China

Archived

In March 2015, Beijing police arrested and detained a group of young women planning to hand out stickers on the subway on International Women’s Day opposing sexual harassment. They were jailed for more than a month, received “criminal suspect” status, and remain under surveillance today. These women became known as the Feminist Five.

Ten years later, and people are still talking about what happened.

[...]

China has dropped 37 ranks in the Global Gender Gap Index – run by the World Economic Forum of which China is an advocate – since Xi Jinping became Communist Party General Secretary in 2012. The Communist Party diminishes the role of women in public office. For the first time in decades, there is not one woman among the 24 Politburo members, China’s executive policymaking body. Party spokespeople often encourage more traditional roles for women – as caretakers and mothers – to address an ageing population. And the Party has made it harder for women to organise or advocate for themselves in China, using online censorship and the 2017 Overseas NGO Law to stifle dissent among civil society.

[...]

Cross post from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/30688909

Archived

Canada and Philippines will sign a key defense pact to boost combat drills and military ties in response to China's aggression in the South China Sea

Canada and the Philippines, both vocal critics of China’s increasingly aggressive actions in the disputed South China Sea, have concluded talks for a key defense pact that would allow their forces to hold joint combat drills and boost defense engagements, the Department of National Defense in Manila said Friday.

Canada and other Western nations have been reinforcing their military presence in the Indo-Pacific to help promote the rule of law and expand trade and investment in the region.

That dovetails with Philippine efforts under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to broaden defense ties with friendly countries to bolster his country’s defense as it faces an increasingly assertive China in the disputed South China Sea.

The agreement with Canada “will establish a framework for increased cooperation, fostering closer collaboration between defense and military establishments, improving interoperability between forces and facilitating more effective joint exercises and capacity-building exercises,” the Philippine defense department said.

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[Edit typo.]

Thailand's deportation of 40 Uyghurs to China last week was in the Southeast Asian country's best interest due to the possibility of retaliation from Beijing if the group was sent elsewhere, a Thai minister said on Thursday.

Thailand's government has repeatedly defended the secretive deportation, which came despite calls from United Nations human rights experts who said the Uyghurs would be at risk of torture, ill-treatment and "irreparable harm" if returned to China.

Human rights groups accuse China of widespread abuses of Uyghurs, a mainly Muslim ethnic minority numbering about 10 million in its northwestern region of Xinjiang. Beijing denies any abuses.

Russ Jalichandra, Thailand's vice minister for foreign affairs, in a statement on Thursday said some countries had offered to resettle the Uyghurs, walking back previous comments by Thai officials that no such proposals had been made.

He did not name the countries.

The United States, Canada and Australia were among countries that had offered to resettle the Uyghurs but Bangkok took no action for fear of upsetting China.

[...]

Archived

radiates the sort of charm for which China’s ancient northwest has become known. Once a stopover on the northern Silk Road, the city is home to the towering Xumishan grottoes, a collection of Buddhist cave temples dating back to the fifth century A.D. Now, with the help of a state-run media giant, the local government hopes to translate its cultural capital into global impact.

In a ceremony last week, local propaganda officials in Guyuan signed an agreement for framework cooperation with China Daily, the government-run multiple-language outlet that serves as one of the country’s primary communication vehicles. The agreement corresponded with the official launch of the local “Guyuan International Communication Center” (固原国际传播中心), a rebranded entity under the local propaganda office that will leverage local media content production — and the China Daily relationship — to promote Guyuan to the world.

The local initiative is yet another point of implementation of Xi Jinping’s national strategy since 2018 to strengthen China’s global discourse power (话语权) through a campaign of grassroots storytelling — empowering local governments and media groups to add their voices to China’s collective voice. To date, the China Media Project has documented the launch of 28 provincial-level international communication centers (国际传播中心), or ICCs, and at least 50 at the city and district level — most of these established only since 2023.

[...]

While presented as revolutionary approaches to enhance China’s global voice, these vertical integration efforts often amount to little more than performative compliance with central directives. The local implementations often lack substance beyond recycled rhetoric about “turning new chapters,” focusing more on communicating upward to leadership than outward to international audiences. It remains to be seen whether the local ICC push championed under Xi Jinping will result in meaningful global engagement.

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Archived version

The daughter of Uyghur economist Ilham Tohti, who was given a life sentence on separatism-related charges in China in 2014, said recently her ongoing goal is to ensure as many people as possible are aware of the oppression her people have suffered.

Jewher Ilham, 30, who was separated from her now 55-year-old father in February 2013 at a Beijing airport by Chinese authorities and currently resides in the United States, told Kyodo News she has not returned to China since that day and that her father's current location is unknown.

Ilham Tohti, a former professor at Minzu University of China in Beijing, was barred from leaving the country to take up a position as a visiting scholar at a college in the United States.

He was then detained in January 2014 and convicted in September that year following a closed-door trial.

[...]

As the detention of many Uyghur people at Chinese facilities for "re-education" has come to light since 2018, Jewher Ilham said she believes conditions for the ethnic group have been "deteriorating year by year." She led the production of a 2023 documentary film collecting the stories of people from the Uyghur, Kazakh, and Uzbek ethnic minorities who fled China to escape oppression.

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She insisted China's ruling Communist Party continues the practice of forced labour because it bolsters the world's second-largest economy. Jewher Ilham urged companies worldwide to end interactions with Chinese supply chains suspected of using slave labour.

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In 2022, a report from the United Nations (UN) said "serious human rights violations" have been committed in Xinjiang in the context of Beijing's application of strategies against terrorism and extremism, with those placed in "vocational educational and training centres" subject to torture, abuse and inhuman treatment between 2017 and 2019.

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• Before the British government handed over Hong Kong in 1997, China agreed to allow the region considerable political autonomy for fifty years under a framework known as “one country, two systems.”
• In recent years, Beijing has cracked down on Hong Kong’s freedoms, stoking mass protests in the city and drawing international criticism.
• Beijing imposed a national security law in 2020 that gave it broad new powers to punish critics and silence dissenters, which has fundamentally altered life for Hong Kongers.

Archived

China pledged to preserve much of what makes Hong Kong unique when the former British colony was handed over in 1997. Beijing said it would give Hong Kong fifty years to keep its capitalist system and enjoy many freedoms not found in mainland Chinese cities.

But more than halfway through the transition, Beijing has taken increasingly brazen steps to encroach on Hong Kong’s political system and crack down on dissent. In 2020, Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong. Since then, authorities have arrested dozens of pro-democracy activists, lawmakers, and journalists; curbed voting rights; and limited freedoms of the press and speech. In March 2024, Hong Kong lawmakers passed Article 23, an additional security legislation that further cements China’s rule on the city’s rights and freedom. These moves have not only drawn international condemnation, but have also raised questions about Hong Kong’s status as a global financial hub and dimmed hopes that the city will ever become a full-fledged democracy.

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Sky Net is China’s overarching overseas fugitive recovery operation. Launched in 2015, it includes the notorious Operation Fox Hunt started in 2014. It does not include ad hoc operations, such as the anti-telecom fraud campaign that forced the return of 230,000 individuals in the span of just over a single year (April 2021 – July 2022).

The methodology for China’s forced return operations were laid out in the CCDI’s 2018 written legal interpretation to the National Supervision Law. The mix of overt and covert means explicitly include the use of:

• Extraditions
• Deportations
• Persuasion to return
• Luring and entrapment
• Kidnapping

[...]

Last week, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) released its annual report. It provides a rare glimpse of insight into some of the Chinese Communist Party’s operations, as official data are increasingly hard to come by.

Beyond the steep increase in the use of extra-judicial incommunicado detentions in Liuzhi [the Chinese Communist Party's secret detention system], the annual report also provides an update on the CCP’s flagship operation for “overseas fugitive recovery”.

In 2024, a reported 1597 individuals were captured under Sky Net. While the data does not provide a breakdown of how many of those individuals were forcefully returned from abroad, past research and official data sets indicate that would be most of the reported number.

This latest number puts the total amount of individuals forcefully returned to China under Operations Fox Hunt and Sky Net at almost 14,000 from over 120 countries and regions between 2014 and 2024.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/30463693

Taiwan is learning from companies in Ukraine which continue to operate during the country's fight against Russia, [according to] a senior Taiwan official, as the island speeds up contingency planning amid heightened Chinese threats.

China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, despite the objection of the government in Taipei, and has ramped up its military pressure against the island in recent years, including holding several rounds of major war games.

"We hope to learn from Ukraine's first-hand experiences - how private companies helped build the resilience of its government and society during wartime," said a senior Taiwan security official, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

[...]

Among the ideas Taiwan is taking inspirations from Ukraine for include how to incorporate supermarkets into the government's supply distribution network and utilising taxi services for medical emergencies such as blood donations when the health system is overwhelmed.

The official said the government was working to connect companies in Taiwan with their counterparts in Ukraine in order to help Taiwan firms quickly boost their contingency planning.

"We have the will to fight, and now we must also look closely into our will to prepare," the official said. Taiwan is revamping its air-raid alert and shelter systems, taking into account lessons by northern European countries and Baltic states, the official added.

A closed-door workshop on preparations including stockpiling and civil defence training was held in Taipei this week, which was attended by Taiwan security officials and senior diplomats from countries including the U.S., Japan and Australia.

[...]

"Technology, banking, food, delivery, retail - how do you keep the economy running?" [one expert] said when asked how the Taiwan government should prepare itself.

Archived

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For their own people [the Chinese Communist Party, CCP, has] imposed a dystopia, including the “great firewall” to control information from the outside. It also exerts strict control over domestic Internet information, uses a vast surveillance camera network with facial recognition and monitors financial transactions done online. If the CCP can think of any way to impose more control over their subjects they will do it.

Abroad they traditionally used RICE (Reward, Ideology, Coercion and Ego) techniques to not only recruit spies, they have used it to win over politicians, scientists and other useful people. They have weaponized overseas Chinese community groups, taken over their media and even set up police stations around the world.

Through software like ByteDance’s TikTok they are capable of sweeping data collection, while Chinese hackers steal all sorts of information and attack online systems. Huawei used their telecommunications equipment to collect yet more.

They have worked to subvert algorithms even in foreign Web sites by flooding the Internet with disinformation and misinformation. Their infamous “little pink” and “50-cent” armies roam the Internet spreading their agenda.

MAKING PROPAGANDA

AI is taking this to an exponentially higher level.

The CCP is investing heavily in AI because it opens opportunities for the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) and Ministry of State Security (MSS) to vastly increase its power worldwide.

While Hailuo [a very popular AI used to create videos which is based in Shanghai] can be very useful in creating propaganda, TikTok owner ByteDance’s just released OmniHuman-1, which is explicitly for deepfakes and is shockingly good. It is able to produce videos from pictures, video and audio fed by the user to create videos realistic enough to require paying attention.

[...]

The gullible will fall for outrageous deepfakes in partisan social media, but these are pretty easy to discredit. It is the more subtle videos that are concerning because they can be used subtly to change the narrative, such as editing a video of the US Secretary of State and swap out “one China policy” for “one China principle.”

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The release last month of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High Flyer rightly attracted a vast amount of attention. Users amused themselves trying to get around the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) imposed censorship, but more alarmingly hackers discovered unprotected data ports [in Deepseek], that data was being shared with TikTok and many reminded us that by law they must share any data with the CCP.

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Perhaps intentionally to avoid widespread press scrutiny, the most powerful AI agent ever, UI-TARS, was released during the DeepSeek hoopla. AI agents by American companies require a paid subscription but offer powerful research capabilities and other functions by taking over a browser and doing work for you.

Unlike previous AI agents, UI-TARS comes in two varieties, one taking over the browser like the others, but with a second option to take over the entire computer or phone.

It can install software, scrape any bit of data it likes and make all sorts of modifications all on its own following whatever instructions it is given whether online or not. That could completely change how we work, play and communicate on our devices.

UI-TARS is open source, so unlike the American AI agents, developers can access, modify and distribute the software for free. This should encourage widespread adoption, including under different branding as long as they retain the original copyright notice, license text and notices in the source code, which non-coders never read.

Why would they do this for free instead of requiring a subscription? To make sure it gets on to as many devices as possible.

How nice of ByteDance, the developer of UI-TARS.

[...]

Soon people will be downloading off-brand UI-TARS without knowing it, and there could be hundreds or even thousands of brands running it. Your [...] AI agent running on UI-TARS can act as spyware tracking your every move and stealing all your data for Beijing, and it will know everything about you — opening up blackmail opportunities on a massive scale.

[...]

As is the case on TikTok, results playing up the CCP line would also be prioritized and content scrubbed from the results as DeepSeek-R1 AI does now, albeit still rather clumsily. DeepSeek-generated articles and books, propaganda videos made with Hailuo AI and deepfake videos made or modified by OmniHuman would feature prominently.

Millions of people around the world could soon be constantly surveiled through their own cameras and microphones, monitored and tracked and living in an alternate information reality — just like in China.

The CCP would have the ability to control nearly every aspect of these people’s lives — just like in China.

But unlike the Chinese, they would not even know how much power they have lost to the CCP.

New data released by the Chinese Communist Party's internal policing body shows a major 46.15% increase in the use of the Liuzhi system from 2023 to 2024. Over the course of last year, 38,000 people were detained by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).

Liuzhi, or retention in custody, is very similar in design to the better-known residential surveillance at a designated location system (RSDL), which is traditionally used against lawyers, rights defenders and dissidents.

Both systems consist of incommunicado detentions in solitary confinement at secret locations for a period of up to six months.

Unlike RSDL however, the Liuzhi system resides entirely outside the legal system and is treated as an internal party matter (even though many of its victims are likely not party members). In Liuzhi, one does not even theoretically have a right to legal counsel.

For more information on CCDI, Liuzhi and related issues, see our longer report on this (16 Dec 2024).

Key findings from the latest report on the use of Liuzhi:

• The number of investigations of “discipline violations” rose from 626,000 in 2023 to 877,000 in 2024, an increase of 40.09%.

• The number of people placed into Liuzhi rose from 26,000 in 2023 to 38,000 in 2024, an increase of 46.15%.

• Based on the above, the use of Liuzhi, the harshest form of investigation, rose not only in total number of instances used, but also relative to all investigations: 4.15% of those investigated placed into Liuzhi 2023, and 4.33% of those investigated placed into Liuzhi 2024.

• Of the 889,000 people given disciplinary sanctions of any sort, 17,000 regarded people in the financial sector, 94,000 within State-Owned Enterprises, and 60,000 people within the pharmaceutical sector.

• The** total number of victims since the system was implemented in 2018 is now likely close to - or slightly above - 200,000**. All are victims of the CCDI’s systematic and widespread use of arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances and torture (due to the prolonged use of solitary confinement).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/30359557

Archived

China has informed the Australian government to expect more visits from its warships amid the ongoing political standoff between Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and China.

The situation follows live-fire exercises conducted by a People's Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) taskforce in the Tasman Sea just over a week ago.

[...]

Both New Zealand and Australia condemn the live-fire exercises held on 21-22 February.

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Defence Minister Judith Collins maintain that Wellington had no prior knowledge of the Chinese military operation.

Collins expresses disappointment over Beijing’s failure to inform Wellington about the arrival of a “highly capable” strike force with considerable firepower along Australia’s east coast.

[...]

Luxon and Collins’ Australian counterparts, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles, also criticise China for not providing “sufficient notice” on the live-fire exercise in the Tasman Sea.

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The live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea follow another incident in which a Chinese Air Force J-16 fighter jet releases flares 30 metres from an Australian P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft in the South China Sea.

Australia’s Department of Defence criticises the interaction as “unsafe and unprofessional”.

The flare release, reported on 13 February, is the fifth known incident of unsafe behaviour by the Chinese military towards the Australian Defence Force since 2022.

Analysts warn that these military interactions with China are now becoming increasingly routine.

Reports by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reveal that China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea and beyond make it much harder for the Albanese government to stabilise its relationship with Beijing, particularly under its strategy of ‘cooperate where we can, disagree where we must, and engage in the national interest’.

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The Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide released a report in January 2025, “Eight Years On, China’s Repression of the Uyghurs Remains Dire: How China’s Policies in the Uyghur Region Have and Have Not Changed.” The report is authored by Rian Thum, Senior Lecturer in East Asian History, at the University of Manchester.

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The [new] report finds that, given the available information, all of the policies that led to accusations of mass atrocities in the Uyghur region continue, and some are expanding. These findings should prompt deeper research into the nature of mass atrocities facing the Uyghur population and spark urgent, effective responses. In particular, the report recommends further research into emerging repressive strategies, including the intense network of electronic and human surveillance, curbs on religious practice, and the destruction of cultural heritage.

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A list of boarding schools (pdf) newly built or expanded with new dormitories in 2023 and 2024. The sources are Chinese government construction tenders (formal requests for bids from contractors on a project) and state-approved media, with links to the sources provided in the table. Some of the sites are geolocated by comparison using details from the tender or media sources.

A list of prisons and kanshousuo (pdf), a type of internment facility, that have either been newly built or expanded from 2019 onward. Geolocation (associating names of documented facilities to exact coordinates) is based on the work and available sources on the Xinjiang Victims Database. Expansion and new construction dates are based on data satellite imagery, in most cases from Google Earth.

Using the list of kanshousuo identified by Xinjiang Victims Database from satellite imagery and government documents, this spreadsheet (pdf) provides an estimate of total kanshousuo capacity in Xinjiang at Chinese government standards. Government standards, available at Archive Today, dictate cell capacity of eight or 16 prisoners for the two standard cell sizes. Cell sizes and numbers were identified from the unroofed outdoor section that is mandated for each cell and is visible in satellite imagery. Google Earth and Apple Maps were the sources for satellite imagery.

Cross post from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/30322019

Archived

A $1bn Chinese investment to build an electric vehicle plant, championed by Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was meant to breathe new hope into Camaçari, an industrial city rocked by US automaker Ford’s departure four years ago.

But on a development that carmaker BYD sold to locals as a “Brazilian Silicon Valley” with the promise of 20,000 jobs, diggers and mobile cranes lay idle underneath the blazing sun one recent afternoon.

Following inspections of the site and construction workers’ accommodation in December, officials “rescued” 163 Chinese nationals — all now returned home — from allegedly “degrading” conditions that authorities likened to slavery.

The scandal highlights one way in which Chinese companies’ attempts to expand high-value manufacturing overseas can come unstuck at a time when concerns are mounting over the Asian superpower’s dominance of global export markets for green tech.

Following inspections of the site and construction workers’ accommodation in December, officials “rescued” 163 Chinese nationals — all now returned home — from allegedly “degrading” conditions that authorities likened to slavery.

The scandal highlights one way in which Chinese companies’ attempts to expand high-value manufacturing overseas can come unstuck at a time when concerns are mounting over the Asian superpower’s dominance of global export markets for green tech.

[...]

"We feel betrayed,” Antonio Ubirajara, head of the local construction workers’ union, said of the revelation that 500 Chinese workers were on the site. “Unemployment is still high in Bahia. We have a surplus of skilled labour here and it hasn’t been used.”

[...]

Some economists view the investments in foreign facilities as a means to curtail local governments’ concerns over China dumping cheap goods on global markets and undercutting their own manufacturers. It can also offer Beijing a means of working round tariffs on its exports.

“The trend [by China] to invest abroad is a function of the resistance that Chinese auto manufacturers started to encounter as their foreign sales grew quickly, particularly in the EV sector,” said Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s a response to the protection that countries started to introduce [such as] restrictions and tariffs.”

[...]

Labour inspector Liane Durão highlighted that only 163 out of 350 Jinjiang workers were “rescued” and not the entire workforce.

Durão also said the authorities believed most of the roughly 500 Chinese workers — employed across three contractors — were brought into the country illegally because they were wrongly designated as technical specialists.

[...]

Archived

"In China, you could be arrested simply for chatting with someone, copying a map, or unintentionally taking a photo of a sensitive location,” said Dinah Gardner, research director at the human rights organization Safeguard Defenders.

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Arbitrary Detention as a Political Tool

The report highlights that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government is increasingly employing 'arbitrary detention' as a diplomatic leverage, particularly targeting citizens from Western nations. In recent years, numerous similar cases have surfaced, including the 'Two Michaels' incident in Canada (Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor), the case of British citizen Han Feilong, and the case involving Australian writer Yang Hengjun.

Cheng Lei's partner, Koyle, discovered in August 2020 that Cheng Lei had suddenly gone missing; her phone was unreachable, and her social media accounts showed no updates.

'Honestly, I wasn't sure at first. I was the first to notice she was missing, and I contacted the embassy to inform them of her disappearance. I quickly realized she had been detained because her computer was missing, along with other signs,' Koyle told Voice of America.

After realizing that Cheng Lei might have been detained, Koyle's initial response was to identify the agency responsible for her detention. He mentioned that if it were the CCP's Public Security Bureau (PSB), there might still be some official avenues to pursue action. However, upon discovering it was the CCP's Ministry of State Security (MSS), he understood that the situation had become much more complex.

[...]

The report highlights that since Xi Jinping assumed power [...] China has not only gradually closed its doors to foreigners but has also increasingly 'brazenly detained foreigners for political reasons,' 'pressuring or punishing foreign governments.' Such detentions have been integrated into the national security framework that China is increasingly emphasizing, particularly following the 2023 revision of the Anti-Espionage Law enacted in 2014, along with the revision of the National Secrets Law in May 2024, leading to a sharp rise in the number of foreigners detained on espionage charges in China.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/30226134

Pilots first heard about a Chinese live-fire naval exercise near Australia last week when already in the air, receiving messages that forced some to change paths through a busy air corridor, satellite text messages to and from pilots seen by Reuters show.

The incident highlights how airlines are increasingly having to react at short notice to geopolitical disruptions and military hazards, such as missile and drone barrages between Israel and Iran last year.

It also shows how China's military, in its first drills in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, is raising tensions by being more assertive across the Indo-Pacific region, according to Western defence analysts, including near Taiwan.

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Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said the forced return of the Uyghurs, who had been detained in Thailand for over 11 years, was deeply troubling.

“This violates the principle of non-refoulement for which there is a complete prohibition in cases where there is a real risk of torture, ill-treatment, or other irreparable harm upon their return,” he said.

Contained in Article 3 of the Convention against Torture, the principle prohibits returning individuals to a country where they face a risk of persecution, torture or ill-treatment. It is also referred to in Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The right to seek asylum and of non-refoulement are also enshrined in Article 13 of Thailand’s Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearance Act, and Article 16 of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration.

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Tibetans have worked to protect the Tibetan language and resisted efforts to enforce Mandarin Chinese. Yet, Tibetan children are losing their language through enrolment in state boarding schools where they are being educated nearly exclusively in Mandarin Chinese. Tibetan is typically only taught a few times a week – not enough to sustain the language.

[...]

[Beijing's] Government policy forces all Tibetans to learn and use Mandarin Chinese. Those who speak only Tibetan have a harder time finding work and are faced with discrimination and even violence from the dominant Han ethnic group.

[...]

Meanwhile, support for Tibetan language education has slowly been whittled away: the government even recently banned students from having private Tibetan lessons or tutors on their school holidays.

Linguistic minorities in Tibet all need to learn and use Mandarin. But many also need to learn Tibetan to communicate with other Tibetans: classmates, teachers, doctors, bureaucrats or bosses.

[...]

The government refuses to provide any opportunities to use and learn minority languages like Manegacha. It also tolerates constant discrimination and violence against Manegacha speakers by other Tibetans.

These [Chinese] assimilationist state policies are causing linguistic diversity across Tibet to collapse. As these minority languages are lost, people’s mental and physical health suffers and their social connections and communal identities are destroyed.

[...]

Here is the article as pdf.

Drawing on the author’s own experience, this paper explores the rarely researched experience of sibling abortion under China’s One-Child Policy [1979 and 2015] through a psychodynamic lens.

The author uses writing as a method of inquiry to delve into the emotional impact of losing a younger brother to abortion due to the One-Child Policy and to dialogue with relevant psychodynamic literature on loss and grief.

The main body of this paper consists of three separate yet interrelated sections.

• In the first section, drawing on the concept of The Dead Mother, the author explores the possible impact of her mother’s bereavement of a second child on the author’s emotional life in her formative years.

• The second section draws on psychodynamic literature on melancholia to understand how the lost life of an aborted brother is kept alive in the author’s psyche and the ambivalence this brings to the author’s psychical world.

• The third section is an analysis of the first two sections, constructing an understanding of the missing psychosocial elements in the first two sections.

This paper gives voice to the longing and mourning brought by sibling abortion under China's One-Child Policy, presenting the author’s process of trying to understand such experiences and attempt to understand the personal and the psychical under the influence of the political.

At least 40 Uyghurs have been deported to China, the Thai authorities have confirmed, despite warnings from rights groups that they face possible torture and even death.

The group is thought to have been flown back to China's Xinjiang region on Thursday, after being held for 10 years in a Bangkok detention centre.

China has been accused of committing crimes against humanity and possibly genocide against the Uyghur population and other mostly Muslim ethnic groups in the north-western region of Xinjiang. Beijing denies all of the allegations.

It is the first time Thailand has deported Uyghurs since 2015.

The deportation has been shrouded in secrecy after serious concerns were raised by the United States and United Nations.

Thai media reported that several trucks, some with windows blocked with sheets of black plastic, left Bangkok's main immigration detention centre in the early hours of Thursday morning.

[...]

Archived

International Labour Organization (ILO) flags 'full extent of forced labour' in China's Xinjiang and Tibet

The ILO report 2025 states that forced labour extends beyond internment camps to include long-term imprisonment and large-scale labour transfers into industries such as solar panel production, agriculture, and textiles.

[...]

Information relating to forced labour of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in China [...] were raised as observations predominantly by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and UN bodies such as the UN Human Rights Council (OHCHR). The report specifically highlights that forced labour is not confined to internment camps but includes long-term imprisonment and large-scale labour transfers. It has been rejected by a spokesperson at the Chinese Embassy in Washington.

Summary:

Two major systems of coercive work placement coexist in Xinjiang.

• Firstly, a system of arbitrary detention for Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities suspected of endangering social stability and national security (the “Vocational Skills Training and Education Centers” or VSTEC system) which since 2020 has been replaced with institutionalized long-term detention in regular prisons following a formal legal process, notably of prominent intellectuals and continued forced placement of “released” detainees in labour-intensive industries such as textiles and electronics.
• Secondly, a system of transferring “surplus” rural workers from low-income traditional livelihoods pursuits into industries such as the processing of raw materials for the production of solar panels, batteries and other vehicle parts; seasonal agricultural work; and seafood processing. In recent years, based on an intensified campaign of investigating and monitoring the poverty status of millions of rural households, the authorities had raised targets leading to increased cross-provincial labour transfers.

At the same time, Chinese local authorities had “actively guided” ethnic smallholder farmers to transfer their agricultural plots to large state-led cooperatives, thus “liberating” “surplus” rural workers for transfer into manufacturing or the service sector.

[...] In the last decade, similar policies have been pursued in the Tibet Autonomous Region (Tibet). These policies would apply coercive methods such as military-style vocational training methods and the involvement of political cadres to have Tibetan nomads and farmers swap their traditional livelihoods for jobs providing measurable cash income in industries such as road construction, mining or food-processing, thereby diluting “the negative influence of religion.” Placement incentives to local labour brokers and companies had facilitated a gradual increase in the labour transfer of rural workers to reach 630,000 workers in 2024.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/2049441

Archived

Here is the study (pdf)

Most recently, the imposition of Chinese sanctions against individuals and institutions from the EU and the United Kingdom – including independent researchers that are members of the ETNC network [European Think-tank Network on China (ETNC)] – in retaliation for Western sanctions against Chinese individuals accused of grave human rights violations in Xinjiang have paved the way to an escalation in tensions between Europe and China. Even before these developments, however, it had become clear that Beijing’s efforts to developing soft power across the continent were increasingly ineffective.

Summary:

• Developing soft power has been a pillar of Chinese foreign policy since 2007 and remains a stated goal of China’s long-term policy orientation to 2035.
• We identify three prominent Chinese approaches to developing soft power in Europe: promoting Chinese language and culture; shaping China’s image through the media; and using the secondary soft-power effects of economic prowess.
• Recently, and over the last year in particular, China has become more assertive in attempting to shape its image by expanding its toolkit, particularly to enhance its political messaging. This includes the systematic use of social media.
• On the importance of China’s economy, the lines can often be blurred between the attractiveness of economic cooperation and the pressures of economic coercion. Withholding market access for European firms and products has long been an observed practice of reactive Chinese diplomacy, but an increasingly formalized development of sanctioning mechanisms, including “unreliable entity lists” and export control legislation, is a cause for growing concern.
• In other words, market access, trade and investment opportunities are perhaps the single largest factor determining China’s appeal in Europe, but also a major source of its coercive power.

Different patterns of Chinese soft power projections can be seen across four groups of countries analysed in this report:

• In the first group (Austria, Hungary, Poland, Portugal and Slovakia), China does not appear compelled to actively project its soft power, mostly because of the lack of public interest in these countries.
• In Italy and Greece, China’s soft power approach aims to arrest the trend of a deteriorating image and is geared towards damage containment.
• In Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain and the UK, perceptions of China are clearly becoming less favourable, and Beijing is struggling with growing vigilance.
• Finally, in Czechia, Denmark, France, and Sweden, China’s soft power is clearly in a state of free fall.

In turn, EU institutions appear to follow the trend described in the third group, of growing vigilance, as the risks posed by China’s geopolitical ambitions increasingly underlined.

A number of factors have driven these trends, from the fallout of COVID-19 to Chinese domestic developments (including in Xinjiang and Hong Kong) and the impact of growing US-China rivalry. These factors ultimately appear to be more substantive drivers of European perceptions and attitudes towards China today than the traditional sources of soft power.

In response, the Chinese government’s public messaging in Europe has become increasingly proactive, even aggressive, including through the imposition of sanctions.

These new methods, though deployed differently across the continent and aimed in part at a Chinese political audience, point to Beijing’s objective to increase its sway over Europe by influencing related discourse. They are presumably designed to prevent negative publicity and criticism, rather than achieve likeability.

[...]

The United States has reiterated its opposition to any forced change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio stressing that Washington does not seek conflict while standing by its long-standing policies on Taiwan, a recent report carried by the island nation’s Central News Agency (CNA) said.

His comments come as Taiwan continues to face the persistent threat of a Chinese invasion. In an interview broadcast on the social media platform X, Rubio reaffirmed Washington’s stance, stating: "We are against any sort of compelled, forced change of status. That's been our policy; that remains our policy."

[...]

Meanwhile, in another demonstration of EU recognition of Taiwan, a delegation from the European Parliament (EP) arrived in Taiwan earlier in the week to mark the first visit by EP lawmakers in 2025.

The group, led by Ivars Ījabs, a vice-president of the Renew Europe political group from Latvia, was scheduled to meet Taiwan’s Vice-President Hsiao Bi-khim and other senior officials during their five-day trip.

The delegation also includes Hannes Heide of Austria, Arkadiusz Mularczyk from Poland, and Vladimir Prebilič from Slovenia, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

During their visit, the EP members were scheduled to engage with government officials, lawmakers, as well as a number of local NGOs during which time they would be discussing Taiwan-EU relations in addition to regional geopolitics, and technological innovation a statement by the Ministry said.

[...]

Taiwan on Wednesday dispatched naval, air and land forces in response to China's "live-fire" drills held off the coast of the self-ruled island, its Defense Ministry said, condemning the unexpected exercise.

China's People's Liberation Army "has blatantly violated international norms by unilaterally designating a drill zone 40 NM off the coast of Kaohsiung and Pingtung, claiming to conduct live-fire exercises without prior warning," Taipei said.

Detecting 32 aircraft around Taiwan as part of the Chinese drill, Taiwan's military said it responded by sending forces to "monitor, alert and respond appropriately."

"This move not only caused a high degree of danger to the safety of international flights and vessels at sea, but is also a blatant provocation to regional security and stability," the ministry said.

[...]

China has time and again threatened to use force to establish control over Taiwan.

The self-ruled island is a major point of contention between Washington and Beijing. While the US is legally required to provide arms to Taiwan for its defense, it has remained ambiguous about sending its own military if required.

Archived

East Turkestan — or Xinjiang, as it is known in Chinese — is a border region where ethnic minorities are subjected to the Chinese regime’s stifling repression.

Subjected to arbitrary arrests and forced labor, sterilizations to torture, more than one million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other minorities are estimated to have been locked up in so-called “re-education” camps and prisons in the region over the last decade, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

While China contends it is fighting ‘terrorists,’ to others it seems the objective is to annihilate any cultural and religious particularism which could be seen as an impediment to the ethnic purity component of the “Chinese dream.”

The United Nations has warned that what is happening in the region may amount to “crimes against humanity,” while others, including the US State Department, have gone further, labeling it a genocide in 2021, especially due to measures intended to reduce the number of children being born.

This repression is not confined to China, but takes on a transnational dimension: even beyond the country’s borders, Beijing persecutes those who have been designated as its political opponents. In Central Asia, the former Soviet republics, heavily economically dependent on their Eastern neighbor, are home to a pervasive interference that extends the repression.

China has built hundreds of detention centers along the border of its Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the eastern frontiers of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, making those countries a common landing spot for refugees fleeing Chinese repression.

[...]

The region between China and Kazakhstan had become a border of tears, where many families mourn the loved ones who have never returned from the Chinese camps, and where the survivors of the camps who managed to make it across the border have carried with them the trauma of the experience.

[...]

Because the repression in Xinjiang is still ongoing, a single wrong word can lead to deportation, imprisonment, or death for witnesses and their relatives if they are identified by Chinese or Kazakh intelligence.

In those conditions, most survivors are terrified to be acknowledged as such, and not likely to speak to journalists. Building a network of contacts within persecuted communities therefore requires a great deal of time, caution, and trust.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/2043982

[...]

Many people might wonder why a person living in a largely stable economy where the GDP per capita is roughly in line with the global average [such as in China] might choose to take so many risks to start a new life in a foreign country.

[...]

Ling [a Chinese migrant who fled to Germany] started thinking about leaving China more than 20 years ago. But it wasn’t until the government’s harsh Covid-19 lockdown restrictions that he seriously considered taking action. During the pandemic he lost his job and saw his salary halve to 3,000 yuan (£326) a month as he picked up replacement work as a delivery driver. He grew increasingly uncomfortable with [his daughter] Feifei’s education, such as her being required to wear the red neckerchief of the Young Pioneers, the Chinese Communist party’s organisation for children aged six to 14. He was appalled when a teacher showed Feifei’s class videos portraying the US and western countries as “bullying China”.

“Education should be about teaching children how to love people around them and society, rather than promoting hatred and distorting the minds of children from an early age,” he says, adding that he felt discriminated against as a Christian.

[...]

Crossing rivers and mountains for a new life in the west is known on Chinese social media as zouxian, or “walking the line”.

Wealthier Chinese are also abandoning their homeland for a new start in Europe. In February this year, Mou* and his family landed in Frankfurt for a transfer to Serbia. In the transfer hall, Mou called an emergency family meeting. We’re not going to Serbia, he told his three children, and we’re not going back to China either. Mou, his wife, their children and Mou’s parents approached Frankfurt airport staff and said they wanted to claim asylum. The plane tickets for the family of seven had cost more than 45,500 yuan.

[...]

Pre-Covid, the 42-year-old businessman [Mou] enjoyed his life in China. He ran several food export companies, including a rougamo company that exported the popular Xi’an street food snack to the US. He owned several properties.

But the pandemic battered his business, and also his faith in the government. In 2022 he got into a fight with security officers because he refused to obey a lockdown order. He was detained for three days at the police station. Later, the police asked him to come back and “record some videos”. Mou refused to cooperate and was warned that his children’s future education would become “problematic”.

“My body was shaking when I got the call, full of fear and desperation … I immediately talked to my wife and said let’s leave,” Mou [said].

[...]

Most of all, the new migrants hope that anti-immigration sentiment doesn’t take aim at them. “Germany has taken care of me when I have no job and am making no contribution,” says Ling, who is living on a government handout of 700 euros (£581) a month as he awaits the outcome of his asylum application. “I hope to become a legal citizen, to work and to pay taxes. If the country needs me one day, I would contribute without hesitation”.

*All names in the article have been changed.