Day: March 31, 2023

Vietnamese police have been harassing a former prisoner of conscience released from jail in December 2022 after serving most of a five-year sentence on charges of distributing materials against the state and participating in protests against the government.

Nguyen Thi Ngoc Suong, 55, told Radio Free Asia on Friday, that the harassment began after she attended the appeals trial of activists Nguyen Thai Hung and his spouse, Vu Thi Kim Hoang, at the People’s Court in the southern province of Dong Nai on March 29. Authorities asked her to leave the courtroom.

On Friday, Dinh Quan district police summoned her and warned her not to attend other trials. They also said policemen would check on her often. 

“Recently, the police have watched me very closely,” Suong told Radio Free Asia after she met with police. “They came to see me right after I returned home [from the trial]. They said I was not allowed to do this.” 

At the end of the meeting, a police officer told her: “I’ll visit you every couple of days.” 

Suong said she did not remember the officer’s name because he was not wearing a name badge. 

When RFA contacted Dinh Quan district police to verify the information, a staffer asked for the name of the officer for verification. 

Suong, who said her health has been deteriorating since her release, was convicted in May 2019 under Article 117 of Vietnam’s penal code. The article, which criminalizes “making, storing, distributing or disseminating information, documents and items” against the state. Violators can be sentenced to from five to 20 years in prison.  

Suong was freed last Dec. 13 in poor health, 10 months before her jail term ended. 

Health issues while detained 

While in prison, Suong had several physical ailments, including liver and kidney swelling, elevated liver enzymes, a bacterial infection in her stomach and thyroid issues.   

The only treatment she received was the medicine that prison officials gave to all inmates to treat various diseases.  

“When I took them, my condition got worse,” Suong said. “I remember one time I could not speak because my body was swollen from top to toe, including my mouth and tongue.” 

Suong said she believes her health deteriorated because she had been subjected to forced labor at Dong Nai police’s B5 temporary detention facility where she was held during the investigation period, and later at An Phuoc Prison, where she was held after an appeals trial. She produced votive paper offerings without protective gear.  

Suong also said she had not been paid for her labor, though Vietnamese law stipulates that inmates should receive some compensation for labor they perform in jail.  

While she was at the temporary detention facility from October 2018 to early December 2019, Suong’s family had to bribe staffers so they could get supplies to her, though she never received them after the payments were made, she said.  

When Suong had a medical check after she was released, her doctor said she was very weak and it would be difficult for her to improve her physical condition because she took too much pain reliever in previous years.  

RFA could not reach officials at Dong Nai police or An Phuoc Prison for comment. 

Arrested and charged in 2018 

Suong was arrested along with activist Vu Thi Dung in October 2018, and they were both brought to court in the same case for using different Facebook accounts to watch videos and read articles containing anti-state content. 

They both allegedly called for protests against draft laws on the creation of new special economic zones and cybersecurity, and were said to have incited locals people to take to the streets.  

The indictment also said that Dung had produced anti-state leaflets and asked Suong to distribute them at four different places in Dinh Quan town of Dong Nai province. 

Dung was sentenced to six years in prison and will complete her jail term this month.  

Suong received the Tran Van Ba Award for 2021-2022 along with four other Vietnamese activists — Nguyen Thuy Hanh, Huynh Thuc Vy, Vo An Don and Nguyen Thi Ngoc Hanh. 

Named for a Vietnamese dissident and freedom fighter executed in 1985 on charges of treason and intent to overthrow the government, the award is given annually to Vietnamese in Vietnam in recognition of their courageous action for freedom, democracy, justice and independence for their country.

Translated by Anna Vu for RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Matt Reed.

Western Myanmar’s once bustling town of Thantlang, with a sign above its gateway proclaiming that its inhabitants are “Not rich, but happy,” now lies in ruin after an onslaught of military raids, arson attacks, and airstrikes.

Two years after the military seized power in a coup d’etat, the Chin state township on the border of India’s Mizoram state is a shell of its former self. A resident who, like others RFA Burmese spoke with for this report, declined to be named out of security concerns, said the once bustling hub is now little more than a smoking ash heap.

“Our town is in dead silence as all residents have fled,” he said. “The only thing we hear from the area is gunshots and bomb blasts. It was a growing town before the military coup but it is now a deserted ruin.”

The inhabitants of Thantlang were quick to oppose the Feb. 1, 2021 coup and by September of that year had formed several anti-junta People’s Defense Force groups to counter a military offensive in the region.

Clashes between the two sides broke out on Sept. 19, 2021, during which junta troops shot and killed a Christian religious leader as he tried to put out fires in the township. Slightly more than a month later, junta soldiers returned to Thantlang and burned down two churches and at least 164 homes.

The September and October attacks sent more than 10,000 people – the entire population of Thantlang – fleeing to nearby villages and across the border into India, residents told RFA.

Since then, the military has returned several times to raze the township, including on June 9, 2022, when soldiers torched the decades-old Thantlang Baptist Church and set fire to homes.

The Chin National Front claims that in the two years since the coup, the junta launched more than 140 airstrikes on Thantlang, destroying many of the town’s buildings, including the CNF’s headquarters. The Thantlang PDF says junta troops have fired more than 100 heavy artillery shells at the town in 2023 alone.

In February, a member of the Thantlang PDF documented the destruction in a video, which he shared with RFA, claiming that “two-thirds of the town has been reduced to ashes because of [junta] arson.”

“The junta soldiers have raided and looted the remaining houses,” he said at the time. “They took whatever they wanted including rice, food, household items and everything … Only empty houses remain there.”

Airstrike on Khuabung village

The latest attack took place on Thursday, when two jets dropped bombs on Thantlang’s Khuabung village, around five miles (8 kilometers) from the township seat. The airstrike killed at least eight residents, including a six- and nine-year-old, and injured 20 others. It also set fire to multiple structures.

Salai Htet Ni, the spokesman for the ethnic Chin National Front, told RFA that Thursday’s attacks were unprovoked and intentionally targeted a civilian population.

“There is no member of [the armed resistance] in the location where the military junta dropped bombs – it was just a civilian village,” he said, calling the regime “a terrorist organization.”

“This attack is the proof of what [junta chief Senior Gen.] Min Aung Hlaing said in his Armed Forces Day speech, that he is ‘taking decisive action.’ They are just targeting innocent civilians and this is part of an attempt to wipe our Chin ethnic group from the face of the earth.”

The junta has not released any information about why it attacked Khuabung, and attempts by RFA to reach Thant Zin, the junta’s social affairs minister and spokesman for Chin state, went unanswered Friday. 

Salai Mang Hrang Lian, an official with the Chin Human Rights Group, told RFA that targeting civilians and burning down religious buildings are “war crimes.”

“No one is allowed to target and attack innocent civilians, religious buildings like churches, hospitals and schools,” he said. “This is the universal code of military conduct and the international basic rule of the law of armed conflict … The fact that the junta has committed war crimes is made clear when considering the incidents in Thantlang.”

Chin state under attack

And while the destruction in Thantlang is significant, it is only a small part of what the military has done in Chin state and elsewhere in Myanmar.

According to Chin civil groups, there are currently around 60,000 people displaced by conflict in Chin state, and around 50,000 others who have fled across the border to India’s Mizoram and Manipur states. The 60,000 inside Chin are part of an estimated 1.7 million refugees in Myanmar, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said this month.

Junta troops have killed nearly 400 people, including civilians and PDF members, and destroyed more than 4,300 homes in Chin state since the coup, according to the Institute of Chin Affairs. Thailand’s Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma) says that authorities in Myanmar have killed at least 3,194 civilians since the takeover – mostly during peaceful anti-junta protests.

Speaking to RFA on Friday, a resident of Thantlang who fled fighting there said he would never forgive the junta for what it did to his town.

“Thantlang was a great town before the military came into power,” he said. “Business was booming with many grocery stores and tea shops on each roadside. It was a bustling town and people enjoyed living there. But it has been reduced to ashes and now all I have left is bitterness toward the junta.”

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Matt Reed.

A criminal cyber spy group believed to be backed by the North Korean government poses as journalists, academics and experts to trick its victims into giving out information that can be used for espionage.

It also spoofs websites of legitimate organizations to trick targets into giving out information that can be used in cybercrimes the group carries out to fund itself, according to a new report that tracked the cyber attackers’ operations over five years.

Google Cloud’s cybersecurity subsidiary firm Mandiant classified the group, which it calls APT43 and which it has been monitoring since 2018, as a “moderately-sophisticated cyber operator that supports the interests of the North Korean regime.” 

The designation of the group as a “named threat actor” indicates that Mandiant’s cyber analysts had enough evidence to attribute activity to a specific group.

APT stands for “advanced persistent threats,” which the firm says are groups that “receive direction and support from an established nation state.”

APT43 has also been called “Kimsuky” or “Thallium” by other firms, which have their own naming conventions. Mandiant believes the firm could be part of North Korea’s main foreign intelligence agency.

“APT43 has demonstrated it can be quite fluid at adapting to the needs of the regime and shifts their targeting accordingly,”  Gary Freas, a senior analyst at Mandiant, told RFA.

According to the report, APT43 conducted espionage against South Korean and U.S.-based government organizations, members of academia and think tanks that deal with North Korean geopolitical issues, and engaged in cyber crime to steal and launder crypto currency.

Impersonating experts

APT43’s most common attack involves impersonating experts or journalists in spear-phishing emails with the goal of getting information out of its victims. 

In this scheme, the attacker poses as a reporter or a think tank analyst to collect intelligence, including by asking experts and academics to answer questions on topics related to North Korea. Often the attackers pretend to be people who are well known in their field to develop rapport with others in the field before asking them to provide strategic analysis on specific subjects.

In a sample example provided in the report, an attacker pretended to be a journalist with an email address ending in “@voanews.live,” which is similar to the “@voanews.com” addresses used by journalists working for U.S news outlet Voice of America.  

The email requested a reaction to an Oct. 4, 2022, North Korean ballistic missile launch that flew over Japan, including asking the recipient if it meant that another North Korean nuclear test could be imminent, and if Japan might increase its defense budget or pursue a more “proactive” defense policy.

Because the focus of these types of attacks is often North Korean security and nuclear development, Mandiant believes “with moderate confidence” that APT43 operates under the Reconnaissance General Bureau, or RGB, North Korea’s main foreign intelligence service.

“Campaigns attributed to APT43 are closely aligned with state interests and correlate strongly with geopolitical developments that affect Kim Jong-un and the hermit state’s ruling elite,” the report said. “Since Mandiant has been tracking APT43, they have consistently conducted espionage activity against South Korean and U.S.organizations with a stake in security issues affecting the Korean peninsula.”

Mandiant also noted that it detected a shift in the group’s activity between October 2020 and October 2021 toward targeting the health care sector and pharmaceutical companies, likely to gather information to support a North Korean response to COVID-19. This indicates that the group adapts to changing priorities of the North Korean government.

“The kinds of questions we’re seeing them ask when they commission papers and when they ask for interviews are very much about potential responses to different stimuli,” Jenny Town, director of the Washington-based Stimson Center’s 38 North Project, during a discussion about APT43 in a podcast hosted by Mandiant. 

“And really, [they’re] trying to better understand how different actions might be perceived, presumably to help them better decide where red lines are,” she said.

Emails indicate objectives

Town, who has herself been targeted by APT43 and impersonated by them when they target others, said that the emails can show what North Korea’s goals might be.

“The questions they’re asking make a lot of sense and give us a sense of the kinds of things they might be thinking of doing as well,” she said. “It’s always been really interesting to see the evolution and what they’ll ask different people.”

Freas said that the questions in the emails often show North Korea’s intent.

“Whenever APT43 goes after people, pretending to be a reporter or prominent analyst, they ask questions that are so specific to the regime’s priority intelligence requirements that they show us their hand,” he said. “This gives us good insight into what’s going on in the closed off nation and that data is very insightful to security vendors and for people that are trying to investigate this.” 

Town said that other experts have come to consider it an indication of their success in the field when they are impersonated by what seems to be North Korean cyber attackers. 

APT43 has also been known to target organizations for information about sanctions items that are banned for export to North Korea, the report said.

During the same podcast, Mandiant analyst Michael Barnhart said that APT43’s methods tend to work on older victims.

“Some of the younger folk aren’t so [eager] to click on a suspicious link, and so you might not get them quite there,” said Barnhart. “You’re looking at kind of an older crowd that probably has a little less cyber hygiene.”

‘Good at what they do’

“What this group lacks in sophistication they make up for in volume,” said Freas. “It is unique to see the success they are having with such widely known and frequently leveraged techniques.”

Freas explained that APT43 extensively researches people they can spoof and target to reach its goals.  

“If APT43 fails with one target or one persona, they simply move onto the next set. They are agile, and we see them spinning up new personas and infrastructure for targeting very quickly, and at scale,” said Freas.

Barnhart said in the podcast that awareness of the group’s methods was necessary for potential victims to protect themselves.

“We’re trying to be proactive. We’re done kind of being reactive. We’re trying to try to get out there and get in front of it and your endpoint protections and stuff like that,” he said. “These guys … they’re good at what they do.”

Besides espionage, the group conducts internal monitoring of other North Korean groups and their operations.

Crypto laundering

For many years, the cash-strapped North Korean government has ordered government organizations to generate funds for their own operations, in line with North Korea’s founding juche ideology of self-reliance. 

For factories or collective farms, this might mean that they sell some of their product on the open market to generate funds for raw materials or farming equipment.

But for APT43, much of their funding comes from crypto currency theft and laundering. To compromise financial data, the group engages in credential collection campaigns.

“In particular, the group registers domains masquerading as popular search engines, web platforms, and cryptocurrency exchanges in relevant target countries of interest,” the report said. “We believe these credentials are used to support operations that further APT43 missions.”

An example in the report showed the spoofed website of Cornell University, which instructed users to sign in with their cornell.edu credentials. 

The group has also been known to spoof Google and Yahoo mail and other legitimate sites on domains it controls, to host “malicious scripts and tools,” said an advisory about the group published in 2020 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

APT43 launders the ill-gotten cryptocurrency to mine for new cryptocurrency that can’t be traced back to the theft.

“In other words, they use stolen crypto to mine for clean crypto,” the report said.

Unlike other groups that engage in cybercrime, APT43 seems to be funding itself rather than generating income for the North Korean regime, which Mandiant said suggests a “widespread mandate” for government-backed groups to remain operational without resources from the central government.

‘All-purpose sword’

Cyber attacks are the North Korean leadership’s “all-purpose sword,” and a weapon of mass destruction second only to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons, said Daniel Russel, former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs and current vice president for international security and diplomacy at the New York-based Asia Society Policy Institute.  

“For the DPRK, cyber is a high-impact, low-cost, and low-risk digital-age tool for stealing cash and cryptocurrency, hacking secrets, and for terrorizing wired nations,” Russel told RFA’s English Service. “APT43 is part of a large, elite corps of highly trained cyber hackers that has likely already stolen billions of dollars, blunting the effect of sanctions.”

Russel said that North Korea has also experimented with cyberattacks against infrastructure overseas.

“Developed countries with sophisticated urban, aviation, communications, and electrical infrastructure are particularly vulnerable,” he said, adding that cyber attacks can be camouflaged so that they are hard to attribute to a particular country or entity. “It is no accident that North Korean hackers are embedded in China and Russia, utilizing servers in those countries to make retaliation by the United States risky.”  

Russel said developing cyber capabilities can be done inexpensively, using widely available equipment.

“The spotlight on hacker groups like APT43 is essential, both as a warning to potential targets but also to galvanize cybersecurity companies to defend against their malicious attacks,” said Russel.

Edited by Boer Deng and Malcolm Foster.

It’s probably no coincidence that former Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou landed in Shanghai just a day before his successor, Tsai Ing-wen, took off for a two-night visit to New York on Tuesday.

Described officially as only personal travel, Ma’s visit to the mainland has seemed carefully stage-managed to shadow Tsai’s own so-called private “transit” through the United States, which Chinese officials have described as a “provocation” due to Beijing’s characterization of the self-governing island as a renegade province.

From their arrivals in New York and Shanghai, respectively the most populous cities in the United States and China and each country’s primary financial and business center, to their effusive praise for their host government, the trips have had an eerie mirror quality.

The only difference has been in where the praise has been directed.

“The bond between Taiwan and the United States is strong today,” Tsai said in New York, calling Taiwan a “beacon of democracy” in Asia and calling for closer ties between the island and the United States.

Ma, by contrast, on Thursday praised China’s “effective control measures” in Wuhan after the outbreak of COVID-19 there as a “contribution to the whole of humanity,” a report in Xinhua said. 

He also called for more cross-strait cooperation and applauded the Chinese authorities for “preventing the large-scale spread of the virus,” seemingly in spite of the global pandemic that has followed.

‘Propaganda effect’

Tsai departed on Friday for official visits over the weekend to Guatemala and Belize – the ostensible primary reason for her travel, necessitating the two rounds of “transit” through the United States – but returns on Tuesday for two further nights in Los Angeles. 

A planned meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has already drawn threats of “countermeasures” and “confrontation” from Beijing.

Ma leaves China for Taiwan on April 7, a day before Tsai’s return. 

Austin Wang, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said the reason for the mirrored trip was likely the “international propaganda effect that Beijing is hoping to achieve” by having Ma on the mainland during Tsai’s U.S. stays.

“After all, Ma Ying-jeou is a former president, and from the attention of domestic and foreign media, his visit to China gives a sense of ‘balance,’ as if Taiwan’s public opinion is not all leaning towards the U.S.,” Wang told Radio Free Asia on Thursday. 

The first leg of Tsai’s visit to America mostly passed without controversy, with Beijing seeming to be more concerned about her plans to meet McCarthy next week. Taiwanese and American officials have appeared careful to avoid a flare-up in relations between Washington and Beijing amid efforts to cool down months of mounting tensions.

Tsai on Thursday night, for instance, delivered a speech behind closed-doors at the InterContinental New York Barclay hotel – with media not invited – after receiving a global leadership award from the Hudson Institute, a conservative foreign-policy think tank. 

A leaked recording obtained by The Washington Post quoted Tsai as saying that Taiwan wanted to cool down relations with Beijing amid growing threats and predictions of an invasion, but also seek to keep a status quo where the island is not under China’s thumb.

“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a wake-up call to us all, and served as a reminder that authoritarianism does not cease in its belligerence against democracy,” Tsai reportedly said. “Taiwan has also long endured the peril of living next to an authoritarian neighbor.” 

‘Their battle is our battle’

At the same event on Thursday evening, Hudson Institute President John Walters praised Tsai, to whom the think tank presented an award for leadership previously granted to former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for resisting what he termed Beijing’s aggression.

“The Chinese Communist Party fears her because she and Taiwan are an inspiration for the Chinese people who aspire to be free and yearn for democracy,” Walters said, according to the event recording obtained by The Post. “Her battle – their battle – is our battle.”

It’s the kind of language Beijing had described as a “red line” and a violation of the “One China” principle that Taiwan belongs to China.

At a press briefing on Friday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning responded to Tsai’s praise of closer U.S.-Taiwan ties by saying that it proved her U.S. trip was not just “transit” on the way to Central America, but a visit in service of “Taiwanese independence.”

“Let me stress that no matter what the Taiwan authorities say or do, it won’t change the fact that Taiwan is part of China,” Mao added. “No one and no force can hold back China’s reunification.”

Wang from the University of Nevada said the Biden administration would likely be hoping to weather the two legs of “transit” through the United States by Tsai, a close ally, as it seeks to re-engage with Beijing, with Taiwan’s leader forced to accept that reality.

“The United States is currently in a position of hoping to observe whether there will be any changes or opportunities to re-engage with China after the two sessions, which may explain the low-key attitude of the U.S. towards handling Tsai Ing-wen’s transit,” he said.

“Taiwan is mostly in a relatively passive position.”

Private citizen

Tsai’s visit has already apparently been pared back, with reported plans for another speech – at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library next Wednesday, when she meets McCarthy – having apparently been canceled amid growing concerns from the Biden administration.

Melissa Giller, the library’s chief marketing officer, confirmed that Tsai would not speak at the event, and denied that had been the plan.

“We just said that we had invited her,” Giller told RFA on Friday. “No speech has been cancelled, as there was never a speech set up.”

While both Ma and Tsai’s trips out of Taiwan have been described as private, rather than official travel, one of the trips is clearly more private than the other, according to Bonnie Glaser, the director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Glaser told RFA that Ma is “a private citizen and as such can speak for himself,” but, unlike Tsai, “not for the rest of the citizens of Taiwan.” She said Tsai’s trip would serve the purpose of cementing U.S.-Taiwan ties. 

“The success of a transit should not be measured by whether or not there is a breakthrough. I expect that the transit will underscore the close U.S.-Taiwan relationship, including our shared interests and values,” Glaser said, adding that Beijing needed to look inward.

“There are many drivers of change in U.S.-China-Taiwan dynamics,” she explained, “but the most important is the growing coercive nature” of Beijing’s own recent approach to cross-strait relations.

Coming elections

The two leaders’ trips, in the end, appear at the very least to have drawn battle lines for the self-governing island’s January 2024 presidential election, which will decide Tsai’s successor.

The president is term-limited from running again, but her vice-president, Lai Ching-te, is expected to be the nominee for the ruling Democratic People’s Party, and has praised Tsai’s visit.

“I’m proud to see President Tsai represent our country with dignity. No matter the difficulties we face, Taiwanese people are calm, pragmatic, and confident in who we are,” Lai tweeted on Thursday.

Ma’s Kuomintang party, meanwhile, won the Taipei mayoral race in November and hopes to retake the presidency next year. 

Amid his trip, a spokesperson for Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office, Zhu Fenglian, said in a speech Thursday that Taiwan’s 23 million people would “enjoy tangible benefits after unification,” and promised they could maintain “a social system different from that of the mainland.”

Nonetheless, party spokesman Alfred Lin said a Kuomintang victory next year did not necessarily mean imminent reunification. The opposition party merely wanted to “engage in peaceful exchanges and coexist” with Beijing, he said, while keeping the status quo.

“The Kuomintang has always been opposed to the ‘One country, two systems’ model, and has never advocated for unification with the Chinese Communist Party, as we do not want to live under such an authoritarian regime,” Lin said, calling for forbearance.

“When a small country confronts a large one, we must have wisdom and patience,” he said. “We may never win this game, but we must never lose it. The best way for Taiwan is to maintain this game.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster

Plans by the police in Hong Kong to massively upgrade the city’s digital surveillance networks using 5G networked bodycams could result in a facial recognition system similar to China’s Skynet, according to opposition politicians, sparking fears that the city will soon be subject to totalitarian monitoring.

Police recently requested an additional H.K.$5.8 billion (around U.S.$740 million) to fund the project from the Legislative Council, which has been stacked with government supporters since changes to the electoral system imposed by Beijing to prevent democratic candidates from running for office.

The 2019 protest movement was cited as a key reason behind the Digital Policing initiative that aims to digitize police communications, including video and still images collected by devices belonging to police officers and members of the public, according to a briefing document sent to the legislature for debate on April 4.

The government has already boosted police funding to the tune of billions of Hong Kong dollars in the wake of the pro-democracy protests, which the authorities say were the work of “hostile foreign forces” seeking to foment a “color revolution” in the city.

“Through construction of a new digital highway to leverage advanced technologies such as optical fiber and WiFi … smartphones, tablet computers and Body Worn Video Cameras, coupled with the development of new mobile applications, the [police force] aims to improve connection among police officers and the speed of multimedia data transmission,” the document said.

“The [police force] must further enhance its command and communications, image processing and human resource management,” it said.

Real time video

Under the new system, officers will be able to send audio, video and images in real time from wherever they are, across 5G mobile broadband, to a central digital information platform that will be searchable using artificial intelligence, in a manner similar to that of China’s Skynet.

“The platform’s system configuration is compatible with other artificial intelligence image analysis tools to facilitate more efficient and accurate targeting of suspicious persons and … vehicles,” it said. 

“The platform … will substantially promote … case detection and intelligence analysis capabilities, especially for … cases involving national and public security,” it said.

Opposition politicians said the measures would turn Hong Kong into a police state and make people fear being targeted under the current crackdown on political dissent under a draconian national security law imposed by the ruling Chinese Communist Party from July 1, 2020.

Former pro-democracy lawmaker Ted Hui said the request is at odds with recent claims by the government that the national security law has succeeded in restoring a sense of normalcy to the city.

“It’s often said that Hong Kong has gotten back to normal under the national security law, and that the social turmoil is now over, with no risk of more arising,” said Hui, who fled the city amid an ongoing crackdown on peaceful political opposition and public criticism of the authorities.

“Do they really need to spend so much money on investigations and national security? I don’t think the police can justify it,” he said.

Tool for totalitarian control 

He said the new system would be a massive upgrade compared with the network of smart lamp posts installed by the authorities during the 2019 protest movement, which have surveillance cameras preinstalled.

“There are more than 30,000 police officers in Hong Kong, and each one carries a camera on their body,” Hui said. “They are monitoring people at all times.”

It’s a bit like the old days of the police political department, monitoring whether or not there is a crime – it’s a tool for the totalitarian control of society,” he said, drawing parallels with China’s Skynet nationwide facial recognition and surveillance system.

“It makes me think of the monitoring and artificial intelligence used in Chinese cities, and that this is the total mainlandization of Hong Kong,” Hui said, in a reference to the ongoing blurring of boundaries between the city and the rest of China.

Avery Ng of the League of Social Democrats said the Legislative Council no longer challenges the government or acts as a curb on the administration.

“Billions of billions of dollars for this piece of equipment – we have no way of checking whether it is worth the money,” Ng said, adding that the government can now treat the legislature like “a cash machine with no password.”

“The national security police want billions just to upgrade their artificial intelligence and to set up a communications platform,” he said. “Is Hong Kong really that dangerous – because I’d like to know.”

“If law and order were really such a big problem in Hong Kong, wouldn’t it be better to use the money to hire more police officers and add staff to the crime-reporting hotlines?”

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Matt Reed.

A Thai court on Friday began the trial of 28 Chinese Christians charged with overstaying their visa, and who were in the country seeking protection from the United Nations refugee agency claiming religious persecution back home, police said.

The Associated Press news agency reported that the Chinese were fined and released on Friday. The Chinese exiles belong to the Shenzhen Holy Reformed Church, also known as the Mayflower Church.

One police official said the group of 63 Christians including 35 children, who had been arrested Thursday afternoon, would likely not be deported back to China.

 “No, there won’t be that thing. It’s not going to happen,” Col. Tawee Kutthalaeng, chief of the Nong Prue police station, told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated news service.

“We did not charge all of them because there were children as well. They were charged with overstaying their visas, staying too long and not renewing their visas.”

Thailand is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, but the non-refoulement principle under international human rights law states that people cannot be sent back to a country where they are likely to be persecuted, tortured, mistreated or have their human rights violated.

The group of 63 Chinese had fled their homeland in 2019, making their way first to South Korea’s Jeju Island, before landing in Thailand last year, according to RFA’s Mandarin Service.

Nury Turkel, chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), expressed concern about the Chinese exiles in Thailand.

“Members of the Mayflower Church are at imminent risk of being deported to China, where they will face severe consequences, including imprisonment and torture,” he said in a tweet on Thursday.

According to an American NGO, Freedom House, Christianity has expanded rapidly in China since 1980, but is strictly controlled by the state.

“The Chinese authorities seek to monitor and control Christians by encouraging them – sometimes forcefully – to join state-sanctioned churches that are affiliated with ‘patriotic’ associations and led by politically vetted clergy,” says a 2017 Freedom House report.

“Religious leaders and congregants who refuse to register for theological or practical reasons risk having their place of worship shuttered and face detention, beatings, dismissal from employment, or imprisonment.”

Certain religions and religious groups, including Christian “house churches” that operate independently from state-sanctioned ones, are persecuted harshly, according to Freedom House’s 2023 Freedom in the World report.

In October, the pastor associated with the Mayflower Church, Pan Yongguang, who is also in Thailand, told RFA that he was afraid of being caught in an immigration prison and eventually deported to China.

“I can’t fall into their hands. If they find me and put me in an immigration prison, they will take me back to China,” he had said.

“I will not voluntarily return to mainland China, and I will not choose to commit suicide.”

‘China’s threats have never stopped’

Meanwhile, Deana Brown, an American who was also arrested briefly with the group according to the Associated Press, said Friday that renewing visas for the Chinese nationals was not easy.

She told AP that when the Chinese exiles had sought to renew their Thai visas, they had been told they had to first report to their country’s embassy.

“We knew [then] that nobody could get their visas,” Brown told AP.

“There was no way, because as soon as they walk into the Chinese Embassy they’re gone, we would not see them again. They’ve been hiding out since then.”

Brown is the founder of a Texas-based organization called Freedom Seekers International, which says on its website that it “exists to rescue ‘last resort’ and the most severely persecuted Christians in hostile and restrictive countries.”

The organization says it “is taking the lead role in establishing a new life for them in Tyler, Texas.”

Fu Xiqiu, chairman of the China Aid Association, a Christian NGO headquartered in the United States, told RFA on Thursday that one of the church members had been coerced into informing the Thai authorities where they were staying. That is what prompted the immigration raid and arrest, Fu alleged.

“Based on the way other missing persons were treated in the past, this must be the CCP’s mafia behind the scenes,” he said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

“We call on the international community to lend a helping hand urgently to stop the atrocities. We can imagine that if these adults and children return to China, they will definitely be imprisoned and persecuted.”

Fu further alleged that threats from Chinese authorities have continued despite the church members being in exile.

“China’s threats have never stopped, including family members being kidnapped, threatened, and interrogated,” Fu claimed.

“Even in Jeju Island, they were threatened by text messages and phone calls from the CCP Consulate in Jeju Island, saying that they were traitorous, treasonous, and endangering national security.”

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.