China

Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11498645

Russian firms' efforts to make payments for goods in China as secondary sanctions fears spook local banks have generated a flourishing market for middlemen, four sources told Reuters, with up to half of transactions now handled by intermediaries.

Deterred by the threat, Chinese banks are limiting their dealings with Russian companies, which in turn are rushing to open accounts at the only Russian lender with a Chinese branch, causing a bottleneck at VTB Shanghai.

The sources, including trade consultants, bankers and importers and exporters who all requested anonymity to share sensitive information, said long transaction and shipment delays have seen businesses turn to intermediaries in spite of high fees and risks of shipment seizures in third countries.

"There are a lot of (Russian) businessmen who just go from bank to bank, opening current accounts," said one of the sources. "If their payment doesn't go through, they go to the next one."

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/13413005

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Last week, the Chinese government ordered Apple to remove several widely used messaging apps—WhatsApp, Threads, Signal, and Telegram—from its app store. Beyond Apple’s allusion to “national security,” why exactly the apps were removed is unclear.

Some sources say that the Chinese Cyberspace Administration asked Apple to remove WhatsApp and Threads because both are home to content that includes “problematic mentions” of Xi Jinping, China’s president. The New York Times also quoted a source as saying that the apps were removed because they platformed “inflammatory” content about Xi and violated China’s cybersecurity laws.

Others claim the move came just a few days after the US Congress resurrected a bill aimed at forcing ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, to either sell the app or be banned from the US (the Senate passed the bill on Tuesday, and President Biden signed it into law yesterday)—timing that suggests possible retaliation on China’s part.

The US and Chinese governments have been playing this kind of tit-for-tat game for some time.

Nor is this the first time that Apple has acquiesced to requests made by the Chinese government. In 2017, the company came under fire for removing dozens of VPN apps that allowed Chinese internet users to circumvent the Great Firewall. In 2020, the company removed more than thirty thousand apps from its store—mostly games—because they did not have a government license either.

Some experts say that Apple’s commitment to helping the Chinese government runs much deeper than app removal—over the past two decades, they say, Apple has integrated its business with China to such an extent that it has effectively partnered with the Chinese government.

China not only assembles most of Apple’s smartphones, but sales to the country and its growing middle class amounted to almost seventy billion dollars last year, equivalent to a fifth of Apple’s annual revenue. When Beijing asks for something, critics argue, Apple can’t really say no—because its business has become so reliant on the Chinese market and on Chinese manufacturers as to make total extrication almost impossible.

Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11475895

The problem of “new yellow journalism” in Chinese cyberspace, which thrives on and profits from sensationalism, is a serious problem that is not limited to self-media. And yet, the issue has received only a smattering of attention. In many cases, state media are among the worst violators, exaggerating social and political ills in the United States and the West to support the idea of the superiority of China’s system.

Examples include “GT Investigates,” a series from the Global Times, a spin-off of the CCP’s flagship People’s Daily, that regularly depicts the US and Western media as false and hypocritical; and “Media Unlocked” (起底), a brand under the state-run China Daily that frequently resorts to sensational attacks on the West.

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A new UHRP analysis of official figures1 indicates that Uyghurs, Turkic and other non-Han peoples in the Uyghur Region account for more than a third (34 percent) of China’s estimated prison population, despite making up only one percent of China’s overall population. When accounting for the total regional population, the Uyghur Region has the highest prison rate in the world at an estimated 2,234 per 100,000.

The prison population refers specifically to formal imprisonment under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice, and is separate from the unknown number of people still interned in the region’s camps and other forms of arbitrary detention.

Statistics released by the state prosecution in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR)—known as East Turkistan to many Uyghurs—suggest that Uyghurs, Turkic and other non-Han peoples in the region are imprisoned at a rate of 3,814 people per 100,000.2

In comparison, Han people throughout China are estimated to be imprisoned at a rate of 80 per 100,000. In other words, Uyghurs and other non-Han people in the Uyghur Region are estimated to be imprisoned at just over 47 times the rate of Han people.

Typing logographic languages such as Chinese is more difficult than typing alphabetic languages, where each letter can be represented by one key. There is no way to fit the tens of thousands of Chinese characters that exist onto a single keyboard. Despite this obvious challenge, technologies have developed which make typing in Chinese possible. To enable the input of Chinese characters, a writer will generally use a keyboard app with an “Input Method Editor” (IME).

Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the globe share a security vulnerability that can be exploited to to detect what users are typing, researchers at the Citizen Lab, a technology and security research lab affiliated with the University of Toronto, have found.

Acvording to Citizen Lab, the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and state surveillance groups.

"Our analysis revealed critical vulnerabilities in keyboard apps from eight out of the nine vendors in which we could exploit that vulnerability to completely reveal the contents of users’ keystrokes in transit," a new report says, adding that "most of the vulnerable apps can be exploited by an entirely passive network eavesdropper".

Combining the vulnerabilities discovered in this and our previous report analyzing Sogou’s keyboard apps, Citizen Lab estimates that up to one billion users are affected by these vulnerabilities. "Given the scope of these vulnerabilities and the ease with which these vulnerabilities may have been discovered, it is possible that such users’ keystrokes may have also been under mass surveillance," the report says.

In their report, the researchers analyzed the security of cloud-based pinyin keyboard apps from nine vendors: Baidu, Honor, Huawei, iFlytek, OPPO, Samsung, Tencent, Vivo, and Xiaomi.

We examined these apps’ transmission of users’ keystrokes for vulnerabilities.

In eght out of the nine vendor, the researchers could exploit the vulnerability to completely reveal the contents of users’ keystrokes in transit, the only exception being a phone by Huawei.

Having the capability to read what users type on their devices is of interest to a number of actors — including government intelligence agencies that operate globally — because it may encompass exceptionally sensitive information about users and their contacts including financial information, login credentials such as usernames or passwords, and messages that are otherwise end-to-end encrypted.

A Chinese student in the US has been sentenced to nine months in prison for stalking and threatening a female Chinese student who put up pro-democracy fliers on campus.

The fliers, put up at the Berklee College of Music in Boston in late 2022, read: "We want freedom... We want democracy, we want to love, stand with Chinese people."

In response, Xiaolei Wu said he would "chop [the woman's] hands off".

A federal judge has ordered that the 26-year-old be deported after serving his sentence.

“What Mr. Wu did in weaponising the authoritarian nature of the People’s Republic of China to threaten this woman is incredibly disturbing," said Jodi Cohen, who leads the FBI’s Boston Division that investigated the case.

The pro-democracy fliers were put up in late October 2022 during a wave of activism among Chinese people abroad.

Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11433181

Britain's Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank said the Russian vessel Angara, which since August 2023 has moved to Russian ports thousands of containers believed to contain North Korean munitions, has been anchored at a Chinese shipyard in eastern Zhejiang province since February.

With Ukraine under a renewed Russian assault and running short of ammunition, U.S. officials have issued increasingly stark warnings about what they say is China's help rebuilding Russia's military after its early setbacks in the Ukraine war.

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in western China became known to the world through reports about the so-called “re-education camps,” in which the authorities held hundreds of thousands of local residents. Uyghurs, Kazakhs and representatives of other Turkic and Muslim ethnic groups were tried for any connections with Islam. The Chinese authorities have portrayed the region as a source of instability and danger, citing separatist and terrorist threats, which enabled them to justify carrying out large-scale repressive measures against the local peoples. Since the end of 2016, the situation in the region has remained critical.

According to the 2018 Human Rights Watch report, even though there had been repressions of Muslims of Turkic origin in XUAR before, a sharp escalation began at the end of 2016. Then, the former secretary of the Communist Party in Tibet, Chen Quanguo, was transferred to Xinjiang. After his relocation, Quanguo introduced a policy of forced assimilation, in the process of which locals were detained under the pretext of fighting the “three forces of evil”: terrorism, extremism and separatism.

Having studied data from the XUAR prosecutor's office, HRW found out that between 2017 and 2021, almost 10 percent of the population — 540,826 people — were prosecuted in the region. Most of them are still in prison. However, in 2019, many of the extrajudicial detention camps were gradually abolished. In the last couple of years, the region has seen “liberalization” with external controls weakening and the Chinese authorities actively organizing demonstrative visits, primarily for diplomats and journalists from Muslim countries.

Global Voices spoke with Ivan Petrov (name changed for security reasons), a cultural expert from Belarus living in Southeast Asia, to discuss with him the different approaches Chinese authorities have employed to pacify the region in the last eight years. Petrov visited XUAR twice, in 2019 and 2023. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11408796

European Union officials have raided the offices of a Chinese company as part of a probe into subsidies, exposing rising tensions between the bloc and one of its biggest trading partners.

The European Commission said Tuesday that it carried out “unannounced inspections” at the premises of a company making and selling security equipment in Europe, which it suspects may have benefited unduly from state subsidies. It did not name the company.

“The commission has indications that the inspected company may have received foreign subsidies that could distort the (EU’s) internal market,” the EU’s executive body said in a statement on its website.

Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week.

The State Department's annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese counterparts.

In a preface, Blinken said the report "documents ongoing grave human rights abuses in the People's Republic of China (PRC)."

"For example, in Xinjiang, the PRC continues to carry out genocide, crimes against humanity, forced labor, and other human rights violations against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups," Blinken said in the preface.

Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11399150

The European Union launched an investigation on Wednesday into Chinese public procurement of medical devices to determine if European suppliers have been granted fair access, the EU's official journal said on Wednesday.

The investigation, conducted by the European Commission under the EU International Procurement Instrument, could ultimately lead to the bloc placing restrictions on Chinese medical device companies bidding in EU public tenders.

Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11368266

German police have arrested an employee of an Alternative for Germany (AfD) politician in the eastern German city of Dresden on suspicion of espionage for China, broadcasters ARD, RBB and SWR reported on Tuesday.

The employee, Jian G, worked as an assistant for the AfD's top candidate in the European Parliament elections, Maximilian Krah, and lived in Brussels as well as Dresden, according to the broadcasters.

Investigators suspect that he passed on information on parliamentary operations to China's Ministry of State Security (MSS), with a particular focus on Chinese opposition members, said the report.

Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11367309

European Union lawmakers are set to vote to ban products made using forced labour under a new law that has China in its sights, risking tensions with Beijing.

The law to be voted on on Tuesday does not directly mention China, but many lawmakers hope it will be used to block imports from China involving the region where the Uighur Muslim minority lives.

Human rights groups say at least 1 million people, mostly members of Muslim minorities, have been detained in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region and face a series of abuses, including forced sterilisation of women and coerced labour.

With the European Parliament’s green light after a vote in Strasbourg, France, the draft text will officially become law following final approval by the EU’s 27 member states.

“The reason for arrest is that he stopped others from smoking and drinking,” said an officer. “He is not a religious figure.”

Abstaining from alcohol is one of 75 different activities and behaviors identified by the Chinese government as a sign of potential religious extremism. It is listed in brochures distributed in some parts of Xinjiang to educate the public on how to identify extreme religious activities.

It is also a cause for jailing Uyghurs, who as Muslims abstain from drinking alcohol, as part of a larger effort by Beijing to eradicate Uyghur culture and religion.

Initially, the Uyghur was “educated” in a camp for two years, but in 2019, he was sentenced and transferred to prison, they said.

Xaneriq village consists of 23 smaller communities with a total population of 31,000 people, averaging around 1,400 people in each community.

About 800 people live in Tawaqchi community, of which more than 100 were in prison, with some serving indefinite sentences in internment camps, an Uyghur expatriate said.

[Edit typo.]

Christopher Cash, 29, the researcher, and Christopher Berry, 32, were charged under the Official Secrets Act.

They are accused of giving "articles, notes, documents or information" to a foreign state, the Met Police in the UK said.

Mr Berry, from Witney in Oxfordshire, and Mr Cash, of Whitechapel, London, were arrested last March in connection with the investigation.

It was previously reported that one of the men - Mr Cash - was a parliamentary researcher involved with the China Research Group, and who is understood to have had access to several Conservative MPs.

The German Federal Prosecutor's office on Monday said three German nationals were arrested under the strong suspicion of having worked for Chinese secret service.

Prosecutors believe the three may have been involved in research projects that could be useful for China to expand its maritime power.

What is China's GDP really?

This is the cautionary tale that unfolded last week as Navina Heyden, a German influencer based in China's Shandong with 80,000 followers on both X and Weibo, published an article on Weibo discussing the partial decriminalization of marijuana in her home country.

Heyden explained that the policy, which took effect on April 1 and legalized recreational usage of cannabis by adults, aimed at reducing use by eradicating the black market. Countries without China’s historical sensitivities around drug use may think about the issue differently, she said, adding that, in her opinion, alcohol was more damaging to one’s health.

Though she took pains to emphasize that she was not advocating a similar approach in China, Heyden was subsequently attacked by netizens who accused her of “promoting drugs”, with some clamoring for a police investigation.

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/13320532

Chinese quant hedge funds have been venturing into overseas markets for years, but their expansion has accelerated as the sector has become increasingly crowded at home and regulators tighten their supervision of a sector able to profit from market volatility.

"Under the current compliance rules in China, some quant strategies don't work, or cannot deliver the best performance at home," said Shen, who helps Chinese funds build global brands.

"So some quant funds are setting up their second investment centre, in Hong Kong or Singapore, where their strategies may work better, and operate more freely."

As they ended their meeting on Capri, the G7 ministers said transfers of such material [such as machine tools, semiconductors, other dual-use items that have helped Russia rebuild the defence industrial base] from Chinese companies were being used by Russia “to advance its military production”.

“This is enabling Russia to reconstitute and revitalise its defence industrial base, posing a threat both to Ukraine and to international peace and security,” they said, calling on China to stop its backing “as it will only prolong this conflict and increase the threat that Russia poses to its neighbours”.

Twenty-three Chinese swimmers tested positive for the banned drug TMZ months before the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, it has emerged. However, they were cleared to compete at the Games after the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) accepted an explanation from the Chinese authorities that the kitchen at their hotel was contaminated.

The story, which has come to light after a joint investigation by the German TV channel ARD and the New York Times, has led to widespread criticism of Wada from senior figures in anti-doping, with one calling the case “shocking” and another a “devastating stab in the back to clean athletes”.

The families of non-governmental organization (NGO) delegates to the UN were visited by Chinese police and “forced to phone them to tell them to stop their advocacy, arbitrarily arrested, placed under house arrest for the period of the meeting, disappeared, sentenced to long prison terms without cause, tortured, or, as regards Uyghurs, put in concentration camps,” Emma Reilly, a former Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights employee, told British House of Commons.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) “imposes a secret conditionality across UN agencies that the monies so provided may not be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan,” she said.

“Essentially, the PRC instumentalises the UN to increase pressure on” small island developing states and least developed countries, “which account for a majority of states that still have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, to transfer their allegiance to the PRC,” she said.

The “Chief of the Human Rights Council Branch in OHCHR, a French national, was secretly providing the PRC with advance information on which human rights activists planned to attend the Human Rights Council,” Reilly wrote.

That information included British citizens and residents, she added.

Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11278111

"China tries to get hold of technology in the Netherlands in various ways, using a combination of (cyber) espionage, company insiders, acquisitions, circumvention of export restrictions and reverse engineering of technology for which no licenses are required,” the Dutch intelligence agency said.

A new report asserts that Chinese intelligence agencies have broadened the scope, intensity and technical level of their cyber campaigns over the past 12 months. It also suggests that Chinese universities play a vital intelligence-gathering role, noting that [Chinese] scientists employed by western companies often work for China’s security services and state companies.