Oriental Despotism

China’s Communist Party is as shadowy and repressive as when it took power 70 years ago

By YAQIU WANG

On Sept. 23, the wife of 38-year-old Chinese activist Wang Meiyu learned that her husband had died in a detention center in Hunan province, less than three months after the police detained him there. Wang had staged lone protests calling for Xi Jinping to step down and allow democracy in China.
“He was a healthy, normal man when he went in there,” Wang’s widow told Radio Free Asia. 

“When I saw his [dead] body… he was totally unrecognizable.”
Those who rely on Chinese media for their news are unlikely ever to hear about Wang’s death — or about the hundreds of thousands of other Chinese citizens who have run afoul of the government. Controlling information has always been central to Chinese Communist Party rule, and as the 70th anniversary of that rule approaches on Oct. 1, the propaganda machine is in overdrive. 

What Chinese people hear are Xi’s speeches extolling the party’s achievements and interviews with people expressing their national pride. 

They see images of government-produced high-speed trains, state-of-the-art weaponry, and high-tech mega projects.
“There are actually two Chinas,” Chinese scholar Qian Liqun said in a speech. 

“One is the China amplified by the historical narrative and propaganda machinery, a China that strides triumphantly and is unstoppable. The other is the China ravaged and denied, perishing in the darkness.”
As a China researcher for Human Rights Watch, I know something about that other China. 

It’s one where people are routinely imprisoned for speaking out for a more just and free society, where a critical comment online about the president can get someone forcibly disappeared, and where a person can be declared mentally ill and sent to a psychiatric hospital for seeking compensation for expropriated land.
It is the China where a million Turkic Muslims in the East Turkestan colony are now being detained solely because of their ethnic identity, while many of their children are forcibly housed in state-run boarding schools. 

It is the China where millions of women have suffered the trauma of forced sterilizations and abortions, and where children cannot go to school because they were born outside of the One-Child or Two-Child policies.
“The other China” is the one whose existence the Communist Party denies and forbids anyone to speak about.
The other day I came across an anonymous posting by a woman based in Shanghai who had found her way to some Human Rights Watch’s research on East Turkestan — presumably using a virtual private network, or VPN, to circumvent the state censorship that prevents internet users in China from reading uncensored news of the region. 

She described how her “heart sank” and her “body trembled” as she learned of the government’s brutal repression. 

She wrote that her daily life in the first China was “good and vacuous,” but when reading censored news websites about “the other China” she feels “uncontrollably frightened” and “powerless.”
Most Chinese people, at least for now, can live their lives untroubled by “the other China.” 

But there are no guarantees of not being suddenly engulfed by it. 

The billionaire Xiao Jianhua and the former vice minister of public security and president of Interpol, Meng Hongwei, now live in “the other China,” incarcerated since 2017 and 2018, respectively. 

Once you are pulled into that shadowy world, it is difficult to get out. 

Actress Fan Bingbing only reemerged from months of house arrest after making a groveling public apology.
People understand the message of these cases, and do their utmost to protect themselves.
Last year, the writer Yangyang Cheng, tweeted about how, at the age of 8, she learned to be careful about expressing dissent. 

After a “lively dinner” at her grandmother’s, Cheng said in her tweet, she wrote in her diary about the night’s political discussion. 

“My mother blocked out the lines with the darkest of ink,” Cheng tweeted, “and told me to never write such things again.”
This is not just the impulse of intellectuals. 

Even at a time of strong nationalistic sentiment and high tension with the West, many hope to immigrate to Western countries. 

In 2017, nearly 90% of the applicants on the waiting list for America’s investment-based green cards were from China. 

Many Chinese have chosen to store their assets abroad—so much so that the massive wave of capital flight in recent years has prompted the party to resort to extreme measures to control it.
After all, no one would want to meet the same fate as Xiao Jianhua or Wang Meiyu.
Seventy years into the Chinese Communist Party’s rule, millions of people now live in the China that promises material comfort and convenience, and projects political unity. 

But they all live in fear of “the other China”— a reality the party’s top brass relies on to maintain control.

Interpol tragicomedy

China suspends cooperation with France on police affairs, says report
Action comes after France gave asylum to wife of jailed former Interpol chief Meng Hongwei
By Emma Graham-Harrison

Former Interpol chief Meng Hongwei at his trial in Tianjin in June. 

China has cut off all cooperation with France on police affairs, after Paris gave asylum to the Chinese wife of a former Interpol chief now in jail on corruption charges, the French newspaper Le Monde reported.

Chinese authorities told a diplomat in Beijing in late July that a decision had been made to halt all cooperation after Grace Meng was awarded political asylum in May, the newspaper reported.
Increasingly assertive internationally, Beijing has made the decision to suspend a key aspect of the diplomatic and security relationship with Paris at a time when it is already in the global spotlight over protests in Hong Kong and an escalating trade dispute with the US.
Meng first hit headlines last year, when she decided to go public about her husband’s sudden disappearance during a trip home to China in September.
Interpol had not been given any information about the whereabouts of Meng Hongwei, who had been elected president of the body in 2016, leading to the humiliating spectacle of the global police body pleading with China for information about its chief.

Grace Meng at a press conference with journalists in France in 2018, in which she did not want her face to be shown.

In October, under international pressure, China finally admitted that Hongwei had been detained. 

He was not seen in public again until June, when he appeared in court in the north-eastern port city of Tianjin, confessed to accepting more than $2m in bribes and expressed regret for his crime, a court statement said.
A confession assures a conviction but it was not immediately clear when a verdict and sentence would be handed down. 

Confessions in corruption cases, often televised, have become a hallmark of dictator Xi Jinping’s rule; he has put a very public crackdown on official graft at the heart of his rule.
Chinese authorities reportedly also wanted to charge Grace Meng, Le Monde said, but she stayed in France, where she has been given police protection, and sought asylum. 

Grace says she fears personal retaliation from Chinese authorities, and in spring France opened a judicial inquiry into a kidnapping attempt.
The end of police cooperation is likely to complicate Chinese efforts to seek fugitives in France, Le Monde said. 

For Paris, it will complicate efforts to track down up to €500m stolen by fraudsters and sent by bank transfer to China.
It will also undermine work to protect intellectual property rights in China, where, despite decades of pressure from western governments, counterfeiting is still rampant.

Meng Hongwei's Arrest in China was Politically Motivated

Reuters

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

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

Interpol Tragicomedy

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

By Javier C. Hernández

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interpol Tragicomic Saga

Wife of Former Interpol Chief Seeks Asylum in France

By Aurelien Breeden

Grace Meng, the wife of the former Interpol president Meng Hongwei, speaking to reporters in Lyon, France, during a news conference last year in which she did not want her face shown.

PARIS — Nearly four months after an Interpol chief was detained in China on corruption charges, his wife has applied for asylum in France, she said on Saturday.
Grace Meng, wife of Meng Hongwei, the former Interpol president, has remained in France, where the organization has its headquarters, since his arrest.
“I have officially claimed asylum in France,” Ms. Meng said in a text message on Saturday.
Ms. Meng, who has refused to specify her Chinese given name or to have her face photographed or filmed by the news media, said in interviews on Friday that she was seeking French protection for her and her twin boys.
“I cannot go back to China; such strange things happen there, and fundamental rights are not respected,” she told the newspaper Libération. 

“Even here, I am afraid of being kidnapped, and I fear for the safety of my children.”
The Chinese authorities have not specified the charges against Meng, who was also a vice minister in the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, and it is unclear where he is being held.
His abrupt detention in the fall, accompanied by the news that he had resigned from Interpol with immediate effect, has cast a cloud over China’s push for a more prominent role in global affairs by taking up more leadership roles in international bodies.
Ms. Meng was put under French police protection shortly after her husband’s arrest.
In the interviews published on Friday, Ms. Meng said that she had not had any contact with her husband or with any friends or relatives in China since the arrest, and that her Chinese phone and email had been blocked. 

She said that strangers had followed her, had tried to get her to travel with them and that she had received threatening phone calls.
“I need the French government to protect me, to assist me, to help me, me and my children,” Ms. Meng told Radio France in an off-air interview on Friday.
Both Libération and Radio France reported that Ms. Meng was supposed to go to the French asylum agency headquarters in Paris on Friday to file an official request. 

The agency was not immediately reachable for comment on Saturday, and it was not clear whether Ms. Meng had sufficient grounds to claim asylum.
In November, Interpol elected a South Korean police veteran as its next president to replace Meng, who was halfway through his four-year term when he was detained.
Interpol, which functions as a sort of clearinghouse for the circulation of arrest warrants, tips and data, does not have direct policing powers of its own. 

Its presidency is a largely ceremonial role that entails chairing meetings and representing the institution at official events; a secretary general runs the police organization on a day-to-day basis.
Jürgen Stock, the current secretary general, has said repeatedly that Interpol does not have a say in a state’s internal affairs and was not in a position to prevent the arrest of Meng.
Ms. Meng has denied that her husband is guilty of corruption.
“We don’t have any secret accounts abroad, no hidden money,” she told Libération. 

“I think that my husband was arrested for a political reason.”

China's disappeared: Some of the people who vanished at the hands of the Chinese state in 2018

Canadian citizens, a famous actress, a security insider and a student Marxist disappeared in China this year
The Associated Press
Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig briefly disappeared this month before it was revealed they were taken into custody by Chinese officials. The two men's detention followed the arrest and detention of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou by Canadian authorities. 

It's not uncommon for individuals who speak out against the government to disappear in China, but the scope of the "disappeared" has expanded since Xi Jinping came to power in 2013.
Not only dissidents and activists, but also high-level officials, Marxists, foreigners and even a movie star — people who never publicly opposed the ruling Communist Party — have been whisked away by police to unknown destinations.
The widening dragnet throws into stark relief the lengths to which Xi's administration is willing to go to maintain its control and authority.
Here's a look at some of the people who went missing in 2018 at the hands of the Chinese state:

Canadian citizens
China threatened "grave consequences" if Canada did not release high-tech executive Meng Wanzhou, shortly after the Huawei chief financial officer was detained in Vancouver earlier this month for extradition to the U.S.
The apparent consequences materialized within days, when two Canadian men went missing in China. 

Both turned up in the hands of state security on suspicion of endangering "national security", a nebulous category of crimes that has been levied against foreigners in recent years.
Former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig was taken by authorities from a Beijing street late in the evening, a person familiar with his case said. 

He is allowed one consular visit a month and has not been granted access to a lawyer, as is standard for state security cases.

Kovrig, an adviser with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, remains in detention in China.

Also detained is Michael Spavor, who organizes tours to North Korea from the border city of Dandong. 

China has not said whether their detentions are related to Meng's, but a similar scenario unfolded in the past.
A Canadian couple was detained in 2014 on national security grounds shortly after Canada arrested Su Bin, a Chinese man wanted for industrial espionage in the U.S.
Like Spavor, Kevin and Julia Garratt lived in Dandong, where they ran a popular coffee shop for nearly a decade. 

They also worked with a Christian charity that provided food to North Korean refugees.
While Julia Garratt was released on bail, her husband was held for more than two years before he was deported in September 2016 — about two months after Su pleaded guilty in the U.S.

Tax-evading actress
Fan Bingbing was living the dream. 

Since a breakthrough role at the age of 17, Fan has headlined dozens of movies and TV series, and parlayed her success into modelling, fashion design and other ventures that have made her one of the highest-paid celebrities in the world.
All this made her a potent icon of China's economic success, until authorities reminded Fan — and her legion of admirers — that even she was not untouchable.
For about four months, Fan vanished from public view. 

Her Weibo social media account, which has more than 63 million followers, fell silent. 

Her management office in Beijing was vacated. 

Her birthday on Sept. 16 came and went with only a handful of greetings from entertainment notables.
When she finally resurfaced, it was to apologize.
"I sincerely apologize to society, to the friends who love and care for me, to the people, and to the country's tax bureau," Fan said in a letter posted on Weibo on Oct. 3.
Chinese actress Fan Bingbing poses for photographers upon arrival at the opening of the Cannes film festival in southern France in May. One of China's highest paid celebrities, Fan disappeared from public view for four months before apologizing for tax-evasion. 

Fan later admitted to tax evasion. 

State news agency Xinhua reported that she and the companies she represents had been ordered to pay taxes and penalties totaling 900 million yuan ($130 million US).
"Without the party and the country's great policies, without the people's loving care, there would be no Fan Bingbing," she wrote, a cautionary tale for other Chinese celebrities.
Xinhua concurred in a commentary on her case: "Everyone is equal before the law, there are no `superstars' or `big shots.' No one can despise the law and hope to be lucky."

Security insider
Unlike most swallowed up by China's opaque security apparatus, Meng Hongwei knew exactly what to expect.
Meng — no relation to the Huawei executive — is a vice minister of public security who was also head of Interpol, the France-based organization that facilitates police cooperation across borders.
When he was appointed to the top post, human rights groups expressed concern that China would use Interpol as a tool to rein in political enemies around the world.
Instead, he was captured by the same security forces he represented.
Former Interpol president Meng Hongwei delivers his opening address at the Interpol World congress in Singapore in July 2017. 

In September, Meng became the latest high-ranking official caught in Xi's banner anti-corruption campaign. 

The initiative is a major reason for the Chinese leader's broad popularity, but he has been accused of using it to eliminate political rivals.
Xi pledged to confront both high-level "tigers" and low-level "flies" in his crackdown on graft — a promise he has fulfilled by ensnaring prominent officials.
Meng was missing for weeks before Chinese authorities said he was being investigated for taking bribes and other crimes. 

A Chinese delegation later delivered a resignation letter from Meng to Interpol headquarters.
His wife Grace Meng told the AP that she does not believe the charges against her husband. 

The last message he sent her was an emoji of a knife.

Daring photographer
Lu Guang made his mark photographing the everyday lives of HIV patients in central China. 

They were poor villagers who had contracted the virus after selling their own blood to eke out a living — at a going rate of $7 a pint, they told Lu.
A former factory worker, Lu traversed China's vast reaches to capture reality at its margins. 

He explored environmental degradation, industrial pollution and other gritty topics generally avoided by Chinese journalists, who risk punishment if they pursue stories considered to be sensitive or overly critical.
His work won him major accolades such as the World Press Photo prize, but his prominence likely also put him on the government's radar.
This November, Lu was travelling through East Turkestan, the far west colony that has deployed a vast security network in the name of fighting terrorism. 

He was participating in an exchange with other photographers, after which he was to meet a friend in nearby Sichuan province. 

He never showed up.
More than a month after he disappeared, his family was notified that he had been arrested in East Turkestan, according to his wife Xu Xiaoli. 

She declined to elaborate on the nature of the charges.

Marxist student
In the past, the political activists jailed in China were primarily those who fought for democracy and an end to one-party rule. 

They posed a direct ideological threat to the Communist Party.
This year, the party locked in on a surprising new target: young Marxists.
About 50 students and recent graduates of the country's most prestigious universities convened in August in Shenzhen, an electronics manufacturing hub, to rally for factory workers attempting to form a union
Among them was Yue Xin, a 20-something fresh out of Peking University. 

Earlier this year, she made headlines by calling for the elite school to release the results of its investigation into a decades-old rape case.
This time, she was one of the most vocal leaders of the labour rights group, appearing in photographs with her fist up in a Marxist salute and wearing a T-shirt that said "Unity is strength" — the name of a patriotic Chinese communist song.
Yue, a passionate student of Marx and Mao Zedong, espoused the same values as the party. 

She wrote an open letter to Xi and the party's central leadership saying all the students wanted was justice for Jasic Technology labourers.
Her letter quoted Xi's own remarks: "We must adhere to the guiding position of Marxism." 

Yue called Marx "our mentor" and likened the ideas of him and Mao to spiritual sustenance.
Nonetheless, she ended up among those rounded up in a raid on the apartment the activists were staying at in Shenzhen. 

While most have been released, Yue remains unaccounted for.
She has been missing for four months.

Interpol Tragicomedy

Wife of Disappeared Former Interpol President Lawyers Up in Europe
By Ng Yik-tung and Sing Man

Grace Meng, wife of missing Interpol president Meng Hongwei, consults her mobile phone in a hotel lobby in Lyon, France, Oct. 7, 2018.

The wife of former Interpol president Meng Hongwei has hired two European law firms in a bid to track down her husband, who was detained last month on suspicion of bribery during a trip home to China.
In an e-mail statement to Reuters, Grace Meng said she had received offers of help from all over the world since her husband's sudden disappearance and his subsequent resignation from Interpol, which the international police body accepted without publicly questioning or explaining the sudden move.
Grace Meng said she has hired the French law firm of Marsigny Avocats and the London-based Lindeborg Counsellors, who specialize in international cases, to help find her husband, who is being detained in an unknown location.
“Above all, I urge everyone to raise their voice in asking China to respect our family’s fundamental human rights,” she said. 

“His disappearance could not be for anything other than political reasons.”
The Lindeborg website describes its team of lawyers as including a former Interpol General Counsel and Legal Affairs Director, and offers experienced legal counsel to those wishing to challenge "red notices," or international arrest warrants issued by the Lyon-based organization.
Paris-based Marsigny specialize in cases involving national or international corruption, misconduct, misappropriation of public funds, money laundering, and tax evasion, and advises clients on international asset seizures and extradition procedures.
Germany-based law scholar Qian Yuejun, who edits the China-Europe Herald newspaper, said Meng's detention is "undoubtedly political," and that the law firms could take steps to track him in China, as well as lobbying for diplomatic pressure to be brought to bear on the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
"Meng Hongwei is a Chinese national, but his place of residence is France, so the law firm can ask the French government to ask the Chinese government about him," said Qian, who last year led a demonstration outside Interpol's German headquarters protesting against Meng's presidency.
"Another angle is Interpol. This case is already a combination of politics and law, and these lawyers will be aware of political channels they could use," he said.

Red Notices
Critics of Meng's presidency said China would use its influence with Interpol to successfully issue "red notices" targeting peaceful critics of the regime and political opponents of Xi Jinping under the banner of the anti-corruption campaign or other criminal allegations.
Qian said Meng's disappearance is yet another example of extrajudicial detentions and punishments meted out by Beijing to its targets.
"If the Chinese government is a rogue state, then it must be clearly described as such," he said. 

"Meng Hongwei was illegally kidnapped, a tragic side-effect of power struggles [in Beijing]."
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang told journalists that Grace Meng could call her husband "at any time," but had declined to do so. 

However, such calls are likely to be closely monitored, and it is unclear whether Meng has had access to a lawyer.

Outlook not good
Beijing-based rights lawyer Lin Qilei said international law enforcement has collided with an authoritarian regime, and that the outlook isn't good for Meng.
"Meng Hongwei's wife may have hired foreign lawyers and be drumming up international support, even to the highest levels of government and diplomacy," Lin said. 

"But she should also try to find him a lawyer in China."
Lin said such an effort would highlight the Chinese government's control over who is allowed to represent former high-ranking officials in such cases.
U.S.-based veteran rights campaigner Liu Qing said the Chinese government has used "mafia tactics" to detain Meng.
"They have just made the head of an international law enforcement body disappear into thin air, by trapping and secretly imprisoning him," Liu said. 

"This shows ... the Chinese Communist Party's contempt for global public opinion."
"The Chinese Communist Party has a long history of international kidnaps," he wrote in a commentary aired on RFA's Mandarin Service, citing the 2015 cross-border detentions of five Hong Kong booksellers wanted by Beijing for selling banned political books to customers in mainland China and the reported abduction of "missing" billionaire Xiao Jianhua from a Hong Kong hotel in April 2017.
"If we do not recognize and cut off the long and pernicious arm of the Chinese Communist Party as it reaches across the world, international due process and rule of law could be ruined beyond all recognition," Liu said.

Interpol tragicomedy

Interpol says no option but to accept China's removal of its chief
Agence France-Presse

China has said Meng Hongwei has resigned as president of Interpol 

Interpol must accept the resignation of its Chinese boss, who is detained in China on charges of accepting bribes, the organisation’s secretary general has said.
Interpol, which coordinates police work across the world, has been “strongly encouraging China to provide us with more details, more information” on what exactly took place when then-director Meng Hongwei was reported missing in early October, Juergen Stock told a news conference at Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France.
The body investigating Meng, China’s National Supervisory Commission, can hold suspects for as long as six months without providing access to legal counsel.
“We have to accept, like we would accept with any other country, that this country [China] is taking sovereign decisions and if that country tells us ‘We have investigations, they are ongoing, and the president has been resigning, he’s not a delegate of the country anymore,’ then we have to accept,” Stock said.
Meng, who had travelled back to China, was reported missing by his wife who had stayed at home in the south-eastern French city of Lyon.
China then informed Interpol that Meng had resigned as the organisation’s president, before saying he had been charged with accepting bribes.
Stock said he had no further details and could only say that the bribery charges were not linked to Meng’s work at Interpol.
“There’s no reason for me to suspect that anything was forced or wrong” regarding the resignation, Stock said.
Meng’s successor is to be appointed later this month at Interpol’s general assembly in Dubai.

Great Purge

Wife of China's detained Interpol chief says he might already be dead

By Ben Westcott

The wife of former Interpol chief Meng Hongwei, who dramatically vanished into police custody after returning to China in September, told the BBC she isn't sure her husband is still alive.
In an interview with the British broadcaster, Grace Meng said she has received threatening phone calls since the Chinese government announced her husband was in custody in early October.
"I think it is political persecution. I'm not sure he's alive. They are cruel. They are dirty ... They can do anything," she told the interviewer.
Then-President of Interpol Meng Hongwei disappeared after he took a flight back to China in late September. 

His wife, Grace, said at the time that the last contact she received from him was a text message saying to wait for his call, followed minutes later by a knife emoji.

She reported him missing to French authorities, who opened an investigation. 

Interpol sent an official inquiry to the Chinese government asking for the whereabouts of their missing president.
On October 8, Beijing's Ministry of Public Security admitted they had detained Meng following his return to China, saying he was being investigated for corruption.
"(Meng) insisted on taking the wrong path and had only himself to blame (for his downfall)," the country's top law enforcement official, Zhao Kezhi, was quoted as saying in the statement.
In a previous interview with CNN earlier in October, Meng said she still hadn't told her children that their father was in custody in China.
"No TV for them ... because they are already seven-years-old, maybe they can feel something has happened. (When) they see Mummy is crying, I told them Mummy has a cold," she said at the time.
Speaking with in silhouette to protect her from being recognized, Grace told CNN she had spoken out to raise awareness of China's extrajudicial detentions. 

"I do these things ... for all of China's children. For all of China's wives," she said.
No further information has been released by the Chinese government, and Meng has not been seen in public since he left France for China in September.
Shortly after Beijing announced Meng's arrest, Interpol said it had received and accepted his resignation with "immediate effect." 

It made no mention of the former president's whereabouts or the Chinese investigation.
Meng was the first Chinese official to lead the international policing body and his appointment just two years ago in 2016 was greeted enthusiastically by the country's state media.
As President, Meng oversaw the agency's executive committee, which sets overall strategy.

How President Trump’s Trade War Is Driving China Nuts

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping reacted to American pressure with desperation

By WILLIAM PESEK

TOKYO—Five years ago, China’s Xi Jinping rocked the Communist Party establishment by pledging to let markets play a “decisive role” in decision making. 

Reformists rejoiced as Xi signaled a revival of Deng Xiaoping’s pro-capitalism revolution.
Things haven’t gone as planned. 

First, Xi slow-walked steps to reduce China’s reliance on runaway credit, debt and an antiquated state sector. 

He prioritized short-term growth over long-term upgrades. 

And then President Donald Trump came along to imperil both objectives.
Initially, Xi’s government figured the president was bluffing. 

Beijing’s calculation was that, sure, President Trump might slap some tariffs on Chinese goods, but it’s a mere negotiating tactic – his “Art of the Deal” writ large. 

After all, past American presidents had often attacked China on the campaign trail—only to make nice while in office. 

Xi’s men held it together as President Trump slapped taxes of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum. 

They figured President Trump’s initial attack on $50 billion of Chinese imports in June would satisfy Professor Peter Navarro and other anti-China voices in the White House.

Hardly, as Xi’s team is realizing. 

If the extra $200 billion of levies President Trump tossed Beijing’s way in September weren’t reality-check enough, Vice President Mike Pence’s Oct. 4 “we-will-not-stand-down” speech suggests 2019 could get even worse for Beijing.

Mr. Pence accused Beijing of trying to malign President Trump’s credibility, of reckless harassment and of working to engineer a different American president.

On both economic and military issues, Mr. Pence declared: “We will not be intimidated; we will not stand down.”
The vice president seemed to confirm that President Trump’s trade war is more about tackling China than creating U.S. jobs. 

Worse, perhaps, taxing Beijing is shaping up to be a 2020 re-election strategy. 

Forget Russia, Vice President Pence suggested: China is the real election meddler. 

It “clearly laid down an official marker for a much more competitive and contentious New Era of U.S.-China relations,” says China analyst Bill Bishop.

All this is throwing Xi’s domestic strategies into disarray – perhaps permanently.
Six months ago, Beijing was throttling ahead with “Made in China 2025,” a multi-trillion-dollar effort to dominate the future of self-driving vehicles, renewable energy, robots and artificial intelligence. 

Party bigwigs were also planning festivities to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Deng’s reforms -– and Xi’s steps to accelerate them.
Now, Xi’s undivided attention is on making this year’s growth numbers. 

President Trump’s trade-policy grenades are sending a few too many market forces Beijing’s way for comfort. 

China’s currency is down 6.4 percent this year. 

Shanghai stocks are down 22.3 percent this year as JPMorgan Chase and other investment banks turn cautious despite China’s 6.7 percent growth.
The headwinds heading China’s way are unmistakable, particularly with President Trump threatening to up the tariff ante to $505 billion. 

In August, export growth weakened to just under 10 percent from the previous month -- crisis levels for a trade-reliant developing nation. 

Fixed-asset investment has stalled, falling to a record low in August. 

And the latest purchasing managers’ data from the government and Caixin at right at the 50-point mark -- just a small step from contraction.
That’s unleashed a frantic push to keep China’s growth engine from crawling to a stop. 

Almost daily, Xi’s team rolls out new plans to cut taxes, boost business lending and ramp up infrastructure spending. 

Regulators are easing up on credit curbs and limits on property speculation. 

On Oct. 7, the central bank slashed the amount of cash lenders must set aside as reserves for the fourth time this year. 

It is as clear an admission as any that China’s 6.5 percent growth target is in trouble.
So are Xi’s designs of raising Deng’s upgrades to 11. 

In 1978, Deng set the most populous nation on a journey from impoverished backwater to surpassing Japan’s GDP on the way to America’s. 

Deng replaced Maoist egalitarianism with meritocratic forces. 

He loosened price controls, decollectivized agriculture, allowed entrepreneurs to start businesses, welcomed foreign investment and morphed China into a global manufacturing juggernaut.
Xi’s Made in China 2025 gambit aimed to push the economy upmarket – making it more about tech companies like Alibaba and Tencent than sweatshops. 

Yet now Xi is engaged in all-hands-on-deck battle against President Trump’s ploy to turn back the clock on China’s rising influence.
A key element of moving China beyond boom-and-bust cycles and making growth more productive is tackling dueling bubbles in credit, debt and property prices. 

That means increasing transparency, policing an out-of-control $20 trillion shadow-banking sector and dropping support for state-owned enterprises to create a vibrant private sector. 

Such upgrades will necessitate slower growth -- 5 percent or below.
Yet they are now largely on hold. 

Xi reverting to the stimulus-at-all-costs playbook that got China into financial hot water is a worrisome bookend for the Deng revolution. 

Xi is ensuring that when China’s debt-excess reckoning comes, what economists call a “Minsky moment,” it will be bigger, more spectacular and more globally impactful. 

If you thought the “Lehman shock” of 2008 was scary, wait until the No. 2 economy with $14 trillion of annual output goes off the rails.
Beijing is well aware of its plight – and the air of panic and paranoia is manifesting itself in bizarre ways.
The disappearance of a beloved actress, the detention of an Interpol bigwig and the visa troubles of a Western journalist wouldn’t normally be big concerns for economists. 

But there’s nothing typical about the lengths to which China is going to fend off President Trump’s escalating trade war.
The first narrative involves “X-Men” star Fan BingBing, who resurfaced last week after vanishing from public view. 

She was detained for alleged tax evasion and ordered to cough up $129 million. 

Yet her case was a stark reminder about something else: President Xi’s paranoia about capital outflows as wealthy mainlanders spirit their fortunes abroad.
The second concerns Meng Hongwei, the Chinese head of Interpol who went missing last month. Meng is being investigated for bribery. 

Yet Xi’s heavy-handed tactics highlight the lengths to which the Communist Party will go to maintain absolute control over its subjects, even those on the world stage. 

Couldn’t Interpol deal with any credible allegations in-house? 

It hardly helps that Xi’s anti-graft drive often seems more about sidelining rivals than cleansing the system.
The third narrative relates to Hong Kong-based Financial Times editor Victor Mallet, whose visa renewal was just rejected. 

Mallet is vice president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which in August enraged Xi by hosting a pro-Hong Kong independence speaker. 

It may be the latest sign of Chinafication in a city that once stood as a financial green zone for investors tapping the mainland market.
Taken together, these plotlines make a mockery of Xi’s market-forces pledge. 

Rather than creating a predictable rule of law on which trusted economies thrive, Xi’s China is regressing in ways sure to chill foreign investment. 

This imperils his efforts in the President Trump era to portray China as a credible power ready to fill the global leadership void. 

Xi is engaged in his own Trumpian battle against the media –- even outside the mainland –- and going after high-profile rivals.
President Trump doesn’t get all the blame. 

If Xi had worked with Deng-like determination to recalibrate growth engines and wean China off exports, the economy would be less vulnerable to President Trump’s attacks. 

By certain metrics, meantime, Xi, is dragging China backward. 

Its press-freedom ranking from Reporters Without Borders worsened to 176th, three notches below 2013.
Irony abounds, of course. 

Earlier this year, Xi convinced the party to effectively make him president for life rather than the traditional 10 years. 

Past U.S. presidents would’ve condemned the power grab; Trump was all compliments. 

Yet the stronger Xi becomes, the more he clamps down on the media and dissenting voices needed to police the government and corporate titans.
Nor has Xi addressed a central paradox: how China increases innovation while walling off innovators from Google, Facebook and the big debates of the day. 

Those market forces Xi pledged to heed are coming from Silicon Valley, too. 

While Trump complains about fake news, Xi’s China has a “fake reform” problem, says Wang Yiming, deputy director of the State Council Development Research Center.
A propensity for own-goals, too. 

Case in point: China’s government inserted tiny spying chips into smartphones and other devices. 

Might that troll President Trump to retaliate further? 

“Conflict with China over trade, investment, technology and geopolitical dominance will only escalate,” says analyst Arthur Kroeber of Gavekal Research in Beijing.
That’s likely to further reduce China’s appetite for risk. 

Since Xi’s legitimacy is predicated on rapid growth, he’s likely to punt Deng 2.0 forward. 

It follows that the faster China grows over the next 12 months, the less reforming Xi’s men are doing behind the scenes.

China’s Great Leap Backward

For decades, the country managed to avoid most problems suffered by dictatorships. Now Xi Jinping’s personal power play risks undermining everything that made China exceptional.
BY JONATHAN TEPPERMAN

In the last 40 years, China has racked up a long list of remarkable accomplishments. 

What made these achievements all the more striking is that the Chinese government accomplished them while remaining politically repressive—something that historical precedent and political theory suggest is very, very difficult. 

The miraculous quality of China’s achievements makes what is happening in the country today especially tragic—and alarming. 

Under the guise of fighting corruption, Xi Jinping is methodically dismantling virtually every one of the reforms that made China’s spectacular growth possible over the last four decades. 

In the place of a flawed but highly successful system, he is erecting a colossal cult of personality focused on him alone, concentrating more power in his hands than has any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.
In the short term, Xi’s efforts may make China seem less corrupt and more stable. 

But by destroying many of the mechanisms that made the Chinese miracle possible, Xi risks reversing those gains and turning China into just another police state (think a gigantic, more open version of North Korea): inefficient, ineffective, brittle, and bellicose. 

And that should worry not just China’s 1.4 billion citizens but the rest of us as well.

Members of the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution in China in 1966. 

To understand what makes Xi’s personal empire-building campaign so dangerous, it helps to first understand what made China exceptional for so long. 

Throughout modern history, most tyrannies and one-party states have shared a few basic traits. 

Power is held by a very small number of individuals. 

To maintain their power, those individuals repress dissent and rule by intimidation. 

Because bureaucrats and citizens live in fear, they compete to flatter their bosses. 

Nobody tells the truth, especially when it could make them or their leaders look bad. 

As a result, cloistered tyrants—their egos bloated by constant, obsequious praise—find themselves increasingly cut off from reality and the rest of the world (think Kim Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad, or Robert Mugabe) and end up ruling by whim and instinct with little sense of what’s actually happening in their own countries. 

The impact of this ignorance on domestic and foreign policy is disastrous.
For 35 years or so—from the time Mao died and Deng Xiaoping launched his reforms in the late 1970s until Xi assumed power in 2012—China avoided many of these pitfalls and defied the law of political averages by building what scholars have called an “adaptive authoritarian” regime. 

While remaining nominally communist, the country embraced many forms of market capitalism and a number of other liberalizing reforms. 

Of course, the old system remained highly repressive (remember Tiananmen Square) and was far from perfect in many other ways. 

It did, however, allow the Chinese government to function in an unusually effective fashion and avoid many of the pathologies suffered by other authoritarian regimes. 

Censorship never disappeared, for example, but party members could disagree and debate ideas, and internal reports could be surprisingly blunt.
No longer. 

Today, Xi is systematically undermining virtually every feature that made China so distinct and helped it work so well in the past. 

His efforts may boost his own power and prestige in the short term and reduce some forms of corruption. 

On balance, however, Xi’s campaign will have disastrous long-term consequences for his country and the world.
Perhaps the most unusual feature of the system Deng created was the way it distributed power among various leaders. 

Rather than let one person exercise supreme authority, as do most dictatorships, Deng divided power among the Communist Party’s general secretary (who also gets the title of president), the premier, and the Politburo.
Deng hoped this system would ensure that no one person could ever again exercise the kind of control Mao had—since his unchecked power had led to vast abuses and mistakes, such as the Great Leap Forward (during which an estimated 45 million people perished) and the Cultural Revolution (during which Deng himself was purged and his son was tortured so severely he was left paralyzed). As Minxin Pei, a China expert at Claremont McKenna College, explains, the collective leadership model Deng designed helped weed out bad ideas and promote good ones by emphasizing careful deliberation and discouraging risk-taking.
Since assuming power in 2012, Xi has worked to dismantle China’s collective leadership system in several ways. 

First, in the name of fighting corruption—an important goal and one China badly needs—he has purged a vast number of officials whose real crime, in Xi’s view, was failing to show sufficient loyalty to the paramount leader. 

Meng Hongwei, the Interpol chief who China abruptly detained two weeks ago, is just the latest, high-profile case; his story is hardly unusual.

Staff look at an image of disgraced politician Bo Xilai at the Intermediate People’s Court after he was sentenced to life in prison on Sept. 22, 2013, in the country’s highest-profile trial in decades. 

In the last six years, a staggering 1.34 million officials have been targeted, and more than 170 leaders at the minister or deputy minister level have been fired (and most were imprisoned). 

Meng’s plight, like that of Bo Xilai—the powerful Chongqing party boss brought down in 2012—shows that no one is immune from Xi’s purges. 

Indeed, more members of the Communist Party’s powerful Central Committee have been disciplined since 2012 than in the entire period dating back to the Communist Revolution.
Not content to merely eliminate any competition, Xi has also consolidated his power by abandoning the term limits on his job and by refusing to name a successor, as his predecessors did halfway through their tenures. 

He’s also had “Xi Jinping Thought” enshrined in China’s constitution (an honor shared by only Mao and Deng); assumed direct control of the armed forces; and made himself “chairman of everything” by creating a large number of working groups on policies ranging from finance to Taiwan to cybersecurity—all of which report directly to him.
A second important feature of the old system was that bureaucrats at every level could expect to be rewarded for good performance. 

This wasn’t quite a meritocracy, and the system included a fair degree of corruption and patronage. But both of those features actually served the common good in one key way: If an official performed well, he or she could expect a cut of the proceeds and steady promotion. 

Xi, by contrast, has “replaced this incentive-based system with one based on fear,” as Pei puts it. 

And there are two big problems with this shift. 

First, it has warped officials’ priorities, from showing results to showing loyalty. 

The second problem, according to Alexander Gabuev, a China specialist at the Carnegie Moscow Center, is that “when fear is all you have, bureaucrats become too frightened to do anything without explicit orders from the top. So the whole bureaucracy becomes passive. Nothing gets done.”

Another related asset of the old system was the way it encouraged local governments—at the village, county, and provincial levels—to experiment with new initiatives, from building free markets four decades ago to allowing private land ownership more recently. 

Such experimentation turned China into a country with hundreds of policy laboratories, enabling it to test different solutions to various problems in safe, quiet, and low-stakes ways before deciding whether to scale them up. 

This system helped Beijing avoid the kind of absurdities and disastrous mistakes it had made under Mao—such as when, during the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1962, central planners insisted that farmers in Tibet plant wheat, despite the fact that the arid, mountainous region was utterly unsuited to the crop.
Of course, Beijing had to tolerate a certain level of autonomy in order to allow local officials to try new things. 

Xi, by contrast, seems to view such independent thinking as an intolerable threat. 

At his behest, the government has begun discouraging small-scale pilot programs. 

Sebastian Heilmann of Germany’s Trier University estimates that the number of provincial experiments fell from 500 in 2010 to about 70 in 2016, and the tally has probably dropped even lower since then. 

In their place, policies are once again being dictated from the top, with little concern for local conditions.
One last example: Just as China’s tech industry is notorious for stealing and applying foreign innovations, Chinese officials long did something similar on the policy level, carefully studying what worked in other countries and then applying the lessons at home. (The best example of this process, of course, was the construction of China’s free markets themselves, which drew on models from Japan, Taiwan, and the United states.) 

Like Deng’s other innovations, Xi has curtailed this practice as well, by making it much harder for government officials to interact with foreigners. 

In 2014, authorities began confiscating bureaucrats’ passports. 

Like so many of the government’s other recent restrictions, this move has been justified in the name of combatting corruption—the idea, ostensibly, is to prevent dirty officials from fleeing the country. 

But the fact that the policy has recently been extended all the way down to elementary school teachers and reinforced by other, related strictures—officials now must apply for permission to attend foreign meetings and conferences and account for their time abroad on an hour-by-hour basis—reveals that the real priority is limiting contact with outsiders and their ideas.

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping inspects troops in Beijing on Sept. 3, 2015. 

What does Xi’s crackdown mean for his country’s future and for the rest of us? 

While one should always be careful about betting against China, it’s hard to avoid the grim conclusion that Xi’s China is rapidly becoming a lot less exceptional and a lot more like a typical police state.
On the domestic level, Beijing’s policymaking is already becoming less agile and adept. 

Examples of this more rigid approach, and its downsides, aren’t hard to find. 

Consider last winter, when the government decided to force an abrupt nationwide switch from the use of coal to gas in heating systems. 

It sounded like a smart move for a country as polluted as China. 

But the edict was enforced suddenly across the country, with no exceptions. 

Thus in China’s frigid north, many coal-burning furnaces were ripped out before new gas ones could be installed—leaving entire towns without heat and forcing villagers to burn corn cobs to survive.
If China continues down its current course, expect many more cases where even well-intentioned policies are implemented in a rash and clumsy way, leading to still more harmful consequences. 

Since personalized dictatorships are necessarily bad at admitting fault—for nothing can be permitted to damage the myth of the omnipotent leader—China will also likely become less adept at correcting mistakes once it makes them. 

Or at confronting the underlying problems that are dragging down its economy, such as an overreliance on bloated and inefficient state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which have only grown bigger and more powerful since Xi took office; dangerously high debt levels, especially among local governments; and a tendency to react to every downturn by pumping more cash into the system, especially for unnecessary infrastructure projects. 

In fact, China is not only unlikely to address any of these shortcomings; it’s likely to compound them. That is just what it did on Oct. 7, when the People’s Bank of China announced yet another costly stimulus program: a $175 billion plan to shore up small and medium-sized businesses.
With each new budget-busting move, and in the absence of reform, the odds that China will experience a seriously destabilizing economic crisis—which China bears such as Ruchir Sharma, the head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley, have been predicting for years—keep rising. 

“The big question is whether one of the ticking time bombs—bad debt, overheated property markets, oversized SOEs—will explode,” Gabuev says. 

“Because of Xi’s concentration of power, no one will give him advance warning if one of these bombs is about to go off. And because he doesn’t actually understand macroeconomics very well, and everyone is afraid to contradict the emperor, there’s a huge risk that he’ll mismanage it when it does.” 

Indeed, the government’s response to any instability is likely to be ugly. 

As Schell explains, “Xi has really put China at enormous risk. And because his only tool is repression, if things go wrong we’re likely to see even more crackdowns.”
Such predictions should worry everyone. 

China is the world’s largest economy by some measures, so if it melts down, the entire planet will pay the price. 

But the history of other autocracies, such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Kim’s North Korea, suggests that Xi’s relentless power play could produce even worse consequences. 

Since taking power, Xi has charted a far more aggressive foreign policy than his predecessors, alienating virtually every neighbor and the United States by pushing China’s claims in the South China Sea, threatening Taiwan, and using the military to assert Beijing’s claims to disputed islands.
Should China’s economic problems worsen, Xi could try to ratchet up tensions on any of these fronts in order to distract his citizens from the crisis at home. 

That temptation will prove especially strong if U.S. President Donald Trump keeps poking China by intensifying the trade war and publicly denouncing it.
And things could get scarier still, Pei warns, if China’s economic problems spin out of control completely. 

In that case, the Chinese state could collapse—a typical occurrence among typical dictatorships when faced with economic shocks, external threats (especially a defeat in war), or popular unrest—but one that, given China’s size, could have cataclysmic consequences if it happened there.
Which is why the rest of us should hope that China somehow finds a way to defy political gravity once again and remain an exception to all the rules—despite Xi’s ongoing efforts to make it normal in the worst sense of the word.

The Chinese Can Not Be Trusted to Lead Global Institutions

The abduction of Interpol’s president shows that Beijing’s officials will be subordinate to the orders of the Communist Party.

By BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN

Meng Hongwei

China has spent years trying to gain an equal footing in international institutions originally set up by the West. 

Those efforts have seen gradual success, as Chinese nationals have come to occupy leading positions on United Nations committees, multilateral development banks, international courts, and many other organizations.
So when Meng Hongwei, a high-ranking Chinese Communist Party member who was chosen to serve as the president of Interpol in 2016, disappeared last month while visiting China, and was revealed two weeks later to have been detained by Chinese authorities, it seemed like an unforced error. 

Interpol is an important international organization tasked with facilitating cooperation between police forces in countries around the world. 

But even so, party disciplinary authorities were treating Meng first and foremost as a party member who had strayed from the straight and narrow, rather than as the internationally recognized top official of a major multilateral organization who deserves due process.
Meng’s detention shows that under Beijing’s increasingly confident global authoritarianism, China’s participation in and even its leadership of international institutions will be openly subordinate to the diktat of the Communist Party. 

This stands in stark contrast to the preceding eras under previous Presidents Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, when China paid lip service to following international law and to becoming a conforming member of the current international system.
The circumstances under which Meng disappeared highlight the authority the party still wields over Meng, even while he served as the head of a supposedly politically neutral institution. 

His disappearance first became known when his wife reported his absence to police in France, where the couple lives, and the French police launched an investigation. 

His wife had begun to worry for his safety when she received a knife emoji in a text message from her husband, taking it as a coded warning that all was not well on his trip home.
On October 7, almost two weeks after Meng went missing, Chinese authorities announced that they were charging Meng with bribery. 

After coming to power in 2012, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping launched a sweeping anti-corruption crackdown that has felled thousands of mid-level party cadres and numerous high-ranking officials.
But experts say the anti-corruption campaign is used as cover for political purges intended to strengthen Xi’s grip on power. 

There are hints of a political element in Meng’s detention; when announcing the charges against Meng, Chinese authorities also stressed the need for “absolute loyal political character.” 

Meng is now being held in a custody system notorious for torture, abuse, and denial of access to lawyers or a fair trial. 

It is certainly normal for any country to prosecute government officials for corruption; it is not normal to detain them without notice or charge, then thrust them into a system without fair representation or transparency.
That raises serious questions about the fitness of any member of the Chinese Communist Party to serve in a leadership position in international organizations. 

Meng’s detention is a clear sign that any party members abroad, no matter how high their profile or how important political neutrality is to their position, are still subject to the will and demands of the party—a party that’s willing to punish them at any cost if they stray. 

This is far truer under Xi than under his recent predecessors because one of Xi’s top goals has been to revitalize the once-moribund party, reestablish it as the main guiding force in China, and double down on party discipline.
It’s clear that Meng was the party’s man at Interpol. 

During his tenure as Interpol president, Meng simultaneously served as a vice minister in China’s public-security bureau, the country’s chief law-enforcement institution. 

It’s unlikely he could have risen to such a high position without demonstrating years of loyalty to the party. 

And the public-security bureau is behind illegal detentions and numerous other injustices visited upon a populace with few civil-rights protections. 

That means Meng spent his career climbing the ladder within a ruthless organization.
Thus, Meng’s election in 2017 to the position of Interpol president, though a largely ceremonial post, raised concerns that China would use Meng’s position to pursue political dissidents through the issuance of Interpol red notices. 

A red notice is roughly equivalent to an international arrest warrant requested by an individual government, and Interpol approves requests based not on an assessment of the target’s guilt but rather on whether the requesting government followed the appropriate laws and regulations in making the request. 

This makes the red-notice system notoriously easy to abuse; Russia, China, Turkey, Venezuela, and some Central Asian nations are known to request politically motivated red notices targeting political foes and journalists. 

Interpol member nations are not required to detain or extradite those with a red notice against them, though many do.
And indeed, shortly after Meng became president, Interpol issued a red notice for Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire who had recently threatened to release compromising information on leading members of the Communist Party.
But not everything went so smoothly for China, or for Meng. 

In February, Interpol rescinded a red notice, originally issued at China’s request, for Dolkun Isa, the Europe-based president of World Uyghur Congress, a group that advocates for a beleaguered Chinese ethnic minority. 

Beijing claims that Isa is a terrorist, and China has frequently requested that European governments arrest and deport him.
Some observers noted that about six weeks after Isa’s red notice was revoked, Meng was removed from his post as a member of the public-security bureau’s party committee, the party organ embedded inside the bureau to provide leadership and ideological guidance, leading to speculation that the party was unhappy with Meng for allowing Interpol to remove the notice.
“Look at East Turkestan,” wrote Bill Bishop, the author of the influential Sinocism newsletter, referring to the Chinese region where an estimated 1 million Muslims are being held without due process. 

“Does Beijing care if there is fleeting concern over the fate of their Interpol appointee?”
These days, Beijing seems far less concerned about the opinion of the liberal West than it once was. Rather than continuing to try to hide the existence of its concentration camps in East Turkestan, Chinese officials are declaring them to be a true societal good. 

In the contested South China Sea, China now rarely claims that it aims to uphold international law—instead, it emphasizes that no one has the right to criticize its island building and militarization there. 

Might makes right, as it were.
At the same time, Beijing wields greater sway over international institutions than ever before. 

That means stakeholders in the international system would do well to ask themselves what price they might pay if they offer leadership positions to Chinese Communist Party members. 

It’s likely that as China promotes its authoritarian system around the world, one will increasingly see the party justify and even tout its realpolitik approach to international power. 

A liberal world order built on human rights and rule of law will need to find an effective response—and soon.

Interpol tragicomedy

China and the Case of the Interpol Chief
The New York Times

China has yet to give any details of the corruption charges against Meng Hongwei, the president of Interpol, who disappeared on a visit home and was later said to have been arrested. 

Whatever the charges are, they are almost certainly not the real reason for his fate. 

In China, the law is what the Communist Party says it is — more precisely, what Xi Jinping says it is. 

And when an official of Meng’s global stature is nabbed, it’s a political decision — even if, coincidentally, he was corrupt, as is often the case in China.
Meng understood the rules of that game. 

He had been a vice minister of public security in a police state and had played a role in many operations, including Operation Fox Hunt, which tried to bring Chinese officials and businesspeople suspected of corruption back from abroad. 

His former boss, Zhou Yongkang, was imprisoned for life on corruption charges in 2015. 

Meng’s last WhatsApp message to his wife was an emoji of a knife, which she understood to mean he was in danger.
Interpol has asked Beijing for an explanation for Meng’s detention but has taken no further action. 

The agency issued a statement on Sunday that it had accepted his resignation as president “with immediate effect” and named a replacement.

Whatever else he was, Meng was the president of Interpol, a venerable international organization based in France that facilitates cooperation among police forces from its 192 member countries. 

The position of president is largely ceremonial — a secretary general, currently Jürgen Stock of Germany, runs day-to-day operations. 

But the selection of a Chinese official for the post was a major feather in China’s cap, proudly hailed by Xi a year ago as evidence that China “abided by international rules.”
The crude arrest of Meng proclaims the opposite. 

China’s behavior puts it more closely in a league with Russia, another nation whose authoritarian leader is convinced that his country is due global respect and deference by virtue of its wealth and might, and not its actions. 

Tellingly, both China and Russia have brazenly tried to use Interpol to pursue political foes. 

China put out a “red notice,” in effect a wanted alert, for Dolkun Isa, a self-exiled activist for the rights of China’s beleaguered Uighur minority. 

Russia tried to use Interpol to catch Bill Browder, a hedge-fund manager turned anti-Vladimir Putin campaigner, among other political gadflies. 

In these cases, Interpol has properly refused to cooperate.
It is possible that Meng’s failure to pursue the Isa warrant fed Xi’s anger. 

According to The Economist, a Ministry of Public Security statement condemning Meng’s alleged wrongdoings also stressed the need for “absolute loyalty” and for “resolute support” for the country’s leader.
What Meng did to join the lengthening list of officials purged by Xi may never be fully known outside the Communist hierarchy. 

What is known, and deeply troubling, is how brazenly China is prepared to wage its internal power struggles without any regard for procedures, appearances or international norms.

Interpol tragicomedy

Death note : Wife of ex-Interpol chief receives threat from China
AP
Grace Meng is now under French police protection 

The wife of the former Interpol president who disappeared in China has revealed that she had received a threatening phone call warning of Chinese agents coming for her in France.
In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Grace Meng denied bribery allegations against Meng Hongwei and said that speaking out about his disappearance was placing her "in great danger".
Meng -- who is also China's vice minister of public security -- disappeared while on a trip home to China late last month.
Speaking to the AP late on Monday, Grace Meng said her last contact with her husband was by text message, on September 25, when he wrote "wait for my call" and sent her an emoji image of a knife after traveling back to China.
After a week with no subsequent news, one evening while she was at home in Lyon having put their two young boys to bed, she then got a threatening call on her mobile phone from a man speaking in Chinese.
"He said, 'You listen but you don't speak'," she said. 

He continued: "We've come in two work teams, two work teams just for you."
She said the man also said, "We know where you are," and that when she tried to ask a question, he repeated: "You don't speak, you just listen to me."
As a result, Grace Meng is now under French police protection.

Grace Meng said her husband's disappearance placed her 'in great danger'
Chinese authorities said on Monday that Meng Hongwei was being investigated for taking bribes and other crimes that were a result of his "willfulness".
Hours earlier, Interpol said Meng had resigned as the international police agency's president. 

It was not clear whether he did so of his own free will.
Grace Meng suggested that the bribery accusation is just an excuse for "making him disappear for so long".
"As his wife, I think he's simply incapable of this," she said. 

She said she would be willing to make their bank accounts public.
She said that she spoke out in hopes that doing so might help other families in similar circumstances.
Grace Meng refused to provide her real name to the AP, saying she was too afraid for the safety of her relatives in China. 

It is not customary for Chinese wives to adopt their husbands' names.
She said she has done so now to show her solidarity with her husband. 

Her English name, Grace, is one she has long used, she said.
A French judicial official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed to AP that police are investigating the threat against Grace Meng, but said the probe has yet to determine whether there were indeed Chinese teams sent to Lyon.

Rogue Regime: Suspend China From Interpol

China needs to face the consequences when it  abuses the international law-enforcement system.

By Eli Lake

No corrupt regimes allowed.

In the high-stakes drama over the detention of Interpol President Meng Hongwei, one thing stands out. 

It’s the plea the international police agency’s secretary general, Juergen Stock, made to his captors in China.
Over the weekend, Stock officially requested that Chinese police clarify the status of Meng, who had not been heard from since leaving Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France, to travel to Beijing nearly a week before. 

“Interpol's General Secretariat looks forward to an official response from China’s authorities to address concerns over the President’s well-being,” Stock said in a statement.
On Sunday the Chinese government fessed up. 

Meng had been arrested on charges of bribery and corruption, it announced. 

On Monday, Chinese authorities notified the world that Meng had resigned from his position at Interpol.
Think about that for a moment. 

Chinese authorities appear to have abducted Interpol’s president. 

In response, the agency’s secretary general, who oversees its day-to-day operations, issued a statement pleading with them to let him know how the president is doing. 

Where is the statement urging member states to suspend China from Interpol?
All of this reflects a deeper problem with Interpol. 

Nearly 80 percent of Interpol’s annual operating budget of about $80 million comes from Western democracies, but authoritarian states have begun to corrupt the organization. 

Many countries still rely on Interpol to share information on real criminals. 

But a handful of bad actors have abused the system to target their political foes. 

As Ted Bromund, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation who focuses on Interpol, puts it: “The problem with the Interpol system is that a lot of nations are not like us and we pretend that they are.”
The pioneer in this regard is Russia. 

In the last 10 years, just as Western law-enforcement agencies began focusing on the financial crimes of Russian oligarchs, the Kremlin began requesting red notices, or requests for arrest and extradition, for its political opponents. 

Hedge fund manager William Browder is the most high-profile victim of this kind of abuse.
Other rogue states have followed Russia’s lead. 

Iran has issued red notices for dissidents. 

Turkey has gotten Interpol to issue a red notice to arrest a Turkish writer who had been critical of the government. 

China has abused the system, issuing a red notice in 2017 for the head of the World Uighur Congress. 

The Chinese Uighurs are treated as second-class citizens in western China.
In most of these cases, the Interpol system has worked and the red notices were revoked. 

Last year, Interpol instituted new reforms to make these abuses harder. 

But authoritarians have also adjusted, making use of so-called diffusion notices, which are communicated directly to national law-enforcement authorities and do not have to go through Interpol’s red-notice system.
In the case of Meng Hongwei, a Chinese national who became president of Interpol in 2016, there are two possibilities: Either China nominated a corrupt man to be president of a major international law enforcement agency; or China is detaining an innocent man. 

Whichever way you interpret it, says Bruno Min, a senior policy adviser at Fair Trials, a U.K. based human-rights group, “It shows disrespect to Interpol.” 

China has ignored Interpol’s rules before, he says, “and now they are going even further.”
Until now, the Western nations of Interpol have been loath to suspend any country’s membership. This practice has to stop. 

If China doesn’t face consequences for what it has done, then Interpol will be setting the conditions for its own irrelevance. 

What good is an international law enforcement system that lets rogues act like cops?