This is the edition of the China, middle land newsletter. Do you want to receive it every Friday in your email? Sign up below.
A database of more than 1 billion Chinese people’s personal information was leaked onto the internet. According to foreign outlets such as Vice and The Wall Street Journal, an unidentified hacker has announced the sale of the information on a cybercrime forum for the price of 10 bitcoins (R$1.14 million). The data would have been extracted from the police system in Shanghai and the Alibaba Cloud cloud storage system.
The hacker released a “sample” with 750,000 records. The files contained the names, phone numbers, ID numbers, addresses, birthplaces, educational level, marital status, and birthdays of at least 250,000 people.
Vice called 12 people listed in the sample. All of them confirmed the information.
-
A man in Shanghai told the report that his daughter-in-law was likely in the police system after reporting the sale of fake tickets on the internet in 2015;
-
Another woman reported reporting a burglary at her apartment to the police in 2019;
-
The report managed to validate the identity of four other people through cross-referencing with the AliPay system, a digital wallet widely used in China.
Alibaba group said it is investigating the source of the leak. Officials in Shanghai declined to comment on the news, but responded with censorship to posts on the internet about the matter.
On Weibo, a kind of Chinese Twitter, the hashtags #leakdata, #breach of databases in Shanghai and #leakage of records of 1billion people were all deleted. On Baidu, the local equivalent of Google, searches on the subject report generic and old news about old cases.
why it matters: the Chinese government has made several changes to national legislation to force foreign technology companies to keep Chinese user data on domestic servers. This was one of the main reasons given by regulators for blocking the ride-sharing app Didi last year.
The leak reportedly affected nearly 70% of China’s population. The risk is that, in addition to online criminals, foreign intelligence services have had access to the data, which would be one of the biggest national cyber security risks in the country’s recent history.
what also matters
TikTok assumed that employees in China have access to US user data. The social network’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, said, however, that these people would be subject to “a series of cybersecurity controls and authorization protocols” and would be conditioned to the supervision of a team working in the US.
The confession, made to congressmen from the Republican Party, confirms a report by BuzzFeed that revealed the access after getting about 80 audios with internal discussions at ByteDance (parent company of TikTok) on the subject.
The news promises to further complicate the regulatory environment for the Chinese app, even after President Joe Biden canceled a Trump-era executive order that demanded the blocking of TikTok if the US operations were not sold to a non-Chinese company.
Now, Republican senators speak of a bipartisan investigation that would assess TikTok’s risks to national security.
A Hong Kong lawmaker was infected with Covid days after posing for a photo with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Xi was visiting the city to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover. It was his first trip outside mainland China since the start of the pandemic in 2020.
Steven Ho is a member of the pro-Beijing bloc in the city and was one of 100 government officials who had direct contact with Xi during the event. He was seated two rows behind the Chinese leader.
Beijing did not comment on the news, but a person who attended the same event, in an interview with the Financial Times, played down the chances of health risks to those involved. According to the source, everyone wore professional masks, and Xi maintained social distancing throughout the celebration.
Keep an eye
Argentina received formal support from China to join the BRICS, the country’s foreign minister, Santiago Cafiero, said on Thursday (7) after meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, in Indonesia. Cafiero stated that joining the group would “strengthen and amplify the voice [argentina] in defense of the interests of the developing world”.
why it matters: as I told in Sheet, last week, the Chinese embassy in BrasÃlia left support for Argentina between the lines after a press conference held with Brazilian journalists. Itamaraty views a possible expansion with reservations.
Diplomats fear that the bloc will end up becoming a reissue of the Cold War Non-Aligned Movement and also speculate about Brazil’s loss of prestige if more countries join the initiative.
to go deep
- After three years of research, professors Fábio Morosini (UFRGS) and Michelle Ratton launched this week the book “Brazil-China Economic Relations Law: Empirical Evidence”. Available for purchase online, the work will also feature a launch event in SP on August 18th. (paid, in Portuguese).
- Also on pre-sale was the book “China in Contemporary Capitalism”, a collection of articles written by Brazilian and Chinese academics coordinated by Edemilson Paraná and Esther Majerowicz. The work talks about Chinese economic development, social classes in post-reform China and the global expansion in the technological dispute. (paid, in Portuguese.
- Observa China is holding this Saturday (9), at 10 am, another of its international online events, now with the participation of Chen Dingding, dean of the Institute for 21st Century Silk Road Studies at the University of Jinan. He will talk about the role of think tanks in shaping domestic and foreign policies in China. (free, in English.
