China's latest nuclear submarine sank during its construction earlier this year, senior US defense officials said on Thursday.

Satellite images from June showed cranes at the Wuchang shipyard where the Zhou-class attack submarine would have been docked.

These images indicate that the vessel likely sank between May and June, US officials told news agencies including the Associated Press and Reuters.

China has not confirmed the current status of the submarine.

Reports of a submarine sinking during construction could be a potential setback for China as it continues to expand its naval capacity.

"We are not familiar with the situation you mentioned and currently have no information to provide," a Chinese embassy spokesperson in Washington said.

A US official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Reuters it was "not surprising" that China's navy would hide the sinking of the submarine.

"In addition to the obvious questions about training standards and equipment quality, the incident raises deeper questions about the PLA's internal accountability and oversight of China's defense industry — which has long been plagued by corruption," they added, using the acronym for the People's Liberation Army.

Archived link

The Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) presents unique challenges for air infrastructure superiority, with its high altitude and rugged terrain. While the expansion of airports and deployment of fighter jets and sophisticated radar systems have been traditional measures of this superiority, a less recognised but equally critical aspect is China's increasing rotary-wing capabilities at extreme altitudes.

[...]

China's critical military infrastructure at higher altitudes is rapidly expanding in the challenging environment of the TAR. A vital part of this expansion is the proliferation of high-altitude heliports and helipads, which are quickly becoming crucial nodes in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) ground and air operations strategy.

These helipads, strategically placed near the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between India and China, disputed areas with Bhutan, and critical infrastructure like surface-to-missile (SAM) sites and military barracks, serve as logistics hubs. Their role in facilitating rapid troop and equipment movement underscores their strategic significance.

Archived link

Top security official of China Chen Wenqing visited Tibet in the second week of September and instructed the local authorities to step up a crackdown against ethnic Tibetans, branding them as ‘separatists.’

It is a different question who these separatists are as China is in illegal occupation of Tibet. The move by the Chinese Communist Party to step up security in Tibet is believed to be a knee-jerk reaction to the passage in the U.S. Congress of the Resolve Tibet Act which empowers the U.S. government to put pressure on Beijing to hold talks with the Dalai Lama.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/3199955

Archived link

On Saturday [September 21], Tibetan activists convened outside the Musée Guimet in Paris to protest the museum’s decision to replace exhibition materials that identify certain artifacts as Tibetan by replacing it with the Chinese name for the region. Activists claim the change to the language is problematic for deferring to a Chinese political narrative that’s historically aimed to erase Tibetan cultural identity from public spaces.

The mass protest, which some sources estimate attracted 800 demonstrators, followed a report in the French newspaper Le Monde alleging that Musée Guimet and the Musée du quai Branly, two prominent Parisian museums that house collections of Asian art, altered their exhibition materials cataloging Tibetan artifacts as deriving instead from then Chinese term “Xizang Autonomous Region.” According to the same report, the Musée Guimet renamed its Tibetan art galleries as deriving from the “Himalayan world.”

A handful of Tibetan cultural advocacy groups based in France penned letters to both museums, requesting formal meetings to discuss the reasons behind and implications of the terminology changes, a request that activists say was accepted by Musée du quai Branly, but not it’s peer Musée Guimet.

China’s problem is essentially that it has too much debt.

The main role of debt is to bring forward demand from the future. [...] China’s stimulus has kept on increasing since 2008, until it peaked with the end of the pandemic.

Now China risks entering a classic ‘debt trap’ where new loans are taken out to repay existing debt – not to create new demand. In other words, the debt is no longer being used to generate growth. In turn, this risks generating a downward spiral.

[...]

The underlying problem, of course, is China’s massive housing bubble. It was probably the largest ever seen. And it has been bursting for some time, with home sales slumping, as the Bloomberg chart shows.

[...]

China needs to urgently boost [domestic] consumption and downsize manufacturing.

[...]

• Housing is currently unaffordable for most people
• The real estate market is an outsize risk for the economy – it is 29% of GDP, and 70% of China’s urban wealth
• Given China’s ageing population, it seems likely [that housing sales] volume could drop at least another 20% before the market bottoms
• That will mean China will need to import a lot less oil, metals, plastics and everything else connected to the bubble.

A Hong Kong Court has jailed two journalists who led a pro-democracy newspaper after they were found guilty in a landmark sedition case last month.

Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam, editors at the now-defunct Stand News media outlet, had published articles about the crackdown on civil liberties in the city under China.

Chung was sentenced to 21 months, while Lam was given 11 months, but was released on medical grounds. The publisher behind Stand News - Best Pencil - has been fined HK$5,000 (US$643; £480).

It is the first sedition case against journalists in Hong Kong since the territory's handover from Britain to China in 1997.

After a lengthy trial, which began in October 2022 and was originally scheduled to last just 20 days, district court judge Kwok Wai-kin Kwok found that 11 articles published by Stand News were seditious and that Stand News had become a "danger to national security".

Their newspaper's editorial line supported "Hong Kong local autonomy", Mr Kwok said in a written statement.

"It even became a tool to smear and vilify the Central Authorities [in Beijing] and the [Hong Kong] SAR Government," he added.

Archived link

On Wednesday last week, one of China’s largest tea chains found itself at the center of an online storm after a video emerged of employees for the company apparently wearing cardboard signs and makeshift cardboard handcuffs to enforce workplace discipline — public displays of shame that had disturbing echoes of the country’s political past.

The offending post, made on September 17 to the official Douyin and Xiaohongshu accounts of the Guangdong operations of Good Me (古茗茶饮) — a tea chain with more than 5,000 locations across the country — showed several employees on site at a Good Me shop standing with their heads cast down, their hands bound in front with what appeared to be cardboard cup holders. Handwritten signs around their necks read: “The crime of forgetting to include a straw”; and “The crime of knocking over the teapot.”

[...]

For China’s media and internet authorities, the Cultural Revolution is generally not a subject to be talked about at all. And for many Chinese who remember the period, which was ended by the ouster and arrest in October 1976 of the so-called Gang of Four, it remains a silent source of pain and fear.

[...]

Most comments on the video on both platforms expressed shock and ridicule at what seemed to be extremely unfair and inhumane treatment of employees on the one hand, and an acute lack of good taste on the other. By Wednesday the video had been removed and Good Me was scrambling to contain the damage.

[...]

Archived link

An investigation by the independent Russian media outlet The Insider has uncovered the involvement of four major Chinese banks in the transfer of funds to companies supplying sanctioned equipment to Russian oil firms. They are:

• China Everbright Bank Beijing
• Bank of Ningbo
• Bank of China
• Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC).

An analysis of equipment deliveries to Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom reveals details of the transactions.

Here is the report: We Can’t Write the Truth Anymore’: Academic Freedom in Hong Kong Under the National Security Law (pdf)

• Academic freedom in Hong Kong has severely declined since the Chinese government imposed the draconian National Security Law on the city on June 30, 2020.
• Students and faculty accustomed to academic freedom must now tread carefully to avoid retribution for what they teach, research, and publish, and even with whom they associate.
• Concerned governments and foreign universities with partnerships with Hong Kong universities should speak up for affiliated academics and students, and review these partnerships to avoid becoming complicit in human rights violations.

Academic freedom in Hong Kong has severely declined since the Chinese government imposed the draconian National Security Law on the city on June 30, 2020, Human Rights Watch and Hong Kong Democracy Council said in a report released today.

The 80-page report, “‘We Can’t Write the Truth Anymore’: Academic Freedom in Hong Kong Under the National Security Law,” documents that long-protected civil liberties, including the rights to freedom of expression, assembly, and association, have been under assault in Hong Kong’s eight publicly funded universities. As these universities have become increasingly repressive, students and faculty widely self-censor, fearful of being targeted for harassment, retribution, and even prosecution for what they say and do both in the classroom and on campus.

Archived link

The brutal killing of a Japanese schoolboy in the Chinese city of Shenzhen last week has made headlines across the world. The wider context of the tragedy — that it happened on the anniversary of the “Mukden Incident” that began Japan’s invasion of China nearly a century ago, and just months after another nearly deadly attack on a Japanese mother and her child in another city — raises serious questions about how it might be linked to decades of anti-Japanese education, entertainment and cultural conditioning in China.

But these are serious questions China’s media are not asking, or cannot ask.

How the media in China have reported the incident domestically (or not) is an unfortunate reminder not just of how stringent controls have become, but also how detrimental this atmosphere has been to discussion of the darker undercurrents of contemporary Chinese society.

[...]

From the early stages of the incident, key details were missing. The police report from Shenzhen did not mention the boy’s nationality, age, or where the attack took place.

[...]

In all likelihood, reports [...] were removed by the authorities because they jumped the gun, not waiting for an official news release (通稿) from Xinhua News Agency. Generally, for such sensitive stories, more compliant media know that protocol demands that they wait for official word. State media, therefore, kept silent on the issue until after Lin Jian (林剑), a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), held a press conference late on September 18, and again on September 19.

[...]

Hunan Daily, for example, the official mouthpiece of the provincial CCP leadership in the province, quoted Lin Jian verbatim, offering no additional details or context. The same was true of Shanghai’s The Paper, published by the state-owned Shanghai United Media Group, and other provincial-level dailies such as Guizhou Daily.

[...]

The Shenzhen attack is a sensitive story on a number of fronts for China. For starters, the government — which has touted increasing foreign visits as a mark of economic turnaround — is wary of frightening away foreign tourists, businesspeople, and investors. The attack, the third high-profile assault on foreigners in China in recent months, risks undermining the leadership’s message that China is open and ready to engage again with the world following the pandemic downturn.

The attack also risks undermining the simplistic narrative, advanced by state media, that China is fundamentally a society encouraging tolerance among civilizations — which has lately been a key pillar of what the leadership calls “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture.” The case tells us that despite China’s rhetoric of civilizational tolerance, the country has its own share, like perhaps any country, of individuals capable of violent xenophobia.

But the most sensitive aspect of this story, the most dangerous question that can be asked, is why. Why is China experiencing such violent attacks, and against the Japanese in particular? The answer to that question is no doubt complex. And yet, as netizens made clear in their early, stillborn conversations on the Shenzhen attack, the role of China’s officially-encouraged culture of xenophobic ire — a culture of “toxic nationalism” — is a serious issue that needs to be addressed.

The brutal truth behind this savage attack is that this problem will not go away until the antipathy at its root, present in the media discourse of the state as much as in the heart of the attacker, can be faced head on.

The Chinese government should quash the conviction and release Ilham Tohti, the prominent Uyghur economist and government critic, on the 10th anniversary of his sentencing, Human Rights Watch said today.

In 2014, the Xinjiang People’s High Court convicted Professor Tohti on politically motivated charges of “separatism” and sentenced him to life in prison. His family has not been allowed to visit him since early 2017 and he is believed to have been in solitary confinement since his arrest.

“The life sentence for Ilham Tohti marked the beginning of the Chinese government’s severe crackdown on the Uyghur region in 2014,” said Maya Wang, associate China director at Human Rights Watch. “Tohti’s life imprisonment for his peaceful criticism and torturous solitary confinement reflects the Chinese government’s heightened repression and relentless abuses against Uyghurs.”

Tohti, 54, was teaching at Central University of Nationalities of China when he established “Uighurs Online,” a website aimed “to provide Uyghurs and Hans with a platform for discussion and exchange” in late 2005. The Chinese government shut down the website in 2008 and sentenced the manager, Gheyret Niyaz, now 65, to 15 years in prison in 2010 for “endangering state security.”

At least six of Tohti’s students, Abduqeyum Ablimit, Perhat Halmurat, Akbar Imin, Mutellip Imin, Shohret Nijat, and Atikem Rozi, are believed to have been sentenced to between three-and-a-half and eight years in prison in 2014, based on a document leaked to Xinjiang Victims Database. It is unclear whether they were released when their sentences ended.

[Edit typo.]

The killing of a Japanese schoolboy in the Chinese city of Shenzhen has sparked worry among Japanese expats living in China, with top firms warning their workers to be vigilant.

Toshiba and Toyota have told their staff to take precautions against any possible violence, while Panasonic is offering its employees free flights home.

Japanese authorities have repeated their condemnation of the killing while urging the Chinese government to ensure the safety of their citizens.

The stabbing of the 10-year-old boy on Wednesday was the third high-profile attack on foreigners in China in recent months.

In a statement issued to the BBC, electronics giant Panasonic said it would "prioritise the safety and health of employees" in mainland China in the wake of the latest attack.

Panasonic is allowing employees and their families to temporarily return to Japan at company expense, and is offering a counselling service as well.

Toshiba, which has around 100 employees in China, has urged its workers "to be cautious of their safety".

The world's biggest car manufacturer Toyota, meanwhile, told the BBC it was "supporting Japanese expatriates" by providing them with any information they might need on the situation.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/3139706

Archived link

Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who was held in China for nearly three years [told] about the interrogation he endured during his six months in solitary confinement.

[...]

"They are trying to bully and torment and terrorize and coerce you … into accepting their false version of reality, in which you're guilty.

[...]

On December 14 [2018], four days after he was taken into custody [in China], Kovrig got his first consular visit with Canada's then-ambassador John McCallum and another official from the embassy an an offsite location.

Kovrig said he remembers trying, in that meeting and others, to communicate that China was violating international law by interrogating him the way they were.

[...]

He said his food rations were cut for being uncooperative. He said that during interrogations he was put in a high-backed wooden chair and restrained, forbidden from crossing his legs or changing his position.

[...]

[Kovrig and Michael Spavor, another Canadian who had also been detained but was being held separately] had been illegally detained by China in apparent retaliation for the Vancouver arrest of Huawei's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, who was detained at the behest of the U.S. to face fraud charges related to American sanctions against Iran.

[...]

Kovrig's partner [who was pregnant at the time when he was detained] had played their daughter recordings of his voice and showed pictures of her father while he was locked up on the other side of the world. Their daughter was two-and-a-half years old when he finally arrived back in Canada.

[...]

Archived link

Chen Wenqing, head of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, recently visited Lhasa, Kardze, and Chamdo, meeting with local officials to emphasize the need for heightened surveillance and control. His tour, which took place from September 10th to 13th, focused on maintaining stability and combating what the Chinese government terms “separatists”.

[...]

The official emphasized the need for legal suppression against those deemed threats to China’s stability and called for stricter management of religious activities stating, “We must resolutely crack down on separatist and sabotage activities in accordance with the law, resolutely manage religious affairs in accordance with the law, resolutely protect normal religious activities in accordance with the law.”

[...]

Concurrent with Chen’s visit, other high-ranking officials have made similar trips to the region. Zhang Jun, president of the Supreme People’s Court, advocated for “tough punishments to maintain pressure on violent terrorism, ethnic separatism and other serious criminal crimes” during his visit to courts in Tibet.

These heightened security measures have raised concerns among human rights advocates, who note that China’s broad definition of separatism often includes individuals merely critical of its policies toward Tibetans.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2963866

Archived link

• Research from Infyos has identified that companies accounting for 75 per cent of the global battery market have connections to one or more companies in the supply chain facing allegations of severe human rights abuses.

• Most of the allegations of severe human rights abuses involve companies mining and refining raw materials in China that end up in batteries globally, particularly in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwest China.

• “The relative opaqueness of battery supply chains and the complexity of supply chain legal requirements means current approaches like ESG audits are out of date and don’t comply with new regulations. Most battery manufacturers and their customers, including automotive companies and grid-scale battery energy storage developers, still don’t have complete supply chain oversight," says Sarah Montgomery, CEO & co-founder, Infyos.

• Supply chain changes are needed to eliminate widespread forced labour and child labour abuses occurring in the lithium-ion battery market, Infyos added.

Archived link

At a less well-reported meeting in Beijing late last year, organised by the China-Africa Business Council, officials pushed for the rapid expansion of Chinese private security firms [in countries of the Global South]. ‘Outbound Chinese investors face security challenges and a complex environment,’ said an official statement.

[...]

Officials are concerned about the fate of programmes under China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which started as a global infrastructure programme, but has evolved into an umbrella for just about everything China does overseas to further its influence. Projects have stalled or collapsed under a mountain of unsustainable debt and growing resentment at the outsize role of Chinese firms and labour. In Pakistan, for instance, Gwadar Port, built by China as key part of a $62 billion (£47 billion) China-Pakistan economic corridor has been under virtual siege by Baloch separatists, who have targeted Chinese engineers. Chinese-owned mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo have also been targeted.

A BRI working group recently highlighted the need to ‘hammer out the safety protection in a detailed way,’ according to the state-owned Xinhua news agency.

[...]

China now has overseas economic investments and assets worth well over a trillion dollars by most estimates. It has set up around 47,000 overseas firms across 190 countries or regions, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

[...]

Beijing now seems to have concluded that they are dangerously exposed, particularly at a time of growing economic stress and geopolitical tensions and require a local security apparatus to match.

[...]

The Solomon Islands provide a template for China. Last year, they signed a deal on police cooperation with Beijing as part of an upgrade of their relations to a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’. The Chinese telecoms company Huawei is building a cellular network on the Islands, and a Chinese state company plans to redevelop the port in the capital, Honiara.

[...]

China had less success with Thailand, where the government scrapped plans for joint patrols with Chinese police in popular tourist spots following criticism that it compromised Thai national sovereignty, and a rebuke from the country’s police chief. There was also anger on social media. ‘Thailand will become a complete surveillance state’, was one typical response, though among other autocrats more welcoming of Chinese, that seems to be precisely the point.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2929490

Archived link

Since August 28, disinformation has been circulating on social media platforms, Chinese content farms, and Taiwanese news media, claiming that Lai was stranded for one day (some disinformation said two days) in Kinmen because of the People's Liberation Army's exercise encircling Kinmen. Many of the disinformation posts identically referred to Lai as "rampant and arrogant [囂張]" and used the Chinese idiom "catching a turtle in a jar [甕中捉鱉]" to describe how the Liberation Army successfully confined Lai in Kinmen. The pieces further asserted that if the Liberation Army continued the exercise, Lai would only be imprisoned in Kinmen.

These claims were apparently untrue. According to the Taiwan President's office and the Kinmen County government, Lai was back in Taipei around 12:30 pm on the same day and later on met with athletes who were going to compete in the Paris Paralympics. Lai's meeting with the athletes was also broadcast by several news media.

What makes this disinformation particularly intriguing is how Taiwanese political commentators propagated this disinformation claim. These Taiwanese political commentators, who often appear on pro-China TV talk shows or make comments on cross-strait politics on their own online platform channels, were among the first to spread the false claim around the same time in late August.

[...]

**The [...] disinformation claims resonated with the main theme of Chinese propaganda: on the one hand, it denounced the idea of Taiwan's independence and demonized those who defied China; on the other hand, the propaganda was eager to show China's generosity and its congenial relationship with those who are willing to "return to the Motherland." **

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2927437

Archived link

High-tech CCTV, super-accurate DNA-testing technology and facial tracking software: China is pushing its state-of-the-art surveillance and policing tactics abroad.

Delegates from law enforcement across the world descended this week on a port city in eastern China showcasing the work of dozens of local firms, several linked to repression in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.

China is one of the most surveilled societies on Earth, with millions of CCTV cameras scattered across cities and facial recognition technology widely used in everything from day-to-day law enforcement to political repression.

Its police serve a dual purpose: keeping the peace and cracking down on petty crime while also ensuring challenges to the ruling Communist Party are swiftly stamped out.

During the opening ceremony in Lianyungang, Jiangsu province, China's police minister lauded Beijing's training of thousands of police from abroad over the last 12 months -- and promised to help thousands more over the next year.

An analyst said this was "absolutely a sign that China aims to export" its policing.

"Beijing is hoping to normalise and legitimise its policing style and... the authoritarian political system in which it operates," Bethany Allen at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute said.

[...]

"The more countries that learn from the Chinese model, the fewer countries willing to criticise such a state-first, repressive approach."

[...]

Tech giant Huawei said its "Public Safety Solution" was now in use in over 100 countries and regions, from Kenya to Saudi Arabia.

[...]

The United States sanctioned SDIC Intelligence Xiamen Information, formerly Meiya Pico, for developing an app "designed to track image and audio files, location data, and messages on... cellphones".

In 2018, the US Treasury said residents of Xinjiang "were required to download a desktop version of" that app "so authorities could monitor for illicit activity".

China has been accused of incarcerating more than one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang -- charges Beijing vehemently rejects.

[...]

Several delegations expressed interest in learning from the Chinese police.

"We have come to establish links and begin training," Colonel Galo Erazo from the National Police of Ecuador told AFP.

"Either Chinese police will go to Ecuador, or Ecuadorian police will come to China," he added.

One expert said that this outsourcing of security is becoming a key tool in China's efforts to promote its goals overseas.

[...]

"China's offers of police cooperation and training give them channels through which to learn how local security forces -- many either on China's periphery or in areas that Beijing considers strategically important -- view the security environment," [Sheena Greitens at the University of Texas in the U.S.] said.

"These initiatives can give China influence within the security apparatus if a threat to Chinese interests arises."

[Corrected broken link.]

A Hong Kong man is facing as long as 10 years in jail after he pleaded guilty to sedition for wearing a T-shirt featuring a protest slogan.

In court on Monday, Chu Kai-pong, 27, was the first person to be convicted under Hong Kong’s tough homegrown national security law enacted in March.

[...]

He was arrested on June 12 at a train station wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times”, and a yellow mask printed with “FDNOL” – the shorthand for another pro-democracy slogan, “five demands, not one less”. June 12 is a date associated with protests in the city in 2019.

[...]

Chu’s lawyer argued that the maximum he could be given would be two years.

Archived version

A Christian pastor from California has been freed from China after nearly 20 years behind bars and is back home in the U.S., the State Department said Monday.

David Lin, 68, was detained after he entered China in 2006, later convicted of contract fraud and sentenced to life in prison, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and advocacy groups.

[...]

The Biden administration has been working on David Lin’s case and those of other wrongly detained Americans in China for years and have raised them at every meeting with senior Chinese officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s meeting this summer with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Laos.

[...]

Lin was formally arrested in 2009 on suspicion of contract fraud and, after a court review, was sentenced to life in prison, China Aid said.

The charge is frequently used against leaders of churches that operate outside state-sponsored faith groups, and it is a crime that Lin denied, according to the Dui Hua Foundation, a humanitarian group that advocates for prisoners in China. The commission on religious freedom says those leading and taking part in churches not sanctioned by the Chinese government “often face intimidation, harassment, arrest and harsh sentences.”

In China, all Christian churches must pledge loyalty to the ruling Communist Party and register with the government. Any unregistered congregation is considered an underground church whose activities are illegal in China. Beijing has always cracked down on “unlawful preaching,” and efforts have only intensified in the past decade.

[...]

Other Americans known to remain detained in China include Kai Li, a businessman who is being held on espionage-related charges that his family says are bogus, and Mark Swidan, who was sentenced on drug charges. The State Department’s office of the special presidential envoy on hostage affairs has designated the two as “wrongful detainees,” a label given to Americans jailed in foreign countries for what the U.S. government considers legally specious allegations or for improper motivations.

Archived link

Over the past decade and a half, the Chinese techno-authoritarian state has deeply entrenched itself in the day-to-day lives of citizens through the use of highly sophisticated surveillance technology. Two of the world’s largest manufacturers of video surveillance equipment, Hikvision and Dahua, have revolutionized the industry and exported their products to hundreds of countries worldwide.

Chinese citizens are required to use their ID when engaging in various activities, from signing up for WeChat, the ubiquitous messaging app, to using super-apps like Alipay or WeChat Pay for tasks such as public transport, online shopping, and booking movie tickets.

This extensive network allows the government to track citizens’ everyday activities and create detailed profiles, effectively establishing a Panopticon state of censorship and repression.

The most prominent feature of China’s surveillance state is its extensive network of facial recognition cameras, which are nearly ubiquitous. The Chinese government launched a programme known as Skynet in 2005, which mandated the installation of millions of cameras throughout the nation.

This initiative was further expanded in 2015 with the introduction of SharpEyes, aiming for complete video coverage of ‘key public areas’ by 2020.

The government, in collaboration with camera manufacturers such as Hikvision and Dahua, framed this as a progressive step towards developing ‘smart cities’ that would enhance disaster response, traffic management, and crime detection.

However, the technology has been predominantly employed for repressive purposes, reinforcing compliance with the Communist Party of China.

[...]

Although many of the ‘threats’ identified by this system may turn out to be false alarms, the omnipresent vigilance of the state ensures that even the slightest dissent from citizens is swiftly suppressed.

[...]

China has become the first known instance of a government employing artificial intelligence for racial profiling, a practice referred to as ‘automated racism’, with its extensive facial recognition technologies specifically identifying and monitoring minority groups, particularly Uyghur Muslims, who have been subjected to numerous human rights violations by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

[This inlcudes] mass detentions, forced labour, religious oppression, political indoctrination, forced sterilisation and abortion, as well as sexual assault.

In Xinjiang, an extreme form of mass surveillance has transformed the province into a battleground, with military-grade cyber systems imposed on the civilian population, while the significant investment in policing and suppressing Uyghur Muslims has established Xinjiang as a testing ground for highly intrusive surveillance technologies that may be adopted by other authoritarian regimes, and the Chinese government has been known to collect DNA samples from Uyghur Muslims residing in Xinjiang, a move that has drawn widespread international condemnation for its unethical application of science and technology.

[...]

The Chinese government has adeptly formulated legislation that unites citizens and the state against private enterprises. Laws such as the Personal Information Protection Law and the Data Security Law, both enacted in 2021, impose stringent penalties on companies that fail to secure user consent for data collection, effectively diverting scrutiny away from the state’s own transgressions.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2894418

Archived link

[...]

Apparently, AMD has placed a long black sticker on the lower left corner, seemingly to remove mentions of Taiwan. That appears to be convenient timing as the new 7600X3D chips are slated for release in China on September 20, and the country has a history of forbidding mentions of Taiwan on product packaging.

The hidden text shows the origin of the Ryzen processor: “AMD processors are diffused and/or made in one or more of the following countries and/or regions: USA, Germany, Singapore, China, Malaysia, or Taiwan.”

[...]

We can surmise that the company is doing this to soothe Beijing’s ruffled feathers, which claims Taiwan is part of China and has previously slapped import restrictions on products mentioning Taiwan as the place of manufacture.

It isn’t the first time that AMD has seemingly acquiesced to the demands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In January, it removed the ‘Diffused in Taiwan’ silkscreen from the Ryzen 7000 chips. Although the company says it did this to standardize production with the products from its Xilinx acquisition, it does have the convenient side effect of keeping Beijing happy.

[...]

This recent change — adding a sticker that covers ‘Taiwan’ on the box — doesn’t seem to have any other reason except to address the CCP’s likely complaints.

Archived version

In a strategic move to bolster its international propaganda on Tibet, the Chinese government has launched the ‘Tibet International Communication Center’ on September 2, coinciding with Tibetan Democracy Day. This initiative is part of China’s broader strategy to control and shape the global narrative on Tibet, presenting it from a perspective aligned with its political agenda.

The establishment of the latest propaganda center was made during a group study session of the Political Bureau of the CCP Central Committee in May 2021. On September 2nd, a meeting was held in Lhasa, attended by representatives from the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region’s Propaganda Department and China Foreign Language Bureau related to Tibet. During this round-table conference, which focused on how to build effective international communication for Tibet, the “Tibet International Communication Center” was officially established.

[...]

According to Chinese state media, Wang Junzheng, Communist Party Secretary of the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region, highlighted at the meeting the critical importance of external propaganda as a key directive of the Communist Party and the state. He reiterated the need to uphold and implement President Xi Jinping’s ideology on Tibet.

[...]

The International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), a U.S.-based advocacy group, reported on this development, expressing concern over China’s expanding efforts to dominate the global narrative on Tibet.

[...]

The ICT warned that China’s propaganda efforts concerning Tibet are likely to intensify, potentially through increased collaboration with state-controlled media and the China Tibetology Research Center, expanded use of social media platforms to promote pro-China propaganda, and pressure on international organisations to adopt China’s stance on Tibet. The group expressed concern that, as China’s propaganda machine strengthens, the voices of Tibetans will be further marginalised on the global stage, and reports of repression within Tibet may increasingly go unheard.

Archived version

'Large-scale harassment:' Dozens of Hong Kong journalists and their family members and associates have been harassed in recent months, a leading media professional group says

Drastic political changes have created an increasingly restricted environment for journalists in the semi-autonomous Chinese city once regarded as a bastion of press freedom in Asia.

Selina Cheng, chair of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, said in a news conference that this was the largest-scale harassment of reporters in the city that they are aware of.

Cheng said her group found that people describing themselves as patriots have sent anonymous complaints to at least 15 journalists’ family members, the employers of their family members, their landlords and other related organizations since June. She said the attacks appeared to be “systematic and organized” and that she was among those targeted.

Many of the letters and emails threatened the recipients that if they continued to associate with the reporters in question or their family members, they could be endangering national security, the association said.

In addition, posts on Facebook targeting at least 36 journalists called their articles inflammatory and described legitimate reporting as problematic or illegal, the group said. Violent online threats were also made against some journalists and members of the association’s executive committee, it said.

"This type of intimidation and harassment, which includes sharing false and defamatory content, and death threats, damages press freedom in Hong Kong and we should not tolerate it,” Cheng said.

[...]

Since the introduction of a Beijing-imposed national security law in 2020, two news outlets known for critical coverage of the government, Apple Daily and Stand News, were forced to shut down after the arrest of their senior management, including Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai.

[...]

In March, Hong Kong enacted another security law that deepened fears over civil liberties and press freedom. In August, two former editors of Stand News were convicted in a sedition case widely seen as a barometer for the future of the city’s media freedoms. The ruling drew criticism from foreign governments.

Hong Kong was ranked 135 out of 180 territories in Reporters Without Borders’ latest World Press Freedom Index, down from 80 in 2021.