China

First, about Hu Anyan:

How a Beijing courier’s story struck a chord and escaped the censors

• https://www.metafilter.com/209002/The-wild-writer-who-told-the-truth-about-work-in-China
• • The Financial Times - The ‘wild’ writer who told the truth about work in China
• • Sixth Tone - Hu Anyan and the Beauty of ‘Ordinary Things’ as a Refuge From Reality
• • Pandayoo - A Look at “I Deliver Packages in Beijing”

Second, by Meng Xia:

Reading Contemporary Chinese Migrant Fiction: Memories in Negotiation, Contradiction, and Translation examines the spectrum of Chinese migrant writing about memory since the 1990s and what it tells us about history, memory and trauma in contemporary China.

• China Rhyming - Reading Contemporary Chinese Migrant Fiction

Archived

[Op-ed by Benedict Rogers, Senior Director of Fortify Rights and a co-founder and trustee of Hong Kong Watch.]

Dictatorships use solitary confinement as a form of torture, designed to break the prisoner’s spirit. Under international law, “prolonged solitary confinement” is defined as exceeding 15 days.

British citizen and 77 year-old media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, in jail in Hong Kong, has now exceeded 1,600 days in solitary confinement, yet has committed no crime.

He has already served several prison sentences on multiple trumped-up charges, including 13 months for lighting a candle and saying a prayer at a vigil commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35616560

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said China has stopped selling drones to Kyiv and other European nations while continuing shipments to Russia.

“Chinese Mavic is open for Russians but is closed for Ukrainians,” Zelenskiy told a group of reporters on Tuesday. “There are production lines on Russian territory where there are Chinese representatives,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy added.

The Mavic is a popular civilian quadcopter, normally used for aerial photography, which can be adapted to carry explosives. On the battlefield, Mavics can be used both for surveillance and to attack enemy targets.

Drones have become central to the war in Ukraine, dramatically reshaping the tactics both sides employ on the frontline because of their ability to limit offensive maneuvers. They’ve also been increasingly used for long-range strikes far behind the frontlines.

A European official said that Zelenskiy’s remarks match their own assessments. The official said that China also appears to have curtailed deliveries to western buyers of some drone components, such as magnets used in motors, at the same time as ramping up deliveries to Russia.

“When someone is asking whether China is helping Russia, how shall we assess these steps?” Zelenskiy said.

Manufacturers in China began limiting sales to the US and Europe of key components Bloomberg reported late last year, in a move that western officials believed was a prelude to broader export restrictions.

[...]

Bloomberg reported last summer that Chinese and Russian companies were working together on developing attack drones. The US and European Union have since sanctioned several Chinese firms for aiding Moscow’s drone manufacturing operations and providing critical components, including as part of a recent package of measures adopted by Brussels earlier this month.

[...]

In March, Ukraine launched a so-called the Drone Line project that envisions the creation of a “kill zone” up to 15 kilometers (9 miles) along the front line to limit maneuvers by the Kremlin’s troops and provide air support for its own infantry.

Kyiv has asked allies to help finance its drone production as it seeks the ability to make between 300 to 500 units every 24 hours, Zelenskiy said.

“There is no issue in production capacity,” the Ukrainian president said. “The issue is in financing.”

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/22869744

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Brazilian prosecutors [...] they are suing Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD and two of its contractors over allegations of using workers in slave-like labor conditions and engaging in international human trafficking.

The labor prosecutors’ office in Bahia state [in Brazil] said in a statement that they are seeking 257 million Brazilian reais ($50 million) in damages from BYD, China JinJiang Construction Brazil and Tecmonta Equipamentos Inteligentes.

The lawsuit stems from an investigation that led to the rescue last year of 220 Chinese workers from the construction site of BYD’s new factory in the city of Camaçari. Prosecutors said the workers were brought to Brazil under false pretenses and with visas that did not match their jobs.

The prosecutors’ office said:

“Working conditions were extremely degrading. Five settlements were kept by BYD, JinJiang and Tecmonta. Some workers slept on beds without mattresses and had their personal belongings alongside with their food. There were few bathrooms, which were not gender-assigned. In one of the settlements, there was one toilet for 31 people, forcing workers to wake up at 4 a.m. for their personal hygiene before their work.”

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China’s economy runs on Uyghur forced labour: More than 100 global brands are linked to a scheme that ships Xinjiang ethnic minorities to work in factories thousands of miles away from their home

[...]

By trawling tens of thousands of videos posted on Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese sister app, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) has uncovered a largely hidden force that is helping to fuel China’s economic expansion. Geolocating the videos and reviewing Chinese state media reports allowed TBIJ, The New York Times and Der Spiegel to identify Xinjiang minority workers in 75 factories across 11 regions.

International responses to the oppression of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang have tended to focus on products grown or made within the province, particularly cotton. But this investigation demonstrates that the problem of forced labour goes well beyond the borders of Xinjiang.

The investigation establishes the most detailed picture to date of how China’s programme to move tens of thousands of people from Xinjiang to work in eastern factories has become an inescapable facet of its export economy. The Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz workers make everything from keyboards to cars, as well as components that end up in products shipped around the world, including to the UK.

The link to forced labour pervades entire swathes of the Chinese economy. More than a hundred consumer brands – from Apple to Volkswagen– can be tied to the tainted trade and, for the first time, evidence shows factories directly owned by big brands themselves, like those run by Midea and LG Electronics, have participated in the Chinese government programme. The products implicated include everything from shoes like Skechers to KFC chicken.

[...]

The mass transfer of mostly Muslim minority workers constitutes state-imposed forced labour according to researchers, human rights watchdogs, North American and European governments and the United Nations. This type of forced labour involves authorities recruiting targeted populations who — living in a police state-like environment — are coerced to work in key industries.

“When a government official knocks on the door of a Uyghur person and says they should take a job far from home, the person knows this is not merely a request,” said Laura Murphy, a former senior policy adviser to the Biden administration on Xinjiang forced labour.

“They know there are directives that say refusal is punishable by detention. And they know how horrible detention is. Every Uyghur in Xinjiang has either been in detention themselves or has someone close to them who has been. This is not a choice. This is not consent.”

[...]

Search for ‘Xinjiang’ on Douyin, and your feed will light up with mountainous vistas, horseback riding and sizzling kebabs uploaded by Chinese travel bloggers. The occasional talking-head influencer – Han Chinese settlers to the region – offers advice on navigating the government’s various relocation subsidies.

Dig deeper and you’ll find a different kind of video.

[...]

On the outskirts of Wuhan, a security guard at a car parts manufacturer cried: “Plenty of Xinjiang workers here – more than 200!” The company didn’t hire them directly, he said. “It’s all government-organised labour.”

Local state media reports only offer a glimpse of the national programme; Beijing doesn’t publish statistics on such transfers. The written evidence gathered by TBIJ shows transfers of at least 11,000 people in the past decade to factories in nine provinces, all thousands of miles east of Xinjiang, and to the megacities of Tianjin and Chongqing.

This figure is a fraction of the total: Jiangsu province, for instance, hosted 39,000 Xinjiang “migrant workers” in 2023, according to official figures, and just one Xinjiang county transferred more than 10,000 people in the first quarter of the same year, according to local official reports. A state media article tallied more than 100,000 labour transfers out of Xinjiang as far back as 2006, the year the program started.

[...]

In August 2023, President Xi Jinping visited Xinjiang. There he urged authorities to “encourage and guide” Uyghurs to find jobs throughout the country. A few months earlier, the local government had pledged to expand labour transfers out of the region by more than a third.

The measures are just the latest phase of the government’s decades-long crackdown on ethnic minorities. The state has moved millions of mainly rural ethnic minorities — what Beijing calls “surplus labourers” — both within and outside of Xinjiang for work, as part of a broader drive to forcibly re-engineer their identities under the guise of “poverty alleviation”. The repressive programme serves Xi’s vision of forging a more homogenous culture, society and ethnicity, and turbocharging China’s economy in a race to gain the upper hand over the US and EU.

Xi first declared war on “terrorism” and “violent extremism” in Xinjiang in 2014, when unrest was met with brutal crackdowns. Since then, Xinjiang has been wrapped in a web of surveillance and security architecture. More than a million ethnic minorities have been arbitrarily detained, many forced into factory work at internment camps and detention facilities.

[...]

The repression has gone wider still. Beijing has demolished thousands of mosques, collectivised land and herds and built vast new estates to house displaced ethnic minorities and sprawling industrial parks to employ them. High unemployment linked to broad discrimination in the local job market has helped keep Uyghurs in lower-skilled work like farming.

[...]

The region’s current five-year plan requires all able members of ethnic minority households to be employed – a shift from the single family member specified previously. It projects that 13.75 million people will be transferred, mostly within Xinjiang, between 2021 and 2025, and instructs local governments across China to strengthen coordination, including through digitising personnel files for all transfer workers.

This data is integrated into a “real-time’”employment monitoring system, which Beijing established after deploying hundreds of thousands of party officials to assess the income of 12 million rural Xinjiang households. It includes regular home visits by local teams of party officials, like the one seen by the BBC in 2021 reducing a 19-year old girl to tears as they broke down her resistance to labour transfer.

Authorities have identified almost 800,000 people for real-time monitoring, according to state media in 2022, and transfers are the government’s first recourse to stop household incomes dropping.

[...]

When 30 or more workers are transferred together, government minders and security guards accompany them. These minders deliver them to the factory where they will live and work, and stay on to help communicate with management and address concerns. Hubei Hangte, which claims it supplies BMW and other carmakers, said in 2022 that it invited minders to discuss how to stop problem behaviours among workers from Xinjiang “such as drinking and swimming in groups”.

The minders also help with the primary aims of the labour programme: cultural assimilation and political indoctrination. Their own Douyin posts can be revealing.

[...]

The scenes [shown in videos posted on Chinese social media that display members of the Uyghur group and other minorities celebrating and dancing, and enjoying their lives are staged propaganda and] are examples of the sinister destruction of Uyghur, Kazakh and Kyrgyz identities, much like the “patriotic” education sessions routinely described in state media, analysts told TBIJ.

Yalkun Uluyol, China researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), called the videos “extremely unsettling”. He added that HRW’s research showed swearing allegiance to the flag is “political indoctrination” and part of the suite of repressive policies that “constitute crimes against humanity”.

[...]

Last year, the International Labour Organization decided to start measuring state-imposed forced labour by looking at what a given government is doing, rather than the conditions experienced at an individual level. Pointing to factors like a police state and policies targeting specific ethnicities, the organisation highlights how this kind of forced labour feeds on people’s vulnerabilities, such as a lack of job opportunities, but may not always exploit them economically because the political aims are more important.

[...]

In Liaoning, a few hours drive from the North Korean border, a young Uyghur woman turns to show piles of raw chicken on the gleaming aluminum worktops of a poultry processing factory. She sets the 14-second clip to a stanza from a Uyghur poem, spoken in a hushed voice:

>My many sorrows overflow, uncontained.

>But to the world I am lighthearted, companioned with laughter.

>I am bait for my silence, quietly.

>Nobody is aware, and they shall never be.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35553382

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European companies operating in China are the most pessimistic about growth prospects since 2011, a published by the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China says.

"European business confidence currently sits at or around record low levels for many key metrics, despite several policy initiatives geared towards strengthening the economy and the improving business environment for foreign investment having been launched over the past two years," the report reads.

Faced with greater challenges, a record 73% (+5 percentage points (pp)) reported that doing business in China became more difficult year-on-year (y-o-y) in 2024.

• 71% (+1pp y-o-y) expect their China business to be negatively impacted over the next two years by China’s economic slowdown, and 60% (-1pp y-o-y) are pessimistic about the outlook for competitive pressure in their sector over the same time frame.
• A record 63% (+5pp y-o-y) missed business opportunities in 2024 due to market access and regulatory barriers, while 44% expect to see an increase in the number of regulatory obstacles faced over the coming five years.
• 52% reported that the business environment in China become more politicised in 2024 – a reflection of escalating geopolitical tensions. This percentage has likely increased as members were polled prior to the US-China April 2025 tariff hikes.

[...]

“Uncertainty resulting from escalating trade and geopolitical tensions, concerns about China’s domestic economy and persistent producer price deflation weigh on the minds of both European and Chinese companies,” said Jens Eskelund, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China. “Our key message to policymakers is: the disparity between supply growth and demand is eroding both profits and business confidence. Achieving a better balance, will not only benefit companies and make China a more attractive investment destination but may also lead to a reduction in trade tensions.”

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35510976

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The Czech Republic has accused China of being “responsible” for cyberattacks against a a communication network of its Foreign Ministry, officials said on Wednesday.

The Foreign Ministry in Prague said the malicious activities started in 2022 and targeted the country’s critical infrastructure, adding it believed the Advanced Persistent Threat 31, or APT31, hacking group, which is associated with the Chinese Ministry of State Security, was behind the campaign.

It was not immediately clear what specific information were seized or what damage was caused by the attacks. The Czech ministry said a new communication system has already been put in place.

Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský said in a separate statement that his ministry summoned China’s ambassador to Prague to make it clear to Beijing “that such activities have serious impacts on mutual relations.”

“The government of the Czech Republic strongly condemns this malicious cyber campaign against its critical infrastructure,” the statement said. “Such behavior undermines the credibility of the People’s Republic of China and contradicts its public declarations.”

[...]

NATO and the European Union also condemned the attack and expressed solidarity with the Czechs.

“We observe with increasing concern the growing pattern of malicious cyber activities stemming from the People’s Republic of China,” NATO said.

“This attack is an unacceptable breach of international norms,” Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said. “The EU will not tolerate hostile cyber actions.”

"We will raise them with our Chinese counterparts as well," she went on according to Euronews. "We definitely remain ready to impose costs for these kinds of attacks."

Kallas did not specify which sort of sanctions could be introduced, simply noting they would be designed on a "case-by-case" basis as the bloc did in the past. Under EU rules, approving sanctions requires the unanimity of all member states, a threshold that is often hard to meet due to disparate views and strategies inside the room.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35481783

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Here is the original article (in German).

China, including Hong Kong, is responsible for 80% of the sanctions circumvention against Russia, but denies any involvement.

This is stated in an internal report of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs [...]

The document states that the EU sanctions have had a significant impact on the Russian economy, in particular by restricting exports of military goods through Armenia, Serbia, Uzbekistan and India. At the same time, problems persist with Kazakhstan, the UAE and Turkey, which do not provide complete data on export suspensions.

At the meeting, EU Sanctions Commissioner David O'Sullivan stressed that China, including Hong Kong, plays a key role in circumventing sanctions. However, Beijing denies any involvement in this. At the same time, the participation of EU companies in these schemes also weakens the European Commission's position in negotiations with third countries.

The document also reports on the EU's success in fighting Russia's "shadow fleet". O'Sullivan called for decisive action against the ports in Turkey, India and Malaysia that serve these vessels.

Archived

Leaked Chinese government records show Beijing’s systematic reprisals against Uyghur reporters working for a news organization that is now in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.

The documents include a list of names with addresses, professions, phone numbers and other private details of 42 “sensitive and special” people who had allegedly been in “close contact” with Uyghur journalist Shohret Hoshur, 60. Hoshur, who escaped China in 1994, has been a reporter for Radio Free Asia (RFA) since 2007. Security officers needed to “pay close attention” to people who were once in Hoshur’s orbit, the document said, noting that one person, an author, had been “dealt with by the public security authorities on political suspicion.”

As a U.S.-based reporter for RFA, Hoshur has covered the Chinese government’s repressive policies against Turkic people in Xinjiang, including the mass internment of hundreds of Uyghurs — abuses that “may constitute crimes against humanity,” according to the United Nations. Hoshur’s deep knowledge of the region and extensive contacts have allowed him to gather exclusive information from police officers and other confidential sources on the ground. At the same time, his reporting has ignited the ire of Chinese authorities, who have accused him of encouraging terrorist acts and allegedly vowed to retaliate against Hoshur’s extended family and friends.

[...]

When Hoshur first read the list of acquaintances under surveillance by Xinjiang officers, he was surprised to see the names of his college friends from decades earlier.

“I recognize all of them,” Hoshur told ICIJ of the classmates he said he hasn’t seen in over 30 years.

Despite the officers’ allegations, Hoshur remembered many of those acquaintances being “extremely quiet and cautious about anything political,” he said. “They avoided social events and kept a low profile. There were even a few who were openly loyal to the Chinese Communist Party, and yet they were also targeted.”

Hoshur said that four of his siblings, including three of his brothers — a cosmetics store owner, a merchant who ran a butcher shop and a farmer — as well as their spouses, have been missing for eight years and were likely sentenced to more than 15 years in prison on spurious charges. He believes his journalism is the reason for their detention because the authorities, who secretly monitored their calls, “repeatedly pressured them to persuade me to stop my work, warning that otherwise they would face consequences,” Hoshur said.

[...]

Alongside police bulletins and internal security guidelines reviewed by ICIJ, the government documents provide new evidence of how Chinese authorities, seeing the media outlet as a threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s rule, have strictly monitored RFA reporters abroad and harassed their families and acquaintances.

[...]

Hoshur, who worked for a broadcaster in his native Xinjiang, fled China in 1994 after he wrote two articles about Beijing’s oppression of Uyghurs, which the government’s propaganda department labeled subversive. Wanted by the authorities, he bought a fake passport and fled first to Pakistan, then to Turkey and later to the U.S., where he became a citizen. While in exile, he has continued to expose Chinese policies affecting his community.

As Uyghurs listened to his reporting on RFA broadcasting, “authorities wasted little time in making it clear to my family — and to me — that they would one day pay a price for my journalism,” Hoshur told the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China in 2015.

[...]

[...]

Kwok Yin-sang, 68, father of Anna Kwok Fung Yee, an exiled activist wanted by Hong Kong police with a HKD 1 million bounty, was arrested on April 30, denied bail, and charged with “attempting to deal with, directly or indirectly, any funds or other financial assets or economic resources belonging to, or owned or controlled by, a relevant absconder,” under Article 23, the city's domestic security law. The maximum penalty for the offence is seven years’ imprisonment.

[...]

Since Hong Kong national security police announced arrest warrants for exiled activists beginning in July 2023, relatives of these wanted individuals have become subjects of police interrogations in the name of investigations. Overseas human rights organisations condemned the move and accused Hong Kong officials of turning the activists’ loved ones back home into hostages so as to silence them. They added that the strategy is directly from China’s transnational repression playbook.

Currently, there are 19 wanted persons involved in national security cases, each with a HKD 1 million bounty. Since the passage of Article 23 in March 2024, the Secretary of Security, Chris Tang, has denounced 13 of the wanted activists as “absconders.” The legal label will prohibit any individual from having financial exchanges and dealings with them. Anna Kwok, the executive director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council, is one of the “absconders.”

[...]

Archived

China has long orchestrated its Internet censorship through relatively centralized policies and a unified implementation, known as the Great Firewall of China (GFW). However, since August 2023, anecdotes suggest that the Henan Province has deployed its own regional censorship.

[This study] characterizes provincial-level censorship in Henan, and compare it with the national-level GFW. We find that Henan has established TLS SNI-based and HTTP Host-based censorship that inspects and blocks traffic leaving the province. While the Henan Firewall is less sophisticated and less robust against typical network variability, its volatile and aggressive blocking of second-level domains made it block ten times more websites than the GFW at some points in time. Based on the observed parsing flaws and injection behaviors, we introduce simple client-side methods to bypass censorship in the Henan province.

[The] work documents an alarming sign of regional censorship emerging in China.

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Archived

Through a mix of subsidised tours, university scholarships, TikTok-style propaganda and influencer outreach, Beijing is trying to win over the generation in Taiwan that has grown up with democracy, freedom and a deepening sense of Taiwanese identity separate from China.

But how successful has this campaign been? And what are the political consequences? While Chinese soft power has made cultural inroads—especially through popular apps and lifestyle content—it has largely failed to shift the political convictions of Taiwan’s youth. The result is a more politically aware generation—one increasingly fluent in the coercive tactics used against it.

At the heart of China’s strategy lies a simple idea: if it can’t win over Taiwan’s government, it can win over its youth. Beijing is attempting to influence them by showing attention and affection in an overt and attributable manner through cross-strait youth exchange programmes. This form of soft power includes inviting Taiwanese students to China for subsidised trips featuring choreographed cultural activities and friendly political messaging. Scholarships have also been offered to study at Chinese universities, where students are exposed to Chinese Communist Party ideology and are encouraged to become ambassadors for Beijing’s unification message.

[...]

United-front work targeting Taiwan is orchestrated by a network of Chinese party-state organisations that aim to influence, cultivate and co-opt key figures within Taiwanese civil society. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, the agency responsible for cross-strait relations, has described united-front work as ‘an important magic weapon for the Communist Party of China to unite people and gather strength’. Events that are facilitated by united-front agencies, such as the Taiwan Affairs Office, are intended to co-opt participants, exert malign influence on or redefine Taiwan, its people and its history solely on the CCP’s terms.

[...]

While Chinese soft power has made some cultural inroads, especially among apolitical or disengaged youth, it has not translated into widespread political conversion. Most young Taiwanese still identify strongly with Taiwan, value their democratic freedoms, and remain sceptical of Beijing’s intentions. The memory of Hong Kong’s crushed democracy looms large. So does the daily reality of China’s military and diplomatic pressure.

[...]

Taiwanese youth are not easily fooled. Many are critically aware of Beijing’s tactics. Some are even pushing back, turning digital platforms into spaces for satire, resistance and civic debate. The battle for young minds is real, but it is multi-dimensional.

China’s efforts to charm Taiwan’s youth are part of a broader campaign of influence and coercion. The challenge for Taiwan is not only to expose these tactics, but to offer a better story: one grounded in freedom, identity and the right to choose their own future. That, more than any app or influencer, is what will determine the outcome of this generational contest.

Author is a respected FT alumnus who runs a geopolitics think tank.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35360838

Today [May 26], following a coordinated investigation at European level, the Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Network of national consumer authorities and the European Commission notified the online marketplace and e-retailer Shein of a number of practices on its platform that infringe EU consumer law. The CPC Network directed Shein to bring those practices in line with EU consumer laws. Shein remains under investigation and was requested to provide further information to the CPC Network.

The CPC Network's action against Shein is led by the competent national authorities of Belgium, France, Ireland and The Netherlands, under the coordination of the European Commission.

[...]

The investigation [which was opened in February 2025] covers a broad range of practices with which consumers are confronted while shopping on SHEIN and that are in breach of EU law, including:

• Fake discounts: pretending to offer better deals by showing price reductions that are not based on the actual ‘prior prices'.
• Pressure selling: putting consumers under pressure to complete purchases using tactics like false purchase deadlines.
• Missing, incorrect and misleading information: displaying incomplete and incorrect information about consumers' legal rights to return goods and receive refunds and failing to process returns and refunds in accordance with consumers' relevant rights.
• Deceptive product labels: using product labels that suggest that the product offers something special when in fact the relevant feature is required by law.
• Misleading sustainability claims: Providing false or deceptive information about the sustainability benefits of its products.
• Hidden contact details: Consumers cannot easily contact Shein for questions or complaints.

[...]

Shein now has one month to reply to the CPC Network's findings and propose commitments on how they will address the identified consumer law issues. Depending on Shein's reply, the CPC Network may enter a dialogue with the company. If SHEIN fails to address the concerns raised by the CPC Network, national authorities can take enforcement measures to ensure compliance. This includes the possibility to impose fines based on Shein's annual turnover in the EU Member States concerned.

[...]

crosspostato da: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35295352

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Oleh Ivashchenko, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine, reported this.

“We have confirmed information that China is supplying machine tools, special chemicals, gunpowder, and components directly to Russian military plants. We have verified data on 20 such factories,” he shared.

[...]

He added that between 2024 and 2025, at least five instances of aviation-related cooperation were documented, involving equipment, spare parts, and technical documentation. In six additional cases, large shipments of special chemicals were delivered.

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According to the FISU, as of early 2025, 80% of the critical electronics used in Russian drones originate from China.

The report notes that to bypass sanctions, Chinese entities use deceptive labeling and shell companies to ship microelectronics components to Russia.

[...]

In February 2025, an investigation by the Schemes project discovered that China had become the primary — and in some cases the sole — supplier of key semi-metals to Russia following the imposition of Western sanctions.

[...]

crosspostato da: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35288347

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In 2023 and 2024, the Spanish government authorized nine extraditions to continue through judicial channels, and at least one person has already been handed over to Chinese authorities. On October 29, 2024, after almost two years in prison, this 41-year-old man, wanted for fraud, was released from Madrid’s Soto del Real prison to be extradited to the People’s Republic of China. “I have no information about his situation or treatment in China, except that he is awaiting trial,” confirms the lawyer who defended him during the process, Carlos Aguirre de Cárcer.

The lack of guarantees that extradited individuals would receive humane and fair treatment in China was the reason why the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) prohibited Poland from extraditing Taiwanese Hung Tao Liu in a landmark judgment, Liu v. Poland. Reports by the United Nations and non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International found, in the eyes of the seven judges, “the use of torture and ill-treatment” in Chinese prisons and detention centers “to such an extent that it may amount to a situation of generalized violence.”

The lack of guarantees that extradited individuals would receive humane and fair treatment in China was the reason why the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) prohibited Poland from extraditing Taiwanese Hung Tao Liu in a landmark judgment, Liu v. Poland. Reports by the United Nations and non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International found, in the eyes of the seven judges, “the use of torture and ill-treatment” in Chinese prisons and detention centers “to such an extent that it may amount to a situation of generalized violence.”

Consequently, the ECHR exempted Liu from having to prove a specific personal risk, given that the extradition request indicated that, once in China, he would be placed in a detention center, which was “sufficient” to deny the extradition. “An individual requesting protection must be guaranteed the benefit of the doubt,” reads the judgment of October 6, 2022.

Since the ruling became final in January 2023, Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands and Norway have not handed over any person wanted by the Chinese authorities, as confirmed to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) by various authorities in these countries within the framework of China Targets, an investigation coordinated by the ICIJ, in which EL PAÍS participate.

[...]

Luis Chabaneix, founder and director of a Madrid-based firm specializing in extraditions that has managed to stop two extraditions to China in extremis in recent months, believes that, despite the extradition treaty and the alignment of interests that may exist between governments — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has traveled to China three times on official visits — “deep down, judges are almost ashamed to send someone there” and agree to suspend them for a variety of reasons.

[...]

Sometimes, however, the reasons run much deeper. Chabaneix’s legal firm defended a Chinese businessman detained in Marbella and wanted by Beijing for an alleged corporate crime. The case met all the formal requirements, but Chabaneix claimed that the accusation had been fabricated using a partner’s statement obtained under torture.

The partner, who currently lives in the United States, testified in writing before the Spanish High Court that he spent 14 months imprisoned in the Beijing Municipal Security Bureau “sleeping on the floor, with the lights permanently on, frequently subjected to physical punishment, coercion, and insinuation to fabricate false evidence against himself and the defendant," according to the ruling by the Third Section of the Criminal Chamber of the High Court.

All of this occurred during the same time that the Spanish government was demanding China guarantee in writing that it would respect the human rights of the English teacher it was seeking to extradite.

[...]

Meanwhile, a new appeal originating in Spain and headed to Strasbourg is underway. In addition to the man extradited from the Soto del Real prison in October, the High Court had authorized at least a second extradition, but an appeal has managed to suspend it, for the time being. The extraditable man, another Chinese businessman being pursued by Beijing, is an asylum seeker with a son who holds Spanish nationality and the court ruled that the petition must wait for his request to be resolved, according to his lawyer, Inmaculada Cruz Guillén.

The case will reach Strasbourg via Rome, says Cruz Guillén. An Italian law firm has appealed the case to the ECHR from the Italian capital, where the European Convention on Human Rights, ratified by Spain in 1979, was signed in 1950.

BANGKOK (AP) — The Chinese government said Friday that the Trump administration’s move to ban international students from Harvard would harm America’s international standing, and one university in Hong Kong looked to capitalize on the uncertainty by promising to take them in.

Chinese students make up a large part of Harvard University’s international student population. The university enrolled 6,703 international students across all of its schools in 2024, according to the school’s data, with 1,203 of those coming from China.

The Trump administration’s move, announced Thursday, was a hot topic on Chinese social media. State broadcaster CCTV questioned whether the U.S. would remain a top destination for foreign students, noting Harvard was already suing the U.S. government in court.

“But with the long litigation period, thousands of international students may have trouble waiting,” the CCTV commentary said. It went on to say that it becomes necessary for international students to consider other options “when policy uncertainty becomes the norm.”

[...]

Zhang Youmiao was detained for seven days before being released, although they were later sectioned again for 15 days, without the consent of their parents. The doctors had been sympathetic, with one even quietly suggesting to Zhang that they could apply for political asylum in a foreign country. “That was something I’d never heard of,” Zhang says. “I didn’t view my behaviour as political, I was just protecting my rights.”

Chinese law states that if a person is hospitalised involuntarily, they should have a diagnosed psychiatric condition. Zhang says they didn’t receive a formal diagnosis in either of their spells in hospital. They do not have hospital records from that time, but provided documentary evidence to support other elements of their account.

Zhang never formally complained about their treatment. “I was frightened, I was afraid of being put into jail or a psychiatric ward again. I even doubted myself, I thought that maybe I was the root cause of the problem”.

Zhang left China in 2023 and is now applying for asylum overseas.

[...]

Others have sought accountability from the Chinese system. More than 100 people attempted to bring legal cases related to involuntary hospitalisation against hospitals, police or local governments between 2013, when the mental health law was enacted, and 2024. Few succeed.

In 2024, Shenzhen-based lawyer Zeng Yuan sued her local public security bureau after she was sectioned for four days after a dispute with local police. Zeng had smashed a sign in the police station, venting her frustration at their failure to help her contact her estranged father and handle a barrage of online harassment she had been receiving in relation to her job. Zeng lost her case, despite the fact that the Shenzhen health commission ruled that her medical records and behaviour “did not fully support a diagnosis of severe mental disorder”.

Zeng represented herself in her legal case. “If you directly accuse the government of violating the law, it’s basically impossible to find a lawyer in the commercial field who will represent you,” she said. Huang’s NGO, the Equity and Justice Initiative, used to provide legal aid to people bringing civil rights complaints, often funded with the help of donations from overseas. But tightened laws on foreign funding “has severely impacted our ability to do these cases”, she said.

[...]

China has no right to decide whether or not Taiwan is a country given it chooses its own government, Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung said on Wednesday, adding that he would be happy to shake the hand of his Chinese opposite number in friendship.

China views democratically-governed Taiwan as its own territory and has stepped up military and political pressure to assert those claims, including increasing the intensity of war games, saying the island is one of its provinces with no right to be called a state.

[...]

At just 37 hectares, the Philippines-controlled island of Pagasa – or "hope" – is barely big enough to live on. There is almost nothing there.

The 300 or so inhabitants live in a cluster of small, wooden houses. They fish in the clear, turquoise waters, and grow what vegetables they can in the sandy ground.

But they are not alone in these disputed waters: just off shore, to the west, lies an armada of ships.

These are all Chinese, from the navy, the coastguard or the so-called maritime militia – large fishing vessels repurposed to maintain Chinese dominance of this sea. As our plane approached the island we counted at least 20.

For the past 10 years, China has been expanding its presence in the South China Sea, taking over submerged coral reefs, building three large air bases on them, and deploying hundreds of ships, to reinforce its claim to almost all of the strategic sea lanes running south from the great exporting cities on the Chinese coast.

Few of the South East Asian countries which also claim islands in the same sea have dared to push back against China; only Vietnam and the Philippines have done so. The militaries of both countries are much smaller than China's, but they are holding on to a handful of reefs and islands.

[...]

"Pagasa is very important to us," Jonathan Malaya, assistant director-general of the Philippines National Security Council, tells the BBC.

"It has a runway. It can support life – it has a resident Filipino community, and fishermen living there.

"And given the size of the island, one of the few that did not need reclaiming from the sea, under international law it generates its own territorial sea of 12 nautical miles.

"So it is, in a way, a linchpin for the Philippine presence."

[...]

[Assistant director-general of the Philippines National Security Council] Jonathan Malaya says his government has made a formal diplomatic protest every week to the Chinese Embassy over the presence of its ships in what the Philippines views as the territorial waters of Pagasa. This is in marked contrast to the previous administration of President Rodrigo Duterte, which avoided confrontations with China in the hope of getting more investment in the Philippines.

[...]

Archived

In 2010, an elite unit of the Chinese police entered an Apple shop in Shanghai and violently assaulted the customers. The attack was so brutal that the floor tiles subsequently had to be replaced: they were too bloodstained. Those customers had been waiting in line for days for the latest iPhone; their crime was to refuse to leave upon learning that the shop had sold out of stock.

Yet no official record of this event exists. The shop’s cameras were cut and employees had their phones wiped. “It shows you how quickly the Chinese can brush everything under the carpet,” one person present tells journalist Patrick McGee. “It was like a mini-Tiananmen Square.” The incident is one small example in McGee’s eye-opening book, Apple in China, of how the Californian iPhone maker has “bound its future inextricably to a ruthless authoritarian state”.

When people think of Apple’s presence in China, the focus tends either to be on the cheap manufacture of the company’s parts and the poor working conditions at those factories, or on the censorship of content on Apple devices inside the country. McGee, a journalist at the Financial Times, breaks down in much greater detail the relationship between this capitalist company and communist nation – a relationship so intertwined and complex that it will take decades to unravel. He makes the argument that not only has China effectively made Apple what it is today, but the reverse is also true. “China wouldn’t be China today without Apple,” McGee writes. “[Apple’s] investments in the country have been spectacular, rivalling nation-building efforts.”

[...]

The more Apple invests in both training these [Chinese] contracted factory workers and paying for special machinery that could only be used for its products – in 2018 the value of Apple’s “long-lived assets” in China peaked at $13.3 billion – the more it becomes bound to the country. [Apple contractor's] Foxconn hubs, for example, are now surrounded by hundreds of sub-suppliers that cater to Apple’s every whim. “Anything we wanted, we could get it,” one engineer recalls. “Whatever we needed, it would happen.”

[...]

Apple is notoriously secretive, but McGee proffers dozens of first-hand accounts of how the company essentially bumbled its way into becoming hooked on China. By the time Apple executives realise that the Chinese president Xi Jinping is ramping up repression at home and taking a more combative stance in international affairs, it’s too late to untangle the relationship: those business ties, McGee writes, are “unbreakable”. In 2016, when the Chinese authorities make it clear that they can remove, whenever they want, the cheap and plentiful labour on which Apple relies, Cook is compelled to make a trip to the Chinese Communist Party headquarters. The company pledges to invest $275 billion in China over the next five years. It does not, unsurprisingly, announce this investment to the Western press.

[...]

Arthur Kaufman | May 19, 2025

Researchers from the censorship monitoring platform Great Firewall Report (GFW Report) published an investigation last week that “sounds the alarm” about the emergence of regional online censorship in China. They noted that in August 2023, netizens in Henan began reporting an uptick in inaccessible websites that were accessible elsewhere in the country. Their investigation found no evidence of region-specific censorship in the other areas analyzed—Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Sichuan—but did find that Henan censored a massive amount of content beyond that blocked by China’s national-level Great Firewall. GFW Report authors Mingshi Wu, Ali Zohaib, Zakir Durumeric, Amir Houmansadr, and Eric Wustrow provided more detail on the scale, targets, and potential motivations of Henan’s firewall:

The Center for Uyghur Studies released its new report titled “Breaking the Roots: China’s Use of Boarding Schools as a Tool of Genocide Against Uyghur Muslims.” This report sheds light on one of the most alarming and underreported aspects of China’s repressive policies against the Uyghur people: the state-run boarding school system that targets Uyghur children in East Turkistan (AKA Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). The report documents how these schools are being used not as centers of learning and development, but as tools of forced assimilation, designed to erase Uyghur identity, language, and culture from a young age.

[...]

The report provides an in-depth examination of how the boarding school system in the Uyghur homeland functions as a mechanism of cultural genocide:

• Policy Origins – Tracing the roots of China’s assimilation campaign against the Uyghurs, including how “counter-terrorism” narratives have been used to justify oppressive policies post-9/11.
• Implementation of Boarding Schools, detailing how children, some as young as primary school age, are forcibly separated from their families and placed into state-run facilities.
• Educational Indoctrination, describing the curriculum and environment within these schools, where the Uyghur language is banned, familial ties are vilified, and loyalty to the state is indoctrinated.
• Eyewitness Testimonies, presenting first-hand accounts from survivors of these schools, offering credible and emotional insight into the long-term psychological and cultural damage inflicted on Uyghur children.

[...]

[Experts say that the matter with the] ‘boarding schools’ is not education, it is forced assimilation, cultural erasure, and psychological trauma. By severing children from their families, language, and identity, the Chinese government is committing a grave injustice that meets the definition of genocide. The international community cannot remain silent in the face of this systematic destruction of an entire people’s future.

[...]

[Edit typo.]