The Himalayan Voice

CHINA HARVESTS MASSES OF DATA ON WESTERN TARGETS, DOCUMENTS SHOW

2021-12-31T23:25:00.002-05:00

[These include a $320,000 Chinese state media software program that mines Twitter and Facebook to create a database of foreign journalists and academics; a $216,000 Beijing police intelligence program that analyses Western chatter on Hong Kong and Taiwan; and a Xinjiang cybercenter cataloguing Uyghur language content abroad.]

By Cate Cadell

China is turning a major part of its internal Internet data surveillance network outward, mining Western social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to equip its government agencies, military and police with information on foreign targets, according to a Washington Post review of hundreds of Chinese bidding documents, contracts and company filings.

China maintains a countrywide network of government data surveillance services — called public opinion analysis software — that were developed over the past decade and are used domestically to warn officials of politically sensitive information online.

The software primarily targets China’s domestic Internet users and media, but a Washington Post review of bidding documents and contracts for over 300 Chinese government projects since the beginning of 2020 include orders for software designed to collect data on foreign targets from sources such as Twitter, Facebook and other Western social media.

The documents, publicly accessible through domestic government bidding platforms, also show that agencies including state media, propaganda departments, police, military and cyber regulators are purchasing new or more sophisticated systems to gather data.

These include a $320,000 Chinese state media software program that mines Twitter and Facebook to create a database of foreign journalists and academics; a $216,000 Beijing police intelligence program that analyses Western chatter on Hong Kong and Taiwan; and a Xinjiang cybercenter cataloguing Uyghur language content abroad.

“Now we can better understand the underground network of anti-China personnel,” said a Beijing-based analyst who works for a unit reporting to China’s Central Propaganda Department. The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their work, said they were once tasked with producing a data report on how negative content relating to Beijing’s senior leadership is spread on Twitter, including profiles of individual academics, politicians and journalists.

These surveillance dragnets are part of a wider drive by Beijing to refine its foreign propaganda efforts through big data and artificial intelligence.

They also form a network of warning systems designed to sound real-time alarms for trends that undermine Beijing’s interests.

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“They are now reorienting part of that effort outward, and I think that’s frankly terrifying, looking at the sheer numbers and sheer scale that this has taken inside China,” said Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund who has conducted extensive research on China’s domestic public opinion network.

“It really shows that they now feel it’s their responsibility to defend China overseas and fight the public opinion war overseas,” she said.

Some of the Chinese government’s budgeting includes buying and maintaining foreign social media accounts on behalf of police and propaganda departments. Yet others describe using the targeted analysis to refine Beijing’s state media coverage abroad.

The purchases range in size from small, automated programs to projects costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that are staffed 24 hours a day by teams including English speakers and foreign policy specialists.

The documents describe highly customizable programs that can collect real-time social media data from individual social media users. Some describe tracking broad trends on issues including U.S. elections.

The Post was not able to review data collected by the systems but spoke to four people based in Beijing who are directly involved in government public opinion analysis and described separate software systems that automatically collect and store Facebook and Twitter data in real time on domestic Chinese servers for analysis.

Twitter and Facebook both ban automated collection of data on their services without prior authorization. Twitter’s policy also expressly bars developers from gathering data used to infer a user’s political affiliation or ethnic and racial origin.

“Our API provides real-time access to public data and Tweets only, not private information. We prohibit use of our API for surveillance purposes, as per our developer policy and terms,” said Katie Rosborough, a Twitter spokesperson, referring to the company’s Application Programming Interface (API), which allows developers to retrieve public data from the platform among other functions.

Facebook did not respond to requests for comment about whether it is aware of the monitoring or whether several companies, universities and state media firms listed as supplying the software were authorized to collect data on its platform.

China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

'Public opinion guidance'

China’s systems for analyzing domestic public opinion online are a powerful but largely unseen pillar of President Xi Jinping’s program to modernize China’s propaganda apparatus and maintain control over the Internet.

The vast data collection and monitoring efforts give officials insight into public opinion, a challenge in a country that does not hold public elections or permit independent media.

The services also provide increasingly technical surveillance for China’s censorship apparatus. And most systems include alarm functions designed to alert officials and police to negative content in real time.

These operations are an important function of what Beijing calls “public opinion guidance work” — a policy of molding public sentiment in favor of the government through targeted propaganda and censorship.

The phrase first came to prominence in policymaking after the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations, when officials began exploring new ways to preempt popular challenges to the Communist Party’s power, and has since become integral to the underlying architecture of China’s Internet, where users are linked by real name ID, and Internet services are required by law to maintain an internal censorship apparatus.

The exact scope of China’s government public opinion monitoring industry is unclear, but there have been some indications about its size in Chinese state media. In 2014, the state-backed newspaper China Daily said more than 2 million people were working as public opinion analysts. In 2018, the People’s Daily, another official organ, said the government’s online opinion analysis industry was worth “tens of billions of yuan,” equivalent to billions of dollars, and was growing at a rate of 50 percent a year.

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That surveillance network system is expanding to include foreign social media at a time when global perceptions of Beijing are at their lowest in recent history.

A Pew Research survey released in June showed that perceptions of China among 17 advanced economies had dipped to near historic lows for a second year in a row in the aftermath of the U.S. trade war, the Xinjiang human rights crisis, Hong Kong and the coronavirus pandemic.

In May this year, Xi called on senior officials to portray a more “trustworthy, lovable and reliable” image of China abroad, calling for the “effective development of international public opinion guidance.”

His comments reflect Beijing’s growing anxieties over how to control China’s image abroad.

“On the back of the Sino-US trade talks and the Hong Kong rioting incident, it’s becoming clearer day by day that the public opinion news war is arduous and necessary,” China Daily said in a July 2020 bidding document for a $300,000 “foreign personnel analysis platform.”

The invitation to tender lays out specifications for a program that mines Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for data on “well known Western media journalists” and other “key personnel from political, business and media circles.”

“We are competing with the US and Western media, the battle for the right to speak has begun,” it said.

The software should run 24 hours a day, according to the specifications, and map the relationships between target personnel and uncover “factions” between personnel, measuring their “China tendencies” and building an alarm system that automatically flags “false statements and reports on China.”

Warning systems like the one outlined in the China Daily document are described in over 90 percent of tenders that list technical specifications, The Post’s review of the documents show.

Two people who work as analysts in public opinion analysis units contracted by government agencies in Beijing told The Post that they receive automated alarms via SMS, email and on dedicated computer monitors when “sensitive” content was detected. Both of the people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to foreign media.

“Having responsibility for [the monitoring] is a lot of pressure,” said one of the people. “If we do our work poorly, there are severe repercussions.”

Highly sensitive viral trends online are reported to a 24-hour hotline maintained by the Cybersecurity Administration of China (CAC), the body that oversees the country’s censorship apparatus, the person said of their unit.

The person added that most of the alarms were related to domestic social media but that foreign social media had also been included in the units’ monitoring since the middle of 2019.

The person’s account is supported by four bidding documents for unrelated systems that mention direct hotlines to the CAC.

“In case of major public opinion, directly contact the staff on duty of the CAC by telephone to ensure that notifications are in place through various communication tools,” said one December 2020 tender for a $236,000 system purchased by the municipal propaganda department in eastern China’s Fuzhou city for monitoring Facebook and Twitter alongside domestic social media.

It specifies that reports to the CAC should include the details of individual social media users.

State media-led data mining

Suppliers of the systems vary. The China Daily awarded its contract to Beijing’s Communications University, one of a half dozen Chinese universities that have launched specialized departments to develop public opinion analysis technology.

However, some of the most prolific public opinion monitoring services are provided to police and government agencies by state media themselves.

The documents provide insight into the scope of foreign social media data collection done by China’s major state media outlets, which maintain offices and servers abroad, and their key role in providing Beijing with publicity guidance based on increasingly sophisticated data mining analysis.

The growing clout of Beijing’s propaganda efforts abroad, spearheaded by state media, has triggered alarms in Washington.

In 2020, the State Department reclassified the U.S.-based operations of China’s top state media outlets as foreign missions, increasing reporting requirements and restricting their visa allocations, angering Beijing.

The People’s Daily Online, a unit of the state newspaper the People’s Daily, which provides one of the country’s largest contract public opinion analysis services, won dozens of projects that include overseas social media data collection services for police, judicial authorities, Communist Party organizations and other clients.

The unit, which recorded $330 million in operating income in 2020, up 50 percent from 2018, says it serves over 200 government agencies, although it is not clear how many request foreign social media data.

In one tender won by the People’s Daily Online, the Beijing Police Intelligence Command Unit purchased a $30,570 service to trawl foreign social media and produce reports on unspecified “key personnel and organizations,” gathering information on their “basic circumstances, background and relationships.”

It also calls for weekly data reports on Hong Kong, Taiwan and U.S. relations. Issued shortly before the 2020 U.S. presidential election results were ratified on Jan. 6, it also called for “special reports” on “netizens’ main views” related to the election.

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“The international balance of power has been profoundly adjusted,” said the request for tenders. “Through the collection of public Internet information we can keep a close eye on the international community, analyze sensitivities and hot spots, and maintain the stability of Chinese society.”

In an April 2020 article, the chief analyst at the People’s Daily Online Public Opinion Data Center, Liao Canliang, laid out the ultimate goal of public opinion analysis.

“The ultimate purpose of analysis and prediction is to guide and intervene in public opinion,” Canliang wrote. “… Public data from social network users can be used to analyze the characteristics and preferences of users, and then guide them in a targeted manner.”

In the article, Liao points to Cambridge Analytica’s impact on the 2016 U.S. election as evidence of social media’s ability to mold public opinion.

“The West uses big data to analyze, research and judge public opinion to influence political activities. ... As long as there is a correct grasp on the situation, public opinion can also be guided and interfered with,” he wrote.

People’s Daily subsidiary Global Times, a firebrand newspaper known for its biting coverage of China’s critics, also has a unit gathering foreign social media data for China’s Foreign Ministry, Beijing’s Foreign Affairs Office and other government agencies.

In late 2019, the Global Times Online won a three-year contract worth $531,000 to provide a “China-related foreign media and journalist opinion monitoring system” that monitors overseas social media on behalf of China’s Foreign Ministry and produces comprehensive regular reports, as well as special briefings in “urgent circumstances.”

Documentation accompanying the project says that close to 40 percent of the Global Times monitoring unit’s staffers are senior Global Times reporters and that the publication maintains large overseas social media monitoring platforms.

A description on the website of the Global Times’s public opinion research center says the group conducts “overseas monitoring and overseas investigation services” and provides “comprehensive response plans” to government and private clients.

Both the People’s Daily and the Global Times were among the outlets designated as foreign missions in the United States.

The increase in China’s monitoring of foreign public opinion on social media coincides with efforts by Beijing to boost its influence on Twitter and other U.S. social media platforms.

In June 2020, Twitter suspended 23,000 accounts that it said were linked to the Chinese Communist Party and covertly spreading propaganda to undermine pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. This month, Twitter said it removed a further 2,048 accounts linked to Beijing and producing coordinated content undermining accusations of rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Experts say those accounts represent a small fraction of China’s efforts to boost pro-Beijing messaging on foreign social media.

'Extreme chilling effect'

Just under a third of the public opinion analysis systems reviewed by The Post were procured by Chinese police.

In 14 instances, the analysis systems included a feature requested by the police that would automatically flag “sensitive” content related to Uyghurs and other Chinese ethnic minorities. An additional 12 analysis systems included the police-requested capability of monitoring individual content authors over time.

“It must support information monitoring of overseas social media … and provide for targeted collection of designated sites and authors,” said one invitation to tender released by the Fuzhou city police in October that lists coverage of Facebook and Twitter as a requirement.

The monitoring of social media abroad by local police throughout China could be used in investigating Chinese citizens locally and abroad, as well as in flagging trends that stir domestic dissent, experts say.

“The public security monitoring is very much about stability maintenance, tracking people down and finding people’s identity, and when they monitor overseas social media, it’s also often with an eye to monitoring what news could cause trouble at home in China,” said the German Marshall Fund’s Ohlberg.

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Companies providing overseas public opinion monitoring to police include a mix of private and state-owned firms, including the People’s Daily Online.

Six police contracts awarded since 2020 stated that the People’s Daily was chosen to conduct monitoring on the basis of its technical ability to gather data abroad.

“It’s the only one in the industry that deploys overseas servers. It is a public opinion service organization that can monitor and collect more than 8,000 overseas media without ‘overturning the wall,’ ” said the Guangdong Police Department in a $26,200 contract offer posted in July 2020, referring to the ability of the People’s Daily unit to collect overseas data outside China’s Great Firewall.

Experts say the increasingly advanced social media surveillance technology available to Chinese police could worsen the targeted harassment of Beijing’s critics.

“The Chinese government is one of the worst offenders when it comes to targeting individuals outside of the country,” said Adrian Shahbaz, the director for technology and democracy at the think tank Freedom House.

“It has an extreme chilling effect on how Chinese citizens outside of China are using social media tools, because they know that back home, their information is very easily monitored by Chinese authorities,” he said.

The China Public Security Bureau did not respond to a request for comment.

A police bureau in southern China’s Nanping city purchased a $42,000 system that “supports collection, discovery, and warning functions for ... Twitter and Facebook social media data according to different classifications and keyword groups, as well as overseas information lists,” according to bidding documents released in July 2020.

Other procurements for public opinion services outline programs purchased by Chinese police and Xinjiang government bodies to track “sensitive” ethnic language content abroad. (China’s mainly-Muslim Uyghurs are concentrated in Xinjiang.)

A $43,000 system purchased by police in central China’s Shangnan county included a “foreign sensitive information” collection system that requested Uyghur and Tibetan staff translators, according to the contracts.

Military procurement documents — less detailed than other types — did not offer much detail on the purpose of the foreign data collection but alluded to vague categories of data including “key personnel.”

One heavily redacted June 2020 contract issued by the People’s Liberation Army described a system that would trawl foreign sites and categorize data on the basis of affiliation, geography and country.

Source Data Technology, the Shanghai-based company that won the contract, says on its website that it uses “advanced big data mining and artificial intelligence analysis technology” to cover more than 90 percent of social media in the United States, Europe and China’s neighboring countries.

@ The Washington Post

TALIBAN CRACKS DOWN ON MORE RIGHTS WHILE DEMANDING WESTERN AID

2021-12-30T20:25:00.005-05:00

[Women must have male escorts on long taxi rides, and election commissions are shut down]

By Pamela Constable

KABUL — Even as they appeal to the world to release frozen humanitarian aid funds and bank accounts, Taliban officials are taking new actions to restrict women’s freedoms and dismantle democratic institutions — defying the top two international concerns that have kept most foreign aid at bay as a cold winter looms for millions of destitute Afghans.

Over the past week, the powerful ministry for Islamic guidance has issued rules requiring women to fully cover their heads if they ride in a public taxi and to be accompanied by a male relative if they travel more than 45 miles. The instructions also require cabdrivers to refuse to carry female passengers who do not comply and to stop playing music while driving because it is “un-Islamic.”

In the political arena, Taliban spokesmen announced the shutdown of two national election oversight commissions and two cabinet ministries. One longtime ministry dealt with parliamentary issues; the second was formed in 2019 to promote peace during lengthy — and ultimately futile — negotiations to end the 20-year conflict between the Islamist insurgents and Western-backed government forces.

These moves follow actions including the armed occupation and shutdown of the national independent bar association. Rights groups and analysts see the moves as signals that the new, deeply conservative Islamist rulers are both tightening and widening their grip across Afghan society — despite initial promises of leniency after they took power in mid-August.

“The Taliban are reverting to their repressive policies of the past, shattering the myth of a kinder and more moderate Taliban 2.0,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the Wilson Center in Washington. Even if their leaders carry cellphones and laptops now, he added, “they feel emboldened, and they are not about to change the ideology that defined them” when they held power in Kabul from 1996 to 2001.

Kugelman and others said Taliban authorities do not appear to be overly concerned about the looming humanitarian crisis that international aid agencies predict could engulf the poor, drought-plagued nation of 39 million this winter. They suggest that Taliban demands for the release of foreign funds are more a contest of wills — a game of chicken with the West — than a sign of real urgency over the collapsing economy and worsening levels of hunger and cold.

In an interview this week, the Taliban’s deputy spokesman, Bilal Karimi, said that his government “appreciates” international assistance but that it is working to “manage” the current humanitarian crisis through its own resources and charities. “We want to solve problems through negotiations, and we want to have good relations with the world, but the world must also want good relations with us,” he said.

Asked about the new restrictions on women, he said that his government is “even more committed to women’s rights than others” and that there are “no obstacles” to women working or studying as long as they can be can be physically separated from men.

“We fought for 20 years for an Islamic system,” he said. “We are still working on putting the mechanisms in place, but we need more time.”

Karimi said he had “no information” about the new travel rules prescribed for women in a handwritten order by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. “This is an Islamic society, and it is natural for women to wear hijab anyway,” he said, adding that the ministry’s pronouncements are “recommendations, not compulsory.”

Human rights groups, however, called the new rules a chilling echo of the draconian strictures that were placed on women’s activities during the first Taliban era, when those who ventured outdoors without a male relative, or who did not cover their faces and bodies with voluminous burqas, risked being punished with lashings by vigilantes from the same ministry.

“This will have a huge impact on women and girls. It will make it difficult for those who want to study at universities away from home, and it will stop those fleeing to escape domestic violence,” said Heather Barr, an official of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch in New York. “This is another move toward making girls and women prisoners in their own homes, and a signal that more such violations may be coming.”

In Kabul this week, lines of male taxi drivers waited at busy outdoor bazaars, calling out their destinations, and groups of women crammed inside them with their purchases. One young woman in a fashionable outfit and makeup, sorting through a sidewalk table of secondhand sweaters, said she was very upset about the new travel rules.

“The situation is getting more and more difficult for us,” said Shaqaf Salah, who said she was forced to quit pre-med studies. “I am married and educated, and still I have no rights. I was a very good student, and now I am sitting at home. My husband is with me today, but what if he wasn’t? How would I get out of the house?”

On Wednesday, a group of about 50 women held a brief protest in downtown Kabul, calling for the United States and foreign agencies to release funds to the Afghan government. They said women are bearing the brunt of hardship and demand the right to work, but their blame was pointed mostly at the West, and they carried banners that read, “Joe Biden, my children have nothing to eat.” The Biden administration is withholding more than $8 billion in Afghan government assets, although it has begun channeling funds to humanitarian aid efforts.

The official crackdown on democratic institutions has drawn less public opposition, in part because electoral politics and civilian governance were discredited during two decades of fraud-marred elections and official corruption. But among Afghan lawyers and other advocacy groups, those Taliban actions are seen as having an even greater chilling effect on individual rights and freedoms.

Last month, after shutting down the bar association, the government required all lawyers to be approved by the Taliban Justice Ministry, raising concerns that criminal defendants will not be able to get fair treatment and that sharia law courts will dominate the system. During the first period of Taliban rule, such courts ordered stonings, amputations and executions.

Karimi said the government is taking such steps largely to meet its “administrative needs” and priorities during the economic crisis. The Peace Ministry, he said, “is not needed any more because there is no fighting, and security is being enforced.” The election commissions “have only been closed temporarily, and if we need them in the future, we can rebuild them,” he said.

Some observers say the mixed signals from Taliban leaders, with vague explanations for some new policies and others backpedaled as “temporary,” reflect a larger problem facing the new rulers: persistent internal divisions that have undercut decision-making and pitted religious imperatives against public and operational necessity.

“The Taliban are facing multiple challenges, including the need to consolidate power and unify a group with internal divides,” Kugelman said. The new rash of restrictive orders, he said, “smacks of a plan to project strength and defiance at a moment when they are in over their heads.” While millions of Afghans may face a life-threatening winter, he added, “they are tending to internal politics, and fiddling while Rome burns.”

Analysts described a state of competing priorities among Taliban officials — including senior religious leaders who insist on applying sharia law to every issue, younger administrators who are more educated but wield little power, and moderate figures who have traveled abroad to negotiations and conferences and are the most open to modernization and reform.

Some civilian activists here, including those who organized the women’s march, assert that there is still hope for Taliban governance if the more moderate among them can find room to maneuver and gradually gain influence. Others fear that the die is cast and that the recent crackdowns are a harbinger of more to come, with or without international aid.

“We need to work with the Taliban for change, lower our expectations and give them time,” said Faiz Zaland, a public policy professor at Kabul University who has built relations with numerous Taliban figures and has often been criticized for it. “It is a last chance to save Afghanistan for the next generation. If everything collapses and they become a rogue state, the country will be lost.”

@ The Washington Post

FROM ECONOMIC MIRACLE TO MIRAGE – WILL CHINA’S GDP EVER OVERTAKE THE US?

2021-12-29T13:47:00.004-05:00

[Analysis: issues of governance, rising debt, Covid and property market turmoil will delay Beijing’s quest to become the global economy’s No 1]

By George Magnus

“The east is rising, the west is declining”, according to the narrative propagated by the Chinese Communist party (CCP). Many outside China take its “inevitable rise” as read. On the way to becoming a “modern socialist country” by 2035, and rich, powerful, and dominant by 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic, China wants to claim bragging rights as its GDP surpasses the United States, and project its power based on its expanding economic heft.

There is, however, a critical flaw in this narrative. China’s economy may fail to overtake the US as it succumbs to the proverbial middle-income trap. This is where the relative development progress of countries in relation to richer nations stalls, and is normally characterised by difficult economic adjustment and often by unpredictable political consequences.

Historically, China’s growth miracle has been remarkable. In the 30 years to 1990, the money GDP (the market value of goods and services produced in an economy) for China and the US in American dollar terms grew more or less in tandem at just over 6% and 8% per annum, respectively. . But in the next three decades, China’s GDP growth doubled to more than 13%, while America’s halved to 4.5%. That pushed China’s GDP up from 5% of American GDP to 66%.

Yet, China’s growth spurt is now over, and the huge disparity in GDP growth has been eliminated. In the last few quarters, China’s GDP has been growing at half the rate of the US. Although that discrepancy is probably unsustainable, America’s estimated $7tn GDP margin over China in 2021 means that comparable rates of GDP growth in the future will sustain and even widen the margin. A Japanese thinktank has recently extended the date when it expects China to overtake the US, from 2029 to 2033. Deferrals like this are now a feature, and there will be more.

The issue though is less about the maths and more about why China is at a turning point.

Remember we have been here before. In the 1930s, Germany was going to dominate Europe, if not the world. In the 1960s and the 1980s, the Soviet Union – which had already stolen a march on the US in space technology – and later Japan, which was the rising economic force on the planet, would within 10 to 20 years overtake America to become the dominant economic and technological power.

History was not kind to the consensus. There is a serial tendency going back to the 1920s to underestimate the self-rectifying capacity of American institutions and enterprise. Equally, the Soviet Union and Japan both pursued similar development models, based around distortions that emphasised unsustainably and excessively high savings, high investment, and eventually high debt. Their development models cracked with spectacular consequences attributable to chronic failures of institutions and governance.

China is our 21st-century version of this phenomenon. Its investment rate is a good 10 percentage points of GDP higher than it was at the peak in the USSR and Japan, and strongly associated with misallocation and inefficiency of capital, and widespread debt servicing problems.

Its zero-Covid policy could keep barriers in place between China and the world economy until 2023 or even beyond, but this aside, a protracted slowing in trend growth, exacerbated by over-indebtedness and the tipping point now in real estate, as illustrated by the crumbling development giant Evergrande, is already under way. China’s $60tn real estate sector is four times GDP and accounts for a quarter to a third of annual growth. It faces years of awkward adjustment, not least as developers cut debt, the first-time buyer age cohort contracts, and probably as real estate prices decline.

China’s economic structure, moreover, is unbalanced. It has income per head that is the equivalent of Mexico, but consumption per head that is no higher than Peru. Consumer spending accounts for about 37% of GDP, little higher than it was in 2010, and much lower than in 2000. Productivity growth, closely associated with liberalising reform, has stalled.

China’s development model urgently needs a makeover to avoid the middle-income trap. The longer it is delayed, the bigger the costs. China’s leaders recognise that change is necessary, and Xi Jinping recently revived the slogan of “common prosperity” to mobilise the Communist party and citizens around a strategy to reduce income and regional inequality, and improve living standards.

Yet these political goals require precisely the kind of liberalising, progressive and redistributive reforms to the economy to which Xi Jinping is opposed. He has pursued an increasingly ideological and totalitarian governance style in which the already dominant position of the party and state in the economy has been strengthened further.

Perversely, he has created a contradiction in which even the CCP’s expertise in dialectical argument may be of little help. The recent blizzard of new laws and regulations aimed at private firms and entrepreneurs, for example, is designed to nail down the party’s control and bring the private sector to political heel. This is hardly compatible with the productivity growth and innovation on which China’s lofty economic ambition depends.

Overtaking the United States is going to need a lot more than narrative. It requires policies to which Xi’s China is opposed, and might just remain a mirage. The consequences for China and the rest of the world have not been properly thought about.

@ The Guardian

INDIAN AUTHORITIES TO BLOCK FOREIGN FUNDING FOR MOTHER TERESA’S CHARITY

2021-12-28T22:31:00.004-05:00

[In recent years, the Modi government has cut off foreign funding for nonreligious organizations as well, in moves that effectively led to the decline or demise of civil society groups critical of its administration. Greenpeace slashed its Indian operations amid a lengthy financial probe, while Amnesty International announced last year it would cease its Indian operations altogether after its bank accounts were frozen.]

By Gerry Shih

NEW DELHI — For decades, the Christian congregation founded by Mother Teresa in an Indian slum was seen by supporters as a symbol of selfless giving and a magnet for donations from around the world. But to India’s Hindu right wing, it was a target of their ire — and a hotbed, some alleged, for the conversion of desperate Hindus into Christians.

Now, the Missionaries of Charity — an organization that grew from a humble order of 12 sisters led by Mother Teresa into one of the world’s most recognizable Christian nonprofits with branches from Venezuela to Washington, D.C. — is facing potentially crippling sanctions from the Indian government.

The organization’s international donations will be effectively frozen on Saturday after India’s Home Ministry said Monday it will not renew the group’s license to receive funds from abroad because it found “adverse inputs.”

Although the ministry did not provide details about its reasoning or the case, the decision comes at a moment of rising Hindu nationalism in India — and mounting scrutiny of foreign nonprofits and human rights organizations — under the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party.

The funding ban threatens an operation of thousands of nuns who have depended for decades on the enduring legacy of Mother Teresa to raise money from around the world and use it to provide shelter, food and education for orphans, the homeless and the sick. Mother Teresa died in 1997 and was declared a saint in 2016.

Leaders at the Missionaries of Charity declined to comment but issued a brief statement saying they have asked members to stop accessing accounts with foreign funds until the matter is “resolved.” A senior official from the Archdiocese of Calcutta, where the nonprofit is based, condemned the government move as an attack on both the Christian community and on “the poorest of India’s poor” who depend on its services.

In recent years, the Modi government has cut off foreign funding for nonreligious organizations as well, in moves that effectively led to the decline or demise of civil society groups critical of its administration. Greenpeace slashed its Indian operations amid a lengthy financial probe, while Amnesty International announced last year it would cease its Indian operations altogether after its bank accounts were frozen.

Mother Teresa’s order has not been a vocal opponent of the government, but it has long been viewed with distrust by India’s Hindu right. The leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an influential Hindu organization closely aligned with the BJP, sparked a national debate in 2015 after he said Mother Teresa served India’s poor not only out of altruism but to convert them to Christianity.

John Dayal, a Christian activist in New Delhi, said India’s Christian community has long faced pressure, particularly under periods of BJP rule when Hindu vigilante groups feel more emboldened. But this year, he said, reports of attacks on churches have ticked up. Christian communities in several states reported cases of vandalism or disturbances during their Christmas celebrations this week.

Earlier in December, local officials in Gujarat — a predominantly Hindu state where Modi served as leader for more than a decade — filed complaints against workers from the Missionaries of Charity, accusing them of “luring” local girls to Christianity and “hurting Hindu religious sentiments.”

Two of the group’s workers are under investigation for forced conversion and could face imprisonment and fines.

The government “decided to teach Mother Teresa’s organization a lesson,” said Dayal, who predicted that her order would financially “starve to death” under the funding restriction. “She was always, and continues to be, vilified by the Hindu right wing,” he said.

Mother Teresa, an ethnic Albanian born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910, arrived in India as a young nun in 1929. She established the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 in Kolkata, then known as Calcutta. She received the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize for her charity work and was declared a saint by Pope Francis in 2016. That year, Modi surprised some of his right-wing supporters by saying Indians should feel proud about her canonization.

Although modern India was founded in 1947 as a secular nation and Hindus retain a significant majority, the religious balance of the population and the issue of conversions represent looming concerns for members of the RSS and affiliated Hindu nationalist groups. They argue that Abrahamic religions such as Islam and Christianity are influences historically brought in by foreign invaders and undermine India’s national character.

Under BJP leadership, several Indian states have recently introduced, or are mulling, laws to restrict conversion through marriage. Hindu nationalists, including BJP leaders, have warned about the rise of “love jihad,” a term they use to allege that Muslim men are marrying and converting Hindu women as part of a systematic conspiracy.

India’s last census in 2011 showed that roughly 2 percent of the population are Christians, compared with 80 percent Hindus and 14 percent Muslims.

A.C. Michael, a Christian community leader in New Delhi and former member of the Indian capital’s minorities commission, said the Missionaries of Charity should be able to continue operations purely on funding from its domestic donors. But it was also possible that the government would backtrack, he said.

“It seems the government didn’t understand what would happen if they touched an organization like this,” he said. “They’ve gotten the whole world calling them up.”

In the Indian city where Mother Teresa founded her order, ambivalence about her legacy

Mother Teresa’s nuns still quietly serve the poor at D.C. convent

@ The Washington Post

‘FAMILIES WANT A SON AT ANY COST’: THE WOMEN FORCED TO ABORT FEMALE FOETUSES IN INDIA

2021-12-27T07:15:00.006-05:00

[Laali and Meenakshi’s unborn daughters are among the country’s 46 million ‘missing’ women and girls over the past 50 years]

By Yashraj Sharma

Laali was alone at home when she realised her legs were drenched in blood. The bleeding did not stop for eight hours. As she fell unconscious, the 25-year-old thought she would die alongside the foetus she was losing.

She had been three months pregnant when she was taken for prenatal sex determination. “When I learned it was a girl, I started feeling as though I was suffocating,” she says.

An abortion pill was forced down her throat, without a doctor’s supervision, and subsequent complications led to hospitalisation. The night she was released, Laali cried herself to sleep – and in the morning returned to her work in the fields.

Laali’s unborn daughter is among India’s estimated 46 million “missing females” over a period of 50 years, ten times the female population of London. A deepening gender bias, breeding rampant sex-selective abortions and female infanticides, means that India accounts for nearly half of global missing female births.

“The traditional pattern of marriage and customs dictate an inferior position to women in Indian societies,” says Prem Chowdhry, a gender activist and retired professor at the University of Delhi. Since girls leave their birth family after marriage, she says, the dowry and cost of raising a girl is considered an unwelcome obligation, and sex-selective abortions are common.

Prenatal sex determination was criminalised in 1994, but it is a widely flouted law. The practice has thrived with medical advancements, spread to more regions, and is still easily accessible in privately run clinics.

Surrounded by vast sugar cane fields, Laali’s village is 40 miles from Delhi. Social health activists who run an unregistered support group for women here estimate that “every third house in the village” has aborted a foetus because of the sex.

“Families want a son at any cost. Any cost!” Laali says. “If I die, my husband will remarry tomorrow morning, hoping the next woman will give birth to a son.”

Laali was 19 when her marriage was arranged with a farmer in 2009. In the next three years, she gave birth to two daughters. During her second pregnancy, she was regularly drugged by traditional and faith healers in order to “make” a boy.

When her baby girl was born, no one from her family came to see them in the hospital. Returning home was worse. “My mother-in-law refused to see my daughter’s face,” Laali said. “She refused to take care of me, saying: ‘you are giving birth to girl after girl. How far can I take care of you?’”

Every night, as she sat down for dinner after a day of labour in the field, someone would toss in a taunt. “When anyone had a son in the village, it was a nightmare for me,” she recalls. “My family abused me in front of my girls.”

The government of India appears unwilling to act. A recent government survey hailed the fact that there are more women than men for the first time. However, activists on the ground and experts are sceptical of the data. “The main objective of the survey was to look into data on reproductive health and family welfare indicators and not on the population sex ratio,” said Sabu George, a researcher and activist based in Delhi. “All state-wise trends show a different picture.”

Dr Prabhat Jha of the University of Toronto, who led India’s Million Death Study, agrees: “The UN Population Division, the most careful demographic work, estimates the number of ‘excess men’ in India is growing.”

India’s own registrar general’s estimate suggests a similar trend.

A 2021 Lancet research paper, co-authored by Jha, claimed that the situation has worsened, with missing female births increasing from 3.5 million in 1987–96 to 5.5 million in 2007–16.

The male child bias has cut through class and geographical divisions. In August, a 40-year-old woman from a wealthy upper-class Mumbai family said she was forced to abort eight times to satisfy the family’s desire for a son. She was given more than 1,500 hormonal and steroid injections before she lodged a police complaint. Last year, in southern India’s Karnataka, a 28-year-old woman died after complications during a third forced abortion.

Endless harassment pushed Laali to seek psychiatric help, and she is currently on medication. Two abortions and a surgery later, doctors have advised her to not get pregnant again. “My womb has weakened and my body cannot bear another child,” she said.

Family interference can cause huge stress for women. Bhavna Joshi, 39, from Chittorgarh in Rajasthan, had eight pregnancies in her 11 years of marriage, and finds her experience so painful to talk about that she only wants to share the basic facts: she was taken to “uncountable” numbers of traditional healers, had three abortions and lost two infants as babies. It didn’t stop until she finally gave birth to a son, now aged five.

After two abortions, Laali wishes for a boy too. “I want this to end. They are drugging me and I cannot eat or drink for days,” she said. “I just want out of it, badly.”

Over the past two decades, trends in sex-selective abortions have shifted. The Lancet research found that as more families in India become nuclear, abortions are more common with the third pregnancy. “Families let nature decide twice, but then – for the third time – they make sure it is a boy,” said Jha. “Violence against women is a cultural thing in India. The problem is going to get much worse before it might get better.”

After having two daughters, 36-year-old Meenakshi was taken by her in-laws for a prenatal sex test when she fell pregnant for the third time. “The area was completely deserted and hidden,” she says, hiding in another home for the interview. “I was scared. It wasn’t a normal clinic.”

Meenakshi, currently seven months pregnant, wasn’t directly told the result. “My husband and his mother looked happy so I understood it was going to be a boy,” she said. “Otherwise, they would have killed it [before the birth].”

In India’s deeply patriarchal society, women’s full sexual and reproductive rights are still a distant dream. Women like Meenakshi are fighting for acceptability in the family. Meenakshi’s parents raised her to expect freedom after marriage. But everything is worse, she says, sobbing.

For Laali, harassment is part of her daily life. By the time she was 15, her mother had aborted two female foetuses, and her younger sister has aborted at least three.

“You are brought up in an environment where this violence against women is completely acceptable and normalised,” says George. “The question is: how do you resist this on the ground? And that’s frightening.”

Both Laali and Meenakshi were isolated in society, lacking any emotional support. Talking of their experiences, hidden inside their rooms, makes them cry, and their daughters, all in their teens, console them with hugs. Laali and Meenakshi are desparately worried they will not be able to protect their daughters from similar trauma, but for now the girls are mostly oblivious.

Meenakshi’s eldest daughter jumps with joy as she sees a plane passing over their heads. “She wants to be a pilot,” says Meenakshi, wiping her tears. “When I cry, she tells me: ‘Mamma, it’ll get better, and one day we’ll fly together, in a plane that I’ll pilot.’”

@ The Guardian

IS MOUNT EVEREST REALLY THE TALLEST MOUNTAIN ON EARTH?

2021-12-26T16:30:00.003-05:00

[Mount Everest is the tallest mountain above sea level, while Mauna Kea can certainly claim to be the world's tallest mountain (when sea level isn't taken into account). It would be difficult to make a case for Chimborazo being the tallest, but "it's all a matter of perspective," Price admitted.]

It depends how you measure height.

By Joe Phelan

It's no secret that Mount Everest, the jewel in Nepal's Himalayan crown, is the world's premier mountain. It's one of those facts embedded in childhood, like knowing that Neil Armstrong was the first person to walk on the moon or that blue whales are the largest animals ever to have lived.

You may be surprised to hear, then, that other peaks could conceivably be considered Earth's tallest; it just depends how you measure them.

So, judging by different parameters — including tallest by altitude, tallest from base to top and tallest based on being the farthest point from Earth's center — what is the tallest mountain in the world?

Mount Everest, located deep in the Mahālangūr Himāl subrange of the Himalayas, is undoubtedly the most famous — and alluring — of all our planet's mountains. Also known as Chomolungma, meaning "Goddess Mother of the World" in Tibetan, Everest was first scaled on May 29, 1953 by Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa of Nepal, and New Zealander Edmund Hillary, and has since been successfully climbed by around 4,000 people. The mountain has also claimed the lives of over 300 since records started being kept in 1922, according to the Guardian.

Researchers have measured Mount Everest many times over the past few decades, but the latest assessment, announced in November 2021, puts it at 29,031.69 feet (8,848.86 meters) above sea level, which is almost 5.5 miles (8.8 kilometers) tall. It's a pretty impressive height, but it does raise a question: Why do we use "above sea level" when determining the world's tallest peak?

"In order to have comparability in measurements, it is necessary to have a consistent baseline," Martin Price, a professor and founding director of the Centre for Mountain Studies at the University of Highlands and Islands in Scotland, told Live Science.

"Historically, and even now, elevation is usually given as height above mean sea level," Price told Live Science in an email. "However, this has to be with reference to a standard mean sea level, which has to be defined. Sea levels are different in different parts of the world, and they're changing due to climate change."

As a result, "elevation is now measured in relation to the mathematically defined geoid of the Earth," he said. The geoid is, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "a model of global mean sea level that is used to measure precise surface elevations." This average is used to ascertain the height of mountains, a process that sometimes requires an aeroplane to fly "back and forth over a mountain in a series of parallel lines to measure how much gravity pulls down on its peak," according to GIM International. These measurements, in conjunction with GPS readings, provide incredibly accurate elevation readings.

So, all mountains are measured from sea level, predominantly for convenience and consistency, but what if measurements were simply taken from base to peak? Would Everest still top the charts?

The answer is a mountainous "no." That honor would go to Mauna Kea, an inactive volcano in Hawaii. Although its peak is 13,802 feet (4,205 m) above sea level — which is less than half the height of Everest, according to National Geographic — the majority of Mauna Kea is hidden below sea level. When measured from base to peak, Mauna Kea is 33,497 feet (10,211 m) tall, according to the United States Geological Survey, which puts it heads and shoulders above Mount Everest.

Should we, therefore, regard Mauna Kea as the tallest mountain on Earth?

"It all depends on the perspective you take," Price said. "If there were no oceans on our planet, there would be no debate! You could draw comparisons to the highest mountains on other bodies in our solar system, which have no oceans."

Meanwhile, another contender, Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, boasts a peak that is the farthest point from Earth's center.

Chimborazo isn't the tallest mountain in the Andes — it's not even in the top 30 — but its proximity to the equator is what makes all the difference. Earth is not a perfect sphere — technically, it's an oblate spheroid — and it bulges along the equator. This is a result of the force created by Earth's rotation. As a result, it means there is a difference of 13.29 miles (21.39 km) between the planet's polar radius (3,949.90 miles/6,356.75 km) and its equatorial radius (3,963.19 miles/6,378.14 km), according to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Chimborazo is just 1 degree south of the equator, where Earth's bulge is most prominent; this geographical quirk means Chimborazo's summit is 3,967 miles from Earth’s core, making it 6,798 feet (2,072 m) farther away from the planet's center than the peak of Everest.

So, which of these three contenders for tallest mountain should take home first prize?

Mount Everest is the tallest mountain above sea level, while Mauna Kea can certainly claim to be the world's tallest mountain (when sea level isn't taken into account). It would be difficult to make a case for Chimborazo being the tallest, but "it's all a matter of perspective," Price admitted.

Regardless of the mountain you choose, its height will pale in comparison with Mars' Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano in the solar system. It has a height of around 16 miles (25 km), according to NASA, which is almost three times taller than Everest, and a base of 374 miles (601.9 km) in diameter, which is about the same distance separating San Francisco and Los Angeles (383.1 miles/616.5 km).

There is also an impact crater called Rheasilvia on the asteroid Vesta, which is part of the asteroid belt 100 million miles from Earth. At the center of this crater is a peak that scientists believe could be anywhere between 12 and 15.5 miles (20 and 25 km) in height, meaning it may be the tallest mountain in the solar system, according to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Originally published on Live Science.

@ Live Science

THE MOB KILLING OF A FACTORY MANAGER IN PAKISTAN COMES AMID SURGE IN ANTI-BLASPHEMY VIOLENCE

2021-12-25T21:13:00.001-05:00

[This religious crusade is rapidly gaining popular support and could threaten the country’s stability.]

By Pamela Constable

SIALKOT, Pakistan — Priantha Kumara, the longtime Sri Lankan manager of a sportswear factory in this gritty industrial city, was known as a “strict administrator,” according to police. Workers complained that he forced them to stay past their shifts to meet export orders. He was also a foreigner and a Christian, while the 2,000-plus employees were mostly young Muslim men.

On the morning of Dec. 3, the resentments at Rajco Industries exploded into mob violence. Word spread across the factory that Kumara, preparing to repaint the walls for a visiting delegation, had taken down some religious posters that praised the prophet Muhammad and tossed them in the trash — thus committing an act of blasphemy.

Enraged by rumors of Kumara’s offense, several hundred workers chased him onto the factory roof and then dragged him into the yard, where they beat, stoned and kicked him to death, then set his crumpled corpse on fire.

The grisly incident highlighted a dangerous streak of radicalization that is spreading among ordinary, lower-income and nonmilitant Muslims, according to observers in Pakistan. Some say this trend is a greater threat to Pakistan’s stability than the armed, pro-Taliban militias that have been challenging state security forces for years. Unlike the militants’ agenda, the anti-blasphemy cause enjoys wide support in this majority-Muslim nation of 220 million.

Amid the chaotic attack in Sialkot, security cameras and television news videos recorded workers taking selfies and chanting religious slogans. “We told the foreman what [Kumara] had done, but he ran away. Then we all rushed to find the manager, and we sent him to hell,” one young worker, flushed with righteous bravado, explained to several TV crews that arrived before he was arrested. Other workers crowded around, and several shouted, “I am here in the service of the Prophet,” the slogan of a radical Muslim movement.

The killing shocked the country, drawing swift condemnation from political, civic and religious leaders of all stripes. Prime Minister Imran Khan denounced the “horrific vigilante attack” and said it had brought a “day of shame” to Pakistan.

Khan vowed that the perpetrators would be punished “with full severity of the law,” and he publicly awarded a certificate “for courage and valor” to a junior factory manager who had tried to hold back the mob. The government sent Kumara’s remains home to Colombo with full state honors, and officials from Sri Lanka — one of Pakistan’s few regional allies and a major economic partner — expressed confidence that Pakistani authorities would do justice in his death.

Sialkot police, who had been slow to reach the factory and were criticized for failing to stop the attackers, launched investigations with the help of several other police agencies, using security videos to identify attackers. In the past two weeks, more than 100 suspects have been arrested, all young men who worked at Rajco, and a smaller number are being held for prosecution in anti-terrorism courts.

“The fury of the attackers was frightening. Some of them might be punished, but it is the impunity for rising religiously inspired violent extremism that will keep producing tragedies like Sialkot,” columnist Zahid Hussain wrote in Dawn newspaper. The “weaponization of faith” is the main reason for the spread of such brutality in society, he wrote, adding that the state’s “policy of appeasement” has made it worse.

In the past decade, millions of Pakistanis have been caught up in the religious fervor of an anti-blasphemy campaign, launched after a liberal politician named Salman Taseer was assassinated by his own bodyguard for his denunciation of the harsh legal punishment of a Christian peasant woman accused of blasphemy.

The anti-blasphemy group built a cult around the bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri. After he was hanged for murder in 2016, they declared him a martyr for Islam, built a shrine near the capital, Islamabad, and formed a new political party, Tehrik-e-Labbaik Pakistan. Since then, Labbaik’s leaders have staged increasingly large, aggressive protests across the country and rapidly gained electoral support.

First, in 2017, these party leaders challenged a change in election laws that weakened requirements for candidates to declare their faith. After protesters blocked a major highway for weeks, the government, then led by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, backed off and made peace with Labbaik leaders. In 2019, the group staged protests when Asia Bibi, the woman championed by Taseer, was freed after 10 years on death row and allowed to flee to the West.

In 2020, Labbaik supporters again occupied highways and bridges, this time protesting the publication of anti-Muslim cartoons in France and demanding that the French ambassador to Pakistan be expelled. The disruption continued until last month, when the Khan government finally agreed to drop Labbaik’s leader, Saad Rizvi, from a terrorism watch list and released him from prison.

[Four killed, hundreds wounded in clash with police as radical Islamists move to march on Pakistan’s capital]

Labbaik’s leaders have repeatedly declared that they do not condone violence, yet they also preach that blasphemers deserve to die, and their crusade has inspired incidents of murder and arson. At a college campus in northwest Pakistan, a secular student was accused of blasphemy and beaten to death by classmates in 2017. A few days before the Sialkot attack, a mob burned down a police station in the northwest after officials refused to hand over a prisoner accused of blasphemy.

In an interview this week at an Islamic seminary in the city of Rawalpindi, Syed Enayatul Haq Shah, a senior official of Labbaik, asserted that the group had “nothing to do” with the mob attack in Sialkot, which he attributed to the natural outrage of Muslims when they believe the prophet Muhammad has been insulted. The group’s name translates as “Here in the Service of the Prophet.”

“We have always been peaceful, and we never preach violence,” Shah said. “To a Muslim, the biggest crime in the world is insulting the Prophet, but it is up to the state to take action. Instead, people see the judicial system failing to act in these cases. They see the government under pressure from Western liberal forces to change the law. They cannot bear it, and sometimes they take the law into their own hands.”

Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy law is harsh, calling for death when the case has been proved. People can spend years in prison on mere accusations of insulting Islam, such as making a joke or dropping a Koran. The law is also misused to target Christians and other minorities, especially from the Ahmadi sect, in cases of personal or community grudges.

A top religious adviser to the government, Allama Hafiz Tahir Ashrafi, said officials have been encouraged by the broad array of groups that condemned the Sialkot attack, including Labbaik. He said that he and others are working to counter anti-blasphemy radicalism through dialogue but that Islamic fervor has taken deep root in Pakistan and will be difficult to counter.

“This is not the product of one day. It is a disease that has grown during 40 years,” said Ashrafi, the prime minister’s special representative on religious harmony. “There is so much ignorance and unemployment. People take advantage of it.” But he also said the West should not press Pakistan too hard on the blasphemy issue because that will backfire. “It will take time, but we can put our own house in order,” he said.

This week in Sialkot, near Pakistan’s southern border with India, the streets were crammed with noisy motorbikes and cargo trucks, and talk about the attack had died down. The Rajco factory was closed and under guard, but dozens of other garment and small manufacturing plants — a mainstay of Pakistan’s modest export economy — were operating normally.

People from all walks of life expressed horror and condemnation over the attack on Kumara, a bespectacled man in his 50s who had managed the plant for more than a decade. Some had heard conflicting versions of what sparked the workers to violence and were not sure whether the foreign manager realized he was stripping sensitive Islamic sayings off the walls.

“This was a very wrong thing, to kill and burn a man in such a cruel way,” said Arshad Arif, 60, a retired textile factory worker who was sitting in the sun with some friends. No matter what alleged abuse triggered the workers’ violent wrath, he said, “It was especially wrong if it was done in the name of God.”

Hard-line Islamists take 6 Pakistani security personnel hostage amid deadly clashes

More than three dozen dead, 100 injured after fire tears through crowded ferry in Bangladesh

@ The Washington Post

AS HINDU EXTREMISTS CALL FOR KILLING OF MUSLIMS, INDIA’S LEADERS KEEP SILENT

2021-12-24T21:59:00.007-05:00

[Right-wing Hindu activists at a conference took an oath to harm Muslims if necessary to make “a Hindu-only nation,” the most blatant example of rising anti-Muslim sentiment across India.]

By Sameer Yasir

Hundreds of right-wing Hindu activists and monks rose in unison at a conference this week to take an oath: They would turn India, constitutionally a secular republic, into a Hindu nation, even if doing so required dying and killing.

“If 100 of us are ready to kill two million of them, then we will win and make India a Hindu nation,” said Pooja Shakun Pandey, a leader of Hindu Mahasabha, a group that espouses militant Hindu nationalism, referring to the country’s Muslims. “Be ready to kill and go to jail.”

Even by the standards of the rising anti-Muslim fury in India, the three-day conference in the city of Haridwar, 150 miles north of New Delhi, produced the most blatant and alarming call for violence in recent years.

The crowded auditorium, where right-wing Hindu monks called for other Hindus to arm themselves and kill Muslims, included influential religious leaders with close ties to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing party, and even some members of the party.

Videos of the event have spread widely on social media in India this week. Yet Mr. Modi has maintained a characteristic silence that analysts say can be interpreted by his most extreme supporters as a tacit signal of protection.

The police, who readily jail rights activists and comedians on charges lacking evidence, have been slow to take action. Even opposition political groups have been restrained in their response, an indication of the degree to which right-wing Hindu nationalism has gripped the country since Mr. Modi came to office in 2014.

The inflammatory remarks come as some states governed by Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., are holding elections, including in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, where the conference was held. Mr. Modi was busy campaigning this week in Uttar Pradesh for Yogi Adityanath, his hard-line protégé and the state’s chief minister, who has frequently fanned anti-Muslim hatred.

Multiple episodes of violence against Muslims have been reported during election season, including attacks by mobs trying to close businesses owned by Muslims.

“There are virtually only a handful of political leaders left who even mention the need to preserve India’s secularism,” said Gilles Verniers, a professor of political science at Ashoka University near New Delhi. “The B.J.P. may face increasing political challenges, but it has won its cultural war, with lasting effects on India’s democracy, and on India’s largest minority.”

Right-wing Hindu nationalists have preached violence online for years, but the violence has recently spilled onto the streets. Muslim fruit sellers have been beaten and their earnings snatched away after being accused of luring Hindu women into marriage to convert them. Muslim activists have been threatened with prosecution under an antiterrorism law that has been scrutinized by courts.

In recent months, Hindu nationalists in Gurugram, a major technology center about 15 miles south of New Delhi, have confronted Muslims during Friday Prayer. Bands of right-wing Hindus have interrupted prayers with chants of “Jai Shri Ram!” Meaning “Hail Lord Ram,” a major Hindu god, the chant has become a battle cry for Hindu nationalists.

“We are fast losing everything in this country, including the right to worship,” said Niyaz Farooqi, a Muslim who works in an automobile showroom in Gurugram. “A right given to us by the Constitution of this country.”

On Friday, four days after the conference ended, and after the videos circulated widely, the police in Uttarakhand announced that they had opened an investigation but that no arrests had been made. Officials said they have registered a case against organizers of the conference for promoting “enmity between different groups on grounds of religion,” which can mean a jail term of five years.

“We will do the investigation as per law and such types of incidents will not be tolerated,” said Ashok Kumar, a top police officer in the state of Uttarakhand.

During the conference, Swami Prabodhanand Giri, head of a right-wing Hindu organization in Uttarakhand, said the country now belongs to Hindus.

“This is why, like in Myanmar, the police here, the politicians here, the army and every Hindu must pick up weapons, and we will have to conduct this cleanliness drive,” he said while referring to Muslims. “There is no solution apart from this.”

Mr. Prabodhanand’s aides declined to comment for this article.

Videos from the conference also showed Suresh Chavhanke, who heads a news channel, administering an oath to turn India into a Hindu-first country.

“We make a resolution until our last breath: We will make India a Hindu nation, and keep it a Hindu-only nation,” he said. “We will fight and die if required, we will kill as well.” He then tweeted a video of the oath to his half a million followers.

Political observers say the government is allowing hate speech of this kind by remaining silent in the face of calls for violence, a silence underscored by the meekness of the political opposition.

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, a biographer of Mr. Modi who has written extensively on the rise of the Hindu right, said the B.J.P.’s earlier leaders thought they could use Hindu nationalism to mobilize constituencies but then contain the ideology. That calculation backfired in 1992, when Hindu activists demolished a major mosque.

Many earlier B.J.P. leaders expressed regrets about the episode, but Mr. Modi has no such qualms, Mr. Mukhopadhyay said at a recent book event.

“They thought they were going to ride the tiger, easily tame it and get down. But you can’t easily tame a tiger. If you ride the tiger, you have to decide that at some point the tiger is going to eat,” he said. “Modi decided to allow the tiger to eat sometimes and lead the tiger when he wants to.”

Mujib Mashal contributed reporting.

Rising Intolerance in India

In a Region in Strife, India’s Moral High Ground Erodes

Nov. 6, 2021

In India, Modi’s Policies Have Lit a Fuse

March 1, 2020

Under Modi, a Hindu Nationalist Surge Has Further Divided India

April 11, 2019

Modi Founds Temple on Mosque’s Ruins, in Triumphal Moment for Hindu Base

Aug. 5, 2020

Sameer Yasir is a reporter for The New York Times. He joined The Times in 2020 and is based in New Delhi. @sameeryasir

@ The New York Times

AS OLYMPICS NEAR, CHINA TIGHTENS RULES AND ATHLETES INVENT THEIR OWN

2021-12-23T22:45:00.002-05:00

[With the Omicron variant spreading only weeks before the Beijing Games, Olympians and organizers are navigating a stretch run marked by isolation, inoculation and worry.]

By Andrew Keh and Keith Bradsher

Athletes and sports officials around the world have for months been viewing the approaching Winter Olympics in Beijing, set to take place in February amid a still-raging pandemic, with a mixture of apprehension and weariness. Now, a global surge of cases tied to the highly contagious Omicron variant has given them all the more reason to be on edge.

A single positive test before the opening ceremony on Feb. 4, after all, could derail an athlete’s entire career. An outbreak in China could still derail the entire Games.

“With the new variant being out and about, it’s definitely a little scary,” said Karen Chen, an American figure skater. “I know it’s definitely been going around. All we can do is sanitize our hands, wear a mask and hope for the best.”

China has already announced elaborate precautions to protect against the coronavirus reaching its own population or participants in the Winter Games, and to ensure those two groups have almost no contact with one another. On Thursday, as athletes around the world continued to plot out the safest personal routes to the Games, China detailed some of the strictest rules yet for its own citizens.

Spectators at the Winter Olympics — which were already limited to residents of China — will be allowed to clap, but not shout, in support of athletes. Waiters, cleaners and other support staff will not be allowed to leave Olympic venues to visit their families. And any Olympic participants leaving the vicinity for the rest of China will be required to spend at least one week in quarantine, followed by at least two weeks of isolation at home.

And still, Chinese officials acknowledged they were bracing for the inevitability that some infections will emerge at the Olympics, where everyone will face daily polymerase chain reaction (P.C.R.) tests.

“A certain number of positive cases will become a high probability event,” Han Zirong, the secretary general of Beijing’s Winter Games organizing committee, told reporters on Thursday.

China has barred overseas spectators from entering the country. It is allowing vaccinated foreign athletes, trainers, coaches, referees, journalists and a few others to enter without enduring the usual two or more weeks of quarantine followed by a week of home confinement.

The exemption, however, comes with a stringent requirement that foreigners not leave a “closed loop” of hotels and sports venues, linked by special buses and trains.

“We must never go outside the closed loop, let alone reach the city level — this is our bottom line,” said Huang Chun, deputy director of the Olympic organizing committee’s Office of Epidemic Prevention and Control.

For those outside China, getting to the Olympics in the first place remained the most urgent goal.

Many are now taking proactive measures to keep the virus at bay before their scheduled departures to Beijing. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, for instance, has begun strongly encouraging, but not requiring, that its athletes receive booster shots. The British Olympic Association said it was similarly recommending boosters for its athletes “where feasible.” Some teams are going further, specifically telling athletes to try to obtain the Moderna booster after the company announced the results of early studies that appeared to show it was slightly more effective against the Omicron variant. Other studies have suggested those findings are more hopeful than realistic since the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines remain largely unavailable in much of the world.

For many athletes and teams, though, the heartbreak of having years of hard work erased by a positive test on the eve of the Games seemed almost unimaginable. That fear has led to changes large and small.

In the Netherlands, the national speedskating trials — typically a boisterous, multiday affair held in front of tens of thousands of fans — will take place next week behind closed doors amid nationwide lockdowns, with only teams and select members of the news media allowed to enter the rink.

In Austria, a group of American biathletes training at a high-altitude camp in Ramsau am Dachstein has been sending a single staff member out for sporadic visits to the grocery store with a big shopping list containing the athletes’ various requests, as part of an effort to limit potential exposure.

And Olympic hopefuls attending the U.S. figure skating championships next month in Nashville — where masks will be required for fans, but vaccinations will not — are already mapping out plans to avoid risky situations. Madison Hubbell, an American ice dancer, said major figure skating competitions were already infamous for spreading colds and flus. As in previous years, Hubbell will be staying in a rental apartment rather than the team hotel.

“We have our own accommodations that are walking distance that don’t require ground transportation,” she said. “The N95 mask does wonders, and distance does wonders, and we try to take that same policy that we take into the grocery store here and into the airport.”

China has reported dozens of coronavirus cases daily this week. On Thursday, the local authorities locked down Xi’an, a city of 13 million people. At least 242 cases have occurred there in an outbreak this month. Beijing has not divulged how many involve the Omicron variant.

The country has been mostly successful in controlling the virus by quarantining hundreds of close contacts of infected people, and in some cases contacts of contacts. But similarly broad measures at the Olympics could make it hard to hold the Games.

Some precautions are already visible at a ski resort in the mountains near Zhangjiakou, about 100 miles northwest of Beijing, where nearly half of the Olympic events will be held. Thick, clear plastic sheeting from floor to ceiling separates bus drivers from their passengers.

At the resort’s high-speed-rail station, visitors must provide proof of a negative P.C.R. test in the preceding 48 hours. Also required is proof on a smartphone app that the traveler has not visited any Chinese city in the previous two weeks that has had a recent infection.

For construction workers putting the finishing touches on the venues, the authorities already do nucleic acid tests once every three days, Jia Maoting, the general manager of the Olympic Sports Construction and Development Company, told reporters during a visit to the Olympic ski jump venue.

Han, the secretary general of the Olympic organizing committee, cautioned that further measures may be added in the weeks to come. “Everything depends on the changes in the global and Chinese epidemic situation,” he said, “especially the infectiousness of the new mutant strain, Omicron.”

For prospective international attendees, unease about the virus itself has been amplified by uncertainty about the official protocols should they test positive or be identified as a close contact of someone who has.

The National Hockey League this week announced that its players will not participate, a reversal of the league’s earlier position. And Natalie Geisenberger, an Olympic luge champion from Germany, drew attention this month after criticizing the restrictions she experienced during a three-week training trip in China and suggesting she was reconsidering whether she was even willing to travel there again for the Games.

Geisenberger, 33, told a German broadcaster that she was identified as a close contact of someone who had tested positive and was forced to quarantine for several days in her room, despite testing negative herself. She said the food provided for her during her isolation fell short of the standard required for an elite athlete in the midst of training and competition.

“The conditions that we experienced there speak in favor of not necessarily going back there again,” said Geisenberger, who has won four Olympic gold medals in her career.

Others, including Zach Donahue, Hubbell’s skating partner, seemed resigned to the fact that many things would be out of their control, and that going to China to chase an Olympic dream in the middle of a pandemic already meant they were willing to encounter some potentially uncomfortable situations.

“The decision to continue on to the Games means we choose to accept anything that happens due to testing or anything like that,” he said. “We know going into it that it’s high risk. We know going into a grocery store there’s risk. It’s part of the journey.”

Liu Yi and Li You contributed research.

@ The New York Times

ON VOLATILE BORDER BETWEEN INDIA AND CHINA, A HIGH-ALTITUDE MILITARY BUILDUP IS UNDERWAY

2021-12-22T07:11:00.002-05:00

[High in this corner of the Himalayas, an expanse of snowy peaks and glacier-fed rivers claimed by both China and India, a tense standoff between the two armies is spurring a flurry of infrastructure and military buildup that’s transforming one of the world’s most remote and inhospitable regions.]

By Shams Irfan and Gerry Shih

ZOJI LA PASS, India — The construction crew peered into two inky shafts bored into a rocky cliff face, bracing against the bitter cold and the impending blast.

Harpal Singh gave the go-ahead. The mountain was rocked by a thunderous explosion and, moments later, patriotic cheers. India was one step closer to completing a top strategic priority: a series of new tunnels and roads leading to the increasingly militarized border with China.

The tunnel will “safeguard the territorial integrity of our motherland,” said Singh, an engineer overseeing about 1,700 men racing to finish one stretch of the $600 million upgrade. Down the twisting one-lane road from their work site were parked construction machinery, heavy trucks hauling winter supplies for the army and armored vehicles under camouflage-patterned tarp, all preparing to make an arduous drive to the border that will become substantially shorter once the construction is finished.

“We understand the importance of this project,” Singh said. “It’s the vital supply line to the border with China.”

High in this corner of the Himalayas, an expanse of snowy peaks and glacier-fed rivers claimed by both China and India, a tense standoff between the two armies is spurring a flurry of infrastructure and military buildup that’s transforming one of the world’s most remote and inhospitable regions.

On the Chinese side of the unmarked border, new helicopter pads, runways and railroads have been laid on the Tibetan plateau, according to satellite images and state media reports. On the Indian side, officials are rushing construction on the Zoji La tunnels, upgrading several strategic roads and unveiling new cell towers and landing strips. Both countries have deployed more military force to the border, with India diverting nearly 50,000 mountainous warfare troops there, according to current and former Indian military officials. In recent months, both militaries have publicized combat readiness drills to practice airlifting thousands of soldiers to the front lines at a moment’s notice.

Following 13 rounds of inconclusive negotiations between military commanders since June 2020, the standoff is now entering a second winter, an unprecedented development that is stretching logistics and budgets — especially for India. But the result, observers say, is a normalization of a hardened border and a fragile stalemate between two Asian powers that could last for years.

Retired Lt. Gen. Deependra Hooda, who served until 2016 as head of the Indian Army’s Northern Command, said India last year assigned, for the first time, an offensively oriented mountain warfare division to the China border.

“The thinking was always we could handle China politically, diplomatically, but that feeling changed after 2020,” said Hooda, who directs the Council for Strategic and Defense Research think tank in New Delhi.

The deployed troops require “huge infrastructure to support them, huge reserves to replace them,” he added. “But even if there is a diplomatic process, the fact is that suspicions are going to remain. There’s no way of returning to the status quo.”

The question of where India ends and China begins has been the subject of negotiations by various parties — including the British Empire and the Qing Dynasty, and an independent India under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Communist China led by Mao Zedong. The roughly 2,100-mile border does not cleave through significant natural resources or population centers, but the dispute over where exactly it lies has led to a bloody war and several skirmishes.

The current impasse began in May 2020, when Chinese patrols objected to Indian construction on a strategically placed road in Ladakh, inside territory that China claimed. The faceoff culminated in a brawl that killed scores of soldiers that June.

Infrastructure construction also sparked earlier flare-ups. In 1957, China built a road linking the two vast and restive regions of its western periphery — Tibet and Xinjiang — that crisscrossed an expanse of salt flats that India claims to be part of Ladakh. Tensions over the road simmered and contributed to the Sino-Indian War of 1962, in which China attacked India and both sides saw thousands of men die in freezing conditions.

In 2017, Chinese workers sought to build roads near India’s Sikkim state before they were stopped by Indian troops, creating a diplomatic crisis.

India needs to firm up its border by building infrastructure not only for its military, but for its civilians, said Sonam Tsering, a former village councilor from Chushul, which overlooks a lake where new structures housing Chinese troops have materialized over the past year.

Nearby Demchok village, which didn’t have electricity a decade ago, only got its first cell tower in November, Tsering said. Basic roads are still lacking in the region, and many residents are simply moving away due to poor living conditions, which erodes India’s territorial claims, he added. Last month, a village leader wrote a letter to India’s defense minister pleading for reliable electricity, basic hospitals and roads, and 4G cell towers for nine villages without service.

“The Chinese villages across the Indus River have had multiple cell towers for the last 15 years, with cable TV, electricity lines, big concrete houses, wide, paved roads,” Tsering said. “China gives citizens incentives to live in these forward villages because they know civilians living there are the first line of defense.”

A Pentagon report in November said China has recently built a small settlement in disputed territory on the eastern section of the India-China border. Military infrastructure has also boomed: Satellite imagery suggests that between 2019 and 2020, China had finished expansion projects on about 20 helipads or airstrips bordering India, said Sim Tack, a former military analyst for Stratfor, a private intelligence firm.

Both Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping have equated infrastructure with national security. After Indian and Chinese troops clashed last summer, Modi vowed to triple spending on border infrastructure and assured troops in Ladakh that India’s enemies had tasted its “fire and fury.” This year, Xi traveled to Tibet for the first time to inspect a new railway leading to the Indian border, then told People’s Liberation Army officers at a command center to “comprehensively strengthen training and preparation work.”

Wang Xiaojian, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in New Delhi, said China was committed to peace at the border and considered the situation “stable and controllable,” while adding that China would firmly safeguard its territorial sovereignty. Indian Ministry of External Affairs spokesman Arindam Bagchi said the two countries’ foreign ministers met most recently in September 2021 in Tajikistan and agreed to continue talks between diplomats and military commanders to resolve the remaining issues.

Christopher Clary, an expert on India-China military relations at the University of Albany, said the border buildup has been “asymmetrically” more taxing for India than China, which has a defense budget that is 3.5 times larger and a GDP six times greater. Chinese leaders have historically been wary of antagonizing India, Clary said, but they could afford to prolong the standoff as a way to punish India for its growing closeness with the United States and its allies.

“There must be concern as India increasingly takes part in the Quad, and other alignments perceived as encircling China, and Beijing may want to use demonstrative force to show there are red lines,” Clary said, noting that Mao attacked India in 1962 after sensing Nehru’s closeness with his rival, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

In the decades following India’s defeat in 1962, Nehru intentionally avoided building infrastructure in Ladakh, fearing that roads might help the Chinese army descend the Himalayas and march on the Indian capital, said Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor of Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

But today, the thinking in New Delhi has flipped. On the road to Ladakh on a recent afternoon before the start of the snow season, dozens of heavy trucks painted with pictures of Sufi saints idled at a weigh station, their drivers milling about.

“I have been traveling on this road for the last 35 years but never seen it as busy as it is now,” said Nazir Ahmad Wani, 65, a Kashmiri driver who was bringing machinery and winter supplies to the border.

Wani recalled volunteering to shuttle goods during the 1999 Kargil War, when Pakistan shelled the road. Now, about 200 out of 500 trucks every day are again carrying military supplies, Wani estimated. There’s no shooting, he said, but a familiar sense of tension.

“It’s scary to see lots of men and weapons being ferried every day to Ladakh,” Wani said. “It’s as if something big is about to happen.”

Shih reported from New Delhi. Pei Lin Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.

Shots fired on the India-China border for the first time decades as tensions flare

China and India withdrew troops from contested border

@ The Washington Post

IN A BOSTON COURT, A SUPERSTAR OF SCIENCE FALLS TO EARTH

2021-12-21T21:49:00.009-05:00

[A jury found Harvard chemist Charles Lieber guilty of lying to the federal government about his participation in China’s Thousand Talents recruitment program.]

By Ellen Barry

BOSTON — Charles Lieber, one of the country’s top research chemists, sat miserably in a chair at the Harvard Police Department, trying to explain to two F.B.I. agents why he had agreed to partner with a lesser-known Chinese university in a relationship that had soured and landed him in trouble with the U.S. government.

The university had money to spend — “that’s one of the things China uses to try to seduce people,” Dr. Lieber said in the interrogation, clips of which were shown in court.

But money wasn’t the reason, he said. By training young scientists in the use of technology he had pioneered, he hoped to burnish his credentials with the committee that decides the ultimate scientific honor.

“This is embarrassing,” he said. “Every scientist wants to win a Nobel Prize.”

On Tuesday, after deliberating for two hours and 45 minutes, a federal jury found Dr. Lieber guilty of two counts of making false statements to the U.S. government about whether he participated in Thousand Talents Plan, a program designed by the Chinese government to attract foreign-educated scientists to China. They also found him guilty of failing to declare income earned in China and failing to report a Chinese bank account.

Though it is not illegal to participate in Chinese recruitment programs, scientists are required to disclose their participation to the U.S. government, which also funds their research and may view it as a conflict of interest.

Dr. Lieber’s conviction is a victory for the China Initiative, an effort launched in 2018, under the Trump administration, to root out scientists suspected of sharing sensitive information with China.

Among the cases opened against academic researchers, most, like the case against Dr. Lieber, do not allege espionage or intellectual property theft, but failure to disclose Chinese funding, and the effort has been criticized for prosecutorial overreach.

It suffered a series of setbacks over the summer, with half a dozen cases dismissed and the first case to reach the trial stage, against the researcher Anming Hu, ending in acquittal. Dr. Lieber’s trial was watched closely in scientific circles, as an indicator of whether the Justice Department will proceed with prosecutions of other researchers.

Peter Zeidenberg, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who represents around a dozen researchers who are under investigation, said Dr. Lieber’s case stands out because he was specifically asked about his participation in the Chinese program, and denied it.

“The reason people like Lieber lie is because they are afraid,” he said. “It’s really sad. They are afraid to answer truthfully, ‘Are you a member of the talent program?’ I’m sure in the Red Scare, people said they were not a member of the Communist Party. ”

In closing arguments on Tuesday, Dr. Lieber’s lawyer, Marc Mukasey, said the government had inadequate proof of wrongdoing and risked silencing a pioneering researcher.

“Isn’t it troubling that nobody in this courtroom has explained what the Thousand Talents Plan is and who is in it?” he said. “Isn’t it troubling that Dr. Lieber’s work was all public, was for the benefit of the world, yet he is facing criminal charges for it?”

He added, “No villains, no victims, no one got robbed, no one got rich, but over a few seconds of conversation — Special Agent Mousseau called it a blip on the radar — the world’s greatest nanoscientist is facing multiple felonies.”

Among the researchers prosecuted as part of the China Initiative, Dr. Lieber is by far the most prominent, chosen as chairman of Harvard’s chemistry and chemical biology department and seen by some as a potential Nobel Prize winner.

Since 2008, prosecutors said, his laboratory at Harvard had received research grants totaling $18 million from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.

At issue in this case was a joint venture that Dr. Lieber launched in 2011 with the Wuhan University of Technology, where one of his former students had taken a post. Outside employment is standard for high-level researchers, who often contract with private sector firms or universities overseas for part of the academic year.

A three-year contract emailed to Dr. Lieber in 2012, and displayed to the jury by prosecutors, identified him as a “One Thousand Talent High Level Foreign Expert,” entitling him to $50,000 a month, plus about $150,000 in living expenses and more than $1.5 million for a laboratory, which they called the WUT-Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory.

In 2018, as the China Initiative got underway, investigators from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health approached Dr. Lieber to ask if he had taken part in the Thousand Talents programs. Over the week-long trial, jurors heard from a series of witnesses who said that in both instances, Dr. Lieber had denied participating.

They also watched video clips from an F.B.I. interrogation, conducted on Jan. 28, 2020, the morning Dr. Lieber was arrested at 6:30 a.m. at his office at Harvard.

After initially asking for a lawyer, Dr. Lieber went on to answer the agents’ questions for about three hours, acknowledging at several points that he had misled investigators.

At first, he denied receiving income from the Wuhan university or participating in the Chinese recruitment program. Then the agents produced a series of documents, including contracts from 2011 and 2012, and Dr. Lieber examined them, remarking at one point, “I should pay more attention to what I’m signing.”

“That’s pretty damning,” he said. “Now that you bring it up, yes, I do remember.”

He went on to offer detail about his financial arrangements with the Wuhan university: A portion of his salary was deposited in a Chinese bank account and the remainder — an amount he estimated as between $50,000 and $100,000 — was paid in $100 bills, which he carried home in his luggage.

“They would give me a package, a brown thing with some Chinese characters on it, I would throw it in my bag,” he said. After returning home, he said, “I didn’t declare it, and that’s illegal.”

He acknowledged, as well, that he “wasn’t completely transparent by any stretch of the imagination” when approached by investigators from the Department of Defense in 2018, and that he was aware he might face charges.

“I was scared of being arrested, like I am now,” he added.

As the jury prepared to deliberate, Jason Casey, an assistant U.S. attorney, reminded jurors of Dr. Lieber’s demeanor in the F.B.I. interview and urged them to “use your common sense.”

“It’s not that the defendant has no memory of events prior to 2015,” he said. “It’s that he does not want to remember. He does not want to remember that he participated in the Thousand Talents program. He does not want to remember that he took bags of cash on an airplane and never reported them to the I.R.S.”

‘Scaring the scientific community’

Dr. Lieber’s arrest was one of the first signals that federal authorities were investigating scientists who had received funding from Chinese sources, and it sent shock waves through academic circles.

It was followed, in January of 2021, by the arrest of Gang Chen, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on suspicion of hiding affiliations with Chinese government institutions in order to secure $19 million in U.S. federal grants

Brian Timko, who worked under Dr. Lieber as a graduate student and now heads his own laboratory at Tufts University, said he believed China Initiative had strayed from its original focus on espionage toward disclosure violations that, a few years ago, “would have been handled at the university level.”

“I think these cases are about scaring the scientific community,” he said.

Dr. Timko, who attended stretches of the week-long trial, said he was troubled by the way Dr. Lieber's work had been “twisted” by prosecutors.

He said Dr. Lieber had invented electronic chips so small and flexible that they could be injected into parts of the human body, like the brain or the retina. Eventually, he said, the technology could lead to breakthroughs in bioelectronic medicine, like restoring sight to blind people or movement to paralyzed limbs.

“Charlie spent his whole career trying to help the world, and a handful of individuals who don’t even understand how science works tore the whole thing down,” he said. “And that is just not fair.”

Witnesses over the last week painted Dr. Lieber as a demanding, sometimes impatient academic star, who struggled to manage his relationship with his partners in Wuhan, and complained that Harvard was not acting vigorously to defend him.

“I definitely do not have a good taste” about “many ‘friends’ in China,” Dr. Lieber wrote in an email to a Chinese colleague at another institution. “These people want to use me, so we will not let that happen, versus me using them. But we’ll be ever so polite in the mean time.”

He expressed alarm, in 2018, when investigators from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health began asking about his participation in the Thousand Talents plan.

“They are threatening not only to end my funding (which supports much of my research) but also force me to pay back the last three plus years they supported much of my work,” he wrote to a Chinese colleague, adding, “perhaps someone (Chinese) who does not like me brought this to attention of N.I.H.?”

In his conversation with the F.B.I. agents on the day of his arrest, Dr. Lieber was reflective about the role of international funding in the lives of researchers, saying that relationships with foreign partners were never as straightforward as they seemed at first.

“Early on, if someone said, ‘We’ll give you this title and we’ll pay your travel to and from,’ you don’t think anything about it,” he explained, but partners “always want something from you.”

“A lot of countries, money is what they have in excess,” he said. He added, “that’s one of the things China uses to seduce people.”

He tried to impress on the two special agents that a different motive, the desire for acclaim, had brought him to partner with Wuhan and train scientists there.

“I was younger and stupid,” he said. “I want to be recognized for what I’ve done. Everyone wants to be recognized.” He offered a comparison he had given his son, a high school wrestler. The Nobel Prize is “kind of like an Olympic gold medal — it’s very, very rare,” he said.

A prize he had won recently was more like a bronze medal, he said with a self-deprecating laugh. “That probably is the underlying reason I did this,” he said.

Ellen Barry is The Times's New England bureau chief. She has previously served as The Times's Russia and South Asia bureau chief and was part of a team that won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. @EllenBarryNYT

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 22, 2021, Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Top U.S. Chemist Guilty of Not Disclosing Chinese Ties. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

@ The New York Times

FAILURE TO CREATE SAFE ROUTES ‘FORCING AFGHANS TO MAKE PERILOUS JOURNEYS TO UK’

2021-12-20T22:43:00.005-05:00

[Afghan resettlement scheme still not up and running four months after fall of Kabul, says Refugee Council]

By Caroline Davies

The UK’s failure to create safe routes for vulnerable Afghans is forcing thousands to make the “gut-wrenching” decision to embark on “perilous, life-threatening journeys” to seek safety in Britain, the Refugee Council has warned.

Four months since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August, causing mass displacement of hundreds of thousands, the government’s Afghan citizens resettlement scheme was not yet up and running, the charity said.

Official data showed asylum applications from Afghanistan to the UK tripled from 435 between April and June to 1,093 between July and September, it added.

The UK government had committed to bringing another 5,000 Afghans to the UK this year and a further 15,000 in future as part of the resettlement scheme, the charity said, calling for its urgent implementation.

It also called for an expansion of the family reunion rules so relatives were not torn apart and the prioritisation of all asylum cases from Afghanistan, with Home Office data showing more than 4,000 Afghans are awaiting a decision on their asylum claims, with nearly 2,500 waiting more than six months.

The charity said it wanted a rethink on the nationality and borders bill so Afghans and other people seeking asylum were not treated differently based on how they reached the UK.

“Last month 27 refugees tragically lost their lives whilst trying to cross the Channel in a small boat to reach the safety of UK shores,” it said. “It was reported that people fleeing Afghanistan were sadly involved in this tragedy.”

As well as providing a safe and legal route for people from Afghanistan, it said the government must provide extra financial support for councils to successfully settle them.

Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, said: “Afghans have been left with a heartbreaking choice. Either they stay in a country where they fear for their lives every day or take the gut-wrenching decision to leave and embark on a dangerous journey in an attempt to reach safety.

“It is critical the government brings forward the scheme they promised and help provide the safe routes and support these people both desperately need and deserve.”

Solomon added that under the nationality and borders bill, “anyone reaching the UK from Afghanistan who does not arrive under a resettlement scheme could be prosecuted and sent to prison for having entered the country unlawfully”.

“The government must rethink its proposals and ensure all Afghans can be given protection irrespective of how they arrived in the UK.”

@ The Guardian

HUNDREDS LINEUP FOR PASSPORTS IN BID TO LEAVE AFGHANISTAN

2021-12-19T20:26:00.002-05:00

[Crowds brave sub-zero temperatures after Taliban announces it will resume issuing travel documents]

By Patrick Wintour and agencies

Hundreds of people have braved sub-zero temperatures in Afghanistan’s capital to queue outside the passport office, a day after the Taliban government announced it would resume issuing travel documents.

Many began their wait the previous night and most stood patiently in single file – some desperate to leave the country for medical treatment, others to escape the Islamists’ renewed rule. Tense Taliban personnel periodically charged crowds that formed at the front of the queue and at a nearby roadblock.

“We don’t want any suicide attack or explosion to happen,” said a Taliban security operative, Ajmal Toofan, 22, expressing concerns about the dangers of crowding.

The local branch of the Islamic State group, the Taliban’s principal enemy, killed more than 150 people in late August when citizens massed at Kabul airport in a desperate effort to leave during the early days of the new regime.

“Our responsibility here is to protect people,” Toofan added, his gun pointed towards the ground. “But the people are not cooperating.”

He spoke to Agence France-Presse as one of his colleagues pushed a man, who then fell headlong just short of a coil of barbed wire.

Mohammed Osman Akbari, 60, said he was urgently trying to reach Pakistan because dilapidated hospitals at home were unable to complete his heart surgery. Medics “put springs in my heart”, he said, referring to a stent. “They need to be removed and it’s not possible here.”

Nearby, ambulances containing people too sick to queue were parked at the side of the road. “The patient has a heart problem,” said an ambulance driver, Muslim Fakhri, 21, referring to a 43-year-old man lying on a stretcher inside his vehicle. An applicant had to be present to ensure the passport is issued, he explained.

‘No one cares’

The Taliban initially stopped issuing passports shortly after their return to power, which came as the previous, western-backed regime imploded in the final stages of a US military withdrawal. In October, authorities reopened the passport office in Kabul only to suspend work days later as a flood of applications caused the biometric equipment to break down.

The office said on Saturday that the issue has been resolved and people whose applications were already being processed could get their documents.

Mursal Rasooli, 26, said she was happy to hear the news. “The situation here is not peaceful,” she told AFP, hugging her two-year-old daughter Bibi Hawa to protect her against the biting cold. “If the situation gets worse than this, then we have the passport” and could flee, she said.

Her husband is in Iran because he could not find work, she added, before expressing concern about skyrocketing prices and a lack of jobs and education for women and girls.

Issuing passports – and allowing people to leave amid a humanitarian crisis the UN has called an “avalanche of hunger” – is seen as a test of the Taliban’s commitment to the international community.

The Taliban are pressing donors to restore billions of dollars in aid that was suspended when they came to power. A local musician, Omid Naseer, sporting a leather jacket, short beard and unkempt hair, was desperate to leave. For “months now, since the Taliban came [to power], we’ve had no work”, he said. “The artists are most vulnerable, but no one cares.”

Meanwhile, Muslim nations resolved on Sunday to work with the United Nations to try to unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen Afghan assets in a bid to tackle a growing humanitarian crisis.

At a special meeting in Pakistan of the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) delegates said they would work “to unlock the financial and banking channels to resume liquidity and flow of financial and humanitarian assistance”.

The meeting was the biggest conference on Afghanistan since the US-backed government fell in August and the Taliban returned to power.

Martin Griffiths, the secretary general of the UN’s humanitarian affairs agency, told the meeting: “We need continued constructive engagement with the de facto authorities in a process of meaningful dialogue to clarify what we expect of each other.

“The consequences of inaction are clear: Afghanistan will collapse, people will run out of hope, and the region – and indeed the world – will see destabilisation increase. Afghanistan’s economy is now in freefall and if we don’t act decisively and with compassion, I fear this fall will pull the entire population with it.

“Twenty-three million people are already facing hunger; health facilities are overflowing with malnourished children; some 70% of teachers are not getting paid and millions of children – Afghanistan’s future – are out of school.

“The value of the Afghani currency is plummeting, trade is wrecked by lack of confidence in the financial sector, and the space for borrowing and investment has constricted dramatically.”

A draft roadmap of the steps the Taliban need to take before sanctions are lifted has been drawn up and has the support of Germany and Qatar. It is likely to be raised on the margins of a meeting in London on Monday between the British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, and members of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

@ The Guardian

SOME SOUTHEAST ASIAN TOURISM SPOTS REOPEN, BUT ARRIVALS ARE DOWN FROM MILLIONS TO DOZENS.

2021-12-18T22:41:00.001-05:00

[Bali, where tourism accounted for more than half of the prepandemic economy, had more than six million international arrivals in 2019. But so far this year, the figure is just 45, said Dayu Indah, the head of the marketing division at the island’s official tourism office. All of those travelers arrived by sea at Benoa Port, down the road from the international airport.]

By Mike Ives and Muktita Suhartono

Indonesia reopened the island of Bali to fully vaccinated tourists from 19 countries in October. But only two foreign nationals arrived that month — both by sea — and its airport is not yet receiving international flights.

Bali, one of the world’s most popular destinations, is among several tourism hot spots in Southeast Asia that have reopened — technically, at least — to international visitors in recent weeks. For local hotels, tour operators and other businesses whose income was obliterated during the early part of the pandemic, the news originally brought a smidgen of hope that 2021 might end on a positive note.

But traveling to these destinations from other countries is such an undertaking — amid rules, fees, a lack of flights and lingering uncertainty around new outbreaks — that very few people have bothered.

“For all but the most determined, it’s a pretty convoluted process to plan a short holiday,” Stuart McDonald, a co-founder of Travelfish.org, a guide to Southeast Asia, said of international travelers who want to vacation in the region.

“There will be determined people who figure it out,” added Mr. McDonald, who lives in Bali. “But for anything at scale, we’ve got a while to wait yet.”

Bali, where tourism accounted for more than half of the prepandemic economy, had more than six million international arrivals in 2019. But so far this year, the figure is just 45, said Dayu Indah, the head of the marketing division at the island’s official tourism office. All of those travelers arrived by sea at Benoa Port, down the road from the international airport.

“Where they come from I don’t know,” Ms. Indah said. “Whether they are tourists or expats, I have no details.”

Recent arrival numbers at other Southeast Asian tourist hot spots are not quite as extreme, but they are still miserable by prepandemic standards.

In Malaysia, only a few hundred foreign tourists have visited the resort island of Langkawi since the government partially opened it to visitors this fall — far fewer than the thousands that a local development authority had anticipated.

In Thailand, more than 100,000 foreign visitors arrived in November as part of a quarantine-free entry program for fully vaccinated tourists from dozens of countries. But the country’s total arrival figure for the year — less than 270,000 — is still a tiny fraction of the 40 million who came in 2019.

In Vietnam, foreign tourists began trickling in by the dozens under pilot programs in November, but such numbers are nowhere near the 1.8 million international arrivals that the country recorded in November 2019, according to official data. The programs were started before the Omicron variant was discovered and the country’s case numbers hit a new high.

Part of the problem for Southeast Asia’s tourism industry is that China, a major source of visitors, has imposed so many restrictions on its citizens who travel overseas — including a 14-day quarantine when they return — that very few of them are leaving.

Another problem is a lack of direct flights. Cambodia, for example, reopened to international travelers last month and has waived quarantine for those who are fully vaccinated and submit to testing. But most travelers from outside Asia who want to visit the country would need to transit through aviation hubs elsewhere in the region, such as Malaysia, Mr. McDonald said. That means additional Covid screenings.

“It’s just too complicated,” he said. “You get stuck in quarantine and you test positive. Who wants to have a holiday like that?”

As for Bali, the reasons not to visit include not only a lack of direct international flights, but also Indonesia’s 10-day quarantine for fully vaccinated people and the paperwork required to secure a business visa. (Tourist visas have been suspended.)

Ms. Indah said that Bali’s focus for now was on domestic tourists, and that 12,000 of them arrived by air last weekend.

The island has prepared as much as possible for a resumption of international tourism, she added. More than 90 percent of residents have been fully vaccinated, and more than 2,000 facilities have passed a Covid-specific health and safety inspection.

“But if we talk about opening borders, opening the country, the authority is with the central government, and that’s not easy, I’m sorry to say,” she said. “There are many considerations to consider.”

Muktita Suhartono reports for The New York Times in Indonesia and Thailand. She joined The Times in 2018 and is based in Bangkok.

@ The New York Times

PHONE OF INDIAN ACTIVIST JAILED ON TERRORISM CHARGES WAS INFECTED WITH PEGASUS SPYWARE, NEW ANALYSIS FINDS

2021-12-17T21:42:00.005-05:00

[The phone backups were provided to Amnesty at the request of Wilson’s defense team by Arsenal Consulting, a U.S. digital forensics firm that examined an electronic copy of Wilson’s laptop provided by his lawyers. Amnesty’s new finding raises further questions about the Indian government’s case against Wilson, a Delhi-based activist who campaigned for the rights of those incarcerated for their political ideology. In February, Arsenal said Wilson’s computer had been hacked by an unknown attacker and that malicious software was used to plant documents that are cited in the charging documents as evidence against him.]

By Niha Masih

NEW DELHI — A smartphone belonging to jailed Indian activist Rona Wilson was infiltrated using NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware before his arrest, according to a new forensic analysis by Amnesty International’s Security Lab that reignites questions about the use of malware attacks against dissidents and government critics in India.

The analysis by Amnesty showed that two backups of an iPhone 6s belonging to Wilson, who has been in jail on terrorism charges since June 2018, had digital traces showing infection by the Pegasus surveillance tool, which its developer, the Israeli cybersecurity firm NSO Group, has said has been licensed only to government agencies. The analysis expands the findings reported by The Washington Post and a global media consortium in July that the tool has been deployed against a wide range of targets around the world, including human rights activists and journalists.

The Indian government has neither confirmed nor denied that it is an NSO Group client.

The phone backups were provided to Amnesty at the request of Wilson’s defense team by Arsenal Consulting, a U.S. digital forensics firm that examined an electronic copy of Wilson’s laptop provided by his lawyers. Amnesty’s new finding raises further questions about the Indian government’s case against Wilson, a Delhi-based activist who campaigned for the rights of those incarcerated for their political ideology. In February, Arsenal said Wilson’s computer had been hacked by an unknown attacker and that malicious software was used to plant documents that are cited in the charging documents as evidence against him.

Arsenal has worked on the case on a pro-bono basis.

[The spyware is sold to governments to fight terrorism. In India, it was used to hack journalists and others.]

Vijayanta Goyal Arya, a spokeswoman for the National Investigation Agency, the anti-terrorism authority overseeing the case, said that the charging documents have been filed “based on prosecutable evidence” and that the “forensic reports have been submitted to the court.” She declined to comment on the new forensic findings but said the agency seeks reports from labs recognized by the courts.

An NSO Group representative responded to a request for comment with a statement: “Without addressing specific countries and customers, the allegations raised in this inquiry are not clear. Once a democratic country lawfully, following due process, uses tools to investigate a person suspected in an attempt to overthrow a (democratically-elected) government, this would not be considered a misuse of such tools by any means.”

Etienne Maynier, a technologist at Amnesty International, called the presence of Pegasus on Wilson’s phone “very worrying.”

“What we need is an independent investigation into who is at the origin of this attack and responsible for this abuse,” said Maynier. Legislation should prevent this kind of “unlawful surveillance” against human rights defenders, he said.

The Pegasus Project news investigation revealed that hundreds of numbers from India appeared on the global list of more than 50,000 phone numbers, which included some numbers selected for surveillance by NSO’s clients.

The list included numbers for Rahul Gandhi, India’s main opposition leader, and his aides; Ashok Lavasa, an election commissioner who ruled that Prime Minister Narendra Modi violated campaign guidelines in 2019, and more than 30 journalists.

Officials at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology declined to comment on the matter.

The phone numbers used by Wilson and seven other co-defendants were added to the list that included those selected for surveillance before their arrests. Three of the numbers were added in 2017, well before the event that police said precipitated the investigation: a commemoration of a 200-year-old battle held on Jan. 1, 2018, during which one person died in clashes near a village known as Bhima Koregaon.

An earlier examination by Amnesty confirmed the presence of Pegasus on a phone belonging to S.A.R Geelani, who headed the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners, the organization with which Wilson worked. Geelani, who died in 2019, was not a defendant in the Bhima Koregaon case.

Amnesty’s analysis of two electronic copies of Wilson’s phone backups revealed that his phone was first compromised using Pegasus spyware in July 2017. The traces of infection appear again in early 2018, according to Amnesty.

Wilson received at least 15 SMS messages with malicious links in a span of six months, the last of which was delivered four months before his arrest in June 2018, according to Maynier. Some were disguised as links to sign petitions on human rights causes, and others were advertisements.

[Invisible surveillance: How spyware is secretly hacking smartphones]

The charging documents claim that Wilson and more than a dozen other activists were associated with a banned guerrilla group of Maoists in central India that aims to overthrow the government. The activists deny the charges.

The activists have been charged under a stringent anti-terrorism law that critics say Modi’s government has used increasingly against dissidents.

The trial in the Bhima Koregaon case has yet to begin. Those in jail include a prominent academic specializing in India’s caste structure, a discriminatory Hindu system based on birth; a lawyer who fought cases of tribal youths accused of being Maoists; and singers who wrote songs parodying Modi and his government.

In July, one of the defendants, Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest suffering from Parkinson’s, died of ill health at a hospital after nearly eight months in jail. This month, Sudha Bharadwaj, a lawyer and trade unionist, became the first imprisoned activist in the case to be released on statutory bail after spending more than three years in jail.

The forensic analysis of Wilson’s phone backup was confirmed in a separate examination by Arsenal Consulting at the request of the defense team.

In February, The Washington Post was first to report that a forensic analysis showed Wilson’s laptop had been subject to a sophisticated malware attack in 2016, nearly two years before his arrest, in which an unknown hacker planted evidence, including a letter purportedly written by Wilson to a Maoist leader where he urged the group to assassinate Modi. A subsequent forensic analysis by Arsenal revealed that at least 30 incriminating documents recovered from Wilson’s device by the police had been planted.

A similar hack was perpetrated on a second co-defendant by the same attacker, according to Arsenal. Forensic experts based in North America reviewed the Arsenal reports at the request of The Post and said Arsenal’s conclusions were sound

Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that specializes in studying Pegasus and other spyware, has found evidence that India has been a client of NSO, according to Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow.

Since the publication of the project, several countries have ordered an internal investigation into the use of Pegasus. In India, the Supreme Court established a committee of experts overseen by a retired judge to investigate the findings.

The NSO Group has come under fire globally over the project’s findings. The U.S. Department of Commerce last month blacklisted the company, barring it from receiving American technologies.

[Biden administration blacklists NSO Group over Pegasus spyware]

Although NSO Group has denied the findings of the Pegasus Project news investigation, it has acknowledged problems with a client and said it suspended the contract when abuse of the spyware surfaced. The company vowed to investigate other allegations of misuse.

Wilson, 50, has spent more than 1,200 days in jail awaiting trial. Sanjay Kak, a filmmaker and writer who worked with Wilson on a few citizen campaigns for the release of political prisoners, called him a “quintessential self-effacing figure.”

“Ironically, he’s now at the other end of the very machine that he worked against,” Kak said.

Evidence found on a second Indian activist’s computer was planted, report says

Indian activists jailed on terrorism charges were on list with surveillance targets

@ The Washington Post

CONGRESS PASSES BAN ON GOODS FROM CHINA’S XINJIANG REGION OVER FORCED LABOR CONCERNS

2021-12-16T21:11:00.007-05:00

[President Biden is expected to sign the bill, which drew a fierce corporate lobbying campaign against it.]

By Catie Edmondson

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted unanimously on Thursday to approve legislation that would ban the import of a wide array of products made in China’s Xinjiang region in a drive to prevent companies from sourcing goods produced through forced labor by persecuted Muslim minorities.

Its passage was a victory for supporters of an aggressive human rights measure that faced a fierce corporate lobbying campaign from businesses that argued it was too onerous and would disrupt global supply chains. The vote sent the measure to President Biden’s desk, where he was expected to sign it into law.

The bill represents the most forceful legislative response yet to China’s campaign against the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, which the Biden administration has called a genocide. It would impose a high standard for companies seeking to import products from the region, banning goods made “in whole or in part” in Xinjiang unless companies are able to prove to customs officials that the products were not made with forced labor.

“Many companies have already taken steps to clean up their supply chains,” said Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida and one of the authors of the bill. “They should have no concerns about this law. For those who have not done that, they’ll no longer be able to continue to make Americans — every one of us, frankly — unwitting accomplices in the atrocities, in the genocide that’s being committed by the Chinese Communist Party.”

The legislation had stalled for months on Capitol Hill, even as lawmakers decried the severity of China’s wide-scale repression of Uyghurs. Those offenses have included administering forced sterilizations and abortions, and placing Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in concentration camps, where they have faced torture and sexual abuse.

Few officials or companies wanted to publicly push back against the legislation, wary of the optics of appearing indifferent to genocide. But behind the scenes, the bill’s tough standard — which presumes that all goods produced in the region are made with forced labor unless companies can prove otherwise — alarmed some corporations, lawmakers and Biden administration officials who feared it was overly broad.

Roughly one in five cotton garments sold globally contains cotton or yarn from Xinjiang, and the region produces a significant portion of the world’s polysilicon, which is used to make solar panels and smartphones. Some administration officials worried that the standard at the heart of the bill would cripple already disrupted supply chains and create additional roadblocks to meeting the nation’s climate goals, according to congressional aides familiar with the discussions.

Companies including Nike, Coca-Cola and Apple also lobbied Congress in an attempt to weaken that provision.

But lawmakers coalesced around a compromise version of the legislation earlier this week and pushed it through, a burst of momentum that came after Mr. Rubio held up consideration of the annual defense policy bill, demanding that the Senate turn its attention to the forced labor measure.

The final version retained the tough importation standard for companies, but stripped out a related measure that would have required companies to disclose any involvement in a wide range of activities conducted in the Xinjiang region. That reporting requirement, vehemently opposed by large companies, was met with resistance from some lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee.

Earlier this week, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, confirmed in a statement that Mr. Biden would sign the bill into law, noting that the White House had earlier cracked down on forced labor in the supply chain for solar panels made in Xinjiang by banning products made by specific companies.

“The administration will work closely with Congress to implement this bill to ensure global supply chains are free of forced labor, while simultaneously working to onshore and third-shore key supply chains, including semiconductors and clean energy,” Ms. Psaki said.

Legislative drama dogged the legislation until the end. Attempts by Mr. Rubio to expedite the bill’s passage on Wednesday were halted by Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who tried to attach an extension of an expiring child tax credit payment, which Republicans widely oppose, to the anti-forced labor measure.

“Getting this bill over the finish line and into law ensures that American consumers and businesses can buy goods without inadvertent complicity in China’s horrific human rights abuses,” said Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon and a co-sponsor of the legislation. “As the Chinese government tries to whitewash their genocide and claim a propaganda victory with the upcoming Olympics, this legislation sends a powerful, bipartisan message that the United States will not turn a blind eye.”

@ The New York Times

PUTIN AND XI SHOW UNITED FRONT AMID RISING TENSIONS WITH U.S.

2021-12-15T07:32:00.002-05:00

[President Vladimir V. Putin and President Xi Jinping of China, meeting in a video summit, sought mutual support in their conflicts with the West but have not yet declared a formal alliance.]

By Anton Troianovski and Steven Lee Myers

MOSCOW — President Biden may have his alliance of democracies, but Russia and China still have each other.

Xi Jinping addressed Vladimir V. Putin as his “old friend,” and the Russian president called his Chinese counterpart both his “dear friend” and his “esteemed friend,” as the two leaders held a video summit on Wednesday — a display of solidarity in the face of Western pressure over Ukraine, Taiwan and many other matters.

In footage of opening remarks released by the Kremlin, Mr. Putin said he would attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in February, making him the first leader of another country to confirm he would come to the event that Mr. Biden has already pledged to boycott, as have the leaders of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and others.

During the meeting, Mr. Xi voiced support for Mr. Putin’s demands for “security guarantees” from the West that would effectively preserve a Russian sphere of influence in parts of Eastern Europe, according to the Kremlin. That fast-moving diplomatic push, coupled with alarming troop movements near Russia’s southwestern borders, has Western officials fearing a possible Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine in the coming months.

Chinese officials did not immediately make public their own version of the meeting, which the Kremlin said lasted about an hour and a half. The Kremlin said that Mr. Putin concurred with Mr. Xi’s critical view of Western military activity in the Asia-Pacific region, such as Australia’s deal to deploy nuclear-powered submarines with American and British backing.

Mr. Xi, noting that he was meeting Mr. Putin for the 37th time since 2013, praised the Russian president for thwarting attempts to “drive a wedge between our countries.” He said the two countries were “defending the true meaning of democracy and human rights,” according to the Russian translation of his remarks as the virtual summit began.

That message appeared meant to strike a contrast with the Summit for Democracy that Mr. Biden hosted last week, which was widely viewed as an effort to build a united front against Russia and China

The two countries, once adversaries, have formed an ever-tighter economic, military and geopolitical partnership under Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi — one that increasingly looks like a bloc against American influence as both countries’ confrontations with the United States deepen. Mr. Xi told Mr. Putin that while Russia and China are not formally allies, “in its closeness and effectiveness, this relationship even exceeds an alliance,” according to a Kremlin aide, Yuri V. Ushakov, who briefed reporters in Moscow on the meeting after it ended.

The talks came at a high-stakes moment. Karen Donfried, the American assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, was in Moscow on Wednesday for talks on Ukraine; Russian officials presented her with a proposal demanding that the West roll back its military support for Ukraine and rule out the expansion of the NATO alliance to include Ukraine or other countries in the region.

Mr. Xi “underlined that he understands the Russian concerns and fully supports our initiative about working out such security guarantees for Russia,” Mr. Ushakov said.

There was also the signal that as the United States and its allies threaten crushing economic sanctions against Russia were it to assault Ukraine, Moscow has plenty of other friends in the world.

The Russian president’s trip to New Delhi last week to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India sent a similar message. On Wednesday, Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi even discussed forming an “independent financial infrastructure,” Mr. Ushakov said, apparently in an effort to reduce their reliance on Western banks and their vulnerability to sanctions.

“A new model of cooperation has been formed between our countries — one based on foundations like noninterference in domestic affairs and respect for each others’ interests,” Mr. Putin told Mr. Xi.

Both Russia and China frequently accuse the West of interfering in other countries’ domestic affairs and disrespecting their interests.

In one symbol of their bond, Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin spoke with the Chinese and Russian flags in the frame behind them — unlike Mr. Putin’s videoconference last week with Mr. Biden, when Mr. Putin spoke next to only the Russian flag.

For Mr. Xi, the summit was a chance to deflect criticism that has been piling up over China’s actions from the South China Sea to the mountainous border with India. He hopes to show that China is not isolated diplomatically, especially on the eve of the Winter Olympics, which are intended to showcase China’s global stature, not the souring of its relations with much of the world.

“I expect that in February of next year, we will finally meet in person in Beijing,” Mr. Putin told Mr. Xi. “We have unfailingly supported each other in questions of international athletic cooperation, including in not accepting any attempts to politicize sports or the Olympic movement.”

Cheng Xiaohe, a professor at the Renmin University’s School of International Studies in Beijing, said the relationship between the two countries gave their leaders the opportunity to demonstrate “mutual support and joint confrontation” with the United States. That is especially true at a time of economic uncertainty and rising international tensions.

“Both China and Russia face the same pressure from the United States,” he said. “Therefore, the two countries need to support each other in diplomacy.”

The two men meet or speak often — though only virtually since the pandemic began. What was unusual about Wednesday’s meeting was China’s effort to telegraph its message in advance.

“Close strategic coordination” between the two countries, as a spokesman for the foreign ministry put it this week, is essential in today’s turbulent world.

The two countries have deepened a relationship that over the decades has been fraught with suspicion and, in 1969, a border clash near Khabarovsk.

When Russia faced punitive sanctions following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Mr. Putin turned to China to soften the blow, stepping up trade across the border from energy to timber. That same year, Russian public opinion of China improved sharply; 70 percent of Russians now have a positive attitude toward the country, according to the Levada Center independent pollster — far better than their view of the United States, the European Union or Ukraine.

The militaries of both countries have also stepped up joint exercises and even operations, including in the air and, for the first time in October, naval patrols in the Pacific. They have pledged to explore space together.

Before Wednesday’s call, Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s space program, said that a proposed Russian-Chinese lunar station “will be based on principles of equal partnership, transparency and consensus in the decision making process” — in contrast to the terms set by the United States in its lunar station project.

Even so, there are limits to this united front. China has never recognized the annexation of Crimea, for example, nor does Russia side with China on its expansive claims in the South China Sea. They have also stopped short of binding themselves with a formal treaty alliance, preferring to maintain their ability to act independently and flexibly.

“I do not think they are yet at a point where Beijing would endorse any adventurous action in Ukraine — nor would Russia eagerly side with China if the Chinese decided to invade Taiwan,” said Sergey Radchenko, a professor of international relations at Cardiff University, who has written extensively on the relationship.

“I would imagine that they would each show a degree of benevolent neutrality toward the other.”

Anton Troianovski reported from Moscow, and Steven Lee Myers from Seoul. Claire Fu, John Liu and Khava Khasmagomadova contributed research.

@ The New York Times

BLINKEN WARNS CHINA TO STOP ‘AGGRESSIVE ACTIONS’ IN FIRST TRIP TO SOUTHEAST ASIA

2021-12-14T22:05:00.002-05:00

[Blinken’s criticisms of China in a region where it holds strong political and economic ties resembled some of the broadsides leveled by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, his predecessor in the Trump administration. But Blinken sought to strike a softer tone, insisting that Washington is not forcing countries to choose between the two superpowers.]

By John Hudson

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Secretary of State Antony Blinken used his first official visit to Southeast Asia to criticize China’s “aggressive actions” and encourage smaller countries in the Indo-Pacific to unite against Beijing’s assertiveness in the region.

Speaking at a university in the capital of Indonesia, Blinken said the Biden administration would work with allies and partners to defend the “rules-based order” against a rising China that he depicted as a threat to freedom of movement in the South China Sea, where an estimated $3 trillion of commerce flows every year.

“Claiming open seas as their own. Distorting open markets through subsidies to its state-run companies. Denying the exports or revoking deals for countries whose policies it does not agree with,” Blinken said. “Countries across the region want this behavior to change — we do too.”

[Biden administration shows appetite for high-profile fights with China and Russia]

Blinken’s criticisms of China in a region where it holds strong political and economic ties resembled some of the broadsides leveled by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, his predecessor in the Trump administration. But Blinken sought to strike a softer tone, insisting that Washington is not forcing countries to choose between the two superpowers.

“Individual countries will be able to choose their own path and their own partners,” he said.

Blinken is using his three-country swing through Southeast Asia, which will include stops in Malaysia and Thailand, as a means for spelling out the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy. Beijing has drawn criticism in the region for laying claim to much of the South China Sea, which is disputed by smaller countries in the region such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia. China has also moved military hardware into the waters and dismissed a 2016 international tribunal decision that refuted its historical claim there.

U.S.-China relations have plummeted in recent years due to differences over Hong Kong, Taiwan, human rights and the coronavirus pandemic. Blinken said the United States, which has more members of its military stationed in the Indo-Pacific than anywhere outside the contiguous United States, is committed to “peace and security” that is “vital to prosperity in the region.”

A key pillar of the Biden administration’s policy is to ensure the rights and freedoms of the people of the region, Blinken said.

But in promoting free and democratic governance, he was careful not to criticize corruption and anti-democratic practices of the countries on his tour, which he’s hoping to bring closer to Washington’s orbit.

During a news conference in Jakarta’s glitzy Fairmont hotel, Blinken was asked about whether he would give voice to anti-corruption and pro-democracy efforts in Thailand and Malaysia. The top U.S. diplomat dodged the question, saying, “we’ll have an opportunity in both places to address questions particular to those places when we’re there.”

Despite Blinken’s disciplined focus on Asia, the stop in Indonesia also brought a reminder of Washington’s high-stakes standoff with Russia over its military buildup on the border with Ukraine.

[Russia planning military offensive against Ukraine, U.S. intelligence warns]

When Blinken touched down in Jakarta on Monday, he shared the same tarmac as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s senior aide Nikolai Patrushev, whose plane parked nearby as he met separately with Indonesian officials.

“I noticed his plane on the runway next to ours when we landed,” said Blinken during the news conference. “I can’t or won’t speak to why anyone else might be here or what they’re doing.”

Blinken, who did not meet with Patrushev during the stop, was asked if he missed a diplomatic opportunity to address a crisis that has consumed Washington. He suggested that Washington first needed to consult with its partner Ukraine before serious discussions ensued with Moscow.

“We have a senior State Department official, Karen Donfried, who is now in Ukraine consulting with our Ukrainian partners,” he said.

“She’ll be going on to Moscow . . . to test” whether Moscow is serious about resolving the crisis in Ukraine, Blinken said.

@ The Washington Post

MILITANTS KILL 2 POLICEMEN IN KASHMIR AS VIOLENCE ESCALATES

2021-12-13T22:40:00.005-05:00

[The clash on Monday came three days after a similar attack on a squad of police officers patrolling streets in northern Kashmir left two of its men dead.]

By Sameer Yasir

SRINAGAR, Kashmir — Militants fired on a police bus in the Indian region of Kashmir on Monday, killing at least two officers and wounding more than a dozen, the police said, just three days after a similar attack left two policemen dead.

Kashmir, disputed between India and Pakistan, has long endured clashes between separatist insurgents and government forces, and the violence has escalated recently as strict security protocols imposed in 2019 and pandemic restrictions have been lifted. Pakistan, which contains a part of Kashmir, also claims the Indian portion, and there have been repeated conflicts along the boundary separating them.

The attack on Monday, on the outskirts of the largest Kashmiri city, Srinagar, took place in a highly guarded area home to major Indian security establishments operating in the region. In the attack three days earlier, gunmen fired on a squad of officers patrolling streets in northern Kashmir.

Jammu and Kashmir was India’s only Muslim-majority state, with a degree of autonomy, until August 2019, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government drastically changed the region’s political status. It stripped the region of its autonomy and its status as a state, and placed it under the direct control of New Delhi.

Mr. Modi’s government sent in thousands of troops, detained many people without charges, cut off Kashmir’s internet and phone access to the outside and imposed a kind of lockdown. The moves were meant to smother militancy in Kashmir, but critics feared it would only heighten the region’s troubles.

“I think the question has been since August 2019 when things would go bad again,” said Daniel Markey, a South Asia expert at the United States Institute of Peace, a U.S. government agency.

“There has been an assumption that the Indian government would have a perpetual capacity to maintain a security crackdown such that you wouldn’t see this kind of violence happen again, but that is a challenging and very costly thing to do,” he added. “You let up a little bit, that creates openings. That’s why critics thought it was ill-advised to begin with.”

Rather than a changed political landscape in Kashmir, Monday's attack highlighted old, lingering tensions, experts said.

Police officials at the scene said the assailants tried to board the bus carrying about two dozen policemen returning to their base Monday evening. Unable to get on the bus, the attackers sprayed it with gunfire and fled.

Mr. Modi was seeking more information and had expressed condolences to the officers’ families, the prime minister’s office said on Twitter.

Protests and bouts of violence have erupted across Kashmir in recent months. The Indian government’s move in 2019 split the region into two federally controlled territories. One of those territories, Ladakh, perched high in the Himalayas on the Chinese border, observed a complete shutdown on Monday, demanding full statehood.

India has deployed additional paramilitary soldiers to try to tamp down the violence. Observers say the fresh attack is likely to increase tensions between the residents and the police, hundreds of whom have lost their lives fighting the insurgency since it erupted in the late 1980s.

Mehbooba Mufti, a former top elected official who governed the region in a coalition with Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party — a partnership that ended abruptly in 2018 — said on Twitter that the attack on Monday belied the government’s claims of having restored control and calm.

“Terribly sad to hear about the Srinagar attack in which two policemen were killed,” Ms. Mufti wrote. The “false narrative of normalcy in Kashmir stands exposed yet there has been no course correction,” she added.

Government forces reported killing two insurgents earlier on Monday, and there was speculation that the attack on the police bus could have been in retaliation.

Officials said they had received a tip about militants moving around Srinagar. They set up checkpoints to frisk travelers.

“Two suspected persons on noticing the police party fired indiscriminately upon them. In the ensuing encounter, two terrorists were neutralized on spot,” the police said in a statement.

Minutes after that shootout, protests and clashes broke out in the area and angry residents, including women, threw rocks at the police vehicles and chanted anti-India slogans. Security forces dispersed the crowds with tear gas.

As the clashes continued, a resident, Arshid Malik, splashed the blood of the killed militants with water.

“They are killing people on the streets here everyday,” he said. “And the world is watching.”

Emily Schmall contributed reporting from Chicago.

@ The New York Times

FEARS GROW THAT HOME OFFICE HAS LOST WILL TO RESETTLE AFGHANS UNDER THREAT

2021-12-12T18:36:00.006-05:00

[Thousands are still at the Taliban’s mercy in Afghanistan, and expert warns that ‘politically expedient’ initiative may now wither]

By Mark Townsend

Priti Patel’s much-trumpeted scheme to allow Afghans to resettle in Britain has been starved of “appropriate resources”, according to officials, as a former senior diplomat voices fears that the UK government appears intent to let the initiative wither away before it has even started.

The Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS) was announced to great fanfare in August as the Taliban took Kabul, but four months on it has still not started. A senior Whitehall source with intimate knowledge of the scheme said it had been delayed because it had not received adequate support for it to launch.

Adam Thomson, a former Foreign Office director for Afghanistan, said that, based on his experience, it appeared evident that the scheme to resettle vulnerable Afghans had been a cynical show of political opportunism that was now destined to fail.

“It looks like a politically expedient announcement. With the media focus having gone elsewhere, the government has lost political will, lost focus and lost implementation.

“It’s a tried and tested technique. You announce something, you look good. Then somehow circumstances prevent you from actually achieving your targets,” said Thomson, who is also a former UK ambassador to Pakistan and Nato”.

Since the announcement of the resettlement scheme on 18 August more than 100 days have passed with no apparent tangible progress. Its website has not been updated since 13 September and confirms the programme “is not yet open”.

Last night, however, the government issued a statement saying it was committed to the initiative and that the ACRS was “one of the most generous schemes in our country’s history”.

Without offering a timeframe, it promised “more details soon” on a scheme which was promoted by ministers as a programme to help women, children and religious minorities at risk of Taliban reprisals.

Similar disquiet also surrounds the resources and effectiveness of another government relocation scheme involving Afghanistan – the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap).

On Friday, a parliamentary answer revealed that just 84 officials have been assigned to Arap, which was launched in April and conceived to resettle people who worked for the UK in Afghanistan. The same parliamentary response confirmed it had so far received more than 90,000 applications, with more arriving each day – a caseload that suggests each official is dealing with or has processed more than 1,000 applications.

When the Home Office was asked how many officials had been assigned to the resettlement scheme, it would not provide a figure. Similarly, no indication of resources relating to the scheme has been provided, although a Whitehall source said if they had wanted to get the scheme up and running quickly they could have recruited volunteers from the civil service.

The Whitehall source, who has knowledge of the ACRS, said: “The resettlement scheme was a ticket for people to rebuild their life but it’s just not been resourced appropriately.”

Thomson added: “As far as I can tell there’s no cross-Whitehall coordination mechanism that brings together FCDO [the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office], the Home Office and the MoD to actually make sense of Arap and launch ACRS.”

A spokesperson for Adam Smith International (ASI), which delivered UK government aid programmes in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2018, said the failure to open the resettlement scheme had compounded eligibility issues with regard to Arap and had left hundreds in grave danger.

“Almost none of our former staff have had any update or information about their applications since the evacuation finished. The ACRS scheme is not yet open. This has left hundreds of our staff from UK projects in a desperate situation in Kabul, without hope and without information,” they said.

Only about 20 of ASI’s former staff out of more than 230 who applied for resettlement via the Arap scheme have so far been given the chance to relocate to the UK.

The government said: “ACRS is one of the most generous schemes in our country’s history and will give up to 20,000 further people at risk a new life in the UK. We are working across government and with partners such as UNHCR [the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] to design and open the scheme amidst a complex and changing picture. We are committed to working in step with the international community to get this right.”

@ The Guardian

U.S. BANS INVESTMENT IN CHINESE SURVEILLANCE COMPANY SENSETIME, SAYING IT SUPPORTS REPRESSION OF UYGHUR MINORITY POPULATION

2021-12-11T22:35:00.005-05:00

[Biden administration calls the sanction part of broad effort to unite democracies against authoritarian states]

By Jeanne Whalen

The Biden administration on Friday banned U.S. investment in a Chinese company that it said supports China’s use of repressive surveillance technology, calling the move part of a broad effort to unite democracies against authoritarian states.

The sanction adds the facial recognition company SenseTime to a list of 59 Chinese companies in which U.S. citizens and entities are prohibited from investing. The Biden administration widened that list this summer to include firms that it said support China’s military and state surveillance, building on a Trump administration effort.

The Biden administration announced the move alongside new sanctions on individuals it said were responsible for repression and human rights abuses in Bangladesh, Myanmar and North Korea. It also announced a partnership with other democracies to tighten export controls on technology that can be used for repression.

The measures “send a message that democracies around the world will act against those who abuse the power of the state to inflict suffering and repression,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in a statement.

The Treasury Department, which oversees the investment prohibition list, said SenseTime “has developed facial recognition programs that can determine a target’s ethnicity, with a particular focus on identifying ethnic Uyghurs,” a persecuted Muslim minority population in China.

It added that China has used digital surveillance technology to track Uyghurs’ movements and activities and to “create a police state in the Xinjiang region.”

In an email, SenseTime spokeswoman June Jin said the company “strongly” opposes “the designation and the accusations that have been made in connection with it.”

“The accusations are unfounded and reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of our company,” Jin wrote. “We regret to have been caught in the middle of geopolitical disputes.”

[Biden bans investment in Chinese companies linked to surveillance technology]

Scholars estimate that Chinese authorities have detained more than 1 million Uyghurs in centers and reeducation camps for periods ranging from weeks to years. The United States has labeled the campaign a genocide. The United Kingdom pressed China in January to allow United Nations rights inspectors to visit the region, while the European Parliament has condemned China for using forced labor in Xinjiang.

The sanction against SenseTime will complicate its preparations to list its company shares on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange through an initial public offering.

SenseTime is one of China’s largest artificial intelligence companies, pairing cameras and software algorithms for uses that include identity verification and monitoring whether a driver is drowsy or distracted.

The Trump administration began raising alarms about the company in 2019, adding it to an official export blacklist for what the administration called its support of China’s surveillance of Uyghurs and other minority groups in Xinjiang.

That blacklist, called the Entity List, requires U.S. companies to receive a government license before exporting technology to the targeted companies.

The new sanction adds SenseTime to the separate Chinese Military-Industrial Complex Companies List, which prohibits U.S. individuals from buying or selling any publicly traded securities in the companies. Existing investors have one year to divest after a company is placed on the list.

In 2018, several U.S. venture capital funds invested in SenseTime, including Tiger Global Management and Glade Brook Capital Partners, according to market data provider Pitchbook. Those investors did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

[Who are the Uyghurs and what is happening to them in China?]

SenseTime joins two other Chinese companies, Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology and Huawei Technologies, already included on the prohibited investment list for allegedly aiding repressive state surveillance.

The Washington Post reported last year that Huawei had tested facial recognition software that could send automated “Uyghur alarms” to government authorities when camera systems identified members of the oppressed minority group. Huawei at the time said the work was “simply a test and it has not seen real-world application.”

Cameras made by Hikvision have been deployed throughout Xinjiang to monitor Uyghurs in internment camps, according to the Uyghur Human Rights Project, an advocacy group based in Washington.

The Treasury Department also added two Chinese Communist Party officials from the Xinjiang region, Shohrat Zakir and Erken Tuniyaz, to a sanctions list for their role in “serious human rights abuse.” Zakir was chairman of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region until 2021. Tuniyaz now serves as the acting chairman.

“During their tenures, more than one million Uyghurs and members of other predominantly Muslim ethnic minority groups have been detained in Xinjiang,” the Treasury Department statement said.

The Biden administration on Friday was wrapping up a two-day “Summit for Democracy,” a virtual gathering aimed at rallying the democracies of the world against the forces of authoritarianism.

As the summit came to a close, the White House said the United States and seven allied democracies have agreed to develop a voluntary nonbinding code of conduct “to use export control tools to prevent the proliferation of software and other technologies used to enable serious human rights abuses.”

The other participating countries are Australia, Denmark, Norway, Canada, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, according to a brief statement on the agreement.

@ The Washington Post

CHINA TROLLS BIDEN SUMMIT WITH HARRY POTTER JOKES AND CLAIMS TO BE A DEMOCRACY

2021-12-10T22:02:00.008-05:00

[In recent years, the party has preferred to highlight its Marxist roots and talk about the unique nature of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and its “scientific” approach to governance. Xi has repeatedly declared that liberal multiparty democracy will never work in China.]

By Christian Shepherd

Does U.S.-style democracy “realize dreams or create nightmares?” It appears to have turned evil like Voldemort, the dark wizard of the Harry Potter franchise. Young President Biden must have eaten too much KFC and McDonald’s, leading to a belief that democracy is like a fast-food chain with the United States supplying the ingredients.

These are among the odd arguments and analogies deployed in recent days during a Chinese Communist Party propaganda blitz to claim that China is as much a democracy as the United States. After China was excluded — along with Russia and other nations deemed autocratic — from Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” this week, Chinese state media, think tanks and officials have lined up to take potshots at the event.

But aside from mudslinging and off-color humor, the campaign also betrays Beijing’s desire to redefine international norms and present its controlling, one-party political system as not just legitimate but ideologically superior to liberal multiparty democracies.

[Taiwan loses another diplomatic partner as Nicaragua recognizes China]

A decade ago, China’s ambition to change the world’s political structures was less clear, but “now I think they genuinely do want to change the world on an ideological level,” said Charles Parton, an associate fellow at the Council on Geostrategy, a British think tank.

The former British diplomat added that the propaganda messages may appear ineffective to Western observers, but they will strike a chord with Beijing’s intended domestic audience and help Chinese President Xi Jinping legitimize his monopoly on power.

“It’s saying to the Chinese people that ‘we are the best,’ ” Parton said. “The summit is the trigger, but more generally China is keen to diminish the ideological power of the U.S. because doing so increases its own.”

The party’s claim to embody a form of democracy is not new. Being a “people’s democratic dictatorship” is written into the constitution of the People’s Republic. But China’s recent defense of its democratic credentials has been unusually direct.

“It’s presented more confidently and much more definitively as a different kind of system and as a rejection of Western-style democracy,” said Mary Gallagher, director of the International Institute at the University of Michigan.

In recent years, the party has preferred to highlight its Marxist roots and talk about the unique nature of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and its “scientific” approach to governance. Xi has repeatedly declared that liberal multiparty democracy will never work in China.

Even before Xi reasserted party control over Chinese society, calls for liberal democracy were never tolerated. The party has repeatedly crushed demands for free and fair elections, whether during the military crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, jailing dissident Liu Xiaobo in 2009 or silencing critics in Hong Kong.

Global rankings of national democratic institutions regularly label China as an autocracy. The V-Dem Institute, based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, ranked China 174th out of 179 countries on its liberal democracy index in 2020. (In the same year, the United States fell to 31st place from the top 20 2016 and 3rd in 2012.)

A white paper the State Council Information Office released recently, titled “China: Democracy That Works,” suggested that Xi’s recently coined “whole-process people’s democracy” was a legitimate inheritor of the ancient Greek ideal of citizen rule.

The document argues that what matters isn’t any particular process, such as direct leadership elections, but rather the outcome — meeting the people’s needs. Among examples it listed as proof that China’s version of democracy works is “promoting political stability, unity and vitality” and halting the spread of the coronavirus.

[China passes history resolution to enshrine open-ended rule of Xi Jinping]

One-party rule, rather than being a hindrance to democratization, is its guarantor. “It is no easy job for a country as big as China to fully represent and address the concerns of its 1.4 billion people. It must have a robust and centralized leadership,” the paper states.

The drier descriptions in official documents have been mixed with colorful commentaries from state media. One by Xinhua News Agency likened the United States to Voldemort — and, by implication, the Chinese Communist Party to Harry Potter — to cast shade on U.S.-style democracy.

“Just like young Voldemort was a star of the wizarding world in his youth, American-style democracy’s early development was an innovation,” the article said. “But just as Voldemort went down an evil path, so has American-style democracy over time gradually changed and decayed.”

The weakening of democratic norms in the United States has emboldened Beijing’s propagandists to be more determined to present the party as building a coherent and superior system of governance

“The U.S. has long been an example — bad or good — that China pays close attention to,” said Gallagher of the University of Michigan. “If the U.S. struggles in the next few national elections, that will be important in deciding how China moves forward with this re-articulation of its own political system.”

To deflect criticism in multilateral forums, Beijing has increasingly reappropriated contested ideas such as human rights and justified its actions by supplying alternative models.

China has defended the mass internment of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other mostly Muslim people in Xinjiang as a novel approach to “counterterrorism.” It justifies roundups of human rights lawyers as strengthening China’s “rule of law” and invokes “national security” to crush pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

This tactic, which may appear to be Orwellian doublespeak to critics, has allowed Beijing to make progress in weaponizing such rhetoric at the United Nations, where it often rebuffs liberal democracies’ concerns by collecting signatures, votes and statements from partner nations.

“What started as a limited, defensive argument has now morphed into a more assertive — you could say aggressive — position that makes sweeping claims about why the Chinese mode of governance is superior,” said Eva Pils, a scholar at King’s College London who studies Chinese law.

After China and Russia’s ambassadors to the United States jointly opposed the democracy summit as the product of a “Cold War mentality,” Pakistan, one of China’s closest diplomatic and military partners, announced on Wednesday that it would not take up an invitation to join.

The extent to which China wants to revise the existing international order is a live debate,” but “I would read more recent moves as an indication that the goal is to build a countervailing sphere of influence,” rather than merely weaken liberal principles, Pils said.

Lyric Li in Seoul and Pei Lin Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.

Xi Jinping’s crackdown on everything is remaking Chinese society

China passes history resolution to enshrine open-ended rule of Xi Jinping

@ The Washington Post

NEW ZEALAND PLANS TO EVENTUALLY BAN ALL CIGARETTE SALES

2021-12-09T21:15:00.002-05:00

[The proposal, expected to become law next year, would raise the smoking age year by year until it covers the entire population.]

By Natasha Frost

New Zealand unveiled a plan on Thursday to eventually ban all sales of cigarettes in the country, a decades-long effort unique in the world to prevent young people from taking up smoking.

The proposed legislation, which is expected to become law next year, would leave current smokers free to continue buying cigarettes. But it would gradually raise the smoking age, year by year, until it covers the entire population.

Starting in 2023, anyone under age 15 would be barred for life from buying cigarettes. So, for instance, in 2050 people 42 and older would still be able to buy tobacco products — but anyone younger would not.

“We want to make sure young people never start smoking, so we will make it an offense to sell or supply smoked tobacco products to new cohorts of youth,” Dr. Ayesha Verrall, the country’s associate health minister, said in Parliament on Thursday. “People aged 14 when the law comes into effect will never be able to legally purchase tobacco.”

The legislation was among several proposals announced on Thursday that aim to reduce smoking levels in New Zealand across all ethnic groups, including its poorer Indigenous Maori and Pacific Island citizens, below 5 percent by 2025. Currently the rate is just under 10 percent.

New Zealand first announced this target in 2011. Since then, it has steadily raised the price of cigarettes to among the highest in the world. A pack in New Zealand costs about 30 New Zealand dollars, or a little over $20, second only to neighboring Australia, where wages are considerably higher.

Dr. Verrall said the government was not considering raising prices beyond that point. “We’ve already seen the full impact of excise tax increases,” she said. “Going further will not help people quit. It will only further punish smokers who are struggling to kick the habit.”

Banning tobacco sales, despite the clear benefits to public health, has been a virtual nonstarter around the world, with arguments often centering on civil liberties and fears of increased smuggling. In 2010, the Himalayan nation of Bhutan prohibited the sale of tobacco products, only to suspend the restrictions last year amid worries that cigarette traffickers would bring in the coronavirus.

As New Zealand unveiled its proposal, the government acknowledged the possible effects on the black market, which currently makes up at least 10 percent of tobacco sales in the country.

It said that smuggling of tobacco products into New Zealand, particularly by organized crime groups, had been rising. “The changes proposed in this document may contribute to this problem,” the government’s proposal notes.

But Dr. Robert Beaglehole, a professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Auckland, said there were potential solutions. “We can deal with it, if we only scanned every container coming into the country, which we don’t,” he said. “The technology is there.”

Since the New Zealand government began targeting smoking, rates have fallen far below the global average: 9.4 percent of New Zealanders currently smoke, down from 18 percent in 2008. Around 14 percent of people in the United States smoke, and roughly 20 percent worldwide.

The rates are not consistent among the New Zealand population. While the government is likely to meet its target for white New Zealanders by 2025, it would need to adjust its plans to sufficiently lower smoking rates among Maori and Pacific Island communities, Dr. Verrall said.

In addition to the gradual ban on cigarette sales, the proposed legislation would increase funding for addiction services, limit where cigarettes can be sold and reduce the amount of nicotine in cigarettes. Vaping products, which the government has embraced as a safer alternative, would not be affected by the law.

The proposal did not say how the ban on sales would be enforced.

The New Zealand government has an absolute majority in Parliament, so it does not need the support of any coalition partners to make the proposals into law.

Janet Hoek, a public health expert at the University of Auckland, said the ban for future generations would help maintain the country’s gains.

“Once we get to the Smokefree 2025 goal and we’ve reduced smoking prevalence, we want to make sure that’s what the future looks like as well,” she said. The phased ban on cigarette sales is “one way of ensuring that this goal, once we reach it, is sustained,” she added.

Dr. Hoek said she hoped New Zealand’s plans would inspire other countries to pass similarly ambitious legislation, especially in light of World Health Organization estimates that a billion people will die of smoking-related causes this century.

“Now that New Zealand has made that step, I expect many other countries are going to follow suit,” she said. “This will be something that begins in New Zealand but that really has global implications.”

@ The New York Times

INDIA’S MILITARY CHIEF DIES IN HELICOPTER CRASH THAT KILLS 13

2021-12-08T22:37:00.006-05:00

[There were no immediate indications of foul play. Videos from the crash site broadcast by local news outlets showed the charred wreckage burning in a forested area, with local residents and rescuers attempting to extinguish the blaze. Local outlets quoted residents as saying the helicopter may have accidentally struck a tree.]

By Gerry Shih and Niha Masih

NEW DELHI — A military helicopter carrying India’s highest-ranking military official crashed Wednesday in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, killing him and 12 others, according to the Indian air force, which has launched an inquiry.

The Russian Mi-17V5 helicopter was carrying Chief of Defense Staff Bipin Rawat and his wife when it crashed.

“With deep regret, it has now been ascertained that Gen Bipin Rawat, Mrs Madhulika Rawat and 11 other persons on board have died in the unfortunate accident,” the air force said in a statement.

There were no immediate indications of foul play. Videos from the crash site broadcast by local news outlets showed the charred wreckage burning in a forested area, with local residents and rescuers attempting to extinguish the blaze. Local outlets quoted residents as saying the helicopter may have accidentally struck a tree.

Rawat previously survived a helicopter crash: In 2015, his Cheetah helicopter suffered an engine failure and plummeted moments after it lifted off from a military base in northeast India. Rawat suffered minor injuries.

Born into a military family, Rawat began as an infantry commander and rose to become the army chief in 2019 when he oversaw an airstrike in Pakistan’s Balakot in retaliation for a terrorist attack against Indian soldiers in Kashmir. The Indian airstrike was criticized for achieving scant military objectives, but it stoked nationalist sentiment in India just weeks before national elections.

Rawat, 63, was promoted in 2019 to chief of defense staff, a newly created role similar to the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Rawat’s mandate was to lead a military modernization effort to unify India’s army, navy and air force under one command.

On Wednesday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed Rawat as an “outstanding soldier” who “greatly contributed to modernizing our armed forces.” Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, who was for several years Rawat’s direct counterpart in the rival Pakistani army, expressed condolences via the Pakistani military’s Twitter account.

The Indian military has undergone a significant reorientation in recent years as it redeploys resources and troops once targeted toward Pakistan to confront China, its massive northern neighbor. But under Rawat’s watch, the Indian military has seen its budget relative to the government’s total expenditures shrink consistently year after year as India’s economy sagged and its outlays on costs such as pensions have risen.

As Indian and Chinese troops skirmished along the remote Himalayan border in recent years, Rawat had been one of the most vocal Indian officials to characterize Beijing rather than Pakistan as the top threat to India. He pulled the Indian military closer to the Biden administration, seeking to counter China. In October, he visited Washington to discuss closer collaboration with his U.S. counterpart, Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

After his death, the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi issued a statement calling Rawat “a strong friend and partner of the United States, overseeing a major expansion of India’s defense cooperation with the U.S. military.”

Pravin Sawhney, a veteran defense analyst and editor of Force Magazine in the Indian capital, said the military overhaul that Rawat led was still old-fashioned and treated China as an extension of India’s traditional adversary — Pakistan — rather than as a far more sophisticated rival that could deploy advanced technology and cyberweapons.

Rawat’s successor will need to continue the modernization push but in a different way, Sawhney said.

“China today is three generations ahead of India militarily,” he said. “Something new is required.”

India and Chinese troops in fresh skirmish

As Biden hosts first Quad summit at the White House, China is the background music

@ The Washington Post

HOW MANY COUNTRIES WILL FOLLOW THE U.S. OFFICIAL SNUB OF BEIJING’S OLYMPICS?

2021-12-07T21:36:00.003-05:00

[Australia said it would join the diplomatic boycott. Several others have signaled that they would find ways to protest China’s human rights abuses.]

By Steven Lee Myers and Steven Erlanger

SEOUL — Neither President Biden nor other American officials are going, but the Russian leader might. New Zealand says it decided months ago that its diplomats wouldn’t be attending. On Wednesday, Australia said its officials would be staying home, too. Political leaders of other nations are expected to bow out, whether they announce an explicit reason or not.

In less than two months, China will open the 24th Winter Olympics in Beijing under the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic and now also a diplomatic boycott intended to protest the host country’s repressive policies.

The White House announcement on Monday that it would send no official delegation prompted anger in Beijing, where Chinese officials on Tuesday once again vowed to retaliate.

“This will only make people see the sinister intentions of the American side and will only make the American side lose more morality and credibility,” said a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zhao Lijian.

A prominent columnist for state media, Chen Weihua of China Daily, bitingly expressed hope that Mr. Biden would live long enough to see China boycott the Summer Olympics to be held in Los Angeles in 2028.

Although the effect of Mr. Biden’s decision on other countries remains to be seen, several have already signaled that they, too, will seek ways to express displeasure with China’s policies while stopping short of prohibiting athletes from attending.

The decision will be especially complicated for European nations, which have sharply criticized China’s abuses of human rights and democracy in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

The European Union has just renewed for another year the business and travel restrictions it imposed a year ago on officials involved in the crackdown on Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang.

And in July, the European Parliament, which often takes strong moral positions, overwhelmingly passed a nonbinding resolution calling on diplomatic officials to boycott the Winter Olympics “unless the Chinese Government demonstrates a verifiable improvement in the human rights situation in Hong Kong, the Xinjiang Uyghur Region, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and elsewhere in China.”

At the same time, many European nations have extensive trade ties with Beijing that they do not want to jeopardize, especially for a measure that is likely only to offend China, not change it.

An official response on Tuesday from the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, to a question about the boycott offered no support for the American position.

Major sporting events like the Olympics, with their universal audiences, “can be instrumental for spreading positive values and promoting freedom and human rights at global level,” the commission said in a statement. “We are ready to contribute to that end. However, such platforms should not be used for political propaganda.”

Attendance at the Olympics in whatever form is a decision for individual member states, which are sure to be divided on this issue, as on much else.

Italy would not join the American boycott, an Italian government official said on Tuesday, while France, Germany and Britain were noncommittal.

If the Italian position changes, however, it will be a direct blow to Beijing. Italy will host the Winter Games in 2026 and would be expected by Olympic tradition to send official emissaries to these Games, accepting the baton, as it were, from one host to another.

At a news conference on Wednesday local time, Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia, citing concerns over human rights abuses in Xinjiang and China’s criticism of Australia’s plans for new nuclear submarines — along with Beijing’s reluctance to discuss the issues — said the country’s government officials would “not be going to China for these games. Australian athletes will though.”

Only a handful of world leaders attended the Summer Games in Tokyo, which were held after a year’s delay because of the coronavirus pandemic. They included President Emmanuel Macron of France, whose country will host the next Summer Olympics in Paris in 2024, and he may be expected to attend these games because of protocol.

His office said on Tuesday that Mr. Macron had taken note of the U.S. diplomatic boycott and that France would “coordinate at the European level” on the issue, Agence France-Presse reported.

“When we have concerns about human rights we let the Chinese know,” Mr. Macron’s office said. “We took sanctions related to Xinjiang last March.”

Germany has not sworn in its new government yet, and while the coalition is expected to take a somewhat tougher line on China, Olaf Scholz, the incoming chancellor, refused to provide an answer on Tuesday. At a news conference, after a third question on the topic, he simply said, “We think it’s important to do everything you can to make the world work together internationally.”

Britain has made no decision on a diplomatic boycott either, but there are calls from within the ruling Conservative Party to do so

Iain Duncan Smith, a former leader of the party and a vocal critic of Beijing’s policies, welcomed the U.S. announcement and urged Britain to follow suit.

The British government “needs to do the same and announce a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics,” Mr. Duncan Smith wrote on Twitter, adding in another post that many in Parliament favor such a move.

The British government’s approach to China has been toughening amid growing tension over Chinese policy in its former colony, Hong Kong, a direct embarrassment to London. Speaking before the U.S. announcement, Britain’s deputy prime minister and former foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, told LBC News: “I can tell you categorically I will not be attending the Winter Olympic Games.”

China’s critics praised the White House for focusing international attention on China’s long record of human rights abuses. Those include crackdowns in Tibet and Hong Kong, as well as in Xinjiang, where more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslims have cycled through mass detention and re-education camps.

The International Campaign for Tibet said in a statement that a boycott was “the right choice both morally and strategically.”

Canada and Australia, both of which have tangled diplomatically with China this year, are also considering whether to join the boycott.

“Australia must not be complacent but move ahead with speed to demonstrate our long commitment to upholding human rights and calling out where they are breached,” Eric Abetz, a senator from that country’s governing Liberal Party, said in a statement. He has been calling for a diplomatic boycott since last year.

Although the American decision had been expected and, administration officials said, conveyed to Beijing in advance of Monday’s announcement, the Communist Party government appeared flustered, as well as angered.

Censors appeared to bar searches online for the word “boycott,” while initial reports in state media focused on statements by Chinese officials calling the efforts a politicization of a sporting event in violation of the Olympic spirit.

Officials in Beijing last week tried to pre-empt any prospect of a diplomatic boycott by saying they would not extend invitations to foreign leaders to attend the Winter Games, leaving that task to national Olympic committees around the world instead.

That, however, contradicted a statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs last month that the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, would attend at the invitation of China’s leader, Xi Jinping. Mr. Xi attended the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014 at a time when Russia, too, faced diplomatic boycotts.

For many countries, especially China’s Asian neighbors, the question of how to engage with Beijing around the Olympic Games has been fraught. Given the diplomatic sensitivities, some nations have sidestepped any explicit rebuke of Beijing.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan said on Tuesday that his country had not yet decided who would represent the country in Beijing, though some lawmakers have called for a boycott because of human rights abuses, territorial disputes and Chinese aggression in regional seas.

New Zealand said that it had also expressed concerns about human rights in China, but that it would not send top officials mostly because of the pandemic.

The obstacles to attending the Beijing Olympics are not just diplomatic.

China has very stringent quarantine rules, requiring everyone who enters the country to spend two weeks in isolation, followed by a week or two of daily health monitoring at home or a hotel, with many restrictions on travel and social interactions.

The annoyances of the pandemic could diminish attendance, as they did in Tokyo. They could also give cover to nations that would simply rather not attend.

Mr. Putin, an avid sportsman and an increasingly close ally of Mr. Xi’s, has not yet given final confirmation of his attendance despite China’s public statement last month that he would attend the opening ceremony, to be held on Feb. 4 in Beijing’s National Stadium, popularly known as the Bird’s Nest.

Steven Lee Myers reported from Seoul, South Korea, and Steven Erlanger from Brussels. Reporting or research was contributed by Yan Zhuang in Melbourne, Australia; Keith Bradsher and Claire Fu in Beijing; Choe Sang-hun in Seoul; Hisako Ueno in Tokyo; Stephen Castle in London; Gaia Pianigiani in Rome; Constant Méheut in Paris; and Christopher F. Schuetze in Berlin.

Steven Lee Myers is the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times. He joined The Times in 1989 and has previously worked as a correspondent in Moscow, Baghdad and Washington. He is the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin,” published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015. @stevenleemyers • Facebook

Steven Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe, based in Brussels. He previously reported from London, Paris, Jerusalem, Berlin, Prague, Moscow and Bangkok. @StevenErlanger

@ The New York Times