Colleagues at WSJ confirmed this protest in Beijing with an eye-witness (story coming soon). The guts it took to do this, and the ability to pull it off despite suffocating security, are both astounding

https://twitter.com/aliceysu/status/1580456534475038720

The story as promised, by @Kubota_Yoko @JChengWSJ and @wangjoyu

wsj.com/articles/rare-…

Another eyebrow-raising chapter in the story of China's biggest data leak, courtesy of @_KarenHao : Cybersecurity firms say Alibaba hosted the Shanghai police database using outdated systems that didn't allow for the use of a password

wsj.com/articles/aliba… @leak_ix and @MayhemDayOne both said they found 13 other Alibaba-hosted databases that used the same outdated version of the database and dashboard products. All were exposed for upwards of a year, and two contained more terabytes than the Shanghai police database

China's average life expectancy rose to 78.2 yrs in 2021, Beijing's National Health Commission reported this week.

When Wikipedia next updates this chart, China (blue) will have switched places with the US (red), which has fallen to 76.6 yrs after a historic Covid-driven drop Even more remarkable, China's maternal mortality rate is on course to slip below 16 per 100,00 (currently 16.1). The US rate was 23.8 in 2020, up from 20.1 the year before -- highest in the developed world, and expected to get worse: axios.com/2022/07/05/mat…

Excellent digging here shows how Chinese surveillance technology is spreading globally. What's most revealing, though, is the precedent set before the junta took power.

https://twitter.com/f_potkin/status/1546290251395543040

As the story notes, the new surveillance projects come after camera systems (touted as crime prevention measures) were either installed or planned in five cities by the previous government led by Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi

The fantastic team at @stmartinespress have produced this new video, which gives @lizalinwsj and me an excuse to belatedly announce a bit of *news*: The book documents the Chinese Communist Party's effort to build history's 1st full-fledged surveillance state: a blend of authoritarianism and AI with vast quantities of personal data that Beijing believes is capable of going toe-to-toe with -- and maybe vanquishing -- democracy

The Chinese government’s massive campaign to spread its message globally often seems clumsy and counterproductive, but a new study shows the investment is paying off in one very consequential way

Excellent story by @_KarenHao

wsj.com/articles/china… Searches for “Xin­jiang” re­turn con­tent from Chi­nese state out­lets in the top re­sults on You­Tube al­most daily, and close to 90% of the time on ei­ther Google’s or Bing’s news sites

A major leak from a police database literally puts a face -- more than 2,800 faces, actually -- on the Chinese Communist Party's ethnic re-engineering campaign in Xinjiang. Truly striking work:
bbc.co.uk/news/extra/85q… Data from the leak suggests more than 12% of adults in Konasheher (aka Shufu) County were in either a camp or a prison in the years 2017 and 2018. Extrapolated to Xinjiang as a whole, that supports earlier estimates of more than a million detained.

“A lot fewer people would have died” had the government acted sooner, said one of Wuhan's first Covid-19 patients.

The definitive, damning tale of how we got to where we are in China from @JNBPage @wenxin @natashakhanhk + others.

wsj.com/articles/how-i… This timeline gives a sense of how misstep after misstep fed the virus to the point that it required draconian measures. Critical to understand as the U.S. bumbles through its own response:

Here’s the shape of the world to come: Two countries that used to be models of web freedom in Africa have embraced China’s vision of the internet. And Huawei is in both places, hand-holding local police as they learn to shackle dissidents with digital surveillance

https://twitter.com/WSJ/status/1161646955921137665

This story was the results of months of digging by @Nicholasbariyo and @JoeWSJ, who discovered Huawei technicians embedded with a Ugandan police intelligence helped crack the phone of @HEBobiwine, who was planning a concert to rally resistance to President Yoweri Museveni.

Quotes on surveillance from foreign correspondents in the @fccchina's annual report are bonkers and chilling. Here's a sample, starting with this surreal account from ABC's @MJSCarney: Creepy phone snooping via the BBC's @ProducerKathy

Here’s our addition to the growing body of reporting on China’s shadowy attempt to erase the cultural identities of around 14 million Muslim minorities living in the northwestern border region of Xinjiang using a network of internment camps. 1/x wsj.com/articles/china… We confirmed a lot of what others have reported and we found out some new things. It’s incredibly difficult to dig up information about these camps, so I thought it would be helpful to describe how we did our reporting. 2/x

We spent almost two weeks exploring what life is like in Xinjiang, which China's government has made into a laboratory for its surveillance ambitions. We came back with harrowing stories, and some pretty crazy video: wsj.com/articles/twelv… In Urumqi, we talked to Parhat Imin, a Uighur fruit vendor whose shop was closed down after ethnic riots in 2009. Now his ID card sets off alarms at checkpoints, making him afraid to leave his neighborhood. "I tell them, 'Just shoot me. I can't live like this."