Kai Strittmatter > Quotes

“Hannah Arendt, who studied totalitarian regimes, said as much in an interview in 1974: “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”6 But a population that no longer believes anything is robbed of its ability to think and to judge, and ultimately of its capacity to act. As Arendt says, “with such a people, you can then do what you please.” These are the ideal subjects—or the ideal opponents.”
― Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State – How Biometric Control and Censorship Threaten Global Freedom and Privacy

“In a world where the distinction between truth and lies has been abolished, there are just facts and alternative. The dominant values are not morality and a sense of responsibility, but usefulness and profit. If you do see the truth, it will do you no good to tell it; in fact, it’s dangerous. Best of all is to acknowledge the lie as true and embrace it passionately—that’s what the fanatics do. But they will only ever be a very small group. The next best thing is deliberately to avoid learning the truth, to live a life of benumbed ignorance—and if you do happen upon the truth, keep quiet and pretend you haven’t. These two groups represent the majority of the population. Anyone who speaks the truth is either stupid or suicidal. The smart people in such a world are not the clear-sighted and wise; the smart people are the cunning and shrewd.”
― Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State – How Biometric Control and Censorship Threaten Global Freedom and Privacy

“the tyrant must “stifle everything that might give rise to two things, self-assurance and trust.”
― Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State – How Biometric Control and Censorship Threaten Global Freedom and Privacy

“In 2019, a study by the Open Technology Fund identified 102 countries to which China had exported information-control technologies. These included autocracies such as Egypt and Azerbaijan, as well as semi-authoritarian or even democratic states such as Brazil, Malaysia, Poland, and South Korea.240”
― Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State – How Biometric Control and Censorship Threaten Global Freedom and Privacy

“The source of Xi’s power over his own ranks remains intimidation. And that is certainly effective in the short term: during his first term in office, Party functionaries all over the country were paralyzed with fear of the dreaded Central Commission for Discipline Inspection—one of the country’s most secretive and powerful organizations—and the suicide rate among CCP workers doubled. Between 2009 and 2016, according to a study by the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 243 Party officials took their own lives (140 jumped to their deaths, 44 hanged themselves, 26 took poison, 12 drowned themselves, and 6 slit their wrists).21 These figures are likely to fall short of the true number.”
― Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State – How Biometric Control and Censorship Threaten Global Freedom and Privacy

“After Mao’s death, the Communist Party grandees condemned the Cultural Revolution as “ten years of chaos”—but they quickly added that Mao had done the Motherland a great service, and his errors were trivial in comparison. The Party drew up a balance sheet and concluded that Mao had been “70 percent good and 30 percent bad.” The 30 percent part would include the 40 million people who died of starvation during the “Great Leap Forward” from 1958 to 1961—that devastating campaign in which Mao ordered every last peasant in every last village to melt down their tools and pots to provide steel. Mao wanted to “catch up with England and overtake America” by turning China into an industrial nation overnight. Eventually, China had no spades or shovels left, no ploughshares and no woks, and the result was one of the greatest famines in history.”
― Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State – How Biometric Control and Censorship Threaten Global Freedom and Privacy

“the sociologist Sun Liping from Beijing’s Tsinghua University identified three techniques for “mind control.”33 One central technique is the control of news sources: “The meal you cook can never be better than the rice you cook it with.” The system successfully blocks information from outside and replaces it with “patriotic education.” Hence, for example, the ubiquitous narrative in which China’s “special national circumstances” have made the country into a unique place unlike anywhere else in the world, and which requires the Party to rule in the precise way China’s subjects are currently experiencing. Second, the system starts building the parameters for your thought when you’re very young, changing the way in which you ask questions and steering you into predetermined channels. Once you have swallowed and internalized what the Party has fed you, says Sun Liping, you can’t even ask certain questions: they lie outside your realm of experience and powers of imagination. And third, the system inspires the kind of fear that suppresses awkward questions: “If you don’t swallow all this, you’ll be punished.”
― Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State – How Biometric Control and Censorship Threaten Global Freedom and Privacy

“If an individual is completely isolated, but most important, completely visible, says Foucault, then power functions automatically. “[T]he surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; [ . . .] the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary.”
― Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State – How Biometric Control and Censorship Threaten Global Freedom and Privacy

“Xi has publicly scolded Party functionaries who don’t give proper attention to the law. “We will spread the rule of law throughout the country,” he once announced. For the CCP, though, the rule of law means something completely different from what it means to most citizens of Western democracies. The Chinese word for rule of law is fa zhi, and is made up of the words fa (law) and zhi (rule). China-watchers spent many years puzzling over where the Party might take this idea. Would they tread a slow path toward the “rule of law” in our sense? Or was the destination to be “rule by law”—with laws mere tools in the service of power? The riddle has long since been solved. Xi Jinping himself has compared the role of laws to the “handle of a knife in the hand of the Party.” In summer 2015 the lawyer Zhou Shifeng, head of the above-mentioned Fengrui practice, explained to me his interpretation of the Party’s “rule of law”: “What they mean by that is: ‘I will take my laws and rule you with them.’” Less than four weeks after our conversation, Zhou was in prison. Shortly afterward he made a forced confession on state television, where he was shamed as the mastermind of a “criminal gang”; and a year later he was sentenced to seven years in jail for “subversion.”
― Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State – How Biometric Control and Censorship Threaten Global Freedom and Privacy

“a leader does not convert to Confucianism without risk, because doing so also reminds people of the old Confucian ideal of the noble philosopher king: a ruler is so wise, virtuous, and just that his charisma alone inspires people and brings order to society. “He who rules through moral strength is like the pole star,” it says in the Analects of Confucius. “He stays in his place and all the other stars circle about him.” For the Confucians, a good king is no autocrat, pursuing power without limits; and a good government neither intervenes excessively in society, nor doles out punishments. Ministers and scholars have not only the right but the duty to contradict the ruler if he strays from the correct path. By these measures, Xi’s rule is anything but Confucian.”
― Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State – How Biometric Control and Censorship Threaten Global Freedom and Privacy

“the Party attempts to create terms that unite all contradictions, and thereby do away with them. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is one of these. Or the “socialist market economy.” These formulations contain left and right, up and down, Maoist and neo-liberal all at once. Language has overruled logic and in doing so believes itself untouchable. Of course, in reality it is becoming ever more empty and absurd, but in a country where what matters is power and not letters, that doesn’t really make a difference. Here, more often than not, the function of words is to convey an order rather than a meaning: Nod! Swallow! Forget! Kneel! And so the propaganda machine feels perfectly free to compare the Dalai Lama with Adolf Hitler, and at the same time to warn the country’s newspaper editors never to confuse “truth and lies, good and evil, beauty and ugliness.” The true, the good, and the beautiful are always the Party and its Word.”
― Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State – How Biometric Control and Censorship Threaten Global Freedom and Privacy

“started to call the demonstrators a “violent mob” and their protests an “insurrection” that carried “trains of terrorism.”
― Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State – How Biometric Control and Censorship Threaten Global Freedom and Privacy

“Dla nas, Europejczyków, Chiny były wciąż jeszcze czystą kartą, dziewiczym obszarem dla naszych własnych wyobrażeń. Raz były niebem, raz piekłem, innym razem znów „żółtym niebezpieczeństwem”, rzadko ktoś rozróżniał stany pośrednie.”
― Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State

“The Chinese state is the majority shareholder in the Hangzhou firm Hikvision, which began life in a state research institute and is now the largest manufacturer of video surveillance systems in the world. Today, Hikvision cameras have been installed in more than 150 countries, where they identify faces and license plates, and send an automatic alert when a driver is seen texting at the wheel.”
― Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State – How Biometric Control and Censorship Threaten Global Freedom and Privacy

“Harmony is when ordinary people don't make a fuss.”
― Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State