China’s Thug Diplomacy

Calls for China’s thug ambassador to be thrown out of Sweden 

• Gui Congyou lashed out at local media in an interview on the weekend, saying they ‘have a habit of criticising, accusing and smearing China’
• He has been summoned for a meeting at the foreign ministry on Tuesday, and three Swedish parties have called for him to be expelled.

Bloomberg

China's thug diplomat Gui Congyou has repeatedly angered Swedish lawmakers with his remarks since he became China’s ambassador to the country in 2017. 

Sweden’s government has demanded a meeting with the ambassador for China after he lambasted Swedish media.
Thug ambassador Gui Congyou caused a diplomatic furore over the weekend after giving an interview to Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT, in which he said that some local media representatives “have a habit of criticising, accusing and smearing China”.
He went on to compare the relationship between Swedish media and China to one in which “a 48kg weight boxer keeps challenging an 86kg weight boxer to a fight”.
Three parties in Sweden’s parliament have now called for Gui to be thrown out of the Nordic country, adding to tensions ahead of a meeting scheduled to take place with the ambassador at the foreign ministry in Stockholm on Tuesday.
Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde has already ruled out the option of expelling Gui.

But she also made clear Sweden would not accept veiled threats from China.
Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde has ruled out expelling China’s ambassador. 

Relations between the two countries have soured recently over jailed Chinese-born Swedish publisher Gui Minhai, who was honoured last year by the Swedish chapter of PEN International with its annual Tucholsky Prize.
Gui Minhai, who has written several books that are critical of China’s leadership, has been detained since late 2015 by Chinese authorities, who accuse him of crimes including “operating an illegal business”.

Gui Congyou says Minhai is a “lie-fabricator” who “committed serious offences in both China and Sweden”. 

He also said Swedish media “is full of lies” about the case and that the Tucholsky Prize, which was handed out by Sweden’s minister of culture, would result in Chinese “countermeasures”.

Gui Minhai has been detained since late 2015 by Chinese authorities. 

The spat comes amid a more assertive diplomatic stance from China, which dominates global export markets and is one of Sweden’s most important trade partners. 

In neighbouring Norway, the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 to Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo led to a deep-freeze of diplomatic relations that lasted more than half a decade and hurt trade. 

In 2018, Sweden exported goods and services to China worth 67 billion kronor (US$7 billion), making it the Nordic country’s eighth-largest export market.
Gui Congyou, who was appointed ambassador to Sweden in 2017, has repeatedly angered lawmakers in the country with his remarks over the years. 

Commenting on Swedish media’s coverage of Gui Minhai, Gui Congyou in December cited a Chinese proverb: “We treat our friends with fine wine, but we have shotguns for our enemies.”
The ambassador’s latest remarks prompted the Sweden Democrats as well as the Christian Democrats and the Left Party to demand that he be thrown out.

'This Is a Fight.'

Meet Badiucao, the Dissident Cartoonist Taking on the Chinese Government

BY AMY GUNIA / HONG KONG

Chinese cartoonist Badiucao standing behind his artwork titled 'Light' in his studio in Melbourne on May 28, 2019.

A giant tattoo of tiny man standing in front of an oncoming tank covers the entirety of one of artist Badiucao’s upper arms. 

It’s an inspired choice of ink for the Chinese artist who has earned both the fury of the Chinese Communist Party and excited comparisons to Banksy.
Images of the individual known to history as Tank Man flashed around the world on June 5, 1989, when the anonymous Beijing resident, clutching a shopping bag, faced down a column of advancing tanks. 

The night before, troops had rolled into Tiananmen Square and brutally suppressed a weeks-long, peaceful occupation by students and workers calling for political reform. 

Thousands are thought to have died.
“I wanted [the Tank Man tattoo] on my right arm, the arm that I use to draw,” Badiucao (pronounced ba-doo-chow) tells TIME. 

“It’s a personal reminder to keep having courage with my arm, with my hand, and with my pen.”
Born in China in 1986, Badiucao grew up in a society where all mention of the Tiananmen massacre is fanatically censored. 

He was in university in 2007, studying law, when he gathered with friends in his dormitory to watch what they thought was a Taiwanese rom com. 

In turned out that their copy had been doctored by activists intent on spreading awareness of the events of 1989—a few minutes into the film, the movie suddenly cut to a documentary about the massacre.
“It shocked me deeply,” he says. 

For Badiucao, it was the moment that started his politicization. 

He tried to find out information about Tiananmen, but was quickly stymied. 

“If I can’t see the truth about the country, how can I have hope for the country?”
Out of frustration, he started using his artistic talents to create satirical doodles. 

He had loved painting, drawing and photography as a child: now he used those skills to comment on the political situation in China, and dropped his plans to become a lawyer.
Badiucao comes from a family of artists — his grandfather and his great uncle were filmmakers in China during the 1930s and 1940s. 

As the political situation deteriorated in China in the 1950s, they both considered moving to Hong Kong or Taiwan, but ultimately decided to stay in their homeland. 

It’s a decision they paid for with their lives; both were persecuted and killed in an anti-intellectual crackdown, leaving Badiucao’s father orphaned as a young child.
“In my family, there’s a very clear message that to be an artist in China is dangerous,” he says.
So, in 2009, Badiucao packed his bags for Australia, where he got a masters degree and later naturalized. 

Today, the artist’s work encompasses all mediums, from fine to installation to performance to street art, but he says that everything he creates has a common theme.
“The message from me is always about promoting freedom of speech, advocating for human rights.”
He is best known for the cartoons he posts online, which often take aim at the Chinese government, like a drawing of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping hunting for Winnie the Pooh (the fictional creature was banned on the Chinese internet after a meme comparing Xi to Pooh went viral).
“Why are they censoring such an adorable animal?” the artist asks.

A cartoon drawn by Chinese dissident artist Badiucao

The artist, who now lives in Melbourne, shares much of his work on Twitter, which he started using after censors shut down his account on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo more than 30 times. Twitter is banned in China, but despite China’s Great Firewall, he’s sure that his artwork still reaches people at home who access the website via virtual private networks (VPNs).
“More and more websites, terms and photos are becoming ‘sensitive’ each year and have been added to censorship lists maintained by social media companies,” Yaqiu Wang, China Researcher at Human Rights Watch, tells TIME. 

But she says that creative work like Badiucao’s might be able to slip by the censorship apparatus.
“Netizens can still post about political sensitive topics through creative means,” Wang explains, “such as altering the images or replacing critical characters with characters that look alike or with characters that have the same pronunciations.”
For years, and even though he was no longer living in China, Badiucao attempted to conceal his identity, appearing at events in a ski mask. 

He had good reason to be fearful; others critical of the regime have faced severe punishments. 

Ai Wei Wei, who Badiucao worked for as an assistant at one point, has been imprisoned and hit with hefty tax evasion fines that were politically motivated. 

The political cartoonist Jiang Yefei was sentenced to six and a half years in prison last year for “subversion of state power.”
Badiucao finally unmasked himself on the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in June, when a documentary about him called China’s Artful Dissident came out. 

It had become terrifyingly clear to him that Beijing already knew his identity. 

Ahead of a planned exhibition in Hong Kong late last year, he began receiving threats. 

When several of his family members in China were detained by the police, he decided to cancel his trip to Hong Kong and call off his show, which was going to feature artwork like an installation made from neon lights depicting the late Nobel Prize winning Chinese political prisoner Liu Xiaobo.
Despite the danger he faces, Badiucao refuses to stand down, and although he wasn’t able to have his exhibition in Hong Kong, his work is now being featured across the city in another way. 

Since early June — when Hong Kong’s anti-government protests began — the artist has spent much of his time creating artwork to comment on the unrest and the government’s response to it. 

When Hong Kong’s top official, Chief Executive Carrie Lam, wept on television as she spoke about the sacrifices she had made for the city, the artist released a cartoon of the leader with a reptilian arm wiping away what many Hongkongers said were crocodile tears.

A Badicao cartoon depicting Carrie Lam, Hong Kong's Chief Executive
Demonstrations have now become a near daily occurrence in the city, and Badiucao’s art can often be seen at rallies, printed out and turned into posters, or taped onto one of the colorful “Lennon Walls” of protest messages and artwork that have popped up across the city. 

It inspires the protesters to keep fighting.
“Protest art serves the function of not only spreading the necessary political messages but also connecting movement participants’ emotions, which are pivotal in sustaining a movement,” Vivienne Chow, a journalist and cultural critic based in Hong Kong, tells TIME.
Although Badiucao can’t be in Hong Kong alongside the protesters, he is happy that his artwork has finally reached the city, even if it’s via the Internet instead of a gallery. 

As the Hong Kong protests enter their third month, he hopes that his work will continue motivating the protesters to carry on their resistance against what is perceived as Beijing’s tightening grip.
“What’s happening in Hong Kong is not just about Hong Kong, it’s also about every country that values freedom and democracy,” Badiucao says. 

“This is a fight, and it’s a meaningful fight.”

This Chinese Christian Was Charged With Trying to Subvert the State

By Ian Johnson

Wang Yi and his wife, Jiang Rong, at their home in Chengdu, China, last year. They have been detained since December.

BEIJING — In 2006, three Chinese Christians traveled to Washington to ask President George W. Bush for his support in their fight for religious freedom.

One of them had converted to the faith only a few months earlier: Wang Yi, a 33-year-old lawyer from the southwestern city of Chengdu.
But Mr. Wang had already become such a prominent Christian that organizers made sure he went to the White House. 

A nationally known essayist and civil rights lawyer, he would soon found a 500-member church that was independent of government control, along with a seminary, an elementary school and even a group to aid the families of political prisoners — all illegal but which he accomplished by sheer force of will.
Today, Mr. Wang, now 45, is back in the spotlight, this time at the center of an intense crackdown on Christianity. 

His Early Rain Covenant Church and others like it are popular among China’s growing middle class and have resisted government control, testing the ruling Communist Party’s resolve to bring China’s churches to heel.
“He saw an inevitable fight with the government because of it trying to control the churches,” said Enoch Wang, a pastor based in the United States who has met Wang Yi many times. 

“He knows that sooner or later they’ll come for you and so there’s no point in trying to hide.”
That was one reason Wang Yi has in recent years become a vocal critic of Xi Jinping’s moves toward authoritarianism.
Last December, he and 100 church members were detained. 

Although most have been released, Mr. Wang, his wife and 11 others are still being held incommunicado without access to a lawyer.
The charges against Mr. Wang and his wife — inciting to subvert state power — typically result in lengthy prison sentences. 

The same charge was used to sentence Liu Xiaobo, a dissident, to 11 years in prison in 2009. 

He was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and died in custody in 2017.
According to church members who were detained and subsequently released, the police are also investigating Mr. Wang and two junior pastors for economic crimes such as whether they broke Chinese law by publishing books and DVDs without government approval.
Many congregants who have been released have lost their jobs and housing over their church membership. 

Others have been sent back to their hometowns or had their bank accounts frozen. 

Mr. Wang’s 11-year-old son now lives with his 74-year-old grandmother.
The crackdown is part of a broader effort to subdue China’s fast-growing religious groups. 

This includes detaining a million minority Muslims in internment camps in China’s far west, a drive that has drawn international condemnation.
But while Islam is practiced by about 20 million non-Chinese minorities in largely far-off provinces, Protestant Christianity is followed by about 60 million ethnic Chinese in China’s economic heartland. About half worship in churches that raise their own money and run their own affairs.
In the past, many of these were called underground churches, but over the past decade, some have become public megachurches. 

Run by well-educated white-collar professionals in China’s biggest cities, the churches own property and have nationwide alliances — something anathema to the party, which tightly restricts nongovernmental organizations.
Also targeted in the crackdown were the 1,500-member Zion Church in Beijing, which was closed in September, and the Rongguili Church in Guangzhou, which attracted thousands of worshipers each week.
Unlike the old underground churches, these independent churches wanted to be public.
“They want to be the city on the hill,” said Fredrik Fallman, a professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden who studies contemporary Chinese Christianity. 

“But this is the basic fear of the Communist Party — people organized independent of the party in a structured way.”

Pastor Wang, second from right, met President George W. Bush at the White House in 2006 with other prominent Christian activists.

Since Xi took power in 2012, the party has ramped up efforts to promote ideas such as the glory of traditional China and respect for authority.
Christians like Mr. Wang have challenged this top-down ideology. 

Many are interested in socially engaged models of Christianity, especially the Protestant denomination of Calvinism.
“Traditionally, Christians in China were mainly concerned with saving people’s souls,” said Yu Jie, an exiled essayist who helped convert Mr. Wang in 2005. 

“But Wang Yi and others like us, we don’t think the world is hopelessly corrupt. We want to improve it, and so there’s an emphasis on issues like public service and justice.”
Born in 1973, Mr. Wang grew up in the rural Chinese county of Santai. 

He met his wife in elementary school — and wrote in an essay that he was immediately infatuated with her.
He was 16 when the government crushed pro-democracy protesters near Tiananmen Square in Beijing. 

That event shaped his life, pushing him to a career in law and an interest in justice.
All of this meant his church was unusually active in sensitive areas.
It set up a group that helped the families of political prisoners by regularly visiting them and paying their children’s college tuition. 

The church also helped fund a homeless shelter and protested the ubiquitous use of abortion in Chinese family planning.
Mr. Wang, a pastor, also held prayer services for the victims of the June 4, 1989, massacre of the Tiananmen protesters. 

In one widely circulated photo, he is wearing his pastor’s collar and holding a sign that says, “June 4. Pray for the Country.”
He also became a sharp critic of  Xi, especially after presidential term limits were lifted last year, allowing him to serve a third term and to potentially rule for life.
In response, Mr. Wang circulated a message calling Xi a “usurper” who was “not amending the Constitution but destroying it.”
Some in his congregation objected to his overtly political message. 

Two years ago, another pastor left Early Rain to start his own church, criticizing some of Mr. Wang’s statements as stunts. 

But others in the church thought they were necessary.
Mr. Wang’s bluntness made him one of the most polarizing figures in Chinese Christianity. 

When the government began reducing the public face of Christianity in one province by tearing crosses off the steeples of even government-run churches, Mr. Wang expressed no sympathy for the churches affected. 

Instead, he said their pastors were wrong for serving in churches controlled by the government.
Mr. Yu, the writer, said he wondered if his old friend was wise in confronting the government so openly.
“As a pastor, you do have a responsibility to protect your members,” Mr. Yu said. 

“Given the conditions in China, it’s something one can consider.”
But Mr. Wang had long anticipated his detention over the question of state control.

In a 2017 sermon, he asked his congregation what he should do if the government demanded even limited control over their church: Should he agree and avoid persecution, or resist?

He joked that some people might ask him if he couldn’t make a few compromises.
“We’ve got an 80-year-old grandma at home and we just had a child!” he said, anticipating the argument.
But then Mr. Wang argued against this sort of accommodation.
“In this world, in this crooked, depraved and perverse world, how do we demonstrate that we are a group of people who trust in Jesus?” he said. 

“It is through bodily submission, through bodily suffering, that we demonstrate the freedom of our souls.”

Denmark expels two Huawei workers over work permits, as Norway warns of espionage risk

• The Danish expulsions came about as a result of a ‘routine check’ at Huawei’s offices
• Norway’s intelligence service said it was attentive to the close connections between Huawei and the Chinese government

Agence France-Presse

Denmark has ordered the expulsion of two employees of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies because their residence and work permits were not in order, Copenhagen police said Monday.
“On Thursday, the Copenhagen police carried out a routine check of the residence and work permits,” at Huawei’s offices, a Copenhagen police source said.
“In two cases, the people did not have the proper paperwork.”
The pair, who were not identified, were ordered to leave the country, the source said.
The move came on the same day that neighbouring Norway’s intelligence service issued a warning about Huawei, whose ties to Beijing have sparked security concerns.
“One has to be attentive about Huawei as an actor and about the close connections between a commercial actor like Huawei and the Chinese regime,” the head of Norway’s domestic intelligence unit PST, Benedicte Bjornland, said as she presented a national risk assessment report for 2019.
“An actor like Huawei is subject to influence from its home country as long as China has an intelligence law that requires private individuals, entities and companies to cooperate with China,” she said.

In Norway, the main telecoms operators Telenor and Telia – which chose Huawei to supply their 4G networks – are gearing up for the roll-out of 5G.
Several countries including the United States have banned Huawei 5G telecoms equipment for security reasons, on concerns its technology could be a Trojan horse for Beijing’s intrusive security apparatus, as Chinese law requires all firms to cooperate with the intelligence services. 

Norway is considering ways of limiting its exposure.
“As far as we’re concerned, it’s about setting up a regulatory framework to protect what could be considered critical infrastructure,” Norwegian Justice Minister Tor Mikkel Wara said at the same news conference.
“What this regulatory framework would look like, and what it would cover, is what we’re working on right now,” he said.
Norway is treading cautiously on the issue, after China’s angry reaction to the award of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, which trigger lengthy diplomatic and trade repercussions from Beijing’s side.
Huawei, founded by former People’s Liberation Army engineer Ren Zhengfei, has become a leading supplier of the backbone equipment for mobile networks, particularly in developing markets, thanks to its cheaper prices.
Spearheading cutting-edge 5G equipment has also seen it make inroads into developed markets.

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.”

China's Final Solution

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

By James Griffiths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China's "Barbarian" Tourists

Swedish Comedy Show Reminds Chinese ‘Not To Poo Outside Of Historic Buildings’
By Austin Ramzy

The satirical Swedish show, Svenska Nyheter, aired a skit about "barbarian" tourists from China

HONG KONG — Tension between China and Sweden over the treatment of a group of tourists in Stockholm has escalated after a satirical skit depicted Chinese travelers as people who eat dogs and need to be told not to defecate in public.
The incident has led to repeated complaints from Chinese, and calls on Chinese social media for boycotts of Swedish products and travel to the country.
The tensions began earlier this month when a Chinese man and his parents arrived at a hostel in Stockholm after midnight, hours before they could check in for a reservation beginning the next afternoon. 

The Generator hostel told the three they could not stay overnight in the lobby, and called the police when they refused to leave.
Video of the police removing the family, who were protesting their treatment, was posted online. 

At one point the son, surnamed Zeng, shouted, “This is killing!”
The incident has been given extensive coverage by Chinese media outlets. 

The ire from the Chinese increased after the skit was aired last week by the Swedish national broadcaster SVT.
The skit, which ran on the Svenska Nyheter program, was billed as a guide for Chinese tourists to avoid causing problems while abroad. 

It said that pet dogs should not be seen as potential meals, and warned against defecating outside historical monuments. 

The show uploaded a portion of the skit on Youku, a Chinese online video service.
Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called the program “a gross insult to the Chinese” in a statement Monday. 

Thomas Hall, the entertainment director for SVT, said in a statement Monday that the intention of the skit was to mock racism and highlight how “sinophobia” was not considered as much of a concern as other forms of discrimination in Sweden.
SVT’s program director, Jan Helin, said the network would not apologize for the satire, the network’s news division reported.
The tension between China and Sweden over the tourist incident and the skit follows long-running concerns about the fate of a Chinese-born Swedish publisher who was imprisoned in China. 

The publisher, Gui Minhai, had published books from Hong Kong about the Chinese leadership.
He was secretly taken from Thailand to China in 2015 and was later shown on Chinese television admitting to violating publishing rules. 

Such televised confessions by subjects who have been incommunicado with no legal protections are often used by the Chinese authorities to respond to outside criticism over politically sensitive cases.
Mr. Gui spent two years in prison for an alleged drunken-driving fatality in China more than a decade earlier. 

The Chinese authorities said he had been released last year, but his whereabouts were unclear.
Then in January he was snatched from a Chinese train while traveling with Swedish diplomats. Sweden’s foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom, called it a “brutal intervention” that contravened “basic international rules on consular support.”
The diplomatic strains over the tourist incident have reverberated on Chinese social media. 

While some people said the family traveling in Sweden acted inappropriately, the strongest sentiment seemed to be anger at Svenska Nyheter’s depiction of Chinese tourists.
It is unclear whether calls to punish Sweden economically will have any lasting effect. 

Chinese nationals are a small but rapidly growing part of tourism to Sweden. 

Ikea, the Swedish furniture giant, has eight outlets in mainland China, and they are often packed with shoppers.
Previous boycott efforts have had mixed results. 

While Norway’s salmon exports to China plunged after the Nobel Peace Prize was given to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in 2010, bilateral trade hit a peak in 2015. 

The two countries normalized relations in 2016.
Trade also rose between China and South Korea even after the Chinese government stirred up anger over the installation of a missile defense system by the United States in South Korea. 

But some prominent South Korean companies did take a hit, and the supermarket chain Lotte was forced to close dozens of stores in the mainland.
The controversial television skit is likely to fuel lingering resentment in China over the treatment of the family of tourists in Stockholm.
The video of the tourists being removed from the hotel did not show the police using violence against the family. 

Some aspects of Chinese state media reports on the incident were contested by Swedish journalists. The family was not taken to a cemetery, as the Communist Party-owned Global Times reported, but to a metro station called Woodland Cemetery.
Chinese diplomats nevertheless complained about the family’s treatment. 

The Chinese Embassy in Sweden said they had been “brutally abused by the Swedish police.”
The Swedish Prosecution Authority said the Public Prosecution Office determined that the police had not committed a criminal offense and would not open an investigation.

The Manchurian Company

Google Is Handing the Future of the Internet to China
The company has been quietly collaborating with the Chinese government on a new, censored search engine—and abandoning its own ideals in the process.
BY SUZANNE NOSSEL

In May, Google quietly removed “Don’t be evil” from the text of its corporate code of conduct, deleting a catchphrase that had been associated with the company since 2000. 

Amid startling revelations of how social media and internet platforms can enable political interference and new forms of stealthy cyberwarfare, avoiding evil in Silicon Valley has turned out to be harder than it looks. 

In a world where Twitter’s terrorist may be Facebook’s freedom fighter, decisions over what content to algorithmically uplift or suppress can involve agonizing questions of interpretation, intent, and cultural context.
But amid all the moral ambiguity and uncharted terrain of running an internet platform that controls vast swaths of global discourse and reaps commensurate revenues, some dilemmas are more straightforward than others. 

That’s why word of Google’s plans to substantially expand its currently minimal role in the Chinese market—through the potential launch of a censored search engine code-named Dragonfly—has provoked such uproar.
The plans were revealed through documents leaked to the Intercept, which reported that prototypes and negotiations with the Chinese government were far along, laying the groundwork for the service to launch as soon as early 2019. 

In late August, a group of free expression and human rights organizations published a joint letter proclaiming that the launch of a Chinese search application would represent “an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights.” 

Six U.S. senators, led by Marco Rubio and Mark Warner, sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai demanding answers to a series of queries about the company’s intentions. 

Last week, PEN America sent a detailed letter to Google executives spelling out specific human rights issues and subjects that, per Chinese censorship rules, would be treated repressively and deceptively by any information platform operating in the country. 

Google’s own employees are also up in arms: More than 1,400 signed a letter to management saying the floated China project “raise[s] urgent moral and ethical issues” and demanding greater transparency before any plans are implemented.
In demonstrating that a company as mighty as Google was unable to resist the allure of the Chinese market, despite the terms of entry, Beijing will advance its campaign to remake global internet governance on its own terms. 

The utopian notion of an internet that unifies people across borders, fosters the unfettered flow of information, and allows truth and reason to triumph is already under attack on multiple fronts. 

The trade-off, to date, has been that countries insistent on controlling the internet have had to forfeit access to the world’s most powerful and innovative online services in favor of local providers.
If Google is willing to play along with China, governments in Russia, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and elsewhere will have little reason not to fortify their own measures to control content and opinion. 

At a time when even the U.S. president is attacking Google and other platforms as biased and rigged, for the company to signal a new willingness to bow before an overreaching government would represent a grave setback for the rights of citizens to harness digital technology as a tool of empowerment.
Google is no stranger to the Chinese market or to the moral dilemmas it poses. 

Google first began offering a Chinese-language version of its search engine back in 2000. 

Periodic blocking and slowdowns caused by filtering through China’s Great Firewall made the service clunky and unreliable on the mainland. 

In 2006, Google launched a Google.cn service based in China, agreeing to block certain websites in return for being licensed to operate in the country. 

The company promised to tell mainland users when results were being withheld and to avoid offering services that would require housing confidential user data on Chinese servers. 

At the same time, native Chinese internet services such as Baidu and Tencent began to gain steam. Chinese authorities were brazen in utilizing Western online services to surveil and track down dissenters. 

In a notorious 2007 incident, it was revealed that Yahoo had turned over private information about two journalists at the request of Chinese authorities, resulting in 10-year prison sentences for the men and a global uproar at the spectacle of a U.S. company betraying its users to an authoritarian regime. The company settled a lawsuit with the families of the two men, established a $17 million fund to support Chinese dissidents, and faced a congressional investigation in which Rep. Tom Lantos infamously chided, “While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies.”
It’s not just Yahoo. 

In 2008, the Chinese human rights scholar and activist Guo Quan threatened to sue Yahoo and Google for omitting his name from search results inside China. 

He wrote in an open letter: “To make money, Google has become a servile Pekinese dog wagging its tail at the heels of the Chinese Communists.” 

He has been serving a 10-year prison sentence since 2009. 

That same year, the Chinese government punished Google, purportedly for failing to adequately screen out pornography, by limiting its reach and advantaging its leading local search competitor, Baidu.
In January 2010, Google issued a detailed statement declaring that it would stop censoring Chinese search results and was prepared to pull out of the market. 

It announced that the service had been targeted by attacks aimed at hacking the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights defenders and their supporters around the world. 

The corporate release reflected on Google’s aspirations and trajectory in China, saying it had entered the country “in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results.” 

The statement went on to say that four years later, in the face of continued attacks and surveillance, “combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web … we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn. … We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.” 

After failed attempts to negotiate a way to remain in China by redirecting local traffic to Google’s Hong Kong site, the company effectively pulled out of the market later that year, maintaining only a token presence and small staff.
It is not hard to understand why Google’s corporate bosses have grown wistful about the Chinese market. 

According to a September 2017 report by the Boston Consulting Group, with more than 700 million users (nearly as many as the next two biggest markets—India and the United States—combined) and close to $100 billion in revenue, China has become the world’s largest internet market by several measures, behind only the United States in terms of online spending. 

The future upside seems nearly boundless. 

With its vast and upwardly mobile rural population, growth rates in Chinese internet use far outpace any other market, with internet penetration rates still lagging well behind those of other G-20 countries. 

Right behind the U.S. tech giants Google, Amazon, and Facebook, five of the world’s 10 largest internet companies are Chinese, including Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu. 

China is also home to 29 to 40 percent of the world’s “unicorns,” defined as privately held start-ups valued at more than $1 billion. 

For a leading global player to be shut out of an increasingly critical and dynamic market could pose long-term risks for Google’s business.
Given those metrics, it is no surprise that Google’s management has continued to explore ways to re-enter the country. 

For a long time, Western CEOs and politicians expounded the view that deepening commercial and cultural ties between China and the rest of the world would inevitably crack open Beijing’s tight stranglehold on political freedom and freedom of speech. 

This theory conveniently dictated that even if, in the near term, companies such as Google were forced to jettison corporate values in order to take part in the market, that sacrifice could be justified over time since their very presence in China would steadily foster a loosening of constraints. 

In 2005, then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair gushed at the end of a visit to China that “in a country that is developing very fast, where 100 million people now use the internet, and which is going to be the second-largest economy in the world … there is an unstoppable momentum toward greater political freedom.”
Blair was dead wrong. 

Whatever fleeting momentum might once have existed ground to a halt in 2013 with the ascent of Xi Jinping, who ushered in a period of tightening, consolidating repression of free expression, press freedom, political dissent, protest rights, and other civil liberties. 

The premise of short-term trade-offs by Western companies in order to contribute to an inevitable long-range trend toward liberalization might been plausible when Google and others first entered China in the early 2000s. 

But it isn’t now. 

As documented in a March report by PEN America, titled “Forbidden Feeds: Government Controls on Social Media in China,” the mushrooming Chinese internet sector has walled itself off from outside influence. 

Beijing has created a set of rules and operating paradigms that are deeply entrenched, robustly enforced, almost universally adhered to, and scarcely challenged. 

The Chinese are constantly implementing new technological methods of surveillance and tracking, as well as enacting new laws that zip shut channels of dissent and methods of circumvention. 

The PEN America report states: “Those who dare to test the limits of China’s online censorship can face intimidation, job loss, years-long prison sentences, or find themselves forced into exile. … [T]he vague and broad nature of China’s censorship rules means that the ‘red lines’ of posting or conversing on social media are continually drawn and re-drawn, and socially-engaged authors and bloggers who wish to make their voices heard online are faced with difficult choices: take one’s chances in speaking freely, self-censor, withdraw from the conversation, or leave the country.”
For media companies, there is no wiggling free from government dictates. 

“China’s legal system conscripts domestic social media companies to be active participants in the monitoring and censorship of their own users. Chinese companies have no choice but to operate in accordance with the government’s demands. … Within the existing censorship framework, there is simply no way for foreign social media companies to operate in China without becoming active partners in the government’s efforts to silence dissent through censorship, mass surveillance, and the use of criminal charges,” the report adds.
China’s approach is underpinned by a sweeping philosophical conception of the internet, premised on the notion of cybersovereignty, a vision that “rejects the universalism of the internet in favor of the idea that each country has the right to shape and control the internet within its own borders.” 

China is working actively to export this concept for adoption by other authoritarian countries and in United Nations forums. 

This paradigm stands in direct opposition to the conception of an open internet that digital rights activists, human rights organizations, tech leaders, and even the United Nations have long espoused. Yet Western CEOs hungry to enter the Chinese market have begun to moderate their public statements, tacitly eliding the essential distinctions between an internet that is open and one that is government-controlled.

***

Against this backdrop, the leaked plans for Google’s aspiring re-entry into China are troubling. 

The Intercept reported that all websites blocked in China—including the BBC and Wikipedia—will be unavailable via Google search, replaced by an anodyne disclaimer revealing only that “some results may have been removed due to statutory requirements.” 

So-called “sensitive queries” will be placed on a “blacklist,” meaning that people, topics, and photographs banned by the government will be expunged from any appearance via Google. 

Lest anyone argue that, given the dominance of local players, Google’s role in the market may not be significant, the leaked documents make clear that the company is setting out to go head to head with China’s dominant search engine, Baidu. 

While Microsoft’s Bing search engine has operated in China for years without attracting significant criticism, it accounts for a smaller share of the Chinese market—just 1.27 percent—than does Google itself, eight years after effectively closing up shop on the mainland. 

Google is not a bit player anywhere, and doesn’t intend to be one in China.
The ethical dilemmas raised by Google’s plans are sweeping. 

For Chinese individuals who somehow cross the government, the prospect of being erased from existence on Google is a new and dehumanizing digital version of being declared stateless, persona non grata, or otherwise unworthy of the right to simply exist in the country in which you live. 

For ordinary users who take advantage of Google’s services, the government’s right to access personal data—such as search histories—housed on corporate servers would be absolute. 

An appendix to the PEN America report documents the cases of 80 Chinese citizens who have been targeted, detained, or prosecuted for online postings. 

The list includes people such as the writer Wu Yangwei, who was detained and strip-searched after broadcasting a press freedom protest online; the women’s rights activist Su Changlan, who was convicted of “subversion” for posting articles and comments supportive of Hong Kong’s Umbrella protests; and the blogger Duan Xiaowen, who has been imprisoned and tortured for blogging about government corruption. 

Another prominent example of an online dissident was 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, who died of liver cancer last year while serving an 11-year prison sentence in part for his role in drafting the online “Charter 08” petition on freedom and democracy. 

The prospect of Google helping to build cases against such courageous advocates is dire.
While disclaimers and usage agreements may technically put Google users on alert that their searches (and, potentially, emails, texts, and documents depending on the scope of services Google ultimately offers) are all within easy reach of the government, Google’s business model relies on free-flowing exploration and discovery that run counter to the extreme caution that would be required to avoid triggering official scrutiny. 

When users are arrested and prosecuted for promulgating dissenting ideas in personal communications on Google, the company may play a role as a mandated purveyor of essential evidence to enable conviction.
Google’s compliance with Chinese censorship directives will also have an unavoidable, distorting impact on online discourse in the world’s most populous country, obscuring the truth, reifying government-sanctioned orthodoxies, denying history, and furthering the repression of persecuted groups. 

Chinese government organs are estimated to issue thousands of separate censorship directives annually, charging all companies with compliance under threat of severe sanction or shutdown. Discussion of the Tiananmen Square protests, Taiwan’s independence, and the rights of Tibetans is forbidden, and those who violate the strictures face harsh punishment. 

Beyond those three top taboo topics, Google may be required to deny its users vital information about health and safety threats when such information casts a negative light on the state, including vaccinations, pollution, and disease controls. 

Those who use Google to search for information on human rights violations—including the pervasive, forced detainment of hundreds of thousands of ethnic minority residents of China’s East Turkestan colony—will find only whitewashed accounts that provide cover for the government’s abusive campaigns. 

Articles or posts questioning China’s frequent use of forced confessions will be banned, helping to shield this brutal practice from scrutiny. 

Other topics certain to be off-limits include the rights of other ethnic minorities; the mistreatment and premature deaths of Chinese political prisoners; politically motivated charges and show trials of activists, human rights lawyers, and independent scholars; and extrajudicial renderings of Chinese and foreign citizens throughout Asia. 

Whereas Google has positioned itself as a champion of the #MeToo movement, it will be required to censor that and related hashtags in China, denying survivors of sexual assault and abuse a desperately needed voice.
Google executives make the point that all digital platforms must adhere to local law in the countries in which they operate, and that doing so often includes imposing some forms of censorship. 

In Germany, Holocaust denial and other forms of hateful speech are prohibited, for example, with strict penalties for platforms that neglect to remove offending content. 

Internet platforms are profit-making entities, not human rights organizations. 

Like all businesses, they weigh competing considerations and confront circumstances in which professed corporate values bump up against business considerations. 

But after making a principled, high-profile retreat from China years ago to protest the country’s intrusive and coercive policies, Google’s choice to re-enter now will deal a huge victory to Beijing and its campaign to entrench cybersovereignty in the global order. 

As it is, for Chinese internet users imbibing music, celebrity content, recipes, or videos, the fact that the system keeps certain content strictly off-limits is easy to forget—or scarcely noticed in the first place. 

Hundreds of millions of Chinese internet users are inured to a universe where dissent, conflict, and uncomfortable facts don’t exist. 

At least, as of today, they recognize that the systems they utilize are Chinese and are aware that beyond their borders other versions of the internet exist. 

With Google becoming newly available in China under the same terms as existing local services, even the notion that a wider, more open internet may be out there somewhere will fade.

***

The signal sent by the world’s largest internet company acquiescing to Chinese dictates it once eschewed will ratify and legitimize Beijing’s repressive rules. 

Moreover, even if Google officials were somehow to get comfortable with the strictures imposed as the conditions of the company’s initial re-entry into China, the terms of its presence will be forever subject to Chinese government whim. 

Google described its decision to leave China eight years ago as “incredibly hard.” 

With the market having mushroomed since, and having weathered the furor accompanying its possible re-emergence, a second such retreat would be even more painful. 

Those disincentives for exit will afford the Chinese government near boundless leverage: What if it chooses to censor all critical coverage of Chinese policies or those of its allies? 

Or to ban all favorable descriptions of the United States? 

Having crossed what it once described as “red lines,” it may be impossible for Google to set any new ones.
Moreover, once it has re-established its leverage over Google, Beijing is unlikely to confine its demands within its borders. 

This year, China demanded that global airlines begin to list Taiwan as part of China, not just within the mainland, but on all websites, fare listings, and promotions globally. 

Almost all carriers complied immediately. 

With the growth of China’s film market, Hollywood studios now factor in Chinese censors in the production of action movies in order to ensure that the final cuts—slated for global release—pass muster with the country’s minders. 

The result is that major blockbusters are written and filmed to avoid irking Beijing. 

The growing influence of Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes at U.S. universities has resulted in a shadowy hand of censorship being felt at academic conferences and on campuses. 

Once Google’s new Chinese business is up and running, there will be nothing to stop Beijing from seeking to dictate how references to Taiwan are addressed not just in China but throughout the site globally. 

China will demand to shape how protests in Taiwan, Hong Kong, or the mainland are addressed or what happens when people search for dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo or topics such as human rights. 

While Google executives may believe that their company would never accede to such requests outside of China’s borders, there are no guarantees. 

If China gains the leverage to shape how Google presents what Beijing considers to be sensitive topics throughout the rest of the world, it will deal a mortal blow to international principles of freedom of expression and thought.
When facing dubious employees at an internal meeting in mid-August, Google’s Pichai maintained that the company’s plans for China were far from finalized, insisting that many options remained on the table. 

Google is not wrong to keep its eye on China and weigh every angle in analyzing whether the company can enter the market without doing more harm than good. 

But the company’s vast size, visibility, and influence make it impossible to downplay the ill consequences that would result if it turned its back not only on independent thinkers in China but also on the value system that has underpinned an open internet and the rise of Google itself. 

The efficacy of China’s authoritarianism may cause some to privately wonder whether resistance to Beijing’s repression is futile. 

It is tempting to put aside thoughts of beleaguered, isolated Chinese dissidents in the drive to serve millions of ambitious, striving young Chinese, who have every incentive to avoid touching political third rails.
In his speech to Google staff last month, Pichai said: “Stepping back, I genuinely do believe we have a positive impact when we engage around the world, and I don’t see any reason why that would be different in China.” 

But in the rest of the world, Google has brought people newly potent tools for search and information discovery. 

In China, such tools already exist, operating within stringent government constraint. 

All Google can offer to China that is truly new would be the imprimatur of one of the world’s most powerful brands on an unparalleled system of internet censorship and control—a system that is tightening, expanding, and presenting a formidable counterweight to the values and principles that allowed Google to rise and thrive in the first place.

China's State Gangsterism

Barging into your home, threatening your family, or making you disappear: Here's what China does to people who speak out against them

By Alexandra Ma
The Chinese Communist Party has long sought to suppress ideas that could undermine the sweeping authority it has over its 1.4 billion citizens — and the state can go to extreme lengths to maintain its grip.
In just the past few years, the government has attempted to muzzle critics by making them disappear without a trace, ordering people to physically barge into their houses, or locking up those close to critics as a kind of blackmail.
Even leaving China isn't always enough. 

The state has continued to clamp down on dissent by harassing and threatening family members who remain in the country.
Scroll down to see what China can do to people who criticize it.

1. Make you disappear.Li Wenzu holds a photo of her husband, detained human rights lawyer Wang Quanzhang, while protesting in front of the Supreme People's Protectorate in Beijing in July 2017.
Wang Quanzhang, a human rights lawyer who defended political activists in the past, has not been seen since he was taken into detention three years ago.
He was taken away in August 2015 alongside more than 200 lawyers, legal assistants, and activists for government questioning. 

Three years later, he remains the only person in that cohort who still isn't free.
Nobody has heard from him since. 

His lawyers, friends, and family have all tried contacting him, but have consistently been denied access, Radio Free Asia reported.
The lawyer's friends and family, and other lawyers, have tried visiting him, but to no avail. 

His wife, Li Wenzu, has been routinely harassed by Chinese police for protesting Wang's detention, according to the BBC.
His wife recently received a message from a friend saying that Wang was alive and "in reasonable mental and physical health," but was denied further information when she contacted authorities.

2. Physically drag you away so you can't speak to the media.

A woman being taken away by police after she tried sharing footage of an explosion outside the US embassy in Beijing on July 26.
A woman was dragged away by men in plainclothes after she tried to share footage of an explosion outside the US embassy in Beijing with journalists on the ground in July.
As the woman was trying to share images of the scene with journalists, a group of men took her across, claiming it was a "family matter," according to Agence France-Presse reporter Becky Davis who witnessed it.
The woman claimed she didn't know any of the men. 

You can watch the whole scene unfold in this video.
China was trying to cover up news of the explosion. 

Weibo, a popular microblogging platform, reportedly wiped all posts about it in the hours following the incident, before allowing some media coverage of it later on.
While it remains unclear who the men were and why they took the woman, Davis said it is common for plainclothes police to act as "family members" and take people away.
Read more: 'I do not know that man. I didn't do anything!': A woman who tried to share footage of the explosion near Beijing's US Embassy was forced into a car and driven away

3. Put your family under house arrest, even if they haven't been accused of a crime.Portraits of Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia displayed at a protest in Hong Kong in June 2017.
China has kept family members of prominent activists under house arrest to prevent them from traveling abroad and publicly protesting the regime.
In 2010 Liu Xia tried to travel to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of her husband, Liu Xiaobo, a human rights activist who at the time was imprisoned for "inciting subversion" with his protests.
She wasn't allowed to go and was placed under house arrest with 24-hour surveillance. 

She had no access to a cell phone or computer, even though she hadn't been charged with a crime.
She was allowed to leave the house in 2017 to attend the sea burial of her husband after his death from liver cancer, before being sent to the other side of the country by authorities so she wouldn't see memorials held by supporters in Beijing.
Liu Xia was detained in her house for eight years in total. 

She was released to Berlin in July after a sustained lobbying effort from the German government for Liu's release.
Still, she is not completely free: Xia is effectively prevented from appearing in public or speaking to media for fear of reprisal from Beijing. 

She fears that if she does, the government will punish her brother, who remains in Beijing, her friend Tienchi Martin-Liao told The Guardian.

4. Threaten to kill your family and forbid them from leaving China.Anastasia Lin, whose family in China is being punished for her activism against China.

Even when dissidents leave China, they are not safe. 

Chinese expats and exiles have seen family members who remained in China pay the price for their protest.
One example is Chinese-Canadian actress Anastasia Lin, who repeatedly speaks out to criticise China's human rights record.
She told Business Insider earlier this year that her uncles and elderly grandparents had their visas to Hong Kong — a Chinese region that operates under a separate and independent rule of law — revoked in 2016.
Security agents also contacted Lin's father saying that if she continued to speak up, the family "would be persecuted like in the Cultural Revolution" — a bloody ten-year period under Mao Zedong when millions of Chinese people were persecuted, imprisoned, and tortured.
Shawn Zhang, a student in Vancouver who has criticized Xi Jinping online, told Business Insider earlier this year that police incessantly called his parents asking them to take down his posts.
The family members of five journalists with Radio Free Asia — a US-funded media outlet — were also recently detained to stop their reporting on human rights abuses against the Uighur minority in China's East Turkestan colony.
Read more: China uses threats about relatives at home to control and silence expats and exiles abroad

5. Take down your social media posts.

A woman surrounded by Chinese paramilitary police on a smoggy day in Beijing in December 2015.

Chinese tech companies routinely delete social media posts and forbid users from posting keywords used to criticize the government.
Censorship in China has soared under Xi Jinping's presidency, with thousands of censorship directives issued every year.
Posts and keywords are usually only banned for a few hours or a few days until an event or news cycle is over.
In February, popular chat and microblogging platforms WeChat and Weibo banned users from writing posts with the letter N when it was used to criticize a plan allowing Xi to rule without term limits.
Read more: Planting spies, paying people to post on social media, and pretending the news doesn't exist: This is how China tries to distract people from human rights abuses

6. Remove your posts from the internet — and throw you in a psychiatric ward.Dong Yaoqiong live-streaming herself defacing a poster of Xi Jinping in Shanghai, China, on July 4.

In July, Dong Yaoqiong live-streamed herself pouring black ink over a poster of Xi Jinping in Shanghai, while criticizing the Communist Party's "oppressive brain control" over the country.
Hours later, she reported seeing police officers at her door and the video — which can still be seen here— was removed from her social media account.
She has not been seen in public since, although Voice of America and Radio Free Asia reported that she was being held at a psychiatric hospital in her home province of Hunan, citing local activists.

7. Barge into your house to force you off the airwaves.Sun Wenguang in his home in Jinan in August 2013.
Sun Wenguang, a prominent critic of the Chinese government, was forced off air during a live phone interview with Voice of America in early August.
The 83-year-old former economics professor had been arguing that Xi Jinping had his economic priorities wrong, when up to eight policemen barged into his home, and forced him off the line.
His last words before he got cut off were: "Let me tell you, it's illegal for you to come to my home. I have my freedom of speech!" 

You can listen to the audio (in Chinese, but subtitled in English) here.
The father of Dong Yaoqiong, the woman who defaced the poster of Xi, was also interrupted while live-streaming a video calling for his daughter's release.
In the recording, which can be seen here, a man purporting to be a plain-clothed police officer can seen entering the premises, demanding to take Dong's father and his friend away, and ignoring their questions about whether the man had a search warrant.

8. Trap you in your house, and detain people who come to see you.

About 11 days after Sun Wenguang, the dissident Chinese professor, was interrupted on his call, he was found locked inside his own home.
Police had detained him in his house and Sun told two journalists who went to interview him that police forced his wife to tell people he had gone traveling to avoid suspicion.
He added: "We were taken out of our residence for 10 days and stayed at four hotels. Some of the rooms had sealed windows. It was a dark jail. After we were back, they sent four security guys to sleep in our home."
The journalists, from the US government-funded Voice of America, were detained immediately after the interview. 

Their whereabouts are not clear at this point.
Read more: A renegade Chinese professor who was forced off-air while criticizing the government was locked in his apartment and told to make up a story that he left town

9. Forbid you from leaving the country.Ai Weiwei in London in September 2015, two months after his release from China.
Ai Weiwei, the prolific Chinese artist and avid critic of the Chinese government, was blocked from leaving China for four years.
Authorities claimed he was being investigated for various crimes, including pornography, bigamy, and the illicit exchange of foreign currency.
He was detained for 81 days and charged with tax evasion, for which his company was ordered to pay 15 million yuan ($2.4 million). 

His supporters claimed the tax evasion charges were fabricated.
The government took away his passport in 2011 and refused to give it back until 2015. 

He then immediately flew to Berlin, where he now lives.

10. Intercept your protests before they even begin.Police surrounding a group of people preparing to protest in Beijing on August 6.
A group of protesters had been planning a demonstration in Beijing's financial district over lost investments with the country's peer-to-peer lending platforms.
Many of those platforms had shut down due to a recent government crackdown on financial firms, causing investors to lose some tens of thousands of dollars in savings.
But the demonstration, scheduled for 8:30 a.m. on a Monday in front of China's banking regulatory commission, never materialized — because police had already rounded up the protesters and sent them home.
Many demonstrators who arrived in Beijing earlier that day found police waiting for them at their bus and train stations, before sending them away.
Peter Wang, who planned to take part in the protest, told Reuters: "Once the police checked your ID cards and saw your petition materials, they knew you are here looking to protect your [financial] rights. Then they put you on a bus directly."
Becky Davis, AFP's reporter in Beijing, described seeing more than 120 buses parked nearby to take the protesters away.
Other protesters seen traveling from their home towns to Beijing to take part in the demonstration were forced to give their fingerprints and blood samples, and prevented from traveling to the capital, Reuters said.
Activists told The Globe and Mail that the police found out about the protest by monitoring their conversations on WeChat.

Activists say we are now seeing 'human rights violations not seen in decades' in ChinaSurveillance cameras in front of a giant portrait of Mao Zedong in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 2009.

China has a long history of suppressing dissenting views and actions. 

But Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, said the number of people being targeted and the extent of their punishment has worsened under Xi's rule.
"While life for peaceful critics in modern China has never been easy, there have been times of relative latitude," she told Business Insider.
"Eleven's tenure is most certainly not one of those times — not just in the numbers of people being targeted, but in the use of harsh charges and long sentences, and in the state's adoption of rights-gutting laws.
"Add to that the alarming expansion of high-tech surveillance and mass arbitrary detentions across East Turkestan, and you've got a scale of human rights violations we have not seen in decades."
The United Nations recently accused China of holding one million Uighurs in internment camps in the western colony of East Turkestan. 


Does the Chinese Communist Party care that people know what's going on?
Probably not.

Richardson said: "The Chinese communists will keep treating people however badly they want unless the price for doing so is made too high for them — clearly this calculus finally changed recently for them with respect to Liu Xia," referring to the activist's wife who was released to Beijing after eight years of house arrest.
"That's why relentless public and private interventions on behalf of those unjustly treated is critical — to keep driving up the cost of abuses many people inside and outside China find unacceptable," Richardson added.
But there's a catch, says Frances Eve, a researcher at Chinese Human Rights Defenders. 

While the Party has released political activists due to public pressure in the past, it has kept family members in China to make sure the activists don't speak out.
Eve told The Guardian in July: "The Chinese Communist Party has become more immune to international pressure to release activists and let them go overseas, coinciding with its growing economic clout.
"Nowadays, on the rare occasion it does allow an activist to go abroad, it's with the sinister knowledge that their immediate or extended family remains in China and can be used as an effective hostage to stifle their free speech."