In the land where young people are simply giving up on work, charity and society as the only form of protest still available to them, police have been videoed shoving state media away from the scene of an explosion in Hebei, thereby “aiding” their journalistic comrades to maintain the national policy of “telling China’s story well.”
That drew a stunning and highly unexpected statement from the Chinese Communist Party’s All-China Journalists Association, which criticized the police for interrupting broadcasts and affirmed both the right to report and the importance of doing so. It was customarily removed from the association’s website before long, according to The Guardian.
The incident followed last week’s Nikkei Asia observation of female journalists being “tackled to the floor” by security when trying to ask questions at a press conference for the heads of China’s macroeconomic management body on the sidelines of the Second Plenary Session of the 14th National People’s Congress held in Beijing from March 5 to March 11, 2024.
This was about as close to the action as reporters could get after China’s leadership took yet more steps to minimize accountability by canceling an annual National People’s Congress news conference with the country’s premier, a 30-year tradition. On March 11, this was accompanied by revisions to the State Organic Law that made the State Council, a body that is headed by the premier, even more subordinate to the Chinese Communist Party. It must now follow Xi Jinping Thought, i.e. the ideological wisdom of China’s dictatorial president.
The Chinese Communist Party can only function with strict information control for obvious reasons: Otherwise, somebody might, for example, ask into anomalies like why China’s prosecutor-general, Ying Yong (應勇), reported to the National People’s Congress a huge jump in the number of arrests, particularly for “national security” crimes, if the country is truly the low-crime society that it claims to be.
Such a question could then be followed up by inquiring what becomes of people once they enter the penal system, drawing on matters like the accumulation of suspicious deaths of women from the same spiritual group in the same Heilongjiang prison. Bitter Winter reports more than thirty fatalities in total and five since the beginning of 2023, attributing the latest two to the denial of medical care and torture.
Torture and blocked access to treatment are also the alleged reasons for the death of the human rights lawyer Cao Shunli (曹顺利) on March 14, 2014, a date that was commemorated on its tenth anniversary with a statement by 31 organizations including PEN International, Safeguard Defenders and the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders. It urges “the international community to take meaningful steps to ensure accountability for ‘deadly reprisals’ against [her].”
Six months after Xi Jinping was established as China’s leader in March 2013, Cao was detained by Chinese authorities while attempting to travel to Geneva to observe the second Universal Periodic Review of China’s human rights under the United Nations Human Rights Council and to take part in a related civil society event. She never saw freedom again.
Marking the date of her passing, too, 14 specialist experts for the U.N. called out Beijing for a decade of failure to deliver an impartial investigation into why she died. They noted that the participation of civil society from China in U.N. human rights mechanisms has reached a historic low and stated, “Rather than using Cao Shunli’s death as a wake-up call and a moment to reform engagement with civil society, Chinese authorities have regrettably intensified their persecution of human rights defenders.”
Another strong statement emerged from Volker Turk, the current United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who, during a global update to the U.N. human rights council, directly challenged the Chinese government to accompany poverty alleviation with “reforms to align relevant laws and policies with international human rights standards.”
He also requested that China amend its notorious practice of prosecuting people for the vague offense of “picking quarrels and making trouble” (尋釁滋事罪) and demanded implementation of recommendations from his and other human rights bodies to end legislation and actions “that violate fundamental rights, including in the Xinjiang and Tibet regions.”
The U.N. has been roundly criticized in recent years for its failure to achieve much in China other than more effective methods of smothering dissent, in part because it seems institutionally compromised by the Chinese Communist Party regime. Turk’s comments do at least acknowledge that crimes are happening, but more than just words are required for change to be expected.
How this might look was described by the Tibet Policy Institute in Dharamshala, which held a panel discussion to back up last month’s comparatively large protests by Tibetans against dam construction in Dege County, a location presently administered as part of Sichuan under Beijing rule. Arrests in relation to the protest are ongoing amid an internet blackout as authorities comb through locals’ previous social media activities, according to Radio Free Asia.
One panelist at the Tibet Policy Institute event called on countries downstream of the dam to confront China over its potential negative socio-economic consequences, while a ten-point call to action released at the end of the discussion asks international businesses to cease working together with Chinese companies that undertake environmentally destructive activities in Tibet and for the ongoing exploitation of Tibetan resources to be understood through the prism of colonialism.
To put it mildly, Beijing dislikes these kinds of conferences and is desperate to destroy any collective opposition to its behavior. A starting point for doing so is information-gathering on diaspora communities, and, this month, it is suspected of being behind the infiltration of the website for an event that was held in Bodhgaya, India related to the Monlam Festival in the Tibetan Buddhism calendar.
The website was weaponized to deliver malware to IP addresses within certain ranges, including those from Australia, Hong Kong, India, Taiwan, the United States and, specifically, the Georgia Institute of Technology in the latter, according to ESET, a Slovakian cybersecurity company. ESET also revealed that a translation tool for the Tibetan language provided by an Indian company has been “trojanized” and the Tibet Post news website nefariously utilized to host “malicious payloads.” It attributed the attacks to a hacking group known as Evasive Panda that is believed to be connected to the Chinese state.
By compromising personal computers and other devices of individuals in communities it wishes to break apart or control, Beijing can exert pressure beyond its borders, and its ability to do so is potentially being cemented by a series of deals with other countries to allow its police to operate on the ground under their jurisdictions. Fiji has this month decided to continue police exchanges with China following a government review. Hungary, a NATO and European Union member, meanwhile became the latest country to agree to the deployment of Chinese officers on its soil this month, placing the nearly 20,000 people of Chinese descent who live in the country at greater risk.
Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban is, of course, both one of Russia President Vladimir Putin’s staunchest allies in Europe and widely believed to be directing his country back towards authoritarianism. He therefore looks an excellent candidate for an emerging, China-centered, co-supporting geopolitical family, whose policies and activities constitute the most serious challenge to global human rights of the present era.
Potentially adding to these, the Central Asian countries Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have been identified this month by the Wall Street Journal as suspected conduits through which goods manufactured in China that can be used in the war against Ukraine are being supplied to Russia. Some of these are produced by Western firms operating factories in the Middle Kingdom, who say that their products are being rerouted without their consent. Tens of thousands of civilians alone have been killed or maimed in Ukraine to date.
Famously, North Korea is also supplying the Russian war effort, and China has now been implicated in an investigation by Nikkei Asia for conducting joint research with Pyongyang scientists that may enable them to develop new military technologies, including missiles, in violation of U.N. sanctions. From 110 research papers that could be breaking sanctions involving North Korean authors on the Scopus publishing database, Nikkei discovered that 85% were co-written with figures from Chinese research institutes. More than half of these were funded one way or another by the Chinese government.
This follows last month’s expose in The New Yorker that the city of Dandong in China’s northeast is a hotspot of human rights abuse against North Korean citizens, who are being shipped across the border to work in factories. Those interviewed for the article allege routine conditions of sexual assault and coercion and have large portions of their salaries redirected to the Pyongyang government, from whence it no doubt contributes to missile research, too.
As it became known to local Chinese authorities that a journalistic investigation was taking place, they reportedly released a threatening announcement that anybody caught speaking to foreign media was at risk of adding to the earlier mentioned national security arrest statistics under “anti-espionage” laws. Based on the National People’s Congress session, Human Rights in China, an organization dedicated to improving conditions for all peoples under Chinese Communist Party rule, has warned that the scope of national security offenses is set to expand even further later this year.
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