CHINA HARVESTS MASSES OF DATA ON WESTERN TARGETS, DOCUMENTS SHOW

[These include a $320,000 Chinese state media software program that mines Twitter and Facebook to create a database of foreign journalists and academics; a $216,000 Beijing police intelligence program that analyses Western chatter on Hong Kong and Taiwan; and a Xinjiang cybercenter cataloguing Uyghur language content abroad.]

By Cate Cadell

China is turning a major part of its internal Internet data surveillance network outward, mining Western social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to equip its government agencies, military and police with information on foreign targets, according to a Washington Post review of hundreds of Chinese bidding documents, contracts and company filings.

China maintains a countrywide network of government data surveillance services — called public opinion analysis software — that were developed over the past decade and are used domestically to warn officials of politically sensitive information online.

The software primarily targets China’s domestic Internet users and media, but a Washington Post review of bidding documents and contracts for over 300 Chinese government projects since the beginning of 2020 include orders for software designed to collect data on foreign targets from sources such as Twitter, Facebook and other Western social media.

The documents, publicly accessible through domestic government bidding platforms, also show that agencies including state media, propaganda departments, police, military and cyber regulators are purchasing new or more sophisticated systems to gather data.

These include a $320,000 Chinese state media software program that mines Twitter and Facebook to create a database of foreign journalists and academics; a $216,000 Beijing police intelligence program that analyses Western chatter on Hong Kong and Taiwan; and a Xinjiang cybercenter cataloguing Uyghur language content abroad.

“Now we can better understand the underground network of anti-China personnel,” said a Beijing-based analyst who works for a unit reporting to China’s Central Propaganda Department. The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their work, said they were once tasked with producing a data report on how negative content relating to Beijing’s senior leadership is spread on Twitter, including profiles of individual academics, politicians and journalists.

These surveillance dragnets are part of a wider drive by Beijing to refine its foreign propaganda efforts through big data and artificial intelligence.

They also form a network of warning systems designed to sound real-time alarms for trends that undermine Beijing’s interests.

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“They are now reorienting part of that effort outward, and I think that’s frankly terrifying, looking at the sheer numbers and sheer scale that this has taken inside China,” said Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund who has conducted extensive research on China’s domestic public opinion network.

“It really shows that they now feel it’s their responsibility to defend China overseas and fight the public opinion war overseas,” she said.

Some of the Chinese government’s budgeting includes buying and maintaining foreign social media accounts on behalf of police and propaganda departments. Yet others describe using the targeted analysis to refine Beijing’s state media coverage abroad.

The purchases range in size from small, automated programs to projects costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that are staffed 24 hours a day by teams including English speakers and foreign policy specialists.

The documents describe highly customizable programs that can collect real-time social media data from individual social media users. Some describe tracking broad trends on issues including U.S. elections.

The Post was not able to review data collected by the systems but spoke to four people based in Beijing who are directly involved in government public opinion analysis and described separate software systems that automatically collect and store Facebook and Twitter data in real time on domestic Chinese servers for analysis.

Twitter and Facebook both ban automated collection of data on their services without prior authorization. Twitter’s policy also expressly bars developers from gathering data used to infer a user’s political affiliation or ethnic and racial origin.

“Our API provides real-time access to public data and Tweets only, not private information. We prohibit use of our API for surveillance purposes, as per our developer policy and terms,” said Katie Rosborough, a Twitter spokesperson, referring to the company’s Application Programming Interface (API), which allows developers to retrieve public data from the platform among other functions.

Facebook did not respond to requests for comment about whether it is aware of the monitoring or whether several companies, universities and state media firms listed as supplying the software were authorized to collect data on its platform.

China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

'Public opinion guidance'

China’s systems for analyzing domestic public opinion online are a powerful but largely unseen pillar of President Xi Jinping’s program to modernize China’s propaganda apparatus and maintain control over the Internet.

The vast data collection and monitoring efforts give officials insight into public opinion, a challenge in a country that does not hold public elections or permit independent media.

The services also provide increasingly technical surveillance for China’s censorship apparatus. And most systems include alarm functions designed to alert officials and police to negative content in real time.

These operations are an important function of what Beijing calls “public opinion guidance work” — a policy of molding public sentiment in favor of the government through targeted propaganda and censorship.

The phrase first came to prominence in policymaking after the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations, when officials began exploring new ways to preempt popular challenges to the Communist Party’s power, and has since become integral to the underlying architecture of China’s Internet, where users are linked by real name ID, and Internet services are required by law to maintain an internal censorship apparatus.

The exact scope of China’s government public opinion monitoring industry is unclear, but there have been some indications about its size in Chinese state media. In 2014, the state-backed newspaper China Daily said more than 2 million people were working as public opinion analysts. In 2018, the People’s Daily, another official organ, said the government’s online opinion analysis industry was worth “tens of billions of yuan,” equivalent to billions of dollars, and was growing at a rate of 50 percent a year.

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That surveillance network system is expanding to include foreign social media at a time when global perceptions of Beijing are at their lowest in recent history.

A Pew Research survey released in June showed that perceptions of China among 17 advanced economies had dipped to near historic lows for a second year in a row in the aftermath of the U.S. trade war, the Xinjiang human rights crisis, Hong Kong and the coronavirus pandemic.

In May this year, Xi called on senior officials to portray a more “trustworthy, lovable and reliable” image of China abroad, calling for the “effective development of international public opinion guidance.”

His comments reflect Beijing’s growing anxieties over how to control China’s image abroad.

“On the back of the Sino-US trade talks and the Hong Kong rioting incident, it’s becoming clearer day by day that the public opinion news war is arduous and necessary,” China Daily said in a July 2020 bidding document for a $300,000 “foreign personnel analysis platform.”

The invitation to tender lays out specifications for a program that mines Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for data on “well known Western media journalists” and other “key personnel from political, business and media circles.”

“We are competing with the US and Western media, the battle for the right to speak has begun,” it said.

The software should run 24 hours a day, according to the specifications, and map the relationships between target personnel and uncover “factions” between personnel, measuring their “China tendencies” and building an alarm system that automatically flags “false statements and reports on China.”

Warning systems like the one outlined in the China Daily document are described in over 90 percent of tenders that list technical specifications, The Post’s review of the documents show.

Two people who work as analysts in public opinion analysis units contracted by government agencies in Beijing told The Post that they receive automated alarms via SMS, email and on dedicated computer monitors when “sensitive” content was detected. Both of the people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to foreign media.

“Having responsibility for [the monitoring] is a lot of pressure,” said one of the people. “If we do our work poorly, there are severe repercussions.”

Highly sensitive viral trends online are reported to a 24-hour hotline maintained by the Cybersecurity Administration of China (CAC), the body that oversees the country’s censorship apparatus, the person said of their unit.

The person added that most of the alarms were related to domestic social media but that foreign social media had also been included in the units’ monitoring since the middle of 2019.

The person’s account is supported by four bidding documents for unrelated systems that mention direct hotlines to the CAC.

“In case of major public opinion, directly contact the staff on duty of the CAC by telephone to ensure that notifications are in place through various communication tools,” said one December 2020 tender for a $236,000 system purchased by the municipal propaganda department in eastern China’s Fuzhou city for monitoring Facebook and Twitter alongside domestic social media.

It specifies that reports to the CAC should include the details of individual social media users.

State media-led data mining

Suppliers of the systems vary. The China Daily awarded its contract to Beijing’s Communications University, one of a half dozen Chinese universities that have launched specialized departments to develop public opinion analysis technology.

However, some of the most prolific public opinion monitoring services are provided to police and government agencies by state media themselves.

The documents provide insight into the scope of foreign social media data collection done by China’s major state media outlets, which maintain offices and servers abroad, and their key role in providing Beijing with publicity guidance based on increasingly sophisticated data mining analysis.

The growing clout of Beijing’s propaganda efforts abroad, spearheaded by state media, has triggered alarms in Washington.

In 2020, the State Department reclassified the U.S.-based operations of China’s top state media outlets as foreign missions, increasing reporting requirements and restricting their visa allocations, angering Beijing.

The People’s Daily Online, a unit of the state newspaper the People’s Daily, which provides one of the country’s largest contract public opinion analysis services, won dozens of projects that include overseas social media data collection services for police, judicial authorities, Communist Party organizations and other clients.

The unit, which recorded $330 million in operating income in 2020, up 50 percent from 2018, says it serves over 200 government agencies, although it is not clear how many request foreign social media data.

In one tender won by the People’s Daily Online, the Beijing Police Intelligence Command Unit purchased a $30,570 service to trawl foreign social media and produce reports on unspecified “key personnel and organizations,” gathering information on their “basic circumstances, background and relationships.”

It also calls for weekly data reports on Hong Kong, Taiwan and U.S. relations. Issued shortly before the 2020 U.S. presidential election results were ratified on Jan. 6, it also called for “special reports” on “netizens’ main views” related to the election.

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“The international balance of power has been profoundly adjusted,” said the request for tenders. “Through the collection of public Internet information we can keep a close eye on the international community, analyze sensitivities and hot spots, and maintain the stability of Chinese society.”

In an April 2020 article, the chief analyst at the People’s Daily Online Public Opinion Data Center, Liao Canliang, laid out the ultimate goal of public opinion analysis.

“The ultimate purpose of analysis and prediction is to guide and intervene in public opinion,” Canliang wrote. “… Public data from social network users can be used to analyze the characteristics and preferences of users, and then guide them in a targeted manner.”

In the article, Liao points to Cambridge Analytica’s impact on the 2016 U.S. election as evidence of social media’s ability to mold public opinion.

“The West uses big data to analyze, research and judge public opinion to influence political activities. ... As long as there is a correct grasp on the situation, public opinion can also be guided and interfered with,” he wrote.

People’s Daily subsidiary Global Times, a firebrand newspaper known for its biting coverage of China’s critics, also has a unit gathering foreign social media data for China’s Foreign Ministry, Beijing’s Foreign Affairs Office and other government agencies.

In late 2019, the Global Times Online won a three-year contract worth $531,000 to provide a “China-related foreign media and journalist opinion monitoring system” that monitors overseas social media on behalf of China’s Foreign Ministry and produces comprehensive regular reports, as well as special briefings in “urgent circumstances.”

Documentation accompanying the project says that close to 40 percent of the Global Times monitoring unit’s staffers are senior Global Times reporters and that the publication maintains large overseas social media monitoring platforms.

A description on the website of the Global Times’s public opinion research center says the group conducts “overseas monitoring and overseas investigation services” and provides “comprehensive response plans” to government and private clients.

Both the People’s Daily and the Global Times were among the outlets designated as foreign missions in the United States.

The increase in China’s monitoring of foreign public opinion on social media coincides with efforts by Beijing to boost its influence on Twitter and other U.S. social media platforms.

In June 2020, Twitter suspended 23,000 accounts that it said were linked to the Chinese Communist Party and covertly spreading propaganda to undermine pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. This month, Twitter said it removed a further 2,048 accounts linked to Beijing and producing coordinated content undermining accusations of rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Experts say those accounts represent a small fraction of China’s efforts to boost pro-Beijing messaging on foreign social media.

'Extreme chilling effect'

Just under a third of the public opinion analysis systems reviewed by The Post were procured by Chinese police.

In 14 instances, the analysis systems included a feature requested by the police that would automatically flag “sensitive” content related to Uyghurs and other Chinese ethnic minorities. An additional 12 analysis systems included the police-requested capability of monitoring individual content authors over time.

“It must support information monitoring of overseas social media … and provide for targeted collection of designated sites and authors,” said one invitation to tender released by the Fuzhou city police in October that lists coverage of Facebook and Twitter as a requirement.

The monitoring of social media abroad by local police throughout China could be used in investigating Chinese citizens locally and abroad, as well as in flagging trends that stir domestic dissent, experts say.

“The public security monitoring is very much about stability maintenance, tracking people down and finding people’s identity, and when they monitor overseas social media, it’s also often with an eye to monitoring what news could cause trouble at home in China,” said the German Marshall Fund’s Ohlberg.

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Companies providing overseas public opinion monitoring to police include a mix of private and state-owned firms, including the People’s Daily Online.

Six police contracts awarded since 2020 stated that the People’s Daily was chosen to conduct monitoring on the basis of its technical ability to gather data abroad.

“It’s the only one in the industry that deploys overseas servers. It is a public opinion service organization that can monitor and collect more than 8,000 overseas media without ‘overturning the wall,’ ” said the Guangdong Police Department in a $26,200 contract offer posted in July 2020, referring to the ability of the People’s Daily unit to collect overseas data outside China’s Great Firewall.

Experts say the increasingly advanced social media surveillance technology available to Chinese police could worsen the targeted harassment of Beijing’s critics.

“The Chinese government is one of the worst offenders when it comes to targeting individuals outside of the country,” said Adrian Shahbaz, the director for technology and democracy at the think tank Freedom House.

“It has an extreme chilling effect on how Chinese citizens outside of China are using social media tools, because they know that back home, their information is very easily monitored by Chinese authorities,” he said.

The China Public Security Bureau did not respond to a request for comment.

A police bureau in southern China’s Nanping city purchased a $42,000 system that “supports collection, discovery, and warning functions for ... Twitter and Facebook social media data according to different classifications and keyword groups, as well as overseas information lists,” according to bidding documents released in July 2020.

Other procurements for public opinion services outline programs purchased by Chinese police and Xinjiang government bodies to track “sensitive” ethnic language content abroad. (China’s mainly-Muslim Uyghurs are concentrated in Xinjiang.)

A $43,000 system purchased by police in central China’s Shangnan county included a “foreign sensitive information” collection system that requested Uyghur and Tibetan staff translators, according to the contracts.

Military procurement documents — less detailed than other types — did not offer much detail on the purpose of the foreign data collection but alluded to vague categories of data including “key personnel.”

One heavily redacted June 2020 contract issued by the People’s Liberation Army described a system that would trawl foreign sites and categorize data on the basis of affiliation, geography and country.

Source Data Technology, the Shanghai-based company that won the contract, says on its website that it uses “advanced big data mining and artificial intelligence analysis technology” to cover more than 90 percent of social media in the United States, Europe and China’s neighboring countries.

 

@ The Washington Post

TALIBAN CRACKS DOWN ON MORE RIGHTS WHILE DEMANDING WESTERN AID

[Women must have male escorts on long taxi rides, and election commissions are shut down]

By Pamela Constable

KABUL — Even as they appeal to the world to release frozen humanitarian aid funds and bank accounts, Taliban officials are taking new actions to restrict women’s freedoms and dismantle democratic institutions — defying the top two international concerns that have kept most foreign aid at bay as a cold winter looms for millions of destitute Afghans.

Over the past week, the powerful ministry for Islamic guidance has issued rules requiring women to fully cover their heads if they ride in a public taxi and to be accompanied by a male relative if they travel more than 45 miles. The instructions also require cabdrivers to refuse to carry female passengers who do not comply and to stop playing music while driving because it is “un-Islamic.”

In the political arena, Taliban spokesmen announced the shutdown of two national election oversight commissions and two cabinet ministries. One longtime ministry dealt with parliamentary issues; the second was formed in 2019 to promote peace during lengthy — and ultimately futile — negotiations to end the 20-year conflict between the Islamist insurgents and Western-backed government forces.

These moves follow actions including the armed occupation and shutdown of the national independent bar association. Rights groups and analysts see the moves as signals that the new, deeply conservative Islamist rulers are both tightening and widening their grip across Afghan society — despite initial promises of leniency after they took power in mid-August.

“The Taliban are reverting to their repressive policies of the past, shattering the myth of a kinder and more moderate Taliban 2.0,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the Wilson Center in Washington. Even if their leaders carry cellphones and laptops now, he added, “they feel emboldened, and they are not about to change the ideology that defined them” when they held power in Kabul from 1996 to 2001.

Kugelman and others said Taliban authorities do not appear to be overly concerned about the looming humanitarian crisis that international aid agencies predict could engulf the poor, drought-plagued nation of 39 million this winter. They suggest that Taliban demands for the release of foreign funds are more a contest of wills — a game of chicken with the West — than a sign of real urgency over the collapsing economy and worsening levels of hunger and cold.

In an interview this week, the Taliban’s deputy spokesman, Bilal Karimi, said that his government “appreciates” international assistance but that it is working to “manage” the current humanitarian crisis through its own resources and charities. “We want to solve problems through negotiations, and we want to have good relations with the world, but the world must also want good relations with us,” he said.

Asked about the new restrictions on women, he said that his government is “even more committed to women’s rights than others” and that there are “no obstacles” to women working or studying as long as they can be can be physically separated from men.

“We fought for 20 years for an Islamic system,” he said. “We are still working on putting the mechanisms in place, but we need more time.”

Karimi said he had “no information” about the new travel rules prescribed for women in a handwritten order by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. “This is an Islamic society, and it is natural for women to wear hijab anyway,” he said, adding that the ministry’s pronouncements are “recommendations, not compulsory.”

Human rights groups, however, called the new rules a chilling echo of the draconian strictures that were placed on women’s activities during the first Taliban era, when those who ventured outdoors without a male relative, or who did not cover their faces and bodies with voluminous burqas, risked being punished with lashings by vigilantes from the same ministry.

“This will have a huge impact on women and girls. It will make it difficult for those who want to study at universities away from home, and it will stop those fleeing to escape domestic violence,” said Heather Barr, an official of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch in New York. “This is another move toward making girls and women prisoners in their own homes, and a signal that more such violations may be coming.”

In Kabul this week, lines of male taxi drivers waited at busy outdoor bazaars, calling out their destinations, and groups of women crammed inside them with their purchases. One young woman in a fashionable outfit and makeup, sorting through a sidewalk table of secondhand sweaters, said she was very upset about the new travel rules.

“The situation is getting more and more difficult for us,” said Shaqaf Salah, who said she was forced to quit pre-med studies. “I am married and educated, and still I have no rights. I was a very good student, and now I am sitting at home. My husband is with me today, but what if he wasn’t? How would I get out of the house?”

On Wednesday, a group of about 50 women held a brief protest in downtown Kabul, calling for the United States and foreign agencies to release funds to the Afghan government. They said women are bearing the brunt of hardship and demand the right to work, but their blame was pointed mostly at the West, and they carried banners that read, “Joe Biden, my children have nothing to eat.” The Biden administration is withholding more than $8 billion in Afghan government assets, although it has begun channeling funds to humanitarian aid efforts.

The official crackdown on democratic institutions has drawn less public opposition, in part because electoral politics and civilian governance were discredited during two decades of fraud-marred elections and official corruption. But among Afghan lawyers and other advocacy groups, those Taliban actions are seen as having an even greater chilling effect on individual rights and freedoms.

Last month, after shutting down the bar association, the government required all lawyers to be approved by the Taliban Justice Ministry, raising concerns that criminal defendants will not be able to get fair treatment and that sharia law courts will dominate the system. During the first period of Taliban rule, such courts ordered stonings, amputations and executions.

Karimi said the government is taking such steps largely to meet its “administrative needs” and priorities during the economic crisis. The Peace Ministry, he said, “is not needed any more because there is no fighting, and security is being enforced.” The election commissions “have only been closed temporarily, and if we need them in the future, we can rebuild them,” he said.

Some observers say the mixed signals from Taliban leaders, with vague explanations for some new policies and others backpedaled as “temporary,” reflect a larger problem facing the new rulers: persistent internal divisions that have undercut decision-making and pitted religious imperatives against public and operational necessity.

“The Taliban are facing multiple challenges, including the need to consolidate power and unify a group with internal divides,” Kugelman said. The new rash of restrictive orders, he said, “smacks of a plan to project strength and defiance at a moment when they are in over their heads.” While millions of Afghans may face a life-threatening winter, he added, “they are tending to internal politics, and fiddling while Rome burns.”

Analysts described a state of competing priorities among Taliban officials — including senior religious leaders who insist on applying sharia law to every issue, younger administrators who are more educated but wield little power, and moderate figures who have traveled abroad to negotiations and conferences and are the most open to modernization and reform.

Some civilian activists here, including those who organized the women’s march, assert that there is still hope for Taliban governance if the more moderate among them can find room to maneuver and gradually gain influence. Others fear that the die is cast and that the recent crackdowns are a harbinger of more to come, with or without international aid.

“We need to work with the Taliban for change, lower our expectations and give them time,” said Faiz Zaland, a public policy professor at Kabul University who has built relations with numerous Taliban figures and has often been criticized for it. “It is a last chance to save Afghanistan for the next generation. If everything collapses and they become a rogue state, the country will be lost.”

 

@ The Washington Post

  

FROM ECONOMIC MIRACLE TO MIRAGE – WILL CHINA’S GDP EVER OVERTAKE THE US?

[Analysis: issues of governance, rising debt, Covid and property market turmoil will delay Beijing’s quest to become the global economy’s No 1]

By George Magnus

“The east is rising, the west is declining”, according to the narrative propagated by the Chinese Communist party (CCP). Many outside China take its “inevitable rise” as read. On the way to becoming a “modern socialist country” by 2035, and rich, powerful, and dominant by 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic, China wants to claim bragging rights as its GDP surpasses the United States, and project its power based on its expanding economic heft.

There is, however, a critical flaw in this narrative. China’s economy may fail to overtake the US as it succumbs to the proverbial middle-income trap. This is where the relative development progress of countries in relation to richer nations stalls, and is normally characterised by difficult economic adjustment and often by unpredictable political consequences.

Historically, China’s growth miracle has been remarkable. In the 30 years to 1990, the money GDP (the market value of goods and services produced in an economy) for China and the US in American dollar terms grew more or less in tandem at just over 6% and 8% per annum, respectively. . But in the next three decades, China’s GDP growth doubled to more than 13%, while America’s halved to 4.5%. That pushed China’s GDP up from 5% of American GDP to 66%.

Yet, China’s growth spurt is now over, and the huge disparity in GDP growth has been eliminated. In the last few quarters, China’s GDP has been growing at half the rate of the US. Although that discrepancy is probably unsustainable, America’s estimated $7tn GDP margin over China in 2021 means that comparable rates of GDP growth in the future will sustain and even widen the margin. A Japanese thinktank has recently extended the date when it expects China to overtake the US, from 2029 to 2033. Deferrals like this are now a feature, and there will be more.

The issue though is less about the maths and more about why China is at a turning point.

Remember we have been here before. In the 1930s, Germany was going to dominate Europe, if not the world. In the 1960s and the 1980s, the Soviet Union – which had already stolen a march on the US in space technology – and later Japan, which was the rising economic force on the planet, would within 10 to 20 years overtake America to become the dominant economic and technological power.

History was not kind to the consensus. There is a serial tendency going back to the 1920s to underestimate the self-rectifying capacity of American institutions and enterprise. Equally, the Soviet Union and Japan both pursued similar development models, based around distortions that emphasised unsustainably and excessively high savings, high investment, and eventually high debt. Their development models cracked with spectacular consequences attributable to chronic failures of institutions and governance.

China is our 21st-century version of this phenomenon. Its investment rate is a good 10 percentage points of GDP higher than it was at the peak in the USSR and Japan, and strongly associated with misallocation and inefficiency of capital, and widespread debt servicing problems.

Its zero-Covid policy could keep barriers in place between China and the world economy until 2023 or even beyond, but this aside, a protracted slowing in trend growth, exacerbated by over-indebtedness and the tipping point now in real estate, as illustrated by the crumbling development giant Evergrande, is already under way. China’s $60tn real estate sector is four times GDP and accounts for a quarter to a third of annual growth. It faces years of awkward adjustment, not least as developers cut debt, the first-time buyer age cohort contracts, and probably as real estate prices decline.

China’s economic structure, moreover, is unbalanced. It has income per head that is the equivalent of Mexico, but consumption per head that is no higher than Peru. Consumer spending accounts for about 37% of GDP, little higher than it was in 2010, and much lower than in 2000. Productivity growth, closely associated with liberalising reform, has stalled.

China’s development model urgently needs a makeover to avoid the middle-income trap. The longer it is delayed, the bigger the costs. China’s leaders recognise that change is necessary, and Xi Jinping recently revived the slogan of “common prosperity” to mobilise the Communist party and citizens around a strategy to reduce income and regional inequality, and improve living standards.

Yet these political goals require precisely the kind of liberalising, progressive and redistributive reforms to the economy to which Xi Jinping is opposed. He has pursued an increasingly ideological and totalitarian governance style in which the already dominant position of the party and state in the economy has been strengthened further.

Perversely, he has created a contradiction in which even the CCP’s expertise in dialectical argument may be of little help. The recent blizzard of new laws and regulations aimed at private firms and entrepreneurs, for example, is designed to nail down the party’s control and bring the private sector to political heel. This is hardly compatible with the productivity growth and innovation on which China’s lofty economic ambition depends.

Overtaking the United States is going to need a lot more than narrative. It requires policies to which Xi’s China is opposed, and might just remain a mirage. The consequences for China and the rest of the world have not been properly thought about.

 

@ The Guardian

 

INDIAN AUTHORITIES TO BLOCK FOREIGN FUNDING FOR MOTHER TERESA’S CHARITY

[In recent years, the Modi government has cut off foreign funding for nonreligious organizations as well, in moves that effectively led to the decline or demise of civil society groups critical of its administration. Greenpeace slashed its Indian operations amid a lengthy financial probe, while Amnesty International announced last year it would cease its Indian operations altogether after its bank accounts were frozen.]

 

By Gerry Shih

NEW DELHI — For decades, the Christian congregation founded by Mother Teresa in an Indian slum was seen by supporters as a symbol of selfless giving and a magnet for donations from around the world. But to India’s Hindu right wing, it was a target of their ire — and a hotbed, some alleged, for the conversion of desperate Hindus into Christians.

Now, the Missionaries of Charity — an organization that grew from a humble order of 12 sisters led by Mother Teresa into one of the world’s most recognizable Christian nonprofits with branches from Venezuela to Washington, D.C. — is facing potentially crippling sanctions from the Indian government.

The organization’s international donations will be effectively frozen on Saturday after India’s Home Ministry said Monday it will not renew the group’s license to receive funds from abroad because it found “adverse inputs.”

Although the ministry did not provide details about its reasoning or the case, the decision comes at a moment of rising Hindu nationalism in India — and mounting scrutiny of foreign nonprofits and human rights organizations — under the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party.

The funding ban threatens an operation of thousands of nuns who have depended for decades on the enduring legacy of Mother Teresa to raise money from around the world and use it to provide shelter, food and education for orphans, the homeless and the sick. Mother Teresa died in 1997 and was declared a saint in 2016.

Leaders at the Missionaries of Charity declined to comment but issued a brief statement saying they have asked members to stop accessing accounts with foreign funds until the matter is “resolved.” A senior official from the Archdiocese of Calcutta, where the nonprofit is based, condemned the government move as an attack on both the Christian community and on “the poorest of India’s poor” who depend on its services.

In recent years, the Modi government has cut off foreign funding for nonreligious organizations as well, in moves that effectively led to the decline or demise of civil society groups critical of its administration. Greenpeace slashed its Indian operations amid a lengthy financial probe, while Amnesty International announced last year it would cease its Indian operations altogether after its bank accounts were frozen.

Mother Teresa’s order has not been a vocal opponent of the government, but it has long been viewed with distrust by India’s Hindu right. The leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an influential Hindu organization closely aligned with the BJP, sparked a national debate in 2015 after he said Mother Teresa served India’s poor not only out of altruism but to convert them to Christianity.

John Dayal, a Christian activist in New Delhi, said India’s Christian community has long faced pressure, particularly under periods of BJP rule when Hindu vigilante groups feel more emboldened. But this year, he said, reports of attacks on churches have ticked up. Christian communities in several states reported cases of vandalism or disturbances during their Christmas celebrations this week.

Earlier in December, local officials in Gujarat — a predominantly Hindu state where Modi served as leader for more than a decade — filed complaints against workers from the Missionaries of Charity, accusing them of “luring” local girls to Christianity and “hurting Hindu religious sentiments.”

Two of the group’s workers are under investigation for forced conversion and could face imprisonment and fines.

The government “decided to teach Mother Teresa’s organization a lesson,” said Dayal, who predicted that her order would financially “starve to death” under the funding restriction. “She was always, and continues to be, vilified by the Hindu right wing,” he said.

Mother Teresa, an ethnic Albanian born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in 1910, arrived in India as a young nun in 1929. She established the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 in Kolkata, then known as Calcutta. She received the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize for her charity work and was declared a saint by Pope Francis in 2016. That year, Modi surprised some of his right-wing supporters by saying Indians should feel proud about her canonization.

Although modern India was founded in 1947 as a secular nation and Hindus retain a significant majority, the religious balance of the population and the issue of conversions represent looming concerns for members of the RSS and affiliated Hindu nationalist groups. They argue that Abrahamic religions such as Islam and Christianity are influences historically brought in by foreign invaders and undermine India’s national character.

Under BJP leadership, several Indian states have recently introduced, or are mulling, laws to restrict conversion through marriage. Hindu nationalists, including BJP leaders, have warned about the rise of “love jihad,” a term they use to allege that Muslim men are marrying and converting Hindu women as part of a systematic conspiracy.

India’s last census in 2011 showed that roughly 2 percent of the population are Christians, compared with 80 percent Hindus and 14 percent Muslims.

A.C. Michael, a Christian community leader in New Delhi and former member of the Indian capital’s minorities commission, said the Missionaries of Charity should be able to continue operations purely on funding from its domestic donors. But it was also possible that the government would backtrack, he said.

“It seems the government didn’t understand what would happen if they touched an organization like this,” he said. “They’ve gotten the whole world calling them up.”

Read more:

Amnesty International to cease work in India, citing government harassment

In the Indian city where Mother Teresa founded her order, ambivalence about her legacy

Mother Teresa’s nuns still quietly serve the poor at D.C. convent

 

@ The Washington Post

 

 

‘FAMILIES WANT A SON AT ANY COST’: THE WOMEN FORCED TO ABORT FEMALE FOETUSES IN INDIA

[Laali and Meenakshi’s unborn daughters are among the country’s 46 million ‘missing’ women and girls over the past 50 years]

By Yashraj Sharma

Laali was alone at home when she realised her legs were drenched in blood. The bleeding did not stop for eight hours. As she fell unconscious, the 25-year-old thought she would die alongside the foetus she was losing.

She had been three months pregnant when she was taken for prenatal sex determination. “When I learned it was a girl, I started feeling as though I was suffocating,” she says.

An abortion pill was forced down her throat, without a doctor’s supervision, and subsequent complications led to hospitalisation. The night she was released, Laali cried herself to sleep – and in the morning returned to her work in the fields.

Laali’s unborn daughter is among India’s estimated 46 million “missing females” over a period of 50 years, ten times the female population of London. A deepening gender bias, breeding rampant sex-selective abortions and female infanticides, means that India accounts for nearly half of global missing female births.

“The traditional pattern of marriage and customs dictate an inferior position to women in Indian societies,” says Prem Chowdhry, a gender activist and retired professor at the University of Delhi. Since girls leave their birth family after marriage, she says, the dowry and cost of raising a girl is considered an unwelcome obligation, and sex-selective abortions are common.

Prenatal sex determination was criminalised in 1994, but it is a widely flouted law. The practice has thrived with medical advancements, spread to more regions, and is still easily accessible in privately run clinics.

Surrounded by vast sugar cane fields, Laali’s village is 40 miles from Delhi. Social health activists who run an unregistered support group for women here estimate that “every third house in the village” has aborted a foetus because of the sex.

“Families want a son at any cost. Any cost!” Laali says. “If I die, my husband will remarry tomorrow morning, hoping the next woman will give birth to a son.”

Laali was 19 when her marriage was arranged with a farmer in 2009. In the next three years, she gave birth to two daughters. During her second pregnancy, she was regularly drugged by traditional and faith healers in order to “make” a boy.

When her baby girl was born, no one from her family came to see them in the hospital. Returning home was worse. “My mother-in-law refused to see my daughter’s face,” Laali said. “She refused to take care of me, saying: ‘you are giving birth to girl after girl. How far can I take care of you?’”

Every night, as she sat down for dinner after a day of labour in the field, someone would toss in a taunt. “When anyone had a son in the village, it was a nightmare for me,” she recalls. “My family abused me in front of my girls.”

The government of India appears unwilling to act. A recent government survey hailed the fact that there are more women than men for the first time. However, activists on the ground and experts are sceptical of the data. “The main objective of the survey was to look into data on reproductive health and family welfare indicators and not on the population sex ratio,” said Sabu George, a researcher and activist based in Delhi. “All state-wise trends show a different picture.”

Dr Prabhat Jha of the University of Toronto, who led India’s Million Death Study, agrees: “The UN Population Division, the most careful demographic work, estimates the number of ‘excess men’ in India is growing.”

India’s own registrar general’s estimate suggests a similar trend.

A 2021 Lancet research paper, co-authored by Jha, claimed that the situation has worsened, with missing female births increasing from 3.5 million in 1987–96 to 5.5 million in 2007–16.

The male child bias has cut through class and geographical divisions. In August, a 40-year-old woman from a wealthy upper-class Mumbai family said she was forced to abort eight times to satisfy the family’s desire for a son. She was given more than 1,500 hormonal and steroid injections before she lodged a police complaint. Last year, in southern India’s Karnataka, a 28-year-old woman died after complications during a third forced abortion.

Endless harassment pushed Laali to seek psychiatric help, and she is currently on medication. Two abortions and a surgery later, doctors have advised her to not get pregnant again. “My womb has weakened and my body cannot bear another child,” she said.

Family interference can cause huge stress for women. Bhavna Joshi, 39, from Chittorgarh in Rajasthan, had eight pregnancies in her 11 years of marriage, and finds her experience so painful to talk about that she only wants to share the basic facts: she was taken to “uncountable” numbers of traditional healers, had three abortions and lost two infants as babies. It didn’t stop until she finally gave birth to a son, now aged five.

After two abortions, Laali wishes for a boy too. “I want this to end. They are drugging me and I cannot eat or drink for days,” she said. “I just want out of it, badly.”

Over the past two decades, trends in sex-selective abortions have shifted. The Lancet research found that as more families in India become nuclear, abortions are more common with the third pregnancy. “Families let nature decide twice, but then – for the third time – they make sure it is a boy,” said Jha. “Violence against women is a cultural thing in India. The problem is going to get much worse before it might get better.”

After having two daughters, 36-year-old Meenakshi was taken by her in-laws for a prenatal sex test when she fell pregnant for the third time. “The area was completely deserted and hidden,” she says, hiding in another home for the interview. “I was scared. It wasn’t a normal clinic.”

Meenakshi, currently seven months pregnant, wasn’t directly told the result. “My husband and his mother looked happy so I understood it was going to be a boy,” she said. “Otherwise, they would have killed it [before the birth].”

In India’s deeply patriarchal society, women’s full sexual and reproductive rights are still a distant dream. Women like Meenakshi are fighting for acceptability in the family. Meenakshi’s parents raised her to expect freedom after marriage. But everything is worse, she says, sobbing.

For Laali, harassment is part of her daily life. By the time she was 15, her mother had aborted two female foetuses, and her younger sister has aborted at least three.

“You are brought up in an environment where this violence against women is completely acceptable and normalised,” says George. “The question is: how do you resist this on the ground? And that’s frightening.”

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Both Laali and Meenakshi were isolated in society, lacking any emotional support. Talking of their experiences, hidden inside their rooms, makes them cry, and their daughters, all in their teens, console them with hugs. Laali and Meenakshi are desparately worried they will not be able to protect their daughters from similar trauma, but for now the girls are mostly oblivious.

Meenakshi’s eldest daughter jumps with joy as she sees a plane passing over their heads. “She wants to be a pilot,” says Meenakshi, wiping her tears. “When I cry, she tells me: ‘Mamma, it’ll get better, and one day we’ll fly together, in a plane that I’ll pilot.’”

 

@ The Guardian

 

 

IS MOUNT EVEREST REALLY THE TALLEST MOUNTAIN ON EARTH?

[Mount Everest is the tallest mountain above sea level, while Mauna Kea can certainly claim to be the world's tallest mountain (when sea level isn't taken into account). It would be difficult to make a case for Chimborazo being the tallest, but "it's all a matter of perspective," Price admitted.]

It depends how you measure height.

By Joe Phelan 

It's no secret that Mount Everest, the jewel in Nepal's Himalayan crown, is the world's premier mountain. It's one of those facts embedded in childhood, like knowing that Neil Armstrong was the first person to walk on the moon or that blue whales are the largest animals ever to have lived.

You may be surprised to hear, then, that other peaks could conceivably be considered Earth's tallest; it just depends how you measure them.

So, judging by different parameters — including tallest by altitude, tallest from base to top and tallest based on being the farthest point from Earth's center — what is the tallest mountain in the world?

Mount Everest, located deep in the Mahālangūr Himāl subrange of the Himalayas, is undoubtedly the most famous — and alluring — of all our planet's mountains. Also known as Chomolungma, meaning "Goddess Mother of the World" in Tibetan, Everest was first scaled on May 29, 1953 by Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa of Nepal, and New Zealander Edmund Hillary, and has since been successfully climbed by around 4,000 people. The mountain has also claimed the lives of over 300 since records started being kept in 1922, according to the Guardian.

Researchers have measured Mount Everest many times over the past few decades, but the latest assessment, announced in November 2021, puts it at 29,031.69 feet (8,848.86 meters) above sea level, which is almost 5.5 miles (8.8 kilometers) tall. It's a pretty impressive height, but it does raise a question: Why do we use "above sea level" when determining the world's tallest peak? 

"In order to have comparability in measurements, it is necessary to have a consistent baseline," Martin Price, a professor and founding director of the Centre for Mountain Studies at the University of Highlands and Islands in Scotland, told Live Science.

"Historically, and even now, elevation is usually given as height above mean sea level," Price told Live Science in an email. "However, this has to be with reference to a standard mean sea level, which has to be defined. Sea levels are different in different parts of the world, and they're changing due to climate change."

As a result, "elevation is now measured in relation to the mathematically defined geoid of the Earth," he said. The geoid is, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "a model of global mean sea level that is used to measure precise surface elevations." This average is used to ascertain the height of mountains, a process that sometimes requires an aeroplane to fly "back and forth over a mountain in a series of parallel lines to measure how much gravity pulls down on its peak," according to GIM International. These measurements, in conjunction with GPS readings, provide incredibly accurate elevation readings. 

So, all mountains are measured from sea level, predominantly for convenience and consistency, but what if measurements were simply taken from base to peak? Would Everest still top the charts?

The answer is a mountainous "no." That honor would go to Mauna Kea, an inactive volcano in Hawaii. Although its peak is 13,802 feet (4,205 m) above sea level — which is less than half the height of Everest, according to National Geographic — the majority of Mauna Kea is hidden below sea level. When measured from base to peak, Mauna Kea is 33,497 feet (10,211 m) tall, according to the United States Geological Survey, which puts it heads and shoulders above Mount Everest.

Should we, therefore, regard Mauna Kea as the tallest mountain on Earth?

"It all depends on the perspective you take," Price said. "If there were no oceans on our planet, there would be no debate! You could draw comparisons to the highest mountains on other bodies in our solar system, which have no oceans."

Meanwhile, another contender, Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, boasts a peak that is the farthest point from Earth's center.

Chimborazo isn't the tallest mountain in the Andes — it's not even in the top 30 — but its proximity to the equator is what makes all the difference. Earth is not a perfect sphere — technically, it's an oblate spheroid — and it bulges along the equator. This is a result of the force created by Earth's rotation. As a result, it means there is a difference of 13.29 miles (21.39 km) between the planet's polar radius (3,949.90 miles/6,356.75 km) and its equatorial radius (3,963.19 miles/6,378.14 km), according to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Chimborazo is just 1 degree south of the equator, where Earth's bulge is most prominent; this geographical quirk means Chimborazo's summit is 3,967 miles from Earth’s core, making it 6,798 feet (2,072 m) farther away from the planet's center than the peak of Everest. 

So, which of these three contenders for tallest mountain should take home first prize?

Mount Everest is the tallest mountain above sea level, while Mauna Kea can certainly claim to be the world's tallest mountain (when sea level isn't taken into account). It would be difficult to make a case for Chimborazo being the tallest, but "it's all a matter of perspective," Price admitted.

Regardless of the mountain you choose, its height will pale in comparison with Mars' Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano in the solar system. It has a height of around 16 miles (25 km), according to NASA, which is almost three times taller than Everest, and a base of 374 miles (601.9 km) in diameter, which is about the same distance separating San Francisco and Los Angeles (383.1 miles/616.5 km).

There is also an impact crater called Rheasilvia on the asteroid Vesta, which is part of the asteroid belt 100 million miles from Earth. At the center of this crater is a peak that scientists believe could be anywhere between 12 and 15.5 miles (20 and 25 km) in height, meaning it may be the tallest mountain in the solar system, according to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

Originally published on Live Science.

 

@ Live Science