Suspension of this belief? Iran’s morality police

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. Today from London, I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. There is a China where the only fixation is a technological march toward greatness and plenty unmarred by protests or high Covid numbers. It's the China of the evening state news broadcast. We settle in for a watch of the CCP's preferred narrative. And despite plenty of progress toward gender parity in many professions, there's one in which women had not played much of a role. Funeral directors. We ask why in America that's changing so fast. First up though, Iran is on the second day of a three day general strike and it's not quiet resistance Shopkeepers and students walked out of their jobs and schools in almost 40 cities. So some naming the supreme leader and chanting death to the dictator. It's been 11 weeks since protesters first poured onto Iran's streets following the death of 22 year old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police for not properly wearing a hijab. Demonstrators have been beaten, locked up, even killed. But the defiance continues. With women still going without hijabs, burning them. A new rallying cry spreading women life, freedom. There had been little sign the regime would bend. But then some confusing news about those morality police seemed to suggest they would be disbanded. But that apparently hasn't changed the mood of Iranians on the streets.

There are a series of mixed messages that are coming from the regime at the moment and it's really not clear whether this is by design or by default. And the theocracy is really confused about which way it wants to go.

Nicholas Pelham is a Middle east correspondent for the Economist.

The Prosecutor General has said that the morality police have been shut down, but it's not clear that that was within his jurisdiction to actually shut it down. And it certainly hasn't been echoed by other key institutions within the system.

And just to wind back a bit who are the morality police? What's their role?

The morality police are the ayatollahs armed to enforce the morals of the Islamic Republic on a society which historically has kind of been one of the most secular in the Middle east, there to impose Islam law and ensure that it's upheld within society. They're a department of the police force. They have guidance patrols which roam the streets of major cities, particularly in the summer, when people tend not to want to cover up so much. And they've really been in existence since the outset of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Their role is to enforce the dress code. They make sure that women wear veils when they go out in the street. In the eyes of many Iranians, they sort of terrorized the population. They've had powers of arrest. They have powers to take women to education centers where they can reportedly be raft up. And millions of women in Iran do live in fear of their patrols. And there's been this sort of increasing sense of defiance, anger, civil disobedience at their presence on the street.

And what do we know at this stage about the status of the morality police? Right now?

We know that the Moralesi police have disappeared from the streets pretty much from the first weeks of the demonstrations which have engulfed Iran since mid September. Some would say that this is in part due to the onset of winter. People are covering up their bodies more, but women are not covering up their heads. So that's what's happened in practice. But what astonished many Iranians over the weekend was that the prosecutor general, Muhammad Jafar Mantasseri, said that the unit had been shut down by the authority that established it. He'd also said that unspecified cultural methods would be adopted instead. So it did suggest that there was a sort of change of heart, at least by some members of the regime. In another meeting, he also said that the decision would be taken in the middle of this month on whether to abolish the mandatory veil, the hijab, altogether. Again, we haven't heard any confirmation from the government or from other lawmakers, but it does suggest that there is some thinking at high levels of government that really they have to try and accommodate the street to some extent if they're going to hold onto power.

You say that the morality police have disappeared from the streets, but what does that mean for women in the country?

There's a really different climate prevailing in Iran. Women in their millions are walking around the streets without veils. We're hearing instances of women going through kind of even passport control unveiled at airports of Just really a sense in which the authorities are so preoccupied with how they're going to contain the demonstrations that they don't have time or the inclination to try and enforce their morality codes. The authorities in some places are still trying to maintain a sense that nothing has changed. They've publicized that banks have been closed down that serve women without veils and that supermarkets are in danger of being closed if they let in women without veils. But on the streets, women are just going and about their day as if the mandatory veil no longer applied.

Well, if this is to be viewed then as a concession to all the protesters, what do you suppose the protesters.

Have made of that on the streets of Tehran? It doesn't really seem that this statement in itself is going to do much to calm protesters. The law for the mandatory veil still is on the statute books. There hasn't been any formal revocation of that law. And even if there was, I think there's a general sense on the part of many Iranians that this is just kind of too little, too late. Trust in the regime's word has sunk to an unprecedented low. Even insiders suggest that the decision on the hijab could be a ruse to divide protesters. And there's a sense that even if the government was to make this concession one day, as soon as they felt a bit more confident, they might kind of reapply their morality codes once more. And even this disappearance of the religious police, I think there's a sense that this is not a regime to be trusted, that they can hand over the responsibilities of the religious police to another, the regime's sprawling security apparatuses. And this fissure, this chasm between where the authority is and where many, probably most Iranians are, is just too wide at the moment to be bridged.

If they're messing around to the margins of a rule that came about with the founding of the Islamic Republic, this is a big deal, isn't it?

I think many Iranians feel that there is a kind of sense of disarray in government. There's a lack of clear leadership on the streets, but there's also a lack of clear leadership as to who is calling the shots. What we know about the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is that he is not somebody who backs down. Like many governments in the region, Iran's feels that any concession will be interpreted as a sign of weakness and will just simply embolden the population. And already we're seeing the process is trying to turn society as a whole against the regime. We're in the middle of a three day strike at the moment that hasn't affected industry or the oil sector, but it has led to a sort of shutdown of shops. And it does seem that on a street level this is a society which is now firmly at odds with its rulers. And I think there's a sense that on both sides they've gone too far to go back. It's really hard to see now how Iran rewinds the clock to where it was before the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22 year old woman who sparked these demonstrations. Both sides are too heavily invested. And you know what is really remarkable is that in the past when you've had major crackdowns, and this is a major crackdown, we're hearing human rights groups talk of sort of 18,000 detainees and over 450 people who've been killed, many of them minors and women, that in the past when you had these crackdowns, society has pretty much gone back to a sense of normality. It's been a kind of bitter calm, but it has been a calm and that's not happening now. You're seeing strikes continue two and a half months into these protests. And this is a society which just doesn't feel normal, which feels on the cusp of something much bigger.

Nicholas, thanks very much for joining us.

Jason, thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure.

We hope you enjoy listening to the intelligence as much as we enjoy making it. We're always thinking of ways to improve and to do that. We'd like to know more about you. Do us a little favor and fill out a short questionnaire@examiner.com intelligencesurvey the link is in the notes. Thanks. China has at last been easing some of its zero Covid rules and procedures, releasing some areas from long running lockdowns to and in other places, scrapping the need for negative tests to use public transport. This apparent policy shift follows widespread protests that were comprehensively reported by the world media.

Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Shanghai, calling for President Xi Jinping to step down.

Scenes of violence emerged in the Chinese city of Guangzhou on Monday night. Hundreds of people.

There's one exception to the coverage, of course. China's own state television, in particular its national Nightly news broadcast. It's incredibly widely viewed, but it's not the only place that a lot of people get their news.

If you watch the evening news in China, the world looks very different.

David Rennie is our Beijing bureau.

So to take an example, Saturday, 26th November was a huge, really unusual news day. We had very rare protests on a university campus in the city of Nanjing lasting several hours. And that evening there were protests in Shanghai, which turned political, with people chanting slogans about down with Xi Jinping, which is the most dramatic thing you could do. The day before, on the Friday, we'd had street protests in the capital of Xinjiang, the most tightly policed place in China, after a deadly house fire where people were saying that they had burned to death because the fire exits had been locked shut because of COVID control. So a huge news day. And Xinwen Lianbo, the nightly news channel on all state TV channels, 7 o', clock, opened with a segment on equipment manufacturing and how it continues to make breakthroughs to build a solid foundation for the real economy. If you're a big fan of big machines and shiny trains, Simonian Bo is for you. And this segment doesn't disappoint. We have space rockets, we have high speed trains, cranes in ports. It's Tonka toy television. And the aim is to be reassuring and soothing and to make you proud of China and, and the pandemic. When it's mentioned in this episode, which is raging on that day with huge numbers, we got a very reassuring, orderly explanation of a new document setting out some ways in which they were relaxing some of the controls. And so we had shots of people lining up in a very orderly way at COVID testing sites, Community workers going around in nice little red waistcoats, interviews with doctors in white coats. And as we've had every night through the pandemic, you get a single screenshots of a dark blue screen with just very, very simple statistics of China's case numbers, Nothing about the protests starting to take hold.

And the rest of the coverage beyond the light touch, Covid coverage then is combine harvesters and shiny trains, as you say.

Now, we did have a dramatic doomy segment about COVID on that day of all dramas in China, but as so often, it wasn't about China, it was about America. And as so often, it was based on this number that over a million people have died of COVID in America, which is a huge number and a source of shame to America's political system. But it has been on the news in China most nights of the week for the entirety of the pandemic. And all of those kind of happy Chinese shots of combine harvesters in fields full of corn, aircraft carriers zooming through the oceans, all those stirring scenes. When you get to the American segment on this night on Tsinguan, Lianbo it is very grim. You have shots of a coroner's van, you have up close shots of Americans on respirators in American hospitals. You have a young child in a respiratory mask with his mother looking distraught. And then you have shots of a deserted American restaurant with a worker in a face mask. And you might wonder when that was filmed cause it probably wasn't filmed this month. And then to top it off, there's a item on Covid in Britain and in Japan.

And so is that standard fare then? Pretty much putting the COVID problem onto America and others.

It's completely normal. And in fact, at the week that I looked at four nights out of the seven, Ximena Lembo has had a segment about how badly America has handled the virus.

So tell me more about this show. Is this what Chinese people understand as television news?

Full stop?

So it's a very old program. It's been on the air continuously since the 1970s. It's broadcast across all state channels at the same time around the country. So if you go into a small town or a village, this is what will be on at seven in the evening. And it's kind of a cultural icon. There's this thing, Boyinjiang, which is anchor speech. So like you have BBC English, a very correct way of speaking in the UK in the old days, Boy and Chung is like this super correct Mandarin. And the anchors are very well scrubbed, very well behaved young people with kind of hairspray. They take exams in never making mistakes allegedly they get fined if they make a mistake in mispronouncing a Chinese character.

And their job these days then is essentially to deliberately overlook the country's biggest story.

It's not just these days, that's their job. The Chinese media, particularly the big state media, their job is to support the Communist Party and explain to the people of China why the Communist Party is right and this isn't a secret. Xi Jinping, the big guy toured the offices of the state news agency and told them a few years ago that the media should have party as its surname. Ximen Nymbo is not there to speak truth to power. It is there to help the power define what is true. And they do talk about fighting Covid in China. But it's not scenes of ambulances or people on sort of respirators or showing fear. It's a segment where the super correct anchors say now we're going to hear an expert explain the prevention and control of the epidemic in a down to earth manner and continuously improving the efficiency of Prevention and control work. That's how Shimon Yambo sounds.

But if this is the kind of news people are getting and what the people across the whole country are getting.

Then why are there protests?

Well, because a lot of people watch it, but it's not the only news source for China. So I was out on the streets of Beijing for the big protest here with hundreds of students. Now, do they watch the Xin We Lianbo? The answer is only if they're back home visiting their grandmother. Because quite common to hear kind of hip young people here saying that for them, it's almost like a nostalgia thing because their grandparents love it and so they kind of watch it with them. But it's not where kind of young plugged in people get their news. But there's an awful lot of China that isn't surfing the Internet, that isn't on social media. And this is the big television event, particularly for older people, villages, kind of smaller provincial cities. And that audience, they're very scared of COVID and it works. When I was by the banks of the Liangar river in Beijing on the night of the protest here, the youngsters had lit some candles to mourn the dead of zero COVID lockdowns. This old guy wanders up and he was furious, and he said, who are you mourning? Why are you mourning in China? And he turned to me as the foreigner and he goes, how many people have died in America? Tell me the number, tell me the number. And I said, well, it's over a million. Exactly how many people have died in China? And I said, well, you know, the official count is 5,000. Those numbers, the fact they're repeated every single night on Simu Lianbo, it matters. That's why they keep doing it.

So how to unpick what you would call a majority view in China then? If a lot of people in the country are seeing this state television and the story it wants to tell, and then some other part is seeing the social media mediated version and indeed protesting about it.

I think the fear for the party leadership under Xi Jinping is that those two different Chinas, like middle China, fly over China. Choose your kind of metaphor. They're actually just as angry about the lockdowns and the fact that this policy has been so strict for so long and yet now doesn't seem to stem the cases. So if the only thing happening was hipsters and students in the middle of Beijing and Shanghai saying very political things, they can deal with that. They've got a security machine to crush that and lots of other people get their news from Shimon Lianbo. The problem is that the hipsters by the river and Shimon Lianbo viewers, they're all pretty sick of this policy. The fact that these protests are actually not all political and are so broad and so diverse, that is the dilemma the party faces. Because if they please people by lifting the lockdowns and then get a gigantic exit wave, particularly if it rips through the older population who are not properly vaccinated, then a lot of Shimon Diembo viewers are going to get very, very sick.

David, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

Think of a funeral director, probably you're.

Thinking of a man, somber, dark suit. For a lot of years, you'd have pretty good odds of being right. But the industry is starting to see a big shift.

The funeral industry in America for the better part of the past century has remained pretty unchanged. But changes are happening now.

Johnny Williams writes about America for the Economist.

Women are starting to take over the funeral industry. About 1,500 embalmers and funeral directors graduated from mortuary sciences schools in 2021, and over 70% were women. And that share is growing.

So why that sudden change? Why is the profession becoming attractive to women?

It's a job that has a low entry bar but offers a pretty decent salary. It's especially attractive to women who are in their 20s or 30s, who perhaps have started a career or stay at home mothers and are looking for a new vocation. And some of them are even already in other vocations. I spoke with Lily McMurrow. She's the president of Worsham College in Illinois, and she's also the chair of the accreditation board for mortician schools. In many ways, Ms. McMurrow is the archetype of the new funeral director. She's a millennial. She's Iranian American. She was actually training in another profession to be a lawyer. When she first learned about mortician school. She actually had never gone to a funeral before, but she was drawn to the aspect of working with people and helping them in times especially of difficulty. So she studied law and she enrolled in mortician school in the same year she graduated from law school, she also graduated from mortician school.

When you think about it, there's only about 25,000 funeral directors in the entire country. Can't even fill a stadium. But every single person, regardless of age, class, stage status, anything, every single person needs a funeral director at some point in time in their life.

Some of the women that I spoke with, one was training to be a nurse. The other one had been a fashion designer, the other one had worked in theater, and they all decided to pivot to funeral services instead.

But the things that might attract women to the profession have kind of always been true. What's changed now, do you think?

There are a couple of changes that have made the funeral industry more accessible to women. One of them is that you actually have a lot of funeral homeowners that are planning to retire in coming years, about 60% of them. The job placement is also very high because of that. And one reason that perhaps explains some of this is that mortuary science schools were late coming to online education. So, for example, Worsham College, they didn't have a edu website until Ms. McMurrow took over, and that was in 2019. And so that has made the degree and the studies more available to women, especially women who may be working from home or who may be in another profession. And evidence of that is that last year, nearly half of the graduates from mortuary schools were all online students. Now, Ms. McMurro also told me that she thinks that women have some advantages in this line of work.

What kind of advantages?

So the explanation that is often given is that women are drawn to the work because they are empathetic. And that's generally true. But that seems to be more of a reason for why they are succeeding in the industry. There's a very strong connection that must be formed between a funeral director and a family who is grieving for the loss of a close friend, loved one. And women seem to be really good at making that connection. As a matter of fact, Ms. McMurrow tells me that some of the best students that they have are bartenders because they're really good at talking with people.

With more women coming into the industry, is that changing how it's being done?

Yes, it seems so. What Ms. McMurray says is that the new funeral directors are focusing more on personalized services. They're kind of breaking off from the traditional funeral. And what they're doing is they're connecting with families and asking them what they want to do. One example from one of the morticians that I spoke with, she was telling me that for one of the funerals they helped arrange 18 hole golf course that was part of the funeral celebration. Ms. McMurray says that this is one of the aspects of the job that she really likes and that she's really found fulfilling.

I love this idea that you want something to make it more about your family, whether it's that your grandfather loved gummy bears. And then the next thing you know, there's gummy bears throughout the entire funeral home. Just those little things that really matter.

There are still some people who think that mortuary work and funeral director work perhaps is not a job that's suitable for women. In fact, Ms. McMurrow tells me that she still gets asked if women are strong enough for the job to move a body, but she tells me, yes, it's all about training, and the likelihood is that the next funeral director that you meet is going to be a woman.

Johnny, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you for having me on, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Don't forget that we want to hear from you. Take our listener survey at the address that's in the notes and see you back here tomorrow. Sam.