The China Nexus: Thirty Years In and Around the Chinese Communist Party’s Tyranny
Benedict Rogers
Optimum Publishing, £18.99, 360 pages
Part memoir and part exposé, Benedict Rogers’ The China Nexus is a com- mendable addition to an already vast literature on the lamentable record of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The title refers to the regime being the “nexus” that unites the author, the persecuted peoples and dissidents – and eventually, it is hoped, the Chinese people – against its own tyranny. The author’s ultimate aim is to demonstrate that “being pro-China and pro-CCP are two entirely different things”.
The book opens with Rogers’ account of his final, forced deportation from Hong Kong in October 2017 and the creepy campaign of harassment that followed him around the globe. For example, ahead of a visit to Vancouver in late 2021 – now “ground zero” for the CCP in North America – he received an anonymous email saying, “See you at the Sheraton” and had to change hotels to protect his contacts. Such are the lengths to which the regime will go to intimidate “one activist in London”.
Jumping back in time to his first visit to China as an English teacher in 1992, the author recounts his gap-year in the coastal city of Qingdao. Despite having a relatively jovial time with friendly locals (under the gaze of some fairly unwatchful minders), he nonetheless witnessed signs of CCP oppression, such as a dinner conversation with party officials who “looked forward to being able to lower the standard of living of the Hong Kong people” and a bizarre Mao-mandated classroom exercise for children who had to sit in silence “slowly massaging their eyelids to music” to prevent them needing glasses.
Quoting Perry Link’s description of the CCP as an “anaconda in the chandelier” that observes all and occasionally drops on its prey, Rogers notes that his school had a “political education office” that would “criticise” students who “think wrongly” by dispatching them to the countryside for “physical labour”. Restrictions on Christianity are also ever-present, with one of the author’s friends remarking, “I would like to believe, but I am a member of the Communist Party Youth League, and so I am not allowed to,” and another noting that those within the state-sanctioned churches must register themselves so that the government can control them.
Rogers then relates his time in post-colonial Hong Kong from 1997 as an editor covering business and employment matters alongside his political journalism and human-rights activism. Among his greatest journalistic hits from this time are endorsing Cardinal Zen against the Beijing regime in a dispute over Chinese saints, and tracking the degeneration of formerly independent Chinese newspapers into self-censoring regime mouthpieces. From 2002, the action moves back to mainland China where Rogers charts the “shrinking space for lawyers, civil society, media, and dissent”, along with the abuses and arrests attendant on Xi Jinping’s crackdown on freedoms.
The author is particularly good on the persecution of Christianity. The chapter dedicated to this does a wonderful job of documenting the grim realities of life for the faithful under the regime, the cravenness of so many bishops and charities in the face of such pressure, and the grotesque plan to issue an official “CCP version of the Bible” at the centre of a perverse new “Chinese-style theology”. The beige bureaucratic language for officially sanctioned churches says it all: “The Three-Self Patriotic Movement”, the “Catholic Patriotic Organisation” and so on. All of this, amplified by powerful testimonies from Chinese Christians, reveals the lengths to which the regime will go to undermine the faith and, in doing so, gives a striking insight into how the CCP itself lives in fear of Christianity’s revolutionary potential.
The subsequent chapters on Tibet’s subjugation, the Uyghur genocide and Falun Gong persecutions are equally bleak as moving reminders of CCP tyranny. Those fleeing Tibet for India, for example, are shot at by Chinese soldiers, interned in China, die of cold and starvation in the mountains; those remaining behind have “no freedom… no human rights” and are used as leverage against their ex-patriot relatives. Similarly, the Uyghurs disappear to be “re-educated”, murdered, sterilised, interned and conscripted as slave labour, all while the regime gaslights and euphemises on the world stage. Followers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement are imprisoned for the nightmarish purpose of organ-harvesting.
The remaining substantive chapters focus on the CCP’s policies towards Hong Kong (intensifying repression), Taiwan (imperialistic aggression), Myanmar (shameless enabling), and North Korea (staunch sugar daddy). There is little that is new in these chapters to surprise avid China-watchers, but the first-hand testimonies give the familiar material a poignancy and weight that would otherwise be absent.
The book concludes with a prescriptive chapter on “what the free world must do to fight for freedom”. It opens with a recollection of the ridiculous spectacle of Xi’s state visit to London in 2015 and the hundreds of pro-regime activists bussed in by the Chinese embassy to line the streets, flag-wave and intimidate protestors. Rogers rightly lauds the growing anti-CCP movements in Washington and London while naming and shaming Canadian pusillanimity. Usefully and accessibly distilled from existing scholarship and policy papers, Rogers’ final “ten-point action plan” subdivides into “three thematic clusters”: (1) punitive accountability measures, (2) supporting dissidents and regime victims, and (3) defending liberal democracy and the international rules-based order.
Rogers’ moral instincts about the CCP are spot on, his observations about the deteriorating quality of life under Xi-era policies astute, and the urgency of his personal perspective encouraging at a time of stubborn complacency about this grave threat to world order. While the list of recommended works listed in the introduction – not least Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg’s Hidden Hand and Rush Doshi’s The Long Game – provide more rigorous treatments of this subject, one can only commend Rogers for assembling his truly impressive nexus of the who’s who of the anti-regime world and for steadfastly exposing the CCP’s mendacious depravity for over three decades.
Dr Patrick Nash is the author of British Islam and English Law (CUP, 2022)
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