Malaysia FM: China's 'nine-dash line' claim 'ridiculous'

Foreign Minister Saifuddin says Malaysia's decision to take South China Sea claim to UN is its 'sovereign right'. 
by Ted Regencia
Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah said he expects ASEAN to further debate in the coming months the need for a 'Code of Conduct' with China over the South China Sea issue

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - Malaysia has hardened its diplomatic position on the disputed South China Sea, questioning China's "nine-dash line" claim over the entire sea lane that has already been previously declared with "no legal basis" by an arbitration tribunal in The Hague.
Malaysian Minister of Foreign Affairs Saifuddin Abdullah said late on Friday that Kuala Lumpur has the "sovereign right to claim whatever that is there that is within our waters".
"For China to claim that the whole of South China Sea belongs to China, I think that is ridiculous," Saifuddin said in response to an Al Jazeera question about Malaysia's decision last week to take its case to the United Nations.
"It is a claim that we have made, and we will defend our claim. But of course, having said that, anyone can challenge and dispute, which is not something unusual."
On December 12, Malaysia formally filed a submission seeking clarity on the limits of its continental shelf beyond the 322 kilometre (200 nautical miles) exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the disputed body of water claimed by several countries in the Southeast Asian region.
The move has angered China, which claims "historic rights" over all of South China Sea.
It has also blamed the United States for raising tensions in the area.
In response, the US Navy's Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral John Aquilino accused China of "bullying" its Southeast Asian neighbours.
Malaysia and China are both signatories to the UN Convention for the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which codifies the rights and responsibilities of independent states' use of the oceans.
Under UNCLOS, coastal states like Malaysia are entitled to an EEZ.
Beyond that waters are considered the high seas, common to all nations.
UNCLOS also defines rules in the case of overlapping EEZs.
It was on this basis that the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague rejected in 2016 China's claims to almost the entire sea, through which an estimated $3 trillion of trade pass each year.
China, however, rejects the ruling in The Hague, and since then has expanded its presence in the region, building artificial islands with runways and installing an advanced missile system.

ASEAN Code of Conduct
Beijing has insisted on the application of its "nine-dash line" demarcation, which claims that the littoral countries are only entitled to the seas and other resources nine miles from their shore.
Aside from the Philippines and Malaysia, China's claim is also being questioned by Vietnam.
Brunei and Taiwan also claim parts of the South China Sea.
Asked whether Malaysia's latest diplomatic move would strengthen the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' (ASEAN) push for a unified "Code of Conduct" in the South China Sea, Foreign Minister Saifuddin replied, "It would be debated for sure."
It was unclear what prompted Malaysia to file a formal submission this month.
In August, Saifuddin had said that he was "very hopeful" that ASEAN and China can reach an agreement within the three-year deadline or earlier, to help ease the tensions, Bloomberg News reported him as saying.
In September, Saifuddin also met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi to set up a "bilateral consultation mechanism for maritime issues".
The agreement was dubbed "a new platform for dialogue and cooperation".
China has tried to keep discussions over the sea on a bilateral basis rather than negotiating with ASEAN as a group.
In October, Saifuddin told members of Parliament that Malaysia should be "upgraded" in order to "better manage our waters should there be a conflict between major powers in the South China Sea."
For the last 10 years, China has been Malaysia's largest trading partner.
In 2018, its trade was estimated to be at about $76.6bn, representing 16.7 percent of Malaysia's total trade, according to Malaysia's trade ministry.

Chinese Paranoia

Indonesia rejects China's claims over South China Sea
Reuters

Indonesia's Deputy Minister for Maritime Affairs Arif Havas Oegroseno points at the location of North Natuna Sea on a new map of Indonesia during talks with reporters in Jakarta, Indonesia, July 14, 2017. 

JAKARTA -- Indonesia said on Wednesday it rejected China’s claims over a disputed part of the South China Sea as “having no legal basis”, after two days earlier protesting to Beijing over the presence of a Chinese coastguard vessel in its territorial waters.
The boat trespassed into Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone off the coast of the northern islands of Natuna, leading Indonesians officials to issue a strong protest and summon the Chinese ambassador in Jakarta.
Speaking in Beijing on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang had said China had sovereignty over the Spratly Islands and their waters and that both China and Indonesia have “normal” fishing activities there.
In a sharp rebuke, Indonesia’s foreign ministry called in a statement on Wednesday for China to explain the “legal basis and clear borders” regarding its claims on the exclusive economic zone, as based on the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
“China’s claims to the exclusive economic zone on the grounds that its fishermen have long been active there... have no legal basis and have never been recognized by the UNCLOS 1982,” the foreign ministry said.
Jakarta also noted that the argument had been refuted during China’s legal defeat against the Philippines in 2016 over disputed South China claims at Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.
Indonesia has no claims over the Spratly Islands, which lie to the northeast of the Natuna Islands.
The foreign ministry reiterated its stance that the country is a non-claimant state in the South China Sea and that it has no overlapping jurisdiction with China.
However, Jakarta has repeatedly clashed with China over fishing rights around the Natuna Islands, detaining Chinese fishermen and expanding its military presence in the area.
China claims most of the South China Sea, an important trade route which is believed to contain large quantities of oil and natural gas.
Several Southeast Asian states dispute China’s territorial claims and are competing with China to exploit the South China Sea’s abundant hydrocarbon and fishing resources.
Beijing has raised the ante by deploying military assets on artificial islands constructed on shoals and reefs in disputed parts of the sea.
China’s embassy in Indonesia was not immediately reachable for comment.

Chinese Paranoia

Even Xi can't turn Macao into an international finance center
By Fraser Howie

The growth of Macao's casino industry has not necessarily improved the reputation of the city's financial sector. 

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has arrived in Macao in time for celebrations to mark the 20th anniversary of the city's return to the motherland's embrace.
As is customary among his compatriots, he is not coming empty-handed.
But rather than bringing cash for the gambling tables, Xi is bringing goodies for his hosts said to include the formation of a yuan-denominated stock exchange and an offshore yuan settlement center and Macao's admission as a member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China's homegrown development bank.
City authorities have hopes of diversifying Macao's economy, as heavily dependent on gambling as ever, into other sectors.
Yet in light of recent unrest in Hong Kong, Xi's proclamation can also be seen as a warning that Beijing has alternatives to the former British colony.
While often lumped together, Hong Kong and Macao are quite different.
Macao has 3% of Hong Kong's land area, less than 10% of its population and virtually none of the global financial infrastructure of bankers, lawyers and accountants who have made Hong Kong one of the world's leading financial centers.
Macao might take comfort in how the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market for technology companies went from announcement in November 2018 to launching trading just eight months later. But creating meaningful financial infrastructure in Macao will be far harder than just expanding on an existing major Chinese market.
Recent moves by the national government and state-owned companies from the neighboring mainland city of Zhuhai to issue yuan bonds in Macao should not be seen as indicative of what is to come.
More bonds will not themselves make Macao a financial center able to challenge Hong Kong or even bite at its heels, much as a handful of listings does not make a marketplace.
There are dozens of exchanges globally that provide listing services and many cities which aim to be financial centers.
Trying to be one won't simply make it so.
Macao also faces the challenge of shaking off its inglorious financial history. 
After 12 years, local financial group Banco Delta Asia remains under U.S. sanctions for facilitating North Korean money laundering activities. 
The growth over the period of Macao's casino industry has not necessarily improved the city's reputation.
Banco Delta Asia remains under U.S. sanctions for helping North Korean money laundering activities. 

Xi, however, no doubt sees his Macao announcement as a reminder to the people of Hong Kong that China's patronage and favor can fall elsewhere.
Yet actually what Beijing is admitting is that it really needs the services of an offshore financial center.
Hong Kong is China's financial window on the world.
As a financial center, Hong Kong's challenge comes not from Macao, Singapore, Taipei or Tokyo.
Only Shanghai, or possibly Shenzhen, could steal Hong Kong's role but only if China opened up to free flows of capital, information and talent in ways which simply will not happen under one-party rule. 
Until that changes, Hong Kong's role is secure.
Macao, like Hong Kong, operates under a "one country, two systems" model, although many in Hong Kong would find elements of its system distasteful.
Macao's version emphasizes "one country" ahead of two systems and the city has implemented national security legislation while Hong Kong has failed to.
There is minimal political opposition and the city's constitution holds no promise of democratization.
Capricious border controls are another issue. 
Among those most recently turned back were the chairman and president of the American Chamber of Commerce of Hong Kong on their way to their Macanese sister organization's annual ball.
Two hours of detention, no explanation and then deportation back to Hong Kong -- hardly good advertising for a city wanting to show that it is open for international business. 
The free flow of people, money and information are necessary hallmarks of a financial center and Macao has fallen at the first hurdle. 
To some this was a one-off incident but surely middle-aged Americans in their party best could not be a threat to the world's next superpower?
Xi can promise anything he wants but Macao won't be challenging Hong Kong in financial services anytime soon.
It may get its own market, but trading will be next to nonexistent.
After six months of unrest, Hong Kong has seen only a few billion dollars at most of capital outflows, according to the latest estimates.
Meantime, the city has successfully retained its crown as the world's top market for stock offerings by listing Alibaba Group Holding and trading volumes through its links with markets in Shanghai and Shenzhen are at record highs.
Hong Kong financial position remains secure.
Macao is in no position to challenge it and risks instead seeing its market project turn into a repeat of the Xiongan New Area, Xi's underwhelming initiative to build a new high-tech urban center south of Beijing.
Beijing attempt to threaten Hong Kong only shows its lack of understanding of the need for a political solution to the city's protest movement. 
Let Macao celebrate its anniversary, but it is not the future center of Chinese offshore finance.

Chinese Paranoia

Hong Kongers Break Beijing’s Delusions of Victory

The authorities were so confident of elections going their way that state media filed copy in advance.
BY JAMES PALMER

Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam, attends the opening session of the National People's Congress in Beijing's Great Hall of the People on March 5, 2018. 

As the district council election results came in Sunday in Hong Kong, the pan-democratic camp—the loose alliance of parties in favor of universal suffrage and opposed to Beijing’s policies—was ecstatic. 

The democrats had expected a likely victory, though nervous about possible interference and fixing—but not of quite this scale. 

By the end of the night, the democrats had tripled their seats, beating the pro-Beijing camp 389-61 with the highest turnout ever. 

Seat after seat flipped yellow, as establishment representatives fell to a wave of public anger; the more tear gas had been used by the increasingly brutal Hong Kong police, the bigger the movement toward the democrats.
In newsrooms in Beijing, however, the results began a panicked scramble to find a way to spin them in favor of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 

In stark contrast to most observers in Hong Kong, editors—and the officials behind them—appear to have sincerely believed that the establishment parties would win an overwhelming victory.

Propaganda is a heady drug, and Beijing got high on its own supply.

I spoke with editors and journalists, both foreign and Chinese, at China Daily, the flagship English-language newspaper of state media; at the English-language version of the nationalist tabloid Global Times; and at the People’s Daily—the CCP’s official newspaper. (My sources universally asked for anonymity.) 

At each paper, copy was filed to editors the night before the Nov. 24 elections assuming a strong victory for the establishment. 

This included predictions of increased majorities (with numbers left to be filled in as needed) for figures such as Junius Ho, whose vicious rhetoric against protesters has left him widely hated but whose comments regularly appear in the Global Times.
The misplaced confidence in Beijing’s victory points to a worrying problem; at high levels within the CCP, officials believe their own propaganda about Hong Kong. 

That’s a frightening prospect for both governance in China and for the future of the city, especially as the system struggles to come up with political excuses for a cataclysmic failure.
In many news organizations, it’s standard to pre-write stories to different outcomes or at least to prepare some copy in advance. 

It’s possible that filing these stories was simply an attempt to make life easier and that the alternative copy, anticipating a democratic victory, was simply unwritable for political reasons. (Chinese office politics are intense, and the mere writing of such copy ahead of events could be portrayed by a rival as a sign of political unreliability.)
But I spent seven years (2009-2016) working as a foreign editor for the Global Times and never saw copy filed ahead of time for similar events. 

Articles published in China Daily and the Global Times in the run-up to the election also seemed to anticipate an establishment victory, saying that the turnout “demonstrated the hope of Hong Kong residents that the chaos will not continue.” 

There was little attempt to preemptively discredit the results or establish a narrative in the event of failure, and the results have genuinely shocked the establishment.
Communist leaders actually believed the line being pushed ahead of the elections by the establishment; ordinary Hong Kongers—the “silent majority,” as flailing Chief Executive Carrie Lam repeatedly called them—were fed up with protest, blamed the opposition for violence, and wanted a return to normality. 

Yet this was a narrative easily refuted by opinion polling, which repeatedly showed a lack of identification with the mainland, massive distrust in the police, and that the overwhelming majority of Hong Kongers, while unhappy with violence, principally blamed the government for it. 

The biggest question in the minds of most analysts was whether the democrats would make sufficient gains to win a majority—while the copy filed in these mainland newsrooms anticipated the establishment increasing its margin of victory.
What caused such an enormous misjudgment? 

The biggest single problem is this: The people in charge of manipulating Hong Kong public opinion for the CCP are also the people charged with reporting on their own success.

The chief channel is the Hong Kong Liaison Office, a government organ that, officially, is in charge of pushing mainland-Hong Kong integration and that in reality acts as the coordinator for United Front policies, coordinating pro-Beijing politicians, CCP-backed newsletters, and the co-option of patronage and business networks. 

At the same time, it also provides intelligence to the central government.

The protests have been a massive failure for the Liaison Office. 

The silent majority narrative was a way of redeeming itself. 

Material supporting it was being fed back to Beijing while any counternarrative was suppressed. 

A similar problem reportedly emerged with the Taiwan office several years ago.
But, of course, the CCP leadership doesn’t rely on just one channel. 

This isn’t a new problem for autocracies; from the Qing princes who told the emperor of fake successes against British forces to the Soviet underlings who reported imaginary harvests, dictatorships have a problem with data. 

The CCP leadership is aware of this and usually receives its information through a variety of methods, including neican (“internal reports”) produced by media staff, especially at the official news agency Xinhua, for the leadership and informal channels—sometimes deliberately circumventing official sources to get at the truth.
The problem is that under the increasingly paranoid regime of Xi Jinping, even these internal reports have become much more geared toward what the leadership wants to hear. 

Reporting on a failed program can be painted as a sign of disloyalty. 

That’s especially the case when it comes to any issue involving separatism—in East Turkestan in 2017, more than 12,000 party members were investigated for supposed failings in the “fight against separatism.” 

Hong Kong is not as politically dangerous as East Turkestan, but it’s still highly risky waters. 

Political incentives cause multiple sources to repeat the same comforting narratives to the leadership, which then becomes convinced of its credibility.

This paranoia can go to extreme lengths. 

In 2016, I began to notice that even positive comments from officials in the media about government programs were being reported anonymously. 

A journalist friend told me the reason: A positive comment about a program backed by a leader who later fell in the rolling political purges under Xi could be very dangerous. 

The fall of Bo Xilai, a prominent leader whom many journalists and pundits once backed, had killed many careers—and resulted in the disappearance of one of the country’s most famous TV anchors.
Outside of political risks for speaking critically, there are more subtle reasons for the group think. 

The need for stability and national unity is so heavily propagandized in the mainland that many Chinese citizens find the idea of backing protests, especially chaotic and violent ones, almost unimaginable. 

Both the CCP leadership and ordinary mainlanders are also given to a crude Marxist analysis that sees material interests as dominant and finds ideological ones—especially those opposed to the CCP—hard to process. 

Mainlander WeChat groups in Hong Kong shared the same conviction that the establishment would triumph and have been shocked by the results.The election has worsened a crisis of conscience in Beijing newsrooms. 

Several current and former reporters, although broadly sympathetic toward the government position and especially conscious of the prejudices felt by many Hong Kongers against mainlanders, spoke of feeling uncomfortable with the extremism of the coverage. 

Two especially singled out the repeated use of the term “traitors,” and one called their own paper’s coverage “toxic” and said it harmed attempts to win over the Hong Kong public.
The result may cause a change of thinking. 

But so far, all indicators are for a doubling down on previous convictions. 

State media has turned to blaming protesters and the United States for supposed electoral interference, furthering a persistent paranoia inside the CCP about foreign intelligence. 

Heads are likely to roll for the failure—but quite possibly the wrong ones.

The Battle of Hong Kong

Beijing Misjudged Trump and Overestimated Its Infiltration in US Government Before Hammering Hong Kong
BY OLIVIA LI

Several Chinese government agencies and numerous state-run media bombarded the White House with harsh criticism after the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Bill on Nov. 19 in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters.

Beijing’s blatant arrogance, reflected in the escalation of police violence in the past week, and its furious response to the passing of the bill indicate that Chinese leaders misjudged the situation, according to China expert Qin Peng, who shared his views with Sound of Hope radio, during a Nov. 19 interview.
“The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has shown unfettered evil in Hong Kong in the latest round of suppression. Police assaulted universities and brutally beat protesters in public. Numerous murders on the sly have been reported. Needless to say, it is the CCP’s true nature that leads to these outrages,” Qin said.
“However, there is also another important factor. That is, the CCP thought that the international community couldn’t do anything other than condemn its actions, and that it was even possible that both the CCP and the protesters would be criticized in equal measure, which wouldn’t bring any real harm to the CCP. Therefore, it dared to commit all kinds of outrages.”
The CCP thought President Donald Trump would only be concerned about economic benefits for the United States, which is one of the major reasons for their misjudgment, Qin added.
The Fourth Plenary Session of the CCP was held between Oct. 28 and Oct. 31 in Beijing.
An insider revealed that the main topics discussed at the political meeting were the Hong Kong protest and the U.S.-China trade talks.
“Moreover, the CCP believed they had enough influence inside the U.S. Senate, through years of infiltration, to help postpone the Hong Kong bill or even obstruct the bill from passing. The escalation of police brutality after the CCP’s Fourth Plenary Session tells us that Beijing’s plan was to quell the protest before the U.S. senators discussed the bill.”
Thus, when the U.S. Senate expedited the vote on the Hong Kong rights bill and then passed it unanimously, it was a heavy and unanticipated blow to Beijing, which Chinese leaders were not prepared for, Qin said.
The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act requires the U.S. Secretary of State to annually assess whether Hong Kong is sufficiently autonomous from Beijing to warrant the special trade status it currently has.
Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997 under Beijing’s promise that the city would remain a highly autonomous region with the “one country two systems” framework.
The United States has treated it as a separate entity from mainland China in trade, investment, and visa processing.
For example, Hong Kong doesn’t face the tariffs that the United States is imposing on Chinese imports.
Chinese officials and Hong Kong leaders deemed responsible for any gross violations of international human rights standards, such as arbitrary detention, torture, or coerced confessions from individuals in Hong Kong, will face sanctions after President Trump signs the bill into law.
Qin applauded the bill, saying that these measures can serve to punish and curb the actions of the perpetrators.
Heng He, a U.S.-based Chinese affairs commentator, expressed similar views when speaking with Sound of Hope.
According to Heng, before the passage of the bill in the U.S. Senate, the CCP took a chance and amped up its handling of protestors, hoping that international society would continue its appeasement attitude toward Beijing.
“Especially when the White House expressed eagerness to reach a deal in the trade talks, and when the U.S. Senate didn’t seem to have a sense of urgency in discussing the Hong Kong rights bill, the CCP wishfully interpreted these as hopeful signs that it could do whatever it wanted without any consequences,” Heng said.

Paramount and paranoid: dictator Xi faces a crisis of confidence

By Anna Fifield

Members of a band from the People’s Liberation Army leave following a speech by Chinese dictator Xi Jinping after the closing session of the National People’s Congress in Beijing in 2018. 

SHANGHAI — Chinese scholars and Communist Party cadres have a succinct way of describing the tectonic shifts taking place here: Deng Xiaoping made us rich, now Xi Jinping is making us strong.
The phrase sums up China’s economic rise that began under Deng four decades ago, and the hopes for a similarly significant geopolitical realignment under the current president.
Xi has devoted his seven years in power to strengthening the ruling Communist Party.

He has relentlessly quashed dissent, sidelined rivals and demanded absolute loyalty.
After pledging to make the party “north, south, east and west,” he has ensured that it is paramount not just in policymaking but in the military, business, education and the law.
Now, Xi is facing challenges on multiple fronts, and the Communist Party, riven with paranoia at the best of times, is seeing threats at every turn.
He has to contend not just with a slowing economy but also a protracted trade war with the United States that has entered a new confrontational phase with President Trump’s decision to impose more tariffs next month.
He is facing escalating Western criticism of Chinese policies toward ethnic Uighurs in East Turkestan, where as many as 3 million people have been put into reeducation camps. 

He is dealing with an increasingly assertive Taiwan at the same time a pro-democracy movement swells in Hong Kong.
All of these loom as dangers to Xi’s authority as the party’s general secretary and are heightening a sense of alarm within a party long fearful of external threats.
“A strong party is the key to a successful China, in Xi’s eyes. It is also the only way to fend off enemies abroad, most notably the U.S.,” said Richard McGregor, an expert on the party and the author of a new book about Xi’s leadership.
Xi is trying to harden the party’s internal resolve to fend off these threats — most acutely, a United States that many observers say seems intent on containing China.
“Xi has a legion of internal critics, including over his handling of relations with Washington,” McGregor said. 

“One way to bring them to heel is by demanding fealty and loyalty to the party, and by extension, to himself.”
Since taking power, Xi has rewritten the party’s rules — including ending term limits, setting himself up to be leader indefinitely — and launched huge study campaigns to instill his personal ideology across society, starting with toddlers, through schools and universities and through the Central Committee Party School in Beijing. 

The party has developed an app through which Chinese can study “Xi Jinping Thought.”
The dictator this past week exhorted party members to “work hard to purify, perfect, reform and upgrade ourselves.”
“No exterior forces are able to take us down, as we are the world’s largest political party; the only one who can defeat us is ourselves,” Xi wrote in Qiushi, the influential publication of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.
“We should stay alert to the ubiquitous factors that could weaken our Party’s pioneering nature and contaminate our Party’s purity,” he said. 

“If we don’t take strict precautions and correct them in time... small problems will grow into big ones, minor slips will escalate into an irreversible landslide, probably even leading to a broader and subversive catastrophe.”
Making the situation even more delicate, the party is now entering a sensitive period.
This month, party leaders both current and retired will repair to the beach resort of Beidaihe, about 200 miles east of Beijing, for their annual policy conclave. 

It was a ritual first begun by Mao Zedong in the 1950s.
The meeting is highly secretive — the state media don’t announce that it has begun or that it has ended, let alone what is discussed — and last summer, Beijing was awash with speculation that party elders had taken Xi to task for mismanaging the trade war.
This year, Trump’s threat to impose tariffs of 10 percent on the remaining $300 billion of untaxed Chinese exports to the U.S. could provide Xi with more cover, said Bill Bishop, publisher of the widely read Sinocism newsletter.
“It should be an easy argument to make that no one can manage Trump and so those trying to blame Xi have other, ulterior motives, and that even if China agrees to humiliating concessions there is no guarantee the U.S. side will keep its word,” Bishop wrote this week.
The other key event that is concerning party leaders is the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, which Xi plans to mark in October with a massive military parade.
With the anniversary drawing near, Chinese television regulators this past week ordered all soap operas and costume dramas off the air for the 100 days leading up to National Day on Oct. 3, replacing them instead with patriotic shows that engender love for the motherland.
The airwaves with be filled for the next two months with dramas like “Spy Hunter,” a thriller about young Communist agents sacrificing themselves to protect the motherland and fight for peace in 1931. 

Then there’s “Barley Fragrance,” set in a southern village in the decades after economic reforms began, which tells the story of a veteran soldier and his selfless wife leading villagers to cast off poverty and rejuvenate the local economy.

Xi Jinping, bottom, is applauded as he arrives at the closing session of the National People’s Congress in Beijing in 2018. 

The relevance of the Communist apparatus to modern Chinese life is not always readily apparent, even to the party faithful.
On a recent rainy Saturday, lines of them were queuing up to enter the site where the first National Congress of the Communist Party of China was held in 1921.
The birthplace of the Communist Party, a set of brick buildings in the financial capital of Shanghai, is now surrounded by glitzy malls and Lamborghini dealers. 

But school groups and work groups flock here by the busload to learn about the party’s history.
“Stay true to our founding mission and loyal to the party, lead the staff and workers to achieve [new] feats,” read a banner held up by the members of the Lujiazhen Workers Union, who had made the pilgrimage from the surrounding Jiangsu province.
Inside, groups of 20-somethings stood with their fists raised in front of the Communist Party flag, reciting the party admission oath. 

I will “strictly observe party discipline, guard party secrets, be loyal to the party, work hard, fight for communism throughout my life, be ready at all times to sacrifice my all for the party and the people,” they chanted.

Chinese tourists flocked to the birthplace of the Communist Party, a set of brick buildings in the financial capital of Shanghai that is now surrounded by glitzy malls and Lamborghini dealers.

Xi’s efforts to bolster the party and his leadership over it are rooted in a sense of insecurity, say longtime China scholars.
“The party system, after all, doesn’t just exist on its own. It operates in opposition to something else: the West and democracy,” McGregor writes in “Xi Jinping: The Backlash.” 

China’s leaders have intensively studied the collapse of the Soviet Union — Xi even had top officials watch a four-part documentary about it soon after he came into office — and concluded that Mikhail Gorbachev made a strategic error by opting to liberalize rather than tighten political controls.
The Arab Spring, in which popular revolts forced Middle Eastern dictators from power, added weight to the view in Beijing that it must clamp down and not loosen up. 

Chinese leaders have been watching events in Venezuela, where the United States has tried to help Juan Guaidó oust authoritarian president Nicolás Maduro.
Pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong this summer and Washington’s recent accommodation of Taiwan — notably through renewed arms sales and allowing the democratically ruled island’s president to visit the United States — have only heightened the party’s fears.
Meanwhile, the party’s increasingly repressive actions inside China, such as the crackdown in the East Turkestan colony and the growing use of surveillance technology, “reflect heightened fear and insecurity, not a self-confident China aspiring to enhanced leadership in global and regional affairs,” Jonathan D. Pollack and Jeffrey A. Bader of the Brookings Institution wrote in a recent paper.
“Beijing exhibits a narrowness of vision and self-protectiveness, at the same time warily eying America’s increasingly stark and threat-driven characterizations of relations with China,” they wrote.
Because of this sense of insecurity, party leaders view the Trump administration’s declaration of a trade war not as a purely economic matter but as a broader, strategic effort to contain China.

China’s economy registered its slowest annual growth in 27 years in the second quarter.

Delegates listen to a speech by Xi during the closing session of the National People's Congress in March 2018. 

This theory got a boost from none other than John Bolton, President Trump’s national security adviser, late last year.
“This is not just an economic issue,” he told Fox Business.
“This is not just talking about tariffs and the terms of trade. This is a question of power.”

Chinese Golem

Red China redux: pariah among nations, enemy of its people

BY JOSEPH BOSCO

At this week’s G-20 meeting, Xi Jinping, like the other 15 male leaders except the Indian and Saudi representatives, will be dressed in traditional Western business attire. 

But the coat-and-tie garb should not disguise the nature of the regime he represents. 

It will be conveniently easy to forget the fundamental linear identity of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of today with that of its founder, Mao Zedong.
When Richard Nixon looked at the problem of “Red China” as he began his successful 1968 run for the presidency, he saw an angry, resentful communist regime that was determined to “nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.” 

The world had much to worry about, he warned, from the ideologically-driven, viscerally anti-Western party that had seized control of a vast Asian territory and its 750 million inhabitants.
Less than a year after its creation, the new communist state already had been condemned as an aggressor by the United Nations for encouraging and joining North Korea’s invasion of South Korea. Simultaneously, it subjugated Tibet and East Turkestan and began a campaign of cultural genocide in both places.
Nor was it just non-Chinese cultures the Communist Party sought to destroy. 

Mao launched his Cultural Revolution against the ancient Han civilization itself, ending with the banishment, imprisonment and deaths of tens of millions of Chinese.
The CCP’s aggression extended beyond populations within China and along its borders. 

It went “abroad in search of (Western) monsters to destroy” and supported “wars of national liberation” to overthrow existing “imperialist” or “puppet” governments throughout Asia, Africa and the Third World.
That was the dangerous, hostile rising power that Nixon warned could not be allowed to remain on its maniacally destructive path: “China must change,” he wrote in his seminal Foreign Affairs article anticipating the policy he would pursue as president. 

He examined the risks of alternative approaches to the China problem.
“Conceding to China a ‘sphere of influence’ embracing much of the Asian mainland and extending even to the island nations beyond … would not be acceptable to the United States or to its Asian allies.”
Equally undesirable and highly imprudent, Nixon concluded, would be an effort to “eliminate the threat by preemptive war … a confrontation which could escalate into World War III.”
On the other hand, Nixon did not favor over-eager accommodation with China. 

“[A]s many would simplistically have it, rushing to grant recognition to Peking, to admit it to the United Nations and to ply it with offers of trade — all of which would serve to confirm its rulers in their present course.”
Instead, U.S. policy “must come urgently to grips with the reality, … recognizing the present and potential danger from Communist China” by applying a combination of deterrence and dissuasion. 

“For the short run … this means a policy of firm restraint, of no reward, of a creative counter-pressure designed to persuade Peking that its interests can be served only by accepting the basic rules of international civility.”
Yet, Nixon argued, “containment without isolation” was necessary but not sufficient. 

“Along with it, we need a positive policy of pressure and persuasion, of dynamic detoxification … to draw off the poison from the Thoughts of Mao.” 

Integrating China into “the family of nations” was the only practicable solution he foresaw. 

“There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation.” 

Thus was born the idea of engagement that he undertook with his opening to China, with the purpose of normalizing the communist regime.
At first, Nixon seemed to heed his own caveat that the Americans not appear too eager for a deal, lest China sense weakness and exploit it. 

He cautioned his junior partner, national security adviser Henry Kissinger, “We cannot be too forthcoming in terms of what America will do. We’ll withdraw [from Taiwan], and we’ll do this, and that, and the other thing.”
Yet, in the end, he and Kissinger did just that, by acceding to Beijing’s demands on Taiwan. 

The U.S. removed the Seventh Fleet from the Taiwan Strait, then began the first phase of a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Taiwan — even before Nixon made his visit to China. 

The preemptive concessions violated not only Nixon’s self-imposed restraint but also Kissinger’s academic teaching: “We [Americans] have a tendency to apply our standards to others in negotiations. We like to pay in advance to show our good will, but in foreign policy you never get paid for services already rendered.”
In the deal struck by the two consummate realists, Taiwan would be left to Beijing’s tender mercies. In exchange, America would be allowed a graceful exit after abandoning Vietnam as well. 

But China reneged on that commitment and continued its flow of arms, material and Chinese soldiers in support of North Vietnam’s final conquest of South Vietnam and America’s humiliating retreat.
Kissinger noted with pride, before the arrival of the Trump administration, that all Nixon’s successors followed the original engagement policies. 

And he was right. 

By comparison with the ragings of the Mao period, and even after the Tiananmen massacre, other Chinese leaders have appeared on the surface to be conventional national leaders — as long as we were willing to look away from their brutal policies to suppress dissent: imprisoning and torturing to death a Nobel Laureate, forcing abortions and infanticide, organ harvesting from dead and living persons, mass internments of ethnic and religious populations, and other moral outrages.
Despite the historical record, U.S. leaders accepted the pronouncements of academics and other experts that Beijing’s foreign policies were benign and that the only way China would become an enemy of the West is if we treated it as such. 

So, for decades, China treated us as its ultimate adversary, while proclaiming its peaceful intentions.
Now Xi has pretty much ripped off the mask, and even invokes the very Thoughts of Mao that Nixon had hoped to “detoxify” from China’s policies. 

But Nixon said, years later, that his policies might have “created a Frankenstein” — and the family of nations he hoped would domesticate China finally has begun to take notice of the monster that has arisen in its midst.

Paranoid Chinese Government Erases All Evidence Of Country’s Existence From Internet

The Onion

BEIJING—In an effort to completely stamp out any possibility of political unrest, officials within the Chinese government have scrubbed from the internet all evidence that might suggest their nation exists, according to a highly classified internal report obtained by reporters Wednesday. 

“To ensure the safety of our citizens, we have removed all written and visual representations of China, its history, and its people from the web forever,” the report read in part, suggesting the government would look “terrible” if any information about the country were to reach the Chinese public, and thus the best course of action would be to permanently delete all mentions of the 4,000-year-old civilization. 

“Going forward, all internet searches for China will simply redirect to Korea, and our online encyclopedia articles will be revised to indicate that when Marco Polo reached the eastern edge of Central Asia, there was nothing else to see so he turned around and went home. In addition, Google Maps has agreed to replace our territory with a 9.6-square-kilometer bay that extends westward from the Pacific Ocean to the coast of Tajikistan.” 

Asked for comment during a White House press briefing, President Trump praised China’s Xi Jinping as a strong leader and suggested American news outlets could learn a lot from the Asian nation’s state-run media.

Xi Jinping Wanted Global Dominance. He Overshot.

China wasn’t ready for the trade war with the United States.
By Yi-Zheng Lian

The endgame in the trade war between China and the United States seems near. 

President Trump, betting with real currency — American strength — apparently has the upper hand, and the concessions Xi Jinping is likely to make won’t be mere tokens. 

When — if? — an agreement is finally announced, President Trump will surely fire off bragging tweets, partly to shore up his credentials for a second term, amid personal and policy troubles. 

For Xi, any deal could mean a very serious loss of face.
Xi assumed power when China was still riding high on its so-called economic miracle (and the United States remained mired in the aftereffects of the 2008-9 recession). 

He became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) in late 2012 and president of the People’s Republic in early 2013. 

His anticorruption campaign was instantly popular. 

He championed the “Chinese Dream,” a vague vision of prosperity, strength and well-being for the country and its people, that seemed to fire up many citizens. 

His proposal to Barack Obama to establish a “New Model of Major Country Relations” could only please Han-majority Chinese with imperial yearnings.
But those were easy stunts, performed in a country with no audible opposition and that bans “reckless” talk about the government. 

The trade war, on the other hand, is the first real occasion to assess Xi’s leadership capabilities. 

And his performance might not look so good, even if one discounts the setbacks related to the trade war.
First and foremost, Xi has utterly failed to manage the United States–Chinese relationship. 

In contrast, every Chinese leader since the founding of the communist state in 1949 had recognized the paramount importance of those ties, worked hard to improve them — and reaped huge benefits.
Mao staged Ping-Pong diplomacy to break the ice in 1971, and President Nixon supported him in his standoff against the Soviet Union. 

Deng Xiaoping went all-out to woo the United States, and Jimmy Carter switched recognition of China from Taipei to Beijing in 1979. 

During the 1980s, the C.C.P. leaders Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang invited Milton Friedman and other American economists to visit and provide advice; after that, American capital and technology started flowing into China. 

In 1997, Jiang Zemin made an eight-day visit to the United States — at one point, while in Williamsburg, Va., putting on a three-cornered colonial hat. 

Bill Clinton then gave China a strong push to enter the World Trade Organization in 2001.
The Hu Jintao years, 2003–13, saw China’s most tactful exploitation of American openness (and naïveté). 

Cheap Chinese imports created runaway bilateral trade deficits for the United States. 

The Confucius Institutes, a network of language schools cum influence agencies, began to take root in American universities and high schools. (Today, there are more than 100 throughout the United States.) 

Chinese venture capitalists flooded Silicon Valley with money raised in American financial markets — then quietly siphoned off cutting-edge American expertise and injected it into China’s own high-tech hub.
But Xi has been aggressively hard-line. 

Under him, anti-American rhetoric has spread in official media. 

The Chinese government has been explicit about wanting to challenge the United States’s military presence in Asia. 

It has made aggressive moves toward Taiwan and in the South China Sea. 

It has sent Chinese battleships through American waters off the coast of Alaska. (It claimed to only be exercising the internationally recognized right of “innocent passage,” but the move clearly was a show of force.)
State authorities in Beijing try to co-opt members of China’s vast diaspora, hoping to develop a network that will facilitate political infiltration into other countries and high-tech transfers out of them. 

To this end, they resort to both overt schemes, like the Thousand Talents Plan, an official headhunting program, and covert tactics overseen by the C.C.P.’s influence machine, the United Front.
These efforts have set off alarms among some Americans. 

In 2017 and 2018, two groups of blue-ribbon scholars and ex-officials from previous United States administrations advocated a fundamental change in America’s view of China. 

Their members were moderates and mostly well-disposed toward China. 

Yet some of their recommendations dovetailed with the views of the Trump administration experts who consider China to be America’s number-one enemy and security threat. 

Xi, apparently oblivious to this sea change, was caught unprepared when President Trump hit China with a tariff war.
The dispute is having a knock-on effect elsewhere in Asia, Australia and New Zealand, and Europe. After a summit in Brussels last month, China "agreed" to grant European Union countries “improved” market access, stop the forced transfer of technology and discuss the possibility of curtailing state subsidies to Chinese companies, which gives them an unfair competitive advantage. 

Although these concessions were presented in the mild, mutual-promise language of a joint statement, they were a clear setback for China and will blunt its global ambitions.
Why is all of this happening under Xi? 

History suggests an answer.
In the late 1950s, Mao began to challenge the Soviet Union’s leadership of the international communist movement, then a potent force that hoped to overturn the United States-led world order. Mao was also seeking global dominance, in line with the traditional concept that the emperor of the Middle Kingdom was the rightful ruler of “tian xia” (天下), everything under the heavens. 

But Mao overreached; China wasn’t strong enough for that then. 

The Soviet Union’s decision to scrap aid programs to China and pull out its scientific and technological advisers there dealt a severe blow to China’s underperforming socialist economy.
Like Mao with the Soviets, Xi has challenged the global leadership of the United States too hard and too soon.
Xi’s second major shortcoming has been his failure to articulate a coherent set of policies to stop the Chinese economy’s long-term weakening, after many years of stellar performance. 

China’s gross-domestic-product growth in 2018 was the weakest in 28 years. 

The figure for the first quarter of this year was 6.4 percent, compared with the record high of 15.4 percent for the same period in 1993. 

Even that number would be the envy of many Western states, but the decline should concern China’s leadership because it underlines the country’s structural problems — notably, a rapidly graying population, a shrinking labor force and a total debt-to-G.D.P. ratio that neared 300 percent in the first quarter of 2018. 

The Japanese bank Nomura has estimated that defaults on bonds denominated in renminbi (also known as yuan) quadrupled between 2017 and 2018.
Weighed down by demographics and debt, China can hardly expand through more private investment and consumption. 

Worse, since its economy already has some huge excess capacities (think newly built ghost towns), government stimulus isn’t very effective. 

According to the International Monetary Fund, in 2008, it took one trillion yuan of credit to generate one trillion yuan of economic output; by 2017, the ratio was 3.5-to-1.
Yet Xi has done little to address these structural issues.
Evidence of severe demographic problems had become apparent by the late 2000s, but in 2016 Xi merely replaced the one-child policy with a two-child policy. 

Too little, too late. 

China’s number of newborns per year has dropped since the changes. 

The 2018 total was the lowest since 1961, a year struck by a terrible famine. 

Xi signed off on an economic stimulus package in 2015 that was 25 percent larger than his predecessor’s emergency plan in 2009, which had been implemented as a response to the global financial crisis. 

And again, in January and February of this year alone, even while Xi has been paying lip service to the need to wean the economy off state support, the government offered new loans and financing exceeding the package for all of 2015, according to an article in Forbes.
A third criticism of Xi is that under him, China has sponsored or condoned actions by Chinese citizens and entities worldwide that have damaged the country’s international reputation while degrading its own moral fabric.
Take intellectual property, for example. 

The United States has hard evidence that it was the policy of Huawei, a flagship Chinese high-tech company, to reward employees for I.P. theft. 

And, as I have written before, such a policy is encouraged, arguably even mandatory, under China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law.
Traditionally, the ideal Chinese state is a Confucian state that adheres to strict moral and behavioral norms. 

Yet for all his cracking down on corruption at home, Xi has encouraged moral turpitude abroad; his vision of China is a nation of patriotic thieves. 

All Chinese arguably have lost face as a result, and now innocent people overseas may be dismissed out of hand as guilty by association.
Xi is widely seen as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao. 

After the Constitution was amended last year, he could be president for life — unless his serious failures of leadership give his opponents at home enough reason to cut him short.

Chinese Paranoia

Inside China’s ‘tantrum diplomacy’ at APEC

By Josh Rogin 

Chinese and Papua New Guinea flags line a street in front of the parliament building in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, host of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. 

PORT MORESBY, PAPUA NEW GUINEA — For the first time in its 20-year history, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit ended in disarray Sunday when the 21 member countries could not reach consensus on a joint statement because of objections by one member — China. 

When the summit failed, to the disgust of the other diplomats, Chinese officials broke out in applause.
But that was only the final incident in a week during which China’s official delegation staged a series of aggressive, bullying, paranoid and weird stunts to try to exert dominance and pressure the host nation and everyone else into succumbing to its demands.
“This is becoming a bit of a routine in China’s official relations: tantrum diplomacy,” a senior U.S. official involved in the negotiations told me. 

“Them walking around like they own the place and trying to get what they want through bullying.”
Even before the summit started, and continuing right up to its end, Chinese officials used every opportunity to strong-arm or undermine the host nation government of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the other summit members. 

Chinese tactics included being thuggish with the international media, busting into government buildings uninvited, papering the capital city of Port Moresby with pro-Beijing propaganda and using cyberattacks to stifle the message of Vice President Pence, the U.S. delegation leader.
I was traveling with Mr Pence, and the APEC summit was his last stop in a week-long Asia tour, which included visits to Japan, Australia and Singapore, where the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit was held. 

The PNG stop was a showdown of sorts between Mr Pence and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, who had been in Port Moresby for several days prior for an official state visit.
China’s attempted “charm offensive” was visible everywhere. 

The Chinese delegation had filled the streets of Port Moresby with Chinese flags for Xi’s state visit. The PNG government demanded that they be taken down before the APEC summit.

The Chinese officials eventually complied, but then replaced them with solid red flags — almost identical to the official Chinese flags, but without the yellow stars.
A huge banner along a major thoroughfare touted China’s One Belt, One Road economic initiative as “not only a road of cooperation and win-win situation, but also a road of hope and peace!” 

In his speech at APEC, Vice President Pence called it “a constricting belt” and “a one-way road.”
China’s first outwardly intimidating move was to ban all international media from Xi’s meeting with the leaders of eight Pacific nations. 

Journalists had traveled from around the region to attend the event, and the PNG government gave them credentials. 

But Chinese officials barred them from entering the building and only allowed China’s state media to cover it. 

A U.S. official called it an “own goal” by China, because the journalists then could only write about China’s brutish behavior.
Things got worse from there. 

On Saturday, Xi and Vice President Pence were the final two official speakers at the public part of the summit. 

They gave their speeches on a cruise ship docked off the coast, while most journalists were stationed on shore in the International Media Center. 

But five minutes into Vice President Pence’s remarks, the Internet in the media center crashed for most of the reporters there, meaning they couldn’t hear or report on it in real time.

Just as Mr Pence was finishing his speech, the media center’s Internet mysteriously came back on. U.S. officials told me they were investigating what happened.
“Was there any trouble with the Internet for the speaker before Mr Pence?” another senior U.S. official asked me. (No.) “And who was that speaker again?” (Xi.)
Then things got even crazier. 

Behind the scenes, the member countries were furiously negotiating over the joint statement. 

Chinese officials, not happy with how they were faring inside the negotiations, demanded a meeting with the PNG foreign minister. 

He declined, not wanting to appear to violate PNG’s neutrality as summit chair.
The Chinese wouldn’t take no for an answer. 

They went to the foreign ministry and physically barged into his office, demanding he meet with them. 

He called the local police to get them out of the building. 

Every diplomat I talked to in PNG was stunned by China’s actions. 

But that’s not the end of it.
The negotiations continued into Sunday, and the Chinese delegation’s bad behavior continued apace. According to U.S. officials, Chinese were getting so paranoid about the statement that they began pushing into the meetings of smaller groups of countries on the summit’s sidelines. 

Inside the official sessions, Chinese yelled about countries “scheming” against China. 

Nobody else in the room was yelling, the U.S. officials said.
All 20 countries except China finally agreed to the joint statement, except for China.

The Chinese delegation objected primarily to one line that read: “We agree to fight protectionism including all unfair trade practices.” 

They perceived that as singling out and targeting China.
The Chinese filibustered inside the session, giving long monologues, knowing that time was short and the world leaders had planes waiting to take them home. 

When the time ran out and therefore the summit had officially failed, the Chinese delegation stationed in a room near the main session broke out in applause.
There are three conclusions we can take away from this tragicomedy of errors put on by the Chinese government. 

First, they are behaving in an increasingly brazen and coercive way. 

This is especially true with the small Indo-Pacific countries — such as Papua New Guinea — that they are flooding with development projects and saddling with massive debt.
Second, the paranoid and oversensitive nature of China’s behavior is a clear indication that the government feels under threat from the United States and its allies. 

Lastly, the fact that Beijing is acting in a way that actually alienates other countries — which is clearly against China’s own interests — shows that Chinese official action is controlled from the top down in ways that often prevent good decision-making. 

Even when the Chinese delegation saw its tactics were backfiring, they didn’t have the authority to change course.
This is what the Chinese government is today: pushy, insecure, out of control and with no desire to pretend anymore they will play by the rules the international community has been operating under for decades. 

How to deal with that reality is the debate the rest of the world must now begin in earnest.

China's Final Solution

China's paranoia and oppression in East Turkestan has a long history

By James Griffiths

Hong Kong -- China finally admitted this week what had been widely reported: that it is interning thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people in "re-education camps" in the far-western colony of East Turkestan.
Human rights groups previously estimated that as many as one million people have been held in the camps, which satellite photos show have sprung up across the region in recent months.
Along with restrictions on halal food, Islamic dress, and general religiosity, the ongoing crackdown has primarily affected the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group who historically were the majority in the region.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang defended recent measures at a press briefing Thursday, saying "taking measures to prevent and crack down on terrorism and extremism have helped preserve stability, as well as the life and livelihood of people of all ethnicities in East Turkestan."
While the strategies Beijing is taking are new -- and include a state-of-the-art surveillance regime -- they echo a longtime paranoia about East Turkestan and a deep suspicion of its non-Han population among China's rulers which have historically resulted in oppression and rebellion.
East Turkestan is vast. 

Stretching 1.6 million square kilometers (640,000 sq miles) from the Tibetan plateau in the southeast to Kazakhstan on its north-western border, it is by far China's largest colony, but one of its least densely populated. 

Around 22 million people reside in the region, most of whom live around the major cities of Urumqi, Kashgar and Yining.
While Chinese armies rampaged through East Turkestan and controlled parts of it for centuries, the modern administrative unit only dates to the mid-nineteenth century, a fact hinted at by its Chinese name, which translates as "new frontier" in Chinese.
Despite the Communist Party's claims that "East Turkestan has since ancient times been an inseparable part of the motherland," the relatively recent imperial conquest of East Turkestan has always been accompanied by an ever present paranoia that it could break away from Chinese rule, becoming another "Outer Mongolia."
During the Sino-Soviet split, there was a deep fear in Beijing that Moscow would seek to annex East Turkestan, which bordered the then Soviet Union, or encourage ethnic minority groups to rebel.
This was a very real possibility: during the 1930s and 40s, as the short-lived Nationalist government fought a civil war with the Communists and faced a growing threat of Japanese invasion, two breakaway East Turkestan Republics were declared and swiftly put down.
While the East Turkestan independence movements (and their successors today) were largely based on ethno-nationalist arguments about a homeland for Turkic-speaking Uyghurs, since the turn of the millennium Beijing's chief concern has been the potential spread of radical Islam in the region, and the alleged influence of international terrorist organizations.
Particularly in the wake of September 11, 2001, as Washington sought Beijing's support in its "war on terror," the Chinese government linked unrest in East Turkestan with Islamist groups overseas, succeeding in getting the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) listed as a terrorist organization by the US.
This was despite there being such little information available on ETIM at the time or evidence supporting Beijing's claims that some openly questioned whether it existed as a coherent group at all.

A woman stands in front of police and riot vehicles on July 7, 2009 in Urumqi, the capital of East Turkestan.

Ethnic unrest
Even as the authorities were focused on Islamic terrorism, the biggest unrest in East Turkestan in recent years appeared to have nothing to do with religion.
A mass protest which broke out after a police crackdown on a smaller demonstration spiraled out of control in July 2009, and saw rioters rampage through Urumqi armed with clubs, knives and stones.
They randomly attacked and in many cases beat to death any Han Chinese they found in the streets, including women and elderly people, and set cars, houses and shops on fire.
It took around 20,000 paramilitary police and People's Liberation Army soldiers to quell the unrest, which left at least 197 Han and Uygur people dead, according to Chinese state media.
Internet access to all of East Turkestan, along with international phone and text messaging services, was cut off for almost a year in the wake of the violence.
Since the 2009 violence -- which came shortly after unrest in Tibet -- restrictions on the lives of ordinary Uyghurs in East Turkestan have increased, even as the space to criticize and push for alternative policies has narrowed.
The region has a multitude of problems deserving of discussion beyond security and ethnic unrest. East Turkestan is one of China's poorest areas, and development has lagged other parts of the country. Uyghurs and other minorities complain of discrimination in employment and education, and corruption is rife within state-controlled industries that continue to dominate the local economy.
Increasingly however, any criticism of these issues -- particularly anything which touches on ethnic or religious matters -- is cast as advocating for independence or seeking to undermine the government.
In 2014, Ilham Tohti, a Beijing-based economics professor who was considered one of the leading moderate Chinese voices on East Turkestan, was jailed for life for "separatism" and spreading "ethnic hatred."
His arrest and the severity of his sentence shocked many supporters, who warned that by stamping out voices such as Ilham's, "the Chinese Government is in fact laying the groundwork for the very extremism it says it wants to prevent."
This prediction has largely been borne out, especially as Chinese authorities have ramped up restrictions on Islam in the name of fighting terrorism, including banning veils and bears, cracking down on Quran study groups, and preventing Muslim officials from fasting for Ramadan.
Both Al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State have featured East Turkestan in their propaganda in recent years, and Uyghur fighters have been spotted in Syria and Iraq.
Uyghurs have also been linked to numerous violent attacks in East Turkestan and other parts of China, though it is disputed how many of these incidents are linked to or directed by overseas militant groups.

A person wearing a white mask with tears of blood takes part in a protest march of ethnic Uyghurs asking for the European Union to call upon China to respect human rights East Turkestan in April 2018.

No way out
Beijing's paranoia about separatism in East Turkestan is real.
But despite numerous warnings about this resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy, the authorities' reaction has only been to crack down harder and restrict Muslim life further.
Chinese officials argue that without a firm hand, the country's far west risks turning into another Syria, where rebel groups and Islamist militants backed by foreign powers, including the US, have plunged the country into a years-long civil war.
This narrative has been used to justify not only restrictions on Islam, but the massive securitization of East Turkestan, with armed police manning checkpoints across cities, surveillance cameras everywhere, and citizens unable to leave the region.
That approach reached its zenith in the past year with the expanding network of "re-education camps," where predominantly Uyghur internees are forced to attend "anti-extremist ideological" classes and their behavior -- particularly religious behavior -- is tightly controlled.
"Detentions are extra-legal, with no legal representation allowed throughout the process of arrest and incarceration," according to the World Uyghur Congress, a Germany-based umbrella group for the Uyghur diaspora, which recently submitted evidence to the United Nations about the camps.
While the Chinese government initially pushed back against these claims -- saying "East Turkestan citizens including the Uyghurs enjoy equal freedoms and rights" -- the apparent acknowledgment and legalization of the camps this week, as well as increasing discussion of the issue in state media, indicates Beijing may be doubling down on its policies in East Turkestan in the face of growing international condemnation.
Washington has recently found its voice on East Turkestan, where it long overlooked abuses by Beijing. 

This week, US lawmakers announced their intention to nominate Ilham Tohti for the Nobel Peace Prize, the award of which in 2010 to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo infuriated Beijing. 

Liu died of cancer last year while still in Chinese government custody.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu rejected US criticism at a regular press briefing Thursday, saying people had "been creating lies and launching baseless accusations at the appropriate counter-terrorism measures taken by the East Turkestan authorities."
Nor is it obvious how Beijing would reverse its policies at this point. 

Few moderate Chinese voices are left who can speak authoritatively on East Turkestan, and those officials running the province -- like Chen Quanguo, former Tibet party secretary and a key ally of Xi Jinping -- are hardliners with a reputation for ruthless crackdowns and brutal repression.
Just as in Hong Kong, where China's heavy-handed approach arguably inspired support for independence, Beijing is left with a problem that it created, but one that perversely justifies its earlier approach.
Charting an alternative path of reconciliation and respect for human rights would require a subtlety in dealing with dissent that Xi's administration has so far not shown evidence of.

‘We Cannot Afford This’: Malaysia Pushes Back Against China’s Paranoia

A country that once courted Chinese investment now fears becoming overly indebted for big projects that are neither viable nor necessary — except to China.

By Hannah Beech

Melaka Gateway, a set of artificial islands in Malaysia, is a joint project between a Malaysian group and Chinese companies.

KUANTAN, Malaysia — In the world’s most vital maritime chokepoint, through which much of Asian trade passes, a Chinese power company is investing in a deepwater port large enough to host an aircraft carrier.

Another state-owned Chinese company is revamping a harbor along the fiercely contested South China Sea.
Nearby, a rail network mostly financed by a Chinese government bank is being built to speed Chinese goods along a new Silk Road. 

And a Chinese developer is creating four artificial islands that could become home to nearly three-quarters of a million people and are being heavily marketed to Chinese citizens.
Each of these projects is being built in Malaysia, a Southeast Asian democracy at the heart of China’s effort to gain global influence.
But where Malaysia once led the pack in courting Chinese investment, it is now on the front edge of a new phenomenon: a pushback against Beijing as nations fear becoming overly indebted for projects that are neither viable nor necessary — except in their strategic value to China or use in propping up friendly strongmen.
At the end of a five-day visit in Beijing, Malaysia’s new leader, Mahathir Mohamad, said on Tuesday that he was halting two major Chinese-linked projects, worth more $22 billion, amid accusations that his predecessor’s government knowingly signed bad deals with China to bail out a graft-plagued state investment fund and bankroll his continuing grip on power.
His message throughout his meetings with officials, and in public comments, has been unambiguous.
“We do not want a situation where there is a new version of colonialism happening because poor countries are unable to compete with rich countries,” Mr. Mahathir said on Monday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing after meeting with Li Keqiang.

For a time it appeared that China’s standard playbook for gaining favor was working in Malaysia. 

It had successfully courted Mr. Mahathir’s predecessor, Najib Razak, with easy loans and showcase projects, and secured deals that were of strategic value for its ambitions.
But in May, Mr. Najib was voted out of office by an electorate tired of the corruption scandals swirling around him, some of which involved China’s highest-profile investment deals in Malaysia.
Mr. Mahathir, 93, was voted into office with a mandate that included getting the country out from under its suffocating debt — roughly $250 billion of it, some of it owed to Chinese companies.
From Sri Lanka and Djibouti to Myanmar and Montenegro, many recipients of cash from Chinese’s huge infrastructure financing campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, have discovered that Chinese investment brings with it less-savory accompaniments, including closed bidding processes that result in inflated contracts and influxes of Chinese labor at the expense of local workers.
Fears are growing that China is using its overseas spending spree to gain footholds in some of the world’s most strategic places, and deliberately luring vulnerable nations into debt traps to increase China’s dominion as the United States’ influence fades in the developing world.
“The Chinese must have been thinking, ‘We can pick things up for cheap here,’” said Khor Yu Leng, a Malaysian political economist who has been researching China’s investments in Southeast Asia. “They’ve got enough patient capital to play the long game, wait for the local boys to overextend and then come in and take all that equity for China.”
In his action in Beijing on Tuesday, Mr. Mahathir said he was halting a contract for the China Communications Construction Company to build the East Coast Rail Link, thought to have cost the government around $20 billion, along with a $2.5 billion agreement for an arm of a Chinese energy giant to construct gas pipelines. 

He had earlier suspended the projects, leading some analysts to believe he wanted to renegotiate the terms during his China trip. 

Instead, he announced that the deals were off for now.
“It’s all about borrowing too much money, which we cannot afford and cannot repay because we don’t need these projects in Malaysia,” Mr. Mahathir said.

Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has been given an electoral mandate to guide Malaysia out from under $250 billion in debt, some of it owed to Chinese companies.

A rooftop bar at Melaka Gateway.

A Pentagon report released last week said “The ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) is intended to develop strong economic ties with other countries, shape their interests to align with China’s and deter confrontation or criticism of China’s approach to sensitive issues.”
“Countries participating in BRI could develop economic dependence on Chinese capital, which China could leverage to achieve its interests,” the report said.
Malaysia’s new finance minister, Lim Guan Eng, raised the example of Sri Lanka, where a deepwater port built by a Chinese state-owned company failed to attract much business. 

The indebted South Asian island nation was compelled to hand over to China a 99-year lease on the port and more land near it, giving Beijing an outpost near one of its busiest shipping lanes.
“We don’t want a situation like Sri Lanka where they couldn’t pay and the Chinese ended up taking over the project,” Mr. Lim said.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Mr. Mahathir made clear what he thought of China’s strategy.
“They know that when they lend big sums of money to a poor country, in the end they may have to take the project for themselves,” he said.
“China knows very well that it had to deal with unequal treaties in the past imposed upon China by Western powers,” Mr. Mahathir added, referring to the concessions China had to give after its defeat in the opium wars. 

“So China should be sympathetic toward us. They know we cannot afford this.”

Strategic Location

The Malaysia-China Kuantan Industrial Park.

Malaysia has long served as a prize of empire, with a geopolitical importance that belies its relatively small size. 

The Portuguese, Dutch and British flocked here, eager to control a fulcrum linking the Pacific and Indian Oceans. 

China is the latest power to try to share in the riches.
Kuantan, a Malaysian city nestled on the South China Sea coast, had never been a hot spot. 

But then China began adding military heft to its territorial aspirations in the sea, where five other governments, Malaysia’s included, have competing claims.
Chinese financing began washing over Kuantan five years ago. 

Guangxi Beibu Gulf International Port Group, a state-owned firm from an obscure Chinese autonomous region, won a contract supported by the Malaysian government to build a deepwater terminal and industrial park. 

Nearby was a planned stop on the East Coast Rail Link that would mostly be financed by the Export-Import Bank of China, a government institution.
Presiding over the official launch for the Malaysia-China Kuantan Industrial Park in 2013, Mr. Najib conferred on the project a global import.
“China and Malaysia remain closely connected at a time when the balance of global trade is tilting in Asia’s direction,” he said. 

“On economic cooperation — and diplomatic — I am proud to say that Malaysia is ahead of the curve.”
Kuantan residents, though, have long worried that the city could be saddled with white-elephant projects.
“We welcome foreign investment and development, but we question the huge price that we will have to pay,” said Fuziah Salleh, a Kuantan lawmaker for Malaysia’s new governing coalition. 

“Who is the real beneficiary of all this financing? The Malaysians or the Chinese?”
“I am worried that our sovereignty has been sold,” Ms. Fuziah said.
Mr. Mahathir, however, is not averse to standing up to the superpower of the day. 

He was prime minister before, from 1981 to 2003, and back then he railed against the United States and other Western countries for what he said was a plot to hold back developing nations like Malaysia.
“Mahathir thinks China is a hegemonic force that can control economies like Malaysia,” said Edmund Terence Gomez, a political economist at the University of Malaya. 

“He’s always been worried about powerful forces. Before it was the U.S., now it’s China.”
Mr. Mahathir’s administration has been in power for little more than 100 days. 

In that time, Malaysian officials say, they have discovered that billions of dollars in inflated Chinese contracts were used to relieve debts associated with a Malaysian state investment fund at the heart of a graft scandal that led to Mr. Najib’s downfall.

Former Prime Minister Najib Razak arriving at court in Kuala Lumpur last month after his arrest on corruption charges.

The construction site of a deepwater port in Kuantan.

The United States Treasury Department has accused Mr. Najib and his family and friends of plundering billions of dollars from that fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB. 

When the indebted fund began a fire sale of assets, two Chinese state-owned giants, the China General Nuclear Power Corporation and the China Railway Engineering Corporation, moved in, prompting speculation that Beijing was happy to keep Mr. Najib’s cash-strapped government afloat.
Sitting at his desk during an interview after the election, Mr. Mahathir pointed to a sheaf of papers before him. 

It was a proposal from a Malaysian construction company that he said contained evidence that the East Coast Rail Link could have been developed by a Malaysian company for less than half of the $13.4 billion contract won by the China Communications Construction Company, a state-owned Chinese firm with extensive operations overseas.
Notably, the bidding process for the rail contract was closed.
Last week, Mr. Lim, the finance minister, told Parliament that Malaysia would not be able to cover the operational cost for the railway, much less the capital expenditure, which he estimated at nearly $20 billion rather than $13.4 billion.
Neither the Chinese company nor its Malaysian partner responded to requests for comment.
“It looks like not all the money is being used for building the railway line,” Mr. Mahathir said of the East Coast Rail Link deal. 

“The likelihood is the money has been stolen.”
Malaysian investigators are looking into whether an associate of Mr. Najib’s stepson may have brokered the rail deal to alleviate the debt accrued by 1MDB or to fund Mr. Najib’s re-election campaign.
The United States Treasury Department considers that associate, Jho Low, an exiled financier who has an arrest warrant out on him, to be the prime agent in the 1MDB scandal. 

On the eve of Mr. Mahathir’s trip to China, Malaysian finance ministry officials said they believed that Low had been hiding out in China.
Malaysia’s new administration, which unseated a coalition that had ruled, in one form or another, since independence in 1957, has also been scrutinizing the $2.5 billion deal for a subsidiary of the China National Petroleum Corporation to build energy pipelines in Malaysia. 

Mr. Lim said he had discovered upon taking up his post that the Malaysian government had already disbursed more than $2 billion for the project.
There was one catch. 

“From what we understand,” Mr. Lim said, “zero percent of the construction work has been carried out.”

Building Big Ports

Melaka Gateway includes three artificial islands and an expanded natural islet.

While the role of Chinese money in bailing out Mr. Najib’s indebted administration has received the most attention, another Chinese megaproject raises even sharper questions about Beijing’s geopolitical aims.
The Malaysian city of Malacca was once a conduit for spices and treasures that flowed from Asia to Europe. 

The strait named after the city is still the channel through which much of Asia’s seaborne trade — and most of China’s oil imports — flows.
But Malacca’s port silted up centuries ago and is now a backwater. 

Instead, nearby Singapore, which sits at the southern end of the Strait of Malacca, ranks as the world’s busiest transshipment hub.
A $10 billion development project — backed by PowerChina International, a major Chinese utility, and two Chinese port developers — is supposed to propel Malacca back into global significance, as a vital stop on a maritime trade route that stretches from Shanghai to Rotterdam.
The plan for this project, Melaka Gateway, includes three artificial islands and an expanded natural islet, which will hold an industrial park, cruise terminal, theme park, marina, offshore financial hub and self-styled seven-star hotel.
And there will be a new deepwater port, with berths large enough to host an aircraft carrier. 

The port operator was given a 99-year lease for the deepwater terminal, rather than the more common 30-year time frame.
The local partner in Melaka Gateway is KAJ Development, which counts among its previous accomplishments building the local zoo and bird park.

Chinese tourists posing in front of an “I Love Melaka” sign in Malacca.

A road worker sweeping near the entrance to Melaka Gateway.

To explain how a little-known company was able to work with Chinese firms to transform such a strategic spot, locals have remarked on the close ties between the head of KAJ Development and Mr. Najib’s party machine. 

The company did not respond to a request for comment.
“We have so many questions about the project but no answers,” said Sim Tong Him, a former lawmaker from Malacca. 

“How did KAJ get the contract? What might happen if the Malaysian side can’t pay up? The Chinese are so secretive about this. It leaves us with a very bad feeling.”
Malacca State’s new chief minister has promised an investigation into the feasibility of the entire project, including the possibility that land on one island could be sold as a freehold to a Chinese state-owned company.
Melaka Gateway’s necessity, at least for locals, has never been clear. 

After all, the nearby Singaporean port is unlikely to be eclipsed. 

And Malaysia is already expanding other ports, even as many are running under capacity.
“We are very concerned because in the first place we don’t need any extra harbor,” Mr. Mahathir said of the Malacca project.
“We don’t have to depend upon foreigners to come,” he added. 

“When they build, they use foreign labor, foreign materials. What do we get? Nothing.”
But Beijing has funded the building of ports across the Indian Ocean, a strategy known as the string of pearls. 

Military experts have said that these ports could one day welcome Chinese warships and submarines.
“You look at a map and you can see the places where China is plotting ports and investments, from Myanmar to Pakistan to Sri Lanka, on toward Djibouti,” said Liew Chin Tong, Malaysia’s deputy defense minister. 

“What’s crucial to all that? Our little Malaysia, and the Malacca Strait.”
Under Mr. Najib, Malaysia conducted joint military drills with China and allowed Chinese attack submarines to make a port call. 

Mr. Mahathir has shifted course.
“I say publicly that we do not want to see warships in the Strait of Malacca or the South China Sea,” he said.

City of Dreams

A showroom model of Forest City, a China-financed real estate project in Johor Bahru, Malaysia.

In Forest City, a new metropolis being built at the tail end of the Malaysian peninsula, a tour guide gazed up at a bank of screens showcasing the latest in Chinese facial-recognition technology, and gave his best pitch to a group of would-be investors from a coal town in northern China.
Forest City, he said in Mandarin, was a jewel on the South China Sea.
Best of all, he said, everything in the city was designed for a Chinese clientele, from the layout of the luxury apartments to the signage in Mandarin.
The development — four artificial islands covering around eight square miles, or enough space for around 700,000 people — was conceived of by Country Garden, one of the largest private Chinese property developers, in cooperation with an investment entity whose largest shareholder is the local sultan.
In the sales gallery, an electronic display plays up Forest City’s “strategic location” and places it at the center of a map of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative projects.
“We are doing something that will alter the world map,” the sales pitch reads.

Forest City showroom employees putting on a show in Chinese for the children of prospective buyers.
Ceramic sea lions on the beach at Forest City.

More than any other project, Forest City helped turn local sentiment against Chinese cash, amid suspicions that a private Chinese property developer was somehow plotting to reshape Malaysia’s delicate ethnic balance.
“This is not Chinese investment but a settlement,” Mr. Mahathir said during the election campaign, using Forest City as a frequent punching bag.
Forest City is not a strategic play by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to station warships in Malaysia. 

Nor is it viewed as a way for Beijing to finance the excesses of a corrupt leader. 

Instead, it represents something even more alarming to the average Malaysian — four man-made islands on which Chinese can live as they like and, in the process, dilute the Malaysian national identity.
Although the majority of Malaysians are Malay Muslims, the country’s second largest ethnic group is Chinese, followed by an Indian population. 

Many Chinese migrated to Malaysia during the colonial era, and the feeling that they were given preferential treatment by the British lingers to this day.
Affirmative action programs that gained full force during Mr. Mahathir’s first stint as prime minister ensure that Malays and indigenous populations get a leg up over ethnic Chinese Malaysians.
In that context, the prospect of a new wave of Chinese migration, even if only a population of part-time sunbirds, is politically sensitive in Malaysia.
But what if that wave doesn’t even materialize? 

Capital controls in China have made it far more difficult for Chinese to get their money out to pay for overseas real estate, worrying the Mandarin-speaking sales staff at Forest City. 

Who will buy all these condominiums, which are priced far above the local property market, if not the Chinese?
“We all want Forest City to succeed, because we cannot afford for it to fail and become an empty ghost city,” said Wong Shu Qi, a member of parliament for the Democratic Action Party, which is part of the governing coalition.
“The reality is that wishing for a Chinese concession in Malaysia is the best thing we can hope for,” she added. 

“How sad is that?”

A residential tower project under construction at Forest City.