Welcome back to China Uncensored,
I'm your host Chris Chappell.
If you were living under a brutal, authoritarian regime,
how would you change things?
Would you rally your fellow citizens to take up arms
against the tyrant?
Or would you use nonviolent civil resistance?
I'm willing to bet you already have a strong feeling about
which way you would go.
But what if I told you that according to historical data,
the most likely way to make meaningful change
is through nonviolent resistance?
You might not believe me.
But I sat down with a man who wants to convince you otherwise—
Dr. Peter Ackerman,
founder of the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict.
Nonviolent, conflict?
Sounds like an oxymoron.
But his organization has advised dissidents in dozens of countries
on how to create lasting regime change without using violence.
Thank you for joining me today, Dr. Ackerman.
So, why nonviolent resistance?
Well, why totalitarian rule?
It's a response to totalitarian rule,
to the kind of rule that people feel oppressed under,
that makes their lives miserable, and puts them under threat of death,
pestilence, bad education, injustice.
All the horribles that one can think of for humanity
correlate with tyrannical rule,
and one of the responses to tyrannical rule that I believe
has been effective for decades if not millennia is civil resistance,
or nonviolent resistance, or people power,
when understood and used with the most strategically sound methods.
But can nonviolent resistance really stand up to a bloodthirsty dictator?
Remember, a bloodthirsty dictator can't shoot everybody with his own gun.
He can try.
Yeah, but even he doesn't try.
What he can, what he must do,
is he must have people who will do it for him.
Even Hitler had people who had to do it for him.
So he has to muster an army, a police,
and not all these organizations remain loyal.
Sometimes, the more bloodthirsty you are,
the more brittle you are, because the bloodthirstiness
carries over to your own military.
Remember, the newest head of North Korea took his uncle,
put him on a fence post, and shot him with an artillery round,
in front of the cadets on graduation day, as I understand the story.
Look at how solid True Korea is.
Yeah, it's as stable as you can imagine.
The American Revolution was a violent revolution,
and America's the greatest country on Earth,
so how can nonviolent revolution be better than violent revolution?
Well, there were important nonviolent tactics used,
like the tea party.
The Boston Tea Party was a nonviolent tactic.
No one is saying ...
We can't be absolute.
No one is saying that violent tactics
linked into a strategy can't be effective.
It was against the British,
but there are also factors that were not military in character
that also impacted the outcome.
An occupation is a difficult thing from across an ocean.
Now, we have done a study of 323 insurrections between 1900 and 2006.
They were divided into two kinds of insurrections,
those dominated by violent tactics, guerrilla warfare, insurrection, terrorism,
whatever you might want to think of,
and those that are dominated by tactics that maintain nonviolent discipline,
strikes, boycotts, mass protests.
There's hundreds of them, bank holidays, consumer boycotts.
Where people stop supporting the system.
Or disrupt the system.
Disruption.
What we found was that of the two-thirds
that were dominated by violent tactics,
based on their own goals as articulated,
they reached their goals 26% of the time.
With respect to campaigns of civil resistance
or people power movements,
those goals articulated by them were reached 53% of the time,
and the transfer of power that occurred was 10 times more likely to be democratic
after a civil resistance movement than a violent insurrection.
You're saying nonviolent resistance is actually
a more effective means at achieving democracy.
That data would suggest just that.
Wow.
People like to use the term nonviolence and confuse it with nonviolent conflict.
When you think about nonviolence, you think about people
who are there to basically convince you of the error of your ways,
to sit cross-legged with incense and say,
"Beat me until you basically have sympathy of my views
so you'll change your ways."
It has a component that's very moral in its impetus,
which is a wonderful thing,
but it doesn't overthrow dictators.
Because I have yet to meet a dictator,
or hear about one, when he's asked to give up some of his power,
he says back, "Would Tuesday be soon enough?"
They don't give their power up. It has to be taken,
so nonviolent conflict is the act of disruption
that leads to defections that undermines the legitimacy of a dictator
or an authoritarian.
You're saying this is an aggressive form of nonviolent conflict.
No. All nonviolent conflict is aggressive. It's just that nonviolence,
which is peaceful, tranquil, has nothing to do ...
It's not a strategy.
It's a morality.
It's a fine morality.
Now, one of the things that confuses people is,
what about Gandhi and King?
They both were committed pacifists, true,
but nobody would care about Gandhi if, in 1930,
he didn't leave his ashram, walk 210 miles to Dandi Beach,
pick up a handful of mud, throw it into a pot of boiling water,
turn it into salt, which was illegal to make,
and have 250 million people follow him,
do the same thing,
and then read from the viceroy of India that if this disruption continues,
and the local constabularies around India,
if only 100,000 basically defect,
we're going to have to leave.
This is basically a targeted strategy of regime change.
Power shifting. It may lead to regime change,
or it may lead to a new mode of coexistence
between the tyrant and the opposition,
but it's a power shifting,
a dramatic power shifting to restore human rights,
to restore justice, liberty, property rights,
the things that basically advanced societies have a lot of and enjoy.
What are some of the tactics that you encourage
dissenting groups around the world to use?
We don't give advice about what tactics to use,
but we try to make them understand that
there is a tremendous variety of tactics.
Let's take in Poland,
it was the Gdansk shipyard strike.
In South Africa, it was the boycott in Port Elizabeth.
In India, it was the salt march.
We did the story of the Nashville lunch-counter boycott
in the civil rights movement.
In Chile, it was a referendum that undid Pinochet.
He thought he was going to win.
He didn't.
He told the military, "Please, let's forget we ever had a referendum."
The military says, "You're done." Remember?
I do.
He wants to shoot them. They won't shoot.
He's in big trouble. In Ukraine, it was a protest in Maidan
for a month that basically led to a military defection.
In Egypt, which is I think yet to be successful,
we had Tahrir Square, which was that eruption.
Let's shift over to China.
Then of course Tiananmen in China.
...that didn't exactly go so well.
Now, when you say it didn't go well,
that tactic alone didn't get the job done,
but there's a difference between tactics and strategy.
A strategy that works is when you knit a series of tactics together.
It went very well if you measure the tactic in terms of
successfully disrupting the status quo.
It certainly did that.
The question wasn't about that tactic,
but what would come next.
The only way you know what comes next is if you're trained
to think about how to link tactics into a strategy,
and that's what the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict does.
Our site is very rich. We help dissidents around the world.
We don't tell people who we're helping,
but we've now helped probably dissidents in 70 countries
over the last 15 years.
That's what we do.
It's a coaching mechanism to make people think strategically
about the campaign of civil resistance.
How do you coach that?
Because in the Tiananmen protest as well as
many other grassroots movements around the world,
the question is always, who is in charge?
Who is making these decisions?
Now, often, they end up shooting themselves in the foot.
There's a lot of different ideas.
First of all, who's shooting who in the foot in a nonviolent conflict?
Themselves. It's a metaphor.
Did they shoot them? Yeah, it's a metaphor, okay,
but there's a lot there that needs to be unpacked.
A nonviolent resistance movement done badly,
people will shoot themselves in the foot,
but they won't shoot themselves in the foot.
They might shoot themselves in the foot,
but it might hit the little toe.
A violent insurrection that screws up,
they shoot themselves in the head.
There's no coming back from it.
We have data to show that a civil resistance movement
that even is not successful lays the seeds,
potentially, for another one four, five, or six years later.
That's exactly what's happening in Iran today.
Or like in Hong Kong,
where they had the Umbrella Movement in 2014.
Even though that did not necessarily achieve all of their goals,
that movement is still alive.
Exactly.
In a country like China,
how can the population that is under so much propaganda ...
The Communist Party has this thing called patriotic education,
where from a young age, people are taught that the Party
is there for them,
that they have to love the Party,
that the Party is China. In an environment like that,
how can people decide to begin a nonviolent resistance movement?
Well, let's answer this by referring to Natan Sharansky,
who was the great refusenik in the Soviet Union,
where that ideological indoctrination was just as intense.
He asked a very interesting question.
How was it that the people in the gulags,
the people who basically were under the most pressure,
lived the most miserable lives,
were able to predict the end of the Soviet Union
where all the intelligence agencies of the world
and all the smart people who were Russian experts couldn't?
Because they knew something that's profoundly true,
that in every authoritarian regime, there's four kinds of people.
There's the population that's apathetic and just doing nothing.
Then, there's the part of the population that's willing to dissent.
Then, they're in opposition to the third group, which is the true believer,
who basically is at the very top and believes the ideology,
whatever ridiculous justification it may have for mistreating people
the way they do.
Then you have the latent double-thinker,
who is a normal human being,
who hates to see the collateral damage of what the true believers
are trying to inculcate.
They become disillusioned.
That's exactly it.
Double-thinkers are the subject of disillusionment, exactly.
Perfectly expressed.
So, the strategy is for the activists to convert the double-thinkers,
or make them go from latent to active.
Yes. Now, China, we know there's lots of double-thinkers,
and they're latent.
The question is, how do they-
Take action?
First, how do they expose themselves safely to find other double-thinkers,
and then take action? The disruption, like I told you in India,
and I don't think there was 250 million people saying before that,
"I want the Raj over," but as soon as the guy made salt,
it was easy for people to say that that's what they wanted.
People need to see that they can win.
They can win, or more importantly, it's that they can express
their double-thinking without fear of terrible reprisals.
They're always afraid of being the one head that's above
the other that gets chopped off.
One of the tactics I know you talk about is signage.
What do you mean by signage?
One of the questions I've been asked all the time is,
"Won't the Internet make all this right?"
The answer is it may or it may not.
The Internet is interesting in terms of its ability to
distribute information individual to individual,
but it's also a problem,
because it basically allows people to be tracked individual to individual.
You can have granularity of communication, granularity of tracking.
The Chinese Communist Party is especially good at using social media.
So I'm told, yeah.
Now, the one thing that's interesting,
that I've been trying to tell people to think about,
is stop this obsession with the Internet, because the Internet is great,
but it's also a choke point.
Unless they're watching this show,
in which case they should still be on the air.
Then you're unclogging the artery that's been clogged,
and thank you for doing that, but the one thing, people have to go outside.
There have to be buildings, and lots and lots of signs expressing dissent
have a virtue of being out there.
They show that people are not in control, that they claim to be.
They can offer directions. They can interact with the Internet.
You know, "Click here." We haven't done nearly enough technologically
to make sign-making instantaneous and hard to track as to who is doing it.
If you want to say about the Internet, "Go here," like in Tahrir Square,
everybody thought it was a Facebook revolution,
because people always refer to things based on
what they're experiencing at the moment.
Facebook was taking off, but the fact is that 6% of the population
only were Internet-savvy, Internet-connected, and the Internet was shut off
before Tahrir Square, but we don't want to get into those facts.
But, It may be a choke point, but it may be an addendum to something,
a form of communication that's not a choke point,
but becomes a magnifier to something that already exists.
That's what signage can be.
I wonder if this would count.
One of the largest groups of nonviolent resisters in China right now
is practitioners of Falun Gong.
I know one of the tactics they use is to write messages on Chinese money
and pass that around.
Same idea.
What can groups like that in China do to effect change?
If we're talking about the logistical support of
nonviolent tactics through signage,
one of the things we also have to realize is that Facebook is not a strategy.
You've got goals, and you've got tactics, boycotts, strikes,
and then you have a strategy that knits them together.
Then you have logistics that support a strategy.
Facebook is communications logistics.
It's nothing more than that.
We get enamored with Facebook and think it's secure for everything,
but it's just a logistical tool.
We need to understand that.
Then we say,
"What other logistical tools can achieve the same things?"
Once you basically sharpen your logistical tools, your knives,
for the tactics you're going to use, that's all they're used for.
Then there's the selection of tactics,
and the selection of tactics is far more important,
because the disruption you create will lead to
a certain level of repression.
It might lead to obedience,
or it may lead to a certain level of disruption.
That may lead to defection.
The authoritarian regime wants to have as much obedience
with as little repression as possible.
Of course.
The nonviolent resistance-
The civil resisters want to have as much defection
with the least amount of disruption.
That's where the competition is,
because if you have too much disruption and too little defection,
the public will become apathetic.
If you have too little obedience with too much repression,
the repression will backfire, and then-
People will defect.
the authoritarian has lost his main tool.
So when you think of tactics, nonviolent tactics.
There's really two forms of non violent tactics
Doing things the authoritarian wants you to stop doing,
like a protest or a march,
and stop doing things they want you to continue to do,
which is what you're talking about here.
The most important thing I would do is think,
what else can we do in combination?
Because it's the combination of tactics that create a strategy.
Tactics on their own is not a strategy.
The power is in the combination.
At the end of the day, it's a game of chess between
the authoritarian regime and the resisters.
Right.
Each using their tactics to try and defeat the other.
Each using their tactics to create the best strategy.
What the authoritarian is most worried about is that
the opposition will actually have a strategy,
because what they want to do is disrupt that possibility.
That's their best. They want to basically make sure nobody unifies.
They want to make sure that nobody's thinking about
different ways to disrupt.
They want to make sure nobody's planning.
Eisenhower said that plans are useless, but planning is everything.
The ability to constantly think about how to piece together a string of tactics,
always thinking about that, is very, very powerful.
My son's a wrestler.
You don't just bull-rush an Olympic wrestler.
You have to basically pull his arm,
pull his head, touch his knee, and it's called chain wrestling,
until basically if you do it properly, he'll fall over.
You cannot talk about a tactic in isolation.
Let me say one thing.
A tactic in isolation, or a tactic combined with another tactic,
or a tactic combined with a second tactic,
that first tactic has completely different outcomes
depending on whether you combine it and what you combine it with.
So that's the danger of violent resistance,
because it's very easy to just not think, attack.
Yes. The real danger, why I think violent tactics
and violent strategies are generally a loser,
is because the people who start with the guerrilla movement
basically start with an inferior military position.
The only way they can right that position,
which is a key to their having any hope of success,
is to kill enough people on the other side,
who are mostly authoritarians.
But before that,
the people they're killing also are seeking protection,
so they will go and basically strengthen
their relationship with the authoritarian for protection.
They won't want to defect.
So, they won't want to defect.
I think a violent insurrection tends to work against itself,
and that's why the data has shown very low incidences of success.
Do you think we'll see a nonviolent resistance movement
taking down the Chinese Communist Party?
I don't know what "taking down" means.
I know that a violent insurrection will never have a meaningful impact.
I think it's a loser,
but remember the point that taking down is a loaded phrase.
Do I think that over time, a nonviolent resistance movement
is likely to create a complete new compact of power
between those at the top and citizens?
I think there's a good chance of that.
Whether it means regime change or it comes in a different form,
where the current practices are embedded with other,
more democratic practices,
and individual rights are basically protected,
I can't say what the endgame is.
I know that civil resistance, if persisted on, is highly likely,
over a 50% chance of creating a better,
more democratic endgame,
but we also know that violent ...
This is an interesting fact.
A violent insurrection takes nine years, on average,
a civil resistance movement, three years.
If people can plan and persist for three years,
there will be a change.
That's what they need to know.
That's what we're in business to tell them.
I see what you mean about the importance of language,
because taking down implies violence.
Really, what you want is a conversion.
A transfer of power.
That's brilliant.
Thank you very much for joining me today.
A pleasure being with you.
Thanks for watching.
Want to see more interviews like this?
Leave your comments below about who or what kind of person
you'd like to see on China Uncensored next.
And remember you can watch our full half-hour episodes
on www.ChinaUncensored.tv.
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