There’s now substantial evidence – in the Chinese government’s own words – that they are detaining Muslims in massive numbers.
403 pages of internal documents have been leaked to theNew York Timesthat describe a clampdown in Xinjiang – a resource-rich territory located on the border of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia – where authorities have “corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.”
In Xinjiang, Muslim ethnic minority groups make up more than half the region’s population of 25 million. The largest group is the Uighurs. Beijing has fought with the Uighurs for decades, who have offered resistance to Chinese rule.
The current crackdown began after a surge of anti-government and anti-Chinese violence, including ethnic riots in 2009 in Urumqi, the regional capital, and a May 2014 attack on an outdoor market that killed 39 people just days before Mr. Xi convened a leadership conference in Beijing to set a new policy course for Xinjiang.
The Chinese government has called these camps “job training centers” to fight Islamic extremism, but the documents seem to confirm the coercive nature of the crackdown in the words of the Chinese government.
The campaign is being called “ruthless and extraordinary”. Senior party leaders are recorded ordering “drastic and urgent” action, including mass detentions. The leaked papers show how the country carried out its “most far-reaching internment campaign since the Mao era.”
President Xi Jinping laid the groundwork for the camps during speeches to officials in Xinjiang in April 2014, after Uighur militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station, killing 31. In his speech, Xi called for “an all-out struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism using the organs of dictatorship and showing absolutely no mercy.”
Xi also said: “The methods that our comrades have at hand are too primitive. None of these weapons is any answer for their big machete blades, ax heads and cold steel weapons. We must be as harsh as them and show absolutely no mercy.”
Xi also urged his party to “emulate aspects of America’s war on terror after the Sept. 11 attacks.”
“We say that development is the top priority and the basis for achieving lasting security, and that’s right. But it would be wrong to believe that with development every problem solves itself,” Xi said in one speech.
In another speech, he said: “After the United States pulls troops out of Afghanistan, terrorist organizations positioned on the frontiers of Afghanistan and Pakistan may quickly infiltrate into Central Asia. East Turkestan’s terrorists who have received real-war training in Syria and Afghanistan could at any time launch terrorist attacks in Xinjiang.”
The camps expanded rapidly in 2016 when Chen Quanguo was appointed new party boss for the region. He handed out Xi’s speeches to stay on message and implored his officials to “round up everyone who should be rounded up.” Any local leaders that stood in Chen’s way were immediately purged, including one official who was jailed.
And the leak suggests that there could be discontent from within the party. The Chinese, who often undertake policy making under the cloak of secrecy, are certainly not known for leaking internal government documents.
Since 2017, hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been detained in Xinjiang. One leaked document describes how to handle minority students returning home to Xinjiang in summer 2017 to find that their relatives have been detained. The document says that students should be informed that their relatives are receiving “treatment”.
One document ordered: “Keep up the detentions. Stick to rounding up everyone who should be rounded up. If they’re there, round them up.”
Officials in Eastern Xinjiang drafted the Q and A script and distributed the guide across the region, urging officials to use it as a model.
The document says: “Returning students from other parts of China have widespread social ties across the entire country. The moment they issue incorrect opinions on WeChat, Weibo and other social media platforms, the impact is widespread and difficult to eradicate.”
Authorities suspected that the answers wouldn’t work well with students and also supplied answers to follow up questions like:
When will my relatives be released?
If this is for training, why can’t they come home?
Can they request a leave?
How will I afford school if my parents are studying and there is no one to work on the farm?
The guide recommends answers that get firmer in nature, eventually culminating telling students that their relatives have been “infected” by the “virus” of radical Islam and must be quarantined and cured. Even grandparents could not be spared, officials were told to say.
One answer says: “If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism. No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.”
What happens to those who don’t meet course completion standards?
Another says: “Treasure this chance for free education that the party and government has provided to thoroughly eradicate erroneous thinking, and also learn Chinese and job skills. This offers a great foundation for a happy life for your family.”
The authorities are using a scoring system to see who can be released from camps. Students are told that the system takes into account their daily behavior, which has a direct effect on when their relatives may be released.
“There must be effective educational remolding and transformation of criminals. And even after these people are released, their education and transformation must continue,” President Xi said during one trip to Xinjiang.
You can read the New York Times’ full long form piece, including all of the leaked documents,here.
In a time when China is losing between a third and half of its pig herds as a result of the unprecedented decimation unleashed by African swine fever – less affectionately known as pig ebola – which has sent wholesale pork prices in China soaring to all time highs…
… China is increasingly finding itself at America’s mercy.
As Bloomberg reports, as China’s hog herd is collapsing, Beijing’s imports of U.S. pork exploded to a weekly record.
According to USDA data, in the week ended Oct. 3, pig imports soared to 142,200 metric tons, more than 7 times greater than September’s total shipments of 19,900 tons.
China signaled it may import as much as 400,000 tons to stem a domestic shortfall, and it now appears that the US may be the easiest source of said pigs, which needless to say grants the US substantial leverage in the ongoing trade talks. The swine fever outbreak killed millions of pigs. The country also appeared poised to boost purchases of agriculture products as a good-will gesture before talks between Washington and Beijing on easing trade tensions.
Meanwhile, as BBG notes, volatility in hog futures in Chicago has surged to a record, spurred by speculation on exactly when Chinese demand would finally surface. The answer: right now.
The USDA data showed 123,500 tons are for shipment in 2020 with the balance set for the end of this year.
Back home, farmers are busy dealing with the impacts of winter weather approaching ten weeks earlier than normal…
(Nicole Hao) The Chinese regime announced a new rule which requires residents to pass afacial recognitiontest in order to apply for an internet connection via smartphone or computer.
A woman uses a facial recognition device installed at a self-service supermarket in Tianjin, China on Aug. 21, 2019. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images)
The rule will be implemented from Dec. 1, 2019. In addition, nocell phoneor landline number can be transferred to another person privately.
This is an upgraded restriction after the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) required all applicants to present a valid ID and personal information to register for a cell phone or a landline number since January 2015.
New Rule:
MIITpublishedthe new rule on its official website and distributed it to all telecom carriers on Sept. 27, which includes three main requests.
First, all telecom carriers MUST use facial recognition to test whether an applicant who applies for internet connection is the owner of the ID that they use since Dec. 1. At the same time, the carriers must test that the ID is genuine and valid.
Second, all telecom carriers MUST upgrade their service’s terms and conditions and notify all their customers that they are not allowed to transfer or resell their cell phone SIM card to another person by the end of November 2019.
Third, telecom carriers should help their customers to check whether there are cell phone or landline numbers that don’t belong to them but registered under their names since Dec. 1. For unidentified numbers, the telecom carries MUST investigate and close the lines immediately.
MIIT said in the notice that it will arrange for supervisors to check each telecom carrier’s performance, and will arrange inspections to make sure all carriers will follow the rule strictly.
Purpose:
“The reason why the Chinese regime asks people to register their real identities to surf the internet is because it wants to control people’s speech,” U.S.-based commentator Tang Jingyuan told The Epoch Times on Sept. 27.
Authorities arrested hundreds of Chinese people in recent years because they posted a topic that the regime deemed sensitive, including the most recent Hong Kong protests.
“MIIT’s new rule on using facial recognition to identify an internet user means the government can easily track their online activities, including their social media posts and websites they visit,” Tang said.“Then these people become scared of sharing their real opinions online because their comments could anger the authorities and they could get arrested for it.”
Tang concluded: “I think MIIT’s new rule takes away freedom of speech from Chinese people completely.”
The Chinese regime has used facial recognition systems to monitor people for several years now. In cities and public spaces such as train stations, airports, government buildings, and entrances of museums, police use smart glasses to check each passerby’s identity and whether they have a criminal record.
On the streets, millions of surveillance cameras capture and track people’s movements.
At crosswalks, facial recognition systems recordjaywalkers, who are then fined 20 yuan ($2.81), and docked points on their social credit score. The Chinese regime’s social credit system assigns each citizen a score of social “trustworthiness.” A person with a low social credit score may not be allowed to board a train or airplane, or their child may not be admitted to a reputable school.
Inside classrooms, facial recognition technologymonitorseach student and reports their actions to the teacher and parents.
Even insidepublic restrooms, tourists and residents have to use facial recognition system to get toilet paper.
The Chinese regime hopes to install enough surveillance cameras to cover the entire country.
According to the latestreportof U.S. based market research firm IDC, China spent $10.6 billion on video surveillance equipment in 2018, and spending will reach $20.1 billion in 2023. 64.3 percent of the spending in 2018 accounted for surveillance cameras.
IDCreportedon Jan. 30 that it predicted China would have 2.76 billion surveillance cameras installed in 2022.
Chinese government defines million-man camps as ‘vocational’
Leaked online footage that appears to show hundreds of blindfolded and shackled prisoners in a Muslim-dominant region of China is believed to be authentic, according to a European security source.
The detainees are thought to be Uighur Muslims, a large minority group within China.
“We’ve examined the footage and believe it to be genuine,” the source told Sky News, adding that it was likely taken this year.
4.6 million Chinese uyghur Muslims are locked up in concentration camps and their organs are being sold online. Their only crime is being Muslim. Why is nobody talking about this? They are forced to be athiests and Muslim women are forced to be married to ugly atheist men. Smh pic.twitter.com/MbGQGblvwp
“It shows up to 600 prisoners being moved; they’re shackled together, have shaved heads, are blindfolded and have their hands locked behind their backs. This is typical of the way the Chinese move this type of prisoner.”
The footage, posted anonymously on Tuesday on Twitter and YouTube, shows lines of men, heads shaved, hands bound behind their back, sitting in lines on the floor or being moved by guards at a station in the city of Korla in Xinjiang, northwest China.
United Nations experts have spoken of “credible reports” of China holding one million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities at mass detention camps in Xinjiang.
China insists the alleged detention sites are “vocational” centres aimed at training and skills development. In a report earlier this year to counter criticism, the government said it had arrested nearly 13,000 people it described as “terrorists” and had broken up hundreds of “terrorist gangs” in Xinjiang since 2014.
During the 1980s and 90s, Maoist China had been using re-education camps against political dissidents, usually blindfolding and shackling them before marching them out by the hundreds for their execution and subsequent organ harvesting.
“The Xinjiang region of far-western China has been a hotbed of violence for centuries,” Listversereportedin July. “In 1775, the Qing Empire, an ethnic Manchu dynasty that ruled all of China from Beijing, began the liquidation of the Dzungar people, or ethnic Mongols who lived in Xinjiang, following a rebellion against Qing rule. In total, between 480,000 and 500,000 Dzungars, or 80 percent of their population, were killed by Qing soldiers and their allies. The remaining 20 percent were forced into slavery.”
(Photo credit: Amnesty International)
600 people being marched outside in blindfolds and shackles, as the video shows, is starkly similar to how Maoist China rounded up prisoners for execution.
It’s not outside the realm of possibility that the same Maoist genocidal system is being implemented here, as history has shown the fate of these groups within China time and time again.
Report: 1 in 4 pigs on Earth were lost this year(!), prompting China to release 10,000 tons of pork from their strategic national reserves this week.
That works out to about 6 grams per person in China. That’s like asking 50 people to share a single can of SPAM for dinner.
This is the latest indicator of the systemic stress on modern agriculture, and presages further tapping of strategic reserves. Christian recalls the Great Chinese Famine and warns of the dangers of centralized, collectivist policies, and the illusion of superabundance. In other news, Canada wipes temperature data from the web, as censorship increases. Norway’s winter storm in Summer.
(David P. Goldman) Bill Gertz is the dean of American defense journalists, and brings vast knowledge and an abundance of sources to his latest book. His review of China’s efforts to gain a decisive edge in military technology is indispensable reading for anyone concerned with the rapid rise of a prospective adversary. Gertz is a reporter first and foremost, and Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy distills the thinking of America’s military and intelligence establishment in a terse and highly readable presentation.
What We Don’t Know
The book’s lacunae are less the fault of the senior defense correspondent for the Washington Times and Washington Free Beacon than of the American national security establishment itself. Our institutions lack a clear understanding of what China is doing and what we should do in response. Amid the impressive mass of detail, readers are left to wonder what the Chinese really want. If they were to take over the world, what would they do with it? In the case of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, we know the answer, because we saw Germans and Russians at work as occupiers. China reached its present borders for the most part by 800 C.E. under the Tang Dynasty and has shown little interest in sending troops to occupy other countries.
A related question involves China’s order of battle. What does China hope to achieve with its anti-satellite weapons, carrier-killer missiles, anti-submarine devices and so forth? Gertz presents the sort of war scenario that staff officers grind out as a matter of course, without explaining what Chinese war aims might be.
A key issue is the distinction between China’s notorious theft of U.S. technology and its homegrown innovations. Not until page 185 do we read of the most striking and strategically important Chinese invention:
A major worry for American defense planners and intelligence strategists is China’s drive to deploy extremely secure quantum communications. This development was announced by China in August 2016 . . . Quantum communications for the Chinese are designed to produce encryption that is unbreakable—a capability that would hamper what has been a strategic advantage for the United States in relying on the very capable code breakers at the US National Security Agency.
Earlier in the book, Gertz had spent four pages recounting China’s theft, in 2013, of U.S. plans for the C-17 military transport plane. Reprehensible as that may be, it was not a game-changer. Quantum communications, a Chinese innovation, inaugurates a revolution in signals intelligence.
Gertz discusses Washington’s campaign to dissuade its allies from buying fifth-generation (5G) mobile broadband technology from China’s national champion Huawei Technologies. By the time the book went to press, it was evident that the initiative was a humiliating failure; not a single country on the Eurasian continent bent to American threats, which included the suspension of intelligence-sharing. Quantum communications help explain why.
About to Go Dark
Not only the Chinese, but South Korean, Japanese, British and other teams are building the capability to embed quantum communications in the new 5G networks. Not only will China go dark to U.S. signals intelligence; the rest of the world will, too, and in short order. Huawei’s 5G systems will wipe out America’s longstanding advantage in electronic eavesdropping. The U.S. intelligence community spends $80 billion a year, mostly on SIGINT, and the whole investment is at risk. Washington’s view, dutifully reported by Gertz, is that Huawei’s dominance in 5G systems will allow China to steal everyone’s data. The reality is far more ominous, as I understand it. China will enable the rest of the world to cut off America’s access to everyone else’s data. When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged a senior German official not to buy Huawei’s broadband, the German replied that China hadn’t eavesdropped on Chancellor Merkel’s cell-phone conversations, as had the United States.
Huawei owns 40 percent of the patents related to fifth-generation broadband, largely because it spent twice as much on research and development as its two largest rivals (Ericsson and Nokia) combined. The strategic challenge to the United States comes not from Chinese technology theft, obnoxious as that is, but from Chinese innovation backed by state resources. The American intelligence community realized too late that China had gained the upper hand, and convinced the Trump administration to try to postpone the 5G rollout until it could work out what to do next. The failure is of such catastrophic proportions that no one in a position of responsibility dare acknowledge it for fear of taking the blame.
Domination of E-Commerce and E-Finance
Huawei’s vision of a global broadband market under its domination is hardly a secret. This is a case where China has advertised its intentions while the US ignored the issue. Since 2011, the company’s website has promulgated an “eco-system” enabled by broadband networks that in turn would bring in Chinese e-commerce, e-finance, logistics, and marketing—in short, the whole array of business and financial services that will integrate the labor of billions of people into the greater Chinese model.
The world will become a Chinese company store: Chinese banks will lend the money, Huawei will build the broadband network and sell the handsets, Alibaba and JD.Com will market the products, Ant Financial will make micro-loans, and Chinese companies will build airports and railroads and ports. As an investment banker for a Hong Kong boutique from 2013 to 2016, I saw this first hand, and reported it here. Among other things, Huawei is building most of Mexico’s new national broadband network, including 5G capability, in a consortium with Nokia financed by a group led by Morgan Stanley and the International Finance Corporation. Huawei also dominates telecommunications infrastructure in Brazil and other Latin American countries. China’s tech dominance in America’s neighborhood, remarkably, has occasioned no official comment from Washington.
In my view, this is far more alarming than what Gertz envisions. He writes, “China will control all deals and win any business arrangements it seeks by dominating the information domain and thus learning the positions of bidders and buyers. All Chinese companies will be given advantages in the marketplace.”
That simply isn’t the way things work. China will lock whole countries into Chinese hardware through state-financed national broadband networks, including Brazil and Mexico, where construction is underway. It understands the network effect that made Amazon and Facebook dominant players in the U.S. market, and will use its financial and technological head start to establish the same sort of virtual monopoly for Chinese companies throughout the Global South.
China envisions a virtual empire, with military deployments to protect key trade routes, starting with oil from the Persian Gulf. China’s navy established its first overseas base in Djibouti last year. Meanwhile China has invested heavily in high-tech weaponry, including satellite killers. During the first minutes of war, the United States and China would destroy each other’s communications and reconnaissance satellites. But China has a network of thousands of high-altitude balloons around its coasts, too many for U.S. forces to destroy.
Why a Shooting War Is Unlikely
The dog that doesn’t bark in this particular night is China’s land army. China has about 40,000 marines and an additional 60,000 seaborne mechanized infantry, enough to invade Taiwan. Otherwise its ground forces are feeble. China spends about $1,500 to arm an infantryman, as compared to $17,500 for his American counterpart. China owns no ground-attack aircraft like the American A-10 or the Russian SU-25. Unlike the United States, China hasn’t equipped its forces for any foreign expeditions, excepting of course the threat against Taiwan. With few exceptions its military priority is control of its own coastline. That in my view is why a shooting war is not likely. America cannot win a war on China’s coast, and China has scant interest in fighting anywhere else.
As we examine the details, the picture of a Soviet-style communist regime bent on world domination falls apart. China’s concept of world domination is so different from what we imagine that it has halfway come to fruition before we noticed it. The broader issues are too complex to address in a review, but I feel obliged to add that there is quite a different way of looking at present-day China, as an imperial system with a 3,000 year history.
In extensive contacts with Chinese officials, I haven’t met a single dedicated communist, except for the distinguished professor of Marxist-Leninist studies who asked me to help his child find a job on Wall Street. I do not believe in Gertz’s distinction between the good Chinese people and the wicked communist leaders. The emperor (the leader selected by the Mandarin caste that today masquerades as communists) is the capo di tutti capi, whose job is to limit the depredations of local power centers and maintain order. Most mainlanders will tell you blandly that, without an emperor they would kill each other, as they indeed have done after the fall of every Chinese dynasty.
No one should minimize the brutality of the present dynasty by any means; but it is no more reprehensible than the Ming, who buried a million forced laborers in the Great Wall, or the Qin, who destroyed the whole literary record of the Chinese kingdoms that preceded it and buried alive hundreds of scholars to ensure that no memory of the past survived. Every Chinese in a position of influence, when asked about the Muslim Uyghur minority in China’s far West, will say matter-of-factly, “We’re going to kill them all.” China has been exterminating “unruly barbarians” on its borders for thousands of years. That is why the Huns came to Europe and the Turks came to Asia Minor: Chinese punitive expeditions against these peoples forced them to migrate westward.
In China’s view, the “Century of Humiliation” that lasted from the First Opium War of 1848 to the Communist Revolution of 1949 was a temporary aberration that displaced China from its dominant position in the world economy, a position the present dynasty seeks to restore. If we do not want this to happen, we will have to dominate critical technologies, including quantum computing, quantum communications, broadband, Artificial Intelligence, and missile defense.
Weak Proposals
The recommendations that Gertz offers at the book’s conclusion do not convince me. He proposes to disengage economically from China; I should think that our object should be to introduce innovations that disrupt and discredit China’s state planning. We have none at the moment, but that is because American high-tech industry has invested overwhelmingly in software and left the manufacturing to Asia. We require a revival of American R&D on the scale of our response to Sputnik. Gertz also proposes “covert financial warfare” to disrupt China’s overseas borrowing. He does not seem to realize that China is a net creditor to the extent of $1.6 trillion, which means that it can finance its own requirements readily. He wants to crack down on Chinese nationals abusing their position in the United States, and so forth.
None of this will make a difference. Our problem is far graver. China now graduates four STEM bachelor’s degrees to every one of ours, and the ratio is rising. Foreign students earn four-fifths of all doctoral degrees in electrical engineering and computer science at U.S. universities. Because we have so few engineering students (just 5 percent of undergraduate majors), engineering faculties are small, which means that most of the foreign students return to teach in their own countries. The United States has trained a world-class engineering faculty at Chinese universities, such that the best Chinese students stay home. I know Chinese IT managers who will not hire Chinese students with a U.S. bachelor’s degree, because the Chinese programs are more rigorous.
We can only best China through innovation, and we are losing our edge in that regard. Nothing short of a grand national effort on the scale of the Kennedy moonshot or the Reagan Cold War defense buildup will get our mojo back.
Woolsey, former CIA director in the administration of Bill Clinton, said China is seeking to defeat the United States according to the dictums of the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu—without having to engage in a major conflict.
