Day: September 7, 2022

As the United States imposes further bans on the export of high-tech software and chips to China, ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping has unveiled plans to focus resources on homegrown high-tech products and processes.

Nvidia said on Sept. 2 that it had been banned by the U.S. government from exporting its A100 and H100 graphics processing unit chips to China and Russia, while its DGX AI server was also banned from being shipped to China with the chips onboard.

Reports have also emerged of a U.S. ban on exports of AMD’s MI250 Accelerator AI chip to China.

Currently, Chinese high-end chips can only compete with those made by Nvidia, AMD and Taiwan Semiconductor in a few areas, and the bans are expected to deal a heavy blow to the country’s AI sector.

Xi Jinping announced on Sept. 6 a framework of measures aimed at allowing China to “achieve breakthroughs in core technologies and establish competitive advantages and seize the strategic initiative in several important areas,” state media reported.

Xi told the 27th meeting of the Central Commission for Comprehensively Deepening Reform that the CCP and government would strengthen leadership of scientific and technological innovation, allocating nationwide resources to meet research and development needs.

The plan envisions the nationwide husbanding of existing resources to achieve “economic and social development in all fields,” according to state news agency Xinhua.

Current affairs commentator Wang Qingyang said the reforms proposed by Xi seem to herald a return to a top-down, planned economy, and a sharp turn away from the economic reforms and opening up initiated by late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping.

“The nationalization of science and technology is already under way,” Wang told RFA. “For example, there is an annual catalog of official national subsidies for major science and technology projects.”

“In the past, they used to distribute funding to some companies, but now it’s all under unified state control,” he said.

According to Wang, nationalization means that “national interests” are prioritized over everything else, following a similar model to the state-sponsored recruitment and training of elite athletes.

“Imports of high-tech raw materials has pretty much halted under foreign sanctions, so they have to nationalize this system,” Wang said. “The biggest precedent for this was the iron and steel smelting during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960).

Political analyst Xia Liang noted that the Xinhua news agency report on the decision mentioned “reform” seven times, but never once referred to “opening up,” suggesting that this part of Deng’s policy is being dropped.

“He is taking the initiative to decouple from the entire Western science and technology community,” Xia said. “[This means that] over the next two to three years, all foreign software will be replaced by homegrown, Chinese software and hardware.”

“Although these domestic products are not so user-friendly, it won’t matter, because they make sense for [Xi], whose main concern is security,” he said.

“His view of security is all about regime stability,” Xia said. “It prepares the public for the next step, which is active decoupling from the West.”

Two-way process

The process appears to be a two-way one, as the passage of the CHIPS Act in the United States in July 2022 will strengthen domestic semiconductor manufacturing, design and research, fortify the economy and national security, and reinforce chip supply chains for U.S. companies.

There are also national security concerns around Chinese companies’ recent bids to acquire stakes in companies that own certain assets.

Last month, then British secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy Kwasi Kwarteng put a stop to the planned acquisition of Bristol-based Pulsic by Super Orange HK Holding Ltd, as its electronic design automation [EDA] products “could be used in a civilian or military supply chain.”

In July, Kwarteng made a similar order targeting the would-be acquisition of intellectual property developed by the University of Manchester by the Beijing Infinite Vision Technology Co, which wanted to buy SCAMP-5 and SCAMP-7 vision sensing technology.

China claims it doesn’t extend military assistance to Russia, but Chinese customs data showed increased exports of raw materials for military use to Russia.

In the first five months of 2022, Chinese chip shipments to Russia more than doubled from a year earlier to U.S.$50 million, while exports of components like printed circuits also recorded double-digit percentage growth.

China also exported 400 times more alumina — an important raw material for weapons production and the aerospace industry — to Russia compared with the same period in 2021.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

The head of China’s state news agency has pledged never to swerve from the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) line or from supporting incumbent leader Xi Jinping as he gears up to seek an unprecedented third term in office at the 20th CCP National Congress in October.

Xinhua news agency president Fu Hua said his journalists shouldn’t take leave of the party line, Xi Jinping Thought or core propaganda themes “not even for a minute.”

“Xinhua will never depart from the party line, not even for a minute, nor stray from the path laid down by general secretary Xi Jinping, not even for a minute, nor lose sight of General Secretary Xi Jinping and the Central Committee, not even for a minute,” Fu wrote in a Sept. 2 article for the Cyberspace Administration publication ChinaNetNews.

Fu’s pledge was explicitly linked to the run-up to the 20th party congress, and called on Xinhua to “give the strongest voice to the party’s ideas” during that time.

Xi Jinping Thought, a hodge-podge of ideological buzzwords emphasizing total party leadership and control over everything, was “a logical starting point for reporting the news,” Fu wrote.

He also threw his weight behind totalitarian control over the Chinese internet, saying online censorship and public opinion management was “an unshakable political principle.”

Veteran political journalist Hu Ping said Fu’s article is further evidence of a cult of personality forming around Xi Jinping.

“Xi Jinping Thought is now a required textbook in universities, high schools and primary schools, raising the personality cult around Xi Jinping to unprecedented heights,” Hu told RFA. “This is absurd, and humiliating for all concerned.”

“His will has now been imposed on more than one billion people in China, meaning that everyone in the country is now supposed to follow his ideas, something that he has used his power to impose on everyone,” he said.

Just days after Fu’s article appeared, the propaganda department of the Zhejiang provincial CCP called on all those engaged in propaganda work to do a better job of explaining party policies in detail, rather than simplifying them.

It said some outlets have been exaggerating support for the CCP in an extreme manner, damaging the party’s public image, while at the same time oversimplifying its message to the general public.

Others have attacked government policies, couching “smears and slander” in partial praise, the post said.

It listed caricatures of devotion to the CCP as examples, citing references to model workers who “work overtime non-stop without changing clothes or washing their hair” or “grandmas in wheelchairs singing revolutionary songs” as a form of “dumbing down” and “brainless boasting” that should be avoided in party propaganda work.

It said merely parroting slogans was “self-defeating and offensive.”

‘Talking gibberish’

Former Sina Weibo censor Liu Lipeng said the post appeared to be targeting mainstream, state-controlled media, which regularly put out stories that are clearly out of touch with online public sentiment.

“The Chinese state media operate behind closed doors, talking gibberish and often making jokes [out of what they write],” Liu told RFA. “You see in these articles, the examples they cite are all coming from their own.”

He said many state-backed media outlets will write fake news.

“They don’t care if they’re fake, because nobody can hold them accountable anyway, so they just write nonsense,” Liu said.

He said social media users often repost such articles out of a sense of satire or irony, and are more likely to hold online activities late at night, when many paid internet censors have left work for the day.

“Actually, internet users are resisting,” Liu said, citing online reactions to accusations by China on Monday that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had carried out a cyberattack on Northwestern Polytechnical University. “For example, there was a wave of anti-American propaganda recently.”

Liu said the incident was also used as a way to satirize and vent dissatisfaction with the authorities’ constant censorship and surveillance of online activities.

He said keywords linked Fu’s article about Xi Jinping thought and the CCP line seemed to have disappeared from major social media platforms by Sept. 6.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

While it’s been well documented that cotton production in China’s Xinjiang region is at high risk of using Uyghur forced labor, the Uyghur Human Rights Project has found that 20 percent of red dates in the global supply chain also are probably similarly tainted. It found that the Xinjiang Construction and Production Corps (XPCC) or “Bingtuan,” a paramilitary and corporate organization responsible for mass internment and forced labor, holds a majority stake in at least 13 red date companies, which account for more than 25 percent of China’s production. Additionally, the fruit is frequently grown with cotton and thus would draw from the same involuntary labor pool.