China

Taiwanese businessman Morrison Lee spent almost four years locked up or under an exit ban in China, detained only because he had postcards deemed sensitive and a few publicly-taken shots of military vehicles on his phone.

Lee is one of many overseas victims of China’s secret RSDL jail system. Under what is called 'Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location', police can hold victims incommunicado without sunlight, exercise, or access to a lawyer for six months. Well-known RSDL victims include the Canadian Michaels (Kovrig and Spavor), Australian journalist Cheng Lei, and countless Chinese human rights lawyers.

Chinese shipments to Russia rose 17% to $8.69 billion in October from a year earlier. Although the pace of growth slowed from the 21% gain in September, it was in contrast to a 6.4% decline in China’s overall exports last month.

Chinese asylum-seekers say they are seeking to escape an increasingly repressive political climate and bleak economic prospects.

"The unemployment rate [in China] is very high. People cannot find work,” said Xi Yan, a Chinese writer. “For small business owners, they cannot sustain their businesses.”

It is the first quarterly shortfall since China's foreign exchange regulator began compiling the data in 1998, which could be linked to the impact of "de-risking" by Western countries from China, as well as China's interest rate disadvantage. "With interest rates in China 'lower for longer' while interest rates outside of China 'higher for longer', capital outflow pressures are likely to persist," analysts say.

Julian Evans-Pritchard, head of China economics at Capital Economics, said the unusually-large interest rate gap "has led firms to remit their retained earnings out of the country".

He also thinks that in the mid-term the "increasing geopolitical tensions will hamper China's ability to attract Foreign Direct Investments" as global companies will "favour emerging markets that are more friendly to the West."

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/5368293

Original link: https://thechinaproject.com/2023/11/06/china-owned-companies-reckon-with-u-s-state-national-land-purchase-bans/

Japan has had a longstanding territorial dispute with China over islands in the East China Sea. There has been a series of tense confrontations, meanwhile, between Chinese and Philippine coast guard and navy ships in the disputed South China Sea.

Two weeks ago, China’s ships separately blocked then hit a Philippine coast guard vessel and a supply boat near the disputed Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea. Japan immediately expressed its strong support to the Philippines.

High childcare costs and having to stop their careers have put many women off having more children or any at all. Gender discrimination and traditional stereotypes of women caring for the children are still widespread throughout the country.

Authorities have in recent months increased rhetoric on sharing the duty of child rearing but paternity leave is still limited in most provinces.

Beijing has faced multiple accusations of using forced labour practices in solar panel manufacturing. Concerns have focused particularly on the Xinjiang region, where the Chinese government has committed “serious human rights violations” against the Uyghur population, according to a UN report.

Xinjiang is the source of up to two-fifths of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon, a key raw material in the solar panel supply chain.

Online feminism has a short but turbulent history in China, its intensity ebbing and flowing alongside the country’s ever-shifting red lines of permissible speech. Young women are largely unaware of earlier waves of activism — long since erased by government censorship — but not unaffected.

Lü Pin, a prominent feminist activist, remembers the golden age of Chinese social media. Weibo launched in 2009, and grew to 500 million members within four years — in part because foreign competitors like Facebook and Twitter were banned in China.

The tide turned in 2015, during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first term. That March, Beijing police detained five feminist activists who had been handing out stickers against sexual harassment on public transport. The month-long detention of the Feminist Five, as they became known, was a landmark event. “It meant organized feminist events and groups are not welcomed by the government,” Lü told Rest of World. She was in the U.S. when the five were taken into custody, and decided to stay there.

More restrictions followed. In 2016, a new law gave the security apparatus control over the funding and activities of NGOs, causing the country’s most prominent women’s rights organization to close. Police increasingly asked feminist activists to come “drink tea,” a euphemism for being interrogated.

China's president urged the All China Women’s Federation — a government-led organization — to “actively cultivate a new marriage and childbirth culture, strengthen guidance of young people’s views on marriage, parenthood and family, as well as promote policies to support childbirt," according to state broadcaster CCTV.

During hus China visit, Gavin Newsom just handed China's Xi a big propaganda victory, while also trading away moral credibility for empty promises. When asked about human rights, Newsom had no good answer, nor even a coherent sentence, except to say that he cares about other things more — namely, climate change.

But what makes it truly embarrassing is that China’s commitments on climate change are just as illusory and fraudulent as its commitment to human rights.

China is putting hundreds of new coal-fired power plants online, permitting additional new ones each week. It is replacing all of the carbon emissions that California has ever taken offline, and then some. Despite China’s pledges on the international stage, Xi himself has stated he has no intention of following Newsom, Biden or anyone else down the West’s zero-carbon rabbit hole.

Authorities in China carried out special investigations of over 3,000 meteorological stations across more than 20 provinces, “among which hundreds of sites had been found transmitting meteorological data to overseas in real time,” the agency said on social media. More than 10 meteorological agents with foreign links were also investigated in the nationwide inspection. According to the statement, some projects were “directly funded by foreign governments."

The tighter reins on data have sent chills through the international business community, as overseas firms remain wary of getting caught in the regulatory crosshairs despite Beijing’s efforts to assure that it is “open” to foreign businesses.

Last month, Hiroshi Nishiyama, a Japanese executive of the pharmaceutical company Astellas Pharma, was formally charged in China on allegations of espionage. He had been detained in Beijing by Chinese authorities in March, a move that had shocked the Japanese business community and damaged ties between the two Asian neighbors.

A week earlier, Australian journalist Chéng Lěi, a former news anchor at Chinese state media television channel CGTN, was released after more than three years of imprisonment in China on national security charges.

Another Australian citizen, Yáng Héngjūn, remains behind bars since January 2019 on vague espionage charges after a closed-door trial. His family released a letter pleading with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to negotiate with Beijing for his release.

Yuen Ching-ting, a 23-year-old student, was publishing 'online speech with seditious intent in relation' to a number of social media posts, made from September 2018 to March 2023.

Yuen was arrested in March after returning to Hong Kong from Japan, where she was studying. Local media outlets reported that she was in the city to change her Hong Kong identity card. She was initially arrested on suspicion of inciting secession, a crime under the national security law.

Her passport was confiscated and she was unable to return to Japan to continue her studies.

Since winning the May 2022 elections, the Albanese government has focused on “stabilizing” Australia’s relationship with China. This visit comes after several years of significant trade disputes and sanctions between the two countries. It also comes amidst deepening abuses by the Chinese government in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, and throughout the mainland, as well as growing activity to intimidate dissent abroad, the human rights organization says.

Plainclothes and uniformed police lined the roadway leading to the funeral home, blocking traffic and telling people to move along while watching for the presence of unofficial or foreign media.

Public tributes to Li have been strictly controlled as the government seeks to prevent a mass outpouring of grief that it regards as a possible trigger for social unrest.

But despite censorship targeting “overly effusive” comments and gatherings, in Li’s home city of Hefei, in Anhui province, hundreds of mourners laid flowers for one of their most significant sons over the weekend.

If the gossip is correct, Chinese citizens no longer have to fear setting out to celebrate the Year of the Dragon with their families but accidentally deposing their beloved head of state instead, although deletion of the holiday may well be more to do with asserting the Chinese Communist Party’s preeminence over tradition.

China is the world's biggest EV market but largely relies on other countries to supply the lithium used in the batteries that power low-carbon vehicles. That is set to change as Beijing begins to exploit vast deposits on the Tibetan plateau—around 85 percent of the country's total lithium reserves.

But this "white gold rush" has led to Chinese miners polluting the local environment with "quick, cheap and dirty" extraction and processing techniques, according to the report by Turquoise Roof, a network of Tibetan researchers.

The group used satellite data and public resources to chart the impact of lithium mining in culturally Tibetan areas and its links to carmakers, including Elon Musk's Tesla and its Chinese competitor BYD.

Japan is the first country in the Asia-Pacific region to publicly condemn and acknowledge the ongoing atrocities against Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic groups. Since 2019, during the second Abe administration, Japan has been the only non-Western country to sign a joint statement condemning the Uyghur Genocide at the United Nations every year.

The current Kishida administration has prioritized human rights diplomacy, including a response to the Uyghur Genocide in its election manifesto and the establishment of a Prime Minister’s Adviser on International Human Rights Issues.

Here is the whole report: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/pacific-aid-map-2023-key-findings-report

TLDR:

China’s financing in the Pacific region has gone from "loud and brash" to a self-styled strategy of "small and beautiful", ushering in a new trend of downsized, more politically targeted development loans, the Australian Lowy Institute says in a report.

The annual 'Pacific Aid Map' — launched by the Lowy Institute in 2018 — is an analytical tool designed to improve aid and development effectiveness in the Pacific Islands region. It seeks to do this by enhancing the transparency of Official Development Finance (ODF) flows to Pacific Island states.

China’s total ODF engagement fell to $241m in 2021, below its pre-pandemic historical average of $285m a year. The Lowy Institute said Beijing’s financing had become “more strategically targeted at the most China-friendly Pacific Island states”.

The Lowy Institute continues saying that China’s decreasing engagement “has not signalled a wholesale departure from the region, but rather a strategic shift to reduce risk, cement political ties, and enhance capital returns”.

Since the onset of the pandemic, there has been surprisingly little new Chinese financing in the region. China's total development finance disbursements fell to just $241 million in 2021, below its pre-pandemic historical average of $285 million per year. This year, Beijing’s Official Development Finance commitments were a quarter that of its historical average," according to the Lowy Institute.

The Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility is reshaping regional development financing, with infrastructure set to increasingly eclipse health and education as major donor priorities.

Australia has become the leading source of loans. While providing much needed development support, this comes at a time of elevated debt sustainability risks in the Pacific.

Climate development financing has grown steadily but remains well below that needed, especially for adaptation. Japan leads the way with the greatest focus on climate projects.

New data for this edition show donors have collectively been less focused on gender equality than in other regions but this is set to change given ambitious Australian targets.

Rayhan Asat is one of the most vocal advocates today for the Uyghur people, her people, whose homeland in northwestern China is the scene of the Communist Party’s ongoing commission of what the United Nations says may be “crimes against humanity,” and what U.S. President Joseph Biden called a “genocide.” Among the roughly 1 million Turkic peoples detained, imprisoned, and forced into labor there — most of them Muslims — is Asat’s younger brother.