The China Thread

[Jacob]

Do you have a good link for this story?

Not immediately at hand. I'll be looking for it.

The source is dinner table conversation derived from Chinese internet social media, especially Chinese expat social media. The track record of my sources - in my experience - about 75% chance of being accurate, and 25% percent chance of being an inaccurate overstatement.*

I'm 100% certain that certain wetlands near my wife's hometown have are being converted to farmland - local wildlife be damned - and that other outlying areas of her town (including ones I've visited) are being converted to farmland too.

... but I'll see if I can find a more substantial source than that, and if so I'll share it.

[Jacob]

This article is pretty good I think - you'll have to use google translate (or equivalent) though: https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/shehui/gt-04282023032947.html

[Hamilcar]

Jacob since you're plugged in to the discourse: Is China busy sending workers to the Russian far east? You know, just in case they need to protect Chinese-speakers on traditionally Chinese lands from a Nazi regime?

[Jacob]

Jacob since you're plugged in to the discourse: Is China busy sending workers to the Russian far east? You know, just in case they need to protect Chinese-speakers on traditionally Chinese lands from a Nazi regime?

If they are it's not something that's high profile or discussed widely to my knowledge.

[viper37]

34 years ago, absolutely nothing happened in Tiananmen Square (Official Wikipedia page for the place lists nothing for 1989).
There is however, a detailed page about the incident.

[grumbler]

34 years ago, absolutely nothing happened in Tiananmen Square (Official Wikipedia page for the place lists nothing for 1989).
There is however, a detailed page about the incident.

The TS wiki pages includes, in a summary of key events occurring in the square, "the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 after the death of Hu Yaobang, which was suppressed in a military crackdown" with a link to the wiki article "1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre."

[Jacob]

Something that I don't think many in the West really think of anymore is that the protests were nationwide. My wife remembers sitting on the back of her father's bike after school and riding by burning buildings and angry crowds in her hometown.

She's also talked about how VHS tapes were passed around and everyone (well, the grown ups) knew what happened in Beijing, seeing the reports.

On a related note, a number of the university "blank page" protestors protesting excessive covid measures have just disappeared.

[Josquius]

Nationwide as in major cities right?
Didn't they stop tianmin by bringing in rural (mongol?) army units who saw no issue smashing student skulls?

[grumbler]

Nationwide as in major cities right?
Didn't they stop tianmin by bringing in rural (mongol?) army units who saw no issue smashing student skulls?

Nationwide as in hundreds of cities.

The massacres in Beijing were not in Tiananman Square (which the students eventually evacuated) but in the surrounding city.  The protests were widespread in the city and the some of the troops were undisciplined in theirs shooting (killing hundreds of bystanders and people in buildings along the routes the army was taking).  Other units refused to use force against their own civilians and there's some evidence of intra-army fighting.

The most brutal assaults were performed by the 38th Army, which was not recruited from any specific group of people.  There were a number of divisions from the Northern Command, which bordered Mongolia, but I've not seen evidence that they were especially brutal.

I had heard some time ago (and believed) that the most violent troops were non-Han, but discovered after some research that this did not appear to be the case.

[Jacob]

The CCP is alleged to have used TikTok data to track Hong Kong protestors, and to have access to US user data:

A former executive at ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the popular short-video app TikTok, says in a legal filing that some members of the ruling Communist Party used data held by the company to identify and locate protesters in Hong Kong.

Yintao Yu, formerly head of engineering for ByteDance in the United States, says those same people had access to U.S. user data, an accusation that the company denies.

Yu, who worked for the company in 2018, made the allegations in a recent filing for a wrongful dismissal case filed in May in the San Francisco Superior Court. In the documents submitted to the court, he said ByteDance had a "superuser credential" — also known as a "god credential" — that enabled a special committee of Chinese Communist Party members stationed at the company to view all data collected by ByteDance, including those of U.S. users.

The credential acted as a "backdoor to any barrier ByteDance had supposedly installed to protect data from the C.C.P's surveillance," the filing says.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tiktok-hong-kong-1.6868141

... I don't think that'll surprise anyone here, of course.

[Tamas]

Yeah I'd be shocked if the Chinese state doesn't have access to TikTok data everywhere. I just cannot see such a mega-influential product and company be free of government oversight and influence (at the very least covert) in a country like China. Just does not happen.

[DGuller]

I think the story has been clear enough about TikTok for a while.  I wonder about Telegram:  so many people are using it to get the news about the war, and so many rumors are floating that FSB has the keys to everything.

[Jacob]

I think the story has been clear enough about TikTok for a while.  I wonder about Telegram:  so many people are using it to get the news about the war, and so many rumors are floating that FSB has the keys to everything.

I would be shocked if the FSB does not have keys to everything at Telegram.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah I've had conversations about Telegram through work.

It is essential in that part of the world and elsewhere (huge in Turkey too). Which mean it's where information and people are.

It has a reputation for being secure and good for privacy. They did have some fights with the Russian state (it was banned for a couple of years in Russia to no great success). So it is widely used in activist circles - again particularly in parts of Eastern Europe, Turkey etc. From my understanding, that reputation is unfounded and from a cybersecurity perspective it is one of the least secure or private social media platforms, especially from a default user perspective. I don't know if the FSB has some privileged access. From my understanding I'm not sure they'd need it because every security agency can do a lot of snooping on Telegram.

I remember speaking to someone about this in the context of Turkey when there were protests and loads of opposition groups organising on Telegram and deliberately avoiding WhatsApp because of Snowden/NSA etc etc. There were lots of memes of how unsafe it was. But in reality Telegram is far less secure and hugely easier for Turkish intelligence agencies to snoop on. It was such a thing that I actually heard theories that some of those memes were maybe basically digital agents provocateurs to undermine trust in more secure networks and build it up in a less secure one - so the very people state security agencies want to monitor are herded onto a network that is easier to monitor.

[Jacob]

So apparently German car makers are losing significant market share to Chinese companies in China... and the Chinese cars are also making inroads in the German market.

Reportedly, you get more for your money for the Chinese cars and the quality is... not bad? Good, even?