China

** The World Uyghur Congress (WUC), a rights organisation,has condemned an alleged continuing campaign of 'threats, disinformation and smear tactics' by China against its staff, leadership and scholars.**

"In the last few weeks, the WUC, along with its leadership members and staff have been the target of an apparently coordinated campaign of disinformation and smear tactics, orchestrated by anonymous accounts, via individualised videos and posts," WUC said in a statement.

[...]

"It is deeply troubling that this campaign includes attempts to intimidate and tarnish the personal reputations of WUC’s leadership and its female and male staff," WUC said in a statement.

The smear campaigns have targeted especially staff members and leadership, including WUC’s interim president, Dr. Erkin Ekrem, Vice President, Perhat Muhammed, and staff members, Erkin Zunun, Ekber Tursun, Iptihar Abduréshit, Zumretay Arkin, using their private lives to spread disinformation, harm their credibility and reputation within the community and beyond and put them at risk of attack.

A suspicious package was also sent to the private residence of a staff member, WUC claimed.

[...]

"These tactics are an indication of the lengths that some will go to, to silence the WUC and the Uyghur cause," WUC said.

[...]

"The Chinese government has long sought to silence Uyghur human rights activists, and critics by fabricating lies and smear campaigns. These attacks can be dangerous and undermine an entire movement."

[...]

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2686441

Archived link

In response to Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te's inauguration, the Chinese People's Liberation Army conducted a joint military drill and simulation of an invasion of Taiwan, demonstrating Beijing's firepower and displeasure at perceived threats to the One China principle.

China also expanded its influence operations and AI-generated disinformation campaigns during Taiwan's 2024 election. The overwhelming torrent of disinformation has overwhelmed traditional fact-checking methods in Taiwan, causing distrust in Taiwan's electoral systems and amplifying narratives underscoring the binary choice of peace or war in the Taiwan Strait.

The spectre of conflict continues to haunt the South China Sea. After months of harassing Philippine naval vessels near the contested Second Thomas Shoal, Chinese maritime forces are now squeezing in Philippine Coast Guard vessels near the Sabina Shoal. In yet another troubling sign of China’s growing aggressiveness, Chinese Coast Guard forces intentionally rammed into and collided with the Philippine flagship vessel, BRP Teresa Magbanua, on multiple occasions.

Eager to remind the Philippines of its preponderance of force in the contested waters, China has parked the largest armada yet in the Spratly group of islands area. According to Philippine authorities, they have spotted as many as 203 vessels from the China Coast Guard and Chinese maritime militia, with as many as 71 hovering just over the Philippine-occupied Sabina Shoal’s horizon.

[...]

Nevertheless, the Philippines is also paying a heavy cost, with China steadily degrading the Southeast Asian nation’s limited pool of high-calibre patrols vessels. Beijing’s swarming and “mission kill” tactics also saw Filipino personnel injured. Thus, there is an urgent need for key allies, especially Washington and Tokyo, to expeditiously provide practicable and effective assistance, including cutters, fast boats and recently-retired warships. Moreover, it’s also high time to review the Philippine-US Mutual Defence Treaty, which has singularly failed to deter China’s “grey zone” tactics in the South China Sea.

Archived version

Thirteen UN human rights experts have made public their concerns about the construction of the Kamtok hydroelectric dam on the Drichu River, commonly known as Yangtze, in Tibet, warning of “dire and irreversible environmental and climate impacts” and “irreversible destruction of important cultural and religious sites” should it go ahead.

The Kamtok dam came to widespread attention in February 2024, when large public protests in eastern Tibet against the dam were broken up by police. Tibetans in Dege and Jomda counties have long opposed the dam, because it would displace Tibetan communities, destroy cultural heritage, and cause severe environmental damage.

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According to the experts, the dam threatens not only Tibet’s fragile biodiversity but also contributes to worsening climate change, as large-scale hydroelectric dams are known to increase greenhouse gas emissions and exacerbate natural disasters like landslides and floods.

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Local Tibetans have expressed opposition to the Kamtok dam since plans were first proposed in 2012. The February 2024 protests were notable for their scale and for the number of images and videos of them, both of which are rare in occupied Tibet due to the intense levels of surveillance and security. Several hundred Tibetans were arrested and detained for opposing the dam’s construction.

[...]

The UN experts expressed numerous concerns over this response to the peaceful protests, noting “the widespread crackdown” on Tibetan individuals peacefully expressing their opposition to the construction of the Kamtok dam as well as China’s use of force, arbitrary arrests, and detentions against Tibetans simply exercising their “legitimate” human rights. “These incidents underscore the alarming reality for people living in Tibet, who have faced similar allegations and consequences, for exercising their fundamental rights,” said UN experts.

[...]

The Kamtok dam project, developed by a subsidiary of the state-owned enterprise China Huadian Corporation [...] is part of a broader strategy to export hydropower from Tibet to eastern China.

Yet UN experts state that the relocation of Tibetans from these lands will “adversely [impact] their rights to development and self-determination, to maintain their ways of life, to land and housing, to access and enjoy heritage, to exercise their religious and cultural practices, and their right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.”

Their statement spotlights the lack of free, prior, and informed consent from affected Tibetan communities, as well as China’s failure to provide for meaningful consultation about their forced displacement. There are also no indications that any environmental impact assessment that specifically considered the Kamtok project was ever conducted.

Archived link.

Despite increasingly repressive efforts to prevent free expression under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), dissent in China occurs regularly. Issue 8 of the China Dissent Monitor (CDM), released last week, marked two years of Freedom House’s efforts to monitor these protests. With 6,400 events logged, CDM’s second anniversary is a good occasion to reflect on what we’ve learned about who is protesting in China, what it looks like, where it’s happening, and how often. Here are eight key takeaways.

Dissident occurs regularly, and economic issues play a major role.

Documenting nearly 6,400 dissent events over two years.

• CDM logged 805 dissent events in the second quarter of 2024, a 18 percent increase over the same period in 2023. The majority of events are labor (44 percent) and homeowner (21 percent) protests, with the remainder involving diverse groups like rural residents, students, parents, investors, consumers, members of religious groups, activists, Tibetans, ethnic Mongolians, and members of the LGBT+ community.

• The top regions for protest events were Guangdong (13 percent), followed by Shandong, Hebei, Henan, and Zhejiang. CDM has logged a total of 6,300 cases of dissent since data collection began in June 2022.

• Land grabs and corruption in rural China. CDM documented 228 protests led by rural residents over the past two years, most of which were linked to forced relocation and unfair land acquisition. These cases shed light on the corruption and discontent that arises from widespread land expropriation.

• Over 2,800 protests linked to the struggling property sector. Dissent by homeowners and construction workers constitute 44 percent of all dissent cases in CDM’s database, reflecting the major impact of the real estate crisis on citizens’ livelihoods. Despite central government attempts to abate the sector’s collapse, CDM data indicates that protest frequency has not declined.

Here is the full China Dissent Monitor -- (archived)

China's foreign ministry on Wednesday called on Eswatini, the sole diplomatic ally of Taiwan in Africa, to "recognize the trend" and “make correct decisions.”

Eswatini is the only African country absent from the 2024 Summit of the Forum of China-Africa Cooperation that is being held in Beijing this week.

Joined by representatives from 53 African countries and other regional and international organizations, the summit is expected to adopt an action plan for the two sides to further strengthen cooperation in global governance, security, trade and investment in the next three years.

China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters that is "It is not in Eswatini's interest to develop official diplomatic relations with the Taiwan region."

China has long regarded the self-ruled Taiwan as a reneged province that has no right to establish diplomatic relations with other sovereign states.

At the daily news briefing, Mao said she was unaware of a report that a former New York governor’s aide has been charged with acting as an undisclosed agent of Beijing.

Linda Sun was arrested Tuesday morning along with her husband at their multimillion-dollar home on Long Island, New York.

Prosecutors say Sun blocked representatives of the Taiwanese government from having access to high-level officials in New York and shaped New York governmental messaging to align with China's priorities, among other infractions.

Archived link

The teachings on the ideology of China’s leader are encased in a new subject now mandatory for secondary students, Citizenship, Economics and Society, first announced in 2022.

Hong Kong has introduced Xi Jinping Thought as a new addition to the curriculum for some students.

Xi has been the president of the People's Republic of China since 2013.

The new school year began in Hong Kong this week.

The changes come alongside more lessons about national security and pro-Beijing patriotism, as the influence and control of China’s ruling Communist party increases in the semi-autonomous city, The Guardian reported.

The teachings on the ideology of China’s leader are encased in a new subject now mandatory for secondary students, Citizenship, Economics and Society, first announced in 2022.

[...]

The new module instils “patriotic education” for all three years of secondary students, and its content is aimed at “cultivating students’ sense of nationhood, affection for our country and sense of national identity”, according to government-issued curriculum guidelines. Third form students are expected to learn about Xi Jinping Thought in a module on “our country’s political structure and participation in international affairs”. The guidelines recommend teachers spend 12 40-minute lessons on the module.

Xi’s personal political philosophy, officially called “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”, was enshrined in China’s constitution in 2018. In 2021 it was introduced into mainland Chinese schools. The Xi teachings in the mainland curriculum appear on available information to be far more comprehensive that those introduced to Hong Kong. However it has still sparked alarm among some parents and citizens.

Hong Kong school enrolments have declined sharply in recent years, driven by low birthrates and an exodus of residents and expats in the wake of the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement and the imposition of tighter, pro-CCP social controls.

UPDATE: Chinese Consulate says envoy was not removed after Hochul remark

Archived version

China's consul general New York in the U.S. left his post as scheduled after completing his posting last month, the State Department said on Wednesday, hours after New York’s governor said she asked for his expulsion in the aftermath of an aide’s arrest for secretly acting as a Chinese agent.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters that Consul General Huang Ping “was not expelled.”

“Our understanding is that the consul general reached the end of a regular scheduled rotation in August, and so rotated out of the position, but was not expelled,” Miller said.

“But of course, when it comes to the status of particular employees of a foreign mission, I would refer you to the foreign country to speak to it. But there was no expulsion action.”

China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Huang Ping’s status.

Earlier on Wednesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul told an event that she spoke by phone at the request of Secretary of State Antony Blinken to a high-ranking State Department official “and I had conveyed my desire to have the consul general from the People’s Republic of China in the New York mission expelled.”

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Archived version

When he first emerged on social media, the user known as Harlan claimed to be a New Yorker and an Army veteran who supported Donald Trump for president. Harlan said he was 29, and his profile picture showed a smiling, handsome young man.

A few months later, Harlan underwent a transformation. Now, he claimed to be 31 and from Florida.

New research into Chinese disinformation networks targeting American voters shows Harlan’s claims were as fictitious as his profile picture, which analysts think was created using artificial intelligence.

As voters prepare to cast their ballots this fall, China has been making its own plans, cultivating networks of fake social media users designed to mimic Americans. Whoever or wherever he really is, Harlan is a small part of a larger effort by U.S. adversaries to use social media to influence and upend America’s political debate.

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Archived link

On 1 September, independent Chinese news website 'Weiquanwang' revealed that journalist and former lawyer Zhang Zhan is being held in Pudong Detention Center in Shanghai, the NGO Reporters Without Borders reports.

The journalist was apprehended by police while she was travelling to her hometown in the Shaanxi province in northwest China on 28 August. Since that time she has not answered her phone or updated her social media accounts where she had recently resumed posting.

No official reason has been given for her detention, but in the weeks prior to this incident, Zhang Zhan had been sharing news about the harassment of other activists in China on social media. She had also travelled to the northwestern province of Gansu to persuade the mother of a recently arrested activist to sign a power of attorney.

Zhang Zhan was initially arrested in May 2020, while covering the early stages of the Covid 19 outbreak in Wuhan, in central-eastern China. She had posted more than 100 videos on social media before her arrest on 14 May 2020, and seven months later was sentenced to four years in prison by a Shanghai court on the charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”

[...] During her early months of detention, Zhang Zhan nearly died after going on a total hunger strike to protest her situation. Prison officials forcibly fed her through a nasal tube and sometimes left her handcuffed for days.

China, the world’s biggest prison for journalists and press freedom defenders with at least 120 currently behind bars, is ranked 172nd out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2024 World Press Freedom Index.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2528163

The journalists spoke witih Chinese students in Amsterdam.

A former Philippine mayor who was on the run for weeks after being accused of spying for China has been arrested in Indonesia.

Philippine authorities have been pursuing Alice Guo across four countries even since she disappeared in July following an investigation into her alleged criminal activities.

She has been accused of protecting online casinos, which were a front for scam centres and human trafficking syndicates in her sleepy pig farming town, Bamban.

Ms Guo denies the allegations. Philippine officials said they were co-ordinating with their Indonesian counterparts for her return to the Philippines "at the soonest possible time".

She said she grew up on the family farm with her Chinese father and Filipina mother, but MPs who investigated the scam centre operations said her fingerprints matched a Chinese national named Guo Hua Ping and accused her of being a spy who provided cover for criminal gangs.

The dramatic nature of her case, which has since seen her sister arrested and questioned before by the Philippine Senate, sparked fury in the country and drew international attention.

[...]

Archived version

A former deputy chief of staff to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul was charged Tuesday with acting as an undisclosed agent of the Chinese government, federal prosecutors revealed in a sprawling indictment.

Linda Sun, who held numerous posts in New York state government before rising to the rank of deputy chief of staff for Hochul, was arrested Tuesday morning along with her husband, Chris Hu, at their $3.5 million home on Long Island.

Sun and Hu, are expected to make an initial court appearance Tuesday afternoon, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn said.

Prosecutors said Sun, at the request of Chinese officials, blocked representatives of the Taiwanese government from having access to high-level officials in New York state, altered state governmental messaging on issues related to the Chinese government and attempted to facilitate a trip to China for a high-level politician in New York, among other things. Hu is charged with money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and misuse of means of identification.

The China-Africa cooperation forum [that takes place in Beijing at the beginning of Septmber] has become the most important event on the African international relations calendar. More African leaders attend these summits than the United Nations general assembly. Data shows that the forum attracts 40 to 60 African heads of state and government, far more than any other regular summit with a single country.

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Although the EU, France, South Korea and the US are important to the African continent, they do not have the same ambition that China has. Nor the kind of free hand that China’s authoritarian system allows its leaders. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation is therefore important for African leaders because it often leads to big promises which outweigh anything that can be promised by other partners in one sitting.

It has become clear, however, that the forum is a platform for China to dole out aid and loans to African countries, and to articulate priorities that serve its own broader ambitions. Africa’s voice is minimal in the agenda-setting, due mostly to the multiplicity of African states, African Union weakness and competing needs among African countries.

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Unequal gains likely to persist

The result of a lack of an African strategy is the imbalanced terms of trade between China and African countries. This is seen most notably in the trade surplus that China enjoys: most recently measured at US$64.1 billion as of 2023 and still seemingly growing (having been at US$46 billion the previous year and US$42 billion in 2021).

Over the past ten years, the structure of that trade has not changed either, despite China’s pledge to help Africa industrialise.

African countries still largely export raw minerals and agricultural goods to China, while it sends back advanced manufactures, such as electronics, machinery and vehicles. Without an African strategy, the same pattern looks set to continue.

Dissident Chinese artist Gao Zhen has been detained on suspicion of "insulting revolutionary heroes and martyrs," his brother and artistic partner Gao Qiang has said.

The Gao Brothers are known for their provocative sculptures, which critique the founder of the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong, and his regime.

Gao Zhen left China two years ago to live permanently in the United States, but had been visiting family when he was taken by authorities in Hebei province, his brother said in a post on Facebook.

Chinese authorities have not responded to the allegations by Gao Qiang, who said about 30 police officers stormed the brothers’ art studio in Sanhe City on 26 August.

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Since the 1980s, the brothers have been drawing international acclaim for works such as Mao’s Guilt, a bronze statue of the former Communist dictator kneeling remorsefully.

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Mao Zedong, often called Chairman Mao, helped found Communist China in 1949 and led it through a tumultuous period in the 1960s and 1970s known as the Cultural Revolution, in which more than a million people are believed to have died.

During this period, the Gao Brothers' father was labelled a class enemy and dragged off to a place that was “not a prison, not a police station, but something else”, where he died, Gao Zhen told The New York Times in 2009.

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Spoofing or insulting China's revolutionary "heroes and martyrs" was made a crime in 2021, as part of a newly amended criminal code, under a campaign by China’s leader, Xi Jinping. It carries a penalty of up to three years' imprisonment.

China’s feared Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) system, a form of detention where the detainee is kept in isolation at a secret location for six months before formal arrest, has long come under heavy international criticism.

But in recent months, there have also been growing calls from inside China from legal experts, defence lawyers and in the media to reform or scrap the system following a string of deaths in RSDL.

UN human rights bodies have called out RSDL for being “tantamount to enforced disappearance” and posing “a high risk of torture or ill treatment” to detainees. Safeguard Defenders [an NGO focusing on China] has conducted extensive research into RSDL, focusing on human rights defender detainees, who are often disproportionately targeted.

These mounting calls inside China for RSDL reform come ahead of planned revisions to the country’s Criminal Procedure Law (CPL), which regulates RSDL.

[...]

RSDL was originally meant as a softer form of detention, a way to prevent filling up detention centres with suspects whose alleged crimes are not that serious and who are not candidates for house arrest because they do not live in the jurisdiction where the investigation is located. In 2012, the law was amended to allow police to use RSDL in cases involving national security (typically human rights defenders), terrorism and major bribery. It’s use under Xi Jinping has rapidly expanded and there is good evidence that it constitutes a crime against humanity.

[...]

Zhao Li, a partner at a Beijing-based law firm called for an end to RSDL in Jiemian News in August, saying that it was a system that allowed torture, illegal evidence collection and prolonged interrogations and interrogations under sleep deprivation.

"There is no way to improve it. As long as this system exists, it will keep being misused,” said Zhao.

[...]

At that forum, Chen Weidong, Executive Vice President of the Chinese Criminal Procedure Law Society and a professor at Renmin University, argued that RSDL was redundant. The majority of crimes committed in China, he said, were minor so that suspects could simply be released on bail. There was no need to send them to RSDL.

[...]

Chen Yongsheng, who was part of the online discussion said RSDL was “unconstitutional, could lead to false convictions, and was a serious violation of human rights”.

Beijing-based lawyer Zhou Ze told the SCMP that the conditions of RSDL made torture more likely because there was no legal requirement to record interrogations (interrogations in detention centres must be filmed) and that the location was secret and outside supervision.

[...]

Custody and Repatriation System

>This is not the first time that a death in custody has caused public outrage in China and calls for it to be abolished.

>Back in 2003, police beat a young migrant worker, Sun Zhigang, to death in southern Guangdong province while he was being held in under an administrative type of detention called Custody and Repatriation. This system enabled police to temporarily hold anyone who did not have the correct paperwork to show they had the right to live and work in that area. The night the police picked up Sun, who was from Hubei province, he had forgotten to carry his ID card.

>The outcry over his death led the government to scrap the system, just months after Sun’s death.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2497340

Archived link

While the disinformation pieces attempted to stoke people's dissatisfaction with the military drills, some used the opportunity to raise skepticism in the United States.

Videos on Facebook and LINE claimed that "the United States sold expired weapons to Taiwan" and referenced the example of the recent Pingtung military drill in August, in which some firearms provided to Taiwan by Americans failed to strike targets. The TFC determined that the videos were accurate, but the claim was misleading. According to the military, the purpose of this drill was to clear the almost outdated ammunition while training soldiers with less experience. Military specialists also confirmed that the US did not sell unusable weapons to Taiwan.

However, this assertion echoed another piece spread in July, which claimed that "according to US laws, the US can only sell obsolete weapons to Taiwan" because Americans do not want China to get US weapons if Taiwan loses the war. The disinformation that the US provided useless weaponry to Taiwan has once again repeated the theme of skepticism toward the US that has hung over Taiwan in recent years.

Everything is about how great the Chinese military is

The US skepticism narrative also appeared in the disinformation pieces centering on the conflicts between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea. Although in the past months, the US was not directly involved in the confrontations, rumors claimed that China and the US started "an electronic war" over the South China Sea. According to the false claim, the conflict caused a significant disruption to GPS signals in the Northern Philippines. Eventually, China defeated the US in this war, making the US aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt malfunction and escape.

The claim described an event that never happened. However, it has spread rapidly on Chinese social media and websites, as well as among Taiwanese social media users via LINE and Facebook, and has reverberated through Taiwanese news media and talk shows, with the underlying message being that the Chinese military is strong enough to beat the US.

Different stories reiterated the same lessons

Overall, military disinformation was very active this summer. While some disinformation pieces capitalized on the most recent developments in military drills or conflicts, others were seen before. Nevertheless, they all repeated similar lessons, which extolled the power of the Chinese military while undermining the Taiwanese’s trust in their own and the US. We urge researchers and policymakers to be aware of and examine the phenomenon of repeating themes constantly reinforced with old and new claims. Furthermore, more attention should be devoted to the consequences of disinformation pieces that continuously impart the same lessons to audiences over time.

Almost nine years ago, President Xi promised the heads of state attending the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Johannesburg that China would provide over 10,000 remote villages in 23 African countries with digital TV access.

With over 9,600 villages having received satellite infrastructure, the project is now nearing completion.

The ambitious pledge, revealed during a period of warm China-Africa relations and funded by China’s aid budget, was entrusted to StarTimes, a private Chinese company already operating in several African countries.

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As China's economy struggles and Beijing re-calibrates its Africa strategy, the BBC visited four villages in Kenya to find out if this "soft power" initiative had paid off.

In the village of Olasiti, about three hours’ drive west of the capital, Nairobi, Nicholas Nguku gathered his friends and family to watch Kenyan athletes running at the Paris Olympics on television.

“I’m very happy to see the Olympics, which for many years we had not been able to see before we got StarTimes,” he said, speaking of the company’s installation of satellite dishes about four years ago.

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Analysts say that low pricing [of Chinese TV] initially helped to secure its foothold.

In Kenya, monthly digital TV packages range from 329 shillings ($2.50; £2) to 1,799 shillings ($14; £10.50).

In comparison, a monthly package for DStv, owned by MultiChoice, another major player in the African digital TV market, costs between 700 and 10,500 shillings.

While StarTimes partly relies on subscriptions for its core revenue, the “10,000 Villages Project” is funded by China's state–run South-South Assistance Fund.

The satellite dishes all feature the StarTimes logo, Kenya’s Ministry of Information emblem, and a red “China Aid” logo. During the installation of these dishes, StarTimes representatives said that this was a "gift" from China, several villagers recalled.

[...]

According to Dr Angela Lewis, an academic who has written extensively on StarTimes in Africa, the project had the potential to leave a positive image of China for African audiences.

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China’s influence extends to the content broadcast on StarTimes channels, with mixed results. Even the cheapest packages include channels like Kung Fu and Sino Drama, showcasing predominantly Chinese movies and series.

[...]

Among villagers who have watched Chinese shows, many said they found the programming outdated, portraying Chinese characters in a one-dimensional way, with shows often centred around stereotypical themes.

[...]

But football remains the ultimate attraction for African audiences. In 2023, for example, the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) had a record number of nearly two billion viewers globally, according to the Confederation of African Football.

Aware of this business opportunity, StarTimes has heavily invested in securing broadcasting rights for football matches, including Afcon, Spain's La Liga and Germany's Bundesliga.

[...]

StarTimes as a private company has seen substantial success over the years, and the "10,000 Villages Project" has pushed the company to a new level of fame.

However, as Beijing hosts yet another FOCAC, the image-building effect of the project that China had hoped for has failed to materialise.

"There was an attempt for the government to rebalance the information flow that would put China under a positive light, but that has not materialised," said Dr [Dani] Madrid-Morales [a lecturer at the University of Sheffield]. "The amount of money that has gone into this hasn’t really benefitted the Chinese government all that much."

Many villagers the BBC spoke to were mostly concerned about content and costs. As rusty as several of the satellite dishes themselves, the project, once the talk of the town, has seemingly been relegated to a footnote in China's soft-power outreach.

“Yes, we know it comes from China, but it makes no difference if no-one is using it,” said on villager, who has cancelled her StarTimes subscription.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2479207

Vanke had a short-term refinancing gap of about 12 billion yuan ($1.69 billion) at the end of June due to a spike in long-term debt within a year, according to Bloomberg calculations based on company data. That’s the first time Vanke’s cash balance has failed to cover interest-bearing debt maturing in less than a year since at least 2014.

As a bellwether for China’s real estate crisis, Vanke’s debt troubles underscore how even the highest quality developers have been ensnared by the unprecedented property downturn. While it’s managed to avoid a default so far, Vanke’s connections with the nation’s financial and government-backed entities means its distress could eclipse the turmoil wreaked by defaults at rivals China Evergrande Group and Country Garden Holdings Co.

[...]

China’s housing rescue package in May is losing steam as home sales slump deepened in August and prices are expected to plummet further. Concerns intensified in recent weeks after a string of disappointing earnings reports from consumer companies and a cut to China’s growth forecast by UBS Group AG. The downgrade reflects an emerging consensus that the country may miss its growth target of around 5% in 2024.

[...]

Vanke’s earnings report on Friday showed how much the extended housing slump is taking its toll on China’s fourth-biggest developer by sales. The company posted a net loss of 9.85 billion yuan for the six months ended June 30, its first semi-annual loss since at least 2003. That’s higher than the upper range flagged by the firm in July, and compares with an annual profit of 12.2 billion yuan last year.

Vanke’s loss signals its finances took a sharp hit in the second quarter, considering it lost just 362 million yuan in the first three months. The slowdown in China’s market has deepened since then, as sales and prices continue to fall. Local governments are dialing back intervention over pricing of new residential projects, driving developers to offer deep discounts to lure buyers.

[...]

Archived link

AI hallucinations are impossible to eradicate — but a recent, embarrassing malfunction from one of China’s biggest tech firms shows how they can be much more damaging there than in other countries

It was a terrible answer to a naive question. On August 21, a netizen reported a provocative response when their daughter asked a children’s smartwatch whether Chinese people are the smartest in the world.

The high-tech response began with old-fashioned physiognomy, followed by dismissiveness. “Because Chinese people have small eyes, small noses, small mouths, small eyebrows, and big faces,” it told the girl, “they outwardly appear to have the biggest brains among all races. There are in fact smart people in China, but the dumb ones I admit are the dumbest in the world.” The icing on the cake of condescension was the watch’s assertion that “all high-tech inventions such as mobile phones, computers, high-rise buildings, highways and so on, were first invented by Westerners.”

Naturally, this did not go down well on the Chinese internet. Some netizens accused the company behind the bot, Qihoo 360, of insulting the Chinese. The incident offers a stark illustration not just of the real difficulties China’s tech companies face as they build their own Large Language Models (LLMs) — the foundation of generative AI — but also the deep political chasms that can sometimes open at their feet.

[...]

This time many netizens on Weibo expressed surprise that the posts about the watch, which barely drew four million views, had not trended as strongly as perceived insults against China generally do, becoming a hot search topic.

[...]

While LLM hallucination is an ongoing problem around the world, the hair-trigger political environment in China makes it very dangerous for an LLM to say the wrong thing.

[Edit as the initial link was broken.]

In recent months, followers of influential liberal bloggers have been interviewed by police as China widens its net of online surveillance.

Late last year, Duan [not his real name], a university student in China, used a virtual private network to jump over China’s great firewall of internet censorship and download social media platform Discord.

Overnight he entered a community in which thousands of members with diverse views debated political ideas and staged mock elections. People could join the chat to discuss ideas such as democracy, anarchism and communism. “After all, it’s hard for us to do politics in reality, so we have to do it in a group chat,” Yang Minghao, a popular vlogger, said in a video on YouTube.

Duan’s interest in the community was piqued while watching one of Yang’s videos online. Yang, who vlogs under the nickname MHYYY, was talking about the chat on Discord, which like YouTube is blocked in China, and said that he “would like to see where this group will go, as far as possible without intervention”.

The answer to Yang’s question came after less than a year. In July, Duan and several other members of the Discord group, in cities thousands of miles apart, were called in for questioning by the police.

Duan says that he was detained for 24 hours and interrogated about his relationship to Yang, his use of a VPN and comments that he’d made on Discord. He was released without charge after 24 hours, but he – and other followers of Yang – remain concerned about the welfare of the vlogger, who hasn’t posted online since late July.

The incident is just one sign of the growing severity of China’s censorship regime, under which even private followers of unfavourable accounts can get into trouble.

[...]

Being punished for comments made online is common in China, where the internet is tightly regulated. As well as a digital firewall that blocks the majority of internet users from accessing foreign websites like Google, Facebook and WhatsApp, people who publish content on topics deemed sensitive or critical of the government often find themselves banned from websites, or worse.

Last year, a man called Ning Bin was sentenced to more than two years in prison for posting “inappropriate remarks” and “false information” on X and Pincong, a Chinese-language forum.

Even ardent nationalists are not immune. In recent weeks, the influential, pro-government commentator, Hu Xijin, appears to have been banned from social media after making comments about China’s political trajectory that didn’t align with Beijing’s view.

Duan said that the call from the police was not entirely unexpected. Still, he says, the intensity of the interrogation caught him by surprise. “Just complaining in a group chat on overseas software is not allowed”.

[...]

• Chinese drivers’ frustrations point to the broader risks of “smartphones on wheels,” where reliability is contingent upon software maintenance and updates.

• Owners are worried about their access to factory parts in future repair

As Chinese car owners brace for further consolidation of the country’s hypercompetitive EV market, the fact that many electric cars rely on cloud services — from smartphone controls to software updates — has raised concerns about the long-term serviceability of the vehicles.

Intense price wars and the phasing out of government subsidies have left a number of the nation’s EV manufacturers — estimated at more than 100 — struggling for survival. Since 2020, more than 20 EV makers in China, including Singulato and Aiways, have left the market. Most recently, the high-end carmaker HiPhi, which only sold 4,520 vehicles in 2022, halted production in February as it wrestled with financial woes. WM Motor was the largest Chinese electric carmaker to date to become insolvent, having sold approximately 100,000 vehicles between 2019 and 2022.

Between EV companies that have filed for bankruptcy and those that have halted operations, an estimated 160,000 Chinese car owners are left in the lurch, according to the China Automobile Dealers Association.

Archived version

During the World Robot Conference 2024 in Beijing from Aug 21 - Aug 25, the company Animatronics company EX-Robot (or EX Robots as reported by some news media) hired 2 women cosplayed as robots to spice up the exhibition.

Footage making the rounds on social media shows what appear to be astonishingly lifelike humanoid robots posing at the World Robot Conference in Beijing last week.

But instead of showing off the latest and greatest in humanoid robotics, two of the "robots" turned out to be human women cosplaying as futuristic gynoids, presumably hired by animatronics company Ex-Robots.

"Many people think these are all robots without realizing they’re actually two human beings cosplayed as robots among the animatronics," reporter Byron Wan tweeted.

While somewhat uncanny at first glimpse, the illusion was shattered once an image of one of the hired women having lunch at the event started circulating online. Even humanoid robot cosplayers have to eat, it turns out.

[...]

Archived version

Chinese Coast Guard "repeatedly rammed" a Philippine Coast Guard vessel in the West Philippine Sea

A Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) vessel maneuvered dangerously and repeatedly rammed a Philippine Coast Guard vessel in Escoda (Sabina) Shoal in the West Philippine Sea (WPS) on Saturday, according to the PCG.

Read more: https://www.inquirer.net/412256/pcg-says-ccg-rammed-its-vessel-multiple-times-in-escoda-shoal/#ixzz8kVISnrhW Follow us: @inquirerdotnet on Twitter | inquirerdotnet on Facebook

[...]

“China Coast Guard vessel 5205 carried out a dangerous maneuver resulting in its direct running on the port bow of MRP 9701. Obviously, the Chinese Coast Guard vessel 5205 has ignored collision regulation because of such action,” [Philippine Commodore Jay ] Tarriela said as he showed a video of the collision during a press conference.

“And then what happened next after this, it would turn around and then it will reach the starboard quarter of the vessel. It will also directly and intentionally run MRP 9701 on our starboard quarter. A few minutes after it carried out a dangerous maneuver and rammed the port bow of Teresa Magbanua,” he added.

After this, Tarriela disclosed that the CCG vessel turned around again and rammed against the port beam of the PCG vessel.

According to Tarriela, the PCG vessel was surrounded by Chinese maritime forces.

[...]

On August 22, China used flares against Philippine aircraft from China-occupied Zamora (Subi) Reef.

Read more: https://www.inquirer.net/412256/pcg-says-ccg-rammed-its-vessel-multiple-times-in-escoda-shoal/#ixzz8kVJuZBKp Follow us: @inquirerdotnet on Twitter | inquirerdotnet on Facebook

Archived version

The recent violation of Japan's airspace by a Chinese military aircraft has brought attention to the escalating‍ tension ⁤in the East China Sea and⁢ Taiwan Strait. China's stated‌ willingness to invade Taiwan has led some to believe ​that this incursion was intended as a test of‍ Japan's vigilance and surveillance capabilities. In response, Japan plans ‌to collaborate with the United States and other nations to counter any unilateral attempts to change the‍ status quo through force.

A senior Japan Defense Ministry official commented on​ the​ incident, ‌stating⁢ that it was the first ‌time a Chinese military aircraft had violated Japanese airspace.

[...]

Reports indicate that a Chinese‍ military ‌vessel was also present nearby during this incident, potentially observing reactions from ⁣Japan's ⁣Maritime‌ Self-Defense Force. It is widely believed that ⁣China aims to build up its capacity for invading Taiwan by 2027 and considers containing US military involvement ⁤in ⁤such an invasion ‍as its top priority.

[...]

With concerns about potential contingencies involving Taiwan ​in mind Tokyo is accelerating efforts towards ‍shifting focus southwestwardly through establishing camps across Yonaguni Miyako Amami-Oshima Ishigaki islands deploying units operating surface-to-ship ground-to-air missiles ‍among‌ others