26 2GM Monday January 3 2022 | the times
Wo r l d
tion of the Uighur minority. The rela-
tionship has fallen to a nadir in recent
weeks after Lithuania permitted Tai-
wan to open a quasi-diplomatic office in
Vilnius, the capital. China regards the
island as a renegade province and plans
to bring it under its direct control, by
force if necessary.
It was the first time Taiwan had
established a representative office in a
European country under its own nameChina has expanded its vast domestic
internet surveillance programmes to
include western social media sites as it
tries to build profiles on dissidents,
journalists, academics and politicians.
A review of Chinese bidding docu-
ments, contracts and company filings
by The Washington Post has uncovered
a $320,000 programme by state media
to mine Twitter and Facebook to create
a database of its “targets”. It also found
a $216,000 police intelligence pro-
gramme that analyses western chatter
on Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as a
China
Didi Tang Beijing
Lithuania has accused China of
launching a “co-ordinated” economic
attack on its businesses as a warning to
the rest of Europe not to side with
Taiwan.
Lithuanian firms say they have been
locked out of the Chinese market, with
other European companies coming
under pressure to drop their products,
after the Baltic state strengthened its
ties with the self-ruling island.
“The reaction from Beijing has been
extraordinary,” Gabrielius Landsber-
gis, 39, the Lithuanian foreign minister,
told The Times. “We’ve never seen any-
thing like it before. Maybe it’s trying to
teach [Europe] a lesson so that nobody
would follow in our footsteps, or it
wants to show that it has weapons of
economic coercion that the West didn’t
think China had, or was ready to use.”
Relations between the two nations
have deteriorated sharply since 2019,
when Lithuania identified China as a
threat in its annual national security
report and President Nauseda, 57, criti-
cised Chinese attempts to buy a stake in
Klaipeda, the country’s largest port.
After further friction over China’s
suppression of the pro-democracy
movement in Hong Kong, Lithuania
pulled out of the 17+1 club, set up to
channel Chinese investment into cen-
tral and eastern Europe. It was also one
of only a handful of countries to chal-
lenge a World Health Organisation
study dismissing the possibility that
Covid-19 had leaked from a laboratory
in Wuhan. Later its MPs passed a
motion condemning China’s persecu-
Gabrielius
Landsbergis:
reaction from
Beijing has been
“extraordinary”China’s bullying is
warning to Europe,
claim Lithuanians
rather than that of its capital Taipei, the
term preferred by China.
Since then Lithuanian companies
say they have encountered “technical
errors” when they try to register ship-
ments to and from China. At least 60
firms have also been quietly cut adrift
by their European partners under pres-
sure from Beijing, according to Vid-
mantas Janulevicius, head of the Lithu-
anian Confederation of Industrialists.
Last month the German-Baltic
Chamber of Commerce warned that
German investors might be forced to
shut their factories in Lithuania unless
there was a “constructive solution” to
the stand-off. The BDI, the largest Ger-
man business group, said the measures
amounted to a “trade boycott”.
China insists the claims that Lithua-
nian products have been frozen out of
its market are “completely groundless”.
Wang Weidong, of the the Chinese em-
bassy in Germany, said: “The Lithuani-
an side needs to look for internal rea-
sons if co-operation between the two
countries encounters difficulties. It
needs to admit wrongdoings and take
measures to rectify [them].”
Trade with China accounts for barely
1 per cent of Lithuania’s GDP, but the
broader supply chain problems are
painful for a country where exports
make up nearly three quarters of the
economy. Janulevicius said the effects
were hitting almost every sector.
“We need to find some compromise,”
he added. “We’re a democratic country.
We have this spirit of wanting to be free,
which is why I think the support for Tai-
wan is quite strong. We support our
government but we really need to find
a balance between the economy and
keeping our democratic way of being.”
The German business lobby has criti-
cised China’s conduct as a “devastating
own goal” — but, significantly, also sug-
gested that Lithuania should dilute its
commitment to Taiwan and bring itself
back into line with the rest of Europe.
Russia, like China, wants to airbrush
history, Edward Lucas, page 22Lithuania
Oliver Moody
Party’s over for Walmart
Walmart faces a backlash in China
after removing products produced
in Xinjiang from its shelves (Didi
Tang writes).
Shoppers have rushed to cancel
their membership of Sam’s Club, as
the US retail giant’s outlets are
known in China, and the Communist
Party has issued a statement
denouncing the company for
“profiting from the Chinese market
but hurting the country’s interest”. It
accused Walmart of “dirty tricks”,
adding that it was “eating the meal
but smashing the wok”.
Under US law, any company
importing goods from Xinjiang
province must prove that no forced
labour was used in the
manufacturing process. China has
been condemned by western
governments for its human rights
abuses in the region, where more
than a million ethnic Muslims,
especially Uighurs, are detained in
“re-education” camps, often forced
to work in factories and on farms.
Sam’s Club has attempted to
mollify customers by saying it had
simply run out of stock of Xinjiang
products, but in vain. “They have
refused Xinjiang, so I refused them,”
a businessman told Global Times,
the Communist Party newspaper.
“Out of patriotism, I will never visit
the store,” he added.Beijing’s dossier of dissidents revealed
cybercentre that catalogues overseas
content in the ethnic Uighur language.
State media, propaganda depart-
ments, police, military and cyber-regu-
lators have bought sophisticated sys-
tems to mine data on western sites, it re-
ported. “Now we can better understand
the underground network of anti-
China personnel,” an analyst who
works for a unit reporting to the ruling
party’s central propaganda department
in Beijing told the newspaper.
Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow at
the German Marshall Fund, said
Beijing was “reorienting” its efforts to
control the internet beyond its own
borders. “I think that’s franklyterrifying, looking at the sheer numbers
and sheer scale that this has taken
inside China,” she said.
A separate review of documents by
The New York Times has shown efforts
by Beijing to create fake accounts, gen-
erate content, draw followers and track
critics on sites such as Facebook and
Twitter, which are inaccessible from
China without the use of a virtual
private network. The campaign also
targets Chinese citizens living outside
the country who speak out against the
government, tracking down family
members at home and pressuring them
to compel the critics to remove posts or
even close their accounts.