China

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/15144651

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On July 1, 2024, the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party launched a probe into Harvard University, seeking answers after student protestors were violently dragged, interrogated, and followed by Chinese individuals during an April protest of Chinese Ambassador Xie Feng’s speech at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The Select Committee expressed grave concerns about transnational repression by the Chinese government and the involvement of international students from China in acts of harassment and intimidation condoned by the Chinese government against its critics. In a letter to Harvard University’s President Garber, the Select Committee requested that Harvard provide it with a briefing and answers to a series of questions.

[...]

After this incident, the student victims at Harvard felt terrified, unsupported, and unsafe. Their peaceful protest of the Chinese government’s human rights abuses resulted in violence and threats as well as disciplinary action from the university. The injustice and censorship of an authoritarian regime have permeated this democratic country and been condoned at one of America’s most prestigious academic institutions.

Unfortunately, this case is not an isolated one. The CCP has increasingly applied its surveillance and censorship capabilities to monitor, deter, and punish protesters and activists overseas. Numerous human rights organizations [...] have released detailed reports documenting transnational repression at American universities and issued guidelines for universities to best protect their students and staff. Unfortunately, current practices at Harvard and elsewhere fall far short of these guidelines.

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Analysts say China faces pressure to act on decade-old economic policy promises that it repeated at its leadership meeting last week.

With imbalances in China’s economy deepening, threats of lingering deflation, plus weak demand at home and increased hostility towards its export dominance abroad, national leaders chose policy continuity rather than any structural shifts at the twice a decade political event known as a plenum.

[...]

Analysts say China faces pressure to act on decade-old economic policy promises that it repeated at its leadership meeting last week.

With imbalances in China’s economy deepening, threats of lingering deflation, plus weak demand at home and increased hostility towards its export dominance abroad, national leaders chose policy continuity rather than any structural shifts at the twice a decade political event known as a plenum.

[...]

Huge inequalities, credibility deficit

China’s pledges to boost domestic demand, reform a Mao-era internal ‘hukou’ passport system blamed for huge rural-urban inequalities, strengthen rural land rights or improve social security also date back to at least 2013.

In reiterating a policy agenda with a mixed track record, Beijing faces a credibility deficit it did not have a decade ago and will need to act with more urgency if it wants to lift business and consumer sentiment from near-record lows, economists say.

Unusually for a plenum, as they tend to be vague on implementation timelines, Beijing committed to meet its policy goals by 2029. But the concrete deadline failed to inspire investors.

[...]

China is betting on high-tech export products becoming a new driver of growth that compensates for the dwindling returns on infrastructure investment and the growing writedowns it faces after its giant real estate bubble popped in 2021.

That bet is unnerving Washington, Brussels and other capitals that argue Beijing is driving industrial overcapacity in various sectors that cheapen Chinese exports and threaten manufacturing jobs around the world.

It also concerns many economists who have argued the world’s second-largest economy needs to reduce its over-reliance on external markets and debt-fuelled investment and stimulate household consumption instead.

Archived version

Surangel Whipps Jr, President of Palau, a Taiwanese ally, has accused China of interference and criticized Beijing for blocking a travel industry delegation's visit to Macau, Taiwan News reported. Whipps also accused China over two cyberattacks faced by Palau this year.

In an interview with Nikkei Asia, Whipps said that China was taking its actions against Palau to a "new level." He further said that a Palauan delegation aimed to participate in an international travel industry conference in Macau in May but was denied visas due to Palau's diplomatic relationship with Taiwan.

[...]

Whipps said that in March, thousands of government documents were stolen and released on the dark web, with an investigation tracing the suspects back to China.

He added that the second cyberattack in July targeted the country's customs and border protection system, probably to try and disrupt the country's tourism industry. He further said that the second cyber incident could not be confirmed as coming from China, but in both instances, ransomware was involved.

Notably, Palau will have presidential and legislative elections in November this year.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/15110888

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Chinese leaders have been citing the billions of dollars committed to new construction projects and record two-way trade as evidence of their commitment to assist with the Africa’s modernisation and foster “win-win” cooperation.

But the data reveals a relationship that is still largely extractive and has so far failed to live up to some of Beijing’s rhetoric about the Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi Jinping’s strategy to build an infrastructure network connecting China to the world.

While new Chinese investment in Africa increased 114% last year, according to the Griffith Asia Institute at Australia’s Griffith University, it was heavily focused on minerals essential to the global energy transition and China’s plans to revive its own flagging economy, but has brought less advantage to Africa.

• Minerals and oil also dominated African-Chinese trade. As efforts falter to boost other imports from Africa, including agricultural products and manufactured goods, the continent’s trade deficit with China has ballooned.

• The result is a more one-sided relationship than China says it wants, one that is dominated by imports of Africa’s raw materials and that some analysts argue contains echoes of colonial-era Europe’s economic relations with the continent.

• Although two-way trade reached a record $282 billion last year, according to Chinese customs data, the value of Africa’s exports to China fell 7%, mainly due to a decline in oil prices, and Africa's trade deficit widened 46%.

• Many projects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which grew rapidly in the two decades before the COVID-19 pandemic, proved unprofitable. As some governments struggled to repay loans, China cut lending. COVID-19 then pushed it to turn inward, and Chinese construction projects in Africa fell.

• China's hunt for critical minerals is a main driver of African infrastructure construction. In January, for example, Chinese companies pledged up to $7 billion in infrastructure investment under a revision of their copper and cobalt joint venture agreement with Democratic Republic of Congo.

• With one of Africa’s largest trade deficits to China, Kenya has been pushing to increase access to the world’s second-largest consumer market, recently gaining it for avocados and seafood. But cumbersome health and hygiene regulations mean Chinese consumers remain out of reach for many producers.

• Overall, Kenyan exports to China fell over 15% to $228 million, Chinese customs data showed, as a decline in titanium production led to a drop in shipments of the metal – a key export to China. But Chinese manufactured goods kept coming.

Unless African nations can add value to their exports through increased processing and manufacturing, says Francis Mangeni, an advisor at the Secretariat of the African Continental Free Trade Area, “we are just exporting raw minerals to fuel their economy.”

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/15094770

Archived version

Developing countries owe China an estimated $1.1 trillion, and more than 80% of China’s loans are to countries experiencing financial distress, according to AidData, a research lab at William & Mary. Despite this, China rarely agrees to loan forgiveness or principle reduction, preferring to negotiate longer repayment plans on a case-by-case basis.

• Despite promises of two-way trade, African exporters have little access to Chinese markets for their goods. Most of China’s imports from the continent are oil, gas and minerals.

• The result is a more one-sided relationship than China says it wants.. One that is dominated by imports of Africa’s raw materials and that some analysts argue contains echoes of colonial-era Europe’s economic relations with the continent.

• With the annual Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) set to take place in September, China is expected to announce new projects in Africa. But its lending practices are coming under scrutiny. Several countries that have taken on debt have found themselves forced to make drastic cuts to domestic programs or raise taxes in order to repay the loans.

• Kenya, for example, spends about 60% of its revenue on debt payments, with about one-third of that money going to pay the interest on loans.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/15093584

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Uighur activists and human rights defenders often contend that major Western electronics and apparel manufacturers profit from the use of slave-like and coerced labor in China, including work done by Uighurs confined in camps in western Xinjiang Province.

**Rune Steenberg, an anthropologist and researcher at the University of Olomouc in the Czech Republic who has long studied the Uighur population in Xinjiang. **He and his colleagues rely on an approach they call “remote ethnography” to form a picture of what is transpiring in Xinjiang. This method relies on anecdotal evidence from those who have direct experience in Xinjiang, as well as close analysis of written accounts and economic data, to compensate for the lack of access for foreign experts to the region.

This is an interview with Rune Steenberg.

Steenberg: There are three different types of forced or involuntary labor in Xinjiang, each having different degrees of coercion. The most forced and difficult labor occurs in prisons. In Xinjiang prisons, prisoners can be forced to work for decades. Often it is very hard work, physically difficult work in terrible conditions, and no pay, nothing.

Then we have a situation where people are forced to work in the camps, or are transferred from a camp to closed factories, which also operate according to the principles of the camps, where they sew clothes, produce food and various other things. They aren’t paid for this either, but the conditions are not as harsh as in prison.

There are also those who have been interned in a camp but are given an opportunity to move from the camp to a factory. This can be described as “liberation.” All this camp forced labor, as well as prison “slave” labor, takes place in Xinjiang itself, next to the camps and prisons. People who have had a chance to be released from the camp to work in factories are sometimes transferred to inland China. There, they are given a contract, they sign an agreement, and they are paid some kind of salary, albeit a very low one [...]

A fourth category is the so-called labor transfer programs. This involves people who have not been arrested or detained. They are directly “recruited” to work in various factories, fields, etc. Some people are sort of forced into it because in their village – or wherever they are – they are told that they need to bring so many people to a certain place, for example, to pick cotton.

[...] when many men are detained in “re-education” camps, their wives, sisters and daughters can be sent to factories in so-called new special economic zones in Kashgar and Ghulja. I’ve heard stories of people who were directly involved, who worked in these newly opened factories. For their work they received a modest salary, but the government, at its own expense, arranged for transport to and from villages. It wasn’t entirely voluntary either – if you didn’t show up or didn’t agree to participate, you could get in trouble.

[...]

[Forced labor] is not used directly by these [Western] companies, but by someone in their supply chains. [...] Many of these companies hide behind the fact that they don’t know anything, they just get ready-made products. But the reason why they do this, the benefit they get from it, is that they simply, through forced labor, get very, I repeat, very cheap products.

[...]

China is not just a market economy, but a state-controlled market economy. Therefore, many of these [Western] companies may have been involved in these labor transfer programs. Until companies and factories open up to transparent inspections, we will be forced to suspect that similar forms of forced labor exist throughout the region.

[...]

Our understanding of forced labor needs clarification. Our ideas about it do not quite correspond to the situation in Xinjiang. As I already said, many people there have contracts, they sign up for work, they are paid a salary, but they are under political pressure to go and do the work, and they have no alternative. Therefore, I believe that this could still qualify as forced labor, and maybe even coercion. So, we need to think more deeply about the terms we use and how we define them, as well as the legal framework that surrounds them [...]

https://archive.is/nVZTB

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/890069

The newly-signed Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) is a de facto visiting forces deal, since it establishes procedures for the cooperative activities, while the force of one country is visiting the other country and defines a legal status of the visiting force. Accordingly, it allows the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Japanese Self Defence Forces (JSDF) to dramatically expand joint military activities, including large-scale drills focused on enhancing interoperability and joint response to various contingencies, including disasters as well as armed conflicts.

Both nations also have a direct interest in preparing for contingencies in neighbouring Taiwan, which is almost equidistantly positioned between important military facilities in northern Philippines and southern Japan. Thus, geography alone makes a more robust Philippine-Japan security cooperation pivotal to their American ally’s “integrated deterrence” strategy against a resurgent China, which has repeatedly warned of potential invasion of the self-ruling island nation.

The move comes also as there are growing worries over a more transactional and unilateralist American foreign policy under a second Trump administration. By all indications, the United States will remain as the “hub” of a network of partnerships in the Indo-Pacific, but allies are stepping up their own defence spending as well as deepening “spoke-to-spoke” cooperation among themselves.

The fatalistic tag “garbage time” began popping up on social media platforms over the past month. It was given a more recent boost when state media and commentators lined up to denounce the phrase and any suggestion that decline would follow downturn for China.

“This is a catchphrase insinuating that there’s no help and no hope, denying and downplaying everything in China,” [state-owned media outlet] Beijing Daily said in a commentary last week.

It follows another buzzword China’s censors have targeted as a threat to stability since it broke into the mainstream three years ago: “lying flat,” a call to a slacker life of limited ambition and quiet protest.

[...]

There are other signs China’s collective confidence has suffered, according to survey data collected by Stanford University professor Scott Rozelle and others published in summary last week by the U.S. think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Rozelle found Chinese respondents to a survey were more pessimistic than they had been two decades ago, more likely to blame structural factors for determining whether a person is rich or poor and far less likely to believe hard work pays off.

In 2004, 62% agreed “in our country, effort is always rewarded." That dropped to 28% in the 2023 survey.

The Chinese banking sector is facing a severe crisis. In just one week, 40 banks disappeared, and the collapse of Jiangxi Bank has further deepened the sector's problems.

Cryptocurrency market analyst Sigma G also examined the situation in China's banking sector. He points out that the leading cause of the problems is the deep recession in China's real estate sector. Over-indebted developers and local governments fail to repay loans, leading to financial instability. Property prices have plummeted, and construction projects have been halted, further burdening the economic system.

The author also highlights the issue of hidden bad debts. Banks have used asset management companies (AMCs) to offload toxic loans, creating an illusion of stability. However, a new banking regulator, the National Financial Regulatory Administration (NAFR), has begun cracking down on these practices by imposing fines and increasing oversight.

Many Chinese cities and even entire regions are drowning in debt. The liabilities were so high that local government representatives sent envoys to Beijing in the spring. They are negotiating terms for repaying billions in loans. Unpaid debts are increasingly weighing on regional economies, threatening national economic growth.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/807960

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Human rights lawyer Kenneth Roth on Xitter:

"The United Arab Emirates government is so contemptuous of human rights that it is holding military exercises with China in Xinjiang of all places, the site of Beijing's mass detention and persecution of Uyghur Muslims."

China and the United Arab Emirates are holding military training exercises this week in Xinjiang, as Emirati-Chinese defense ties see a boost despite US concerns.

The joint air force training exercise, dubbed Falcon Shield, began on Wednesday in the northwest Xinjiang province of China. Officers and soldiers from both countries attended the opening ceremony, including the UAE’s deputy military attache in China.

Xinjiang province, where the exercise took place, is home to China’s Uyghur Muslim community. China has been widely criticized for its treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities there. According to observers such as Human Rights Watch, China has detained up to a million Muslims in Xinjiang in recent years as part of its anti-terror campaign. The United Nations’ Human Rights Office released a report in 2022 detailing human rights issues in the region.

“The extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups, pursuant to law and policy, in context of restrictions and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity,” said the UN.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/804918

The manufacturing sector's woes have left Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, who took power last year, struggling to fulfil his promise of bringing average annual GDP growth to 5% over his four-year term, up from 1.73% in the past decade.

"The industrial sector has slumped and capacity utilisation has fallen below 60%," Srettha told parliament last week. "It is clear that the industry needs to adapt."

Supavud Saicheua, chairman of the state planning agency National Economic and Social Development Council, said Thailand's decades-long manufacturing-driven economic model is broken.

"The Chinese are now trying to export left, right and centre. Those cheap imports are really causing trouble," Supavud told Reuters.

"You have to change," Supavud said, arguing that Thailand should refocus on making products that China wasn't exporting while strengthening its agriculture sector. "No ifs or buts."

The factory closures between July 2023 and June 2024 increased 40% from the preceding 12 months, according to the latest Department of Industrial Works data that has not been previously reported.

As a result, job losses jumped by 80% during the same period, with more than 51,500 workers left without work, the data shows.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/14998436

Archived version

China says it has graduated 320 more monks and nuns this year from the Xizang Buddhism University in Lhasa with the mandate, among others, to promote the Sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism, bringing the total since its establishment in 2011 to more than 1,700. “Xizang” is China’s term for Tibet truncated to the territory of Tibet (Xizang) Autonomous Region.

The graduates “should learn to use the national language and script, infuse Tibetan Buddhism with excellent traditional Chinese culture, actively engage in doctrinal interpretation, promote positive thoughts in Tibetan Buddhist doctrine such as promoting equality and tolerance, poverty alleviation, and helping the needy, and jointly promote the Sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism,” China’s official chinadaily.com.cn Jul 12 quoted Drubkhang Thubtan Khaidrub, the head of the university, as saying.

[...]

The university was established by China outside the rigorous traditional Geshe degree programme to educate Tibetan monks and nuns to promote the Sinicization of Tibetan Buddhism and culture with focus on teaching Mandarin Chinese and the ideology of patriotic loyalty to the communist Party of China-state as the basis for learning Buddhism.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/14991388

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Last week the Economist (“A short history of Taiwan and China, in maps,” July 10) and Al Jazeera both sent around short explainers of the Taiwan-China issue.

The Al Jazeera explainer [...] was fairly standard, and it works because it appeals to the well-understood convention that Taiwan enters history in 1949 when the KMT retreats to it.

Very different, and far more pernicious, was the biased, error-studded production by the Economist. Centering Taiwan against Chinese history, it claimed that “After Japan’s defeat in 1945 Taiwan was ceded to the nationalist government of the ROC [Republic of China]” and that Taiwan became a province of the Qing empire in 1885. Neither is correct: Taiwan was not made a province by the Manchus until 1887, and it was never ceded to the ROC. Moreover, in the best pro-China fashion, Japanese rule in Taiwan simply disappears from the discussion.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/14985216

Archived version

To be a woman, to be any human in China, is to master the act of double-think, self-censorship, and denial. But to be a woman on the [Chinese] mainland is to work twice as hard at filtering out the disturbing noises produced by the ever-ruling Communist Party.

[...]

Some might even understand the astonishing tracking and surveillance the population was placed under from 2020-2023, unraveling after the White Paper Protests that began in memorial of lives lost in an apartment fire during a months-long lockdown in Urumqi.

But China’s imprisonment of its feminists is often overlooked.

[...]

Censorship in China is effectively a question of wealth. No city-dwelling university-educated white-collar worker needs to live without a good VPN, and stepping outside of the firewall is seamless if you’re willing to buy it. Inside China, it is perfectly possible to be able to see but also to choose to look away.

[...] the young urban women of China did not ignore the #MeToo movement, and the hashtag began trending across the social media islands of Chinese-made and Chinese-monitored apps before being rapidly but unsurprisingly blocked. As the state flexed to bring things under control, the movement collapsed before it had even reached enough height for its downfall to cause reverberations.

[...] Sophia Huang Xueqin, and the Feminist Five: Li Maizi, Wang Man, Wei Tingting, Wu Rongrong, and Zheng Churan. These women form a small, silenced memorial in the face of the patriarchy upon which China is founded, and have faced interrogation and incarceration for speaking out against sexual harassment and domestic violence.

[...]

The silencing of feminists in China seems incomprehensible in the wake of Mao’s too often quoted phrase, occurring in the wake of modern domestic violence laws, in a country with maternity rights some of us could only dream of. To make sense of this incongruity, it is necessary to understand that grassroots feminism, the feminism practiced by Sophia Huang Xueqin and the Feminist Five, stands in direct opposition to Chinese policy on women’s rights and equality and is treated as extremism.

To protest sexual harassment, to demand an end to domestic violence, to highlight the discrimination in academia and the workplace is to turn squarely towards the party and accuse it of failing in its duty to its people. In this sense, China does not have a problem with women as much as it does with being criticized, even implicitly. One does not seek to disrupt the status quo, for to do so is to disrupt the party itself [...]

And so the women must wait, silent and grateful to the party that builds and sustains their world. The women must not ask for their inequalities to be addressed with any more urgency than they currently are, and instead, in a country where Xi Jinping’s name is rarely spoken and silence is the only guarantee of safety, feminism becomes almost extinguished, openly mourned by only a few, and documented by even fewer.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/14965748

Archived version

The self-driving taxis have become popular — with Baidu offering super cheap rides to win customers — and the company is eyeing expansion into other Chinese megacities as local governments rush to issue policies in support of the new technology.

But the robotaxi revolution is also causing some public concerns in China, with the issue blowing up on social media after an Apollo Go vehicle ran into a pedestrian in Wuhan last Sunday.

Footage of the incident spread online has sparked a wide debate about the issues created by robotaxis — especially the threat the technology poses to ride-hailing and taxi drivers.

Authorities in Wuhan have felt the need to respond to the “rumors” about problems caused by robotaxis. The city’s transportation bureau told domestic media that the local taxi industry is “relatively stable”.

[...]

In response to video clips showing a pedestrian lying on the road next to an Apollo Go robotaxi which began trending within hours, a Baidu spokesperson told domestic media that the accident was a “mild” collision that had occurred because the pedestrian had been jaywalking.

[...]

In 2019, Baidu was among the first companies to obtain a business license for operating autonomous vehicles in Wuhan. Then, in 2022, it was granted a license to operate its vehicles on public roads without a safety driver.

[...]

But the robotaxis’ growing popularity has also sparked backlash. Wuhan residents have been complaining for months that Apollo Go cars cause traffic jams by driving slowly and stopping unexpectedly. Viral clips on social media show long lines of cars forming behind an Apollo Go vehicle that is blocking the road.

[...]

It’s unclear whether the controversy will affect China’s plans for autonomous driving. Beijing recently issued a draft guideline that would allow self-driving vehicles to be used in the public transportation and ride-hailing industries. Cities including Changsha and Jinan have announced plans to conduct robotaxi testing schemes.

[...]

So far, the publicity appears to be providing an unexpected boost to Baidu’s stock price. The company’s shares achieved their largest daily gain in over a year on Wednesday, and are still up for the week as of Friday afternoon.

Archived version

China’s relentless e-commerce price war leaves sellers struggling to make ends meet as shopping platforms compete with ever-more aggressive policies and a domestic economy slowing down

https://theadvisermagazine.com/market-research/stock-market/chinas-relentless-e-commerce-price-war-leaves-sellers-struggling-to-make-ends-meet-by-reuters

A once-thriving e-commerce industry punctuated by shopping bonanzas featuring galas and celebrities is bearing the brunt of a sputtering economy that has seen consumers all but tie knots in their purse strings.

While extreme discounting, influencer-led sales campaigns and generous returns policies did much to enrich the sector, those same practices by which vendors have to abide are now hurting those upon which the sector rests.

“The good times for e-commerce are over,” said Shanghai-based e-commerce operator Lu Zhenwang, who sells everyday items for small vendors. “This year there is fierce competition and I don’t think a lot of sellers will survive another three years.”

Profit margins are being squeezed at big platforms such as those of Alibaba and JD, but also at the thousands of small businesses which joined the e-commerce boom decade that started around 2013.

That boom has left e-commerce accounting for 27% of retail, with 12 trillion yuan ($1.65 trillion) of goods sold annually.

But as the economy slows, so does e-commerce, with the double-digit growth of recent years set to be replaced by single digits, showed data from Euromonitor.

[...]

[One e-commerce shop owner] said major platforms, upon which vendors rely, should not use “consumer first” policies that add to the burden of businesses, many of which have to sell below cost to maintain high positions in search results amid multiple discount events.

Chinese authorities have recently announced legal changes that could impose harsh sanctions, including the death penalty, on individuals working "at separating Taiwan from China." Beijing sees the self-ruled island as part of its own territory and has hinted at the possibility of using violence to subdue any attempts at pursuing indepedence.

Former Taiwanese legislator Chen Jiau-hua, already blacklisted by Beijing as one of the "stubborn separatists," told DW she was not intimidated by the new measures. Instead, the set of guidelines revealed last month simply made her grow "even more resentful" towards China.

"I think Taiwanese people shouldn't be afraid and threatened by these guidelines. Nor should they surrender to an authoritarian regime," Chen said.

Some of the legal changes, however, are not easily dismissed. Beijing courts can now pass sentences, including life imprisonment or the death penalty, to "Taiwan independence" supporters who are convicted of conducting or inciting secession.

China says its new guidelines are targeting a "very small number of diehard 'Taiwan independence' separatists."

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/14931133

In its daily update on Chinese military activity over the past 24 hours, released on Thursday morning, Taiwan’s defense ministry said it had detected 66 Chinese military aircraft around the island.

Of those, 39 passed to the south and southeast of Taiwan, the ministry said. On Wednesday the ministry said it had detected 36 aircraft heading to the Western Pacific to carry out drills with the Shandong.

Taiwan’s defense ministry released two pictures, a grainy black-and-white image of a Chinese J-16 fighter and a colour image of a nuclear-capable H-6 bomber, which it said were taken recently, but did not say exactly where or when.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/676299

Here is the original You-Tube link

This is how Tim Cook turned Apple into China's biggest ally in their imperial and authoritarian expansion.

Textile waste is an urgent global problem, with only 12 per cent recycled worldwide, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Even less - only 1 per cent - of castoff clothes are recycled into new garments; the majority is used for low value items like insulation or mattress stuffing.

Nowhere is the problem more pressing than in China, the world’s largest textile producer and consumer, where more than 26 million tons of clothes are thrown away every year year, according to government statistics. Most of it ends up in landfills.

And factories like this one are barely making a dent in a country whose clothing industry is dominated by fast fashion  - cheap clothes made from unrecyclable synthetics, not cotton. Produced from petrochemicals that contribute to climate change, air and water pollution, synthetics account for 70 per cent of domestic clothing sales in China.

China's footprint is worldwide: E-commerce juggernaut brands Shein and Temu make the country one of the world’s largest producers of cheap fashion, selling in more than 150 countries.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/14920021

Many middle-class Chinese trekking to the US are college-educated, have an established career or business in China and know how to use a VPN to avoid official censorship and access the free internet.

Mostly in their 30s and 40s, they grew up when China had impressive economic growth and became more connected with the rest of the world. But now they feel increasingly suffocated by the country’s lacklustre economy and the government’s tightening political grip. Many find the US attractive because they see it as an economic powerhouse where there is also political freedom.

For Chinese middle class people, their options for migrating to the US are limited. While more affluent Chinese opt for investor visas, those who are less wealthy struggle to obtain a US visa. The refusal rate for Chinese nationals applying for US tourist and business visas was 27 percent last year, higher than before the pandemic. And due to a huge backlog of applications, the wait time for US visa appointments in China is now more than two months.

More Taiwanese traveling to China, Hong Kong or Macau have been detained or faced trials since Beijing implemented the Anti-Espionage Law and Law on Guarding State Secrets, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday.

Since July last year, 15 Taiwanese have been detained or undergone trials after entering China and the two special administrative regions, while 51 have been interrogated by border officers, Tsai said, adding that the number of cases is increasing.

“We respect the Mainland Affairs Council’s decision to raise the travel alert for China from ‘yellow’ to ‘orange,’ meaning that people should avoid non-essential travel. Other countries have also raised the travel alert for China, which shows that it has become an issue that the international community is monitoring closely,” Tsai said at a meeting of the legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee.

Corruption is especially widespread among officials with already high incomes and has a massive impact on earnings. While only seven per cent of officials proven to be corrupt would normally belong to the top one per cent of earners in urban China, the figure would rise to 91 per cent when considering illegal income. However, the far-reaching measures already taken by China with 3.7 million sanctions systematically inhibit corruption.

These are the findings of a study conducted by Germany's ZEW Mannheim with the City University of New York in the U.S. The study is the first of its kind to analyse the financial benefits of corruption for the individual perpetrators, drawing on data from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/558539

Archived link

Pointing to China’s anaemic private consumption rates, economists have long advocated boosting growth through measures such as expanding China’s parsimonious social safety net. Despite paeans to “common prosperity”, Beijing has shown little inclination to do this.

Instead, China has been focusing unusually strong on export for a very long time. Chinese leaders definitely see strategic utility in ensuring that G7 nations are reliant on China for critical technologies. Yet, with most of China’s population still poor by advanced economy standards, this dynamic can be over-egged when explaining China’s export overcapacity and aggressive push into Western markets.

At the same time, China’s overcapacity has proved corrosive to the industrial ambitions of lower and middle-income countries. Rather than offshoring more labour-intensive industries as has been hoped, President Xi has called for the “transformation and upgrading of traditional industries”. Chinese manufacturing imports from these countries have declined appreciably.--

• Provincial government land markets and local government financing vehicles (LGFVs) may seem arcane and far removed from global trade. But in reality, they have served as the edifice upon which China’s now slowing investment-led growth model has been built.

• With Beijing deeply reluctant to embrace consumption-led growth alternatives, leaders are betting on exports to take up a much larger share of the slack. China invests about 45 per cent of its GDP – an unprecedented figure for any modern economy. Until recently, infrastructure and property have routinely each comprised about 30 per cent of this total. The idiosyncrasies of China’s political economy and fiscal composition mean that much of this investment has been driven by local governments.

• To maintain services provision while meeting aggressive growth targets, local governments have become reliant on non-tax funding – i.e., LGFVs [LGFVs are off-balance financing vehicles used by local governments to circumvent restrictions on issuing conventional bonds] and land sales. The latter constituted 42 per cent of local governments’ general public budget revenue in 2021 – a figure that is still above 20 per cent.

• LGFVs played an essential role in funding China’s colossal infrastructure buildout, which has also helped drive up land prices in what was previously a virtuous growth cycle. In the heady days before China’s real estate collapse, land revenue provided an ostensibly inexhaustible source of largesse for subsidies.

• This growth model was not without its drawbacks. After decades of bingeing, LGFV debt comprises well over half of China’s GDP [some economists claim that LGFV debt has reached almost China's GDP, ed] – a totally unsustainable dynamic when median return on assets has hovered around one per cent. Local governments are now spending around 19 per cent of total fiscal resources on interest payments.

• Earlier this year, Beijing drastically restricted the ability of the 12 most indebted provinces and municipalities (whose cumulative investment comprised 16 per cent of China’s total in 2023) to tap LGFVs for infrastructure spending. Investment in these regions is expected to decline by around one-quarter this year. Restrictions of varying severity have been placed on 18,000 LGFVs across China.