Beijing’s global reputation as a green energy leader collides with brutal realities in Tibet. Volkswagen has a head-on smash with the truth about forced labor in East Turkestan (Xinjiang). Hackers-for-hire are exposed. And Chinese film-makers risk everything for their art
In the land where state media quotes the U.N. Development Program to claim that its green transition is inspiring the world, a large protest starting on February 14 against hydroelectric dam construction in Eastern Tibet has resulted in between 100 and 1,000 arrests and reported hospitalizations due to beatings in custody.
As per Radio Free Asia, which has cited sources inside Tibet and provided video footage of events, hundreds of Tibetan monks and villagers overrode their fear of the most tech-empowered repressive regime the world has ever seen to beg for their homes and monasteries, from which they are being forcibly removed in order to make way for the Gangtuo Dam on the Drichu (Jinsha) River.
Part of a multi-tier mega-project, Gangtuo will contribute to inevitable environmental destruction at a major hotspot of fish diversity while progressing the break-up of the Tibetan people: Two villages and six monasteries will be submerged, the latter including Wonto, which is home to murals that are at least 600 years old.
Around the world, Tibetan communities and human rights organizations backed up the protest. They, too, risked dangers of their own as highlighted in a new report from the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD), which focuses on China’s extraterritorial attempts to silence dissenting diaspora voices.
Compiling insights from 84 first-hand testimonies of individuals in at least ten countries, the report points out the role of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department in infiltrating, cajoling, spying upon and punishing overseas Tibetans via embassies, business groups, friendship associations and supposed welfare organizations. These, it explains, are supplemented by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Federation, which has been established at all levels of government in China to “to monitor and exert pressure” on exiles whose families remain in Tibet.
The aim is to “sever connections between Tibetans in exile and their relatives in Tibet by making communication technically impossible or dangerous,” to “sabotage diaspora networks” and to force exiled Tibetans into “renouncing their activism.” Methods include blackmail and the deprivation of livelihoods. Relatedly, TCHRD released a letter to bodies including the United Nations contesting the situation for Tibetan refugees in Nepal, which it has particularized as “repression second only to Tibet under Chinese occupation.”
The perils of the information interface between those inside and outside of Beijing’s control was brought sharply into focus also by two overseas Chinese bloggers who provide unfiltered news of happenings behind the Great Firewall: Wang Zhi’an (王志安) and Li Ying (李穎). Li warned the followers of his X account, @whyyoutouzhele, that China’s public security bureau was going through his follower list, identifying individuals and hauling them in for interrogation. Approximately 200,000 people disconnected from his account in the wake of the announcement. Wang had a similar message.
More light was cast on how Beijing operates cross-border authoritarianism also by an apparent leak of 500 documents from a company in the Middle Kingdom known as I-Soon (上海安洵). These unveil a system by which firms offer hackers-for-hire services to the Chinese state, which uses them to target not only entities like the U.K. government, NATO and the European Union, but also activists and human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, often by breaking into social media and email accounts to monitor communications. The purpose is largely data harvesting, but also to identify individuals who would otherwise be anonymous.
Among other activities, I-Soon has been bidding for contracts in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) to support the state persecution of Turkic peoples under the euphemism of “counter-terrorism.” The leaked documents that reveal its entwinement with Chinese Communist Party crimes have, however, been taken down by GitHub, where they originally appeared, ostensibly because of a terms of service violation related to doxing and invasion of privacy. Intelligence webzine SpyTalk speculates that the removal may have more to do with GitHub’s 2018 acquisition by Microsoft, which has extensive operations in China.
A clearer case for the complicity of Western companies in the violent colonial domination and possible strategic erasure of East Turkestan’s local population, however, can be made with the automotive manufacturer Volkswagen. Just weeks after it attempted to prove that its supply chains in the region were clean with a contentious audit, the firm has now been hit with allegations from the researcher Adrian Zenz and German media Handelsblatt that its test track there was constructed with forced labor.
The allegations are based upon reports from both Chinese media and the China Railway Engineering Corporation, which worked together with a Volkswagen joint venture on the Xinjiang Test Track Project. According to such sources, the project took in “surplus” Uyghur workers at the peak time when hundreds of thousands of such people were being involuntarily interred in government camps. It seemingly involved military-style drilling, indoctrination and compelled assimilation of Turkic children to Han culture.
Reeling from these revelations, Volkswagen then suffered further stains on its name: News broke that thousands of its cars under the Audi, Bentley and Porsche brands were impounded by U.S. authorities on the grounds that one of their subcomponents had also been made in East Turkestan, from which items cannot be imported to the world’s largest economy unless it can be satisfactorily demonstrated that the workers who produced them were doing so of their own free volition.
Volkswagen is now discussing a battered and belated East Turkestan exit, which looks to be a wise move given other Zenz research also released this month that draws upon Chinese policy and state planning documents to conclude that “coercive Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) employment and poverty alleviation policies are to continue at least through 2025.”
If Volkswagen finally does leave, it will join the U.S. academic publisher Wiley in seeking to limit the reputational damage from being implicated in the Chinese government’s degrading mistreatment of those under its rule. This month, Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, a journal under Wiley’s roof, retracted 18 papers over concerns that the DNA samples forming the basis for their research could not have been obtained under conditions of free and informed consent. Many were collected from Uyghurs and Tibetans, and some of the researchers were affiliated with public security authorities, reports The Guardian.
Name-blackening by virtue of operations under the Chinese Communist Party’s sphere of influence has also afflicted the sci-fi writers’ 2023 Hugo Awards, which had already been rocked by controversy since nomination statistics were published last month that contained strange and unexplained disqualifications for certain writers.
Now, emails leaked from the Hugo Awards’ Western administration team have confirmed that it engaged in a process of compiling dossier-like information on authors and earmarked those whose content contained mentions of “Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, negatives of China” for possible ineligibility. The censorship resulted from the decision to host the 81st World Science Fiction Convention in Chengdu last October, where the awards were presented. Chengdu was selected amid voting uncertainties in 2021.
Others subjected to deletion or detention as a result of Beijing’s inability to accept almost any form of criticism or information flow to the outside world have included the film-makers Chen Pinlin (陳品霖) and Wang Xiaoshuai (王小帥) as well as a freelance administrator named Emily Chen. The latter was briefly contracted by an American logistics firm named Safe Ports before disappearing into China’s labyrinthine prison system on spying charges for little discernible reason other than helping the company find an office.
Meanwhile, since uploading to YouTube a documentary known in English as “Not the Foreign Force” about 2022’s “White Paper Revolution,” during which Chinese citizens rose up against and ultimately overturned their country’s “Zero COVID” policy, Chen Pinlin has been held under arrest. He was charged with the notorious and bizarre crime of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” (尋扣滋事罪) on February 18, 2024, and it is unlikely that he will be seen again for years.
Wang is at risk of a similar fate after bravely consenting to screen his movie “Above the Dust” at the Berlin Film Festival despite not having received prior approval from China’s National Film Bureau, a decision that is illegal under Chinese law. Although the movie received 50 edits over a period of 15 months, censors have still not allowed its release, prompting Wang to take matters into his own hands. A central theme of Above the Dust is Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, which appears to have been portrayed unfavorably.
Quoted by Variety, Wang stated that he wishes to use his films “to advocate for freedom of expression” and confided to feeling a mixture of uncertainty about the future and disappointment that a big moment in his career has been tarnished. “I should be happy that the film can make its world premiere somewhere in Berlin,” he said. “But I have to face pressure first, not knowing exactly what will happen later.”
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