The New York Times International - 29.08.2019

4 | T HURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

world

He said the commission had found
cases where children had been put to
work by men who only posed as their fa-
thers.
“It has become a business,” Mr. Sirait
said. “This is clearly child exploitation.
The horses move so fast. The boys ride
the horses with no proper protection.
This is violence against children. As
children, they cannot say no to their par-
ents or whoever ordered them to ride
the horse.”
“This practice should not be toler-
ated,” Mr. Sirait added. “It is a crime.”
A government official said the prac-
tice did not seem to fall afoul of existing
Indonesian law banning child exploita-
tion. “By definition, exploitation means
that the children do not get anything and
they are unhappy about it,” said Retno
Listyarti, a commissioner at the Indone-
sian Child Protection Commission, a
government agency. “But in this case, it
seems that the kids are happy, proud
and it is even a dream.”
Despite the call by child advocates to
outlaw the races, they show no signs of
stopping, and the week of competition in
Bima is a highlight of the city’s calendar.
The grandstands are full of spectators
on weekdays and overflowing for the
weekend finals, with animated fans
cheering on their favorites and waving
fists full of the Indonesian rupiah they
have gambled.
Though gambling is illegal in Indone-
sia, the police are there to stop occa-
sional scuffles over gambling debts,
rather than to stop the betting.
The income the Sumbawan boys earn
from a race can be meaningful to a poor
family.
For each of the more than 300 races
during the week, horse owners pick
from a pool of about 30 child jockeys and
pay them from 50,000 to 100,000 rupiah
a race in the early rounds, or $3.50 to $7.
As they progress to the finals, they can
earn double that, with bonuses up to one
million rupiah, in a place where the min-
imum monthly wage is just over twice
that.
The owners, like Edy Poky, 42, who
has more than 10 horses in his stable and
works as a local coal and rice trader, are
all vying for their share of prize pot
worth about $34,000.
The top prize for winning the final of
each category is a moped worth $1,200.
Second prize is a cow worth $500. Other
prizes include refrigerators and TVs.
About 20 minutes before one of Mr.
Edy’s horses was scheduled to race in an
early round, his trainer funneled a cock-
tail of milk, eggs, energy drink, ginger
and coffee through a section of hose pipe
into the horse’s mouth, with the hope the
concoction would increase its speed.
Most of the elixir ended up on the floor,

but Mr. Edy seemed satisfied as he pat- ted the horse. The owner wasn’t shy about revealing some other performance enhancers he gives his steeds. “We buy doping medicine from Aus- tralia and online in Indonesia, and inject the horses in the morning and at night on race days to make them faster and improve their stamina,” said Mr. Edy. Most trainers also rub chili powder and stinging plants on the hindquarters to numb the horses’ muscles so they don’t feel fatigue during the race. One child jockey, Imam Dudu, 8, who dreams of becoming a policeman and who races in a SpongeBob SquarePants helmet and balaclava, goes to elemen- tary school, but his father admits that he sometimes misses class to race. Imam’s mother, Tiara, 36, said, “Rac- ing horses is easy money for the family,” and she noted that paying for her son’s schooling will be expensive.

As they get older, the most successful jockeys go on to compete in regional races on neighboring islands, including Lombok, a popular tourist destination, where jockeys continue racing past 14. Asikin Bin H. Mansur, 47, is a horse trainer whose two adult sons, now 25 and 18, were jockeys. His boy Adi, 7, raced in this year’s Police Chief’s Cup. “I worry about him falling and getting hurt, but it is a tradition here on the island and in my family,” Mr. Asikin said. “Sometimes if he falls, he gets injured and sometimes not. If Allah wants him to be injured, it’s his destiny.” Adi, playing with friends between races, said, “I like racing and don’t get scared,” though he admitted he misses going to school when he’s away racing. The 7-year-old qualified for a final in Bima and came in fourth, winning the owner a refrigerator. Adi’s father seemed pleased with his son’s haul for the week, about $162. “A little less than I hoped for,” Mr. Asikin said, “but it was a gift from Allah.”

Where jockeys retire at age 10

I NDONESIA, FROM PAGE 1

Oscar Siagian contributed reporting from Bima, and Muktita Suhartono from Bangkok.

Top, horses on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia, are bathed in the sea by former child jockeys and stable boys at dawn before a day of racing; above left, child jockeys and their friends and siblings passing the time between races with the Indonesian board game karambol; above right, young jockeys waiting at the starting gates before a preliminary race.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADAM DEAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

THE NEW YORK TIMES

can officials say.
That is because many of its 645 mil-
lion users are seeking employment op-
portunities, often from strangers. To en-
hance their prospects, many former
government employees advertise that
they have security clearances.
LinkedIn is also the only major Amer-
ican social media platform not blocked
in China because the company has
agreed to censor posts containing deli-
cate material.
Chinese agents often make offers
over various channels, including
LinkedIn, to bring the prospective re-
cruit to China, sometimes through the
guise of a corporate recruiting firm of-
fering to pay them for speaking or con-
sulting engagements or aid in research.
From there, agents develop the relation-
ship.
“The Chinese want to build these op-
tions with political, academic and busi-
ness elites,” said Jonas Parello-Plesner,
the former Danish Foreign Ministry of-
ficial who reported the apparent recruit-
ing attempt by the Chinese that began
over LinkedIn. “A lot of this thrives in
the gray zone or the spectrum between
influence-seeking and interference or
classical espionage.”
People who have just left government
are especially vulnerable, because they
are often looking for new employment,
he and other former officials say.
Nicole Leverich, a spokeswoman for
LinkedIn, said the company proactively
finds fake accounts to remove and has a
team that acts on information from a va-
riety of sources, including government
agencies.
“We enforce our policies, which are
very clear: The creation of a fake ac-
count or fraudulent activity with an in-
tent to mislead or lie to our members is a
violation of our terms of service,” she
said.
Some photographs on fake accounts
are generated by artificial intelligence,
The Associated Press reported.
In multiple recent cases, LinkedIn
proved to be an effective recruiting tool.
A former employee of the C.I.A. and De-
fense Intelligence Agency, Kevin Pat-
rick Mallory, was sentenced in May to 20
years in prison for spying for China. The
relationship began after he replied in
February 2017 to a LinkedIn message
from a Chinese intelligence agent pos-
ing as a think tank representative, the
F.B.I. said.
The Justice Department last October
charged a Chinese intelligence agent,
Yanjun Xu, with economic espionage af-
ter he recruited a GE Aviation engineer

in a relationship that began on LinkedIn, according to the indictment. Mr. Evanina, the counterintelligence chief, told Reuters last year that Chinese agents were contacting thousands of people at a time on LinkedIn. “It’s the ul- timate playground for collection,” he said. That level of activity has not dropped, though Mr. Evanina declined to give sta- tistics. “People in the private sector and aca- demia are also being targeted this way,” he said this month. “Foreign intelligence services are looking for anyone with access to the information they want, whether classified or unclassified, including corporate trade secrets, intel- lectual property and other research.” The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. The former Obama senior foreign policy official, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing fu- ture interactions related to China, described in interviews a monthslong re- cruitment effort by someone who ap-

peared to be a Chinese spy. In May 2017, five months after the official left his government job and just after he made a trip to China, someone called Robinson Zhang reached out via LinkedIn. Mr. Zhang’s profile photograph features the Hong Kong skyline, and he identifies as a public relations manager for a company called R&C Capital. In a message to the former official, Mr. Zhang described R&C as “an international consulting company based in Hong Kong” that specializes in “global investment, geopolitical issues, public policy, etc.” “I’m quite impressed by your CV and think you may be right for some opportunities, which are all well paid,” Mr. Zhang wrote, according to screen shots of the exchanges. The words struck him as strange, the former official said, so he asked Mr. Zhang for a website. Mr. Zhang directed him to a home page with an image of the Eiffel Tower but little information about R&C Capital. It appeared to be “some-

thing he made up on the fly,” the former official said. (The New York Times viewed the site, which was deleted sometime after The Times emailed the company for an interview request.) Mr. Zhang repeatedly indicated that his company could pay for a trip to China. The former official asked multiple times for more detail on the company but did not get any substantive re- sponses. In a message in August 2017, Mr. Zhang said that Zhejiang University had “already determined a candidate” for a conference on China’s Belt and Road in- frastructure projects before suggesting other opportunities — even though the two had not shared any earlier exchanges about this or any other event. The former official referred Mr. Zhang to a speakers’ agency represent- ing him and has not heard from Mr. Zhang since. Although the site for R&C Capital listed its address as No. 68 Mody Road in Hong Kong, there is no company by that name there. The company is also not in-

cluded in the Hong Kong corporate reg- istration database. Mr. Parello-Plesner, the former Dan- ish official, had similar exchanges on LinkedIn with a user by the name of Grace Woo who contacted him in 2011. Ms. Woo said she worked for DRHR, a headhunting company in Hangzhou, China. When she learned Mr. Parello- Plesner was visiting Beijing in 2012, she suggested he stop by Hangzhou to meet with the company. She asked for an image of his passport so she could make travel arrangements, but he declined.

Mr. Parello-Plesner agreed to meet in the St. Regis Hotel in Beijing. Ms. Woo never appeared, but a young man who said he was from DRHR guided Mr. Par- ello-Plesner to a conference room, where three middle-aged men wel- comed him. They said they were from a government research organization, but they did not have business cards. “I thought, ‘This meeting is very dodgy,’” Mr. Parello-Plesner said. The men told Mr. Parello-Plesner they could fund his research if he worked with them, promising “ ‘really great access to the Chinese system,’ ” he said.

Mr. Parello-Plesner, suspecting the men were intelligence or security officials, reported the meeting to British officials when he returned to London, where he lived at the time. “If I were LinkedIn, I would proactively do my homework now,” said Mr. Parello-Plesner, who has researched China’s foreign interference operations as a senior fellow at the Hudson Insti- tute and wrote about his encounter last year. “This was just the tip of the ice- berg.” DRHR was one of three companies German domestic intelligence officials singled out in December 2017 as front or- ganizations for Chinese agents. Those officials concluded that Chinese agents had used LinkedIn to try to contact 10,000 Germans, and LinkedIn shut down some accounts, including those of DRHR and Ms. Woo. Last October, French intelligence agencies told the government that Chi- nese agents had used social networks — LinkedIn in particular — to try to contact 4,000 French individuals. Targets included government employees, scien- tists and company executives, according to Le Figaro, the French newspaper. It can be hard to pinpoint the origins of the people behind fake social media accounts. A former Obama White House official and career diplomat, Brett Bruen, said a user by the name of Donna Alexander contacted him in 2017 on LinkedIn. Her profile says she is a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology, but the photograph is of an actress. A spokeswoman for the university said it has no record of an employee by that name. Ms. Alexander’s network on LinkedIn includes White House officials and former ambassadors, according to screen- shots seen by The Times. “This person seems to have ingratiated herself with or gotten accepted by a lot of people in the foreign policy structure of U.S. government,” Mr. Bruen said. At the same time, Western intelligence agencies are discovering another potential issue with LinkedIn — some of their operatives have no accounts there at all, which might raise questions about a person’s true identity among foreign officials or counterintelligence agents. Mr. Bruen said one European official told him that his country’s intelligence agency was creating “the most boring LinkedIn profiles possible — a shallow cover so it doesn’t arouse suspicion.”

To recruit foreign spies, China hunts on LinkedIn

C HINA, FROM PAGE 1

CARSTEN SNEJBJERG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Brett Bruen, above, a former official in the Obama administration, and Jonas Parello-Plesner, left, a former Danish Foreign Ministry official, both reported having dubious contacts on LinkedIn.

JUSTIN T. GELLERSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Cao Li contributed reporting from Hong Kong.

“I’m quite impressed by your CV and think you may be right for some opportunities, which are all well paid.”

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The New York Times International - 29.08.2019

Where jockeys retire at age 10

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