Chinese Aggressions

South Korea to China: Stay Out of Our Airspace
Reuters
Chinese Ambassador to South Korea Qiu Guohong arrives at the Foreign Ministry in Seoul, South Korea, Oct. 11, 2016. On Tuesday South Korea summoned Qiu to protest Chinese military aircraft flying inside its air defense identification zone.

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — South Korea summoned the Chinese ambassador Tuesday to lodge a complaint over a Chinese military aircraft entering the South’s air defense territory, the second such incident this year, the foreign ministry said Wednesday.
The Chinese aircraft flew for more than four hours inside South Korea’s air defense identification zone (KADIZ) Tuesday, prompting the South to scramble multiple fighter jets to track it, a South Korean defense official told Reuters.
China’s Ambassador Qiu Guohong was told the military jet’s flight into South Korean airspace had been unfortunate and urged to prevent similar instances from occurring again, the ministry said in a statement.
Three other Chinese officials based in South Korea had been summoned to the defense ministry earlier in the day for the incident, which occurred near South Korea’s island of Ulleungdo off its east coast.
The aircraft was told to “halt its threatening flight” and “any other actions that could raise the possibility of sudden conflict,” said the South Korean defense official, adding Chinese officials told South Korea’s military the aircraft’s movements had been part of regular military exercises.
Speaking in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said China’s sending of an aircraft for training in the “relevant air space” was completely in line with international law and practice.
“Air defense identification zones are not territorial air space. There is absolutely no justification for South Korea to criticize China on the basis of a so-called ADIZ,” Lu told a daily news briefing.
A Chinese military aircraft entered the KADIZ on Jan. 29 while two similar instances were observed in 2017.

Rotten Apple

Apple under fire for moving iCloud data to China: Apple's latest move has privacy advocates and human rights groups worried.

by Sherisse Pham

The U.S. company is moving iCloud accounts registered in mainland China to state-run Chinese servers on Wednesday along with the digital keys needed to unlock them.
"The changes being made to iCloud are the latest indication that China's repressive legal environment is making it difficult for Apple to uphold its commitments to user privacy and security," Amnesty International warned in a statement Tuesday.
The criticism highlights the tradeoffs major international companies are making in order to do business in China, which is a huge market and vital manufacturing base for Apple.
In the past, if Chinese authorities wanted to access Apple's user data, they had to go through an international legal process and comply with U.S. laws on user rights, according to Ronald Deibert, director of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which studies the intersection of digital policy and human rights.
"They will no longer have to do so if iCloud and cryptographic keys are located in China's jurisdiction," he told CNNMoney.
The company taking over Apple's Chinese iCloud operations is Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD), which is owned by the government of Guizhou province. 

GCBD did not respond to requests for comment.
The change only affects iCloud accounts that are registered in mainland China.
Apple made the move to comply with China's latest regulations on cloud services. 

A controversial cybersecurity law, which went into effect last June, requires companies to keep all data in the country. 

Beijing has said the measures are necessary to help prevent crime and terrorism, and protect Chinese citizens' privacy.
The problem with Chinese cybersecurity laws, Deibert said, is that they also require companies operating in China "to turn over user data to state authorities on demand -- Apple now included."
Other big U.S. tech companies have had to take similar steps -- Amazon and Microsoft also struck partnerships with Chinese companies to operate their cloud services in the country.
"Our choice was to offer iCloud under the new laws or discontinue offering the service," an Apple spokesman told CNN. 

The company decided to keep iCloud in China, because cutting it off "would result in a bad user experience and less data security and privacy for our Chinese customers," he said.
Apple users typically use iCloud to store data such as music, photos and contacts.
That information can be extremely sensitive. 

Earlier this month, Reporters Without Borders urged China-based journalists to change the country associated with their iCloud accounts -- which is an option for non-Chinese citizens, according to Apple -- or to close them down entirely.
Human rights groups also highlighted the difficult ethical positions Apple could find itself in under the new iCloud arrangement in China.
The company has fought for privacy rights in the Unites States. 

It publicly opposed a judge's order to break into the iPhone of one of the terrorists who carried out the deadly attack in San Bernardino in December 2016, calling the directive "an overreach by the US government."
At the time, CEO Tim Cook pretentiously said complying with the order would have required Apple to build "a backdoor to the iPhone ... something we consider too dangerous to create."
Human Rights Watch questioned whether the company would take similar steps to try to protect users' iCloud information in China, where similar privacy rights don't exist.
"Will Apple challenge laws adopted by the Chinese government that give authorities vast access to that data, especially with respect to encrypted keys that authorities will likely demand?" asked Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch.

Apple declined to answer that question directly,.
"Apple has not created nor were we requested to create any backdoors and Apple will continue to retain control over the encryption keys to iCloud data," the Apple spokesman said.
Rights groups and privacy advocates are not convinced.
"China is an authoritarian country with a long track record of problematic human rights abuses, and extensive censorship and surveillance practices," Deibert said.
Apple users in China should take "extra and possibly inconvenient precautions not to store sensitive data on Apple's iCloud," he advised.
Most of those users have already accepted the new status quo, according to Apple. 

So far, more than 99.9% of iCloud users in China have chosen to continue using the service, the Apple spokesman said.

China detains relatives of U.S. reporters in punishment for East Turkestan coverage

By Simon Denyer

A policeman is seen through a car window at a security checkpoint at Khom village of Altay, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China, on Jan. 28. 

BEIJING — China’s security services have detained several close relatives of four U.S.-based reporters working for Radio Free Asia, in an attempt to intimidate or punish them for their coverage of the Muslim-majority East Turkestan region, the news organization said Wednesday.
Tens of thousands of Muslim ethnic Uighurs have been detained in “political education centers” by Chinese authorities in East Turkestan in recent months, according to Human Rights Watch. 

The campaign is portrayed as a “strike hard” campaign against "terrorists and separatists", but effectively means anyone who expresses their religious or cultural identity is targeted, Human Rights Watch said.
“We’re very concerned about the well-being and safety of our journalists’ family members, especially those in need of medical treatment,” said Rohit Mahajan, director of public affairs at Radio Free Asia in Washington.
“We’re also particularly concerned about the use of detentions as a tactic by Chinese authorities to silence and intimidate independent media, as well as to inhibit RFA’s mission of bringing free press to closed societies.”
Among those who have been detained or disappeared are several close relatives of Shohret Hoshur, Gulchehra Hoja, Mamatjan Juma and Kurban Niyaz, four ethnic Uighur journalists working for Radio Free Asia in Washington. 

The first three are U.S. citizens while Niyaz is a green-card holder.
Their reporting for the U.S. government-funded news organization has offered one of the only independent sources of information about the crackdown in the province.
All three of Hoshur’s brothers were jailed in East Turkestan in 2014, but two were released in December of the following year after protests from the U.S. government. 

The third, Tudaxun, was sentenced to a five-year jail term in 2015 for endangering state security and remains in prison.
Now, Hoshur said, the other two brothers were detained again in September and taken to the “Loving Kindness School,” a political re-education center in the city of Horgos. 

Hoshur said a source told him that around 3,000 people have been detained there.
Hoshur said Chinese authorities have contacted family members living in East Turkestan, urging them to ask him to stop calling and reporting on events in the region.
In a separate statement posted online last week, Hoja said her brother, 43-year-old Kaisar Keyum, was taken away by police in October and his whereabouts are unknown. 

Since late January, she has also lost all contact with her parents, who are both in their seventies and suffer from poor health.
“My father is paralyzed on one side and needs a constant care. My mother has recently had a surgery on her feet and is very weak,” she said in the statement. 

“I need to know where they are and that they are OK. I need to be able to speak to them. They have not committed any crime.”
Shortly after calling her aunt earlier this month, Hoja said she received a call from a friend in West Virginia whose mother lives in Urumqi, East Turkestan’s capital. 

Her friend said that around 20 of Hoja’s relatives had been arrested by the Chinese police because of her reporting.
When her brother was detained, police told Hoja’s mother that her employment with RFA was the reason for his detention, while Hoja has heard that her relatives may have been detained for being in communication with her through a WeChat messaging group, RFA said.
Juma, deputy director of RFA’s Uyghur Service, reported that his brothers Ahmetjan Juma and Abduqadir Juma were detained in May 2017. 

Ahmetan’s whereabouts are unknown, while Abduqadir has been taken to a prison in Urumqi. 

He suffers from heart and health issues that require medical care, but his sister has been denied access to him.
“The family is deeply concerned about his health and well-being while being held in a prison known for its inhumane conditions,” RFA said.
RFA Uyghur broadcaster Niyaz’s youngest brother Hasanjan was arrested last May and soon afterward sentenced to six years in jail for “holding ethnic hatred.”
Human rights groups say China represses the rights, culture and freedom of worship for Uighur Muslims. 

East Turkestan has been home to long-running separatist unrest, and there have been several violent attacks there in recent years, blamed by the authorities on Islamist extremism.
In a report issued Tuesday, Human Rights Watch described how a system of predictive policing, involving constant mass surveillance and big data analysis, was being deployed to bolster the crackdown in East Turkestan.
The policing program called “Integrated Joint Operations Platform” gathers data from all-pervasive security cameras, some of which have facial recognition or infrared capabilities, “WiFi sniffers” monitoring smartphones and computers, and car license plate and identity card numbers gathered at the region’s countless security checkpoints, all cross-checked against health, banking and legal records, the report said.
Police officers, Communist Party cadres and government workers also visit homes to gather data on families, their “ideological situation” and their relationships with neighbors. 

One interviewee said even owning a large number of books could arouse suspicion, unless one worked as a teacher, while data is also gathered on frequency of prayer and visits abroad.
Constant surveillance and harassment have made it extremely difficult for foreign reporters based in China to cover the crackdown in East Turkestan effectively, with locals too scared to talk to reporters and security officials obstructing or detaining several journalists who have ventured there. 

That has made RFA’s coverage even more important in understanding the situation there.
RFA said it had been in contact with the State Department over the detentions, but China’s foreign ministry declined to say whether it had received any communications from the U.S. government.
RFA was set up by Congress in 1994 to broadcast news that would otherwise not be reported in Asian countries where governments do not allow a free press and it continues to be funded by an annual grant from the U.S. government’s Broadcasting Board of Governors.
Hoshur said China might be using voice recognition technology to intercept his phone calls to gather information from East Turkestan, with almost all of them cut off in under a minute.

Tech Quisling and Moral Pygmy

Apple is kowtowing to China’s police state
Washington Post

CHINA AND Russia, among other places ruled by strongmen and their political cronies, are demanding that technology companies locate all their data on national soil.  

The titans of American digital innovation — Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and others — face a difficult choice. 

They can risk moving the data of millions of customers to a police state, or they can refuse and risk losing millions of customers.
This week, Apple is choosing option A: police state. 

Starting Wednesday, the data of its iCloud customers in China will be transferred to China, as required by a new law, to be housed in a center operated by a Chinese company. 

Apple will control the encryption keys but says it will respond to “valid legal requests” from Chinese authorities for the data of individuals. 

This applies only to the popular iCloud and what Chinese users decide to store there; data on an iPhone itself is encrypted, and users are the only ones who can unlock it.
Previously, a request for the cloud data would have come to the United States and would have been subject to the rigors of U.S. law and due process. 

China, however, is ruled by the Communist Party, which remains above the law. 

A vivid glimpse of how the mechanism works is China’s recent campaign to silence and punish human rights lawyers, jailing them for defending people who dared speak their minds openly. 

China is also rolling out a nationwide system to monitor the behavior of individuals, including their financial transactions, shopping habits, social media, traffic tickets and unpaid bills, and combining it with ubiquitous surveillance. 

This is the legal environment that will oversee the iCloud data of Chinese users.

Amazon and Microsoft have also established data centers in China. (The chief executive and founder of Amazon, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Post.)
Two years ago, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, refused to help the FBI crack open an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorists. 

Cook insisted that it was vital to protect data encryption for privacy, that to give in to the FBI would “make hundreds of millions of customers vulnerable around the world, including in the U.S.” 

We understand that Cook was talking about the iPhone then, and not the cloud, but he was very passionate about the principle of resisting government snooping. 

“We need to stand tall and stand tall on principle,” Cook bombastically declared.

When it comes to China, however, Apple says that it decided to “remain engaged.” 

This cannot have been an easy decision for Apple or Cook. 

Other companies will confront it, too. 

Of course it would have been painful to Apple’s customers, and to its bottom line, to pull out of China. 

But obeying “local laws” can mean honoring the whims of mega-snoops and dictators who do not share the values of democracy and free expression. 

Apple should find that painful, too.

Chinese Golem: Globalization Has Created a Chinese Monster

Xi Jinping's dictatorship isn't what the end of history was supposed to look like.
BY EMILE SIMPSON 

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping speaks at the opening session of the 19th Communist Party Congress in Beijing on Oct. 18, 2017. 

On Sunday, the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee recommended ending the two-term limit on the presidency, paving the way for Xi Jinping to stay in office indefinitely. 

This surely marks the end of an era — and not just for China, but also for the West.
For the West, the era in question started with the end of the Cold War, as old enemies became “emerging markets.” 

China had already started opening its markets to foreign investment since 1978 under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. 

But only in the 1990s did the private sector take off there, and Western firms promptly rushed in to profit from the breakneck speed of Chinese economic growth.
The beauty of the post-Cold War emerging market story was that it was apolitical. 

Recall the famous identification of the leading emerging markets by Jim O’Neill in 2001 as the “BRICs” (Brazil, Russia, India, China) — four states from different groupings during the Cold War now viewed together as the leading protagonists in a new era of peaceful globalization under the Pax Americana. 

Some called it the end of history.
But this apolitical approach was premised on the assumption, inherited from the Cold War, that democracy and capitalism go hand in hand, and that the extension of free markets would bring global convergence to the Western economic model, as the Washington Consensus predicted.
Confidence in globalization saw massive amounts of Western capital and intellectual property flow to emerging markets, above all to China. 

But few in the West registered the geopolitical significance of this at the time. 

Instead, they praised the economic growth story. 

And not without good reason: the integration of China into global markets lifted a billion people out of poverty. 

It remains a testament to the material benefits of removing geopolitical obstructions from the development of global business.
But this story of global cosmopolitan peace has been on the rocks for some time. 

Russian privatization in the 1990s ultimately produced a mafia state controlled by an oligarchy. 

More broadly — with a few exceptions, mainly in Eastern Europe, where democracy did take hold (current problems notwithstanding) — capitalism has expanded since the end of the Cold War in spite of democracy, not alongside it.
And nowhere is this more evident than in China. 

It’s now abundantly clear that despite the West’s pious belief in the transformative power of free markets to encourage “reform,” China is headed toward more, not less autocracy. 

Indeed, China has broken a path toward a new form of totalitarianism in which one man will sit atop a police state with access to ubiquitous data gathered about citizens by social media and online shopping platforms and a vast human and electronic surveillance apparatus to track their every move. 

Look no further than the ghastly “social credit score” system that Beijing wants to roll out by 2020 to get a sense of how wrong the idea has proven to be that free markets will bring about democratic change, or even minor liberalizing reform in China. 

A billion people may have been lifted out of poverty, but only to find themselves living under cyber-totalitarianism.
The geopolitical consequences of this realization could be very profound indeed. 

In the Cold War, the West faced totalitarian communist regimes whose economic model and political system were both alien to what the “free world” claimed to stand for. 

Of course, the link between capitalism and democracy was always tenuous, not least given the reality that many of the West’s allies were not democratic. 

But now, if it was ever in doubt, we know for sure that capitalism and democracy don’t have to go together: Capitalism is up for grabs, and you don’t even need to support the Pax Americana to plug into it

How does this end? 

We don’t yet know, but the question may well come to be the defining feature of a new geopolitical phase the world seems to have entered. 

Note how far removed from the happy story of liberal globalization is the language of the Trump administration’s December 2017 National Security Strategy: “China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.”
Admittedly, this comes in the context of a presidency that bizarrely refuses to carry out U.S. congressional sanctions on Russia for interference in the U.S. 2016 elections. 

But the more important point is that Western states and their citizens are becoming increasingly alert to the need fundamentally to reappraise the value of the integrated global capitalism they have more or less promoted since the early 1990s. 

I am not talking about a reappraisal in light of the inequality that economic growth has produced, or the massive outsourcing of manufacturing jobs that created rust belts on both sides of the Atlantic, which is a separate discussion. 

Rather, this reappraisal concerns the inconvenient truth, which surely now is undeniable, that the West’s own economic policy has encouraged, if unwittingly, the rise of deeply illiberal regimes in much of the former communist world.
What practical effect this produces in the foreign and economic policies of the West depends, on the one hand, on the extent to which the West is prepared to sacrifice material wealth in support of its public values; and, on the other hand, on the extent to which authoritarian states, above all Russia and China, attempt to export their values abroad. 

One could list any number of areas where this dilemma will play out, but the most important near-term litmus test will be whether the West responds to China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a benign economic project, or as a geopolitical threat.

China Is Using Big Data to Repress its Muslim Uighur Population

By GERRY SHIH 

BEIJING — Human Rights Watch says it has found new evidence that authorities in one of China’s most repressive regions are sweeping up citizens’ personal information in a stark example of how big-data technology can be used to police a population — and abused.
The rights group used publicly available government procurement documents, media reports and interviews to assemble details of the policing program called the “Integrated Joint Operations Platform” in East Turkestan, a sprawling area in northwest China that security officials say harbors separatist and religious extremist elements.
Unidentified sources inside East Turkestan described to Human Rights Watch the computer and mobile app interfaces of the IJOP software that tracks almost all citizens of the Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighur ethnic minority and stores detailed information including their travel history, prayer habits, the number of books in their possession, banking and health records.
Procurement notices show that the IJOP also deploys license plate tracking and facial-recognition cameras to follow people in real time and provide “predictive warnings” about impending crime, Human Rights Watch said.
Although surveillance is pervasive in many countries, including the United States, and has the potential for abuse, the technology is being deployed far more broadly in East Turkestan, said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch and the report’s author.
“In China the programs are very explicitly focused on people who are politically threatening or an entire Uighur ethnic group,” Wang said.

Police patrol in a night market near the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar in China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, a day before the Eid al-Fitr holiday on June 25, 2017. 

An official in the press office of Xinjiang police headquarters on Monday confirmed AP’s questions had been received but said leaders were out and he had no idea when or if there would be a reply. 

The official, like many Chinese bureaucrats, declined to give his name because he wasn’t authorized to speak to reporters.
China’s 10 million Uighurs already face a raft of restrictions not imposed on people of the Han ethnicity, who are the overwhelming majority in China. 

Uighurs face multiple hurdles in procuring passports and those who have them are required to leave them with the police. 

Hotels are required to register their presence with the local authorities and frequently turn them away to avoid the hassle. 

Frequent road blocks and checkpoints across the vast East Turkestan region enable authorities to stop people and check their mobile phones for content that might be deemed suspicious.
Such pressure was ratcheted up following a series of deadly attacks blamed on Uighur extremists seeking independence from Chinese rule.
A 2017 investigation by The Associated Press showed that thousands of Uighurs in East Turkestan, and possibly many more, have been sent to an extrajudicial network of political indoctrination centers for months at a time for reasons including studying abroad and communicating with relatives abroad.
The AP also found evidence in government documents and procurement contracts of the Xinjiang government compiling biometric and personal data and systematically rating its Uighur citizens’ political reliability.
The Human Rights Watch report reveals for the first time that the disparate data collection efforts appear to be unified under one central digital database that calculates citizens’ political risk.
Use of the integrated computer system has led to people being detained and sent to political indoctrination centers, Wang said, citing interviewees who were kept anonymous out of concern for their safety.
Wang said she has found evidence that Chinese police are building similar big-data tracking capabilities in other parts of the country under a program called the “police cloud,” but do not deploy them to as such an extent as in Xinjiang.

Oriental Despotism

Xi Jinping steps up as the leader of the unfree world

By Ishaan Tharoor

On Sunday, the Chinese Communist Party made an unexpected announcement: The party will propose scrapping the line in China's constitution that limits presidents to “no more than two consecutive terms.” 

That means Xi Jinping, who just started his second five-year term, probably will rule well beyond 2023.
When Xi came to power half a decade ago, some commentators in the West imagined him leading his nation down the road of economic and political change. 

Instead, as we've discussed before, Xi ushered in a stiffening authoritarianism, purging thousands of political opponents, squeezing the already narrow space for civil society and presiding over the creation of a cutting-edge 21st- century surveillance state.  

The latest news only confirms his desire to bring China firmly under his grasp.
“It is the strongest sign yet that Xi intends to hold on to power, potentially taking China back toward one-man rule,” my colleague Emily Rauhala noted.
The two-term limit was imposed in the wake of China's traumatic Cultural Revolution, when the country was still reeling from the bloody despotism and personal whims of the long-ruling Mao Zedong. 

The amendment to the constitution “reflected a widespread desire to prevent the return of one-man dictatorship. Its abolition signals the likelihood of another long period of severe repression,” Jerome Cohen, a noted Chinese legal expert at New York University, wrote in a blog post.

The signs of a deepening dictatorship under Xi have been present for quite some time. 

Human rights activists have been jailed, internal party debate subdued and censorship ratcheted up — including against memes on social media that mocked Xi's budding imperial rule. 

In recent years, Beijing has also taken dramatic steps to rein in the special administrative region of Hong Kong. 

Once considered an incubator of liberal values that could help spread democracy and liberalism to the Chinese mainland, the former British colony is now increasingly at risk of losing its cherished freedoms.
My colleague Simon Denyer suggested there are some practical reasons Xi wants to remain in power: “Xi has already used his power to implement a far-reaching crackdown on corruption, even if it has also been used to instill obedience and eliminate rivals. He is equally determined to improve the way the party governs China, eliminate poverty and even improve the country’s poisoned environment.” 

But, he added, there are obvious risks: “Joseph Stalin and Mao both illustrated the dangers of centralizing too much power in one man’s hands, because one lonely man at the top can easily become paranoid.”
In the near term, Xi may have little to fear when it comes to internal challenges. 

But China’s economic growth is slackening, and some critics point to looming structural crises on the horizon that could further shock the system — and possibly give momentum to potential rivals among the various cliques and power centers within China's high leadership.
“Xi’s ability to push this decision through in the short-term is undoubtedly a display of his grip on all levers of power,” wrote veteran China watcher Richard McGregor. 

“But the very fact that he feels the need to do so could easily be a sign of something else — that he is possessed by an urgency to gather even more power than he already has to keep his enemies at bay.”

Souvenir necklaces with portraits of Xi on sale in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on Feb. 26. 

Xi’s move should also be seen in a broader global context. 

For years, Chinese officials and state media have rolled their eyes at Western lectures about China's undemocratic political system. 

They pointed to the dysfunction gripping democracies elsewhere, contrasting it to the economic and diplomatic successes achieved under one-party rule. 

And now, they are casting Xi's tightening grip as the right system for an uncertain geopolitical moment.
“In the era of globalization and the Internet, although China has stunning economic might, it has not yet become a leading power in terms of ideology and information,” the Global Times, China's oft-provocative English-language mouthpiece, wrote in an editorial. 

“The most influential value system in the world now is the Western value system established by the U.S. and Europe. It has shaped and affected quite a few Chinese people's mind-sets. But some key parts of the Western value system are collapsing. Democracy, which has been explored and practiced by Western societies for hundreds of years, is ulcerating.”

The value system floated here isn't wholly unique to China. 

Xi propagates a muscular brand of Chinese nationalism, steeped in appeals to a rosy imperial past and visions of a triumphant future — not unlike other illiberal autocrats elsewhere. 

Speaking to Denyer, Willy Lam, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, invoked Vladimir Putin, who has also challenged the Western-led status quo while playing the part of the indispensable father of his nation.
“Xi is a big admirer of Putin,” Lam said. 

He added: “The most reliable legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party is nationalism. Nationalism is very important to both the legitimacy of the party and Xi himself.”
If Xi is issuing a new challenge, it has yet to provoke much of a response. 

The muted reaction from Western governments to Xi's power grab underscored the calculation many governments seem to have made: In the age of nuclear threats and budding trade wars, strong, stable Chinese leadership — no matter the costs at home — is preferred to fragility or uncertainty in Beijing.
When pressed for comment Monday, White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said President Trump “has talked about term limits in a number of capacities during the campaign and something that he supports here in the United States, but that's a decision that's up to China.”
“Thirty years ago, with what Xi did ... there would have been an outpouring of international concern: ‘You’re getting off the path,’ and so on,” Michael A. McFaul, a political scientist and former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, told the New York Times. 

“Nobody is making that argument today.”

Death by China

Peter Navarro set to assume more influential role in Trump White House
By DON LEE

Peter Navarro, second from right, stands behind President Trump during a ceremony to mark a formal withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade deal in 2017.

Once sidelined inside the White House, Peter Navarro, the noted economist, is set to re-emerge as a more influential member of the Trump administration, just as the president is gearing up to take potentially punishing economic actions against Beijing.
Navarro, a former longtime UC Irvine professor, is expected to be named assistant to the president, a promotion that would place the Harvard-trained economist among the ranks of top-level policy advisors, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Trump's decision to give Navarro a higher rank, first reported by the publication Inside Trade, comes as the president faces an April deadline to determine whether to impose tariffs and other measures to restrict imported steel and aluminum from China and other nations.
The Trump administration is also considering more sweeping penalties on China for massive theft of intellectual property and forced technology transfers.
Navarro was a top economic advisor to Trump during his campaign in 2016, providing the economic rationale for Trump's fiery rhetoric that called for overhauling free-trade deals and tariffs of 45% on Chinese imports.
"They may be preparing for stronger tariffs, so he'd be the natural one to represent the White House," said Derek Scissors, a China economic analyst with the American Enterprise Institute.
White House spokeswoman Natalie Strom declined to comment, saying she had no "personnel announcements to make at this time."
Navarro, who has written such brilliant books as "The Coming China Wars" and "Death by China: Confronting the Dragon — a Global Call to Action," was an architect of Trump's campaign white paper on economic policy, along with now-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
After Trump's victory, the president appointed Navarro head of a newly created White House National Trade Council. 

But that office dissolved after a few months, and Navarro was relegated to a role subordinate to the National Economic Council and its director, Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs president whose pro-China positions on trade clashed with Navarro's nationalist stance.
The new rank could allow Navarro to bypass Cohn and once again report directly to Trump.
White House officials have downplayed the apparent conflicts between the administration's economic nationalists and the so-called "globalists". 

The latter group worries about the economic risks of a hard-line approach that could trigger a trade war, especially with China.
Trump has somewhat moderated his rhetoric on trade since taking office even as he has often given conflicting signals about how he might deal with China. 

On Monday, speaking to state governors meeting in Washington, Trump again praised Chinese dictator Xi Jinping while insisting that the United States cannot tolerate lopsided trade with China.
"I think that President Xi is unique. He's helping us with North Korea," Trump told the governors.
"China's been good, but they haven't been great," he added. 

"China has really done more, probably, than they've ever done because of my relationship. We have a very good relationship, but President Xi is for China, and I'm for the United States."
"We probably lost $504 billion last year on trade" to China, Trump said. 

In fact, Chinese imports last year were more than $505 billion, but the United States also exported $130 billion in goods, resulting in a merchandise trade deficit of about $375 billion. 

Trump's mantra on trade has been "fair and reciprocal trade," and his aides are trying to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and the United States' trade pact with South Korea.
Navarro has blamed trade deals like NAFTA and the one with South Korea for weakening the American economy, and Trump and Navarro have shared the same critical view of Chinese economic policies and the World Trade Organization.
"Peter has shown staying power," said Scissors. 

Although he was seen as marginalized in the administration, Navarro always seemed to have a voice at the table, he added.
"Peter's influence comes from the fact that the president tends to agree with him," he said.

Sina Delenda Est

USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier sails through South China Sea in defiance of China
By Adam Harvey

Deep in the South China Sea the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, USS Carl Vinson, has a point to make.
"It shows resolve, and gives decision space to our leaders," the ship's commanding officer, Captain Doug Verissimo, said.
"When they put a carrier strike group somewhere it helps to show that the United States is interested.
"We don't have a lot of these, so when you put one in a certain area it has some influence.
"Of course it also gives our diplomats time and space to negotiate and make decisions, ultimately to try and prevent any type of armed conflict."
The Carl Vinson is the flagship of a strike group from the US Third Fleet.
The other vessels are here — but you can't see them.
The Carl Vinson is the flagship of a strike group from the US Third Fleet. 

Somewhere over the horizon, guided missile cruisers and destroyers form a protective shield around the aircraft carrier.
No-one on board will say it so bluntly, but the ship is sailing through the South China Sea to send a deliberate message: these waters aren't China's alone.
China has built airstrips and ports on reefs and shoals throughout the sea in defiance of a ruling from an international tribunal in the Hague.
"We want to keep laws and norms in place that we don't change the map along the way, to avoid frictions," Captain Verissimo said.
"As you change maps it creates new frictions and new issues."

The ship's aircraft includes FA18 Super Hornets, EA 18G Growlers and Nighthawks.

He doesn't mention it by name, but the only nation trying to change the map out here is China, which has drawn a so-called "Nine Dash Line" around waters it claims as its own.
It doesn't want anyone going near any of its artificial islands.
The strike group's commander, Rear Admiral John Fuller, won't reveal where he's planning on sailing during this mission but it's clear he's not charting his course using China's map.
"I will say our navigation is very good and we know where international law says we can operate and I know where international law says we can't. And we're going to do what international law says we can do."

The ship's commanding officer describes the Carl Vinson as a floating city — it has a dental surgery, gyms, a Starbucks cafe, armed guards, Friday night karaoke and even a chapel that holds services for Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists … and Wiccans.
There's a permanent crew of 3,000 — and another 2,000 people on board associated with the ship's aircraft: about 70 planes, including FA18 Super Hornets and Hornets, EA 18G Growlers, Nighthawk helicopters and surveillance aircraft.
There are 3,000 permanent crew on board USS Carl Vinson and another 2,000 for the ship's aircraft.

I'm on board of the Vinson along with media from the Philippines — the nation with perhaps the most to lose from Chinese expansion in the South China Sea.
China's already blocked Filipino fishermen from the lucrative fishing ground around Scarborough Shoal.
The US is making a big deal of this trip because it wants to show Filipinos that it stands with them in keeping the South China Sea open.
The ship is moving between an old ally and a new one … and another nation concerned about China's island-building in these waters.
The Carl Vinson began this leg of its journey in Manila and it'll drop anchor next off Danang, Vietnam.
It'll be the first visit from a US aircraft carrier since the end of the Vietnam War.
This time the fighter jets will be stowed away.

The Manchurian Pope

Hong Kong Catholics Condemn China-Vatican Deal
By Suzanne Sataline

About 200 Catholics attend a prayer meeting for the Chinese Church after news emerge that Beijing and the Vatican have reached a deal on bishop appointments, in Hong Kong, China, Feb. 12, 2018.
HONG KONG — At a recent all-night prayer vigil, nearly 100 Roman Catholics gathered in a church ground floor chapel to pray the rosary in Cantonese for their fellow worshippers in mainland China.
On their minds as they recited the prayer: a possible deal between the Holy See and China's communist leaders that is worrying many Catholics.
Lucia Kwok, a care worker stepped out of the chapel and spoke of her dismay over the recent news. Francis, she said, was making deals with the government in China. 

“We don’t trust the PRC because they are dishonest. They lie, they do bad things and never keep their promises,” Kwok said. 

“China is not worth our trust.”
Many Catholics in Hong Kong are confused and upset with the Vatican’s recent steps to resume relations with the Chinese government even as Beijing has continued to silence critics.
In the nearly seven decades since its establishment, the People's Republic of China has not had formal diplomatic relations with the Holy See, a condition rooted in the Vatican's tradition of appointing its bishops worldwide — a practice the mainland Chinese leadership has historically viewed as interference in its internal affairs.

Cross-bearers process through the church grounds during a Christmas Eve mass at the Southern Cathedral, an officially-sanctioned Catholic church in Beijing, Dec. 24, 2015.
Patriotic Catholic Association
China's Catholics have been allowed to practice their religion under a government-supervised entity known as the Patriotic Catholic Association in which the government officially names bishops. 

Some — but not all — of those bishops have been quietly approved by the Vatican as well.
The Holy See has considered sacraments administered in the patriotic church valid, but the existence of the entity and the government's tight control of it has for decades has prompted many observant Catholics to practice their faith in a parallel, "underground" Catholic church, whose members see themselves as true followers of the church in Rome. 

The underground church is declared illegal and its members have been routinely subjected to arrest and ruthless persecution.
Believers take part in a weekend mass at an underground Catholic church in Tianjin.
An agreement between the Holy See and the Chinese government would allow the Vatican to operate more openly in China, but grant greater control to Beijing over the church's decisions.

Zen expresses frustration
At the prayer gathering in Hong Kong, Kwok’s frustration was echoed by Cardinal Joseph Zen, the retired bishop of Hong Kong and a longtime critic of Beijing, who prayed quietly with the group.

In recent weeks he has termed any agreement between the Vatican and Beijing that would allow China control over the church as “evil.”
Retired archbishop of Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen gestures during an interview in Hong Kong, Friday, Feb. 9, 2018.

News reports have said the agreement would legitimize the government-appointed bishops and force those in the underground church to retire. 

The reports say the pope in Rome would have a final say over the approval of bishops, but Zen has voiced concern that Beijing would only name bishops loyal to the communist leadership.
In this Jan. 10, 2018 photo made available the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, retired archbishop of Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen hands a letter to Francis at the end of his weekly general audience.

“It’s something important for the whole church, this attitude of fidelity and disrespect for our faith. The faith and the discipline. It’s a very serious matter to disregard centuries of doctrine,” Zen said. “They want everybody to come into the open and obey the government. They never say how they would deal with bishops in the underground. It’s obvious what they are going to do… They will not only eliminate bishops, but in some dioceses have no bishop, but some kind of [government] delegate.”
The Vatican has asked Catholics for time to work out details. 

Francis, speaking to reporters in early December, said: “It’s mostly political dialogue for the Chinese Church… which must go step by step delicately,” he said. 

“Patience is needed.”

Changing political landscape
Several Catholics in Hong Kong have said the move can be seen as an appeasement, coming at a fraught moment when China has grown more authoritarian under Xi Jinping.
On Sunday, China’s ruling party announced it would end presidential term limits, an extraordinary move by a government that sought to avoid the dangerous one-man control exerted by former leader Mao Zedong. 

The move will, in effect, allow Xi to serve for life. 

During his five years in office, Xi’s policies have attacked economic corruption as well as curtailed the work of human rights attorneys, labor organizers, investigative journalists and bloggers.
In December, the Vatican asked two bishops in the underground church in China to relinquish their roles to men approved by the government. 

Vatican envoys asked Bishop Zhuang Jianjian of Shantou to step down and cede control to Huang Bingzhang, an excommunicated bishop and a member of China’s acquiescent legislature, the National People’s Congress, according to asianews.it.
Guo Xijin, another underground bishop in Fujian province, was asked to serve as an assistant to Zhan Silu, another government appointed bishop. 

Previously, the Vatican had said that both men had been elevated illegally by the government.
Opponents see it as an unusual intrusion, even violation, of the church’s authority. 

They are also concerned about signs that the government has restricted religious practice, such as orders that followers not bring children to worship.
News of the Vatican’s negotiations prompted several professors to start a petition against any agreement that would cede control to Beijing. 

More than 2,000 people have signed.
“We think the Catholic Church has appeal [for] the Chinese people exactly because it has refused to compromise with the Chinese authority,” said Joseph Cheng Yu-shek, a retired political science professor in Hong Kong, and one of the petitions organizers. 

“The first Christians of China were the very, very poor peasants in the cultural revolution days. My argument is if the Vatican makes a compromise with Beijing, the Catholic church loses that moral and spiritual appeal. And it doesn’t benefit the church.”

Rogue Nation

Xi Jinping’s Strongman Rule Raises New Fears of Hostility and Repression
By JANE PERLEZ and JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

Xi Jinping’s efforts to indefinitely extend his rule as China’s leader, announced on Sunday, raised fresh fears in China of a resurgence of strongman politics — and fears abroad of a new era of hostility and gridlock.
Xi, who has been president since 2013, has tried to cultivate an image as a benevolent father figure who is working to promote China’s peaceful rise.
But the ruling Communist Party’s decision to open a path to a third term for Xi heightened a sense of resentment in China among academics, lawyers, journalists and business executives. 

Many have watched warily as Xi has used his power to imprison scores of dissidents, stifle free speech and tighten oversight of the economy, the world’s second largest.
Wu Qiang, a political analyst in Beijing, said the change to the Constitution would turn Xi into a “super-president.”
“He will have no limits on his power,” he said.
Government censors rushed to block criticism of the decision. 

Internet memes depicted Xi as an emperor with no regard for the rule of law and showed a portrait of Xi replacing Mao’s hallowed image in Tiananmen Square. 

Another repurposed an ad for Durex condoms, adding a tag line — “Twice is not enough” — to poke fun at the idea of Xi angling for a third term.
The party’s move comes as Xi has proclaimed an era of China’s greatness, when the country, he says, will take what he sees as its rightful place as a top global power. 

Already, it is establishing military bases in the Western Pacific and Africa, building infrastructure across Asia, parts of Europe and Africa, and running what Xi hopes will be the world’s No. 1 economy within two decades or sooner.
“China feels it is on the road to great power status and they want to perpetuate the trajectory they are on,” said David Finkelstein, director of China Studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Va.
Analysts outside China said they worried that allowing Xi one-man rule might worsen an increasingly tense relationship between the United States and China.
After years of efforts by the United States to engage China on issues from market reform to climate change to human rights, the Trump administration turned on Beijing last December and called China a strategic competitor in its first national security document.
Washington policymakers are preparing plans to impose tariffs on some Chinese imports, limit Chinese investments in the United States, particularly in technology, and spend more on the United States military to sustain its big advantage over the People’s Liberation Army.
In Congressional testimony earlier this month, the director of the F.B.I., Christopher Wray, described China as “not just a whole of government threat but a whole of society threat.”
Trump may well see Xi’s consolidation of power as part of a global trend toward increasingly influential leaders, in which he might include himself along with Xi and Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian leader, said James Mann, the author of “The China Fantasy,” which contradicted the popular view that increasing prosperity would lead to political liberalization in China.
“I’m guessing he will not deplore the lack of democracy in China, because that’s the sort of thing he rarely if ever does,” Mr. Mann said of Trump.
Mr. Mann also said Trump might not have much problem with what Xi had accomplished.
“Over the past 14 months in office, Trump has almost never voiced the sort of support for our constitutional system that has been a staple in the statements of past presidents,” Mr. Mann said. 

“He does not respect the dignity or integrity of political opponents. He does not express support for the independence of the courts or the freedom of the press.”
So if anything, he said, “I think Trump is probably jealous.”
From Clinton to Bush to Obama, the prevailing belief was engagement with China would make China more like the West.

Donald J. Trump and Xi Jinping walking off stage after a meeting with business leaders in Beijing last year. 

Instead, as Mr. Mann predicted, China has gone in the opposite direction.
Shi Yinhong, professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said Xi likely did not care how the world would interpret his designation as a potential ruler in perpetuity.
With an unlimited term in office, Xi would almost certainly be in office beyond 2024, the year Trump would leave the White House if he won a second term.
“This objectively makes him stronger than Trump, who has no reason to like the change,” Mr. Shi said.
At home, Xi will likely have considerable support for a third term, the result of a yearslong campaign to sideline political rivals and limit dissent. 

And nationalists cheered the decision, describing Xi as a singular force who could restore the glory of the nation.
But as the news spread, readings of Hannah Arendt who wrote about the evils of totalitarian rule, and passages from George Washington, who retired after two terms as president, were discussed on social media in Chinese legal circles.
Douglas H. Paal, a China expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the sudden move, before Xi even starts his second term next month, suggested that things were not “normal” within the Communist Party.
“This looks like forced marching, not normal order, so something is going on,” Mr. Paal said. 

“Xi is winning, but it will take sleuthing to find out what. These are not ordinary times.”
A series of visits by senior Chinese officials to Washington in the past month to try and persuade the Trump administration to slow down plans to introduce punitive measures that could result in a trade war had failed, Mr. Paal said.
“This could get complicated when U.S. initiatives meet unconventional times in China,” he said.
Still, Xi is popular in many areas — his fans affectionately call him “Uncle Xi” — and his brand of folksy nationalism wins accolades, especially in rural areas. 

Experts said Xi would likely benefit from the perception in China that the rest of the world is chaotic.
“With a population amazed at the incompetent mess in much of the rest of the world, and intoxicated by nationalism, for Xi to effect this change will be seen as reasonable,” said Kerry Brown, a professor of Chinese politics at King’s College, London.
But Xi’s assumption of unfettered power may not work out the way he thinks, said Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and a former senior Australian defense official.
“The risks to his personal fortunes are huge,” he said. 

“What if the People’s Liberation Army decides he should be cut loose?”

And, he added, “What if growth slows more than expected?”
If Xi comes under pressure at home or abroad, he could become unpredictable, and even dangerous, Mr. Jennings said. 

The reach for more personal power could be the start of his downfall.
“The West can take no comfort in that because Xi’s situation means he may take more risks in the South China Sea or over Taiwan,” he said. 

“He has nothing to lose and everything to gain by engaging in more Putin-like brinkmanship.”
Moreover, he added, “Where does one ever see the ‘president for life’ model end well?”

Tech Quisling

Apple’s iCloud Data Storage in China Includes Cryptographic Keys – Decision Raises Security Concerns
By Rafia Shaikh

Apple will begin hosting iCloud data of its Chinese users in a new data center in China. 

Complying with the tougher Chinese laws, the local authorities will start having faster access to iPhone users’ data stored in the cloud. 

The company had first announced this move last summer after the new cybersecurity laws were passed in China requiring all the foreign companies to use locally managed businesses to store data.
This data, that is currently stored in the United States, will now be stored locally in China and includes, among other things, iCloud cryptographic keys needed to unlock an account. 

This essentially means that China will no longer need to reach out to the US government or deal with US legal system to seek information on a Chinese Apple user. 

While this is becoming an increasingly common practice with the US itself pushing for a similar strategy, the approach does raise user privacy and security concerns. 

Reuters reports today that it’s the first time for Apple to store keys outside of the United States.
That means Chinese authorities will no longer have to use the U.S. courts to seek information on iCloud users and can instead use their own legal system to ask Apple to hand over iCloud data for Chinese users, legal experts said.
For a perspective, Apple reportedly refused all requests it received from the Chinese authorities for information on over 176 users between 2013 and mid-2017. 

Considering China’s tightening control over local internet access, human rights advocates warn that this move will make it impossible for dissidents and journalists in China to freely communicate, as it will become easier for the authorities to track them down. 

They are also pointing to a similar move taken by Yahoo several years ago, when this data access was used to arrest dissidents and human rights activists.
“Jing Zhao, a human rights activist and Apple shareholder, said he could envisage worse human rights issues arising from Apple handing over iCloud data than occurred in the Yahoo case,” Reuters report added.
In its statement Apple said it has to comply with the local laws as it does in the United States, as well. 

The move does raise questions over Apple’s previous strategy of keeping user security at the center of its business – something that no longer seems to be the case.
“While we advocated against iCloud being subject to these laws, we were ultimately unsuccessful,” Apple said in its statement. 

The company said offering this new system was a better choice than discontinuing it which would have led to bad user experience.
The company continued to say that the latest move affects only the data stored in cloud that will now be easily accessible to Chinese authorities who will just need to push Apple with a local legal warrant.
While Apple led the industry with user-focused decisions for years, it continues to make moves that no longer align with the company’s previous focus on user privacy. 

The company recently also removed VPN apps from its Chinese App Store raising questions from the United Nations. 

Tim Cook had said at the time that the company was “just following the law.”
Privacy advocates warn that Apple’s decision to comply with the Chinese demands will only hurt Apple and other tech companies in the long run, since more governments will follow to make similar demands. 

The company’s position, however, aligns with what Bill Gates had said earlier this month – follow whatever governments legally ask you or be ready for strict government regulation.

Australia's Quislings

Labor has a cancer growing in it that must be cut out
By Clive Hamilton

Canberra is finally beginning to push back against Beijing’s long-running campaign to seduce our elites so completely that the nation kow-tows before China’s wishes.
The first phase of the pushback culminated in December with the Turnbull government introducing legislation to outlaw foreign interference operations and novel forms of espionage. 

Afraid that its well-made plans will be thwarted, Beijing has been making panicky claims that it’s all motivated by “anti-Chinese racism”.

The Sam Dastyari affair was one clumsy instance of a more insidious problem for Labor. 

Led by shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus, the Labor Party is gearing up to oppose the legislation. 

Dreyfus says his concern is to protect press freedom, but that is being used to undermine the rationale of the laws themselves.
Amending the legislation to protect democratic freedoms is easy.  

The harder task is undoing the deep penetration of the Labor Party by proxies for and agents of the Chinese Communist Party. 

The spectacular downfall of Sam Dastyari was one clumsy instance of a more insidious problem for Labor.

Paul Keating has praised China's government as the best government in the world in the last 30 years. 

The Liberal Party has been subject to the same kind of influence operations and the party undoubtedly has a problem. 

Yet, going by the Turnbull government’s determination to enact the foreign interference legislation, the Liberals still remain willing to put basic Australian democratic freedoms before Chinese money.

Apologists for China in the Labor Party have been working, wittingly or otherwise, to entrench China’s structure of influence. 

Last week, Kevin Rudd played perfectly into the hands of Beijing by lambasting the Turnbull government’s proposed laws as an “anti-China jihad”.
The Mandarin-speaking former prime minister said that current laws are perfectly adequate. 

If that’s true, why have there been no prosecutions? 

And why are several Western nations watching events here so intently, expecting to follow the trail being blazed in Australia?
The Rudd government’s approach to China was weak and indecisive, perhaps best represented by Rudd’s disastrous decision in 2008 to wreck the emerging Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with India, Japan and the United States. 

His pull-out, under Chinese pressure, soured relations with India and delayed for a decade cooperation between the four democratic powers to begin acting jointly to resist Beijing’s aggression.
Rudd believes what he put in place is enough to protect Australia. 

Anyone who has tracked China’s growing influence over the last several years, including our intelligence agencies, knows that is laughable.
It’s to be expected that a former leader will attempt to burnish his legacy, but when he uses his residual influence to expose the nation to foreign domination he needs to be called out. 

Rudd’s Labor predecessor Paul Keating retains much greater influence in the Labor Party and beyond. 

He chairs an international advisory council for the huge China Development Bank. 

He regularly praises the Communist Party bosses for their brilliant achievements—“the best government in the world for the last 30 years”—and calls for Australia to loosen our ties with the United States.
Keating is the godfather of the powerful NSW right faction of the ALP that has been so corrupted by Chinese influence.
Dastyari may have gone because of his unseemly relationship with Chinese billionaire Huang Xiangmo, but plenty of powerful Beijing sympathisers remain.

Former NSW premier and foreign minister Bob Carr has been castigated for agreeing to run a “think tank” established with a large donation from Huang Xiangmo. 

Carr proudly proclaimed that the Australia-China Relations Institute would adopt a “positive and optimistic” view of China.
Tony Burke, a federal leadership aspirant, is also a beneficiary of Chinese money. 

His election campaign was boosted by a $30,000 donation from a source flagged by ASIO as connected to the CCP.
When asked on radio about the $30,000 donation, Burke said it was donated by a family friend, whom he holds in the “highest regard”.
There are current and former Labor politicians who understand fully the danger posed by the Chinese Communist Party to our democratic freedoms and support measures to protect our sovereignty. 

They include Richard Marles, Kim Beazley, John Faulkner, Michael Danby, Stephen Conroy and Anthony Byrne. 

But the party has a cancer growing in it, and it must cut it out.

Australia has become China's puppet state, says Clive Hamilton in Silent Invasion

Chinese agents and Australian Quislings are undermining Australia's sovereignty
By Dylan Welch
Subversion: Huang Xiangmo (R) donated $1.8m to build a "research" institute headed by Bob Carr, aka Beijing Bob.

Thousands of agents of the Chinese state have integrated themselves into Australian public life — from the high spheres of politics, academia and business all the way down to suburban churches and local writers' groups — according to a brilliant book to be published on Monday.
The book, Silent Invasion: How China Is Turning Australia into a Puppet State, is written by Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University.
In it, he alleges that a systematic Chinese government campaign of espionage and influence peddling is leading to "he erosion of Australian sovereignty.
That erosion is caused, in part, by a recent wave of Chinese migration to Australia including "billionaires with shady histories and tight links to the [Chinese Communist] party, media owners creating Beijing mouthpieces, 'patriotic' students brainwashed from birth, and professionals marshalled into pro-Beijing associations set up by the Chinese embassy," Professor Hamilton writes.

Professor Clive Hamilton denounces Chinese interference in Australian affairs. 

ABC News has been given a pre-publication copy of the book, which is being published in the middle of widening public debate over China's influence in Australia and concerns Beijing has thousands of unofficial spies in the country.
Those concerns were given some credence by the Government late last year, when Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced he planned to enact new foreign interference laws to counter such espionage.
Mr Turnbull used strong language at the time, paraphrasing a famous Chinese communist slogan to say Australia would "stand up" to foreign governments meddling in Australian affairs.
The book will cause particular angst among Australia's political class.

Australia's Quislings
It lists more than 40 former and sitting Australian politicians who are doing the work of China's totalitarian government, if sometimes unwittingly. 

Many are household names.
"Former prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, when their political careers ended they went on to become reliable friends of China, shuttling between the two countries, mixing with the top cadres and tycoons," Professor Hamilton writes.
"While Hawke's China links proved lucrative, Keating was more interested in influence."

Beijing Bob

Bob Carr, aka Beijing Bob, is the most famous Australian Quisling. He is currently running a Beijing-backed propaganda outfit: the Australia-China Research Institute (ACRI) at the University of Technology, Sydney.

An entire chapter, titled Beijing Bob, is dedicated to former Labor foreign minister and NSW premier Bob Carr.
The chapter accuses Carr of pushing an aggressive pro-China stance in Labor caucuses.
Professor Hamilton chronicles Carr's 2015 appointment as the founding director of the Australia-China Research Institute (ACRI) at the University of Technology, Sydney.
ACRI was created with a $1.8m donation from billionaire property developer Huang Xiangmo, who has donated millions to Australian politicians and has been described in the book as being one of Beijing's most powerful agents of influence in Australia.
"Huang sits at the centre of a web of influence that extends throughout politics, business and the media," Professor Hamilton writes.
Huang has been the subject of public speculation ever since the ABC News revealed his millions of dollars in political donations, and his questionable connections to senior federal politicians, in a series of stories in 2015, 2016 and 2017.
"Let's call the Australia-China Research Institute for what it is," Professor Hamilton writes.
"A Beijing-backed propaganda outfit disguised as a legitimate research institute, whose ultimate objective is to advance the CCP's [Chinese Communist Party's] influence in Australian policy and political circles, an organisation hosted by a university whose commitment to academic freedom and proper practice is clouded by money hunger, and directed by an ex-politician suffering from relevance deprivation syndrome who cannot see what a valuable asset he has become for Beijing."

Huang denies his donations and influence within Australian society are connected to the Chinese Government, describing the allegations as innuendo and racism.

Carr, who declined to comment for this article, has previously said ACRI took a "positive and optimistic view" of the Australia-China relationship.

The book also details a list of Chinese-Australian academics who are allowing the transfer of national security-significant research — in sensitive areas such as space, artificial intelligence and computer engineering — from Australian universities to the Chinese military.
Silent Invasion appears to have also divided Australian Parliament, with Labor and Liberal members of a classified parliamentary committee at odds over whether they should provide legal cover for the book.
Plans were hatched recently by members of Parliament's intelligence oversight body, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS), to publish a digital copy of the book.
The release would have been the first time the Australian parliament published a book in its entirety — therefore granting it a limited form of parliamentary privilege — in an effort to protect the information it contains from legal attack.
While Liberal members of the committee broadly supported publication of the book, the majority of Labor committee members did not, arguing it was not appropriate for the Australian Parliament to give the book its imprimatur.
Silent Invasion was provided to the committee in a submission as part of an inquiry into Mr Turnbull's foreign interference laws.
The book's release by the committee would have been seen as an inflammatory act by Beijing, already smarting from Mr Turnbull's announcement.

Co-opting God
In another section of the book, Professor Hamilton describes a curious relationship between Chinese Christian churches in Australia and the atheist Chinese Communist Party, which has a history of suppressing Christianity at home.

The cover of the controversial book, Silent Invasion: How China Is Turning Australia into a Puppet State, authored by Professor Clive Hamilton. 
He refers to classified Chinese Government reports which instruct Chinese officials to infiltrate overseas churches that have Chinese congregations. 

"They instruct cadres to monitor, infiltrate and 'sinify' overseas Chinese churches by actively promoting the CCP's concepts of Chineseness and 'spiritual love'."
In 2014, he notes, the website of the Canberra Chinese Methodist Church included a statement which linked the rise of the CCP to God's will: "The awe-inspiring righteousness of Xi Jinping, the President of the People's Republic of China, and the rise of a great nation that is modern China are part of God's plan, predestination and blessing."
Many Chinese church pastors believe their congregations have been penetrated by Chinese Government cadres, Professor Hamilton writes.
"One pastor told me: 'There are lots of communists in our church community.' He guessed that around a quarter or a third are or have been communists. Some join the church for the companionship, some for the social contacts; others are the [Chinese Government's] assets."
People connected to the Chinese Government have also infiltrated Australia's writing scene. 

A group called the Australian-Chinese Writer's Association was recently taken over by "pro-Beijing forces".
Professor Hamilton describes how well-known Australian writing forums such as the Melbourne Writers Festival and Writers Victoria have unwittingly hosted local Chinese writing groups operating under Beijing's control and "whose aim is to spread into Australian society the CCP worldview, one that is extremely intolerant of artistic license and dissenting views."

A 'landmark win' for China
Silent Invasion is so hated by Beijing it almost didn't make it to publication. 

It was due to be released late last year by Allen & Unwin, but the publisher baulked over concerns it would be targeted by Beijing and its proxies in Australia. 

Melbourne University Press also turned down the book.
That led Professor Hamilton — the author of half-a-dozen books about climate change, politics and economics — to hit out at this attempt by the CCP to muzzle public debate in Australia.
"[This is a] landmark win for the Chinese Communist Party's campaign to suppress critical voices," Professor Hamilton wrote to Allen & Unwin chief executive Robert Gorman at the time.
The book was recently acquired by Hardie Grant, run by Sandy Grant, who in the 1980s published the memoir of former British intelligence officer Peter Wright. 

The publication occurred against the wishes of the British government, which was trying to censor the book.
Mr Grant told the ABC he was aware publishing Silent Invasion may invite the attention of the Chinese government, but he hoped it would not be serious. 

"This is a debate being held at the ABC, the New York Times, the London Times; we are just one voice in that, we are hardly a serious thorn in the Chinese government's side," he said.
Professor Hamilton may also have reason to be concerned about the impact of authoring the book. This week New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ordered intelligence officers to investigate break-ins at the home and office of prominent NZ China academic Anne-Marie Brady.
Professor Brady has spent her career researching China's global influence and her 2017 paper, Magic Weapons, caused global waves when it revealed how deeply China had penetrated NZ's Government.

Chinese surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants

Monitoring tech pioneered in East Turkestan is spreading across China and the world.
By Nithin Coca

Security cameras are seen on a street in Urumqi, East Turkestan.

In July 2009, deadly riots broke out in Urumqi, the capital of East Turkestan. 

Nearly 200 people died, the majority ethnic Han Chinese, and thousands of Chinese troops were brought in to quell the riots. 

An information battle soon followed, as mobile phone and internet service was cut off in the entire province. 

For the next 10 months, web access would be almost nonexistent in East Turkestan, a vast region larger than Texas with a population of more than 20 million. 

It was one of the most widespread, longest internet shutdowns ever.
That event, which followed similar unrest in neighboring Chinese-ruled Tibet in 2008, was the sign of a new phase in the Chinese state's quest to control its restive outer regions. 

The 2009 shutdown was the first large-scale sign of a shift in tactics: the use of technology to control information.
"East Turkestan has gotten little attention, but this is where we're really seeing the coming together of multiple streams of technology [for surveillance] that just hasn't happened in other contexts before," said Steven Feldstein, fellow in the Democracy and Rule of Law Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Nine years later, East Turkestan has seen the widespread implementation of sophisticated high-tech surveillance and monitoring technology, what BuzzFeed called "a 21st century police state." 

But what happens in East Turkestan does not stay in East Turkestan. 

The technologies piloted there are already spreading across all of China, and Chinese companies are beginning to sell some of this technology to other authoritarian-minded countries. 

If this trend continues, the future of technology, particularly for those in the Global South, could more resemble what's happening in East Turkestan than developments in Silicon Valley.
East Turkestan is the home to the Uyghurs, a Turkic people who mostly follow Islam and have a distinct culture and language. 

Not surprisingly, the region has a tenuous relationship with Beijing, which is more than 1,400 miles away. 

Protests, riots and even terrorist attacks have been connected to the Uyghur struggle, which gives cover to Chinese authorities to implement the harshest strategies there.
"Abuses are most apparent in East Turkestan because of the lack of privacy protections but also because the power imbalance between the people there and the police is the greatest in China," said Maya Wang, China researcher at Human Rights Watch.
That is why security investment in East Turkestan skyrocketed after the riots. 

According to Adrian Zenz, a lecturer at the European School of Culture and Theology who has written extensively about the police presence in East Turkestan and Tibet, the region's security forces doubled between 2009 and 2011 to more than 11,000 people. 

And it kept growing: In 2017, he documented more than 65,000 public job advertisements for security-related positions in East Turkestan, and last year Amnesty International estimated that there were 90,000 security staff in the region, the highest ratio of people to security in any province in China.
Several new tools and tactics accompanied this rise in security personnel, most notably the implementation of "convenience police stations," a dense network of street corner, village or neighborhood police stations designed to keep an eye out everywhere and rapidly respond to any threat, perceived or real. 

But there were also corresponding investments in security technology on a globally unprecedented scale. 

It started with a drive to put up security cameras in the aftermath of the 2009 riots before evolving into something far more sophisticated, as East Turkestan turned into a place for state-connected companies to test all of their surveillance innovations.
"The rule of law doesn't exist," said William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International. "They are able to pioneer new methods of control that, if successful, they could use elsewhere in China."
Today, East Turkestan has both a massive security presence and ubiquitous surveillance technology: facial-recognition cameras; iris and body scanners at checkpoints, gas stations and government facilities; the collection of DNA samples for a massive database; mandatory apps that monitor messages and data flow on Uyghurs' smartphones; drones to monitor the borders. 

While there's some debate over how advanced the system tying these technologies together is, it's clear that China's plan is for a fully integrated system that uses artificial intelligence to rapidly process massive amounts of information for use by the similarly massive numbers of police in convenience stations.
For Uyghurs, it means that wherever they go, whomever they talk to and even whatever they read online are all being monitored by the Chinese government. 

According to The New York Times, "When Uighurs buy a kitchen knife, their ID data is etched on the blade as a QR code." 

BuzzFeed documented stories of family members too scared to speak openly to relatives abroad. 

And the combination of all of these tools through increasingly powerful AI and data processing means absolute control and little freedom.
"It's one thing to have GPS tracking. It's another thing to monitor social media usage of large populations," said Feldstein. 

"But to do that in combination with a large DNA database of up to 40 million people and to integrate those methods with other modes of surveillance and intrusion -- that represents a very new frontier and approach when it comes to online surveillance and oppression."
The result, at least for China, is a massive success. 

Violence in the region has fallen as riots, protests and attacks are now rare in East Turkestan. 

Part of that is due to the presence of the state, but it's also related to a rise in fear, as no one is sure how pervasive the Chinese surveillance apparatus is.
"People can never be sure if they are free from monitoring," said Nicole Morgret, project coordinator at the Uyghur Human Rights Project. 

"The fear is such that even if the surveillance is not complete, people behave as if it is. The technology is being rolled out so quickly."
That is because access to the actual platforms being used by the Chinese authorities is limited, and much of the knowledge about surveillance technology comes from observations by the few journalists who can report from East Turkestan or through looking at public tender and budget documents. 

Or, increasingly, the knowledge comes from observing how other regions in China are being monitored and how Chinese tech companies abroad are deploying or marketing similar tools.

While the East Turkestan model may be extreme even for China, it is starting to influence policing across the country. 

The advent of the surveillance state in East Turkestan has come alongside China's increasingly tightening control over national information flows, including the blocking or removal from app stores of many foreign apps, VPNs and platforms, most recently Skype.

"The question a lot of people have [is] ... to what extent is this going to be rolled [out] across the rest of China and packaged and sold to other repressive governments around the world?" said Morgret. "You can definitely see parts of it being implemented in China proper, such as the police database and collecting DNA samples from certain people. I certainly suspect the government has ambitions to create this type of total surveillance across the country."
The government has a powerful tool at its disposal, as last year, a new cybersecurity law went into effect that greatly broadens the power of the state to further control information. 

It requires foreign companies to maintain data centers in China, something Apple, for example, is complying with, leading the nonprofit watchdog group Reporters Without Borders to warn journalists working in China not to use iCloud anymore to store data. 

WeChat, China's do-everything app, is already sharing user data with the state.
There are other signs that East Turkestan's policing innovations are entering the rest of China. 

The country is planning to integrate footage from its estimated 176 million surveillance cameras into a "police cloud" system, linked to national identity cards, making it possible that in the near future, everyone in China could be tracked anywhere. 

A model of this was demonstrated earlier this month when news reports emerged that new facial-recognition glasses are being used by police in train stations and airports across the country, tracking travelers ahead of the Lunar New Year.
Considering all of this, it's no surprise that China is already the world's biggest market for surveillance software and hardware, estimated by industry researcher IHS Markit at $6.4 billion in 2016, a figure expected to triple by 2020. 

China's tech giants Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are also jumping in, investing heavily in surveillance technology to take advantage of this boom.
These companies are starting to sell some of these tools abroad as well. 

In Ecuador, a Chinese ECU911 Integrated Security Service system, the development of which was connected to the state-owned China National Electronics Import and Export Corporation, was deployed in 2016 and credited with a 24 percent drop in crime. 

A more worrisome case was uncovered by Human Rights Watch, which found evidence that the Ethiopian government was using telecom-surveillance technology provided by the Chinese telecom giant ZTE to monitor the political opposition, activists and journalists.
Other companies are following ZTE's path. 

Yitu Technology, an AI facial-recognition company, has already set up offices in several African countries and is looking to expand to Europe, where it sees potential due to recent terrorist attacks -- the same rationale initially used to expand the surveillance state in East Turkestan. 

These examples are few and not yet a sign that the East Turkestan model is having a big global impact, but even if the overseas market for Chinese surveillance technology remains limited for now, many observers think that could quickly change.
"Now that China is delving into this new technology realm and is repressing very successfully and effectively, it is by nature that other dictatorial regimes would try to emulate this," said Feldstein.
"I think we're on the threshold of this exploding," said Zenz. 

"China wants to become a world leader in AI, and that includes a lot of these security applications that are already earmarked for exporting."
While the technology itself is not necessarily harmful, the concern is that in the wrong hands, it could empower repressive governments around the world to further abuse human rights. 

And the number of these regimes is growing, as recently released reports from the Economist Intelligence Unitand Freedom House show that around the world, free speech and democracy are falling and censorship, authoritarianism and autocracy are rising.
"The Chinese government is leading on thinking around mass surveillance, and it has the impact of influencing other countries to think, 'Well, we could have an authoritarian government but look outwardly stable by putting in these systems to make sure that even if people are discontented, we can still keep them down by ensuring that every move is monitored,'" said Wang. 

"As this technology becomes cheaper, that reality might become more possible even for countries without massive resources like the Chinese government."
Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar, East Turkestan

In East Turkestan, there are no signs that the massive buildup in both police presence and surveillance technology will recede anytime soon, despite the perceived success in limiting violence and protests thus far. 

If anything, it looks like things will get a lot worse. 

More and more Uyghurs, perhaps as many as 120,000, are being rounded up and sent to reeducation camps for minor offenses. 

Increasingly, any outward expression of religion or cultural expression is being seen as subversive, with even elderly intellectuals facing arrests, like the 82-year-old Islamic scholar Muhammad Salih Hajim, who died earlier this year in a reeducation camp. 

Now Uyghurs are also being forced to hand over DNA samples and put spyware on their phones. 

Meanwhile, spending on both technology and human-security presence is expected to rise even further.
"It is going to crazy heights and there are no sign of it abating ... quite to the contrary, the state officials are really into intelligent, big data processing, networking of information, storing all the information and linking it up, applying AI and predictive policing for it," said Zenz.
At least one facet of the East Turkestan model has gone global. 

Internet shutdowns, like what happened in East Turkestan in 2009, are now common around the world. 

Just this past year, there were widespread internet shutdowns in Indian-controlled Kashmir, the English-speaking region of Cameroon, Ethiopia, Kenya and more than 30 other countries. 

Often the causes are similar to what took place in East Turkestan -- ethnic tensions, riots or political events such as elections.
"It's an increase around the world," said Melody Patry, a spokesperson with Access Now. "Moreover, the phenomenon of repeat offenders is on the rise. ... When a government issues a first internet shutdown, they are more likely to issue others."
But China has moved on, and internet shutdowns are now rare. 

According to Access Now, there was only one documented shutdown in China in all of 2016. 

While uninformed observers could see this as a sign of progress, in actuality it shows that the next frontier of digital surveillance and state control is not blocking information access but harvesting it with a purpose.
"You don't need these blackout shutdowns anymore when you have much more fine-grained mechanisms of control ... that can very early on detect potential issues and problems, and in turn promote self-policing, self-censorship," said Zenz. 

"Because people know what consequences there are."
The shift in China is that the internet, which was initially seen as a threat due to its ability to allow users to access information, is now being perceived differently. 

What was back in 2009 blamed for the riots is now the source of information empowering the Chinese government to preemptively arrest and detain not only Uyghurs but also, increasingly, Chinese human rights lawyers, feminist activists and journalists around the country before they can post something inflammatory on a website or share sensitive content on WeChat.
"The internet ... has become a great source of information that can be intelligently processed at capacity and speed that was not possible 10 years ago," said Zenz. 

"What we see is a moving from a mere firewall that just blocks or an instant response, like the deletion of messages, to proactive self-censorship."
The global rise in shutdowns, which Access Now notes are getting more sophisticated and fine-tuned, shows that East Turkestan model has a market in an increasingly technological, authoritarian world. How quickly other countries follow China's move toward more total, personalized and data-driven control depends on both the need and the availability of the tools pioneered in East Turkestan on the global marketplace.