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No idea how credible this source is.

 

Xi Jinping Defeated in Nepal, Threatens to “Smash Opponents into Pieces”  

10/14/2019Massimo Introvigne

  https://bitterwinter.org/xi-jinping-defeated-in-nepal/

 

The Chinese President reacted angrily after the Himalayan kingdom refused to sign an extradition treaty aimed at deporting Tibetan refugees back to China.

 

by Massimo Introvigne

 

Nepal is home to some 20,000 Tibetan refugees, 9,000 in Kathmandu alone. Their status is uncertain, as Nepal has never signed the Geneva Convention and Protocol on refugees. In the past, some refugees have been stopped at the border, and under Chinese pressure the police has prevented anti-CCP demonstrations to be organized in Kathmandu.

This was then, though. Now, under Xi Jinping, the attitude of Nepal is no longer enough for the CCP. They want the Tibetan refugees deported back to China, starting with those who tell to international media the story of the atrocities they suffered in Tibet. Chinese media, and pro-CCP Nepalese media, have already started their familiar campaigns, claiming that the Tibetans in Nepal are “false refugees.”

An extradition treaty was ready, and President Xi Jinping went to Nepal on October 12-13, expecting to sign it with great fanfare. It was the first visit of a Chinese President to Nepal since 1996. In addition, China would have assisted Nepal in setting up a National Defense University to train military and police personnel. What Chinese professors would have taught them is easy to imagine.

Xi’s visit, however, did not go on as expected. When he arrived in Kathmandu, he was informed that the Nepalese government had decided not to sign the extradition treaty, nor the agreement about the National Defense University. Nepal also refused Chinese money for building a new Parliament building and roads near the Chinese border.

The Nepalese knew that Xi had to save face, and signed a Pact on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters, but this refers to common, non-political crimes and is not the extradition treaty the Chinese expected to sign. The usual trade agreements were also signed.

For once, the protests by human rights organizations and the Tibetan diaspora were heard, although it is expected that China will continue to put pressure on Nepal, and Nepalese Prime Minister Sharma Oli, who is a member of the Communist Party of Nepal, reiterated that anti-CCP demonstrations are forbidden in Nepal.

That Xi was not happy was confirmed by the belligerent tone of his speeches in Kathmandu. Referring to Hong Kong, he stated that “anyone attempting to split China in any part of the country will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones.” He added that “those who engage in separatist activities in any part of China will be smashed into pieces.” Local media interpreted the words as a veiled threat to Tibet and to all who would support Tibetan refugees.

As usual, the Chinese were not informed of the failure of Xi’s visit to Nepal. It was hailed by CCP media as a great success.

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Hong Kong is exporting its protest techniques around the world

https://qz.com/1728078/be-water-catalonia-protesters-learn-from-hong-kong/

 

 

 

Hashtags and Hong Kong protest tips: How Indonesian students mobilised to stop new laws

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-indonesia-politics-rights-internet/hashtags-and-hong-kong-protest-tips-how-indonesian-students-mobilised-to-stop-new-laws-idUKKBN1WC17J

 

 

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I'm 100% in solidarity with the Catalan independence movement. A very good friend of mine lives in Barcelona and is super active in that movement.

 

image.png.d46b7c1466cb7914e49bdc6a976029b7.png

 

I have no idea what the deal is with Indonesia but I'm 100% in solidarity as long as it's not commie/socialist, or religious in nature and focused on liberty, and freedom.

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Apple’s data sharing with firms tied to the Chinese government may endanger dissidents

By Matthew De SilvaOctober 16, 2019

https://qz.com/1728556/apple-tencent-data-sharing-may-endanger-chinese-political-dissidents/

Chinese users may want to be careful about searching the web through Apple’s Safari browser.

That’s because Apple has turned to Chinese tech giant Tencent to provide a blacklist of dangerous websites. Superficially, this is intended to protect users from malware and phishing attacks. The partnership, which began with iOS 11 in 2017, has raised eyebrows among privacy advocates who worry about Tencent’s close ties to the Chinese government (paywall).

It’s possible that Tencent could flag or censor websites at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party. When a user visits a website that triggers a fraud warning (legitimate or not), their IP address is shared with their safe browsing provider. Typically, Safari relies on Google for a list of shady sites, but the Google domain is blocked in China.

In a statement, Apple explained how Safari authenticates websites:

Apple protects user privacy and safeguards your data with Safari Fraudulent Website Warning, a security feature that flags websites known to be malicious in nature. When the feature is enabled, Safari checks the website URL against lists of known websites and displays a warning if the URL the user is visiting is suspected of fraudulent conduct like phishing.

To accomplish this task, Safari receives a list of websites known to be malicious from Google, and for devices with their region code set to mainland China, it receives a list from Tencent. The actual URL of a website you visit is never shared with a safe browsing provider and the feature can be turned off.

The fraudulent website warning feature is turned on by default on Apple devices. On a MacBook, it can be switched off by navigating to Safari’s Preferences > Security > Warn when visiting a fraudulent website. On an iPhone, the feature can be toggled under Settings > Safari > Fraudulent Website Warning.

Although Apple conceals URLs, privacy researchers are still worried because Google and Tencent could analyze the shared data to identify users based on their search histories. The anonymizing technique used by Google and Tencent—crunching URLs into hashes and comparing their prefixes to blacklists locally—is imperfect. Matthew Green, a cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, explains the method’s shortcomings in a blog post:

The weakness in this approach is that it only provides some privacy. The typical user won’t just visit a single URL, they’ll browse thousands of URLs over time. This means a malicious provider will have many ‘bites at the apple’ (no pun intended) in order to de-anonymize that user. A user who browses many related websites … will gradually leak details about their browsing history to the provider, assuming the provider is malicious and can link the requests.

Green says the privacy-focused community has generally accepted Google’s trade-off between ensuring online safety and sacrificing anonymity.

“But,” he adds, “Tencent isn’t Google. While they may be just as trustworthy, we deserve to be informed about this kind of change (Apple using Tencent’s blacklist in China) and to make choices about it. At [the] very least, users should learn about these changes before Apple pushes the feature into production, and thus asks millions of their customers to trust them.”

Because of Tencent’s involvement, China’s political dissidents should be extra cautious about using Safari. The very system that’s meant to protect them online could also threaten their safety.

Apple clarified to Quartz that Hong Kong users still rely on Google’s blacklist. Earlier this month, Apple seemingly submitted to pressure from China when it pulled a Hong Kong protest map app from the App Store, as well as the Quartz app from the China App Store. The company also removed the Taiwan flag emoji from its keyboard for users in Hong Kong and Macau, China’s two Special Administrative Regions.

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Not a lot in this piece other than the leak that Beijing is looking to replace Lam and the names of possible successors.

 

the interesting question is about the leak. Is it a genuine leak, is it a strategic leak, by Beijing or HK? And if so, to what ends?

 

 

Beijing draws up plan to replace Carrie Lam as Hong Kong chief

Chief executive would resign by March under proposal that needs Xi’s sign off

https://www.ft.com/content/5ef0fc30-f4a3-11e9-b018-3ef8794b17c6



The Chinese government is drawing up a plan to replace Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s leader, with an “interim” chief executive following violent protests against her administration, according to people briefed on the deliberations. The people said that if Xi Jinping, China’s president, decided to go ahead, Ms Lam’s successor would be installed by March and cover the remainder of her term, which ends in 2022. They would not necessarily stay on for a full five-year term afterwards. When Tung Chee-hwa, Hong Kong’s first Chinese chief executive, resigned in 2005, Donald Tsang, the territory’s then most senior bureaucrat, served out the remainder of his term and was reappointed chief executive for a full five-year term in 2007.

 

Leading candidates to succeed Ms Lam include Norman Chan, former head of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, and Henry Tang, son of a textile magnate who has also served as the territory’s financial secretary and chief secretary for administration, the people added.

 

The protest movement, now in its fifth month, is seen as the most serious challenge to Communist party authority on Chinese soil in three decades. Protesters say they will not stop until the territory’s chief executive and legislators are chosen through democratic elections. Chinese officials want the situation to stabilise before making a final decision on whether to proceed with a leadership change, as they don’t want to be seen to be giving in to violence, according to the people briefed on the discussions. Officials are hoping the violence will subside as arrests mount and now weekly vandalisation dissipates public support for the protests. March is when China’s rubber stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, holds its annual session.

 

Ms Lam’s handling of the crisis has been marred by a series of mis-steps, including her decision to press ahead with the controversial extradition bill that sparked the protests even after a series of massive and peaceful marches in early June, analysts said. She was later forced to drop the bill. The Financial Times reported in July that Ms Lam had offered to resign, but Beijing forced her to stay on. The Hong Kong and Chinese governments later denied that she had wanted to step down.

 

Mr Chan is one of the “three Chans” viewed as possible successors to Ms Lam. But the other two — Paul Chan, financial secretary, and Bernard Chan, convener of an “executive council” that advises Ms Lam — are viewed as being too close to her now discredited administration. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority, which Norman Chan headed for a decade, is widely respected as an independent institution that has successfully managed the territory’s US dollar currency peg for almost 40 years. Mr Tang, meanwhile, only served under Ms Lam’s predecessors. “We have to look within at people who have served in government but also know how business operates here,” said one prominent member of Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing establishment. “And of course they need to be trusted by Beijing.”


A spokesperson for Ms Lam and the Chinese government’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office did not respond to requests for comment. In a leaked audio recording, released last month by Reuters, Ms Lam said that “for a chief executive to have caused this huge havoc to Hong Kong is unforgivable”. She added: “If I have a choice, the first thing is to quit, having made a deep apology.” On October 4, Ms Lam enacted emergency powers allowing her to bypass Hong Kong’s Legislative Council and introduce a law that banned people from wearing masks during public assemblies, punishable by up to one year in prison. As people participating in unauthorised or violent demonstrations already risked lengthy jail terms of up to 10 years, the ban only deterred people from wearing masks at peaceful marches and rallies that had secured police permits.

 

Opposition to the move triggered Hong Kong’s worst weekend of violence since the protests began, resulting in the closure of the territory’s entire rail network for almost 48 hours. Last week, Ms Lam’s annual policy address, which she had to deliver via a pre-taped video recording after pro-democracy legislators disrupted her speech, was also widely viewed as a missed opportunity to address at least some of the grievances fuelling the protests. “We needed a big bang but this government doesn’t have any imagination,” said a senior executive at one of Hong Kong’s largest companies. Recommended Weekend long reads Inside the battle for Hong Kong “To calm things down, Carrie Lam needed to do two things,” said Simon Cartledge, author of a book about Hong Kong’s political economy, A System Apart. “First, announce an independent inquiry into the events of the last five months and second, say that when the time was right — say, early next year — her government would start looking at how to move Hong Kong’s political development forward. That was all, but she did neither.” Mr Tang campaigned to be chief executive in 2012 and was initially viewed as Beijing’s favourite for the post. But his popularity plummeted after it was discovered he had built an elaborate basement complex at his home without proper approvals. As a result, Chinese government officials directed the 1,200-member “election committee” that selects Hong Kong’s chief executive to vote instead for his rival, Leung Chun-ying, who was leading Mr Tang in public opinion polls. After Mr Leung’s chances of serving a second term were upended by pro-democracy protests in late 2014, the Chinese government wanted Ms Lam to succeed him even though her rival for the job, John Tsang, was more popular with the general public.

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This is an interesting little piece in that it was MAo being given bullshit information on harvest yields that, in large part, led to the great famine (approx 30 million dead) in the 1950s (which then led to the Cultural Revolution, 6 million dead). No one was willing to tell Mao that his proclamations on rice planting methods were off the mark and then they all tried to please him by saying that they had better yields than their neighbours reported.

 

Until recently, provincial level performance was based on GDP growth, and of course, they all reported BS figures to please Beijing. The fear now is that the internal security depts are telling Xi that the unrest in HK is being fuelled by foreing forces (the US) and by the other BS issues they've tried to blame it on (cost of living) rather than the people's fear of the Party. That's how disastrous decisions can be made.

 

 

Want to hear some bad news? No, we don't either. But if you're leading a government, you need accurate information about what's happening inside your country and what people think of you—especially if it's not what you want to hear. You also need good advice about how to respond to what you hear.

 

Case in point: After Yuri Andropov became Soviet leader in 1982, he admitted publicly that Soviet economic decision-making had fallen prey in previous years to "elements of separation from reality." His predecessors had spent much more time on propaganda than on rational economic policy. Andropov, and eventual successor Mikhail Gorbachev, also knew that the Kremlin had no idea what Soviet citizens thought about anything.

 

That's one reason that Russia's Vladimir Putin allows his government to publish credible economic statistics, good or bad. It's why he's allowed the Levada Center, a public polling organization based in Moscow, to publish credible opinion surveys with only occasional political pressure. At least, so far.

 

Unwillingness to hear bad news and dissenting views made headlines again this month when Donald Trump seemed surprised by the furious response from within his own party following his announcement of a US troop pullback from northern Syria—as if no one had warned him this reaction was inevitable. He also provoked anger and disbelief with a (since aborted) plan to host next year's G7 Summit at a Trump-owned hotel. He faces fresh accusations that he's rid himself of advisors willing to speak truth to power.

 

At least as worrying is the question of whether China's President Xi Jinping is hearing warnings of trouble inside his country. Tom Mitchell wrote in Monday's Financial Times that China's heavily centralized system "may be great at building infrastructure, repressing dissent and censoring the internet, but it is often hopeless when it comes to passing bad news up the chain." We've written before that a future economic or financial crisis inside China will leave investors wondering whether the statistics Beijing publishes are reliable.

 

Take for example the introduction of a law in Hong Kong earlier this year that would have permitted residents of the territory to be extradited into mainland China's highly politicized court system. If senior Chinese officials knew of this proposal in advance, they were naïve to believe it would be easily accepted. If they didn't know in advance, then the center isn't effectively connected to local administrators, even on crucial questions. Either way, that law sparked protests that have convulsed Hong Kong for three months now.

 

For now, there are no economic or political problems that Beijing can't manage. But what about the future?

 

President Xi has repeatedly promised a "new era" in which China will "take center stage in the world." Is there anyone within China's leadership willing to tell him that this expansionist rhetoric might needlessly provoke pushback from foreign leaders, particularly in the United States and Europe? Is there anyone to take aside a man – whose "thought" has been written into the constitution – to offer a frank appraisal of why so many Hong Kongers are so angry?

 

Even if someone is willing to speak the truth, is Xi Jinping listening?
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As Ukraine is for Russia, Taiwan is China's testing ground. What succeeds in Taiwan will be seen, in some form, further afield in other democracies.

 

a million cyber attacks a day is hard to even believe.

 

 

 

China’s Information War on Taiwan Ramps Up as Election Nears

Beijing has followed Moscow’s example, developing a coordinated influence machine in time for the presidential vote.

By

and

October 24, 2019, 7:00 AM GMT+11

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-23/china-s-information-war-on-taiwan-ramps-up-as-election-nears

 

Holger Chen cuts a fierce profile with his skull-tattooed biceps, each bigger than a human head, and the oft-broken nose of a fighter. A mixed martial arts fighter, ex-Marine, former gangster, and owner of a chain of fitness clubs in Taiwan named after Genghis Khan, Chen has become an emblem of what he calls “defensive democracy” against disinformation from China. In his YouTube broadcasts, watched by hundreds of thousands of people, he rails against “brainwashing” by websites linked to China and throws rhetorical punches at pro-Beijing television stations and newspapers that support Taiwan’s unification with the mainland.

 
 

Chen is tapping public anger in a place that ranks No. 1 out of 202 in perceived foreign dissemination of false information, according to a recent study by the V-Dem Institute at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg. “They’re using our strengths, like free speech, as weak points to attack us,” Chen says over expensive tea served in incongruously delicate cups at his studio on the outskirts of Taipei. With his normal speaking voice on the verge of a shout, it doesn’t take much to get him into fighting mode. “We need to protect our country!” he bellows.

 
After decades of China’s veiled threats to invade and a long-running campaign to get Taiwan’s allies to shift their diplomatic allegiance to Beijing, researchers, government officials, and lawmakers in Taipei all say that China is pursuing a new tactic in the runup to Taiwan’s Jan. 11 presidential vote: election meddling. “China is following the steps from Russia,” says Tzeng Yi-suo, head of cyberwarfare at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, which is advising Taiwan’s government on ways to counteract the interference. “In our election campaign periods, there is a most striking influence campaign coming from the Chinese Communist Party.”
 
 

The incumbent president, Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), has called “information warfare being waged from China” a threat to Taiwan’s democratic principles. Her chief challenger, Han Kuo-yu, from the Kuomintang (KMT) party, supports closer ties with the mainland. Last year, Han was elected mayor of Kaohsiung, a DPP stronghold, helped by overwhelmingly favorable coverage on Taiwan’s most-watched cable news station and what researchers say was a campaign of false claims and misleading information orchestrated by China. The DPP acknowledges that its own missteps and a strong campaign by Han contributed to last year’s election rout, but it’s hoping for a better showing in January. Tsai has been riding on renewed popularity since protests in Hong Kong crystallized fears about the “One Country, Two Systems” model of unification, which China’s President Xi Jinping has also pushed for Taiwan.

 
 

A spokesman for Han’s campaign said in a statement that any claim Han benefited from Chinese disinformation is “completely groundless.” He added that the DPP’s anti-China platform will isolate Taiwan from the rest of the world and “not only undermine economic growth and development in Taiwan but also destabilize cross-strait relations.”

 

China’s disinformation apparatus goes well beyond what it considers its borders, according to an analysis published by Harvard researchers in April. Using proxies around the world and some of the same social media platforms it bans at home, the government in Beijing posts 448 million comments a year aimed at promoting a pro-China agenda or sowing discord, the researchers found. In August, Twitter Inc. suspended 936 mainland Chinese accounts, part of a larger network of 200,000 spam accounts it disabled because of what it called a “significant state-backed operation” working to undermine Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations. On Sept. 20 it suspended an additional 10,000. Facebook Inc. and YouTube have disabled accounts for similar reasons. In December, new foreign-influence laws went into effect in Australia aimed at blocking China’s efforts to sway politics and key decision-makers in that country.

 

 

In Taiwan, guarantees of free speech and expression pose a dilemma: How does a society balance the fight against information warfare with the right of its people to publish their political views freely? “It’s a line between democratic freedoms of speech and the national security of Taiwan under attack from the Chinese government, and it’s a very difficult line to draw,” says Lee Chun-yi, secretary general of the DPP’s legislative caucus. There are two major factors to consider, he says: whether speech has been directly funded by China, and whether China-based entities originated, spread, or otherwise aided coordinated disinformation.

 

 

Lee and DPP researchers have identified 22 websites in Taiwan they say fall on the disinformation side of that line. They exhibit similar page designs, often publish the same news, and have ties to the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council in Beijing, the Chinese government’s chief administrative authority in charge of promoting unification. All 22 sites, as well as one operated by the Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing, featured a story about the selection of an administrator, who had served as an official under the previous pro-China president, to lead Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Echoing Chinese Communist Party language designed to diminish Taiwan’s political institutions, the piece portrayed Tsai as the force behind a wave of anti-China repression and warned that if her government blocked the appointment, Tsai would lose her reelection bid.

 

 

“We think this network is the Chinese government,” says Lee, pointing to printouts of the research in his office. “When you have the same news from the same source point on the same day, there’s something wrong.” The party is drafting legislation to ban direct funding from Chinese entities for news outlets and campaigns, and to require registration for foreign agents. The Taiwan Affairs Office in Beijing didn’t respond to questions sent by fax.

 

 

Puma Shen, an assistant professor at National Taipei University, has spent months analyzing the spread of disinformation from China with a team of researchers at DoubleThink Labs, an organization he chairs. He describes one incident that occurred last November: During one of the Kaohsiung mayoral debates, an article was published on more than a dozen websites implying that the DPP candidate was stupid because he was wearing an earpiece and seemingly taking directions from an unseen adviser. Photographs of the event didn’t show him wearing an earpiece, but immediately after the stories were published, searches for information about the debate in five Chinese provinces, as identified by their internet service providers, caused Google to return the false article as the top result. Two weeks later, the DPP candidate lost to Han, who’s now running for president on the KMT ticket. That bit of disinformation wasn’t the only factor, Shen says, but it helped.

 

 

At a presentation to government officials and foreign diplomats in Taipei in September, Shen said that while China lacks Russia’s sophistication, it’s rapidly advancing. In July and August, he told the group, there was a marked increase in news that appeared to originate in China showing how difficult life in the U.S. has become as a result of the trade war. Such reports aim to raise doubts about Tsai’s DPP government and its friendly relationship with the U.S., Shen says. “China’s message is to get people to think, What is this government doing being close to the U.S. in this trade war? Maybe it should be closer to China.”

 

 

Shen’s group says it has found Chinese-language websites, search boosters, and a network of content farms working together to sow disinformation from China and other countries. These overseas sites post the same news item at about the same time and then count on search boosters in China to move them to the top of Google pages, Shen says. The content farms appear to operate in a coordinated fashion from the same IP addresses. Often, the telltale sign that text originated in China is the use of the mainland’s simplified characters, rather than the traditional ones used in Taiwan, he says.

 

 

Chinese agencies have been launching an estimated 30 million cyberattacks against Taiwan a month, according to the government’s director general of cybersecurity, Jyan Hong-wei. The patterns indicate Chinese state involvement, he says. All came between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., with a break for lunch from noon to 1:30 p.m. Most are exploratory, looking for vulnerabilities, but several thousand have resulted in full-blown attacks. Six last year were successful, he says, adding that it’s possible sensitive information already obtained by China could be released before the January vote. The information war will likely heat up about two months before, Shen and other researchers say; they’ve already noticed a surge in posts on Taiwanese sites from China’s 50-cent army, or wu mao, named for the amount of money people are said to receive from the government every time they promote China or attack policies and articles not in the country’s interest. Two years ago, DPP legislator Karen Yu Wan-ju found it easy to spot them on her Facebook fan page. Now that’s changing. “Lately, some strange accounts are based in Taiwan and use traditional characters,” Yu says, scrolling through her page and pointing out suspicious posts. “What I worry is that these cyber armies are becoming one of us.”

 

Shen and others have asked Google and Facebook to change the way they display posts to downplay manipulated or outright false news. “We have to provide the standard,” he says, adding that both companies have been receptive. In August, Facebook and Twitter announced they would no longer accept paid posts from Chinese state-owned news outlets. And in September, Google said it would change its algorithm to show original news sources higher in searches than duplicate sites that copy and disseminate. “We have teams of people dedicated to protecting Taiwan’s upcoming elections,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in an email.

 

 

In the meantime, Taiwan’s National Communications Commission has taken action against Want Want China Times Media Group, a prominent media organization that has been accused of having ties to China. Owned by Tsai Eng-meng, who made a fortune selling rice crackers and is now Taiwan’s richest man according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Want Want operates the pro-unification China Times newspaper and television network Chung T’ien, known as CTi. In the runup to local elections last year, the commission found, the network’s CTi TV News devoted about 70% of its airtime to Han, the KMT mayoral candidate. The commission fined the network NT$5.03 million ($164,000) for violations of broadcast regulations, including failure to fact-check and harming public order. The company says it has reduced its coverage of Han. “The number of issues around China-related content has risen significantly in recent years,” says the commission’s acting chairman, Chen Yaw-shyang. “The question for us is whether this increase still falls within our protections for freedom of speech, or whether it touches upon national security issues.”

 

 

Want Want China Holdings Ltd., a Hong Kong-traded snack maker and beverage unit that’s Tsai’s main source of wealth, has acknowledged receiving subsidies from the Chinese government, but it said the money went to that business only. The media company is a separate personal investment of Tsai’s, according to a representative. “I absolutely have not taken any money I shouldn’t have taken,” Tsai was quoted saying in a YouTube video the company posted.

 

 

Still, the DPP’s Lee and other legislators say the admission shows Want Want is too close to China’s government for comfort. Chen, the martial artist, urges a tougher line. “I want everyone to boycott them and the government to legislate against them,” he says. “If we keep watching their news over and over, there doesn’t even need to be a war. We can just surrender to China right now.” —With Cindy Wang and Adela Lin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

For those who saw the footage of the incident in HK yesterday.

 

For those who did not, google "Andrew Chui's ear" and make sure you watch the one that begins with a person laying on the ground and ends with a different person laying on the ground.

 

Shit is getting brutal and this is what I was talking about up the page when I said things are going to spiral.

 

image.thumb.png.edf4e7c8fd4639765b0f1d907603ad11.png

Edited by Hua Guofang
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^^ Wow, what a fucking mess.  I don't know if I found the same video you're talking about, but it looks like I found clips of it.  I don't admit to know everything about what's going on over there, but whatever it is, I hope they get it figured out in an amicable way that makes the people happy.  (I assume that's the "right" thing that needs to happen, but again not sure).

 

I cringe when I see this kind of stuff, not because I"m squeamish, but because it bugs me that people are like this to eachother.

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Yeah, it gets to me too. The guy who copped the beat down deserved it but the mob mentality of the people serving it is just as ugly as him biting off dudes ear and knifing the other folk. 
 

I’m a new dad and all I can think about when I see helpless people being bashed is how helpless my little girl is and it genuinely fucks me up. I’m not a fan of suffering, even when it happens to bad people. 

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1 hour ago, Hua Guofang said:

Yeah, it gets to me too. The guy who copped the beat down deserved it but the mob mentality of the people serving it is just as ugly as him biting off dudes ear and knifing the other folk. 
 

I’m a new dad and all I can think about when I see helpless people being bashed is how helpless my little girl is and it genuinely fucks me up. I’m not a fan of suffering, even when it happens to bad people. 

 

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Not sure if i found the exact video but i have to say, i don’t feel bad. 
 

I absolutely understand the disgust in mob mentality and needless suffering. This dude caused the suffering though. Unless I’m reading pure Chinese propaganda. The dude had “violent tendencies” and attacked several people with a knife and then bit part of the ear off this political dude when he tried to stop him from escaping. 

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I mean.... in USA this would very likely end the guy up in prison for a very very long time.... and not in gen pop either.  He'd be in one of those crazy dorms where they only let one person out into the rec room at a time because they'll do shit like this to eachother.  He'd be hanging out with people that draw on the glass of their door with their on spit/poop paint they "made".

 

I can see:

 

* disturbing the peace

* assault with a deadly weapon

* attempted murder with a deadly weapon

* fleeing the scene of a crime

 

The judge that hears this case would throw the book at anyone brought in on those charges.  I don't know how it works over there, but I hope someone has to pay a high price for their crimes against people.

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And back and forth the spiral spins down into the abyss:

 

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/11/06/just-pro-beijing-hong-kong-lawmaker-junius-ho-attacked-tuen-mun/

 

That guy getting his ear bitten off was a pro-democracy politician. Today, we see a pro-Beijing politician attacked. Dude just up and stabbed him, aiming for the heart.

 

Watch the video.

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People being shot in the street and run over with vehicles by cops in HK this morning.

 

It won't be long until elements of the movment splinter off into cells and begin using deadly force.

 

Beijing wants this to happen, they want to encourage the extreme elements to act out in a way that alienates the moderate majority of supporters. Only problem is, the police provocations are being caught on film and the protet movement doesn't seem to be splintering.

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Well, I've never actually met him but know a lot of his colleagues and contemporaries and he's a well respected journo.

 

I suspect once he's finished in China (which I believe is next year as Sarah Ferguson is taking over as Bureau Chief in 2020), we'll have him in for some discussions regards what's happening on the ground in HK and some of the other stuff he's worked on in Beijing. He's definitely one of the better journos around.

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2 minutes ago, Hua Guofang said:

Anyone see the footage of the dudes escaping the university on motorbikes after abseling down ropes from a bridge?

 

I don't have time to di the footage up now but do yourself a favour and check it out, shit is badass.

Now that i'd watch. Copy paste THAT

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Struggling to find the orginal footage I saw that was a lot better and showing the line of bikes that showed up pulling people out of there. This is the best I can find as I'm supposed to be working, not procrastinating on here, lol

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-19/hong-kong-students-escape-university-siege/11716274

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