One Way Ticket Out Of Hong Kong: Our Family's Journey | One Way - Part 1 | CNA Documentary - YouTube
Finding A New Home After Leaving Hong Kong | One Way - Part 2 | CNA Documentary - YouTube
Telling A Different Hong Kong Migrant Story: What Happened To The Chow Family From One Way? - YouTube
Must watch: Better ‘a beggar here than an emperor there’ — life after Hong Kong, and the struggle to resettle - "“A lot of things are not up to you. Everyone wants to marry actor Daniel Wu, but most of us don’t get to.”... A viewer also offered some context for the “candid discussion” of dying and divorce. “(It’s) a very typical scene of Hong Kong married life,” wrote YouTube user, eggsplash."
Singapore, Britain must not appear imperialist to China - "With a large British naval force scheduled to pass through Singapore to enter the South China Sea in May, the British must deploy their naval force in a way that will not appear as imperialist posturing against China. If the Chinese leaders perceive this British naval group, which includes the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, as reviving gunboat diplomacy in the tradition of the bygone British empire, Singapore risks suffering collateral damage for hosting this British force. If the British fleet provokes China, the Chinese government may possibly find ways to punish Singapore"
To China shills, anyone who doesn't roll over is provoking China. The South China Sea belongs to China and anyway who sails past the nine-dash line is an imperialist!
Chinese Government Attempts to Sabotage U.S.-Based Performing Arts - "Since Shen Yun’s inception, the company has had to overcome CCP interference, with the Party changing its sabotage strategies annually"
Progressive watchdog Media Matters paints China as victim of GOP "fearmongering"
REVEALED: China's Plan to Censor The Whole Internet. - "Chinese state-owned technology firm Huawei recently unveiled their own proposal to replace TCP/IP. Called New IP, this standard is designed to make communication more efficient, allowing for faster internet connections for smartphones and web-connected devices such as light bulbs and self-driving cars. But the new proposal has a darker side. The first red flag in the New IP proposal is a built-in kill switch that can be used to cut off websites or users that are engaging in bad behavior."
The faces China never intended us to see. by Best of Today | Podchaser - "‘We found multiple instances where the data or the photos in the hacked files could be shown to match with real people. Also contained in the spreadsheets are lists of phone numbers for police officers, who work in the camps, or in legal offices and police stations.’
‘So we're going to try and verify some of the pictures and some of the databases’...
‘Many of them didn't pick up when our team called… but some did’
‘Confirming names, roles and departments. When asked about the re-education camps though, they quickly hung up’...
‘In addition to those sent to the camps thousands more have been given long prison terms for ordinary everyday expressions of Islamic faith. One man for example is accused of growing a beard under the influence of religious extremism. For this the 58 year old was jailed for 16 years and 11 months’...
‘in response to questions the Chinese Embassy in the U.S issued a statement… there was no attempt to address any of the hacked data directly’"
Damn CIA!
China’s State-Sponsored Hacking Hits Companies Around the World - "Symantec first addressed this campaign when suspicious DLL-side loading activity on one the customers networks triggered a warning from Cloud Analytics technology available in Symantec Endpoint Security Complete (SESC)."
Thread by @ZhugeEX on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Let's talk about a controversial topic in the world of video games. Chinese games dev Paper Games just shut down its game, Shining Nikki, in Korea after controversy erupted between Chinese and Korean players... It's no secret that China has a strict regulatory environment for games. There are restrictions that developers have to impose on their own games in order to release them in China... This is a top down approach to game censorship, but it's worth noting that there is also a bottom up approach too Which is to say Chinese game companies also self censor themselves + Chinese players may demand changes... the game is a simulation RPG with dressing up elements, which is to say a key part of the game is customising your character with outfits and such. A Hanbok, Korean traditional clothing pack was released in the game. Some gamers in China took offense to the DLC as they complained that some of the traditional clothes were in fact Chinese (Ming Dynasty era) and not Korean as claimed This infuriated some gamers in Korea who claimed China was trying to steal Korean traditional culture This controversy was already going on outside of the game, due to a different comic book controversy, and the release of this DLC only exacerbated the situation. Ultimately this led to boycotts from both sides, with review bombing of the game and insults to the devs / players This controversy got so big that even the Chinese Academy of History issued a notice saying that the clothing should be considered traditionally Chinese, which only led to further boycotts and complaints. Paper Games did address this by saying it would respect Chinese culture. However, many in China found this response to be lacking and claimed the devs were afraid to anger Korean players. Ultimately the devs pulled the DLC and refunded users. They also went one step further and censored / banned players in Korea who insulted them / China. In Korea this caused further outcry. In China people were still complaining about the issue and that the devs had not addressed the core issue of the clothing being traditionally Chinese. This spawned multiple media articles. Yes, it turns out people care about this a lot... It is a shame that it got to this point, but the outcome is indicative of the approach Chinese game companies take to satisfy their home market This wasn't a top down order, it was a driven from the bottom up and led to a tangible outcome, with the game being shut down in Korea Of course these controversies are nothing new for people who are aware of the Blitzchung incident, the Devotion incident and the recent hololive incidents. But it shows the disconnect between how Chinese regulators and players view games, and how those outside China view games."
Meme - "FRAGILE. HANDLE WITH CARE *China*"
China’s Missing Million - "Over the winter of 2022-23, one million Chinese people died from Covid-19—or so estimates now suggest. This figure would indicate that China experienced as many deaths from the virus in two months as the United States did in three years... Grappling with China’s “missing million” involves, above all, contending with the realization that President Xi Jinping’s iron implementation of Zero-Covid was a failure of colossal proportions. Civil liberties were severely curtailed in unending lockdowns, and China’s economy harmed to the tune of billions of dollars, in the name of a “people’s war” against a “devil virus,” as per the president’s repeated exhortations. This war was to be furious and unrelenting. Then suddenly it was abandoned, after November’s popular protests (dubbed the White Paper Revolution) gave Xi bad dreams of insurrection. Those people whose lives had supposedly been spared by the lockdowns lost their lives anyway, in accelerated fashion... Xi’s beloved lockdown policy had helped create a nation largely unprotected by natural immunity: “more vulnerable,” writes academic Yanzhong Huang, “than almost any other population on Earth.” Poor natural immunity, low vaccination rates, the mid-winter cold—these were the ripe circumstances into which SARS-CoV-2 was suddenly released. Faced with none of the usual obstacles, the virus was able to tear through China. On the ground, reporters found chaotic scenes. No surge capacity measures had been implemented at hospitals, because no warnings had been given. Emergency rooms were overwhelmed, patients sprawled on floors, ambulances were turned away. The unchecked spread of Covid augured a hotbed of new strains. Sure enough, Xu Wenbo—head of the virus control institute at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC)—soon admitted that a worrying number of new Omicron sublineages had been detected. Xi Jinping’s policies had, effectively, created a genuine threat to the rest of the world. Happily, no extra-lethal strain has so far emerged from China’s enormous experimental cauldron. But within China, many were still dying. So how many? Is the million-strong estimate reliable?... China’s hospitals swelled with the dying, but only in-patients who had taken a test and gained a positive result were registered as Covid-19 deaths. Deaths outside hospital did not count; in the early stages of reopening, hospital deaths involving no respiratory failure did not count either. These were the means by which the Party would avoid the embarrassment of a truly astronomical fatality figure. And so we have no hope of a reliable statistic for the nation... No one wants to know. The entire three-year nightmare is being assigned to history: Covid-19, Zero-Covid, the chaos of reopening—all of it. Incredible as it may seem, my contacts in China tell me that people have already begun to forget. In the face of this series of catastrophes—a years-long clampdown on civil liberties on a national scale, followed by a blistering Covid wave—the CCP has responded by… declaring victory... In terms of opacity, the CCP’s scope really is sweeping. There is, for instance, no nationwide figure for average home prices (a ploy by the CCP to avert a bubble) and no reliable estimate as to China’s true population (in 2017, for instance, a fresh 14 million citizens abruptly materialized in the official count). The net result of the data-juking is that the average Chinese citizen is grossly misinformed about events in China. This is true in the best of times, let alone during a crisis. This chronic opacity presents problems for all of us. China is no longer a distant concern. In a globalized world, we’re all jostling together in a crowded room; it is almost as if we could reach out and touch people who live on the other side of the planet. And so mistakes that occur in China quickly become everyone else’s business. We learned this, very dramatically, in 2020—or should have. Three years on, the CCP is the same catastrophic mix of secrecy, paranoia, huge power, and huge incompetence. There were many lessons that could have been learned from Covid—the need for transparency predominant among them. The CCP took in none of those. Instead, China is back to where it started with the first Covid wave: obfuscation and a death toll that we can only guess at."
China imposes de facto ban on Japanese seafood imports amid anger over Fukushima water release plan - "the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) approved Japan’s plan to release the water, saying it met international standards and that the radiation impact on people and the environment could be considered negligible"
Chinese N-plants Releasing Water Containing Tritium at Levels 6.5 Times Higher than Planned Fukushima Discharge - "Chinese nuclear power plants have been releasing into the ocean water containing tritium at levels up to 6.5 times higher than the annual amount scheduled to be released from Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, Inc.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, according to a document the Japanese government compiled for other countries ahead of TEPCO’s discharge. TEPCO plans to start discharging treated water as early as this summer. Beijing has strongly opposed the plan, waging a campaign via state media, even though some Chinese nuclear power plants are discharging levels of tritium higher than the amount TEPCO plans to release."
There's a good comparison of Hongyanhe, Qinshan, Ningde, Yangjiang and Fukushima's radiation levels
Ambassadors, opposition denounce 'shameful' Liberal posture toward China following Taiwan report - "Former ambassadors and opposition members of Parliament called the Liberal government’s posture toward China a “disgrace” and “shameful” following a media report that said government officials had sought to block the president of Taiwan from receiving an award in Canada. According to a report by Politico, federal government officials had threatened to pull funding to the Halifax International Security Forum if it awarded its John McCain Prize for Leadership in Public Service to Tsai Ing-wen, the president of Taiwan. The report attributed the Liberal decision to a fear of offending the Communist Party of China, which has for decades sought to reclaim Taiwanese territory as its own... David Mulroney, another former Canadian ambassador to China, called the report a “national disgrace” on Twitter Monday. “Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy has no room for one of the most courageous, principled, and seriously threatened women on the planet,” he said."
Clearly nothing to do with why they refuse to publicly investigate Chinese election interference
Analysis: Xi Jinping's path to greater power goes through Taiwan - Nikkei Asia - "Xi did not clinch his ultimate goal of staying leader for life -- despite stacking the top leadership with his allies and acquiring ultimate power. Foreign companies must now worry if an armed unification of Taiwan will become an option to realize that final goal... Xi has shown that he is perfectly fine with ignoring economic rationality in pursuing "common prosperity." The leader seems unfazed by the economic slump his policies have brought about. His thick-skin approach has people wondering if he will be just as irrational in security policy and reach for the Taiwan option... In a report to last month's national congress on Oct. 16, Xi declared that China "will never promise to renounce the use of force" against Taiwan. It was the first time he had referred to the use of force in a report to a party congress... Xi changed direction in April when he proposed a Global Security Initiative during a keynote speech delivered via video to the opening ceremony of the annual conference of the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan Province. The grandiose proposal, encompassing the entire world, is reminiscent of ancient Chinese empires that stretched out over the eastern half of Eurasia, with tributary states reaching into present-day Thailand and India. Xi's so-called security initiative is also closely related to a strategy of gradually spreading Chinese-style modernization -- which was emphasized at the party congress -- as a development model for the rest of the world."
Taiwan should destroy chip infrastructure if China invades: paper - Nikkei Asia - "Samsung, based in U.S. ally South Korea, would be the only alternative for cutting-edge designs. If TSMC went offline, "China's high-tech industries would be immobilized at precisely the same time the nation was embroiled in a massive war effort," the authors note. "Even when the formal war ended, the economic costs would persist for years," the paper suggests, adding that such a scenario could hurt the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party... The People's Liberation Army's goal for a successful invasion is 14 hours, a Chinese analyst with connections in the PLA Navy told the authors, while the PLA projects the U.S. and Japan to need 24 hours to respond."
Why Wagner revolt is such a nightmare to Xi Jinping - Nikkei Asia - "There is no doubt that Beijing was shaken by the uprising, at least initially. The Chinese government kept mum about the mutiny, launched on June 23 by mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, until the night of June 25, when it became clear that Prigozhin had stopped his advance toward Moscow. China's foreign ministry then issued a statement supporting stability in Russia. It seems that Chinese leaders continued to discuss how to engage with Russia following the rebellion. Eventually, Beijing decided to maintain and deepen the country's military cooperation with Russia... One lesson Xi may have gleaned from Russia's aggression is that an invasion of Taiwan would be disastrous unless it can secure an overwhelming victory in a very short time. It is, of course, hard to imagine an armed insurrection like Wagner's in China, which is tightly controlled by the Communist Party with extensive use of surveillance networks. But the fact that Russia came close to civil war must be very unnerving to Xi.
Hong Kong braces for a court ruling that could spell the beginning of the end of its open internet - "The city government applied in June for a court order to prohibit people from broadcasting or distributing Glory to Hong Kong, arguing that the song contains a slogan that amounts to a call for secession—one of four offenses outlawed under the sweeping National Security Law imposed by Beijing in 2020... For Hong Kong residents, a larger concern is that the city’s censorship efforts will not end with the song. “It is not the first time and it won't be the last,” says Kwong Chung Ching, a digital rights activist and Hong Kong campaigns coordinator at the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, an international legislative coalition aimed at countering China's influence. According to Google’s latest transparency report, it received requests from the Hong Kong government to remove 183 items—mostly from YouTube—in the second half of 2022, including 55 related to national security. It did not take action on nearly half of the takedown requests, including links to children’s books that a court has deemed seditious. A court-ordered injunction could embolden the government to expand its effort to censor comments and speech deemed a threat to national security. “This is ringing an alarm bell for a lot of the online service providers in Hong Kong. They might be subjected to content moderation coming directly from the government,” Kwong says. There are already signs that Hong Kong authorities are stepping up their control over information flow both online and offline. A small but growing list of websites, including an online museum commemorating the Tiananmen Square crackdown, has been blocked by local telecom networks in recent years. Authorities have charged ordinary social media users—from a 23-year-old student studying in Japan to a 48-year-old housewife—with sedition over their online comments. Books by prominent democracy advocates disappeared from public libraries and a new channel was recently established for residents to report titles that could endanger national security. A new threat to Hong Kong’s internet freedom looms on the horizon: the upcoming enactment of Article 23 of the Basic Law, the city’s own security law. The city’s security chief pledged to “plug loopholes” in the internet and establish online patrols to identify messages and acts of “soft resistance” under the new legislation."
China Will Miss American Reporters When They’re Gone | Foreign Affairs - "American reporters have played a key role in telling China’s story and encouraging it to modernize, not just over the past 50 years but over the past 150... over the past few decades in particular, China has thrived when it has proved responsive to stories that policymakers might otherwise have ignored, and suffered, often catastrophically, when those developments have been suppressed. Given the tight constraints on Chinese reporters, the foreign press corps has been integral to bringing stories to light. Think of the reporting that has been done by the Times and the Journal on China’s environmental problems. That has been to the clear benefit of the Chinese people. It has also, in a way, been to the benefit of China’s leaders, since their success has depended on their ability to be responsive to national needs and popular demands—needs and demands that they often would have missed without the efforts of American reporters. The novel coronavirus outbreak, like the 2003 SARS outbreak before it, provides an especially stark example of how foreign reporting spurs needed government action... American reporters have been pesky, but the service they provided, especially to Chinese people, has been invaluable. Think back over the last several decades about key stories involving China, and practically each time there was an American reporter if not at the center, at least close by. The Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989? Jeff Widener, an Associated Press photojournalist from Long Beach, California, took the iconic picture of “the tank man,” a lone protester who, following the June 4 crackdown, stopped a line of People’s Liberation Army tanks. The CCP may not have liked the picture, but no image from the calamity better captured its pathos than the futile standoff between man and war machine. Widener’s picture was the starting point of thousands of conversations with Chinese students who came to the United States, often to study science but ultimately learning much, much more. Then there’s the CCP’s much-vaunted crackdown on corruption under President and Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping. Groundbreaking work by the American New York Times journalists Michael Forsythe and David Barboza on the fortunes of the families of China’s high and mighty set a new standard for financial forensic journalism. No doubt the details of their reports mortified the CCP writ large, but every individual Chinese official with whom I have spoken has privately acknowledged that these reports constituted a necessary, bracing tonic to a sclerotic political system. That would never have come about had these reporters not been in China... Each day, the Communist Party publishes a compendium of reports about China in foreign publications. This compendium is classified, and it is also treasured by those high ranking enough to gain access to it. A declassified version of this compendium, Cankao Xiaoxi, has the largest circulation of any newspaper in China. In a closed system such as China’s, these reports constitute a key source of news and perspective. In an environment where all the news must fit into a narrative set by the Ministry of Propaganda, alternative facts are in scant supply and thus uniquely valuable. That’s what foreign reporters provide the Chinese government; this service will suffer when Beijing nixes the American contribution to that effort. Under Xi, the Chinese political system is becoming ever more closed—making the service provided by the foreign press corps even more valuable... he New York Times published a series of stories based on leaked CCP documents concerning the mass incarceration of more than one million Uighurs in northwestern China. The source of the leak is almost as fascinating as the content: “a member of the Chinese political establishment.” That suggests greater discontent inside the party apparatus over the crackdown than was previously known. Wouldn’t China’s leadership want to know that?"
From 2020
Evergrande: Crisis-hit Chinese property giant reveals $81bn loss - "Crisis-hit Chinese property giant Evergrande has revealed that in 2021 and 2022 it lost a combined 581.9bn yuan ($81.1bn; £62bn). The firm, which defaulted on its debts in late-2021, reported its long overdue earnings to investors in Hong Kong."
China’s Abandoned Electric Cars Pile Up After EV Boom Fueled by Subsidies - "On the outskirts of the Chinese city of Hangzhou, a small dilapidated temple overlooks a graveyard of sorts: a series of fields where hundreds upon hundreds of electric cars have been abandoned among weeds and garbage. Similar pools of unwanted battery-powered vehicles have sprouted up in at least half a dozen cities across China, though a few have been cleaned up. In Hangzhou, some cars have been left for so long that plants are sprouting from their trunks. Others were discarded in such a hurry that fluffy toys still sit on their dashboards. The scenes recall the aftermath of the nation’s bike-sharing crash in 2018, when tens of millions of bicycles ended up in rivers, ditches and disused parking lots after the rise and fall of startups backed by big tech such as Ofo and Mobike... About a decade ago, encouraged by government subsidies, hundreds of automakers across China, both established players and startups, waded into electric-car manufacturing. They churned out huge numbers of early-stage EVs — relatively no-frills cars whose batteries in some instances could only run for around 100 kilometers (62 miles) on a charge. Those vehicles were mostly bought by ride-hailing companies that leased them to drivers... Many of the ride-hailing companies that were early adopters of EVs have gone out of business. There are now around 100 Chinese electric-car makers, down from roughly 500 in 2019. The graveyards are a troubling consequence of that consolidation. Not only are the sites an eyesore, getting rid of EVs so quickly reduces their climate benefit considering they’re more emissions-intensive to build and only produce an advantage over combustion cars after a few years. Each of the vehicles’ spent batteries also contain precious ingredients like nickel, lithium and cobalt — metals that could be recycled to make China’s EV industry more environmentally friendly. According to local media reports, the government of Hangzhou has vowed to dispose of the cars, which started to accumulate in 2019. But when Bloomberg News visited late last month, reporters uncovered several sites filled with abandoned EVs in the city’s Yuhang and West Lake districts after scouring satellite images and hacking through overgrown dirt paths... In the mid-2010s, China ramped up its push for EV adoption with a credit system that rewarded automakers for producing EVs and penalized the manufacturing of high fuel-consumption cars. A 2021 Fitch Ratings Inc. report raised the possibility that some companies started ride-hailing companies as an easy way to absorb their growing inventories of EVs that weren’t being bought by the public. Some companies also began cheating the subsidy program by falsifying records for non-existent EVs. For example, they could produce an empty chassis that didn’t contain a battery, or make cars with batteries that didn’t meet the correct specifications. The official People’s Daily in 2016 cited estimates that dozens of companies had fraudulently claimed more than 9.3 billion yuan ($1.3 billion) in subsidies. Beijing began slashing national subsidies for all electric car purchases in 2019. Many ride-hailing companies were unprepared for the policy change, which severely affected their cash flow. “Those players couldn’t survive”... “The shared bikes and EV graveyards are a result of unconstrained capitalism,” Wu said. “The waste of resources, the damage to the environment, the vanishing wealth, it’s a natural consequence.”"
Apparently government subsidies and regulation are the fault of capitalism
Uproar Over New Citizen's "Heart Always Belongs to China" Little Red Book Post - "A post on China’s “Instagram”, Little Red Book, has gotten many Singaporeans rankled. The post, made by a user known as “Singapore – Little Dragon Brother”, shows him holding up a Singapore passport. “Singapore – Little Dragon Brother” captions the post in Chinese, saying: “A villager from the farm! Successfully received Singapore citizenship after 4 years!” Ending the post nationalistically with a China flag, he added: “Heart always belongs to China.”... “If the reverse happened, this would be seen as treason by China people. Maybe they (the Chinese government) might even catch him and shoot him.”"
Evergrande bankruptcy: Chinese property developer files for Chapter 15 protection in the US - "China’s Evergrande Group — once the country’s second-largest property developer — filed for bankruptcy... The beleaguered firm borrowed heavily and defaulted on its debt in 2021, sparking a massive property crisis in China’s economy, which continues to feel the effects... The industry’s problems have been amplified by an overall economic slowdown in the country."
China's youth unemployment rate just hit a new high and its GDP growth missed analysts' expectations - "China on Monday said its economy grew 6.3% in the second quarter of 2023 from a year ago, badly missing analysts' expectations. The country's youth unemployment hit a new record high of 21.3% in the second quarter. This means more than one in five of those between 16 to 24 years old are unemployed... The country's second-quarter GDP data could be masking troubles in its economy because the of the low base last year when the country was still mired in on-off COVID-19 lockdowns... Recent economic data printout of China has also been poor — on Thursday, China's economy flashed a red flag. The country's exports tanked 12.4% in June from a year ago, while imports fell 6.8% in the same period — missing expectations majorly, official data showed. After an initial spurt, China's economy has struggled to recover from three years of on-off COVID-19 lockdowns, pointing to a disappointing showing for the world's second-largest economy this year."
China Threatens ‘Consequences’ Over Inquiry on Canada Meddling - Bloomberg - "The embassy spokesman, however, said China has always adhered to the principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs."
SPOING
What could they be afraid of?
