Tibet human rights bill

US House Passes Bill on Sanctions Against Chinese Officials for Meddling in Dalai Lama's Succession.

The bill will also prohibit China from opening any new consulate in the US until Beijing allows Washington to open its diplomatic station in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.

PTI

Washington/Beijing -- The US House of Representatives has passed a bill that authorises financial and travel sanctions against Chinese officials who interfere in the process of selecting the successor to the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader based in India.
Introduced by Congressman James P McGovern, Chairman of the House Rules Committee and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, the bill was passed by a overwhelming vote of 392 to 22 on Tuesday.
The bill, if passed by the Senate and signed into law by the president, will also prohibit China from opening any new consulate in the US until Beijing allows Washington to open its diplomatic station in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.
According to the bill, the succession or reincarnation of Tibetan Buddhist leaders, including a future 15th Dalai Lama, is an exclusively religious matter that should be decided solely by the Tibetan Buddhist community.
Under the draft legislation, Washington would freeze any American asset and ban US travel of Chinese officials if they are found to be involved in "identifying or installing" a Dalai Lama approved by Beijing.
The Dalai Lama fled to India in early 1959 after a failed uprising against the Chinese rule.
While Beijing views the Dalai Lama as a separatist who seeks to split Tibet from China, the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize laureate says he only seeks greater rights for Tibetans, including religious freedom and autonomy.
US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the bill sends Beijing a clear signal that it will be held accountable for interfering in Tibet's religious and cultural affairs.
The proposed legislation, she said, makes it clear that "Chinese officials who meddle in the process of recognising a new Dalai Lama will be subject to targeted sanctions, including those in the Global Magnitsky Act".
The Global Magnitsky Act allows the US to sanction foreign government officials implicated in human rights abuses anywhere in the world.
Pelosi said the bill deploys America's diplomatic weight to encourage a genuine dialogue between Tibetan leaders and Beijing.
"It is unacceptable that the Chinese government still refuses to enter into a dialogue with Tibetan leaders... We are supporting the Tibetan people's right to religious freedom and genuine autonomy by formally establishing as US policy that the Tibetan Buddhist community has the exclusive right to choose its religious leaders, including a future 15th Dalai Lama," she said.
Though introduced as a stand-alone piece of legislation, the bill serves as an amendment to the Tibet Policy Act of 2002, which codified the US position of support for the Tibetan people.
"Our bill updates and strengthens the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 to address the challenges facing the Tibetan people. But perhaps as importantly, it reaffirms America's commitment to the idea that human rights matter. That we care about those who are oppressed, and we stand with those who are struggling for freedom," Congressman McGovern said on the House floor.
"It should be clear that we support a positive and productive US-China relationship, but it is essential that the human rights of all the people of China are respected by their government," he asserted.
Last year, the US Congress passed the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act, demanding that American journalists, diplomats and tourists be given the same freedom to travel to Tibet that Chinese officials have to travel freely in the US.
"The Dalai Lama should be commended for his decision to devolve political authority to elected leaders. The Tibetan exile community is also to be commended for adopting a system of self-governance with democratic institutions to choose their own leaders, including holding multiple 'free and fair' elections to select its Parliament and chief executive," McGovern said.
The bill also mandates the US State Department to begin collaborative and multinational efforts to protect the environment and water resources of the Tibetan Plateau.
"We are protecting Tibet's environmental and cultural rights: working with international governments and the business community to ensure the self-sufficiency of the Tibetan people and protect the environment and water resources on the Tibetan Plateau. It is really important to sustainability of our planet," Pelosi, a longtime advocate for Tibet, said.

Sina Delenda Est

U.S. carrots have failed to reform China. It’s time to use sticks.

By Henry Olsen 

Protesters use umbrellas to protect from tear gas in the Kowloon area of Hong Kong on Monday. 

This was a bad weekend for the Communist Chinese government. 

The leak of internal documents proving that the government has detained more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs, combined with the violent crackdown on Hong Kong university protesters, again reveals the regime’s true face. 

The United States cannot stand idly by.
China’s government cannot credibly deny its repressive nature. 

It is bad enough that there is no political freedom and that it censors public expression and the Internet. 

Its suppression and ruthless colonization of Tibet were a cause celebre years ago but unfortunately have been forgotten even as Tibet’s culture and its people are slowly crushed beneath the weight of state power. 

What is happening now in East Turkestan, home of the Uighur population, and Hong Kong isn’t a bug; it’s the essential feature of the Chinese regime.
The United States bears some responsibility for what is going on. 

China’s Communists would repress its people regardless of what we do, but our open and extensive economic ties finance the regime’s power. 

Without our markets, China would be a poor and technologically backward country. 

With them, however, they are fast becoming a global power that can dream of repressing other people in addition to its own.We had hoped the regime would liberalize once it saw how rich it could become by becoming more Western. 

Instead, open economic ties enrich its economy while Western governments turn a blind eye to the terrors the government perpetuates. 

Carrots have not worked. 

If we want China to liberalize, and if we want to reduce its potential threat to our way of life, we need to start looking at using sticks.
A bill working its way through Congress is a good first step. 

Because Hong Kong is officially semi-independent of China under the “one nation, two systems” doctrine, it has long had a separate economic status under U.S. law. 

That status gives goods and services that flow through Hong Kong special access and favored treatment and is thus unaffected by the current trade war with China. 

The bill would require an annual reassessment of that status based on whether Hong Kong is credibly a separate part of China or remains under the thumb of Beijing as any other Chinese city. 

The bill has already been approved by the House, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is working this week to ease its passage through the Senate by unanimous consent. 

All signs suggest he will succeed.
Trump should then sign the measure and show China’s government that he does not value a trade deal more than he values human rights. 

Indeed, a veto would be a sign of weakness in his trade negotiations, as China would see that pressure from U.S. businesses eager to keep the money flowing can influence the White House. 

Signing the Hong Kong bill would thus both help the protesters fighting for freedom and strengthen Trump’s hand in the ongoing discussions.
But this should be only a first step. 

China’s government needs rapid economic growth to further its power and ambitions. 

Its people have become used to capitalist comforts. 

Any slowing of that growth would raise the potential for discontent and unrest among the Chinese themselves. 

It should be U.S. policy to slow that growth and thereby force the Chinese government to choose between freedom and repression, between guns and butter.That will mean going much further than even the Senate bill contemplates. 

Taking a tough line on trade negotiations is essential. 

The United States should not sign any deal that allows China to continue its mercantilist practices, even if refusal to sign a deal causes U.S. businesses pain. 

China is counting on our government caring more about avoiding pain than on inflicting pain on it. 

Trump revels in showing he is a tough guy; he cannot show weakness now by giving in to commercial pressure.
The United States also needs to commit to a slow economic disengagement from China. 

The government should encourage U.S. firms to find other countries to invest in, and we need to work with our allies to have them follow suit as much as possible. 

This will slow global economic growth for some time, as moving businesses is expensive. 

But the Chinese government should see that global engagement with the West means adapting to the values of the West.
China is known for its collection of wise proverbs. 

“Patience is power,” one states. 

“In a struggle between strength and patience, patience will win,” advises another. 

If the United States can patiently use its power, it will start to change China’s dangerous and unjust behavior. 

This will take a while, but “it takes more than one cold day for a river to freeze a meter deep.” 

For our sake, and for the sake of the Uighurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers and all of China, we should start today.

In the Spirit of Václav Havel

Prague city council moves to axe partnership with Beijing
By Jan Lopatka

Prague mayor Zdenek Hrib tweeted this image of himself on March 9, 2019, raising the Tibetan flag at the Czech capital’s town hall.

PRAGUE -- Prague city council voted on Monday to cancel a partnership agreement with Beijing after it failed to remove an article requiring it commit to the “one China” principle, which refers to China’s stance that Taiwan and it both belong to one China.
The city’s leadership, elected last year, says it is non-standard for city-to-city partnerships such as the one signed by the previous administration in 2016, to include diplomatic matters that are up to national governments.
“Unfortunately, the Chinese side did not respect our opinion that we do not want the political article, so the negotiations did not lead anywhere,” council member Hana Kordova Marvanova.
“For us this is also a gesture that we do not want to declare subservient attitude to the authoritarian regime in China.”
The decision must still be approved by the city assembly, where parties backing the executive council have a majority.
The spat between Prague and Beijing, which has been rumbling throughout the year, has soured ties between the two countries, which have in recent years tried to build a stronger political and business relationship.
Chinese authorities have already canceled tours of several Czech musical groups to China that had some link to Prague.
The Czech ties to China have been pushed mainly by Milos Zeman, who has frequently visited China and backed investments by Czech lender Home Credit there, as well as Chinese telecoms firm Huawei’s business in the Czech Republic.
New agency CTK reported Czech Foreign Minister Tomas Petricek said foreign policy was determined by the government and it maintained its position on China, although it respected the council’s decision. 

The Czech government adheres to the one China principle.
The Chinese Embassy in Prague said last month that the cause of the clashes was on the Czech side. It said Prague city hall had “very negative” effects in affairs related to China’s "sovereignty", and this undermined the atmosphere in bilateral relations.
The embassy did not immediately answer a request for comment on Monday.
Czech-Chinese relations have already been dented by a warning last year by the Czech cyber-security watchdog against risks of using equipment made by China’s Huawei and ZTE in critical infrastructure.
Expectations of billions of dollars worth of Chinese investments in the country have also not materialized.

Hong Kong Is Winning the Global Public-Opinion War With Beijing

The city’s protest movement has unofficial representatives, crowdfunded advertising, viral videos, and much else that has caught Chinese off guard.

By CHRIS HORTON

The Hong Kong pro-democracy campaigners Joshua Wong (far left) and Denise Ho (left) testify in Congress.

TAIPEI—Months of protests in Hong Kong have pitted residents of all ages and backgrounds against their police force, local government, and the Chinese Communist Party, and there is no question of who is less powerful.
Yet in a parallel battle over international public opinion, it is Beijing and its minions that are outgunned. 

This weekend that mismatch was once again highlighted by the thousands of people in cities across Australia, Asia, Europe and North America coming out in support of Hong Kong, but also in a much broader sense, against the CCP. 

Here in Taipei alone, thousands of Taiwanese and Hong Kongers marched through the streets on a rainy Sunday, told by Denise Ho, one of the most visible faces among Hong Kong’s unofficial diplomatic corps, that her home and theirs shared the same fight against Beijing.
These latest worldwide, pro–Hong Kong rallies are the most recent iteration of what supporters of repressed groups in East Turkestan and Tibet, as well as those who back Taiwan’s sovereignty, have all struggled to do: Mobilize large communities internationally to denounce the Chinese Communist Party.

The relative success of Hong Kong’s protest movement is all the more significant because it’s occurring alongside Beijing expanding its propaganda efforts globally, as state-owned outlets trumpet China’s vision of the world in multiple languages. 

This global campaign is the biggest challenge to China’s rulers by the territory since 1989, when, still a British colony, its residents took part in demonstrations in solidarity with protesters in Tiananmen Square, while also providing financial and material support.
From Oslo to Osaka, Congress to the United Nations, Taiwan to Twitter, Hong Kongers have taken their DIY approach to protest to a global audience. 

Celebrity supporters testify in high-profile settings; highly targeted, crowdfunded media campaigns aim to keep the issue in the spotlight; and viral videos, catchy slogans, and even a movement anthem and flag help magnify the message on social media.

On September 17, a panel of witnesses including Ho and pro-democracy campaigner Joshua Wong testified before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China in Washington, the latest in a string of public appearances for the two activists around the globe. 

Ho has been especially active, shuttling back and forth between Hong Kong and elsewhere to promote her message of resisting Beijing to receptive crowds, especially in Taiwan.
Earlier this month in Taipei, Ho spoke and performed at the Asia installment of the Oslo Freedom Forum. 

Only days before, she had been in Melbourne, where she appeared in public with the Chinese dissident artist Badiucao, designer of the unofficial Hong Kong protest movement flag. 

In Taipei, Ho took the stage to a screaming crowd of hundreds of admirers, their phones raised to record her appeal to democratic Taiwan, whose way of life is also under threat from China. Describing the struggle of Hong Kongers, who cannot rely on their own government to counter China’s narrative, Ho struck a pragmatic tone. 

“When the system fails us,” she said to the attentive crowd, “we take things into our own hands.”
Wong, who rose to international fame as one of the leaders of the pro-democracy, Occupy-style Umbrella Movement of 2014, has also been busy on the diplomatic front. 

Prior to his congressional testimony, he stopped in Germany, urging its government to cease exporting crowd-control weapons to Hong Kong and to put human rights in Hong Kong on the agenda in Berlin’s trade talks with Beijing. (Germany's foreign minister, Heiko Maas, met with Wong on September 10.)
Wong’s German visit came after he and fellow activists visited Taiwan, where he implored the ruling party to pass an asylum law that would make it easier for Hong Kongers to seek refuge here, territory the CCP claims despite having never controlled it.
Although neither Wong nor Ho has been appointed by the current protest movement to represent it abroad—a remarkable feat of the demonstrations is that they have been largely leaderless—the general consensus in Hong Kong seems to be that they are well-known names and faces who offer the advantage of signal-boosting.
While in Taipei mid-month, Ho told me she thought of herself as a mediator or spokesperson for the movement at large. 

“I’m not seeing myself as a leader of any sort,” she said. 

“I am, on the other hand, one of the participants of this movement: I have been on the streets with these people. I have been teargassed.” 

She added that, as a “recognizable face,” she saw herself “as a conduit that can bring stories of these people to the world.”
In July, Ho scored one of the first public-relations victories abroad for Hong Kong’s protesters when, speaking at the United Nations in Geneva, she described growing police brutality against Hong Kongers and called on the UN to remove China from its Human Rights Council. 

During her remarks, she was interrupted twice by China’s representative to the body on procedural grounds. 

More recently, while in Washington, Ho and Wong were joined by other activists and congressional leaders for the launch of the Hong Kong Democracy Council, a D.C.-based lobbying group for the movement.
Ho and Wong are far from the only diplomats working on behalf of the movement. 

In June, a crowdfunding drive raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from more than 20,000 donors, paying for full-page ads in more than 10 major international newspapers, urging the G20 summit in Osaka to raise Hong Kong’s plight. 

How much impact the campaign had is unclear, but Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did bring up Hong Kong’s protests with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping when the two met on the sidelines of the summit. 

Another crowdfunded ad campaign is under way, this time targeting papers on October 1 to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, a particularly sensitive date for the CCP. 

The campaign is not the only bit of rain to fall on the party’s parade—Hong Kong’s government announced on September 18 that it had canceled the fireworks show planned for the anniversary.
Unlike East Turkestan or Tibet, both of which the Communists forcibly took control of in the 1950s, Hong Kong was handed over peacefully by the British in 1997, following 150 years of colonial rule. 

At the heart of the agreement between London and Beijing was an arrangement whereby Hong Kong would maintain its separate political and economic system and enjoy “a high degree of autonomy,” with Beijing handling national security and diplomacy.
This “one country, two systems” arrangement has allowed Hong Kong to have a free internet, for example, whereas Beijing heavily restricts the web within China and even went so far as to either partially or completely shut down the internet in East Turkestan—the size of western Europe—for 10 months.
Today, many Hong Kongers worry that their internet access may go the way of China’s, adding a sense of urgency to their attempts to use it to organize themselves and to reach the outside world in order to spread their message and counter Beijing’s narrative. 

Twitter, in particular, has become an important virtual battleground for foreign hearts and minds.
The Chinese authorities appear to agree. 

On September 3, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute published an investigation into the methods used in a disinformation campaign aimed at Hong Kong that Twitter has attributed to Beijing, a first. “Efforts by the Chinese government to leverage Twitter to redirect and recast political developments in Hong Kong—both in terms of covert information operations and through its state media—highlight just how powerful Twitter is as a tool of statecraft,” Danielle Cave, deputy director of the ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre, told me.
Hong Kong’s protesters have also recognized the global influence of Twitter in the information domain and are themselves trying to use Twitter diplomacy to share breaking developments and to connect with journalists, Cave noted. 

This includes providing images and videos of events on the ground, often in real time, and generating new hashtags, including ones that highlight violent incidents and police brutality. (The protesters’ tool of choice for coordinating rallies has thus far been the encrypted messaging app Telegram, but that can’t match Twitter’s global reach or public-broadcasting capabilities, nor does it have the ear of global stakeholders that the protesters seek to engage.)
Hong Kongers have, so far, proved a nimble David to China’s clumsy Goliath. 

But the CCP does occasionally score points. 

Donald Trump, for example, parroted the Chinese government’s line on the Hong Kong protests when he called them “riots” in early August, a characterization that many viewed as a win for Beijing.
In other incidents, however, the tendency of Chinese nationalism to backfire on the foreign stage has hampered the Communist cause. 

Among these incidents are violent Chinese-student reactions to pro–Hong Kong demonstrations at Australian universities, with the Chinese embassy expressing support for the students’ actions on social media afterward. 

Debate in Australia regarding the ability of China to control public speech there has since intensified. Elsewhere, Montreal’s Pride parade excluded Hong Kong participants after receiving threats from pro-Communists.

At the parade, many onlookers were aghast when, during the moment of silence for those who have died from HIV/AIDS, Chinese participants sang their national anthem.
“The most basic weakness of the external communications of the Chinese party-state is the fact that foreign audiences, and their values and interests, are never truly considered,” David Bandurski, co-director of the China Media Project, told me. 

“Sure, the messages are directed at foreigners, but the language is still the internal and insular language of the party-state.”
In this sense, Bandurski said, these propaganda efforts are not really external at all.
“Try as it might to raise the volume on China's singular, restrained voice, the party-state is still talking to itself, or shouting at its own wall,” Bandurski said. 

“The louder that voice becomes, the more uncompromising and aggressive it sounds.”

Mitch McConnell slams China over Hong Kong, threatens a global confrontation that could tank the finance hub

• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote a blistering op-ed calling out China for various human rights violations and a crackdown on Hong Kong.
• He said the US could revisit the 1992 Hong Kong Policy Act, which gave the city special access to the US market and poured billions into Beijing's pockets. The act allows the US to trade with Hong Kong on better, more favorable terms than it affords the Chinese mainland.
• Doing this would punish China, but also Hong Konge as the island could lose its status as a global financial hub.

By Alex Lockie


Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote a blistering op-ed calling for the world to stand up to and confront China over a variety of human rights concerns and a violent response to 11 weeks of largely peaceful protests in semi-autonomous Hong Kong.
"Sooner or later, the rest of the world will have to do what the protesters are doing — confront Beijing," McConnell wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
In the article, McConnell also called for a punishment that could demolish Hong Kong's status as a global financial hub and a cash cow for Beijing.

Hong Kong on fireThe emblem of communist China is seen vandalized on the Chinese Liaison Office after a march to call for democratic reforms, in Hong Kong, China July 21, 2019. 

When the British returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, it did so with an internationally recognized treaty wherein China promised to respect Hong Kong's system of government, which allows greater freedoms than the mainland's strict communist rule.
But China has steadily eroded the freedoms people in Hong Kong enjoy, partially due to a creeping takeover of its government, and partly due to techno-authoritarianism enabling an unparalleled surveillance state. 

The recent spate of protests in Hong Kong kicked off when the local government proposed a bill that would allow China to deport Hong Kongers to the mainland for trials.
Hong Kongers responded to the bill with perhaps the largest protests in human history, and carried them out in a notably peaceful and orderly way for weeks, despite documented police brutality and brutal beatings from mainland-linked gangs.
McConnell described China's often violent response to Hong Kong as "authoritarian rulers seeking to repress the innate human desire for freedom, self-expression and self-government" on par with historical massacres of freedom-seekers in the former Soviet Union and under former Chinese dictator Mao Tse-tung.
McConnell goes on to shred China's brutal oppression of ethnic and religious minorities, including in Tibet and East Turkestan, where more than 1 million Chinese citizens have been detained, re-educated in party propaganda, and often made to renounce their religion.

The US could hurt China over Hong KongA demonstrator sits down in front of riot police during a demonstration to demand authorities scrap a proposed extradition bill with China, in Hong Kong, China June 12, 2019.

Perhaps most significantly, McConnell threatened a move that would destroy Hong Kong's special appeal to global finance by revisiting the 1992 Hong Kong Policy act.
The act allows the US to trade with Hong Kong on better, more favorable terms than it affords the Chinese mainland.
"This special access to the U.S. and other nations helped drive the investment and modernization that have enriched Hong Kong, and Beijing by extension," wrote McConnell. 

"Beijing must know the Senate will reconsider that special relationship, among other steps, if Hong Kong's autonomy is eroded."
He then went on to say that he had instructed various Senate committees to examine Beijing's actions in Hong Kong and increase funding for pro-Democracy movements in Asia.
"Revoking the 1992 Hong Kong Policy Act is a double-edged sword and one that should be wielded cautiously," Mike Fuchs, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a progressive DC think tank, told Business Insider.
Ending the policy "would hurt Beijing by closing off a backdoor through Hong Kong to receive preferred economic treatment because of the status that it has," said Fuchs. 

For reference, the US did $67.3 billion worth of business with Hong Kong in 2018.
Matthew Henderson, the director of the Asia Studies Centre at the Henry Jackson Society, told Business Insider that the 1992 act allows the US to revisit the policy if China gets too involved in Hong Kong policy.
"From a Western perspective, it makes sense to remind Beijing that loss of benefits conferred under the Act would harm Hong Kong as a global financial and commercial centre — and also harm China's prosperity, to which Hong Kong still makes a very big contribution," Henderson said. 

"So Beijing would be wise not to erode Hong Kong's autonomy to the point that the Act's conditions cease to apply."
But both Henderson an Fuchs agreed, if the US does revoke the 1992 act, Hong Kongers will feel the effects first and foremost.

Zdeněk Hřib: the Czech mayor who defied China

By refusing to expel a Taiwanese diplomat, the Prague mayor has joined the ranks of local politicians confronting contentious national policies

By Robert Tait in Prague

Zdeněk Hřib of the Czech Republic’s Pirate party.

Zdeněk Hřib had been Prague’s mayor for little more than a month when he came face-to-face with the Czech capital’s complex entanglement with China.
Hosting a meeting with foreign diplomats in the city, Hřib was asked by the Chinese ambassador to expel their Taiwanese counterpart from the gathering in deference to Beijing’s ‘one China’ policy, under which it claims sovereignty over the officially independent state of Taiwan.
Given recent Chinese investments in the Czech Republic, which have included the acquisition of Slavia Prague football club, a major brewery and a stake in a private TV station, the fledgling mayor could have easily agreed. 

Prague city council had, under the preceding mayor, signed a twin cities agreement with Beijing that explicitly recognised the one China policy.
Instead, Hřib refused and the Taiwanese diplomat stayed.
The episode is a rare case of a local politician defying the might of a global superpower while making a principled stand against a national government policy that has promoted Chinese ties.

Hřib has since gone further, demanding Beijing officials drop the clause stating Prague’s support for the one China policy in the 2016 deal and threatening to scrap the arrangement if they refuse.
“This article is a one-sided declaration that Prague agrees with and respects the one China policy and such a statement has no place in the sister cities agreement,” Hřib said in an interview in Prague’s new town hall, close to the city’s historic tourist district, which draws an increasing number of visitors from China.
“The one China policy is a complicated matter of foreign politics between two countries. But we are solving our sister cities relationship on the level of two capital cities.”

Hřib, a 38-year-old doctor who spent a medical training internship in Taiwan, is challenging the Czech president, Miloš Zeman, who has visited China several times, installed a Chinese adviser at his office in Prague castle and declared that he wanted to learn “how to stabilise society” from the country’s communist rulers.
The dispute has catapulted the unassuming Hřib to household name status in Czech politics, helped by Prague’s position as an international cultural draw and its outsize share of national resources.
Hřib’s rise from obscurity is striking because Czech mayors, unlike their US and Polish counterparts, are not directly elected. 

He became mayor of a coalition administration after his Pirate party, a liberal group with roots in civil society, finished second in last October’s municipal elections.
He says he is merely adopting the policy of his party and its two coalition partners in taking decisions that are cooling Prague’s relations with Beijing.

Zdeněk Hřib and Lobsang Sangay at the Old Town Hall in Prague. 

In March, his administration restored the practice of flying the Tibetan flag from Prague’s town hall, reinstating a tradition begun in the era of the Czech Republic’s first post-communist president, Václav Havel, that was dropped by the previous city administration. 

At the same time, in a move tailor-made to infuriate Beijing, Hřib hosted the visiting head of Tibet’s government-in-exile, Lobsang Sangay.
An official visit to the Taiwanese capital, Taipei, followed. 

During the visit, Hřib criticised China for harvesting organs from political prisoners belonging to the Falun Gong movement.
Threats of retaliation came soon afterwards. 

A planned tour of China by the Prague Philharmonia in September is in jeopardy after it rebuffed Beijing’s demands to repudiate the mayor.
Iva Nevoralova, the orchestra’s spokesperson, likened the request to the actions of Czechoslovakia’s former communist regime, which pressured artists to denounce Havel’s dissident Charter 77 movement as the price for being allowed to perform.

Members of the Prague Philharmonia. 

Speaking to the Guardian, Hřib questioned whether Prague’s arrangement with Beijing was a fair relationship and criticised China’s “social scoring” system for good citizenship. 

He suggested that investment from Taiwan, with its western-style democracy and record of technological innovation, offered greater benefit.
The mayor has won praise for restoring the Czech Republic’s image as a champion of human rights and self-determination at a time when its politics have been dominated by the populist messages of Zeman and Andrej Babiš, the anti-immigration billionaire prime minister.
“It is empowering to see that a mayor of Prague can have a principled position, despite large portions of the Czech political establishment being co-opted by the narratives spread by the totalitarian government of China,” said Jakub Janda, executive director of the European Values thinktank, which monitors anti-western influence in Czech politics and beyond.


Jakub Janda@_JakubJanda
THREAD:
CZECH RESISTANCE TO CHINESE HARASSMENT:
We have a good Mayor of Prague. He supports Tibet + Taiwan. When the PRC ambassador tried to force him to have a TW diplomat kicked out of a diplomatic meeting hosted by Prague City Council, he declined.
2,268
8:59 PM - Apr 28, 2019

Jiří Pehe, the director of New York University in Prague, said Hřib was using the mayor’s office to reassert the values of Havel, who died in 2011. 

“Everyone in this country knows that when you support Taiwan and Tibet, you’re saying exactly what Havel used to say,” said Pehe. 

“This was intentional on the part of the Pirate party as soon as he took over Prague. They are saying that the Czech Republic has a special history of fighting against communism and you should respect it.”

Die Endlösung der Uigurischefrage

Chinese surveillance firm's stock plunges after reports of possible US ban

By Sherisse Pham

Hong Kong -- Shares in Chinese surveillance company Hikvision plunged on Wednesday, following a report that the Trump administration is mulling slapping it with a US export ban.
Hikvision stock plummeted the daily limit of 10% during early morning trading in Shenzhen. 

It recovered some of those losses to close about 6% lower.
The drop came after the New York Times reported that the United States is considering placing the Chinese surveillance technology firm on a trade blacklist, citing people familiar with the matter.
The move would be Washington's latest attempt to curb Beijing's tech ambitions, and a further escalation of the US-China trade war.
Huawei is the first big casualty of China's war with America

"Hikvision takes these concerns very seriously and has engaged with the US government regarding all of this since last October," a company spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday.
The US Department of Commerce did not respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours.
Hikvision manufactures surveillance cameras and security products powered by artificial intelligence. 

The company says its products can track people using facial recognition or physical characteristics such as gait, count the number of people who visit specific areas, and detect "unusual behavior like a violent action."

Hikvision has faced international criticism for its surveillance deals in Tibet and East Turkestan, with US lawmakers last year urging sanctions against the company and accusing it of helping China create a "high-tech police state."
The Chinese government has stepped up surveillance in the country's East Turkestan colony as part of a crackdown on the region's Uyghur Muslim population. 

Its presence in Tibet, an internationally recognized autonomous region, is also disputed by the Tibetan population and has boiled over into large scale riots in the past.
The US move on Hikvision would be similar to the restrictions placed on Chinese tech giant Huawei last week. 

The US Department of Commerce would place Hikvision on a list of foreign firms deemed to undermine American national security or foreign policy interests. 

Listed companies are barred from receiving components and software unless the trade is licensed.
Hikvision buys computer chips and components from US companies such as Nvidia, Western Digital, Intel and Seagate.
Brokerage firm Jefferies said in a note Wednesday that a US ban would not hit Hikvision as hard as it did Huawei. 

The company can buy critical parts for its artificial intelligence products from local distributors, said Jefferies analyst Rex Wu.
In a note last month, Wu said he expects Hikvision's annual revenue to be boosted by "China's central government procurement platform," noting that "East Turkestan's public security budget for 2019 is still rising" compared to a year earlier.

Born to Censor

Scholars say they thought a China studies journal was run on Western standards of free expression, but they found Chinese government control instead.
By Elizabeth Redden

Yet another account of censorship involving a China studies journal has come to light. 

And the scholars involved say this case involves an insidious “blurring of boundaries” where they were misled into thinking Western publishing standards would apply when in fact the journal in question was subject to Chinese government censorship.
Lorraine Wong and Jacob Edmond, both professors at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, have written an account of the censorship they encountered when they edited a planned special issue of the journal Frontiers of Literary Studies in China. 

The journal is published by the Netherlands-based publishing company Brill in association with the China-based Higher Education Press, an entity that describes itself on its website (in Chinese) as affiliated with China’s Ministry of Education. 

The journal's editorial board lists scholars from major American and international universities -- including Cornell University, Duke University, Harvard University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of Washington -- and its editor in chief is based at New York University. The journal’s editorial office is located in Beijing.
Wong and Edmond wrote that the association with Brill, along with the involvement of leading scholars in the field on the editorial board, led them to mistakenly assume the publication standards would be akin to those of other journals in the field published in the U.S. 

What they found, however, was that the affiliation with the Higher Education Press and the location of the editorial office in Beijing means “the journal is subject to the full range of Chinese government censorship.”
Wong and Edmond encountered this censorship in editing the planned special issue on the topic of “how diverse understandings and uses of the Chinese script have shaped not only Chinese literature and culture but also representations of China in the wider world.” 

They oversaw a peer-review process and accepted four essays.
But they wrote that when they received the proofs for the issue shortly before the publication date, one of the four essays, by Jin Liu, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, was entirely missing. 

Their introductory essay had also been “crudely edited” to remove references to Liu’s essay, which focused on an artist who uses invented characters to satirize the Chinese Communist Party.
“When we wrote to the FLSC editor, Xudong Zhang, to question this censorship, we were told that the removal of Liu’s essay should come as no surprise, since FLSC has its editorial office in Beijing and so must abide by normal Chinese censorship,” Wong and Edmond wrote. 

“However, Zhang went further. He went on to say that Liu’s essay should never have been accepted and that he was now using his editorial prerogative to reject it.” 

Email correspondence with Zhang shared with Inside Higher Ed verifies this general account.
Zhang, a professor of comparative literature and East Asian studies at New York University, declined to comment via email, saying he would like to confer with the editorial board before issuing a statement. 

He did say there were "misrepresentations in the article about the editorial process and decision making, but those may appear to be academic niceties compared with the larger issue of censorship in China and U.S. academic response to it."
One listed member of the editorial board, Nick Admussen, an assistant professor of Chinese literature and culture at Cornell University, said on Twitter that he had asked to be de-listed from the editorial board and that he had never agreed to join in the first place. 

“There is something fake about the journal, it shouldn't be on Brill, and while it has published useful and meaningful research, it's not for me,” he wrote.
Brill’s chief publishing officer, Jasmin Lange, issued a written statement saying Brill's cooperation with Higher Education Press in China is under review.
“Since 2012 Brill has had an agreement with Higher Education Press (HEP) in China to distribute the journal Frontiers of Literary Studies in China,” Lange said. 

“HEP is responsible for the editorial process and production of the journal. Brill distributes the journal in print and online to customers outside China. We are very concerned about the developments that were described in the recent blog post by Lorraine Wong and Jacob Edmond. Brill, founded in 1683, has a long-standing tradition of being an international and independent publisher of scholarly works of high quality. We are committed to the furthering of knowledge and the concepts of independent scholarship and freedom of press. The cooperation with HEP is currently under review and Brill will not hesitate to take any necessary action to uphold our publishing ethics.”

Brill is the latest international scholarly publisher to find itself embroiled in issues related to the exportation of Chinese censorship. 

In 2017, Cambridge University Press briefly blocked access in mainland China to more than 1,000 journal articles in the prestigious journal The China Quarterly before reversing course and restoring access to the articles, which dealt with sensitive topics in China like the Cultural Revolution, Tibet, Tiananmen Square and the pro-democracy movement, and the East Turkestan colony. 

The German publisher Springer Nature has stood by its decision to block access to journal articles in China on the grounds that limiting access to certain content in China is necessary to preserve access to its wider catalog. 

More recently it’s come to light that Chinese importers have stopped buying whole journals in China or area studies.
International scholarly publishers interested in maintaining access to the massive Chinese market are coming under pressure to comply with Chinese government censorship demands, in effect helping spread the Chinese censorship regime beyond China's borders and tainting scholarly publishing standards worldwide. 

In reflecting on what happened in their specific case, Wong and Edmond wrote that scholars are used to different sets of rules applying to publication inside mainland China and outside China, but that the details of the Frontiers case suggest that distinction is breaking down.
They wrote, “We were naïve to assume that the association with Brill and the international editorial board indicated that the journal operated according to the normal standards for non-Mainland publications and would not be subject to censorship -- a mistaken belief shared by us as editors and our contributor, Liu. In subsequent correspondence, we have discovered from senior colleagues that others, particularly colleagues in junior and vulnerable positions, have also been caught in the unexpected application of censorship to a journal that, at a casual glance, might appear to sit outside the boundaries of Chinese government control. The journal Frontiers of History in China, which is likewise jointly published by Brill and the Higher Education Press, may have misled others in a similar way.
“It is precisely the blurring of boundaries between publication inside and outside Mainland China that makes the precedent of FLSC particularly worrying and insidious,” they continued. 

“We have trained ourselves to read between the lines of work published on the Mainland, noting and compensating for the telling absences. But what happens when it is no longer obvious where something was published and according to which rules? Moreover, in these straitened times, dependence on editorial and financial support may well lead other editors, academics and publishing houses outside China to add their stamp of legitimacy to such censorship.”
Wong and Edmond wrote that they withdrew the entire issue of Frontiers in solidarity with Liu and that three of the four essays, including Liu's, have just been published in another journal, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (their essay on the censorship they experienced serves as a preface to the three essays, and was also published Thursday on the Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center website).
“I admire the two special editors, their courage for speaking out and letting the broader academic community know about this,” said Liu, an associate professor of Chinese language and culture at Georgia Tech. 

“I think scholars will be more careful to submit their articles to this journal later on.”
In an interview, Edmond, an associate professor of English at Otago, said he and Wong decided to go public with what happened "because of our belief in academic freedom, also a desire for the Chinese studies community to at least have a proper conversation about the potential through such joint publication deals and other forms of partnership for Chinese government censorship to be extended beyond the borders of China. We consider these really serious issues."
Charlene Makley, a professor of anthropology at Reed College who has tracked issues related to censorship in China studies journals, said that "many of the previous examples that have come to light have been more about Chinese importers choosing not to buy whole journals or trying to pressure publishers to get rid of certain articles just due to key terms. We haven’t [previously] seen cases come to light where you actually see editors stepping in and going after content.
"This might be a tip of an iceberg or it might be an anomaly," Makley said. 

"What’s happening I think is as they say the boundaries are blurring: there’s no easy distinction between China publication and outside China publication because of these behind-the-scene connections between Chinese publications and non-Chinese distributors and publishers. We need somebody to be trying to unpack some of those behind-the-scene relationships. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than authors and peer reviewers know and maybe even editors -- in this case, they were invited editors."

60 years after exile, Tibetans face a fight for survival in a post-Dalai Lama world

By Sugam Pokharel

New Delhi -- The Dalai Lama describes it as "freedom in exile," but it's a freedom which has lasted longer than he likely ever dreamed about.
Sixty years ago today, the Tibetan Buddhist leader set foot on Indian soil to begin his life as a refugee.
After an unsuccessful revolt following the arrival of Chinese troops in Tibet, the Dalai fled Lhasa in fear for his life. 

Only 23 years old, he and his followers crossed a treacherous Himalayan pass into India on horseback, arriving on March 31, 1959.
Then-Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru offered the religious leader asylum along with tens of thousands of other Tibetans who had followed him into exile.
Ever since, the Dalai Lama -- who is revered as a living god by millions of Tibetan Buddhists -- has made India his home. 

India officially calls him "(our) most esteemed and honored guest."
"I'm the longest guest of the Indian government," the Dalai Lama, the 14th holder of the title, jokingly told CNN in an interview in 2009.

Tibetans gather during the armed uprising against Chinese rule on March 10, 1959, in front of the Potala Palace, the former home of the Dalai Lama, in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.

But as Tibetans mark 60 years of exile for their cultural icon, there is growing uncertainty about what the future holds. 

The globe-trotting monk, now 83, decided last year to cut down on his travels, citing age and exhaustion.
It is unclear who will succeed him when he dies, how that person will be picked or whether there will even be another Dalai Lama.
Traditionally, the title is bestowed on the highest-ranking leader in Tibetan Buddhism. 

It is given to those deemed to be the reincarnation of a line of revered religious teachers.
Asked in a recent interview with Reuters what might happen after his death, the Dalai Lama anticipated a possible attempt by Beijing to foist a successor on Tibetan Buddhists.
In the interview, the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize laureate said: "In future, in case you see two Dalai Lamas come, one from here, in a free country, one is chosen by Chinese, and then nobody will trust, nobody will respect (the one chosen by China). So that's an additional problem for the Chinese. It's possible, it can happen."

Tibetan flags are displayed as people protest in front of the Chinese Consulate General in Los Angeles on March 10.

End of the line
Such speculation is not new. 

The Dalai Lama once told the BBC that he might be the last person to hold the title, or that the next leader could be elected and not reincarnated.
But his comments highlighted the dilemma facing the future of Tibetan Buddhism as its current leader heads into his mid-80s.

China's foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said in March the "reincarnation of living Buddhas including the Dalai Lama must comply with Chinese laws and regulations and follow religious rituals and historical conventions."
Beijing must have full control over the appointment of the next Dalai Lama to help strengthen its overall grip on the Tibetan community, which is deeply faithful to its spiritual leader.
The Dalai Lama says he no longer seeks an independent Tibet, only its cultural autonomy, but China is not convinced. 

It reviles him as a traitor, "a wolf in monk's robes" engaged in "anti-China separatist activities under the cloak of religion with the aim of breaking Tibet away from China."
In 2011, in a move to democratize the Tibetan government-in-exile, the Dalai Lama gave up his political and administrative powers to become just a spiritual leader, but he is still by far the community's most influential figure.
Even though he has set up a democratic structure for Tibetans in India, many are concerned their future may look bleak without the Dalai Lama to speak on their behalf.

The Dalai Lama celebrates the birthday of the Lord Buddha for the first time since his arrival in India in exile in May 1959.

India-Tibet divide?
India is home to nearly 100,000 Tibetan refugees, some 73% of all Tibetans in exile.
But many in recent years have questioned whether the host nation is distancing itself from the community and whether the Dalai Lama and his followers would get the same welcome today as they did in 1959.
"India is sensing Tibet's appeal in the West is declining," said Tsering Shakya, a Tibet scholar and research chair at the University of British Columbia in Canada.
Ultimately, current geopolitics are what matters most for India. 

China is vastly more powerful than it was 60 years ago, and India takes a pragmatic view of the relationship -- an approach that could have a cost for the interests of exiled Tibetans.

A Tibetan exile activist is detained by Indian police during a protest near the Chinese embassy in New Delhi on March 12.

Celebrations last year to mark the start of the 60th anniversary were moved or canceled when asking senior leaders and government officials not to attend them.
The note reportedly said that the events, in March and April, came at a "very sensitive time in the context of India's relations with China." 

A week later, the Tibetan Central Administration -- the government in exile -- decided to move a major cultural event from New Delhi to Dharamsala, where the exiled community is based.
These are worrying developments for the community.
"The current Indian stand towards the Tibetans is based on its relationship with the Dalai Lama," Shakya said. 

"All the privileges afforded to the Tibetans on the ground, they are honoring an important and internationally recognized religious figure. This claim provides a moral legitimacy for the Indian government.
"In the absence of the Dalai Lama, India cannot make a similar claim."
As China's influence in South Asia rapidly increases and the Dalai Lama grows old and frail, the exiles in India can only worry and wait.

Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act

President Trump Signs Law Punishing Chinese Officials Who Restrict Access to Tibet

By Edward Wong

A security camera monitored visitors to the Potala Palace in Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet colony. The Chinese government puts tight restrictions on travel to Tibetan areas, where discontent with Beijing’s rule is widespread.

WASHINGTON — President Trump has enacted a law that requires the State Department to punish Chinese officials who bar American officials, journalists and other citizens from going freely to Tibetan areas in China’s far west.
By some measures, those areas, though sparsely populated, make up one-quarter of China’s territory, and they have been the site of protests and riots against Chinese rule for decades. 

Because of the delicate political situation, the Tibetan plateau has long been under careful watch by central and local security officials.
Chinese security agencies make it difficult for foreigners to travel in most of the areas, and those restrictions have gotten tougher since widespread protests took place in 2012.
The government and the ruling Communist Party ban foreign diplomats and journalists from going to central Tibet, called the Tibet Autonomous Region, without getting official permission and going on carefully organized propaganda tours. 

It has been eight years since The New York Times was allowed to go on one of those trips, which are run by the Foreign Ministry.
Ordinary foreign tourists who want to visit central Tibet, which includes the capital city of Lhasa, must join a tour group, often with people of the same nationality.

The new American law cites Larung Gar, a sprawling Buddhist institution in Sichuan Province, as a site that Chinese officials have kept foreigners from seeing. The homes of many monks and nuns there have been demolished in recent years.

The new American law, enacted on Wednesday and called the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act, says the secretary of state, who is now Mike Pompeo, must within 90 days give Congress a report that lays out the level of access to Tibetan areas that Chinese officials grant Americans.
The secretary is then supposed to determine which Chinese officials are responsible for placing limits on foreigners traveling to Tibet and bar them from getting visas to the United States or revoke any active visas they have. 

The secretary must make this assessment annually for five years.
The goal of the law is to force Chinese officials to relent on the limits they impose on travel to Tibetan areas.
“For too long, China has covered up their human rights violations in Tibet by restricting travel,” Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a written statement. 

“But actions have consequences, and today, we are one step closer to holding the Chinese officials who implement these restrictions accountable.”
Matteo Mecacci, president of the International Campaign for Tibet, an advocacy group based in Washington, said President Trump’s enactment of the law “has blazed a path for other countries to follow.”
China is unlikely to change its travel limits, despite the law.
The Trump administration has taken steps against China on a wide range of issues, most notably trade. 

On Thursday, the Justice Department indicted two Chinese men on charges of hacking corporate networks and downloading troves of business data.

Buddhist nuns at Larung Gar in 2016. Tibetans across the plateau are concerned about the dilution of their culture.

American officials recently lured a Chinese man accused of being a spy to Belgium and had him arrested there. 

The United States has also had Canada arrest a top executive of Huawei, the giant technology company, as she was passing through Vancouver. 

The United States is seeking her extradition on charges that she tricked banks into conducting transactions that violated United States sanctions on Iran.
The bipartisan support for the Tibet legislation and its easy passage into law reflect the willingness of American officials to take a hard stand against China. 

The new law cites Larung Gar, an enormous Buddhist institution in Sichuan Province, as an example of a Tibetan area that Chinese officials have kept foreigners from seeing in recent years. 

That is because officials have been demolishing the homes of many monks and nuns there.
Across the plateau, Tibetans are anxious about the dilution of their culture, an issue that the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader living in exile, has raised repeatedly, calling it “cultural genocide.”
This year, a Chinese court sentenced Tashi Wangchuk, an advocate of Tibetan language education, to five years in prison, despite widespread international criticism of his arrest. 

He had appeared in a Times video talking about the need for more teaching of Tibetan in schools, and he was arrested even though he has said he does not advocate for an independent Tibet.
Since 2009, at least 155 Tibetans have self-immolated in acts of protest against Chinese rule.

Rogue Nation

How The Chinese Government Works To Censor Debate In Western Democracies
By FRANK LANGFITT

Tibetans cheer on a Tibetan team at a soccer tournament in London. Fans say they were pleased and surprised that the tournament organizers didn't succumb to pressure from potential sponsors and dump the Tibetan team to avoid angering the Chinese government.

It used to be that the Communist Party focused on censoring free speech primarily inside of China. 

In recent years, though, China's authoritarian government has tried to censor speech beyond its borders, inside liberal democracies, when speech contradicts the party's line on highly sensitive political issues, such as the status of Tibet and Taiwan. 

It's part of the party's grand strategy to change the way the world talks about China.
The Chinese government has been so effective at intimidating Western businesses on this front that companies do the party's work for it. 

That's what happened in London this summer at an obscure soccer tournament modeled on the World Cup. 

The teams were drawn from a hodgepodge of minority peoples, isolated territories and would-be nations, including Tibet.
Some potential corporate sponsors were queasy.
"There were inquiries made as to whether we would consider removing Tibet from the competition," said Paul Watson, commercial director for the Confederation of Independent Football Associations, or CONIFA, which ran the tournament. 

Watson spoke with one potential sponsor who was apologetic but direct.
"Look, I took this to my boss," Watson recalled the sponsor telling him. 

"It's Tibet. Can you get them out of there? I'm really sorry. It's a terrible thing to ask. We love what you do, but would you remove Tibet?"
Watson refused to dump the Tibetans, which he said cost CONIFA more than $100,000 in sponsorship money. 

Watson said no one from the Chinese government ever approached him, but they didn't have to, because the sponsors already knew the risks.
Tibet is a colony of China, but Tibetans hate Chinese rule because the Chinese are trying to destroy Tibetan spiritual and cultural identity, not only at home, but also abroad. 

Potential sponsors were worried about offending Beijing because they'd already seen how other companies were punished when they didn't follow China's official line. 

In January, authorities suspended Marriott's Chinese website after the hotel group mistakenly referred to Tibet, Hong Kong and Macau as countries. 

The next month, Mercedes-Benz was forced to apologize for quoting the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, on Instagram.
"Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open," the quote read.
Watson said potential sponsors were terrified that if they backed the tournament, they'd be in a business meeting in China a few months later, staring at a photo of their company's logo next to Tibetan soccer players and the Tibetan flag.
"It could be a deal-breaker," Watson said.

Potential sponsors urged the Confederation of Independent Football Associations, CONIFA, to drop a Tibetan team from a soccer tournament in London for fear of offending the Chinese government.

Tibetans in London who turned out to root for their team were grateful and surprised that CONIFA stood up for them.
"It's very rare these days that you see people sticking to such principles," said Pema Yoko, a former official with Students for a Free Tibet, "but the more you allow yourself to bend down to China, the more China is going to bully."
The Communist Party has spent years trying to control the country's narrative and influence how the world talks about China. 

Between the Opium War in 1840 and the Communist victory in 1949, foreign powers including Japan and the United Kingdom controlled pieces of Chinese territory during a period the party refers to as the "Century of Humiliation."
"One of the contexts for the obsessive way in which Chinese officials can sometimes think about the way that China is portrayed overseas is the fact that, from the mid-19th century to well into the 20th century, China was not in control of its own destiny," said Rana Mitter, a China scholar at Oxford University.
The recent economic boom, which vaulted China from a backward, agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse and the world's second-largest economy, changed all that.
"These days China is in a much better position to actually spread [its] narrative," said Mitter, "with, we might say, a much louder megaphone."
When groups or institutions in the West don't toe Beijing's line, the Chinese government is now more willing to use its muscle to enforce its views.
Last year, the Durham University students' union organized a debate on whether China was a threat to the West. 

Tom Harwood, then president of the union, said the school's Chinese Students and Scholars Association complained about the topic and pressed him to drop one of the speakers, Anastasia Lin, a former Miss World Canada. 

Lin is also a human rights activist and a practitioner of Falun Gong, a spiritual meditation group banned by the Chinese government.

A Chinese Embassy official in London urged the Durham University students' union to drop Anastasia Lin, a former Miss World Canada and a human rights activist, from a debate on whether China is a threat to the West.

"Actually, it got to the point where the Chinese embassy phoned up our office and started questioning us a lot about the debate, asking if we could not invite Anastasia Lin," Harwood recalled. 

"It even got to the point where one of the officials at the embassy suggested that if this debate went ahead, the U.K. might get less favorable trade terms after Brexit."
In March, the United Kingdom is scheduled to leave the European Union, a giant market of more than 500 million consumers. 

British officials are desperate to ink new free trade deals with major economies, including China. Harwood was stunned that a Chinese diplomat would suggest that the United Kingdom might pay a financial price for something as small as a college debate.
"It's just quite shocking that within an institution that was 175 years old, that's prided itself on hosting free speech, free exchange, free debate, that an outside influence was trying to change that or try and stop us hosting a speaker," said Harwood.
Malcolm Rifkind, a former British foreign secretary, participated in the Durham debate. 

He didn't think much of China's tactics.
"I thought it was pathetic," Rifkind said. 

"It's something that the Chinese very foolishly do again and again."

Malcolm Rifkind, a former British foreign secretary, participated in the Durham debate. Rifkind served as foreign secretary in the lead-up to the return of the then-British colony of Hong Kong to China in 1997.

Rifkind said that a couple of decades earlier, when China was much weaker and its economy much smaller, it was easy to ignore such complaints. 

Rifkind served as Britain's foreign secretary as the country prepared to return the then-British colony of Hong Kong to China in 1997. 

At the time, the United Kingdom's economy was bigger than China's. 

When the Dalai Lama asked to meet Rifkind, about a year before the handover, he didn't hesitate.
"They spluttered," Rifkind recalled. 

"They complained. They said it was inappropriate, but nothing more than that happened because, at that time, they didn't have the diplomatic weight they have today."
Flash-forward to 2012 when then-British Prime Minister David Cameron met with the Dalai Lama in public in London. 

China's economy was now more than three times the size of the United Kingdom's. 

Beijing responded by canceling meetings and freezing out British officials. 

In 2015, Cameron refused to meet the Dalai Lama, who told The Spectator, a conservative political magazine, "Money, money, money. That's what this is about. Where is morality?"

The Chinese government no longer just tries to punish the West for straying from the Communist Party line. 

In the past year, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has gone further, arguing that China's authoritarian system can serve as a model for others, an alternative to liberal democracy.
Jan Weidenfeld, who runs the European China Policy unit at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, a Berlin-based think tank, says the party's argument runs like this: "Look at where democracy has gotten you? Lots of irrational decisions. You got Donald Trump in the White House. You've got Brexit and we've just got the better model here."
Weidenfeld says Beijing's goal is to undermine support for the Western system and wage a broader battle of systemic competition — something that would've been unthinkable just a few years ago.
Clumsy attempts to censor people — as in the case of the Durham University debate — have backfired, but China has had success pressuring businesses, as the apologies by Marriott and Mercedes-Benz show.
Benedict Rogers, deputy chair of the Conservative Party's Human Rights Commission, said the willingness of some in the West to knuckle under to the Communist Party is part of the problem. 

Rogers said that a Chinese Embassy official called a member of Parliament last year to try to prevent a conservative website from publishing an article Rogers was writing about China's repressive policies in Hong Kong on the 20th anniversary of the handover. 

Rogers said that five or 10 years ago, the embassy would've never had the guts to try that.
"China has been emboldened by our weakness over recent years," Rogers said. 

"Actually, if we'd taken a stronger stand a few years ago, they perhaps wouldn't have been doing this kind of thing now."

Chinese Paranoia

White House calls China’s threats to airlines ‘Orwellian nonsense’
By Josh Rogin 

In the long strategic struggle between the United States and China, one key issue is whether the Chinese Communist Party will be able to force Americans to do what it says, especially American companies. 

Now, the Chinese government is threatening to impose a version of its “social credit score” system on international airlines, with steep punishments unless they acquiesce to Beijing’s political demands. 

The Trump administration has decided to tell China that that is not going to fly.
On April 25, the Chinese government sent dozens of international airlines a written threat of severe punishments if they don’t change their websites to declare that Taiwan is part of China, among other things. I have obtained a copy of the letter. 

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is set to release a press statement calling the Chinese government’s threats “political correctness” run amok.
“This is Orwellian nonsense and part of a growing trend by the Chinese Communist Party to impose its political views on American citizens and private companies,” the statement reads. 

“China’s internal Internet repression is world-famous. China’s efforts to export its censorship and political correctness to Americans and the rest of the free world will be resisted.”
The White House statement is the strongest U.S. government rebuke to date of China’s increased pressure on foreign companies to toe the Chinese Communist Party line. 

In recent months, Marriott Hotels and Mercedes-Benz both folded to Chinese government pressure and removed online content related to Tibet. 

Marriott even fired an American worker for “liking” a tweet by a pro-Tibet group.
The letter from China’s Civil Aviation Administration says that on Feb. 27, the Chinese government asked each airline to investigate its websites and remove any references to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau that “mistakenly describe them as countries or anything otherwise inconsistent with Chinese law.”
The version of the letter I obtained was addressed to United Airlines and said the Chinese government found “there still exists violations of Chinese laws and contradictions to the one China policy of your government.” 

The Chinese government demanded United change its website so that “Taiwan shall be called ‘Chinese Taiwan’ or ‘Taiwan: province/region of China.’”
Taiwan must be included in any map of China on its website and United must use the same color on the website for mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, the letter stated. 

Taiwan cannot be listed as a country alongside China. 

Taiwan destinations must not be classified as being in Southeast Asia but must be put in the same category as China on the website.
If United doesn’t comply by May 25, the Chinese government will invoke “Civil Aviation Industry Credit Management Trial Measures” and “make a record of your company’s serious dishonesty and take disciplinary actions against your company,” the letter states. 

The Civil Aviation Administration will also “transfer your company’s violation of Chinese laws to the National Cyber Information Office and other law enforcement agencies to take administrative penalties according to law.”
That reference to “Civil Industry Credit Management” is citing a trial regulation on credit scoring in the aviation industry, and the letter claims United’s labeling of Taiwan is equal to “serious dishonesty” under that regulation, said Samantha Hoffman, visiting fellow at the Mercator Institute for China Studies.
“China’s domestic law, in this case on civil aviation credit and cybersecurity, allow China to extend something like ‘social credit’ beyond its own borders,” she said. 

“It demonstrates why any interpretation of the social credit system must be placed in the context of China’s definitions of state security. And state security is about protecting the Chinese Communist Party above all else.”
Moreover, the Chinese letter mischaracterizes U.S. government policy by saying “the one-China policy of your government.” 

The United States does not have a one-China policy. 

Washington acknowledges Beijing’s position that there is one China that includes Taiwan and the United States takes no stance on that question. 

The U.S. government is not going to agree that Taiwan is part of the People’s Republic of China, and neither should American companies.
The White House statement defends the principle that American private companies must have freedom in their interactions with their customers and not be pressured into taking the political positions of an authoritarian foreign power.
“The United States strongly objects to China’s attempts to compel private firms to use specific language of a political nature in their publicly available content,” the White House statement says. 

“We call on China to stop threatening and coercing American carriers and citizens.”
This is one more example of the Trump’s administration’s continuing shift toward a more assertive stance, said Peter Mattis, a former U.S. intelligence analyst on China. 

But American businesses have yet to stand up to Chinese pressure and interference. 

United declined to comment. 

Delta Air Lines and British Airways have already partially succumbed to the Chinese demands.
“The danger is less the squeeze on Taiwan and more the clear proof that China’s social management system will be used to condition companies and people outside China to align behind the party’s positions,” said Mattis. 

“The cost of doing business has been raised.”
The Chinese Communist Party can be forgiven for believing it can use a version of its social credit system on American companies. 

Nobody has pushed back on this so far. 

The White House is pledging to start doing that now. 

It’s a recognition that, as a White House official told me, “China is out of control.”