Closeted communist: Beijing represses Hong Kong with active Tim Cook's help

Apple bans an app because Hong Kong protesters use it to avoid the murderous, out of control police

https://boingboing.net

Hkmap Live is a crowdsourced app that uses reports from a Telegram group to track the locations of protesters, police, and traffic, as well as the use of antipersonnel weapons like tear gas, mass arrests of people wearing t-shirts associated with the protest movement, and mass transit closures in proximity to demonstrations (it's a bit like Sukey, the British anti-kettling app).
The escalation of indiscriminate violence by Hong Kong's police has driven mainstream opposition to the Chinese state and the Hong Kong authorities. 

The protests continue to grow, the police continue to attack families, elderly people, bystanders, and the main body of protesters, with no mercy or quarter -- including the on-camera, point-blank shooting of an unarmed, nonviolent protester. 

In this context, Hkmap isn't just a way for protesters to evade police, it's a survival lifeline for innocent people facing an occupying army of sadistic armed thugs.
But Iphone owners in Hong Kong can't access the Hkmap Live app anymore. 

Apple has removed it from the App Store, telling the app's creators that "Your app contains content - or facilitates, enables, and encourages an activity - that is not legal ... Specifically, the app allowed users to evade law enforcement."
This isn't the first time that Apple has used its monopoly over which apps can be used on Ios devices to help the Chinese state abuse human rights: in May 2018, the company removed all working VPNs from the App Store, leaving only compromised ones that the Chinese state could surveil.
Apple is America's largest tech company, and its corporate communications have presented the company as an ethical alternative to "surveillance" companies like Google, but while Apple doesn't spy on you to advertise to you, it certainly is willing to facilitate state spying on its customers for the purpose of abetting their arbitrary arrest, torture, and executions.
Moreover, Apple often describes its locked-down App Store model -- which uses technical countermeasures and legal threats to prevent its customers from installing apps that it hasn't approved -- as a way of defending its users' security from unethical apps (this was a claim that was repeatedly raised last year when Apple led an industry coalition that defeated 20 state-level Right to Repair bills).
But Apple's absolute control over the App Store means that when a state suborns the company to serve as part of its anti-democratic enforcement system, users are corralled in its walled garden where they are easy pickings for murderous authoritarians and their hired killers.
Moreover, this outcome is entirely predictable: when you design your device so that users can't override your decisions, you practically beg authoritarian governments to order you to make decisions that help them control their citizens.

HKmap.live 全港抗爭即時地圖@hkmaplive
"Your app contains content - or facilitates, enables, and encourages an activity - that is not legal ... Specifically, the app allowed users to evade law enforcement."@Apple assume our user are lawbreakers and therefore evading law enforcement, which is clearly not the case.
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8:58 PM - Oct 1, 2019


Pinboard@Pinboard
It appears that Apple has rejected an app that warns Hong Kongers about police activity. The Hong Kong police force shot a high schooler in the chest yesterday and put seventy people, from 11 to 75, in the hospital. That app saves lives in Hong Kong. Let me tweet about it a bit https://twitter.com/hkmaplive/status/1179108329240424448 …
HKmap.live 全港抗爭即時地圖@hkmaplive
"Your app contains content - or facilitates, enables, and encourages an activity - that is not legal ... Specifically, the app allowed users to evade law enforcement."@Apple assume our user are lawbreakers and therefore evading law enforcement, which is clearly not the case.
751
5:14 AM - Oct 2, 2019

Standing With The People Of Hong Kong For Human Rights And Democracy

By Ewelina U. Ochab

September 15 marks the International Day of Democracy, a UN day aimed at reminding us of the importance of democracy. 

This year’s commemoration focuses on participation. 

Indeed, democracy is built on participation as well as other principals such as inclusion and equal treatment. 

As the UN reminds us, “True democracy is a two-way street, built on a constant dialogue between civil society and the political class. This dialogue must have real influence on political decisions. This is why political participation, civic space and social dialogue make up the very foundations of good governance. It is even more true with the impact of globalization and technological progress.” 

Unfortunately, this crucial civic space continues to shrink. 

“Civil society activists are finding it increasingly difficult to operate. Human rights defenders and parliamentarians are under attack. Women remain vastly under-represented. Journalists face interference, and in some cases violence.” 

These are all signs of democracy undermined or even at risk of collapse. 

Marking the UN day, the UN “urges all governments to respect their citizens’ right to active, substantive and meaningful participation in democracy.”

Protesters are seen holding up umbrellas while they walk down a street in Hong Kong on August 18, 2019. According to the organizers, over 1.7 million people attended the rally. 

However, in many parts of the world, such calls are bluntly ignored. 

The recent protects in Hong Kong are a perfect example. 

The protests in Hong Kong were sparked by a proposed extradition bill that would have enabled China to extradite individuals from Hong Kong and try them in mainland China. 

The bill has rightly sparked concerns. It could be interpreted as one step towards tightening the Chinese power grip over Hong Kong.
Hong Kong was handed back to China from British control in 1997. 

Hong Kong is governed under the authority of the Chinese government. 

The handover agreement was meant to guarantee Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy and accommodate the “one country, two systems” framework. 

Indeed, Hong Kong has an independent judiciary, legislature, a free press and other freedoms, that are often lacking in mainland China.
In light of the protests, the extradition bill was suspended in mid-June. 

The protests, nonetheless, continued with calls to officially withdraw the bill. 

First on September 4, 2019, Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, announced that her government will formally withdraw the extradition bill. 

As this step was taken too little too late, the protests continue.
In response to the protests, the authorities have been resorting to more and more excessive measures to curb the ongoing protests. 

Furthermore, towards the end of August 2019, several pro-democracy advocates, including Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow were arrested. 

They were charged with offences including taking part in an "unlawful" assembly. 

It is assessed that more than 800 people have been arrested since the being of the protests in June 2019.
As the UN reports, there is credible evidence of “law enforcement officials using anti-riot measures which are prohibited by international norms and standards.” 

Some examples include “firing tear gas canisters into crowded, enclosed areas and directly at individual protesters on multiple occasions, creating a considerable risk of death or serious injury.”
The UN called upon the authorities to act with restraint when responding to such protests; respect and protect peaceful protesters and ensure that any response to acts of violence is in accordance with international standards on the use of force. 

These calls appear not to be heard.
The example of the protests in Hong Kong and the excessive response to them shows the ever-growing challenges to participation, a necessary principle for any functioning democracy. 

As there is little international support and solidarity towards the peaceful protesters exercising their right to freedom of expression and assembly, fundamental human rights enshrined in international legal standards, the authorities that try to suppress them will only continue until they break those protesting.
In solidarity with those protesting, on September 9, 2019, over 130 British parliamentarians delivered a letter to the U.K. Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, calling for international support for the people of Hong Kong. 

 Their letter emphasized that: “China’s recent words and actions indicate that their leadership has moved away from the commitment to upholding Hong Kong’s way of life, enshrined in their Basic Law and founded on values we share: commitment to the rule of law, democracy and human rights. The continuing protests by the courageous people of Hong Kong have been their response to increasing restrictions on those values.”
Standing alongside the people of Hong Kong, speaking up for their human rights and democracy, should be commended and encouraged. 

The alternative incites further human rights violations and suppression that should not be accepted in the 21st century.

Chinese Internet Pioneer Who Exposed Misdeeds Gets Heavy Prison Term

By Ian Johnson

Huang Qi in his apartment in 2013 in Chengdu, China. A Chinese court convicted him of disclosing state secrets.

A Chinese internet pioneer who once won Communist Party praise for using the Web to combat social ills was sentenced Monday to 12 years in prison — a further sign that the window for independent social activism in China has all but closed.
Huang Qi, 56, who spent nearly 20 years exposing local government malfeasance and brutality, and has already served eight years in prison, was found guilty by a court in southwestern China of “deliberately disclosing state secrets” and “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities,” according to the court statement.
In addition to the prison term, he was deprived of political rights for four years and fined 20,000 yuan, or nearly $3,000.
It was one of the longest sentences given to a rights advocate in recent years and followed calls for clemency by human rights groups, foreign governments and the United Nations. 

In light of Mr. Huang’s chronic bad health, including high blood pressure as well as kidney and heart problems, the nongovernmental organization Reporters Without Borders called the 12-year term “equivalent to a death sentence.”
Mr. Huang was most recently arrested in 2016 for “inciting subversion of state power,” which often carries a prison term of up to 10 years.

 The more serious charge of divulging state secrets, and its longer sentence, may have stemmed from his unwillingness to cooperate or confess, according to Patrick Poon of Amnesty International.
During a secret trial in January, Mr. Huang reportedly denied all wrongdoing and criticized the government, according to one associate who asked to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions.
“The authorities are using his case to scare other human rights defenders who also do similar work,” said Mr. Poon. 

“Due to his popular website and broad network of volunteers and grass-roots activists, his case is highly sensitive.”
Mr. Huang is one of several activists recently targeted for running human rights websites. 

One, Zhen Jianghua, who ran the Human Rights Campaign in China, was sentenced to two years last December, while another, Liu Feiyue, received five years in January for running the Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch.
Mr. Huang’s 64Tianwang website was a ticker of social unrest.
He and his team of volunteers fielded dozens of phone calls a day, often from people appealing government decisions to expropriate their land. 

Many were engaged in street protests or presenting petitions to government agencies, and Mr. Huang’s team reported on their complaints and actions.
When he started his site in 1999, Mr. Huang and his former wife, Zeng Li, helped missing children and their parents unite.
In a 1999 profile, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, People’s Daily, focused on a man who had disappeared after he followed the banned spiritual practice Falun Gong. 

Through the site’s efforts, the man’s family found out he had committed suicide.
While that story was in line with government priorities, the newspaper’s report also discussed other more sensitive cases that the site handled, including the kidnapping of rural children, which was rampant in the 1990s because of the government’s single-child policy.
The website’s name reflected its agenda. 

“Tianwang” means “heavenly web,” referring to the idea of heaven as a synonym for “justice.” 

The numbers 6 and 4 referred to the date of the site’s founding: June 4, 1999. 

But that date was also — not coincidentally, Mr. Huang said in later interviews — the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, when pro-democracy protesters were killed in Beijing.
Soon after the flattering profile in People’s Daily, the site’s social edge sharpened. 

Eventually Mr. Huang paid a heavy price.
In 2000, the site reported on migrant laborers forced to undergo unnecessary appendectomies, and pay exorbitant bills at state-run hospitals. 

This also won government praise.
But later that year, the site began reporting on the violent suppression of Falun Gong, which included the beating deaths of followers in police custody. 

Shortly after that report, Mr. Huang was arrested and served five years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power.”
He said he spent a year in solitary confinement, often sleeping on a concrete floor, which damaged his kidneys and led to regular dialysis.
Released in 2005, Mr. Huang reopened the site and won numerous human rights awards for his reporting of malfeasance, especially about the shoddy construction of schools that collapsed in the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake.
Those reports led to another prison stay, this time of three years.
He relaunched the site after his release, remaining optimistic that it was having an effect. 

In a 2013 interview, he said that the site was read by the country’s security apparatus, and that it helped publicize citizen grievances, applying pressure.
Mr. Huang also expressed optimism that the new government of Xi Jinping would be more tolerant of his work because of its avowed goals of promoting a transparent legal system and cracking down on corruption.
Mr. Huang said, however, that the struggle could be prolonged and costly. 

Comparing his efforts to those of American revolutionaries, he said the British agreed to negotiate only after Washington inflicted defeats on them.
“It’s like that with us now,” Mr. Huang said.

 “It’s only after pressure from the people that the government will change its opinions.”

Hong Kong sends China a powerful message and proves President Trump is right

By Rebecca Grant 

Hong Kong’s message to Beijing is loud and clear. 

That city won’t succumb to creeping Chinese control, and the rest of the world shouldn’t either.
The crowds filling the streets between Hong Kong’s thin skyscrapers want to protect their autonomy, free speech, and basic rights against an insidious tide of Chinese Communist party influence. 

What started as a rally at the legislature against an extradition bill is now an unforgettable moment for this city of 7 million.
“Before this week I’d never been on a protest,” one 28-year-old Hong Kong resident told Britain’s The Guardian.


“We are watching the people of Hong Kong speak about the things they value,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday.
Hong Kong’s protests are a massive repudiation of Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power. 

Hong Kong is also showing the world that President Trump was right. 

It’s high time to confront China.
Beijing would love to make Hong Kong shut up. 

Hong Kong was a thriving British colony from 1842 until 1997. 

But Hong Kong depended on supply from the mainland, China was getting stronger, and it seemed like time to welcome China to the Western economic and financial system. 

Still, when Britain handed over control in 1997, Hong Kong made a good deal. 

China’s leader Deng Xiaoping promised Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy until 2047. 

Hong Kong kept its own court system, and most of the legal and institutional protections of a Western democracy under the doctrine of “one country, two systems.”
That included free speech and unrestricted internet access and street rallies – privileges rarely seen in mainland China. 

Hong Kong remains a prosperous financial hub and residents exercise their free speech rights with events like the so-called umbrella protests of 2014 and annual remembrances of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square incident. 

A cherished element of the agreement was that Hong Kong would not allow extraditions to mainland China. 

You can imagine why.

The lesson of Hong Kong? Hold firm when China won’t play by the rules. Trump saw that early on. Hence the tariffs and trade talks. Great Britain realized it too, deciding to remove Huawei devices from sensitive emergency response networks.

The new bill to permit Taiwan, mainland China, and other jurisdictions to extradite fugitives was sneaky. 

Just plugging a loophole and catching criminals, Hong Kong’s leadership claimed. 

Not so fast. 

China does not have an independent justice system. Hong Kong does. 

The extradition measure, if passed by Hong Kong’s legislature, would let Beijing pick up political dissidents, or really anyone, in Hong Kong.In this jewel of a city, people could just disappear.
Small protests began in March. 

Hong Kong Executive Carrie Lam said the bill would not apply to political crimes. 

Few believed her. 

Lam was appointed directly by Beijing, and she had put the extradition bill on a 20-day fast track.
Then in June, protests grew. 

This past weekend, organizers estimated 2 million out of Hong Kong’s population of over 7 million took to the streets. 

The protests brought Hong Kong to a standstill.
Consider that Martin Luther King’s March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs on August 28, 1963, tallied about 300,000, according to the National Park Service.
Whatever the exact headcount, the point is Hong Kong won’t succumb quietly.
Yes, there is a brutal murder case at the center of it all. 

Back in February 2018, 20-year old Chan Tong-Kai killed his pregnant girlfriend, stuffed her in a pink suitcase, and dumped the body on the outskirts of Taipei, Taiwan. 

Then he stole money from her bank account and fled back to Hong Kong. 

Chan confessed. 

Taiwan indicted him in late 2018, and that’s when the extradition problem arose. 

Sadly, the brutal murder case was basically exploited as a political smokescreen.
For its part, Taiwan has sided with Hong Kong’s protestors. 

Taiwan said back in May they no longer wanted fugitive, Chan. 

The political fate of Hong Kong is just too important.
For Xi, the scenes in the streets of Hong Kong are a nightmare. 

Xi hates unrest. 

Most of China’s 1.3 billion people won’t even see what’s happening in Hong Kong because China blocks news and internet access.
The lesson of Hong Kong? 

Hold firm when China won’t play by the rules. 

President Trump saw that early on. 

Hence the tariffs and trade talks. 

Great Britain realized it too, deciding to remove Huawei devices from sensitive emergency response networks.
Xi could do better as a world leader, for instance, by overt help with North Korean denuclearization and by cutting out the mischief in the South China Seas. 

Internally, China’s challenge is how to allow more freedoms alongside its prosperity.
Or there is the dark choice: more crackdowns, more control. 

Thanks to Hong Kong, the world will be watching.

If Trump Wants to Take On China, He Needs Allies

And he should start with Europe.
By Julianne Smith

BERLIN — With the prospect of a trade deal between China and the United States all but dead, the Trump administration is no doubt weighing its next steps in its quest to rein in Beijing’s rise. President Trump should try something he hasn’t yet: call Europe.
Just five years ago, such a suggestion would have raised eyebrows. 

Europe’s relationship with China has traditionally been one of close economic cooperation, especially for an export-led country like Germany. 

To the extent that Europeans saw political and security challenges in working with China, they kept faith that growing economic ties with the West would temper the country’s worst instincts.
Over the last few years, though, Germany, along with several other European countries, have experienced a strategic awakening. 

German policymakers, along with industry leaders, have become much more vocal about China’s predatory trade practices, in particular forced technology transfers. 

They have begun to refer to China as a “systemic competitor.” 

So has the European Union.
This should make the countries of Europe, historically among America’s closest allies, well placed to work with Washington to confront China over trade, its destabilizing policies in Asia, and the authoritarian political model it is promoting around the world. 

Instead, Europe and the United States are consumed by cyclical arguments over — to name just a few issues — military spending, trans-Atlantic trade imbalances and the Iran nuclear deal. 

That’s exactly where the Chinese want the two sides of the Atlantic to be: distracted and divided.

On the subject of China, Europeans feel like they have been relegated to observer status. 

Trump administration officials have made few efforts either to brief allies on their China policy or to propose anything like a unified trans-Atlantic strategy. 

When the Trump administration has engaged Europe on China, such discussions tend to focus on tightening investment screening and preventing the Chinese telecommunications provider Huawei from constructing 5G networks. 

Those two important issues merit trans-Atlantic consultations. 

But the Trump administration’s approach — which includes threatening to limit intelligence sharing with any ally that proceeds to build its next generation of mobile infrastructure with Huawei — is a losing strategy. 

Europeans are tired of taking orders from Mr. Trump’s America, which makes them more inclined to ignore American directives on issues like Huawei.
The president should start over. 

The United States and Europe need to come to the table as actual partners and begin a much broader dialogue about China’s political, economic and technological ambitions. 

At the very minimum, the two sides of the Atlantic should be sharing insights on everything from Chinese influence operations to human rights abuses to investments in artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies. 

More ambitiously, the United States and Europe should aim to fortify their trade relationship; coordinate American and European policies on China’s human rights abuses; and create alternatives to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
The best way for the United States and Europe to compete with China would be to resolve their own bilateral trade disputes. 

The more the two sides bicker and threaten each other with more tariffs, the more space they allow for China to continue ignoring international trading rules. 

When — or if — the two trans-Atlantic partners turn down the heat on their simmering trade war and focus on strengthening trade ties, they should reach out to Japan and other allies that could bolster the West’s economic strength and influence.
Better coordination should be the next item on the trans-Atlantic to do list. 

In March, when Xi Jinping visited Paris, President Emmanuel Macron invited the chancellor of Germany and the president of the European Commission to join him. 

Mr. Macron’s intended message was clear: Instead of picking off individual European Union members, China would have to deal with a united Europe. 

The United States and Europe could send a similar message. 

The two partners could begin coordinating their messaging on issues like China’s continuing persecution of the Uighurs, or the two Canadian citizens that China is detaining.
One specific area of focus should be China’s Belt and Road Initiative — a vast network of infrastructure and connectivity projects, underwritten by China, across Asia, Africa and Europe. Some of those projects provide much needed investment. 

Many, however, lack transparency, leave the host country riddled with debt, and require political favors in return. 

Given the scale of China’s investment, it is tough for Europe and the United States to offer viable alternatives. 

They should still try.
They could also do more to help countries avoid the Belt and Road Initiative’s many pitfalls. 

Last year the United States Treasury sent a team of evaluators to Myanmar to help it navigate the challenges of a Belt and Road project. 

Europe should be doing the same thing. 

They could start that work not halfway around the world but in Portugal, Greece, Italy and Serbia, which have already signed on to Chinese projects and are looking at more.
It may be hard to imagine the Trump administration doing any of these things. 

This is an administration, after all, that has undermined, not strengthened, America’s network of alliances from the start. 

It prefers to see the world, as two administration officials put it in a 2017 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, as “not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors, and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”
Mr. Trump is right to claim that America finds itself in an era of great power competition with China. Where his administration has repeatedly missed the mark, though, is in its determination to deride the very “global community” that could help America in its challenge. 

If Trump were serious about competing with China, he would be doing more to get as many allies on his side as possible.
Working with Europe will not be easy. 

The two will never be in perfect lock step on China, especially when it comes to security issues. Europe doesn’t have anything resembling America’s forces in Asia nor does it share America’s security commitments. 

Even inside Europe, there will continue to be different approaches to China. 

Nonetheless, the smartest thing for Europe and the United States to do would be to find areas where they can come together. 

Right now, they are not positioning themselves for even modest levels of success. 

They aren’t competing, and China wants to keep it that way.

Trade War

President Trump planning more restrictions on tech exports to China

By ADAM BEHSUDI


The Trump administration is taking steps toward issuing even more restrictions on exports of high-tech goods to China as the U.S. ratchets up its trade war with Beijing, according to two people familiar with the plans.
The Commerce Department will soon recommend rolling back regulations making it easier for U.S. companies to export certain goods that have both civilian and military purposes, the people said. Commerce will also recommend ending a general policy of approving export licenses for that group of goods if they go to civilian use and instead require reviews on a case-by-case basis.
The expected moves would make it harder for China to acquire U.S. technology. 

They come on top of actions President Donald Trump has taken since U.S.-China trade talks ground to a halt earlier this month, such as raising tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods. 

His administration also put Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei on a trade blacklist and is considering similar actions against other Chinese tech companies.
How President Trump is willing to use these actions as leverage could become clearer next month when he may meet with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in late June on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Japan, though no formal plans have been set.

“It seems to me we’re still turning up the pressure to try to get a deal,” said Scott Kennedy, a senior adviser and China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Commerce is drafting the recommendations as part of a review required by an export-control law recently passed by Congress. 

A Commerce spokesperson said the department is finalizing the review, which has a May 10 deadline, but declined to confirm specific actions the administration is weighing.
Commerce is considering at least four regulatory actions targeting China under the Export Control Reform Act, said the two people, who declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the deliberations.
Two of those options would involve revoking two license exceptions U.S. companies can get for shipping restricted technology to China. 

U.S. firms can avoid an export license requirement to China if they can prove the good is bound for civilian end-use or if a U.S.-origin good is approved for re-export to China from an allied third country.
Another option would be expanding a prohibition on any U.S. goods bound for military use in China on par with restrictions now applied to Russia and Venezuela.
Finally, Commerce could look at changing its general policy of approving export licenses for goods bound for civilian uses.
One of the people close to the deliberations said the actions appear to be “a direct response to the civilian-military fusion that is happening in China.”
The U.S. already maintains relatively tight restrictions on exports to China of technology and goods that have both civilian and military uses. 

Tough U.S. export controls aimed at China have long riled Beijing and Chinese officials have raised objection to mounting restrictions with previous administrations.
The additional restrictions would add to the recent Commerce Department decision to blacklist Huawei, forcing most of the company’s U.S. suppliers to obtain a special license for export transactions. 

Commerce has a general policy of denying license applications for blacklisted companies.
The Commerce Department is also considering similar action against a number of other Chinese companies, including Hikvision and Dahua Technology, which manufacture sophisticated video surveillance technology, according to the two people familiar with the plans.
Those companies have been implicated in human rights abuses as a result of the monitoring and mass detention of members of the Muslim Uighur group in China’s East Turkestan colony.
Any final actions related to the surveillance companies are complicated by the scope of a broader proposed package of sanctions the administration is considering. 

Officials are looking at using a law that would allow the U.S. to ban Chinese government and business officials accused of human rights abuses in the region from entering the U.S. or holding assets in America, said a lobbyist familiar with the matter.
“There is broad disagreement over both timing and which tools to use here,” the lobbyist said. 

“In any case, this will really piss off Beijing.”
The Trump administration had held back on several actions — including punishing China for its activities in East Turkestan as well as Huawei’s blacklisting — in the hopes that a deal could be reached with Xi to draw down trade tension. 

But talks fell apart earlier this month amid accusations from U.S. officials that Beijing had backtracked on commitments to codify under domestic law obligations to address intellectual property theft and forced technology transfers.
“China’s backtracking in a massive way at the eleventh hour from four months of shuttle diplomacy has fed a view in the administration that there is no reason to hold back from these types of actions,” said one person close to the internal deliberations.

Huawei Scapegoats

China Charges 2 Canadians With Spying

By Chris Buckley and Javier C. Hernández

Outside the Canadian Embassy in Beijing in December. China’s detention of two Canadians that month roiled relations between the two countries.

BEIJING — Two Canadian men detained in China since December have been formally arrested on espionage charges, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Thursday, in a move likely to ratchet up tensions between China and Canada that broke out with the arrest of Huawei's Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver.
Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat who was detained while visiting Beijing, was charged with “gathering state secrets and intelligence for abroad,” while Michael Spavor, a business consultant who was detained in northeast China, was accused of “stealing and providing state secrets for abroad,” Lu Kang, a spokesman for the foreign ministry, said at a regularly scheduled news briefing.
The vague reference to unspecified overseas entities left open the question of whether the men were suspected of working for a government or for some other organization.
The charges are likely to anger the government of Canada who condemned the initial detentions of Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor as “arbitrary” and politically motivated.
Their detentions were retaliation for the arrest in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei, at the behest of the United States.
The United States has pressured allies not to use Huawei’s technology, arguing that China could use it to spy on other countries. 
Those efforts intensified on Wednesday, when President Trump moved to ban American telecommunications firms from installing China-made equipment that could pose risks to national security.
The measure seemed aimed at blocking sales by Huawei.

Michael Kovrig

Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor were seized by the police in December, days after Meng was arrested while changing planes in Vancouver.
The Chinese government was incensed by Meng’s arrest, and the charging of Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor makes it more likely that they will face trial and conviction, deepening the standoff with Trudeau’s administration.
Lu did not provide further details and said only that the arrests were made recently.
Before the latest announcement, Chinese officials had already signaled that Mr. Kovrig and Spavor could be charged with espionage offenses.
Mr. Kovrig worked for the United Nations and the Canadian foreign service before 2017, when he joined the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization that tries to defuse conflicts between states.
He focused on Chinese foreign policy, Asian regional politics and North Korea, and he was often quoted in foreign news outlets and invited to meetings in China.
Mr. Spavor followed a less conventional path, using his knowledge of the Korean language to establish himself as a consultant for companies and people interested in North Korea, including Dennis Rodman, the former basketball star who has befriended the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un.
Mr. Spavor was detained in Dandong, the Chinese city on the North Korean border where he was based.
In early March, a legal affairs committee within China’s ruling Communist Party said investigators believed that Mr. Kovrig had been “stealing and spying to obtain state secrets and intelligence,” and that Mr. Spavor had supplied him with information.

Michael Spavor

But China’s definition of state secrets is opaque, and the International Crisis Group has said Mr. Kovrig’s work for it was in no way nefarious.
Since they were detained, Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor have been held in secretive detention sites, without visits from lawyers and family members.
Canadian diplomats have been allowed to visit them about once a month.
Lu, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, did not respond to questions Thursday about where the two men were being held.
Human rights advocates on Thursday denounced the arrests of Mr. Kovrig and Mr. Spavor.
“Their cases show again how the Chinese criminal system violates the human rights of detainees,” said Patrick Poon, a researcher for Amnesty International in Hong Kong.
He called on Chinese officials to release the men, absent “credible and concrete evidence” of crimes.
Meanwhile, Meng has been granted bail as she fights extradition to the United States to face criminal charges.
Her lawyers have said that they would sue Canadian border services, the police and the federal government for violating her constitutional rights when she was detained for three hours in December before being arrested.
In January, American prosecutors released an indictment of Meng and Huawei, laying out efforts by the company to steal commercial secrets, obstruct a criminal inquiry and engage in bank fraud while trying to evade American sanctions on Iran. 
The Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, said at a news conference in early March that the case against Huawei and Meng was “by no means a purely judicial case, but rather a deliberate political case” intended to bring down Huawei.
Trudeau and Canadian and United States officials have said that the case against Meng is a legal matter, not a political one.
But Trump veered from that position in December, when he suggested that he could intervene in the case if that helped to seal a trade agreement with China.

China’s human rights abuses threaten the state of our union

By Josh Rogin

President Trump delivers his first State of the Union address on Jan. 30, 2018, in Washington. 
The wife of a Taiwanese human rights activist imprisoned in China will attend President Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, hoping to raise awareness of her husband’s plight and Beijing’s growing persecution of non-Chinese citizens. 

She is calling on Trump and all Americans to help confront China’s exporting of its authoritarianism around the world.
Chinese authorities arrested Taiwanese democracy activist Li Ming-che in March 2017 in the Chinese territory of Macau. 

He was put under investigation for “pursuing activities harmful to national security.” 

That September, he was sentenced to five years in prison for “subverting state power,” based on what his family and supporters say was a forced confession.
His wife, Li Ching-yu, has led a public campaign for his release, raising the ire of the Chinese authorities. 

On Tuesday, she will sit in the House gallery while Trump addresses the nation and the world. 

She told me she wants to serve as a reminder that human rights are universal and that the Chinese Communist Party is now exporting its repression.
“Human rights abuses in China are not only to Chinese citizens,” she said. 

“When they start persecuting Taiwanese citizens like my husband, the persecution of human rights by the Chinese Communist Party has already extended beyond China’s borders, all over the world. So the whole world should really be concerned about China.”
Li will be a guest of Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), who serves as the co-chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. 

The commission has been investigating Beijing’s persecution of minority groups inside China, including the Chinese government’s forced internment of hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslim Uighurs.
As part of Beijing’s clampdown on criticism of its human rights policies, the Chinese authorities have imprisoned dozens of family members of American journalists and others who speak out. 

Smith told me that he invited Li to the State of the Union to draw attention to the Chinese Communist Party’s relentless efforts to harass Taiwan, including her husband’s case.
But the larger issue is Xi Jinping’s broad campaign to round up hundreds of lawyers and activists inside China while also exporting repression, which represents a threat to the integrity and security of free and open societies, said Smith.
“If we want democratic values to survive in the 21st century, the international community cannot be passive in the face of massive human rights abuses in China or the threats to a democratic Taiwan, particularly as Xi Jinping seeks to export neo-Stalinist ideas about censorship, politics, and social control globally,” he said.
Li is in Washington as part of a delegation organized by Bob Fu, the founder and president of China Aid, a nongovernmental organization that advocates for human rights activists and Christians being persecuted in China. 

Fu and some members of the delegation will attend the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday.
Li knows her public advocacy is risky. 

After visiting her husband in prison in December, she held a news conference decrying the conditions of his detention. 

In retaliation, the Chinese government banned her from seeing him again until April. 

But she believes Trump and the United States have an important role to play.
“China is a rising economic giant, but it uses its power to expand its authoritarianism globally. So this is a threat not only Taiwan is facing, but the entire world is facing, including the United States,” she said. 

“I hope and call on America, in accordance with the spirit of the founding fathers, to help.”
Last year, Trump highlighted human rights by inviting North Korean defector Ji Seong-ho to the State of the Union and talking about the “depraved character” of the Kim Jong Un regime. 

This year, with his North Korea diplomacy in full swing, his tone may be different.
Trump will likely call out the regimes in Iran and Venezuela for their repression — and rightfully so — but he may tread lightly when talking about China at a sensitive time in economic negotiations. But Vice President Pence stated the problem clearly in his October speech at the Hudson Institute.
“For a time, Beijing inched toward greater liberty and respect for human rights, but in recent years, it has taken a sharp U-turn toward control and oppression,” Pence said. 

“As history attests, a country that oppresses its own people rarely stops there. Beijing also aims to extend its reach across the wider world."
The State of the Union is a chance not just for the president but also for Congress to highlight important issues we as a country must address in the year ahead. 

Confronting the Chinese government’s atrocious human rights policies inside China and abroad must be on that list.

China's detention of Muslims in concentration camps country's worst human rights abuse since Mao era

Grave human rights violations being committed on vast scale in East Turkestan colony, experts say
By Chris Baynes

Why aren’t Muslim leaders standing up for Uighurs?
China’s detention of millions of Uighur Muslims in re-education camps amounts to human rights abuse on a scale not seen since in the country since Mao Zedong’s era, British MPs have been told.
The UK must not remain silent over grave violations committed during Beijing’s crackdown on the minority in East Turkestan colony, the foreign affairs committee heard.
Up to three million Uighurs have been arbitrarily detained in centres which Amnesty International has compared to “wartime concentration camps”. 

Released internees were tortured into denouncing Islam and swearing loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.
Steve Tsang, director of the London School of Oriental Studies said: “When you have an identifiable group of citizens in a country where something like one tenth of that identifiable group live in camps, you have an enormous human rights problem.
“Ever since the end of Mao Zedong’s era in 1976, and probably including the period of hard military crackdown in 1989, we have not seen the scale of human rights abuse that we are seeing today in East Turkestan.”
An estimated 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death under rule of Mao Zedong, who founded the People's Republic of China.
Hundreds surround Chinese embassy over detention of Uighur Muslims
Chinese ‘re-education camps run like concentration camps’

Speaking to MPs on the committee, Prof Tsang urged politicians to speak out over abuses against Uighur Muslims
He said: “If we believe in our values, in our system – even though there’s probably not much we can actually do to change the situation in China – it would be wrong for us to remain silent on the subject.”
China denied the existence of the camps until October last year, and since claimed it is detaining people guilty of minor crimes in what it describes as “vocational education centres”.
Eva Pils, a China human rights expert and professor of law at King’s College London, said Beijing had been careful to present the crackdown as a response to the threat of Islamist terrorism.
She said there was credible evidence human rights abuses were happening on vast scale.
Prof Pils told MPs: “The grave human rights violations that Professor Tsang was alluding to in my view almost certainly include not only arbitrary detention of people in these camps but also the use of torture to ‘transform’ them, to ‘de-extremify’ them.
“That, in my view, especially as we have credible evidence that it happens at this very vast scale, is extremely concerning.”
Beijing faces mounting international criticism over its treatment of the Uighur minority, an estimated 15 million of whom live in China.
UN human rights official Michelle Bachelet, said in December her office was seeking access to East Turkestan to verify worrying reports.
The UK government has also raised concerns and pledged to “press China to change its approach”.
“I think it’s extremely important to continue raising the issue,” said Prof Pils.
“The ability of any western country, including the UK, to influence China is limited, but I think that at least we need to ask for investigation. It would be appropriate to seek the appointment of international observers.”
Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee, warned China’s Muslim crackdown could put Britain at greater risk of Islamist terror attacks.
He said: “On jihadi websites today, you are starting to see very clear condemnation of the Chinese government’s actions on the Uighar population. You seeing very, very clearly the imprisonment and torture of Muslims in western China being cited as reasons for jihad.
“Indeed, there is a real issue here for countries like our own that the mass torture, imprisonment and execution of Muslims in western China is leading to a rise in jihadism that could easily have repercussions for us, not just in China.”
Prof Tsang replied: “The basic point you make is a very, very true one. China did have a very, very small terrorist problem before.
“If this policy is continued you will have a very large number of Muslim people – Uighurs or sometimes other nationalities who will turn to jihadism because they have got nothing else.”

Rogue Nation

China’s long game on human rights

By Ted Piccone

For decades, China’s Communist Party largely kept clear of muscling its way on to the global human rights stage, preferring to bide its time while it contended with massive economic and social challenges at home. 

This began to change in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 when China faced unprecedented criticism of its brutal repression of unarmed citizens demanding more freedoms. Beijing fought hard to defend its one-party system and joined hands with like-minded autocratic states to block external criticism of its hard-line rule. 

It also engaged in the international human rights system in other ways, including by ratifying a number of relevant treaties and inviting some independent U.N. experts to visit the country and advise officials on compliance with international norms.
More recently, however, especially since the ascension of Xi Jinping in 2013, China is moving beyond playing defense and adopting a more self-confident posture in the halls of the United Nations. 

It has begun promoting its model of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” as the preferred path for protecting human rights while chipping away at well-entrenched principles that define the international human rights system. 

These principles include external monitoring by independent experts of a state’s human rights record, active participation of civil society as both stewards and sirens for human rights, and, when merited, public condemnation of egregious human rights violators. 

Through soft terms like “win-win cooperation” and building a “community of common destiny”—newly blessed as “Xi Jinping thought” deserving of constitutional standing—China is winning some important battles that will determine the meaning of sovereignty and human rights in the 21st century.
Given China’s accelerating rise in global affairs, this development should not come as a surprise. 

This progress, in the view of China’s leaders, supports the argument that their controlled approach to state-led development should be emulated by others.
The catch, of course, is the high cost of China’s system to political, civil, cultural, and minority rights, which China dismisses as inconvenient and disruptive to their one-party control of society. 

For those on the front lines of defending such rights in China, the penalties are severe—denial of state benefits, detention, torture, and death. 

Mass internments of Muslims in concentration camps and militarized police patrols in the East Turkestan province are on the rise. 

More broadly, China’s advances in the field of internet censorship, facial recognition and artificial intelligence already are having dire consequences for even a modicum of personal liberties and civil rights enshrined in international human rights law.
The Chinese state’s growing power is felt not only at home. 

Its expanding portfolio of loans, direct investment, and trade agreements around the world, and its willingness to use them as leverage for diplomatic gains that challenge the U.S.-led international order, are changing the geopolitical game across a wide swath of issues. 

On the human rights front, China’s more confident behavior is a direct existential threat because it seeks to subvert the fundamental norms which have shaped global progress toward greater respect for liberal democracy and the rule of law. 

It is making tangible headway, for example, in Europe, where Hungary and Greece blocked consensus last year on a European Union statement criticizing China’s crackdown on lawyers and journalists. 

It is making steady progress in isolating democratic Taiwan by offering economic incentives to developing countries like El Salvador, Dominican Republic, and Burkina Faso, which previously did not recognize Beijing. 

It is partnering with Russia to cut budgetary resources for human rights monitors integral to U.N. peacekeeping missions and to block civil society organizations from participating in U.N. forums.
In the pre-Trump world, the United States was on the forefront of challenging China’s long game on human rights. 

It regularly called out China’s repressive human rights record and more broadly built cross-regional coalitions of other democratic states to defend and strengthen the international human rights system. Now, however, the United States has walked away from the U.N.’s primary forum for promoting human rights. 

It claims its membership, which regularly includes China, Vietnam, Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela, renders the body hopelessly ineffective.
The reality is quite different. 

Time and again, the U.N.’s human rights system has responded to egregious violations by calling emergency sessions and dispatching independent experts and investigators to document abuses, demand accountability, and defend human rights activists in such places as Iran, Vietnam, Syria, North Korea, Eritrea, Myanmar, and Cambodia. 

The United States, as in many other domains of international affairs, is now missing in action. 

The result is clear: China and its allies are filling the vacuum and, over time, will neuter if not fundamentally redefine the core precepts of universal human rights.
So far, China’s more assertive gambit on human rights has not always won the day. 

Despite the U.S. withdrawal, and China’s growing efforts to sway others, a core bloc of democratic states remain steadfastly committed to bolstering the international human rights regime. 

Leading European actors like France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands, joined by Japan, Canada, South Korea, and Australia, are building coalitions with states like Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Tunisia, Ghana, Georgia, and Ukraine to hold the line on key principles. 

The U.S. Congress can do its part by ensuring that the system’s building blocks are properly funded. And the new High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, can speak with moral clarity for defending the principles that China, slowly but surely, now seeks to undermine.

Liberal values are worthless when Trudeau takes China’s side against Taiwan

For nearly half a century, China’s Communist Party overlords have been telling us we can’t have it both ways, and we must choose in Beijing’s favour

By Terry Glavin

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in Beijing, China on Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2017.

You would think the choice would be a straightforward one. 

Should Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government persist in its headlong rush to deepen Canada’s ties with the increasingly grotesque and globally menacing police state in Beijing? 

Or should Canada instead strengthen its relationships with the flourishing and economically vibrant liberal democracy in Taiwan?
For nearly half a century, China’s Communist Party overlords have been telling us we can’t have it both ways, and we must choose in Beijing’s favour. 

Canadian foreign affairs mandarins and their friends in the Canada-China business lobby have been telling us the same thing: that we have no choice but to do as we’re told. 

And so we do. 

But lately, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has emerged as an existential threat to Taiwan, while simultaneously revealing himself to be the greatest threat to the rules-based international order that the Trudeau government insists Canada must defend at all costs.
In all its dealings with China, Canada’s posture is uniquely supine among the G7 countries, but Xi’s wildly ambitious belligerence worldwide has made a hardheaded re-evaluation of Canada’s approach unavoidable. 

This would have been necessary without even figuring Taiwan into it, but there is an urgency that informs Canada’s predicament now.Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen delivers a speech as she departs for Latin America at Taoyuan International Airport in Taoyuan, Taiwan, Sunday, Aug. 12, 2018. 

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland can’t be taken seriously as she rallies liberal democracies to unite against the dire threats of rising authoritarian unilateralism while at the same time doing nothing about Beijing’s accelerated military and economic encirclement of Taiwan. 

When Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen addressed a seminar at the European Parliament on Monday, it could have been Freeland talking: “A liberal democratic order can only survive if like-minded countries, including our European partners, work together for the greater good,” Tsai said.
“I’m calling on all like-minded countries to display the same spirit that led to the founding of a union across Europe in 1951: the clear-eyed sense that only by coming together can we protect our values and our future.”
But to get out from underneath the absurd restraints that have dictated our relationship with Taiwan ever since Canada opened diplomatic relations with the Chinese Communist Party regime in 1970, we’re all going to have to confront some of the prettiest lies we have been telling ourselves about Canada’s place on “the world stage” and about how we got there. 

This is where Eric Lerhe, the former director of NATO policy at the National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa, enters the conversation.
In an extensive paper to be released this week by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Lerhe proposes a series of modest contributions Canada might make to Taiwan’s security — particularly in collaboration with Japan, France, Germany, the United States, New Zealand and Australia — and also to more securely guarantee Taiwan’s place as a key trading partner in the Pacific region. 

“But first, Ottawa needs to be prepared to challenge some of the sacred shibboleths in how it has approached China and Taiwan,” Lerhe writes.

One thing to get out of the way is the legend that it was the bright idea of the visionary Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau to break with the Cold War consensus of the day and defy the stubborn bellicosity of Richard Nixon’s White House in a brilliant diplomatic move that paved the way for the People’s Republic of China to take its place at the United Nations.
More accurately, it was at least as much Beijing’s idea, setting the favourable terms of its diplomatic entente with Canada as a Taiwan-isolating precedent for other countries to follow. 

Besides, then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had already been secretly negotiating with Beijing to establish diplomatic relations, a year before Trudeau came along. 

There was also the grubbier involvement of the Canadian Wheat Board, with its eyes on China’s voracious appetite for Canada’s grain.
In any case, Canada’s allegedly deft stickhandling of the Taiwan issue did not decisively address the conundrum, which was a Taiwan that was at the time governed by a military dictatorship born of the old Republic of China that still claimed sovereignty over mainland China, while the Communist People’s Republic of China at the same time claimed Taiwan as a mere renegade province.
Canada’s resulting “One China” policy took note of Beijing’s claims, and on Oct. 12, 1970, Taiwan’s ambassador was given a month to clear out of the Ottawa embassy and shutter the Vancouver consulate. 

All these years later, Global Affairs Canada still considers Taiwan part of “Greater China.”
Beijing was moving forwards in 1970 — now it’s going backwards, deeper into police-state dystopia. Taiwan, meanwhile, has made extraordinary democratic leaps and bounds forward.
Lerhe puts forward several recommendations that Beijing would shout about, but which would nonetheless not breach the commitments Canada made in 1970. 

Canada should fight for Taiwan’s membership in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, for instance. 

Lerhe’s other proposed measures include fighting for Taiwan’s place at a variety of international agencies that Beijing has managed to keep off-limits to Taiwanese representatives, joining U.S.-supported intelligence efforts or replicating Japan’s intelligence-sharing arrangements with Taiwan, assigning a full-time security liaison officer or military attaché to Canada’s trade office in Taipei, and so on.
It’s mostly small stuff, but it adds up.
“Doing nothing to defend a threatened democracy signals that Canada, a fellow middle power, is also ready to, however briefly, cease defending the rules-based international order that has protected it and allowed it to prosper these last seventy years,” Lerhe writes.
It also signals that Canada is a wholly unserious champion of the values it claims to cherish most dearly.

“Freedom democracy for China; end one-party dictatorship”

Activists target China’s human-rights record with new ad campaign in Vancouver

By XIAO XU

Louis Huang sits next to an ad he designed at a bus stop in Richmond, B.C., on Aug. 11, 2018.
An activist group made up largely of Chinese immigrants is launching an advertising campaign in the Vancouver region to criticize China’s human-rights record, with an aim to raise awareness among people from that country who are now living in Canada.
The campaign began in late July with a bus shelter ad, located along one of the busiest roads in Richmond, B.C., but the Vancouver Chinese Human Rights Watch Group plans to purchase billboards and other forms of advertising to bring attention to poor human-rights conditions in China.
“The ad may raise awareness among people from the Chinese community and make them realize, in our country of birth, the human-rights situation is getting worse and worse," Louis Huang, co-ordinator with the group, said in an interview. 

"They may pay more attention to it in the future, which could push China’s human rights to improve.”
The Richmond bus ad features a picture of an eagle flying in the sky. 

It says “Freedom democracy for China; end one-party dictatorship” in English, and “End one-party system; build democratic China,” in Chinese.
Mr. Huang said he and his group’s more than 20 members, mostly immigrants from China, covered the cost of the ad. 

He said future ads will touch on topics ranging from jailed dissidents to the Chinese government’s foreign influence.
“We hope more overseas Chinese will have courage to express their opinions when they see these ads. Because they’re still afraid to discuss politically sensitive topics related to China, even though they are living abroad,” he said.
The Chinese consulate in Vancouver didn’t respond to The Globe and Mail’s interview request.
Mr. Huang, who moved to Canada in 2002, has been fighting for China’s human rights for about a decade. 

He said since Xi Jinping took power five years ago, the country’s human-rights situation has been worsening.
The group has previously protested outside the Chinese consulate in Vancouver, urging the government to release activists and rights lawyers who have been held in custody since the nationwide crackdown in 2015 and then-imprisoned Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, who died in jail last year.
Pitman Potter, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, said China has tightened its grip on freedom of expression, religious freedom and people’s private rights under Eleven’s leadership.
“There has been a dramatic increase of oppression in East Turkestan in particular, but also in Tibet," Dr. Potter said. 

“When you look at the social-credit system that basically keeps track of people’s behaviour electronically and create files on them … all those are recent indicators of very serious declines in human-rights conditions.”
Shawn Zhang, a Chinese-born UBC law student, has been using satellite images to track down suspected locations of camps in the East Turkestan colony of China, where scholars estimate hundreds of thousands of mainly Muslim people have been forced to undergo political indoctrination.
Mr. Zhang said the overseas Chinese community cannot be apathetic towards human-rights issues in China.
“If the overseas Chinese community did nothing to address the human rights conditions in our home country, we are communicating that we don’t care about the importance of human rights in our own," he said in an e-mail. 

"It is dangerous because when other people realize that you do not care about human rights, why should they protect you when your own human rights are violated?”
Guo Ding, a current-affairs commentator in the B.C. Chinese community, said Canada should champion human rights, but any foreign country can hardly change the human-rights condition in China.
“The change of a [country’s] system and social value has to happen within its own society,” he said.
Alex Neve, secretary-general at Amnesty International Canada, said members of Canada’s Chinese community who are actively involved in human-rights protection in China can play a significant role in improving such issues in China.
“The Chinese government clearly understands that their voices can be very powerful within the community," he said.
"It’s something very different to have your own neighbours and some of the community members who are speaking out of these concerns than it is to hear those criticisms or concerns raised from the outside of the community.”

Tech Quisling

Google does evil at China’s bidding

The Washington Post

THAT SPARKLING adage of the digital age that “information will set you free” turns out to carry a giant asterisk. 

Authoritarian regimes have figured out how to control digital space, put firewalls around their countries and send violators to prison. 

The largest digital police state today is China, and that is reason enough for Google to abandon its work on development of a search app for China that would censor results about human rights, democracy, religion, peaceful protest and other ticklish topics for the ruling Communist Party.
The Intercept, which broke the story, said that a team of Google workers has been engineering an Android search app for China that would “blacklist websites and search terms” to satisfy China’s strict censorship. 

China’s control of news, messages and information is vast and ranges from instructions to news media about what to report, to pressure on academic journals and book publishers about what to print, to surveillance of social media for posts that might touch third-rail topics prohibited by the party, such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. 

China’s “Great Firewall” is a mammoth cordon around its digital universe that is a nanny to hundreds of millions of users, letting them access only content approved by the state. 

Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter and news sites such as the BBC and the New York Times are blocked. 

China is also actively demanding that companies that do business there follow its laws and regulations, which are often aimed at repressing free speech, free association and other rights, while permitting the state unparalleled surveillance.
Google, founded with the admonition “don’t be evil,” made a smart decision in 2010 to pull out of China because of the pervasive censorship. 

Now, the company is feeling the pull of a market of more than 750 million Internet users, a potentially lucrative source of revenue, though President Trump’s current trade dispute with China is apparently slowing down Google’s negotiations. 

Google has started tiptoeing back into China with a file management app, establishment of an artificial-intelligence research center, and launching of a game on the widely used WeChat platform. According to the Intercept, the driving force is chief executive Sundar Pichai, who said at a June 2016 conference in Southern California: “I care about servicing users globally in every corner. Google is for everyone. We want to be in China serving Chinese users.”
The dangers are plain: A censored search app will put Google’s imprimatur on the largest and most pervasive authoritarian system in the world, making Google an accomplice to repression. 

The censored search app would no doubt whet the appetite of autocrats elsewhere, and it would mark a terrible setback for those apostles of freedom who predicted the digital revolution would be a new era of liberty. 

The app would also sunder the faith of many Google users that the company is a force for good.

China is trying to muzzle Gui Minhai. These poems tell his story.

By Fred Hiatt

Gui Minhai in an undated photo. 

Gui Minhai, a Chinese-born Swedish citizen, was riding a train from Shanghai to Beijing in the company of two Swedish diplomats in January when 10 Chinese plainclothesmen stormed aboard, lifted him up and carried him off the train and out of sight.
Three weeks later, Gui was paraded before Chinese media to recite a bizarre and apparently coerced confession. 

He hasn’t been heard from since.
This is what passes for the rule of law in China today.
I think of Gui sometimes when I hear Chinese dictator Xi Jinping boasting about a country that “has stood up, grown rich and is becoming strong.”
Would a truly strong and self-confident nation behave this way? 

Why would it feel the need to kidnap — for the second time, no less — a peaceable 54-year-old gentleman such as Gui and keep him, in poor health, locked up for, now, more than a thousand days?
Gui left China as a young man to study in Sweden and got marooned there when the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre rendered his home country inhospitable to anyone inclined toward democracy. 

He earned a Phd, married, had a daughter, Angela, who is now, at 24, beginning her own PhD studies at the University of Cambridge in England.
Eventually, as the political climate in China eased, Gui moved back. 

He established a book business in Hong Kong, where he published insider accounts from China’s Communist Party — books that were banned in China itself.
In October 2015, he disappeared from his small vacation home in Thailand. 

That was the first abduction, followed by the first bizarre confession: Gui showed up on television in January 2016 claiming he had voluntarily returned to China to take responsibility for a long-ago hit-and-run car accident.
Angela could never find out where he was being held, but last fall he was released into a kind of house arrest in Ningbo, a coastal city south of Shanghai, where he was allowed to resume a careful communication with his daughter.
He told her that, while in prison, he had been composing poems. 

His captors had not permitted him pen and paper, but he had committed them to memory — and last fall he began writing them down and sending them to his daughter.
In one, he compares himself to a Père David’s deer — a species that, by the time a French missionary became in the 19th century the first Westerner to see it, existed only in captivity, in the Chinese emperor’s hunting preserve.
“When I was caught I started to evolve/When I started to evolve, I was tamed,” Gui wrote. 

“But while I am shamed in the swamp/I still yearn to run through the Swedish woods.”
Also last fall, Gui began to notice alarming signs of neurological deterioration — perhaps a result of maltreatment in captivity; perhaps, as a Ningbo doctor believed, early signs of ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“He was very shaken by this,” Angela recalled. 

“He told me, ‘I’m not afraid to die, I’m just not ready yet. There’s so much more to be done.’”
The Ningbo doctor said he should see a specialist; the Swedish government agreed to send one to Beijing; China’s ambassador to Sweden said Gui would be permitted to travel to the capital for the exam. 

It was on the way to that appointment that he was, again, abducted. 

And at his next “confession,” he was being charged, even more absurdly, with stealing “state secrets.”
What kind of state secrets could Gui possess after nearly three years in captivity?
Angela wonders, sadly, if the secret is not the case itself — a story that has become such an embarrassment of injustice atop injustice that the Communist Party can’t bring itself to turn her father loose.
All of this is happening while, given America’s forfeiture of global standing, China is, understandably, trying to present itself as an alternative model. 

Yet how can its leaders convince the world that they are “an unstoppable and invincible force” (that’s Xi, again) if they fear a man such as Gui Minhai? 

Who wants to imitate a regime that behaves like gangsters?
Angela hopes the Chinese will let her father see a doctor. 

She hopes his health is not deteriorating. 

Sometimes she even lets herself dream that her father — who was not there to see her graduate at the top of her class this spring — will be with her when she earns her next degree.
Today, The Post is proud to publish two of Gui Minhai’s poems for the first time. 

Like Angela, I hope he will be free and publishing a full volume of his verse before too long.
“There is so much more he wanted to do,” she says. 

“There was so much he wanted to tell people.”

Père David’s Deer
By Gui Minhai, translated by Anne Henochowicz

Under the harsh light day and night
I quickly turned into a Père David’s deer
it took only seven hundred days or so
for my graying hair to evolve into antlers

These strange creatures don’t live here
they say my name is “Neither Fish Nor Fowl”
When I was caught I started to evolve
When I started to evolve, I was tamed

As soon as my clothes were peeled away
I became a tamed David’s deer
I sobbed in front of the cameras
admitting I was a deer that had strayed away

In the secret garden, my swift devolution
turned speech into furry groans
turned a hat into a black hood
turned nationality and citizenship into diplomatic dispute

In every Chinese encyclopedia, it is written
that Père David’s deer is a rare beast unique to China
thus one such deer, at ease in the Swedish forest
began a new life in an Asian swamp

I am a devolved David’s deer
unable to choke down poems or prose
but while I am shamed in the swamp
I still yearn to run through the Swedish woods.

first written in prison
rewritten Dec. 10, 2017

Heroism
By Gui Minhai, translated by Anne Henochowicz

When I was young, I cared for a cute little chicken
in the time of my childhood it laid an egg
an egg that shone toward the sun’s light
with a round, round yolk inside its shell

I took this egg with me everywhere
and made many yolk-yellow drawings
when even the moon was curved with exhaustion
I dreamed dreams as round as a yolk

Only when a pair of boots trampled my egg
did I know how frail an eggshell is
the forlorn, helpless yolk on the ground
the egg white flowing out like tears

A bare chicken egg is so weak
after the yolk had been ravaged
I curled into a ball, surrendered the egg’s genetic code
and admitted I really was a duck egg

I burn to my end in the red-hot pan
only because I have this humble notion:
once I’m fried into a fat omelette
a hero’s death will be wrapped inside me

written Dec. 27, 2017

Rogue Nation

China’s human rights abuses, aggressive military expansion damage its soft power rating

By Liu Zhen

China’s soft power has been weakened by its hard line on foreign policy and human rights, according to an annual survey released on Thursday.
In the “Soft Power 30” report by communications consultancy Portland and the University of South California Centre on Public Diplomacy, China ranked 27th of the 30 countries to make the list, down two places from last year.
The weaker showing was mostly a result of it finishing bottom on the “Government” subindex, which measures nations’ political values, such as their position on human rights, democracy and equality, said Jonathan McClory, the report’s author and Portland’s general manager for Asia.
“China’s record in human rights and civil liberties reflects poorly among Western audiences,” the survey said, adding that “relatively low scores in competitiveness, ease of doing business, and rule of law diminish its attractiveness as a global business hub of choice”.
Also, while China was boosted in 2017 by Xi Jinping’s speech at the Davos forum, in which he sought to position the country as a "responsible" global leader that supported globalisation and free trade, as well as the fight against climate change, that positive narrative “somewhat faded” this year, the report said.
“International attention concentrated on Xi’s decision to eliminate the two-term limit on the presidency,” it said.
Beijing’s “aggressive military expansion” had also undermined its efforts to build trust abroad, by promoting bilateral relations and through its “Belt and Road Initiative”, the survey said.
“Increasing demands for authenticity means that Chinese soft power efforts must be congruent with its political and economic pursuits,” it said.

Meanwhile, with Beijing and Washington embroiled in a major trade dispute, the United States also found itself sliding down the chart, to fourth place in 2018, from third in 2017 and first in 2016.
It also fell four places to 16th on the government subcategory, though still topped three of the six other composite indexes.
Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor and the originator of the term “soft power”, said the US was counting the cost of its leader’s hard-line approach.
“The results of this year’s study show a further erosion of American soft power,” he said. 

“Clearly, the Trump administration’s ‘America first’ approach to foreign policy comes at a cost to US global influence.”
The annual soft power report was launched in 2015 and ranks the top 30 nations on the scores awarded to them in seven categories by 11,000 people from 25 countries.