Matthew Robertson, October 11, 2018     China’s rapidly expanding interest in researching and applying artificial intelligence has been widely noted. Last year, the Chinese government published a plan to become a world leader in the field by the end of the next decade; billions of dollars are being funnelled into AI startups; and China [...] Keep reading »

China Change, September 16, 2018   Unsettling news from China has been emerging in a constant stream for some time now, in news, on social media and from our own sources in the country. Not every new development is suited to a fully fleshed-out analysis, and as with so much to do with China, many reports and developments cannot be immediately [...] Keep reading »

China Change, August 28, 2018     This 3-minute video has gone viral on Twitter the last couple of days. It’s not a movie; it’s an everyday reality in China that’s seldom captured on record. We, as many people do, know it’s a commonality, but the video somehow sends chills down the spine. The video emerged on Twitter on August [...] Keep reading »

Matthew Robertson, August 23, 2018   “Our goal is to make sure that any user facing an increased risk of online attacks enrolls in the Advanced Protection Program.”  — Dario Salice, Advanced Protection Product Manager at Google.        Journalists and dissidents involved in Chinese affairs are accustomed to [...] Keep reading »

Yaxue Cao, April 17, 2018     On April 10, China’s State Administration of Radio and Television ordered the permanent closure of the Neihan Duanzi (translated roughly as ‘quirky skits’) app and website. In its announcement, the authorities denounced the app and its public WeChat account as having an “improper orientation and vulga [...] Keep reading »

China Change, April 4, 2018     Between February and March this year, rights activists from provinces around China were summoned, questioned, and threatened by secret police who demanded that they withdraw from the ‘Rose chatgroups,’ also known as the ‘Rose team.’ These chatgroups have attracted relatively large numbers of interne [...] Keep reading »

Yaxue Cao, November 1, 2017     Li Aijie (李爱杰) is from Henan province, China’s central plains. She married a man named Zhang Haitao (张海涛) in Urumqi, Xinjiang, who moved from Henan to the far northwestern region in the 1990s seeking job opportunities after being laid off from a state-owned enterprise. He made a living trading [...] Keep reading »

Safeguard defenders, September 19, 2017     Among the many revelations into the systematic repression of the human rights community to have come to light since the beginning of the 709 Crackdown have been accounts from those released about the access of police and state security to chat logs and emails, even communications and documents t [...] Keep reading »

Safeguard Defenders, September 10, 2017     A new report by a Lookout, a Cybersecurity company, has generated renewed interest in the security, or lack thereof, of WeChat and QQ (https://blog.lookout.com/xrat-mobile-threat). Despite this, there has been limited attention paid to this explosive new revelation. It has long been known that d [...] Keep reading »