cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/53106188

Thirty-seven years after massacre, Beijing continues to suppress its memory while extending its crackdown on dissent

Opinion piece by British human rights lawyer Benedict Rogers.

It is said that you can judge a government by the way it treats its citizens. As we remember the day when, on June 4, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government turned its guns on its own unarmed people peacefully demonstrating for democracy in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and in cities across China, let us never forget that China’s dictatorship is a murderous, criminal regime that rules through fear and the barrel of the gun.

Indeed, let that iconic image of “Tank Man” — the brave, unknown, unarmed civilian who confronted the tank on Chang’an Avenue near Tiananmen Square — stay uppermost in our hearts and minds as we commemorate the Tiananmen massacre this week.

The exact death toll is disputed, but the Red Cross reports at least 2,600 people died on June 4, and British diplomatic cables claim as many as 10,000.

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History matters, and when we forget the tragedies of modern history — the Holocaust, Stalin’s gulags, South Africa’s apartheid, Pol Pot’s heinous genocide in Cambodia, China’s Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen massacre and other atrocities — our civilization is in trouble.

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The first reminder is from the mothers of the Tiananmen dead and wounded.

In a statement released last week by Human Rights in China, the mothers of the victims reminded the world that “this was a tragedy caused entirely by the government at that time, one that gravely violated China’s Constitution, violated the most basic principles of humanity, and trampled upon the civil rights of its citizens. Precisely because it was an act of state power, this human calamity remains, 37 years on, no closer to resolution. To this day, the government continues to evade responsibility, refuse redress, and suppress all public discussion of what took place.”

Moreover, the Tiananmen Mothers observe, “despite extraordinary advances in information technology, truthful accounts of the June Fourth Massacre remain inaccessible within China. People cannot discuss it openly or mourn it publicly. Even commemorations held by the victims’ families have long been subject to intense surveillance. This reality has left many young people unaware that in June 1989, in Beijing, soldiers opened fire on unarmed students and civilians. It is as if nothing ever happened.”

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All of us with the freedom to do so — democratic governments, independent media, civil society and ordinary people across the free world — must take up the Tiananmen Mothers’ message and ensure that the massacre 37 years ago is never forgotten, and that their demands for justice and accountability are pursued.

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Just five days before the Tiananmen massacre anniversary, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at a screening of a new film about one of the CCP’s other egregious barbarities: forced organ harvesting.

The film, State Organs, is a compelling overview of the practice of forced organ harvesting — which the independent China Tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, who prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic, declares a “crime against humanity.”

And when you take the evidence of the China Tribunal, together with the subsequent Uyghur Tribunal, as well as numerous reports on the human rights crisis in Tibet, the persecution of Christians, the repression of dissidents over the past three decades or more, and the dismantling of Hong Kong’s promised freedoms, you find a CCP state that lives up to the values it exhibited in Tiananmen Square in June 4, 1989: barbarity, inhumanity, criminality, murder, torture, and — in some specific instances — crimes against humanity and genocide. That criminal regime is still in power in Beijing today. And it should be held to account.

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Web Archive link

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/8721733

[Op-ed by Michael Caster, Head of the Global China Program at ARTICLE 19, and co-founder of Safeguard Defenders, a human rights organization focused on China.]

Archived version

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Thanks to RightsCon organizer AccessNow’s laudable transparency, we now know what many suspected: RightsCon was effectively canceled by the Zambian government under direct pressure from China.

In a statement released on May 1, AccessNow revealed that on April 27, diplomats from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had reached out to pressure the Government of Zambia over the participation of Taiwanese civil society representatives. A press statement from the government further noted the need to ensure thematic issues aligned with Zambia’s “national values” and “policy priorities,” arguably shorthand for avoiding other topics sensitive to Beijing. Perhaps not so coincidentally, on April 23 China and Zambia signed a development cooperation agreement, including a $1.5 billion USD investment into its energy infrastructure.

While AccessNow says it immediately pushed back, the government’s position did not change. Ultimately, it came to represent a red line. AccessNow says “at a time when this sector is already under immense financial and political strain, what we and our community forcefully experienced is unprecedented and existential.”

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What happened in Zambia also raises questions of security and civil society access for future gatherings. This includes this year’s Internet Governance Forum (IGF), scheduled for Kenya, which has adopted Chinese surveillance infrastructure, or regional fora such as the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APRIGF), to take place in Nepal, which has engaged with China’s Digital Silk Road.

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This is a major escalation in transnational repression and a testament to China’s influence on global digital rights far beyond its borders that deserves reflection.

This should be a stark reminder that, even as we must now face rising threats to the freedom of expression and digital rights from previously aligned governments such as the United States, old school authoritarian actors remain significant threats. To be sure, China has seized on geopolitical shifts and recent US funding cuts to expand its already significant influence in ways that continue to threaten human rights in the digital domain. While this is as much about China’s adverse influence in Africa as it is about its campaign of transnational repression against Taiwan, arguably this assault on inclusive, multistakeholder fora like RightsCon is also indicative of China’s broader authoritarian approach to digital governance, against which advocates for democracy and human rights must push back.

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Four of the top ten countries globally most affected by influence from China are in Africa (Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Algeria, and South Africa), according to Taiwan-based Doublethink Lab’s China Index. Beyond these indicators, China’s footprint exists at multiple layers of the tech stack across the continent, including digital infrastructure, ‘smart cities’ and other surveillance tech, and censorship tools.

Last year, researchers from InterSecLab and others analyzed a leak of over 100,000 documents linked to Chinese tech company Geedge Networks—a little known company with ties to the Great Firewall— revealing a web of partnerships that exports China-style ‘cyber sovereignty’ through technology transfers that let other countries replicate similar internet controls. As noted by the researchers, the investigation identified “a pattern of commercialization of surveillance capabilities, with Geedge Networks offering a suite of products that enable comprehensive monitoring and control of internet users.” Ethiopia was one of the named country partners.

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China was able to exert pressure on Zambia to take this unprecedented step toward canceling a major international conference in part because China’s influence on the continent has expanded in the absence of adequate rights-based alternatives. Contesting China’s adverse influence in Africa, and around the world, cannot rest merely on criticizing its assault on human rights but must also come with positive and accessible rights-based solutions to real digital development needs. The world’s remaining liberal democracies must expand their efforts to meet the moment, or risk ceding more of the globe to Chinese-style authoritarianism.

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cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/8380312

Archived version

Under the pretext of cultural cooperation, China sends propaganda officials to Europe and Estonia to promote a carefully crafted "China story." The ISS [Estonian Internal Security Service] wrote that this cultural engagement diverts attention from human rights abuses, unfair economic practices, and growing support for Russia in the war against Ukraine.

The Chinese Embassy in Estonia has stepped up cultural outreach by organizing events with local governments. Alongside these events, meetings are held with local political and business elites, providing favorable opportunities to establish contacts and shape attitudes toward China.

According to the ISS (opens pdf), efforts to cultivate a positive attitude begin with young people. For example, the Chinese ambassador is a frequent guest at Estonian general education schools and universities.

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The ISS noted that last year the embassy published several native advertising articles in the media of Estonia and other Baltic states about "democracy," "fair" trade and Taiwan's "historical" status as part of China, even though the Chinese Communist Party has never governed Taiwan.

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The embassy also pays local companies for media and public relations services to mediate contacts with Estonian journalists and find outlets willing to publish its articles.

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According to the ISS, Chinese intelligence activities focus on science, technology and security. After establishing contact via LinkedIn, Chinese intelligence services attempt to lure influential individuals by inviting them to China or its neighboring countries. Travel to China creates recruitment opportunities.

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The ISS separately highlighted the Estonian-Chinese Chamber of Commerce established in 2022, which has targeted Estonia's technology sector and contacted several startup and technology companies with proposals for lucrative cooperation with China. The proposals were not sent to company executives or general addresses but specifically to individuals responsible for technology. The founders of the chamber also sought to establish contacts with European Union institutions.

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In 2025, the use of professional work platforms such as LinkedIn intensified in identifying intelligence targets, the ISS noted. As a new trend, instead of sending personalized messages, job advertisements are posted, and potential candidates are then contacted based on them.

Among candidates, work experience in government service and in the fields of foreign or security policy is particularly valued. Cooperation offers have been made to Estonian politicians, diplomats, ministry officials, members of the Defense League, researchers and others, the ISS wrote.

China has also begun using job advertisements more broadly. For example, in November last year, the United Kingdom's security service MI5 issued a spying alert to the UK Parliament and its staff, warning about Chinese recruiters and citing two LinkedIn accounts as examples. As early as October 2023, the head of MI5 stated that nearly 20,000 Britons had been contacted via LinkedIn.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/50260494

Over the past month, several reports offered new details on the scale and tactics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s foreign influence operations.

In late February, OpenAI published findings on how ChatGPT was being misused, including by an account linked to Chinese law enforcement, to plan and document what that user termed “cyber special operations.” Meta’s first report of 2026 on adversarial threats detailed the takedown of a China-linked network targeting Taiwan. The European Council on Foreign Relations published an analysis of China’s influence playbook in Europe, drawing on a decade of documented activity in Poland and the Czech Republic. And the International Campaign for Tibet exposed a Chinese state-backed AI model designed to shape how Tibetan speakers view the region.

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Customized AI Model for Narrative Control

In March 2026, Chinese state media announced the launch of DeepZang, billed as “the world’s first Tibetan large language model,” ostensibly designed for “global users seeking to learn about Tibetan culture, history, and politics.” In practice, the app delivers CCP talking points: it tells users Tibet has always been part of China, describes the Dalai Lama in line with official party positions, and when users ask about Tibetan independence, self-immolation protests inside Tibet, or the Tibetan national anthem, it instructs them to ask only “legally compliant” queries.

The name of the app itself serves the regime’s Sinicization campaign by incorporating a reference to the Chinese name for the region: Xizang. Within China, the government has simultaneously banned access to Monlam.ai, a Tibetan-language AI tool built by exile communities in India, which is in fact the world’s first Tibetan LLM.

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Fake Business Targeting Western Officials

Accounts likely linked to China also reportedly used ChatGPT to draft English-language emails presenting a fictitious consulting firm called “Nimbus Hub” as a legitimate geopolitical advisory company — complete with a professional website and fake LinkedIn profiles for supposed team members. The emails targeted U.S. state-level officials and policy analysts working in business and finance, inviting them to paid consultations to “interpret policy and provide strategic advice,” while requesting information about American citizens and federal buildings. According to OpenAI, the messages were crafted with “subtle psychological cues” and designed to move recipients off-platform quickly.

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Coordinated Fake Personas and Platform Manipulation

[Facebook] pages with names like “Taiwan Gossip Net” and “New Generation Rebellion” claimed to be run by Taiwanese volunteers, used Taiwan-based proxy IPs, and wrote in traditional Chinese script to make the operation appear local.

The network encouraged users to submit anonymous grievances about Taiwanese public affairs to foster domestic discord and undermine the ruling party. Meta documented roughly $15,000 in Facebook and Instagram ad spending to support the campaign. The OpenAI report also describes “cyber special operations teams” creating fake accounts on Bluesky impersonating Chinese dissidents in an effort to occupy their identities and pre-empt those activists from building a presence on the platform. Five accounts impersonating a single dissident were all created on the same day.

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Cloaking: Disguising State Media as Independent Journalism

According to the ECFR report, in the Czech Republic, a commercial rock radio station aired a 30-minute program called Colorful World six times a week for four years, totaling more than 1,000 episodes, before analysis revealed that every episode had been produced by China Radio International (CRI), a Chinese state-run broadcaster.

The ECFR report also documents a “laundering” technique in which CRI publishes articles without prominent disclosure of their origin, which are then republished by Czech alternative news outlets as their own work, so that readers encounter the content as apparently domestic journalism with no visible connection to Beijing.

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“Borrowing Mouths”: Paying Local Influencers to Carry CCP Messaging

The ECFR report relays several examples of how social media influencers and ordinary users were offered payments or other monetary incentives — sometimes above market value — to produce content or engage with CRI accounts in order to boost their apparent reach and authenticity ... The ECFR describes the underlying approach as a “bait and switch”: build an audience through seemingly apolitical cultural content, then use that established platform to carry more strategic messaging.

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Two dynamics run through all of these examples: the sheer scale of the operations and a consistent emphasis on obfuscation, making the China-linked origins of content as difficult for ordinary users to perceive as possible.

While the monetary figures cited in the above examples may seem modest on their own, they are only the tip of the iceberg and illustrate a systemic, budgeted investment in making foreign influence look homegrown.

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A LinkedIn message from a professional-looking consulting firm, a travel video from a familiar content creator, a radio program on a commercial station: none of these automatically signal a foreign influence operation to an average user. But knowing that these are documented tactics used by Beijing enhances resilience and provides context on how such content should be consumed. As these operations grow in scale and sophistication, that kind of literacy may be one of the more practical tools available to ordinary users to make sense of what they are reading and seeing.

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Web Archive link

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/8229390

Archived link

Brazil's labour ministry on Tuesday added Chinese electric vehicle (EV) giant BYD (Build Your Dreams) to a registry of employers found to have subjected workers to conditions analogous to slavery, limiting access to state financing and increasing reputational risks in its most important market outside China.

The Ministry of Labour and Employment published the updated Cadastro de Empregadores, commonly known as the "dirty list", adding 169 employers in the latest semi-annual revision.

BYD Auto do Brasil Ltda was included following the conclusion of an administrative process stemming from a December 2024 rescue operation at the company's factory construction site in Camacari, in the northeastern state of Bahia.

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Brazilian workers told auditors that their Chinese counterparts normally worked seven days a week, including public holidays, and that supervisors had given them the days off only because the inspection team was coming.

At one of four dormitories examined, inspectors found 107 passports locked in an administrative cabinet labelled in Mandarin as "security"; some had been held since August 2024, leaving workers without access to their own travel documents on weekends and outside business hours.

Armed private security guards enforced a lockdown, sealing the gates after dinner and forbidding workers from leaving without supervisor authorisation.

Beds lacked mattresses or rested on foam padding roughly three centimetres thick; food was stored on the floor alongside personal belongings, with cockroaches and rats moving through sleeping areas.

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In one facility, 31 workers shared a single bathroom, forcing them to wake at 4am to queue before their 5.30am departure for the site, and the kitchen was deemed unfit for use by inspectors.

On the construction site, there were only eight chemical toilets for the entire workforce, and workers had no sunscreen despite visible skin damage from prolonged sun exposure.

Workers received only a nominal living allowance in Brazil, in some cases less than US$200 a month, disbursed only with supervisor approval, and investigators found that around 60% of their wages were withheld and remitted directly to accounts in China.

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The federal labour prosecutor's office said there were also indications of fraud in the immigration documents presented by the carmaker's contractors, as the Chinese workers had been brought to Brazil on visas issued for specialised technical services when the men were in fact construction labourers.

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Brazilian officials identified a contractor network centred on China JinJiang Construction Brazil Ltda and a second firm, later renamed Tecmonta Equipamentos Inteligentes Brasil, both of which worked exclusively on BYD's Camacari site.

Brazilian labour law holds the contracting company responsible for conditions imposed by its suppliers, a principle that auditors applied directly to BYD.

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cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/42165288

Free beer is great. Securing the keg costs money fosdem 2026  Open source registries are in financial peril, a co-founder of an open source security foundation warned after inspecting their books. And it's not just the bandwidth costs that are killing them.…

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40765647

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/42456387

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/42456384

Unpaywalled (Web archive)

The strange number lighting up Tawanda Majoni’s phone again and again felt like a warning.

Majoni, one of the Zimbabwe’s most respected journalists, soon learned where the calls were coming from: a federal police unit called Law and Order, notorious for abductions, torture and killings.

When unmarked cars rolled through his neighborhood after a relative was pressed for his location, Majoni packed a bag, tossed his cell phone’s SIM card so he couldn’t be tracked and fled the city, haunted by memories of slain colleagues. One was hurled from a moving vehicle in broad daylight. Another was beaten to death.

He knew he couldn’t run forever. After two weeks, he returned and answered one of the calls. An officer told him to come in: We have a case related to you.

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A few days later, Majoni sat in a small, airless room at Law and Order offices, his lawyer ordered to wait outside. For three hours, officers grilled Majoni about his work, at one point sliding a printout across the desk—a tweet about a speech he’d given on World Press Freedom Day. They accused him of “inciting rebellion,” a treasonous offense.

The questioning made no sense until Majoni noticed a file on the desk: his photograph on top, and beneath it, text written in Mandarin Chinese.

He didn’t need to ask. His newsroom, the Information for Development Trust, had recently published exposes on Chinese mining projects that left open waste pits, poisoned rivers and displaced communities. “I know what this is about,” Majoni said.

The lead officer smiled, then pressed on about the tweet. Majoni walked free that day but stopped writing his weekly column. Later, he said, trusted police contacts confirmed what he already suspected: Chinese investors had been behind the interrogation.

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The Chinese government’s repression of journalists at home is well known. Less visible is how that machinery now reaches far beyond its borders—and what that means for the environment.

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An Inside Climate News investigation has identified more than a dozen journalists who have faced retaliation for reporting on environmental destruction and human rights abuses tied to China’s ventures in African countries, likely a stark undercount. Many of those cases involve projects under Beijing’s $1.3 trillion Belt and Road Initiative, a massive investment effort into mines, ports, railways, pipelines and other infrastructure in mostly poor countries.

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When a project carries political weight for both the Chinese government and local authorities, that’s often when repression happens, according to Sarah Cook, author of the UnderReported China newsletter who has studied the country’s media influence operations for more than 15 years.

“If there are muckraking journalists or whistleblowers who might expose environmental issues, it could potentially be in the interest of both the local actors and the Chinese-linked ones to put a stop to that,” Cook said.

That suppression hides or sanitizes environmental and human rights abuses, even as Chinese President Xi Jinping promotes the Belt and Road Initiative as a model of “green” development and positions China as a global climate leader.

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China’s media influence campaign targets a continent crucial to the planet’s climate and ecological balance. Africa is home to the world’s second-largest rainforest, vast carbon-rich peatlands and a quarter of all mammal species, including endangered mountain gorillas, pangolins and chimpanzees. Its degradation threatens not only 1.5 billion Africans, but also Earth itself.

Polluting companies from other nations have been linked to attacks on journalists, too. But China’s role is distinct.

“We’re talking about a nation that is not only highly repressive but also the second-largest economy globally,” said Cook, who worked for years for Freedom House, which defends civil liberties around the globe. “This creates an unprecedented situation.”

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Censorship is only half the story. Journalists across the Global South are regularly flown to China on all-expense-paid trips that function like indoctrination, according to some participants. Chinese officials have also showered underfunded news organizations in other countries with investments and gifts—from computers to cell phones—and later exerted influence to spike stories and promote flattering coverage, journalists and government officials interviewed for this article said.

“The Chinese are very good with disseminating their agenda,” said Leo Mutisya, manager of press freedom and advocacy at the Media Council of Kenya, an independent government institution tasked with protecting media independence.

Mutisya pointed to the reach of Chinese state media in Kenya, their sprawling Nairobi offices and their cozy ties with the Kenya Broadcasting Corp., which gives a regular slot to one Chinese network and a radio frequency to another. (The Kenya Broadcasting Corp. did not respond to requests for comment.) Chinese officials also organize private lunches and parties with Kenyan journalists and editors, Mutisya added, and sponsor the country’s annual journalism awards—handing out Huawei smartphones to winners.

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China has cast its overseas mining and other ventures not as a new form of imperialism but as “win-win” partnerships among nations of the Global South—countries, it says, long oppressed by Western exploitation. The message resonates in places like Zimbabwe, where resentment of Western interference runs deep and memories of colonial horrors remain vivid.

After winning independence from Britain in 1980, freedom fighter Robert Mugabe came to power in Zimbabwe as a symbol of unity and liberation. But by the late 1990s, his rule had hardened into autocracy—marked by election rigging, repression and state violence. Western nations responded with sweeping sanctions, in part over human rights abuses but also over Zimbabwe’s efforts to redress deep land inequities left by racist colonial rule.

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Beijing’s lending to Zimbabwe has come free from Western pressure to improve democracy and human rights—a hallmark of what Beijing calls its “noninterference” policy.

But that principle, said Richardson, who is also co-executive director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, is “nothing more than words on paper.”

“The Chinese government interferes left, right and center,” Richardson said, adding that Beijing spends “massive amounts of time and money and effort on putting forward and protecting a very particular image of what it is.”

Environmental reporters and researchers across Africa described how that influence plays out in the media.

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cross-posted from: https://kbin.melroy.org/m/[email protected]/t/1225798

After: ~1,337 days, 271 releases, 78,000 stars on GitHub, 1,558 contributors, 31,500 members on Discord, 36,000 members on Reddit, 68 languages on Weblate, Surviving the controversial announcement about joining FUTO, Having overwhelming success and support from the community with the product keys model, Launching the Merch store, Attending our first FOSDEM, ...and before the release of GTA VI We are thrilled to announce the stable release of Immich! 🎉

I'm really excited about such a large project adopting semver! I never got the trend for software without a need for rapid release cycles adopting purely time-based version numbers.