Day: June 15, 2023

A banned Hong Kong protest anthem has disappeared from music streaming services around the world after the city’s government applied for a court injunction banning its dissemination.

“Glory to Hong Kong,” which has sparked a police investigation after organizers played it instead of China’s national anthem at recent overseas sports events, was regularly sung by crowds of unarmed protesters during the 2019 pro-democracy and anti-extradition movement.

It is still sung at rallies and protests by Hong Kongers in exile around the world, but has been targeted by an ongoing crackdown on public dissent and political opposition under a draconian national security law since 2020.

Last week, the Hong Kong government applied for a High Court injunction banning it from being disseminated in any way, prompting mass downloads of the song that propelled it to the top of local music charts.

The hearing has been postponed to July 21, yet many versions of the song have already been removed from Spotify, Apple’s iTunes and other music platforms.

The song’s creators said they were having “technical issues.”

“Working on some technical issues not related to the streaming platform, sorry for the temporary impact,” they said in a post on their Facebook page. “Thank you to all our listeners.”

‘Live on in everyone’s hearts’

Comments under the announcement were sad but defiant.

“Really sad! It’s been taken down from Apple Music regardless of country,” wrote one user, while another said: “Even if it’s banned, this song will live on in everyone’s hearts. Go Hong Kong!”

Another added: “The most important thing is that you are safe.”

Spotify said in an emailed statement to the Associated Press and Reuters that the song had been pulled by its distributor and not the platform itself, while Facebook, Instagram, and Apple Music did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The song calls for freedom and democracy rather than independence, but was nonetheless deemed in breach of the law due to its “separatist” intent, officials and police officers said at the start of the current crackdown on dissent.

The high court has set the hearing date for the injunction at July 21.

If granted, the injunction will ban “broadcasting, performing, printing, publishing, selling, offering for sale, distributing, disseminating, displaying or reproducing [the song] in any way including on the internet,” according to a police statement on the injunction.

Francis Fong, president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation, said there are two possible reasons for the song’s disappearance from music platforms.

“It could be that the creators are worried about violating the national security law, and it wouldn’t be surprising if they removed it themselves,” Fong said. “It’s not the same as uploading to YouTube, where anyone can create an account and upload something.”

“You can’t just do that on iTunes, where you have to apply for an account so as to receive money, which means that [the authorities] have a way to track down whoever the author is,” he said.

“If they feel that things could be getting dangerous, they could have removed it themselves.”

Fong said many global platforms are also pretty responsive to government takedown requests, particularly relating to defamation, pornography and violent content, either with or without court orders.

“They will remove certain things if the police ask them to,” he said.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Cambodian journalist Mech Dara was presented with an award by the U.S. State Department on Thursday for his reporting about the prevalence of cyber-scam slavery compounds in his country.

Dara was one of eight journalists, activists and community leaders presented with a Hero Award by Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a morning ceremony at the State Department in Washington to mark the release of the 2023 U.S. Trafficking in Persons report.

A former reporter with The Cambodia Daily, Phnom Penh Post and Voice of Democracy, Dara led coverage of Cambodia’s scam-compound problem, with locals and foreigners alike being forced to work – under threat of violence – as the perpetrators of online scams targeting people across the world.

Dara’s reporting on compounds in Phnom Penh and the coastal casino town of Sihanoukville led Cambodian authorities, who initially denied the existence of the compounds, to acknowledge the problem and launch periodic raids on buildings housing the operations.

The compounds are typically run by Chinese crime syndicates with alleged ties to local Cambodian authorities, but one report by Al Jazeera even linked government senator Kok An and Hun To, the nephew of Prime Minister Hun Sen, to some of the operations.

Cambodia’s cyber-scam slavery problem has since been covered by news outlets around the world, including Al Jazeera’s 101 East, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, BBC, ABC Australia and Vice.

Cindy Dyer, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for the office to monitor and combat trafficking in persons, praised Dara’s extensive reporting for uncovering the issue and bringing it to international attention.

The award, she said, recognized “his courageous reporting on human trafficking for the purpose of forced criminality in Cambodia, which led to greater public awareness of, and improvement within, the Cambodian government’s anti-trafficking response.”

Trafficking in persons

The 2023 U.S. Trafficking in Persons report says “forced criminality in cyber scam operations” has become a multi-billion industry since the pandemic, as weak economies and travel restrictions have made vulnerable people more susceptible to being tricked into slavery. 

“Rather than fulfilling their advertised employment promises, many of these companies began forcing the recruits to run internet scams directed at international targets and subjecting them to a wide range of abuses and violations,” the report says, noting it is becoming a global problem, particularly in remote areas and border towns.

Among other methods, it says, compound owners enslave their victims through “withheld travel and identity documentation, imposition of arbitrary debt; restricted access to food, water, medicine, communication, and movement; and threats, beatings, and electric shocks,” and force them to carry out the scams.

Each year the report also places countries around the world into one of three tiers measuring their government’s efforts to combat human trafficking. Cambodia this year once again placed in the lowest tier, alongside China, Myanmar, Russia and North Korea, among others.

In Southeast Asia, the only better performer this year was Vietnam, which was upgraded from Tier 3 to the “Tier 2 watchlist,” alongside countries like Brunei, Malaysia, El Salvador, and South Africa.

Among the 30 Tier 1 countries – which the report notes  “does not mean that a country has no human trafficking problem” but rather “that a government has made efforts to address the problem” – are France, the United States, Seychelles, Colombia and Cyprus.

The only Asian designees in the top tier are Taiwan, Singapore and the Philippines. South Korea, Laos and Hong Kong fall in Tier 2.

During his visit this week to China, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas voiced support for China’s policies in the far western region of Xinjiang, where the United Nations has found credible patterns of torture and ill treatment against the mostly Muslim Uyghurs living there.

A joint statement issued shortly after Abbas met with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday declared that “Xinjiang-related issues are not human rights issues at all, but anti-violent terrorism, de-radicalization and anti-separatism.” 

“Palestine firmly opposes interference in China’s internal affairs under the pretext of Xinjiang-related issues,” it read.

The statement also declared the Palestinian Authority’s support for China in regards to Taiwan and Hong Kong, recognizing Xi’s government as the “only legal government representing the whole of China.”

Abbas is on a four-day trip to discuss China’s potential role in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, who live in territories occupied by Israel, which has imposed many restrictions on the movement and activities of the mostly Muslim Palestinians.

Prioritizing national interests

Although Palestinians would have reasons to support the Uyghurs, siding with China benefits Palestinians’ national interests, said Erkin Ekrem, an associate professor of China foreign policy at Hacettepe University in Turkey.

The Palestinian Authority is becoming more dependent on China and is in need of Chinese funds, technology and support on the international stage, he said.

“The Uyghur issue does not align with Palestine’s interests,” Ekren said. “Therefore, the primary concern here is the national interest of Palestine.”

“The benefits they can gain from China outweigh the gains of supporting the Uyghurs,” said Ekrem. “In this kind of situation, the Uyghur issue, despite the fact that the Uyghurs are Muslims, is not a priority for them.”

Ekrem noted that previous Palestinian leaders, including Yasser Arafat, expressed support for China’s Uyghur policies.

The Abbas and Xi’s joint declaration comes amid a growing body of evidence documenting the detention of up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and others in “re-education” camps, torture, sexual abuse and forced labor. 

In a comprehensive report released in August, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, found that China’s arbitrary detentions against Uyghur and other minorities in Xinjiang “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”

Yet a number of Muslim-majority countries have not criticized China’s policies in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region – or have openly supported them – so as not to alienate or upset Beijing, experts say.

Countering U.S. sway

China, meanwhile, has been drawing Arab countries closer to itself to counter U.S. influence in the Middle East, experts say.

Regarding Beijing’s role in brokering a peace deal between Israel and Palestine, China is trying to show itself to be a reliable partner in tackling regional issues, Giorgio Cafiero,  CEO and founder of Washington-based Gulf State Analytics, told RFA. 

“If the Chinese are able to make some progress on this issue, that would do a lot to send a message to regional actors about the benefits of working with Beijing instead of Washington when it comes to sensitive diplomatic files in the region,” said Cafiero. 

He said that Palestine sees itself as disadvantaged in its conflicts with Israel and would trust China more than the United States – a strong supporter of Israel – as a facilitator in peace talks.  

“I’m sure that viewers will be disappointed by this statement from Abbas, but the Palestinian leadership has to be pragmatic about how it engages with foreign governments,” he said. 

“At the end of the day, China is very important to Abbas, and his priority, being on good terms with China and improving his relationship with Beijing, involves him saying things that many Uyghurs do not like.”

Translated by Mamatjan Juma. Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is making a visit to Beijing in a bid to reopen communications between the world’s top powers after months of tensions and refusals by Chinese officials to speak with their U.S. counterparts. Blinken canceled a planned China trip in February after a Chinese spy balloon was found in U.S. airspace, but is going ahead this month despite revelations of a multibillion-dollar Chinese spy base in Cuba and other fresh bilateral irritants.

In a slow-motion blow-up that has been underway since March, a diplomatic row between China and India over journalist visas has prompted each side to minimize the other’s media presence in their territories.

China claims to have just one journalist left in India due to bureaucratic obstacles. This month, it instructed the Press Trust of India’s Beijing-based reporter to leave the country, Bloomberg reported earlier this week.

The situation means that the world’s two most populous nations, each with 1.3 billion people and sharing a more than 3,440-kilometer border, have hardly any of their own journalists in the other country.

“The Indian side has refused to review and approve Chinese journalists’ applications for stationing in India and limited the period of validity of visas held by Chinese journalists in India to only three months or even one month,” Wang Weibin, a foreign ministry spokesman, said in a regular press conference on Monday.

“As a result, the number of Chinese journalists stationed in India has plummeted from 14 to just one,” he said. “As we speak, the Indian side still has not agreed to renew the visa of the last Chinese journalist in the country.

“For Indian media outlets, four have been stationed in China in recent years and one is still working and living normally in China,” he said.

Points to strained ties

The Times of India reported that New Delhi had rejected two visa renewals from journalists with Xinhua and China Central Television

“This will be the first time ever that India has no journalists based in Beijing,” Aadil Brar, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Taiwan Fellow and a columnist on China for The Print India, told RFA’s Tibetan service.

“We’ve never seen a scenario quite like this and this tells you how difficult relations between India and China are right now,” he added.  

Writing in The Print, Aadil Brar said, “The issue of access to journalists was always tipped in favor of Beijing. Chinese state-backed and semi-independent news outlets such as CGTN and Phoenix TV continue to operate from India with locally hired staff.”

“With this, China will not have a single Indian journalist reporting from the country, down from four,” Brar said. “The other three journalists – from Hindustan Times, The Hindu, and Prasar Bharati – were either asked to leave the country or their visa renewal applications were denied.

No precedent

Brar noted that even during the Sino-Indian war of 1962, when the two countries clashed violently in two remote Himalayan border regions, Indian journalists were able to operate in Beijing.

Kanwal Sibal, former foreign secretary of India, told RFA’s Tibetan service that he did not expect any imminent breakthrough in relations that have been steadily eroding since renewed border clashes in 2020 in the Galwan Valley – a disputed section of their shared Himalayan border.

“I’m not sure what will happen at the G20 summit,” held in New Delhi on Sept. 9-10, he said.

“Let’s see if Xi Jinping comes,” Sibal said. “If there’s no dialogue between the two sides then it will be a disaster for both sides, [but] there can’t be a dialogue unless Xi Jinping comes.”

“The journalists that have been forced to leave won’t be going back anytime soon so that makes it difficult for Indians to learn about what’s going on in Beijing and similarly for Beijing to find out what’s going on in Delhi,” said Brar.

In a sign that China is not going to budge, on May 31 foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning warned, “As we speak, the Indian side still has not renewed the visa of the last Chinese journalist in the country.

“The number of Chinese journalists stationed in India is about to drop to zero.”

 

Edited by Malcolm Foster.