China has turned East Turkestan into a zone of repression — and a frightening window into the future

The Washington Post

The Chinese database that Victor Gevers, a Dutch cybersecurity researcher, found online has given a rare glimpse into China’s extensive surveillance of East Turkestan, a remote colony home to an ethnic minority population that is largely Muslim. 

AT A minimum, the minority Muslim Uighur population of East Turkestan colony in China is about 11 million people, and probably significantly higher. 

So consider the scope of surveillance over Uighurs in light of a recent database leak that indicated about 2.5 million people in East Turkestan are being tracked by cameras and other devices, generating more than 6.6 million GPS coordinates in one 24-hour period, much of it tagged with locations such as “mosque” and “hotel.”
Victor Gevers, a security researcher for the GDI Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to defend Internet freedom, found the database, belonging to SenseNets, a Chinese company that provides facial recognition and other monitoring systems to the police. 

The company had left the database unguarded but closed it off when Mr. Gevers inquired. 

It included records such as identification numbers, gender, nationality, address, birth dates, photographs, employers and which cameras or trackers they had passed. 

Mr. Gevers suggests that more than a quarter of those in the database appear to be ethnic Uighurs, although it also included Han Chinese and others.
The data provides another glimpse into the darkening world of East Turkestan, which China’s authorities have turned into a zone of repression. 

In addition to ubiquitous electronic and physical surveillance, an estimated 1 million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims have been incarcerated in concentration camps where they are being brainwashed to wipe out their traditional culture and language.
According to Xiao Qiang, director of the Counter-Power Lab at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information, East Turkestan is a window on the future of China, a “frontline” test-bed for data-driven surveillance that could then be spread well beyond. 

Mr. Xiao wrote in the Journal of Democracy last month that China under Xi Jinping is attempting to marshal the powers of artificial intelligence to process all kinds of surveillance data, including facial recognition, and systems that can monitor gender, clothing, gait and height of passersby, as well as voice recognition, and creating a DNA database.
After being asked by the New York Times about the use of its technology to build the DNA database, a Massachusetts company, Thermo Fisher, said it would no longer sell its equipment in East Turkestan. 

Congress is considering important legislation that would help expose and pressure others who enable China’s abuses.
China’s goal is to use these technologies to suppress dissent, and to predict and snuff out any challenge to the ruling Communist Party’s grip on power. 

In East Turkestan, surveillance is part of a policy of cultural genocide. 

In addition to the camps and cameras, Mr. Xiao says the government has issued guidelines to collect DNA samples from all East Turkestan residents between ages 12 and 65.
When George Orwell’s “1984” was published seven decades ago, it seemed a dire warning of a future dystopia ruled by thought police and authoritarian control. 

Today, such a world is becoming a reality in East Turkestan. 

We agree with human rights groups who have urged the United Nations Human Rights Council, when it meets starting Monday, to launch an international fact-finding mission to East Turkestan to expose this unsettling experiment in state control of human behavior.

Orwellian China

Thousands of low-wage workers in “censorship factories” trawl the online world for forbidden content, where even a photo of an empty chair could cause big trouble.
By Li Yuan

Li Chengzhi had a lot to learn when he first got a job as a professional censor.
Like many young people in China, the 24-year-old recent college graduate knew little about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

He had never heard of China’s most famous dissident, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in custody two years ago.
Now, after training, he knows what to look for — and what to block. 

He spends his hours scanning online content on behalf of Chinese media companies looking for anything that will provoke the government’s wrath. 

He knows how to spot code words that obliquely refer to Chinese leaders and scandals, or the memes that touch on subjects the Chinese government doesn’t want people to read about.
Li, who still has traces of youthful acne on his face, takes his job seriously. 

“It helps cleanse the online environment,” he said.
For Chinese companies, staying on the safe side of government censors is a matter of life and death. Adding to the burden, the authorities demand that companies censor themselves, spurring them to hire thousands of people to police content.
That in turn has created a growing and lucrative new industry: censorship factories.
Mr. Li works for Beyondsoft, a Beijing-based tech services company that, among other businesses, takes on the censorship burden for other companies. 

He works in its office in the city of Chengdu. 

In the heart of a high-tech industrial area, the space is bright and new enough that it resembles the offices of well-funded start-ups in tech centers like Beijing and Shenzhen. 

It recently moved to the space because customers complained that its previous office was too cramped to allow employees to do their best work.
“Missing one beat could cause a serious political mistake,” said Yang Xiao, head of Beyondsoft’s internet service business, including content reviewing. (Beyondsoft declined to disclose which Chinese media or online companies it works for, citing confidentiality.)
China has built the world’s most extensive and sophisticated online censorship system. 

It grew even stronger under Xi Jinping, who wants the internet to play a greater role in strengthening the Communist Party’s hold on society. 

More content is considered sensitive. 

Punishments are getting more severe.
Once circumspect about its controls, China now preaches a vision of a government-supervised internet that has surprising resonance in other countries. 

Even traditional bastions of free expression like Western Europe and the United States are considering their own digital limits. 

Platforms like Facebook and YouTube have said that they would hire thousands more people to better keep a handle on their content.
Workers like Li show the extremes of that approach — one that controls what more than 800 million internet users in China see every day.
Beyondsoft employs over 4,000 workers like Li at its content reviewing factories. 

That is up from about 200 in 2016. 

They review and censor content day and night.
“We’re the Foxconn in the data industry,” said Yang, comparing his firm to the biggest contract manufacturer that makes iPhones and other products for Apple.
Many online media companies have their own internal content review teams, sometimes numbering in the thousands.
They are exploring ways to get artificial intelligence to do the work.
The head of the A.I. lab at a major online media company, who asked for anonymity because the subject is sensitive, said the company had 120 machine learning models.
But success is spotty.
Users can easily fool algorithms.
“The A.I. machines are intelligent, but they aren’t as clever as human brains,” Mr. Li said.
“They miss a lot of things when reviewing content.”
Beyondsoft has a team of 160 people in Chengdu working four shifts a day to review potentially politically sensitive content on a news aggregating app.
For the same app, Beyondsoft has another team in the western city of Xi’an reviewing potentially vulgar or profane content.
Like the rest of the world, China’s internet is rife with pornography and other material that many users might find offensive.
In the Chengdu office, workers must put their smartphones in hallway lockers.
They can’t take screenshots or send any information from their computers.
The workers are almost all college graduates in their 20s. They are often unaware of, or indifferent to, politics. 
In China, many parents and teachers tell the young that caring about politics leads only to trouble.
To overcome that, Yang and his colleagues developed a sophisticated training system.
New hires start with weeklong “theory” training, during which senior employees teach them the sensitive information that they didn’t know before.
“My office is next to the big training room,” Mr. Yang said.
“I often hear the surprised sounds of ‘Ah, ah, ah.’”
“They didn’t know things like June 4,” he added, referring to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. 
“They really didn’t know.”
Beyondsoft has developed an extensive database based on such information that Yang calls one of its “core competencies.”
It also uses anti-censorship software to regularly visit what it calls anti-revolutionary websites that are blocked by the Chinese government.
It then updates the database.
New employees study the database much like preparing for college entrance exams.
After two weeks, they have to pass a test.
The screen saver on each computer is the same: photos and names of current and past members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the Communist Party’s top leadership.
Workers must memorize those faces: Only government-owned websites and specially approved political blogs — a group on what’s called a whitelist — are allowed to post photos of top leaders.
Workers are briefed at the beginning of their shift on the newest censoring instructions sent by clients, which the clients themselves receive from government censors. 
Workers then must answer about 10 questions designed to test their memory.
The results of the exam affect the workers’ pay.
One question on a recent Friday: Which one of the following names is the daughter of Li Peng, China’s former premier?
The correct answer is Li Xiaolin, a longtime target of online ridicule for her expensive fashion taste and for being one of many children of senior officials who come into high positions or wealth.
That’s a relatively easy one.
A tougher test is parsing the roundabout ways that China’s internet users evade stringent censorship to talk about current affairs.
Take, for example, a Hong Kong news site’s 2017 commentary that compared the six Chinese leaders since Mao Zedong to emperors during the Han dynasty.
Some Chinese users started using the emperors’ names when referring to the leaders.
Beyondsoft’s workers have to know which emperor’s name is associated with which leader.
Then there are the photos of an empty chair. 
They refer to Mr. Liu, the Nobel laureate, who wasn’t allowed to leave China to attend the award ceremony and was represented by an empty chair.
References to George Orwell’s novel “1984” are also forbidden.
Beyondsoft’s software trawls through web pages and marks potentially offensive words in different colors.
If a page is full of color-coded words, it usually requires a closer look, according to the executives.
If there are only one or two, it’s pretty safe to let it pass.
According to Beyondsoft’s website, its content monitoring service, called Rainbow Shield, has compiled over 100,000 basic sensitive words and over three million derivative words.
Politically sensitive words make up one-third of the total, followed by words related to pornography, prostitution, gambling and knives.
Workers like Li make $350 to $500 a month, about average pay in Chengdu.
Each worker is expected to review 1,000 to 2,000 articles during a shift.
Articles uploaded to the news app must be approved or rejected within an hour.
Unlike Foxconn workers, they don’t work much overtime because longer hours could hurt accuracy, said Yang, the executive.
It’s easy to make mistakes.
One article about Peng Liyuan, China’s first lady, mistakenly used the photo of a famous singer rumored to be linked to another leader.
It was caught by someone else before it went out, Yang said.
Li, the young censor, said the worst mistakes were almost all related to senior leaders.
He once missed a tiny photo of Xi on a website not on the whitelist because he was tired.
He still kicks himself for it.
When asked whether he had shared with family and friends what he learned at work, such as the Tiananmen massacre, Li vehemently said no.
“This information is not for people outside to know,” he said.
“Once many people know about it, it could generate rumors.”
But the massacre was history.
It wasn’t a rumor.
How would he reconcile that?
“For certain things,” he said, “one just has to obey the rules.”

Huawei Is the Doorway to China's Police State

The free world should be worried about the creation of a police state under the technology umbrella of Huawei.
by Dan Blumenthal 

The arrest of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou was apparently a long time coming. U.S. investigators began looking into Huawei’s dealings when Iran’s once Chinese-backed ZTE was identified as a sanctions-breaker. 

U.S. prosecutors now appear to have substantial evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s state-backed mobile and technology company’s violations of the sanctions regime against Iran.
The arrest and call for extradition spotlights just how concerned the free world should be about Huawei. 

The stakes are high, as the company is positioned to be the dominant player in 5G mobile networks. If Huawei wins this competition against U.S. companies, much of the world’s data will pass through the mobile networks of a CCP-backed company that does business with the world’s most troubling regimes. 

Huawei is also the critical player in Xi Jinping’s bid to establish a high-tech police state and to leapfrog the United States in critical technologies that will enable a host of military capabilities.
The CCP is already collecting enough data from Chinese citizens who use mobile networks, search engines, and online purchasing systems to establish a “Social Credit System.” 

To say that this system is Orwellian is an understatement. 

Even George Orwell could not have imagined the new technology of totalitarianism.
The Chinese government plan is to have a database on Chinese citizens’ consumer preferences, personal activities, and habits to give each one a “score” based on loyalty to the party and other behaviors deemed by party leaders to make for good citizens. 

This score will determine if Chinese citizens are accepted to colleges, can get good jobs, buy a house, and so much more. 

It is nothing less than an attempt to perfect the world’s first ever high-tech police state.
Huawei will continue to play a big role in the creation of this system. 

But Huawei is an international company with high ambitions. 

An almost unimaginable amount of global data will flow through the next generation of mobile technology. 

This is partly the reason why 5G and artificial intelligence are so closely related: the companies with the most access to data will be able to train the best AI systems.
Thus, this CCP-backed company is poised to determine the future of how people use everything, from transportation to health care. 

If it wins the global race to become the dominant player in mobile technology, then the rest of the world could lose control over the use and integrity of data to the CCP colossus. 

Regardless of Huawei’s protestations that it is a private company, Chinese laws require companies doing business in China to share data that the party deems necessary for national security. 

And, notwithstanding the passage of strict data laws in places like Europe, there will no way to guarantee the integrity and use of data if it flows through a CCP-made 5G system. 

The CCP may not own Huawei, but it is benefitting from the massive amounts of 5G and AI related research and development, the abuse of Chinese patenting and anti-monopoly laws that put competitors at a disadvantage, the absence of ethical restrictions in China, and the use of AI technologies.
Thus, the recent arrest reveals just one element of Huawei breaking of international laws and practices. 

And, the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt to browbeat Canada to break its own laws shows how close Huawei and the party really are. 

If Beijing succeeds in its years-long plan for Huawei to become the dominant player the mobile industry, then it will be China—not the West—setting the ‘rules of the road’ for the next generation of technology. 

 Given Huawei’s record, this is a truly troublesome future to consider.

Chinazism, Forced Sinicization and Cultural Genocide

Chinese civil servants are happy to occupy Uyghur homes in East Turkestan

By Darren Byler, Ph.D.

A civilian worker presents a Uyghur child whom he has been assigned to treat as his "relative" with a picture book titled Our China, in an undated photo from East Turkestan's Chinese Communist Youth League.

Over the past two years, news of the mass detention of Muslim-majority Uyghurs has slowly filtered out of the East Turkestan colony in Western China.
These reports have coalesced into the outlines of a nightmarish system of massive prison camps and AI-enabled surveillance systems. 

Uyghurs, a group of nearly 11 million people who are native to Central Asia, have come to refer to themselves as a "people destroyed."
Chinese authorities have described their project to re-engineer Uyghur society as a response to religious "extremism" and the threat of terrorism. 

In the absence of a free press, stories of violent attacks by Uyghurs have been amplified far beyond all evidence of resistance to state control.
Up to one million Uyghurs are estimated to be imprisoned inside the camps, according to the scholar Adrian Zenz and Human Rights Watch. 

Beijing denies the camps are detention centers and instead claims they are "vocational training centers," which students are happy to attend.
Amid the growing outrage over the camps around the world, more than one million government workers, members of China's ethnic Han majority, have been quietly sent to Uyghur homes to monitor and assess Uyghur resistance to this process.
These "relatives," as they have been trained to call themselves, are part of an effort to fully assimilate the Uyghur population by undermining things as basic as religion and language, family structure and food culture.
Chinese Uyghurs forced to welcome Communist Party into their homes

Reports of the home stay system published in state media said the visits would "enhance ethnic unity," with pictures posted of Communist Party members posing smiling with Uyghur families.
When I visited the region in April 2018 I met a number of these Han civil servants. 

I asked them to tell me about their work and what they thought about it.
Through my research I found that these "relatives" have been given two major tasks when they arrive in Uyghur homes. 

Their first priority is fact finding. They are tasked with uncovering religious and ethnic nationalist attitudes. 

They also attempt to understand the loyalties Uyghurs have to family members that have been detained.
The manual that is used by "relatives" in Kashgar prefecture advocates asking Uyghur children questions regarding sensitive issues since "they will tell the truth." 

The information they gleaned through this process is then entered into digital security systems, where higher-level authorities determine who should be sent to the camp system.
The second priority for the "relatives" is what they refer to as "showing warmth" or care to Uyghurs.
This approach centers on showing "sympathy" regarding Uyghur living circumstances and asking questions regarding things that would "improve" their lives.

Photo taken on July 2, 2018, shows a man walking past a wall bearing a China Communist Party slogan in Kashgar.

Of course, this form of care does not include extending sympathy for missing and detained family members. 

The manual they used in Kashgar Prefecture warned against this. 

It told them to be careful not to be "brainwashed" into sympathizing with Uyghur families.
I found that it was difficult for the majority of the civil servants I spoke with to place themselves in the position of the Uyghurs whose lives and society they were destroying. 

They saw the type of violent paternalism they were engaged in as necessary to find a solution to what they called the "East Turkestan problem."
Many of them believed that dominating all aspects of Uyghur life was the only way to move forward with the project of the Chinese nation.
George Orwell has argued that when people come to believe in the necessity of their dominance they often become obsessed with disrespect on the part of others. 

Their domination needs to be loved. 

In such a state, Orwell notes, "actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them."
Uyghur crackdown in East Turkestan doubles security spending in one year

Under such conditions outrages such as imprisonment without trial, the removal of children and the occupation of minority homes are viewed as normal and necessary.
Many of the Han civilians who were involved in the broad Uyghur "reeducation" effort, particularly the most recent arrivals in East Turkestan, told me that they saw themselves as building a kind of secular Han nationalism. 

And this impulse, combined with the totalitarian control of the Chinese leadership, made the question of the ethics of the camp system an even harder question to ask.
For them it was easier to say that in the end this painful, yet banal, process would be a long-term benefit to East Turkestan's Uyghurs and Kazakhs -- another Muslim ethnic minority in the region. After all, through this process East Turkestan would become secular and safe for Han people.
Many "relatives" believed they had sacrificed their time and energy in "reeducating" Muslims, and in return they believed they deserve to be embraced by their Uyghur and Kazakh "little brothers and sisters." 

They were not able to think about the effects of what they are doing from the perspective of their Muslim neighbors.
As Hannah Arendt observed decades ago about systems of mass oppression elsewhere, the banality of Uyghur unfreedom was simply a product of those in power "doing their jobs." 

Until Han "relatives" can confront what they have been forced to enact, resistance to the state-directed human engineering project in East Turkestan will remain unthinkable.

Ma Jian: ‘Freedom can’t be taken for granted. We have to remain constantly vigilant’

The exiled Chinese writer on the murder of dissidents, attacks on free speech and his new novel exposing the brutality of his homeland

Interview by Claire Armitstead

‘Everyone thought economic expansion meant China would become increa­singly like the west, but that has been a catastrophic miscalculation’ … the novelist Ma Jian. 

In an era of growing political impunity, when dissidents are murdered on foreign soil and even the head of Interpol is not immune from being “disappeared”, Ma Jian seems almost recklessly brave. Could there be a more provocative title than that given by the exiled novelist to his latest satirical onslaught on the country of his birth? 

For, with China Dream, he co-opts the rhetoric of the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping to tell the story of a politician who is driven mad by memories of his own corruption.
Xi first used the phrase shortly after becoming general secretary of the Communist party in 2012, and Ma has responded “in a rush of rage” with a short, ferocious novel about the way turbo-capitalism and authoritarianism have combined to inform a Chinese dream that excludes all but a chosen few. 

“I wanted to give myself the challenge of encapsulating everything in as few words as possible,” he says, wryly adding that it will be interesting to see how the Chinese authorities react to the novel, given that they’ve outlawed so many “key words” online – “even the name Winnie-the-Pooh is banned because people joked that Xi Jinping resembled him”.
A momentary silence falls as we consider the surreal possibility of the “paramount leader” being forced to ban his own slogan. 

But the reality, Ma acknowledges, is that censorship is now so all-encompassing that the novel will very probably not be allowed to exist in Chinese, even in Hong Kong, which has historically provided a toehold for work by dissident authors banned on the mainland.

‘Today’s China is more extreme than anything George Orwell could have imagined’ … Ma Jian. 

In a tranquil London cafe, close to the home he shares with his translator and partner Flora Drew and their four children, the risks this slight, 65-year-old writer is taking are hard to comprehend. 

Despite living in the UK for 17 years, he does not speak English. 

It’s not as if he hasn’t tried, says Drew, who translates our interview, but he has a stubborn devotion to his mother tongue and remains more engaged with goings-on in China than those in his adopted country. 

“Living in the west allows me to see through the fog of lies that shrouds my homeland,” he writes in the foreword to China Dream. 

During the interview, he invokes Dante’s Divine Comedy: “It’s only through being expelled that the poet gets to see heaven and hell and purgatory.”
It was a perspective forced on him from his earliest days, as one of five children born into a well-to-do family in the provincial city of Qingdao in 1953. 

A childhood in which he had already shown promise as an artist came to an abrupt end with the start of the Cultural Revolution. 

He was 13 years old. 

His art teacher was persecuted as a “rightist” and his grandfather, a landlord and tea connoisseur, was executed. 

At 15, he joined an arts propaganda troupe, beginning an adult life that would take him through various industrial assignments to a job as a photojournalist. 

He married a dancer and had the regulation single child. 

Then a photography prize brought him to the attention of the authorities and he was transferred to work for the foreign propaganda unit of the Federation of Trade Unions in Beijing.

‘When a regime is trying to hurt a person’s physical being, at the heart of it is an attempt to crush their soul’ … Ma Jian. 

There, living in a “one‑bed shack”, he connected with a buzzy young community of writers and artists. 

Officially, he worked as a journalist. 

Unofficially, he made and occasionally sold paintings. 

“Mostly they were stolen, but a man from the US embassy bought one for $40,” he recalls. 

“My hair was encrusted with oil paint and the walls were papered with my paintings.”
In 1983, just as he turned 30, he hit the crisis that would upend his life. 

Divorced from his wife, who forbade him to make contact with his daughter, he was arrested for “spiritual pollution”. 

Though Ma was released, his shack was ransacked and his canvases ripped up. 

“I never painted again,” he says. 

“I saw what a fragile medium it was, and how vulnerable to abuse and persecution, and I asked myself what was I going to do for the rest of my life?”
In his attempt to answer this question he converted to Buddhism and set off on a three-year journey across China on foot. 

At first, he was afraid even to record what he witnessed in his notebook, in case it fell into the wrong hands, but gradually, he says, “I saw that through literature I could paint my own reality. I could record history.”
He arrived in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa to find a people whose traditions had been corrupted by poverty and political oppression even as they celebrated the 20th anniversary of their “liberation” to the status of autonomous region. 

In 1987, Ma poured his impressions into a collection of short stories, belatedly published in English as Stick Out Your Tongue. 

It was immediately banned by the Chinese censors, sending him into an exile from which he has never permanently returned, though until six years ago he was allowed to visit China, and continues to keep in close contact with friends and family.
He turns up for the interview with a dramatically bandaged thumb, the result of an accident while building a shed in his garden, the explanation of which leads on to one of his latest frustrations. 

He had written a letter to one of his brothers inviting him to come over to help, he says, “but during this time there was a huge demo of disgruntled veterans demanding higher benefits, so the whole town had been sealed off and surrounded by armed police. No information was able to get in or out, so the letter has probably been handed over to the authorities. What happened there shows how today’s China is more extreme than anything George Orwell could have imagined, because these events don’t even reach public consciousness: it’s as if they never happened.”

It is not only China that troubles Ma today. 

“The world is becoming increasingly unsafe,” he says. 

“Just look at what happened to Jamal Khashoggi: within the space of seven minutes we saw the triumph of barbarism over civilisation. But this is happening every day in China. Everyone thought we could ignore what happened in 1989 [the Tiananmen Square massacre] and that economic expansion meant it would become increasingly like the west, but that has been a catastrophic miscalculation. China might have draped itself in a coat of prosperity, but inside it’s become more brutal than ever, and it’s this venomous combination of extreme authoritarianism and extreme capitalism which has infected countries around the world.”
Erasure of memory is the abiding theme of Ma’s work, whether through the literal motif of an unconscious man in his epic 2008 novel Beijing Coma, set around Tiananmen Square, or through the allegorical pursuit of a recipe for “Old Lady Broth of Amnesia” to which the municipal leader Ma Daode devotes himself in China Dream, tormented by a past in which he drove his own parents to suicide by denouncing them. 

“The process of dragging back memories that are being constantly erased, especially from my position of exile, makes even more important to me the primacy of memory,” Ma says, “and how it not only involves a nation’s sense of history but a person’s sense of self.”
His satire is always firmly located in violations of the human body. 

Stick Out Your Tongue told stories of ritual rape and multi-generational incest. 

In his 2013 novel, The Dark Road, aborted late-term foetuses are carried around in plastic bags or boiled in Cantonese restaurants to make potency soups for men. 

The fourth of China Dream’s seven episodes takes Ma Daode to a strip club, where VIPs have orgies in Mao’s private room with women who are identified only by numbers. 

The reason for this, he explains, is because “totalitarianism not only seeks to control the thought but also the body in which those thoughts are housed”.
“As a writer, when you are trying to describe your characters, there’s a visceral connection to their being. But in my exploration of the body I’m always trying to show that in these systems, when a regime is trying to hurt a person’s physical being, at the heart of it is an attempt to crush their soul. Sometimes, the body can survive but a lot of the time it becomes no more than a carcass.”
Red Dust, his semi-fictionalised 2001 account of his life-changing three-year journey, introduced another persistent theme, betrayal. 

It recounted how he was twice betrayed by an actor girlfriend, whom he, in turn, considered denouncing to the film studio that employed her, out of jealousy over her infidelity. 

None of his characters is without blame, but neither are they entirely evil. 

Even Ma Daode in China Dream attempts to warn protesters that they will be killed if they refuse to move out when bulldozers arrive to clear their homes for redevelopment.

Exiled author Ma Jian banned from visiting China

Ma relates his story quietly and urgently through Drew, keeping his own record of the conversation in spidery Chinese script. 

The couple met in 1997 when she was working on a TV documentary about the handover of Hong Kong to China and he was one of the few local people who agreed to speak. 

He invited her to a poetry reading and gave her all his books to read; she stayed on to finish them, and by the time she left they were together. 

He moved briefly to Germany after the handover before joining her in London. 

She has translated everything he has written since. 

Does she worry that his repeated attacks on China may put him in danger? 

“This is the first time I’ve felt concerned, because there’s a brazenness to the behaviour now and they can do it without any backlash at all,” she says.
But the couple have kept faith with the best of the country, sending their 15-year-old son to study martial arts at a Shaolin monastery and to spend time with his Chinese family. 

Ma plans to travel to the Hong Kong literary festival this month, to present his novel in English. 

“I refuse to be afraid,” he says. 

“The disregard for truth is infectious. It also explains the rise of Trump. We need to protect concepts of humanity, and freedom can’t be taken for granted. We have to remain constantly vigilant. The more you buckle under these pressures, the huger the monster becomes. One’s responsibility as a writer is to be fearless.”

Die Endlösung der Uigurischfrage

U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley says China's concentration camps are straight out of George Orwell
By Lucas Tomlinson, Samuel Chamberlain

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley said China has persecuted minorities on a massive scale. 

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley accused China of persecuting religious and ethnic minorities on a massive scale Monday in her first public remarks since announcing she would leave office last week.
"It is the largest internment of civilians in the world today," Haley said in keynote remarks at the Chiefs of Defense Conference Dinner in Washington. 

"It may be the largest since World War II."
The former South Carolina governor was particularly critical of Beijing's crackdown on Uighur and other Muslim minorities in China's northwest, which she described as being "straight out of George Orwell."
"At least a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities have been imprisoned in so-called 're-education camps' in western China," Haley said, noting that detainees are "tortured ... forced to renounce their religion and to pledge allegiance to the Communist Party."
Haley announced last week that she planned to leave her post as envoy to the U.N. at the end of this year. 

Her announcement surprised many observers, who saw her as one of the Trump administration's most effective members. 

Her Monday comments followed recent tough talk from President Trump and his top aides about China.

Beijing recently canceled a planned visit by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis amid rising tensions over trade and defense issues. 

China has described recent U.S. B-52 bomber flights and warship patrols near contested man-made islands in the South China Sea as "provocative."
China recently rejected a request for a Hong Kong port visit by an American warship, and last summer Mattis disinvited China from a major maritime exercise in the Pacific. 

In response, China scrapped a scheduled Pentagon visit by its navy chief last month.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has slapped new sanctions on more than $200 billion in Chinese goods and plans to send hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Taiwan.

Inside China’s surveillance state

From schoolchildren to political dissidents: how technology is tracking a nation 
By Louise Lucas and Emily Feng

Zhejiang Hangzhou No 11 High School, on the fringes of downtown Hangzhou in eastern China, is a green, peaceful-seeming place to learn.
Gazebo-like structures nestle among lush foliage; grey stone sculptures enact eternal dioramas and Japanese maples gently fan placid lakes. 
It is also a digital panopticon.
A surveillance system, powered by facial recognition and artificial intelligence, tracks the state school’s 1,010 pupils, informing teachers which students are late or have missed class, while in the café, their menu choices leave a digital dietary footprint that staff can monitor to see who is gorging on too much fatty food. 
In May, The People’s Daily, a state-run media group, tweeted approvingly about the school’s use of cameras to monitor, via their facial expressions, how children were engaging in class.
Had this classroom-based part of the programme not been abruptly halted later that month in the wake of local controversy, it would also have been deployed to predict which pupils (the slouching ones) were likely to underperform.
Welcome to China, where AI is being pressed into service as handmaiden to an authoritarian government.
For many critics, this seems fraught with danger: an Orwellian world where “Big Brother” is always watching, able to spy on anyone from human rights lawyers to political dissidents and persecuted minorities.
For supporters, it is near utopian: a land where criminals and miscreants are easily weeded out, where no one can cheat, where good behaviour is rewarded and the bad punished.
The latter vision is the Chinese government’s stated aim.
By 2020, a national video surveillance network will be “omnipresent, fully networked, always working and fully controllable”, according to an official paper released in 2015. 

Visitors try out facial-recognition technology at the China Public Security Expo in Shenzhen last year 

The idea of constant monitoring is not unprecedented in China.
Indeed, the name of the government’s 2020 project — xueliang, or “sharp eyes” — is a throwback to a Communist party slogan, “The people have sharp eyes”, referencing the totalitarian ploy of encouraging neighbours to spy on their neighbours.  
Under Mao Zedong, cities were split into grids of socialist work units where access to rations, housing and other benefits was enforced by local spies who reported wayward behaviour from their neighbours.
This system of social control had in turn been built on a model of communal self-policing introduced centuries before, during the Song dynasty.  
Today, the grid system has been revived, manned by an extensive network of volunteer and part-time lookouts.
In more troubled regions such as East Turkestan and Tibet, armed police booths dot street corners. Beijing has about 850,000 “informants” patrolling its streets, according to state media.
Renewing these old-school tactics is a deliberate decision: the government knows that while surveillance technology is advancing rapidly, it is far from perfect. 
Cheetah Mobile is a Chinese company whose subsidiary’s facial-recognition vending machine scored top in an international facial-recognition test last year sponsored by Microsoft Research.
But Fu Sheng, its founder and chief executive, concedes it has a long way to go in terms of spotting faces in crowds.
“The human is an excellent product,” he tells the FT.
“No technology can exceed it.” 
 That may not matter.
When the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham envisaged his panopticon penitentiary in the late 18th century — a circular building with an inspection tower at its centre — the idea was that inmates would never know if they were being observed or not.
This “simple idea in architecture” would offer “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind”, Bentham wrote.
For some analysts looking at the impact of China’s growing surveillance state, any technological shortcomings are incidental.
Like the panopticon itself, it is the fear of being watched that is the most powerful tool of all.

“There’s a wave of enhanced surveillance going on worldwide,” says Rogier Creemers, who studies Chinese governance at Leiden University.
The difference in China is the historical context: “Liberal democratic institutions are based on the notion that state power must lie in the hands of the population. There are things the state is just not supposed to know or do,” he says.
“China starts from a different point of view — that a strong empowered state is necessary, in order to drag the nation forward. In China, surveillance is almost a logical extension of what the state is supposed to do, because the state is supposed to keep people safe.” 
 Feng Xiang is translating the Old Testament book of Jeremiah when the FT visits his office at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.
A prominent legal scholar, he has been studying AI and its implications for jobs, society and capitalism in China.
 His view is a gloomy one.
As he sees it, public surveillance via CCTV cameras is being rapidly supplemented by a range of more insidious data collectors-cum-tracking devices: the smartphones in almost half of all Chinese citizens’ pockets. 
This will eventually create a world devoid of privacy. 
 “It’s not like George Orwell’s 1984, but it’s like a new way of life,” says Feng, noting that even a hike in a scenic park or up a mountain in China today can involve mandatory fingerprinting by police. “In the old days at least you had somewhere you could hide, or where you can do your private things. But now the assumption is people know where you are.”
 Against the backdrop of deepening surveillance, the Chinese government is introducing a “social credit system”.
First described in an official document in 2014 and now being piloted in various forms in several cities, the idea is that people will ultimately be scored based on past behaviour, taking in misdemeanours such as traffic offences and court records. 
 At present, a good financial credit score, handed out by some companies and operating rather like a loyalty programme, can confer benefits such as waived deposits on shared bikes or preferential loan rates.
A poor social credit score, by comparison, could jeopardise a university place, rule out certain jobs and even limit travel: more than 10.5 million people have been barred from buying airline or high-speed train tickets, according to the Supreme Court, since a debtors blacklist was launched. 
 Meanwhile, the technology by which the government can track people is constantly evolving.
Facial recognition is increasingly used to unlock smartphones in China, and thanks to its multiple commercial applications — from allowing easy payment in a grocery store to home security — it has attracted a slew of venture capital from across the world.
One tech banker dismisses facial recognition to the FT as “kindergarten stuff” compared with what will come next. 

Police in Zhengzhou wearing AI-powered smart glasses with facial-recognition capability in April this year 

Some of China’s leading facial-recognition players, for example, are now moving into gait recognition.
Hanwang Technology was an early entrant in the field: it was forced to rethink its fingerprint-recognition technology when the Sars epidemic of 2003 left people in China terrified of physical contact. 
 “We can see the human figure and his gait, so if his cap is pulled down [we] can still recognise him,” explains Liu Changping, president of the Beijing-based company.
The Chinese authorities already have a decent video database to build on, he adds: “If [someone] was put in prison before, there’s video of him walking around.”
 Although China is expanding its surveillance network nationwide, it is in the western region of East Turkestan that the technology is being put to its most extreme use.
The region has been closely policed since 2009, when deadly riots broke out between the 11 million-strong Muslim Uighur population and the minority Han Chinese.
East Turkestan is a vast region, and a relatively poor one, making the multitude of gleaming cameras and sophisticated technology — inside bazaars, schools and even mosques — all the more incongruous amid the expanses of desert and empty roads. 
 Residents were unwilling to talk on the record about their experiences, for fear of repercussions, but it is clear that normal life has changed irrevocably for the Uighurs.
Tahir Hamut, a Uighur poet and film-maker who fled China and is now based in the US, tells the FT about the day he and his wife were ordered to visit their local police station and leave voice recordings, fingerprints, DNA swabs and, of course, high-resolution video footage of their faces making various expressions.
 “I am a director, I make films, and I have seen many kinds of cameras. But I had never seen a camera that strange. They adjusted [the] camera to my eye level. They had me look up and look forward and down, left and right and back,” Hamut recalls.
“They did the same for females . . . they had the women pucker their lips and filmed that. Every step had to be completed perfectly; each expression could not be done too quickly or slowly. If you made a face too fast, the computer would ask you to stop and have you repeat it again. I had to try many times. Many people had to spend an hour to complete this facial filming.” 

Mandatory surveillance software is installed on residents’ mobile phones to scan for Islamic keywords and pictures.
Some people told the FT that anyone found to have shared illicit material would be sent to the region’s extensive network of extralegal detention camps, where hundreds of thousands of Uighurs have already been imprisoned.
Making too many phone calls to or from anywhere outside of East Turkestan can also result in detention.
As a result, Uighurs living in East Turkestan can go years without speaking to family members working in coastal cities like Beijing or Shanghai. 
 Facial recognition, intrusive as it is, is only one of the tools the authorities are using to monitor residents.
Last year police were told to conduct DNA swabs, iris scans and blood tests using a specially designed mobile app and health checks, in order to build a region-wide biometric database. 
 None of this is cheap.
Overall public security spending in the region was Rmb57.95bn ($9.16bn) in 2017, a 10-fold increase over the previous decade.
That has proved a windfall for Chinese security companies.
The government’s investment in public-private partnerships in security has also increased, from $27.3m in 2015 to at least $1.1bn in 2017, based on a tally of existing public tenders and Bank of China data.
Among the largest of these privately funded projects is in East Turkestan’s Shache county, where almost 100 people were killed in 2014 in what state media called a terrorist attack.
The network there will include a video surveillance centre, cloud storage facilities and a drone system. 
 Smaller companies are also getting a slice of the action, especially government-backed start-ups with the right connections.
Meiya Pico, a private company based in the coastal Fujian province, was selected to develop a desktop version of the mobile-surveillance software that East Turkestan residents were forced to download this year.
The software is now installed on the computers of all public companies and academic institutions. Several East Turkestan academics told the FT that authorities are now alerted if illicit files are accessed. 
Meiya Pico’s management frequently meets with high-level officials from the Communist party and the state security apparatus, according to articles and pictures on its website.
Indeed, many Chinese tech companies talk proudly of working to further the government’s aims. “Our business is dictated by the political requirements of our country. ‘Maintaining stability’ is China’s national security priority so East Turkestan really needs our products. The province is our largest client by far,” says Wang Wufei, a sales director at X-Face, a Shenzhen-based company that makes facial-recognition software and hardware.
In June, X-Face won a contract to supply 200 security checkpoints in East Turkestan. 
 Scarier still is what comes next.
A Shenzhen start-up making grenade-bearing drones predicts the East Turkestan authorities will become its largest client.
Another, East Turkestan-based Zhenkong, which specialises in signal-interference technology and has received funding from the East Turkestan border police, sounds a bellicose note.
“The government needs entrepreneurs like us,” says Ge Guangxu, its president.
“There is no second place in war. We need to be prepared.”

Three centuries ago, Jeremy Bentham suggested his panopticon would lead to “morals reformed . . . industry invigorated . . . public burthens lightened”.
China’s facial-technology players sound an eerily similar note.
Megvii and SenseTime, two of the country’s biggest facial-recognition companies, claim their technology has apprehended thousands of criminals — all without the need for armies of people to watch hours and hours of CCTV footage.
Both have attracted billions of dollars in funding, from Chinese and Russian state funds as well as stars of the Chinese tech scene such as Alibaba.

A statue in honour of Mao Zedong next to CCTV cameras in Tiananmen Square, Beijing 

Qi Yin, co-founder and chief executive of Megvii, notes the myriad uses of his company’s Face++ technology, such as in fintech payments.
But for him, surveillance is king: “I believe this will be the largest one in the next three years.” Megvii counts on the government for 40 per cent of its business and describes its work as profiling rather than just identifying.
Someone who regularly appears in video from a subway station but is not an employee could be a thief, says Xie Yinan, a vice-president at Face++, and the information — in the form of code — is sent to the police.
 One of the surveillance industry’s recent — and much publicised — success stories took place at a pop concert in eastern China.
While Jacky Cheung, a Hong Kong pop star (rebranded a “fugitive trapper” by the Chinese media) crooned, cameras were automatically sweeping the audience. 
 Facial-recognition technology picked out four men accused of crimes — including a ticket scalper and a greengrocer accused of a Rmb110,000 potato scam in 2015.
“Smiling as he approached his idol, he did not realise he had already been spotted,” Jiaxing police gloated in a social-media post. 
 Aside from its uses in law enforcement, AI-aided surveillance is also being touted as a tool for industry.
Hanwang Technology, China’s grandfather of facial recognition, has sold its surveillance system to construction sites, enabling managers to track how many hours workers are on site and who is slacking. 
 Another company, LLVision, produces smart sunglasses with built-in facial recognition; these became famous after police in Zhengzhou were photographed wearing them to monitor travellers at train stations earlier this year.
But the company has also been supplying them to manufacturing plants for use in time management and quality control.
 “[Even] if you have 10,000 people checking [machines and workforces] globally, they cannot manage and audit and analyse their checking,” says Fei Wu, chief executive and founder of LLVision.
“Nor can you see that worker A is working faster than worker B, or how you get more people to work like worker A.”
 Wu, a graduate of the UK’s Birmingham University, raised money to produce the sunglasses through crowdfunding and spent three years trialling them.
They have been worn by surgeons in theatre to record or broadcast surgery.
There is even demand among insurers, he says, to use the glasses to recognise cows — farmers have been known to claim insurance on the same deceased bovine twice. 
But, as with so many other Chinese companies in this field, a key client for LLVision is the Public Security Bureau.
Think of it, says Wu.
There are almost 1.4 billion people in China.
“But the PSB is done by a few million people. Medical treatment is done by a few million people. Education is done by a few million people . . . There’s a huge gap to fill, so tech must play a big role.” As the technology to enable mass surveillance and identification becomes more sophisticated, governments across the world will face dilemmas over when and how to use it.
One overseas minister on a trip to China was awed by the technology he was shown, according to Wu, briefly fretting at his country’s strict privacy rules before concluding that in the case of a wanted criminal, everyone would want him to be caught. 
 Germany unleashed a wave of criticism when it began piloting facial recognition to help track and catch suspected terrorists, while the UK’s independent CCTV watchdog wrote to police chiefs last year raising concerns about the increasing use of facial-recognition technology to monitor crowds. Earlier this year, about 40 civil liberties groups wrote to Amazon urging it to halt sales of its Rekognition software, which the company has promoted as offering “real-time face recognition across tens of millions of faces and detection of up to 100 faces in challenging crowded photos”.
The product, which has been sold to a number of US police forces, “poses a grave threat to communities, including people of colour and immigrants”, the campaigners said. 
 Then there are China’s own exports, particularly to developing countries under the “ One Belt One Road” initiative.
One such deal, to Zimbabwe, could highlight another key problem with facial-recognition technology, which learns according to the data it is fed: an MIT and Stanford University study found error rates of 20-34 per cent for determining the gender of darker-skinned women compared with less than 1 per cent for light-skinned men.

 The rise of mass surveillance yields reams of data, and therein lies one of the big dangers for any country going down this road, says Nuala O’Connor, chief executive of the US-based Center for Democracy and Technology.
“The risks are the creation of a pervasive and permanent database of individual images for law enforcement, but then used for other purposes, perhaps by government actors,” she says.
 Some 530 camera and video surveillance patents were filed by Chinese groups last year, according to the research firm CB Insights — more than five times the number applied for in the US.
Unhindered by worries about privacy or individual rights, China’s deepening specialism has attracted global customers and investors.
“The surveillance industry is still in the growth phase,” proclaimed analysts at Jefferies, the New York-based investment bank. 
 Hikvision, a company majority owned by two Chinese state entities whose surveillance systems have been used everywhere from East Turkestan to US military bases, was selected to join the MSCI Emerging Markets Index — a global equity benchmark — in June.
Its Chinese-listed shares have risen nearly fivefold over five years. 
 In Hangzhou, a start-up called Rokid is preparing to release augmented-reality glasses next year. Outside its lakeside office, the company’s founder Mingming Zhu — known as Misa — demonstrates a prototype pair to the FT.
The glasses are aimed at consumers rather than law enforcement: walking into a party, for example, their facial-recognition technology means you could immediately see the names of guests superimposed above their heads; the glasses could potentially also add information from their social-media feeds. 
 They look cool, but there is something spooky about getting the lowdown on people without so much as a “hello”, and Misa sounds a note of caution.
“We are making something happen but we have to be very careful. With AI we have a bright side and a dark side. The most difficult thing you are working on right now might bring you to someplace wrong.”

Apple aids and abets Big Brother in China

Lack of transparency in pulling New York Times app adds to Orwellian nature of move 
By Tom Mitchell in Beijing

Most people old enough to have watched the 1984 Super Bowl will not remember the two American football teams that played in it.
They will probably remember “The Commercial”.
In the annals of the NFL playoffs, it is almost as famous as “The Catch” — an improbable end zone grab by the San Francisco 49ers’ Dwight Clark in the 1982 NFC Championship game.
During a break in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, as the Los Angeles Raiders were running up the score on the Washington Redskins, CBS broadcast an Apple advertisement for its new Macintosh computer.
Directed by Ridley Scott, the 60-second spot featured an athlete hurling a sledgehammer into a giant screen on which Big Brother was hypnotising the masses.
The screen explodes, symbolising Apple’s assault on what it regarded as the bland conformity of the emerging personal computer industry. 
Titled “1984” in honour of George Orwell’s novel of the same name, it is today regarded as one of the best television commercials of all time.
It is also sadly ironic in light of recent events in China, where Apple has decided to aid and abet Big Brother. 
Last week, Apple confirmed it had pulled the New York Times app from its online store in China, where the newspaper’s website has been blocked by censors since 2012.
The app was the only way China-based readers could access New York Times content, including articles translated into Mandarin, without having to use special software that is expensive for the average Chinese internet user and often unreliable.
At first glance, Apple had no choice but to comply with the Chinese government’s directive.
China’s smartphone market, the world’s largest, accounted for 20 per cent of its sales — or $8.8bn — in the third quarter of last year.
The California company’s supply chain is also deeply rooted in China.
When running at full tilt, an iPhone manufacturing facility operated by Foxconn in Zhengzhou, Henan province, can produce 1m handsets every two days.
The Chinese government’s leverage over Apple is enormous.
But so is Apple’s leverage over the Chinese government, should it be brave — and wise — enough to use it. 
At a time when Beijing is simultaneously attempting to spur slowing economic growth and halt capital outflows, it badly needs foreign investment and the jobs it creates. 
The iPhone manufacturing facility in Zhengzhou is a high-tech jewel in a relatively poor, inland province, otherwise blighted by twilight heavy industries and chronic pollution.
Foxconn also recently announced it would spend $8.8bn on a flat-panel display factory in the southern city of Guangzhou.
It may well be that Apple quietly fought the good fight before yielding to the authorities’ demand to pull an app that was allegedly “in violation of local regulations”.
But in confirming the decision, Apple could have at least specified what regulations the New York Times app had supposedly violated.
It did not and the lack of transparency surrounding the affair has only added to the Orwellian nature of Apple’s surrender. 
It is a disappointing outcome for a company whose remarkable run, from 1980s iconoclastic outsider to the world’s most valuable company 30 years later, began with such a bold statement.

Chinese Information Warfare: The Panda That Eats, Shoots, and Leaves

Obama never explained why he refused to take action against China, but he clearly rejected anything that might make the United States appear as a world leader and power.

By Bill Gertz

The year is 2028. 

It is August and the weather is hot. 

People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Col. Sun Kangzhou and three highly trained special operations commandos from the Chengdu military region in southern China are sitting in two vehicles outside a Wal-Mart Supercenter in rural Pennsylvania about 115 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. 

Dressed in jeans, t-shirts, and work boots, the men appear to be just like any construction workers. 

In fact, Colonel Sun and his men are members of the elite Falcon special forces team. 

One of the vehicles is a heavy-duty pickup truck with a trailer carrying a large backhoe. 

The other is a nondescript blue sedan. 

The commandos’ target today is not a military base but something much more strategic.

It has been two weeks since the deadly military confrontation between a Chinese guided-missile destroyer and a U.S. Navy P-8 maritime patrol aircraft thousands of miles away in the South China Sea. 

The 500-foot-long Luyang II missile warship Yinchuan made a fatal error by firing one of its HHQ-9 long-range surface-to-air missiles at the P-8 as it flew some 77 miles away. 

The militarized Boeing 737 had been conducting a routine electronic reconnaissance mission over the sea, something the Chinese communist government in Beijing routinely denounces as a gross violation of sovereignty. 

The Chinese missile was tracked by the P-8’s sensors after a radar alarm signal went off, warning of the incoming attack. 

The advance sensor warning allowed the P-8 pilot to maneuver the jet out of range of the missile. 

The crew watched it fall into the sea. 

Fearing a second missile launch, the pilot ordered the crew to fire back. 

The aircraft bay doors opened and an antiship cruise missile, appropriately named SLAM-ER, for Standoff Land Attack Missile-Expanded Response, took off. 

Minutes later, the missile struck the ship, sinking the vessel and killing most of the crew.

The South China Sea incident, as the military encounter was called, was just the kind of military miscalculation senior American military leaders feared would take place for years, as China’s military forces over the years had built up military forces on disputed islands and gradually claimed the entire strategic waterway as its maritime territory.
Following the South China Sea incident, U.S.-China tensions reached a boiling point with threats and counterthreats, including official Chinese government promises of retaliation. 

In Washington, phone calls to Chinese political leaders went unanswered. 

Beijing streets were filled with thousands of protesters in what were carefully orchestrated government-run demonstrations denouncing America. 

The demonstrators were demanding payback for sinking the warship. 

Tensions were the highest in history and threatened to end the peaceful period since the two major trading partners shelved their ideological differences beginning in the 1980s.
Colonel Sun and his team are now striking back in ways the United States would never suspect. 

The sabotage mission they have embarked on is unlike any conducted before and is one that China’s military over the past two decades has been secretly training to carry out: an information warfare attack on the American electrical power grid.
Chinese military intelligence hackers, after decades of covert cyber intrusions into American industrial control computer networks, have produced a detailed map of the United States’ most critical infrastructure—the electrical power grid stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and north and south between Canada and Mexico.
Unbeknownst to the FBI, CIA, or National Security Agency, the Chinese have discovered a strategic vulnerability in the grid near the commandos’ location. 

The discovery was made by China’s Unit 61398, the famed hacker group targeted in a U.S. federal grand jury indictment more than a decade earlier, which named five of the unit’s PLA officers. 

The officers and their supporters had laughed off the Americans’ legal action as just another ineffective measure by what Beijing believed had become the weakened “paper tiger” that was the United States.
The raid is code-named Operation Duanlu—Operation Short-Circuit—and was approved by the Communist Party of China Central Military Commission a day earlier. 

The commission is the ultimate power in China, operating under the principle espoused by People’s Republic of China founder Mao Zedong, who understood that political power grows from the barrel of a gun.
The two commandos in the truck drive off to a remote stretch of highway several miles away to a point that was previously identified near a large hardwood tree that has grown precariously close to a key local power line. 

The truck drives by the tree, whose roots have been weakened on the side away from the power lines by the commandos weeks earlier. 

The backhoe arm pushes the tree over and into the power lines, disrupting the flow of electricity and shutting down power throughout the area.
At precisely the same time as the tree strikes the power lines, Colonel Sun sits in the car, boots up a laptop computer, and with a few keystrokes activates malicious software that has been planted inside the network of a nearby electrical substation. 

The substation is one of the most modern power centers and is linked to the national grid through “smart grid” technology designed to better automate and operate the U.S. electrical infrastructure. The smart grid technology, however, has been compromised years earlier during a naïve U.S. Energy Department program to cooperate with China on advanced electrical power transmission technology. 

The Chinese cooperated, and they also stole details of the new U.S. grid system and provided them to Chinese military intelligence.
Once in control of the substation’s network, Colonel Sun sets in motion a cascading electrical power failure facilitated by cyberattacks but most important carried out in ways that prevent even the supersecret National Security Agency, America’s premier cyber-intelligence agency, from identifying the Chinese cyberattackers and linking them to Beijing. 

The agency never recovered from the damage to its capabilities caused years earlier by a renegade contractor whose charges of illegal domestic spying led to government restrictions on its activities that ultimately prevent the agency from catching the Chinese before the electrical infrastructure cyberattack. 

For political leaders, the devastating power outage is caused by a tree in Pennsylvania, leading to a cascading power outage around the nation.
The Chinese conducted the perfect covert cyberattack, which cripples the United States, throwing scores of millions of Americans into pre-electricity darkness for months. 

Millions of deaths will ensue before Washington learns of the Chinese military role and, rather than fight back, makes a humiliating surrender to all Beijing’s demands—withdrawal of all U.S. military forces from Asia to areas no farther west than Hawaii, and an end to all military relationships with nations in Asia.

***

The above scenario is fictional. 

Yet the devastation a future information warfare attack would have on critical infrastructures in the United States is a real and growing danger.
No other nation today poses a greater danger to American national security than China, a state engaged in an unprecedented campaign of information warfare using both massive cyberattacks and influence operations aimed at diminishing what Beijing regards as its most important strategic enemy. 

Yet American leaders remain lost in a Cold War political gambit that once saw China as covert ally against the Soviet Union. 

Today the Soviet Union is gone but China remains a nuclear-armed communist dictatorship on the march.
From an information warfare stance, China today has emerged as one of the most powerful and capable threats facing the United States. 

By May 2016 American intelligence agencies had made a startling discovery: Chinese cyber-intelligence services had developed technology and network penetration skills allowing them to control the results of Internet searches conducted on Google’s world-famous search engine. 

By controlling one of the most significant Information Age technologies used in refining and searching the massive ocean of data on the internet, the Chinese are now able to control and influence what millions of users in China see when they search using Google. 

Thus a search for the name Tiananmen—the main square in Beijing, where Chinese troops murdered unarmed prodemocracy protesters in June 1989—can be spoofed by Chinese information warriors into returning results in which the first several pages make no reference to the massacre. 

The breakthrough is similar to the kind of totalitarian control outlined in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four with the creation of a fictional language called Newspeak, which was used to serve the total dominance of the state.
Technically, what China did was a major breakthrough in search engine optimization—the art and science of making sites appear higher or lower in search listings. 

The feat requires a high degree of technical skill to pull off and would require learning the secret algorithms—self-contained, step- by-step computer search operations—used by Google. 

The intelligence suggests that Chinese cyberwarfare researchers had made a quantum leap in capability by actually gaining access to Google secrets and machines and adjusting the algorithms to make sure searches are produced according to Chinese information warfare goals.
Those goals are to promote continued rule by the Communist Party of China and to attack and defeat China’s main enemy: the United States of America. 

Thus Chinese information warriors can continue the lies and deception that China poses no threat, is a peaceful country, does not seek to take over surrounding waterways, and does not abuse human rights, and that its large-scale military buildup is for purely defensive purposes.
The dominant battle space for Chinese information warfare programs is the internet, using a combination of covert and overt means. 

The most visible means of attack can be seen in Chinese media that is used to control the population domestically, and to attack the United States, Japan, and other declared enemies through an international network of state-controlled propaganda outlets, both print and digital, that have proved highly effective in influencing foreign audiences. 

One of the flagship party mouthpieces is China Daily, an English-language newspaper with a global circulation of 900,000 and an estimated 43 million readers online. 

China Central Television, known as CCTV, operates a 24-hour cable news outlet as well to support its information warfare campaigns.
One of the most damaging Chinese cyberattacks against the United States was the theft of federal employee records in the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in 2015. 

That attack took place after an earlier private sector cyber strike against millions of medical records held by the major health-care provider Anthem.
The data theft included the massive loss of 21.5 million records. 

Worse, the OPM delicately announced that among those millions of stolen records was “an incident” affecting background investigation records, among some of the most sensitive information in the government’s possession used in determining eligibility for access to classified information.
It was a security disaster for the millions who held security clearances and were now vulnerable to Chinese intelligence targeting, recruitment, and neutralization. 

A senior U.S. intelligence official briefed on the classified details of the OPM told me that the early technical intelligence analysis of the data theft revealed that it was part of a PLA military hacking operation. 

“It is fair to say this is a Chinese PLA cyberattack,” said the official, adding that the conclusion was based on an analysis of the software operating methods used to gain access to the government network.
The threat was not theoretical. 

In the months after the OPM breach, several former intelligence officials began receiving threatening telephone calls that authorities believe stemmed from the compromised information obtained from OPM background investigation data hacked by the Chinese.
The response by the Obama administration to the Chinese hacking was to ignore it, despite appeals from both national security officials and private security experts that immense damage was being done to American interests and that something needed to be done to stop the attacks.
The White House, however, under Obama had adopted a see-no-evil approach to Chinese hacking that would endure throughout his administration and border on criminal neglect. 

On several occasions, Obama and his key White House aides were presented with proposals for proactive measures against the Chinese designed to send an unmistakable signal to Beijing that the cyberattacks would not be tolerated. 

Intelligence officials revealed to me that beginning in August 2011, a series of policy options were drawn up over three months. 

They included options for conducting counter-cyberattacks against Chinese targets and economic sanctions against key Chinese officials and agencies involved in the cyberattacks. 

Obama rejected all the options as "too disruptive" of U.S.-China economic relations. 

Obama never explained why he refused to take action against China, but he clearly rejected anything that might make the United States appear as a world leader and power.
By the summer of 2015, the group of sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies—including the CIA, DIA, and NSA—that make up what is called the intelligence community weighed in on the growing threat of strategic cyberattacks against the United States.
In their top-secret National Intelligence Estimate, the consensus was that as long as the continued policy of not responding remained in place, the United States would continue to be victimized by increasingly damaging cyber- attacks on both government and private sector networks. 

A strong reaction was essential.
Chinese cyberattacks have been massive and have inflicted extreme damage to U.S. national security.
Among the exotic Chinese information weapons Beijing plans to use in a future conflict are holographic projectors and laser-glaring arms that can present large unusual images in the skies above enemy forces that would simulate hallucinations among troops on the ground, according to one recent translated Chinese military report on the subject.
Traditional propaganda also will be used, including “public opinion propaganda and PSYWAR weapons to execute psychological attacks against the enemy, so as to disrupt the enemy command decision making, disintegrate the enemy troop morale, and shake the enemy’s will to wage war,” according to recently translated Chinese military writings.
Stefan Halper, a Cambridge University professor and editor of Pentagon study on Chinese information warfare, told me the Chinese are far more advanced than the Pentagon in the art of information war.
“We’re in a period where it’s not whose army wins. It’s whose story wins, and the Chinese figured that out very quickly,” Halper says.
“They’re way ahead of us in this. We’re in an age where nuclear weapons are no longer usable. They understand that. We keep nattering on about nuclear capabilities, and shields and so on, but it’s really quite irrelevant.”
As Jake Bebber, a U.S. Cyber Command military officer, put it, the threat from China and its strategy of seeking the destruction of the United States have been misunderstood by the U.S. government and military.
“China seeks to win without fighting, so the real danger is not that America will find itself in a war with China, but that America will find itself the loser without a shot being fired,” he wrote in a report for the Center for International Maritime Security.
In the future, an American president must come to the realization that the decades-long policy of appeasing and accommodating the communist regime in Beijing is not just contrary to American national interests, but is in fact advancing a new strategic threat to free and democratic systems everywhere.
Retired army lieutenant general and former DIA director Michael Flynn, the incoming White House national security adviser, has criticized the failure to understand Information Age threats and respond to them forcefully.
“Until we redefine warfare in the age of information, we will continue to be viciously and dangerously attacked with no consequences for those attackers,” he told me.
“The extraordinary intellectual theft ongoing across the U.S.’s cyber-critical infrastructure has the potential to shut down massive components of our nation’s capabilities, such as health care, energy, and communications systems. This alone should scare the heck out of everyone.”
China today employs strategic information warfare to defeat its main rival: the United States. China’s demands to control social media and the Internet are part of its information warfare against America and must be resisted if free and open societies and the information technology they widely use are to prevail. China remains the most dangerous strategic threat to America—both informationally and militarily.

This is the beginning of the end of Hong Kong

The ‘one country, two systems’ principle and the Sino-British Joint Declaration are now completely shattered and irrelevant

By Claudia Mo

Protesters clash with police at China Liaison Office, where they occupied the road and were pepper sprayed. 

The Chinese government’s decision to bar two elected lawmakers from taking up their seats marks the beginning of the end of Hong Kong.
Samuel Johnson once said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. 

And today China has said that in Hong Kong, patriotism is so vital that it trumps freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of thought, which are all now completely irrelevant.
By preventing the two pro-independence politicians from taking office, the Chinese government has opened the door to disqualify anyone from Hong Kong’s government if they are determined to not be loyal to Beijing.
This sets a very, very dangerous precedent because China has now started to form a habit of ruling Hong Kong by decree. 

Rule of law has become nonexistent in Hong Kong and there is no telling how that’s going to affect the confidence of foreign investors. 

We have to plug the dyke, but there’s nothing Hong Kong people can do and that explains all the fear, anger, resentment and frustration you now see in the city.

Of course, according to the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the power of interpretation is vested in Beijing, but that sort of power should not be used lightly. 

Every policeman has the power to stop you in the street and haul you off to the station if you’re acting suspiciously, but no one expects every policemen to do that lightly. 

Beijing is abusing its power.
Beijing loyalists in Hong Kong’s legislature will say, ‘We need to protect the integrity of the motherland, you’re not allowed to say things like ‘Hong Kong is not China.’’ 

They worry these sentiments will spread to places like Tibet and Xinjiang, western Chinese provinces with large populations of ethnic minorities and a history of chafing under Beijing’s yoke.
The Chinese government never promised “one country, two systems” to Tibet or Xinjiang, but that promise was made to Hong Kong. 

However, that and the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which sought to safeguard freedoms in the former colony, is now completely shattered and has become irrelevant. 

China’s mandarins now behave exactly like the Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. 

Whatever and whenever they find something politically incorrect, they will just change it and make it bend to their will.
The oath-taking saga is merely an excuse to make sure Hong Kong will be reined in. 

Chinese officials needed an issue and pounced at the first opportunity, because in Beijing’s eyes Hong Kong has become uncontrollable and disobedient, especially after the umbrella movement.
This is a very frightening trend that shows Beijing will interpret Hong Kong laws any time it wants. Anytime they feel parts of the Basic Law are not up to their current standards of political correctness, they will change it and tell Hong Kong courts to obey.
This move is not only a blow to our legislature, but also local courts as well. 

What are our judges for if Beijing steps in whenever it wants?
Today Beijing talks about anti-independence, tomorrow it talks about anti-self-determination and the day after it can talk about anti-democracy altogether.
While I have met some young people who have foreign passports who want to stay and fight for Hong Kong, they have a safety net and can leave whenever they want. 

I’m very worried about the young who can’t afford to leave and have no choice but to fight on against extremely difficult odds.
But we still need to fight, because if we don’t, we will definitely never get what we want.