Thursday 31 March 2022

Senior British Judges Resign from Hong Kong’s Highest Court, Citing Erosion of Freedoms

On Wednesday, the two most senior judges of the UK Supreme Court resigned from their overseas positions on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal, the city’s highest court. The two judges’ resignations further challenge the legitimacy of Hong Kong’s rule of law and the independence of its courts since Beijing imposed the National Security Law in 2020. Hillary Leung at the Hong Kong Free Press reported on the statement by one of the judges, who claimed that the administration “has departed from values of political freedom, and freedom of expression”:

Court of Final Appeal judges Right Honourable Lord Robert Reed and the Right Honourable Lord Patrick Hodge submitted their resignations on Wednesday with immediate effect.

“The courts in Hong Kong continue to be internationally respected for their commitment to the rule of law,” a statement from Lord Reed, who is president of the UK Supreme Court, said.

“Nevertheless, I have concluded, in agreement with the government, that the judges of the Supreme Court cannot continue to sit in Hong Kong without appearing to endorse an administration which has departed from values of political freedom, and freedom of expression, to which the Justices of the Supreme Court are deeply committed.” [Source]

Lord Reed has served as president of the UK Supreme Court since 2020, and as a non-permanent judge on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal since 2017. Lord Hodge has served as deputy president of the UK Supreme Court since 2018, and as a non-permanent judge on the Court of Final Appeal since 2021. Since the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the Court of Final Appeal has hosted several judges from the UK, Canada, and Australia as non-permanent members in order to maintain a connection to the world of common law. Their presence has also indicated international confidence in Hong Kong’s judiciary. Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam even said so herself when Lord Hodge joined the court in 2021, as China Daily reported at the time:

Lam said the presence of the esteemed non-permanent judges manifests the judicial independence of Hong Kong, helps maintain a high degree of confidence in its legal system and allows Hong Kong to maintain strong links with other common law jurisdictions.

[…] Ronny Tong Ka-wah, senior counsel and executive councilor, said Hodge’s acceptance of the role demonstrated the international recognition of Hong Kong’s judicial independence. [Source]

However, foreign judges have also enabled Hong Kong’s legal crackdown on pro-democracy figures. Now, the withdrawals of the two senior British judges “are votes of no confidence to the whole political and legal environment after the national security law,” said Eric Yan-ho Lai, the Hong Kong Law fellow at the Center for Asian Law in Georgetown University. As Jill Lawless and Danica Kirka reported for the Associated Press, the British government determined that their presence was no longer tenable given the current political situation:

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the two U.K. judges had “concluded that the constraints of the national security law make it impossible for them to continue to serve in the way that they would want.”

“I appreciate and I understand their decision,” he said.

In announcing the move, British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said there had been “a systematic erosion of liberty and democracy in Hong Kong.”

“The situation has reached a tipping point where it is no longer tenable for British judges to sit on Hong Kong’s leading court, and would risk legitimizing oppression,” she said. [Source]

Under the National Security Law, national security cases are heard by judges who can be personally picked by the Hong Kong Chief Executive or by judges in mainland China. Haroon Siddique and Helen Davidson from the The Guardian described how the two British judges had no positive influence on national security cases in their position and thereby gave a false sense of legitimacy to the government:

Chung Ching Kwong, the Hong Kong campaign’s director for the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said the decision came as a surprise, given expectations of a Westminster Hall debate on Wednesday morning.

Kwong told the Guardian the campaigners had been seeking to have the British judges removed from the court of final appeal as their presence was “no longer acting as a moderating force, as the government has claimed, but was giving a false sense of legitimacy to the Hong Kong government”.

Kwong said the non-permanent judges had no impact over political cases, and so there was no positive influence they could wield by remaining.

“They are only in the court of final appeal, and when it comes to national security law cases the Hong Kong government gets to handpick which judges can sit on the panel. None of the British judges have ever been chosen.” [Source]

The Chinese and Hong Kong governments criticized the British judges’ withdrawal and called it politically motivated. The spokesperson of the Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China in Hong Kong stated: “The UK, through such a trick, smeared the National Security Law for the HKSAR and its rule of law, and interfered in Hong Kong affairs … [The] UK attempted to denigrate the Chinese Government’s policies towards Hong Kong and discredit the development of its rule of law by playing the ‘foreign judge’ card.” Chris Lau from the South China Morning Post described Carrie Lam’s claim that the judges’ withdrawal was political and not connected to the National Security Law: 

“We have no choice but acquiesced in the two eminent judges’ decision to resign from the Court of Final Appeal following the UK government’s decision to discontinue an agreement that has been respected and has served both the Hong Kong and UK interests well for years,” Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said.

“But we must vehemently refute any unfounded allegations that the judges’ resignations have anything to do with the introduction of the Hong Kong national security law or the exercise of freedom of speech and political freedom in Hong Kong.”

The government issued a separate statement against Britain’s “unfounded allegations”.

“The fact that there would be a debate in the UK Parliament may well have influenced the resignation of the two serving UK judges,” the statement read.

“This is clear evidence of external political pressure on judges of an otherwise independent judiciary. This will not be tolerated and will not happen in Hong Kong.” [Source]

Some noted the irony of Hong Kong and Chinese officials’ invocation of political interference in their criticism of a court outside of their jurisdiction:

Four of the remaining ten foreign judges on the Court of Final appeals said that they would remain in their positions, and the other six have not yet stated whether they would stay or resign. Australian judge James Spigelman set the precedent for foreign judges’ departure from the Court of Final Appeal when he resigned in September 2020 for reasons “related to the content of the national security legislation.”

“The continued presence of overseas (judges) is of clear reputational benefit to the HK government and the HK government knows it,” wrote Alvin Cheung, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University and expert on the abuse of legal norms and institutions by authoritarian regimes. “This reputational benefit far outweighs the potential for overseas (judges) to act as any sort of meaningful restraint.” Austin Ramzy from The New York Times described how the resignations of these two senior British judges put pressure on the remaining foreign judges to follow suit: 

The role of the British Supreme Court judges on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal is unique because they are acting judges at home. Other foreign judges on the Hong Kong court, including current members from Britain, Australia and Canada, are retired.

But the resignation of the high-profile British judges could pressure others to follow, legal experts said.

“This will influence a lot of public opinion, even though it may not actually be true in terms of the state of justice in Hong Kong,” said Simon Young, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong.

“This ongoing perception and reality — you see this great divide,” he added. “And then, of course, it puts the other foreign judges in a difficult position because they will be asked, ‘If this is true, why are you staying?’” [Source]



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/03/senior-british-judges-resign-from-hong-kongs-highest-court-citing-erosion-of-freedoms/
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Independent Reporting On MU5735 Disaster Blocked, Criticized, and Censored

On Monday, March 21, 2022, China Eastern Airline Flight 5735 crashed in Guangxi, killing all 132 people on board. The Guangzhou-bound plane departed from Kunming in the early afternoon, flew normally for approximately an hour, plunged 21,000 feet in 72 seconds, briefly recovered altitude, and then crashed into a Guangxi hillside. The flight was piloted by one of China’s most experienced commercial aviators and co-piloted by a young captain following in the footsteps of his father, a former commercial pilot. Experts are flummoxed as to the cause of the nose dive.

The crash is the greatest air disaster in China in decades. The last deadly China Eastern Airlines accident occured in 2004, when a jet flying from Inner Mongolia to Shanghai crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 55 people on board. Information about the recent crash has been strictly controlled by the government. At The New York Times, Austin Ramzy reported on how the Chinese government has leveraged propaganda and censorship to control discussion of the disaster: 

Government and airline officials did emerge to give a news conference a day after the crash, but they could not answer basic questions about the doomed plane, a six-year-old Boeing 737-800, or its pilots, drawing online criticism that officials were issuing “rainbow farts” — a common idiom to describe excessive praise. Censors deleted articles and social media posts that raised more detailed questions about the disaster.
[…] Online, many mocked the performance of officials at a news conference late Tuesday, particularly Sun Shiying, the chairman of China Eastern Airlines Yunnan branch. He declined to answer questions about the maintenance history of the aircraft, the weather, the flying experience of the pilots and what they said to air traffic control during the flight. Instead, he read from a brief written statement saying that the plane was cruising when the crash occurred, and the airline was carrying out a thorough investigation.
[…] “Judging from the actual contents of those censored articles, they really did not say much,” said Xiao Qiang, founder of China Digital Times and a researcher on internet freedom at the University of California, Berkeley. “So there is definitely quite tight control on the airplane crash.” [Source]

Journalists attempting to report from the scene of the crash have been denied access to the area. In a now-censored WeChat essay archived by CDT, journalist Du Qiang—famed for his 2016 long-form article “Massacre in the Pacific: A Personal Account”— wrote of the extraordinary measures journalists have taken to evade police blockades and other obstacles while attempting to access the crash zone. Du himself rode a rented motorbike more than 35 miles in a futile attempt to evade checkpoints set up to block entry to journalists and other outsiders. Police also shot down drones used by news organizations to gain access to the site. In the essay, published to his personal WeChat blog, Du lamented that Chinese citizens today demand that everyone wait for “official announcements,” whereas in years gone by, they understood the need for investigative journalism: “People believing in their own government is a good thing, but in certain situations it is extremely naive—akin to a fantasy that some abstract system of integrity exists […] When people in the media don’t play by ‘the rules,’ that’s because there is no truth within the rules set up by the responsible parties.” The public’s demands are shaped by censorship. As pointed out in The Economist, censors allow nationalist commentators to savage independent journalists deemed unpatriotic—the irony being, a veteran journalist told the magazine, that they are unaware that “what they are attacking is already dead.”

Du’s point that censorship and media constraints are, in part, a product of public demand was illustrated by the blowback China’s People magazine received after publishing intimate portraits of the disaster victims. Netizens accused the publication of “eating buns dipped in human blood.” As Fang Kecheng explained in his NewsLab newsletter, the phrase has been appropriated by Chinese netizens to accuse media outlets of capitalizing on victims’ trauma—whereas the phrase as it originally appeared in Lu Xun’s 1919 short story “Medicine” criticized the ignorance and apathy that plagued late imperial China. At China Media Project, Stella Chen documented the ensuing media firestorm and state media’s consistent efforts to reroute the conversation away from human tragedy and towards official narratives:  

In using this term “public character” (公共性), the central media source [quoted in a piece critical of People] meant something akin to, but notably different from, the idea of the public interest. Generally, in China’s official news culture, under the strictures of the CCP’s view of the news, the government response is the news, period. The leadership is anxious to ensure that the initial news cycle is dominated by stories of government action and heroism – and that questions of negligence or responsibility are sidelined or buried. Frequently, once the initial period of response is finished and an official investigation underway, media are told that the time has passed for reflection. Propaganda instructions will often explicitly direct media not to “reflect back” (回顾).
[…] Another Shenzhen University professor, Peng Huaxin (彭华新), took issue with the assertion that all information about the victims and their family members should remain private. While the right to privacy involved the protection of certain private information as well as the dignity of a person, the release of certain information could also be of public concern in the event of such tragedies, he said. “Obviously, the people in this sudden tragedy are figures for whom most of the nation now feels concern and attachment, and the publication of their names is also done out of respect or a sense of grief for them,” said Peng. “There is nothing wrong with the moderate disclosure of their names, which does not include any negative information or personal insult.”
[…] The CCTV reporter’s action quickly became the story on March 23, drawing the focus away from the victims and back to one of a number of official narratives. A still image of the CCTV broadcast was shared by the network on social media, the reporter’s hand covering an ID in the dirt, with the caption: “This does not need to be featured.” [Source]

Online, many followed People’s Daily’s lead and insisted that media outlets not publish the names of victims or contact their families in the name of “journalistic ethics.”  During previous disasters, the state has mandated that media outlets follow Xinhua’s line rather than pursue independent inquiry. A WeChat essay from the blog @旧闻评论 (in English, “Old News Revisited”), criticized the tropes of “eating buns dipped in human blood” and “journalistic ethics” as tools used to silence the free press:

To slander People magazine’s reporting as “eating buns dipped in human blood” is an extremely foolish concept. In fact, doing so accords with certain shrewd plans that aim to control the flow of information about disasters and manage the direction of public debate. To minimize media reports by alleging they do not conform with so-called “journalistic ethics,” to engage in grandiose discussions on “journalistic ethics” in a place without journalism, is a method [for unnamed parties] to reap the benefits of sowing confusion. [Chinese]

The strictures faced by the media were again put in stark relief during the search for MU5735’s two black boxes. The first black box was recovered quickly at the scene of the crash, while the second box remained undiscovered for a number of days. On the Friday following the crash, the state-run outlet China Civil Aviation News, in a two-word article that included 7 reporters’ bylines, reported that the second black box had been found —only to retract their report and apologize for a lack of fact checking. Major state news outlets then reported the discovery of the second black box on Sunday.

Upon the recovery of the second black box and the identification of all 132 victims’ remains, the Chinese state moved on to an officially designated mourning period. After previous tragedies, the media’s effort to “reflect back” after the official mourning ceremonies has been met with further strictures. At China Media Project, David Bandurski reported on the Catch-22 that plagues Chinese media: report too early and be accused of “eating buns dipped in human blood”; report too late and be accused of picking at old scars:

Now that fully eight days have passed, the authorities are pushing for everyone to move on from the tragedy – and from related stories and speculation. At this point, according to general practice, media will be discouraged from any further reporting on the crash, possibly through propaganda department directives.

During the first 7 days of a tragedy, the official line is typically that it is too early to “reflect back.” Personal and human stories are too painful and disrespectful while all energy should be on recovery and rescue. Once 7 days have passed, the perspective shifts. It is suddenly time for everyone to move on – because revisiting tragedy, or obsessing about its details, is too painful.

Xi Jinping’s tribute on Monday to the victims will likely be the last word before the results of the official investigation are released weeks or months from now. [Source]

The WeChat blog 中式没品笑话百科 sarcastically highlighted the fallacy inherent in the arguments of free media’s critics: “It’s as if, if the media simply ceased to exist, horrible things would vanish, the internet would be purified, and society would take a turn for the better. Media is the root of all evil. Curse the media forever, while forever crying righteous tears.”



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/03/independent-reporting-on-mu5735-disaster-blocked-criticized-and-censored/
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L.A. Times – China streamers scrub Keanu Reeves titles over his support for Tibet



source https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2022-03-24/china-streamers-scrub-keanu-reeves-titles-over-his-support-for-tibet#new_tab
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NYT – China Finds Flight Recorder From Plane Crash as Rain Hinders Search



source https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/world/asia/china-crash-black-box-found.html#new_tab
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Wednesday 30 March 2022

Photo: The Red Land 紅土地之行——乐谱沟, by JiKang Lee

A stunning vista of rolling hills covered with a patchwork of fields in shades of green, pale green, yellow, and brown, as well as the dark reddish soil of harvested fields. Taken in Yunnan Province, China.

The Red Land 紅土地之行——乐谱沟, by JiKang Lee (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/03/photo-the-red-land-%e7%b4%85%e5%9c%9f%e5%9c%b0%e4%b9%8b%e8%a1%8c-%e4%b9%90%e8%b0%b1%e6%b2%9f-by-jikang-lee/
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Coda Story – British homegrown conspiracies get Beijing’s stamp of approval



source https://www.codastory.com/newsletters/beijing-british-conspiracies/#new_tab
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China Strengthens Ties with Global South to Counter Western Pressure Over Ukraine

Over the past two weeks, China has increased its engagement with countries in the Global South, partially in response to the war in Ukraine. China’s position on the war has been one of feigned neutrality in the form of “rock solid” diplomatic and propaganda support for Russia, censure directed at NATO and the U.S. for provoking the conflict, and calls to de-escalate the conflict by lifting Western sanctions against Russia. Some of these messages have resonated throughout the developing world, and China has sought to capitalize on shared interests to bolster its position.

An unusually large number of recent, high-level diplomatic interactions is one sign of China’s desire to reaffirm common ground. In quick succession, Foreign Minister Wang Yi met on different occasions with his counterparts from Zambia, Algeria, Tanzania, Somalia, Egypt, The Gambia, Niger, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Nepal, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, and President Xi Jinping spoke with his counterpart from South Africa. Jun Mai from the South China Morning Post described how these diplomatic interactions garnered words of affirmation for China’s position on Ukraine:

Meeting Wang in southeast China on Sunday, Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra called Beijing’s approach to the crisis “a correct and broad path”.

[…] Those points were repeated in Islamabad on Monday, when Wang met his Pakistani counterpart Shah Mahmood Qureshi. They also raised concern over the “spillover effect of unilateral sanctions”. Islamabad also abstained from voting on the General Assembly resolutions.

Tanzania abstained from the earlier vote [on a UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia], and in virtual talks on Sunday, Wang and Tanzanian Foreign Minister Liberata Mulamula called for “stronger solidarity” among developing nations on the “turbulent international situation”.

Meeting Wang in Islamabad on Tuesday, Egypt’s top diplomat Sameh Shoukry opposed efforts to “pressure China” over Ukraine, according to the Chinese side.

Zambian Foreign Minister Stanley Kakubo praised China for playing a “leading role” in mediation when he met Wang in Anhui province on Saturday.

And in talks in Islamabad on Wednesday, Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud agreed with Wang that all nations should “withstand external pressure” and make their own judgment on the Ukraine crisis. [Source]

These diplomatic visits follow a UN General Assembly resolution criticizing Russia for the “dire” humanitarian situation in Ukraine, on which China and a significant number of countries from the Global South abstained. Almost half of all African countries refused to vote in favor of the resolution. While there is a diversity of rationales, Hannah Ryder and Etsehiwot Kebret drew a parallel between the motivations of these African countries and those of China, which were based on “neutrality” and a desire for dialogue. Ryder and Kebret noted that all of the abstaining African countries are affiliated with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a group born out of the desire to avoid commitment to either the U.S. or the Soviet Union, and in which China has observer status. The BRICS, another coalition created as a counterweight to the West, and of which China is a member, has also largely shunned the resolution and has achieved greater solidarity amid the crisis. 

In an analysis for The China-Africa Project, Cobus van Staden outlined several aspects of China’s repositioning in relation to the Ukraine crisis, much of which taps into Western challenges in the Global South:

In the first place, China is trying to use broad statements in support of negotiations as a way to stake out a third position that relieves the pressure to be either pro-Putin or pro-NATO. After his meeting with Ramtane Lamambra, Algeria’s Foreign Minister, Wang Yi said: “We generally agreed that there are more than two options, namely war, and sanctions, for dealing with international and regional hotspot issues, but dialogue and negotiation is the fundamental solution.”

Second, China is trying to reframe the debate from solidarity in the face of aggression towards the economic impact that this solidarity (in the form of massive sanctions and mangled supply chains) will have on the global economy. China of course has its own sanctions-related preoccupations, but it has managed to hook them to the Global South’s worries about paying for a conflict far away with spiking bread prices in their own countries. 

[…] Third, Beijing seems to be wagering that whatever outrage certain Global South constituencies feel about Russian aggression, this will be sufficiently diluted by wider misgivings about Western double standards to at least give its third position some political legs. This is arguably the most potent part of the strategy, and the one Western countries trying to build solidarity on Ukraine will find the most troublesome. 

[…] China’s emerging position seems to shrewdly hone in on twin Global South resentments: of the economic fallout from Western sanctions, and of Western pressure as a whole, no matter the specific merits of the case. This weekend, Xue Bing, China’s new Special Envoy to the Horn of Africa, struck this note too:  “Some western countries come here and tell you what and how to do it. From our discussions, I have a feeling countries are fed up with that.” [Source]

However, not all of the diplomatic meetings between China and countries from the Global South revolved around Ukraine. As Lauren Ashmore argued in The Diplomat, the meetings involved many unique African interests and mostly demonstrated China’s willingness to engage with African countries, even as some Western countries have shunned those who refused to criticize Russia:

[These] meetings did not happen in a vacuum, but rather within the bounds of both African and Chinese foreign policy goals. Yes, Ukraine and Russia featured in the discussions, as they should, but there was a great deal more on the table.

In particular, these seven countries all have differing views on the crisis. Egypt, The Gambia, Niger, Somalia, and Zambia voted in favor of Ukraine at the March 2 U.N. General Assembly session, while Tanzania and Algeria abstained (as did China). While understanding different points of view can be helpful to China in taking its own next steps, what this demonstrates is that the meetings were not conditional on African governments aligning or not aligning with China.

This is in stark contrast to how some other countries have handled recent international engagements – for example the U.K. recently cancelled a delegation’s visit to India due to the latter’s stance on Ukraine. Chinese engagement with the African continent has continued without such strings attached, making China both a consistent and unique development partner for African countries. [Source]

Indeed, China has continued courting developing countries regarding matters unrelated to Ukraine, often to strengthen economic ties and oppose Western influence. Last weekend in Nepal, Wang Yi signed deals for projects connecting Chinese and Nepalese rail and energy sectors and offered to donate another four million doses of COVID vaccines, all of which was seen as a move to compete with a large American grant recently approved by the Nepalese parliament. Last Thursday, Wang made a surprise visit to Afghanistan to discuss the Taliban’s cooperation in the Belt and Road Initiative, to denounce “the political pressure and economic sanctions on Afghanistan imposed by non-regional forces,” and to declare that China “respects the independent choices made by the Afghan people.” Behind the scenes, as Samya Kullab wrote for the Associated Press, Chinese investors have been working with Taliban officials to develop the Mes Aynak copper mine, which lies below a 2,000-year-old Buddhist city along the Silk Road and contains one of the world’s largest deposits of copper:

Ziad Rashidi, the ministry’s director of foreign relations, approached the consortium made up by MCC, China Metallurgical Group Corporation and Jiangxi Copper Ltd. Dilawar has had two virtual meetings with MCC in the last six months, according to company and ministry officials. He urged them to return to the mine, terms unchanged from the 2008 contract.

A technical committee from MCC is due in Kabul in the coming weeks to address the remaining obstacles. Relocating the artifacts is key. But MCC is also seeking to renegotiate terms, particularly to reduce taxes and slash the 19.5% royalty rate by nearly half, the percentage owed to the government per ton of copper sold.

“Chinese companies see the current situation as ideal for them. There is a lack of international competitors and a lot of support from the government side,” Rashidi said.

[…] Rashidi has also reached out to China’s CNPCI [China National Petroleum Corporation International] to revamp an oil contract to explore blocks in Amu Darya near the Turkmenistan border, terminated in 2018.

Dozens of small-scale contracts have been handed out to local investors, many of whom have joint ventures with international companies, mainly Chinese and Iranian. [Source]

 



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/03/china-strengthens-ties-with-global-south-to-counter-western-pressure-over-ukraine/
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WeChat “Bug” Turns Out To Be Obscure Insult for Xi Jinping

A group of students under the impression they had discovered a WeChat “bug” that hides the phrase “200 jin of dumplings” (roughly 220 pounds) had in fact stumbled upon an obscure insult for Xi Jinping that triggers automatic censorship. 

In the course of daily conversation, the students found that messages preceded by the term “200 jin of dumplings” (200斤饺子) were not received by their counterparts. Juvenile hilarity ensued. They sent each other curses and confessions: “200 jin of dumplings, you’re a stupid c***,” “200 jin of dumplings, you’re an idiot,” “200 jin of dumplings, piggy,” and “200 jin of dumplings, you’re a lil’ cutie.” They then shared screenshots of their “discovery” online—delighting in their exploitation of a perceived bug in China’s most popular chat app.

Little did they know, the “bug” was no accident—but rather an automatic censorship mechanism. In 2017, CCTV aired a special on Xi Jinping’s time as a sent-down youth in the village of Liangjiahe, Shaanxi Province, in which Xi claimed, “I’d carry 200 jin of wheat on a ten-li mountain road without even switching shoulders.” Mass ridicule followed his boast. Many doubted his claim. In 2020, a group of Taiwanese bodybuilders attempted, and failed, to recreate the feat (their shoulder yoke broke under the weight.) The 2021 smash hit song “Fragile,” which is censored in China, also mocked the claim. 

Screenshot of an interview with Xi Jinping, with subtitles in Chinese reading: “I’d carry 200 jin of wheat on a ten li mountain road..."

Subtitle: “I’d carry 200 jin of wheat on a ten-li mountain road…”

“200 jin” soon became a tongue-in-cheek reference for Xi, alongside a host of other phrases derived from the same interview series: “Wheat-Carrying Man,” “Wheat-Bearing Donkey,” “Without Switching Shoulders,” and the character 奭 shì, which resembles a single person carrying a heavy load across their shoulders (the two radicals 百 at left and right mean “one hundred.”) All of these have become sensitive words subject to censorship. In 2019, a person claimed that they were invited to “drink tea,” a euphemism for police interrogation, after posting “I hope that Trump beats ‘200 jin’s’ brain out soon,” in a QQ group.

It is not uncommon for young Chinese netizens to brush up against censorship without realizing it. Even the censors need refresher courses on the Tiananmen democracy protests and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Liu Xiaobo. China’s censorship regime is so vast that it is difficult to remember what must be forgotten.



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/03/wechat-bug-turns-out-to-be-obscure-insult-for-xi-jinping/
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Friday 25 March 2022

COVID Conspiracies, Hashtag Suppression, and a Broadside Aimed at the “Great Translation Movement”

This week saw the proliferation of COVID conspiracy theories on Chinese social media, the suppression of a popular hashtag about the Xuzhou trafficking and abuse case, and a Global Times broadside aimed at discrediting the crowd-sourced “Great Translation Movement.”

On March 24, the hashtag #ResearchConfirmsNovelCoronavirusCreatedByUSCompany# (#研究证实新冠病毒是美国公司制造#) briefly topped the Weibo Trending Topics List, although it has now disappeared from the list. Many were dismayed by the overnight popularity of a rumor whose “chain of transmission” stretches from Chinese state media and a Confucius Institute professor back to the British anti-vax and conspiracy podcast The Exposé, the Daily Mail tabloid, a Fox Business channel interview, and a study that appeared in a minor medical journal. The rumor has been debunked by a number of fact-checking organizations, including AFP Fact Check and Politifact.

Posts debunking the rumor quickly appeared on Chinese social media sites. In a WeChat post titled “Does research confirm that the novel coronavirus was created by the American company Moderna?” Wang Zilong of China Fact Check delved into the source material, including the Daily Mail article that quoted scientists skeptical of the study’s findings, and concluded that the rumor was unfounded. Another WeChat essay (“Moderna created the novel coronavirus? Sorry, you’ve been hoodwinked again”) conducted a deep dive into the medical evidence and concluded: “Subscribing to rumors and conspiracy theories will ultimately only […] blind us even more. Not to mention that at present, the currently effective vaccines are the best way to fight the pandemic and return to normal life and [economic] production as soon as possible. If vaccines are demonized in this way, we will only victimize ourselves.” 

A post by WeChat user donkeymeipin (“No one really believes that #ResearchConfirmsNovelCoronavirusCreatedByUSCompany#, do they?”) took a humorous approach to debunking the rumor and highlighting the official hypocrisy that allowed it to spread:

After reading it, I couldn’t help but be amazed: such big news, such an evil act, yet the BBC, CNN and the like all chose to remain silent. Even RT, hitherto so outspoken, didn’t utter a word about it. It was only some of our local media that chose to stand up and unmask the truth—it turns out that China’s journalism industry is the cream of the crop!

So, who was this maverick foreign media source? According to our local media, it was the Daily Mail. 

This left me speechless, because the Daily Mail is a famous tabloid that often publishes sensational news. In 2017, Wikipedia announced that the Daily Mail would be classified as a “generally unreliable source,” and that citations from it would be prohibited when editing Wikipedia articles in English, except in exceptional circumstances.

The Daily Mail has also spread rumors about us. Last year, when people made memes satirizing some Chinese netizens’ extreme fixation on gold medals, […] the Daily Mail saw it, assumed it was true, and without fact-checking, published the fake news on its website under the headline: “China declares itself the winner of the 2020 Olympics after altering medal count to claim those won by Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau.”

[…] If you search a bit online, you will also find that as early as July 22 last year, the [Chinese] National Health Commission was proclaiming that the novel coronavirus showed no sign of being altered or manipulated by humans, thus fundamentally negating the possibility of it being man-made. [Chinese]

Despite the debunkers’ best efforts, the rumor was further amplified when China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) entered the fray. Li Yang, counselor of the Department of Information at MoFA and former Chinese Consul General in Rio de Janeiro, tweeted out a screenshot from the ur-source of the rumor: anti-vax/conspiracy podcast The Exposé.

This is consistent with the recent uptick in Chinese government officials and affiliated academics promoting pet conspiracy theories such as “American-run biolabs in Ukraine” and the warmed-over “Fort Detrick COVID-origins probe.”

The fact that these hashtagged conspiracy theories are allowed to germinate and thrive on Chinese social media offers a glimpse into top-level propaganda priorities, as communicated to tech platforms via censorship directives. Recently leaked directives from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), published and translated by CDT, reveal the extreme control that platforms and censors exert over hashtags and trending topics.

A March 3 CAC directive addressed to major media platforms including Baidu, Tencent, Sohu, Netease, and Sina contained the following instructions regarding list management on the topic of Ukraine (italics added by CDT editors):

Strengthen list management. Without exception, existing hashtags started by individuals, self-published media, and commercial platforms must not be included in trending topics, and new hashtags are strictly prohibited. Apart from local media hashtags that feature objective reporting on official government statements or on measures such as the evacuation of Chinese citizens living overseas, any other local media hashtags should gradually move down and drop off the lists, and the addition of new hashtags on lists should be controlled.

[…] Apart from core media [i.e. the core state-media outlets such as Xinhua, CCTV, People’s Daily etc], all news topics started by commercial websites and self-published media will be dissolved, without exception, and collected content citing foreign media reports will be suppressed and dealt with. [Source]

Past censorship directives provide ample evidence that the central government can “turn down the temperature” on an issue when it so desires, or shut down unwanted discussion about an inconvenient topic, including the origins of COVID-19:

This morning, the State Council will hold a press conference on tracing the origins of COVID-19. Do not report. (July 23, 2021) [Source]

The high-level, tacit approval of the recent Moderna/COVID conspiracy hashtag stands in stark contrast to the relentless censoring of hashtags related to topics the government would prefer to suppress—the Xuzhou trafficking case, Peng Shuai, Xianzi’s sexual harassment lawsuit, commemorations of International Women’s Day, or anti-war sentiments. On the same day that the Moderna/COVID conspiracy hashtag shot to number one, the official hashtag for the Xuzhou trafficking case was quietly scrubbed from Weibo, despite continuing public interest in the case and concern for the woman involved.

Translation of the above tweet by @jakobsonradical: This morning, netizens discovered that the hashtag about the Xuzhou mother-of-eight case had been silently deleted from Weibo. It hasn’t even been two months, much less half a year. How easily forgotten are we lowly “chives” [peons].

Image at bottom left shows a message posted by Weibo user @更九九:  Sure enough, it quietly disappeared. While the China Eastern Airlines plane crash drew major attention, it quietly disappeared, along with the six billion views it generated. #OfficialUpdateOnTheFengxianMother-of-8# [the now-deleted official hashtag]

Image at right shows that @更九九’s Weibo account was later suspended for the previous comment. Notice at bottom right: “This account is temporarily suspended for violating the [Weibo] Community Agreement.” [Chinese]

The issue of what gets censored and what is allowed to remain on Chinese social media is at the heart of the “Great Translation Movement” (大翻译运动, Dà Fānyì Yùndòng), a crowd-sourced project to translate and publicize some of the more extreme and uncensored nationalistic sentiments being expressed on Chinese social media. On March 24, the Global Times printed a scathing editorial in which it accused the movement’s participants of selecting and translating “cherry picked content” as part of “a malicious smear campaign against China.”

Global Voices’ Oiwan Lam reported on the origins of the movement, which began among Chinese-speaking Reddit users and has spread to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram. She also detailed the varying reactions to the movement, and the dilemma it poses for Chinese censors:

Apart from criticism from official Chinese outlets, some overseas Chinese netizens also expressed concern that translating hate speech on Chinese social media would fuel anti-Chinese sentiment among western societies.

[…] Chang Ping, an exiled veteran Chinese journalist, however, pointed out that the Great Translation movement is not counteracting against Chinese people, but a propaganda and censorship machine that produces a large number of patriotic “zombies” or the so-called Little Pinks

[…] Cai Xia, a retired professor of the CCP Central Party School also supports the initiative.

[…] Some users suggested that the organizers of the Great Translation Movement should review and provide more context for the translations so as to prevent the spread of hatred against Chinese people.

Others believe that the translation efforts are creating a dilemma for Chinese censorship authorities. Namely, if it censors problematic content from the Little Pinks, they may lose some supporters; if the authorities ignore them, they are tacitly approving them. [Source]

A recent CDT Chinese article includes a compilation of Twitter comments describing the ideas behind the Great Translation Movement, and how it seeks to draw attention to the Chinese government’s tacit support of hateful or bombastic online commentary:

@liuchiawan: Since it [the content being translated] 1. was posted within the Great Firewall of China (GFW) and 2. was not deleted, this indicates that this sort of speech is, in fact, very much in line with Communist Party censorship standards for speech, and counts as “allowable speech.” How, then, can it be labeled “extreme”?

[…] @Nicky38950176: This type of censored speech is, in itself, a reflection on them [the CCP leadership]. They’re the reason that this sort of speech can exist.

[…] @RekishitoSeiji: “You insulted China!” “What did we do to insult China? “You translated what I said.”

@Allan_km_lin: Actually, the Chinese government is capable of censoring this sort of speech. The fact that they don’t means that they have no objection to it. [Chinese]



source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2022/03/covid-conspiracies-hashtag-suppression-and-a-broadside-aimed-at-the-great-translation-movement/
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