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Final act: my last reporting trip in China. It was supposed to be about life getting to normal, but we were followed by police, had interviewees intimidated, and then got a nice dose of xenophobic vitriol. And for some reason I'm still sad to leave. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/business/china-coronavirus-censorship.html
My great fear is the chauvinism+xenophobia that come with China's new nationalism will stay after the virus has gone. In the past year the CCP has blamed foreigners for the Hong Kong protests, said we invented the issues in Xinjiang, and now the virus. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/podcasts/the-daily/china-coronavirus.html
If you take Beijing at its word you'd be crazy not to be angry at the world. That's creating very ugly scenes at the moment. The lashing out at writer Fang Fang for chronicling Wuhan's suffering. The racism towards Africans in Guangzhou. It feels a new era https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/world/asia/coronavirus-china-nationalism.html
And if you want to see how the fears and anger over the virus are being tied more broadly to the nationalism, today was national security day. A totally normal holiday, where buildings display slogans like this: “work together to fight traitors and oppose spies.”
To me this seems the flowering of Xi Jinping’s vision of ethnonationalist rejuvenation. Beijing’s post-virus diplomatic campaigns of hectoring and lecturing, the wolf warrior diplomacy, are just another sign of a triumphalism of hard authoritarianism. It will continue.
On the trip we were followed by a crew of police who broke up every interview we did. They even stopped us from interviewing the brave staff of China Gold. Who danced even tho they had no customers. They said few had money to spend. The economic revival for them was not obvious.
I got frustrated and messed with the cops. Forced them to walk across traffic and then jumped on and off the subway to lose some. But they still caught up. Here’s a secret police taking down the license of our car. Within minutes they called the driver.
For fun here’s some more shots of the police that followed us. It’s rare to get such a crew for something so innocuous as talking to regular people. But it happens more and more. I actually felt a bit wistful knowing it’d be my last Chinese police chase.
The trip had more to give. At a McDonalds a man walked up to my colleague and I and hurled a xenophobic rant: “You foreign trash. Foreign trash! What are you doing in my country? And you, with him, you bitch.” Here’s a shot of a Hefei park named for a forthright official.
It was one for the ages. Felt a fitting goodbye. I’m sad to leave, but I think plenty aren’t sad to see American media go. I worry China is becoming more like its internet, closed to the world, yet eager to project power beyond its borders.
I feel lucky to have the time I did. I’ve seen 100 years of history in 15. The good, bad and tragic have been a hell of an education. And it’s been an honor to tell the stories of so many amazing Chinese. I hope one day they will be allowed to tell whatever stories they want.
