Together, the U.S. and China are responsible for more than a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and both countries need to take action to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels, as Newsom argued on his trip. One technology that most scientists agree will make a meaningful difference for the climate is solar panels. U.S. appetite for photovoltaics is growing, and although it’s the world's biggest polluter, China happens to dominate the global supply chain for solar panels: Chinese companies manufacture panels more efficiently and at greater scale than suppliers in other countries, and they sell them at rock-bottom prices.

But there’s a big problem at the start of the supply chain. Part of what makes China’s solar industry so prolific is that it is rooted in China’s Xinjiang province, home to a vast system of forced labor in detention camps and prisons where an estimated 1-2 million ethnic Uyghurs and members of other ethnic minority groups are held against their will. There is strong evidence that Uyghurs in Xinjiang live in conditions akin to slavery. Key components of solar energy, in other words, are being brought to much of the world by the victims of what U.S. authorities call an ongoing genocide.

None of this material officially lands in the U.S., owing to the 2022 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a federal regulation that restricts imports of any goods from Xinjiang — the only law of its kind among the world’s biggest economies. Still, the topic of solar panel production — a critical weapon in today's arsenal of climate action — is intrinsically tangled up with Uyghur forced labor. Yet Newsom made no mention of the Uyghurs on his recent China tour, a silence that has become all too common among left-wing and climate advocacy groups. At the same time, the Uyghur plight has captured a certain element of the right-wing political zeitgeist in the U.S. for reasons that are more complicated than one might expect: The Uyghur genocide is a near-perfect reason not to invest in solar energy, a prime talking point for right-wing media personalities and Republican lawmakers known for promoting climate skepticism and disinformation.

Uyghur forced labor is also unlikely to have come up when U.S. climate envoy John Kerry met with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua in California last week. Their talks, Kerry later told delegates at a conference in Singapore, led “to some very solid understandings and agreements” in preparation for the upcoming COP28, the United Nations climate summit that begins in Dubai on November 30. The timing of the talks suggests that the U.S. acknowledges that Chinese dominance of the solar industry is unlikely to be challenged anytime soon. In the first half of 2023, Chinese exports of solar panels grew by 34% worldwide, and China already controls 80% of the global market share. 

Climate scientists say that we have perhaps only a few years left to reduce emissions and avoid a runaway greenhouse gas scenario, which could lead to rapid sea-level rise, mass desertification and potentially billions of climate refugees. Extreme weather events fueled by the changing climate are becoming more frequent and their impacts more devastating. Canada saw 18 million hectares of forest burn this year, emitting a haze that had people from Maine to Virginia donning KN95s just to walk outside. Last year in Pakistan, historic floods covered one-third of the country.  

“The lack of progress on emissions reduction means that we can be ever more certain that the window for keeping warming to safe levels is rapidly closing,” said Robin Lamboll, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, in a recent press statement.

There is an urgent need to reduce emissions from fossil fuels, and solar power is seen as an essential part of how to do this — it’s affordable and can be placed nearly anywhere. Without a rapid increase in the amount of solar installations around the world, limiting climate change might be impossible.

But right now, a huge proportion of solar installations are a product of Uyghur forced labor. A 2021 report from Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K. highlighted the solar industry’s dependency on materials from Xinjiang, estimating that 45% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon come from the region. The report detailed how Uyghurs and other minorities were made to live in camps that are “surrounded by razor-wire fences, iron gates, and security cameras, and are monitored by police or additional security.” Factories are located within the camps, and Uyghurs cannot leave voluntarily. And there is evidence that workers are unpaid. One former camp detainee, Gulzira Auelhan, told Canadian journalists that she was regularly shocked with a stun gun and subjected to injections of unknown substances. She felt she was treated “like a slave.”

For Uyghurs in exile, what is happening is clear — a genocide that aims to eliminate the Uyghur language, culture and identity and turn their homeland into another Chinese region. Mosques and old Uyghur neighborhoods are being replaced by hotels and high-rise apartments and populated by members of China’s dominant ethnic group: the Han Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is now the primary language taught in schools. “Putting it bluntly, the Uyghur genocide is more real and immediate than climate change,” says Arslan Hidayat, a Uyghur Australian program director at the nonprofit Campaign for Uyghurs. He believes that stories like Auelhan’s barely scratch the surface of what’s happening. 

“It’s still not widely known that Uyghur forced labor is used in the supply chain of solar panels,” said Hidayat.

Seaver Wang is a climate director at the California-based Breakthrough Institute, which published another report on the connections between Xinjiang and solar energy last year. Wang hoped the wave of research on the issue would be a wake-up call for the industry and for climate and energy nonprofits. But the reaction has been mixed at best. “Labor and some industry groups were very eager to talk about the issue,” he said. “But other constituencies, like solar developers and areas of the climate advocacy movement, who are really prioritizing deployment and affordability, didn’t want to rock the boat.”

Indeed, major environmentalists and climate groups have said little about the origins of so much of the world’s solar energy technology, possibly out of fear of inadvertently harming the expansion of clean energy. Recent reports on solar in China from international organizations including Ember, Global Energy Monitor and Climate Energy Finance make no mention of the solar industry’s links to Xinjiang. 

The same is true for major American nonprofits. Even as they strongly support the expansion of solar, Sierra Club, 350.org, NRDC, Environmental Defense Fund and the National Wildlife Federation make no mention of Uyghur forced labor on their websites or social media. None agreed to speak to me for this story. 

Only the Union of Concerned Scientists mentions issues related to Uyghur forced labor on their website and agreed to be interviewed for this story. “UCS strongly advocates for justice and fairness to be centered in all our climate solutions,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the climate and energy program, via email. “The clean energy economy we are striving to build should not replicate the human rights, environmental and social harms of the fossil fuel based economy.” Cleetus declined to comment on the decisions of its peer organizations not to acknowledge the issue.

Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at California’s San José State University, has a theory about why so many climate advocates and groups hesitate to speak on Uyghur forced labor. “It’s an area that people are uncomfortable talking about because they fear it undermines the objectives of getting more solar,” said Mulvaney. “It's almost as if people are concerned that any information about solar that could be interpreted as a negative could be amplified through the same networks that are doing climate disinformation.”

To wit, U.S. think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute, both heavily right-leaning, have released dozens of blog posts, op-eds and interviews focusing on Uyghur forced labor. These groups are also notorious hubs of climate disinformation.

One headline from a Heartland Institute blog post warned that “China’s Slave Labor, Coal-Fired, Mass-Subsidized Solar Panels Dominate the Planet.” An article on far-right news site Breitbart cautioned that the clean energy clauses in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act “may fund China’s Uyghur slavery.” Further amplifying the focus on Uyghur forced labor in solar are right-wing media outlets like Daily Signal and Newsmax and the pseudo-educational organization PraegerU.

Alongside mentions of Uyghur forced labor in the solar industry, one typically finds far less factual claims — that the emissions generated throughout the life cycle of solar panels are as bad as fossil fuels, that climate change is not responsible for recent extreme weather events, or that “net zero” and socially responsible investment trends are insider tactics meant to weaken the American economy. Some even push political disinformation. There are claims that President Joe Biden is pro-solar because he has received donations from China or because his son, Hunter Biden, has links to China — and that U.S. climate envoy John Kerry is benefiting personally due to his investments in Chinese solar. 

Organizations like these are spreading climate skepticism, minimizing the threat of climate change, and casting doubt on its links to extreme weather events. This has also been the refrain from elected officials like Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, sponsor of the Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act, a bill that would further prohibit federal funds from being used to buy solar components from Xinjiang.

Another common argument holds that domestic fossil fuel production is better for the economy than importing solar from China. Support for fossil fuels does seem to be a common link across the groups and political figures focused on the issue. In fact, politicians speaking out about Uyghur forced labor in solar are among the top recipients of political donations from the fossil fuel industry. According to data from Open Secrets, a nonpartisan project that tracks political spending, Scott alongside two cosponsors of his Keep China Out of Solar Energy Act — Senators Marco Rubio and John Kennedy — accepted more contributions from the oil and gas industries than almost all other U.S. senators in 2022.

The U.S. is not the only country where this kind of narrative has found a home. Earlier this year, Taishi Sugiyama, who directs research at the Canon Institute for Global Studies, agitated on the issue after officials in Tokyo announced a plan to mandate solar panels on all newly constructed homes in the city. Like conservatives in the U.S., Sugiyama cited the plight of the Uyghurs as a primary reason to divest from solar. But Sugiyama’s think tank is a well known source of climate disinformation in Japan.

“Sugiyama is basically using absolutely any argument he can, real or false, in order to pursue what he’s aiming for in terms of his anti-climate objectives,” said James Lorenz, the executive director of Actions Speak Louder, a corporate accountability nonprofit focused on the climate. Some of Sugiyama’s allies have close links to Japanese companies importing coal, natural gas and petroleum from abroad. Two of the institute’s board members represent Sumitomo and JICDEC, both major importers of fossil fuels in Japan.

Early reports about China’s crackdown on ethnic Uyghurs, including the detention of thousands of people as part of a massive "political reeducation" program, emerged in 2017. Dustin Mulvaney, the environmental studies professor, thinks that would have been the optimal time to act. “Had the industry had that traceability in place back then, had they had this conversation back then, they might not find themselves in this situation today,” he said.

But now, six years later, both the climate and the Uyghur human rights crisis have worsened. Implicit in the silence from many climate and environmentalists is the idea that, in order to address climate change, the Uyghur cause may have to be sacrificed. Mulvaney feels that environmental advocates have hesitated to criticize solar or bring up forced labor issues for fear of playing into anti-solar messaging.

Mulvaney has personally experienced this, seeing his critiques being misquoted in right-wing media. “But I don't think it works that way. I think people are a little too guarded in protecting solar from criticism.”

To the Breakthrough Institute’s Seaver Wang, being forced to choose between reclaiming human rights in Xinjiang and ramping up clean energy quickly enough to address climate change presents a false dichotomy. 

“We’re willing to have open and frank conversations around responsible sourcing everywhere but China,” said Wang. “I recognize that there are climate versus human rights trade-offs, but let’s talk about those trade-offs rather than just prioritizing climate, because it all factors into equity at the end.”

For Uyghurs like Hidayat, who are used to being ignored by not only climate activists but also by progressive politicians, he’s open to any support and is glad to see people like Rick Scott proposing stronger regulations on solar imports from China, even if their motives are less than pure. At the same time, Hidayat is wary that they might be using the Uyghur crisis for their own political benefits, and would welcome more actions from environmentalists. 

“There is nothing clean about using solar panels linked to Uyghur forced labor,” said Hidayat. Instead, he says there needs to be a “change in the definition of what clean energy is. The whole supply chain, from A to Z, the raw materials all the way to its installation, has to be free of human rights abuses for it to actually be defined as green, clean tech.”

How do we get there? Wang wants to see a frank discussion, rather than the silence or politicization that has dominated the debate so far. 

“I do think that we could balance clean energy deployment, meet climate ambitions and address human rights in Xinjiang,” said Wang. “But I know it won't be easy,” he said. “It's not an unmitigated win-win.”

The post Why are climate skeptics speaking out about the Uyghur genocide? appeared first on Coda Story.

Many political analysts now believe that this interference played a role in the shock victory of the pro-China candidate Han Kuo-yu as mayor of Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second largest city. That result was so unexpected that it drew comparisons to the election of President Donald Trump in the United States. Once the election was over, researchers and Taiwanese officials evidenced that much of the disinformation, distributed via content mills, fake accounts, and the use of bots, originated in China.

In January 2019, V-Dem Institute, an independent research institute based in Sweden, declared Taiwan one of a few democracies most affected by disinformation. These incursions have continued throughout the nation’s January 2020 presidential election and the subsequent coronavirus pandemic.

According to the Taiwan-based disinformation research center Doublethink Lab, China’s strategy has evolved. While previous disinformation campaigns focused on open social networks — including the Reddit-like message board PTT, Facebook, and Twitter — they have now shifted towards a popular Tokyo-based messaging app named Line.

Line is similar in function to China’s WeChat or WhatsApp. In 2019, the company reported 194 million monthly users around the world. Eighteen million of them are in Taiwan — a country of just under 24 million people. It is also the most popular messaging app in Japan and Thailand.

“There is no more important platform in how Taiwanese communicate with each other or interact in a social way online,” Nick Monaco, research director at the California-based Institute for the Future’s Digital Intelligence Lab, told me, during a recent telephone conversation. 

Owing to its very nature, Line presents a number of challenges for researchers and journalists seeking to understand and combat disinformation in Taiwan.

“Line is relatively closed in comparison to Facebook and PTT,” said Monaco. “You can’t often see where messages came from, how popular they are, and how much they are spreading.”

Last month, an Institute for the Future report identified an obscure Malaysia-based operation named the Qiqi News Network as playing a key role in the creation and spread of Covid-19 disinformation, via Line groups and activity on a number of other platforms. Monaco believes that Qiqi’s use of mainland-specific Chinese phrasing and its frequent promotion of content produced by Chinese state-owned media offer evidence of a connection to Beijing.

Some messages linked to Qiqi and other unidentified sources have also downplayed or cast doubt on foreign reporting of Uyghur human rights abuses in Xinjiang, accused the Taiwanese government of hiding the scale of the coronavirus pandemic and questioned the academic background of Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen.

Chat bots to counter disinformation

Around the world, independent fact-checking and academic research are viewed as some of the most crucial lines of defense against disinformation. 

Johnson Hsiang-Sheng Liang, however, is concerned about the limitations of this approach. He believes that the reach and influence of the media and educational institutions can’t compete with that of hugely popular chat apps like Line. 

“Personally I often receive hoaxes from Line groups,” said Liang during a series of online messages. “Finding information to reply to them every time is pretty time consuming.”

Liang is a Taiwan-based hacker with a background in electrical engineering and computer science. In 2017, he and local social worker Billion Lee got together to found CoFacts — a decentralized, open-source project staffed by volunteers.

One of Line’s features is that it allows verified users to create chat bots. CoFacts decided to exploit this aspect of its functionality to counter fake news and disinformation. It built its own chatbot, to which users can send suspect posts. Once it receives a message, the bot analyzes it to see if it matches anything it has previously received. If so, the bot sends an automated response, saying whether the message should be trusted or not. If the content of the message has not been seen before, it is sent to a team of volunteer fact-checkers.

Line also uses CoFacts’ findings and content on its own official fact-checking account. The Institute for the Future has also used information from the CoFacts database in its research.

Risks in other markets

While Taiwan’s difficult relationship with China poses unique geopolitical challenges, it is not the only country in East Asia dealing with disinformation spread via Line.

“China obviously has a strategic interest in the greater East and Southeast Asia regions,” said Monaco, adding that the platform “may be used in other places” to disseminate fake news and propaganda.

In Thailand, the media watchdog Sure and Share Center has been monitoring disinformation on the app since 2015. Until recently, the main misleading stories it encountered were related to matters of health.

“The source of the disinformation often came from people who want to sell something — a herbal medicine or supplement,” said Peerapon Anutarasoat, one of the organization’s fact-checkers.

Even in the age of coronavirus, this is changing. Student-led protests that began in July against the Thai military’s powerful role in government have led to an increase in political disinformation on Line. Recent examples include a widely shared story claiming that the U.S. government was funding activists and demonstrations. 

“Political misinformation is seasonal,” said Anutarasoat. “Now, we have protests in Thailand, so there is a lot of information and misinformation that makes people confused.” 

Anutarasoat fears that closed channels such as Line help to create hard-to-penetrate echo chambers in which disinformation thrives. He also believes that Line is taking fewer steps to address these issues in Thailand than it has in Taiwan.

“Thailand is Line’s number-two market, but we cannot find many efforts around disinformation,” he said. 

In Japan — Line’s largest market, with 80 million active users — the app is not seen as a major vector for disinformation. This can largely be attributed to media consumption habits within the nation, where, according to a 2020 Reuters Institute study, print newspapers still dominate and online sharing of news lags far behind other Asian countries. 

“Misinformation there isn’t a big problem,” said Masato Kajimoto, a professor of media studies at Hong Kong University, during a telephone conversation. “If you look at research, people in Japan tend to be less willing to share political news with certain viewpoints.” 

He will be watching closely, though, as sudden domestic unrest, or a shift in relations with China could significantly alter the nation’s information landscape.

For now, observers believe that since being hit by a campaign in 2018, Taiwan has responded well to the challenges posed by external disinformation. CoFact’s Line bot and the work of organizations such as Doublethink Lab have all played a part in minimizing the risk posed by fake news and conspiracy theories. 

Kajimoto sees this is largely a result of widespread sharing of knowledge about disinformation and its proliferation.

When it comes to fake news, he believes that the majority of Taiwanese people are “aware of potential threats from mainland China.” This, he partly attributes to the growing visibility of organizations dedicated to providing reliable information to an increasing number of individuals and institutions. 

“Even if the proportion of people who use fact-checking platforms like CoFacts is not high, everyone knows they exist now,” he said.

The post Disinformation from China floods Taiwan’s most popular messaging app appeared first on Coda Story.

Arief, 21, is currently unemployed, and lives in Songkhla, one of Thailand's Southern Border Provinces (SBPs). Unlike the rest of majority-Buddhist Thailand, this region is largely populated by ethnic Malay Muslims. It has also been under some form of military control since 2005. 

While Thais elsewhere have to register their SIM cards by showing a passport or government-issued ID, biometric registration has been mandatory for all residents of the SBPs since April. This move comes alongside a proliferation of surveillance technology that human rights groups believe could be used by Thai authorities to monitor minority groups. 

The longtime imposition of military control by Bangkok, along with excess use of force by authorities has left many Malay Muslims distrustful of the state and concerned about how these technologies will impact their lives. While many of Arief's friends and family have chosen to sacrifice privacy for convenience, he remains resolute.

“I don’t trust the government,” he told me, via Signal, using his home internet connection. “They will take advantage of this to further suppress our voices.”

Authorities argue that such measures are necessary to counter violence in the region. Since 2005, an armed insurgency, led by pro-independence groups such as the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (National Revolutionary Front), has carried out attacks targeting Thai civilians. At the same time, Human Rights Watch has documented abuses against Malay Muslims by Thai Security forces, including "extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture of suspected insurgents." All in all, more than 7,000 people have died as a result of state or separatist violence.

"The conflict has left us with a region which is administered and governed, when it comes to conflict, territory, people and budgets, in ways that are visibly differently from other parts of the country,” said  Romadon Panjor, editor of Deep South Watch, an organization that collects and analyzes data on conflict in the SBPs.

According to Chanatip Tatiyakaroonwong, a researcher, who has done extensive field work on biometric technology and data collection in the SBPs the increased militarization of the SBPs since 2005 has resulted in discrimination against Malay Muslims. He believes current and future uses of technology will only reflect this power imbalance.

“In everyday interactions, Malay Muslims are subject to racial profiling at checkpoints,” said Tatiyakaroonwong. “This is the same kind of racial profiling, but through an automated channel.”

Surveillance and monitoring technology is being used more and more by Thai security forces in the SBPs. For instance, here have also been media reports that ethnic Malay Thai citizens crossing the border from Malaysia have been subject to forced DNA collection, with some under the impression it was for Covid-19 testing.

According to Pornpen Khongkachonkiet, director of Thai human rights organization The Cross Cultural Foundation, “DNA collection was, before, very selective, for suspects, prisoners, or detainees, but now, they have been using this forced DNA collection for the greater population.” 

Her organization has documented more than 100 cases of forced or involuntary DNA collection of Malay Muslims by security forces in the SBPs during anti-insurgency campaigns. They believe this is just a small fraction of the actual total. 

Khongkachonkiet does not believe it is a coincidence that the SBPs form the first region in Thailand to see the installation of a widespread, AI-enabled CCTV surveillance system. In all, 8,200 cameras have already been installed in the SBPs, supervised by the National Security Council in Bangkok. 

The government is framing this expansion of surveillance technology in a beneficial light.

“The biometric technology promises more accuracy in determining who is an insurgent,” said Tatiyakaroonwong. “It sets an expectation for law enforcement and the military that they are finally going to find all the insurgents, put them in jail and restore peace in the region.”

However, many people have concerns relating to both data privacy and oversight of security forces operating in the region.

From 2014 to 2019, Thailand was under the control of an unelected military junta. Before ceding some power to Parliament in elections last July, the junta enacted a number of laws that increased state control of digital technologies and data. They still retain total control over the upper house of Parliament, of which all 250 members are appointed by the military, and there's been no change to their special role in the SBPs. 

Its amendment of the Computer Crime Act in 2016 gave the government "nearly unfettered authority to restrict free speech, engage in surveillance” and “conduct warrantless searches of personal data, according to Article19, a United Kingdom based NGO which focuses on freedom of expression. The even more controversial 2019 Cybersecurity Law gave the state power to search and seize data and equipment in cases deemed matters of national security, all without court orders. 

“We don’t have the robust personal data regulation, and when it comes to the Cybersecurity Law, the authorities can access information gathered by internet service providers,” said Sutawan Chanprasert, coordinator of internet research at the Bangkok NGO Digital Reach. “There’s no guarantee against misuse after the data is gathered, and no law that stipulates what state agencies can do with the data.”

Last year, Thailand passed a bill that would create a national digital ID system. Now, human rights groups are concerned that this scheme could be integrated with the country's growing biometric infrastructure.

“If they merge the biometric technology with the digital ID, it could be disastrous because of the lack of protections in the law,” said Chanprasert. “If a lot of information is going to be integrated, it might allow the government to track citizens.”

There is also little to no transparency about who is providing the surveillance technology being deployed in Thailand. Military spending is highly opaque, and organizations like CrCF have been unable to ascertain which companies or countries are behind the systems.

“We don’t really have any level of access to that information,” said Khongkachonkiet. 

What is known is that Mengvii — a Chinese company that designs image recognition and deep learning software and is currently blacklisted by the U.S. government for being implicated in human rights violations in Xinjiang — has been focusing its attention on Thailand. It's Face++ facial recognition technology was demonstrated to Thai government officials and police departments in 2018. 

For now, though, opposition to the use of biometric technology in the SBPs is strong. In addition to those residents who, like Arief, are refusing to register their biometric data for a SIM card, others are refusing to provide DNA samples to security forces. A growing debate about whether or not to provide biometric data to the authorities is also playing out on Facebook. 

“People are becoming more and more vocal about the possibility of misuse on these technologies,” said Tatiyakaroonwong. 

Many Malay Muslims are also aware of how surveillance technology has been used to repress other minority populations around the world, including the Uyghur community in China. 

However, events in the SBPs tend to attract little attention in the rest of Thailand and concerns about the rights of Malay Muslims generally come a distant second to matters of national security.

“Biometrics and other technologies seem to be far away from the general public in the rest of Thailand,” said Khongkachonkiet. “But as surveillance technology creeps into the daily lives of Malay Muslims in the SBPs, with time, it may someday creep into the lives of all Thais.”

Illustrations by Gogi Kamushadze

The post Surveillance of minority Muslims in southern Thailand is powered by Chinese-style tech appeared first on Coda Story.

In the race to build a truly effective wall, China provides a model with a unique goal: keeping oppressed minority Tibetans within the country. For decades, the region’s daunting topography made this task difficult. The frontier between Tibet, which was occupied and annexed by China in the 1950s, and South Asia is a vast space, extending for more than 4,500 kilometers. The border falls mostly along the Himalayas, and the distance and remoteness of this region made a physical wall impractical.

The border’s near impenetrable nature was also a lifeline: from 1959 until 2008, thousands of Tibetans a year made the arduous trek across the mountain range to safety. Today, there are an estimated 150,000 Tibetans living abroad, in India, Nepal, or western countries including the U.S. and Canada. Nearly all can trace their freedom to a perilous Himalayan journey that was difficult for Chinese occupying forces to patrol effectively.

Until now. In recent years, the flow of refugees from Tibet has almost completely stopped. In 2007, about 3,000 Tibetans entered India; that number dwindled to only 80 by 2017. The reason is not, as China wants the world to believe, an improving situation in Tibet – in fact, nearly every human rights group believes repression there is at its highest level in decades.

“The human rights situation is completely different today,” said Kai Muller, the executive director of the International Campaign for Tibet’s Germany office, highlighting increased controls on the rights of Tibetans to move, practice their religions, and even learn their language. “Every aspect of life you look at, you will find an expansion of government intervention.”

The 97% drop in refugee numbers escaping Tibet is due to new technology which has allowed China to build a nearly impassable digital and securitized border wall along its southern and western borders. In Tibet, and also in Xinjiang, the homeland of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims which has become a widely reported technological dystopia, the border is patrolled by drones, cameras and an interconnected system that allows soldiers to rapidly monitor – and apprehend – any Tibetan, Uyghur, or Kazakh attempting to flee. The digital wall also prevents the vast majority from even trying.

From Protests to Border Control

The earliest signs of China’s building of a digital wall were first seen in March of 2008, five months before Beijing hosted the Olympic Games, when widespread anti-China protests broke out across Tibet. They made headlines globally and were soon followed by global protests against the oppression of Tibetan, Uyghur, and minority human rights.

“The uprising itself was responsible for the kind of paranoia that we see with the Chinese authorities,” said Tsering Tsomo, Director of the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy, based in India. “They really want to stop anyone from coming in, or going out.”

That year, martial law was declared across the entire Tibet Autonomous Region, which forms part of historical Tibet. Since then, Tibet has been closed off to foreign journalists and civil society groups, besides state-run propaganda tours. This makes it difficult to understand the scope of digital surveillance in the region, as even Xinjiang can be visited by foreign journalists.

There are several pieces of data that are concerning about Tibet. No region, not even Xinjiang, sees more per-capita spending on security than Tibet, where in 2017 China spent 3,137 yuan per person – more than the 2,417 for Xinjiang and well ahead of the national average of just 763 yuan.

“From this you can guess how extensive the total security system is, even when compared to Beijing or Xinjiang,” said Tenzin Tsultrim, a Research Fellow at the Tibet Policy Institute. Tsultrim is also concerned about drives to collect DNA samples from Tibetans under the guise of mandatory medical check-ups. "It is easier to track a person if you have their DNA," said Tsultrim. "It’s a deadly combination for surveillance."

The controls exerted on ordinary Tibetans originate in their homes. One of China’s responses to the 2008 protests was to vastly increase the scale and scope of policing efforts in Tibet. The overhaul was led by party secretary Chen Quanguo who, after successfully clamping down Tibet, went on to become Communist Party Secretary in Xinjiang where he is considered the architect of the high-tech surveillance system. In Tibet, authorities expanded their network of small police stations known as “convenience” stations to every 200-300 meters in urban areas, to quickly respond to any threat.

Cities like Lhasa now have comprehensive networks of CCTV cameras and numerous checkpoints, allowing authorities to keep track of all those who enter and leave. More recently, police stations and CCTV cameras with facial recognition technology have spread to villages in the countryside, especially along the border.

“In Lhasa alone, there are more than 600 convenience police stations,” said Tsultrim, who said increasing numbers of security staff are being sent to rural areas. “In recent year, more than 21,000 officials were sent to the countryside around [Tibet].” This is in addition to at least 12,000 security staff working primarily in urban areas.

In fact, since 2008, the ability of Tibetans to even move across the country has worsened. Tibetans now need to get permission to visit, for example, Lhasa, and according to sources, numerous checkpoints exist around cities and at borders between neighboring districts and provinces. Surveillance and facial recognition technologies can also identify when Tibetans are outside of their home areas, further impeding their ability to reach the border.

“It's like the authorities have put in place a series of filters throughout the region filtering out people that they don’t trust, and assuring that they are keeping people in their place,” said Maya Wang, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong. “The border, in a way, is a last line of defense. But if you have filters...you have fewer people reach the border in the first place.”

More challenges await those Tibetans who finally reach the border. China Daily, a government newspaper, reported on the deployment of a Chinese-made integrated frontier monitoring system with advanced radars, acoustic monitoring devices, and drones. A spokesperson said that anyone trying to cross the border would be detected by the system, which automatically notifies soldiers.

China has also deployed GGJ-2 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles that can operate at high altitude for up to 20 hours along both the Tibet and Xinjiang borders, designed to monitor and, if necessary, conduct offensive activities in regions where troops cannot be stationed. There have been past instances where security officials have used force against Tibetans attempting to flee. Tenzin Dahla, a researcher at the Tibet Policy Institute based in India, believes that satellites are also part of the increasingly automated digital wall.

“I recently heard from Tibetan people inside Tibet that they are using satellite early warning systems near border areas,” said Dalha. He is concerned about China’s intention to launch Huawei 5G networks in Tibet, which would make it easier to deploy sensors and quickly transmit high volumes of data for real time analysis. Companies involved in Tibet’s facilitating digital surveillance system include China North Industries, Shenzhen Intelligent CIMC, Wiseweb Technology Company, which operates a real-time tracking center at Tibet University, Intellifusion, and IflyTek.

The Firewall

In tandem with the limitations on freedom of movement for Tibetans are strict controls on the flows of digital information. Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto in Canada, has analyzed content shared on WeChat, China’s dominant social media and chat platform, and found regular filtering of certain keywords and terms from within and outside of Tibet.

These digital controls can be extensive. Last March, when a video emerged of flames leaping out from the rooftop of the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, considered the holiest site for Tibetan Buddhism, it raised fears that an irreplaceable piece of cultural heritage had been damaged. Yet, in the months that have passed, there has been no further news about the circumstances of the fire. Chinese censors prevented further postings of videos, silenced social media, and closed off physical access to the temple.

Similarly, while it is easy to find photos of hundreds of thousands of Chinese tourists that visit and photograph Lhasa every month, often posting to Chinese social networks such as Weibo or WeChat, hearing from Tibetans is becoming increasingly difficult. In just over a decade, Tibet has been cut off from the world, both physically, and digitally.

The most visible sign of this digital apartheid is along the heavily controlled border. In late 2017, the Kerung border crossing between Nepal and Tibet re-opened, after being closed for more than two years due to damage caused by an earthquake in 2015. While the border remains open, Tibetans rarely cross. Instead, traffic mostly consists of Chinese travelers and businesspeople entering Nepal.

“Before 2008, there were lots of Tibetans escaping from Tibet to Nepal, but now its Chinese who are flourishing in Nepal,” said Dalha. On a recent visit to the area, he noted that many signs were in Chinese, and that several Nepali shopkeepers could speak basic Chinese. A crossing that once connected Tibet with South Asia now connects China with Nepal.

The situation is becoming dire in Dharamshala, India, where the Indian government of Jawaharlal Nehru gave refuge to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government in Exile in 1959. Once, a constant flow of refugees, including children, kept the community vibrant and allowed for the transference and preservation of cultural heritage – language, religious teachings, and songs and dance – that was increasingly banned in China. Today, however, the 500 bed Tibetan Reception Center sits mostly empty. Schools teach fewer and fewer children every year. As the number of Tibetans crossing the border declines and censorship becomes more sophisticated, the two communities are increasingly cut off.

“What it is has done is that, today, the majority of Tibetans who are living in Tibet are placed in a cocoon, in terms of being isolated from the outside world,” said Bhuchung K. Tsering, vice president at the International Campaign for Tibet in Washington, D.C.

The post China’s Digital Wall Around Tibet appeared first on Coda Story.

Only when the story broke in the British and Thai press and on social media in August did the police finally act, but not to investigate the crime. Instead, they went after those who had shared the story. They first detained a dozen Thai residents for sharing news on the case. The residents were arrested under Thailand’s Computer-Related Crime Act and could face up to five years in prison and fines for spreading false information and damaging national security. The act has previously been used to prosecute those responsible for critical or defamatory Facebook posts about the country's monarchy or politicians, but rarely in criminal cases.

In an another remarkable move, police also obtained warrants to arrest the editor of an online Thai newspaper in Britain and the administrator of a dissident Facebook page in California, both of whom had shared or reported on the case.

“This event was quite surprising” said Wason Liwlompaisan, a digital activist and co-founder of the Thai tech news site Blognone. “I'm not sure why the police tried to arrest just these people in this case.”

The message was clear—news of the alleged rape was not to be shared on social media or reported by members of the Thai press. And it worked; in the 18 months since the story broke, there has been little domestic news coverage of the case, even as it has been widely reported in Britain and the United States.

Thailand has had a history of arresting or charging people for posts on social media since a coup in 2014. For example, in 2015, a tour operator named Pongsak Sriboonpeng was sentenced to 30 years in prison for several Facebook posts critical of the royal family.

This latest crackdown, driven by the spread of a seemingly non-political news story, marks a newly authoritarian approach to media coverage. The reaction of Thai officials to news stories on an alleged rape case speaks to the state’s increasingly overbearing imprint on its citizen’s digital space ahead of forthcoming elections on March 24.

Pramuk Anantasin, the California-based administrator of the CSI LA Facebook page, which has hundreds of thousand of followers and regularly shares stories that are censored in Thailand, believes timing is partly why he was targeted.  “I feel like it was because the election is coming,” said Anantasin. “They don’t want people to follow my Facebook page, so that’s why they arrest my followers. [Something like this] never happened in Thailand before.”

At the center of the crackdown, however, is Thailand’s pivot from its traditional ally, the U.S., towards its largest trading partner and source of inbound tourism, China.

The Power of Chinese Tourism  

To understand Thailand’s censorious response to the alleged rape case, it is important to go back to another tourism-related event which took place around the same time, but one that received even less attention. On July 5, 2018, shortly after the rape, a tour boat sank off the Thai resort island of Phuket, killing 47 of its 93 passengers, nearly all of whom were Chinese. The incident was widely covered in China and, in the coming months, resulted in a large drop off in inbound tourists.

Tourism is a key contributor to the Thai economy, accounting for nearly 20 percent of gross domestic product, or $95 billion, a figure that is growing. In fact, it is one of the few sectors of the Thai economy still performing well.

China has been a key supporter of Thailand since the coup. It was one of the first countries to lend its support to the military junta, and the last four years have seen huge growth in trade alongside an influx of Chinese tourists. Maintaining that relationship has become a key priority of the military government.

“Thailand is highly dependent on tourism, especially these days when the military is struggling to get the rest of the economy growing at the rate that it should be,” said Benjamin Zawacki, a Bangkok-based human rights researcher and author.

At the same time, Thailand’s tourism industry has also become less dependent on visitors from Europe or North America. Since 2009, the number of Chinese tourists has jumped from just under 800,000 to more than 8 million.

“Chinese are the most important market, responsible for about a third of all arrivals and probably for up to 50% of all inbound tourism-related income,” said Wolfgang Georg Arlt, director of the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute (COTRI).

In fact, Chinese tourism has proven uniquely resilient despite widespread protests in 2013, the military coup in 2014 and a deadly terrorist attack in 2015. According to analysts, this is no accident.

“A large percentage of Chinese tourist travel as part of official tour groups organized by travel agencies, rather than independently,” said Edoardo Saravalle, a researcher at the Center for a New American Security. “This gives China a way to influence the flows of tourism.”

In the aftermath of the drownings, the king apologized for the boat accident and in October, Thailand announced a China-focused tourism stimulus package. A new marketing campaign has promoted travel around Chinese New Year.

The strategy seems to have worked. China has not reduced the flow of tourists visiting Thailand, as it has after geopolitical spats with countries like South Korea and Taiwan, resulting in significant negative impacts to their GDP. Moreover, while it is impossible to verify the source, a story published by the Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua on its English language site published, nearly verbatim, the official Thai version of the rape story. Similar stories were also found in Chinese-language state media and the rape story was not widely shared on searchable Chinese social media.

“I wouldn't be surprised if, whatever coverage Thailand gets [in China], it’s positive, whether it’s about tourism or politics,” said Sarah Cook, China media researcher at Freedom House.

Thailand’s eagerness to please China is evident in how Thailand has responded to other instances involving Chinese tourists. When a Thai security guard hit a Chinese tourist at an airport last October, an incident captured and shared on Chinese social media, Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha apologized both to the Chinese government and the tourist. News of the apology was also published in Xinhua.

Thailand’s servility has worked. After dropping off significantly in the months after the boat accident, the number of inbound Chinese tourists began to recover in late 2018, according to data from COTRI. Thailand recently celebrated the arrival of the record 10 millionth Chinese tourist with a big media event. And censorship is a key pillar of Thailand’s efforts to keep tourists coming.

Seeking Greater Digital Control

The censorship of the alleged rape foretells a potential future for Thailand as it moves closer to China and the “China Model” of a state-monitored internet.

“The level of communication with the Chinese is constant, and at a high level,” said Zawacki. “It’s on a much more intimate and regular basis than with the United States and other countries.”

Thus far, censorship and digital control of the media by the military junta has been mostly haphazard. A 2017 study by the Thai Netizens Network, Sinar Project, and the Online Observatory of Network Interference found that Thai Internet Service Providers (ISPs) do not follow uniform standards, or even block the same sites. They found that “Denial of Service” (DDS) was the most commonly used censorship tool but that other forms of censorship were also used. Moreover, only a few URLs were blocked by all ISPs, mostly news sites.

Part of this inconsistency is due to the fact there are several different laws that govern censorship. Two laws in particular—NCPO orders 97/2014 and 3/2015, relate directly to the news media and are responsible for widespread self-censorship. In the digital space, the key tool is The Computer Crimes Act. This was the law used to arrest the twelve residents who shared information about the Kao Tao rape case.

But Thailand now has a new, more powerful censorship tool that brings it closer to the Chinese model. A new the Cybersecurity Act passed last week, notably ahead of planned elections, gives Thailand’s National Cybersecurity Committee (NCSC) sweeping powers to question individuals and enter private property without a court order in case of actual or even anticipated “serious cyber threats”. The NSC will be able to monitor and access the private data of citizens and seize data and equipment without a court order in “emergency cases”.

The new law dramatically increases the power of the state to further police digital content by mandating social media platforms to delete content at the government’s request. It will also allow for censorship on disturbingly vague criteria like being “against public order or good morals of the people.”

“The [law] provides an overly broad ground for authorities in Thailand to arbitrarily enforce censorship of vaguely defined offenses,” said Sunai Phasuk, senior researcher for Thailand in Human Rights Watch's Asia division. “The precedent of interpretation by authorities that are neither judicial nor independent from the executive has troubling implications for human rights reporting.”

No one is certain if China played any role in the bill’s drafting. In nearby Vietnam, a new and draconian cybersecurity law has been directly linked to meetings with Chinese officials. There is evidence that China is playing some role in Thailand too, as Freedom House documented Thailand as one of the countries where government officials underwent training sessions in China.

In another development, Thailand recently launched a Huawei Technologies 5G test bed in the Thai military government’s $45 billion economic project near Bangkok. The test bed is Huawei’s first in Southeast Asia. The U.S. has urged its allies to prevent the world’s top producer of telecoms equipment from building next-generation mobile networks over fears that China could use the digital infrastructure for purposes of espionage. Huawei says the concerns are unfounded; Nokia, Ericsson and a number of Thai telecoms operators are also operating 5G labs at the site.

Observers are also worried that China could also have a wider influence on media in Thailand. The country is a regional hub for outlets such as Reuters and the Associated Press, along with the regional offices of a number of NGOs, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, many of whom have reported stories or released reports critical of China’s human rights record.

“As the economic relationship gets closer between two countries, especially when the non Chinese country is fairly authoritarian, the Chinese government is very good at using that to crack down on dissenting voices in the country,” said Cook.

The biggest test of Thailand’s new attitude to censorship will take place in the run-up to the elections on March 24th. While some are skeptical that this date will be adhered to, or that the elections will be fair, everyone agrees that there will be more censorship of the traditional media and online posts under the new cybersecurity law.

“I hope that Thailand has an election as soon as possible,” said Anantasin. “If we don’t have any election, or if the military tries to rig the election, the censorship will become worse.”

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