Chinazism: Why you should worry if you have a Chinese smartphone

China’s use of technology for social control of its citizens is extensive – but it affects users elsewhere too

By Ian Tucker
Chinese firms have signed deals with cities around the globe that include facial recognition software. 

Samantha Hoffman is an analyst of Chinese security issues at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi). She recently published a paper entitled Engineering Global Consent: The Chinese Communist Party’s Data-Driven Power Expansion.

Internet pioneers heralded a time when information would be set free, giving people everywhere unfiltered access to the world’s knowledge and bringing about the decline of authoritarian regimes… that’s not really happened has it?
Bill Clinton said that, for China, controlling free speech online would be like “nailing Jell-O to the wall”. 

I wish he had been right. 

But unfortunately, there was too much focus on the great firewall of China and not enough on how the Chinese Communist party was trying to shape its external environment.

When did China pivot from seeing the internet as a US-generated threat to something it could use to discipline and punish its own population?
It’s not just the internet, it’s technology in general. 

If you go back to even the late 1970s and early 80s, the way the Chinese Communist party (CCP) talks about technology is as a tool of social management. 

It’s a way of not only coercive control, but also sort of cooperative control where you participate in your own management. 

It’s this idea of shaping the environment, shaping how people think, how they’re willing to act before they even know they’re making a choice. 

That’s the party’s idea.

When did that develop into what is called the social credit system?
Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin spoke about this in 2000. 

He said we need a social credit system to merge rule by law and rule by virtue. 

I don’t see it as different from the way Hannah Arendt describes how regimes attempt to make the law inseparable from ethics in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

How does the social credit system work for the average citizen? As they are going about their lives, are they continually earning and losing points based on their behaviour?
A pop cultural reference might be the Black Mirror episode Nosedive. 

But it isn’t the same. 

It’s not really a number score that goes up and down. 

There are multiple inputs. 

So you have, say, legal inputs, like a court record, and financial inputs. 

Then there are third-party inputs, such as surveillance video or data about your sentiment on social media. 

The system includes blacklists, records on public websites, and platforms to support decisions on creditworthiness that integrate things like “sentiment analysis”. 

This applies to companies and individuals. 

Muji’s Shanghai branch had a mark of dishonesty on its credit record with the Shanghai government because one of its products was labelled “Made in Taiwan”.

The number of people affected is enormous: 17.5 million people were prevented from buying flights in 2018. Is there much pushback from the Chinese population about this system?
An average person might not see how it’s affecting them yet. 

Social credit is technology augmenting existing control methods. 

So if you’re used to that system, you aren’t necessarily seeing the change yet. 

Blacklists aren’t new, but the technology supporting this social management is. 

And over time, as it becomes more effective, that’s where more people will notice the impact.

So there isn’t much concept of user privacy or anonymising data in China?
Privacy matters to the average Chinese citizen and there are privacy regulations in place. 

But privacy stops where the party’s power begins. 

And so, you know, the party state might put controls on how companies can share data. 

But again privacy stops where the party’s power begins. 

And that’s a huge difference in the system.
One thing that’s interesting to keep in mind is the system itself. 

When we think about China’s authoritarianism, we think about surveillance cameras, we think about facial recognition. 

But we forget that a lot of the technology involved provides convenience. 

And control happens for convenience. 

Some of the technologies involved in increasing the party’s power are actually providing services – maybe Mussolini and his timely trains is a useful way of thinking about it.
Dr Samantha Hoffman, an expert on China’s cyber security operations.

The most egregious example of this surveillance technology would be in East Turkestan for controlling the Uighur [Muslim] population?
The most visibly coercive forms of what the party is doing are unfolding in East Turkestan. 

It’s a virtual police state. 

There are QR codes on people’s doors for when the party goes in to check on who is in. 

Some researchers have found that if someone leaves through the back door instead of the front door, that can be considered suspicious behaviour.

Is the wider Chinese population aware of how the technology is being used in East Turkestan? Do they realise this is a more enhanced version of what we’ve got in their own lives?
I don’t think people are aware of how bad it is. 

A lot of people don’t believe Western reporting. 

If they see it. 

Even if they do believe it, propaganda has shaped a bad public opinion of the Uighurs.

Do you think the Chinese Communist party has a file on you?
I imagine that they probably have a file on a lot of outspoken researchers. 

I try not to think about what mine would look like. 

In general, a lot of researchers on China have a fear, whether it’s conscious or unconscious, about losing access or the ability to go to China.

You have written about your fears that a commercial deal struck between Huawei and a Turkish mobile operator could be used to monitor the exiled Uighur population in Turkey.
Chinese tech giants like Huawei are signing agreements for smart cities globally – in April we at Aspi counted 75. 

These agreements include public security, licence-plate and facial recognition tools. 

As a local government you’re taking what is the cheapest and best product for your city. 

You’re deploying it in ways you’ve decided are reasonable, but what might be forgotten is that these services require data to be sent back to the company to keep it up to date – and who else has access to that data once the manufacturer has it? 

One agreement was made with Turkish mobile provider Turkcell. 

Turkey has about 10,000 Uighurs living in exile – that system could be used to further control and harass exiles and family members in China.
More generally, I found that the party central propaganda department has made cooperation agreements with a number of major Chinese tech companies. 

As their products are bedded in they become ways of collecting tons of data. 

A language translation tool, for instance, doesn’t sound like a surveillance tool but it’s a way to collect a lot of data. 

Technically it’s not different from what Google does but their intent is different – it’s about state security.

So western governments should be wary of installing Chinese-designed tech infrastructure in their cities?
Yes. 

It’s perhaps uncomfortable for a lot of people to acknowledge, but the party is very clear about its intent. 

Its intent relates to state security. 

The party talks about “discourse power” – the party’s version of the truth being the only thing that’s accepted. 

The Chinese government ultimately controls all Chinese companies through its security legislation. You might be comfortable with someone collecting data to tailor advertising to you, but are you comfortable with sharing your data with a regime that has 1.5 million Uighurs imprisoned on the basis of their ethnic identity?

So we should be cautious about buying Chinese smartphones and smart home products?
I would be. 

You may think “I’m not researching the CCP or testifying in Congress, so I don’t have anything to worry about”. 

But you don’t really know how that data is being collected and potentially used to shape your opinion and shape your decisions, among other things. 

Even understanding advertising and consumer preferences can feed into propaganda. 

Taken together, that can be used to influence an election or feelings about a particular issue.

Some of these elements of monitoring and nudging are present in western life. For instance, fitness tracking that earns you discounts on health insurance, or local authorities using machine learning to identify potential abuse victims. Should we be careful about letting this stuff into society?
We need to be very careful. 

It’s easy to see what the benefits are, but we aren’t adequately defining the risks. 

Some of the problems can be dealt with by introducing more data literacy programmes, so that individuals understand, say, the privacy issues concerning a home-security camera.
The Chinese party state is taking advantage of the weaknesses in liberal democracies, whether they’re legal or cultural. 

They take advantage of our really weak data privacy laws. 

GDPR is a good step, but it doesn’t really deal with the core problem of technology that’s providing a service. 

By its nature the company providing the service collects and uses data. 

Who has access to that data, their ability to process it, and their intent is the problem.

China’s Most Dangerous Profession

Jung Chang is one of the most celebrated chroniclers of modern China. Her life spotlights the threat that writing still holds for the country’s rulers.

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Jung Chang at the Times Chelte​nham literary festival.

If you grew up in China in the 1950s and ’60s, as Jung Chang did, the last thing you aspired to be was a writer. 

“Writing was the most dangerous profession,” she told me recently.
In fact, writing was taken so seriously that most of the violent purges engineered by the Chinese Communist Party’s demigod leader, Mao Zedong—including the Cultural Revolution—began with an attack on some article or play or piece of literary criticism on the grounds of its alleged bourgeois or anti-Mao characteristics. 

There would be an opening salvo written by a Maoist acolyte, after which everybody who was anybody in China would line up in an Orwellian exercise of ritual denunciation of the isolated and defenseless writer. 

From there, the campaign would expand to claim hundreds of thousands of victims. 

“No parents would tell their child, ‘Become a writer,’” Chang said.
Of course, Chang did become a writer, leaving China to study in Britain in 1978, and over time a celebrated chronicler of the modern Chinese experience in the English language, one of the first from China itself to overturn some of the romantic-revolutionary conceptions of Mao and his era that had a remarkably long life in the West. 

Her first book, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China—a memoir of her grandmother, her mother, and herself living through China’s tragically turbulent 20th century—sold 10 million copies and was probably the most widely read personal account ever to come directly out of the belly of the Chinese beast. 

She followed that up 12 years later with a contentious, blistering, 800-page treatment of Mao himself, co-written with her husband, the historian Jon Halliday; then came an eye-opening revisionist biography of the Empress Dowager Cixi, a sinister villain in the eyes of most previous historians, a progressive feminist hero to Chang.
Her role as a writer who explained China to the West has dissipated somewhat—as China has grown in importance and as news coverage of the country and its impact on the world has increased. 

There are also now an array of writers from China, many of them living in the West, who have created a specifically Chinese voice that is accessible to foreigners in English (as well as a litany of other languages), with much of their best work, be it novels, memoirs, or journalism, banned in their motherland. 

In a way, these writers have picked up where Wild Swans left off, providing an ongoing dissenting portrait of China in the years since the events that Chang wrote about. 

In addition, a younger cadre of Western historians who study China deeply has emerged, demolishing whatever remains of Maoist apologetics.
Yet one thing is unchanged from Chang’s younger years: Writing about China remains a dangerous occupation—dangerous of course to China’s citizens, but now even to foreigners who challenge the official doctrine. 

Witness the storm of protest from China, the threats and the economic penalties imposed on the National Basketball Association over a single tweet by Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, who briefly wrote of (and hastily deleted) his support for pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong. 

China’s ruling authority has a very thin skin. 

Inside the country, the danger of writing leads to pervasive self-censorship, and more and more that appears to apply to those outside the country, too.
Of course, even at the time when Wild Swans appeared, Chang was not alone in opening Western eyes to the full horror of the Maoist era. 

When we spoke, she was quick to give credit to Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai, an unforgettable account of survival in the Cultural Revolution, as an earlier example of such works. Subsequently there have been other books—Wu Ningkun’s A Single Tear and the physicist Fang Lizhi’s The Most Wanted Man in China among the most affecting of them. 

But while she hasn’t had the field to herself for a long time, Chang occupies a special position, not only because Wild Swans, with its historical, multigenerational sweep and its sheer narrative power, is a true masterpiece, but also because she has moved on from memoirist to what might be called a polemical historian.
Chang could have followed what some might have expected to be her natural trajectory—becoming a kind of Chinese Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a public critic of China’s cruelly authoritarian, one-party system. 

Her more recent works, including Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, out October 29, instead take a different approach.
“I like the distance that only history provides,” she said. 

“History is no less devastating.” 

She meant devastating in the effect that an honest attempt at recounting the past can have on the sanctioned Chinese version of the past. 

In China, that is the heroic chronicle according to which the Communist Party rescued the country from the scourges of imperialism, poverty, and oppression. 

A few years ago, in a proclamation known as “Document Number Nine,” the party’s central committee warned against what it said were wrong ideological tendencies, among them “historical nihilism,” meaning history that undermines the official account of the past. 

“History is one of the biggest taboos in China today,” Chang told me. 

“It’s not some harmless, apolitical thing.” 

In this sense, Chang is one of the world’s leading historical nihilists.
Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is a collective biography of three women of China’s 20th century, the Soong sisters—famous for marrying powerful men, notorious for their extravagance and corruptibility, and for the ways they used their proximity to power. 

Soong Qingling (Red Sister) married Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the 1911 revolution that overthrew China’s last dynasty; Soong Meiling (Little Sister) was the wife of the Nationalist head Chiang Kai-shek, who led China for 20 years until he was overthrown by the Communists; and Soong Ailing (Big Sister) was married to H. H. Kung, Chiang’s corrupt minister of finance. 

Chang makes the case that the trio, in their different, conflicting ways, were both close observers of and participants in the deadly, knife-in-the-back struggle for power between Chiang’s Nationalists and the Communists that in one guise or another dominated China for a quarter century.
Like Wild Swans, the book intertwines the intimate with the big historical picture, tying their personal stories to the deep and irreconcilable political divisions among them. 

Meiling, for example, had an early, visceral dislike of the Communists, while Qingling loathed Chiang, her brother-in-law, which was one of the things that made her a faithful servant of Mao and the Communists most of her life. 

At the end of 1947, not long before the Nationalists would have to flee to what is now Taiwan, it had become clear to both Chiang and Meiling that the Communists were winning the Chinese civil war. Meiling, on a mission from her husband, invited Qingling on an outing to ask her what the Communists’ conditions were for ending the conflict. 

Qingling replied with “the same old make-believe,” Chang writes, “that she had nothing to do with the Communists” and didn’t know their conditions. 

Then Qingling “left her sister and boarded the next train to Shanghai, where she immediately informed the CCP of the conversation between her and Little Sister,” not wanting the party to suspect her of double-dealing.
The new book fits into the period between Cixi and Mao, and seeks to understand how China went from the promising days after the fall of the last dynasty to the Maoist wreckage. 

And while it is probably Chang’s least edgy, least contentious work, it is still stamped by her revisionist impulse.
Cixi was the most powerful person in China for most of the second half of the 19th century and has been regarded by most historians as a usurping, reactionary tyrant, but Chang portrayed her as a pioneering reformer, “the modernizer who brought China out of the medieval world,” as she put it to me. 

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Chang argued that it was Cixi who had fostered the freedom that China experienced in the couple of decades after the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty. 

“She was the first to ban foot binding, which had tormented my grandmother and Chinese women for a thousand years,” Chang said. 

“In school in China we learned that it was the Communist Party that did that.” 

Her and Halliday’s biography of Mao was criticized by some historians for always putting forth the worst possible interpretation of things. 

Still, informed by some 200 interviews with people who knew Mao, the book made a powerful case for the authors’ withering judgment of a man still admired in parts of the world as a revolutionary genius. 

In Chang and Halliday’s view, Mao belonged with Hitler and Stalin as one of the most destructive and hateful figures of 20th-century history.
Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister keeps in that revisionist tradition. 

Chang debunks Sun’s reputation as one of China’s great founding figures, for example, finding him to be not just mediocre and self-serving but at least partially responsible for bringing an end to the democratic experiment that marked the first couple of decades following the overthrow of the Manchus. 

She also blames him for inviting to China the Soviet advisers who brought Leninism to the country. 

In a significant recasting of conventional views on this topic, she also argues that it was Sun’s, and subsequently Chiang’s, war against the republican government in Beijing—presented by most historians as a liberation of the country from warlord control—that doomed the chance of a Chinese liberal democracy.
Chang is translating the book into Chinese for publication in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but almost surely not mainland China. 

It contains too much truth about Mao and the Communists to get past the censors. 

And here we see again the threat, in Beijing’s view, of writing: Not only are Chang’s and others’ published work not available to Chinese readers, but that work has led many of them to be exiled from the country. 

After her biography of Mao came out, Chang was banned from China. 

Only through the intervention of the British government did Chinese authorities relent slightly, allowing her to visit the country to see her 88-year-old mother, but just for two weeks at a time and under strict conditions.
“When I’m there, I’m in a cocoon,” she told me of her trips to China. 

“I can have no contact beyond my immediate family.” 

She spoke of her dread that even this “privilege” will one day be revoked, of the anxiety she experienced living apart from her mother, of the sadness she felt for being treated as what she called a “nonperson” in her home country. 

“But,” she said, “I realize this is the price I pay for writing honestly.”

‘No Regrets’: Hong Kong’s Protesters Test China’s Limits

Demonstrators and the embattled authorities are locked in an impasse.

By Andrew Jacobs and Tiffany May

A core group of combative young Hongkongers has come to define the antigovernment protests that have convulsed Hong Kong since June.

HONG KONG — Fat Boy is a college dropout with a youthful blush of acne who excels at playing video games and lives with his mother.

He is also a wily commander who leads a ragtag band of protesters willing to risk injury and arrest as they face off against the police.
Fat Boy oversees 50 or so Hong Kong protesters, ages 15 to 35, who focus their attacks on the police, government offices and Chinese-owned banks or other businesses they view as hostile to their movement. 

Their weapons — bricks, poles and Molotov cocktails — are often met with tear gas and rubber bullets. 

Occasionally, the police have responded with live fire.
They are part of a core of combative young Hongkongers, garbed in black, who have come to define the antigovernment protests that have convulsed this semiautonomous territory for more than four months and that have posed a bold challenge to the dictatorship of China’s Communist Party.
“You have to earn your rights and freedom,” Fat Boy, 20, said one afternoon this month at his apartment as he and three team members picked at takeout food and talked about their anxieties and aspirations. 

“For this, we can have no regrets.”

The protest leader known as Fat Boy in Hong Kong on Saturday.

With self-confidence, he showed off photos from the day he hot-wired an excavator at a construction site and drove it to the entrance of a police station.
“After I did that, other people copied me,” he said.
The protesters have escalated their use of aggressive tactics, smashing storefronts, setting bonfires at subway stations and taking justice into their own hands.
On Oct. 13, a protester stabbed a police officer in the throat with a box cutter, leaving him in serious condition. 

The same day, a homemade bomb detonated by cellphone exploded in a sidewalk planter, though it caused no damage or injuries.

Parts of a homemade bomb that exploded on Oct. 13.

Protesters and the authorities are locked in an impasse that feels as if it is edging closer to a fatality or perhaps even an intervention by Chinese troops that could further endanger the civil liberties long enjoyed by the territory’s seven million residents.
The protesters have been driven to extremes by a government that won’t meet their demands for greater democracy and an investigation into police conduct. 

Francis Lee, a journalism professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who has conducted public opinion surveys on the unrest, said the police and protesters were trapped in a vicious cycle of surging violence.
“We have reached a stage where it is difficult for either side to escalate their actions without creating backlash,” he said.
The city’s leaders and the police, seeking to drive a wedge between the front-line protesters and the broader public, have cast the demonstrators as rioters and violent vigilantes. 

Protesters clashing with police officers in riot gear in the Sha Tin area of Hong Kong on July 14.

For now, Hong Kong’s residents continue to back the protests by wide margins despite the violence, said Professor Lee, whose polling suggests that at least creating an independent commission on police conduct would go a long way toward defusing the crisis.
“These demands are not radical at all,” he said. 

“Doing them is very likely to be adequate to kick-start a process of de-escalation.”
Fat Boy, his three teammates and one other front-line protester agreed to be interviewed on the condition that they be identified by nicknames or first names only, for fear of being arrested.
The teammates include Jeff, a 24-year-old musician and skateboarder who quit his full-time job renovating apartments to devote himself to the protest movement; Kitty, a 21-year-old English major who recently left school for the same reason; and Tyler, 34, a construction manager who supports the brigade by supplying the helmets and carbon fiber shields that protect its members during confrontations with the police.
They said they wanted to push back against the Hong Kong government’s narrative likening them to thugs and mainland China’s propaganda that describes them as separatists. 

Their goals: to seek police accountability and secure the universal suffrage that Beijing promised when this former British colony was returned to China in 1997.
Like many Hong Kong youths, the front-line protesters assert an identity that, unlike in generations past, is fiercely distinct from that of mainland China.
Their anger is rooted in a growing sense that China’s Communist Party has worked swiftly to erode Hong Kong’s civil liberties, and as examples they point to the ousting of opposition lawmakers and detention of city booksellers by the mainland authorities.

With their gas masks and ninjalike attire, the front-liners are an unmistakable presence during demonstrations.

Samuel, 24, a freckle-faced protester and aspiring songwriter who is not part of Fat Boy’s group, explained, “We just don’t want to become like those Chinese who have become accustomed to living without freedom.”
During protests, Samuel erects roadblocks to slow down advancing columns of officers. 

He and the others defended their tactics and said they were being driven by mounting police brutality and an inflexible government.
A few of the democracy advocates conceded that the homemade bomb gave them pause.
Longhaired, lanky and contemplative, Jeff, the musician, equivocated when asked whether he approved of the bombing. 

He said that he didn’t think he could use such a weapon but that he might reconsider if its sole aim was to sow chaos and disperse charging police officers.
“I used to be someone who wouldn’t even throw a brick,” he said. 

“But every time I encounter an escalation by the police, my limit goes higher.”

A protester with a shield made from a street sign.

With their gas masks and sleek, ninjalike attire, the front-liners are an unmistakable presence during demonstrations. 

They have adopted the martial arts hero Bruce Lee’s ruminations on flexibility in the face of obstacles — “Be water, my friend” — saying they should behave like a wave that appears at once to pound the enemy and then promptly recedes into countless drops that cannot be contained.
They coordinate moves on encrypted messaging apps and are aided by four tacticians on three continents who remotely monitor the street battles.
It is impossible to know the number of antigovernment protesters who have embraced a more violent approach, but Fat Boy says he is aware of as many as 30 groups whose leaders meet face to face once or twice a month. 

The groups operate autonomously, with infrequent contact, an arrangement that helps protect them from arrest.
Fat Boy and those who direct the activities of the other groups are the closest thing to commanders in a movement largely characterized by the absence of readily identifiable leaders.
“It would be dangerous to talk to each other,” he said. 

“If one gets caught, all of us get caught.”

Police officers last month with protesters they had arrested.

So far, the police have arrested around 2,700 people, though most have been released on bail. 

About 200 could face 10 years in prison on charges of rioting. 

Roughly a third of them are under 18, and 100 of them are under 16.
Many of Fat Boy’s claims could not be independently verified, but his mother and the three front-liners on his team corroborated much of what he said.
He has named his team Hogwarts, after the mythical school of wizardry in the Harry Potter series, and says his group was one of the first to use Molotov cocktails, a weapon that was quickly embraced by other front-line protesters as a way to slow the advance of the riot police.
His team has been especially busy this fall. 

On Sept. 29, two days before National Day celebrations in China, several team members set fire to a subway station entrance, producing huge plumes of black smoke and drawing a battalion of firefighters.
On Oct. 1, they donned Guy Fawkes masks, burned paper portraits of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, near military barracks and quickly vanished.

Protesters set fire to a subway station entrance in Central Hong Kong on Sept. 29.

At first glance, Fat Boy is hardly menacing. 

He shuffles around his mother’s luxury apartment in slippers, toggling between cable news channels and video games like Red Dead Redemption. 

He rarely sleeps more than a few hours each night.
“I’m mentally and physically exhausted,” he said. 

“I think the police are tired too.”
As he spoke, Fat Boy’s mother cleaned up the apartment while Jeff and Kitty cuddled on the sofa — their romance began at a protest this summer.
Fat Boy’s mother was once largely apolitical but now attends the protests, handing out food and tending to those overcome by pepper spray or tear gas.
“Every time he goes out, I worry he and his friends will get hurt, or that they might not come home at all,” she said, wringing her hands.
Fat Boy said that his schooling influenced his political awakening. 

He attended an elite Hong Kong academy that he described as pro-China. 

It sent him and his classmates to the mainland for a week of military training, where he learned the value of leadership and how to fire a gun.
He later went to school in Canada, where he gained an appreciation for Western-style democracy and civil liberties. 

He is also well versed in military history and especially World War II, which he says taught him the importance of standing up to tyranny.
Fat Boy’s evolution from peaceful demonstrator to firebomb-throwing provocateur mirrors that of other combative protesters.
On June 9, he joined a million people who took to the streets in the very first protest against a contentious bill that would have allowed residents to be extradited to mainland China. 

Fat Boy and many others were infuriated after the city’s leader, Carrie Lam, said the legislation would proceed as planned, driving home the idea that peaceful demonstrations were useless.

On June 9, a million people took to the streets in the first protest against an extradition bill that was eventually withdrawn.

Three days later, on June 12, he joined thousands of protesters in surrounding the legislative complex to block debate about the bill. 

A core group lobbed umbrellas and bricks at the police, who responded with what critics say was excessive force, beating protesters with batons and dousing them with pepper spray and plumes of tear gas.
“On June 9, I was just a guy passing out fliers on the street. By June 12, I had 100 people at my side,” he said, referring to the confrontational core of protesters.

The protests escalated on June 12, when protesters surrounded Hong Kong’s legislative building.

To prevent infiltration by undercover officers, Fat Boy scrutinizes the social media accounts of new recruits. 

So far, he said, only five or six of his members have been arrested, all of them during street fights with the police.
Their support network includes Hong Kongers in Canada, Australia and Britain who help coordinate attacks on the police, he said. 

Studying protester chat groups and the live feeds from videographers on the ground, these remote tacticians can direct the front-liners — and help guide their retreat.
As he spoke, the rest of the crew was entranced by a particularly graphic video game that Fat Boy was playing on a large-screen TV. 

His mother winced as a Wild West gunslinger lassoed a man and dragged him to his death.
“It’s so realistic,” she said.
Fat Boy seemed to appreciate the moment’s irony and briefly put down the controls.
“Now it’s like we are playing a video game on the street,” he said with a sigh. 

“Except it’s real, and it’s not fun.”

Demonstrators faced police officers in Kowloon in August.

As China’s Troubles Simmer, Xi Reinforces His Political Firewall

With China mired in a trade war, economic slowdown and Hong Kong unrest, Xi Jinping will use an elite meeting to focus more on increasing his control over the Communist Party.

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING — Slowing economic growth. 

A rancorous trade war. 

Recalcitrant protesters in Hong Kong. 

A mass die-off of pigs and surging food prices. 

The frustrations are piling up for Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
But a gathering of the Communist Party elite this week will grapple with lurking risks that worry him more: dysfunction, divisions and disloyalty in the party.
Communist Party rule could eventually crumble if the party fails to constantly reinforce its grip on China, Xi said in a recently published speech, citing ancient emperors whose dynasties rotted from corruption, lax discipline and infighting. 

The Central Committee, a party conclave of about 370 senior officials, began meeting in Beijing for four days on Monday to approve policies intended to ward off such dangers.
“From ancient times to the present, whenever great powers have collapsed or decayed, a common cause has been the loss of central authority,” Xi said in the speech, which was given early last year but not issued till this month in a leading party journal, Qiushi.
“As I see it, we can be defeated only by ourselves,” he said. 

“Prevent strife starting from inside the family home.”
Xi has warned this year that China must prepare for “struggle,” an ominous term for domestic and external challenges, and has described his goal as building an authoritarian fortress against any shocks. 

The meeting this week, also called the plenum, will push efforts to sharpen China’s political defenses, likely including greater use of advanced technology to monitor and manage officials and citizens.
Xi laid out his proposals on the first day, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency, but no details were released.
“He’s looking at this from the viewpoint of the next 30 years,” said Tian Feilong, a professor of law at Beihang University in Beijing. 

“The system still isn’t strong enough for this struggle against all kinds of external forces, because it still has many holes.”
To critics, Xi’s drive to centralize power is not a cure for China’s policy missteps, but rather one of their chief causes. 

The intense pressure on lower officials to conform with the top leader has robbed them of room to debate, spot missteps, and alter course, they say.
Some have pointed to Xi’s misreading earlier in the year of how far he could push the Trump administration in trade talks, and China’s impasse in Hong Kong, where demonstrators have taken to the streets for 21 weeks.
“The principal problem stems from the nature of the political system which increasingly permeates all sectors of activity,” said Jonathan Fenby, China chairman of TS Lombard, a firm that advises investors. 

“The political constraints sap initiative.”

The Yangshan Deep Water Port in Shanghai. Chinese and American negotiators agreed to a provisional pause in their trade dispute this month.

‘Rumors of Displeasure’
For Xi, there is no issue more vital to his political survival than command of the party, and he appears anxious to stop setbacks from festering into wider doubts about his and the party’s capacity to rule.
Since 2012, he has repeatedly introduced offensives intended to rid officialdom of graft, factionalism and bureaucratic fragmentation, failings that he suggested weakened his predecessors. 

Last year, he swept away a term limit on the presidency, opening the way to an indefinite stay as president, Communist Party general secretary and chairman of China’s military.
“The plenum will be the latest step in this campaign,” Mr. Fenby from TS Lombard said. 

“It may bring institutional changes aimed at streamlining the transmission of orders and achieving further centralization of authority. But the main element is likely to be an intensification of Xi’s personal leadership.”
Two retired officials in Beijing and a businessman who talks to senior officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, described jitters in the party elite about Xi’s policies. 

Even so, that sentiment was far from coalescing into concerted opposition to him, they said.
“Rumors of displeasure — even animosity — toward Xi’s rule are rampant, but his hold on power appears firm,” said Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
A deeper worry for Xi and other top leaders is improving the effectiveness and morale of hundreds of thousands of junior officials who enforce their policies.
Many midranking officials resent Xi’s anticorruption drive, which has shrunk their income and influence, Ke Huaqing, a professor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing who studies the rules and workings of the party, said in an interview.
Cadres have also been punished for complaining about government policies, defying orders to move to other posts, or spreading rumors about leaders. 

When the party recently announced the punishment of Liu Shiyu, the former chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, it said his misdeeds included a “wavering” political stance and failure to rigorously enforce central leaders’ decisions.
“The Chinese Communist Party could get away without cleaning itself up,” Ke said, “but after a period of time it might collapse.”

A construction site in Beijing. The country has seen slowing economic growth.

‘Modernizing the System’
While the committee usually meets once a year at the walled Jingxi Hotel in western Beijing, this session has been unusually delayed — it has been 20 months since the last meeting.
That has led some to speculate that Xi feared rifts upsetting proceedings. 

Others have questioned why he has devoted the meeting to party organization issues when China faces many pressing problems.
“He would seek to delay a full gathering of the Central Committee until such time that he felt he had built a consensus,” said Mr. Blanchette from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who wrote an assessment of the speculation. 

“Xi can stand before his peers with some credible ‘wins.’”
He has had several of late. 

On Oct. 1, Xi presided over a military parade celebrating 70 years of Communist rule, basking in adulatory shouts of loyalty from 15,000 troops. 

Later in the month, Chinese and American negotiators agreed to a provisional pause in their trade dispute.
The group could discuss economic and foreign policy at the gathering. 

But often at this point in the leadership’s 5-year cycle of meetings, the Central Committee focuses on the party’s organizational and legal issues.
Some in Beijing have speculated that Xi could also use the meeting to elevate protégés as he lays the groundwork for a third term as party leader in 2022. 

Xi, though, was unlikely to signal a possible successor so soon, the three political insiders in Beijing said.
“Xi draws much of his strength from his careful cultivation of an air of implacable unassailability,” said Christopher K. Johnson, a former China analyst at the C.I.A. 

“Injecting that kind of uncertainty makes no political sense, particularly as his bid for a third term presumably is about to gear up.”

Soldiers during a parade in Beijing on Oct. 1 to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of communist China.

The official announcements at the end of the meeting on Thursday will most likely to focus on the official theme of “modernizing the system of governance.”
According to experts, the steps announced could include:

• Fleshing out the powers of the new party policy commissions that Xi has created to steer policy.
• Honing a shake-up of government begun last year that Xi said in July remains incomplete, creating gaps and poor coordination.
• Expanding the presence of party committees in businesses, organizations and neighborhoods to enforce policy and monitor potential discontent.
• Using high-tech monitoring to detect and extinguish sources of public ire, such as official misconduct, pollution or land disputes, before they ignite protests. China already leads the way in using collection of personal data, surveillance technology and online monitoring to stifle social threats, most notably in East Turkestan, the ethnically divided colony in western China.

Hong Kong Bars Joshua Wong, a Prominent Activist, From Seeking Election

Mr. Wong, a leader of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, had planned to run for a district council position amid widespread public anger with the government.
By Austin Ramzy and Elaine Yu

The democracy activist Joshua Wong speaking outside the Legislative Council building in Hong Kong on Tuesday, after being barred from running in district council elections next month.

HONG KONG — The Hong Kong authorities on Tuesday barred Joshua Wong, a prominent democracy activist, from running in district council elections next month, a blow to the protest movement’s efforts to convert deep anger toward the authorities into electoral gains.
The government cited statements by Mr. Wong’s political organization that the future of Hong Kong should be determined by its people, and independence is a possible option. 

An official said those statements were incompatible with the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, which states that the semiautonomous city is part of China.
“The candidate cannot possibly comply with the requirements of the relevant electoral laws, since advocating or promoting ‘self-determination’ is contrary to the content of the declaration that the law requires a candidate to make to uphold the Basic Law and pledge allegiance” to Hong Kong, the government said in a statement.
Mr. Wong said the decision showed that China’s central government was manipulating the election, which is expected to be a key test of public sentiment about the protest movement.
In a news conference outside the Hong Kong government headquarters, he called the decision to bar him “a political order that Beijing has handed down.”
Earlier he said that the official who made the decision had been relegated to a role as the “thought police.”
The district council elections, which will be held on Nov. 24, are usually focused on local issues such as bus stops and neighborhood beautification. 

But the race is taking on a broader political significance this year. 

Whichever side wins the most seats will control 117 votes in the 1,200-member election committee that chooses the next chief executive, Hong Kong’s top government position.
The pro-democracy camp’s fears of even wider prohibitions on their candidates seeking office have not been realized, as Mr. Wong will most likely be the only candidate barred from the district council race.
He said Tuesday that he hoped voters would support another candidate, Kelvin Lam, who had registered to run in the event of Mr. Wong’s disqualification.
Mr. Wong, 23, grew to international prominence as a student leader during the 2014 Umbrella Movement, when protesters occupied streets for weeks to push for freer elections. 

He was sentenced to short prison terms twice over the 2014 protests, and was still in custody in June when the current protest movement began.
The current protest movement began as a fight over a now-withdrawn extradition bill and has expanded its demands to include an investigation into use of force by the police and direct elections for the chief executive and the entire Legislative Council.
Unlike 2014, there are no widely known protest leaders. 

But Mr. Wong has remained a prominent participant and has been regularly attacked in the state-run Chinese media. 

In August, he and Agnes Chow, another 2014 protest leader who belongs to the same political group, Demosisto, were arrested on unauthorized assembly charges for a June 21 protest, when thousands of protesters surrounded police headquarters.
Ms. Chow was disqualified from running for the Legislative Council last year over similar questions of support for self-determination, including an option for independence. 

She won an appeal last month, with a judge ruling that she had insufficient opportunity to respond to the grounds for disqualification.
Ms. Chow said that ruling was a “Pyrrhic victory,” because it still upheld the ability of officials to disqualify candidates based on their political beliefs.
Mr. Wong had previously publicly shared his response to the official who disqualified him, Laura Aron, on Facebook on Saturday, where he argued that his advocacy remains within the bounds of the city’s Constitution.
“My position is that any decision on Hong Kong’s future should be carried out within the constitutional framework of ‘one country, two systems,’” he wrote. 

“Supporting democratic self-determination does not mean supporting Hong Kong’s independence from the central government of the People’s Republic of China.”
He added that comments two weeks ago by Chinese dictator Xi Jinping that any effort to divide the country would end in failure showed the futility of upholding such a position.
When Mr. Xi “threatened in strong terms that ‘anyone attempting to split China in any part of the country will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones,’ I believe that in reality Hong Kong independence cannot become an acceptable option,” Mr. Wong wrote.
Ms. Aron wrote in her decision that by referring to Mr. Xi’s comments, Mr. Wong suggested that “both Demosisto and he were pressed into saying that they have given up the notion as a compromise, instead of a genuine intention.”

Greedy America: Hollywood Is Paying an ‘Abominable’ Price for China Access

A kid’s movie has turned into a geopolitical nightmare for DreamWorks.
BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN 

A scene from "Abominable" taken in a theater and shared by Vietnamese media. 

Hollywood’s China reckoning has come. 

But unlike the NBA’s recent China debacle, this time it’s not the United States but China’s nearest neighbors who’ve had enough.
Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia have all expressed outrage at a map of China that flickers across the screen in a new film released in late September. 

The animated film, Abominable, is a joint production of DreamWorks and Pearl Studios, which is based in Shanghai. 

The map includes China’s infamous “nine-dash line”—the vague, ambiguously marked demarcation line for its territorial claim over most of the Vietnam East Sea.
The dispute points to a new problem for Hollywood as studios move closer to Beijing’s positions. Silence on China is nothing new—but positively pushing the Chinese government’s view of the world is.
Hollywood’s traditional self-censorship on China has market roots. 

China’s burgeoning market of movie-goers is expected to soon surpass the United States as the largest in the world. 

China’s censors have wielded this power adroitly, mandating that production companies abide by the party’s bottom lines in order to earn one of the 34 coveted spots allotted to foreign films for distribution in China each year. 

That has resulted in a deafening silence from Hollywood on the realities of Chinese Communist Party rule.
In the 1990s, several Hollywood films depicted oppression in Tibet, such as Seven Years in Tibet and Red Corner, and the Tibetan cause was popular among celebrities, most notably Richard Gere. 

But there hasn’t been a major film sympathetic towards Tibet since Disney’s 1997 film Kundun, for which Disney CEO Michael Eisner flew to Beijing to apologize to the Chinese leadership. 

Gere claims he has been frozen out of major films for his Tibet activism. 

The 2013 zombie movie World War Z altered the location of the origin of the zombie outbreak from China to North Korea. 

The 2016 film Doctor Strange changed the “Ancient One,” a Tibetan character in the original comic book series, to a white character played by Tilda Swinton. 

In the past decade, no major film has portrayed China as a military foe of the United States.
Omitting offending plot lines and characters was once enough to satisfy Chinese censors. 

But pressure has grown to include proactively positive depictions, particularly of Chinese science and military capabilities.
O. In the 2014 film Transformers: Age of Extinction, the Chinese military swoops in to save the day. One film critic described Age of Extinction as “a very patriotic film. It’s just Chinese patriotism on the screen, not American.” 

The payoff was enormous; Age of Extinction became the highest-grossing film of all time in China, raking in more than $300 million. (It no longer holds that record.) 

China saved the day again in The Martian, the 2015 science fiction film starring Matt Damon. 

NASA launches a special rocket carrying food for an astronaut stranded alone on Mars, but it explodes and NASA is out of options—until China’s space agency jumps into the plot out of nowhere, announcing it also has a special rocket it is willing to lend the Americans. (In fairness, the subplot was present in the original novel, not just introduced by the studio.) 

The Martian brought in $95 million at the Chinese box office.
The growing phenomenon of U.S.-China joint movie productions has also resulted in a proliferation of mediocre films that cast China in a conspicuously positive light. 

The 2018 B-grade shark flick The Meg, co-starring Chinese actor Li Bingbing, was one such coproduction. 

It features an American billionaire who finances a futuristic ocean research station located, in a narrative non sequitur, off the coast of China, run by brilliant and heroic Chinese protagonists.
Abominable appears to be another. 

It features a young Chinese girl who discovers a yeti on her roof. 

She decides to help the yeti find his way back home to the snowy mountains in the west, and they set off on a trek across China. 

It has gotten middling reviews: One critic wrote that the film is “so distinctive pictorially, and so manifestly good-hearted, that it’s easy to forgive if not quite forget the ragged quality of its storyline.”
But the Chinese government’s heavy-handed film regulation department seems to have gone a bridge too far. 

One scene in the movie includes a map of China on the young female protagonist’s wall. 

Nine slim dashes trace a U-shape around the Vietnam East Sea, a resource-rich body of water with numerous land features also claimed by the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Brunei.
China is the only country that recognizes this fallacious map. 

The nine-dash line has no basis in international law, which does not recognize any country’s sovereignty over open waters. 

In 2016, an international tribunal in the Hague also rejected China’s assertions of sovereignty over the Vietnam East Sea. 

Beijing has never clarified the line’s legal definition or even its precise location, likely because to do so would open its vague claims up to further legal challenge.
These issues will come into sharper focus as Beijing begins to demand positive submission, not just omission. 

China’s domestic film market has already shifted from censorship to forced inclusion of propaganda. 

Last year, as part of a sweeping reorganization that saw many Chinese Communist Party bureaus absorb the purview of government departments, the party’s propaganda office took over regulation of the film industry. 

The result has been even more heavy-handed censorship and more overtly patriotic content in films. Over the summer, six anticipated blockbusters were axed entirely, and China’s box office slumped.

Chinese Dream 中国梦

39 people found dead in Essex lorry were all Chinese

https://www.aljazeera.com
Thirty-nine people were found dead inside the truck container on Wednesday.

The 39 people found dead in a trailer shipped from Belgium to Britain are all believed to be Chinese nationals, British police said.
"We have since confirmed that eight of the deceased are women and 31 are men and all are believed to be Chinese nationals," police said in a statement on Thursday.
The Chinese foreign ministry said it was trying to confirm the report, according to the Global Times.
The paper, published by the official People's Daily newspaper of China's ruling Communist Party, said the foreign ministry said "nothing more could be released as of now".
Paramedics and police found the bodies early on Wednesday in a truck container on an industrial estate at Grays, about 20 miles (32 km) east of the British capital, London.
Belgian prosecutors confirmed the container was shipped from the port of Zeebrugge on Tuesday.
The tragedy recalls the deaths of 58 migrants in 2000 in a truck in Dover, England who had undertaken a perilous, months-long journey from China's southern Fujian province. 

They were discovered stowed away with a cargo of tomatoes after a ferry ride from Zeebrugge.
Essex Police were questioning a 25-year-old man from Northern Ireland over the latest tragedy.
He was arrested on suspicion of murder, the police said, adding that raids had been carried out at three properties in Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland police searched the properties in the Northern Irish village of Laurelvale, County Armagh late on Wednesday, where the driver and his family lived, according to the Belfast Telegraph.
The vehicle has been moved to a secure site at nearby Tilbury Docks where the bodies can be recovered and further forensic work undertaken to begin what police said would be the lengthy process of identifying the victims.
The National Crime Agency said it was assisting the investigation and working to "urgently identify and take action against any organised crime groups who have played a role in causing these deaths".
Shaun Sawyer, the national spokesman for British police on human trafficking, said many thousands of people were seeking to come to the United Kingdom. 

While they were able to rescue many of those smuggled into the country, Britain was perceived by organised crime as a potentially easy target for traffickers.
"You can't turn the United Kingdom into a fortress. We have to accept that we have permeable borders," he told BBC radio.

How Hong Kongers Show Which Businesses Are Friend or Foe

Hongkongers are adopting small-scale actions to keep the protest movement from stalling, among them a rating system for business for or against the uprising.
By Brendon Hong

HONG KONG—Yellow shop, blue shop, red shop, black shop?
That isn’t the first line in a modern nursery rhyme. 

Rather, it outlines an act of resistance that the people of Hong Kong participate in every day.
Recognizing that the path to true self-governance is one that will take years, if not longer, Hongkongers are adopting small-scale actions so that the protest movement does not stall. 

Medical professionals have daily strikes during daylight hours. 

In the evenings, people meet at certain public squares or in shopping mall atriums so they have a constant, regular presence. 

At night, some yell out protest slogans through their apartment windows.
Street-level actions don’t have the seven-figure turnout like months ago, and are often more scattered throughout the city. 

There’s worry that Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, will invoke emergency powers and cancel the upcoming district elections, where pro-democracy candidates are expected to grab many new seats. 

So, Hongkongers have shifted tactics, and are, for now, voting with their wallets.
For the past few weeks, lists of businesses have been circulating in Hong Kong, each name carrying a color code that defines the stance of its proprietors and general outlook regarding the ongoing protests that have evolved into a movement to shake off the Chinese Communist Party’s influence in the city’s affairs.
Shops and brands that are “yellow”—the color of the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement of 2014—are mostly local, and each in its own way supports those who wear black clothing, gas masks, and hard hats every weekend to translate city-wide discontent into street-level action. 

“Blue” businesses are those where you might find the staff wearing “I (heart) the police” T-shirts, as well as outspoken supporters of the establishment and Carrie Lam.
“Red” shops are affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, while “black” shops—not to be confused with protester-black—are CCP fronts or belong to the Party through direct ownership or shell companies.
The lists serve as guidelines for consumption. 

Hongkongers are encouraged to spend their dollars at businesses like independent bookshops and certain eateries that are marked “yellow.” 

Restaurants that are “blue” have seen steep drops in footfalls in many districts because of the boycott. Starbucks is a chain that is often smashed up during large marches, because it is managed by local conglomerate Maxim’s Caterers; in September, Annie Wu, the daughter of Maxim’s founder, spoke before the United Nations Human Rights Council along with other tycoons, utilizing talking points from CCP propaganda to condemn the blackshirt protesters in her city.

Overtly Chinese businesses see the harshest attacks. 

A branch of Tong Ren Tang, a 350-year-old traditional Chinese medicine maker that was founded in Beijing, was set on fire on Sunday night. 

Throughout the month, Bank of China and China Construction Bank branches saw their ATMs torched in several neighborhoods in the city; some of these banks’ locations are now encased in steel walls to prevent protesters from forcing their way in.
The attacks on “blue,” “red,” and “black” locations have lasted for weeks in Hong Kong, and they remind us of scenes from when the blackshirts briefly seized the legislative building in July. 

There is chaos, but also discipline: No stealing, especially cash. 

Looting is forbidden.
In fact, after the fire set at a store opened by Xiaomi, a Chinese smartphone and consumer electronics company, was put out on Sunday night, one man who was found to be scavenging for new phones was apprehended and tied up by protesters, and then left on the street with a handwritten cardboard sign that read “thief.”
On some days, especially over the weekends, there’s a heavy dose of vigilantism on the streets in Hong Kong, yet support from the public remains high. 

A mid-October poll conducted by the Center for Communication and Public Opinion Survey at the Chinese University of Hong Kong indicates that more than 70 percent of people in the city believe that it is acceptable for protestors to use some level of force in the current conditions.
The yellow-blue dichotomy was originally meant to be a boycott campaign, and it quickly gained traction. (The “red” and “black” tags were added later.) 

After Chief Executive Carrie Lam invoked emergency powers to implement a ban on masks, fewer people have been willing to hit the streets for marches than in the summer (though many still wear face masks during their commutes and regular, daily situations to signal their dissatisfaction). Boycotts of “blue” businesses were designed to be a mode of daily participation in the larger blackshirt movement, so that people would be mindful of channeling their disposable income toward proprietors who keep the welfare of the city in mind.
This act may be small, but it’s a constant reminder that the Chinese Communist Party’s greatest weapon in Hong Kong is one that is commercial, wielded by its tycoon proxies and shell companies that are swallowing up swathes of industries.
In mid-September, local pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily ran a report that Lam had met with more than 30 senior managers of Chinese state-owned enterprises, discussing the possibility of these companies taking more control of various business sectors in Hong Kong. 

Lam denied that was the case, saying the meeting was routine.
And yet the CCP has a history of using businesses to distort public discourse in Hong Kong. 

The most explicit example is the Party’s progress in monopolizing the city’s media and publishing industries. 

The CCP owns two newspapers in the city, Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao. 

The English-language broadsheet with the highest circulation in the city, the South China Morning Post, was bought in 2016 by Alibaba, which has become an e-commerce juggernaut with the blessing of Beijing. 

And as of four years ago, the Party’s liaison office in Hong Kong—its political representative in the city—enjoys around an 80 percent market share in book publishing, printing, distribution, and retail.
For individuals who refuse to compromise their principles, things can escalate quickly. 

In 2014, the once-liberal newspaper Ming Pao saw its chief editor nearly hacked to death by men armed with cleavers. 

It was widely believed that the assault was political motivated. 

On more than one occasion, the house of Apple Daily owner Jimmy Lai was firebombed.
Will the boycott of non-“yellow” businesses work? 

Likely not—at least not if the goal is to remove Chinese capital from the port city. 

Hong Kong and mainland China’s economies are inseparable. 

Look hard enough at any set of books, and you’ll likely find a Chinese supplier, customer, or even investor that is linked to the business. 

For now, those details are overlooked by many protesters. 

The blackshirt movement’s color-coded resistance is keeping the broader population engaged, asserting an acutely anti-CCP message in everyone’s minds at all times. 

In those terms, it has been extremely effective.

Freedom Fighter

A Pop Star Defends Democracy in Hong Kong
By JAY NORDLINGER
Denise Ho performs at the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway, May 27, 2019. 

In the forthcoming issue of National Review, I have a piece about Tanya Chan, who is a Hong Konger: She is a legislator and a democracy leader, in the thick of it all. 

She is also an inspiration.
Today, I talked with Denise Ho — who is also an inspiration. 

She, too, is a Hong Konger, and a democracy leader, in the thick of it all. 

She is also a pop star — a household name in Hong Kong and beyond. 

Her activism has not come without costs. 

She has paid a price in engagements, endorsements, etc. 

Obviously, she is persona non grata in Mainland China — which is a very big market. 

But she could not remain silent. 

Something within her impelled her to join the others in the streets.
For my podcast with her — a Q&A — go here.
We met at Town Hall in New York City, where the Oslo Freedom Forum was holding a special session. (On the façade of Town Hall, it says in big, bold letters, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”) 

We talk about her life and career. 

The prospects for democracy in Hong Kong. 

The brutality of the police. 

The question of Taiwan. 

And other key subjects.
She says that all people who favor democracy, freedom, and human rights — wherever they live — are linked. 

They are allies, and should stand together against oppressors.
Usually, Q&A goes out with music by Glazunov (which is how the show is introduced, too) — the last movement of his Symphony No. 5, “Heroic.” 

This time, it goes out with a Denise Ho song. 

Again, here.

Die Endlösung der Uigurischfrage

Chinese Muslims reveal rapes, abortions and forced sterilisations using chilli paste at concentration camps as shocking footage emerges of hundreds of shackled and blindfolded prisoners

• Ruqiye Perhat claimed: 'Any woman or man under age 35 was raped and abused'
• Gulzira Mogdyn, 38, said that officials cut her open and ripped out her fetus
• Footage of shackled and blindfolded Uighur prisoners being moved emerged
• Some one million Muslims are held in concentration camps in East Turkestan

By JAMES GANT and BILLIE THOMSON

Mulim women who have fled China's concentration camps have revealed a world of rapes, abortions and sterilisations as they find refuge abroad.
It comes as shocking footage emerged allegedly showing hundreds of shackled and blindfolded Muslim prisoners being transferred in East Turkestan, western China.
UN experts say at least one million ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims are held in the concentration camps in East Turkestan.
The escaped women say attempts to curb the Muslim population -- using methods such as rubbing chilli paste on women's privates -- are common. 

Muslim women who have fled Chinese concentration camps have revealed a world of rapes, abortions and forced sterilisations as they find refuge abroad. Gulzira Mogdyn (pictured), 38, said officials cut her open and ripped out her fetus without anaesthetic.

Student Ruqiye Perhat, who was arrested in East Turkestan in 2009 and spent four years in prison before fleeing to Turkey, told the Washington Post: 'Any woman or man under age 35 was raped and sexually abused.'
And others who have fled the camp more recently claimed the rapes had become more systematic than in normal prisons.
The camps' guards would put bags on the heads of the ones they wanted before dragging the women outside and raping them through the night.
In one case, there had been seven instances of women forced into having intrauterine devices implanted.
And women who were pregnant when they were arrested were made to have brutal abortions.

The camps' guards would 'put bags on the heads of the ones they wanted' before dragging the women outside and raping them through the night. Pictured: Gulzira Mogdyn on the phone at a bus stop on the outskirts of Almaty, Kazakhstan 

Gulzira Mogdyn, 38, who fled to Almaty, Kazakhstan, told of the gruesome way Chinese officials cut her open and ripped out her fetus without anaesthetic.
Others have previously said the Chinese guards would also medically experiment on them ahead of planned organ harvesting.
China has been forced to defend its authorities' actions as 'normal tasks' following the emergence of shocking footage purported to show hundreds of shackled and blindfolded Muslim prisoners being transferred.
The drone video shows the detainees being led from trains with their heads shaven, eyes covered and hands bound.
The video, uploaded to social media, appeared as the United States is increasing its pressure on Beijing over what it says is the systematic oppression of Muslims. 

Social media footage purports to show Uighur Muslim prisoners being transferred in China
With their heads shaven, eyes covered and hands bound, the detainees are seen wearing purple vests with the words 'Kashgar Detention Center' written on their backs in the clip

The prisoners are also seen in the clip sitting in rows outside what appears to be a train station watched by dozens of Chinese SWAT officers.
Many of them, thought to be ethnic minority Uighurs, are seen wearing purple vests with the words 'Kashgar Detention Center' written on their backs.
Former detainees have revealed that Muslims were forced to eat pork and speak Mandarin in those concentration camps.
China has also kept thousands of Uighur children away from their Muslim parents before indoctrinating them in camps posing as schools and orphanages, recent evidence shows.

The detainees are seen sitting in rows in a train station watched by dozens of Chinese SWAT officers
The clip then shows them being taken away by the Chinese SWAT officers to an unknown location
A Western intelligence official was able to verify the movement of some 500 prisoners earlier this year from Kashgar to Korla in East Turkestan, a Muslim-dominant colony in western China

Muslims make up about two per cent of the 1.4 billion population in China. 

However, as the country is so populous, its Muslim population is expected to be the 19th largest in the world in 2030.
The Muslim population in China is projected to increase from 23.3 million in 2010 to nearly 30 million in 2030.
The clip, filmed by a Chinese-made DJI drone, was posted to YouTube last month by a user known as 'Fear on War'.
Words in the video suggest the scene was captured in Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, an autonomous prefecture for Mongols in southern East Turkestan.

A pervasive security apparatus has subdued the ethnic unrest that has long plagued China's north-western East Turkestan colony. Chinese officials have largely avoided comment on the concentration camps, but some said that "ideological changes" are needed to fight "separatism". 
Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in East Turkestan have been told to vow loyalty to the Communist Party of China and the country's dictator Xi Jinping. Pictured, a woman walks past a screen showing images of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Kashgar on June 4, 2019
Authorities in China's East Turkestan colony have rounded up an estimated one million mostly Muslim Turkic-speaking minorities into concentration camps.

Nathan Ruser, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said the footage was likely to have been taken at the Korla West Train Station in Korla after analysing the footage, according to Mr Ruser's tweets.
Korla is a city of 550,000 people in Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture.
Authorities of East Turkestan said: 'Transporting inmates by judicial authorities (is related) to normal judicial activities.'

A Western intelligence official believed the footage to be authentic. 

The official was able to verify the movement of some 500 prisoners earlier this year from Kashgar to Korla, according to CNN.

Chinese Muslims face terrible conditions in concentration camps

Omir Bekali cries as he details the psychological stress endured while in a Chinese concentration camp. The programme aims to rewire detainees' thinking and reshape their identities 

A European security source also claimed that the footage was genuine and showed up to 600 Uighur Muslim prisoners being moved earlier this year.
The source told Sky News last month: 'This is typical of the way the Chinese move this type of prisoner.'
New York-based Human Rights Watch said the footage demonstrates the 'gross human rights violations' against Uighurs from Beijing.

It called for an independent investigation into China's treatment of its Muslim residents.
A spokesperson from the group told MailOnline: 'While HRW hasn't yet corroborated this footage, it raises the specter of many of the same kinds of gross human rights violations against Uyghurs we have documented -- especially mass arbitrary detention and lack of access to family or counsel.
'It underscores the urgent need for an independent investigation; Chinese authorities lost all credibility on this issue months ago by denying these abuses even exist.'

Uighur men are seen leaving a mosque after prayers in East Turkestan's Hotan city on May 31, 2019
China is systematically indoctrinating Uighur Muslim children with detainee parents in what has been described as 'children's education camps', investigation has shown 
Radical Muslim Uighurs have killed hundreds in recent years, and China considers the region a threat to peace in a country where the majority is Han Chinese. Armed police and soldiers are common sight in East Turkestan after ethnic unrest in capital Urumqi left nearly 200 people killed

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week blasted China over its treatment of Uighur Muslims.
Pompeo reserved his toughest criticism for China in a keynote speech at a Vatican conference on religious freedom.
'When the state rules absolutely, it demands its citizens worship government, not God. That's why China has put more than one million Uighur Muslims ... in concentration camps and is why it throws Christian pastors in jail,' he said.
'When the state rules absolutely, God becomes an absolute threat to authority,' he said. 

Chinese government systematic campaign against Turkic Muslims

A building of what is officially called a "vocational skills education centre" in Hotan, East Turkestan

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had previously called Beijing's treatment of the country's ethnic Uighur minority among 'the worst stains on the world'.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week said China 'demands its citizens worship government, not God' in a keynote speech at a Vatican conference on religious freedom

China has come under international scrutiny over its policies in the north-western colony of East Turkestan, where as many as one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities are being held in concentration camps, according to the 2018 findings of an independent UN panel.
After initially denying their existence, Beijing now defends the camps, which it calls 'vocational education centres', as a necessary measure to counter "religious extremism and terrorism".
But former inmates and rights groups say individuals are subjected to political indoctrination and abuse.

Who are the Chinese Muslims?
Muslims are not a new presence in China. 

Most of China's Muslim communities, including the Hui, Uighurs and Kazakhs, have lived in China for more than 1,000 years, according to fact tank Pew Research Center.
The largest concentrations of Muslims today are in the western colonies of East Turkestan, Ningxia, Qinghai and Gansu.
A substantial number of Muslims live in the cities of Beijing, Xi'an, Tianjin and Shanghai.

Chinese Muslim men take part in gathering for the celebration of the Muslim holiday, Eid al-Adha, or the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice, at the Niu Jie mosque in Beijing, China

They make up about two per cent of the 1.4 billion population in China. 

However, as the country is so populous, its Muslim population is expected to be the 19th largest in the world in 2030.
The Muslim population in China is projected to increase from 23.3 million in 2010 to nearly 30 million in 2030.
Those who grow up and live in places dominated by the Han Chinese have little knowledge about Islam -- or religions in general -- thus view it as a threat.
Beijing's policymakers are predominately Han.
Uighurs in particular have long been used to heavy-handed curbs on dress, religious practice and travel after a series of deadly riots in 2009 in Urumqi, according to the Financial Times.
Schoolchildren were banned from fasting during Ramadan and attending religious events while parents were banned from giving newborns Muslim names such as 'Mohammed' and 'Jihad'.
Certain symbols of Islam, such as beards and the veil, were also forbidden. 

Women with face-covering veils are not allowed on buses. 

Unauthorised pilgrimages to Mecca were also restricted.