Chinese rulers have a long history of organising households into groups of ten in order to enhance their control
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskChina’s current ruler, Xi Jinping, seems to share Mao’s taste for mobilising the masses to police one another . Mr Xi praises the Fengqiao model, which he has redefined as a way of empowering people. He talks of, or “mass prevention and mass governance”. In reality he is using people to supplement the Communist Party’s other tools of control. It is a low-tech arm of a high-tech police state.
Under the new system households are organised in groups of ten and managed by a leader, such as a veteran or village cadre. The leader must be “politically reliable”, states an official report from the city of Neijiang in Sichuan province. They go door to door, passing down party orders and collecting information to feed back up the chain. In part of the province of Qinghai, for example, leaders are tasked with understanding “the ideological status and actions” of the region’s Tibetan nomads.
But the modern-day incarnation of the system is probably more informed by experiences in Xinjiang, where the government has spent years persecuting Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. In 2017 officials introduced a ten-household “joint defence” system, compelling members of each unit to hold counter-terrorism drills with local police. Residents and shopkeepers had to buy batons, riot shields and alarm systems that could be activated by the authorities.
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