China

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17714578

Archived version

Sweden's foreign minister said Monday that China had denied a request for prosecutors to conduct an investigation on a Chinese ship linked to two severed Baltic Sea cables despite Beijing pledging "cooperation" with regional authorities.

Sections of two telecom cables were cut on November 17 and 18 in Swedish territorial waters. Suspicions have been directed at the Yi Peng 3, which according to ship tracking sites had sailed over the cables around the time they were cut.

[...]

"China is willing to maintain communication and cooperation with the countries involved to advance the follow-up handling of the incident," [spokeswoman Mao Ning] said.

Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard also noted Monday that Swedish prosecutors had not been allowed to conduct an investigation.

"Swedish police have been on board as observers in connection with the Chinese investigation... At the same time, I note that China has not heeded our request for the prosecutor to conduct an investigation on board," Stenergard said in a statement to AFP.

[...]

Sweden's prosecutor Henrik Soderman [said] that no measures had been taken on board the ship as part of the Swedish judicial probe, including questioning crew members or technical investigations.

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"Our request that Swedish prosecutors, together with the police and others, be allowed to take certain investigative measures within the framework of the investigation on board remains. We have been clear with China on this," Stenergard said.

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European officials have said they suspect sabotage linked to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

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Early on November 17, the Arelion cable running from the Swedish island of Gotland to Lithuania was damaged.

The next day, the C-Lion 1 submarine cable connecting Helsinki and the German port of Rostock was cut south of Sweden's Oland island, around 700 kilometres (435 miles) from Helsinki.

Tensions have mounted around the Baltic Sea since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

[...]

In October 2023, an undersea gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia was shut down after it was damaged by the anchor of a Chinese cargo ship.

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cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17711104

Archived link

Serbia has been engulfed in protests for over six weeks as students and citizens demand accountability following the fatal collapse of a railway station canopy in Novi Sad, which claimed 15 lives on November 1. Demonstrators have accused President Aleksandar Vucic’s administration of corruption and negligence, particularly in its dealings with Chinese contractors under Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The tragedy has turned public attention toward the opaque contracts and alleged nepotism tied to infrastructure projects involving Chinese firms, further intensifying scrutiny of Serbia’s growing relationship with China. The incident is not only a domestic crisis but also a potential blemish on China’s ambitious BRI.

Fatal Canopy Collapse Sparks Nationwide Protests

The canopy collapse occurred during a renovation of the Novi Sad railway station, part of a Chinese-led project to modernize Serbia’s railway infrastructure. The project involved China Railway International Co. (CRIC) and China Communications Construction Co. (CCCC), both of which denied direct involvement in constructing the canopy. Despite these claims, footage on social media suggests the collapse was caused by recently installed heavy glass.

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President Vucic dismissed the protests as being fueled by foreign intelligence agencies aiming to destabilize his government. However, under mounting pressure, he agreed to meet some of the protesters’ demands. Transparency Serbia, a watchdog organization, criticized the government’s response, highlighting gaps in the documentation released, including the absence of the 2018 contract signed with the Chinese firms.

[...]

The Novi Sad railway renovation forms part of a broader agreement between Serbia and China under the BRI. These BRI agreements often include confidentiality clauses, which critics argue shield corrupt practices. The contracts are rarely open to competitive bidding, enabling subcontracts to be awarded to firms linked to Serbia’s ruling party.

While CRIC and CCCC maintain they did not directly construct the canopy, legal experts argue that as umbrella contractors, they are responsible for the performance of their subcontractors. This raises broader concerns about the quality and safety of BRI projects, particularly those involving local subcontractors.

[...]

Serbia’s strategic location as a bridge between Europe and Asia has made it a linchpin of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s flagship BRI. Chinese investments in Serbia have surged, with $6.4 billion in manufacturing foreign direct investments recorded in 2023 alone. In October, the two countries signed a free trade agreement, further cementing their economic ties.

However, Western critics have long decried BRI projects for their lack of transparency and accountability. The Novi Sad disaster could amplify these criticisms, undermining China’s efforts to promote its infrastructure projects in Europe.

[...]

Archived link

Hundreds of Tibetans protesting against a Chinese dam were rounded up in a harsh crackdown earlier this year, with some beaten and seriously injured, the BBC has learnt from sources and verified footage.

Such protests are extremely rare in Tibet, which China has tightly controlled since it annexed the region in the 1950s. That they still happened highlights China's controversial push to build dams in what has long been a sensitive area.

Claims of the arrests and beatings began trickling out shortly after the events in February. In the following days authorities further tightened restrictions, making it difficult for anyone to verify the story, especially journalists who cannot freely travel to Tibet.

But the BBC has spent months tracking down Tibetan sources whose family and friends were detained and beaten. BBC Verify has also examined satellite imagery and verified leaked videos which show mass protests and monks begging the authorities for mercy.

The sources live outside of China and are not associated with activist groups. But they did not wish to be named for safety reasons.

[...]

The protests, followed by the crackdown, took place in a territory home to Tibetans in Sichuan province. For years, Chinese authorities have been planning to build the massive Gangtuo dam and hydropower plant, also known as Kamtok in Tibetan, in the valley straddling the Dege (Derge) and Jiangda (Jomda) counties.

Once built, the dam's reservoir would submerge an area that is culturally and religiously significant to Tibetans, and home to several villages and ancient monasteries containing sacred relics.

One of them, the 700-year-old Wangdui (Wontoe) Monastery, has particular historical value as its walls feature rare Buddhist murals.

The Gangtuo dam would also displace thousands of Tibetans. The BBC has seen what appears to be a public tender document for the relocation of 4,287 residents to make way for the dam.

[...]

China is no stranger to controversy when it comes to dams.

When the government constructed the world's biggest dam in the 90s - the Three Gorges on the Yangtze River - it saw protests and criticism over its handling of relocation and compensation for thousands of villagers.

In more recent years, as China has accelerated its pivot from coal to clean energy sources, such moves have become especially sensitive in Tibetan territories.

Beijing has been eyeing the steep valleys and mighty rivers here, in the rural west, to build mega-dams and hydropower stations that can sustain China's electricity-hungry eastern metropolises. President Xi Jinping has personally pushed for this, a policy called "xidiandongsong", or "sending western electricity eastwards".

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The Chinese government has long been accused of violating Tibetans' rights. Activists say the dams are the latest example of Beijing's exploitation of Tibetans and their land.

"What we are seeing is the accelerated destruction of Tibetan religious, cultural and linguistic heritage," said Tenzin Choekyi, a researcher with rights group Tibet Watch. "This is the 'high-quality development' and 'ecological civilisation' that the Chinese government is implementing in Tibet."

One key issue is China's relocation policy that evicts Tibetans from their homes to make way for development - it is what drove the protests by villagers and monks living near the Gangtuo dam. More than 930,000 rural Tibetans are estimated to have been relocated since 2000, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

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Multiple Tibetan rights groups [...] argue that any large-scale development in Tibetan territory, including dams such as Gangtuo, should be halted.

They have staged protests overseas and called for an international moratorium, arguing that companies participating in such projects would be "allowing the Chinese government to profit from the occupation and oppression of Tibetans".

[...]

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17700924

Archived version

The FBI has held classified briefings warning a handful of U.S. lawmakers that the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] is working to create fake stories to portray them in a negative light because of their hawkish views of Beijing and support for Taiwan, two U.S. officials familiar with the briefing said.

The U.S. officials, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the briefings, said that one of the false stories being concocted by the CCP, cited by FBI briefers, is that these lawmakers are espousing pro-Taiwan views because they were taking “bribes” from Taiwan.

“The CCP is trying to undermine congressional support for Taiwan’s democracy, to paint it as corrupt and not in the American public interest,” one of the two U.S. officials told NBC News. “It will not work.”

The officials said the briefings occurred in the fall.

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Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., the chairman of the select House committee on the CCP, had no comment about any specific plot by the CCP, but said it was no secret Beijing has been targeting U.S. officials and other Americans.

“The CCP will try to discredit our way of life, our freedoms and will use every means necessary,” Moolenaar told NBC News. “So you know, whether it’s hacking high-level officials’ communications, we can expect all these things.”

[...]

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17684922

Archived version

[Seventy-eight-year-old Shanghai historian] Xiao Gongqin is the architect of a theory of strongman politics known as “neo-authoritarianism.” In the nineteen-eighties, reformers with varying predilections for democracy and capitalism consolidated power in Communist states. Mikhail Gorbachev restructured the Soviet Union’s planned economy and loosened censorship. In China, Deng Xiaoping ushered in an era known as “reform and opening up,” though the reforms went only so far; he also evinced a limited tolerance for dissent, believing full democracy untenable. In this, he was supported by a group of Chinese thinkers led by Xiao and a prodigious Shanghai academic named Wang Huning. The word “authoritarian” is a rote pejorative in the West, synonymous with tyranny, but in the China of the late twentieth century Xiao and his allies managed to reframe it as a rational, pragmatic, East Asian-specific strategy for modernization. 

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Wang entered government in 1995 and shot through its ranks. He is now one of Xi Jinping’s closest advisers, the preëminent craftsman of Xi’s authoritarian ideology. Xiao, who coined the term “neo-authoritarianism” at a symposium in 1988, continued his advocacy as a professor in Shanghai, until he retired a decade ago. His argument that democracy was a “rootless politics,” alien to Chinese culture, remains part of a dominant strain of the country’s thought. Whether Xiao had influenced the Party’s direction or merely justified it is hard to say. But, in 1988, Deng was briefed on “neo-authoritarianism” by another Chinese leader, who described it as a system where a “political strongman stabilizes the situation and develops the economy.” Deng reportedly responded, “That is exactly what I stand for”; his only qualm was that it could use a rebrand. Later, as China’s economy took off, the world would accept more diplomatic names—“state capitalism” or, more vaguely, “the China model.”

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[Xiao is] a man quietly wrestling with the consequences of his ideas. Xiao has deeply conservative instincts—he counts Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott among his influences—but he was, and is, an incrementalist who dreams of China becoming a “constitutional democracy.” His was a theory of enlightened rule, wherein a dictatorship would vanquish the “radicals,” steward an economic miracle, and then, ideally, relinquish power to the people.

He had ready-made examples in places such as Taiwan, whose leader Chiang Ching-Kuo dismantled his own autocracy before his death, in 1988. Xiao has not disavowed authoritarianism [...] but as the immediate prospects for democracy have all but vanished from China, his politics have shifted from reaction to reflection. Authoritarianism, Xiao [said], “has its own problems.”

When Xi Jinping came to power, in 2012, he used his newfound authority to launch an anti-corruption drive, which Xiao endorsed. Since then, though, Xi has abolished Presidential term limits, decimated civil society, and intensified clampdowns on free expression. As a mainland Chinese scholar, Xiao was careful not to betray his views about the regime. He instead spoke to what he now sees as an unsolvable “dilemma” in his theory. A democrat risks welcoming dangerous ideas into a culture—ideas that, legitimate or not, could hasten a nation’s demise. Xiao turned to authoritarianism partly because he believed that China was careening in that direction. And yet “a neo-authoritarian leader must be wise,” Xiao told me, with a hint of exasperation. “And he may not be.” Once you pin your hopes on a justice-delivering strongman, in other words, he may take the righteous path, or he may not. The only certainty is that he has control./

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Xiao, who was born in 1946 and grew up under Maoism [and who is saying he is "not fundamentally opposed to Western democracy" as he personally feels "very envious of the United States and the West"], witnessed the worst excesses of this kind of armchair statecraft. When Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, in 1966, Xiao had recently graduated high school and was working in a factory. He hadn’t been able to enter university, likely for harboring “bourgeois” sympathies—including his passion for Western philosophy—and he allied himself with the Red Guards as a leader of a “rebel worker faction” at his machinery plant. But, as the revolution wore on, he himself was denounced as a “revisionist,” and he spent the next several years consigned to gruelling work at the factory.

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One is not born but becomes an authoritarian. [...] Xiao was inspired by Yan Fu, the reformist intellectual and translator of Adam Smith who, after living through China’s own republican experiment, decided that his people were “not capable of self-government.” And, in the U.S., one finds examples like Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who declared, in a 2009 essay, that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” [...] Over the years, Thiel’s shift toward the authoritarian right has coincided with the growing acceptance of his ideas in the mainstream. He is now one of the biggest funders of the conservative nationalist movement, a mentor to Vice-President-elect J. D. Vance, and a supporter of “neo-reactionary” figures like Curtis Yarvin, who admires the state-capitalist societies of Singapore and Deng Xiaoping’s China.

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“The problem with Xiao,” Joseph Fewsmith, a professor of Chinese politics at Boston University, [says], “is that he tackles the question of how countries get from autocracy to democracy, but he never explored how not to get stuck. Which is what happened.” When [...] asked ..] what a democracy in China might look like, he [Xiao] said that he hadn’t really thought about it. The proponent of a so-called “soft landing” for democracy did not, ultimately, spend much time designing a parachute.

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For most of his life, Xiao has claimed that the central danger to Chinese society was not the dictator but his liberal opponents. Whether Xiao was right we will never know. We cannot peer into the universe where Liu and his reformers won [literary critic Liu Xiaobo was a leading figure in tbe 1989 Tianamen Square protests who died of untreated liver cancer in 2017, after spending nearly a decade in prison], where they are alive and well, rather than silenced or dead. Ours is the world of strongmen, where decisions increasingly turn on the whims of a vanishing few. In China, the risk of Xiao’s theory has come to pass—the strongman changed tack. At his trial for “subversion of state power,” in 2009, Liu Xiaobo prepared a statement of warning to his political opponents. It remains just as relevant today as it was then. “An enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation,” Liu wrote. It will “destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a country’s advance toward freedom and democracy.”

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17668556

The People's Republic of China has a "magic weapon", according to its founding leader Mao Zedong and its current president Xi Jinping. It is called the United Front Work Department (UFWD) - and it is raising as much alarm in the West as Beijing's growing military arsenal.

Yang Tengbo, a prominent businessman who has been linked to Prince Andrew, is the latest overseas Chinese citizen to be scrutinised - and sanctioned - for his links to the UFWD.

The existence of the department is far from a secret. A decades-old and well-documented arm of the Chinese Communist Party, it has been mired in controversy before. Investigators from the US to Australia have cited the UFWD in multiple espionage cases, often accusing Beijing of using it for foreign interference.

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The United Front - originally referring to a broad communist alliance - was once hailed by Mao as the key to the Communist Party's triumph in the decades-long Chinese Civil War.

After the war ended in 1949 and the party began ruling China, United Front activities took a backseat to other priorities. But in the last decade under Xi, the United Front has seen a renaissance of sorts.

Xi's version of the United Front is broadly consistent with earlier incarnations: to "build the broadest possible coalition with all social forces that are relevant", according to Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.

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Today, the UFWD seeks to influence public discussions about sensitive issues ranging from Taiwan - which China claims as its territory - to the suppression of ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang.

It also tries to shape narratives about China in foreign media, target Chinese government critics abroad and co-opt influential overseas Chinese figures.

"United Front work can include espionage but [it] is broader than espionage," Audrye Wong, assistant professor of politics at the University of Southern California, tells the BBC.

"Beyond the act of acquiring covert information from a foreign government, United Front activities centre on the broader mobilisation of overseas Chinese," she said, adding that China is "unique in the scale and scope" of such influence activities.

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Some experts say that the long arm of China's United Front is indeed concerning. "Western governments now need to be less naive about China's United Front work and take it as a serious threat not only to national security but also to the safety and freedom of many ethnic Chinese citizens," [politics professor at Johns Hopkins University Dr Ho-fung] Hung said.

[But he and Audrye Wong, assistant professor of politics at the University of Southern California, say that] it's important to remember that not everyone who is ethnically Chinese is a supporter of the Chinese Communist Party.

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Ever wonder where all those high officials in China keep disappearing to?

They are but few of a whopping 26,000 individuals placed into the Chinese Communist Party’s notorious Liuzhi system in 2023 alone. Liuzhi, or retention in custody, is a special “investigative mechanism” that allows the [Chinese Communist] Party’s [CCP] internal police force (Central Commission for Discipline Inspection – CCDI) to forcefully disappear, arbitrarily detain and torture individuals for up to six months. All without any judicial oversight or appeal mechanism, the system is specifically designed to force confessions from the victims.

As former CCDI lead Liu Jianchao (since promoted to head of the International Liaison Department) put it: “These are not criminal or judicial arrests and they are more effective”.

A successor to Shuanggui, the system is another of the many hardening reforms since Xi Jinping assumed the helm of the CCP and rapidly started moving the country even further away from the most basic human rights standards to which it is beholden under international law.

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Officially instituted under the National Supervision Law in 2018, liuzhi is rapidly catching up with other mechanisms of enforced disappearances in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Its use now appears to be on par with the use of Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL), instituted in 2014 and most often employed against human rights defenders.

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Per regulation, any individual placed inside the system must be held in solitary confinement. The vast majority of victims are kept from any type of communication with the outside world and their family members are not informed of their whereabouts (or even the retention itself) as the system makes use of undisclosed (designated) locations, from custom-built facilities to CCP-run hotels, guesthouses, offices, etc. By any definition, it is a system of Party-state sanctioned incommunicado detention.

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The reasoning behind it all is very simple: to break the victims down. As a Professor at Peking University explained: [These cases are] “heavily dependent on the suspect’s confession. (...) If he (the suspect) remains silent under the advice of a lawyer, it would be very hard to crack the case”.

Testimonies from inside liuzhi (or its predecessor shuanggui) are rare, but all agree: "It looks very nice. But it is the worst place in the world." - Jean Zou, a shuanggui victim.

“The rooms mostly looked normal, with all the expected facilities — bathroom, tables, sofa, she said in an interview. The only sign of the room’s true purpose was the soft rubber walls. They were installed because too many officials had previously tried to commit suicide by banging their heads against the wall” – description of a facility in Shanghai by Lin Zhe, professor at the Central Party School.

[...]

In January 2024, for the first time since the system’s formal inauguration, the CCDI published official data on its use: no less than 26,000 individuals had been placed inside the system in 2023 alone!

That is an average of 71 people being forcefully disappeared, arbitrarily detained and subjected to torture in liuzhi alone… Every. Single. Day.

The scary part: the 2023 number corresponds exactly to the worst-case high estimates [the rights group] Safeguard Defenders had made for previous years, based on partially available data from provincial Discipline Inspection Committees and punishment statistics.

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Archived version (South China Morning Post)

A Chinese professor has sparked a public backlash after he asked a visiting Kazakh diplomat how to make Chinese women “have children obediently, early and in large numbers” at a think tank event.

Wang Xianju, a professor at Renmin University and a former counsellor at the Chinese embassy in Belarus, was speaking to Erlan Qarin, the state counsellor of Kazakhstan, who visited the university in November.

Qarin had given a speech on Kazakhstan’s domestic reforms and relations between the two countries at an event hosted by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, a think tank based at the university.

The institute published Wang’s remarks on its WeChat account in November but the article only gained online traction – and criticism – this week. It has since been deleted.

During the question-and-answer period, Wang said he was surprised to find there were many children when he visited Kazakhstan.

He said Kazakhstan apparently had effective policies encouraging births, and he wondered how that might be possible, given that Chinese women did not want to get married and have children, and would not listen to their parents or supervisors.

“I even heard that women in Kazakhstan immediately have children after they graduate college, they have children one after another,” Wang said in a now-deleted WeChat article by the think tank.

“How could they listen to you and obediently, submissively have children, have children early and have lots of children?”

On International Human Rights Day, a protest outside the Chinese Embassy in Vienna united Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Christians demanding an end to Chinese Communist Party oppression. Demonstrators called for global action against the ongoing human rights abuses and systemic oppression of marginalized communities in China by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

On International Human Rights Day, a significant protest unfolded outside the Chinese Embassy in Vienna as Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Chinese Christians united against ongoing oppression by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The event, spearheaded by the Tibetan Community Organisation in Vienna, spotlighted widespread human rights abuses by the Chinese authorities.

Leading the demonstration, Tibetan diaspora members waved flags and held banners condemning the CCP's persistent violations in Tibet. They voiced concerns over issues such as the demolition of monasteries, enforced relocation of Tibetan children, and what many called cultural genocide. The protesters urged global recognition of these atrocities and pressed for international intervention to halt Chinese repressive policies.

Uyghur activists stood alongside their Tibetan peers, highlighting the severe persecution faced by Uyghurs, including mass detentions, forced labor, and the destruction of religious sites. Joined by Chinese Christians, who protested against the state's control over religious practices, they collectively demanded an end to CCP tyranny and urged the world to hold China accountable.

[Edit to include the link.]

Archived

[...] China’s dominance at sea comes at a high human and environmental cost. According to the Global Organized Crime Index, China is a major hub for human trafficking and forced labour, and these criminal activities have also been detected within its fishing fleet.

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According to the UN’s International Labour Organization, in 2021 at least 128 000 fishers were trapped in forced labour aboard fishing vessels worldwide. Abuse of these workers is common, with Chinese squid ships being among the most brutal. An investigation by the Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-profit journalism organization based in Washington, found a pattern of human rights abuses on the Chinese ships that were part of the study. Abuses included debt bondage, the withholding of wages, confiscation of passports, lack of timely access to medical care, violence and excessive working hours of 15 hours per day, six days a week. Crew members were found to suffer from injuries, malnutrition and other illness.

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Through a search of company documents and state media stories, the Outlaw Ocean Project’s investigation revealed that over the past five years, more than 1 000 Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities were sent to work in at least 10 seafood processing plants in China. The investigation also found that workers from North Korea are sent to work in Chinese processing plants, mainly in the Liaoning province. For 30 years, the North Korean government has sent citizens to work in factories in Russia and China, and taken 90% of their earnings to deposit in government-controlled accounts. As of November 2022, more than 80 000 North Koreans were employed in Chinese border cities, including hundreds in seafood plants.

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cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17610780

Archived

[...]

Munich-based MAN Truck & Bus, a subsidiary of Volkswagen-owned commercial vehicle manufacturer Traton, has ended a tyre supply deal with the Serbian plant of Chinese Shandong Linglong Tire Co., citing allegations of “human rights violations” in reports on working conditions at the plant, BIRN and Manager Magazin can reveal.

In cooperation with anti-trafficking organisation ASTRA and the Serbia-based Initiative for Economic and Social Rights, A11, BIRN [Balkan Investigative Reporting Network] has reported extensively since 2021 on the exploitation of Vietnamese and Indian workers at the Linglong site in Serbia, which is key to the Chinese company’s European ambitions.

The allegations included a raft of Labour Law violations, the confiscation of passports and cramped, dirty, unsanitary accommodation.

[...]

Serbia has faced calls from the European Parliament and United Nations human rights rapporteurs to investigate allegations of exploitation, while since the start of 2023 German companies have been obliged to carry out due diligence with respect to human rights in global supply chains under Germany’s Act on Corporate Due Diligence Obligations in Supply Chains.

MAN Truck & Bus told Manager Magazin: “We have been following the reports on the working conditions in the Serbian plant of one of our suppliers. We take the allegations that human rights violations have occurred in this context very seriously and, in connection with this suspected case, stopped all delivery requests to the supplier in question at the end of November.”

However, German car giant Volkswagen, MAN’s ultimate owner, said it was still seeking to “clarify the facts”.

“We have followed the reporting on working conditions at the Serbian facility of one of our suppliers,” the company told Manager Magazin. “The allegations of human rights violations in this context are taken very seriously, and we have already taken appropriate steps to clarify the facts. Please understand that we cannot provide further details regarding our supplier relationships due to contractual confidentiality obligations.”

While underscoring that Volkswagen itself had not yet received any supplies from Linglong’s Serbia plant, the company said: “Serious violations of labour standards and human rights can lead to the termination of contracts with suppliers if corrective measures are not taken.”

Volkswagen specified that Linglong China supplies a 19-inch tyre first used on the VW Tiguan and Cupra Terramar models this year and manufactured “exclusively” in China. “In addition, Linglong China is a supplier of spare tyres that are used throughout the Volkswagen Group,” it added.

Alongside Volkswagen, Linglong is one of the sponsors of Bundesliga football club FC Wolfsburg, which grew out of a sports club for Volkswagen workers in the northern German city of Wolfsburg, where Volkswagen Group is headquartered.

The Linglong plant in the northern Serbian town of Zrenjanin is key to the company’s European market hopes. The factory officially opened its doors in September this year, when Linglong Tire general director Wang Feng listed Volkswagen as among the plant’s first customers, alongside Nissan, Audi, Ford, Stellantis, Hyundai, Kia and MAN Truck & Bus.

Labour legislation and human rights violations

For years, Serbian NGOs have been sounding the alarm about the exploitation and possible human trafficking of foreign workers engaged in building Linglong’s Serbian plant, the first Chinese tyre factory in Europe.

They alleged that passports had been confiscated from Vietnamese and Indian workers and that the workers were housed in dirty, cramped dormitories with just two toilets for hundreds of men and a lack of clean, warm water.

In two separate investigations, BIRN found that the contracts they signed with subcontractors of China’s Shandong Linglong Tire Co. violated multiple articles of Serbia’s Labour Law, from working hours to vacation days and financial penalties.

Under the terms seen by BIRN, the workers faced being fired if they tried to unionise or protest, while “regular working hours” could, if necessary, breach the legal maximum.

“The illegalities in the employment contract are such that it is easier to count what is legal than what is not,” Mario Reljanovic, an expert on labour law, told BIRN at the time.

Both the Vietnamese and Indian workers were hired through intermediaries, who charged them thousands of dollars to secure them employment in Serbia.

One Indian worker, Rafiul Bux, told BIRN in January 2024 that he had paid a recruitment agency $3,500, for which he had to take a bank loan.

He described dire working and living conditions in Serbia, a lack of medical support, unpaid salaries and having to surrender his passport to his employer for months on end.

Tomoya Obokata, the UN Special Rapporteur on modern slavery, told BIRN at the time that such fees are a kind of “debt trap”.

“They should not be paying that,” he said in an interview. “It should be employers who should be paying for all of this, and governments to monitor these practices.”

Serbia’s backing for Linglong

Construction of the Linglong factory began in 2019 as one of a number of Chinese projects in Serbia that have made the country a Balkan hub for Chinese investment.

The government handed over 95 hectares of land – valued at 7.6 million euros – free of charge and provided 75 million euros in subsidies from state coffers for the recruitment of 1,200 employees by the end of 2024, according to Serbia’s Commission for the Control of State Aid.

Critics in Serbia say the government, hungry for investment, has turned a blind eye to labour and living conditions facing workers engaged in major foreign projects, particularly Chinese.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has regularly defended Linglong, despite mounting evidence of human rights violations.

Confronted with the allegations concerning Vietnamese workers in 2019, Vucic told reporters: “An inspection has been sent. What do people want? You want us to destroy an investment of $900 million dollars so that Zrenjanin does not progress?”

“You care about Vietnamese workers? Come on people, we know each other well; you’re not worried about Serbian workers and here you are worrying about Vietnamese.”

Serbian authorities said they were looking into the allegations based on criminal complaints made by ASTRA and the workers themselves, but nothing ever came of it.

Linglong has dismissed the accusations and, on occasion, tried to shift any responsibility onto its subcontractors. It denied ever employing workers from India and said its contract with another Chinese company, CEEG TEPC, which did bring in Indians, was terminated in September 2022.

Obokata said that neither Linglong nor the Serbian government had ever responded to the concerns he and his UN colleagues outlined in a letter to them regarding the case of the Vietnamese workers.

“There is a disturbing trend in your country, and it is up to the Serbian government to do something about it,” he said at the time. “If the Serbian authorities are not doing that, they should be held liable as a country and as a government for facilitating labour exploitation and human trafficking.”

Germany’s supply chain act

Germany’s Act on Corporate Due Diligence Obligations in Supply Chains has faced criticism from all sides, either as too soft on companies or as an unwanted brake on the country’s struggling economy.

The Act cites an exhaustive list of international human rights conventions, including the prohibition of child labour, slavery and forced labour, the disregard of occupational safety and health obligations, withholding an adequate wage, disregard of the right to form trade unions or employee representation bodies, the denial of access to food and water as well as the unlawful taking of land and livelihoods.

If enterprises fail to conduct due diligence when choosing suppliers, they risk fines of up to eight million euros or two per cent of annual global turnover. The latter is applicable only to enterprises with an annual turnover of more than 400 million euros. Companies ultimately risk being excluded from public contracts.

Archived version

In June, the world’s largest solar plant opened in China—a 3.5 gigawatt (GW) behemoth. Covering 32,947 acres, it can produce enough energy alone to power Luxembourg. News sites and pro-solar groups hailed the project as a milestone, showcasing the country’s leadership in renewable energy and adding to a growing consensus that China could peak emissions ahead of schedule.

Nearly none, though, highlighted one obvious detail: the location of the plant, in the far western regions of Xinjiang, near the regional capital of Ürümqi. It’s the homeland of the Uyghurs, where, since 2018, what many consider a genocide has been taking place.

In fact, the solar plant is just an hour away from where Uyghur-American Rushan Abbas was born and grew up. Now based near Washington, D.C., she has been unable to return home for decades and has had no contact with her family in years.

“By failing to acknowledge the dark realities behind this solar plant near where I was born, raised, and educated, Ürümqi, they are allowing China to present a false narrative,” said Abbas. “This mega-solar plant is a continuation of the broader history of Chinese occupation and exploitation of Uyghurs.”

To Abbas and other Uyghurs living outside of what China calls Xinjiang and what they call East Turkestan, the solar plant doesn’t deserve praise. Rather, it’s the latest in a decades-long effort to Sinicize the region and exploit its resources to benefit Han Chinese migrants. They believe that the state’s flaunting of record-setting solar expansion is part of a broader plan to greenwash the ongoing genocide of Uyghurs and further allow the colonization of their homeland.

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Just because it’s a solar project doesn’t exempt it from the criticisms that plague fossil fuel or infrastructure projects elsewhere.

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Decades of Resource Exploitation in Xinjiang

[...] Uyghurs know this well. Shortly after East Turkestan was occupied by the newly-in-power Chinese Communist Party in 1949, Han Chinese migrants, led by the state-owned Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), began flowing into the newly renamed region, seeking to exploit its natural resources: coal, quartz, silicon, and oil.

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“When the XPCC first entered our region, they promised development but gradually seized lands and water resources, leaving Uyghur farmers unable to sustain their livelihoods,” said Iltebir. “Many were forced to sell their lands to the XPCC and work for them just to survive.”

To this day, Xinjiang is one of China’s main coal- and oil-producing regions. In fact, coal is what fuels China’s solar industry, which produces panels using subsidized Xinjiang coal.

“Historically my homeland has been rich in resources from cotton to coal to rare earth minerals,” said Abbas. “Since the 1950s, the Chinese government has systematically taken control of these resources to fuel its economic ambitions, while displacing and oppressing the local Uyghur population and migrating Han Chinese from China proper.”

Since the arrival of Han Chinese migrants and corporations, the demographics of the region have transformed entirely. In 1953, Uyghurs were 75% of the population, with Han Chinese at just six percent. Today, Uyghurs make up just 44% of the population, having become a minority in their homeland—a figure that continues to decline as China’s genocidal campaign of forced sterilization, family separation, and cultural “re-education” trudges on.

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“Tainted With Human Rights Abuses”

The $2.13 billion Urumqi plant is, like nearly all of the major fossil fuel, mining, and clean tech projects in the region, led by a Chinese consortium: the state-affiliated China Construction Eighth Engineering Division Corp, PowerChina, and China Green Development Group. In English and Chinese promotional materials, the project proponents highlight its climate impacts—reducing CO2 emissions by 6 million tons and eliminating the demand for 1.9 million tons of coal.

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“It feels hypocritical to be talking about just transition when this specific just transition is tainted with human rights abuses,” said Zumretay Arkin, an ethnic Uyghur who grew up in Canada and now lives in Germany, and director of global advocacy at the World Uyghur Congress.

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A report from the Business and Human Rights Resource Center (BHRRC) found that, broadly, clean energy companies are lagging on human rights policies, including issues like land rights, responsible sourcing, and affected community rights. Chinese companies, including Jinko Solar, Goldwin, LONGi, and JA Solar, were the lowest ranked.

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“It’s not like elsewhere, where abuses would be tied to a company or a non-state entity. This is really state-imposed,” said Arkin. “There are directives, policies in place, subsidizing companies that are, for example, using Uyghurs working in forced labor conditions.”

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Echoes of Xinjiang Beyond

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In fact, other mega-solar projects are already being planned or built in Xinjiang and other parts of China—a planned 1.1 GW project in Tibet, and an even bigger 8 GW project in China’s Inner Mongolia region, for example. But they should also raise eyebrows. There are echoes of Xinjiang in both. In Inner Mongolia, the government has eliminated the local language in education. Meanwhile, in Tibet, over 1,000 protestors were arrested earlier this year during a demonstration opposing a hydropower and solar project that would flood villages and destroy six historic monasteries.

To Arkin, this isn’t surprising. “There’s still a lot of lack of awareness around how China is a colonial power and how it has colonized Uyghurs, Tibetans, and southern Mongolians,” said Arkin.

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“I believe anyone who praises China’s pretentious commitment to green energy while failing to address the severe human rights abuses driving the industry, it amounts to complicity in the government’s crimes", said Abbas.

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Archived

Corruption cases against village and town officials in China have soared in 2024, as a graft crackdown deepens in the world’s second-largest economy.

The number of cases against the directors of village committees, which run China’s smallest administrative areas, grew year on year by 31,000 – or 67.4 per cent – to 77,000 in the first nine months of 2024, according to official figures.

There were also a lot more graft cases involving township officials, which grew by 24,000 – or 36.9 per cent – to 89,000 between January and September, compared with the same period in 2023.

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For the first nine months of 2024, China logged 642,000 corruption cases, higher than the 626,000 for the whole of 2023. The increase is seen at all five levels of the country’s administrative areas, which also include county, prefecture and province.

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Fraudulent claims and embezzlement were the most common forms of corruption in villages in China, according to an analysis by Hunan University of 567 graft cases between 2015 and 2020 made public by the central authorities.

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Experts have told local media that corruption in villages in China has been hard to root out due to weak oversight, a lack of staff trained in accounting and opaque financial disclosures.

Archived

The recent spate of murderous attacks shows the sickness of Communist China. Repression is only making the situation worse.

[...] The Communist Party’s reaction [to the recent mass killings in China] has been to censor news of incidents and prevent expressions of grief and mourning. These actions, by further bottling up emotions, are making a bad situation even worse.

Chinese society in the Communist period has always been volatile, and the Chinese people, who most of the time accept repression, periodically – and unexpectedly – explode. They did that, for instance, in October 2022 when thousands of workers suddenly fled a Chinese manufacturing complex making iPhones in Zhengzhou, in central China. “Something snapped over the weekend,” Bloomberg News reported at the time.

That incident quickly led to spontaneous protests across the country as workers, homeowners, students, the elderly, and others took to the streets for more than two months to complain about a variety of long-simmering grievances. In Shanghai in November of that year, protesters publicly shouted revolutionary slogans. “Step down, Xi Jinping!” they demanded. “Step down, Communist Party!”

Now, as the regime extends totalitarian controls over society, people are “trying to breathe”. They tried to breathe in June as four female college students in Zhengzhou decided to take an overnight 50-kilometre bike ride to Kaifeng for soup dumplings. The craze caught on, and in November 100,000 young were making the overnight treks. Authorities tried to limit the number of riders, and there were even reports that colleges and universities were restricting students from congregating and participating. For an insecure regime, everything is considered a threat to the ruling group.

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The perception of unfairness has aggravated an already tense situation. “China’s economy is failing fast due to Xi Jinping’s policies of repression to preserve the power and privilege of the corrupt Chinese Communist elite,” Charles Burton, a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing, told me after the Zhuhai killing. “More and more people have lost their life savings in the collapse of the housing market. Young people suffer the soul-destroying impact of unemployment.”

Archived link

On the two-year anniversary of Chinese authorities’ crackdown on the peaceful “Blank Paper” demonstrations, Chinese Human Rights Defenders calls on Beijing to release all wrongfully detained protesters.

"We urge the international human rights community to press the Chinese government to fulfill its human rights obligations to protect freedom of peaceful assembly, expression, and the right to fair trials," the organization writes on its websites.

In late November 2022, people across China, outraged by a deadly fire in Urumqi and frustrated by strict COVID-19 lockdown measures, took to the streets in cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, and Wuhan. Demonstrators held up blank sheets of paper, symbolizing censorship and their inability to express dissent openly. They chanted various slogans, including “End zero-COVID.” Some even called for “Down with Xi Jinping” and “Down with the Communist Party!”

The protests represented a rare instance of spontaneous demonstrations across multiple Chinese cities since the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests in 1989, with citizens openly expressing dissent in public space. Authorities responded with widespread detentions of students, journalists and other citizens across the country.

Two years ago, Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) tracked the names of more than 30 people who were taken into custody and estimated that at least 100 people had been detained. No official figures of arrests have been released. Some people were released shortly after their arrests. However, others faced harsher punishments, including imprisonment and enforced disappearances

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The ongoing prosecution of participants and supporters of the Blank Paper protests underscores the urgent need to hold the Chinese government accountable and to put an end to its impunity for repeated and ongoing violations of its obligations to protect human rights.

TLDR: In recent years, as China has suffered from an economic downturn, the rate of random mass attacks has soared. After three random mass killings unfolded in Chinese coastal cities in the last two weeks, some people on social media echoed the official line of harsh punishment, while others called for freedom of expression so that people could express their grievances and the authorities could address their pain in time.

Some also suggested economic reform to boost the employment rate and policy reform, such as social welfare and labour laws, to improve working conditions. In short, people need to see hope for their future.

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However, as anticipated, the Chinese authorities are fixated on their standard social control handbook. While social profiling is common in China through it's social credit system, on Weibo, many said that the Chinese Communist Party’s grassroots branches have started profiling residents into additional categories, namely, “4-without” (四無) and “5-failure” (五失).

The “4-without” are those without a spouse and children, job and regular income, normal social connections, and assets like property and cars. The “5-failure” are those who “fail” in their investments, lives, relationships, and suffer from mental illness.

**The party branches were told to pay special attention to people labelled “4-without” and “5-failure” as they are assumed to have nothing to lose, and thus might be more likely to harm society. **

However, such a measure won’t relieve the social strain. One social media user pointed out that the two social groups are victims of an unjust system and need assistance, rather than further social labels and control.

Having them screened out, and then what, put in jail? [People labelled] 4-without and 5-failure have not broken the law, and almost all of them are in need of economic assistance. The CCP does not have a comprehensive social welfare system, so how can it let these people who are in trouble get through their difficulties? The CCP keeps giving local governments money to solve their debt crisis, and it keeps pumping money into the stability maintenance system, but it is not willing to spend any money to solve the real problem! Shouldn’t the CCP know which is more effective: damming or dredging the river?

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/3444980

Archived link

The Taiwanese government warned Chinese not to say anything that would be harmful to the autonomous status of Taiwan or undermine its sovereignty.

A Chinese couple accused of disrupting a pro-democracy event in Taipei organized by Hong Kong residents has been deported, the National Immigration Agency said in a statement yesterday afternoon.

A Chinese man, surnamed Yao (姚), and his wife were escorted by immigration officials to Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, where they boarded a flight to China before noon yesterday, the agency said.

The agency said that it had annulled the couple’s entry permits, citing alleged contraventions of the Regulations Governing the Approval of Entry of People of the Mainland Area into the Taiwan Area.

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The Chinese nationals were aware they were contravening the rules when they applied for temporary entry permits based on visiting family members living in Taiwan, it said.

In a separate statement issued yesterday, the Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) denounced the couple, accusing them of “abusing” the immigration system.

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