Information War

It’s time for the U.S. to start pushing back against Chinese disinformation operations
By Laura Rosenberger and Zack Cooper

He Jiangbing, a finance scholar, shows his Twitter profile in Beijing on Nov. 30, 2018. 

In recent weeks, the world has watched as millions of Hong Kongers have taken to the streets to defend their democratic rights. 

Police have jailed protest leaders, and China has moved troops to the border. 

The struggle has also spread to online platforms, which Beijing is using to shape perceptions of the protests in order to undermine support for them.
Although Hong Kong’s chief executive Carrie Lam has addressed one of the key demands from protesters, the protests continue. 

Even if protests dissipate, we should anticipate that Beijing will use the next few months to better understand how demonstrators used online platforms to organize, constrict further online activism and manipulate perceptions of the protesters.
The Chinese security apparatus is deeply experienced in restricting speech online, starting inside its own borders and with its own platforms. 

Western tech companies have now confirmed that the Chinese government is also engaged in an effort to manipulate the information space outside its Great Firewall, from Hong Kong to Melbourne to Vancouver. 

In the process it is also making use of U.S. social media platforms. 

This should serve as a wake-up call for Americans that weaponization of social media is not just a Russian tactic and that our social media platforms remain vulnerable to manipulation by foreign actors seeking to interfere in democratic debate.
The first public evidence of this campaign was confirmed several weeks ago when Twitter, Facebook and Google’s YouTube disabled more than one thousand accounts linked to Chinese state-backed disinformation operations. 

According to the companies, these accounts are operating in a “coordinated manner” and “deliberately and specifically attempting to sow political discord in Hong Kong.” 

Beijing’s target certainly wasn’t citizens in mainland China, where all three platforms are blocked.
China has also been using its state media — as well as advertisements on social media platforms — to portray the protesters as violent to external audiences. 

In the face of this activity, Twitter took the commendable action of halting advertisements from state-controlled media outlets.
Beijing and other authoritarian regimes are increasingly employing these techniques. 

Facebook and Twitter have removed numerous fake accounts linked to Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Myanmar for similar manipulative behavior.
Nor is this just about democratic rights in Hong Kong. 

Australia and most of our European allies have struggled to prevent external interference in their democratic processes, and Taiwan is rightly concerned that the manipulation and interference tactics Beijing is exerting in Hong Kong will be used to interfere in its elections next year. 

And we know that social media has been used to attack American democracy.
All Americans can agree on the need to take action to protect our system of government. 

A competition of ideas is healthy, but foreign interference in those debates is not. 

The 2020 elections are likely to be even more contentious than those in 2016, so we need to ensure the health of our political processes.
Despite these shared concerns, our elected leaders have taken few steps to safeguard our democracy, including from foreign manipulation of social media. 

To date, Congress has shown both a thin understanding of technology and a greater interest in scoring partisan points than in addressing real challenges. 

Numerous pieces of bipartisan legislation have gone nowhere, while foreign adversaries have continued their assault on our democratic debate. 

As Congress returns this month, there are several immediate steps it should take.
First, lawmakers should enact measures that facilitate greater cooperation and transparency by social media platforms. 

Congress should pass legislation establishing a mechanism that streamlines and institutionalizes information sharing between and among the social media platforms, government and outside researchers in a manner that protects privacy and speech. 

Legislation such as the bipartisan Honest Ads Act would improve disclosure requirements for online political advertisements and provide Americans with important context to evaluate information about who funds political ads online.
Second, Congress should provide the government with mechanisms to facilitate a coordinated and integrated approach to this issue — one that enables it to see and respond to the full threat picture. This should include creating a counter-foreign interference coordinator at the National Security Council, which would coordinate policy responses across the U.S. government and engage the private sector, and a National Hybrid Threat Center, which would ensure that threat reporting does not fall into gaps and seams as it has in the past. 

Congress should explore whether the intelligence community should receive new powers to detect and assess foreign information operations.
Third, Congress should send a clear message to foreign governments, entities and individuals that the United States will impose significant costs for interference. 

And it should support efforts to redouble coordination with our allies on the shared challenges facing our democracies.
China is using U.S. social media platforms to manipulate how people around the world, including Americans, perceive issues of importance to the party-state. 

Right now the focus is on Hong Kong, but it won’t stay there. 

Our elected leaders can get ahead of the curve and close the vulnerabilities China’s information operations will exploit. 

To preserve the vitality of our free and open democratic process, they should — and now.

Supreme Tech Quisling

Twitter Helps Beijing Push Agenda Abroad Despite Ban in China

• Twitter employees train Chinese officials to amplify message
• Push persists despite recent ban on ads from Chinese state media

By Shelly Banjo and Sarah Frier


Twitter Inc. removed hundreds of accounts linked to the Chinese government this week meant to undermine the legitimacy of Hong Kong protests. 

It also said it would no longer allow state media to purchase ads on its platform.
What Twitter didn’t mention in its series of blog posts this week was the increasing number of Chinese officials, diplomats, media, and government agencies using the social media service to push Beijing’s political agenda abroad. 

Twitter employees actually help these Chinese get their messages across, a practice that hasn’t been previously reported. 

The company provides Chinese officials with support, like verifying their accounts and training them on how to amplify messages, including with the use of hashtags.
This is despite a ban on Twitter in China, which means most people on the mainland can’t use the service or see opposing views from abroad. 

Still, in the last few days, an account belonging to the Chinese ambassador to Panama took to Twitter to share videos painting Hong Kong protesters as vigilantes. 

He also responded to Panamanian users’ tweets about the demonstrations, which began in opposition to a bill allowing extraditions to China.
China’s ambassador to the U.S. tweeted that “radical protesters” were eroding the rule of law embraced by the #silentmajority of Hong Kongers. 

The Chinese Mission to the United Nations’ Twitter account asked protesters to “stop the violence, for a better #Hong Kong,” while social media accounts of Chinese embassies in Manila, India and the Maldives shared articles from China’s state media blaming Westerners for disrupting the city. “Separatists in Hong Kong kept in close contact with foreign elements,” one story says above a photo of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.
“We know China is adept at controlling domestic information, but now they are trying to use Western platforms like Twitter to control the narrative on the international stage,” said Jacob Wallis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s International Cyber Policy Centre.
It’s unclear if any of these diplomats were set up on the service by Twitter, but the state-backed attempt to discredit Hong Kong protesters continues to reach millions of global Twitter users. 

In many cases, the Chinese officials are promoting views similar to those in 936 accounts Twitter banned on Monday.
The practice of supporting Chinese officials who use Twitter to spread the Communist Party agenda highlights how difficult it is for the social media company to balance its commitment to root out disinformation and allow the expression of varying opinions. 

It also raises concerns around why Twitter is helping Beijing make its case to a global audience when the service is banned in China, where dissenting voices are prohibited and officials sometimes detain users accessing the platform through virtual private networks.
Twitter’s recent effort to curtail China’s government-directed misinformation campaigns, which provoked outrage from state media, seems at odds with continuing to welcome pro-Beijing accounts that attack Hong Kong protesters, said Wallis.
“There’s a clear tension for Twitter here having seen that Beijing is willing to use the platform in deceptive and manipulative ways, whilst desiring to use the platform for state diplomacy,” Wallis said.
The tweets are part of a broader campaign by China to reshape the narrative over Hong Kong, particularly in Western nations more sympathetic to the democratic aspirations of protesters. 

China this week also sent a 43-page letter to senior editors at foreign news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Bloomberg.
Twitter says Chinese officials and politicians deserve a voice in the public discourse, as long as they follow its rules and policies. 

The company has used the same argument to defend hosting tweets by U.S. President Donald Trump, which some users have questioned. 

Twitter has said it aims to “advance global, public conversation” and that public figures “play a critical role in that conversation because of their out-sized impact on our society,“ in a blog post last year.
On Monday, Twitter said in a blog post that it would block more than 900 accounts because they appeared to be part of a “coordinated state-backed operation” to “sow political discord in Hong Kong.” 

The accounts accessed Twitter from unblocked IP addresses within mainland China, it said, suggesting the state condoned their activities. 

Twitter also said it would stop accepting advertising from state-controlled media: “Any affected accounts will be free to continue to use Twitter to engage in public conversation, just not our advertising products.”
Twitter’s embrace of Chinese officials on the platform also highlights how some American tech companies try to make inroads in the enormous market, despite government restrictions on their services. 

Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg, for example, has repeatedly expressed a desire to enter China. 

Twitter oversees the China business from offices in Hong Kong and Singapore.
Like Google, Facebook and other sites blocked in China, Twitter sells advertising to Chinese companies like Huawei Technologies Co. and Xiaomi Corp. that are trying to reach overseas users. Before Twitter’s policy change this week, it had also sold ad space to Chinese state media companies that used them to push the narrative that Hong Kong protests were orchestrated by foreign forces and angry mobs unrepresentative of the city’s majority.
Facebook said it has trained Chinese state media entities to use its services, but declined to comment on whether it also works with government officials. 

“We provide a standard set of guidance and best practice training to groups around the world including governments, political parties, media outlets, and non-profits so they can manage their Facebook Pages,” the company said in a statement, noting that their guidance is publicly available online.
YouTube, part of Alphabet Inc., doesn’t have a specific policy that bars state-funded media, but the company’s ad policies require government-funded channels to be labeled as such. 

This week, state media including the Global Times published videos about the Hong Kong demonstrations, including an interview with a police officer who said he was “critically injured by violent protesters.” 

The company didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the matter.
Both Twitter and Facebook have established programs to make sure public figures around the world sign up for their sites and understand how to use them effectively. 

The idea is that people who have a following — athletes, actors or singers — will create interest for their other users in the website. 

For years, the work has extended to politics, with the social networks signing up and training political figures. 

For example, Facebook has embedded staff with or trained Trump; Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, known for encouraging extrajudicial killings; and Germany’s anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party (AfD) in how to most effectively use the platform, Bloomberg News has reported.
Twitter and Facebook have implemented terms of service that ban certain practices, including bot accounts that appear to be real people and promote misinformation. 

But government officials and state media still have wide latitude to say what they want.
“If Trump is going to use Twitter to deliver his message to the Chinese government, then it makes perfect sense China should be using this medium to send signals back,” said Samm Sacks, cybersecurity policy and China digital economy fellow at think tank New America. 

“But then we get into this coordinated state misinformation domain and it raises problematic questions around what is propaganda and what is misinformation.”

Tech Quisling

TWITTER HELPED CHINESE PROMOTE DISINFORMATION ON REPRESSION OF UIGHURS
By Ryan Gallagher

TWITTER HELPED TO promote Chinese government propaganda and disinformation about the country’s concentration camps in the East Turkestan colony, a review of the company’s advertising records reveals.
The social media company today announced a policy change that would bar such promotion following an inquiry from The Intercept and an earlier controversy over similar propaganda related to demonstrations in Hong Kong.
In East Turkestan, a western colony of China, the United Nations has estimated that 1 million ethnic minority Muslim Uighurs — including children, pregnant women, elderly people, and people with disabilities — have been detained under the pretext of fighting extremism. 

According to Human Rights Watch, Chinese authorities are “committing human rights abuses in East Turkestan on a scale unseen in the country in decades.”

A review of Twitter advertisements from between June and August this year showed that the social media giant promoted more than 50 English-language tweets from the Global Times, a Chinese state media organization. 

The tweets deliberately obscure the truth about the situation in East Turkestan and attack critics of the country’s ruling Communist Party regime.
The Global Times paid Twitter to promote its tweets to a portion of the more than 300 million active users on the social media platform. 

The tweets appeared in users’ timelines, regardless of whether they followed the Global Times account. 

In July, amid global condemnation of the treatment of Uighurs in East Turkestan, Twitter began promoting several Global Times tweets about the region.
One of the promoted tweets, from July 11, included a embedded video in which the Global Times’ editor-in-chief claimed that people who refer to the facilities in East Turkestan as “mass detention camps” have “smeared the vocational education and training centers established to help people avoid extremism.” 

He went on to attack “European politicians and media workers,” who he claimed had “tried to defend terrorist activities in East Turkestan,” adding, “their hands are in a way soiled with the blood of the Chinese people who died in violent attacks.”
Another promoted tweet, from July 4, included a video purportedly taken in East Turkestan, in which people are seen shopping in the street and eating in restaurants to a soundtrack of piano music. 

The video describes riots in 2009 that occurred in Urumqi, the capital of East Turkestan, and states that residents there “now live a happy and peaceful life” because they work together to fight terrorism and extremism. 

There is no mention in the video of the mass detention camps.
Other Global Times ads promoted by Twitter follow a similar theme, presenting the region as a happy and peaceful place where no human rights abuses have occurred. 

One promoted tweet includes video of an elderly woman receiving a package of medical supplies from government officials before breaking down in tears of joy. 

The tweet claims that poverty has been alleviated in the area because local residents have “access to high-quality medical care and affordable medicines.”
Patrick Poon, China researcher for Amnesty International, said he found Twitter’s promotion of the advertisements to be “appalling.”
“This is a very important, serious issue that Twitter needs to address,” said Poon. 

“Twitter is helping to promote false allegations and government propaganda. Allowing such advertising sets an alarming precedent.”
On Monday, Twitter said that it would no longer accept advertising from state-controlled media, in order to “protect healthy discourse and open conversation.”
The announcement was published three hours after The Intercept had contacted the company for comment on its promotion of the Global Times’ East Turkestan tweets. 

Earlier on Monday, TechCrunch highlighted Twitter’s promotion of tweets from a different state news entity, China Xinhua News, which portrayed largely peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong as violent.
Twitter’s promotion of Chinese government propaganda had appeared to contradict its own policies, which state that advertising on the platform must be “honest.” 

The advertisements also undermined statements from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who told the Senate Intelligence Committee last year that the company was working to combat “propaganda through bots and human coordination [and] misinformation campaigns.”
Like many Western technology companies, Twitter has a complex relationship with China. 

The social media platform is blocked in the country and cannot be accessed there without the use of censorship circumvention technologies, such as a virtual private network or proxy service. 

At the same time, however, Twitter generates a lot of advertising revenue in China and has a growing presence in the country.
In July, Twitter’s director in China reportedly stated that the company’s team there had tripled in the last year and was the company’s fastest growing division. 

In May, the social media giant held a “Twitter for Marketers” conference in Beijing. 

Meanwhile, Twitter was criticized for purging Chinese dissidents’ accounts on the platform – which it claimed was a mistake – and has also been the subject of a protest campaign, launched by the Chinese artist Badiucao, after it refused to publish a “hashflag” symbol to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Poon, the Amnesty researcher, said police in China have in recent months increasingly targeted human rights advocates in the country who are active on Twitter, forcing them to delete their accounts or remove specific posts that are critical of the government. 

These cases have been reported to Twitter, according to Poon, but the company has not taken any action.
“Twitter has allowed the Chinese government to advertise its propaganda while turning a deaf ear on those who have been persecuted by the Chinese regime,” Poon said. 

“We need to hear how Twitter can justify that.”

Thuggish Nation

Twitter and Facebook shut Chinese accounts targeting Hong Kong protests
By TAMI ABDOLLAH

Freedom fighters: People gather in Lafayette Square in front of the White House in Washington, Sunday, Aug. 18, 2019, in solidarity with the "Stand With Hong Kong, Power to the People Rally" in Hong Kong. 

WASHINGTON — Twitter said it has suspended more than 200,000 accounts that were part of a Chinese influence campaign targeting the protest movement in Hong Kong.
The company also said Monday it will ban ads from state-backed media companies, expanding a prohibition it first applied in 2017 to two Russian entities.
Both measures are part of what a senior company official portrayed in an interview as a broader effort to curb malicious political activity on a popular platform that has been criticized for enabling election interference around the world and for accepting money for ads that amount to propaganda by state-run media organizations.
The accounts were suspended for violating the social networking platform’s terms of service and “because we think this is not how people can come to Twitter to get informed,” the official said in an interview with The Associated Press.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns, said the Chinese activity was reported to the FBI, which investigated Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election through social media.
After being notified by Twitter and conducting its own investigation, Facebook said Monday that it has also removed seven pages, three groups and five accounts, including some portraying protesters as cockroaches and terrorists.
The Chinese government said Tuesday it wasn’t aware of the allegations.
Facebook, which is more widely used in Hong Kong, does not release data on such state-backed influence operations.
Neither does it ban ads from state-owned media companies.
“We continue to look at our policies as they relate to state-owned media,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to the AP.
“We’re also taking a closer look at ads that have been raised to us to determine if they violate our policies.”
Twitter traced the Hong Kong campaign to two fake Chinese and English Twitter accounts that pretended to be news organizations based in Hong Kong, where pro-democracy demonstrators have taken to the streets since early June calling for full democracy and an inquiry into what they say is police violence against protesters.
The Chinese language account, @HKpoliticalnew, and the English account, @ctcc507, pushed tweets depicting protesters as violent criminals in a campaign aimed at influencing public opinion around the world. 
One of those accounts was tied to a suspended Facebook account that went by the same moniker: HKpoliticalnew.
An additional 936 core accounts originated from within China attempted to sow political discord in Hong Kong by undermining the protest movement’s legitimacy and political positions.
About 200,000 more automated Twitter accounts amplified the messages, engaging with the core accounts in the network.
Few tweeted more than once, the official said, mostly because Twitter quickly caught many of them.
The Twitter official said the investigation remains ongoing and there could be further disclosures.
Though Twitter, Facebook and most other foreign social media platforms are banned in China, they’re available in semiautonomous Hong Kong.
At a daily briefing Tuesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said he was “not aware” of the allegations of fake accounts, but added that Chinese had the right to “express their opinions about” the situation in Hong Kong.
The free speech organization PEN America welcomed the tech companies’ actions and urged them to do more.
“China’s government has denied its citizens access to global outlets for communication. That they now turn around and stealthily unleash a campaign of disinformation on the very same platforms represents a new height of hypocrisy,” chief executive Suzanne Nossel said in a statement.
The Twitter campaign reflects that the Chinese government has studied the role of social media in mass movements and fears the Hong Kong protests could spark wider unrest, said James Lewis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“This is standard Chinese practice domestically, and we know that after 2016 they studied what the Russians did in the U.S. carefully,” Lewis said.
“So it sounds like this is the first time they’re deploying their new toy.”
Twitter has sought to more aggressively monitor its network for malicious political activity since the 2016 presidential election and to be more transparent about its investigations, publicly releasing data about state-backed influence operations since October so others can evaluate it, the official said.
“We’re not only telling the public this happened, we’re also putting the data out there so people can study it for themselves,” the official said.
As for state-backed media organizations, they are still allowed to use Twitter, but are no longer allowed to pay for ads, which show up regardless of whether you have elected to follow the group’s tweet.
Twitter declined to provide a list of what it considers state-backed media organizations, but a representative said it may consider doing so in the future.
In 2017, Twitter specifically announced it would ban Russia-based RT and Sputnik from advertising on its platform.

China Communist Party Youth Twitter account prompts abuse

BBC News
The Twitter account appeared to be set up on Friday.

Setting up a Twitter account may seem a fairly obvious thing for a political party to do, but the step has not so far worked out too well for China's Communist Party.
The account by the party's youth wing made its debut on Friday with a chirpy one-liner -- "I'm here!" -- and a picture of what appeared to be cartoon communist rabbits.
The Twitter bio says the account provides "information on the work and activities of the Communist Party Youth League and hot topics among youths".

It has posted more than dozen times since then -- in Chinese -- covering patriotic topics like the anniversary of the Japanese invasion in 1931 and links to state media articles.
But the posts have been met with a deluge of abusive tweets and questions about how the account has managed to circumvent the "Great Firewall" surrounding China's internet and accusing the youth wing of hypocrisy.

'Go back behind the firewall'
China closely controls what can be posted and seen online, and is steadily tightening its restrictions.
To get round this, Chinese users have always used VPNs to access Twitter and other banned sites by making it seem like their device is in another country.
But dozens of VPN apps have been withdrawn in China in recent weeks after the government issued new rules requiring them to get a licence. 

It has also been reining in social media and messaging apps in recent months.
"Go back behind the firewall" and "Give us our VPN" were some of the more popular -- and printable -- responses to @ccylchina.
"Please tell me what kind of miraculous VPN you've used to circumvent the firewall... how brazen you are, you should know that those who do so can be caught!" wrote Twitter user Maoyaodong.
Other criticism referenced Weibo, China's heavily censored Twitter-like microblogging platform. 

One user warned: "This isn't Weibo [where you can] scrub away opinions, get lost."

'Fake news'
One possible reason for the Youth League's debut on Twitter could be the appearance last week of another account, called @ComYouthLeague.
That arrived in a very similar way -- with a tweet, announcing "Hello Twitter" -- and has also been posting patriotic links and news stories.
It met similar questions about firewalls and VPNs, but on Monday, @ccylchina warned its followers it was a fake account, saying: "Please look for the Central Communist Youth League."
It posted a picture -- crossed out -- of a tweet from @ComYouthLeague which talked about respecting China's internet laws.
The ComYouthLeague responded seeming slightly wounded, saying its post was "not fabricated nor fake" but aimed to reflect "the positive energy that Chinese youth should have".
Neither account has yet knocked up a substantial following yet -- in fact @ComYouthLeague is slightly ahead with 1,666 followers at the time of writing.
But that's perhaps unsurprising given the limited Twitter audience in China, where organisations are far more likely to rely on the likes of Weibo to interact with the public.

@Ccylchina seems to be still be finding its feet - it twice posted bursts of "test" tweets on Monday.

Though many Chinese state media outlets have a presence on Twitter, few government and Communist Party bodies maintain accounts.
Those that do include the information office of China's State Council, as well as the main Chinese Communist Party, though its last post was in March 2016.

Chinese Racism

Indians more amused than outraged by Chinese '7 Sins' video

Reuters

This video, released by Chinese state news agency Xinhua, accuses India of perpetrating "Seven Sins."

NEW DELHI -- Indians have been more amused than outraged by an agitprop video released by a Chinese state news agency that accuses India of perpetrating "Seven Sins" in a two-month-old frontier standoff and resorts to a racial stereotype to make its point.
The video, an edition of Xinhua's new "Spark" show, features anchor Dier Wang accusing India of trespassing on Chinese soil, violating international law and "hijacking" the tiny kingdom of Bhutan that has been caught up in the dispute.
An actor wearing a turban and stick-on beard gives obtuse answers, to canned laughter, in the three-minute video posted via Xinhua's English-language account on social network Twitter (http://bit.ly/2vK7HQp). 

Twitter is blocked in China.
"Have you ever negotiated with a robber who had broken into your house and refuses to leave?" asks Wang in American-accented English. 

"You just call 911 or just fight him back, right?"
The actor, apparently representing India, answers: "Why call 911 -- don't you wanna play house, bro?"
Wang gets the last word: "If you wanna play, get out of my house first."
The trouble started in June when India sent troops to stop China building a road in the Doklam area, which is remote, uninhabited territory claimed by both China and India's ally Bhutan.
China has repeatedly asked India to withdraw from the area or else face the prospect of an escalation. Chinese state media have warned India of a fate worse than its crushing defeat in a brief border war in 1962.
Although the escalation in tension is the worst in years, the clip's sketchy production values offered light relief while the stereotype played by the "Indian" actor appeared to cause only mild offence.
"This is China's official sense of humour!" tweeted Indian defence pundit Ajai Shukla. 

"Xinhua isn't quite sure whether it's producing a spoof ... or a propaganda piece."
In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a daily news briefing that she had not seen the video, but would look into it.
India's foreign ministry could not be reached for comment. 

Xinhua asked for questions about the video to be sent by fax, to which it did not immediately respond.

China turns to US courts in effort to silence exiled businessman

Guo Wengui’s accusations from abroad rattle Beijing political elite
By Emily Feng, Sherry Fei Ju and Lucy Hornby in Beijing

Guo Wengui: Beijing has entangled him in at least five lawsuits 
China has taken its fight against an exiled businessman who has stirred up a political hornets’ nest to the US courts, gambling on a legal drama to quell his damaging revelations.
Guo Wengui, also known as Miles Kwok, has levelled personal accusations against Wang Qishan, China’s powerful anti-corruption tsar, from his home in Manhattan. 

The gripping allegations have transfixed the Chinese public as elite factions jockey for influence in the ruling Communist party.
In response, Beijing has entangled Mr Guo in at least five lawsuits, marking an unprecedented engagement with the US judicial system. 

That could prove an expensive distraction for Mr Guo, who relies on Twitter and overseas Chinese media for free airtime.
“No one anticipated that lawsuits against Mr Kwok would come out in such scale,” said Tao Jingzhou, of Dechert, a law firm in Beijing. 

Chinese companies have been defendants in the US but rarely initiated a complaint in a US court, he said.
Many believe that Mr Guo is attempting to drive a wedge between Wang and Xi Jinping, China’s president. 

The party has countered by writing in Hong Kong media that Xi, Wang and Meng Jianzhu, the country’s security chief, are united against Mr Guo.
For the moment, attempts to silence him centre on New York courts. 

China has no extradition treaty with the US and Chinese agents desperate to repatriate him have not provided US law enforcement with sufficient evidence of any crimes committed, people with knowledge of the situation said.
HNA Group, the international conglomerate, announced late on Thursday that it had filed a defamation suit in a New York state court against Mr Guo, according to a court summons. 

The suit is in response to remarks Mr Guo made on his social media accounts.
Last week, journalists were offered unusual but limited access to a trial in China of Mr Guo’s former employees, as part of the effort to discredit him. 

They pleaded guilty to obtaining loans and foreign currency under false pretences.
On Friday morning, two employees were sentenced to two years in prison with three years of probation. 

A third employee was sentenced to two years and three months of imprisonment. 

Mr Guo's company, Pangu Investment Co, was fined Rmb245m ($36m).
China’s attempt to use its court system and jailhouse confessions to muzzle Mr Guo have been handicapped by a lack of credibility. 

During Xi’s tenure many Chinese lawyers who worked as independent defenders in civil rights cases have been jailed. 

The anti-corruption watchdog led by Wang functions without oversight, leading to complaints of false accusations, torture and even deaths in its custody.
Meanwhile, China’s supreme court president in January denounced “false western ideals like judicial independence”.
This week, nine Chinese companies filed a lawsuit in New York to recoup Rmb272m ($38.5m) in unpaid fees from the construction of Mr Guo’s Pangu Plaza near Beijing’s Olympic facilities nine years ago.
“We are only a small party in this lawsuit action, and we only went along like everybody else,” said one of the plaintiff companies. 

“We did not initiate the US court case nor did we play any active role in the process. We only provided the required documents to relevant parties.”
Their suit follows three others previously launched in New York: an $88m lawsuit from Hong Kong-based Pacific Alliance Asia Opportunity Fund over an unpaid loan and two defamation cases brought by Pan Shiyi, chairman of Beijing property developer Soho China, and Hu Shuli, chief editor of financial magazine Caixin.
Meanwhile, another woman named among Mr Guo’s stream of allegations has also threatened to sue.
"We have a total of Rmb28bn in debt disputes involving 145 companies. Why have only nine come forward? I like to fight in groups!” Mr Guo tweeted in response to the suits.
But he evaded representatives sent to his Manhattan apartment, said Kevin Tung, the nine plaintiffs’ New York-based lawyer. 

“I hope he settles,” he said. 

“But I don’t think this man has the personality to do a settlement.” 

Chinese Paranoia

China adds Pinterest to list of banned sites

by Sherisse Pham

China's Great Firewall is cracking down on Pinterest, the social media platform popular for letting users share, or pin, items of interest to a virtual board.
For years, Pinterest has been freely accessible in China, most likely because its users typically don't share content that would rattle Chinese censors. 

People mostly use the site to pin images and tips on home decor, hair styles, cooking, wedding planning and fashion.
The Pinterest block started earlier this month, according to watchdog group Greatfire.org, which monitors censorship and accessibility of websites in China.
The timing coincided with China's annual National People's Congress, a sensitive time in Beijing when China's top leadership and thousands of delegates gather to set the country's political and economic course for the year.
Pinterest did not respond to a request for comment outside of business hours. 

China's Cyberspace Administration did not respond to a request for comment.
Pinterest's ban fits a pattern of China blocking sites that compete with emerging local rivals.
China's censorship has effectively "become a tool of industrial policy to discriminate against foreign competitors," wrote Cho-Wen Chu, a professor at Taiwan's Chinese Culture University, in a paper published in January.
A crackdown on Google, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook helped domestic companies such as Baidu, Youku, Weibo and Renren flourish.
The Western sites were widely used to share content China would deem highly sensitive, like the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protests, Tibet, or the Dalai Lama.
But Pinterest, Facebook's Instagram, or even Snapchat, are not known for their political content.
"China's 'national security' concerns may be only a convenient excuse to favor domestic dotcoms by impeding fair competition," according to Chu.
Banning Western rivals gives Chinese tech companies, including Alibaba's Pinterest rival Faxian, and Instagram imitator Meitu a huge advantage.
China has 731 million internet users, and 95% of them access the web on mobile devices, according to data from the China Internet Network Information Centre.
With that many mobile users tapping into apps and shopping on their smartphones, China is a lucrative market for any social media platform, a fact not lost on Pinterest President Tim Kendell.
Pinterest's position as a "catalogue of ideas" rather than a social network gives the company a big push in areas of the world like China, Kendell said in an interview with Fox News last year.
Pinterest users "are not there to share things with their friends and family, they are not there to find out what their friends and family are doing. So it's not this community planning tool," he said.

Freedom Fighter

He Called Xi Jinping ‘Xitler’ on Twitter. Now He Faces Prison.

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

BEIJING — From his hometown in northeast China, Kwon Pyong used the internet to mock and criticize the nation’s rulers, including posting a selfie in which he wore a T-shirt that likened Xi Jinping to Hitler.
But Mr. Kwon, an ethnic Korean who studied in America, disappeared into police custody last September, soon after he shared on Twitter a picture of the T-shirt featuring scabrous names for Mr. Xi, including “Xitler.” 

And on Wednesday Mr. Kwon faced trial on a charge of “inciting subversion,” said his two former defense lawyers, who were abruptly dismissed from the case days before the trial.
Mr. Kwon’s fate showed that even crude online posts about China’s rulers can lead to a prison term these days, Liang Xiaojun, one of the dismissed lawyers, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. The Communist Party authorities are especially sensitive about protecting Xi's image, and comparisons with the Nazi dictator seem sure to anger them.

“Before, there were cases of people like Liu Xiaobo tried for subversion for long commentaries and essays, but now even short comments on Weibo and Twitter can be treated as inciting subversion of state power,” Mr. Liang said. 

“That point is a change from before. There are other cases like it, including ones that haven’t come to trial yet.”

Weibo is China’s equivalent of Twitter, a popular platform for short comments shared with followers.
But Mr. Kwon, 28, mostly aired his views on Twitter and Facebook, which are both inaccessible in China, except for people with the knowledge and tools to burrow under a wall of online censorship.
“Let’s work together and topple this invisible wall,” Mr. Kwon said in the Twitter post that showed him in the T-shirt mocking the Chinese dictator. 

Mr. Kwon’s Chinese name is Quan Ping, but online he preferred to use his Korean name, and on Twitter he described himself as a “perpetual student, citizen, dedicated to overturning communism.”
The indictment against Mr. Kwon said the charge was based on 70 or more comments, images and video that he shared on Twitter and his Facebook page, Mr. Liang said. 

The comments and images “slandered and insulted state power and the socialist system,” the prosecutors charged, according to the Human Rights Campaign in China, an advocacy group that has followed his case.
But Mr. Kwon’s lawyers said they did not know which ones were classified as subversive and did not know whether the picture of the T-shirt was one of them because officials denied their requests to see Mr. Kwon and the case files. 

They also disputed the claim that such criticism amounted to subversion.
The two lawyers hired by Mr. Kwon’s parents were excluded from defending him in court days before the trial started, when a judge demanded extra paperwork and then Mr. Kwon’s father said their services were no longer needed.
“A judge from the court told us that we needed to provide a letter of introduction from our local bureau of justice” in Beijing, Zhang Lei, who was Mr. Kwon’s other defense attorney, said by telephone. 

“That’s an impossible request and outside the bounds of the law. It’s an unlawful and unreasonable demand.”
Mr. Kwon embodies a phenomenon that worries the Chinese communists: young people, exposed to foreign ideas, sometimes through study abroad, who feel free to criticize the government, Mr. Liang said.
“He’s from a younger generation that’s absorbed ideas about democracy and freedom,” he said. 

“They have a clearer spirit of opposition.”
In January of last year, Zhang Haitao, an activist in his 40s, was sentenced by a court in far western China to 19 years in prison on charges of “inciting subversion” through his writings on the internet and of illegally providing information abroad.
Mr. Kwon studied aerospace engineering at Iowa State University but worked for the family trade business after finishing his studies in 2014, Mr. Liang said. 

Yanbian, the city where Mr. Kwon lives and stood trial, is a hub for trade between China and North Korea, and South Korean businesses have also invested there, partly because of its ethnic Korean population.
But in his spare time, Mr. Kwon’s thoughts turned to the wider world. 

He often sent messages criticizing the Chinese government’s censorship and political controls and voicing support for dissidents and other banned causes. 

In one of his Twitter posts, he discussed being told to “drink tea,” a popular Chinese euphemism for being questioned by security officials.
“If I have to drink tea again, I won’t be shy and nervous,” he wrote on Twitter in September. 

“I’ll very clearly declare my views, as bright as a banner opposing the Communist Party. That’s my attitude. I won’t seek out trouble, but if it comes to me, I’ll live with it.”
But trouble came to Mr. Kwon that month, after he posted a picture of the provocative T-shirt and then, according to later accounts from overseas human rights groups, told friends that he would wear the T-shirt in a show of protest on Oct. 1, China’s National Day.
On Sept. 30, Mr. Kwon sent a message to friends, “There’s trouble,” and then he disappeared, according to the Human Rights Campaign in China.
His family later learned that he had been taken away by the police. 

Officials had told his parents that Mr. Kwon could expect a prison sentence of one and a half years, as long as he dropped Mr. Liang and Mr. Zhang as his lawyers, Mr. Zhang said. 

Mr. Kwon’s parents initially resisted that demand but on Monday told the lawyers that they were no longer needed.
The court did not give a verdict after the one-day trial, and Mr. Kwon’s former lawyers were unsure when it would announce a decision. 

Officials at the Yanbian Intermediate People’s Court refused to comment on the trial, and Mr. Kwon’s mother, Li Lianhua, told Radio Free Asia that she did not want to say anything.
“The authorities were insistent that he plead guilty,” Mr. Liang said. 

“He’s been under all kinds of pressure.”

"We will walk on international stage." --Taiwan president

Tsai Ing-wen returns from trip to Central America, which included stopovers in the US

The Guardian

President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan has declared her country’s determination to “walk on the international stage” after a trip through the US.
Tsai said her trip to Central America with transit stops in the United States – where she met with Republican lawmakers and visited Twitter’s headquarters – elevated the island’s international profile.
China had called on the US to prevent the visit and uphold the “one China” policy under which Beijing asserts "ownership" of Taiwan. 

China has voiced its fury with President Donald Trump, since he spoke by phone with Tsai after his election win. 

It was the first time a US president had spoken to Taiwan’s leader since the “one China” policy was established in 1979.
While stopping over in the US, Tsai met with Texas Republicans including Senator Ted Cruz and the state governor, Greg Abbott, as well as visiting the headquarters of Twitter in San Francisco.
“Our first objective [of this trip] was to consolidate our state friendships and allow Taiwan to walk on the international stage,” Tsai said at Taiwan’s international airport upon her return.

Tsai Ing-wen waves to supporters ahead of her departure from California bound for Taiwan. 

She said she had bilateral talks with four heads of state in Central America. 

“We also grasped the opportunity during our short transit time in the United States to visit industries and talk with important people in America,” Tsai said.
Tsai’s transit stops were based on longstanding US practice and Tsai’s office had characterised her meetings there as private and unofficial.
China’s foreign ministry said on Saturday that its “one China” principle was the non-negotiable political basis for China-US relations, and urged “relevant parties” in the United States to recognise the sensitivity of the Taiwan issue.
President Trump had earlier suggested he might use the “one China” policy as a bargaining chip with Beijing.
After attacking China repeatedly during the election campaign, President Trump has continued to criticise China in Twitter messages over its currency manipulation, for its military moves in the South China Sea, and for not doing enough to restrain North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes.

Trump Tweets, China Retreats

Beijing has no idea how to handle the president, or his twenty-first-century version of the bully pulpit.
By Gordon G. Chang

Beijing’s diplomats have been remarkably quiet after the election of Donald Trump, even though the president has signaled his administration will pursue policies fundamentally disadvantageous to China.
Chinese leaders, some think, are merely laying in wait, but there are signs they have themselves been ambushed and still do not know how to react to Trump. 

Perhaps Erin Burnett put it best. 

“No one has ever talked to China like this before,” she said on her CNN show last month, in the wake of the president taking a congratulatory phone call from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen. 

“China doesn’t have a strategy to deal with this.”
Chinese leaders once had an extremely successful strategy. 

They let American presidential candidates rail against “China” and then challenge them early in their first months in office, throwing them off balance and setting the tone for the rest of their terms.
George W. Bush, for instance, faced a crisis on April 1 of his first year in the White House when a Chinese jet clipped the wing of a U.S. Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane in international airspace over the South China Sea. 

Beijing then imprisoned 24 aviators for 11 days, successfully exacted what amounted to a public apology and a ransom, and completed the humiliation by stripping the Navy plane of its sensitive electronic gear and requiring it to be chopped into pieces.
Beijing tested his successor by harassing two unarmed Navy reconnaissance vessels, the Impeccable and the Victorious, in the South China and Yellow Seas in a series of dangerous incidents beginning March 2009. 

One of those incidents was so serious—the attempted severing of the towed sonar array from the Impeccable—that it constituted an attack on a U.S. vessel, in other words, an attack on the U.S. itself.
Bush and Obama, pursuing misguided approaches, tried to minimize China’s conduct. 

Both presidents avoided further confrontations with Beijing and throughout their terms looked and acted as if intimidated. 

During their administrations, Beijing continually undermined peace and stability in the region—and did so largely without America imposing costs for clearly unacceptable behavior.
Enter a new type of leader, Donald J. Trump. 

The willful president did not wait for China to challenge him. 

On December 2, he took what is now known as “The Call” from Tsai.
Trump turned the tables on Beijing, striking the Chinese even before the swearing-in. 

His conversation with Taiwan’s president was not some happenstance event, as he later tried to characterize it, but the result of weeks of staff work on both sides.
As both critics and admirers noted, the call undermined more than four decades of settled policy, and President Trump made it clear he knew the significance of what he did. 

“I fully understand the One-China policy,” he told Chris Wallace in an interview aired on Fox News Sunday on December 11, “but I don’t know why we have to be bound by a One-China policy.”
The most remarkable aspect of this extraordinary series of events is China’s reaction or, more precisely, its two apparently uncoordinated reactions. 

First, the Chinese air force on December 10 flew planes completely around Taiwan. 

That was the second time in two weeks China’s aircraft had done so, the first time an apparent warning to Tsai to not make the call to Trump. 

Then last month the Liaoning, China’s only aircraft carrier, and five escorts took a detour on the passage from Qingdao to Hainan to brush by the east coast of Taiwan.
Moreover, many interpret China’s seizure of a U.S. Navy drone last month in international waters in the South China Sea as another response to the Tsai call. 

Trump tweeted about the incident as well, suggesting the Chinese could keep it. 

His startling suggestion is certainly an attempt to divest the Chinese of leverage acquired by grabbing the underwater craft.
The provocative actions of the Chinese military, which has been implementing its own foreign policy in recent years, is balanced out by the curiously restrained response from China’s civilian leaders. Trump has repeatedly slammed them in subsequent tweets, but as the South China Morning Post pointed out Wednesday, “Beijing has refrained from directly criticizing him as an individual, despite his outspoken comments about China.”
China’s leaders, as numerous Chinese commentators have pointed out, is unhappy about the unprecedented barrage directed at them, so why such restraint? 

For one thing, the "leadership", in the words of Liu Weidong of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, “has yet to adapt to Trump’s unorthodox style in dealing with diplomacy.”
Said Liu to the South China Morning Post, “Trump may think he is just making casual comments, but Beijing takes it very seriously, since this disrupts Beijing’s calculations.”
Trump is not acting like any of his predecessors, and while that is often held to be a criticism, it has had one important beneficial effect: unnerving overly confident Chinese officials who have become too accustomed to dealing with American presidents behind closed doors.
Those officials find Trump’s effective use of Twitter utterly confounding. 

After all, China’s scripted leaders are picked by their fellow Communist Party cadres, and all of them stay in power by coercion rather than persuasion.
Take Trump’s soon-to-be counterpart, Xi Jinping. 

Xi has only one social media posting to his credit in his entire career, and that was posted to the account of a Party media outlet, the authoritative PLA Daily. 

Tellingly, Xi has no account of his own on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like service. 

China’s supremo, apart from on-high pronouncements, is not big on direct communication either.
Even though Trump cannot stop communicating his intentions, Xi & Co. remains unprepared for him. For instance, Beijing, as the Financial Times reported, was “shocked” by the appointment of Peter Navarro as head the newly formed National Trade Council.
Chinese leaders had hoped, and almost certainly expected, Trump would follow his predecessors and “tone down his anti-Beijing rhetoric after assuming office.” 

With Navarro, Commerce Secretary pick Wilbur Ross, and U.S. Trade Representative-designate Robert Lighthizer—trade hawks all—Trump has made it clear he is going to take on Beijing as the first order of business. 

Chinese leaders should have seen this coming.
There is one other explanation for Beijing lying so low. 

At the moment, Chinese technocrats are engaged in an all-out war against speculators shorting the renminbi, the Chinese currency.
The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, looks like it has been spending tens of billions of dollars in the past several days supporting the “redback,” which fell 6.95% last year against the dollar in the onshore market. 

Perhaps Beijing is letting Trump alone because they do not want him tweeting about their desperate effort to stabilize the situation. 

He has, as just about everyone knows, complained about their rigging of the Chinese currency.
China is now rigging its currency upwards, not down as Trump has alleged, but in Beijing they undoubtedly do not want to take a chance and get involved in a Twitter war with him over any subject, a conflict they know they cannot possibly win.
The Chinese have just met someone impossible for them to intimidate.

Tweeting Mao's Cultural Revolution in Real-Time

A historical Twitter account made for surreal reading in 2016
By SARAH ZHANG
Vendors unfurl a banner from 1969 depicting Mao Zedong as he "inspects the great army of the Cultural Revolution".

Can we agree on this much? 

Twitter was terrible in 2016. 

Too many tweetstorms, too many Russian troll-bots, too much game theory. 

For the blank slate of 2017, may I suggest you follow the 50th-year anniversary of the Cultural Revolution in real time.
Fifty years ago this past May, Mao Zedong declared the beginning of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and in 2016, someone had the idea to livetweet that tumultuous period on a half-century delay.
@GPCR50 has about 1,500 followers, which is frankly on the low end of modest. 

But I’ve been one of its avid followers because this was an uncanny year to see the events of the Cultural Revolution swirled together with the 2016 election in my feed. 

Violence simmered over at Trump rallies. 

Red Guards attacked their teachers in Beijing. 

Deng Xiaoping made self-criticisms in deference to Mao. 

Newt Gingrich declares “I made a big boo boo” in suggesting Trump did not plan to drain the swamp. 

The surreal past met the surreal present.
Anyways, I don’t want to draw tidy parallels between the Cultural Revolution and America in 2016 because, obviously, so much does not run parallel. 

But in a time when voters have shown casual eagerness to blow up a system that isn’t working for them, at at time when Trump can ask, “What do you have to lose?,” @GPCR50 was a daily reminder by tweet of just how much we have to lose. 

We’ve had relative order and stability for so long. 

Chaos is a foreign country.
I confess to being no expert either here. 

As a kid, most of my awareness of the Cultural Revolution came from stories from my parents, who were born in China around that time. 

And like the fairy tales a parent might tell, these stories had a kind of unlogic; they seemed no more real to me than a fairy tale. 

A man, for example, rides home with a portrait of Chairman Mao tied up to the back of his bike. 

The rope holding the portrait in place just happens to go across Mao’s neck. 

This is a sign of disloyalty. 

He is mobbed and killed.
What the hell? 

Yet @GPCR was a constant stream of surreal-sounding violence. 

Mao directed the Red Guards, which grew out of middle-school students in Beijing, to attack the “Four Olds”—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. 

In effect, this meant the destruction of books, museums, temples, and shrines, as well as the people who stood for them. 

Middle-school students turned on their teachers and killed them.

The man behind @GPCR50 is Jacob Saxton of Southampon, U.K., whom I phoned one recent afternoon to talk about his Twitter creation. 

Saxton is a not a historian—he is a logistics analyst by day—but he has an interest in modern Chinese history and was reading Mao’s Last Revolution last year. 

He noticed the 50 years that passed and no one else was chronicling the period. 

So he decided to. 

The one book soon grew to a stack, and Saxton now plans out tweets month by month in a “sort of slightly shoddy Excel spreadsheet.” 

In August, when the anti-teacher violence was reaching its peak, he had to take a few days off work to catch up on the tweets. 

“It’s a lot more time than I realized at the beginning,” he says.
Some of the tweets can, admittedly, be a bit abstruse if you are not already familiar with the cast of characters. 

But the best tweets capture some small measure of humanity. 

One of Saxton’s favorite stories involves a fruit basket, which he actually didn’t get to tweet in real time because he read about it too late. (A hazard of his tweet-writing process.) 

I’ll let him tell it himself now:
Right at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Mao got rid of Peng Zhen, who was the mayor of Beijing. 

He was quite close to Liu Shaoqi, the president. 

Liu went out on a big foreign trip during the time when the purge of Peng Zhen was happening, and he was so in the dark about this—the way Peng had gone from the mayor of Beijing, this really important guy, to pariah—he came back with a beautiful fruit basket for Peng.
Only on the last leg of the journey did he found out how much things have changed. 

It’s quite a funny image to imagine him trying to hide this fruit basket. 

In tweeting out these events in real time, Saxton has also gotten to experience them in real time. 

“I thought the saddest bit were the way you could see this violence creeping towards people—people who you might read about having died on a certain day in the Cultural Revolution,” he says. 

“But then you look more into it, there are weeks of it gradually ramping up, and the attacks get more physical and their own mental state chipped away.”
When Saxton began the Twitter account, he had no idea that it would be such a tumultuous year for politics in his country, the U.K., let alone the U.S. 

He is wary of drawing close parallels too, but he says it struck him how long it took China’s political elite to realize how bad the Cultural Revolution would get.
It can get worse.
The Cultural Revolution officially ends in 1976. 

For now, Saxon says, he’s committed to tweeting the whole thing.

China's acute Twitter allergy

In bursts of 140 characters or less, President Donald J. Trump has jabbed at Beijing over Taiwan, trade, the South China Sea and North Korea. 

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

President Donald J. Trump demonstrating how he uses Twitter in his office in Trump Tower in New York in 2015. He has jabbed at Beijing over Taiwan, trade, the South China Sea and, most recently, North Korea.

BEIJING — China’s leaders thought they had a solution to the torrent of snark, jibes and condemnation on Twitter: They banned access to it at home. 

Yet China has become the country that President Donald J. Trump seems to enjoy criticizing the most on his open-all-hours Twitter feed.
In bursts of 140 characters or less, he has jabbed at Beijing over Taiwan, trade, the South China Sea and, most recently, North Korea. 

“China has been taking out massive amounts of money & wealth from the U.S. in totally one-sided trade, but won’t help with North Korea. Nice!” Mr. Trump said on Twitter on Monday.
How and when Xi Jinping reads about these broadsides remains a mystery to outsiders.
Translating Mr. Trump’s sarcasm — “Nice!” — could be tricky.
But Chinese officials and the state news media want Mr. Trump to know that their leaders prefer doing diplomacy the old-fashioned way, behind closed doors and muffled in platitudes.
Xinhua, the state news agency, has more or less asked Mr. Trump to shut up.
“An obsession with ‘Twitter foreign policy’ is undesirable,” read the headline of a Xinhua commentary on Tuesday about Mr. Trump’s posts.
“Everyone recognizes the common sense that foreign policy isn’t child’s play, and even less is it like doing business deals,” said the article, published after Mr. Trump’s latest barbed comments on China.
“Twitter shouldn’t become an instrument of foreign policy,” the article said.
Earlier that day, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected Mr. Trump’s accusation that Beijing had coddled North Korea.
But the article acknowledged that it was probably too late to detach Mr. Trump from Twitter.
Mr. Trump’s designated press secretary, Sean Spicer, has indicated that Mr. Trump will keep using the terse, punchy format after he settles in the White House.
“Issuing tweets has become a habit for Mr. Trump,” Xinhua noted.
Mr. Trump, it said, appeared to assume that “issuing hard-line comments and taking up sensitive issues may perhaps add to his chips for negotiating with other countries.”
Xi is most unlikely to joust directly with Mr. Trump on Twitter.
The service has been banned in China since 2009, though residents find ways to poke through the firewall of censorship.
And while Chinese politicians love slogans, they prefer to communicate with foreign leaders through long, tranquilizing disquisitions.
Open sarcasm is rare.
Sad!

Two Chinas Policy

New China Policy: Trump’s Taiwan phone call was long planned

By Anne Gearan, Philip Rucker and Simon Denyer

Friday's telephone call between President Donald Trump and President of Taiwan Tsai Ing-wen signals U.S. New China Policy

Donald Trump’s protocol-breaking telephone call with Taiwan’s leader was an intentionally provocative move that establishes the incoming president as a break with the past, according to interviews with people involved in the planning.
The historic communication — the first between leaders of the United States and Taiwan since 1979 — was the product of months of quiet preparations and deliberations among Trump’s advisers about a new strategy for engagement with Taiwan that began even before he became the Republican presidential nominee, according to people involved in or briefed on the talks.
The call also reflects the views of advisers urging Trump to take a tough opening line with China, said others familiar with the months of discussion about Taiwan and China.
Trump and his advisers have sought to publicly portray the call the president took from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen ­on Friday as a routine congratulatory call.
Trump noted on Twitter that she placed the call.
“He took the call, accepted her congratulations and good wishes and it was precisely that,” Vice President Mike Pence said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
That glosses over the extensive and turbulent history of U.S. relations with Taiwan and the political importance the island and its democracy hold for many Republican foreign policy specialists.
Pro-China critics portrayed the move as the thoughtless blundering of a foreign policy novice, but experts said it was calculated to signal a new, robust approach to relations with China.
China reacted sternly to the Taiwan call, suggesting that it shows Trump’s inexperience.
Trump sent two Twitter messages Sunday that echoed his campaign-stump blasts against China.
“Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea?” he asked.
“I don’t think so!”
The United States does impose a tiny tax on Chinese goods — 2.9 percent for non-farm goods and 2.5 percent for agricultural products.
GOP’s most ardent Taiwan proponents are playing active roles in Trump’s transition team, and others in the conservative foreign policy community see a historic opportunity to reset relations with Taiwan and reposition it as a strategic ally in East Asia.
Several leading members of Trump’s transition team are considered friendly toward Taiwan, including incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus.
Indeed, advisers explicitly warned last month that relations with China were in for a shake-up.
In an article for Foreign Policy magazine titled “Donald Trump’s Peace Through Strength Vision for the Asia-Pacific,” Peter Navarro and Alexander Gray described Taiwan as a “beacon of democracy in Asia” and complained that its treatment by the Obama administration was “egregious.”
The article, flagged to China experts as a significant policy blueprint, described Taiwan as “the most militarily vulnerable U.S. partner anywhere in the world” and called for a comprehensive arms deal to help it defend itself against China.
Friday’s phone call does look like the first sign of a recalibration by a future Trump administration, experts say.
It was planned weeks ahead by staffers and Taiwan specialists on both sides, according to people familiar with the plans.
Immediately after Trump won the Nov. 8 election, his staffers compiled a list of foreign leaders with whom to arrange calls.
“Very early on, Taiwan was on that list,” said Stephen Yates, a national security official during the presidency of George W. Bush and an expert on China and Taiwan.
“Once the call was scheduled, I was told that there was a briefing for President Trump. They knew that there would be reaction and potential blowback.”
Alex Huang, a spokesman for Tsai, told the Reuters news agency, “Of course both sides agreed ahead of time before making contact.”
Tsai’s office said she had told Trump during the phone call that she hoped the United States “would continue to support more opportunities for Taiwan to participate in international issues.”
Tsai will have sympathetic ears in the White House.
Priebus is reported to have visited Taiwan with a Republican delegation in 2011 and in October 2015, meeting Tsai before she was elected president.
Taiwan Foreign Minister David Lee called him a friend of Taiwan and said his appointment as Trump’s chief of staff was “good news” for the island, according to local news media.
Edward J. Feulner, a longtime former president of the Heritage Foundation, has for decades cultivated extensive ties with Taiwan and is serving as an adviser to Trump’s transition team.
At the Republican National Convention in July, Trump’s allies inserted a little-noticed phrase into the party’s platform reaffirming support for six key assurances to Taiwan made by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 — a priority for the Taiwan government.
Also written into the 2016 platform was tougher language about China than had been in the party’s platform in its previous iteration four years ago.
“We salute the people of Taiwan, with whom we share the values of democracy, human rights, a free market economy, and the rule of law,” the platform said, adding that the current documents governing U.S.-Taiwan relations should stand but adding, “China’s behavior has negated the optimistic language of our last platform concerning our future relations with China.”
Yates, who helped write that portion of the platform, said Trump made clear at the time that he wanted to recalibrate relationships around the world and that the U.S. posture toward China was “a personal priority.”
About the same time, Navarro, one of Trump’s top economic and Asia advisers, penned an op-ed saying that the United States must not “dump Taiwan” and needs a comprehensive strategy to bolster what he termed “a beacon of democracy.”
The president-elect’s advisers have said the communication does not signify any formal shift in long-standing U.S. relations with Taiwan, even as they acknowledge that the decision to break with nearly 40 years of U.S. diplomatic practice was a calculated choice.
“Of course all head-of-state calls are well planned,” said Richard Grenell, a former State Department official who has advised the Trump transition effort.
Grenell and others noted that the call came about two weeks after Trump had spoken with Xi Jinping.
“There was no policy discussion, and everyone involved is well aware of the ‘One China’ policy,” Grenell said, referring to the Nixon-era shift that established formal direct ties between Washington and Beijing.
The United States maintains a military relationship with Taiwan, which Beijing considers a province, but closed its embassy there in 1979.
Republican administrations since then have emphasized Taiwan’s democracy and flirted with the idea of a shift in policy, but none have held public discussions with a Taiwanese leader.
“There are a lot of things that previous Republican presidents, and Democratic presidents, would do that Donald Trump won’t do,” Grenell said.
“He’s a man that understands that typical Washington rules are not always best for our foreign policy.”
During the campaign, Trump’s fiery rhetoric against China resonated with his supporters, especially those in the economically beleaguered Rust Belt states where he registered unexpected wins.
Trump accused China of “raping” the United States by stealing trade secrets, manipulating its currency and subsidizing its industries. 
He vowed to institute tough new policies designed to crack down on the Chinese and extract concessions, such as by imposing higher tariffs on goods manufactured there.
By angering the Chinese government with his talk with Tsai, Trump showed his supporters in the United States that he would follow through with his promise to get tough on China, some observers said.
“He campaigned on an ‘America first’ platform,” GOP pollster Frank Luntz said.
“Calls like this may upset the diplomats, but they communicate to Americans that he’s not going to play by the same rules and isn’t just talking differently but will act differently.”
Walter Lohman, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center, said the call with Tsai “was deliberate. It was not an accident. Obviously he made a conscious decision to have the call arranged. She called him, but there was an agreement for it.”
Gordon Chang, an Asia expert and author of “ The Coming Collapse of China ,” said Trump’s tweet Friday night that he had just accepted a call from Tsai was “not credible.”
“This has all the hallmarks of a prearranged phone call,” Chang said.
“It doesn’t make sense that Tsai out of the blue would call Donald Trump. She is not known for taking big leaps into the unknown, and it would be politically embarrassing when it was learned that she called Trump and he would not take her call.”
Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to Trump’s transition team, brushed aside questions about what the call signals about the incoming administration’s priorities and policy on China.
“All he did was receive a phone call,” Conway told reporters Sunday at Trump Tower in New York. “Everybody should just calm down. He’s aware of what our nation’s policy is.”

Per un pugno di renminbi

Facebook could pay heavy price if it censors news to please China

By Sherisse Pham

HONG KONG -- Facebook's latest signal that it's willing to play ball with China? 

It has quietly built a censorship tool that would keep certain posts out of people's news feeds, according to The New York Times.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made no secret of his desire to get the giant social network unblocked in the world's most populous nation.
He has traveled to China repeatedly, meeting with the country's propaganda chief during a visit earlier this year and taking heat on social media for "pandering" to the government by jogging through polluted Beijing streets without a face mask. 

He is even studying Mandarin.
And now his company has apparently developed software that stops posts from appearing in users' news feeds in specific geographic regions, a move specifically aimed at helping the company get into China, The New York Times reported, citing current and former Facebook employees.
A Facebook spokeswoman did not deny the report, saying only that the company has "not made any decision on our approach to China."
"We have long said that we are interested in China, and are spending time understanding and learning more about the country," she said.
The report comes at a sensitive time for Facebook. 

Zuckerberg insists he does not want to play the role of an editor, yet he recently announced plans to help prevent fake news being shared on Facebook just days after playing down the problem.
Analysts say the U.S. tech giant could have a lot to lose by compromising with China, where some other big internet platforms like Twitter and Google are also blocked.
For one thing, censorship alone is unlikely to be enough. 

Facebook would have to give China access to its servers to be allowed in the country, said Qiao Mu, professor of communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University.
"You have a deal with a monster," Qiao said.
Facebook would have to comply with China's tough legal requirements for handing over user information to authorities. 

American businesses have criticized a new Chinese cybersecurity law, warning its requirements for data sharing could expose personal information.
Creating a censorship program to appease China could also undermine the trust of non-Chinese users.
"It has potential to call into question the ethics of the company, call into question whether if you're doing that (in China) ... what are you doing with my content?" said Mark Natkin, managing director at market research firm Marbridge Consulting in Beijing.
By making such a tool available in China, Facebook could face pressure from other governments around the world to implement it elsewhere.
Even if Facebook does enough to satisfy the Chinese government, it would face huge competitive hurdles.
Facebook clones like Renren and Kaixin have already long gone out of fashion China. 

The dominant players now are WeChat and Weibo, both hugely popular social networking sites with hundreds of millions of users.
Facebook, the world's largest social network, would in theory offer Chinese users the possibility of connecting with people all around the globe. 

WeChat and Weibo haven't been able to replicate their success outside of China.
But Chinese internet users who really want to get on Facebook can already do so through a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, which enables them to skirt China's huge censorship apparatus known as the Great Firewall.
"I don't think people even care," Natkin said. 

He summed up the likely response from many Chinese people as, "You came to China, good for you. I'm not going to use you anyway."