I guess a bit like in the spy movies where American spies were free to roam everywhere, the superpower status (i.e. money and market access) of China means they get to swing their police truncheon around and most countries just stay quiet about it.
And they were even watching Xinjiang activists outside of China (Source [2]):
> [...] one of the officers shoved a photo under my nose. It was my daughter Gulhumar. She was posing in front of the Place du Trocadéro in Paris, bundled up in her black coat, the one I’d given her. In the photo, she was smiling, a miniature East Turkestan flag in her hand, a flag the Chinese government had banned. To Uighurs, that flag symbolises the region’s independence movement. The occasion was one of the demonstrations organised by the French branch of the World Uighur Congress, which represents Uighurs in exile and speaks out against Chinese repression in Xinjiang.
The drily-written post only talks about telecommunications fraud. Is that a big deal in China, are they doing something like Nigerian 419 scams? I suppose they'd be targeting mostly Chinese citizens, using e.g. WeChat, although that's probably a bad idea because how much do you want to bet WeChat can report home the user's GPS coordinates or even just their IP would be enough for country geo-locating.
It's interesting how the authorities of the US and China have a different view of how to control its populace through information.
China is all about the controlling the logistics of the flow of information, where the authorities need to crack down dissent that can impede the structural stability of the CCP. (Not all social criticism is censored, but the ones that directly criticize the party are.) Therefore they have done many things to shut down access to foreign sites, and created one of the biggest bureaucracies in the history of the world to search through the deluge of information on the domestic net to pick out which users and posts are deemed censorable. And it kinda works, but also kinda doesn't (If you have seen the memes and lexicon circulating in the Chinese nets, you'll understand what I mean instantly.)
Whereas the US authorities plays a much more smarter game: is all about tactics. Instead of controlling the flow of information in a top-down way, it lets them free, and then actively participates in it. While China focuses on removing the opponent's pieces on the chessboard, US focuses on adding their own: through its numerous media conglomerates and NGOs (which if you ultimately trace back its funding, all leads to one of the alphabet-named agencies or neoliberal thinktanks like the Ford Foundation or the RAND Institute). When you search a dissident figure in the Chinese net, all traces will be erased and you will find nothing. When you search a dissident figure on Google, you will be spammed with all the numerous media sites that try to mislead you in some way. (And yes, this also kinda works, but also kinda doesn't. But I see this as a more sophisticated strategy than what China is doing.)
While of course the speech freedom is pretty scarce in China, there are many things that the USG do without the legal ability.
Also, the massive attempt to deplatform Trump supporters also significant weakened my belief in the US's speech freedom. I don't care if this was done by the USG or private companies, but it worked, very effectively, Parler was gone in the same way as Twitter get GFWed in China. I was shocked how Chinese this was. As a Chinese and for personal experiences, I hate Trump and the red-necks to the deepest, but I would support their right for emitting their sound.
Trump used twitter to incite violence and insurrection, which is not protected by the first amendment.
It would be better to determine this through the courts rather than twitter, but twitter has every right to ban trolls, spammers, and politicians calling for violent action
The same would be also applicable, if stretched a little bit, to protests and people organizing them in China. "Weibo has every right to ban trolls, spammers, and politicians calling for violent action" (Weibo is the Chinese Twitter equivalent)
We should not have double standard just because the USG is a something you like and CPC is not.
It's possible given the Chinese government's proficiency in abusing terms.
But it seems for now mostly it's still about real crimes. Guys pretending to be from FedEx, saying your delivery have heroin in it, is seized and you need to pay a fine to get out of trouble. This may sound stupid to you, but anecdotally, one smart friend of mine doing physics PhD at MIT recently got tricked to pay ~$2000. BTW: a significant amount of those calls originated from Taiwan, easy to tell from the accent.
Those scam calls are quite common in Taiwan unfortunately, and it's fairly well known here that it's a big mafia enterprise run by the bamboo union. The government recently repatriated a bunch of Taiwanese that had been trafficked to Cambodia and were being forced to work in scam call centers.
I guess a bit like in the spy movies where American spies were free to roam everywhere, the superpower status (i.e. money and market access) of China means they get to swing their police truncheon around and most countries just stay quiet about it.
And they were even watching Xinjiang activists outside of China (Source [2]):
> [...] one of the officers shoved a photo under my nose. It was my daughter Gulhumar. She was posing in front of the Place du Trocadéro in Paris, bundled up in her black coat, the one I’d given her. In the photo, she was smiling, a miniature East Turkestan flag in her hand, a flag the Chinese government had banned. To Uighurs, that flag symbolises the region’s independence movement. The occasion was one of the demonstrations organised by the French branch of the World Uighur Congress, which represents Uighurs in exile and speaks out against Chinese repression in Xinjiang.
The drily-written post only talks about telecommunications fraud. Is that a big deal in China, are they doing something like Nigerian 419 scams? I suppose they'd be targeting mostly Chinese citizens, using e.g. WeChat, although that's probably a bad idea because how much do you want to bet WeChat can report home the user's GPS coordinates or even just their IP would be enough for country geo-locating.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/09/secret-deal-re... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/12/uighur-xinjian...