Non-China cities with Chinese police stations include:
> Amsterdam, Athens, Belgrade, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Budapest, Dublin, Florence, Frankfurt, Glasgow, Lisbon, London, Madeira, Madrid, Milan, New York City, Paris, Porto, Prague, Quito, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Sao Paulo, Slovakia, Stockholm, Rotterdam, Toronto, Tokyo, Valencia, Viña del Mar, Vienna.
> some countries where fugitives may have fled have either avoided signing extradition agreements with the PRC or have rescinded them following the introduction of the National Security Law to Hong Kong in 2020. These include Australia, Canada, Germany, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK, and the United States.
> ..PRC authorities ..use alternative means to apprehend fugitives. “Persuasion” has become a common tactic, which human rights groups have called “involuntary returns.” Such returns are achieved by threats against family members in the PRC, directly approaching and intimidating the fugitive overseas, or outright kidnapping ..Involuntary returns ..comprise a mix of genuine criminal fugitives, officials who have fallen out of favor with the CCP leadership, and others pursued for their religious or political beliefs.
Note that in Australia I know first hand of Chinese university students having their families back home threatened due to them participating in protests.
I have no doubt that this is not just about criminal activity but any activity that the PRC does not approve of.
Arrest and trade any Chinese spies (that’s what they are. There’s no such thing as foreign secret police. They’re called spies and terrorists) and barter them for Chinese political prisoners coerced in this way.
I'm sure that there are plenty of crimes these folks could be arrested for, and then subjected to the normal legal process. Kidnapping and intimidation are criminal offenses, at least where I live
What makes you think this doesn't happen if there is good evidence of wrongdoing? In democracies, we don't just randomly arrest people, we need actual evidence that holds up in court.
>>In democracies, we don't just randomly arrest people,
There are tons of proof and examples of this being false. Lots of example of police targeting people then finding the law they broke, instead of starting with a crime and finding who did it
Do you understand that China will arrest some American citizens afterwards and will trade them for those "spies"?
Some western people are completely out of bounds. You're basically suggesting trading humans. It's called slavery. To arrest someone and trade him for someone. What's going on. You're not the only person suggesting it. I saw similar comments on other websites. For example someone suggested to arrest some random Russian sportsman and trade him for American sportsman girl who was arrested because of marihuana found on her in airport.
It's just wrong. It creates all the kinds of wrong incentives. If you think that someone is a spy and you can prove it, go ahead and put him in jail or deport him or apply whatever measures law requires. But no human trading.
Not parent's point. The point was not to conflate Prisoners of War (or Prisoners of Spy War here?) with slaves. Slaves are enslaved to provide labor without rights and payments, are treated as commodity, and are traded for other commodities, with explicit monetary value. In the case of spy prisoners, people who are in jail because they broke some law are traded for other people in jail in another country who broke another law, because they are valuable to their country of origin, and they too want to return to their home country instead of being in jail in a foreign country. They are not used for labor and they do not have monetary value that can be used in a market.
Remove diplomatic status for anyone involved in such activities, put oversight on the diplomacy, make a big international public stink out of it (this matters), share intel with other governments and create a working body to root out this, implement local programs so that schools/companies etc. are aware that this happens and should report it, consider other forms of action.
But all of that would be pretty hard in the current geopolitical situation, there would be a huge price to pay.
Australia was slapped with huge trade war in the order of billions for pointing out that China was lying about COVID origins.
So this is a neat idea, but impossible and it demonstrates the very powerful reach of China.
Major American corporations have deep ties with China and China would pressure them to tamp this down.
Without some kind of institutional support from probably a few media companies it would be very hard.
The 'Tea Party Movement' was basically nothing until Fox News decided to put them up front, for example.
American corporations have incredible influence over media.
In particular, the massive hypocrisy over the NBA, and some players who scream about injustice, and then repeat Xi's talking points when it comes to China. Even NBA players have their marching orders.
Truly grassroots things are really really rare, it usually takes participation from aligned forces.
Do you notice how 'Tibet' used to be all the rage? It was the hip thing in Hollywood about 2000. The Dalai Lama was a thing. China put huge pressure on everyone to "Shut the F up about the Dalai Lama" and so corporations, NGOs, Hollywood, Governments, go the message. It becomes more rare to have him visit, and corporations no longer talk about Tibet.
Marc Benioff of Salesforce fame, is illustrative of this - he's ostensibly a big supporter of Buddhism etc. and the Tibet issue should be front and centre with him if he was in any way legit, but of course he keeps his mouth shut entirely, because, hey: it's just business.
Hollywood dutifully keeps their mouths shut and will happily kill anything in their periphery (i.e. documentaries) with the word 'Tibet'. Actors who want to not be blackballed/banned from China will stay the F away from the world 'Tibet'. Actors are corporations.
And of course the Uyghur issue - can you imagine any other major nation putting people in camps on the basis of their ethnicity? E. China is an open air police state, with stations every few hundred meters, propaganda everywhere etc.. There would be huge uproar over this if it were any other state. But we are told to keep our mouths shut, 'or else' - so we do.
All of this could change however - with a bit of coordinated action and political will, it could flip.
Lastly, Germany, which mostly controls EU, is one of the few nations to be a net exporter to China, and they don't want to mess that up and so they are the most likely to 'acquiesce' on the issue, which means the EU will 'keep their mouths shut'.
There was a similar situation during the pandemic in the UK, I know of individuals whose parents in the PRC were contacted by the authorities to “encourage” their kids studying abroad to stay abroad, lest they risk bringing covid back home.
Traveling during a pandemic is not normal so I find the advice not to travel back home during a pandemic is totally normal. Doing otherwise puts everyone at risk (the traveler, people who he/she interacts with during the journey and the host/home country)
I am equally sure you probably support lock-downs, mandatory vaccination, mandatory masking, and all manner of other Draconian actions
Where me and others did not, I did not find these things to be "normal" either.
It all depends on where you place the freedom vs safety metric, I place on the far extreme end of freedom. Which is also why I oppose governments like China in general
National law enforcement agencies often have reciprocity with foreign countries. For example, the FBI has offices in many countries to facilitate things like investigations and extraditions. The common name is "Legat" and they operate in cooperation with and at the pleasure of the host country.
It sounds like the Chinese police are operating like they're in their home country. Which they are not. Sooner or later, their activities are going to get them PNG'd (made Persona Non Grata) and they'll be asked to leave.
They are not "operating" in any official capacity. They are just there, doing their "persuasion." Remember the USA and Europe have good free speech laws that will protect those "persuasion."
Even with police cooperation agreements in place, they don't have the usual police power like arresting anyone.
A NYT article from back in 2016 says,
> In 2014 […] That was the year the two countries signed a bilateral police cooperation agreement, the first of its kind between China and a European nation.
> The Chinese officers do not have arrest powers in Italy, but they are paired with Italian officers who could arrest someone, except no arrests have been needed.
Laws are only as good as the prosecutors enforcing them, and with the support of a nation state it’s very easy to evade criminal prosecution. I suspect that few if any European legal systems are set up to effectively deal with an adversary operating in this manner.
The FBI has an office in Beijing. I’m doubting either government cares that much if they police their own citizens. It’s probably more complex with dual citizens. There’s so many people in each country there has to be some cooperation from time to time.
China technically doesn’t recognize dual citizenship for anyone over 18. But they’ve been known to rescind someone rescinding their citizenship before, which is messed up.
> The court in Ningbo acknowledged Gui had become Swedish in the 1990s but added that he had applied to restore his Chinese citizenship in 2018. China does not recognise dual citizenship and restoring his Chinese passport may have been a way to block Swedish diplomats from visiting him, observers said.
That was after he was detained (china kidnapped him in Thailand).
That doesn't help you if they have you in China and keep you from getting access to an embassy. Dual citizenship only helps if they actually recognize it, or your host country learns of your plight- neither of which are the case here.
This might just be my own strange way of thinking.
I haven't actual lived in my parents house in decades, and yet when I go there to visit them I still think of it as "going home".
In the case above, I assume we are talking about people born in China, who have left to live in another country, and are then involuntarily returned to China. In my head, China is still the home country.
All of that said, having read your comment, I just now realized that is and uncommon understanding of the words. Your interpretation is certainly closer to the emotional meaning of them for the people involved.
Generally speaking, if you are a citizen of country X and you are in country X accused of violating the laws of country X then any citizenship of country Y that you might have is irrelevant.
It's true even if you aren't a citizen of X. Griner isn't escaping prison by not being a Russian citizen. Neither are all the kidnapped Ukrainian children.
Robin Cook, British Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001, has written that al-Qaeda and bin Laden were "a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies", and that "Al-Qaida, literally 'the database', was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians."
So basically US sponsored 9/11. Is there any moral grounds to blame Saudi Arabia?
The US did supply the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Al Qaeda did eventually arise from the Mujahideen so 9/11 is certainly blowback but the CIA would need to be funding and aiding Al-Qaeda operatives during the late 90s to 2001 for there to be equivalency with Saudi but I’m not aware of any evidence to support that. Besides, the point wasn’t that the CIA was innocent it was that Saudi was guilty.
So this was 2012 in Syria and any support for Al-Qaeda was accidental and unintentional, from the article:
“US-backed rebels often fought alongside al-Qaeda's al-Nusra Front, and some of the US-supplied weapons ended up in the hands of the al-Nusra Front, which had been a major concern of the Obama administration when the program was first proposed”
It's conspiratorial and misrepresentation to talk about this - to the point of it being a lie.
If a very rich American went to South America for a decade and then bombed a building in Rio, he would have 'financial relationship' to the US via a number of investments. It doesn't mean that it has anything to do with US foreign policy, the government, or anything.
Osama Bin Laden was a member of a big, sprawling, super rich Oligarchic family in Saudi. Obviously, there were dealings, and obviously some Saudis probably funded some things here and there. Just like a Texan Evangelical Oil Billionaire might fund Christian Schools in Peru, which may even be good schools. But the charity run by a guy with ties to 'American Rio Bomber'.
Everything at that level is intertwined, it's not sufficient to suggest that proves anything.
The 'State' of Saudis is 'mostly a good actor to the outside world, even if they are bad in many ways internally. They allow the free flow of oil at market prices, 'per the deal' and don't align with China, Russia, or some other crazy state, and they are not trying to invade Iran or get nukes (though there are backup plans). And they play nice with Israel, not directly trying to start a war with them, or 'create' one between them and Israel. Most of their vast holdings are invested reasonably.Also, in the 'war on terror' which is actually a financial network and intelligence war, they have been playing 'on the right side' - as 'terrorists' are more dangerous to them than the US anyhow. So that's kind of what we can expect from them. In 100 years, hopefully things will be a bit better.
> It doesn't mean that it has anything to do with US foreign policy, the government, or anything.
The evidence points to the Saudi royal family funding a terrorist organization. That’s a lot more than just a rich citizen, that is their autocratic ruling family and the evidence is very convincing. Their reasoning probably was more about regional concerns rather than attacking the US, however when you fund fanatics they don’t always follow the script.
>It's conspiratorial and misrepresentation to talk about this - to the point of it being a lie.
this is false. there is a great deal of direct and circumstantial evidence that has come out in the last two years. this isn't "bin laden knew people", this is "the 9/11 hijackers received assistance from saudi diplomats in the US"
The intercepts notions of 'this was possibly a false flag' is literally the definition of conspiracy theory.
While there certainly might be more going on than we know, there isn't evidence of that much.
It's not going to be a surprise that a conduit for clandestine money might have some kind of governmental status or what have you.
It's basically insane to suggest House of Saud would want to do 9/11 or even a 'filed false flag', there is no benefit whatsoever in either. 9/11 did not help the Saudis, and even a 'failed false flag' like a pretend attack on a building in NYC would have the objective of what, trying to get more US troops in the Middle East for who's benefit?
More importantly, the likelihood of such a thing getting found out would be extremely high. The ruler of Saudi Arabia is going to blow up the Trade Centre knowing that the CIA/FBI would be able to nail him, and even all of Humpty Dumpty's men probably could not keep that secret contained? And if the US public found out, literally Saudi Arabia would cease to exist?
For what purpose?
No, this insane.
There are ultra Wahhabi nationalists in Saudi Arabia, they have money. We already know that. They are funding odd stuff around the world, just like many other billionaires. As part of the 'war on terror' a lot of that activity was shut down and now it's really scrutinized.
Even setting 9/11 aside, Saudi Arabia publicly funds numerous madrasah in other countries which have a, shall we say, Wahhabi-aligned curriculum. Which then provide a steady stream of recruits for the likes of al-Qaida (or, these, days, ISIS). This might be indirect enough to evade responsibility, but the countries where such radicalization eventually translates to violence generally don't consider Saudis "mostly a good actor".
I get where you are coming from and agree. But why would saudi arabia attack the first world superpower, its biggest trading partner and biggest military ally?
People do some really stupid stuff in the name of religion all the time. Perhaps that was motivation enough, and the line in your comment is seen as a means to invoke plausible deniability
The CIA didn't need to do anything: Bigfoot, Loch Ness, Yeti, all sorts of mysterious / conspiracy theories just propagate on their own and at times because they're fun to imagine as real.
It should not be surprising at all - you are 'allowed' to do what you have the power to do and get away with.
China speaks with one voice, Xi, everyone else a thousand voices. US has 10 000 people at least who make up the power of Xi. President, senator, CEO, senior bureaucrat, judge, heads of NGOs, Universities, police, military etc. all 'put in one group and coordinated with an ambitious 50 year plan' in the West. Even in a single country.
Europe, N. America, Japan, Korea, Australia have to partner with 'everyone else' in a comprehensive way to stand up to this. Trans Pacific was a big opportunity that Trump didn't have the foresight to grasp - he wanted to have 'unipolar power' in a world where the US just does not have the leverage it did after WW2 and no amount of 'wishing' or even exceptional leadership will change that. US could 'solve all it's problems' and it would still be the reality that % of global GDP would be declining because other nations are 'coming on line'.
Oddly, a panacea of 'other voices' may serve to counterbalance. Even if they are acting in self interest, to the extent they are not overrun by China, their own voices add up to something. We are seeing the beginning of that in Africa, with their stance on the Ukraine issue. While they should definitely be taking a more assertive stance via Russia, the fact they are where they are (and partly due to the fact Russia is their 'breadbasket') is an indication of coherent self interest on some level.
I don't think it's cause for world wide alarm, but there needs to be a plan.
>China speaks with one voice, Xi, everyone else a thousand voices. US has 10 000 people at least who make up the power of Xi. President, senator, CEO, senior bureaucrat, judge, heads of NGOs, Universities, police, military etc. all 'put in one group and coordinated with an ambitious 50 year plan' in the West. Even in a single country.
This is an orientalist and simplistic take. The CCP is an enormously complicated system and there are many cliques and ideological debates within it. As any sinologist will tell you, the power struggles at the very top are mostly unknown to us (except years later, to historians) but even in Mao's era there was certainly not a single voice.
I don't think it's simplistic and certainly not orientalist, as it has nothing to do with anything Asian or Oriental specifically.
That the CCP is an 'enormous and complex system with many debates within' doesn't matter if the party speaks very directly and coherently, and the party is very tightly controlled and of course they have all of the power.
The degree of centralization of authority by Xi is unlike we've seen since Mao, and due to universal power of technology, you could say 'more power than any leader in history'.
Xi very quickly and arbitrarily grabbed the nations top tech leaders off of the street. Literally disappeared. He imposed aggressive governmental oversight and controls over those organizations (and others) including government ownership, board seats, CCP members as staffers for internal oversight, censorship requirements, etc. etc.. It's unthinkable outside China, in any normal kind of country.
If any 'outside' leader speaks up against China - be it a Dean, or Prime Minster - the CCP will respond assertively and quickly.
When China does some questionable or malign act - where is the response? Who should respond? Is anyone powerful enough to respond? Can there be a coordinated action?
As the Australian political leadership spoke up against Chinese lies over COVID origins, they were slapped with billions in trade damages, and was attacked in a number of indirect ways. Were Australia to have acted in concert and direct cohesion with USA, EU and UK on that, and were policy and actions to be aligned, it would be a different story.
There's nothing comparable to Xi outside of China (in any normal country - I won't say 'western' country because it goes way beyond that), not even Putin.
There are two different ideas here. The fact that the CCP can act decisively and has an iron grip on China does not contradict the idea that it is still a granular organization with its own internal logic. Xi is not the CCP and the CCP is not Xi. And the iron grip and the decisiveness are not as total as you imagine them to be.
This is in fact where the orientalism comes in: the rejection of granularity. If you think about it for a few seconds, it really makes no sense that a single person would be able to entirely control a structure of 96 million adherents, or that this latter structure would have no internal dissension and tumult. The only reason we might come to these conclusions is if we are deeply unfamiliar with the history, culture, ideology, way of doing things that apply and thus reject the individuality and complexity that are part of these systems. Few Westerners would qualify Western institutions in this way. I don't mean in terms of agreeing or disagreeing with what they do, but analyzing them as just a unified blob and thinking nothing of it.
The TPP was more complicated than this and there was bipartisan opposition to it. The opposition to it wasn't merely Trump's isolationism but genuine concerns about the economic affects it would have on domestic citizens
I haven’t encountered a monolithic opinion in the United States on rendition, mostly disgust and self loathing except amongst the most terminally committed to the “war on terror.” I’ve found many friends in considering it a criminal activity.
The US does not threaten to kill or arbitrarily imprison family members of those they wish to extradite, and does not clandestinely do even remotely such things with US citizens unless there are huge issues of national security, aka a US Passport Holder running a terrorist camp in some place, plotting to blow up buildings.
The moral equivalence argument with China is tiring, and it's actually part of their horrible communications strategy.
The equivalent would be: 'nobody' US citizen 'Joe Smith', living in Paris, mocks Joe Biden on Facebook. As a result, FBI in USA threatens family with prison for arbitrary reasons with fabricated evidence, and clandestinely threatens US citizen in Paris to come home and 'face justice'.
yet again unjustifiably both-sidesing the actions of America and china. i don't like when America does it but it isn't relevant and i'm a lot less worried about her expanding power than china.
spoiler: most of us actually don't like the bullshit war on terror/war on drugs tactics.
and is there evidence we've threatened American citizens at home to get to expats?
So how does this work? Police stations are bases of operation for policemen. And policemen are people who need to have a lawful authority for what they do. These folks roleplaying as policemen have no such authority.
So what do they do? I can't imagine they are detaining people, giving out fines, etc. So what makes them police? Shouldn't we call them spies instead?
Also, one could imagine, these “Persuasion” tactics, might be more successful than, the Western approach of where extradition treaties exist.
Putting social (family?) pressure on someone probably more likely leads to a person giving in, than just being exposed to legal pressure that possibly can't reach them.
Westphalian nation states were established to supercede private armies of mercenaries. If societies now accept extra-legal methods of influence, as vividly illustrated on TV shows like The Sopranos, there will be many organized non-state actors lining up to join the party.
If citizens want a new legal category for extra-territorial operations, beyond extradition, this can be negotiated in a formal international treaty.
Of course. But there's a big difference between doing covertly and doing in daylight with an office.
Should foreign countries open US "Corporate Intellectual Property Donation" physical offices?
Treaties set a floor on behavior. For those who claim laws don't matter, remember that contracts and all global supply chains are based on laws of trade and finance. No law = no economy = war until agreement and law is re-established.
Treaties and international law in general are only relevant for weak states. Powerful states ignore any negative decision against them - especially the most powerful.
This is even official in some cases. For example, the USA does not recognize any authority of the the International Criminal Court (neither do China, Russia and a number of other big states), but that doesn't stop them from occasionally using it against smaller nations.
You can look for a long time, but you'll never find an example of a superpower/empire, or a close ally of one, submitting to any kind of international judgment against it, criminal or in a trade dispute. At most, they may accept a negative ruling to a case they brought against someone else.
> For example, the USA does not recognize any authority of the the International Criminal Court
This is not true. The USA is not a party to the Rome Statute and asserts that the conditions which would otherwise subject its citizens to ICC jurisdiction categorically do not exist, and has authorized unlimited measures should the ICC disagree with the last point, but does not dispute the authority of the ICC.
> You can look for a long time, but you’ll never find an example of a superpower/empire, or a close ally of one, submitting to any kind of international judgment against it, criminal or in a trade dispute.
Well, states are not subjects of criminal law, so the criminal part is trivially true. As for trade disputes, the US has complied with numerous adverse decisions in WTO proceedings.
No, they’re not. The ICC has no authority over ANY state, it has authority over people who are citizens of many states, but not citizens of the US, because the US has a functioning justice system that responds to the things the ICC is focused on. Because of this, there is no need to indict a US citizen in the ICC, you can do it in the US justice system, which is why the US points out that their citizens do not need to be subjected to the ICC.
> because the US has a functioning justice system that responds to the things the ICC is focused on.
Well, that’s the position of US law.
There are certainly cases one might point to and make the argument that the US domestic system does not always effectively deal with US war crimes and the crime of aggression.
Aggression is not criminal. There are times when the US has had soldiers commit war crimes, and it’s debatable how effective the US has been at prosecuting such things historically, but it does make a realistic attempt to do so.
Please let me know when we find mass graves of women and children defiled and murdered by US soldiers, which is unfortunately common behavior for the militaries of many other states, which the ICC has been involved in prosecuting.
The crime of aggression (aka crime against peace) is, like war crimes and crimes against humanity, a widely recognized crime, prosecuted in the various peri-/post-WWII tribunals, though it took a while for the ICC to settle on its operationalization.
> There are times when the US has had soldiers commit war crimes, and it’s debatable how effective the US has been at prosecuting such things historically, but it does make a realistic attempt to do so.
The standard for ICC jurisdiction isn’t general adequacy, it is specific good faith action in the particular case.
The ICC is not the only international tribunal who's authority the USA doesn't recognize on its own citizens/self. There's also the ICJ, which has found the USA guilty of war crimes and ordered it to pay restitution at least once, for having mined Nicaragua's harbors, which the US very explicitly and publically refused to recognize.
> You can look for a long time, but you'll never find an example of a superpower/empire, or a close ally of one, submitting to any kind of international judgment against it, criminal or in a trade dispute. At most, they may accept a negative ruling to a case they brought against someone else.
Since 2020, China's Huawei has been subject to semiconductor supply chain restrictions which have been enforced by multiple countries. This has materially impacted Huawei consumer smartphone revenues.
They are enforced by other countries - it wasn't the Chinese themselves who decided to stop doing something because an international court said so - that is my point. This would be equivalent to a court imposing a fine on you, and your neighbors taking your things in the amount of the fine (instead of the state taking it, or you going to pay).
Self vs. other enforcement is less important than consequences, which are the same in both situations. If a country has the opportunity to negotiate the terms of trade, that is clearly preferable to terms being imposed unilaterally by others.
Yes, countries can break agreements, but good agreements provide benefits to all parties, such that breaking an agreement results in reciprocal loss of benefits. There are always edge cases, but by definition, not everything is an edge case and there are countless routine, negotiated agreements which benefit everyone and are happily followed.
Step 1: picket/protest and close the overt "police stations". Any would-be kidnappers can run a covert operation like countries have done since time immemorial, at the risk of unscheduled encounters with local city, state and federal authorities. Or they can work through the legal extradition system.
If this is allowed to stand after global public disclosure, it can be taken as implicit "consent" having been granted by citizens and their elected representatives, which means the next phase of extra-territorial activity (e.g. new laws on 1st December 2022) will push boundaries even further.
If some countries want to sell their territorial integrity and citizen safety down the proverbial river, at least they can negotiate a good price, e.g. bounty per head, prisoner exchange, or reciprocal global kidnapping by <foreign-country> of <host-country> targets. Good luck recruiting nomadic tech talent after opening such Dantean doors.
Do you know if the families are punished (incarcerated?) in lieu of the AWOL citizen if they can't persuade their family member to come back home and face CCP "justice" ?
They must be, in some way, otherwise this "persuasion" wouldn't be effective. If not incarceration or violence, some kind of social or economic punishment.
The Toronto one… seems like the CCP operatives absconded with the funding!
> All were in areas with large Chinese populations, but no one The Globe spoke to was aware of a police service station or had heard of the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau. One address in Markham was a private home, while the other was a mall full of small Chinese businesses and restaurants. The third property, in a business park near a highway, is owned by the Canada Toronto FuQing Business Association, a federally incorporated non-profit.
Almost equally likey are that one or all of those businesses are fronts or covers; it's not like the CCP wants to advertise the existence of these extraterritorial police stations to nosy journalists.
That's... a bit of a weird thing to say. For one thing, this idea that our "American values" are so superior to everything else is an insult to a large part of the rest of the world that also has values that we'd consider positive and good. They didn't come by those values "because America" (ok, maybe a few did here and there, but that's far from universal).
For another thing, what "traditional" American values are you referring to, in particular? Slavery? Racism? Institutionalized oppression? Police brutality? The military-industrial complex? The prison-industrial complex -- the fact that we have such a high percentage of our population incarcerated? Our legally-enshrined puritanical fear of victimless "crimes" like smoking a plant? The disenfranchisement of the poor? Income and wealth inequality? The continued weakening of labor movements? A small but loud and influential contingent of religious nuts who seem to believe that their god should be calling the shots in our legal system (hypocritically many of the same people who have wrung their hands over "Sharia law")?
Sure, I'm focusing on the negative here, and as much as I'm a bit cynical these days, there is plenty of good to come out of our country, even today. But this whole "wave the flag", "everyone should be more like us" stuff is pretty gross and short-sighted. The better values "dying" of late bit may be true (or not, I don't know anymore), but also overlooks a lot of bad stuff that has been in our national DNA for centuries.
First of all, I never said American values are superior. So you've started your homily on a false premise.
Furthermore, most of your gripes SUPPORT my point, except of course for the tired catch-alls of "slavery" and "racism." As for the rest of what you cite (mass incarceration, worker oppression, the "religious" oppressing others): THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.
Then of course there's democracy, and the alleged "resilience" of the American people. What a joke. Voting rights are being rolled back across "red" states nationwide. And "we" once rebuilt destroyed cities like Chicago and San Francisco in a few years... but it took over a decade to replace TWO buildings in New York after 9/11. And what have we built since?
If you want to roll out time-honored issues, how about abortion? Now a significant portion of the USA wants to (and has been given the go-ahead to) use women as baby farms. Even IRELAND abolished this disgusting regime.
Anyway, instead of a strawman, just create your own original post.
This is a confusion of cause and effect. The current crisis you are seeing is in part caused by this very same baked-in self-congratulatory mindset that permeates many American institutions and demographics
Don't suggest Chinese police overseas are doing covert action. It's silly, those stations are there for helping Chinese tourists, because there are so many in those places.
If Chinese want to do covert action overseas they don't send police to do it I think... It would not be covert.
This mushing together is like a racist smear fear mongering. It's bad.
No you're getting confused, and have it backwards.
These Chinese police patrol around tourist areas with local police. You don't go to a consulate when you lose your mobile phone or someone steals your wallet.
These are police who operate in concert with local police. The whole point is to help Chinese tourists I think. It's not for anything nefarious...It's too racist to be smearing everything Chinese under the banner of the current Western-'China-bogeyman'-hysteria
Is this sort of thing common? Do other countries place police forces in other sovereign nations with the intent to help their home country's tourists get around in a foreign land? If not, then I think we need to look at this as an aberration, with scrutiny, and assume the worst until proven otherwise.
I personally think it is outrageous that the US government (or state or local governments) allows China to station police officers on US soil, and gives them the right to act in a police capacity. I am not ok with that at all, even if what you suggest as their purpose is correct.
Why would this even be necessary, if they're here for the purpose you suggest? Local police can handle these sorts of cases, and cities where tourists tend to travel certainly have translators on staff. Hell, cities in the US have translators to help with residents whose English skills are poor.
Also: it's not "racist" to dislike this sort of thing if the foreign government in question is not aligned values-wise with your own. I don't think it's remotely appropriate for an authoritarian anti-democratic country to have law enforcement influence on our soil.
I wouldn't have the same reaction if, say, a tight US ally (South Korea or Japan, to pick examples from the same part of the world) were to have an informal police presence in the US. But even then, I would expect them to be working with the FBI (or similar) on higher-level international crime matters (sorta like an Interpol type thing), not working on local crime. Foreign police forces should not have any kind of jurisdiction in "local" crimes.
Using "persuasion" in quotation marks is perhaps too nice.
It's coercion, if not worse.
Not that there is much we can do about it. Though limiting ability of Chinese authorities to operate outside china is fair. After all we don't permit organized crime either.
> a seemingly recent campaign to counter transnational telecom and online fraud (according to the official provincial statements)
The increase in telecom scamming activity is a real thing in China, with scammers operating from southeastern Asia countries. And operators are often Chinese citizens hired for what they originally thought would be "oversea job with good pay". The "persuaded to return" strategy might be targeted primarily at them.
Those scams are particularly bad -- maybe even worse than the telecom scams happening in the US and other wealthy English-speaking countries -- because taking personal loans is way too easy in China. A few clicks on a lender's app and you get cash transferred to your account instantly. And there are hundreds of such apps. Scammers can talk victims into maxing out their credit lines and wire the loaned cash away.
And the fact that there isn't "personal bankruptcy" laws in China also makes it worse. Such loans are rarely forgiven and victims often had to pay them off with their future income for years out of the fear that loan defaults can affect their credit score for life.
So I guess this is Chinese police's way of "do something about it". Of course they don't have jurisdiction overseas and should have gone with Interpol and/or local police first, except that hasn't been very effective. My 2 cents on the reasons behind this is:
1. Local police might be paid off;
2. No incentive for local police to prioritize their resource for cases like this -- there were no victims in their own countries;
3. There are just too many scammers;
Surely once this set up is in place it's possible to extend its coverage to harass/"persuade" political dissidents but CCP has already be doing it for years without it. If this oversea police "persuasion" program is getting local law enforcement's attention to the point that they can arrest both them and the scammers, I would see it as an absolute win.
> Since the end of November 2021, many notices have been issued to warn the Chinese public not to travel to nine countries with serious telecom and web crimes: Cambodia, the UAE, the Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Malaysia, Turkey and Indonesia. People who have no "strict necessity" or "emergency reason" to travel to or stay in those countries are required to return to China as soon as possible.
Not too sure about this one though... But the organization is too well aligned with American espionage goals to dismiss it as just a well-intentioned grassroots organization. Do you have any good pointers about how the org is being funded? (Usually the blatantly obvious ones have funding traces back to places like various alphabet-named agencies and other places like the Ford Foundation or the RAND institute.)
It would not surprise me if a large part of this is not driven by an attempt to control the drug trade (e.g., opium) that flows through the golden triangle and southwest China. Note that this trade is huge and is a problem in China.
I don’t want to sound like an apologist (not a fan of this line of action for a number of reasons), but the focus on the nine forbidden countries (mostly in Southeast Asia) and the number of folks repatriated from those countries makes me think that this is not a small part of the motivation behind these actions.
This is very unlikely related with drug trafficking but really to stop fraud activities.
The reason is really simple, crimes associated with drugs in China can lead to death penalties and the threshold is very low. So in most cases people caught with drug trafficking in China are popped, no matter of their nationalities.
Not sure if you guys ever received calls claiming that they were DHL/FedEx etc, and there was a package for you to pick up. More ridiculously, sometimes they even claim to be the Chinese Embassy and of course there was package for you to pick up.
> Not sure if you guys ever received calls claiming that they were DHL/FedEx etc, and there was a package for you to pick up. More ridiculously, sometimes they even claim to be the Chinese Embassy and of course there was package for you to pick up.
Can you elaborate? this happened to my partner and we thought it was something targeted at Chinese foreigners. They were persistent and it was kind of worrying because my partner accidentally gave up a small bit of information before catching on that it was not legit. Are they trying to do identity fraud?
Variety of illegal activities, from illegal telefraud to gambling designed to circumvent PRC gaming laws. Philippines just agreed to deport 40000 chinese workers involved in offshore gambling. Lots of low level crime out there host country wants to sort out but no extradition treaty due to geopolitics. PRC's most wanted big fish list is like 20 people.
Weird that this is downvoted; it is quite factual.
I think you're right about it being centered on Zomia:
> The majority of identified targets were located in northern Myanmar.
but your specific example of the illicit trade is slightly off: aiui, the relevance of the golden triangle as an opioid producer has actually fallen off since the early 2000s as a result of DEA pressure and market shifts, but the slack was taken up by amphetamines (mostly ya ba).
> A new report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) confirms that production and demand for opium has further declined as the region’s synthetic drug market continues to expand and diversify.
> The prevalence rate of heroin use decreased from 0.67% (0.63–0.73%) in 2011 to 0.57% (0.53–0.61%) in 2015, while the prevalence rate of methamphetamine use doubled from 0.20% (0.17–0.24%) in 2011 to 0.48% (0.46–0.50%) in 2015.
> Myanmar is believed to be the single largest supplier of China’s drug market. In 2013, 92.2 percent of the heroin and 95.2 percent of methamphetamine seized in China were traced to Myanmar.
All that said, Chinese in northern Burma also tend to be associated with other rackets:
> Solely in Wanding (畹町), a river port bordering Myanmar in Ruili city,Yunnan province, over 960 suspects of telecom fraud and over 100 suspects of cross-border gambling
Cross-border gambling is huge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mong_La is basically a city-sized casino, built directly across the border from Yunnan (which is incredibly porous due to the terrain, so just clamping down on crossings doesn't work). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangkham is the same deal but in Wa territory, not Shan.
The CCP really really hates cross-border gambling for a variety of reasons, including capital outflows and its nexus with domestic corruption:
There's also a lot of jade/amber/wildlife smuggling but the gambling thing really is astonishingly huge business in northern Burma. So, I see it as a "yes, and": there's a lot of reasons why the CCP would want to crack down on the behavior of Chinese in northern Burma, and the drug trade is a plausible one.
> In that scenario, a public transparency report on involuntary returnee legal cases would be a good start.
Why would they do that?
I’m pretty sure that the powers that be in China don’t really care about the opinions of advocates of human rights, government transparency, etc.
They probably are also not keen on airing their dirty laundry with regards to the drug trade.
Chinese leaders pretty much double dog dare any country not to trade with them based on any set of principles, knowing that the other country will be the one that suffers the most. The US is maybe the only country that could stand up to China, but the US and China are in super weird but oddly balanced symbiotic relationship that would become mutually destructive if one side decides to force its will on the other.
> the powers that be in China don’t really care about the opinions of advocates of human rights
Perhaps, although the recent Chinese adoption of wolf warrior diplomacy [1] makes it appear like they care and are trying to cover it up with bluster. China “doth protest too much, methinks.”
To be fair, have western media ever stopped trying to demonize the Chinese government, no matter what it did?
I thought I knew where Xinjiang was until I saw the CNN news regarding it with a map showing it in somewhere near Guangdong. Another example was the Chinese police event recorder version of the BBC interviews in Xinjiang.
Given such conditions, why would Chinese government give a f*ck about whatever it's doing? It will be attacked anyway, disclosing stuffs just open more attacking surfaces.
nope, a shitton of amphetamines and fentanyl that end up here poisoning our population start there. we should be at war with china the way she is doing this. over 100,000 a year from opioids alone. Australia getting hit with meth explosions in a similar manner. exporting drugs is china's sneaky way of weakening her competition.
Time and again we see how every dictatorship eventually becomes a snake eating it's own tail, and succumbs to self-inflicted wounds...
How can they probably hope to build an advanced society treating their people like that? It will only push Chinese emigres abroad to break every tie with their home country, including relatives that stayed behind, reducing any positive impact on homeland of those people learning things and making money abroad.
I guess a bit like in the spy movies where American spies were free to roam everywhere, the superpower status (i.e. money and market access) of China means they get to swing their police truncheon around and most countries just stay quiet about it.
And they were even watching Xinjiang activists outside of China (Source [2]):
> [...] one of the officers shoved a photo under my nose. It was my daughter Gulhumar. She was posing in front of the Place du Trocadéro in Paris, bundled up in her black coat, the one I’d given her. In the photo, she was smiling, a miniature East Turkestan flag in her hand, a flag the Chinese government had banned. To Uighurs, that flag symbolises the region’s independence movement. The occasion was one of the demonstrations organised by the French branch of the World Uighur Congress, which represents Uighurs in exile and speaks out against Chinese repression in Xinjiang.
The drily-written post only talks about telecommunications fraud. Is that a big deal in China, are they doing something like Nigerian 419 scams? I suppose they'd be targeting mostly Chinese citizens, using e.g. WeChat, although that's probably a bad idea because how much do you want to bet WeChat can report home the user's GPS coordinates or even just their IP would be enough for country geo-locating.
It's interesting how the authorities of the US and China have a different view of how to control its populace through information.
China is all about the controlling the logistics of the flow of information, where the authorities need to crack down dissent that can impede the structural stability of the CCP. (Not all social criticism is censored, but the ones that directly criticize the party are.) Therefore they have done many things to shut down access to foreign sites, and created one of the biggest bureaucracies in the history of the world to search through the deluge of information on the domestic net to pick out which users and posts are deemed censorable. And it kinda works, but also kinda doesn't (If you have seen the memes and lexicon circulating in the Chinese nets, you'll understand what I mean instantly.)
Whereas the US authorities plays a much more smarter game: is all about tactics. Instead of controlling the flow of information in a top-down way, it lets them free, and then actively participates in it. While China focuses on removing the opponent's pieces on the chessboard, US focuses on adding their own: through its numerous media conglomerates and NGOs (which if you ultimately trace back its funding, all leads to one of the alphabet-named agencies or neoliberal thinktanks like the Ford Foundation or the RAND Institute). When you search a dissident figure in the Chinese net, all traces will be erased and you will find nothing. When you search a dissident figure on Google, you will be spammed with all the numerous media sites that try to mislead you in some way. (And yes, this also kinda works, but also kinda doesn't. But I see this as a more sophisticated strategy than what China is doing.)
While of course the speech freedom is pretty scarce in China, there are many things that the USG do without the legal ability.
Also, the massive attempt to deplatform Trump supporters also significant weakened my belief in the US's speech freedom. I don't care if this was done by the USG or private companies, but it worked, very effectively, Parler was gone in the same way as Twitter get GFWed in China. I was shocked how Chinese this was. As a Chinese and for personal experiences, I hate Trump and the red-necks to the deepest, but I would support their right for emitting their sound.
Trump used twitter to incite violence and insurrection, which is not protected by the first amendment.
It would be better to determine this through the courts rather than twitter, but twitter has every right to ban trolls, spammers, and politicians calling for violent action
The same would be also applicable, if stretched a little bit, to protests and people organizing them in China. "Weibo has every right to ban trolls, spammers, and politicians calling for violent action" (Weibo is the Chinese Twitter equivalent)
We should not have double standard just because the USG is a something you like and CPC is not.
It's possible given the Chinese government's proficiency in abusing terms.
But it seems for now mostly it's still about real crimes. Guys pretending to be from FedEx, saying your delivery have heroin in it, is seized and you need to pay a fine to get out of trouble. This may sound stupid to you, but anecdotally, one smart friend of mine doing physics PhD at MIT recently got tricked to pay ~$2000. BTW: a significant amount of those calls originated from Taiwan, easy to tell from the accent.
Those scam calls are quite common in Taiwan unfortunately, and it's fairly well known here that it's a big mafia enterprise run by the bamboo union. The government recently repatriated a bunch of Taiwanese that had been trafficked to Cambodia and were being forced to work in scam call centers.
Is this actually true? It says there is a chinese police station in NYC. Where? I looked at the NGO's pdf and didn't see an address.
It's unclear exactly what having a "police station" means. Has the NGO reported the CCP taking actions in foreign countries against Chinese nationals? The stories are all about getting at them by threatening family in China.
An example of mainland presence from one of the cities mentioned: https://nextshark.com/hong-kong-chinese-nationalists-superca...
Imo, the laurentians area (ottawa/quebec) political class basically hates the rest of the country because we represent their parochial origins, and so they figure they can just import new constituents who can be more easily bribed or with special protections for their money, as a way to keep themselves in power, without having to listen to the constituents they imagine themselves as having transcended and left-behind. Something similar is likely true in other countries with these bases as well.
I can't believe that I can say without an ounce of hyperbole that our representatitives made a deal with the devil, and now they have communist party secret police bases in their cities.
Canada made no special deal with “the devil” and the article you showed in no way demonstrates that.
All those secret polices offices in canada were visited by journalists and nobody was there. If China is sending spy, it’s definitely not under the agreement or through a special deal with the Canadian government.
Only the past that’s convenient to make a point, though. The rest, that could prove the opposite, can stay unmentioned. Fuck nationalism, as well as whataboutism.
People in the West rarely get to encounter situations such as these that make me thankful every day for the imperfect heaven we live in.
This is a daily experience for the families of those 230k. Imagine the horrors the families in places like Xinjiang are going through. Even if a small portion of these reports is factual, we're talking rape, torture, organ harvesting, despicable acts against human life everywhere.
What we have in the west isn't perfect, but God am i thankful to not have my family denied education or other social essentials because i decide to speak my mind.
> thankful to not have my family denied education or other social essentials because i decide to speak my mind
Ongoing vigilance is essential to preserve these freedoms, as evidenced in the recent US DOJ prosecution of eBay executives for intimidation of a journalist, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33049853
> A former eBay Inc. executive was sentenced on Thursday to almost five years in prison for leading a scheme to terrorize the creators of an online newsletter that included sending live spiders, cockroaches, a funeral wreath and other disturbing deliveries to their home.
In many cases, the families of some criminals are enjoying the benefit of the crimes. Actually that's how people from a same village can all go abroad participate in telecom scam activities. They see someone worked abroad and made a lot money, built a new house. The degree of such activities has became a major issue in China, that's why the whole operation was needed.
What's worse now is that there are areas in southeast Asia and Africa have became a hotbed for kidnapping, Chinese citizens being lured abroad, kidnapped, slaved. If you read Chinese, go on Telegram, you see people being sold all the time.
I don't know. It is pretty easy to find these channels. And the channel I followed has been there since I joined. My feeling is that Telegram does not enforce any standard or legal measure is the reason people use it freely and safely. It is also hard to enforce I think.
Non-China cities with Chinese police stations include:
> Amsterdam, Athens, Belgrade, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Budapest, Dublin, Florence, Frankfurt, Glasgow, Lisbon, London, Madeira, Madrid, Milan, New York City, Paris, Porto, Prague, Quito, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Sao Paulo, Slovakia, Stockholm, Rotterdam, Toronto, Tokyo, Valencia, Viña del Mar, Vienna.
https://jamestown.org/program/future-global-policeman-the-gr...
> some countries where fugitives may have fled have either avoided signing extradition agreements with the PRC or have rescinded them following the introduction of the National Security Law to Hong Kong in 2020. These include Australia, Canada, Germany, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK, and the United States.
> ..PRC authorities ..use alternative means to apprehend fugitives. “Persuasion” has become a common tactic, which human rights groups have called “involuntary returns.” Such returns are achieved by threats against family members in the PRC, directly approaching and intimidating the fugitive overseas, or outright kidnapping ..Involuntary returns ..comprise a mix of genuine criminal fugitives, officials who have fallen out of favor with the CCP leadership, and others pursued for their religious or political beliefs.
Earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33049729
Note that in Australia I know first hand of Chinese university students having their families back home threatened due to them participating in protests.
I have no doubt that this is not just about criminal activity but any activity that the PRC does not approve of.
Similar to when a Tibetan student was elected to student council at U of T in Canada: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/china-tibet-student-e...
It's common, in the open, and Western Governments are too afraid to do anything material about it. That tells you who has power.
It's bad.
What, concretely, would western governments do about this?
Arrest and trade any Chinese spies (that’s what they are. There’s no such thing as foreign secret police. They’re called spies and terrorists) and barter them for Chinese political prisoners coerced in this way.
I'm sure that there are plenty of crimes these folks could be arrested for, and then subjected to the normal legal process. Kidnapping and intimidation are criminal offenses, at least where I live
intimidation and black mail sound like perfectly good reasons to arrest these people in most countries
What makes you think this doesn't happen if there is good evidence of wrongdoing? In democracies, we don't just randomly arrest people, we need actual evidence that holds up in court.
>>In democracies, we don't just randomly arrest people,
There are tons of proof and examples of this being false. Lots of example of police targeting people then finding the law they broke, instead of starting with a crime and finding who did it
And this is a good thing that we should do more of?
To be fair, non-immigrant visas can often be revoked on a discretionary basis.
>There’s no such thing as foreign secret police.
The US secret service has offices in over a dozen countries, including China.
That's different. We're the good guys.
The NYPD is also in singapore
Unlikely to happen unfortunately. I mean Russia performed assassinations on UK soil and everyone knows it. Nothing really seemed to happen from that.
Do you understand that China will arrest some American citizens afterwards and will trade them for those "spies"?
Some western people are completely out of bounds. You're basically suggesting trading humans. It's called slavery. To arrest someone and trade him for someone. What's going on. You're not the only person suggesting it. I saw similar comments on other websites. For example someone suggested to arrest some random Russian sportsman and trade him for American sportsman girl who was arrested because of marihuana found on her in airport.
It's just wrong. It creates all the kinds of wrong incentives. If you think that someone is a spy and you can prove it, go ahead and put him in jail or deport him or apply whatever measures law requires. But no human trading.
Prisoners of War are not the same as slaves. Words have meaning.
You really count on semantics to keep us safe from tyranny?
Not parent's point. The point was not to conflate Prisoners of War (or Prisoners of Spy War here?) with slaves. Slaves are enslaved to provide labor without rights and payments, are treated as commodity, and are traded for other commodities, with explicit monetary value. In the case of spy prisoners, people who are in jail because they broke some law are traded for other people in jail in another country who broke another law, because they are valuable to their country of origin, and they too want to return to their home country instead of being in jail in a foreign country. They are not used for labor and they do not have monetary value that can be used in a market.
China is not at war with US.
I would not be so sure...
Yet.
Remove diplomatic status for anyone involved in such activities, put oversight on the diplomacy, make a big international public stink out of it (this matters), share intel with other governments and create a working body to root out this, implement local programs so that schools/companies etc. are aware that this happens and should report it, consider other forms of action.
But all of that would be pretty hard in the current geopolitical situation, there would be a huge price to pay.
Australia was slapped with huge trade war in the order of billions for pointing out that China was lying about COVID origins.
There's a ton of diplomatic and other forms of protests:
- evict caught spies and other agents (or imprison them, it's no secret China does that as well)
- summon or evict their embassy staff and ambassadors
- harass China-owned companies or make their lives difficult with bureaucracy just like China does
- impose tariffs and trade sanctions
- support CCP-critical groups and dissidents both domestic and in China
- threaten China militarily (e.g. by deploying maritime units just right outside of their maritime borders), just like China does
- support nations whose sovereignty is threatened or violated by China, including African nations where Chinese fish trawlers are stealing fish
- hack Chinese government and corporate entities, just like China does
- impose export bans on technology or resources that China needs (which is already done, e.g. ASML litho machines)
- restrict Chinese citizens from visas, buying real estate
- seizing Chinese-owned assets like real estate (bonus: reduces housing pressure)
Individual people can stop purchasing Chinese products. Act locally is small, though it can start a boycott maybe like what pressured S.A. apartheid.
Also, let’s make sure to recycle our cans to stop climate change.
So this is a neat idea, but impossible and it demonstrates the very powerful reach of China.
Major American corporations have deep ties with China and China would pressure them to tamp this down.
Without some kind of institutional support from probably a few media companies it would be very hard.
The 'Tea Party Movement' was basically nothing until Fox News decided to put them up front, for example.
American corporations have incredible influence over media.
In particular, the massive hypocrisy over the NBA, and some players who scream about injustice, and then repeat Xi's talking points when it comes to China. Even NBA players have their marching orders.
Truly grassroots things are really really rare, it usually takes participation from aligned forces.
Do you notice how 'Tibet' used to be all the rage? It was the hip thing in Hollywood about 2000. The Dalai Lama was a thing. China put huge pressure on everyone to "Shut the F up about the Dalai Lama" and so corporations, NGOs, Hollywood, Governments, go the message. It becomes more rare to have him visit, and corporations no longer talk about Tibet.
Marc Benioff of Salesforce fame, is illustrative of this - he's ostensibly a big supporter of Buddhism etc. and the Tibet issue should be front and centre with him if he was in any way legit, but of course he keeps his mouth shut entirely, because, hey: it's just business.
Hollywood dutifully keeps their mouths shut and will happily kill anything in their periphery (i.e. documentaries) with the word 'Tibet'. Actors who want to not be blackballed/banned from China will stay the F away from the world 'Tibet'. Actors are corporations.
And of course the Uyghur issue - can you imagine any other major nation putting people in camps on the basis of their ethnicity? E. China is an open air police state, with stations every few hundred meters, propaganda everywhere etc.. There would be huge uproar over this if it were any other state. But we are told to keep our mouths shut, 'or else' - so we do.
All of this could change however - with a bit of coordinated action and political will, it could flip.
Lastly, Germany, which mostly controls EU, is one of the few nations to be a net exporter to China, and they don't want to mess that up and so they are the most likely to 'acquiesce' on the issue, which means the EU will 'keep their mouths shut'.
A very simple, very easy place to start, would be not allowing the construction of Chinese secret police stations in Western cities.
How does that stop Chinese authorities from threatening relatives of Chinese students protesting in the West?
Step 1 to filling holes is to stop digging new ones.
Infinite things. Literally infinite. Governments exert influence in countless countless ways.
Enact high import tariffs to discourage economic support for China and move the world's wealth into freer nations.
Bingo. Every nation should implement an 'externalization tax'.
So USA would implement X% tax on China for their authoritarian stuff, Y% for their aggression against Taiwan and Z% for their carbon emissions.
Every nation gets a tariff.
That would push them into line on some things.
There was a similar situation during the pandemic in the UK, I know of individuals whose parents in the PRC were contacted by the authorities to “encourage” their kids studying abroad to stay abroad, lest they risk bringing covid back home.
This seems a normal reaction
I would say it was a common reaction, but it should not be considered "normal"
Traveling during a pandemic is not normal so I find the advice not to travel back home during a pandemic is totally normal. Doing otherwise puts everyone at risk (the traveler, people who he/she interacts with during the journey and the host/home country)
I am equally sure you probably support lock-downs, mandatory vaccination, mandatory masking, and all manner of other Draconian actions
Where me and others did not, I did not find these things to be "normal" either.
It all depends on where you place the freedom vs safety metric, I place on the far extreme end of freedom. Which is also why I oppose governments like China in general
That's the opposite of the problem called out in this article.
My university in the US did the same. They encouraged students to stay put during winter break. Are they evil now?
Well, any activity that the PRC does not approve of is criminal activity.
Additionally there was the video of that protest in Australia over China related stuff where Chinese people stepped in to assault the protestors.
I am surprised they are even allowed to "operate" in all these cities... especially the USA/Europe.
National law enforcement agencies often have reciprocity with foreign countries. For example, the FBI has offices in many countries to facilitate things like investigations and extraditions. The common name is "Legat" and they operate in cooperation with and at the pleasure of the host country.
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/international-offices
It sounds like the Chinese police are operating like they're in their home country. Which they are not. Sooner or later, their activities are going to get them PNG'd (made Persona Non Grata) and they'll be asked to leave.
Asked to leave and then swap to another one. How many police they have. Millions. Or 10 millions.
They are not "operating" in any official capacity. They are just there, doing their "persuasion." Remember the USA and Europe have good free speech laws that will protect those "persuasion."
Even with police cooperation agreements in place, they don't have the usual police power like arresting anyone.
A NYT article from back in 2016 says,
> In 2014 […] That was the year the two countries signed a bilateral police cooperation agreement, the first of its kind between China and a European nation.
> The Chinese officers do not have arrest powers in Italy, but they are paired with Italian officers who could arrest someone, except no arrests have been needed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/world/europe/chinese-poli...
> Remember the USA and Europe have good free speech laws that will protect those "persuasion."
I know the US is a special case, but in most of Europe, free speech does not cover threats, intimidation and blackmail.
Laws are only as good as the prosecutors enforcing them, and with the support of a nation state it’s very easy to evade criminal prosecution. I suspect that few if any European legal systems are set up to effectively deal with an adversary operating in this manner.
Huh? The US is not a "special case" in this way.
I meant in terms of how people view free speech in general
The FBI has an office in Beijing. I’m doubting either government cares that much if they police their own citizens. It’s probably more complex with dual citizens. There’s so many people in each country there has to be some cooperation from time to time.
China technically doesn’t recognize dual citizenship for anyone over 18. But they’ve been known to rescind someone rescinding their citizenship before, which is messed up.
> they’ve been known to rescind someone rescinding their citizenship
I'm trying to figure out what you mean here, and wondering if you have a typo. Would you please elaborate?
This case: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/25/gui-minhai-det...
> The court in Ningbo acknowledged Gui had become Swedish in the 1990s but added that he had applied to restore his Chinese citizenship in 2018. China does not recognise dual citizenship and restoring his Chinese passport may have been a way to block Swedish diplomats from visiting him, observers said.
That was after he was detained (china kidnapped him in Thailand).
> they’ve been known to rescind someone rescinding their citizenship
...
> he had applied to restore his Chinese citizenship in 2018
Unless I'm misreading this, or if the latter claim is false, these are two very different scenarios, no?
Gui was kidnapped in 2015, so his "application" to restore Chinese citizenship in 2018 was almost certainly not exactly voluntary.
My take is that even if you rescind your Chinese citizenship, the CCP can choose to un-rescind it, re-exposing you to Chinese authority.
And then they can "persuade" you to return to China, where they don't recognize your dual citizenship.
... but this just give you dual citizenship.
That doesn't help you if they have you in China and keep you from getting access to an embassy. Dual citizenship only helps if they actually recognize it, or your host country learns of your plight- neither of which are the case here.
*home country. Host country is the one persecuting.
This might just be my own strange way of thinking.
I haven't actual lived in my parents house in decades, and yet when I go there to visit them I still think of it as "going home".
In the case above, I assume we are talking about people born in China, who have left to live in another country, and are then involuntarily returned to China. In my head, China is still the home country.
All of that said, having read your comment, I just now realized that is and uncommon understanding of the words. Your interpretation is certainly closer to the emotional meaning of them for the people involved.
Generally speaking, if you are a citizen of country X and you are in country X accused of violating the laws of country X then any citizenship of country Y that you might have is irrelevant.
It's true even if you aren't a citizen of X. Griner isn't escaping prison by not being a Russian citizen. Neither are all the kidnapped Ukrainian children.
OK, but Griner at least receives consular assistance from the US government - she wouldn't even get that if she were a Russian dual-national.
Big difference between the activity in this report and legal (e.g. extradition) cooperation.
Saudi Arabia funded 9/11, Israel shot an American citizen, the U.S. continues to operate as usual with those countries.
My point is that, politics is never about the people/victims.
Even if we assume they're 100% true, two cherry picked incidents is very far from proving that "politics is never about the people/victims".
> Saudi Arabia funded 9/11
Well, some conspiracy theories are considered facts now.
> some conspiracy theories are considered facts now.
There are mainstream sources detailing evidence of Saudi funding for Al Quaeda. [1] Whether they approved of/sanctioned 9/11 is another matter.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/documents/evide...
This is quote from wikipedia:
Robin Cook, British Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001, has written that al-Qaeda and bin Laden were "a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies", and that "Al-Qaida, literally 'the database', was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians."
So basically US sponsored 9/11. Is there any moral grounds to blame Saudi Arabia?
> So basically US sponsored 9/11.
The US did supply the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Al Qaeda did eventually arise from the Mujahideen so 9/11 is certainly blowback but the CIA would need to be funding and aiding Al-Qaeda operatives during the late 90s to 2001 for there to be equivalency with Saudi but I’m not aware of any evidence to support that. Besides, the point wasn’t that the CIA was innocent it was that Saudi was guilty.
"Alqaida" literally means "the base". As in "the foundation [of struggle]", not as in "the database".
Well, there's the fact that 95% of the hijackers were Saudis.
A civil court agrees too.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-saudi-sept11/saudi-ar...
No dog in this race
First of all this is a civil case of liability which ranges from indirect responsibility to facilitated thru incompetence/ambivalence
Second this article is about dismissal of the case over jurisdiction for parts of the claim
Third “The judge also dismissed claims … lack … jurisdiction”
Maybe the case is over with a ruling, maybe there is an article proving a link, maybe maybe but this article doesn’t make that Proof
The US also funded Al Qaeda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore
So this was 2012 in Syria and any support for Al-Qaeda was accidental and unintentional, from the article: “US-backed rebels often fought alongside al-Qaeda's al-Nusra Front, and some of the US-supplied weapons ended up in the hands of the al-Nusra Front, which had been a major concern of the Obama administration when the program was first proposed”
It's conspiratorial and misrepresentation to talk about this - to the point of it being a lie.
If a very rich American went to South America for a decade and then bombed a building in Rio, he would have 'financial relationship' to the US via a number of investments. It doesn't mean that it has anything to do with US foreign policy, the government, or anything.
Osama Bin Laden was a member of a big, sprawling, super rich Oligarchic family in Saudi. Obviously, there were dealings, and obviously some Saudis probably funded some things here and there. Just like a Texan Evangelical Oil Billionaire might fund Christian Schools in Peru, which may even be good schools. But the charity run by a guy with ties to 'American Rio Bomber'.
Everything at that level is intertwined, it's not sufficient to suggest that proves anything.
The 'State' of Saudis is 'mostly a good actor to the outside world, even if they are bad in many ways internally. They allow the free flow of oil at market prices, 'per the deal' and don't align with China, Russia, or some other crazy state, and they are not trying to invade Iran or get nukes (though there are backup plans). And they play nice with Israel, not directly trying to start a war with them, or 'create' one between them and Israel. Most of their vast holdings are invested reasonably.Also, in the 'war on terror' which is actually a financial network and intelligence war, they have been playing 'on the right side' - as 'terrorists' are more dangerous to them than the US anyhow. So that's kind of what we can expect from them. In 100 years, hopefully things will be a bit better.
> It doesn't mean that it has anything to do with US foreign policy, the government, or anything.
The evidence points to the Saudi royal family funding a terrorist organization. That’s a lot more than just a rich citizen, that is their autocratic ruling family and the evidence is very convincing. Their reasoning probably was more about regional concerns rather than attacking the US, however when you fund fanatics they don’t always follow the script.
>It's conspiratorial and misrepresentation to talk about this - to the point of it being a lie.
this is false. there is a great deal of direct and circumstantial evidence that has come out in the last two years. this isn't "bin laden knew people", this is "the 9/11 hijackers received assistance from saudi diplomats in the US"
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/11/september-11-saudi-arabi...
There is no evidence in that article.
The intercepts notions of 'this was possibly a false flag' is literally the definition of conspiracy theory.
While there certainly might be more going on than we know, there isn't evidence of that much.
It's not going to be a surprise that a conduit for clandestine money might have some kind of governmental status or what have you.
It's basically insane to suggest House of Saud would want to do 9/11 or even a 'filed false flag', there is no benefit whatsoever in either. 9/11 did not help the Saudis, and even a 'failed false flag' like a pretend attack on a building in NYC would have the objective of what, trying to get more US troops in the Middle East for who's benefit?
More importantly, the likelihood of such a thing getting found out would be extremely high. The ruler of Saudi Arabia is going to blow up the Trade Centre knowing that the CIA/FBI would be able to nail him, and even all of Humpty Dumpty's men probably could not keep that secret contained? And if the US public found out, literally Saudi Arabia would cease to exist?
For what purpose?
No, this insane.
There are ultra Wahhabi nationalists in Saudi Arabia, they have money. We already know that. They are funding odd stuff around the world, just like many other billionaires. As part of the 'war on terror' a lot of that activity was shut down and now it's really scrutinized.
Even setting 9/11 aside, Saudi Arabia publicly funds numerous madrasah in other countries which have a, shall we say, Wahhabi-aligned curriculum. Which then provide a steady stream of recruits for the likes of al-Qaida (or, these, days, ISIS). This might be indirect enough to evade responsibility, but the countries where such radicalization eventually translates to violence generally don't consider Saudis "mostly a good actor".
Just because some theories are ridiculous doesn’t mean that there aren’t many real conspiracies.
There’s a reason the CIA pushed the idea of conspiracy theory as something ridiculous, it’s great cover.
I get where you are coming from and agree. But why would saudi arabia attack the first world superpower, its biggest trading partner and biggest military ally?
People do some really stupid stuff in the name of religion all the time. Perhaps that was motivation enough, and the line in your comment is seen as a means to invoke plausible deniability
The CIA didn't need to do anything: Bigfoot, Loch Ness, Yeti, all sorts of mysterious / conspiracy theories just propagate on their own and at times because they're fun to imagine as real.
What is the "conspiracy" behind Bigfoot. The word "conspiracy" used to have a specific meaning different from "farfetched".
The Democrats are keeping bigfoot secret until they get the bigfoot population high enough to replace the MAGA crowd.
Those damn democrats!!!
They coined the term and publicised it. The things you described used to be called just myths.
No they didn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory#Etymology_an...
Lately it seems the difference between a conspiracy theory and fact is 3-6 months.
It should not be surprising at all - you are 'allowed' to do what you have the power to do and get away with.
China speaks with one voice, Xi, everyone else a thousand voices. US has 10 000 people at least who make up the power of Xi. President, senator, CEO, senior bureaucrat, judge, heads of NGOs, Universities, police, military etc. all 'put in one group and coordinated with an ambitious 50 year plan' in the West. Even in a single country.
Europe, N. America, Japan, Korea, Australia have to partner with 'everyone else' in a comprehensive way to stand up to this. Trans Pacific was a big opportunity that Trump didn't have the foresight to grasp - he wanted to have 'unipolar power' in a world where the US just does not have the leverage it did after WW2 and no amount of 'wishing' or even exceptional leadership will change that. US could 'solve all it's problems' and it would still be the reality that % of global GDP would be declining because other nations are 'coming on line'.
Oddly, a panacea of 'other voices' may serve to counterbalance. Even if they are acting in self interest, to the extent they are not overrun by China, their own voices add up to something. We are seeing the beginning of that in Africa, with their stance on the Ukraine issue. While they should definitely be taking a more assertive stance via Russia, the fact they are where they are (and partly due to the fact Russia is their 'breadbasket') is an indication of coherent self interest on some level.
I don't think it's cause for world wide alarm, but there needs to be a plan.
>China speaks with one voice, Xi, everyone else a thousand voices. US has 10 000 people at least who make up the power of Xi. President, senator, CEO, senior bureaucrat, judge, heads of NGOs, Universities, police, military etc. all 'put in one group and coordinated with an ambitious 50 year plan' in the West. Even in a single country.
This is an orientalist and simplistic take. The CCP is an enormously complicated system and there are many cliques and ideological debates within it. As any sinologist will tell you, the power struggles at the very top are mostly unknown to us (except years later, to historians) but even in Mao's era there was certainly not a single voice.
I don't think it's simplistic and certainly not orientalist, as it has nothing to do with anything Asian or Oriental specifically.
That the CCP is an 'enormous and complex system with many debates within' doesn't matter if the party speaks very directly and coherently, and the party is very tightly controlled and of course they have all of the power.
The degree of centralization of authority by Xi is unlike we've seen since Mao, and due to universal power of technology, you could say 'more power than any leader in history'.
Xi very quickly and arbitrarily grabbed the nations top tech leaders off of the street. Literally disappeared. He imposed aggressive governmental oversight and controls over those organizations (and others) including government ownership, board seats, CCP members as staffers for internal oversight, censorship requirements, etc. etc.. It's unthinkable outside China, in any normal kind of country.
If any 'outside' leader speaks up against China - be it a Dean, or Prime Minster - the CCP will respond assertively and quickly.
When China does some questionable or malign act - where is the response? Who should respond? Is anyone powerful enough to respond? Can there be a coordinated action?
As the Australian political leadership spoke up against Chinese lies over COVID origins, they were slapped with billions in trade damages, and was attacked in a number of indirect ways. Were Australia to have acted in concert and direct cohesion with USA, EU and UK on that, and were policy and actions to be aligned, it would be a different story.
There's nothing comparable to Xi outside of China (in any normal country - I won't say 'western' country because it goes way beyond that), not even Putin.
There are two different ideas here. The fact that the CCP can act decisively and has an iron grip on China does not contradict the idea that it is still a granular organization with its own internal logic. Xi is not the CCP and the CCP is not Xi. And the iron grip and the decisiveness are not as total as you imagine them to be.
This is in fact where the orientalism comes in: the rejection of granularity. If you think about it for a few seconds, it really makes no sense that a single person would be able to entirely control a structure of 96 million adherents, or that this latter structure would have no internal dissension and tumult. The only reason we might come to these conclusions is if we are deeply unfamiliar with the history, culture, ideology, way of doing things that apply and thus reject the individuality and complexity that are part of these systems. Few Westerners would qualify Western institutions in this way. I don't mean in terms of agreeing or disagreeing with what they do, but analyzing them as just a unified blob and thinking nothing of it.
I mean, that's technically true of any dictator of a large country, no? Stalin was a dictator but also not immune from political machinations.
The TPP was more complicated than this and there was bipartisan opposition to it. The opposition to it wasn't merely Trump's isolationism but genuine concerns about the economic affects it would have on domestic citizens
>threats against family members in the PRC, directly approaching and intimidating the fugitive overseas, or outright kidnapping
Wow. Actual gangster tactics.
When we do it: Realpolitik
When they do it: Gangsters
> When we do it: Realpolitik
I haven’t encountered a monolithic opinion in the United States on rendition, mostly disgust and self loathing except amongst the most terminally committed to the “war on terror.” I’ve found many friends in considering it a criminal activity.
The people who think china doing this is bad are generally the same people who think the USA doing the same thing is bad also.
What is a State, if not a sophisticated gang operating on a large scale?
The US does not threaten to kill or arbitrarily imprison family members of those they wish to extradite, and does not clandestinely do even remotely such things with US citizens unless there are huge issues of national security, aka a US Passport Holder running a terrorist camp in some place, plotting to blow up buildings.
The moral equivalence argument with China is tiring, and it's actually part of their horrible communications strategy.
The equivalent would be: 'nobody' US citizen 'Joe Smith', living in Paris, mocks Joe Biden on Facebook. As a result, FBI in USA threatens family with prison for arbitrary reasons with fabricated evidence, and clandestinely threatens US citizen in Paris to come home and 'face justice'.
So please.
yet again unjustifiably both-sidesing the actions of America and china. i don't like when America does it but it isn't relevant and i'm a lot less worried about her expanding power than china.
spoiler: most of us actually don't like the bullshit war on terror/war on drugs tactics.
and is there evidence we've threatened American citizens at home to get to expats?
1. The US doesn’t actually do what’s described here.
2. Even if it did, that would also be bad and it wouldn’t make what China does good.
These tu quoque arguments always crop up in threads describing whatever horror out of China’s genocidal, inhumane government.
So how does this work? Police stations are bases of operation for policemen. And policemen are people who need to have a lawful authority for what they do. These folks roleplaying as policemen have no such authority.
So what do they do? I can't imagine they are detaining people, giving out fines, etc. So what makes them police? Shouldn't we call them spies instead?
Yeah, agree completely. Shouldn't be called police station, more like a spy operations office.
Also, one could imagine, these “Persuasion” tactics, might be more successful than, the Western approach of where extradition treaties exist. Putting social (family?) pressure on someone probably more likely leads to a person giving in, than just being exposed to legal pressure that possibly can't reach them.
Westphalian nation states were established to supercede private armies of mercenaries. If societies now accept extra-legal methods of influence, as vividly illustrated on TV shows like The Sopranos, there will be many organized non-state actors lining up to join the party.
If citizens want a new legal category for extra-territorial operations, beyond extradition, this can be negotiated in a formal international treaty.
The fact that you think a "formal international treaty" means anything, tells us that you're not ready.
States will do whatever states CAN do. Treaties mean nothing by themselves, especially in this context.
(side note: nearly all treaties are both formal and international by default)
> States will do whatever states CAN do.
Of course. But there's a big difference between doing covertly and doing in daylight with an office.
Should foreign countries open US "Corporate Intellectual Property Donation" physical offices?
Treaties set a floor on behavior. For those who claim laws don't matter, remember that contracts and all global supply chains are based on laws of trade and finance. No law = no economy = war until agreement and law is re-established.
Treaties and international law in general are only relevant for weak states. Powerful states ignore any negative decision against them - especially the most powerful.
This is even official in some cases. For example, the USA does not recognize any authority of the the International Criminal Court (neither do China, Russia and a number of other big states), but that doesn't stop them from occasionally using it against smaller nations.
You can look for a long time, but you'll never find an example of a superpower/empire, or a close ally of one, submitting to any kind of international judgment against it, criminal or in a trade dispute. At most, they may accept a negative ruling to a case they brought against someone else.
> For example, the USA does not recognize any authority of the the International Criminal Court
This is not true. The USA is not a party to the Rome Statute and asserts that the conditions which would otherwise subject its citizens to ICC jurisdiction categorically do not exist, and has authorized unlimited measures should the ICC disagree with the last point, but does not dispute the authority of the ICC.
> You can look for a long time, but you’ll never find an example of a superpower/empire, or a close ally of one, submitting to any kind of international judgment against it, criminal or in a trade dispute.
Well, states are not subjects of criminal law, so the criminal part is trivially true. As for trade disputes, the US has complied with numerous adverse decisions in WTO proceedings.
You both are saying the same thing, according to US; ICC has no authority over US, but on other countries.
No, they’re not. The ICC has no authority over ANY state, it has authority over people who are citizens of many states, but not citizens of the US, because the US has a functioning justice system that responds to the things the ICC is focused on. Because of this, there is no need to indict a US citizen in the ICC, you can do it in the US justice system, which is why the US points out that their citizens do not need to be subjected to the ICC.
> because the US has a functioning justice system that responds to the things the ICC is focused on.
Well, that’s the position of US law.
There are certainly cases one might point to and make the argument that the US domestic system does not always effectively deal with US war crimes and the crime of aggression.
Aggression is not criminal. There are times when the US has had soldiers commit war crimes, and it’s debatable how effective the US has been at prosecuting such things historically, but it does make a realistic attempt to do so.
Please let me know when we find mass graves of women and children defiled and murdered by US soldiers, which is unfortunately common behavior for the militaries of many other states, which the ICC has been involved in prosecuting.
> Aggression is not criminal
The crime of aggression (aka crime against peace) is, like war crimes and crimes against humanity, a widely recognized crime, prosecuted in the various peri-/post-WWII tribunals, though it took a while for the ICC to settle on its operationalization.
> There are times when the US has had soldiers commit war crimes, and it’s debatable how effective the US has been at prosecuting such things historically, but it does make a realistic attempt to do so.
The standard for ICC jurisdiction isn’t general adequacy, it is specific good faith action in the particular case.
The ICC is not the only international tribunal who's authority the USA doesn't recognize on its own citizens/self. There's also the ICJ, which has found the USA guilty of war crimes and ordered it to pay restitution at least once, for having mined Nicaragua's harbors, which the US very explicitly and publically refused to recognize.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States
> You can look for a long time, but you'll never find an example of a superpower/empire, or a close ally of one, submitting to any kind of international judgment against it, criminal or in a trade dispute. At most, they may accept a negative ruling to a case they brought against someone else.
Since 2020, China's Huawei has been subject to semiconductor supply chain restrictions which have been enforced by multiple countries. This has materially impacted Huawei consumer smartphone revenues.
But in the long term, such restrictions are likely to accelerate technical self-sufficiency, https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/22/china_smic_7nm_chips/
They are enforced by other countries - it wasn't the Chinese themselves who decided to stop doing something because an international court said so - that is my point. This would be equivalent to a court imposing a fine on you, and your neighbors taking your things in the amount of the fine (instead of the state taking it, or you going to pay).
Self vs. other enforcement is less important than consequences, which are the same in both situations. If a country has the opportunity to negotiate the terms of trade, that is clearly preferable to terms being imposed unilaterally by others.
Yes, countries can break agreements, but good agreements provide benefits to all parties, such that breaking an agreement results in reciprocal loss of benefits. There are always edge cases, but by definition, not everything is an edge case and there are countless routine, negotiated agreements which benefit everyone and are happily followed.
What would "not-accepting" these methods of influence even look like?
Step 1: picket/protest and close the overt "police stations". Any would-be kidnappers can run a covert operation like countries have done since time immemorial, at the risk of unscheduled encounters with local city, state and federal authorities. Or they can work through the legal extradition system.
If this is allowed to stand after global public disclosure, it can be taken as implicit "consent" having been granted by citizens and their elected representatives, which means the next phase of extra-territorial activity (e.g. new laws on 1st December 2022) will push boundaries even further.
If some countries want to sell their territorial integrity and citizen safety down the proverbial river, at least they can negotiate a good price, e.g. bounty per head, prisoner exchange, or reciprocal global kidnapping by <foreign-country> of <host-country> targets. Good luck recruiting nomadic tech talent after opening such Dantean doors.
Do you know if the families are punished (incarcerated?) in lieu of the AWOL citizen if they can't persuade their family member to come back home and face CCP "justice" ?
They must be, in some way, otherwise this "persuasion" wouldn't be effective. If not incarceration or violence, some kind of social or economic punishment.
The Toronto one… seems like the CCP operatives absconded with the funding!
> All were in areas with large Chinese populations, but no one The Globe spoke to was aware of a police service station or had heard of the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau. One address in Markham was a private home, while the other was a mall full of small Chinese businesses and restaurants. The third property, in a business park near a highway, is owned by the Canada Toronto FuQing Business Association, a federally incorporated non-profit.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-china-police-s...
Almost equally likey are that one or all of those businesses are fronts or covers; it's not like the CCP wants to advertise the existence of these extraterritorial police stations to nosy journalists.
> ... Sao Paulo, Slovakia, Stockholm, ...
Is Bratislava too small?
Oops, I missed Bratislava, it's indeed listed in the table on p. 13, https://safeguarddefenders.com/sites/default/files/pdf/110%2...
Isn't Slovakia too much of a country?
I"m not sure if this is directly related to this particular "initiative" by China or another one: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/five-individuals-charged-vari...
At a time when traditional American values are more desperately needed than ever around the world, they are dying right here in the USA.
That's... a bit of a weird thing to say. For one thing, this idea that our "American values" are so superior to everything else is an insult to a large part of the rest of the world that also has values that we'd consider positive and good. They didn't come by those values "because America" (ok, maybe a few did here and there, but that's far from universal).
For another thing, what "traditional" American values are you referring to, in particular? Slavery? Racism? Institutionalized oppression? Police brutality? The military-industrial complex? The prison-industrial complex -- the fact that we have such a high percentage of our population incarcerated? Our legally-enshrined puritanical fear of victimless "crimes" like smoking a plant? The disenfranchisement of the poor? Income and wealth inequality? The continued weakening of labor movements? A small but loud and influential contingent of religious nuts who seem to believe that their god should be calling the shots in our legal system (hypocritically many of the same people who have wrung their hands over "Sharia law")?
Sure, I'm focusing on the negative here, and as much as I'm a bit cynical these days, there is plenty of good to come out of our country, even today. But this whole "wave the flag", "everyone should be more like us" stuff is pretty gross and short-sighted. The better values "dying" of late bit may be true (or not, I don't know anymore), but also overlooks a lot of bad stuff that has been in our national DNA for centuries.
First of all, I never said American values are superior. So you've started your homily on a false premise.
Furthermore, most of your gripes SUPPORT my point, except of course for the tired catch-alls of "slavery" and "racism." As for the rest of what you cite (mass incarceration, worker oppression, the "religious" oppressing others): THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.
Then of course there's democracy, and the alleged "resilience" of the American people. What a joke. Voting rights are being rolled back across "red" states nationwide. And "we" once rebuilt destroyed cities like Chicago and San Francisco in a few years... but it took over a decade to replace TWO buildings in New York after 9/11. And what have we built since?
If you want to roll out time-honored issues, how about abortion? Now a significant portion of the USA wants to (and has been given the go-ahead to) use women as baby farms. Even IRELAND abolished this disgusting regime.
Anyway, instead of a strawman, just create your own original post.
Or just down-mod fact-based rebuttals and slink off, weasel-like.
This is a confusion of cause and effect. The current crisis you are seeing is in part caused by this very same baked-in self-congratulatory mindset that permeates many American institutions and demographics
Don't suggest Chinese police overseas are doing covert action. It's silly, those stations are there for helping Chinese tourists, because there are so many in those places.
If Chinese want to do covert action overseas they don't send police to do it I think... It would not be covert.
This mushing together is like a racist smear fear mongering. It's bad.
That’s what consulates are. An actual police station is way different.
No you're getting confused, and have it backwards.
These Chinese police patrol around tourist areas with local police. You don't go to a consulate when you lose your mobile phone or someone steals your wallet.
These are police who operate in concert with local police. The whole point is to help Chinese tourists I think. It's not for anything nefarious...It's too racist to be smearing everything Chinese under the banner of the current Western-'China-bogeyman'-hysteria
Is this sort of thing common? Do other countries place police forces in other sovereign nations with the intent to help their home country's tourists get around in a foreign land? If not, then I think we need to look at this as an aberration, with scrutiny, and assume the worst until proven otherwise.
I personally think it is outrageous that the US government (or state or local governments) allows China to station police officers on US soil, and gives them the right to act in a police capacity. I am not ok with that at all, even if what you suggest as their purpose is correct.
Why would this even be necessary, if they're here for the purpose you suggest? Local police can handle these sorts of cases, and cities where tourists tend to travel certainly have translators on staff. Hell, cities in the US have translators to help with residents whose English skills are poor.
Also: it's not "racist" to dislike this sort of thing if the foreign government in question is not aligned values-wise with your own. I don't think it's remotely appropriate for an authoritarian anti-democratic country to have law enforcement influence on our soil.
I wouldn't have the same reaction if, say, a tight US ally (South Korea or Japan, to pick examples from the same part of the world) were to have an informal police presence in the US. But even then, I would expect them to be working with the FBI (or similar) on higher-level international crime matters (sorta like an Interpol type thing), not working on local crime. Foreign police forces should not have any kind of jurisdiction in "local" crimes.
I know there are British policemen in Thailand, there is even a reality show of it. I am not following this topic, so this is the one I know.
Using "persuasion" in quotation marks is perhaps too nice.
It's coercion, if not worse.
Not that there is much we can do about it. Though limiting ability of Chinese authorities to operate outside china is fair. After all we don't permit organized crime either.
As the report says:
> a seemingly recent campaign to counter transnational telecom and online fraud (according to the official provincial statements)
The increase in telecom scamming activity is a real thing in China, with scammers operating from southeastern Asia countries. And operators are often Chinese citizens hired for what they originally thought would be "oversea job with good pay". The "persuaded to return" strategy might be targeted primarily at them.
Those scams are particularly bad -- maybe even worse than the telecom scams happening in the US and other wealthy English-speaking countries -- because taking personal loans is way too easy in China. A few clicks on a lender's app and you get cash transferred to your account instantly. And there are hundreds of such apps. Scammers can talk victims into maxing out their credit lines and wire the loaned cash away.
And the fact that there isn't "personal bankruptcy" laws in China also makes it worse. Such loans are rarely forgiven and victims often had to pay them off with their future income for years out of the fear that loan defaults can affect their credit score for life.
So I guess this is Chinese police's way of "do something about it". Of course they don't have jurisdiction overseas and should have gone with Interpol and/or local police first, except that hasn't been very effective. My 2 cents on the reasons behind this is:
1. Local police might be paid off;
2. No incentive for local police to prioritize their resource for cases like this -- there were no victims in their own countries;
3. There are just too many scammers;
Surely once this set up is in place it's possible to extend its coverage to harass/"persuade" political dissidents but CCP has already be doing it for years without it. If this oversea police "persuasion" program is getting local law enforcement's attention to the point that they can arrest both them and the scammers, I would see it as an absolute win.
Chinese agents have also been arrested in the US for this.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/16/...
> Since the end of November 2021, many notices have been issued to warn the Chinese public not to travel to nine countries with serious telecom and web crimes: Cambodia, the UAE, the Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Malaysia, Turkey and Indonesia. People who have no "strict necessity" or "emergency reason" to travel to or stay in those countries are required to return to China as soon as possible.
This entire NGO seems extremely suspicious. Here's the Swedish guy who runs it being interviewed by a friendly outlet: https://hongkongfp.com/2017/01/08/peter-dahlin-qa-the-swedis...
Not too sure about this one though... But the organization is too well aligned with American espionage goals to dismiss it as just a well-intentioned grassroots organization. Do you have any good pointers about how the org is being funded? (Usually the blatantly obvious ones have funding traces back to places like various alphabet-named agencies and other places like the Ford Foundation or the RAND institute.)
Can you explain what’s suspicious?
It would not surprise me if a large part of this is not driven by an attempt to control the drug trade (e.g., opium) that flows through the golden triangle and southwest China. Note that this trade is huge and is a problem in China.
I don’t want to sound like an apologist (not a fan of this line of action for a number of reasons), but the focus on the nine forbidden countries (mostly in Southeast Asia) and the number of folks repatriated from those countries makes me think that this is not a small part of the motivation behind these actions.
This is very unlikely related with drug trafficking but really to stop fraud activities.
The reason is really simple, crimes associated with drugs in China can lead to death penalties and the threshold is very low. So in most cases people caught with drug trafficking in China are popped, no matter of their nationalities.
Not sure if you guys ever received calls claiming that they were DHL/FedEx etc, and there was a package for you to pick up. More ridiculously, sometimes they even claim to be the Chinese Embassy and of course there was package for you to pick up.
So that was that.
> Not sure if you guys ever received calls claiming that they were DHL/FedEx etc, and there was a package for you to pick up. More ridiculously, sometimes they even claim to be the Chinese Embassy and of course there was package for you to pick up.
Can you elaborate? this happened to my partner and we thought it was something targeted at Chinese foreigners. They were persistent and it was kind of worrying because my partner accidentally gave up a small bit of information before catching on that it was not legit. Are they trying to do identity fraud?
Variety of illegal activities, from illegal telefraud to gambling designed to circumvent PRC gaming laws. Philippines just agreed to deport 40000 chinese workers involved in offshore gambling. Lots of low level crime out there host country wants to sort out but no extradition treaty due to geopolitics. PRC's most wanted big fish list is like 20 people.
Weird that this is downvoted; it is quite factual.
I think you're right about it being centered on Zomia:
> The majority of identified targets were located in northern Myanmar.
but your specific example of the illicit trade is slightly off: aiui, the relevance of the golden triangle as an opioid producer has actually fallen off since the early 2000s as a result of DEA pressure and market shifts, but the slack was taken up by amphetamines (mostly ya ba).
https://www.unodc.org/roseap//en/2021/02/myanmar-opium-surve...
> A new report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) confirms that production and demand for opium has further declined as the region’s synthetic drug market continues to expand and diversify.
That change in drug profile appears to also be true in Yunnan: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.0025...
> The prevalence rate of heroin use decreased from 0.67% (0.63–0.73%) in 2011 to 0.57% (0.53–0.61%) in 2015, while the prevalence rate of methamphetamine use doubled from 0.20% (0.17–0.24%) in 2011 to 0.48% (0.46–0.50%) in 2015.
However, you are absolutely correct that even accounting for trends, Burma is the source of most of both opioids and amphetamines: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/a-peopl...
> Myanmar is believed to be the single largest supplier of China’s drug market. In 2013, 92.2 percent of the heroin and 95.2 percent of methamphetamine seized in China were traced to Myanmar.
All that said, Chinese in northern Burma also tend to be associated with other rackets:
> Solely in Wanding (畹町), a river port bordering Myanmar in Ruili city,Yunnan province, over 960 suspects of telecom fraud and over 100 suspects of cross-border gambling
Cross-border gambling is huge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mong_La is basically a city-sized casino, built directly across the border from Yunnan (which is incredibly porous due to the terrain, so just clamping down on crossings doesn't work). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangkham is the same deal but in Wa territory, not Shan.
The CCP really really hates cross-border gambling for a variety of reasons, including capital outflows and its nexus with domestic corruption:
https://agbrief.com/news/china/09/04/2021/chinas-cross-borde...
https://www.asgam.com/index.php/2022/02/17/china-vows-to-acc...
There's also a lot of jade/amber/wildlife smuggling but the gambling thing really is astonishingly huge business in northern Burma. So, I see it as a "yes, and": there's a lot of reasons why the CCP would want to crack down on the behavior of Chinese in northern Burma, and the drug trade is a plausible one.
In that scenario, a public transparency report on involuntary returnee legal cases would be a good start.
> In that scenario, a public transparency report on involuntary returnee legal cases would be a good start.
Why would they do that?
I’m pretty sure that the powers that be in China don’t really care about the opinions of advocates of human rights, government transparency, etc.
They probably are also not keen on airing their dirty laundry with regards to the drug trade.
Chinese leaders pretty much double dog dare any country not to trade with them based on any set of principles, knowing that the other country will be the one that suffers the most. The US is maybe the only country that could stand up to China, but the US and China are in super weird but oddly balanced symbiotic relationship that would become mutually destructive if one side decides to force its will on the other.
> the powers that be in China don’t really care about the opinions of advocates of human rights
Perhaps, although the recent Chinese adoption of wolf warrior diplomacy [1] makes it appear like they care and are trying to cover it up with bluster. China “doth protest too much, methinks.”
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_warrior_diplomacy
> Why would they do that?
The history of human civilization has countless examples.
Those who willfully ignore history can enjoy speedrunning it instead.
To be fair, have western media ever stopped trying to demonize the Chinese government, no matter what it did?
I thought I knew where Xinjiang was until I saw the CNN news regarding it with a map showing it in somewhere near Guangdong. Another example was the Chinese police event recorder version of the BBC interviews in Xinjiang.
Given such conditions, why would Chinese government give a f*ck about whatever it's doing? It will be attacked anyway, disclosing stuffs just open more attacking surfaces.
> whatever it's doing?
"Doing" in dozens of western cities is a ball game that includes the popular opinion of millions of inhabitants of said cities.
>e.g., opium
lol, are we back to the 19th century?
> lol, are we back to the 19th century?
Are you suggesting that the opium trade in the golden triangle and China is not a thing?
If it makes you feel better, we can call it heroin, which is derived from opium.
Unlike the first opium war, the current incarnation includes a fentanyl supply chain that terminates in North America and starts ..where?
A lot of the precursors are made in Wuhan [1], and then make their way to labs in Mexico before the product is sent to the US [2].
1. https://archive.ph/5HZFc 2. https://www.wsj.com/story/inside-the-mexican-cartels-that-ru...
A lot of it is made in China ironically enough last time I looked.
nope, a shitton of amphetamines and fentanyl that end up here poisoning our population start there. we should be at war with china the way she is doing this. over 100,000 a year from opioids alone. Australia getting hit with meth explosions in a similar manner. exporting drugs is china's sneaky way of weakening her competition.
Time and again we see how every dictatorship eventually becomes a snake eating it's own tail, and succumbs to self-inflicted wounds... How can they probably hope to build an advanced society treating their people like that? It will only push Chinese emigres abroad to break every tie with their home country, including relatives that stayed behind, reducing any positive impact on homeland of those people learning things and making money abroad.
Makes me think of this[1].
I guess a bit like in the spy movies where American spies were free to roam everywhere, the superpower status (i.e. money and market access) of China means they get to swing their police truncheon around and most countries just stay quiet about it.
And they were even watching Xinjiang activists outside of China (Source [2]):
> [...] one of the officers shoved a photo under my nose. It was my daughter Gulhumar. She was posing in front of the Place du Trocadéro in Paris, bundled up in her black coat, the one I’d given her. In the photo, she was smiling, a miniature East Turkestan flag in her hand, a flag the Chinese government had banned. To Uighurs, that flag symbolises the region’s independence movement. The occasion was one of the demonstrations organised by the French branch of the World Uighur Congress, which represents Uighurs in exile and speaks out against Chinese repression in Xinjiang.
The drily-written post only talks about telecommunications fraud. Is that a big deal in China, are they doing something like Nigerian 419 scams? I suppose they'd be targeting mostly Chinese citizens, using e.g. WeChat, although that's probably a bad idea because how much do you want to bet WeChat can report home the user's GPS coordinates or even just their IP would be enough for country geo-locating.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/09/secret-deal-re... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/12/uighur-xinjian...
Would China call any freedom of information and uncensored messages telecommunication fraud?
It's interesting how the authorities of the US and China have a different view of how to control its populace through information.
China is all about the controlling the logistics of the flow of information, where the authorities need to crack down dissent that can impede the structural stability of the CCP. (Not all social criticism is censored, but the ones that directly criticize the party are.) Therefore they have done many things to shut down access to foreign sites, and created one of the biggest bureaucracies in the history of the world to search through the deluge of information on the domestic net to pick out which users and posts are deemed censorable. And it kinda works, but also kinda doesn't (If you have seen the memes and lexicon circulating in the Chinese nets, you'll understand what I mean instantly.)
Whereas the US authorities plays a much more smarter game: is all about tactics. Instead of controlling the flow of information in a top-down way, it lets them free, and then actively participates in it. While China focuses on removing the opponent's pieces on the chessboard, US focuses on adding their own: through its numerous media conglomerates and NGOs (which if you ultimately trace back its funding, all leads to one of the alphabet-named agencies or neoliberal thinktanks like the Ford Foundation or the RAND Institute). When you search a dissident figure in the Chinese net, all traces will be erased and you will find nothing. When you search a dissident figure on Google, you will be spammed with all the numerous media sites that try to mislead you in some way. (And yes, this also kinda works, but also kinda doesn't. But I see this as a more sophisticated strategy than what China is doing.)
No, China does both. US just doesn't have the legal ability to pursue one of the two strategies you mentioned.
While of course the speech freedom is pretty scarce in China, there are many things that the USG do without the legal ability.
Also, the massive attempt to deplatform Trump supporters also significant weakened my belief in the US's speech freedom. I don't care if this was done by the USG or private companies, but it worked, very effectively, Parler was gone in the same way as Twitter get GFWed in China. I was shocked how Chinese this was. As a Chinese and for personal experiences, I hate Trump and the red-necks to the deepest, but I would support their right for emitting their sound.
Trump used twitter to incite violence and insurrection, which is not protected by the first amendment.
It would be better to determine this through the courts rather than twitter, but twitter has every right to ban trolls, spammers, and politicians calling for violent action
The same would be also applicable, if stretched a little bit, to protests and people organizing them in China. "Weibo has every right to ban trolls, spammers, and politicians calling for violent action" (Weibo is the Chinese Twitter equivalent)
We should not have double standard just because the USG is a something you like and CPC is not.
Trump can start his own platform. He did. People are free to join it.
It's a joke to think getting 'deplatformed' in China means you can keep trying. Test the CCP and you and your family might get a visit.
Then what happened to Parler?
Certainly we all know in China there is little speech freedom, I don't need to compare to it. (And I did test it and my family well survived till now)
What I was saying is what happened to Trump's supporters seriously damaged my belief in US's ideology.
What happened to it? Looks like you can still sign up and participate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler#Shutdown_by_service_pro...
wow thats cool they’re still up and running despite getting deplatformed.
I don’t think I’ll use the service but I’m glad they can still exercise their first amendment rights
I'm not sure what your sarcasm is about.
They did managed to restore access after some struggling. Just like Chinese struggle to develop and deploy Shadowsocks to reach Wikipedia.
There's a pretty big difference between shadowsocks and parler.com
It's possible given the Chinese government's proficiency in abusing terms.
But it seems for now mostly it's still about real crimes. Guys pretending to be from FedEx, saying your delivery have heroin in it, is seized and you need to pay a fine to get out of trouble. This may sound stupid to you, but anecdotally, one smart friend of mine doing physics PhD at MIT recently got tricked to pay ~$2000. BTW: a significant amount of those calls originated from Taiwan, easy to tell from the accent.
Those scam calls are quite common in Taiwan unfortunately, and it's fairly well known here that it's a big mafia enterprise run by the bamboo union. The government recently repatriated a bunch of Taiwanese that had been trafficked to Cambodia and were being forced to work in scam call centers.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/23/hundreds-of-ta...
Geez, being forced to talk to people, to lie and persuade and scam them of their money seems very grim for the soul.
Is this actually true? It says there is a chinese police station in NYC. Where? I looked at the NGO's pdf and didn't see an address.
It's unclear exactly what having a "police station" means. Has the NGO reported the CCP taking actions in foreign countries against Chinese nationals? The stories are all about getting at them by threatening family in China.
An example of mainland presence from one of the cities mentioned: https://nextshark.com/hong-kong-chinese-nationalists-superca... Imo, the laurentians area (ottawa/quebec) political class basically hates the rest of the country because we represent their parochial origins, and so they figure they can just import new constituents who can be more easily bribed or with special protections for their money, as a way to keep themselves in power, without having to listen to the constituents they imagine themselves as having transcended and left-behind. Something similar is likely true in other countries with these bases as well.
I can't believe that I can say without an ounce of hyperbole that our representatitives made a deal with the devil, and now they have communist party secret police bases in their cities.
Canada made no special deal with “the devil” and the article you showed in no way demonstrates that.
All those secret polices offices in canada were visited by journalists and nobody was there. If China is sending spy, it’s definitely not under the agreement or through a special deal with the Canadian government.
You are imagining a lot of things.
The amount of astroturfing on this site is incredible
Oh, the whataboutism. Forget about what humanity is doing today, we gotta be outraged about the past.
Only the past that’s convenient to make a point, though. The rest, that could prove the opposite, can stay unmentioned. Fuck nationalism, as well as whataboutism.
People in the West rarely get to encounter situations such as these that make me thankful every day for the imperfect heaven we live in.
This is a daily experience for the families of those 230k. Imagine the horrors the families in places like Xinjiang are going through. Even if a small portion of these reports is factual, we're talking rape, torture, organ harvesting, despicable acts against human life everywhere.
What we have in the west isn't perfect, but God am i thankful to not have my family denied education or other social essentials because i decide to speak my mind.
> thankful to not have my family denied education or other social essentials because i decide to speak my mind
Ongoing vigilance is essential to preserve these freedoms, as evidenced in the recent US DOJ prosecution of eBay executives for intimidation of a journalist, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33049853
> A former eBay Inc. executive was sentenced on Thursday to almost five years in prison for leading a scheme to terrorize the creators of an online newsletter that included sending live spiders, cockroaches, a funeral wreath and other disturbing deliveries to their home.
Almost five years? Wow, I'm sure he'll come out of it a better, de-psychopathized man.
Your example only shows what a joke the system we live under is and what ridiculous lengths we go to justify it.
Are you aware of another such case which was even prosecuted, much less obtaining a conviction with prison sentence?
In many cases, the families of some criminals are enjoying the benefit of the crimes. Actually that's how people from a same village can all go abroad participate in telecom scam activities. They see someone worked abroad and made a lot money, built a new house. The degree of such activities has became a major issue in China, that's why the whole operation was needed.
What's worse now is that there are areas in southeast Asia and Africa have became a hotbed for kidnapping, Chinese citizens being lured abroad, kidnapped, slaved. If you read Chinese, go on Telegram, you see people being sold all the time.
> If you read Chinese, go on Telegram, you see people being sold all the time.
Has there been an effort by Telegram to shut down accounts/communication related to human slavery?
I don't know. It is pretty easy to find these channels. And the channel I followed has been there since I joined. My feeling is that Telegram does not enforce any standard or legal measure is the reason people use it freely and safely. It is also hard to enforce I think.
I've heard of a LOT of people in the West who lived during the 1940's and wouldn't agree so much with your perspective.
Yeah, but the person you're replying to is talking about people who live in the west today, not three quarters of a century ago.