Chinese Peril

Grindr Is Owned by a Chinese Firm, and the U.S. Is Trying to Force It to Sell

By David E. Sanger

Grindr, the gay dating app, is owned by a Chinese company.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is expanding its efforts to block Chinese acquisitions in the United States, moving to force a Chinese firm that owns Grindr, the gay dating app, to relinquish control over concerns that Beijing could use personal information to blackmail or influence American officials.
The action, which is being driven by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, is unusual given that the panel typically investigates mergers that could result in control of an American business by a foreign individual or company, judging whether deals could threaten national security. This appears to be the first case in which the United States has asserted that foreign control of a social media app could have national security implications.
The administration has not announced the move, which will require that Grindr be sold, or explained it.

But officials familiar with the case, which was first reported by Reuters, say the concern focused on the potential for the blackmail of American officials or contractors, if China threatened to disclose their sexual orientation, or track their movements or dating habits.
Three years ago, a Chinese firm that owns both gaming and credit services businesses, Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. Ltd., a public company listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange, bought a 60 percent stake in Grindr, which is based in West Hollywood, Calif., for $93 million. 

Early last year, it bought the remaining shares for a little over $150 million.
While there were news reports about both transactions, the United States did not take action to block the acquisitions. 

Since then, the United States’ definition of national security threats has expanded, in part over concerns by the Trump administration and lawmakers about China’s ability to gain access to critical American technology.
It is unclear why the panel, known as Cfius, acted now, more than three years after control of the company switched to Chinese hands. 

Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said he, along with several other senators, asked Cfius to conduct a review.
“Last year, my office met with a top official from the Treasury Department to express my serious concerns about the national security risks associated with a Chinese company buying Grindr,” he said in a statement. 

While he said he could not “confirm specific actions by Cfius,” a highly secretive panel, “it is high time for the administration and Cfius to consider the national security impact of foreign companies acquiring large, sensitive troves of Americans’ private data.”
Congress handed more power to the panel last year, allowing it to examine transactions that fell short of majority control of a company and involved just minority stakes. 

The expansion was an effort to counter Chinese minority investments in Silicon Valley companies that gave investors an early look at emerging technologies.
The Kunlun purchases had never been submitted to Cfius, giving the government the leverage to go back in after the sale to try to force a divestment. 

Calls to Kunlun’s office number were not answered, and emails seeking comment were not returned.
Grindr has already faced questions about its control and use of personal data. 

The company faced a huge backlash for sharing users’ H.I.V. status, sexual tastes and other intimate personal details with outside software vendors. 

After the data sharing was made public by European researchers in 2018, the company said it would stop sharing H.I.V. data with outside companies.
Last year was the first time Cfius appeared to be concerned about the purchase of companies that contained sensitive data. 

The government killed a proposed merger last year between MoneyGram, the money transfer firm, and Ant Financial, a payments company related to the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.
The United States has also embarked on a global campaign to block a big Chinese telecom equipment giant, Huawei, from building the next generation of wireless networks, known as 5G, over concerns that it could divert critical data through China, or turn over data running through its networks to Beijing. 

The White House has essentially accused Huawei of being an arm of the Chinese government that can be used for spying or to sabotage communications networks.
But the administration’s efforts to control what kind of personal data is available to China’s intelligence services may have come too late. 

China’s ministry of state security and other Chinese groups have already been accused of successfully stealing personal data from American databases.
The theft of 22 million security clearance files from the Office of Personnel Management in 2014, along with similar theft of data from the Anthem insurance networks and Marriott hotels, have all been attributed to Chinese actors operating on behalf of the Chinese government.
The files stolen in the 2014 government breach contain far more personal data than the Chinese could probably find on any individual social media site: They include work history on sensitive United States projects, information about bankruptcies, medical conditions, relationship histories, and any contacts with foreigners. 

The loss of the information forced the C.I.A. to reassign personnel headed to China, and was considered among the largest losses of sensitive security information in decades. 

The Obama administration declined to publicly concede that the breach was committed by Chinese intelligence services.
China has taken steps of its own to limit foreign companies’ access to its citizens’ personal information. 

A recently enacted cybersecurity law mandates that user data be stored in the country, where it can be kept under the government’s control. 

Apple said it would open its first data center in China, and formed a partnership with a Chinese company to run the center and handle data requests from the government.
Before the law even came into effect, the Chinese government had pressured foreign technology companies to operate servers only within its borders — meaning the data is available to Chinese authorities. 

Amazon and Microsoft have partnered with Chinese firms to offer cloud computing services to Chinese customers.
The United States has also pressed China to allow insurance companies and other American firms that control personal data to enter the Chinese market, a demand that goes back nearly two decades. China has agreed to do so, and that agreement is expected to be part of the larger trade deal being negotiated between American and Chinese negotiators.
But the Grindr case could give the Chinese government an excuse to make its own national security claims if American firms sought to purchase a Chinese insurance company, or any of its social media firms.

Meng Hongwei's Arrest in China was Politically Motivated

Reuters

The wife of Meng Hongwei, the missing Chinese former head of Interpol, dismissed allegations by authorities in China accusing her husband of graft.

The wife of the missing Chinese former head of Interpol on Thursday dismissed allegations by authorities in China accusing her husband of graft and said his arrest was politically motivated.
China will prosecute former Interpol chief, Meng Hongwei, for graft after an investigation found he spent “lavish” amounts of state funds, abused his power and refused to follow Communist Party decisions, Beijing’s anti-corruption watchdog said in a statement on Wednesday.
Mr. Meng’s wife, Grace Meng, said in a statement sent to Reuters on Thursday by her lawyers, “The press release openly reveals the political nature of Mr. Meng’s case, without addressing the issues concerning our family’s fundamental human rights.”
Interpol, the global police coordination agency based in France, said last October that Mr. Meng had resigned as its president, days after his wife reported him missing while he was on a trip to China.
The Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CDDI) said Mr. Meng was suspected of taking bribes and causing serious harm to the party’s image and state’s interests, adding that he should be dealt with severely.
Grace Meng, who has remained in Lyon, France, with the couple’s two children, said the CCDI has not provided any information about her husband’s whereabouts or well-being.
“Instead, the CCDI made vague, general, uncorroborated statements,” she said.
“Chinese authorities have not formulated actual charges or adduced the alleged supporting evidence.”

China Is Burning Books Again

Censors are on the lookout for political mistakes—even in print runs for foreigners.
BY AMY HAWKINS

Books about Chinese dictator Xi Jinping are displayed at the Beijing International Book Fair in Beijing on Aug. 23, 2018. 

The year is 1925, and Shanghai is in flux. 

Communists, Nationalists, and Triad gangsters are all fighting for control of this vice-laden city, and one “preeminent bon vivant,” Victor Sassoon, is fighting to keep evil at bay. 

Almost a century later, however, on China’s south coast, Sassoon is burnt to a crisp, a victim of the government’s ever-tightening restrictions on the imaginative world.
Victor Sassoon was a real person—but he’s also the hero of The Sassoon Files, a roleplaying game supplement (think Dungeons and Dragons) designed by Jesse Covner and Jason Sheets, two Americans living in Japan. 

Last week, via a recorded video message, Covner broke the news to their 511 followers—who had crowdfunded $24,183 to make the book a reality—that the entire print run of The Sassoon Files had been destroyed by the factory in Guangzhou contracted to fulfil the order. 

A government official had visited the manufacturer and ordered that all the books be destroyed within 24 hours, even though they were scheduled to be shipped directly overseas, with no plans for sale to the Chinese market. 

“I couldn’t believe what I heard,” lamented Covner. 

“I’d never heard of China’s government getting involved with printing issues for export to foreign markets.”
The Sassoon Files is the latest casualty of the Chinese government’s ever-increasing political paranoia and determination to control the global narrative. 

Whether it’s demanding that Cambridge University Press censor its offerings in China, grooming foreign journalists, or expanding its infiltration of Western newspapers with inconspicuous supplements from the state-run China Daily, Beijing’s propaganda drive has gone from the defensive to the offensive.
As the journalist Louisa Lim and researcher Julia Bergin have argued, the Chinese Communist Party has embarked on an “aggressive drive to redraw the global information order.” 

Part of this drive is controlling what can and can’t be produced in what used to be the world’s workhouse, regardless of who the intended audience is, or of the commercial consequences. 

The printing industry in China is worth about $93 billion—making up more than 10 percent of the worldwide total, and second only to the United States.
Jo Lusby, a former CEO of Penguin Random House North Asia who now runs her own publishing consultancy in Hong Kong, stresses that rules about what printers in China can print have always been in place, and those with a license to print foreign ISBNs know that they will face extra administrative hurdles and scrutiny. 

“It’s like trying to print a T-shirt that says ‘Free Tibet’ in China—that factory would get shut down,” she explained. 

Industry veterans have navigated these murky waters for a long time. 

What has changed, though, is the expanding list of topics deemed sensitive.
Earlier this year, this list was put in writing for the first time and circulated among publishers. 

Its scope is farcical: As well as widely known sensitive subjects such as Tibet, Taiwan, and the Tiananmen Square massacre, any mention of any political figures whatsoever is verboten. 

Lusby said that even the phrase “Deng Xiaoping-era policies,” a common proxy term for the reform and opening up of China that began in the 1980s, has been flagged before.
This rule is where The Sassoon Files faltered—one of the options in the game is to work as a secret agent for Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong’s second in command. 

“The cultural department examined the books and found some false reports about the men of Chinese history, so did not allow us to print [them] and ordered us to destroy the books,” a spokesperson for China Seven Color Group, the factory used by Covner and Sheets, told Foreign Policy. 

Covner and Sheets declined to comment, citing security concerns for their friends and colleagues in China.
It is not just newcomers who have had print runs scuppered by China’s censorship laws. 

Last year, the Australian publishing house Hardie Grant was forced to abandon two book projects after its Chinese suppliers refused to cooperate. 

Both issues were cartographical: In one book, the font used for Taiwan on a hand-drawn map was the same size as that used for China, which was “unacceptable,” they were told; the other book, a children’s atlas, showed a hard border between China and Tibet. 

Maps are a particular shibboleth in China, where “incorrect” images are regularly destroyed.
Sandy Grant, Hardie Grant’s co-founder, said that he hadn’t anticipated any problems, given that neither book was pegged for release in China. 

Still, the publisher tried to find workarounds. 

But when the illustrator of the Taiwan map refused to compromise on the design, and color printers for the children’s atlas in other countries were too expensive, both books had to be dropped. 

“We don’t want to change what we do,” Grant said, “but anything that requires international mapping we will [now] not do or look at very carefully.”
Grant believes the result of China’s demands is that self-censorship “is not just a risk in the industry—it is prominent.” 

As in many other sectors, such as technology, aviation, and film, publishers around the world are having to consider how far they are willing to capitulate to China’s view of the world in order to exploit its economic offerings. 

In the case of publishers, though, it is not about reaching a Chinese audience—it is about what version of China to communicate to the rest of the world. 

For Lusby, the issue of self-censorship is not clear-cut, although she conceded that it can “creep in” in the “tiny judgement calls” that publishers are forced to make over, for example, whether Taiwan should be listed as a separate country. 

Major academic publishers have already conceded to censoring for the Chinese market, if not the global one.
Any publisher has to consider the cost of printing in order to be commercially viable. 

Cheap black-and-white printing is available worldwide, but China still has a market edge when it comes to color or other special features—one publisher estimates that it is 40 percent cheaper to print books in China than it is in North America. 

This could change, though, as publishers feel less confident about investing resources into print contracts that could fall through at the last minute or be subject to lengthy delays. 

Printing is where “the commercial meets the political,” Lusby said, adding that rising labor costs in China and delays caused by factories being forced to close because of air pollution reduction targets have meant that Chinese printers are becoming less competitive.
What is certain to make Chinese printers less competitive is book burning. 

China Seven Color Group said that The Sassoon Files was the first time that it had been forced to take destructive action—a technique once common in the bonfires of the Cultural Revolution.

Publishers might be willing to put free speech concerns aside for the sake of profit, but if Chinese printers are forced to bear the brunt of the government’s obsessions, they’ll pay a sharp price.

Chinese Peril

The United States must help Taiwan resist Chinese dominance
By Josh Rogin

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen speaks in Taipei, Taiwan, on March 21. 

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- During a Hawaiian “transit stop” Wednesday, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen praised the U.S.-Taiwan relationship as “stronger than ever.”

But here in Taiwan, it’s China that dominates every discussion. 

Beijing’s malign influence is apparent everywhere, while the United States is seen as largely absent. 

Washington must wake up to the danger of China’s massive effort to infiltrate, undermine and eventually abolish Taiwan’s democracy.
Tsai called for Washington’s help to confront Beijing’s comprehensive campaign to exert control over Taiwanese politics and society, which is steadily eroding a 40-year status quo that has kept a shaky peace. 

The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which governs the U.S.-Taiwan relationship, stipulates that the United States will consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.
In 2019, those words ring hollow. 

Xi Jinping’s government brazenly uses economic and political pressure to interfere in Taiwan — an attempt to turn the Taiwanese people and their leaders toward Beijing and against the West. 

Xi himself smashed the status quo in January when he publicly called for Taiwan to rejoin China under the “One Country, Two Systems” model. 

One look at Hong Kong should be enough for any Taiwanese citizen to realize that means a steady erosion of their freedoms and sovereignty.
During interviews with Taiwanese politicians, officials and national security experts, our delegation in Taiwan, organized by the East West Center, heard grave warnings. 

Following its successful interference effort in last November’s local elections, Beijing is now focused intensely on ousting Tsai and her Democratic People’s Party in next January’s presidential contest.
“Next year’s election might be the last meaningful election in Taiwan. After that, it will be a Hong Kong-style election,” said Chen Ming-Chi, deputy minister of the Mainland Affairs Council. 

If China succeeds in returning the Beijing-sympathetic Nationalist Party (KMT) to power, that could be the tipping point after which Taiwan can never again exert its own sovereignty. 

“2020 would be the beginning of the reunification.”
In other words, a Chinese military invasion is no longer the scenario Taiwanese fear most. 

China’s strategy to take over Taiwan is focused now on the hybrid warfare tactics authoritarian regimes increasingly deploy in free societies. 

Pro-Beijing interests have bought up a huge portion of Taiwanese media and coordinate with Beijing to spread propaganda and fake news and manipulate social media.
The Chinese government uses economic coercion to both recruit and punish Taiwanese leaders. Meanwhile, China is working overtime to strip Taiwan of its diplomatic allies and keep it out of multilateral institutions. 

Beijing is literally trying to erase the country from the map.
Taiwan is the testing ground for these methods, but China is now exporting them to other places, including the United States. 

That’s a threat not just to Taiwan but also to democracies worldwide, said Deputy Foreign Minister Hsu Szu-chien.
“Taiwan is only the beginning,” he said. 

“They want their new civilization to become a new global order. That’s what they are thinking. And together with an expansion of their physical power, now they are putting their dreams into reality.”
Several KMT officials insist they support the U.S.-China relationship and are not trying to appease Beijing. 

But actions speak louder than words. 

While Tsai was speaking to Americans, Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu, a rising KMT leader and presidential prospect, was holding controversial meetings with Chinese Communist Party officials in Hong Kong and Macau. 

It’s clear which relationship the KMT prioritizes.
The U.S. interest in helping the current Taiwanese government defend its democracy from Chinese interference and aggression is understood — but our will is under question. 

The Trump administration, despite being full of pro-Taiwan officials, has been inconsistent. 

There’s progress on arms sales but no progress on what Tsai wants most, a U.S.-Taiwan free trade agreement. 

There’s not enough U.S. support for Taiwan’s fight against China’s hybrid warfare approach.
In reality, accommodation with Beijing likely won’t work and China’s appetite in Taiwan will only grow with the eating. 

Taiwan proves that democracy and Chinese culture can work together and that prosperity need not require repression. 

This is an example that Beijing, for obvious reasons, cannot tolerate. 

Taiwan’s very existence plays into the Chinese Communist Party’s deep insecurity.
But time is running out fast for the United States to show the Taiwanese people they have international support for refusing to acquiesce to Beijing’s dominance over their politics, economy and society.

China's crimes against humanity

China Has Also Been Targeting Turkish Nationals In Its Brutal Crackdown On Muslims
Turkey is the only Muslim country to call out China’s crackdown on Uighur Muslims. Our investigation finds that several Turkish nationals have also disappeared, something that has never been publicly acknowledged by Turkey.
By Megha Rajagopalan and K. Murat Yildiz

A baker prepares bread for display in a Uighur bakery in the Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul.

ISTANBUL — It was supposed to be a routine business trip, so the young Turkish man was surprised when immigration officials at the Chinese airport pulled him into a room and questioned him for hours. 

He asked to speak to diplomats from his home country, but the Chinese officials shrugged their shoulders, telling him to take it up with police.
When police brought him in handcuffs to a jail cell on the other side of the country, so damp and dark that he immediately became sick, the man asked again. 

They told him his Turkish passport, whose edges had worn out from use, was fake.
A week later, with his arms and legs shackled to a chair in an underground interrogation room in the city of Ghulja in western China, where he had lived before he became a naturalized citizen of Turkey, he asked for a third time to speak to Turkish diplomats. 

This time the answer came sharp and clear.
“You are not a Turk,” an officer told him. 

“You are from here. Don’t think you are special — we kill people like you so that others can live in peace.”
The young businessman said he had endured 38 days of interrogations, hunger, sleep deprivation, and abuse in Chinese custody before finally being released and deported back to Istanbul, without ever being told of any charges against him.
He is an ethnic Uighur — a religious and cultural minority group that the Chinese government views as a threat to the country’s security. 

The government has subjected Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in the far-west colony of East Turkestan to a sweeping campaign of mass surveillance and incarceration that has seen more than a million people detained in concentration camps.
Despite his ordeal, the young businessman was fortunate to have been released. 

BuzzFeed News has found that six Turkish nationals — and possibly dozens more — have gone missing in China’s East Turkestan colony, including a pair of young children. 

None of their cases have been publicly acknowledged by the Turkish government, and are being reported here for the first time.
Their families believe they have been sent to prisons or concentration camps, or in the case of the children, to state-run orphanages.

The families’ claims have been corroborated by email correspondence with government officials and copies of Turkish identification documents.
Every family interviewed by BuzzFeed News said Turkish authorities had given them little information on the status of their relatives, and that they had no evidence that their loved ones had ever been allowed to speak to Turkish diplomats — a privilege guaranteed to both prisoners and detainees by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, to which China is a signatory. 

None of the six people hold dual citizenship with China, according to their families.
Three other families contacted by BuzzFeed News said they also had relatives who were Turkish nationals who had gone missing in East Turkestan, but declined to speak further or be identified because of the sensitivity of the cases. 

And three different Uighur community leaders in Istanbul said dozens more Turkish nationals have gone missing in East Turkestan, but BuzzFeed News could not independently verify all of these cases or speak to the families of those involved.
The families' stories show that Chinese authorities have been unafraid to sweep up foreign nationals in their campaign against Turkic Muslims, even people from countries that are important diplomatic partners.
The businessman who had spent more than a month in Chinese custody over the summer of 2017 became a Turkish citizen in 2011, giving up his Chinese citizenship, and was traveling in China on a tourist visa using his Turkish passport.
“At first I wasn’t that scared,” he said, neatly dressed in a black blazer and sporting a close-cropped haircut at a popular Uighur restaurant in Istanbul last month. 

“I told my cellmates I’m a Turkish citizen, and sooner or later they’d release me.”
The businessman, who asked his name not be used because he is afraid Chinese authorities will retaliate against his family there, was only released after weeks of interrogations about his contacts in Turkey and pictures he had shared on Facebook. 

Though he was never allowed to speak to his family or any Turkish diplomats while he was in custody, he believes he was ultimately let go because of his citizenship.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is one of the few leaders of Muslim-majority countries to have ever criticized China’s treatment of ethnic Uighurs, describing in 2009 a crackdown by Chinese authorities following deadly riots in East Turkestan as “genocide.” 

But the Turkish government, like many others in the world, went mostly quiet on the issue, as Turkey and China established closer economic and diplomatic ties.
That changed in February this year, when Turkey issued the strongest statement in years through its foreign ministry, condemning the use of “concentration camps” by China.
In its unusual rebuke, the foreign ministry called China’s treatment of Uighurs a “shame for humanity.” 

But it said nothing about its own citizens who have been sent to internment camps without charge or who have been missing, in some cases, for more than a year.
In the cases of disappearance confirmed by BuzzFeed News for this article, families said they have contacted the Turkish foreign ministry as well as the presidency, members of parliament, and the Turkish embassy and consulates in China; been assigned case numbers; and been told the ministry is working to find out more information about their missing relatives. 

But they have become distraught. 

After months of begging the Turkish government for information, there have been few responses and no real news on the fates of their children, parents, and siblings. 

Amid constant news reports of detainees facing torture, hunger, and abuse in Chinese internment camps, the lack of information has been terrifying.
The Turkish foreign ministry was asked whether dozens of Turkish nationals had gone missing in China, and if so why it had not said anything about the issue publicly, what Turkey was doing on behalf of the individuals and their families, and to respond to comments from the families that they had heard little from the Turkish authorities. 

The ministry did not comment by the time of this article’s publication.
The Chinese embassy in Turkey also did not respond to a request for comment.

The main street in the Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul, the unofficial center of the city's Uighur diaspora.

Turkey is home to one of the world’s largest Uighur diasporas, with a population of between 20,000 and 50,000 people, according to Uighur community leaders there. 

Uighurs share close cultural, historical, and linguistic ties with Turkish people, and the public there is broadly sympathetic to Uighurs. 

Protests have broken out in Turkey as recently as 2015 over news of mistreatment of Uighurs in China and over forcible repatriation of Uighur migrants.
More recently, there was a public outcry in Turkey after reports in February of the death of Uighur folk musician Abdurehim Heyit, whose music is popular in Turkey. 

It was after this that the Turkish foreign ministry issued its strong statement calling for China to close the camps.
“This tragedy has further reinforced the reaction of the Turkish public opinion towards serious human rights violations committed in the East Turkestan colony,” the statement said.
Heyit later appeared in a video released by Chinese state media saying he was in good health, sparking a Twitter hashtag campaign by overseas Uighurs calling for displays of proof of life for their own family members.
The Uighur community in Turkey has been the heart of the exiled movement for the independence of East Turkestan — the name of the independent state some Uighurs hope to establish as their homeland — since the Communist party took power in China in 1949 and a group of Uighur leaders migrated to Turkey, said Erkin Emet, an associate professor of language at Ankara University who is himself an ethnic Uighur and has researched the history and culture of Uighurs.
“From China’s perspective, Turkey is the most dangerous place for Uighurs,” Emet said, “because of the common culture and history we share with Turks. It is also a place where, unlike in many other Muslim countries, we can easily form political parties and organizations.”
The center of this independence movement, Emet said, is still in Turkey.
Since the early days of its campaign, the Chinese government has specifically targeted Uighurs with links to Muslim countries for detention. 

That has included people who have worked or studied in Muslim countries, or even those who just have relatives living there. 

In particular, China has seized on links to Turkey.
According to the Associated Press, Uighur activists and officials from Syria and China estimate at least 5,000 Uighurs at one time traveled to Syria to fight, many doing so via Turkey. 

China has also said Uighur separatist militants were responsible for a wave of deadly knife and bomb attacks in 2013 and 2014 in East Turkestan and elsewhere in the country. 

But China has targeted millions of Turkic Muslims in its crackdown, the overwhelming majority of whom have no proven links to any extremist cause.
The total number of foreign nationals swept up in the campaign against Muslim minorities, which includes ethnic Kazakhs, is not publicly known. 

Many countries have preferred to advocate for their citizens through quiet diplomacy rather than public advocacy.
Three Australian citizens were released last year after being detained in internment camps. 

Australia is also now working to secure the release of a Uighur Australian baby boy whose father believes he’s at risk of being sent to a state-run orphanage, in a case first reported by BuzzFeed News.
Kazakhstan has remained publicly silent about the plight of ethnic Kazakhs in the region who have been swept up by China’s crackdown, although last August, a Kazakh court ruled against deporting Sayragul Sauytbay — who had worked in an internment camp as a teacher and later fled to Kazakhstan — to China.
BuzzFeed News has shown how Uighurs in countries as far flung as Sweden, Australia, Turkey, and the United States have reported facing harassment and intimidation from Chinese government agents who have contacted them through social media.
Several countries and multinational bodies, including the United States, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the EU, have publicly condemned the Chinese government’s human rights abuses in the region, but China’s incarceration campaign has not led to any international sanctions.
China does not consider the concentration camps to be a form of criminal punishment. 

Government officials have said they are for "vocational training" and have likened them to “boarding schools,” though escapees from the camps have reported being forcibly taught Chinese language and party propaganda, and subjected to hunger, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and other abuses.
But this puts families of detainees in a difficult spot because it means there is no arrest paperwork, no sentence, and frequently no communication at all from Chinese police. 

It is as if their parents, siblings, or children have simply vanished. 

And it’s unclear whether Chinese authorities have provided Turkish officials with any more information.

Hankiz Kurban and her younger sister Nurbiye Kurban in Istanbul.

Hankiz Kurban was, like her three younger siblings, born and raised in Turkey, but has lived in China on and off for years, trying to make the family’s import and export logistics business a success.
For years the 28-year-old had lived in Urumqi, the regional capital of East Turkestan, with her mother, Amina, and her father, Yahya, to whom she had always been close. 

A quiet, methodical man, 52-year-old Yahya would draw up a to-do list each morning before breakfast. 

Because they planned to keep working in China, he was careful, Hankiz said. 

He forbade her from getting involved in political causes, even in Turkey. 

She went to a Uighur cultural event once when she was younger, and he scolded her.
Hankiz started taking Chinese lessons, hoping it would make it easier to work with business partners in China.

In 2017, she started hearing rumors of people who were disappearing. 

Friends and neighbors told her about fathers and brothers who were taken away by police in the middle of the night.
Hankiz started to worry, but her father was unfazed. 

After all, they were Turkish citizens, staying legally in China. 

They paid taxes. 

They had taken care to do everything aboveboard.
When Hankiz’s visa expired, she returned to Turkey to renew it. 

This was already unusual, she said — in the past she could have done this within China. 

While she was in Turkey, what she had feared the most happened. 

Both of her parents were detained. 

She found out through a final voice message from her mother. 

“They’re taking us away,” she said in the message. 

“Contact the embassy.”
“That was when our hell began,” Hankiz said.
Yahya and Amina Kurban were not the only family members to disappear. 

Hankiz’s uncle, Mehmet Emin Nasir, 39, disappeared in Kashgar, a city in southern East Turkestan, on September 9, 2017.
“We never thought this would last so long. We thought that as a Turkish citizen, sooner or later he’d be released,” Muyesser Temel, Nasir’s sister and Hankiz’s aunt, said as she sat in a yellow armchair at her family’s home in the immigrant-heavy neighborhood of Zeytinburnu, where much of Istanbul’s Uighur community lives in apartment blocks. 

“At the beginning I wasn’t scared, but as time passed I realized this was serious.”
Temel first heard that Nasir was taken away by police from her mother, who had gotten a phone call from relatives in East Turkestan. 

Nasir, who ran a shop that sold curtains, was living in Kashgar with his wife and four children at the time. 

He held a Turkish passport, but unlike many other Turkish Uighurs, he wanted to live in his homeland. 

His wife never sought Turkish citizenship because the family was settled in East Turkestan.
Temel said she reached out to the Turkish foreign ministry through repeated phone calls for months since she discovered her brother had been taken away. 

“They tell us they’re in touch with Chinese authorities, but we have no proof of it,” she said. 

“They just tell us on the phone they are dealing with this, but there’s no evidence.”
“We trust above everything our country, Turkey,” she said. 

“But nothing has come out of this. We have exhausted all of our options.”
Both women, and other individuals interviewed for this article, said they had received few signals from the Turkish foreign ministry about the status of their families, even when Turkish officials promised to help.
Even Turkish children have not been spared from China’s crackdown.
Pashahan Kuçar, 75, has two young grandchildren. 

Both Turkish citizens who were traveling on their mother’s Chinese passport, they have disappeared in East Turkestan along with their mother, Kuçar's daughter-in-law. 

According to their identification records, which her family provided to BuzzFeed News, Kuçar's granddaughter is 7 and her grandson has recently turned 6. 

When their mother was taken away to an internment camp, the children were left alone. 

A neighbor took them in and explained the situation to Kuçar's family by text. 

But not long after, the neighbor stopped responding to messages. 

Kuçar hasn’t heard from her grandchildren in months.
Though Kuçar can barely walk and suffers from several health conditions, she has relentlessly campaigned for the release of her family. 

In Turkey’s capital, Ankara, she has protested outside the presidential palace on a mobility scooter, draped in the light blue flag of East Turkestan. 

She has met with Turkish foreign ministry officials, but they’ve given her no clues about where her grandchildren are or whether Turkish diplomats have been able to contact them.

Pashahan Kuçar

In a way, Temel, the woman whose home is in Zeytinburnu, counts her missing brother among the lucky. 

The fact that he holds Turkish citizenship means at least she can expect Turkish authorities to help.
“You cannot find a family in this neighborhood that does not have family in the camps,” she said. “The internet is blocked over there; there’s no way to contact them — if my mother had not gotten that call we would simply not know.”
Hankiz Kurban, the 28-year-old who once dreamed of building a business in China with her father, has tried everything to find news on her missing parents. 

She reported the matter to Turkish authorities and received a case number in an automated email. 

She began calling the Turkish Embassy in Beijing every other day — so much that officials started to hang up when they heard her voice.
She lies awake at night obsessing about what might be happening to her father and mother. 

She tried taking medication for her anxiety and depression, but it just made her feel sleepy and fuzzy. What she can’t figure out is how her father, who all his life eschewed political causes so as not to get on the wrong side of the government, could have been targeted.
Two years ago in Ghulja, interrogators asked the young businessman detained at the airport in China the same questions about his politics and connections over and over again, searching for evidence of his connections to extremist groups. 

There were two interrogators, he said, one Han Chinese — China’s largest ethnic group — and the other Uighur, both fluent in the Uighur language.
One day they demanded his social media passwords — to Facebook, WhatsApp, and the Chinese messaging app QQ. 

They found a post he had shared on Facebook showing both the Turkish flag and the flag for East Turkestan. 

That day they became certain, he said, that he was a threat. 

It was like they had discovered a smoking gun.
Another day they asked him to list his contacts in Istanbul, to tell them which Uighur restaurants he frequented. 

He gave a list of made-up names, he said. 

But the pair of interrogators knew the Uighur community in Turkey well.
Unlike many Uighurs in Istanbul, the businessman didn’t live in Zeytinburnu. 

His interrogators knew the neighborhood’s shops and alleyways better than he did.
In the days before his departure, one of his interrogators mentioned he’d be traveling to Turkey in a few months. 

“If you see us in Istanbul,” he said, “will you welcome us?” ●

Chinese Trap

Countries should not be duped into borrowing from China

“We are being duped, and we have to negotiate better for our own interests,” said Karim Raslan, the founder of ASEAN-focused political risk consultancy firm KRA Group about China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
By Shirley Tay

Countries should not be “duped” into borrowing from China through the Belt and Road Initiative, and should be looking for opportunities in India instead, says one firm critic of Beijing’s flagship infrastructure project.
”The BRI is all about Chinese strategic objectives; it’s not about the host countries,” said Karim Raslan, founder of political risk consultancy, KRA Group.
“We are being duped, and we have to negotiate better for our own interests,” he told CNBC’s Nancy Hungerford at the Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong on Tuesday.
Sometimes referred to as “One Belt, One Road,” the mega-project is a Chinese investment scheme which aims to create a vast global infrastructure network connecting China to more than 60 countries across Asia, Europe and Africa.
Controversy surrounding the strategy was highlighted in 2017 when Sri Lanka handed over its Hambantota port to Beijing for 99 years after the South Asian nation failed to pay back the money it owed Chinese firms.
The BRI is a “debt trap,” said Raslan. 

China is “not investing — they’re lending us money, for projects which have very little economic value to the host countries,” he added.
Borrowing nations need to “look more to India,” Raslan said. 

“We have got to focus there.”
He explained that “India, at the end of the day, (has)1.3 billion people. It’s growing very fast — they will be sucking in imports.”
India’s economy is poised to grow at 7 percent in 2019, expanding more than China’s projected growth of 6 to 6.5 percent the same year.

Tech Quisling

GOOGLE IS CONDUCTING A SECRET “PERFORMANCE REVIEW” OF ITS CENSORED CHINA SEARCH PROJECT
By Ryan Gallagher

GOOGLE EXECUTIVES ARE carrying out a secret internal assessment of work on a censored search engine for China, The Intercept has learned.
A small group of top managers at the internet giant are conducting a “performance review” of the controversial effort to build the search platform, known as Dragonfly, which was designed to blacklist information about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest.
Performance reviews at Google are undertaken annually to evaluate employees’ output and development. 

They are usually carried out in an open, peer review-style process: Workers grade each other’s projects and the results are then assessed by management, who can reward employees with promotion if they are deemed ready to progress at the company.
In the case of Dragonfly, however, the peer review aspect has been removed, subverting the normal procedure. 

In a move described as highly unusual by two Google sources, executives set up a separate group of closed “review committees,” comprised of senior managers who had all previously been briefed about the China search engine.

The existence of the Dragonfly review committees has not been disclosed to rank-and-file Google employees, except for the few who have been evaluated by the committees because they worked on China search. 

Fewer than a dozen top managers at the company are said to be looped in on the review, which has involved studying documents and technical work related to Dragonfly.
“Management has decided to commit to keeping this stuff secret,” said a source with knowledge of the review. 

They are “holding any Dragonfly-specific documents out of [employees’] review tools, so that promotion is decided only by a committee that is read in on Dragonfly.”

Executives likely feared that following the normal, more open performance review process with Dragonfly would have allowed workers across the company to closely scrutinize it, according to two Google sources.
If some of the documents about Dragonfly had been made more widely accessible inside the company, according to the two sources, it would probably have led to further controversy about the project, which ignited furious protests and resignations after it was first exposed by The Intercept in August last year.
The decision to carry out the review in secret, however, is itself likely to stoke anger inside the company. 

During the protests over Dragonfly last year, a key complaint from employees was that the China plan lacked transparency and went against the company’s traditionally open workplace culture. 

Until it was publicly exposed, knowledge about Dragonfly had been restricted to a few hundred of Google’s 88,000 employees — around 0.35 percent of the total workforce.
Facing pressure from both inside and outside the company, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told his staff during an August crisis meeting that he would “definitely be transparent [about Dragonfly] as we get closer to actually having a plan of record. We definitely do plan to engage more and talk more.”
But Google employees told The Intercept this week that company bosses have consistently refused to provide them with information about Dragonfly — leaving them in the dark about the status of the project and the company’s broader plans for China.
Late last year, amid a firestorm of criticism, Google executives moved engineers away from working on the censored search engine and said publicly that there were no current plans to launch it. 

Earlier this month, however, The Intercept revealed that some Google employees were concerned that work on the censored search engine remained ongoing, as parts of the platform still appeared to be under development. 

Google subsequently denied that Dragonfly remained in progress, insisting in a statement that there was “no work being undertaken on such a project. Team members have moved to new projects.”

Google previously launched a search engine in China in 2006, but pulled out of the country in 2010, citing concerns about Chinese government interference. 

At that time, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the decision to stop operating search in the country was principally about “opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent.”
Dragonfly represented a dramatic reversal of that position. 

The search engine, which Google planned to launch as an app for Android and iOS devices, was designed to comply with strict censorship rules imposed by China’s ruling Communist Party regime, enabling surveillance of people’s searches while also blocking thousands of terms, such as “Nobel prize,” “human rights,” and “student protest.”
More than 60 human rights groups and 22 U.S. lawmakers wrote to Google criticizing the project. 

In February, Amnesty International met with Google to reiterate its concerns about the China plan. “The lack of transparency around the development of Dragonfly is very disturbing,” Anna Bacciarelli, an Amnesty researcher, told The Intercept earlier this month. 

“We continue to call on Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai to publicly confirm that it has dropped Dragonfly for good, not just ‘for now.’”
Google did not respond to a request for comment.

Interpol Tragicomedy

China Expels Meng Hongwei From Communist Party for ‘Extravagant’ Spending

By Javier C. Hernández

Meng Hongwei, the former head of Interpol, at the Interpol World gathering in Singapore in 2017.

BEIJING — China’s ruling Communist Party expelled the former chief of Interpol on Wednesday, accusing him of abusing his power to finance an extravagant lifestyle and committing “serious” violations of the law.
The disappearance of the former Interpol chief, Meng Hongwei, during a trip to China last fall drew global attention and highlighted the perils of being on the wrong side of China’s opaque, highly politicized legal system.

The Chinese authorities later said he had been placed under investigation, but the move damaged China’s reputation and raised doubts about Xi Jinping’s efforts to expand its global presence.
Meng, 65, the first Chinese citizen to lead Interpol, has not been heard from since.
The announcement — a rare official update on Meng since his disappearance in October — came as Xi was back in Beijing after concluding a visit this week to France, where he met with President Emmanuel Macron.
Meng’s wife, Grace Meng, had appealed to Mr. Macron in recent days to raise her husband’s case with Xi and to demand answers about his whereabouts, according to Agence France-Presse.
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has led a wide-ranging campaign against corruption and perceived political disloyalty that has ensnared thousands of people, including many high-profile officials.
The party’s anticorruption agency, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, said in a statement Wednesday that Meng had abused his power for personal gain. 

It said that he “recklessly squandered state capital and property to satisfy his family’s extravagant lifestyle.” 

The agency accused Meng of routinely ignoring decisions by top party leaders.
“His family tradition is corrupted,” the statement said. 

“His view on power is twisted.”
Ms. Meng, the former official’s wife, has said that she has not heard from her husband since late September, when he sent a phone message with an emoji of a knife as he left on a trip to China, which she interpreted as a sign of danger.
In the statement on Wednesday, the anticorruption agency also accused Meng of encouraging his wife to use his power and prestige for personal benefit.
Meng, a former vice minister of security, will now likely face a trial on corruption charges.

Italian Horse

Italy is playing with fire when it comes to China

• Italy is to be the first major European economy to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative
• The move exacerbates tensions between Italy and its neighbors.
• France wants a coordinated, united approach to China.

By Holly Ellyatt

Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte meets Chinese dictator Xi Jinping before to sign trade agreements on Belt and Road Initiative, on March 23, 2019 in Rome, Italy.

Italy’s decision to be the first major European economy to join China’s massive investment and infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), can only exacerbate tensions between Italy and its neighbors.
On Saturday, Xi Jinping and the Italian government signed a non-binding agreement for Italy to join China’s trade route and inked a total of 29 deals worth 2.5 billion euros ($2.8 billion) across an array of sectors. Italy hopes the project will boost its sluggish economy but the deal raised more than just eyebrows in Europe and the U.S. with officials criticizing the move.
The BRI is something of a 21st century Silk Road with the sea and land route stretching from Asia, the Middle East, Africa and now into Europe — with Italy being the first Group of Seven (G-7) country to sign up to the global infrastructure and development project.
China sees the BRI as a way to export more of its goods to lucrative markets; its critics see the initiative as a vanity project that increases indebtedness among its participating countries. 

The BRI gives Chinese companies unfettered access to other markets and economies, but that its own is still largely closed to foreign investment.
At the heart of concerns is that the BRI is seen as a way for China to spread its geopolitical influence — an acute concern for a Europe increasingly uncertain of its place in the world.
As such, Italy’s latest move has been seen as undermining Europe’s ability to compete with China’s economic might. 

Italy’s bilateral deal with China also came a day after French President Emmanuel Macron called for a coordinated European approach to the superpower.
Italy’s anti-establishment coalition government has already clashed with Brussels over immigration and its spending plans. 

Its deal with China is likely to be another source of tension.
“It’s clear that this does undermine Europe’s and the West’s ability to stand up to China,” Federico Santi, senior Europe analyst at Eurasia Group, told CNBC Tuesday. 

“This will be another source of friction between Italy and Europe which, ultimately, will be to the detriment of Italy itself,” he added, although he noted that the terms of the agreement between Italy and China remained to be seen.
Italy and China have played down concerns. 

Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio told CNBC that the accord was “nothing to worry about” and Xi tried to assuage concerns in Europe too, saying on Tuesday during a visit to France that “cooperation is bigger than competition between China and Europe.”
Other EU leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron are keen for the EU to have a tougher approach to China and stress the need for reciprocal commercial ties. 

On Tuesday, Macron said while he wants the EU to deepen its ties with China, there must be a united European front when it comes to the superpower.
To emphasize this point, he invited German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker for talks with Xi in Paris on Tuesday. 

There, Macron urged China to “respect the unity of the European Union and the values it carries in the world.” 

Juncker stressed that European companies should find “the same degree of openness in the China market as Chinese ones find in Europe.”
Merkel, for her part, said that Europeans wanted to take part in the Belt and Road Initiative but that “must lead to a certain reciprocity, and we are still wrangling over that bit.”
As Macron said in Brussels last week, “the time of European naïveté is ended” as he called for the EU. For many years we had an uncoordinated approach and China took advantage of our divisions.”
With Italy pursuing its own deal with China regardless of its neighbors’ concerns, China could be able to make the most of those divisions again.

China tries to bribe France to break with America

By Tom Rogan

Beware of Xi Jinping bearing gifts. 

When Xi opens his wallet, it's never with a simple economic agenda.
This bears relevance in light of Xi's announcement in Paris on Tuesday that China will buy 300 jets from Airbus. 

That purchase order will benefit the French economy to the tune of around $34 billion. 

But while China says this purchase is designed to strengthen its domestic aviation sector, that's only the pretense. 

What this deal is really about is encouraging France to separate from the U.S. on matters affecting Chinese foreign policy.
The most obvious Chinese interest here is getting France to oppose U.S. efforts to constrain the Chinese telecommunications firm, Huawei. 

To its credit, the Trump administration has taken a harsh stance on Huawei, warning allies that if they allow the Chinese intelligence cutout to enter their telecommunications networks, they will lose out on U.S. intelligence support and economic opportunities.
But it's not just about Huawei. 

China also wants to prevent France from following Britain in supporting U.S. efforts to ensure the Indo-Pacific region remains open and free. 

As more nations support U.S. efforts to challenge China's imperial aggression in that region, China finds it harder to retain international legitimacy. 

China is also weakened by its reliance on allies of weak interest and political toxicity, such as Pakistan, and by its own domestic conduct because that legitimacy deficit weakens Xi's political influence, economic interests, and military power. 

Although, it must be said, China's cultivation of top research institutions such as Harvard University earns Beijing some political cover.
The U.S. cannot sit idle here. 

It must consolidate Emmanuel Macron to oppose even Xi's marginal interests. 

It's a relevant concern in that some European nations are already yielding to Xi. 

Italy, for example, just last week joined Beijing's Belt and Road initiative. 

That program is the cornerstone of Xi's effort to reshape international economics away from the U.S. free trade orbit, and into a mercantilism-feudal system with China at the top.
Fortunately, there is good cause for American optimism here. 

France is a better American ally than Italy (Rome should face U.S. economic retaliation for bowing to Xi), and recognizes the value of America's rule-of-law based economic system over China's cronyism. 

Xi is likely to be disappointed here.
Still, this vast Airbus purchase is a clear window to Chinese strategy. 

Xi is willing to spend big to try and buy friends.

This Chinese Christian Was Charged With Trying to Subvert the State

By Ian Johnson

Wang Yi and his wife, Jiang Rong, at their home in Chengdu, China, last year. They have been detained since December.

BEIJING — In 2006, three Chinese Christians traveled to Washington to ask President George W. Bush for his support in their fight for religious freedom.

One of them had converted to the faith only a few months earlier: Wang Yi, a 33-year-old lawyer from the southwestern city of Chengdu.
But Mr. Wang had already become such a prominent Christian that organizers made sure he went to the White House. 

A nationally known essayist and civil rights lawyer, he would soon found a 500-member church that was independent of government control, along with a seminary, an elementary school and even a group to aid the families of political prisoners — all illegal but which he accomplished by sheer force of will.
Today, Mr. Wang, now 45, is back in the spotlight, this time at the center of an intense crackdown on Christianity. 

His Early Rain Covenant Church and others like it are popular among China’s growing middle class and have resisted government control, testing the ruling Communist Party’s resolve to bring China’s churches to heel.
“He saw an inevitable fight with the government because of it trying to control the churches,” said Enoch Wang, a pastor based in the United States who has met Wang Yi many times. 

“He knows that sooner or later they’ll come for you and so there’s no point in trying to hide.”
That was one reason Wang Yi has in recent years become a vocal critic of Xi Jinping’s moves toward authoritarianism.
Last December, he and 100 church members were detained. 

Although most have been released, Mr. Wang, his wife and 11 others are still being held incommunicado without access to a lawyer.
The charges against Mr. Wang and his wife — inciting to subvert state power — typically result in lengthy prison sentences. 

The same charge was used to sentence Liu Xiaobo, a dissident, to 11 years in prison in 2009. 

He was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and died in custody in 2017.
According to church members who were detained and subsequently released, the police are also investigating Mr. Wang and two junior pastors for economic crimes such as whether they broke Chinese law by publishing books and DVDs without government approval.
Many congregants who have been released have lost their jobs and housing over their church membership. 

Others have been sent back to their hometowns or had their bank accounts frozen. 

Mr. Wang’s 11-year-old son now lives with his 74-year-old grandmother.
The crackdown is part of a broader effort to subdue China’s fast-growing religious groups. 

This includes detaining a million minority Muslims in internment camps in China’s far west, a drive that has drawn international condemnation.
But while Islam is practiced by about 20 million non-Chinese minorities in largely far-off provinces, Protestant Christianity is followed by about 60 million ethnic Chinese in China’s economic heartland. About half worship in churches that raise their own money and run their own affairs.
In the past, many of these were called underground churches, but over the past decade, some have become public megachurches. 

Run by well-educated white-collar professionals in China’s biggest cities, the churches own property and have nationwide alliances — something anathema to the party, which tightly restricts nongovernmental organizations.
Also targeted in the crackdown were the 1,500-member Zion Church in Beijing, which was closed in September, and the Rongguili Church in Guangzhou, which attracted thousands of worshipers each week.
Unlike the old underground churches, these independent churches wanted to be public.
“They want to be the city on the hill,” said Fredrik Fallman, a professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden who studies contemporary Chinese Christianity. 

“But this is the basic fear of the Communist Party — people organized independent of the party in a structured way.”

Pastor Wang, second from right, met President George W. Bush at the White House in 2006 with other prominent Christian activists.

Since Xi took power in 2012, the party has ramped up efforts to promote ideas such as the glory of traditional China and respect for authority.
Christians like Mr. Wang have challenged this top-down ideology. 

Many are interested in socially engaged models of Christianity, especially the Protestant denomination of Calvinism.
“Traditionally, Christians in China were mainly concerned with saving people’s souls,” said Yu Jie, an exiled essayist who helped convert Mr. Wang in 2005. 

“But Wang Yi and others like us, we don’t think the world is hopelessly corrupt. We want to improve it, and so there’s an emphasis on issues like public service and justice.”
Born in 1973, Mr. Wang grew up in the rural Chinese county of Santai. 

He met his wife in elementary school — and wrote in an essay that he was immediately infatuated with her.
He was 16 when the government crushed pro-democracy protesters near Tiananmen Square in Beijing. 

That event shaped his life, pushing him to a career in law and an interest in justice.
All of this meant his church was unusually active in sensitive areas.
It set up a group that helped the families of political prisoners by regularly visiting them and paying their children’s college tuition. 

The church also helped fund a homeless shelter and protested the ubiquitous use of abortion in Chinese family planning.
Mr. Wang, a pastor, also held prayer services for the victims of the June 4, 1989, massacre of the Tiananmen protesters. 

In one widely circulated photo, he is wearing his pastor’s collar and holding a sign that says, “June 4. Pray for the Country.”
He also became a sharp critic of  Xi, especially after presidential term limits were lifted last year, allowing him to serve a third term and to potentially rule for life.
In response, Mr. Wang circulated a message calling Xi a “usurper” who was “not amending the Constitution but destroying it.”
Some in his congregation objected to his overtly political message. 

Two years ago, another pastor left Early Rain to start his own church, criticizing some of Mr. Wang’s statements as stunts. 

But others in the church thought they were necessary.
Mr. Wang’s bluntness made him one of the most polarizing figures in Chinese Christianity. 

When the government began reducing the public face of Christianity in one province by tearing crosses off the steeples of even government-run churches, Mr. Wang expressed no sympathy for the churches affected. 

Instead, he said their pastors were wrong for serving in churches controlled by the government.
Mr. Yu, the writer, said he wondered if his old friend was wise in confronting the government so openly.
“As a pastor, you do have a responsibility to protect your members,” Mr. Yu said. 

“Given the conditions in China, it’s something one can consider.”
But Mr. Wang had long anticipated his detention over the question of state control.

In a 2017 sermon, he asked his congregation what he should do if the government demanded even limited control over their church: Should he agree and avoid persecution, or resist?

He joked that some people might ask him if he couldn’t make a few compromises.
“We’ve got an 80-year-old grandma at home and we just had a child!” he said, anticipating the argument.
But then Mr. Wang argued against this sort of accommodation.
“In this world, in this crooked, depraved and perverse world, how do we demonstrate that we are a group of people who trust in Jesus?” he said. 

“It is through bodily submission, through bodily suffering, that we demonstrate the freedom of our souls.”

US sends 2 warships through Taiwan Strait ahead of China trade talks

By Samuel Chamberlain, Lucas Tomlinson

The USS Curtis Wilbur, one of two ships to pass through the Taiwan Strait on Sunday. 

Two American warships sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Sunday to send a message to the Chinese government ahead of high-level trade talks between the two nations.
The U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer Curtis Wilbur and U.S. Coast Guard cutter Bertholf sailed through the strait, a body of water separating Taiwan from mainland China that is approximately 100 miles wide and is considered a hot spot for any potential conflict.
Cmdr. Clayton Doss, a spokesman for the Navy 7th Fleet, said in a statement that the ships had conducted a "routine Taiwan Strait transit March 24-25 [local time] in accordance with international law. The ships' transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific."
The transit marked the third time in three months that the U.S. sailed warships through the strait, which is officially considered international waters. 

However, China has considered Taiwan its own territory to be brought under its control -- by force if needed -- and has monitored foreign military activity in the waterway closely.

Beijing has considered control over Taiwan a matter of national pride, as well as a key to its access to the Pacific, the South China Sea and elsewhere. 

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen warned last month that the military threat from China was increasing "every day."

The transit came days before a high-level American delegation led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer are scheduled to arrive in China for the eighth round of trade negotiations aimed at resolving a long-running dispute.
The trade dispute escalated last year after the U.S. made several complaints, including that China was stealing U.S. trade secrets and was forcing companies to give them technology to access its market. President Trump imposed tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese imports, about half what the United States buys from that country. 

China retaliated with tariffs on about $110 billion of U.S. items.

Behind the Niceties of Chinese Leader’s Visit, France Is Wary

By Adam Nossiter

President Emmanuel Macron of France with Xi Jinping at a news conference in Paris on Monday.
PARIS — France rolled out red carpets and honor guards for Xi Jinping on Monday, but beneath the pomp, there were wary statements about China’s influence by his host, President Emmanuel Macron.
With Italy last week breaking from Europe in signing on to China’s global infrastructure project for moving Chinese goods, Mr. Macron has made it clear that a unified European response, in his view, is critical in dealing with the Chinese hegemon.
He reiterated that sentiment Monday as Xi listened in a deal-signing ceremony at the presidential Élysée Palace, where more than a dozen commercial and governmental treaties were signed worth billions of euros.
Earlier Mr. Macron welcomed Xi at a symbol of French imperial history and power, the Arc de Triomphe.
Beneath the tight smiles and brisk handshakes, Mr. Macron’s sharpened words resonated as the template for France’s attitude toward China, a country that floods France with luxury-shopping tourists but competes directly with it in a principal arena of mutual geopolitical interest, Africa.
Mr. Macron, keenly aware of France’s small position in the Chinese market — between 1 and 2 percent of imports — talks about Europe when he talks about China. 

Germany’s position is nearly five times as large.
After saying last week that the era of European “naïveté was over,” and that China had “played on our divisions,” he emphasized to the Chinese leader Monday that in talking to France, he was talking to Europe.
It was not immediately clear how France had avoided the “naïveté” Mr. Macron criticized, nor how it had reinforced the multilateral unified European approach he promulgated, in signing the French deals with the Chinese on Monday.
Still, unlike Italy, France has not signed on to China’s global goods-moving project, which it calls “One Belt One Road.”
Making reference to Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s famous declaration in 1964 that recognizing China was a matter of “reason” and “evidence,” Mr. Macron said Monday at the Élysée that those same words applied to the “choice” of the 21st century: the “relationship between Europeans and Chinese.”
De Gaulle was bucking the United States when he uttered those words, and Mr. Macron, 55 years later, was doing something of the same.
Appealing to China as a partner, he made a pointed reference to the United States under President Trump, who has repudiated multinational agreements like the Paris Climate accord and Iran nuclear deal.
“The order of things has been shaken,” the French president said, and “faced with the risk of the destruction of the multilateral order, France and China have a responsibility,” as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.
“No country can redefine the rules of the international game,” Mr. Macron asserted, saying that France, like China, would stick to an agreement with Iran, and saying the two countries had made progress on the subject of climate change, and on the lifting of import restrictions for French beef and poultry.
Earlier French and Chinese officials and executives signed agreements on aeronautics — the Chinese are buying 300 airplanes from Airbus — and on space, banking and investment, shipbuilding and cultural exchanges.
On human rights violations in China, a subject that preoccupies French media but not official discourse or French business, Mr. Macron made only a hurried reference. 

Xi is visiting at a time when Galeries Lafayette, the emblematic French department store, is projecting a rapid expansion in China, which represents a third of the world market for luxury goods.
Jet-lagged Chinese tourists are bussed directly from the airport to the Galeries Lafayette store in central Paris, and the Rue Saint Honoré, a thoroughfare studded with luxury shops, routinely decks itself out for Chinese New Year.
The Chinese have invested in a wide scattering of French sectors, including wine, hotels, and industrial food production, including milk. 

France was the recipient of 9 percent of Chinese investments in the European Union in 2018; the Chinese have bought more than 150 wineries in Bordeaux, and China is the top export market for Bordeaux wine. 

The Chinese push into that culturally symbolic sector has created some backlash, but not enough to stop French owners from selling their properties.
With Xi silently listening Monday Mr. Macron said that Europe had never considered individual rights as “culturally specific,” and that its preoccupation remained for “the respect of fundamental and individual rights.” 

He said that the two had “had frank exchanges” on the subject.
But French analysts of relations with China said Monday that commercial relations were the real subject of preoccupation. 

“It’s the question of reciprocity,” said Jean-Philippe Béja of Sciences-Po, the research university. “We’ve been open towards trade and investment, and the Chinese have never let us enter their state procurements process.”
Europeans had also become more aware, and wary, of technology transfers and investments that “help the Chinese government develop its potential, and in the case of artificial intelligence it’s about control, and exporting control,” said Mr. Béja, referring to advances in Chinese government surveillance of its own citizenry.
“We’re more fearful than the other” members of the European Union about Chinese power and hegemony, said François Godement, an expert at the Institut Montaigne research center in Paris. “China is pushing its own pawns,” he said, particularly in parts of Africa where for decades French dominance has been undisputed.
Mr. Macron insisted Monday that France and China were “not strategic rivals” in Africa, though he said the two nations could be “much more important partners,” appearing to reflect a worry about Chinese investment on the continent.

China Is Spying On Israel to Steal U.S. Secrets

Benjamin Netanyahu ignored the Chinese intelligence operations for too long. Now, the Israeli government is finally paying attention, but it could be too late.
BY YOSSI MELMAN
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks with soldiers as he stands near a naval Iron Dome defense system installed on a Sa'ar 5 Lahav Class corvette of the Israeli Navy fleet, in the northern port of Haifa on Feb. 12.

This month, Israel’s National Security Council (NSC) will present the cabinet with its recommendations on foreign investments in Israel. 

Because of the sensitivity of the issue, no one in the cabinet is prepared to talk about the elephant in the room. 

Nevertheless, it is clear that the policy review and the report are primarily focused on China.
In the past decade, Beijing has increased its economic and military investments and interests in the Middle East, including Israel.
In the past decade, Beijing has increased its economic and military investments and interests in the Middle East, including Israel. 

The Israeli government ignored China’s behavior for too long, but lately it has begun to pay attention. The National Security Council has to reconcile two contradictory policies, both of which are important to the Israeli economy and its national-security interests.
The first is a policy embraced by all government across the political spectrum for decades: encouraging foreign investment, privatization of national assets and utilities, and the expansion of international markets for Israeli goods. 

In recent years, like many other exporters, Israeli firms have looked eastward to the growing and developing economies of Asia—and China’s in particular.
A recent survey by the Israeli intelligence community that is not in the public domain shows that Chinese investment in the Middle East rose by 1,700 percent between 2012 and 2017. 

Altogether, the Chinese have invested $700 billion in the region. 

Nearly half of it is in the energy sector, $150 billion in research and development, $113 billion in industry, $103 billion in transportation, $68 billion in the military field, $4 billion in financial loans, and only $155 million in humanitarian aid.
From 1992 to 2017, China’s bilateral trade with Israel has grown from $50 million to $13.1 billion, making it Israel’s largest trading partner in Asia and its third-largest trading partner in the world after the European Union and the United States. 

In the first half of 2018, China’s imports from Israel reached $2.77 billion, an increase of 47 percent compared with the same period in 2017.
The second policy is to defend national and strategic assets and infrastructure from being controlled and taken over by foreign governments and corporations, even if they are not hostile to Israel. Because of its high-tech economy, Israel also faces the delicate problem of foreign spying and theft of its advanced technologies and know-how. 

Russia and China have in recent years enhanced their espionage efforts in Israel, particularly to obtain access to both state-owned and private-sector Israeli tech companies, and through them to the United States
Russia and China have in recent years enhanced their espionage efforts in Israel, particularly to obtain access to both state-owned and private-sector Israeli tech companies, and through them to the United States, a close ally of Israel.
China has targeted Israel’s two largest arms exporters, Israel Aerospace Industries and the arms manufacturer Rafael, along with the company Elbit Systems. 

The first two are state-owned corporations, and all three have subsidiaries in the United States that help manufacture Israel’s most advanced weapons, including missiles and avionics. 

These designs and trade secrets are coveted by intelligence agencies and governments throughout the world.
Investigations by Israeli counterintelligence agencies discovered that Chinese hackers were particularly interested in the Israeli companies’ ties with U.S. defense contractors. 

The Israeli firms are collaborating with their U.S. counterparts such as Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin in the joint projects, which include F-16 and F-35 warplanes and the Arrow anti-ballistic missile defense systems. 

Clearly, China perceives Israel as a back door through which it can access and penetrate secret U.S. programs.
Israel is an international powerhouse when it comes to cyberwarfare, which is of the utmost importance to Moscow and Beijing. 

If they can steal state-of-the art technologies, it could create havoc in the United States and other Western democracies.
It’s no wonder that both countries have large embassies in Tel Aviv, which serve as hubs to advance their interests. 

Until recently, China was interested in purchasing a chunk of land in the posh neighborhood of Herzliya Pituach for its new embassy. 

It is located very close to Mossad headquarters and those of the military intelligence agency Unit 8200 at the Glilot Junction, north of Tel Aviv.
In their attempts to penetrate defense installations and steal security-related technologies, Russia and China have faced a fierce, determined, and skillful rival—the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, which specializes in counterintelligence and information protection.
Huawei has deep ties to the Chinese government. 

Berlin might let it build the country’s next generation of communications infrastructure anyway.
But the civilian sector, especially firms producing technologies that can be used for both peaceful and military purposes, is less protected. 

For many years, consecutive Israeli governments neglected and ignored the security risks posed by China. 

On the contrary, they encouraged Chinese businessmen to invest in Israel and purchase Israeli assets. But when it comes to China, the so-called private sector is a fiction. 

The government controls the economy. 

Whoever deviates from party guidelines is severely punished.
And so over the last 15 years, Chinese companies have invaded Israel. 

They purchased Tnuva, a household name and the country’s largest producer of dairy products. 

They won tenders to build roads, light rail lines in Tel Aviv, and the Carmel Tunnels in Haifa. 

China has also expressed intentions to buy Israeli insurance companies and banks, to lease huge tracts of land in the Negev Desert to grow avocados and wheat, and to build a railroad from Tel Aviv to Eilat.
Chinese construction companies are now enlarging Israel’s two major ports in Haifa and Ashdod, which handle most of Israel’s trade. 

Even more worrisome is the fact that Chinese companies have gained the concessions to operate and run the new harbors for 25 years. 

Both ports are also the bases for the Israeli navy, including heavily fortified marine infrastructure which houses the Israeli submarine fleet. 

The decision to build the Haifa marina was a result of the 2006 war in Lebanon. 

During the war, Hezbollah rockets hit Haifa aiming at the port and navy vessels.
The five-strong submarine fleet (the sixth submarine is due to arrive next year from Germany, where all of them were constructed) reportedly carries nuclear-tipped missiles, thus providing Israel with a second-strike nuclear capability, if and when Iran obtains its own nuclear bombs.
For years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his deputy, Transportation and Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz—who is now also acting foreign minister—encouraged the Chinese to gain access to the Israeli market and boasted about their achievements.
Only a few officials tried to warn Netanyahu and the cabinet, including the Shin Bet’s leaders and Efraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad. 

But their warnings were not taken seriously. 

Even Shaul Chorev, a former rear admiral and commander of the submarine fleet from 1980-1985, who was also a defense ministry official and the director general of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), seemed not to be bothered and kept silent.
Now as the head of the Haifa Research Center for Maritime Policy and Strategy at the University of Haifa, Chorev has expresses some concerns about the new Chinese neighbors of the submarine fleet. “I admit that I was insufficiently interested in the topic because as the director of the IAEC I was too busy with other important issues,” he told Foreign Policy. 

“But now I and the center are actively raising awareness of the problem.”
Israel’s bureaucratic negligence was reversed only because of external pressure. 

The U.S. administration perceives China as its main rival and has turned its attention from the Middle East to Asia, the Pacific, and the Korean Peninsula.
U.S. President Donald Trump has declared a trade war on China and is trying to limit its economic and military expansion. 

One of the United States’ major concerns was Chinese involvement in the Haifa port, which is a host to frequent visits by the ships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, including aircraft carriers.
That’s why Chinese involvement in Israel got Washington’s attention. 

The Trump administration asked Israel to reduce its ties with China, and U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton directly requested it. 

Israel doesn’t want to insult or humiliate China, which is sensitive in terms of its pride and would undoubtedly retaliate. 

But Israel can’t ignore a request, which is really a demand, from its most important strategic ally.
In the past, when it came to relations involving the three nations, Israel has bowed to U.S. pressure because it had to comply. 

It is almost certain that past failures and negligence, especially in the harbors, can’t be fixed. 

The contracts given to Chinese firms cannot be canceled. 

In case of war, the submarines will go to sea, but they and the U.S. fleet could still be vulnerable to a surprise attack.
The forthcoming Israeli National Security Council report is therefore likely to focus on the future and seek a solution that satisfies Washington without offending Beijing—offering a set of recommendations to the cabinet that addresses economic needs while defending essential strategic installations and interests in the fields of water, land, energy, food, telecommunications, and finance.
One thing is clear: If the report leads to new laws or regulations, they will employ generic language that will avoid singling out any specific country. 

They will refer to all foreign governments and corporations— although everyone now knows that the main targets will be Russia and China.