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 legal one.
That success helps explain why China’s restrictions on exports of critical minerals to the United States last year proved to be far more effective than similar restrictions imposed on Japan in 2010; this time, the ban was not undercut by smuggling.
“Sand bullies,” however, require a bit of explanation. The term is rather literal. High-quality sand, mostly from rivers and lakes, is an essential ingredient in concrete. Illegal sand mining is an enormous business worldwide, estimated to be worth between $200 billion and $350 billion annually. In 2021 alone, China’s sand and gravel demand was approximately 18 billion tons.
The environmental consequences are severe. Illegal sand mining has devastated ecosystems across the Yangtze River basin, including at Lake Poyang—China’s largest freshwater lake and the site of one of the largest naval battles in history. There, water levels and fish stocks have plummeted.
Beijing has spent years trying to bring the industry under control, including by promoting the use of manufactured sand, made from crushed rocks and leftover mining materials. According to one estimate, manufactured sand now accounts for 79 percent of China’s sand supply. But I’m skeptical: It’s possible that illicit material is being laundered into the market as manufactured sand.
One reason to target both industries is that neither can operate without the compliance of official regulators. It’s hard to hide a mine or a fleet of sand dredgers. That complicity is how you end up with figures such as Lin Jingquan, whose organization illegally mined river sand and paid off a network of officials in Foshan, Guangdong—earning him the nickname “Sand King of the Beijiang River.”
The latest anti-corruption campaign thus seeks to address one of the government’s long-standing objectives: dismantling the protection umbrellas that corrupt officials provide to criminal organizations. Still, these campaigns often end up redistributing criminal resources rather than eliminating them.
Relationships with organized crime are useful to local officials, not only because they create opportunities for personal enrichment but also because these groups sometimes act as so-called thugs for hire. China-linked criminal groups also operate abroad, often serving as extralegal enforcers on behalf of Chinese authorities.
The closeness among police, officials, and criminals can sometimes be exposed by accident, as happened with a scandal in Tangshan in 2022. But such revelations are rarely allowed at the highest levels. Those who investigate the wrong people can themselves become targets for retaliation.
The downfall of Bo Xilai in 2012 offered one of the clearest glimpses of how these relationships work. As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary of Chongqing, Bo won national acclaim for curbing organized crime. Later, this was revealed to involve handing control of protection rackets and other criminal enterprises to his own cronies, with police cooperation.
In practice, the CCP tends to operate less as an enemy of organized crime than as a boss of bosses. When one generation of crime leaders falls, the next merely pays off a different set of officials—often those running the crackdown. Whether the targets are local thugs or sand mafias, a new campaign is unlikely to make organized crime in China simply disappear.
What We’re Following
A flood of AI-generated videos. Chinese nationalists are flooding social media with artificial intelligence-generated videos depicting supposedly heroic Chinese men beating up rude or arrogant foreigners, most of whom are African or Indian. Like other far-right AI fantasies, these videos unconsciously reveal a sense of threatened masculinity.
Beijing implicitly tolerates these videos, since some have accumulated millions of views without attracting censorship. Han Chinese nationalism has long seemed to be at odds with China’s claims of ideological solidarity with the global south, but it has become increasingly aligned with President Xi Jinping’s project of national ethnic integration.
Critical mineral supply chains. U.S. defense companies are trying to break their dependence on China’s near-monopoly of critical minerals processing by searching for new suppliers. Even under ideal circumstances, this would be a difficult undertaking.
China’s successful pressure campaign against the Trump administration last year caused alarm, but a combination of cronyism, incompetence, lack of technical know-how, and munition stocks depleted by the Iran war means that the United States will take a long time to reduce this dependence, if it succeeds at all.
FP’s Most Read This Week
- The Book That Predicted Pete Hegseth’s Failuresby Keith Johnson
- How to End the Iran War by Allison Minor and Nate Swanson
- The Wildberries Theory of Russian Defeat by Alexey Kovalev
Tech and Business
Global green rush. The Iran war is a windfall for Chinese companies, as fears over oil supplies have pushed countries to accelerate investment in clean-energy alternatives. The same technologies powering China’s export boom are also transforming its domestic energy mix: For the first time, coal now accounts for less than half of electricity generation.
Despite efforts by the U.S. government to reverse the energy transition, demand from states, businesses, and households continues to grow, with U.S. imports of Chinese clean-energy products rising sharply in recent months.
Asteroid defense test. China plans to test forcible asteroid deflection before 2030, according to a new paper from its planetary defense team at the National Space Administration. The test will involve slamming an unmanned space vehicle into an asteroid at more than 26 times the speed of sound to alter its trajectory.
The announcement will likely trigger a fresh wave of panic in Washington about China’s space ambitions, even though the United States conducted a similar project in 2021, albeit with a smaller payload.