China

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17794715

"The Chinese people are so miserable," read a social media post in the wake of yet another mass killing in the country earlier this year. The same user also warned: "There will only be more and more copycat attacks."

"This tragedy reflects the darkness within society," wrote another.

Such bleak assessments, following a spate of deadly incidents in China during 2024, have led to questions about what is driving people to murder strangers en masse to "take revenge on society".

Attacks like this are still rare given China's huge population, and are not new, says David Schak, associate professor at Griffith University in Australia. But they seem to come in waves, often as copycat attempts at garnering attention.

[...]

From 2019 to 2023, police recorded three to five cases each year, where perpetrators attacked pedestrians or strangers.

In 2024, that number jumped to 19.

[...]

In 2019, three people were killed and 28 injured in such incidents; in 2023, 16 dead and 40 injured and in 2024, 63 people killed and 166 injured. November was especially bloody.

On the 11th of that month, a 62-year-old man ploughed a car into people exercising outside a stadium in the city of Zhuhai, killing at least 35. Police said that the driver had been unhappy with his divorce settlement.

[...]

Days later, in Changde city, a man drove into a crowd of children and parents outside a primary school, injuring 30 of them. The authorities said he was angry over financial losses and family problems.

That same week, a 21-year-old who couldn't graduate after failing his exams, went on a stabbing rampage on his campus in Wuxi city, killing eight and injuring 17.

[...]

China's slowing economy

A major source of pressure in China right now is the sluggish economy. It is no secret that the country has been struggling with high youth unemployment, massive debt and a real estate crisis which has consumed the life savings of many families, sometimes with nothing to show for it.

Studies appear to point to a significant change in attitudes, with a measurable increase in pessimism among Chinese people about their personal prospects. [While in the past] inequality in society could often be attributed to a lack of effort or ability, [...] people were now blaming an "unfair economic system".

[...]

A lack of options

In countries with a healthy media, if you felt you had been fired from your job unfairly or that your home had been demolished by corrupt builders backed by local officials, you might turn to journalists for your story to be heard. But that is rarely an option in China, where the press is controlled by the Communist Party and unlikely to run stories which reflect badly on any level of the government.

[...]

Then there are the courts – also run by and for the party – which are slow and inefficient. Much was made on social media here of the Zhuhai attacker's alleged motive: that he did not achieve what he believed was a fair divorce settlement in court.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17778322

[...]

A proposed deal by labour prosecutors will be presented to the two firms, which could clear BYD and [its contractor] Jinjiang from an investigation.

But they could still face scrutiny from labour inspectors and from federal prosecutors who have requested the sharing of the evidence.

"Measures can be adopted in the criminal sphere," the prosecutor's office said.

[...]

China's model of taking Chinese workers to the countries where it invests has presented challenges to local employment, a priority for Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

[...]

Backlash on Chinese social media

The case has triggered a rare backlash on Chinese social media against BYD, opening a discussion over worker rights.

Several internet users said living conditions for the workers in Brazil were typical of those seen at construction sites in China.

Brazilian prosecutors released videos of the workers' living quarters, which showed bunk beds without mattresses.

They said the workers laboured for excessively long hours, sometimes seven days a week, in conditions the authorities called degrading.

Archived link

Independent field investigations in China’s Yunnan Province found labor violations at coffee farms that supply coffees purchased and certified as sustainable by coffee giants Starbucks and Nestlé, according to a new report from two labor watchdog groups.

A joint effort from the New York-based nonprofit China Labor Watch and a new Danish nonprofit called Coffee Watch, the report alleges a pattern of “ghost farms” and “coffee laundering,” through which larger coffee producer groups, or certified estates, avoid detailed contractual relationships with the smaller farms supplying them.

[...]

China Labor Watch’s three separate investigations into coffee farms that allegedly supply Starbucks and Nestlé included interviews with 66 individuals, including coffee farmers, their families and teachers from local schools.

The investigations found “substantial abuses” in Starbucks’ and Nestlé’s supply chains, especially among indigenous farming communities.

“These abuses violated the terms of both companies’ certification schemes, namely C.A.F.E. Practices that is run by Conservation International for Starbucks, and 4C which Nestlé uses,” the report states.

[...]

Archived version

China’s leader Xi Jinping wants the recent spree of mass killings that shocked the country not to happen again. He ordered local governments to prevent future “extreme cases.”

The attacks, where drivers mow down people on foot or knife-wielding assailants stab multiple victims, are not new in China. But the latest surge drew attention.

Local officials were quick to vow to examine all sorts of personal disputes that could trigger aggression, from marital troubles to disagreements over inheritance.

However, the increasing reach into people’s private lives raises concerns at a time when the Chinese state has already tightened its grip over all social and political aspects in the East Asian nation.

[...]

'Revenge on Society Crimes’ - this is how people in China label these attacks.

In November alone, three took place: A man struck people at an elementary school in Hunan province, wounding 30, after suffering investment losses. A student who failed his examination stabbed and killed eight at a vocational school in the city of Yixing. The most victims, 35 people, resulted from a man mowing down a crowd in the southern city of Zhuhai, supposedly upset over his divorce.

“On the surface, it seems like there are individual factors, but we see there’s a common link,” Wu Qiang, a former political science professor, said. “This link is, in my personal opinion, every person has a feeling of injustice. They feel deeply that this society is very unfair and they can’t bear it anymore.”

Since 2015, Chinese police have targeted human rights lawyers and non-profit advocacy groups, jailing many, while keeping tight surveillance on others, effectively destroying the civil society that had been active from the early 2000s to 2010s.

Wu was fired from Tsinghua University after conducting fieldwork during the 2014 Occupy protests in Hong Kong. He says police officers have been regularly stationed outside his home in Beijing since last year.

[...]

A decade ago, media outlets could report an incident as it developed and even share a suspect’s name. Nowadays, it’s rarely possible.

During the 24 hours before the death toll was released in the Zhuhai slaying, state censors were quick to remove any videos of the incident and eyewitness accounts shared online. In the case of the Hunan elementary school attack, authorities shared the number of the wounded only after the court sentencing, nearly a month later.

A tally of violent attacks can be documented in other countries; notably, the U.S. had 38 mass killings so far this year, according to an Associated Press database. But in China, a lack of public data makes it hard to decipher mass killing trends.

[...]

Luqiu believes the government may be enforcing censorship thinking it will prevent copycats from imitating such crimes.

“Things will only become more and more strict,” she predicted. For the Chinese state, “the only method to deal with it is to strengthen control.”

[...]

At least a dozen local government notices, from small towns to big cities, [are now] announcing actions in response.

In eastern Anhui province, a ruling Communist Party leader inspected a middle school, a local police station, and even the warehouse of a chemical factory where he urged the workers to “ferret out any hidden risks.” He said they must “thoroughly and meticulously investigate and resolve conflicts and disputes,” including in families, marriages and neighborhoods.

[...]

However, many expressed worry over how such disputes will be detected.

“I think we’re at the beginning of a vicious cycle,” said Lynette Ong, a professor at the University of Toronto and author of “Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China.” “If you nip the conflict in its bud, you’d imagine the system then would impose a lot of pressure ... on schools, enterprises and factories.”

[...]

The new announcements reminded Ong of China’s strict policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Neighborhood committees, the lowest rung of government, set up fences and barriers in front of buildings to control entry and exit and broke into homes in extreme cases to disinfect the apartments of people who had caught the virus.

Eventually, people protested en masse.

“If we see non-sensible measures being introduced, you’ll be met by resistance and anger and grievances from the people, and it’s going to feed into this vicious cycle where more extreme measures are going to be brought,” she said.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17761302

Archived version

Boox recently switched its AI assistant from Microsoft Azure GPT-3 to a language model created by ByteDance, TikTok's parent company.

[...]

Testing shows the new AI assistant heavily censors certain topics. It refuses to criticize China or its allies, including Russia, Syria's Assad regime, and North Korea. The system even blocks references to "Winnie the Pooh" - a term that's banned in China because it's used to mock President Xi Jinping.

When asked about sensitive topics, the assistant either dodges questions or promotes state narratives. For example, when discussing Russia's role in Ukraine, it frames the conflict as a "complex geopolitical situation" triggered by NATO expansion concerns. The system also spreads Chinese state messaging about Tiananmen Square instead of addressing historical facts.

When users tried to bring attention to the censorship on Boox's Reddit forum, their posts were removed. The company hasn't made any official statement about the situation, but users are reporting that the AI assistant is currently unavailable.

[...]

In China, every AI model has to pass a government review to make sure it follows "socialist values" before it can launch. These systems aren't allowed to create any content that goes against official government positions.

We've already seen what this means in practice: Baidu's ERNIE-ViLG image AI won't process any requests about Tiananmen Square, and while Kling's video generator refuses to show Tiananmen Square protests, it has no problem creating videos of a burning White House.

Some countries are already taking steps to address these concerns. Taiwan, for example, is developing its own language model called "Taide" to give companies and government agencies an AI option that's free from Chinese influence.

[...]

Archived version

Chinese authorities wrongfully detained more than 20 Tibetans and severely tortured a Tibetan village head named Gonpo Namgyal to death with the repeated use of electric equipment in detention for several months in Ponkor township, Darlag County in Golog in the traditional Tibetan province of Amdo now incorporated into Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu provinces.

As per information received, in May 2024, due to the extensive “Pure Mother Tongue” campaign [...] Chinese authorities arrested over 20 Tibetans including Khenpo Tenpa Dhargye and village head Gonpo Namgyal. They were forcibly taken to Golog Prefecture headquarters.

Gonpo Namgyal tragically passed away on 18 December 2024 after suffering severe torture and inhuman treatment by the Chinese police for over seven months while in detention. As reported by the source, Gonpo Namgyal was released from detention after becoming ill, but within three days of his release he passed away. During the preparation of his body for cremation at the Traling Monastery’s crematory, many of his internal organs were discovered to have been burned as a result of electric torture.

[...]

The Tibetan people inside Tibet’s efforts to preserve their Tibetan identity, especially the Tibetan language, despite huge threats of persecution and imprisonment from the Chinese government, are of paramount importance with the Communist government’s so-called “Chinese national unity consciousness” framework or policy, which basically meant making Chinese the dominant language by degrading Tibetan from all walks of life.

Until the Communist regime is challenged and Tibetans within Tibet are denied basic human rights as guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution and international human rights law, Tibetan identity will have a dwindling future.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17749474

Hong Kong police have offered rewards of HK$1m (£103,000; $129,000) for information leading to the arrests of six pro-democracy activists living in the UK and Canada.

Among them is Tony Chung, the former leader of a pro-independence group who fled to the UK last year.

The group - which includes a former district councillor, an actor, and a YouTuber - have been lobbying for more democracy in the territory.

[...]

Also on the wanted list is former district councillor Carmen Lau and activist Chloe Cheung. Both are based in the UK and lobby on behalf of two NGOs calling for more democracy in Hong Kong.

[...]

Ms Lau posted on [social media] that the warrant would not stop her advocacy work. She called on the UK, US and EU governments to impose sanctions on "Hong Kong human rights perpetrators".

She also asked the British Labour government to "seriously reconsider its strategies for tackling transnational repression targeting Hong Kongers" and to look at blocking plans for a new Chinese embassy in Tower Hill.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17732629

Brazilian authorities have halted the construction of a factory for Chinese electric vehicle (EV) giant BYD, saying workers lived in conditions comparable to "slavery". More than 160 workers have been rescued in Brazil's northeastern state of Bahia, according to a statement from the Public Labour Prosecutor's Office (MPT).

[...]

The workers, hired by Jinjiang Construction Brazil, lived in four facilities in Camaçari city.

At one such facility, workers were made to sleep on beds without mattresses, according to prosecutors.

Each bathroom was also shared among 31 workers, forcing them to get up extremely early in order to be ready for work.

"The conditions found in the lodgings revealed an alarming picture of precariousness and degradation," the MPT said.

"Slavery-like conditions", as defined by Brazilian law, include debt bondage and work that violates human dignity.

[...]

BYD, short for Build Your Dreams, is one of the world's largest EV makers.

[...]

EV sales in China have been boosted by government subsidies. which encourage consumers to trade their petrol-powered cars for EVs or hybrids. But there is a growing backlash abroad against what some see as the Chinese government's unfair support for domestic car makers. Major markets like the US and EU have placed tariffs on EVs from China, with more tariffs expected during the incoming administration of US president-elect Donald Trump.

The Czech Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee adopted a resolution last week condemning the Chinese government’s manipulation of a key United Nations resolution on Taiwan. Similar initiatives in the parliaments of Australia, The Netherlands, the European Union, Canada, and the United Kingdom over the previous months called out Beijing’s longstanding campaign to block Taiwan’s democratic government from participating in U.N. activities. Governments willing to tackle this challenge also should confront Beijing’s strikingly similar threat to the U.N. human rights system.

At a time of global backsliding on democracy and human rights, these efforts may seem niche or Quixotic. But democracies defending one another, particularly through their own domestic institutions and not only as a matter of foreign policy, demonstrates a principled commitment. Few issues matter more to Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping than retaking control of Taiwan, and his regime has lashed out at other governments taking milder positions on the issue. But these six democracies have recognized that Xi’s posture threatens them and the U.N., one of the key international institutions on which they rely, creating considerable diplomatic momentum for a position that was unimaginable at the beginning of 2024.

The parliamentary efforts are informed by groundbreaking report earlier this year by scholars Bonnie S. Glaser and Jacques deLisle for the German Marshall Fund of the United States, “Exposing the PRC’s Distortion of UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to Press its Claims Over Taiwan.” It details Beijing’s decades-long efforts to launder its claims of sovereignty through the United Nations.

But the political pathologies detailed — and the recommendations offered — could equally apply to Beijing’s efforts to undermine human rights at the world’s flagship body. The similarities cannot be an accident: “flawed legal assumptions” (as Glaser and deLisle put it), decades of pressure, diplomatic capitulations, and weak responses from democracies neatly summarize how Xi seeks to neutralize U.N. human rights initiatives.

[...]

Neijuan is the Chinese term for “involution”, a concept from sociology that refers to a society that can no longer evolve, no matter how hard it tries. Applied to the individual, it means that no matter how hard someone works, progress is impossible.

In China, the term has been used to describe the feeling of diminishing returns in China’s economy. The characters “nei” and “juan” literally mean rolling inwards. After decades of rapid growth, many Chinese millennials and Gen Z people feel that the opportunities that were available to their parents no longer exist, and that working hard no longer offers guaranteed rewards.

[...]

China’s leaders have made it clear that they don’t want the idea of neijuan to catch on more than it already has. In December, top economic policymakers gathered for the annual Central Economic Work Conference, which sets the national economic agenda. According to the readout of the closed-door meeting, the cadres pledged to “rectify ‘involutionary’ competition”. And speaking at Davos in June, China’s premier, Li Qiang, warned against “spiralling ‘involution’” in the world economy.

[...]

Neijuan is also increasingly used to describe certain industries. China is investing massively in what it calls “new quality productive forces”, which means focusing more on research and manufacturing in certain hi-tech sectors, such as solar, electric vehicles and batteries. But overproduction, coupled with sanctions from the US and other western markets, has led to a price war in some sectors, hurting their profitability.

[...]

Although the term has been around for decades in academic circles, it went viral on China’s internet in 2020. A student from Tsinghua University, one of China’s most elite schools, was filmed riding his bicycle with his laptop open, propped up on the handlebars. Soon he was crowned as “Tsinghua’s involuted king”, and a meme was born.

The meme of the involuted king came to represent the perhaps pointlessly intense pressure of China’s rat race, and the impossibility of catching a break. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many people felt physically as well as economically trapped.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17727229

A growing number of Chinese are fleeing their home country, where rising authoritarianism under the rule of Xi Jinping and the difficulties of a faltering economy has prompted some people to look for a way out. The phenomenon has become so widely discussed online that it has its own nickname: runxue, or run philosophy, a coded term for emigration.

Some are relocating on student or business visas, joining growing diaspora communities in places like Japan or Thailand. But tens of thousands of others who don’t qualify or have the resources for such pathways are fleeing in other unconventional and often dangerous ways, known as zouxian, or walking the line.

Most head for the US, trekking from South America through the hostile jungle of the Darian Gap. In September the Guardian revealed a small but growing number were also flying into the Balkans to find smugglers to take them to Germany. Now, another emerging high-stakes escape route has been revealed, through the Indonesian archipelago to a smuggler’s boat destined for Australia.

[...]

Experts say the arrival of Chinese people on this route signals growing discontent at home.

Some Chinese migrants in the US and Europe have said tightening restrictions on political, religious and social freedoms during Xi’s rule led them to flee. Others cited stifling public health policies during the pandemic, and the economic downturn, housing crunch, and youth unemployment crisis that followed.

Meredith Oyen, an associate professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, specialising in Chinese migration, says politics and economics are push factors.

“The zero-Covid policy ended up destroying a lot of small businesses and a lot of middle class people’s economic life … The combination of that and the draconian nature of some of those policies led to frustrations and more political dissatisfactions.

“Even if you’re not driven by political repression, the experience of bankruptcy in China is political, it has more blowback on your life compared to places like the US. So it feels like if you’re just going to be languishing in China and you don’t see hope for recovery in a way that makes you a welcome member of society, you might as well risk it.”

[...]

China does not release statistics on people leaving, but the UN’s refugee agency – which has registered around a third of all displaced people and refugees – recorded 137,143 asylum seekers from China in 2023, five times the number registered a decade earlier at the start of Xi’s rule. By July this year it had grown to 176,239.

[...]

Last week, a Chinese resident commented on a Douyin video about zouxian [a term used in mainland China usually for Chinese trying to escape to the U.S. via the -dangerous- Darien Gap in Latin America] to Australia. “I’m at the end of the road. I can’t survive any more. I want to go. I want to go very much,” he said.

[...]

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17714578

Archived version

Sweden's foreign minister said Monday that China had denied a request for prosecutors to conduct an investigation on a Chinese ship linked to two severed Baltic Sea cables despite Beijing pledging "cooperation" with regional authorities.

Sections of two telecom cables were cut on November 17 and 18 in Swedish territorial waters. Suspicions have been directed at the Yi Peng 3, which according to ship tracking sites had sailed over the cables around the time they were cut.

[...]

"China is willing to maintain communication and cooperation with the countries involved to advance the follow-up handling of the incident," [spokeswoman Mao Ning] said.

Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard also noted Monday that Swedish prosecutors had not been allowed to conduct an investigation.

"Swedish police have been on board as observers in connection with the Chinese investigation... At the same time, I note that China has not heeded our request for the prosecutor to conduct an investigation on board," Stenergard said in a statement to AFP.

[...]

Sweden's prosecutor Henrik Soderman [said] that no measures had been taken on board the ship as part of the Swedish judicial probe, including questioning crew members or technical investigations.

[...]

"Our request that Swedish prosecutors, together with the police and others, be allowed to take certain investigative measures within the framework of the investigation on board remains. We have been clear with China on this," Stenergard said.

[...]

European officials have said they suspect sabotage linked to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

[...]

Early on November 17, the Arelion cable running from the Swedish island of Gotland to Lithuania was damaged.

The next day, the C-Lion 1 submarine cable connecting Helsinki and the German port of Rostock was cut south of Sweden's Oland island, around 700 kilometres (435 miles) from Helsinki.

Tensions have mounted around the Baltic Sea since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

[...]

In October 2023, an undersea gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia was shut down after it was damaged by the anchor of a Chinese cargo ship.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17711104

Archived link

Serbia has been engulfed in protests for over six weeks as students and citizens demand accountability following the fatal collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad, which claimed 15 lives on November 1. Demonstrators have accused President Aleksandar Vucic’s administration of corruption and negligence, particularly in its dealings with Chinese contractors under Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The tragedy has turned public attention toward the opaque contracts and alleged nepotism tied to infrastructure projects involving Chinese firms, further intensifying scrutiny of Serbia’s growing relationship with China. The incident is not only a domestic crisis but also a potential blemish on China’s ambitious BRI.

Fatal Canopy Collapse Sparks Nationwide Protests

The canopy collapse occurred during a renovation of the Novi Sad railway station, part of a Chinese-led project to modernize Serbia’s railway infrastructure. The project involved China Railway International Co. (CRIC) and China Communications Construction Co. (CCCC), both of which denied direct involvement in constructing the canopy. Despite these claims, footage on social media suggests the collapse was caused by recently installed heavy glass.

[...]

President Vucic dismissed the protests as being fueled by foreign intelligence agencies aiming to destabilize his government. However, under mounting pressure, he agreed to meet some of the protesters’ demands. Transparency Serbia, a watchdog organization, criticized the government’s response, highlighting gaps in the documentation released, including the absence of the 2018 contract signed with the Chinese firms.

[...]

The Novi Sad railway renovation forms part of a broader agreement between Serbia and China under the BRI. These BRI agreements often include confidentiality clauses, which critics argue shield corrupt practices. The contracts are rarely open to competitive bidding, enabling subcontracts to be awarded to firms linked to Serbia’s ruling party.

While CRIC and CCCC maintain they did not directly construct the canopy, legal experts argue that as umbrella contractors, they are responsible for the performance of their subcontractors. This raises broader concerns about the quality and safety of BRI projects, particularly those involving local subcontractors.

[...]

Serbia’s strategic location as a bridge between Europe and Asia has made it a linchpin of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s flagship BRI. Chinese investments in Serbia have surged, with $6.4 billion in manufacturing foreign direct investments recorded in 2023 alone. In October, the two countries signed a free trade agreement, further cementing their economic ties.

However, Western critics have long decried BRI projects for their lack of transparency and accountability. The Novi Sad disaster could amplify these criticisms, undermining China’s efforts to promote its infrastructure projects in Europe.

[...]

Archived link

Hundreds of Tibetans protesting against a Chinese dam were rounded up in a harsh crackdown earlier this year, with some beaten and seriously injured, the BBC has learnt from sources and verified footage.

Such protests are extremely rare in Tibet, which China has tightly controlled since it annexed the region in the 1950s. That they still happened highlights China's controversial push to build dams in what has long been a sensitive area.

Claims of the arrests and beatings began trickling out shortly after the events in February. In the following days authorities further tightened restrictions, making it difficult for anyone to verify the story, especially journalists who cannot freely travel to Tibet.

But the BBC has spent months tracking down Tibetan sources whose family and friends were detained and beaten. BBC Verify has also examined satellite imagery and verified leaked videos which show mass protests and monks begging the authorities for mercy.

The sources live outside of China and are not associated with activist groups. But they did not wish to be named for safety reasons.

[...]

The protests, followed by the crackdown, took place in a territory home to Tibetans in Sichuan province. For years, Chinese authorities have been planning to build the massive Gangtuo dam and hydropower plant, also known as Kamtok in Tibetan, in the valley straddling the Dege (Derge) and Jiangda (Jomda) counties.

Once built, the dam's reservoir would submerge an area that is culturally and religiously significant to Tibetans, and home to several villages and ancient monasteries containing sacred relics.

One of them, the 700-year-old Wangdui (Wontoe) Monastery, has particular historical value as its walls feature rare Buddhist murals.

The Gangtuo dam would also displace thousands of Tibetans. The BBC has seen what appears to be a public tender document for the relocation of 4,287 residents to make way for the dam.

[...]

China is no stranger to controversy when it comes to dams.

When the government constructed the world's biggest dam in the 90s - the Three Gorges on the Yangtze River - it saw protests and criticism over its handling of relocation and compensation for thousands of villagers.

In more recent years, as China has accelerated its pivot from coal to clean energy sources, such moves have become especially sensitive in Tibetan territories.

Beijing has been eyeing the steep valleys and mighty rivers here, in the rural west, to build mega-dams and hydropower stations that can sustain China's electricity-hungry eastern metropolises. President Xi Jinping has personally pushed for this, a policy called "xidiandongsong", or "sending western electricity eastwards".

[...]

The Chinese government has long been accused of violating Tibetans' rights. Activists say the dams are the latest example of Beijing's exploitation of Tibetans and their land.

"What we are seeing is the accelerated destruction of Tibetan religious, cultural and linguistic heritage," said Tenzin Choekyi, a researcher with rights group Tibet Watch. "This is the 'high-quality development' and 'ecological civilisation' that the Chinese government is implementing in Tibet."

One key issue is China's relocation policy that evicts Tibetans from their homes to make way for development - it is what drove the protests by villagers and monks living near the Gangtuo dam. More than 930,000 rural Tibetans are estimated to have been relocated since 2000, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

[...]

Multiple Tibetan rights groups [...] argue that any large-scale development in Tibetan territory, including dams such as Gangtuo, should be halted.

They have staged protests overseas and called for an international moratorium, arguing that companies participating in such projects would be "allowing the Chinese government to profit from the occupation and oppression of Tibetans".

[...]

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17700924

Archived version

The FBI has held classified briefings warning a handful of U.S. lawmakers that the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] is working to create fake stories to portray them in a negative light because of their hawkish views of Beijing and support for Taiwan, two U.S. officials familiar with the briefing said.

The U.S. officials, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the briefings, said that one of the false stories being concocted by the CCP, cited by FBI briefers, is that these lawmakers are espousing pro-Taiwan views because they were taking “bribes” from Taiwan.

“The CCP is trying to undermine congressional support for Taiwan’s democracy, to paint it as corrupt and not in the American public interest,” one of the two U.S. officials told NBC News. “It will not work.”

The officials said the briefings occurred in the fall.

[...]

Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., the chairman of the select House committee on the CCP, had no comment about any specific plot by the CCP, but said it was no secret Beijing has been targeting U.S. officials and other Americans.

“The CCP will try to discredit our way of life, our freedoms and will use every means necessary,” Moolenaar told NBC News. “So you know, whether it’s hacking high-level officials’ communications, we can expect all these things.”

[...]

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17684922

Archived version

[Seventy-eight-year-old Shanghai historian] Xiao Gongqin is the architect of a theory of strongman politics known as “neo-authoritarianism.” In the nineteen-eighties, reformers with varying predilections for democracy and capitalism consolidated power in Communist states. Mikhail Gorbachev restructured the Soviet Union’s planned economy and loosened censorship. In China, Deng Xiaoping ushered in an era known as “reform and opening up,” though the reforms went only so far; he also evinced a limited tolerance for dissent, believing full democracy untenable. In this, he was supported by a group of Chinese thinkers led by Xiao and a prodigious Shanghai academic named Wang Huning. The word “authoritarian” is a rote pejorative in the West, synonymous with tyranny, but in the China of the late twentieth century Xiao and his allies managed to reframe it as a rational, pragmatic, East Asian-specific strategy for modernization. 

[...]

Wang entered government in 1995 and shot through its ranks. He is now one of Xi Jinping’s closest advisers, the preëminent craftsman of Xi’s authoritarian ideology. Xiao, who coined the term “neo-authoritarianism” at a symposium in 1988, continued his advocacy as a professor in Shanghai, until he retired a decade ago. His argument that democracy was a “rootless politics,” alien to Chinese culture, remains part of a dominant strain of the country’s thought. Whether Xiao had influenced the Party’s direction or merely justified it is hard to say. But, in 1988, Deng was briefed on “neo-authoritarianism” by another Chinese leader, who described it as a system where a “political strongman stabilizes the situation and develops the economy.” Deng reportedly responded, “That is exactly what I stand for”; his only qualm was that it could use a rebrand. Later, as China’s economy took off, the world would accept more diplomatic names—“state capitalism” or, more vaguely, “the China model.”

[...]

[Xiao is] a man quietly wrestling with the consequences of his ideas. Xiao has deeply conservative instincts—he counts Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott among his influences—but he was, and is, an incrementalist who dreams of China becoming a “constitutional democracy.” His was a theory of enlightened rule, wherein a dictatorship would vanquish the “radicals,” steward an economic miracle, and then, ideally, relinquish power to the people.

He had ready-made examples in places such as Taiwan, whose leader Chiang Ching-Kuo dismantled his own autocracy before his death, in 1988. Xiao has not disavowed authoritarianism [...] but as the immediate prospects for democracy have all but vanished from China, his politics have shifted from reaction to reflection. Authoritarianism, Xiao [said], “has its own problems.”

When Xi Jinping came to power, in 2012, he used his newfound authority to launch an anti-corruption drive, which Xiao endorsed. Since then, though, Xi has abolished Presidential term limits, decimated civil society, and intensified clampdowns on free expression. As a mainland Chinese scholar, Xiao was careful not to betray his views about the regime. He instead spoke to what he now sees as an unsolvable “dilemma” in his theory. A democrat risks welcoming dangerous ideas into a culture—ideas that, legitimate or not, could hasten a nation’s demise. Xiao turned to authoritarianism partly because he believed that China was careening in that direction. And yet “a neo-authoritarian leader must be wise,” Xiao told me, with a hint of exasperation. “And he may not be.” Once you pin your hopes on a justice-delivering strongman, in other words, he may take the righteous path, or he may not. The only certainty is that he has control./

[...]

Xiao, who was born in 1946 and grew up under Maoism [and who is saying he is "not fundamentally opposed to Western democracy" as he personally feels "very envious of the United States and the West"], witnessed the worst excesses of this kind of armchair statecraft. When Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, in 1966, Xiao had recently graduated high school and was working in a factory. He hadn’t been able to enter university, likely for harboring “bourgeois” sympathies—including his passion for Western philosophy—and he allied himself with the Red Guards as a leader of a “rebel worker faction” at his machinery plant. But, as the revolution wore on, he himself was denounced as a “revisionist,” and he spent the next several years consigned to gruelling work at the factory.

[...]

One is not born but becomes an authoritarian. [...] Xiao was inspired by Yan Fu, the reformist intellectual and translator of Adam Smith who, after living through China’s own republican experiment, decided that his people were “not capable of self-government.” And, in the U.S., one finds examples like Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who declared, in a 2009 essay, that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” [...] Over the years, Thiel’s shift toward the authoritarian right has coincided with the growing acceptance of his ideas in the mainstream. He is now one of the biggest funders of the conservative nationalist movement, a mentor to Vice-President-elect J. D. Vance, and a supporter of “neo-reactionary” figures like Curtis Yarvin, who admires the state-capitalist societies of Singapore and Deng Xiaoping’s China.

[...]

“The problem with Xiao,” Joseph Fewsmith, a professor of Chinese politics at Boston University, [says], “is that he tackles the question of how countries get from autocracy to democracy, but he never explored how not to get stuck. Which is what happened.” When [...] asked ..] what a democracy in China might look like, he [Xiao] said that he hadn’t really thought about it. The proponent of a so-called “soft landing” for democracy did not, ultimately, spend much time designing a parachute.

[...]

For most of his life, Xiao has claimed that the central danger to Chinese society was not the dictator but his liberal opponents. Whether Xiao was right we will never know. We cannot peer into the universe where Liu and his reformers won [literary critic Liu Xiaobo was a leading figure in tbe 1989 Tianamen Square protests who died of untreated liver cancer in 2017, after spending nearly a decade in prison], where they are alive and well, rather than silenced or dead. Ours is the world of strongmen, where decisions increasingly turn on the whims of a vanishing few. In China, the risk of Xiao’s theory has come to pass—the strongman changed tack. At his trial for “subversion of state power,” in 2009, Liu Xiaobo prepared a statement of warning to his political opponents. It remains just as relevant today as it was then. “An enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation,” Liu wrote. It will “destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a country’s advance toward freedom and democracy.”

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17668556

The People's Republic of China has a "magic weapon", according to its founding leader Mao Zedong and its current president Xi Jinping. It is called the United Front Work Department (UFWD) - and it is raising as much alarm in the West as Beijing's growing military arsenal.

Yang Tengbo, a prominent businessman who has been linked to Prince Andrew, is the latest overseas Chinese citizen to be scrutinised - and sanctioned - for his links to the UFWD.

The existence of the department is far from a secret. A decades-old and well-documented arm of the Chinese Communist Party, it has been mired in controversy before. Investigators from the US to Australia have cited the UFWD in multiple espionage cases, often accusing Beijing of using it for foreign interference.

[...]

The United Front - originally referring to a broad communist alliance - was once hailed by Mao as the key to the Communist Party's triumph in the decades-long Chinese Civil War.

After the war ended in 1949 and the party began ruling China, United Front activities took a backseat to other priorities. But in the last decade under Xi, the United Front has seen a renaissance of sorts.

Xi's version of the United Front is broadly consistent with earlier incarnations: to "build the broadest possible coalition with all social forces that are relevant", according to Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.

[...]

Today, the UFWD seeks to influence public discussions about sensitive issues ranging from Taiwan - which China claims as its territory - to the suppression of ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang.

It also tries to shape narratives about China in foreign media, target Chinese government critics abroad and co-opt influential overseas Chinese figures.

"United Front work can include espionage but [it] is broader than espionage," Audrye Wong, assistant professor of politics at the University of Southern California, tells the BBC.

"Beyond the act of acquiring covert information from a foreign government, United Front activities centre on the broader mobilisation of overseas Chinese," she said, adding that China is "unique in the scale and scope" of such influence activities.

[...]

Some experts say that the long arm of China's United Front is indeed concerning. "Western governments now need to be less naive about China's United Front work and take it as a serious threat not only to national security but also to the safety and freedom of many ethnic Chinese citizens," [politics professor at Johns Hopkins University Dr Ho-fung] Hung said.

[But he and Audrye Wong, assistant professor of politics at the University of Southern California, say that] it's important to remember that not everyone who is ethnically Chinese is a supporter of the Chinese Communist Party.

[...]

Ever wonder where all those high officials in China keep disappearing to?

They are but few of a whopping 26,000 individuals placed into the Chinese Communist Party’s notorious Liuzhi system in 2023 alone. Liuzhi, or retention in custody, is a special “investigative mechanism” that allows the [Chinese Communist] Party’s [CCP] internal police force (Central Commission for Discipline Inspection – CCDI) to forcefully disappear, arbitrarily detain and torture individuals for up to six months. All without any judicial oversight or appeal mechanism, the system is specifically designed to force confessions from the victims.

As former CCDI lead Liu Jianchao (since promoted to head of the International Liaison Department) put it: “These are not criminal or judicial arrests and they are more effective”.

A successor to Shuanggui, the system is another of the many hardening reforms since Xi Jinping assumed the helm of the CCP and rapidly started moving the country even further away from the most basic human rights standards to which it is beholden under international law.

[...]

Officially instituted under the National Supervision Law in 2018, liuzhi is rapidly catching up with other mechanisms of enforced disappearances in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Its use now appears to be on par with the use of Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL), instituted in 2014 and most often employed against human rights defenders.

[...]

Per regulation, any individual placed inside the system must be held in solitary confinement. The vast majority of victims are kept from any type of communication with the outside world and their family members are not informed of their whereabouts (or even the retention itself) as the system makes use of undisclosed (designated) locations, from custom-built facilities to CCP-run hotels, guesthouses, offices, etc. By any definition, it is a system of Party-state sanctioned incommunicado detention.

[...]

The reasoning behind it all is very simple: to break the victims down. As a Professor at Peking University explained: [These cases are] “heavily dependent on the suspect’s confession. (...) If he (the suspect) remains silent under the advice of a lawyer, it would be very hard to crack the case”.

Testimonies from inside liuzhi (or its predecessor shuanggui) are rare, but all agree: "It looks very nice. But it is the worst place in the world." - Jean Zou, a shuanggui victim.

“The rooms mostly looked normal, with all the expected facilities — bathroom, tables, sofa, she said in an interview. The only sign of the room’s true purpose was the soft rubber walls. They were installed because too many officials had previously tried to commit suicide by banging their heads against the wall” – description of a facility in Shanghai by Lin Zhe, professor at the Central Party School.

[...]

In January 2024, for the first time since the system’s formal inauguration, the CCDI published official data on its use: no less than 26,000 individuals had been placed inside the system in 2023 alone!

That is an average of 71 people being forcefully disappeared, arbitrarily detained and subjected to torture in liuzhi alone… Every. Single. Day.

The scary part: the 2023 number corresponds exactly to the worst-case high estimates [the rights group] Safeguard Defenders had made for previous years, based on partially available data from provincial Discipline Inspection Committees and punishment statistics.

[...]

Archived version (South China Morning Post)

A Chinese professor has sparked a public backlash after he asked a visiting Kazakh diplomat how to make Chinese women “have children obediently, early and in large numbers” at a think tank event.

Wang Xianju, a professor at Renmin University and a former counsellor at the Chinese embassy in Belarus, was speaking to Erlan Qarin, the state counsellor of Kazakhstan, who visited the university in November.

Qarin had given a speech on Kazakhstan’s domestic reforms and relations between the two countries at an event hosted by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, a think tank based at the university.

The institute published Wang’s remarks on its WeChat account in November but the article only gained online traction – and criticism – this week. It has since been deleted.

During the question-and-answer period, Wang said he was surprised to find there were many children when he visited Kazakhstan.

He said Kazakhstan apparently had effective policies encouraging births, and he wondered how that might be possible, given that Chinese women did not want to get married and have children, and would not listen to their parents or supervisors.

“I even heard that women in Kazakhstan immediately have children after they graduate college, they have children one after another,” Wang said in a now-deleted WeChat article by the think tank.

“How could they listen to you and obediently, submissively have children, have children early and have lots of children?”

On International Human Rights Day, a protest outside the Chinese Embassy in Vienna united Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Christians demanding an end to Chinese Communist Party oppression. Demonstrators called for global action against the ongoing human rights abuses and systemic oppression of marginalized communities in China by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

On International Human Rights Day, a significant protest unfolded outside the Chinese Embassy in Vienna as Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Chinese Christians united against ongoing oppression by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The event, spearheaded by the Tibetan Community Organisation in Vienna, spotlighted widespread human rights abuses by the Chinese authorities.

Leading the demonstration, Tibetan diaspora members waved flags and held banners condemning the CCP's persistent violations in Tibet. They voiced concerns over issues such as the demolition of monasteries, enforced relocation of Tibetan children, and what many called cultural genocide. The protesters urged global recognition of these atrocities and pressed for international intervention to halt Chinese repressive policies.

Uyghur activists stood alongside their Tibetan peers, highlighting the severe persecution faced by Uyghurs, including mass detentions, forced labor, and the destruction of religious sites. Joined by Chinese Christians, who protested against the state's control over religious practices, they collectively demanded an end to CCP tyranny and urged the world to hold China accountable.

[Edit to include the link.]

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17610780

Archived

[...]

Munich-based MAN Truck & Bus, a subsidiary of Volkswagen-owned commercial vehicle manufacturer Traton, has ended a tyre supply deal with the Serbian plant of Chinese Shandong Linglong Tire Co., citing allegations of “human rights violations” in reports on working conditions at the plant, BIRN and Manager Magazin can reveal.

In cooperation with anti-trafficking organisation ASTRA and the Serbia-based Initiative for Economic and Social Rights, A11, BIRN [Balkan Investigative Reporting Network] has reported extensively since 2021 on the exploitation of Vietnamese and Indian workers at the Linglong site in Serbia, which is key to the Chinese company’s European ambitions.

The allegations included a raft of Labour Law violations, the confiscation of passports and cramped, dirty, unsanitary accommodation.

[...]

Serbia has faced calls from the European Parliament and United Nations human rights rapporteurs to investigate allegations of exploitation, while since the start of 2023 German companies have been obliged to carry out due diligence with respect to human rights in global supply chains under Germany’s Act on Corporate Due Diligence Obligations in Supply Chains.

MAN Truck & Bus told Manager Magazin: “We have been following the reports on the working conditions in the Serbian plant of one of our suppliers. We take the allegations that human rights violations have occurred in this context very seriously and, in connection with this suspected case, stopped all delivery requests to the supplier in question at the end of November.”

However, German car giant Volkswagen, MAN’s ultimate owner, said it was still seeking to “clarify the facts”.

“We have followed the reporting on working conditions at the Serbian facility of one of our suppliers,” the company told Manager Magazin. “The allegations of human rights violations in this context are taken very seriously, and we have already taken appropriate steps to clarify the facts. Please understand that we cannot provide further details regarding our supplier relationships due to contractual confidentiality obligations.”

While underscoring that Volkswagen itself had not yet received any supplies from Linglong’s Serbia plant, the company said: “Serious violations of labour standards and human rights can lead to the termination of contracts with suppliers if corrective measures are not taken.”

Volkswagen specified that Linglong China supplies a 19-inch tyre first used on the VW Tiguan and Cupra Terramar models this year and manufactured “exclusively” in China. “In addition, Linglong China is a supplier of spare tyres that are used throughout the Volkswagen Group,” it added.

Alongside Volkswagen, Linglong is one of the sponsors of Bundesliga football club FC Wolfsburg, which grew out of a sports club for Volkswagen workers in the northern German city of Wolfsburg, where Volkswagen Group is headquartered.

The Linglong plant in the northern Serbian town of Zrenjanin is key to the company’s European market hopes. The factory officially opened its doors in September this year, when Linglong Tire general director Wang Feng listed Volkswagen as among the plant’s first customers, alongside Nissan, Audi, Ford, Stellantis, Hyundai, Kia and MAN Truck & Bus.

Labour legislation and human rights violations

For years, Serbian NGOs have been sounding the alarm about the exploitation and possible human trafficking of foreign workers engaged in building Linglong’s Serbian plant, the first Chinese tyre factory in Europe.

They alleged that passports had been confiscated from Vietnamese and Indian workers and that the workers were housed in dirty, cramped dormitories with just two toilets for hundreds of men and a lack of clean, warm water.

In two separate investigations, BIRN found that the contracts they signed with subcontractors of China’s Shandong Linglong Tire Co. violated multiple articles of Serbia’s Labour Law, from working hours to vacation days and financial penalties.

Under the terms seen by BIRN, the workers faced being fired if they tried to unionise or protest, while “regular working hours” could, if necessary, breach the legal maximum.

“The illegalities in the employment contract are such that it is easier to count what is legal than what is not,” Mario Reljanovic, an expert on labour law, told BIRN at the time.

Both the Vietnamese and Indian workers were hired through intermediaries, who charged them thousands of dollars to secure them employment in Serbia.

One Indian worker, Rafiul Bux, told BIRN in January 2024 that he had paid a recruitment agency $3,500, for which he had to take a bank loan.

He described dire working and living conditions in Serbia, a lack of medical support, unpaid salaries and having to surrender his passport to his employer for months on end.

Tomoya Obokata, the UN Special Rapporteur on modern slavery, told BIRN at the time that such fees are a kind of “debt trap”.

“They should not be paying that,” he said in an interview. “It should be employers who should be paying for all of this, and governments to monitor these practices.”

Serbia’s backing for Linglong

Construction of the Linglong factory began in 2019 as one of a number of Chinese projects in Serbia that have made the country a Balkan hub for Chinese investment.

The government handed over 95 hectares of land – valued at 7.6 million euros – free of charge and provided 75 million euros in subsidies from state coffers for the recruitment of 1,200 employees by the end of 2024, according to Serbia’s Commission for the Control of State Aid.

Critics in Serbia say the government, hungry for investment, has turned a blind eye to labour and living conditions facing workers engaged in major foreign projects, particularly Chinese.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has regularly defended Linglong, despite mounting evidence of human rights violations.

Confronted with the allegations concerning Vietnamese workers in 2019, Vucic told reporters: “An inspection has been sent. What do people want? You want us to destroy an investment of $900 million dollars so that Zrenjanin does not progress?”

“You care about Vietnamese workers? Come on people, we know each other well; you’re not worried about Serbian workers and here you are worrying about Vietnamese.”

Serbian authorities said they were looking into the allegations based on criminal complaints made by ASTRA and the workers themselves, but nothing ever came of it.

Linglong has dismissed the accusations and, on occasion, tried to shift any responsibility onto its subcontractors. It denied ever employing workers from India and said its contract with another Chinese company, CEEG TEPC, which did bring in Indians, was terminated in September 2022.

Obokata said that neither Linglong nor the Serbian government had ever responded to the concerns he and his UN colleagues outlined in a letter to them regarding the case of the Vietnamese workers.

“There is a disturbing trend in your country, and it is up to the Serbian government to do something about it,” he said at the time. “If the Serbian authorities are not doing that, they should be held liable as a country and as a government for facilitating labour exploitation and human trafficking.”

Germany’s supply chain act

Germany’s Act on Corporate Due Diligence Obligations in Supply Chains has faced criticism from all sides, either as too soft on companies or as an unwanted brake on the country’s struggling economy.

The Act cites an exhaustive list of international human rights conventions, including the prohibition of child labour, slavery and forced labour, the disregard of occupational safety and health obligations, withholding an adequate wage, disregard of the right to form trade unions or employee representation bodies, the denial of access to food and water as well as the unlawful taking of land and livelihoods.

If enterprises fail to conduct due diligence when choosing suppliers, they risk fines of up to eight million euros or two per cent of annual global turnover. The latter is applicable only to enterprises with an annual turnover of more than 400 million euros. Companies ultimately risk being excluded from public contracts.

Archived

[...] China’s dominance at sea comes at a high human and environmental cost. According to the Global Organized Crime Index, China is a major hub for human trafficking and forced labour, and these criminal activities have also been detected within its fishing fleet.

[...]

According to the UN’s International Labour Organization, in 2021 at least 128 000 fishers were trapped in forced labour aboard fishing vessels worldwide. Abuse of these workers is common, with Chinese squid ships being among the most brutal. An investigation by the Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-profit journalism organization based in Washington, found a pattern of human rights abuses on the Chinese ships that were part of the study. Abuses included debt bondage, the withholding of wages, confiscation of passports, lack of timely access to medical care, violence and excessive working hours of 15 hours per day, six days a week. Crew members were found to suffer from injuries, malnutrition and other illness.

[...]

Through a search of company documents and state media stories, the Outlaw Ocean Project’s investigation revealed that over the past five years, more than 1 000 Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities were sent to work in at least 10 seafood processing plants in China. The investigation also found that workers from North Korea are sent to work in Chinese processing plants, mainly in the Liaoning province. For 30 years, the North Korean government has sent citizens to work in factories in Russia and China, and taken 90% of their earnings to deposit in government-controlled accounts. As of November 2022, more than 80 000 North Koreans were employed in Chinese border cities, including hundreds in seafood plants.

[...]

Archived version

In June, the world’s largest solar plant opened in China—a 3.5 gigawatt (GW) behemoth. Covering 32,947 acres, it can produce enough energy alone to power Luxembourg. News sites and pro-solar groups hailed the project as a milestone, showcasing the country’s leadership in renewable energy and adding to a growing consensus that China could peak emissions ahead of schedule.

Nearly none, though, highlighted one obvious detail: the location of the plant, in the far western regions of Xinjiang, near the regional capital of Ürümqi. It’s the homeland of the Uyghurs, where, since 2018, what many consider a genocide has been taking place.

In fact, the solar plant is just an hour away from where Uyghur-American Rushan Abbas was born and grew up. Now based near Washington, D.C., she has been unable to return home for decades and has had no contact with her family in years.

“By failing to acknowledge the dark realities behind this solar plant near where I was born, raised, and educated, Ürümqi, they are allowing China to present a false narrative,” said Abbas. “This mega-solar plant is a continuation of the broader history of Chinese occupation and exploitation of Uyghurs.”

To Abbas and other Uyghurs living outside of what China calls Xinjiang and what they call East Turkestan, the solar plant doesn’t deserve praise. Rather, it’s the latest in a decades-long effort to Sinicize the region and exploit its resources to benefit Han Chinese migrants. They believe that the state’s flaunting of record-setting solar expansion is part of a broader plan to greenwash the ongoing genocide of Uyghurs and further allow the colonization of their homeland.

[...]

Just because it’s a solar project doesn’t exempt it from the criticisms that plague fossil fuel or infrastructure projects elsewhere.

[...]

Decades of Resource Exploitation in Xinjiang

[...] Uyghurs know this well. Shortly after East Turkestan was occupied by the newly-in-power Chinese Communist Party in 1949, Han Chinese migrants, led by the state-owned Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), began flowing into the newly renamed region, seeking to exploit its natural resources: coal, quartz, silicon, and oil.

[...]

“When the XPCC first entered our region, they promised development but gradually seized lands and water resources, leaving Uyghur farmers unable to sustain their livelihoods,” said Iltebir. “Many were forced to sell their lands to the XPCC and work for them just to survive.”

To this day, Xinjiang is one of China’s main coal- and oil-producing regions. In fact, coal is what fuels China’s solar industry, which produces panels using subsidized Xinjiang coal.

“Historically my homeland has been rich in resources from cotton to coal to rare earth minerals,” said Abbas. “Since the 1950s, the Chinese government has systematically taken control of these resources to fuel its economic ambitions, while displacing and oppressing the local Uyghur population and migrating Han Chinese from China proper.”

Since the arrival of Han Chinese migrants and corporations, the demographics of the region have transformed entirely. In 1953, Uyghurs were 75% of the population, with Han Chinese at just six percent. Today, Uyghurs make up just 44% of the population, having become a minority in their homeland—a figure that continues to decline as China’s genocidal campaign of forced sterilization, family separation, and cultural “re-education” trudges on.

[...]

“Tainted With Human Rights Abuses”

The $2.13 billion Urumqi plant is, like nearly all of the major fossil fuel, mining, and clean tech projects in the region, led by a Chinese consortium: the state-affiliated China Construction Eighth Engineering Division Corp, PowerChina, and China Green Development Group. In English and Chinese promotional materials, the project proponents highlight its climate impacts—reducing CO2 emissions by 6 million tons and eliminating the demand for 1.9 million tons of coal.

[...]

“It feels hypocritical to be talking about just transition when this specific just transition is tainted with human rights abuses,” said Zumretay Arkin, an ethnic Uyghur who grew up in Canada and now lives in Germany, and director of global advocacy at the World Uyghur Congress.

[...]

A report from the Business and Human Rights Resource Center (BHRRC) found that, broadly, clean energy companies are lagging on human rights policies, including issues like land rights, responsible sourcing, and affected community rights. Chinese companies, including Jinko Solar, Goldwin, LONGi, and JA Solar, were the lowest ranked.

[...]

“It’s not like elsewhere, where abuses would be tied to a company or a non-state entity. This is really state-imposed,” said Arkin. “There are directives, policies in place, subsidizing companies that are, for example, using Uyghurs working in forced labor conditions.”

[...]

Echoes of Xinjiang Beyond

[...]

In fact, other mega-solar projects are already being planned or built in Xinjiang and other parts of China—a planned 1.1 GW project in Tibet, and an even bigger 8 GW project in China’s Inner Mongolia region, for example. But they should also raise eyebrows. There are echoes of Xinjiang in both. In Inner Mongolia, the government has eliminated the local language in education. Meanwhile, in Tibet, over 1,000 protestors were arrested earlier this year during a demonstration opposing a hydropower and solar project that would flood villages and destroy six historic monasteries.

To Arkin, this isn’t surprising. “There’s still a lot of lack of awareness around how China is a colonial power and how it has colonized Uyghurs, Tibetans, and southern Mongolians,” said Arkin.

[...]

“I believe anyone who praises China’s pretentious commitment to green energy while failing to address the severe human rights abuses driving the industry, it amounts to complicity in the government’s crimes", said Abbas.

[...]

Here is the study: How Weakness in the Social Safety Net Undermines the Political Compact in China (pdf)

“To promote common prosperity, we cannot engage in ‘welfarism.’ In the past, high welfare in some populist Latin American countries fostered a group of ‘lazy people’ who got something for nothing. As a result, their national finances were overwhelmed, and these countries fell into the ‘middle income trap’ for a long time. Once welfare benefits go up, they cannot come down. It is unsustainable to engage in ‘welfarism’ that exceeds our capabilities. It will inevitably bring about serious economic and political problems.” -- Xi Jinping

Summary of the study

This policy memo details China’s approach to social welfare and its impact on the nation’s socioeconomic stability. Xi Jinping and other Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders have an aversion to being “welfarist,” which historically aligns with China’s tendency to view its citizens as a source for labor and tax revenue rather than as human resources to be cultivated and assisted when in need. This has resulted in a social safety net that considerably lags international standards, especially those of developed and even middle-income countries.

High debt levels burden Chinese local governments, and shrinking revenues, declining birthrates, falling marriage rates, and aging populations further fuel the deterioration of government finances. These problems contribute to the growing financial vulnerability of Chinese households and create significant concerns for future generations. Families often shoulder the costs of caring for their elderly, educating their children, and paying for healthcare. China’s public healthcare spending is limited, with around 7 percent of gross domestic product devoted to the national system. Families, on average, spend at least 27 percent out-of-pocket of their total health costs to make up for shortfalls in their health insurance, compared to just 11 percent in the United States.

Local governments are responsible for more than 90 percent of China’s social services costs but only receive about 50 percent of tax revenues. For decades, they have relied on land sales and related real estate revenues to meet their budgets, but both sources have declined precipitously as the housing boom has reversed course. According to the Rhodium Group, more than half of Chinese cities face difficulties paying down their debt, or even meeting interest payments, severely limiting their resources for social services. China’s total debt levels are estimated to be around 140 percent of GDP, limiting budget flexibility for supporting social services.

China’s household savings rates are high by global standards, as Chinese increasingly use personal resources to cover shortfalls in the national safety net. As a result, consumer spending and confidence are down. China has seen lower wage growth in recent years, especially in the private sector, reversing the trend of elevated growth in the first part of the 2010s. Through his dual circulation model of growth, Xi Jinping hopes to shift the country away from an export- and investment-driven economy to a consumption-driven model. But the growing burdens on youth and families undermine this shift.

There are major shortfalls in access to, and quality of, education and healthcare systems, especially in rural areas. The hukou system of residency compounds these problems, stopping many rural migrants from obtaining urban residency and thus preventing them from accessing higher quality urban social services.

Due to severe wealth inequality, low tax revenues, and the decision to prioritize resources for national security and investment in manufacturing and technology, Beijing has limited resources to improve social welfare programs. Low public confidence in the economy and consumer market—fueled by the COVID lockdowns—has reinforced falling birth and marriage rates. Youth unemployment and public dissent have also increased, with the so-called lying flat movement and white hair demonstrations exemplifying public rejection of China’s attitudes toward overworking, professional achievement, and CCP handling of elder care and other social services.

Xi and the CCP have chosen to maintain a limited social services system. Their reluctance to improve the system has contributed to a cycle of slowing economic growth, massive debt levels, stressed personal finances, and declining public confidence. China’s ambitions to become a consumption-driven economy will face significant challenges, possibly further straining the implied social contract that has for decades resulted in social and political stability.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17595490

In a significant political move on December 12, the Czech Chamber of Deputies' Foreign Affairs Committee adopted a resolution challenging China's interpretation of United Nations Resolution 2758. The resolution champions Taiwan's participation in international organizations, as per an official statement released by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC).

The resolution, led by Czechia IPAC Co-Chair Rep. Eva Decroix and backed by key committee members, addresses Beijing's sovereignty claims over Taiwan derived from the UN resolution. It denounces China's military provocations in the Taiwan Strait and calls on the European Union to support Taiwan's inclusion in global forums.

This is the sixth parliamentary motion under IPAC's "Initiative 2758," aimed at countering China's influence and promoting Taiwanese representation on the world stage. Echoing initiatives from other regions like the EU and Canada, this resolution reaffirms a widening international consensus supporting Taiwan.