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Briefings - 146. page

Xi Jinping Criticizes Chinese Universities for Faking Employment Data

China has a record 10.76 million fresh college graduates this year, but the economy is under huge downward pressure due to Beijing’s draconian COVID-19 epidemic control. According to the government statistics, the national urban unemployment rate reached 6.1 percent in April, indicating there is tremendous unemployment pressure. Xi Jinping recently visited a college in Sichuan Province and expressed concern over employment issues.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported that Xi said that the employment data should reflect the real situation. “Some schools, while in pursuit of a high employment rate, falsify the data by coercing the graduates to sign an employment contract regardless of their will.” Xi

stressed, “We cannot fool the higher authorities, let alone the students.”

Source: Central News Agency (Taiwan), June 14, 2022
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/acn/202206140124.aspx

Briefings | | |   Economy/Resources

First Russia-China Transnational Highway Bridge Opens to Traffic

On June 10, Russia and China announced the official opening of the Heilongjiang River Bridge, the first transnational highway bridge between the two countries. While confronting the West over the invasion of Ukraine, Russia is turning to Asia for support.

The bridge, more than one kilometer long, connects Blagoveshchensk, the capital of Russia’s far eastern Amur region, with the city of Heihe in northern China’s Heilongjiang province. Although it was started in 2016 and completed in 2019, the opening ceremony was delayed due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

According to official figures, the bridge, which cost 19 billion rubles (about US$328 million), is a two-lane road. According to Chinese media, the bridge is currently limited to cargo traffic only.

Source: Central News Agency, June 10, 2022
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/acn/202206100334.aspx

Briefings | | |   Geo-Strategic Trend

UDN: Australia Plans to Re-examine the Port of Darwin Lease to China

United Daily News (UDN), one of the primary Taiwanese news groups, recently reported that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese publicly stated that the Australian government will review its 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin to Chinese companies. According to information on Albanese’s personal website, as early as 2018 when he was Labor Party’s infrastructure spokesman, he had already publicly opposed allowing the Chinese-owned Landbridge Group Australia to obtain the 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin. Subsequently, Albanese has repeatedly objected, saying that the Port of Darwin should not fall into the hands of any foreign enterprises.

Albanese said he had promised before the May election that when Labor came to power, he would push for a review of Landbridge’s lease. Albanese said Labor had backed the then Scott Morrison administration in the past when it was the opposition party to push for legislation so the federal government could block agreements between local governments and foreign entities. The Port of Darwin is the northernmost deep-water port in Australia and the closest to Asia. It is considered to be an important strategic stronghold for Australia. The Landbridge Group’s lease of the Port continues to be the focus of Australia’s national security controversy. However, in March this year, the Australian government announced that it would spend A$1.5 billion (about US$1.1 billion) to build a new port facility in Darwin. The New Port Plan is based on national security considerations, so that the Australian and US troops can avoid using the Darwin port facilities that Chinese companies operate.

Source: UDN, June 8, 2022
https://udn.com/news/story/6809/6374152?from=udn-catebreaknews_ch2

Briefings | | |   Geo-Strategic Trend

Nike Announced Ending Its Running App Services in China

Shanghai-based Chinese financial news site East Money recently reported that the Nike Running Club (“NRC”), a running app owned by Nike, issued a notice to users of service suspension. The announcement stated that, due to business plan adjustments, the NRC APP will discontinue its services in China starting July 8, 2022. NRC will provide data export services for runners in need. Garmin’s sports equipment will stop synchronizing data with the NRC APP, effective immediately. Since the APP was launched, more than eight million registered users in China have run more than 100 million kilometers together. The Paper advised that, in late May, some runners also reported that the NRC APP displayed a notice on the relevant page that the service would be suspended, informing that the operation in the area where the runners were located would be stopped on June 30. Some Chinese netizens lamented that many foreign brands have withdrawn from China recently, such as Amazon Kindle and Airbnb.

Source: East Money, June 8, 2022
http://finance.eastmoney.com/a/202206082405491532.html

Briefings | | |   Information/Technology US-China Relations

Oriental Daily: Amazon Halted Kindle Business in China

Popular Hong Kong newspaper Oriental Daily recently reported that global E-commerce leader Amazon said it will stop supplying Kindle e-book readers to Chinese retailers and, next year, it will close its Kindle e-book store in China. Amazon announced this decision on its official WeChat account and said the company was adjusting the strategic focus of its business and that other business lines in China would continue to operate. Amazon will cease operating its Kindle e-book China store on June 30, 2023. Customers will not be able to buy new e-books. For e-books already purchased, customers can download until June 30, 2024, and continue reading thereafter. The Kindle app in the Chinese app store will also be removed in 2024. Amazon China’s business includes cross-border e-commerce businesses that include Amazon overseas purchases, Amazon’s global store, Amazon advertising, Amazon global logistics, Amazon cloud technology, Amazon smart hardware and services, and other Amazon products. A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Commerce said earlier that he noticed that Amazon had just announced the closure of its e-book business in China. As the second largest consumer market in the world, China is rapidly developing and emphasizing its products and services. For various market entities, including foreign companies, it is a normal phenomenon in the market economy to adjust products and services accordingly.

Source: Oriental Daily, June 2, 2022
https://orientaldaily.org/news/international/2022/06/02/490430

Briefings | | |   Information/Technology US-China Relations

U.S. Asked Beijing to Stop Putting Fake Statements into U.S. Officials’ Mouths

On June 5, a WeChat account Buyidao (补壹刀) published an article saying that it obtained exclusive information that U.S. officials from the Consulate in Guangzhou, China stating that the U.S. is using the Xinjiang issue to attack China.

The article claimed the information was provided by Mr. R, a supplier of a world-class sports brand, who attended a reception at the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou in 2021. At the reception, Mr. R heard Sheila Carey and Andrew Chira, two U.S. officials from the  Guangzhou Consulate, saying the U.S. was “using the Xinjiang issue to hype up the so-called issues of forced labor, genocide, and human-rights abuses” as part of a “tug of war” with China. The ultimate goal of the “tug of war” was to “completely sink the Chinese government into a quagmire.”

Many of China’s official media, including the Communist Youth League and local governments, reposted the message. Li Yang, Counsellor from the Department of Information, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Chen Xiaodong, Chinese Ambassador to South Africa, and Hua Chunying, spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, also retweeted the message.

On June 7, the U.S. Embassy countered the false claim. It posted the following on Twitter in both English and Chinese, “We call upon the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to stop attributing false statements to U.S. officials or taking other actions that might subject our diplomats to harassment.” “Such action potentially endangers the U.S. officials being named and is inconsistent with the PRC’s obligation to treat United States diplomats with due respect and take all appropriate steps to prevent any attack on their freedom or dignity.”

Sources:
1. Deutsche Welle, June 8, 2022
https://www.dw.com/zh/补壹刀称美外交官承认故意炒作新疆人权-美方反击/a-62066134
2. Twitter

Briefings | | |   US-China Relations

China Upgrades Ream Naval Base in Cambodia to Expand Its Influence

On June 8 in Cambodia, a ceremony marked the start of the new China-funded construction at Ream Naval Base. The senior Cambodian military and defense officials as well as China’s ambassador to Cambodia attended the ceremony.

According to Gen. Chau Phirun, director-general of the Cambodian Defense Ministry’s material and technical-services department, over the next two years, Chinese firms and technical experts from China’s military will build or renovate a number of structures including a maintenance workshop, a slipway and dry dock for repairing vessels, a warehouse, two new piers, and electrical, water and sewage infrastructures,

Cambodian Defense Minister Gen. Tea Banh said in a speech that the funding for the upgrades will be  from a Chinese grant. He denied that the Chinese forces will use the facility as a naval base.

The Wall Street Journal revealed in 2019 that Beijing had signed a clandestine agreement allowing its armed forces to have exclusive use of a part of Ream Naval Base, which is located on Cambodia’s southern coast facing the Gulf of Thailand.

China is helping Cambodia expand and upgrade Ream naval base in the Southeast Asian country, heightening concerns U.S. officials have expressed for years that Beijing plans to establish a naval outpost there. Experts say Chinese forces would be able to use the Cambodian facility to further assert Beijing’s expansive territorial and maritime claims in the South China Sea.

China’s ambassador to Cambodia, Wang Wentian, said at the ceremony, “The Chinese military shall, as always and within its means, provide assistance to the Cambodian military.” Anyone who claims that China is using the facility to expand its influence is “using the yardsticks of knaves to judge a gentleman’s intentions.”

Sources:
1. WSJ, June 8, 2022.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-to-upgrade-ream-naval-base-in-cambodia-fueling-u-s-concerns-11654674382

2. Epoch times, June9, 2022.                                                                                                                                         https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/6/8/n13755167.htm

Briefings | | |   Geo-Strategic Trend

Communist China’s Propaganda Messages Lead the Search Engines’ Results

Brookings Institution and the Alliance for Securing Democracy reported in May that many of Beijing’s propaganda messages have shown up often at the top of search engine results. A report can be found: https://www.brookings.edu/research/winning-the-web-how-beijing-exploits-search-results-to-shape-views-of-xinjiang-and-covid-19/

The researchers collected search results on two topics that are critical to Beijing’s agenda: Xinjiang and the COVID-19 pandemic. They were collected from five different search engines, Google Search, Google News, Microsoft’s Bing Search, Bing News, and YouTube. The data was collected daily from Nov. 1, 2021, until Feb. 28, 2022.

Chinese state media sends a consistent stream of narratives to the web. They are free of charge and easily available to search. Beijing-backed narratives also take advantage of the algorithms in most search engines that prioritize “freshness.” These contents are also amplified by a huge number of Chinese state actors on social media. For example, they use hashtags like #covid19 and #Xinjiang.

As a result, Chinese state media content frequently appeared in top search results. If one searches for the keywords “Xinjiang,” “terrorism,” or “Xinjiang debunked” on the above platforms, Chinese state media contents appear every day on the first-page of the search results, with the exception of YouTube search, where two days out of the 120 days, it appeared on the second page of the search results.

For neutral terms, such as “kashgar,” “Urumqi,” or “Xinjiang,” ( Kashgar and Urumqi are cities in Xinjiang) Chinese state media content still appeared almost every day on news searches and YouTube searches..

The communist regime also uses influential Westerners  who have lived in China and claim themselves to be “China experts,” to defend Beijing and criticize “Western injustices and biases.”

The report also found a surprisingly large number of seemingly independent news outlets that routinely reposted CCP media reports. The top ten sources that often repost Beijing’s contents are Finland’s helsinkitimes.fi, the UAE’s bignewsnetwork.com, the USA’s msn.com, Pakistan’s dailytimes.com.pk and bolnews.com, Chad’s alwihdainfo.com, India’s indianexpress.com, Ukraine’s ukranews.com, Bangladesh’s tbsnews.net, and Zambia’s iol.co.za.

The report said that, in the early months of 2022, search engines enacted measures to limit the reach of the Russian state media. However, little has been done regarding the Chinese state media.

Source: Epoch Times, May 31, 2022
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/beijing-remarkably-effective-at-exploiting-search-engine-results-report_4501074.html

Briefings | | |   Government/Politics Information/Technology