230K Chinese “persuaded to return” from abroad to establish Extraterritoriality
safeguarddefenders.com
safeguarddefenders.com
> Amsterdam, Athens, Belgrade, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Budapest, Dublin, Florence, Frankfurt, Glasgow, Lisbon, London, Madeira, Madrid, Milan, New York City, Paris, Porto, Prague, Quito, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Sao Paulo, Slovakia, Stockholm, Rotterdam, Toronto, Tokyo, Valencia, Viña del Mar, Vienna.
https://jamestown.org/program/future-global-policeman-the-gr...
> some countries where fugitives may have fled have either avoided signing extradition agreements with the PRC or have rescinded them following the introduction of the National Security Law to Hong Kong in 2020. These include Australia, Canada, Germany, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, the UK, and the United States.
> ..PRC authorities ..use alternative means to apprehend fugitives. “Persuasion” has become a common tactic, which human rights groups have called “involuntary returns.” Such returns are achieved by threats against family members in the PRC, directly approaching and intimidating the fugitive overseas, or outright kidnapping ..Involuntary returns ..comprise a mix of genuine criminal fugitives, officials who have fallen out of favor with the CCP leadership, and others pursued for their religious or political beliefs.
Earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33049729
I have no doubt that this is not just about criminal activity but any activity that the PRC does not approve of.
It's bad.
There are tons of proof and examples of this being false. Lots of example of police targeting people then finding the law they broke, instead of starting with a crime and finding who did it
The US secret service has offices in over a dozen countries, including China.
Some western people are completely out of bounds. You're basically suggesting trading humans. It's called slavery. To arrest someone and trade him for someone. What's going on. You're not the only person suggesting it. I saw similar comments on other websites. For example someone suggested to arrest some random Russian sportsman and trade him for American sportsman girl who was arrested because of marihuana found on her in airport.
It's just wrong. It creates all the kinds of wrong incentives. If you think that someone is a spy and you can prove it, go ahead and put him in jail or deport him or apply whatever measures law requires. But no human trading.
But all of that would be pretty hard in the current geopolitical situation, there would be a huge price to pay.
Australia was slapped with huge trade war in the order of billions for pointing out that China was lying about COVID origins.
- evict caught spies and other agents (or imprison them, it's no secret China does that as well)
- summon or evict their embassy staff and ambassadors
- harass China-owned companies or make their lives difficult with bureaucracy just like China does
- impose tariffs and trade sanctions
- support CCP-critical groups and dissidents both domestic and in China
- threaten China militarily (e.g. by deploying maritime units just right outside of their maritime borders), just like China does
- support nations whose sovereignty is threatened or violated by China, including African nations where Chinese fish trawlers are stealing fish
- hack Chinese government and corporate entities, just like China does
- impose export bans on technology or resources that China needs (which is already done, e.g. ASML litho machines)
- restrict Chinese citizens from visas, buying real estate
- seizing Chinese-owned assets like real estate (bonus: reduces housing pressure)
Major American corporations have deep ties with China and China would pressure them to tamp this down.
Without some kind of institutional support from probably a few media companies it would be very hard.
The 'Tea Party Movement' was basically nothing until Fox News decided to put them up front, for example.
American corporations have incredible influence over media.
In particular, the massive hypocrisy over the NBA, and some players who scream about injustice, and then repeat Xi's talking points when it comes to China. Even NBA players have their marching orders.
Truly grassroots things are really really rare, it usually takes participation from aligned forces.
Do you notice how 'Tibet' used to be all the rage? It was the hip thing in Hollywood about 2000. The Dalai Lama was a thing. China put huge pressure on everyone to "Shut the F up about the Dalai Lama" and so corporations, NGOs, Hollywood, Governments, go the message. It becomes more rare to have him visit, and corporations no longer talk about Tibet.
Marc Benioff of Salesforce fame, is illustrative of this - he's ostensibly a big supporter of Buddhism etc. and the Tibet issue should be front and centre with him if he was in any way legit, but of course he keeps his mouth shut entirely, because, hey: it's just business.
Hollywood dutifully keeps their mouths shut and will happily kill anything in their periphery (i.e. documentaries) with the word 'Tibet'. Actors who want to not be blackballed/banned from China will stay the F away from the world 'Tibet'. Actors are corporations.
And of course the Uyghur issue - can you imagine any other major nation putting people in camps on the basis of their ethnicity? E. China is an open air police state, with stations every few hundred meters, propaganda everywhere etc.. There would be huge uproar over this if it were any other state. But we are told to keep our mouths shut, 'or else' - so we do.
All of this could change however - with a bit of coordinated action and political will, it could flip.
Lastly, Germany, which mostly controls EU, is one of the few nations to be a net exporter to China, and they don't want to mess that up and so they are the most likely to 'acquiesce' on the issue, which means the EU will 'keep their mouths shut'.
So USA would implement X% tax on China for their authoritarian stuff, Y% for their aggression against Taiwan and Z% for their carbon emissions.
Every nation gets a tariff.
That would push them into line on some things.
Where me and others did not, I did not find these things to be "normal" either.
It all depends on where you place the freedom vs safety metric, I place on the far extreme end of freedom. Which is also why I oppose governments like China in general
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/international-offices
It sounds like the Chinese police are operating like they're in their home country. Which they are not. Sooner or later, their activities are going to get them PNG'd (made Persona Non Grata) and they'll be asked to leave.
Even with police cooperation agreements in place, they don't have the usual police power like arresting anyone.
A NYT article from back in 2016 says,
> In 2014 […] That was the year the two countries signed a bilateral police cooperation agreement, the first of its kind between China and a European nation.
> The Chinese officers do not have arrest powers in Italy, but they are paired with Italian officers who could arrest someone, except no arrests have been needed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/world/europe/chinese-poli...
I know the US is a special case, but in most of Europe, free speech does not cover threats, intimidation and blackmail.
I'm trying to figure out what you mean here, and wondering if you have a typo. Would you please elaborate?
> The court in Ningbo acknowledged Gui had become Swedish in the 1990s but added that he had applied to restore his Chinese citizenship in 2018. China does not recognise dual citizenship and restoring his Chinese passport may have been a way to block Swedish diplomats from visiting him, observers said.
That was after he was detained (china kidnapped him in Thailand).
...
> he had applied to restore his Chinese citizenship in 2018
Unless I'm misreading this, or if the latter claim is false, these are two very different scenarios, no?
I haven't actual lived in my parents house in decades, and yet when I go there to visit them I still think of it as "going home".
In the case above, I assume we are talking about people born in China, who have left to live in another country, and are then involuntarily returned to China. In my head, China is still the home country.
All of that said, having read your comment, I just now realized that is and uncommon understanding of the words. Your interpretation is certainly closer to the emotional meaning of them for the people involved.
My point is that, politics is never about the people/victims.
Well, some conspiracy theories are considered facts now.
There are mainstream sources detailing evidence of Saudi funding for Al Quaeda. [1] Whether they approved of/sanctioned 9/11 is another matter.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/documents/evide...
Robin Cook, British Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001, has written that al-Qaeda and bin Laden were "a product of a monumental miscalculation by western security agencies", and that "Al-Qaida, literally 'the database', was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians."
So basically US sponsored 9/11. Is there any moral grounds to blame Saudi Arabia?
The US did supply the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Al Qaeda did eventually arise from the Mujahideen so 9/11 is certainly blowback but the CIA would need to be funding and aiding Al-Qaeda operatives during the late 90s to 2001 for there to be equivalency with Saudi but I’m not aware of any evidence to support that. Besides, the point wasn’t that the CIA was innocent it was that Saudi was guilty.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-saudi-sept11/saudi-ar...
First of all this is a civil case of liability which ranges from indirect responsibility to facilitated thru incompetence/ambivalence
Second this article is about dismissal of the case over jurisdiction for parts of the claim
Third “The judge also dismissed claims … lack … jurisdiction”
Maybe the case is over with a ruling, maybe there is an article proving a link, maybe maybe but this article doesn’t make that Proof
If a very rich American went to South America for a decade and then bombed a building in Rio, he would have 'financial relationship' to the US via a number of investments. It doesn't mean that it has anything to do with US foreign policy, the government, or anything.
Osama Bin Laden was a member of a big, sprawling, super rich Oligarchic family in Saudi. Obviously, there were dealings, and obviously some Saudis probably funded some things here and there. Just like a Texan Evangelical Oil Billionaire might fund Christian Schools in Peru, which may even be good schools. But the charity run by a guy with ties to 'American Rio Bomber'.
Everything at that level is intertwined, it's not sufficient to suggest that proves anything.
The 'State' of Saudis is 'mostly a good actor to the outside world, even if they are bad in many ways internally. They allow the free flow of oil at market prices, 'per the deal' and don't align with China, Russia, or some other crazy state, and they are not trying to invade Iran or get nukes (though there are backup plans). And they play nice with Israel, not directly trying to start a war with them, or 'create' one between them and Israel. Most of their vast holdings are invested reasonably.Also, in the 'war on terror' which is actually a financial network and intelligence war, they have been playing 'on the right side' - as 'terrorists' are more dangerous to them than the US anyhow. So that's kind of what we can expect from them. In 100 years, hopefully things will be a bit better.
The evidence points to the Saudi royal family funding a terrorist organization. That’s a lot more than just a rich citizen, that is their autocratic ruling family and the evidence is very convincing. Their reasoning probably was more about regional concerns rather than attacking the US, however when you fund fanatics they don’t always follow the script.
this is false. there is a great deal of direct and circumstantial evidence that has come out in the last two years. this isn't "bin laden knew people", this is "the 9/11 hijackers received assistance from saudi diplomats in the US"
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/11/september-11-saudi-arabi...
The intercepts notions of 'this was possibly a false flag' is literally the definition of conspiracy theory.
While there certainly might be more going on than we know, there isn't evidence of that much.
It's not going to be a surprise that a conduit for clandestine money might have some kind of governmental status or what have you.
It's basically insane to suggest House of Saud would want to do 9/11 or even a 'filed false flag', there is no benefit whatsoever in either. 9/11 did not help the Saudis, and even a 'failed false flag' like a pretend attack on a building in NYC would have the objective of what, trying to get more US troops in the Middle East for who's benefit?
More importantly, the likelihood of such a thing getting found out would be extremely high. The ruler of Saudi Arabia is going to blow up the Trade Centre knowing that the CIA/FBI would be able to nail him, and even all of Humpty Dumpty's men probably could not keep that secret contained? And if the US public found out, literally Saudi Arabia would cease to exist?
For what purpose?
No, this insane.
There are ultra Wahhabi nationalists in Saudi Arabia, they have money. We already know that. They are funding odd stuff around the world, just like many other billionaires. As part of the 'war on terror' a lot of that activity was shut down and now it's really scrutinized.
There’s a reason the CIA pushed the idea of conspiracy theory as something ridiculous, it’s great cover.
China speaks with one voice, Xi, everyone else a thousand voices. US has 10 000 people at least who make up the power of Xi. President, senator, CEO, senior bureaucrat, judge, heads of NGOs, Universities, police, military etc. all 'put in one group and coordinated with an ambitious 50 year plan' in the West. Even in a single country.
Europe, N. America, Japan, Korea, Australia have to partner with 'everyone else' in a comprehensive way to stand up to this. Trans Pacific was a big opportunity that Trump didn't have the foresight to grasp - he wanted to have 'unipolar power' in a world where the US just does not have the leverage it did after WW2 and no amount of 'wishing' or even exceptional leadership will change that. US could 'solve all it's problems' and it would still be the reality that % of global GDP would be declining because other nations are 'coming on line'.
Oddly, a panacea of 'other voices' may serve to counterbalance. Even if they are acting in self interest, to the extent they are not overrun by China, their own voices add up to something. We are seeing the beginning of that in Africa, with their stance on the Ukraine issue. While they should definitely be taking a more assertive stance via Russia, the fact they are where they are (and partly due to the fact Russia is their 'breadbasket') is an indication of coherent self interest on some level.
I don't think it's cause for world wide alarm, but there needs to be a plan.
This is an orientalist and simplistic take. The CCP is an enormously complicated system and there are many cliques and ideological debates within it. As any sinologist will tell you, the power struggles at the very top are mostly unknown to us (except years later, to historians) but even in Mao's era there was certainly not a single voice.
That the CCP is an 'enormous and complex system with many debates within' doesn't matter if the party speaks very directly and coherently, and the party is very tightly controlled and of course they have all of the power.
The degree of centralization of authority by Xi is unlike we've seen since Mao, and due to universal power of technology, you could say 'more power than any leader in history'.
Xi very quickly and arbitrarily grabbed the nations top tech leaders off of the street. Literally disappeared. He imposed aggressive governmental oversight and controls over those organizations (and others) including government ownership, board seats, CCP members as staffers for internal oversight, censorship requirements, etc. etc.. It's unthinkable outside China, in any normal kind of country.
If any 'outside' leader speaks up against China - be it a Dean, or Prime Minster - the CCP will respond assertively and quickly.
When China does some questionable or malign act - where is the response? Who should respond? Is anyone powerful enough to respond? Can there be a coordinated action?
As the Australian political leadership spoke up against Chinese lies over COVID origins, they were slapped with billions in trade damages, and was attacked in a number of indirect ways. Were Australia to have acted in concert and direct cohesion with USA, EU and UK on that, and were policy and actions to be aligned, it would be a different story.
There's nothing comparable to Xi outside of China (in any normal country - I won't say 'western' country because it goes way beyond that), not even Putin.
This is in fact where the orientalism comes in: the rejection of granularity. If you think about it for a few seconds, it really makes no sense that a single person would be able to entirely control a structure of 96 million adherents, or that this latter structure would have no internal dissension and tumult. The only reason we might come to these conclusions is if we are deeply unfamiliar with the history, culture, ideology, way of doing things that apply and thus reject the individuality and complexity that are part of these systems. Few Westerners would qualify Western institutions in this way. I don't mean in terms of agreeing or disagreeing with what they do, but analyzing them as just a unified blob and thinking nothing of it.
Wow. Actual gangster tactics.
When they do it: Gangsters
I haven’t encountered a monolithic opinion in the United States on rendition, mostly disgust and self loathing except amongst the most terminally committed to the “war on terror.” I’ve found many friends in considering it a criminal activity.
The moral equivalence argument with China is tiring, and it's actually part of their horrible communications strategy.
The equivalent would be: 'nobody' US citizen 'Joe Smith', living in Paris, mocks Joe Biden on Facebook. As a result, FBI in USA threatens family with prison for arbitrary reasons with fabricated evidence, and clandestinely threatens US citizen in Paris to come home and 'face justice'.
So please.
spoiler: most of us actually don't like the bullshit war on terror/war on drugs tactics.
and is there evidence we've threatened American citizens at home to get to expats?
2. Even if it did, that would also be bad and it wouldn’t make what China does good.
These tu quoque arguments always crop up in threads describing whatever horror out of China’s genocidal, inhumane government.
So what do they do? I can't imagine they are detaining people, giving out fines, etc. So what makes them police? Shouldn't we call them spies instead?
If citizens want a new legal category for extra-territorial operations, beyond extradition, this can be negotiated in a formal international treaty.
States will do whatever states CAN do. Treaties mean nothing by themselves, especially in this context.
(side note: nearly all treaties are both formal and international by default)
Of course. But there's a big difference between doing covertly and doing in daylight with an office.
Should foreign countries open US "Corporate Intellectual Property Donation" physical offices?
Treaties set a floor on behavior. For those who claim laws don't matter, remember that contracts and all global supply chains are based on laws of trade and finance. No law = no economy = war until agreement and law is re-established.
This is even official in some cases. For example, the USA does not recognize any authority of the the International Criminal Court (neither do China, Russia and a number of other big states), but that doesn't stop them from occasionally using it against smaller nations.
You can look for a long time, but you'll never find an example of a superpower/empire, or a close ally of one, submitting to any kind of international judgment against it, criminal or in a trade dispute. At most, they may accept a negative ruling to a case they brought against someone else.
This is not true. The USA is not a party to the Rome Statute and asserts that the conditions which would otherwise subject its citizens to ICC jurisdiction categorically do not exist, and has authorized unlimited measures should the ICC disagree with the last point, but does not dispute the authority of the ICC.
> You can look for a long time, but you’ll never find an example of a superpower/empire, or a close ally of one, submitting to any kind of international judgment against it, criminal or in a trade dispute.
Well, states are not subjects of criminal law, so the criminal part is trivially true. As for trade disputes, the US has complied with numerous adverse decisions in WTO proceedings.
Well, that’s the position of US law.
There are certainly cases one might point to and make the argument that the US domestic system does not always effectively deal with US war crimes and the crime of aggression.
Please let me know when we find mass graves of women and children defiled and murdered by US soldiers, which is unfortunately common behavior for the militaries of many other states, which the ICC has been involved in prosecuting.
The crime of aggression (aka crime against peace) is, like war crimes and crimes against humanity, a widely recognized crime, prosecuted in the various peri-/post-WWII tribunals, though it took a while for the ICC to settle on its operationalization.
> There are times when the US has had soldiers commit war crimes, and it’s debatable how effective the US has been at prosecuting such things historically, but it does make a realistic attempt to do so.
The standard for ICC jurisdiction isn’t general adequacy, it is specific good faith action in the particular case.
Since 2020, China's Huawei has been subject to semiconductor supply chain restrictions which have been enforced by multiple countries. This has materially impacted Huawei consumer smartphone revenues.
But in the long term, such restrictions are likely to accelerate technical self-sufficiency, https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/22/china_smic_7nm_chips/
Yes, countries can break agreements, but good agreements provide benefits to all parties, such that breaking an agreement results in reciprocal loss of benefits. There are always edge cases, but by definition, not everything is an edge case and there are countless routine, negotiated agreements which benefit everyone and are happily followed.
If this is allowed to stand after global public disclosure, it can be taken as implicit "consent" having been granted by citizens and their elected representatives, which means the next phase of extra-territorial activity (e.g. new laws on 1st December 2022) will push boundaries even further.
If some countries want to sell their territorial integrity and citizen safety down the proverbial river, at least they can negotiate a good price, e.g. bounty per head, prisoner exchange, or reciprocal global kidnapping by <foreign-country> of <host-country> targets. Good luck recruiting nomadic tech talent after opening such Dantean doors.
> All were in areas with large Chinese populations, but no one The Globe spoke to was aware of a police service station or had heard of the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau. One address in Markham was a private home, while the other was a mall full of small Chinese businesses and restaurants. The third property, in a business park near a highway, is owned by the Canada Toronto FuQing Business Association, a federally incorporated non-profit.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-china-police-s...
Is Bratislava too small?
For another thing, what "traditional" American values are you referring to, in particular? Slavery? Racism? Institutionalized oppression? Police brutality? The military-industrial complex? The prison-industrial complex -- the fact that we have such a high percentage of our population incarcerated? Our legally-enshrined puritanical fear of victimless "crimes" like smoking a plant? The disenfranchisement of the poor? Income and wealth inequality? The continued weakening of labor movements? A small but loud and influential contingent of religious nuts who seem to believe that their god should be calling the shots in our legal system (hypocritically many of the same people who have wrung their hands over "Sharia law")?
Sure, I'm focusing on the negative here, and as much as I'm a bit cynical these days, there is plenty of good to come out of our country, even today. But this whole "wave the flag", "everyone should be more like us" stuff is pretty gross and short-sighted. The better values "dying" of late bit may be true (or not, I don't know anymore), but also overlooks a lot of bad stuff that has been in our national DNA for centuries.
Furthermore, most of your gripes SUPPORT my point, except of course for the tired catch-alls of "slavery" and "racism." As for the rest of what you cite (mass incarceration, worker oppression, the "religious" oppressing others): THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.
Then of course there's democracy, and the alleged "resilience" of the American people. What a joke. Voting rights are being rolled back across "red" states nationwide. And "we" once rebuilt destroyed cities like Chicago and San Francisco in a few years... but it took over a decade to replace TWO buildings in New York after 9/11. And what have we built since?
If you want to roll out time-honored issues, how about abortion? Now a significant portion of the USA wants to (and has been given the go-ahead to) use women as baby farms. Even IRELAND abolished this disgusting regime.
Anyway, instead of a strawman, just create your own original post.
If Chinese want to do covert action overseas they don't send police to do it I think... It would not be covert.
This mushing together is like a racist smear fear mongering. It's bad.
These Chinese police patrol around tourist areas with local police. You don't go to a consulate when you lose your mobile phone or someone steals your wallet.
These are police who operate in concert with local police. The whole point is to help Chinese tourists I think. It's not for anything nefarious...It's too racist to be smearing everything Chinese under the banner of the current Western-'China-bogeyman'-hysteria
I personally think it is outrageous that the US government (or state or local governments) allows China to station police officers on US soil, and gives them the right to act in a police capacity. I am not ok with that at all, even if what you suggest as their purpose is correct.
Why would this even be necessary, if they're here for the purpose you suggest? Local police can handle these sorts of cases, and cities where tourists tend to travel certainly have translators on staff. Hell, cities in the US have translators to help with residents whose English skills are poor.
Also: it's not "racist" to dislike this sort of thing if the foreign government in question is not aligned values-wise with your own. I don't think it's remotely appropriate for an authoritarian anti-democratic country to have law enforcement influence on our soil.
I wouldn't have the same reaction if, say, a tight US ally (South Korea or Japan, to pick examples from the same part of the world) were to have an informal police presence in the US. But even then, I would expect them to be working with the FBI (or similar) on higher-level international crime matters (sorta like an Interpol type thing), not working on local crime. Foreign police forces should not have any kind of jurisdiction in "local" crimes.
It's coercion, if not worse.
Not that there is much we can do about it. Though limiting ability of Chinese authorities to operate outside china is fair. After all we don't permit organized crime either.
> a seemingly recent campaign to counter transnational telecom and online fraud (according to the official provincial statements)
The increase in telecom scamming activity is a real thing in China, with scammers operating from southeastern Asia countries. And operators are often Chinese citizens hired for what they originally thought would be "oversea job with good pay". The "persuaded to return" strategy might be targeted primarily at them.
Those scams are particularly bad -- maybe even worse than the telecom scams happening in the US and other wealthy English-speaking countries -- because taking personal loans is way too easy in China. A few clicks on a lender's app and you get cash transferred to your account instantly. And there are hundreds of such apps. Scammers can talk victims into maxing out their credit lines and wire the loaned cash away.
And the fact that there isn't "personal bankruptcy" laws in China also makes it worse. Such loans are rarely forgiven and victims often had to pay them off with their future income for years out of the fear that loan defaults can affect their credit score for life.
So I guess this is Chinese police's way of "do something about it". Of course they don't have jurisdiction overseas and should have gone with Interpol and/or local police first, except that hasn't been very effective. My 2 cents on the reasons behind this is:
1. Local police might be paid off;
2. No incentive for local police to prioritize their resource for cases like this -- there were no victims in their own countries;
3. There are just too many scammers;
Surely once this set up is in place it's possible to extend its coverage to harass/"persuade" political dissidents but CCP has already be doing it for years without it. If this oversea police "persuasion" program is getting local law enforcement's attention to the point that they can arrest both them and the scammers, I would see it as an absolute win.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/16/...
I don’t want to sound like an apologist (not a fan of this line of action for a number of reasons), but the focus on the nine forbidden countries (mostly in Southeast Asia) and the number of folks repatriated from those countries makes me think that this is not a small part of the motivation behind these actions.
The reason is really simple, crimes associated with drugs in China can lead to death penalties and the threshold is very low. So in most cases people caught with drug trafficking in China are popped, no matter of their nationalities.
Not sure if you guys ever received calls claiming that they were DHL/FedEx etc, and there was a package for you to pick up. More ridiculously, sometimes they even claim to be the Chinese Embassy and of course there was package for you to pick up.
So that was that.
Can you elaborate? this happened to my partner and we thought it was something targeted at Chinese foreigners. They were persistent and it was kind of worrying because my partner accidentally gave up a small bit of information before catching on that it was not legit. Are they trying to do identity fraud?
I think you're right about it being centered on Zomia:
> The majority of identified targets were located in northern Myanmar.
but your specific example of the illicit trade is slightly off: aiui, the relevance of the golden triangle as an opioid producer has actually fallen off since the early 2000s as a result of DEA pressure and market shifts, but the slack was taken up by amphetamines (mostly ya ba).
https://www.unodc.org/roseap//en/2021/02/myanmar-opium-surve...
> A new report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) confirms that production and demand for opium has further declined as the region’s synthetic drug market continues to expand and diversify.
That change in drug profile appears to also be true in Yunnan: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.0025...
> The prevalence rate of heroin use decreased from 0.67% (0.63–0.73%) in 2011 to 0.57% (0.53–0.61%) in 2015, while the prevalence rate of methamphetamine use doubled from 0.20% (0.17–0.24%) in 2011 to 0.48% (0.46–0.50%) in 2015.
However, you are absolutely correct that even accounting for trends, Burma is the source of most of both opioids and amphetamines: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/a-peopl...
> Myanmar is believed to be the single largest supplier of China’s drug market. In 2013, 92.2 percent of the heroin and 95.2 percent of methamphetamine seized in China were traced to Myanmar.
All that said, Chinese in northern Burma also tend to be associated with other rackets:
> Solely in Wanding (畹町), a river port bordering Myanmar in Ruili city,Yunnan province, over 960 suspects of telecom fraud and over 100 suspects of cross-border gambling
Cross-border gambling is huge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mong_La is basically a city-sized casino, built directly across the border from Yunnan (which is incredibly porous due to the terrain, so just clamping down on crossings doesn't work). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangkham is the same deal but in Wa territory, not Shan.
The CCP really really hates cross-border gambling for a variety of reasons, including capital outflows and its nexus with domestic corruption:
https://agbrief.com/news/china/09/04/2021/chinas-cross-borde...
https://www.asgam.com/index.php/2022/02/17/china-vows-to-acc...
There's also a lot of jade/amber/wildlife smuggling but the gambling thing really is astonishingly huge business in northern Burma. So, I see it as a "yes, and": there's a lot of reasons why the CCP would want to crack down on the behavior of Chinese in northern Burma, and the drug trade is a plausible one.
Why would they do that?
I’m pretty sure that the powers that be in China don’t really care about the opinions of advocates of human rights, government transparency, etc.
They probably are also not keen on airing their dirty laundry with regards to the drug trade.
Chinese leaders pretty much double dog dare any country not to trade with them based on any set of principles, knowing that the other country will be the one that suffers the most. The US is maybe the only country that could stand up to China, but the US and China are in super weird but oddly balanced symbiotic relationship that would become mutually destructive if one side decides to force its will on the other.
Perhaps, although the recent Chinese adoption of wolf warrior diplomacy [1] makes it appear like they care and are trying to cover it up with bluster. China “doth protest too much, methinks.”
The history of human civilization has countless examples.
Those who willfully ignore history can enjoy speedrunning it instead.
I thought I knew where Xinjiang was until I saw the CNN news regarding it with a map showing it in somewhere near Guangdong. Another example was the Chinese police event recorder version of the BBC interviews in Xinjiang.
Given such conditions, why would Chinese government give a f*ck about whatever it's doing? It will be attacked anyway, disclosing stuffs just open more attacking surfaces.
"Doing" in dozens of western cities is a ball game that includes the popular opinion of millions of inhabitants of said cities.
lol, are we back to the 19th century?
Are you suggesting that the opium trade in the golden triangle and China is not a thing?
If it makes you feel better, we can call it heroin, which is derived from opium.
1. https://archive.ph/5HZFc 2. https://www.wsj.com/story/inside-the-mexican-cartels-that-ru...
I guess a bit like in the spy movies where American spies were free to roam everywhere, the superpower status (i.e. money and market access) of China means they get to swing their police truncheon around and most countries just stay quiet about it.
And they were even watching Xinjiang activists outside of China (Source [2]):
> [...] one of the officers shoved a photo under my nose. It was my daughter Gulhumar. She was posing in front of the Place du Trocadéro in Paris, bundled up in her black coat, the one I’d given her. In the photo, she was smiling, a miniature East Turkestan flag in her hand, a flag the Chinese government had banned. To Uighurs, that flag symbolises the region’s independence movement. The occasion was one of the demonstrations organised by the French branch of the World Uighur Congress, which represents Uighurs in exile and speaks out against Chinese repression in Xinjiang.
The drily-written post only talks about telecommunications fraud. Is that a big deal in China, are they doing something like Nigerian 419 scams? I suppose they'd be targeting mostly Chinese citizens, using e.g. WeChat, although that's probably a bad idea because how much do you want to bet WeChat can report home the user's GPS coordinates or even just their IP would be enough for country geo-locating.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/09/secret-deal-re... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/12/uighur-xinjian...
China is all about the controlling the logistics of the flow of information, where the authorities need to crack down dissent that can impede the structural stability of the CCP. (Not all social criticism is censored, but the ones that directly criticize the party are.) Therefore they have done many things to shut down access to foreign sites, and created one of the biggest bureaucracies in the history of the world to search through the deluge of information on the domestic net to pick out which users and posts are deemed censorable. And it kinda works, but also kinda doesn't (If you have seen the memes and lexicon circulating in the Chinese nets, you'll understand what I mean instantly.)
Whereas the US authorities plays a much more smarter game: is all about tactics. Instead of controlling the flow of information in a top-down way, it lets them free, and then actively participates in it. While China focuses on removing the opponent's pieces on the chessboard, US focuses on adding their own: through its numerous media conglomerates and NGOs (which if you ultimately trace back its funding, all leads to one of the alphabet-named agencies or neoliberal thinktanks like the Ford Foundation or the RAND Institute). When you search a dissident figure in the Chinese net, all traces will be erased and you will find nothing. When you search a dissident figure on Google, you will be spammed with all the numerous media sites that try to mislead you in some way. (And yes, this also kinda works, but also kinda doesn't. But I see this as a more sophisticated strategy than what China is doing.)
Also, the massive attempt to deplatform Trump supporters also significant weakened my belief in the US's speech freedom. I don't care if this was done by the USG or private companies, but it worked, very effectively, Parler was gone in the same way as Twitter get GFWed in China. I was shocked how Chinese this was. As a Chinese and for personal experiences, I hate Trump and the red-necks to the deepest, but I would support their right for emitting their sound.
It would be better to determine this through the courts rather than twitter, but twitter has every right to ban trolls, spammers, and politicians calling for violent action
We should not have double standard just because the USG is a something you like and CPC is not.
It's a joke to think getting 'deplatformed' in China means you can keep trying. Test the CCP and you and your family might get a visit.
Certainly we all know in China there is little speech freedom, I don't need to compare to it. (And I did test it and my family well survived till now)
What I was saying is what happened to Trump's supporters seriously damaged my belief in US's ideology.
I don’t think I’ll use the service but I’m glad they can still exercise their first amendment rights
They did managed to restore access after some struggling. Just like Chinese struggle to develop and deploy Shadowsocks to reach Wikipedia.
But it seems for now mostly it's still about real crimes. Guys pretending to be from FedEx, saying your delivery have heroin in it, is seized and you need to pay a fine to get out of trouble. This may sound stupid to you, but anecdotally, one smart friend of mine doing physics PhD at MIT recently got tricked to pay ~$2000. BTW: a significant amount of those calls originated from Taiwan, easy to tell from the accent.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/23/hundreds-of-ta...
It's unclear exactly what having a "police station" means. Has the NGO reported the CCP taking actions in foreign countries against Chinese nationals? The stories are all about getting at them by threatening family in China.
I can't believe that I can say without an ounce of hyperbole that our representatitives made a deal with the devil, and now they have communist party secret police bases in their cities.
All those secret polices offices in canada were visited by journalists and nobody was there. If China is sending spy, it’s definitely not under the agreement or through a special deal with the Canadian government.
You are imagining a lot of things.
This is a daily experience for the families of those 230k. Imagine the horrors the families in places like Xinjiang are going through. Even if a small portion of these reports is factual, we're talking rape, torture, organ harvesting, despicable acts against human life everywhere.
What we have in the west isn't perfect, but God am i thankful to not have my family denied education or other social essentials because i decide to speak my mind.
Ongoing vigilance is essential to preserve these freedoms, as evidenced in the recent US DOJ prosecution of eBay executives for intimidation of a journalist, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33049853
> A former eBay Inc. executive was sentenced on Thursday to almost five years in prison for leading a scheme to terrorize the creators of an online newsletter that included sending live spiders, cockroaches, a funeral wreath and other disturbing deliveries to their home.
Your example only shows what a joke the system we live under is and what ridiculous lengths we go to justify it.
What's worse now is that there are areas in southeast Asia and Africa have became a hotbed for kidnapping, Chinese citizens being lured abroad, kidnapped, slaved. If you read Chinese, go on Telegram, you see people being sold all the time.
Has there been an effort by Telegram to shut down accounts/communication related to human slavery?