Disunited Russia party? Moscow’s elections

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The plight of China's Muslim group, the Uyghurs, is now well known. But China's authorities are starting to squeeze another more dispersed Muslim minority. The Huis mosques are being redesigned and Arabic script scrubbed from them. Many fear that further repression awaits and knife crime in Britain is on the rise. The government is trying to spread a public service message that will reduce the violence, particularly among the young. But its plan to target fried chicken shops hasn't gone down well. First up, though, on Sunday, Russians will vote in local elections around the country. They come after a summer of discontent when tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Moscow. Now, after that contentious run up, the focus of attention is on the vote for local council seats in the capital.

City Council elections in and of themselves mean very little. These are positions that have almost no actual powers.

Noah Snyder is the Economist's Russia correspondent.

But symbolically, they mean a lot. And they've become a proxy for the larger battle over nothing less really than Russia's future. Vladimir Putin's in his last constitutionally permitted term. There's a transition of some kind looming in 2024, and the scramble for power has already begun.

And what about the protests that have.

Been happening now for months? How do they figure in? And what is it that people have been calling for?

So the protests were a response initially to the Kremlin's decision to bar these opposition candidates from participating in the elections. They began as small, peaceful, unsanctioned rallies. But as the police began to crack down, including violent arrests on thousands of protesters, they've blossomed into a larger movement about injustice, about political competition, and about the right to free speech and assembly.

So let's go back in time a little bit.

When the protests were small and sort of narrowly focused around the ability of these candidates to stand. What was the response from the Kremlin?

So the Kremlin cracked down, and they cracked down across the board. They started locking up everyone from student activists like Ygor Zhukov, a popular video blogger, who became a sort of symbol of this summer's discontent.

Russia will inevitably be free, but we may not live to see it if we let fear win. Because when fear wins, silence comes, a silence that will be disturbed by the screeching brakes of a black police wagon and the deafening ring of a doorbell that divides life into before and after.

Two more prominent opposition leaders, including some of the candidates running for the Moscow City Council elections and Alexei Navalny, Russia's leading opposition politician. They also crack down, literally, on the streets, arresting hundreds and even thousands over the course of several weeks of protests. There were pretty violent scenes of protesters being beaten by riot police. And when a few tents popped up in the center of Moscow, raised the specter of the Maidan, the revolution in Ukraine in 2014. And for the Russian security services, that's a nightmare scenario. And they sought to cut it off at its knees.

And so how did the opposition and these protesters respond at that point?

In fact, what ended up happening is that rather than cutting off the opposition's momentum, Kremlin's crackdown fueled it and the police brutality, especially against younger people, against children. This fueled a broader sense of sort of injustice and discontent and popularized the protests. And it led to one of the biggest demonstrations in recent memory. Some 60,000 people came to a sanctioned protest in the center of Moscow, and it attracted a crowd that went far beyond the regular sort of opposition liberals and included even celebrities, popular rappers, musicians, and a broader swath of the population who maybe were apolitical but really didn't like what they'd been seeing in their city all summer.

And so how did the Kremlin respond.

To that in the face of this sort of much broader, much Wider support for the opposition?

Well, it's been a tango, and we've seen the Kremlin step back this past week. At least they let the most recent protests go without any arrests, without any crackdown. So in court this week, some of the charges against Igor Zhukov, the video blogger who I mentioned earlier, were dropped. So, too, were the cases against a handful of other protesters. Yet at the same time, another set of protesters received sentences ranging from three to five years in prison for everything from essentially tapping a riot policeman on his helmet to posting an angry tweet about the families of security service members. So there seems to be some uncertainty or some division even inside the Kremlin and inside, inside the Russian power structures about how to respond to this movement.

And so what does that tell you.

Then, about the state of play between the Kremlin and the people?

Essentially, I think what this indicates, this summer of discontent and repression indicates is several things. First of all, that the Kremlin's tools for dealing with the opposition are quite limited, and repression is the main tool they have. At the same time, the scope for repression is limited, which is to say that repression generates a response on the streets, and it also generates discontent within the elite.

But what does it tell you about.

What the people themselves want? If this is a hint as to what happens in the post Putin era, what do you think people are angling for here?

Well, it's a tough question. It's one that many people in Moscow are scratching their heads trying to figure out. What we can talk about with more certainty are the broader shifts in public opinion that we've seen over the last year. Support for President Putin has been declining by all measures, trust, approval ratings and the number of people who would like to see him remain after 2024. And that's fueled in large part by a sense of economic stagnation. The economy has been growing at a slow rate for several years now. Real incomes, real disposable incomes have been falling or stagnant. And there's a sense of uncertainty about the direction of the country, about the Kremlin's vision for the future. The pension age has been raised, taxes have been hiked, but people aren't seeing the benefits of the Kremlin's policies. They're just feeling the pinch.

And so do you think that that kind of discontent is going to be manifest in any way in these local elections? I mean, what should we be looking out for?

Well, one of the ways in the campaign itself that we've seen it is that candidates from the ruling party, the United Russia Parliament, have essentially eschewed that label. They've been running as independents. They've been trying to hide their affiliation with United Russia because the popularity of the party has fallen so far. So that's one early manifestation. The second thing in terms of the results to watch is whether Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader's strategy of what he calls umla glissavania or smart voting is going to work. And essentially what he's been doing is encouraging people to vote for any candidate but the United Russia affiliated ones. So if Mr. Navalny's strategy looks like it's working and folks are casting ballots, especially in Moscow, in the direction he's urged them to, that would be another big sign that this movement isn't going away.

Noah, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you for having me.

In China's far western province of Xinjiang, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uyghurs have been rounded up and thrown into a vast gulag where they're being re educated. The Uyghurs are Muslims, but while in detention, they're made to learn Mandarin Chinese, swear loyalty to President Xi Jinping, and criticize or even renounce their faith. Now another group, the Huis, are increasingly fearless. The effects of the government's clampdown on Islam. Our China editor, James Miles, visited a Hui community in Gansu Province in western China to see how things have been changing.

What you have is a capital city that looks like many other Chinese cities, but then you go a bit south of the city and you're in a different world. You're into what is often known as China's Mecca. Suddenly you're in an area that is dominated by Islam and you can see it in every village. Most of them have at least one, sometimes two, three, even four mosques, huge, grand buildings. The village I went to called Duanjiaping has a large, extravagant mosque, like many others around it. But what's striking now is that scaffolding has recently appeared around the four minarets. And this is part of a government campaign to change the appearance of Islam in that particular part of China.

What do they want to make the mosques look like?

Well, in fact, in that part of Gansu Province, they have come up with 20 approved styles for the building of mosques. And these are Chinese looking styles. And it means no more minarets and instead small structures much lower than the minarets with Chinese style eaves. And in the centre of it, something that looks a bit like a Chinese pagoda. But as well as making this look distinctly More Chinese than the current building. I think part of the issue here is just the sheer height of the minarets. They want something that's much lower and less visible far and wide. They don't want religion to be quite so conspicuous.

So is this a push just for cosmetic changes, or is there something deeper going on?

The central government is waging a campaign to sinicize religion generally. Sinicization is a term that the Communist Party has devised and which applies to an effort to change the way people that Chinese religions that have strong foreign associations look and feel, essentially, and to make adherents of those faiths primarily loyal to the Communist Party of China rather than any outside foreign influence. And the two big ones are Islam and Christianity. So in both of those faiths, we've seen over the past couple of years an intensifying effort by the authorities in to make these religions appear more Chinese in the case of Islam, to minimize the use of the Arabic language on shop fronts, and even to some degree, to rewrite the scriptures of these faiths to come up with new translations that better reflect the way the Communist Party sees the world, and also to spread Communist Party propaganda into these places of worship to try and somehow integrate the teachings of these churches and with what the party sees as core socialist values.

So then why this government clampdown? Why this government interest in messing with their religion now?

Well, the Uighurs have been the subject of particular official attention for some years now because of their long standing grievances against Chinese rule. Some of them have been waging a separatist campaign in that province. This has become interlinked with the global jihadist movement. And the Chinese authorities become very afraid of the spread of militancy from elsewhere in the Muslim world into Xinjiang. And indeed, they say that some people from Xinjiang have made their way to conflicts in Iraq and Syria and that some of them have been coming back. So there's a great deal of worry in Beijing about security in Xinjiang. And that's resulted in a huge escalation of repression there. The building of this Gulag where some 1 million Uighurs have been incarcerated over the last two or three years, ostensibly in order to re educate them, to deter them from turning to militant forms of Islam. But meanwhile, the Huis have not received that kind of attention. They haven't been part of a separatist problem. They haven't been linked with any kind of terrorist activity. But we are now beginning to see a spillover effect of that repression in Xinjiang. And clearly the Chinese authorities are worried about Islam in General, and the Huis are beginning to come into their sights.

And so how is this renewed attention going down with the Huis themselves?

Well, there hasn't been much in the way of unrest among Huis. It's still a well integrated community that doesn't have any territorial ambition, certainly, and doesn't feel itself as put upon by the Communist Party as many Uyghurs do in Xinjiang. But we are beginning to see signs of change. Last year there was a huge protest in Ningxia, which is a province called a Hui autonomous Region. And there there was big unrest over the government's plans to tear down a mosque that happened to look too Arabic. In the end, the government backed down and agreed to at least put off its decision to do that. But the big question is, how much further is the government going to take this? Will this actually result in much more severe curbs on the way people can practice their religion? And there are other aspects of the campaigns going on that are indeed causing a good deal of anxiety. Much tighter restrictions on who can go to mosque. Nobody under 18. Much tighter restrictions on those who teach or preach at mosques. Have they mastered Communist Party philosophy sufficiently? Are they giving the right kind of sermons to people about core socialist values? And all of this, I think, is likely to make Huis who you could argue for a long time in China have been almost a kind of model Muslim minority, as the party sees it, but turn them into a group that is much more resentful. So I think we're seeing the beginnings of something that could lead to greater instability.

And is there any worry that the.

Resistance that the Huis might put forth would take them out of that model minority category, put them perhaps more towards the situation that the Uighurs face and the re education camps and all of that.

I'd be very surprised if we see anything on the scale of the clampdown we've seen in Xinjiang. In other words, re education camps springing up everywhere and Huis being put into them without any sort of recourse to any kind of due legal process. But I think it's likely that the authorities will be paying much closer attention to Huis than we've seen before among the 10 million or so Huis of China. They can still count on regional differences, dialect differences, cultural differences of various kinds, ensuring that they don't coalesce as a big threatening problem for the Communist Party as they see the Uyghurs being. I think the Communist Party in this case will continue to benefit from a kind of divide and rule policy.

James, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

Knife crime in Britain has risen sharply since 2014. Young people, particularly those living in cities, have been disproportionately affected. This summer, the government announced a controversial anti knife crime campaign. It wasn't the message that provoked an outcry, it was where the message appeared.

Chicken shops in South London and further afield are really interesting places because they're frequented by all sorts of people.

Andrew Knox writes for the Economist.

Were you to sit in a South London chicken shop for an entire day, you'd see a sort of sequence of groups of people coming in, starting off from school, kids during their lunch break, grabbing a quick cheap lunch, and that would sort of continue through the evening until finally you get to closing time, pubs letting out, and you start seeing sort of waves of relatively incoherent people asking for a two piece and chips to soak up the alcohol.

Why are we talking about chicken shops at all?

In mid August, the Home Office extended a campaign it's been running to try and counter knife crime among the Youth by distributing 321,000 specially designed chicken boxes with knifefree branding and a series of testimonials from people who have decided to put down their knives, so to speak. And they've distributed these boxes to 210 chicken shops across London and various other cities in the hope of encouraging young people who might be involved in knife crime to reconsider their choices. Many people have found this move somewhat offensive because of a historical racial stereotype associating black people with a love of fried chicken. The MP for Tottenham, David Lammy, tweeted out, is this some kind of joke? Why have you chosen chicken chops? What's next? Knife free Watermelons playing on another historical racial stereotype? Various other people in civil society have similarly thought that this move is racist or borderline racist. And public outcry has been fairly fierce on social media.

So what is the government's defense there? It's its sort of stated purpose for doing it this way.

The rationale offered by the Home Office for this specific part of the knife free campaign was fairly limited. The knifefree campaign is aimed at youths aged between 10 and 21. And according to the creative agency who came up with this part of the campaign, 2/3 of chicken shop customers are aged between 16 and 24. So it's logical to assume that this was part of the Home Office's rationale. Aside from the age of people who frequently attend chicken shops, they also have a serious benefit, which is the dwell time of their customers. A third of customers spend more than five minutes in the chicken shop after ordering and an eighth spend more than 20 minutes. So that gives you a long exposure time for these knife free chicken boxes. There's also a positive association between people and their preferred chicken shop. A lot of people have a particular franchise that they're keen on and will go back there week after week, sometimes multiple times in a week. They become sort of institutions in the neighborhood in that you know, that it's a place where you can go, spend time, hang out with your friends. And increasingly that's hard to find for youths in big cities. In the uk, chicken shops also appear in the right places. A lot of them are found in areas where the residents are relatively low income and also in areas where gangs tend to operate.

So it sounds like this campaign, if indelicate in any case, is trying to find the right demographic in the right place for the right amount of time. Do you think it will succeed?

I think it's unlikely to for a number of reasons. So the first of which is that it frames knife crime as a choice rather than as a result of environmental circumstances. Research has shown that people who carry knives tend to do so to protect themselves in areas that they perceive to be unsafe. When you have this kind of just say no campaign, it doesn't really address the root causes for which people engage in the kind of behaviors that the government is trying to discourage. It derives from poverty, a chronic lack of opportunity for young people, especially in the context of an underfunding of various public services as a result of austerity. Diane Abbott, one of the more vocal critics of this scheme, said, quote, the Home Office would do better to invest in our communities, not demonize them, end quote. Which is a fairly good representation of the spirit of a lot of the criticism that this scheme has come under.

Andrew, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks very much for having me.

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Sam.