Taiwan is battling a wave of online disinformation from China

By Alice Su

Demonstrators in Taiwan rally against pro-China media. A global study found that the island was the territory most exposed to Chinese disinformation.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — The messages start out as innocuous advice, often health-related, like: “Don’t eat mushrooms and eggplant together, or you may die.”
Then they turn political.“Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s PhD is fake.” 

“The CIA pays Hong Kong protesters $385 a day to go on the streets.” 

“Pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan are ethnically Vietnamese and Japanese.”
Thousands of Chinese lies flood social media every day in Taiwan, a new frontier of information warfare. 

The island, which China claims as part of its territory but has been functionally independent since the 1950s, is the target of a Russian-style disinformation campaign by China to exploit social divisions and undermine democracy in the lead-up to the presidential election in January.
A recent study by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden found that Taiwan was the territory most exposed to Chinese disinformation, based on weighted ratings by experts. 

The U.S. ranked No. 13.
On Friday alone, Facebook shut down 118 Taiwanese fan pages, 99 groups and 51 accounts, including at least one unofficial fan group with more than 150,000 members for pro-China politician Han Kuo-yu, the candidate of the Nationalist Party, who is seen as Beijing’s favorite. 

He is seeking to unseat Tsai, whose Democratic Progressive Party takes a more confrontational stance toward China.
Facebook told Taiwan’s Central News Agency that the accounts had been removed for violating the platform’s rules by artificially inflating their posts’ reach, and that the removal was part of Facebook’s efforts to protect Taiwan’s election.
Like other democracies, Taiwan has been struggling to contain the spread of false information via social media. 

Several nations, including Singapore and Vietnam, have passed laws to combat “fake news,” but advocates of human rights and press freedom think that such bans are being used as a pretext to censor news and stifle speech.
In Taiwan, a bill prohibiting foreign “infiltration” of elections is stalled in the legislature, challenged by critics who say it brings back memories of the “White Terror,” a nearly four-decade period of martial law period that ended only in 1987.
Instead, Taiwan’s government is relying on private citizens to check facts and promote media literacy.
In a small office tucked inside a TV broadcast building, four former journalists recently pored over social media posts for the Taiwan FactCheck Center, a nonprofit group that started collaborating with Facebook in July 2018 to debunk disinformation on Taiwanese pages. 

The center is supported by two private foundations and is not funded by any government, political party or politician.
When users click on a Facebook post flagged as false, they encounter a warning screen with a link directing them to the center’s report before the user can access the content.
(Facebook says it similarly works with third-party fact-checking organizations in a number of countries, including the U.S. But when posts are marked false in most countries, they simply get moved lower in the news feed so that users see it less prominently. Fact-checking reports are also added as “Related Articles” connected to the false posts, Facebook says.)
In Taiwan the fact-checking team is small. 

It takes days to research and publish a full debunking report. 

The work is Sisyphean: The center has published 214 reports so far, but thousands of fake-news posts show up daily on Facebook and Line, a popular messaging app. 

Many appear in private chat groups that the center cannot monitor.
“This is just a beginning,” said Summer Chen, the center’s editor in chief, acknowledging the challenge.
Chen sees parallels with the disinformation campaigns used by the Russians to interfere in American elections. 

Some accounts and pages lure readers with seemingly innocuous information, then suddenly switch to political messaging.
Other posts try to stir emotions on hot-button issues — for example, false claims that Tsai’s government has misused pension funds to lure Korean and Japanese tourists to make up for a drop in visitors from the mainland, and that organizers of Taiwan’s annual gay-rights parade received stipends to invite overseas partners to march with them.
“They see a crack and stick a needle in,” Chen said, citing a Chinese proverb to explain disinformation that exploits social divisions.
The provenance of some slanderous posts is barely concealed.
One false post, for example, claimed that pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong had been offered money to kill police officers in suicide attacks. 

Chen’s group traced its first appearance to a post on Weibo, a mainland Chinese platform, by an official account belonging to China’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission.Fact-checkers also noted that the posts were accompanied by a fabricated poster claiming to recruit “martyrs.” 

But the name of the supposed martyrs’ chat group was written in Mandarin phonetics, rather than in Cantonese, the dialect spoken in Hong Kong.
Content analysis is one method analysts use to discern whether disinformation is coming from China, said Puma Shen, head of DoubleThink Labs, an organization that tracks Chinese disinformation and influence networks in Taiwan.
Timing can also be a giveaway, Shen said, as when clusters of accounts post and share content at the same time, between the same hours every day.
Proving whether such “coordinated inauthentic behavior” is linked to the Beijing government is harder. 

But there are clues: When Twitter shut down 936 mainland Chinese accounts targeting Hong Kong protests with disinformation in the summer, it found that several originated from internet addresses in mainland China that can access Twitter without a virtual private network — which strongly suggests that they were state-controlled accounts.
Facebook soon followed suit, closing mainland Chinese pages with thousands of followers and disclosing that individuals behind them were “associated with the Chinese government.” 

Google recently disabled 210 YouTube channels coordinating disinformation about Hong Kong.
Yet Taiwanese society remains undecided on whether Chinese disinformation is a threat, or even real.
In a survey of voters in November 2018, a week after local elections in Taiwan, Wang Tai-Li, a journalism professor at National Taiwan University, found that 52% of respondents did not believe there was Chinese interference in the elections, or did not know enough to judge.
Last month, a survey by the local news outlet Apple Daily found that in general, respondents could not correctly identify the source of online disinformation in Taiwan: 23.6% said it came from Tsai’s party, while 12.8% said it came from the Nationalist Party. 

Only 17.8% said it came from China.
It doesn’t help that Taiwan’s media landscape is severely polarized, with poor fact-checking standards and a high emphasis on entertainment over factual, neutrally presented news. 

Politicians from both of Taiwan’s major parties have also used trolls and cyber armies to influence voters as elections approach, Wang said.
That unsure, confused segment of Taiwanese society is most susceptible to Chinese influence — and most in need of media literacy training, Wang said. 

“Disinformation works on people in the middle, the politically neutral.”
On a recent Sunday afternoon, about 20 volunteers filed into a co-working space in Taipei, the Taiwanese capital. 

Pop music played as they snacked on egg tarts and opened their laptops, typing reports for CoFacts, a crowdsourced fact-checking database. 

Users can send queries to a CoFacts chatbot on Line about suspicious messages, which generates prewritten responses debunking the false claims.
Johnson Liang, the founder of CoFacts, acknowledged that it was hard to change the minds of people deceived by disinformation, but he said that the chatbot at least provided alternative viewpoints to consider.
“We’re providing information, not telling people what to think,” Liang said.
It’s a philosophy in line with how Liang and many Taiwanese people believe the internet should operate: open source, based on exchange and dialogue, not on censorship and top-down control.
“Our kind of defining identity is to be not what the PRC is,” said Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s “digital minister,” referring to the People’s Republic of China. 

Chinese authoritarianism is a reminder of Taiwan’s recent past under martial law, she said.
“Freedom of speech, assembly and press are not something instrumental that you can kind of trade away — rather, they form the core identity of Taiwan.”
Yisuo Tzeng, acting director of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a government-backed think tank, said that China’s Communist Party lacked sufficient understanding of democratic societies to change how people outside mainland China think.
“People always say disinformation must have a huge impact on you, because you are all Chinese — but look at Hong Kong now,” he said, pointing to pro-democracy candidates’ landslide victory in recent elections, notwithstanding a wave of mainland propaganda. 

“If it didn’t work on Hong Kong, how can it have an impact on us?”
Tzeng worries less about disinformation than about conventional influence operations — coercion and bribery — carried out by the United Front Work Department, the Communist Party entity responsible for co-opting ethnic Chinese outside China.
Shen, of DoubleThink Labs, is less optimistic. 

He says that civil society needs physical protection from Chinese agents, especially when they move beyond fact-checking to exposing influence networks.
“There are so many agencies bought or ordered by the Chinese government right now,” Shen said. “We might be attacked by them, and some of them are gangsters.”
One of Taiwan’s largest “triad” gangs, the Bamboo Union, is overtly pro-Beijing. 

Its members attacked students protesting closer ties to Beijing during Taiwan’s 2014 Sunflower Movement. 

The gang also was associated with anti-democratic repression in the 1980s.Civil society can handle content farms and trolls, Shen said, but the government still needs to protect the fact-checkers and democracy advocates in the real world.

Chinese Paranoia

China detains man for asking why can't Taiwan be called a country
Reuters

BEIJING -- Police in China have detained a man who asked on social media what law prevented anyone calling self-ruled Taiwan a country, questioning a fundamental principle of China’s "sovereignty".
Taiwan is China’s most sensitive diplomatic and political issue.
Beijing views the democratic island as merely a wayward province and it has stepped up a campaign against the island as it tries to assert Chinese sovereignty.
Police in the northeastern city of Maanshan said an 18-year-old unemployed man, identified by the family name Yang, had used his Weibo social media account to post questions on a police Weibo including: “What law says you can’t call Taiwan a country?”.
The young man also wrote that Japanese Prime Shinzo Abe was his “real father”, police said in a statement, adding that what he wrote was against the law and “profaned the people’s feelings”.
Yang, who police said had previously been warned for making “bad comments” online, had confessed his crimes and had been detained on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble’, they said.
Defeated Nationalist forces fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing a civil war with the Communists.
Beijing has begun ordering foreign companies to label Taiwan as part of China on their websites and is excluding Taiwan from as many international forums as it can.

Rogue Nation

China's crackdown on Uighurs spreads to even mild critics
By GERRY SHIH
In this photo taken early Dec 27, 2017 and released by China Aid, Li Aijie poses for a photo with one of two photos she has of her husband Zhang Haitao after authorities confiscate her electronic devices after arriving in the U.S. in Midland, Texas. Li is seeking political asylum in the U.S. Zhang who was sentenced to 19 years in prison had been a rare voice in China, a member of the Han ethnic majority and salesman by day who complained on social media about government policies he said were unfair to Muslim minority Uighurs. 

Zhang Haitao was a rare voice in China, a member of the ethnic Han majority who for years had criticized the government on social media for its treatment of the minority Muslim Uighurs.
Zhang's wife had long feared some sort of backlash despite her husband's relative obscurity. 

He was a working-class electronics salesman, unknown even to most Uighur activists. 

So she worried that authorities might block his social media accounts, or maybe detain him. 

Instead he was arrested and prosecuted for subversion and espionage. 

His punishment: 19 years in prison.
"They wanted to make an example of him, to scare anyone who might question what they do in the name of security," Zhang's wife, Li Aijie, told The Associated Press earlier this week, one day after she arrived in the United States and asked for political asylum. 

"Even someone who knows nothing about law would know that his punishment made no sense."
Elsewhere in China, Zhang would have been sentenced to no more than three years, said his lawyer, Li Dunyong, and may not have been prosecuted at all.
But East Turkestan, the tense northwestern region where most Uighurs live, has been enveloped in recent years in a vast dragnet of police surveillance, which authorities insist is needed to root out separatism and Islamic extremism. 

Zhang, who moved to East Turkestan from central Henan province more than a decade ago in search of work, wondered in his social media posts whether these policies were stoking resentment among Uighurs. 

He warned that China's restrictions on the Uighurs' religious practices risked sparking an insurgency.
But questioning government policies in Xinjiang has become an untouchable third rail in today's China.
Court records say Zhang was convicted of sending 274 posts from 2010 to 2015 on Twitter and the Chinese social media service WeChat that "resisted, attacked and smeared" the Communist Party and its policies, earning him 15 years in prison for inciting subversion of state power. 

He was given another five years for talking to foreign reporters and providing photos of the intense police presence in the streets of Xinjiang. 

That, the court said, amounted to providing intelligence about China's anti-terror efforts to foreign organizations.
The court said it would combine the two punishments and sentence him to 19 years in prison.
He was convicted in January 2016. 

An appeals court in December 2016 refused to hear his petition, noting he had never expressed regret or admitted guilt.

Hoping to draw attention to Zhang's plight, Li provided her husband's court documents and letters from jail to the AP, as well as her own account.

The daughter of a farming family in Henan's hardscrabble hill country, Li met Zhang in 2011 after stumbling across a personal ad he had arranged to have placed in a local park where singles sought partners. 

The flier said he sold wireless routers and listed his modest height: 168 centimeters (5-foot-6). 

On their first date, when Zhang was back home in Henan, he wore a jacket with threadbare cuffs but showed Li his identity card in an awkward attempt to prove he was genuine.
That simple directness was something she grew to love, Li said, but it was also Zhang's downfall. 

He had been repeatedly warned by police about his social media activity, but he always ignored them.
When the authorities finally arrested him in 2015, they told Li he was suspected of inciting ethnic hatred. 

The charges were raised to subversion and espionage, Li suspects, after he refused to confess. 

In a letter he wrote to Li and his sister earlier this year, Zhang described how Nelson Mandela, who spent nearly three decades in prison, had become an inspiration.
"Life must have greater meaning beyond the material. Our mouths are not just for eating, but also for speaking out," Zhang wrote.
While the severity of Zhang's sentence stands out, others in the region have been punished for mild criticism.
Ma Like, a Muslim hostel owner in the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar, was accused in April of "propagating extremism" because he had retweeted two Weibo posts — one about how Chinese policies were alienating Uighurs, the other a veiled reference to restrictions on the Islamic headdress — according to two of Ma's friends, who provided copies of Ma's indictment and spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of government retaliation.
The prominent Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti was handed a life sentence in 2014 on charges of fanning ethnic hatred, advocating violence and instigating terror on a website he ran. 

He, too, was known as a moderate who argued against Uighur separatism and stressed the need for dialogue.
But when it comes to East Turkestan, calling for public debate amounts to an intolerable act of defiance, said Wang Lixiong, a Han Chinese writer and dissident.
"The government removes the middle road so it leaves two extremes," Wang said. 

"You're either their mortal enemy or their slave."
Zhang was arrested when Li was three months pregnant. 

She gave birth to their son two years ago, while he was being held in a desert prison. 

She returned home to Henan to raise him and began blogging and speaking to the overseas media.
The authorities tried to silence Li, pounding on her front door as she did a phone interview, for example, and threatening to derail the careers of her two brothers, low-level government workers.
Li's family begged her to divorce Zhang, even give up their child.
When words didn't sway her, in October her siblings and parents beat her, leaving her bruised on the family home's floor.
"I cannot hate them," Li said. 

"They were trying to resist enormous pressure. But after that, I had nowhere to go."
A month ago, she sneaked away and made her way to Bangkok. 

With the help of the U.S.-based organization China Aid, she flew to Texas, where a host family had been found for her, and where she hopes to start a new life with her son.
When she files her asylum paperwork, she lists the boy's legal name.
But in quiet moments, she calls him by his nickname: Xiao Man De La.

"Little Mandela."

Rogue Social Media

China is Using LinkedIn to Recruit Informants
By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ and MELISSA EDDY

The Chinese Embassy in Berlin on Monday. German intelligence services said that more than 10,000 German citizens had been targeted by Chinese spies on LinkedIn.

BEIJING — German’s domestic intelligence agency has accused China of using LinkedIn to infiltrate the German government.
In a scathing investigation released on Sunday, the intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, accused Beijing of using social media to target more than 10,000 citizens, including lawmakers and other government employees. 

To win their trust, the agency said, Chinese agents posed as leaders of think tanks and headhunters, and offered all-expenses-paid trips to China and meetings with influential clients.
The German investigation added to anxieties in Western countries about Chinese efforts to infiltrate foreign governments and businesses, in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage, especially on economic and foreign policy issues. 

The United States has accused China of rampant economic espionage. 

Australia is debating tougher laws to guard against foreign interference, amid reports that China is meddling in Australian universities and elections.
German officials said that Chinese agents had created fake profiles in hopes of “gleaning information and recruiting sources” in Germany. 

Chinese agents approached targets by saying they were interested in exchanging information or offering to establish contact for them with an expert on China, German officials said.

Hans-Georg Maassen, the president of the German intelligence agency, called the efforts “a broad attempt to infiltrate Parliaments, ministries and administrations.”
Adam M. Segal, an expert on cybersecurity and China at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the German investigation will add “more fuel to the fire of skepticism and suspicion about Chinese actions” in the West.
He said that China would probably continue to expand its digital espionage efforts despite criticism. “Given how sensitive the regime and Xi Jinping seems to be to any challenge domestically, they also want to try to control as much as they can internationally,” Mr. Segal said.

LinkedIn is one of few foreign social media companies operating in China, in part because it adheres closely to Chinese regulations and has a relatively warm relationship with the government.
Under the scheme described by German intelligence, Chinese agents used aliases like Eva Han on LinkedIn.

They used photographs from fashion magazines as their profile pictures. 

Several listed fake company names.
Once they established contact with German citizens, the Chinese agents intensified the attempted exchange, asking for a résumé and offering compensation for work on a project.

They invited Germans to China for conferences or meetings with “important clients” who never materialized. 

They pressed the targets for sensitive information in exchange for money.

The German government has repeatedly warned in recent months that China is increasing its efforts to steal trade secrets and other sensitive information from European targets.
In July, the government said that Chinese agents were seeking information about foreign and economic policy. 

It said China had targeted lawmakers and employees of the European and German Parliaments, lobbyists, members of the military and representatives of foundations and think tanks.

Is he a spy? Probably.

Chinese Spies Are Populating LinkedIn

German intelligence unmasks covert Chinese LinkedIn profiles
Reuters

Chinese spies nest

BERLIN -- Germany’s intelligence service has published the details of social network profiles which are fronts faked by Chinese intelligence to gather personal information about German officials and politicians.
The BfV domestic intelligence service took the unusual step of naming individual profiles it says are fake and fake organizations to warn public officials about the risk of leaking valuable personal information via social media.
“Chinese intelligence services are active on LinkedIn and have been trying for a while to extract information and find intelligence sources in this way,” including seeking data on users’ habits, hobbies and political interests.
Nine months of research had found that more than 10,000 German citizens had been contacted on the LinkedIn professional networking site by fake profiles disguised as headhunters, consultants, think-tankers or scholars, the BfV said.
“There could be a large number of target individuals and fake profiles that have not yet been identified,” they added.
Among the faked profiles whose details were published were that of “Rachel Li”, identified as a “headhunter” at “RiseHR”, and an “Alex Li”, a “Project Manager at Center for Sino-Europe Development Studies”.
Many of the profile pictures show stylish and visually appealing young men and women. 

The picture of “Laeticia Chen”, a manager at the “China Center of International Politics and Economy” was nicked from an online fashion catalogue, an official said.
A Reuters review of the profiles showed that some were connected to senior diplomats and politicians from several European countries. 

There was no way to establish whether contacts had taken place beyond the initial social media “add”.
The warning reflects growing concern in European and western intelligence circles at Chinese covert activities in their countries and follows warnings from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency over attempts by the economic giant’s security services to recruit U.S. citizens as agents.
The BfV invited concerned users to contact them if they encountered social media profiles that seemed suspect.

Rogue Nation

Liu Xiaobo’s Death Pushes China’s Censors Into Overdrive
By AMY QIN

A vigil for the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in Hong Kong on Saturday. China’s censors blocked images of Mr. Liu and of people commemorating him. 

BEIJING — It came as little surprise when, after the death of the dissident Liu Xiaobo last week, China’s vast army of censors kicked into overdrive as they scrubbed away the outpouring of grief on social media that followed.
The accounts of censorship have been mostly anecdotal. 

But systematic research from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs shows that there was a “significant shift” in censorship techniques in the days after Mr. Liu’s death, particularly on WeChat, the popular messaging app from Tencent.
On WeChat, which has more than 768 million daily active users, the number of keyword combinations that were blocked greatly increased, according to the report that the Citizen Lab published on Sunday. 

Additions to the blacklist included general references to his death like “Xiaobo + died” in Chinese and in English, and even just his name “Liu Xiaobo,” effectively censoring any messages that mentioned him.
The Citizen Lab said it was also the first time that images were automatically filtered in private one-on-one chats on WeChat. 

Blocked images included photographs of Liu Xiaobo and of people commemorating him.

One of the distinguishing features of WeChat is that it does not notify users when their messages are blocked. 

The service also makes a distinction between accounts registered to phone numbers from mainland China and phone numbers from elsewhere.

In one experiment, researchers at the Citizen Lab found that a photo of Liu Xiaobo posted to an international user’s WeChat social media feed was visible to other users abroad but was hidden from users with Chinese accounts.
The heightened — yet uneven — censorship in recent days has elicited frustration and confusion among Mr. Liu’s supporters.
On the day after Mr. Liu’s death, one user posted on his WeChat feed: “‘Did you see what I just sent?’ ‘No, I can’t see it.’ For the last two days, this has been the constant question and answer among friends.”
The aggressive attempt at censorship is just the latest indication of the strong grip that the Chinese government maintains on local internet companies. 

In addition to automatically filtering certain keywords and images, internet companies like Baidu, Sina and Tencent also employ human censors who retroactively comb through posts and delete what they deem as sensitive content, often based on government directives.
Failure to block such content can result in fines for companies or worse, revocation of their operational licenses. 

Censors have been on especially high alert this year in light of the Communist Party’s 19th National Party Congress in the fall.
Over the years, the constant cat-and-mouse game between Chinese censors and internet users has led to the rise of a robust internet culture in which censorship is normalized and satire and veiled references are par for the course.
So even as censors stepped up scrutiny in recent days, many savvy Chinese internet users found ways to evade those efforts. 

In tributes to Mr. Liu, users referred to him as “Brother Liu” or even “XXX.” 

They posted passages from his poems and abstract illustrations of Mr. Liu and his wife, Liu Xia.
Over the weekend, however, the tributes gave way to scathing critiques as friends and supporters of Mr. Liu reacted angrily to the news of Mr. Liu’s cremation and sea burial under strict government oversight.
One user took to his WeChat feed on Sunday to express disgust with the use of Mr. Liu’s corpse in what some called a blatant propaganda exercise. 

“Swift cremation, swift sea burial,” he wrote. 

“Scared of the living, scared of the dead, and even more scared of the dead who are immortal.”

Unfettered online hate speech fuels Islamophobia in China

By Gerry Shih

In this March 18, 2017 photo, Tao Yingsheng, the imam at the Nangang mosque, stands in the mosque in Hefei in central China’s Anhui province. On the dusty plains of the Chinese heartland, the bitter fight over the mosque illustrates how a surge in anti-Muslim sentiment online is spilling over into the real world. If left unchecked, scholars say, such attitudes risk inflaming simmering ethnic tensions that have in past erupted in bloodshed.

HEFEI, China — The flood of angry anti-Muslim rhetoric on social media was the first sign of how fiercely the suburban middle-class homeowners in this central China city opposed a planned mosque in their neighborhood. 

It quickly escalated into something more sinister.
Soon a pig’s head was buried in the ground at the future Nangang mosque, the culmination of a rally in which dozens of residents hoisted banners and circled the planned building site. 

Then the mosque’s imam received a text message carrying a death threat: “In case someone in your family dies, I have a coffin for you — and more than one, if necessary.”
“How did things get stirred up to this point?” the imam, Tao Yingsheng, said in a recent interview. “Who had even heard of the Nangang mosque before?”
On the dusty plains of the Chinese heartland, a bitter fight over a mosque exemplifies how a surge in anti-Muslim sentiment online is spreading into communities across China, exacerbating simmering ethnic and religious tensions that have in the past erupted in bloodshed. 

It’s also posing a dilemma for the ruling Communist Party, which has allowed Islamophobia to fester online for years as part of its campaign to justify security crackdowns in its restive region of Xinjiang.
“It’s let the genie out of the bottle,” said James Leibold, a professor at La Trobe University in Australia who has tracked the growth of anti-Muslim hate speech on China’s internet.
Interviews with residents and an examination of social media show how a few disparate online complaints by local homeowners evolved into a concerted campaign to spread hate. 

Key to it was an unexpected yet influential backer: a Chinese propaganda official, 2,500 kilometers (1,500 miles) away in Xinjiang, whose inflammatory social media posts helped draw people into the streets on New Year’s Day, resulting in a police crackdown.
___

A stone inscription outside its gate shows the original Nangang mosque was established in the 1780s by members of the Hui minority, the descendants of Silk Road traders who settled across China centuries ago. 

In its present form, the mosque has served the area’s 4,500 Hui for decades, its domed silhouette partially hidden by overgrown shrubs in the countryside beyond Hefei’s last paved boulevards.
Over the past 10 years urbanization has come to Hefei, with sprawling development reconfiguring the landscape and its demographic flavor, and Hui leaders had been pushing for years to relocate their mosque to a more convenient urban location.
City planners in November finally selected a site adjacent to the newly built Hangkong New City condominiums, with its $200,000 two-bedroom units, faux-Mediterranean stylings and a Volvo dealership across the street. 

The project’s homeowners overwhelmingly members of China’s ethnic Han majority began complaining on China’s popular microblog, Weibo.
Some complained the mosque would occupy space promised for a park. 

Others warned that safety in the area would be compromised.
Others were more blunt: Han residents were uncomfortable that a center for Hui community life would be less than 100 meters (300 feet) from their building, a homeowner who later identified himself in messages to the AP by his surname, Cheng, wrote in a petition posted in December.
“And the less said about what happens on Eid al-Adha, the better,” Cheng wrote, referring to the Islamic holiday in which animals are slaughtered for a sacrificial feast. 

“It’s absolutely shocking.”
The story soon caught the attention of Cui Zijian, a boyish-looking propaganda official in Xinjiang who writes about the threat of religious extremism on his Weibo account with nearly 30,000 followers.
On Dec. 16, Cui suggested homeowners lobby local officials to block the construction, adding: “If that doesn’t work, then how about pig head, pig blood.”
Cui followed that a few hours later with another post repeating the four Chinese characters for pig blood and pig head over and over, attracting hundreds of reposts. 

While Cui was criticized by some on Weibo, a larger number — including at least one other government propaganda official — took his post as their cue to hurl abuse at the Hui.
___

The mosque dispute was just the latest flashpoint for an increasingly active anti-Muslim social media movement in China.
A video of a Hui girl reciting the Quran in Arabic sparked outrage last May over so-called terrorist infiltration of Chinese schools, prompting officials to announce a “strict ban” on religion on campuses. 

Online activists derailed a Hui official’s effort to regulate the halal food industry, arguing that religion was creeping into the officially atheistic Chinese state.
Han Chinese, who make up 95 percent of the population, have long grumbled about the dozens of China’s officially recognized minority groups receiving advantages on the hyper-competitive college entrance exams or exemptions from family-size limits, but online abuse has increasingly targeted Muslims.
The rise in Islamophobia comes as Chinese have been buffeted by news of militant attacks in Europe, while at home, violence in Xinjiang and elsewhere has been blamed on Muslim separatists. 

Beijing has responded to the bloody, years-long insurgency from Muslim Uighur minorities in Xinjiang with further restrictions on Islamic expression, a move rights groups warn could potentially radicalize moderate Muslims. 

Such policies have also drawn vows of retaliation from the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
Ethnic hostility can only deepen, scholars say, when the government stops discussion of the plight of Muslims or ethnic policies while allowing anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate speech to go unchecked. 

In 2014, Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti, who had founded a website to host debates about ethnic tensions in Xinjiang, was sentenced to life in prison on separatism charges.
Government censors go after descriptions of abuses against Muslims, but “it doesn’t take long whatsoever to find incredibly Islamophobic things that seem to be not censored at all,” said William Nee, China researcher at Amnesty International, which has appealed for Tohti’s release.
Political observers say the recent rise of a faction within the Communist Party advocating for a hard-line approach on religious affairs has coincided with the rise of government-linked commentators who openly warn about the danger of Islam.
“Interest groups have actively promoted Islamophobia in interior regions in order to create a nationwide environment that justifies Xinjiang’s anti-terrorism campaign,” said Ma Haiyun, a history professor specializing in China’s Muslims at Frostburg State University in Maryland. 

“There’s an Islamophobic movement that aims at creating chaos and even conflicts at the local level.”
After briefly moderating his remarks about the Nangang mosque, the propaganda official, Cui, renewed his criticism in February with an essay arguing that his professional and patriotic duty was to resist extremism. 

His online speech about Muslims was part of the job, he said.
“For that, we’re labeled Muslim-smearers,” wrote Cui, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment. 

“But it is those who instigate a fear of Islam, precisely the terrorists and the extremists, who are the ones smearing Muslims.”
Reached in March, an official at the propaganda department where he worked refused to comment on Cui’s involvement in the controversy. 

But Cui now appears to be even better positioned to influence discourse: The official said Cui was transferred in February to work in the cyberspace administration, the agency in charge of censoring online speech.
___

Tao, the 50-year old imam, recalled the day in December when he heard his mosque was suddenly the subject of thousands of posts and hundreds of comments on Weibo, a service he barely used. 

He soon found himself soothing local Hui who approached him, shaken by what they were seeing online.
“They said people were planning to hang a pig’s head outside our mosque. I said, ‘Then we’ll remove it.’ They said people will bury a pig’s head in the ground. I said ‘Why can’t we just dig it up?’” Tao said.
After protesters followed through with the threat at the New Year’s Day demonstration, police detained two protest leaders for two weeks and summoned others for questioning, according to residents. 

Since then Han indignation has gave way to quiet seething.
“People have been scared into silence,” said Cheng, the Han tea seller.
During a recent visit to Hangkong New City, homeowners repeated the government’s mantra that ethnic unity was important, but complained that officials sacrificed their interests to appease a minority.
“If 99 percent of our compound is Han, it doesn’t seem appropriate that they put a mosque next door,” said a middle-aged woman who said her surname was Han.
Ma Jianhua, a Nangang district planning official, told the AP that construction will proceed after his office “appropriately handled” homeowners’ petitions, but declined to elaborate.
The mosque dispute has left the city’s Hui community on the defensive, with many eager to emphasize their desire to peacefully coexist with their Han neighbors as well as their confidence in the government’s handling of the situation.
At a ranch past the undulating rapeseed field that separates the condos from rubble-strewn Huimin Lu — Hui People’s Road — workers at what is one of the few Hui businesses that hasn’t been demolished to make way for high-rises expressed surprise about the mosque dispute, given the area’s history of ethnic mingling.
“We’ve been in these parts a long time,” a worker surnamed Tao, who is not related to the imam, said as he loaded sacks of dried fatty beef. 

“We mind our business and they mind theirs. We don’t stir up trouble and they don’t either.”
But Tao, the imam, seemed to acknowledge a hardening of attitudes toward Muslims in recent years.
“It may be that the situation has grown more sensitive in that place that we all know about,” he said after a pause, referring to but not daring to mention Xinjiang.
Still he tries to not harbor resentment toward the Han protesters.
“I don’t blame the locals because I believe they were influenced,” he said, sitting below framed pictures of him greeting government religious affairs officials. 

“I want them to know Muslims are virtuous people. We are peaceful. We are reasonable. We are tolerant. And we are good Chinese.”

The Bitter Legacy of the 1979 China-Vietnam War

Officially, both sides have tried to forget the bloody conflict. Unofficially, bitterness still runs deep.
By Nguyen Minh Quang

Almost 40 years after a short yet devastating war launched by China in 1979, there has been not any official commemoration of the war in Vietnam.

The fierce fight from February 17 to March 16, 1979, claimed tens of thousands of lives, soldiers and civilians alike, in Vietnam’s border provinces, but the conflict hasn’t received the same level of attention as wars against the French and Americans.
Yet since the escalation of tensions with China in the South China Sea in recent years, the Sino-Vietnamese war has begun receiving renewed media attention.
For this year’s anniversary, Vietnamese people used social media to vocally commemorate martyrs and civilians who died in the war, followed by debates criticizing the government for remaining silent and neglecting the war in high school history textbooks.

The Road to War

On February 17, 1979, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops crossed Vietnam’s northern border to invade the country, waging a bloody strike along the 600-kilometer border that the two nations share. From the standpoint of historians, China’s month-long invasion of Vietnam is understood to as a response to what China considered to be a collection of provocative actions and policies undertaken by Hanoi.
Historically, China had previously given Hanoi steadfast support against U.S. forces in the Vietnam War. But their comradeship swiftly began to deteriorate in the mid-1970s, especially when Vietnam joined the Soviet-dominated Council for Mutual Economic Cooperation (Comecon) and signed the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union (USSR) – then China’s greatest rival – in 1978.
China called the treaty a military alliance and branded Vietnam the “Cuba of the East,” pursuing hegemonistic “imperial dreams” in Southeast Asia.
In December 1978, Vietnam began a full-scale counter-attack against Kampuchea (today’s Cambodia), whose armed forces had launched a number of unilateral clashes along the Cambodia-Vietnamese land and maritime boundaries between 1975 and 1977, leaving more than 30,000 Vietnamese civilians dead.
Vietnam’s incursions into China-friendly Kampuchea, which quickly eradicated the genocidal pro-Beijing Khmer Rouge regime, coupled with its intimacy with the Soviet Union, which was massively building up forces on China’s northern border, appeared to threaten China’s security and interests in the region.
Thus, China’s leader at the time, Deng Xiaoping, had good reason to urge the government to teach a proper lesson to the Vietnamese.
It’s worth noting that, even prior to the war proper, incidents along the Sino-Vietnamese border had increased in frequency and violence since mid-1978 when Deng came to power and began consolidating his paramount leadership by creating an effective tripod – control of the state, control of the Communist Party, and control of the military.
Deng had seen off the rival threat posed by the ultra-Maoist Gang of Four (headed by Mao’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing) and his well-reasoned strategy to modernize China required the removal of obstructionist Maoist People’s Liberation Army (PLA) cadres.
Thus, some historians have speculated that a war was necessary to support Deng’s modernization plans by highlighting the technological deficiencies of the PLA and keeping the army preoccupied. The war brought Deng precious time in his first full year in charge to cement his own power in Beijing, eliminating leftist rivals from the Maoist era.
Combat with the Vietnamese proved to be the PLA’s blood test.
On August 25, 1978, Chinese troops crossed the border to Vietnam to assault officers, women, and local people.
Le Dinh Chinh, a local policeman, fought back with his bare hands and was stabbed to death by a group of Chinese.
Chinh is thus known as the first Vietnamese soldier who fell in Vietnam’s fight against the Chinese invasion.
This incident sent an ominous signal of a looming armed conflict between the two brothers.
After a few months of serious and careful preparation for a military ground campaign against Vietnam, in the pre-dawn hours of February 17, Chinese spearheads, supported by 400 tanks and 1,500 artillery pieces, concurrently attacked in the direction of Vietnam’s border provincial capitals, when residents living there were still sleeping.
Owning to its large population and the huge disparity in economic and military capacity vis-à-vis Vietnam, the PLA relied on “human waves” of ragtag soldiers, a tactic used nearly three decades before during the Korean War, and a “scorched-earth” policy to conquer Vietnam.
These tactics enabled Chinese soldiers to completely destroy everything in their paths, overrun population centers, and occupy strategically important mountainous areas and high spots along the boundary.
These areas then became sites of low-profile yet deadly conflicts, which took place throughout the following decade.
In early March 1979, China suddenly declared its “lesson” to Vietnam was finished and began to withdraw completely on March 16.
But, in fact, its campaign was not over.
Right after the war, China launched another semi-public campaign that was more than a series of border incidents and less than a limited small-scale war.
On the one hand, the PLA maintained a level of steady harassment through artillery fire, intrusions by infantry patrols, naval intrusions, and mine planting both at sea and in inland waterways.
On the other hand, China pursued psychological warfare operations to sabotage Vietnam’s attempts to restore its war-torn border economic centers by igniting anti-Vietnamese sentiments among the border ethnic minorities and encouraging them to engage illicit activities like smuggling.
The 1979 war and armed clashes that flared over border disputes in the subsequent years resulted in a heavy toll in terms of both casualties and economic losses for both sides.
Though neither side publicized its casualties and the exact figures remain unclear, Western estimates run as high as 28,000 Chinese dead and 43,000 wounded, while the number of Vietnamese dead were estimated at under 10,000.
Since the full normalization of the China-Vietnam relationship in late 1991, though Hanoi and Beijing both claimed victory, state media on both sides have remained quiet on the war, barely mentioning it on commemorative occasions and seeking to deflect questions.
But historians, diplomats, veterans, and local civilians in both sides have not forgotten.
Despite official silence, every February debates about the conflict still rage online in both China and Vietnam.
In China, some social media users question whether it was worth sacrificing thousands of Chinese lives to support the Khmer Rouge butchers.
Other ardent Chinese nationalists downplay the Khmer Rouge factor and instead justify the war by citing Vietnam’s oppression of Hoa people (ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam), and Hanoi’s supposed hegemonic dreams of dominating Indochina with the backing of the USSR.
In Vietnam, low-profile anniversaries of the fierce fight against the Chinese invasion are organized each year in local cemeteries in the northern border provinces while small-scale demonstrations have occurred in Hanoi.
Vietnamese veterans, military enthusiasts, historians, and diplomats have also urged the government to reconsider their decades of deliberate silence; such advocates call on Hanoi to highlight the facts of the war to help people all over the world, including the Chinese, fully understand what really happened.
In 2013, Major-General Le Van Cuong, former director of the Strategy Institute under the Ministry of Public Security, and other retired politicians told state media it was time to review the official commemorations of this war.
In particular, the government must include the war in textbooks.
“Thousands of people have lost their lives to protect the land in the north. Why do we have no words for them? It’s late and can’t be later… We cannot have a vague view or ignore this historic issue,” Cuong said.
Young academics are deeply concerned that a majority of students today do not know about this war.
“While information about Vietnam’s just defensive war against China’s 1979 aggression remains little and vague, the Vietnamese youth have long been surrounded by movies that advertise and diffuse Chinese culture and history. It will be the government’s responsibility if this situation lasts longer,” said Pham Duc Thuan, a 30-year-old history lecturer at Can Tho University.
Apparently, both the Vietnamese and Chinese publics are looking forward to clear and straightforward information about the nature of the war from their respective governments.
For the Chinese people, they need to know the actual ambitions behind a war that seems motivated much more by the Deng-led government’s political interests than the excuses offered by pugnacious nationalists.
For the Vietnamese, they want “justice” for those martyrs who lost their lives in the tragic defensive fight, but have since been forgotten by the government.

Whose Victory, Whose Responsibility?
While the Vietnamese government suppressed memories of the war, the Chinese population and leadership seem convinced that China was on the right side in the 1979 war.
China claims the war as “a victory,” with all missions completed.
This view is not supported by evidence and analyses undertaken by outside observers and strategists. Scholars like Gerald Segal, Bruce Elleman, and Carlyle Thayer agreed that China’s 1979 war was a complete failure.
First, Deng and his generals failed to induce Vietnam to withdraw regular forces from Cambodia and thereby relieve pressure on the Khmer Rouge.
Second, Beijing also sought to engage main force Vietnamese units near the border and destroy them. But Vietnam largely held its main forces in reserve and mainly used its militia and local forces to defend against China; thereby China further failed to dispel its image as a paper tiger.
Third, it also failed to draw the United States into an anti-Soviet coalition.
Two other major goals behind China’s attack were to expose Soviet assurances of military support to Vietnam as a fraud and ruin Vietnam’s northern defense system and economic infrastructure.
In this respect, Beijing’s policy was actually a diplomatic success, since Moscow did not actively intervene, thus showing the practical limitations of the Soviet-Vietnamese military pact. 
It also succeeded in totally destroying most of villages and major provincial capitals such as Lao Cai, Cao Bang, and Lang Son, but not in a few days as anticipated and scheduled by Deng and his men.
It took three weeks of heavy fighting and severe casualties.
With the conflict viewed in this light, Thayer told BBC Vietnamese that China was the aggressor, not Vietnam, in the 1979 war.

Final Remarks
Almost four decades on since China waged a massive and costly invasion of Vietnam on February 17, 1979, the deliberate oblivion of this history by both Hanoi and Beijing has triggered growing public disapproval in both countries.
Though both governments claimed victory, the war was a chastening experience for all involved.
Chinese people’s misunderstanding of the nature of the war, mainly caused by Beijing’s steely and unrelenting efforts to control information, and history in particular, appears to be a major obstacle to resolving the debates and alleviating mutually hostile sentiments between the two peoples.
Since the conflict was fought entirely on Vietnamese territory, it runs contrary to the ruling Communist Party’s prevailing narratives of a China that never threatens or attacks its neighbors. China’s propaganda machine has attached an ungainly and unconvincing name to the conflict, the “Self-Defensive Counterattack Against Vietnam.”
It is also generally held by outside scholars that if the war did not produce an outright defeat for China, it was a costly mistake fought for dubious purposes, including Deng’s political ambitions, and a desire to punish Vietnam for overthrowing Pol Pot, a Chinese ally who was one of the world’s bloodiest tyrants.
Thus, the difficulty for China is how to commemorate the controversial war without raising questions about the veracity of Deng’s claim of having achieved all China’s goals.
For Vietnam, even though it has witnessed some relative stability and economic improvement in its war-torn northern border provinces thanks to strongly growing cross-border trade revenue, it pays to remain vigilant.
Because of geographical proximity, the Vietnamese people have been forced to cope with repeated Chinese invasions, followed by centuries-long suzerainty, in the course of history.
Thus, the 1979 border war, once again, reminded the country to keep in mind who the permanent, ominous foe is.
However, remembering the forgotten war in 1979 does not have to mean igniting national hostilities. Rather, commemorations should provide justice for those soldiers and victims of both sides who lost their lives due to misjudgments and miscalculations of ambitious leaders.
Accordingly, China and Vietnam should both pigeon-hole their tragic past and seriously study the dear lessons drawn from the 1979 war to avoid the same mistakes in the future.
More importantly, once the actual facts and nature of the war are acknowledged with constructive and sympathetic perspectives from both sides, the two sides can consider the use of “historical compensation” to adjust public opinion towards each other.
As long as the mutual suspicion between the two peoples remains unsettled, China-Vietnam bilateral ties will be unable to develop substantially and smoothly, no matter how much official jargon glorifies the relationship.

Peking opera

Deleted postings about missing Chinese billionaire hint at tensions
By Julie Zhu and Venus Wu | HONG KONG

An entrance to Four Seasons Hotel in Hong Kong February 1, 2017, where Chinese billionaire Xiao Jianhua was last seen on January 27. 

A statement of Chinese billionaire Xiao Jianhua is printed on the front page of local newspaper Ming Pao in Hong Kong, China February 1, 2017. 

Scores of China social media postings about a well-connected billionaire who went missing from a Hong Kong hotel have been deleted, pointing to what appears to be heightened sensitivity in Beijing over the case of Xiao Jianhua.
Mystery surrounds the whereabouts of Xiao, one of China's richest men who has close ties to its leaders and their relatives. 

He was last seen at Hong Kong's Four Seasons hotel in late January, with media saying he was abducted and taken to the mainland.
The case has echoes of the disappearance of five Hong Kong booksellers more than a year ago who had published books critical of China's leaders.
The booksellers' case raised concern about interference by Beijing in Hong Kong and the erosion of its freedoms, guaranteed under a 1997 deal that returned the former British colony to Chinese rule.
Authorities in Beijing have declined to comment on Xiao's case.
Hong Kong's government has also not commented. 

The city's police say they are investigating and have approached Chinese authorities to ascertain his "situation in mainland China".
Xiao's disappearance has sparked widespread media speculation that he has been drawn into Xi Jinping's crackdown on corruption, which has ensnared a string of Chinese executives.
After his disappearance, a statement from him appeared on his company's verified WeChat account saying he had not been abducted and had not been taken to mainland China.
The statement added he was "currently abroad being medically treated". 

Hong Kong police say Xiao crossed the border to mainland China.
When news of Xiao's disappearance in Hong Kong began breaking early last week, searches on Chinese search engines and social media for him generated many results, mostly links to reports related to statements he had issued via his company, Tomorrow Holdings, a financial group headquartered in Beijing.
But those posts and most reports related to Xiao have disappeared, with search results only bringing up reports about him from several weeks earlier.

DELETED POSTS
According to Freewechat.com, which tracks censored or deleted posts on China's biggest social network, WeChat, more than 40 articles with the keyword Xiao Jianhua had been censored since Jan. 30.
A similar number of reports with the word "Mingtianxi", which refers to Tomorrow Group and its subsidiaries, were also deleted.
Tencent Holdings Ltd, which operates WeChat, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A spokesman for Sina, which runs China's Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo, told Reuters it censors and deletes posts according to its code of conduct.
But the spokesman declined to comment on any deleted posts related to Xiao and his business ties.
More social media posts purportedly detailing Xiao's business links with high-profile companies and senior leaders were also deleted over the weekend.
The Chinese government routinely censors the internet, blocking many sites it deems could challenge the rule of the Communist Party or threaten stability.
China's internet regulator did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.
Shares in firms directly or indirectly controlled by Tomorrow Group slumped on Friday, with Baotou Huazi Industry and Xishui Strong Year Co Ltd Inner Mongolia both down the maximum 10 percent.
Shares of Baotou Huazi were down 2.6 percent on Monday, while Xishui Strong Year was down nearly 5 percent.
Xiao was ranked 32nd on the 2016 Hurun China rich list, China's equivalent of the Forbes list, with an estimated net worth of $5.97 billion.

Chinese Big Brother collecting big data — and it's all for sale

China has wealth of data on what individuals are doing at a micro level, says The Citizen Lab at University of Toronto
By Saša Petricic

Cameras in Beijing: Big Brother doesn't even need to be watching with his own eyes.

Living in China, it's safe to assume pretty much everything about you is known — or easily can be known — by the government.
Where you go, who you're with, which restaurants you like, when and why you see your doctor.
Big Brother doesn't even need to be watching with his own eyes.
There is an entire network — the internet inside China's Great Firewall — designed to gather the information. 
And there's an industry of private and state-owned high-tech enterprises serving it.
"You could go so far as to make the argument that social media and digital technology are actually supporting the regime," says Ronald Deibert, the director of The Citizen Lab, a group of researchers at the University of Toronto who study how information technology affects human and personal rights around the world.

Ronald Deibert, of The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, says Chinese authorities 'have a wealth of data at their disposal about what individuals are doing at a micro level in ways that they never had before.' 

The lab has taken apart popular apps like WeChat, a messaging app that also does financial transactions designed specifically for the Chinese market by private software giant Tencent.
It's used by more than 800 million people here every month — virtually every Chinese person who is online.
Deibert's team found it contains various hidden means of censorship and surveillance. 
Among other things, the restrictions follow Chinese students who study abroad.
Chinese authorities "have a wealth of data at their disposal about what individuals are doing at a micro level in ways that they never had before," Deibert says.
"What the government has managed to do is download the controls to the private sector, to make it incumbent upon them to police their own networks," he says.

A cyclist in Beijing checks his smartphone. Now every picture posted, every comment made, every driving infraction could go into a central database to produce a person's 'trustworthiness' score. 

And now the data these firms collect is for sale.
An investigation by a leading Chinese newspaper, the Guangzhou Southern Metropolis Daily, found that just a little cash could buy incredible amounts of information about almost anyone.
Friend or fiancé, business competitor or enemy … no questions asked.
Using just the personal ID number of a colleague, reporters bought detailed data about hotels stayed at, flights and trains taken, border entry and exit records, real estate transactions and bank records. 
All of them with dates, times and scans of documents (for an extra fee, the seller could provide the names of who the colleague stayed with at hotels and rented apartments).
All confirmed by the colleague. 
And all for the low price of 700 yuan, or about $140 Cdn.

In a system where every citizen's information is collected and traded at every level, involving government officials and private corporations, it's hard to tell who isn't allowed to know.

Another service provided live tracking of a colleague using his mobile phone, sending pinpoint locations in real time.
This too was surprisingly accurate.
There are countless ads for services like these online, and some seem more reliable than others.
But the reporters at the Southern Metropolis Daily had no trouble getting solid, confirmed information.
Much of the data seems to come from companies like telecom providers and hotels. 
But some is likely only available from government sources, information on driving infractions and border crossings.
In all cases, it seems the data is routinely collected, sorted and cross-referenced — and almost certainly tracked by government officials.
In fact, Beijing recently unveiled an ambitious plan to assign every citizen a so-called "social credit" score. 
Modeled on the score banking institutions give for your financial reliability, this one would measure your social "trustworthiness" using data collected from every online interaction.

Data free-for-all
Every picture posted, every comment made, every driving infraction or incident of rowdiness would go into a central database that would spit out a single number that would determine how far you could be trusted to hold a job or travel or even get married.
That raises the question, would that massive database also be publicly available?
The approach is a far cry from what many Western governments still consider an appropriate balance between privacy and "national security," the vague catch-all phrase that China's Communist leaders use to justify crackdowns against anything that they consider politically threatening.
"I would say it's a very big issue," says The Citizen Lab's Deibert.
"It is in contrast to the data minimization philosophy – collect only what you need and keep it for only as long as you need to use it, then delete, delete, delete."
Technically, privacy is protected by the constitution and the law in China, but when the Southern Metropolis Daily contacted the police with the results of its investigation, there was no comment.
In a system where every citizen's information is collected and traded at every level — in an apparent data free-for-all that involves government officials as well as so many private corporations — it's hard to tell who isn't allowed to know.

Plague of China: Airpocalypse

China Deletes Online Criticism of Toxic Smog Choking Its Cities
By Yang Fan and Lin Ping

As northern China entered its second day on red alert for toxic smog, online censors moved to delete content criticizing the ruling Chinese Communist Party for its handling of the air pollution crisis that grips the country every winter.
Calls have been growing on social media to pin down the government departments responsible for the various factors contributing the toxic brown soup that hundreds of millions of people are forced to breathe in Chinese cities.
"The State Council must make a formal statement to the 1.4 Chinese people explaining itself," one commentator wrote, calling for "formal plans" to tackle the problem within the next decade.
"People understand that the water can support the boat, but that it can also sink it," the article warned, in a metaphor referring to the ruling party and the people.
The post was rapidly deleted from social media sites and the popular smartphone chat app WeChat.
References and links to a Financial Times article in Chinese by outspoken Beijing University law professor Zhang Qianfan, titled "Can China find its way out of its systemic smog?" were also apparently targeted by censors, returning messages indicating a "violation of content regulations" on Friday.

No real plan
Beijing resident Guo Guijun said the deletion of online content about the smog showed the authorities have no real plan to tackle the problem.
"If they are even going to delete content that is public knowledge, then I think they lack the courage to face up to the situation," Guo said.
"The facts are the facts ... and avoiding the issue isn't going to solve anything."
She said many people in Beijing are feeling a sense of despair in the face of the smog.
"I'm from Beijing; I don't have anywhere else I could go," Guo said.
"For me, there's no escape."
"We need a leader who is willing to take responsibility and be accountable to the people, because everyone wants this problem to get fixed," she said.

Help for schools
Meanwhile, the Beijing government said it would help finance air purification systems in the city's schools to protect children's health.
Beijing's municipal government education bureau called on district governments to move ahead with purification systems as part of a pilot scheme that could soon be rolled out citywide, official media reported on Friday.
The city government will allocate money to help schools cover the costs, the Global Times newspaper, which has close ties to the ruling Chinese Communist Party, reported.
It said kindergartens and primary and middle schools in Dongcheng, Xicheng, Chaoyang, Haidian, and Fengtai districts have already installed such devices, with financial support from the government, enterprises, and parents.
Earlier this week, a middle school affiliated with the prestigious Tsinghua University installed the first batch of air filtration devices in 11 classrooms, and will soon install them in all classrooms, the paper said.

Beyond hazardous
Many northern Chinese cities have seen hazardous levels of air pollution, with some measuring far beyond the "hazardous" level of 500 on air quality indices in recent days.
As of 3.00 p.m. local time on Friday, the northern oil city of Daqing saw an AQI level of 999, Quartz news reported after monitoring the online Real-time Air Quality Index, which tracks air pollution readings in cities around the world.
The smog also appeared to be drifting south on Friday.
The provincial meteorological bureau in the southern province of Guangdong issued a warning of "moderate to severe" air pollution for Friday and Saturday in the Pearl River Delta region.
In Hong Kong, where downtown areas logged air quality readings at an "unhealthy" 152 in some busy areas on Friday, government officials said air pollution in the city had showed a marginal improvement in some areas during 2016.
Air quality official Mok Wai-chuen said the city had recently adopted the World Health Organization (WHO) target for nitrogen dioxide into its air quality objectives, which he described as "very strict."
"We have been able to achieve the short-term objectives for the general air monitoring stations, but not for the roadside stations," he said of the pollutant, which is linked to exhaust fumes from diesel vehicles.

Trump thinks China’s leaders are smarter. They didn’t even let their people watch the debate.

By Simon Denyer 

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton speaks as Republican nominee Donald Trump looks on during the final presidential debate, which was held in Las Vegas. 

It was a familiar theme for Donald Trump. 

China’s leaders are smarter than their American counterparts. 

China’s economy is growing much faster than the U.S. economy, and it is one of those countries “raiding” American jobs.
China was cast as the foil to expose the weaknesses of the Obama administration and, by extension, Hillary Clinton.
Ironically, China’s “smart” leaders didn’t let their people watch the debate.
The third U.S. presidential debate was blocked on Chinese media websites.
Some people managed to find a workaround, using unblocked websites such as Yahoo or virtual private network software to get around China’s system of Internet censorship known as the Great Firewall to watch. 

Some news websites also posted translated transcripts.
But on social media there was a muted reaction, with only a few hundred comments on Sina Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, compared with about 10,000 comments during the first debate.
Instructions from Internet censors to block livestreams of the first debate were leaked to the China Digital Times website, but somehow Sina Weibo managed to show the whole program without incident. 

This time around, no such luck.
China’s leadership presumably isn’t that impressed with Trump’s backhanded compliments.
More to the point: China’s state media might gloat that this presidential race — and in particular the rise of a “racist” demagogue like Trump — shows that democracy is “scary.” 

But there is clearly something unsettling to China’s leaders with the idea of two presidential candidates facing off on live television, being asked searching questions, and presenting a democratic choice to the citizens of their country.
On social media, most people who did watch the debate seemed to find it amusing.
“What a good drama! Americans fight with Americans,” one user commented.
“The most funny talk show in the United States — the presidential election,” another wrote.

During the debate, Trump said China’s economy was growing at 7 percent. 

Official figures show it growing at 6.7 percent, but many economists say that the real number is much lower. 

He also argued that U.S. trade negotiators were “political hacks” who were dealing with Chinese officials who were “much smarter than we are.” 

It was a way to show what he sees as the weakness of the current administration and his strength.
Clinton also used China as a foil, but to expose what she argued was Trump’s hypocrisy, and to highlight her principles.
“One of the biggest problems we have with China is the illegal dumping of steel and aluminum into our market. I’ve fought against it as a senator, stood up against it as the secretary of state,” she said.
“Donald has bought Chinese steel and aluminum. In fact the Trump hotel right here in Las Vegas was built, was made with Chinese steel. So he goes around with crocodile tears about how horrible it is, but he has given jobs to Chinese steelworkers, not American steelworkers.”

Clinton also made reference to a speech she made in China in 1995 as first lady when she declared that “women's rights are human rights,” and to China's one-child policy.
“I’ve been to countries where governments either forced women to have abortions, like they used to do in China, or forced women to bear children, like they used to do in Romania,” she said. 

“And I can tell you the government has no business in the decisions that women make with their families in accordance with their faith, with medical advice.”
Although the reaction on social media was muted, a poll issued this month by the Pew Research Center — and conducted in April and May of this year — showed Clinton significantly more popular here than Trump.
It showed that 37 percent of Chinese people held a favorable view of Hillary Clinton, while only 22 percent saw Trump in a positive light. 

Although Chinese state media have never been fans of Clinton, it could be that her stance on human rights and women's rights has won her some support from ordinary people.

The Pew survey was based on face-to-face interviews with more than 3,100 people between April 6 and May 8, and has a margin of error of 3.7 percentage points.