Foreign affairs minister says she raised concerns about China’s human rights record during meeting with Wang Yi, including in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong
The Australian foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, has told her visiting Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, that Australians are “shocked” at the suspended death sentence imposed on the writer Dr Yang Hengjun.
Wong raised the Australian citizen’s case – along with human rights more broadly – during a meeting that was largely aimed at stabilising the previously turbulent relationship with Australia’s largest trading partner.
On 14 March 2024, the FIFDH published the film awards for its 2024 Festival. They include:
Gilda Vieira de Mello Prize
provides a moving account of the daily life of Mohamed Jabaly, who is stranded in Norway after the closure of Gaza’s borders. A call for freedom of movement, but above all freedom to pursue your dreams. “Gaza as depicted in Life is Beautiful no longer exists. Its streets, squares and the faces that populate filmmaker Mohamed Jabaly’s memories have been eradicated in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. What we are left with are the images that tell of the past, already under Israeli occupation. The violence of the borders, but also the solidarity and determination of an individual to lead a dignified existence. Cinema becomes the compass of an odyssey that takes us all to Gaza.”
Prize of the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT)
Total Trust follows the daily lives of activists who are watched and oppressed by the Chinese government through the use of technology, artificial intelligence and human rights. “Unveiling what appears to be a real-life Orwellian 1984 scenario, the documentary vividly portrays the persecution of Chinese human rights defenders and exposes the use of cutting-edge state surveillance technology tools to tightly control the lives of millions of people. This disconcerting image of rising authoritarianism prompts an important question: “Is a future controlled by technology, where we are no longer free to exercise our rights, a real risk for us all?” The prohibition of torture is what allows individuals to shape their personality and views, and establish their dignity, which is the very essence of being human.”
On 22 February 2024, Human Rights Watch came with a study on governments reaching outside their borders to silence or deter dissent by committing human rights abuses against their own nationals or former nationals. Governments have targeted human rights defenders, journalists, civil society activists, and political opponents, among others, deemed to be a security threat. Many are asylum seekers or recognized refugees in their place of exile. These governmental actions beyond borders leave individuals unable to find genuine safety for themselves and their families. This is transnational repression.
Transnational repression looks different depending on the context. Recent cases include a Rwandan refugee who was killed in Uganda following threats from the Rwandan government; a Cambodian refugee in Thailand only to be extradited to Cambodia and summarily detained; and a Belarusian activist who was abducted while aboard a commercial airline flight. Transnational repression may mean that a person’s family members who remain at home become targets of collective punishment, such as the Tajik activist whose family in Tajikistan, including his 10-year-old daughter, was detained, interrogated, and threatened.
Transnational repression is not new, but it is a phenomenon that has often been downplayed or ignored and warrants a call to action from a global, rights-centered perspective. Human Rights Watch’s general reporting includes over 100 cases of transnational repression. This report includes more than 75 of these cases from the past 15 years, committed by over two dozen governments across four regions. While the term “transnational repression” has at times become shorthand for naming authoritarian governments as perpetrators of rights violations, democratic administrations have assisted in cases of transnational repression.
Methods of transnational repression include killings, unlawful removals (expulsions, extraditions, and deportations), abductions and enforced disappearances, targeting of relatives, abuse of consular services, and so-called digital transnational repression, which includes the use of technology to surveil or harass people. These tactics often facilitate further human rights violations, such as torture and ill-treatment.
This report also highlights cases of governments misusing the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol)—an intergovernmental organization with 195 member countries—to target critics abroad.
Victims of transnational repression have included government critics, actual or perceived dissidents, human rights defenders, civil society activists, journalists, and opposition party members and others. Governments have targeted individuals because of their identity, such as ethnicity, religion, or gender. Back home, families and friends of targeted people may also become victims, as governments detain, harass, or harm them as retribution or collective punishment. Transnational repression can have far-reaching consequences, including a chilling effect on the rights to freedom of expression, association, and assembly among those who have been targeted or fear they could be next.
This report is not an exhaustive examination of cases of transnational repression. Instead, it outlines cases that Human Rights Watch has documented in the course of researching global human rights issues that point to key methods and trends of transnational repression.
Human Rights Watch hopes that by drawing attention to cases of transnational repression, international organizations and concerned governments will pursue actions to provide greater safety and security for those at risk. Governments responsible for transnational repression should be on notice that their efforts to silence critics, threaten human rights defenders, and target people based on their identity are no less problematic abroad than they are at home. This report provides governments seeking to tackle transnational repression with concrete recommendations, while raising caution against laws and policies that could restrict other human rights.
Human Rights Watch calls on governments committing transnational repression to respect international human rights standards both within and beyond their territory. Governments combatting transnational repression should recognize such abuses as a threat to human rights generally and act to protect those at risk within their jurisdiction or control.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Philippine counterpart in Manila on Tuesday to lay the groundwork for a summit between the leaders of the United States, the Philippines and Japan next month.
U.S. President Joe Biden, Philippine leader Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will meet in Washington on April 11 for trilateral talks that will focus on protecting a “free and open” Indo-Pacific region, according to the White House.
Speaking at a press conference alongside Blinken, Filipino Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo said the three-way summit aimed to capitalize on “complementarities” between the countries, notably in infrastructure, critical minerals, energy and maritime security.
Blinken said that collaboration on defense and economic issues would only result in all three countries becoming stronger. “So that’s what the summit is about, as well as our work together to uphold international law,” he said.
He and Manalo had discussed ways of streamlining the budding trilateral alliance “to make sure that even as we have this leaders’ summit, we have mechanisms in place to make sure there are things working together day in day out.”
Blinken’s visit comes at a crucial moment in bilateral relations between the two allies, who have ramped up defense cooperation amid increasing Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea, including in waters that fall within the Philippine’s exclusive economic zone.
China claims nearly all of the South China Sea while dismissing the territorial claims of several Southeast Asian nations and Taiwan.
“The alliance has never been stronger, but we not only have to sustain that, we have to continue to accelerate the momentum,” said Blinken, who was making his second trip to Manila as America’s top diplomat. He first visited the Philippines in August 2022, weeks after Marcos took office as president.
Filipino activists protest at the Mendiola Peace Arch outside the presidential Malacañang Palace in Manila ahead of a meeting between President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on March 19, 2024. (Jojo Riñoza/BenarNews)
Manalo said he had thanked Blinken for Washington’s “consistent support,” particularly in regards to Chinese harassment of Filipino supply boats.
In the most recent incident, four Filipino sailorssustained minor injuries earlier this month when China Coast Guard boats intercepted a supply vessel and fired at them with water cannons.
“We discussed regional issues, especially the situation in the South China Sea, and I stated that the Philippines is committed to managing disputes in accordance with our national interests, the rules-based international order and international law, especially UNCLOS,” Manalo said, referring to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
“We reaffirmed our shared view that a strong and capable Philippines would make a formidable ally for the United States.”
Blinken reiterated Washington’s “ironclad commitments” to defend the Philippines from outside aggression.
He also said the two allies had shared concerns about Chinese “actions that threaten our common vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific,” including within the Philippine exclusive economic zone.
“Repeated violations of international law and the rights of the Philippines – water cannons, blocking maneuvers, close shadowing, other dangerous operations – these waterways are critical to the Philippines, to its security, to its economy, but they’re also critical to the interests of the region, the United States, and the world,” Blinken said.
On Tuesday, China’s foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said the U.S. had no right to interfere in disputes between Manila and Beijing and China would take the necessary actions to defend its territory.
“Military cooperation between the United States and the Philippines should not harm China’s sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea, let alone be used to prop up the Philippines’ illegal position,” Lin told a regular briefing, according to a report from Reuters.
Blinken is expected to meet with Marcos later on Tuesday. The Philippine leader recently returned from a trip to Germany and the Czech Republic in which he criticized Beijing’s expansive territorial claims and sought support for a free and open South China Sea.
Camille Elemia contributed reporting from Manila.
BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jason Gutierrez for BenarNews.
Information fed to the general public is deliberately spun to sell the imperial project. In contrast, intelligence assessments for elite policy makers are designed to sustain the endeavor. That the president’s pronouncements diverge from the conclusions reached by his own intelligence community highlights the chasm between what is foisted on the public compared to what is understood within the bowels of the state.
Unlike Biden’s bullish and bellicose pronouncements about “our leadership in the world,” the Assessment’s view was less triumphal. It states: “The United States faces an increasingly fragile global order.”
The fraying US-imposed “rules based order” and its discredited neoliberal economic system are more and more being challenged by “states engaging in competitive behavior,” according to the Assessment. The report adds, fallout from the Gaza crisis, in particular, serves to “undermine” the US.
Both pronouncements, however, have similar biases. Biden’s address to the nation was overtly political, accusing Trump of “bowing down” to Putin. But the supposedly neutral and objective “collective insights of the Intelligence Community” were likewise predisposed in favor of Democratic Party memes. Both blame Russian electoral interference for Trump’s ascension to the Oval Office in 2016. As proof, the so-called intelligence community again offered nothing more than its own assessment, lacking better evidence.
“Ambitious” China
Biden bragged in this address: “For years, all I’ve heard from my Republican friends…is China’s on the rise and America is falling behind. They’ve got it backward!” Contrary to his bravado about “we’re in a stronger position to win the competition for the 21st Century against China,” the World Bank predicts 4.5% GDP growth in China compared to 1.6% for the US in 2024.
China has surpassed the US as the largest world economy by purchasing power parity. The Assessment forecasts slowed – but still greater than for the US – economic growth in what it labels as an “ambitious” China.
The Assessment reports that China “now rivals” the US in DNA-sequencing and is the “world leader” in voice and image recognition and video analytics. Biden’s claim that, “I’ve made sure that the most advanced American technologies can’t be used in China,” is contradicted by the Assessment’s finding that China is “making progress” in producing advanced chips on its own.
The Assessment notes: “China views Washington’s competitive measures against Beijing as part of a broader US…effort to contain its rise.” In this context, the Chinese perceive an increased likelihood of a US first-strike nuclear attack, according to the Assessment. Nevertheless, China has shown growing “confidence” in its nuclear deterrent capabilities against US aggression, also according to the Assessment.
China is disadvantaged militarily, according to the Assessment, because it “lacks recent warfighting experience,” something the US has in excess. US intelligence estimates that China will only “fully modernize” its national defense by 2035 and will not become a “world-class military” until 2049.
The Assessment anticipates increased Chinese push-back over Taiwan. Although Biden claimed that the US is “standing up for peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” the US has done the opposite by continuing to destabilize and militarize the region. To wit, Biden said in his address, “I’ve revitalized our partnerships and alliances in the Pacific.”
“Confrontational” Russia
The Assessment labels Russia “confrontational,” projecting Washington’s own posture. In a fit of made-for-popular-consumption Russophobia, Biden warned in his address: “Putin of Russia is on the march…If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not!”
While the Assessment warns of many threats, Russian expansionism – as Biden fear mongered – is not one of them. In fact, the Assessment notes that Russia stepped down from intervening in neighboring Azerbaijan regarding the Nagorno-Karabakh territory. The Assessment assures us: “Russia almost certainly does not want a direct military conflict with US and NATO forces.”
The Assessment notes that Russia “maintains the largest and most diverse nuclear weapons stockpile.” But it adds that Russia sees its stockpile as “necessary for maintaining deterrence” (presumably from a US first strike). The Assessment, while describing Russia as a “capable and resilient adversary,” takes the contrary view to Biden’s, seeing Russia’s posture as mainly “defensive.”
As the US proxy war against Russia drags on, Biden continues to campaign for expanding the US funding for Ukraine with no hint of a peace. For its part, the Assessment does not contest what it describes as Putin’s belief that Russia is winning the war in Ukraine.
Rather, the Assessment sees no victory in sight for the US: “This deadlock plays to Russia’s strategic military advantages and is increasingly shifting the momentum in Moscow’s favor.” Not surprisingly, this huge admission of the futility of the US war effort in Ukraine coming from its own intelligence institutions has not been prominently reported by the follow-the-flag corporate press.
The Assessment describes how Russia is strengthening and leveraging ties with China, Iran, and North Korea. Russia is mitigating the impacts of US-led sanctions, while “rebuild[ing] its credibility as a great power.” Russia’s deepening ties with China in particular have afforded it significant “protection from future sanctions.”
Despite US-led coercive economic measures, the Assessment projects “modest” Russian GDP growth. Moscow has “successfully diverted” its oil exports and largely evaded the US/G7 price caps, retaining “significant energy leverage” as the second-largest supplier of liquefied natural gas to Europe. In short, Russia is “offsetting its decline in relations with the West” with a pivot to the Global South.
Other global flashpoints
Biden’s policy of “containing the threat posed by Iran” is elaborated in the Assessment. US-led sanctions are credited with putting “brakes on” Iran’s economy. In response, the Assessment reports, Tehran has “expanded its diplomatic influence” by improving ties with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.
The Assessment correctly notes that Iran uses its nuclear program “to build negotiating leverage and respond to perceived international pressure,” pointing out that Iran would “restore JCPOA limits if the United States fulfilled itsJCPOA commitments [emphasis added].”
On the one hand, the Assessment preposterously accuses Iran of seeking to “block a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.” On the other, Iran is absolved of orchestrating or having any foreknowledge of the Hamas attack on Israel. This is a notable admission.
The Gaza conflict, according to the Assessment, poses the “risk of escalation” into regional interstate war. Uncle Sam’s “key Arab partners,” the Assessment laments, face hostile domestic sentiment because their citizens (correctly) see the US and Israel as responsible for “the death and destruction.” Although the US is recognized as the “power broker” that could “end the conflict,” the Assessment (also correctly) implies that the US has not played that role.
The Assessment foresees Israel needing to confront “armed resistance from Hamas for years to come.” While acknowledging that Hamas enjoys “broad support,” the Assessment questions Israeli President Netanyahu’s “viability” and “ability of rule.”
Similar to the case of Iran, the Assessment explains, North Korea’s nuclear program is pursued as a “guarantor of regime security” and to “deter outside intervention.” North Korea’s missile launches, the Assessment admits, are responses to counter hostile US-South Korea military exercises. North Korea’s development of nuclear capabilities, the Assessment further acknowledges, are defensive to “enhance second-strike capabilities” in the contingency of a first strike by the US and its allies.
In regard to immigration, Biden touts his “comprehensive plan to fix” our system. Given the current dysfunction on the US border, claiming credit there sounds more like a Republican talking point than one favoring the incumbent. Largely ignored in Biden’s address, the Assessment is concerned with global warming and its potentially destabilizing effect on the US-imposed global order by generating climate refugees.
“Poor socioeconomic conditions and insecurity” further drive cross-border migration, warns the Assessment. While admitting that “lack of economic opportunities” are among the factors that drive Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan emigration, the Assessment incredulously rejects blaming US sanctions for driving people away from their homelands.
Conclusion
Unlike the upbeat “greatest comeback story never told” of the State of the Union address, the Assessment cautions:
“Strains in US alliances and challenges to international norms have made it more difficult…to tackle global issues…. The world that emerges from this tumultuous period will be shaped by whoever… [is] most effective at advancing economic growth and providing benefits for more people, and by the powers…that are most able and willing to act on solutions to transnational issues and regional crises.”
Meanwhile, the Assessment reports that Putin’s “Russia has increased social spending…and increased corporate taxes.” Also reported, Xi’s China is prioritizing “a more equitable distribution of wealth – replacing the focus on maximizing GDP growth.” Back home, Biden promised in his address “to end cancer as we know it” and prophesized that he will “save the planet from the climate crisis.” (For starters, I would settle for just stopping the genocide in Palestine and a negotiated peace in Ukraine.)
China News Service: It’s reported by Reuters that former US President Donald Trump signed a secret executive order in 2019 to authorize the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign aimed at smearing China by creating a special team of operatives who acted covertly such as buying off media outlets and using bogus internet identities in China, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific and Africa. What’s your comment?
Wang Wenbin: I recall that CIA Director William Burns said publicly not long ago that the CIA has committed substantially more resources toward China-related intelligence collection. The report that you mentioned echoes Director Burns’s remarks. It has also once again shown that the US has spread China-related disinformation in an organized and well-planned way for a long time and it’s America’s important approach to wage a battle of perception against China.
US Republican Senator Rand Paul once said honestly that the US government is the biggest propagator of disinformation. The US who often accuses other countries of spreading disinformation is in fact the true breeding ground of disinformation.
Concocting and spreading rumors will only get one lose credibility faster. Spreading disinformation cannot inhibit China’s progress but will only discredit the US.
The purported threat of TikTok to U.S. national security has inflated into a hysteria of Chinese spy balloon proportions, but the official record tells a different story: U.S. intelligence has produced no evidence that the popular social media site has ever coordinated with Beijing. That fact hasn’t stopped many in Congress and even President Joe Biden from touting legislation that would force the sale of the app, as the TikTok frenzy fills the news pages with empty conjecture and innuendo.
In interviews and testimony to Congress about TikTok, leaders of the FBI, CIA, and the director of national intelligence have in fact been careful to qualify the national security threat posed by TikTok as purely hypothetical. With access to much of the government’s most sensitive intelligence, they are well placed to know.
The basic charge is that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, a Chinese company, could be compelled by the government in Beijing to use their app in targeted operations to manipulate public opinion, collect mass data on Americans, and even spy on individual users. (TikTok says it has never shared U.S. user data with the Chinese government and would not do so if asked. This week, TikTok CEO Shou Chew said that “there’s no CCP ownership” of ByteDance, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.)
Though top national security officials seem happy to echo these allegations of Chinese control of TikTok, they stop short of saying that China has ever actually coordinated with the company.
Typical is an interview CIA Director William Burns gave to CNN in 2022, where he said it was “troubling to see what the Chinese government could do to manipulate TikTok.” Not what the Chinese government has done, but what it could do.
What China could do turns out to be a recurring theme in the statements of the top national security officials.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said during a 2022 talk at the University of Michigan that TikTok’s “parent company is controlled by the Chinese government, and it gives them the potential [emphasis added] to leverage the app in ways that I think should concern us.” Wray went on to cite TikTok’s ability to control its recommendation algorithm, which he said “allows them to manipulate content and if they want to [emphasis added], to use it for influence operations.”
In the same talk, Wray three times referred to the Chinese government’s “ability” to spy on TikTok users but once again stopped short of saying that they do so.
“They also have the ability to collect data through it on users which can be used for traditional espionage operations, for example,” Wray said. “They also have the ability on it to get access, they have essential access to software devices. So you’re talking about millions of devices and that gives them the ability to engage in different kinds of malicious cyber activity through that.”
Wray is referring to the potential ability, according to U.S. intelligence, to commandeer phones and computers connecting to TikTok through apps and the website.
In testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee in November 2022, Wray was even more circumspect, stressing that the Chinese government could use TikTok for foreign influence operations but only “if they so chose.” When asked by Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., if the Chinese government has used TikTok to collect information about Americans for purposes other than targeted ads and content, Wray only could acknowledge that it was a “possibility.”
“I would say we do have national security concerns, at least from the FBI’s end, about TikTok,” Wray said. “They include the possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm which could be used for foreign influence operations if they so chose.”
The lack of evidence is not for lack of trying, as Wray alluded to during the same hearing. When asked by Harshbarger what is being done to investigate the Chinese government’s involvement in TikTok, Wray replied that he would see whether “any specific investigative work … could be incorporated into the classified briefing I referred to.”
The FBI, when asked by The Intercept if it has any evidence that TikTok has coordinated with the Chinese government, referred to Wray’s prior statements — many of which are quoted in this article. “We have nothing to add to the Director’s comments,” an FBI spokesperson said.
The fiscal year 2025 FBI budget request to Congress, which outlines its resource priorities in the coming year, was unveiled this week but makes no mention of TikTok in its 94 pages. In fact, it makes no mention of China whatsoever.
Since at least 2020, the interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has investigated the implications of ByteDance’s acquisition of TikTok. The investigation followed an executive order by former President Donald Trump that sought to force TikTok to divest from its parent company. When that investigation failed to force a sale, a frustrated Congress decided to get involved, with the House passing legislation on Wednesday that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok.
In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, the highest-ranking intelligence official in the U.S. government, was asked about the possibility that China might use TikTok to influence the upcoming 2024 presidential elections. Haines said only that it could not be discounted.
“We cannot rule out that the CCP could use it,” Haines said.
The relatively measured tone adopted by top intelligence officials contrasts sharply with the alarmism emanating from Congress. In 2022, Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., deemed TikTok “digital fentanyl,” going on to co-author a column in the Washington Post with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., calling for TikTok to be banned. Gallagher and Rubio later introduced legislation to do so, and 39 states have, as of this writing, banned the use of TikTok on government devices.
None of this is to say that China hasn’t used TikTok to influence public opinion and even, it turns out, to try to interfere in American elections. “TikTok accounts run by a [People’s Republic of China] propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022,” says the annual Intelligence Community threat assessment released on Monday. But the assessment provides no evidence that TikTok coordinated with the Chinese government. In fact, governments — including the United States — are known to use social media to influence public opinion abroad.
“The problem with TikTok isn’t related to their ownership; it’s a problem of surveillance capitalism and it’s true of all social media companies,” computer security expert Bruce Schneier told The Intercept. “In 2016 Russia did this with Facebook and they didn’t have to own Facebook — they just bought ads like everybody else.”
This week, Reuters reported that as president, Trump signed a covert action order authorizing the CIA to use social media to influence and manipulate domestic Chinese public opinion and views on China. Other covert American cyber influence programs are known to exist with regard to Russia, Iran, terrorist groups, and other foreign actors.
On 14 March 2024, a large number of leading NGOs paid tribute to Cao Shunli, and all human rights defenders targeted by the Chinese government for their commitment to uphold the promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/cao-shunli/]:
Cao Shunli was a brave Chinese woman human rights defender and lawyer. Working with fellow activists, Cao documented abuses, including the now-abolished ‘Re-education through Labour’ extrajudicial detention system, which she was also subjected to as a result of her human rights work. She campaigned for independent civil society to be meaningfully consulted and to be able to contribute to the Chinese government’s national reports to its first and second Universal Periodic Reviews (UPR). In an attempt to speak with government officials about the UPR, Cao courageously organised peaceful sit-ins with other concerned citizens outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs despite great risks. She also submitted information on extralegal detention and torture in China to the UN and expressed the hope that ‘if we could get even 100 words’ into a UN report, ‘many of our problems could start to get addressed.’
On 14 September 2013, Chinese authorities detained Cao at the Beijing Capital International Airport as she was traveling to Geneva to participate in a human rights training, one month before China’s second UPR. Cao was forcibly disappeared for five weeks, until she resurfaced in criminal detention and was charged with ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’. By October 2013, it was clear that Cao Shunli was experiencing serious medical issues while in detention. After months of denial of adequate medical treatment, rejected appeals by her lawyers for bail on humanitarian grounds, and despite multiple calls from the international community for her urgent release, Cao died of multiple organ failure on 14 March 2014 in a hospital under heavy police guard to keep out her lawyers and friends.
Cao was one of the 2014 finalists of the prestigious Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders.
To this day, there has been no accountability for Cao Shunli’s death. The Chinese government refuses to admit wrongdoing, despite repeated calls in 2014 and 2019 by UN Special Procedures experts for a full investigation into this ‘deadly reprisal’.
Her case is one of the longest-standing unresolved cases in the UN Secretary-General’s annual reports on reprisals against civil society actors for engaging with the United Nations. China is one of the most consistent perpetrators of reprisals over time, and one of the most egregious perpetrators in terms of the sheer number of individuals targeted.
Cao is not alone: her courage, but also the abuses she endured, are unfortunately those of other human rights defenders who paid a high cost for cooperating with the UN. Her close colleague, Chen Jianfang was forcibly disappeared under Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) from 19-20 March 2019 after paying tribute to Cao Shunli on the 5th anniversary of her death. Chen was sentenced to four years and six months in jail for ‘inciting subversion of State power’ and left prison on 21 October 2023, after which authorities subjected her to strict surveillance. UN experts have raised with the Chinese government acts of reprisals against Chen Jianfang, but also Jiang Tianyong, Li Qiaochu, Dolkun Isa, Li Wenzu and Wang Qiaoling, among others. The recent instances of intimidation and harassment against NGO participants in China’s 4th UPR in January 2024 further highlight the gravity of the situation.
Li Qiaochu, Xu Zhiyong, Ding Jiaxi, Yu Wensheng, Xu Yan, Huang Xueqin, Li Yuhan, Chang Weiping: many other Chinese human rights defenders are today detained, disappeared, and at grave risk, for upholding the promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
These documented acts do not account for the even greater self-censorship and refusal to engage with the United Nation as a result of a generalised climate of fear.
Ten years ago, when ISHR and many other human rights groups sought to observe a moment of silence at the Human Rights Council in her memory, the Chinese delegation, together with other delegations, disrupted the session for an hour and half.
Cao Shunli is a paradigmatic case of reprisals, not only because of her prominence, but also due to the array of severe human rights violations against her, committed in total impunity. These range from Chinese authorities blocking her exit from her own country, enforced disappearance, arbitrary detention, lack of due process, torture or ill-treatment and denial of adequate medical care, to subsequent death in custody, and the lack of accountability for these abuses. The lack of any progress in achieving accountability underscores the urgent need for continued international attention and pressure on the Chinese government to ensure justice for Cao and all human rights defenders who face persecution for their work.
Cao Shunli said before her death: ‘Our impact may be large, may be small, and may be nothing. But we must try. It is our duty to the dispossessed and it is the right of civil society.’
Today, we pay tribute to Cao Shunli’s legacy, one that has inspired countless human rights defenders in China and abroad. We urge UN Member States to call for a full, independent, impartial investigation into her death. We reaffirm that no perpetrator of reprisals, no matter how powerful, is above scrutiny, and that reprisals are fundamentally incompatible with the values of the United Nations and of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Signatories:
Art for Human Rights
ARTICLE 19
Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA)
Asian Lawyers Network (ALN)
Campaign for Uyghurs
CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation
CSW (Christian Solidarity Worldwide)
Front Line Defenders
HK Labour Rights Monitor
Hong Kong Centre for Human Rights
Hong Kong Democracy Council (HKDC)
Hong Kong Watch
Human Rights in China
Humanitarian China
Humanitarian China
International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI)
International Campaign for Tibet
International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders
International Service for Human Rights
International Tibet Network
Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada
Martin Ennals Foundation
Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD)
PEN International
Safeguard Defenders
The 29 Principles
The Rights Practice
Tibet Justice Center
Uyghur Human Rights Project
World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders
A U.S. bill that if approved would force the sale of the video sharing platform TikTok has sparked mixed reactions from Chinese commentators, with some drawing parallels with Chinese internet censorship and others marveling at the heated debate around the app.
TikTok, whose parent company is China’s ByteDance, has 170 million monthly American users. It has sparked security concerns in Washington that Beijing would use the app for propaganda or to sway American public opinion, particularly leading up to November’s presidential election.
The legislation passed Wednesday in the U.S. House of Representatives would ban the app in America if ByteDance doesn’t divest its controlling stake in the social media app. U.S. President Joe Biden has said he would sign the bill if it is approved by the upper house Senate.
Some Chinese social media users criticized the move, saying it was similar to censorship.
“It’s the same over there [as in China], mutual bans on everything, just that the process is more cumbersome over there,” commented @LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLsm from Guangdong, in a reference to the blocking of Twitter and Facebook for users inside the Great Firewall of internet censorship.
“There’s going to be a rush of white people trying to get over the Great Firewall [into China] now,” quipped Hantang_Lengyue_1130 from Beijing.
“From a Chinese perspective, I hope TikTok can continue to exist in the United States,” another user, 1_lowkey_1 from Gansu, commented. “From another perspective, this gives me a feeling of confusion. Can this thing really get Americans so addicted? That’s powerful.”
Forced to give Beijing user data?
Lawmakers supporting the bill say that TikTok is required under Chinese law to expose American user data to Beijing upon request, and say it could be forced to alter its algorithms to promote Chinese propaganda.
Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi, left, and Mike Gallager talk with reporters after the House of Representatives voted on legislation they co-sponsored that could ban TikTok, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on March 13, 2024. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
TikTok has denied any interference from Beijing, and China’s foreign ministry has said there is “no evidence” of any threat to U.S. national security.
“I would prefer them to remove it than sell it — that way the American people will take up arms and fight the U.S. government to the end,” @Golden_Annunciation_Bird_999 wrote.
User @Xiao_Xianyu added from Beijing: “Rednecks are the angriest, because their main platform is about to be blocked.”
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin on Thursday accused the Washington of using “sheer robbers’ logic to try every means to snatch from others all the good things that they have.”
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs further hit back on Friday with a commentary titled, “The Truth About the So-Called Freedom of Speech in the United States.”
The TikTok bill “violates the rights granted to the American people by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, suppresses and damages the freedom of more than 150 million American TikTok users, and sets a worrying precedent,” the op-ed piece said.
Protecting free speech
A U.S.-based Chinese student majoring in information technology who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals said he doesn’t use the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, citing privacy concerns.
But he said he supported others who wanted to use the app’s equivalent in the United States, and appeared not to support a legal move against the TikTok: “The rights guaranteed by the First Amendment are very important,” the student said.
“If there are individual cases of data disclosure, they can just fine them, like they do Facebook,” he said.
A woman makes a video to post on TikTok as she stands in Times Square in New York City, March 13, 2024. (Mike Segar/Reuters)
In Zhejiang, @The_romantic_and_talented_Mi_Duoduo thought the potential forced sale wasn’t a good idea, either.
“Prohibition will only make it impossible for the people at the bottom, and there will be more and more social unrest,” they commented.
“[TikTok] has overturned American imperialism at its root, along with its hegemony over public opinion,” commented @na_jia丶 from Guizhou,
Meanwhile, @not_a_thief added from Hubei: “The United States was founded on a platform of freedom of speech.”
A Washington-based software engineer who hails from China, and who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, told RFA Mandarin that the best approach was to build a U.S.-company that could compete adequately with TikTok.
‘That’s not going to happen here’
James A. Lewis, senior vice president and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recommended using a U.S. initial public offering, or IPO, to allow TikTok’s current owners ByteDance to cash out of the company and make a profit in doing so.
“An IPO on Wall Street would provide a vehicle for the Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS) to intervene and impose conditions on the IPO to mitigate risk,” Lewis wrote in a March 13 commentary on the Center’s website.
Rep. Maxwell Frost, fellow House members and TikTok creators voice their opposition to the TikTok legislation, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., March 12, 2024. (Craig Hudson/Reuters)
But he warned that there is “a larger and more complicated problem of Chinese software use in U.S. apps and networks,” calling on the Department of Commerce to investigate the scope of that problem.
“The United States should manage the risk created by deep technological connections to a hostile and untrustworthy nation that is undertaking the largest espionage campaign in history,” Lewis said.
While not all Chinese technology creates risk, genuine risks can be mitigated, including those attributed to TikTok, he said.
Xia Ming, professor of political science at New York’s City University noted that LinkedIn was forced to shut down in China last year, and that the TikTok bill could be seen as a retaliatory measure.
“If you kick me, I have to kick you back,” Xia said. But he said freedom of speech is unlikely to be affected by the move.
“The fundamental difference is that, if you listen to the Voice of America or Radio Free Asia in China, the state security police will come for you,” Xia said. “That’s not going to happen in the United States.”
Translated with additional reporting by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Wang Yun for RFA Mandarin.
China’s top securities regulator has released new guidelines to strengthen regulation after the collapse of Chinese stock markets in the first two months of the year, wiping off billions of dollars as the economy teeters.
The draft guidelines will see the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) increase its oversight and supervision of listed companies, brokerages and public fund companies, and accelerate the building of “first-class” investment banks, the regulatory agency’s vice chairman Li Chao said in a press conference Friday in Beijing.
By raising the entry bar for public listings, Li said it will be improving the quality of the companies from the “source”.
“We will strictly prohibit companies from blindly listing to make money, overfinance, fabricate financial reports or report false or fudge information. Such behaviors will be seriously and legally dealt with,” he said.
According to Yan Bojin, head of the CSRC’s public offering supervision, the increased regulations were a response to the findings that listing candidates have unsound internal control mechanisms, irregular corporate governance, and financial fraud in some companies.
Similarly, supervision of gatekeeper responsibilities of intermediaries like the stock exchanges will be strengthened, as will regulation of securities firms and public funds, Yan added.
The stock market has been roiled by frequent turmoil in the past few years, weighed down by a real estate crisis characterized by defaults along with Beijing’s crackdown on sectors like technology and private tuition services. While it isn’t the economy, it is a barometer of investors’ expectations and confidence level of China’s prospects.
Between December and early February, the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index fell nearly 11%. It only began to rebound, helped by Beijing’s recent measures to put a floor under share prices.
It did so by pushing state-owned funds to invest in stocks, curb short selling that bets on price declines, and cracked down on trades by quant funds, which use computer algorithms to catch investment opportunities.
Wu Qing, the newly appointed CSRC chairman also known as the “broker butcher,” has taken aim at quant funds that were blamed for worsening the slump in a stock market made up of mostly retail investors. The quant fund industry is estimated to have doubled in value in the past three years as punishing losses spread across the broader market.
Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.
A bipartisan effort to effectively ban the social media network TikTok in the United States has taken a great leap forward. The House of Representatives voted 352–65 that the network’s parent company ByteDance must divest itself from Chinese ownership.
Lawmakers contend that “TikTok’s Chinese ownership poses a national security risk because Beijing could use the app to gain access to Americans’ data or run a disinformation campaign” (New York Times, 3/13/24). While proponents of the legislation say this is only a restriction on Chinese government control, critics of the bill say this constitutes an effective ban.
The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate. That doesn’t make its passage in the House any less chilling, especially when President Joe Biden has said he will sign it into law if it reaches his desk (Boston Herald, 3/13/24).
‘Profound implications’
Below the scary headline, Politico (3/11/24) acknowledges that “there have been no concrete examples publicly provided showing how TikTok poses a national security threat.”
I have written for almost four years (FAIR.org, 8/5/20, 5/25/23, 11/13/23) about how the US government campaign against TikTok has very little to do with user privacy, and everything to do with McCarthyism and neo–Cold War fervor. Before the vote, a US government report (Politico, 3/11/24) said that the “Chinese government is using TikTok to expand its global influence operations to promote pro-China narratives and undermine US democracy.”
Sounds scary, but fears about TikTok‘s user surveillance, or platforming pernicious content or disinformation, apply to all forms of social media—including US-based Twitter (now known as X) and Facebook, which let political misinformation flow about the US elections (Time, 3/23/21; New York Times, 1/25/24). And the Chinese government point of view flows freely on Twitter: Chinese state media outlets CGTN and Xinhua have respectively 12.9 and 11.9 million followers on the network owned by Elon Musk.
The Global Times (3/8/24), owned by China’s Communist Party, predictably called the legislation a “hysterical move” against Chinese companies. But the American Civil Liberties Union (3/5/24) was also alarmed:
The ACLU has repeatedly explained that banning TikTok would have profound implications for our constitutional right to free speech and free expression, because millions of Americans rely on the app every day for information, communication, advocacy and entertainment. And the courts have agreed. In November 2023, a federal district court in Montana ruled that the state’s attempted ban would violate Montanans’ free speech rights and blocked it from going into effect.
Bipartisan support
“There’s no way that the Chinese would ever let a US company own something like this in China,” Seth Mnuchin told CNBC (3/14/24)—as though the Marxist-Leninist state should be the model for US media regulation.
We can’t write this off as MAGA extremist paranoia. In fact, 155 Democrats voted for the bill (AP, 3/13/24), joining 197 Republicans. Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres (Twitter, 3/12/24) said TikTok “poses significant threats to our national security,” and that the “entire intelligence community agrees.” While the bill may not pass the Senate, it does enjoy some bipartisan support in the upper house (NBC, 3/13/24).
Former President Donald Trump reversed course, and now opposes new restrictions on TikTok (Washington Post, 3/12/24), in part because of his hostility toward TikTok competitor Facebook, which would benefit from a TikTok ban. Trump might have been hyperbolic in calling Facebook “the enemy of the people,” but it is true that Facebook owner Meta is behind the political push against its competitor (Washington Post, 3/30/22).
Former Trump Treasury Secretary Seth Mnuchin is enthusiastic about the bill, however—because he hopes to be TikTok‘s new owner. “I think the legislation should pass and I think it should be sold,” Mnuchin told CNBC’s Squawk Box (3/14/24). “It’s a great business and I’m going to put together a group to buy TikTok.”
Mainstream conservative outlets like the Economist (3/12/24) and Wall Street Journal, at least, have united signed on to the crusade. The Journal editorial board (3/11/24) wrote:
Xi Jinping has eviscerated any distinction between the government and private companies. ByteDance employs hundreds of employees who previously worked at state-owned media outlets. A former head of engineering in ByteDance’s US offices has alleged that the Communist Party “had a special office or unit” in the company “sometimes referred to as the ‘Committee.’”
The Journal’s editors (3/14/24) followed up to celebrate the House bill’s passage. “Beijing treats TikTok algorithms as tantamount to a state secret,” it wrote. This is another way that TikTok resembles US-based social media platforms, of course—but for the Journal, it’s “another reason not to believe TikTok’s denials that its algorithms promote anti-American and politically divisive content.”
The Wall Street Journal (3/11/24) complains that on TikTok, “pro-Hamas videos trend more than pro-Israel ones”–which is also true of Facebook and Instagram (Washington Post, 11/13/23). (By “pro-Hamas,” of course, the Journal means pro-Palestinian.)
In other words, while the US government can’t legally block content it deems politically questionable on Facebook and Twitter, it can use TikTok’s foreign ownership as means to attack “anti-American” content. The paper ignored the issue of censorship and anti-Chinese fearmongering, and denounced “no” votes as either fringe Republicans swayed by Trump, or left-wingers whose political base is younger people who simply love fun apps.
The National Review‘s Jim Geraghty (3/3/23) earlier scoffed at Democratic lawmakers who continue to engage with TikTok:
Way to go, members of Congress. This thing is too dangerous to carry into the Pentagon, but you’re keeping it on your personal phone because you’re afraid you might miss the latest dance craze that’s going viral. And if the last three years of our lives have taught us anything, hasn’t it been that anything that comes to us from China and “goes viral” probably isn’t good for us?
Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, a major backer of the legislation, took to Fox News (3/12/24) to say that Chinese ownership of TikTok was a “cancer” that could be removed, that the problem wasn’t the app itself but “foreign adversary control.”
Vehicle for anti-Chinese fervor
It’s important to remember that people use TikTok to educate and organize, not just amuse—boosting efforts to unionize workers at Amazon and Starbucks, for example (Wired, 4/20/22).
This anger toward TikTok—which, just like other social media networks, is full of brain-numbing content, but has also been used as a platform for social and economic justice (NPR, 6/7/20; Wired, 4/20/22; TechCrunch, 7/19/23)—is not about TikTok, but is rather a vehicle for the anti-Chinese fervor that infects the US government.
Think, for example, how Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) embarrassed himself by repeatedly asking TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in a Senate hearing if he had ties to China’s Communist Party—despite repeated reminders that Chew is Singaporean, not Chinese (NBC, 2/1/24). Is Cotton ignorant enough to think Singapore is a part of China? Or was the lawmaker using his national platform to make race-based political insinuations, in hopes of bolstering the fear that Chinese government agents are simply everywhere (and all look alike)?
That fear is already potent enough to bring together a coalition of Democrats and Republicans to line up against the First Amendment. are doing just that, using a social media app to ramp up a Cold War with China. The targeting TikTok is an attack on free speech and the free flow of information, as the ACLU has argued, but it’s also part of a drumbeat for a dangerous confrontation between nuclear powers.
In a rare bipartisan effort, the U.S. House overwhelmingly passed a bill Wednesday requiring TikTok to be sold by its China-based owner, ByteDance, or face a ban throughout the United States. Backers claim the popular social media app could give the Chinese government access to U.S. residents’ personal data and potentially affect the 2024 elections. The fight over TikTok comes at a time of rising…
How delicious is political hypocrisy. Abundant and rich, it manifests in the corridors of power with regularity. Of late, there is much of it in the US Congress, evident over debates on whether the platform TikTok should be banned in the United States. Much of this seems based on an assumption that foreign companies are not entitled to hoover up, commodify and use the personal data of users, mocking, if not obliterating privacy altogether. US companies, however, are. While it is true that aspects of Silicon Valley have drawn the ire of those on The Hill in spouts of select rage, giants such as Meta and Google continue to use the business model of surveillance capitalism with reassurance and impunity.
In May 2023, the disparity of treatment between the companies was laid bare in a Congressional hearing that smacked the hands of Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pinchai with little result, while lacerating TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. “Your platform should be banned,” blustered Chair Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA) of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The ongoing concern, and one with some basis, is TikTok’s link with parent company ByteDance. Being based in China, the nexus with the authoritarian state that wields influence on its operations is a legitimate concern, given national security laws requiring the company to share data with officials. But the line of questioning proved obtuse and confused, revealing an obsession with themes resonant with McCarthyite hysteria. On several occasions, the word “communists” issued from the lips of the irate politicians, including regular references to the Chinese Community Party.
Alex Cranz, writing for The Verge, summarised the hectoring session well: “Between their obsession with communism, their often obnoxious and condescending tone, and the occasional assumption that Chew was Chinese, despite his repeated reminders that he is Singaporean, the hearing was a weird, brutal, xenophobic mess.”
TikTok, for its part, continues to tell regulators that it has taken adequate steps to wall off the data of its 150 million users in the US from ByteDance’s operations, expending US$1.5 billion in its efforts to do so. A January investigation by the Wall Street Journal, however, found that “managers sometimes instruct workers to share data with colleagues in other parts of the company and with ByteDance workers without going through official channels”. How shocking.
Cranz might have also mentioned something else: that the entire show was vaudevillian in its ignorance of US government practices that involved doing exactly what ByteDance and TikTok are accused of: demanding that companies share user data with officials. If he is to be forgotten for everything else, Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures on the National Security Agency’s collaboration with US telecom and internet companies on that point should be enshrined in posterity’s halls.
The PRISM program, as it was called, involved the participation of such Big Tech firms as Google, Facebook, YouTube and Apple in sharing the personal data of users with the NSA. Largely because of Snowden’s revelations, end-to-end encryption became both urgent and modish. “An enormous fraction of global internet traffic travelled electronically naked,” Snowden remarked in an interview with The Atlantic last year. “Now it is a rare sight.”
The US House of Representatives has now made good its threats against TikTok in passing a bill that paves the way for the possible imposition of a ban of the app. It gives ByteDance a six-month period of grace to sell its stake in the company, lest it face a nationwide block. Whether it passes the Senate is an open question, given opposition to it by certain Republicans, including presidential hopeful Donald Trump. Other politicians fear losing an invaluable bridge in communicating with youthful voters.
On March 13, however, the righteous were shining in confidence. The House’s top Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, claimed that the bill would lessen “the likelihood that TikTok user data is exploited and privacy undermined by a hostile foreign adversary” while Wisconsin Republican Mike Gallagher declared that the US could no longer “take the risk of having a dominant news platform in America controlled by a company that is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party.” The subtext: best leave the despoiling and abuse to US companies.
The blotted copybooks of such giants as Meta and Google have tended to only feature in morally circumscribed ways, sparing the model of their business operations from severe scrutiny. On January 31, the Senate Judiciary Committee gave a farcical display of rant and displeasure over the issue of what it called “the Online Child Exploitation Crisis.” Pet terrors long nursed were on show: the mania about paedophiles using social media platforms to stalk their quarry; financial extortion of youth; sexploitation; drug dealing.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) made much of Zuckerberg on that occasion, but only as a prop to apologise to victims of Meta’s approach to child users. The Meta CEO has long known that such palliative displays only serve as false catharsis; the substance and rationale of how his company operations gather data never changes. And the show was also all the more sinister in providing a backdrop for Congressional paranoia, exemplified in such proposed measures as the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has rightly called KOSA a censorship bill which smuggles in such concepts as “duty of care” as a pretext to monitor information and conduct on the Internet. The attack on TikTok is ostensibly similar in protecting users in the US from the prying eyes of Beijing’s officials while waving through the egregious assaults on privacy by the Silicon Valley behemoths. How wonderfully patriotic.
Second Thomas Shoal has emerged as a South China Sea flashpoint, as China smothers Philippine aspirations to protect its exclusive economic zone (EEZ). This submerged reef 120 miles (194km) west of Palawan is where the Philippine Navy’s BRP Sierra Madre was grounded in 1999 to reinforce its territorial claim. China has been harassing Philippine resupply […]
The United States is going “all in on the Philippines” and its semiconductor sector in a bid to diversify the global chip supply chain amid growing tensions with China, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Tuesday.
Raimondo made the announcement during a two-day trade mission to Manila in which she was joined by 22 American business executives from companies including Alphabet’s Google, Visa and Microsoft.
“This is historic. The message is: We are all in the Philippines,” Raimondo said at a meeting with U.S. and Philippine business associations in Makati City, the city’s financial hub.
She also announced that American companies would invest $1 billion in the Philippines, spanning solar energy, electric vehicles and digitization.
The U.S. delegation, the first of its kind to the Southeast Asian nation, comes as the battle for semiconductor supremacy heats up between the world’s two largest economies.
Washington has stepped up sanctions to limit China’s access to the tiny electronic devices that power the modern economy, while encouraging American firms to diversify hi-tech supply chains.
“U.S. companies have realized that our chip supply chain is way too concentrated in just a few countries in the world. Forget about geopolitics; just add that level of concentration. It’s the old adage: ‘Don’t put your eggs in one basket’,” Raimondo said.
“The Philippines has 13 semiconductor assembly, testing, and packaging facilities. Let’s double it,” she added, without providing details on how that would be achieved.
Raimondo said the Philippines was rich in critical minerals, which “are more important than ever.”
“So as companies are thinking about how to make their supply chain more resilient, they are looking for countries in the world where they can establish an operation. I believe you are at the top of the list,” she said.
Semiconductor chips are seen on a printed circuit board in this illustration picture taken Feb. 17, 2023. [Reuters]
Raimondo did not publicly refer directly to China by name during the Manila visit.
U.S. engagement with the Philippines has increased since President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took office in June 2022, especially onsecurity matters.
At the same time, Washington has done more to cultivate economic ties with nations in the so-calledIndo-Pacific region, which comprises 40% of the global economy, in a bid to counter China’s expanding influence.
In May 2022, the U.S. launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) with a focus on four pillars: Trade, supply chains, the clean economy and the fair economy, the latter of which covers tax and anti-corruption.
Aside from the U.S. and the Philippines, IPEF partners include Australia, Brunei, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
However, the initiative is not a traditional free-trade agreement and has faced criticism for not providing any market access.
On Monday, Raimondo met with Marcos in Malacañang before the president departed for a trip to Germany.
“Today’s gathering not only signifies a meeting of officials, but also celebrates the enduring relations between the Philippines and the United States – ties that have been built on shared sacrifices, mutual support and unwavering respect,” Marcos said.
In 2023, the U.S. ranked as the Philippines’ third biggest trading partner, its largest export market and fifth highest source of imports, according to data from the Philippine government. In the same period, total bilateral trade amounted to $19.96 billion, with exports valued at $11.54 billion and imports at $8.41 billion.
The Philippines’ top bilateral trade partner last year was China, with which it had a deficit of about $2 billion.
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo (center) speaks during a meeting with business executives at a hotel in Manila, March 12, 2024. [Ted Aljibe/AFP]
Most of the Raimondo-led trade delegation was from the technology, artificial intelligence, renewable energy and information and communications sectors.
Tech giant Microsoft said Tuesday it would partner with the Philippines’ Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) to train 100,000 Filipino women on AI and cybersecurity.
Ted Osius, president and CEO of the non-profit US-ASEAN Business Council, said the U.S. commitments were good for the region.
“It’s in our national interest as well as in our economic interest to invest in the Philippines, to be involved in the Philippines, to support the Philippines’ growth and prosperity,” he told reporters after Raimondo’s address.
Resilient supply chains were important not just because of “challenges with China,” he said.
“We found during the COVID-19 pandemic that supply chains are more fragile than we expected. Even right now, there’s action in the Red Sea that is causing delays in shipping, causing delays in parts, needed parts, getting goods,” he said.
BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Camille Elemia for Benar News.
The Taiwanese gangster film, The Pig, The Snake and The Pigeon, has hit the bull in the eye with mainland Chinese moviegoers who saw the cult featured in the movie as an allusion to the Chinese Communist Party.
In less than a week of its release in China, it has chalked up close to 370 million yuan (US$51.55 million) in box office, received more than 580,000 reviews and earned an 8.1 high score on Douban, a social media site with streaming service. The film, currently streaming on Netflix, only sold NT$50 million (US$1.59 million) in Taiwan when it was released in October 2023.
Some scholars have attributed the popularity of this violent film in China to reflect the public’s distrust of the Chinese judiciary. The plot of the movie also exposes lawlessness in the society through labor exploitation and fraud that resonated with the economic hardships that Chinese citizens currently face.
The film’s Chinese title “Zhou Chu Eliminates Three Evils” pays homage to Zhou Chu, a Western Jin-era Chinese general reputed for his uprightness and integrity. Zhou sought to kill a tiger and a dragon that terrorized his hometown. The third evil referred to himself when he was a cruel and violent ruffian in his youth.
The movie’s protagonist is a notorious hitman and gangster Chen Kui-lin, who after learning that he has terminal lung cancer, wanted to leave his mark by taking out the two most wanted criminals ahead of him.
“Have you heard the story of ‘Zhou Chu Eliminates Three Evils’? Everyone only remembers Zhou Chu, and no one will remember the two people he killed. So Zhou Chu is the person of value, and everyone remembers him,” said Chen, who is played by Taiwanese actor Ethan Juan, in the movie.
Cult Party?
One of Chen’s two targets was a cult leader who was swindling money from cult followers.
Lai Rongwei, Taiwan Inspiration Association’s chief executive officer, said the movie made it pass Chinese censors despite the violence and gore because the Chinese Communist Party wanted to warn citizens to be careful of religious gatherings.
Lai said the CCP itself is a religion alienating the Chinese people, and the film’s allusion of the cult, which constantly seeks donations from followers, to the Party coincided with what Chinese President Xi Jinping is doing.
“Xi Jinping constantly talks about ‘common prosperity,’ about how the private sector should contribute to society,” said Lai.
Akio Yaita, Taipei bureau chief of the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun, believes that the movie passed Chinese censors because the film’s underworld backdrop depicting the underbelly of Taiwanese society would illustrate Taiwan as a place where “the weak eat the strong and the people live in dire straits.”
Taiwan is a self-governed democracy that China claims its own and has vowed to reclaim, even by force if needed.
The cult in the movie alludes to the Chinese Communist Party, experts say. (Screengrab from the movie’s fans Facebook post)
A hit among Chinese influencers
The protagonist Chen’s other confrontation with the other wanted man “Hongkie” represented the issue of labor exploitation, which resonated with Chinese workers exploited and owed wages as the economy sputters, according to Taiwan Inspiration Association’s Lai.
“This movie resonated with many because it shows how hard many Chinese people’s lives are, a typical M-shaped society; the rich are very rich and corruption is rampant. The Party, the government and the judiciary collude.”
The M-shaped society describes demographic distribution of wealth where there is a shrinking and greater disparity between the rich and the poor. The statistical curve appears in the form of the letter “M”.
The Pig, The Snake and The Pigeon has also sparked heated discussions online, with Chinese internet celebrities criticizing Chinese gangster films as not realistic enough. One of them, Dadonggua, pointed out that the characterization of Chen truly met the expectations of the Chinese people.
“Chen Kui-lin hunted down Hongkie and destroyed the cult organization all by himself. These are things neither ordinary people dare think or do, nor can the police handle,” said Dadonggua. “With the brutality of the evil forces and the incompetence of the government, people will naturally regard those who use violence to fight violence as heroes.”
In a Facebook post, Nick Wang, a well-known Taiwanese writer, wrote that if Xi had accidentally watched the film, he would certainly realize the cult satirized him and the CCP, as well as predicted their perish.
Still, Lai raised a concern that if public opinion continues to link cults with the CCP, the film may be axed as history has shown.
Translated and additional reporting by RFA Staff. Edited byTaejun Kang.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ray Chung for RFA Cantonese.
President Xi made a promise to rid China of corrupt politicians and military leaders. Defence acquisitions have been examined in detail with irregularities found. He has been partially successful, but the road is long. In the Summer of 2023, People’s Republic of China (PRC) ministers began disappearing. It began on 25 June when Foreign Minister […]
Ukraine and its regional allies on March 10 assailed reported comments by Pope Francis in which the pontiff suggested opening negotiations with Moscow and used the term “white flag,” while the Vatican later appeared to back off some of the remarks, saying Francis was not speaking about “capitulation.”
Francis was quoted on March 9 in a partially released interview suggesting Ukraine, facing possible defeat, should have the “courage” to sit down with Russia for peace negotiations, saying there is no shame in waving the “white flag.”
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hit out in a Telegram post and in his nightly video address, saying — without mentioning the pope — that “the church should be among the people. And not 2,500 kilometers away, somewhere, to mediate virtually between someone who wants to live and someone who wants to destroy you.”
Earlier, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba reacted more directly on social media, saying, “When it comes to the ‘white flag,’ we know this Vatican strategy from the first half of the 20th century.”
Many historians have been critical of the Vatican during World War II, saying Pope Pius XII remained silent as the Holocaust raged. The Vatican has long argued that, at the time, it couldn’t verify diplomatic reports of Nazi atrocities and therefore could not denounce them.
Kuleba, in his social media post, wrote: “I urge the avoidance of repeating the mistakes of the past and to support Ukraine and its people in their just struggle for their lives.
“The strongest is the one who, in the battle between good and evil, stands on the side of good rather than attempting to put them on the same footing and call it ‘negotiations,’” Kuleba said.
“Our flag is a yellow-and-blue one. This is the flag by which we live, die, and prevail. We shall never raise any other flags,” added Kuleba, who also thanked Francis for his “constant prayers for peace” and said he hoped the pontiff will visit Ukraine, home of some 1 million Catholics.
Zelenskiy has remained firm in not speaking directly to Russia unless terms of his “peace formula” are reached.
Ukraine’s terms call for the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine, restoring the country’s 1991 post-Soviet borders, and holding Russia accountable for its actions. The Kremlin has rejected such conditions.
Following criticism of the pope’s reported comments, the head of the Vatican press service, Matteo Bruni, explained that with his words regarding Ukraine, Francis intended to “call for a cease-fire and restore the courage of negotiations,” but did not mean capitulation.
“The pope uses the image of the white flag proposed by the interviewer to imply an end to hostilities, a truce that is achieved through the courage to begin negotiations,” Bruni said.
“Elsewhere in the interview…referring to any situation of war, the pope clearly stated: ‘Negotiations are never capitulations,’” Bruni added.
The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Svyatoslav Shevchuk, said Ukraine was “wounded but unconquered.”
“Believe me, no one would think of giving up. Even where hostilities are taking place today; listen to our people in Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, Odesa, Kharkiv, Sumy! Because we know that if Ukraine, God forbid, was at least partially conquered, the line of death would spread,” Shevchuk said at St. George’s Church in New York.
Andriy Yurash, Ukraine’s ambassador to the Vatican, told RAI News that “you don’t negotiate with terrorists, with those who are recognized as criminals,” referring to the Russian leadership and President Vladimir Putin. “No one tried to put Hitler at ease.”
Ukraine’s regional allies also expressed anger about the pope’s remarks.
“How about, for balance, encouraging Putin to have the courage to withdraw his army from Ukraine? Peace would immediately ensue without the need for negotiations,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski wrote on social media.
Lithuanian President Edgars Rinkevichs wrote on social media: “My Sunday morning conclusion: You can’t capitulate to evil, you have to fight it and defeat it, so that evil raises the white flag and surrenders.”
Alexandra Valkenburg, ambassador and head of the EU Delegation to the Holy See, wrote “Russia…can end this war immediately by respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. EU supports Ukraine and its peace plan.”
Whither China? was the name of a widely circulated pamphlet authored by the respected Anglo-Indian Marxist author, R. Palme Dutt. Writing in 1966, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the throes of the “Cultural Revolution,” the pamphlet sought to shed light on the PRC’s tortured road from liberation in 1949 to a vast upheaval disrupting all aspects of Chinese society as well as foreign relations. To most people — across the entire political spectrum — developments within this Asian giant were a challenge to understand. To be sure, there were zealots outside of the PRC who hung on every word uttered by The Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao, and stood by every release explaining Chinese events in the People’s Daily, Red Flag and Peking Review. A few Communist Parties and many middle-class intellectuals embraced the Cultural Revolution as a rite of purification. Yet for most, as with Palme Dutt, the paramount question remained: Where is the PRC going?
Today, forty-five years later, the question remains open.
I wrote the above thirteen years ago. I contend that the question remains open today. Much has changed, however. In 2011, China-bashing was widespread especially where jobs had disappeared in manufacturing, but largely tempered by a Western business sector anxious to exploit low wages and the Chinese domestic market.
But almost simultaneously with the 2011 posting, the Obama administration made official its “pivot to Asia,” directed explicitly at Peoples’ China. As the Brookings Institute ‘diplomatically’ put it, “Washington is still very much focused on sustaining a constructive U.S.-China relationship, but it has now brought disparate elements together in a strategically integrated fashion that explicitly affirms and promises to sustain American leadership throughout Asia for the foreseeable future.” More explicitly, they intend “to establish a strong and credible American presence across Asia to both encourage constructive Chinese behavior and to provide confidence to other countries in the region that they need not yield to potential Chinese regional hegemony.”
To be sure, the officially declared Obama administration hostility to the PRC was neither a reaction to job loss nor to deindustrialization. The Administration showed no interest in recreating lost jobs or restoring the industrial cities in the Midwest. The real purpose is revealed in the simple phrase “Chinese regional hegemony.” Clearly, by 2011, ruling circles in the US had decided that the PRC was more than an economic cherry ready to be plucked. Instead, it had developed into an economic powerhouse, a true, even the true, competitor in global markets; indeed, it had become a robust threat to U.S. hegemony.
With the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the anti-PRC campaign continued, though conducted in an accelerated, cruder fashion, employing sanctions, threats, ultimatums, and even legal chicanery (the detention of one of Huawei’s executives, the daughter of the company’s founder).
The subsequent Biden administration pursued the same approach, adding another level of belligerence by stirring conflict in the South China Sea and reigniting the Taiwan issue. To anyone paying attention, successive administrations were intensifying aggression against the PRC, a process fueled by the eagerly compliant mainstream media.
It has become commonplace on the left to explain the growing hostility to the PRC by the U.S. and its NATO satellites as the instigation of a new Cold War, a revival of the anti-Communist crusades strengthening after World War II. In the past, I have suggested as much. But that would be grossly misleading.
The original Cold War was a struggle between capitalism and socialism. Whether Western critics will concede that the Soviet alternative was really socialism is irrelevant. It was a sharp and near-total alternative, and the West fought it as such. The Soviet Union did not organize its production to participate in global markets, it did not compete for global markets, nor did it threaten the profitability of capitalist enterprises through global competition. In short, the Soviet Union offered a potent option to Western capitalism, but not the threat of a rival for markets or profits. Moreover, Soviet foreign policy both condemned capitalism and explicitly sought to win other countries to socialist construction.
The same cannot be said for the Western antagonism to the PRC. The West courted Peoples’ China assiduously from the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution through the entire Deng era. Western powers saw the PRC as either an ally against the Soviet Union, a source of cheap labor, an investment windfall, or a virgin market. But with China’s success in weathering the capitalist crisis of 2007-2009, the U.S. and its allies began to look at the PRC as a dangerous rival within the global system of capitalism. Chinese technologies more than rivaled the West’s; its share of global trade had grown dramatically; and its accumulation of capital and its export of capital were alarming to Western powers bent on pressing their own export of capital.
In contrast to the actual Cold War, even the most ardent defender of the “Chinese road to socialism” cannot today cite many instances of PRC foreign policy strongly advocating, assisting, or even vigorously defending the fight for socialism anywhere outside of China. Indeed, the basic tenet of PRC policy — the noninterference in the affairs of others, regardless of their ideologies or policies — has more in common with Adam Smith than Vladimir Lenin.
What the Soviet Union took as its internationalist mission — support for those fighting capitalism — is not to be found in the CPC’s foreign policy. Nothing demonstrates the differences more than the Soviet’s past solidarity and aid toward Cuba’s socialist construction and the contrasting PRC’s commercial and cultural relations and meager aid.
Accordingly, the PRC’s commercial relations with less developed countries can raise substantial issues. Recently, Ann Garrison, a highly respected solidarity activist, often focusing on imperialism in Africa, wrote a provocative article for Black Agenda Report. In her review of Cobalt Red, How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives — an account of corporate mining and labor exploitation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo– Garrison makes the following commentary guaranteed to raise the ire of devotees of the “Chinese road to socialism”:
[The author of Cobalt Red] explains battery technology and the global dominance of battery manufacture by South Korean, Japanese, and, most of all, Chinese industrial titans. Huge Chinese corporations so dominate Congolese cobalt mining, processing and battery manufacture that one has to ask why a communist government, however capitalist in fact, doesn’t at least somehow require more responsible sourcing of minerals processed and then advanced along the supply chain within its borders. I hope that Kara’s book has or will be translated into Chinese. (my emphasis)
Predictably, rejoinders came fast and furious. In both an interview and responseposted on Black Agenda Report, Garrison’s critics struggled to explain why PRC-based corporations were not contributing to the impoverishment and exploitation of Congolese workers. They cited Chinese investments in infrastructure and in modernization; they noted huge increases in productivity wrought by Chinese technology; they reminded Garrison of the corruption of the DRC government and local capitalists, and even blamed capitalism itself. How, one critic asked, could the PRC be singled out, when other (admittedly capitalist) countries were doing it as well?
Yet none even made a feeble attempt to explain how the extraction of one of the most sought-after minerals in modern industry could leave the people of the mineral-rich DRC with one of — if not the lowest — median incomes in the entire world. This striking fact points to the enormous rate of exploitation engaged in cobalt, copper, and other resource extraction in this poverty-stricken African country (for a Marxist angle on this question, see Charles Andrews’s article, cited by Garrison, but seemingly misunderstood by her).
In their zeal to defend the PRC’s Belt and Road initiative, these same defenders of the penetration of Chinese capital in poor countries often cite the frequent Chinese concept of “win-win” — the idea that Chinese capital brings with it victory for both the capital supplier and those ‘benefitted’ by the capital. Theorists of the non-class “win-win” concept are never clear exactly who the beneficiaries are — other capitalists, corrupt government officials, or the working class. Nevertheless, within the intensely competitive global capitalist system, this “win-win” is not sustainable and is contrary to both experience and the laws of capitalist development. Theoretically, it owes more to the thinking of David Ricardo than Karl Marx.
The PRC’s vexing relationship to capitalism has produced contradictions at home as well as globally. The ongoing collapse of the largely private construction/real-estate industry is one very large example. Once a major factor in PRC growth, overproduction of housing is now a substantial drag on economic advance. Monthly sales of new homes by private developers peaked late in 2020 at over 1.5 trillion yuan and fell to a little more than .25 trillion yuan at the beginning of 2024.
With the private real estate sector on the verge of bankruptcy and a huge number of residential properties unsold or unfinished, the PRC leadership is caught in a twenty-first-century version of the infamous scissors crisis that brought the Soviet NEP — the experiment with capitalist development of the productive forces — to a halt. If the government allows the private developers to fail, it will have harsh repercussions throughout the private sector, with banks, and foreign investors. If the government bails out the developers, it will remove the market consequences of capitalist excess and put the burden of sustaining capitalist failure on the backs of the Chinese people.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the government, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is considering placing “the state back in charge of the property market, part of a push to rein in the private sector.” The WSJ editors construe this as reviving “Socialist Ideas” — a welcome thought, if true.
The article claims that in CCP General Secretary Xi’s view, “too much credit moved into property speculation, adding risks to the financial system, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and diverting resources from what Xi considers to be the ‘real economy’ — sectors such as manufacturing and high-end technology.…”
Putting aside the question of how the private real estate sector was allowed to create an enormous bubble of unfinished and unsold homes, the move to return responsibility for housing to the public sector should be welcome, restoring price stability and planning, and eliminating speculation, overproduction, and economic disparities.
Unfortunately, there will be uncertain consequences and difficulties for banks, investors, and real estate buyers who purchased under the private regimen.
It is worth noting that no Western capitalist country or Japan has or would address a real estate bubble by absorbing real estate into the public sector.
Under Xi’s leadership, the direction of the PRC’s ‘reforms’ may have shifted somewhat away from an infatuation with markets, private ownership, and foreign capital. The former “enrich yourselves” tolerance for wealth accumulation has been tempered by conscious efforts at raising the living standards of the poorest. Xi has made a priority of “targeted poverty alleviation,” with impressive success.
Western intellectuals harshly criticize the PRC’s ‘democracy’ because it rejects the multi-party, periodic election model long-favored in the West. These same intellectuals fetishize a form of democracy, regardless of whether that particular form earns the trust of those supposedly represented. The mere fact that a procedure purports to deliver democratic or representative results does not guarantee that it actually makes good on its promise.
If China-critics were truly concerned with democratic or popular outcomes, they would turn to measures or surveys of public confidence, satisfaction, or trust in government to judge the respective systems. On this count, the PRC is always found at or near the top in public trust (for example, hereand here). Moreover, Chinese society shows high interpersonal or social trust, another measure of success in producing popular social cohesion by a government.
It’s telling that with the Western obsession with democracy, there is little interest in holding bourgeois democracy up to any relevant measure of its trust or popularity. When it is done, the U.S. fares very poorly, with a six-decade decline in public trust, according to Pew. As recently as February 28, the most recent Pew poll shows that even people who do respect “representative democracy” are critical of how it’s working. Their answer to their skepticism may be found “if more women, people from poor backgrounds and young adults held elective office”, say respondents. Those elites who so glibly talk of “our democracy,” in contrast to those including the CCP that they call “authoritarians,” might pause to listen to the people of their own country.
The PRC has shocked Western critics with the breakneck pace of its adoption of non-emission energy production. In 2020, the Chinese anticipated generating 1200 gigawatts of solar and wind power by 2030. That goal and more will likely be reached by the end of 2024. Overall, the PRC expects to account for more new clean-energy capacity this year than the average growth in electricity demand over the last decade and a half. This means, of course, that emissions have likely peaked and will be receding in the years ahead– an achievement well ahead of Western estimates and Western achievements, and a victory for the global environmental movement.
At the same time, the PRC’s successful competition in the solar-panel market makes it the target of global competitors, a brutal struggle that undermines the espoused “win-win” approach. Despite the benign tone of “win-win,” market competition is not bound by polite resignation, but aggression, conflict, and, as Lenin affirmed, ultimately war. That is the inescapable logic of capitalism. PRC engagement with the market cannot negate it.
Western leftists too often simplify the ‘Chinese Question’ by making it a parlor game revolving around whether China is or is not a socialist country, an error confusing a settled, accomplished state of affairs with a contested process.
As long as capitalism exists and holds seats of political power, the process of building socialism remains unstable and unfinished.
The 1936 Soviet constitution declared in Article One that the USSR was “a socialist state of workers and peasants,” a status that was under great duress over the subsequent following decades. The 1977 constitution stated even more boldly that the USSR was “a socialist state of the whole people…,” a state without classes and, by implication, class struggle. A decade and a half later, there was no USSR. Building socialism is a fragile process and one prone to reversals and defeats.
Thus, we should follow Palme Dutt’s sage advice and observe developments in the PRC with vigilance and a critical eye. If building socialism is a dynamic process, we should attend to its direction, rather than pronouncing its summary success or failure. The PRC is a complex creation with a complex — often contradictory — relationship with other countries as well as the socialist project. The cause of socialism is ill served by either ignoring or exaggerating both missteps and victories in the PRC’s revolutionary path.
With political tension rising around the world, airborne special mission aircraft have arguably never been more important. Asia-Pacific states facing Chinese pressure on their South China Sea interests are continuing to enhance their air capabilities. This includes the acquisition of special mission aircraft whose various roles include airborne early warning and control (AEW&C), intelligence, surveillance […]
Papua New Guinea and Indonesia have formally ratified a defence agreement a decade after its initial signing.
PNG’s Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko and the Indonesian ambassador to the Pacific nation, Andriana Supandy, convened a press briefing in Port Moresby on February 29 to declare the ratification.
The agreement enables an enhancement of military operations between the two countries, with a specific focus on strengthening patrols along the border between Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.
According to Tkatchenko as reported by RNZ Pacific citing Benar News, “The Joint border patrols and different types of defence cooperation between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea of course will be part of the ever-growing security mechanism.”
“It would be wonderful to witness the collaboration between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, both now and in the future, as they work together side by side. Indonesia is a rising Southeast Asian power that reaches into the South Pacific region and dwarfs Papua New Guinea in population, economic size and military might,” added the minister.
In recent years, Indonesia has been asserting its own regional hegemony in the Pacific amid the rivalries of two superpowers — the United States and China.
Indonesia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Retno Marsudi reiterated Indonesia’s commitment to bolster collaboration with Pacific nations amid heightened geopolitical tensions in the Indo-Pacific region during the recent 2024 annual press statement held by the minister for foreign affairs at the Asian-African Conference in Bandung.
Diverse Indigenous states
The Pacific Islands are home to diverse sovereign Indigenous states and islands, and also home to two influential regional powers, Australia and New Zealand. This vast diverse region is increasingly becoming a pivotal strategic and political battleground for foreign powers — aiming to win the hearts and minds of the populations and governments in the region.
Numerous visible and hidden agreements, treaties, talks, and partnerships are being established among local, regional, and global stakeholders in the affairs of this vast region.
The Pacific region carries great importance for powerful military and economic entities such as China, the United States and its coalition, and Indonesia. For them, it serves as a crucial area for strategic bases, resource acquisition, food, and commercial routes.
For Indigenous islanders, states, and tribal communities, the primary concern is around the loss of their territories, islands, and other vital cultural aspects, such as languages and traditional wisdom.
The crumbling of Oceania, reminiscent of its past colonisation by various European powers, is now occurring. However, this time it is being orchestrated by foreign entities appointing their own influential local pawns.
With these local pawns in place, foreign monarchs, nobility, warlords, and miscreants are advancing to reshape the region’s fate.
The rejection by the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) to acknowledge the representation of West Papua by the United Liberation for West Papua (ULMWP) as a full member of the regional body in August 2023 highlights the diminishing influence of MSG leaders in decision-making processes concerning issues that are deemed crucial by the Papuan community as part of the “Melanesian family affairs”.
Suspicion over ‘external forces’
This raises suspicion of external forces at play within the Melanesian nations, manipulating their destinies. The question arises, who is orchestrating the fate of the Melanesian nations?
Is it Jakarta, Beijing, Washington, or Canberra?
In a world characterised by instability, safety and security emerges as a crucial prerequisite for fostering a peaceful coexistence, nurturing friendships, and enabling development.
The critical question at hand pertains to the nature of the threats that warrant such protective measures, the identities of both the endangered and the aggressors, and the underlying rationale and mechanisms involved. Whose safety hangs in the balance in this discourse?
And between whom does the spectre of threat loom?
If you are a realist in a world of policymaking, it is perhaps wise not to antagonise the big guy with the big weapon in the room. The Minister of Papua New Guinea may be attempting to underscore the importance of Indonesia in the Pacific region, as indicated by his statements.
If you are West Papuan, it makes little difference whether one leans towards realism or idealism. What truly matters is the survival of West Papuans, in the midst of the significant settler colonial presence of Asian Indonesians in their ancestral homeland.
West Papuan refugee camp
Two years ago, PNG’s minister stated the profound existential sentiments experienced by the West Papuans in 2022 while visiting a West Papuan refugee community in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.
During the visit, the minister addressed the West Papuan refugees with the following words:
“The line on the map in middle of the island (New Guinea) is the product of colonial impact. These West Papuans are part of our family, part of our members and part of Papua New Guinea. They are not strangers.
“We are separated only by imaginary lines, which is why I am here. I did not come here to fight, to yell, to scream, to dictate, but to reach a common understanding — to respect the law of Papua New Guinea and the sovereignty of Indonesia.”
These types of ambiguous and opaque messages and rhetoric not only instil fake hope among the West Papuans, but also produce despair among displaced Papuans on their own soil.
The seemingly paradoxical language coupled with the significant recent security agreement with the entity — Indonesia — that has been oppressing the West Papuans under the pretext of sovereignty, signifies one ominous prospect:
Is PNG endorsing a “death decree” for the Indonesian security apparatus to hunt Papuans along the border and mountainous region of West Papua and Papua New Guinea?
Security for West Papua Currently, the situation in West Papua is deteriorating steadily. Thousands of Indonesian military personnel have been deployed to various regions in West Papua, especially in the areas afflicted by conflict, such as Nduga, Yahukimo, Maybrat, Intan Jaya, Puncak, Puncak Jaya, Star Mountain, and along the border separating Papua New Guinea from West Papua.
On the 27 February 2024, Indonesian military personnel captured two teenage students and fatally shot a Papuan civilian in the Yahukimo district. They alleged that the deceased individual was affiliated with the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNB), although this assertion has yet to be verified by the TPNPB.
Such incidents are tragically a common occurrence throughout West Papua, as the Indonesian military continue to target and wrongfully accuse innocent West Papuans in conflict-ridden regions of being associated with the TPNPB.
Two West Papuan students who were arrested on the banks of Braza River in Yahukimo . . . under the watch of two Indonesian military with heavy SS2 guns standing behind them. Image: Kompas.com
These deplorable acts transpired just prior to the ratification of a border operation agreement between the governments of the Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.
As the security agreement was being finalised, the Indonesian government announced a new military campaign in the highlands of West Papua. This operation, is named as “Habema” — meaning “must succeed to the maximum” — and was initiated in Jakarta on the 29 February 2024.
Agus Subiyanto, the Indonesian military command and police command stated during the announcement:
“My approach for Papua involves smart power, a blend of soft power, hard power, and military diplomacy. Establishing the Habema operational command is a key step in ensuring maximum success.”
Indonesian military commander General Agus Subiyanto (left) with National Police chief Listyo Sigit Prabowo (centre) and Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto while checking defence equipment at the TNI headquarters in Jakarta last Wednesday. Prabowo (right) is expected to become President after his decisive victory in the elections last week. Image: Antara News.
The looming military operation in West Papua and its border regions, employing advanced smart weapon technology poised a profound danger for Papuans.
A looming humanitarian crisis in West Papua, PNG, broader Melanesia and the Pacific region is inevitable, as unmanned aerial drones discern targets indiscriminately, wreak havoc in homes, and villages of the Papuan communities.
The Indonesian security forces have increasingly employed such sophisticated technology in conflict zones since 2019, including regions like Intan Jaya, Yahukimo, Maybrat, Pegunungan Bintang, and other volatile regions in West Papua.
Consequently, villages have been razed to the ground, compelling inhabitants to flee to the jungle in search of sanctuary — an exodus that continues unabated as they remain displaced from their homes indefinitely.
On 5 April 2018, the Indonesian government announced a military operation known as Damai Cartenz, which remains active in conflict-ridden regions, such as Yahukimo, Pegunungan Bintang, Nduga, and Intan Jaya.
The Habema security initiative will further threaten Papuans residing in the conflict zones, particularly in the vicinity of the border shared by Papua New Guinea and West Papua.
There are already hundreds of people from the Star Mountains who have fled across to Tumolbil, in the Yapsie sub-district of the PNG province of West Sepik, situated on the border. They fled to PNG because of Indonesia’s military operation (RNZ 2021).
According to RNZ News, individuals fleeing military actions conducted by the Indonesian government, including helicopter raids that caused significant harm to approximately 14 villages, have left behind foot tracks.
The speaker explained that Papua New Guineans occasionally cross over to the Indonesian side, typically seeking improved access to basic services.
The PNG government has been placing refugees from West Papua in border camps, the biggest one being at East Awin in the Western Province for many decades, with assistance from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
How should PNG, UN respond? The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007, article 36, states that “Indigenous peoples, in particular those divided by international borders, have the right to maintain and develop contacts, relations and cooperation with their own members as well as other peoples across borders”.
Over the past six years, regional and international organisations, such as the Melanesian Spearheads groups (MSG), Pacific islands Forum (PIF), Africa, Caribbean and Pacific states (ACP), the UN’s human rights commissioner as well as dozens of countries and individual parliaments, lawyers, academics, and politicians have been asking the Indonesian government to allow the UN’s human rights commissioner to visit West Papua.
However, to date, no response has been received from the Indonesian government.
What does this security deal mean for West Papuans? This is not just a simple security arrangement between Jakarta and Port Moresby to address border conflicts, but rather an issue of utmost importance for the people of Papua.
It concerns the sovereignty of a nation — West Papua — that has been unjustly seized by Indonesia, while the international community watched in silence, witnessing the unfurling and unparalleled destruction of human lives and the ecological system.
There is one noble thing the foreign minister of PNG and his government can do: ask why Jakarta is not responding to the request for a UN visit made by the international community, rather than endorsing an ‘illegal security pact’ with the illegal Indonesia colonial occupier over his supposed “family members separated only by imaginary lines”.
Ali Mirin is a West Papuan from the Kimyal tribe of the highlands that share a border with the Star Mountain region of Papua New Guinea. He graduated last year with a Master of Arts in International Relations from Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia.
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Video imagery released by state-owned broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) in late February has revealed that further development work has been carried out on the Tianying (Sky Hawk) uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV). According to CCTV commentary, improvements to the UAV include enhanced stealth and range performance. It added that flight-testing has also commenced following these […]
China’s top state planner has projected a multi-billion-dollar market from Beijing’s policy pushing for industries to upgrade their equipment and citizens to trade in their old vehicles and home appliances for new ones.
The domestic consumption push, an integral part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s latest mantra to unleash “new productive forces,” is seen as instrumental to Beijing’s efforts to revive growth.
Zheng Shanjie, chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, also assured the media that Beijing’s 5% GDP goal is achievable.
“This goal is in line with the annual requirements of the ‘14th Five-Year Plan’ and matches the potential of economic growth, a goal that can be achieved with positivity and hard work,” he told reporters at a press conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress Wednesday.
Zheng said the economy is recovering and showing new results, without specifying. One such potential result could be the over 5 trillion yuan (US$694 billion) that is forecast to be created annually as industries and companies upgrade their equipment to raise development quality.
“Chinese industries and the agricultural sector last year invested about 4.9 trillion yuan in equipment. The push to raise quality development will only increase demand for equipment upgrade,” he said at the joint briefing with China’s finance minister, commerce minister, central bank chief, and head of the securities regulator.
The campaign will focus on industrial, agricultural, construction, transport, education, cultural tourism and healthcare, where the upgrade will foster reduced carbon emissions, safety, digital transformation and smart intelligence, Zheng added.
Similarly, Zheng described the trade-in market for vehicles and home appliances as “huge” and in the “trillion yuan” level, given that car and white goods ownership last year reached 336 million units and 3 billion units, respectively.
The upgrade and trade-in drives could enhance China’s efforts to build a circular economy, he noted.
“The promotion of such large-scale equipment upgrade and consumer goods trade-in is a systematic project … to be supported by fiscal, financial and tax policies.”
“New productive forces” was coined by President Xi during a trip to the rustbelt Northeast region last September, where he highlighted the need for a new economic model. In Xi’s China, the state’s role is expanding and the private sector is retreating.
Central government agencies and local governments are now focused on putting the new vision into play. Chinese Premier Li Qiang in his maiden government work report on Tuesday called for a “new leap forward” to modernize the industrial system and accelerate the development of new productive forces across sectors like electric vehicles, hydrogen power, new materials, life sciences and commercial spaceflight.
To support the domestic demand policy, Beijing will issue 1 trillion yuan of special long-term bonds this year, and more in the next few years.
The thrust of China’s economic policy direction is “seeking progress while maintaining stability, promoting stability through advancement, and in construction before destruction,” according to the Chinese premier’s work report.
As such, authorities could be banking on “new productive forces” to buffer the structural challenges that clouded the outlook of the Chinese economy, like a deepening real estate market crisis, local government indebtedness and economic issues due to demographic shifts. Li’s report offered little details on structural reforms which some analysts said are crucial to address fundamental problems.
Externally, China’s foreign trade will face a severe situation, commerce minister Wang Wentao said at the press conference.
Echoing the complexity and unpredictability of the external environment, People’s Bank of China Governor Pan Gongsheng stressed that the central bank will leverage on monetary policies and intensity macro-control policies to ensure stability.
“China’s monetary policy toolbox is still rich [with tools at our disposal], and there is still sufficient room for monetary policy [adjustments],” Pan said, adding that the bank will keep the yuan basically stable.
Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.
