TikTok 的一位前风险经理会见了国会调查人员，表达了他对该公司保护美国用户数据的计划存在严重缺陷的担忧，并指出在许多人考虑在全国范围内实施该应用程序的时刻，有证据可能会激起立法者对该应用程序的怀疑 禁止 A former risk manager at TikTok has met with congressional investigators to share his concerns that the company’s plan for protecting United States user data is deeply flawed, pointing to evidence that could inflame lawmakers’ suspicion of the app at a moment when many are considering a nationwide ban
TikTok 可以收集大量用户数据，包括视频观看历史、电子邮件地址和联系人，不过 Facebook 和谷歌等美国科技巨头收集的更多，包括精确的 GPS 位置、广泛的传记详细信息和网络浏览历史，根据一位 上个月发表评论。 TikTok can collect a large range of user data, including video viewing histories, email addresses and contacts, though American tech giants such as Facebook and Google gather even more, including precise GPS locations, extensive biographical details and web-browsing histories, according to a Post review last month.
Mao Zedong (reigned 1893–1976) took China from a semi-colony to the world’s leading power.
However, Mao’s policies caused an enormous number of deaths through famine, prison labor, and mass executions.
In the 1950s, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, which backfired and resulted in the deadliest famine in history. Over 55 million people died of hunger during 1959–61.
Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) resulted in the deaths of up to 7 million people.
“When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”
The Great Chinese Famine — The Deadliest Famine In The Human History
The Great Chinese Famine of 1959-61 resulted in 55 million deaths
To survive, people resorted to cannibalism. Families ate their own children, remote travellers were murdered for food.
https://short-history.com/great-chinese-famine-1e156d0910bA Chinese man eating bark from a tree (Image: Reddit) https://short-history.com/great-chinese-famine-1e156d0910bhttps://short-history.com/great-chinese-famine-1e156d0910b
Mao Zedong believed each sparrow ate 4.5 kilograms (9.9 pounds) of grain per year. Consequently, the government proclaimed sparrows as the enemies of communism and systematically exterminated them.The lack of sparrows allowed locusts and other insects to over-multiply and destroy crops. 毛泽东相信每只麻雀每年吃4.5公斤（9.9磅）的谷物。 因此，政府宣布麻雀为共产主义的敌人，并系统地消灭它们。麻雀的缺乏使蝗虫和其他昆虫过度繁殖并毁坏庄稼。
Forcing farmers to switch to the steel industry 迫使农民转向钢铁工业
Blast furnaces made of earth spread across the Chinese countryside. The task of farmers was to increase the manufacturing of iron and steel (Image: Wikimedia Commons)American cartoon showing the result of the Great Leap Forward initiative (Image:petruskyaus.net)
Totalitarianism in China brutally suppressed any criticism. Mao Zedong was considered infallible. There was no manoeuvering room for fixing mistakes. 中国的极权主义残酷地压制了任何批评。 毛泽东被认为是万无一失的。 没有改正错误的回旋余地。
The cannibalism during the Great Chinese Famine occurred on a scale unprecedented in history. 中国大饥荒期间发生的食人事件规模空前。
“She sliced up the girl’s flesh and spiced it with chilli peppers before steaming and eating it.”
— Zhou Xun, a historian retelling the story of the old lady’s cannibalism
“她把姑娘的肉切成薄片,用辣椒调味,然后蒸着吃.”— 历史学家周迅重述老太太吃人的故事
The peasants were tortured, killed, or buried alive for reporting realistic harvest results, refusing to hand over the remaining bits of food, or for stealing food.
“Liu Desheng, guilty of poaching a sweet potato, was covered in urine… He, his wife, and his son were also forced into a heap of excrement. Then tongs were used to prise his mouth open after he refused to swallow excrement. He died three weeks later.”
The three were arrested in 2021 during a crackdown on the city’s pro-democracy movement following massive protests more than three years ago. They were leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China and were found guilty last week. The alliance was best known for organising candlelight vigils in Hong Kong on the anniversary of the Chinese military’s crushing of Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests in 1989, but it voted to disband in 2021 under the shadow of the Beijing-imposed national security law. Supporters say its closure has shown freedoms and autonomy that were promised when Hong Kong returned to China from the UK in 1997 are diminishing.Before its disbandment, police sought details about its operations and finances in connection with alleged links to democracy groups overseas, accusing it of being a foreign agent. 这三人是在3年前大规模示威后,在2021年镇压城市民主化运动时被逮捕的。 他们是香港支持中国爱国民主运动联盟的领导人，上周被判有罪。1989年中国军队镇压天安门民主抗议活动周年纪念日，该联盟在香港组织烛光集会最为著名，但在2021年北京颁布的国家安全法的阴影下投票解散。支持者说，关闭该机场表明，1997年香港从英国返回中国时所承诺的自由和自治正在减少。在解散前，警方要求提供与据称与海外民主团体有联系的有关其业务和财政方面的细节，指控它是一个外国特工。
Among the 56 countries listed as “Not Free” around the world, North Korea, China and Myanmar were listed as among “the worst of the worst.” Additionally, out of 39 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, nine were listed as “not free” and 13 were deemed only “partly free.”
“In China, one of the world’s most restrictive media environments, journalists faced heightened scrutiny and rigorous political indoctrination when attempting to renew their press licenses, and even individuals who engaged in solitary forms of protest were punished with prison sentences,” it said.
After their husbands became targets of a Chinese crackdown, these women began speaking out against Beijing’s abuses. They tell DW how their experiences have helped them grow and broadened their perspectives.
Since President Xi Jinping took office in 2012, one of the groups that has been persecuted the most by Chinese authorities has been human rights lawyers. Following the “709 mass arrest” in 2015, in which more than 300 lawyers across China were arrested, many are still in detention, have been given lengthy prison sentences, faced exit bans, or simply disappeared.
Amid this yearslong, nationwide crackdown on human rights lawyers, it has fallen on family members, especially their wives, to become “accidental human rights defenders.” They speak out against the Chinese government’s abuses on social media and in media interviews. They also try to hold authorities accountable by sharing details of the cases with foreign parliamentarians and diplomats.
FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday acknowledged that the bureau believes the Covid-19 pandemic was likely the result of a lab accident in Wuhan, China. In his first public comments on the FBI’s investigation into the virus’ origins during an interview with Fox News, Wray said that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
Wray said in the interview that the FBI has a team of experts who focus specifically on the risk of biological threats that come into the “wrong hands,” including by a “hostile nation state.”
“You’re talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab that killed millions of Americans,” Wray said of the coronavirus, “and that’s precisely what that capability was designed for.”
Wray said that most details of the FBI’s investigation remain classified, and that it has been difficult to work with the Chinese government on investigating the pandemic’s origin.
“I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here,” the bureau director said. “The work that our US government and close foreign partners are doing. And that’s unfortunate for everybody.”
美国联邦调查局(FBI)局长克里斯托弗•雷在接受福克斯新闻采访时承认,新冠肺炎大流行很有可能是中国武汉实验室事故的结果。FBI Director Christopher Wray acknowledged in a Fox News interview that the bureau believes the Covid-19 pandemic was likely the result of a lab accident in Wuhan, China
Debate about the origins of COVID-19 reemerged after The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that the United States Department of Energy (DOE) concluded that the virus likely stemmed from a lab leak in China.
Sars-CoV-2—first discovered in Wuhan, China, in December 2019—has spread across the globe ever since, killing more than 6.8 million people worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University, and having life-altering effects on many others. From the onset of the pandemic, questions emerged about the virus’ origins with two leading theories typically dominating the scientific community.
Newsweek reported on March 27, 2020, and corroborated by two U.S. officials, that U.S. intelligence revised its January assessment in which it “judged that the outbreak probably occurred naturally” to now include the possibility that the new coronavirus emerged “accidentally” due to “unsafe laboratory practices” in Wuhan.
The classified report, titled “China: Origins of COVID-19 Outbreak Remain Unknown,” ruled out that the disease was genetically engineered or released intentionally as a biological weapon.
It would be helpful to at least get a vague sense of the evidence that shifted the position from “natural cause with low confidence” to “accidental lab leak with low confidence”. Most of us out here, myself included, immediately jumped to “lab leak with high confidence” at the… pic.twitter.com/zKVzt8LJyQ
Now that the U.S. Department of Energy has joined FBI in concluding that the coronavirus likely leaked from a lab, it’s worth remembering that the media, en masse, condemned the lab leak theory as a “debunked conspiracy theory,” and Facebook censored people who dared suggest it pic.twitter.com/RuT0w0SgpV
A Chinese diplomat in Northern Ireland uploaded a video to social media on Monday morning that inaccurately claimed a partially Korean-engineered bridge in Turkey withstood the recent devastating earthquake thanks to Chinese technology.
The now-deleted video, uploaded to the Twitter account of Consul General Zhang Meifang in Belfast, displayed aerial footage of the 1915 Canakkale Bridge as it was under construction, describing it in an overlying caption in Chinese as “the world’s largest suspension bridge” and claiming “a subsidiary of Shudao Group is the sole participant in the construction.”
In an English caption accompanying the video, Zhang wrote, “The bridge built by China in Turkey’s withstood the earthquake #ChinaTech.”
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stands in front of the 1915 Canakkale Bridge on March 18. (Turkish Presidency)
“The 1915 Canakkale Bridge will leave this history of collision and conflict behind and will be a bridge between East and West, starting a new era of peace and prosperity,” South Korean Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum said during the ceremony, in reference to the Canakkale region’s historic battlefields.
The bridge, which was built by a consortium of Turkish and South Korean companies, will also strengthen the bonds between Turkey and South Korea, Kim said.
The “1915 Canakkale Bridge” cost $2.7 billion to build, but Turkey will save $458 million per year from a reduction of fuel consumption and carbon emissions, Erdogan said. He said the bridge’s toll will be 200 Turkish lira, about $13.50.
China’s Elderly have hit the streets in Wuhan to protest the government’s new health insurance reforms. These reforms include cuts in monthly allowances paid to retirees. Molly Gambhir reports.
The state’s hardening censorship and heavier hand have held back its tech industry; so has entrepreneurs’ reluctance to invest for the long term. It wasn’t always that way.
Today, much has changed. Microsoft — an icon of American technology — helped the start-up OpenAI usher its experimental chatbot, ChatGPT, into the world. And China’s tech entrepreneurs are shocked and demoralized. It has dawned on many of them that despite the hype, China lags far behind in artificial intelligence and tech innovation.
“Why wasn’t ChatGPT invented in China?” they asked. “How big is the ChatGPT gap between China and the U.S.?” “The Chinese equivalent of ChatGPT? Don’t take it too seriously.”
“The development of any significant technological product is inseparable from the system and environment in which it operates,” said Xu Chenggang, a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. He cited TikTok’s Chinese-language sister app Douyin as the sort of innovation that Chinese companies might be unable to achieve in the future because of government limitations on the industry.
“Once the open environment is gone, it will be challenging to create such products,” he said.
If a decade ago China was the wild, wild East for tech entrepreneurship and innovation, it’s a very different country now.
“There are major security concerns with a lot of these cameras, both in terms of the technology they contain and what happens to the data that comes from them. If you buy a system like this, you have to be able to trust the company you are buying from.”
He added that using Chinese-made cameras also presents ethical concerns, since some have been implicated in helping the Chinese government monitor detainment camps for Uyghurs in Xinjiang province.
His comments came after Sir Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, said the UK should “wake up” to the threat posed by China, following last week’s decision by Washington to shoot down a balloon officials believed to be carrying out surveillance.
In a press conference on Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice detailed(Opens in a new tab) newly-unsealed charges against two alleged spies(Opens in a new tab) from China. According to the DOJ brief, Chinese intelligence officers Guochun He and Zheng Wang had attempted to obstruct an ongoing criminal investigation of a “global telecommunications company” based in China through bribery and espionage.
Hu’s apparently reluctant departure from the stage at the 20th congress of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) was a rare moment of unscripted drama at what was otherwise a carefully choreographed week of political theatre.
Former Chinese president Hu Jintao unexpectedly led out of party congress
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The new footage, shot by Channel News Asia but only released two days after the incident, captures about a minute of discreet, high-level manoeuvring before an official arrives to escort Hu away. Hu, who is 79, stepped down as head of the party 10 years ago.
The app, which runs atop the Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized social networking protocol Nostr, was removed from the China App Store per request by the country’s top internet watchdog because it “includes content that is illegal in China,” according to an app review notice Damus received and shared on Twitter.
— Read on techcrunch.com/2023/02/02/damus-pulled-from-apples-app-store-in-china-after-two-days/
In China, None tools allowed to exchange free opinion , get wide range of news, reveal government censored facts but can use communist party controls 100% as like weibo, wechat and tiktok.
