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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52546220

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The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday welcomed a joint statement by Australia and New Zealand emphasizing the importance of peace in the Taiwan Strait.

The statement came at the close of Tuesday’s third ANZMIN 2+2 meeting in Canberra. Participants in the annual consultations were New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters, Defense Minister Judith Collins, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and Defense Minister Richard Marles.

[...]

Australia and New Zealand said they wanted to continue deepening economic, trade, and cultural relations with Taiwan while enhancing the coordination of development efforts in the Pacific.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52546220

Archived

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday welcomed a joint statement by Australia and New Zealand emphasizing the importance of peace in the Taiwan Strait.

The statement came at the close of Tuesday’s third ANZMIN 2+2 meeting in Canberra. Participants in the annual consultations were New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters, Defense Minister Judith Collins, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and Defense Minister Richard Marles.

[...]

Australia and New Zealand said they wanted to continue deepening economic, trade, and cultural relations with Taiwan while enhancing the coordination of development efforts in the Pacific.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52545959

*This is an opinion piece by Benedict Rogers, a British human rights lawyer. *

Archived

[...]

China’s new "ethnic unity" law, passed by the National People’s Congress last week, is the latest step in Xi Jinping’s campaign of forced Sinicization. It codifies in law what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been implementing for some years — a program of forced assimilation for China’s ethnic minorities aimed at wiping out ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity.

[...]

Sharing a common loyalty to one’s country, regardless of ethnicity, is a desirable objective.

However, there are three points about China’s plans that should be kept in mind.

First, this is less about social cohesion and more about political control and repression.

The “identity” the CCP wants its citizens, of all ethnicities, to adopt is loyalty to the Communist Party. Indeed, the CCP conflates Party and State, so that to be patriotic means to be devoted to the Party.

In any democracy, you can be loyal to your country without being aligned with the governing party. You can be a patriotic American and a critic of the incumbent president. You can be a British patriot and an opponent of the sitting prime minister.

The same is true in Asia’s democracies, such as Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. Even in India under the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi, or in Indonesia under former dictator Suharto’s son-in-law Prabowo Subianto, you can be a political opponent without your patriotism being in doubt.

But not in China. The Party, the State, and the nation are one in the mind of the CCP.

That is why the new law insists that citizens must have “correct views” on history, culture, and religion, and abandon “outdated customs.” It requires parents to “educate and guide children to love the Chinese Communist Party.”

[...]

Secondly, this will apply to people who were never part of historic China.

The history is disputed, but certainly for significant periods of history, Tibet and East Turkistan were their own nations, which were invaded by China.

Now the CCP wants us to call East Turkistan — the homeland of the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim peoples — by the name it has chosen, “Xinjiang,” which literally means “New Frontier.”

It is also mounting a campaign to persuade the world to call Tibet “Xizang,” a Chinese term meaning “Western Zang.”

China invaded Tibet in October 1950.

Last week, Tibetans and friends of Tibet around the world marked the 67th anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising Day on March 10, 1959. That day, tens of thousands of Tibetans protested against Chinese military occupation and were massacred. The Dalai Lama escaped into exile, where he has been ever since.

A campaign of forced assimilation has already been underway for decades in both occupied Tibet and occupied East Turkistan.

Under Xi Jinping, it has intensified. More than one million Tibetan children have been forcibly separated from their parents and coerced into colonial boarding schools, where they are prohibited from learning their own Tibetan language, practising their own Tibetan Buddhist religion, or celebrating their Tibetan culture.

[...]

Thirdly, Xi Jinping has also been mounting a campaign of Sinicization against Christians across China, which again proves that this is not about culture or language, but politics.

The Sinicization of religion is not about making religion culturally sensitive or integrated — it is about making religion politically co-opted. It is about forcing state-controlled churches to display portraits of Xi and CCP propaganda banners alongside, or sometimes instead of, religious imagery.

A crackdown against Christians who refuse to comply — or who run churches outside the state-approved institutions — is intensifying, resulting in the detention last October of Pastor Ezra Jin, founder of the Zion Church network, and 17 of his pastors and elders.

[...]

“Ethnic unity” is very different from “inter-ethnic harmony.”

A 22-year-old Chinese student, Zhang Yadi, has been detained since last summer because, while studying in Paris, she had become involved with a group working to promote understanding and awareness among Chinese students about Tibetan culture.

This was promoting inter-ethnic harmony, an idea it turns out the CCP dislikes, and so she was arrested when she returned home to visit her family.

[...]

Diversity, of ethnicity, religion, culture, or thought, and inter-ethnic harmony or pluralism of religious, philosophical, spiritual, political, or cultural ideas, are concepts that terrify the CCP.

That is why it has introduced this new law — because it wants to make every Chinese citizen, regardless of their ethnicity, a cookie-cutter mold in the Party’s image. It is a campaign of forced assimilation that is genocidal in its intentions.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52546220

Archived

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday welcomed a joint statement by Australia and New Zealand emphasizing the importance of peace in the Taiwan Strait.

The statement came at the close of Tuesday’s third ANZMIN 2+2 meeting in Canberra. Participants in the annual consultations were New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters, Defense Minister Judith Collins, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and Defense Minister Richard Marles.

[...]

Australia and New Zealand said they wanted to continue deepening economic, trade, and cultural relations with Taiwan while enhancing the coordination of development efforts in the Pacific.

[...]

Archived

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Wednesday welcomed a joint statement by Australia and New Zealand emphasizing the importance of peace in the Taiwan Strait.

The statement came at the close of Tuesday’s third ANZMIN 2+2 meeting in Canberra. Participants in the annual consultations were New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters, Defense Minister Judith Collins, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, and Defense Minister Richard Marles.

[...]

Australia and New Zealand said they wanted to continue deepening economic, trade, and cultural relations with Taiwan while enhancing the coordination of development efforts in the Pacific.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52545959

*This is an opinion piece by Benedict Rogers, a British human rights lawyer. *

Archived

[...]

China’s new "ethnic unity" law, passed by the National People’s Congress last week, is the latest step in Xi Jinping’s campaign of forced Sinicization. It codifies in law what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been implementing for some years — a program of forced assimilation for China’s ethnic minorities aimed at wiping out ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity.

[...]

Sharing a common loyalty to one’s country, regardless of ethnicity, is a desirable objective.

However, there are three points about China’s plans that should be kept in mind.

First, this is less about social cohesion and more about political control and repression.

The “identity” the CCP wants its citizens, of all ethnicities, to adopt is loyalty to the Communist Party. Indeed, the CCP conflates Party and State, so that to be patriotic means to be devoted to the Party.

In any democracy, you can be loyal to your country without being aligned with the governing party. You can be a patriotic American and a critic of the incumbent president. You can be a British patriot and an opponent of the sitting prime minister.

The same is true in Asia’s democracies, such as Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. Even in India under the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi, or in Indonesia under former dictator Suharto’s son-in-law Prabowo Subianto, you can be a political opponent without your patriotism being in doubt.

But not in China. The Party, the State, and the nation are one in the mind of the CCP.

That is why the new law insists that citizens must have “correct views” on history, culture, and religion, and abandon “outdated customs.” It requires parents to “educate and guide children to love the Chinese Communist Party.”

[...]

Secondly, this will apply to people who were never part of historic China.

The history is disputed, but certainly for significant periods of history, Tibet and East Turkistan were their own nations, which were invaded by China.

Now the CCP wants us to call East Turkistan — the homeland of the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim peoples — by the name it has chosen, “Xinjiang,” which literally means “New Frontier.”

It is also mounting a campaign to persuade the world to call Tibet “Xizang,” a Chinese term meaning “Western Zang.”

China invaded Tibet in October 1950.

Last week, Tibetans and friends of Tibet around the world marked the 67th anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising Day on March 10, 1959. That day, tens of thousands of Tibetans protested against Chinese military occupation and were massacred. The Dalai Lama escaped into exile, where he has been ever since.

A campaign of forced assimilation has already been underway for decades in both occupied Tibet and occupied East Turkistan.

Under Xi Jinping, it has intensified. More than one million Tibetan children have been forcibly separated from their parents and coerced into colonial boarding schools, where they are prohibited from learning their own Tibetan language, practising their own Tibetan Buddhist religion, or celebrating their Tibetan culture.

[...]

Thirdly, Xi Jinping has also been mounting a campaign of Sinicization against Christians across China, which again proves that this is not about culture or language, but politics.

The Sinicization of religion is not about making religion culturally sensitive or integrated — it is about making religion politically co-opted. It is about forcing state-controlled churches to display portraits of Xi and CCP propaganda banners alongside, or sometimes instead of, religious imagery.

A crackdown against Christians who refuse to comply — or who run churches outside the state-approved institutions — is intensifying, resulting in the detention last October of Pastor Ezra Jin, founder of the Zion Church network, and 17 of his pastors and elders.

[...]

“Ethnic unity” is very different from “inter-ethnic harmony.”

A 22-year-old Chinese student, Zhang Yadi, has been detained since last summer because, while studying in Paris, she had become involved with a group working to promote understanding and awareness among Chinese students about Tibetan culture.

This was promoting inter-ethnic harmony, an idea it turns out the CCP dislikes, and so she was arrested when she returned home to visit her family.

[...]

Diversity, of ethnicity, religion, culture, or thought, and inter-ethnic harmony or pluralism of religious, philosophical, spiritual, political, or cultural ideas, are concepts that terrify the CCP.

That is why it has introduced this new law — because it wants to make every Chinese citizen, regardless of their ethnicity, a cookie-cutter mold in the Party’s image. It is a campaign of forced assimilation that is genocidal in its intentions.

*This is an opinion piece by Benedict Rogers, a British human rights lawyer. *

Archived

[...]

China’s new "ethnic unity" law, passed by the National People’s Congress last week, is the latest step in Xi Jinping’s campaign of forced Sinicization. It codifies in law what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been implementing for some years — a program of forced assimilation for China’s ethnic minorities aimed at wiping out ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity.

[...]

Sharing a common loyalty to one’s country, regardless of ethnicity, is a desirable objective.

However, there are three points about China’s plans that should be kept in mind.

First, this is less about social cohesion and more about political control and repression.

The “identity” the CCP wants its citizens, of all ethnicities, to adopt is loyalty to the Communist Party. Indeed, the CCP conflates Party and State, so that to be patriotic means to be devoted to the Party.

In any democracy, you can be loyal to your country without being aligned with the governing party. You can be a patriotic American and a critic of the incumbent president. You can be a British patriot and an opponent of the sitting prime minister.

The same is true in Asia’s democracies, such as Japan, Korea, and the Philippines. Even in India under the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi, or in Indonesia under former dictator Suharto’s son-in-law Prabowo Subianto, you can be a political opponent without your patriotism being in doubt.

But not in China. The Party, the State, and the nation are one in the mind of the CCP.

That is why the new law insists that citizens must have “correct views” on history, culture, and religion, and abandon “outdated customs.” It requires parents to “educate and guide children to love the Chinese Communist Party.”

[...]

Secondly, this will apply to people who were never part of historic China.

The history is disputed, but certainly for significant periods of history, Tibet and East Turkistan were their own nations, which were invaded by China.

Now the CCP wants us to call East Turkistan — the homeland of the Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim peoples — by the name it has chosen, “Xinjiang,” which literally means “New Frontier.”

It is also mounting a campaign to persuade the world to call Tibet “Xizang,” a Chinese term meaning “Western Zang.”

China invaded Tibet in October 1950.

Last week, Tibetans and friends of Tibet around the world marked the 67th anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising Day on March 10, 1959. That day, tens of thousands of Tibetans protested against Chinese military occupation and were massacred. The Dalai Lama escaped into exile, where he has been ever since.

A campaign of forced assimilation has already been underway for decades in both occupied Tibet and occupied East Turkistan.

Under Xi Jinping, it has intensified. More than one million Tibetan children have been forcibly separated from their parents and coerced into colonial boarding schools, where they are prohibited from learning their own Tibetan language, practising their own Tibetan Buddhist religion, or celebrating their Tibetan culture.

[...]

Thirdly, Xi Jinping has also been mounting a campaign of Sinicization against Christians across China, which again proves that this is not about culture or language, but politics.

The Sinicization of religion is not about making religion culturally sensitive or integrated — it is about making religion politically co-opted. It is about forcing state-controlled churches to display portraits of Xi and CCP propaganda banners alongside, or sometimes instead of, religious imagery.

A crackdown against Christians who refuse to comply — or who run churches outside the state-approved institutions — is intensifying, resulting in the detention last October of Pastor Ezra Jin, founder of the Zion Church network, and 17 of his pastors and elders.

[...]

“Ethnic unity” is very different from “inter-ethnic harmony.”

A 22-year-old Chinese student, Zhang Yadi, has been detained since last summer because, while studying in Paris, she had become involved with a group working to promote understanding and awareness among Chinese students about Tibetan culture.

This was promoting inter-ethnic harmony, an idea it turns out the CCP dislikes, and so she was arrested when she returned home to visit her family.

[...]

Diversity, of ethnicity, religion, culture, or thought, and inter-ethnic harmony or pluralism of religious, philosophical, spiritual, political, or cultural ideas, are concepts that terrify the CCP.

That is why it has introduced this new law — because it wants to make every Chinese citizen, regardless of their ethnicity, a cookie-cutter mold in the Party’s image. It is a campaign of forced assimilation that is genocidal in its intentions.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52502991

The Hong Kong democracy campaigner and British citizen was sentenced to 20 years in prison last month under a security law imposed by China.

[...]

In a video address to the Society of Editors conference on Tuesday, Mr Lai’s son Sebastien Lai said: “Recently, we have received some very distressing news about his health.

“The deterioration of his health over the last five years has been heart-breaking to watch.”

Sebastien Lai said his father has remained “stoic”, but said a 20-year sentence at 78 years old is a “death sentence”.

“When they announced this 20-year sentence, which to all intents and purposes is a life sentence, a death sentence,” he said.

“He (Jimmy Lai) was stoic, he was at peace, and he even managed to smile to the judges to tell them that though they have captured his body and they have shackled his body, they have not shackled his spirits.”

Jimmy Lai, who founded the now-defunct Apple Daily newspaper, which criticised the governments in Hong Kong and Beijing, was arrested in August 2020.

[...]

Sebastien Lai asked conference attendees to sign a letter calling for his father’s release.

“His story is a reminder of the responsibility that a journalist has to both his colleagues, but also to the people, that he tells the truth to,” the Hong Kong businessman’s son said.

[...]

The Hong Kong democracy campaigner and British citizen was sentenced to 20 years in prison last month under a security law imposed by China.

[...]

In a video address to the Society of Editors conference on Tuesday, Mr Lai’s son Sebastien Lai said: “Recently, we have received some very distressing news about his health.

“The deterioration of his health over the last five years has been heart-breaking to watch.”

Sebastien Lai said his father has remained “stoic”, but said a 20-year sentence at 78 years old is a “death sentence”.

“When they announced this 20-year sentence, which to all intents and purposes is a life sentence, a death sentence,” he said.

“He (Jimmy Lai) was stoic, he was at peace, and he even managed to smile to the judges to tell them that though they have captured his body and they have shackled his body, they have not shackled his spirits.”

Jimmy Lai, who founded the now-defunct Apple Daily newspaper, which criticised the governments in Hong Kong and Beijing, was arrested in August 2020.

[...]

Sebastien Lai asked conference attendees to sign a letter calling for his father’s release.

“His story is a reminder of the responsibility that a journalist has to both his colleagues, but also to the people, that he tells the truth to,” the Hong Kong businessman’s son said.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52491016

Moscow and Beijing are driving closer collaboration between authoritarian states and such networks help advance repression globally, according to researchers [at the] nonprofit Action for Democracy.

Here is the full report: Authoritarian Collaboration Index - Mapping the Global Autocratic Ecosystem (pdf)

The researchers built an index to track seven types of cooperation, including on funding, diplomatic activities, propaganda and tech sharing.

It found that China and Russia “sit at the center of global authoritarian collaboration” and were jointly involved in around half of all recorded activity. The report’s authors said that such cooperation generated compound returns because, for example, “surveillance infrastructure exported to one regime becomes a template for the next.”

• China and Russia sit at the heart of this axis of autocracy and, together with Iran, were respectively involved in nearly two-thirds of global “collaboration” events for the years 2024 to 2025.

• The authoritarian ecosystem extends far beyond China and Russia, with a mid-tier of regional powers and a long tail of smaller states and parties that sustain collaboration across narrower corridors.

• Authoritarian cooperation is becoming institutional: recurring forums, media alliances, and training platforms are hardening ad hoc coordination into durable infrastructure.

• Authoritarianism is also becoming routinised — practices like reciprocal sham election monitoring and cross-border dissident deportation now operate as low-friction, self-reinforcing defaults. And shared authoritarian imperatives consistently supersede ideological and religious divides, enabling cooperation between actors whose nominal worldviews would otherwise place them in opposition.

[...]

[China's] Belt and Road Initiative has likewise expanded beyond its origins as a development and investment vehicle to serve as a framework for media institutionalization. Beijing has promoted standing media alliances such as the Belt and Road News Network, designed to disseminate favorable content and coordinate a pro-BRI information environment through a multi-country membership model and recurring convenings. In the same vein, the Belt and Road Journalists Network provides for people-to-people information-sharing architecture, uniting nearly 1.7 million media professionals across participating states.

Crucially, these infrastructures are not confined to media collaboration.

[...]

As historian and democracy scholar Anne Applebaum has observed, contemporary authoritarian cooperation is often driven less by ideological convergence than by shared regime-security and elite-enrichment imperatives—namely, sustaining incumbency, protecting patronage networks, and shaping aspects of the international environment in ways that reduce external constraints.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52491016

Moscow and Beijing are driving closer collaboration between authoritarian states and such networks help advance repression globally, according to researchers [at the] nonprofit Action for Democracy.

Here is the full report: Authoritarian Collaboration Index - Mapping the Global Autocratic Ecosystem (pdf)

The researchers built an index to track seven types of cooperation, including on funding, diplomatic activities, propaganda and tech sharing.

It found that China and Russia “sit at the center of global authoritarian collaboration” and were jointly involved in around half of all recorded activity. The report’s authors said that such cooperation generated compound returns because, for example, “surveillance infrastructure exported to one regime becomes a template for the next.”

• China and Russia sit at the heart of this axis of autocracy and, together with Iran, were respectively involved in nearly two-thirds of global “collaboration” events for the years 2024 to 2025.

• The authoritarian ecosystem extends far beyond China and Russia, with a mid-tier of regional powers and a long tail of smaller states and parties that sustain collaboration across narrower corridors.

• Authoritarian cooperation is becoming institutional: recurring forums, media alliances, and training platforms are hardening ad hoc coordination into durable infrastructure.

• Authoritarianism is also becoming routinised — practices like reciprocal sham election monitoring and cross-border dissident deportation now operate as low-friction, self-reinforcing defaults. And shared authoritarian imperatives consistently supersede ideological and religious divides, enabling cooperation between actors whose nominal worldviews would otherwise place them in opposition.

[...]

[China's] Belt and Road Initiative has likewise expanded beyond its origins as a development and investment vehicle to serve as a framework for media institutionalization. Beijing has promoted standing media alliances such as the Belt and Road News Network, designed to disseminate favorable content and coordinate a pro-BRI information environment through a multi-country membership model and recurring convenings. In the same vein, the Belt and Road Journalists Network provides for people-to-people information-sharing architecture, uniting nearly 1.7 million media professionals across participating states.

Crucially, these infrastructures are not confined to media collaboration.

[...]

As historian and democracy scholar Anne Applebaum has observed, contemporary authoritarian cooperation is often driven less by ideological convergence than by shared regime-security and elite-enrichment imperatives—namely, sustaining incumbency, protecting patronage networks, and shaping aspects of the international environment in ways that reduce external constraints.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52490541

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/52490230

UK foreign aid helped to develop Chinese fossil fuel extraction in a region where the oil sector is associated with forced labour risks, a new investigation has found.

Archived

The UK funded the regional government in Xinjiang, China to develop carbon capture technology during the height of its mass internment of Uyghur Muslims, a new investigation has revealed.

The investigation was conducted by Land and Climate Review [...] uncovered data from deleted UK government webpages that show quarterly Foreign Office payments between 2016-2018 “to support the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Development and Reform Commission to systematically assess and identify regional Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) development opportunities, and build capacity for CCUS development in Xinjiang”.

CCUS is a technology designed to reduce pollution from power plants. It uses chemical filters to remove carbon dioxide gas from smokestack emissions. Xinjiang is a major fossil-fuel region for China, containing approximately a third of the country’s onshore oil and gas reserves.

[...]

Laura Murphy, whose research into Uyghur abuses led to a Chinese intimidation campaign now being investigated by counter-terrorism police in the UK, said that the internment of Uyghurs “really ramped up” in 2016. “For the years between at least 2016 and 2020, there was a system of mass internment and arbitrary detention that affected upwards of a million people in the Uyghur region.”

The academic at Sheffield Hallam University said the UK government “absolutely should have known” about this before the aid scheme ended in March 2018.

[...]

Labour transfer schemes – where Uyghurs from rural villages in Xinjiang were forcibly relocated to work across China – were headed by Xinjiang’s Development and Reform Commission as it was receiving UK funding to develop its energy sector. China denies such practices occur.

Zumretay Arkin, Vice President of the World Uyghur Congress, described the investigation findings as “deeply alarming”. She said “the Xinjiang Development and Reform Commission played a central role in the policies that enabled the mass transfer of Uyghur labour. Any cooperation with regional authorities should have been subject to the highest level of scrutiny.”

[...]