Tag: China
China’s protests are testing the surveillance state
“People in China have been living under extreme anti-Covid lockdowns as part of the country’s “zero-Covid” policy for the past three years. But after a wave of protests, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) appears ready to loosen some of those restrictions.
In late November, protests broke out in Urumqi, a city in the Xinjiang province, after an apartment fire there killed 10 people. Residents believe that fire trucks were obstructed by fences, tents, and other barriers normally used for Covid-19 precautions, leading to a multi-hour delay in extinguishing the blazes. The region had been under strict lockdown for more than 100 days at that point, and the fire proved to be a breaking point for many people who live there — and alongside other Covid-related incidents, helped galvanize protests in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, and elsewhere across China.”
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“hile the protests were overwhelmingly about ending the lockdowns, we also heard some calls for an end to President Xi Jinping’s surveillance state. One of the most striking images of the protests has been one of demonstrators holding up blank pieces of paper, a symbol of Chinese censorship.
But it’s not likely to spell the end of surveillance in China. The government is already leveraging the vast amounts of information it’s collected on its citizens — including cell phone location data — to crack down on those who participated in the protests.”
Viral: The Origin of Covid 19 | Matt Ridley
Biden’s hugely consequential high-tech export ban on China, explained by an expert
https://www.vox.com/world/2022/11/5/23440525/biden-administration-semiconductor-export-ban-china
Maybe Trump was right about TikTok
“TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is based in China. It isn’t an arm of the Chinese Communist Party, but Chinese laws say it can be forced to assist the Chinese government. That could mean handing all the data its app has collected about American citizens to China. And TikTok collects a lot of data about its users.
“The Chinese government has established clear pathways to empower itself to surveil individuals, to gather data from corporations, and through the 2017 [National Intelligence] law, to aggregate that data on government servers,” said Aynne Kokas, director of the University of Virginia’s East Asia Center and author of the recently released book Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty. “To the degree to which any of this is happening is difficult to know.”
TikTok has repeatedly said it isn’t happening and that it never will. It’s also tried to distance itself from its Chinese parent company. But those claims have been undermined by recent reports that say ByteDance has a great deal of control over TikTok and its direction, that China does have access to US data, and that ByteDance has tried to get location data from a few Americans through their TikTok accounts. (To these reports, TikTok has said that the app doesn’t collect precise location data and therefore couldn’t surveil US users this way, and that leaked conversations about Chinese employees having access to US data were in regards to figuring out to turn that access off.)”
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” They also fear that TikTok, directed by the Chinese government, will push propaganda or disinformation, which wouldn’t be hard to do considering how TikTok feeds its users so much content with its “For You” algorithm. It’s also not out of the realm of possibility that it would do this. A 2019 report showed that ByteDance had a list of banned content on TikTok, which included Tiananmen Square, Tibet, and Taiwan. And China has been caught using social media to spread disinformation or propaganda before (as have many other countries, including the United States). But that was through someone else’s platform. With TikTok, China could directly control what’s on the platform and how it’s distributed. It can’t do that with Facebook or Instagram.”
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“there’s the fear that China will be able to use TikTok’s data to power its AI innovations. That’s an advantage the US won’t have because its social media apps are banned in China and because there aren’t laws that would compel social media companies to hand over data just because the government wants it.”
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“While some have come around to thinking Trump was right to want to ban TikTok, they don’t necessarily agree with how he tried to do it. Courts didn’t agree either, and blocked his August 2020 executive order that would have forced ByteDance to sell TikTok or be banned. But it never made it to an actual trial, as Biden took office and revoked the executive order.
Republican leaders have criticized President Biden for not being as tough as Trump on TikTok and appearing to support the platform by reaching out to some of its biggest influencers. But the Biden administration isn’t going easy on TikTok, either. Biden recently issued an executive order expanding the definition of national security for the purposes of CFIUS reviews to include data and technologies necessary to “protect United States technical leadership.” It doesn’t directly address TikTok, but it certainly includes it.
CFIUS, by the way, has been reviewing ByteDance’s acquisition of Musical.ly for several years now. CFIUS doesn’t comment on ongoing investigations, but TikTok said in a statement to Recode that “we will not comment on the specifics of confidential discussions with the US government, but we are confident that we are on a path to fully satisfy all reasonable US national security concerns.”
To that end, TikTok is currently trying to wall US data off from China to satisfy CFIUS’s concerns in an effort it’s dubbed “Project Texas.” That would keep what’s considered “protected” data on US users on US-based servers run by Oracle, with controls over who has access to it.”
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“A deal between CFIUS and TikTok has reportedly been imminent for weeks now, but it hasn’t happened yet. There are doubts that anything short of forcing ByteDance to sell off TikTok would guarantee that China can’t access user data or do anything about concerns over pushing propaganda and disinformation.”
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“These problems could be solved very quickly if ByteDance were to sell off TikTok, but that doesn’t seem to be an option. The Chinese government would have to approve such a move, and experts say that’s very unlikely.
“The Chinese government loves TikTok,” Lewis said, pointing out that it’s the only social media app from China that’s been successful outside of the country. “The Chinese government will protect it.””
Are China’s lockdown protests the beginning of the end for Xi Jinping?
“So far, there’s no sign to suggest any significant damage to Xi’s position at the top of the Communist Party.
Nevertheless, it is the first major show of resistance from the public under Xi’s rule, and the grievances directed against the top of the Chinese government are too loud to be unheard.
Xi has made zero-COVID a personal political project. With the public now openly opposing the symbols of that policy — such as the strict PCR test requirements and mask regulations — he will no doubt be seen as personally liable for the public anger.
Ho-fung Hung, an academic at Johns Hopkins University specializing in China’s protest movements, says the government and society “are in the process of seeking a new equilibrium. There can be conflicts and instability in the process.”
Still, the timing could have been worse for Xi, if the protests had taken place before the 20th Communist Party congress last month, when he was confirmed in his position for a precedent-breaking third term.”
Biden administration reacts with caution to China protests
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/28/biden-administration-china-protests-zero-covid-00070924
Climate change has come for the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/9/29/23375616/china-climate-adaptation-heat-wave-future
Despite sanctions, Russian fuel is still selling — here’s who’s buying
“Petroleum shipments are still relatively stable for Russia, as nations like China and India have picked up some slack from EU countries weaning themselves off oil, and Russia still has LNG, coal, and nuclear energy to help the economy float, too.
In order to make petroleum products more appealing to customers like India and Indonesia, Russia has offered fairly steep discounts — an average of $30 per barrel — against Brent crude oil, which has also been a benefit for Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Cuba, all emerging economies struggling with inflation, as Business Insider reported. Although according to S&P the discounts on Russian crude oil are decreasing, some analysts believe they’ll persist, making Russian crude oil imports highly palatable for poorer countries.”
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“Countries like China, India, and Turkey are proving eager partners for the Russian fuel industry, with Turkey doubling Russian oil imports this year and vying to become a hub for Russian LNG transfers into Europe after damage to the Nord Stream pipelines.”
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“Even with the Nord Stream 1 pipeline out of commission — and setting aside the transfers to China, now Russia’s biggest natural gas buyer — European countries are importing record amounts of Russian LNG at market prices, according to Bloomberg. France has purchased about 6 percent more Russian LNG between January and September of this year than it did all of last year; Spain has already broken its record for Russian LNG imports this year, and Belgium is on track to do the same.
The stakes for natural gas imports are somewhat different than they are for Russian petroleum, in a number of different ways; for one, the EU hasn’t imposed sanctions against it as it has against petroleum products, though the bloc does intend to eliminate its reliance on Russian fossil fuels by 2027. Second, Russia has already used Europe‘s reliance on its natural gas as a weapon; Russia cut access to many European countries which refused to pay for LNG in rubles, and cut total output to Europe by 60 percent in June and by 80 percent in July, Reuters reported last month.”
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“Russia continues to invest heavily in its nuclear technology, and nuclear facilities in many nations are dependent on Russian technology and cooperation to function, even if they’re not directly importing Russian nuclear fuel, according to a report by Robert Ichord for the Atlantic Council.”
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“Russia has several illicit strategies to evade western sanctions on its energy products and financial system. Because these transactions are, by their nature, often difficult to track, it’s hard to know how effective and how widespread they are — not to mention how much the Russian economy is benefiting from them.”
The Chinese government’s unlikeliest standoff is with … fandom
“In 2016..China formally banned K-pop…The ban, ironically, turned many former K-pop stars back into Chinese celebrities whose K-pop influence is still being felt.”
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“The K-pop ban both is and isn’t about Korea. It began as a response to a US-Korea missile deal, but really embodied disapproval of three things the Chinese government perceived as tied to K-pop culture: the encroaching influence of US individualism, over-zealous fanbases, and effeminate men.
That last one is a major part of the K-pop ban, which forbids men from wearing earrings and excessive makeup on live TV.”
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“Dan Chen researches authoritarian politics at the University of Richmond. She told Vox that the CCP’s fixation on masculinity is a recent byproduct of Xi’s growing nationalism — because “nationalism is a very masculine ideology.” Framing foreign influences like K-pop as anti-masculine plays right into Xi’s narrative of an idealized China that’s strong physically as well as economically and politically. Toward this end, the government has worked to eradicate effeminacy in schoolchildren and promoted images of strong, muscular soldiers as the masculine ideal.”