Tag: china

REPORT: Over 10,000 Christians Arrested in China as Xi Jinping’s Communist Regime Escalates Religious Crackdown

Christians across Communist China are being arrested, detained and effectively “disappeared” for worshipping outside state-controlled churches, according to a major investigation by The Telegraph.

The report details accounts from underground Christians who say police have raided homes in the middle of the night, separated families and imprisoned pastors as the regime intesifies its campaign against independent religious groups.

One Christian identified only as “TJ” recalled police smashing into his home before dragging away his wife.

“They grabbed my clothes and grabbed my hands so I couldn’t move. I could hear my daughter crying so much in the room next door but I couldn’t go to her, I couldn’t hug my wife.”

His wife remains in custody, according to The Telegraph.

China officially permits Christianity only through churches controlled by the Communist Party, where congregations are expected to display portraits of Xi Jinping and demonstrate loyalty to the regime.

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Mitch McConnell’s Wife, Elaine Chao, Issues Statement Addressing His Health Upon Her Return from China

Former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, wife of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, has issued a statement after returning to the United States from a trip to China, addressing questions about why she did not immediately return when her husband was hospitalized on June 14.

The statement emphasized that Chao was already abroad on a previously scheduled trip supporting her family’s philanthropic work when McConnell was admitted to the hospital, and that his condition at the time did not require her to cut the trip short.

“The secretary was on a long-planned trip in China to support her family’s philanthropic endeavors,” the statement, obtained by WLKY, began.

“During the trip, she met with a number of people, including the US ambassador. The Senator’s health did not warrant an immediate return to the US,” the statement continued.

The statement also noted that Senator McConnell appreciates the outpouring of support he is receiving while he continues his recovery in the hospital.

It did not provide any new information about his condition.

Chao returned to the United States earlier this week after spending roughly three weeks in China. She had begun her trip on June 12, just two days before her husband’s hospitalization.

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Church in China Announces Massive Government Raid, Almost Three Dozen Christians Detained

Early Rain Covenant Church in Sichuan Province, China, announced a massive raid that resulted in almost three dozen of their members being detained.

The church said in a statement published by China Aid that around 11:00 a.m. on Sunday, June 14, between 60 and 70 government agents disrupted their in-person worship gathering.

SWAT teams, police, local officials, and bureaucrats “stormed the venue and forcibly took control of the gathering.”

Two hours after the raid started, the communist officials started hauling away Christians in groups, with 33 total believers detained.

Most of them were transferred to Jiangyou City’s centralized registration center and detention facility.

Before letting anyone leave — including elderly people and children — police made them agree to sign a “guarantee letter.”

Some of the attendees agreed.

“However, officials refused to disclose the contents of the statement until individuals agreed to sign it. Because most believers refused to sign, they were never shown the document,” the statement said.

“Faced with pressure to sign an unknown statement, the congregation chose to remain peacefully and steadfastly in the hall,” the statement continued.

By the end of the day, between 9:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m., most of the Christians were released from the Jiangyou detention center one at a time.

But Elder Yan Hong and Elder Wu Wuqing remained in custody.

“As the released believers emerged from behind the detention center walls, they gathered closely together, offering prayers of thanksgiving and entrusting one another to God’s care. In the early hours of the morning, they accompanied one another on the journey back to Chengdu,” the church added.

“We thank the Lord for using this trial once again to bear witness to the Christian faith before many who have not yet heard the Gospel. Though the world may regard such experiences as shameful, we count them as an honor and a privilege.”

Early Rain Covenant Church, a Reformed Presbyterian congregation, previously made international headlines after their pastor, Wang Yi, was detained in 2018 and forced to endure a secret trial in 2019.

He remains in prison and is carrying out a nine-year sentence.

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Chinese University Espionage and How Biden Shut Down the Program That Might Have Stopped It

Chinese enrollment in U.S. higher education grew steadily through the Obama years, climbing from under 200,000 in 2011–12 to a peak of 372,532 by 2019–20. By March 2018, alongside that growth, the FBI warned in its bulletin, “China: The Risk to Academia,” that the broader population of international students and scholars in the United States, then numbering 1.4 million, posed a national security exposure. Chinese students were the largest source of that population.

The Bureau warned that a subset of those students and scholars was being used by Beijing as “non-traditional collectors,” exploiting the openness of U.S. research institutions through talent recruitment programs, unsolicited research collaboration offers, and academic visits to advance Chinese military and commercial interests. The bulletin stated that China does not “play by the same rules of academic integrity” as American institutions and called on universities to report suspicious contacts to their local FBI field office.

That assessment fed directly into the Department of Justice’s response. On November 1, 2018, the DOJ launched the China Initiative under Attorney General Jeff Sessions to counter Chinese economic espionage. The initiative was led by Assistant Attorney General John Demers of the National Security Division, alongside a senior FBI executive and five U.S. attorneys.

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‘Online Predator Network’: Court Hears Chinese Migrants in Germany Shared Rape Advice in Group Chat

They called themselves the “German driving school for experts,” but prosecutors say the true purpose of their Telegram chats was to brag about the women they raped and share tips about how to drug them.

In posts that sometimes included photos and videos of their attacks on unconscious victims, they referred to women as “cars,” sedatives as “fuel” and rape as “driving,” according to court documents. They called their victims “dead pigs.”

Investigators have been poring through several years’ worth of posts in roughly two dozen group chats on the popular messaging app that authorities believe served an online predator network of mainly Chinese men targeting mostly Chinese women in Germany. Their investigation has led to the convictions of three alleged inner circle members on rape and other charges, and the ongoing trial of a fourth man in Berlin.

“The perpetrators were characterized by a particular ruthlessness, an objectification of the victims, and the perfidious planning of their crimes,” Frankfurt chief prosecutor Dominik Mies told The Associated Press.

Major details of the investigation remain unknown, at least to the public, including how many attacks and perpetrators have been linked to the German Telegram chats and how the chats, some of which reportedly had tens of thousands of members, could have operated for so long. It’s also unclear if the chats are linked to a ballooning investigation in Europe and the Americas into drug-facilitated sexual assaults by misogynist online communities.

Under German privacy laws, prosecutors are limited in what they can say outside the courtroom, documents are restricted and, in the ongoing case in Berlin, members of the public have been forced to leave the courtroom during parts of the trial.

This may be why the investigation into the Telegram group has garnered less attention in Germany than might be expected. But members of the country’s Chinese community, mostly women, have been attending court proceedings to show support for the victims even if they don’t know them.

“What makes one really angry is to see that such groups hate women, they have no respect,” said Fu Xiao, who traveled roughly 500 kilometers (310 miles) to Berlin last week to attend the trial. “Women aren´t seen as people.”

In China, state media has covered the cases comprehensively, but wider discussion about the prosecutions on Chinese-language social media like Rednote has been partially censored. Certain tags have been more likely to get a post deleted or banned on Rednote, screenshots and searches show. But posts using less direct language have survived the censors, including ones that refer to “date rape” or the euphemistic “students studying abroad in Germany.”

China´s Ministry of Public Security and Rednote didn’t respond to requests for comment.

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Anthropic Removes “Scary” Secret Claude Tracker After Developer Stumbles Across It

Anthropic has removed hidden detection code from its Claude Code tool after a developer reverse-engineered the binary and exposed how the company was subtly monitoring users in China.

The code, which Anthropic described as an experiment launched in March, used a form of prompt steganography to signal information about a user’s environment back to Anthropic’s servers. It was designed to help detect unauthorized resellers and attempts by other organizations to distill Claude’s capabilities into their own models.

How The Detection Worked

The mechanism was first spotted by a Reddit user known as LegitMichel777, who stumbled on it while trying to restore a disabled feature in Claude Code. A separate developer known as Thereallo independently confirmed the finding the same day, June 30, publishing a technical breakdown of exactly how it worked.

The checks only ran in one specific situation: when a user pointed Claude Code at a different server instead of Anthropic’s own – something companies commonly do when they route their traffic through internal systems or third-party gateways. From there, it checked two things:

  • Whether the user’s computer was set to a Chinese time zone (Shanghai or Urumqi).
  • Whether the new server address matched a hidden list of Chinese AI companies (including well-known names like DeepSeek, Zhipu, and Moonshot) or known resale and proxy services.

If either check came back positive, Claude Code would quietly tweak a line of text called the “system prompt” – background instructions the app automatically sends to the AI model with every request, invisible to the person typing. Specifically, it changed how the date was written in that line:

  • If the user was in a Chinese time zone, the date switched from using dashes to slashes (e.g., 2026/06/30 instead of 2026-06-30).
  • The apostrophe in the phrase “Today’s date is…” was swapped for one of three lookalike characters, each one a different signal, depending on which combination of checks the session had triggered.

None of this was visible to users, or likely even to the AI model itself in normal use – the characters look identical on screen. But Anthropic’s servers could read the difference instantly. The lists of flagged domains and keywords were also scrambled inside the app’s code using a basic encryption trick, so they wouldn’t show up if someone just opened the file and searched for them.

Thereallo called the approach “prompt steganography” – hiding a signal inside ordinary-looking text – and noted it let Anthropic sort and flag sessions without needing any separate, visible tracking system.

Anthropic’s Explanation

Last Tuesday, Anthropic engineer Thariq Shihipar, who works on the Claude Code team, confirmed the feature on X:

“This is an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation. The team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we’ve actually been meaning to take this down for a while. We merged the PR and this should be fully rolled back in tomorrow’s release.”

Anthropic has stated that unauthorized resellers have been selling access to Claude accounts and subscriptions at steep discounts in certain markets. The company has also publicly documented large-scale efforts by Chinese AI labs to distill its models by querying them at high volume through proxies and fraudulent accounts.

Anthropic removed the detection logic shortly after it became public.

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Missouri State University Been Training Chinese Communists In Business

Missouri has voted strongly Republican since the 2000 election. A red state! How nice. Not exactly. Look deeper.

The Missouri State University, a tax-payer-funded institution like all state schools, has been offering an MBA program to Chinese nationals. Their website seems to be proud of that:

“Missouri State University

Missouri State University is a comprehensive institution offering undergraduate and graduate programs, including the professional doctorate. The university educates students to be global citizen scholars committed to public affairs.

It’s that last line to which I call your attention. “Global citizen scholars.”

Since the year, 2000, MSU HAS TRAINED OVER 1,500 CURRENT AND FUTURE MANAGERS FOR CHINESE STATE-OWNED ENTERPRISES AND GOVERNMENT BODIES – INCLUDING THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY – BY THE YEAR 2018!!

Global Citizen Scholars.

The amount that US Taxpayer’s have been spent on this runs into the tens of millions of dollars, or more, says Strategy Risks, a business intelligence firm focused on global risks which is based in New York City. I believe it has to have been much more.

The estimate of taxpayer funding rests on the most detailed figures available, which appear in a recruiting presentation from the Chinese Agricultural University, according to the report.

A report, “Heartland For Hire,” from Strategy Risks, provides the first public accounting of several MSU master’s programs that have “trained more than 1,500 current and future managers for Chinese state-owned enterprises and government bodies” since the programs began in 2001.

Graduates from these MBA and Executive MBA programs have gone on “to senior roles in China’s defense industry, strategic supply chains, and surveillance-technology sector”—including those sanctioned for aiding the People’s Liberation Army and providing technology to Russia for its war against Ukraine.

However, the report notes that the materials Strategy Risks found gave “conflicting accounts of the program’s finances.” Public recruiting materials for the MBA program describe “different prices, subsidy arrangements, and responsible payers.”

This bears repeating:

A publicly funded university in the State of Missouri, USA, provided a steady flow of business training to the Chinese Communist Party for over 20 years. The ads for the program still appeared on Chinese websites as late as 2024 – when DJT took office for the second term. During his first, you will see he placed this on a watch/special licensing list. Read on.

There is more.

By 2015, 107 finance positions from the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) system entities had completed the MSU MBA program, according to the report.

AVIC is “China’s primary state-owned aviation and defense conglomerate,” which the Department of War designated as a “Communist Chinese military company” in June 2020, and an Executive Order from the Trump administration “prohibited Americans from holding securities in any company on that list.”

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Big Pharma Is Running Drug Trials in a Chinese Concentration Camp Zone

Trivia question: What do Botox, Ozempic knockoff Mounjaro, and the cancer drug Keytruda all have in common?

They were all partly developed using clinical trial data from China. Specifically, from Chinese military hospitals. And, in a bunch of cases, from Xinjiang. That’s the place where the CCP has locked more than a million ethnic Uyghurs in concentration camps.

The House Select Committee on the CCP just sent letters to five major drugmakers—AbbVie, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Merck, and Pfizer—demanding answers about their clinical trials in China. The numbers, pulled straight from ClinicalTrials.gov, are unnerving. Merck alone ran at least 40 trials at PRC military medical centers and 31 more in Xinjiang. AbbVie: 17 Xinjiang trials, 16 at military hospitals. Similar story with Pfizer, Eli Lilly and BMS.

Is this a problem? Well, Committee Chairman and Congressman John Moolenaar said that “data developed through clinical trials at those hospitals could fuel the CCP’s military biotechnology research.”

But let’s say you don’t care about the CCP’s bioweapons program. Maybe you care about ethics?

Xinjiang is where the CCP is running a genocide against Uyghur Muslims. So when a drug trial recruits “volunteers” from inside that system, the word “voluntary” is probably a euphemism. China’s trial system enrolls patients three to five times faster than America’s. That sounds efficient until you ask why. Getting meaningful informed consent tends to slow things down. Forced labor camps tend not to have that problem.

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McConnell’s China-Connected Wife Met with China’s VP in Beijing 3 Days After Her Husband Was Rushed to Hospital

Former U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao traveled to Beijing just three days after her husband, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), was rushed to the hospital following an apparent heart attack that required CPR.

Chao, a former transportation secretary, met with Chinese Vice President Han Zheng on June 17. There are images published by Chinese outlets showing the two seated together during talks ostensibly focused on relations between Washington and Beijing.

In his meeting with Chao, Chinese Vice President Han Zheng called for China and the United States to take more steps to improve ties, saying both sides should work together to move the relationship forward. He said the two countries should follow through on the consensus reached by their leaders to build a more constructive and stable U.S.-China relationship.

Chao’s trip came as McConnell’s office continued to provide only limited information about the senator’s health. While aides have acknowledged that McConnell remains hospitalized, they have not publicly addressed the extent of his condition or explained how his Senate business is being managed during his absence.

“Senator McConnell was admitted to the hospital this morning. He is receiving excellent care,” spokesperson David Popp said in a statement on June 14.

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China-Linked Socialist NGO Derailed $23.6 Billion In Data Center Buildouts: Report

Our note on Thursday titled “World’s Largest Data Center Project On Verge Of Collapse After Blackstone Unexpectedly Pulls Out” detailed Blackstone dialing back its presence from Northern Virginia’s data-center alley, raising questions about whether the AI infrastructure buildout, colliding with local resistance movements, has begun to hit hard limits.

Just days after agreeing to sell stakes in three Virginia data centers to Digital Realty Trust for $3.5 billion, Blackstone’s QTS Realty Trust is reportedly abandoning plans for its portion of the massive Prince William Digital Gateway project. The 2,100-acre campus was expected to include as many as 37 data-center buildings and require city-scale power supplies.

“For community organizers and residents that spent the last five years opposing the Digital Gateway, QTS’s pullout will now validate a playbook that involved pressure campaigns on local politicians and legal attacks. It will also unleash even more powerful blowback nationwide against these unwanted developments,” we noted.

That brings us to the composition of the local resistance. Multiple reports suggest data center opposition is not entirely organic.

In fact, one familiar player appears to be involved, a name our readers know well, and the U.S. government certainly recognizes because a China-based billionaire funds the socialist NGO network.

Y Combinator founder Garry Tan, also founder of Garry’s List, a civic engagement organization, cited the Bitcoin Policy Institute’s recent report on how a “coordinated foreign influence campaign against American AI — running through CCP state media, a Shanghai-based Marxist’s nonprofit network, and foreign billionaire dark money that has funneled $2B+ into US advocacy infrastructure.”

Garry’s List noted, “AI doomerism isn’t as organic as it looks.“

That China-based Marxist’s nonprofit network spreading across the US is supported by Neville Roy Singham, who has reportedly funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into left-wing nonprofits, media operations, and activist networks that seek to sow chaos and spread communism inside the US.

Earlier this week, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York, authorized by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, was authorized to examine whether Singham, NGOs he funded, or their leaders committed wire fraud, bank fraud, money laundering, or other financial crimes.

Given that federal investigators are circling the socialists in the Singham NGO network, Garry’s List noted that Singham’s Party for Socialism and Liberation has “run 21 campaigns across 14 states that delayed, scaled back, or blocked $23.6 billion in AI infrastructure investment.”

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