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 War on Law: Five Names to Listen for at the EU-China Summit

EU Should Call for Release of Activists Unjustly Imprisoned
By Lotte Leicht

Federica Mogherini (L), High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, and China's State Councilor Yang Jiechi attend a joint news conference at Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China April 19, 2017. 

Torture, wrongful imprisonment, restrictions on everything from peaceful expression, to religious practice, to the number of children you can have: these are some of the most persistent human rights abuses in China today. 

Under the dictator Xi Jinping, whose senior officials arrive in Brussels this week for the European Union-China Summit, courageous human rights defenders, lawyers and academics in China have sustained an extraordinary body blow.
The Chinese government’s treatment of five people is emblematic of all that is wrong in China today:
Scholar and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo is serving an 11-year sentence for “inciting subversion” in response to his calls for democratic reform.
Ethnic Uighur economist Ilham Tohti is serving a life sentence for having urged dialogue between different ethnic groups, particularly in the predominantly Muslim area of Xinjiang.
Tibetan language rights advocate Tashi Wangchuk awaits trial for telling his story to the New York Times.
Lawyer Wang Quanzhang, detained since July 2015, is facing subversion charges for his work defending in court members of religious minorities.
Women’s rights activist Su Changlan was convicted on subversion charges in retaliation for her work defending victims of domestic violence.
The EU has pledged to “throw its full weight behind advocates of liberty, democracy and human rights” and to “raise human rights issues” including “at the highest level.” 

If that’s the case, the summit is an ideal opportunity for the EU’s highest officials to explicitly call for these people’s release. 

After all, the EU’s human rights pledges will only be meaningful if applied in real situations, with determination and conviction.
The EU has acknowledged that human rights improvements in China are key to the future of their bilateral relationship, and calling for the freedom of those unjustly imprisoned is an obvious place to start. 

That the summit falls just ahead of the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre – an event that galvanized China’s contemporary human rights community – places a responsibility on EU leaders to call for accountability from Beijing. 

The EU should demonstrate the strength and solidarity that won it the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize by insisting on the release of the 2010 winner – and all others unjustly imprisoned by Beijing.

A human rights activist, a secret prison and a tale from Xi Jinping's new China

Peter Dahlin spent 23 days in a ‘black prison’ in Beijing, where he was deprived of sleep and questioned with a ‘communication enhancement’ machine. Here he tells the story of his incarceration and expulsion from China
By Tom Phillips in Chiang Mai

Some nights Peter Dahlin says he tucks a “big-ass knife” under his bed in case intruders come for him as he dozes; others he cannot sleep at all.
“They’ve kidnapped people several times here before,” says the 36-year-old Swedish human rights activist, chain-smoking Marlboro cigarettes as he remembers the 23 days he spent in secret detention in China.
It has been a year since Dahlin became one of the first foreign victims of Xi Jinping’s war on dissent.
On 3 January 2016 Chinese security agents encircled the activist’s Beijing home and spirited him and his Chinese girlfriend, Pan Jinling, off to a covert interrogation centre he now calls “The Residence”.
Months have now passed but the memories of that spell in custody have proved hard to shake. 

“These facilities are built to break you,” the campaigner says during a seven-hour interview at a home in Chiang Mai, a city in northern Thailand where he and Pan have lived since he was deported from China amid one of the most severe crackdowns in decades.
The story of Peter Dahlin, told here in unprecedented detail, offers a rare and troubling snapshot of Xi Jinping’s China, where an unforgiving offensive against civil society is now unfolding.

Peter Dahlin speaks on camera in a still from video released by China Central Television. 

In the four years since Xi became China’s top leader in November 2012, feminist campaigners, journalists, academics, bloggers, publishers, human rights lawyers and even foreign non-governmental organisation workers such as Dahlin have all been targeted in a coordinated Communist party push to prevent the development of organised opposition to the regime.
The political situation, which some call the most dire since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, has deteriorated so fast under the current leadership that one scholar claims Xi has built “the perfect dictatorship” – an ever-more repressive system that nevertheless avoids major international censure.
During his stint behind bars the Swedish activist says he was given a firsthand taste of the harshness with which that battle for control is being waged. 

He was blindfolded and confined to a cell with expressionless guards who refused to engage in conversation but noted down his every move; was for days deprived of access to his embassy, the right to exercise or even to sunlight; was forced to endure exhausting late-night interrogation sessions conducted by hectoring inquisitors determined to paint him as a spy; subjected to a lie-detection machine intended to extract information about his work; and suffered periods of sleep deprivation intended to weaken his resolve.
Dahlin, who until his detention had run a Beijing-based rights organisation called the Chinese Urgent Action Working Group or China Action, said during the seven years he lived and worked as an activist in China friends and diplomats had always considered him an optimist about the country’s future.
Those illusions have been shattered by the things he witnessed in the lead-up to his incarceration at The Residence.
“For the first time I am not optimistic any more,” he says. 

“This is how China will operate for the next 20 years. Now it’s a new hard line.”

The underground activist
Peter Dahlin arrived in China from his native Sweden in the summer of 2004, a 23-year-old political science graduate keen for a taste of the world outside a lecture theatre.
“I was just there to backpack and learn,” recalls Dahlin, whose travels took him through Beijing, Shanghai and Xiamen, the south-eastern port where Xi served as vice-mayor in the 1980s.
Three years later he returned, throwing himself into human rights work alongside Hou Wenzhou, a Chinese activist he had met online.
Dahlin’s first project was a report denouncing the existence of an illegal nationwide network of secret detention facilities called “black jails”. 

It identified eight such prisons in Beijing.
About the same time Dahlin met Wang Quanzhang, a crusading civil rights lawyer known for his defence of China’s downtrodden and outspoken criticism of the government. 

Together, in 2009, they founded China Action, a non-profit advocacy group dedicated to supporting human rights defenders in the one-party state.
Increasingly draconian laws make it effectively impossible for such non-governmental rights organisations to operate legally in mainland China. 

Instead the pair registered their group as a company in Hong Kong and decided they would strive to operate in the shadows so as to avoid attracting attention.
“I decided we had a shot at doing something quite special,” Dahlin says of the group’s creation. 

The Swedish activist says he was partly driven by “middle-class guilt” but also a conviction that people should be the masters of their own destinies.
“I’ve never been particularly political,” he says. 

“I’ve never paid attention to Tibet and these issues very much. 

“I just believe in the idea of self-determination.
“Whether it is Scottish people, the Catalan people, the Tibetan people or even just a village somewhere in China; that the people there should be the ones that have an influence, whether it is by forming an organisation, a labour union, their own media, whatever.”
Guided by those beliefs, Dahlin set about building China Action into a small but potent force for social change.
With grants from institutions that included the European Union, the National Endowment For Democracy and the Norwegian Human Rights Fund it ran training sessions for human rights lawyers and investigative journalists and offered support to young Chinese campaigners traumatised by run-ins with the security services.
Just as China Action was ramping up its operations, however, the human rights situation in China took a turn for the worse.

The crackdown beginsMany accuse Xi of initiating the current chill but some trace it back to around 2008 when anti-government protests rocked Tibet just as China was preparing to host the Summer Olympics.
Deadly riots the following year in China’s far west left authorities even more convinced that it was time to step up their controls over society.
In Beijing Dahlin sought to fly under the radar, moving into a one-bedroom studio hidden in the alleys around the 13th century Drum Tower and disguising his trueline of work with a series of legends.
He told some he was the son of a wealthy Swedish businessman who was in China researching the electric bicycle industry; to others he introduced himself as a legal researcher or expat English teacher, “just to see the way the conversation dies”.
“Even my close friends didn’t know about my work,” he says. 

“They knew I did something to do with an NGO and human rights but that is about it. I always operated with a cover.”
A self-professed history geek, Dahlin adopted the surname Beckenridge – an allusion to John C Breckinridge, the vice-president of the Confederate states – but he maintained his first name. 

“Any effective cover story has to have 90% truth and then 10% misleading … you always keep your first name to avoid mistakes.”
For a while the subterfuge paid off. 

Dahlin’s visas were renewed by public security authorities, despite the fact that his human rights work was officially illegal, and he sensed that police were happy monitoring the group from afar.
“We’re not a political organisation,” he says by way of explanation for why his group was able to keep operating for so long. 

“We don’t deal with democracy issues.”

Xi Jinping turned his country into a ‘controlocracy’. 

But by 2013, the year Xi became president, the climate had begun to change. 

First came a sweeping crackdown on China’s already tightly controlled internet; outspoken bloggers were detained and publicly humiliated in an attemp to curb the “wanton defamation” of the Communist party.
Next came the obliteration of the New Citizens’ Movement, a collective of liberal scholars and activists who had been pushing for moderate social and political change. 

The group’s leader, a respected lawyer called Xu Zhiyong, was jailed for four years. 

Another prominent member fled into exile in the US.
It was the start of a concerted clampdown on civil society designed to extinguish organised opposition to Beijing at a time when China’s fading economic boom threatened to undermine its political legitimacy.
Stein Ringen, a political scientist whose new book, The Perfect Dictatorship, examines the dramatic political tightening, said he believed that after a period of “steely and foresightful analysis”, China’s top leaders had concluded they must tighten their grip over the population now that the era of mega-economic growth was over.
“There is an absolute determination that the regime will persist and continue. That is number one for everything: the perpetuation of the regime.”
Ringen, an emeritus professor at Oxford University, said that in just a few years Xi had turned his country into a “controlocracy” where an ingenious mix of hard and soft measures were used to ensure the party’s rule went unchallenged.
“It is so smooth that in some respects it doesn’t even look dictatorial,” he said. 

“Most dictatorships are very clumsy, raw, inelegant. But this one isn’t. They have it sussed.”

The arrest
As Xi’s crackdown unfolded up and down the country, agents from China’s ministry of state security, a mysterious spy agency tasked with snuffing out political threats to the party, began to move against Dahlin’s group, trying to recruit his assistant as a mole.
“We were well aware that from at least 2013 state security and not just police were actively monitoring us,” he says.
Dahlin began taking extra precautions, memorising the night flights out of Beijing and filling a brown leather satchel with bundles of cash, hard drives, documents, a change of clothes and his passport.
In the summer of 2015 the situation deteriorated further still. 

A sweeping police offensive against Chinese human rights lawyers – the so-called 709 crackdown – began, sucking in “a very large number” of people directly linked to China Action, including Dahlin’s friend and partner Wang, who was seized near the eastern city of Jinan on 3 August.
With those detentions Dahlin sensed the noose was tightening. 

“Maybe there will be no more China,” he remembers thinking.
Then on 3 January 2016 the end came. 

At about 2pm Dahlin realised China Action was under intense scrutiny when a Chinese associate reported being summoned to meet security officials who had grilled him about a Swedish man named Peter.
Shortly before 4pm the Swede sat down at his computer and began to type an email to a group of close colleagues with the subject line: “Situation”.
“There now seems to be an active investigation,” he wrote, adding that he planned to flee the country and might not return to China “if things get bad”.
“Clear all papers, USBs, computers, phones, pads etc,” Dahlin instructed his workmates. 

“These things need to be done ASAP.”
Dahlin spent the afternoon tying up loose ends: shredding documents, saying goodbye to his girlfriend Pan, and taking care of the couple’s cats, Poopi and Dou Gonggong.
He booked a seat on a 3am Cathay Pacific Flight to Hong Kong and from there planned to take another flight to Thailand. 

The arrest of Peter Dahlin, as described to the Chiang Mai-based Mexican-American artist Nicolas Luna Fleck

But at 9.45pm – just hours before he had planned to set off for the airport – there was a loud bang on the door.
“Are you Peter Dahlin?” said one of the uniformed agents packing the alleyway outside. 

“Well, yeah,” the activist replied.

‘The Residence’
About 15 miles south of Dahlin’s hutong home, not far from Beijing’s Nanyuan military airbase, is a drab, four-storey office block used for the interrogation of those deemed enemies of the Chinese state. “Basically, it is a secret prison,” says Dahlin.
In the early hours of Monday 4 January a convoy of police vehicles pulled up in the ground-floor garage of the U-shaped installation. 

Blindfolded, the activist was led out of one of the cars, into a lift and then along a corridor into a second-floor interrogation room.
“You sort of just freeze … It was sort of expected but still you realise that this could end badly – or this could end very badly.”
Dahlin’s first interrogation began about 2am that winter morning, as temperatures outside The Residence plunged to six degrees below zero.
Two male inquisitors sat opposite the prisoner, who was seated in a hard wooden “tiger chair” with leg shackles that were left splayed out on the floor. 

Metals bars crisscrossed the room’s only window.
The initial questioning was less intimidating than the surroundings might have suggested. 

“It started fairly innocuously. They were just trying to get a sense of me. Who am I? What am I doing in China? Very basic questioning.”
Dahlin’s ties to three persons of interest seemed of particular concern: the human rights lawyer Wang; Xing Qingxian, an activist from south-west China; and Su Changlan, a women’s rights campaigner who had been detained months earlier for offering online support to Hong Kong’s 2014 pro-democracy protests.
But it was a gentle introduction to life in The Residence for the sleep-deprived activist: three hours later, about 5am, the session was terminated and he was led into a rectangular cell across the corridor with beige padded walls and two small windows that were also covered by metal bars. 

Thick blackout curtains made it impossible to tell the time of day; three fluorescent lamps hung from the ceiling, including one directly above the bed. 

“Even the toilet seat was suicide-padded,” Dahlin recalls.
Also inside were two guards, part of a team that remained there and watched over Dahlin 24 hours a day and recorded every move or sound he made in a notebook but never uttered a word.
“They would often stand up and go and stand and look when you take a piss, you take a shit, you take a shower. It’s a bit odd,” Dahlin says, adding with a laugh: “Luckily I’m Swedish and Sweden has a rather relaxed idea of nudity.”
The following days were a blur of interrogations. 

“They made it clear … that they had followed me, surveilled me intently for a while and were well aware, they said, of what I had been doing.”
Dahlin claims his captors demanded a “map” of who his group had been working with and became “very, very angry” after he refused to talk unless he was allowed to see officials from the Swedish embassy.
His interrogators then refused to let him sleep until he offered them detailed information and only relented after he protested to the centre’s boss – a woman who gave her name as Mrs Zhang – that his treatment violated the UN convention against torture, which China ratified in 1988.
“She was very upset,” Dahlin says of her reaction. 

“And went on about how nicely I’m being treated.”
Eventually he was allowed to sleep.
As the questioning sessions continued, often lasting up to six hours at a time, Dahlin, who correctly suspected that Pan and several colleagues were also being detained in the facility, decided his best option was to avoid incriminating others by painting the officers “a big picture … with nothing in it”.
But the interrogators hit back, telling the activist his friends and colleagues were turning against him. “This is your only chance,” they said. 

“They are blaming everything on you. If you don’t strike back it is over for you.”
Dahlin held firm, telling his captors China should be proud of its human rights lawyers and flatly rejecting repeated demands for him to surrender information about them or passwords for email accounts and encrypted hard drives that had been seized from his home.
As night fell on the covert prison, unnerving sounds found their way into the activist’s cell from other parts of The Residence, which Dahlin estimated had been built to house about eight prisoners. 

“I could hear raised voices. I could hear muffled sounds of what I assumed would be someone slammed against the wall and floor.
“I was quite prepared that there was going to be six months of this. That was my timeframe. I was counting the days in my head.”
As Dahlin floundered in the secret jail the world outside went on. 

Exactly one week after he was seized, on 10 January, David Bowie died in his New York flat, news the Swedish activist only received after his release.
Two days later, on 12 January, the first reports of Dahlin’s detention began to emerge in the international media. 

Having initially denied knowledge of the activist’s disappearance, the Chinese government now admitted “coercive measures” had been taken against him.
Three days later, on 15 January, a state-run newspaper published an editorial accusing the activist of funding “radical political activists” who were seeking confrontation with the Communist party.
Friends and relatives called for his release, warning that without access to his medicine, Dahlin, who has Addison’s disease – a rare hormonal disorder also suffered by John F Kennedy – could die.
Cut off from the world in this hidden jail, Dahlin knew nothing of what was going on outside. 

He used music to help him cope with the boredom and stress, attempting to alleviate the tedium by remembering the lyrics of songs by REM, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
“You think through everything. Not once or twice but 100 times for each thing. Every friend you had. Every relationship you had. Every date you had … If you sit there for weeks on end with nothing to do you start having weird thoughts because there is nothing left to think about.”
About 10 days into his captivity Dahlin’s ordeal took an Orwellian turn when interrogators told the activist they wanted to use a “communication enhancement” machine – a species of lie detector – to assist with their inquiries. 

Peter Dahlin faces his interrogators. 

Electrodes were attached to the activist’s fingertips and small cameras trained on his pupils while he was asked questions. 

Dahlin suspects it was “a clever psychological play” to make him reveal details of his group’s work and sponsors – but the device appeared to fail.
“They seemed to have some problem with the fact that my fingertips would sweat so they couldn’t get good readings,” he says. 

“I don’t think they got much from it.”
On about day 13 of Dahlin’s stay at The Residence the omens improved. 

He was granted a visit from two Swedish consular officials who inquired if he had been given any fruit – “Only one small bite of an apple,” the prisoner replied – then left.
Two nights later came a second positive signal. 

At about 3am a group of officers came into his cell and one, whom he knew as Mr Zhang, perched on the edge of his rock-hard mattress. 

“I realised something was happening,” Dahlin says.

The confession
Zhang told the activist he would need to pen “a self-criticism” in which he confessed to a series of crimes.
Crucially, Dahlin should admit that the human rights lawyers with whom he had worked were “criminals” and taking money from the National Endowment for Democracy, a US-funded non-profit which has been demonised in countries such as China and Russia as an instigator of colour revolutions.
“Even though they were not among our biggest funders, that was a very core point,” says Dahlin, who believes the attempt to link China Action to the endowment group was intended to help paint his group as a “hostile foreign force” that had been plotting to undermine the Communist party.
The following night Dahlin received a second visit. 

“We need one more thing,” the officer told him. 

“Let’s make a video.”
Dahlin knew immediately what was being suggested.
Since Xi had taken office forced televised confessions had come back into vogue, used to humiliate a range of government foes including Gao Yu, a veteran journalist who was jailed for leaking a politically sensitive document, and Charles Xue, an internet celebrity known for his online outspokenness on social and political issues.
Within hours Dahlin had been ordered to remove his prison uniform, don his normal clothes and was seated in a room opposite a glamorous female correspondent from the China Central Television, the state broadcaster. 

He was handed a set of seven or eight pre-written answers that had been typed on to a sheet of A4 paper.
“Prime time!” the activist says he thought as the camera began to roll. 

“Great!”
Dahlin, who had lost nearly 6kg since his detention began, immediately agreed to the recording, knowing it would accelerate his release and, more importantly, that of his girlfriend.
“I have been given good food, plenty of sleep and I have suffered no mistreatments of any kind,” he told his interviewer. 

“I have no complaints to make. I think my treatment has been fair.”
Dahlin says he tried to deflect blame from his Chinese associates by shouldering responsibility for his group’s activities.
He refused to label the Chinese lawyers he had worked with as “criminals” but admitted: “I have violated Chinese law through my activities here. I have caused harm to the Chinese government. I have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.
“I apologise sincerely for this and I am very sorry that this ever happened,” he concluded before the camera was turned off.
The next day those comments were splashed across China’s party-controlled media with Xinhua, the country’s official news agency, using the “interview” to prove police had “smashed an illegal organisation that sponsored activities jeopardising China’s national security”.
Dahlin, Xinhua claimed, had been planted in the country by “western anti-China forces” bent on stirring opposition to the regime.
As a reward for his video confession Dahlin says he was given a cup of Nescafé instant coffee and a couple of cigarettes. 

Less than a week later he and Pan would be free.
Dahlin says the final stages of his three-week stint in a secret jail were among the hardest, even though he sensed his release was imminent. 

“I would go from a sense of serene contentment to being exhilarated to being incredibly despondent and thinking, ‘Fuck, this is it. I’m dead.’”

Goodbye to China
On the morning of 21 January he was told he had been granted medical parole and would soon be deported. 

Four days later, after being allowed a fleeting meeting with Pan, he was blindfolded and escorted back downstairs into The Residence’s garage.
Flanked by four burly guards in martial arts clothing, Dahlin was driven north towards Beijing’s international airport where he was told he was being expelled under the espionage act.
“Stay out of trouble now,” he recalls being told by one of the security agents, who escorted him on to Scandinavian Airlines Flight 996 to Copenhagen. 

Peter Dahlin’s last view of China and his security minders

Onboard the passenger jet Dahlin turned on his phone and snapped one final photograph of China: a surreptitious shot of the security officers who had placed him on his last flight out of the country.
The flight attendant in first class – police officials had used cash confiscated from Dahlin’s home to buy his ticket – handed him a glass of champagne.
“I killed it,” Dahlin says. 

“And then I had another glass. I had wine. I had a whisky. I had a beer and I had a coffee. All of the things I hadn’t had.”
Since touching down in Thailand in May, Dahlin says he has been gradually trying to rebuild his life.
After the trauma of 23 days in secret custody and seven years living with the daily stress of concealing his work, he says he is struggling to adapt to a more mundane routine and fears he may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I’ve gotten so used … to living a lie. It takes time to break that habit down.
“I get weird-ass dreams that I never had before; anxiety; never being able to relax properly. I can deal with it – but it takes time,” he says. 

“Your mind plays tricks on you. You hear things by the gate at night.”
One afternoon Dahlin remembers suffering a panic attack when he lost sight of Pan, who moved with him to Chiang Mai, in a supermarket and concluded she had been snatched by Chinese agents – as appears to have happened to a wave of Thailand-based dissidents and Communist party foes.
On another occasion Dahlin’s heart leapt when a group of Chinese men surrounded the couple at a local hotel. 

“I thought, ‘Fuck, is this it? Are they here to do something?’”

The here and now
Back in China, the situation is even gloomier. 

Recent weeks have seen a fresh round of detentions that suggest the crackdown on human rights lawyers has yet to run its course.
Dahlin’s former partner Wang remains in police custody awaiting trial. 

“It is not a happy story,” Dahlin says of his friend. 

“I think he would rather die than admit defeat in this case [by confessing to crimes he didn’t commit]. He is ready to be a martyr.”
Stein Ringen said he believed the world had failed to grasp the scale of the repression now playing out in China, still viewing the country as a “benevolent autocracy” when in fact it had mutated into “a very, very hard dictatorship which manages to look better than it is”.

Peter Dahlin near his home in Thailand. 

The academic said he envisioned no change of direction while Xi, who will reach the halfway point of his anticipated decade-long term in late 2017, was in power.
“Regrettably, I think the best we can hope for is that it doesn’t get worse … My money during Xi Jinping’s tenure would be that what we have now is pretty much what we are going to get – that is a hard dictatorship that is nevertheless tempered by some pragmatism... I’m completely bleak.”
“The alternatives I think are chaos – that the control breaks and that China falls again back into chaos which it has done again and again over the last couple of centuries – or that Xi Jinping’s tightening of controls continues and pulls the system into one of fully fledged totalitarianism.”

On the veranda of his new home, surrounded by wind chimes, hanging planters, and the soothing sound of bird song, Dahlin reminisces about happier times.
He speaks of his admiration for the Chinese campaigners still willing to sacrifice their freedom to promote change and fondly recalls nights spent at his favourite Mongolian whisky bar in Beijing.
“You miss a few things because my exit consisted of going from solitary confinement into an airplane,” he says. 

“I left Beijing with a small bag, three books, two changes of clothes, some hard drives and a laptop.
“You do seven years of something … and now it is all gone: your work, whatever you have accomplished, your clothing, your furniture, my cats, my friends.”
But with no political thaw in sight the activist said he doubted he would ever be able to return to the country he once dreamed of transforming.
“I see no reason why they would ever give me a visa to go back. Why would they?”
“I think the only reason I go back is after the government falls. And I’m not sure that is going to happen in my lifetime.”

China's Rape Culture

Documentary “Hooligan Sparrow” shows how dangerous it is to protest against rape in China

By Joanna Chiu
"Hooligan Sparrow" holds up a sign that says "China’s women’s rights are dead."

The documentary film Hooligan Sparrow begins with Wang Nanfu, a fresh journalism school graduate, introducing herself while standing on a busy street. 

Seconds later, she is surrounded by a group of men. 

They egg each other on, threatening to smash her camera and daring her to continue filming. 

“This is the story I captured before they took the camera from me,” Wang says in a voice over.
The rest of the documentary is even more violent, but Wang’s subjects appear better prepared. 

When eleven people storm into the home of a Chinese women’s rights activist named Ye Haiyan, who also goes by the name “Hooligan Sparrow” (link in Chinese), Ye deftly fights off their attacks with a meat cleaver.
Hooligan Sparrow, Wang’s first film, was an official selection of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival and debuts this month on the POV series on PBS and on Netflix. 

The severe harassment it documents of women’s rights activists is part of a broader clampdown on civil society in China. 

Last summer, police questioned or detained over 300 human rights lawyers and activists. 

At least a dozen are yet to stand trial.
Days before the attack on Ye’s home, during the summer of 2013 covered in the documentary, Ye had organized a small protest in the southern island province of Hainan, where she held up a poster saying, “Principal, get a room with me—leave the school kids alone.” 

A photo of Ye with her sign went viral, raising awareness of a spate of sexual assaults in China against schoolchildren. 

At the time, Ye was already widely known for volunteering to work for free in a brothel in order to draw attention to sex workers’ rights.
Like Ye, Wang is from a poor village in China. 

Wang taught herself English and won scholarships that allowed her to study journalism in Ohio and New York. 

She was planning on making a documentary about Chinese sex workers when Ye invited her to film their protest.
Their Hainan protest was aimed at a school principal and a local government official, who had taken six female students aged 11 to 14 to a hotel and raped them over a 24-hour period. 

The men claimed they thought the girls were sex workers. 

They were each sentenced to less than 14 years in jail, reflecting the fact that the punishment for “engaging in sex with underage prostitutes” in China used to be only five to 15 years in prison. 

The “prostitute” label was a criminal classification that legal experts said shamed child victims into silence and let rapists off the hook.
In the film, Wang follows Ye and her fellow activists as police and hired thugs chase them from town to town. 

In one chilling scene, only the sounds of Ye getting beaten can be heard. 

Wang is also followed and interrogated, with her camera jerking wildly as she tries to run away. 

All of this happened because a small group of women were successfully raising awareness, mostly through social media, about sexual assault cases.
Anti-rape activism wasn’t always so controversial in China. 

Before Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, authorities seemed relatively tolerant of advocacy around women’s issues, compared to causes such as religious freedom and land rights.
Female activists who are currently in jail include former primary school teacher Su Changlan, who faces up to 15 years in prison on the charge of “inciting subversion of state power.” 

Su is a former volunteer for the New York-based Women’s Rights in China group, and has campaigned for an end to violence against women, and assisted women who were forced to abort children to comply with China’s family planning system.
After shutting down Ye’s activism and driving Wang out of the country, authorities made an even stronger statement last year by arresting five young feminist activists, shortly before International Women’s Day on March 8. 

The five were planning to distribute stickers with slogans, including a call for police to arrest sexual harassment suspects, when they were detained.
“Ye can’t hold street protests anymore. She has trouble traveling because she is under constant surveillance, and her passport has been taken away,” said Wang, who is married to an American and lives in New York. 

“Police threatened my family and urged them to stop me from making my documentary. I haven’t tried to go back to China yet. I don’t know if it’ll be safe to go.”