For at least ten years, the Chinese Communist Party has been abducting its overseas citizens on EU territory and forcibly returning them to China - violating the rule of law and public security in Europe - a new report finds.
Full report: https://safeguarddefenders.com/sites/default/files/pdf/Chasing%20Fox%20Hunt.pdf
Archived version: https://archive.ph/lEYCn
EDIT: The discussion shifted to off-topic and insults. Post locked.
Report by "Safeguard Defenders" formerly "China Action"... website here if you want to see a bunch of "HOLY SHIT CHINA BAD" stuff....
Human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders first revealed in 2022 that China operates more than 120 illegal police offices in 53 countries around the world, including around 50 in the EU.
Wasn't this deemed super false? Those "police offices" were just outreach centers for Chinese nationals needing help filling out paperwork or being tracked down to remind them to fill out paperwork?
China in just one year as part of a special campaign in which the threat of collective punishment was also used as a means of persuasion.
Nowhere in the article does it source any of these claims. Doesn't even link to the "report"
...Chinese indiciduals who...
heheh... misspelled "individuals"...
Just around Christmas last year, China’s global hunt for “fugitives” hit a new milestone. Since its launch in 2014 as part of Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, 10,000 are claimed to have been successfully returned from over 120 countries around the globe under Sky Net (and junior partner Fox Hunt) operations....
Its not JUST Chinese citizens, its people that that the Chinese government is claiming have broken the law and fled the country.
Also... the EuroNews article says the report is 169 pages long, the .pdf from Safeguard Defenders is only 69 pages long.
I mean... sure, if you want to make an argument about how the Chinese government may or may not be following extradition treaties/laws to have people accused of criminal activity brought back to the country to stand trial, you can make that argument. Framing it as "Chinese government kidnaps citizens traveling abroad!!!!" is wildly inaccurate.
Isn't most of this Chinese embassies reaching out to fugitives and taking them into going back home to have things sorted out?
Do we know anything about what kind of crimes they're on the run because of or what consequences they gave when they go home? I wouldn't be surprised if most of it is really banale stuff.
You are linking the wrong report.
The article mentions the new report, found here.
Pg. 18:
Ye is the former mayor of Chuanliao Town Government in Qingtian County, Zhejiang. Accused of bribery, he fled to Milan, Italy, in July 2001.
In December 2014, the Zhejiang Public Security Department and the Protectorate sent a joint working group to Italy and Spain to carry out persuade to return operations of fugitives from the Lishui and Wenzhou areas.
After being persuaded face-to-face by the working group, Ye flew back to China with the working group to surrender himself on December 23, 2014.
Nothing alleged here is remotely objectionable.
That's the quote from the linked article in footnote 19, not allegation, read below.
...what?
I'm referencing the actual report you just linked to. I quoted a section of the report that provides an example of the conduct it criticizes. It's nothing; the report is bullshit.
You quoted the section of the report that quotes the linked articles. Apart from the transcript font used, it also links to the footnote.
*removed externally hosted image*
And? A footnote does not change the fact that the report is bullshit.
I quoted a section of the report that provides an example of the conduct it criticizes.
You didn't. You quoted the official statement of the Chinese government, which was quoted in the report. It was not an example provided by the report authors. Their examples and argument is below the quoted section. I'm not sure if you are just misunderstanding or pretending to misunderstand. But in any case, you are welcome to your opinion that the report is "bullshit". But that is not a good argument if you want to bring someone to your way of thinking. You need more objective details for that.
You quoted the official statement of the Chinese government, which was quoted in the report.
Ah, I see. What page of the report gives the authors' version of what actually happened in those cases, or gives an example of something that could be described as kidnapping?
As of 2022, there were approximately 1.2 million victims of US government abduction being held on US soil. Just to put things into perspective.
This is not a good comparison and isn't necessary to show this report is bullshit. It isn't even internally coherent:
"Indeed, the official methodology involves kidnapping," Harth said. "Citizens are persuaded to return..."
They're talking about China telling its citizens to return, which is nothing like kidnapping, but they're calling it that anyway to gin up outrage. Between that and the telltale "Chinese Communist Party" mislabeling, they're obviously not interested in doing any sort of objective analysis.
I did not even click the link because it's obvious on its face that it's bullshit anti-china propaganda in like 7 different ways. My comment is essentially a steel-man argument: Even if I assume that the liberal bullshit propaganda is 100% true, the US is still far worse in every way.
Ah, makes sense. I'd look more at the U.S. drone assassination program and its (actual) kidnapping and torture operations. That's the best comparison to what this report alleges.
Well, I don't appreciate the implication that the time I was in the wrong place at the wrong time so I got forced into the back of a stranger's car at gunpoint and driven 30 minutes to the stranger's HQ where I was then locked in a room and interrogated doesn't count as "abduction" or "kidnapping"
I mean, that wasn't an abuction or kidnapping. There are countless actions that are legal when the government does them but criminal if done by a private citizen. In many cases there's probable cause to make an arrest, but the person is later cleared, which sounds like it happened to you. That doesn't make the arrest illegal, much less kidnapping.
This isn't a technical point, either. Mischaracterizing lawful government conduct as criminal is exactly what this report is attempting to do, and we shouldn't do it ourselves.
I mean, that wasn't an abuction or kidnapping.
It was exactly both of those things, and I don't understand why you are the second person to reply to me under the mistaken impression that abduction and kidnapping are only possible when they are done illegally. Where are you getting this nonsense from?
Where are you getting this nonsense from?
The law. Yes, abduction and kidnapping are only possible when they are done illegally. Illegality is a crucial part of what those terms mean.
You're essentially making the libertarian "tax is theft" argument: it would be criminal if I did it to you, so it must be criminal when the government does it to you.
Illegality is a crucial part of what those terms mean.
No dude, it isn't. At all. You literally have it backwards. The law uses these terms because they are English terms with meanings. The law doesn't give them their meanings.
Non-legal definitions of those terms also imply illegality. There is no legal way to kidnap someone.
There is no legal way to kidnap someone.
There are a wide variety of legal ways to kidnap someone. Such as the one I described which happened to me.
How is this logic different from the article's? You're both calling a legal arrest you don't like "kidnapping."
See also: a libertarian saying "of course you can legally steal, it's called taxes!"
Why are you bootlicking? The US government doesn't define common English words and their usage, and it's very weird that you seem to think that the fact that they have control over the land means that they are incapable of committing violence against people. What the government goons I am describing did to me were acts of state-sanctioned violence in which I was taken under threat of physical harm to a location I did not want to go to and held against my will despite having done absolutely nothing to deserve violence being inflicted upon me. People with fucking souls call that abduction/kidnapping, where is your soul?
Why are you bootlicking?
Jesus Christ. Having a consistent definition of "kidnapping" is not bootlicking.
Consistency is when you can't call an act of violence what it is if it's cops committing the act of violence
Are you an anarchist? I'm not. Like every AES state, I think it's possible to have justifiable government actions. Governments have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, so yeah, a cop making a legal arrest is not the same as me hitting a stranger over the head and stuffing them in a van.
It's not hitting a stranger over the head and stuffing them in a van. It's "an arrest." You can't call it hitting a stranger over the head and stuffing them in a van, because of who's doing it.
This isn't a theory discussion, it's a fucking linguistics discussion. You're insisting that the word "abduction" refers only to a legal term, which it does not. Obviously it does not. Idk what more to say.
Yes, the CCP is notorious for being super friendly when persuading people. They would never ever threaten a person's entire family to get people to step in line.
Grabbing a person off the streets and throwing them into a van isn't the only method of kidnapping.
Pg. 18 of the full report, linked in the post:
Ye is the former mayor of Chuanliao Town Government in Qingtian County, Zhejiang. Accused of bribery, he fled to Milan, Italy, in July 2001.
In December 2014, the Zhejiang Public Security Department and the Protectorate sent a joint working group to Italy and Spain to carry out persuade to return operations of fugitives from the Lishui and Wenzhou areas.
After being persuaded face-to-face by the working group, Ye flew back to China with the working group to surrender himself on December 23, 2014.
Not only is there no evidence of what you're suggesting, but this anti-China group's own report paints a pretty mundane picture.
Their strategy is to create an unfalsifiable position:
- Print a bunch of "China Bad" bullshit, like this report.
- People skim the headlines and think "China Bad."
- Other people read the report and point out how the facts presented don't show anything objectionable.
- The first group thinks "but we all know China Bad, so I'll just read that into the facts, no matter how tame they are."
See this is the kind of sarcasm that only works if you're in a space that has also uncritically accepted at face value the output of the world's biggest disinformation machine.
Also it's CPC, not CCP. Dead giveaway as to where you get your scholarly reading.
We love imprisoning people, blowing them up extra judicially, and deporting our veterans so we don't have to support them, and sometimes we even blow them up extrajudicially after we deport them!
Source? From my experience, US goes in the opposite direction. They keep inventing new reasons to kick people out. Their Title 42 is a perfect example of how they circumvent their Title 8 protections.
Source?
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/prisoners-2022-statistical-tables
Well, you and I use a different definition of abduction. While I'll give you that some of those people are probably imprisoned wrongly, the majority are there because of their own actions. I wouldn't fault China imprisoning someone for breaking their laws (even if I disagree with the law), I also don't fault US for imprisoning people for breaking their laws. Treatment of those prisoners is a different question altogether.
Your definition of abduction apparently includes persuading people to go somewhere, so I think there are many lacks in terms of definitions here.
Asking under a threat of harm is no longer called persuasion, it's a crime.
The link 404s for me, so I can't really look at the details, but more information would be required to establish it as actually being criminal. Saying, and I'm just producing an arbitrary example, "Come here to attend a court case or you will be tried in abstentia (and therefore probably found guilty), which will result in fines that, if ignored, will be satisfied by asset forfeiture in the form of us seizing your shit" is consistent with your description of "asking under threat of harm" while also being an extremely normal thing for a country to do and not a crime.
There is an archived version, and I attached the full report to the post.
The article is worthless, turns out, and looking at the report, it doesn't really help because so many of its critical claims (i.e. actual, specific instances of collective punishment that weren't countered by Chinese courts) just have citations to other reports by the same group. I'm just here to procrastinate on school work rather than read through a collective 500 pages of histrionics (seriously, the stylization of this whole thing is laughable).
Now compare that to imprisonment. One is legal action, another is illegal action. One can argue about the morality of that, but the distinction is clear.
The difference between imprisonment and abduction is not, in fact, legality. I have no idea how you could come to the conclusion that legality has anything to do with the definitions of those words. Average liberal word salad.
Probably a false equivalence to the prisoner population, as if China doesn't have any prisons and it wasn't an entirely different issue
The US drone strikes it's own citizens on foreign soil so yet again China is doing a bad thing that's not nearly as bad as what the US is doing and everyone just ignores what the US is doing and shouts BUT CHYNA! Racist hacks
I will be the first one to accuse US of being a hypocrite criminal state, but this whole mentality of excusing China's abhorrent behavior because someone else is worse is just as bad as ignoring US crimes.
Abducting someone is only "abhorrent" without the context. It's only bad if you assume they don't have a good reason for it. And you can only assume they don't have a good reason for it if you buy into the propaganda that the Chinese government is some entity made of pure evil.
Maybe these folks were past their visa, or were being extradited for some crime. Who knows. There are lots of super valid reasons for an embassy to "abduct" someone. World governments do that kind of shit all of the time for totally normal reasons. And yet where's the article about "German Embassy KIDNAPS man who was staying in the US on an expired visa." They don't exist because people naturally assume that white governments have a good reason for doing something and non white governments don't. It just racism plain and simple.
Sure maybe the Chinese government is just going around risking international incidents because some random dude is doing thought crime. Or maybe they're just getting them out of the country because they're not supposed to be there anymore. One of those is significantly more likely than the other.
Indeed, plenty of other countries extradite people, with the permissions of the other government. The difference here is China not only didn't have the permission, but they didn't even ask for it. So you can call it propaganda, while reasonable people will call it kidnapping under the existing law.
I looked for the article related to "German Embassy KIDNAPS man who was staying in the US on an expired visa" and couldn't find it. Could you provide the link for it?
That's my point, said article doesn't exist, because mundane shit like "embassy does its job" is only "news" when "non white bad people country does things." It's only news when it feeds the racist propaganda machine.
So why does other non-racist countries doesn't cover it if it's happening. Countries that oppose US on stuff like their double standards, war crimes and other hypocrisies release plenty of articles on those topics. But by your own statement, there are 0 articles about this.
I'm not one of those people that will say US good, China bad without looking at the context and judging it on its own merit, but you are not helping your case here. I need some objective details of what you are claiming to be true.
They probably are. They probably aren't covering them in English though, it's not for English speaking audiences. China, as an example, has very publicly chastised the US for its countless human rights violations over the years. Many non-Western countries have.
You're talking about my case here, but your case basically boils down to "I don't see countries reporting on Western crimes in English, so it must not be happening" which...is certainly an argument you could make. Western countries have a horrible track record of reporting on their own crimes, and non Western countries probably aren't writing lots of English articles for English speaking audiences because that isn't who their readership is. I guess if you're fluent in some other languages and spend a lot of time reading non Western media in non-English languages then you'd have a stronger argument here. I kinda doubt that though. And I bet if I did start pulling out less Western media sources that do report in English like Al Jazeera or RT I would be immediately called out for parroting anti-Western propaganda. It's a real catch 22.
My argument is "Western governments fund propaganda efforts against their perceived competition, so stop parroting it as if it's objective fact." They don't even hide that they're doing it, it's not like this is some nutter conspiracy theory. There is plenty to be critical of China for, but "Chinese Embassy Doing Embassy Things" isn't one of them and only serves to fuel anti Asian racism and propaganda.
China should make a Radio Free Garden or something to broadcast real news into the west.
Like I said, US is a perfect example of hypocrisy, but their hypocrisy doesn't automatically absolve China of its own actions. I don't justify US, it's you who are trying to justify China's actions.
I welcome any non-English source. Though if it's never posted in English, it kind of defeats the purpose of exposing English-speaking countries bad behavior.
I don't care about the source, I care about the content. There are plenty of bad articles by reputable sources, and there are plenty of good articles by garbage sources.
And all countries release propaganda. Literally all of them, it's their job. The core issue here is that Western propaganda is mostly influenced by corporations, since governments doesn't directly control the media. While in Asia, the government mostly owns the media. That doesn't automatically make it everything they release bad, but when they disallow negative coverage, it creates a negative impression. And there are plenty of independent media organizations that report on their own countries crimes in the west. Their influence stops at corporate media. While in contrast, there are no independent media organizations that report on Asia's crimes.
Embassy's authority only extends to their embassy grounds. The moment, they step outside, they are subject to the countries laws, where forcibly moving a person against their will is illegal. If there is a legal justification for it, it has to go through those countries legal system.
"The absence of evidence is all the evidence I need!" /s
Your reading comprehension remains sorely lacking. The whole point is that it's not newsworthy, but you can still collect information on it happening by looking up extradition statistics or w/e
Wow 4 hexbear upvotes and one from .ml, you guys are so busy with apologising for Chinese and Russian authoritarianism lately, I don't know how you get anything else done. It's not racist to point out that shit like this isn't ok. You can pretend it's not happening all you like, nobody is fooled.
China's abhorrent behavior
What is abhorrent here? The article you linked to has the report's author saying that telling a citizen to return = kidnapping. It's trumped-up bullshit.
If I first threaten your family member if you don't do exactly as I say, it is not a simple request to return home. There is a legal process for that called extradition.
What you're describing is not kidnapping. The article implies China is threatening family members, but it provides no examples, and I have no reason to trust people who deliberately mischaracterize the facts.
If China, for example, was arresting family members of people for no other reason besides being related to a citizen China wants to return home, the authors would probably have just said that.
The report provides more details, I attached the link to the full report in the post.
Whataboutism is a completely nonsensical concept when comparing countries. The foundation of international law is comparing how different countries handle similar situations.
Does this in your mind make both things okay somehow? Is this a magical word?
Your comment in "China abducted its own citizens on EU territory, report finds" posted in !globalnews@lemmy.zip was removed.
Reason: Rule 3 - Respectful Communication.Please read the community rules.
Oh shit, well I guess in that case killing your own people with sky robots and no trial is okay then.
They have it backwards, Winnie the Pooh is illegal outside of China, that's why Xi abducted him and forces him to work at Disney Shanghai.
What list? The state sponsors religious celebrations, but surely you think they are Potemkin festivals. This sort of cold war bullshit is beneath any decent person.
Why is there so much poverty in Malaysia?
A friend of my girlfriend's family in Malaysia had a literal slave whose passport they confiscated. I remember being there last year and being utterly appalled. This house slave ran away a few months back.
Honestly, Xi would sort your mess of a country out, and no mistake.
Your comment in "China abducted its own citizens on EU territory, report finds" posted in !globalnews@lemmy.zip was removed.
Reason: Rule 3 - Respectful Communication.Please read the community rules.
Disparaging the government is not discrimination against the people
Making "Winnie the pooh" and "Xinnie the pooh" comments over and over isn't criticism at all. It's just shit slinging.
Your "China abducted its own citizens on EU territory, report finds" post in !globalnews@lemmy.zip was removed.
Reason: Rule 3 - Respectful Communication.Please read the community rules.
The joke is that I don't actually apologize, fuck racists, and a very polite "your actions are cowardly" to the mod that removed my comment
Care to explain how calling a person of Asian ancestry Pooh Bear isn't incredibly racist?
Take a look at my nick. Yes, that's a Chinese name. Are we doing the Jewish antisemitism thing?
As an Asian: I have never once met a single other Asian who thinks the pooh meme is racist. Even the Chinese pro-CCP crowd understands it's targeting Xinnie specifically. I've only ever heard the 'racist' take from white folks defending Xinnie. Thanks for your concern guys, but there's really no need
As an Asian: I have never once met a single other Asian who thinks the pooh meme is racist.
Extremely interesting that the people who say this always start with "As an Asian" and not "As a Chinese person". Being Asian doesn't give you any special experience on Sinophobia just as being a Frenchman or a Brit doesn't give a person any special experience on anti-Ziganism or European Islamaphobia (except maybe as a perpetrator).
What do you mean, I often start conversations by saying 'As an Afro-Eurasian from America'.
I'd like to see you make a meme of Obama and Tigger then...
I've met several Asian people, online and offline, who consider it racist to compare an Asian person to a yellow-colored cartoon character.
Europe when violating China's sovereignty for a hundred years: "Hahahaha this rules! I love sowing, I will live forever by the sword!"
Europe when China violates its sovereignty: "Noooooo this sucks! Why do I have to reap what I sowed?! Nobody could have forseen that I would also die by the sword!"
I'm so sorry. 😿 this happened to my family. Would you like to buy a ticket in order to hear our story in music and dance form?
