{"id":223137,"date":"2020-07-22T17:39:42","date_gmt":"2020-07-23T00:39:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/?p=223137"},"modified":"2020-07-30T14:18:34","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T21:18:34","slug":"translation-totalitarianism-is-not-the-other-by-zhang-jieping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2020\/07\/translation-totalitarianism-is-not-the-other-by-zhang-jieping\/","title":{"rendered":"Translation: “Totalitarianism is Not the Other” by Zhang Jieping"},"content":{"rendered":"
Zhang Jieping<\/a>\u00a0is the founder and CEO of\u00a0Matters Lab<\/a>, a decentralized content platform. Earlier this month, as\u00a0fear reverberated following the first arrests<\/a>\u00a0under the hastily enacted national security law<\/a> in Hong Kong, she posted a short essay of encouragement: “To counter fear, the first thing we need to do is take our speech back.”<\/a> Last week on Matters, she published a lengthy essay titled “Under Totalitarianism, Our Fear, Resistance, and Love,”<\/strong><\/a> further reflecting on the new reality of life for Hong Kong, and warning that the line between freedom and totalitarianism is thinner than many think. An excerpt has been translated by CDT:<\/p>\n 1. Totalitarianism is Not The Other<\/strong><\/p>\n At 11:00 at night on June 30, like many people, I read the full text of the Hong Kong version of the National Security Law on my computer, line by line. While reading and\u00a0 interpreting those unyielding yet vague sentences in my head, I felt as though I had returned to those days when I was a journalist reporting on China. Apart from a strong sense of confusion about space and time, the absurdity and bleak emptiness I felt in my heart were beyond words.<\/p>\n Fifteen years ago, I arrived in Hong Kong as a China reporter. One of the most frequent challenges I encountered was investigating why those who work on AIDS prevention and treatment, who survey lists of students that died in an earthquake, who advocate for environmental causes, who litigate on behalf of vulnerable populations, who write articles and poetry and publish books, and who organize house churches\u2014why is it that they are the ones taken away? Between detention and trial, why did they disappear for days, even years at a time? What did they go through? What law did they break, what crime did they commit? And what do the charges even mean? How did they endure those long days of torment? How did they defend themselves? Who defended them? Can they even defend themselves within such a judicial framework? Those people who played a part in their arrest, who are they? Those huntsmen with parents, wives and children of their own, how do they carry out their work, what kind of mentality do they have?<\/p>\n Facing those who have been swallowed alive by darkness, I have countless questions.<\/p>\n I also know that for many people, the answer to these questions is so simple that they do not think of them as questions at all: it is simply “China”\u2014that word says everything.<\/p>\n I remember in the office that Hong Kong colleagues used to listen to these stories with sympathy in their eyes, but would turn their heads to the other side, sigh, and say: that\u2019s China for you. They weren\u2019t wrong. Healthy people have no interest in probing a diseased system; people in bright places need not spend time gazing into the abyss. “China” is the reason for everything. Just stay away from it and everything will be okay. Just like what our parents taught us since we were young, just stay away from the bad guys, and our world and those in it will not turn bad.<\/p>\n Being in the midst of it, of course you know that’s not the case.<\/p>\n Evil is a whole set of mechanisms which operate silently in the day-to-day life of every ordinary person. Every person\u2019s movement need only adapt to this system a little, or bend a little, and thus the abyss that will swallow us all is formed. The cost of freeing oneself from it will only rise higher and higher, far higher than what ordinary people can bear, to the point where even if you do leave, the tacit understanding you have as a result of interacting with this system will remain in your physical habits. By that time, no matter how great the resistance and struggle inside, from the outside everyone will have already coalesced into the same evil symbol.<\/p>\n The difficulty is that you don’t know when you are “in it” and when you can “stay out of it.”<\/p>\n People in democratic countries may feel that totalitarianism is far away. However, after the epidemic, as we enter into a Cold War world, the many policy decisions of democratic countries already contain elements of tyranny which have long been hidden within. If the political arena is reduced, even in a society under the rule of law, the operating elements of tyranny will spring up everywhere, in families, schools, workplaces, churches, in organizations large and small.<\/p>\n Totalitarianism is not the other, it is born within us. The movie “The Wave” uses a real social experiment that took place in a California high school in 1967 to tell us: once the external environment changes, politics and civilization itself can get sucked out to sea.<\/p>\n