China

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10664796

After years of rapid growth spurred by government support, the world’s biggest EV market is facing a slowdown as consumers cut spending in an uncertain post-pandemic economy. As carmakers slash prices further to sustain their sales, some car owners are seeing the value of their vehicles plummet months or even weeks after their purchases. Several EV companies are also in financial crises, leaving thousands of buyers unable to access after-sales and software maintenance services.

EV startups HiPhi, the Baidu-backed WM Motor, and the Tencent-backed Aiways have run out of funds to sustain their operations. Other brands including Levdeo and Singulato Motors have entered bankruptcy proceedings.

The satellite images reveal a layout of streets strongly resembling the Bo’ai Special Zone, a restricted area in Taipei’s Zhongzheng District that houses Taiwan’s most important state buildings, including the presidential palace, the supreme court, the ministry of justice and the central bank of Taiwan.

The Bo’ai Special Zone is subject to specific regulations, including a strict ban on overflight.

He Jiankui's experiments sent shockwaves through the medical and scientific world. He was widely condemned for having gone ahead with the risky, ethically contentious and medically unjustified procedure with inadequate consent from the families involved.

The court found that He had forged documents from an ethics review panel that were used to recruit couples for his research.

He said he had used a gene-editing procedure known as Crispr-Cas9 to rewrite the DNA in the sisters’ embryos – modifications he claimed would make the children immune to HIV.

Taiwan's outgoing President Tsai Ing-wen plans to flee in a U.S. plane if war erupts with China, according to an unsubstantiated report first published in 2021 and echoed in the run-up to the island's January 2024 general election.

Another story said Tsai had given her confidantes VIP "runaway" passes.

They are among the many unsupported tales of Tsai's preparations to escape harm that have been fed into the island by Chinese state media outlets, according to an analysis conducted by the Information Environment Research Center (IORG), a Taiwan-based non-government organisation.

The IORG analysis revealed that the narrative that Tsai planned to flee if war broke out with China, and that Taiwan’s military drills were rehearsals for this, originated with an outlet controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in June 2021, and was quickly repeated by other official Chinese news sources.

Taipei has repeatedly said the reports are false. The government has not publicly detailed its plans for the leadership in the event of conflict. Reuters could not independently determine the existence of any such escape plans.

Chinese propaganda outlet Xinjiang Daily reported from the Autonomous Region Market Supervision Administration that “there are currently 2.476 million registered business entities in Xinjiang, including 266,700 in the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, representing a 7.75% increase compared to the previous year. Among them, there are 548,300 enterprises, showing a 10.41% year-on-year increase, and 1.8816 million individual businesses, reflecting a 7.25% year-on-year rise. “

However, the Chinese government’s report on “Xinjiang”‘s thriving business sector did not mention the ethnicity of the registered business owners.

It has been widely reported that Uyghur business leaders in the region have encountered significant challenges, with many being arrested and their properties seized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Prominent Uyghur business leaders were reportedly detained in the region starting early in 2015. In a detailed report by Uyghur Hjelp citing the detention of nearly 5000 Uyghur businessmen, a figure also reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Of particular importance is the fact that while the Chinese government arrested Uyghur business leaders and seized their properties, they also sent and forced those Uyghur millionaires, among millions of other Uyghurs, to Chinese factories to work under harsh labor conditions without any freedom, effectively as slaves.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10581641

21 countries, including Denmark, Finland, Sweden and the European Union, have expressed concern about dangerous maneuvers and the use of water cannons against Filipino ships by the China Coast Guard. They refer to the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UCLOS) and they call for upholding the rules, when managing the dispute in the South China Sea.

The statements follows weeks of tension between the Philippines and China in the South China Sea, with both countries accusing each other of initiating aggressions.

The Embassy of Sweden in Manila wrote on social media, that damaging the Philippine vessels is “needlessly endangering lives”, and that the “disputes must be resolved peacefully in accordance with UNCLOS and the international rule of law.”

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10580624

Despite the trauma of war between the two nations, the United States and Vietnam have sharply expanded cooperation since the reestablishment of relations 30 years ago.

Vietnam has historic tensions with China including disputes in the South China Sea, where Beijing has increasingly exerted claims against Hanoi, the Philippines and others.

Under President Xi Jinping, China has put forward a somewhat vague project known as the Global Security Initiative — a set of broad-brush principles that, as the Financial Times summed up, “advocates for resolving conflicts through dialogue".

Many countries in China’s neighborhood are not likely to be convinced. Recently the government of the Philippines lodged a protest with Chinese counterparts after a dangerous escalation in the South China Sea, where China’s maritime expansionism is butting against the parallel territorial claims of its weaker neighbors. Authorities in Manila furnished video evidence of a Chinese coast guard vessel attacking a Philippines naval resupply ship with water cannon on March 23, injuring Filipino crew members and damaging their vessel.

This follows a pattern of coercive Chinese measures, including water cannon attacks, deployed around the disputed Second Thomas Shoal, which Manila is defending from constant Chinese encroachment and provocations. The South China Sea is an artery that sees the passage of a third of global trade and its reefs and uninhabited archipelagoes have taken on deeper strategic significance in the shadow of China’s geopolitical rise.

“The systematic and consistent manner in which the People’s Republic of China carries out these illegal and irresponsible actions puts into question and significant doubt the sincerity of its calls for peaceful dialogue,” the Philippines coast guard said in a statement after another incident in December. “We demand that China demonstrate that it is a responsible and trustworthy member of the international community.”

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10554617

Several African countries depend on China as their main technology provider and sponsor of large digital infrastructural projects.

Under the so-called “EPC+F” (Engineer, Procure, Construct + Fund/Finance) scheme, Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE oversee the engineering, procurement and construction while Chinese banks provide state-backed finance. Angola, Uganda and Zambia are just some of the countries which seem to have benefited from this type of deal.

The Chinese government’s expectation is that mobile applications and startups in Africa will increasingly reflect Beijing’s technological and ideological principles. That includes China’s interpretation of human rights, data privacy and freedom of speech.

Researchers like Arthur Gwagwa from the Ethics Institute at Utrecht University (Netherlands) believe that China’s export of critical infrastructure components will enable military and industrial espionage. These claims assert that Chinese-made equipment is designed in a way that could facilitate cyber attacks.

Human Rights Watch, an international NGO that conducts research and advocacy on human rights, has raised concerns that Chinese infrastructure increases the risk of technology-enabled authoritarianism. In particular, Huawei has been accused of colluding with governments to spy on political opponents in Uganda and Zambia. Huawei has denied the allegations.

In the long term African countries should produce their own infrastructure and become less dependent.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10551378

State-sponsored cyberattacks are a leading cause of concern among government entities throughout the world, and Latin America is no exception to this reality.

Most of the attacks come from China and Russia and seek to steal and hijack data and personal information, said Jean Reyes, of Honduran technology firm GBM.

“As part of the technological deployment, Chinese companies such as Huawei, ZTE, Xiaomi, and TikTok and online stores of Chinese origin are involved in collecting user data, which they share with the Chinese government,” Víctor Ruiz, founder of the SILIKN cybersecurity center in Mexico, told Diálogo on March 5. “This poses significant risks in terms of privacy and information security.”

As China’s population ages, so are its migrant workers. About 85 million were over 50 in 2022, the latest year for which data is available, accounting for 29% of all migrant workers and up from 15% a decade earlier. With limited or no pensions and health insurance, they need to keep working.

Migrant workers can get subsidized health care in their hometowns, but they have little or no coverage elsewhere. If they need to go to hospital in Beijing, they have to pay out of pocket.

Older workers are being hit by a double whammy. Jobs have dried up in construction due to a downturn in the real estate market and in factories because of automation and the slowing economy. Age discrimination is common, so jobs tend to go to younger people.

Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has become more controlling than at any stage in the past four decades - rarely good news for free enterprise. In this episode we ask if that lust for control at all costs is the main reason why so many people - both within China and outside of it - have lost faith in a global economic powerhouse’s capacity to bounce back from its current troubles.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10503259

The Philippine president said that his government would take action against what he called dangerous attacks by the Chinese coast guard and suspected militia ships in the disputed South China Sea, saying “Filipinos do not yield.”

Ferdinand Marcos Jr. did not provide details of the actions his government would take in the succeeding weeks but said these would be “proportionate, deliberate and reasonable in the face of the open, unabating, and illegal, coercive, aggressive and dangerous attacks by agents of the China coast guard and Chinese maritime militia.”

“We seek no conflict with any nation,” Marcos wrote on X, formerly Twitter, but said the Philippines would not be “cowed into silence.”

Marcos’s warning is the latest sign of the escalating disputes between China and the Philippines in the contested waters that have caused minor collisions between the coast guard and other vessels of the rival claimant nations, sparked a war of words and strained relations.

The Fractured America series is just one example of how artificial intelligence (AI), with its ability to generate high-quality multimedia with minimal effort in seconds, is beginning to shape Beijing’s propaganda efforts.

Henry Ajder, a UK-based expert in generative AI, said while the CGTN series does not attempt to pass itself off as genuine video, it is a clear example of how AI has made it far easier and cheaper to churn out content.

“The reason that they’ve done it in this way is, you could hire an animator, and a voiceover artist to do this, but it would probably end up being more time-consuming. It would probably end up being more expensive to do,” Ajder says.

Chinese state-backed actors have been deploying AI-generated content since at least March 2023, Microsoft said, and such “relatively high-quality visual content has already drawn higher levels of engagement from authentic social media users”.

It is not limited to the U.S., of course. In the run-up to Taiwan's election in January, for example, more than 100 deepfake videos of fake news anchors attacking outgoing Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen were attributed to China’s Ministry of State Security, the Taipei Times reported, citing national security sources.

Much like the CGTN video series, the videos lacked sophistication, but showed how AI could help spread misinformation at scale, said Chihhao Yu, the co-director of the Taiwan Information Environment Research Center (IORG).

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10499674

While China has built infrastructure throughout the continent, though China’s promising projects are typically faulty or incomplete, revealing its self-serving goals.

Ethiopia is a prominent example of African countries’ challenges. As Ethiopia lacks the funds to build a seaport in its ally Djibouti. China started investing in Ethiopia and agreed to construct a railroad from Addis Ababa to the Port of Djibouti. China gave Ethiopia a $1.3 billion loan with 3% interest and a 6-year repayment period. The modernization project covered 750 km and cost $4 billion. China’s state-owned EXIM bank, one of the primary lenders for BRI projects, covered 70% of the cost with Ethiopia paying the rest in loan installments.

Because China now owns 32.9% of Ethiopia’s external debt, the African country heavily depends on loans from state-owned banks linked to China’s state-controlled market, and is thus affected by China’s economic health.

As repayment amounts are denominated in China's currency yuan, a weaker currency means inflated repayment costs, straining these indebted countries even more.

The overall economic leverage is primarily attributed to a system of high-interest, high-risk loans, as countries fall into a “debt trap” caused by unsustainable debt that continuously accrues.

China has tried to alleviate concerns by highlighting debt-restructuring agreements with African countries. These agreements aim to help struggling countries repay loans, but they’re vague and don’t adequately help countries overcome the debt trap.

Adding to Ethiopia’s woes are corrupt activities by Chinese companies. To get projects in Ethiopia, these firms have bribed corrupt politicians. When they start constructing in Ethiopia, Chinese companies fail to deliver their promises of high-quality infrastructure. In contrast, as Ethiopia’s debt increases, reports have appeared of faltering infrastructure due to lower quality materials than initially promised.

China has built similar projects in other African countries like Kenya and Zambia, with similar attractive promises, like the Nairobi-Mombasa railway and Mongu-Kalabo highway respectively. All these projects require large loans to often opaque conditions.

Health officials have long warned that gonorrhea is becoming more and more resistant to all the antibiotic drugs we have to fight it. If public health alarm bells could somehow hit a higher pitch, a study published Thursday from researchers in China would certainly accomplish it.

The study surveyed gonorrhea bacterial isolates—Neisseria gonorrhoeae—from around the country and found that the prevalence of ceftriaxone-resistant isolates nearly tripled between 2017 and 2021. Ceftriaxone-resistant strains made up roughly 8 percent of the nearly 3,000 bacterial isolates collected from gonorrhea infections in 2022. That's up from just under 3 percent in 2017. The study appears in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The Peruvian Government terminated the exclusive right of COSCO, the Chinese state-owned shipping company, to operate the Chancay megaport COSCO is currently building under China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI has enticed more than 150 countries worldwide to sign up for Chinese investment in key infrastructure; from pipelines, power plants and telecoms networks, to airports, roads, railways and ports.

In Peru, Beijing has focused heavily on exporting the country’s large commodities market, led by copper, gold, gas, and grapes.

While promoting Chinese aims – and trade – overseas remains the overarching goal of the BRI, Beijing’s strategy in Peru “has evolved over the last couple of years”, according to Rory Green, chief China economist and head of Asia research at TS Lombard.

“China’s BRI investment has moved away from unrestrained outbound investment to a much more strategic approach”, Green tells Ship Technology. “BRI and outward direct investment are now focused on a few core objectives; the supply of essential raw materials, access to major markets, acquisition of tech IP – and geopolitics.”

Some see the BRI, or so-called ‘New Silk Road’, as a harbinger of a new era of trade and growth for developing economies in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Sceptics say China is using the BRI to lay a debt trap for borrowing governments – and use its right to retain the right to demand repayment at any time for geopolitical leverage over issues such as Taiwan’s sovereignty or the treatment of Uyghurs.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10465099

Investigating Sino-African labour relations at the Karuma hydroelectric dam in Uganda and published recently by Cambridge University Press, researchers Robert Wyrod and Kimberlee Chang urge African countries to introduce stronger worker protections to avoid situations as at Karuma "where [labour] abuse seems systemic".

"Unless African governments take a proactive role in monitoring and enforcing standards in a sector they define as strategic, Chinese state capital operates like any other form of transnational capital," they say.

Their findings suggest that there may be something at work beyond more classic labour conflicts related to pay, benefits and safety. They also stress that the abuse is not simply a language barrier issue.

Dams became some of the most controversial development projects, criticised especially for their environmental damage, displacement of communities, and loss of local livelihoods. Due to such criticisms, by the turn of the millennium the World Bank, along with other Western funders, had reconsidered how dams figured into their development portfolio, essentially retreating from this sector.

This shift in the role of hydroelectric dams in Western development funding coincided with the rise of a new player in global dam construction, particularly China. As part of China's ‘going global’ strategy aimed at finding new international markets for China's state-owned and private companies, China began promoting overseas dam construction, along with other large-scale infrastructure projects.

The researchers focuse on the Karuma Hydropower Project, a 600-megawatt power station on the Nile River in northern Uganda. When completed, the Karuma dam will be the largest in Uganda and one of the largest in sub-Saharan Africa. While Uganda is a relatively small country, it has forged a strong partnership with China in recent years. This has resulted in an outsized range of China funded and/or constructed projects in Uganda.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10439953

Canada's corporate ethics watchdog on Tuesday said it was likely that human rights abuses of using Uyghur forced labor had occurred.

In a report, the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) recommended the federal government refuse to provide any future financial support to Dynasty until it implemented recommendations to combat abuse.

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Hong Kong was once a place where people did not live in fear. It had rule of law, a rowdy press and a semi-democratic Legislature that kept the powerful in check. The result was a city with a freewheeling energy unmatched in China. Anyone who grew up in China in the 1980s and 1990s could sing the Cantopop songs of Hong Kong stars like Anita Mui, and that was a problem for Beijing: Freedom was glamorous, desirable.

When Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, the city’s people accepted, in good faith, Beijing’s promises that its capitalist system and way of life would remain unchanged for 50 years and that the city would move toward universal suffrage in the election of its leader.

Not anymore. Now Hong Kong people are quietly taking precautions, getting rid of books, T-shirts, film footage, computer files and other documents from the heady days when the international financial center was also known for its residents’ passionate desire for freedom.

She was arrested for defending Wang Yu, a younger colleague who was one of the main victims of the 9 July 2015crackdown, one of the harshest on activists in China. Despite her age, she served her full sentence, six years and six months, for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10403446

The businessman Zhao Fugang's role is typical of Beijing’s steady efforts to build its footprint in the Pacific Islands. The ruling Chinese Communist Party often uses prominent members of the overseas diaspora as proxies to push Chinese interests, under a strategy it calls the “United Front.”

Australian law enforcement and intelligence agencies believe that Zhao is not merely a businessman or political operative. They suspect he is also a senior organized crime figure.

Australia’s top criminal intelligence body, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, went to the extraordinary step of adding Zhao to its registry of Australian Priority Organization Targets in mid-2023, reporters have learned. The list of priority targets is secret, and includes about a dozen top suspected criminals, typically based abroad, who are deemed to be “the most significant threats facing Australia.”

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10400125

New Zealand’s allegation comes a day after American and British authorities announced a set of criminal charges and sanctions against seven hackers, all believed to be living in China, who targeted U.S. officials, journalists, corporations, pro-democracy activists and the U.K.’s election watchdog.

“The use of cyber-enabled espionage operations to interfere with democratic institutions and processes anywhere is unacceptable,” Minister Responsible for the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) Judith Collins said in a media statement.

China’s private property developers continue to experience funding pressure amid weak internal funding from contracted sales, says Fitch Ratings. Funding assistance by authorities since late 2023 has also been hampered by a focus on the project level, rather than developers’ central operations, while state-backed developers are also struggling after several defaults and reports of difficulties in serving maturing debt.

Local governments in almost all of China’s cities have submitted thousands of whitelisted projects, largely from non-state-owned developers, requesting that banks consider granting loans, as guided by the government’s Coordination Mechanism for Urban Property Financing. The mechanism requires local authorities to provide detailed project information to banks to help them better evaluate projects and offer accelerated paperwork. About 6,000 projects have been submitted and over CNY200 billion loans granted as of 28 February 2024.