China Launches New Crackdown on Organized Crime |
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: Beijing launches a new crackdown on organized crime; a slate of racist, AI-generated videos floods the Chinese internet; and China plans to conduct an asteroid defense test.
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: Beijing launches a new crackdown on organized crime; a slate of racist, AI-generated videos floods the Chinese internet; and China plans to conduct an asteroid defense test.
Beijing Targets Illegal Mining, Sand Industries
China has launched a one-year “special campaign” against organized crime, promising a crackdown on enterprises ranging from online scam syndicates to human trafficking. These campaigns are a semiregular feature of Chinese politics. The last major one, named the “Special Campaign to Sweep Away Black Societies and Eliminate Evil Forces,” ran from 2018 to 2021.
An official Q&A notes a focus on six types of “bullies”—a term used in previous government crackdowns to describe gangs that dominate what should be public spaces or state resources. (“Bullies” is the state media translation. The Chinese word is ba, which is akin to a local tyrant; “thugs” or “racketeers” might be closer in English.)
This list includes “village bullies” and “township bullies,” or local gangs that effectively control small communities, as well as “street bullies” and “city bullies,” which run protection rackets targeting street vendors and small businesses. But it’s the final pairing—“mining bullies” and “sand bullies”—that stands out.
The first of these is unsurprising. Mining has long been a major nexus of organized crime in China, with criminal groups building mines within state-run operations, digging illegal tunnels, and employing off-the-books migrant labor. China has cracked down on illegal rare-earth mining since 2009, shrinking an illicit market that was once roughly half the size of the........