China’s Military Seeks New Islands to Conquer

Allies in the Pacific are worried that the U.S. and Europe are no longer reliable.

By James Stavridis

A Defense Department report warns that China’s military buildup is reaching the point where it can attempt to “impose its will on the region and beyond.” 

Visiting recently with senior officials from two U.S. allies in the region, Japan and Singapore, gave me a visceral feeling of how things look on the ground (and at sea). 

“We are deeply concerned about the US long-term commitment in the region, starting with troops in South Korea – especially in the face of China and their determined military expansion,” a senior Japanese official told me.
The constant refrain was simple: The West is becoming a less reliable partner. 

These allies are dismayed by a U.S. administration that has repeatedly criticized its closest partners and accused them of freeloading on defense. 

They are also worried about weakness and distraction of a Europe facing Brexit. 

This is compounded as they watch China increase pressure on Taiwan to accept a “one nation, two systems” deal à la Hong Kong and militarize the South China Sea by constructing artificial islands.
Japan, in particular, faces a host of challenges from Beijing. 

These begin with a long and bitter history of conflict, principally stemming from the Second World War but also dating back to the Sino-Japanese War more than a century ago. 

Other areas of contention include China’s unfounded territorial claims including the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea; support for North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, who has launched ballistic missiles over the Japanese islands; massive hacks into Tokyo’s intelligence and military command systems; and the intellectual property theft that has also frustrated the U.S. so deeply. 

Singapore, given its geographic position as the gateway to the Indian Ocean, is a key stepping stone in China’s military expansion and its massive One Belt-One Road development project.

There is also a less-noticed but extremely worrisome aspect to China’s increasing boldness: It is building its naval capability to dominate farther into the Pacific -- as far as what Western analysts call the “second island chain.”
When thinking in a geo-strategic sense about China, the island-chain formulation is helpful. 

Since the 1950s, U.S. planners have delineated a first island chain, running from the Japanese islands through the Philippines, and down to the tip of Southeast Asia. 

Dominating inside that line has been the goal of China’s recent buildup in naval and missile capabilities. 

But U.S. officials warn that Chinese strategists are becoming more ambitious, set on gaining influence running to the second island chain -- running from Japan through the Micronesian islands to the tip of Indonesia. 

As with its initial forays into the South China Sea, Beijing is using “scientific” missions and hydrographic surveying ships as the tip of the spear.
Japan and Singapore are essentially anchors at the north and south ends the island chains. 

They have been integrating their defense capabilities with the U.S. through training, exercises and arms purchases. 

They are exploring better relations with India as the Pacific and Indian Oceans are increasingly viewed as a single strategic entity. 

This is a crucial element in the U.S. strategy for the region. 

But there are changes coming.
First, there are expectations that China will eye the third island chain, encompassing Hawaii and the Alaskan coast before dropping south down to New Zealand. 

This has long been regarded as the final line of strategic demarcation between the U.S. and China. Second, some analysts are beginning to talk about a fourth and even fifth island chain, both in the Indian Ocean, an increasingly crucial zone of competition between the U.S. and China.
Two obvious Indian Ocean chains exist. 

The first would run from southern Pakistan (where China has created a deep-water port at Gwador) down past Diego Garcia, the lonely atoll controlled by the U.K. from which the U.S. runs enormous logistical movements into Central Asia. 

As a junior officer on a Navy cruiser in the 1980s, I visited Diego Garcia when it was essentially a fuel stop with a quaint palm-thatched bar. 

The base has expanded enormously, becoming critical to supporting U.S. and British combat efforts in the Horn of Africa and Middle East.
The fifth and final island chain could be considered to run from the Horn of Africa – where the U.S. and China now maintain significant military bases – down to the coast of South Africa. 

Little wonder the U.S. military has renamed its former Pacific Command as the Indo-Pacific Command.
Each of the island chains will be a line contention. 

Both U.S. and Chinese war plans encompass protocols for employing land-based forces from the various islands to project power to sea.
Japan and Singapore are keenly aware of the geographic importance of the Pacific island chains, as are more distant allies such as Australia and New Zealand. 

How the U.S. Navy integrates forces with allies and partners, and develops cogent plans to use the islands should matters come to blows (as bases for long-range air, intelligence gathering, and logistic resupply) will be crucial.

The most helpful analogy may be the so-called Great Game between the U.K. and Russia for control of South Asia in the 19th century. 

But in today’s world, both the U.S. and China have broader global ambitions and larger international trade empires to defend. 

Control of the island chains, with Japan and Singapore at the most crucial points in the Pacific, can give either great power the upper hand.

Chinese Fifth Column

China-funded Confucius Institutes trying to influence US public opinion should be constrained
By Rich Edson

WASHINGTON -- Senators are considering legislation to constrain Chinese government-funded institutes they say are spreading propaganda and limiting criticism of China at hundreds of elementary, middle and high schools and colleges across the United States.
Confucius Institutes “depict China as approachable and compassionate; rarely are events critical or controversial,” according to a bipartisan report from the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. 

“The Chinese government approves all teachers, events, and speakers. Some U.S. schools contractually agree that both Chinese and U.S. laws will apply.”
In the last 15 years, the Chinese government has opened more than 100 Confucius Institutes on college and university campuses in the U.S. and are also in more than 500 primary schools, according to the report. 

Since 2006, according to the subcommittee, China has directly provided more than $158 million to U.S. schools for Confucius Institutes. 

Investigators said they found no evidence of espionage at the institutes as their investigation, they said, focused on propaganda and influence.
“That level of access stifles academic freedom and provides students and others exposed to Confucius Institute programming with an incomplete picture of Chinese government actions and policies that run counter to U.S. interests at home and abroad,” said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, the subcommittee’s chairman.
“Given what our country experienced during the 2016 election and what we’re preparing to grapple with in 2020, it is critical that we be vigilant in combatting Chinese efforts to influence American public opinion,” said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the subcommittee’s senior Democrat.

The subcommittee report cites Chinese government statements acknowledging their propaganda value to address criticism over human rights, Taiwan and individual freedom.

“We’re not against cultural exchange or language learning outright. We do view and recognize the value in this globalized world of cultural exchange, of foreign exchange, of language learning,” said a subcommittee investigator. 

“There are concerns schools need to be aware about how these things operate. And the public, faculty and students also need to be aware.”
The institutes, the schools they contract with and the Chinese government should reveal the details of their agreements, said the investigator. 

Without achieving that transparency, the investigator said senators are exploring legislation to address those concerns or would even pursue ways to shut them down.
In its study, the GAO found, “While 42 of 90 agreements include language indicating that the document was confidential, some agreements were available online or are shared upon request. Some officials at schools that did not post agreements online said this was consistent with handling of other agreements.” 

The report also read, “Nonetheless, school officials, researchers, and others suggested ways schools could improve institute management, such as by renegotiating agreements to clarify U.S. schools' authority and making agreements publicly available.”
Last year, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, sponsored a provision included in the National Defense Authorization Act that prohibits Pentagon funding of Confucius Institutes. 

He’s also pushed a bill that would lower the threshold for universities reporting foreign contributions from $250,000 to $50,000.
The subcommittee investigation found that nearly 70 percent of U.S. schools that received more than $250,000 from the Chinese government for Confucius Institutes failed to properly report those contributions to the federal government.
In 2010, the State Department granted more than $5 million to create American cultural events on Chinese campuses.
The department’s inspector general determined the U.S. effort was “'largely ineffective' in its mission due to Chinese interference” and closed the program late last year, according to the report.
“As China has expanded Confucius Institutes here in the U.S., it has systematically shut down key U.S. State Department public diplomacy efforts on Chinese college campuses,” said Senator Portman.
While there are more Confucius Institutes in the U.S. than any other country, the Chinese government has spent more than $2 billion expanding them across the world, according to the subcommittee.
“They show no signs of slowing,” said an investigator.

China has turned East Turkestan into a zone of repression — and a frightening window into the future

The Washington Post

The Chinese database that Victor Gevers, a Dutch cybersecurity researcher, found online has given a rare glimpse into China’s extensive surveillance of East Turkestan, a remote colony home to an ethnic minority population that is largely Muslim. 

AT A minimum, the minority Muslim Uighur population of East Turkestan colony in China is about 11 million people, and probably significantly higher. 

So consider the scope of surveillance over Uighurs in light of a recent database leak that indicated about 2.5 million people in East Turkestan are being tracked by cameras and other devices, generating more than 6.6 million GPS coordinates in one 24-hour period, much of it tagged with locations such as “mosque” and “hotel.”
Victor Gevers, a security researcher for the GDI Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to defend Internet freedom, found the database, belonging to SenseNets, a Chinese company that provides facial recognition and other monitoring systems to the police. 

The company had left the database unguarded but closed it off when Mr. Gevers inquired. 

It included records such as identification numbers, gender, nationality, address, birth dates, photographs, employers and which cameras or trackers they had passed. 

Mr. Gevers suggests that more than a quarter of those in the database appear to be ethnic Uighurs, although it also included Han Chinese and others.
The data provides another glimpse into the darkening world of East Turkestan, which China’s authorities have turned into a zone of repression. 

In addition to ubiquitous electronic and physical surveillance, an estimated 1 million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims have been incarcerated in concentration camps where they are being brainwashed to wipe out their traditional culture and language.
According to Xiao Qiang, director of the Counter-Power Lab at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information, East Turkestan is a window on the future of China, a “frontline” test-bed for data-driven surveillance that could then be spread well beyond. 

Mr. Xiao wrote in the Journal of Democracy last month that China under Xi Jinping is attempting to marshal the powers of artificial intelligence to process all kinds of surveillance data, including facial recognition, and systems that can monitor gender, clothing, gait and height of passersby, as well as voice recognition, and creating a DNA database.
After being asked by the New York Times about the use of its technology to build the DNA database, a Massachusetts company, Thermo Fisher, said it would no longer sell its equipment in East Turkestan. 

Congress is considering important legislation that would help expose and pressure others who enable China’s abuses.
China’s goal is to use these technologies to suppress dissent, and to predict and snuff out any challenge to the ruling Communist Party’s grip on power. 

In East Turkestan, surveillance is part of a policy of cultural genocide. 

In addition to the camps and cameras, Mr. Xiao says the government has issued guidelines to collect DNA samples from all East Turkestan residents between ages 12 and 65.
When George Orwell’s “1984” was published seven decades ago, it seemed a dire warning of a future dystopia ruled by thought police and authoritarian control. 

Today, such a world is becoming a reality in East Turkestan. 

We agree with human rights groups who have urged the United Nations Human Rights Council, when it meets starting Monday, to launch an international fact-finding mission to East Turkestan to expose this unsettling experiment in state control of human behavior.

The Establishment Goes Trump on China

A new consensus is emerging, and it sounds a lot like what the president has said all along.
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
President Trump takes part in a welcoming ceremony with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Beijing, November 9, 2017.

Read recent essays on China. 

Visit think-tank public symposia. 

Hear out military analysts. 

Talk with academics and media pundits. 

Listen to Silicon Valley grandees. 

Watch Senate speeches and politicians interview on television.
The resulting new groupspeak is surreal. 

If one excises the word “Trump,” what follows is a seemingly revolutionary recalibration of attitudes toward China that more or less echo Trump’s voice in the wilderness and often crude and shrill warnings dating back from the campaign trail of 2015.
Trump’s second secretary of state, the skillful Mike Pompeo, has been institutionalizing the president’s pessimistic view of China. 

Insightful but heretofore underappreciated assessments from China scholars such as Miles Yu and Gordon Chang are now being taking seriously. 

Both have been warning us for years that the Chinese seek domination, not accommodation, and are replacing their erstwhile feigned respect for our strength with an emboldened contempt for our growing weakness, whether real or psychological. 

Both have warned also that once China achieves military, economic, and cultural parity with the United States, the global order will be quite different from that of the last 75 years.
From the military, one hears more frequently now that we were at a tipping point by late 2016: The Obama Asian pivot had failed — publicly provocative, but in reality without substance, giving the lethal impression of real weakness masked by empty rhetoric. 

The Chinese militarization of the Spratly Islands was conceded as the inevitable future of the South China Sea. 

Chinese military and weapons doctrine was aimed at destroying the offensive capability of the U.S. fleet in the Pacific as a way of breaking off allies from America, and then Finlanding them.
From 2009 to 2016, our defense readiness was eroding, China’s increasing. 

Psychologically, the American military could not reassure the global order that China would not one day soon unleash North Korea, absorb Taiwan, emasculate South Korea and Japan, or isolate the Philippines and Australia. 

Huge and mercantile Chinese trade surpluses with all its Western trading partners were accepted as normal.
The cash-short Pentagon seemed to shrug that America was the victim of cosmic and historic forces that inevitably would dethrone the United States, analogous to the declinism of the 1930s, when a powerful U.S. 7th Fleet was not able to deter a modern rising Japanese navy from carving out what would become the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere based on perceptions of American impotence and weariness and spent European colonialism.
In Silicon Valley, the good old news of making trillions of dollars over the last 30 years in outsourcing assemblage to China, opening up a huge new Chinese consumer market, and entering joint partnerships has insidiously been eclipsed by the growing reality that our techie masters of the universe were instead deluded Dr. Frankensteins who had helped to birth an unstoppable monster.
Technology was stolen, either by espionage inside the U.S. or by formalized theft as the cost of doing business inside China. 

Copyrights and patents did not bother China. 

The scale of environmental damage inside China did not diminish, but accelerated and was manifested abroad. 

There was no sense of symmetry; in dealing with China, the idea of commercial reciprocity, shared environmental protocols, generalized notions of international commerce — all that simply did not exist. 

And the reason it did not exist wasn’t sloppiness or insensitivity; it did not exist by design, owing to the Chinese’s arrogance that they were the rising sun and the U.S. was in its twilight — with a few exceptions granted to some of the Western elite who were getting rich largely by accommodating the Chinese warping of trade and technological theft.
Financially challenged colleges and universities had come to rely on full-tuition-paying Chinese students. 

When stories spread that some Chinese students were acting as organs of the Chinese Communist Party, actively engaging in espionage, or illiberally bullying any critics of China, colleges either ignored such news or regarded its bearers as racists and xenophobes.
Chinese college students who mouthed government talking points were strangely rebranded, in identity-politics fashion, as the victimized Other, and to be accorded the usual accruing exemptions. In sum, China was considered a politically correct entity. 

Or better yet, it was seen as a cash cow for struggling liberal-arts colleges and so properly immune from any suggestion that it sent thousands of its citizens abroad to absorb or expropriate Western technology without contamination from taboo liberal ideas. 

While the U.S. obsessed over “Russian collusion” from a thuggish but comparative weak Vladimir Putin, no one worried much about the increasingly boldness of Chinese espionage and cyber sabotage. 

In Tolkienesque terms of relative threats, Putin played Saruman to a Chinese Sauron.
This willful blindness was similar again to the denseness of Europe and the United States from 1880 to 1920, when Japan had sent tens of thousands of students and liaisons abroad to learn everything from nautical and aviation engineering to assembly-line fabrication and sophisticated steel production. 

The West, in condescending and racist fashion, was flattered: Such emulation must be proof of Japan’s inferiority and desires to become a Westernized (albeit junior) free-market democracy.
In fact, Japanese expropriation was done in a context of arrogance and bitterness over not receiving commensurate recognition after World War I. 

Japan assumed that whatever was stolen from the West could be improved by superior Japanese discipline, order, and national unity and purpose — far better craftsmanship without the drag of research-and-development costs.
Our diplomats for decades had assured Americans that Chinese trade imbalances, technological theft, gratuitous bullying in the air and sea, disdain for U.S. Asian allies, rampant espionage, and contempt for the postwar commercial order were 50-year-old “growing pains” — the Tiananmen Square road bumps on the inevitable path to liberal society and consensual government.

The arrogant Western idea was that just as free-market economics (rather than jaded mercantilism, dictatorship, and government monopolies) had enriched the Chinese, so too would the accruing bounty “liberalize” Chinese society, ensure an “aware” consumer class, and impress on the country that Western popular culture and politics were just as inevitable and attractive as had been Western profit-making. 

Or economists and investors insisted that cheap imported Chinese goods meant that the stagnant wages of the middle classes would not matter so much at Walmart — while American business would be forced to be leaner and more efficient to survive the cutthroat competition.
The net result was to ignore or contextualize China’s civil-rights abuses, contaminated products, religious persecution, flagrant international aggression, attacks on the postwar global order, neo-colonialism, and abject racism on the grounds these sins were comparable to our own 19th-century bouts with such illiberality — or in some perverse way in the long run even beneficial to the United States.
Again, American finance and corporations invested full bore in Chinese joint projects, offshored, and outsourced — at the price of giving away key American technological and strategic advantages, hollowing out American red-state industrial and manufacturing capacity, and weakening the nation’s cyber and conventional military security.
The idea seemed to be that if a few thousand multimillionaires got even far more fabulously rich by acquiescing to Chinese mercantilism, they could not do real harm to the vast and powerful U.S. 

Or perhaps, given inevitable American decline, the idea was that they should get their profits in now, before the American golden goose was put out of its misery.
In all these areas and more, a new consensus, among left and right, is now settling in that we are at a crossroads with China. 

Any more appeasement and acquiescence will lose the West its Asian allies, who will be forced to go with the ascendant superpower, not the declining one.
Either the U.S. military recalibrates or it will return to its 1930s stature of a powerful but vastly overextended Pacific navy and air force. 

We have reached a cultural nexus at which any more acquiescence would institutionalize the idea that to object to Chinese piracy is to indulge in hurtful stereotypes and therefore should be replaced with appeasement, and that giving away American technology or allowing its expropriation with a wink and nod is not treasonous but simply good business.
The establishment would like to fool itself that it came to its growing about-face on China thanks to a natural exhaustion of patience, or new data, or brilliant new exegeses. 

And that evolution may be in part true.
But far more likely, Trump’s early and relentless hammering on Chinese mercantilism, systematic cheating, and illiberality finally made the old status quo unsustainable in the face of mounting evidence.
The establishment is adopting Trump’s once-renegade stance toward China, and yet trying to immunize it from him all the same. 

So the end result seems something like the following: “That idiot Trump somehow now agrees with us on confronting China.”

Clown King?

Trump Undermines Top Trade Adviser as He Pushes for China Deal

By Ana Swanson

WASHINGTON — Trump has signaled that he is moving toward peace with China in a trade standoff that has rattled markets and businesses globally. 

But as he backs off his threat to impose higher tariffs, the president’s relationship with his own trade negotiator is now showing signs of strain.
The situation has left Trump’s trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, who is both an ardent supporter of the president and a longtime China critic, in an uncomfortable bind. While broad tariffs on Chinese imports brought Beijing to the negotiating table, Trump has grown impatient with the talks, and a consensus is growing in Washington that Trump will ultimately accept a weak deal.
And despite the lack of a transformative arrangement he once promised, Trump has begun dangling the idea of a “signing summit” with Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida resort. 

As a result, Trump is undermining Mr. Lighthizer as he tries to pressure China to make big concessions.
“Trump is certainly doing his negotiating team no favors by undercutting them in public,” said Eswar Prasad, a trade expert and the former head of the China division of the International Monetary Fund. 

The president’s actions, he said, “weakens rather than fortifies Lighthizer’s leverage.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Lighthizer will testify before House lawmakers, where he will have to credibly defend a pact that is shaping up to be less ambitious than he might have hoped.
Mr. Lighthizer has publicly expressed solidarity with Trump’s goals, and those who know him say he remains loyal to Trump. 

In private, however, he has been frustrated by Trump’s superficial understanding of the trading relationship with China and his tendency to jump unpredictably into the fray.
American and Chinese negotiators have wrestled over trade terms in rounds of talks over the past year, including in Washington last week. 

Chinese negotiators have largely repackaged old promises about opening their markets to foreign companies and offered large purchases of American products that are designed to impress a president who is focused on reducing the bilateral trade deficit.
The Chinese have so far declined to make the concrete commitments to reform their economy that the administration has demanded, including ending China’s practice of subsidizing companies, engaging in cybertheft and forcing American companies to hand over intellectual property to Chinese partners in order to do business there.
Trump continues to insist that any deal with China will end “unfair” trade practices, including what he has said is theft of American technology and intellectual property. 

And negotiators are trying to insert an enforcement mechanism into any deal that would require China to return to the bargaining table if it fails to make these structural changes, a person familiar with the talks said.
But the hardened position that prompted Trump’s unprecedented imposition of sweeping tariffs on Chinese goods appears to be weakening, giving Beijing more room to maneuver and undermining Mr. Lighthizer’s goal.
On Sunday, citing “substantial progress” in trade talks, Trump backed off his March 1 deadline to impose higher tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. 

That date had been described by Mr. Lighthizer in December as a “hard deadline” and was viewed as critical to getting Beijing to agree to significant changes since its economy, already hurting from tariffs, would suffer more from higher levies.
Last week, Trump contradicted Mr. Lighthizer by lumping the fate of Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant facing criminal charges, in with the trade talks. 

Mr. Lighthizer had insisted that Huawei was “entirely a criminal justice matter” and that it had “nothing to do with anything I’m working on.” 

But on Friday, when asked whether criminal charges against Huawei could be dropped as part of an agreement, Trump said: “We’ll be talking to the U.S. attorneys. We’ll be talking to the attorney general. We’ll be making that decision.”
“His intervention has now ratcheted up the pressure on both sets of negotiators to find a path to an agreement in the coming weeks, even if the result should be a narrow and short-lived agreement,” Mr. Prasad said.
The differences between the two men mounted on Friday, as they shared a remarkable exchange in front of the press and the Chinese delegation over whether to call the current trade agreement a memorandum of understanding, or M.O.U., as Mr. Lighthizer had been doing.
“I don’t like M.O.U.s because they don’t mean anything,” Trump told Mr. Lighthizer. 

“I think you’re better off just going into a document. I was never a fan of an M.O.U.”
Mr. Lighthizer interjected to explain that, in trade negotiations, an M.O.U. is a typical term for a detailed contract between two parties.
“It’s just called a memorandum of understanding,” he said. 

“That’s a legal term.”
Trump, seemingly unhappy with being contradicted, cut back in.
“By the way, I disagree,” the president said. 

“I think that a memorandum of understanding is not a contract to the extent that we want.”
“To me, the final contract is really the thing, Bob — and I think you mean that, too — is really the thing that means something,” the president added.
Mr. Lighthizer quickly reversed course. 

“From now on, we’re not using the word memorandum of understanding anymore,” he told Trump and his Chinese counterparts. 

“We’ll have the same document. It’s going to be called a trade agreement. We’re never going to use M.O.U. again.”
“I like that much better,” Trump said.
By Sunday night, the president seemed eager to heal any rift. 

Speaking from a dinner at the White House, the president commended Mr. Lighthizer for working around the clock to secure a deal with China.
“When I was able to be lucky enough to win the presidency, I called Bob Lighthizer, because for years people have known he’s the greatest trader that we have on this type of trade — we have many different types of trade — and I really understand now why,” the president said.
With the Chinese now making only vague concessions on structural reforms, Mr. Lighthizer would prefer to stay tough and let the bite of American tariffs persuade them to make bigger promises. While he has shared with Trump the view that the Chinese are not ready to make significant concessions, the president has continued to press for a deal.
Jeff Emerson, a spokesman for the United States trade representative, denied that Mr. Lighthizer had ever been frustrated with the president, saying that he and Trump were in complete agreement on the negotiating strategy with China.
“Trump has never insisted that Ambassador Lighthizer make a deal with China and has instead told Ambassador Lighthizer he is interested only in making a ‘great deal’ with China that addresses structural issues,” Mr. Emerson added. 

“Anyone claiming otherwise either does not know what they are talking about or is deliberately pushing falsehoods.”
Mr. Lighthizer is well respected in Washington, with decades of experience in private legal practice and government, including leading trade talks with Japan in the 1980s. 

In trying to pin down the Chinese on making ambitious reforms to their economy, he has an unenviable task.
Business groups and China watchers credit the Trump administration with forcing China to finally come to the table and address longstanding concerns, including its treatment of American companies. 

And they say the administration is poised to secure greater concessions than previous administrations have.
“Bob Lighthizer has made it a priority to get this China deal right,” said Myron Brilliant, an executive vice president and the head of international affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 

“He understands that this is the moment in time in which there’s an opportunity to make a real change in the trajectory of the U.S.-China relationship, and he’s focused on the bottom line: what he can get from the Chinese that will improve the U.S.-China economic relationship.”
Mr. Lighthizer, who will testify before the House Ways and Means Committee, is expected to face tough questions from lawmakers about the state of the negotiations and whether he feels comfortable staking his legacy on the evolving China deal. 

While many Republicans are eager for the trade war to end, they are warning the administration not to settle for a weak deal. 

Democrats are already trying to outflank Trump on China and are gearing up to call any agreement that does not include structural changes a failure.
Mr. Lighthizer and other members of his office have held discussions with politicians and trade advisers of both parties, urging them to maintain their public pressure to get a substantial deal.
In a statement Monday, Daniel DiMicco, Trump’s trade adviser during the campaign and the chairman of trade group the Coalition for a Prosperous America, urged Trump to “continue his strategy of strength and leverage in the U.S. trade and geopolitical relationship with China” and to “resist short-term pressure from Wall Street.”
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, urged Trump not to cave, saying in a tweet, “No matter how many tons of soybeans they buy if #China gets to keep cheating & stealing trade secrets it won’t be a good deal for America, our workers or our national security.”
Mr. Lighthizer, a former steel industry lawyer who grew up watching factories disappear from his native Ohio, took the trade representative job in large part to shift power away from China and toward the United States. 

Mr. Lighthizer has long viewed China as an economic enemy that has engaged in unfair trade practices, destroying American industries in the process.
The potential for Trump to reach a compromise deal with China has prompted speculation in Washington that Mr. Lighthizer, like so many other administration officials, might resign. 

But while Mr. Lighthizer views changing the China dynamic as critical, his confidantes say he is unlikely to leave given his unprecedented opportunity to improve America’s terms of trade with Canada, Mexico and the European Union, as well as at the World Trade Organization.
Mr. Emerson said rumors of Mr. Lighthizer’s resignation were “a total falsehood."
Mr. Lighthizer “believes Trump is the greatest trade president in our history and is honored to help him,” Mr. Emerson said.

US warships sail through the Taiwan Strait again, putting pressure on Beijing

• Two US Navy warships — the destroyer USS Stethem and the fleet oiler USNS Cesar Chavez — conducted a routine Taiwan Strait transit Monday.
• The passage sent the message to Beijing that the US will "fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows" and that these trips through the closely watched waterway will occur regularly.
• Monday's trip marks the fourth since October and the fifth since the US Navy restarted the practice of sending surface combatants through the strait last July.
• Chinese warships trailed the US ships.
• News of the latest transit comes as the Trump administration announces that the US and China are close to an agreement on trade.

By Ryan Pickrell

Two US Navy warships sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Monday, sending a message to Beijing, which has warned the US to "tread lightly" in the closely watched waterway.
The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Stethem and the replenishment oiler USNS Cesar Chavez navigated a "routine" Taiwan Strait transit Monday, the US Pacific Fleet told Business Insider in an emailed statement.
"The ships' transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific. The US Navy will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows," the Pacific Fleet said.
The two US Navy vessels that passed through the Taiwan Strait were shadowed by People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) warships.
The passage is the fourth since October and the fifth since the US Navy restarted the practice of sending surface combatants through the strait last July.
The Taiwan Strait is a roughly 80-mile international waterway that separates the democratic island from the communist mainland, and China regularly bristles when US Navy vessels sail through. When a US destroyer and a fleet oiler transited the strait in January, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the passage "provocative behavior," accusing the US of "threatening the safety" of those nearby.
Beijing considers Taiwan, a self-ruled territory, to be a renegade province, and it firmly opposes US military support for the island, be that arms sales, protection assurances, or even just the US military operating in the area. 

China has repeatedly urged the US to keep its distance from Taiwan, but the US Navy has continued its "routine" trips through the strait. 

"We see the Taiwan Strait as another (stretch of) international waters, so that's why we do the transits," Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson said in January.
The rhetoric used by the Navy to characterize the Taiwan Strait transits is almost identical to that used to describe US freedom-of-navigation operations (FONOPs) in the South China Sea.
The Navy has already conducted two FONOPs this year, angering Beijing both times.

Turkey urges China to respect religious freedom in East Turkestan

China must respect human rights of Muslims, including freedom of religion, Turkish FM says.

al jazeera
China must learn to distinguish between terrorists and innocent people, Mevlut Cavusoglu said.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has voiced concern over China's mistreatment of Uighur and other Muslims in its East Turkestan colony and called on Beijing to protect freedom of religion there.
The United Nations Human Rights Council opened its annual four-week session on Monday as Western countries are looking to Turkey and other members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to spotlight what China calls "re-education and training" facilities in East Turkestan.
UN experts and activists say the camps hold one million Uighurs, who speak a Turkic language, and other Muslim minorities. 

China has denied accusations of mistreatment and deems criticism within the UN council to be interference in its sovereignty.
In his remarks, Cavusoglu did not specifically mention mass detention camps in the remote western colony of China.
However, he told the Geneva forum that reports of human rights violations against Uighurs and other Muslims in East Turkestan were serious cause for concern.

'Distinction needed'
A distinction should be made between "terrorists and innocent people", Cavusoglu said.
"We encourage Chinese authorities and expect that universal human rights, including freedom of religion, are respected and full protection of the cultural identities of the Uighurs and other Muslims is ensured," Cavusoglu said.
China, a member of the 47-member Human Rights Council, did not immediately respond to the Turkish foreign minister's remarks, but delegations will be free to reply later in the session.
East Turkestan has been enveloped in a suffocating blanket of security for years, particularly since a deadly anti-government riot broke out in the regional capital, Urumqi, in 2009.
The roughly 10 million Uighurs make up a tiny proportion of China's almost 1.4 billion people and there has never been an uprising that could challenge the central government's overwhelming might.

Axis of Evil

China has put 1 million Muslims in concentration camps. A Saoudi murderer had nothing to say.
By Fred Hiatt

Saudi murderer Mohammed bin Salman, left, shakes hands with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Beijing on Friday. 

China is a leading oppressor of Muslims, so it should come as no surprise that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia — the kingdom that views itself as defender of the Islamic faith — would visit Beijing to deliver a stern rebuke.
After all, China has penned an estimated 1 million Muslims into concentration camps in western China. 

It has sent ethnic Han Chinese to live with Muslim families and report on anyone who refuses to eat pork or shave his beard. 

It is wrenching children from parents to reprogram them away from their faith and culture in mass orphanages.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman must have had a lot to say when he met Chinese dictator Xi Jinping late last week.
Wait, what’s that you say? 

The prince had nothing to say on behalf of China’s Muslims? 

In fact, he defended what China calls an effort to fight extremism?
Yes, that is in fact what happened. 

And the reason is simple: In return, China defended Saudi Arabia’s right to orchestrate a murder and get away with it.
Your concentration camps are your internal affair. 

My conspiracy to commit murder is my internal affair. 

How nice, we understand each other.
It has been nearly five months since Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, murdered and dismembered. 

Little accountability has been achieved since then.
It is not that little has been discovered about the crime. 

Despite a shifting series of lies from the Saudi government, we know quite a lot.
We know that the crown prince, who is second in command to his father, King Salman, told a top aide a year before the killing that he would use “a bullet” on Khashoggi if the exiled journalist did not return to Saudi Arabia and stop criticizing the Saudi regime.
We know that when Khashoggi visited the consulate to take care of some paperwork, he was instructed to return on a set day the following week. 

We know that the Saudi government then sent two planeloads of 15 officials, including close aides to Mohammed, to Istanbul. 

One was a forensic expert who came equipped with a bone saw.
We know that when Khashoggi entered the consulate, this hit squad instructed the consul to leave his office. 

He left and has not been publicly heard from since.
We know, thanks to Turkish eavesdropping, that Khashoggi was then gruesomely murdered. 

We know that when Turkey tried to investigate the crime, Saudi Arabia barred police from the consulate until it had a chance to hose it down and scour it of any possible evidence.
Now Saudi Arabia says it will put some officials on trial for the murder. 

It will not say who, but it is clear that henchmen, not ringleaders, are at risk. 

If executions occur, they will be more likely used to eradicate witnesses than deliver justice.
For all this knowledge, the consequences so far have been modest. 

Trump, in defiance of U.S. law, refuses to report to Congress on the administration’s conclusions regarding Mohammed’s culpability. 

Congress so far has taken no action to insist that Trump follow the law — or that Mohammed be punished for this crime. 

The U.N. secretary general has been similarly inert.
Still, it would not be right to say that the regime is paying no price in the West. 

Mohammed bin Salman, who toured triumphantly through U.S. business and academic capitals not long before the murder, knows he would not be welcome now. 

Think tanks, universities, even businesses to varying degrees understand that public association with the regime is no longer a smart marketing strategy. 

Congress has expressed misgivings about the Saudis’ brutal war in Yemen and their nuclear ambitions, and it may yet have something to say about the Khashoggi murder. 

The U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions is investigating.
So the crown prince turned east. 

He understood that human rights violators always find absolution in Beijing. 

And he must have understood that if he, as guardian of Islam’s two holiest sites, absolved China of its anti-Muslim depradations, he would be especially welcome.
After all, it was only a fortnight ago that the Turkish government, which is competing with Saudi Arabia for leadership of the Muslim world, broke its long silence to criticize the repression of Muslim Uighurs in western China. 

“It is no longer a secret that more than 1 million Uighur Turks incurring arbitrary arrests are subjected to torture and political brainwashing,” a Turkish spokesman said.
There was no such rudeness from the crown prince on Friday. 

You can have your concentration camps. I can have my murder.

Rogue Nation

2019 Is a Sensitive Year for China. Xi Is Nervous.
By Chris Buckley

Pictures of Xi Jinping at an exhibition for the 40th anniversary of China’s reform and opening up, at the National Museum of China in Beijing last year.

BEIJING — Chinese dictator Xi Jinping abruptly summoned hundreds of officials to Beijing recently, forcing some to reschedule long-planned local assemblies.

The meeting seemed orchestrated to convey anxious urgency. 

The Communist Party, Xi told the officials, faces major risks on all fronts and must batten down the hatches.
Whether dealing with foreign policy, trade, unemployment, or property prices, he declared, officials would be held responsible if they slipped up and let dangers spiral into real threats.
“Globally, sources of turmoil and points of risk are multiplying,” he told the gathering in January at the Central Party School. 

At home, he added, “the party is at risk from indolence, incompetence and of becoming divorced from the public.”
The speech was one of Xi’s starkest warnings since he came to power in 2012, and has been echoed at hundreds of local party meetings nationwide.
It underscores how slowing growth and China’s grinding trade fight with the United States have magnified the party leadership’s chronic fears of social unrest. 

Trade talks in Washington between American and Chinese officials ended last week without an official agreement, although President Trump delayed a deadline to increase tariffs on Chinese goods, saying that negotiators were making progress.
“Beijing is confronting significant pressure from the international community over its political and business practices that only adds to its difficulties in dealing with its domestic issues,” said Elizabeth C. Economy, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York who wrote “The Third Revolution,” a study of Xi.
There are no political challengers on the horizon who could pose an immediate threat to the Communist Party or Xi. 

But his remarks made clear that especially in 2019 — a year of politically sensitive anniversaries — the party would aggressively extinguish sparks that could ignite protests and turbulence.

An assembly line in Zhejiang Province. The economy is a major concern for China’s leadership.

A year ago, Xi triumphed at China’s national legislature, abolishing a term limit on his presidency, opening the way for another decade or longer as both president and party leader, and shaking up the government to become a more compliant tool of party power.
A year on, though, Xi’s speech and other official warnings show that triumphalism has receded. 

Xi also appeared keen to signal that if anything goes wrong, other officials will also shoulder responsibility, said several experts.
“It was about showing that the risks aren’t borne by just Xi Jinping, but go down to other members of the Politburo Standing Committee and down again from there,” said Wu Qiang, a political analyst in Beijing.
Xi’s warnings were more wide-ranging than his previous repeated calls about risk, experts said, and his defensiveness is likely to constrain policy changes this year. 

Even though President Trump’s negotiators want China to take big steps in reducing state controls on the economy, Xi appears to be in no mood for gambles, Wu said.
“The central leadership’s assessment of risks to China has officially expanded from the economy to every sphere,” Mr. Wu said. 

“This year will put policing and security to the forefront.”
The timing of the meeting was designed to reinforce Xi’s message, according to an online article from People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official news outlet, noting that local legislatures’ scheduled meetings were forced to make way for it.
Xi made clear that the economy was a major concern, telling officials to beware of “black swans” and “gray rhinos” — investor jargon for surprise economic shocks and financial risks hiding in plain sight.
The economic risks to China include rising local government debt, Mr. Trump’s trade tariffs and international pushback against China’s technological expansion, most recently against Huawei, the telecommunications equipment maker.

Officers patrolling in 2017 near the Great Hall of the People. This year, said one analyst, “will put policing and security to the forefront.”

But Xi identified dangers that extended far beyond the economy, especially political risks like the party’s ability to keep young Chinese from slipping from its ideological orbit.
He demanded stricter controls on the Chinese internet — which is already thoroughly censored — and more indoctrination to “ensure that the youth generation become builders and inheritors of socialism.”
“Younger officials must go in guns blazing to take on these major struggles,” Xi told the officials, seated in rows like students taking notes.
Yet Xi’s demands for unyielding stability could backfire, experts say, as warnings of danger around every turn could smother the initiative and flexibility that Chinese officials need to defuse long-term economic and social dangers.
The demands for rigid order on so many fronts put local cadres in near impossible binds, they said: trying to prevent job losses while cutting debt and shutting inefficient “zombie” businesses; trying to buoy private investment while cracking down on pollution and bank credit; and proclaiming public confidence in the government while stifling complaints from the public.
“If everything is a risk, you can end up mitigating nothing,” said Jude Blanchette, an expert on Chinese policymaking at Crumpton Group in Virginia, which advises companies on investments.
China’s jumpiness can seem far-fetched, given the Communist Party’s daunting reach, the underlying strength of the economy and the extensive powers of the domestic security services.
But anxiety seems to run deep in Xi’s veins.
He is the son of a Communist revolutionary, and since coming to power he has hinted at worry that party power could easily slip away. 

Soon after taking office, he said that the Soviet Union had fallen apart because Mikhail S. Gorbachev failed to lead like a “real man.”

A ceremony at Tiananmen Square in September. It is 30 years since student protests ended in a bloody crackdown around the square.

Since Xi, 65, abolished the term limit on his presidency last year, murmurs of discontent have risen among academics, businesspeople and former officials, despite censorship and the security police.
Chinese leaders’ worries have been magnified by what party journals warn is an increasingly hostile bloc of Western governments, led by the United States, that have pushed back against Chinese high-tech acquisitions, propaganda influence and the mass detentions in East Turkestan.
This year especially, Chinese officials worry that sensitive anniversaries could act as kindling, according to directives issued by local governments. 

It is 30 years since student protests for democratic change filled Beijing and other Chinese cities, ending in a bloody armed crackdown around Tiananmen Square that began late on June 3, 1989.
It is also 100 years since the watershed “May 4” patriotic student protests of 1919, 60 years since a failed uprising against Chinese rule in Tibet and 10 years since ethnic riots killed hundreds in East Turkestan, the western region where hundreds of thousands of Uighur Muslims have been detained in indoctrination camps.
The government is also preparing grand celebrations in October to commemorate 70 years since Mao founded the People’s Republic of China.
Since the January meeting, provinces, cities and towns have rolled out or freshened up plans to monitor and contain dangers. 

Officials from Hunan Province, for example, vowed to beat back debt owed by state-linked companies. 

Liu Jiayi, the party chief of Shandong Province in the east, also called for dealing with discontented former soldiers demanding better welfare.
Local governments have warned the police to redouble their vigilance against protests ahead of the “sensitive anniversary dates.” 

Small protests by Marxist students supporting striking workers in 2018 already resulted in detentions and warnings on university campuses in Beijing.
“Prevent social and economic risks evolving into political risks,” Chen Yixin, the secretary-general of the party’s law and order committee, said late last month. 

With the internet, he said, “a small incident can form into a vortex of public opinion.”

Han peril: China’s island chain plans

Beijing’s not just keen to annex the South China Sea and Taiwan — it has its eyes set on whole other island chains to dominate the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
By Jamie Seidel

Beijing wants to be an international super power.

To achieve this, it needs to carve out a vast swath of economic and military influence. 

And it has a plan.
A recent US Defense Intelligence Agency analysis of China’s growing strength and expanding international ambitions judged Xi Jinping wants to project power far beyond its shores.
The China Military Power report delves into deep detail about what is known about Beijings capabilities and intentions.
“China is rapidly building a robust lethal force with capabilities spanning the ground, air, maritime, space and information domains designed to table to impose its will in the regional and beyond,” A DIA spokesperson told media at its launch.
Beijing is seeking to ‘unchain’ itself from what it sees as the shackles of Western cultural, military and economic dominance.
To do this, it has its eyes set on a series of five ‘island chains’ over which it seeks to exert its national interests.
Any one of them could be the spark of an international crisis.
And the talk has been getting tough.

The US Naval Base at Guam’s Apra Harbor.

RESTRAINING CHAINS
Beijing’s ‘Belt and Road initiative’ is an expansive project to connect China’s expansive economy with the rest of Europe and Asia.
But there are ‘choke-points’.
On land, the narrow mountain passes of China’s East Turkestan colony (where the suppressed ethnic Muslim Uighurs reside), along with Pakistan and Afghanistan, funnel road and rail traffic with the Middle East.
At sea, Singapore and the slender Malacca Straits is an unavoidable bottleneck in the flow of shipping between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean.
And then there is the small island democracy of Taiwan, the last outpost of pre-Communist China, acting as what Beijing believes as a link in a chain holding it back from the broader Pacific.

It already dominates what has been defined as the “First Island Chain”: the waters of the East and South China Seas following a rough ‘nine-dash line’ from Japan in the north, past Taiwan and the Philippines down to Singapore and Malaysia.
It’s achieved this through a rapid build-up of its navy and long-range strike aircraft, along with the internationally condemned construction of artificial island fortresses on remote reefs also claimed by neighbouring countries.
Now this victory of might over right has been achieved, analysts believe Beijing is setting out on its next objective: dominating the “Second Island Chain”.
Meanwhile, it’s begun defining the next boundaries of its desired influence … a ‘Third Island Chain’ (encompassing Alaska, Hawaii and New Zealand), a ‘Fourth Island Chain’ (Linking Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldive Islands and the US/UK military facility at Diego Garcia in the midst of the Indian Ocean), and, finally, the ‘Fifth Chain’ extending from Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, past Madagascar to South Africa.

US strategic bombers on the island of Diego Garcia, in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

DANGEROUS IDEAS
Every island chain represents a sphere of influence over the nations they encompass.
Every island chain has at least one major US military base.
Every island chain is a potential flashpoint for international tensions.
All affect Australia: they fall to the north, east and west of the remote island nation.
But the nations most fearful of a dramatic shift in regional power dynamics from Washington to Beijing are Singapore and Japan.
Both could rapidly find themselves encompassed by seas dominated by China’s navy and skies by its air force.
Australia and New Zealand would soon follow.
But it’s the remote islands that are most at risk of conflict.
The United States has long since built up a strategy of using island bases to project power over a region.
Warships and combat aircraft can be based there.
But, most importantly, they can be used as launch pads for strong ground-based forces (such as troops and tanks).
Beijing has followed this line of thinking.
Its artificial island fortresses in the South China Sea are bristling with missiles, guns and military radars.
Their airfields and ports are military-grade.
They have strong garrisons.
All that is missing — for the time being — are permanently stationed combat aircraft and warships.
And it’s keenly aware of the strategic geographic importance of the Pacific island chains.
Which is why there’s a diplomatic land-grab underway.
Australia and the US have moved to head-off Beijing’s interest in Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, making a last-minute deal to reactivate the old World War II naval facility there as a forward operating base.
A recent change in government in Micronesia upset Beijing’s ambitions there, and resulted in what is in effect an economic embargo — the suspension of government-sanctioned holiday tours there.
It’s a similar story in the Indian Ocean, with a democratic change of government stifling Beijing’s growing economic dominance over the Maldive Islands.
Such ‘push-back’ has led some international affairs analysts, including in China, to suggest Xi Jinping has ‘overextended’ himself.
He’s moved too hard, too early — and is meeting an unexpected backlash over his plans to make China great again.
The question is: how will he react?

HMAS Choules pictured at the Manus Island Lombrum Naval Base, Paupa New Guinea. The US and Australia are planning a joint military facility there to stave-off Beijing’s interest. 

THE NEXT CRISIS
China’s own 2015 Military White Paper outlines a mission statement: “It is a Chinese Dream to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. The Chinese Dream is to make the country strong …”
It’s already been enacting this mission through the building of extensive artificial island fortresses in the South China Sea, as well as establishing its first foreign military places at locations including Djibouti and Pakistan.
But military analysts are worried this expansion is set to accelerate.
With the European Union hobbled and distracted by a shambolic ‘Brexit’ divorce with the United Kingdom, and President Donald Trump’s insular ‘Make America Great Again’ perspective, Beijing has sensed an opportunity.
This has Australian, Singaporean and Japanese strategic think-tanks worried: can we rely on our treaties and relationships with the US, UK and Europe in the face of growing Chinese ambition?
Or will they retreat from their old island chains of influence?
The next real test will be the ‘Second Island Chain’.
This is defined as a wavy line starting in the middle of Japan, weaving through the scattered islands of Micronesia (including the major US military base of Guam) and down to the Indonesia’s Western New Guinea
Its growing naval and missile strength appears designed to project power at this scale.
Aircraft carriers can provide protection and strike power for naval formations.
Swarms of long-range guided missiles can force back larger US carrier battle groups.
Beijing’s already working to extend its diplomatic influence into the region.
As its hydrographic survey ships plough the waters to the north of Papua New Guinea and through Micronesia, it’s also pushing hard to establish a strong economic and diplomatic foothold in these Pacific states as well as the Philippines.
The major US defence facility on the Japanese island of Okinawa is grappling with deep unpopularity among the island’s residents.
Ties with Thailand are being cultivated, with talk of a possible canal to bypass Singapore.
And Xi is becoming increasingly vocal over ‘reunification’ with Taiwan — whether it wants it or not.

China's Final Solution

China Spiriting Uyghur Detainees Away From East Turkestan to Prisons in Inner Mongolia, Sichuan
By Shohret Hoshur

Police patrol the area outside Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar, in China's East Turkestan colony, June 26, 2017.

Ethnic Uyghurs held in political “re-education camps” in northwest China’s East Turkestan colony are being sent to prisons in Inner Mongolia and Sichuan province, officials have confirmed, adding to the growing list of locations detainees are being secretly transferred to.
In October last year, RFA’s Uyghur Service reported that authorities in the East Turkestan had begun covertly sending detainees to prisons in Heilongjiang province and other parts of China to address an “overflow” in overcrowded camps, where up to 1.1 million Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities accused of harboring “strong religious views” and “politically incorrect” ideas have been held since April 2017.
And earlier this month, RFA spoke to officials in both Shaanxi province and neighboring Gansu province, who confirmed that Uyghur and other Muslim detainees from East Turkestan had been sent to prisons there, although they were unable to provide specific numbers or dates for when they had been transferred.
The first report, which was based on statements by officials in both East Turkestan and Heilongjiang, came in the same month that East Turkestan chairman Shohrat Zakir confirmed to China’s official Xinhua news agency the existence of the camps, calling them an effective tool to protect the country from "terrorism" and provide vocational training for Uyghurs.
As global condemnation over the camp network has grown, including calls for international observers to be allowed into East Turkestan to investigate the situation there, reports suggest that authorities are transferring detainees to other parts of China as part of a bid to obfuscate the scale of detentions of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the region.
RFA recently spoke to an official at the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Women’s Prison who said that detainees from East Turkestan had been transferred to detention facilities in the region, but was unable to provide details without obtaining authorization from higher-level officials.
“There are two prisons that hold prisoners from East Turkestan—they are Wutaqi [in Hinggan (in Chinese, Xing'an) League’s Jalaid Banner] Prison and Salaqi [in Bogot (Baotou) city’s Tumd Right Banner] Prison,” she said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
When asked how many Uyghur detainees are held in the prisons, the official said she could not disclose the number “because it is strictly confidential.”
The official said she had attended a meeting on transfers of detainees from East Turkestan and that prior to the meeting attendees had received notices informing them that “we are not allowed to disclose any information regarding the transportation program.”
“Regardless of who is making inquiries, we cannot disclose any information unless we first obtain permission from our superiors,” she said.
An official at the Wutaqi Prison Command Center also told RFA that detainees from East Turkestan are being held at Wutaqi, as well as a second one in Inner Mongolia, without specifying which one.
The official, who also declined to provide his name, said the detainees had been transferred to the two prisons as early as August last year, but was unsure whether they were being permanently relocated to the two prisons or being held there temporarily before they are transferred elsewhere.
“The prisoners are placed in two prisons, but [the officials at the facilities] don’t report to us about what is happening inside,” he said, before referring further inquiries to his supervisor.
“Regarding the number and the exact location of where they are held [in the prisons], I am unable to say,” he said.
The official said he was unsure of whether any detainees from East Turkestan had been sent to Inner Mongolia recently, as information about the transfers is closely guarded.
“It is impossible for me to tell you how many prisoners have been transferred here this month or last month,” he said.
“The authorities are keeping all the information very secret—even we don’t know the details.”

Sichuan transfers
Reports of detainee transfers from East Turkestan to Inner Mongolia followed indications from officials in Sichuan province that prisons there are also accepting those held in East Turkestan "re-education" camps.
When asked which prisons East Turkestan detainees are being sent to in Sichuan, an official who answered the phone at the Sichuan Provincial Prison Administration told an RFA reporter that if he was calling to “visit them,” he would first have to make an official request.
One official at a prison believed to hold detainees from East Turkestan in Yibin, a prefectural-level city in southeast Sichuan, told RFA that he “can’t discuss this issue over the phone” and suggested that the reporter file an official request for information.
But when asked about whether there had been any “ideological changes” to procedures at the facility, a fellow official who answered the phone said “these detentions are connected to "terrorism", so I can’t answer such questions.”
“The transfer of East Turkestan detainees is a secretive part of our work at the prison, so I can’t tell you anything about it,” she added.
The statements from officials in Inner Mongolia and Sichuan province followed recent reports by Bitter Winter, a website launched by the Italian research center CESNUR that focuses on religious in China, which cited “informed sources” as confirming that detainees from East Turkestan are being sent to prison facilities in other parts of the country.
The website, which routinely publishes photos and video documenting human rights violations submitted by citizen journalists from inside China, cited “CCP (Chinese Communist Party) insiders” as saying that more than 200 elderly Uyghurs in their sixties and seventies have been transferred to Ordos Prison in Inner Mongolia.
Bitter Winter also cited another source in Inner Mongolia who said one detainee was “beaten to death by the police” during his transfer, and expressed concern that the victim’s body “might already have been cremated.”
The website has previously said that the Chinese plan to disperse and detain “an estimated 500,000 Uyghur Muslims” throughout China.

Call to action
Dolkun Isa, president of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress exile group, told RFA he was “deeply troubled” by the reports of secret transfers of detainees from East Turkestan to prisons in other parts of China, saying the move signalled a “very dark intent” by authorities.
“We simply cannot imagine what kind of treatment they are enduring at the hands of Chinese guards in these prisons, as this is shrouded in complete secrecy,” he said, adding that he was concerned for the well-being of the detainees.
Isa called on the international community to turn its attention to the transfers and demanded that the Chinese government disclose the total number of detainees who had been moved, as well as the location of the prisons they had been sent to.
“If the United Nations, U.S., EU, Turkey and other Muslims nations do not voice their concerns over this troubling development in a timely manner, I fear these innocent Uyghurs will perish in Chinese prisons without a trace,” he said.
China recently organized two visits to monitor re-education camps in East Turkestan—one for a small group of foreign journalists, and another for diplomats from non-Western countries, including Russia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan and Thailand—during which officials dismissed claims about mistreatment and poor conditions in the facilities as “slanderous lies.”
Reporting by RFA’s Uyghur Service and other media organizations, however, has shown that those in the camps are detained against their will and subjected to political indoctrination, routinely face rough treatment at the hands of their overseers, and endure poor diets and unhygienic conditions in the often overcrowded facilities.
Adrian Zenz, a lecturer in social research methods at the Germany-based European School of Culture and Theology, has said that some 1.1 million people are or have been detained in the camps—equating to 10 to 11 percent of the adult Muslim population of East Turkestan.
In November 2018, Scott Busby, the deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the U.S. Department of State, said there are "at least 800,000 and possibly up to a couple of million" Uyghurs and others detained at "re-education" camps in East Turkestan without charges, citing U.S. intelligence assessments.
Citing credible reports, U.S. lawmakers Marco Rubio and Chris Smith, who head the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China, recently called the situation in East Turkestan "the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today."

China Uses DNA to Track Its People, With the Help of American Quislings

The Chinese turned to a Massachusetts company and a prominent Yale researcher as they built an enormous system of surveillance and control.
By Sui-Lee Wee

Tahir Imin, a 38-year-old Uighur, had his blood drawn, his face scanned and his voice recorded by the authorities in China’s East Turkestan colony.

BEIJING — The authorities called it a free health check. Tahir Imin had his doubts.
They drew blood from the 38-year-old Muslim, scanned his face, recorded his voice and took his fingerprints. 

They didn’t bother to check his heart or kidneys, and they rebuffed his request to see the results.
“They said, ‘You don’t have the right to ask about this,’” Mr. Imin said. 

“‘If you want to ask more,’ they said, ‘you can go to the police.’”
Mr. Imin was one of millions of people caught up in a vast Chinese campaign of surveillance and oppression. 

To give it teeth, the Chinese authorities are collecting DNA — and they got unlikely corporate and academic help from the United States to do it.
China wants to make the country’s Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, more subservient to the Communist Party. 

It has detained up to a million people in concentration camps, drawing condemnation and threat of sanctions from the Trump administration.
Collecting genetic material is a key part of China’s campaign.

A comprehensive DNA database could be used to chase down any Uighurs who resist conforming to the campaign.
Police forces in the United States and elsewhere use genetic material from family members to find suspects and solve crimes. 

Chinese officials, who are building a broad nationwide database of DNA samples, have cited the crime-fighting benefits of China’s own genetic studies.
To bolster their DNA capabilities, scientists affiliated with China’s police used equipment made by Thermo Fisher, a Massachusetts company. 

For comparison with Uighur DNA, they also relied on genetic material from people around the world that was provided by Kenneth Kidd, a Yale University geneticist.

Kenneth Kidd is helping China's Final Solution

On Wednesday, Thermo Fisher said it would no longer sell its equipment in East Turkestan, the colony of China where the campaign to track Uighurs is mostly taking place. 

The company said separately in an earlier statement to The New York Times that it was working with American officials to figure out how its technology was being used.
Kidd said he had been unaware of how his material and know-how were being used. 

He naively "believed" Chinese scientists were acting within scientific norms that require informed consent by DNA donors.
China’s campaign poses a direct challenge to the scientific community and the way it makes cutting-edge knowledge publicly available. 

The Chinese campaign relies on public DNA databases and commercial technology, much of it made or managed in the United States. 

In turn, Chinese scientists have contributed Uighur DNA samples to a global database, violating scientific norms of consent.
Cooperation from the global scientific community “legitimizes this type of Orwellian genetic surveillance,” said Mark Munsterhjelm, an assistant professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario who has closely tracked the use of American technology in East Turkestan.

China has maintained an iron grip in East Turkestan, where it is trying to make Uighur Muslims more subservient to the Communist Party.

Swabbing Millions
In East Turkestan, in northwestern China, the program was known as “Physicals for All.”
From 2016 to 2017, nearly 36 million people took part in it, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency. 

The Chinese collected DNA samples, images of irises and other personal data.

It is unclear whether some residents participated more than once — East Turkestan has a population of about 24.5 million.
In a statement, the East Turkestan government denied that it collects DNA samples as part of the free medical checkups. 

It said the DNA machines that were bought by the East Turkestan authorities were for “internal use.”
China has for decades maintained an iron grip in East Turkestan. 

In recent years, it has blamed Uighurs for a series of "terrorist" attacks in East Turkestan and elsewhere in China, including a 2013 incident in which a driver struck two people in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
In late 2016, the Communist Party embarked on a campaign to turn the Uighurs and other largely Muslim minority groups into loyal supporters. 

The government locked up hundreds of thousands of them in what it called "job training" camps, touted as a way to escape poverty, backwardness and radical Islam. 

It also began to take DNA samples.
In at least some of the cases, people didn’t give up their genetic material voluntarily. 

To mobilize Uighurs for the free medical checkups, police and local cadres called or sent them text messages, telling them the checkups were required, according to Uighurs interviewed by The Times.
“There was a pretty strong coercive element to it,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Washington who studies the plight of the Uighurs. 

“They had no choice.”

A market in Kashgar, a city in East Turkestan. China has detained up to a million people in camps in the western region.

Calling Kidd
Kenneth Kidd first visited China in 1981 and remained curious about the country. 

So when he received an invitation in 2010 for an expenses-paid trip to visit Beijing, he said yes.
Kidd is a major figure in the genetics field. 

The 77-year-old Yale professor has helped to make DNA evidence more acceptable in American courts.
His Chinese hosts had their own background in law enforcement. 

They were scientists from the Ministry of Public Security — essentially, China’s police.
During that trip, Kidd met Li Caixia, the chief forensic physician of the ministry’s Institute of Forensic Science. 

The relationship deepened. 

In December 2014, Li arrived at Kidd’s lab for an 11-month stint. 

She took some DNA samples back to China.
“I had thought we were sharing samples for collaborative research,” said Kidd.
Kidd is not the only foreign geneticist to have worked with the Chinese authorities. 

Bruce Budowle, a professor at the University of North Texas, says in his online biography that he “has served or is serving” as a member of an academic committee at the ministry’s Institute of Forensic Science.
Jeff Carlton, a university spokesman, said in a statement that Budowle’s role with the ministry was “only symbolic in nature” and that he had “done no work on its behalf.”
“Budowle and his team abhor the use of DNA technology to persecute ethnic or religious groups,” Mr. Carlton said in the statement. 

“Their work focuses on criminal investigations and combating human trafficking to serve humanity.”
Kidd’s data became part of China’s DNA drive.
In 2014, Chinese ministry researchers published a paper describing a way for scientists to tell one ethnic group from another. 

It cited, as an example, the ability to distinguish Uighurs from Indians. 

The authors said they used 40 DNA samples taken from Uighurs in China and samples from other ethnic groups from Kidd’s Yale lab.
In patent applications filed in China in 2013 and 2017, ministry researchers described ways to sort people by ethnicity by screening their genetic makeup. 

They took genetic material from Uighurs and compared it with DNA from other ethnic groups. 

In the 2017 filing, researchers explained that their system would help in “inferring the geographical origin from the DNA of suspects at crime scenes.”
For outside comparisons, they used DNA samples provided by Kidd’s lab, the 2017 filing said. 

They also used samples from the 1000 Genomes Project, a public catalog of genes from around the world.
Paul Flicek, member of the steering committee of the 1000 Genomes Project, said that its data was unrestricted and that “there is no obvious problem” if it was being used as a way to determine where a DNA sample came from.
The data flow also went the other way.
Chinese government researchers contributed the data of 2,143 Uighurs to the Allele Frequency Database, an online search platform run by Kidd that was partly funded by the United States Department of Justice until last year. 

The database, known as Alfred, contains DNA data from more than 700 populations around the world.
This sharing of data could violate scientific norms of informed consent because it is not clear whether the Uighurs volunteered their DNA samples to the Chinese authorities, said Arthur Caplan, the founding head of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s School of Medicine. 

He said that “no one should be in a database without express consent.”
“Honestly, there’s been a kind of naïveté on the part of American scientists presuming that other people will follow the same rules and standards wherever they come from,” Dr. Caplan said.
Kidd said he was “not particularly happy” that the Chinese ministry had cited him in its patents, saying his data shouldn’t be used in ways that could allow people or institutions to potentially profit from it. 

If the Chinese authorities used data they got from their earlier collaborations with him, he added, there is little he can do to stop them.
He said he was unaware of the filings until he was contacted by The Times.
Kidd also said he considered his collaboration with the ministry to be no different from his work with police and forensics labs elsewhere. 

He said governments should have access to data about minorities, not just the dominant ethnic group, in order to have an accurate picture of the whole population.
As for the consent issue, he said the burden of meeting that standard lay with the Chinese researchers, though he said reports about what Uighurs are subjected to in China raised some difficult questions.
“I would assume they had appropriate informed consent on the samples,” he said, “though I must say what I’ve been hearing in the news recently about the treatment of the Uighurs raises concerns.”

Machine Learning
In 2015, Kidd and Budowle spoke at a genomics conference in the Chinese city of Xi’an. 

It was underwritten in part by Thermo Fisher, a company that has come under intense criticism for its equipment sales in China, and Illumina, a San Diego company that makes gene sequencing instruments. 

Illumina did not respond to requests for comment.
China is ramping up spending on health care and research. 

The Chinese market for gene-sequencing equipment and other technologies was worth $1 billion in 2017 and could more than double in five years, according to CCID Consulting, a research firm. 

But the Chinese market is loosely regulated, and it isn’t always clear where the equipment goes or to what uses it is put.
Thermo Fisher sells everything from lab instruments to forensic DNA testing kits to DNA mapping machines, which help scientists decipher a person’s ethnicity and identify diseases to which he or she is particularly vulnerable. 

China accounted for 10 percent of Thermo Fisher’s $20.9 billion in revenue, according to the company’s 2017 annual report, and it employs nearly 5,000 people there.
“Our greatest success story in emerging markets continues to be China,” it said in the report.
China used Thermo Fisher’s equipment to map the genes of its people, according to five Ministry of Public Security patent filings.
The company has also sold equipment directly to the authorities in East Turkestan, where the campaign to control the Uighurs has been most intense. 

At least some of the equipment was intended for use by the police, according to procurement documents. 

The authorities there said in the documents that the machines were important for DNA inspections in criminal cases and had “no substitutes in China.”
In February 2013, six ministry researchers credited Thermo Fisher’s Applied Biosystems brand, as well as other companies, with helping to analyze the DNA samples of Han, Uighur and Tibetan people in China, according to a patent filing. 

The researchers said understanding how to differentiate between such DNA samples was necessary for fighting "terrorism" “because these cases were becoming more difficult to crack.”
The researchers said they had obtained 95 Uighur DNA samples, some of which were given to them by the police. 

Other samples were provided by Uighurs voluntarily, they said.
Thermo Fisher was criticized by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, and others who asked the Commerce Department to prohibit American companies from selling technology to China that could be used for purposes of surveillance and tracking.


Marco Rubio
✔@marcorubio
Grotesque to read @thermofisher fawning over #XiJinping in #China’s state media.
A reminder #ThermoFisher is making lots of $ helping #Xinjiang authorities conduct mass detention & brutal suppression of #Uyghur Muslims by selling them DNA sequencers.http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201811/05/WS5bdfe891a310eff3032869d9_12.html …
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On Wednesday, Thermo Fisher said it would stop selling its equipment in East Turkestan, a decision it said was “consistent with Thermo Fisher’s values, ethics code and policies.”
“As the world leader in serving science, we recognize the importance of considering how our products and services are used — or may be used — by our customers,” it said.

Tahir Hamut, a Uighur now living in Virginia whose blood was taken by the police in East Turkestan, said it was “inconceivable” that Uighurs there would have consented to give DNA samples.

Human rights groups praised Thermo Fisher’s move. 

Still, they said, equipment and information flows into China should be better monitored, to make sure the authorities elsewhere don’t send them to East Turkestan.
“It’s an important step, and one hopes that they apply the language in their own statement to commercial activity across China, and that other companies are assessing their sales and operations, especially in East Turkestan,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch.
American lawmakers and officials are taking a hard look at the situation in East Turkestan. 

The Trump administration is considering sanctions against Chinese officials and companies over China’s treatment of the Uighurs.
China’s tracking campaign unnerved people like Tahir Hamut. 

In May 2017, the police in the city of Urumqi in East Turkestan drew the 49-year-old Uighur’s blood, took his fingerprints, recorded his voice and took a scan of his face. 

He was called back a month later for what he was told was a free health check at a local clinic.
Mr. Hamut, a filmmaker who is now living in Virginia, said he saw between 20 to 40 Uighurs in line. He said it was absurd to think that such frightened people had consented to submit their DNA.
“No one in this situation, not under this much pressure and facing such personal danger, would agree to give their blood samples for research,” Mr. Hamut said. 

“It’s just inconceivable.”