Crossing the Straits: Why Blitzchung and Blizzard Matter on the Mainland

At the end of a week when Blizzard harshly, and then somewhat less harshly, sanctioned Blitzchung for using an official Blizzard stream as a platform to trumpet the cause of Hong Kong against the Communist Party’s erosion of their prized civil rights, the Hearthstone community here in the US finds itself awkwardly and unusually situated on the front lines of a geopolitical fight that’s seen our niche little game become the subject of Important Thoughts expressed by people who, if they knew what Hearthstone was before, would likely have dismissed it as the pastime of nerdish children.

From where I sit, the response of the community here — players, casters, even some Blizzard employees — has been heartening. Acts of solidarity with Blitzchung, and by extension with Hong Kong, have garnered attention across the larger gaming world and beyond, and swelled this player, at least, with pride in the willingness of those in the community to stand up, be heard, and in many cases pay a price for doing so.

A few threads have emerged in the many conversations I’ve participated in or eavesdropped on over this time: As US citizens, we value individual rights and believe that we, and Blizzard, should stand against silencing of political speech by a totalitarian government; as consumers, we newly question our role as participants in a global capitalist system that makes such silencing good business; and as fans of one or more Blizzard games in particular, we are a little embarrassed, I think it’s fair to say, that the corporate mythology of this being a somehow “good” global gaming corporation worked on us so thoroughly, making the betrayal feel personal in some way.

This idea that Blizzard has let down its players by acting as it did is an interesting one, and particularly interesting because in that light, Blizzard finds itself in an impossible situation. For as much as their stated “every voice matters” ethos seems here an endorsement of the individual, and therefore implicitly of the general flavor of liberal democracy in the West, there is a substantial and rapidly growing group of Blizzard players for whom any implicit endorsement of Blitzchung’s actions would also be seen as a profound betrayal: namely, among many Chinese players of their games.

This ties into other threads I’ve seen in discussions within the community, and indeed in discussions of the even larger, and arguably much more disturbing, fight along similar lines that the NBA found itself enmeshed in at the same time. The usual gloss is something along the lines of “the situation is complicated” or “I don’t really understand all the issues,” an admission of some awareness that while we in the US may be able to fit the Hong Kong situation nicely into a familiar box of “freedom-loving people struggling against a system that wants to utterly subjugate them,” on the other side of the divide are hundreds of millions of people who see the people of Hong Kong as traitors, agents of a global system whose main aim in China is to slice away its sovereignty bit by bit until it is little more than a playground for Western interests.

There is a reason they believe this: It’s happened before.

I certainly can’t claim to be any kind of expert in the history of Western involvement in China, but a few years ago, perceiving along with more or less everyone else that much of what happens in the coming century depends upon relations between China and the West — and understanding, further, that Chinese culture is renowned for its long view of history, and correspondingly long memory — I began to read in an effort to understand what that history is like, and in particular how the mistrust of China for the West, and vice-versa, came about.

It was easy for me, having been in school at the tail end of the Cold War, to put this down to the generic rabid anti-Communist sentiment that served as the basis of most international relations at the time. This is not entirely wrong. I knew, for example, that at the founding of the UN, China’s permanent seat on the Security Council was occupied by the government-in-exile of the military dictator the West had supported against Mao in the Revolution, resident then and now in Taiwan, which China considers a rebel province even as, for decades, the West considered it “China,” and the whole of the mainland an international void. Certainly seeing their defeated enemies installed under their name in the supposedly representative body meant to democratize international relations did nothing to discourage a rather wry view on the mainland of what Western values in action really mean.

Of course I had at one time heard of the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion as items of Chinese history, but for me they had the indistinct character of something one learns in class without being able to explain why it was being taught — floating free of context, named and empty. The more I tried to remedy that, the more I realized that whatever I had been taught about it probably didn’t take root because it conflicted quite strongly with beliefs I may have held in my youth about who wore the white hats in the great Spaghetti Western of world history.

It is sordid and honestly shocking. If you’re interested in some gruesome detail, I can recommend Drugging a Nation: The Story of China and the Opium Curse. The book was written as a series of magazine articles in 1907 by the American playwright and novelist Samuel Merwin based on his experiences there, and while it does have some, let’s say charitably, old-fashioned habits of thought and expression that may be jarring to a contemporary sensibility, it is a remarkably sympathetic account of China as it existed at the time, and a scathing indictment of the foreign colonies and enclaves that had been forced upon it. The book also has the virtues of being in the public domain, relatively short, and engagingly written (again, in the style of writing at that time), so you can try it for free if you’re interested.

When most Americans think of colonialism — to the extent they ever do, a national failing for discussion at another time, perhaps — it is mostly in terms of the so-called “Race for Africa,” or perhaps the British Empire’s great colonial elephant, India, or the US’s own forays into colonialism via territorial conquest in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. But the English passion for tea was not born on some vast plantations in Cornwall. Not for all the tea in China would I attempt to encompass the vast significance of the British East India Company to world history in such a little note as this, but it is worth understanding, a little, how international trade worked under the system they essentially founded.

The prevailing economic theory of the day — mercantilism — considered the most important activity in national economies to be trade, and trade in turn to be a game with one goal: Accumulate all the gold you can. Winning meant taking in more gold, as a nation, than you sent out to other countries, and gold was in turn the foundation of a nation’s wealth, the soundness of its currency, and so on. But gold is, we can see in hindsight, a terrible international currency for a variety of reasons, most stemming from the fact that all of the gold ever extracted by humans in the history of the world, if melted down, would fit into a few Olympic-sized swimming pools. Given that countries were reluctant to pay gold for international trade commodities, and anyway there wasn’t enough of it around to serve as a medium of exchange on that scale, the system that arose was one in which goods were transported and traded for other goods internationally, with goods of greater value at home brought back to be sold domestically for currency (based on gold), which was fine under the rules of the game, because that gold wasn’t leaving your country.

Now, China had, in addition to the all-important tea, many goods of value in England — silk in particular. As a largely agrarian and poor traditional society at the time, however, China had little need for the kinds of goods England had to offer, requiring sophistication and scale to manufacture. China really only wanted gold in trade.

There was, however, a commodity that the British could produce in abundance that China might want — or that, rather, China could be made to want: opium. Opium could be grown at scale in India, conveniently located along the route from England to China. To open up the Chinese market and establish some basis for trade that did not involve taking a mercantilist L, the British Empire very intentionally set out to create a drug problem in China. Ever encountered dark conspiracy theories of some anti-US cabal in South America conspiring to weaken the United States by getting Americans addicted to cocaine? Well, that’s probably not true, or it’s at least an exaggeration, but in the case of importing opium to China, this is exactly what happened. It was an official act of trade policy.

Now, the Emperor and the mandarins at his court and the constellation of regional and local officials forming the Chinese bureaucracy, understandably, did not want their country full of opium addicts. And, to be fair, the Han Chinese were at the time of first Western engagement accustomed to being in a position to dictate terms to other people in the region, so they maintained very strict control over trade and only awarded trade rights on terms that the West found, rightly, humiliating. To disabuse the Emperor of the notion that they would be treated the same way, and to carry out the aforementioned opium plans, the British with their justly feared Navy started not one but two wars in China, winning them both, with the consequence that opium would indeed be imported by China if China knew what was good for it, and to ensure that the whole scheme was appropriately remunerative, the British also forced territorial concessions that put the Western powers in control of many vital Chinese ports. These included the monumentally important city of Shanghai and — wasn’t this article about Hearthstone? — Hong Kong.

Merwin’s account of what these foreign enclaves were like is colorfully appalling. They were not subject to Chinese law, and in truth it seemed they were mostly subject to no law at all. Merwin’s descriptions make me think of Shanghai in this period as something like the bar scene in Mos Eisley blown up to the scale of a city, only this time in the midst of a people with a culture highly focused on tradition and mutual responsibility, about which more in a moment. These cities attracted adventurers, con men, and fugitives of every stripe, but especially of the stripe where they would love to swindle you out of your last dollar if they possibly could. The enclaves were rife with drunken mayhem, gambling, prostitution, and of course opium dens. Chinese efforts to suppress the addiction among their people were, predictably, ineffective when the dens in these enclaves remained pointedly open for business. These, then, were the ambassadors of Western values in mainland China.

The process by which China, over time, reclaimed its own cities is not too relevant to our purposes here, except to say that it from time to time involved massacres of comparatively ill-defended Christian missionary settlements in the interior, events that were widely and gruesomely reported on in the West and probably have not contributed favorably to the history of Western-Chinese mutual understanding. Merwin’s description of how these massacres came about is relevant, and I’ll address it further in a second, but due to subsequent treaties and settlements, the enclave of Hong Kong proved to be the odd colony out in this resumption of Chinese control. Although terms were renegotiated to make a colony a lease, with a defined handover date, until the end of the 20th century Hong Kong was a proper British protectorate on Chinese soil.

In the West, we see Hong Kong as a symbol of what might have been. As Maoist China spasmodically tried to modernize, reinforcing Western notions of Chinese backwardness and cruelty — particularly in the Great Leap Forward, possibly the most murderous act by a government perpetrated on its own people in human history — Hong Kong prospered, became a world financial and trading center, and while assertions of the rights of its citizens are given a not-entirely-deserved rosy hue here in the US, certainly the contrast with the mainland in terms of human rights is stark.

China, too, saw this prosperity and drew conclusions from it that have led it to become the largest economy on the planet. But while, yes, Hong Kong was a lesson in building prosperity, it was also a reminder of national humiliation and subjugation. Hong Kong was, and until it becomes truly a part of China, remains a colonial intrusion, a lesson that while some of the tools that built it may be productively used, those who bore them to these shores are not to be trusted. The ideals that the Hong Kong protestors espouse are, in this view, another addictive poison that the West peddles in service of its goals.

I say all this because it is too easy to dismiss the attitude of people on the mainland as a form of brainwashing promulgated by a clever totalitarian regime. And while I’ll never argue that the ruling party in China is anything but totalitarian, it insults Chinese citizens, I think, to believe that the official view of Hong Kong they have been presented is distorted beyond all recognition. If anything, the idea of Hong Kong as a bulwark of freedom and self-determination can, in historical context, be seen as the greater distortion as it appears from the mainland.

Relevant, too, in the midst of the current controversy is that Blizzard, a Western company, was the delivery mechanism for the message, since it was in the name of commerce that the intolerable situation of which Hong Kong is an ongoing reminder was promulgated to begin with. The Chinese urge to gain a seat at the table in the boardrooms of Western corporations is not merely driven by profit, although of course it surely is in part, but also by the thought that from a position of influence, the nefarious tendency of Western companies to act as agents of empire might be curbed. One needn’t go as far back as the Opium Wars to see examples of how the US’s imperial reach has in the postwar period been extended by commerce to the farthest reaches of the globe. Indeed, our naive supposition that the act of commerce is somehow unrelated to geopolitics is a significant source of the outrage in the case of Blizzard and other companies, where seemingly the censorship prevalent on the mainland is being imported to these shores. Evidently the idea of private companies as vectors of governing ideology is not as just and right an arrangement as many in the West have previously claimed to believe.

So with all this established — that Hong Kong means something very different on the mainland than it does in the US, that the Chinese paranoia about the influence of Western commercial interests is quite firmly grounded in historical experience, and an attitude that flows not just from the top down — the last question of interest is one that Blizzard itself has protested much about, namely the degree to which Chinese pressure was a factor in the harshness of Blitzchung’s initial punishment, or whether there was Chinese approval sought before that punishment was reduced. In Blizzard’s public statements, the answer on all counts is no, no, a thousand times no. That answer is almost certainly not true, but it is also probably correct in a literal sense, a set of facts that many here in the US may find difficult to reconcile.

Merwin, in a fascinating chapter of his book he calls “China’s Sincerity,” addresses riots and massacres taking place against Western targets in one particular province, and embarks on one of those analyses I alluded to originally that clashes with contemporary ears, as at times it takes a frankly racial approach to the question. However, as a window on Western perception of Chinese culture as it existed at the time, it is not devoid of interest, and indeed lays out a social system whose traces one can see quite easily in the network of relations, such as we observe it, in modern China.

His observations hinge initially on the strange fact that, while these periodic massacres are acts of wanton and perhaps relished violence, the pattern of them seems to indicate that they take place more or less at official direction — that is, that the regional officials of the Chinese government are perfectly able to control this latent violence stoked by hatred of the intruding Westerners, and seemingly that hatred only blooms at the direction, and with the through-the-grapevine permission, of the local authorities. Merwin marvels that such rage as revealed by these outbreaks can lie beneath the surface of so many seemingly cordial daily interactions, and once loosed, so easily be contained again. It is hard not to think of certain conspiracy theories that see the mobilization of protestors in Hong Kong as a vast CIA operation when presented with this analysis. Perhaps to a certain cultural experience, the thought that the riots are not sanctioned by some greater power is impossible.

From there, Merwin dilates upon what the Chinese culture of shared social responsibility looks like to his American eyes. Rather than paste the analysis in verbatim, I will attempt to summarize it: To Merwin, the individual in China is enclosed in a set of concentric group memberships — the individual as part of a family, the family as part of a neighborhood, and so on from neighborhood to village to region to China more broadly — and in these nested circles, responsibility both radiates outward and pushes inward. An individual who commits a crime, say, does so not as an individual but as a member of a family, and the family in turn has a responsibility to make amends to others outside its group. If the individual cannot be found to have punishment carried out for this crime, the family will serve instead. As Merwin puts it:

The family, in order to protect itself, trains its individuals to live up to their promises, or else not to make promises. The neighborhood, well knowing that it will be held accountable for its units, watches them with a close eye. When a new family comes into a neighborhood, the neighbors crowd about and ask questions which are not, in view of the facts, so impertinent as they might sound. Indeed, this sense of family and neighborhood accountability is so deeply rooted that it is not uncommon, on the failure of a merchant to meet his obligations, for his family and friends to step forward and help him to settle his accounts. It is the only way in which they can clear themselves. –pg.76

To the degree that contemporary China expects Western companies to comport themselves as members of Chinese society on the mainland, and to the degree that the network of social responsibility that Merwin describes persists in that society — and I find it difficult to argue that this basic idea has somehow died off in the course of a century — then Blizzard’s actions, and their accounts of it, make eminent sense.

Is it untrue, then, that as many have alleged, it was Blizzard’s effort to protect its own business interests in China that led to the harshness of the sanctions? Not at all. The pursuit of those interests requires that the company behave in what is deemed a socially responsible manner, just as certain norms would be expected to be observed by foreign companies operating in the US. These norms dictate that, since it was on Blizzard’s watch, and on its own platform, that the offense was created, Blizzard had best be seen to mete out appropriate punishment. Failing that, the circles of responsibility embedding Blizzard’s presence on the mainland would have taken it out on them. This is not speculation. It is a set of relations that enforces social order in China, and has done so since long before Communist rule.

So, yes, China is a totalitarian state, but not perhaps in the manner many Americans envision when that term is used. Our Western imaginations are fired by tales of social credit systems, concentration camps, and blatant injustices carried out by courts and judges. These things are indeed terrible, they are real (although the “social credit” thing is more Black Mirror fantasy than reality so far), and they appeal to our American imagination of total government control as an Orwellian nightmare of compliance enforced via a surveillance state and fear of being disappeared in the night, but they are not the most lived-in means by which the totalitarian project of the Party is carried out. That distinction belongs to a set of traditions that have long enforced social order, and of which the Party’s control over the country can be seen as an extension of traditional relations. The order does not come from some central committee or police apparatchik; it comes from your business ties and associates, when it needs to be spoken of at all: Take care of this, or we will take care of it for you.

The question of how one does business in China, taking into account the context in which Western commercial interests on the mainland find themselves, has never been simple and seems unlikely to become so any time soon. Hong Kong has been seen in the West as a test case for a clash of those old Cold War world views, communism and capitalism, but honestly this question has been definitively resolved on the mainland itself, showing that they are not only compatible, but that one can be harnessed effectively as a powerful policy tool by the other. Instead, what Hong Kong represents now is an opening of the question whether a Western system that short-circuits traditional social relations can be digested without giving rise to vast upheaval and violence along the lines of what ultimately led to the reintegration of the other former Western enclaves imposed upon China at gunpoint. Make no mistake: Hong Kong’s special arrangement has a defined end date of 2047. It will be integrated if the Communist Party of China still exists at that time to integrate it. This tiny conflict over a digital card game we all love provides us an inkling of how the resolution of that conflict is likely to go. The early returns are not good.