Chinese Propaganda

Beijing Is Pushing Hard To Influence U.S. Views Of China
By ROB SCHMITZ

Beijing is mounting an aggressive influence campaign targeting multiple levels of American society, according to a report published Thursday that is written by some of the top China experts in the U.S.
The working group that compiled the report includes scholars who for decades have agreed that as long as the U.S. continued to engage the People's Republic of China, the paths of both countries would eventually converge and that when they did, China's political system would become more transparent and its society more open.
However, as China's economy climbed to unprecedented heights, Xi Jinping has consolidated power, and in the eyes of the report's authors, the idea of convergence has been put to rest.

A different path
As Xi took office in 2013, China "began to take a very different path forward," says Orville Schell, a China scholar who co-chairs the working group that produced the 200-page report, "Chinese Influence and American Interests."
Schell says that prior to Xi, China's leaders viewed their country as in a state of transition, but since Xi's ascendancy, China is seen internally more as a country that has arrived in its own right.
"Then the whole idea of engagement took on a very different character," he says.
The report is sponsored by Stanford University's Hoover Institution, the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands and the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, which Schell directs.
The publication comes amid rising trade tensions between the U.S. and China and just days before President Trump's planned meeting with Xi during the Group of 20 events in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this week.
The report's authors assert that China's Communist Party has launched a campaign aimed at influencing the U.S. as part of a broader expansion of aggressive policies spearheaded by Xi.
"These policies not only seek to redefine China's place in the world as a global player," the report asserts, but also to advertise a "China Option" to the rest of the world as "a more efficient developmental model" in much the same way that the Soviet Union sought to present itself as a viable alternative to the West's liberal democracies during the Cold War.
Schell says that China's doing away with presidential term limits earlier this year, effectively clearing the way for Xi to rule indefinitely, became a metaphor for the leader's expansion of control and power both inside and outside China, firmly placing his country on a separate competing path with the U.S.

The scope of influence
The report examines eight sectors of American society that China's government is attempting to influence — including the U.S. Congress, local governments, universities and corporations. 

While nearly all examples cited have been widely covered by the media and academia, the report aims to add historical context to weave them together and to make concrete suggestions to the U.S. government and institutions on how to handle the growing threat.
One section of the report examines the large amounts of money China's government and Chinese individuals who are loyal to the Communist Party are investing into U.S. universities.
"[Very] often, that money will come not with any explicit prohibitions, but with implicit ones," says Schell.
"If you want to get more money, don't say this, don't say that. In other words," he says. 

As a result, China aims for "modulating and controlling what people say about it and how they view it."
China's government has, with the help of dozens of U.S. universities, established 110 Confucius Institutes on campuses throughout the United States. 

The institutes are forced to use Communist Party-approved materials "that promote PRC Chinese viewpoints, terminology and simplified characters; the avoidance of discussion on controversial topics such as Tibet, Tiananmen, East Turkestan, the Falun Gong, and human rights in American classrooms and programs," the report says.
Several U.S. universities, such as the University of Chicago and the Texas A&M system, have had second thoughts about the Confucius Institute and have closed their branches. 

The report suggests that U.S. institutions rewrite their contracts with their Chinese government partner by eliminating a clause that stipulates Confucius Institutes must operate according to China's laws.

China and Hollywood
Another section examines how Hollywood has come under the influence of Chinese investment and, as a result, now routinely makes films that portray China's government in a favorable light. 

Whereas in 1997, films such as Red Corner, Seven Years in Tibet, and Kundun addressed topics the Chinese government deemed sensitive, now Hollywood studios are teaming up with Chinese partners to make films such as The Martian, a blockbuster hit backed by Chinese money in which the Chinese government saves the American protagonists.
"The rush of Chinese investment into the American film industry," the report concludes, "has raised legitimate concerns bout the industry's outright loss of independence."
Schell says after a year and a half of research, he and his team came to the conclusion "that the relationship between the U.S. and China when it comes to influence is not reciprocal," he says. 

"The open society of the United States gets used for Chinese purposes in myriad ways that are not available to Americans in China."
For example, American universities have not been granted the same access to China as Beijing has received and Chinese media is able to operate freely inside the U.S., while American journalists are severely restricted inside of China. 

The report's authors suggest that the visas of visiting Chinese scholars and journalists be redirected unless American scholars and journalists are able to operate with more freedom inside of China.
The report's solutions urge the U.S. government and society to be more transparent about their relationships with Chinese institutions, and when Beijing limits the rights of American institutions inside of China, the U.S. should consider doing the same to Chinese institutions on American soil.
It also urges Americans to act with integrity when Chinese state-sponsored actors try to coerce them or manipulate America's core principles. 

"Openness and freedom are fundamental elements of American democracy and intrinsic strengths of the United States and its way of life," the report concludes. 

"These values must be protected against corrosive actions by China and other countries."

Tracking China’s Muslim Gulag

Turning the desert into concentration camps

China is incarcerating hundreds of thousands of Muslims in concentration camps that are rising from the desert sands in East Turkestan. A forensic analysis of satellite images of 39 of these facilities shows they are expanding at a rapid rate.
By Philip Wen and Olzhas Auyezov

A United Nations panel has accused China of turning its far-flung western colony of East Turkestan “into something that resembled a massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy, a ‘no rights zone’.” It estimates that there could be as many as one million Muslims who have been detained there.
Former detainees describe being tortured during interrogation, living in crowded cells and being subjected to a brutal daily regimen of Communist Party indoctrination that drove some people to suicide. 

Most of those who have been rounded up by the security forces are Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority that numbers some 10 million. 

Muslims from other ethnic groups, including Kazakhs, have also been detained.
China rejects the allegations that it has locked up large numbers of Muslims in re-education camps. The facilities, it says, are vocational training centers that emphasize “rehabilitation and redemption” and are part of its efforts to combat "terrorism" and religious extremism.
The crackdown includes tight control over information and access to the region. 

East Turkestan is now the most heavily policed area in the world.

This follows the launching of a “people’s war on terror” in 2014 after a series of violent attacks in East Turkestan and other parts of China that authorities blamed on religious extremists.

While China says the Uighur camps are "vocational training" centers, they are heavily guarded. Researchers have resorted to using satellite imagery to view and track the expansion of these facilities.
Reuters worked with Earthrise Media, a non-profit group that analyzes satellite imagery, to plot the construction and expansion of 39 of these camps, which were initially identified using publicly available documents such as construction tenders. 

The building-by-building review of these facilities revealed that the footprint of the built-up area almost tripled in size in the 17 months between April 2017 and August 2018. 

Collectively, the built-up parts in these 39 facilities now cover an area roughly the size of 140 soccer fields.
The facility at Turpan can be seen at the foot of the Tianshan mountains in East Turkestan. 

A tender notice revealed that officials there wanted to be able to listen in to telephone calls made by "trainees" at the camp.
Construction notices published on local government websites, including tenders and procurement requests, have provided clues about the location and features of many of the camps. 

The technical specifications in these documents include references to guardhouses, surveillance systems that leave “no blind spots,” automatic weapons and their safe storage.
A tender issued for the center at Turpan, for instance, canvassed bids for a telecommunications “control system,” saying the facility was in “urgent need to know in real time” the content of trainees’ telephone conversations so that they could be forcibly interrupted.
Having identified 80 detention facilities using construction notices, Reuters focused its analysis on 39 that were clearly identifiable from satellite imagery. 

Earthrise then scrutinized hundreds of satellite images spanning a two-year period.
“I was immediately struck by how many camps there were, how large, and how quickly they are growing. In a matter of months they are throwing up five-story buildings, longer than football fields, lined up in rows in the desert,” said Edward Boyda, co-founder of Earthrise. 

“The construction and arrangement of buildings is very similar from site to site, in the new sites especially, which means there is a method behind it.”
China’s State Council Information Office, foreign ministry and the East Turkestan government did not respond to questions from Reuters.

Uighurs have bristled at what they say are harsh restrictions on their culture and religion. 

They have faced periodic crackdowns, which intensified after riots in the regional capital in Urumqi in 2009 killed nearly 200 people.
Bombings in East Turkestan and attacks allegedly carried out by Uighur separatists, including a mass stabbing in the city of Kunming in China’s southwest in 2014 that killed 31 people, led to further restrictions. 

In recent years, under Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party secretary in East Turkestan and a loyalist of Xi Jinping, measures against Uighurs have included a ban on “abnormal” beards for men and restrictions on religious pilgrimages to Mecca.
Chen has also overseen the installation of a pervasive, technology-enhanced surveillance apparatus across East Turkestan. 

Tens of thousands of security personnel have been recruited to staff police stations and checkpoints. Security screening, including scanners equipped with facial recognition cameras, has been installed in public places such as mosques, hotels and transportation hubs.
Reuters did not receive a response to questions sent to Chen via the East Turkestan government.
Reuters visited the locations of seven of the facilities identified as detention camps from construction documents and satellite photos. 

All had imposing perimeter walls, guard watchtowers and armed guards at the entrances. 

Signs at two of the facilities identified them as "vocational training" centers. 

When reporters approached the compounds, police pulled them over and told them to leave.


Rapid expansion
The full scale of the camp network is likely vast. 

Many smaller buildings like schools, hospitals and police stations were repurposed to hold Muslims, according to residents in East Turkestan and construction and procurement documents. 

Two of the smaller camps visited by Reuters were previously a factory and a Communist Party school.
Adrian Zenz, an anthropologist who has tracked the expansion of the camps, estimates there could be as many as 1,200 – at least one for every county and township in East Turkestan. 

There is limited information on the costs of construction, but tenders for one facility outside the city of Kashgar list a combined budget of $45.6 million.
The vast majority of facilities have been built since early 2017, says Shawn Zhang, a law student based in Canada who has used government documents and open-source satellite imagery to identify dozens of camps. 

Recently, Zhang said, the Chinese government has stopped publishing tender notices and has been deleting old ones from the internet.
The construction of new facilities and expansion of existing ones largely began around April 2017. That was the month Beijing enforced new anti-extremism regulations in East Turkestan, including prohibitions on the wearing of veils in public places and the stopping of children from attending “patriotic education classes.”

Foreign reporters who arrive in East Turkestan are closely followed by Chinese security forces. Reuters reporters who visited 10 different cities in the region this year were under surveillance from the moment they got off the plane. 

They were followed in their car, on foot and on trains.
On several occasions, police threw up temporary roadblocks to block the reporters from reaching the camps.
The Chinese government did not respond to questions from Reuters about these restrictions.

A Chinese police officer stops reporters at a roadblock near what is officially called a "vocational training center" in Ghulja, a city in the northwest of East Turkestan.
A remote place with snow-capped mountains and sprawling wind farms, the district of Dabancheng is home to one of the largest camps.
It is one of many that have been built from scratch. 

It is surrounded by a barbed wire fence and high perimeter wall. 

A sign at the main entrance reads: “Urumqi Vocational Education Training Center.”

A guard watchtower can be seen above the perimeter fence at Dabancheng.
Satellite images reveal that before April last year, the site was a brown expanse of desert without a single building. 

Since then, a sprawling complex has risen from the sand.
A close-up look at the construction


Workers walk along the perimeter fence at Dabancheng (left). Signs at the entrance to the camp remind workers about building safety requirements.

In September, a narrow road running along the facility was filled with construction vehicles and workers, indicating that building was still underway at Dabancheng. 

Satellite photos from August reveal the scale of the construction at the camp.


Intense indoctrination
Interviews with eight former detainees, all of whom are now outside China, reveal a picture of harsh extrajudicial detention that is at odds with Beijing’s claim that it is providing vocational skills at training centers to help the local population.
The former detainees said they were shackled to chairs for days during interrogation and deprived of sleep. 

They described living in prison-like conditions. 

Their every move, including visits to the toilet, was monitored by cameras and microphones.

One female detainee said her cell was so crowded that inmates took turns to sit and rest while others stood.
From early morning to night, the detainees said they were subjected to mind-numbing political indoctrination. 

This included reciting Chinese laws and Communist Party policies, as well as singing the national anthem and other traditional Red songs. 

Those who failed to correctly memorize the lines of Communist Party dictums were denied food.

Detainees were forced to renounce their religion, engage in self-criticism sessions and report on fellow inmates, relatives and neighbors.
Of the eight former detainees interviewed by Reuters, four were Uighurs and four were ethnic Kazakhs. 

Some requested anonymity, in most cases because they said they feared repercussions for family members who remained in China.

Kairat Samarkan said he was detained late last year when he returned to his hometown of Altay, in the north of East Turkestan, to sell his home. 

Samarkan, a 30-year-old ethnic Kazakh who was born in China, had moved to Kazakhstan in 2009.
After about three months of intense indoctrination sessions at the camp where he was held, Samarkan said he became “obsessed with suicide. I had thought for a long time about how to do it,” he said. One day, he tried: He ran into a wall head first. 

When he regained consciousness, he was in the camp hospital. 

He was released in February this year and returned to Kazakhstan the next month.
The Chinese government did not respond to questions about the accounts given by former detainees.


China's explanation
Many of the construction tenders issued last year refer to “re-education” facilities. 

But China, which for months denied their existence, now calls them "vocational training centers".
“Through vocational training, most trainees have been able to reflect on their mistakes and see clearly the essence and harm of terrorism and religious extremism,” Shohrat Zakir, the East Turkestan governor, said in remarks to the state-run Xinhua news agency in October. 

“They have also been able to better tell right from wrong and resist the infiltration of extremist thought.”
In September, a Chinese official at the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva said the West could learn from his country’s program of "vocational training". 

“If you do not say it’s the best way, maybe it’s the necessary way to deal with Islamic or religious extremism, because the West has failed in doing so,” said Li Xiaojun, the director of publicity at the Bureau of Human Rights Affairs of the State Council Information Office.

The criminals who run East Turkestan
Criticism of China’s policies in East Turkestan has been growing. 

In late August, a bipartisan group of 17 members of the U.S. Congress wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin urging them to impose sanctions on seven senior Chinese officials for their role in the “ongoing human rights crisis” in East Turkestan. 

At the top of the list was Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party secretary in East Turkestan, who made his name in Tibet. 

There, Chen implemented a sustained crackdown on the local population.


Chen Quanguo


Shohrat Zakir


Hu Lianhe


Sun Jinlong


Peng Jiarui


Shewket Imin


Zhu Hailun

Earlier this year, one of the U.S. lawmakers who signed the letter urging sanctions, Senator Marco Rubio, described what was happening to Muslims in East Turkestan as “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”
In August, a United Nations human rights panel said that Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were “being treated as enemies of the state based on nothing more than their ethno-religious identity.”


Empty mosques
In Kashgar, the ancient Silk Road oasis town in East Turkestan’s southern Uighur heartland, locals say they live in fear. 

As security forces have blanketed the region and high-tech surveillance has become pervasive, there have been waves of mass detentions of Muslims in places like Kashgar.
The arrests peaked last year as police convoys with sirens blaring took people away, their heads covered in black hoods. 

In Kashgar, the locals say that many of those detained have not yet returned. 

On the streets, there are few young men to be seen.
“You can go to a Uighur and slap him in the face and he won’t dare retaliate,” said one Han Chinese local, who grew up with Uighurs in Kashgar and saw many of his friends taken away. 

“It’s going to be quiet for another one or two years, but then what? The greater the pressure, the fiercer the backlash.”


An elderly man (left) sits in the Old Town of Kashgar. A Chinese flag (right) flutters next to the Id Kah Mosque in the Old Town.

Mosques across East Turkestan are now adorned with Chinese flags and banners exhorting people to “Love the Party, Love the Country.” 

During Friday prayers, the mosques are almost empty.
The Chinese government has been trying to change the ethnic balance by shifting members of the majority Han Chinese into the region. 

That policy is reflected in other ways on the ground – such as the dramatic transformation of the Old Town section of Kashgar, once considered one of the best-preserved sites of traditional Islamic and Central Asian architecture in the region.
The local authorities have long espoused the need to bulldoze and modernize large swathes of the mud-brick maze of courtyard homes in the Old Town, citing building-safety concerns. 

Now, large sections of the quarter have been vacated and shut for reconstruction. 

Already, there are bars and restaurants springing up that offer food designed to appeal to Han tourists visiting from other parts of the country.
One mosque has been transformed into a trendy hookah lounge and bar serving shisha tobacco and alcohol. 

The interior of the “Dream of Kashgar 2018” has been renovated and freshly painted, except for the ceiling, where the original wood carvings and tapestries have been preserved.

A waitress carries drinks at a bar located in what was once a mosque in the Old Town of Kashgar.

A food market in Kashgar’s Old Town is now filled with Han Chinese tourists and adorned with Chinese flags.

A Uighur woman walks past a giant screen broadcasting Communist Party messages and images of Xi Jinping in the main square in Kashgar.

When Kairat Samarkan returned to his village in Altay prefecture in February, he noticed many changes. 

“Men were missing from almost every household in my village,” he said.
Photos of ancestors and prayer mats usually on display in Kazakh homes were all gone. 

They were “burned,” the locals told him.
“These items,” he said, “were replaced with photos of the Chinese president and Chinese flags.”

Methodology
For each of the 39 facilities, cloud-free, high-resolution satellite images of the scene were gathered from multiple sources. The dates of the satellite images from which data was derived vary for each camp. The first image of each camp that was analyzed was captured somewhere between Jan. 7, 2016 and April 9, 2017. The most recent image of each camp was captured between May 29, 2017 and Sep. 23, 2018, with the majority of these images being captured in August and September this year. The resolution of the satellite images makes wire fences and guard towers visible; perimeter walls and other features can also be traced.

Steal or Die

China Accelerates Cyberspying Efforts to Obtain U.S. Technology
By David E. Sanger and Steven Lee Myers

General Electric Aviation’s factory in Cincinnati. A Chinese intelligence official is accused of trying to obtain trade secrets from the company.

WASHINGTON — Three years ago, Barack Obama struck a stupid deal with China: Xi Jinping agreed to end his nation’s yearslong practice of breaking into the computer systems of American companies, military contractors and government agencies to obtain designs, technology and corporate secrets, usually on behalf of China’s state-owned firms.
The pact was celebrated by the Obama administration as one of the first arms-control agreements for cyberspace — and for some few months, the number of Chinese attacks plummeted.
But the "victory" was fleeting.
Soon after President Trump took office, China’s cyberespionage picked up again and, according to intelligence officials and analysts, accelerated in the last year as trade conflicts and other tensions began to poison relations between the world’s two largest economies.
The nature of China’s espionage has also changed.
The hackers of the People’s Liberation Army — whose famed Unit 61398 tore through American companies until its operations from a base in Shanghai were exposed in 2013 — were forced to stand down, some of them indicted by the United States.
But now, they have begun to be replaced by stealthier operatives in the country’s intelligence agencies.
The new operatives have intensified their focus on America’s commercial and industrial prowess, and on technologies that the Chinese believe can give them a military advantage.
That, in turn, has prompted a flurry of criminal cases, including the extraordinary arrest and extradition from Belgium of a Chinese intelligence official in October. 
Trump administration officials said the arrest reflected a more determined counterattack against a threat that has infuriated some of the country’s most powerful corporations.
“We have certainly seen the behavior change over the past year,” said Rob Joyce, President Trump’s former White House cybercoordinator, speaking at the Aspen Cyber Summit in San Francisco this month.
President Trump and administration officials often suggest that all technology-acquisition efforts by China amount to theft.
In doing so, they are blurring the line between stealing technology and negotiated deals in which corporations agree to transfer technology to Chinese manufacturing or marketing partners in return for access to China’s market — a practice American companies often view as a form of corporate blackmail but one distinct from outright theft.
The stealing of industrial designs and intellectual property — from blueprints for power plants or high-efficiency solar panels, or the F-35 fighter — is a long-running problem.
The United States Trade Representative published a report earlier this month detailing old and new examples.
But the administration has never said whether cracking down on theft and cyberattacks is part of the negotiations or simply a demand that China cease activity that Beijing has already acknowledged was illegitimate.
But as President Trump and Xi prepare to meet at the Group of 20 gathering in Argentina this weekend, China’s corporate espionage has once again emerged as a core American grievance.
Whatever the reason for the renewed hacking, it is a cautionary tale as President Trump tries to use tariffs and threats of more restrictions to strike a new trade deal with Xi, one that presumably would address, once again, the Chinese practices that Obama naively thought Xi had halted.
American trade and intelligence officials, as well as experts from private cybersecurity firms, all acknowledged that the previous agreement had completely fallen apart.
And that, they agreed, has made it still more difficult to imagine how any new agreement struck between President Trump and Xi would become a permanent solution to a problem that reaches back years, and seems rooted in completely different views of what constitutes reasonable competition.
“Our two systems are so dissimilar that I think there was never real hope that crafting an agreement like this would last that long anyway,” said Matthew Brazil, a former government official who now runs Madeira Security Consulting, a firm in San Jose, Calif.
Why the espionage has spiked again is a matter of debate.
Some officials and analysts call it a cause of the worsening trade relationships, others a symptom. Still others argued that the tightening of American export controls in critical industries like aerospace and rules on Chinese investment in Silicon Valley has led the Chinese once again to try to steal what they cannot buy.
The impetus for the 2015 accord was one of the most blatant espionage operations ever conducted by the Chinese government: the removal, over a period of more than a year, of 22 million security-clearance files on American officials, military personnel, contractors and American intelligence officers.
The Obama administration, out of embarrassment, said little about the breach, never naming the Chinese publicly — except by mistake when the director of national intelligence blurted out the truth.
American intelligence officials concluded that the Chinese were assembling a giant database of who worked with whom, and on what, in the American national security sphere, and were applying “big data” techniques to analyze the information. 
The C.I.A. could not move some officers to China, for fear their cover had been blown. 
Publicly, Obama administration officials offered millions of Americans credit protection for a few years in the wake of the data breach — as if Xi’s agents were looking for credit card numbers.
Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat who is now a China analyst for the International Crisis Group, said that China had a fundamentally different understanding of what was acceptable in espionage.
While the Central Intelligence Agency, say, would not act to help a private company gain a competitive advantage over a foreign competitor, he said, China’s Communist Party, which has control over practically all aspects of policy there, would make no such distinction.
“If you view economic growth as an existential pillar of your party’s political legitimacy and in fact your national security, it follows that you would do anything possible to maintain that competitive edge,” he said.
Indeed, the latest spike in corporate espionage cases — including some not yet made public — has focused on industries critical to Xi’s Made in China 2025 program.
That is a plan to jump ahead of the United States and others in cutting-edge industries like aerospace, automation, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
“We are seeing it in high tech, in law firms, in insurance companies,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, one of the founders of CrowdStrike, who early in his career was one of the first to identify the teams of state-run Chinese hackers aiming at the United States.
With the arrest of the intelligence officer in Belgium in October, the Trump administration claimed it had exposed what the assistant F.B.I. director, Bill Priestap, called “the Chinese government’s direct oversight of economic espionage against the United States.”
That case involves Xu Yanjun, a deputy division director in the Jiangsu branch of the Ministry of State Security, China’s main intelligence agency.
According to a secret criminal complaint filed in Ohio in March but not unsealed until October, Xu tried to recruit an employee of General Electric Aviation and entice him to provide proprietary information about jet fan blade designs.
Instead the employee alerted the company, which went to the F.B.I. and organized a sting.
Xu flew from China to Belgium in April on the hope he would be able to copy the employee’s computer hard drive.
He was arrested on April 1 when he arrived in Brussels and was extradited to the United States on Oct. 9, the day before the Justice Department made the case public.
China’s Foreign Ministry denounced the criminal case as “pure fabrication,” but it has neither confirmed nor denied that Xu was an intelligence officer.
China’s relatively muted reaction could be an effort to minimize attention on an embarrassing intelligence failure and leave room for quiet negotiations for an exchange.
Xu’s was the most high profile of several recent cases, including two others that had links to the Ministry of State Security’s branch in Jiangsu Province, which extends north from Shanghai.
In September, the Justice Department announced the arrest of Ji Chaoqun, a 27-year-old graduate student who had joined the Army Reserves under a special waiver for foreigners.
The F.B.I. affidavit in the case said that Ji’s handler — presumably Xu — had been arrested, allowing the bureau to send an undercover officer to meet the student in April.
Ji, the affidavit said, had been recruited to gather background information about eight potential recruits for the Jiangsu branch.
Xu, who went by at least two aliases, often claimed to represent the Jiangsu Association for International Science and Technology Cooperation and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, both based in the provincial capital, Nanjing.
The reasons Jiangsu has become a hotbed of China’s cyberespionage are not entirely clear, though it is an important manufacturing center, with many foreign investments, and is thus one of China’s richest provinces.
In 2016, the director of the Jiangsu intelligence branch, Liu Yang, declared that “the national security departments should actively cooperate and promote enterprises” in their efforts to expand and compete globally, according to a report from the Suzhou General Chamber of Commerce.
In January, Liu was promoted and is now the vice governor of the province.
Another American criminal case of espionage in the same region of China was announced Oct. 30. The Justice Department accused two other intelligence officers from that branch, as well as five hackers and two employees of a French aerospace company in Suzhou.
The target was Safran, which operates a joint venture, CFM International, that builds jet engines with General Electric.
The hackers were accused of using a variety of sophisticated techniques and tools against the Suzhou plant, and against other companies.
But the suspects are believed to still be in China and thus beyond the reach of American law enforcement.

Make China Small Again

President Trump’s China Policy Is a Triumph.
The president's trade war is bringing Beijing to heel.
BY GREG AUTRY

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at a rally on February 22, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. 

U.S. President Donald Trump’s aggressive approach to China has been the most credible and consistent policy of an often-criticized White House.
The president’s assertions of Chinese malfeasance in trade matters are undeniably true.
Even CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, no fan of the president, has said, “Donald Trump is right: China is a trade cheat,” going on to praise the U.S. trade representative’s exhaustive report on China’s World Trade Organization noncompliance as a rare example of a quality document from this administration.
Despite dire warnings from establishment economists and media pundits that getting tough on China would damage the U.S. economy, we have seen nothing of the kind.
The United States is not simply surviving the trade war but has thrived through two years of global stagnation.
In the meantime, as best as can be told from highly unreliable and often-faked data, Chinese economic growth has stalled.
The hard-line U.S. policy has been effective and should be maintained until China demonstrates real, substantial behavioral change such as no longer requiring forced joint partnerships and ceasing its vast state-run cyberespionage program. 
Holding Beijing accountable for its treatment of its own citizens isn’t too much to ask either.
Then-President Bill Clinton’s fateful decision to disconnect U.S. human rights policy from trade deals in 1993 removed America’s most powerful instrument for producing good in the world. 
As George W. Bush and Barack Obama subsequently adopted Clinton’s “business is business” policy, the Chinese Communist Party learned to exploit a complacent Western media to whitewash its authoritarianism, militarism, and repression and greenwash its environmental depravation.
Lazy American journalists eagerly reprinted half-truths generated by D.C. think tanks funded by the multinational corporations growing rich on the China trade, as well as quotes from professors at universities addicted to foreign student tuition fees and wealthy Chinese donors. 
Those who criticized China, as I did, were marginalized, maligned, and censored. 
U.S. firms such as Google and Home Depot found their attempts to actually access the promised mega-market wrecked by a system tilted in favor of China’s domestic champions.
Still, the horrors of Tibet and Tiananmen were obscured by iPhones and corporate profits. 
Today, Americans enjoy movies from U.S. studios whose scripts are written to avoid offending the Communist Party and are blissfully unaware that over a million Chinese citizens are being brutalized in “re-education” camps designed to deprogram their religious identities.
President Trump holding China’s hypersensitive authoritarians accountable to international standards of decency in trade was a badly overdue act of bravery, and one that perhaps only an unabashedly indiscreet leader could pull off.
The very public shaming of Beijing over its blatantly closed markets, transshipment of products, export subsidies, abuse of joint partnerships, espionage, and technology theft has revealed the party’s claims as a sham. 
All of these facts are superbly documented in the aforementioned Office of the U.S. Trade Representative report and in the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing’s report on China’s economic aggression.
The emperor’s imaginary clothes vanished in a wink.
The promise implied by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and others that appeasing and enriching China’s brutal despots would align them with U.S. interests or liberalize them can no longer be defended with a straight face. 
Over the last two years, establishment pundits shifted from spouting nonsense about China’s inevitable progress toward capitalism and democracy to asking whether tariffs are the right way to confront a dangerous regime we all agree is built on lies and cheating.
The initial results are now in.
The current trade policy has demonstrated its effectiveness, and it is undermining the Communist Party’s only source of legitimacy: ill-gotten economic growth. 
And on the U.S. side, it’s going to be easier to maintain than most people think.
The U.S. market remains the most valuable economic prize on Earth, something this week’s annual Black Friday consumption-fest underscores.
It is, by far, the world’s largest economy, with a 2017 GDP of $19.4 trillion.
That’s at least 60 percent larger than China’s $12.2 trillion and probably a lot more, as China’s dubious GDP figures bend to fit official targets.
Since consumption forms a much larger part of American GDP, the U.S. market for goods is many times larger than China’s.
The United States is also the healthiest major economy, with robustly increasing GDP growth and the lowest unemployment rate in nearly 50 years.
China is not likely to catch up in our lifetimes.
Additionally, the United States has a much smaller population dividing those spoils—and being less burdened by taxes than their global counterparts, U.S. consumers can spend far more than the citizens of any large nation.
Most importantly, China is paying the lion’s share of America’s tariffs.
While advocates of "free" trade have worked hard to scare consumers with threats of huge price increases, these have not emerged.
This is because any additional cost incurred in the distribution of a product may be allocated to either the consumer, through higher prices, or to the producer, through lower margins.
The market determines this split as consumers demonstrate their tolerance for absorbing higher prices.
The elasticity of demand for products determines the price, and a recent European study by EconPol concludes, “A 25 percentage point increase in tariffs raises US consumer prices on all affected Chinese products by only 4.5% on average, while the producer price of Chinese firms declines by 20.5%.” 
And don’t forget that the entire 25 percent goes into the U.S. Treasury, feeding America’s economy, not China’s. 
If Chinese prices eventually do increase, the same system will force distributors and retailers to absorb the cost before consumers.
Their suppliers are already moving to non-China sources.
Significantly, none of this success is accidental.
Many of this administration’s political appointments have been criticized, and the president has removed several of them.
President Trump has even publicly expressed regret over his appointment of Steven Mnuchin as treasury secretary.
In contrast, the team at the White House National Trade Council, the Department of Commerce, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative have been brilliantly strategic in the face of a relentless, China-backed media attack on the trade policy. 
The EconPol researchers recognized this when they wrote, “The US government has strategically levied import duties on goods with high import elasticities.”
Whether or not you agree with the tactics crafted by White House trade advisor Peter Navarro (with whom I wrote a book), Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, this operation has been professionally planned and executed.
Knowing that China would quickly move to disguise its products in transshipments, the Trump team expertly renegotiated complex deals with South Korea, Mexico, and Canada in record time. 
A critical and disorganized Europe has been left scrambling to reassess its China relations, lest its market become the dumping ground of last resort.
Investors buying in to the media prattle that U.S. trade policy has been ill-informed or that soybeans are somehow more important to the United States than technology do so at great peril.
In the face of this success, free trade backbiters are now calling for negotiations.
If you are under any delusion that this time, the Chinese government will take a trade agreement with the West seriously, I encourage you to read Articles 33 through 41 of the Chinese Constitution, which reads like the U.S. Bill of Rights.
This document specifically protects human rights, freedom of religious beliefs, freedom from illegal arrest, freedom from unreasonable search, freedom of speech, and the right to vote and protest. 
None of these things actually exist. 
Like the regime’s official name, the “People’s Republic,” rule of law in China has always been a lie the West agreed to accept. 
The Chinese Communist Party does not respect the rule of law—it respects strength and power.
The U.S. president and his team should stay the course, both for America’s sake and for China’s. Reducing the economic influence of an aggressive authoritarian regime is the right thing to do for the world and, eventually, for the Chinese people. 
They shouldn’t bother with an agreement designed only to delay the other side and that will never be honored.
The new Democratic majority in the lower house of the U.S. Congress and establishment Republicans who otherwise oppose the president should re-evaluate the current trade policy in light of the positive empirical results and eschew the illusory arguments of those who benefit from enriching a dangerous and tyrannical regime.

The Empire Strikes Back

Japan to get first aircraft carrier since second world war amid China concerns

By Justin McCurry in Tokyo

Japan is to upgrade two of its existing Izumo-class helicopter carriers.

Japan is to acquire at least one aircraft carrier for the first time since the second world war, as it attempts to counter Chinese maritime expansion in the Pacific ocean.
The government will upgrade its two existing Izumo-class helicopter carriers so they can transport and launch fighter jets, according to media reports. 

The plans are expected to be included in new defence guidelines due to be released next month.
This week the Nikkei business paper reported that Japan was poised to buy 100 F-35 stealth jets from the US at a cost of more than US$8.8bn, a year after President Donald Trump urged Tokyo to buy more US-made military equipment.
The reported order is in addition to 42 F-35 jets it has already bought from the US.

Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, told President Trump in September that high-spec military equipment would be “important to strengthen Japan’s defences”.
By refitting its two 248-metre-long Izumo-class vessels, which can each carry up to 14 helicopters, Japan would in effect be acquiring its first aircraft carriers since the end of the war.
Previous Japanese governments have ruled out acquiring aircraft carriers, adhering to the postwar consensus that the vessels’ capabilities could be interpreted as offensive, in a possible violation of the country’s “pacifist” constitution.
In its latest defence white paper, Japan noted that China had acquired and built aircraft carriers to enable it to expand into Pacific waters near Japan’s outlying south-western islands.
Increased Chinese naval activity in waters far from its shores has added to bilateral tensions over Japan's Senkaku islands.
“It’s desirable that the Izumo can be used for multiple purposes,” the defence minister, Takeshi Iwaya, told reporters this week.
The carriers will be deployed to defend Japan’s remote south-western islands, according to the Mainichi Shimbun.
The defence white paper, published in August, also voiced concern about Chinese military spending and naval activity in the South China Sea.

Chinazism: For China, Islam is a mental illness that needs to be cured

China's relentless campaign to erase the identity of the Uighurs continues, as the Muslim world remains silent.

By Khaled A Beydoun
Muslims pray at a mosque in Aksu, East Turkestan colony, China, August 3, 2012 

Abdulla* goes to bed every night dreading that knock on the door, a knock he has heard in recurrent nightmares and in stories from neighbours. 

He expects it can come at any moment.
He is an ethnic Uighur and has always called East Turkestan his home. 

His forefathers lived and toiled atop this land for centuries, which the nascent communist Chinese government annexed in 1949. 

He is a father of two, a son and a daughter, and a devout Muslim -- cautiously performing his five prayers every day behind the veil of secrecy his home temporarily offers him.
In the past months, several of his friends and colleagues have heard that dreaded knock on their doors and in the quiet of the night, disappeared with no trace or warning. 

Everybody, including Abdulla, knows where they have been taken and kept. 

But nobody knows for how long they will be held, nor do they know if they'll ever come back home. Most are yet to return, and those who have returned are shells of their former selves, neighbourhood ghosts, warning others of what looms around the corner for Uighurs refusing to disavow Islam.
In August, a United Nations human rights panel reported that nearly 1.1 million Uighur Muslims were being held in concentration camps in East Turkestan -- the colony in western China, home to approximately 11 million Uighurs. 

Gay McDougall, who sits on the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, claimed that the imprisoned population could be as high as 2 million. 

Notwithstanding the estimates, the number of Uighur Muslims being arrested, uprooted from their families and lives, and imprisoned in concentration camps -- for no other reason than being Uighur and Muslim -- is rising with each passing day.
Shortly after the UN broke the news of the concentration camps, Sigal Samuel of The Atlantic reported that inmates were "forced to renounce Islam, criticize their own Islamic beliefs and those of fellow inmates, and recite Communist Party propaganda songs for hours each day." 

Male inmates were compelled to shave their beards and were force-fed pork and alcohol -- which Muslims are forbidden from consuming.
These concentration camps, which hold more than 10 times the number of Japanese citizens and residents the US government locked away during World War II, are where Uighur Muslims are remade into atheist Chinese subjects.

These are horrific sites where fear and physical violence, psychological trauma and emotional abuse are all available tools, wielded to push Uighur inmates to renounce Islam, which the state has called a "mental illness", and reject the distinct Uighur customs that are deeply intertwined with their faith.
This programme of brainwashing and indoctrination is not exclusive to adults. 

The state also operates orphanages for Uighur Muslim children taken from their parents, where the process of disconnecting them from their Islamic faith and ethnic heritage is deeply inculcated into their education. 

At these orphanages, disguised as schools, China is converting future generations of Uighur Muslim children into loyal subjects who embrace atheism and Han customs, pushing them to turn their backs on their families and towards Beijing's vision of destroying the Uighur Muslim people.
Three months have passed since the UN broke the news of China's network of concentration camps and the ancillary programmes designed to purge Islam and destroy the Uighur people who cling so tightly to it. 

Yet, global outrage and political pressure are slow to match the velocity and ferocity of China's designs to cleanse itself of a population it deems inimical to and inassimilable with its national identity.
Why? 

Answers can be traced to prevailing economic and geopolitical pressures, namely, nations fearing the economic hit they would foreseeably take if they challenged or sanctioned China for its ethnic cleansing of the Uighur people. 

China is an economic superpower, and nations across the world rely on it heavily for imports, trade, and more. 

The economic factors deterring humanitarian intervention are accompanied by a global so-called "war on terror" landscape that opened the door for Beijing, after 9/11, to violently rev up its persecution of Uighur Muslims behind the veneer of countering terrorism. 

Today, China is violently upping the ante, capitalising on this global moment to use Islamophobia to push forward its own populist vision: Wiping out an indigenous people seeking self-determination and standing against the state-sponsored mandate of Han supremacy.
With Islam serving as the spiritual lifeline connecting the Uighur people to their land, their history and to one another, the state has zeroed in on it. 

If it can destroy Islam, Beijing believes, it can destroy the Uighurs. 

And this is precisely what it has been doing behind a curtain of global ignorance for years and, even after the UN lifted that curtain for the whole world to see in August, it has carried forward without pause.
For Abdulla, that feared knock on the door is yet to come. 

It may never come, or it may come tomorrow, or the day after. 

Yet, the fear of the unknown and the stark reality that every moment with his children, his wife, and his elderly parents, could be his last, follows his every step like a shadow. 

Beyond the walls of the concentration camps, East Turkestan has become an open-air prison for Uighur Muslims like Abdulla, whose every word is monitored and religious expression closely policed.
He only finds solace in prayer. 

Prostrating himself before Allah, beginning in the early morning and one final time after sitting with his children at dinner, he prays that the state does not take him away and destroy his family.
Yet, the paradox of prayer symbolises the imminent perils of being Muslim in East Turkestan today, whereby the more people are unwilling to relinquish their spiritual identity and disavow Islam, the more likely they are to be taken way and kept far from everybody they love and everything they know, locked away in a living hell devised to purge them of their faith, disintegrate their families, and wash away their nation.

*Name changed to protect identity

Panama the new flashpoint in China's growing presence in Latin America

A spat over the site of China’s embassy has underlined the strategic value of the canal – through which two-thirds of ships to or from the US pass
By Mat Youkee in Panama City

Jutting four kilometres into the Pacific, the Amador causeway islands separate the concrete and glass skyline of Panama City from the entrance to the Panama Canal. 

Jutting four kilometres into the Pacific, the Amador causeway islands separate the concrete and glass skyline of Panama City from the soaring iron arch of the Bridge of the Americas – under which 40 cargo ships pass each day en route to or from the Panama Canal.
Linked to the mainland by a slender causeway, these strategic outcrops are home to a handful of derelict buildings once used to house US military personnel.
But they have become a new flashpoint in the global rivalry between Beijing and Washington, as the US struggles to develop a coherent strategy to deal with China’s rising influence in Latin America.

China’s plans to build a new embassy on the islands were derailed after US officials pressured the government of Panama’s president, Juan Carlos Varela, to withdraw its offer of a four-hectare plot, according to senior Panamanian and diplomatic sources.
“Of course there was pushback from the US: they weren’t going to allow a huge Chinese flag next to the entrance to the canal,” a diplomatic source told the Guardian. 

“But local pressure was also important. Handing over that land to the Chinese would have been a hugely unpopular move by the Varela government.”
Panama’s government has insisted that the decision was based on security and environmental concerns.
But a previous plan to build a new Chinese embassy in the traditional diplomatic district of Panama City was also blocked by objections from Washington, and Beijing has now established a temporary mission in an office block.
The incident may prove to be a pyrrhic victory for Washington, however. 

This weekend, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping arrives in Panama for a visit aimed at cementing ties with the Central American nation.
It will be the first such visit by a senior Chinese figure since Panama cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan to open formal relations with Beijing in June 2017.
Since then, the two countries have signed 28 diplomatic and investment agreements, a $500m renminbi-denominated “Panda” bond is expected before the end of the year and Chinese contractors have won major contracts for a port, convention centre and a new bridge over the canal.
The growth of Chinese investment and influence in the country has been the source of growing unease in Washington.

President Juan Carlos Varela, left, and the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, talk at the presidential palace in Panama City. 

In July, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, ended a visit to Panama with the warning that “when China comes calling, it’s not always to the good of your citizens”. 

He added that state-run Chinese firms operated with political, rather than market-driven motives.
Xi’s visit comes amid an escalating trade war between China and the US, which has highlighted Panama’s strategic importance as a pinch-point of world commerce.
Two-thirds of ships to or from the US pass through the Panama Canal – which was an unincorporated territory of the US between 1903 and 1979 and was home to dozens of American military installations.
“Recent rhetoric from Washington suggests the US has not accepted that the canal has shifted from being a military asset to a commercial one,” said Eddie Tapiero, a competitive intelligence specialist for the Panama Canal Authority and author of a new book on China-Panama relations. 

Negotiations for a free trade agreement between China and Panama are at an advanced stage; Panamanian officials say the country can benefit from its growing role as a regional logistics hub, build its exports to China and protect local farmers.
“We will become the gateway for Chinese goods into Latin America,” the trade minister, Augusto Arosemena, told the Guardian. 

“I think Panama will be an example of how smaller countries can negotiate with China.”
Meanwhile, the US has been caught flatfooted: diplomats were unaware of Varela’s decision to establish ties with Beijing until hours before its announcement and the state department has yet to name a replacement for John Feeley, who stood down as ambassador in March.

In recent years, Beijing has shown growing interest in strategic infrastructure projects in the region: Chinese companies are involved in a project to build a rival interoceanic canal through Nicaragua and investigated the option of a “dry canal” railroad linking Colombia’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
Some Panamanians are also wary of Bejing’s intentions, said Euclides Tapia, a professor of international relations at the University of Panama. 

“The Chinese are here for the long term – and they’ve come for the canal,” he said.

Two U.S. Navy ships pass through Taiwan Strait, opposing China

Reuters

WASHINGTON -- The United States sent two Navy ships through the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday in the third such operation this year, as the U.S. military increases the frequency of transits through the strategic waterway despite opposition from China.
The voyage will be viewed in self-ruled Taiwan as a sign of support from U.S. President Donald Trump’s government amid growing friction between Taipei and Beijing.
“The ships’ transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” U.S. Pacific Fleet said in a statement.
“The U.S. Navy will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows.”
It said the passage was carried out by the destroyer USS Stockdale and the Pecos, a replenishment vessel.
Taiwan’s defense ministry said it was a normal transit through international waters in the Taiwan Strait and Taiwan forces had monitored the passage of the ships.
China’s foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a regular briefing on Thursday that Beijing had expressed its concern over the passage to the United States.

The U.S. patrol comes ahead of an expected meeting between President Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping this week in Argentina on the sidelines of a G20 summit.
The U.S. Navy conducted a similar mission in the strait’s international waters in July, which had been the first such voyage in about a year.
The latest operation shows the U.S. Navy is increasing the pace of strait passages.
Washington has no formal ties with Taiwan, but is bound by law to help it defend itself and is the island’s main source of arms. 

The Pentagon says Washington has sold Taiwan more than $15 billion in weaponry since 2010.
Over the weekend, Taiwan’s ruling pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party suffered heavy losses in mayoral and county elections to the China-friendly Kuomintang, which has been welcomed by Beijing.
Taiwan is one of a growing number of flashpoints in the U.S.-China relationship, which also include a trade war, U.S. sanctions and China’s increasingly muscular military posture in the South China Sea, where the United States also conducts freedom of navigation patrols.

Stop China’s Infiltration of US Railroads

America shouldn’t be buying Chinese railcars, ceding control of its rail industry, or injecting spyware-laden rolling stock into its transportation network.

BY JOHN ADAMS

A myriad of problems has led to a “surprising level of foreign dependence on competitor nations,” according to the White House’s long-awaited report on the severe challenges facing our manufacturing and defense industrial base. 

A look at one field — manufacturing the railroad cars that carry America’s commuters and freight — reveals growing dangers that demand urgent action.
Transportation is among the priority sectors under the Made in China 2025 industrial policy, which aims to help Chinese firms in various sectors reach the highest levels of the global manufacturing chain. 

In the business of railcars, the banner is being carried by China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation, a massive state-owned conglomerate with deep ties to the Communist Party of China.
CRRC has set up two U.S. subsidiaries — CRRC MA in Massachusetts and CRRC Sifang Americas in Chicago — and pursues U.S. contracts with predatory zeal. 

Since 2014, the company has been awarded four contracts totaling $2.5 billion to build metro cars for the cities of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. 

In each case, CRRC used massive subsidies and other resources from the Chinese government to dramatically underbid its competitors —regularly by 20 percent or more. In one case, the Chinese bid was half as much as another competitor. 

To have any company consistently come in so low is unheard of.
It is clear that these bids aim not for short-term profit, but medium-term market domination. 

The pattern was set in Australia, where it took less than a decade for China to gain control of the freight-railcar market. 

A recently deleted tweet by CRRC boasted that the company controls 83 percent of the global rail market and asked followers, “How long will it take for us conquering [sic] the remaining 17 percent?”
But the increasing presence of made-in-China rolling stock on North American rails means more than the loss of manufacturing jobs. 

Modern railcars are not just boxes on wheels, but full-fledged parts of the Internet of Things that soak up and transmit information.
The commuter trains manufactured by CRRC will contain Wi-Fi systems, automatic train control, automatic passenger counters, surveillance cameras and internet-of-things technology that will be deeply integrated into the information and communication technology infrastructure of transit authorities, all sole-sourced from a Chinese state-owned enterprise. 

Chinese surveillance cameras could track the movements and routines of passengers, searching for high-value targets from whose devices intelligence officials can vacuum data from using the train’s Wi-Fi systems. 

This is not an unrealistic prospect. 

Already, China is openly developing a system of “algorithmic surveillance” that uses advances in artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology to enable the Chinese Communist Party to monitor the movements and patterns of its own citizens, purportedly to fight crime.
The risks are even sharper in freight cars, whose onboard GPS systems and telematics monitor the contents and health of trains carrying sensitive cargo such as toxic chemicals and military equipment. 

If China is allowed to insert its railcars into U.S. freight networks, it could give Beijing early and reliable warning about U.S. military mobilization and logistical preparations for conflict. 

It could also give China a destabilizing economic competitive edge, by detecting, say, shortages of critical material such as oil or chlorine gas based on a change in their movements on freight railroads.
As well, Chinese internet-connected products on U.S. rails could be designed to be more susceptible to cyber-attack or hacking by third parties, as has been done with numerous other products.
While CRRC has yet to produce any freight railcars for the U.S.market, it is clearly on their radar. 

In 2014, CRRC launched a now-defunct joint venture with an American firm in Wilmington, North Carolina to build freight cars, but shuttered the facility before filling any orders following rounds of layoffs and a federal investigation into Vertex’s ties to the Chinese government. 

They have also already begun making inroads in Canada with the establishment of a freight railcar assembly facility in Moncton, New Brunswick. 

Should CRRC shift its focus to freight in the United States, it is likely that CRRC would underbid any American competitors and quickly start to dominate the country’s freight railcar fleet.
U.S. lawmakers have recognized and taken steps to address similar threats to products such as computer chips, drones, and cellular technology, and indeed, both chambers of Congress recently passed a ban on federal funding from going to CRRC. 

Yet policymakers may not fully understand the scope or impact of China’s incursion into an increasingly digitized rail network. 

CRRC is likely to continue to win contracts without federal funding and the security of the trains already being built will continue to remain in question. 

There may not be a silver bullet to this problem, but it’s time for our nation’s leaders to put an end to CRRC’s infiltration of the U.S. rail manufacturing industry by developing comprehensive solutions to ensure the integrity of our nation’s transportation systems. 

Nothing stands in their way.

Tech Quisling

Google must not capitulate to China's censorship demands
Amnesty International

Yesterday Google staff published an open letter in support of Amnesty International’s campaign for Google to #Drop Dragonfly.
Part of the letter reads: “Many of us accepted employment at Google with the company’s values in mind, including its previous position on Chinese censorship and surveillance, and an understanding that Google was a company willing to place its values above its profits. After a year of disappointments including Dragonfly and Google’s support for abusers, we no longer believe this is the case. This is why we’re taking a stand.”
The letter will continue to be updated with new signatures.

Google must not capitulate to China's censorship demands
Google’s plans to launch a censored search app in China could irreparably damage internet users’ trust in the tech company, Amnesty International said today, warning that going ahead with the app would set a dangerous precedent for tech companies enabling rights abuses by governments.

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Google should be fighting for an internet where information is freely accessible to everyone, not backing the Chinese government’s dystopian alternative 

Joe Westby, Researcher on Technology and Human Rights

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The organization has launched a global petition calling on Google CEO Sundar Pichai to drop the app, which is codenamed Project Dragonfly and would blacklist search terms like “human rights” and “Tiananmen Crackdown”.
Following a public outcry from Google’s own workforce, Amnesty International is reaching out to the company’s staff through protests outside Google offices and targeted messages on LinkedIn calling on them to sign the petition.
A spoof promotional video offering Google staff the chance to participate in Project Dragonfly ends with a twist on Google’s motto: “Don’t be evil – unless it’s profitable”.
“This is a watershed moment for Google. As the world’s number one search engine, it should be fighting for an internet where information is freely accessible to everyone, not backing the Chinese government’s dystopian alternative,” said Joe Westby, Amnesty International’s Researcher on Technology and Human Rights.

“Many of Google’s own staff have spoken out against these plans, unwilling to play a role in the Chinese government’s manipulation of information and persecution of dissidents. 
Their courageous and principled stance puts Google’s leadership to shame. 
Today we are standing with Google staff and asking them to join us in calling on Sundar Pichai to drop Project Dragonfly and reaffirm Google’s commitment to human rights.”

State repression
The Chinese government runs the world’s most repressive internet censorship and surveillance regime. 
In 2010 Google publicly exited the search market in China, citing restrictions to freedom of expression online.
Since then, the Chinese government has intensified its crackdown and it is unclear how Google would safeguard human rights in this environment.
Leaked internal documents obtained by The Intercept show that the prototype app that Google built under Project Dragonfly would comply with China’s censorship rules by automatically identifying and filtering websites blocked in China and “blacklisting sensitive queries”. 
According to The Intercept, the blacklist that Google itself developed for the project includes the terms “student protest” and “Nobel Prize” in Chinese, as well as phrases that imply criticism of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
Google would cooperate with Chinese censors in cracking down on posts related to developing social issues, such as the Chinese government’s response to the growing #MeToo movement and the Chinese government’s internment of ethnic minorities.
The prototype app would also make it easier for authorities to track individual users’ searches, which means that Google would be helping the Chinese government to arrest or imprison people.
Chinese laws and regulations force tech companies to cooperate fully with inspections by public security officials.
Launching Project Dragonfly would also legitimize China’s vision of the internet, which gives governments absolute control over what information is available to the population and the power to freely access all online data about their citizens. 
A recent report by Freedom House found that China is actively exporting its model of internet control around the world by conducting large-scale trainings for foreign officials, providing technology to other governments and forcing international companies to follow its rules even outside China.

Sundar Pichai must do the right thing and drop Project Dragonfly for good. 

Joe Westby

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In response to criticism over Project Dragonfly, Google has said it is committed to respecting the fundamental rights of its users.
However, the company has failed to explain how it would square this commitment with a project that appears to accept censorship and surveillance. 
The company’s leadership has also tried to shrug off criticism by saying it has simply been exploring the possibility of re-entering the Chinese search market and that it does not know whether it “would or could” launch such a product.
However leaked comments by a senior Google manager suggest that before the project was made public, the company had been working to have Project Dragonfly ready to launch as soon as possible.
“Google needs to stop equivocating and make a decision.
Will it defend a free and open internet for people globally?
Or will it help create a world where some people in some countries are shut out from the benefits of the internet and routinely have their rights undermined online?” said Joe Westby.
“If Google is happy to capitulate to the Chinese government’s draconian rules on censorship, what’s to stop it cooperating with other repressive governments who control the flow of information and keep tabs on their citizens? 
As a market leader, Google knows its actions will set a precedent for other tech companies.
Sundar Pichai must do the right thing and drop Project Dragonfly for good.”