How Hong Kong protests play into Trump’s showdown with China

By Ishaan Tharoor

The battle over Hong Kong’s proposed extradition law intensified on Wednesday.

The decision of the city government’s legislature to postpone debate on the measure did little to calm a heated protest movement that has mobilized on a scale not seen for half a decade. 

In the heart of Asia’s financial capital, demonstrators once more occupied central thoroughfares, squaring off against riot police who fired tear gas and rubber bullets. 

More than 70 people were injured in the clashes, according to local news reports.
Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam, a proxy for China’s political leadership, condemned the protesters for “organizing a riot” and said her government still plans on pushing through the legislation. 

The Legislative Council of Hong Kong is dominated by pro-Beijing forces.
The protesters, though, show no sign of backing down. 

They see the invisible hand of Beijing behind the law and fear China will use it to further squeeze Hong Kong’s civil liberties, arrest dissidents and chill dissent. 

Chinese authorities in recent years have exerted unprecedented control over Hong Kong’s politics, including issuing a ruling in 2016 that led to the expulsion of six pro-democracy lawmakers from Hong Kong’s legislature.
For ordinary Hong Kongers — and especially a young, galvanized generation of protesters — the current fight is about much more than just one bill. 

“We are trying to tell the government that the more they suppress us, the more we will fight back,” Justin Tang, a 25-year-old protester, told my colleagues. 

“Being the last city in China that is able to do that, we are going to hold on to that right.”
The scale of confrontation returns the international spotlight to Hong Kong. 

British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt urged the former colony’s administration to “pause and reflect” over its course of action. 

Morgan Ortagus, a spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department, said people in Hong Kong don’t like being subjugated by Beijing.
Chinese officials have rebuffed any Western censure into what they deem an internal matter. 

Hu Xijin, editor in chief of Global Times, a strident English-language state mouthpiece, tweeted that the scenes of unrest on Wednesday looked like a “Color Revolution,” hinting that the West was fomenting “disturbance” in the city.
Autistic Trump, for his part, seemed to dismiss the gravity of the moment. 

“I hope it all works out for China and for Hong Kong,” he said Wednesday while meeting Polish President Andrzej Duda at the White House. 

“I’m sure they’ll be able to work it out.”
Human rights have never featured prominently in Trump’s rhetoric. 

He has yet to speak publicly about China’s mass incarceration of more than 1 million Uighur Muslims and other minority groups in so-called reeducation camps in the restive region of East Turkestan. 

Nor did he this week echo his administration’s comments on the “fundamental rights” of Hong Kongers.
His remarks came just a day after Trump indicated he was “holding up” a trade deal with China, and two days after Trump threatened to raise tariffs on Chinese goods if Xi Jinping didn’t meet with him in Osaka, Japan, during the Group of 20 summit later this month.
The unrest in Hong Kong only adds to the tensions building around that summit. 

Few American or Chinese observers expect either party to make significant concessions. 

These would include the Trump administration easing restrictions on Chinese tech giant Huawei, which the United States essentially has barred from doing business with U.S. firms. 

There’s a chance the presidents won’t even talk in Japan. 

Though he is the leader of an authoritarian one-party state, Xi is still sensitive to nationalist sentiment at home and won’t want to be seen caving to Trump’s pressure.
“Trump’s stance that he is unlikely to make any concessions is very clear. So, China should be very cautious when arranging a bilateral meeting with him,” Liu Weidong, a China-U.S. affairs expert from the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said to the South China Morning Post.

Marco Rubio
✔@marcorubio
#China has already jailed innocent foreign business executives as retribution against other countries. If #HongKong legalizes the kidnapping of people who disagree with Beijing it will have a devastating effect on their economy https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kong-legislature-fast-tracks-china-extradition-bill-amid-strike-calls-11560269656 …
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Thousands of Protesters Block Hong Kong Roads Over China Extradition Bill
Thousands of protesters blocked roads around Hong Kong’s legislature early Wednesday as lawmakers were set to debate a widely unpopular proposed law that would allow people to be extradited to China.wsj.com
720 people are talking about this.

Adding to the impasse are a chorus of voices in Washington demanding tough action in defense of Hong Kong’s political freedoms. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the extradition bill “chillingly showcases Beijing’s brazen willingness to trample over the law to silence dissent and stifle the freedoms of the people of Hong Kong.” 

She added in a statement that, if the bill passed, Congress would have “no choice but to reassess whether Hong Kong is ‘sufficiently autonomous’ under the ‘one country, two systems’ framework,” referring to the degree to which Hong Kong maintains a separate political, legal and economic system from China. 

The special status is recognized by foreign governments and underpins their dealings with the territory.
Rumors swirled this week of the possibility of the United States repealing its recognition of that status as a way of punishing Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing government and China.
“Diplomats have played down the suggestion that the U.S., or other Western governments, will revoke Hong Kong’s special status on a wholesale basis,” said Ben Bland, director of the Southeast Asia Project at the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank. 

“Such a move would punish the Chinese state-owned companies, tycoons and officials who use Hong Kong as an entry point to the global financial system. It would also undermine the political and economic interests of foreign governments and businesses in Hong Kong, as well as punish local citizens who would suffer from the inevitable financial fallout.”
Yet that’s precisely the sort of wanton havoc a politician such as President Trump may consider unleashing. 

“As Chinese officials have discovered over the past year, nothing is sacred to the U.S. president when it comes to collecting chips that he thinks he can cash in during the course of a negotiation,” wrote Tom Mitchell, the Beijing bureau chief for the Financial Times. 

“If anyone is willing to turn the screws on Hong Kong as they are now being turned on Huawei, it is President Trump.”

Chinese Dissidents Feel Heat of Beijing’s Wrath. Even in Canada.

Sheng Xue thought she would be safe in Toronto. Then she began speaking out against the Chinese government and became the victim of a lurid smear campaign.
By Catherine Porter

Sheng Xue has been the victim of a relentless smear campaign that has all the markings of a coordinated attack by the Chinese Communist Party.

MISSISSAUGA, Ontario — Search for Sheng Xue on Google in English and you will find the story of an award-winning writer who left China for Canada after the Tiananmen Square uprising and became one of the world’s leading advocates for Chinese democracy.
But that same search in Chinese comes up with a very different portrait: Sheng Xue is a fraud, a thief, a traitor and a serial philanderer.
Want proof?
It offers up salacious photos, like one seeming to show her kissing a man who is not her husband.
As China extends its influence around the globe, it has mastered the art of soft power, establishing Confucius Institutes on Western college campuses and funding ports and power plants in developing countries.
But building up is only one prong of the Chinese strategy.
The other is knocking down.
And few know this better than Sheng Xue.
For more than six years, the Chinese-Canadian activist has been the victim of a relentless campaign to discredit her by blog, Listserv, e-book and social media, which bears the markings of a coordinated attack by the Chinese Communist Party.
“This is a textbook destabilization of the exile movement,” said Nicholas Bequelin, Amnesty International’s regional director for East Asia.
“Since the early 1990s,” Mr. Bequelin said, “China has understood the best way to neutralize this group and prevent them from essentially getting organized is to ensure they have no undisputed figurehead.”
Sheng Xue is the pen name for 57-year-old Zang Xihong.
The attacks have left her name — and health — in tatters.
“I escaped Tiananmen Square in China,” she said one winter day sitting in the living room of her suburban bungalow outside Toronto.
“I thought I’d have a safe, happy life in Canada.”
But the Communist Party, she said, “was already here.”
The smears cannot be definitively linked to the Chinese government, experts say.
However in Canada, security experts have warned for years about the growing influence of Beijing not only on Chinese expatriates but on the Canadian government itself. 
In 2010, the head of Canada’s intelligence service shocked the country by declaring that the Chinese Communist Party had agents of influence in local governments.
And in 2017, a confidential report prepared by the Canadian branch of Amnesty International alerted the authorities to the harassment of Chinese-Canadian activists, the scale of which appeared “consistent with a coordinated, Chinese state-sponsored campaign.”
The dissident who seemed to be getting the worst of it: Sheng Xue.
“I think she’s a victim,” said Andy Ellis, the former assistant director of operations for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
“I strongly do. The Chinese government is trying to sully her reputation to advance their own interests.”
The Chinese Embassy in Ottawa declined to comment.

Rise to prominence. Flood of hate.
Sheng Xue, whose pen name is Mandarin for “abundant snow,” arrived in Canada in August 1989 on a visa to study journalism.
But while she had left China, she could not leave China behind.
Haunted by the sight of soldiers shooting into a crowd close to her family’s apartment during the Tiananmen Square massacre in June of that year, Sheng Xue abandoned her study plans and threw herself into the burgeoning Chinese democracy movement in Toronto.
She helped form a local branch of the Federation for a Democratic China, which at its height had 3,000 members in 25 countries.
Despite having forgone a degree, Sheng Xue broke into journalism and fashioned a successful career as a writer.
But she was best known for her activism — leading protests, lobbying governments and helping fellow activists with their asylum cases.
In 2012, Canada’s immigration minister gave her a medal for “extraordinary contributions to the country.”
A month later, she was elected president of the federation.
The first conference she hosted as the group’s president should have been a moment of glory. Hundreds came from across the globe.

Sheng Xue at a rally last year for political prisoners in front of the Chinese Consulate in Toronto.

The Chinese Consulate in Toronto.

Sheng Xue and her husband, Xin Dong, visiting the graveyard where her parents are buried in Mississauga, Ontario.

The moment she remembers best, however, is stepping off the stage and finding herself surrounded by colleagues holding cellphones.
They were showing her emails they had just received, with various photos of her half-naked.
Except they were obvious fakes.
In one photo, Sheng Xue’s face was pasted onto another woman’s body.
Another email included a supposed love letter from her to an activist in Australia, so crass, it seemed a parody.
The sender appeared to be yet another activist, Chin Jin, but he said the email was a fake.
There were sex-wanted ads posted in Sheng Xue’s name.
Lurid stories about her sex life.
Nude photos were published on a new Twitter account, of higher quality than the first ones, and harder to dismiss out of hand.
Some seemed to capture her kissing the Australian activist, Xiaogang Zhang, although both say they are fakes.
The timing seemed beyond coincidence.
“There has been a pattern,” said Jie Chen, an associate professor of international relations at the University of Western Australia who studies the Chinese democracy movement.
Pointing a finger at the Chinese Communist Party, he said, “Whoever is doing well, whoever seems to be effective in damaging the reputation of the C.C.P., all of a sudden they will get attacked very systematically.”

‘I am the real Liu Shaofu’
The attacks appear to exploit tensions within the dissident movement, where Sheng Xue is a polarizing figure.
“People who love her, really love her,” said Michael Stainton, the retired president of the Taiwanese Human Rights Association of Canada.
“People who despise her, really despise her.”
Many of her attackers are former friends and colleagues. But they say their identities were stolen.
Zhu Rui, a Chinese-Canadian author, began questioning Sheng Xue back in 2010, after the two traveled together to Dharamsala, India.
Since then, Ms. Zhu has penned many critical blog posts and assembled two e-books about Sheng Xue, accusing her of lying, personally profiting off refugee applicants and events, and being a fake witness to the Tiananmen Square massacre, among other things.
But in 2011, Ms. Zhu said, someone hacked into her computer, stole an unpublished essay about Sheng Xue and sent it to a dissident group posing as her.
Similarly, Liu Shaofu, an elder of the democracy movement, said an impostor opened a Twitter account with his name and photo to post criticism of Sheng Xue, including one fake nude photo.
Mr. Liu had collaborated with Sheng Xue for years, even living in her basement, but they had a public falling out in 2013.
“I am the real Liu Shaofu,” he wrote in his first tweet after setting up a different account in June 2014.
“Don’t you feel ashamed you sent out so many tweets in my name?”

Sheng Xue at a hospital for a CT scan. She says that stress related to ongoing online attacks has compromised her health.

A portrait of Xi Jinping was defaced at a rally for political prisoners at the Chinese Consulate in Toronto.

Toronto’s Chinatown district.

Perhaps Sheng Xue’s most vocal critic is Fei Liangyong, a former federation president living in Germany who has accused her of a raft of moral failings, including “sexual impropriety and general wickedness.”
“To not criticize her would run counter to my democratic ideas and bring shame on my lifelong struggle for democracy and constitutional government in China,” he said in an email.
Mr. Fei’s essays have been widely republished on anonymous anti-Sheng Xue blogs.
But he said he did not know who was behind them.
A Twitter account with his name and photo, which Mr. Fei said he did not create, posted links to one of the blogs.
Many fellow activists, even those who have themselves been targeted by the Chinese government, believe some of the accusations against Sheng Xue.
“The Chinese government tries all means to marginalize, to silence and detain Chinese activists, in China and outside,” said Teng Biao, a civil rights lawyer who escaped China in 2012 and now lives in New Jersey.
But, he added, “what happened to Sheng Xue might be a little complicated, because as far as I know, some claims are true.”
Taken together, a pattern emerges: Doubt is turned into distrust, and dislike into loathing.
“It’s called blowing on the hot coals,” said Mr. Bequelin of Amnesty International.

A movement splintered
Sheng Xue learned the Chinese government had her on its black list in 1996, when she tried to return to Beijing.
She was stopped at the airport, interrogated and sent back to Canada the next day.
Since then, it has become clear she remains a target, and at least three comrades in Canada report pressure from Chinese security services over their ties to her.
One, Yi Jun, said every time he returned to China, he was taken to tea by members of the Communist security bureau.
“They say Sheng Xue is very counterrevolutionary and a very bad person,” said Mr. Yi, the president of the federation’s Toronto branch.
Another dissident, Leon Liang, said his wife back in Shenzhen was visited regularly by the authorities and given a warning: “If I didn’t inform on Sheng Xue, they would take her job.”
The attacks on Sheng Xue have taken a toll not just on her but on the dissident movement itself.
The federation, which had already dwindled to about 100 members, split in two in 2017, with Mr. Fei forming a second group.
Sheng Xue has stepped down as president.
The fight was so public and ugly, it tarnished everyone.
One member in Germany distributed an “investigation” a year after the death of Sheng Xue’s mother, claiming that she had pimped out her young daughters, and that it was the source of Sheng Xue’s moral bankruptcy.
“I really lament the fact the organization founded by Tiananmen Square leaders and intellectuals has degenerated to such a miserable state,” said Mr. Chen, the University of Western Australia professor.
Few dissidents will fail to get the message, said Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former Canadian intelligence officer specializing in China: “If you participate and support these people, look what I can do to you. Your local government won’t be able to protect you.”

Sheng Xue lives in a bungalow in a suburb of Toronto. Many fellow dissidents stay there, renting rooms in the basement.

The walls of Sheng Xue’s living room are decorated with photos of her with influential people, including the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere.

Sheng Xue with friends and supporters during her birthday party.

Sheng Xue continues her activism, but her health has been declining.
She has met with doctors about heart palpitations and headaches.
She never found an effective defense against the campaign, which she dismisses in totality as lies.
Some of her supporters formed a “Friends of Sheng Xue” organization, declaring the attacks a “threat to Canada’s sovereignty and security.”
They got nowhere.
In its report, Amnesty International urged the Canadian government to fashion a “comprehensive approach to addressing this problem,” and suggested a complaint hotline.
That has not happened.
In 2016, a Chinese-Canadian human rights lawyer, Guo Guoting, volunteered himself as an arbiter between Sheng Xue and Mr. Fei.
He considers both friends.
Mr. Guo moved into Sheng Xue’s home for a month and began researching the attacks.
But his computer was hacked, he said, and “all the documents disappeared.”
He never published his report.

How Xi Jinping ensures his will is being enforced — at home and abroad

Xi’s Communist Party has extended its reach deep into suburban Australia, effectively silencing dissidents and ensuring Beijing’s agendas are enforced.
By Jamie Seidel

China bigger security threat than Russia: Wray

GROWING concerns about the security of sensitive national infrastructure projects involving Chinese firms are well founded, says University of Adelaide Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies Dr Gerry Groot.
“The Communist Party is always interested in leveraging its companies and people to serve its economic, strategic and military interests as it seeks to make China more powerful and eventually eclipse the United States,” he says.
It’s a key element of Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream’ of national rejuvenation.
The Communist Party, which Xi runs, has an additional advantage. 

It controls an international network of seemingly innocent representative bodies that inevitably weave their way back to Beijing.
And the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department is a two-headed hydra, Dr Groot says.
At home it has the public face of being a conduit between Chinese society and the Party’s leadership. Compulsory united front associations are established everywhere, to represent everything and everyone.
This includes religious groups, trade groups, sporting organisations — and Chinese managers working in international businesses.

A poster of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping with his eyes blocked by words " Not my president" is seen as thousands of protesters march in Hong Kong. The Communist Party has an extensive network in place to report -- and suppress -- such protests. 

UNITED WE STAND
China’s United Front is being used as a means of enforcing State control, Dr Groot says. 

Each association monitors and reports on the behaviour and performance of its members.
“This organisation is yet one more means by which the Party can reach out to, work with or coerce otherwise private Chinese-owned businesses through industry associations and chambers of commerce,” he says. 

“However, because there is much to be gained by being on the good side of the Chinese government, many business people are only too happy to be seen as supporting it.
“If you want to get anywhere, then you have to be in the related official organisation. And if you want a leadership role, you have to be approved by the United Front department.”
Through these United Front associations, the Communist Party’s influence now extends to international corporations and organisations within China.
“They’ve targeted Chinese managers in foreign companies and joint ventures,” Dr Groot says. 

“They also target every new industry that pops up. They soon start organising an association for them, and (if you’re Chinese) you either have to be in that association or you’re going to get into trouble. It’s quite invasive.”
Details about these groups and their members — whether within China or without — are funnelled up the Communist Party chain.
“There is also the Party’s increased emphasis in recent years, of forming Communist Party organisations within Chinese companies and China-based foreign companies with numerous Chinese employees,” Dr Groot says. 

“This means that there is no such thing as a major Chinese company which is free of Communist Party influence. To believe that companies would be willing, let alone able to refuse Party orders, is asking a lot of them.”

A security guard extinguishes a burning portrait of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping held by a pro-democracy activist during a protest march by thousands in Hong Kong. 

LOOMING PRESENCE
It’s the all-pervasive reach of these various Party controlled associations that should make us think very carefully before giving Chinese businesses access to major infrastructure projects, Dr Groot says.
“The reason is those companies must listen to the Party. They must have Party committees at the highest levels. And anyway most of the bosses are patriotic — and if ex-military people run them, what do you expect? Moreover, it is always a good idea to have the Party onside, business is more successful that way. “
Dr Groot says the United Front’s international presence is all about maintaining control over those it regards to be its citizens, promoting Beijing’s agenda — and generating Party-positive perceptions.
This applies to business people and students studying abroad — as well as exiled Tibetan communities and Uyghur ethnic group refugees
“Interestingly, one of the reasons we’re not hearing about what’s happening to the Tibetans and Uyghurs, in particular, is the success of the United Front Department in shutting down these disparate critics abroad. They’ve even turned up in Adelaide to do their work,” Dr Groot says.
“Australia’s Falun Gong community will often tell you that they’re getting surveilled and that they’re getting nuisance phone calls in the middle of the night.”
A simple ‘chat’ with a United Front representative is often enough to do the job, he says.
“They work for the United Front or the Ministry of State Security, and they can go around in Australia and talk to people. They can say ‘oh, I can help you if you really want to go and see your parents. I can help you do this, or solve that problem’. It’s carrot-and-stick stuff.”
Chinese consulates also serve this dual role, he says.
“Consulates are another Communist Party arm. Business people like consulates because they make business easy, that’s true. But they have other responsibilities. They still have to carry out Party policy, which includes looking for enemies, looking for Chinese democracy activists, Falun-Gong or other religious dissidents — Tibetan splittists, Uyghur splittists …
“I think it’s very interesting these communities have been very quiet in Australia for a long time. There’s been very little peep out of these groups. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

A Dragon dance being performed in Rundle Mall, Adelaide. Chinese business and communities abroad are being influenced by the Communist Party.

Evil Tech

Google's China prototype links searches to phone numbers

By Christopher Carbone

How the Google search retrieves results is a closely guarded trade secret, but a few things are known about the mysterious algorithm.
Google built a prototype of a censored search engine for China that links users’ searches to their personal phone numbers—therefore making it easier for the Chinese government to monitor its citizens’ queries.
The app-based project, codenamed Dragonfly, also would remove content deemed sensitive by China’s authoritarian Communist Party regime, including information about freedom of speech, dissidents, peaceful protest and human rights, The Intercept reported.
Previously unknown details about Dragonfly included a censorship blacklist  compiled by Google that included terms such as “student protest” and “Nobel Prize” in Mandarin.
Human rights organizations have criticized Dragonfly and seven engineers resigned in protest over the lack of accountability and transparency for the controversial project.
“This is very problematic from a privacy point of view, because it would allow far more detailed tracking and profiling of people’s behavior,” Cynthia Wong, a senior internet researcher with Human Rights Watch, told The Intercept. 

“Linking searches to a phone number would make it much harder for people to avoid the kind of overreaching government surveillance that is pervasive in China.”
Fox News reached out to Google for comment and received the following statement from a spokesperson on Sunday:
“We've been investing for many years to help Chinese users, from developing Android, through mobile apps such as Google Translate and Files Go, and our developer tools. But our work on search has been exploratory, and we are not close to launching a search product in China.”
Back in August, more than a dozen human rights groups sent Google CEO Sundar Pichai a letter asking him to explain how Google was safeguarding Chinese users from censorship and surveillance.
The search giant told Fox News at the time that it had been “been investing for many years to help Chinese users, from developing Android, through mobile apps such as Google Translate and Files Go, and our developer tools. But our work on search has been exploratory, and we are not close to launching a search product in China.”

In 2010, Google announced it was leaving China, mentioning the Communist country’s censorship tactics as a reason for its decision.
However, Pichai has said that he wanted the world’s most-used search engine to be in China "serving" its 800 million Internet users.

Evil Tech

SENIOR GOOGLE SCIENTIST RESIGNS OVER “FORFEITURE OF OUR VALUES” IN CHINA
By Ryan Gallagher

A SENIOR GOOGLE research scientist has quit the company in protest over its plan to launch a censored version of its search engine in China.
Jack Poulson worked for Google’s research and machine intelligence department, where he was focused on improving the accuracy of the company’s search systems.
In early August, Poulson raised concerns with his managers at Google after The Intercept revealed that the internet giant was secretly developing a Chinese search app for Android devices. 

The search system, code-named Dragonfly, was designed to remove content that China’s authoritarian government views as sensitive, such as information about political dissidents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest.
After entering into discussions with his bosses, Poulson decided in mid-August that he could no longer work for Google. 

He tendered his resignation and his last day at the company was August 31.
He told The Intercept in an interview that he believes he is one of about five of the company’s employees to resign over Dragonfly. 

He felt it was his “ethical responsibility to resign in protest of the forfeiture of our public human rights commitments,” he said.
Poulson, who was previously an assistant professor at Stanford University’s department of mathematics, said he believed that the China plan had violated Google’s artificial intelligence principles, which state that the company will not design or deploy technologies “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”
He said that he was concerned not just about the censorship itself, but also the ramifications of hosting customer data on the Chinese mainland, where it would be accessible to Chinese security agencies that are well-known for targeting political activists and journalists.
In his resignation letter, Poulson told his bosses: “Due to my conviction that dissent is fundamental to functioning democracies, I am forced to resign in order to avoid contributing to, or profiting from, the erosion of protection for dissidents.”
“I view our intent to capitulate to censorship and surveillance demands in exchange for access to the Chinese market as a forfeiture of our values and governmental negotiating position across the globe,” he wrote, adding: “There is an all-too-real possibility that other nations will attempt to leverage our actions in China in order to demand our compliance with their security demands.”
In the six weeks since the revelations about Dragonfly, Google has still not publicly addressed concerns about the project, despite facing a major backlash internally and externally. 

Earlier this month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai refused to appear at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, where he would have been asked questions about the China censorship. 

The company has ignored dozens of questions from journalists about the plan and it has stonewalled leading human rights groups, who say that the censored search engine could result in the company “directly contributing to, or [becoming] complicit in, human rights violations.” (Google also did not respond to an inquiry for this story.)
Poulson, 32, who began working for Google in May 2016, told The Intercept that the company’s public silence fueled his sense of frustration. 

“There are serious worldwide repercussions to this,” he said. 

“What are Google’s ethical red lines? We already wrote some down, but now we seem to be crossing those. I would really like to see statements about what Google’s commitments are.”
Google launched a censored search engine in China in 2006, but stopped operating the service in the country in 2010, citing Chinese government efforts to limit free speech, block websites, and hack people’s Gmail accounts. 

At that time, Google co-founder Sergey Brin made clear that he was strongly opposed to the censorship. 

Brin had spent part of his childhood in the Soviet Union, and said that he was “particularly sensitive to the stifling of individual liberties” due to his family’s experiences there.

In 2010, after the company pulled its search engine out of China, Brin told the Wall Street Journal that “with respect to censorship, with respect to surveillance of dissidents” he saw “earmarks of totalitarianism [in China], and I find that personally quite troubling.”
Poulson said that he “very much agree[s] with the case Sergey made in 2010. That’s the company I joined, the one that was making that statement.” 

If the anti-censorship stance is shifting, he said, then he could no longer “be complicit as a shareholder and citizen of the company.”
Only a few hundred of Google’s 88,000 employees knew about Dragonfly before it was publicly exposed. 

Poulson was one of the majority who were kept in the dark. 

But because he was focused on improving the company’s search systems — specifically in an area called “international query analysis” — it is possible his work could have been integrated into the censored Chinese search engine without his knowledge or consent.
Once news of Dragonfly spread through Google, there were protests inside the company. 

More than 1,400 of the internet giant’s employees signed a letter demanding an ombudsman be appointed to assess the “urgent moral and ethical issues” they said were raised by the censorship plan. 

The letter condemned the secrecy surrounding Dragonfly and stated: “We urgently need more transparency, a seat at the table, and a commitment to clear and open processes: Google employees need to know what we’re building.”
Google bosses have tried to contain the anger by shutting down employee access to documents about the China search engine. 

Following leaks from an all-hands staff meeting last month, sources said, the company has tightened rules so that employees working remotely can no longer view a livestream of the meetings on their own computers — they can only watch them inside a designated room at a Google office overseen by managers.
Poulson said he considered staying on as an employee of Google and trying to raise his protests from within. 

Some of his colleagues argued that the decision to launch the Chinese search engine may still be reversed, and encouraged him to wait before making his call on resigning. 

“But then I have no chance of changing that decision,” he said, “whereas if I resign beforehand, then there’s some chance of impact.”
Between May 2016 and July 2017, Poulson worked out of Google’s Mountain View headquarters, before he relocated to company offices in Toronto. 

He said he views his former Google colleagues as some of the smartest and most hardworking people he has ever met. 

But he is surprised more of the company’s employees have not quit over Dragonfly.
“It’s incredible how little solidarity there is on this,” he said. 

“It is my understanding that when you have a serious ethical disagreement with an issue, your proper course of action is to resign.”

Beijing Is Holding Sino-Americans Hostage in China

Exit bans are a new tool in China’s global coercion campaign.

By BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN

In its ongoing campaign to extend its reach beyond its borders, the Chinese government has found a new form of leverage: Sino-Americans in China.
Last year, Beijing prevented several Sino-Americans from leaving China, including a pregnant woman, according to email correspondence obtained by The Daily Beast. 

The total number of so-called exit bans placed on Sino-Americans in China is unknown, but at least two dozen cases have occurred within the past two years, according to one analyst’s estimate.
Chinese authorities typically target U.S. citizens of Chinese heritage for exit bans, usually in connection with an investigation. 

Sometimes, Beijing uses Sino-Americans to try to coerce family members residing in the United States to return to China or to cooperate with Chinese authorities in investigations.
Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has championed a sweeping anti-corruption campaign with an international element, known as “Operation Fox Hunt,” aimed at pursuing Chinese citizens who have fled abroad after allegedly committing economic crimes. 

The United States does not have an extradition treaty with China and in the past has rarely cooperated with Chinese demands to repatriate Chinese citizens whom Beijing considers to be fugitives. 

Beijing has previously deployed undercover agents to the United States to coerce targets into returning to China, violating U.S. visa laws and prompting U.S. government indignation.
Now the People’s Republic seems to have found another lever of pressure. 

If one of Beijing’s targets living in the United States has relatives in China, Chinese authorities aren’t shy about applying pressure to those relatives, even if they are U.S. citizens. 

Exit bans are a “pretty new tool in the Chinese toolbox” for exerting such pressure, said John Kamm, founder of the U.S. nonprofit Dui Hua Foundation, which works on sensitive human rights cases in China.
“That individual might be treated as a material witness,” said Kamm. 

“Or that individual might be in effect being held as a hostage in an effort to get the people back.”
The Trump administration has pushed back quietly but firmly against exit bans. 

For example, in the lead-up to the first U.S.-China Law Enforcement and Cybersecurity Dialogue, held in Washington, D.C., in October 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions pushed for China to allow the free travel of three Sino-Americans who had been prevented from leaving China, including a pregnant woman, according to emails reviewed by The Daily Beast.
“Both sides will continue to cooperate to prevent each country from becoming a safe haven for fugitives and will identify viable fugitive cases for cooperation,” reads the U.S.-China joint statement released on Oct. 6, after the dialogue concluded. 

“Both sides commit to take actions involving fugitives only on the basis of respect for each other’s sovereignty and laws.”
It’s a delicate balancing act for an administration that also wishes to deport Chinese citizens who are in the United States illegally. 

In the past, China has often refused to accept deportations, leaving the United States with a large number of Chinese asylum seekers with final deportation orders. 

In 2015, Beijing’s refusal to accept deportees began to coincide with its push to repatriate fugitives it claimed were guilty of corruption. 

The Obama administration signed a memorandum of understanding with China to help expedite the deportation process, but remained reluctant to agree to Chinese demands to extradite fugitives.
Human rights groups have warned that fugitives may face torture or death back in China, also expressing concerns that Beijing might use trumped-up corruption charges to get their hands on troublesome political dissidents abroad.
The Department of Justice did not respond to emailed questions. 

The National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment.
The State Department declined to comment regarding the fate of those three U.S. citizens, citing privacy concerns, but a State Department spokesperson said that the U.S. government had not agreed to repatriate any Chinese citizen due to pressure from exit bans.
However, in January, the State Department warned Sino-Americans that going to China could be risky.

“Exit bans have been imposed to compel Sino-Americans to resolve business disputes, force settlement of court orders, or facilitate government investigations,” states the travel advisory for U.S. citizens traveling to China, particularly U.S.-China dual nationals. 

“Individuals not involved in legal proceedings or suspected of wrongdoing have also be subjected to lengthy exit bans in order to compel their family members or colleagues to cooperate with Chinese courts or investigators.”
It’s difficult to know exactly how many Sino-Americans have been affected. 

The State Department declined to confirm the number of cases, citing privacy concerns, but Kamm said he knows of about two dozen cases over the past year and half alone.
“One of the problems with exit bans is that you don’t know that there is an exit ban on you until you actually get to the airport,” said Kamm. 

“There may be people in the country who have exit bans on them and they don’t know it.”
Exit bans have also been applied to ethnic Chinese of other nationalities. 

Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai was subject to an exit ban after he was kidnapped from Thailand and taken into custody in mainland China. 

The Swedish government has objected to his treatment there. 

Australian academic Feng Chongyi was interrogated by security officials while visiting China in 2017 then prevented from leaving the country. 

He was permitted to return to Australia a week later amid international media attention.
China has frequently used exit bans on its own citizens, most notably in 2010, when it prevented Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and others from traveling to Norway for Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. 

Chinese authorities have also revoked the passports of many Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority in China’s northwest, as part of a massive repression campaign.
Exit bans violate United Nations human rights precepts. 

Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” 

The State Department declined to say whether or not China’s actions violated U.S. or international law; the Justice Department did not respond to request for comment.
“A lot of people simply don’t know that they can be stopped for leaving China,” said Kamm.
It’s well-known that China blacklists people from entering, denying visas to academics and journalists who are critical of Beijing.
But, Kamm said, “even worse is if you get into the country and they won’t let you out.”

Rogue Nation

China’s law-enforcers are going global but their methods are far from orthodox

The Economist

LAST year’s big blockbuster in China, “Wolf Warrior 2”, assured citizens not to fear running into trouble abroad: “Remember, the strength of China always has your back!” 

That is doubtless a comfort to patriots. 

But for those who seek to escape the government’s clutches, its growing willingness to project its authority beyond its borders is a source of alarm. 

In pursuit of fugitives, the Chinese authorities are increasingly willing to challenge the sovereignty of foreign governments and to seek the help of international agencies, even on spurious grounds.
Fugitives from China used to be mainly dissidents. 

The government was happy to have them out of the country, assuming they could do less harm there. But since Xi Jinping came to office in 2012 and launched a sweeping campaign against corruption, another type of fugitive has increased in number: those wanted for graft. 

Though they do not preach democracy, they pose a greater threat to the regime. 

Most are officials or well-connected business folk, insiders familiar with the workings of government. And in the internet age it is far easier for exiles to maintain ties with people back home.
So China has changed its stance, and started to hunt fugitives down. 

It has managed to repatriate nearly 4,000 suspects from some 90 countries. 

It has also recovered about 9.6bn yuan ($1.5bn). 

Still, nearly 1,000 remain on the run, according to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, China’s anti-graft watchdog
The problem is that only 36 countries have ratified extradition treaties with China. 

France, Italy, Spain and South Korea are among them, but few other rich democracies. 

It is easy for Chinese suspects seeking refuge abroad to argue that they will not get a fair trial if returned home, since the government does not believe that courts should be independent. 

Last year the country’s top judge denounced the very idea as a “false Western ideal”. 

What is more, China has thousands of political prisoners. 

Torture is endemic.

The hard way
These failings have forced the Chinese authorities to resort to less-straightforward methods to bring suspects home. 

Typically, they send agents, often travelling unofficially, to press exiles to return. 

The tactics involved are similar to ones used at home to induce people to do the Communist Party’s bidding. 

Many are subjected to persistent surveillance, intimidation and violence. 

Occasionally, Chinese agents attempt to kidnap suspects abroad and bring them home by force.
If runaways have family in China, those left behind are often subject to threats and harassment. 

In an interview in 2014 a member of Shanghai’s Public Security Bureau said that “a fugitive is like a flying kite: even though he is abroad, the string is in China.” 

Exiles are told that their adult relatives will lose their jobs and that their children will be kicked out of school if they do not return. 

Police pressed Guo Xin, one of China’s 100 most-wanted officials, to return from America by preventing her elderly mother and her sister from leaving China, and barring a brother living in Canada from entering the country, among other restrictions. 

In the end she gave in and went home.
In countries with closer ties to China, agents have occasionally dispensed with such pressures in favour of more resolute action. 

Wang Dan, a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, says that he and other exiled dissidents have long avoided Cambodia, Thailand and other countries seen as friendly to China for fear of being detained by Chinese agents. 

The case of Gui Minhai, a Swede who had renounced his Chinese citizenship, suggests they are right to do so. 

He was kidnapped by Chinese officials in Thailand in 2015 and taken to the mainland. 

In a seemingly forced confession broadcast on Chinese television, he admitted to a driving offence over a decade earlier.
Many countries, naturally, are upset about covert actions by Chinese operatives on their soil. 

In 2015 the New York Times reported that the American authorities had complained to the Chinese government about agents working illegally in America, often entering the country on tourist or trade visas. 

Foreign diplomats note that officials from China’s Ministry of Public Security travel as delegates of trade and tourism missions from individual provinces. 

Chinese police were caught in Australia in 2015 pursuing a tour-bus driver accused of bribery. Though France has an extradition treaty with China, French officials found out about the repatriation of Zheng Ning, a businessman seeking refuge there, only when China’s own anti-graft website put a notice up saying police had successfully “persuaded” him to return to China. 

The French authorities had not received a request for his extradition.
This pattern is especially disturbing since the anti-corruption campaign is used as an excuse to pursue people for actions that would not be considered crimes in the countries where they have taken refuge—including political dissent. 

It beggars belief that the Chinese authorities would have worked so hard to capture Mr Gui, the kidnapped Swede, just to answer for a driving offence. 

His real crime was to have published books in Hong Kong about the Chinese leadership. 

By the same token, last year the Chinese embassy in Bangkok reportedly asked the Thai government to detain the wife of a civil-rights lawyer after she escaped over China’s south-western border. 

Her only known offence was to have married a man who had the cheek to defend Chinese citizens against the state.
Increasingly, China is trying to use Interpol, an international body for police co-operation, to give its cross-border forays a veneer of respectability. 

Interpol has no power to order countries to arrest individuals, but many democratic states frequently respond to the agency’s “red notices” requesting a detention as a precursor to extradition. 

In 2015 China’s government asked Interpol to issue red notices for 100 of its most-wanted officials. To date, the government says half of those on the list have returned, one way or another. 

Small wonder that Xi Jinping has said he wants the agency to “play an even more important role in global security governance”.
Since 2016 Interpol has been headed by Meng Hongwei, who is also China’s vice-minister of public security. 

That year alone China issued 612 red notices. 

The worry is that China may have misrepresented its reasons for seeking arrests abroad. 

Miles Kwok, also known as Guo Wengui, a businessman who fled China in 2015, stands accused of bribery. 

But it was only when he was poised to give an interview last summer in which he had threatened to expose the misdeeds of the ruling elite that China asked Interpol to help secure his arrest. 

When America refused to send him home, the Chinese government requested a second red notice, accusing Mr Kwok of rape.
China’s covert extraterritorial activity suggests that foreign governments are right to be cautious about deepening ties in law-enforcement. 

If nothing else, the fate of those who do return provides grounds for concern. 

Although few would shed any tears for corrupt tycoons or crooked officials, the chances of any of them getting a genuine opportunity to prove their innocence are all but zero. 

Nearly half of the repatriated officials who were subject to red notices have been sentenced to life in prison; the other half have not yet been tried. 

Chinese courts have an astonishingly high conviction rate. 

In 2016, the latest year for which figures are available, it was 99.9%.

Rogue Nation

Xi Jinping’s Strongman Rule Raises New Fears of Hostility and Repression
By JANE PERLEZ and JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

Xi Jinping’s efforts to indefinitely extend his rule as China’s leader, announced on Sunday, raised fresh fears in China of a resurgence of strongman politics — and fears abroad of a new era of hostility and gridlock.
Xi, who has been president since 2013, has tried to cultivate an image as a benevolent father figure who is working to promote China’s peaceful rise.
But the ruling Communist Party’s decision to open a path to a third term for Xi heightened a sense of resentment in China among academics, lawyers, journalists and business executives. 

Many have watched warily as Xi has used his power to imprison scores of dissidents, stifle free speech and tighten oversight of the economy, the world’s second largest.
Wu Qiang, a political analyst in Beijing, said the change to the Constitution would turn Xi into a “super-president.”
“He will have no limits on his power,” he said.
Government censors rushed to block criticism of the decision. 

Internet memes depicted Xi as an emperor with no regard for the rule of law and showed a portrait of Xi replacing Mao’s hallowed image in Tiananmen Square. 

Another repurposed an ad for Durex condoms, adding a tag line — “Twice is not enough” — to poke fun at the idea of Xi angling for a third term.
The party’s move comes as Xi has proclaimed an era of China’s greatness, when the country, he says, will take what he sees as its rightful place as a top global power. 

Already, it is establishing military bases in the Western Pacific and Africa, building infrastructure across Asia, parts of Europe and Africa, and running what Xi hopes will be the world’s No. 1 economy within two decades or sooner.
“China feels it is on the road to great power status and they want to perpetuate the trajectory they are on,” said David Finkelstein, director of China Studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Va.
Analysts outside China said they worried that allowing Xi one-man rule might worsen an increasingly tense relationship between the United States and China.
After years of efforts by the United States to engage China on issues from market reform to climate change to human rights, the Trump administration turned on Beijing last December and called China a strategic competitor in its first national security document.
Washington policymakers are preparing plans to impose tariffs on some Chinese imports, limit Chinese investments in the United States, particularly in technology, and spend more on the United States military to sustain its big advantage over the People’s Liberation Army.
In Congressional testimony earlier this month, the director of the F.B.I., Christopher Wray, described China as “not just a whole of government threat but a whole of society threat.”
Trump may well see Xi’s consolidation of power as part of a global trend toward increasingly influential leaders, in which he might include himself along with Xi and Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian leader, said James Mann, the author of “The China Fantasy,” which contradicted the popular view that increasing prosperity would lead to political liberalization in China.
“I’m guessing he will not deplore the lack of democracy in China, because that’s the sort of thing he rarely if ever does,” Mr. Mann said of Trump.
Mr. Mann also said Trump might not have much problem with what Xi had accomplished.
“Over the past 14 months in office, Trump has almost never voiced the sort of support for our constitutional system that has been a staple in the statements of past presidents,” Mr. Mann said. 

“He does not respect the dignity or integrity of political opponents. He does not express support for the independence of the courts or the freedom of the press.”
So if anything, he said, “I think Trump is probably jealous.”
From Clinton to Bush to Obama, the prevailing belief was engagement with China would make China more like the West.

Donald J. Trump and Xi Jinping walking off stage after a meeting with business leaders in Beijing last year. 

Instead, as Mr. Mann predicted, China has gone in the opposite direction.
Shi Yinhong, professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said Xi likely did not care how the world would interpret his designation as a potential ruler in perpetuity.
With an unlimited term in office, Xi would almost certainly be in office beyond 2024, the year Trump would leave the White House if he won a second term.
“This objectively makes him stronger than Trump, who has no reason to like the change,” Mr. Shi said.
At home, Xi will likely have considerable support for a third term, the result of a yearslong campaign to sideline political rivals and limit dissent. 

And nationalists cheered the decision, describing Xi as a singular force who could restore the glory of the nation.
But as the news spread, readings of Hannah Arendt who wrote about the evils of totalitarian rule, and passages from George Washington, who retired after two terms as president, were discussed on social media in Chinese legal circles.
Douglas H. Paal, a China expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the sudden move, before Xi even starts his second term next month, suggested that things were not “normal” within the Communist Party.
“This looks like forced marching, not normal order, so something is going on,” Mr. Paal said. 

“Xi is winning, but it will take sleuthing to find out what. These are not ordinary times.”
A series of visits by senior Chinese officials to Washington in the past month to try and persuade the Trump administration to slow down plans to introduce punitive measures that could result in a trade war had failed, Mr. Paal said.
“This could get complicated when U.S. initiatives meet unconventional times in China,” he said.
Still, Xi is popular in many areas — his fans affectionately call him “Uncle Xi” — and his brand of folksy nationalism wins accolades, especially in rural areas. 

Experts said Xi would likely benefit from the perception in China that the rest of the world is chaotic.
“With a population amazed at the incompetent mess in much of the rest of the world, and intoxicated by nationalism, for Xi to effect this change will be seen as reasonable,” said Kerry Brown, a professor of Chinese politics at King’s College, London.
But Xi’s assumption of unfettered power may not work out the way he thinks, said Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and a former senior Australian defense official.
“The risks to his personal fortunes are huge,” he said. 

“What if the People’s Liberation Army decides he should be cut loose?”

And, he added, “What if growth slows more than expected?”
If Xi comes under pressure at home or abroad, he could become unpredictable, and even dangerous, Mr. Jennings said. 

The reach for more personal power could be the start of his downfall.
“The West can take no comfort in that because Xi’s situation means he may take more risks in the South China Sea or over Taiwan,” he said. 

“He has nothing to lose and everything to gain by engaging in more Putin-like brinkmanship.”
Moreover, he added, “Where does one ever see the ‘president for life’ model end well?”

Tech Quisling

Apple’s iCloud Data Storage in China Includes Cryptographic Keys – Decision Raises Security Concerns
By Rafia Shaikh

Apple will begin hosting iCloud data of its Chinese users in a new data center in China. 

Complying with the tougher Chinese laws, the local authorities will start having faster access to iPhone users’ data stored in the cloud. 

The company had first announced this move last summer after the new cybersecurity laws were passed in China requiring all the foreign companies to use locally managed businesses to store data.
This data, that is currently stored in the United States, will now be stored locally in China and includes, among other things, iCloud cryptographic keys needed to unlock an account. 

This essentially means that China will no longer need to reach out to the US government or deal with US legal system to seek information on a Chinese Apple user. 

While this is becoming an increasingly common practice with the US itself pushing for a similar strategy, the approach does raise user privacy and security concerns. 

Reuters reports today that it’s the first time for Apple to store keys outside of the United States.
That means Chinese authorities will no longer have to use the U.S. courts to seek information on iCloud users and can instead use their own legal system to ask Apple to hand over iCloud data for Chinese users, legal experts said.
For a perspective, Apple reportedly refused all requests it received from the Chinese authorities for information on over 176 users between 2013 and mid-2017. 

Considering China’s tightening control over local internet access, human rights advocates warn that this move will make it impossible for dissidents and journalists in China to freely communicate, as it will become easier for the authorities to track them down. 

They are also pointing to a similar move taken by Yahoo several years ago, when this data access was used to arrest dissidents and human rights activists.
“Jing Zhao, a human rights activist and Apple shareholder, said he could envisage worse human rights issues arising from Apple handing over iCloud data than occurred in the Yahoo case,” Reuters report added.
In its statement Apple said it has to comply with the local laws as it does in the United States, as well. 

The move does raise questions over Apple’s previous strategy of keeping user security at the center of its business – something that no longer seems to be the case.
“While we advocated against iCloud being subject to these laws, we were ultimately unsuccessful,” Apple said in its statement. 

The company said offering this new system was a better choice than discontinuing it which would have led to bad user experience.
The company continued to say that the latest move affects only the data stored in cloud that will now be easily accessible to Chinese authorities who will just need to push Apple with a local legal warrant.
While Apple led the industry with user-focused decisions for years, it continues to make moves that no longer align with the company’s previous focus on user privacy. 

The company recently also removed VPN apps from its Chinese App Store raising questions from the United Nations. 

Tim Cook had said at the time that the company was “just following the law.”
Privacy advocates warn that Apple’s decision to comply with the Chinese demands will only hurt Apple and other tech companies in the long run, since more governments will follow to make similar demands. 

The company’s position, however, aligns with what Bill Gates had said earlier this month – follow whatever governments legally ask you or be ready for strict government regulation.

CHINA’S OPERATION AUSTRALIA

The party line: The Chinese Communist Party is waging a covert campaign of influence in Australia and while loyalists are rewarded, dissidents live in fear.
By Nick McKenzie, Richard Baker, Sashka Koloff and Chris Uhlmann


University student Tony Chang had suspected for months that he was being secretly monitored, but it was a panicked phone call from a family member in China that confirmed his fears.
It was June 2015 and Chang’s parents had just been approached by state security agents in Shenyang in north-eastern China and invited to a meeting at a tea house.
It would not be a cordial catch-up.
As Chang later detailed in a sworn statement to Australian immigration authorities, three agents warned his parents about their son’s involvement in the Chinese democracy movement in Australia. The agents “pressed the point that my parents must ask me to stop what I am taking part in and keep a low profile,” the statement said.

From a Brisbane share house littered with books and unwashed plates, the Queensland University of Technology student told a Fairfax Media-Four Corners investigation that the agents had intelligence about his plans to participate in a protest in Brisbane on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and also during the Dalai Lama’s visit to Australia.
Chang’s activities in Brisbane meant that his terrified father in China feared that he too was being “watched and tracked”.
His father, a cautious, apolitical man, had already spent years worrying about his unruly son.
In 2008, when Chang was 14, he was arrested for hanging Taiwan independence banners on street poles in Shenyang.
His family was forced to call on Communist Party contacts to ensure Chang was released after several hours of questioning.

Tony Chang awaits questioning in a police station in China in 2008.

After Chang was questioned again in 2014 for dissident activities, he decided it was no longer safe to remain in China.
He applied for an Australian student visa.
The June 2015 approach to his parents back in China was the second time in two months that security agents had warned Chang’s family to rein in his anti-communist activism in Australia.
These threats helped convince the Australian government to grant Chang a protection visa.
Chang’s treatment as a teen is typical of the way the party-state deals with dissidents inside China. But the monitoring of the student in Brisbane and his decision to speak out about the threats to his parents in Shenyang, despite the risk it poses to them, provides a rare insight into something much less well known: the opaque campaign of control and influence being waged by the Chinese Communist Party inside Australia.

Tony Chang in Brisbane in 2017.

Part of this campaign involves attempts to influence Australian politicians via political donors closely aligned with the Communist Party – something that causes serious concern to Australia’s security agency, ASIO.
But the one million ethnic Chinese living in Australia are also targets of the Communist Party’s influence operations.
On university campuses, in the Chinese-language media and in some community groups, the party is mounting an influence-and-control operation among its diaspora that is far greater in scale and, at its worst, much nastier, than any other nation deploys.
In China, it’s known as qiaowu.
The recent chief of Australia’s diplomatic service, Peter Varghese, who is now chancellor at the Queensland University, told Fairfax Media and Four Corners that China’s approach to influence building is deeply concerning, not least because it is being run by an authoritarian one-party state with geopolitical ambitions that may not be in Australia’s interest.
“The more transparent that process [of China’s influencing building in Australia] is, the better placed we are to make a judgment as to whether it is acceptable or not acceptable and whether it is covert or overt,” Varghese says.
“This is an issue ASIO would need to keep a very close eye on, in terms of any efforts to infiltrate or subvert our system which go beyond accepted laws and accepted norms.”
The depth of the concern at the highest levels of the defence and intelligence establishment can be measured in recent public statements by the departing Defence Force Chief and the director general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.
Australia’s domestic spy chief Duncan Lewis warned Parliament that Chinese interference in Australia was occurring on “an unprecedented scale”.
“And this has the potential to cause serious harm to the nation's sovereignty, the integrity of our political system, our national security capabilities, our economy and other interests,” Lewis said.
A China expert, Swinburne professor John Fitzgerald, agrees.
“Members of the Chinese community in Australia deserve the same rights and privileges as all other Australians, not to be hectored, lectured at, monitored, policed, reported on and told what they may and may not think.”

The coercion category
The definitive text on Beijing’s overseas influence operations is Qiaowu: Extra-Territorial Policies for the Overseas Chinese by China expert James To.
Citing primary documents, To concludes the policies are designed to “legitimise and protect the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power” and maintain influence over critical “social, economic and political resources”.
Those already amenable to Beijing, such as many student group members, are “guided” – often by Chinese embassy officials – and given various benefits as a means of “behavioural control and manipulation,” To says.
Those regarded as hostile, such as Tony Chang, are subjected to “techniques of inclusion or coercion.”
Australian academic Dr Feng Chongyi is another who falls into the “coercion” category.
In March, Feng travelled to China to engage in what he calls the “sensitive work” of interviewing human rights lawyers and scholars across China.
Feng expected to be closely watched and harassed when he arrived in Beijing but accepted it simply as an irritating feature of his job.
“It’s an open secret that our telephone is tapped, we are followed everywhere.”
“But that is a little thing that we have to accept if we want to work in China,” the University of Technology Sydney China scholar and democracy activist tells Fairfax Media and Four Corners.
Feng is a small, energetic man who has retained his Communist Party membership in the hope that he will live long enough to see some results from what has become his life’s mission: democratising China.
But he is also a realist, which meant he was initially unconcerned when, on March 20 and after he’d arrived in the city of Kunming, he was approached by agents from the Ministry of State Security. Feng was driven to a hotel three hours away to be questioned.
He expected the matter to end there but, a day later, he realised he was being followed by security agents to the sprawling port city of Guangzhou.
There he was told his interrogation would continue.
“That’s the time when I really realised something serious is happening,” he recalls.

Dr Feng Chongyi in 2017.

Big trouble
In a Guangzhou hotel room, the security agents subjected Dr Feng to daily six-hour questioning sessions, all of it video-taped.
Many of the questions were about his activities in Sydney, including the content of his lectures at UTS, the people in his Australian network of Communist Party critics, and his successful efforts to stop a concert glorifying the Communist Party founder Chairman Mao Zedong.
Then the agents turned their attention to Feng’s family, asking him specific questions to show him that his wife and daughter were also being closely watched. 
He describes this change in tactics as a means of getting him to fully submit to his inquisitors’ demands.
It is the only part of his story that the wily academic hesitates to recall, as if emotion might overtake him.
“I can suffer this or that but I’ll not allow my wife and my daughter and my other family members [to] suffer from my activities,” he says.
“That is the thing that’s quite fearful in my mind.”
When his inquisitors demanded Feng take a lie detector test on March 23, he called his wife who told him to make a run for it.
A few hours later, after midnight, Feng crept out of his hotel, hoping to board a 4am flight.
But as he sought to check in, an airport official told him he could not leave China because he was suspected of endangering state security.
“At that point, my wife told my daughter that I was in deep trouble,” says Feng.
Feng’s daughter immediately called a foreign affairs specialist in the Australian government and asked for help.
Feng’s questioning continued for six more days until his daughter was contacted by an Australian government official and told Feng would be permitted to board a flight back to Australia.
In his final interrogation session, the MSS agents presented Feng with a document to sign that forbade him from publicly discussing his ordeal. 
But by then, his detention had already been covered by several Australian media outlets.
When Feng landed at Sydney airport on April 1, a small group of supporters was waiting for him with banners.
Feng believes his treatment in China was designed to send other academics, along with his supporters in the Chinese Australian community, a message to “stay away from sensitive issues or sensitive topics”.
“Otherwise they can get you into big trouble, detention or other punishment.”

Campus patriots
Mostly though, the Communist Party’s influence on Australian university campuses takes a subtler form, and works through the Chinese Students and Scholars Associations.
The Communist Party targeted these patriotic associations after the Tiananmen Square student uprising as a way of maintaining control over overseas students.
In Australia, which has 100,000 Chinese students, the associations are “sponsored” by Chinese embassy and consular officials.
Lupin Lu, an amiable 23-year-old communications student who is president of the Canberra University Students and Scholars Association, explains to Fairfax Media and Four Corners how Chinese embassy officials played an active role in organising a large student rally to welcome Li Keqiang when he visited Australia in March.
On the day, the rally had two shifts, the first starting at 5am.
Lu insists it was students rather than the embassy calling the shots.
“I wouldn’t really call it helping,” she insists of the embassy’s role, while confirming it provided flags, transport, food, a lawyer and certificates for students that would help them find jobs back in China.
“It’s more sponsoring,” Lu explains.

Li Keqiang and Malcolm Turnbull in 2017.

Lu says her fellow students are willing to assemble at 5am to welcome Li because of their pride at China’s economic rise.
Other factors are an early education system that extols the virtues of the Communist Party and the reality that positive connections with the government can help a person land a job in China.
Federal police officers still describe with awe events in 2008 at the Olympic torch rally, when hundreds of chartered buses entered Canberra from NSW and Victoria, delivering 10,000 Chinese university students “to protect the torch”.
“If the Aussie embassy in London issued a similar call to arms to Australian students in London, there would be two students and a dog,” an officer says.
Lu had another way of motivating her fellow students to assemble before dawn: she stressed the importance of blocking out anti-communist protesters.
Would she go so far as to alert the embassy if a human rights protest was being organised by dissident Chinese students?
“I would, definitely, just to keep all the students safe,” she says. “And to do it for China as well.”

Going viral
The extent to which this student nationalism is directed and monitored from Beijing, and what this means for academic freedoms, is uncertain.
Last year, ANU Emeritus Professor and the founding director of the Australian centre on China in the World, Geremie Barme, was so concerned he wrote a lengthy letter to Chancellor Gareth Evans.

Barme’s fears were sparked by a series of viral nationalistic videos created and posted by a Chinese ANU student, Lei Xiying.
One of Lei’s videos, “If you want to change China, you’ll have to get through me first”, attracted more than 15 million hits.
“I would opine that Mr Lei is an agent for government opinion carving out a career in China’s repressive media environment for political gain,” wrote Barme.
The ANU defended the student’s activities on free speech grounds, but Barme said the university was ignoring Lei’s sponsorship by an authoritarian government that routinely threatens scholars and journalists.
“Make no mistake, it is officially sanctioned propaganda,” Barme said.
He urged the university to confront the issue by debating it openly.
His supporters say that request was ignored.
Real media
A gracious host, Sam Feng is in a gregarious mood when he invites us to the headquarters of Pacific Times, the once proudly independent community Chinese-language newspaper he founded in the 1980s.
Over Chinese tea, Feng scoffs at suggestions that his paper is involved in financial dealings with an arm of the Chinese Communist Party that shapes its coverage.
“It is false. It is fake … They don’t need to do that,” says Feng, while insisting that questions of bias should be directed to Western media outlets whose coverage supports the US version of the world. “We are real media,” Feng explains of his small team of staff.
But corporate records suggest his paper is less independent than he claims.
Subsidiaries of the Communist Party’s overseas propaganda outlet, the Chinese News Service, own a 60 per cent stake to Feng’s 40 per cent in a Melbourne company, the Australian Chinese Culture Group Pty Ltd.
The results of this joint-venture deal appear evident in the newspaper’s content, vast chunks of which are supplied direct from Beijing where propaganda authorities control the media.
Academic Feng Chongyi describes Pacific Times as one of several Australian Chinese-language media outlets that have forgone any semblance of editorial independence in exchange for deals offered by the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus.
“It used to be quite independent or autonomous,” he says, “but ... you can see the newspaper now is almost identical [to] other newspapers that exclusively focus on the positive side of China.”
In a backroom in Sam Feng’s West Melbourne headquarters is evidence suggesting his Beijing dealings extend beyond what is placed in his newspaper.
A well-placed source leaked to Fairfax Media photos of dozens of placards resting against a wall of the room.
“We Against Vain Excuse for Interfering in South China Sea,” reads one of the placards.
To a casual observer, the placards would barely warrant a glance.
But along with other information provided by the source, they point towards what Australian security officials suspect: that the Chinese Communist Party has had a hand in encouraging protests in Australia.
“The Chinese would find it unacceptable if Australia was to organise protests in China against any particular issue,” says former DFAT chief Peter Varghese.
“Likewise, we should consider it unacceptable for a foreign government to be [encouraging], organising, orchestrating or bankrolling protests on issues that are ultimately matters for the Australian community or the Australian government.”
The placards stored at Pacific Times were handed out to hundreds of protesters who marched in Melbourne on July 23, 2016, to oppose an international tribunal ruling – supported by Australia – that rejected Beijing's claim over much of the South China Sea.
Of Pacific Times owner Sam Feng, the source says the newspaper owner seeks to keep the Chinese Communist Party onside for commercial reasons: “He is a nationalist. But he just cares about business.”
A review of the corporate records of other large Chinese Australian media players reveals the involvement of Communist Party-controlled companies. 
Those who turn down offers to become the party’s publishing partners and seek to print independent news face the prospect of threats, intimidation and economic sabotage.

Overseas forces
Don Ma, who owns the independent Vision China Times in Sydney and Melbourne, tells Fairfax Media and Four Corners that 10 of his advertisers have been threatened by Chinese officials to pull their advertising.
All acquiesced, including a migration and travel company whose Beijing office was visited by the Ministry of State Security every day for two weeks until they cut ties with the paper.
Ma is happy to speak publicly because he has already been blocked from travelling to China.
His journalists, though, request their names and images not be used when we visit Ma’s Sydney and Melbourne offices.
They are fearful of retribution.
Ex-DFAT chief Peter Varghese and Swinburne Professor Fitzgerald says Australia should require more accountability and transparency around the way the Communist Party and its proxies are operating in the media and on university campuses.
Fitzgerald warns Communist Party influence operations in Australia not only risk dividing the Chinese community, but sparking hostility between it and other Australians.
“The Chinese community is the greatest asset we have in this country for managing what are going to be complex relations with China over the next decades – in fact for centuries to come – and we need them to help us in managing this relationship.
“If suspicion is sown about where their loyalties lie then we lose one of our greatest assets in this country now.”
The Vision China Times’ Don Ma has not only endured economic sabotage from the Communist Party but a campaign of vilification from pro-Beijing members of the local Chinese community.
Yet he keeps publishing, not only because he embraces freedom of the press but because many members of the disparate Chinese community urge him to keep doing so.
“The media here, almost all the Chinese media, was being controlled by overseas forces,” says Ma.
“This is harmful to the Australian society. It is also harmful to the next generation of Chinese. Therefore, I felt I wanted to invest in a truly independent media that fits in with Australian values.”