Notes from ChinaFile

The new documentary feature film Mistress Dispeller probes the unraveling and redemption of a marriage at breathtakingly close range. Director Elizbeth Lo follows Teacher Wang, a professional “mistress dispeller,” as she counsels a middle-aged wife undone by her husband’s infidelity and unspools a covert plan to rid them of his lover. The film is currently playing at the IFC Center in New York through October 30. ChinaFile’s Susan Jakes spoke with Lo about how she made the film. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Susan Jakes: How did you come to make this film?

Elizabeth Lo: After making my first feature documentary, Stray, which was set in Turkey and  follows the perspective of stray dogs as they wander through Istanbul—that was such a revelatory experience for me to get to know a culture that was so different than my own—I knew that I wanted to set my second feature-length documentary in mainland China. As a Hong Kong citizen, mainland China is both foreign but also really close to my own heritage. I wanted to use the documentary as a way to explore this culture and country that’s so vast and so relevant to my own life. . . I had spent quite a lot of time in mainland China, but documentaries take you into a culture in a way that you can’t experience as just a normal, regular person without a camera.

I thought exploring love would be a really interesting way to get to know the country. And I had re-watched Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern, in which [a character played by] Gong Li marries as a fourth wife into a patriarch’s family, and has to navigate the pressures of that.

And I thought it would be really interesting to pose the question of what it is like to be a woman navigating society today, and transpose the spirit of that film to contemporary China. So I was researching mistresses in contemporary China, and that’s how I came across the mistress dispelling phenomenon.

How did you find out about it?

I was researching mistresses in China and I came across articles about mistress schools. . . But then by the time I had asked my producer, Maggie, to look into this, they had all been shut down. But when I asked her to look into mistress dispellers, those actually existed, and there were plenty of them. And I remember at first thinking, you know, this could only be a fiction film when I read about it in the news, because access would be so difficult for a subject matter that’s so enshrouded in shame and secrecy. But Maggie was able to find real mistress dispellers for us to meet in our scouting trip to China, and Teacher Wang [the film’s main character] was the only one who, on day one of the scouting shoot, was able to get us access to film a husband, a wife, and a mistress who are all part of the same case, at its tail end. I was so moved by even the husband’s perspective, because he was crying at this table with Wang, that it really changed the focus of my film. It became much more inclusive, and I wanted to make it about, sort of, how people deal with the pain of being in a marriage, and also figuring out the problems of when love fades or when desire fades. And so that was really the impetus for making the film: To compassionately look at all three angles of a love triangle.

So that couple was not the couple that appears in the film?

No. We ended up following Teacher Wang for three years, hoping the whole time to be able to capture and authentically document a case from beginning to end. We filmed with at least six other couples in those three years who are not in the film. Mr. and Mrs. Li [who appear in the film] came in the third year, and [their story] was filmed over the course of four months. It took us so long to finally get because it’s just really difficult. There were always pieces of the love triangle missing, or people would drop out midway through filming. And we would, of course, respect that decision.

My producer Emma Miller and I were very conscious of how to stay ethical when deception is such a big part of the mistress dispelling process. [Initially] the husband and the mistress couldn’t have known what Teacher Wang’s role was in their lives, and so they had agreed to be in a film just broadly about modern love in China, and that’s what they had agreed to participate in.

Let’s back up a bit. So you first got Teacher Wang to say that she would kind of broker your relationship with her clients?

Actually, to alleviate the burden on her, we initially tried to cast ourselves for potential clients that we could bring to her and say, “Hey, we got their permission to film with them. Can you now fix their problem?” But what we found when we did that was those strangers, you know, wives or mistresses who had no idea who Wang was or her capabilities, they didn’t have the trust that her real clients had for her, and trust and faith in her work is such a big part of her effectiveness. So it just didn’t work. So then we were like, okay, we need to only rely on Wang’s incoming organic pool of clients and see. Out of hundreds of cases, usually it would be a handful who would agree [to be filmed]. And of those handful, it would really depend on the character of those people and whether they could compel you to feel sympathetic to each of their plights.

I guess Mrs. Li knew what you were filming, or understood that you were filming about mistress dispelling?

Yes, but actually by that point, as a backup plan we had filmed so many different other love industries in China, because we weren’t totally sure if we could get access to make a film about an individual story.

What are some other love industries?

We filmed a lot of matchmaking companies. We filmed with dating coaches who help young men. And then we filmed with divorce lawyers, because we thought maybe this would be the end of the process. We also even filmed with BDSM rope play communities in Shanghai. We were looking for textures and tangents around love and desire that might be able to bolster our story. So those were all the different tangents we went on in the event that we would not be able to get as deep access as we hoped to build this Rashomon around a love triangle.

By the time we got to Mr. and Mrs. Li, we had actually filmed with [Mrs. Li’s] little brother who had been a male mistress two years prior to production, and we had filmed with him as he was getting dispelled by Teacher Wang himself. And so two years later, when his older sister comes to him with her problem, he says, I have a great solution for you. You know this film crew are lovely, and then Teacher Wang is also a magician who will make your problem go away. So with that pre-existing vouch of approval and relationship with us through a trusted relative, Mrs. Li was on board.

Why do you think she wanted to be filmed?

We asked her, and it actually appealed to her altruistic side. Teacher Wang said to her, you’re struggling so much in private, and so many women struggle in private with this domestic issue, but if you share your struggle publicly, you may be able to help other families navigate with this situation. You can see her temperament in the film. She’s a brave, strong woman who’s very kind at the end of the day. And that really appealed to her, and I think that’s why she participated.

How did you film Mr. Li (the cheating husband) and his mistress (Feifei) without their knowing what was happening?

We didn’t have contact with them at first, it was Teacher Wang’s business partner who also kind of works in psychology who approached them, separately, and asked whether they would be part of a production that was about love and China—that’s what they [initially] agreed to. And our interactions with the wife, the husband, and the mistress were intentionally kept to a minimum because Wang didn’t want [us] to inadvertently sort of spill the beans to them or reveal too much to them and disrupt her mistress dispelling. At the end of the process, once everybody completely understood what Wang did in their lives, we traveled back to China and showed a cut of the film to each of them separately to sort of get their blessing and offer them the opportunity to reconsent to being a part of the project.

How do you understand why Mr. Li and Feifei were willing to be in the film?

With Mr. Li, I think he felt compelled to because of his wife. He knew that his marriage was struggling. So I think partly to save his family, he felt being a part of this project that his wife wanted to be a part of would help.

But with Feifei, we asked her at the end why she had agreed to be in this, and why she had stuck with it even as the relationship was falling apart. And what she said was so striking to me. She said that she thought that the film was going to be a gift from the husband to her, a document of their love story in which she was the central character. And she kept staying because she wanted to know how their love story would end or continue. She wanted to know what would happen. So I think, on a very deep level—and we don’t know what was said to her off camera by her lover—she didn’t think that she would lose to the 55 year old wife, and so that’s partly why she kept staying and wanted to see it through, because she didn’t believe that the relationship would come to an end.

When we started talking you said you knew you wanted to film in China. Did you think of yourself as making or having made a film that is about China or Chinese society?

People always ask me, could mistress dispelling [work] in the West or, you know, internationally, this business itself? And I’m of two minds. I do think on one hand, infidelity is universal. It’s a human condition. But I do think there is something culturally specific to mistress dispelling and why it thrives in Asia. I think that has to do with this difference between a culture which prioritizes the collective over the individual, the greater good of the family and keeping the family, preserving the family unit, versus in the West, a more individualistic culture where pursuit of your own personal happiness is paramount.

And that’s why mistress dispelling works, because in the West, I think if you found out your spouse was cheating on you, divorce would be almost the first resort. Actually a divorce lawyer said to me, “this plays like science fiction. I cannot believe that these scenes are taking place.” And also, a lot of men in the West will ask me, “why did the husband choose to stay? I don’t understand.” Whereas in Asia, it was never a question in the husband’s mind that he would leave his wife, because even if having a mistress is more socially acceptable, leaving your wife would make you human scum.

And yet divorce rates in China have risen dramatically in recent decades.

I think mistress dispelling is sort of a symptom and a response to enduring patriarchy. But also it’s a way that women, contradictorily, are empowering themselves to reassert fidelity within their own homes and reassert control in their families and demand fidelity. And I also think the way that at least Teacher Wang goes about solving a case and approaches conflict resolution does feel Asian to me in that it’s not directly confrontational, it’s very indirect, and it it’s trying to seek a harmony where everything is sort of simmering under the surface, but you’re allowing every person in the conflict to emerge unscathed.

Maybe one could say that it’s China, how innovation and the entrepreneurial nature of this industry collide with pragmatism and preservation of family in a way that allows the mistress dispelling phenomenon to thrive there. But I think as ethically murky and dubious as this profession can be, that there is something redeeming and beautiful about resolving a conflict in this way, in which nobody’s screaming. The cost is that there’s no accountability and no confrontation ever. But I do think there’s something really beautiful about an alternate mode of conflict resolution. I don’t know if that’s specific to China. The reason why I was drawn to this subject matter was not because it represented China, necessarily, but that I knew as a Hong Kong citizen to go and make a film in China in this day and age where there’s so much anti-Chinese sentiment in the West that I wanted to pursue subject matter that wasn’t going to further alienate China from Western audiences.

And so few documentaries that have gotten exposure in the West have explored just middle-class, ordinary people’s domestic lives in contemporary China. A love story involves universal emotions, and that was part of why I was drawn to this subject matter, as a person who is very conscious of what stories we tell that come out of China, that are consumed in the West, and what that does to the psyche in the West about China. So to me, the story of love and betrayal—even though there’s a strange profession that is handling it in a slightly different way than it would be handled in the West at the heart of it—these people, what they’re going through, it’s super universal. And that’s what drew me.

China’s appetite for critical minerals, fossil fuel, timber, and other commodities is the subject of countless news articles and has created anxiety in capital cities around the world. The dominant narrative is one of concern over Beijing’s dominance of global supply chains. Yet while the country clearly exhibits strengths as a commodity superpower, it also suffers from important vulnerabilities. A new book by political economist Pascale Massot, China’s Vulnerability Paradox: How the World’s Largest Consumer Transformed Global Commodity Markets, examines this paradox, and is the subject of this Q&A by author Paul French.

Paul French: Pascale, can you explain for us succinctly China’s “vulnerability paradox” when it comes to commodities?

Pascale Massot: China’s “vulnerability paradox” refers to the tension between China’s market size and its (actual or perceived) market power. As I was conducting interviews for the book with industry and government insiders in China, it struck me that the perception of China’s power in the West was not necessarily shared by commodity market participants in China. This is one of the puzzles I seek to elucidate in the book.

This “vulnerability paradox,” or how a country can be the largest player in a market and yet feel vulnerable, is, I suggest, the result of a few interrelated dynamics. One of them is the fact that China remains heavily import-dependent for most raw metals and minerals (rare earths and a few other critical minerals are the exception). China’s current dominance of global supply chains is in the refining and processing segments.

There is another way in which China has experienced vulnerability vis-à-vis global commodity markets over the past decades, which I label “market vulnerability,” referring to the market power differentials between domestic and global market stakeholders. Given China’s industrial and development history, the political economy of certain domestic Chinese markets is particularly fragmented—here iron ore comes to mind. China is home to thousands of iron ore mining and steel firms and has consistently missed its own consolidation targets. At the turn of the century, the top four Chinese steel producers were responsible for around 30 percent of domestic production, compared to over 70 percent for the top three Japanese steel makers, and over 500 Chinese firms were importing iron ore. In 2020, the top four Chinese steel producers were responsible for less than a quarter of domestic production, whereas the top two Japanese firms were responsible for over 80 percent of domestic production. High fragmentation has led to domestic difficulties in China, for sure, but here what interests me is the negative impact on China’s capacity to coordinate its procurement behavior internationally. To put it plainly, it is more difficult to coordinate import strategies among a handful of large importers, like Japan did for decades, than it is to do so among hundreds of firms, going from medium-size to larger importers, as was the case for China. In fact, I was able to document in my book the extent to which Chinese iron ore importers ignored or actively skirted coordination attempts by the central government in the late 2000s. Adding to this fragmentation was the fact that the global iron ore exporters are very concentrated (four companies are responsible for 70 percent of global iron ore exports). So you have a combination of China’s domestic market fragmentation and the concentrated nature of the global iron ore producers, and this resulted in a position of market vulnerability that was particularly sharp for China in this case.

I don’t want to suggest that China is experiencing only vulnerabilities in regard to global commodities. In fact, China is in a position of strength when it comes to the production of some commodities such as rare earths or graphite, and quite dominant in the refining and processing of a number of others as well. Rather, I want to help us understand where the current situation comes from. First, China’s current position of dominance in the global value chains for many critical minerals is uneven, both across commodities and across the various supply chains. By this I mean that China’s dominance or vulnerability modulates (goes up or down) along the supply chain. It can be vulnerable to imports of raw commodities, then dominate the refining and processing segments, then dominate some of the product creation/research/innovation space but be dependent on the West in some areas. Then it may dominate the manufacturing space, but be vulnerable to export acceptability at the very end of the supply chain, as it faces pushback from a growing number of countries internationally. These patterns are not the same for every metal and mineral. Rare earths, germanium, or copper supply chains shake out differently. Second, China’s overall approach to commodities procurement is directly linked to its experience of import vulnerabilities over the past decades. We have to remember that China’s deep concerns about import dependence for food, energy, and resources go back to the Mao era and even prior to that. This has led to a more assertive set of commodity procurement policies over the years. In the West, the dominant paradigm until recently was a market-led one. Only since the pandemic have we seen a resurgence of economic security narratives regarding China’s dominance of critical minerals supply chains.

You also talk about a second paradox—that China’s rise in consumption (using the example of iron ore) was “too fast for its own good.” Usually, the story of rapid growth in China is presented as a good one, beneficial for the country, so why was this growth problematic?

China’s rise was in some ways too fast for its own good. There were growing pains that resulted from the speed and amplitude of China’s growth over the past decades. At the turn of the 21st century, global commodity supply was squeezed by China’s rapid consumption rise. The scale and speed of China’s growth in resource consumption was nothing the world had ever seen, and it took many seasoned market participants by surprise. This led, in part, to the commodities supercycle of 2007-2008, in which prices rose rapidly in the leadoff to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Commodity prices have continued to experience a high level of volatility in subsequent years, most recently illustrated by the spike in lithium carbonate prices which rose above $70,000 in 2022 and dipped below $10,000 in early 2025.

The first decade of the century presented unique difficulties for China. There can be certain advantages to relative technological “backwardness” for developing countries that allow for leaping over technological stages. However, this was not the case for the commodities that China needed, especially for legacy metals and minerals. First, the best international mining deposits, with the highest grades and easier logistical access, had already been discovered and were owned by large mining conglomerates by the time of China’s emergence. This pushed China into developing deposits that were not economically efficient, often in politically unstable countries. Many Chinese-backed projects floundered over the past decades, for a variety of reasons. One example is the Simandou iron ore project in Guinea, which China became involved in in 2010. It encountered decades of setbacks and has yet to ship a single ton of iron ore.

Aside from the difficulty of securing mining resources, at the turn of the century China faced commodity markets that were firmly embedded in Western institutional systems, including the U.S. dollar, and price-setting mechanisms and commodity exchanges that were located in the West, such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange or the London Metals Exchange (which Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing acquired in 2012). Chinese commodity market stakeholders entered an arena that was already occupied by mining giants, and dominated by Western market institutions.

During the course of the interviews I conducted for the book, these issues came back often enough that I had to stop and reflect about them. I think this taps into a reality that is shared broadly across developing countries. The extractive resource industry operates under extraordinary levels of industry concentration, and a difficult history of exploitation by Western powers, which we have to consider carefully as we think about China’s evolving role in global commodity markets—and how the West should respond.

China’s growth was in large part predicated on its ability to acquire vast amounts of commodities (inputs) to drive manufacturing, infrastructure development, and energy production. Yet to achieve this China had to deal with a relatively small number of global mining giants. This had led to some tricky, and sometimes adversarial, negotiations over the years, not always to China’s benefit. How well do you think Beijing has handled this situation?

It has varied. In the book, I devote a chapter to the iron ore market, and I do this in three parts. First, I do a deep dive into the 2010 fall of the iron ore benchmark pricing system, which consisted of annual, closed-door negotiations between iron ore importers and global producers for a price that remained valid for the global market that year. Then I study some of the parallel developments in the iron ore shipping sector. I also conduct a historical comparison with Japan’s emergence as the number one consumer of iron ore 50 years earlier.

When China replaced Japan as the lead benchmark pricing negotiator in 2006, only three years after becoming the world’s number one consumer of iron ore, it took a hard stance against the “Big Three” global iron ore producers (Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, and Vale) in the annual benchmark negotiations, and tried to negotiate markdowns. In 2009, while the negotiations were ongoing, the China Iron and Steel Association (CISA) demanded that its members (and iron ore import license holders) refrain from buying on the global iron ore market. However, CISA’s strategy backfired. A multitude of small- and medium-sized Chinese firms ignored the request and purchased iron ore on the global market through individual “spot” contracts, delivered to China by BHP Billiton, quickly followed by Vale and then Rio Tinto.

Only three years after China had become the world’s top iron ore consumer, the behavior of its iron ore importers disrupted a decades-old, stable pricing system that had been established by Japanese buyers. The iron ore benchmark pricing system was China’s to lose. The Chinese position of market vulnerability and its lack of coordination of procurement behavior, combined with the decisions of key global iron ore producers, led to this outcome. The fall of the iron ore benchmark is a fascinating case, because the outcome is the opposite of what the most powerful Chinese stakeholders wanted.

Diagnosing this exact lacuna—the lack of domestic coordination—in 2022 the Chinese government announced the creation of the China Mineral Resources Group, a $3 billion procurement giant whose mission explicitly includes the coordination of the various Chinese iron ore market stakeholders at the interface with global markets. China’s experience in the iron ore market may have informed its policy decisions in the rare earths space, including the consolidation of the industry and the creation of the China Rare Earth Group in 2021.

One lesson is that we cannot assume that China’s largest impacts internationally would be the result of a position of strength, whereas a position of weakness would lead China to be a “rule-taker” or to seamlessly integrate into international markets. The relationship between Chinese domestic dynamics and institutional change at the global level is more complex. Given China’s size, vulnerability and strength can both create a large global impact.

You give a good history of the development of benchmark pricing in commodities, using Japan’s economic emergence as an example. How has China’s supremacy in the market as a customer changed international pricing in sectors like iron ore, uranium, potash, etc. in the last few decades?

As a comparativist, I pay attention to variation across cases. I coin a phrase in the book to describe this variation: China is a heterogenous power. I think it is important to understand why there is concurrent variation in Chinese behavior and impacts at the international level. This is more intuitively recognized across different issue areas (say climate policy vs. defense policy), but it also happens within the same issue-area, in this case commodities procurement.

As I touched on earlier, Chinese market stakeholders’ fragmented behavior in the iron ore market led to the fall of a decades-old pricing regime. This was the very regime that Japanese iron ore importers had spearheaded decades earlier. At the time, Japanese iron ore importers acted as part of a coordinated purchasing group, while Japanese financiers invested upstream in the mining industry to guarantee adequate supply. Chinese importers were not able to maintain this regime in the iron ore case, even though this was very much the wish of the leading Chinese state-owned enterprises and CISA.

In the potash market, however, the benchmark system survives to this day. China is the lead benchmark price negotiator, despite the fact that the global potash market had many similarities with the global iron ore market when China emerged as the number one consumer. This derives from a more evenly balanced position of market power between Chinese domestic and global potash market stakeholders. It turns out that Chinese potash importers are much more concentrated and better coordinated than their iron ore counterparts. Indeed, two key state-owned entities control close to half of all imports and negotiate their import strategy carefully as part of a leading group. This has led to more stability in the international potash pricing regime.

If the Chinese importers continue, with the support of the government, to coordinate their behavior and extract rents from other Chinese fertilizer market players, such as distributors and fertilizer manufacturers, the benchmarking system could survive a while longer. If they fail, we could see the fall of the relevance of benchmark negotiations as price signals, and the rise of the dominance of spot pricing.

Interestingly, Brazil’s rise as a significant consumer of potash (it now is responsible for over 20 percent of global potash imports) and the fragmentation of its domestic industry have weakened the benchmark system and the influence of Chinese importers. Just as in the iron ore market, the gradual dissolution of the potash benchmark pricing regime is the result of the emergence of a fragmented consumer, facing oligopolistic global producers, and occurring despite contrary preferences from the largest Chinese importers.

Arguably, we are now seeing China’s economy slowing—manufacturing as well as infrastructure/property development and perhaps power consumption. How will this affect China’s commodity hunger and how does that affect its “vulnerability paradoxes”?

I’m not in the business of predicting Chinese commodities consumption trends, but I would just say that while some legacy commodities such as iron ore and coal are unlikely to see as big a rise in demand as the one we have seen at the turn of the 21st century, absolute levels of consumption will remain very high. Just to give a sense of the scale here, China has gone from importing around 1 percent of global iron ore exports in the 1970s to importing over 65 percent of global iron ore exports in the 2020s. The end products driving domestic demand for steel are shifting in China, and as a result it has sought to find overseas sources of demand to compensate. This means that China remains the number one steel producer with over 50 percent of global production even despite decreasing domestic consumption, and will remain the dominant global actor for the foreseeable future. China’s share of copper ores and concentrates (a more processed form of copper, ready for smelting) imports is also at 65 percent currently.

Of course, in terms of commodities needed for the green transition and growing need for energy given the expansion of AI, worldwide demand is projected to grow rapidly. Here, China’s share of global consumption is not only dependent on China’s domestic needs, but also on the world’s continued reliance on China for refined commodities and manufactured products, which has opened new vulnerabilities.

It may be that the Chinese government, understandably, makes decisions based on a predominantly domestic reading of the economy. However, many stakeholders central to China’s continued economic development sit outside of China’s borders now, whether China likes it or not. At the same time, the “open markets” assumptions that had underpinned global economic exchange over the past decades are being profoundly disrupted. China now needs to address concerns about the impact of its exports on the job markets of countries far away from its borders, as part of its domestic economic policymaking. This is a tough spot for China, as Xi Jinping had specifically decided to solve some of China’s domestic economic issues (post-COVID economic recovery, real estate market restructuring, self-reliance agenda) via a huge ramp-up in manufacturing exports.

Every economy that has a relationship with the global economy has vulnerabilities. What we are seeing right now is the evolution of China’s—and other countries’—vulnerabilities over time. A more granular understanding of both could help better guide an economic resilience agenda, in an age of continued global interactions.

Where is all this going? A slowing China maybe, a changing international trade regime perhaps, a move away from non-renewables hopefully? What do you think the future holds, and where does that leave China in terms of vulnerability?

We have entered a different era in the relationship between China and the global economy. The reform and opening-up era, where the ramping up of China’s economic interdependence with the rest of the world was seen as a net positive, especially in the West, ended sometime in the 2010s. A few years of escalating tensions with the U.S., starting in 2017 and continuing under President Joe Biden, until the return of President Donald Trump in 2025, saw the Chinese leadership react with what was seen by many as relative measure, at least in the economic sector. The rare earths export control measures announced by China in April 2025, and the subsequent panic that ensued around the world, signaled a change in the leadership’s willingness to use critical minerals and associated technologies as tools of economic leverage. There remains high uncertainty regarding how the U.S.-China relationship may evolve over the next few years. One of the many unfortunate impacts of escalating distrust and strategic tensions across the Pacific is that this may lead to entrenched positions and hubris, lowering the likelihood of needed structural readjustments. We have not arrived at a place where a new “grand bargain” that would recalibrate China’s economic relationship with the rest of the world can be found—yet it is needed.

At the same time, China’s economy is so large and so globally entwined that domestic Chinese dynamics have, as a result, an impact on global markets, whether China intends them to do so or not. This is not only true for commodities, including critical minerals, but also for a range of advanced manufactured products, technologies, and, more broadly, domestic economic policy decisions, investment, standards, and even meta narratives.

This for me demonstrates the importance of studying the impact of China on global markets from the perspective of deep resonance dynamics. The resurgence of discussion about economic security and self-reliance around the world comes from the perceptions of each other’s actions, like a traditional security dilemma, but it also stems from profound domestic realities—fractures and failures in both sides’ domestic systems of political economy, which are, incidentally, not entirely unrelated to each other.

Another lesson I draw from this book is the importance of unintended consequences and second-order effects. The impacts of China’s rise on the economies of other countries vary only in part according to the preferences of the Chinese Communist Party, state, and private actors. In the case of resource security and supply chain resilience, there are many interacting effects and powerful drivers at play. This means, on the one hand, that we cannot underestimate the structural forces that have taken us to where we are today. In the case of critical minerals today, it also means that given the complex nature of global supply chains, their excessive securitization and weaponization would be detrimental to global resilience and supply security. In other words, while recalibration is clearly needed, we should, on the one hand, encourage the development of realistic and specific critical mineral supply chain resilience goals and, on the other, realize that these should be balanced with investments in bolstering trust, the elaboration of credible reassurances, and a commitment to stability, transparency, and continued open access for most metals and minerals.

For several generations now, the overriding philosophy of life for many Chinese intellectuals and average citizens has been “mingzhe baoshen,” (明哲保身) which dictionaries define as “a wise man looks after his own hide” or “put one’s own safety before matters of principle” but can be also be rendered more colloquially as “keep your head down, mouth shut, and stay out of trouble.” After decades of political movements that have targeted intellectuals and citizens for speaking out, alternately resulting in criticisms, attacks, imprisonment, re-education, and other forms of persecution, most Chinese people have learned that there is no benefit to protesting, or speaking “truth to power.”

Shirley Xinyi Cai is a researcher in comparative politics and political theory, pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science at McGill University. One of her ongoing projects is about the caili (彩礼, i.e. bride price or betrothal gift), a deep-rooted marriage custom that calls on the family of the groom-to-be to pay a sum of money to the bride’s family.

The scholar and journalist Kejia Wu is the author of A Modern History of China’s Art Market, a fascinating book that examines the relationship between the Chinese government’s push for cultural “soft power” and its desire for control. In the book, Wu looks at the rise of contemporary art and a market for it after the end of the Cultural Revolution; the oddity of China’s parallel art systems: one highly ideological, censored, and state-organized market, and the other market-oriented; and five Chinese artists from different generations whom she profiles.

Jeremy Goldkorn spoke to Kejia Wu in 2023 about her book, and then edited and updated this Q&A with her by email in 2024.

Jeremy Goldkorn: Your book looks at the market for Chinese art going back to the Cultural Revolution. But I first want to talk about the 1990s and the 2000s, when you and I were both in Beijing, and I was tangentially involved in the art scene.

It’s not just that we were there, it was also the period when China’s art market went from basically nonexistent in the ’90s to taking up 30 percent of the global art and antiquities market by 2011, surpassing the U.S. and becoming number one in the world.

How did you land in the middle of the art scene?

Kejia Wu: I went to college in Beijing at Renmin University from ’94 to ’98. My major was real estate management.

Great timing! Just before the real estate industry boomed! But not the usual entry into the art world.

Yes. No.

After graduation, I joined COSCO Real Estate Development Company. And the project I got involved in was on land owned by one of the largest textile factories in Beijing, just near the East Fourth Ring Road. With the government restructuring state-owned enterprises, and the downfall of the textile industry, the factory had to sell the land and move production somewhere else.

And just for context, COSCO is China Ocean Shipping Company, right, and this was the real estate division they launched in the 1990s?

Yes. And I was on the project development team for the takeover of the textile factory site. The factory had been one of the largest state-owned enterprises in Beijing, which contributed a lot of employment to the city. We were thinking, what can we give back to the community?

Valery Hache—AFP/Getty Images

A gallery at the 789 Art Zone in Beijing, August 9, 2008.

At the time, there was news about a “loft culture” in New York and London, where large warehouses and industrial spaces with high ceilings and big windows were being converted to contemporary art spaces. I was on a development team working together with a marketing team and we felt like we could do something similar for Beijing. As the residential real estate project was being developed, we decided to keep the textile factory building and turn it into a contemporary art center, and offer free space for painters and dancers to do contemporary projects for free. That was before the 798 project—the idea was still new in Beijing.

There were many artists, including dancers, performing artists, and painters, who were desperate to find a place that was more modern and contemporary for them to exhibit or showcase their performances. And there was nowhere else like that space, a large-scale industrial space with high ceilings.

But since there was nobody at the company who was interested in such an endeavor, the general manager at the real estate company asked me to run it as a contemporary art center. So at the end of the ’90s, and early 2000s, I got the chance to oversee 50,000 square feet of space, and work together with architects and artists and dancers to put together programs for the space. That was the East Modern Art Center (远洋艺术中心).

One of the opening shows was Dancing with Farmworkers, in which I worked together with Song Dong, Yin Xiuzhen, Wen Hui, and Wu Wenguang. They invited migrant construction workers to do an improvised dance performance. The final performance was quite a huge deal in Beijing because of word of mouth. There was not much of an Internet or social media presence back then, but tons of people came.

Yeah, I remember that. What year was it?

The final performance was in August 2001. And there were a few weeks of improvised rehearsals which you may have visited. There was no script. Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen and Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang just worked and danced with construction workers on a daily basis, purely based on improvised movement.

That’s such an interesting way to get into the art world—via real estate! Such a story of China’s reform and opening era!

Yes.

And at that time, there was no censorship or review process. The whole idea of the dance with the construction workers came up in a brainstorm over the summer. I was sitting on the roof of the Drum Tower [a tower in central Beijing built in 1272] with Song Dong, Yin Xiuzhen, Wen Hui, and Wu Wenguang, just chatting, drinking beer, and eating peanuts. And they’re like, “Why don’t we do something together with construction workers, because they contributed a lot to the urban development of the city but were always the marginalized community and through this collaboration with dancers, they will be put at the center stage.”

Beijing was full of such opportunities.

We didn’t try to plan far in advance. It was all based on this feeling: “Oh, why don’t we do this, this will be exciting.” We just made a decision, we decided to do it then and there. We didn’t have to go through any cultural bureau for a censorship review, or write a memo to get their approval. At that time, you could just think about an idea, you start to do it, and a lot of people come to see the rehearsal. Maybe because of that, the word of mouth got out really quickly, and lots of people came for the final performance.

What did you do next?

There were no alternative spaces like that, so the East Modern Art Center got famous very quickly, and many artists and dancers came to apply for the opportunity to do a show or performance for free.

But then from the management point of view, the brand-building purpose was achieved, and they wanted to focus on growing the business and generate more profit. And I think it was too edgy, too avant-garde, and the concept of having something like 798 that would last for decades, that didn’t really occur to them. They felt that the mission was accomplished within a short period of time and decided to demolish the art center and build residential buildings on the land [in 2003].

So I left. For a time, I ran the communications department for Dow Jones. Then I joined a British firm called Brunswick, which had an art advisory practice. I was advising foreign institutions like the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum on their China programs. Then I got my business degree at Yale, and then I joined Sotheby’s, the auction house in New York City, and subsequently taught at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in NYC and Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles.

And based on all those experiences and quite a bit of research, I wrote the book. But I think everything that got me interested in this topic can be traced back to the end of the 1990s and early 2000s. Because that experience at that time cannot really be replicated, anywhere in the world.

Such an exciting time. And as you said or hinted, if you operated outside of the official cultural system, or in my own experience the publishing and Internet systems, you didn’t really have any censorship. It was the age of not asking for permission but saying sorry later if you got into trouble.

That started to change quickly, as the government started to figure out that people were doing cultural things beyond their control, but also, as your book documents, that there was money to be made.

So can you explain how art systems developed? Your book describes the evolution of two separate, parallel art systems: the private market system and the state system. What does that look like now?

The state system has a structure where the leadership on content is by the Ministry of Propaganda and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. They basically will review and make sure the message is right. It must be in line with “Cultural Construction” (社会主义文化建设) and “the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation,” and everything defined clearly as “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture” [introduced in October 2023]. The whole trend started when Xi became Party General Secretary in 2012.

So pretty much that means under the leadership of Xi Jinping, there is the Party, the Propaganda Department, and the administrative infrastructure, including the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the universities, like the Central Academy of Fine Arts [CAFA], and then the Chinese Artists Association. Everyone in these organizations has to abide by guidelines instructed by Xi Jinping to “tell China’s story well.”

How does it function as a market? If you do the officially approved type of art, how do you get paid?

The state has funding to support artists to do those officially-approved creative projects. For example, in 2021, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] History Museum was officially launched in Beijing. At the time, the government allocated funds to the top academies, including the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. They selected “reliable” faculty members and commissioned them to create art works to be displayed in the CCP History Museum as educational tools.

There’s a China National Arts Fund. It’s a grant-making fund which has been funding a variety of projects. If you look at the list of the projects [such as those] discussed in my book, you see they are pretty much restricted to works which promote traditional Chinese culture, or that tell attractive, good China stories, or endorse “the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation.” Artists who need to get paid and want to advance their career in the state system are willing to compete for those opportunities.

Mark Ralston—AFP/Getty Images

A statue depicting the former Chinese leader Mao Zedong stands at the 798 Art Zone, as the country prepares for leadership change, in Beijing, February 29, 2012.

(China Photos/Getty Images)

Visitors sit in front of a sculpture titled “Arresting Sex Worker” during the 2007 Beijing 798 Art Festival, at 798 Art Zone in Beijing, May 5, 2007.

What about the market system that used to be almost completely separate? How did the private art market develop and what does it look like now?

In the late 1990s to mid-2000s, artists like Zhang Xiaogang, whom you mentioned before we started recording, that kind of artist became popular with foreign collectors. At that time, the Chinese contemporary market was starting to do very well, driven by new demand from international collectors, people like Guy Ullens and Uli Sigg. Very soon, Chinese artists like Zhang Xiaogang were represented by blue chip Western galleries like Pace.

Artists like that are often not part of the official state system. They make their living by having shows through their galleries, and galleries often bring the artists’ work to art fairs. The galleries help generate sales for them. Artists can survive outside of the state system by being represented by commercial galleries.

However, now the authorities review all their exhibitions (unless the Chinese artist creates their work outside of the country and it is exhibited overseas), including gallery shows, domestic public and private museum shows, and any artworks sent abroad. If these artists have shows in New York, all their paintings will have to be reviewed. And the review process can take three months, but it’s very hard to predict, it can take longer.

How strict is it now? When I was writing about art in the late 1990s, I remember the Post-Sense Sensibility exhibition that had works with human body parts. Crazy stuff with dead babies and animals. And there were plenty of artists who totally lacked the “positive energy” the government asks of its artists today: Fang Lijun, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhu Wei, and everyone in the Life exhibition.

I can’t imagine anything like that would pass muster today. How much stricter has it got?

There are no clear official guidelines of art exhibitions that say, oh, you can’t show this or that. But you can discern some basic rules over the years from seeing what was actually regulated.

When you and I were in Beijing art circles in the late ’90s, the criteria were quite simple. Nothing pornographic, nothing clearly anti-socialism, but everything else was pretty much okay.

Mike Clarke—AFP/Getty Images

Workers prepare giant woodblock-print hanging scrolls by artist Fang Lijun to be auctioned by Sotheby’s, in Hong Kong, April 5, 2008.

Liu Jin—AFP/Getty Images

Artist Xin Ba presents a performance art piece calling for the release from house arrest of blind human rights activist Chen Guangcheng, at the 798 Art Zone in Beijing, January 9, 2012.

But it’s been getting stricter and stricter, especially in recent years. In 2016, the Ministry of Culture issued a regulation with 11 clauses [about] visual artworks forbidden from exhibiting/exporting. Let me quote them, from chapter six of my book:

1. Opposing the basic principles established by the Constitution
2. Endangering national unity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity
3. Leaking state secrets, endangering national security, or harming national honor and interests
4. Inciting ethnic hatred, ethnic discrimination, undermining national unity, or harming ethnic customs and habits
5. Undermining national religious policies, promoting cults and superstition
6. Promoting terrorist activities, spreading rumors, disturbing social order, undermining social stability
7. Promoting obscenity, pornography, gambling, violence, or abetting crime
8. Insulting or slandering others, infringing on the legitimate rights and interests of others
9. Contrary to social morality or national cultural traditions
10. Deliberately falsifying history, serious distortions of history
11. Any other content that is prohibited by laws, regulations, and state regulations

Look at this list, it’s very ambiguous. For example, nudity in the past was tolerated, but now is a taboo subject. Anything related to nudity will be taken out, although it is still at the discretion of the local Culture Bureau officials and in very rare cases may still be shown.

(Voishmel/AFP/Getty Images)

Visitors pass by statues in a gallery in the 798 Art Zone, May 25, 2008.

For example, Taikang [Space] art museum, which is owned by Chen Dongsheng who founded China Guardian Auctions. They just opened their private museum in Beijing last year. There was at least six months of review process for the opening show. First they had put what they intended to include in the exhibition on a list, and sent it to the Cultural Bureau for at least three rounds of reviews. After that, they put the approved paintings on the wall, and then officials from the local Cultural Bureau will show up in person for the last time before the show can open to the public.

What happened to Chen Dongsheng’s Taikang Art Museum? [He is supposed to be] a “safer” entrepreneur because his wife is the granddaughter of Chairman Mao, right? You would think that after all the paperwork, this private museum should be okay. But what I heard was, on the VIP preview day before the exhibition opened to the public, the cultural bureau officials showed up in person. And they were pointing at a number of paintings, including a Zeng Fanzhi painting, which, despite the fact it had the paperwork review, had to be taken down because of nudity, and a Zhang Xiaogang painting had to be taken down because the government officials felt the ambiance of the painting was negative, it didn’t tell a good China story. There is just so much ambiguity, the decision was completely up to the government officials who were standing in the gallery space, making the decision right there.

All of Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings are negative! That’s kind of the whole point, that you don’t know what’s going on in the paintings, and it’s never 100 percent good, right?

For example, he had his show last year in spring at the Long Museum in Shanghai, which was a recap of his experience during the pandemic because he was in lockdown, including being put into a fangcang hospital [temporary hospitals designed to be set up quickly in existing spaces to isolate COVID-19 patients] multiple times. During the pandemic, he was in pretty tough lockdowns for a total of more than 40 days. He wrote a quarantine diary and described those experiences in his paintings.

Six months after the show, his catalogue was still being reviewed. He said words like “pandemic” and “quarantine” and “death”; all these words had to be removed from the catalogue. The catalogue went through multiple publishers—some of them decided to give up because the review process was so long. The catalogue finally came out at the end of 2023 but none of the catalogue essays included words like “pandemic,” “quarantine,” and “death.”

It sounds like there’s not going to be a meaningful difference between the private and state systems, with this level of scrutiny and censorship?

There are a number of examples that can help us to see where things are going. There are certain artists, for example, Qiu Zhijie: he was quite edgy, avant-garde. He did calligraphy on his body and those early works were included in numerous international museum collections. But now he’s the President of Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, one of the state-run art academies in China. He’s an example of an experimental contemporary artist who sees the benefit of being in the state system, and he would like to advance his career within the system. Maybe from his perspective, he has a desire to elevate his social impact. And being in China with funding from the government, he can do a lot of things, which might be hard to do overseas, even though he’s very famous among international museum curators.

There are artists who are like Liu Xiaodong, whose paintings have become much less critical. He even went to the National People’s Congress [NPC] as a representative. And then he would share his experiences at the NPC in lectures at CAFA. The state system has grown so powerful, if you become a director or deputy director at a university or at CAFA, you have so many international exchange opportunities, and government funding. For ambitious artists, that could be very attractive.

CAFA recently chose a new president, Lin Mao, born in the mid-70s, one of the youngest ever appointed. Initially, a group of old professors at CAFA jointly wrote a collective open letter to the Ministry of Education to say “please reconsider, we need somebody who has better credentials because CAFA has a long history of choosing well-established, renowned artists as its president, including Xu Beihong, Wu Zuoren, etc.” The Ministry of Education wrote back to those professors who complained and said Lin Mao is very loyal to the CCP, we believe he’s committed and he’s a good choice. And I heard those professors who wrote the letter were investigated. So very soon, everyone became pretty obedient to this decision. The dean of CAFA’s architecture school, who was one of the professors who wrote and signed the letter of complaint, joined the new President Lin Mao to meet the celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas—he went to Beijing to meet with the faculty and talk about collaboration. That kind of social status is really attractive for a lot of people. [Koolhaas’ firm designed the iconic CCTV building.]

On the other hand, artists who don’t want to be part of the system will stick to collaboration with their galleries or independent art institutions (including international museums). And hopefully, those galleries, particularly Western galleries, can help them generate more sales overseas or create exhibition opportunities outside of China. So the two trajectories are happening at the same time.

What about the Chinese world outside of the People’s Republic of China? People like Ai Weiwei. He is unusual in that he has made a global career, he’s part of a global art market that doesn’t really have anything to do with China anymore. Are we going to see more exiled Chinese artists like Ai Weiwei?

In the next five to 10 years, definitely more artists will establish studios overseas, some people might decide to immigrate to another country, depending on their family situations.

The censorship is getting so much worse. For example, there is an artist whose work is based on Buddhist philosophy, and often incorporates elements of human limbs and bodies—nudity. Before 2019, she often had artworks shown domestically, but now her figurative artworks that reference nudity would not pass the censorship review domestically. She has a studio in Austria, and is trying to create a studio in Berlin. [She is not named to protect her identity as she is still working in China.]

And then there is one artist I described in my book who has already established a studio in Tokyo, Lu Yang. Although he has a studio in Shanghai, he pretty much creates all his artworks in Tokyo now. Because he’s a Buddhist, and almost all of his artworks are related to Buddhism, he likes to explore subject matter such as the concept of hell, death, and bardo. That’s not a positive kind of story from the official arts and culture rhetoric perspective. When I was writing the book, around the time when the pandemic broke out, he still had videos being exhibited in China, but now, many of his videos cannot be shown in China.

Everything got worse after the pandemic, I guess.

We updated our suite of graphics tracking the impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law. The law, which went into effect on June 30, 2020, and the allegation of “sedition,” have been used to arrest 292 individuals, charge 159, and convict 71 as of January 31, 2024.

Among arrests under the law in recent months, four individuals were arrested for signing up for paid subscriptions to Patreon accounts for Nathan Law and Ted Hui, Hong Kong politicians now living in the UK and Australia, respectively. Reasons cited for other recent arrests include posting on social media criticizing officials, as well as calling for protests and threatening the families of government officials, leading to charges of sedition.

In March, legislators passed a new security law in Hong Kong. Enacting a mandate in Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the territory’s constitution, the new legislation expands on the 2020 National Security Law to cover sedition (and increases the maximum sentence for this offense), collaboration with “external forces,” treason and insurrection, and other acts. We will be looking into how this new legislation will affect national security cases going forward.

You can see our full dataset and graphics here.

The Chinese Communist Party, an organization of over ninety million members, remains opaque to many outsiders, even within China. Wall Street Journal reporter Chun Han Wong spent years in Beijing documenting social, political, and economic changes as General Secretary Xi Jinping consolidated his power over the Party and country. Last year, Wong published Party of One, a portrait of the organization that rules China, and the man who rose to its top. Xi emerges in the book as a prisoner of the Party, and its history, as much as he is its leader. Wong spoke with Nick Frisch, a research fellow at Yale. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Nick Frisch: What misconceptions were you hoping this book would address?

Chun Han Wong: Talking about what kind of person Xi Jinping is, what he is trying to do, many people reach for this easy and simplistic reference to Mao Zedong. They just say Xi Jinping is doing a Mao. This comparison needs to be qualified. We do see some of the slogans, some of the tactics that we saw in the Mao era. But it’s too convenient to say that Xi Jinping is a second Mao, or Xi Jinping took this or that out of the Mao playbook. Of course there is some truth to the Mao comparison. Xi had little real education. His true education, throughout his early life, was political education. As a child, he had a front row seat to political drama, to Communist Party intrigue. He consistently learned up close how power was exercised, how power struggles evolve, the impact they can have on people. His own family suffered the negative consequences of such events.

But there are also important influences that not many observers note, and in my book I want to highlight those. Xi’s tactics have other influences. For example, [Mao’s rival Party leader] Liu Shaoqi, who was the arch Party-builder. Liu really believed in internal discipline, internal propaganda, internal political education. Liu wanted to ensure the Leninist hierarchy of the Party remained strong. Mao, by contrast, mobilized normal people to destroy the Party from the outside. This is something Xi Jinping would never do. The Party is his one true vehicle of power, the one instrument he has for implementing his vision. Xi is only powerful if the Communist Party is powerful. Xi’s internal purges, the internal Party inquisitions, emphasis on discipline, that’s from Liu Shaoqi. Xi Jinping doesn’t proclaim that theme loudly in public, but you can tell from the way he does things. Mao wouldn’t have done it that way.

Xi was born when the Party was a revolutionary movement that had just taken power. Now the Party has been a ruling institution for decades. How has the Party evolved over his lifetime?

It all goes back to Xi’s upbringing during the Mao era. Mao’s mobilizational approach, leaning heavily on ideology and messages, caused a lot of internal discord, dysfunction, violence. It was not good governance. We all know the worst excesses of the Mao era: the anti-Rightist campaign [in 1957], the Great Leap Forward [starting in 1958], the famine that resulted [killing an estimated 30 million people]. For the first two or three decades of the People’s Republic, Party rule was not conducive to nation-building, to what was envisioned before 1949. Much time passed between then and when Xi took power. His ideas of good governance would have been shaped by seeing what didn’t work during his childhood.

The years after Mao, the boom years, the Reform [and Opening] era [under Deng Xiaoping, from 1978], also had problems. Xi Jinping was reacting to those problems, trying to strike a balance between the two extremes. There was too much revolution in the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and then, in the decades before Xi took power, things went too far the other way [with corruption and disorder accompanying fast economic growth]. Party policy had swung too far towards development. Problems festered, to the point where the Party was struggling to control them. Xi wants to find an in-between: delivering good governance and economic results, but also with effective Party structures so top leaders can effectively execute their vision, rein in vested interests, and get all organs of the Party pointed in the same direction. That means ramping up the Leninist aspects of internal Party management.

You will often see [Xi’s] administration promulgating new rules and regulations, laws, Party guidelines. In the National People’s Congress, we haven’t historically seen such levels of legislative work. They have put down in black and white a lot of these things that might not have been considered necessary to say explicitly before, prescribing exemplary behavior for both citizens and Party members. Dangji [党纪, Party discipline] is stricter than guofa [国法, national law]. Party regulations are far more restrictive as a code of behavior. Some of the biggest changes introduced under Xi include new disciplinary regulations, clarifying processes, and penalties. In 2015, for example, he introduced this regulation against wangyi Zhongyang [妄议中央, speaking out of turn, or rashly, against the Party Center]. There is no room for freelancing when discussing matters of the Party Center.

How important is ideology today? 10 or 15 years ago, Marxism in China was considered a bit passé, almost a joke.

If you mean ideology like Marxist-Leninism, Party members have to be conversant with that, at least superficially. In 2018, on the [200th] anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, Xi led a propaganda push to study the Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital, those early communist writings. People said, “Xi Jinping is leaning into the hardcore stuff.” He was, it’s true, the first leader in a long time to invest so much public effort in getting people to read such things. But in my experience, talking to people within the system, looking at the reading materials for their mandatory political study sessions, the people themselves are not necessarily ideological. They’re not studying it like academics, not engaging like a graduate student. That is not required. What is required is that people show their willingness to study. What really matters day-to-day is not so much Marx, but Xi Jinping Thought. That is the number one thing for these regular political study sessions that Party members must attend, whether ordinary SOE [state-owned enterprise] Party members or senior Politburo members.

Reading Xi Jinping Thought, there’s nothing essentially Marxist or Leninist about it. A lot of it is just about what makes China a strong country, and the things we must deliver to make China the great nation that we know it is. The student’s ability to regurgitate the mantras is key. Xi’s ideological emphasis is not so much making people good Marxists, it’s making people good cogs in the Leninist machine, showing willingness to participate in these rituals.

What are Xi’s economic policies? For decades, the Chinese state prioritized growth. Now, there’s concern that has changed.

From Xi’s perspective, he is not saying that we should not have growth, but he would argue that the growth China had was too focused on raw numbers, the blind pursuit of more GDP that doesn’t take into consideration distribution of wealth, benefit to the majority of people. You can argue there are elements of his Maoist upbringing that influence him: He frequently cites Maoist slogans about “common prosperity,” making sure that Chinese society is more egalitarian. He calls upon that spirit and nostalgia.

What Xi is trying to do is steer China closer to what it professes to be: a socialist state. It aspires to be a modern socialist power. Socialism, he’s actually serious about it. It’s not cynical. He believes China should be a more equal society. He thinks China has gone too far in one direction over the last few decades, and wants to recalibrate. He’s not an economist, so he sets the direction and entrusts delivery to his underlings. Xi Jinping doesn’t want to destroy the economy. He has gone to lengths to offer reassurances to the private sector, but signals that the private sector cannot blindly pursue its own narrow interests.

Because of how this message was implemented, a lot of private entrepreneurs and foreign investors are scared. They are realizing he’s serious. Private entrepreneurs are now rounded up for doing things that in the past the authorities would have tolerated or even actively encouraged. For a long time, foreign investors were welcomed with open arms. Now, they are expected to recognize that foreigners are guests of China, they’re on China’s terms. Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic [and Xi’s draconian pandemic management policies], where we saw the extent to which he’s willing to ride roughshod over private sector interests, many people are finally thinking they can’t work with this.

In China’s foreign policy, observers have noted a shift from Deng Xiaoping’s low-key “hide and bide” stance to a more assertive “wolf warrior” diplomacy. Is this one of Xi’s signature policies?

That shift started before Xi. Even under Hu Jintao, there were signs that China was trying to assert itself more abroad. In terms of economic statecraft, we saw use of trade pressure to exert leverage before Xi, for example with Norway [the suspension of salmon imports after Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010]. Elements of “wolf warrior” diplomacy were visible in moments when Chinese diplomats were truculent and brash about “core interests” like Tibet, when the Dalai Lama was at the peak of global prominence and influence. Under Xi, you see these displays more often on a wider range of issues. Chinese diplomats are taking up Xi’s spirit of struggle, using harsh language.

In diplomacy broadly, Xi himself is also leading from the front. He is the most traveled PRC leader ever, and he has welcomed the most foreign visitors to Beijing, at a greater frequency than any predecessor. He has invested more money in diplomatic outreach. The foreign affairs budget has increased; there are more Chinese embassies and consulates around the world than before. It flows from Xi’s core political agenda.

What kind of legacy does Xi want to leave?

Only he truly knows. I think you can take him at face value when he talks about things like the “China Dream” and the “Two Centenaries” goals [for certain policy achievements by the 100th anniversaries of the Party’s founding in 1921, and the PRC’s founding in 1949]. Often, these slogans are vague and amorphous goals, so you can never really fail, you can always redefine them.

Xi probably wants to be remembered as someone who restored China to its rightful place in the world, whatever that might mean in terms of concrete achievements. The general vibe—and he has already delivered on this part—is a China that gets global attention, a China that is recognized by governments around the world as an important political and economic power, and that is dealt with as such. You could even spin the perceived negatives of “wolf warrior” diplomacy as positives, because if the West is taking China seriously, then you know China is strong, because China is seen as a threat.

There are other issues where the legacy might be more mixed, domestic issues where Xi has set expectations of delivery and hasn't quite gotten there. Poverty alleviation, anti-corruption—those are as close to being clear victories as he has.

Then there are other things that you can’t dress up despite best efforts, like the Xiong’an economic region [south of Beijing], which hasn’t really taken off. The Belt and Road Initiative is not exactly a failure, but is not the resounding achievement that Xi would have liked. It will persist, but the limits of these projects, the limits of Xi’s ambitions, are becoming apparent. Some things you cannot will into reality.

There is a saying that Mao Zedong achieved jianguo [建国, founding the new Chinese republic], Deng Xiaoping fuguo [富国, enriching China], and Xi has presided over qiangguo [强国, strengthening China]. If we say Xi’s objectives are for China to be economically powerful, militarily powerful, internationally respected, you can argue he’s done much of these three elements, especially the last two.

A major part of legacy is succession. How much more time does Xi want on the job? When will he feel satisfied he did his best? It’s a dynamic problem, it’s not just about what you achieved, it’s about whether you can find someone to carry forward your vision. Xi has seen himself what happens when succession is botched.

Then there is Taiwan. This is one of those things everyone has an opinion on, but only Xi himself can answer. We’ve heard many anecdotes from people who have been in meetings with him, talked to him about Taiwan. He seems to hold this issue more closely and passionately than his recent predecessors. The language he uses creates a sense of urgency. But the realities of the situation are difficult. There’s a reason why Mao Zedong didn’t do it. There’s a reason why Deng Xiaoping didn’t do it.

The gap in relative strength of militaries across the Taiwan strait is big and probably going to grow bigger [in Beijing’s favor]. The sense of identity among people on Taiwan is drifting far from being “Chinese” or identifying with the mainland. This drift is a trend you can’t really reverse without taking military and political control of Taiwan. It’s not something you can change by force of will. Many issues in Taiwan now are seen through the lens of Beijing influence, so the more Xi does, the more it’s perceived negatively. In this respect, I don’t think Xi and the Party are better positioned than before. It’s arguably worse. You could put some of this on Xi himself. Can you resolve that peacefully? It’s hard to see. Is the alternative plausible? If you use force to take Taiwan back, that’s jeopardizing your achievements for 1.4 billion people on the mainland. The conditions for a war of choice undertaken by Xi are, at this moment, hard to foresee. You could end up in a war by accident, the lesser option of seizing Taiwan’s outlying islands [closer to the mainland China coast], or a blockade, to take political control by force.

In his article “Authoritarian Privacy” for the University of Chicago Law Review, Mark Jia writes: “Privacy laws are traditionally associated with democracy. Yet autocracies increasingly have them.” In this ChinaFile Q&A, Jia and Samm Sacks engage in an exchange about what has motivated the Chinese government to enact and enforce a range of laws on information privacy and the implications for understanding the role of privacy laws in non-democratic states.

Samm Sacks: Outside observers have commented that China appears to have a split identity when it comes to privacy: rules limit how firms handle citizens’ data, while the state has unchecked surveillance powers. Is this dichotomy accurate? What does privacy mean in China, particularly in the wake of COVID, when the scale and reach of government surveillance and the use of data-intensive technologies for tracking and monitoring appears to have intensified?

Mark Jia: I agree with the view that China’s privacy laws are meant to preserve a broad “exceptional zone” for state surveillance in areas like intelligence collection, law enforcement, and domestic stability maintenance. I agree too that a lot of the rules and their enforcement have focused on how companies handle citizens’ data. For example, the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL for short), China’s first comprehensive privacy law enacted in 2021, establishes greater compliance obligations for major Internet platforms, such as a requirement to establish an independent body to “supervise” their privacy protection work.

But I think the reality is more complex than a private-public dichotomy would suggest. Most notably, the PIPL explicitly applies to state organs. The aim is not just to discipline firms but also lower-level bureaucratic entities that are abusing or misusing citizens’ data. To take one somewhat mundane example, my article discusses a case in which a local prosecutor discovers that a county-level agricultural bureau has been disclosing information on machinery purchase subsidies online without removing the personal information of over 1,000 farmers. The local procuratorate (prosecutor’s office) initiated a procedure that essentially asked the bureau to fix these violations, and the bureau complied.

The application of privacy law to state entities stems from a realization that some of the most egregious instances of data abuses in recent years, especially during COVID, emanated from state or quasi-state entities, not just private individuals or market actors. Most famously, perhaps, local officials in Henan once assigned red COVID health codes to a group of citizens to prevent them from traveling to protest the freezing of their bank deposits. Authorities have been sufficiently alarmed by these practices that as early as 2020, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) issued a notice urging governments to follow personal information protection guidelines in their pandemic-control work. (At this point, the PIPL had not yet been enacted.)

I take this as supporting my general argument that China’s privacy laws were enacted in large part to highlight its responsive governance in the face of new vulnerabilities and dependencies that have arisen out of China’s data-driven society. If you look at how the national legislature and state media have framed China’s recent privacy laws, they have sought to position the central Party-state as a champion of individual privacy rights against incursion from various digital bad actors—individuals, firms, even local governments. Notably missing from this list of privacy intruders is the central Party-state itself, of course, despite its leading role as a surveillant. In this regard, privacy law may also be a means of distracting the population from the central Party-state’s own privacy incursions by redirecting attention to others.

You write that of the 130 countries that have enacted privacy laws, only about half are considered “free” by the nonprofit Freedom House. Why did you choose China as a case study for the role privacy laws play in these countries and to develop your theory of “authoritarian privacy”?

The most immediate aim of the piece is to explain China’s turn to privacy law. I do not claim that China’s situation is universal. But I do think that a close study of China’s privacy story can help draw out some hypotheses as to why authoritarian countries have been enacting privacy laws at their present speed and scale. In the article, I discuss four objectives that motivated the central government to enact privacy laws: to support its digital economy, to expand its geopolitical influence, to enhance its national security, and (most unappreciated in my view) to respond to data-related social grievances. Not all of these motivations apply to every authoritarian ruler. China’s geopolitical goals, for instance, are decidedly more ambitious than those of Saudi Arabia or Venezuela. But it’s also the case that at least some of these motivations likely present in other authoritarian examples. The government in Vietnam, for instance, has also been highly invested in growing its digital economy, deepening its surveillance state, protecting data security, and addressing digital abuses online. Vietnam is quite close, I believe, to enacting its own information privacy law.

Moreover, I think China is an interesting case because it is both the world’s leading surveillance state and a home to comprehensive personal data protections along lines inspired by the European Union’s Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is considered the gold standard in information privacy protection law today. Because China crystallizes that apparent paradox, I thought it could help suggest dynamics that might exist elsewhere.

We often talk about the Chinese government as a monolithic entity, especially when it comes to data. What are the ways in which Party-state actors at both central and local levels have responded to the so-called “datafication of China,” and what are some examples of their competing interests in datafication?

I draw on a definition of “datafication” as the process of “taking all aspects of life and turning them into data.” I think you’re absolutely right that central and local governments in China are not always 100 percent aligned in their data-related interests and priorities, including with respect to privacy. For example, some local governments that are highly invested in supporting local industry may be less willing to saddle those companies with the higher compliance costs associated with strict adherence to national data protection laws. On the other end of the spectrum, some localities may carry out central mandates more aggressively than central leaders might prefer. For example, a common pandemic-control measure implemented in residential communities required residents to use facial recognition to access their buildings. This became a sore spot for many. In 2021, the Supreme People’s Court included, in a legal notice clarifying the law on facial-recognition technology in civil cases, a provision explicitly calling on all people’s courts to “support” residents who request alternative methods of identification if their building managers mandate facial recognition technology for access. So here you see the center starting to reign in local practices that were initially implemented to carry out central mandates.

What has been the role of Chinese courts in enforcing privacy protections?

The PIPL provides for both administrative enforcement and judicial enforcement. The most prominent cases of enforcement, the ones we hear about in the news, tend to involve administrative processes. But courts have played an important role as well. It’s still early to draw general conclusions, as the PIPL is a relatively new law and legal disputes necessarily take time to work their way through the legal system. But early evidence on the ground suggests a few interesting trends.

First, in addition to what you might think of as ordinary civil suits against privacy violators or criminal prosecutions for data fraud and theft, we see a rise in public interest data protection suits brought by local prosecutors. In one Hangzhou case, for example, a local prosecutor brought a public interest suit against a short-video app for violating the privacy rights of minors. The court supervised a mediation agreement that required the firm to follow a compliance schedule, to pay out compensation to various children’s welfare groups, and to issue a public apology in a state-owned newspaper. Some of these prosecutor-initiated public interest suits have targeted state entities—usually for a failure to adequately supervise privacy rights protection in their jurisdictions, but sometimes for direct privacy violations too.

The second trend to note is more of a caveat. China’s law-enforcement apparatus may be mobilized now to carry out the privacy law’s socially protective mandate (and to boast about their success online), but these same agencies are also charged with balancing assertions of privacy rights against considerable state interests. In one case, for example, a Shandong court denied a plaintiff’s request for a pharmacy to delete her personal information because the pharmacy was not authorized to do so under local public health regulations devised for pandemic control. This shows that there are hard limits to how far law enforcers are willing to go.

Policymakers in Washington, D.C. have expressed concerns that Chinese-owned software applications threaten Americans’ data security and privacy—that Chinese laws compelling companies to cooperate with intelligence services mean Americans’ sensitive data could end up in Chinese government hands. Are Washington’s anxieties warranted based on your research into how Beijing has enacted privacy laws?

A key question for Chinese policymakers when drafting privacy legislation was how to further its various objectives (including predominantly domestic goals) while maintaining flexibility for state surveillance. It is well established that Chinese firms are required to share information with intelligence services under various laws, including the National Intelligence Law. The PIPL does not fundamentally alter these obligations, and I have seen no commentaries suggesting otherwise.

This replicates a broader pattern that fairly describes much of Chinese law generally: even as the Party-state has legislated in various areas to serve its national objectives, it has done so through a legal regime that is carefully crafted to keep its own hands untied in core areas of national interest, including state security. In other words, the Party-state has sought to extract the benefits of law while minimizing its costs. I would hypothesize that a similar calculus also helps explain the substance of privacy laws in other authoritarian settings.

It’s refreshing to hear a perspective focusing on domestic factors underpinning China’s privacy regime because so much discussion I hear about developments inside China look at everything through the lens of U.S. national security and great power competition. Why did you choose to frame your argument as a domestic legitimization story?

I do see this paper as offering a corrective to a troubling tendency now in our national discourse to understand China primarily through the lens of U.S.-China competition. This is evocative of the Cold War insofar as normative ideological and geopolitical frameworks are increasingly used to structure our descriptive understandings of reality.

Many analyses in the think tank literature frame the PIPL as a top-down effort to grow China’s digital economy, to enhance the country’s security, and to expand China’s data influence abroad. These explanations aren’t wrong for what they say, but they miss a critical part of the story: the Party-state’s perceived need to address data privacy incursions through socially protective legislation. This is how privacy law is discussed in Party reports, legislative documents, and state media, and it is how prosecutors, courts, and other agencies have framed their enforcement work as well. Party-state documents rarely shy away from boasting of geopolitical goals where they are relevant, and yet official PIPL-related documents scarcely mention them.

The reason why I think a lot of existing explanations miss or understate the domestic legitimation piece of the story is because those accounts tend to take a fairly reductionist view of China, either as a monolith that is locked in geopolitical competition with the West, or as featuring an all-powerful totalitarian government that can essentially impose its will upon its population. But not every major piece of legislation in China today is principally motivated by geopolitics, and despite Xi Jinping’s ascendance as paramount leader in China, his rule continues to require a high level of responsiveness. Consider, in this regard, Xi’s abrupt reversal of the country’s pandemic policies after the lockdown protests last fall.

How would you answer the question raised by Jamie Horsley (in a piece by this title): “How will China’s privacy law apply to the Chinese state?” How does the PIPL apply to state organs, and how does it apply to companies? Is it empowering security authorities to demand greater data access from the private sector because now they have a legal authority they can cite in making data requests?

While there is an entire section in Chapter II of the PIPL devoted to state organs, that section is fairly abstract. It states that the law generally applies to state organs’ handling of personal information, while enumerating several exceptions at fairly high levels of generality. The result is that much is left to implementation. From what I have seen so far, state organs in China have sometimes been disciplined for privacy violations, often for what you might think of as inadvertent publication of private information, rather than any sort of malicious abuse of personal data. I gave an example earlier from Jiangxi of an agricultural bureau that (accidentally, it seems) disclosed the personal information of farmers online in the course of reporting local subsidies. I’ve seen other cases where a government organ was disciplined for failing to remove identifying information from various documents posted in the “Government Information Disclosure” column of its website. I would guess that drafters of the PIPL envisioned enforcement of the law against state organs for more serious violations, given the kinds of national controversies discussed earlier that helped pave the way for the Law’s enactment. For now though, initial enforcement patterns as to state agencies seem to reflect a measure of institutional and political caution in the early days of the law’s implementation.

China’s technology firms have sometimes balked at sharing their data with government agencies, and have often cited a lack of legal basis as grounds for refusal. My impression is that this dynamic is beginning to change, not only because of the PIPL’s clearer specification of legal authorities, but because the state-led campaigns targeting the tech sector that started in late 2020 and 2021 have fundamentally shifted the relationship between the technology sector and the central Party-state. As Professor Angela Zhang has well documented, the Party-state had employed a relatively lax approach to tech regulation in the years before Jack Ma’s fateful address in late 2020. Now that the pendulum has swung the other direction, I would imagine technology firms are more willing to share data with central regulators when asked.

I agree that the space for companies to push back is shrinking as the Party institutionalizes its power over the private sector. I have wondered what this dynamic means for the longstanding push and pull between economic goals and national and domestic security goals of the leadership. Economic growth goals have long been a backstop against implementation of some of the worst or most hardline elements of China’s cybersecurity and data regulations because officials recognize pushing companies too hard could come at a cost to investment in their jurisdictions. We saw this with data localization, with data access requests, and other cybersecurity-related audits where companies sometimes had more space to maneuver. It sounds like you are somewhat pessimistic that this space will continue, but I do wonder about it given the economic pressure facing China’s leaders. How do economic imperatives impact the way China’s privacy law is implemented and enforced?

If China’s economic prospects worsen, it’s plausible to me that the center may decide to relax enforcement of not only its privacy standards, but other laws that create regulatory burdens for firms in areas like antitrust, consumer protection, and financial regulation. The costs to popular support associated with a deteriorating economy may be steeper than the legitimation and securitization benefits of a zealously enforced privacy law, especially at the margins. But I think the old days of completely lax regulations are over. Central leaders have come to appreciate more fully the political risks of overseeing unchecked technology firms helmed by ambitious entrepreneurs sitting atop mountains of sensitive data. They know too much now to turn back the clock completely.

This week, China’s National Bureau of Statistics announced it would cease collecting data on youth unemployment. The news came after nearly a decade of poor job prospects for Chinese people ages 16-24, often reported on by international media as mainly a problem affecting recent college graduates. Earlier this summer, ChinaFile’s Jessica Batke spoke with sociologist Eli Friedman, who studies international labor, about the reasons for joblessness among China’s young people and how it is covered.