The China Thread

[Monoriu]

A material portion of the Chinese population are very nationalistic, and want to go to war with Taiwan.  They think they'll win easily.  If there is an alternative, that party could call for an immediate invasion of Taiwan, war with Japan to reclaim some island, war with Vietnam to reclaim some historical land, etc.

Naturally the CCP has spent decades indoctrinating them to want those things. So we must preserve the CCP in order to save us from the CCP? Fascinating.

It isn't up to the US    You and I are merely spectators. 

[Admiral Yi]

Valmy's making an argument about enlightened self interest, not moral responsibility.

[Threviel]

It's like the arab spring, hhen Egypt went democratic the people immediately wanted to declare war on Israel. I imagine the same would happen in China. Well, not war on Israel, but Taiwan perhaps.

[Josquius]

Iran is not more democratic than China, in that both have sham elections.  I'd argue that China's government is more representative of what its people want than Iran's is. Irn's government would be much more liberal if it's people had the choice, IMO, while China's would not.  The Chinese urban, educated types are reportedly okay with world domination, even if it means some risk.

Iffy.
Tehranites for sure would rather have something far more liberal than what they do have.
All signs suggest the rural majority is far more conservative than the very western city folks.

Though I'd definitely agree the balance is less in favour of keeping things as they are than in China I don't think we can call it a majority.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Maybe. But the thing about free and fair elections is that you get more than one. Eventually the rioters would lose.

They wouldn't be rioting if there were free and fair elections.

exactly

[garbon]

A lengthy, but impactful read. Below is mainly just the background/setup; link continues with the recall of life in the camps.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/12/uighur-xinjiang-re-education-camp-china-gulbahar-haitiwaji

'Our souls are dead': how I survived a Chinese 're-education' camp for Uighurs

The man on the phone said he worked for the oil company, "In accounting, actually". His voice was unfamiliar to me. At first, I couldn't make sense of what he was calling about. It was November 2016, and I had been on unpaid leave from the company since I left China and moved to France 10 years earlier. There was static on the line; I had a hard time hearing him.

"You must come back to Karamay to sign documents concerning your forthcoming retirement, Madame Haitiwaji," he said. Karamay was the city in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang where I'd worked for the oil company for more than 20 years.

"In that case, I'd like to grant power of attorney," I said. "A friend of mine in Karamay takes care of my administrative affairs. Why should I come back for some paperwork? Why go all that way for such a trifle? Why now?"

The man had no answers for me. He simply said he would call me back in two days after looking into the possibility of letting my friend act on my behalf.

My husband, Kerim, had left Xinjiang in 2002 to look for work. He tried first in Kazakhstan, but came back disillusioned after a year. Then in Norway. Then France, where he had applied for asylum. Once he was settled there, our two girls and I would join him.

Kerim had always known he would leave Xinjiang. The idea had taken root even before we were hired by the oil company. We had met as students in Urumqi, the largest city in Xinjiang province, and, as new graduates, had begun looking for work. This was in 1988. In the job ads in the newspapers, there was often a little phrase in small print: No Uighurs. This never left him. While I tried to overlook the evidence of discrimination that followed us everywhere, with Kerim, it became an obsession.

After graduation, we were offered jobs as engineers at the oil company in Karamay. We were lucky. But then there was the red envelope episode. At lunar new year, when the boss handed out the annual bonuses, the red envelopes given to Uighur workers contained less than those given to our colleagues who belonged to China's dominant ethnic group, the Han. Soon after, all the Uighurs were transferred out of the central office and moved to the outskirts of town. A small group objected, but I didn't dare. A few months later, when a senior position came up, Kerim applied. He had the right qualifications and the seniority. There was no reason he shouldn't get the position. But the post went to an employee who belonged to a Han worker who didn't even have an engineering degree. One night in 2000, Kerim came home and announced that he had quit. "I've had enough," he said.

What my husband was experiencing was all too familiar. Since 1955, when communist China annexed Xinjiang as an "autonomous region", we Uighurs have been seen as a thorn in the side of the Middle Kingdom. Xinjiang is a strategic corridor and far too valuable for China's ruling Communist party to risk losing control of it. The party has invested too much in the "new silk road", the infrastructure project designed to link China to Europe via central Asia, of which our region is an important axis. Xinjiang is essential to President Xi Jinping's great plan – that is, a peaceful Xinjiang, open for business, cleansed of its separatist tendencies and its ethnic tensions. In short, Xinjiang without Uighurs.

My daughters and I fled to France to join my husband in May 2006, just before Xinjiang entered an unprecedented period of repression. My daughters, 13 and 8 at the time, were given refugee status, as was their father. In seeking asylum, my husband had made a clean break with the past. Obtaining a French passport in effect stripped him of his Chinese nationality. For me, the prospect of turning in my passport held a terrible implication: I would never be able to return to Xinjiang. How could I ever say goodbye to my roots, to the loved ones I'd left behind – my parents, my brothers and sisters, their children? I imagined my mother, getting on in years, dying alone in her village in the northern mountains. Giving up my Chinese nationality meant giving up on her, too. I couldn't bring myself to do it. So instead, I'd applied for a residence permit that was renewable every 10 years.

After the phone call, my head was buzzing with questions as I looked around the quiet living room of our apartment in Boulogne. Why did that man want me to go back to Karamay? Was it a ploy so the police could interrogate me? Nothing like this had happened to any of the other Uighurs I knew in France.

The man called back two days later. "Granting power of attorney will not be possible, Madame Haitiwaji. You must come to Karamay in person." I gave in. After all, it was only a matter of a few documents.

"Fine. I'll be there as soon as I can," I said.

When I hung up, a shiver ran down my spine. I dreaded going back to Xinjiang. Kerim had been doing his best to reassure me for two days now, but I had a bad feeling about it. At this time of year, Karamay city was in the grip of a brutal winter. Gusts of icy wind howled down the avenues, between the shops, houses and apartment buildings. A few bundled-up figures braved the elements, hugging the walls, but on the whole, there was not a soul to be seen. But what I feared most of all were the ever-stricter measures regulating Xinjiang. Anyone who set foot outside their home could be arrested for no reason at all.

...

[Josquius]

Well this is dissapointing news. This guy has really started to break through as an up and coming comedian in the uk

BBC News - Uncle Roger comedian deletes video with China critic
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-55651798

BBCs app has stopped copy pasting

[Sheilbh]

Also

Huawei patent mentions use of Uighur-spotting tech
By Leo Kelion
Technology desk editor

A Huawei patent has been brought to light for a system that identifies people who appear to be of Uighur origin among images of pedestrians.

The filing is one of several of its kind involving leading Chinese technology companies, discovered by a US research company and shared with BBC News.

Huawei had previously said none of its technologies was designed to identify ethnic groups.

It now plans to alter the patent.

Forced-labour camps

The company indicated this would involve asking the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) - the country's patent authority - for permission to delete the reference to Uighurs in the Chinese-language document.

Uighur people belong to a mostly Muslim ethnic group that lives mainly in Xinjiang province, in north-western China.

Government authorities are accused of using high-tech surveillance against them and detaining many in forced-labour camps, where children are sometimes separated from their parents.

Beijing says the camps offer voluntary education and training.

"One technical requirement of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security's video-surveillance networks is the detection of ethnicity - particularly of Uighurs," said Maya Wang, from Human Rights Watch.

"While in the rest of the world, such targeting and persecution of a people on the basis of their ethnicity would be completely unacceptable, the persecution and severe discrimination of Uighurs in many aspects of life in China remain unchallenged because Uighurs have no power in China."

Body movements

Huawei's patent was originally filed in July 2018, in conjunction with the Chinese Academy of Sciences .

It describes ways to use deep-learning artificial-intelligence techniques to identify various features of pedestrians photographed or filmed in the street.

It focuses on addressing the fact different body postures - for example whether someone is sitting or standing - can affect accuracy.

But the document also lists attributes by which a person might be targeted, which it says can include "race (Han [China's biggest ethnic group], Uighur)".

A spokesman said this reference should not have been included.

"Huawei opposes discrimination of all types, including the use of technology to carry out ethnic discrimination," he said.

"Identifying individuals' race was never part of the research-and-development project.

"It should never have become part of the application.

"And we are taking proactive steps to amend it.

"We are continuously working to ensure new and evolving technology is developed and applied with the utmost care and integrity."

'Confidential' document

The patent was brought to light by the video-surveillance research group IPVM.

It had previously flagged a separate "confidential" document on Huawei's website, referencing work on a "Uighur alert" system.

In that case, Huawei said the page referenced a test rather than a real-world application and denied selling systems that identified people by their ethnicity.

On Wednesday, Tom Tugendhat, who chairs the UK Parliament's Foreign Affairs Select Committee and leads the Conservative Party's China Research Group, told BBC News: "Chinese tech giants supporting the brutal assault on the Uighur population show us why we as consumers and as a society must be careful with who we buy our products from or award business to.

"Developing ethnic-labelling technology for use by a repressive regime is clearly not behaviour that lives up to our standards."

Facial-recognition software

IPVM also discovered references to Uighur people in patents filed by the Chinese artificial-intelligence company Sensetime and image-recognition specialist Megvii.

Sensetime's filing, from July 2019, discusses ways facial-recognition software could be used for more efficient "security protection", such as searching for "a middle-aged Uighur with sunglasses and a beard" or a Uighur person wearing a mask.

A Sensetime spokeswoman said the references were "regrettable".

"We understand the importance of our responsibilities, which is why we began to develop our AI Code of Ethics in mid-2019," she said, adding the patent had predated this code.

Ethnic-labelling solutions

Megvii's June 2019 patent, meanwhile, described a way of relabelling pictures of faces tagged incorrectly in a database.

It said the classifications could be based on ethnicity, for example, including "Han, Uighur, non-Han, non-Uighur and unknown".

The company told BBC News it would now withdraw the patent application.

"Megvii recognises that the language used in our 2019 patent application is open to misunderstanding," it said.

"Megvii has not developed and will not develop or sell racial- or ethnic-labelling solutions.

"Megvii acknowledges that, in the past, we have focused on our commercial development and lacked appropriate control of our marketing, sales, and operations materials.

"We are undertaking measures to correct the situation."

Attribute-recognition model

IPVM also flagged image-recognition patents filed by two of China's biggest technology conglomerates, Alibaba and Baidu, that referenced classifying people by ethnicity but did not specifically mention the Uighur people by name.

Alibaba responded: "Racial or ethnic discrimination or profiling in any form violates our policies and values.

"We never intended our technology to be used for and will not permit it to be used for targeting specific ethnic groups."

And Baidu said: "When filing for a patent, the document notes are meant as an example of a technical explanation, in this case describing what the attribute-recognition model is rather than representing the expected implementation of the invention.

"We do not and will not permit our technology to be used to identify or target specific ethnic groups."

But Human Rights Watch said it still had concerns.

"Any company that sells video-surveillance software and systems to the Chinese police would have to ensure that they meet the police's requirements, which includes the capacity for ethnicity detection," Ms Wang said.

"The right thing for these companies to do is to immediately cease their sale and maintenance of surveillance equipment, software and systems, to the Chinese police."

[Barrister]

Well this is dissapointing news. This guy has really started to break through as an up and coming comedian in the uk

BBC News - Uncle Roger comedian deletes video with China critic
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-55651798

BBCs app has stopped copy pasting

I watch this guys videos.  He's funny but kind-of one note.  I even watched the banned video last night - was pretty innocuous - just made fun of this guys dumpling-making skills.

[garbon]

Also

Huawei patent mentions use of Uighur-spotting tech
By Leo Kelion
Technology desk editor

A Huawei patent has been brought to light for a system that identifies people who appear to be of Uighur origin among images of pedestrians.

The filing is one of several of its kind involving leading Chinese technology companies, discovered by a US research company and shared with BBC News.

Huawei had previously said none of its technologies was designed to identify ethnic groups.

It now plans to alter the patent.

Forced-labour camps

The company indicated this would involve asking the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) - the country's patent authority - for permission to delete the reference to Uighurs in the Chinese-language document.

Uighur people belong to a mostly Muslim ethnic group that lives mainly in Xinjiang province, in north-western China.

Government authorities are accused of using high-tech surveillance against them and detaining many in forced-labour camps, where children are sometimes separated from their parents.

Beijing says the camps offer voluntary education and training.

"One technical requirement of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security's video-surveillance networks is the detection of ethnicity - particularly of Uighurs," said Maya Wang, from Human Rights Watch.

"While in the rest of the world, such targeting and persecution of a people on the basis of their ethnicity would be completely unacceptable, the persecution and severe discrimination of Uighurs in many aspects of life in China remain unchallenged because Uighurs have no power in China."

Body movements

Huawei's patent was originally filed in July 2018, in conjunction with the Chinese Academy of Sciences .

It describes ways to use deep-learning artificial-intelligence techniques to identify various features of pedestrians photographed or filmed in the street.

It focuses on addressing the fact different body postures - for example whether someone is sitting or standing - can affect accuracy.

But the document also lists attributes by which a person might be targeted, which it says can include "race (Han [China's biggest ethnic group], Uighur)".

A spokesman said this reference should not have been included.

"Huawei opposes discrimination of all types, including the use of technology to carry out ethnic discrimination," he said.

"Identifying individuals' race was never part of the research-and-development project.

"It should never have become part of the application.

"And we are taking proactive steps to amend it.

"We are continuously working to ensure new and evolving technology is developed and applied with the utmost care and integrity."

'Confidential' document

The patent was brought to light by the video-surveillance research group IPVM.

It had previously flagged a separate "confidential" document on Huawei's website, referencing work on a "Uighur alert" system.

In that case, Huawei said the page referenced a test rather than a real-world application and denied selling systems that identified people by their ethnicity.

On Wednesday, Tom Tugendhat, who chairs the UK Parliament's Foreign Affairs Select Committee and leads the Conservative Party's China Research Group, told BBC News: "Chinese tech giants supporting the brutal assault on the Uighur population show us why we as consumers and as a society must be careful with who we buy our products from or award business to.

"Developing ethnic-labelling technology for use by a repressive regime is clearly not behaviour that lives up to our standards."

Facial-recognition software

IPVM also discovered references to Uighur people in patents filed by the Chinese artificial-intelligence company Sensetime and image-recognition specialist Megvii.

Sensetime's filing, from July 2019, discusses ways facial-recognition software could be used for more efficient "security protection", such as searching for "a middle-aged Uighur with sunglasses and a beard" or a Uighur person wearing a mask.

A Sensetime spokeswoman said the references were "regrettable".

"We understand the importance of our responsibilities, which is why we began to develop our AI Code of Ethics in mid-2019," she said, adding the patent had predated this code.

Ethnic-labelling solutions

Megvii's June 2019 patent, meanwhile, described a way of relabelling pictures of faces tagged incorrectly in a database.

It said the classifications could be based on ethnicity, for example, including "Han, Uighur, non-Han, non-Uighur and unknown".

The company told BBC News it would now withdraw the patent application.

"Megvii recognises that the language used in our 2019 patent application is open to misunderstanding," it said.

"Megvii has not developed and will not develop or sell racial- or ethnic-labelling solutions.

"Megvii acknowledges that, in the past, we have focused on our commercial development and lacked appropriate control of our marketing, sales, and operations materials.

"We are undertaking measures to correct the situation."

Attribute-recognition model

IPVM also flagged image-recognition patents filed by two of China's biggest technology conglomerates, Alibaba and Baidu, that referenced classifying people by ethnicity but did not specifically mention the Uighur people by name.

Alibaba responded: "Racial or ethnic discrimination or profiling in any form violates our policies and values.

"We never intended our technology to be used for and will not permit it to be used for targeting specific ethnic groups."

And Baidu said: "When filing for a patent, the document notes are meant as an example of a technical explanation, in this case describing what the attribute-recognition model is rather than representing the expected implementation of the invention.

"We do not and will not permit our technology to be used to identify or target specific ethnic groups."

But Human Rights Watch said it still had concerns.

"Any company that sells video-surveillance software and systems to the Chinese police would have to ensure that they meet the police's requirements, which includes the capacity for ethnicity detection," Ms Wang said.

"The right thing for these companies to do is to immediately cease their sale and maintenance of surveillance equipment, software and systems, to the Chinese police."

God...

[garbon]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/21/china-deal-damages-eus-human-rights-credibility-meps-to-say

China deal damages EU's human rights credibility, MEPs to say

European commission will come under fire over agreement that is already causing tensions with US

Transatlantic tensions over how to handle China will come into the open next week when MEPs condemn the European commission for rushing to sign a controversial investment agreement with China that they say undermines the EU's credibility on human rights.

The criticism, echoing views held inside the Biden administration in the US, will confirm the view of those including the UK that believe the determination of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to secure the China deal, and assert European autonomy from Washington on China, was a geopolitical blunder. The EU had set a deadline of the end of 2020 to reach the agreement.

The most complete analysis of the agreement yet published by the Institut Montaigne finds the agreement could not have been negotiated at a worse time, provides minimal additional market access and contains currently "next to no means" to enforce Chinese assurances over the eradication of forced labour.

The commission oversold the deal, largely due to pressure from Merkel, the report's author, François Godement, told the Guardian.

The agreement, already a source of tension between the EU and the Biden administration, is due to be published in full on Friday, and the European parliament is set to pass a resolution next week condemning the way the agreement was rushed through and undermined the EU's credibility on global human rights.

MEPs have a right to ratify the agreement and, according to Godement, this may take as long as a year. The delay will give the US time to seek changes to the agreement if it feels necessary.

The new secretary of state, Antony Blinken, told the Senate on Tuesday that he believed China was committing genocide in Xinjiang province, remarks that indicate the Biden team are going to push a tough trade approach to Beijing.

A motion due to be passed by the European parliament next week will "regret the fact that the decision for a political conclusion of the comprehensive agreement on investment (CAI) has not reflected the European parliament's requests in previous resolutions on Hong Kong for using investment negotiations as a leverage tool aiming at preserving Hong Kong's high degree of autonomy, as well as its basic rights and freedoms".

Godement argues the deal allows China "to build on Europe's claims to have advanced its values while escaping enforcement and remedies on the issues that are at the heart of current public debates: environment and labour".

He added: "Given China's track record, it is impossible to rely on goodwill to implement commitments and unwise to believe that on key issues, a top-down political process between both parties can be substituted to legal arbitration.

"On WTO-plus issues, the deal fails to put a secure mechanism of implementation in place."

No deadline is set for China to meet its International Labour Organization obligations.

He says that the EU is risking disaster for its interests and irrelevance for its values by going it alone and overestimating its potential for "strategic autonomy".

British diplomats, meanwhile, see the EU-China investment deal as a potential opening for the UK to offer itself as a better ally to the US on China than the EU.

But the British effort to portray itself as Biden's true ally on China is weakened by the fact that, whatever the rhetoric of Boris Johnson's government, UK investment in China is growing fast.

Foreign investment into China is up 6.2% to just under 1tn RMB (£110bn) in 2020, with the UK as one of the largest investors. British investment into China increased by 31% year-on-year, second only to the Netherlands in terms of investment growth.

The UK government is also resisting a human rights confrontation with China. It fended off an all-party effort to give the courts a chance to designate China guilty of genocide on the day that Blinken said China was intent on genocide in Xinjiang province.

The UK has not, unlike the US government, imposed any sanctions on Chinese officials for their role in suppressing democracy in Hong Kong, or for setting up "rehabilitation" camps for Uighur Muslims.

[Jacob]

So the current Chinese rumour mill is that Xi recently had brain surgery and that it "went well" meaning he survived. However the metaphor used was "a leaking water pipe fixed with tape." He can do things like stringing eight words together, according to the rumours, but it leaves him exhausted. He hasn't been seen in public recently, and any sightings in the near future are likely to be a body double wearing mask and hat

I don't know how much truth there is to it, but I'm putting it down for those who are interested.

[Syt]

[Josquius]

So the current Chinese rumour mill is that Xi recently had brain surgery and that it "went well" meaning he survived. However the metaphor used was "a leaking water pipe fixed with tape." He can do things like stringing eight words together, according to the rumours, but it leaves him exhausted. He hasn't been seen in public recently, and any sightings in the near future are likely to be a body double wearing mask and hat

I don't know how much truth there is to it, but I'm putting it down for those who are interested.

No desire to wish death on him but I do wish him a happy a few decades spending all his time playing golf or mahjong or whatever he's into.

[garbon]

I'm going to attent this online event on Monday eve.

https://www.csw.org.uk/2020/12/23/event/4933/article.htm

25 January 2021: Together for Uyghurs a Holocaust Memorial event