Tag: Era of Xi

Soft power? We don’t need no stinking soft power.

Update at August 28 – the affronts to human dignity, scholarship, free speech, trade fairness and personal expression now seem to come on a daily basis.  China under Mr. Xi is really carving a new international image, and it is neither “peaceful rise” nor “responsible stakeholder in the community of nations.” 

You’ve read some of the Hong Kong stories, in the media and below, and the disruptions and violence and threats coming from Chinese students in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US  when confronted with others speaking their minds.  You’ve read about the billionaires, activists, lawyers and missionaries who have been disappeared in the mainland.  As described in the Guardian, “China feels emboldened to place literally anyone under arbitrary and secret detention, regardless of citizenship. It is now long overdue for the world to stand up.”  Family members of those the CCP wants, for whatever purposes, are at significant risk, both inside China and outside. I had some fears for my wife and son when they were in China a few weeks ago.  I am unsure of my own potential for detention when I return to China.  In July, the Swedish Supreme Court ruled against extradition to China of a sought-after former official, based on threat of human rights violations if he were to be returned.

These are all on top of the old stories, from the last ten years or more, of American businessmen being kidnapped in China over real or imagined disputes with Chinese businesses.

The government has long pressured western businesses to conform to CCP political thought, at the risk of losing access to the Chinese market.  You remember the demands that hotels and airlines stop referring to Taiwan as a country. Then luxury brands like Versace and Coach faced the same demands, and folded immediately.  Now, we have the government demanding resignation of a Hong Kong airline CEO  – and getting it – over participation by Cathay Pacific employees in the Hong Kong protests.  Cathay Pacific is Hong Kong’s best known local business in international markets.  You can expect more pressure from the government over actions of foreign businesses, and you can expect more compliance. The government has said it will enforce a “social credit score” on foreign companies in China.  Expect the blacklisting to be used when a companies employees or related entities fail to conform – not to government, but to CCP – requirements.  This is despicable behavior by the government, and potentially dangerous to companies and their employees.

About a week ago, in Shenzhen, the government seized a Hong Konger who works for the British consulate in Hong Kong, thus confirming the worst fears of Hong Kongers about the extradition treaty that was the original proximate cause for the protests.  Simon Cheng was returning to Hong Kong when he apparently was seized on the train late at night. 

In the last couple of months, a Hong Kong 2014 umbrella protest leader, Nathan Law, has been singled out by Chinese student groups at Yale, and targeted with death threats. From ChinaFile on the messages sent to Nathan Law –  “I will wait for you at school and you have no escape. Gun shooting will start—American style.”

Let there be no mistake – there is no peaceful rise, CCP expects to dominate international relations as well as business and markets, free speech and rights of assembly are under attack throughout the world, and capitalism is no friend to democracy when profits are at stake.  We tend to ignore the Americans, Canadians, Australians being held in China under any form of false charges, to be used as warnings or bargaining chips. More stories are here and warnings to Americans from the US State Department are here.  The 2017 book The Peoples Republic of the Disappeared documents some of the stories of Chinese and foreigners held for no good reason. 

There seems no good outcome in the current Hong Kong protests.  About the best the world can expect is an updated version of the rallying cry from the War of Texas Independence – Remember Hong Kong.   May it be remembered as a rallying cry for free speech and a free press and free assembly and rule of law in Australia, and New Zealand, and Greece, and all of Africa, and South America, and southeast Asia. 

The old post from August 1 –

 You remember the bandits in Treasure of the Sierra Madre – the bandit horde, pretending to be Federales, descending on Humphrey Bogart and fellow prospectors.  “Badges?  We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges.  I don’t have to show you no stinking badges.” The famous lines were uttered by Gold Hat, head of the bandits, when Fred C. Dobbs (Bogart) asked for their badges.   Hong Kong was the soft power model, the badge of Chinese “peaceful rise.”  Mainland students and Confucius Institutes were supposed to be the badge of Chinese soft power in the world.  But no more, as we see in Hong Kong, in Australian and New Zealand universities, and indeed, universities throughout the world.

I kept thinking of that scene as I watched Hong Kongers resist the violence of the banditos, this time in the form of white-shirted thugs from Triad gangs, and the local police.   And then, watching mainland Chinese students attack Hong Kong sympathizers at Queenland University in Australia and Auckland University in New Zealand.

Watch the videos from Hong Kong –

Please stop beating us!

Hong Kong police use violence on protesters, not on thugs

In Australia and New Zealand …

In Australia, a Chinese diplomat applauded patriotic behavior from mainland students in disrupting a peaceful protest at University of Queensland.  As reported, the attack was coordinated, quite possibly by the local CSSA (Chinese Students and Scholars Association).  You can hear the beginning of the Chinese national anthem playing in the background of the Queensland attack.  Watch the video at twitter.

The New York Times reports– The Chinese nationalists disrupting pro-Hong Kong democracy rallies at the University of Queensland arrived 300 strong, with a speaker to blast China’s national anthem. They deferred to a leader in a pink shirt. And their tactics included violence.

Threats to Australian students via social media have continued, including death threats.  Similar violence took place last week at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Bill Bishop at Sinocism suggests that expulsion might be beneficial to PRC students who can’t abide exercise of free speech – In the case of PRC students (expulsion) could be quite beneficial, as there are pressures from within the PRC student community, and its CCP minders, to be aggressive in the face of any perceived slights, and if you are not then you run the risk of being seen as insufficiently loyal and patriotic.  

Western universities have though that mainland Chinese students will see freedom at work, and have their lives transformed.  For some that is true.  But now, some mainland Chinese are out to transform their hosts.  The Confucius Institutes were supposed to be the vanguard of Chinese soft power in the world.  Now, they are suspected – in at least some cases, legitimately – of being a conduit for United Front activities.

In 2016, Xi Jinping issued what now seem to be orders to Chinese students abroad to serve their country, and the Chinese Ministry of Education issued a directive calling for a “contact network” connecting “the motherland, embassies and consulates, overseas student groups, and the broad number of students abroad” and ensuring that they will “always follow the Party.”

In Canada and the US …

You remember the death threats earlier this year to the Tibetan-Canadian student elected as student union president at the University of Toronto University of Toronto.   She now has a safety plan with the university police, letting them know where she is, hour by hour.  You remember the uproar  at McMaster University in Canada when a Uighur activist was scheduled to speak.  Mainland Chinese students sought advice from the Chinese consulate about how to proceed in their protests.  You remember the large protests in 2017 at the University of California at San Diego. Mainland students reportedly sought advice from the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles before condemning the university for naming as commencement speaker the Dalai Lama.  There are many such stories, including demands from the Chinese government that Uighur students return to China immediately, using their parents as potential hostages.

Hong Kong as the new model of Chinese power …

The “peaceful rise” touted by Deng Xiaoping, and the soft power projection from the Confucius Institutes worldwide is no more.  In Tibet, in Xinjiang, on the mainland in prisons where human rights lawyers and activists rot, in Canada, now in Hong Kong, and Australia, and New Zealand, the gloves have come off on soft power.  In Hong Kong, the protests have not yet turned deadly.  But Christy Leung, Hong Kong student at Queensland, made the point –

“People in Hong Kong are risking their lives. The threats we faced last week are nothing compared to them. We have to stand up. With them.”  

For Hong Kongers, it is more than a movie.  They are risking their lives.  They all know about June 4, even if mainland students do not.  

For western students, and teachers, and universities generally, lives are not likely at risk.  But the very concept of the university – let us say, seeking truth from facts, and speaking truth to power- is at risk.  The soft power glove is revealing the clenched fist beneath.

Chinese Officials Threaten Mainland Parents of Student Attending Australian Protest

It is important to remember what we are dealing with.  Let’s review –

From the Sydney Morning Herald, August 7 – Chinese authorities approached the family of an international student who participated in high-profile protests at an Australian university and warned his parents of the potential consequences of political dissent.

It has been clear for years that the Chinese government monitors words and actions of mainland students overseas.  There are various means.  Most prominent is the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) which operates as a student-run organization on most university campuses throughout the world.  It is now common for students to record other Chinese students expressing negative feelings toward the mainland government or CCP.  Chinese government officials in the foreign country support such efforts.

A mainland student who attended one of the pro-Hong Kong protest rallies at the University of Queensland in Australia later received a call from his mother.  From the Herald –

But within days of the rally the student received a call from his mother in China to say the family had been approached by “a guest”.  His mother told him the authorities had issued a warning about engaging in “anti-China rhetoric” in Brisbane and warned him not to “join any events where people are gathered together”.  “As long as you do that, we can make sure you’re safe and we’re safe,” his mother told him.  

Chinese officials in Australia praised actions by mainland students to disrupt the protests –

China’s consul-general in Brisbane, Xu Jie, subsequently issued a statement praising “the spontaneous patriotic behaviour of Chinese students” at the university in response to “people with ulterior motives [who] conducted anti-Chinese separatist activities”.

Government threats to families in China, or threats to Chinese abroad, are a despicable practice.  But it has become standard operating practice in the last decade. 

Put this down alongside threats to Yang Shuping the 2017 University of Maryland valedictorian, who praised fresh air and freedom in the US compared with her experiences in Yunnan.  The  former president of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) at the University of Maryland, told the CCP sponsored Global Times  – “Insulting the motherland to grab attention is intolerable. The university’s support to such critical speech is not only ill-considered, but also raises suspicion about other motives.”  The CSSA called on students from China to make videos promoting their hometowns with the scripted words “I have different views from Shuping Yang. I am proud of China.”  Yang received hundreds of negative or threatening social media posts. 

Or the action by the Chinese Education Ministry in 2010 to remove the University of Calgary from its list of approved universities, after Calgary awarded an honorary degree to the Dalai Lama.  That action threatened the ability of Chinese students at Calgary to have recognition of their degree in China.

And the experience of Chemi Lhamo, who by the nature of being Tibetan, and then earlier this year elected as student president at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus, was so threatened by Chinese vitriol, including death threats, that she needed university support;

And threats to Rukiye Turdush, Uighur activist, whose speech earlier this year at McMaster University in Ontario was disrupted in what some claim was activity promoted by the Chinese government.  University students clearly sought Chinese consulate advice on how to proceed with disruption.  Chinese officials in Canada applauded the threats from mainland Chinese students against Turdush;  

And Uighur university students throughout the world asked by the Chinese government to return home immediately, under hostage and harm threats to their parents and relatives in Xinjiang;

And physical destruction of the Lennon Wall at the University of Queensland on August 6.  From the Guardian – The University of Queensland has promised to take action after a pro-Hong Kong Lennon wall on its campus was torn down on Monday night by four masked men. The colourful protest wall – similar to those around Hong Kong and the rest of the world – had attracted hundreds of notes calling for democracy and solidarity with Hong Kong, and opposing the totalitarianism of the Chinese government. Two weeks ago pro-Beijing government protesters clashed violently with Hong Kong international students on the university’s Brisbane campus, punching and shoving.

Four masked men were seen destroying the wall.  Students have since put it up again. 

And, of course, the old standby –

Chinese rights lawyer Chen Jiangang-flees to US to escape persecution

In terms of (legal) human traffic, China still exports far more to the US than we export to China.  No sign of that changing anytime soon.  I reported on that at Let’s remember what we are dealing with.  

Let’s remember what we are dealing with …

News reporting is so uneven.  No mass shooting in the US is censored information in China – in fact, the news is prominently featured.   From China Xinhua News on Twitter –

China Xinhua News

@XHNews

 Shootings this weekend at a Texas Walmart and a bar in Ohio have left 30 people dead. Retail employees are taking to social media to say they’re terrified to go to work. Workers fear getting shot at their workplace

The Chinese government twitter account has several posts on the shootings, with video. 

At the same time, Xinhua completely missed this story – 

Chinese rights lawyer Chen Jiangang flees to US to escape “persecution” in China  

The South China Morning Post did report the story. 

Chen is a human rights lawyer who has been threatened and harassment before. He was representing Huang Yang, daughter in law of disgraced leader Zhou Yongkang.  Huang is an American citizen.  She has not been allowed to leave China over what is termed a rental disagreement, but it is not uncommon to punish relatives of disgraced CCP leaders without evidence of any wrongdoing. 

Huang explained that Wang Cun, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Justice, threatened Chen if he continued to represent her.  Chen was told that he would disappear if he continued to represent his client. 

Chen had been threatened before.  In April of this year, he was not allowed to leave China for a fellowship funded by the US government, citing national security concerns. 

In 2017, Chen’s entire family was put on an exit ban list, which has become a common means of targeting Chinese and foreigners who displease the government.

It is not clear how Chen and his family were able to get out.  News reports say that they traveled through several countries before finally arriving in the US.  China Aid, a non-profit reporting on human rights abuses in China, seems to have helped Chen and his family get out. 

Lawyer Chen Jiangang (second from left) and his family have fled China for the United States  Source: ChinaAid

China Aid, by the way, is a remarkable organization.  It seeks to expose persecution, torture, and imprisonment of Christians and human rights lawyers in China. 

Xinhua seems to have missed this story.   Perhaps international news is more compelling in this case.  

No Wechat conversation is safe. Anytime. Anywhere. What Chinese are (not) talking about (4)

Wechat is almost universal.  It is ubiquitous in China, and among the Chinese diaspora and their foreign friends and families.  Its functionality for social media, news, and buying things makes it a better choice than any combination of applications available in the west.  It is Twitter, Facebook, Googlemaps, Tinder and Apple Pay all rolled into one. And it is free.

Free does not mean without cost, of course, and in this case, the cost is the Chinese government being ready, willing, and able to monitor what you say, what you text, what you watch, what videos you post.  In China and outside.  If you think the long arm of Chinese government censorship doesn’t reach into the US – well, you would be wrong. 

SupChina cites a new report from Citizen Lab on WeChat censorship, surveillance, and filtering.  Citizen Lab is based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of  Toronto.  The lab studies government information controls, such as censorship surveillance and filtering, that affect the openness and security of the internet that pose threats to human rights.  Citizen Lab seems to be an extraordinarily sophisticated (to me, anyway) information provider for anyone interested in international government monitoring of individual communications.  Highly recommended.  Read the wiki.

The Citizen Lab report is (Can’t) Picture This2: An Analysis of Wechat’s Realtime Image Filtering in Chats. 

Two key findings on international scrutiny of chat images and texts –

WeChat implements realtime, automatic censorship of chat images based on text contained in images and on an image’s visual similarity to those on a blacklist

WeChat facilitates realtime filtering by maintaining a hash index populated by MD5 hashes of images sent by users of the chat platform

As the predominant form of personal communication in China, Wechat receives directives directly from the government as to what should be filtered.

Wechat Moments, Group Chat, and one-to-one communications are filtered differently.  Not surprisingly, filtering is heaviest for political, government, and social resistance topics.

Sometimes, the filtering does seem a bit much. A pdf of a student resume, sent to me in May of this year from China, was received in early July.  Three short videos of my son at swimming lessons, sent from China to Chicago, were blocked on July 19.  One doubts that the swimming pool could be understood as a state secret, but you never know. For the government, better safe than sorry in censorship.  Last year, I was talking about events in Xinjiang with government friends of mine.  They had fairly high-ranking jobs in a city police department, and I know they had access to information before it was disseminated to the public.  They knew nothing of events in Xinjiang.  That could have been feigned ignorance; but other Chinese colleagues suggested that no, my friends really did not know anything.  “Everything is fine in Xinjiang,” they told me.

An example from the Citizen Lab report –

 Figure 1: Top, a Canadian account sending an image memorializing Liu Xiaobo over 1-to-1 chat; bottom, the Chinese account does not receive it.

Stephen McDonnell, a BBC reporter in Beijing, describes being locked out of Wechat in China Social Media: WeChat and the Surveillance State.  As he describes it, life becomes almost unbearable without access.  He could not get a taxi, call friends or colleagues, contact sources for news stories, get airplane or train or movie tickets, make children’s school arrangements, or pay for almost anything.  He was locked out while in Hong Kong covering the recent protests.  He was allowed back in only when he provided his voice print and face print for WeChat.  Now, as he says, no doubt he has joined some list of suspicious individuals in the hands of goodness knows which Chinese government agencies.

For anyone with morbid curiosity, here is a friendly guide in English on installing and using WeChat.  Enjoy!

Learning from China … and Hong Kongers

“Don’t trust China” is what the recent Hong Kong protesters told the G20 representatives in Osaka.

 I think that is right. It has been a sea change for me.  Fool me once.  Maybe even a few times. Still, over the last 15 years, I have come to realize that we should listen to the Hong Kongers (who don’t wish to be called Chinese).

Why believe twenty-somethings marching in the streets? Let’s remind ourselves that lying and no respect for human dignity are part and parcel of the government face to the world.  FBI director Christopher Wray’s declaration of China as a “whole of state” threat should be taken at face value.  There is no company or researcher or even student studying abroad who cannot be tapped to assist CCP.  (This of course casts false suspicion on honest Chinese everywhere.  Resistance is of course possible, and the norm, but it can be dangerous).

We have preponderance of the evidence and beyond a reasonable doubt.  On our most public piece of recent evidence – Huawei cannot be an innocent bystander, regardless of its own wishes.  It has been implicated or charged in theft and cyberspying for years China hacked Norway’s Visma to steal client secrets: investigators | Reuters:; Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of U.S. Targeting Chinese Giant – Bloomberg:; Cisco, T-Mobile, Motorola, Nortel, et.al.  The rap sheet over a decade or two is pretty impressive.

Don Clarke, cited at Huawei – taking a fall, hoping for a call– There’s a whole variety of pressures that the government can bring to bear on a company or individual, and they are not at all limited to criminal prosecution …. China is a Leninist state that does not recognize any limits to government power.

Mark Rosenblatt  in Real Clear Policy  citing two recent Chinese laws, the National Intelligence Law and the Anti-Spyware Law –  Specifically, “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law, and keep the secrets of the national intelligence work known to the public. The State protects individuals and organizations that support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence work.”

Other evidence – politics in Australia and New Zealand are under direct attack, as are American tech companies; also, here – china cyber-cloudhopper.  A mayoral election in Taiwan appears to have been determined by fake news on social media coming from inside the mainland. Academic researcher Anne Marie Brady is under personal attack in New Zealand, presumably for research not to Mr. Xi’s liking. See Intimidation knows no boundaries and the update.  Wechat news for Chinese in the US is unabashedly Republican oriented, not only because of Democratic support for immigration and Chinese fears of university quotas.  The news stories, coming from Wechat in China, support the buffoon who is easy to exploit.

 Chinese espionage even rates its own wiki site now.

 My own path from trust to mis- began in 2004.  I taught CCP members going to school in Chicago for a year. They were sent by the government to learn about markets and government management. The students were midlevel bureaucrats, in about every discipline from police and propaganda bureau officials to stock market administrators. Over the years, many became my friends and colleagues.  I stayed in their homes, they in mine, we vacationed and worked together.

In 2009, I went to China to teach.  The world was still enamored of China, the shiny once-in-world-history transform learning to be a responsible leader in the community of nations. 

Living closely in China, one sees more sides of the world-facing sculpture constructed to be the New China –  like seeing the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz.  What’s behind the curtain is not so shiny and imposing.  Nowadays, it can still be threatening.

The 2008 riots in Tibet and the 2009 unrest in Xinjiang were part of my seeing more clearly.  Suppression of the Sanlu milk scandal in 2008, for fear of soiling the glory of the Olympic Games, was another eye-opener.  Years later, my wife, who is Chinese, would never buy Chinese milk for our son.

There are, of course, innumerable other incidents of moral decay and lying, some reported in the Chinese media. For comparison, the US has no shortage of corruption, murder, mayhem, and cheating in business and government.  But more of that malfeasance is available in the news, and sometimes lawsuits and media and whistleblowers can help restore human dignity.  But see this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and – well, you get the idea.

By 2012, my view had changed. I had first hand exposure to police and hospitals and doctors and universities and media, urban and rural, wealthy and poor, citizen and peasant – and a lot of guanxi exercised on my behalf. I saw a university dean jailed not for a crime but for political retribution. I see now a university party leader heavily suspected of corruption, cheating faculty and no one will dare to complain. I see how judges and police and teachers deal with the moral quandaries.  I learned a great deal about Chinese as moral individuals in an immoral system.  I developed an idea – honor and respect individual Chinese; mistrust Chinese people; fear the Chinese government.  That still seems right to me.

None of this is new; China Law Blog, now-retired China Accounting Blog, and major media have been documenting for years how malfeasance – basically, all forms of lying – has cost American business and threatens models of business and law in which good will and good faith are basic to ideas of civility, fair dealing, and due process. 

The world is no longer so naïve about Chinese government intentions.  In 2009 American intellectuals thought a modern Chinese economy would bring democratic change.  Mr. Xi has disabused them of that notion.   Don Clarke has written about the Uyghur concentration camps, entirely outside the purview of the Chinese legal system.  This is what Hong Kongers see. 

The notion of Chimerica, the international economic partnership, is clearly no more.  Now, how does one deal with an ex when the breakup is a matter of lying?  Trust is off the table – even Reagan told us that, in the 1987 SALT treaty – “trust but verify.”  Now, the US negotiators want to insert such provisions into any trade agreement about IP theft.  While an admirable goal, Chinese will never agree to such a limitation, could not enforce it, and in any case, sanctions are after the fact. 

Now comes an open letter in the Washington Post to Trump from more than a hundred “scholarly, foreign policy, military and business” individuals advising return to the days of wishin’ an’ a hopin’ on China policy.  Bill Bishop’s sound reply at Sinocism is here, at item number three.  “Can’t we all just get along?” is so twentieth century. 

Turn the other cheek in international economic and political matters is no prescription for achieving a final reward.  The partnership breakup is a done deal. The only way forward for America is some limited decoupling, along with doubling down on the ideals of honesty and fairness and respect for human dignity that made Hong Kongers appeal to Americans at the G20.  Going forward, we should all learn from Hong Kongers.  We can’t go back to those innocent days of a decade ago.  You also remember – denial is not just a river in Egypt. 

Brief Note on the Trade Shootout

It is no surprise to anyone familiar with Chinese thinking on foreign policy or negotiating practice that China is  balking at changing its laws to reflect what the American negotiators apparently thought had been previously agreed. From the Reuters article –

 In each of the seven chapters of the draft trade deal, China had deleted its commitments to change laws to resolve core complaints that caused the United States to launch a trade war: Theft of U.S. intellectual property and trade secrets; forced technology transfers; competition policy; access to financial services; and currency manipulation.

One can marvel at American stupidity, if that is what is involved; or simply invoke the negotiating principle that no items are agreed to until all items are agreed to. One can call it Chinese perfidy, but that would simply imply that the Americans are so uninformed about Chinese negotiating tactics that they should not be in the same room with their counterparties at all.  To paraphrase Harold Washington on politics, trade negotiations ain’t beanbag.

So let’s get past the propaganda and posturing. This below is what no negotiating is going to change.  It is at the heart of some American thinking on the trade battle.

This is from Dan Harris at China Law Blog, the best China business advisory online – Doing Business Overseas? Have you Checked Your Trademarks?

From time to time when we write something here with which a reader      disagrees, we get a comment or an email accusing us of scare-mongering…. If I can scare a few more companies into not losing their trademarks I will have achieved my goal.

… stealing a brand name is a lot easier (and usually a lot more profitable) than stealing a product design. Our international IP lawyers deal with probably three trademark theft cases for every one design case.

…

Why does any of this matter?

It matters because if someone beats you to registering “your” trademark and you are having products made with that trademark on it, the person or company who owns “your” trademark can stop you from manufacturing your product or exporting the product with the trademark on it. The The trademark owner can also register its mark with its own country’s customs authorities and then have customs seize the trademarked product at the port, preventing your shipment from leaving the country in which it was made. This is a particularly nasty surprise in those cases where the foreign buyer has already paid for the product.

Who is going to register your trademarks? It is typically someone you know, like someone tied to your factory, one of your competitors or even a disgruntled employee. One of our China lawyers loves to talk about what happened a few years ago when he gave a series of lectures in China on how to protect your brand and product when manufacturing in China. After the talks, he went to dinner with a group of foreign company production managers who talked of how they had for years been urging the foreign companies for whom they worked to register their trademark. The foreign companies consistently refused, claiming such registrations were a waste of money. These production managers then told our China lawyer the following:

We are going to form our own trading company. We will register all the   important trademarks of our employers in China in the name of that trading company. When we get fired, we will register “their” marks with China customs and completely shut down their Chinese operations. It will serve them right for being so stupid and lazy.

Now just for the record, the laws in many countries would not allow these employees to get away with this, but the mere fact they were plotting this ought to scare many of you. In my view, your bigger threats to register your brand name where you manufacture is someone tied in with your manufacturer (they do this so they can stop you from going to someone else) and your competitors (they do this so they can stop you).

Note though that these operation managers did not say they were going to steal their employer’s product design…. But this small expense might give them considerable power over their former bosses.

Is a law or regulation negotiated at the central government level going to put a stop to what is legal, if unethical, in China?  No agreement in law or regulation will stop this sort of practice, if for no other reason than China is big and law and regulation are heavily decentralized.  Forget Mr. Xi’s language about rule of law and forget the pronouncements from the new Foreign Investment Law and forget the new National Supervision Commission combining government and CCP regulation of conduct.

There is one, and only one, issue in the trade shootout, and that is IP theft, whether theft by cyber or by hand.  By this point in 2019, after decades of dealing with Chinese companies, everything else is attributable to American naivete and some assumptions about beanbag. 

The culture of lying and deception in business should be well understood by now.  As I always say, this means no disrespect to those Chinese business owners who manage to conduct business honorably, whether one uses Confucian or western standards of conduct.  The Silver Rule is fundamentally no different than the Golden Rule – treat others as you would want to be treated.  Sunzi and San shi liu ji are about deceiving an enemy.  Business partners in the west are not usually thought of as enemies.

As I wrote in No Way Out from the Middle Kingdom –

Think about it this way – is there another major American trading partner where one need fear being kidnapped over a real or imagined payment dispute?  Is there another American major trading partner for which the best trade advisories scream, danger, danger, danger?

Caveat emptor, especially in China.   Perhaps an urgent note to our dear leader and his negotiators would be useful. 

How to End June 4, et al.

A Country That Controls the Internet Should be Able to Control the Calendar

A few years ago, it was reported in the Australian Financial Review that senior party members in the Chinese Communist Party were reading deTocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution.  This was at the suggestion of Xi Jinping, who apparently wanted to call attention to the fate of leaders who ignore the people in favor of corruption and the easy life.  The end times of the French monarchy is a good model for what rulers should not do.

We now have the anti-corruption campaign and the tigers and flies and the framing of enemies by other Party members.   And we have the mandate to remove evil western influence from China (free speech, free press, democracy, and the western books and teachers who are unfortunately a product of those ideas).  This was the pronouncement from Yuan Guiren, the Chinese Education Minister.

An aside – Communism, you know, is a German import.  What CCP should do about that is overlooked.  No doubt this will be the subject of investigation.   Someone, somewhere, within the CCP, at a very senior level, is protecting Communism, this western import,  from being attacked.   Is this more corruption?

Anyway, the French Revolution has spawned lots of interesting ideas, in addition to “liberty, equality, fraternity.”    One of the more interesting was the French Revolutionary calendar.   Those of you who can get access to the internet outside China can look at French Republican Calendar.

The rationale for the calendar was to sweep away the ideas, the habits, the customs of the old system – the ancien régime, as it is called.   The concept was to erase the memories, the Four Olds of France as it were, and pave the way for a new France.

Sort of like a New China.  

On October 23, 1793, the Revolutionary Calendar was adopted by the National Convention, acting as the government in France.  The idea was to make the calendar rational, and modern.

In the spirit of the times the calendar was designed to do away with the old names of months, irrational numbers of days in the month and the week and hours in the day, and replace them with systematic, metric, and base-10 representations.    Very modern.  

The wiki article describes the months, days, and hours –

There were twelve months, each divided into three ten-day weeks called décades. The tenth day, décadi, replaced Sunday as the day of rest and festivity….

Names of the days, names of the months, and number of days in the month and hours in the day were all changed.  Controlling the calendar was rational, and modern.

How the old New France can help the New China

There has been a lot of anxiety within China about the date of June 4.    Many people think that June 4 is part of the modern calendar, and should come after June 3 and before June 5.    But in New China, old ideas should be eliminated.

Others in China seem to fear the date of June 4, and would like to see it banned.   Certainly, the Chinese Communist Party has taken that position, in action if not in policy statement.   References to June 4, particularly if they include a year, such as 1989, are blocked by the Chinese government.   References to related terms, such as May 35, or characters or words that could be generally understood as meaning “June 4” are also blocked by the Chinese government.  Attempts to talk about June 4 can land people in jail. 

Now we know that the Chinese government supports modernization of everything in China.   Getting rid of the Four Olds is itself an old term, but still a useful idea.

In the spirit of modernization, and using modernist ideas from the French enlightenment to support the CCP, we recommend that June 4 just be eliminated from the calendar.  This should eliminate the anxiety felt within the government about June 4, and make it possible for millions of Chinese to get back to the business of making money, which, after all, is what a society is for.

How to do it

There are many ways to eliminate June 4.   Perhaps the easiest would be to simply print calendars that go directly from June 3 to June 5.   The extra day can be added somewhere else, like February, which really could use another day in any case.

If this program were implemented immediately, then the calendar revision could be accomplished in conjunction with the map revisions that show dotted lines in the South China Sea and Taiwan as part of traditional China.  Maybe include some proposed acquisitions, as well.   Arunachal Pradesh, Aksai Chin, and diaoyudao in the East China Sea.  Mongolia?  Surely some argument can be made for ports in Sri Lanka, or along the coast of Africa.   With all those dotted lines, it would be easy to draw a dotted line between June 3 and June 5 to February 29.

Another idea – print calendars that call the day between June 3 and June 5, June X.   There will be confusion with people thinking we are using Roman numerals, like the French Republican calendar.   But we already have a June 10, so the confusion should be small, even if unavoidable for some people.   We all have to pay a price for progress.

There are other ideas.   June 3.99 has a nice look to it. Chinese citizens can come up with variations.

And the beauty of that sort of choice is that there are an infinite number of variations.  If some people don’t like June 3.99, then they can try June 3.999.   Or June 3.1.   Lots of choices.

Some people – looking at you, CCP –  get so anxious about June 4 that they try to eliminate June entirely from the calendar, or at least eliminate internet use during June.   We can fix that, too, by eliminating the word “June” from the calendar.

Early June in the French Revolutionary calendar would be Prairial, from the French word for prairie, or pasture.

And senior Communist Party officials who are reading deTocqueville should really have no objection to naming a month after a French prairie.   So Prairial 3.99 could be just what is desired, for all Chinese people.    So the sequence could be, Prairial 3, Prairial 3.99, Prairial 5.   So much more modern feeling.  And the internet doesn’t  have to go down, again, for maintenance, every year during May and  June.  There is no June.

As a final solution, we could just replace June 4 with nothing.   We would write June   , 2019, or 2019 – Prairial –    .     That way, the people who want to eliminate June 4 will have done so.   Everyone else can just remember what goes in front of the comma or behind the dash.

And then, on Prairial    , Chinese web-users should show their solidarity, and go silent.   Post nothing on Prairial    , and show your support for June 3.99.   This might be the most effective way to deal with the June 4 problem.  Post nothing on that date.  

If enough people comply, government will be flustered.  What does it mean to protest when no one shows up?  What if they blocked the internet and no one complied by being blocked?  And how about all those millions of Chinese who failed to post anything on June 4?  Which side are they on?

Think of  Tenzin Gyatso. the Dalai Lama, suggesting that if CCP demands that there be a new Dalai Lama to succeed him at death, then perhaps there should not be a new Dalai Lama.  Atheistic CCP is insistent that there be a new leader, so CCP can control; the religious faithful are not so sure.   What is the sound of one internet not buzzing?

Now I know it will be difficult to get hundreds of millions of people to adopt a system like this.   Sometimes when something is very difficult to do, we say it would be like murder to accomplish.   But that is what we suggest.   Not posting would to be thinking of murder.

Even if it is like murder to not think about June 4, take up the banner for June X or, if you wish, for June    , or Prairial 3.99.   Your choice.  Then we can completely forget June 4, and maybe that day, the internet can go silent, while millions remember. 

What Chinese cannot not talk about …

In a previous post, I mentioned the heavy hand of CCP coming down on internet access each year in the weeks leading up to date of the Tian’anmen Massacre in 1989.

What CCP sincerely wants is for Chinese netizens to model the three monkeys – see, hear, speak no evil – evil, of course, being in the eye of the CCP beholder and specifically any sight, sound, voice or thought related to the events leading up to and during June 4, 1989. 


But netizens are tenacious.  They are inventive in devising terms to get around blocking of all sorts, but particularly the blocking of 6-4 remembrance.

China Digital Times maintains a list of terms, indicating the extraordinary lengths to which Chinese netizens go to communicate about 6-4, or May 35, or any of dozens of other made up ways to refer to the date.  My current favorite is 82 = 64.

In spite of netizen tenacity, the government crackdown on public knowledge about Tian’anmen has worked very well.  While the “tank man” photo is recognized worldwide, it is nearly unknown in China.  My undergraduate students did not know what it was – or would not admit to knowing.  In 2014, the Onion had a headline – Chinese Citizens Observe 25-year Moment of Silence for Tian’anmen Square Massacre.  In 2013, Louisa Lim, author of Republic of Amnesia, found that 85% of Beijing  college students could not identify the picture.

And in truth, 1989 was a long time ago for young Chinese.  That was then, this is now.  In June, 2014 Robert Hariman noted how complete the erasure of history has been for most Chinese – a public act of protest against the authoritarian state has been replaced with political quiescence on behalf of commercial consumption. 


Michela Buttignol/New York Times

Also in 2014, China Law & Policy published a moving short biography of Wang Nan, originally published in People’s Republic of Amnesia.  (Video at Louisa Lim at Google).  In 2014, Wang Nan was a 45 year old photojournalist with a wife and family – except that he never made it to 45.  He was killed at Tian’anmen as a 19 year old student. 

China Law and Policy

His mother remembers her son.  Along with others, she is monitored heavily around this time each year.  She is one of the Tian’anmen mothers.

http://api.pictures.reuters.com/archive/CHINA-TIANANMEN-MOTHER-GM1EA640E8X01

Helen Gao, writing Tian’anmen, Forgotten in the New York Times in 2014 –

I do remember the first time the topic came up in conversation with my Chinese peers. On June 4, 2009, the 20th anniversary of the crackdown, I was shopping with a friend at a convenience store near Tsinghua University, when she, a junior at the university, turned to me, next to a shelf of colorful shampoos and conditioners. “Some people have been talking about this incident, liu si,” she said. “What was it all about?”

One of my minor subversive acts teaching in China was to accommodate Chinese undergrads who talked with me after class – “We want to know what happened.”   I gave them a three hour video documentary in Chinese about the events of the days.  The Gate of Heavenly Peace – part 1 and Part 2 was produced in 1995 with compiled videos and interviews with students, teachers, and observers of the events.  This is an extraordinary documentary.  There are some English subtitles.

No doubt that video has been shared.  I felt a bit like Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, retrieving truth from the west.

Outside the mainland, remembrance persists – in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, in the Chinese diaspora. The date is remembered each year in Hong Kong, to the worry and dismay of mainland officials.  The commemoration is one way that young people in Hong Kong express themselves as HongKongers, not Chinese. Typical of the response in Hong Kong is this from China Digital Times – Hong Kong Marks June 4 Anniversary.  Some of my mainland Chinese undergraduates expressed some anger at students in Hong Kong, deriding them as bad Chinese – disloyal and “stirring up trouble” – a common arrest charge on the mainland.

CCP likes to use Confucian chapter and verse to support its policies.  There is a paragraph in the Analects that would seem to recommend the stance of the three monkeys to all Chinese –  “Look not at what is contrary to propriety; listen not to what is contrary to propriety; speak not what is contrary to propriety; make no movement which is contrary to propriety” (Analects Book 12 (Yan Yuan) para 1)

But this is not a recommendation to self censorship. Confucius is speaking of a man in control of his emotions, assured of his correctness, the Junzi– without anxiety or fear, as is pointed out in the same book, paragraph 4.  Censorship is the action of a man anxious or afraid, suppressing citizens’ lack of confidence in rule. In paragraph 7, the Master said that military equipment and even food sufficiency may be given up in extremis, if the people have confidence in their rulers.  Otherwise, the Master said, there is no standing for the state.

Censorship betrays the anxiety and fear in CCP.  In a far different context, Bill Clinton reminded us that a strong grip is the sign of a weak hand.  Netizens constantly remind CCP that the Chinese people are as Sun Yat-sen said in 1924 – a handful of sand, without a strong commitment to the CCP variety of nationalism and unmoldable to the model of a good communist soldier – willing to sacrifice all, even memory and moral freedom, for the benefit of the state.

CCP must walk a fine line – Xi Jinping just got through extolling the actions of student protesters of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, a foundational time for CCP. For CCP, also, that was then, this is now.  Student protesters in 1989, and since, are subject to arrest, jail, or murder.  See The Ideology of Occupation on arrest and disappearance of Peking U students trying to be good Marxists. 

This year, 30 years later, the heavier than usual blocking should be starting about now.  CCP must be always on guard against thinking that will pollute minds of Chinese.  Otherwise, as the Master said, there may be no standing for the state.

Huawei – Taking a Fall, Hoping for a Call

Pardon the soccer reference.  But to my mind, that is the Huawei move.  But Huawei has the support of the fans, at least in China, and they are vocal.

Don Clarke, professor of law at George Washington University, has penned this response to the declaration of the Zhong Lun law firm in Beijing, in support of Huawei as an innocent private company caught in a nasty trade spat.  According to the declaration, no company in China is ever required to comply with demands from the central government to install spyware or backdoors in any communication equipment.   Clarke points out that this is misleading and inaccurate.  Chinese law says nothing about what provincial and local governments might demand from a company, and in any case, law is not a constraint. 

“There’s a whole variety of pressures that the government can bring to bear on a company or individual, and they are not at all limited to criminal prosecution Clarke says.  “China is a Leninist state that does not recognize any limits to government power.”

From Clarke’s China Collection  blog –

Last May, two attorneys from the Zhong Lun law firm submitted a declaration to the FCC in support of Huawei’s position that it could not be compelled by the Chinese authorities to install backdoors, eavesdropping facilities, or other spyware in telecommunications equipment it manufactured or sold. I finally had the time to look at the declaration in detail. I don’t find it convincing. I have written up a pretty full analysis (over 10 single-spaced pages) and posted it here on SSRN. Enjoy.

Incidentally, my colleague Jacques deLisle of the University of Pennsylvania Law School also submitted a statement of his views, which largely support Huawei’s position. (I hope I have not characterized his statement unfairly.) Needless to say, I don’t agree, but the paper here is an analysis of the arguments of the Zhong Lun submission, not Jacques’. Those who are interested can read Jacques’ statement for themselves.

 Even we non-lawyers can read.  I wrote about this previously in Lie Down with Dogs, Get Up with Fleas

 Don Clarke’s analysis –

The Zhong Lun Declaration on the Obligations of Huawei and Other Chinese Companies Under Chinese Law (March 17, 2019)

Added March 22:  Steve Dickinson at China Law Blog on the new foreign investment law, which has been touted as an improvement in business conditions and a response to forced technology transfer – https://www.chinalawblog.com/2019/03/chinas-new-foreign-investment-law-and-forced-technology-transfer-same-as-it-ever-was.html      Steve’s conclusion – 

Article 22 of China’s new Foreign Investment Law is not relevant to the issue of forced technology transfer. On that front absolutely nothing has changed and nobody should expect it to either.

Added May 25: Christopher Balding and Donald Clarke on Who Owns Huawei?  Huawei claims to be employee-owned.  But their shares are not ownership, but contract rights in a profit-sharing plan.  To the extent ownership is vested in a trade union, Chinese law does not grant ownership rights to employees if the company or trade union go bust.  It appears that ultimately Huawei could be state-owned, since all trade unions are part of the state.

Huawei responds

Don Clarke’s rebuttal.  Huawei makes no case for employee-ownership and does not refute any facts in the Balding-Clarke paper. 

What Chinese are talking about … fake news

You know that China is increasing pressure on every state it can bully.  The bullying is easiest when the victim state has a substantial share of its GDP connected to China, whether as exports or as Chinese FDI coming in.  Now come fake news stories published in China, quoting New Zealand politicians approving of Chinese policies on the Belt and Road initiative.  New Zealand is in a tough spot. 
 
It is one of the “five eyes” countries, those English speaking countries that share some cultural backgrounds and concepts of law and government.  Others are the US, England, Canada, and Australia.  These five share intelligence efforts in some detail.  The US agencies involved include the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA).  Security issues – now, the Huawei 5G business, and related Chinese hacking and theft – are top priorities among the five eyes countries.  Even more than Australia, New Zealand is a western country in Asia. 
 
New Zealand is isolated.  It is more than 1300 miles from Sydney to Auckland and it cannot develop much stronger markets for agricultural goods elsewhere in the world.  China is its largest trading partner, followed by Australia.  Agricultural exports are about 27% of GDP, and food exports are about half of that. New Zealand signed a free trade agreement with China in 2008.
 
A good example of the position in which New Zealand finds itself is the relative lack of police response to the attacks on the home and office of Anne Marie Brady, a scholar at the University of Canterbury, who has written in detail about the means by which China is infecting media and politics and public opinion outside China.  I wrote about these attacks in two places in the last couple of months. It is suspected that the intruders, who have also left threatening phone messages, are some local version of chengguan, the Chinese hired thugs who terrorize street vendors, old ladies who don’t want to leave their homes in the way of demolition, and anyone in the way of growth and development.  A substantial contingent of chengguan were responsible for watching Chen Guangcheng for years before he escaped in 2012.   New Zealand police have found no evidence, it seems, and do not seem too alarmed by the attacks.  There seems no doubt that these despicable attacks are politically motivated.  Brady’s recent article is Magic Weapons: China’s political influence activities under Xi Jinping. 
 
What is New Zealand to do? 
 
 
4. Chinese pressure on New Zealand increasing
Fake OpEd on People’s Daily English site by former Prime Minister Dame Jenny Shipley – Foreign Minister Winston Peters slams former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley after China Daily article appears – NZ Herald:
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has launched a stinging attack on former Prime Minister Dame Jenny Shipley after an article appeared in China’s “People’s Daily” under her byline complimenting China on its reforms and the Belt and Road Initiative.
But Shipley did not write the piece, which appears under the Online opinion section. It is headlined “We need to listen to China” and carries Dame Jenny’s byline and on Tuesday night was the fourth best read piece on the website.
She was interviewed by the state-run newspaper in December for a feature article which has run already and was surprised to learn a new piece had been published under her name.

Some economic development issues are similar around the world.   An American local government, faced with declining tax base, ageing population, loss of markets, and little ability to change the course of history is faced with  tough choices.  New Zealand is in a similar spot, with respect to China and the English-speaking west.   But American local governments usually don’t have to deal with fake news stories planted by enemies in the town next door.

Url for the New Zealand Herald article –

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12205347&ref=clavis