World News

Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/13000698

Beijing often states that there are about 60 million people of Chinese origin living abroad in nearly 200 countries and regions, presumably excluding those living in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, the self-ruled island that the CCP claims as its own. People of Chinese ethnicity can trace their roots back centuries in countries like Malaysia, where they make up some 23 percent of the population, and Thailand and Indonesia.

In the telling of China’s story, Xi has recently highlighted the role that “Chinese sons and daughters at home and abroad” must play in “uniting all Chinese people to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.

According to Associate Professor Ian Chong Ja, who teaches Chinese foreign policy at the National University of Singapore, Xi’s language suggests that the CCP sees ethnic Chinese across the world as a vehicle to mobilise support and advance Beijing’s interests, even if those people are not nationals of China and have no allegiance to the country.

Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12997488

Originally from the coastal city of Mariupol, Ukrainian teenager Bohdan Yermokhin was forced to live in Moscow for almost one and a half years after he and 30 other Ukrainian orphans were rounded up by Russian forces and deported against their will.

Nicknamed the Mariupol 31, he and his friends had already lived through months of brutal siege, witnessing widespread death and destruction as Vladimir Putin’s forces turned their home city to rubble.

Mr Yermokhin said the Russians tried to gain his trust, treating him nicely at first, but things deteriorated over time when he retained his positivity towards Ukraine – he would regularly argue with those around him and it was a constant psychological strain.

The Mariupol 31 were quickly turned into a propaganda tool for Moscow to “prove” they had saved the city.

Mr Yermokhin’s best friend, Pylyp Holovnya, became a poster boy for Russia’s so-called rescue missions when he was adopted by Maria Lvova-Belova, the ombudsman for children’s rights.

A half-hour documentary called This Is My Child broadcast on a nationalist TV channel last year told the story of Mr Holovnya’s removal from Mariupol, with Mrs Lvova-Belova declaring: “The moment I spoke to him I realised he’s mine: this is my child.”

A few months before, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Mrs Lvova-Belova, as well as Putin, over the unlawful removal of Ukraine’s children.

Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12996823

Under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has called for “telling China’s story well” and spreading “positive energy”.

Since Xi came to power in 2013, the media environment has tightened. Internet freedom has also declined.

In Freedom House’s 2023 report on internet freedom around the world, China was rated “not free: with a score of only nine points out of 100, one point less than the year before.

In RSF’s World Press Freedom Index, meanwhile, China fell four spots compared with 2022, ranking second to bottom and just above North Korea. More journalists are currently in jail in China than anywhere else in the world.

“There has been a very clear development towards greater state control over the media in China in recent years leaving very little space for media,” Alfred Wu, a scholar of public governance in China at the National University of Singapore, told Al Jazeera.

This development has also affected state media, according to Yuan at Rutger’s University.

“Under the rule of President Xi Jinping, state media in China have been consolidated and aligned closer with the ideology of the CCP,” he said.

"This involves regular ideological education and training, aiming to make sure that reporting reinforces Xi Jinping Thought [Xi’s ideology] and the objectives of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and this is why we are witnessing foreign staff members resigning from media outlets like [formerly more independent media company] Sixth Tone.”

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(Or, if you'd like to read the original article instead, here it is)

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Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12976581

Freely accessible archived version.

"The actions of mine that were deemed treasonous [by China] involved writing about China’s concentration camps, which hold up to a million Uighurs, and forced Uighur labour that implicated global supply chains," says Vicky Xu, an Australian journalist and researcher, previously with The New York Times and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

"In the visit of Chinese Foreign Affairs Minister Wang Yi last month, there was positive talk of trade and bilateral relations between Australia and China but nothing about me or the many other Australian citizens and residents targeted by the Chinese state on Australian soil. I thought I’d remind people of our existence and present my point of view."

"It has grown tiresome for me to recount how my life has been ruined by the Chinese state, how my family and friends were taken away as a result of my journalistic work on China. In Australia I’ve been followed around. Strange East Asian men stood in front of my apartment complex like voluntary doormen. I changed my number, got new email addresses, installed home security systems, moved again and again. Counter-surveillance has been a full-time job. As I write this, I do not have a stable home address because my current solution to the problem is leading a nomadic lifestyle to stay a step ahead of Chinese Communist Party goons. I don’t know what their plans are if and when they catch up with me again. I’m not the only China scholar who lives in fear of abduction or assassination."

Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12976164

Finland's president on Wednesday signed a 10-year security deal with Ukraine in Kyiv where President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he believed Russia planned to mobilise 300,000 new troops for its war by June. But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, quoted by Russian news agencies, said the Ukrainian president's assertion about a new Russian mobilisation was untrue.

The pact signed by President Alexander Stubb and Zelenskiy made Finland the eighth NATO member this year to commit to long-term security cooperation and defence backing for Kyiv as it battles to hold back Russian forces.

Finland, which shares a 1,340-km (830-mile) border with Russia, joined NATO a year ago.

Stubb said Finland would also send 188 million euros ($203 million) in additional military aid, including air defences and heavy-calibre ammunition. That sum took Finland's overall defence contribution to around 2 billion euros during the war.

"We are not giving this military support only for Ukraine to defend itself, we are giving this military support for Ukraine to win this war," Stubb told a joint news conference in Kyiv.

Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12975746

Capacity utilization rates in China have declined over the past couple of years in every surveyed manufacturing sector except non-ferrous metals. Products linked to the property sector, such as plastics and non-metal minerals, are experiencing severe overcapacity because of weak demand in their downstream markets. But many other sectors are seeing declining capacity utilization, too, from machinery to food, textiles, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals.

But the drop in capacity utilization rates observed in the past few years is only one aspect of a more profound phenomenon that should draw equal concern for policymakers in Brussels and other economies—China’s growing domestic production surplus. Chinese companies, across a wide range of sectors, now produce far more than domestic consumption can absorb. This domestic surplus can produce low factory utilization rates. But it can also find its way into foreign markets, creating a growing trade surplus and, at times, global redundancies that threaten industrial ecosystems in other countries.

Those imbalances are not new, but they have reached unprecedented levels since the pandemic.

Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12956314

"I push back on doomism because I don’t think it’s justified by the science, and I think it potentially leads us down a path of inaction,” said Mann during a talk last Thursday at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

“And there are bad actors today who are fanning the flames of climate doomism because they understand that it takes those who are most likely to be on the front lines, advocating for change, and pushes them to the sidelines, which is where polluters and petrostates want them.”

Cross:posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12953917

Over the past few years, Russian authorities have significantly tightened control over what is taught in schools and how. For example, starting in September 2022 students have been attending a weekly flag-raising ceremony and listening to the national anthem before classes. They also attend mandatory lessons called “Conversations about Important Things,” where they learn about patriotism from the Kremlin’s viewpoint.

Any dissent schools is persecuted. In spring 2023, sixth-grader Masha Moskaleva drew an antiwar picture during a class, depicting the Ukrainian flag, the slogan “Glory to Ukraine” and Russian missiles.

"The teacher ran to the principal, who then called the police. The art teacher went and threatened my daughter, so when the officers arrived and waited for Masha at the entrance, asking all the children for their first and last names, my daughter immediately understood what was going on. She managed to slip away: she gave a false last name. She ran home, out of breath, and said, ‘dad, I was almost caught by the police, I drew a picture.’ My daughter was scared. I promised that the next day I would come to school and wait for her until the end of classes," said Masha’s father, Alexei Moskalev.

Later, antiwar statements were found on social media belonging to Moskalev. He was sentenced to one year and 10 months in prison.

Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12950703

As the threat of secondary sanctions deters Chinese banks from facilitating trade with Russia, companies are flocking to the one Russian bank with a Chinese branch and facing up to six months of delays, five people familiar with the matter said.

Russia's largest banks rushed to open accounts in China following sweeping sanctions imposed by the United States and other Western nations on Russia's financial system after Moscow sent its army into Ukraine in February 2022. By the end of that year, 90% of Russian banks had yuan accounts in Chinese banks.

Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12949038

A team of researchers at Chinese, German and Canadian universities have tracked the impacts of deteriorating air at that time. They found that particle pollution deaths in China were increasing at about 213,000 a year and peaked at 2.6mn people in 2005.

More positively, the impact of rapid improvements in China’s air pollution were also seen, with decreases of 59,000 deaths a year from 2013 to 2019.

Air pollution in China is still far worse than in many developed countries. In 2019, about half of China’s cities failed to meet their own national standards, let alone those from the World Health Organization.

[Edit typo.]

Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12949136

Russia's energy sector is struggling in the face of Western sanctions to repair their refineries, built with the help of U.S. and European engineering firms, according to at least 10 Russian industry sources.

The difficulties have been exacerbated by Ukrainian drone attacks that have struck at least a dozen Russian refineries this year, the industry sources said. The attacks forced Russian refineries to shut in some 14% of capacity in the first quarter, according to Reuters calculations.

"If the stream of drones continues at this rate and Russian air defences don't improve, Ukraine will be able to cut Russian refining runs quicker than Russian firms will be able to repair them," said Sergey Vakulenko, an expert on Russia's energy industry and non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an international affairs think tank.

Russia is "very likely" behind a series of disturbances affecting GPS navigation in the Baltic region, the German Defence Ministry said on Thursday, pointing to the Kaliningrad exclave as a source of the problem.

"The persistent disruptions to the global navigation satellite system are very likely of Russian origin and are based on disruptions in the electromagnetic spectrum, including those originating in the Kaliningrad Oblast," a spokesperson for the ministry told Reuters, confirming a report by news website t-online.

The spokesperson declined to give details on how Berlin made its assessment or the exact nature of the disruptions, citing "reasons of military security".

Kaliningrad is sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland on the coast of the Baltic Sea. It was cut off from Moscow when Lithuania became independent during the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12948796

Finland views Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries and military targets inside Russia as legally justified, Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen told The Moscow Times on the sidelines of a NATO foreign ministers meeting.

Ukrainian drone strikes on Tuesday targeted an oil refinery and a drone assembly plant in the republic of Tatarstan, the farthest-reaching strikes inside Russia since Moscow invaded Ukraine over two years ago.

“The UN Charter allows a country, while it defends its independence, to attack targets which are military. So I would just leave it like that,” Valtonen told The Moscow Times on Wednesday.

A strong statement emerged from Volker Turk, the current United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who, during a global update to the U.N. human rights council a few weeks ago, directly challenged the Chinese government to accompany poverty alleviation with “reforms to align relevant laws and policies with international human rights standards.”

The U.N. has been roundly criticized in recent years for its failure to achieve much in China other than more effective methods of smothering dissent, in part because it seems institutionally compromised by the Chinese Communist Party regime. Turk’s comments do at least acknowledge that crimes are happening, but more than just words are required for change to be expected.

Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/12934557

Taiwan on Thursday condemned China as “shameless” after Beijing’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations thanked the world for its concern about a strong earthquake on the island.

China claims democratically-governed Taiwan as its own territory and also claims the right to speak for it on the international stage, to the fury of Taipei given Beijing’s communist government has never ruled the island and has no say in how it chooses its leaders.

On Wednesday, after the 7.2 earthquake hit eastern Taiwan, killing 10 people, China’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the U.N., Geng Shuang, mentioned at a meeting about children’s rights that another speaker had brought up the quake in “China’s Taiwan”. China is concerned about the damage and has expressed condolences to Taiwan and offered aid, he said, according to a transcript of his remarks carried on the Chinese mission to the U.N.’s website.

“We thank the international community for its expressions of sympathy and concern,” he added.

Taiwan’s foreign ministry expressed anger at the remarks.

The ministry “solemnly condemns China’s shameless use of the Taiwan earthquake to conduct cognitive operations internationally”, it said, using Taiwan’s normal term for what it views as Chinese psychological warfare.

This shows China has no goodwill towards Taiwan, the ministry added.

Taiwan’s government has already thanked governments and leaders around the world for their messages of concern and offers of support, including from the United States, the island’s most important international supporter despite the lack of diplomatic ties.

In a letter to the prime minister, they said exports must end because the UK risks breaking international law over a "plausible risk of genocide" in Gaza.

PM Rishi Sunak is already facing growing cross-party pressure after seven aid workers were killed in an air strike.

Mark Swidan has been languishing in a Chinese prison since his arrest in 2012 on narcotics trafficking charges, which he denies. He was visiting China to buy flooring and furniture, according to his mother. But he was not in the country at the time of the alleged offenses, according to a review of his case by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.

A Chinese court upheld his death sentence in 2023, with a two-year reprieve.

a notable point in here, particularly given the recent WCK murders:

In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.