Beijing Launches Global “Terror” War Aimed at Internet, Critics

The Communist Chinese dictatorship approved a controversial “anti-terror” decree last month that, among other troubling provisions, purports to authorize foreign deployments of police, soldiers, and special forces to battle alleged “terrorists” and “extremists” — or perhaps dissidents so labeled by the regime — wherever they may be in the world.

The new decree, approved by the Communist Party of China’s Politburo before being rubber-stamped by the pseudo-“legislature” on December 27, also orders technology firms to cooperate with the dictatorship in hunting down its enemies, shredding privacy, and censoring speech. The widely criticized scheme also imposes new censorship rules on the regime’s “media” organs and even on social media, while forcing all service providers to “check the identity of clients.”

Despite the regime’s international propaganda efforts, global criticism of the edict and its implications for China and beyond is still growing louder. Just as The New American warned as recently as a few months ago, however, the brutal autocracy in Beijing cited similar precedents established by Western governments as justification for its own dangerous moves. “This rule accords with the actual work need of fighting terrorism and is basically the same as what other major countries in the world do,” explained Li  Shouwei, deputy head of the criminal division of Beijing’s “parliament.” He may well have had Obama in mind.

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Under the new terror decree, the regime’s so-called “People’s Liberation Army” is authorized to become involved in terror operations worldwide. “Terrorism is the public enemy of mankind, and the Chinese government will oppose all forms of terrorism,” declared terror boss An Weixing at Beijing’s “Public Security Ministry,” among the most brutal terror tentacles of the regime. He pointed to alleged militants among long-oppressed Muslim Uyghur communities in occupied “East Turkestan,” which the regime refers to as Xinjiang, as an example of the alleged threat the regime faces.   

Beijing-empowering Western governments, including the Obama administration and various European capitals, feigned outrage over the new “law.” U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner, for example, expressed concern about “overreach,” adding that the new decree “could lead to greater restrictions on the exercise of freedoms of expressions, association, and peaceful assembly.” Of course, in practice, the barbaric regime in Beijing has not recognized any of those freedoms since it enslaved mainland China more than half of a century ago. Obama has also reportedly raised “concerns” about the law directly with his partner in crime, Communist Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.  

Similarly, the European Chamber of Commerce in China, which must choose its words very carefully when criticizing the totalitarian regime, said it had “concerns” about the terror decree even after a handful of other outrageous proposals — outright forcing companies to hand over all encryption codes, for example — were dropped from the final version. “Some concerns remain over issues such as market access, intellectual property rights, and the obligation to monitor, report and censor terrorist [sic] content,” the Chamber said in a statement.

The law still purports to mandate that tech firms help the regime in its decryption efforts. Telecommunication and Internet service providers (ISPs) “shall provide technical interfaces, decryption and other technical support and assistance to public security and state security agencies when they are following the law to avert and investigate terrorist activities,” demands the new edict. Terrorist activities, of course, means any activities, including speech, that the regime does not approve of. In other words, Western technology companies are being forced to help the world’s most powerful dictatorship better impose its tyranny on China’s 1.3 billion victims, and, considering the regime’s history of persecuting dissidents even abroad, potentially even more.

Regime lackeys such as Li, the deputy criminal chief in the Communist Chinese rubber-stamp “Parliament,” tried to claim that the global Internet was a terror tool in need of Beijing’s control. “Not only in China, but also in many places internationally, growing numbers of terrorists are using the Internet to promote and incite terrorism,” he claimed at a Beijing news conference after the “Parliament” rubber-stamped the Politburo’s terror decree. He also claimed, without offering details, that “terrorists” were “using the Internet” to “organize, plan and carry out terrorist acts.” And so, the regime, which already operates the world’s most Orwellian censorship regime, also known as the “Great Firewall of China,” needs to crack down even harder on free speech, freedom of the press, and Internet freedom.

In addition to stepping up the tyranny and surveillance of dissidents, more than a few critics have also suggested that the “terror” scheme was aimed at helping the regime and its “companies” steal secrets and technology from Western firms. As The New American and many other sources have documented, on top of terrorizing the Chinese people at home and abroad, Beijing and its gigantic “intelligence” apparatus also specialize in stealing trade secrets, intellectual property, and other sensitive information from Western companies — especially those that operate in mainland China.

If the latest developments offer any clue about the future, Western companies may be forced to participate in an Orwellian new system known as “Sesame Credit,” too. The radical plot, also approved by the Politburo and set to become mandatory by 2020, aims to rank each Chinese subject based on his or her loyalty to the regime, reading choices, and more. Essentially, the terror scheme will turn businesses with any connection to the Internet, technology, or telecommunications into unpaid agents of the repressive party-state — a dictatorship most infamous for failed central planning, censorship, mass murder, torture, pollution, forced abortions, coercive population control, re-education camps, subversion, espionage, illegal organ harvesting from dissidents, and other barbaric crimes against humanity.  

Perhaps to prove how serious it was about cracking down on “terror” rather than speech and dissent, the regime even expelled a foreign journalist from China who reported negatively on the new “law.” French reporter Ursula Gauthier raised the ire of the dictatorship after highlighting its ruthless oppression of Uyghurs under the guise of “terrorism,” noting that the new “terror” decree is “dreadful.” The regime’s “Foreign Ministry” said her comments were an example of “double-standards,” and so, Gauthier was unceremoniously evicted from China. Fortunately, she was not Chinese, or the consequences would have been much more unpleasant.

The same accusation leveled at Gauthier was also hurled at all critics. Other regime organs, including its propaganda and espionage service Xinhua, blasted opponents of the terror law for “double standards” — as if lawless crimes by Western governments legitimized similar crimes by the world’s most deadly dictatorship. “If they keep the common interests of mankind in mind, some people would know which side to stand for,” the regime’s propagandists said in a Xinhua editorial, adding that the Internet was being used to spread “extremist ideas.” The regime, of course, considers any opposition to its brutal rule to be “extreme.”       

While forcing technology and Internet firms to impose its tyranny on the Chinese people has been widely denounced, perhaps even more troubling is the purported authorization for overseas “terror” operations by the regime’s brutal agents. But it should not be a surprise. In fact, once the increasingly lawless governments of the West began openly assassinating people all over the world without charging them with crimes, censoring the Internet under the guise of “terror,” and conscripting technology firms into their lawless terror war, it was inevitable that barbaric Third World regimes and other governments would eventually follow suit.     

Just last October in an article about Obama’s mass-murder-via-drone program, The New American warned: “What if, for example, hostile foreign regimes — the ones ruling Russia, Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and on and on — started dropping bombs on targets in the United States or other countries, based on secret information, by claiming they were ‘hunting suspected militants’? Already, the United Nations, with support from Obama, is deploying unmanned aerial drones in support of its scandal-plagued ‘peacekeeping’ armies. U.K. authorities are also assassinating people, in some cases their own citizens, in a similar manner. With the U.S. government having already established the precedent, there is now little standing in the way of other governments deciding to start compiling ‘kill lists’ for extrajudicial execution.” And now, while extra-judicial assasinations have not yet officially been approved, it appears to be happening. The implications should terrify everyone. 

Ironically, while the Communist Chinese regime claims its latest decree is aimed at terrorism, its actions since the time of savage mass-murderer “Chairman” Mao Tse-tung are practically the very definition of terrorism — massacring, butchering, torturing, and abusing a civilian population to strike terror into it for the purpose of achieving political goals. In fact, since enslaving China with help from Western globalists and communists, the dictatorship in Beijing has murdered and terrorized more human beings than any other entity in all of recorded human history. And now, thanks to the lawless and unconstitutional precedent set by the Obama administration, the Bush administration, and other Western powers, that mass-murdering regime plans to take its “terror” war global, all while conscripting even Western companies into its international reign of terror. Humanity must say no.

Photo of Chinese paramilitary police on patrol: AP Images

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is currently based in Europe. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU.

 

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