English Quisling

Pro-Beijing Refinitiv created filter to block Reuters stories amid Hong Kong protests

By Steve Stecklow

LONDON -- As anti-government demonstrations engulfed Hong Kong in August, Reuters broke a sensitive story: Beijing had rejected a secret proposal by city leader Carrie Lam to meet several of the protesters’ demands in a bid to defuse the unrest.
The story buttressed a main claim of the protesters, that Beijing is intervening deeply in the affairs of the semi-autonomous city. 

A state-run newspaper denounced the story as “fake” and “shameful.” 

The article soon became unavailable in mainland China.
It wasn’t the Chinese government that blocked the story. 

The article was removed by Refinitiv, the financial information provider that distributes Reuters news to investors around the world on Eikon, a trading and analytics platform. 

The article was one of a growing number of stories that Refinitiv – which until last year was owned by Reuters’ parent company, Thomson Reuters Corp – has censored in mainland China under order from Beijing.
Since August, Refinitiv has blocked more than 200 stories about the Hong Kong protests plus numerous other Reuters articles that could cast Beijing in an unfavorable light. 

Internal Refinitiv documents show that over the summer, the company installed an automated filtering system to facilitate the censoring. 

The system included the creation of a new code to attach to some China stories, called “Restricted News.”
As a result, Refinitiv’s customers in China have been denied access to coverage of one of the biggest news events of the year, including two Reuters reports on downgrades of Hong Kong by credit-rating agencies. 

Nearly 100 other news providers available on Eikon in China have also been affected by the filtering.
Censorship in China has been intensifying in recent years under Xi Jinping, and Western businesses have come under rising pressure to block news, speech and products that Beijing sees as politically dangerous. 

Refinitiv generates tens of millions of dollars of annual revenue in China. 

As Reuters reported in June, citing three people familiar with the matter, Refinitiv began the censorship effort earlier this year after a regulator threatened to suspend its Chinese operation.
Refinitiv has joined a lengthening list of greedy companies complying with Chinese demands. 

They include hotel giant Marriott International Inc, which last year temporarily shut down its Chinese websites and apologized for, among other things, listing Taiwan as a separate country in a customer questionnaire. 

Several U.S. airlines also stopped describing Taiwan as non-Chinese territory on their websites. 

The censorship has angered the top news and business executives of Reuters and the directors of the Thomson Reuters Founders Share Co Ltd, an independent body tasked with preserving the news agency’s independence.
Speaking to Reuters journalists on a visit to the Singapore newsroom in October, Kim Williams, the Australian media executive who chairs the body, lashed out at Refinitiv, calling its actions “reprehensible” and a capitulation to “naked political aggression” from Beijing. 

Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler told Reuters journalists in London in November that the censorship was “damaging” the brand. 

“I don’t approve of it,” he said.

David "Quisling" Craig

Refinitiv chief executive David Craig and Thomson Reuters CEO Jim Smith have held multiple talks, as recently as this week, in an effort to resolve the issue, said people familiar with the matter. Smith “was very concerned” upon learning about Craig’s decision to impose the filtering, said a senior Thomson Reuters official. 

It is not clear how close the two are to reaching a solution both sides find agreeable, one of the people said.
“We recognize that the processes that were put in place earlier this year need to be improved and are actively working on enhancements,” Refinitiv spokesman Patrick Meyer said of the filtering system in a statement. 

Refinitiv was formed last year when a consortium led by private equity giant Blackstone purchased a 55% stake in Thomson Reuters’ Financial & Risk business, which included the Eikon terminal business, for about $20 billion and rebranded it.
Refinitiv and Thomson Reuters remain close: Reuters sells news to Eikon, and Thomson Reuters retains a 45% stake in Refinitiv. 

Refinitiv is by far Reuters’ largest client, providing nearly half its revenue. 

As part of the spin-off deal, Refinitiv agreed to make inflation-adjusted annual payments of $325 million to Reuters over 30 years for news – a reliable income stream that is rare in the media business.
The Founders Share directors are particularly incensed. 

They have complained to Thomson Reuters CEO Smith that by suppressing stories, Refinitiv is violating the terms of the deal. 

They also say they fear that Refinitiv, having given in to China’s demands, might start blocking stories in other countries.
Prior to the Blackstone deal, when Thomson Reuters controlled the Eikon business, Reuters stories were not blocked in China on Eikon. 

The Chinese government itself has been blocking access in China to the Reuters website for general readers, Reuters.com, for years, as well as the sites of many other foreign news organizations.
“Let the Chinese decide if they ban something,” said Pascal Lamy, a Founders Share director and former head of the World Trade Organization. 

“But this is not Refinitiv’s or Reuters’ decision.” 

Lamy said the directors believe the terms of the deal require Refinitiv to adhere to Reuters ethical rules on editorial integrity and independence, known as the Trust Principles, which “prevent you from accepting self-censorship.”
In response, Refinitiv said it is “complying with our obligations with respect to the Trust Principles.” It argues that in filtering out political stories for its own customers in China, it is following local laws and regulations as required by its operating license.
Smith, who sits on the boards of both Thomson Reuters and Refinitiv, did not respond to requests for comment.
The London Stock Exchange has agreed to buy Refinitiv for $27 billion in a deal that’s expected to close in the second half of next year. 

It declined to comment.

TIANANMEN TABOO
Reuters reported in June that Refinitiv had blocked several Reuters stories under government pressure. 

The articles were about the 30th anniversary of the bloody suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. 

According to the people with knowledge of the matter, Refinitiv acted after the Cyberspace Administration of China, or CAC, which controls online speech, threatened to suspend the company’s service in China if it didn’t comply.
The CAC did not respond to questions about this article. 

China’s Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment.
On June 3, Reuters editor Adler and Michael Friedenberg, president of Reuters, emailed the staff saying they’d expressed concern to Refinitiv.
Refinitiv promised it would alert the newsroom when it came under pressure from Chinese regulators about Reuters coverage. 

The news agency, as it does when it receives any complaint from individuals and institutions it covers, then would determine if there was any reason to correct a published story.

In late July, Refinitiv asked Reuters to review an article that detailed how a Chinese government representative in Hong Kong had urged local residents to drive off protesters, just a week before a violent clash broke out between pro- and anti-government crowds in the area. 

That story, too, was touchy because it showed Beijing intervening in the internal affairs of Hong Kong.
Despite assurances from Reuters that the story was accurate, Refinitiv removed the headline of the story from Eikon in China, making the item difficult for users to find and view. 

On Aug. 2, Reuters published a story about the blocking of this article as well.

‘STRATEGIC CHINA FILTER’
Refinitiv began ramping up its efforts to purge offending China coverage. 

Internal Refinitiv documents and emails describe how the company over the summer created an automated filtering system -- referred to as the “Strategic China filter” -- to block stories to Eikon users in mainland China.
In July, Refinitiv’s news platform architecture director requested that a new code be created, called “Restricted News,” that could be added to articles. 

He asked that it “should be hidden for all users (internal and external),” according to notes of a conference call on July 17 where the code was discussed. 

One reason was that Refinitiv didn’t want to give its mainland China customers the ability to disable the filtering.
In an email to colleagues, the platform director explained the code: “The flag is to highlight news that requires additional processing, prior to consumption in China.”
The filtering system is designed to block stories for readers in mainland China but allow them to be accessed in other markets. 

It looks for restricted keywords in headlines, such as “Hong Kong” and “protest,” according to a person familiar with the matter.Refinitiv employees also discussed by email whether the “Restricted News” code should be China-specific or “generic,” so it could be used to block stories in other countries in the future. 

The email exchange indicates they opted for a generic code. 

Refinitiv didn’t comment on whether it plans to use the restriction code elsewhere.

Eikon users outside mainland China can retrieve stories about the Hong Kong protests by clicking on headlines, or by searching for keywords or codes. 

For users inside China, however, articles that are blocked bring up this message: “You do not have access to this story.”
Refinitiv’s blocking of protest stories intensified after Aug. 30, when Reuters reported that Beijing had rejected a bid by Hong Kong leader Lam to compromise with the protesters. 

Before that date, all but five of 246 Reuters articles that had run in 2019 containing the words “Hong Kong” and “protest” in the headline were accessible on the mainland. 

By contrast, between Aug. 30 and Nov. 20, Refinitiv blocked nearly four out of five such articles that Reuters filed – 196 out of 251.
The censorship was especially severe between Sept. 4 and Oct. 7, when all 104 Reuters articles containing those words in the headline were blocked. 

At the time, demonstrators were rampaging across the city and police were responding with water cannons and rubber bullets.
Refinitiv also censored potentially market-moving stories that would have been of interest to Refinitiv’s core clientele of financial professionals. 

These included a Sept. 6 report that Fitch Ratings had downgraded Hong Kong’s long-term foreign currency issuer default rating. 

Also blocked were stories on the effect of the protests on stock prices and initial public offerings.
Refinitiv eventually began having employees get involved in the filtering process to prevent the blocking of financial stories, according to a person familiar with the matter. 

Yet the filtering remains inconsistent.
It lets through some stories that China might consider politically taboo, including some articles about the Chinese government’s mass incarceration of Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority in western China. Many other articles on the Uighurs have been blocked.
Besides Reuters articles, the filtering has also blocked one or more stories from 97 other news providers that are available inside China on the Eikon system – including Xinhua, China’s official state-run news agency.

And news relevant to investors is still being censored. 

Eikon users in mainland China couldn’t read this story shortly after it was published. 

It was blocked.

The Vatican's Quisling: Francis Is Playacting Realpolitik

The Vatican’s diplomacy with authoritarian China is based on a century-old fantasy of its worldly power.
BY GEORGE WEIGEL

Xi Jinping's Pope or Vatican's Quisling?

In recent weeks, many observers have been deeply disturbed by what appears to be an impending deal between the Vatican and the People’s Republic of China. 

The agreement would concede a significant role to the Chinese Communist regime in the appointment of Roman Catholic bishops in China, as a step on the path to full diplomatic relations between Beijing and the Holy See. 

More than a few questions have been raised about such an arrangement.
Why would the Vatican trust any agreement cosigned by a totalitarian power, given its previous unhappy experiences with Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Third Reich, both of which systematically violated concordats they concluded with the Holy See?

Why have the Vatican’s diplomats (and Francis himself) dismissed warnings from within China, and from the retired bishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zen, about the negative impact of such a deal on those Chinese Catholics who have remained loyal to Rome rather than to the regime-sponsored Patriotic Catholic Association?
Why would the Church violate its own canon law (according to which “no rights or privileges of election, appointment, presentation, or designation of bishops are conceded to civil authorities”) as a step toward full diplomatic exchange with a regime that routinely violates human rights with great cruelty?
What has motivated the dogged pursuit by Vatican diplomats of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and China over the past four decades?
Answering these questions requires three steps back: first to 1870, then to 1929, and finally to 1962.
In 1870, when the forces of the Italian Risorgimento captured Rome and made it the capital of a unified Italy, the last vestiges of the old Papal States (which once encompassed all of central Italy) disappeared, and Pope Pius IX retired behind the Leonine Wall, styling himself the “Prisoner of the Vatican.” 

The Holy See, which international law and customary diplomatic practice have long recognized as the juridical embodiment of the pope’s role as universal pastor of the Catholic Church, continued to send and receive ambassadors even as it lacked any territory over which it exercised internationally recognized sovereignty. 

But Pius’s four successors tried nonetheless to reach an agreement with the new Italian state that would guarantee the pope’s independence from all earthly powers.
That goal was finally achieved by Pius XI in the 1929 Lateran Accords, which created the independent Vatican City State on a 108-acre tract surrounding St. Peter’s Basilica.
But while the Lateran Accords assured the pope’s freedom to conduct his global ministry without interference from another sovereign, the reduction of the pope’s sovereign territory to the Vatican City microstate underscored that, in the future, Holy See diplomacy would have to reply on the exercise of papal moral authority, not the usual tangible instruments of state power.
The largely Italian Vatican diplomatic service never quite grasped this implication of the Lateran Accords, though. 

Rather, it seems these foreign-policy professionals continued to think that the new Holy See/Vatican City was something like the old Holy See/Papal States: a third-tier European power. 

And as Italy itself became a less serious actor in world politics, it was natural for Italian papal diplomats to seek some significant role for “Rome” on the global stage, working the system as other third-tier powers did.
Then came October 1962. 

It has been insufficiently remarked that the opening of the Second Vatican Council — the four-year meeting of all the world’s Catholic bishops that became the most important event in Catholic history since the Reformation and set the foundations for Catholicism’s current role as a major institutional promoter and defender of human rights — coincided precisely with the Cuban missile crisis. 

Pope John XXIII and the Vatican diplomatic corps were sufficiently shaken by the possibility of a nuclear war that might have ended Vatican II before it got underway that they devised a profound redirection of Vatican diplomacy toward the European communist world. 

This became known as Vatican Ostpolitik, and its principal agent was the career Vatican diplomat Archbishop Agostino Casaroli.
Casaroli’s Ostpolitik, which unfolded during the pontificate of Pope Paul VI (1963-1978), aimed at finding a modus non moriendi, a “way of not dying” (as Casaroli frequently put it), for the Catholic Church behind the Iron Curtain. 

In order to appoint bishops, who could ordain priests and thus maintain the Church’s sacramental or spiritual life under atheist regimes, the Vatican ended the anti-communist rhetoric that had characterized its public diplomacy in the 1950s, removed senior churchmen who refused to concede anything to communist governments (like Hungary’s Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty and Czechoslovakia’s Cardinal Joseph Beran), discouraged any public role for exiled Catholic leaders like Ukrainian Cardinal Josyf Slipyj, urged underground Catholic clergy and laity to cease their resistance to their local communist regimes, and diligently sought various forms of agreements with communist governments. 

One premise informing this remarkable volte-face was that the Vatican’s once-harsh anti-communist rhetoric had been at least partially to blame for communist regimes’ persecution of the Church; the theory was that if the Vatican showed itself more accommodating (the buzzword was “dialogue”), such mellowness would be reciprocated.
It wasn’t. 

And by any objective measure, Casaroli’s Ostpolitik was a failure — and in some instances a disaster.
In Rome, it led to the deep penetration of the Vatican by East bloc intelligence services, a counterintelligence debacle (now fully documented from original sources) that put the Church’s diplomats in an even weaker position in negotiations with their communist counterparts, who frequently knew the Vatican game plan thanks to the work of well-placed moles and informers inside the Roman Curia.
In the countries that were to be the putative beneficiaries of the Ostpolitik, there were no improvements of consequence as a result of Casaroli’s shuttle diplomacy, and in fact more damage was done. 

The Hungarian Catholic hierarchy became what amounted to a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hungarian state, which of course meant the Hungarian communist party. 

Repression increased in what was then Czechoslovakia, with regime-friendly faux-Catholic organizations achieving public prominence while underground bishops and priests worked as janitors, window-washers, and elevator repairmen, conducting clandestine ministries at night. 

The Ostpolitik did nothing to improve the situation of Catholics in the Soviet Union: The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church remained the world’s largest illegal religious community, and Lithuanian Catholic resistance leaders found themselves doing hard time in gulag labor camps.
The Ostpolitik had no serious effect in Poland, however, where the wily primate Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski and the charismatic archbishop of Krakow, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, nodded politely to visiting Vatican diplomats but continued to confront the Polish communist authorities with vigorous public protests when they thought that necessary to preserve the Church’s tenaciously held free space in a communist state. 

That strategy, in turn, strengthened the most vigorous national Catholic community in the Soviet sphere, even as the Vatican Ostpolitik was weakening local Churches in other Warsaw Pact countries.
When Wojtyla was elected pope in 1978, taking the name John Paul II, the Casaroli Ostpolitik was quietly buried — although the shrewd John Paul appointed Casaroli his secretary of state, thus creating something of a good cop-bad cop strategy. 

Casaroli would continue his shuttle diplomacy in east-central Europe. 

But that, John Paul understood, would provide him useful cover as he, using the megaphone of the papacy, boldly challenged communist human rights violations in his pilgrimages all over the world, most notably on his first papal visit to Poland in June 1979, and then in October of that year from the rostrum of the General Assembly of the United Nations. 

That two-track strategy was instrumental in igniting the revolution of conscience that shaped the Revolutions of 1989 and the self-liberation of east-central Europe from communism.
Yet the lessons that ought to have been learned from all this — that the Ostpolitik was a failure because the appeasement of communist and other authoritarian regimes never works, and that the only real authority the Holy See and the pope have in world politics today is moral authority — were not learned by the heirs of Agostino Casaroli, many of whom are influential figures in Vatican diplomacy today. 

At Rome’s Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, the Ostpolitik is still presented to future Vatican diplomats as a model of success, and at no level of the Vatican Secretariat of State has there been an intellectual reckoning with the evidence demonstrating the failures of Casaroli’s diplomacy.
The election of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires as Francis in March 2013 has not changed the “Casarolian” cast of mind dominating Vatican diplomacy; quite the opposite, in fact. Bergoglio brought to the papacy a record of resistance to the authoritarian Kirchner regime in his native Argentina, with which he had tangled on several issues. 

But he had no experience of world politics, and from the outset of his pontificate, Francis made it clear that he believed that “dialogue,” perhaps his favorite word when speaking of international affairs, is possible with the likes of Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, Nicolás Maduro, and Raúl Castro.
Thus under Francis, the accommodating Casaroli approach to Vatican diplomacy has made a great comeback, while the world-changing achievements of John Paul II, the result of charismatic moral leadership, seem to be virtually ignored by the Church’s senior diplomats. 

And one result of that comeback is the new démarche with China, which the senior Italians among the Vatican’s diplomats regard as a rising world power with whom they must be a “player.”
John Paul and his successor, Benedict XVI, could have had the deal now being proposed by Beijing, or something very similar to it. 

Both declined, because they knew it was not a step toward greater freedom for the Catholic Church in China but a step toward greater Catholic subservience to the Chinese Communist regime, a betrayal of persecuted Catholics throughout the People’s Republic of China, and an impediment to future evangelism in China. 

Both may also have weighed the fact that any formal Vatican diplomatic exchange with Beijing would necessitate ending diplomatic relations with Taiwan, the first Chinese democracy in history — and that would be a bad signal to the rest of the world about the Vatican’s commitment to Catholicism’s own social doctrine.
Vatican diplomacy today rests on shaky and insecure foundations — and on Italianate fantasies that the 21st-century Holy See can act internationally as if this were 1815, when Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, Pope Pius VII’s chief diplomat, was a significant actor at the Congress of Vienna. 

Those shaky foundations and that fantasy are not a prescription for diplomatic success. 

They are, rather, a prescription for both diplomatic and ecclesiastical failure, which is the likely result of the deal now being bruited between the Vatican and China.