Chinese Court Sentences Canadian Man To Death, Escalating Tensions
"A New Cold War Has Begun"
January 14, 20194:51 PM ET
Sasha Ingber
The Dalian Intermediate People's Court in China, where the retrial for Canadian citizen Robert Lloyd Schellenberg was held.
China Stringer Network/Reuters
A Canadian man who appealed his 15-year prison sentence in China for drug smuggling was instead sentenced to death — a swift ruling that has led some experts to believe Beijing is applying pressure to Canada after last month's arrest of Chinese tech executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver.
Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, 36, was detained in 2014 in northeast China's Liaoning province. In November 2018, a court found him guilty of trying to smuggle methamphetamine from China to Australia.
In a terse statement .. http://court.dl.gov.cn/info/122_138601.vm , the court announced that Schellenberg was "sentenced to death" and that all of his property would be confiscated.
Prosecutors argued that Schellenberg's 15-year prison sentence was too lenient, in light of new evidence of his alleged involvement in a drug trafficking operation, according to news reports. Schellenberg said he was a tourist framed by crooks, including a witness brought in by the prosecution.
"When pressed on details," the SCMP newspaper reported, a witness named Xu Qing "frequently told the court he could not remember them and had to refer to a written statement for details, including when Schellenberg questioned him about 180,000 yuan he was purportedly given."
In a message to NPR, Schellenberg's aunt, Lauri Nelson-Jones, said, "All I can really say at this moment is, it is our worst case fear confirmed." She added that the family's thoughts were with him during this "heartbreaking" time. "It is rather unimaginable what he must be feeling and thinking."
Meng is the chief financial officer of Huawei, a massive telecom equipment manufacturer headquartered in Shenzhen, China. She is also the daughter of its multi-billionaire founder, Ren Zhengfei.
Canadian diplomatic experts believe those detentions are related to Meng's. And on Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau denounced the sentence handed down in Schellenberg's case.
Trudeau told reporters he was extremely concerned that China chose to "arbitrarily apply [the] death penalty" to a Canadian citizen. He said his country will try to intervene.
Officials in Beijing have denied that Schellenberg's sentence and the arrests of Kovrig and Spavor were in retaliation for Meng's situation, according to the Times.
A lawyer for Schellenberg, Zhang Dongshuo, told reporters that his client is likely to appeal the court's decision, according to SCMP. Schellenberg can appeal his sentence to the Liaoning Provincial Higher People's Court.
Schellenberg appeared "quite calm" during a visit last week when the possibility of the death penalty was discussed, Zhang said.
He added that Schellenberg's was "an unusual case."
Putin Gets Red Carpet Treatment in Serbia, a Fulcrum Once More
"A New Cold War Has Begun"
President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia welcomed President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Belgrade on Thursday. Stoyan Nenov/Reuters
By Marc Santora and Neil MacFarquhar
Jan. 17, 2019
BELGRADE, Serbia — The water in Belgrade’s central fountain was lit Russian red, ceremonial artillery blasts thundered at the palace, and tens of thousands of Serbs were bused in from around the country to welcome President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday.
If the tableau seemed more fitting for the days of kings than a typical state visit, these are no ordinary times for Serbia, which once again finds itself tugged between East and West in ways hauntingly reminiscent of the Cold War.
Then, Yugoslavia, with its capital in Belgrade, managed to stay out of the Soviet bloc, though it was nominally aligned with it. Now, amid resurgent competition for political and economic influence in Europe, especially in the Balkans, that strategy seems suddenly relevant.
With Serbia seeking to join the European Union without damaging its ties with Moscow, this country on the eastern flank of Europe is in play all over again.
[...]
Even before he arrived, Mr. Putin seemed to be everywhere. Billboards on the highway welcomed Serbia’s “dear friend.” His face was plastered on T-shirts, mugs, pins and even underwear. As he toured historic sites with Mr. Vucic by his side, the Russian national anthem rang out time and again.
In recent years, more than 100 pro-Russian media outlets and nongovernmental organizations have taken root in Serbia, according to the Center for Euro-Atlantic Studies, a Belgrade-based think tank.
Jelena Milic, the head of the think tank, termed Moscow’s varied efforts to exert influence “Putin’s orchestra.”
“There is more and more evidence that some members of ‘Putin’s orchestra’ are financed directly from Moscow,” she wrote.
Serbia is a crucial transit point in Russia’s plans to extend its TurkStream pipeline to supply natural gas across southern Europe, a project that has provoked misgivings in the European Union.
Russian investment in Serbia’s economy has already exceeded $4 billion, Mr. Putin told Politika .. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/59680 . It faces stiff competition from China and Turkey among others, however.
To highlight the cultural ties, Mr. Putin visited Belgrade’s newly restored Church of St. Sava, one of the world’s largest Orthodox Christian churches, where Russian businessmen underwrote the cost of the gilded mosaic lining the dome.
[...]
Mr. Jaksic, the political columnist, said Kosovo is at the heart of the balancing act Mr. Vucic is trying to pull off.
Even if Mr. Vucic managed to achieve lasting peace with Kosovo, Mr. Jaksic said, it might be at the expense of Serbia’s democracy.
The police at Mr. Ivanovic’s offices in Mitrovica, Kosovo, last year. His death is a rallying point for those who say Mr. Vucic has created a climate of fear. Andrew Testa for The New York Times
“I am against Mr. Vucic because of his authoritarian model,” he said. “He is always talking about my big friend Putin, my big friend Orban, my big friend Erdogan. You can judge him by his friends.”
Mr. Vucic has recently floated the idea .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/world/europe/kosovo-partition-aleksandar-vucic.html?module=inline .. of some sort of partition of Kosovo. While he has not publicly offered any details on how that might work, especially given the inherent dangers of redrawing maps in the volatile Balkans, the idea gained momentum last year when John R. Bolton, the Trump administration’s national security adviser, said the United States was open to the idea.
Searching for truth in China's Uighur 're-education' camps
----- "A New Cold War Has Begun [...] There is also the ideological aspect of this new cold war. For several decades, China’s breakneck development was seen positively in the United States, and the relatively enlightened authoritarianism of Deng Xiaoping and his successors was easily tolerated, especially by the American business community. But under Xi Jinping, China has evolved from a soft to a hard authoritarianism. Rather than a collegial group of uncharismatic technocrats constrained by retirement rules, there is now a president-for-life with a budding personality cult, overseeing thought control by digital means—including facial recognition and following the internet searches of its citizens. It is becoming rather creepy, and American leaders of both parties are increasingly repelled by it. This is also a regime that in recent years has been imprisoning up to a million ethnic Uighur Muslims in hard labor camps. The philosophical divide between the American and Chinese systems is becoming as great as the gap between American democracy and Soviet communism." -----
By John Sudworth BBC News, Xinjiang
21 June 2019
China says those inside the camps are now on the road to reform
The Chinese region of Xinjiang is home to millions of ethnic Muslim Uighurs who have lived there for decades. Rights groups say hundreds of thousands have been detained in camps without trial, but China argues they voluntarily attend centres which combat "extremism". The BBC went inside one of them.
I'd been to the camps before.
But the closest I'd managed to get on previous visits were snatched glimpses of the barbed wire and watchtowers from a passing car, while the plainclothes police officers tailing us tried to stop us getting any closer.
Now I was being invited inside.
The risks of accepting were obvious. We were being taken into places that appeared to have been carefully spruced up - with satellite images revealing that much of the security infrastructure had recently been removed.
And one by one the people we spoke to inside, some of them visibly nervous, told us similar stories.
The highly secure camp building in Xinjiang
All of them members of Xinjiang's largest, mainly Muslim ethnic group - the Uighurs - they said they'd been "infected by extremism" and that they'd volunteered to have their "thoughts transformed".
This was China's narrative in the mouths of people selected for us, and for whom any cross-examination might pose a serious risk.
What might be the consequences if they did let something slip? How could we safely separate the propaganda from the reality?
Radicalised and reborn
There are plenty of precedents for this kind of reporting dilemma.
There was the heavily managed 2004 press tour of the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, in the wake of the abuse scandal, with reporters herded away from detainees clamouring to have their voices heard, some while waving their prosthetic legs.
And in the 1930s and 1940s, Germany organised media trips to camps at Sonnenburg and Theresienstadt, designed to demonstrate how "humane" they were.
In all such cases, the reporter is witness to a story of vital global importance, but forced to try to tell it with only limited or highly controlled access to those most affected by it.
In Xinjiang though, there is one big difference. The authorities grant access not only to show that the conditions inside the facilities are good, they also want to prove that they are not prisons at all.
We were shown adults seated in rows at school desks in brightly lit classrooms, chanting in unison while learning Chinese.
VIDEO - The BBC visits the camps where China’s Muslims have their "thoughts transformed"
Rows of adults are seen studying inside classrooms
Some performed highly staged and choreographed music and dance routines for us, wearing traditional ethnic costumes, whirling around their desks, smiles fixed in place.
Others perform to choreographed tunes
And what was quite clear was that the Chinese officials accompanying us believed wholeheartedly in the narrative on display, some almost moved to tears as they looked on.
These people, we were urged to recognise, were reborn. Once dangerously radicalised and full of hatred for the Chinese government, they were now safely back on the road to reform thanks to the timely, benevolent intervention of that same government.
The West could learn a lot from this was the message.
Referring to the date the re-education policy began, one senior official looked me sternly in the eye.
"There has not been a single terror attack in Xinjiang in 32 months," he said. "This is our patriotic duty."
'Oh my heart don't break'
But in accepting the access, our job was to try to peer beneath the official messaging and hold it up to as much scrutiny as we could.
There were the bits of graffiti we filmed, written in Uighur, that we later had translated.
"Oh my heart don't break," read one. Another in Chinese said simply: "Step by step."
All men at the camp wear a blue tracksuit "uniform"
There were the answers, in extended interviews with the officials, that revealed much about the nature of the system.
Those in it were "almost criminals," they said, viewed as a threat not because they'd committed a crime, but because they might have the potential to do so.
And there was the admission that, once identified as having extremist tendencies, they were given a choice - but not much of one.
The option was "of choosing between a judicial hearing or education in the de-extremification facilities".
"Most people choose to study," we were told. Little wonder, given the odds of a fair trial.
And we know, from other sources, that the definition of extremism is now drawn very widely indeed - having a long beard for example, or simply contacting relatives overseas.
We saw the dormitories in which these "extremists" slept, up to 10 per room, in bunk beds and with a toilet at one end, shielded with only a thin sheet of fabric.
A bathroom inside a female dormitory
One dormitory can sleep up to 10 people
And then there was the cautious questioning that revealed much, not in what they could say, but what they couldn't.
I asked one man, who'd been there for eight months already, how many people he'd seen "graduate" in that time.
There was a slight pause before he answered. "About that, I have no idea," he said.
A heart-shaped sticker of China's flag can be seen pasted on a locker
Just one voice from within a giant system of mass internment thought to hold more than a million people on the basis of their ethnicity and their faith.
However faint and muted, we should listen carefully to what such voices might be telling us.
ASEAN summit: Asia trade bloc deal 'expected' in February 2020
"A New Cold War Has Begun "China Warns 2 American Warships in South China Sea "The Dispute About the South China Sea Is Also a Dispute About History and America's Role"""
Plans to sign the world's largest free trade pact at a regional summit in Bangkok have been thrown into doubt after objections from India. China, hurt by its trade war with the US, is keen to see the deal finalized.
[Hidden inside]UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, Brunei's Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen
Thailand, which is hosting the three-day Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Bangkok, had previously said it hoped to conclude negotiations on the trade deal by the end of the year.
Watch video 01:36 - China's foreign trade has shrunk more than expected
The new trade area, known as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), involves the 10 ASEAN members, plus China, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan and South Korea. If implemented, it would be the world's largest free trade bloc, comprising nearly half the world's population and about a third of GDP.
Speaking at the summit's formal opening, Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha called for a swift agreement "within this year to stimulate economic growth as well as trade and investment."
"The early conclusion of RCEP negotiations will lay the foundation for East Asia's economic integration," a statement from China's Foreign Ministry said on Sunday.
RCEP negotiations had stalled over India raising concerns about the impact a flood of cheap Chinese goods could have on local businesses.
Some countries have also raised the possibility of moving ahead without India. Discussions on the deal will resume when member states meet on Monday afternoon.
ASEAN countries at a glance Symbolizing unity The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. Since its founding, the bloc has emerged as a beacon of unity in Southeast Asia, although it has often struggled to find consensus among members over key policy issues affecting the region's politics, security and the economy, among other things. 1234567891011 [links to more inside]
Li said significant progress had been made on a legally binding code of conduct, which is due to be completed by 2021. The document has long been an aim for ASEAN countries, which reject China's vast maritime claims and accuse Beijing of encroaching on their territory.
China warned! Indonesia promises to defend interests in South China Sea after incursion
"A New Cold War Has Begun "China Warns 2 American Warships in South China Sea "The Dispute About the South China Sea Is Also a Dispute About History and America's Role"""
INDONESIA has issued a harrowing military warning to China over South China Sea dispute with a promise to defend Jakarta's interests at all times.
By Richard Percival PUBLISHED: 09:00, Wed, Oct 7, 2020
‘Hostage diplomacy’: Canada asks NATO to track China moves in South China Sea
Canada’s defence minister Harjit Sajjan made the observation during a panel discussion titled A Compass of Stability - NATO’s Ageless Utility, organised by GLOBSEC Bratislava Forum
world Updated: Oct 08, 2020 14:40 IST
Anirudh Bhattacharyya Hindustan Times, Toronto
This aerial file photo taken on January 2, 2017 shows a Chinese Navy formation, including the aircraft carrier Liaoning (C), during military drills in the South China Sea. (AFP/ File)
Canada’s defence minister Harjit Sajjan has said that NATO needs to “monitor” China’s activities as the actions that it has been “demonstrating in the South China Sea are obviously concerning”.
Sajjan made these observations while participating in a panel discussion titled A Compass of Stability - NATO’s Ageless Utility, organised by the GLOBSEC Bratislava Forum, based in the Slovakian capital.
Sajjan, who appeared from Ottawa via video link, also accused China of indulging in “hostage diplomacy” by taking two Canadians, including a former diplomat, into detention in retaliation for the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei, in Vancouver in 2018.
“This type of hostage diplomacy is not what good rules-based-order nations do. So, if you want to be part of the global rules-based order, we need to have greater predictability,” Sajjan said, as per the agency Canadian Press.
Sajjan also said that such actions raised questions about China’s “true ambitions”, during the discussion hosted by the Slovakian think tank GLOBSEC.
“These are some of the things that we will continue to monitor, and we need to monitor in NATO,” he said, adding, “This is not just about being reactionary to a problem. It’s about making sure any nation out there sees the collective will of what NATO brings to the table, and that’s the strong message of defence and deterrence.”
These remarks came as relations between Canada and China continue to deteriorate. It started after Wanzhou was detained in a case related to bank fraud that could see her being extradited to the US. That resulted in a sharp response from Beijing, including the arrest of the two Canadians and the sentencing of others to death.
Canada has abandoned the possibility of a free trade deal with China as ties have worsened.
Federal Government spends $1.1 billion on Northern Territory air base, expanding reach into the Indo-Pacific By political reporter Matthew Doran July, 2012, "US spy drones may fly from Australia's Indian Ocean territory of Cocos Islands" https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=154017456
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