Chinazism: China, Desperate to Stop Coronavirus, Turns Neighbor Against Neighbor

The authorities hunt for people from Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, encouraging citizens to inform on others. Even those without symptoms are being ostracized.
By Paul Mozur

A man who arrived from Hubei Province in China crossing the Jiujiang Yangtze River Bridge near a checkpoint in Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province.

GUANGZHOU, China — One person was turned away by hotel after hotel after he showed his ID card. 

Another was expelled by fearful local villagers. 

A third found his most sensitive personal information leaked online after registering with the authorities.
These outcasts are from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, which is at the center of a rapidly spreading viral outbreak that has killed more than 420 people in China and sent fear rippling around the world. 

They are pariahs in China, among the millions unable to go home and feared as potential carriers of the mysterious coronavirus.
All across the country, despite China’s vast surveillance network with its facial recognition systems and high-end cameras that is increasingly used to track its 1.4 billion people, the government has turned to familiar authoritarian techniques — like setting up dragnets and asking neighbors to inform on one another — as it tries to contain the outbreak.
It took the authorities about five days to contact Harmo Tang, a college student studying in Wuhan, after he returned to his hometown, Linhai, in eastern Zhejiang Province. 

Mr. Tang said he had already been under self-imposed isolation when local officials asked for his personal information, including name, address, phone number, identity card number and the date he returned from Wuhan. 

Within days, the information began to spread online, along with a list of others who returned to Linhai from Wuhan.
Local officials offered no explanation but returned a few days later to fasten police tape to his door and hang a sign that warned neighbors that a Wuhan returnee lived there. 

The sign included an informant hotline to call if anyone saw him or his family leave the apartment. 

Mr. Tang said he received about four calls a day from different local government departments.
“In reality there’s not much empathy,” he said. 

“It’s not a caring tone they’re using. It’s a warning tone. I don’t feel very comfortable about it.”
Of course, China has a major incentive to track down potential carriers of the disease. 

The Chinese coronavirus outbreak has put parts of the country under lockdown, brought the world’s second-largest economy to a virtual standstill and erected walls between China and the rest of the world.

A person suspected of having the coronavirus in Wuhan, China, was taken from an apartment last week.

Still, even some government officials called for understanding as concerns about prejudice spread. Experts warned such marginalization of an already vulnerable group could prove counterproductive, further damaging public trust and sending those who should be screened and monitored deeper underground.
“We are paying attention to this issue,” Ma Guoqiang, the Chinese Communist Party secretary of Wuhan, said at a news conference there last Tuesday.
“I believe that some people may label Hubei people or report them, but I also think most people will treat Hubei people with a good heart.”
While networks of volunteers and Christian groups have been vocal about offering help, many local leaders have focused efforts on finding and isolating people from Hubei. 

On big screens and billboards, propaganda videos and posters warn people to stay inside, wear masks and wash hands.
In the northern province of Hebei, one county offered bounties of 1,000 yuan, or about $140, for each Wuhan person reported by residents. 

Images online showed towns digging up roads or deputizing men to block outsiders. 

Some apartment-building residents barricaded the doors of their towers with China’s ubiquitous ride-share bikes.
In the eastern province of Jiangsu, quarantine turned to imprisonment after authorities used metal poles to barricade shut the door of a family recently returned from Wuhan. 

To get food, the family relied on neighbors who lowered provisions with a rope down to their back balcony, according to a local news report.
Scared for the safety of his children as conditions at home worsened, Andy Li, a tech worker from Wuhan traveling with his family in Beijing, rented a car and began driving south to Guangdong, an effort to find refuge with relatives there. 

In Nanjing, he was turned away from one hotel before getting a room at a luxury hotel.
There he set up a self-imposed family quarantine for four days, until local authorities ordered all people from Wuhan to move to a hotel next to the city’s central rail station. 

Mr. Li said the quarantine hotel did not seem to be doing a good job isolating people. 

Food delivery workers came and went, while gaps in the doors and walls allowed drafts in.
“They’re only working to separate Wuhan people from Nanjing people,” Mr. Li said. 

“They don’t care at all if Wuhan people infect each other.”
To help, he stuffed towels and tissues under the door to block the drafts.
“I’m not complaining about the government," Mr. Li said. 

“There will always be loopholes in policy. But in a selfish way I’m just really worried about my children.”

Delivering packages protected by a mask and special suit in Wuhan.

Across the country, the response from local authorities often resembles the mass mobilizations of the Mao era rather than the technocratic, data-driven wizardry depicted in propaganda about China’s emerging surveillance state. 

They have also turned to techniques Beijing used to fight the outbreak of SARS, another deadly disease, in 2002 and 2003, when China was much less technologically sophisticated.
Checkpoints to screen people for fevers have popped up at tollbooths, at the front gates of apartment complexes and in hotels, grocery stores and train stations. 

Often those wielding the thermometer guns don’t hold them close enough to a person’s forehead, generating unusually low temperature readings. 

Such checks were worthless, for instance, against one man in the western province of Qinghai, whom police are investigating on suspicion that he covered up his symptoms to travel.
Authorities have used computerized systems that track ID cards — which must be used to take most long-distance transport and stay in hotels — to round up people from Wuhan. 

Yet one article about the ID system in The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party, included a plea to all passengers on affected flights and trains to report themselves.
The campaigns have turned life upside down in unexpected ways. 

Jia Yuting, a 21-year-old student in Wuhan, had already been back in her hometown in central China for 18 days — longer than the 14-day quarantine period — when she got news her grandfather was sick in a nearby village. 

During a visit to see him, she followed local instructions broadcast on speakers in the village and registered her personal details with the local Communist Party Committee.
When a middle-school teacher randomly reached out to her on the messaging app WeChat to inquire about her health, she realized her data had been leaked online and was spreading on a list. 

Later, she received a threatening phone call from a man who lived in her home city.

Checkpoints where people’s temperatures are checked, though sometimes not carefully, have proliferated.

“Why did you come back Wuhan? You should have stayed there. You Wuhan dog!” she recalled him saying.
Authorities offered her no explanation for how it happened, and insisted such leaks did not disrupt her regular life. 

Three days after her visit to the village, her grandfather died. 

Local officials there immediately told her family that she would not be allowed to return to the village to pay her final respects at a funeral that was taking place more than three weeks after she had returned from Wuhan.
“I feel that the villagers are ignorant and the government isn’t helping; instead it’s leaking the information everywhere without telling them that I don’t have any symptoms,” she said, adding that she felt guilty she could not be there to comfort her grandmother.
“I was very close to my grandfather. I think it’s not humane — it’s cruel.”

Chinazism

Prague security services say China poses major threat as Czech billionaire's loan firm launches propaganda campaign to burnish Beijing’s image
By Robert Tait

  Liberal Prague mayor Zdeněk Hřib, who refused to abide by Beijing’s One China policy, which recognises China’s claim to Taiwan. 

The Czech Republic’s richest man is at the centre of a foreign influence campaign by the Chinese government after one of his businesses financed an attempt to boost China’s image in the central European country.
In a development that has taken even seasoned sinologists aback, Home Credit – a domestic loans company owned by Petr Kellner that has lent an estimated £10bn to Chinese consumers – paid a PR firm to place articles in the local media giving a more positive picture of a country widely associated with political repression and human rights abuses.
Home Credit also funded a newly formed thinktank – headed by a translator for the Czech Republic’s pro-Chinese president, Miloš Zeman – to counteract the more sceptical line taken by a longer-established China-watching body, Sinopsis, linked with Prague’s Charles University, one of Europe’s oldest seats of learning.
Experts say the moves, revealed in an investigation by the Czech news site Aktualne, bear the hallmarks of a foreign influence campaign by China that highlights its aggressive attempts to gain access to former communist central and eastern European countries through its ambitious “belt and road” initiative, under which it offers to fund infrastructure projects in those states.
According to analysts, the Czech Republic has been more open to Chinese influence than most other European countries, a situation that has coincided with the burgeoning commercial relationship between China and Kellner’s sprawling PPF group, which boasts an estimated £40bn in assets, including Home Credit.
PPF began accumulating its vast wealth in the mass privatisation of state assets that followed the fall of communism in the former Czechoslovakia in 1989.
Home Credit is currying favour with the Chinese regime in an effort to protect its interests after a series of political disputes between China and the Czechs that cooled previously warm bilateral relations.
Home Credit has acknowledged paying the PR firm, C&B Reputation Management, and backing Sinoskop, the thinktank, to try to bring “greater balance” to debate about China.
“Discussion of China in the Czech Republic had become one-sided, relentlessly negative and poorly informed,” Home Credit’s spokesman, Milan Tomanek, told the Observer.
Martin Hala, a lecturer at Charles University’s Sinology department and director of Sinopsis, said: “The bottom line is that Home Credit hired this company not to defend their own corporate interests per se, but rather to promote the narrative coming from the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese communist party.
“The first goal is to normalise China, presenting it not as a dictatorship but as a country, like any other, that is opening up to reforms. I don’t think that’s an accurate picture.” 
The revelations coincide with a recent warning by the Czech intelligence service, BIS, that Chinese influence campaigns pose a greater threat to national security than meddling by the Russian government of Vladimir Putin.
“The BIS considers primarily the increase in the activities of Chinese intelligence officers as the fundamental security problem,” the report says.
“These activities can be clearly assessed as searching for and contacting potential cooperators and agents among Czech citizens.”
Czech ties with Beijing grew closer after 2014 when the regime granted Home Credit a nationwide licence to offer domestic loans, the first foreign company to be given the right.
This would only have happened on the understanding that Home Credit would work to ensure favourable coverage of China in the Czech media and political discourse. 
It heralded several trips to China by Zeman, who is close to Kellner, and culminated in a state visit in 2016 by the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping to Prague.
The rapprochement – which also saw the purchase of a Czech brewery, television station and Slavia Prague football club by a Chinese energy company, CEFC – reversed the policy adopted by the late Václav Havel, the Czech Republic’s first post-communist president who had championed human rights, and the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet.
But relations began to sour last year when the Czech government of prime minister Andrej Babiš, acting on advice from the country’s cybersecurity agency, banned Huawei phones from ministerial buildings, prompting Chinese protests and a rebuke from Zeman, who accused the security services of “dirty tricks”.
They took a further turn for the worse when Prague’s liberal mayor, Zdeněk Hřib, refused to abide by the One China policy – recognising China’s territorial claim to Taiwan – accepted by his predecessor as part of a twinning arrangement between the Czech capital and Beijing.
In retaliation, China scrapped the agreement and cancelled a planned tour of the country by the Prague Philharmonia.
Amid the rows, criticism began to appear in Chinese state media of Home Credit’s lending practices, accompanied by several failures in court to fully recover unpaid debts.
That has fuelled speculation that the company began to fear for the future of its interests in China.
When Sinopsis reported the Chinese media criticism on its website, it received a “cease and desist” legal warning from Home Credit which threatened to sue unless in the absence of an apology.
The company accuses Sinopsis of failing to correct “misleading or incorrect statements”.
Home Credit had earlier abandoned a £50,000 sponsorship deal with Charles University – which foreswore each institution from damaging the other’s good name – after a backlash from academics, who feared it would muzzle any criticism of China.
Now critics see a new threat, from PPF’s recent £1.62bn purchase from AT&T of Central European Media Enterprises (CME), a company which includes the Czech Republic’s most-watched commercial TV station, Nova, as well as channels in neighbouring countries.
PPF has dismissed warnings about potential political interference in the station’s output but some are sceptical.
“PPF negotiated this deal saying that they would never meddle in politics,” said Petr Kutilek, a Czech political analyst and human rights activist.
“But from the Home Credit affair, you actually see them meddling in politics.”

'Unprecedented atrocity of the century': Uighur activist urges Australia to take tougher stance against China

Rushan Abbas says countries doing business with China are enabling its mass detention of 3 million people, including her sister
By Sarah Martin

Uighur activist Rushan Abbas: China is using its economic power to silence world criticism of its detention of 3 million Muslims.

A leading Uighur activist, Rushan Abbas, has urged Australian MPs to take a stronger stance against the Chinese regime, while backing realist comparisons between the state’s authoritarianism and Nazi Germany.
Abbas, who met with MPs in Canberra on Thursday and held a roundtable at the US Embassy on the plight of the Uighur Muslim minority in western China’s East Turkestan colony, said that “modern day” concentration camps holding as many as 3 million Uighurs were a case of “history repeating itself”.
The Liberal MP Andrew Hastie sparked a controversy when he penned an opinion piece in the Nine newspapers in August, comparing the west’s complacency about China to France’s response to the rise of authoritarian Germany in the lead up to the second world war.
Abbas, the executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs, said she strongly backed the comparison, saying the first German concentration camps were built in 1933 while the country was still trading with other democratic countries. 

The first Uighur camp was built in 2014, Abbas said.
“Most of the economically independent or rich countries, they continued to do business with Germany, they enabled Germany’s economy to murder more people,” Abbas said.
“Great Britain – they continued to do business with Nazi Germany at that time – what happened? 

They were then faced with the bombers flying over London. 

That’s exactly the same thing happening right now. 

Continuing to do business with China is enabling China’s economy to be the threat to the world community … its democracy and values.
“Continuing to do business with China is enabling China to murder my people.”
Abbas, whose sister and aunt were both abducted and detained in camps a week after she first went public as an advocate in the US in late 2018, said Uighurs were being detained because “our religion, our culture, our language is being targeted as a mental ideological disease”.
“[It is] not just the 3 million people in the concentration camps facing mental and physical torture, forced intense indoctrinations, forced medications, food and sleep deprivation, [but] even the people at large … living outside, are facing a complete surveillance police state.”
Abbas said she had not heard from her sister since she was abducted, saying: “I don’t even know if my sister is still alive.”
There are 17 Australian residents who are believed to be under house arrest, in prison or detained in the secretive “re-education” camps, Guardian Australia revealed in February.
Labelling the mass detention of Uighurs as the “unprecedented atrocity of the century”, Abbas hit out at western countries, including Australia, for being too timid in the face of China’s authoritarianism.
“[This] is the largest incarceration of one ethnic group since the Holocaust, since world war two – why we are not getting much attention in the international media?“It’s because China is using its economy and the market for silencing the world population.
“China has become a power able to strong-arm the world … and with all that they are actually successfully silencing the world communities,” she said.
She urged Australia to do more to raise human rights concerns in its dealings with China, saying the west could use its combined economic might to pressure China. 

She also called for the international community not to “reward” China with the hosting rights for the Winter Olympics in 2022 and the FIFA World Cup in 2021.
“Freedom is not free – any kind of doing the right thing comes with a price,” Abbas said.
“Yes, there might be some economic burden, but when it comes down to what is right, and when it comes down to the basic rights of human beings that is endangered right now … we shouldn’t be only shortsighted to see the economy today, or next year or next five years.”
She also called for the establishment of a Uighur friendship group and for Australia to advance its own version of the US Magnitsky Act, which would impose sanctions on individuals who commit gross human rights abuses.
The foreign minister, Marise Payne, has tasked parliament’s joint standing committee on foreign affairs, defence and trade to conduct an inquiry into Australia’s legal standing in response to international human rights abuses.
Such legislation has already gained support from the Labor senator Kimberley Kitching and the Liberal senator James Paterson.

Australia's foreign minister Marise Payne labels China's treatment of Uighurs 'disturbing'

Last month, Payne labelled reports of China’s mass internment of Uighurs as “disturbing” and called on China to end arbitrary detention, following leaked internal Chinese government documents which included directives from Chinese dictator Xi Jinping to “show absolutely no mercy” in the “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism”.
Abbas also called on the Australian government to do more to prevent the “harassment and surveillance” of the 3,000-strong Uighur community in Australia.
“They are feeling threatened for their own safety and for their relatives back home,” Abbas said.
On the call to strip China of the Olympic Games hosting rights, Abbas also pointed to the historical comparison of Berlin’s hosting of the 1936 Olympic Games, which at the time faced calls for a boycott, and was used by the Nazi regime as a platform for rampant nationalist propaganda.
“The Olympic Games is a celebration of the differences and unity in the world, bringing together all different regions, different nations … a country holding 3 million innocent people because of their race and religion is the last country qualified to host such a game.”

Chinazism

Eye blinded covering Hong Kong protests, Indonesian reporter seeks justice

By Jessie Pang


HONG KONG -- Hit by a projectile fired by Hong Kong police while covering an anti-government protest nearly two months ago, Indonesian journalist Veby Mega Indah was blinded in one eye, but that has not blotted out the traumatic flashbacks filling her mind.
Working as an associate editor for Suara, a newspaper popular with Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong, Indah, 39, had been live-streaming in the Bahasa Indonesia language on the frontlines of demonstrations.
At the time of the shooting Indah was reporting on the street protests alongside other journalists from the vantage point of a footbridge. 

She believes she was hit by a rubber bullet. 

Whatever the projectile was, it has caused the permanent loss of sight in her right eye.
“I felt like I could not bear it anymore. I thought it’s going to be my end,” she told Reuters.
Indah recalled hearing fellow journalists behind her shout: “We are journalists, stop shooting at us!”
The Chinese-ruled city has been roiled by more than six months of sometimes violent protests as activists call for greater democracy and an independent inquiry into police actions, among other demands.
Police, who have at times fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse demonstrators, say they have shown restraint in the face of escalating violence.
Indah and her legal representative told Reuters they have filed a legal request asking the police to name the officer involved in the incident so they can pursue a civil case, but that they have had no meaningful response so far.
Hong Kong police did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
While Indah still feels pain, she is adjusting to life with one eye, although she is still haunted by the experience.
“When I was in the hospital, I keep waking up because some images (keep) flashing back ... the projectile keeps coming back and coming back to my right eye,” she said, while holding back tears.
She has been unable to return to work.

Chinazism

Photograph of Hong Kong policewoman sitting on 14-year-old who was resisting arrest goes viral

• Schoolgirl was among group of students who police say blocked road and vandalised bus in To Kwa Wan.
• Picture sparks hundreds of critical comments online as senior officer says officer used ‘minimum force’.

By Clifford Lo

An online photo of a masked policewoman in plain clothes sitting on a 14-year-old schoolgirl has gone viral. 

A photograph of a masked policewoman in plain clothes sitting on a 14-year-old schoolgirl after the teenager was pinned to the ground and subdued at a busy road junction in Hong Kong on Wednesday has gone viral, sparking criticism online.
The girl, who was in school uniform, was one of four secondary students who were arrested at the junction of Ma Tau Wai Road and Tam Kung Road, in To Kwa Wan, at about 7.15am.
Police said the girl had resisted arrest, and a man had tried to help her to escape.
According to police, the schoolgirl and three schoolboys aged 15 were among a group who set up barricades with traffic cones and sprayed paint on a passing bus, before a team of masked detectives in plain clothes swooped in to stop them.
Officers seized a can of spray paint, a retractable baton, face masks and gloves from the suspects, who are students at nearby two secondary schools.
Hung Hom divisional commander Superintendent Alan Chung said the four suspects had set up roadblocks and vandalised the bus on the way to school.

Chung said detectives also arrested a 47-year-old man, who was said to have pushed a masked policewoman and tried to assault her in an attempt to help the schoolgirl escape.
A photograph of the incident drew hundreds of critical comments on the internet.
Questioning why it was necessary to sit on top of the girl, one user called it an “inhuman act”, while another said police had become more violent.
When asked whether police had used excessive force, Chung said: “The schoolgirl put up a struggle in the incident, and the 47-year-old suspect tried to attack our female colleague in an attempt to help the female student to escape.
“The female student was quickly handcuffed and then no one continued to sit on her. So this is the minimum use of force.”
Following the arrests, some of the officers were seen holding batons to guard the suspects at the scene while waiting for the arrival of police vehicles.
As some passers-by took photographs of police, one officer was alleged to have said: “Stop taking photographs. Filming what? You don’t take photos while cockroaches set up road barriers.” Cockroaches is a common slur used by some officers against anti-government protesters.

Police arrested the four students on suspicion of possession of an offensive weapon, disorderly behaviour in a public place, and criminal damage. 

The 47-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of assault and obstructing police.
A police source said all three boys were from Tang King Po School on Tin Kwong Road and the female pupil from a nearby girls’ school.
Tang King Po School confirmed some of its pupils had been arrested.
The boys’ school said parents, the headmaster and teachers had gone to a police station to find out the details of the case, and that legal assistance would be offered.
“As the incident is being investigated, it is inappropriate to give further comment,” the school said in a statement.
The five suspects were being held overnight for questioning and none had been charged.

Chinazism

Yang Hengjun: Australia criticises China for detainment of 'democracy peddler'
BBC News
Yang Hengjun, a popular blogger and former Chinese diplomat, was detained in January.

Australia says the treatment endured by one of its citizens in criminal detention in China is "unacceptable".
Chinese-Australian writer Dr Yang Hengjun has been held in Beijing since January.

He has been accused of espionage -- charges denied by him and the Australian government.
He now faces daily interrogations while being shackled, and has been increasingly isolated, Canberra said.
Australia has consistently lobbied Chinese authorities for his release.
But China's foreign ministry has told Australia to not interfere in the case, and to respect the nation's "judicial sovereignty".
On Monday, Foreign Minister Marise Payne said she was "very concerned" about his condition, which was reported in a recent consulate visit.
Mr Yang, a former Chinese diplomat, has been allowed one visit from Australian officials per month.
But he has been barred from contact with his lawyers and his family for close to 11 months and has not been given any of their letters.
His health has deteriorated in recent months. 

China formally charged him in August.
Mr Yang, a scholar and novelist based in New York, was detained when he travelled to China in January with his wife Yuan Ruijuan and her child.
Prior to the arrest he had maintained an active presence on Chinese social media.
Nicknamed "the democracy peddler", he maintained a blog on the country's current affairs and international relations. 

However, he had not been directly critical of Chinese authorities in recent years.
Beijing has held him for alleged "involvement in criminal activities endangering China's national security". 

Australia has called for clarification of the charges.
Australia has also repeatedly requested that he receive "basic standards of justice, procedural fairness and humane treatment" during his detention.
His lawyers say his treatment has got worse as Chinese authorities attempt to extract a confession from him. 

His case must be brought before a court by March.
Canberra's rebuke comes as tensions remain heightened with Beijing.
Australia's political class was rocked last week by allegations of Chinese espionage and interference in domestic issues. 

Chinazism

It has been a bad week for Beijing, with new support for pro-democracy protesters and detailed evidence of the repression in the north-western colony

The Guardian

Beijing was never going to welcome the news that the US had passed a law backing pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. 

But its anger today at Donald Trump’s signing of a bill it condemns as “full of prejudice and arrogance” perhaps had extra bite. 

This was its third blow in a week. 

On Monday, leaders woke up to a pro-democracy landslide in Hong Kong’s local elections, and the publication of leaked documents exposing the workings of concentration camps in East Turkestan, where at least a million Uighurs and other Muslims are detained.
China’s bullishness has already been challenged by the trade war and slowing economic growth, now at a 27-year low. 

President Trump has previously made it clear that he regards Hong Kong’s protesters as leverage, and has shown he does not want this law to hinder a trade deal that both sides need and appear to be close to agreeing. 

China is hoping he will not implement the law, which enables sanctions on individuals and the revocation of the region’s special trade status if annual reviews find that it has not retained sufficient autonomy.
The passage of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act may prove to be most important in embodying the striking shift in US attitudes towards China. 

The shift has taken place across the political spectrum and it is not primarily about what has changed in America, but what has changed in China: its ever-increasing authoritarianism under Xi Jinping.

Western engagement with China rested largely on a blithe and now utterly discredited assumption that economic liberalisation would bring political freedoms. 

The bilateral relationship is responding to the change in China’s relationship with its own people. 

The tightened grip has been seen most clearly on its periphery, in East Turkestan and Hong Kong, albeit by very different means and to very different degrees.
The erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy has been clearer precisely because it still enjoys freedoms and rights denied to people on the mainland, who do not get to deliver a verdict on their leaders. 

Though the district council elections are usually low stakes affairs, they had effectively become a referendum on the city’s political future. 

Communist authorities have believed that a “silent majority” would come out to reject the protests by voting for pro-Beijing candidates. 

The silent majority duly showed up – with turnout soaring in the biggest electoral exercise the city has seen – but overwhelmingly backed the other side. 

Pro-democracy candidates took 392 seats (to 60) and seized control of 17 out of 18 district councils. 

The message was clear. 

Hong Kong people embrace peaceful democratic means when they are available. 

And they are on the side of the protesters.Extraordinary levels of control and surveillance make it far harder to determine what is happening in East Turkestan, despite dogged researchers and horrifying accounts of abuse and torture from former camp inmates and their families. 

Now documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with the Guardian and other media partners have laid bare their workings.

Authorities initally denied the camps and now portray them as "vocational training centres". 

The internal papers tell another story: “Never allow escapes.”
These two stories are connected by more than the wrath they have roused in Beijing. 

Despite the gulf between the cultures and experiences of the regions, people in Hong Kong increasingly cite the north-western colony as a kind of warning, seeing East Turkestan as at the far end of a slope down which they will slide unless they take a stand now.
In recent years, China’s economic might has silenced many critics and muted others. 

Though the new US law and renewed protests over the treatment of Muslim minorities in the wake of the leaked files suggest things may be evolving, many will decide it is too costly to care. 

After this week, however, they can no longer say they did not know.

Chinazism

In China, every day is Kristallnacht
By Fred Hiatt

In China, every day is Kristallnacht.
Eighty-one years ago this week, in what is also known as the “Night of Broken Glass,” hundreds of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries in Nazi Germany were damaged or destroyed, along with thousands of Jewish-owned businesses.
It was in a sense the starting gun for the genocide that culminated in the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka.

In western China, the demolition of mosques and bulldozing of cemeteries is a continuing, relentless process.
Before                                                                      After: Dome removed
The dome of a Uighur mosque in Artush, East Turkestan, was removed in 2018.
(Satellite images via Google Earth)

In a cultural genocide with few parallels since World War II, thousands of Muslim religious sites have been destroyed. 

At least 1 million Muslims have been confined to concentration camps, where aging imams are shackled and young men are forced to renounce their faith. 

Muslims not locked away are forced to eat during the fasting month of Ramadan, forced to drink and smoke in violation of their faith, barred from praying or studying the Koran or making the pilgrimage to Mecca.
And — in the most astonishing feature of this crime against humanity — China has managed to stifle, through 21st century repression and age-old thuggery, virtually any reporting from the crime scene.
Which makes all the more significant the publication last week of a heartrending compendium of evidence: “Demolishing Faith: The Destruction and Desecration of Uyghur Mosques and Shrines,” by Bahram K. Sintash.

Before                                                                      After: Cemetery demolished
The site of Sultanim cemetery in Hotan, East Turkestan, in December, 2018 and March 2019.
(Satellite images via Google Earth)

Sintash, 37, lives in the United States but grew up in what is now, he says, “a police surveillance state unlike any the world has ever known.” 

Sintash knows: Chinese police took his father into custody in February 2018, and Sintash has not heard from him since.
Unable to help his father — who, if he is still alive, turned 69 last month — Barham has channeled his anguish into documenting the destruction of the Uighur heritage.
Uighurs — Barham, his father and millions of other Chinese citizens — are an ethnically Turkic and religiously Muslim people. 

For decades, they found a place in Communist China. 

In fact, the Chinese Communist Party vetted imams, approved their sermons and authorized the study of Uighur culture.

Before                                                                     After: Mosque destroyed
A mosque in Aksu was replaced by a parking lot in 2017.
(Satellite images via Google Earth)

But in the increasingly intolerant rule of Xi Jinping, nothing that competes with party loyalty can be tolerated. 

Previously vetted clerics, even octogenarians, receive 20-year sentences. 

Anything that looks too “Islamic” — even a dome atop a department store — is flattened.
Based on satellite imagery and interviews with recent exiles — escapees might be an apter term — Sintash estimates that 10,000 to 15,000 religious sites have been destroyed, he told a conference at the National Endowment for Democracy last week.
Many of these are village mosques, too small to stand out in Google satellite imagery, and no one on the ground will send pictures, because to do so would guarantee confinement in the camps. 

But Sintash has documented the destruction of more than 150 larger mosques in before-and-after, shrine-to-parking-lot photographs. 

In big cities, one mosque may be spared, for tourism or propaganda purposes, but even that one will have its dome and minarets removed, its religious inscriptions displaced by party banners.
Even starker are the images of cemeteries, such as the centuries-old Sultanim burial ground in Hotan, replaced by what look like giant fields of mud.
“My father and my grandfather were also buried in this cemetery,” one exiled Uighur scholar told Sintash. 

“The cemetery was the most important holy place for millions of people to go and visit in Hotan every year.”
Workers in the world of human rights tend to be highly reticent when it comes to Nazi analogies. 

The Holocaust was a unique event.
Yet at the unveiling of the report last week, the Holocaust kept pushing itself into the conversation as the only adequate point of comparison. 

Omer Kanat, director and co-founder of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, noted the Kristallnacht anniversary.
Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, likened the brave reporters of Radio Free Asia to Jan Karski, the Pole who tried to alert the West to Nazi atrocities. 

Those RFA reporters are living in exile, since China does not let them in, but dozens of their family members in western China have been imprisoned in retribution for RFA’s groundbreaking journalism on this cultural genocide.

Before                                                                     After: Mosque demolished
The site of the Grand Mosque in Wusu,  East Turkestan, in 2017 and 2019.
(Satellite images via Google Earth)

And what is the impact of such destruction of sacred spaces?
Rahile Dawut is a respected scholar who in 2017 was preparing to travel to Beijing from her home in Urumqi when she was taken away. 

Years before she disappeared, she said, “If one were to remove these . . . shrines, the Uighur people would lose contact with earth. They would no longer have a personal, cultural and spiritual history. After a few years we would not have a memory of why we live here or where we belong.”
Sintash himself says he fears this is China’s “final solution” to destroy the Uighur people.
“I don’t know if my father died or is alive right now,” he says. 

“But I can see the mosque where we prayed is gone.”

Chinazism

China Sharpens Hacking to Hound Its Minorities, Far and Wide
By Nicole Perlroth, Kate Conger and Paul Mozur

Uighur teenagers on their phones in Kashgar in China’s East Turkestan colony. Chinese hackers have secretly monitored the cellphones of Uighurs and Tibetans around the globe.

SAN FRANCISCO — China’s state-sponsored hackers have drastically changed how they operate over the last three years, substituting selectivity for what had been a scattershot approach to their targets and showing a new determination by Beijing to push its surveillance state beyond its borders.
The government has poured considerable resources into the change, which is part of a reorganization of the national People’s Liberation Army that Xi Jinping initiated in 2016, security researchers and intelligence officials said.
China’s hackers have since built up a new arsenal of techniques, such as elaborate hacks of iPhone and Android software, pushing them beyond email attacks and the other, more basic tactics that they had previously employed.
The primary targets for these more sophisticated attacks: China’s ethnic minorities and their diaspora in other countries, the researchers said. 

In several instances, hackers targeted the cellphones of a minority known as Uighurs, whose home region, East Turkestan, has been the site of a vast build-out of surveillance tech in recent years.
“The Chinese use their best tools against their own people first because that is who they’re most afraid of,” said James A. Lewis, a former United States government official who writes on cybersecurity and espionage for the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington. 

“Then they turn those tools on foreign targets.”
China’s willingness to extend the reach of its surveillance and censorship was on display after an executive for the National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets tweeted support for protesters in Hong Kong this month. 

The response from China was swift, threatening a range of business relationships the N.B.A. had forged in the country.
In August, Facebook and Twitter said they had taken down a large network of Chinese bots that was spreading disinformation around the protests. 

And in recent weeks, a security firm traced a monthslong attack on Hong Kong media companies to Chinese hackers. 

Security experts say Chinese hackers are very likely targeting protesters’ phones, but they have yet to publish any evidence.

A security checkpoint with facial recognition technology in Hotan in East Turkestan.

Security researchers said the improved abilities of the Chinese hackers had put them on a par with elite Russian cyberunits. 

And the attacks on cellphones of Uighurs offered a rare glimpse of how some of China’s most advanced hacking tools are now being used to silence or punish critics.
Google researchers who tracked the attacks against iPhones said details about the software flaws that the hackers had preyed on would have been worth tens of millions of dollars on black market sites where information about software vulnerabilities is sold.
On the streets in East Turkestan, huge numbers of high-end surveillance cameras run facial recognition software to identify and track people. 

Specially designed apps have been used to screen Uighurs’ phones, monitor their communications and register their whereabouts.
Gaining access to the phones of Uighurs who have fled China — a diaspora that has grown as many have been locked away at home — would be a logical extension of those total surveillance efforts. Such communities in other countries have long been a concern to Beijing, and many in East Turkestan have been sent to camps because relatives traveled or live abroad.
The Chinese police have also made less sophisticated efforts to control Uighurs who have fled, using the chat app WeChat to entice them to return home or to threaten their families.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment. 

Security researchers recently discovered that the Chinese used National Security Agency hacking tools after apparently discovering an N.S.A. cyberattack on their own systems. 

And several weeks ago, a Chinese security firm, Qianxin, published an analysis tying the Central Intelligence Agency to a hack of China’s aviation industry.

Xi Jinping visiting President Barack Obama in 2015. Their agreement to halt certain cyberoperations gave China time to hone its abilities.

Breaking into iPhones has long been considered the Holy Grail of cyberespionage. 

“If you can get inside an iPhone, you have yourself a spy phone,” said John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at FireEye, a cybersecurity firm.
The F.B.I. couldn’t do it without help during a showdown with Apple in 2016. 

The bureau paid more than $1 million to an anonymous third party to hack an iPhone used by a gunman involved in the killing of 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif.
Google researchers said they had discovered that iPhone vulnerabilities were being exploited to infect visitors to a set of websites. 

Although Google did not release the names of the targets, Apple said they had been found on about a dozen websites focused on Uighurs.
“You can hit a high school student from Japan who is visiting the site to write a research report, but you are also going to hit Uighurs who have family members back in China and are supporting the cause,” said Steven Adair, the president and founder of the security firm Volexity in Virginia.
The technology news site TechCrunch first reported the Uighur connection. 

A software update from Apple fixed the flaw.
In recent weeks, security researchers at Volexity uncovered Chinese hacking campaigns that exploited vulnerabilities in Google’s Android software as well. 

Volexity found that several websites that focused on Uighur issues had been infected with Android malware. 

It traced the attacks to two Chinese hacking groups.
Because the hacks targeted Android and iPhone users — even though Uighurs in East Turkestan don’t commonly use iPhones — Mr. Adair said he believed that they had been aimed in part at Uighurs living abroad.

An analyst at FireEye. “If you can get inside an iPhone, you have yourself a spy phone,” said John Hultquist, the company’s director of intelligence analysis.

“China is expanding their digital surveillance outside their borders,” he said. 

“It seems like it really is going after the diaspora.”
Another group of researchers, at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, recently uncovered an overlapping effort, using some of the same code discovered by Google and Volexity. 

It attacked the iPhones and Android phones of Tibetans until as recently as May.
Using WhatsApp messages, Chinese hackers posing as New York Times reporters and representatives of Amnesty International and other organizations targeted the private office of the Dalai Lama, members of the Tibetan Parliament and Tibetan nongovernmental organizations, among others.
Lobsang Gyatso, the secretary of TibCERT, an organization that works with Tibetan organizations on cybersecurity threats, said in an interview that the recent attacks were a notable escalation from previous Chinese surveillance attempts.
For a decade, Chinese hackers blasted Tibetans with emails containing malicious attachments, Mr. Lobsang said. 

If they hacked one person’s computer, they hit everyone in the victim’s address books, casting as wide a net as possible. 

But in the last three years, Mr. Lobsang said, there has been a big shift.
“The recent targeting was something we haven’t seen in the community before,” he said. 

“It was a huge shift in resources. They were targeting mobile phones, and there was a lot more reconnaissance involved. They had private phone numbers of individuals, even those that were not online. They knew who they were, where their offices were located, what they did.”
Adam Meyers, the vice president of intelligence at CrowdStrike, said these operations were notably more sophisticated than five years ago, when security firms discovered that Chinese hackers were targeting the phones of Hong Kong protesters in the so-called Umbrella Revolution.

The attacks on iPhones, which Uighurs in East Turkestan don’t typically use, suggested that Uighurs abroad were among the targets, said Steven Adair, president of Volexity.

At the time, Chinese hackers could break only into phones that had been “jailbroken,” or altered in some way to allow the installation of apps not vetted by Apple’s official store. 

The recent attacks against the Uighurs broke into up-to-date iPhones without tipping off the owner.
“In terms of how the Chinese rank threats, the highest threats are domestic,” Mr. Lewis said. 

“The No. 1 threat, as the Chinese see it, is the loss of information control on their own population. But the United States is firmly No. 2.”
Chinese hackers have also used their improved skills to attack the computer networks of foreign governments and companies. 

They have targeted internet and telecommunications companies and have broken into the computer networks of foreign tech, chemical, manufacturing and mining companies. 

Airbus recently said China had hacked it through a supplier.
In 2016, Xi Jinping consolidated several army hacking divisions under a new Strategic Support Force, similar to the United States’ Cyber Command, and moved much of the country’s foreign hacking operation from the army to the more advanced Ministry of State Security, China’s main spy agency.
The restructuring coincided with a lull in Chinese cyberattacks after a 2015 agreement between Xi and President Barack Obama to cease cyberespionage operations for commercial gain.
“The deal gave the Chinese the time and space to focus on professionalizing their cyberespionage capabilities,” Mr. Lewis said. 

“We didn’t expect that.”
Chinese officials also cracked down on moonlighting in moneymaking schemes by its state-sponsored hackers — a “corruption” issue that Xi concluded had sometimes compromised the hackers’ identities and tools, according to security researchers.
While China was revamping its operations, security experts said, it was also clamping down on security research in order to keep advanced hacking methods in house. 

The Chinese police recently said they planned to enforce national laws against unauthorized vulnerability disclosure, and Chinese researchers were recently banned from competing in Western hacking conferences.
“They are circling the wagons,” Mr. Hultquist of FireEye said. 

“They’ve recognized that they could use these resources to aid their offensive and defensive cyberoperations.”

Chinazism

We’re finally discovering the ugly truth about China and the harm it has caused

By Victor Davis Hanson

In these times of near civil war, Americans agree on almost nothing. 

Yet sometime in 2019, almost all of America finally got “woke” on China.
For years, our leaders had yawned about Silk Road neo-imperialism in Africa and Asia, and gross abuses of human rights against Chinese religious minorities and political dissidents.
Almost every assumption Washington made, both by Democratic and Republican administrations, was logically flawed at best. 

And at worst, these calculations were a weird mix of conservative commercial greed, liberal political correctness and shared screwball naiveté.
American trade and political appeasement were never interpreted by Beijing as magnanimity to be reciprocated, but always as weakness to be exploited. 

It was always ludicrous to think that the more concessions on trade and human rights the United States gave, the more China would Westernize and begin to resemble America or a European Union nation.
Even sillier was the old shibboleth that China’s embrace of capitalist reforms — as if by some unwritten, determinist economic law — would lead to constitutional government. 

But the ability to buy a new cellphone never ensures the right to vote for a candidate of one’s choice.
Instead, all China did was auction off large sections of its new and more efficient economy to crony communist pseudo-capitalists and corrupt provincial officials in order to modernize the country, beef up the military, warp the international trading system — and make itself very rich.
Why did America act in such a suicidal way on China?
Cheap Chinese labor and lax American laws motivated hundreds of U.S. corporations to shut down their domestic assembly plants and relocate to China. 

At least at first, they were free to pay substandard wages and were mostly unregulated.
Once American businesses got hooked on mega-profits, the Chinese government slowly started stealing their technology, infringing on copyrights and patents, dumping their own merchandise on the world market at prices below production costs, running up huge trade surpluses and manipulating their currency.
But by then, American corporations were so addicted to laissez-faire profitmaking that they turned a blind eye and paid their hush money.
Universities cashed in too, both by setting up lucrative satellite campuses
in China and admitting tens of thousands of Chinese citizens. 

These Chinese students paid full tuition (and sometimes premiums and surcharges), turning once cash-strapped campuses into profitable degree mills.
Most college deans and presidents simply ignored the dreadful human rights record of China, not to mention expatriate espionage rings designed to steal engineering and high-tech research.
If profits had blinded corporations to exploitive Chinese partnerships, political correctness conveniently offered academia and the media political cover — as if a mostly monoracial China was a 1.3 billion-person diverse “other” with historical grievances against a supposedly racist America.
The result was that everyone profited and all remained willfully blind to the ascendant cutthroat and dictatorial colossus.
The domestic winners in the appeasement of Communist China were the two American coasts — the New York financial industry, the Washington political lobbying nexus, Silicon Valley’s high-tech companies, and the coastal mega-research universities such Harvard, Stanford and Yale.
Suddenly, the intellectual and informational classes could sell their wares in a new global market, and they profited enormously.
Few cared about the “losers” in the now-hollowed-out Midwest and in rural America. 

For corporate America, domestic muscular labor could be easily and cheaply replaced by millions of Chinese workers. 

Outsourcing and offshoring pulled investment capital out of America and put it overseas, as Chinese-assembled products brought far greater profits.
Academics could not have cared less that the Deplorables and the working classes were being wiped out, given their politically incorrect social and cultural views.
What finally woke America up were two unforeseen developments.
First, the Chinese overreached and systematically began militarizing neutral islands in the South China Sea. 

They derided international commercial treaties.
In racist fashion, they treated Asian and African countries as if they were 19th-century colonies. 

And they unapologetically lifted technology from America’s biggest and most powerful corporations to turn China into something akin to George Orwell’s “1984.”
Meanwhile, Beijing began rounding up dissidents, cracking down in Hong Kong and “re-educating” millions of Muslims in detention camps. 

All that brazenness finally drove the left to drop its multicultural blinders and accept the truth of renegade Chinese oppression.
Second, Donald Trump got elected president, all the while screaming that the Chinese emperor had no clothes. 

The cheerleaders finally listened and admitted that China had been buck naked after all.
Now we will learn whether America woke up just in time or too late. 

Either way, no one will credit the loud Trump for warning that China was threatening not just the U.S. but the world as we have known it.

The Battle of Hong Kong

Hong Kong Burns on Eve of Communist Anniversary
Thousands of people in Hong Kong took the streets on Saturday and Sunday, the 16th weekend of rolling protests against the Chinese communist regime and the last before the Communist Party celebrates its 70th anniversary on Tuesday.
By FRANCES MARTEL
Peaceful marches throughout the day – with a “global” theme featuring protesters waving the flags of dozens of nations that have expressed support for their movement – gave way to violence in the evening as police shot tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, and, in one case, live gunfire at the protesters.

In response, a small group of protesters responded by hurling Molotov cocktails and bricks at police. Flaming barricades appeared throughout the city to keep police at bay.
The Hong Kong Foreign Press (HKFP), citing police and hospital officials, reported on Monday that the violence has resulted in 48 people being hospitalized, one of them a woman described as being in “serious condition.” 

Police arrested over 100 people.
While no official estimates of the number of people attending these marches is currently available – and likely will never be for Sunday’s given that police did not grant a permit for it – estimates suggest that the number of people taking the streets on Saturday rose to the hundreds of thousands, while several thousands braved the streets on Sunday to call for an end to Chinese repression of Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong protest movement that emerged in June has issued five demands of its government. Chief Executive Carrie Lam has granted one of them: the withdrawal of a proposed law that would have allowed China to extradite any individual present in the city if accused of violating communist law.
The protesters have not dropped their other four demands: freedom for political prisoners, an independent investigation into police brutality, an end to calling the peaceful protests “riots,” and direct election of all lawmakers. 

Currently, Hong Kong residents are only allowed to elect half of their Legislative Council, the other half appointed by a shady coalition of special interests controlled by China.
Hong Kong is part of China under a policy called “One Country, Two Systems,” which denies Hong Kong sovereignty in exchange for Beijing not imposing communism or restricting its traditional democracy. 

China has violated the principle of “One Country, Two Systems,” and has revealed a desire to fully annex Hong Kong through policies like the extradition bill.
The “illegal” protest Sunday also directly targeted the Chinese Communist Party given the upcoming anniversary. 

Protesters waved Chinese flags with X marked on them, trampled images of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, and used swastikas and other Nazi imagery to convey the gravity of the threat China poses to the world.

Thousands of people hold an unsanctioned march through the streets of Hong Kong on September 29, 2019, part a coordinated day of global protests aimed at casting a shadow over communist China’s upcoming 70th birthday. 

Thousands of people hold an unsanctioned protest march through the streets of Hong Kong on September 29, 2019. 

A protester steps on an image of China’s “President” Xi Jinping during an unsanctioned march through the streets of Hong Kong on September 29, 2019, part a coordinated day of global protests aimed at casting a shadow over communist China’s upcoming 70th birthday.


Joshua Wong 黃之鋒
✔@joshuawongcf
"Appeasement is a great policy if you want a world war."

3,005
2:15 PM - Sep 29, 2019


In addition to raising the four remaining demands, protesters called for the world to intervene in East Turkestan, western China, where the communists have built thousands of concentration camps holding 1 to 3 million people, mostly Muslims of the Uighur ethnic minority. 

Beijing claims the camps are “vocational centers” where Uighurs learn job skills; survivors say they face indoctrination, torture, murder, slavery and live organ harvesting.
“They are treating the Uighurs very inhumanely. They are put in concentration camps,” an unnamed Hong Kong protester told the Los Angeles Times. 

“These actions should not be tolerated in the world right now. But they are letting it happen.”
Graffiti throughout Hong Kong urged support for the Uighurs in addition to the Hong Kong democracy movement.

Cleaners try to remove graffiti put up by protesters in Hong Kong on September 30, 2019, a day after the protest-wracked financial hub witnessed its fiercest political violence in weeks. 

Police cracked down heavily on Sunday’s protest, first with liberal use of tear gas against peaceful protests, then eventually with gunfire. 

Police officials confirmed that one officer fired “one warning shot” on Sunday because protesters had placed the lives of police “under serious threat.”

Women run covering their mouths after police fired tear gas to disperse pro-democracy protesters ahead of a march on September 29, 2019, in Hong Kong. 

Hong Kong police fire tear gas toward protesters taking part in an unsanctioned march through the streets of Hong Kong on September 29, 2019, part a coordinated day of global protests aimed at casting a shadow over communist China’s upcoming 70th birthday. 

Police assaulted at least one Hong Kong lawmaker, pro-democracy legislator Eddie Chu, when Chu attempted to approach police and discuss their strongarm tactics. 

One officer attempted to hand Chu water and faced threats to stand down from his peers. 

In a press conference Monday, Chu said the officers who attacked him were illegally operating without displaying proper identification, making it impossible to identify and punish the officer for his use of violence.
The officer’s face is visible on video shared online through the Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily.


Demosistō 香港眾志
✔@demosisto
A #hkpolice officer suddenly pepper sprayed legislator Chu Hoi-dick’s face when Chu’s asking police to stop their violence! #929GlobalAntiTotalitarianism #hkpolicebrutality #HKPoliceState

4,175
8:48 AM - Sep 29, 2019

Coconuts Hong Kong@CoconutsHK
.@ChuHoiDick said the officer in question didn't have his warrant card or police ID number displayed on his uniform, which means he was unable to identify him.http://coconuts.co/hongkong/news/lawmaker-eddie-chu-demands-id-of-police-officer-who-pepper-sprayed-him-in-the-face/ … #hongkong #hongkongprotests #AntiELAB

Lawmaker Eddie Chu demands ID of police officer who pepper sprayed him in the face | Coconuts Hong...
A prominent pro-democracy lawmaker has urged Hong Kong police commissioner Stephen Lo to hand over details of a police officer who pepper sprayed him in the face In a short viral video taken from an...coconuts.co
27
12:48 PM - Sep 30, 2019

Journalists and activists alike captured images of extreme police abuse in response to the peaceful march. 

Protesters wearing gas masks and goggles – a necessity after police shot a woman in the eye in August – were seen bleeding on the streets in police custody. 

In one shocking image to emerge from the protests, police appear to be using a protester strapped to a cot as a gun mount.

Hong Kong police detain a woman (C) near the central government offices after thousands took part in an unsanctioned march through Hong Kong on September 29, 2019, part a coordinated day of global protests aimed at casting a shadow over communist China’s upcoming 70th birthday. 


Galileo Cheng@galileocheng
The arrested in Admitalty was spurting blood and another got kicked after we filmed him yelling out his name. Video by Vivian Tam #antiELAB #ExtraditionLaw #HongKongProtests

841
3:30 PM - Sep 29, 2019

Joshua Wong 黃之鋒
✔@joshuawongcf
Hong Kong Police using subdued protester as gun mount. This is humanitarian crisis.

13.4K
6:54 AM - Sep 30, 2019

As the sun set, protesters built flaming barricades to keep police from attacking them, setting significant portions of the city on fire.

A water cannon (R) is used to put out a fire (C) during clashes with police following an unsanctioned march through Hong Kong on September 29, 2019. 

Debris are left burning during clashes with police following an unsanctioned march through Hong Kong on September 29, 2019. 

A pro-democracy protester attempts to burn a Chinas 70 anniversary slogan billboard in Admiralty district on September 29, 2019, in Hong Kong. 

A protester throws more debris onto a fire set in the street during clashes with police following an earlier unsanctioned protest march through Hong Kong on September 29, 2019. 

Hong Kong police accused “radical” protesters of starting the violence.
“A number of radical protesters had gone on a rampage since the afternoon, vandalising numerous public property and the facilities of several MTR [railway] stations,” a police spokesman said, according to the HKFP. 

“They set fires at various places, which were fierce at one point, and hurled petrol bombs on the streets as well as into a MTR station and at the Mong Kok police station, posing a grave threat to police officers, MTR staff and members of the public at the scene.”
The Global Times, a Chinese state propaganda outlet, accused the protesters of damaging Hong Kong’s economy.
“Some local observers have already pointed out that young radicals, who risk their lives to do illegal acts such as attacking police officers, damaging public property, and vandalizing government buildings, know there are low costs of breaking the law,” the Times claimed on Monday. 

“The areas hit by the chaos on Sunday used to be popular areas for shopping and tourism. However, almost all the stores along the roads from Wan Chai to Causeway Bay were shut down on Sunday, and radicals also vandalized the MTR station in Wan Chai.”
Protesters are organizing events against the communist regime for Tuesday, the official anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.

Chinazism

Japan lists China as much bigger threat than North Korea

By Tim Kelly

TOKYO -- China’s growing military might has replaced North Korean belligerence as the main security threat to Japan, Tokyo’s annual defense review indicated on Thursday, despite signs that Pyongyang could have nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.
The document’s security assessment on China comes after a section on Japan’s ally, the United States, the first time Beijing has achieved second place in the Defense White Paper and pushing North Korea into third position.
Russia, deemed by Japan as its primary threat during the Cold War, was in fourth place.
“The reality is that China is rapidly increasing military spending, and so people can grasp that we need more pages,” Defense Minister Taro Kono said at a media briefing.
“China is deploying air and sea assets in the Western Pacific and through the Tsushima Strait into the Sea of Japan with greater frequency.”

Japan has raised defense spending by a tenth over the past seven years to counter military advances by Beijing and Pyongyang, including defenses against North Korean missiles which may carry nuclear warheads, the paper said.
North Korea has conducted short-range missile launches this year that Tokyo believes show Pyongyang is developing projectiles to evade its Aegis ballistic missile defenses.
To stay ahead of China’s modernizing military, Japan is buying U.S.-made stealth fighters and other advanced weapons.
In its latest budget request, Japan’s military asked for 115.6 billion yen ($1.1 billion) to buy nine Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighters, including six short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) variants to operate from converted helicopter carriers.
The stealth jets, U.S.-made interceptor missiles and other equipment are part of a proposed 1.2% increase in defense spending to a record 5.32 trillion yen in the year starting April 1.
By comparison, Chinese military spending is set to rise this year by 7.5% to about $177 billion from 2018, more than three times that of Japan. 

Beijing is developing weapons such as stealth fighters and aircraft carriers that are helping it expand the range and scope of military operations.
Once largely confined to operating close to the Chinese coast, Beijing now routinely sends its air and sea patrols near Japan’s western Okinawa islands and into the Western Pacific.

The Defense White Paper said Chinese patrols in waters and skies near Japanese territory are “a national security concern”.
The paper downgraded fellow U.S. ally, South Korea, which recently pulled out of an intelligence sharing pact with Japan amid a dispute over their shared wartime history. 

That could weaken efforts to contain North Korean threats, analysts said.
Other allies, including Australia, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and India, feature more prominently in the defense paper.

Chinazism

How Hong Kong protesters are defending their use of Chinazi

By Mary Hui

A new crop of symbols has emerged in Hong Kong’s protests in recent weeks: swastikas and the term “Chinazi.”
At a demonstration earlier this month, when protesters marched to the US consulate to urge Congress to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, a red flag with yellow stars arranged in the shape of a swastika was hung from a bridge, as the flags of Hong Kong and China fluttered overhead.

The Chinazi flag flying over a large crowd of protesters.

At another major march a week later (Sep. 15), one of the most widely seen posters was that of the “Chinazi” flag. 

Local pro-democracy party People Power also set up a small stage at the start of the march, putting up a banner that cast chief executive Carrie Lam as an unmistakable Hitler, giving her a the label “Butcher Carrie” against a backdrop of yellow swastikas.


Mary Hui
✔@maryhui
· Sep 15, 2019
This guy's writing calligraphy. He just wrote one that says 良知—conscience. The flyers are free to take.



Mary Hui
✔@maryhui
Banner by People Power, the pro-democracy coalition chaired by lawmaker Ray Chan.

23
9:15 AM - Sep 15, 2019

And this Sunday (Sep. 29)—coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the divvying up of occupied Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union—Hong Kongers are scheduled to host a large protest, alternately dubbed the “Global Anti-Totalitarianism March” and the “Global Anti-Chinazi March,” alongside dozens of cities around the world. 

Ahead of the march, organizers have shared a series of graphics on the event’s Telegram channel to explain the term “Chinazi,” drawing comparisons between, for example, the Holocaust’s concentration camps and China’s concentration camps in East Turkestan.
Making comparisons to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust has long been a sensitive issue. 

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis committed one of the worst atrocities ever in human history, orchestrating a state-sponsored genocide that led to the murder of millions of Jews.

Comparing China to Nazi Germany in fact predates Hong Kong’s protests, and traces its roots back to anti-China protests in Hanoi and Tokyo in 2011 and 2012.

First use of the term "Chinazi": Vietnamese protesters showed a banner depicting the late Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong and Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler to compare China to the Nazis during an anti-China rally in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Aug. 21, 2011. 

Japanese people condemned Chinazism at a rally in Tokyo in September 2012.

Writing in the Times of Israel newspaper, Deborah Fripp, president of the Teach the Shoah Foundation, noted that “a well-placed comparison to the Holocaust can be a call-to-action, can help to highlight bias and create change.”
In August, for example, an Australian lawmaker compared the West’s approach to China to France’s failure to hold back Nazi Germany. 

Hong Kong protesters see the Nazi comparisons as necessary. 

One protester who identified himself as Johnson, and who is an administrator in the public Telegram group for Sunday’s “anti-Chinazi march” said in an interview conducted over the messaging app that he understood concerns over the use of the term “Chinazi,” but that “the atrocities committed by the [Chinese Communist Party] are greater than you originally thought of.”
“Making this term ‘Chinazi’ is to send a warning to the world: if we do not stop the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), the deaths and the tragedies will probably keep happening,” he said. 

“The victims may not only be the Chinese people, the Hongkongers, the Taiwanese, but may be you. The history of German Nazi may repeat itself.”
As of today (Sept. 26), Nazi imagery was still being deployed, with material featuring swastikas, the Chinazi term, and comparisons between China and the Holocaust still being shared on Telegram groups.