China restricts activists' social media ahead of Olympics

Beijing (AFP) – Human rights activists and some academics in China have had their WeChat messaging app accounts restricted in recent weeks, multiple people affected have told AFP, as Beijing cracks down on dissent before the Winter Olympics.

26/01/2022 - 06:18

Multiple Chinese activists have seen their WeChat accounts restricted or disabled entirely in the lead-up to the Winter Olympics in Beijing Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV AFP

China hopes to make next week's Games a soft power triumph, although the lead-up has seen some Western powers launch a diplomatic boycott over Beijing's rights record and cybersecurity firms warn athletes of digital surveillance risks.

For China's ever-dwindling community of activists, the imminent arrival of the world's best athletes has triggered a familiar clampdown.

Eight individuals told AFP that their WeChat accounts had been restricted in some form since early December, with some unable to use their accounts entirely and forced to re-register.

The restrictions came as authorities detained two prominent human rights activists, lawyer Xie Feng and writer Yang Maodong, while a third rights lawyer missing since early December is believed by relatives to be in secret detention.

"This storm of shuttering WeChat accounts is too strong and unprecedented," said veteran journalist Gao Yu, whose account had features like group chat messaging permanently disabled for the first time on December 20.

Beijing is seeking a soft power victory with its hosting of the Winter Olympics Jewel SAMAD AFP

China routinely suppresses the social media accounts and physical movements of dissidents during politically sensitive periods such as Communist Party gatherings in Beijing or key anniversaries like the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.

A major Party Congress will take place towards the end of this year when President Xi Jinping, China's most authoritarian leader in a generation, is expected to further cement his rule with a third term.

The arrival of the Winter Olympics has presaged a clampdown similar to those surrounding other major events.

"The government now wants to make sure that people don't cross the line online to poke the facade of a perfect Winter Olympic Games," said Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Ubiquitous app

Tencent's app WeChat is a mainstay of daily life in China, with users relying on it for a range of services including payments and scanning health codes that permit entry to public venues.

China's dominant WeChat app is used for myriad purposes, including payments NICOLAS ASFOURI AFP

"I know many people who've been banned from posting in group chats or posting WeChat Moments lately," a Beijing lawyer whose account was restricted last month said on condition of anonymity.

Beijing-based writer Zhang Yihe said her WeChat group chat and Moments functions -- similar to Facebook's Wall or Instagram Stories -- were restricted on January 8.

Tsinghua University sociology professor Guo Yuhua confirmed her account was permanently blocked the same day, while prominent legal scholar He Weifang said he encountered the same on January 9.

"Isn't this equal to removing an individual from a public space?" said Zhang, adding she can now only send WeChat messages to individual users.

"Before and during the Olympics is a major sensitive period," added a Beijing-based activist whose account was restricted twice in the past two months.

Tencent, the owner of WeChat, did not respond to a request for comment.

Offline crackdown

In recent weeks, Chinese police have detained two prominent rights activists on suspicion of "inciting state subversion", according to official notices shared with AFP.

One of them, Yang Maodong, was unable to reunite with his wife in the United States before her death in early January.

Relatives of Tang Jitian, a human rights lawyer who vanished last month en route to an EU Human Rights Day event in Beijing, told AFP they believe he is being held under a form of secret detention commonly used against dissidents, possibly in his home province of Jilin.

Lawyer Tang Jitian vanished last month, and his relatives believe he is being held in secret detention OLLI GEIBEL AFP

"We don't know where he is. I've reported him missing to the police but with no result," said a relative who did not wish to be identified for fear of reprisal.

"They said it doesn't meet the requirements for filing a (missing persons) case and that he had scanned the Jilin province health code."

People arrested for national security offences in China can disappear for months at a time into incommunicado detention before authorities charge them or reveal their fate.

Both Jilin and Beijing's public security bureaus did not respond to requests for comment.

The International Olympic Committee said in an emailed response that it "has neither the mandate nor the capability to change the laws or the political system of a sovereign country", adding that it "must remain neutral on all global political issues".

Beijing Games organisers told AFP they "oppose the politicisation of sports" and were "not aware of these matters".

Meanwhile, those still free lament mounting restrictions on speech under the current political climate.

"The space for public discourse is getting smaller and smaller," said He.

© 2022 AFP

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220126-china-restricts-activists-social-media-ahead-of-olympics

China's ruling party plenary to tighten President Xi's grip on power

Chinese President Xi Jinping, the uncontested leader of the world's most populous nation, heads a pivotal plenary of the ruling party's top figures next week that will set the tone for his bid for long-term rule.

8 November 2021   France 24

Carlos Garcia Rawlins, REUTERS

From Monday to Thursday, some 400 members of the Communist Party's all-powerful Central Committee gather in Beijing behind closed doors.

The only such meeting this year paves the way to its 20th party congress next autumn -- at which Xi is widely expected to be handed a third term in office, cementing his position as China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong.

At next week's plenary, top figures will debate a key resolution celebrating the party's main achievements in its 100 years of existence, according to state news agency Xinhua.

Analysts say the resolution, only the third of its kind in the party's history, will help Xi shore up his grip on power by setting in stone his vision for China, ahead of the crucial 2022 party congress.

Like all meetings of Beijing's secretive top leadership, the event will be held behind closed doors, and most key decisions are made well in advance.

China's political meetings are all highly choreographed and open dissent to the official line is extremely rare.

'Natural inheritor' 

The content has not yet been published in full but the timing of the resolution is key -- as was the case with the previous two resolutions.

The first, passed under Mao in 1945, helped him cement his authority over the Communist Party four years before it seized power.

The second, adopted under Deng Xiaoping in 1981, saw the regime adopt economic reforms and recognise the "mistakes" of Mao's ways.

Unlike the previous two, Xi's resolution will not mark a break with the past, Harvard University's Anthony Saich told AFP.

"Rather, it is intended to show that Xi is the natural inheritor of a process since the founding of the party that qualifies him to lead in the 'new era'," said Saich, an expert on Chinese politics.

"The purpose is to consolidate Xi as the natural inheritor of the 'glorious history' of the CCP," he added, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

Saich also said the resolution is likely to mark a step back from Deng's text in that it will be less critical of the Mao era from 1949 to 1976.

Under Mao's grip, tens of millions of people starved as the regime sought to force the country into communes.

In the decade leading up to his death, he unleashed the Cultural Revolution, an era of violence that scarred the national psyche.

Under Deng, the party saw a bid to evade a repeat of Mao's personality cult -- if only to ensure continuity of its rule.

'Uncontested' 

According to dissident political scholar Wu Qiang, who lost his job as a lecturer at Tsinghua University in Beijing over his research, the resolution's approval would mean "that Xi Jinping's authority is uncontested".

Wu also believes the plenum will firm China's path back towards a more "controlled, planned" economy -- as seen in Xi's ongoing drive to regulate the country's mammoth enterprises in sectors from tech to real estate.

The question of the democratic island of Taiwan -- which sees itself as sovereign but which Beijing claims as its own territory -- could also be on the meeting agenda.

Regardless of next week's meeting, Xi's uncontested authority is not in question, according to Carl Minzner, a senior fellow for China studies at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations.

"The core issue is: how much higher might he go?" he told AFP.

"The tone and content of the resolution will likely give some suggestion as to how Xi seeks to be portrayed," he said.

"As the equal of Mao and Deng? Or merely Mao alone?"

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/china-s-ruling-party-plenary-to-tighten-president-xi-s-grip-on-power/

China’s tech and finance crackdown is a challenge to western ideas that cuts across developing world

China introduced new rules on November 1 that restrict the extent to which internet companies can collect and store user data. Known as the personal information protection law, it is said to be among the toughest data-protection regimes in the world.

November 4, 2021 

Johannes Petry   CSGR Research Fellow, University of Warwick

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has been strangling corporate power. Sipa US

As part of the rules, tech giants are having to set up external bodies to monitor their data collection, while foreign companies have to appoint representatives within China dedicated to compliance. Companies in breach are risking fines of up to 5% of turnover.

These rules are the latest example in the year-log crackdown on tech and finance in China. It started with Beijing’s decision in November 2020 to scrap finance giant Ant Group’s flotation, which was expected to have been the world’s largest IPO. Billionaire founder-CEO Jack Ma subsequently disappeared from the public eye for three months, and it is still not clear if an IPO will go ahead.

Beijing has also been getting tougher on companies, such as DiDi (China’s Uber), whose shares are listed overseas; shutting down China’s most famous financial bloggers; banning cryptocurrency trading and mining; and introducing new restrictions for whole industries such as gaming. Most recently, regulators have been signalling that some of the country’s most popular stock-trading apps are illegal.

These interventions have consequences not just for Chinese companies but for the global financial system. China’s financial system is a US$45 trillion (£33 trillion) industry, boasting the world’s second-largest stock and bond markets. But when you look closely at the way that China runs these markets, you realise that the whole philosophy underpinning them is very different to markets in the west. This is helpful for making sense of the crackdown – both why it has happened and how it should be viewed.

Market intervention and China

I am the principal investigator of a new research project known as StateCapFinance, which looks at how emerging economies run capital markets (meaning stocks, bonds and derivatives). In many instances, such markets are influenced by the state, meaning they operate by a very different logic to the west.

In western capital markets, the underlying principle is efficiency: investors’ money flows to whichever companies are judged the best, in terms of how prudently they are run, the strength of their business models, their prospects for the future and so on. This instils market discipline, encouraging everyone to compete as aggressively as possible – or so the argument goes. Capital markets are seen as the epitome of liberal capitalism, with state interference merely serving as a backstop if things go wrong (think 2008).

In state-capitalist economies such as China, by contrast, capital markets are designed to enable state control and facilitate state objectives. For example, the Chinese don’t like to see too much speculation in their markets, and monitor activity closely to prevent it getting out of hand. If the authorities decide that certain traders are too active, they will ask them to cancel trades and may even ban them.

Billionaire Jack Ma is one of victims of China’s crackdown. Frederick Legrande - COMEO

The state is also careful to restrict international traders, setting limits on how much they can trade for instance. And just like Ant Group demonstrated, the authorities carefully weigh whether flotations can go ahead. Decisions can have less to do with a company’s financial abilities than whether they have political ties or contribute to national development.

As I demonstrate in a recent paper, these markets are focused on containing financial risk, maintaining social stability and steering financial activity into more productive tracks. It is all geared towards state control and accomplishing national development goals – and here we see the overlap with the recent crackdown.

Some of Beijing’s interventions, such as reining in financial bloggers or restricting Ant Group – with its peer-to-peer payment system and vast consumer data – are part of the same tradition of managing markets. As finance permeates ever more aspects of Chinese life, the authorities are using it as a lever to govern economic activity. Meanwhile, other interventions, such as data protection and restricting gaming, are more broadly about managing society, but with the same approach to putting the state before enterprise.

Other emerging economies

Part of our work in the StateCapFinance project is about recognising this Chinese approach as an alternative, and even a challenge to the contemporary global financial order. Interestingly, we see this not only in China but across emerging markets. In Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa and South Korea – which together with China account for 25% of global stock market capitalisation and 50% of trading in global futures markets – states facilitate control and national development in similar ways.

In most of these nations, it’s more common for the state to own listed companies and stock exchanges, and foreign and private ownership tends to be more restricted. Speculative trading is much more curbed, while states tend to try and control the price of key commodities by setting up rival benchmarks to the west. China has done this with commodities like crude oil, iron ore, copper and gold.

In StateCap’s most recent research, we locate different countries on a continuum, with the neoliberal approach at one end and the state-capitalist approach at the other. China is the closest to state capitalism, but India is quite far in the same direction and, perhaps surprisingly, so is South Korea. On the other hand, Brazil and South Africa are more towards the neoliberal approach, and – again contrary to what you might think – so is Russia. But to emphasise, this is all relative: Russia’s rules about the extent to which foreign companies can invest in strategically important industries are tougher than in most western countries, for example.

Viewed in this context, China’s regulatory crackdown is essentially an exercise in state management where the authorities aim to establish more control over what they perceive as outsized, unproductive economic sectors that ought to facilitate national development goals. Whether these interventions are progress is debatable, of course, but it helps to understand the fundamentally different philosophy underpinning them.

I’ll leave you with two final observations. Wall Street is still aggressively venturing into China. In 2020 alone, global investors channelled upwards of RMB1 trillion (£115 billion) into its capital markets, while global financial players have been scrambling to ramp up their China operations. And while the west worries about the power of its own tech companies within a system that is designed to give them as much leeway as possible, it is perhaps unsurprising that some have been wondering whether some of China’s more strong-handed interventions are the right way forward.

With the centre of the global economy gradually shifting east, we can probably expect an intensification of this clash of philosophies of how to organise the relationship between state and markets.

https://theconversation.com/chinas-tech-and-finance-crackdown-is-a-challenge-to-western-ideas-that-cuts-across-developing-world-171059