Editor’s note for Thursday, October 28, 2021

My thoughts today:

China is not building a new military base in Tajikistan, as we mistakenly reported yesterday: Rather, Beijing is financing “the construction of an outpost for a special forces unit of Tajikistan’s police” to counter terrorism.

“The post will be located in Tajikistan’s eastern Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province in the Pamir mountains, which border China’s Xinjiang province as well as the northeastern Afghan province of Badakhshan,” Reuters reports, or see this report from Eurasia.org.

China already operates a military outpost in Tajikistan near the Afghan border and the Wakhan Corridor, the narrow strip of Afghan land that borders China. But this is manned not by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) but by the People’s Armed Police (PAP), and is likely used for intelligence gathering purposes, not any kind of military operations, said Harvard scholar of Central Asia Nargis Kassenova in a telephone interview with The China Project.

We’ve corrected the online version of our report first sent to you by email yesterday.

Across the border, meanwhile, the “Taliban are eager to have dialogue with the rest of the world, and the international community should help Afghanistan with its development,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wáng Yì 王毅 said yesterday.

Back in Beijing, the Cyberspace Administration of China, which has become the chief censor and skullcracker of the internet under Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, has announced (in Chinese) a campaign to “strengthen the construction of a civilized internet,” which includes making sure everyone in China knows about Xi Jinping thought and accepts socialist values.

China has changed so much over the past two decades, but in some ways it has changed so little. The first “civilized internet” campaign was rolled out in 2006 with the slogan, “Run a civilized internet, use the internet civilly,” and that resulted in the withering of a then vibrant community of bloggers.

Our words of the day are:

Strengthen the construction of a civilized internet
加强网络文明建设 jiāqiáng wǎngluò wénmíng jiànshè

Run a civilized internet, use the internet civilly
文明办网，文明上网 wénmíng bànwǎng, wénmíng shàngwǎng

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief