China (Tianyang Xiting, Hebei), by Lei Han (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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The practice of containing information not approved by the government has long been commonplace in China, and has steadily intensified both in traditional media and online under the leadership of Xi Jinping. Amid a global focus on China’s reaction to the novel coronavirus that originated in Wuhan and has so far infected at least 28,000 people and killed 563 in China, commentators have blamed China’s rigid autocracy as a cause of the outbreak and its quick spread. Many have pointed directly to the systemic use of censorship as a major public health risk intensifier. Local authorities were slow to respond to the first cases and stifled information by penalizing frontline health workers–itself characteristic of the national environment of censorship and intimidation. While public anger boiled over authorities’ ability to contain it briefly last month (and also created temporary “creative coverage” opportunities for quality professional and citizen journalism), central authorities are reportedly planning to further tighten information controls.

According to a February 2 WeChat Moments post shared by an anonymous Wuhan resident, local police in Wuhan are issuing verbal warnings not to share information about the fallout of the disease and the city’s current lack of resources to handle it. A screenshot of the Moments post has been archived and translated by CDT:

Tonight at Simen Gate, aside from me there was an elderly person collecting scraps. Besides the two of us, I didn’t see another person walking outside. The lighting along the riverbank was no longer on, and the sky looked like it had been enveloped by a bat’s wing, making it hard for people to breathe. Now I understand, life is good when there’s an endless stream of traffic, a cacophony of voices, and the flickering of neon lights; when traffic jams are backed up from Hankou to Wuchang and then to Hanyang. Just now, at 17:30, there was a man who jumped off the Simen Gate bridge, crying incessantly before he did. His tears were laden with grief and despair… On that quiet street his cries and shouts rang out, stabbing the hearts of all passersby.

The main theme of his laments was that he had been infected with coronavirus, that he couldn’t stay at home as he was afraid of infecting his wife and child. Hospitals have run out of empty beds, so he was staying in a rented flat. He needed to visit the doctor but there is no public transit. He had to walk for a long long time. His strength was failing, and now he didn’t even have food to eat, it is better to die than to live. 

With that jump, he left behind all his grievances with the world. Blood obscured his face and made me tear up…  As I was preparing to call the police a police car came from nearby. I bowed to the deceased three times.

As I was leaving, the police repeatedly urged me “not to share this information online.” I laughed with tears in my eyes… [Chinese]

See also CDT’s translation of a lower-level health official’s description of his frustration at the frontline of relief efforts, or a Wuhan resident’s notes from the Wuhan lockdown. CDT has also translated a propaganda directive ordering the deletion of an article on an infected frontline doctor who had earlier been disciplined for “spreading rumors” about the virus, and an earlier directive to delete a state media report on the potential economic impact of the coronavirus (the deleted article has also been translated by CDT).

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Post tags: censorship, coronavirus, Netizen Voices, public health, River Crabbed, suicide

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The British government last week unveiled a new policy on Huawei’s role in the U.K.’s nascent 5G cellular network amid suspicion of Chinese authorities’ influence over the firm. Huawei has been labeled a “high-risk vendor,” and therefore barred from “core” and other sensitive parts of the network, and limited to 35% market share elsewhere. The decision fell short of the strict ban urged by the U.S., Huawei’s most vocal detractor, which had threatened both the two countries’ deep security cooperation and “totemic” post-Brexit trade negotiations if it did not get its way. The U.K., like other countries, has faced similar pressure in the opposite direction from China. The Guardian reported last week that although Prime Minister Boris Johnson faced possible rebellion from his own MPs and criticism from some prominent Republicans after the decision, the U.S. appeared to have somewhat softened its position. House Republicans, though, introduced a resolution condemning the U.K.’s choice on Monday.

Wired’s Garret M. Graf, author of an in-depth recent piece on U.S. moves against Huawei, cited the decision as one of several indications “that the Trump administration might have already lost one of its important geopolitical campaigns“:

[…] In the end, the technological world may actually just be too complex, the global supply chains too interwoven, and the networks that drive modern life too interconnected to draw the bright lines that the Trump administration wants. What that ultimately means for security and privacy remains an open question.

[…] Now, as it weighs how to proceed, the US must confront a difficult question: Is it really prepared to cut off intelligence sharing with key partners who open their doors to Huawei? And if so, will it ultimately hand China yet another victory by weakening the very global alliance that could counter the rising superpower? [Source]

At The Telegraph, the Royal United Services Institute’s Raffaello Pantucci described the process leading up to the U.K. decision as “an immature discussion that let the conversation about Huawei turn into a proxy for a discussion about China, reducing the debate to a false binary choice between Washington and Beijing.” At The Spectator, RUSI’s Charles Parton also suggested looking beyond entanglement with ongoing Sino-U.S. tensions: “forget the Americans, if you wish, on the grounds that they are ideologues. But why has Australia, for whom China is a key trading partner, banned Huawei?” One authoritative answer came last week with a blog post from Simeon Gilding, former head (until December) of the Australian Signals Directorate’s signals intelligence and offensive cyber missions, now a senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Gilding described the British stance as “disappointing” and premature, and a doubling down “on a flawed and outdated cybersecurity model” involving close official scrutiny of Huawei products and a misconceived distinction between core and peripheral technology.

We developed pages of cybersecurity mitigation measures to see if it was possible to prevent a sophisticated state actor from accessing our networks through a vendor. But we failed.

We asked ourselves, if we had the powers akin to the 2017 Chinese Intelligence Law to direct a company which supplies 5G equipment to telco networks, what could we do with that and could anyone stop us?

We concluded that we could be awesome, no one would know and, if they did, we could plausibly deny our activities, safe in the knowledge that it would be too late to reverse billions of dollars’ worth of investment. And, ironically, our targets would be paying to build a platform for our own signals intelligence and offensive cyber operations.

[…] Cybersecurity is all about raising the costs for the attacker. Network access through vendors—which need to be all over 5G networks to maintain their equipment—effectively reduces the access cost to zero.

[…] When you are one update away from being owned, a code review cannot provide any confidence that the code you checked reflects the code in your network. Even with expensive oversight by cleared personnel, it would be hard to spot malware developed by a top-notch intelligence agency, especially when the network is down and your customers are screaming. [Source]

At The Sydney Morning Herald, Nick McKenzie and Anthony Galloway followed up on Gilding’s post:

Huawei Australia’s spokesman Jeremy Mitchell says ASD’s assessment relied on at outdated understanding of how 5G will work. He argues that multiple vendors can help run parts of a 5G network, mitigating the risk of compromise.

[…] Mitchell also says that if ASD’s concern is really about China, then it should equally apply to the other key players in the 5G debate, Nokia and Ericsson, as both manufacture in China and could also theoretically face demands from the government. Huawei is hoping the British decision will be replicated across the world and may even force a rethink in Australia and the US.

But in Canberra, Gilding thinks this is unlikely. Contrary to multiple press reports that assert Malcolm Turnbull simply followed US president Donald Trump’s lead when banning Huawei in 2018, Gilding insists the decision was made on his team’s advice about how to best protect Australia. That advice has not changed and is unlikely to, given the man who signed off on Gilding’s work, former ASD director Mike Burgess, now heads ASIO.

Sources close to Malcolm Turnbull also point out it was Turnbull who forcefully briefed Donald Trump about the need to ban Huawei from 5G, rather than the other way around. Despite this, Huawei continues to push the line that Australia has been dancing to Trump’s tune when it comes to Huawei. [Source]

Huawei was placed on the defensive elsewhere last week, following reports in a German newspaper of an alleged “smoking gun” for the company’s collusion with Chinese authorities. From Douglas Busvine and Andreas Rinke at Reuters:

“Huawei Technologies has never, and will never, do anything to compromise the security of networks and data of its customers,” the Chinese company said in response to the report in the Handelsblatt business daily.

“The Handelsblatt article repeats old, unfounded allegations without providing any concrete evidence whatsoever.”

The Handelsblatt report cited a confidential foreign ministry document that intelligence shared by U.S. officials represented a “smoking gun” that meant Chinese companies were unsafe partners for building next-generation 5G mobile networks.

“At the end of 2019, intelligence was passed to us by the U.S., according to which Huawei is proven to have been cooperating with China’s security authorities,” the newspaper cited the document as saying.

The German foreign ministry said it did not comment on internal documents as a matter of policy. [Source]

The European Union last week announced non-binding recommendations along similar lines to the U.K. decision. At the European Council on Foreign Relations, Janka Oertel argued that the recommendations were more aggressive than they might appear, and “should be read very comprehensively as part of Europe’s attempts to strengthen its defensive mechanisms against the systemic challenge from China.”

In the entire document, there is no mention at all of China, or leading Chinese telecommunications firms Huawei and ZTE. This comes as little surprise. But the toolbox is crystal-clear in the direction it sets: high-risk vendors (read: Huawei and ZTE) will have to be restricted or excluded from sensitive parts of the network in order to mitigate the risk of state interference through the 5G supply chain. The sensitive parts of the network are explicitly not limited to “core” functions, but also include the access network, which the October 2019 EU Risk Assessment already underlined. The toolbox directly acknowledges the strategic and technical risks in this issue. It states that the strategic risks cannot be mitigated with technical measures alone, and it points to the need for a political and regulatory response, especially when it comes to the “risk of interference by a third country or dependency risks”.

[…] Brussels remains realistic about applying these measures. As such, the toolbox indicates that an outright ban on high-risk vendors will unlikely lead to the best and most favourable economic results. Its reasonable suggestion is that each member state, depending on its specific timeframe of deployment, should devise a plan for reducing dependencies. In other words, the commission provides member states with a roadmap to slowly wean themselves off high-risk vendors at the same time as they proceed with upgrading their infrastructure. It suggests that member states should consider exclusions and restrictions within normal cycles of replacement, thus creating a transition period to mitigate the economic impact of replacing existing kit from Chinese vendors. [Source]

In Canada, which has yet to announce a position and is even more deeply entangled by the ongoing extradition process against Huawei CFO and founder’s daughter Meng Wanzhou, Public Safety Minister Bill Blair said that the U.K. decision “requires careful examination.” In an op-ed at The Globe and Mail, the University of Ottawa’s Wesley Wark suggested that “Britain’s 5G announcement has long been awaited and may be considered a shield by the Liberal government, should it consider adopting a similar policy on Huawei.”

Amid the various apparent failures of the Trump administration’s campaign to turn other countries against Huawei, its broader policy on technological rivalry has boosted Chinese moves toward technological self-sufficiency, as The Financial Times’ Yuan Yang explored in a “Big Read” feature article last month. Huawei executives commented on this situation in Politico’s weekly Morning Tech newsletter last week:

“We want to continue with those relationships [with U.S. chipmakers] and we also, though, are willing to go our own way and rely on our own sources in China and also East Asia and Europe rather than the U.S.,” Glenn Schloss, head of global communications for Huawei, said in an interview. Schloss said there is a “growing awareness” that Huawei’s placement on the entity list is affecting the company’s supply chain, but a “plan b” was put in place before the U.S. took action.

[…] A request that would allow Google to license its popular Android mobile operating system for new Huawei devices is still outstanding, Huawei executives told POLITICO. It’s a key arrangement for both companies, as Huawei trails only Samsung, the world’s largest smartphone maker. A Google spokesperson said the company has a temporary license to service Huawei phones that were on the market before the Commerce Department’s restrictions went into effect last May.

“The business relationship with Google is very, very important. We’re reluctantly pursuing an alternative to it that we will achieve and we will end up probably making a whole lot more money than we did before,” said Andy Purdy, Huawei’s chief security officer. Nevertheless, he added, “We hope that the license will be granted to Google so we can maintain the relationship.” Huawei’s alternative is a system originally developed for connected commercial devices, called Harmony, which Schloss said can be adapted into a mobile operating system. “We have the capability to do something similar and consumers globally may welcome a non-U.S. operating system,” he said. [Source]

The post including the Huawei interviews is sponsored, somewhat incongruously, by 5G Action Now. Chaired by a former House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chairman, Michigan Republican Mike Rogers, the organization aims “to elevate the conversation regarding American national security and the economic benefits of winning the 5G innovation and deployment battle against China.” Politico reported elsewhere that the group “has hired Republican lobbyists and consultants at a rapid clip since its launch earlier this month.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Australia, Australia relations, Canada, cyberespionage, cybersecurity, data security, donald Trump, espionage, european union, huawei, intelligence, United Kingdom, United States

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The novel coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, Hubei has now killed 426 people (all but one in China) and infected more than 20,000 globally. Much criticism has been levied at the Chinese government for their slow initial response and continued opacity about the outbreak: officials in Wuhan appeared more concerned with politics and “stability maintenance” than with a potential public health emergency, while central authorities have recently been maintaining tight control of the narrative, hushing news that hints at the economic cost of what is now a global health emergency.

Central authorities took charge of the response last week by appointing Premier Li Keqiang head of a new task force, and commentators noted the test that the these efforts would pose on Beijing. Xi Jinping this week made a second public address about the situation to signal a more assertive central government response, warning lower-level cadres against letting “bureaucratism” slow things down. Meanwhile, many experts have pointed to China’s rigid central autocracy as a major cause for the outbreak and its rapid spread. CDC officials have said that Beijing has been slow to allow U.S. health experts to observe or assist. At Foreign Policy, James Palmer highlights that the opacity demonstrated by Wuhan officials is the status quo in Xi’s China. At Vox, Yanzhong Huang notes flaws in China’s hierarchical national post-SARS outbreak reporting and testing systems, and expresses concern over unintended consequences of ongoing mass quarantine efforts.

As public anger was rising over the official response to the disease, state media last week reported that a 17-year-old boy with cerebral palsy died at home in the Hubei countryside while his family was under quarantine. In answer to the question “a 17-year-old child with cerebral palsy was isolated in Hubei and died after being home alone for six days. How can we avoid similar incidences?” on the Q&A site Zhihu, a low-level CCP cadre weighed in. The response, by user Tan Jiandong (谭靖东) and translated below, provides a glimpse into the confusion and frustration that exists on the frontline, even among officials:

Civil servants, ideologues, theorists, fans of future history.  

I’m crying while I type. In my mind, “why do the common people suffer like this” is constantly echoing.

Why do the common people suffer like this?!

As a person within the system, I know that many things should not be said. To say those things would be to disregard politics. To talk about politics means you must speak according to the rules.

But, I can’t help but speak.

I’ve seen some people criticizing local officials for non-action. To be frank, in my time working as a local cadre, I’ve also even seen inaction at the local level. But, do you know how much salary local officials receive? Do you know where bosses, big and small, assign their unemployed relatives? Do you know how much work the local government has taken on, and how much anger we have to bear?

On the evening of the 25th, the first day of the New Year, I received an urgent notification. On the 26th I drove 500 kilometers to the work unit.  

It’s now been five days. I don’t really want to go into what I’ve done these five days, all I want to say is that the people at the local level have done enough to be worthy of their conscience. 

Today was the busiest day. Throughout the day, those looking for me either requested data or advanced models, checked posts or investigated accounts; either ordered the removal of individuals or lockdowns of streets; the messages that were sent to us were either documents or propaganda slogans. The funniest thing is that the higher-up government and inspection departments told everyone to wait for orders. We waited for an entire day without hearing anything, till we finished work and got a call telling us to come back tomorrow.  What a smart move, frightening their subordinates everyday and then worrying whether they are fulfilling their duties.  

Five days. I’ve received everything from higher authorities except a mask, a thermometer, and disinfectant. 

It’s been five days, all investigations have been reported. The format of the ledger is being changed on a daily basis, but nobody is giving instructions on what to do about the high-risk individuals that have been reported.

You all say that grassroots cadres do not care for children with cerebral palsy, but how much time do grassroots cadres–who must report dozens of statistics a day–have to take care of neighborhood children who may be infected? After the visit ends, how much time do local cadres have for even a bite of food before they have to go back and rewrite the report just because they did not wear the right volunteer uniform when making the visit? After all, there are still hundreds of thousands of inhabitants waiting for their forms to be signed, and dozens of locations waiting for political slogans to be hung.  

Originally I was indifferent, used to the sight of it all. But today I received instructions that tomorrow I’m to completely seal the community and expel all outsiders. Both myself and those in my neighborhood felt uncomfortable about this. I tried to tell them that if people become homeless and fall sick in this cold weather, that would only increase pressure on the hospital. I told them that with lockdowns everywhere, these people will have nowhere to go once they are kicked out of the community.  I even used cost-benefit analysis to try to convince them that if people in this group are later diagnosed with the virus and if it becomes known that we are responsible for causing the spread of the virus/movement of people because we expelled them, we will also be held responsible.

But what’s the use. None of the people I’m talking to are decision makers. Who is there to blame? The examples are right there–those people from Hubei who are stuck on the highway and not allowed to enter any city. Is everyone thinking ‘so long as the epidemic doesn’t happen where I am then all is well’?… Using one’s neighbor as a drain; I’m just being used to dig, and I’m not qualified to comment.  

After the meeting I picked up my phone and saw this news. The accumulated emotions of the entire day burst out–a big man was now crying. On this day I didn’t see a shred of good news. In the morning I saw experts wrangling over for their papers. In the afternoon I read about the scuffling happening at the Huoshenshan Hospital construction site. In the evening I saw that the Huanggang Health Commission director had been sacked. All these things are rushing around in my head in a hideous mess. I’m at a loss, I don’t know what to do.   

That child who died quietly was 17 years old. That is to say, he came into the world the year that SARS wreaked havoc. He left this world 17 years later with this new outbreak. I’m not sure if his cerebral palsy affected the way that he saw the world. 

How innocent are the people!!

Enough, now to sleep. Even if I can’t sleep, I should probably pretend to sleep. After all, once morning comes, I still have to go with the propaganda department to interview the disease prevention frontline model officials.  [Chinese]

See also CDT’s translation of a Wuhan resident’s notes from the Wuhan lockdown. CDT has also translated a propaganda directive ordering the deletion of an article on an infected frontline doctor who had earlier been disciplined for “spreading rumors” about the virus, and an earlier directive to delete a state media report on the potential economic impact of the outbreak (the deleted article has also been translated by CDT).

© Josh Rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: coronavirus, Netizen Voices, public health

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