BRICS Meeting, China- and Russia-Friendly Peace Activists, Bootleg “Barbie,” Aesopian Language, Prigozhin

What We’re Reading, Hearing and Watching -- August 24, 2023

BRICS Summit, a Big Deal for China

Chinese state media and state-affiliated commentators have given a great deal of attention to the 15^th BRICS Summit held in Johannesburg, South Africa this week. BRICS is a grouping of states including Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Before the opening of the summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived a day early and paid a state visit to South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa. On the eve of the visit, South Africa media published an article authored by Xi, entitled “Sailing the Giant Ship of China-South Africa: Friendship and Cooperation Toward Greater Success.” It was rare to see a signed article by Xi published in foreign media. In the article, Xi described China and South Africa as having “brotherly sentiments” toward each other. The relationship between the two countries “has achieved leapfrog development – from a partnership to a strategic partnership, and then to a comprehensive strategic partnership.” (Note: Russia is the first major country to establish “a comprehensive strategic partnership” with China in 2016. In the article Xi praised South Africa as the first African country to sign the Belt and Road international development initiative with China and expressed the hope for continued growth in bilateral trade cooperation. Xi complimented South Africa’s contributions to “the development of BRICS cooperation mechanism, further substantiating BRICS cooperation and extending its influence.” “Now more and more countries are knocking on the door of BRICS, aspiring to join our cooperation,” Xi wrote. Reuters reported, citing 2023 BRICS summit chair South Africa, that over 40 countries, mostly developing nations, expressed interest in joining BRICS. The expansion of BRICS cooperation was one of the main discussion topics for this year’s summit. Whether the BRICS bloc is becoming a geopolitical rival of the United States and its allies remains to be seen. However, BRICS’s offer of an alternative to a world order dominated by wealthy Western nations seems to be resonating with the developing world.

China has been a strong promoter of BRICS expansion. At the 2017 BRICS Summit held in Xiamen, China, Xi proposed the “BRICS Plus” model to broaden BRICS cooperation to other countries. On August 22, a commentary on the BRICS summit in People’s Daily, the Chinese Community Party’s official media platform,  led off with the expansion of BRICS cooperation. The commentary noted that “emerging market countries and developing nations are playing an increasingly important role in global governance” as demonstrated from an increasing number of countries applying to join the BRICS cooperation. The commentary further explained, “the growth and development of the BRICS countries has driven the adjustment of the international structure and is fundamentally changing the political and economic landscape of the world.” (hxxp://paper.people.com[.]cn/rmrb/html/2023/08/22/nw.D110000renmrb_20230822_2-02.htm)

Given the importance of BRICS to China, it was strange that  Xi was absent from the BRICS economic forum’s first session on Tuesday and failed to deliver his scheduled speech. Media and China watchers speculated on possible reasons for Xi’s absence – illness, possible power struggles within the Communist Party, or other reasons which will never be confirmed.   Xi reappeared on the second day of the forum. As the forum closed on August 24, the group announced the accession of six new countries.

Peace Advocacy with Chinese Characteristics

American peace activists are divided on what to make of the Russia-Ukraine war. Many of them justify Ukraine’s fight as a war of self-defense, the New York Times (NYT) reported on August 14. However, other activists staunchly oppose continued Western military assistance to Ukraine. The NYT article features a photo of Medea Benjamin, a founder of the group Code Pink, being removed from a Senate hearing where she had disrupted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s testimony by shouting “Be a diplomat — not a war hawk!”  Benjamin “said she firmly opposes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but doubts that a prolonged fight can restore Ukraine’s borders.” 

“China Is Not Our Enemy”

Code Pink also figured in an August 5 NYT article, which described pro-Chinese messaging by the group. Co-founder Jodie Evans, a long-time progressive activist, had formerly criticized China for human rights violations, the article said. However, in 2017 she married Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman and former employee of Chinese tech giant Huawei, who has long admired Maoism and other leftist ideologies and who currently lives in China. Since their marriage, Code Pink has been receiving about a quarter of its funding from groups linked to Mr. Singham, the NYT reports, and “Ms. Evans now stridently supports China. She casts it as a defender of the oppressed and a model for economic growth without slavery or war.... She describes the Uyghurs as terrorists and defends their mass detention.” Multiple reports have described Chinese government policies of torture, reeducation, and forced sterilization against the Uyghur minority ethnic group in western China’s Xinjiang region, in what the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights determined may amount to crimes against humanity and that the administration of US president Joe Biden has described as genocide. 

Code Pink’s website has varied in the nuances of its messaging on the Uyghurs. A screenshot of the page archived on February 4 had a section entitled “What about the Uyghur population in China?” said ““This is complex and painful for the Uyghurs in China and for Muslims across the globe. Our concern is that the U.S. is using this issue as a tool to drive its attacks on China, instead of a human rights issue that needs to be addressed as such. There is much wrong with how the US reacted and acted on terrorist attacks as with many governments across the globe, China’s included.” Versions of the websit cached on March 9 and May 10 lack this section. By August 7, the section had reappeared, but without referring to the Uyghurs as terrorists, and by August 16 Code Pink had added that Chinese human rights violations against them are “of concern to us.”

Overall, according to the August 5 NYT report, US nonprofit groups linked to Mr. Singham have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to groups that “mix progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points,” contributing to what the New York Times described as a “smokeless war” intended to “disguise propaganda as independent content.”

A researcher at the China Media Project, in an August 16 provided further evidence of broader pro-China messaging associated with Neville Singham. It noted, for example, that a researcher for one of his companies spoke at a 2021 conference organized by a Chinese propaganda-related entity; “she spoke on the need to ‘tell China’s story well’ to the Global South,” with the latter term referring to countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The article noted, “The growing body of reporting on Singham’s network and its amplification of what are clearly Chinese state propaganda talking points should already encourage skepticism about the integrity of Code Pink’s peace-focused China mission. That skepticism only deepens upon closer scrutiny of the goals and language of the organization’s ‘China Is Not Our Enemy’ campaign.” The rest of the article examines that campaign in depth.

“Peace in Ukraine”

Another campaign listed on the Code Pink  website is Peace in Ukraine.  The Peace in Ukraine website calls for an immediate ceasefire and an end to US weapons deliveries to Ukraine. Cached copies of the website show that even before the February 2022 full-scale Russian invasion, Peace in Ukraine was advertising webinars with titles like "Is the US Going to War with Russia Over Ukraine?", and in February 2023, on the invasion’s first anniversary, the website showed pictures of demonstrators with banners like "No to war with Russia over Ukraine." These headlines echo Russian and Chinese talking points about Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.   

Code Pink has been at the center of progressive causes ever since its founding in 2002 and has skillfully used social media for “micro-mobilization” of various groups. It continues to receive support from organizations that may not be aware of reports that Code Pink’s funding and stances have changed since 2017. 

As some of the peace activists in the August 14 NYT article pointed out, Russia’s war on Ukraine “flips the script…The peace movement needs to resist the urge to simply replay our ‘greatest hits’ about U.S. imperialism when we talk about Ukraine,” said Jon Rainwater of the group Peace Action. Liberal theorist Michael Walzer, who wrote Just and Unjust Wars in 1977, published an editorial in 2022 describing the Russian invasion as “unjust according to every version of just war theory,” and Ukraine’s self-defense as just. The NYT quoted Matthew Duss, a former top aide to progressive senator Bernie Sanders, as saying, “This is not a war that America started. This is a war that Russia started against its neighbor, and the left generally supports a system of rules for the world in which might does not make right.” He pointed out that the US administration had sought to avoid direct US involvement in the conflict. The NYT authors noted, “Some critics also charge that American opponents of the war are, at best, unwittingly parroting Kremlin propaganda.” (Team Natto has written about Russian information operations here, here, and here).

Bootleg Barbie

The Financial Times reports that Russians are watching pirated copies of the Barbie movie. It is not legally available there; Warner Brothers, the movie’s producer, pulled out of Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, some local cinemas are showing copies that viewers stealthily recorded in other countries.

However, some viewers may find the movie’s feminist message unsettling, in a country where a parliamentarian recently drafted a law denouncing feminism as “extremist” and “against the demographic policy of the Russian Federation.” This refers to the government’s attempts to bolster Russia’s sagging birthrate amid a demographic crisis that the current war has only exacerbated.

Indeed, Russian establishment commentators have criticized the Barbie movie as yet another sign of Western decadence--not in the sense of extravagant consumerism but for its challenge to historic women’s roles. Maria Butina, who served time in a US prison for acting as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation in the United States and returned to Russia to be hailed as a hero, called the movie “an ‘advertisement’ for the agenda of the US Democratic party. ‘What do we see [in the film]? Gays. Trans people. Women who have taken over the world. Nothing about the union between men and women, nothing about love’, she said in an appearance on the Russian Duma TV channel,” the Financial Times wrote.

Until recently, Russian cinemas could evade bans more easily, by importing films from Kazakhstan, where they can legally be shown, but in June a top distributor of such films pulled out of that business. “To get around the official accounting system, some cinemas would sell movie-goers tickets for a little-known Russian documentary or short film and then show an entire new movie during the previews. That way, the cinemas skirted both American copyright laws and Russian laws that require distribution certificates from the Russian ministry of culture,” the Financial Times reported.  Just as with the journalists cited elsewhere in this posting, Russian movie consumers are finding creative ways to navigate official restrictions.

Russian Journalists Navigate Wartime Censorship

In an August 15 long-read article “How do Russian journalists work in a time of war?,” journalist Ben Aris of Business News Europe surveys increasing pressures facing Russian journalists in recent years and how some media outlets maintain a modicum of independence. An unnamed editor of an unnamed business news outlet summed it up: “Yes, it is scary, as you can spend life in jail, but we don't self-censor…The main problem is the laws are so vague, you never know what is going to happen. You don’t know what constitutes a state secret or when you are revealing ‘counter-sanctions information’ until after you have published a story.” 

Aris interviews the editor-in-chief of Kommersant, one of Russia’s top relatively independent media sources, on how he navigates legal restrictions. For example, Kommersant observes the state ban ons directly referring to Russia’s war on Ukraine as a “war.” However, they directly quote others who do use that word–including people whom they must legally identify as having been designated “foreign agents” by the Russian government.

 These coping strategies resemble those that Soviet-era writers used to evade that era’s censorship. For example, just as Kommersant today avoids using the word “war” but quotes others who do so, Soviet scholars would write books denouncing “bourgeois falsifications“ by their foreign counterparts. But in order to provide proper Marxist-Leninist counter-arguments to those “falsifications,” they would study the foreign scholars’ views in detail. Indeed, they would indeed often reproduce the arguments in order to refute them, thus making those thoughts available to their Soviet readers despite the censors. 

Soviet authors, like those in other censorship regimes, would use “Aesopian” language, the use of “allegories, allusions, citations, ellipses, parody, and other devices” to deliver political or social commentary that perceptive readers could understand, just as the storyteller Aesop criticized human foibles through stories about animals. A Soviet TV adaptation of the children’s story “Winnie the Pooh” (Russian title: Винни Пух), for example, exposed children to a hero who daydreamed and thought only of his stomach, in contrast to Soviet “socialist-realist” literature that espoused collectivism and self-sacrifice, according to one scholarly analysis of the Soviet Pooh show . (Ironically, Chinese censors ban online mentions and images of Winnie-the-Pooh because netizens have been using that image to mock Chinese president Xi Jinping (https://www.npr.org/2023/03/23/1165504942/winnie-the-pooh-xi-jinping-china-film). 

Aesopian tactics continue in some pockets of present-day Russia. In January a Financial Times columnist noted, “The bestseller tables in Moscow’s bookshops have an Aesopian flavour: a collection of Tolstoy’s pacifist writings, life in Germany during the rise of Nazism, and philosophical musings about intellectuals’ culpability in war. Books by writers labelled ‘foreign agents’, a black mark equating them with spies, are now sold wrapped in brown paper.”  A book that came out in January dealt with the return to democracy after periods of dictatorship in Spain, Portugal, and Greece. The book attracted enormous attention in Russia, even among high officials, and has “become a pretext for discussion of taboo topics, such as political transition, the health and death of the leader, defeat in a colonial war, the end of isolation and, indeed, the end of the regime,” the book’s author wrote in a New York Times guest essay. The author notes, “numerous bookstores are using it to quietly indicate their positions. А major store near the notorious Lubyanka, the headquarters of the Federal Security Service (and previously the K.G.B.) in Moscow, placed copies of “The End of the Regime” right next to “Putin’s Path,” a hagiography devoted to the Russian leader, and a book on Stalin. The implication was clear.... Nevertheless, there is no legal way for the authorities to ban it.”

Oh, and Prigozhin…

As this post goes to press, barely 24 hours have passed since reports of the crash of a Russian plane in which paramilitary leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin was listed as a passenger. Rumors, theories, videos, commentaries and questions swirl about the crash, its causes, whether Prigozhin even died, and the event’s implications for the Wagner mercenary group, Russia’s presence in Africa, the war in Ukraine, and Russia’s own stability. Previous NattoThoughts postings, including “The Code of the Underworld,” and  “Russia After Putin: Dictatorship, Democracy, or Chaos?” provide insights into the political context of the Prigozhin phenomenon and scenarios for Russia, and “​​Vocabulary of Mutiny, Mafia and Misery” links to reputable sources for timely reporting and analysis on Russia.

August 28: Added links to other NattoThoughts postings on Russian information operations.