Saturday, November 17, 2018

Social Credit in China and the dangers of over-the-top reporting

Over the past year, one of the biggest China stories to strike the world's attention has been the "social credit" score which the Chinese government is supposedly getting ready to assign every citizen. I can no longer count the number of times that I have heard the words "Orwellian" and "Black Mirror" used in conjunction with this topic. Most gravely, this issue made its way into US vice-president Mike Pence's momentous and confrontational speech about China on the 4th of October, widely described as the portent of a new cold war. After making a very reasonable remark about China's Great Firewall restricting the free flow of information, Pence added that "by 2020, China's rulers aim to implement an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life - the so-called "social credit score".

There is only one problem: the narrative that claims the Chinese state is going to assign every single citizen a score that will determine their social standing and many or all aspects of their life is essentially one big myth. This misconception seems to have originated due to reporters, probably in good faith, conflating a pretty mundane government plan to extend a system of social credit scoring to all companies and organizations by 2020 with credit score systems set up by private companies like Alibaba, and perhaps some local government schemes. None of these initiatives come close to being some sort of all-encompassing system that catches every citizen in its net and determines their place in society.

Yesterday's article by Jamie Horsley, published in Foreign Policy, does an excellent job of putting the record straight. Entitled "China's Orwellian Social Credit Score isn't Real", the piece provides a realistic view of China's current "social credit" policies, and of what misunderstandings might have fuelled the over-the-top reporting on this topic. Jeremy Daum, who runs the excellent China Law Translate website, has also done a good job of taking on the inaccurate reports.

A still from the nightmarish Black Mirror episode where every person is given a social media score that updates in real time. 

I don't find it hard to see how this myth of a dystopian social credit system could have arisen. Chinese laws and government plans are confusing for anyone, and implementation differs very much from what's written on paper. Also, modern life in China certainly does have a dystopian feel to it: almost all of people's transactions and a good chunk of their social interactions pass through one single phone app, WeChat, or at most through two or three different apps, and an authoritarian government has full access to all the records when it wants to. The use of facial-recognition technology and electronic monitoring of all kinds is expanding, and the censorship of "unharmonious" content on the internet is truly unparalleled worldwide. 

Still, it is crucial that big media organizations in Western countries be especially cautious about maintaining accuracy in their reporting on China, and not give in to sensationalism and concocted stories. Apart from the simple moral duty to report in an honest fashion, this is important for another reason: protecting their reputation in the eyes of the Chinese public. 

This might seem like a strange consideration, given that much of the foreign media is inaccessible within China. But there is a class of Chinese who are able to read English, travel abroad, use VPNs and will come across reporting on China in the international media no matter how much their government tries to prevent it. For many of them however, the credibility of such reports is open to question. In their own country, they are told that the "Western media" does nothing but maliciously slander China for its own shadowy purposes. While they may not completely believe this, many Chinese will approach any foreign articles on their country, especially negative ones, with a degree of skepticism. At best, they may believe that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Churning out articles about social credit that are clearly over-the-top and inaccurate, in ways that anyone who lives in China can see, is a great way to make sure that the Western media loses points in the battle for hearts and minds. Most seriously, it may be causing Chinese with access to the international media to disbelieve the entirely true reports on the awful events going on in Xinjiang, which go completely unreported in their own country. Now is truly the time to produce accurate reporting on China, rather than giving in to sensationalist fantasies.

Monday, October 29, 2018

A visit to Kinmen, where the PRC meets the ROC

A few weeks ago I visited the island of Kinmen, off the coast of Fujian, in Southern China. For decades this unassuming little island was one of the front lines in the Cold War, and it still lies on the edge between two political entities that don't recognize each other's legitimacy.

The question of who governs Kinmen gives rise to one of the world's strangest cases of political semantics. The governments of the People's Republic of China and of the Republic of China agree on very little, but they both concur that this small island is part of Fujian province, China. The only thing is that both governments officially consider themselves to be the rightful representatives of the whole of China, Fujian included, so this doesn't tell you much about who actually governs the island.

In practice, Kinmen has been governed from Taipei since the KMT retreated to Taiwan in the late nineteen forties. The island is, however, far closer to the Mainland of China than it is to Taiwan. In fact, it is literally in swimming distance from the the city of Xiamen, whose high-rises are clearly visible from the island's Western shore. This sleepy place was at the centre of two "Taiwan straits crises" in the fifties, which almost led China and the US into open conflict with each other. Kinmen was fired upon regularly from the Mainland up until the seventies, and its inhabitants lived under martial law, unable even to go to Taiwan with any ease. Nowadays open hostilities have ended, and life on the island is more or less "normal" in spite of the ongoing military presence. The fact that Kinmen is still ruled by Taiwan seems almost surreal, given how incredibly close it is to a powerful and revanchist China.

I visited Kinmen during the week-long vacation for China's National Day. It is a nice place to spend a few days, with lots of sites related to its recent history, well preserved architecture and traditions, and some nature thrown in. The island is reachable by ferry from the cities of Xiamen and Quanzhou, on the Mainland. These ferry rides started up when the so-called "three small links" were introduced in 2001, allowing trade, postal and transportation links to be set up between Mainland China and the two little Taiwan-controlled islands of Kinmen and Matsu. For a while these were the only direct points of contact between the PRC and the ROC, until the same three links were established between the PRC and Taiwan proper in 2008.

I decided to get to Kinmen by first flying down to Xiamen from Beijing, and then taking the 20 minute ferry ride to island. Flights to Xiamen cost one thirds of flights to Taipei, in spite of the distance from Beijing being basically the same. This route gave me the opportunity to spend a day in Xiamen, which I had never been to before. If you mention Xiamen to people in China you will be told that it is a pleasant city, with a relaxed lifestyle, clement weather and nice views of the ocean, and I found this to be more or less true. As Chinese cities go, Xiamen is definitely one of the more pleasant ones. I spent the night in a nice hostel located in the city centre, which is made up of winding alleyways dotted with cafes and shops, rather than the straight, alienating boulevards that make up the centre of most Chinese cities. What's more, while the city feels relaxed and the sea brings a nice breeze and good views, Xiamen still maintains a certain big-city vibe and urban energy.


Xiamen's impressive Shimao Twin Towers as seen from my taxi window

I also visited Gulangyu, a little island of the coast of Xiamen which is the city's main tourist attraction. When Xiamen was turned into a "treaty port" after the fist opium war, Gulangyu became its "international settlement", peopled mostly by Europeans and policed by Sikh policemen brought over from British India. For this reason it is still filled with Victorian-era buildings. It also has a long association with Western classical music, and is known as the "piano island". It has a piano museum, and some of China's most famous classical musicians were born on the island, even though it has few residents.

The island is now a UNESCO world heritage site, and entirely car-free. It is reached by a five-minute ferry ride from Xiamen. When I got to the pier and asked for a ticket, I was amazed to be asked for my passport, which I had not thought to bring with me. Luckily my Chinese social insurance card was accepted as photo ID, and I was still able to buy a ticket. As I scanned my ticket to get on to the ferry, a photo of my face was taken by the scanning machine (which may well be equipped with facial recognition technology). Levels of monitoring of people's movement are getting more and more insane.

Not having arrived in China yesterday I kept my expectations low, knowing that on the evening before the National Day a site so famous would be completely packed with tourists from the provinces, and I was proven correct. I will admit that I did not explore the island too much, since it was already evening, but the roads I walked down reminded me of Beijing's Nanluoguxiang, the centre of Lijiang, and every other tourist trap in China: the same shops, the same souvenirs, the same kitsch, overcrowding and commercialisation. Unfortunately this seems to be the destiny of most tourist sites in the country, even the ones like Gulangyu that must have originally had much real charm.

The next day I took the ferry to Kinmen, which leaves from a special pier near the airport. I passed through PRC customs before getting on, and then ROC customs once on the island. All the other passengers on the ferry seemed to be Mainlanders taking a trip for the holidays. Although Kinmen is far from being famous throughout China, people from Fujian do go there on weekend trips. Mainland Chinese are in fact able to go to Kinmen much more easily than to Taiwan itself. They can go independently and buy a travel permit on arrival, whereas for Taiwan proper they have to apply for a permit in advance, and can only go in an organized group unless their hukou is based in one of China's main cities. The number of Mainlanders visiting Taiwan has dropped after the election of Tsai Ying-Wen and the deterioration in cross-straits relations, but apparently the number of visitors to Kinmen has continued growing, although fewer of them fly onwards to Taipei.

Kinmen is hardly huge, but it's not tiny either. It has about 130,000 people living on it, and it would take a couple of hours to drive around it. I stayed in an airbnb in a rural settlement a few bus stops away from the island's main town, Jincheng. That afternoon I took the bus into town, and found a shop where I could buy a Taiwanese SIM card (my Mainland Chinese SIM card worked on international roaming, but as well as being far more expensive the service also made it impossible to visit websites that the Chinese government blocks. So for instance I could not use Google maps). After that I strolled around Jincheng. The town is a pleasant, laid back place, with a network of little lanes full of shops and restaurants. Although Kinmen still isn't Taiwan, the atmosphere is unmistakably that of a place ruled by Taiwan rather than by Beijing, right down to the 7-11s on every corner and the scooters parked on every pavement. While I wouldn't say it exactly feels more prosperous than the Mainland, everything somehow seems a bit more humane and easy going.

What made it especially clear that I was not in the Mainland were the big campaign posters for the candidates in the local elections, and the little temples that dotted the streets. Not that temples don't exist in Mainland Chinese cities, but they are not integrated into local life in the same way, and you don't usually see locals going there regularly. Jincheng also has a few interesting historic sights, including the Wu River Academy, originally built in 1780 as an academy of classical Chinese learning, and the surviving Qing government headquarters, all of which I visited.

Xiamen, PRC as seen at night from Kinmen, ROC

The Guomindang headquarters in Jincheng

Kinmen (or Quemoy, as Westerners used to call it) has been populated since the Tang dynasty, and for most of history it was a sleepy place, although not a totally unimportant one. Famous Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhuxi (1130-1200) even founded an academy on the island. It suffered from pirate attacks throughout history, in fact the name Kinmen (金门) or "golden gates" refers to the gates that were raised to defend the island from pirates. Koxinga, the famous Ming loyalist who expelled the Dutch from Taiwan and turned it into a base from which to resist the Qing and restore the Ming, also expelled the Dutch from the Kinmen, as well as chopping down all of the island's trees to build his navy. Still, Kinmen would have remained pretty anonymous if it hadn't been for the Chinese civil war in the forties. In the battle of Guningtou, in 1949, roughly 20,000 Communist troops were unable to take the island from the hands of 40,000 Nationalist ones, meaning that it was fated to become the last little outpost of Nationalist China.

After the Second Taiwan Straits Crisis in 1958, the two sides agreed to a bizarre "odd-day ceasefire". For the next two decades, the island was only shelled on even days (in the beginning the shelling also went in the other direction, but eventually it became a one-way affair). As well as shells, a constant barrage of propaganda leaflets was shot both ways. Until the nineties, the island was treated by Taipei as a special military zone, and travel to and from it was restricted. This led to the tragic Lieyu Massacre in 1987, when a boatload of Vietnamese refugees arriving on Kinmen to ask asylum were shot in cold blood by ROC soldiers under orders to execute anyone who landed on the island without permission, after which the government unsuccessfully tried to cover things up. In 1992 martial law was finally lifted, five years after it was in Taiwan.

The islanders' sense of identity is an unusual one. They don't see themselves as Taiwanese and don't share much of Taiwan's history, including the 50 years of Japanese colonialism that did much to shape the bigger island's identity. They are culturally very much Fujianese, and their dialect is Hokkien spoken with a Quanzhou accent (although it is still intelligible with Taiwanese Hokkien). As such the recent surge in Taiwanese identity holds little interest to them, but they generally identify with the Republic of China, while fearing that if Taiwan gave up on that charade and became de-jure independent it might lose interest in them and abandon them to the PRC, a result which most islanders unsurprisingly do not want to see. Due to these circumstances, the Kinmense vote for the Guomindang in national elections almost to a man and woman, and steer clear of the DPP.

On my second day on the island I went back into town with the intention of renting a scooter, which is by far the best way of getting around. Renting one was hard, since Mainlanders who'd come over for the holidays had already rented almost everything available, but in the end I found a place with an electric scooter left. Once motorized I headed south, to a village called Shuitou. The island's rural scenery looked pretty and green, but not exactly untouched. Unlike Taiwan's other "outer islands", Kinmen is quite well populated and mostly flat, and there are houses and new developments almost everywhere, much of them pretty unsightly and utilitarian.

All the same, Kinmen also has some of the best preserved old buildings in the country, perhaps due to life being frozen under martial law for decades. The village of Shuitou is known to have the island's best traditional architecture, and it did not disappoint. At its centre stand some impressive villas built in the late 19th century by locals who came back from the Dutch Indies after making their fortunes. The villas mix Chinese and European colonial architecture, and have now become museums. The most famous one is the Deyue mansion, featuring an impressive watchtower that was used against pirates. Next to it are rows of authentic traditional Fujianese houses from the 19th century, with local families happily living inside them. Seeing people living in houses more than a century old might be the norm in parts of Europe, but not so much in the Chinese-speaking world. Many of the houses have the long swallowtail roofs that are a feature of Fujianese architecture. These are normally only found on temples and ancestral halls due to their showy nature, but this was once a wealthy place. Over the last few centuries the Fujianese have been those who emigrated abroad in the highest numbers out of all the Chinese, especially to South-East Asia, and some of the resulting wealth made its way to this island.






After leaving Shuitou, I drove across the island and reached Mt. Taiwu, the island's highest peak, which reaches 262 mts. above sea level. I was able to go halfway up the mountain on my scooter, at which point I reached a shrine dedicated to the ROC soldiers who died defending Kinmen from the PRC, and a military cemetery with rows upon rows of soldiers' graves. Next to the cemetery was a modern military base, and I saw young men in uniform jogging, probably Taiwanese youngsters doing their two-year military service. After that point you could only continue on foot, and I walked up the rest of the way to the top of the mountain. Although there were few people around, I met the odd visitors from both the Mainland and Taiwan. The nature was gorgeous and untouched. In the trees next to the path there were webs with huge yellow and black spiders sitting in the middle, with thin and elongated bodies and leg-spans about the size of a dinner plate.

Once I got to the peak of the mountain, I could see most of the island around me. I could also see the Mainland's coast extremely clearly across the sea, so close I could have made out the buildings if the weather had been clearer. I asked myself how China's government, with its vast territorial claims that it is aggressively pursuing elsewhere, can let this state of affairs persist. Then I reminded myself that Kinmen is crawling with Taiwanese soldiers, and not for nothing. Doubtless China could now take the island back in a fight if it wanted, but this would involve serious fighting and numerous casualties on both sides, and it would mean the beginning of a real war. As long as a war doesn't start, Kinmen will thus remain under Taiwanese rule. If one day hostilities do break out however, I can't see it standing much of a chance.


A large spider with black and yellow stripes in the middle of its web

The view from the top of Mt. Taiwu, with the mountains of Fujian visible across the sea.

After leaving the mountain, I drove my scooter to the August 23 Artillery War Museum, which documents the battle that started on that date in 1958, when the PRC launched a heavy artillery attack against Kinmen. The subsequent hostilities (known as the "second Taiwan straits crisis") lasted for weeks, and included air-to-air combat between the two sides. Hundreds of ROC soldiers and possibly a few thousand of the island's civilians were killed, as well as a few hundred soldiers and civilians on the other side. The PRC was eventually deterred by the direct intervention of the United States. The museum was small but informative enough. Outside it stood a Taiwanese tank and another big military vehicle from that era. What was most surprising was that the museum's cafe' sold "Mao Zedong milk tea", and the wall displayed a large poster advertising Mao's milk tea and "Chiang Kai Shek's special blend coffee", with pictures of the two leaders' faces. It seems rather incredible that the Chairman's image would be made use of so lightly in Kinmen of all places, but there you go.

Mao Zedong milk tea and Chiang Kai Shek coffee on sale in the cafe' of the August 23 Artillery War Museum

A Republic of China tank outside the museum

War cemetery with the tombs of soldiers who died defending Kinmen

I got out of the museum and rode my scooter to nearby Shanwai, the island's second town. Looking for a place to eat, I wandered into a huge and very fancy five-storey shopping mall which seemed quite incongruous, in the middle of a little town of a few thousand people. I later discovered that the mall was opened in 2014 by Taiwanese company Ever Rich, in the hope of cashing in on Mainland tourism, and it boasts Asia's largest duty-free store and Kinmen's first multiplex cinema. The mall wasn't exactly empty, but it was hardly packed either, in spite of those being the peak days of the year for Chinese tourism, and I wondered how much money it can really be making. I was the only customer in the cafe' where I had a bite to eat.

That evening, back in Jincheng, I ate a bowl of the well-known local Beef Noodle Soup (牛肉麵) in a little restaurant, and then went and had a drink at the only bar in town (and probably on the island), a place named the "White Lion Pub". The bar was completely empty except for me and the girl working there, so we ended up chatting for a while. She was a local, and I asked her whether local people feel Chinese, Taiwanese or what. She replied that by now they don't really feel any of the two. "If we go to Taiwan we just say we are from Kinmen, but if we go abroad where no one has ever heard of Kinmen, then we say we are from Taiwan". It struck me that this would be the least misleading answer, while still technically inaccurate. Saying "Republic of China" would only baffle most people.

All in all, Kinmen struck me as a worthwhile place to spend a few days. It really has quite a lot of things to see, and in fact I only managed to pack in about half of the sites. For anyone who has to spend time in Xiamen it can make for a good weekend trip to see some nature, look at some old buildings, eat some good food and appreciate a few geopolitical realities.

Sunday, October 14, 2018

Italy should learn how to manage migration and public security from China, says Italian politician who lived there for a decade


-->
The rise of populist politicians and movements has been the political story of the decade in Europe. "Populism" is a very broad label, sometimes used as a smear against anyone who pushes for genuine change. All the same, it has currently come to indicate a wave of movements that all share some broad features: they claim to be outside of the political mainstream, reject traditional politics as corrupt, are hostile to immigration, view the EU with suspicion, claim to speak for the people against the elites and hark back to the "good old days" when every country was supposedly in charge of its own affairs. 

Italy might well be the first Western European country to elect a government that belongs within this current. Although the prime minister Conte is an unassuming technocrat, the two major parties that make up the government, the Lega and the 5 Star Movement, embody two different brands of populism. The Lega's brand is more "right-wing", anti-immigrant, nationalistic and anti-EU. The 5 Star Movement is more anti-establishment and anti-traditional politics, and in some cases it promotes environmentalism, universal basic income and other progressive causes. On the other hand, it is strongly Eurosceptic and many of its leaders appear to feel an affinity with Putin.

Within this new government, the main link to China is the undersecretary for economic development, Michele Geraci. An ex-investment banker and economist, Geraci moved to China in 2008 and lived there for a decade, teaching finance in the University of Zhejiang and at the University of Nottingham's campus in Ningbo, until he was recently called back to Italy to take up his current post. He has long been close to the Lega, which proposed him for the government post, and he has also long been a strong admirer of the Chinese system. 

Geraci is fond of claiming that Italy should learn from the Chinese model and copy what it can, a point he has made in numerous talks and articles. His view of how China works would appear to be extremely one-sided, since he never makes any reference to China's huge debt problem, or the slowing down of its economic growth, or its worsening repression and pursuing of dubious territorial claims. At a conference organized by the Lega last summer, Geraci exhorted the audience (link in Italian) to "study China and copy the things we can learn from, adapting them to our needs", and he explained the sources of China's success, which lie in the fact that China "decides every year how much to build and how many people will have to move from the countryside to the city, programs immigration, and controls the tariffs on international trade and the interest rates".

This June Geraci authored an article published on Beppe Grillo's blog (Beppe Grillo is the founder of the 5 Star Movement, and his blog used to be the movement's quasi-official media outlet). Entitled "China and the Government of Change", the article lists a whole lot of ways in which Italy's new government should learn from China, a few of which really raised my eyebrows. One area in which China could show Italy the way is apparently the control of migration. China's management of the influx of migrants from rural areas to the cities over the last 40 years is presented as a model for Italy to manage its own problem with migration. "Who can we learn how to manage the migratory flows from? From China".

Geraci claims that the Chinese government only let people move to the cities after investing to give them "dignity and work", but it also limited "loitering and crime" by making sure that the new arrivals "knew the rules and respected the social pact of the place that hosted them". No mention is made of the inequality between rural migrants and urban residents that the hukou system creates, an inequality that extends to the migrants' children and is hardly very dignified. There also seems to be no understanding of how disruptive, chaotic and costly the whole process of urbanization has been. But most of all, there is no recognition of the fact that China's experience with urbanization has nothing to do with Italy's need to deal with a constant inflow of people arriving from Africa on rickety boats across the Mediterranean, given which Geraci's recommendations appear to be nothing more than some cheap rhetoric about how immigrants should be "kept in their place like they do in China". 

Even more strikingly, Geraci claims that Italy should learn from China in terms of public security. "Which is the country where public security works? Who can we learn something useful from? From China", claims the undersecretary. Mirroring the kind of discourse you find in the Chinese media, he says that "in China women can walk the streets happily at night without the terror that reigns over here". He then adds that "in the last few years, China has also improved a lot in terms of criminal and civil justice, overtaking Italy". He does add the caveat that cooperation would be good "within the limits that our culture and constitution impose", however we do not hear a single word about China's dire and worsening human rights record, in the face of which claiming that China's criminal and civil justice has overtaken Italy's can only make any sense if you think that the civil and human rights of criminal suspects are not worth respecting.

This pro-Chinese rhetoric is reflected in the new government's actions. Luigi Di Maio, leader of the Five Star Movement and minister of economic development, as well as unofficial head of the government alongside the Lega's leader Salvini, made an official visit to China last month, with Geraci going along as his sidekick. During the visit, Di Maio made it clear that Italy wishes to be the first G7 country to sign an MOU with China to become a partner in the Belt and Road project, something which the British and French prime ministers have already declined to do.

Geraci's uncritical expression of admiration for Chinese governance has elicited a reaction in the form of an open letter signed by a group of young Italian academics involved in the study of contemporary China. The letter calls Geraci's article part of a "very dangerous drift that is taking place today in many Western societies, including Italy", and takes him to task for his call to learn from China's handling of migration and public security, answering back with reasoned arguments. Strikingly, almost all of the letters' signatories work in universities outside of Italy. I recently met one of them in person when he visited Beijing. He told me that there is a very simple reason why most of the signatories are not based in Italy: the China Studies departments of Italian universities are linked to Confucius Institutes and receive funding from them. People are convinced that if they take this kind of stand, they put themselves at risk of being cut off from funding, cooperation, and visits to China. Now where have I heard all this before?

Geraci and Di Maio signing a cooperation agreement with Sichuan province during their recent visit to China

Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Foreign tourists aren't coming to China, and it is hurting the economy

-->
Most foreign residents in China seem to agree that the country has become a less easy place for outsiders to navigate over the last few years. From renting a house to accessing banking services, having a foreign passport rather than a Chinese ID is becoming more and more of a liability. This is probably part of the reason that the number of foreigners living in China is still pretty tiny, and not really increasing very fast either. I would argue that this is not to the country's benefit, although this can be a hard point to sell in China. 

It has become apparent, however, that there is one area where China's refusal to make more accommodation for foreigners is causing an immediate, tangible damage to the country's economy, and that is tourism. Over the last couple of years, various analysts have noted that China's current account balance has been hard hit by the gap between inbound and outbound tourism. To put it simply, there are currently far more Chinese travelling abroad than there are foreign tourists coming to China.

In 2017 Chinese tourists made 130 million trips abroad, spending a total of 115.29 billion US dollars. In the same year, the number of foreigners taking trips to China fell just short of 30 million. For a country of China's size and heritage, this is not a very impressive figure. By way of comparison, Thailand received over 35 million visits in the same year, Japan got over 28 million, and even not so glamorous Vietnam still managed 12 million.

It isn't hard to see why China receives few visitors. The unnecessarily restrictive visa regime for foreign tourists is one major factor. In a world where more and more countries allow visa-free travel (at least for citizens of developed countries), China is definitely not going down this path. While Americans, Brits and a few other nationalities are able to receive multiple entry tourist visas as part of reciprocal deals, citizens of most countries are generally given one-month visas. This is dependent on showing that they have tickets both to enter and leave China, and presenting evidence of hotel bookings for the entire duration of the trip.

For most individual travellers this is a burdensome requirement, based on the assumption that they have planned out their entire trip in advance. For young backpackers on their gap year trips around the world, this may well be reason enough to stay away from China all together. 


Then there is the hassle of getting around China as a foreign tourist. This has become much harder in recent years, precisely because of the same set of factors that have made life more convenient for long-term residents. Essentially, almost everything in China is now arranged and paid for through an ecosystem of smartphone apps that is very hard for outsiders to access. From cabs to cinema tickets, phone bills to airplanes, there is almost nothing that cannot be booked through your phone and paid for using WeChat.

Trying to do things the old way can be tricky, more expensive or downright impossible. For example, waving down a taxi on the street has become much harder in Chinese cities, since everyone uses Didi to hail a car. But you cannot use Didi unless you can pay with WeChat or Alipay, and you cannot do that unless you have a Chinese bank account. WeChat used to allow you to use its "wallet" function even without linking it to a bank account, but this is no longer possible (probably due to "security concerns").

For travellers not planning to open a Chinese bank account (which is generally impossible on a tourist visa anyway), getting around an already puzzling country has become a lot harder. Fortunately it is still possible to pay in cash in most establishments, although even this could soon start to change (I already know of one restaurant in Beijing that only accepts mobile payments).  

Then there is the truly incredible fact that a large proportion of Chinese hotels do not accept foreign guests as a matter of policy. This is the case even in cities like Beijing and Shanghai. While a few decades ago hotels needed a special license to accept foreigners, and only the high-end ones generally received it, nowadays all hotels could do so in principle. Quite simply many establishments do not want the hassle of having to register foreign guests with the local police, or do not know how to go about it, and so they just reject all foreigners. Although any Chinese city will still have hotels where foreigners can stay, this state of affairs represents a serious annoyance for the independent traveller, especially since it is the cheaper places that are most likely not to accept foreigners.

All in all, what emerges is the picture of a country that is simply not trying very hard to make itself welcoming to short-term visitors, even though this is actually costing it economically. The omnipresent sense of national pride and the state's growing security paranoia remain the best explanations. The strict visa regime is probably seen as a response to other countries' strict requirements for visiting Chinese citizens. The situations are not really comparable though: while most rich countries have a justified fear of illegal immigration, the chances of visitors from places like Australia or Germany overstaying their visas in China is almost non-existent (and they would hardly be able to lay low for very long, given the country’s omnipresent surveillance). The same sense of pride, the increased regimentation and control and the perceived need to monitor foreigners’ movements makes it hard to imagine changes to the rules that make China difficult for independent travellers, although many of them could be changed quite easily with some good will.

The fact remains that China’s diminishing capital account surplus is a serious source of concern for the government, and the large imbalance between how much Chinese tourists spend abroad and how much foreign tourists spend in China is a significant contributing factor (although obviously not the only one). Given that it is no longer politically feasible to restrict the majority of Chinese citizens from travelling abroad, there is little that could be done about this except opening up more to foreign tourism. 

Even within China, some have now begun to call for more openness. At the recent ITB conference in Beijing, Ctrip founder and co-chairman James Liang called for the government to make China more attractive to foreign visitors. He recommended relaxing visa policies, pointing to a study by the World Tourism Organization showing that only five countries worldwide have more restrictive visa policies than China, those countries being Angola, Gabon, Nigeria, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. He noted that Turkey, which allows visa-free access for nationals of 78 countries, managed to attract more international visitors than the whole of China in 2017. He also recommended that the government build more museums and further develop airports and railway travel (this last suggestion might seem a bit superfluous).

While this is encouraging, I can't really see much being done to make China more inviting for foreign travellers any time soon. In the near future, tourism is probably going to remain one field in which China haemorrhages money towards the outside world.