Rogue Nation

China Wields Its "Laws" to Silence Critics From Abroad
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and CHRIS HORTON

Lee Ming-cheh, second from left, an activist from Taiwan, in court in the Chinese city of Yueyang, Hunan Province, last week. The case against Mr. Lee punctuates what critics warn are China’s efforts to stifle what it perceives as threats from overseas. 

BEIJING — On the morning he disappeared, the activist Lee Ming-cheh crossed from Macau into mainland China to meet with democracy advocates.
It was 177 days later when he reappeared in public, standing in the dock of a courtroom in central China last week, confessing to a conspiracy to subvert the Communist Party by circulating criticism on social media.
The circumstances surrounding Mr. Lee’s detainment remain murky, but what has made the case stand out from the many that the Chinese government brings against its critics is that Mr. Lee is not a citizen of China, but rather of Taiwan, the self-governing island over which Beijing claims sovereignty.
The proceedings against Mr. Lee, who is expected to be sentenced as soon as this week, punctuated what critics have warned are China’s brazen efforts to extend the reach of its security forces to stifle what it perceives as threats to its power emanating from overseas.
In recent months alone, China has sought the extradition of ethnic Uighur students studying overseas in Egypt and carried out the cinematic seizure of a billionaire from a Hong Kong hotel in violation of an agreement that allows the former British colony to run its own affairs. 

The billionaire, Xiao Jianhua, now appears to be a material witness in another politically tinged investigation against the Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda.

China abruptly surfaced charges of "rape" against yet another billionaire, Guo Wengui, after he sought political asylum in the United States, where he has been making sensational accusations about the Communist Party’s leadership. 

Mr. Guo’s case could become a major test for the Trump administration’s relations with Beijing at a time of tensions over North Korea and trade.

The Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui has sought political asylum in the United States.

“China has been extending its clampdown — its choking of civil society — throughout the world, and often it is attempting this through official channels such as the U.N. or Interpol,” said Michael Caster, a rights campaigner who was a co-founder of the Chinese Urgent Action Working Group. “Unfortunately, they’re very adept at doing it.”
The Chinese Urgent Action Working Group, which provided seminars for lawyers and legal aid for defendants in China, folded last year after the country’s powerful Ministry of State Security arrested and held Mr. Caster’s colleague, Peter Dahlin, a Swedish citizen, for 23 days.
Mr. Caster noted that Interpol’s president, Meng Hongwei, is a veteran of China’s state security apparatus. 

Human Rights Watch recently reported that China was blocking the work of United Nations agencies investigating rights issues and preventing critics from testifying at hearings, including in one case the leader of the World Uyghur Congress, Dolkun Isa.
China’s economic clout has meant that few countries are willing to do much to challenge its extraterritorial legal maneuvers. 

Some have even gone along.
And countries as varied as Armenia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Kenya, Spain and Vietnam have all extradited to China scores of people accused in a spate of telephone swindles targeting Chinese citizens, even though the suspects are, like Mr. Lee, citizens of Taiwan.
“Treating Lee Ming-cheh as a mainland Chinese marks a major watershed,” said Hsiao I-Min, a lawyer at the Judicial Reform Foundation in Taiwan, who accompanied Mr. Lee’s wife from Taiwan to attend the trial.

Peter Dahlin, a Swedish citizen, was arrested in China and held for 23 days last year.

Mr. Lee’s case has added new strain in relations with Taiwan, which have soured since the election last year of a new president, Tsai Ing-wen. 

China has cut off official communications with Ms. Tsai’s government over her refusal to voice support for what Beijing calls the “1992 consensus,” which holds that the mainland and Taiwan are both part of the same China but leaves each side to interpret what that means.
In response to Mr. Lee’s legal odyssey, Ms. Tsai’s government has been relatively muted. 

“Our consistent position on this case is that we will do everything in our power to ensure his safe return while protecting the dignity of the nation,” said a spokesman for the presidential administration, Alex Huang.
China and Taiwan had in recent years cooperated on criminal investigations under a protocol that required each to notify the other in cases involving the arrests of its citizens. 

The Chinese government has recently abandoned such diplomatic niceties, officials in Taiwan say.
Taiwan’s government was notified of Mr. Lee’s arrest only when the public was — 10 days after his detainment in March near Macau, the former Portuguese colony that, like Hong Kong, is a special administrative region of China with its own legal system.
Mr. Lee, 42, assumed enormous risk to make contact with rights campaigners inside China. 

A manager at Wenshan Community College in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, Mr. Lee volunteered for a rights organization called Covenants Watch and often traveled to the mainland.
Mr. Lee’s wife, Lee Ching-yu, learned his case had come to a head when a state-appointed lawyer contacted her this month. 

She only found out about his court appearance last week in Yueyang, in the southern province of Hunan, from news reports that circulated two days later, according to Patrick Poon, a researcher at Amnesty International.

Lee Ching-yu, the wife of Mr. Lee, departing for her husband’s trial in China from an airport in Taipei, Taiwan, this month. 

According to excerpts released by the Yueyang Intermediate People’s Court, Mr. Lee entered a guilty plea. 

He appeared with a Chinese co-defendant, Peng Yuhua, and together they were accused of trying to organize protests using the social media platforms WeChat and QQ, as well as Facebook, which is banned here.
Mr. Lee told the court that watching Chinese state television during his prolonged detention convinced him that he had been deceived by Taiwan’s free news media and was wrong about China’s political system. 

“These incorrect thoughts led me to criminal behavior,” he said.
Mr. Hsiao, the lawyer from Taiwan, said none of Mr. Lee’s acquaintances had heard of the co-defendant. 

Mr. Peng testified that together they had established chat groups online and formed a front organization, the Plum Blossom Company, with the aim of fomenting change. 

Mr. Hsiao said that no such company existed.
“He was a fake,” Mr. Hsiao said of Mr. Peng. 

“This guy does not really exist. He was playing a role.”
Ms. Lee, too, denounced her husband’s trial as a farce. 

“Today the world and I together witnessed political theater, as well as the differences between the core beliefs of Taiwan and China,” she said at her hotel in Yueyang, adding that the “norms of expression in Taiwan are tantamount to armed rebellion in China.”
Mr. Lee’s case has echoes of the fate of five booksellers in Hong Kong, four of whom who were spirited out of the semiautonomous city in the fall of 2015 after publishing gossipy material about Chinese political intrigues, which, while legal in Hong Kong, is not in China.
One bookseller, Lee Bo, is a British citizen. 

Another, Gui Minhai, is a naturalized Swedish citizen; he vanished from his seaside apartment in Pattaya, Thailand, in October 2015 and returned to China in a manner that has not been fully explained. 

He appeared on state television in January 2016 and said he had voluntarily returned to face punishment for a fatal car accident in 2003. 

He remains in prison.
“What happened to my father is a much larger issue,” Mr. Gui’s daughter, Angela Gui, who has been campaigning for his release, wrote in an email. 

“It shows that foreign citizens aren’t safe from Chinese state security, even when they are outside China’s borders. I find it strange that governments aren’t more worried about China’s new self-proclaimed role as world police.”

China loses ‘soft power’ edge ahead of G20 summit

Sino-EU relations are dented by trade disputes as well as dissident’s illness 
By Tom Mitchell in Beijing

Until late last month Xi Jinping was looking forward to easy “soft power” victories at this week’s meetings with Angela Merkel in Berlin and the G20 summit in Hamburg — the latest opportunities for China to shine on a global stage.
But news that the country’s most famous political prisoner is gravely ill has thrown a spanner in the works, exposing the deep gulf that remains between Beijing and Berlin, while lingering trade and economic disputes continue to complicate Sino-EU relations.
“For Beijing the goal is to present itself as a generous, co-operative and friendly power,” says Sebastian Heilmann, president of the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin.
“However, the two countries continue to have completely different understandings of basic political order, rule of law and civil society.” 
That divide has been evident since Chinese authorities confirmed last month that Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate serving an 11-year term for subversion, was in hospital with late-stage liver cancer.
In its attempt to contain the international outcry that followed, the Chinese government has veered between stern rhetoric — warning that Mr Liu was a “criminal” unworthy of international sympathy — and attempts to show he was being treated with compassion.
Days after summoning western diplomats to private meetings to advise them that Mr Liu was too ill to travel abroad for medical treatment, Chinese officials on Wednesday invited German and US doctors to visit him in the northeastern city of Shenyang.
The same day, Xi was focused on panda and football diplomacy in Berlin.
He and the German chancellor visited Berlin Zoo, which recently received two new giant pandas from China, and watched a football match together.
People briefed on the leaders’ meetings say Ms Merkel raised Mr Liu’s condition and offered to have him treated in Germany. 
On Wednesday, a German foreign ministry official said only that Berlin supported a “humanitarian solution” for Mr Liu.
Mr Liu’s illness is a reminder that while Beijing and Berlin will present a united front at the G20 summit when it comes to arguments with US president Donald Trump over “global commons” issues such as trade and climate change, Asia and Europe’s two largest economies have stark differences.
Ms Merkel is critical of the market access barriers German companies face in China and has also expressed concerns about Chinese corporate acquisitions in Europe.
These issues came to the fore early last month when Li Keqiang visited Berlin and Brussels.
Li arrived just after Mr Trump had raised doubts about his administration’s commitment to the Nato alliance, clashed with Ms Merkel and other G7 leaders in Sicily on issues from Nato to trade, and formally announced the US would withdraw from the Paris accord on climate change.
But China’s premier achieved the geopolitical equivalent of missing an open goal.
According to three people briefed on Li’s discussions in Brussels, the two sides initially agreed to put aside a disagreement over whether China should be granted “market economy status” by the World Trade Organisation, paving the way for a joint statement in defence of the Paris accord.
If granted, market economy status would make it more difficult to penalise Chinese exporters for dumping. 
EU negotiators were instead shocked when, after a break in the talks, their Chinese counterparts raised the MES issue again, scuppering plans for the joint statement on climate. 
Chinese analysts suggest Beijing has learnt its lesson from Li’s rocky European tour.
“After Trump’s election and Brexit, China and Germany need each other to protect globalisation,” says Ding Chun, a European expert at Fudan University in Shanghai.
“Market economy status should not be a big issue this time.”

Rogue nation: China's crackdown on economists and free speech

A concerted crackdown on individual freedom in China has been in operation since Xi Jinping took power more than four years ago.

By Katie Stallard

When China's president travels abroad, he likes to present an image of a country that is open and outward-looking.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, he positioned himself as the last great defender of globalisation and free trade.
But at home, the attitude to freedom is very different.
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has overseen a concerted crackdown on individual freedoms in the most sustained attack on civil society in China in decades.
Human rights lawyers have been rounded up and put on trial, activists abducted and tortured and critical voices silenced, as the Communist Party moves to stifle potential sources of dissent.
Now one of China's only truly independent think tanks, and one of its most respected, is under threat.
In January the website of the Unirule Institute of Economics was shut down, along with its social media accounts.
As far as the Chinese internet is concerned, it has ceased to exist.
It all happened in less than an hour, co-founder Professor Sheng Hong told us, with no official notification from the authorities, which they could then appeal.
The only explanation has been an article in state-controlled media, describing the think tank as one of 17 "illegal" websites, closed for "violation of laws and regulations" or providing "pornographic content".
His staff are determined to continue their work at their Beijing headquarters, but without a platform to publish their research or raise funds, the institute's survival is in jeopardy.
"In this age of the internet, getting online is an essential part of life and work for any individual," Professor Sheng explained.
"If this is taken away from an organisation, it constitutes a highly significant attack as it has no way of getting its voice across, no way of letting the outside world know what work it is doing."
The professor was keen to stress that their organisation was not "anti-government" and that this should not be seen as an issue of "left" or "right" politics in China.
He believes this is about freedom of speech, and that fundamental values are now at stake.
He said: "Article 35 of the Chinese constitution states that all citizens have freedom of expression, including freedom of speech, of publication, of assembly, of association.
"So the severity of this problem goes far beyond an attack on [a single] organisation and any losses it may incur, as this poses a potential danger to the entire people."
Founded by liberal intellectuals in 1993, Unirule advocates independent research and the open sharing of ideas as the country moves from a planned to a market economy.
But in Xi Jinping's China, it seems the organisation's ideas are no longer welcome.
"Unirule's idea comes from the the Chinese 'Tianze', which is a word for universal rule," James Dorn, of the Washington DC-based Cato Institute, explained.
"They think that you should have a system in which the government protects people's rights and their property rights, rather than just telling people what to do.
"And that's a threat to the Communist Party, because they have a monopoly on power, and the power of ideas is very strong in that type of a system."
Cato honoured another of Unirule's co-founders -- the now 88-year-old economist Mao Yushi -- with the Milton Friedman prize for Advancing Liberty in 2012, in recognition of his lifetime's work in support of the principles of a free society.
Mr Dorn said he was concerned by what was now happening to Unirule, and called on Xi to apply some of his rhetoric in Davos on trade to the freedom of ideas.
"He likened protectionism to locking someone in a dark room, and not allowing any light to come in, and that's what protectionism does in the market place," Mr Dorn explained.
"But he didn't say anything about the free market for ideas and protectionism there -- which closes off the light of competition, and knowledge, and new information coming in.
"So there is a hypocrisy there -- and people should call him on that."
So far there is little evidence of that, and every sign that Xi's crackdown will continue.
It is difficult to show what is happening here on camera -- there are few dramatic scenes, you don't need riot police to to shut down a website.
This is repression by increment -- the gradual silencing of critical voices and ideas.
China's economy may be slowly opening up, but in terms of civil liberties and intellectual freedom, it is moving backwards.

China eliminating civil society by targeting human rights activists

Report details use of torture by Chinese security agencies – including beatings, stress positions and sleep deprivation – to force activists to confess ‘crimes’
By Benjamin Haas In Hong Kong

Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has overseen a sweeping crackdown on civil society. 

China’s human rights situation further deteriorated last year as police systematically tortured activists and forcibly disappeared government critics while state TV continued to broadcast forced confessions, a new report shows.
A creeping security state also attempted to codify much of its existing behaviour on paper, giving the police legal authority to criminalise a host of NGOs deemed politically sensitive by the authorities, according to the report by the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD).
“The Chinese government seems intent on eliminating civil society through a combination of new legislation restricting the funding and operations of NGOs, and the criminalisation of human rights activities as a so-called threat to national security,” Frances Eve, a researcher at CHRD, told the Guardian.
“What stands out is the institutionalised use of torture to force defenders to confess that their legitimate and peaceful human rights work is somehow a ‘crime’.”
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi Jinping has overseen a sweeping crackdown on civil society. 

In 2015, police targeted almost 250 rights lawyers and activists in a “war on law”, and the effects of that campaign continued to be felt throughout last year.
Reports of torture while in detention in 2016 were rampant, with methods including beatings, attacks by fellow inmates on the orders of prison guards, stress positions, deprivation of food, water and sleep, inhumane conditions and deprivation of medical treatment.
In some cases, human rights activists were prevented from receiving medical care even once they were released.
Huang Yan, who was detained in November 2015, was suffering from ovarian cancer and diabetes. Police confiscated her diabetes medication, and despite an exam done at a detention facility in April 2016 showing the cancer had spread, she was not treated and was denied medical bail.
When she was finally released, Huang was scheduled to undergo surgery last November to treat her cancer, but the authorities pressured the hospital and the team of surgeons declined to treat her.
Torture also took more overt forms. 

Last year reports also emerged that rights lawyer Xie Yang was subject to beatings and stress positions in detention, with interrogators warning him: “We’ll torture you to death just like an ant”.
In November 2016, Jiang Tianyong, a respected Christian attorney, disappeared while about to board a train and police waited weeks to confirm he had been detained. 

Jiang’s whereabouts are still a mystery nearly three months later.
In a rare strongly-worded statement, the European Union called for his immediate release along with several other lawyers.
China also continued the practice of airing confessions on state television, a move that is reminiscent of internal Communist party political purges.
In one of the most prominent cases, Swedish NGO worker Peter Dahlin was paraded on the national broadcaster after three weeks in detention, declaring: “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.”
The confessions air before detainees ever see the inside of a courtroom, and in Dahlin’s case he was promptly deported.
For those activists that do go to trial, in at least 15 cases last year police attempted to pressure activists into accepting government-appointed lawyers. 

In cases where state-appointed lawyers represented human rights activists, little defence was mounted and the accused pleaded guilty and promised not to appeal their cases.
The report also outlined two laws passed in 2016 that are likely to curb civil society: legislation regulating charitable giving and a law on foreign NGOs. 

The charity law, while not explicitly requiring all NGOs to register with the government, makes it difficult for unregistered organisations to raise funds domestically.
The foreign NGO regulations require overseas groups that give money to Chinese organisations to be registered with the police.
“Together, these laws will hamper the development of Chinese civil society by restricting their funding,” the CHRD report said.
“There are no more ‘grey areas’,” an unnamed human rights activist said in the report. 

“To advocate for human rights in China today, you must be willing to accept the reality that the government views your work as ‘illegal’.”

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 Seeks Tighter Grip in Wake of a Religious Revival

By IAN JOHNSON

Ethnic Lisu heading to a Christian church in April in Fugong, in Yunnan Province. The Chinese government is expected to enact regulations tightening its oversight of religion in the coming days.

BEIJING — The finances of religious groups will come under greater scrutiny.
Theology students who go overseas could be monitored more closely.
And people who rent or provide space to illegal churches may face heavy fines.
These are among the measures expected to be adopted when the Chinese government enacts regulations tightening its oversight of religion in the coming days, the latest move by Xi Jinping to strengthen the Communist Party’s control over society and combat foreign influences it considers subversive.
The rules, the first changes in more than a decade to regulations on religion, also include restrictions on religious schools and limits on access to foreign religious writings, including on the internet. 
They were expected to be adopted as early as Friday, at the end of a public comment period, though there was no immediate announcement by the government.
Religion has blossomed in China despite the Communist Party’s efforts to control and sometimes suppress it, with hundreds of millions embracing the nation’s major faiths — Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and Taoism — over the past few decades.
But many Chinese worship outside the government’s official churches, mosques and temples, in unauthorized congregations that the party worries could challenge its authority.

Tu Shouzhe, a Protestant lay leader, standing on the roof of his church in Muyang, Zhejiang Province, last year, hours after government workers cut down its cross.

A draft of the new regulations was published in September, several months after Xi convened a rare leadership conference on religious policy and urged the party to be on guard against foreign efforts to infiltrate China using religion.
“It could mean that if you are not part of the government church, then you won’t exist anymore,” said Xiao Yunyang, one of 24 prominent pastors and lawyers who signed a public statement last month criticizing the regulations as vague and potentially harmful.
The regulations follow the enactment of a law on nongovernmental organizations that increased financial scrutiny of civil society groups and restricted their contact with foreign organizations in a similar way, as well as an aggressive campaign to limit the visibility of churches by tearing down crosses in one eastern province where Christianity has a wide following.
But the rules on religion also pledge to protect holy sites from commercialization, allow spiritual groups to engage in charitable work and make government oversight more transparent.
That suggests Xi wants closer government supervision of religious life in China but is willing to accept its existence.
“There’s been a recognition that religion can be of use, even in a socialist society,” said Thomas Dubois, a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra.
“There is an attempt, yes, to carve out the boundaries, but to leave a particular protected space for religion.”

Uighur men performing Muslim prayers in September in the far western region of Xinjiang. The rules include restrictions on religious schools and limits on access to foreign religious writings, including on the internet.

Although the governing Communist Party requires its 85 million members to be atheist, its leaders have lauded some aspects of religious life for instilling morality in the broader population and have issued directives ratcheting back the hard-line attacks on religion that characterized the Mao era.
Over the past decades this has permitted a striking religious renaissance in China, including a construction boom in temples, mosques and churches.
Christianity is widely considered the fastest-growing faith; there are as many as 67 million adherents now, at least half of whom worship in unregistered churches that have proliferated across China, sometimes called underground or house churches.
The new regulations are more explicit about the party’s longstanding requirement that all religious groups register with the government, and the most vocal opposition so far has come from Protestant leaders unwilling to do so.
“These regulations effectively push house churches into taking on an illegal character,” said Yang Xingquan, a lawyer who is one of the signatories of the public statement.
“This is very clear.”
Many Christians contend that government-approved churches are tools of the state, as sermons are vetted to avoid contentious political and social issues and clergy are appointed by the party rather than congregants or, in the case of the Catholic Church, the Vatican.

Mosques in Linxia, in Gansu Province, last year. The rules pledge to protect holy sites from commercialization, allow spiritual groups to do charitable work and make government oversight more transparent.

The new rules call for more stringent accounting practices at religious institutions, threaten “those who provide the conditions for illegal religious activities” with fines and confiscation of property, and require the many privately run seminaries in China to submit to state control.
Other articles in the regulations restrict contact with religious institutions overseas, which could affect Chinese Catholics studying theology in the Philippines, Protestants attending seminaries in the United States, or Muslims learning at madrasas in Malaysia or Pakistan.
Overseas churches and activists with ties to Chinese Christians have been scathing in their attacks on the new regulations.
In its annual report on religious persecution released on Wednesday, China Aid, a group based in Texas, said they violated the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religious belief.
The regulations also say for the first time that religion must not harm national security, which could give security services in China greater authority to target spiritual groups with ties overseas.
Chinese officials have already banned residents from attending some religious conferences in Hong Kong and increased oversight of mainland programs run by Hong Kong pastors, raising fears within the city’s vibrant Christian community.
For traditional Chinese religions such as Buddhism and Taoism — which are practiced by 300 million to 400 million people and which the party views more favorably — the regulations appear intended to address a different problem: crass commercialization.
Temples are often forced by local governments to charge entrance fees, which mostly go to the state and not the place of worship.
About 600 people were recently detained at Mount Wutai, a Buddhist pilgrimage site in a northeastern city, for posing as monks to hustle money by fortunetelling, begging for alms and performing street shows, the state news media reported.
The new regulations say spiritual sites should be “safeguarded” from tourism and development.
The rules also require local governments to decide on applications to build houses of worship within 30 days and to explain denials in writing.
Scholars caution that it is unclear how strictly the regulations will be enforced, noting that local officials have often tolerated and sometimes encouraged religious activity that is formally illegal, including house churches.

Five Ways China Has Become More Repressive Under Xi Jinping

According to the 2016 report by the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China, there has been a broad corrosion of freedoms
By Charlie Campbell / Beijing 

Respect for human-rights and rule of law have deteriorated markedly during the term of  Xi Jinping, according to a new U.S. government report, which blames an ideological tightening within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a slowing economy brings the legitimacy of its rule into focus.

The almost 80,000-word bipartisan U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) 2016 report, released Thursday morning, raises long-festering issues such as repression of ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang, as well as the erosion of autonomy in the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong.
However, the CECC notes a broader corrosion of freedoms, encompassing a social and political reinforcement of the supremacy of the CCP under Xi’s leadership, with deleterious consequences for civil society, media freedom, labor rights and judicial due process.
“Xi has overseen a deterioration in human-rights and rule of law conditions in China marked by greater consolidation of his own power — leading some analysts to draw comparisons to Mao Zedong — through forced ideological conformity and the systematic persecution of human rights lawyers and defenders,” says the CECC report.
Here are five areas the CECC deems to be of particular concern.

1. Rule of Law
When China joined the World Trade Organization 15 years ago, it made commitments regarding enshrining financial fair play and judicial independence. 

However, the CECC report says that China has failed to implement substantive legal reforms, and instead of “rule of law” has become “rule by law — that is, using the law as a means to expand control over Chinese society while disregarding the law when it does not accommodate Party imperatives or advance Party objectives.”
Late last year, the U.N. Committee against Torture concluded that China had failed to eliminate torture, enforced disappearances, deaths in custody, and numerous other forms of ill-treatment in detention. 

The CECC says the Chinese authorities continue to use “black jails” and other forms extrajudicial detention to suppress individuals such as petitioners, rights activists and members of the banned socio-religious group Falun Gong.
Xi’s “tigers and flies” anti-corruption campaign has also seen accusations of torture and coerced confessions and even a spate of suicides by those in line for CCP disciplinary investigations.
“Xi is also looking to promote allies ahead of a major leadership transition next year,” Meredith Sumpter, Asia director of Eurasia Group think-tank, tells TIME. 

“His efforts to ensure that he will be able to fill the five available positions on the Politburo Standing Committee have included making political rivals targets of anti-graft probes.”

2. Civil Society
“Rule by law” has also increasingly been used to quash civil society, and groups and individuals working in what were previously acceptable areas are finding that they are under siege.
Much of this stems from Document No. 9, the internal CCP directive issued just as Xi came to power, which pointed to China’s flourishing civil society as a risk to the Party’s hold over society. “Advocates of civil society want to squeeze the Party out of leadership of the masses at the local level, even setting the Party against the masses, to the point that their advocacy is becoming a serious form of political opposition,” says the document.
To cite just one, sadly typical example, the Beijing Zhongze Women’s Legal Counseling and Service Center was shuttered in February 2016, despite more than two decades advocating for anti-domestic violence litigation and the protection of land rights for rural women.
The party is “determined to clamp down on any civil society that they deem to be a threat,” says William Nee, Hong Kong researcher for Amnesty International. 

“But what they consider to be a threat is really open to interpretation.”
China’s new foreign NGO and domestic Charity Laws are designed to interpret that “threat” pretty broadly, drastically limiting the ability for civil society to operate outside government sponsorship.

3. Labor Rights
Over the last three decades, CCP legitimacy has been inextricably linked to economic growth and raising the living standards of the Chinese people. 

But that legitimacy is facing unprecedented challenges as economic growth slows to the weakest annual rate in 25 years and economic liberalization flounders. 

Although the official urban unemployment rate at the year’s end was a mite over 4%, economists caution that the true unemployment rate was most likely higher.
The Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin (CLB) recorded 2,773 strikes and protests in China in 2015, more than twice that of a year earlier. 

The CECC also documented growing labor unrest, especially in the construction and manufacturing industries, as well as a government crackdown on labor advocacy.
Labor NGOs have long been subjected to various forms of harassment, often when their actions chaff with the interests of venal individuals connected to the CCP, but labor rights advocates have reported a comprehensive upping of pressure from late 2014.
One such advocate He Xiaobo, of the Nan Fei Yan Social Work Services Center, was previously fêted and even received government funding for his work assisting migrant laborers. 

However, in December 2015 authorities detained He and charged him with “embezzlement.” 

He is now free on bail.
More than a dozen other labor rights advocates have been similarly targeted, including the government award-winning Zeng Feiyang, director of Panyu Migrant Workers Center, who last week received a suspended sentence for “disturbing public order.” 

This was despite court records showing that government officials had approved of the collective bargaining agreement that was the spur for the charges.
“With the economy slowing down, the government is nervous, as workers have shown their ability to not just organize, but organize and win,” says CLB researcher Keegan Elmer. 

“The NGOs are a crucial part of the broader worker struggles in the country, and this ruling and crackdown were directed just as much at their struggles as they were at civil society and international labor rights.”

4. Media
Freedom of the press has, of course, never been a strong point since the birth of the People’s Republic. 

This year, China ranked 176 out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, and was “the world’s worst jailer of the press” for the second year in a row, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
In addition, for the first time since 2012, a foreign journalist, French reporter Ursula Gauthier, was effectively expelled from China, owing to her critical coverage of the government’s ethnic policies in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
According to analysis by Washington-based advocacy group Freedom House, of government directives in 2015, prohibited topic areas were “far broader than mere criticism of the regime, dissident activities, or perennially censored issues ” (typically Taiwan, the personal wealth of CCP bigwigs, Tibet and the Falun Gong).
In November 2015, a Criminal Law amendment came into force that placed journalists at risk of criminally charges for “fabricating false reports” when covering “hazards, epidemics, disasters, and situations involving police.”
Information on public health and safety, economic policy, official malfeasance, media censorship, civil society crackdowns, and the Party’s reputation are also increasingly forbidden, reports the CECC.
While attempting to report August’s stock market tumble, for example, Caijing Magazine journalist Wang Xiaolu was arrested for “suspected violations of colluding with others and fabricating and spreading fake information on securities and futures market,” according to state news wire Xinhua.
Sumpter says Xi has reigned in the growing autonomy that the media was enjoying under his predecessors, who allowed Chinese citizens — albeit with many restrictions — to connect with each other, access information and express views over the Internet.
“Xi thus came to power genuinely concerned about the legitimacy and long-term viability of the Party,” says Sumpter. 

“His primary pursuit as China’s leader has been to reform the Party and re-exert its influence and control over all aspects of the state.”

5. Nationalism
Increasingly, CCP directives exhibit a nationalist bent. 

The 13th Five-Year Plan, adopted this year, explicitly cites an intention to “spur a great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” in line with the “Chinese dream.”
Authorities in Tibetan and Xinjiang autonomous areas continue with policies that further threaten indigenous culture, religion and language, even labeling ordinary religious activities by Uighur Muslims as extremism and terrorism. 

Self-immolation protests in Tibetan communities have slowed — perhaps, the CECC speculates, due to the authorities imposing collective punishment on the family members of self-immolators.
Outside of restive regions, there has been a clampdown on religious organizations deemed to be not under state control. 

An estimated 1,500 crosses from the steeples of churches have been removed, even though the churches were state-sanctioned. 

Some 20 churches have been completely demolished. 

In the Kaifeng municipality of Henan province, the local Jewish community has reportedly begun to experience government restrictions on religious activity.
According to Nee, the Beijing authorities are drafting ever more laws with a “national security” focus: “It seems to be the default position of the government that the penetration of ‘foreign forces’ can have a negative effect on China.”