World News

crosspostato da: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36338295

Archived

[...]

Cotton has long been the focus of international responses to human rights abuses in Xinjiang. About a fifth of the world’s cotton originates from the region. In 2021, US customs banned the import of Xinjiang cotton and anything made with the raw material, such as clothes or shoes.

But Chinese advances in biotechnology mean Xinjiang cotton is being transformed into animal feed, which food multinationals and some of China’s biggest farmers are using to raise billions of chickens, pigs, cattle, fish and other animals. The breakthrough also helps China reduce its heavy dependence on US imports of protein, strengthening its hand in the rivalry between the two superpowers.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) has traced supply chains from Xinjiang all the way to the UK, and to factories that supply major international brands, including KFC and McDonald’s in China.

Some supply chains even involve forced labour and human rights abuses at multiple points. In at least one case, a company sources tainted cotton, makes poultry feed with a sanctioned paramilitary arm of the Xinjiang government, and then slaughters and processes its chickens in a factory using transferred ethnic minority workers.

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The UN and rights watchdogs say Xinjiang labour transfers are coercive, state-imposed forced labour. A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in the US said “allegations of ‘forced labour’ in Xinjiang are nothing but vicious lies concocted by anti-China forces”.

Members of all ethnic groups there “enjoy happy and fulfilling lives”, they said, adding that “Xinjiang-related issues are not human rights issues at all, but in essence about countering violent terrorism and separatism”. They said the UFLPA “seriously violates international law and basic norms governing international relations and grossly interferes in China’s internal affairs”.

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Government programmes in the 2000s saw school children as young as eight sent to the fields each year. Xinjiang millennials on Douyin mourn childhoods spent picking cotton. “Look at this white cotton sea, this used to be my childhood nightmare,” says a Uyghur man walking in a cotton field in one video clip. “Oh, that’s really an unbearable past to look back on.”

Clips uploaded more recently show children are still working Xinjiang’s fields.

One video shows a single mother picking cotton with two young children. The trio harvested 151 kilograms for $21 the previous day, she tells the interviewer. “This video will be a disaster if it spreads abroad,” comments a netizen from the other side of China.

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For more than 30 years, Beijing has worked to unlock the nutritional benefits of cottonseed. The state has poured billions into agricultural biotechnologies, according to a US government report last year.

For centuries, farmers have used cottonseed meal, a byproduct of cotton harvesting, as feed for adult cattle. But gossypol, a toxin, makes it a risky business for most other animals, including humans; it can cause infertility, stomach bleeding, heart failure and death.

Recent Chinese advances in biotechnology have changed this. Microbes are now used to detoxify cottonseed in fermentation tanks, and “turn waste into treasure”, as the website of Xinjiang Shipu Biotechnology puts it.

Last year, another feed source came to market when – after 14 years of research – a group in Xinjiang figured out how to ferment cotton straw into feed using “special bacteria” and other ingredients, including tomato skin residue.

These are important developments in the nation’s drive for food security. China consumes more meat than anywhere else in the world, and securing protein-rich ingredients for animal feed, like cottonseed, is seen as vital by Beijing.

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During the Covid-19 pandemic, state media wrote that the government transferred “more than 240 young people from southern Xinjiang” to companies in the north including the Urumqi mill, as part of a “timely rain” of government assistance.

Evidence from social media and official reports also shows the Chinese government sending Xinjiang workers to at least one CP factory outside of Xinjiang. Hubei CP, which supplies chicken to McDonald’s and KFC in China, has taken transfer workers since at least 2019. TBIJ found that almost two dozen Uyghurs posted videos from the plant between 2022 and 2024.

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McDonald’s website proudly claims that, in 2023, 100% of the soy used in poultry feed for its chickens was deforestation free. KFC aims to achieve the same across Europe by 2030. The moves are responses to EU legislation that comes into effect later this year.

Neither chain responded to questions about whether Xinjiang cotton was fed to chickens or other animals served in their restaurants.

[...]

crosspostato da: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/36277659

Original NYT article (paywalled)

In public, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says his country’s growing friendship with China is unshakable — a strategic military and economic collaboration that has entered a golden era.

But in the corridors of Lubyanka, the headquarters of Russia’s domestic security agency, known as the F.S.B., a secretive intelligence unit refers to the Chinese as “the enemy.”

This unit, which has not previously been disclosed, has warned that China is a serious threat to Russian security. Its officers say that Beijing is increasingly trying to recruit Russian spies and get its hands on sensitive military technology, at times by luring disaffected Russian scientists.

The intelligence officers say that China is spying on the Russian military’s operations in Ukraine to learn about Western weapons and warfare. They fear that Chinese academics are laying the groundwork to make claims on Russian territory. And they have warned that Chinese intelligence agents are carrying out espionage in the Arctic using mining firms and university research centers as cover.

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In response, Russian counterintelligence launched a programme titled “Entente-4” just days before the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. The programme—ironically named after the historical Franco-Russian alliance, was designed to prevent Chinese infiltration at a time when Moscow’s military and intelligence focus had shifted heavily westward.

Since then, according to the report, the FSB has tracked an increasing number of attempts by Chinese intelligence to penetrate Russian political and business circles. The document details orders for surveillance of Russian people closely tied to China and heightened monitoring of the Chinese messaging app WeChat. This includes hacking phones and gathering personal data using a specialised FSB tool.

[...]

As the Freedom Flotilla’s “Madleen” approaches the shores of Gaza, a Tunisian-led convoy sets out to confront Israel’s humanitarian blockade by land.

Rabat– Tunisian football ultras are taking part in a grassroots effort to confront and break the genocidal siege Israel continues to impose on Gaza. Several major supporter groups have declared their participation in the “Resilience Convoy,” which is set to depart Tunisia on Monday, June 9, with plans to reach Gaza through Libya and Egypt.

The convoy is being organized by the Coordination for Joint Action for Palestine, and has already received over 7,000 applications. Volunteers are being screened based on age, health, and logistical feasibility.

Among the first to respond were the Bad Blue Boys Juniors, supporters of Espérance Sportive de Tunis (ES Tunis), and the Leaders Clubistes, affiliated with Club Africain.

Both groups issued calls to action urging fans and citizens alike to take part in the convoy, framing it as a moral and political duty rooted in a long-standing tradition of Tunisian ultras using football spaces to express solidarity with Palestine.

“When the world falls silent, the crowds must scream,” declared Leaders Clubistes, affirming that solidarity with the Palestinian struggle remains a core part of their identity.

Support has also come from Libya. The Teha Boys, ultras of Al-Ahly Tripoli, joined the initiative in a joint statement with their Tunisian counterparts. Major Tunisian unions—representing workers, farmers, doctors, and supporters—have also declared their backing for the convoy, now rallying under the revolutionary slogan: “The Shackle Must Be Broken.”

crosspostato da: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35707986

crosspostato da: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/35707933

Archived

Question: [In 2025, U.S. President] Donald Trump ... jump started major changes in the global security order, Russia's war against Ukraine continues, and populism is rising across Europe. How would you evaluate these first steps of the new era?

Timothy Garton Ash: The triple shock: the Putin shock, what I call the Xi Jinping shock, and now the Trump shock means that we are in the deepest crisis Europe has been in for a very long time, in some respects, since 1945.

But it also means that we all know that in Europe.

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There's a long-term trend of the United States becoming less committed to and less engaged in Europe, which started already after the end of the Cold War. It was happening under the Democrats and under the Republicans. It's turning either to what (Barack) Obama called nation-building at home, or the pivot to Asia.

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First of all, we never really had a unipolar world. Even the U.S.-led liberal international order was only a large part of the world. It worked because the United States was what the Princeton scholar John Ikenberry calls a "Liberal Leviathan."

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So I believe that if we are to preserve what's left of the liberal international order, which is not a great deal, it's up to us as Europeans, but also other liberal democratic partners.

Canada becomes much more important to us. Australia becomes important to us. Japan becomes important to us. In other words, there's a whole new constellation of liberal international order — if you like, a new West.

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Our role is to defend ourselves and to look after what we've achieved in Europe over the last 80 years. That means defending ourselves against external enemies or challenges. Obviously, Vladimir Putin's Russia in the first place, but also China in a different way, and other powers.

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[We Europeans need to] preserve at least some elements of what we call the liberal international order — for example, a free trading world, an international economic order. The EU is a regulatory superpower. Can we preserve some of those shared regulations around the world?

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I would say the forces of integration and disintegration [Ash mentions right-wing populism in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Czech Republic] in Europe are quite finely balanced at the moment.

We have to be tough on populism and tough on the causes of populism. We have to fight the nationalist populist and make a convincing case to our public for a different approach.

But we also have to understand why they continue to get large numbers of votes. For example, the sense that large parts of our societies have been both economically and culturally neglected in the name of liberalism.

And we need to show that we care, we're actually doing something for them economically, that culturally we don't just care about specific minorities in the name of multiculturalism, but we actually care about everyone in our societies.

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There's always been an anti-liberal Europe, as well as a liberal Europe throughout European history. And it's always been a great mistake to believe that the liberal Europe has prevailed once and for all. By the way, there are also liberal and anti-liberal forces in Ukraine, let's make no mistake about that.

The two things are intimately connected. It's very difficult to imagine Ukraine making a successful transition to a prosperous, sovereign, democratic European future if Europe is disintegrating next door. It's quite difficult to imagine a successful, liberal, democratic, integrated Europe if Ukraine is disintegrating next door.

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[History is] going to give us both hope and warnings.

The warning is that just when everybody takes things for granted, they start going wrong. [...] The hope is that we already have examples of successful liberal fightback [against anti-democratic tendencies]. The Polish (2023 parliamentary) election is a classic example of a (country) which had nearly gone in the direction of Hungary and an electoral-authoritarian, non-liberal regime, and then it came back.

The larger lesson is that you have these wave movements in history. We had what I would call a liberal democratic revolution across Europe and much of the world from the early 1970s to the 2000s. Now we have an anti-liberal counter-revolution. But with time, people start discovering that that doesn't deliver either.

In fact, it delivers even less. And if you look at the enormous demonstrations in Serbia, large demonstrations in Hungary in support of an opposition candidate, and in Turkey after the imprisonment of Mr. (Ekrem) Imamoglu, you see that the fightback also comes from the countries that have gone authoritarian.

Cross posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/33679319

[...]

With a population of 1.4 billion, China has, in theory, a huge domestic market. But there's a problem. They don't appear willing to spend money while the country's economic outlook is uncertain.

This has not been prompted by the trade war – but by the collapse of the housing market. Many Chinese families invested their life savings in their homes, only to watch prices plummet in the last five years.

Housing developers continued to build even as the property market crumbled. It's thought that China's entire population would not fill all the empty apartments across the country.

The former deputy head of China's statistics bureau, He Keng, admitted two years ago that the most "extreme estimate" is that there are now enough vacant homes for 3 billion people.

[...]

And it's not just house prices that worry middle-class Chinese families.

They are concerned about whether the government can offer them a pension – over the next decade, about 300 million people, who are currently aged 50 to 60, are set to leave the Chinese workforce. According to a 2019 estimate by the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the government pension fund could run out of money by 2035.

There are also fears about whether their sons, daughters and grandchildren can get a job as millions of college graduates are struggling to find work. More than one in five people between the ages of 16 and 24 in urban areas are jobless in China, according to official data published in August 2023. The government has not released youth unemployment figures since then.

The problem is that China cannot simply flip a switch and move from selling goods to the US to selling them to local buyers.

"Given the downward pressure on the economy, it is unlikely domestic spending can be significantly expanded in the short term," says Prof Nie Huihua at Renmin University.

[...]

Xi is also aware that China has a disheartened younger generation worried about their future. That could spell bigger trouble for the Communist Party: protests or unrest.

A report by Freedom House's China Dissent Monitor claims that protests driven by financial grievances saw a steep increase in the last few months.

All protests are quickly subdued and censored on social media, so it is unlikely to pose a real threat to Xi for now.

[...]

China will have to tread carefully. Some countries will be nervous that products being manufactured for the US could end up flooding into their markets.

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There are barriers to Xi presenting himself as the arbiter of free trade in the world.

China has subjected other nations to trade restrictions in recent years.

In 2020, after the Australian government called for a global inquiry into the origins and early handling of the Covid pandemic, which Beijing argued was a political manoeuvre against them, China placed tariffs on Australian wine and barley and imposed biosecurity measures on some beef and timber and bans on coal, cotton and lobster. Some Australian exports of certain goods to China fell to nearly zero.

Australia's Defence Minister Richard Marles said earlier this month that his nation will not be "holding China's hand" as Washington escalated its trade war with Beijing.

China's past actions may impede Xi's current global outreach and many countries may be unwilling to choose between Beijing and Washington.

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This trade war has China looking in the mirror to see its own flaws – and whether it can fix them will be up to policies made in Beijing, not Washington.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/33597000

Archived

On a chilly afternoon in the spring of 2021, while awaiting an extradition hearing in Bordeaux, France, Businessman H. received an unexpected call from an old friend and business partner.

Jack Ma was on the line.

H. was surprised to hear from Ma, the tech titan and one of China’s richest men, according to a transcript of the call.

Ma said he was calling at the behest of Chinese authorities, who were seeking H.’s immediate return to China.

“Did they approach you?” H. asked.

“Mmh,” Ma acknowledged. “They said I’m the only one who can persuade you to return.”

A few weeks earlier, H. had been arrested by French authorities on the basis of a red notice, an alert circulated among police forces worldwide by Interpol, the international police organization that critics say is often misused by authoritarian regimes.

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Despite attempts at reforming Interpol, the organization’s secretive processes and reluctance to hold system abusers publicly accountable remain a boon for authoritarian regimes. China does not appear to be among countries currently subject to Interpol corrective measures for alleged misuse of the organization’s system, ICIJ [International Consortium of Investigative Journalists] and its Slovenian media partner Oštro found.

The findings are part of ICIJ’s China Targets investigation, a collaboration of 43 media partners in 30 countries that exposes the mechanics of the Chinese government’s global repression campaign against its perceived enemies and the governments and international organizations that allow it. The investigation found that China’s misuse of Interpol is part of a well-organized effort to silence and coerce anyone that the Chinese Communist Party deems as a threat to its rule, including those no longer on Chinese soil. Chinese authorities also use surveillance, hacking, financial asset seizure and intimidation of targets’ relatives in China and other measures to neutralize regime critics beyond its borders.

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Ted Bromund, a strategic studies specialist and expert witness in legal cases involving Interpol procedures, says Interpol has become central to China’s campaign of transnational repression, a vital “tool” to put pressure on targets abroad. In particular, China uses red notices “like a pin through a butterfly,” he said. “It holds someone down, locks them in place so they can’t get away.”

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