In the land where human pain counts for so little that even natural disasters are pretexts for imperialist propaganda and the venting of xenophobic hate, a state representative at the United Nations attempted to re-channel sympathy for Taiwan towards Beijing in the aftermath of a deadly earthquake, while nationalists stomped around the internet trolling those who expressed concern for Japan following strong tremors there a day later.
In the latter case, the nationalists were, for once, left red-faced (no pun intended) after inadvertently dissing Mao Zedong in the process, although they still had their successes elsewhere by stoking hatred towards “foreign” religions in the run-up to Tomb-Sweeping Day (清明節), a traditional Chinese festival during which people clean the graves of their ancestors and make offerings to them.
This year — and not for the first time — several local authorities attempted to clamp down on the practice of burning paper money and other representations of items that people would like to send to their loved ones in the afterlife during the festival.
Premised as an anti-superstition drive, the bans on offerings are thought to result from fears that honoring the dead could take a political turn this year due to both the death toll from COVID-19 and last year’s passing of former China premier, Li Keqiang (李克強), who is seen by many citizens as a symbol of what their country could have been if its current president Xi Jinping was not in charge. Flowers, it seems, could not be delivered to Li’s former home, while state security was strategically placed to prevent public mourning for him.
Nonetheless, per Bitter Winter, some authorities were not able to prevent people sending gifts to the departed, due in part to the aforementioned activities of the nationalists on social media, who railed against what they regard as the state’s “leniency” apropos outsider religions like Islam and Christianity in contrast to native traditions.
The Chinese Communist Party supported this view in more ways than one. Perhaps recognizing that it was fighting a battle it might not win on this occasion, state-backed media took the position that burning spirit money was not in fact a superstition, which lessened pressure on adherents of the custom. However, over in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) and among the Hui of Yunnan, the party was simultaneously using various means to discourage the religious observance of Ramadan.
Reported by The Economist, in East Turkestan, this took the form of making it “risky to be caught fasting” against a backdrop of long-term iconoclasm, mass detainments and elimination of local practices such as iftar suppers, which are designated by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage elsewhere in the world.
Contextualizing what “risk” means in real terms for fasters, the Xinjiang Victims Database confirmed yet more prison facilities in the region, where countless thousands of Turkic Muslims are being transferred from involuntary “re-education” camps to labor postings or the formal penal system, often essentially for nothing more than having been deemed too religious. Some do not return alive from their detainment.
Written on location, The Economist piece described a journalistic atmosphere in which people were afraid to speak openly and the reporter himself was trailed by plainclothes agents both on foot and in vehicles. By contrast, Chinese media rolled out a series of woodenly predictable quotes from the ambassadors of Iran, South Africa, Syria and Turkey, all of whom engaged in Beijing’s pretense that China-ruled East Turkestan is a fairytale land of smooth economic development, where nothing untoward would ever be allowed to happen to followers of Islam.
The intersection of concealment, intimidation and rights abuses was further emphasized by the experiences of Vicky Xu (許秀中), an Australian citizen who, in 2020, helped to uncover the mass coercive placement of Turkic peoples into Chinese factories. In an article for The Saturday Paper on April 6, she revealed how she now has to constantly move home, vary her routes and even avoid walking at a constant pace in order to reduce the likelihood of a Beijing revenge attack against her on Australian soil as a result of her work.
Both Xu and David Rennie, the writer for The Economist, are therefore in line with the 81% of foreign journalists who have encountered harassment, interference or violence while conducting their work in China, according to a survey by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China. That is marginally less than the 99% who say that conditions in the country “rarely or never” meet international reporting standards. Vital Chinese staff at foreign media are at particular risk.
East Turkestan was the region associated with the most restrictive environment, although the Russian border area and South (Inner) Mongolia have also become sensitive. In examples from the latter, one journalist stated that interviewees “were literally dragged away” by plainclothes figures, while another detailed how similarly unidentified individuals would warn members of the public off from speaking before interviews even began. At Poyang Lake in Jiujiang, reporters looking for information about the Yangtze River dolphin were monitored and tracked by both vehicle and drone.
The dolphin has become a no-go topic, because it has almost certainly gone extinct in what the Cetacean Specialist Group for the International Union for Conservation of Nature has called a “national tragedy for China and an international disgrace.” It is not the only environmental topic where issues of human rights and species persistence have converged in the past couple of weeks, though.
The co-author of a paper published this month in the journal Nature has remarked that illegal road construction, a leading factor in the expansion of further law-breaking activity such as logging, poaching and even the murder of indigenous peoples, is “actively encouraged” by China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This echoes warnings from the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights about the impact of the BRI and other international infrastructure initiatives in 2017.
Meanwhile, an alert on the condition of South China Sea fisheries has been raised by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) and China Ocean Institute, who warn that a conservative estimate of 21,183 acres of coral reefs have been razed in the South China Sea as a result of both the clam-raiding activities of Chinese fishing vessels and the creation of artificial islands to project Beijing’s self-claimed sovereignty over far-flung areas of ocean. This far outstrips the impact of other countries.
Since the reefs are the nurseries for many marine species, the habitat loss threatens to impact populations of edible fish that contribute 12% to total global catch, hence constituting a potential food security issue. This concurs with a report by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), also released this month, which concludes that the activities of China’s distant water fleet “pose a serious threat to the sustainability of global fisheries and the wellbeing of fishers, and the millions of people who rely on the ocean for their livelihoods.”
It further suggests that China’s port investments and political influence in the southwest Indian Ocean is enabling rife illegal fishing and human rights abuses, often on board vessels controlled by enterprises that are wholly or partially under the ownership of the Chinese state. These include “crews suffering from physical violence, abusive working and living conditions, intimidation and threats.” In what sounds very much like neo-colonial resource extraction, benefits are “enjoyed rarely, if at all, by coastal communities, whose livelihoods are often undermined directly and indirectly as a result of the illegal and unsustainable nature of the Chinese [distant water fleet]’s operations.”
Even when they occur on land in China, environmental battles are extremely dangerous to fight as highlighted by the one-year anniversary of the detention of human rights lawyer Yu Wensheng (余文生) and his activist wife Xu Yan (許艶). Yu sued the governments of Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei over air pollution in 2016. He has also defended mainland supporters of Hong Kong democracy and likeminded lawyers.
Forthwith, he was sentenced to prison from 2018 to 2022 and then taken away by authorities again in 2023 along with Xu, who has campaigned for the release of human rights defenders. In the past year since their detainment, their 19-year-old son has twice attempted suicide, and several human rights groups have published a letter this month calling for their release.
Given that these are the grim prospects for anybody who steps up to challenge government-endorsed norms in present-day China, the onus falls on people outside the country to campaign for change, which is one motivation for Beijing’s electoral manipulations overseas.
In Canada, during a federal inquiry in the past couple of weeks, Beijing has been accused of browbeating Chinese high school students that study in the country, falsifying documents and then bussing them in to vote in party elections for a liberal candidate named Han Dong (董晗鵬), whom it perceived to be pliant to its interests in a shoe-in seat. It has been aiming to engineer lame-duck ruling parties that cannot pass “anti-China” legislation due to their inability to overcome parliament, too.
Microsoft has also discovered “Chinese Communist Party-affiliated actors” performing reconnaissance on the issues that divide Americans ahead of the U.S. elections later this year; deploying artificial intelligence to stoke reactions, swing opinions or disseminate fake news; and stepping up influence operation attacks on several targets, including South Pacific Islands and — surprise, surprise — the South China Sea.
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