China’s Orwellian War on Religion

Concentration camps, electronic surveillance and persecution are used to repress millions of people of faith.
By Nicholas Kristof

Police patrolling near the Id Kah Mosque in the old town of Kashgar in China’s East Turkestan colony.

Let’s be blunt: China is accumulating a record of Orwellian savagery toward religious people.
At times under Communist Party rule, repression of faith has eased, but now it is unmistakably worsening. 

China is engaging in internment, monitoring or persecution of Muslims, Christians and Buddhists on a scale almost unparalleled by a major nation in three-quarters of a century.
Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch argues that China under Xi Jinping “poses a threat to global freedoms unseen since the end of World War II.”
China’s roundup of Muslims in concentration camps appears to be the largest such internment of people on the basis of religion since the collection of Jews for the Holocaust. 

Most estimates are that about one million Muslims have been detained in China’s East Turkestan region, although the actual number may be closer to three million.
Muslims are being ordered to eat pork or drink alcohol, against their religious principles.

China has also offered “free health checks” that are used to get fingerprints, photos and DNA samples from Muslims for a surveillance database.
While China hasn’t established concentration camps for Christians, it has harassed congregations, closed or destroyed churches, in some areas barred children from attending services and last year detained Christians about 100,000 times, according to China Aid, a religious watchdog group (if one person was detained five times over the year, that would count as five detentions).
China installed monitoring cameras in churches, including on the pulpit aimed at the congregation. 

With China’s facial recognition software, that would enable security authorities to identify who shows up at services.
The country is also experimenting with even more Orwellian technology, including the Ministry of Public Security’s mass surveillance system and a “Social Credit System” that can create a blacklist for those who don’t pay debts or who cheat on taxes, break traffic rules or attend an unofficial church.
Blacklisted individuals can be barred from buying plane or train tickets: Although the system is still being tested in different ways at the local level, last year it barred people 17.5 million times from purchasing air tickets, the government reported. 

It could also be used to deny people promotions or assign a ring tone to their phone warning callers that they are untrustworthy.
The system isn’t focused on religious people, and some argue that it isn’t as menacing as it is sometimes portrayed, but it’s easy to see how the Social Credit System could punish faith communities — especially if it is integrated with a mass surveillance network. 

The East Turkestan mass surveillance system explicitly targets people who collect money for a mosque “with enthusiasm.”
Through it all, Chinese people of faith have shown enormous courage. 

One Catholic bishop, James Su Zhimin, 87, has been detained by China since he led a religious procession in 1996. 

Counting previous detentions, he has spent a total of four decades in prisons and labor camps.
The paradox is that for half a century before the Communist revolution in 1949, Western missionaries traveled around China, operated schools and orphanages and had negligible impact on the country — yet these days missionaries are banned, ministers are persecuted and Christianity has grown prodigiously. 

There are many tens of millions of Christians, mostly Protestants, with some estimates as high as 100 million.
Some are part of officially recognized churches that pledge loyalty to the government, but most are part of the underground church that has been the main target of the crackdown.
Tibetan Buddhists have likewise suffered brutally. 

Most extraordinary is the fate of the Panchen Lama, the No. 2 figure in Tibetan Buddhism, after the Dalai Lama.
The previous Panchen Lama died in early 1989. 

Following tradition, Tibetans in 1995 chose a 6-year-old boy as the next incarnation of the Panchen Lama. 

Shortly afterward, the Chinese authorities kidnapped the boy and his family, and they haven’t been seen since. 

In his place, the Chinese helped pick a different person as a rival Panchen Lama. (When the Dalai Lama dies, something similar may happen, so at that point there would be two Dalai Lamas and two Panchen Lamas.)
The true Panchen Lama, once the world’s youngest political prisoner, has now apparently been detained for 24 years, along with his entire family, through reformist Chinese leaders and repressive ones.
We can’t transform China, but we can apply levers like targeted sanctions on individuals and companies participating in abuses of freedom — plus we can certainly do more to speak up for prisoners of conscience of all faiths. 

It’s as important to push for their freedom as to seek more soybean exports.

China’s long surveillance arm thrusts into Canada

State intimidation and electronic surveillance can be highly effective. It's affecting China's 180,000 students in Canada, as well as journalists.
By DOUGLAS TODD 

Tibetan Chemi Lhamo, student-union president at the University of Toronto, was barraged with a 11,000-name petition from people with Chinese names, demanding she be removed. Police are also investigating possible criminal threats against her.

What does a superpower do when pandas, private persuasion at the highest echelons and trumpeting the value of “harmony” are no longer winning global friends?
If you’re the leaders of increasingly autocratic China, you clamp down, especially on your own people. 

You spread an evermore elaborate system of surveillance, monitoring and pressure on citizens in your home country and in foreign lands.
You press your overseas contingent, including Chinese students you have in Canada, to attack disapproving speakers. 

You suddenly toss two Canadians in secret isolation cells in China and, this week, accuse them of spying. 

And then you dismiss Canadians as “white supremacists” if they get riled or defend the lawful arrest and bail of a Huawai executive in Vancouver.
Back home, you develop an invasive mobile phone app and make sure its downloaded by most of the 90 million members of your ruling Communist party. 

You take DNA samples from millions of the Uyghur Muslims in China, because genetics can be used to track their moves. 

You bully Chinese journalists at home and abroad.
And it works.
State intimidation and electronic surveillance can be highly effective, no matter which regime brings it into oppressive play.
It’s not just China. 

Often times in Canada it is global agents of Iran’s regime, who spy on the anxious Persian diaspora in this country. 

And this year Saudi Arabia expanded its watching game with a high-tech app by which male guardians could track the movement of Saudi women abroad.
When people know, or fear, they are being watched through technology or by clandestine agents of the state, they understandably grow nervous — and compliant.
The only hope is this culture of watchfulness doesn’t always work. 

A University of B.C. professor who specializes in Asia tells me how an apparent culture of subjugation is playing out on campus.
The majority of the many students from China that the professor comes across are self-censoring.
They don’t go to possibly contentious events about China. 

They don’t speak out in classes. 

A few patriotic ones feel it’s their duty to criticize the professor for exposing them to material that does not hold the world’s most populous country in a positive light. 

A few very privately offer the faculty member their thanks for the chance to hear the truth.
“Mostly, however, I find my undergrads in particular to be profoundly uninterested in politics and proud of their country’s rise,” said the professor, who, like many academic specialists on China these days, spoke on condition of anonymity. 

Metro Vancouver campuses host almost 50,000 of the more than 180,000 students from China in Canada.
Mandarin-language students in Canada are “the major beneficiaries of the rise” of China, said the professor. 

“They don’t want to rock the boat and the more aware ones are discreet about their critiques. They have decided to tread carefully, which suggests a consciousness that they could be under surveillance.”
If that is the look-over-your-shoulder reality for students from China in B.C., imagine how it is for those on some American and Ontario campuses, which have had high-profile outbreaks of angry pro-China activism.
National Post reporter Tom Blackwell has covered China’s recent interference in Canadian affairs. He’s dug into how University of Toronto student president Chemi Lhamo was barraged with a 11,000-name petition from people with Chinese names, demanding she be removed. 

A Canadian citizen with origins in Tibet, which China dominates, Lhamo was also targeted by hundreds of nasty texts, which Toronto police are investigating as possibly criminal threats.
A similar confrontation occurred in February at McMaster University in Hamilton, where five Chinese student groups protested the university’s decision to give a platform to a Canadian citizen of Muslim Uyghur background. 

Rukiye Turdush had described China’s well-documented human-rights abuses against more than a million Uyghurs in the vast colony of East Turkestan.
The harassment is escalating. 

Even longtime champions of trade and investment in Canada from China and its well-off migrants are taken aback. 

Ng Weng Hoong, a commentator on the Asian-Pacific energy industry, is normally a vociferous critic of B.C.’s foreign house buyer tax and other manifestations of Canadian sovereignty.
But Ng admitted in a recent piece in SupChina, a digital media outlet, that Chinese protesters’ in Ontario “could shift Canadians’ attitude toward China to one of outright disdain and anger at what they see is the growing threat of Chinese influence in their country.”
It certainly didn’t help, Ng notes, that the Chinese embassy in Ottawa supported the aggressive protesters. 

“The story of Chinese students’ silencing free speech and undermining democracy in Canada,” Ng said, “will only fuel this explosive mix of accusations.”
Some of the growing mistrust among Canadians and others has emerged from multiplying reports of propaganda and surveillance in China.
Chinese dictator Xi Jinping is attempting to control followers through a dazzling new app, with which China’s Communist Party members are expected to actively engage. 

The New York Times is reporting China has been swabbing millions of Uyghur Muslims for their DNA, the genetic samples being used to track down those not already sent to “re-education” camps.
China’s pressure tactics are also coming down on journalists. 

The Economist reports students from China trying to enroll in Hong Kong’s journalism school are being warned against it by their fearful parents. 

They’re begging their offspring to shun a truth-seeking career that would lead to exposing wrongdoing in China, which could result in grim reprisals against the entire family.
Within the Canadian media realm there are also growing private reports that Mandarin-language Chinese journalists at various news outlets across this country are being called into meetings with China’s officials, leading some Chinese reporters to ask editors to remove their bylines from stories about the People’s Republic of China and its many overseas investors.
It’s always wise to be wary of superpowers. 

But China’s actions are cranking suspicion up to new levels. 

China’s surveillance tactics are making it almost impossible for that country to develop soft power with any appeal at all.
While some observers say many of the people of China are primed for more reform, openness and media freedom, it’s clear the leaders of China have in the past year been going only backwards, intent on more scrutiny and repression.

China's Digital Silk Road Benefits Chinese Espionage

Cross-border communications networks and e-commerce links built by Chinese tech companies are used for Beijing's intelligence operations
By Nyshka Chandran

A major element of China's continent-spanning Belt and Road Initiative has nothing to do with roads, ports or power plants. 

Rather, the "Digital Silk Road" aims to construct communications networks across the developing world.
Many fear Beijing could use those tools for electronic surveillance.
The world's second-largest economy wants to build fiber optic cables, international trunk passageways, mobile structures and e-commerce links in countries tied to its investment initiative. These technologies are designed to supplement the Belt and Road's physical infrastructure while introducing common technical standards in participating nations, most of which are emerging economies and lack rudimentary internet facilities.
Boosting connectivity can enable information exchanges, bringing about "mutual benefit and win-win cooperation," according to a 2015 white paper jointly released by various Chinese government bodies. 

But there are geopolitical implications if foreign governments allow Chinese technology companies — believed to carry close ties with the state — to install complex data communications systems.
A big fear is that Chinese players insert "backdoor mechanisms that increase [Beijing's] intelligence and propaganda operations in BRI partner countries," researchers at the Council on Foreign Relations said in a note last week.
State-owned China Mobile, the world's biggest telecom carrier by subscriber count, is currently building optical fiber cable projects linking Beijing to Myanmar, Nepal and Kyrgyzstan. 

Meanwhile, "private" player Huawei signed a deal last year to build a cable system linking Pakistan to Kenya via Djibouti. 

Talks are also underway for state-owned China Telecom to help build fiber-optic links in the Arctic Circle.
Cables, which transfer massive amounts of personal, government and financial data, are controlled by telecommunications firms. 

So, when it comes to enforcing security, regulatory grey areas emerge.
That infrastructure can be used to help Beijing gain information, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. 

For example, technicians can bend or clamp the fibers to allow data to leak out or bypass encryption, the note explained: "Prior actions taken by the Chinese government, such as installing backdoors in encryption technology, suggest that it will take similar actions when laying down fiber optic cables in other countries."
China Mobile, Huawei and China Telecom didn't respond to CNBC's requests for comment.
While these projects may benefit developing economies, "they have raised concerns that Beijing uses these networks to exert pressure on other states or engage in electronic surveillance," The Economist Intelligence Unit said in a recent report. 

"BRI countries will need to enhance regulatory frameworks and oversight of projects to mitigate financial risks and political dependence," it added.
Heavyweights such as Huawei are also involved in deploying 5G mobile technology — a central component of China's digital economy — worldwide under the Digital Silk Road. 

But there are worries those firms could use their influence to promote Beijing's preferred standards.
"In 5G, China’s commercial and geopolitical objectives are closely aligned," said Elsa Kania, a Fulbright specialist at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. 

Beijing "views the nascent and emerging technical standards in new technologies as a 'golden opportunity’ that Chinese national champions are poised to take advantage of," she said.
At the heart of the matter is deep-rooted suspicion about the data-sharing practices of Chinese firms.
Corporates could be legally required or co-opted to support and participate in Chinese intelligence, according to Kania. 

"That raises concerns about the implications for China’s future espionage capabilities, while also creating leverage that could be exercised for coercive purposes," she explained.
In 2012, U.S. intelligence chiefs deemed Huawei and ZTE products a risk to national security, claiming the companies collaborate with China's government to spy, steal trade secrets and cast cyberattacks.