Day: March 1, 2023

Congress can’t agree on much, but it can agree on China.

The harmony is so deafening that lawmakers spent nearly 10 hours across two committees in the House on Tuesday agreeing something must be done about Beijing – and done together, preferably.

“We must practice bipartisanship,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois during his opening remarks as the ranking Democrat on a new Republican-led panel focused specifically on China. 

“For the last three decades, both Democrats and Republicans underestimated the CCP,” Krishnamoorthi said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party, which he said wanted American leaders and lawmakers to be “fractious, partisan and prejudiced.”

It’s a drastic change for a Capitol Hill more used to bickering, “roadblock” and point-scoring between Democrats and Republicans. 

Fortunately, then, two committees were in on the act.

Parallel committees

Earlier Tuesday, Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican from Texas who has headed the Foreign Affairs Committee since his party took back House control in January, opened the day by leading his panel’s own lengthy discussions on the U.S. rivalry with Beijing.

Sitting from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. with only about a half-hour break for lunch, McCaul’s panel quizzed Biden administration officials including Daniel Krittenbrink, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, and Alan Estevez, the under secretary of commerce responsible for much of U.S. chip policy, before debating a new bill that may ban TikTok.

“As chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, it is my priority to make sure Congress and this administration are working together in a bipartisan fashion to confront this generational threat,” McCaul said of the CCP during his own opening remarks. “I stand ready to work with the administration and those on the other side of the aisle.”

The Democrats on the panel as well as the Biden appointees appearing before it were in lockstep with McCaul’s Republicans that Beijing represented an unheralded threat to U.S. security.

“I would also say TikTok represents a threat,” Estevez said, noting the app was currently being investigated by the Treasury Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

The committee later unanimously passed a number of China-related bills, including on organ trafficking of Uyghurs at the hands of Chinese authorities, to the full House of Representatives to be voted on.

Main event of the evening

As primetime arrived, the 61-year-old McCaul had to cede the limelight to the House’s newest special panel for its own three-hour session: the new Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.

Led by Gallagher, a 38-year old former Marine from Wisconsin, the special China panel seemed keen to take a leaf out of the book of the last “select” House panel – the Democrats’ January 6 inquiry – by getting proceedings underway at a TV-friendly time of 7 p.m.

Bearing the hearing title “The Chinese Communist Party’s Threat to America” – as opposed to McCaul’s “Combatting the Generational Challenge of CCP Aggression” – the panel in some ways paralleled the day’s earlier hearings by quizzing administration officials.

But where McCaul focussed efforts on Biden officials, Gallagher, who was first elected in 2016, preferred a more friendly spate of faces.

He brought in two former Trump administration officials: H.R. McMaster, Trump’s onetime national security adviser, and Matt Pottinger, his National Security Council director for Asia.

In a made-for-television twist, the hearing was interrupted by two young protesters who bore signs that said “China is not our enemy” and “Stop Asian Hate,” with both being escorted out unwillingly by congressional security. The pair of protesters, McMaster promptly told the panel, were themselves evidence of Chinese subversion.

“I think these eruptions are indicative of really the effect the United Front work department has had,” McMaster said. “They have reinforced, to some degree, what you might call a bit of a curriculum of self-loathing that has taken hold in academia for many years.”

By the time all was done, the two House committees together had sat and discussed China nearly unbroken from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., with absences only from about 1:30 p.m. to 2 p.m. and from 5 to 7 p.m.

Old habits

The only tension in the day was when McCaul introduced a bill that would allow the Biden administration to ban TikTok. Rep. Gregory Meeks, a Democrat from New York who chaired the committee until last year, moved to amend McCaul’s bill to make it less broad.

Exasperated, McCaul, who called TikTok a “spy balloon in your phone,” said he was surprised Meeks did not agree to the bill. Another Democrat intervened to ask McCaul to define the word “algorithm,” leading the Republican to appear annoyed.

“Why are we even talking about this?” he said in a rare outburst.

The Democrats reiterated they had no issue with the proposed bill’s broader designs on TikTok, and only wanted alterations. Reaching 5 p.m., the committee hearing was adjourned until Wednesday. 

But the general bipartisanship did not go unnoticed in Beijing. 

Speaking at the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s regular press conference on Wednesday, spokesperson Mao Ning accused U.S. lawmakers of playing politics and said they should “stop framing China as a threat.”

She added that Americans should “abandon their ideological bias and zero-sum Cold War mentality, develop an objective and rational perception of China and U.S.-China relations,” and “stop trying to score political points at the expense of US-China relations.”

In such a rare area of unity in Washington, that seems unlikely.

“This is not a polite tennis match,” Gallagher said during his new committee’s primetime hearing on Tuesday. “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century.”

Twenty years ago, when Ayshemhan Abdulla, sent her three teenage children to a local home-based religious school, little did she know that her action would later land her in prison for 21 years.

At the time, the Uyghur housewife, now 62, thought she was doing what was best for her two daughters and one son by ensuring they received Islamic religious instruction in keeping with their Muslim Uyghur identity in China’s far-western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

When Chinese authorities began the “strike hard” campaign in Xinjiang in 2014, they imposed severe penalties on Uyghurs, arrested them arbitrarily, and began a propaganda drive against the group’s ethnic customs and religious faith under the guise of promoting modernity. 

As part of the campaign, authorities destroyed mosques, restricted religious practices, forbid Islamic garb and long beards for men, banned Islamic names for children, and prohibited fasting during the holy month of Ramadan.

By 2017, the situation for the repressed minority group had grown worse. That year, authorities began forcing what would amount to roughly 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities into “re-education” camps. Chinese officials claimed the camps were vocational training centers meant to prevent terrorism and religious extremism.

Beyond the detentions, authorities subjected Uyghurs to intense surveillance, torture, forced labor, involuntary sterilizations and other severe human rights abuses. 

Abdulla got caught up in Chinese authorities’ dragnet in Xinjiang, where more than 11 million Turkic-speaking, mostly Muslim Uyghurs live.

They arrested Abdulla, a resident of Ghulja county, or Yining in Chinese, and sentenced her to 21 years in prison in 2017 for sending her children to a house religious school, said a security chief from her village in Qarayaghach township. 

“She is serving her prison term in Baykol Women’s Prison in Ghulja city,” said the man who declined to be named out of concern for his safety. “For each child she sent, she received seven years in prison.”

Authorities also took Abdulla’s children to a camp and held them for more than a year, but later released them, the village security chief said. 

Many Uyghurs over 60 were arrested and sentenced to harsh prison sentences for sending their children to religious schools though they had done so more than a decade ago, according to the Xinjiang Police Files, a cache of millions of confidential documents hacked from Xinjiang police computers and released in May 2022. Though Abdulla was not on the list, the files indicate that the arrests of innocent people were not legal.   

‘Incompatible with relevant laws’

A Uyghur former police officer, who declined to give his name for fear of his safety, said Abdulla’s harsh sentence was likely not the decision of judicial authorities but made by the Chinese Communist Party’s political and legal committee.

The former policeman, who now lives in Sweden, said he believes Beijing authorities set their own arrest numbers and told local authorities who should receive harsh punishments.

“Sentencing someone to such a long prison term is incompatible with the relevant laws,” he told Radio Free Asia. 

“Beijing’s central government might have given the local political and legal committee assignments to harshly punish Uyghurs in the concentration camps since the mass detention started in 2017,” he said. “There was an order and pressure from Beijing, and thus they arbitrarily detained and harshly sentenced innocent Uyghurs to meet Beijing’s quota.”

The Chinese apparatus at various levels completed their “assignments” by imposing a “seven-year prison sentence for each person who sent her kid to religious school.”

The former officer said misuse of legal power and abuse of the law were rife when he worked in the police force in Xinjiang in the early 2000s, though Chinese authorities tried to justify their policies. 

Back then, no matter if legal authorities held open or secret trials, they always used to inform the convicts’ families about their sentencing and their right to oppose the court’s decision, he said. 

“They attempted to go by some rules and legal procedures to deal with the arrested then,” the former policeman said. “It was impossible to imagine someone being sentenced to 21 years in prison for sending her children to a religious school when I worked 20 years ago.”

“Compared to then, the situation has worsened dramatically now,” he said. “At present, they have no shame at all in breaking their laws and openly abusing them.”

Other women in Qarayaghach met a similar fate.

Halide Qurban, a Uyghur from the same village as Abdulla, received 18 years in prison, 14 years for sending her two children to a religious school and four years for illegal praying activity, the village security official said.  

“She was an illiterate woman and she died in prison because she had diabetes,” he said.

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.

The police investigation into the gruesome murder of Hong Kong model and socialite Abby Choi, in which three former relatives by marriage including her ex-husband and former police detective father-in-law have been charged, raises worrying questions about “loopholes” in law enforcement in the city, according to a former high-ranking police officer.

Police on Sunday brought a holding charge of murder against three men aged 28 to 65 and a charge of “perverting the course of justice” against a 63-year-old woman, in connection with the murder of a 28-year-old woman at a village in Tai Po district, according to a statement on the government’s official website. 

A 47-year-old woman — reportedly the girlfriend of Choi’s ex-father-in-law Kwong Kau — was also arrested on suspicion of “assisting offenders” in the case, it said.

Media reports said the three men were Kwong Kau, Choi’s ex-husband Alex Kwong and ex-brother-in-law Anthony Kwong, identifying the 63-year-old woman as Choi’s former mother-in-law Jenny Li.

Police have been searching nearby landfill sites for Choi’s missing body parts after an investigation at Tai Po’s Lung Mei Tsuen village revealed a “butcher’s shop” where several pieces of a human body were found alongside a meat grinder, an electric saw and two vats of soup containing human tissue, as well as cleavers, a hammer, face shields, black raincoats and a purple handbag that belonged to Choi, the English-language South China Morning Post reported.

Police found a skull and several ribs believed to belong to the victim inside a large soup pot from a village house in Tai Po.

Media reports said the murder came amid a dispute between Choi and her ex-in-laws over the sale of a multimillion-dollar property in the upmarket neighborhood of Kadoorie Hill in Ho Man Tin district.

The ground-floor flat where the human remains were found had been rented by Kwong Kau in early February. Choi was reported missing on Feb. 21, the same day police believe Anthony Kwong drove to pick up Choi and the daughter she had with Alex Kwong, the South China Morning Post cited police sources as saying.

Police found blood splatters in a seven-seater vehicle, suggesting Choi was attacked there, noting the presence of a large hole in the back of the skull they said could have been made by the blow that killed her.

Alex Kwong was arrested on Feb. 25 at a pier in the Tung Chung area of Hong Kong’s Lantau Island, about to board a speedboat in possession of around H.K.$500,000 (U.S.$63,700) in cash and several luxury watches worth around H.K$4 million (U.S.$510,000), it said.

Densely populated Hong Kong is no stranger to murder by dismemberment, with a number of grisly cases making headlines since the 1980s, after perpetrators chopped up and even reportedly cooked their victims’ remains in a bid to evade detection and dispose of the body.

Former detective accused

Former police superintendent Lai Ka Chi told Radio Free Asia that Kwong Kau is a former detective stationed in the Kowloon shopping district of Mong Kok who resigned in 2004 after being accused of raping a woman he became acquainted with during the course of an investigation.

Lai said that even if the rape allegations were never proven, Kwong’s behavior was likely a violation of police ethics.

“There are many types of punishment that can be handed out as part of the disciplinary process, like warnings, written warnings, severe reprimands, and dismissal,” he said. 

“A lot of police officers really fear dismissal because they [would] lose their pension after many years,” he said. “This is effective because it means officers are less likely to engage in wanton law-breaking, because they could be left with nothing if dismissed.”

“It’s far better to resign during the course of the investigation, because then any disciplinary process stops immediately, because you are no longer part of the police force,” Lai said. “Then you can withdraw your pension fund [beginning] from the age of 55.”

Online comments also suggested a possible link to current chief executive John Lee, who was the head of criminal investigations in West Kowloon at the time that Kwong Kau was a detective in the Mong Kok branch of the criminal investigations department.

Radio Free Asia carried out checks of public records to verify this claim, and found that Lee returned to Hong Kong in 2003 after being sent for training in London, whereupon he was promoted to the rank of assistant commissioner and given command of the Kowloon West region, a job that included running regional crime and criminal intelligence units, the Organized Crime and Triad Bureau and the Narcotics Investigation Bureau.

‘Someone let this slide’

Lai said there are also question-marks about the arrest of Alex Kwong, who he said was technically already a fugitive, having jumped bail in 2015 while a suspect in a robbery case.

Alex Kwong was arrested at the time on suspicion of stealing 39 necklaces, more than 13 gold bars, 102 gold nuggets and other jewelry, he said.

Lai said it is unclear why he was able to evade arrest for eight years without being apprehended. 

An unconfirmed social media post by someone claiming to be the arresting officer in 2015 claimed that Kwong Kau had helped Alex Kwong to cross the border into mainland China to evade judicial proceedings.

“He should have been added to the wanted list,” he said. “It’s not the Immigration Department’s job to know if someone is wanted or not; this should be handled by the police and the court.”

“Once the case [of a fugitive] is handed to the police, they should go to the fugitive’s reported residence to look for them,” Lai said. “If he crossed the border, then that’s because of a loophole, although I daren’t say in which department.”

“Someone let this slide, because he was never put into the computer system as a wanted person,” he said.

‘Loopholes’ suggest broader problems

Lai said such “loopholes” are indicative of a much broader issue with selective law enforcement in Hong Kong.

“This sets a precedent and sends the message that anyone [with connections] can escape,” Lai said. “How can you announce to the world that Hong Kong is a safe city, and that people should feel secure investing here?”

“It’s not just law enforcement that’s affected if people don’t have to be held to account for [criminal behavior]; the whole of Hong Kong’s economy is affected,” he said.

“All law enforcement agencies should take a close look and see what they could do better.”

A request for comment made to the Hong Kong Police Force on Tuesday had met with no response by the time of writing, after being repeated on Wednesday.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.

Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský met with Norzin Dolma, Minister of Information and International Relations at the Central Tibetan Administration this week in the Indian capital New Delhi. 

Lipavský is the first minister of a European nation to openly meet with the CTA’s foreign ministry officials. The meeting took place on the sidelines of the ongoing G20 foreign minister gathering in India. 

The Central Tibetan Administration is considered by most Tibetans in exile as the official representative of the Tibetan people, while China claims full sovereignty over Tibet. 

The Czech Republic also held the Presidency of the European until December 2022, until that role rotated over to Sweden. Czech government officials also recently met with their Taiwanese counterparts, drawing ire from Chinese authorities. 

Following the meeting with the Tibetan delegates, the Czech Foreign Minister tweeted;

“It was a pleasure to meet again with representatives of Tibetans in exile during my visit to India. The friendship between Václav Havel and His Holiness the Dalai Lama lives on”.

Lobsang Shastri, a representative of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader in exile in northern India, also attended the meeting. “It was a productive exchange of views on mutual priorities and we are deeply encouraged by the continued support of the Czech Republic for Tibet and the Tibetan people,” Shastri told RFA.

“The meeting also echoed the lifelong friendship of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Former President Vaclav Havel.” 

Havel was a renowned dissident when Czechoslovakia was under Communist rule, and he served as the country’s President from 1989 until, and then as President of the newly-independent Czech Republic until 2003. 

Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Edited by Nawar Nemeh and Malcolm Foster.

Protesters gathered outside a Chinese “police service station” in New York – believed to serve as a base to spy on dissidents – and two Chinese consulates in California over the weekend amid growing calls in the United States, Canada and around the world for curbs on Beijing’s overseas influence activities.

Canadian lawmaker Jagmeet Singh called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday to hold a public inquiry into alleged Chinese interference in Canada’s elections, the latest in a string of political figures to do so.

Recent media reports alleging foreign interference needed a “thorough, transparent and independent investigation,” Singh said. “When Canadians learn about possible foreign interference through leaked documents, confidence in our democracy is put at risk.”

“The way to stop alleged secret Chinese interference is to refuse to keep their secrets for them. A fully independent and non-partisan public inquiry is the way to shine a light into the shadows,” he said in comments reported by the Global News.

In New York on Saturday, dozens of protesters gathered with banners outside the Changle Association on East Broadway, which had billed itself a charity.

The association was reportedly raided by the FBI last year, and then put onto a blacklist by the IRS for tax evasion over the previous three years. Staff have since disappeared.

Congressman Mike Gallagher told protesters at the scene that he had written to the FBI asking for a faster response on such stations in future. 

“This innocent-looking building that you see behind me has an unauthorized secret police station linked to the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.

Global network of policing operations

The protests came as governments around the world have launched their own investigations into alleged Chinese secret police stations identified by the Madrid-based non-governmental organization, Safeguard Defenders, which reported in September 2022 that China is carrying out “illegal, transnational policing operations” across five continents via 54 so-called police service stations in 30 countries.

Beijing says the stations were set up to provide essential services to Chinese citizens overseas, but Safeguard Defenders says they are actually used to coerce emigrants into returning home to face criminal charges and to silence dissent abroad.  

Zhou Fengsuo, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights in China, said the protest event was organized by the newly formed Congressional Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, headed by Gallagher in a bid to raise public awareness of potential political threats posed by Beijing.

“This was the first public event organized by the newly established anti-communist committee in the U.S. Congress,” Zhou said. “For them to choose this place, and to choose to stand with us sends a very important message.”

“These representatives of American public opinion have listened to Chinese dissidents, and they understand the harassment, threats and attacks that Chinese dissidents have suffered at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party in the United States,” he said. “They aren’t going to allow this to continue.”

Exiled activist Wang Yonghong told the rally that he was beaten up by Chinese agents on July 1, 2019, as he turned out to welcome President Tsai Ing-wen of democratic Taiwan in Manhattan.

“This was [the work of] a peripheral organization linked to the Chinese Communist Party,” Wang said. “It doesn’t matter what guise they take: they are all the spies, lackeys, goons and accomplices of Beijing and are all evil organizations.”

New York-based Xiao Li welcomed the protests. “I am glad that so many people care about the struggles of ordinary Chinese people and the Chinese people’s desire for democracy,” Xiao said. “It makes me very happy.”

California protests

Further protests were held on Feb. 25 outside the Chinese consulates in Los Angeles and San Francisco, amid calls for an end to Chinese spy balloons flying over the United States.

“It rained heavily in LA today, but I still saw a lot of people turn out at the gate of the Chinese consulate to protest against the Chinese Communist Party’s transnational infiltration and arrests,” protester Xie Zeng, a member of the banned China Democracy Party from the southwestern city of Chongqing told Radio Free Asia.

“I will continue to take part in these activities, because it’s our responsibility to do so,” she said.

On Feb. 24, British shadow foreign minister Catherine West called on the foreign secretary to assess how the Foreign Office would respond to reports of intimidation by Chinese intelligence officers towards Hong Kong nationals and Uyghur Muslims living in the United Kingdom.

Minister of State at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office Anne-Marie Trevelyan told the House of Commons: “The UK Government takes the protection of individuals’ rights, freedoms and safety in the UK very seriously.”

“The UK will continue to defend human rights, speaking out and taking action where appropriate – as we have done over Hong Kong and Xinjiang,” she said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.