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It’s time for Canada to stand up to China’s censorship crackdown
China
just strengthened its Great Propaganda Firewall to limit what its
citizens can see and read about the outside world. The Liberals should
be outraged.
Chinese
President Xi Jinping and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the
Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China August 31, 2016. REUTERS/Wu
Hong/Pool
You won’t hear any loud alarms being rung about this from either the
starry-eyed or the sinister China trade enthusiasts in Justin Trudeau’s
cabinet, or Global Affairs Canada, the Canada China Business Council or
the Asia Pacific Foundation, but the Ministry of Industry and
Information Technology in Beijing has made it official.
The Communist Party of China has ordered a shutdown of all
unauthorized and unmonitored communication between China’s 1.3 billion
people and the outside world. In its formal statements, the Ministry
announced that it is closing the last digital breaches in the Great
Firewall of China—the outer ring of the regime’s vast snooping,
censorship and website-blocking superstructure.
Any VPN (virtual private network), proxy server or special cable
service operating without Beijing’s approval, under Beijing’s tight
controls, are now outlawed.
Chinese citizens require independent VPNs to access Google, Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Dropbox, Youtube, Tumblr and all the
other web applications that allow one-on-one and group discussions with
the outside world that the regime has blocked. The technology research
firm GlobalWebIndex reckons that one in three Chinese citizens has used
VPNs, which redirect Chinese web traffic through offshore servers,
allowing users to access outside-world websites undetected.
The corporate sector needs VPNs too, which is why Beijing has been
biding its time. International companies with operations in China will
be able to hold onto some perks, at least on paper. Foreign firms will
still be permitted to use VPN services—but only to communicate with head
office. The VPN must be a Chinese corporation. Sensitive company data
must now be stored in China. The identities of every employee using a
VPN workaround must be given to the ministry.
Without VPNs to traverse the catacombs under the Firewall or to scale
circumvention “ladders” to get over it, Chinese citizens cannot access
the regime-banned New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, the Economist, the Financial Times,
or Reuters news services—for starters. The CBC has been blocked in
China since 2014. According to the results of a URL test attempted
Sunday on the freedom-of-information site Greatfire.org, “100 per cent” of CBC’s online presence is off-limits inside China.
The ministry has set a deadline of March 31, 2018 to fully secure the
regime’s propaganda wall around China by “urgent regulation and
governance” of China’s internet systems, in order to correct what it
called the industry’s “disordered development.” To that end, internal
censorship has gone into overdrive in recent weeks, most noticeably to
cover up the scandal surrounding the torment and July 13 death of the
imprisoned Nobel laureate and democracy activist Liu Xiaobo.
A further tightening of the regime’s paranoid censorship of public
discussion was already in the works, besides, owing to the upcoming
national congress of the Chinese Communist Party, at which President Xi
Jinping is expected to further consolidate his stranglehold on the
Chinese state. Unless he rewrites the rules, Xi and Premier Li Keqiang
are expected to be the only members of the seven-member Politburo
Standing Committee who won’t be shuffled out.
The one glimmer of hope is that Beijing’s efforts at an
across-the-board VPN clampdown may not even be possible. Fast-moving
offshore operators usually pick up a lot of the slack when Chinese VPNs
get shut down. Within three years of the regime’s banning of the online
edition of the New York Times in 2012, the newspaper had regained its pre-censorship readership through VPNs.
Now, however, it’s not clear how Chinese citizens will find out how
to access offshore VPNs, or whether they will risk attempts to go over
or under the Firewall. On WeChat and Weibo, two of China’s most widely
used (though intermittently non-functioning) discussion platforms,
Beijing’s censors have now added “VPN” to the list of keywords that
trigger eavesdropping, blacklisting and blackouts.
Last month, the Ministry of Public Security’s Network Security Squad
was already issuing orders to internet service providers, warning them
to expunge all software that circumvent the Firewall. China’s
state-owned telecommunications giants, among them China Telecom, China
Unicom and China Mobile, were instructed to bring themselves in line
with President Xi’s draconian “internet sovereignty” push. The popular
Hong Kong Chinese proxy-service provider GreenVPN told its customers it
was being shut down by the authorities in Beijing. Last week, Guangzhou
Huoyun Information Technology Ltd. told Reuters that the company had
received a directive to begin blocking VPN services. Similarly leaked
and off-the-record accounts have been coming fast and thick in recent
weeks.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology communiques don’t
just make it official that a digital Iron Curtain is shutting China off
from the rest of the world. The ministry is putting the lie to any
further claims by Canada’s China trade lobby and its many friends in the
Liberal government that “free trade” talks are about bringing Canadians
and Chinese people closer together. That is not what is happening here.
We are being driven further apart.
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed
by the U.N. General Assembly on December 10, 1948, could not be more
plain in this matter: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and
expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without
interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas
through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
This is not just about the rights of Chinese citizens, to speak
freely with one another, without fear, through any media, across
frontiers. It is about the rights of Canadians to do the same. It is an
inalienable human right that is being trampled upon here, openly and
brazenly, and the Liberal government has only one choice in this: to
carry on in its disgrace, serving the Chinese slave state as a
collaborator and an accomplice, or to stand up for once and fight. MORE ABOUT CHINA:
North Korea, famous for its nuclear brinksmanship, has recentlycriticizedits Chinese ally with unprecedented candor. Recent nuclear and ballistic missile tests have angered the Xi Jinping administration in Beijing, causing something of a fall-out between the two communist powers.
The state-run Korean Central News Agency published a report on May 3, warning China that there would be “grave consequences” for “chopping down the pillar of the DPRK–China relations.” (DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.)
Rumors abound that China is preparing armies along the Yalu River to secure its border with North Korea. This signifies a sharp reversal in relations from when the two countries formed a communist bloc that stopped United Nations forces in the Korean War and granted the Kim regime over six decades in power.
But if North Korea collapses, what's in store for Beijing?
As the ancient Chinese political saying goes, “without lips, the teeth are cold.” The end of Kim Jong Un's multigenerational communist regime would weigh heavily on China, which is under another communist regime that formerly, under Mao Zedong, resembled today's North Korea writ large.
Since the launch of China's economic reforms, Pyongyang's eccentricity has allowed China to project an image of normalcy and progress even as grievous human rights abuses—including those unprecedented in the history of totalitarian abuse, such as forced live organ harvesting—took place en masse under the direction of the Chinese regime’s communist leaders.
North Korea's nuclear threat also provided a convenient point of crisis thatleaders in Beijingcould use to leverage against its neighbors and the United States.
Under Xi, however, Beijing has arrived at a crossroads. The nuclear threat is too grave to tolerate for much longer. And as U.S. President Donald Trump's many recent negotiations with his Chinese counterpart suggest, the Xi administration is open to cooperating to neutralize the Kim regime.
At the same time, viewed from the lens of Communist Party doctrine, Xi and his cohorts cannot afford to simply give up on North Korea, which still holds a solid place in the revolutionary mythos.
Adding another dimension to the problem is the upcoming 19th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, where Xi Jinping has a chance to clear the Politburo Standing Committee of his factional rivals—or spend another five years locked in some degree of political impasse.
How Xi's government handles North Korea, should the crisis flare up again, could make—or break—his designs for the reconstitution of China's leadership.
—Leo Timm
Across China, regional communist leaders affiliated with former regime leader Jiang Zemin continue to trouble the Xi Jinping leadership,writes Larry Ong. Xi and his administration have removed and replaceddozens of provincial leadersshown to be close to Jiang, reducing their numbers by two thirds.
China may be preparing forinstability or even national collapse in North Korea,writes Joshua Philipp. According to reports, the Chinese authorities are urgently looking to recruit workers in areas like border security, public security, trade, customs, and quarantine, as well as Chinese-Korean interpreters.
The anti-corruption agency of the Chinese Communist Party has putVancouver-based real estate developerCheng Muyang on its wanted list,writes Larry Ong. Cheng, accused of embezzlement and “concealment of illegal gains,” fled China in 2000 and became a political donor. The Canadian Liberal Party and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continued to accept Cheng’s donations and support, despite a tip off about his background, according to an exposé by South China Morning Post.
China's new impetus to rein in its financial sector has been underway for more than three months. Its effects arealready being feltin the financial markets, impacting short-term borrowing rates and the global commodities market,writes Fan Yu. The China Banking Regulatory Commission, under the direction of new chairman Guo Shuqing, has issued a flurry of new policy directives with the goal of regulating the shadow banking sector and reducing liquidity in the banking system.
American universities riskpromoting Chinese regime interestsvia the heavily subsidized and ideologically narrow Confucius Institutes,writes Gary Feuerberg. A Canadian documentary released last year and an April 26 report commissioned by the National Association of Scholars offer new insights on the the discriminatory and repressive practices of the institutes.
Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas gave a presentation on the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners in China at a conference held at Presidency University in Kolkata, India,writes Jonathan Zhou. In particular, Matas said that hundreds of thousands of people are thought to have beenmurdered for their organsunder the direction of the Chinese communist regime.
In April, at the initiative of the US, the Council is expected to
hold a briefing on reviewing peacekeeping operations. Secretary-General
António Guterres will brief.
Background
A concept note circulated ahead of the meeting stresses the important
role that political foundations play in the success of peacekeeping
missions. One of the conclusions of the 2014-2015 review
by the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) was the
“primacy of politics”, which implied the need for the Council to bring
its collective leverage to bear in support of political solutions.
In a
25 November 2015 presidential statement,
the Council underlined “the significant impact its statements and
actions can exert in situations of armed conflict or in support of peace
processes.” However, the Council has often failed to agree on a
political strategy in support of peace operations for many reasons,
including decision-making processes that do not prioritise the emergence
of strategic or collective thinking, divergent political priorities,
inadequate Secretariat analysis and planning, and host state hostility.
The concept note encourages Council members to review missions and
identify areas where mandates no longer match political realities,
asking whether it is advisable or possible to operate a mission without
the strategic consent of the host government.
Even though the Council
resolved in 2016 to send a regional protection force to Juba in South
Sudan, and a police component to Burundi, these decisions have not been
implemented promptly, if at all, in part due to the resistance of host
states.
The fact that the resolutions adopting these decisions were
non-consensual testifies to the divisions among Council members faced
with host state resistance. However, host state hostility has also
featured in situations where the Council has continued to unanimously
extend mandates of long-standing missions in Darfur and in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The achievability of Council mandates and the need to bridge the gap
between expectations and resources have been a key element in the
discussions related to peace operations reform since at least 2000. The
HIPPO report observed how, in recent years, mandates have become
lengthier and more specific, and at times less realistic, manageable or
achievable.
It maintained that “too often, mandates and missions are
produced on the basis of templates instead of tailored to support
situation-specific political strategies”. This is particularly relevant
in missions facing “conflict management” situations for which the
concepts, tools, mission structures and doctrine originally developed
for peace implementation tasks may not be well suited.
The Secretariat
and the Council have been unable to escape the so-called “Christmas tree
mandates”, where template language for many tasks routinely appears in
mission mandates. This is influenced by the lack of restraint on the
part of Council members—and those lobbying them—in pressing specific
issues, and internal Secretariat negotiations reflecting an arbitrage of
interests rather than prioritisation.
Although the 25 November 2015
presidential statement stated that the Council will consider sequenced
and phased mandates, where appropriate, when evaluating existing UN
peace operations or establishing new ones, so far this agreement in
principle has had little impact on the Council’s mandating patterns.
Prioritised and sequenced mandates, geared towards the achievement of
clear objectives, could also provide a framework for clearer exit
strategies.
The concept note asks what the Council should do in
situations where missions serve a valuable protection role, but without
any conceivable conclusion to this role, and quotes the HIPPO report’s
injunction that “protection mandates must be realistic and linked to a
wider political approach.”
One of the issues raised in the concept note is the need for the
Council to re-examine the value of a mission where there is no political
process or the political process breaks down. In Council practice, most
mandates are reviewed at the end of their cycles, irrespective of
developments, unless these are especially dramatic, as in South Sudan in
December 2013.
Even though the conditions on the ground might change
(for example, an increase in asymmetric attacks, a change in the nature
of threats to civilians or the unravelling of the political process),
Council members are often reluctant to reassess the appropriateness of
mandates in light of bad news in the hope that tactical changes within
the existing mandates can mitigate the new threats.
The HIPPO report
recommended that independent evaluations of peace operations should be
commissioned at key decision points to provide objective assessments of
progress in mandate implementation and overall context.
The Secretariat
has conducted several “strategic reviews” of peace operations, sometimes
at the request of the Council, but these have had no independent
element.
Some recent dynamics show increased attention to the political
context of peace operations: Council members are now regularly inviting
regional actors, including mediators, to engage with them, formally and
informally; and despite political divisions, Council members are
increasingly striving to deliver unified messages after private meetings
or during visiting missions.
At the meeting, Council members are
expected to discuss the range of options at the Council’s disposal to
exert its political leverage.
The US decision to hold this discussion follows Ambassador Nikki
Haley’s statement, in her Senate confirmation hearing, regarding the
need for a mission-by-mission review of peacekeeping as well as the
intention of the US administration to reduce its peacekeeping funding.
The case for a close re-examination of the assumptions underpinning
Council mandates throughout the life spans of peace operations
challenges the past management of mandates by the Council, dominated by
the P3 as penholders, as well as by the Secretariat. Other Council
members may resist an approach which appears budget-driven, while
recognising that these are issues which have not been sufficiently
addressed since the HIPPO report.
Council negotiations regarding the
reduction of the troop ceiling in the renewal of the UN Organization
Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) have already seen divisions.
The briefing constitutes an opportunity for the Secretary-General to lay
out his approach to greater effectiveness of peace operations reform
and for the Council to have a candid discussion about the way it
establishes and oversees mandates.
UN DOCUMENTS ON PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS
April 2017 Monthly Forecast www.securitycouncilreport.org/monthly-forecast/2017-04/reviewing_peacekeeping_operations.php
