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Beijing Interfered in the Canadian 2022 Local Election

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) reported that, last year, China’s Vancouver Consulate interfered in the election of Vancouver’s mayor and the election of its city council .

A CSIS report on January 10, 2022, summarized that Tong Xiaoling, then China’s Consul-General, discussed how to “groom” the Chinese diasporas to get political positions in order to advance Beijing’s interests. In the middle of November 2021, Tong said they needed to try all of their efforts to increase the minority’s vote ratio. She stressed this was necessary because candidates would rely on those votes (to be elected). Tong also expressed that they needed to get a specific person (Tong had her eyes on who to select, but the CSIS report didn’t disclose his name) to enter the Vancouver city council.

It appeared that the CCP had also interfered in the election of Vancouver’s mayor. After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sanctioned Member of Parliament Michael Chong for criticizing Beijing, then Vancouver mayor Kennedy Stewart cancelled his meeting with the CCP diplomats and strengthened ties with Taiwan. Both Tong and the Chinese language media criticized Kennedy. Some Chinese language media called him the “Cold War Mayor.” In the  election for mayor, Kennedy lost to Chinese diaspora candidate Ken Sim by a small margin – 37,000 votes.

Source: Epoch Times, March 16, 2023
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/23/3/16/n13951845.htm

Briefings | | |   @CS Geo-Strategic Trend Government/Politics

Ecuador’s Former President Accused of Accepting the CCP’s Bribes

Lenin Moreno, who was the President of Ecuador until he was succeeded by the incumbent on May 24, 2021,  was sued by prosecutors on March 5 for accepting bribes amounting to US $76 million from China’s state-owned enterprise Sinohydro between 2009 and 2018. The government of Ecuador contracted Sinohydro to build the Coca Codo Sinclair Dam under China’s “Belt & Road Initiative.” Construction started in 2010 and the dam was put in use in 2016. However, by 2018, 7,648 large and small cracks had been identified on the dam’s wall.

Source: Aboluo, March 8, 2023
https://www.aboluowang.com/2023/0308/1875096.html

Briefings | | |   Economy/Resources Geo-Strategic Trend

Renting a “Girlfriend”

China’s one-child policy has now generated a new industry – “The girlfriend” rental business. Chinese tradition is that a son (but not a daughter) will carry on the family heritage. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forced people to have only one child, some families chose to abort the pregnancy if the baby was a girl. China’s seventh census in 2020 showed that the male to female ratio in China was 105 to 100 and there were 35.9 million more males than females.

As a result, many young men cannot find girlfriends. Of course, there are reasons such as work pressure and so on other than the population parity. A new business started that when a young man goes home for Chinse New Year or other occasion, he hires a woman to go together with him and act as his girlfriend to quiet down his parents’ pressure on him to find a girlfriend.

An article reported that in the year 2022, a woman lending herself out as a “girlfriend” charged 1,000 yuan per day for her services (the price could go to 2,500 yuan per day during holidays) and she made 40,000 yuan (US$ 6,000) from this business.

Source: Guancha, March 17, 2023
https://www.guancha.cn/politics/2023_03_17_684476.shtml

Hot Topics | | |   Economy/Resources

Chinese Peasant Retirees Receive $324 a year as Pension

A posting about a Chinese peasant’s income has been spreading widely over the Internet. The author said that her mother-in-law, a migrant worker (a peasant who came to the city to work) in Chengdu City, Chongqing Province, where she has been since 2005, receives a pension of107 yuan (US$16) each month. However, only one single grocery shopping trip (she avoided the expensive items) had cost her 110 yuan. She was not the worst though. The author’s mother, a peasant in Henan Province, received only 240 yuan (US$35) pension – in the whole year.

With such a small amount of money, medical treatment is nothing but a remote concept. After a villager was diagnosed with cancer at a county’s hospital, he ended his life by drinking pesticides. He didn’t bother with a re-check at a provincial level hospital (which has better medical resources and whose diagnosis could be more reliable), because the travel expense (to the city) was too high.

In another report, the Yicai Media Group reported that the average pension for peasants in China is 188 yuan ($27) per month, which is only 5.26 percent of the pension for urban employee retirees (3,577 yuan per month). The communist regime in China has long treated peasants as second class citizens and provided them with inferior services as compared with the city dwellers.

Though China defined the male retirement age as 60 and female as 50 or 55 depending on their work type, 510 million, or one-third of the young elderly (people of Age 60-69) are still working. Based on the statistics of the young elderly, they accounted for 6.8 percent of the worker population in China in the “China’s Census – 2020” report. Among them, 62.44 percent are working in the agricultural fields.

Source:
1. Secret China, March 17, 2023
https://www.secretchina.com/news/gb/2023/03/17/1031202.html
2. Sina, March 17, 2023
https://finance.sina.cn/chanjing/gdxw/2023-03-17/detail-imymayim4479732.d.html?oid=3819239134138970&vt=4&cid=79649&node_id=79649

Briefings | | |   Economy/Resources

Travel Data and Other Sources May Indicate Beijing’s Claim of1.4 Billion Population Is a Fake Number

The Chinese New Year period is the peak travel time for Chinese people. During this period, people working in different cities (including migrant workers) return to their hometown and then afterwards come back to the cities where they work. Also many people travel for tourism.

According to China’s Ministry of Transportation, in the 40-day Chinese New Year period (15 days before the New Year and 25 days after), there were 4.7 billion person-times (if a person rode the train 3 times, it would be counted as 3 person-times) travelling in China in 2023. That number was .57 billion in 2019 (the last year before COVID spread). Travel went down by 924 million person-times.

This could indicate a huge population loss (t could be in the hundreds of millions) in China due to COVID, but the Chinese Communist Party just hid the information.

There are other sources indirectly supporting the suspicion. In June 2022, hacker “ChinaDan” obtained data from the Shanghai Public Security Bureau’s database of individual information. The database had information (name, birth date, address, picture, phone number, etc.) of only 970 million people.

In 2021, overseas media reported that internal data from the Ministry of Public Security showed that China had only 780 million ID cards at that time (an ID card is mandatory for every Chinese citizen who is over 16 years of age). According to China’s Seventh Census in 2020, 81 percent of the people in China were 16 or above. Assuming all the 780 million ID cards are for these people, then the total population would be 960 million.

Source: Epoch Times, March 11, 2023
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/23/3/10/n13947106.htmoii

Briefings | | |   @CS Economy/Resources

The CCP’s New Control over the State Council and the People’s Congress

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) published a “(Communist) Party and State Organization Reform Plan (党和国家机构改革方案)” on March 16. The Epoch Times commented that the essence of the Reform Plan is to “strengthen the party central committee’s centralized and unified leadership,’” to further consolidate power under the CCP and to use the CCP’s organs to oversee and manage the state functions.

Item one of the plan is to establish the CCP’s Central Finance Committee (中央金融委员会) to “study and review major policies and issues in the financial field.” The CCP will dissolve the State Council’s Financial Stability and Development Committee (国务院金融稳定发展委员会) and move its responsibilities and place them under the office of the new party committee. Item two of the plan is to create the CCP’s Central Finance Working Committee (中央金融工作委员会) so as to “unify the party’s work in the financial field.” These two items set the structure for the CCP to define financial policies and manage work directly. The State Council will establish the Bureau of Financial Supervision and Administration (国家金融监督管理总局) as an execution vehicle.

Item three is to establish the CCP’s Central Technology Committee (中央科技委员会), to let the party “provide centralized, unified leadership” over the technology field, including resolving major strategic, directional, and overall issues, defining national strategic technological tasks and significant research projects, managing national labs, and coordinating military-civilian technology fusions.

Item four is to establish the CCP’s Central Social Work Department (中央社会工作部), to oversee the party’s development work throughout the whole country and in every economic structure (in the public and private sectors) and every industry. It also “provides guidance on working on people’s complaints (信访工作).”

Item five is to establish the Office of the (CCP’s) Central Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Work (中央港澳工作办公室), which also uses the name of the State Council’s Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office, but that state council office is no longer a separate office by itself.

Item six is to establish the National People’s Congress Representatives Work Committee (全国人大常委会代表工作委员会), which is responsible for allocating representative quotas and reviewing qualifications, directing and coordinating representative’s research work, managing representative’s proposals, and other related functions. Thus, the party is directly managing the congress representatives.

Source: Epoch Times, March 17, 2023
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/23/3/17/n13951999.htm

Briefings | | |   @CS Government/Politics

China’s Countermeasure to Starlink

Seeing the SpaceX’s Starlink power in the Ukraine war, the Chinese military has been thinking about how to counter it. Recently, in the February edition of the Command, Control and Simulation Journal, a researcher at China’s Space Engineering University published a thesis, “The Impact of Starlink’s Cconstellation on Space Situational Awareness and Countermeasures.”

The article said that Starlink’s near 42,000 low-orbit satellites can realize high-speed network communication and a high military potential, as well as present a huge threat to China’s space development.

The China Satellite Network Group Co. Ltd. has a “Giant Constellations” plan called Guo Wang (GW), Chinese words “国网,” (meaning National Web), to deploy 13,000 low-orbit Internet satellites, to compete with and occupy orbital tracks and radio frequencies. That company was established by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) on April 28, 2021, with 10 billion yuan in registered capital.

The thesis also said that it can deploy “lethal” weapons on its satellites, such as lasers and high-powered microwaves weapons, to attack the Starlink satellites. “If necessary, (China) can paralyze the Starlink with specialized electronic warfare and sophisticated electromagnetic jamming techniques.”

SpaceX owner, Elon Musk, mentioned on October 7, 2022, that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) expressed that they did not want him to use Starlink to help the Ukrainian army and asked him to guarantee not to sell the Starlink service in China. He also said in 2015 that the CCP threatened that they would blow out his satellites if he provided the Chinese people with network service which would bypass the CCP’s censorship.

Sources:
1. Liberty Times, February 25, 2023
https://news.ltn.com.tw/news/world/breakingnews/4222704
2. Epoch Times, March 3, 2023
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/23/3/3/n13942178.htm

Briefings | | |   Defense/Military

Chinese City Announced Stoppage of Public Transit Operations

An Internet picture showed a notice from the Public Transit Company at Mohe City, Heilongjiang Province, announcing it would stop its public transit operations due to heavy financial losses. The notice said that it had not been able to make payments on its bus purchase loans, employee salaries, and electric fees on charging poles. Usually public transit companies rely on government funding to subsidize their low fare. The financial problem showed the local government had a severe shortage of money.

After the announcement, the city government contacted the company and settled the issue. The public transit operation did not stop.

Source: Guancha, February 13, 2023
https://www.guancha.cn/economy/2023_02_13_679622.shtml

Briefings | | |   Economy/Resources Government/Politics