Dozens arrested in Hong Kong around Tiananmen Square Massacre anniversary,
Cuba Hosts a secret Chinese spy base And a Chinese warship almost
crashes into a US warship. That and more of this week’s China news headlines.
Welcome to China Uncensored, I’m Chris Chappell. This episode is sponsored by Incogni.
You probably know that companies are collecting your personal data. But you may not realize just
how many. Dozens, maybe hundreds—most of which you’ve never heard of. And you have no idea
what they’re doing with it. Incogni helps stop them. I’ll explain more at the end.
Well, it happened again. Less than a week after a
Chinese pilot got dangerously close to a US air force plane over the South China Sea,
This week, a Chinese warship almost collided with a US one.
On Monday, a US destroyer and a Canadian frigate were traveling through the Taiwan
strait on a freedom-of-navigation patrol in international waters.
This Global News footage shows how a Chinese warship cut right in front of the US ship,
getting dangerously close. The US Navy said the Chinese ship got within 150 yards of its ship and
that it had to slow down to avoid hitting it. The Commander of the Canadian frigate saw it
happen and said this wasn’t an accident on China’s part.
“The fact that this was announced over the radio, prior to doing it,
clearly indicated it was intentional.” Very smooth, China, very smooth.
All this took place as the US and China Defense chiefs were attending
a security conference in Singapore this week. Man, talk about awkward timing. If I were China,
I would at least wait until I didn’t have to look the US in the eye when the report came in.
But when China’s Defense Minister was asked about it, he said “that the passage
of the allied Western vessels on ‘freedom of navigation patrols’ was a provocation to China.”
So, basically, the same reason China gave for its dangerous pilot stunt—that
it was the United States’ fault for being in China’s backyard.
Nevermind that the US was in international airspace and international waters.
Now, when I said this was awkward timing, I should have said it *would* have been
awkward timing if the defense chiefs were actually talking, which they’re not.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tried to call China back when a Chinese spy balloon
flew over the US earlier this year, only to get the answering machine.
A White House spokesman said communication has been “curtailed” between the Pentagon
and China ever since former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan last August.
Ugh, the silent treatment—that’s the worst. Of course Austin was still hoping to meet
with his counterpart, Li Shangfu, on the sidelines of the conference this week.
But China is still unhappy that the US sanctioned Li in 2018 for
importing Russian weapons and said, “no thanks”. Now, it’s not like China is saying it wants war.
Li *did* give lip service to improving the relationship when he said war with
the US would be an “unbearable disaster”.
But kind of like plowing in front of someone’s warship,
what he did didn’t make it better, either. And after the break, some US officials
did get meetings with their Chinese counterparts—but was that a good idea?
Welcome back.
This week marks the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
The massacre was the end of a weeks-long student-led protest movement all over
China calling for better human rights and Democratic reforms.
The biggest protest was­­ in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square,
the nerve center of the Chinese Communist Party.Chinese
leaders declared martial law to clear the streets, and, as they say, the rest was history.
We don’t know exactly how many were killed,
but a declassified British cable puts the number at over 10,000.
For years, the June 4th massacre has been commemorated in Hong Kong. It
was the only place technically in China where that could happen.
But, since 2020, those commemorations have been banned. Not because the Communist Party
is squeezing the life out of Hong Kong now, no no. It was because of Covid.
So why remove the statues?
But Covid can’t be used as an excuse this year. So what happened?
Well, Hong Kong police detained dozens of people
who they suspected might try to commemorate the day.
“eight people, including activists and artists, were detained on the eve of the anniversary…[and
on June 4th, police] took 23 others away on suspicion of breaching public peace”.
However, pro-China groups *were* able to hold a memorial on the same day for
the British handover of Hong Kong 26 years ago…
which actually happened in *July*, but, hey, when you’ve got a protest paper over, why wait?
Despite the Communist Party still trying to sweep that bit of ugly history under
the rug, the US sent diplomats to Beijing for meetings this week.
These are lower level diplomats since high level talks are still basically frozen.
The White House denied its timing was maybe just a little bit tone deaf.
Reporter: Was that decision a messaging misstep? Kirby: We would not call it a misstep. I mean,
this was a long-planned trip. And this is the way the schedules worked out. But the -- I think,
honestly, people will be --criticizing the timing of Tiananmen Square are just
making a whole heck of a lot out of nothing. And guess who also got a meeting in Beijing?
CIA director Bill Burns .
He secretly traveled to China in May to try to “thaw relations”,
which I would say went about as well as
thawing an ice cube with an air conditioner in the North Pole.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken keeps saying he’s going to get his China meeting back one of
these days. But like that friend who always has a “get rich quick” plan,
it just never seems to quite pan out. Or, at least, it hasn’t yet.
Blinken called off his trip to Beijing at the 11th hour in February after a
Chinese spy balloon flew across the entire United States. For more on the
scandal behind that whole saga, check out this episode we did recently. It’s quite a wild ride.
Another possible reason Blinken hasn’t gone yet—he’s taking the advice of his own department:
“The State Department has China on its ‘reconsider travel’ list,
citing the risk of detention or arbitrary enforcement of local laws.”
Yeah, we wouldn’t want the United States top diplomat to go missing in China.
He might just get put on a spy balloon to nowhere.
And speaking of spying, is China building a spy base in Cuba?
The Wall Street Journal cited “US officials familiar with highly classified intelligence”
as saying there’s an agreement for Cuba to host a Chinese spy base focusing on the U.S.
It said “An eavesdropping facility in Cuba, roughly 100 miles from Florida,
would allow Chinese intelligence services to scoop up electronic communications throughout
the southeastern U.S., where many military bases are located, and monitor U.S. ship traffic.”
China reportedly offered to pay Cuba $7 billion for it, although it’s not clear
where that agreement is at. The Journal says they had reached an agreement “in
principle” but its sources wouldn’t say if construction had begun or not.
And after the break, the UK gets tough on China Welcome back.
The UK is finally getting tough on China…or, well, maybe sorta.
It told China to shut its illegal UK-based police stations this week.
These underground police stations were first publicized by the human
rights group Safeguard Defenders last September.
Now, the UK has told the Chinese embassy to shut them down.
However, the UK security minister told Parliament they so far haven’t found evidence of “illegal
activity at the addresses associated with the alleged Chinese police outposts.”
The UK government is also putting a timeline on getting rid of Chinese-made security cameras,
which, as you can imagine, aren’t very secure. “British lawmakers have previously called for
a ban on the sale and use of security cameras made by Hikvision and Dahua,
two partly state-owned Chinese firms, over privacy fears and concerns of the
companies' products being linked to human rights abuses in China.”
According to the Daily Mail, Chinese cameras were being used at UK military bases, despite lawmakers
banning them on government buildings. It’s not just a military problem,
though. A report by civil liberties watchdog Big Brother Watch found “over 60% of public bodies
in the UK currently operate Chinese state-owned surveillance cameras”.
Yes, UK surveillance cameras—cameras for the Chinese government to surveil the UK.
There is some good China news this week though. In a rare victory for the media,
a Hong Kong court has overturned the conviction of a Hong Kong journalist.
“A court ruled that ‘substantial and grave injustice’ was done to Choy Yuk-ling,
an investigative journalist who also goes by the name Bao Choy.”
Bao was convicted in 2021 of improperly accessing car records for a documentary she
did about a mob attack on Hong Kong protesters. To find out who was transporting the attackers,
she looked up license plate records from a public database. She had to select a reason
for her search from a dropdown menu that didn’t have an option for media work, so she chose “other
traffic and transport related issues” . The court found that she didn’t knowingly
make a false statement in order to get the car records and granted her appeal.
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Once again, I’m Chris Chappell. Thanks for watching China Uncensored.