What Knowledge Is Sought in China? Arab Visitors and Chinese Propaganda Dhul Hijjah, 1440 - August 2019

48 Dirasat What Knowledge Is Sought in China? Arab Visitors and Chinese Propaganda Dhul Hijjah, 1440 - August 2019 Kyle Haddad - Fonda What Knowledge Is Sought in China? Arab Visitors and Chinese Propaganda Kyle Haddad - Fonda 4 Dirasat No. 48 Dhul Hijjah, 1440 - August 2019 © King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, 2019 King Fahd National Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data Haddad Fonda, Kyle What Knowledge Is Sought in China: Arab Visitors and Chinese Propaganda. / Haddad Fonda, Kyle.- Riyadh, 2019 48 p ; 23 x 16.5 cm ISBN: 978-603-8268-23-0 1- Propaganda, Chinese I-Title 303.3750951 dc 1440/11524 L.D. no. 1440/11524 ISBN: 978-603-8268-23-0 Table of Contents Abstract 6 The standard itinerary in the 1950s 10 The Standard Itinerary up to 2018 17 Since the Crackdown 31 Can China’s Arab Outreach Be Successful? 35 5 6 Dirasat No. 48 Dhul Hijjah, 1440 - August 2019 Abstract This article investigates the experiences of Arab dignitaries, journalists, youth groups, and trade envoys who have visited the People’s Republic of China in an official or semiofficial capacity since China’s initial overtures to Middle Eastern countries in 1955. First, it outlines the “standard itineraries” given to Arab delegations touring China both in the 1950s and in the twenty- first century, demonstrating how the changes to this agenda reflect the shifting priorities of the Chinese state. Second, it explores how the Chinese government has refined the vision of Chinese Islam that it presents to visitors from the Middle East, taking into account Beijing’s changing attitude toward expressions of Islamic piety. Finally, this article asserts that, despite the social and political transformation China has undergone since 1949, the Chinese government has tried to impart to its guests a remarkably consistent ideological message about Chinese unity. Ever since the government of the People’s Republic of China first began sponsoring tours for Arab visitors in the mid-1950s, pious Muslims have justified their visits to an avowedly atheist country by invoking a supposed saying of the Prophet Muhammad to “seek knowledge even unto China.” Although religious scholars doubt the authenticity of this hadith, it has inspired many believers to explore a distant and unfamiliar society. In order to gauge the political, cultural, and ideological influence that China exerts on the Arab world, researchers must first understand exactly what these travelers have found upon their arrival—to ask, in other words, what knowledge one might be able to seek in China. From the perspective of 2019, this question takes on added significance. China is in the midst of a nationwide crackdown on expressions of religiosity, which has hit Chinese Muslims especially hard. According to estimates, as many as one million ethnic Uighurs have been detained in “reeducation” camps in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang.1 Chinese Muslims beyond Xinjiang have also been subject to increasing pressure, especially since the state-run China Islamic Association detailed its plans to “Sinicize” Chinese Islam during the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in March 2018.2 In such an environment, China’s leaders must make a deliberate and concerted effort to ensure positive coverage for their country in the international media, especially in Islamic countries, where audiences may object to Beijing’s repressive policies. In recent years, the Chinese government’s strategies for manipulating public perceptions around the world have begun to receive widespread attention from Western journalists and academics. The most detailed investigations have focused on such topics as the expansion of China Global Television Network and China Radio International, the outright purchase of international media outlets by Chinese companies, and the spread of paid supplements about China in foreign newspapers.3 This last topic even became the subject of a high-level diplomatic 7 8 Dirasat No. 48 Dhul Hijjah, 1440 - August 2019 incident during the 2018 American midterm election campaign, when President Donald Trump complained at a session of the United Nations Security Council that a paid China Daily supplement in the Des Moines Register constituted foreign interference in the electoral process.4 As public critiques of Beijing’s influence operations become more frequent, analysts are beginning to delve into a wider range of Chinese initiatives, including in the non-Western world. China’s outreach to Arab journalists has not yet been the focus of systematic scrutiny, despite the obvious high stakes of that enterprise. One challenge facing any scholar of China’s Arab propaganda efforts is the need to account for the Chinese government’s shifting attitude toward Islam. Accordingly, it is necessary to take a broad historical look at the evolution of China’s propaganda tours for Arab journalists. Many of the strategies that the Chinese government devised and perfected to impress Arab visitors in the 1950s have continued to guide Chinese officials in their interactions with Arabs in the twenty-first century. China’s leaders began encouraging representatives from around the world to visit China in the mid-1950s. Chinese Premier and Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai told fellow delegates from Asian and African countries at the Bandung Conference in April 1955 that the exchange of “friendly visits” would help “promote mutual understanding and cooperation.”5 This proposal, like the similar invitation Zhou had offered to Western diplomats and journalists at the Geneva Conference one year before, triggered a frenzy of excitement. From late 1954 through the end of the decade, China played host to a steady stream of international visitors, who came to investigate and evaluate the Communist regime. Among those who traveled to China were diplomats, government ministers, journalists, student delegations, women’s organizations, and civil society groups representing a diverse array of nationalities and political beliefs. By one accounting, a total of 435 delegations from non-communist countries toured China in the year 1956 alone.6 Chinese propaganda tours have long captured the attention of Western scholars. Initially, this interest was the result of Cold War paranoia. Soon after Zhou welcomed the first wave of foreigners to China, Western analysts who were concerned about the prospect of communist “subversion” began to catalog and dissect the flurry of reports filed by those who had accepted the invitation.7 Although scholars in the United States and Europe inevitably relied on publications about China in English and other European languages, they did not overlook China’s efforts to attract travelers from non-Western countries.8 In recent years, sophisticated historical research on China’s interactions with foreigners, based on Chinese archival sources, has helped reveal how Chinese officials prepared to receive tourists.9 Scholars have also begun to reexamine the experiences of Americans and Europeans who traveled to China, focusing on subjects of particular interest to Western readers such as British Labour Party delegations or African-American leftists.10 It is important for historians to build on this trend by also reevaluating how Chinese officials in the same era interacted with individuals from non-Western countries who journeyed to China. Today, it is all too easy to overlook the significance of Chinese propaganda tours. As China’s capacity for public diplomacy has expanded, it has often been able to influence overseas audiences directly through its own institutions, which have footholds around the globe. Yet China’s initiatives abroad should not distract from the fact that Beijing continues to arrange tours for official or semiofficial delegations, much as it did in the 1950s. Far from being a relic of the Cold War, these tours remain an important component of China’s cultural diplomacy. This report considers China’s propaganda tours in historical perspective, comparing the first efforts of the 1950s with those of the twenty-first century— both before and after the recent crackdown on Chinese Islam. It highlights the ways in which the Chinese state involves its own Muslim population as a promotional tool and questions whether that practice can endure in a more highly charged political environment. 9 10 Dirasat No. 48 Dhul Hijjah, 1440 - August 2019 The first goal of this report is to distill an eclectic range of publications about China by Arab travelers in the 1950s and 2010s in order to present side by side the organization of Chinese propaganda tours in these two eras. Second, this report explains how the Chinese government has refined its messaging about Islam since the 1950s; whereas it was once eager to feature Muslims of a variety of ethnicities from throughout the country, it is now much more proactive about presenting a particular, carefully curated vision of Chinese Islam. Third, this report traces how Chinese officials have used foreign visits to present a consistent vision of China as a unified society. Finally, it evaluates the effectiveness of propaganda tours by demonstrating how such visits continue to frame the terms by which China is discussed in the Arabic- language press. The standard itinerary in the 1950s The first foreigners to arrive in Communist China in the 1950s encountered a system designed to control everything they saw, heard, or experienced inside the country. Tourists were the responsibility of the China International Travel Service (CITS), an arm of the state bureaucracy tasked

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