Brave New World Meets Nineteen Eighty-Four in a New Golden Age: On the Passing of Liu Xiaobo, Advent of Big Data, and Resurgence of China as World Power

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss recent years’ worrying development in the intensified persecution of dissidents in the People’s Republic of China, as most vividly symbolised by the death of the country’s high-profile prisoner of conscience Liu Xiaobo, and the government’s increasing and worsening intolerance for demands for political freedom and pluralism from the civil society, and how a perfect police state in this largest dictatorship on earth has now become imminent with the planned nationwide introduction of a “social credit system”. The paper also examines the real implications of President Xi Jinping’s “China Dream”, and looks into the impressive outreach of China’s economic power through the Belt and Rad Initiative (BRI) that not only aims to make the global economy a friendly place for Chinese commerce, but also to elevate nationalistic popular support for the Chinese Communist Party’s one-party rule in a new Chinese “golden era of prosperity” as well as to extract complicity from foreign governments in assisting the PRC’s domestic oppression on political freedom and civil liberties to reach beyond the country’s borders.

Keywords: Liu Xiaobo, dissent, dissidents, “China Dream”, Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Innenpolitik­-Aussenpolitik nexus, “Golden Age”, “Era of Prosperity”, social credit system, surveillance, China, Malaysia