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

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

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

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

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

They were then faced with the bombers flying over London. 

That’s exactly the same thing happening right now. 

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

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

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

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

Chinazism

China is compared to the Nazis in dire warning to Australia and the world

• MP Andrew Hastie says Australia will face its biggest security test over next decade
• Compared China to Nazi Germany
• Said Australia ignored role of ideology in communist China's push for influence

By AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS

Federal Liberal MP Andrew Hastie

The chair of parliament's powerful security and intelligence committee has warned Australia against underestimating China, pointing to the experience of Europe in the face of an aggressive Nazi Germany.
Federal Liberal MP Andrew Hastie says Australia will face its biggest democratic, economic and security test over the next decade as China and the US compete for global dominance.
The West once believed economic liberalisation would naturally lead to China becoming a democracy, just as the French believed steel and concrete forts would guard against Germany in 1940.

The chair of parliament's powerful security and intelligence committee has warned Australia against underestimating China, pointing to the experience of Europe in the face of an aggressive Nazi Germany (pictured is Chinese dictator Xi inspecting PLA Navy honour guard)

The West once believed economic liberalisation would naturally lead to China becoming a democracy, just as the French believed steel and concrete forts would guard against Germany in 1940 (pictured is Adolf Hitler and Gestapo commander Heinrich Himmler inspecting guard of honour parade)

'But their thinking failed catastrophically. The French had failed to appreciate the evolution of mobile warfare,' Mr Hastie wrote in an opinion piece published on Thursday in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
'Like the French, Australia has failed to see how mobile our authoritarian neighbour has become.'
'What Scott Morrison needs to do, is he needs to come out and say whether this is the government's view or whether there are divisions in the government,' he said.
Mr Hastie, a former SAS captain, said Australia had ignored the role of ideology in communist China's push for influence in the Indo-Pacific region.
'We keep using our own categories to understand its actions, such as its motivations for building ports and roads, rather than those used by the Chinese Communist Party,' he said.
He noted western commentators once believed Josef Stalin's Soviet Russia was the 'rational actions of a realist great power'.
'We must be intellectually honest and take the Chinese leadership at its word,' he wrote of Xi Jinping's speeches referencing Marxist-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

Australia faces a delicate diplomatic balancing act with the US, the nation's closest strategic ally, and major trade partner China, going toe-to-toe in a trade war.
Mr Hastie said it was impossible to forsake America or disengage from China.
'The next decade will test our democratic values, our economy, our alliances and our security like no other time in Australian history,' the Liberal backbencher wrote.
Mr Hastie says 'choices will be made for us' if Australia fails to grasp the challenges across politics, education, civil society and business.
'Our sovereignty, our freedoms, will be diminished.'

Chinazism

Under Xi Jinping, China is seeking to control not just the bodies, but also the minds of its inhabitants.

By Michael Clarke

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has proclaimed that his signature “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) that seeks to link the Chinese economy with the major continental and maritime zones of the Eurasian continent will “benefit people across the whole world,” as it will be based on the “Silk Road spirit” of “peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness.”

The lived reality of the people of China's vast East Turkestan colony—the hub of three of the six “economic corridors” at the heart of BRI—could not be further from this idyll.
Rather, China has constructed a dystopic vision of governance in East Turkestan to rival that of any science-fiction blockbuster.
East Turkestan’s geopolitical position at the eastern edge of the Islamic and Turkic-speaking world and the ethno-cultural distinctiveness of its largely Turkic-Muslim ethnic groups such as the Uyghur have long constituted a challenge to Chinese authorities.
The Chinese Communist Party has since 1949 pursued a strategy of tight political, social and cultural control to integrate East Turkestan and its people into the People’s Republic of China (PRC). 

This has periodically stimulated violent opposition from the Uyghur population who chafe against demographic dilution, political marginalization and continued state interference in the practice of religion.
“Stability” in East Turkestan is however now a major strategic imperative for the Party, driven by periodic violent attacks in, or connected to, East Turkestan by Uyghurs that Beijing blames on an externally-based organization, the “Turkestan Islamic Party” (TIP) and the region’s role as hub of key elements of the BRI.
This obsession with “stability” in East Turkestan has seen the regional government’s expenditure on public security balloon, with provincial spending on public security in 2017 amounting to approximately $9.1 billion —a 92 percent increase on such spending in 2016.
Much of this expenditure has been absorbed by the development of a pervasive, hi-tech “security state” in the region, including: use of facial recognition and iris scanners at checkpoints, train stations and gas stations; collection of biometric data for passports; and mandatory apps to cleanse smartphones of potentially subversive material.
This system is not only reliant on technology but also significant manpower to monitor, analyse and respond to the data it collects. 

Its rollout has thus coincided with the recruitment of an estimated 90,000 new public security personnel in the region.
This is consistent with the Party’s move toward tech-driven ‘social management’ throughout the rest of China. 

However, in East Turkestan it has become defined by a racialized conception of “threat” in which the Uyghur population is conceived of as a “virtual biological threat to the body of society.”
From government officials describing Uyghur “extremism” as a “tumour” to equating religious observance with a virus , the Party’s discourse frames key elements of Uyghur identity as pathologies to be “cured.”
The Party’s “cure” for such pathologies is a programme of mass internment of Uyghurs — up to one million people according to some estimates — in prison-like “re-education” centres based on analysis of the data harvested through its system of “predictive policing.”
Here, receiving a phone call from a relative studying or travelling overseas or attendance at a mosque result in an almost immediate visit from local police and indefinite detention in a “re-education” centre.

The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century—Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy—while divergent ideologically were united by their drive to make a “total claim” on the individual. 

“They were not content,” as historian Ian Kershaw reminds us , “simply to use repression as means of control, but sought to mobilize behind an exclusive ideology to ‘educate’ people into becoming committed believers, to claim them soul as well as body.”
The goal of China’s “re-education” of Uyghurs, according to a East Turkestan CCP Youth League official, is to “treat and cleanse the virus [of “extremism”] from their brain” and “restore their normal mind” so that they may “return to a healthy ideological state of mind.”
Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, China is thus arguably pursuing a “total claim” on the bodies and minds of the Uyghur people via a twenty-first century, technologically-enabled version of this—a “totalitarianism 2.0.”

Criminal Nation

Malala condemns China over death of fellow Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo
By Paul Carsten

Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai 
ABUJA -- Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai condemned China's treatment of her fellow peace prize-winner Liu Xiaobo following his death of liver cancer in custody last week.
Liu, 61, was jailed for 11 years in 2009 for "inciting subversion of state power" after he helped write a petition known as "Charter 08" calling for sweeping political reforms in China.
Liu's incarceration meant he was unable to collect his Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, and he became the second winner of it to die in state custody, the first being Carl von Ossietzky in Germany in 1938. Liu's wife Liu Xia remains under effective house arrest.
"I condemn any government who denies people's freedom," Yousafzai, 20, a Pakistani education activist who came to prominence when a Taliban gunman shot her in the head in 2012, told Reuters at a school in the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri.
"I'm hoping that people will learn from what he (Liu) did and join together and fight for freedom, fight for people's rights and fight for equality," she said.
Yousafzai's trip to Nigeria was aimed at raising awareness of education problems in Africa's most populous country where over 10.5 million children are out of school, more than anywhere else in the world.

Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai speaks during an exclusive interview with Reuters in Maiduguri, Nigeria.

The issue is felt more severely in the mainly Muslim north. 

The south has over the decades seen greater investment and a system of schools started by Christian pastors affiliated with British colonists.
Nigeria needs to "increase spending on education and they need to make it public, the rate of spending planned and how much they're spending," said Yousafzai. 

Since her first trip to Nigeria three years ago, the proportion of the budget allocated to education has dropped from above 10 percent to around 6 percent, she said.
The eight-year Islamist insurgency of Boko Haram, whose name roughly means "Western education is forbidden," has compounded problems with education in Nigeria's north.
The militants have destroyed hundreds of schools and uprooted millions, forcing them into refugee camps which often lack the most basic necessities, let alone decent schooling.
On Monday, Malala called on Nigeria's acting president, Yemi Osinbajo, to call a state of emergency for the country's education.
"Nigeria in the north has been suffering through conflicts as well and extremism," she said.
"So it is important in that sense as well that they prioritize education in order to protect the future."

The death of Liu Xiaobo marks dark times for dissent in China

By Ishaan Tharoor 

It has been a week since the death of Liu Xiaobo, the famed Chinese dissident who was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Peace while imprisoned.
Late last month, Chinese officials announced that the prominent writer, who had been detained since 2009, was being moved to a hospital to receive treatment for late-stage liver cancer. 

Despite the entreaties of his family, friends and foreign governments, Beijing refused to release him to seek care overseas. 

He died July 13, becoming only the second Nobel laureate to perish in custody (Carl von Ossietzky, an anti-Nazi pacifist, died in 1938).
In a move that sparked the ire of Chinese activists, authorities apparently ensured that his ashes were buried at sea and not on Chinese soil. 

Acclaimed artist Ai Weiwei, who lives in Germany, said the move was aimed at denying Liu’s supporters “a physical memorial site” and that it “showed brutal society can be.”
“It is a play,” said Ai. 

“Sad but real.”

Liu Xiaobo’s wife, Liu Xia, prays as his ashes are buried at sea off the coast of Dalian, China, on July 15.

Indeed, for China’s authoritarian leadership, what Liu represents is all too real. 

The poet and essayist was admired by many among the Chinese diaspora and the international community. 

“He fought for freedom and democracy for more than 30 years, becoming a monument to morality and justice and a source of inspiration,” Wen Kejian, a fellow writer, told my colleague Emily Rauhala.
“Liu Xiaobo was a representative of ideas that resonate with millions of people all over the world, even in China. These ideas cannot be imprisoned and will never die,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, in a statement.
Ironically Liu’s legacy and oeuvre are more visible abroad than at home, where even Internet searches of his name are censored and tributes to his life were hurriedly erased from social media.
But what further underscores the tragedy of his life was the nature of his politics. 

Liu was not calling for radical change or an overthrow of the regime. 

The putative reason for his 2009 imprisonment was his co-authorship of “Charter 08,” a manifesto calling for reform and greater freedom of expression within the Chinese system.
“Inevitably, some in the West will think that honoring Liu Xiaobo is an act of offense against China (or, more practically, a potential risk to relationships with the government). That’s a mistake,” wrote Evan Osnos, author of the National Book Award-winning “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China.” 

“Honoring Liu is an act of dedication to China at its best. He was, to the end, unwilling to renounce his principled commitment to China’s constitution — to the freedoms enshrined in law but unprotected in practice.”
Osnos also offered an anecdote from when he met Liu: “If you never had a chance to meet him, it was easy to misread him as a cynic. On the contrary, in person, Liu could be unnervingly optimistic. On that day when I met him, in 2007, at a teahouse near his apartment, he told me that as China became stronger and more connected to the world, he imagined that the ‘current regime might become more confident.’ He went on, ‘It might become milder, more flexible, more open.’ In that prediction, he was, for now, wrong, and he paid with his life.”

People sign their names at a memorial event for late Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo in Hong Kong on July 19. 

“Although the regime of the post-Mao era is still a dictatorship, it is no longer fanatical but rather a rational dictatorship that has become increasingly adept at calculating its interests,” Liu once said in 2006, in another illustration of his optimism about the capacity for change.
“In calculating those interests, the regime has decided that it was safer to turn Liu into a dead martyr than to allow his ideas to spread unchallenged,” wrote Jamil Anderlini of the Financial Times. 

“This conclusion is probably correct in the short term. Thanks to the party’s efforts, the vast majority of Chinese people have never heard of Liu and most of those who have heard of him think he was a hopeless troublemaker. His death will not spark a revolution.”

Under Xi Jinping, the invasive, authoritarian control of the ruling government has expanded, while the space for civil society has contracted. 

Dissent and critical expression have been chilled, and it seems increasingly clear that Chinese officials aren’t bothered by censure from abroad.
“What is really important isn’t so much that the party is tightening its control — that is happening anyway,” noted Steve Tsang of the Chatham House think tank in London. 

“What is more important is that the party is not that worried about how the Liu Xiaobo case affects international opinion.” 

A budding global hegemon, China can withstand the clucking of outside powers over its human rights record.
It also doesn’t help that there is an American president who has explicitly argued against fighting for universal values and rights elsewhere. 

On the day of Liu’s death, Trump happened to hail Xi as a “terrific” and “talented” leader.
“It is especially shameful that Donald Trump praised Xi Jinping at the moment when Liu Xiaobo was dying,” said Teng Biao, a Chinese human rights lawyer living in exile in the United States. 

“Xi Jinping is not a respectable leader. He is a brutal dictator.”
“Western countries have adopted a policy of appeasement,” said Hu Jia, a prominent dissident who served more than three years in prison, to the New York Times. 

“The Communist Party has the resources to whip whomever they want.”
Hu, who still faces regular surveillance from police, offered an ominous warning: “Some have turned to believe in violent revolution. It makes people feel the door to a peaceful transition has closed.”

China's growing intolerance for dissent will come at a high price

By pushing the Hong Kong opposition out of the legislature and persecuting Liu Xiaobo, Beijing has set in motion a new era of resistance

By Jason Y Ng

People attend a candlelight march for the late Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo in Hong Kong. 

On Thursday evening, Chinese dissident and political prisoner Liu Xiaobo died from liver cancer in a Shenyang Hospital. 

Liu was, as the Western press sharply pointed out, the first Nobel Peace Prize laureate to die in custody since Carl von Ossietzky did in Nazi Germany in 1938. 

Supporters the world over mourned the death of a man who lived and died a hero. 

The only crime he ever committed was penning a proposal that maps out a bloodless path for his country to democratise.
Then on Friday afternoon, Beijing’s long arm stretched across the border and reached into Hong Kong’s courtroom. 

Bound by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee’s decision on oath-taking etiquettes, the Hong Kong High Court ruled to unseat four democratically-elected opposition lawmakers, including Nathan Law, the youngest person ever to be elected to the legislature. 

The only infraction the four ever committed was straying from their oaths during the swearing-in ceremony to voice their desire for their city to democratise.
The two news stories, less than 24 hours apart, share a chilling symmetry. 

They underscore the Chinese government’s growing intolerance for dissent on both the mainland and the territories it controls.
But Beijing’s tightening grip comes at a cost. 

In Hong Kong, Liu’s death has rekindled an anti-mainland sentiment that has been smouldering for years. 

To the seven million citizens who watched Liu’s slow death in equal parts horror and grief, any remaining pretence that modern China is a benevolent paternal state that has moved beyond a brutal response to political debate has been shattered once and for all. 

And all current and future attempts by Beijing to win over Hong Kong people, especially the younger generations, are doomed to fail. 

The indelible images of a skin-and-bone dissident on his deathbed or of that famous empty chair in the Oslo City Hall have been seared into their collective mind. 

China has lost Hong Kong forever.
Similarly, the removal of four pro-democracy lawmakers is not without consequence for Beijing. 

By reinterpreting the oath-taking provisions in the Basic Law, the Chinese government has sidestepped the judiciary in Hong Kong and dealt another blow to the city’s rule of law. 

Each time the NPCSC rewrites the rules and overrides local judges, Hong Kong’s independent judiciary—the bedrock of its economic success—means a bit less. 

With each heavy-handed attempt to squash the opposition, “one country, two systems”—the framework of happy coexistence for Hong Kong that Xi Jinping is fond of parading in front of world leaders and hopes that Taiwan will one day embrace—looks a little more like a broken promise.
What’s more, the loss of four pro-democracy seats has removed the checks and balances in Hong Kong’s bicameral legislature – the Legislative Council – which comprises the democratically-elected Geographical Constituencies and the undemocratic Functional Constituencies stacked with pro-business special interest lobbyists. 

The unseating of the foursome has cost the opposition its majority in the Geographical Constituencies, which means that any unwanted bill proposed by a pro-Beijing lawmaker will sail pass both houses.
One of the first things that the pro-Beijing camp plans on doing is amend the voting procedures in the legislature to put an end to filibusters. 

Without the ability to block that amendment, the opposition will see its only effective weapon against the government taken away. 

That means there will be nothing to stop the Hong Kong government from pushing through Beijing’s political agenda for Hong Kong, from the passing of a highly unpopular anti-subversion law to the approval of multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects for great economic integration with the mainland.
All that will work in Beijing’s favour in the short run, but the headache won’t be far behind. 

A legislature that acts with complete impunity will further embitter the population and destabilize Hong Kong. 

By pushing the opposition out of the legislature and back onto the streets, Beijing may have inadvertently set in motion a new era of resistance.
The same ingredients that ignited the Occupy Movement three years ago will once again bubble to the surface, pushing the city toward a political movement of a larger scale and with more far-reaching repercussions. 

None of that is in Xi’s interest, considering that the senior Chinese leadership is already mired in factional infighting and an increasingly ungovernable Hong Kong will hurt the strongman image that Xi has so carefully crafted for himself.
What separates a skilled autocrat from the rest of the mad dictators is his ability to judge the difference between going too far and just far enough. 

Control may be the Chinese Communist Party’s best substitute for legitimacy and a necessary condition for self-perpetuation, but how much control is too much continues to confound –and may one day trip up – Xi’s leadership. 

What happened to Liu Xiaobo and the four ousted lawmakers in Hong Kong suggests that Beijing is now dangerously close to overstepping that line. 

The price for misjudging the situation will be high, and while most of it will be borne by mainland dissidents and the citizens of Hong Kong, it may pack enough punch to upset the ever-delicate balance in the house of cards.

Kowtowing to China’s despots

Paying The Price Of Chinese Business ‘Partners’

Byy Larry M. Elkin

A portrait of Liu Xiaobo at the Nobel Peace Center in 2010. 

Two stories juxtaposed in the news late last week show just what it means to have China as a business “partner.”
First came word that famous dissident and Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo died in a Chinese prison hospital, where he was suffering from liver cancer, at age 61. 

Both a German doctor and an American doctor recently examined Liu and pronounced him fit to travel abroad for treatment, which many Western governments urged China to allow. 

The Chinese government disputed the Western doctors’ findings, however, declaring Liu too ill to travel.
Beijing was never going to let Liu go, regardless of his state of health. 

His prompt death will surely be cited by his captors as evidence that they were right about his condition. 

Hardly anyone outside China will take such a claim at face value, when Liu’s death was so conveniently timed to remove a problem for the regime.
Liu had been in custody since late 2008 for his part in drafting Charter 08, a call for democratic, multi-party elections and the recognition of Chinese citizens’ human and civil rights. 

Not only did China refuse to let Liu accept his Nobel Prize in 2010, but the government did its utmost to ensure any Chinese invitee could not attend. 

It also threatened to retaliate against governments, including Norway, that it viewed as celebrating Liu’s recognition. 

Even before Charter 08, Liu had been an active voice for governmental reform since the Tiananmen protests of 1989. 

As The Wall Street Journal observed, Liu was the first Nobel Peace laureate to die in custody since 1938, when Carl von Ossietzky died in a prison hospital in Nazi Germany.
The second news item also appeared in The Wall Street Journal. 

The news outlet reported that Western companies face a major obstacle to introducing self-driving cars in China: The country won’t let them map its roads. 

Chinese mapping is done under licenses issued only to Chinese companies, 13 of them to date. 

Even Google Maps, ubiquitous in so much of the world, is restricted to use on desktop computers – not especially handy for turn-by-turn directions. 

These restrictions are in place for national security reasons, according to the government.
In contrast to the assertions about Liu’s medical condition, I am inclined to take this one at face value – just not in the way China presumably intends. 

Advanced weapons used by America and its allies have all the precise guidance they need; they don’t require Waze to find the places they need to go. 

On the other hand, if China’s citizens ever rise up against the country’s self-appointed and self-perpetuating ruling class, we can be sure that one of the government’s first counterrevolutionary steps will be to sharply restrict travel – and to turn off the mapping software that could guide everything from flash mobs to rogue soldiers driving tanks.
National security, indeed.
So, under the circumstances, will Western car companies walk away from the Chinese market? 

Not a chance. 

Robert Bosch GmbH, a German auto supplier, has already announced a partnership with Chinese mapping firms, according to the Journal. 

South Korea’s Hyundai Motors has also said it will work with one of China’s licensed mappers, and GM may not be far behind. 

Volvo may likewise follow, although that prominent brand with Swedish roots is now owned by a Chinese conglomerate. 

If history is any indication, few in the autonomous car industry will walk away from the huge consumer market that China represents, regardless of the draconian restrictions involved.
Like virtually every other Western industry – other than defense – over the past three decades, the makers of self-driving cars will kowtow to China’s rulers and take whatever crumbs happen to drop off the country’s economic banquet table. 

The shame this choice entails will only be briefly highlighted by the death in captivity of the fearless Nobel Prize laureate who devoted his entire adult life to the liberation of his nation, currently held captive by itself.

Free the Nobel laureate’s wife now

China jailed the author over an appeal for peaceful democratic reform. It is too late to help him – but governments must speak out for his wife, Liu Xia, and other political prisoners
The Guardian

The late Liu Xiaobo with his wife Liu Xia. ‘The author was exceptional in his intelligence, sustained courage and humanity.’ 

Not since Nazi Germany had a country allowed a Nobel peace laureate to die in custody – until today. 

Liu Xiaobo was still held over his peaceful call for democratic reform, made almost nine years ago, when he died in hospital. 

That is China’s shame. 

But it is also a stain on the world’s conscience. 

Germany, to its credit, worked hard for his release; the US, Canada and EU said he should be allowed to leave China for treatment. 

But the only leader to make a personal, public call for his freedom was Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan. 

The Norwegian Nobel committee is right to lament the “belated, hesitant” reactions to news of his terminal illness. 

Governments weighed trade opportunities while Chinese citizens pressed his case at personal risk.
It is too late now. 

The empty chair left at the Nobel ceremony will never be occupied. 

The tardy and muted international response did not only let Mr Liu down. 

The author was exceptional in his intelligence, sustained courage and humanity: in his final statement to his trial, he insisted he had no enemies and no hatred. 

Mr Liu was an inspiration to those fighting for rights in China – even if the authorities erased him from the broader consciousness. 

But he also represented the lawyers, dissidents and campaigners who together carved out a greater space for expression and activism. 

His punitive sentence for “inciting subversion” in 2008 was a turning point. 

The ensuing crackdown has seen many more people detained and jailed and their families too have suffered. 

The international community has in general offered minimal protest, letting Beijing carry on without even the cost of embarrassment. 

China may throw the odd bone in return; it does not guarantee long-term nourishment. 

Indeed, the swift submission on human rights has told it that countries will cave on issues when enough pressure is applied.
Mr Liu died under guard; his wife is not yet free. 

Liu Xia has committed no crime – even according to Beijing. 

But she has been held under house arrest since her husband’s Nobel win, devastating her physical and mental health. 

The prospects that authorities plan to leave her in this invisible prison to avoid further publicity are high. 

Rex Tillerson, the US secretary of state, has already urged China to let her go. 

The rest of the world should join him.

Criminal Nation

Liu Xiaobo: The man China couldn't erase
By Carrie Gracie

Activist Liu Xiaobo has died after spending eight years in prison

"There is nothing criminal in anything I have done but I have no complaints."
So stated Liu Xiaobo in court in 2009, and in the eight long prison years between then and now, he refused to recant his commitment to democracy. 

No wonder China's leaders are as afraid of him in death as they were in life.
The Chinese Communist Party was once a party of conviction, with martyrs prepared to die for their cause, but it's had nearly 70 years in power to become an ossified and cynical establishment. 

It imprisons those who demand their constitutional rights, bans all mention of them at home and uses its economic might abroad to exact silence from foreign governments. 

Under Xi Jinping, China has pursued this repression with great vigour and success. 

Liu Xiaobo is a rare defeat.
Beijing's problem began in 2010 when he won a Nobel Peace Prize. 

That immediately catapulted Liu Xiaobo into an international A-list of those imprisoned for their beliefs, alongside Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and Carl von Ossietzky.
The last in that list may be unfamiliar to some, but to Beijing he's a particularly uncomfortable parallel. 

Carl von Ossietzky was a German pacifist who won the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize while incarcerated in a concentration camp.

Hitler would not allow a member of the laureate's family to collect the award on his behalf.
Liu Xiaobo was also serving a prison sentence for subversion when he won the peace prize. 

Beijing would not let his wife collect the award and instead placed her under house arrest. 

Liu Xiaobo was represented at the 2010 award ceremony in Oslo by an empty chair and the comparisons began between 21st Century China and 1930s Germany.

While in jail, Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. An empty chair was left for him at the ceremony
Strict censorship is another shared feature of both cases. 

Mention of Carl von Ossietzky's 1935 Nobel peace prize was banned in Nazi Germany and the same is true of Liu Xiaobo's award in China today. 

For a time China even banned the search term "empty chair". 

So he has been an embarrassment to China internationally, but at home few Chinese are aware of him. 

Even as foreign doctors contradicted the Chinese hospital on his fitness to travel, and Hong Kong saw vigils demanding his release, blanket censorship in mainland China kept the public largely ignorant of the dying Nobel laureate in their midst.
Selective amnesia is state policy in China and from Liu Xiaobo's imprisonment until his death, the government worked hard to erase his memory. 

To make it hard for family and friends to visit, he was jailed nearly 400 miles from home. 

His wife Liu Xia was shrouded in surveillance so suffocating that she gradually fell victim to mental and physical ill health. 

Beijing punished the Norwegian government to the point where Oslo now shrinks from comment on Chinese human rights or Liu Xiaobo's Nobel prize.

Liu Xiaobo (left) is seen here with his wife Liu Xia (right) in this undated photo

But in death as in life, Liu Xiaobo has refused to be erased. 

The video footage of the dying man which China released outside the country was clearly intended to prove to the world that everything was done to give him a comfortable death. 

The unintended consequence is to make him a martyr for China's downtrodden democracy movement and to deliver a new parallel with the Nobel Peace Prize of 1930s Germany.
Liu Xiaobo was granted medical parole only in the terminal stage of his illness, and even in hospital he was under close guard with friends denied access to his bedside. 

Nearly 80 years ago, Carl von Ossietzky also died in hospital under prison guard after medical treatment came too late to save him.
Comparisons with the human rights record and propaganda efforts of Nazi Germany are particularly dismaying for Beijing after a period in which it feels it has successfully legitimised its one-party state on the world stage. 

At the G20 summit in Hamburg earlier this month, no world leader publicly challenged Xi over Liu Xiaobo's treatment. 

With China increasingly powerful abroad and punitive at home, there are few voices raised on behalf of its political dissidents.
Liu Xiaobo was not always a dissident. 

An outspoken academic with a promising career and a passport to travel, until 1989 he'd led a charmed life. 

The Tiananmen Square democracy movement that year was the fork in his path.

After the massacre on June 4th, the costs of defying the Party were tragically clear to all.
Most of his contemporaries, and of the generations which followed, judged those costs too high. 

They chose life, liberty and a stake in the system.
Liu Xiaobo was one of the few who took the other fork. 

He stayed true to the ideals of 1989 for the rest of his life, renouncing first his opportunities to leave China, and then, repeatedly, his liberty. 

Even in recent years, his lawyers said he had turned down the offer of freedom in exchange for a confession of guilt.
'If you want to enter hell, don't complain of the dark....' Liu Xiaobo once wrote. 

And in the statement from his trial which was read at his Nobel award ceremony alongside his empty chair, Liu Xiaobo said he felt no ill will towards his jailers and hoped to transcend his personal experience.
No wonder such a man seemed dangerous to Beijing. 

For a jealous ruling party, an outsider with conviction is an affront, and those who cannot be bought or intimidated are mortal enemies.
But for Liu Xiaobo the struggle is over. 

The image of his empty deathbed will now haunt China like the image of his empty chair. 

And while Beijing continues to intimidate, persecute and punish those who follow his lead, it will not erase the memory of its Nobel prize winner any more than Nazi Germany erased its shame 81 years ago.

Beijing’s Nobel Shame

Trump should call on China to let a dying hero travel to the U.S. for care
The Washington Post

Protesters wear masks of Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo. 

FOR TWO decades, Liu Xiaobo has been one of China’s foremost advocates of human rights and peaceful democratic reform. 

For that, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 — but he has also suffered unrelenting persecution and mistreatment by his own government. 

Now comes the ultimate abuse: Having failed to treat Mr. Liu for liver cancer until it was too late to do so, the regime of Xi Jinping has transferred him to a hospital in the city of Shenyang — so that it cannot be said that he died in prison. 

This cosmetic act of clemency should not stop the democratic world, led by the United States, from holding China up for condemnation for its unconscionable treatment of one of its most important freedom fighters.
Mr. Liu was a leader during the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. But his most important contribution was his work in authoring Charter 08, a petition calling for freedom of association, an independent legal system, separation of powers and other elements of liberal governance that would allow China to “join the mainstream of civilized nations.” 

Mr. Liu was the first of more than 10,000 people who signed; for that he was arrested and, in 2009, sentenced to 11 years in prison. 

His wife, Liu Xia, was illegally placed under house arrest; anyone else who supported him was subjected to persecution.
When the Nobel Committee chose Mr. Liu, China became the first regime since Nazi Germany to prevent an honoree or their family members from traveling to Oslo. 

Since then, it has worked relentlessly to silence support for him abroad as well as at home, with lamentable success. 

Barack Obama spoke out only once on behalf of Mr. Liu, and many other Western leaders were altogether silent — intimidated by the punishments the regime inflicted on Norway after the Nobel was awarded. 

Since taking power in 2012, Xi has greatly increased repression of liberal voices, including not just democracy advocates but also liberal academics, journalists and lawyers who defend those subjected to abuses of power. 

He seems intent on establishing that China will never embrace the freedoms that Mr. Liu fought for.
On Tuesday , the State Department joined human rights activists in calling on China to allow Mr. Liu freedom to travel to a place of his own choosing for medical care. 

According to a U.S.-based advocate, Jared Genser, the 61-year-old dissident has asked authorities to allow him and his wife to travel to the United States.
But the U.S. statement came from a low-level official, the spokeswoman of the embassy in Beijing, when it ought to be delivered directly by President Trump to Xi. 
Mr. Liu’s case is a signal example of why China lacks the moral capacity to exercise global leadership. 
By advocating for this dying hero of human rights, Mr. Trump could show that the United States still lives by different values.