinhua. The Xi administration has spent a huge amount of money expanding them and trying to upgrade them by hiring quality foreign journalists. But those have almost completely failed. Xinhua has had more success. Xinhua has signed a lot of content sharing agreements with a lot of news agencies around the world. In developing countries, Xinhua is increasingly stepping into the void left by other news wires like the Associated Press, because Xinhua content is free or cheap. 

The second prong is control over information pipes, building cables, 5G networks, etc. China has had some success with that in Africa and other places, but they are losing out as Western countries increasingly crack down on a lot of their efforts. 

The third prong is an increasingly sophisticated use of disinformation. They have become more sophisticated at using bots and flooding sites with disinformation. For instance, Meta and Twitter recently reported efforts by China to spread disinformation online to influence the U.S. midterm elections in November. 

What’s in it for China? 

Beijing felt that the entire global media environment was dominated by outlets that were from liberal democracies — NBC, CNN, other major Western news outlets — and that those outlets didn’t cover China fairly. They wanted to be able to get China’s story out there. They wanted to promote China’s own model and also get their views out there and build networks that were capable of delivering this message. 

You wrote that the Chinese government tried and failed to make CGTN like Al Jazeera, which is owned by the Qatari government. What went wrong? 

They wanted CGTN to be regarded as a credible source of information, like Al Jazeera. But the idea that China could have had something like Al Jazeera was always something of a fantasy. Qatar is a small state, and it has significant foreign policy on a few certain issues. But outside of those issues, Qatar has basically left its Al Jazeera reporters alone. China was never going to be able to do that because virtually any issue could have an impact on China. 

You write about the dominance of Xinhua’s content sharing agreements, especially with local news outlets in Southeast Asia. What are the implications of those agreements for people in their daily lives? 

Xinhua has had success at reaching audiences, and so those Chinese-language readers are getting a skewed view. It’s dramatically cutting them off. But the greater danger is Xinhua increasingly developing content sharing agreements with local language outlets. Like in Thailand, now there are a lot of Thai-language outlets using Xinhua content. That’s going to become more common in Southeast Asia, except in Singapore, where outlets have the money to pay for the major global wires. 

That’s going to be a serious problem because you’re going to have Xinhua copy increasingly picked up by a lot of local news outlets in the local languages. Readers don’t really notice where it comes from. That’s going to skew the views of the general reading public, and that’s quite dangerous. 

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WeChat is an omnipresent Chinese messaging app, and Kokas, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, needed it to talk to Chinese sources for her research. But, as Kokas told me, it soon became “a very meta experience.” To have WeChat on her personal phone meant that “you were subjecting yourself to precisely the type of surveillance that you were writing about.”

In the book, Kokas analyzes how Chinese firms and the Chinese government gather data on U.S. citizens for political and commercial gain, putting U.S. national security at risk. China is able to do this, Kokas points out, in part because the U.S. government does not have substantial regulations in place to protect users and their data.

“By tracing how China and the US have shaped the global movement of data, I hope this book empowers citizens around the world to navigate the complex terrain created by Silicon Valley, Washington, and Beijing,” she writes.

I recently spoke with Kokas on the phone. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What do “digital sovereignty” and “data trafficking” mean in layman's terms? 

Digital sovereignty is the idea of control over a country’s digital resources. Digital sovereignty is something that we see in countries that are trying to protect their digital domain from oversight from other countries. The Chinese government has a more expansive vision called cyber sovereignty, which is that any digital space that a country touches should be part of their digital domain.

Data trafficking is the movement of data from one country to another without the consent of users and without their understanding of the implications of their data being moved between national data regimes. For example, if I sign up for TikTok here in the U.S. and I find out that my data has been accessed in another country, that would be data trafficking. 

My favorite line in the book is when you write, “Most people are simply not exciting intelligence targets.” So what are the implications of data trafficking for most Americans in their daily lives? 

People are afraid that they are individually going to be targeted, and there are some scary stories, but ultimately the more interesting data for the Chinese government and for Chinese firms is actually at scale. So while you might not personally be interesting, you plus all of your neighbors, or you plus all of the people in your state, yield really rich insights that can enable the tracking and mapping of a whole society.

And while most people aren’t that interesting, there are specific subgroups that face intensive targeting, like Hong Kong democracy activists, as well as Uyghur and Tibetan activists. 

I also think there are other layers that are significant. One is economic risk. U.S. companies can’t gather data in China the same way that Chinese companies can in the United States, and that creates a fundamental asymmetry in the development of the digital economy in ways that will have long-standing implications for the development of products. At a certain point, it’s not necessarily just about spying or surveillance. It’s about what types of products you can build.

The third issue is national security. These platforms are becoming essential in daily life and the functioning of society. For example, TikTok now functions as a form of critical communications infrastructure. Chinese firms have also become involved in gathering and using health data and agricultural data from the United States. If that breaks down or if the Chinese government decides to pull participation from these firms, which they can do, it leads to a fundamental destabilization of key areas in the U.S. and global economy — areas like communication, health, food production. 

That’s not a risk that I think most people want to take.

Do you think the United States is at fault for not better protecting user data? Or is China more at fault for taking advantage of those weaknesses? 

A lot of China’s ability to go into other countries and propose tech platforms that rapidly gather data builds on the fact that U.S.-based companies have already been there. A great example of this is TikTok being officially based in the Cayman Islands. This is a classic move by U.S. firms to escape U.S. government scrutiny. And TikTok adopted this, so while their headquarters are officially in Beijing, they’re domiciled in the Cayman Islands. The other thing that U.S. firms pioneered was a lack of algorithmic transparency. And that’s at the foundation of a lot of these business models from which many Chinese entrepreneurs learn to grow their businesses.

The first and most important thing the U.S. government should do is pass national data regulations that have actual enforcement requirements in place. But there are significant differences within the U.S. government about what is and is not acceptable in terms of government oversight over corporations, as well as oversight over data. And even if laws are passed, enforcement is still really challenging. 

You present these issues as being contested, but it seems that the U.S. isn’t putting up much of a fight. 

The title should be something like, “China is taking over the digital world, and the U.S. kind of agreed to it.” But people I interviewed in the U.S. government and tech corporations would argue that by not heavily regulating the U.S. digital landscape, U.S. platforms are able to grow and compete with China that way. The other aspect is this resistance to changing U.S. data governance policies because that would be “letting China win” by adopting too many aspects of the Chinese model. I don’t fully agree with that framework. 

You wrote that you felt a sense of urgency while working on the book. Why did you feel that way? 

A lot of people outside China haven’t experienced China’s digital control directly, so they don’t understand the seriousness of what it means for that model to be exported and how difficult it is to put the genie back in the bottle once it’s out.

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Several officers, some carrying assault weapons, surrounded the car, gestured for them to get out and interrogated them about what they were doing in the area. After persuading the police officers to let them go, Chin asked one of them how they had found them in the first place. 

“We have cameras back there,” Chin recalls the officer saying. “One of them recognized your license plate.”

Such advanced surveillance has become the norm in Xinjiang and around the country, according to Chin’s new book, “Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control,” which he co-wrote with his Wall Street Journal colleague Liza Lin. 

The pair, both longtime China reporters, describe the building of a dystopian police state in Xinjiang, where China, many human rights groups say, is perpetrating genocide and crimes against humanity against the mostly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic groups. 

Under the guise of counterterrorism, they write, China has been using advanced artificial intelligence, facial recognition software, DNA collection, “Big Brother” programs and other tactics “to exert total control” over local populations. 

But surveillance is not limited to Xinjiang. Even in cities like Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing, China is using surveillance to create a “digital utopia” where technology helps improve everything from traffic patterns to emergency responses. 

It’s “a new society engineered around the power of digital surveillance,” they write, and it’s a model China appears to be exporting to other authoritarian countries. 

I recently spoke with Chin — now based in Taiwan — and Lin — now based in Singapore — about their new book. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What shocked you most about surveillance in Xinjiang? 

Chin: The shock came in two waves. The first was just seeing so much futuristic and untested technology being unleashed indiscriminately, and seemingly without hesitation or consideration of the side-effects, on an entire population of people. The second came when we realized the Communist Party was using it to reboot one of the most reviled institutions of the 20th century — the mass incarceration of a religious minority in gulag-style camps.  

How do you compare surveillance in Xinjiang to the rest of China? 

Chin: In Xinjiang, surveillance is truly totalitarian. It covers every Turkic Muslim in the region. It’s pervasive and constant, and its aim is to remold the individuals it targets. In the rest of China, Covid complicates the picture. Pre-Covid, the Xinjiang style of hard surveillance was reserved for half-a-dozen categories of people, including ex-cons, dissidents and the mentally ill. People outside that category experienced surveillance mostly in terms of “smart city” conveniences, like being able to scan their faces to pay for subway tickets. But under “zero Covid,” nearly everyone in China has been subjected to hard surveillance in the form of health codes that track and limit their movements depending on their exposure — similar to the way authorities in Xinjiang track exposure to the “ideological virus” of religious ideas.  

Lin: Over the last 20 years, the Chinese social contract was that we’ll give you higher salaries and better living standards and you’ll keep us in power. But in the past five years, with Chinese economic growth slowing, the Chinese government realizes that the old social contract is no longer working because you’re going to hit a point where not everyone’s income is rising. You’re an authoritarian government, but you still need to keep your citizens happy to stay in power. So the new social contract, outside of Xinjiang, is we’re using all this technology to make your life nice and efficient by doing things like clearing traffic jams and helping ambulances get to hospitals faster, and you give us your loyalty. And the government has always viewed Xinjiang as a place that breeds separatism. They always want to clamp down on it, and with digital technology, they’ve found an almost easy way to do it. 

To what degree do you fault or blame U.S. technology companies for their role in the use and abuse of surveillance technology in China? 

Chin: U.S. tech companies midwifed the Chinese surveillance state from its most embryonic state in the early 2000s, and they continue to nurture it with capital and components. They’ve done this for the same reason American companies always do things: it’s extremely profitable. U.S. chip makers say they can’t control how every single buyer uses their products, which is true. But can they try harder than they are? Almost certainly.

Lin: Western technology and capital have been the building blocks of China’s surveillance state. Right from the early years, when China was seeking a way to build up its capability, folks like Sun Microsystems, Nortel Networks, Cisco, Siemens were there to sell to Chinese police. I would describe the feeling Western companies had towards China in the early days and even up to recent years as naive optimism and strategic corporate ignorance. Now, folks are talking about the possible regulatory risks to doing business in the market and scouring their supply chains for evidence of forced labor. 

How much further can China take surveillance? 

Chin: Beijing's ultimate goal is something like a perfectly engineered society — one that has no dissidents because everyone is satisfied, that automatically course-corrects without leaders having to intervene with force. They seem more likely to end up with something less than perfect, which will still require them to track and punish misbehavior. They also have huge technical and political barriers to overcome. It’s hard to say where all this will end up, but I think it’s safe to say the Communist Party isn’t done trying to optimize its control over Chinese society.

It seems that the Chinese public generally approves of China’s surveillance technology. To what degree do you think that approval is a result of state propaganda? 

Chin: It’s extremely difficult to disentangle public opinion from propaganda in China. To some degree, it may not really matter. State surveillance is, at heart, a propaganda project. Its aim is to persuade people that they’re being watched, along with everyone around them. That gives people a sense of security while at the same time encouraging them to modify their own behavior. To the Party, what matters is the belief, not how people come to hold it.

Lin: I had gone into this project thinking state surveillance is always a very bad thing. But a lot of Chinese people find surveillance attractive. Chinese state media are not shy about saying how amazing the surveillance is at finding criminals. There are stories in local papers about abducted or missing children who were reunited with their parents because of facial recognition technology. The surveillance state is as much a propaganda project as it is a tech and infrastructure one.

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In July, technology companies were required by the government to comply with new, strict licensing rules for technology platforms. These rules — called Ministerial Regulation 5, or MR5 — require tech companies to take down content deemed unlawful or that “disturbs public order” within four hours if urgent, and within 24 hours if not. 

Under these rules, technology companies are also required to release user data to the government upon request. 

“Ministerial Regulation 5 represents an attempt by the Indonesian government to hide one of the most repressive internet governance regimes in the world behind the veneer of the rule of law,” Michael Caster, Asia Digital Program Manager at the freedom of expression group Article 19, told me.

Indonesian journalists have faced a wave of physical harassment and intimidation this past July.  In one case, an aide for Maluku province’s Governor Murad Ismail grabbed TV reporter Sofyan Muhammadiyah’s phone while he covered student demonstrations against the governor and deleted some footage.

And on July 14, three unidentified men harassed one journalist working with CNN Indonesia and another with a local news website while they covered the aftermath of the shooting of a police officer in Jakarta.

These instances of harassment and intimidation were physical, but are symptomatic of the growing threat to press freedom in the country. In Indonesia, like in many other countries around the world, the assault on press freedom and freedom of expression is also legislative.

Governments often describe this sort of restrictive legislation as necessary to protect the public. For instance, in Indonesia, content related to terrorism or child sexual abuse must be taken down. However, any content that the government deems to be disturbing community or public order also has to be removed.

This sort of language, Caster points out, “is so vague and broad as to mean anything the authorities choose.” As a result, arbitrary restrictions on speech will likely become the norm, drastically expanding the government’s capacity to censor criticism. 

Indonesia’s Washington, D.C. embassy did not reply to an email requesting comment for this story.

The MR5 regulations were first released in late November 2020, and technology companies were told they would lose access to the Indonesian market if they didn’t comply. Indonesia has a population of over 270 million, and more than 190 million of them are internet users. Major companies like Google, Zoom, Twitter and Meta’s Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram all complied with the new rules by the government’s deadline.

According to Ika Ningtyas, the Secretary-General of Indonesia’s Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), the new rules are an “obstacle to the work of journalists and the media.” In early August, she met with Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Information, but officials refused to cancel the new regulations.

Drafted as they are, the rules could enable the authorities to censor journalists and coverage of sensitive issues, like human rights abuses in West Papua. There’s also a risk that the government will force tech companies to turn over the user data of journalists in particular. 

“The regulators, implementers, and supervisors are all in the hands of the Ministry of Communication and Information,” Ningtyas wrote in a Signal message to me. “There is too much authority held by the Ministry and this can be abused.”

These repressive new rules aren't the only attempt to curtail press freedom. The latest draft of the Indonesian criminal code includes at least 14 articles that effectively criminalizes routine journalistic work. Defamation against the president and vice president is still listed as a crime in the draft, as is slander against the government and the spread of misinformation. Journalists could face prison sentences of up to two years for publishing so-called “incomplete” articles.

“This will be the next dangerous regulation that could bring many journalists to prison,” Ningtyas wrote in a message to me about the potential criminal code revisions. Press freedom groups have urged the government to drop these controversial articles and consult with civil society during the revision process. 

But the Indonesian government has not been transparent while working on these potential revisions, civil society groups say. Even organizing peaceful protests now can lead to fines and prison sentences of up to six months.

If the government abuses these new regulations, “we will have no free space to express ourselves,” said Nenden Arum, the head of the freedom of expression division at the Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network (SAFEnet), a Bali-based digital rights group. “It will really affect our democracy.” 

Much of what is happening in Indonesia parallels broader trends in Southeast Asia. All ten member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including the likes of the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar and Singapore, sit in the bottom half of the 2022 World Press Freedom Index, according to Reporters Without Borders. 

“Governments around the world are increasingly flexing their muscles to assert their authority over social media platforms,” Freedom House analyst Kian Vesteinsson says. “MR5 is one of the pieces of legislation that really embodies this trend around the world.”

He told me that the language of MR5, in common with similar regulations, is intended to enable authorities to force tech platforms to remove broad categories of speech and give up data without needing court orders. “These laws often dangle access to a given country's market in exchange for compliance with these really problematic censorship provisions,” Vesteinsson says. 

In recent years, Indonesia has embarked on a campaign of “digital authoritarianism, marked by high repression using digital technology,” Ningtyas told me.

When I asked SAFEnet’s Arum whether she was hopeful about the future of freedom of expression in Indonesia, she laughed. The Indonesian public largely appears to oppose the government’s increasing control, she said, but “there is still a long way to go.” 

Caster from Article 19 believes the future is bleak. “If Indonesia insists on going down this path,” he told me, “it risks becoming one of the most restrictive internet governance regimes in the world.”

Working as both a journalist and press freedom advocate means AJI’s Ningtyas is more likely than most to face harassment, she said. As Indonesia’s new regulations are implemented, she worries about what the future holds for her in a country where the government is intent on using legislation to quash free expression and exert authoritarian control over the internet. 

“I work in the shadow of terror,” she said. But she doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. 

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The showrunners blamed technical issues, but Weibo users weren’t convinced, as China Digital Times recently reported. They suspected that the actual reason was “historical nihilism,” which broadly refers to any versions of Chinese history that conflict with the state’s more selective narrative. The show’s male protagonist, Liang Xiang, is based on the Manchu nobleman Liangbi, who led the effort to quash the 1911 Wuchang Uprising. That uprising eventually sparked the Xinhai Revolution, which led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty. 

That narrative was likely a problem for the government. To the Chinese Communist Party, the Xinhai Revolution is celebrated as having “ignited hope for a revitalized China.”

Last year, Chinese president Xi Jinping stressed the need for Chinese Communist Party members to know their tradition and history, to reprioritize their ideological education, in order to effectively carry forward the revolution. He spoke out against historical nihilism as dangerous, a theme he has expounded on since he came to power a decade ago.

Two months before the centenary celebrations in July last year, the Chinese authorities admitted to deleting more than two million posts on social media that a party spokesman described as having “polluted” the conversation. The offending posts, he said, were “disseminating historical nihilism.”

China must “dare to brandish the sword, dare to fight, and have the strength to refute historical nihilism and other wrong ideas and viewpoints,” wrote Zhuang Rongwen, the director of the all-powerful Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), in an April essay about strengthening the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) control of the internet. 

Chinese social media giants responded in swift succession. As China Digital Times reported, Douban, Douyin, Toutiao and Weibo all announced their own campaigns against “historical nihilism,” including encouraging users to report posts that conflicted with the CCP’s preferred narratives. 

This development underscores the CCP’s binary view of history as both a valuable resource and a threat, argues Katie Stallard, an editor at the New Statesman magazine and author of “Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea,” published in April. 

It just comes down to which version of history we’re dealing with — and who’s in control. 

“I see it as an attempt to codify the Communist Party’s version of history and to classify anything that challenges that version of history or the party’s interpretation of history as being nihilism,” Stallard said in a phone interview. “I see it as being a way to try and seal off their preferred version of history from challenge.”

One of the most important historical reference points for the CCP — and Xi himself — is the Century of Humiliation, according to Stallard. The Century of Humiliation refers to the period of intervention and subjugation of China by foreign powers from 1839 to 1949. 

The crucial endpoint of that story is the rise of the CCP and how they present themselves as rallying the people to fight back and defeat Japan at the end of World War II. “It’s critical to the story the Communist Party tells about itself and why it must be in power,” Stallard explains. “And so it needs to keep that under quite tight control. There are elements of truth in it, absolutely. But it’s a very selective version of history.”

Opposing the state’s version of history can have serious consequences. For instance, in May former journalist Luo Chanping was sentenced to seven months in prison for a social media post that questioned the wisdom of China’s military strategy during the Korean War and joked about soldiers who froze to death. 

But these consequences, as with the consequences to breaking many other rules in China, are enforced erratically. Jeremiah Jenne, a historian and writer based in Beijing, told me that in China “there are so many different ways to get in trouble. And most of the time, none of those ways will get you in trouble. Until that one time when they decide that you are in trouble.” 

The Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. did not respond to Coda Story’s request for comment on the concept of historical nihilism.

Stallard said the CCP believes a key component of national security is control over the ideological environment, and that includes history. “They formally classified [historical nihilism] as a tactic that China’s enemies are using to undermine the country and the Communist Party’s rule.” 

The CCP often points to the Soviet Union as a warning of what can happen if historical nihilism is not quashed. Xi has said that the threat of historical nihilism was an important lesson learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Xi fearing that Mao could be rejected in a similar way to Stalin and Lenin. 

To the CCP, controlling history is important for survival, says Angeli Datt, a China analyst at Freedom House. Document No. 9 — a high-level, internal CCP memo from 2013 — made the paranoid assertion that the “goal of historical nihilism, in the guise of ‘reassessing history,’ is to distort Party history and the history of New China.” 

But Datt thinks the CCP is blowing the significance of historical nihilism out of proportion. “These things aren’t going to topple the government. For a party with the size and the power of the CCP, to be afraid of that shows a level of deep insecurity,” she said. 

Jenne, the Beijing-based writer, agrees. “They talk a lot about cultural self-confidence, political self-confidence, but maybe a little bit of that is like the affirmation on the sticky note on the mirror in the morning, like, ‘We are the ruling party. The military works for us. All is well.’ But sometimes you don’t always believe your own affirmations,” he told me.

It’s difficult to determine what Chinese citizens genuinely believe about Chinese history, Stallard said. But to a certain extent, it doesn’t actually matter, since deference to the party narrative functions as a litmus test. 

“Xi is taking history very seriously,” Stallard said. “So you need to show that you do, too.” But whose history and whose narrative is a question Chinese people continue to ask, at the risk of being silenced.

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In Stallard’s new book, “Dancing on Bones: History and Power in China, Russia, and North Korea,” she analyzes how leaders in Russia, China and North Korea manipulate and distort historical narratives about war as a way to maintain and strengthen their hold on power. Stallard drew extensively on her experience reporting on the ground in all three countries.

In Russia, Putin “has elevated the memory of the Great Patriotic War to the status of a national religion,” Stallard writes. Meanwhile in China, President Xi Jinping has used World War II as a marker of the end of China’s so-called “century of humiliation.” And war narratives are especially important in North Korea, where Kim Il Sung is falsely presented as a war hero who freed the country from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and secured a victory over the United States in the Korean War eight years later.

This is history, Stallard points out, stained with a “veneer of patriotism.”

I recently spoke with Stallard on the phone. She is currently based in Washington, D.C. as senior editor for China and Global Affairs at the New Statesman. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

You set out to explore how autocrats exploit history to stay in power. How would you summarize your reporting? 

It’s about how effectively and often how cynically the leaders of these regimes have manipulated historical narratives to suit their own political purposes and to position themselves as patriotic defenders of their countries — and everyone who opposes them, therefore, as traitors. But really, first and foremost, they do this to shore up their own power and their own popular support.

I understand that the title of your book — “Dancing on Bones” — comes from a Russian activist. What does the phrase mean and why did it resonate with you?

The rough backstory is that there was this Russian activist who, with his friends, founded this grassroots movement — the Immortal Regiment — which was basically intended to be an alternative to what they felt was the very bombastic, militaristic, official commemorations of the Second World War. It was about marching quietly with photos of your relatives. But once it became very popular, and the authorities had taken it over, he gave this very exasperated interview, saying “Guys just stop, stop. Like, we all have relatives who died. It’s dancing on bones.” And to me that really spoke to the very cynical manipulation of what are devastating and personal memories and experiences.

As a means of maintaining power, how does the exploitation of these historical narratives compare to other methods? How critical is this particular method to maintain power in these three countries?

The way I think about it is that there are all of these different elements that work together very effectively, so it’s difficult to strip one out and consider it totally discretely. Timothy Frye has a quote in his book “Weak Strongman” on Putin about how it’s much easier to be a popular autocrat than an unpopular one, which for me captures it quite neatly. If you removed all references to history tomorrow, would those regimes stand? I think so. But in terms of building resilience and making the regime more secure and making it less brittle, less fragile, I think the more you can also embed and draw on these popular ideas and some of the population buys in — even if it’s not a majority — it makes the regime more secure, more resilient.

What the historical narratives have going for them is that they endure, particularly in times when there are economic problems, when the country is facing difficulties, when you’re asking people to accept a degree of hardship and sacrifice within their own lives. It’s very helpful and quite effective to be able to frame that in terms of these past struggles and external enemies that you can blame for your problems. So it’s difficult to separate them, and I think it’s important to see them as part of a toolkit or an arsenal.

It would probably be impossible to measure how much all of this costs, but it would be interesting to know the approximate price tag of the manipulation of history.

In the North Korean case, that was one of the things that struck me. There is a price tag, like with rebuilding the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang. It’s an absolutely extraordinary building in scale and ambition. The Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities is another example. Obviously we don’t know what the budget was because there’s no transparency, but in a country where there are people right now who are desperately in need of sufficient calories and where children are stunted and chronically malnourished, it is a choice to spend a conservative estimate of what must have been millions on these museums. That is a choice, when that money could go elsewhere. 

What role does state media play in these campaigns? 

Each has a slightly different tone. One of the things Russia has done more effectively than China is to make particularly state television channels very entertaining, very watchable. If you can suspend your disbelief at the content, they really have put a lot of effort into having these very provocative, very dramatic talk shows and making their messaging very appetizing. Often Chinese evening television news is very dry. It’s not something you would turn to for entertainment. But they have become much more proactive in recent years in using other mediums — particularly I’m thinking about some of the big budget films in recent years. 

In the book’s conclusion, you said you were writing its final words in January with Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s border. Russia then invaded Ukraine at the end of February. Not specifically about Russia, you wrote, “This warped version of history is the backdrop against which future wars will be fought.” What was it like for you to watch what has happened since?

It was really surreal. When Putin said that morning that it was a denazification operation, partly I felt like, “Of course,” like I should have understood that this was where this was heading. I just didn’t expect that he would go through with it. But with hindsight, of course that’s how he would frame this. I did feel like this was the ideas in the book come to life. This is the worst case scenario. I had spent a lot of time thinking about it in this abstract, theoretical sense, but to see it being used to take real people’s lives and destroy towns and cities in Ukraine is really sickening. 

What are the implications of these campaigns for people who don’t live in China, Russia or North Korea? 

I think we should all be very wary, and it’s made me very conscious of how leaders in other countries like here in the United States, and in the U.K. where I’m from — how people who have power or seek power or want to stay in power, turn to history. These historical narratives are effective because they resonate, so they can be very dangerous in the hands of people who are in power. There’s a live debate here in the United States about whether we should also focus on the darker aspects of the past or whether that’s an unpatriotic thing to do. We should problematize — to use a horribly scholarly term — as much as we can. 

That reminds me of a quote in your book about history functioning as a comfort blanket in Russia. 

Yeah, it feels really nice. It’s nice to believe you’re the hero of the story, that your country is the greatest in the world. But we should be aware that that’s also what all these other countries tell their citizens, that they’re the heroes of the story, that their countries are the force for good. I want to emphasize the unexceptional nature of the desire to do this. Leaders in all countries do draw on various versions of the past, so it’s not an exceptional impulse, but it’s been taken to extremes in these three countries. It is absolutely not only autocrats who are attracted to this idea, so we should all really be on our guard against it. 

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