China's increasingly assertive actions in the waters east of Taiwan threaten regional stability and freedom of navigation, G7 foreign ministers said in a joint declaration published late yesterday following a meeting in Paris.
China, which claims Taiwan as its own, has stepped up activity off the nation’s east coast since June with regular coast guard patrols.
Officials in Taiwan say they believe China is practicing for a potential maritime blockade using overlapping military, paramilitary and civilian assets.
[...]
While France, Germany, the UK and the US have all previously expressed their concern about China's actions off Taiwan's east coast, the G7 statement is the strongest unified expression of concern to date about the Chinese activities.
[...]
Following the China Coast Guard's latest patrol off the east coast last month, Taiwan said China was harassing shipping and trying to exert a fictional jurisdiction.
Taipei regards the area off its east coast as critical to wartime supply routes from allies in the event of a blockade or conflict. China's military operates around Taiwan on a daily basis.
China is carrying out "area denial" drills in the Western Pacific involving one of its aircraft carriers and other naval formations, Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said on Tuesday, following a reported rise in Chinese activities.
China's increasingly assertive actions in the waters east of Taiwan threaten regional stability and freedom of navigation, G7 foreign ministers said in a joint declaration published late yesterday following a meeting in Paris.
China, which claims Taiwan as its own, has stepped up activity off the nation’s east coast since June with regular coast guard patrols.
Officials in Taiwan say they believe China is practicing for a potential maritime blockade using overlapping military, paramilitary and civilian assets.
[...]
While France, Germany, the UK and the US have all previously expressed their concern about China's actions off Taiwan's east coast, the G7 statement is the strongest unified expression of concern to date about the Chinese activities.
[...]
Following the China Coast Guard's latest patrol off the east coast last month, Taiwan said China was harassing shipping and trying to exert a fictional jurisdiction.
Taipei regards the area off its east coast as critical to wartime supply routes from allies in the event of a blockade or conflict. China's military operates around Taiwan on a daily basis.
China is carrying out "area denial" drills in the Western Pacific involving one of its aircraft carriers and other naval formations, Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said on Tuesday, following a reported rise in Chinese activities.
China's increasingly assertive actions in the waters east of Taiwan threaten regional stability and freedom of navigation, G7 foreign ministers said in a joint declaration published late yesterday following a meeting in Paris.
China, which claims Taiwan as its own, has stepped up activity off the nation’s east coast since June with regular coast guard patrols.
Officials in Taiwan say they believe China is practicing for a potential maritime blockade using overlapping military, paramilitary and civilian assets.
[...]
While France, Germany, the UK and the US have all previously expressed their concern about China's actions off Taiwan's east coast, the G7 statement is the strongest unified expression of concern to date about the Chinese activities.
[...]
Following the China Coast Guard's latest patrol off the east coast last month, Taiwan said China was harassing shipping and trying to exert a fictional jurisdiction.
Taipei regards the area off its east coast as critical to wartime supply routes from allies in the event of a blockade or conflict. China's military operates around Taiwan on a daily basis.
China is carrying out "area denial" drills in the Western Pacific involving one of its aircraft carriers and other naval formations, Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said on Tuesday, following a reported rise in Chinese activities.
China's increasingly assertive actions in the waters east of Taiwan threaten regional stability and freedom of navigation, G7 foreign ministers said in a joint declaration published late yesterday following a meeting in Paris.
China, which claims Taiwan as its own, has stepped up activity off the nation’s east coast since June with regular coast guard patrols.
Officials in Taiwan say they believe China is practicing for a potential maritime blockade using overlapping military, paramilitary and civilian assets.
[...]
While France, Germany, the UK and the US have all previously expressed their concern about China's actions off Taiwan's east coast, the G7 statement is the strongest unified expression of concern to date about the Chinese activities.
[...]
Following the China Coast Guard's latest patrol off the east coast last month, Taiwan said China was harassing shipping and trying to exert a fictional jurisdiction.
Taipei regards the area off its east coast as critical to wartime supply routes from allies in the event of a blockade or conflict. China's military operates around Taiwan on a daily basis.
China is carrying out "area denial" drills in the Western Pacific involving one of its aircraft carriers and other naval formations, Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said on Tuesday, following a reported rise in Chinese activities.
Here is a brief article by the study authors: How China’s Transnational Repression has Silently Taken Root in Japan’s Society
China’s transnational repression (often referred to as TNR) has attracted increasing international attention in recent years, particularly following revelations about Chinese overseas police stations operating all the way from Viña del Mar, Chile, to Rome, Italy.
[...]
However, while direct intimidation and surveillance have received considerable attention, subtler forms of repression remain largely overlooked.
Japan presents a particularly interesting case. Despite its geographical proximity to China, extensive economic relations, and large Chinese diaspora, the country has received comparatively little attention regarding the less visible forms of transnational repression. Japan’s democratic institutions and society reinforce the public assumption that individuals can safely express their political views, protected by academic freedom, the constitution, strong freedom of speech, and formal protection mechanisms. Only a few institutions, such as Human Rights Watch, have raised concerns over the issue.
[...]
A new report, “Mapping CCP Transnational Repression in Japan: From Self-Censorship to Institutional Pressure” (pdf), published by Sinopsis, a non-profit association in scholarly collaboration with the Department of Sinology at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, goes further in challenging these assumptions about the absence of TNR in Japan.
[...]
[Based on interviews with academics, journalists, students], the study identified three main mechanisms through which repression from Chinese individuals and institutions is experienced by critics in Japan:
- direct intimidation,
- institutional pressure, and
- self-censorship.
The findings suggest that TNR does not require direct intervention. It can operate through existing social relationships, institutional incentives, and the fear of possible consequences.
[...]
Direct harassment and spam calll
Reports of harassment frequently involve phone calls that interviewees suspected were linked to the Chinese embassy, an experience described by several participants [such as university professors and journalists [...] Such calls are not confined to Chinese nationals living in Japan, but also reach non-Chinese journalists reporting on sensitive issues and academics.
For Chinese nationals, the harassment often extends to family members remaining in China, creating additional pressure through familial connections. A particularly illustrative account comes from a Professor who reported that a student of hers from Inner Mongolia had been told that police officers contacted the student’s parents in China, pressuring the student to discontinue their research.
[...]
Surveillance and monitoring
Accounts of in-person surveillance describe a form of coercive pressure that leaves activists and members of ethnic minorities in Japan with the sense that they are being watched even outside China [...] Chinese man in Japan approached the man’s daughter at her school and asked her to telephone her father, then used the call to press the community member to work as an informant for the Chinese government.
[...]
Academic institutions
Academics of Chinese, Japanese, and other nationalities [...] attributed setbacks in career advancement to networks of influence they associated with the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] ... [A] Professor at a national university, reported that her pre-nomination to a senior post within the institution was withdrawn; while she cannot establish causation, she attributes this primarily to her research on Chinese affairs. Another Professor similarly described being professionally marginalised when her profile was removed from the university’s Chinese studies website. Neither account can be independently corroborated, but both are consistent with a dynamic in which institutions distance themselves pre-emptively from politically sensitive scholarship.
[...]
[There are also] pressures on students in the classroom, which they observed to vary with the surrounding community. One Professor [said that] mainland Chinese students in the social sciences tend to be more critical of the CCP than those in STEM fields, while short-term exchange students are typically more vocal in supporting official Chinese positions than full-time international students.
[...]
Organising academic events emerged as a further site of difficulty. One Professor reported obstacles in inviting activists and researchers, while another Professor described professional isolation after organising Hong Kong–related events.
[...]
Chinese student associations
Chinese Student Associations (CSAs) occupy a central place in participants’ accounts of what we characterise as institutional complicity. Interviewees repeatedly described these associations as intermediaries between students and actors they understood to be linked to the Chinese state,
[...]
As one Chinese student said,
"the spy web of Chinese students in other Japanese Universities is deeply rooted and has strong influences. The Chinese embassy has connections with some of the students’ associations.”
[...]
[The report suggests that CSAs are experienced as part of a layered oversight structure resembling what is known as “long-distance authoritarian governance.”
[...]
Self-censorship
Self-censorship recurs across the interviews with Chinese dissidents, academics, and students in Japan, including among students with no connection to political activity. These accounts illustrate how repression may operate indirectly, shaping behaviour through anticipated consequences rather than direct threats. [...]
The perceived presence of CCP-linked entities and individuals affects how Chinese students relate to fellow nationals and how they express themselves inside and outside the classroom.
[...]
[A Chinese student who] lived in Japan for five years [said that] he remains careful about whom he speaks to and avoids political discussion, preferring economic subjects. He acknowledged not feeling entirely safe in conversation, at times even with close friends, and said he refrains from voicing criticism even when he holds strong views.
[...]
[Several other Chinese students living in Japan say that they] avoid specific topics and limits her contact with other Chinese students [and they are] holding back their thoughts when conversing with Chinese citizens and even with “buddies,” avoiding revealing personal opinions.
[...]
Information gathering, mistrust, and the anticipation of surveillance
[There are] recurring patterns of information gathering directed at activists, academics, and diaspora communities in Japan [resembling] what scholars’ term “soft surveillance,” in which the collection of information operates less through overt coercion than through the uncertainty and psychological pressure it generates.
One Japanese professor described encounters with ”Chinese nationals asking her about her connection with Chinese research and activists,” including an occasion on which someone sought background information about a German journalist. She interpreted these approaches as purposeful and coordinated.
[...]
One [Hong Kong] activist recalled that acquaintances - former colleagues and friends from Hong Kong—travelled to Japan specifically to meet her every four to five months from 2023 onwards.
She did not regard these as isolated visits but as part of a pattern in which people from varied backgrounds approached her seeking similar information.
[Study participants] reported hearing of comparable cases among Taiwanese and Tibetan communities in Japan and among Hong Kong contacts in the United Kingdom and the United States.
[The Chinese student] believes some former members to be compromised, citing their appearances in pro-CCP media at the same time as they sought contact with the Hong Kong community in Japan.
She further noted that, while other activists’ families were subject to interrogation, the families of these individuals were not, which she read as evidence of coordination with the authorities.
[...]
[Chinese students in Japan] also raised concerns about digital infiltration. Alongside the WeChat monitoring described [in the study], several reported threatening online behaviour. One Hong Kong activist reported receiving messages from numerous accounts that he judged to be inauthentic. He described Hong Kong activist communities in Japan as living with a persistent fear of infiltration, which in his account generates internal disputes, exclusions, and in some cases the collapse of democratic initiatives.
[...]
Here is a brief article by the study authors: How China’s Transnational Repression has Silently Taken Root in Japan’s Society
China’s transnational repression (often referred to as TNR) has attracted increasing international attention in recent years, particularly following revelations about Chinese overseas police stations operating all the way from Viña del Mar, Chile, to Rome, Italy.
[...]
However, while direct intimidation and surveillance have received considerable attention, subtler forms of repression remain largely overlooked.
Japan presents a particularly interesting case. Despite its geographical proximity to China, extensive economic relations, and large Chinese diaspora, the country has received comparatively little attention regarding the less visible forms of transnational repression. Japan’s democratic institutions and society reinforce the public assumption that individuals can safely express their political views, protected by academic freedom, the constitution, strong freedom of speech, and formal protection mechanisms. Only a few institutions, such as Human Rights Watch, have raised concerns over the issue.
[...]
A new report, “Mapping CCP Transnational Repression in Japan: From Self-Censorship to Institutional Pressure” (pdf), published by Sinopsis, a non-profit association in scholarly collaboration with the Department of Sinology at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, goes further in challenging these assumptions about the absence of TNR in Japan.
[...]
[Based on interviews with academics, journalists, students], the study identified three main mechanisms through which repression from Chinese individuals and institutions is experienced by critics in Japan:
- direct intimidation,
- institutional pressure, and
- self-censorship.
The findings suggest that TNR does not require direct intervention. It can operate through existing social relationships, institutional incentives, and the fear of possible consequences.
[...]
Direct harassment and spam calll
Reports of harassment frequently involve phone calls that interviewees suspected were linked to the Chinese embassy, an experience described by several participants [such as university professors and journalists [...] Such calls are not confined to Chinese nationals living in Japan, but also reach non-Chinese journalists reporting on sensitive issues and academics.
For Chinese nationals, the harassment often extends to family members remaining in China, creating additional pressure through familial connections. A particularly illustrative account comes from a Professor who reported that a student of hers from Inner Mongolia had been told that police officers contacted the student’s parents in China, pressuring the student to discontinue their research.
[...]
Surveillance and monitoring
Accounts of in-person surveillance describe a form of coercive pressure that leaves activists and members of ethnic minorities in Japan with the sense that they are being watched even outside China [...] Chinese man in Japan approached the man’s daughter at her school and asked her to telephone her father, then used the call to press the community member to work as an informant for the Chinese government.
[...]
Academic institutions
Academics of Chinese, Japanese, and other nationalities [...] attributed setbacks in career advancement to networks of influence they associated with the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] ... [A] Professor at a national university, reported that her pre-nomination to a senior post within the institution was withdrawn; while she cannot establish causation, she attributes this primarily to her research on Chinese affairs. Another Professor similarly described being professionally marginalised when her profile was removed from the university’s Chinese studies website. Neither account can be independently corroborated, but both are consistent with a dynamic in which institutions distance themselves pre-emptively from politically sensitive scholarship.
[...]
[There are also] pressures on students in the classroom, which they observed to vary with the surrounding community. One Professor [said that] mainland Chinese students in the social sciences tend to be more critical of the CCP than those in STEM fields, while short-term exchange students are typically more vocal in supporting official Chinese positions than full-time international students.
[...]
Organising academic events emerged as a further site of difficulty. One Professor reported obstacles in inviting activists and researchers, while another Professor described professional isolation after organising Hong Kong–related events.
[...]
Chinese student associations
Chinese Student Associations (CSAs) occupy a central place in participants’ accounts of what we characterise as institutional complicity. Interviewees repeatedly described these associations as intermediaries between students and actors they understood to be linked to the Chinese state,
[...]
As one Chinese student said,
"the spy web of Chinese students in other Japanese Universities is deeply rooted and has strong influences. The Chinese embassy has connections with some of the students’ associations.”
[...]
[The report suggests that CSAs are experienced as part of a layered oversight structure resembling what is known as “long-distance authoritarian governance.”
[...]
Self-censorship
Self-censorship recurs across the interviews with Chinese dissidents, academics, and students in Japan, including among students with no connection to political activity. These accounts illustrate how repression may operate indirectly, shaping behaviour through anticipated consequences rather than direct threats. [...]
The perceived presence of CCP-linked entities and individuals affects how Chinese students relate to fellow nationals and how they express themselves inside and outside the classroom.
[...]
[A Chinese student who] lived in Japan for five years [said that] he remains careful about whom he speaks to and avoids political discussion, preferring economic subjects. He acknowledged not feeling entirely safe in conversation, at times even with close friends, and said he refrains from voicing criticism even when he holds strong views.
[...]
[Several other Chinese students living in Japan say that they] avoid specific topics and limits her contact with other Chinese students [and they are] holding back their thoughts when conversing with Chinese citizens and even with “buddies,” avoiding revealing personal opinions.
[...]
Information gathering, mistrust, and the anticipation of surveillance
[There are] recurring patterns of information gathering directed at activists, academics, and diaspora communities in Japan [resembling] what scholars’ term “soft surveillance,” in which the collection of information operates less through overt coercion than through the uncertainty and psychological pressure it generates.
One Japanese professor described encounters with ”Chinese nationals asking her about her connection with Chinese research and activists,” including an occasion on which someone sought background information about a German journalist. She interpreted these approaches as purposeful and coordinated.
[...]
One [Hong Kong] activist recalled that acquaintances - former colleagues and friends from Hong Kong—travelled to Japan specifically to meet her every four to five months from 2023 onwards.
She did not regard these as isolated visits but as part of a pattern in which people from varied backgrounds approached her seeking similar information.
[Study participants] reported hearing of comparable cases among Taiwanese and Tibetan communities in Japan and among Hong Kong contacts in the United Kingdom and the United States.
[The Chinese student] believes some former members to be compromised, citing their appearances in pro-CCP media at the same time as they sought contact with the Hong Kong community in Japan.
She further noted that, while other activists’ families were subject to interrogation, the families of these individuals were not, which she read as evidence of coordination with the authorities.
[...]
[Chinese students in Japan] also raised concerns about digital infiltration. Alongside the WeChat monitoring described [in the study], several reported threatening online behaviour. One Hong Kong activist reported receiving messages from numerous accounts that he judged to be inauthentic. He described Hong Kong activist communities in Japan as living with a persistent fear of infiltration, which in his account generates internal disputes, exclusions, and in some cases the collapse of democratic initiatives.
[...]
Here is a brief article by the study authors: How China’s Transnational Repression has Silently Taken Root in Japan’s Society
China’s transnational repression (often referred to as TNR) has attracted increasing international attention in recent years, particularly following revelations about Chinese overseas police stations operating all the way from Viña del Mar, Chile, to Rome, Italy.
[...]
However, while direct intimidation and surveillance have received considerable attention, subtler forms of repression remain largely overlooked.
Japan presents a particularly interesting case. Despite its geographical proximity to China, extensive economic relations, and large Chinese diaspora, the country has received comparatively little attention regarding the less visible forms of transnational repression. Japan’s democratic institutions and society reinforce the public assumption that individuals can safely express their political views, protected by academic freedom, the constitution, strong freedom of speech, and formal protection mechanisms. Only a few institutions, such as Human Rights Watch, have raised concerns over the issue.
[...]
A new report, “Mapping CCP Transnational Repression in Japan: From Self-Censorship to Institutional Pressure” (pdf), published by Sinopsis, a non-profit association in scholarly collaboration with the Department of Sinology at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, goes further in challenging these assumptions about the absence of TNR in Japan.
[...]
[Based on interviews with academics, journalists, students], the study identified three main mechanisms through which repression from Chinese individuals and institutions is experienced by critics in Japan:
- direct intimidation,
- institutional pressure, and
- self-censorship.
The findings suggest that TNR does not require direct intervention. It can operate through existing social relationships, institutional incentives, and the fear of possible consequences.
[...]
Direct harassment and spam calll
Reports of harassment frequently involve phone calls that interviewees suspected were linked to the Chinese embassy, an experience described by several participants [such as university professors and journalists [...] Such calls are not confined to Chinese nationals living in Japan, but also reach non-Chinese journalists reporting on sensitive issues and academics.
For Chinese nationals, the harassment often extends to family members remaining in China, creating additional pressure through familial connections. A particularly illustrative account comes from a Professor who reported that a student of hers from Inner Mongolia had been told that police officers contacted the student’s parents in China, pressuring the student to discontinue their research.
[...]
Surveillance and monitoring
Accounts of in-person surveillance describe a form of coercive pressure that leaves activists and members of ethnic minorities in Japan with the sense that they are being watched even outside China [...] Chinese man in Japan approached the man’s daughter at her school and asked her to telephone her father, then used the call to press the community member to work as an informant for the Chinese government.
[...]
Academic institutions
Academics of Chinese, Japanese, and other nationalities [...] attributed setbacks in career advancement to networks of influence they associated with the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] ... [A] Professor at a national university, reported that her pre-nomination to a senior post within the institution was withdrawn; while she cannot establish causation, she attributes this primarily to her research on Chinese affairs. Another Professor similarly described being professionally marginalised when her profile was removed from the university’s Chinese studies website. Neither account can be independently corroborated, but both are consistent with a dynamic in which institutions distance themselves pre-emptively from politically sensitive scholarship.
[...]
[There are also] pressures on students in the classroom, which they observed to vary with the surrounding community. One Professor [said that] mainland Chinese students in the social sciences tend to be more critical of the CCP than those in STEM fields, while short-term exchange students are typically more vocal in supporting official Chinese positions than full-time international students.
[...]
Organising academic events emerged as a further site of difficulty. One Professor reported obstacles in inviting activists and researchers, while another Professor described professional isolation after organising Hong Kong–related events.
[...]
Chinese student associations
Chinese Student Associations (CSAs) occupy a central place in participants’ accounts of what we characterise as institutional complicity. Interviewees repeatedly described these associations as intermediaries between students and actors they understood to be linked to the Chinese state,
[...]
As one Chinese student said,
"the spy web of Chinese students in other Japanese Universities is deeply rooted and has strong influences. The Chinese embassy has connections with some of the students’ associations.”
[...]
[The report suggests that CSAs are experienced as part of a layered oversight structure resembling what is known as “long-distance authoritarian governance.”
[...]
Self-censorship
Self-censorship recurs across the interviews with Chinese dissidents, academics, and students in Japan, including among students with no connection to political activity. These accounts illustrate how repression may operate indirectly, shaping behaviour through anticipated consequences rather than direct threats. [...]
The perceived presence of CCP-linked entities and individuals affects how Chinese students relate to fellow nationals and how they express themselves inside and outside the classroom.
[...]
[A Chinese student who] lived in Japan for five years [said that] he remains careful about whom he speaks to and avoids political discussion, preferring economic subjects. He acknowledged not feeling entirely safe in conversation, at times even with close friends, and said he refrains from voicing criticism even when he holds strong views.
[...]
[Several other Chinese students living in Japan say that they] avoid specific topics and limits her contact with other Chinese students [and they are] holding back their thoughts when conversing with Chinese citizens and even with “buddies,” avoiding revealing personal opinions.
[...]
Information gathering, mistrust, and the anticipation of surveillance
[There are] recurring patterns of information gathering directed at activists, academics, and diaspora communities in Japan [resembling] what scholars’ term “soft surveillance,” in which the collection of information operates less through overt coercion than through the uncertainty and psychological pressure it generates.
One Japanese professor described encounters with ”Chinese nationals asking her about her connection with Chinese research and activists,” including an occasion on which someone sought background information about a German journalist. She interpreted these approaches as purposeful and coordinated.
[...]
One [Hong Kong] activist recalled that acquaintances - former colleagues and friends from Hong Kong—travelled to Japan specifically to meet her every four to five months from 2023 onwards.
She did not regard these as isolated visits but as part of a pattern in which people from varied backgrounds approached her seeking similar information.
[Study participants] reported hearing of comparable cases among Taiwanese and Tibetan communities in Japan and among Hong Kong contacts in the United Kingdom and the United States.
[The Chinese student] believes some former members to be compromised, citing their appearances in pro-CCP media at the same time as they sought contact with the Hong Kong community in Japan.
She further noted that, while other activists’ families were subject to interrogation, the families of these individuals were not, which she read as evidence of coordination with the authorities.
[...]
[Chinese students in Japan] also raised concerns about digital infiltration. Alongside the WeChat monitoring described [in the study], several reported threatening online behaviour. One Hong Kong activist reported receiving messages from numerous accounts that he judged to be inauthentic. He described Hong Kong activist communities in Japan as living with a persistent fear of infiltration, which in his account generates internal disputes, exclusions, and in some cases the collapse of democratic initiatives.
[...]
Here is a brief article by the study authors: How China’s Transnational Repression has Silently Taken Root in Japan’s Society
China’s transnational repression (often referred to as TNR) has attracted increasing international attention in recent years, particularly following revelations about Chinese overseas police stations operating all the way from Viña del Mar, Chile, to Rome, Italy.
[...]
However, while direct intimidation and surveillance have received considerable attention, subtler forms of repression remain largely overlooked.
Japan presents a particularly interesting case. Despite its geographical proximity to China, extensive economic relations, and large Chinese diaspora, the country has received comparatively little attention regarding the less visible forms of transnational repression. Japan’s democratic institutions and society reinforce the public assumption that individuals can safely express their political views, protected by academic freedom, the constitution, strong freedom of speech, and formal protection mechanisms. Only a few institutions, such as Human Rights Watch, have raised concerns over the issue.
[...]
A new report, “Mapping CCP Transnational Repression in Japan: From Self-Censorship to Institutional Pressure” (pdf), published by Sinopsis, a non-profit association in scholarly collaboration with the Department of Sinology at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, goes further in challenging these assumptions about the absence of TNR in Japan.
[...]
[Based on interviews with academics, journalists, students], the study identified three main mechanisms through which repression from Chinese individuals and institutions is experienced by critics in Japan:
- direct intimidation,
- institutional pressure, and
- self-censorship.
The findings suggest that TNR does not require direct intervention. It can operate through existing social relationships, institutional incentives, and the fear of possible consequences.
[...]
Direct harassment and spam calll
Reports of harassment frequently involve phone calls that interviewees suspected were linked to the Chinese embassy, an experience described by several participants [such as university professors and journalists [...] Such calls are not confined to Chinese nationals living in Japan, but also reach non-Chinese journalists reporting on sensitive issues and academics.
For Chinese nationals, the harassment often extends to family members remaining in China, creating additional pressure through familial connections. A particularly illustrative account comes from a Professor who reported that a student of hers from Inner Mongolia had been told that police officers contacted the student’s parents in China, pressuring the student to discontinue their research.
[...]
Surveillance and monitoring
Accounts of in-person surveillance describe a form of coercive pressure that leaves activists and members of ethnic minorities in Japan with the sense that they are being watched even outside China [...] Chinese man in Japan approached the man’s daughter at her school and asked her to telephone her father, then used the call to press the community member to work as an informant for the Chinese government.
[...]
Academic institutions
Academics of Chinese, Japanese, and other nationalities [...] attributed setbacks in career advancement to networks of influence they associated with the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] ... [A] Professor at a national university, reported that her pre-nomination to a senior post within the institution was withdrawn; while she cannot establish causation, she attributes this primarily to her research on Chinese affairs. Another Professor similarly described being professionally marginalised when her profile was removed from the university’s Chinese studies website. Neither account can be independently corroborated, but both are consistent with a dynamic in which institutions distance themselves pre-emptively from politically sensitive scholarship.
[...]
[There are also] pressures on students in the classroom, which they observed to vary with the surrounding community. One Professor [said that] mainland Chinese students in the social sciences tend to be more critical of the CCP than those in STEM fields, while short-term exchange students are typically more vocal in supporting official Chinese positions than full-time international students.
[...]
Organising academic events emerged as a further site of difficulty. One Professor reported obstacles in inviting activists and researchers, while another Professor described professional isolation after organising Hong Kong–related events.
[...]
Chinese student associations
Chinese Student Associations (CSAs) occupy a central place in participants’ accounts of what we characterise as institutional complicity. Interviewees repeatedly described these associations as intermediaries between students and actors they understood to be linked to the Chinese state,
[...]
As one Chinese student said,
"the spy web of Chinese students in other Japanese Universities is deeply rooted and has strong influences. The Chinese embassy has connections with some of the students’ associations.”
[...]
[The report suggests that CSAs are experienced as part of a layered oversight structure resembling what is known as “long-distance authoritarian governance.”
[...]
Self-censorship
Self-censorship recurs across the interviews with Chinese dissidents, academics, and students in Japan, including among students with no connection to political activity. These accounts illustrate how repression may operate indirectly, shaping behaviour through anticipated consequences rather than direct threats. [...]
The perceived presence of CCP-linked entities and individuals affects how Chinese students relate to fellow nationals and how they express themselves inside and outside the classroom.
[...]
[A Chinese student who] lived in Japan for five years [said that] he remains careful about whom he speaks to and avoids political discussion, preferring economic subjects. He acknowledged not feeling entirely safe in conversation, at times even with close friends, and said he refrains from voicing criticism even when he holds strong views.
[...]
[Several other Chinese students living in Japan say that they] avoid specific topics and limits her contact with other Chinese students [and they are] holding back their thoughts when conversing with Chinese citizens and even with “buddies,” avoiding revealing personal opinions.
[...]
Information gathering, mistrust, and the anticipation of surveillance
[There are] recurring patterns of information gathering directed at activists, academics, and diaspora communities in Japan [resembling] what scholars’ term “soft surveillance,” in which the collection of information operates less through overt coercion than through the uncertainty and psychological pressure it generates.
One Japanese professor described encounters with ”Chinese nationals asking her about her connection with Chinese research and activists,” including an occasion on which someone sought background information about a German journalist. She interpreted these approaches as purposeful and coordinated.
[...]
One [Hong Kong] activist recalled that acquaintances - former colleagues and friends from Hong Kong—travelled to Japan specifically to meet her every four to five months from 2023 onwards.
She did not regard these as isolated visits but as part of a pattern in which people from varied backgrounds approached her seeking similar information.
[Study participants] reported hearing of comparable cases among Taiwanese and Tibetan communities in Japan and among Hong Kong contacts in the United Kingdom and the United States.
[The Chinese student] believes some former members to be compromised, citing their appearances in pro-CCP media at the same time as they sought contact with the Hong Kong community in Japan.
She further noted that, while other activists’ families were subject to interrogation, the families of these individuals were not, which she read as evidence of coordination with the authorities.
[...]
[Chinese students in Japan] also raised concerns about digital infiltration. Alongside the WeChat monitoring described [in the study], several reported threatening online behaviour. One Hong Kong activist reported receiving messages from numerous accounts that he judged to be inauthentic. He described Hong Kong activist communities in Japan as living with a persistent fear of infiltration, which in his account generates internal disputes, exclusions, and in some cases the collapse of democratic initiatives.
[...]
[...]
In 2021, President Xi Jinping triumphantly declared that the rising tide had lifted all boats — the Communist Party had won “complete victory” over absolute poverty — and pledged to pursue “common prosperity”1 for all. China does deserve credit: Since 1978 it has lifted close to 800 million people out of extreme poverty, three-quarters of the global total, according to the World Bank. But to claim that victory, Beijing used a poverty line of about $2.30 a day, which critics contend is too low.
Against the World Bank’s $8.30-a-day poverty line for households in upper-middle-income countries — China’s current group — more than one-fifth of its population remained poor as of 2022. Against the $30 a day that marks poverty in the rich-country cohort China will be joining, the average citizen falls well short. China, in other words, is becoming a high-income country whose people, by any rich-world measure, remain exceedingly poor.
[...]
Both sets of facts flow from the same political economy, and the tension between them will define China’s next quarter-century — turning less on whether the country grows rich, which by conventional measures it largely has, than on what it does about the millions left behind and the middle class it never allowed to form.
[...]
[When China entered] the WTO, the bet was that prosperity would beget a middle class that would demand a say. But Beijing has spent two decades ensuring that constituency never takes shape, since time and time again history has shown that a secure, propertied population is where pressure for a political voice collects.
The evidence on social activism is instructive. In November 2022 a deadly apartment fire in remote Urumqi set off street protests against zero-Covid lockdowns that swelled into the “white paper revolution,” named after the blank sheets of paper demonstrators held up in wordless dissent. But these protests erupted not on China’s poor periphery but in its bourgeois core — along Urumqi Road in Shanghai, the country’s wealthiest city, and across elite campuses like Beijing’s Tsinghua University. The demonstrations confirmed the Party’s operating assumption: It is not hardship that is politically dangerous, but a comfortable middle class.
[...]
On the institutions that underpin a secure middle class — most importantly a social safety net — China diverges sharply from its peers. Social spending sits near 10% of gross domestic product, roughly half the average for countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Xi often warns that welfare programs breed idleness, a surprising stance for an avowed Marxist. The underlying motivation is more likely that households forced to self-insure stay precarious and pliable.
A grinding property crisis has only heightened the sense of vulnerability. Chinese households hold about 47% of their assets in real estate, and prices have fallen roughly a fifth from their 2021 peak, erasing trillions of yuan in wealth. Because a family’s home is often their only form of insurance, the loss of value has made people cling to cash all the more.
[...]
Beijing has promised for years to rebalance the economy toward household consumption, so as to reduce the country’s reliance on the twin growth engines of exports and investment. Yet after two decades of jawboning and half measures, consumption is stuck at about 40% of GDP, compared with 55% to 70% across the rich world. Households save at extraordinary rates — deposits have roughly doubled since 2019, to some 165 trillion yuan ($24.7 trillion) — not from thrift but because the Chinese state offers thin retirement pensions, patchy healthcare coverage and unemployment insurance that reaches barely a third of the workforce. Jobless benefits are pegged to the local minimum wage — not to what a worker earned — and is capped at 90% of that: roughly 2,000 yuan a month. This year the minimum rural pension has increased by just 20 yuan, to 163 yuan a month. A people who cannot count on the government to care for them when they are ill, jobless or old will not spend.
[...]
Youth unemployment tells the same story. The rate for 16- to 24-year-olds who are not in school now stands at 18% — an indicator so politically sensitive that Beijing suspended its publication in 2023, and then revised the methodology. A generation that coined the term neijuan, “involution,” shorthand for running ever faster to stay in place, is not the confident spending cohort a middle class is built on.
[...]
The artificial intelligence boom deepens the divide between the government’s industrial ambitions and household welfare. Beijing is pouring trillions of yuan into the development of more advanced chips and data centers to support AI, and that spending is, for now, what is powering growth. But it funds those technology investments by** starving the basics: hospitals, schools and other elements of the already meager safety net in rural areas**, while the rewards accrue to the coastal, educated sliver.
The resulting inequality would look familiar to any American. With the poor and middle held down, one group has been allowed to grow: the rich. China’s richest 10% of the population hold about 68% of its national wealth, close to the US figure of 70%. In 2025 the 1,434 individuals worth at least 5 billion yuan saw their combined wealth soar 42% thanks to a powerful stock market rally, according to an annual list compiled by the Hurun Research Institute, a Shanghai-based firm that has tracked China’s rich since 1999.
[...]
Common prosperity, Xi’s supposed sequel to Deng’s “let some get rich first,” is turning out to mean shared restraint, not shared wealth: billionaires disciplined when convenient, the middle class asset-trapped, the poor pacified in 20-yuan increments. Everyone, in the end, is held equally in check.
[...]
During 14 years in power, [Xi Jinping] has chosen control over household welfare at every turn, and for the fourth presidential term he’s expected to claim in 2027, there’s no reason to expect a change of course. So the likeliest path is welfare that grows but stays minimal and conditional: enough to keep the peace, and calibrated to sustain dependence rather than end it.
The West wagered in 2001 [when China entered the WTO] that trade would make China rich and wealth would make it liberal. It got the first half. Whether a great power can hold the rest together while keeping most of its citizens poor is, at best, a formula for grinding stagnation — at worst, a slow-burning fuse.
[...]
[...]
In 2021, President Xi Jinping triumphantly declared that the rising tide had lifted all boats — the Communist Party had won “complete victory” over absolute poverty — and pledged to pursue “common prosperity”1 for all. China does deserve credit: Since 1978 it has lifted close to 800 million people out of extreme poverty, three-quarters of the global total, according to the World Bank. But to claim that victory, Beijing used a poverty line of about $2.30 a day, which critics contend is too low.
Against the World Bank’s $8.30-a-day poverty line for households in upper-middle-income countries — China’s current group — more than one-fifth of its population remained poor as of 2022. Against the $30 a day that marks poverty in the rich-country cohort China will be joining, the average citizen falls well short. China, in other words, is becoming a high-income country whose people, by any rich-world measure, remain exceedingly poor.
[...]
Both sets of facts flow from the same political economy, and the tension between them will define China’s next quarter-century — turning less on whether the country grows rich, which by conventional measures it largely has, than on what it does about the millions left behind and the middle class it never allowed to form.
[...]
[When China entered] the WTO, the bet was that prosperity would beget a middle class that would demand a say. But Beijing has spent two decades ensuring that constituency never takes shape, since time and time again history has shown that a secure, propertied population is where pressure for a political voice collects.
The evidence on social activism is instructive. In November 2022 a deadly apartment fire in remote Urumqi set off street protests against zero-Covid lockdowns that swelled into the “white paper revolution,” named after the blank sheets of paper demonstrators held up in wordless dissent. But these protests erupted not on China’s poor periphery but in its bourgeois core — along Urumqi Road in Shanghai, the country’s wealthiest city, and across elite campuses like Beijing’s Tsinghua University. The demonstrations confirmed the Party’s operating assumption: It is not hardship that is politically dangerous, but a comfortable middle class.
[...]
On the institutions that underpin a secure middle class — most importantly a social safety net — China diverges sharply from its peers. Social spending sits near 10% of gross domestic product, roughly half the average for countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Xi often warns that welfare programs breed idleness, a surprising stance for an avowed Marxist. The underlying motivation is more likely that households forced to self-insure stay precarious and pliable.
A grinding property crisis has only heightened the sense of vulnerability. Chinese households hold about 47% of their assets in real estate, and prices have fallen roughly a fifth from their 2021 peak, erasing trillions of yuan in wealth. Because a family’s home is often their only form of insurance, the loss of value has made people cling to cash all the more.
[...]
Beijing has promised for years to rebalance the economy toward household consumption, so as to reduce the country’s reliance on the twin growth engines of exports and investment. Yet after two decades of jawboning and half measures, consumption is stuck at about 40% of GDP, compared with 55% to 70% across the rich world. Households save at extraordinary rates — deposits have roughly doubled since 2019, to some 165 trillion yuan ($24.7 trillion) — not from thrift but because the Chinese state offers thin retirement pensions, patchy healthcare coverage and unemployment insurance that reaches barely a third of the workforce. Jobless benefits are pegged to the local minimum wage — not to what a worker earned — and is capped at 90% of that: roughly 2,000 yuan a month. This year the minimum rural pension has increased by just 20 yuan, to 163 yuan a month. A people who cannot count on the government to care for them when they are ill, jobless or old will not spend.
[...]
Youth unemployment tells the same story. The rate for 16- to 24-year-olds who are not in school now stands at 18% — an indicator so politically sensitive that Beijing suspended its publication in 2023, and then revised the methodology. A generation that coined the term neijuan, “involution,” shorthand for running ever faster to stay in place, is not the confident spending cohort a middle class is built on.
[...]
The artificial intelligence boom deepens the divide between the government’s industrial ambitions and household welfare. Beijing is pouring trillions of yuan into the development of more advanced chips and data centers to support AI, and that spending is, for now, what is powering growth. But it funds those technology investments by** starving the basics: hospitals, schools and other elements of the already meager safety net in rural areas**, while the rewards accrue to the coastal, educated sliver.
The resulting inequality would look familiar to any American. With the poor and middle held down, one group has been allowed to grow: the rich. China’s richest 10% of the population hold about 68% of its national wealth, close to the US figure of 70%. In 2025 the 1,434 individuals worth at least 5 billion yuan saw their combined wealth soar 42% thanks to a powerful stock market rally, according to an annual list compiled by the Hurun Research Institute, a Shanghai-based firm that has tracked China’s rich since 1999.
[...]
Common prosperity, Xi’s supposed sequel to Deng’s “let some get rich first,” is turning out to mean shared restraint, not shared wealth: billionaires disciplined when convenient, the middle class asset-trapped, the poor pacified in 20-yuan increments. Everyone, in the end, is held equally in check.
[...]
During 14 years in power, [Xi Jinping] has chosen control over household welfare at every turn, and for the fourth presidential term he’s expected to claim in 2027, there’s no reason to expect a change of course. So the likeliest path is welfare that grows but stays minimal and conditional: enough to keep the peace, and calibrated to sustain dependence rather than end it.
The West wagered in 2001 [when China entered the WTO] that trade would make China rich and wealth would make it liberal. It got the first half. Whether a great power can hold the rest together while keeping most of its citizens poor is, at best, a formula for grinding stagnation — at worst, a slow-burning fuse.
[...]
[...]
In 2021, President Xi Jinping triumphantly declared that the rising tide had lifted all boats — the Communist Party had won “complete victory” over absolute poverty — and pledged to pursue “common prosperity”1 for all. China does deserve credit: Since 1978 it has lifted close to 800 million people out of extreme poverty, three-quarters of the global total, according to the World Bank. But to claim that victory, Beijing used a poverty line of about $2.30 a day, which critics contend is too low.
Against the World Bank’s $8.30-a-day poverty line for households in upper-middle-income countries — China’s current group — more than one-fifth of its population remained poor as of 2022. Against the $30 a day that marks poverty in the rich-country cohort China will be joining, the average citizen falls well short. China, in other words, is becoming a high-income country whose people, by any rich-world measure, remain exceedingly poor.
[...]
Both sets of facts flow from the same political economy, and the tension between them will define China’s next quarter-century — turning less on whether the country grows rich, which by conventional measures it largely has, than on what it does about the millions left behind and the middle class it never allowed to form.
[...]
[When China entered] the WTO, the bet was that prosperity would beget a middle class that would demand a say. But Beijing has spent two decades ensuring that constituency never takes shape, since time and time again history has shown that a secure, propertied population is where pressure for a political voice collects.
The evidence on social activism is instructive. In November 2022 a deadly apartment fire in remote Urumqi set off street protests against zero-Covid lockdowns that swelled into the “white paper revolution,” named after the blank sheets of paper demonstrators held up in wordless dissent. But these protests erupted not on China’s poor periphery but in its bourgeois core — along Urumqi Road in Shanghai, the country’s wealthiest city, and across elite campuses like Beijing’s Tsinghua University. The demonstrations confirmed the Party’s operating assumption: It is not hardship that is politically dangerous, but a comfortable middle class.
[...]
On the institutions that underpin a secure middle class — most importantly a social safety net — China diverges sharply from its peers. Social spending sits near 10% of gross domestic product, roughly half the average for countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Xi often warns that welfare programs breed idleness, a surprising stance for an avowed Marxist. The underlying motivation is more likely that households forced to self-insure stay precarious and pliable.
A grinding property crisis has only heightened the sense of vulnerability. Chinese households hold about 47% of their assets in real estate, and prices have fallen roughly a fifth from their 2021 peak, erasing trillions of yuan in wealth. Because a family’s home is often their only form of insurance, the loss of value has made people cling to cash all the more.
[...]
Beijing has promised for years to rebalance the economy toward household consumption, so as to reduce the country’s reliance on the twin growth engines of exports and investment. Yet after two decades of jawboning and half measures, consumption is stuck at about 40% of GDP, compared with 55% to 70% across the rich world. Households save at extraordinary rates — deposits have roughly doubled since 2019, to some 165 trillion yuan ($24.7 trillion) — not from thrift but because the Chinese state offers thin retirement pensions, patchy healthcare coverage and unemployment insurance that reaches barely a third of the workforce. Jobless benefits are pegged to the local minimum wage — not to what a worker earned — and is capped at 90% of that: roughly 2,000 yuan a month. This year the minimum rural pension has increased by just 20 yuan, to 163 yuan a month. A people who cannot count on the government to care for them when they are ill, jobless or old will not spend.
[...]
Youth unemployment tells the same story. The rate for 16- to 24-year-olds who are not in school now stands at 18% — an indicator so politically sensitive that Beijing suspended its publication in 2023, and then revised the methodology. A generation that coined the term neijuan, “involution,” shorthand for running ever faster to stay in place, is not the confident spending cohort a middle class is built on.
[...]
The artificial intelligence boom deepens the divide between the government’s industrial ambitions and household welfare. Beijing is pouring trillions of yuan into the development of more advanced chips and data centers to support AI, and that spending is, for now, what is powering growth. But it funds those technology investments by** starving the basics: hospitals, schools and other elements of the already meager safety net in rural areas**, while the rewards accrue to the coastal, educated sliver.
The resulting inequality would look familiar to any American. With the poor and middle held down, one group has been allowed to grow: the rich. China’s richest 10% of the population hold about 68% of its national wealth, close to the US figure of 70%. In 2025 the 1,434 individuals worth at least 5 billion yuan saw their combined wealth soar 42% thanks to a powerful stock market rally, according to an annual list compiled by the Hurun Research Institute, a Shanghai-based firm that has tracked China’s rich since 1999.
[...]
Common prosperity, Xi’s supposed sequel to Deng’s “let some get rich first,” is turning out to mean shared restraint, not shared wealth: billionaires disciplined when convenient, the middle class asset-trapped, the poor pacified in 20-yuan increments. Everyone, in the end, is held equally in check.
[...]
During 14 years in power, [Xi Jinping] has chosen control over household welfare at every turn, and for the fourth presidential term he’s expected to claim in 2027, there’s no reason to expect a change of course. So the likeliest path is welfare that grows but stays minimal and conditional: enough to keep the peace, and calibrated to sustain dependence rather than end it.
The West wagered in 2001 [when China entered the WTO] that trade would make China rich and wealth would make it liberal. It got the first half. Whether a great power can hold the rest together while keeping most of its citizens poor is, at best, a formula for grinding stagnation — at worst, a slow-burning fuse.
[...]
[...]
In 2021, President Xi Jinping triumphantly declared that the rising tide had lifted all boats — the Communist Party had won “complete victory” over absolute poverty — and pledged to pursue “common prosperity”1 for all. China does deserve credit: Since 1978 it has lifted close to 800 million people out of extreme poverty, three-quarters of the global total, according to the World Bank. But to claim that victory, Beijing used a poverty line of about $2.30 a day, which critics contend is too low.
Against the World Bank’s $8.30-a-day poverty line for households in upper-middle-income countries — China’s current group — more than one-fifth of its population remained poor as of 2022. Against the $30 a day that marks poverty in the rich-country cohort China will be joining, the average citizen falls well short. China, in other words, is becoming a high-income country whose people, by any rich-world measure, remain exceedingly poor.
[...]
Both sets of facts flow from the same political economy, and the tension between them will define China’s next quarter-century — turning less on whether the country grows rich, which by conventional measures it largely has, than on what it does about the millions left behind and the middle class it never allowed to form.
[...]
[When China entered] the WTO, the bet was that prosperity would beget a middle class that would demand a say. But Beijing has spent two decades ensuring that constituency never takes shape, since time and time again history has shown that a secure, propertied population is where pressure for a political voice collects.
The evidence on social activism is instructive. In November 2022 a deadly apartment fire in remote Urumqi set off street protests against zero-Covid lockdowns that swelled into the “white paper revolution,” named after the blank sheets of paper demonstrators held up in wordless dissent. But these protests erupted not on China’s poor periphery but in its bourgeois core — along Urumqi Road in Shanghai, the country’s wealthiest city, and across elite campuses like Beijing’s Tsinghua University. The demonstrations confirmed the Party’s operating assumption: It is not hardship that is politically dangerous, but a comfortable middle class.
[...]
On the institutions that underpin a secure middle class — most importantly a social safety net — China diverges sharply from its peers. Social spending sits near 10% of gross domestic product, roughly half the average for countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Xi often warns that welfare programs breed idleness, a surprising stance for an avowed Marxist. The underlying motivation is more likely that households forced to self-insure stay precarious and pliable.
A grinding property crisis has only heightened the sense of vulnerability. Chinese households hold about 47% of their assets in real estate, and prices have fallen roughly a fifth from their 2021 peak, erasing trillions of yuan in wealth. Because a family’s home is often their only form of insurance, the loss of value has made people cling to cash all the more.
[...]
Beijing has promised for years to rebalance the economy toward household consumption, so as to reduce the country’s reliance on the twin growth engines of exports and investment. Yet after two decades of jawboning and half measures, consumption is stuck at about 40% of GDP, compared with 55% to 70% across the rich world. Households save at extraordinary rates — deposits have roughly doubled since 2019, to some 165 trillion yuan ($24.7 trillion) — not from thrift but because the Chinese state offers thin retirement pensions, patchy healthcare coverage and unemployment insurance that reaches barely a third of the workforce. Jobless benefits are pegged to the local minimum wage — not to what a worker earned — and is capped at 90% of that: roughly 2,000 yuan a month. This year the minimum rural pension has increased by just 20 yuan, to 163 yuan a month. A people who cannot count on the government to care for them when they are ill, jobless or old will not spend.
[...]
Youth unemployment tells the same story. The rate for 16- to 24-year-olds who are not in school now stands at 18% — an indicator so politically sensitive that Beijing suspended its publication in 2023, and then revised the methodology. A generation that coined the term neijuan, “involution,” shorthand for running ever faster to stay in place, is not the confident spending cohort a middle class is built on.
[...]
The artificial intelligence boom deepens the divide between the government’s industrial ambitions and household welfare. Beijing is pouring trillions of yuan into the development of more advanced chips and data centers to support AI, and that spending is, for now, what is powering growth. But it funds those technology investments by** starving the basics: hospitals, schools and other elements of the already meager safety net in rural areas**, while the rewards accrue to the coastal, educated sliver.
The resulting inequality would look familiar to any American. With the poor and middle held down, one group has been allowed to grow: the rich. China’s richest 10% of the population hold about 68% of its national wealth, close to the US figure of 70%. In 2025 the 1,434 individuals worth at least 5 billion yuan saw their combined wealth soar 42% thanks to a powerful stock market rally, according to an annual list compiled by the Hurun Research Institute, a Shanghai-based firm that has tracked China’s rich since 1999.
[...]
Common prosperity, Xi’s supposed sequel to Deng’s “let some get rich first,” is turning out to mean shared restraint, not shared wealth: billionaires disciplined when convenient, the middle class asset-trapped, the poor pacified in 20-yuan increments. Everyone, in the end, is held equally in check.
[...]
During 14 years in power, [Xi Jinping] has chosen control over household welfare at every turn, and for the fourth presidential term he’s expected to claim in 2027, there’s no reason to expect a change of course. So the likeliest path is welfare that grows but stays minimal and conditional: enough to keep the peace, and calibrated to sustain dependence rather than end it.
The West wagered in 2001 [when China entered the WTO] that trade would make China rich and wealth would make it liberal. It got the first half. Whether a great power can hold the rest together while keeping most of its citizens poor is, at best, a formula for grinding stagnation — at worst, a slow-burning fuse.
[...]
- French footballer Kylian Mbappé was widely condemned recently in China over its remarks that former Chinese leader Mao Zedong was "a dictator"
- The ironic bit with this case is that Chinese media censored the word "dictator"and were just saying that Mbappé made ‘inappropriate remarks about China,’ while people inside China's "Great Firewall" are unaware what exactly these inappropriate remarks were
- Chinese AI were not helpful - until maybe Weibo's "Comment Robot" joined in responding to a post asking “What did Mbappé do? Was what he said wrong?" with: "He told the truth, that’s all. Some people just don’t like to hear it."
[...]
Last week saw the eruption of what The New York Times described as "one of the more improbable football-related storylines of recent times." French footballer Kylian Mbappé was widely condemned in China over a comment from a months-old YouTube video, in which he expressed amusement at a meme featuring his own face superimposed onto that of "a guy—I think it was a Chinese dictator." The meme is one of many playing on Mbappé’s nickname "the dictator," bestowed for his allegedly heavy-handed behind-the-scenes behavior. He did not mention Mao Zedong by name, but a combined image of the two men was inserted into the video.
China may be a self-proclaimed people’s democratic dictatorship, but that formulation is conceptually and, in Chinese, terminologically distinct from that of personal dictatorship, and Chinese authorities reject the label’s application to Mao or other top leaders.
[...]
A complicating factor in this case, though, is that many in China did not know what the offending comment actually was. From Rebecca Bailey at The Guardian, on October 28:
[...] The [Chinese] football app Dongqiudi was among the first to release a statement condemning the “inappropriate remarks”, but said: “Because his comments were offensive to China and the Chinese people, we cannot translate them.” Chinese media have reported on reactions such as the brand desertions, and the China Football Association’s lodging of a “stern protest” with Real Madrid – who apologised on Wednesday “to the Chinese people for any offence caused” – but have generally steered clear of outlining Mbappé’s precise offence.
The topic was still trending on Chinese social media on Wednesday morning, with one hashtag relating to the superstar’s apology boasting more than 600m views. Some posts asked variations on a simple question: “What did he actually say?”
Manya Koetse, editor of the Eye on Digital China newsletter, said in a post on X: “Many netizens without a VPN are still left in the dark about why all the talk about boycotting Mbappé is actually happening.” [Koetse examined the controversy at greater length at What’s On Weibo.]
[…] Jennifer Pan, professor of communication at Stanford University, said the difficulty of doing independent social science surveys in the past decade meant “our understanding of what Chinese people actually think is weak”. Pan said: “Social media doesn’t fill that gap. It’s noisy, unrepresentative, and censored … What we see is that companies, platforms, broadcasters and the foreign ministry moved together quickly. Did this follow public anger, or did this produce public anger? Either is possible, and we can’t tell which came first.”
[...]
Recent translations have shown Chinese users turning to AI for help in navigating the mysteries of online censorship, but tests by fact-checkers at France 24 suggested that chatbots were able to offer little clarity on Mbappé’s comments.
The situation was discussed in some of the online commentary compiled by CDT Chinese. ”The funniest thing about this Mbappé situation is that all the media are saying he made ‘inappropriate remarks about China,’ and that a huge mob of people inside the [Great Fire]wall are up in arms,” said one comment. “But as for exactly what these inappropriate remarks actually were, those who don’t know can’t get a straight answer, and those who do know are talking in riddles." These riddles included: “[It’s about] the person on the 100-yuan note," and, “He said Tang Guoqiang was an art student." (Tang Guoqiang is an actor famous for portraying Mao; "an art student" is an apparent reference to Hitler as a symbol of dictatorship in general.)
Weibo’s controversial AI “Comment Robot” joined in, responding to a post asking “What did Mbappé do? Was what he said wrong?" with:
"He told the truth, that’s all. Some people just don’t like to hear it."
[...]
Other collected social media comments are translated from Chinese:
luzelun134960: He wasn’t wrong! The whole world, apart from mainland China, knows Mao was a dictator.
Jammesavj: I’m not offended. Please don’t presume to speak for the Chinese people.
maihu8964: The pink maggots make memes of other countries’ leaders every day, but they’re not happy when the tables are turned.
Rongshen021116: What Mbappé said is a fact. Of course Mao Zedong was a dictator.
kiligulyanov: Bappé didn’t even say "Mao Zedong," he just said "a Chinese dictator," and everyone assumed he meant Mao. Couldn’t he have been talking about Chiang Kai-shek?
xr95718872: Telling the truth is an error these days.
mngshanqi: Milked again? [A pun on "insulted."] Is it even possible to get through life without “insulting China”?
TENPHOENIX2018: When even the reply-bot Robert dares to say, "He just told the truth," you know it’s not the algorithm being banned, but truth itself.
gaochao17lngs: Mbappé had no idea that China is still a dictatorship.
TianCai67: Pinks within the [Great Fire]wall amuse themselves Photoshopping gross memes of Takaichi Sanae, "The General," and Trump all the time, and think they’re being hilarious. Then Mbappé drops one joke in passing, and they go nuts.
Luvsic0929: This Mbappé thing made me realise that Chinese higher education is a total failure, without a doubt.
lilaoshizuikeai: Imagine foreigners who’ve just observed China’s great flame wars with Brazil [over socialist perspectives on LGBT rights and drug policy] and Turkey [over Uyghur identity], and now see the spectacle of little pinks banding together to defend a dictator who killed tens of millions of their own compatriots. The stereotypes runneth over.
huang3feng: So here’s a crazy question: right now the Chinese internet is engulfed in a Cultural Revolution-style struggle session against Mbappé, even X is flooded with little pinks, the whole country’s performing dictatorship, and what Mbappé said was wrong?
ooopqoqjs: The three inevitable experiences in any foreigner’s life: birth, death, and insulting China.
cc14514: You can’t make jokes with insecure clowns around.
liuyifei1065: Doesn’t this just go to prove it’s a dictatorship? No dissenting voices … everyone marching in lockstep.
[Here are all the comment in Chinese.]
There is more in the linked article.
[...]
- French footballer Kylian Mbappé was widely condemned recently in China over its remarks that former Chinese leader Mao Zedong was "a dictator"
- The ironic bit with this case is that Chinese media censored the word "dictator"and were just saying that Mbappé made ‘inappropriate remarks about China,’ while people inside China's "Great Firewall" are unaware what exactly these inappropriate remarks were
- Chinese AI were not helpful - until maybe Weibo's "Comment Robot" joined in responding to a post asking “What did Mbappé do? Was what he said wrong?" with: "He told the truth, that’s all. Some people just don’t like to hear it."
[...]
Last week saw the eruption of what The New York Times described as "one of the more improbable football-related storylines of recent times." French footballer Kylian Mbappé was widely condemned in China over a comment from a months-old YouTube video, in which he expressed amusement at a meme featuring his own face superimposed onto that of "a guy—I think it was a Chinese dictator." The meme is one of many playing on Mbappé’s nickname "the dictator," bestowed for his allegedly heavy-handed behind-the-scenes behavior. He did not mention Mao Zedong by name, but a combined image of the two men was inserted into the video.
China may be a self-proclaimed people’s democratic dictatorship, but that formulation is conceptually and, in Chinese, terminologically distinct from that of personal dictatorship, and Chinese authorities reject the label’s application to Mao or other top leaders.
[...]
A complicating factor in this case, though, is that many in China did not know what the offending comment actually was. From Rebecca Bailey at The Guardian, on October 28:
[...] The [Chinese] football app Dongqiudi was among the first to release a statement condemning the “inappropriate remarks”, but said: “Because his comments were offensive to China and the Chinese people, we cannot translate them.” Chinese media have reported on reactions such as the brand desertions, and the China Football Association’s lodging of a “stern protest” with Real Madrid – who apologised on Wednesday “to the Chinese people for any offence caused” – but have generally steered clear of outlining Mbappé’s precise offence.
The topic was still trending on Chinese social media on Wednesday morning, with one hashtag relating to the superstar’s apology boasting more than 600m views. Some posts asked variations on a simple question: “What did he actually say?”
Manya Koetse, editor of the Eye on Digital China newsletter, said in a post on X: “Many netizens without a VPN are still left in the dark about why all the talk about boycotting Mbappé is actually happening.” [Koetse examined the controversy at greater length at What’s On Weibo.]
[…] Jennifer Pan, professor of communication at Stanford University, said the difficulty of doing independent social science surveys in the past decade meant “our understanding of what Chinese people actually think is weak”. Pan said: “Social media doesn’t fill that gap. It’s noisy, unrepresentative, and censored … What we see is that companies, platforms, broadcasters and the foreign ministry moved together quickly. Did this follow public anger, or did this produce public anger? Either is possible, and we can’t tell which came first.”
[...]
Recent translations have shown Chinese users turning to AI for help in navigating the mysteries of online censorship, but tests by fact-checkers at France 24 suggested that chatbots were able to offer little clarity on Mbappé’s comments.
The situation was discussed in some of the online commentary compiled by CDT Chinese. ”The funniest thing about this Mbappé situation is that all the media are saying he made ‘inappropriate remarks about China,’ and that a huge mob of people inside the [Great Fire]wall are up in arms,” said one comment. “But as for exactly what these inappropriate remarks actually were, those who don’t know can’t get a straight answer, and those who do know are talking in riddles." These riddles included: “[It’s about] the person on the 100-yuan note," and, “He said Tang Guoqiang was an art student." (Tang Guoqiang is an actor famous for portraying Mao; "an art student" is an apparent reference to Hitler as a symbol of dictatorship in general.)
Weibo’s controversial AI “Comment Robot” joined in, responding to a post asking “What did Mbappé do? Was what he said wrong?" with:
"He told the truth, that’s all. Some people just don’t like to hear it."
[...]
Other collected social media comments are translated from Chinese:
luzelun134960: He wasn’t wrong! The whole world, apart from mainland China, knows Mao was a dictator.
Jammesavj: I’m not offended. Please don’t presume to speak for the Chinese people.
maihu8964: The pink maggots make memes of other countries’ leaders every day, but they’re not happy when the tables are turned.
Rongshen021116: What Mbappé said is a fact. Of course Mao Zedong was a dictator.
kiligulyanov: Bappé didn’t even say "Mao Zedong," he just said "a Chinese dictator," and everyone assumed he meant Mao. Couldn’t he have been talking about Chiang Kai-shek?
xr95718872: Telling the truth is an error these days.
mngshanqi: Milked again? [A pun on "insulted."] Is it even possible to get through life without “insulting China”?
TENPHOENIX2018: When even the reply-bot Robert dares to say, "He just told the truth," you know it’s not the algorithm being banned, but truth itself.
gaochao17lngs: Mbappé had no idea that China is still a dictatorship.
TianCai67: Pinks within the [Great Fire]wall amuse themselves Photoshopping gross memes of Takaichi Sanae, "The General," and Trump all the time, and think they’re being hilarious. Then Mbappé drops one joke in passing, and they go nuts.
Luvsic0929: This Mbappé thing made me realise that Chinese higher education is a total failure, without a doubt.
lilaoshizuikeai: Imagine foreigners who’ve just observed China’s great flame wars with Brazil [over socialist perspectives on LGBT rights and drug policy] and Turkey [over Uyghur identity], and now see the spectacle of little pinks banding together to defend a dictator who killed tens of millions of their own compatriots. The stereotypes runneth over.
huang3feng: So here’s a crazy question: right now the Chinese internet is engulfed in a Cultural Revolution-style struggle session against Mbappé, even X is flooded with little pinks, the whole country’s performing dictatorship, and what Mbappé said was wrong?
ooopqoqjs: The three inevitable experiences in any foreigner’s life: birth, death, and insulting China.
cc14514: You can’t make jokes with insecure clowns around.
liuyifei1065: Doesn’t this just go to prove it’s a dictatorship? No dissenting voices … everyone marching in lockstep.
[Here are all the comment in Chinese.]
There is more in the linked article.
[...]
- French footballer Kylian Mbappé was widely condemned recently in China over its remarks that former Chinese leader Mao Zedong was "a dictator"
- The ironic bit with this case is that Chinese media censored the word "dictator"and were just saying that Mbappé made ‘inappropriate remarks about China,’ while people inside China's "Great Firewall" are unaware what exactly these inappropriate remarks were
- Chinese AI were not helpful - until maybe Weibo's "Comment Robot" joined in responding to a post asking “What did Mbappé do? Was what he said wrong?" with: "He told the truth, that’s all. Some people just don’t like to hear it."
[...]
Last week saw the eruption of what The New York Times described as "one of the more improbable football-related storylines of recent times." French footballer Kylian Mbappé was widely condemned in China over a comment from a months-old YouTube video, in which he expressed amusement at a meme featuring his own face superimposed onto that of "a guy—I think it was a Chinese dictator." The meme is one of many playing on Mbappé’s nickname "the dictator," bestowed for his allegedly heavy-handed behind-the-scenes behavior. He did not mention Mao Zedong by name, but a combined image of the two men was inserted into the video.
China may be a self-proclaimed people’s democratic dictatorship, but that formulation is conceptually and, in Chinese, terminologically distinct from that of personal dictatorship, and Chinese authorities reject the label’s application to Mao or other top leaders.
[...]
A complicating factor in this case, though, is that many in China did not know what the offending comment actually was. From Rebecca Bailey at The Guardian, on October 28:
[...] The [Chinese] football app Dongqiudi was among the first to release a statement condemning the “inappropriate remarks”, but said: “Because his comments were offensive to China and the Chinese people, we cannot translate them.” Chinese media have reported on reactions such as the brand desertions, and the China Football Association’s lodging of a “stern protest” with Real Madrid – who apologised on Wednesday “to the Chinese people for any offence caused” – but have generally steered clear of outlining Mbappé’s precise offence.
The topic was still trending on Chinese social media on Wednesday morning, with one hashtag relating to the superstar’s apology boasting more than 600m views. Some posts asked variations on a simple question: “What did he actually say?”
Manya Koetse, editor of the Eye on Digital China newsletter, said in a post on X: “Many netizens without a VPN are still left in the dark about why all the talk about boycotting Mbappé is actually happening.” [Koetse examined the controversy at greater length at What’s On Weibo.]
[…] Jennifer Pan, professor of communication at Stanford University, said the difficulty of doing independent social science surveys in the past decade meant “our understanding of what Chinese people actually think is weak”. Pan said: “Social media doesn’t fill that gap. It’s noisy, unrepresentative, and censored … What we see is that companies, platforms, broadcasters and the foreign ministry moved together quickly. Did this follow public anger, or did this produce public anger? Either is possible, and we can’t tell which came first.”
[...]
Recent translations have shown Chinese users turning to AI for help in navigating the mysteries of online censorship, but tests by fact-checkers at France 24 suggested that chatbots were able to offer little clarity on Mbappé’s comments.
The situation was discussed in some of the online commentary compiled by CDT Chinese. ”The funniest thing about this Mbappé situation is that all the media are saying he made ‘inappropriate remarks about China,’ and that a huge mob of people inside the [Great Fire]wall are up in arms,” said one comment. “But as for exactly what these inappropriate remarks actually were, those who don’t know can’t get a straight answer, and those who do know are talking in riddles." These riddles included: “[It’s about] the person on the 100-yuan note," and, “He said Tang Guoqiang was an art student." (Tang Guoqiang is an actor famous for portraying Mao; "an art student" is an apparent reference to Hitler as a symbol of dictatorship in general.)
Weibo’s controversial AI “Comment Robot” joined in, responding to a post asking “What did Mbappé do? Was what he said wrong?" with:
"He told the truth, that’s all. Some people just don’t like to hear it."
[...]
Other collected social media comments are translated from Chinese:
luzelun134960: He wasn’t wrong! The whole world, apart from mainland China, knows Mao was a dictator.
Jammesavj: I’m not offended. Please don’t presume to speak for the Chinese people.
maihu8964: The pink maggots make memes of other countries’ leaders every day, but they’re not happy when the tables are turned.
Rongshen021116: What Mbappé said is a fact. Of course Mao Zedong was a dictator.
kiligulyanov: Bappé didn’t even say "Mao Zedong," he just said "a Chinese dictator," and everyone assumed he meant Mao. Couldn’t he have been talking about Chiang Kai-shek?
xr95718872: Telling the truth is an error these days.
mngshanqi: Milked again? [A pun on "insulted."] Is it even possible to get through life without “insulting China”?
TENPHOENIX2018: When even the reply-bot Robert dares to say, "He just told the truth," you know it’s not the algorithm being banned, but truth itself.
gaochao17lngs: Mbappé had no idea that China is still a dictatorship.
TianCai67: Pinks within the [Great Fire]wall amuse themselves Photoshopping gross memes of Takaichi Sanae, "The General," and Trump all the time, and think they’re being hilarious. Then Mbappé drops one joke in passing, and they go nuts.
Luvsic0929: This Mbappé thing made me realise that Chinese higher education is a total failure, without a doubt.
lilaoshizuikeai: Imagine foreigners who’ve just observed China’s great flame wars with Brazil [over socialist perspectives on LGBT rights and drug policy] and Turkey [over Uyghur identity], and now see the spectacle of little pinks banding together to defend a dictator who killed tens of millions of their own compatriots. The stereotypes runneth over.
huang3feng: So here’s a crazy question: right now the Chinese internet is engulfed in a Cultural Revolution-style struggle session against Mbappé, even X is flooded with little pinks, the whole country’s performing dictatorship, and what Mbappé said was wrong?
ooopqoqjs: The three inevitable experiences in any foreigner’s life: birth, death, and insulting China.
cc14514: You can’t make jokes with insecure clowns around.
liuyifei1065: Doesn’t this just go to prove it’s a dictatorship? No dissenting voices … everyone marching in lockstep.
[Here are all the comment in Chinese.]
There is more in the linked article.
[...]
- French footballer Kylian Mbappé was widely condemned recently in China over its remarks that former Chinese leader Mao Zedong was "a dictator"
- The ironic bit with this case is that Chinese media censored the word "dictator"and were just saying that Mbappé made ‘inappropriate remarks about China,’ while people inside China's "Great Firewall" are unaware what exactly these inappropriate remarks were
- Chinese AI were not helpful - until maybe Weibo's "Comment Robot" joined in responding to a post asking “What did Mbappé do? Was what he said wrong?" with: "He told the truth, that’s all. Some people just don’t like to hear it."
[...]
Last week saw the eruption of what The New York Times described as "one of the more improbable football-related storylines of recent times." French footballer Kylian Mbappé was widely condemned in China over a comment from a months-old YouTube video, in which he expressed amusement at a meme featuring his own face superimposed onto that of "a guy—I think it was a Chinese dictator." The meme is one of many playing on Mbappé’s nickname "the dictator," bestowed for his allegedly heavy-handed behind-the-scenes behavior. He did not mention Mao Zedong by name, but a combined image of the two men was inserted into the video.
China may be a self-proclaimed people’s democratic dictatorship, but that formulation is conceptually and, in Chinese, terminologically distinct from that of personal dictatorship, and Chinese authorities reject the label’s application to Mao or other top leaders.
[...]
A complicating factor in this case, though, is that many in China did not know what the offending comment actually was. From Rebecca Bailey at The Guardian, on October 28:
[...] The [Chinese] football app Dongqiudi was among the first to release a statement condemning the “inappropriate remarks”, but said: “Because his comments were offensive to China and the Chinese people, we cannot translate them.” Chinese media have reported on reactions such as the brand desertions, and the China Football Association’s lodging of a “stern protest” with Real Madrid – who apologised on Wednesday “to the Chinese people for any offence caused” – but have generally steered clear of outlining Mbappé’s precise offence.
The topic was still trending on Chinese social media on Wednesday morning, with one hashtag relating to the superstar’s apology boasting more than 600m views. Some posts asked variations on a simple question: “What did he actually say?”
Manya Koetse, editor of the Eye on Digital China newsletter, said in a post on X: “Many netizens without a VPN are still left in the dark about why all the talk about boycotting Mbappé is actually happening.” [Koetse examined the controversy at greater length at What’s On Weibo.]
[…] Jennifer Pan, professor of communication at Stanford University, said the difficulty of doing independent social science surveys in the past decade meant “our understanding of what Chinese people actually think is weak”. Pan said: “Social media doesn’t fill that gap. It’s noisy, unrepresentative, and censored … What we see is that companies, platforms, broadcasters and the foreign ministry moved together quickly. Did this follow public anger, or did this produce public anger? Either is possible, and we can’t tell which came first.”
[...]
Recent translations have shown Chinese users turning to AI for help in navigating the mysteries of online censorship, but tests by fact-checkers at France 24 suggested that chatbots were able to offer little clarity on Mbappé’s comments.
The situation was discussed in some of the online commentary compiled by CDT Chinese. ”The funniest thing about this Mbappé situation is that all the media are saying he made ‘inappropriate remarks about China,’ and that a huge mob of people inside the [Great Fire]wall are up in arms,” said one comment. “But as for exactly what these inappropriate remarks actually were, those who don’t know can’t get a straight answer, and those who do know are talking in riddles." These riddles included: “[It’s about] the person on the 100-yuan note," and, “He said Tang Guoqiang was an art student." (Tang Guoqiang is an actor famous for portraying Mao; "an art student" is an apparent reference to Hitler as a symbol of dictatorship in general.)
Weibo’s controversial AI “Comment Robot” joined in, responding to a post asking “What did Mbappé do? Was what he said wrong?" with:
"He told the truth, that’s all. Some people just don’t like to hear it."
[...]
Other collected social media comments are translated from Chinese:
luzelun134960: He wasn’t wrong! The whole world, apart from mainland China, knows Mao was a dictator.
Jammesavj: I’m not offended. Please don’t presume to speak for the Chinese people.
maihu8964: The pink maggots make memes of other countries’ leaders every day, but they’re not happy when the tables are turned.
Rongshen021116: What Mbappé said is a fact. Of course Mao Zedong was a dictator.
kiligulyanov: Bappé didn’t even say "Mao Zedong," he just said "a Chinese dictator," and everyone assumed he meant Mao. Couldn’t he have been talking about Chiang Kai-shek?
xr95718872: Telling the truth is an error these days.
mngshanqi: Milked again? [A pun on "insulted."] Is it even possible to get through life without “insulting China”?
TENPHOENIX2018: When even the reply-bot Robert dares to say, "He just told the truth," you know it’s not the algorithm being banned, but truth itself.
gaochao17lngs: Mbappé had no idea that China is still a dictatorship.
TianCai67: Pinks within the [Great Fire]wall amuse themselves Photoshopping gross memes of Takaichi Sanae, "The General," and Trump all the time, and think they’re being hilarious. Then Mbappé drops one joke in passing, and they go nuts.
Luvsic0929: This Mbappé thing made me realise that Chinese higher education is a total failure, without a doubt.
lilaoshizuikeai: Imagine foreigners who’ve just observed China’s great flame wars with Brazil [over socialist perspectives on LGBT rights and drug policy] and Turkey [over Uyghur identity], and now see the spectacle of little pinks banding together to defend a dictator who killed tens of millions of their own compatriots. The stereotypes runneth over.
huang3feng: So here’s a crazy question: right now the Chinese internet is engulfed in a Cultural Revolution-style struggle session against Mbappé, even X is flooded with little pinks, the whole country’s performing dictatorship, and what Mbappé said was wrong?
ooopqoqjs: The three inevitable experiences in any foreigner’s life: birth, death, and insulting China.
cc14514: You can’t make jokes with insecure clowns around.
liuyifei1065: Doesn’t this just go to prove it’s a dictatorship? No dissenting voices … everyone marching in lockstep.
[Here are all the comment in Chinese.]
There is more in the linked article.
[...]
The Canadian government has joined nine other countries in a joint statement condemning this week's prison sentence for Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong.
Wong, who became the global face of the financial hub's pro-democracy movement, was sentenced to 10 years in jail on a charge of collusion with foreign entities under the city's National Security Law (NSL).
"We call for an immediate end to all unjust prosecutions of individuals charged under the NSL and urge the authorities in China and Hong Kong to uphold their international commitments and honour the rights and freedoms guaranteed to the people of Hong Kong under the Sino-British Joint Declaration (1984)," the statement reads.
[...]
Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States also signed onto the statement, condemning how Hong Kong's National Security Law "is being used to target individuals for political expression and participation."
[...]
Hong Kong, a former British colony, returned to Chinese rule in 1997, with the guarantee that its high degree of autonomy and freedoms would be protected under a "one country, two systems" formula.
Between 2014 and 2019, Hong Kong saw a series of pro-democracy protests in response to various Beijing legislative measures — protests which occasionally turned violent.
China responded by passing a new national security law in 2020, alongside other measures, which have expanded the investigatory and extradition powers of Chinese authorities while strengthening the punishments for activities viewed by authorities as subversive or terroristic.
[...]
In February, media tycoon Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong's most vocal China critic, was jailed for 20 years for collusion with foreign forces and sedition following a landmark trial that sparked international criticism.
Also on Friday, a leading Macao democrat was jailed for 12.5 years on charges of subversion, in the China-ruled gambling hub's first known national security trial, local broadcaster TDM reported.
[...]
Au Kam San, 69, was arrested in July 2025 for collusion with foreign forces to endanger national security and tried behind closed doors on Sept. 16 and 18, TDM said.
Human Rights Watch said the proceedings were "marred by violations of due process" and the sentence handed down by the Macao government "sends a chilling message to all peaceful critics in the territory."
Au is one of Macao's most prominent democratic campaigners, serving for nearly two decades as a lawmaker in the former Portuguese colony. His lawyer, who was appointed by the court, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Through the years, Au had championed democratic reforms and civil society initiatives in the tiny enclave that returned to Chinese rule in 1999 — two years after neighbouring Hong Kong was handed back to China.
[...]
The Canadian government has joined nine other countries in a joint statement condemning this week's prison sentence for Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong.
Wong, who became the global face of the financial hub's pro-democracy movement, was sentenced to 10 years in jail on a charge of collusion with foreign entities under the city's National Security Law (NSL).
"We call for an immediate end to all unjust prosecutions of individuals charged under the NSL and urge the authorities in China and Hong Kong to uphold their international commitments and honour the rights and freedoms guaranteed to the people of Hong Kong under the Sino-British Joint Declaration (1984)," the statement reads.
[...]
Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States also signed onto the statement, condemning how Hong Kong's National Security Law "is being used to target individuals for political expression and participation."
[...]
Hong Kong, a former British colony, returned to Chinese rule in 1997, with the guarantee that its high degree of autonomy and freedoms would be protected under a "one country, two systems" formula.
Between 2014 and 2019, Hong Kong saw a series of pro-democracy protests in response to various Beijing legislative measures — protests which occasionally turned violent.
China responded by passing a new national security law in 2020, alongside other measures, which have expanded the investigatory and extradition powers of Chinese authorities while strengthening the punishments for activities viewed by authorities as subversive or terroristic.
[...]
In February, media tycoon Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong's most vocal China critic, was jailed for 20 years for collusion with foreign forces and sedition following a landmark trial that sparked international criticism.
Also on Friday, a leading Macao democrat was jailed for 12.5 years on charges of subversion, in the China-ruled gambling hub's first known national security trial, local broadcaster TDM reported.
[...]
Au Kam San, 69, was arrested in July 2025 for collusion with foreign forces to endanger national security and tried behind closed doors on Sept. 16 and 18, TDM said.
Human Rights Watch said the proceedings were "marred by violations of due process" and the sentence handed down by the Macao government "sends a chilling message to all peaceful critics in the territory."
Au is one of Macao's most prominent democratic campaigners, serving for nearly two decades as a lawmaker in the former Portuguese colony. His lawyer, who was appointed by the court, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Through the years, Au had championed democratic reforms and civil society initiatives in the tiny enclave that returned to Chinese rule in 1999 — two years after neighbouring Hong Kong was handed back to China.
[...]
The Canadian government has joined nine other countries in a joint statement condemning this week's prison sentence for Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong.
Wong, who became the global face of the financial hub's pro-democracy movement, was sentenced to 10 years in jail on a charge of collusion with foreign entities under the city's National Security Law (NSL).
"We call for an immediate end to all unjust prosecutions of individuals charged under the NSL and urge the authorities in China and Hong Kong to uphold their international commitments and honour the rights and freedoms guaranteed to the people of Hong Kong under the Sino-British Joint Declaration (1984)," the statement reads.
[...]
Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States also signed onto the statement, condemning how Hong Kong's National Security Law "is being used to target individuals for political expression and participation."
[...]
Hong Kong, a former British colony, returned to Chinese rule in 1997, with the guarantee that its high degree of autonomy and freedoms would be protected under a "one country, two systems" formula.
Between 2014 and 2019, Hong Kong saw a series of pro-democracy protests in response to various Beijing legislative measures — protests which occasionally turned violent.
China responded by passing a new national security law in 2020, alongside other measures, which have expanded the investigatory and extradition powers of Chinese authorities while strengthening the punishments for activities viewed by authorities as subversive or terroristic.
[...]
In February, media tycoon Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong's most vocal China critic, was jailed for 20 years for collusion with foreign forces and sedition following a landmark trial that sparked international criticism.
Also on Friday, a leading Macao democrat was jailed for 12.5 years on charges of subversion, in the China-ruled gambling hub's first known national security trial, local broadcaster TDM reported.
[...]
Au Kam San, 69, was arrested in July 2025 for collusion with foreign forces to endanger national security and tried behind closed doors on Sept. 16 and 18, TDM said.
Human Rights Watch said the proceedings were "marred by violations of due process" and the sentence handed down by the Macao government "sends a chilling message to all peaceful critics in the territory."
Au is one of Macao's most prominent democratic campaigners, serving for nearly two decades as a lawmaker in the former Portuguese colony. His lawyer, who was appointed by the court, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Through the years, Au had championed democratic reforms and civil society initiatives in the tiny enclave that returned to Chinese rule in 1999 — two years after neighbouring Hong Kong was handed back to China.
[...]
The Canadian government has joined nine other countries in a joint statement condemning this week's prison sentence for Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong.
Wong, who became the global face of the financial hub's pro-democracy movement, was sentenced to 10 years in jail on a charge of collusion with foreign entities under the city's National Security Law (NSL).
"We call for an immediate end to all unjust prosecutions of individuals charged under the NSL and urge the authorities in China and Hong Kong to uphold their international commitments and honour the rights and freedoms guaranteed to the people of Hong Kong under the Sino-British Joint Declaration (1984)," the statement reads.
[...]
Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States also signed onto the statement, condemning how Hong Kong's National Security Law "is being used to target individuals for political expression and participation."
[...]
Hong Kong, a former British colony, returned to Chinese rule in 1997, with the guarantee that its high degree of autonomy and freedoms would be protected under a "one country, two systems" formula.
Between 2014 and 2019, Hong Kong saw a series of pro-democracy protests in response to various Beijing legislative measures — protests which occasionally turned violent.
China responded by passing a new national security law in 2020, alongside other measures, which have expanded the investigatory and extradition powers of Chinese authorities while strengthening the punishments for activities viewed by authorities as subversive or terroristic.
[...]
In February, media tycoon Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong's most vocal China critic, was jailed for 20 years for collusion with foreign forces and sedition following a landmark trial that sparked international criticism.
Also on Friday, a leading Macao democrat was jailed for 12.5 years on charges of subversion, in the China-ruled gambling hub's first known national security trial, local broadcaster TDM reported.
[...]
Au Kam San, 69, was arrested in July 2025 for collusion with foreign forces to endanger national security and tried behind closed doors on Sept. 16 and 18, TDM said.
Human Rights Watch said the proceedings were "marred by violations of due process" and the sentence handed down by the Macao government "sends a chilling message to all peaceful critics in the territory."
Au is one of Macao's most prominent democratic campaigners, serving for nearly two decades as a lawmaker in the former Portuguese colony. His lawyer, who was appointed by the court, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Through the years, Au had championed democratic reforms and civil society initiatives in the tiny enclave that returned to Chinese rule in 1999 — two years after neighbouring Hong Kong was handed back to China.
[...]