What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening

Dear Access members,

We’ve got four things at the top for you — the big one is China’s response to charges of widespread human rights abuses of minorities at the United Nations.

Our whole team really appreciates your support as Access members. Please chat with us on our Slack channel or contact me anytime at jeremy@suchina.com.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief

1. ‘There is no such thing as re-education centers.’

Last Friday, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) heard testimony about China, condemning China’s massive social engineering program in Xinjiang that has seen perhaps more than a million Uyghurs disappeared into “re-education camps” as part of an apparent plan to destroy Uyghur culture.

A few hours before today’s session, I sent an email to The China Project subscribers and guessed that the Beijing delegation would be similar to an editorial in the nationalistic rag Global Times titled Protecting peace, stability is top of human rights agenda for Xinjiang.

The Global Times is not the official voice of the Party or government, but in some ways, it represents the Party’s id. The English version of the Global Times also often tries out arguments that sometimes later find their way into government rhetoric. This piece about the “human rights agenda for Xinjiang” does not deny that there are extreme measures being used in Xinjiang. Instead, it justifies “the high intensity of regulations” and ubiquitous “police and security posts” as necessary to maintain peace and ensure future development. A “transition to normal governance” will resume at some unspecified future time, we are assured. The money quote, which the Global Times also tweeted:

Through the strong leadership of the Communist Party of China, the national strength of the country and the contribution of local officials, Xinjiang has been salvaged from the verge of massive turmoil. It has avoided the fate of becoming “China’s Syria” or “China’s Libya.” Xinjiang is operating under the rule of law and ethnic unity. As business recovers, the region’s future is promising.

I expected the Chinese delegation to CERD to make a similar argument.

I was wrong. The delegation completely denied the existence of any camps, abusive practices, or restrictions targeting Muslims, Uyghurs, or any other minorities.

You can watch a three-hour video of the session on the UN website here (the interesting stuff starts about an hour in). There are reports by the Guardian, CNN, the South China Morning Post, the BBC, Quartz, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal (the last two are paywalled). Here are some quotes from the Chinese delegation.

• “Xinjiang citizens including the Uyghurs enjoy equal freedoms and rights… There is no arbitrary detention, or lack of freedom of religious belief.”

• “There is no such thing as re-education centers… It must be pointed out that Xinjiang is a victim of terrorism. In an effort to secure the life and property of all ethnic groups in the region, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has undertaken special campaigns to crack down on terrorism… With respect to criminals involved in minor offenses, the authorities assign them vocational, educational and employment training centers with a view to assisting in their rehabilitation. They are not subject to any arbitrary detention or ill treatment there.”

• “The argument that one million Uyghurs are detained in re-education centres is completely untrue.”

• “On freedom of religious belief, Xinjiang guarantees citizens freedom of religious belief and protects normal religious activities.”

• “Those deceived by religious extremism…shall be assisted by resettlement and re-education,” he added.

It’s unlikely anyone will be convinced. As Emily Rauhala of the Washington Post tweeted: “China denies the mass detention of Muslims in Xinjiang. Kazakhstan has a growing number of witnesses.” She links to her report: New evidence emerges of China forcing Muslims into ‘reeducation’ camps.

Nathan Vanderklippe of Canada’s Globe and Mail is another reporter on top of this story right now. His latest piece, published over the weekend, is: Exporting persecution: Uyghur diaspora haunted by anxiety, guilt as family held in Chinese camps.

For background on how the story has been building for the last year:

2017

• October 17: This is what a 21st-century police state really looks like, by Megha Rajagopalan / BuzzFeed

• December 19: Twelve days in Xinjiang: How China’s surveillance state overwhelms daily life, by Josh China / WSJ (porous paywall)

• December 17-29: In western China, thought police instill fear, Uighurs fighting in Syria take aim at China, China’s crackdown on Uighurs spreads to even mild critics, China’s Uighurs work to fend off pull of jihad, by Gerry Shih / AP

2018

• February 18: Sinica Podcast: Gerry Shih on China’s Uyghur Muslims, under pressure at home and abroad

—Jeremy Goldkorn

2. Peak Xi and ‘getting China wrong’

In the email I sent earlier today, I linked to a piece by William H. Overholt — senior fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center and longtime adviser to the public and private sectors: The West is getting China wrong. The article is extracted from Overholt’s recent book, China’s Crisis of Success, and here is an even briefer extract:

The dominant narrative in the West reads that China has a stable administration run by a ‘president for life’ who is the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. China has escaped the pressures for political change that transformed earlier Asian miracle economies at similar levels of development. It has consolidated a particularly repressive market Leninism, which is destined to grow rapidly for the indefinite future. And its increasingly centralised economic control and ambitious industrial policies are so efficient that they constitute an unlimited threat to the West.

These arguments are wrong. China has not escaped the pressures of political complexity that forced political reform elsewhere. Rather, those pressures are so powerful that the whole structure of Xi Jinping’s administration is a reaction to those pressures…

…Xi is vulnerable. He disappears from the media for days. An adulatory movie is suddenly curtailed. Portraits are suddenly removed. His bodyguards are suddenly changed. Lawyers and students are increasingly assertive. The annual Beidaihe leadership meeting is contentious.

Read the whole thing. It’s an excellent piece and food for thought, and I just bought his book. Two comments on the extract:

• Obviously Overholt’s book has been some time in the making, but this article came out exactly when the conventional wisdom in much of the English-language commentary may be shifting, with the recognition that we may have reached peak Xi in terms of his façade of invulnerability.

• It’s impossible to judge threats to Xi’s power from the little we know about elite Party politics. Mao Zedong himself, from the time of the Yan’An revolutionary base in the 1930s until his death in 1976, spent a great deal of energy fending off real and imagined threats to his power. And Xi has never disappeared from the media “for days” since he has been Party secretary — at most, he has been absent from the top headline of Xinhua and the People’s Daily for 48 hours or so.

—Jeremy Goldkorn

3. Trade war, day 39: China has ‘basically stopped’ buying American soybeans

Last Friday, the trade war reached a new low as the People’s Daily blamed the entire conflict on an American “hegemony-dominated mindset,” and concluded, “No matter what China does, in the eyes of the United States, China’s development has already ‘damaged the supremacy of the United States.’”

Not much has happened since then, but a couple of interesting reports on soybeans, the largest single product caught up in the trade war, came out:

• The Peak Pegasus ship, which just barely missed the deadline to unload its 70,000-ton haul of Americans soybeans in China before tariffs hit, floated aimlessly at sea for five weeks since then. Voice of America reports that its saga has come to an end, as the soybean transaction was successfully completed at the port of Dalian — with an extra 25 percent fee, of course, totaling $6 million.

• Future soybean shipments of the size and regularity that Peak Pegasus represented may never resume between the U.S. and China, the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture warned. Han Jun, the vice agriculture minister, said that China had “basically stopped” buying American soy, adding, “Many countries have the willingness and they totally have the capacity to take over the market share the US is enjoying in China. If other countries become reliable suppliers for China, it will be very difficult for the US to regain the market.”

—Lucas Niewenhuis

4. The White Wolf

Last week, an official at the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office told AFP that investigators had “conducted a search of the Chinese Unity Promotion Party (CUPP)  headquarters and residence of the main suspects for possible violation of the political donations act.”  

• One of the main suspects is Chang An-lo 张安乐, also known as the White Wolf (白狼 bái láng), who founded the CUPP in 2004 in Shenzhen.

• The Party is pro-Beijing and pro-unification, and has often been accused of being a front for organized crime, and for being a paid agent of Beijing influence.

• The White Wolf was leader of the Bamboo Union a.k.a. United Bamboo Gang, UBG, or 竹联帮 zhū liánbāng, the largest triad in Taiwan. Wikipedia says the Bamboo Union members call themselves “businessmen” and see themselves as “patriots” rather than “criminals,” but these are the criminal activities Wikipedia attributes to them: “Drug trafficking, kidnapping, extortion, espionage, protection racket, contract killing, assault, assassinations, illegal gambling, loan sharking, political corruption, human trafficking, prostitution, murder, and organized crime.”

In December 2000, the Washington Post published a profile of the White Wolf, by John Pomfret, author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom and occasional The China Project contributor.

We reprint that story with permission — and editor’s updates on relevant details — for Access members.

You’re welcome to copy it and forward it to friends or colleagues — we’ll put it on our public site on Thursday.

—Jeremy Goldkorn

BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY:

• China is literally printing money (for other countries)
  Why other countries are giving China a licence to print money / SCMP
  Channel NewsAsia correspondent Wei Du commented on Twitter: “As cash goes out of fashion in China, a Chinese mint turns to BRI. What a wonderfully quirky story that also packs a ton of social political economy.”

• Government policy
  China releases three-year action plan for information technology consumption / TechNode

• Blockchain and crypto
  China’s Xiong’an New Area is going to use blockchain for project fund management / TechNode

• Film star tax fraud
  Chinese authorities crack down on tax dodges, illegal capital remittances by celebrities / SCMP
  “The probes culminated from several weeks of intense public scrutiny and outcry stirred up by popular TV host Cui Yongyuan, who blew the whistle in June on a prevalent practice in China’s entertainment circles to help highly paid celebrities evade tax: dual accords known as ‘yin-yang contracts’ that split remuneration agreements into a copy for tax officials and a private copy for the actor.”

• Tencent
  Tencent spinoff China Literature to buy New Classics Media for $2.2B in content consolidation / TechCrunch

• Solar and subsidies
  Can China’s solar sector survive without subsidy? / Chinadialogue
  China’s solar stress could burn more dealmakers / Breakingviews

POLITICS AND CURRENT AFFAIRS:

• Vaccine scandal ?
  The mysterious rise and fall of China’s scandal-hit ‘vaccine queen’ / SCMP

• Detained Hong Kong booksellers ?
  China lets Swedish doctor see detained bookseller Gui Minhai eight months after he was arrested in Beijing / SCMP
  Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee’s Taiwan shop deal fell through after investor ‘warned by Chinese agents’ / SCMP

• The have-one-more-child policy
  Burying ‘one child’ limits, China pushes women to have more babies / NYT (paywall)

• Sun Wenguang detention
  China detains VOA Mandarin correspondent / Voice of America

• Cults and religious groups
  China tries more members of banned religious group ‘Almighty God’ / Reuters
  “China has already sentenced dozens of followers of Quannengshen, or the Church of Almighty God, since the murder of a woman at a fast-food restaurant by suspected members of the group in 2014 sparked a national outcry.”

• Malaysia and Belt and Road headaches
  AP Interview: Malaysia’s Mahathir aims to scrap China deals / AP
  “‘We don’t think we need those two projects. We don’t think they are viable. So if we can, we would like to just drop the projects,’ he said from his office in the administrative center of Putrajaya.”

• Military maneuvers
  China flexes its military might with series of naval exercises in local waters / SCMP
  China’s air force quietly adds new J-16 fighter jets to ‘push the envelope’ / SCMP

• Sri Lanka
  US gives Sri Lankan military US$39 million to combat China’s investments in strategic island / SCMP

• Taiwan
  China’s efforts to lure Taiwanese workers may be backfiring / Taiwan News
  Chen I-hsin 陳以信, who Jonathan Sullivan noted on Twitter is “Ma Ying-jeou’s former presidential spokesperson,” has quite the quote in the article: “The more they [Taiwanese workers in China] understand China, the more they hate China. This is the biggest blind spot in mainland China’s policy toward Taiwan.”

• Africa
  China may try to join hands with Japan to challenge US / The Mainichi
  Eric Olander of the China-Africa Podcast, on Twitter: “Ever since Japan floated the idea of reaching out to China to cooperate on dev projects in Africa, I’ve struggled to understand why Beijing would even consider it. One idea: to slowly try and chip away at the U.S.-Japan alliance.”
  Tebogo Khaas: The right track, or Sino abyss? / News24
  “China, Africa’s blesser-in-chief, and South Africa used the BRICS summit as a backdrop to announce a much-needed R33 billion ($2.29 billion) loan… It is feared, though, that a ‘messianic’ China could signal South Africa’s descent into a debt trap, given our already bloated public debt and enormously shrunken fiscal capabilities.”
  Silk Road to the Sahel: African ambitions in China’s Belt and Road Initiative / SAIS: CARI
  Yunnan Chen, a researcher at the China Africa Research Initiative (CARI) at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), investigates exactly what the Belt and Road has to do with Africa.
  Ghana bishop complains of growing Chinese influence in the country / Crux
  “A bishop in Ghana is claiming Chinese influence in the country is making the people face ‘captivity in our own land.’ In a video of a sermon that has gone viral across the country, Bishop Joseph Francis Kweku Essien of Wiawso said the growth of Chinese-owned businesses in the country is pushing Ghanaians out of work.”

• Belt and Road commentary
  Soviet collapse echoes in China’s Belt and Road / Bloomberg (paywall)
  David Fickling reminds us, “Grand investment plans for unproductive regions have caused empires to founder before.”

• France in the South China Sea
  How French ‘political messengers’ counter Beijing in South China Sea / SCMP
  Mathieu Duchâtel, a senior policy fellow at the European Council of Foreign Relations, writes that “France’s air and sea presence in the region asserts its support for a maritime security order based on shared rules and norms.”

• No journalism at the journalism school, please
  China expels German student who researched rights lawyers / Ap
  “A German man has learned the hard way that practicing journalism in China, even for a class project, could lead to serious trouble. David Missal, 24, was pursuing a master’s degree in journalism and communication at prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing. He was due to return to Germany on Sunday after immigration authorities told him his student visa was canceled.”
  Related: University teachers fired on say of student informants / University World News
  “The role of student information officers is to report any statements that contradict the official party line, an academic in Southern China told University World News on condition of anonymity. There has been more reliance by the authorities on such informants after widespread censorship of the internet curbed the spread of ‘non-ideological’ views on social media platforms, he said.”

SOCIETY AND CULTURE:

• Obituary: Ah Chung
  Renowned Hong Kong cartoonist Yim Yee-king, also known as Ah Chung, dies at 85 / SCMP
  “Renowned Hong Kong cartoonist Yim Yee-king [嚴以敬 a.k.a. Ah Chung 阿虫 or something like “bug buddy”] died in Los Angeles in the early hours of Saturday, just three days after he turned 85.”
  Pictured above is the cover of A Bug Collects Happiness (虫拾快乐 chóng shí kuàilè), a collection of Ah Chung’s cartoons and short writings that Baidu’s encyclopedia says is called “the Chicken Soup for the Soul of China” because of the philosophy of living a happy life it expresses.

• #MeToo at Beijing private summer camp  
  Sports coach accused of sexually assaulting 12-year-old twin girls at summer camp in China / SCMP
  “A sports coach is under investigation after a mother accused him of sexually assaulting her 12-year-old twin daughters during a summer camp – the latest in a string of allegations made on social media as the #MeToo campaign gains momentum in China.”

• Pets and the people who hate them
  Chinese pet owners panic over online call to poison unleashed dogs / Global Times
  “Chinese dog owners are in a panic after an online article calling on the public to poison unleashed pet dogs once again brought the country’s war over dogs in the spotlight.”

• Women’s writing from Taiwan
  “Contemporary Taiwanese Women Writers: An Anthology,” edited by Jonathan Stalling, Lin Tai-man and Yanwing Leung / Asian Review of Books
  “They are short and delicious samples of human curiosity, humor, suffering, politics and love. They are very well translated and well mixed as if for a literary buffet.”

• Chinese Labour Corps fought alongside Britain in World War I
  Chinese who helped allies in first world war commemorated in Britain / SCMP
  “A representative of Queen Elizabeth paid tribute to the men, who all died of contagious diseases in Liverpool hospitals, and to the rest of the 100,000-strong Chinese Labour Corps.”

VIRAL VIDEO ON WEIBO

Click Here10-year-old falls through moving escalator  

Luckily, she was rescued. According to official numbers, there were 48 elevator and escalator accidents in 2016, killing 41 people.

Amazing student’s notebook!

Some people underline their notes, some people highlight them, but this student draws intricate cartoons to accompany hers.

ON SUPCHINA

Click Here

Reddit, the ‘front page of the internet,’ has been blocked in China

Reddit, the world’s most popular discussion site and the 10th most visited website in the world (according to Alexa), is now blocked in China, joining the likes of Google, Facebook, and several Western media organizations (including The China Project).

Kuora: China’s claim to ‘5,000 years of history’

China often notes it has 5,000 years of history — but on what basis? Is this an internationally agreed claim, and could the same be said of other places on Earth? Kaiser Kuo examines.

Reminder: The China Project Photo Contest ends in two days

The first-ever The China Project Photo Contest ends on August 15. We’ve received some great entries so far, but the competition is just heating up as we approach the deadline. Show us your China story.

PHOTO FROM MICHAEL YAMASHITA

Produce market

A woman holds a watermelon inside a market in Xiaguan, Dali, Yunnan Province. The province has more than 100 varieties of fruits — its climate ranges from subtropical highland to humid subtropical.

—Jia Guo