On 24 August, James Lin, a human rights activist in the Netherlands, posted a notification of arrest issued on 7 July by the affiliated sub-bureau directly under the Hengyang Public Security Bureau. It states that Yang has been arrested on charges of “inciting subversion of the state power” and is currently detained at the Hengyang Youth Detention Center. It shows that the Laos government had allowed the arrest to take place, as outlined in Safeguard Defenders’ more detailed post on his arrest in the Laotian capital by both Chinese and Laotian police officers.
The CCP’s involuntary returns operations on foreign soil directly threaten the safety of Chinese activists living in exile and host countries’ national and judicial sovereignty. Victims of China’s involuntary returns will not be given a fair trial, human rights activists say.
I’ve seriously never seen anything like them, I thought they didn’t exist except in the sexual snuff fantasies of hardcore preppers.
I thought the guys on reddit were exaggerating to an insane degree, never imagined they were underselling them.
The literal worst of both worlds.
If you think about it it kinds of makes sense, they’re essentially the MAGA of China. It would be more strange if such an authoritarian nation like China that is hyper-focused on monitoring speech and manipulating public narrative *didn’t * have some kind of deluded super-nationalistic demographic.
I think the skepticism of their prevalence from the outside is understandable and happens because A) hardcore prepper types do tend to be melodramatic, often mixing in racism and applying terms like tankie in bad faith and B) the tankie’s themselves can often operate in a lowkey way in english-speaking communities. They can’t go into a community and immediately start advocating bloody dismantling of democracy, so it’s not immediately apparent how extreme they are until confronted with something that criticizes or contradicts the Chinese government and the like. Like Russian trolls, I don’t get the impression that they really have any issues pretending to be someone else to stir up chaos.
Demographically a lot of them are teenage girls and women in their 20s. The “Little Pink Army”. So it’s like if MAGA was fuelled by the same passion, energy and stamina that fuels a lot of pop star fandom.
Yeah, you’re on it, I’m just amazed how blatantly mask-off they are when comfortable, this is sobering as hell.