Chinese Gov't Inflicts Its Selective Amnesia On Hong Kong, Forcing The Removal Of Tiananmen Square Massacre Monuments

from the gaslighting-at-gunpoint dept

To be subservient to the Chinese government is to be in a constant state of (mandated) denial. The government has a narrative to project. No, that's not an accurate depiction. The state has a narrative to enforce.

An obscene amount of oppression and death is apparently nothing to be ashamed of. And how could the government be ashamed of it? It never happened. Whatever violence Chinese citizens saw perpetrated against them was merely the actions of a heroic and patriotic government, inflicting death and misery for the greater good. Of course, the only beneficiaries of this "greater good" are those inflicting death and misery. Hence the friction between fact and government fiction.

To make things easier for the people who serve the government (rather than the other way around), the Chinese government has spent years trying to eliminate the friction. Having a singular narrative may not fool people, but it at least gives them an official timeline to follow, which makes it easier to maintain "citizen scores" and stay off the radar of a government more interested in curbing thoughtcrime than actual crime.

The Chinese government's steady incursion into the day-to-day activities of Hong Kong residents has been greeted with heated, sustained protests from residents of the region, as well as international condemnation. Neither of these reactions have slowed the Chinese government's roll. Neither has its tacit agreement with the British government to leave Hong Kong unmolested until 2049. Since 1999, the Chinese government has inflicted its will on the extremely profitable region, stripping it of the democracy and independence that allowed it to flourish.

When regular laws just weren't effective enough in shutting down Hong Kong protests, the Chinese government introduced a new national security law. With this vague and easily abused justification for crushing dissent, the Chinese government made resistance untenable by threatening protesters and critics with life sentences for daring to challenge the narrative.

Then it began erasing history. The Chinese government had already cleared the slate in China, eliminating its past misdeeds by rewriting textbooks, jailing dissenters, and creating an insular web overseen by multitudinous censors. Then it came for Hong Kong, using its "national security" pretext to jail journalists, target documentarians, and prevent artistic works challenging the official narrative from being displayed.

Now, it has come for the last physical remnants of its checkered past. Erasure is here if you want it. If you have no monument to atrocities, did the atrocities even happen?

Two more Hong Kong universities have removed works of art marking Beijing’s deadly 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square democracy protesters, as authorities move to erase memorials to the event.

The removals come a day after Hong Kong’s oldest university took down a statue named the Pillar of Shame, commemorating the events of 1989, sparking outcry by activists and dissident artists in the city and abroad.

Hong Kong used to be the one place in China where mass remembrance of Tiananmen was still tolerated, with thousands gathering each year to mourn the hundreds of democracy protesters killed by Chinese troops in 1989.

Excuses were made. Some were more honest than others. But the writing is on the wall. And those who are unwilling to read it are headed towards a lifetime of misery. The heads of these universities can see what the future holds. Dissent and criticism are one-way tickets to hard labor or reeducation.

CUHK said it removed the “unauthorised statue” after an internal assessment, adding that the groups responsible for moving it to the campus in 2010 were no longer functional.

Lingnan University said it had taken down a wall relief, also created by Chen, after having “reviewed and assessed items on campus that may pose legal and safety risks to the university community”.

The first excuse is bullshit. But it's bullshit the Chinese government will find acceptable, especially since it resulted in the removal of a monument to its brutality. The second assessment is far more realistic. It at least informs readers that the university has accepted its fate as the neck under the heel of the Chinese government's boot. Rather than subject administrators, teachers, and students to future brutality from the Chinese government, the school has decided to remove the inanimate provocateur. This cedes ground to the Chinese government's narrative but at least prevents punishment for "misremembering" the Tiananmen Square Massacre. There is a clever backup plan for remembrance -- a crowdsourced 3D model that would allow for swift, cheap replication of one of these monuments -- but it's clear Hong Kong entities will never officially host any version of these sculptures.

Having spent years making itself essential to supply chains -- both as a producer and a consumer -- the Chinese government is now openly mocking every critical statement, sanction, or tariff issued by foreign governments. It has demonstrated the strength of its convictions. And it has yet to see anything in response that would deter it from becoming its worst self. If it decides certain parts of its history no longer exist inside its borders, then that's the way it's going to be. The outcry coming from beyond its borders is just background noise.

But even though it means nothing to the Chinese government, it still means something to everyone else. World leaders need to confront the Chinese government about its actions and draw attention to its oppressive efforts and erasure of history when meeting with Chinese officials or addressing supply chain issues. The Chinese government may choose to remember its history selectively, but the rest of the world should be under no obligation to indulge in its fantasies.

Filed Under: china, hong kong

Details Leak On Apple's Secret $275 Billion Deal With The Chinese Government

from the raising-marketshare,-eyebrows,-and-concerns dept

More troubling news has surfaced about Apple's and China's relationship. Apple relies on Chinese manufacturing to make its phones and the Chinese government relies on its massive amount of power to leverage deals that allow it to achieve its ends, many of which are oppressive.

An exclusive report by The Information (paywalled) details a $275 billion deal Apple struck with the Chinese government, apparently in hopes of exempting the company from new regulations that would have negatively affected its products and services. That deal was signed in 2016 and apparently includes an option for a sixth year, which would extend it through 2022.

Here's what appears to have been the end result of this deal, which required Apple to invest heavily in China and work with the government to develop new technologies and cultivate Chinese tech talent. The South China Morning Post notes Apple is now back on top of the Chinese phone sales charts.

In October, Apple regained its title as the largest smartphone brand in China by shipments, its first time at the top of the list since December 2015, according to Counterpoint. Sales grew 46 per cent that month compared with the previous month, while the overall smartphone market grew just 2 per cent.

There's something in it for China as well.

China has also become more important to Apple’s supply chain. The company has added more suppliers from mainland China to its list of vendors than anywhere else from 2017 to 2020, according the Apple’s supplier list for the period. Mainland Chinese companies make up nearly a third of newly-listed companies.

The Chinese government also asked for -- and apparently received -- some smaller, much stranger concessions from Apple, as Richard Lawler reports for The Verge.

That includes a request Apple reportedly received in 2014 or 2015 about a small group of uninhabited islands that China and Japan apparently have a dispute over in terms of who owns them. Going by either the Senkaku Islands or the Diaoyu Islands, depending on which side of the argument you’re taking, they inspired a request from China to members of the Maps team to make them appear larger, even when viewers are zoomed out on the map. According to The Information, not only did Apple eventually make the change, but even today, for viewers using its map from within China, the islands are still shown at a larger scale than the territories around them.

Weird flex by the Chinese government. But the government has plenty of weird flexes. More concerning is whatever concessions were made to allow the Chinese government to more directly control iPhone users in the country. Apple has already made several concessions, including erecting local data centers that can be easily accessed by the government. It has also removed content deemed unlawful or offensive by the Chinese government, some of which has been directly related to the government's ongoing repression of its Muslim minority.

For Apple, this is a problem of both supply and demand. Apple obviously wants to be able to sell its products to the large Chinese market. But it's pretty difficult to obtain much leverage when you're also reliant on this market to manufacture the same devices you want to sell to this market.

Despite that lack of leverage, Apple has still secured some minor wins, as Samuel Axon points out at Ars Technica.

Encryption keys for iCloud user data for the region are controlled by Apple, despite the government's efforts to encourage, pressure, or force foreign companies to hand over responsibility for that data to Chinese companies.

Still, the deal with the Chinese government suggests the country will continue to have the upper hand in negotiations. Apple may be investing in its future, but it's pouring money into a regime that has continually expanded its power and escalated its oppressive activities against its own people. Apple's money will fund these activities, even if only indirectly. Striking a secret deal worth hundreds of billions of dollars with an authoritarian government is never a good look.

Apple hasn't said much about this report. The Chinese government, however, has reacted (via its state-owned press) and that reaction is bizarre, to say the least.

A commentary published on the WeChat blog Buyidao, operated by the state-run tabloid Global Times, defended the investments. The attack on Apple’s ties to China are “clearly driven by the ‘political correctness’ of Sinophobia”, according to the article.

“Forcing American companies to decouple from China is forcing them to decouple from opportunities and gains,” the article reads. “This is as good as McCarthyism for business.”

Huh. Well, that's a take. The Chinese government has shown repeatedly it cannot and should not be trusted, that it's an abuser of its considerable power. It's possible to question deals struck with an oppressive regime without engaging in Sinophobia. This isn't about the Chinese people or their way of life. It's about a government that disappears unwanted residents into prisons, threatens government critics with death sentences, and reacts with hostile indignation any time its narrative and claims are questioned. Pulling out of China isn't McCarthyism. It's simply a refusal to cater to the whims of a government that is its own population's primary antagonist.

There's nothing inherently wrong with striking deals with foreign governments to ensure steady supply chain operations or expand customer bases. But striking a deal of this size with a government that expects its foreign partners to assist it in the oppression of its constituents is cause for concern.

Filed Under: china
Companies: apple

How China Uses Western Influencers As Pawns In Its Propaganda War

from the chaos-and-suspicion dept

China's efforts to subdue the turkic-speaking Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region will be familiar to Techdirt readers. International awareness is increasing, too, not least thanks to the diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics that the US and other countries have announced. That presents an interesting challenge to the Chinese authorities: how to counter the growing evidence of pervasive surveillance and large-scale arrests of the Uyghurs. Using official outlets like China's Global Times is one way, but its articles are easily dismissed as crude propaganda. Much more interesting is the approach described by the New York Times, which looks at how China is helping Western YouTubers to report on the country:

The videos have a casual, homespun feel. But on the other side of the camera often stands a large apparatus of government organizers, state-controlled news media and other official amplifiers -- all part of the Chinese government's widening attempts to spread pro-Beijing messages around the planet.

State-run news outlets and local governments have organized and funded pro-Beijing influencers' travel, according to government documents and the creators themselves. They have paid or offered to pay the creators. They have generated lucrative traffic for the influencers by sharing videos with millions of followers on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Typically, the Chinese government support comes in the form of free organized trips around China, particularly in Xinjiang. By showing the influencers a carefully sanitized image of life in the country, the authorities don't need to worry about negative stories. They simply make it easy for the YouTubers to present images of jolly peasants and happy city-dwellers, because that's all they are allowed to see.

One of the authors of the New York Times piece, Paul Mozur, noted on Twitter another important way that the authorities are able to help their influencer guests. Once produced, the China-friendly videos are boosted massively by state media and diplomatic Facebook and Twitter accounts:

One video by Israeli influencer Raz Gal-Or portraying Xinjiang as "totally normal" was shared by 35 government connected accounts with a total of 400 million followers. Many were Chinese embassy Facebook accounts, which posted about the video in numerous languages.

A new report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, "Borrowing mouths to speak on Xinjiang", has some more statistics on this practice:

Our data collection has found that, between January 2020 and August 2021, 156 Chinese state-controlled accounts on US-based social media platforms have published at least 546 Facebook posts, Twitter posts and shared articles from [China Global Television Network], Global Times, Xinhua or China Daily websites that have amplified Xinjiang-related social media content from 13 influencer accounts. More than 50% of that activity occurred on Facebook.

Mozur says that the use of Western influencers in this way also allows employees of Beijing-controlled media, like the journalist Li Jingjing, to present themselves as independent YouTubers. On Twitter, however, she is labeled as "China state-affiliated media". The Australian Strategic Policy Institute sees this as part of a larger problem (pdf):

labelling schemes adopted by some video-sharing and social media platforms to identify state-affiliated accounts are inconsistently applied to media outlets and journalists working for those outlets. In addition, few platforms appear to have clear policies on content from online influencers or vloggers whose content may be facilitated by state-affiliated media, through sponsored trips, for example.

According to Mozur, China's state broadcaster is actively looking for more influencers, offering bonuses and publicity for those who sign up. In the US, China's consulate general is paying $300,000 to a firm to recruit influencers for the Winter Olympics, ranging from Celebrity Influencers with millions of Instagram or TikTok followers, to Nano Influencers, with merely a few thousand. The ultimate goal of deploying these alternative voices is not to disprove negative stories appearing in Western media, but something arguably worse, as the New York Times report explains:

"China is the new super-abuser that has arrived in global social media," said Eric Liu, a former content moderator for Chinese social media. "The goal is not to win, but to cause chaos and suspicion until there is no real truth."

As if we needed any more of that…

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: china, influencers, propaganda, social media, surveillance, uyghurs

An Unplanned, Ad-Hoc Collaboration Reveals The On-The-Ground Truth About China's Internment Camps For Uyghurs

from the name-that-surveillance-camera dept

The US, UK and Australia have all announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. The reason given for the move is because of human rights abuses in China, particularly in the turkic-speaking region of Xinjiang. Techdirt has been writing about the Chinese authorities' use of technology to censor and carry out surveillance on the local Uyghur population, among others, for some years. One of the most controversial aspects of China's policy in the region is the use of huge detention camps. According to the authorities there, these camps are for educational and vocational training. Human rights organizations call them internment camps; some governments speak of "genocide" against the Uyghurs.

Given the highly sensitive nature of the topic, it is naturally hard to ascertain what is really happening in these camps. One solution is to use satellite imagery to peek inside China's tightly-controlled borders. Perhaps the best-researched investigation using this technique appeared on BuzzFeed News last year. The main article, and the four follow-ups, revealed the hitherto unknown scale of the internment camps, but were necessarily limited by their use of an extreme physical viewpoint -- the view from space.

A Chinese travel blogger going by the name of Guanguan decided to investigate on the ground some of the camps located by BuzzFeed News, by driving to them. The remarkable 20-minute video summary of his travels provides unique views of the camps, which complement the satellite imagery used by BuzzFeed News. Specifically, they show in some detail side-views of the camps. This allows Guanguan to make reasonable guesses about which camps are indeed for education and training of some kind, and which ones are likely to be high-security internment camps.

The video is well-worth watching in its entirely, since it provides probably our best glimpse yet of the reality of China's internment camps for Uyghurs and others (wisely, Guanguan seems to be out of China now). In fact, the quality of the video images is such that IPVM, which specializes in covering the world of video surveillance, was able to recognize several of the security cameras used at the internment camps. There are a few cameras from the Chinese company Dahua Technology, but the majority identified come from Hikvision. This, Techdirt readers will recall, is the company whose director of cybersecurity and privacy said that IoT devices with backdoors "can't be used to spy on companies, individuals, or nations." IPVM reported that Hikvision "declined to comment" on these latest findings. Its article noted that the visual evidence of Hikvision cameras being used in multiple internment camps, the result of an interesting unplanned, ad-hoc collaboration between Western journalists and a Chinese video blogger, is likely to make things even worse for a company already blacklisted by the US government.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: china, guanguan, internment camps, surveillance, uyghurs
Companies: hikvision

Chinese Government Is Building A Surveillance System That Will Target, Track Foreign Journalists, Students

from the if-you-can't-beat-'em,-maybe-it's-time-to-start-physically-beating-t dept

The Chinese government is truly, undeniably, utterly evil. Anyone saying otherwise has something to sell (most likely to the Chinese people or their government). Private companies and public entities alike have kowtowed and capitulated rather than face the ferocity of the easily angered government and/or risk losing access to a marketplace containing a few billion people.

China has embraced its own version of capitalism to create the leverage it now wields against those who offend it, no matter where else in the world they might be located. It sees even more opportunity in ultra-lucrative Hong Kong and has taken direct control of the region. It refuses to acknowledge Taiwan's existence as a separate country and demands apologies from world leaders and professional athletes when they make the "mistake" of acknowledging yet another lucrative region China wishes to directly control.

It has rolled out multiple layers of oppression to keep its citizens in line, starting with pervasive widespread surveillance that ties into "citizen scores" that limit opportunities for those the government believes aren't patriotic enough. It is engaged in the erasure of its Uighur Muslim population, utilizing concentration camps, disappearances, brutality, and a war of attrition designed to eliminate these "unwanteds" completely in the coming years.

Is China irredeemable? I guess it all depends on what you think of redemption. The underlying basis of Christianity is that no one is completely irredeemable (even if far too many Christians seem to believe certain people are). Our penal system, in a much more half-hearted way, conflates punishment with rehabilitation, as if the best way to turn your life around is to see it destroyed. China isn't a Christian nation, so that ends that part of the speculation. And China most likely believes people can be punished into contrition, which will "redeem" them while allowing the state to remain intact. Can China ever be anything than increasingly worse versions of itself?

Sanctions and public condemnation haven't had any effect. The Chinese government isn't too big to fail. Nothing ever is. Just ask the former USSR (which, unfortunately, is resembling its old self more and more every day.) But it is too big to care what anyone else thinks. The first step towards redemption is realizing you need to be redeemed. Will China ever reach that starting point?

It seems unlikely. The government likes things the way they are. And its vision for the future is the elimination of any roadblocks to complete power. But it still struggles to control the narrative, despite constantly finding new ways to limit the spread of information it doesn't approve of and its rewriting of even very recent history to excise anything that might suggest the state is immoral, fallible, or dangerous to the citizens it oversees.

Which brings us to this, which isn't the worst thing China has done. Instead, it's just another example of the Chinese government tossing aside concerns about its public image. Press freedoms are practically nonexistent in China. And now the government is planning to actively target journalists who refuse to play by its rules.

Security officials in one of China's largest provinces have commissioned a surveillance system they say they want to use to track journalists and international students among other "suspicious people", documents reviewed by Reuters showed.

A July 29 tender document published on the Henan provincial government’s procurement website - reported in the media for the first time - details plans for a system that can compile individual files on such persons of interest coming to Henan using 3,000 facial recognition cameras that connect to various national and regional databases.

The surveillance apparatus is already in place. The county has millions of surveillance cameras everywhere. All these cameras need are a certain form of "smarts" -- one that lets the government identify and track undesirables. The government has already asked Chinese tech companies to give it AI capable of seeking out Uighur Muslims. Now, it wants a system that can see past facemasks and eyewear to positively identify journalists and foreigners it wants to keep track of. And it wants the system to be responsive and fast, capable of performing searches of recorded footage for images matching uploaded images or biometric attributes.

It's going to throw a lot of money and personnel at this "problem," grading targets on a scale that will easily indicate how much the Chinese government wants journalists or international students deported, disappeared, silenced, or otherwise punished.

The system will be operated by at least 2,000 officials and policemen, and specifies that journalists will be divided into three categories: red, yellow, green, in decreasing order of risk, according to the tender.

Different police forces covering all of Henan, whose 99 million inhabitants makes it China's third-largest province by population, will be connected to the platform in order to spring into action in the event of a warning being set off, the tender explains.

Warnings will be set off if a journalist while in Henan registers into a hotel, buys a ticket, or crosses the provincial border, according to the tender.

"Suspicious persons must be tailed and controlled, dynamic research analyses and risk assessments made, and the journalists dealt with according to their category," the tender reads.

All of this will be perfectly legal when it finally goes into use. The Chinese government has spent the last several years rewriting and expanding its national security laws to justify actions it takes against critics, activists, journalists, and dissidents. It has thrown "fake news" into the mix to grease the wheels for direct targeting of press outlets.

And it's not just for locals. The Chinese government was unhappy with foreign news coverage of flooding in the country earlier this year and engaged in harassment of reporters covering the disaster. Not coincidentally at all, the proposal paper also lists "foreign journalists" as targets of this surveillance, which suggests the government wants to be able to eject members of the press from other countries the moment their reporting starts contradicting the government's narrative.

This is ugly and it's right out there in the open. The tender documents were perhaps never meant to be seen by outsiders, but the details show the government is seeking ways to destroy everything but the party line. No one really needs any more evidence the Chinese government is evil. But somehow, entities that should want to have nothing to do with it play by its rules and apologize publicly when they break them. Maybe China can't be stopped. But the deference shown to it with alarming frequency certainly needs to.

Filed Under: china, journalists, students, surveillance

Disney Yanks China-Mocking Simpsons Episode From Its Hong Kong Streaming Service

from the for-reasons-only-understandable-to-multi-national-conglomerates dept

American companies still give China what it wants. Y THO?

The only thing that can be gained from maintaining whatever the fuck a "good relationship" with the world's most powerful autocracy is… more subjugation! Who would want that?

I wish this was rhetorical but it seems plenty of entities want to be bossed around by the Big Red Bully, ranging from the NBA to a variety of tech companies which consider a potential market of billions more valuable than their credibility.

So, who's caving to the always unreasonable demands of China and its head of state, Winnie the Pooh? Why, it's none other than Disney, the current host for every Simpsons episode ever. And what's getting pulled? It's a Simpsons episode that chose to portray China the way China would not choose to portray China, according to this report from Narayan Liu for CBR.com.

Disney+ recently launched in the Hong Kong, a special administrative region that, until recently, officially functioned separately from China. Not everything will be available to Hong Kong viewers, however, as subscribers have found at least one episode of The Simpsons has been removed due to a reference to the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Numerous subscribers and reports have surfaced, showing that the Season 16 episode "Goo Goo Gai Pan" has been removed in Hong Kong.

What's wrong with this episode? Tough to say since it simply repeats (mocks) the official party line. Here's a screenshot of the "offending" language China feels is too subversive to allow Hong Kong viewers to enjoy for what must be at least the umpteenth time.

It's a shot of the place where things happened in 1989, most notably a Chinese citizen staring down a line of tanks. But the Chinese government continues to insist this is a collective delusion and has worked as tirelessly as a country of kowtowed billions can to erase history. In this Simpsons episode, the illusion is complete. If you can't read/see the screenshot, it shows a monument apparently erected in Tiananmen Square that reads:

TIAN AN MEN SQUARE
ON THIS SITE, IN 1989,
NOTHING HAPPENED

That's what the Chinese government wants everyone to pretend to believe. So, what's the problem? Well, I guess Chinese censors are at least able to discern context when they want to. And since this isn't officially issued propaganda, it has to go.

But it doesn't. Disney could have ignored demands to remove the episode, if there actually were any demands. It could be a proactive move by Disney which makes it even worse. A country known for its casual disrespect for American copyrights and trademarks should be way up on Disney's shitlist, considering its efforts to extend all things IP to forever and a day.

Disney should be willing to flip the bird to a nation full of casual IP violators. Somehow, it's apparently not up to the task. Instead, it has (preemptively or otherwise) caved to the overseer of millions of infringers in the apparent hopes of retaining some relationship to millions of Hong Kong streamers, as well as the billions just over the imaginary property line that separates the region the Chinese government was supposed to leave unmolested for the next couple of decades.

Once again, we must ask: what is the fucking endgame? Do American companies actually believe that adhering their tongues to the underside of the Chinese government's boot will somehow exclude them from future censorship demands? All signs point to No.

So… is it easier than showing spine? It must be because we've seen similar acts far too often. China may have a supply chain stranglehold, but it relies on a steady supply of customers in other nations. With a little collective effort, this imbalance of power can be leveraged to make China more amenable to the freedoms enjoyed by customers around the world who purchase its products.

Filed Under: china, free speech, hong kong, self-censorship, the simpsons
Companies: disney

Chinese Internet Companies Are Censoring People Who Write Or Speak Tibetan Or Uyghur, Lending A Hand To China's Cultural Genocides

from the remembering-Jack-Ma dept

Techdirt has reported on the oppression of Tibetans by the Chinese authorities for 15 years now. More recently, the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs in Xinjiang have come in for the same treatment, with the apparent aim of breaking their spirit and imposing total obedience. But alongside the hundreds of prisons and physical repression -- sometimes leading to deaths -- the Chinese authorities have been making it increasingly hard for Tibetans and Uyghurs to preserve their distinctive, non-Han cultures. Now Chinese Internet companies are lending a hand to these cultural genocides, reported here by Protocol:

First it was Talkmate, a language-learning app that partners with UNESCO, that posted via its official Weibo account that it had "temporarily" taken down Tibetan and Uyghur language classes "due to government policies." There is no set date for them to return.

On some services, even people who already speak those languages aren't allowed to write them. The popular Chinese streaming service Bilibili has banned comments posted in Tibetan and Uyghur:

Screen recordings shared by Fergus Ryan, a senior analyst with ASPI's International Cyber Policy Centre, showed that when he tried to type comments in Uyghur and Tibetan, he received error messages that read: "Comment contains sensitive information."

Similarly, on Douyin, the original Chinese version of TikTok, whenever live-streamers speak an ethnic minority language or a dialect, they will receive a warning to switch to Standard Chinese. And if they don't, Douyin's moderators will just cut off the stream, regardless of the content.

The companies are probably not doing this with the explicit intent to stifle Tibetan and Uyghur cultures. It is more likely that they are frightened they will be punished if they let any content that the Chinese government might deem to be "instigating" terrorism or separatism slip through. The dramatic fall from grace of China's outspoken tech billionaire, Jack Ma, stands as a chilling warning to all Internet companies, big or small. Safer just to block everything in these sensitive languages, it seems. And so the rich living cultures of Tibet and the Uyghurs move another step closer to extinction.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: censorship, china, culture, internet, tibet, uyghurs, xinjiang

Yahoo Reminds Everyone It Still Exists By Formally Announcing Its Exit From China

from the dozens-of-users-forced-to-choose-from-hundreds-of-alternatives dept

The bell continues to toll for American tech companies willing to do business with China. Increasing censorship demands have made even the most obliging of platforms reconsider their obligations to the authoritarian regime, resulting in the most difficult tradeoff: a company's reputation versus access to a market containing more than a billion users.

LinkedIn was one of the last to pull up its anchor and exit the country under a not-so-full head of steam. LinkedIn survives in China, albeit in a severely limited form that will make it less likely to receive content deletion requests from the Chinese government. That doesn't mean it won't receive more requests. It just means it won't have as much to delete or block when it's asked to.

Most social media platforms operated by US companies are already blocked by the Chinese government, mostly due to their refusal to set up local data centers as is required by law in the country. Those that can still be accessed by Chinese citizens are subject to the censorial wishes of the government.

But nothing says American tech companies are done with China like the announcement that a long-forgotten search engine and email provider is finally calling it quits. Last chopper out of Saigon this ain't. But it's still notable, even if it only affects a small customer base.

Yahoo Inc. is shutting down operations in China due to an "increasingly challenging business and legal environment," The Wall Street Journal reports.

As of Nov. 1, Yahoo’s suite of services are "no longer...accessible from mainland China," a Yahoo spokesman tells the Journal, which notes that on the same day, China’s Personal Information Protection Law went into effect. The new privacy law from Beijing is meant to “curb data collection by technology companies,” the Journal says.

LOL. First of all, any Chinese law that claims to protect users from internet services just means the government is trying to oust companies that won't retain shitloads of data for the Chinese government to rifle through at will. The Chinese government does not care about the privacy of its citizens and it never will.

Second of all, any American tech company that willingly continues to do business does so at the government's pleasure. Cooperation with the Chinese government means being implicated in everything from jailing journalists to vanishing the country's Muslim population into political prisons. No company should want to be a part of that, no matter how really cool a billion users might sound.

Yahoo's announcement is a bit too belated to have much of an impact, however. It hasn't been relevant for years, which means most of the gasps in its direction are from people surprised the company still exists. And this exit strategy has been in the works for most of a decade at this point. Yahoo Mail was ejected from China in 2013 and Yahoo's holding company has been winding down its Chinese-based operations since then, obviously expecting the day would come when it would be no longer possible (or wise) to continue as subservient to the Chinese censorship apparatus.

But once you've lost Yahoo… as the saying goes. There's not much left for Chinese citizens to work with that isn't at least indirectly controlled by the Chinese government. Pulling out may leave Chinese residents with precious few options for uncensored communications, but staying put means allying with a government that's shown an alarming willingness to be all the bad things people have attributed to it over the years. It loves capitalism, but only when it can control it. And it abhors anything it can't.

American companies have either found the exit or been shown it by the Chinese government several times over the past decade. Those who have found the exit on their own can at least say they did it voluntarily, even if this statement comes years after it has any meaningful impact.

Filed Under: china, internet services, personal information protection law
Companies: yahoo