Dutch journalist who writes critically on China targeted in intimidation scheme
nltimes.nl
nltimes.nl
[0] https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/108649435/professor-annemarie...
I had to read that a few times because it just sounded nonsensical. What where the repercussions for Chinese govt. for that action? It there weren’t any except strong worded “we seek explanation” requests, the Chinese will just double down on attacks. Bullies see weak responses as an invitation for more bullying.
There's nowhere to hide if you're a Chinese dissident, it seems...
What is really mind blowing is that the Chinese society in NL is so closed off from the rest of the country that word of this did not reach the authorities for many years. And what it says to me is that if this could happen in Amsterdam, 300 meters away from a Dutch police station that it likely can happen anywhere in the world and that I would not be surprised at all if more of these turned up if people actively went looking for them.
In all honesty, I don't think the Dutch (or Canadian or else) governments will really care since these are "ethnic Chinese" citizens. It's not their business. The image of dutch sovereignty has only to stand to the eye of its very "own" citizens and even so.
The only world power that is standing to that is the USA. And that's not because they care about these particular persons but because they are currently engaged in a feud with China.
...
>word of this did not reach the authorities for many years
The entire PRC "overseas Chinese service stations" are AKTUALLY ILLEGAL POLICE STATIONS VIOLATING TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY/SOVEREIGNTY is new propaganda framing to sell United Front threat. State intelligence in the west has known about United Front activities, from their actual (predominant) legitimate diaspora services to their grayscale tactics to "coerce" Chinese diaspora - some dissidents, most financial criminals - to return to PRC on their own accord for 10+ years. Dissidents have been whining about UF for even longer. Like no one's being illegally renditioned, they're being told of personal and extended consequences in PRC if they don't return and face justice. That kind of conversation is legal statecraft, and TBH a workable arrangement between PRC and the west who has no extradition treaty with (due to politics/optics) while actually shelters a fuckton of PRC criminals who should have the book thrown at them in PRC.
It makes perfect sense that ex/PRC nationals who committed crimes in PRC should be subject to PRC laws. That's why countries have extradition treatises, because it's bad form to shelter criminals across borders and expect smooth diplomatic relations. The funny side effect of PRC capital controls is that virtually every PRC ex-national with a decent amount of assets abroad didn't get it there legally. The West wants PRC diaspora wealth, knows it's misbegotten, and can't survive politics of formal extraditing to PRC, so we have this informal shenanigans.
Typically whenever there are diplomatic relationships extradition requests can be made and these are honored if there is reciprocity and there is sufficient evidence that the request to be have been made in good faith.
If no one will make deals to help your government then maybe you need a new one.
> there's nothing functionally inappropriate about what PRC is doing
That's your opinion.
> are used for rendition
There's no extradition agreement between PRC and NE hence rendition could only be extralegal/extraordinary, which these stations are not doing. That's borderline declaration of war territory. I'm not suggesting these stations are not also used to "pressure" / coerce people to return - they explictly are - but my point is in terms of functionally appropriate is there's nothing wrong about informing people about consequences on PRC soil if they don't voluntarily return. I don't see how "free" societies can enforce, in this case dutch nationals (again a lot of these stations are staffed by nationals) telling other dutch nationals about "implications" on PRC soil. That's as tame as it gets in terms of permissible foreign influence.
the only unique thing here is that we are talking about a state actor vs the traditional style organized mafia intimidation, vito corleone style.
> diaspora wealth, knows it's misbegotten, and can't survive politics of formal extraditing
So prosecute them for any crimes they committed in your country? I mean the Chinese government is thoroughly corrupt so the fact the they want to arrest certain people and not others is not a great indicator on which wealth is "misbegotten"...
> told of personal and extended consequences
Right.. like how much their families will suffer it they won't return. The Soviets were using the same tactic on political dissidents to shut them up,
> capital controls is that virtually every PRC ex-national with a decent amount of assets abroad didn't get it there legally
Safeguarding the capital control laws of the PRC should be something anyone cares about why exactly?
Well yes, but they are only after the misbegotten gains of the people who currently don't have the favor of the party/Winnie-the-Pooh. So either western countries have to become tools for the Chinese "judicial system" or they have to start investigating these alleged crimes themselves to determine which are legit and which are political motivated (problem is that most are probably both...).
Neither seems like a great option...
Besides this I mostly agree on your take on this whole situation overall though.
Operation Foxhunt criminals being harboured in west should get a pass just to stick it to CCP/Xi is pretty much why Guo Wengui happened. Let a known criminal swindle billion+ in US instead of working out deal to hand him to CCP after years of petitioning because... I don't even know. Ultimately extraditing even criminals to PRC too much of political shitshow in west, especially under current environment.
A big portion of diplomacy is signalling what a country is aware of, how it feels about the transgression, and consequences it claims it'll implement if nothing changes.
The intent of grey actions is that they're arguably legal.
And the intent of response to same is to make whoever runs the program reevaluate the costs of doing so and voluntarily close up the operation.
Ergo, the response is calibrated instead of just dropping the hammer immediately every time.
If nothing happens... then eventually you get police raids.
I'll go out on a limb and bet there are everywhere.
Also this: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/china-denies-role-in-...
And those are just a couple of stories that blew up. There's countless others being underreported.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/report-of-china-run-p...
Will it really take until a politician (not local) in parliament gets spied / threaten until action is taken?
Look at what actually happened: Somebody called in a bomb threat under her name, and somebody made some fake reservations under that name at a hotel near the location they were "threatening."
...That's the sort of thing a bored teenager on 4Chan or KiwiFarms would do, without even breaking a sweat. There's nothing in the article to suggest that the Chinese government is behind this; their only action was to report the bomb threat as though it was credible. The threat itself probably came from some terminally-online, but patriotic, expat Chinese ne'er-do-well.
Are Chinese operators sophisticated enough to encourage people on 4chan/kiwifarms to do the dirty work for them?
4chan is probably an unreliable gun to trigger, but the random effects when triggered could be useful if you want to cause grief to a target.
https://thechinaproject.com/2019/11/01/inside-chinas-recentl...
Needless to say, that type of online community is virtually impossible to shut down. Shutter one site, and another will pop up. China is not at all unique in that regard: Even though it was hit with unusual and really quite severe measures in an effort to take it offline, The Daily Stormer is still going strong.
Any bored teenager with a text-to-speech app and a stolen or prepaid credit card could have pulled off the stunt mentioned in OP.
At minimum they should have sent a squad for the commander who ordered the firing and who is a big social media star today on Russian Telegram.
Including Putin? How would this work?
The reality is that they are extremely afraid that the flow of cheap goods from china to the population will stop I think.
If that's free trade - then I'm Santa Klaus
That’s a very different matter from the CCP stealing IP or even entire companies.
I can speak only from my experience.
In 2000s we heard that Huawei GSM is copycat of Erricson and Huawei CDMA is Qualcomm.
I had very limited experience with both GSM and CDMA switches - I saw nothing similar.
I can't say for sure about CDMA but Huawei GSM was certainly different from Erricson switches I saw
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2023/04/05/...
The Prince: Searching for Xi Jinping
"Xi Jinping is the most powerful person in the world. At China’s 20th Communist Party congress in October he secured a third term as party chief, and may rule China for the rest of his life.
But the real story of China’s leader remains a mystery. The Economist’s Sue-Lin Wong finds out how he rose to the top in our eight-part podcast series. The Prince is the epic story of Mr Xi’s turbulent past, how he has changed China and how he is trying to change the world."
https://www.economist.com/theprincepod
--
This podcast is worthy enough to overcome my distain for The Economist. (I canceled my subscription over their endorsement for the Iraq War.)
It's not quite as over produced as the Radiolab genre. The signal is discernible from the noise without excess effort.
I'm liking the followup Drum Tower podcast so far. But it's too soon to cast judgement.
china? easy. 1 billion people lifted out of poverty. life is good now unlike 30yrs ago.this is the best government in generations.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/biden-admin-accused-intimidati...
and why do you think they do that? isn't it possiblee that there are many things very, very wrong with china?
In case anyone is worried about us "banning $user just because you disagree with their $views" - I've spent countless hours protecting and defending HN commenters who happen to be posting contrary views on China, just as on any other topic. You can see years' worth of this at https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod, which is a list I made when this worry came up once before.
So yes, it's certainly ok for people with different backgrounds to defend minority views on HN—that's an important principle here. It's not ok, though, to just use HN for destructive flamewar. We have to ban accounts that do the latter regardless of what they're arguing for.
Accounts arguing for contrarian positions are under greater pressure because they get surrounded and pounced on by the majority in ways that can feel very much like being ganged up on. This makes it understandable that they tend to become defensive (i.e. aggressive), resort to snark and fulmination and flamewar, etc. But even though it's understandable, it's not ok, and we don't have a choice but to ban accounts when they are doing this with no regard for HN's rules.