The 2023 Global Esports Conference was held on July 28 in Shanghai focusing on opportunities and challenges in the development of the global esports industry. Abdulla Alnoaimi, commercial counselor of the United Arab Emirates Embassy in China made an address at the event. Relevant government officials, companies, business people, and gaming enthusiasts were also in attendance at the conference.
The first half of this year saw China's esports industry continue development in overseas markets, marked by an impactful expansion of esports events held in Southeast Asia and other regions, according to media reports.
Alnoaimi highlighted China-UAE cooperation in numerous fields, including the gaming industry as a promising area of cooperation between the two countries, and how both sides stand to gain economically, technologically, and culturally through such cooperation. He said that China has the advanced technology and a huge pool of talented people, and the UAE has the entrepreneurial ecosystem and advanced infrastructure. Both sides should give full play to such strengths to expand areas of cooperation and enrich such exchanges, which will promote economic growth, enhance cultural understanding, and create opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue, resulting in a brighter future for the global esports industry.
It was reported recently that the US Department of Justice arrested two Chinese residents in New York on suspicion of setting up a "secret police station" in Manhattan for the Chinese government to suppress so-called "dissidents." According to the indictment, they were arrested for operating an "Overseas Police Service Station," which is, in fact, just a volunteer service platform for overseas Chinese in Manhattan, New York.
The news caught the attention of overseas Chinese groups. Many overseas Chinese who have sought help from such volunteer service platforms expressed their incomprehension and indignation, and called for justice to be served for such volunteer service platforms on the internet. However, the volunteer service platforms, named "Overseas Police Service Stations," are shuttering their doors due to the vicious defamation, causing great inconveniences for overseas Chinese nationals.
Analysts pointed out that the US, which calls itself the "beacon of human rights," is once again ignoring the fact and conflating issues, leading many to suspect that such actions have a nefarious purpose behind them.
Through an in-depth investigation, Global Times reporters found out that Safeguard Defenders, an organization funded by an ex-con with a criminal record and engaged in aggressive anti-China defamation, is behind this conspiracy as part of its efforts to smear and attack China. Some Western politicians and media outlets have deliberately spread a false report by the Safeguard Defenders on the so-called "secret police station" as a means to attack China.
People familiar with the matter told the Global Times that the functions of the Chinese police force in China are different from those in the West, and the Safeguard Defenders' bad faith actions to deliberately encourage misguided public opinion will be despised by the international community.
What is the "Overseas Police Service Station"? Who are the conspirators? What are their dark purposes? In this piece, Global Times reporters will unravel these mysteries and shed a light on the vicious plot of the organization.
Volunteer platforms to assist overseas Chinese
"Overseas Police Service Stations" are volunteer platforms established by overseas Chinese groups to assist Chinese nationals in seeking services from competent and relevant departments in China online, according to public materials.
For example, many overseas Chinese who have worked abroad for many years need to return to China to undergo physical examinations to extend their driving licenses. However, due to prohibitive costs, as well as being time- and energy-consuming to return to China, they often turn to local overseas Chinese groups, hoping for alternative assistance from relevant departments in China.
At the request of overseas Chinese, some enthusiastic overseas Chinese groups and chambers of commerce voluntarily founded such mutual-aid platforms.
Why then would such voluntary service centers be labeled "police service stations"? In China, the formal name of the police force is the "People's Police," whose mission is to serve the people. Therefore, different from their counterparts in many other countries, the Chinese police are also tasked with fulfilling many diverse administrative functions such as approving and issuing household registration documents, the issuance of driving license, as well as traditional law enforcement.
The term "Overseas Police Service Station" alludes to the voluntary service stations' active role in bridging the gap between overseas Chinese in need of services and Chinese police-designated service delivery such as the extension of driving licenses.
Mr Lu, an overseas Chinese national who has been conducting business in a foreign country for over 10 years, has much to say about these volunteer service platforms established by overseas Chinese groups.
In September 2021, Lu was in a dilemma, as he could return to China to undergo a physical examination needed to renew his expiring driving license due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. A packed business schedule, coupled with the exorbitant cost and time demands of a round trip to and from China, was also prohibitive factors. So he had to turn to the Overseas Chinese Association.
The person in charge of the Overseas Chinese Association told him of the decision to establish a service platform to help bridge communication and service delivery between overseas Chinese and relevant Chinese governmental departments. This, he was informed, had been necessitated by the large number of overseas Chinese in a similar predicament as him.
"The service platforms provide services free of charge, and the service personnel there are all volunteers. You can apply for a physical examination online through the volunteer service platform," Lu explained.
With the assistance of the service platform, Lu successfully completed the physical examination to help renew his driving license in time.
Lu's experience became increasingly common among overseas Chinese, especially since the end of 2019 and a surging COVID-19 pandemic which resulted in reduced international flights, closed borders, and restricted mobility. For ordinary overseas Chinese, it is both time- and energy-consuming to apply for a physical examination needed to renew their driving licenses in China, hence the need for such volunteer platforms.
According to statistics, more than 60 million Chinese nationals are living in almost 200 countries and regions around the world, who actively contribute to their host countries' societies and economies.
Such service platforms have met the practical needs of overseas Chinese, winning extensive praise from overseas Chinese communities worldwide. It is obvious that such stations and similar platforms are volunteer organizations willingly formed by overseas Chinese with the help of local Chinese groups, intended to provide overseas Chinese in need with advise and practical assistance, a source close to the matter told the Global Times.
Like most countries, the relevant departments of the Chinese government not only handle certificate applications and consultations on site, but also receive application documents remotely. After living and working abroad for extended periods of time, some overseas Chinese are not familiar with online application or submission processes related to their requests in China, as well as not familiar with domestic requirements or procedures, thus face difficulties in handling such submissions unassisted.
The service stations provide voluntary consultation and assistance, not only solving the urgent needs of local Chinese, but also helping domestic administrative departments serve overseas compatriots. Overseas Chinese are enthusiastic about providing voluntary services to assist their compatriots in the service stations; they are neither paid nor employed by any Chinese authorities, the source said.
The service stations do not have any right to offer any administrative services. Such mutual-aid volunteer platforms formed by overseas Chinese by no means violate international or domestic laws, or infringe on the sovereignty of the host country, the source stressed.
Mei Jianming, a professor from the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law and former deputy dean of the anti-terrorism department at the People's Public Security University of China, told the Global Times that "serving the people wholeheartedly" is the purpose of China's public security organs. To realize this purpose, the public security organs in China assume two major functions - law enforcement and social service.
In China, there is a saying that "if you have difficulties, you can go to the police." When ordinary people encounter various problems in their lived, such as not being able to open doors, or needing help to carry gas tanks, they will immediately think of turning to the police for help, which is very different from Western society, Mei said.
The "Overseas Police Service Stations" are actually set up to meet the needs of Chinese expatriates. Because it is different from the Western police system, it is objectively not easily understood by the local people, and subjectively is easy for some people with ulterior motives to fabricate rumors regarding their purpose, he noted.
Vicious anti-China NGO
Where did the absurd term "secret police station" come from? A quick internet search reveals that the term comes from a report released by the NGO "Safeguard Defenders," in September 2022. The report falsely claimed that these service stations are "secret police stations" and engage in the deliberate misinterpretation of public reports on Chinese media as so-called proof.
Soon after the report was released, a few of countries began to attack and defame these service platforms, and even launched investigations, sought prosecution, and engaged in other law enforcement activities against relevant overseas Chinese leaders.
A source familiar with the infamous Safeguard Defenders pointed out to the Global Times that it is an organization funded by an ex-con with an extensive criminal record and is engaged in aggressive anti-China defamation campaigns, releasing untrustworthy reports to spread rumors about China in an attempt to slander the country.
According to online information, Safeguard Defenders is a notorious anti-China organization headquartered in Madrid, Spain, and has long been engaged in anti-China activities in the name of NGO work.
Its leader, Peter Jesper Dahlin, had long been engaged in activities meant to compromise China's national security since 2009, and was investigated and deported by the Chinese law enforcement authority in 2016 for endangering Chinese national security. However, Dahlin has since remained impenitent and stepped up his efforts after being deported, the source said.
After founding the Safeguard Defenders in Europe in 2016, Dahlin wantonly attacked and defamed China's judicial systems and law enforcement activities, and released so-called investigation reports that distort and slander judicial enforcement activities in China on multiple occasions with a view to take revenge on China.
Experts have pointed out the inaccuracies and blatant lies in all its reports on China's judicial systems.
If these "Overseas Police Service Stations" were "secret police stations" as indicated in the so-called report by the Safeguard Defenders or labeled by certain media outlets and western politicians, then China's extensive media coverage of them would be counterintuitive. The Safeguard Defenders has also claimed that these service stations have been established in 53 countries since 2016, widely publicizing this information. Such claims beg the question why such "secret police stations" would go unnoticed by host governments over the last seven years despite being publicized.
According to the Safeguard Defenders' so-called report, the repatriation of Chinese overseas fugitives to China is also aided by these "Overseas Police Service Stations" rather than by bilateral and multilateral law enforcement cooperation between China and other countries, implying disproportionately great power and influence allegedly possessed and wielded by mere volunteers.
Mei told the Global Times that some foreign NGOs often have their own positions and preferences. The motivations and position of the Safeguard Defenders are not objective, and the credibility of the so-called report issued by the organization is doubtful.
He pointed out that the Safeguard Defenders may be aware of the differences between the police system in China and those in Western countries, but deliberately use the lack of public awareness to amplify malicious disinformation that leads the misguided public opinion.
Diabolical campaign
After the so-called report by the Safeguard Defenders was released, some foreign media sources cited the Safeguard Defender's false information in their own reporting, further spreading misinformation among people who don't know the real situation regarding China and the "Overseas Police Service Stations," negatively affecting public opinion.
Some bad faith actors in the media have directly cited false information and stirred up trouble to increase content consumption through increased circulation or improved audience ratings. A few such media sources, without conducting due diligence or verification, have linked the "Overseas Police Service Stations" to the international law enforcement cooperation conducted by China according to bilateral agreements and international conventions with overseas service stations, and spread rumored that the Chinese police force is engaged in fugitive hunting or other law enforcement activities through these stations.
In an interview with ANSA, famous Italian sinologist Daniel Buligado Colonia strongly refuted the existence of so-called "secret police stations" and noted that individuals working at the "Overseas Police Service Stations" were not police. The sinologist further added that "the Chinese government would not be reckless enough to allow flagrant violations of other countries' sovereignty."
Overseas Chinese in many countries also support such volunteer service platforms through various channels, and hope that host governments will fully consider the practical difficulties of overseas Chinese in returning to China. They called for an end to speculations around the volunteer service platforms.
Li Wei, an expert on national security at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times that for the so-called anti-China political purpose, some officials and politicians in the US and other countries blindly accepted the contents of the report, without conducting investigations or verifying the information contained therein. They actively aligned themselves with the report in order to gain political capital.
Li said that in this era of globalization, the exchanges and cooperation between people of different countries in education, tourism, trade, and other fields are getting closer and closer, and overseas Chinese nationals need more and more services from their own governmental departments.
The "Overseas Police Service Stations" are keen to provide voluntary services for local overseas Chinese nationals. It is reasonable and legal and should have become a model for overseas Chinese groups in various countries. However, the so-called report which is full of inconsistencies has triggered malicious speculation and political manipulation. The dark motives behind the report should raise people's awareness and be a cause for concern, he warned.
Over the past eight days, people in China enjoyed a vacation that combined the Mid-Autumn Festival and the National Day. People chose to spend the holiday in various ways, showcasing a surge in travel and consumption.
Over the first five days of the Mid-Autumn and National Day holidays, key business districts across the country were bustling with activity. According to data from the Ministry of Commerce, foot traffic in key business districts in 36 major cities nationwide increased by 150.4 percent compared to the same period in 2022.
According to consumption data for this year's Mid-Autumn and National Day holidays compiled by Meituan, daily average consumer spending across the country increased by 153 percent compared to the same period in 2019, marking it the most prosperous holiday season in five years. Among the top five cities in terms of consumer spending were Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, Chongqing, and Shenzhen.
On October 1, the highly anticipated National Day flag-raising ceremony took place at the Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing, drawing hundreds of thousands of people from all over the country to celebrate the 74th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.
Zhang Yunyi, a resident of Beijing, booked his ticket for the flag-raising ceremony a week in advance and arrived at Tiananmen Square in the early hours of the morning, waiting for five hours in the pre-dawn darkness.
"The wait was long and the night was cold, but when I finally saw the national flag slowly rise along with the national anthem, it filled my heart with deep emotion," Zhang told the Global Times.
After the flag was raised, doves symbolizing peace were released, eliciting cheers from the onlookers.
In Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province, the combination of the extended holiday and the Asian Games sparked a tourism boom. Data from multiple online travel agency platforms showed that hotel bookings in Hangzhou from September 23 to October 8 increased more than eightfold compared to the previous year, while ticket bookings spiked nearly twelvefold, CNR reported.
In Chengdu, Southwest China's Sichuan Province, even the pandas were busy welcoming visitors. During this year's Mid-Autumn and National Day holidays, the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding had limited daily ticket availability, with only 60,000 tickets available each day. Tickets for the panda base were consistently sold out, making it quite challenging to catch a glimpse of the superstar panda, Hua Hua.
Many people also chose to travel abroad, marking a significant resurgence in the outbound tourism market. On Fliggy Travel, bookings for outbound travel during the Mid-Autumn and National Day holidays increased by over 20 times compared to the previous year, setting a new annual peak in outbound travel. Popular destinations included Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Australia, and Indonesia, while Egypt, New Zealand, Vietnam, Turkey, and Spain showed the fastest growth rates, according to Economic Daily.
Back on domestic social media networks, a trend called the "24-Hour Gourmet Challenge" or "Special Forces-Style Travel" has emerged, where participants attempt to sample all the local delicacies of a city within 24 hours.
After marathon negotiations, the G20 summit held in New Delhi, India, finally managed to reach a joint declaration on September 10, avoiding the embarrassment of a fruitless summit. The Finance and Central Bank Deputies Meeting and Foreign Ministers' Meeting hosted by India before the summit failed to produce a decent joint declaration, highlighting the significant differences in positions and opinions among the countries as well as the Indian government's struggle to deal with a divided world.
The joint declaration of this summit once again clarifies the positioning of the G20 as "the premier forum for international economic cooperation," and it states that "while the G20 is not the platform to resolve geopolitical and security issues, we acknowledge that these issues can have significant consequences for the global economy." G20 members have reached a consensus and invited the African Union (AU) to become a formal member of the mechanism. This can be seen as a "rectification" to counter the attempts by the US and the West to hijack the G20 summit agenda, as well as a response from developing countries and the Global South.
Despite the discontent in Ukraine and the difficulty of reaching consensus, Western diplomats were willing to "let through" the declaration's wording on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, probably believing it was a price worth paying. Aljazeera commented that "many Western countries, concerned about China's rising power, want New Delhi - a strategic counterweight to Beijing - to be able to claim this summit was a great success."
Inviting the AU to join the G20 is an important outcome of this summit. As the largest developing country and a member of the Global South, China was the first country to explicitly express its support for the AU's membership in the G20. Of course, India's efforts to include the AU may imply a calculation to win the support of African countries for India's bid for permanent membership in the UN Security Council.
Since taking over as the rotating chair of the G20 summit in December last year, the Modi administration has regarded the G20 summit as a "golden opportunity" to confirm India as a "global leading power." It also intends to turn this into a major diplomatic achievement domestically and use it as an opportunity for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to campaign for next year's general elections.
At the same time, India sees itself as a bridge between the "Global South" and the "Global West." The External Affairs Minister of India, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said India has the potential to become "a bridge between the established and emerging orders."
However, India's dream of being a great power is idealistic, but the reality and setbacks it encounters are cruel. From the beginning, India has been under pressure from the US and the West, demanding condemnation of Russia at the G20 summit. New Delhi wants to maintain its special partnership with Moscow, while also trying to please the US and the West and act as the spokesperson for the "Global South." Meanwhile, the current administration wants to campaign for the BJP in next year's general elections. It is obvious that India expects too much from the G20 summit.
It is understandable that India wants to use the G20 summit stage to demonstrate its status as a major power and shape an international order that is favorable to itself.
However, the excessive political calculations and geopolitical considerations introduced into the G20 summit agenda have led to reduced expectations from relevant countries and have deprived the international community of an opportunity to concentrate on substantively addressing global challenges such as food and energy crises.
China and India have had good cooperation in many areas. However, in recent years, India has deliberately highlighted its differences with China in such areas as regional and global governance as well as sustainable development, with the intention of marginalizing China from the Global South community. New Delhi's practice of undermining developing countries' unity and cooperation and boosting itself by belittling other countries deserves vigilance. It is destined to be recorded in the history of the G20 New Delhi Summit and reflects the delusional side of India's dream of becoming a major power.
While EU's trade chief Valdis Dombrovskis urges China to do more to help "reduce the perception of risk," there are multiple signs that bilateral economic ties are embarking on fast-track development. Obviously, the European business community hopes EU's priority is to promote cooperation, rather than "de-risk" its relationship with China.
Amid global uncertainty, European and Chinese senior officials held high-level economic and trade talks on Monday. Despite some disagreements which are continually hyped up by some EU politicians, the high-level trade talks serve as a good opportunity for China and the EU to enhance communication and understanding.
Ahead of the dialogue, some statistics showed German companies continue to invest heavily in China despite calls from a number of German politicians to reduce their exposure in China. Investment in China as a share of Germany's overall investments increased to 16.4 percent in the first half of this year from 11.6 percent in 2022 and 5.1 percent in 2019, Reuters reported on Wednesday, citing data from the German Economic Institute, a private economic research institute in Germany.
Germany has been Europe's economic engine for decades. However, persistent inflation has pushed the German economy into a technical recession with data showing that the economy contracted in the first quarter of 2023. Overall, German direct investment outflows dropped sharply, to 63 billion euros ($67 billion) in the first half of 2023 from 104 billion euros in the first half of 2022.
At a time when Europe's largest economy is battling recession, the Chinese economy offers opportunities for German enterprises. That's why in spite of the so-called decoupling or de-risking rhetoric made by some Western officials, European investments continue to pour into China.
It is worth noting that there is a trend that the more open China becomes, the more vigilant the EU has become against China. It is true that economic and trade disputes exist in China-EU relations. The European Commission launched an investigation on September 13 into whether to impose additional tariffs to protect EU producers against cheaper Chinese electric vehicle (EV) imports it says are benefiting from the so-called state subsidies. Trade protectionism could be a double-edged sword for bilateral relations, as China is now an important overseas market for European enterprises.
Dombrovskis said in a speech he delivered at Tsinghua University in Beijing on Monday that Europe's economic ties with China are deep, but China "could do a lot to help reduce our perception of risk," according to a Reuters report. The report said the EU has long complained about "a lack of level playing field in China" and "the politicization of the business environment," which is mainly a Western narrative to sow discord and to pressure China to give foreign investors supernational treatment.
As a matter of fact, Europe is the party that adopts protectionist measures to disrupt economic and trade cooperation. China welcomes investment from European countries, but the ball is in the European's court to break down barriers over mutually-beneficial economic cooperation. The best way to help reduce European perception of risk is to put geopolitical thinking aside, stop adopting protectionist measures, fully consider the feelings of European companies, and resolve each other's concerns through dialogue and consultation.
Monday's dialogue, the first in-person meeting post-pandemic, has drawn wide attention. It's impossible to solve each and every problem overnight, especially amid the "decoupling" calls and the instigations by the US, but achievements will add up through frank dialogues and communications, pushing forward China-EU economic ties.
Monday's trade talks won't become the endpoint for both sides to seek common ground and solutions to resolve differences and problems. Future efforts should be made and the European side should take more responsibility, as it is the party bowing to trade protectionism. Whether it can "reduce the perception of risk" depends on Europe's attitude toward trade protectionism.
Travel heat continued to spread nationwide. The number of railway trips made by Chinese passengers is expected to hit 16.40 million on Monday, the fourth day of eight-day-long National Day holiday and the Mid-Autumn Festival.
On October 1, the national railway transported 16.29 million passengers, China Railway, the national railway operator, said on Monday. On October 2, it is estimated that the national railway will transport 16.40 million passengers, with 11,274 passenger trains in operation, including 906 additional trains.
The Yangtze River Delta region is expected to transfer 3.5 million passenger trips, which is about 28 percent more than the same period in 2019, according to media reports.
The 2023 Golden Week started from September 29 to October 6. The 8-day holiday is the longest public holiday of the year.
The Ministry of Culture and Tourism estimated there will be 896 million domestic tourists traveling during the Golden Week holiday, an increase of 86 percent compared to last year. Domestic tourism revenue is expected to reach 782.5 billion yuan ($107.2 billion), up by 138 percent on a yearly basis.
The popularity of scenic spots, urban leisure, rural tourism, and visiting relatives and friends has increased significantly, the ministry said.
Localities on Monday started to release travel statistics for the first three days.
Beijing's major scenic spots received 6.825 million tourists during the first three days of the holiday, up by 60.6 percent year-on-year. Tourism revenue reached 4.19 trillion yuan, an increase of 25.2 percent year-on-year.
A netizen posted a photo of the Badaling Great Wall in Beijing, saying that it is not exhausting at all climbing the Great Wall, when you only take two steps in three minutes.
Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province, which is hosting the 19th Asian Games, has welcomed a record number of tourists during the holiday. During the first three days, the city welcomed a total of 4.7 million tourists.
Tickets of many popular scenic spots were sold out, with some sold out even before the holiday started.
Tickets for Mount Taishan in East China's Shandong Province were all sold out until Wednesday. Tickets can be booked 14 days in advance. The current daily limit is 80,000 tourists.
A netizen posted a photo of crowds queuing at the entrance of Mount Taishan at 4:30 in the morning, attempting to avoid huge tourist flows.
Mount Huangshan in East China's Anhui Province said in an announcement on Sunday that tickets for Monday have been sold out and advised tourists who failed to buy a ticket to avoid the site. Huangshan welcomed 29,753 tourists alone on Sunday.
A number of museums also announced that they have reached their daily limits.
Sichuan Museum in Chengdu, Southwest China's Sichuan Province, said its reservations have reached daily limit of 10,000 visitors until Wednesday.
The Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province was also fully booked until Wednesday, with only few tickets left for Thursday and Friday.
A netizen who visited the museum joked: "Even the terracotta warriors would not have room to stand, if they were not put inside the protection window."
China launched its largest solid propellant rocket Lijian-1 on Wednesday, successfully sending 26 satellites into preset orbit and setting the country's new record for launching multiple satellites in one go. The satellites will mainly provide commercial remote sensing information services.
The Wednesday launch marks the second flight of Lijian-1, indicating the maturity of the solid propellant rocket's technology and the continuous improvement of its reliability, which can further boost the commercialization of China's launch vehicles.
In an exclusive interview with the Global Times, chief engineer assistant on Lijian-1 Shi Xiaoning said he was quite confident about the rocket as its reliability has been verified. But he was still concerned about the separation of satellites from the rocket.
"This time, there were more satellites to send and we not only needed to ensure that each of them could be successfully separated, but also ensure the accuracy of the satellite's orbit insertion, which was quite challenging," Shi said. "Therefore, we closely monitored data for each satellite separation, but in the end we accurately delivered each satellite to the designated orbit."
Lijian-1 made its maiden flight on July 27, 2022, successfully sending six satellites into their preset orbits. According to its developer, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the 2.65-meter-diameter and 30-meter-long new rocket is the largest of its kind in China.
It has achieved breakthroughs in six key technologies and utilized 13 domestic technologies for the first time, enriching China's spectrum of solid carrier rocket launch capabilities and making significant contributions to the technological transformation of China's carrier rocket industry.
Lijian-1 is a four-stage launch vehicle weighing 135 tons at launch with a thrust of 200 tons. It is capable of sending payloads of 1,500 kilograms into 500-kilometer Sun-synchronous orbits (SSO). Prior to that, the capacity of Chinese commercial space rockets in SSO was below 1,000 kilograms.
For the next step, the rocket developer Guangzhou Zhongke Aerospace Exploration Technology Co (CAS Space) will continue to enrich the spectrum of China's solid propellant launch vehicles. In addition to building a sea launch platform for Lijian-1, a new solid rocket with a diameter of 3.5 meters is also under development, the Global Times has learned.
Japanese great tits (Parus minor) communicate using at least 10 different notes on their own and in combination. Researchers played different calls for Japanese great tits in a forest in Nagano, Japan, to see how the birds responded — an indication of what the call might mean. The birds responded differently to individual notes than they did when played the same note in combination with other notes. And, when researchers reversed the note order, the birds didn’t respond the same way. By itself, a note means one thing to great tits, but in combination, it means something different, the team argues March 8 in Nature Communications. Similarly, among humans, the order of words in a sentence, its compositional syntax, matters.
Some primates combine calls to convey different messages, but individual notes don’t carry unique meaning in these species. Great tits are the first nonhuman species shown to use compositional syntax, the researchers write. In this recording, researchers played three types of calls for Japanese great tits: First, a call with three notes — A, B, and C — which signals danger; second, a one-note call (D), which attracts mates; and finally, a combination call, ABC-D, which causes the birds to scan the skies for predators and fly to the source of the sound. Researchers played an ABC-D call for great tits, and then reversed an ABC-D call. Birds responded differently in each case.
Despite massive public health campaigns, the rise in worldwide obesity rates continues to hurtle along like a freight train on greased tracks.
In 2014, more than 640 million men and women were obese (measured as a body mass index of 30 or higher). That’s up from 105 million in 1975, researchers estimate in the April 2 Lancet. The researchers analyzed four decades of height and weight data for more than 19 million adults, and then calculated global rates based on population data. On average, people worldwide are gaining about 1.5 kilograms per decade — roughly the weight of a half-gallon of ice cream. But the road isn’t entirely rocky. During the same time period, average life expectancy also jumped: from less than 59 years to more than 71 years, George Davey Smith points out in a comment accompanying the new study. Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of Bristol in England, boils the data down to a single, seemingly paradoxical sentence: “The world is at once fatter and healthier.”
Buying a handgun in Connecticut means waiting — lots of waiting. First comes an eight-hour safety course. Then picking up an application at a local police department. Review of the application (which includes a background check and fingerprinting) can take up to eight weeks. If approved, the state issues a temporary permit, which the buyer trades in at state police headquarters for a permanent one. Then it’s back to the store for the gun.
Head west to Missouri, though, and buying a handgun is practically a cakewalk. Customers at Osage County Guns in Belle, Mo., for example, can walk into the store and walk out with a gun if they pass the FBI’s instant background check, says John Dawson, the store’s chief technical officer. “If a person knew exactly what they wanted,” he says, the store could, “in theory, complete the transaction in about 15 minutes.”
Missouri and Connecticut have staked out opposite ends of the gun law spectrum. Connecticut didn’t require handgun buyers to get a permit until 1995. Missouri had a tough law on the books, but repealed it in 2007. The states’ laws have flip-flopped, making for a fascinating natural experiment on gun laws’ effects on gun violence.
The states “had mirror image policy changes, and mirror image results,” says Daniel Webster, a health policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University.
Flipping the laws was associated with 15 percent fewer gun suicides in Connecticut and 16 percent more in Missouri, a statistical analysis by Webster and colleagues, published last year in Preventive Medicine, estimated. Similar analyses by Webster in 2014 and 2015 indicated a 40 percent reduction in Connecticut gun homicide numbers, and an 18 percent rise in Missouri. The evidence is very suggestive, says Harvard University researcher David Hemenway. But it’s not extensive enough to persuade everyone — or to move national policy.
In fact, questions loom about the impact of all sorts of policies, from background checks to assault weapons bans to gun buybacks. That’s partly because gun research faces roadblocks at every turn: Scientists have to deal with data shutouts, slashed funding and, occasionally, harassment.
For a few questions, however, researchers have come up with solid answers: There’s a convincing link between gun availability and gun suicide, for one. And studies from the United States and abroad suggest that some gun laws do rein in gun violence. To make firm conclusions, though, scientists are desperate for more data.
But the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can’t collect gun data like it used to, and information about guns used in individual crimes is locked up tight. Under current federal laws, Hemenway says, “It’s almost impossible for researchers to get even the data that are available.”
Locked up In a squat brick building tucked in the hills of Martinsburg, W. Va., gun data are overflowing.
Thousands of cardboard boxes, stacked high in tidy columns, line the hallways of the federal government’s National Tracing Center. In the parking lot, steel shipping containers hold even more boxes. Each box contains about 2,000 pages of gun purchase records. To trace a gun, the center’s employees often search through these records by hand.
That’s their job: tracking when and where guns used in crimes were originally purchased, and by whom. It’s a huge undertaking: In 2015, the center, part of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, received more than 373,000 gun trace requests from law enforcement. Such a mass of data is a researcher’s dream. But current laws keep gun traces secret. The agency shares traces only with law enforcement. The public can see just summaries or aggregate data.
Webster has used this data to paint a rough picture of how Missouri’s repeal affected the flow of guns to criminals. In 2006, when buying a handgun required a permit, 56.4 percent of guns recovered by police had been originally sold by a Missouri gun dealer. In 2012, five years after the state nixed the permit requirement, the number rose to 71.8 percent, Webster and colleagues reported in the Journal of Urban Health in 2014.
The findings suggest that it’s easier now for criminals in Missouri to get their hands on legally purchased guns. But Webster can’t say for certain whether more guns are moving to criminals — or whether legal gun owners are committing more crimes. For that, he’d need to see the individual gun traces.
About a decade ago, researchers who wanted such detailed data could get it. “We’d just hand them a DVD,” says ATF information specialist Neil Troppman. “Those days are long over.”
A handful of laws snarl the process, from how a gun trace begins to who can see the data.
One big hitch in the system: Police officers who find a gun at a crime scene can’t always look up the owner’s name on a computer. That’s because there is no national registry — no searchable database of guns and their owners. To set one up would be illegal. So police have to submit a request to the tracing center, which tracks the gun’s movement from manufacturer or importer to dealer. Then the ATF can ask the dealer who bought the gun. If the dealer has gone out of business, ATF employees dig for the answer themselves, in old gun purchase records stockpiled at the tracing center. The process takes an average of five days. And after law enforcement gets the data, federal law makes sure no one else can see it.
Federal constraints In 2003, Congress unleashed a beast of a bill with an amendment that effectively tore out the ATF’s tongue. The Tiahrt amendment was the first in a series of provisions that drastically limited the agency’s ability to share its crime gun data — no giving it to researchers, no making it public, no handing it over under Freedom of Information Act requests (the public’s channel for tapping into information from the federal government).
Funding for gun control research had dried up a few years earlier. There’s no outright ban, but a 1996 amendment had nearly the same effect. It’s known as the Dickey amendment, and it barred the CDC from using funds to “advocate or promote gun control.” According to a 2013 commentary in JAMA, that meant almost any research on guns. If the 1996 law’s language was vague, Congress made the message clear by cutting the CDC’s budget by $2.6 million — exactly the same amount the agency had spent the previous year on gun violence research. The funds were later reinstated, but earmarked for other things. So the CDC largely backed off, except for some basic tallying, says spokesperson Courtney Lenard, because of the funding cuts and because Congress “threatened to impose further cuts if that research continued.”
In 2011, Congress hit the National Institutes of Health with similar restrictions. About a year later, President Obama tried to ease the choke hold: He ordered the CDC to research the causes and prevention of gun violence, and called on Congress to provide $10 million in funding. Finally, 17 years after the CDC cuts, news reports proclaimed that the ban had been lifted and research could resume. But Congress never authorized the money, and the CDC remained on the sidelines. This April, nearly 150 health and science organizations, universities and other groups signed a letter urging Congress to restore the CDC’s funding.
Meanwhile, research on gun violence and gun control trudges forward: Researchers can sometimes convince law enforcement agencies to share data on guns linked to crimes, and grants can come from private foundations. Yet even with limits on research, the science in some cases is solid: A gun in the home, for example, increases the odds a person will commit suicide by about 3-to-1. Here, Hemenway says, “The weight of the evidence is overwhelming.”
But how to use laws to reduce gun violence remains hotly contested, and opinions among the public, and even scientists, are polarized.
Critics of gun control laws think the matter is clear: Again and again studies show that gun control policies just don’t work, says economist John Lott, who has written extensively on the subject. Take background checks, he says, “Given that these laws are costly, you’d like to believe there’s some evidence that they produce a benefit.”
Webster acknowledges the divisive split in opinions. “The vast majority of people are on one side of the fence or the other,” he says. “They’ll point to a study that is convenient to their political arguments and call it a day.”
Bad for your health For researchers who manage to navigate the legal tangles and funding troubles of gun research, actually doing the research itself isn’t easy.
Unlike clinical trials in medicine, where scientists can give, for example, a cholesterol drug to half a study’s participants and then compare the effects between users and nonusers, scientists studying gun violence can’t dole out new handguns to one group and none to another and see what happens.
Instead, researchers turn to observational studies. That means looking at how — and if — suicides track with gun ownership in different groups of people and over time, for example. Finding a link between two observations doesn’t necessarily mean they’re connected. (People have linked the yearly number of Nicolas Cage movies to swimming pool drownings, after all.) But finding a lot of links can be telling.
For suicides, the link to gun access holds strong — among old people, young people, women, adolescents, “you name it,” Hemenway says. Lots of guns means lots of suicides by gun, he says. In 2007, Hemenway and colleagues examined gun ownership rates and statewide suicide data from 2000 to 2002. People in states with a high percentage of gun owners (including Wyoming, South Dakota and Alaska) were almost four times as likely to kill themselves with guns as people living in states with relatively few gun owners (such as Hawaii, Massachusetts and Rhode Island), the researchers reported in the Journal of Trauma Injury, Infection and Critical Care.
More recently, a 2013 study in Switzerland compared suicide rates before and after an army reform that cut the number of Swiss soldiers by half. After the reform, fewer people had access to army-issued guns — and the suicide rate dipped down by about two per 100,000 men age 18–43. That’s about 30 men each year who didn’t die from suicide, the study’s authors estimated in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
A 2014 review of 16 such studies, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, came to the same conclusion, again: Access to guns meant higher risk of suicide.
“The evidence is unassailable,” says Stanford University criminologist John Donohue. “It’s as strong as you can get.”
Mental illness factors into suicide too, says Jeffrey Swanson, a medical sociologist at Duke University. (Some 21 to 44 percent of suicides reported to the CDC are committed by people with mental health problems.) And federal laws aren’t particularly good at keeping guns away from mentally ill people. A 1968 law prohibits gun sales to a narrow slice of people with a history of mental illness, but it’s easy for others to slip through the cracks. Even people the law does target can end up with guns — because states don’t have to report mental health records to the FBI’s national background-check system.
“You’ve got tons of records that would disqualify people from buying guns,” Swanson says, but they don’t necessarily make it into the system. Even if the United States had a perfect mental health care system and cured schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and depression, he says, the overall problem of gun violence would still exist. Mentally ill people just aren’t that violent toward others, Swanson noted in the Annals of Epidemiology in 2015. In fact, people with mental illness committed fewer than 5 percent of U.S. gun killings between 2001 and 2010, according to the CDC.
“People think that in order to fix gun violence, we need to fix the mental health care system,” Swanson says. That’s wrong, he argues. “It’s a diversion from talking about guns.”
Weak laws After Sandy Hook, San Bernardino and other high-profile mass shootings, people have been talking about what gun control laws, if any, actually work.
Unfortunately, there’s just not enough evidence to make strong conclusions about most laws, Hemenway says. In 2005, for example, a federal task force reviewed 51 studies of gun laws, mostly in the United States, and came up empty-handed. The task force couldn’t say whether any one of the laws made much of a difference. The efficacy of U.S. gun laws is hard to pin down for two main reasons, Hemenway says: Gun laws aren’t typically very strong, and studies tend to look at overall effects on violence.
One major study published in JAMA in 2000 analyzed suicide and homicide data from 1985 to 1997 to evaluate the impact of the Brady Act, a 1994 federal law that requires background checks for people buying guns.
Eighteen states and the District of Columbia already followed the law. So researchers compared suicide and homicide rates with those in the 32 states new to the law. If Brady curbed gun violence, those 32 states should see dips in deaths. That didn’t happen (with one exception: Gun suicides in those states dropped in people age 55 and older — by about 1 per 100,000 people).
“I don’t think anybody was really shocked,” Webster says. After all, Brady had a gaping hole: It didn’t require background checks for guns bought from private sellers (including those at gun shows). The loophole neutered Brady: People who didn’t want a background check could simply find a willing private seller. That’s just too easy, Webster says: It’s like letting people decide whether they want to go through the metal detector at the airport.
Like the Brady Act, the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban didn’t seem to do much to prevent violence, criminologist Christopher Koper and colleagues concluded in a 2004 report to the U.S. Department of Justice. The law, which expired in 2004, imposed a 10-year ban on sales of military-style semiautomatic guns. These weapons fire one bullet per trigger squeeze and have features like threaded barrels (which can be used for screwing on silencers) or barrel mounts (for attaching bayonets). The 1994 law also banned most large-capacity magazines (storage devices that feed guns more than 10 rounds of ammo).
But like Brady, the ban came with a catch: It didn’t apply to weapons and magazines made before September 13, 1994. That’s a lot of exemptions. At the time, the United States had more than 1.5 million assault weapons and nearly 25 million guns with large-capacity magazines, reported Koper, of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
“The more complete the bans are, the better the effects seem to be,” Donohue says. Take Australia: In 1996, the country enacted strict laws and a gun buyback program after a mass shooting killed 35 people in Tasmania. The ban made certain long-barreled guns illegal (including semiautomatic rifles and pump-action shotguns — weapons that let people fire lots of rounds quickly), and the country bought back and destroyed more than 650,000 guns.
With the law, Donohue says, “Australia effectively ended the problem of mass shootings.”
And as economists Christine Neill and Andrew Leigh found, the law drastically cut down the number of gun suicides, too. Tough laws Eleven years after Australia launched its tough gun control legislation, Neill, of Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, and Leigh, then at Australian National University in Canberra, announced that the law might actually be saving lives.
Critics attacked. One petitioned Neill’s university to reprimand her. Then they came for Leigh’s e-mails. He had to hand over any that mentioned firearms or guns. Had there been anything improper — any whiff that the researchers were biased — Neill believes gun advocates would have pounced.
Neill and Leigh, now an Australian politician, had uncovered telling changes in different regions’ suicide rates between 1990–1995 and 1998–2003. “Firearms suicides fell most in Tasmania, by a long shot,” Neill says, almost 70 percent, the team later reported in 2010 in the American Law and Economics Review.
Australia’s law, called the National Firearms Agreement, or NFA, applied to all of the country’s states and territories, but some had more guns than others. Tasmania, for example, had the most guns bought back, Neill says: 7,302 guns per 100,000 people. More guns bought back meant bigger drops in suicide rates, she says. Instead, the United States goes for smaller laws, fashioned mostly state-by-state. Still, some may be effective. Blocking domestic violence offenders’ access to guns seems to cut down on homicides, for example. From 1982 to 2002, states with restraining order laws that bar offenders from buying guns had rates of intimate partner homicide that were 10 percent lower than in states lacking the laws, researchers reported in 2006 in Evaluation Review.It’s a stark result, and suggests that tough laws can have big impacts. Australia “did an outright ban and something akin to a confiscation of guns,” Webster says. “That’s never going to happen in the United States.”
In 2010, Webster and colleagues reported similar results at the city level. He and colleagues tracked intimate partner homicides from 1979 to 2003 in 46 U.S. cities. Those that made it hard for people with domestic violence restraining orders to get guns had 19 percent fewer intimate partner homicides compared with cities with less stringent laws, the team reported in Injury Prevention.
“These are pretty consistent findings,” Webster says. Those state policies seem to be working.
Conclusions about other, more well-known laws, such as “right-to-carry,” are less convincing. Such laws, which allow people to carry concealed handguns in public, could offer people a means of defense. Or they could make it easier for people in an argument to whip out a gun. “The findings are all over the map,” Hemenway says. A report from the National Research Council in 2005 found no causal link between right-to-carry laws and crime. It also concluded that people do use guns to protect themselves (say, by threatening or shooting an attacker) but how often is hard to say. Estimates vary from 100,000 to 2.5 million times per year in the United States.
Economist Mark Gius of Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., estimated that restricting people’s right to carry boosts a state’s murder rate by 10 percent, he reported in 2014 in Applied Economics Letters.
Donohue’s 2014 results lean a different way. The Stanford researcher updated the NRC analysis with more than a decade of new data and found that laws letting people carry concealed weapons boost violent crime — a bit. Based on data from 1979 to 2012, his statistical modeling showed that a state with a right-to-carry law would experience 8 percent more aggravated assaults than a state without such a law, for example.
“More and more evidence is amassing that these laws are harmful,” Donohue says, but he concedes that there’s still uncertainty. “I’m not quite ready to say that we’ve nailed it down.”
Less uncertainty would require more analyses and more data. But in this field, even that doesn’t guarantee consensus.
“The problem is that there are many ways to slice the data,” Donohue says. “Almost nothing is as clear as the advocates make it — on both sides.”
