Friends,
The title this week springs from an interview that CBS’ 60 Minutes did with Nick Burns, U.S. Ambassador to the PRC, as well as language I’ve heard on countless occasions when describing the Sino-American relationship.
To set it up, Burns invited Lesley Stahl to Beijing (essentially the only way U.S. journalists can enter the PRC) and conducted a far-ranging interview. IMO Burns did a great job with this interview, being upfront and straight-forward about the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party to foreign businesses, individuals, the United States, and its allies.
However, I think he perpetuates a misconception that has caused confusion and problems for years:
Lesley Stahl: I want to quote you back to you, and tell us what you meant. You have said, "Divorce is not an option."
Nicholas Burns: Right. Our two countries have to live together. And this, I think, is the greatest tension in the U.S.-China relationship.
While the Sino-American relationship is consequential, it is important not to mischaracterize it. Suggesting it a “marriage,” claiming that the two countries are “coupled,” or that “divorce is not an option” suggests a level of shared responsibility and shared interests that does not, and has never, existed between the two countries.
Setting aside the problems with anthropomorphizing relations between nations states or using imperfect analogies to describe complex phenomena, there are state-to-state relations that we could characterize as a “marriage” or “being coupled.”
For example, American States are joined in a formal union. New Hampshire and Arkansas may be very different and geographically separate, but they are “married” in a real way with bonds of affection, responsibility, and common property. That is not to say that the two states always see eye-to-eye (just as a real marriage), but there is an underlying union that connects them and holds them together.
The relationship between Member States of the European Union is a marriage, those states are coupled. They combine economic, political, and social equities with each other to a significant degree. When UK voters decided to leave the European Union, it was rightly described as a divorce. It is not my place to judge whether it should have happened, but the decision to go through with that divorce was objectively painful and costly. Whether it was worth those costs, remains to be seen and can only be judged by the parties involved.
NATO or the various collective security treaties (US-Japan, US-ROK, US-Australia, etc.) could also be described accurately as marriages or as a coupling of nation states. Those agreements represent formal commitments to common interests, values and responsibilities to one another. Again, like a real marriage these can get rocky and there are problems that could lead to divorce or a decoupling.
However, none of this can be applied to the relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic (or to the relationship that the People’s Republic has with any other country… side-eye at Germany). There is no formal union between the two sides (the three communiques read more like an armistice than a bond of union and affection) and there is no recognition that the two sides share property, interests, or responsibilities to one another. At best, the United States and the People’s Republic are neighbors with some limited business partnerships.
We live down the street from one another, we run into each other at the store or on the street, we exchange goods and services occasionally, sometimes we attend the same parties, and we should expect a level of mutual civility based on reciprocity, but no more than that.
To pretend that there is more, that we are married or coupled, is an error. To assert that “divorce is not an option” (and here) or that we cannot decouple is a category and conceptual error. It makes no sense to use that language when no union exists.
Perhaps the best proverb for our complex relationship with Beijing comes from Robert Frost: “good fences make good neighbors.”
If we hope to maintain peace and stability, which is the only reasonable goal we should expect to achieve with Beijing, then it is absolutely critical that we dispel these errors and drop these misconceptions.
I hate to do this because I know it’s corny, but a quote from Confucius on the “rectification of names” is apt:
“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.
If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.
When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish.
When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded.
When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot.
Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.”
— Confucius, The Analects, Book 13
Never have more truer words been written…
It is also critical to keep in mind who we are “married” to and what real geopolitical divorce and decoupling looks like.
Germany’s duty to Lithuania, France, Poland, and the United States far exceeds what they owe to the PRC, despite the business interests of a handful of automobile and chemical companies.
The same applies to the United States. What Washington owes to Tokyo, Manila, Berlin, and Brussels, far exceeds what we owe to Beijing.
Some would have us break those longstanding bonds of affection, duty, and responsibility because we are angry with one another, or we feel that the other party isn’t living up to the union, or the individual leader simply has no sense of duty. The solution to those problems is not divorce, but marriage counseling and a commitment by both sides to live up to one’s responsibilities and duties. If we can keep those relationships in proper perspective, we stand a much better chance of deterring conflict and generating a prosperous future for ourselves and our posterity.
None of this is to suggest that we should withdraw our embassies or ambassadors from the PRC, or avoid working with them where it is mutually beneficial.
It is important to maintain communications, just as we would with a neighbor and as Robert Frost’s narrator does in Mending Wall.
But it is also important to keep in mind that the relationship is transactional at a fundamental level. Pretending that it is more than transactional is dangerous. There is a chance that we may find ourselves in direct conflict given our contradictory interests and values, as well as our duties and responsibilities to others whom we share real bonds with.
***
“Why be half pregnant”
Speaking of language and its pitfalls, here is another interesting clip, this time from Australia’s 60 Minutes program last night.
Mike Burgess, the head of Australia’s domestic intelligence service, ASIO, is being interviewed and refuses to mention the word China when discussing the threats to Australia.
Perhaps he has succumb to some medical affliction that prevents him from saying the word… but that probably isn’t the explanation. Mike is a serious fellow who knows his job in and out… the hint of a smirk on Mike’s face reveals that he gets the joke too.
Now I’m speculating here, but this interview catches our attention in ways that are the opposite of what folks in the Australian Government likely wanted to achieve.
Burgess’ decision to refuse to name “China” likely springs from someone in the Australian government, specifically within the administration of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who is responsible for something called “strategic communications.”
Given the tough time Australia has had with the PRC over the past six years and the understandable desire to stabilize the Beijing-Canberra relationship, these strategic communicators had a bright idea: Officials should no longer utter the word “China” when discussing threats to Australia and instead claim that there are a wide variety of threats (a tactic adopted by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his administration when they were forced to launch a public inquiry into foreign interference by the Chinese Communist Party).
Thought bubble of the strategic communicators:
If they avoid naming China publicly, then Beijing won’t get pissed off and everything can go back to normal.
Brilliant, problem solved, next topic…
Hold on a minute. I seemed to remember this thing called the interwebs or maybe its called the internet…
Crikey… you’re saying there is also a video (from minute 8:43 on) of Mike Burgess saying these things about China specifically?!? While sitting next to all the other allied domestic intelligence chiefs and being moderated by a former U.S. Secretary of State?!?
Crap and double crap… maybe all those brilliant efforts at strategic communications don’t really work.
The irony is that this example of communications on 60 Minutes Australia last night was incredibly UNstrategic. As the clip shows, the effort to adopt cute tactics like not mentioning China by name invariably backfires in an open society. It barely worked for two seconds as the interviewer immediately saw through the ruse.
Only regimes like the one in Beijing can employ Orwellian doublespeak… for democracies like Australia. As the old saying goes: “don’t try to out-China China.” You end up looking ridiculous, as the interviewer revealed, and it calls attention to the contradictions in your own policies.
Speaking plainly and truthfully bolsters your own domestic and international legitimacy, even if it means suffering retaliation by an authoritarian regime.
Australians are world-renowned for their straight talk and unwillingness to shy away from a fight, it is what makes Australians such great friends, allies, and business partners… my advice: stick with that!
***
On a related note, Politico highlights the continued obstacles for improving people-to-people ties between the United States and the People’s Republic.
This from Politico’s China Watcher
As Phelim Kine points out this week in the excellent newsletter he shares with Stuart Lau in Brussels, how or why should the U.S. encourage people-to-people ties with the PRC while the State Department still warns its citizens to avoid travel to the PRC over threats of arbitrary detention and exit bans?!?
From my perspective, the “agreement” to expand people-to-people ties is simply a throw-away line in the POTUS-Xi summits and we shouldn’t take it as any more significant than that. The Chinese Communist Party has become incredibly hostile to foreigners, waging campaigns to convince its citizens that foreigners, in particular Americans, Japanese, Australians and Europeans, are spies and not to be trusted (and here and here).
Poster in Beijing alleyway from 2016… you don’t need to read Mandarin to understand the point.
It would be irresponsible for American universities, businesses, and nonprofits to put their students and employees in an increasingly dangerous situation. And even more irresponsible of the U.S. Government to encourage those exchanges when we openly acknowledge the threats to personal safety.
Until the CCP makes significant and demonstrable changes to its own behavior and the way it treats its individuals, people-to-people ties that involve foreigners going to the PRC should remain frozen as much as possible.
However, people-to-people ties in the other direction should be expanded and welcomed… but it is clear that Beijing also wants to discourage that flow as well (here and here and here). Party surveillance of Chinese students and citizens in the U.S. and other open societies remains pervasive with family members back home being held hostage to ensure Chinese traveling overseas behave themselves according to the Party’s desires (see #8, #17, and #34 below).
Thanks for reading!
Matt
MUST READ
1. China Expands State-Secrets Law, Highlighting Risks for Foreign Businesses
Austin Ramzy, Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2024
New provision covering ‘work secrets’ could vastly expand scope of restricted information.
China revised its law on state secrets on Tuesday to encompass sensitive information that didn’t previously fall under its scope, potentially adding to foreign businesses’ concerns over the risks of operating in the country.
The changes, the first to the law since 2010, were adopted by China’s top legislative body and signed by leader Xi Jinping, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. The amendments are the latest sign of Beijing’s heightened vigilance around potential national-security threats, following the passage of a strict information-security law and the rewriting of a law against espionage last year to expand the scope of state control of information.
The latest iteration of the state-secrets law cites Xi’s “comprehensive national-security” concept, which calls for guarding against internal and external threats while ensuring the primacy of Xi and the Communist Party.
“This revision is the latest in a series of legal moves to strengthen the national-security state, which has been a key element of Xi Jinping’s approach to governance since taking power in 2012,” said Thomas Kellogg, the executive director of the Georgetown Center for Asian Law.
“We’re now at more than 20 state-security laws that have either been passed or revised in recent years—this is the latest in that stream, and probably won’t be the last,” he said.
Under Xi, who has consolidated power and swept away precedents that would prevent him from ruling indefinitely, China has embraced a broad emphasis on national security, steeling the nation for potential confrontation with the West.
As Xi tightens rules around national security, American companies have described deteriorating confidence in doing business in China, citing the slowing economy and a legal environment that they regard as being increasingly hostile. China has cracked down on due-diligence firms, launched raids and legal reviews of foreign companies and detained some foreign executives or in some cases blocked them from leaving mainland China.
One provision of the revised law establishes “work secrets” at government and party bodies that aren’t considered state secrets but could “cause certain adverse effects if leaked,” adding a potentially broad new category of restricted information. The NPC Observer, a website that monitors China’s legislative developments and was founded and managed by Changhao Wei, a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, said the new category “raised eyebrows” after a draft version was released last year.
COMMENT – None of this should be a surprise.
2. Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists Are Breaking Up with China
Erin Griffith, New York Times, February 21, 2024
Under intensifying scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers, top firms have pulled back from investing in Chinese start-ups.
DCM Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, began investing in China’s start-ups in 1999. The move reaped such blockbuster returns that in 2021, DCM said it planned to “double down” on its strategy of investing in China, the United States and Japan.
Yet when DCM set out to raise money last fall for a new fund focused on very young companies and promoted its “cross-Pacific” expertise, the firm described plans to invest in the United States, Japan and South Korea, according to a fund-raising memo that was viewed by The New York Times.
China was not mentioned.
DCM’s messaging is one example of an industrywide shift happening between Silicon Valley investors and Chinese start-ups. U.S. venture capital firms that once saw China as the next frontier for innovation and investment returns are backing away, with some separating their Chinese operations from their American business and others declining to make new investments there.
The about-face stems from the tense relationship between the United States and China as they jockey for geopolitical, economic and technological primacy. The countries have engaged in a trade war amid a diplomatic rift, enacting tit-for-tat restrictions including U.S. moves to curb future investments in China and to scrutinize past investments in sensitive sectors.
“It was an incredibly fruitful partnership for a long time,” Tomasz Tunguz, an investor at Theory Ventures, said of how U.S. venture firms had invested in China. Now, he said, most investors are “looking for places to invest those dollars because that market is effectively closed.”
A spokeswoman for DCM said that its strategy had not changed and that investments in China had always been “a smaller component” of its funds focused on very young companies. The firm is monitoring U.S. regulations on China to comply, she added.
In Washington, actions to limit investing in China have piled up. President Biden signed an executive order last year restricting investments from U.S. firms in Chinese start-ups working on artificial intelligence, quantum computing and semiconductors.
This month, a congressional committee investigation sharply criticized five U.S. venture firms in a report that outlined their investments in Chinese companies that helped facilitate human rights abuses and built weapons for the Chinese military. The committee did not accuse the firms of breaking the law, but urged lawmakers to pass legislation further restricting such investments.
“We can’t afford to keep funding our own destruction,” said Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee, said Congress might look at other areas where U.S. venture capitalists had invested in China, including biotech and financial technology.
The intensifying scrutiny has prompted U.S. venture firms to make changes. Last year, Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent investment firms, which has invested in China since 2005, separated its Chinese operation into an entity called HongShan. The firms, which shared profits and other administrative operations, now run independently.
GGV Capital, another venture capital firm with a long history of investing in China, said in September that it would separate its American and Asian operations. It is also trying to sell its holdings in two companies that the congressional committee determined were helping the Chinese military.
Deals for Chinese start-ups that included U.S. investors declined 88 percent between 2021 and 2023, from $47 billion to $5.6 billion, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups.
The moves are a painful step backward for the venture capital industry, which spent the last decade transforming from a cottage industry into a global force. China was an important part of that expansion, with firms including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Matrix Partners entering the country.
Silicon Valley venture capitalists “made a whole bunch of bets that the U.S. and China were converging,” said Matt Turpin, a former director for China at the National Security Council and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.
COMMENT - I think these developments are incredibly consequential.
3. Hong Kong pro-democracy cafe fined HK$3500 for toilet stains after owners complained of weekly inspections
Irene Chan, Hong Kong Free Press, February 22, 2024
The owners of Not One Less Coffee have announced they will close down, saying earlier that the inspections scared customers away.
Owners of a Hong Kong pro-democracy cafe, who had complained of weekly government inspections which scared customers away, have been fined a total of HK$3,500 for stains in its washroom.
Not One Less Coffee has announced it will shut down because of a slump in business and the frequent visits by various different departments. InMedia reported that the cafe sometimes received dozens of fines a month.
Eastern Magistrates’ Courts fined the cafe over two hygiene offences on Wednesday, Ming Pao reported. According to the first summons, authorities found a grey stain of around six square metres on the ceiling of the men’s restroom last September.
The second summons related to a permanent black stain inside the toilet bowl of the men’s restroom found last October.
The Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD) charged the cafe with two offences – “unhygienic conditions in the food premises” and “unclean and improperly maintained sanitary facilities.”
The cafe manager pleaded guilty but said staff had been working hard to keep the premises clean and took immediate action once they found the stains.
Owners of the shop said last December on Facebook that revenue had dropped around 80 per cent last year even after Hong Kong dropped Covid controls in early 2023.
The cafe “was visited by various government departments every week, ” including the FEHD, the Fire Services Department, the Agriculture Fisheries and Conservation Department, the Inland Revenue Department, the Police Force, the Labour Department and the Building Department, the owners said.
COMMENT – What a shame, Hong Kong authorities making their own city a less hospitable place to live.
4. Taiwan’s leadership ‘extremely worried’ US could abandon Ukraine
Phelim Kine, Politico, February 23, 2024
A congressional delegation assured senior officials that the U.S. “will stand firmly” with the island regardless of the results of the U.S. presidential election.
Taiwanese senior officials repeatedly questioned members of a visiting U.S. congressional delegation on what stalled aid to Ukraine means for U.S. commitments to defend the island from potential Chinese aggression.
The Senate last week passed the national security supplemental — which includes $1.9 billion in U.S. funding to restock arms bound for Taiwan — but House Speaker Mike Johnson has vowed to block the bill unless it includes provisions to tighten border security.
“Taiwan is extremely interested in Ukraine, and extremely worried that we might walk away from Ukraine,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the House Select Committee on China, told reporters on Friday at the end of a three-day CODEL to the self-governing island.
The issue of U.S. support for Ukraine came up repeatedly in meetings that Gallagher and CODEL members including committee ranking member Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) had with senior officials including Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen and President-elect Lai Ching-te. “They are watching the supplemental requests for Ukraine like hawks and they view Ukraine prevailing against the criminal invasion by Russia as incredibly important in sending a message to the Chinese Communist Party,” Krishnamoorthi said.
The potential for a Trump victory in the U.S. presidential election and the possibility that it might result in a change in traditional U.S. support for Taiwan is also worrying its leaders. The CODEL tried to ease those fears by assuring their Taiwanese hosts of the strong bipartisan congressional support for the island. “The people in Taiwan should be confident that regardless of how fractious our election gets, America will stand firmly with Taiwan,” Gallagher said.
Those concerns reflect the knock-on effect of the impasse on Capitol Hill in supplying Ukraine the weaponry it needs to fend off Russian aggression.
The congressional deadlock has frozen U.S. military aid to Kyiv and prompted warnings from the Pentagon that Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines are running out of ammunition and other weapons needed to fight the invading Russian forces. That has spooked a Taiwanese leadership that is also heavily reliant on U.S. arms to deter repeated threats from Chinese leader Xi Jinping to use force to “reunify” with Taiwan.
Taiwan is already struggling with a bottleneck in U.S. arms deliveries. The Biden administration has increased the tempo of arms sales approvals for the self-governing island, but some $19 billion of those weapons — including Harpoon anti-ship missiles and Stinger surface-to-air missiles — are yet to be delivered because of the supply chain issues.
Gallagher said that backlog is “not getting fixed anytime soon” and required “creative” solutions, including shifting the production of U.S. aerial and submersible drones to Taiwan to speed up their deployment to Taiwanese military units.
“Co-producing defense technology in Taiwan would have the added benefit of helping preposition weapons and strengthen deterrence so Xi Jinping thinks twice before believing the People’s Liberation Army could quickly and easily take control of the island,” Gallagher said.
The CODEL also heard reports while in Taiwan that the Starshield network, a military version of the Starlink satellite internet system developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is denying service to Taiwan.
Ukraine’s military has relied heavily on Starlink in its two-year campaign to fend off Russian forces. “We’re trying to confirm those reports right now. We’ve heard them from numerous parties. And we’re hoping to have a dialogue with Elon Musk and SpaceX leadership” about that reported service denial, Gallagher said.
COMMENT – CODELs like this need to continue to visit Taiwan. It is important for Members of Congress to see for themselves the situation and talk directly to Taiwanese leaders.
Deterring Beijing from using force to annex Taiwan over the next two decades will require a different approach than what we have relied on over the past four decades. Countries that are interested in maintaining peace and stability must forge a closer relationship with Taiwan, demonstrate that Taiwan cannot be isolated, and directly challenge Beijing’s fantasy of sovereignty over the island.
Ignoring Beijing’s threats and appeasing their illegitimate demands will only invite further military adventurism and aggression.
The Chinese Communist Party will howl that this kind of engagement with, and support for, Taiwan threatens war.
We must push back against these self-serving claims.
It is Beijing, not Taipei, that is threatening to invade its neighbor.
5. China’s Rush to Dominate A.I. Comes with a Twist: It Depends on U.S. Technology
Paul Mozur, John Liu, and Cade Metz, New York Times, February 21, 2024
China’s tech firms were caught off guard by breakthroughs in generative artificial intelligence. Beijing’s regulations and a sagging economy aren’t helping.
In November, a year after ChatGPT’s release, a relatively unknown Chinese start-up leaped to the top of a leaderboard that judged the abilities of open-source artificial intelligence systems.
The Chinese firm, 01.AI, was only eight months old but had deep-pocketed backers and a $1 billion valuation and was founded by a well-known investor and technologist, Kai-Fu Lee. In interviews, Mr. Lee presented his A.I. system as an alternative to options like Meta’s generative A.I. model, called LLaMA.
There was just one twist: Some of the technology in 01.AI’s system came from LLaMA. Mr. Lee’s start-up then built on Meta’s technology, training its system with new data to make it more powerful.
The situation is emblematic of a reality that many in China openly admit. Even as the country races to build generative A.I., Chinese companies are relying almost entirely on underlying systems from the United States. China now lags the United States in generative A.I. by at least a year and may be falling further behind, according to more than a dozen tech industry insiders and leading engineers, setting the stage for a new phase in the cutthroat technological competition between the two nations that some have likened to a cold war.
COMMENT – When I opened this article in the NYTs website to read it, I was presented with perhaps the most well-timed (or should I say, ill-timed) banner advertisement… you simply cannot make this stuff up and if I didn’t see it myself, I would assume it was disinformation:
Intel, the American semiconductor company… the same one that is lobbying everyone in the Biden Administration and Congress for their cut of funding from the CHIPS Act… teams up with Lenovo, the PRC computer manufacturer whose computers have been banned from sale to the U.S. Government for at least the last 15 years, runs a joint advertisement campaign about how the two companies partner to provide more advanced AI solutions.
Really Intel?!? Do better.
Talk about a clueless marketing department… this is the kind of ham-fisted public relations that raises huge red-flags across the U.S. Government. As Intel tries to say all the right things about U.S. national security when walking the halls of Congress or the Commerce Department Headquarters, they simultaneously signal that they have no real interest in doing anything to protect U.S. security.
Folks are left with the impression that Intel is only interested in lobbying for public funding so that it can continue to operate selfishly.
6. McKinsey-led think-tank advised China on policy that fed US tensions
Stephen Foley and Sun Yu, Financial Times, February 22, 2024
The Urban China Initiative, a think-tank led by McKinsey, advised the PRC Government in 2015 to deepen cooperation between business and the military and push foreign companies out of sensitive industries. The recommendations were part of a project for the PRC government and included boosting the country's technological prowess. McKinsey has played down its relationship with the PRC government as lawmakers have suggested that McKinsey be excluded from U.S. Government contracts.
COMMENT – McKinsey has tried hard to distance itself from the Urban China Initiative, releasing this statement last week in which it claims that it had little association with the non-profit and that “the central government of China is not, and to our knowledge has never been, a client of McKinsey.”
However, sites like “On Think Tanks” provides some additional details about the creation of the Urban China Initiative in 2011 and McKinsey’s role.
I’d take McKinsey’s protests more seriously if we hadn’t seen this three years ago: McKinsey worked with Chinese government despite assurances to senator, document indicates (NBC News, December 16, 2021). McKinsey had told Senator Rubio the same thing that it had never worked for the Chinese Government and then folks discovered that McKinsey had disclosed in court documents in 2020 that it did have a “commercial connection to the Chinese Government.”
If we think back over a decade ago, McKinsey was likely quite proud of the work it was doing for the PRC Government and was working hard to make the Chinese Government a client. An effort like the Urban China Initiative was likely pursued to bring about contracts with the Chinese Government.
Organized as a partnership, McKinsey’s operations in the PRC likely fell under the control of its Chinese partners. Those Chinese partners undoubtably had wide latitude to pursue clients and partnerships with places like Tsinghua University without much oversight from other portions of the firm.
To illustrate just how critical the PRC was to McKinsey during this time, its global managing partner between 2009 and 2018 was Dominic Barton, who would leave the firm to become Canada’s Ambassador to the PRC. In 2018, McKinsey held a lavish corporate retreat in Kashgar, Xingang miles from a PRC concentration camp for Uyghurs. Then between 2018 and 2021, under its new global managing partner, Kevin Sneader, Hong Kong was McKinsey’s de facto global headquarters. We’ve known for years that McKinsey spend much of the last two decades assisting authoritarian regimes like the PRC and Russia.
So I’m quite skeptical about McKinsey’s protests today that the Urban China Initiative “is not McKinsey” or its efforts to portray its entire global partnership over the last two decades as being focused on “supporting the US government.” McKinsey is a global firm with foreign partners residing around the world. When we assumed the world was converging on some form of liberal globalism, it made sense for a firm like McKinsey to work everywhere and for everyone. Now that world looks like a mirage and McKinsey is seeking to whitewash its earlier practices.
McKinsey isn’t alone in this. Other management consulting firms set themselves up in similar fashion, partnerships involving individuals in countries around the world. When I worked for a short period at Deloitte, I was outraged that a portion of the firm had donated $200 million to further the objectives of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2017.
My advice to McKinsey and other firms, is that they should own their earlier practices and take responsibility, instead of dissembling that they have always kept U.S. national security interests at the center of their corporate missions.
They should make definitive policy changes within their firms to make a clean break with their past. The U.S. and other democracies need firms like McKinsey, but only if they can make the clear choice to align themselves with the values and interests of their home countries (and leave jurisdictions that conflict with those values)… the days of floating above geopolitics and being everything to everyone are over.
Make a choice and pick a side.
7. 2 Scientists in Canada Passed on Secrets to China, Investigations Find
Ian Austen, New York Times, February 29, 2024
After a prolonged Parliamentary debate, details about two microbiology researchers who were found to have shared secrets with China have been released.
Two scientists who worked at Canada’s top microbiology lab passed on secret scientific information to China, and one of them was a “realistic and credible threat to Canada’s economic security,” documents from the national intelligence agency and a security investigation show.
The hundreds of pages of reports about the two researchers, Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng, who were married and born in China, were released to the House of Commons late Wednesday after a national security review by a special parliamentary committee and a panel of three retired senior judges.
Canadian officials, who have warned that the country’s academic and research institutions are a target of Chinese intelligence campaigns, have tightened rules around collaborating with foreign universities. Canadian universities can now be disqualified from federal funding if they enter into partnerships with any of 100 institutions in China, Russia and Iran.
The release of the documents was the subject of a prolonged debate in Parliament that began before the last federal election, in September 2021. Opposition parties asked to see the records at least four times and found the Liberal government to be in contempt of Parliament in 2021. The government filed a lawsuit in an attempt to keep the records hidden, but dropped it when the vote was called.
8. The Chinese government tried to silence them. It backfired.
Mo Abbas, NBC, March 3, 2024
Some overseas critics of the Chinese Communist Party have been emboldened, not cowed, after police and other officials warned them about their activities.
She had almost forgotten about the petition, a critique of the Chinese government that she had posted online months earlier. The woman, a Chinese citizen living in the United States, had been careful to register on the site anonymously, and the petition drew little notice.
Except, that is, from the Chinese government.
Early one morning last year, she said, she got a call from her father in China, as police officers in his office dictated questions about the petition and demanded she log into her social media accounts.
“It’s kind of unbelievable. How did they find out? My only reaction was to think about how to fool them, how to protect my parents,” said the woman, a scientist based on the East Coast who asked not to be identified by her real name and to withhold her exact location for fear of reprisals from the Chinese government.
Rights groups say that of all authoritarian governments, China is one of the most aggressive in pursuing dissidents abroad, often by threatening and harassing their relatives back home, and sometimes using sophisticated technology to track critics online.
Two prominent Chinese bloggers in exile said this week that Chinese police were interrogating their hundreds of thousands of followers on X and other international social media platforms, urging fans to unsubscribe from their accounts.
Some of the hacking tools that Chinese police use to investigate social media users around the world were revealed in a recent leak of documents from I-Soon, a private security contractor linked to the Chinese government.
Such allegations of transnational repression are “groundless and malicious defamation,” the Chinese Embassy in London said in a statement in January. “The Chinese government fully protects Chinese citizens’ legal rights and freedoms in accordance with the law and is fully committed to protecting the safety and lawful rights and interests of overseas Chinese citizens.”
The U.S. and other governments have raised the issue at the United Nations and elsewhere. At a regular U.N. review of China’s human rights record in January, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Michèle Taylor, listed “transnational repression to silence individuals abroad” among Washington’s issues of concern.
In some cases, however, China’s tactics have emboldened, not cowed, overseas critics of its ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“After that, I felt so angry,” the scientist said. “I think maybe I’m not quite a typical Chinese. If you offend me, I will take my revenge. So when they try to harass me, I’m thinking, ‘So my family and I are in trouble. Let’s get everyone in trouble.’”
She responded to the demands by going public, describing her family’s experience with the Chinese police in posts on X seen by NBC News that have since been deleted.
The idea was to “expose them to the whole world,” said the woman, whose experience with the Chinese police NBC News was not able to independently verify.
Though her interrogators appear to have relented for the moment, she said she expects to be questioned again if she returns to China.
“After the interrogation, they told my parents to warn me not to mention this to anyone, and to tell me that protests and petitions are useless: ‘The West won’t listen to you.’”
‘Determined to speak out’
A chemical engineer living in California has a similar story.
Like the scientist, he had spent some of his youth in China under the leadership of Xi Jinping, and had jumped at a job opportunity in the U.S. after studying at an American college.
“Under Xi Jinping, things got worse and worse,” said the engineer, who like the scientist requested anonymity because of safety concerns for himself and his family.
The Chinese leader has concentrated power in his own hands since taking office in 2012, tightening control over civil society, the media and the internet. Rights groups also accuse Xi’s government of abuses against Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang region, allegations that Beijing denies.
The engineer said he had posted critical videos online while concealing his identity, but that was well before authorities first contacted his family last March.
“My father called me. He asked me, ‘What are you doing? Did you say something against our government and the CCP?’ So he wouldn’t worry, I told him ‘no.’ I lied.”
He said he was then contacted by a police officer on the Chinese messaging service WeChat.
“He asked me to provide my personal accounts for YouTube and Twitter,” the engineer said. “I said no, you can’t ask me that, because I’m in the United States,” where unlike in China he can access such services freely.
“He said even if you’re in the United States, it’s your responsibility as a Chinese citizen to maintain our country’s good image.”
He said police contacted his family two other times, and threatened his father with not being able to leave the country — a practice known as an exit ban that rights groups say is an increasingly favored tool of Chinese state repression.
NBC News was not able to independently verify the engineer’s account.
He said that before police visited his family in China, he had not expressed much criticism of the CCP, “since I have my own work and life.”
“But based on their unreasonable threats — threatening my family, asking me to delete my social media accounts and shut up — I’m even more determined to speak out more frequently against them,” the engineer said.
Taking on the Chinese government is a step that dissidents, even those abroad, do not take lightly.
The severity and type of transnational repression varies widely depending on the countries in which critics live and the relationships their governments have with China, Human Rights Watch says.
While the U.S. takes strong measures to counter Chinese espionage, in other places “people have told us that they have suspected quite blatant physical intimidation,” said Maya Wang, associate director of the rights group’s Asia division.
That includes “being followed by cars, by Chinese suspected security agents, very visible,” she said.
The repression may not always be direct. Chinese dissidents say the ruling party has fostered a culture in which critics fear denunciation by fellow citizens.
In January, a U.S. federal jury found a Chinese music student guilty of cyberstalking and other charges after he harassed a pro-democracy activist posting fliers at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, including claiming that he had reported her to a Chinese public security agency.
Because the intimidation and surveillance often comes from inside their own communities, some Chinese dissidents abroad “take extreme pains to essentially isolate themselves,” Wang said, undermining their mental health.
Uyghurs in particular have been harassed, detained and sometimes extradited back to China, at times with the help of Beijing-friendly governments in regions such as the Middle East and North Africa.
“If you’re a Uyghur, you’re pretty much doomed in many parts of the world,” Wang said.
COMMENT – Not everyone cowers in fear when threatened, sometimes people get pissed off and fight back.
Authoritarianism
9. Hong Kong's plan for a new national security law deepens fears over eroding civil liberties
Kanis Leung, Associated Press, February 28, 2024
10. Hong Kong's new security law prompts foreign envoys to lodge concerns
Pak Yiu and Echo Wong, Nikkei Asia, February 29, 2024
11. China’s former foreign minister Qin Gang resigns as lawmaker after abrupt removal from office last year
AFP, Hong Kong Free Press, February 28, 2024
12. 7 veteran Hong Kong democrats launch bid to appeal unauthorised assembly convictions linked to 2019 demo
James Lee, Hong Kong Free Press, February 23, 2024
13. ‘Little by little, the truth is being discovered’: the archive rescuing China’s forbidden films
Amy Hawkins, The Guardian, February 20, 2024
14. Xi Jinping plays social engineer
The Economist, February 22, 2024
15. Major companies in China are setting up their own volunteer armies | CNN Business
Laura He, CNN, February 21, 2024
16. Tone Deaf
Rachel Cheung, The Wire China, February 25, 2024
Beijing’s crackdown on a celebrated, state-owned media outlet shows just how far Chinese censors have gone.
Bibek Bhandari was on holiday at home in Nepal for the first time in two years when he received an ominous text message from his manager at Sixth Tone, an English-language online publication in China. “Things are getting serious,” it said.
Several weeks before, on one of the last days of December 2022, the Shanghai-based outlet had run a year-end review, reflecting on the year’s biggest headlines. There were highlights, such as the Winter Olympics in Beijing, but overall, it was a tough year for China. Bhandari, Sixth Tone’s head of news at the time, had mostly selected buzzwords like “baby bust,” “housing crisis,” “gender violence,” “climate catastrophe,” and “COVID” to represent the year.
There was hardly anything new in the piece, but it caught the attention of jingoistic bloggers who found the depiction unfairly negative. In a Weibo post, Yu Liang, former editor-in-chief of the ultranationalist outlet Guancha, compared Sixth Tone’s coverage to that of The New York Times and BBC. “We have a CNN among our ranks,” a reader wrote in the comments.
Sixth Tone took the piece down shortly after Yu’s post made the rounds, but the damage was done. “I was told the project enraged certain people in Beijing — our criticism of the ‘zero-COVID’ policy had crossed the line,” Bhandari recalled on Twitter.
Sixth Tone is state-owned, but this was not the first time it had run into trouble with authorities. In 2017, the outlet published a photo essay of Uyghur life in Langan village, in southern Xinjiang, capturing the early signs of China’s repression of ethnic minorities in the region. After it was shared by Uyghur rights groups overseas, Sixth Tone was ordered to delete all stories about Xinjiang, regardless of whether they were related to human rights. In 2019, after a series of articles on migrant relocation, the outlet’s commentaries desk was suspended for a month. In most cases of perceived overreach, senior editors would write apology letters and the publication would lay low until things blew over.
17. Australian Writer’s Case Highlights Risks Foreigners Face in China
William Yang, VOA, February 22, 2024
Chinese-born Australian writer and businessman Yang Hengjun’s recent suspended death sentence on espionage charges is likely to add to growing concerns about the risks foreign nationals face living in, working in and visiting China, analysts say.
Yang, a democracy advocate and spy novelist, was sentenced earlier this month. On Wednesday, his family released a statement saying that they would not file an appeal to the ruling due to a lack of trust in China’s judicial system and the hope of securing “adequate and supervised medical care” for him.
“Yang’s decision to forgo the appeals process does not in any way change the fact that he is both innocent and morally unbreakable, [and] we, family and close friends, strongly support Yang’s decision to waive his legal right to appeal the suspended death sentence handed down to him,” they wrote in the statement.
Feng Chongyi, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of Technology Sydney and Yang’s former academic adviser, told VOA in a phone interview that the case will have ripple effects.
“The Chinese government’s decision to give Yang Hengjun a suspended death sentence will create a chilling effect among democratic countries and discourage foreign nationals from doing business in China,” Feng said.
He added that under China’s anti-espionage law, which was amended in July 2023 to give Chinese authorities more power to punish threats against national security, the Chinese government categorizes commercial information and news as “state secrets,” and that any foreigner could be treated as a spy under the law.
COMMENT – The Chinese Communist Party has adopted such a broad definition of “espionage” as to categorize criticism of the State and the Party as punishable by death. The suspended death sentence is a tactic to silence efforts by Yang’s family and friends to highlight this injustice and I can’t blame them for just wanting to accept fate.
It imposes upon those who care for Yang a difficult dilemma: continue to amplify Beijing’s crimes against Yang and risk his death OR stay silent and hope that Beijing loses interest and eventually eases up.
This should serve as a reminder to all Governments that they should not be encouraging their citizens to travel to the PRC. Only by imposing reputational costs and harming Beijing’s access to investment and the outside world will we stand any chance in moderating this outrageous behavior.
The more that the Party views these tactics as effective and low cost, the more we should expect them to employ these tactics.
My advice: avoid travel to the PRC at all costs and welcome Chinese citizens to visit, work, and emigrate in our countries.
18. Submission on Hong Kong Government Public Consultation Document Safeguarding National Security: Basic Law Article 23 Legislation
Georgetown Center for Asian Law, February 27, 2024
This submission is an analysis of the Hong Kong government’s public consultation document, Safeguarding National Security: Basic Law Article 23 Legislation. As the below analysis makes clear, we find the government’s proposals highly problematic. If new laws are enacted, and existing laws amended, along the lines put forward in the proposal, we believe that the impact on human rights and the rule of law in Hong Kong will be significant. We are also deeply concerned that the business environment will be affected as well.
This submission was drafted by the Georgetown Center for Asian Law (GCAL). One of the leading centers for teaching and research on Asian Law in the United States, GCAL has followed developments in Hong Kong quite closely since the 2019 pro-democracy protests. Since the 2020 National Security Law (NSL) went into effect, we have published a series of reports on its implementation. (These reports are all available on our website.) These reports have shown quite clearly that the NSL is a deeply flawed law. The government has used the NSL to crack down on its political opponents, including pro-democracy politicians, journalists, rights lawyers, civil society activists, and others.
Looking at the current situation in Hong Kong, and taking into account the government’s abuse of the NSL and other security laws, we believe that no new legislation is needed at this time. Hong Kong faces no known national security threats. Instead, it faces a crisis of confidence in its legal and political institutions, one generated by the government’s aggressive implementation of the NSL. Further legislation will only exacerbate this crisis, and should therefore be avoided.
COMMENT – The Georgetown Center for Asian Law at Georgetown University Law School does world renowned research on the law and policy across Asia. This is a submission to the Hong Kong Government, I wonder if this is available to the citizens of Hong Kong?
This report’s observation that “Hong Kong faces no known national security threats” is spot on.
The only “threat” in Hong Kong is its own citizens who question the erosion of the rule of law and the imposition of an authoritarian model for society, completely dominated by the Chinese Communist Party.
19. Leaked Files Show the Secret World of China’s Hackers for Hire
Paul Mozur, Keith Bradsher, John Liu and Aaron Krolik, New York Times, February 22, 2024
The hackers offered a menu of services, at a variety of prices.
A local government in southwest China paid less than $15,000 for access to the private website of traffic police in Vietnam. Software that helped run disinformation campaigns and hack accounts on X cost $100,000. For $278,000 Chinese customers could get a trove of personal information behind social media accounts on platforms like Telegram and Facebook.
The offerings, detailed in leaked documents, were a portion of the hacking tools and data caches sold by a Chinese security firm called I-Soon, one of the hundreds of enterprising companies that support China’s aggressive state-sponsored hacking efforts. The work is part of a campaign to break into the websites of foreign governments and telecommunications firms.
The materials, which were posted to a public website last week, revealed an eight-year effort to target databases and tap communications in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, India and elsewhere in Asia. The files also showed a campaign to closely monitor the activities of ethnic minorities in China and online gambling companies.
The data included records of apparent correspondence between employees, lists of targets and material showing off cyberattack tools. Three cybersecurity experts interviewed by The New York Times said the documents appeared to be authentic.
20. Detention of Chinese Businesswoman Owed Money by the State Sparks Public Outcry
Chun Han Wong, Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2024
The detention of a Chinese businesswoman trying to recoup unpaid fees from government-backed projects in an impoverished stretch of southern China has stirred widespread outrage over a perceived abuse of state power.
The case, centered on a stalled resort development worth tens of millions of dollars, speaks to widespread frustration in China with how authorities are managing the world’s second-largest economy, with previously profligate local governments now struggling to pay their debts.
The controversy erupted this week after a state-run newspaper published a report late Sunday saying that Ma Yijiayi, a construction contractor, spent years waging legal battles to press claims against officials in Shuicheng, a district of Guizhou province, only for local authorities to take her and her lawyers into custody late last year for allegedly disrupting public order.
Private entrepreneurs, lawyers and state-news outlets alike have weighed in, airing suspicions that district officials were trying to use criminal proceedings to fend off debtors and alleviate financial pressures.
China’s post-Covid economic hangover and slumping property market have driven down land-sales revenues that prop up local government coffers, prompting some officials to shore up finances through unorthodox means. This has included using law-enforcement agencies to boost income or—as some observers alleged to be happening in Shuicheng—ease debt pressures.
“Now they don’t even bother to pretend, they are committing daylight robbery,” one commentator wrote in an essay that garnered more than 100,000 views on the WeChat social-media app. “Using power to suppress the law and grasping power to play tricks, deadbeats with power are the deadliest.”
Ma and her lawyers couldn’t be reached for comment. Calls to Ma’s construction company didn’t go through, while queries sent to its email address weren’t immediately answered.
Shuicheng authorities said they have already paid most of the owed project fees, and that Ma was detained for allegedly provoking trouble and committing personal-data violations. The Shuicheng government and public-security bureau didn’t respond to requests for comment.
…
According to China Business Journal, Shuicheng officials offered Ma in November a lump-sum payment of 12 million yuan to settle the dispute despite owing about 220 million yuan in project payments. Ma rejected the offer, and soon after, local police detained her and her lawyers, the newspaper said.
COMMENT – “Provoking trouble”
As one colleague pointed out: “this gives an all-new meaning to the term debtors’ prison.”
21. McKinsey website touted its advice to Chinese government ministries
Stephen Foley, Ryan McMorrow, and Demetri Sevastopulo, Financial Times, February 27, 2024
22. China Expands Scope of ‘State Secrets’ Law in Security Push
Daisuke Wakabayashi, Keith Bradsher, and Claire Fu, New York Times, February 28, 2024
23. China says it aims to 'contain' foreign interference over Taiwan this year
Reuters, February 23, 2024
24. San Diego Zoo Could Be First in U.S. to Get Pandas from China Again
Claire Moses, New York Times, February 22, 2024
Environmental Harms
25. Growth in CO2 emissions leaves China likely to miss climate targets
Amy Hawkins, The Guardian, February 21, 2024
But carbon dioxide emissions have continued to grow, even as economic growth has slowed due to the fact that China’s economic growth during and after the Covid-19 pandemic has been highly energy intensive. Between 2021 and 2023, CO2 emissions grew at an average of 3.8% a year, up from 0.9% a year between 2016 and 2020. GDP growth slowed slightly over the same period.
The findings were published in an analysis from Carbon Brief conducted by Lauri Myllyvirta, a lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
Under the Paris agreement, China’s climate pledges require a number of targets to be met by 2025; these include increasing the share of non-fossil energy sources to 20% and reducing the carbon intensity of the economy by 18%. Carbon intensity refers to how many grams of CO2 are released to produce a kilowatt hour of electricity.
However, Myllyvirta’s analysis found that China was “way off track” on many of these targets, primarily because of the carbon intensity of recent economic growth. CO2 emissions will have to fall by between 4% and 6% to meet the government’s 2025 target, Myllyvirta predicts.
COMMENT – The PRC will NOT hit their targets and their carbon emissions exceed the entire developed world.
No matter how much the United States, Europe, and others make additional costly cuts to their own carbon emissions (actions that will continue to impose damaging political costs as well as rob countries of the funds they will need for mitigation), the continued emissions from the PRC will outweigh those cuts and total global carbon output will only grow.
The PRC represents 17% of global population but burns half the world’s coal and accounts for 26% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, a proportion that has doubled over the past decade.
The PRC’s carbon and greenhouse gas emissions are baked in for the next few decades, additional solar and wind energy production will simply be placed on top of Beijing’s massive coal-burning power plant infrastructure.
Instead of trying to prevent climate change (which is no longer possible given what the PRC has already built), we should seek to adapt to our changing climate and mitigate the worst impacts.
Buying electric vehicles and imposing increasingly harsh regulations on American and European farmers and natural gas producers will NOT solve the problem, but will fracture our polities and rob us of the funds we will need for adaptation.
26. Making Green Industrial Policy Work for the Climate
Ilaria Mazzocco, CSIS, February 21, 2024
Foreign Interference and Coercion
27. Could Myanmar become Beijing’s quagmire?
Henry Storey, Lowy Institute, February 28, 2024
28. Tuvalu’s new gov’t vows to continue ‘special’ Taiwan links, amid concerns of diplomatic switch to China
AFP, Hong Kong Free Press, February 28, 2024
29. China’s LOGINK: Securing Maritime Data in European Ports
Tereza Corradi, CHOICE, February 22, 2024
30. Malaysia’s prime minister doesn’t want to choose between the U.S. and China: ‘Why must I be tied to one interest?’
Lionel Lim, Fortune, February 25, 2024
31. US Republicans call for McKinsey to be banned from federal contracts
Demetri Sevastopulo and Stephen Foley, Financial Times, February 23, 2024
32. US Coast Guard boards Chinese fishing boats near Kiribati, official says
Kirsty Needham, Reuters, February 25, 2024
33. Turkey detains six suspected of spying on Uyghurs for China
Reuters, February 20, 2024
Human Rights and Religious Persecution
34. Exclusive: Police interrogate and beat Tibetans arrested in dam protest
Kalden Lodoe and Tenzin Pema, Radio Free Asia, February 24, 2024
35. Shanghai director set to face trial over 'white paper' protest film
Yitong Wu and Chingman, Radio Free Asia, February 23, 2024
36. China: Free Detained Tibetan Demonstrators
Human Rights Watch, February 28, 2024
37. Émigrés Are Creating an Alternative China, One Bookstore at a Time
Li Yuan, New York Times, February 26, 2024
From Thailand to America, Chinese denied a safe public space for discussion in their home country have found hope in diaspora communities.
On a rainy Saturday afternoon in central Tokyo, 50 or so Chinese people packed into a gray, nondescript office that doubles as a bookstore. They came for a seminar about Qiu Jin, a Chinese feminist poet and revolutionary who was beheaded more than a century ago for conspiring to overthrow the Qing dynasty.
Like them, Ms. Qiu had lived as an immigrant in Japan. The lecture’s title, “Rebuilding China in Tokyo,” said as much about the aspirations of the people in the room as it did about Ms. Qiu’s life.
Public discussions like this one used to be common in big cities in China but have increasingly been stifled over the past decade. The Chinese public is discouraged from organizing and participating in civic activities.
In the past year, a new type of Chinese public life has emerged — outside China’s borders in places like Japan.
“With so many Chinese relocating to Japan,” said Li Jinxing, a human rights lawyer who organized the event in January, “there’s a need for a place where people can vent, share their grievances, then think about what to do next.” Mr. Li himself moved to Tokyo from Beijing last September over concerns for his safety. “People like us have a mission to drive the transformation of China,” he said.
From Tokyo and Chiang Mai, Thailand, to Amsterdam and New York, members of the Chinese diaspora are building public lives that are forbidden in China and training themselves to be civic-minded citizens — the type of Chinese the Communist Party doesn’t want them to be. They are opening Chinese bookstores, holding seminars and organizing civic groups.
These émigrés are creating an alternative China, a more hopeful society. In the process, they’re redefining what it means to be Chinese.
Four Chinese bookstores opened in Tokyo last year. A monthly feminist open-mic comedy show that started in New York in 2022 was so successful that feminists in at least four other U.S. cities, as well as London, Amsterdam and Vancouver, British Columbia, are staging similar shows. Chinese immigrants in Europe established dozens of nonprofit organizations focused on L.G.B.T.Q., protest and other issues.
Most of these events and organizations are not overtly political or aimed at trying to overthrow the Chinese government, though some participants hope they will be able to return to a democratic China someday. But the immigrants organizing them say they believe it’s important to learn to live without fear, to trust one another and pursue a life of purpose.
38. Hong Kong to consider barring early-release prisoners from leaving city, corrections chief says
Hans Tse, Hong Kong Free Press, February 22, 2024
39. Inside North Korea's Forced-Labor Program
Ian Urbina, New Yorker, February 25, 2024
Workers sent from the country to Chinese factories describe enduring beatings and sexual abuse, having their wages taken by the state, and being told that if they try to escape they will be “killed without a trace.”
In February of last year, Donggang Jinhui Foodstuff, a seafood-processing company in Dandong, China, threw a party. It had been a successful year: a new plant had opened, and the company had doubled the amount of squid that it exported to the United States. The party, according to videos posted on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, featured singers, instrumentalists, dancers, fireworks, and strobe lights. One aspect of the company’s success seems to have been its use of North Korean workers, who are sent by their government to work in Chinese factories, in conditions of captivity, to earn money for the state. A seafood trader who does business with Jinhui recently estimated that it employed between fifty and seventy North Koreans. Videos posted by a company representative show machines labelled in Korean, and workers with North Korean accents explaining how to clean squid. At the party, the company played songs that are popular in Pyongyang, including “People Bring Glory to Our Party” (written by North Korea’s 1989 poet laureate) and “We Will Go to Mt. Paektu” (a reference to the widely mythologized birthplace of Kim Jong Il). Performers wore North Korean colors, and the country’s flag billowed behind them; in the audience, dozens of workers held miniature flags.
Drone footage played at the event showed off Jinhui’s twenty-one-acre, fenced-in compound, which has processing and cold-storage facilities and what appears to be a seven-floor dormitory for workers. The company touted a wide array of Western certifications from organizations that claim to check workplaces for labor violations, including the use of North Korean workers. When videos of the party were posted online, a commenter—presumably befuddled, because using these workers violates U.N. sanctions—asked, “Aren’t you prohibited from filming this?”
Like Jinhui, many companies in China rely on a vast program of forced labor from North Korea. (Jinhui did not respond to requests for comment.) The program is run by various entities in the North Korean government, including a secretive agency called Room 39, which oversees activities such as money laundering and cyberattacks, and which funds the country’s nuclear- and ballistic-missile programs. (The agency is so named, according to some defectors, because it is based in the ninth room on the third floor of the Korean Workers’ Party headquarters.) Such labor transfers are not new. In 2012, North Korea sent some forty thousand workers to China. A portion of their salaries was taken by the state, providing a vital source of foreign currency for Party officials: at the time, a Seoul-based think tank estimated that the country made as much as $2.3 billion a year through the program. Since then, North Koreans have been sent to Russia, Poland, Qatar, Uruguay, and Mali.
40. Human Rights Heist at the United Nations
David Bandurski and Dalia Parete, China Media Project, February 16, 2024
During its recent Universal Periodic Review China emphasized that it had its own path for human rights, rejecting “the West’s” focus on political rights. David Bandurski and Dalia Parete look at how related state narratives have emerged from the heart of the UN.
Industrial Policies and Economic Espionage
41. Russia outsmarts Western sanctions—and China is paying attention
The Economist, February 21, 2024
42. U.S. export curbs on China won't extend to legacy chips: official
Sadayasu Senju, Nikkei Asia, February 23, 2024
43. Comac Steals the Limelight in Singapore with First Peek of C919 Jet
Danny Lee, Bloomberg, February 25, 2024
44. Return of Chinese tourists still big question mark for U.S. hotels
Jack Stone Truitt, Nikkei Asia, February 24, 2024
45. In ‘finance war’ with US, former official says China risks staring down the barrel of a capital conundrum
Mandy Zuo and Ralph Jennings, South China Morning Post, February 28, 2024
46. Offshore creditor files petition to wind up Country Garden
Echo Wong, Nikkei Asia, February 28, 2024
47. China's slowing economy, Xi's government tactics leave American investors wary
Lesley Stahl, CBS News, February 25, 2024
48. Shields Up: How China, Europe, Japan and the United States Shape the World through Economic Security
Elvire Fabry, Nicolas Köhler-Suzuki, Pascal Lamy, and Marco Sibona, Jacques Delors Institute, February 2024
49. USTR Releases Annual Report on China's WTO Compliance
Office of the United States Trade Representative, February 23, 2024
“China remains the biggest challenge to the international trading system established by the World Trade Organization. It has been 22 years since China acceded to the WTO, and China still embraces a state-directed, non-market approach to the economy and trade, which runs counter to the norms and principles embodied by the WTO,” said Ambassador Katherine Tai. “Even more problematic, China’s approach targets industries for global market domination by Chinese companies using an array of constantly evolving non-market policies and practices. This report details the breadth and scale of China’s non-market policies and practices and the serious harm that they cause to workers, businesses, and industries in the United States and around the world. It is a stark reminder that the members of the international trading system must continue to work together to defend our shared interests against these many harmful policies and practices, particularly in sectors targeted by China’s industrial plans.”
Over the last three years, the Biden-Harris Administration has pursued a multi-faceted strategy that accounts for the current realities in the U.S.-China trade relationship and the many challenges that the PRC poses for the United States and other trading partners, both now and in the future. Under President Biden’s leadership, the United States has invested at home in the industries of today and tomorrow. The Administration continues to take actions to address the PRC’s non-market excess capacity and distortions across key economic sectors. At the same time, President Biden continues to build a coalition of allies and partners to address the unique problems posed by the PRC and its non-market economic policies and practices. The United States has also pursued direct engagement with the PRC, where appropriate.
COMMENT - How can the WTO survive when the largest trading nation refuses to abide by the rules and foundational concepts of the WTO?
I recommend we acknowledge reality that the WTO does not function and start over with a new international trading agreement.
We’ve tried to make that organization work for 29 years and it cannot given the fundamental error of bringing in a nation-state that does not accede to the rules of the game.
Cyber & Information Technology
50. TikTok Executives Fretted About China Ties of CapCut Editing-App
Juro Osawa, Information, February 20, 2024
51. China lures AI talent with hefty salary premium as demand far exceeds supply, report finds
Ben Jiang, South China Morning Post, February 28, 2024
52. US Renews Inquiry into Applied Materials’ Chinese Business
Mackenzie Hawkins and Debby Wu, Bloomberg, February 27, 2024
53. Who's Who in the Semiconductor Supply Chain
Paul Sédille, The Wire China, February 26, 2024
54. Alibaba Discloses State Ownership in More Than 12 Business Units
Sarah Zheng, Bloomberg, February 25, 2024
55. Largest chip toolmaker receives multiple subpoenas from U.S government over China shipments — Applied Materials under the govt's microscope News
Anton Shilov, Tom’s Hardware, February 28, 2024
56. Exclusive: US targets China's top chipmaking plant after Huawei Mate 60 Pro
Alexandra Alper and Karen Freifeld, Reuters, February 21, 2024
Military and Security Threats
57. By the numbers: China’s nuclear inventory continues to grow
Amrita Jash, Lowy Institute, February 27, 2024
58. Chinese company hacked UK government, NATO, GitHub leak claims
Gigi Lee, Radio Free Asia, February 22, 2024
59. Satellite images reveal floating barrier at mouth of disputed atoll in South China Sea
Greg Torode and Karen Lema, Reuters, February 26, 2024
Satellite images of the hotly disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea show a new floating barrier across its entrance, near where Philippine ships and China coast guard vessels have had frequent run-ins.
One of the images taken by Maxar Technologies on Feb. 22 and viewed by Reuters showed the barrier blocking the mouth of the shoal, where the Chinese coast guard last week claimed to have driven off a Philippine vessel "illegally intruding" into Beijing's waters.
The Philippines, which last week deployed a Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) vessel to patrol the shoal and transport fuel to Filipino fishermen in the area, said that China's claims were "inaccurate" and that Manila's activities there were lawful.
China claims the Scarborough Shoal, although it is inside the Philippines' 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone. An international arbitration tribunal in the Hague said in 2016 that China's claims had no legal basis - a decision Beijing has rejected.
That makes the atoll one of Asia's most contested maritime features and a flashpoint for diplomatic flare-ups over sovereignty and fishing rights.
The satellite image bolsters a report and video distributed by the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) on Sunday showing two Chinese coast guard inflatable boats deploying floating barriers at the shoal's entrance on Feb 22.
The PCG said that a China coast guard ship shadowed the BFAR vessel, "conducted blocking manoeuvres" about 1.3 nautical miles (2.4 km) off the shoal, and closely approached it.
60. Southeast Asia’s preferred military exercise partner
Rahman Yaacob and Jack Sato, Lowy Institute, February 29, 2024
61. As China ramps up its presence in Antarctica, analysts say Australia is 'asleep at the wheel'
Libby Hogan, ABC News, February 17, 2024
62. China's New Antarctic Research Station Renews Concerns About Potential Security Threats
William Yang, VOA, February 16, 2024
63. U.S. Military Theories of Victory for a War with the People's Republic of China
Jacob L. Heim, Zachary Burdette, Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, RAND, February 21, 2024
64. Decoding China: Inevitable Taiwan tensions in 2024
Yuchen Li, DW, February 16, 2024
65. Closer to China than to the Japanese mainland, these idyllic islands confront the prospect of war
Stephanie Yang, Los Angeles Times, February 28, 2024
66. Chinese firm’s leaked files show vast international hacking effort
Christian Shepherd, Cate Cadell, Ellen Nakashima, Joseph Menn, and Aaron Schaffer, Washington Post, February 22, 2024
67. Silicon Valley’s Next Mission: Help the U.S. Catch China and Russia in Hypersonic Weapons
Heather Somerville, Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2024
68. U.S. Limits Sales of Americans’ Personal Data to China, Other Adversaries
Dustin Volz and Lingling Wei, Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2024
69. China urges largest nuclear states to negotiate a 'no-first-use' treaty
Reuters, February 27, 2024
One Belt, One Road Strategy
70. China’s Security Engagement in Latin America and the Caribbean
R. Evan Ellis, The Diplomat, February 23, 2024
71. Cambodia's airport dreams stall as Chinese money dries up
Jack Brook, Nikkei Asia, February 23, 2024
Opinion Pieces
72. Red China Isn’t ‘Back’ Under Xi Jinping. It Never Went Away
Frank Dikötter, TIME, February 26, 2024
73. Why Are We Still Reliant on China for Our Biosecurity?
Matthew Turpin, RealClearDefense, February 28, 2024
74. The Real Roots of Xi Jinping Thought
Rana Mitter, Foreign Affairs, February 20, 2024
In 2023, Hunan TV, China’s second-most-watched television channel, unveiled a series called When Marx Met Confucius. The conceit was literal: actors playing the two thinkers—Confucius dressed in a tan robe and Karl Marx in a black suit and a leonine white wig—met at the Yuelu Academy, a thousand-year-old school renowned for its role in developing Confucian philosophy. Over five episodes, Marx and Confucius discussed the nature of politics, arriving at the conclusion that Confucianism and Marxism are compatible—or that Marx may have subconsciously drawn his theories from a Confucian well. In one episode, Marx noted that he and his companion “share a commitment to [political] stability,” adding that “in reality, I myself was Chinese for a long time,” suggesting that his thinking had always been harmonious with traditional Chinese worldviews.
The series was backed by the Chinese Communist Party and formed part of President Xi Jinping’s sweeping political project to reconceptualize his country’s ideological identity. Since taking office in 2012, Xi has made it imperative for Chinese people to understand his interpretation of Chinese ideology, which he calls “Xi Jinping Thought.” Bureaucrats, tycoons, and pop stars have been required to endorse it; students now learn it in school; CCP members must use a smartphone app that regularly communicates its precepts. Key to Xi’s thought is pairing Marxism with Confucianism: in October 2023, he declared that today’s China should consider Marxism its “soul” and “fine traditional Chinese culture as the root.”
Xi’s efforts to redefine China’s ideological underpinnings feel increasingly urgent as a slowdown in growth has fed doubts among investors and public distrust at home. He leads a country whose economic might is far more respected than its form of government: China has now won a place among the world’s major economies but remains an aspirant within the international order. To the frustration of Xi and other Chinese leaders, Western countries will be reluctant to accept China’s global influence unless China conforms to modern liberal values. But his attempted synthesis of Marx and Confucius has prompted bafflement, even mockery, among observers outside and inside China.
Over the past century, Chinese communist thinkers have tended to believe that a flourishing future demands a complete break from the past. China’s formative early Marxist thinkers, in particular, generally condemned Confucianism, a philosophy that stresses hierarchy, ritual, and a return to an idealized past. Mao Zedong and other Chinese Marxists believed that Confucianism was theoretically incompatible with Marxism, which celebrates revolution and perpetual change, and that its practical influence on politics had made China weak. Confucian thinking, in their view, had generated a moribund bureaucracy that failed to adapt to the challenges of modernity; this renunciation found its ultimate expression during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when the Chinese Red Guards dynamited the philosopher’s tomb before hanging a naked corpse in front of it.
But erasing the past in a country with so rich a history was always a struggle. It has consistently also seemed to matter to Chinese thinkers, and Chinese people in general, that their country should be seen as responding to political change with methods derived from a recognizably Chinese source. Even as many of China’s early-twentieth-century political theorists condemned Confucianism, other thinkers strove to show that China did not have to imitate Western ideas—be they nationalist, liberal, or Marxist—to modernize. They found a road map for a different but potentially effective kind of modernization within the universe of traditional Chinese ideas.
75. Xi Jinping is tanking China’s economy. That’s bad for the U.S.
The Editorial Board, Washington Post, February 21, 2024
76. China Is Running Out of Lines to Cross in the Taiwan Strait
Ben Lewis, New York Times, February 26, 2024
In 2020 the balance of military power in the Taiwan Strait began a gradual but profound shift in China’s favor.
That August, Alex Azar, then the health and human services secretary, became the highest-ranking U.S. cabinet official to visit Taiwan in more than four decades. Though he was there to talk about the pandemic, China’s People’s Liberation Army responded by carrying out large-scale military exercises around the self-governing island, sending aircraft over the median line of the Taiwan Strait, the halfway point between China and Taiwan, for only the third time in more than 20 years. Since then, China has responded to such visits and other perceived provocations by flying more than 4,800 sorties, with growing numbers of aircraft flying in locations previously seen as off-limits and conducting dozens of increasingly complex air and naval military exercises around Taiwan.
The P.L.A.’s now-normalized presence around Taiwan raises the risk of an accidental confrontation. But over the longer term, it has also gradually created a dangerous sense of complacency in Taipei and Washington while giving China the crucial operational practice it might one day need to seize the island.
As a military analyst specializing in China and Taiwan who has spent the past two years managing an open-source database tracking Chinese military activity, I am deeply concerned about the dangers that this activity poses. Alarms should be ringing, but neither Taiwan nor the United States has taken meaningful action to deter China, and Taiwan’s response has been inconsistent and lacks transparency, which may further embolden Beijing. A more robust approach is needed to deter China from escalating the situation.
In 2020, shortly after China began raising the pressure, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense started releasing daily reports on Chinese military activity inside the island’s Air Defense Identification Zone, a perimeter extending beyond Taiwan’s territorial waters and airspace that is monitored to provide early warning of approaching Chinese planes or missiles. In previous years, China rarely entered the zone. But in 2020, P.L.A. aircraft breached it nearly 400 times. Last year, that number exceeded 1,700.
Beijing has steadily pushed the envelope. P.L.A. forces also rarely crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait. But in August 2022, after a visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Chinese forces crossed the line 302 times, essentially erasing it as a functional boundary. Today, Chinese aircraft continue to cross the line almost daily, leaving Taiwan only minutes to assess China’s intentions in a dangerous guessing game that leaves the door open for miscalculation. Since last year, China also has essentially established a permanent naval presence around the island.
With no official contact between Beijing and Taipei for the past eight years, the chances of defusing an inadvertent clash are limited. An isolated confrontation could escalate into an attack by China or to a rapid deployment of the now well-drilled air and naval forces it has around Taiwan, cutting the island off from any U.S. help and significantly reducing American military options.
This tense climate is straining Taiwan’s defenses. In early 2021, Taiwan stopped scrambling jets for every violation of the island’s Air Defense Identification Zone after spending almost 9 percent of the previous year’s defense budget on monitoring Chinese aircraft.
This atmosphere has sown policy confusion. In October 2022, after the incursions following Ms. Pelosi’s visit, Taiwan’s Defense Ministry announced that any P.L.A. aircraft that violated Taiwan’s territorial air and sea space — 12 nautical miles from the island’s shores — would be viewed as a “first strike,” most likely meaning they would be shot down.
Since then, no incursions by P.L.A. aircraft have been publicly revealed, but China has tested Taiwan’s policy by sending at least 27 balloons into the island’s territorial airspace since the start of this year, forcing Taipei to choose between taking no action, which gives Beijing tacit permission to continue to violate the island’s airspace, or shooting down the balloons, which could provoke China. So far, Taiwan is not known to have taken any action against the balloons that have entered its airspace.
Taipei’s approach to sharing information about Chinese activities with the public has not been fully transparent, marked by unexplained changes in how much information it releases. Caution is understandable to avoid raising public alarm. But a lack of transparency also prevents the government from communicating the true situation to Taiwan’s people, which could lead to calls for a different policy.
Voters in Taiwan made their desires clear last month when they chose Lai Ching-te, who is committed to the island’s sovereignty, as their next president. His victory presents a chance for his government to adopt a more transparent approach to Beijing’s military aggression similar to that of the Philippines, which has demonstrated that drawing attention to Chinese actions in the South China Sea can help build domestic, regional and international support for efforts to counter that aggression.
In Washington there is bipartisan support for Taiwan, and President Biden has repeatedly stated that the United States would come to the island’s defense. The Taiwan Relations Act, which has governed American policy toward the island for four decades, explicitly states that any moves to determine Taiwan’s future by other than peaceful means would be of “grave concern.” But America has come up with no specific response to China’s recent military activity.
The United States must make clear to China that its military activities could spark a war and are no longer acceptable. Washington should also coordinate with Taipei on more effective ways to deter Chinese provocations, such as through increased information sharing, air patrol exercises and ensuring that the island is fully equipped and prepared to defend its sovereignty.
America’s strategic attention is being consumed by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. But if the United States takes its eye off the perilous situation facing Taiwan, there soon may be no lines left for China to cross.
77. Why China will focus on technology but muddle through on policy at NPC meeting
Andy Xie, South China Morning Post, February 23, 2024
78. Russia Might Win in Ukraine. China Can't
Minxin Pei, Bloomberg, February 21, 2024
79. China should not underestimate impact of inward FDI plunge
Nikkei Asia, February 21, 2024