Last month, five people were arrested during Hong Kong bookstore raids for selling ‘seditious’ literature. Human rights groups cited the arrests as evidence of ‘the chilling reality of what the city has become’.

Meanwhile, China’s Ethnic Unity Law gave Beijing expanded legal tools to target dissidents abroad.

Across Australia, Britain, and the US, concerns are growing that such threats are enabling Beijing to discipline the Chinese diaspora. The think tank UK-China Transparency surmises ‘the situation in China itself has been partially replicated in the UK’.

The response has been to securitise against a threat to free speech emanating directly from Beijing. Indeed, MI5 has briefed university Vice-Chancellors in the UK on foreign interference.

The totalitarian onion

Western understanding of party-states typically characterise them as totalitarian: political organisations that dismantle societal boundaries and exercise total domination.

This view owes much to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of Nazi Germany and the USSR.

Arendt described these regimes as ‘onion-like’: party leadership sat at the centre, radiating political ‘truth’ across concentric circles of society. Political narrative, and the disciplining of dissent, was one-directional: from the centre outwards.

Western analysis of China often mirrors this structure. Outlets like China Digital Times publish leaked ‘propaganda directives’, reinforcing the impression of centralised control. Scholars, meanwhile, focus on unmasking the Party’s hand in controlling narratives.

Red lines

But focusing solely on Party control risks overlooking the nuances of discourse discipline.

Despite insisting raided bookshops crossed a ‘red line’, Hong Kong’s Security Chief asserted there is no list of prohibited titles. Instead, much like food vendors, booksellers must ensure their product contains nothing ‘harmful’.

This shifts the burden of judgement from the state to the bookseller, and, as the raided bookstore lamented, renders ‘red lines’ ambiguous.

Ruairidh encountered this tightrope firsthand. His local bookshop refused to supply him with works on Scottish history, fearing its content could inspire separatism in China. The bookshop, not the state, thus enacted de facto censorship.

Many Chinese students avoid studying international relations at foreign universities, instead playing it safe with apolitical disciplines such as business management

The same applies to DeepSeek, frequently framed in the west as a disciplinary arm of Beijing. Rather than emanating a core worldview of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), however, the AI exercises hyper-caution around China’s ambiguous red lines.

Ruairidh observed such behaviour among Chinese students. Many avoided studying international relations at foreign universities, fearing association with ‘foreign perspectives’ might bring them too close to a red line. Instead, students found safer distance in apolitical disciplines like business management.

Fear of the state is not, however, the sole, or even the overriding, factor for self-censorship. Rather, as Momo attests, people more commonly exercise hyper-caution to avoid creating tensions in a relationship.

Self-advancement

CCP actors often exploit such ambiguities for personal advancement or localised power.

Ruairidh encountered an official exercising a ban on Taiwanese passports, even pressuring Taiwanese students to surrender their documents.

On further inquiry, Ruairidh discovered the individual was not acting in the capacity of their employment, but as a party member. They had ‘misinterpreted’ the party line and abused their position. Their actions would thus cease immediately.

The Taiwanese students were never hassled again.

Such an encounter is distinctly Arendtian, reflecting how petty self-advancement drives action in a party-state.

It nevertheless challenges the onion-like model: discipline does not originate at the core but with the ambitions of one rogue agent.

Gendered norms

Not all power struggles are, however, political. Gender conflicts also shape discourse control.

Momo, a Chinese female, found she was expected to remain silent and passive during political conversations; a piece of furniture in the background. When she attempted to engage in such discussions, men frequently policed her discourse, encouraging her to return to a background role.

As a Chinese international student researching IR, Momo's male Chinese peers silenced her on common discussion points, claiming she was transgressing into ‘sensitive’ territory.

Often, these claims were absurd; the discussions contained no 'dangerous' comments.  

A male peer, for example, reprimanded Momo for mentioning a scholarly work on 'foreign interference' in New Zealand–Australia relations. He chastised her for failing to recognise that the term's ‘sensitive connotation’ in China meant the work was 'politically sensitive'.

The diced onion

While recent events in Hong Kong capture headlines, the policing of discourse is often carried out at societal level, not by state authorities. The Chinese party-state appears loath to suppress dissenting views by dismantling societal structures.

Motivations for societal censoring are diverse, from hyper-caution and self-advancement to gendered hierarchies. Disciplining is thus not a top-down silencing force, but a multidirectional contested practice; the boundaries of acceptable speech are constantly negotiated across society.

Discourse disciplining is not achieved by political domination; it is a complex process of interactions between different members of society

To understand China, we must update Arendt’s onion model. Rather than a whole onion with the party at its core, discourse disciplining works like a diced onion: not one form of political domination but a complex process of interactions between different members of society.

Positioned outside the core, the party-state is, however, far from absent. It is instead the heat of the stove: not directing every word, but creating the atmosphere that incites societal censorship; the force responsible for the consequence of what is produced when the contents of the pan encounter heat.

Western responses

Western attempts to securitise against Chinese discourse control are Schmittian: they seek to identify a clear human enemy, and eliminate it.

This is problematic because it rests on the assumption that disciplinary power emanates solely from Beijing, overlooking its nuanced social dimensions. It also risks Sinophobia, identifying all Chinese nationals as potential enforcers of Beijing’s worldview and, thus, as security threats.

Western attempts to securitise against Chinese discourse assume a clear human enemy. Yet disciplinary power doesn't emanate solely from Bejing, but from other societal pressures, too

More constructive would be to recognise that this issue more commonly arises out of social, as well as political, pressures. Addressing the problem in higher education requires greater awareness of these societal pressures, and would enable teachers to detect and mitigate them in classroom situations.

We must better equip staff to interpret and respond to these pressures, rather than merely warning them of Beijing's hidden hand.

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