Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17841591
The World Health Organization has urged China to share data on the origins of the Covid pandemic, five years on from its start in the city of Wuhan.
"This is a moral and scientific imperative," the WHO said in a statement to mark what it called the "milestone" anniversary.
"Without transparency, sharing, and co-operation among countries, the world cannot adequately prevent and prepare for future epidemics and pandemics," it added.
Many scientists think the virus transferred naturally from animals to humans, but some suspicions persist that it escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.
China has not responded to Monday's WHO statement. In the past it has strongly rejected the lab leak theory.
In September, a team of scientists said it was "beyond reasonable doubt" that the Covid pandemic started with infected animals sold at a market, rather than a laboratory leak.
[...]
[WHO] director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said at the time that at least seven million people had died in the pandemic.
But he added that the true figure was "likely" closer to 20 million deaths - nearly three times the official estimate.
Since then, the WHO has repeatedly warned against complacency about the possible emergence of future Covid-like illnesses.
Dr Ghebreyesus has said the next pandemic "can come at any moment" and has urged the world to be prepared.
[...]
The US Treasury Department notified lawmakers on Monday that a China state-sponsored actor infiltrated Treasury workstations in what officials are describing as a “major incident.”
[...] ATreasury official said it was informed by a third-party software service provider on December 8 that a threat actor used a stolen key to remotely access certain Treasury workstations and unclassified documents.
“Based on available indicators, the incident has been attributed to a Chinese state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor,” Aditi Hardikar, assistant secretary for management at the US Treasury, wrote in the letter.
A Treasury spokesperson said in a statement to CNN that the compromised service has been taken offline and officials are working with law enforcement and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“There is no evidence indicating the threat actor has continued access to Treasury systems or information,” the Treasury spokesperson said.
[...]
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241231023952/https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/baltic-subsea-sabotage-were-letting-russia-and-china-undertake-target-practice/)
Weak-kneed responses to attacks on Baltic cables risk allowing the Russia-China axis to conduct free target practice against NATO critical infrastructure, promoting the two countries’ proficiency, interoperability and lethality.
Thanks to this opportunity, Russian crews and their masters ashore will become much better at crippling critical infrastructure connecting NATO states just as Europe is preparing for a defensive war against Moscow’s aggression. And Chinese planners and crews will similarly become more adept at waging this form of hybrid warfare in the Indo-Pacific.
The presence of China-flagged vessels near disruptions to undersea cable infrastructure in Europe in 2024 raises questions about whether Beijing’s involvement was accidental, surveillance-related or part of a coordinated effort. That Beijing calls itself Moscow’s ‘no-limits’ partner suggest its involvement in the suspected sabotage was plausible, if not probable. Even if China wasn’t involved, it will be eager and able to learn from Russia’s experience.
This seems indeed be the main theme of Putin and ‘war economist’ Andrei Belousov, who has pushed for aggressive state spending to boost arms production even before he was appointed Russia’s ‘defense minister.’
Russia’s military spending might officially reach ~7 percent of GDP in 2024, many economist say it may even be higher.
In 2025, Russia plans to spend 40 oercent of its state budget for the military, up from 30 percent in 2024.
***This is an opinionated piece by Peter Pomerantsev, senior fellow at SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University.--***
It’s also in Ukraine that one realises that “freedom” and “sovereignty” exist in a collaborative relationship with others. Ukraine is now defending its neighbours’ freedom from an advancing Russia. Kyiv’s resistance is benefiting Taiwan’s freedom, too.
[...]
As Ukraine prepares for possible negotiations, its leadership is asking what “guarantees” its partners can give. If “international order”, “Europe” and even “Nato” are flaky concepts, how can guarantees be secured into something real? **Ukrainians remember the Budapest memorandum of 1994, when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for promises from Russia, the US and Britain to respect its borders**. Everyone fears a repeat of those empty words. Even if Russia agrees to a ceasefire next year, what’s to stop it rearming and attacking again?
[...]
The idea that freedoms and military production are so interdependent may jar with the pacifist instincts of some progressives. But here Ukraine can offer a pointed lesson. Ever since she won the Nobel peace prize, the Ukrainian human rights lawyer Oleksanda Matviichuk has been gracefully explaining to the world that even though, indeed because, she is a human rights activist, she also advocates for Ukraine’s right to self-defence and to return fire inside Russia at the military bases that are being used to murder Ukrainian civilians. “International law” is also an empty term if it can’t be defended literally.
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241226131107/https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/5055171-constitution-insurrection-trump-disqualification/)
*This is an opinionated article by legal experts: Evan Davis was editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review and David Schulte was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. Both clerked for Justice Potter Stewart. Davis is a New York lawyer who served as president of the New York City Bar and Schulte is a Chicago investment banker.*--
The Constitution provides that an oath-breaking insurrectionist is ineligible to be president. This is the plain wording of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. “No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” This disability can be removed by a two-thirds vote in each House.
Disqualification is based on insurrection against the Constitution and not the government. The evidence of Donald Trump’s engaging in such insurrection is overwhelming. The matter has been decided in three separate forums, two of which were fully contested with the active participation of Trump’s counsel.
[...]
The unlikelihood of congressional Republicans doing anything that might elect Harris as president is obvious. But Democrats need to take a stand against Electoral College votes for a person disqualified by the Constitution from holding office unless and until this disability is removed. No less is required by their oath to support and defend the Constitution.
[...]
[Edit typo.]
Today, December 29, the Putin-sponsored government of Georgia will attempt to install the illegitimate president, which the people did not elect. Live blog
"The Chinese people are so miserable," read a social media post in the wake of yet another mass killing in the country earlier this year. The same user also warned: "There will only be more and more copycat attacks."
"This tragedy reflects the darkness within society," wrote another.
Such bleak assessments, following a spate of deadly incidents in China during 2024, have led to questions about what is driving people to murder strangers en masse to "take revenge on society".
Attacks like this are still rare given China's huge population, and are not new, says David Schak, associate professor at Griffith University in Australia. But they seem to come in waves, often as copycat attempts at garnering attention.
[...]
From 2019 to 2023, police recorded three to five cases each year, where perpetrators attacked pedestrians or strangers.
In 2024, that number jumped to 19.
[...]
In 2019, three people were killed and 28 injured in such incidents; in 2023, 16 dead and 40 injured and in 2024, 63 people killed and 166 injured. November was especially bloody.
On the 11th of that month, a 62-year-old man ploughed a car into people exercising outside a stadium in the city of Zhuhai, killing at least 35. Police said that the driver had been unhappy with his divorce settlement.
[...]
Days later, in Changde city, a man drove into a crowd of children and parents outside a primary school, injuring 30 of them. The authorities said he was angry over financial losses and family problems.
That same week, a 21-year-old who couldn't graduate after failing his exams, went on a stabbing rampage on his campus in Wuxi city, killing eight and injuring 17.
[...]
**China's slowing economy**
A major source of pressure in China right now is the sluggish economy. It is no secret that the country has been struggling with high youth unemployment, massive debt and a real estate crisis which has consumed the life savings of many families, sometimes with nothing to show for it.
Studies appear to point to a significant change in attitudes, with a measurable increase in pessimism among Chinese people about their personal prospects. [While in the past] inequality in society could often be attributed to a lack of effort or ability, [...] **people were now blaming an "unfair economic system"**.
[...]
**A lack of options**
In countries with a healthy media, if you felt you had been fired from your job unfairly or that your home had been demolished by corrupt builders backed by local officials, you might turn to journalists for your story to be heard. But that is rarely an option in **China, where the press is controlled by the Communist Party and unlikely to run stories which reflect badly on any level of the government.**
[...]
**Then there are the courts – also run by and for the party** – which are slow and inefficient. Much was made on social media here of the Zhuhai attacker's alleged motive: that he did not achieve what he believed was a fair divorce settlement in court.
An armada of aging oil tankers is helping to keep Russian oil flowing. Hundreds of vessels are part of a “shadow fleet” that’s allowed the Kremlin to dodge Western sanctions over its war on Ukraine. Bloomberg set out to uncover the traders, intermediaries and investors that make up this network, and how they’re getting rich in the process.
Finland’s PM Petteri Orpo (NCP) has called for firmer measures to combat the risks associated with the so-called shadow fleet of Russia, [saying he] had discussions about the issue with his counterparts from Denmark, Estonia, Norway, Poland, Sweden and the European Commission.
[Finnish] President Alexander Stubb, meanwhile, has been in contact with Nato.
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241228110106/https://theins.press/en/politics/277539)
**In Georgia's recent parliamentary elections, the decisive factor in the ruling Georgian Dream party’s victory was the use of “carousels”: a method of vote rigging in which voters cast their ballots at more than one polling station.**
In this case, those involved were predominantly male, allowing the fraud to be detected through a gender-based study of data that the Georgian Central Election Commission (CEC) inadvertently provided to independent observers.
Unlike in Russia, outright ballot stuffing is impossible in Georgia, so the orchestrators of carousel voting had to obtain IDs or other identification numbers from real voters who had been paid not to turn up at the polls. Election analyst Roman Udot estimates that a fair vote would have resulted in the ruling party losing its majority in parliament. Anyone interested in checking The Insider’s work can download the data and verify the accuracy of the calculation using this interactive tool.
[...]
Applying the methodology of renowned analyst Sergey Shpilkin to a pair of variables, The Insider was able to calculate the number of anomalous votes: approximately 300,000 in support of the Georgian Dream. The mathematical explanation for the anomaly is supported by eyewitness accounts of “carousel voting” by predominantly male groups.
Carousel organizers obtained genuine IDs — or at least their numbers — from real voters who had guaranteed they would not go to the polls. Carousel voters then used them to cast multiple ballots. The turnout figures showed no anomalies, as bribed ID holders did not come to the polling stations.
[...]
The main evidence of vote rigging is found in the reported electorate’s gender imbalance, which skews decidedly male. This is a statistical anomaly. In the absence of electoral fraud, the average turnout among men and among women would be roughly the same.
[...]
The CEC's gender data immediately raised suspicions. Initially, the CEC reported that 961,751 women and 1,098,661 men had cast ballots — an incredible figure for a nation where women outnumber men by 200,000. In response to the reasonable surprise of local observers, the CEC, in a frantic attempt to cover up the scandal, hid the original data. However, the government body inadvertently issued a document with detailed data for each polling station. The second report attempted to mask the initial anomaly by adding 91,911 female voters and hiding 88,975 male voters, but analysts were not fooled.
[...]
Such a ratio of male to female voters is inexplicable. If male and female voters showed the same level of electoral activity at each station (the same number of ballots cast per 100 registered voters of each gender), a total of 913,584 male voters would have voted nationwide, instead of the recorded 1,006,170. In short, the CEC’s revised data still shows an anomalous surplus of 92,586 male votes.
[...]
The second most “hyperactive” male region of Georgia, Gori, [...] showed a surplus of approximately 5,000 men. On Nov. 25, the Mtavari Arkhi TV channel broadcast the confession of a man called Gocha Chalauri, who shared how he and his associates repeatedly voted for Georgian Dream in the Oct. 26 elections:
> "There were four of us in my car, all men, driving as part of a group of five vehicles. We traveled through Gori, from one village to another, and voted for Georgian Dream about 30 times each. In total, 120 or 130 cars like ours were driving around [the Gori region].”
**Electoral fraud is a crime in Georgia, so Chalauri's words should be taken seriously**.
[...]
According to Georgian journalists, voters who “rented out” their IDs or personal data promised not to show up at the polls for the recent election. Eyewitness accounts and testimonies from those who took part in the fraud, captured on camera by Pirveli, suggest that **this [fraud] scheme was orchestrated by heads of local administrations and members of the Georgian Dream party**.
[...]
Each appearance of a “carousel” participant adds one vote for the Georgian Dream and likely subtracts one from the opposition while leaving voter turnout unchanged. As such, it renders fraud detection through traditional methods nearly impossible.
[...]
Subtracting these 300,000 “carousel” votes both from Georgian Dream’s results and from the overall turnout would lower the party’s share from 54% to 46%, reducing their parliamentary seats from 89 to 77 — to a tipping point of a majority in the 150-seat parliament.
However, if there had been no “passport rentals,” and if the citizens who were paid to stay home had shown up to vote for the opposition, genuine voters would have contributed to the turnout — and thus to the total denominator. In that case, the ruling party’s percentage would have dropped even further, to 39%. In this scenario, **Georgian Dream would have secured only 67 seats in parliament — and ceased to be the ruling party**.
In reality, not all of those voters would have necessarily supported the opposition, but calculations based on official Central Election Commission data show that even a slight influx of average voters would have inevitably tipped the scales.
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241228105323/https://apnews.com/article/united-states-china-hacking-espionage-c5351ef7c2207785b76c8c62cde6c513)
A ninth U.S. telecoms firm has been confirmed to have been hacked as part of a sprawling Chinese espionage campaign that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and phone conversations of an unknown number of Americans, a top White House official said Friday.
Biden administration officials said this month that at least eight telecommunications companies, as well as dozens of nations, had been affected by the Chinese hacking blitz known as Salt Typhoon.
But deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger told reporters Friday that a ninth victim had been identified after the administration released guidance to companies about how to hunt for Chinese culprits in their networks.
...]
The hackers compromised the networks of telecommunications companies to obtain customer call records and gain access to the private communications of what officials have said is a a limited number of individuals. Though the FBI has not publicly identified any of the victims, officials believe senior U.S. government officials and prominent political figures are among those whose whose communications were accessed.
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241228095137/https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1151955/Russia-linked-cable-cutting-tanker-seized-by-Finland-was-loaded-with-spying-equipment)
**Listening equipment was placed on Eagle S and related tanker Swiftsea Rider to monitor Nato naval and aircraft activities.**
Russia-linkex dark fleet* tanker Eagle S (IMO: 9329760), seized by Finland on December 25 for damaging an undersea cable, had transmitting and receiving devices installed that effectively allowed it to become a “spy ship” for Russia, Lloyd’s List has learnt.
The hi-tech equipment on board was abnormal for a merchant ship and consumed more power from the ship’s generator, leading to repeated blackouts, a source familiar with the vessel who provided commercial maritime services to it as recently as seven months ago.
[...]
As well as Eagle S, another related tanker from the same ownership cluster, UK-sanctioned Swiftsea Rider (IMO: 9318539), also had similar equipment installed, Lloyd’s List was told.
Cook Islands-flagged Eagle S and Honduras-flagged Swiftsea Rider are two of 26 elderly Russia-linked tankers with opaque ownership structures connected to three related shipmanagers, including two sanctioned by the UK government 12 months ago for “propping up Putin’s war machine”.
[...]
Eagle S was boarded by Finnish forces investigating sabotage of the Estlink 2 undersea cable that disrupted the supply of electricity to Estonia from Finland.
The tanker slowed and dragged its anchor around the cable around midday, December 25, Finland’s police said. Another three cables were also damaged.
[...]
The equipment was kept on the bridge or in the “monkey island”, they said. The monkey island is the top-most place on the ship.
The transmitting and receiving devices were used to record all radio frequencies, and upon reaching Russia were offloaded for analysis.
“They were monitoring all Nato naval ships and aircraft,” Lloyd’s List was told.
“They had all details on them. They were just matching their frequencies.
“Russians, Turkish, Indian radio officers were operating it.”
[...]
[Archived version](https://archive.is/dVfae)
A vessel carrying a sanctioned shipment of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) appears to be off-loading the fuel into storage in Russia’s far east, having failed to find a buyer willing to circumvent US restrictions despite a four-month, across-the-world journey.
[Edit title for clarity.]
“The plane was shot down on the territory of Russia, in the skies of Grozny. It is impossible to deny this. Those who did it must be held criminally responsible and compensation must be paid. If this does not happen, then, of course, relations will move to another level.”
Azerbaijan's transport minister has said the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed on 25 December was subjected to "external interference" and damaged inside and out, as it tried to land in Russia's southern republic of Chechnya.
"All [the survivors] without exception stated they heard three blast sounds when the aircraft was above Grozny," said Rashad Nabiyev.
The plane is thought to have come under fire from Russian air defence systems before being diverted across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan, where it crashed with the loss of 38 lives.
The Kremlin has refused to comment, but the head of Russia's civil aviation agency said the situation in Grozny was "very complicated" at the time and a closed-skies protocol had been put in place.
[...]
Azerbajian Airlines said on Friday that a preliminary inquiry had blamed both "physical and technical external interference", without going into details.
However, aviation experts and others in Azerbaijan believe the plane's GPS systems were affected by electronic jamming and it was then damaged by shrapnel from Russian air-defence missile blasts.
The transport minister said investigators would now examine "what kind of weapon, or rather what kind of rocket was used."
[...]
Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17776417
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241227110516/https://apnews.com/article/china-mass-killings-revenge-society-security-censors-705144a770b486eb222c040cba056f41)
China’s leader Xi Jinping wants the recent spree of mass killings that shocked the country not to happen again. He ordered local governments to prevent future “extreme cases.”
The attacks, where drivers mow down people on foot or knife-wielding assailants stab multiple victims, are not new in China. But the latest surge drew attention.
Local officials were quick to vow to examine all sorts of personal disputes that could trigger aggression, from marital troubles to disagreements over inheritance.
However, **the increasing reach into people’s private lives raises concerns at a time when the Chinese state has already tightened its grip over all social and political aspects** in the East Asian nation.
[...]
'Revenge on Society Crimes’ - this is how people in China label these attacks.
In November alone, three took place: A man struck people at an elementary school in Hunan province, wounding 30, after suffering investment losses. A student who failed his examination stabbed and killed eight at a vocational school in the city of Yixing. The most victims, 35 people, resulted from a man mowing down a crowd in the southern city of Zhuhai, supposedly upset over his divorce.
“On the surface, it seems like there are individual factors, but we see there’s a common link,” Wu Qiang, a former political science professor, said. “This link is, in my personal opinion, **every person has a feeling of injustice. They feel deeply that this society is very unfair and they can’t bear it anymore**.”
Since 2015, Chinese police have targeted human rights lawyers and non-profit advocacy groups, jailing many, while keeping tight surveillance on others, effectively destroying the civil society that had been active from the early 2000s to 2010s.
Wu was fired from Tsinghua University after conducting fieldwork during the 2014 Occupy protests in Hong Kong. He says police officers have been regularly stationed outside his home in Beijing since last year.
[...]
**A decade ago, media outlets could report an incident as it developed and even share a suspect’s name. Nowadays, it’s rarely possible**.
During the 24 hours before the death toll was released in the Zhuhai slaying, state censors were quick to remove any videos of the incident and eyewitness accounts shared online. In the case of the Hunan elementary school attack, authorities shared the number of the wounded only after the court sentencing, nearly a month later.
A tally of violent attacks can be documented in other countries; notably, the U.S. had 38 mass killings so far this year, according to an Associated Press database. But in China, a lack of public data makes it hard to decipher mass killing trends.
[...]
Luqiu believes the government may be enforcing censorship thinking it will prevent copycats from imitating such crimes.
“Things will only become more and more strict,” she predicted. For the Chinese state, “the only method to deal with it is to strengthen control.”
[...]
**At least a dozen local government notices, from small towns to big cities, [are now] announcing actions in response.**
In eastern Anhui province, a ruling Communist Party leader inspected a middle school, a local police station, and even the warehouse of a chemical factory where he urged the workers to “ferret out any hidden risks.” He said they must **“thoroughly and meticulously investigate and resolve conflicts and disputes,” including in families, marriages and neighborhoods.**
[...]
However, many expressed worry over how such disputes will be detected.
“I think we’re at the beginning of a vicious cycle,” said Lynette Ong, a professor at the University of Toronto and author of “Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China.” “If you nip the conflict in its bud, you’d imagine the system then would impose a lot of pressure ... on schools, enterprises and factories.”
[...]
The new announcements reminded Ong of China’s strict policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Neighborhood committees, the lowest rung of government, set up fences and barriers in front of buildings to control entry and exit and **broke into homes in extreme cases to disinfect the apartments of people** who had caught the virus.
Eventually, people protested en masse.
**“If we see non-sensible measures being introduced, you’ll be met by resistance and anger and grievances from the people, and it’s going to feed into this vicious cycle where more extreme measures are going to be brought,”** she said.
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241226180714/https://yle.fi/a/74-20133531)
Disruptions have been detected in a total of four telecommunications cables connecting Finland in the Baltic Sea.
Two of the cables are marine cables operated by Elisa, running between Helsinki and Tallinn, Estonia. One also running from Helsinki to Tallinn is owned by the Chinese-owned CITIC Telecom.
The fourth cable is Cinia's C-Lion1 submarine cable, which connects Helsinki to Germany. Finnish state-owned Cinia has pinpointed the damage to its cable southeast of Porkkala peninsula, just west of Helsinki on the Gulf of Finland.
According to the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency (Traficom), Elisa's cables have been severed, and two other cables have sustained damage.
At a press conference on Thursday, Jarkko Saarimäki, Director-General of Traficom stated that the agency was informed about disruptions to the Elisa and Cinia cables on Wednesday evening. Information about the fourth cable damage emerged on Thursday morning.
According to Saarimäki, telecommunication cables are robust, and their failure typically requires external force.
[...]
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241226151701/https://apnews.com/article/eu-finland-estonia-baltic-sea-power-cable-6741ef1ce9130602abac6214d7297717)
Finnish authorities have detained a Russia-linked ship as they investigate whether it damaged a Baltic Sea power cable and several data cables, according to police and news media reports, in the latest incident involving disruption of key infrastructure.
Finnish police and border guards boarded the vessel, the Eagle S, early Thursday and took over the command bridge, Helsinki Police Chief Jari Liukku said at a news conference. The vessel was being held in Finnish territorial waters, police said.
The Eagle S is flagged in the Cook Islands, but was described by Finnish customs officials as a suspected part of Russia’s shadow fleet of fuel tankers, Yle television reported. Those are aging vessels with obscure ownership, acquired to evade Western sanctions amid the war in Ukraine and operating without Western-regulated insurance.
[...]
Estonia’s government was holding a extraordinary meeting on the issue Thursday, Prime Minister Kristen Michal said on X. Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina said she was in close touch with Michal and Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo.
“Our armed forces have strengthened surveillance and are monitoring the situation,” she said on X. “The Baltic states currently have sufficient energy production capacity, although we are challenged by the Baltic Sea cable incidents.”
[...]
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241226140715/https://the-decoder.com/chinese-ebook-reader-boox-ditches-gpt-for-state-censored-china-llm-pushing-propaganda/)
Boox recently switched its AI assistant from Microsoft Azure GPT-3 to a language model created by ByteDance, TikTok's parent company.
[...]
**Testing shows the new AI assistant heavily censors certain topics. It refuses to criticize China or its allies, including Russia, Syria's Assad regime, and North Korea. The system even blocks references to "Winnie the Pooh" - a term that's banned in China because it's used to mock President Xi Jinping.**
When asked about sensitive topics, the assistant either dodges questions or promotes state narratives. For example, **when discussing Russia's role in Ukraine, it frames the conflict as a "complex geopolitical situation" triggered by NATO** expansion concerns. The system also spreads Chinese state messaging about Tiananmen Square instead of addressing historical facts.
**When users tried to bring attention to the censorship on Boox's Reddit forum, their posts were removed**. The company hasn't made any official statement about the situation, but users are reporting that the AI assistant is currently unavailable.
[...]
In China, every AI model has to pass a government review to make sure it follows "socialist values" before it can launch. These systems aren't allowed to create any content that goes against official government positions.
We've already seen what this means in practice: Baidu's ERNIE-ViLG image AI won't process any requests about Tiananmen Square, and while Kling's video generator refuses to show Tiananmen Square protests, it has no problem creating videos of a burning White House.
Some countries are already taking steps to address these concerns. Taiwan, for example, is developing its own language model called "Taide" to give companies and government agencies an AI option that's free from Chinese influence.
[...]
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241226103119/https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/global-hunger-crisis-deepens-as-major-nations-skimp-on-aid/)
**It’s a simple but brutal equation: The number of people going hungry or otherwise struggling around the world is rising, while the amount of money the world’s wealthiest nations are contributing toward helping them is dropping.**
The result: The United Nations says that, at best, it will be able to raise enough money to help about 60% of the 307 million people it predicts will need humanitarian aid next year. That means at least 117 million people won’t get food or other assistance in 2025.
The UN also will end 2024 having raised about 46% of the $49.6 billion it sought for humanitarian aid across the globe, its own data shows. It’s the second year in a row the world body has raised less than half of what it sought. The shortfall has forced humanitarian agencies to make agonizing decisions, such as slashing rations for the hungry and cutting the number of people eligible for aid.
[...]
UN officials see few reasons for optimism at a time of widespread conflict, political unrest and extreme weather, all factors that stoke famine. “We have been forced to scale back appeals to those in most dire need,” Tom Fletcher, UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, said.
[...]
The majority of humanitarian funding comes from just three wealthy donors: the US, Germany and the European Commission. They provided 58% of the $170 billion recorded by the UN in response to crises from 2020 to 2024.
**Three other powers – China, Russia and India – collectively contributed less than 1% of UN-tracked humanitarian funding over the same period, according to a Reuters review of UN contributions data**.
[...]
With a 2023 gross national income (GNI) less than 2% the size of America’s, Norway ranked seventh among governments who gave to the UN that year [...] It provided more than $1 billion.
**Two of the five biggest economies – China and India – gave a tiny fraction as much.**
China ranked 32nd among governments in 2023, contributing $11.5 million in humanitarian aid. It has the world’s second-largest GNI.
[...]
[Former UN humanitarian chief and now head of the Norwegian Refugee Council Jan] Egeland noted that **China and India each invested far more in the type of initiatives that draw world attention**. Beijing spent billions hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics, and India spent $75 million in 2023 to land a spaceship on the moon.
“How come there is not more interest in helping starving children in the rest of the world?” Egeland said. “These are not developing countries anymore. They are having Olympics ... They are having spaceships that many of the other donors never could dream of.”
[...]
**When aid does come, it is sometimes late, and with strings attached, making it hard for humanitarian organizations to respond flexibly to crises.** [This includes that some] Donors dictate details to humanitarian agencies, down to where food will go. They sometimes limit funding to specific UN entities or nongovernmental organizations. They often require that some money be spent on branding, such as displaying donors’ logos on tents, toilets and backpacks.
[...]
**The US has a long-standing practice of placing restrictions on nearly all of its contributions to the World Food Program**, one of the largest providers of humanitarian food assistance. More than 99% of US donations to the WFP carried restrictions in each of the last 10 years.
[...]
In 2014, António Guterres, now the UN's secretary-general and then head of its refugee agency, suggested a major change that would charge UN member states fees to fund humanitarian initiatives. The UN’s budget and peacekeeping missions already are funded by a fee system. Such funding would offer humanitarian agencies more flexibility in responding to need.
The UN explored Guterres’ idea in 2015. But donor countries preferred the current system, which lets them decide case by case where to send contributions, according to a UN report on the proposal.
[...]
Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17750855
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241225202806/https://tibet.net/china-wrongfully-detains-over-20-tibetans-and-beats-village-head-gonpo-namgyal-to-death/)
**Chinese authorities wrongfully detained more than 20 Tibetans and severely tortured a Tibetan village head named Gonpo Namgyal to death with the repeated use of electric equipment in detention for several months** in Ponkor township, Darlag County in Golog in the traditional Tibetan province of Amdo now incorporated into Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu provinces.
As per information received, in May 2024, due to the extensive “Pure Mother Tongue” campaign [...] Chinese authorities arrested over 20 Tibetans including Khenpo Tenpa Dhargye and village head Gonpo Namgyal. They were forcibly taken to Golog Prefecture headquarters.
Gonpo Namgyal tragically passed away on 18 December 2024 after suffering severe torture and inhuman treatment by the Chinese police for over seven months while in detention. As reported by the source, Gonpo Namgyal was released from detention after becoming ill, but within three days of his release he passed away. During the preparation of his body for cremation at the Traling Monastery’s crematory, **many of his internal organs were discovered to have been burned as a result of electric torture**.
[...]
The Tibetan people inside Tibet’s efforts to preserve their Tibetan identity, especially the Tibetan language, despite huge threats of persecution and imprisonment from the Chinese government, are of paramount importance with the Communist government’s so-called “Chinese national unity consciousness” framework or policy, which basically meant making Chinese the dominant language by degrading Tibetan from all walks of life.
Until the Communist regime is challenged and Tibetans within Tibet are denied basic human rights as guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution and international human rights law, Tibetan identity will have a dwindling future.
Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17749474
Hong Kong police have offered rewards of HK$1m (£103,000; $129,000) for information leading to the arrests of six pro-democracy activists living in the UK and Canada.
Among them is Tony Chung, the former leader of a pro-independence group who fled to the UK last year.
The group - which includes a former district councillor, an actor, and a YouTuber - have been lobbying for more democracy in the territory.
[...]
Also on the wanted list is former district councillor Carmen Lau and activist Chloe Cheung. Both are based in the UK and lobby on behalf of two NGOs calling for more democracy in Hong Kong.
[...]
Ms Lau posted on [social media] that the warrant would not stop her advocacy work. She called on the UK, US and EU governments to impose sanctions on "Hong Kong human rights perpetrators".
She also asked the British Labour government to "seriously reconsider its strategies for tackling transnational repression targeting Hong Kongers" and to look at blocking plans for a new Chinese embassy in Tower Hill.
Hong Kong police have offered rewards of HK$1m (£103,000; $129,000) for information leading to the arrests of six pro-democracy activists living in the UK and Canada.
Among them is Tony Chung, the former leader of a pro-independence group who fled to the UK last year.
The group - which includes a former district councillor, an actor, and a YouTuber - have been lobbying for more democracy in the territory.
[...]
Also on the wanted list is former district councillor Carmen Lau and activist Chloe Cheung. Both are based in the UK and lobby on behalf of two NGOs calling for more democracy in Hong Kong.
[...]
Ms Lau posted on [social media] that the warrant would not stop her advocacy work. She called on the UK, US and EU governments to impose sanctions on "Hong Kong human rights perpetrators".
She also asked the British Labour government to "seriously reconsider its strategies for tackling transnational repression targeting Hong Kongers" and to look at blocking plans for a new Chinese embassy in Tower Hill.
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241225180247/https://theins.ru/en/news/277378)
The Russian disinformation network “Matryoshka” has launched a new campaign on the Bluesky social network. Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat, has been one of the first researchers to detect its activity. So far, four Russian-made fake videos have been identified on the platform.
Each disinformation video begins with a real person — a professor, a student from a top university, or a recognized expert — introducing themselves and beginning to speak on a topic unrelated to Russia’s war in Ukraine. The footage then transitions to segments that do not show the speaker on screen — while what sounds like their voice continues narrating. In these moments, the speaker seems to promote claims that the West should end its support for Ukraine, that Europe should align its future with Russia, and that Volodymyr Zelensky is a dictator — or even a vampire.
[...]
The videos circulating on Bluesky had previously appeared on X, according to the Bot Blocker project (@antibot4navalny), which first uncovered and detailed the workings of the Matryoshka network in early 2024.
[...]
Meanwhile, Putin says that relations between Russia and China have reached “an unprecedented level” as a result of the high level of mutual trust between both countries, as per Chinese state media.
As millions of Ukrainians celebrate Christmas Day, Russia has launched a major missile and drone attack on the country's energy infrastructure
President Zelensky says Russia made a "conscious choice" to launch attacks at Christmas
Ukraine's air force says it detected 184 missiles and drones - many were shot down or missed their target
Russia confirms what it calls the "massive" attack, saying the "goal was achieved"
In Kyiv, people sheltered in metro stations - "It's scary to stay at home," one woman says
There are power cuts and planned outages across the country, including in parts of Kyiv
[In bitterly cold Ukraine, attacks on power sites are now a regular occurrence](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c159082vdqyt?post=asset%3Aeae711fe-8ed0-471c-8132-7fea05fe39e6#post).
Climate change and the melting of the Arctic ice has intensified interest in Greenland’s natural resources. The island could become the next mini.g frontier. For example, KoBold Metals -a joint venture partly backed by Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Michael Bloomberg- and operated by Bluejay Mining in the UK, has been drlling there for critical minerals since 2022.
The outgoing U.S. administration under President Joe Biden has been offering advice to Greenland officials to draft a mining investment law for some time, all aimed at prodding investment in Greenland at standards considered higher than Chinese-linked rivals.
Or that of Australia. In 2023, Greenland Minerals -which is a 100-percent subsidiary of an Australian mining company- initiated arbitration proceedings against the Governments of Greenland and Denmark for the right to mine in Greenland. The Australian company seeks to gain the right to mine in Greenland or USD 11.5bn in compensation (the sum is almost four times Greenland’s annual GDP).
Access to the Arctic (maybe a similar playbook than China’s pursuing with Russia?) may be a thing, too. Just a few weeks ago, for example, Greenland’s capital Nuuk opened an International Airport, enabling larger plane landings in the country for the first time in their history.
the “never again” only applies to European countries. At least, that’s what we are now witnessing.
I’m not so sure. That can happen again in Europe at any time imo as it happens in the Near and Middle East now, as well as in Xinjiang and Tibet, in Russia, Sudan, and many other places. Human rights and democratic values are under pressure everywhere, and this year saw a rise of autocracies and extremists globally. I hope 2025 will be different.
The Danish government has announced a huge boost in defence spending for Greenland, hours after US President-elect Donald Trump repeated his desire to purchase the Arctic territory.
Danish Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said the package was a “double digit billion amount” in krone, or at least $1.5bn (£1.2bn).
Brazilian authorities have halted the construction of a factory for Chinese electric vehicle (EV) giant BYD, saying workers lived in conditions comparable to "slavery".
More than 160 workers have been rescued in Brazil's northeastern state of Bahia, according to a statement from the Public Labour Prosecutor's Office (MPT).
[...]
The workers, hired by Jinjiang Construction Brazil, lived in four facilities in Camaçari city.
At one such facility, workers were made to sleep on beds without mattresses, according to prosecutors.
Each bathroom was also shared among 31 workers, forcing them to get up extremely early in order to be ready for work.
"The conditions found in the lodgings revealed an alarming picture of precariousness and degradation," the MPT said.
"Slavery-like conditions", as defined by Brazilian law, include debt bondage and work that violates human dignity.
[...]
BYD, short for Build Your Dreams, is one of the world's largest EV makers.
[...]
EV sales in China have been boosted by government subsidies. which encourage consumers to trade their petrol-powered cars for EVs or hybrids.
But there is a growing backlash abroad against what some see as the Chinese government's unfair support for domestic car makers.
Major markets like the US and EU have placed tariffs on EVs from China, with more tariffs expected during the incoming administration of US president-elect Donald Trump.
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241224173206/https://www.comicsands.com/trump-greenland-prime-minister-response)
After President-elect Donald Trump posted on Truth Social calling "the ownership and control of Greenland" an "absolute necessity," Greenland's prime minister let him know in no uncertain terms that it wouldn't be happening.
[...]
Trump posted on his platform 'Social Truth' that "the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity."
[...]
Not long afterward, Greenland Prime Minister Mute Egede said the following in a written comment that rebuked Trump's suggestion:
"Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom."
Trump was harshly criticized.
[...]
Greenland is an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, alongside the Faroe Islands, the only other autonomous territory within the Kingdom. Citizens of both Greenland and the Faroe Islands are full citizens of Denmark. As one of the Overseas Countries and Territories of the European Union, Greenland’s citizens are also recognized as EU citizens.
[...]
The United States has long recognized Greenland's strategic importance. In 1946, the U.S. even proposed purchasing Greenland from Denmark, offering $100 million in gold as part of the deal. Of course, that never panned out and the U.S. has no claim to Greenland in any way, shape, or form—regardless of what Trump might think.
I thought you might be familiar with Australia’s threats to ban tiktok whilst ignoring the crimes other tech companies commit and making no effort to protect Australians from them.
Isn’t it somewhat strange that Tiktok, whose parent company is forced to closely surveill and censor each politically undesired content in its home country, while it is at the same time not only unable to suppress but reportedly even promotes obviously harmful content on its platforms outside China?
Isn’t it somewhat strange that Tiktok, whose parent company is forced to closely surveill and censor each politically undesired content in its home country, while it is at the same time not only unable to suppress but reportedly even promotes obviously harmful content on its platforms outside China?
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241223154647/https://www.communitynewspapergroup.com/news/nation/sweden-says-china-blocked-prosecutors-probe-of-ship-linked-to-cut-cables/article_45ce2671-f4a6-5619-92d6-59bfdb22b34a.html)
**Sweden's foreign minister said Monday that China had denied a request for prosecutors to conduct an investigation on a Chinese ship linked to two severed Baltic Sea cables despite Beijing pledging "cooperation" with regional authorities.**
Sections of two telecom cables were cut on November 17 and 18 in Swedish territorial waters. Suspicions have been directed at the Yi Peng 3, which according to ship tracking sites had sailed over the cables around the time they were cut.
[...]
"China is willing to maintain communication and cooperation with the countries involved to advance the follow-up handling of the incident," [spokeswoman Mao Ning] said.
Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard also noted Monday that Swedish prosecutors had not been allowed to conduct an investigation.
"Swedish police have been on board as observers in connection with the Chinese investigation... At the same time, I note that China has not heeded our request for the prosecutor to conduct an investigation on board," Stenergard said in a statement to AFP.
[...]
Sweden's prosecutor Henrik Soderman [said] that no measures had been taken on board the ship as part of the Swedish judicial probe, including questioning crew members or technical investigations.
[...]
"Our request that Swedish prosecutors, together with the police and others, be allowed to take certain investigative measures within the framework of the investigation on board remains. We have been clear with China on this," Stenergard said.
[...]
European officials have said they suspect sabotage linked to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
[...]
Early on November 17, the Arelion cable running from the Swedish island of Gotland to Lithuania was damaged.
The next day, the C-Lion 1 submarine cable connecting Helsinki and the German port of Rostock was cut south of Sweden's Oland island, around 700 kilometres (435 miles) from Helsinki.
Tensions have mounted around the Baltic Sea since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
[...]
In October 2023, an undersea gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia was shut down after it was damaged by the anchor of a Chinese cargo ship.
[...]
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241223095114/https://theins.ru/en/corruption/277396)
Companies partially owned by billionaires closely tied to Vladimir Putin continue to export their products to Western markets without disruption.
An investigation by The Insider revealed that even individuals under sanctions are earning billions from deals with EU countries. They exploit a loophole that allows firms to operate freely in EU markets so long as sanctioned individuals hold less than 50% of the company’s shares. This loophole enables some of the most controversial oligarchs, including Gennady Timchenko, Alisher Usmanov, and Oleg Deripaska, to reap massive profits from trade with Europe.
[Archived](https://web.archive.org/web/20241223095912/https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/12/17/russias-new-year-holiday-turns-into-a-countdown-to-economic-crisis-a87370)
As Russia approaches its annual New Year celebrations, a once-joyous occasion now seems more like a grim countdown to the country falling off an economic precipice.
With warning lights flashing, ordinary Russians are tightening their belts amid galloping inflation and a plunging ruble while the Kremlin raises the possibility of introducing food cards for the poor. All the while, the Central Bank is scrambling to stabilize the economy through interest rate hikes and foreign currency interventions.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has already confirmed that fireworks will be canceled again this year due to the ongoing war with Ukraine. Meanwhile, old friends of mine in Moscow are beginning to panic about affording the traditional New Year’s Eve feast, as inflation and a weakened ruble threaten to shrink the usual abundant spread of fine food and booze.
[...]
This year, as inflation takes its toll, the cost of Olivier [Olivier salad is described as are the centerpiece of any Russian holiday spread] has soared. Key ingredients like chicken and mayonnaise have risen by over 30%, while potatoes have spiked by a staggering 65%. According to RIA Novosti, citing Rosstat data, four servings of this holiday staple will now cost 553 rubles — an 8.5% jump in the Olivier Index.
[...]
Many Russian bankers and industrialists now worry that the economy could be heading into a tailspin like 2008, when a credit crisis led to waves of bankruptcies.
[...]
Surging borrowing costs are now pushing many companies into a debt spiral, with interest payments eating up one in every four rubles they earn.
[...]
Ralf Ringer, Russia’s largest shoe manufacturer, which was declared bankrupt on Dec. 7 after its accounts were blocked due to debts and fines of 1.5 billion rubles.
Real estate developer Samolet is now slashing jobs amid a slump in new apartment sales. By the end of 2024, around 2,000 employees are expected to be laid off, following 5,000 job cuts earlier this year, according to a Lifenews report on Dec. 8.
Even Kremlin loyalists like Sberbank CEO Herman Gref are publicly admitting that the economy is tanking.
[...]
There has been increasing concern from Albanian parents after reports of children taking knives and other objects to school to use in quarrels or cases of bullying promoted by stories they see on TikTok.
Isn’t it somewhat strange that Tiktok, whose parent company is forced to closely surveill and censor each politically undesired content in its home country, while it is at the same time not only unable to suppress but reportedly even promotes obviously harmful content on its platforms outside China?
There has been increasing concern from Albanian parents after reports of children taking knives and other objects to school to use in quarrels or cases of bullying promoted by stories they see on TikTok.
Isn’t it somewhat strange that Tiktok, whose parent company is forced to closely surveill and censor each politically undesired content in its home country, while it is at the same time not only unable to suppress but reportedly even promotes obviously harmful content on its platforms outside China?
Albania's prime minister has announced the government intends to block access to TikTok for one year after the killing of a schoolboy last month raised fears about the influence of social media on children.
Speaking on Saturday Edi Rama declared the proposed ban would start in January.
[...]
The blocking of TikTok comes less than a month after the 14-year-old student was killed and another injured in a fight near a school in southern Tirana which had its roots in a confrontation on social media.
The killing sparked a debate in Albania among parents, psychologists and educational institutions about the impact of social networks on young people.
"In China, TikTok promotes how students can take courses, how to protect nature, how to keep traditions, but on the TikTok outside China we see only scum and mud. Why do we need this?", Rama said.
TikTok is already banned in India, which was one of the app's largest markets before it was outlawed in June 2020. It is also blocked in Iran, Nepal, Afghanistan and Somalia.
TikTok is also fighting against a law passed by the US Congress which would ban the app from 19 January unless it is sold by ByteDance - its Chinese parent
company.
This is the first scandal of the second Trump term, and take a long look, because it’s going to look like all the other scandals: a conflict of interest among his impossibly wealthy advisers and aides (or from Trump himself) seeps over into policy.
The measure at issue is known as the “outbound investment” provision. We have heard for years about the problem of manufacturing businesses shipping jobs overseas to China, with its low worker wages and low environmental standards. China typically forces businesses wanting to locate factories in its country to transfer their technology and intellectual property to Chinese firms, which can then use that to undercut competitors in global markets, with state support.
Congress […] finally came up with a way to deal with this issue. Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) have the flagship bill, which would either prohibit U.S. companies from investing in “sensitive technologies” in China, including semiconductors and artificial intelligence, or set up a broad notification regime around it.
[…] Cornyn-Casey [which added some reporting requirements and enhanced reviews] passed the Senate last year, and after about a year of legislative wrangling, a final outbound investment package made it into the year-end bill. “We’re taking a necessary step to safeguard American innovation against bad actors and ensure our lasting dominance on the world stage,” Cornyn said in a statement.
Funny story: Elon Musk’s car company has a significant amount of, well, outbound investment. A Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai opened in 2019; maybe a quarter of the company’s revenue comes from China. Musk has endorsed building a second Tesla factory in China, where his grip on the electric-vehicle market has completely loosened amid domestic competition. He is working with the Chinese government to bring “Full Self-Driving” technology to China, in other words, importing a technology that may be seen as sensitive. Musk has battery and solar panel factories that are not yet in China, but he may want them there in the future.
You can argue about whether the U.S. should be restricting investment in China. But it’s incontrovertible that a billionaire who has a bunch of investments in China and wants to make more all of a sudden disrupted a normal congressional process that was going to restrict that investment with a bunch of lies from his media platform. And lo and behold, when the new funding bill emerged, the outbound investment feature was dropped. In fact, all traces of provisions related to China were removed from the bill.
[Archived version](https://web.archive.org/web/20241221173027/https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/the-father-of-chinese-authoritarianism-has-a-message-for-america)
[Seventy-eight-year-old Shanghai historian] Xiao Gongqin is the architect of a theory of strongman politics known as “neo-authoritarianism.” In the nineteen-eighties, reformers with varying predilections for democracy and capitalism consolidated power in Communist states. Mikhail Gorbachev restructured the Soviet Union’s planned economy and loosened censorship. In China, Deng Xiaoping ushered in an era known as “reform and opening up,” though the reforms went only so far; he also evinced a limited tolerance for dissent, believing full democracy untenable. In this, he was supported by a group of Chinese thinkers led by Xiao and a prodigious Shanghai academic named Wang Huning. The word “authoritarian” is a rote pejorative in the West, synonymous with tyranny, but in the China of the late twentieth century Xiao and his allies managed to reframe it as a rational, pragmatic, East Asian-specific strategy for modernization.
[...]
Wang entered government in 1995 and shot through its ranks. He is now one of Xi Jinping’s closest advisers, the preëminent craftsman of Xi’s authoritarian ideology. **Xiao, who coined the term “neo-authoritarianism” at a symposium in 1988,** continued his advocacy as a professor in Shanghai, until he retired a decade ago. His argument that democracy was a “rootless politics,” alien to Chinese culture, remains part of a dominant strain of the country’s thought. **Whether Xiao had influenced the Party’s direction or merely justified it is hard to say**. But, in 1988, Deng was briefed on “neo-authoritarianism” by another Chinese leader, who described it as a system where a “political strongman stabilizes the situation and develops the economy.” Deng reportedly responded, “That is exactly what I stand for”; his only qualm was that it could use a rebrand. Later, as China’s economy took off, the world would accept more diplomatic names—“state capitalism” or, more vaguely, “the China model.”
[...]
[Xiao is] a man quietly wrestling with the consequences of his ideas. Xiao has deeply conservative instincts—he counts Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott among his influences—but **he was, and is, an incrementalist who dreams of China becoming a “constitutional democracy.”** His was a theory of enlightened rule, wherein a dictatorship would vanquish the “radicals,” steward an economic miracle, and then, ideally, relinquish power to the people.
He had ready-made examples in places such as Taiwan, whose leader Chiang Ching-Kuo dismantled his own autocracy before his death, in 1988. Xiao has not disavowed authoritarianism [...] but as the immediate prospects for democracy have all but vanished from China, his politics have shifted from reaction to reflection. **Authoritarianism, Xiao [said], “has its own problems.”**
When Xi Jinping came to power, in 2012, he used his newfound authority to launch an anti-corruption drive, which Xiao endorsed. Since then, though, Xi has abolished Presidential term limits, decimated civil society, and intensified clampdowns on free expression. As a mainland Chinese scholar, Xiao was careful not to betray his views about the regime. He instead spoke to what he now sees as an unsolvable “dilemma” in his theory. A democrat risks welcoming dangerous ideas into a culture—ideas that, legitimate or not, could hasten a nation’s demise. Xiao turned to authoritarianism partly because he believed that China was careening in that direction. **And yet “a neo-authoritarian leader must be wise,” Xiao told me, with a hint of exasperation. “And he may not be.”** Once you pin your hopes on a justice-delivering strongman, in other words, he may take the righteous path, or he may not. The only certainty is that he has control./
[...]
Xiao, who was born in 1946 and grew up under Maoism [and who is saying he is "not fundamentally opposed to Western democracy" as he personally feels "very envious of the United States and the West"], witnessed the worst excesses of this kind of armchair statecraft. When Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, in 1966, Xiao had recently graduated high school and was working in a factory. He hadn’t been able to enter university, likely for harboring “bourgeois” sympathies—including his passion for Western philosophy—and he allied himself with the Red Guards as a leader of a “rebel worker faction” at his machinery plant. But, as the revolution wore on, he himself was denounced as a “revisionist,” and he spent the next several years consigned to gruelling work at the factory.
[...]
**One is not born but becomes an authoritarian**. [...] Xiao was inspired by Yan Fu, the reformist intellectual and translator of Adam Smith who, after living through China’s own republican experiment, decided that his people were “not capable of self-government.” And, in the U.S., one finds examples like Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who declared, in a 2009 essay, that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” [...] Over the years, Thiel’s shift toward the authoritarian right has coincided with the growing acceptance of his ideas in the mainstream. He is now one of the biggest funders of the conservative nationalist movement, a mentor to Vice-President-elect J. D. Vance, and a supporter of “neo-reactionary” figures like Curtis Yarvin, who admires the state-capitalist societies of Singapore and Deng Xiaoping’s China.
[...]
“The problem with Xiao,” Joseph Fewsmith, a professor of Chinese politics at Boston University, [says], “is that he tackles the question of how countries get from autocracy to democracy, but he never explored how not to get stuck. Which is what happened.” When [...] asked ..] what a democracy in China might look like, he [Xiao] said that he hadn’t really thought about it. **The proponent of a so-called “soft landing” for democracy did not, ultimately, spend much time designing a parachute.**
[...]
For most of his life, Xiao has claimed that the central danger to Chinese society was not the dictator but his liberal opponents. Whether Xiao was right we will never know. We cannot peer into the universe where Liu and his reformers won [literary critic Liu Xiaobo was a leading figure in tbe 1989 Tianamen Square protests who died of untreated liver cancer in 2017, after spending nearly a decade in prison], where they are alive and well, rather than silenced or dead. Ours is the world of strongmen, where decisions increasingly turn on the whims of a vanishing few. In China, the risk of Xiao’s theory has come to pass—the strongman changed tack. At his trial for “subversion of state power,” in 2009, Liu Xiaobo prepared a statement of warning to his political opponents. It remains just as relevant today as it was then. **“An enemy mentality will poison the spirit of a nation,” Liu wrote. It will “destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and hinder a country’s advance toward freedom and democracy.”**
And this war has just one aggressor. No aggressor, no war.