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China Defence Budget Conceals More Than It Reveals: Report

China’s Nuke Stockpile To Swell To 1500 By 2035: US Report

By LokMarg 30th November 2022

With the aim to modernize, diversify, and expand nuclear forces, China has accelerated its nuclear expansion and plans to field a stockpile of about 1500 warheads by its 2035 timeline.

In a report titled “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Pentagon said Beijing probably accelerated its nuclear expansion last year, surpassing the operational 400 nuclear warheads stockpile.
“The Department of Defence estimates that the PRC’s operational nuclear warheads stockpile has surpassed 400,” the US Defense Department said in the report.

“The PLA (People’s Liberation Army) plans to basically complete modernization of its national defence and armed forces by 2035. If China continues the pace of its nuclear expansion, it will likely field a stockpile of about 1500 warheads by its 2035 timeline,” it adds.

According to Pentagon, the PRC aims to modernize, diversify, and expand its nuclear forces over the next decade. Compared to the PLA’s nuclear modernization efforts a decade ago, current efforts exceed previous modernization attempts in both scale and complexity, the report said.

“The PRC is investing in and expanding the number of its land-, sea-, and air-based nuclear delivery platforms and constructing the infrastructure necessary to support this major expansion of its nuclear forces,” it adds.

On the “operational structure and activities on china’s periphery,” the Pentagon report said the PRC continues to refine military reforms associated with the establishment of the Eastern, Southern, Western, Northern, and Central Theater Commands, based on its perception of peripheral threats.

The Western Theater Command, oriented toward India and counterterrorism missions along China’s Central Asia borders, is geographically the largest theater command within the PRC and is responsible for responding to conflict with India and terrorist threats in western China, the report said.

According to Pentagon, PLA units located within the Western Theater Command include 76th and 77th Group Armies and ground forces subordinate to Xinjiang and Xizang Military Districts; three PLAAF bases, one transportation division, and one flying academy; and one PLARF base.

“PAP units responsible for internal security operations are also likely under the control of the Western Theater Command. Within China, the Western Theater Command focuses on Xinjiang and Tibet Autonomous Regions, where the CCP perceives a high threat of separatism and terrorism, particularly among Uyghur populations in Xinjiang,” it adds. (ANI)

China Censors Reference To Protest Code Words, Demonstration Hotspots Like Xinjiang

By LokMarg 28th November 2022

Chinese censors are scrambling to scrub references to protest code words and demonstration hotspots like Xinjiang.

Chinese internet users and government censors are engaged in a cat-and-mouse game to control the narrative around the country’s anti- “zero COVID” protests, reported Al Jazeera.
By Monday, Chinese social media appeared to have scrubbed searches for protest hotspots like “Xinjiang” and “Beijing”, while posts with oblique phrases like “I saw it” – a reference to an internet user having seen a recently deleted post – were also censored.

“As the fissure widens between the lie and the truth, even what cannot be said or seen becomes immensely symbolic,” David Bandurski, co-director of the China Media Project, told Al Jazeera.

“It can punch right through the veneer. And this is what we’ve seen over the past few days. The words, ‘I saw it, marking the void in the wake of a deleted protest video, can become powerful. Or students protesting on campus can hold up blank sheets of paper and they speak volumes.”

Many posts documenting the protests have already jumped China’s Great Firewall with the help of virtual private networks (VPNs) and have been shared on popular Western platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, which are officially banned in China.

“Beijing appears to be using the same tactics of censoring Chinese social media based on keywords – however, the amount of information that is getting out past the Great Firewall is definitely noteworthy,” Stevie Zhang, the associate editor of First Draft News, a non-profit dedicated to combating online misinformation, told Al Jazeera.

Zhang said internet users were evading censors by taking screenshots of posts before they were deleted and then sharing them with each other or posting them on Western social media. In some cases, posts have made it full circle back to China via Twitter screenshots.

Other users have taken to using seemingly unrelated and uncensored phrases to express their feelings, Zhang said, using “repetitions of ‘good’, or ‘well done’, or ‘win’ as a sort of sarcastic or passive-aggressive way of highlighting the inability for Chinese people to voice any form of criticism.”

The use of euphemisms is a common tactic of Chinese netizens to evade government censors, with abbreviations and homonyms often standing in for banned words. During China’s “Me Too” movement in 2018, many internet users posted under the hashtag “rice bunny” – which when said aloud in Mandarin Chinese sounds like “me too” – after the original hashtag was banned, reported Al Jazeera.

This time, China’s censors have also taken note of how much information is circulating on Western platforms such as Twitter.

Protests began in Urumqi, the capital of the far-western Xinjiang region, on Friday following the deaths of 10 people in an apartment block fire before spreading over the weekend to major cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, and Chengdu.

Meanwhile, China’s western Xinjiang region eased some COVID-19 restrictions in its capital Urumqi on Monday, after a deadly fire in the city blamed on virus controls sparked protests across the country.

People in the city of four million, some of whom have been confined to their homes for weeks on end, can travel around on buses to run errands within their home districts starting Tuesday, officials said at a press conference Monday, reported Arab News.

The protests in Urumqi erupted after footage posted on social media showed fire trucks spraying water from too far away to reach the apartment building, with internet users claiming authorities could not get closer due to pandemic barricades and cars that had been abandoned by people who had been quarantined.

Videos and photographs of the protests quickly circulated on Chinese social media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo, where they received tens of thousands of views before being deleted by government censors, reported Al Jazeera.

The acts of defiance shared online included scenes of people tearing down barricades, calling for the resignation of Chinese President Xi Jinping, and holding up blank white pieces of paper as a symbol of protest.

China’s COVID protests come as the country is grappling with its most cases yet, promoting a new wave of lockdowns and restrictions on freedom of movement in big cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Guangzhou. Health authorities reported 40,347 new infections for Sunday, a fifth straight daily record.

Residents of Urumqi, where the recent protests began, have lived under harsh restrictions since August 10, in what is believed to be China’s longest continuous lockdown.

In late March and early April, a five-day “circuit breaker” lockdown in Shanghai was extended to two months, prompting food shortages and rare displays of public discontent.

China is the last country in the world sticking to a “zero-COVID” policy aimed at stamping out flare-ups of the virus at almost any cost. The strategy, which relies on lockdowns, border controls, and mass testing, has kept cases and deaths low compared with elsewhere but inflicted serious economic and social costs. (ANI)

50 UN Member States Condemn Xinjiang Rights Abuses In China

By LokMarg 1st November 2022

As many as 50 members of the United Nations issued a joint statement condemning the Chinese government’s oppression of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples in Xinjiang province

“We are gravely concerned about the human rights situation in the People’s Republic of China, especially the ongoing human rights violations of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang,” read the joint statement of 50 countries in the UN General Assembly Third Committee on the human rights situation in Xinjiang, China.
This comes in the backdrop of a recent UN report said that the violations have taken place in the country under the garb of targeting “terrorists” among the Uyghur minority with a counter-extremism strategy that involves the use of so-called Vocational Educational and Training Centres (VETCs), or re-education camps.

A strongly-worded assessment by the UN rights office said that the extent of arbitrary detentions against Uyghur and others, in the context of “restrictions and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights, enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”

The UN members state that the release of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) assessment of human rights concerns in Xinjiang corroborates these concerns in an impartial and objective manner.

They say that the UN assessment finds that the scale of the arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang “may constitute international crimes, in particular, crimes against humanity”.

In view of the gravity of the OHCHR assessment, UN member states said they are concerned that China has so far refused to discuss its findings and urged the Chinese government to uphold its international human rights obligations and to fully implement the recommendations of the OHCHR assessment.

“This includes taking prompt steps to release all individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in Xinjiang, and to urgently clarify the fate and whereabouts of missing family members and facilitate safe contact and reunion,” the letter read.

The UN member states stressed that addressing human rights violations, engaging in meaningful dialogue, and working together as partners are foundational to creating more inclusive societies where all can fully enjoy their human rights. “We encourage all to adopt this approach,” they said. (ANI)