Day: March 9, 2023

Hong Kong police on Thursday arrested a prominent labor activist on suspicion of “collusion with foreign forces” under a draconian national security law that criminalizes public dissent, according to multiple media reports in the city.

Police arrested veteran labor unionist Elizabeth Tang, 65, who is married to jailed opposition politician Lee Cheuk-yan, on suspicion of “colluding with foreign forces to endanger national security,” according to the English-language South China Morning Post.

Officers stopped Tang, who was wearing black clothing in a possible show of solidarity with the 2019 protest movement, outside Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison, where Lee is currently serving time for “unauthorized assembly” in connection with protests in 2019 and 2020, the Beijing-backed Wen Wei Po newspaper reported.

The paper said the charges against Tang were likely linked to her work with the pro-democracy Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions she set up alongside Lee and other activists in 1990, which had been in receipt of overseas funding.

Lee is currently also awaiting trial under the national security law for “incitement to subvert state power” in connection with his leadership of the 32-year-old Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, which stands accused of acting as the agent of a foreign power alongside its other leaders, barrister Chow Hang-tung and veteran rights lawyer Albert Ho.

The Alliance organized annual vigils for the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park for three decades before the event was banned under the ongoing crackdown on dissent in the city. The group was among several prominent civil society groups to disband following investigation by police under the national security law that took effect from July 1, 2020.

‘They are framing her’

Tang’s arrest came after she set up a news research center affiliated with the Confederation of Trade Unions and after she left for the United Kingdom at the end of September 2022, the Wen Wei Po – which is owned by Beijing’s Central Liaison Office in Hong Kong – reported, without explaining why she had returned.

Current affairs commentator Sang Pu said Tang’s arrest shows that the authorities continue to pursue political opposition figures using the law.

“They are framing her, saying she harmed national security,” Sang said. “Basically, they want to wipe out their political opponents.”

“Everything I know of Lee Cheuk-yan and everything I have heard about Elizabeth Tang leads me to believe that they never had overthrowing the People’s Republic of China as their goal,” he said. “This crackdown under the national security law is targeting important figures in the pro-democracy camp and the labor movement.”

Sang said the couple married in 1985 and formed the Confederation of Trade Unions five years later.

“They have devoted a lot of effort to helping workers in Hong Kong, and to the international labor movement,” he said. “What does that have to do with endangering national security?”

“How is helping foreign domestic helpers in labor disputes relevant to national security?”

Lee’s current jail terms are related to his attendance at rallies on Aug. 18 and Aug. 31, 2019, at the height of the protest movement, and to his participation in a Tiananmen massacre vigil on June 4, 2020, after the event had been banned.

He was arrested on Jan. 1, 2021, as he released a balloon bearing a slogan calling for the release of political prisoners near the Legislative Council.

Plunging democracy ranking

Hong Kong recently plummeted to 139th place in a global survey of democracy by the V-Dem research institution at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg.

Hong Kong’s scores relating to electoral democracy, political participation, media censorship and academic freedom had all fallen sharply since the last report in 2012, contributing to the low score, which is now in the bottom 20-30%, the report found.

U.S.-based Hong Kong Democracy Council executive director Anna Kwok welcomed the report.

“The most worrying thing is that Hong Kong has lost so many media organizations that can tell the truth, so it’s hard to get the news of what’s happening in Hong Kong to the rest of the world,” Kwok said.

“The report … also showed us that the winding back of freedom and democracy isn’t only happening in Hong Kong,” she said. “It’s a problem faced by people all over the world.”

Veteran activist and consultant to the Hong Kong Democracy Council Sunny Cheung said the closures of pro-democracy media outlets like the Apple Daily, Stand News and Citizen News under national security probes in recent years had contributed to the rapid decline in the city’s freedoms.

“The media used to be some of the best in the region, but now it has suddenly been suppressed,” Cheung said. “If the government goes ahead with [further national security legislation] and a “fake news” law … and other draconian legislation like an online security law … this is going to increase the sense of fear and turbulence and fear in Hong Kong.”

The U.S.-based think tank Freedom House said in a survey of global freedoms released on Thursday that the space for dissenting views had greatly diminished in Hong Kong under the national security law.

“In Hong Kong, following Beijing’s imposition of the draconian National Security Law in 2020, authorities began pursuing national security and sedition charges against both political activists and ordinary residents for expressing dissent, for example by playing protest songs, clapping in court, or putting up posters,” the report said.

“Those demanding democracy in places like … Hong Kong … desire … the freedoms and the institutions that will allow them to create a better life and a more just society over time,” it said.

China now ranks eighth from the bottom in the V-Dem study, and is the world’s most populous “closed autocratic” country, according to the definitions in the study.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

China and America are at risk of increasing tensions until a crisis leads to war “by accident,” Australia’s incoming ambassador to the United States, Kevin Rudd, said in an interview on Wednesday.

The Mandarin-speaking former Australian prime minister and foreign minister and current president of the New York-based Asia Society takes the reins as Canberra’s top diplomat in Washington this month.

Speaking to ABC Australia’s “7.30” program from New York, Rudd said Washington and Beijing risked sleepwalking into a conflict.

“The overall state of the U.S.-China relationship is in bad strategic repair,” said Rudd, a career diplomat who served as Australia’s prime minister between 2007 and 2010 and again in 2013. 

Australia, he said, must help bridge the gap between China, which is Australia’s main trading partner, and the United States, which has served as the country’s military guarantor since World War II.

“Our job as friends, partners and allies of the United States – and as strategic partners with China – is to encourage both Beijing and Washington to move in the direction of a new strategic framework of managed strategic competition, to build new strategic guardrails into their relationships so that we do not end up with a crisis, escalation and war by accident,” he said. 

“That, I think, is a responsibility we share with all U.S. allies around the world and partners of China.”

Tides of war

Rudd’s comments came in response to a spate of warnings from Beijing, including from new Foreign Minister Qin Gang, the former Chinese ambassador to Washington, who used his first media appearance in the role on Tuesday to warn of inevitable conflict “if the U.S. does not hit the brakes” in its approach to China.

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday also claimed “Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression of China,” and on Wednesday called for the military to upgrade “more quickly.”

Rudd said he found it surprising for Chinese leaders to openly “point to the possible inevitability of conflict” with the United States.

“It was unusual, and it was blunt,” Rudd said. “In fact, I’ve been struggling for the last 24 hours to find a time when a Chinese paramount leader has attacked the United States by name. I think you have to go back, probably, to the 90s. So this is unusual.” 

But he added that the statements “need to be understood in China’s domestic political context” – as a way for Xi and Qin to express to Chinese citizens problems they face due to “external pressures.” 

“Both [Qin’s] statements and those of President Xi Jinping, I think, are very mindful of China’s domestic challenges at present,” Rudd said, listing, in particular, “the fact that economic growth has been very slow during 2022 [and] that there has been a whole lot of domestic political reaction to COVID pressures as well.”

Submarines

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and U.S. President Joe Biden are expected to meet in San Diego, California, on Monday as part of the new military and security pact between the three nations known as AUKUS.

Albanese served as Rudd’s deputy prime minister in 2013 and came to power last year pledging a more diplomatic approach than the outgoing conservative government when it comes to managing Australia’s balancing act between Beijing and Washington.

Yet he has continued Canberra’s participation in the AUKUS pact and the related “Quad” partnership between Australia, India, Japan and the United States aimed at countering China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific, and is set to announce the purchase of a number of U.S.-made nuclear-powered submarines at Monday’s event.

Albanese is currently in India, and appeared in an extravagant pre-game show alongside Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the morning before the start of a major cricket match between the two countries at a stadium recently renamed after the Indian prime minister in his hometown of Ahmedabad on Thursday.

Asked on the 7.30 program if such U.S.-led regional alliances aimed at China risked provoking Beijing into attacking Australia, Rudd said he did not believe so, even if they clearly irked China’s leaders.

“Chinese long-term doctrine, going back decades, has been one of fairly open hostility towards the retention of any alliance structures in Asia, or beyond Asia, which they regard … as relics of the Cold War era,” Rudd said, adding Australia never “accepted that logic.”  

Due to Australia’s enormous territorial size relative to its economy and military, he argued, entering into multilateral security pacts with like-minded allies was “acting in our national interest.”  

“We regard the alliance with the United States as part and parcel of the fabric of Australia’s overall national security,” he said. 

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Chinese leaders aspire to global economic, political, and even spiritual leadership.  But unless the Chinese Communist Party relaxes its suffocating restrictions on civil society, Chinese citizens won’t be able to fulfill their creative and human potential.  Without independent assessments of the utility and moral integrity of its policies, no government can understand its errors and make changes, and keep its own power in check.

Free access to information strengthens society, but in 2017, Chinese leader Xi Jinping explained that “the [CCP] manages the media by putting all media at all levels under the leadership of the party.” 

Censorship disadvantages the Chinese people in comparison to their counterparts in democratic societies.  They are deprived of full access to scientific facts, historical and social scientific research, and the humanistic contributions and political debates that broaden our thinking and allow informed reflection on the challenges and possibilities of life in society.   Instead, most of the Chinese people have access only to what the state allows.  All public information and opinion are shaped in ways that putatively ensure the stability of the regime, not reflecting the objective reality of events.

Xi, now safely ensconced in a third term as top leader of the Communist Party, is using this year’s session of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, to push structural changes that would tighten party control over security, intelligence, scientific and technological institutions, as well as over financial institutions–consolidating more political power in his hands. This will also choke the flow of information.

In free societies, schools and universities have been incubators for new ideas and techniques, and for the development of individual character.  But in China, education and research at all levels has been co-opted to control the people’s knowledge and understanding through propaganda, according to official directives on “adhering to political standards” and “strengthening and improving ideological and political work” at the primary, secondary, and university levels.

Xi’s support for “think tanks with Chinese characteristics” serves as an evidence for the suppression of independent research and thought. According to an Opinion published in 2015, the basic principle is to “adhere to the Party’s leadership.” In August 2019, an independent think tank promoting economic liberalism and constitutional democracy was shut down because it was deemed “unregistered and unauthorized.”

Clearly, the CCP-ruled government is afraid of independent research and thought it cannot control.   Since its release in November last year, ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence application, has amassed over 100 million users, and aroused a flurry of activity as engineers race to incorporate AI into their products. In China, Baidu is trying to keep pace with its Ernie Bot.  But restrictions imposed by censorship and surveillance put it at a severe disadvantage. China’s industrial sector and overall economy is the loser.

What is even worse is how the Chinese state imposes itself on the moral and spiritual life of the people.  Despite being peaceful and non-political, religious movements not under state control are ruthlessly persecuted; in 2022, for example, more than 10,000 members of the Church of Almighty God were arrested, with over 3,000 tortured and 14 killed, according the Church’s records. China has become the world’s worst abuser of religious freedom, violently suppressing other minority communities like Falun Gong, Buddhism, and, in a region-wide program of incarceration and torture in Xinjiang, Islam. 

Protestant Christianity is growing faster in China than anywhere on Earth, by about 10 percent annually.  Today there are about 38 million believers, up from 22 million just a decade ago. If this trend holds by 2030, China could be the “world’s most Christian nation.” 

Because the government insists on being the sole source of authority and meaning for the Chinese people, the authorities feel threatened by this dramatic development, itself a sign of the spiritual vacuousness of Marxist materialism. Against the growth of religious denominations, the government has responded with violent crackdowns and persecution, as well as by clumsy efforts to insert state ideology and propaganda into Christian houses of worship. 

Following a 2017 regulation, the State should “actively guide religion to adapt to socialist society” and “practice the core values of socialism.” In April 2016, at the National Religious Work Conference, Xi stated: “Providing active guidance for the adaptation of religions to socialist society is to guide religious believers to love the motherland and the people, safeguard the unity of the motherland and… uphold the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist system.” At another conference in 2021, Xi stressed the need to guide religious figures and believers to “cultivate and practice the core values of socialism.” 

The CCP degrades and subjugates historical faiths, attempting to make them into propaganda tools, as Stalin did with the Russian Orthodox Church.  But in claiming to construct a “spiritual civilization,” and pretending socialism is a religion, Xi has drawn upon a language of religious idealism, and thus inadvertently validated their moral power.   In Tibet, so many images of Xi saturate daily existence that party bosses claim many Buddhists consider him a living Bodhisattva.  

By promoting the belief that he is some form of deity, Xi is mimicking, and revealing his envy of the transcendental faith he has tried to stamp out. But while arrogating to himself unlimited power in both the political and spiritual realm, unconstrained by civil society and democratic institutions, he has also set China on a course that is dangerous to itself, and to other societies.

Aaron Rhodes is Senior Fellow at the Common Sense Society and President of the Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe. Cheryl Yu is Senior Researcher in China and human rights at the Common Sense Society.