Quotes of the Day:
The demagogue Is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
- H.L. Mencken
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”
- Viktor Frankl
"Political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz's doctrine in time of peace. In broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation's command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives."
- George Kennan
1. Former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno Dies
2. Pakistani nuclear weapons scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan dies aged 85
3. Microsoft: Digital Attacks Are Getting Worse, Russia Bears Much of the Blame
4. U.S. Set Out to Hobble China’s Huawei, and So It Has
5. It’s Not Misinformation. It’s Amplified Propaganda.
6. Taiwan's future lies in reunification
7. Why Can’t Women End Wars?
8. US Withdrawal From Afghanistan: An Act Of Offshore Balancing
9. EXCLUSIVE Cash airlifts planned to bypass Taliban and help Afghans -sources
10. China’s Communist Party Formally Embraces Assimilationist Approach to Ethnic Minorities
11. ‘Starting a Fire’: U.S. and China Enter Dangerous Territory Over Taiwan
12. Box office success in China of Korean war epic shows importance of patriotic themes and influence of Hong Kong filmmakers
13. Who should decide the future of Taiwan?
14. Chinese former journalist detained after questioning country's role in Korean War
15. Perspective | Why outlawing harmful social media content would face an uphill legal battle
16. Applications for FDD’s 2022 National Security Fellows Program are NOW OPEN!
1. Former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno Dies
For those who might have missed this news.
Former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno Dies
Photo by: Army National Guard/Sgt. 1st Class Jim Greenhill
Sat, 10/09/2021 - 14:55
Retired Gen. Raymond Odierno, the former Army chief of staff who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq, died Oct. 8. He was 67.
A native of Rockaway, New Jersey, Odierno, known for his tall, imposing frame, was a 1976 West Point graduate who commissioned as a field artillery officer. During more than 37 years of Army service, he commanded units at every echelon, from platoon to theater, and served in Germany, Albania, Kuwait, Iraq and across the U.S.
He also led the Army as it faced steep budget cuts and struggled to maintain its end strength and readiness under the threat of sequestration. “I began my career in a hollow Army. I am determined not to end my career in a hollow Army,” the general testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2013. “We owe that to the young men and women who are willing to raise their right hand and defend this country.”
After a first assignment with U.S. Army Europe, Odierno served with the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he commanded two batteries and served as a battalion operations officer, according to his Army biography.
Odierno then returned to Europe and deployed from there for Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He later commanded the 2nd Battalion, 8th Field Artillery Regiment, 7th Infantry Division, and division artillery for the 1st Cavalry Division.
As commander of the 4th Infantry Division, Odierno led the division to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom for a yearlong deployment from April 2003 to March 2004. During his tenure as III Corps commander, Odierno led Multi-National Corps-Iraq from December 2006 to February 2008, serving as the operational commander of the surge of forces into the country.
He would later serve as commanding general of Multi-National Force-Iraq and U.S. Forces-Iraq from September 2008 to September 2010, according to his bio. He would serve more than 50 months in Iraq.
After returning from Iraq, Odierno commanded Joint Forces Command from October 2010 to August 2011 and became the 38th Army chief of staff in September 2011. He retired from the Army in August 2015.
At his retirement ceremony, then-Army Secretary John McHugh praised Odierno’s service, Army Times reported.
“Ray firmly believes soldiers aren't in the Army, they are the Army,” McHugh said. “It’s always been his No. 1 job to serve them well and serve them honorably. Whether it’s fighting in Tikrit or visiting a hospital bed at Walter Reed, he's led with a quick mind, calloused hands and a servant’s spirit.”
Before retiring, Odierno stressed the importance of honoring the fallen, staying connected to Gold Star families and taking care of soldiers.
“We all understand why we do this, and the risks associated,” he said in a briefing with reporters. “But I had the opportunity firsthand to stand side by side by these young men and women who … really cared about what they were doing. They showed incredible selflessness and courage in what they did, and for me, we should be so proud of them and their sacrifice, and it's important that we remember that, and we do that by taking care of their families, their children as we go forward.”
Odierno is survived by his wife and high school sweetheart, Linda, as well as their three children, including retired Capt. Tony Odierno, a combat veteran, and their families.
2. Pakistani nuclear weapons scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan dies aged 85
A hero to some (in Pakistan and some rorgue powers) but probably one of the worst nuclear proliferators in history.
Excerpts:
Khan was lauded for bringing the nation up to par with India in the atomic field and making its defences “impregnable”, but he found himself under international scrutiny when he was accused of illegally sharing nuclear technology with Iran, Libya and North Korea.
He confessed in 2004, after the International Atomic Energy Agency placed Pakistani scientists at the centre of a global atomic black market. Pardoned by Pakistan’s military ruler Pervez Musharraf, he was instead put under house arrest for five years.
“I saved the country for the first time when I made Pakistan a nuclear nation and saved it again when I confessed and took the whole blame on myself,” Khan told Agence France-Presse in an interview in 2008.
Pakistani nuclear weapons scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan dies aged 85
Abdul Qadeer Khan, considered to be the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme and later accused of smuggling technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya, has died aged 85.
The atomic scientist, who spent the last years of his life under heavy guard, died in the capital, Islamabad, where he had recently been hospitalised with Covid-19.
Khan died after being transferred with lung problems to the city’s KRL hospital, the state-run broadcaster PTV reported. He had been admitted to the same hospital in August with Covid-19. After returning home several weeks ago, he was rushed back after his condition deteriorated.
Khan was hailed as a national hero for transforming Pakistan into the world’s first Islamic nuclear weapons power and strengthening its clout against rival and fellow nuclear-armed nation India.
The news of Khan’s death prompted an outpouring of grief and praise for his legacy.
“Deeply saddened by the passing of Dr AQ Khan,” tweeted Pakistan’s prime minister, Imran Khan, stressing how loved the nuclear scientist had been within the country because of “his critical contribution in making us a nuclear weapon state”.
“For the people of Pakistan he was a national icon.”
The scientist would be buried at Islamabad’s Faisal mosque at his request, the prime minister said.
The opposition leader, Shehbaz Sharif, described his death as a “huge loss for the country”, tweeting: “Today the nation has lost a true benefactor who served the motherland with heart and soul.”
The interior minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, told journalists the scientist would be laid to rest with “full honours”, with all government ministers and senior armed forces officials attending the funeral at 3.30pm local time on Sunday.
According to Islamic tradition, burials should take place as soon as possible, usually within 24 hours of death.
Khan was lauded for bringing the nation up to par with India in the atomic field and making its defences “impregnable”, but he found himself under international scrutiny when he was accused of illegally sharing nuclear technology with Iran, Libya and North Korea.
He confessed in 2004, after the International Atomic Energy Agency placed Pakistani scientists at the centre of a global atomic black market. Pardoned by Pakistan’s military ruler Pervez Musharraf, he was instead put under house arrest for five years.
“I saved the country for the first time when I made Pakistan a nuclear nation and saved it again when I confessed and took the whole blame on myself,” Khan told Agence France-Presse in an interview in 2008.
After his house arrest was lifted, he was granted some freedom of movement around the capital, but always flanked by the authorities, whom he had to inform of his every move.
On Sunday, journalists gathered behind barriers blocking off the street leading to his home as a procession of cars entered and left the property.
Born in Bhopal, India on 1 April 1936, Khan was just a young boy when his family migrated to Pakistan during the bloody 1947 partition at the end of British colonial rule. He took a science degree at Karachi University in 1960, then went on to study metallurgical engineering in Berlin before completing advanced studies in the Netherlands and Belgium.
His crucial contribution to Pakistan’s nuclear programme was the procurement of a blueprint for uranium centrifuges, which transform uranium into weapons-grade fuel for nuclear fissile material.
He was charged with stealing it from the Netherlands while working for the Anglo-Dutch-German nuclear engineering consortium Urenco, and bringing it back to Pakistan in 1976. On his return to Pakistan, the then prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, put Khan in charge of the government’s nascent uranium enrichment project.
By 1978, his team had enriched uranium and by 1984 they were ready to detonate a nuclear device, Khan later said in a newspaper interview.
Khan maintained that nuclear defence was the best deterrent. After Islamabad carried out atomic tests in 1998 in response to tests by India, Khan insisted Pakistan “never wanted to make nuclear weapons. It was forced to do so.”
None of the controversies that dogged Khan’s career appeared to dent his popularity at home. Many schools, universities, institutes and charity hospitals across Pakistan are named after him, his portrait decorating their signs, stationery and websites.
3. Microsoft: Digital Attacks Are Getting Worse, Russia Bears Much of the Blame
I wonder if China is fourth because of some kind of good "cyber tradecraft?"
The stats:
The October 2021 edition of the Microsoft Digital Defense Report, released Thursday, reports that 58% of all cyberattacks Redmond saw launched from nation-states originated from Russia. North Korea came in second at 23%, Iran third at 11%, and China was fourth at a mere 8%.
Microsoft: Digital Attacks Are Getting Worse, Russia Bears Much of the Blame
Information security remains a bear of a problem—most often, a Russian bear. Microsoft’s latest report on digital attacks cites the Russian Federation as the top source of nation-state attacks and one of the most destructive ones.
The October 2021 edition of the Microsoft Digital Defense Report, released Thursday, reports that 58% of all cyberattacks Redmond saw launched from nation-states originated from Russia. North Korea came in second at 23%, Iran third at 11%, and China was fourth at a mere 8%.
“Over the past year, Russia-based activity groups have solidified their position as acute threats to the global digital ecosystem by demonstrating adaptability, persistence, a willingness to exploit trusted technical relationships, and a facility with anonymization and open-source tools that make them increasingly difficult to detect and attribute,” the report states on page 57. “They have also shown a high tolerance for collateral damage, which leaves anyone with connections to targets of interest vulnerable to opportunistic targeting."
As seen in such episodes as the Russia-launched SolarWinds supply-chain attack, these intrusions now focus on governments—the target of 53% of Russian activity since July 2020, but just 3% in the previous period of nation-state data (July 2019 to June 2020). And they’re getting better at it, raising their success rate from 21% in that previous period to 32% since last July.
The United States and Ukraine are the top two targets of nation-state attacks overall, at 46% and 19%, respectively, and worldwide most of these are aimed at governments (48%), followed by non-governmental organizations and policy groups (31%).
Microsoft’s report observes that many organizations continue to fail to practice basic security measures. For example, it notes that less than 20% of Microsoft’s own customers use such “strong authentication” measures as multiple-factor authentication, a statistic it calls “shocking.” It also cites a Microsoft survey of Internet-of-Things attacks that found 20,994,693 cases of IoT devices that had “admin” as their admin password.
If you want a reason not to reach for the vodka after all that bad news, Microsoft’s report cites such signs of progress as a 220% jump in strong authentication use over the last 18 months and increasing transparency among victims of ransomware and other attacks. It also commends such recent US government actions as President Biden’s May 12 executive order requiring more government-industry cooperation and stronger basic security standards at both federal agencies and the private-industry contractors working for them.
Lest that last detail suggest Microsoft is trying to curry favor with a new administration: This is not a new subject for Microsoft. Company President Brad Smith has been speaking out for years about the growing risks of government-launched digital attacks and the need for international cooperation to end the use of digital tools as weapons against civilians.
In 2017, at the Microsoft Inspire conference in Washington, D.C., for example, he denounced governments “attacking the fundamental civilian infrastructures of our times” and called for “a new Geneva Convention that will call on the countries of the world that they will not attack civilians.” A year later, Smith gave a similar speech at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, declaring “We need governments to do better."
Any day now, Moscow. Any day.
4. U.S. Set Out to Hobble China’s Huawei, and So It Has
Excerpts:
Huawei has said its main business of selling telecom equipment such as base stations, routers and switches is still well supplied.
Huawei has been shut out of 5G rollouts in nine markets, including the U.K., Australia and Japan, following a U.S. campaign alleging security risks in the Chinese company’s networks, according to a March tally by the Council on Foreign Relations. Even more have enacted restrictions on the company’s technology.
After growing every year since 2007, Huawei’s telecom-equipment market share slipped to 29% during the first half of this year, from 31% in 2020, according to Dell’Oro Group.
U.S. Set Out to Hobble China’s Huawei, and So It Has
Big maker of telecom gear and phones is short of advanced chips and facing customers who heed sanctions or doubt company’s technical reliability
Huawei is in the midst of a deep slump. As recently as the start of last year, the world’s largest maker of telecommunications equipment was increasing market share in 5G rollouts and surging toward the top of the global smartphone market, shrugging off a year of export restrictions imposed by the Trump administration.
Now, its revenue has dropped for three straight quarters. The company has fallen to No. 9 in smartphone sales, with buyers evaporating from Europe to China. Its global telecom market share is shrinking as it loses out in key markets, a result of U.S. pressure designed to halt the spread of Huawei’s 5G technology plus concerns by some customers over its ability to remain technologically competitive.
U.S. officials and members of Congress continue to call Huawei a national-security threat, concerned that the Chinese government could use the privately held company’s gear, embedded in telecom networks world-wide, to spy or disrupt communications.
Huawei has repeatedly denied that it poses a security threat and has said the U.S.’s actions are unjustified. The company has beefed up its lobbying and public-relations budgets in the U.S. in an effort to get Washington to reconsider, but the U.S. hasn’t given the company a clear pathway to having the sanctions lifted.
Customers checked out a Huawei electric car at a shopping mall in Yantai, China, on Sept. 29. Huawei plans to put cars in hundreds of stores across the country by the end of the year.
Photo: Tang Ke/Barcroft Media/Getty Images
The restrictions imposed by the U.S. have choked off Huawei’s access to chips from suppliers even outside the U.S., prompting the Chinese company to sell its budget phone unit and to forecast up to $40 billion in lost smartphone revenue this year. It relied on China for two-thirds of its revenue last year, compared with half in 2017.
Washington’s campaign has used some of the most destructive tools in its arsenal, and they have succeeded, forcing Huawei to experiment with new business lines, cede overseas territory and foster a supply chain independent of the U.S., all while its stockpile of high-end chips diminishes. Rarely, if ever, has the U.S. directly taken on such a big overseas company and had such an impact.
Huawei executives, who often refer to a battle for survival, are steering the company toward electric vehicles, software and coal-mining technology. Many of the efforts remain nascent and make up a small fraction of revenue.
Huawei’s core business of selling telecommunications equipment is also starting to suffer. Huawei has said that in the first half of 2021, revenue from selling telecom carriers gear such as base stations and routers fell 14% from a year earlier to 136.9 billion yuan, about $21 billion.
Despite its troubles, Huawei generates profits each quarter and disclosed $55 billion in cash and short-term securities at the end of last year. Executives describe Huawei’s fat research and development budget as its insurance plan. Last year it said it spent $22 billion on R&D, more than Apple Inc. spent in its most recent fiscal year.
Huawei said it expects revenue from selling telecom equipment to ultimately show “moderate, but solid, growth” by the end of the year as China’s 5G rollout picks up steam. But it acknowledges that its new ventures are unlikely to make up for the revenue lost by its slumping smartphone sales anytime soon.
The daughter of Huawei’s powerful founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei, Ms. Meng pleaded not guilty but admitted to some wrongdoing in exchange for the U.S. deferring prosecution and dropping the charges against her next year, provided she doesn’t violate terms of the agreement.
While the deal that also freed two Canadians from Chinese prisons is hailed in China as a major victory for Huawei, there are few signs of the U.S. relaxing sanctions on the company. Biden administration officials said that Ms. Meng’s release didn’t indicate a softening of U.S. policy. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told news outlets that her department would continue efforts to block Huawei from getting advanced chips.
In June 2020, Huawei opened a sprawling retail store in an art deco building in Shanghai. Fans queued up outside, eager to view tables spread with smartwatches, tablets and smartphones inside.
In October 2020, long lines of people waited to get into Huawei's flagship store in Shanghai for a newly launched mobile phone series.
Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Today, visitors encounter a different scene. On a weekday in August, three hybrid SUVs were on prominent display, while mobile phones were relegated to a side table, where a sales clerk cautioned that many weren’t in stock. Huawei is de-emphasizing longstanding business lines and throwing its weight behind novel ventures such as systems used in electric cars.
The vehicle on display was the Seres SF5, manufactured for Huawei by a small Chinese auto maker. Huawei designed the car’s electric-drive system and its electronics. It has also developed a more advanced vehicle with state-owned auto maker BAIC Automotive Group Co., for sale by the end of the year.
Huawei has said it will have cars on sale at 1,000 stores across China by the end of this year. Executives have set an ambitious target of selling 300,000 vehicles next year, which is almost double what Tesla Inc. sold in China this year through August.
“By selling cars, Huawei can offset the impact of profit decline caused by U.S. restrictions on our phone business,” Huawei’s consumer-business chief, Richard Yu, said earlier this year.
Other new Huawei ventures signal a transition to software from hardware that needs foreign supply chains.
People browsing at a Huawei store in Shenzhen in May.
Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
A coal mine in Shanxi province uses technology equipped with a 5G router from Huawei to gather data for the control center seen here, an example of Huawei’s new business ventures.
Photo: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News
Other ventures unveiled this year include bringing artificial intelligence to pig farming and building 5G-connected cameras to monitor fish farms. In May, a Hong Kong-based beauty-products seller tapped Huawei to supply retail technologies such as data analytics and electronic payments.
“None of these efforts into these novel areas will be big enough to make up for the plummeting smartphone sales,” said Dan Wang, a Shanghai-based technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, a Hong Kong research firm.
The company has found ways to stretch chip inventories, Eric Xu, a deputy chairman, said earlier this year. Some now appear to be running out: Huawei’s latest flagship smartphone, the P50, was launched in July without 5G connectivity. Huawei cited a lack of advanced chips.
“Due to U.S. restrictions over the past two years, we no longer seek to use the best components to make the best products,” Mr. Ren said in an August speech to employees. Instead, he said, Huawei was turning to “appropriate components to make high-quality products, which has significantly improved our profitability.”
Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei spoke at a press briefing in Taiyuan in Shanxi province in February.
Photo: jessica yang/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Huawei has said its main business of selling telecom equipment such as base stations, routers and switches is still well supplied.
Huawei has been shut out of 5G rollouts in nine markets, including the U.K., Australia and Japan, following a U.S. campaign alleging security risks in the Chinese company’s networks, according to a March tally by the Council on Foreign Relations. Even more have enacted restrictions on the company’s technology.
After growing every year since 2007, Huawei’s telecom-equipment market share slipped to 29% during the first half of this year, from 31% in 2020, according to Dell’Oro Group.
In Malaysia, Huawei built about 50% of the country’s 4G networks. In late 2019, Malaysia’s then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Malaysia wouldn’t follow other countries in blocking the Chinese company despite intensifying U.S. pressure. He lauded a carrier that had picked Huawei to help build out 5G.
In July came an unexpected snub. Malaysia’s state-owned telecom company Digital Nasional Berhad picked Sweden’s Ericsson AB to help build a $2.6 billion national 5G network. Malaysia’s main opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, complained that Huawei could have done the job for less.
Digital Nasional said Ericsson had outbid three other vendors and was about $170 million cheaper than the closest bid. A person close to Ericsson said company executives believe that while they won mostly for competitive reasons, there were also concerns in Malaysia about the sustainability of Huawei’s supply chain. A Huawei spokeswoman declined to comment on that.
Men lifted a Nokia antenna during work to replace Huawei components on a mobile network antenna array in Hull, U.K., in April.
Photo: Ian Forsyth/Bloomberg News
In Mauritius, Vivacom African Networks Ltd. delivered a setback to Huawei this year when it chose a small American competitor to build networks in rural sub-Saharan Africa. Vivacom’s executive chairman, Ackim Hamweenda, said he was aware of Huawei’s reputation for building sturdy, inexpensive networks, but had concerns over the company’s future after it became the target of U.S. sanctions.
Mr. Hamweenda instead picked Parallel Wireless Inc., a company that has accepted U.S. government funding, to build 2G and 4G networks in rural Zambia and Malawi.
While Parallel’s lower cost was the main reason, “we asked ourselves, well, if we settled for a vendor like Huawei, we don’t know the extent of the ban on their equipment and the performance of their equipment tomorrow,” Mr. Hamweenda said. “At the end of the day, we are in business, and we wouldn’t want our investment to be affected by these politics.”
—Stu Woo in London and Chester Tay in Kuala Lumpur contributed to this article.
5. It’s Not Misinformation. It’s Amplified Propaganda.
The key paragraph from this article. I always criticize the chase for a pithy new term but this one may be very useful though I doubt that it will catch on due to its awkwardness (in my opinion the pronunciation seems a little awkward but maybe that is just because of the "newness.").
In fact, we have a very old word for persuasive communication with an agenda: propaganda. That term, however, comes with historical baggage. It presumes that governments, authority figures, institutions, and mass media are forcing ideas on regular people from the top down. But more and more, the opposite is happening. Far from being merely a target, the public has become an active participant in creating and selectively amplifying narratives that shape realities. Perhaps the best word for this emergent bottom-up dynamic is one that doesn’t exist quite yet: ampliganda, the shaping of perception through amplification. It can originate from an online nobody or an onscreen celebrity. No single person or organization bears responsibility for its transmission. And it is having a profound effect on democracy and society.
Conclusion:
America’s political and civic norms have not adjusted to these conditions. We are surrounded at all times by urgency, by demands to take action. We may not be entirely sure why something popped up in our feed, but that doesn’t obviate the nagging feeling that we should pay attention. Understanding the incentives of influencers, recognizing the very common rhetorical techniques that precipitate outrage, developing an awareness of how online crowds now participate in crystallizing public opinion—that is an education that Americans need. Regulators and members of Congress are attempting to sort out which guardrails our communication infrastructure might require, and the platforms that designed the architecture incessantly amend their policies in response to the latest media exposé of unintended consequences. In the short term, each of us becomes more aware of what we choose to amplify, and how we choose to participate. To adapt to the new propaganda, the public must first learn to recognize it.
I closed my laptop as #PelosiMustGo began to fall off the Twitter leaderboards. The next day, there would be new hashtags to track. Whether organic or contrived, they would be amplified by factions, curated and pushed out to the public by algorithms that reward engagement with yet more engagement. A giant web of interconnected users, each with an agenda, shouting at one another to pay attention. It’s not disinformation. Our politics is awash in ampliganda, the propaganda of the modern age.
It’s Not Misinformation. It’s Amplified Propaganda.
You don’t need fake accounts to spread ampliganda online. Real people will happily do it.
One Sunday morning in July of last year, a message from an anonymous account appeared on “Bernie or Vest,” a Discord chat server for fans of Senator Bernie Sanders. It contained an image of Shahid Buttar, the San Francisco activist challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the 2020 congressional runoff, and offered explicit instructions for how to elevate the hashtag #PelosiMustGo to the nationwide Trending list on Twitter. “Shahid Says…,” read the large print, “Draft some tweets with #PelosiMustGo—don’t forget to capitalize #EachWord. Don’t use more than two hashtags—otherwise you’ll be marked as spam.” The call to action urged people to start posting at noon Pacific time, attach their favorite graphics, and like and retweet other Buttar supporters’ contributions.
I was living in San Francisco then and had been following Buttar’s efforts to get attention, as traditional outlets largely ignored the democratic socialist’s underdog campaign. The day before, incensed at Pelosi’s refusal to debate him, he had sparred with an unoccupied chair outdoors on a public street. But on Twitter that Sunday morning, the challenger had a more promising strategy: If the ploy worked, his slogan would show up on millions of screens across the entire country without costing him a dime. Team Buttar’s message was sent at 10:30 a.m. I wondered whether the online armies would turn out for him. “Did you see this?” I asked a colleague at the Stanford Internet Observatory over Slack, dropping the anonymous call to action into the channel. Then I made a pot of coffee and waited to see whether Buttar’s supporters could pull it off.
Through my work at the Internet Observatory, I’d witnessed many attempts to push messages by gaming the algorithms that Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms use to identify popular content and surface it to users. Confronted with campaigns to make certain ideas seem more widespread than they really are, many researchers and media commentators have taken to using labels such as “misinformation” and “disinformation.” But those terms have fallen victim to scope creep. They imply that a narrative or claim has deviated from a stable or canonical truth; whether Pelosi should go is simply a matter of opinion.
In fact, we have a very old word for persuasive communication with an agenda: propaganda. That term, however, comes with historical baggage. It presumes that governments, authority figures, institutions, and mass media are forcing ideas on regular people from the top down. But more and more, the opposite is happening. Far from being merely a target, the public has become an active participant in creating and selectively amplifying narratives that shape realities. Perhaps the best word for this emergent bottom-up dynamic is one that doesn’t exist quite yet: ampliganda, the shaping of perception through amplification. It can originate from an online nobody or an onscreen celebrity. No single person or organization bears responsibility for its transmission. And it is having a profound effect on democracy and society.
Buttar’s #PelosiMustGo was both typical and unusual. Hashtag campaigns occur all the time, but I happened to catch this one right at the start. First, it was a blip in a corner of the internet, but the hashtag soon lit up the modern propaganda system. This amplification chain is incredibly powerful; it surfaces civil-rights violations, protest movements, and breaking events, whether traditional media choose to cover those events or not. But it’s also how quack medical claims and a daily parade of conspiracy theories are made to trend—#Ivermectin, #SaveTheChildren, #StopTheSteal.
Buttar had two key prerequisites for creating a viral moment: an Extremely Online supporter base experienced in Twitter conflict, and a hashtag slogan expressing righteous indignation. At 11:57 a.m., a Twitter user who went by @Pondipper and had a modest 1,700 followers, jumped the gun: #PelosiMustGo. Tweet No. 1. Buttar himself posted promptly at noon: “Why do you think #PelosiMustGo?” he asked his 113,000 followers. The tweet inspired several hundred replies and retweets, some encouraging him, others questioning him, others mocking him. But anyone who engaged with Buttar’s post—whether to applaud it or scorn it—was telling Twitter algorithms to elevate it. My coffee cooled as the hashtag moved up Twitter’s rankings and began elbowing aside trends about AR-15s, golf, Donald Trump’s pardons, and then–Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
In the previous few years, taking advantage of features like trending lists had become more challenging as social-media companies had gotten wise to the manipulation. By 2018, Twitter had already begun to discount postings from bot and sock-puppet accounts when determining which subjects were becoming popular. Facebook had kicked an infamous Russian troll factory off the platform, and then established integrity teams to look for “coordinated inauthentic behavior”—that is, suspicious activity by networks of accounts that, in many cases, consisted of fake personas. For tech platforms, cracking down on fake accounts, bot networks, and institutional trolls was easy to justify; the general public didn’t much care about the free-speech rights of fake people. But the rewards for successfully capturing public attention were still huge enough to keep authentic actors looking for creative ways to propel their message to the top of Twitter’s popularity charts. More and more, I noticed, ordinary people had been stepping up to spread messages that, in the past, might have been amplified by bots.
As #PelosiMustGo reached No. 7 on the Trending list, the former GOP congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero discovered Buttar’s hashtag and tweeted it to her own 330,000 followers. She and Buttar disagreed on nearly everything—except that #PelosiMustGo. Within three minutes, the hashtag began rippling through the conservative Twitterverse, where regular people utterly unaware of the coordinated effort on the left began tweeting alongside Tesoriero. A second faction had entered the campaign! The conspiracy brokers of QAnon quickly got in the game, appending #PelosiMustGo to posts about the addled theory they happened to be pushing that morning (that the online furniture retailer Wayfair was trafficking children). Pelosi’s own fans followed closely behind, trying to reframe the hashtag: #PelosiMustGo “straight to the White House and take over the presidency!” But by contributing, they only amplified the messages of ideological enemies on the House speaker’s right and left.
If Buttar were a Russian troll, the #PelosiMustGo triumph might have earned him a promotion: Americans were yet again feuding on social media. But Buttar is very much an American, and so were the overwhelming majority of the online activists whom he exhorted to join his campaign. Although it is tempting to believe that foreign bogeymen are sowing discord, the reality is far simpler and more tragic: Outrage generates engagement, which algorithmically begets more engagement, and even those who don’t want to shred the fabric of American society are nonetheless encouraged to play by these rules in their effort to call attention to their cause. When I asked Buttar about the hashtag campaign recently, he told me that he’d chosen #PelosiMustGo because it had the potential to attract attention from a variety of communities. “Foundationally, the challenge is that I talk about all kinds of things—most of what I talk about are solutions to problems—but those posts don’t go viral,” Buttar said. His campaign had built direct-messaging groups of supporters “who were enthusiastic about coordinating across the broader movement,” he recalled, “and I thought of that network and its messaging and capacity as a sort of counterpropaganda, a way to help break through to the public because so many stories never get covered.”
Some ampliganda takes off because an influential user gets an ideologically aligned crowd of followers to spread it; in other cases, an idea spontaneously emerges from somewhere in the online crowd, fellow travelers give it an initial boost, and the influencer sees the emergent action and amplifies it, precipitating a cascade of action from adjacent factions. Most Twitter users never knew that #PelosiMustGo began because someone gave marching orders in a private Discord channel. They saw only the hashtag. They likely assumed that somewhere, some sizable portion of Americans were spontaneously tweeting against the speaker of the House. And they were right—sort of.
In 1622, the same year that Galileo was reiterating his defense of the heliocentric model of the solar system, Pope Gregory XV created the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith—known in Latin as the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, or the Propaganda Fide for short—a body tasked with coordinating and expanding the missionary activity of the Catholic Church.
The Church was in crisis. The Protestant Reformation, kicked off just more than a century earlier, had divided the European continent into competing factions. The English and Dutch were spreading Protestantism to far-flung colonies in Asia and the Americas, while the printing press and rising literacy rates had shattered the Church’s monopoly on the divine word. The Propaganda Fide was intended to stem the losses, to draw waverers back to the one true faith.
The word propaganda is a form of a Latin verb, one that Gregory likely chose “to add to the sense of a religious Crusade,” Maria Teresa Prendergast and Thomas Prendergast write in the Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies. The term referred less to what Church representatives said than what they did; propaganda described their fervid mission to disseminate the Church’s view far and wide.
Over the subsequent centuries, propaganda gradually acquired a secular meaning—information with an agenda, deliberately created to shape the audience’s perception of reality. The term also took on an antidemocratic connotation: Propaganda’s intent was to circumvent a citizen’s reason, to propel him via deceit or chicanery toward belief in a particular cause. Historically, many Americans have been loath to admit either spreading or falling for such material. During the two world wars, propaganda was what the Germans did; in the Cold War era, conservatives in the United States feared Communist domination of the media.
Yet the notion that the powerful could manipulate the masses from the top down took hold on the left as well. At the zenith of mass media, television networks and radio stations communicated unidirectionally to the public. The linguist, philosopher, and social critic Noam Chomsky argued in a 1988 book that the U.S. government was “manufacturing consent” for its policies with the help of complicit news outlets, whose economic incentives and ties to elites led them to abdicate their responsibility to inform the public. This line of reasoning gradually took on a conspiratorial undertone among its most sympathetic audiences: They are trying to control us.
Since then, social media has ended the monopoly of mass-media propaganda. But it has also ushered in a new competitor: ampliganda—the result of a system in which trust has been reallocated from authority figures and legacy media to charismatic individuals adept at appealing to the aspects of personal or ideological identity that their audiences hold most dear.
Of all the changes wrought by social networks, this ability of online crowds to influence one another is among the most important and underappreciated. In a postmortem analysis of the 2016 election, MIT’s Yochai Benkler described a “propaganda pipeline” whereby marginal actors on such social-media sites as Reddit and 4chan pass stories to online influencers, who in turn draw the attention of traditional media. Another scholar, Alicia Wanless, applied the term participatory propaganda, and Jennifer Mercieca, a rhetoric professor at Texas A&M, recently insisted, “We are all propagandists now.” The old top-down propaganda model has begun to erode, but the bottom-up version may be even more destructive.
Today there is simply a rhetorical war of all against all: a maelstrom of viral hashtags competing for attention, hopping from community to community, amplified by crowds of true believers for whom sharing and retweeting is akin to a religious calling—even if the narrative they’re propagating is a ludicrous conspiracy theory about stolen ballots or Wayfair-trafficked children. Ampliganda engenders a constellation of mutually reinforcing arguments targeted at, and internalized by, niche communities, rather than a single, monolithic narrative fed to the full citizenry. It has facilitated a fragmentation of reality with profound implications. Each individual act of clicking or resharing may not feel like a propagandistic act, but in the aggregate, those acts shape conversations, beliefs, realities.
Although we are all partly responsible, we are not all equally responsible. On my computer screen, the spiderlike network graph of Buttar’s hashtag began thickening its web among a new set of users, a disproportionate number of whom had American-flag emoji in their bios and MAGA hats in their profile photos. Jack Posobiec had tweeted about #PelosiMustGo.
Frequently seen sporting a close-cropped beard and a sharply pressed blazer, Posobiec is a former U.S. military-intelligence analyst. His work today is altogether more difficult to categorize. In 2017, Posobiec described it to The New York Times as “part investigative, part activist, part commentary.” Posobiec is notorious for peddling Pizzagate and other groundless, inflammatory conspiracy theories to his 1.3 million Twitter followers. He is an influencer—someone who is famous on social media mostly for being famous on social media. The influencer is an authentic figure in a chaotic online world, opining about topics as disparate as armed conflicts and laundry detergents. Whereas expertise is conferred by the academy and celebrity is conferred from the outside by recognized media outlets, influencers can rise without the validation of gatekeepers—a selling point in an era of anti-elite sensibilities. Conservative influencers promote themselves as ordinary people who defy conniving liberals and the lying mainstream media. Most of these personalities generate attention and, yes, advertising revenue from their adulatory audiences. This is their business; on the left, a separate group of hyperpartisan influencers are running their own grift.
The crowd, meanwhile, is motivated by ideology, but also the camaraderie of participation and the potential for recognition; in their Twitter bios, many of the most committed online factionalists list influencer luminaries who have retweeted them. Once disparagingly called “slacktivism,” clicks and shares in service to a cause have evolved into a source of meaning for many, and what happens online doesn’t stay online.
Jack Posobiec’s tweet about #PelosiMustGo, posted 45 minutes after Buttar’s, was a banal observation: “#PelosiMustGo is now #6 trending,” was all he said. But it was enough; his followers knew their cues. They liked the message 16,000 times and replied or retweeted thousands more, propelling the hashtag fully into the national political conversation. Shortly after, on my screen, the trend hit No. 1.
Five hours after the campaign began, as the sun dipped lower over the San Francisco hills, more than 100,000 tweets had been posted. An ad hoc coalition of socialists, conservatives, influencers, liberals, QAnon supporters, and others had gathered together on the internet for an afternoon of fragmentary and cacophonous micro-discussions about whether #PelosiMustGo. The public’s attention would soon shift elsewhere. The ultimate victory, of course, would be Pelosi’s; she remains the speaker of the House. But for the moment, a politician and a little more than 100 blue-check Twitter accounts had moved in concert with tens of thousands of other users to call the public’s attention to California’s Twelfth District, where Shahid Buttar—socialist, activist, and intersectional feminist—was campaigning to unseat Nancy Pelosi, then the most powerful Democrat in America.
In my conversation with Buttar, he sounded struck not only by the power of the various networks to break through and capture public attention, but also by the unpredictability of how #PelosiMustGo spread. “We didn’t have any control over it,” he said several times, referring to the hashtag once it was unleashed as much as to the behavior of the digital crowds themselves. “We built a pretty big wave, and I was glad to surf it for a while,” he said, until others “with a bigger board pushed me off the wave.” He added, “I remembered thinking as it was happening, Wow, our supporters can build waves like this?! But it wasn’t just our supporters; it was a bunch of other waves in confluence, building on each other.”
America’s political and civic norms have not adjusted to these conditions. We are surrounded at all times by urgency, by demands to take action. We may not be entirely sure why something popped up in our feed, but that doesn’t obviate the nagging feeling that we should pay attention. Understanding the incentives of influencers, recognizing the very common rhetorical techniques that precipitate outrage, developing an awareness of how online crowds now participate in crystallizing public opinion—that is an education that Americans need. Regulators and members of Congress are attempting to sort out which guardrails our communication infrastructure might require, and the platforms that designed the architecture incessantly amend their policies in response to the latest media exposé of unintended consequences. In the short term, each of us becomes more aware of what we choose to amplify, and how we choose to participate. To adapt to the new propaganda, the public must first learn to recognize it.
I closed my laptop as #PelosiMustGo began to fall off the Twitter leaderboards. The next day, there would be new hashtags to track. Whether organic or contrived, they would be amplified by factions, curated and pushed out to the public by algorithms that reward engagement with yet more engagement. A giant web of interconnected users, each with an agenda, shouting at one another to pay attention. It’s not disinformation. Our politics is awash in ampliganda, the propaganda of the modern age.
6. Taiwan's future lies in reunification
Perhap this is true if the mainland become West Taiwan. But somehow I do not think that is what the PRC and CCP intends.
Taiwan's future lies in reunification
Photo taken on July 21, 2019 from Xiangshan Mountain shows the Taipei 101 skyscraper in Taipei, China's Taiwan. [Photo/Xinhua]
On Saturday President Xi Jinping delivered a speech at a gathering to mark the 110th anniversary of the Revolution of 1911. One hundred and ten years ago, revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), putting an end to the absolute monarchy that had dominated China for several thousand years.
The 1911 Revolution reflected the desire of the Chinese people to achieve political independence, realize the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and promote social change in the country.
The significance of the 1911 Revolution has been recognized by both sides of the Taiwan Straits, and Chinese people across the Straits should commemorate the historic achievement together.
In the important speech, President Xi emphasized national reunification by peaceful means best serves China's interests. He said that the Taiwan question arose out of the weakness and chaos of the Chinese nation, and it will be resolved as national rejuvenation becomes a reality.
Sun Yat-sen called for efforts to revitalize the Chinese nation and safeguard the integrity and unity of the country, and hoped that China would keep pace with the times and rank among the world's top nations in the future.
The Communist Party of China has faithfully inherited and staunchly carried forward what Sun Yat-sen wished. China has proceeded from "standing up to getting rich to becoming powerful". And the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation has become an integral part of China's journey.
Over the past 70-odd years, cross-Straits relations have seen tense confrontations, thaw and peaceful exchanges. But healthy cross-Straits relations are of fundamental interest to people on both sides of the Straits and to the benefit of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
The Chinese mainland will stick to the path. Upholding the idea that people on both sides of the Straits are one family, the mainland has been creating opportunities of growth for Taiwan, and giving the mainland and island residents and enterprises the same treatment.
Irrespective of the difficulties, cross-Straits exchanges should never be stopped. Despite the attempts of Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party to undermine cross-Straits ties, the mainland has kept offering preferential policies in a bid to garner the support of more Taiwan residents, especially those who study, work, and live on the mainland, to realize the national rejuvenation.
As Sun Yat-sen said, a unified China has been imprinted on the minds of the Chinese people. The leader of the 1911 Revolution said unification was the hope of all Chinese people, and they would benefit if the nation unified, and suffer if it did not.
But since assuming power in May 2016, the pro-independence DPP has been advancing its political agenda of "Taiwan independence" and has thus deteriorated cross-Straits relations and harmed the interests of Taiwan residents.
There is only one China, and Taiwan is a part of China. This fact can never be changed, and the international community including the United Nations acknowledges it.
The commemoration of the 1911 Revolution will enhance the idea across the Straits that reunification is in the fundamental interest of the Chinese nation and people on both sides should oppose the secessionist forces on the island and work for peaceful reunification.
China has undergone great political changes since the 1911 Revolution, and the Chinese people today will not allow any power to interfere in the internal affairs of the country and check the rise of the Chinese nation.
The key to achieving national reunification is to prevent foreign forces from meddling in the Taiwan question. In the pursuit of "Taiwan independence" in order to fulfill its narrow political interests, the DPP has refused to acknowledge the 1992 Consensus that there is only one China and is serving as a pawn of the United States against the mainland. And the US has used this as an excuse to intensify efforts to heighten tensions across the Straits.
History shows that Taiwan's future depends on the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation rather than on foreign forces. And the DPP's attempts to seek "independence" with the help of the US is doomed to failure, because the mainland will never let that happen.
The commemoration of the 1911 Revolution will help refresh the common memory of compatriots on the both sides of the Straits and boost their emotional connection. Taiwan compatriots should realize the island's future lies in reunification and national rejuvenation. That is also the call of history.
The author is an associate researcher at the Institute of Taiwan Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.
7. Why Can’t Women End Wars?
I think the title is misleading. i think the author's point is women can end wars if they were just given the chance.
Excerpts:
Women, peace, and security is such a popular topic for university programs, think tanks, and Zoom conferences that it even has its own acronym: WPS. This month, the United Nations is set to host its annual open debate on WPS. The field of WPS gets lots of attention, makes everyone feel as if they’re doing something, and ticks all the right boxes for donors.
In Aristophanes’s fifth-century B.C. comedy Lysistrata, the women of ancient Athens and Sparta discover an ingenious way of ending the war between the two city-states. They withhold sex from their menfolk until the warriors cease fighting and sit down to settle terms. It’s possibly the most original and effective peace process ever devised.
While Aristophanes’s method might not work for ending modern wars, such as those still raging in Syria and Ethiopia’s Tigray region, the general concept still holds: Women often have unique skills and power when they negotiate or sit down at the table to end conflicts. Yet why are so few women involved in peace processes as negotiators, mediators, community organizers, or facilitators of so-called Track 2 dialogues—far fewer than in many other areas of politics and policy? Why are questions of war and peace still left almost entirely to men?
Why Can’t Women End Wars?
An expert's point of view on a current event.
Even as other domains of policy diversify, peacemaking is still left almost entirely to men.
By Janine di Giovanni, a columnist at Foreign Policy and a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs.
A Spartan woman says goodbye to her son as he goes to war in an 1881 drawing by Dionisio Baixeras. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
In Aristophanes’s fifth-century B.C. comedy Lysistrata, the women of ancient Athens and Sparta discover an ingenious way of ending the war between the two city-states. They withhold sex from their menfolk until the warriors cease fighting and sit down to settle terms. It’s possibly the most original and effective peace process ever devised.
While Aristophanes’s method might not work for ending modern wars, such as those still raging in Syria and Ethiopia’s Tigray region, the general concept still holds: Women often have unique skills and power when they negotiate or sit down at the table to end conflicts. Yet why are so few women involved in peace processes as negotiators, mediators, community organizers, or facilitators of so-called Track 2 dialogues—far fewer than in many other areas of politics and policy? Why are questions of war and peace still left almost entirely to men?
Women, peace, and security is such a popular topic for university programs, think tanks, and Zoom conferences that it even has its own acronym: WPS. This month, the United Nations is set to host its annual open debate on WPS. The field of WPS gets lots of attention, makes everyone feel as if they’re doing something, and ticks all the right boxes for donors.
In Aristophanes’s fifth-century B.C. comedy Lysistrata, the women of ancient Athens and Sparta discover an ingenious way of ending the war between the two city-states. They withhold sex from their menfolk until the warriors cease fighting and sit down to settle terms. It’s possibly the most original and effective peace process ever devised.
While Aristophanes’s method might not work for ending modern wars, such as those still raging in Syria and Ethiopia’s Tigray region, the general concept still holds: Women often have unique skills and power when they negotiate or sit down at the table to end conflicts. Yet why are so few women involved in peace processes as negotiators, mediators, community organizers, or facilitators of so-called Track 2 dialogues—far fewer than in many other areas of politics and policy? Why are questions of war and peace still left almost entirely to men?
Women, peace, and security is such a popular topic for university programs, think tanks, and Zoom conferences that it even has its own acronym: WPS. This month, the United Nations is set to host its annual open debate on WPS. The field of WPS gets lots of attention, makes everyone feel as if they’re doing something, and ticks all the right boxes for donors.
But WPS is a talking-shop term. Even though I am a woman involved in peace and security—I have worked with the United Nations, teach about conflict at Yale University, and have written about peace and security in my books and countless articles—I’ve been baffled by the term for years. What exactly does it mean? Engaging civil society to take a more active role in ending conflicts? Putting women at the forefront of negotiating teams? Training more women in peacebuilding?
All of it sounds fine on paper—but in reality, it rarely happens. The U.N. Security Council’s groundbreaking Resolution 1325 recognized the disproportionate, unique, and harrowing impact of conflict on women and girls. It was meant to increase the participation of women and “incorporate gender perspectives.” Governments were supposed to implement national action plans to support women peacebuilders.
But in the current conflicts raging across the globe, I don’t see many women leading the talks or being empowered to select the participants of peace conferences. With the U.N. deadlocked in Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere by various member states that benefit from each continuing war, the trend falls on letting boutique conflict resolution organizations—such as the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, the Berghof Foundation in Berlin, or the European Institute of Peace in Brussels—set the stage by engaging in Track 2 dialogue, as informal, behind-the-scenes peace processes are known.
Track 2 usually involves civil society representatives hashing out the opening moves of how to end a conflict. This often includes faith-based leaders and—at least aspirationally—women’s groups. Although women’s groups are a powerful component of civil society, women are rarely there. Interestingly enough, all three conflict resolution organizations mentioned above are run by men who once held senior positions at the U.N.
The women close to the men waging war could also have tremendous influence. The powerful spouses of leaders, for example, are not always peacemakers, but they should be—and things might turn out differently if they were called on to influence peace processes. Wives of senior military commanders are potent as well; they can often influence their husbands in a way that the men’s closest advisors cannot. They are often mothers and can exercise empathy. They can help stop massacres or grievous human rights abuses.
Just think of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s wife, Asma, who was silent when her husband chemically gassed Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, in 2013, killing children. This was not long after she gave an infamous interview to Vogue (now scrubbed from the internet) talking about her children’s charity. Asma was silent when her husband bombed family homes in Homs and when he leveled Aleppo with barrel bombs, hitting schools and hospitals.
Asma was also silent when he starved to death the people of Moadamiya using his tactic of “starvation or surrender.” She could have reminded her husband that he also had children—what if this were happening to them? Like the strong women of Lysistrata, she could have leveraged their relationship, but she chose not to. The same with Mirjana Markovic, the wife of Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, who was considered the power behind the throne as her husband ripped the country apart via four wars in the 1990s. Markovic was presumably with her husband in Belgrade in July 1995, when 8,000 Bosniak boys and men were slaughtered at Srebrenica. Milosevic was the top of the chain of command, and he was besotted with his wife—she could have influenced him and stopped the genocide. She was a fiercely nationalist politician in her own right and may even have pressed him on, underlining the point that leaders’ spouses are often too important to ignore.
We’re all aware of the gender imbalance in Silicon Valley and Hollywood. But the life-and-death imbalance is in peacemaking. In 2018, the World Economic Forum concluded: “Only 4% of signatories to peace agreements between 1992 and 2011 were women, and only 9% of negotiators. And yet, studies have shown that female participation is the secret to ensuring lasting peace.” The report cites examples of women being instrumental in forging peace in Liberia, Northern Ireland, and the Philippines.
There have been attempts to right the balance. In 2017, the United States became the first country in the world with a comprehensive law on WPS. It states: “The WPS Strategy recognizes the diverse roles women play as agents of change in preventing and resolving conflict, countering terrorism and violent extremism, and building post conflict peace and stability. The WPS Strategy seeks to increase women’s meaningful leadership in political and civic life by helping to ensure they are empowered to lead and contribute, equipped with the necessary skills and support to succeed, and supported to participate through access to opportunities and resources.” The irony: This law to advance women’s equality was passed under one of the most misogynist presidents in U.S. history.
As with most government reports, I read the law over and over and am still wondering what it means—and how it will be put in practice.
Nordic countries still surpass most places with their advancement of women’s rights and their commitment to peacebuilding. Finland was the first country in Europe to give women the right to vote and remains one of the most impressive countries in the world in terms of women and gender equality in politics. Yet, at a famous, off-the-record peacemakers’ confab that takes place in Norway every year, I noticed only a handful of women, and most were the special assistants of powerful men.
And the powerful women who are often cited in politics don’t seem to go down the road of peacemaking. Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took her country to war in 1982. U.S. first lady Hillary Clinton stood by while her husband did nothing in Rwanda or Bosnia until it was too late.
Women are often portrayed as victims of war, largely of sexual violence. But women have power. According to U.N. Women, when women participate in a peace process, it increases the likelihood of peace lasting more than two years by 20 percent. The U.N. Security Council has called for women to be more involved in conflict resolution. One strong grassroots example of conflict resolution is the Mothers of Srebrenica, a powerful advocacy and lobbying group founded after the 1995 genocide in the Bosnian town.
U.N. Women’s analysis of 40 peace processes since the end of the Cold War shows that, “in cases where women were able to exercise a strong influence on the negotiation process, there was a much higher chance that an agreement would be reached than when women’s groups exercised weak or no influence. In cases of strong influence of women an agreement was almost always reached.”
If we really want to start developing WPS into more than just a trendy acronym, we need to prepare more women to be on the ground and in Track 2 processes—to learn how to organize, facilitate, and negotiate. These skilled activities, along with decision-making, are too often left to men. In peace processes in places like Mali, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic, women were woefully underrepresented. Only Colombia, which has so far managed to stay at peace after a long and bloody war, is an example of where women were better represented.
Gaining more diverse input in peace processes can only have positive results. After all, women are usually not the combatants but the ones picking up the pieces of a broken society. They know what needs to be done. They know how to heal and how to patch together broken people.
I think a copy of Lysistrata should be sent to the head of every government, who should read it carefully as a metaphorical model for implementing peace and charting success. We should remember the wise words of the title character Lysistrata: “Before now, and for quite some time, we maintained our decorum and suffered in silence whatever you men did, because you wouldn’t let us make a sound. … But if the women gather together here—the Boeotian women, the Peloponnesian women, and ourselves—together we’ll be able to rescue Greece.”
Janine di Giovanni is a columnist at Foreign Policy, a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, the winner of multiple journalism awards, and the author of The Vanishing: Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophets, to be published in October. Twitter: @janinedigi
8. US Withdrawal From Afghanistan: An Act Of Offshore Balancing
Excerpts:
To conclude, the US will push China to shift its foreign policy of non-intervention to intervention by using regional security threats, QUAD and AUKUS. The policy of offshore balancing eventually will pose threats to China and its neighbors. To an extent the US policy of offshore balancing will force China to intervene in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is an Achilles’ heel for Chinese growing power, as no country likely to be a regional hegemon if there is a security threat in its neighborhood. All the neighboring countries of China may share the burden of the US offshore balancing policy. The region might get divided into blocs as the world powers compete for supremacy.
China might focus enhanced economic cooperation with Afghanistan keeping the defensive posture towards its counterparts, and would try to bring peace in order to secure its One Belt One Road Initiative (BRI). Keeping in view the Chinese history of non-confrontational politics and use of soft power, Beijing may go for engagement with the stake holders in Afghanistan. Moreover, unlike the US, it may invest more on infrastructural development with mutual benefits in sight for both Afghanistan and China rather than opting for confrontation.
US Withdrawal From Afghanistan: An Act Of Offshore Balancing – OpEd
The year 2021 marked the end of the US war on terror in Afghanistan. The US invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks planned by Al-Qaeda. The US led invasion lasted for two decades, and the complete withdrawal ended on 31st August 2021. Why did the US leave Afghanistan, a strategically important region in Asia, and end its war? To adequately comprehend the situation, one needs to see within the lens of offensive realisms significant axiom offshore balancing. The US practiced offshore balancing to deal with world affairs, become a global hegemon, and maintain its regional hegemony. For offensive realists, the ultimate objective of the superpowers is to attain and retain global hegemony. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt emphasize that in reality, no country can attain global hegemony due to the difficulty for projecting and maintaining power throughout the globe and into the territories of other major countries. As a result, powerful countries gain regional hegemony and prevent the emergence of other potential regional hegemons.
By observing the US withdrawal from Afghanistan through the offshore balancing lens, one can argue that the US has been trying to consolidate its dominance in South Asia by obstructing the rise of China. The US policy in Afghanistan was clear – the Bush administration started the war on terror and President Barack Obama, an antiwar advocate, followed the same steps, and increased the number of troops. Later, President Donald Trump unveiled his Afghanistan strategy in his inauguration in 2016. Trump promised during his election campaigns to withdraw the US troops from Afghanistan as quickly as feasible. Unfortunately, during Trump’s presidency, nearly 10,000 US troops and twice as many US contractors as the total number of US troops remained in the war-torn region. Things changed when the Biden administration took charge of the country, and an exit plan was completed on August 31, 2021.
Numerous observers and actors are alarmed by the planned yet instantaneous withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan, a strategic area for US policymakers. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan without foreseeing the return of the Taliban posed some serious questions to the US foreign policy. However, the US is recalibrating its foreign policy priorities for the century ahead. Although the US withdrew its ground troops from Afghanistan, its policy of offshore balancing remains intact.
Moreover, the US believed that their peacemaking activities in Afghanistan are directly being used by China to control the vast mineral resources. Likewise, for the US the Chinese rise needs to be slowed down by any means. By withdrawing and ending the support to the Afghan government, the US paved the way for the Taliban to take over Afghanistan. The takeover of the Taliban and fall of the Panjshir can escalate the civil war within Afghanistan. A country cannot be a hegemon if its region is not in order and the US deliberately left Afghanistan for dragging China in Afghanistan issue. The US militarization in Afghanistan was an indirect on-shore counterweight against China. The ongoing policy shift grants the US more time to focus on the China’s rise and to secure its fading global power rather than spending billions on Afghanistan.
Furthermore, alliances like Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) and Australia, the United Kingdom, and the US (AUKUS) are used to keep check on China’s growing influence in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and North Pacific Ocean and on the land. The US withdrawal has already left a significant power vacuum. As concerns are raised that how the Taliban regime would rule, regional actors are expected to assist in order to prevent any political crisis. Russia, Iran, Turkey, India, and Pakistan have their reasons to intervene. However, the biggest question remains that is whether China will depart from its longstanding “non-interventionist” policy to get involved in an area historically known as “the graveyard of empires’”.
To conclude, the US will push China to shift its foreign policy of non-intervention to intervention by using regional security threats, QUAD and AUKUS. The policy of offshore balancing eventually will pose threats to China and its neighbors. To an extent the US policy of offshore balancing will force China to intervene in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is an Achilles’ heel for Chinese growing power, as no country likely to be a regional hegemon if there is a security threat in its neighborhood. All the neighboring countries of China may share the burden of the US offshore balancing policy. The region might get divided into blocs as the world powers compete for supremacy.
China might focus enhanced economic cooperation with Afghanistan keeping the defensive posture towards its counterparts, and would try to bring peace in order to secure its One Belt One Road Initiative (BRI). Keeping in view the Chinese history of non-confrontational politics and use of soft power, Beijing may go for engagement with the stake holders in Afghanistan. Moreover, unlike the US, it may invest more on infrastructural development with mutual benefits in sight for both Afghanistan and China rather than opting for confrontation.
*Aqeel Ahmad is a Research Assistant at Balochistan Think Tank Network (BTTN).
9. EXCLUSIVE Cash airlifts planned to bypass Taliban and help Afghans -sources
I defer to all the Afghanistan experts on this. But can the cash make it to the people and won't those who receive such cash just be targets for the Taliban? And if we can get cash into Afghanistan and to specific people in need can we also get Americans and SIV eligible and other at risk Afghans out?
EXCLUSIVE Cash airlifts planned to bypass Taliban and help Afghans -sources
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A boy sells bread at a makeshift shelter for displaced Afghan families, who are fleeing the violence in their provinces, at Shahr-e Naw park, in Kabul, Afghanistan October 4, 2021. REUTERS/Jorge Silva
- Summary
- Cash drops would go to poorest facing hunger
- Special fund could help pay salaries
- Some donors want money to pressure Taliban
BRUSSELS/FRANKFURT/WASHINGTON, Oct 7 (Reuters) - As desperate Afghans resort to selling their belongings to buy food, international officials are preparing to fly in cash for the needy while avoiding financing the Taliban government, according to people familiar with the confidential plans.
Planning for the cash airlifts is going ahead against the background of a rapidly collapsing economy where money is short, although diplomats are still debating whether Western powers can demand that the Taliban make concessions in return, according to internal policy documents seen by Reuters.
The emergency funding, aimed at averting a humanitarian crisis in the face of drought and political upheaval, could see U.S. dollar bills flown into Kabul for distribution via banks in payments of less than $200 directly to the poor - with the Taliban's blessing but without their involvement.
As well as flying in cash to stem the immediate crisis, donor countries want to set up a "humanitarian-plus" trust fund that would pay salaries and keep schools and hospitals open, two senior officials said.
Many Afghans have started selling their possessions to pay for ever scarcer food. The departure of U.S.-led forces and many international donors robbed the country of grants that financed 75% of public spending, according to the World Bank.
The West's unorthodox strategy reflects the dilemma it faces. Still eager to help Afghanistan after two decades of war, and to prevent mass migration, it is also loathe to give money to the Taliban, who seized power in August and have yet to show significant change from the harsh way they ruled the country between 1996-2001.
CASH DROPS
The United Nations has warned that 14 million Afghans face hunger. Mary-Ellen McGroarty, U.N. World Food Programme Afghanistan director, said the economy could collapse in the face of the cash crisis.
"Many parents are foregoing food so that their children can eat," she has said.
In recent days, Western diplomats and officials have stepped up efforts to establish a cash lifeline.
The United Nations World Food Programme has distributed about 10 million Afghanis ($110,000) in cash via a local bank and intends to disburse more soon, said one person with knowledge of the situation.
The cash runs are a trial for larger air deliveries of dollars from Pakistan, the person said.
A senior diplomat said two approaches are under consideration that would inject cash into the Afghan economy. Both are in the planning stages.
Under the first plan, the World Food Programme would fly in cash and distribute it directly to people to buy food, expanding on something the agency already has been doing on a smaller scale.
The second approach would see cash flown in to be held by banks on behalf of the United Nations. That would be used to pay salaries to the staff of U.N. agencies and non-governmental organizations, the diplomat said.
A third person said U.N. officials had talked with Afghan banks about opening up cash distribution channels.
"If the country collapses, we will all pay the consequences," said a senior European Union official. "No one wants to rush into a recognition of the Taliban, but we need to deal with them. The question is not if ... but how."
A spokesperson for the World Food Programme said it had helped almost 4 million people in September, nearly triple the August number, chiefly with food, and some cash assistance had been given out in Kabul.
The spokesperson said the cash shortage was also affecting the millers and truckers it worked with. He said that the agency was not flying cash into Afghanistan.
NINE-BILLION-DOLLAR LEVERAGE
Separately, the European Union, Britain and the United States have discussed setting up an international trust fund to bypass the Afghan government and help finance local services, according to two officials with knowledge of the matter.
The Taliban did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the cash airlift plans.
A U.S. Treasury spokesperson said it would allow humanitarian assistance through independent international and non-governmental organisations while "denying assets" to the Taliban and sanctioning its leaders.
The Kabul government has little to fall back on. The central bank, with assets of $9 billion frozen offshore, has burnt through much of its reserves at home.
Shah Mehrabi, an official who helped oversee the bank before the Taliban took over and is still in his post, recently appealed for a release of the overseas reserves.
"If reserves remain frozen, Afghan importers will not be able to pay for their shipments, banks will start to collapse, food will be become scarce," he said.
But there is also a debate about whether strings should be attached to cash releases.
In a paper written last month and seen by Reuters, French and German officials outline their aim of using money as a "lever" to pressure the Taliban.
"Countries could condition recognition of the political ... legitimacy of the Taliban to the commitments they would be ready to take," officials said in the two-page report.
"Economic and trade levers are among the strongest we have," the note said, raising the prospect of releasing the Afghan reserves held abroad.
In a separate diplomatic note, French and German officials outline five demands that could be made of the Taliban.
Those include allowing Afghans who want to leave the country to do so, "breaking ties with ... terrorist organisations", allowing access to humanitarian aid, respect for human rights and establishing an "inclusive government".
Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay, Michelle Nichols and Rupam Jain; Writing by John O'Donnell; Editing by Giles Elgood
10. China’s Communist Party Formally Embraces Assimilationist Approach to Ethnic Minorities
"Integration of all ethnic groups" may be translated as the elimination of all ethnic cultures except the Han Chinese.
Excerpts:
Beijing is also breaking with precedent in deciding which officials to put in charge of managing minority populations. In addition to Ms. Wang’s unusual appointment in Inner Mongolia, Mr. Xi last year replaced the ethnic Mongolian head of the National Ethnic Affairs Commission with Chen Xiaojiang, the first Han Chinese director of the commission since 1954.
Local governments have taken the lead in adopting some policy changes. In March, Guizhou province, where close to 40% of the population are minorities, announced it would gradually stop giving extra points for ethnic minorities in college-entrance exams. Others, such as Liaoning and Fujian, also announced late last year that they would end such affirmative action by 2026.
Following Mr. Xi’s ethnic affairs meeting in August, the country’s top ethnic-affairs body published a commentary that called for “forging a collective consciousness of the Chinese nation” to be woven through the entirety of the country’s education system, especially for younger students.
It also pledged to promote the exchanges between ethnic minorities and Han Chinese, and suggested encouraging more ethnic Chinese to work in other minority-dominated regions of the country—a common source of resentment among Tibetans and Uyghurs.
“It is necessary to promote the extensive exchanges and integration of all ethnic groups, promote the unity of all ethnic groups in ideals, beliefs, emotions, and cultures, and support each other and have deep brotherhood,” it quoted Mr. Xi as saying.
China’s Communist Party Formally Embraces Assimilationist Approach to Ethnic Minorities
Quiet changes to education policy, personnel in minority regions follow Xi’s call for forging of a ‘collective consciousness’
That shift follows a meeting of senior officials in Beijing to discuss ethnic policy in late August, where party leaders acknowledged the new direction for the first time in a formal setting.
“Guiding all ethnic groups to jointly strive to build a modern socialist country is a crucial aspect on ethnic issues in the new era,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping said at the meeting, according to state-run Xinhua News Agency. The way to reduce the potential for ethnic conflict, he said, is by taking steps to “forge a collective consciousness of the Chinese nation.”
The policy shift is increasingly showing up in personnel moves. In September, the party appointed a new chairwoman, Wang Lixia, to serve as the head of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Ms. Wang, an ethnic Mongolian born in northeast China’s Liaoning province, became the first head of the government born outside of the region since the late 1970s.
Members of the Young Pioneers of China in Shanghai. Xi Jinping has promoted a ‘China Dream’ of national rejuvenation
Photo: alex plavevski/Shutterstock
The National Ethnic Affairs Commission, the agency in charge of implementing ethnic policy, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
For the past several years, China’s government has waged an aggressive campaign in the far northwestern region of Xinjiang, where as many as one million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims have been subjected to political indoctrination in a network of internment camps—what Beijing has called vocational training schools. Tibetans and Mongolians have also felt increased pressure to assimilate through changes in education and increased surveillance.
Despite pursuing what government documents refer to as “ethnic fusion” in places like Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia, the Communist Party had continued to pay lip service to its original ethnic policy. Inspired by the Soviet Union, it offered minority communities nominal political autonomy alongside preferential policies like extra points on the country’s competitive college-entrance examinations and exemptions from family-planning rules.
The recent developments indicate that Mr. Xi and the party are moving more aggressively away from that approach, scholars say.
Mr. Xi’s speech at the ethnic affairs meeting in Beijing in August “marks the formal arrival of the second generation of ethnic policy,” said James Leibold, a professor who specializes in China’s minorities at La Trobe University in Australia.
Tension between Han Chinese, who account for more than 90% of China’s population, and some of the country’s 55 other ethnic groups has been an abiding theme in China since the Communist Party took power in 1949. The most revered figure in Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, fled into exile in India in 1959 after a failed uprising against Communist rule. In 2009, at least 200 Uyghurs and Han Chinese died during several days of ethnic rioting in Xinjiang’s capital of Urumqi.
The Communist Party used to believe that minority groups would assimilate naturally if given the space and enough economic assistance to draw even in development with the country’s dominant Han Chinese population, but Mr. Xi no longer believes in the viability of that strategy, Mr. Leibold said.
“Not that economic development is not important, but that economic development alone is not going to solve the problem of ethnic affairs,” he said.
The change has been driven by an increase in conflicts, particularly in Xinjiang, as well as rising resentment among Han Chinese at the advantages afforded minorities, and Mr. Xi’s own rhetoric in promoting a “China Dream” of national rejuvenation, scholars say.
Paramilitary police took to the streets in the aftermath of 2009 riots in China’s Xinjiang province, in which at least 200 Uyghurs and Han Chinese died.
Photo: Eugene Hoshiko/associated press
Mr. Xi is concerned that his goal of completing China’s national rejuvenation by 2049—the centennial of the country’s founding—could be undermined by ethnic conflict, according to officials and government advisers.
That concern helps explain the party’s aggressive actions in Xinjiang, as well as more subtle changes taking place elsewhere in the country.
The recent changes to childhood development guidelines underscore and unify scattered efforts to phase out or de-emphasize the teaching of minority languages in schools—a key element in the forging of a single national identity, according to government documents.
Beijing is also breaking with precedent in deciding which officials to put in charge of managing minority populations. In addition to Ms. Wang’s unusual appointment in Inner Mongolia, Mr. Xi last year replaced the ethnic Mongolian head of the National Ethnic Affairs Commission with Chen Xiaojiang, the first Han Chinese director of the commission since 1954.
Local governments have taken the lead in adopting some policy changes. In March, Guizhou province, where close to 40% of the population are minorities, announced it would gradually stop giving extra points for ethnic minorities in college-entrance exams. Others, such as Liaoning and Fujian, also announced late last year that they would end such affirmative action by 2026.
Following Mr. Xi’s ethnic affairs meeting in August, the country’s top ethnic-affairs body published a commentary that called for “forging a collective consciousness of the Chinese nation” to be woven through the entirety of the country’s education system, especially for younger students.
It also pledged to promote the exchanges between ethnic minorities and Han Chinese, and suggested encouraging more ethnic Chinese to work in other minority-dominated regions of the country—a common source of resentment among Tibetans and Uyghurs.
“It is necessary to promote the extensive exchanges and integration of all ethnic groups, promote the unity of all ethnic groups in ideals, beliefs, emotions, and cultures, and support each other and have deep brotherhood,” it quoted Mr. Xi as saying.
Police officers patrol the border in Yili in China's Xinjiang region.
Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
11. ‘Starting a Fire’: U.S. and China Enter Dangerous Territory Over Taiwan
Excerpts:
Behind the scenes, Biden administration officials have expressed worry that China is trying to normalize a new baseline of hostile pressure on Taiwan, and they have deliberated on ways to slow or thwart its military development.
Mr. Biden is also trying to lower the temperature, speaking last month with Mr. Xi. On Tuesday he said he and the Chinese leader had agreed to the standing agreements on Taiwan. A day later, the White House announced that he and Mr. Xi would hold a virtual summit by the end of the year.
The two leaders know each other well. A decade ago, Mr. Biden, then vice president, went to China to size up Mr. Xi before he became the nation’s top leader.
“My father used to tell me, Joey, the only thing worse than a war is an unintentional war,” Mr. Biden told Mr. Xi, according to Mr. Russel, the former national security aide.
Mr. Russel added: “I think it is a prescient warning.”
The Taiwan Strait, with Xiamen, China, in the background, and the islands of Kinmen County, Taiwan, in the foreground. The question at the heart of Taiwan’s future is whether Mr. Xi intends to act.
‘Starting a Fire’: U.S. and China Enter Dangerous Territory Over Taiwan
The self-ruled island has moved to the heart of deepening discord and rivalry between the two superpowers, with the potential to ignite military conflagration and reshape the regional order.
Taiwanese helicopters flying through Taipei, the capital. China’s growing military might has for the first time made a conquest of Taiwan conceivable, perhaps even tempting.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
The self-ruled island has moved to the heart of deepening discord and rivalry between the two superpowers, with the potential to ignite military conflagration and reshape the regional order.
Taiwanese helicopters flying through Taipei, the capital. China’s growing military might has for the first time made a conquest of Taiwan conceivable, perhaps even tempting.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
The 25 Chinese fighter jets, bombers and other warplanes flew in menacing formations off the southern end of Taiwan, a show of military might on China’s National Day, Oct. 1. The incursions, dozens upon dozens, continued into the night and the days that followed and surged to the highest numbers ever on Monday, when 56 warplanes tested Taiwan’s beleaguered air defenses.
Taiwan’s jets scrambled to keep up, while the United States warned China that its “provocative military activity” undermined “regional peace and stability.” China did not cower. When a Taiwanese combat air traffic controller radioed one Chinese aircraft, the pilot dismissed the challenge with an obscenity involving the officer’s mother.
As such confrontations intensify, the balance of power around Taiwan is fundamentally shifting, pushing a decades-long impasse over its future into a dangerous new phase.
After holding out against unification demands from China’s communist rulers for more than 70 years, Taiwan is now at the heart of the deepening discord between China and the United States. The island’s fate has the potential to reshape the regional order and even to ignite a military conflagration — intentional or not.
By The New York Times
“There’s very little insulation left on the wiring in the relationship,” Danny Russel, a former assistant secretary of state, said, “and it’s not hard to imagine getting some crossed wires and that starting a fire.”
China’s military might has, for the first time, made a conquest of Taiwan conceivable, perhaps even tempting. The United States wants to thwart any invasion but has watched its military dominance in Asia steadily erode. Taiwan’s own military preparedness has withered, even as its people become increasingly resistant to unification.
Planes from the People’s Liberation Army Air Force were covered before the opening of an aviation expo in Zhuhai, China, last month.
All three have sought to show resolve in hopes of averting war, only to provoke countermoves that compound distrust and increase the risk of miscalculation.
At one particularly tense moment, in October 2020, American intelligence reports detailed how Chinese leaders had become worried that President Trump was preparing an attack. Those concerns, which could have been misread, prompted Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to call his counterpart in Beijing to assure otherwise.
“The Taiwan issue has ceased to be a sort of narrow, boutique issue, and it’s become a central theater — if not the central drama — in U.S.-China strategic competition,” said Evan Medeiros, who served on President Obama’s National Security Council.
Mr. Xi said Saturday in Beijing that Taiwan independence “was a grave lurking threat to national rejuvenation.” China wanted peaceful unification, he said, but added: “Nobody should underestimate the staunch determination, firm will and powerful ability of the Chinese people to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Few believe a war is imminent or foreordained, in part because the economic and diplomatic aftershocks would be staggering for China. Yet even if the recent flights into Taiwan’s self-declared air identification zone are intended merely as political pressure, not a prelude to war, China’s financial, political and military ascendancy has made preserving the island’s security a gravely complex endeavor.
Until recently, the United States believed it could hold Chinese territorial ambitions in check, but the military superiority it long held may not be enough. When the Pentagon organized a war game in October 2020, an American “blue team” struggled against new Chinese weaponry in a simulated battle over Taiwan.
An undated photo from Taiwan’s defense ministry showing a Chinese H-6 bomber. The ministry said that H-6 bombers were among the planes that China flew recently near the island.Credit...Taiwan Ministry Of National Defense, via EPA, via Shutterstock
China now acts with increasing confidence, in part because many officials, including Mr. Xi, hold the view that American power has faltered. The United States’ failures with the Covid-19 pandemic and its political upheavals have reinforced such views.
Some advisers and former officers in China argue that the United States no longer has the will to send forces if a war were to break out over Taiwan. Under the right conditions, others suggest, the People’s Liberation Army could prevail if it did.
“Would the United States court death for Taiwan?” Teng Jianqun, a former Chinese navy captain, said in a recent interview on Chinese television.
Such posturing, in turn, ignites more tensions.
In Taiwan, China’s military provocations have bolstered political support for the island’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, who has sought to forge ties with countries increasingly wary of China. The Biden administration is trying to bolster Taiwan’s defense capabilities and international standing, hoping to delay or prevent the need for American military intervention.
“The three sides have seen their interactions caught in a vicious spiral,” Jia Qingguo, a professor of international relations at Peking University who advises the Chinese government, recently wrote. “The process of vicious interactions between Taipei, Beijing, and Washington resembles the forming of a perfect storm.”
A ‘Historic Mission’
Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, center. Under his nationalist agenda, Mr. Xi has vowed to bring Taiwan under Chinese control.Credit...Roman Pilipey/EPA, via Shutterstock
Two days after the fall of Kabul in August, as the Biden administration scrambled to evacuate thousands stranded by the American withdrawal, China staged military exercises explicitly designed to show off its prowess.
Chinese warships fired missiles into the sea south of Taiwan, while amphibious landing vehicles swept ashore a beach in China. It was one of the largest exercises ever to simulate an invasion across the Taiwan Strait.
In previous drills, the People’s Liberation Army maintained a gauze of deniability about its imagined adversary, but this time it left no doubt. One officer on Chinese television warned the United States and Taiwan “not to play with fire on the Taiwan issue and immolate themselves.”
The question is whether Mr. Xi intends to act.
He has vowed to lead the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” including bringing Taiwan under Chinese control. Some interpret that to mean within a decade, if not sooner. His hard-line policies have made it less likely that Taiwan could ever willingly agree to China’s terms, especially after Mr. Xi throttled political freedoms in Hong Kong.
Every leader since Mao has vowed to absorb Taiwan, but Mr. Xi is the first who commands a military strong enough to make forced unification plausible, albeit still a formidable task.
Soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army during a live-fire exercise earlier this year.Credit...CNS, via Reuters
Any assault on Taiwan, which lies 100 miles off the coast, would require overwhelming military advantage. Even if Chinese forces seized control over the island of 24 million, the war would badly shake China’s economy and international relations, while exacting a significant human toll.
“Even moderate voices in Beijing have been calling for tossing out peaceful reunification,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “I think the military option is the option now.”
China’s leaders began the long, politically fraught process of overhauling the People’s Liberation Army after watching the United States put its military power on display in the Persian Gulf war against Iraq in 1990.
Six years later, they understood just how far behind their military had fallen when the United States dispatched two aircraft carriers near Taiwan in response to China firing missiles into the seas near the island. After the American show of force, China backed down.
Robert L. Thomas, a former vice admiral who commanded the United States Navy’s Seventh Fleet in Japan, recalled a meeting with a Chinese admiral in 2015. The admiral told him that the 1996 confrontation still stung nearly two decades later.
The Chinese military maneuvers have bolstered political support for Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
“It’s clear to me that they won’t allow themselves to be embarrassed again by a Taiwan Strait crisis where the U.S. Seventh Fleet shows up and says, ‘Everybody calm down,’” Mr. Thomas said.
Since then, China’s leaders have poured money into the People’s Liberation Army. In a decade, military spending grew by 76 percent, reaching $252 billion in 2020, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (The United States spent $778 billion on its military last year.) Mr. Xi has also reorganized the military, raising the status of naval and air forces and pushing commanders to master joint warfare.
In an exercise last year, the military conducted a drill that simulated sealing off the Taiwan Strait from outside forces. What was unthinkable in 1996 could now be within reach.
The exercise was like “trapping a turtle in a jar,” said a website run by China’s office for Taiwan affairs.
‘A Matter of Time’
When the United States Air Force held its own war games over Taiwan in autumn last year, the outcome rattled Washington’s political and military establishment.
Ships from the U.S. Navy, left, and the U.S. Coast Guard sailed through the Taiwan Strait in August.Credit...U.S. Coast Guard, via Associated Press
In war games since at least 2018, American “blue” teams have repeatedly lost against a “red” team representing a hypothetical Chinese force — in part by design, since the exercises are intended to test officers and war planners. In a game simulating a war around 2030, reported earlier by Defense News, the “blue” team struggled even when given new advanced fighter planes and other weapons still on the Pentagon’s drawing board.
The classified game culminated with China launching missile strikes against American bases and warships in the region, and then staging an air and amphibious assault on Taiwan, according to a Defense Department official. The officials concluded that Taiwan, backed by the United States, could hold out for maybe two or three days before its defenses crumbled.
The Pentagon’s annual assessments of China’s military have since 2000 chronicled its evolution from a large but ineffective force into a potential rival. Its latest report said Chinese capabilities have already surpassed the American military in some areas, including shipbuilding, conventional ballistic and cruise missiles, and integrated air defense systems. All three would be essential in any conflict over Taiwan.
“I worry that they are accelerating their ambitions to supplant the United States,” Admiral Philip S. Davidson, the retiring commander of the Indo-Pacific Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March. “Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions before then, and I think the threat is manifest during this decade; in fact, in the next six years.”
His bleak prediction has since colored debates in Washington over what to do. Some have argued that explicit security guarantees for Taiwan are needed. Others have called for building up of military forces around China, and helping Taiwan to do the same.
Admiral Philip S. Davidson, center left, the retiring commander of the Indo-Pacific Command, told a Senate committee in March that China could try to get control of Taiwan within the next six years.Credit...Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser, via Associated Press
“To us, it’s only a matter of time, not a matter of if,” Rear Admiral Michael Studeman, the director of intelligence with the United States’ Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii, said in a July talk, about the possibility of armed conflict over Taiwan.
It is far from clear that Taiwan is ready. Since Taiwan’s government has phased out mandatory conscription for most young men, it has struggled to sustain a professional, all-volunteer force. The state of its military has declined steadily, punctuated by a series of accidents, including a helicopter crash last year that killed its top commander.
“The training isn’t as intense as it was before,” said Chang Yan-ting, a former deputy commander of Taiwan’s air force. He said that decades of prosperity encouraged a view that the island no longer needed to maintain a heightened military alert.
“That’s in keeping with the whole tide of the times,” he added, “but certainly it has some relative strategic impact, even if there hasn’t been a war to test it.”
An internal assessment of the Chinese military by Taiwan’s defense ministry, reviewed by The New York Times, also documented the increasing challenge. China’s military, for example, has developed the capability to cripple communications around the island, the assessment found. That could hamper the arrival of American reinforcements.
“This really is the grimmest time I’ve seen in my more than 40 years working in the military,” Taiwan’s minister of defense, Chiu Kuo-cheng, told lawmakers on Wednesday. China already had the means to invade Taiwan, though still at a high price, he said. “By 2025, the cost and attrition will be squeezed lowest, and so then it could be said to have ‘full capability’.”
A military recruitment billboard in Taipei. Taiwan’s government has phased out mandatory conscription for most young men, and it has since struggled to sustain a professional, all-volunteer force.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times
Since coming to office in January, the Biden administration has stepped up support, continuing moves made under President Trump.
American warships sailed through the Taiwan Strait eight times in the first eight months of the year. The administration approved a new arms sale in August worth about $750 million. Since at least last year, small teams of American troops, including Marines and Army special forces, have conducted training sessions with the Taiwanese military.
The administration has also marshaled statements supporting Taiwan and criticizing China from a succession of international summits, including the Group of 7.
Chinese leaders, for their part, fear that American support for Taiwan is entrenching pro-independence tendencies. None of the American moves are entirely new, but as mutual animosity has deepened, Beijing views them as an increasingly belligerent strategy to “contain China by using Taiwan.”
The depth of American and allied assistance for Taiwan, though, has not been tested.
A fighter jet taxiing along a highway in Taiwan during military exercises last month.Credit...Taiwan Presidential Office, via Associated Press
“You get to this issue of how far are you willing to go to defend Taiwan,” said Mr. Thomas, the former Seventh Fleet commander. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and I don’t know if the United States is willing to see U.S. young people coming back in body bags for the defense of Taiwan.”
Behind the scenes, Biden administration officials have expressed worry that China is trying to normalize a new baseline of hostile pressure on Taiwan, and they have deliberated on ways to slow or thwart its military development.
Mr. Biden is also trying to lower the temperature, speaking last month with Mr. Xi. On Tuesday he said he and the Chinese leader had agreed to the standing agreements on Taiwan. A day later, the White House announced that he and Mr. Xi would hold a virtual summit by the end of the year.
The two leaders know each other well. A decade ago, Mr. Biden, then vice president, went to China to size up Mr. Xi before he became the nation’s top leader.
“My father used to tell me, Joey, the only thing worse than a war is an unintentional war,” Mr. Biden told Mr. Xi, according to Mr. Russel, the former national security aide.
Mr. Russel added: “I think it is a prescient warning.”
The Taiwan Strait, with Xiamen, China, in the background, and the islands of Kinmen County, Taiwan, in the foreground. The question at the heart of Taiwan’s future is whether Mr. Xi intends to act.
Eric Schmitt, Michael Crowley and Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting.
12. Box office success in China of Korean war epic shows importance of patriotic themes and influence of Hong Kong filmmakers
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Box office success in China of Korean war epic shows importance of patriotic themes and influence of Hong Kong filmmakers
Hong Kong filmmakers Tsui Hark and Dante Lam, and China’s Chen Kaige, directed The Battle at Lake Changjin, which has taken US$527 million at the box office
The popularity of patriotic productions in China may provide new opportunities for those working in Hong Kong’s film industry
By Elaine Yau South China Morning Post3 min
A still ffromThe Battle at Lake Changjin
Of the many patriotic entertainment productions launched in China this year to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, The Battle at Lake Changjin is the most successful, with the film’s
Audiences praised the movie set during the Korean war, which was directed by C
The Battle at Lake Changjin, which depicts a brutal episode known as the Battle of Chosin Reservoir during the Korean war from 1950 to 1953, has taken in 3.4 billion yuan (US$527 million) so far.
Critics say the latest success of Lam and Tsui will further accelerate the trend of recruiting Hong Kong directors to spice up patriotic Chinese entertainment.
Professor Emilie Yeh Yueh-yu, director of the Centre for Film and Creative Industries at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, says Hong Kong directors, being the best in Asia in his eyes, can help make the film genre more universal. “They lend humour and extra stylistic values to them,” she says.
Kenny Ng Kwok-kwan, an associate professor at Hong Kong Baptist University’s Academy of Film, says Hong Kong directors’ expertise in making action and crime movies can help make Chinese patriotic works more entertaining.
“Hong Kong directors know how to handle the required didactic elements, leaving them only [to be revealed] at the end,” he says. Ng points out that Tsui used popular cinema elements such as chivalry to package
“
Several Chinese movies with patriotic themes directed by Hong Kong filmmakers have been box office winners.
Dante Lam’s
Hong Kong film director Clifton Ko Chi-Sum, who is in Beijing directing a patriotic musical, says Hong Kong-China creative collaborations are mutually beneficial.
“The current dismal economic climate in Hong Kong means big-budget productions are impossible,” he says.
First invited to China to produce musicals in Guangzhou two years ago, Ko says Hong Kong creative people like him are sought after as they are well versed in East-West cultural crossovers: “We can mix and repackage both the traditional and the avant-garde.”
To premiere in Beijing on October 22, Ko’s musical Goodfellas in 15 Days, which he also wrote, is based on the eponymous novel by Ma Boyong, whose book The Longest Day in Changan was turned into
Goodfellas in 15 Days portrays a prince from China’s Ming dynasty who has to flee for his life along the Grand Canal from Hangzhou to Beijing. When he witnesses first-hand the populace’s plight alongside the canal, it makes him determined to be a benevolent emperor bent on improving the commoners’ livelihood in future.
Ko says he must handle deftly the patriotic themes to dovetail with the country’s mission to boost its cultural confidence on the global stage. To do this, he puts more emphasis on the characterisation and portrayal of humanity in the musical, he says.
While more Hong Kong directors go north to work on “main melody” works, Professor Yeh says they must deal with strict censorship, both in pre-production and post-production. “The final cut of films is out of their control.”
Inferno affairs’ director Andrew Lau told Yazhou Zhoukan in 2003 he had to make two endings for the film so that it could pass mainland censors. However, Ko says he has never had any problems regarding censorship in China.
“Many of my Hong Kong musicals have done roving shows around China for many years. For all of them, the versions shown in Hong Kong and China are the same.”
He hopes patriotic, “main melody” productions featuring Hong Kong directors can help draw Hong Kong and China closer together.
“Hong Kong young people don’t embrace ‘main melody’ works [unlike their mainland counterparts]. I hope our participation in them can help extend the artistic horizons of Hong Kong youths.”
Elaine Yau is a senior reporter on the culture desk based in Beijing. She covers food, fashion, travel, health and fitness, music, film and TV, arts, lifestyle, as well as insider tips on the best of Beijing. She studied translation in Hong Kong and taught secondary English before joining the Post.
13. Who should decide the future of Taiwan?
All people have the right to self determination of government.
Interesting argument and analogies to include one on north and South Korea.
Who should decide the future of Taiwan? | The China Collection
The other day on Twitter I quoted Tsai Ing-wen and posed a question:
“We believe that the Taiwanese people should decide #Taiwan‘s future.” All you folks who like to talk about history, the KMT, the Qing empire, etc.: do you actually disagree with this statement? Come out and say so openly.
A friend responded:
I certainly agree that Taiwan’s people should have a much greater voice than they’ve had. But do you think that it’s really so simple, that theirs should be the only voice? That the history, the diplomatic agreements, etc. don’t complicate things at all?
OK, a reasonable question. Yes, it’s complicated – in fact, way too complicated for a simple answer on Twitter, so I decided to put together this blog post to set out my thoughts.
I asked the question because it’s my instinct, as a lawyer, to try to identify and narrow down the points of actual contention in any debate. Often it turns out that people are arguing past each other, or perhaps even agreeing on something without realizing it, so we can save a lot of time and energy by identifying what’s really disputed and what isn’t. If I find disagreement in talking to someone about Taiwan, I want to know whether we are disagreeing about the best way to get as close as possible to an agreed ideal, or whether we are disagreeing over the ideal itself. As I will show, it matters because different kinds of arguments are relevant and permissible depending on whether the disagreement is of the former or the latter kind.
A normative question can be complicated either in its own right or because of the consequences that might follow from trying to achieve it. It is important to separate these two types of complications. The question of whether anyone other than the people of Taiwan should have a voice in Taiwan’s future, like any normative question, has a variety of possible policy consequences. But we need to separate the basic normative question from the policy consequences. That the latter is complicated does not mean that the former is. Should women in Afghanistan have equal access to education? The normative question to me is not very complicated. It is the policy consequence – should, for example, the U.S. army stay in Afghanistan to promote that normative preference? – that is complicated. People may be unwilling to sign on to a particular normative position because they think that some undesirable policy consequence necessarily follows, but let’s keep the two issues distinct.
Take another example: should the people of South Korea have the sole deciding voice in their future? Should anyone other than the people of South Korea decide? To the extent they are not harming anyone else and not asking anyone else to help them, I think the answer is not complicated: Yes, it should be up to the people of South Korea alone. (Obviously, if they want other governments to support their decisions, they need to take into account what those governments think; nobody is going to write them a blank check.) It does not follow as a policy consequence that one should ignore the North Korean government as if it were not there. We live in the real world. But there is a big difference between taking account of the real world on the one hand, and asserting that the North Korean government has a legitimate interest in wanting to bring South Korea under its control on the other.
When we move to the question of Taiwan, clarifying the normative stance of participants in the debate serves not just to prevent people from wasting time arguing over things that aren’t really disputed; it also serves to separate out relevant arguments from irrelevant ones.
Suppose you believe that the people of Taiwan should have the decisive voice in their future. This does not commit you to a particular policy for achieving that ideal. It doesn’t mean that you ignore the presence of China and its missiles pointing at Taiwan. It doesn’t mean that you ignore the fact that the Chinese leadership believes – strongly believes – that Taiwan should be part of the PRC, under the control of the Communist Party of China, like the mainland. But a critical part of this realpolitik approach – one of the very things that make it realpolitik – is that it doesn’t matter why the Chinese leadership thinks this way. The fact that they do think this way is all that matters (unless, very implausibly, you think that they could be reasoned out of their position by rational argument and evidence).
Hence the challenge in my tweet that asked people to identify their basic stance on the normative question. If you believe that the people of Taiwan should have the sole voice in their future (subject, as I mentioned above, to the need to take account of the views of anyone they expect to support them), then all the arguments about history, what year Taiwan was incorporated into the Qing Empire, various agreements that may or may not have been made by various people and organizations over time, and what they really mean – they’re all irrelevant. We can finesse all these debated questions because they don’t matter. The thing that matters – and I would never deny that it matters – is the practical fact that the PRC government has a particular view of Taiwan. What to do in light of that particular view – now that is a complicated question without an easy answer.
Thus, if you are making arguments about history, then it seems to me that you are making them in support of some kind of normative claim, rather than undertaking a strictly practical, realpolitik analysis. A historical argument that backs the Chinese government’s view is more than simply the advocacy of realism; it is a denial of the basic normative position that the Taiwanese people alone should decide their future, and an affirmation that it is normatively desirable, not just an unfortunate necessity, for the government of China – in effect, the Party leadership – to have a say as well. It is of course possible to take this view – there’s nothing illogical about it – but I think those who take this view should own it.
Let me finish with a look at the normative question itself. Far more convincing to me than the historical arguments on each side is a simple human welfare analysis, which I think should be the touchstone of any policy or action. Does it make people better off? It’s not always easy to answer the question, but I cannot think of a better guide to analysis.
And I cannot for the life of me see how a forcible annexation of Taiwan by China adds to human welfare. Let’s suppose Taiwan could be annexed to China without the use of force or indeed any other kind of disruption; that the people of Taiwan suddenly by magic found themselves living like ordinary PRC citizens, under the PRC’s political system. (This is how we can state this as a potential normative goal, separate from the practical issue of how to achieve it.) Is anybody going to argue that they would be better off than they are now? If not, then at the very least it’s not a Pareto-efficient move.
Is it Kaldor-Hicks efficient? In other words, is there some benefit to others (PRC leaders and citizens, for example) that more than offsets the loss to Taiwanese? Let’s suppose for a moment that we can do what economics forbids, that is, make interpersonal comparisons of utility. What exactly would the offsetting benefit be to PRC leaders and citizens? The only thing I can think of is the possible psychic benefit of being able to put on a parade to one’s own glory and putting those uppity Taiwanese in their place. However real those psychic benefits may be to those enjoying them, should we value and respect them?
And all this is based on assuming a magical, instant transition into a regular PRC province. In fact, of course, there would be considerable disruption costs, possibly involving war, death, and destruction on all sides. This just makes more stark the question of how exactly human welfare is enhanced by an annexation. I really wish someone would explain to me who specifically is made better off (and how) by bringing Taiwan under PRC control, and why we should want to make them better off in spite of the undeniable costs. Abstract arguments about history simply don’t cut it.
14. Chinese former journalist detained after questioning country's role in Korean War
Excerpts:
“Some individuals still try to completely deny the War of Resistance against the United States and Aid Korea, question the justice of sending troops, and try to erase the great victory,” read a statement on The People's Liberation Army social media accounts, according to the Times.
“No matter how they distort, obliterate, falsify, tease and denigrate the facts, history is written in the hearts of the people," the statement continued, according to the paper.
The former journalist, now a businessman, was charged under a criminal code that took effect this year which makes the disparagement of political martyrs illegal, the Times reported. The crime can lead to a prison sentence of up to three years.
The news comes as China is cracking down on media in the country. Last month, regulators issued new rules prohibiting minors from engaging in “harmful” video game content and limiting the amount of time they can play games. The country also set new guidelines last month slamming the entertainment industry for "severely polluting the social atmosphere."
Chinese former journalist detained after questioning country's role in Korean War
The Hill · by Natalie Prieb · October 8, 2021
Former Chinese journalist Luo Changping was detained by police in the country Thursday after critiquing China's role in the Korean War and its depiction in a blockbuster film on social media.
Luo's commentary was in reaction to a state-sponsored film, "The Battle at Lake Changjin," that portrays an American loss in the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, The New York Times reported.
According to the Times, Luo took to the social media platform Weibo, China's version of Twitter, and questioned the legal justification of China's intervention when North Korean troops invaded South Korea. At the time, northern troops were close to defeat.
In the battle, United Nations forces were forced to withdraw from North Korea by Chinese forces.
"Half a century later, few Chinese people have reflected on the justifiability of the war,” the journalist wrote, according to the Times. Luo then commented on a specific Chinese military unit in the film, saying they "did not doubt the 'wise decision' of the top."
Luo's arrest was propagated on state media and China's main television network, CCTV.
The country's government has been known to monitor social media platforms used in China, taking posts down that appear critical of leaders and the Chinese Communist Party. The Times reported that the government sought to make an example out of Luo, who was forced out of the journalism industry in 2014.
Luo's Weibo account has since been blocked and the original post has been deleted, according to the Times.
“Some individuals still try to completely deny the War of Resistance against the United States and Aid Korea, question the justice of sending troops, and try to erase the great victory,” read a statement on The People's Liberation Army social media accounts, according to the Times.
“No matter how they distort, obliterate, falsify, tease and denigrate the facts, history is written in the hearts of the people," the statement continued, according to the paper.
The former journalist, now a businessman, was charged under a criminal code that took effect this year which makes the disparagement of political martyrs illegal, the Times reported. The crime can lead to a prison sentence of up to three years.
The news comes as China is cracking down on media in the country. Last month, regulators issued new rules prohibiting minors from engaging in “harmful” video game content and limiting the amount of time they can play games. The country also set new guidelines last month slamming the entertainment industry for "severely polluting the social atmosphere."
The Hill · by Natalie Prieb · October 8, 2021
15. Perspective | Why outlawing harmful social media content would face an uphill legal battle
We cannot put the genie back in the bottle and certainly not using legal maneuvers that would attempt to outlaw it. We need to learn to operate in this new normal. Unfortunately the key is education and critical thinking and adhering to our American values (as set forth in the Declaration, our Constitution, and described in the Federalist Papers). But the paradox is that the use of social media stifles critical thinking and allows us to just follow reporting that aligns with our preconceived notions.
Excerpts:
Both Haugen and another former Facebook employee, Roddy Lindsey, have suggested that eliminating immunity for amplified content could have a different consequence: Making platforms stop their current “engagement-based” ranking practices altogether. For critics who believe that platforms’ current systems inevitably prioritize emotionally engaging but societally damaging content, this may sound like a great outcome.
But this, too, is complicated. First, is it right to predict that ranked feeds will go away? Or will they just become a feature that only the richest and best-lawyered platforms can afford to offer? Might ranked feeds persist in the most anodyne and PG-rated possible version, eliminating controversial or legally risky speech entirely? That could reduce misinformation on platforms’ most-used features, but also prevent the next #MeToo movement. What would unranked news feeds look like if platforms could no longer use algorithms to reduce the presence of spam, coordinated “brigading,” or simply redundant and uninteresting content? And perhaps most importantly: Are changes to Section 230 even the right mechanism to address the problems Ms. Haugen has documented, or does the better path lie in long overdue changes to privacy law or reforms grounded in competition — both of which might avoid major constitutional problems?
We don’t pretend to know the answers to those questions. But importantly, Congress doesn’t know either. That’s precisely why transparency mandates and a government commission to assess the facts are so important. In the meantime, we will have to rely on whistleblowers like Haugen to provide the information we need to regulate wisely, address real problems and avoid hasty fixes that run headlong into the First Amendment.
Perspective | Why outlawing harmful social media content would face an uphill legal battle
The Washington Post · by Jeff Kosseff and Daphne Keller Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT · October 9, 2021
Testimony from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has given new life to a pair of ideas that, given the alarming revelations about “misinformation, toxicity, and violent content” in our social media feeds, may sound good in principle. The first is that Congress can and should prevent the spread of lies on social media platforms like Facebook. The second is that the law should restrict platforms’ “amplification” of such content, on features like Facebook’s algorithmically ranked news feed.
Whatever the merit of these ideas as a matter of morals or policy, they both run into serious problems with the Constitution. Unless Congress is realistic about those limits, it could squander political momentum on proposals likely to founder on the constitutional rocks.
Proposals to address these issues generally call for an amendment to or repeal of Section 230, the 1996 law that protects platforms from many kinds of liability arising from user content. Commentators and politicians have floated various proposals, including to remove Section 230’s protections for some harmful content or for content amplified by a platform’s content ranking algorithms.
Even without Section 230, though, it’s unlikely that lawmakers could require platforms to stop sharing misinformation. Some small portion of false content might count as defamation — material so damaging to a person’s reputation that they can sue over it. But many of the concerns about misinformation involve more generalized societal harms, such as influencing people to take unreasonable health risks. Courts have long resisted penalizing that kind of speech, holding that the First Amendment or common law often preclude lawsuits based on false statements — even in cases with tragic facts.
For instance, on New Year’s Day 1988, Wilhelm Winter and Cynthia Zheng went hunting for wild mushrooms in Marin County, Calif. They claimed that they relied on “The Encyclopedia of Mushrooms” to identify and discard suspicious fungi — and as a result, they collected, cooked, and ate an amanita phalloides mushroom, also known as a “death cap.” They both became so ill that they required liver transplants, and incurred about $400,000 in medical costs.
Winter and Zheng sued the book’s U.S. publisher for negligence, false representations and other claims. A federal judge in California ruled for the publisher, which had not edited the book, but had purchased copies from its original British publisher and distributed them in the United States. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed, concluding that publishers do not have a legal duty to investigate whether their books are accurate. “Were we tempted to create this duty, the gentle tug of the First Amendment and the values embodied therein would remind us of the social costs,” the Court wrote.
Like many other courts, the Ninth Circuit also refused to hold the publisher liable under products liability law, the sort of claim you might file against the manufacturer of a defective car. “We place a high priority on the unfettered exchange of ideas,” the Court wrote. “We accept the risk that words and ideas have wings we cannot clip and which carry them we know not where. The threat of liability without fault (financial responsibility for our words and ideas in the absence of fault or a special undertaking or responsibility) could seriously inhibit those who wish to share thoughts and theories.”
This line of thinking pervades dozens of court opinions in which injured people have sought redress for misleading information. The cases run the gamut of harms: investors who say they lost money due to a ticker service’s inaccurate stock price, people who became sick after following a book’s risky diet plan, and a man who had a heart attack after reading a newspaper’s inaccurate report that his father had died.
These cases generally have not made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. But in 2012, the high court struck down a federal law that imposed criminal penalties on those who falsely claimed to have received certain military honors, regardless of their intentions or the harm caused by the lie. Although the First Amendment allows liability for some lies, such as defamation, fraud and false advertising, lawmakers cannot simply prohibit all misleading speech. “Our constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania's Ministry of Truth,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the plurality, in a nod to George Orwell’s “1984.”
Some might argue that the stakes have changed in 2021, and that the individualized harms in the earlier cases pale in comparison to the threats to public health and democracy created by modern misinformation. Courts may not have necessarily struck the right balance in the past. It’s not impossible for the law to change. But the point is that courts would need to substantially rethink First Amendment and common law doctrine for such a rationale to justify restricting much of the misinformation shared on social media. Until that happens, there isn’t much Congress can do to restrict this kind of speech. There also isn’t much that Congress could do by tinkering with laws like Section 230.
What if Congress didn’t directly restrict false but legally protected speech, and instead created new liability for the platforms that amplify it? That apparent workaround may appeal to lawmakers. It’s unlikely to convince courts, though. The Supreme Court has been clear that laws restricting the distribution of unpopular speech raise the same First Amendment problems as laws prohibiting that speech outright. As it explained in 2000, when it rejected a law limiting pornography on cable TV, “laws burdening and laws banning speech” are equally suspect.
To be clear, the question here is not whether platforms like Facebook can or should change their amplification practices or their handling of potential misinformation in light of societal harms. They already have, and could voluntarily do more — without the kind of government mandate that raises First Amendment concerns. Nor is it solely a question about whether Congress can regulate platforms’ speech.
The question is whether Congress can regulate everyone’s speech by telling platforms which of our currently legal posts must be banished to the bottom of the news feed or promoted to the top. A law like that would use government power to restrict Internet users’ speech. Courts would rightly scrutinize it under the First Amendment.
Even proposals that tackle only amplification of genuinely illegal content — for example, by eliminating platforms’ Section 230 immunities for defamation — would raise real concerns. We already know what happens when platforms are put in charge of deciding which user speech violates the law: They err on the side of taking down lawful speech in order to protect themselves. Facebook notoriously took down images of law enforcement abusing protesters in Ecuador based on a fake claim of copyright infringement, for example. The tools platforms adopt to police user content can also cause new harms, disproportionately penalizing users from minority or marginalized groups or invading users’ privacy. A law that gave platforms this kind of policing duty for ranked news feeds, recommendations or search results would concentrate those harms into the very places where speakers most want their speech to appear — the places where other people will see it.
It’s possible to design better laws to limit distribution of illegal content while avoiding the worst of these foreseeable harms. But it’s complicated. Difficult policy trade-offs are impossible to avoid, and even the best laws involve complicated mechanisms like appeal rights for users, transparency reporting or regulatory oversight. None of that would happen under a law that simply swept away statutory immunities under Section 230.
Both Haugen and another former Facebook employee, Roddy Lindsey, have suggested that eliminating immunity for amplified content could have a different consequence: Making platforms stop their current “engagement-based” ranking practices altogether. For critics who believe that platforms’ current systems inevitably prioritize emotionally engaging but societally damaging content, this may sound like a great outcome.
But this, too, is complicated. First, is it right to predict that ranked feeds will go away? Or will they just become a feature that only the richest and best-lawyered platforms can afford to offer? Might ranked feeds persist in the most anodyne and PG-rated possible version, eliminating controversial or legally risky speech entirely? That could reduce misinformation on platforms’ most-used features, but also prevent the next #MeToo movement. What would unranked news feeds look like if platforms could no longer use algorithms to reduce the presence of spam, coordinated “brigading,” or simply redundant and uninteresting content? And perhaps most importantly: Are changes to Section 230 even the right mechanism to address the problems Ms. Haugen has documented, or does the better path lie in long overdue changes to privacy law or reforms grounded in competition — both of which might avoid major constitutional problems?
We don’t pretend to know the answers to those questions. But importantly, Congress doesn’t know either. That’s precisely why transparency mandates and a government commission to assess the facts are so important. In the meantime, we will have to rely on whistleblowers like Haugen to provide the information we need to regulate wisely, address real problems and avoid hasty fixes that run headlong into the First Amendment.
Read more:
The Washington Post · by Jeff Kosseff and Daphne Keller Today at 6:00 a.m. EDT · October 9, 2021
16. Applications for FDD’s 2022 National Security Fellows Program are NOW OPEN!
This is a great program.
NATIONAL SECURITY FELLOWS PROGRAM
Applications for FDD’s 2022 National Security Fellows Program are NOW OPEN!
The deadline to apply is November 2, 2021
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) sponsors an annual National Security Fellows Program (NSFP) for mid-career U.S. national security leaders. The 12-month program supports the aspirations of promising 30-40 year old professionals by providing networking, skill-building workshops, and roundtable conversations with high-level experts.
The programming, which takes place on a monthly basis in Washington D.C., provides Fellows with an opportunity to participate in:
- Intimate, off-the-record dinners with high-level government officials and ambassadors. Fellows have the opportunity to engage with government officials on a range of national security issues during a private dinner. Rather than a briefing, the dinner is a truly a conversation amongst the Fellows and the VIP guest.
- Roundtable conversations on pressing national security challenges with issue experts. Fellows participate in series of talks with experts on questions ranging from “Can the United States do Grand Strategy?” to “What are the implications of an Iran Deal?”
- Skill-building sessions with industry insiders, such as on the Ins and Outs of Strategic Communications. Hailed by previous Fellows as the most memorable session, Fellows gained insight into how to shape messaging and effectively respond to routine, and not-so-routine, communication crises.
- Mentorship and collaboration opportunities with FDD scholars, distinguished members of FDD’s Board of Advisors, and select others in the policy community.
- Invitation to apply for the NSFP National Security Trip to Israel. Fellows will be invited to apply for FDD’s annual NSFP National Security Trip to Israel. The trip aims to provide participants with a nuanced understanding of the national security landscape in Israel as well as with practical skills on how to counter terrorism and safeguard U.S. security interests.
- FDD’s National Security Alumni Network, which provides alumni with special invitations to private briefings, events and other VIP opportunities. Alumni are also provided with a platform to further connect, network, and collaborate with their peers in the national security community as well as with FDD experts.
Eligibility Requirements:
- U.S. Citizens
- Based in Washington, D.C.
- Between the ages of 30-40
- A minimum of seven years of employment in national security or foreign policy
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
