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In the latest in a series of business school-style teaching case studies, Professor Usha Haley considers the supply problems faced by technology and electronics companies because of growing restrictions on US-China trade. Readers are invited to read the article and linked stories and consider the questions raised at the end.

China and the US are intense rivals in national security and economic output. Yet the world’s two largest economies — which represent 40 per cent of GDP — remain integral partners in many ways.

So, in these circumstances, what should companies do to manage global supply chains and geopolitical risks , and how does uncertainty affect the green economy and economic stability?

CIA Director William Burns has argued that, for the US, the answer is “not to decouple from an economy like China’s, which would be foolish, but to sensibly de-risk and diversify by securing resilient supply chains, protecting our technological edge and investing in industrial capacity”. The August 2022 US Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (Chips) and Science Act reflected that view, with implications for supply chains, nanotechnology, clean energy, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

In December 2022, China announced a $143bn retaliatory package and, in May 2023, banned Chinese companies from buying from US chipmaker Micron Technology , reducing its sales by $3bn. Then, in July, it restricted exports of two key metals essential to the semiconductor, telecommunications and electric vehicle industries.

In October, an updated Chips act limited US sales of high-performance semiconductors and access to technology that “could fuel breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and sophisticated computers”. That affected Nvidia (which receives a quarter of its chip revenues from China), Intel and AMD.

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China has been a major player in global supply chains, dominating the technology and electronics industries. In 2020, its chip sales totalled nearly $40bn, or 9 per cent of the world market, and they are projected to reach $116bn this year. But that is changing. Kearney’s 2023 Reshoring Index indicated that 96 per cent of US chief executives may reshore or already have, including Dell, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Amazon and Walmart. In 2023, China accounted for the smallest share of US imports in 20 years. And, as global supply chains restructured, US foreign direct investment in China fell to an 18-year low of $8.2bn in 2022.

For US and European companies, strategies for resilient supply chains now include the following:

Friendshoring & reshoring

Foxconn and the other leading Taiwanese manufacturers of electronics responded to customers’ demands by moving production from China to elsewhere in Asia, Mexico and beyond. Companies have hedged bets using a “China plus one” strategy to maintain existing domestic operations while directing new investments elsewhere.

Many businesses “ friendshored ” or moved supply chains to political or economic allies such as India, Thailand and Vietnam . In 2022, Dell said it would move one-fifth of its laptop production to Vietnam. Apple also said it was shifting 18 per cent of global iPhone production to India. US companies “near-shored” to Mexico and Canada to benefit from the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement on free trade, and reshored production to the US.

‘In China, for China’

Chips subsidy recipients are not allowed to make semiconductors in “countries of concern” (including China) for 10 years. So some companies are now producing goods made in China for domestic Chinese consumption only , although government-affiliated organisations must buy Chinese brands. Investing in China has exposed foreign manufacturers to IP theft and skewed competition from Chinese subsidised industries that obtain cheap or free land, capital, electricity, raw materials and access to technology. Companies have also faced politically motivated harassment. In October 2023, Foxconn underwent tax probes in four provinces.

Chinese investment in the US

Chinese investments face a high risk of coming under regulatory scrutiny, over national security and competition concerns. For example, a China-linked company’s Wyoming facility came under investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, after a report suggested its proximity to a Microsoft data centre and a US airbase might enable intelligence gathering. Some 33 US states have now prohibited the Chinese government, citizens or businesses from buying agricultural land or property near military bases, and the trend will probably continue. Meanwhile, Chinese investments in US shale gas have been found to skew energy technology development, reduce US patents, increase Chinese patents but offer few benefits to local communities, in research funded by the National Science Foundation.

Replacing China in supply chains will take time. It is the largest producer of key components in electric vehicle battery production. Over the next two years, manufacturing incentives in the $430bn US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) offset one-tenth of an EV’s cost while shutting out battery-content and critical materials from “foreign entities of concern”, including China. But China has begun circumventing the restrictions through joint ventures with US free-trade partners South Korea and Morocco. The US and China remain mutually dependent, even as they balance economic interests with geopolitics.

Questions raised

How are US-China relations affecting global supply chains worldwide?

Which companies and countries gain from the current US-China tensions — and which lose?

What strategies can companies follow, including staying out of the Chinese market or leaving? What are the upsides and downsides?

What risks for companies are associated with leaving or staying in China, and how can these risks be managed?

What immediate, medium- and long-term threats exist for global supply chains? And what are the threats to the green economy from changed supply chains?

What further problems do reshoring and friendshoring raise for US and European manufacturers? Is the solution worse than the problem?

How do you predict US-China tensions will play out in five years and in a decade? Which factors are most important in your scenarios?

Usha Haley is W Frank Barton Distinguished Chair in International Business & Kansas Faculty of Distinction, Barton School of Business, Wichita State University

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Teaching and Learning Chinese through Immersion: A Case Study from the North American Context

• Review Article
• Published: 03 April 2020
• Volume 15 , pages 99–141, ( 2020 )

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• Chan Lü 1  

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With the promise of achieving bilingualism, biliteracy, and cultural pluralism, Chinese immersion programs for students from kindergarten to 12th grade (K-12) in North America, especially the US, have been proliferating in the past two decades. Research on this rapidly growing population of non-native Chinese learners is also growing. This research synthesis focuses on 35 selected studies published in recent years on Chinese immersion in both Chinese and English language journals and books. The review found that researchers are exploring a wide range of issues with respect to language and literacy development in Chinese immersion programs, including academic achievement in English, language and literacy acquisition in Chinese, instructional strategies and classroom interaction, as well as learners’ language use and its sociolinguistic variations. These studies reflect a growing interest in and demand for learning more about the lesser-researched Chinese foreign language (CFL) learner population, and this review concludes with suggestions for future research on Chinese immersion based on its curricular features as well as specific considerations for conducting research with young, emergent bilingual and biliterate learners.

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Home » Case Study – Methods, Examples and Guide

Case Study – Methods, Examples and Guide

Table of Contents

A case study is a research method that involves an in-depth examination and analysis of a particular phenomenon or case, such as an individual, organization, community, event, or situation.

It is a qualitative research approach that aims to provide a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the case being studied. Case studies typically involve multiple sources of data, including interviews, observations, documents, and artifacts, which are analyzed using various techniques, such as content analysis, thematic analysis, and grounded theory. The findings of a case study are often used to develop theories, inform policy or practice, or generate new research questions.

Types of Case Study

Types and Methods of Case Study are as follows:

Single-Case Study

A single-case study is an in-depth analysis of a single case. This type of case study is useful when the researcher wants to understand a specific phenomenon in detail.

For Example , A researcher might conduct a single-case study on a particular individual to understand their experiences with a particular health condition or a specific organization to explore their management practices. The researcher collects data from multiple sources, such as interviews, observations, and documents, and uses various techniques to analyze the data, such as content analysis or thematic analysis. The findings of a single-case study are often used to generate new research questions, develop theories, or inform policy or practice.

Multiple-Case Study

A multiple-case study involves the analysis of several cases that are similar in nature. This type of case study is useful when the researcher wants to identify similarities and differences between the cases.

For Example, a researcher might conduct a multiple-case study on several companies to explore the factors that contribute to their success or failure. The researcher collects data from each case, compares and contrasts the findings, and uses various techniques to analyze the data, such as comparative analysis or pattern-matching. The findings of a multiple-case study can be used to develop theories, inform policy or practice, or generate new research questions.

Exploratory Case Study

An exploratory case study is used to explore a new or understudied phenomenon. This type of case study is useful when the researcher wants to generate hypotheses or theories about the phenomenon.

For Example, a researcher might conduct an exploratory case study on a new technology to understand its potential impact on society. The researcher collects data from multiple sources, such as interviews, observations, and documents, and uses various techniques to analyze the data, such as grounded theory or content analysis. The findings of an exploratory case study can be used to generate new research questions, develop theories, or inform policy or practice.

Descriptive Case Study

A descriptive case study is used to describe a particular phenomenon in detail. This type of case study is useful when the researcher wants to provide a comprehensive account of the phenomenon.

For Example, a researcher might conduct a descriptive case study on a particular community to understand its social and economic characteristics. The researcher collects data from multiple sources, such as interviews, observations, and documents, and uses various techniques to analyze the data, such as content analysis or thematic analysis. The findings of a descriptive case study can be used to inform policy or practice or generate new research questions.

Instrumental Case Study

An instrumental case study is used to understand a particular phenomenon that is instrumental in achieving a particular goal. This type of case study is useful when the researcher wants to understand the role of the phenomenon in achieving the goal.

For Example, a researcher might conduct an instrumental case study on a particular policy to understand its impact on achieving a particular goal, such as reducing poverty. The researcher collects data from multiple sources, such as interviews, observations, and documents, and uses various techniques to analyze the data, such as content analysis or thematic analysis. The findings of an instrumental case study can be used to inform policy or practice or generate new research questions.

Case Study Data Collection Methods

Here are some common data collection methods for case studies:

Interviews involve asking questions to individuals who have knowledge or experience relevant to the case study. Interviews can be structured (where the same questions are asked to all participants) or unstructured (where the interviewer follows up on the responses with further questions). Interviews can be conducted in person, over the phone, or through video conferencing.

Observations

Observations involve watching and recording the behavior and activities of individuals or groups relevant to the case study. Observations can be participant (where the researcher actively participates in the activities) or non-participant (where the researcher observes from a distance). Observations can be recorded using notes, audio or video recordings, or photographs.

Documents can be used as a source of information for case studies. Documents can include reports, memos, emails, letters, and other written materials related to the case study. Documents can be collected from the case study participants or from public sources.

Surveys involve asking a set of questions to a sample of individuals relevant to the case study. Surveys can be administered in person, over the phone, through mail or email, or online. Surveys can be used to gather information on attitudes, opinions, or behaviors related to the case study.

Artifacts are physical objects relevant to the case study. Artifacts can include tools, equipment, products, or other objects that provide insights into the case study phenomenon.

How to conduct Case Study Research

Conducting a case study research involves several steps that need to be followed to ensure the quality and rigor of the study. Here are the steps to conduct case study research:

• Define the research questions: The first step in conducting a case study research is to define the research questions. The research questions should be specific, measurable, and relevant to the case study phenomenon under investigation.
• Select the case: The next step is to select the case or cases to be studied. The case should be relevant to the research questions and should provide rich and diverse data that can be used to answer the research questions.
• Collect data: Data can be collected using various methods, such as interviews, observations, documents, surveys, and artifacts. The data collection method should be selected based on the research questions and the nature of the case study phenomenon.
• Analyze the data: The data collected from the case study should be analyzed using various techniques, such as content analysis, thematic analysis, or grounded theory. The analysis should be guided by the research questions and should aim to provide insights and conclusions relevant to the research questions.
• Draw conclusions: The conclusions drawn from the case study should be based on the data analysis and should be relevant to the research questions. The conclusions should be supported by evidence and should be clearly stated.
• Validate the findings: The findings of the case study should be validated by reviewing the data and the analysis with participants or other experts in the field. This helps to ensure the validity and reliability of the findings.
• Write the report: The final step is to write the report of the case study research. The report should provide a clear description of the case study phenomenon, the research questions, the data collection methods, the data analysis, the findings, and the conclusions. The report should be written in a clear and concise manner and should follow the guidelines for academic writing.

Examples of Case Study

Here are some examples of case study research:

• The Hawthorne Studies : Conducted between 1924 and 1932, the Hawthorne Studies were a series of case studies conducted by Elton Mayo and his colleagues to examine the impact of work environment on employee productivity. The studies were conducted at the Hawthorne Works plant of the Western Electric Company in Chicago and included interviews, observations, and experiments.
• The Stanford Prison Experiment: Conducted in 1971, the Stanford Prison Experiment was a case study conducted by Philip Zimbardo to examine the psychological effects of power and authority. The study involved simulating a prison environment and assigning participants to the role of guards or prisoners. The study was controversial due to the ethical issues it raised.
• The Challenger Disaster: The Challenger Disaster was a case study conducted to examine the causes of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986. The study included interviews, observations, and analysis of data to identify the technical, organizational, and cultural factors that contributed to the disaster.
• The Enron Scandal: The Enron Scandal was a case study conducted to examine the causes of the Enron Corporation’s bankruptcy in 2001. The study included interviews, analysis of financial data, and review of documents to identify the accounting practices, corporate culture, and ethical issues that led to the company’s downfall.
• The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster : The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster was a case study conducted to examine the causes of the nuclear accident that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan in 2011. The study included interviews, analysis of data, and review of documents to identify the technical, organizational, and cultural factors that contributed to the disaster.

Application of Case Study

Case studies have a wide range of applications across various fields and industries. Here are some examples:

Business and Management

Case studies are widely used in business and management to examine real-life situations and develop problem-solving skills. Case studies can help students and professionals to develop a deep understanding of business concepts, theories, and best practices.

Case studies are used in healthcare to examine patient care, treatment options, and outcomes. Case studies can help healthcare professionals to develop critical thinking skills, diagnose complex medical conditions, and develop effective treatment plans.

Case studies are used in education to examine teaching and learning practices. Case studies can help educators to develop effective teaching strategies, evaluate student progress, and identify areas for improvement.

Social Sciences

Case studies are widely used in social sciences to examine human behavior, social phenomena, and cultural practices. Case studies can help researchers to develop theories, test hypotheses, and gain insights into complex social issues.

Law and Ethics

Case studies are used in law and ethics to examine legal and ethical dilemmas. Case studies can help lawyers, policymakers, and ethical professionals to develop critical thinking skills, analyze complex cases, and make informed decisions.

Purpose of Case Study

The purpose of a case study is to provide a detailed analysis of a specific phenomenon, issue, or problem in its real-life context. A case study is a qualitative research method that involves the in-depth exploration and analysis of a particular case, which can be an individual, group, organization, event, or community.

The primary purpose of a case study is to generate a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the case, including its history, context, and dynamics. Case studies can help researchers to identify and examine the underlying factors, processes, and mechanisms that contribute to the case and its outcomes. This can help to develop a more accurate and detailed understanding of the case, which can inform future research, practice, or policy.

Case studies can also serve other purposes, including:

• Illustrating a theory or concept: Case studies can be used to illustrate and explain theoretical concepts and frameworks, providing concrete examples of how they can be applied in real-life situations.
• Developing hypotheses: Case studies can help to generate hypotheses about the causal relationships between different factors and outcomes, which can be tested through further research.
• Providing insight into complex issues: Case studies can provide insights into complex and multifaceted issues, which may be difficult to understand through other research methods.
• Informing practice or policy: Case studies can be used to inform practice or policy by identifying best practices, lessons learned, or areas for improvement.

Advantages of Case Study Research

There are several advantages of case study research, including:

• In-depth exploration: Case study research allows for a detailed exploration and analysis of a specific phenomenon, issue, or problem in its real-life context. This can provide a comprehensive understanding of the case and its dynamics, which may not be possible through other research methods.
• Rich data: Case study research can generate rich and detailed data, including qualitative data such as interviews, observations, and documents. This can provide a nuanced understanding of the case and its complexity.
• Holistic perspective: Case study research allows for a holistic perspective of the case, taking into account the various factors, processes, and mechanisms that contribute to the case and its outcomes. This can help to develop a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of the case.
• Theory development: Case study research can help to develop and refine theories and concepts by providing empirical evidence and concrete examples of how they can be applied in real-life situations.
• Practical application: Case study research can inform practice or policy by identifying best practices, lessons learned, or areas for improvement.
• Contextualization: Case study research takes into account the specific context in which the case is situated, which can help to understand how the case is influenced by the social, cultural, and historical factors of its environment.

Limitations of Case Study Research

There are several limitations of case study research, including:

• Limited generalizability : Case studies are typically focused on a single case or a small number of cases, which limits the generalizability of the findings. The unique characteristics of the case may not be applicable to other contexts or populations, which may limit the external validity of the research.
• Biased sampling: Case studies may rely on purposive or convenience sampling, which can introduce bias into the sample selection process. This may limit the representativeness of the sample and the generalizability of the findings.
• Subjectivity: Case studies rely on the interpretation of the researcher, which can introduce subjectivity into the analysis. The researcher’s own biases, assumptions, and perspectives may influence the findings, which may limit the objectivity of the research.
• Limited control: Case studies are typically conducted in naturalistic settings, which limits the control that the researcher has over the environment and the variables being studied. This may limit the ability to establish causal relationships between variables.
• Time-consuming: Case studies can be time-consuming to conduct, as they typically involve a detailed exploration and analysis of a specific case. This may limit the feasibility of conducting multiple case studies or conducting case studies in a timely manner.
• Resource-intensive: Case studies may require significant resources, including time, funding, and expertise. This may limit the ability of researchers to conduct case studies in resource-constrained settings.

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Methodology

• What Is a Case Study? | Definition, Examples & Methods

What Is a Case Study? | Definition, Examples & Methods

Published on May 8, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on November 20, 2023.

A case study is a detailed study of a specific subject, such as a person, group, place, event, organization, or phenomenon. Case studies are commonly used in social, educational, clinical, and business research.

A case study research design usually involves qualitative methods , but quantitative methods are sometimes also used. Case studies are good for describing , comparing, evaluating and understanding different aspects of a research problem .

Table of contents

When to do a case study, step 1: select a case, step 2: build a theoretical framework, step 3: collect your data, step 4: describe and analyze the case, other interesting articles.

A case study is an appropriate research design when you want to gain concrete, contextual, in-depth knowledge about a specific real-world subject. It allows you to explore the key characteristics, meanings, and implications of the case.

Case studies are often a good choice in a thesis or dissertation . They keep your project focused and manageable when you don’t have the time or resources to do large-scale research.

You might use just one complex case study where you explore a single subject in depth, or conduct multiple case studies to compare and illuminate different aspects of your research problem.

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Once you have developed your problem statement and research questions , you should be ready to choose the specific case that you want to focus on. A good case study should have the potential to:

• Provide new or unexpected insights into the subject
• Challenge or complicate existing assumptions and theories
• Propose practical courses of action to resolve a problem
• Open up new directions for future research

TipIf your research is more practical in nature and aims to simultaneously investigate an issue as you solve it, consider conducting action research instead.

Unlike quantitative or experimental research , a strong case study does not require a random or representative sample. In fact, case studies often deliberately focus on unusual, neglected, or outlying cases which may shed new light on the research problem.

Example of an outlying case studyIn the 1960s the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania was discovered to have extremely low rates of heart disease compared to the US average. It became an important case study for understanding previously neglected causes of heart disease.

However, you can also choose a more common or representative case to exemplify a particular category, experience or phenomenon.

Example of a representative case studyIn the 1920s, two sociologists used Muncie, Indiana as a case study of a typical American city that supposedly exemplified the changing culture of the US at the time.

While case studies focus more on concrete details than general theories, they should usually have some connection with theory in the field. This way the case study is not just an isolated description, but is integrated into existing knowledge about the topic. It might aim to:

• Exemplify a theory by showing how it explains the case under investigation
• Expand on a theory by uncovering new concepts and ideas that need to be incorporated
• Challenge a theory by exploring an outlier case that doesn’t fit with established assumptions

To ensure that your analysis of the case has a solid academic grounding, you should conduct a literature review of sources related to the topic and develop a theoretical framework . This means identifying key concepts and theories to guide your analysis and interpretation.

There are many different research methods you can use to collect data on your subject. Case studies tend to focus on qualitative data using methods such as interviews , observations , and analysis of primary and secondary sources (e.g., newspaper articles, photographs, official records). Sometimes a case study will also collect quantitative data.

Example of a mixed methods case studyFor a case study of a wind farm development in a rural area, you could collect quantitative data on employment rates and business revenue, collect qualitative data on local people’s perceptions and experiences, and analyze local and national media coverage of the development.

The aim is to gain as thorough an understanding as possible of the case and its context.

In writing up the case study, you need to bring together all the relevant aspects to give as complete a picture as possible of the subject.

How you report your findings depends on the type of research you are doing. Some case studies are structured like a standard scientific paper or thesis , with separate sections or chapters for the methods , results and discussion .

Others are written in a more narrative style, aiming to explore the case from various angles and analyze its meanings and implications (for example, by using textual analysis or discourse analysis ).

In all cases, though, make sure to give contextual details about the case, connect it back to the literature and theory, and discuss how it fits into wider patterns or debates.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Normal distribution
• Degrees of freedom
• Null hypothesis
• Discourse analysis
• Control groups
• Mixed methods research
• Non-probability sampling
• Quantitative research
• Ecological validity

Research bias

• Rosenthal effect
• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Selection bias
• Negativity bias
• Status quo bias

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NEW REPORT: Authoritarian Controls on Freedom of Movement

China: Transnational Repression Origin Country Case Study

China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world.

China conducts the most sophisticated, global, and comprehensive campaign of transnational repression in the world. Efforts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to pressure and control the overseas population of Chinese and members of minority communities are marked by three distinctive characteristics. First, the campaign targets many groups, including multiple ethnic and religious minorities, political dissidents, human rights activists, journalists, and former insiders accused of corruption. Second, it spans the full spectrum of tactics: from direct attacks like renditions, to co-opting other countries to detain and render exiles, to mobility controls, to threats from a distance like digital threats, spyware, and coercion by proxy. Third, the sheer breadth and global scale of the campaign is unparalleled. Freedom House’s conservative catalogue of direct, physical attacks since 2014 covers 214 cases originating from China, far more than any other country.

These egregious and high-profile cases are only the tip of the iceberg of a much broader system of surveillance, harassment, and intimidation that leaves many overseas Chinese and exile minorities feeling that the CCP is watching them and constraining their ability to exercise basic rights even when living in a foreign democracy. All told, these tactics affect millions of Chinese and minority populations from China in at least 36 host countries across every inhabited continent. 1

The extensive scope of China’s transnational repression is a result of a broad and ever-expanding definition of who should be subject to extraterritorial control by the Chinese Communist Party.

• First, the CCP targets entire ethnic and religious groups, including Uighurs, Tibetans, and Falun Gong practitioners, which together number in the hundreds of thousands globally. Over the past year alone, the list of targeted populations has expanded to also include Inner Mongolians and Hong Kongers residing outside the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
• Second, China’s anticorruption drive has taken a broad, global view, targeting what may be thousands of its own former officials living abroad, now designated as alleged embezzlers.
• Third, China’s overt transnational repression activities are embedded in a broader framework of influence that encompasses cultural associations, diaspora groups, and in some cases, organized crime networks, which places it in contact with a huge population of Chinese citizens, Chinese diaspora members, and minority populations from China who reside around the world.
• Fourth, China deploys its technological prowess as part of its transnational repression toolbox via sophisticated hacking and phishing attacks. One of China’s newest avenues for deploying repressive tactics overseas has been via the WeChat platform, a messaging, social media, and financial services app that is ubiquitous among Chinese users around the world, and through which the party-state can monitor and control discussion among the diaspora.
• Fifth, China’s geopolitical weight allows it to assert unparalleled influence over countries both near (Nepal, Thailand) and far (Egypt, Kenya). This produces leverage that the CCP does not hesitate to use against targets around the world.
• Finally, China asserts control over non-Chinese citizens overseas, including ethnic Chinese, Taiwanese, or other foreigners, who are critical of CCP influence and human rights abuses. While not the focus of this report, China’s attempts to intimidate and control foreigners in response to their peaceful advocacy activities is an ominous trend.

Due to China’s growing power internationally, its technical capacity, and its aggressive claims regarding Chinese citizens and noncitizens overseas, its campaign has a significant effect on the rights and freedoms of overseas Chinese and minority communities in exile in dozens of countries. Additionally, the CCP’s use of transnational repression poses a long-term threat to rule of law systems in other countries. This is because Beijing’s influence is powerful enough to not only violate the rule of law in an individual case, but also to reshape legal systems and international norms to its interests.

A multi-faceted transnational repression bureaucracy

The parts of the Chinese party-state apparatus involved in transnational repression are as diverse as the targets and tactics of the campaign. The importance of extending the party’s grip on overseas Chinese and ethnic minority exiles originates with the highest echelons of the CCP. Besides CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s own advancement of sweeping anticorruption campaigns, leaked speeches from other members of the Politburo high up in the security apparatus are explicit about the priority that should be given to the “overseas struggle” against perceived party enemies. These name specific tactics or goals, like co-opting allies in foreign countries to assist in the effort, using diplomatic channels and relevant laws in host countries, and preventing protests during overseas visits of top party officials. 2

The harshest forms of direct transnational repression from Chinese agents—espionage, cyberattacks, threats, and physical assaults—emerge primarily from the CCP’s domestic security and military apparatus: agencies like the Ministry of State Security (MSS), the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), although the precise division of labor among these entities is often unclear. Persecution of Uighurs, Tibetans, and political dissidents is typically managed by the MSS, 3 but MPS is often involved in threats against family members within China, or cases where regional authorities call exiles to threaten them from within China. Anti-Falun Gong activities are led by the 6-10 Office, an extralegal security agency tasked with suppressing banned religious groups, 4 and the MPS, but local officials from various regions are also involved in monitoring Falun Gong exiles from their provinces. Hackers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) run spyware campaigns from within China. 5

Other forms of transnational repression that involve working through the legal and political systems of foreign countries—including detentions and extraditions—or that involve diplomatic staff at embassies and consulates, run through agencies like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. China has proven particularly adept at using its geopolitical and economic clout to provoke foreign governments in countries as diverse as India, 6 Thailand, Serbia, 7 Malaysia, 8 Egypt, 9 Kazakhstan, 10 the United Arab Emirates, 11 Turkey, 12 and Nepal 13 to use their own security forces to detain—and in some cases deport to China—CCP critics, members of targeted ethnic or religious minorities, and refugees. “Anticorruption” activities that target CCP members are coordinated by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).

Beyond the direct agencies of the party-state, a networks of proxy entities—like “anti-cult” associations in the United States, Chinese student groups in Canada, 14 and pro-Beijing activists with organized crime links in Taiwan 15 —have been involved in harassment and even physical attacks against party critics and religious or ethnic minority members. The greater distance from official Chinese government agencies offers the regime plausible deniability on the one hand, while accomplishing the goal of sowing fear and encouraging self-censorship far from China’s shores, on the other.

These actors taken as a whole are best understood as part of the united front system, “a network of [Chinese Communist] party and state agencies responsible for influencing groups outside the party, particularly those claiming to represent civil society,” as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) describes it. 16 United front work is an important part of how the party rules China, “cultivating, co-opting, and coercing nonparty elites” using economic carrots and sticks, according to China analyst Matt Schrader. 17 United front work outside of China—partly coordinated by the CCP United Front Work Department (UFWD)—includes regional diaspora associations, student groups, and scholarly bodies that officially represent specific regions of China abroad. This work has been growing in importance for the CCP, as shown in the restructuring of the UFWD, including its work on the Chinese diaspora, in the last three years. 18 While some of these activities may be legal public diplomacy, united front work binds them with espionage and transnational repression. When US authorities arrested a Tibetan New York Police Department officer for spying on the Tibetan community in September 2020, one of his handlers was identified as a Chinese consular employee working for the UFWD. 19

An escalating campaign

China’s use of transnational repression is not new. Uighurs, Tibetans, and Falun Gong practitioners, as well as political dissidents, have long faced systematic reprisals outside the country. 20 The campaign has escalated considerably since 2014, however, and new target groups have been added in an international extension of emergent repressive campaigns within the PRC. The concentration of power under CCP general secretary Xi Jinping and his emphasis on an assertive foreign policy has led to an ever-more aggressive stance in Chinese foreign policy, which includes transnational repression. A series of new PRC laws passed under Xi have codified the extraterritorial reach of CCP controls, such as the National Intelligence Law, the Hong Kong National Security Law, and the draft Data Security Law. 21

A significant step in this process was the CCP’s increasing effort to control the Uighur community, including by claiming broad jurisdiction over Uighurs abroad. In 2014, Xi Jinping ordered the CCP to escalate its efforts against alleged “terrorism, infiltration, and separatism” in the Uighur-plurality region of Xinjiang. In 2016, Chinese authorities began to round up Uighurs and other Muslims in the region for “re-education” camps. At the same time, the authorities also clamped down upon mobility, collecting the passports of Uighurs across the region and preventing their exit. In early 2017, Uighurs around the world with Chinese citizenship began to be told to return to China; those who did often joined the over a million Uighurs housed in the camps. 22 Those who did not return, or those who fled the escalating repression inside China, were detained and in many cases rendered or unlawfully deported to China. At least 109 Uighurs were deported unlawfully from Thailand in 2015, and 13 were rendered from Egypt without due process; 23 Egypt may have unlawfully deported another 86 during this time. 24 The global persecution of Uighurs continues to this day. As of November 2020, Saudi Arabia was detaining two Chinese Uighurs and considering their forced return to China. 25

Uighurs who avoided coerced return were still subject to abuses. For instance, Chinese political pressure has weakened Turkish protections for the large Uighur diaspora in that country. 26 Residence permits remain difficult for Uighurs to acquire or to keep in Turkey. The US outlet National Public Radio (NPR) reported in March 2020 that between 200 and 400 Uighurs had been detained in Turkey in 2019 alone. Deportations from Turkey to China also occur despite the Uighur community’s efforts. In August 2019, a Uighur woman and her two children were deported from Turkey to Tajikistan, and then promptly transferred to Chinese custody. 27 News outlets reported that five or six other Uighurs were on the flight with her.

Wherever they are, Uighurs face intense digital threats combined with family intimidation, in which their relatives in Xinjiang are used as proxies to threaten or coerce them. 28 In multiple cases, Chinese police are reported to have forced family members to call their relatives abroad on WeChat in order to warn them against engaging in human rights advocacy. 29 China has used some of its most powerful spyware tools against Uighurs, developing malware to infect iPhones via WhatsApp messages. 30 China has even hacked into telecommunications networks in Asia in order to track Uighurs. 31

These threats create an atmosphere of fear for Uighurs abroad. In November 2020, a Uighur in Turkey, who had previously come forward as having been pressured to spy on the community, was shot in Istanbul. 32 He survived, and has accused the Chinese state of targeting him.

Tibetans overseas are also subject to sustained, systematic pressure from the CCP party-state that spans from neighboring Nepal to Europe and the United States. Only around 14,000 Tibetans reside in Nepal. But the “gentleman’s agreement” that allows Tibetans who reach Nepal to travel on to the exile Central Tibetan Administration’s headquarters in India made it the main conduit for Tibetans fleeing China. In recent years, this agreement has eroded under Chinese pressure. First, stricter mobility controls by China reduced the ability of Tibetans to flee the country, winnowing the number of those reaching Nepal from several thousand per year down to only 23 in 2019. 33 At the same time, Tibetans who reached Nepal have been more vulnerable to return, as happened with six individuals who crossed the border in September 2019 but were immediately handed to Chinese authorities. 34 The number of Tibetans able to flee may shrink even further. In October 2019, the Nepalese government and China signed a new agreement including a “Boundary Management System” and Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) that would expedite Nepalese handovers of Tibetans to China, either at the border or after they are inside Nepal. 35

Like Uighurs, Tibetans around the world are subject to intimidation and espionage by Chinese agents. In September 2020, US federal authorities announced the arrest of an active New York Police Department officer of Tibetan descent who had worked with Chinese officials in the US to spy on the Tibetan community in and around New York City. 36 The case resembles recent incidents of surveillance and intimidation of Tibetans in Sweden, Switzerland, and Canada. 37 The same top-shelf spyware used against Uighurs has also been used in campaigns against Tibetans. 38

As Chinese government efforts to suppress the culture and language of Mongolians in Inner Mongolia accelerated in 2020, provoking widespread protests, threats also spread to members of the ethnic group living outside China. In September 2020, a man from Inner Mongolia living in Australia on a temporary visa reported that that he had received a call from local authorities in China warning him that if he spoke out about events in the region, including on social media, then he would “be withdrawn from Australia.” 39

Practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in China, also face regular reprisals from China and from Chinese agents. These include frequent harassment and occasional physical assaults by members of visiting Chinese delegations or pro-Beijing proxies at protests overseas, as in cases that have occurred since 2014 in the United States, 40 the Czech Republic, 41 Taiwan, 42 Brazil, 43 and Argentina. 44 Media and cultural initiatives associated with Falun Gong have reported suspicious break-ins targeting sensitive information, vehicle tampering, and pressure from Chinese authorities for local businesses to cut off advertising or other contractual obligations with them. 45 Multiple Falun Gong practitioners in Thailand have also faced detention, including a Taiwanese man involved in uncensored radio broadcasts to China 46 and several cases of Chinese refugees formally recognized as such by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). 47 In October 2017, a Falun Gong practitioner who had survived a Chinese labor camp and become a high-profile informant on CCP abuses—sneaking a letter into a Halloween decoration when detained and later filming a documentary with undercover footage—died of sudden kidney failure in Indonesia. Some colleagues consider his death suspicious, but no autopsy was performed. 48

Human rights defenders, journalists, and others who criticize the CCP have come under target as well. Independent Chinese media in Australia have had advertisers and even local town councils withdraw from sponsorships under Chinese diplomatic pressure, while suffering more overt actions like the theft of newspapers. 49 Chinese journalists 50 , political cartoonists, 51 activists, and the teenage son of a detained rights lawyer who have fled China have been threatened or detained in neighboring countries like Thailand 52 and Myanmar, 53 and in some cases, forcibly returned to the mainland. In July 2020, a Chinese student in Australia who runs a Twitter account critical of Xi Jinping said she had received video calls in which a Chinese police officer, speaking next to her father, warned her “to remember that you are a citizen of China.” 54

In recent years, Hong Kong democracy advocates have emerged as a relatively new target of transnational repression. In October 2016, prominent Hong Kong political activist Joshua Wong was detained on arrival and deported from Thailand. 55 After large-scale prodemocracy protests broke out in Hong Kong in 2019, advocates traveling to Taiwan were followed, harassed, and attacked with red paint by pro-CCP groups, 56 prompting police protection to be assigned to them. 57 A Singaporean activist was jailed for 10 days in August 2020 for “illegal assembly” because of a Skype call he convened with Joshua Wong in 2016 during a discussion event in Singapore. 58 With Beijing’s imposition of a National Security Law on Hong Kong in June 2020, the net around Hong Kongers globally tightened. The law includes a provision with vast extraterritorial reach, potentially criminalizing any speech critical of the Chinese or Hong Kong government made anywhere in the world, including speech by foreign nationals. 59 Among those who received the first round of arrest warrants under the new law was Samuel Chu, an American citizen, who was charged for his work to gain US government support for the cause of freedom in Hong Kong. 60 Chu and others like him now must not only avoid traveling to Hong Kong, but also to any country with an extradition treaty with Hong Kong or China.

Reflecting the CCP’s expansive idea of who belongs within its purview, in line with the state’s “One China” policy, the PRC considers citizens of Taiwan as its own despite lacking any actual control over Taiwan’s government affairs, law or law enforcement, or its military. In April 2016, eight Taiwanese citizens were extradited to China from Kenya after being acquitted of telecommunications fraud, despite stringent protests from the Taiwanese government. 61

China’s aggressive extraterritorial policies extend even in some cases to people of Chinese origin with other nationalities. One of the most prominent recent cases was that of Gui Minhai, a Chinese-origin bookseller who was a Swedish—and not Chinese—citizen. After Gui angered Xi Jinping with sales of books in Hong Kong containing salacious rumors about the general secretary, he was forced to flee to Thailand. In October 2015, he was kidnapped and taken to China. There he appealed in what looked by all accounts to be a forced confession to be treated as a Chinese citizen, and for Swedish authorities not to be involved in his case. In 2019, Minhai’s daughter Angela Gui was warned by two China-linked businessmen to stop publicly advocating on her father’s case if she ever wanted to see him again. This threat was made during a meeting in Stockholm arranged by the Swedish ambassador to China, Anna Lindstedt, who lost her job as ambassador as a result of the meeting. 62 As Yuan Yang, the deputy bureau chief of the Financial Times wrote, Gui Minhai's case “makes us wonder whether the state sees itself as the governor of ethnic Chinese people wherever they may be, rather than a state constrained by international law and diplomatic protocol.” 63

“Anticorruption”: Fox Hunt and Skynet

The final area of focus for China in transnational repression is its global “anticorruption” campaign. The party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) oversees this campaign, focusing on members of the CCP who are accused of corruption and may be fugitives within China, but also those who have fled abroad. The campaign has escalated since 2014, when the CCP announced a global anticorruption drive under the banner of “Fox Hunt.” 64 The campaign expanded further in 2015 with the announcement of “Operation Skynet.” 65 The scale of the anticorruption drive is difficult to evaluate through public sources, but in 2018, Chinese state media claimed that 3,000 people had “returned or been repatriated” from 90 countries. 66 In public remarks in August 2020, US FBI director Christopher Wray said that there were “hundreds” of targets of Fox Hunt in the United States. 67

On the official level, the anticorruption campaign is a legal effort to hold accountable Chinese elites who have embezzled money, frequently from state enterprises, and fled abroad. The CCP makes a point of emphasizing the supposed legality and legitimacy of Fox Hunt. The campaign was announced alongside the dissemination of a list of 100 individuals China said were sought through Interpol “Red Notices.” Like other countries, China uses Interpol notices to imply international endorsement of its pursuit, even though Interpol notices are not subject to any judicial review. In January 2019, Beijing’s state broadcaster, China Central Television (CCTV), aired a program titled “Red Arrest Notice” documenting 14 cases of individuals arrested and returned to China, and one found hiding in China. The show emphasized the legality of the process of repatriation from abroad, including through lengthy legal proceedings in other countries. In line with the CCP’s communications, the overall message of the show was that China’s anticorruption campaign is a fully legal effort accepted by other states as a matter of international cooperation.

The actual tactics underpinning the CCP’s anticorruption campaign are much more unsavory. These include at a minimum surveillance, physical threats, and family intimidation in order to force exiles to return “voluntarily” to China. In October 2020, the US Department of Justice accused eight individuals of acting as illegal agents of China in a multiyear campaign of harassment and stalking in order to coerce an unnamed Chinese individual to return to face trial. 68 In 2018, US intelligence officials alleged off the record to Foreign Policy that Chinese agents had beaten and drugged multiple individuals in Australia, returning them to China by boat. 69

The anticorruption campaign is also a vehicle for the CCP to seek to change international norms to better suit its objectives and interests. Chinese officials and media present the anticorruption campaign as part of a global effort to shape anticorruption norms. This includes endorsing the 2014 “Beijing Declaration” on fighting corruption, a product of that year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC), and the G20 Anti-Corruption Action Plan of 2017–18. In all of its efforts, officials highlight calls to join the UN Convention against Corruption. The CCP has also put significant diplomatic effort into building bilateral legal relationships that would enable authorities to more readily “reach” individuals who flee abroad. A 2019 analysis by the Center for Advanced China Research identified 37 countries with which China had extradition treaties, a list that notably includes European Union (EU) member states like Italy, France, and Portugal. 70 According to analysis in The Diplomat, from 2015–17, five EU member states extradited “economic fugitives” to China. 71 In at least one other European state—Switzerland—Chinese officials successfully entered into a secret agreement to give their security agents free reign in the territory to monitor and potentially intimidate a wide range of targets, including Fox Hunt fugitives. 72

Despite its cultivation of an image of legality and careful references to international law, at its core the CCP’s anticorruption campaign reflects its domestic context, in which the preferences of the party-state stand above all other considerations. It is useful to recall the case of Meng Hongwei. A prominent CCP official from the domestic security apparatus, Meng served as president of Interpol from 2016 until October 2018, when he was abruptly arrested in China, expelled from the party, and sentenced to prison for corruption. 73 This sequence of events should act as a reminder of how the CCP’s global anticorruption drive is part and parcel of its overall strategy of shaping international norms to its advantage. As countries around the world grapple with how to manage relations with China, they should avoid assuming that “anticorruption” is neutral ground without implications for broader engagement with the Chinese Communist Party.

• 1 Freedom House found 18 countries where China was the origin country for physical incidents of transnational repression. The larger count includes countries where diasporas experienced digital intimidation and where Fox Hunt cases took place.
• 2 // www.adhrrf.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/20160124.pdf .
• 3 //docs.uhrp.org/pdf/UHRP_RepressionAcrossBorders.pdf.
• 4 //jamestown.org/program/the-610-office-policing-the-chinese-spirit/.
• 5 // www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/technology/china-hackers-ethnic-minorities.h… .
• 6 // www.vice.com/en/article/kz4xwa/india-is-arresting-tibetans-ahead-of-chi… .
• 7 //balkaninsight.com/2014/12/18/serbia-expels-arrested-falun-gong-members/.
• 8 Joseph Sipalan,
• 9 // www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/world/asia/egypt-muslims-uighurs-deportation… .
• 10 //vlast.kz/novosti/36299-prosivsih-politubezise-v-kazahstane-etniceskih-kazahov-peredadut-v-kitaj.html; Leila Adilzhan, “Three Refugees from Xinjiang in Kazakhstan Will Not Be Deported to China,” Bitter Winter, January, 22, 2020, https://bitterwinter.org/refugees-from-xinjiang-in-kazakhstan-will-not-… .
• 11 // www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/MDE2591872018ENGLISH.pdf .
• 12 // www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/2184860/uygur-restaurateur-xinji… .
• 13 // www.reuters.com/article/us-nepal-tibet-refugees-idUSKBN13A2BQ .
• 14 // www.amnesty.ca/sites/default/files/Canadian%20Coalition%20on%20Human%20… .
• 15 J. Michael Cole, “Who’s Waving Those PRC Flags (and Beating People Up) at Taipei 101?,” Thinking Taiwan, August 16, 2014, http://thinking-taiwan.com/thinking-taiwan.com/whos-waving-those-ccp-fl… .
• 16 // www.aspi.org.au/report/party-speaks-you .
• 17 //securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Friends-and-Enemies-A-Framework-for-Understanding-Chinese-Political-Interference-in-Democratic-Countries.pdf.
• 18 //jamestown.org/program/reorganizing-the-united-front-work-department-new-structures-for-a-new-era-of-diaspora-and-religious-affairs-work/.
• 19 // www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1318496/download .
• 20 // www.uyghurcongress.org/en/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2017/06/WUC-Re… ; Sarah Cook, “The Long Shadow of Chinese Censorship: How the Communist Party’s Media Restrictions Affect News Outlets around the World,” Center for International Media Assistance, October 22, 2013, https://www.cima.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/CIMA-China_Sarah%20… ; US Congress, “H.Con.Res.304—Expressing the sense of Congress regarding oppression by the Government of the People’s Republic of China of Falun Gong in the United States and in China,” 2003, https://www.congress.gov/bill/108th-congress/house-concurrent-resolutio… ; Naomi Xu Elegant, “If you’re reading this, Beijing says its new Hong Kong security law applies to you,” Fortune, July 7, 2020, https://fr.reuters.com/article/idUSLA502381 .
• 21 // www.mannheimerswartling.se/globalassets/nyhetsbrev/msa_nyhetsbrev_natio… ; Bird & Bird LLP, “China’s long-awaited draft Data Security Law released—What does it cover (and not cover)?,” Lexology, July 6, 2020, https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=67e3bd08-554c-437a-8d3e-… ; Naomi Xu Elegant, “If you’re reading this, Beijing says its new Hong Kong security law applies to you,” Fortune, July 7, 2020, https://fortune.com/2020/07/07/hong-kong-law-scope-extraterritorial-jur… .
• 22 // www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/ordered-05092017155554.html .
• 23 // www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/world/asia/thailand-deports-uighur-migrants-… ; Nour Youssef, “Egyptian Police Detain Uighurs and Deport Them to China,” New York Times, July 6, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/world/asia/egypt-muslims-uighurs-dep… .
• 24 This case involving a larger group of Uighurs deported from Egypt is not based on public sources and therefore is not included in China’s overall incident tally. For more on the report methodology, visit [LINK].
• 25 // www.hrw.org/news/2020/11/23/saudi-arabia-clarify-status-uyghur-detainee… .
• 26 //sinopsis.cz/en/klimes-xinjiang-turkey/.
• 27 // www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/deportation-08092019171834.html ; Ayla Jean Yackley and Christian Shepherd, “Turkey’s Uighurs Fear for Future after China Deportation,” Financial Times, August 24, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/caee8cac-c3f4-11e9-a8e9-296ca66511c9 .
• 28 // www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2020/02/china-uyghurs-abroad-living-… .
• 29 //uhrp.org/press-release/new-uyghur-human-rights-project-uhrp-report-details-how-chinese-government-engaged.
• 30 // www.nytimes.com/2019/10/22/technology/china-hackers-ethnic-minorities.h… .
• 31 // www.reuters.com/article/us-china-cyber-uighurs/china-hacked-asian-telco… .
• 32 // www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/spy-11032020175523.html .
• 33 //savetibet.org/new-china-nepal-agreements-could-deny-tibetans-freedom/; Freedom House interview, March 2020.
• 34 // www.rfa.org/english/news/tibet/nepal-deport-09092019064318.html .
• 35 Freedom House interview, March 2020.
• 36 // www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1318496/download?utm_medium=emai… .
• 37 // www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/world/europe/sweden-china-spy.html ; “Tibetans in Switzerland Denounce China’s Intimidation Tactics,” Swissinfo.ch, July 14, 2019, https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/exile_tibetans-in-switzerland-denounce-chi… .
• 38 //techcrunch.com/2019/09/24/tibetans-iphone-android-hacks-uyghurs/?guccounter=1.
• 39 // www.sbs.com.au/news/amid-suicide-and-threats-to-their-language-ethnic-m… .
• 40 // www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-nyed-1_15-cv-01046/pdf/USCOURTS-ny… .
• 41 //fofg.org/2014/08/31/czech-republic-chinese-embassy-official-arrested-for-attacking-peaceful-falun-gong-protestors/.
• 42 //fofg.org/2014/09/09/cross-strait-relations-bring-taiwan-thuggery/; J. Michael Cole, “Who’s waving those PRC flags (and beating people up) at Taipei 101?,” Thinking Taiwan, August 16, 2014, http://thinking-taiwan.com/thinking-taiwan.com/whos-waving-those-ccp-fl… .
• 43 // www.epochtimes.com/gb/14/7/23/n4207087.htm .
• 44 //endtransplantabuse.org/chinese-embassy-military-attache-arrested-for-attacking-peaceful-protest/.
• 45 Who’s Afraid of Shen Yun?, “Incidents & Evidence,” 2019, http://leeshailemish.com/on-shen-yun/whos-afraid-of-shen-yun/ .
• 46 //rsf.org/en/news/prosecution-thailand-over-shortwave-broadcasts-china.
• 47 //visiontimes.com/2019/12/07/chinese-youtuber-detained-in-thailand-fears-being-sent-back-to-china2.html.
• 48 //supchina.com/2018/06/15/qa-with-leon-lee-director-of-letter-from-masanjia/.
• 49 Freedom House interview with Chinese journalist, February 2020.
• 50 //time.com/4207428/li-xin-journalist-thailand-return-china/.
• 51 //cbldf.org/2015/12/chinese-cartoonist-deported-from-thailand-jailed-in-china/.
• 52 Maren Williams, “Chinese Cartoonist Deported from Thailand, Jailed in China.”
• 53 // www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/case/case-history-xing-qingxian .
• 54 // www.sbs.com.au/news/this-activist-says-she-is-being-tracked-and-harasse… .
• 55 // www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/05/hong-kong-activist-joshua-wong-de… .
• 56 //hongkongfp.com/2019/09/30/will-not-back-activist-denise-ho-attacked-paint-taiwan-thousands-march-solidarity-hong-kong-protesters/; “HK Bookseller Who Fled to Taiwan Attacked with Red Paint,” Deutsche Welle, April 24, 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/hk-bookseller-who-fled-to-taiwan-attacked-with-re… .
• 57 // www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/2060205/hong-kong-democrac… .
• 58 //hongkongfp.com/2020/08/22/singaporean-activist-to-serve-10-day-jail-sentence-over-skype-call-event-with-hong-kongs-joshua-wong/.
• 59 //freedomhouse.org/report/china-media-bulletin/2020/beijings-extraterritorial-reach-hong-kong-national-security-law#A1.
• 60 // www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/31/china-hong-kong-security-law-amer… .
• 61 // www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/world/asia/kenya-deport-taiwan-china.html .
• 62 //thediplomat.com/2019/03/how-china-used-the-swedish-ambassador-to-threaten-angela-gui/.
• 63 // www.ft.com/content/378988a4-594f-11ea-abe5-8e03987b7b20 .
• 64 //cpc.people.com.cn/pinglun/n/2014/0724/c78779-25336902.html.
• 65 //politics.people.com.cn/n1/2017/0309/c1001-29132787.html; Human Rights Watch, “Tibet: A Glossary of Repression,” June 19, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/interactive/2017/06/20/tibet-glossary-… . “Skynet” is used in a variety of CCP official statements regarding surveillance and the capture of fugitives. According to Human Rights Watch, the phrase originally came from a medieval Chinese play and was later adopted by Mao Zedong and revived by Xi Jinping in 2014.
• 66 //foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/29/the-disappeared-china-renditions-kidnapping/; “China Focus: CPC Sets Anti-corruption Records over Past Five Years,” Xinhua, June 29, 2017, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-06/29/c_136404844.htm .
• 67 // www.fbi.gov/news/speeches/the-threat-posed-by-the-chinese-government-an… .
• 68 // www.justice.gov/opa/pr/eight-individuals-charged-conspiring-act-illegal… .
• 69 //foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/29/the-disappeared-china-renditions-kidnapping/.
• 70 // www.ccpwatch.org/single-post/2019/03/13/Taking-the-Anti-Corruption-Camp… .
• 71 //thediplomat.com/2017/01/the-pitfalls-of-law-enforcement-cooperation-with-china/.
• 72 //safeguarddefenders.com/en/blog/lies-and-spies-switzerland-s-secret-deal-chinese-police.
• 73 // www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51185838 .

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About Transnational Repression

By studying transnational repression at a global scale, Freedom House aims to explain the repercussions of these campaigns, and to help policymakers and civil society think about how they can respond to protect exiles and diasporas.

Policy Recommendations

These recommendations are intended to constrain the ability of states to commit acts of transnational repression, to increase accountability for perpetrators of transnational repression, and to provide protection for at-risk exiles and diasporas.

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The Economy of China: A Case Study on the Second-largest Economy in the World

Harshit Verma

The world has about 775 crore people living on its surface. If you look at the population graph, you will notice a straight line facing the sky. The rate at which the population is growing makes a steep graph.

The world is divided into continents and countries. Most people live in china. China is the most populous country in the world. In fact, China has been the most populous for a long time now. When we write ‘for a long time, it means centuries. The first census showed the Chinese population at 583 million and by the fifth census, it had risen to double at 1.2 billion. The Chinese population now has crossed a mark of 1.4 billion people. It also covers most geographical time zones after that of Russia. This means that the country is not just big in population but also huge in the area.

A big country like that of China needs a lot of products and services. They need a lot of goods to meet the needs of people residing in that country. Some of the goods can be imported and the rest have to be produced in the home country. In fact, most goods that they can’t import or the goods that are not economical to import, they have to manufacture by themselves.

Not to mention that China is one of the cheapest labour countries out there. In this article, we are gonna cover the economy of this country. We will discuss what comprises the most in this economy and what are its driving factors. Read on to know more about the second-biggest economy in the world.

China: The Most Populous Country China: The Culture China: The Economy The Reasons for Economic Growth in China What can go wrong with China? FAQ

China: The Most Populous Country

China or the Republic of China (official name) is a country in East Asia. As we mentioned earlier it is the biggest, in terms of population. It contains the largest number of people than any country. This country also spans and covers most geographical time zones after Russia.

The country has 23 provinces, 4 municipalities, 5 autonomous regions and 2 SARs (Special administrative regions). The capital of China is Beijing . The largest city in China, which is also the financial centre, is Shanghai . In terms of technological and innovative approaches, the city of Shenzhen tops the chart in this country.

China at its inception emerged as one of the very first civilisations. It was the fertile land basin of a river named Yellow that marked its beginning. After the civilization boom, China also emerged as one of the first economically strong countries. Their time as a strong economic power also remained for almost most of the two millennia (thousand years).

Also, the political system of this country is based on monarchies. It has been this way for almost a thousand years (Millenia). This means that for those many years, China’s political system was controlled by rulers and then their heirs and then their heirs. This is what we call an absolute hereditary monarchy. This system of political control began from the ‘ Xia dynasty in about the 21st Century BCE. Moreover, since then the country of China has seen multiple expansions, fractions and re-unities.

China: The Culture

The culture of such a big country is expected to be special and unique. Since very ancient times, the culture has been heavily influenced by the philosophy of Confucianism. Which is a tenet in philosophy. This is also known as a truism and inspires people to live a humanistic, rationalistic and very simple life.

The culture there in the past also offered examinations, tests. Those exams were to be passed by a person to get a highly prestigious and better status in society. This is one of the reasons why China has a long history of writing and calligraphy. In fact, calligraphy, writing poetry and painting are more celebrated than other forms of art like dancing or dramatics. Its culture also inspires people to be diving deep into the lanes of history to know about their past. This also invokes the trait of an inward-looking behaviour of Chinese people in the past, this ran at a national level of thought process.

China: The Economy

It is an aforementioned fact that China is big and has a lot of people. It has to cater to about 1.4 billion people for its sustenance. This really marks that the economy must be big and effective. However, this is not as easy as it seems.

Even though China is the largest in terms of population, we cannot really say that it is the biggest when it comes to the economy. It is second in terms of magnitude just after the United States . It is important to note that economies are weighed in terms of GDPs. GDP stands for the gross domestic product. That is in simpler terms, the sum total of all the valuable products or services that a country produces in a financial year.

According to the GDPs, in the pandemic year 2020, China is seen to have the second-largest GDP in the world. Here are the top five countries according to the GDP ranks.

When we talk in terms of GDP, we measure it in dollars. We can also notice that China may be the second largest in GDP but it is the largest in terms of PPP.

PPP stands for purchasing power parity. PPP is a popular macroeconomic analysis metric that is used to compare economic productivity and standards of living between countries in purchasing power. The theory follows a theory known as the “Basket of goods” for comparing the purchasing power of different countries.

China tops the list when we see through the lens of purchasing power parity. This shows us the fact that even if the Chinese economy is the second-largest, the citizens of China are better in purchasing power and economic productivity than that most countries. Please note that PPP here does not mean a paycheck protection program , made by the CARES Act.

China’s growth rate (In annual terms) is displacing that of the United States of America. Many think that China’s rate will overtake the United States in terms of Nominal GDP too in the upcoming years. Don’t get scared of the terminology “Nominal GDP”. Nominal GDP is a form of GDP that is in the current rates, without accounting for the effect of inflation on the GDP. So, this is a GDP at the current market price.

There are many reasons for china that made this country get this spot of a top tier pacer in the economic race. We will discuss more in a second. But let us get some overview, China has progressively opened its economy with the whole world, continuously for more than forty years. This reveals a good reason why its economy is on a paced growth and why the standards of people there have been improving vastly.

The Chinese government has gradually phased out collectivised agriculture too. It means the type of agriculture in which multiple farmers can hold land and share workloads of the agriculture activity. Thus, it helps in sharing Profits and losses among farmers and makes farming a little more smooth sailing.

Collectivised farming has also boosted flexibility for market prices and increased the autonomy of businesses. When a country’s agriculture is doing well, it can then pay more attention to the industrial sector and thus China’s domestic and foreign trade magnitudes are also rising at a good rate of growth.

The Reasons for Economic Growth in China

By far we have discussed China and its economy. We have seen that it is a rapidly growing economy with such a behemoth sort of population. This might interest you in how this big country is fostering growth with such a huge number of people and how it is able to raise citizens' standard of living. This is the part of the article where we discuss the reasons for such growth in China. How it is becoming, what it is becoming and what are the main drivers of growth for this economy.

The Manufacturing Hub of the world

China, if you don’t know, is the manufacturing hub of the world. If you are using a product that is sold by a brand or even a local product then it is a good possibility that the product would be manufactured in China.

Yes, look around yourself. Your favourite Apple products are assembled in china, your favourite Converse or Nike sneakers are made in China, and most things that you can think of are manufactured in China. Do you ask for a reason? The reason is obviously cheap labour.

With such a big population, China has some special benefits over any other country in the world. It can provide a good basis for cheap labour. For that one reason, it has emerged as the global capital of manufacturing items.

Besides its large hands on the textile industry, the economy also is big on machinery, processing of food items, Cement for infrastructure, consumer goods and many many more fields.

Moreover, China is not a huge hub only for domestic manufacturing plants, it also caters to the needs of foreign companies to come and manufacture there or assemble items. Famous examples may include Apple. Apple designs their products in California and they are assembled in China. Adding to this, The Chinese software and IT industry grew by over 14.2% from 2018 to 2019, generating revenue of approximately $940 billion.

Heavy Focus on Industries

Another reason which makes this country a big economy is its industries. As any normal developing country, China knows that for growing its economy, it needs to pay attention to the industries that are set in its territory. So they focus extensively on that.

China is a super friendly nation when it comes to industries wanting to set up manufacturing plants there. Results of which are the fact that China is the world's biggest steel manufacturer . This shows a strong will of steel.

The Chinese government began opening up the economy for the whole world in 1978. Which is also known as globalisation. So it began its reforms for economic development under the leader named Deng Xiaoping. That was a turning point in the history of this big country, after the reforms it went on to become the fastest-growing major country globally.

According to a report, the growth rates were averaging 10% over 30 years. China also has three of the ten largest stock exchanges in India. They are located in prime cities like Shanghai, Hong Kong and Shenzhen. They are big in terms of market capitalisation and trading volume. All these factors establish that China is an industrial hub.

The Medicines industry

Abbreviated as Pharmaceutical industry. China has one of the best, state of the art medical supply chains. The growth trends in this industry copy the whole of China. It grows almost as China grows, which is rapid. China had the second-largest pharmaceutical market in the world as of 2017.

The pharmaceutical industry follows the same structure as most of the world. They have manufacturers at the top and then middlemen or distributors and then retail stores communicate directly to the general public. However, the global share of China's medicines is seen less. With a big population, it is forecasted to grow even more and is still one of the biggest in terms of scale.

The Population’s Demand-pull

As mentioned earlier, China is very populous. Which makes it a generator of huge demands. Brands all over the world try to target this demand to get some share of this market. So this has become one of the most important drivers of economic growth for that country. It is a consumer paradise with all types of demands for goods, be it normal or luxury items.

China has some of the biggest shopping malls in the world. They, not to mention, stimulate growth in a good direction. The retail lines of China contributed about 1.8 trillion dollars to the Gross domestic product.

China is also the home to the E-Commerce giant Alibaba. It is responsible for giving a lasting boost to the already big consumerism in China. A report said that Alibaba on a shopping festival achieved something sort of called a miraculous sale. It touched a sales record of 540.3 billion Yuan (it is about 84.5 billion dollars), which is a huge record for such a huge country. This gave a much-needed boost to the consumer sector. Even today it is one of the benchmarks for sales all over the world.

Tourism and travel is also big sector in China. It reportedly contributed 992 billion dollars to the Chinese GDP in the year 2019. Other sectors that are the prime demand pullers are transportation, construction and estate.

What can go wrong with China?

China, however big it may seem from the outside, can go weak from the inside. There can be many premises on which the country is not doing well. For example, China uses a lot of Non-renewable resources to produce power, electricity. The population needs it and the shift in this sector seems impossible. This marks the country as a huge member of the world's pollution and a big emitter of greenhouse gases.

As we discussed previously, the China government is a monarch at its core. This makes enough space for corruption. The government is however trying to curb corruption and make the country more flexible and friendly for the world’s businesses. This can take time and if not done correctly can leave a bad impression on the image of China. This problem is not just one faced. It is a multifaceted problem, as it can lead to fewer industries in China and thus low employment rates in the country.

Speaking of that, China also faces the problem of unemployment . It needs to place people with enough skillsets for employment. Which is also a big deal in a country as big as China.

In addition to the political and the internal housing issue, one more issue lurks there. The recent downward trend of the labour industry. This means that China is slowly losing the crown of the cheapest labour in the world . The reason for this can be inflation and the digitalised working models and economy. China is losing its position to other cheap labour countries like Pakistan, India etcetera. For India, it is good news but if China has to retain its manufacturing position then it needs to be more ready for this changing technological world.

As we discussed above, China is a big country with a huge population and big demands. It is important to note that it, obviously, also has some cracks. Some cracks in the economy that are not severe but if not cured could sink a big ship.

The recent Evergrande fail was one such big example of how things can go wrong. China has seen real estate bubbles in its history too. The previous bubble burst and hit the whole world’s market, more recently the Evergrande crisis made the investors scared of investing in China.

It is a good point to say that “With great powers comes great responsibilities”. China has a load of the most people on the globe, which can be overwhelming to the government. In these times of pandemic, the future remains random and uncertain.

The fact that the Covid 19 pandemic originated from the heart of China also is affecting the Chinese economy in the wrong manner. It has defamed China in some sense. This is the reason that some industries are looking to shift base to developing countries like India.

For China, it remains a tough call to tackle a pandemic and the future of its economy. Again, it is not supposed to be easy to handle such a big and populous economy.

Is China a developed country?

Yes, China is one of the largest developing countries in the world.

What is China's GDP?

The gross domestic product (GDP) of China is around 14.87 trillion U.S. dollars as of 2020.

Is China the fastest growing economy?

Yes, China ranks second in the world's fastest-growing economy.

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Exploring local meaning-making resources

A case study of a popular chinese internet meme ( biaoqingbao ).

• Author(s): Yaqian Jiang 1  and Camilla Vásquez 1
• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: 1 University of South Florida
• Source: Internet Pragmatics , Volume 3, Issue 2 , Nov 2020, p. 260 - 282
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00042.jia
• Version of Record published : 19 Nov 2019
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This study examines various combinations of visual and textual meaning-making resources in a popular Chinese meme. The meme features an exogenous image – the grinning facial expression of a U.S. wrestler, D’Angelo Dinero – that has been recontextualized into numerous other visual texts, to create semiotic ensembles with local meanings, which are then distributed across Chinese social media platforms. We analyzed 60 of these image macros, and our findings show that local meanings are created when Dinero’s facial expression is blended with visual references to Chinese digital culture, Chinese popular culture, Chinese social class issues, Chinese politics, and Chinese institutions. The majority of textual elements in the image macros are Chinese; however, the handful of examples that also include other languages typically involve multilingual wordplay and carnivalesque themes. We argue that although the multivalency of the wrestlers’ facial expression invites interpretations of a wide range of affective meanings, an overarching rebellious or transgressive stance is consistent across individual texts.

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Identity-related issues in meme communication, self-praise online and offline, incongruity-resolution humorous strategies in image macro memes, introducing internet pragmatics, genres, media, and recontextualization practices, “ya bloody drongo”, stylistic humor across modalities, relational work in multimodal networked interactions on facebook, an outline of some future research issues for internet pragmatics.

Trump indicted again in federal election interference case following Supreme Court immunity ruling

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump has once again been indicted over his efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss, an effort that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

A federal grand jury on Tuesday returned a superseding indictment that charges Trump with the same four counts he faced in the original indictment last August : conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.

The new indictment was returned following the Supreme Court's decision on presidential immunity last month , which barred the government from using certain "official acts" Trump took in his role as president in its prosecution.

“The superseding indictment, which was presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case, reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions,” special counsel Jack Smith's office said in Tuesday's filing.

Trump blasted the new indictment as “shocking” and “a direct attack on democracy” in a string of social media posts. “The case has to do with ‘Conspiracy to Obstruct the 2020 Presidential Election,’ when they are the ones that did the obstructing of the Election, not me,” he wrote . His campaign also sent out a fundraising email within two hours of the filing, saying Trump was "just indicted again" and urging supporters to "stand with Trump" by donating.

While the charges are the same, some of the evidence has been whittled down in light of the Supreme Court's ruling, which expanded what could be considered official acts.

Gone from the superseding indictment are the sections that detailed Trump’s conversations with Justice Department officials in which he is alleged to have asked them to support his false claims of election fraud. Former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark , who backed Trump's claims and was almost named acting attorney general, has been removed as an unindicted co-conspirator. Prosecutors also removed references to advice Trump got from or conversations he had with direct advisers in the Oval Office, like White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and references to some of his tweets from that period.

The new indictment also notes Vice President Mike Pence's role as president of the Senate on the day of the electoral vote count — Jan. 6, 2021 — in an apparent nod to concerns from the Supreme Court about whether evidence of Trump's campaign to get Pence to intervene in the count should be allowed. The Supreme Court ruling said, "Whenever the President and Vice President discuss their official responsibilities, they engage in official conduct," and there is therefore a "presumption of immunity" around their conversations. But the ruling also noted that Pence's responsibility of "'presiding over the Senate' is 'not an ‘executive branch’ function.”

Other parts of the new indictment are the same, with prosecutors again taking the position that Trump didn't actually believe the lies he was spreading in the wake of his 2020 election loss and that he knew that they were, in fact, lies.

“These claims were unsupported, objectively unreasonable, and ever-changing, and the Defendant and his co-conspirators repeated them even after they were publicly disproven," the indictment says. "These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false."

While many Jan. 6 defendants have told courts that they now recognize they were tricked and lament that they were “gullible” enough to fall for the misinformation about the 2020 election that Trump promoted , Trump himself has never publicly admitted that he realizes he was spreading misinformation.

Trump's state of mind will be a major issue at a future trial , which won't take place before Election Day and could be complicated if he wins. If Trump is victorious, he or his appointees would almost certainly kill the case, as well as other Jan. 6 prosecutions: Trump has referred to Capitol rioters as " hostages " and " unbelievable patriots ," and he has indicated he would pardon many, if not all, Jan. 6 defendants. (Trump said he would "absolutely" consider pardoning every Jan. 6 criminal defendant, but his campaign has said pardons would be issued case by case.)

Trump's legal team had prepared for the possibility of a new indictment, according to a source familiar with the defense team's thinking, but believes the revised indictment still contains "fatal" flaws under the Supreme Court's reasoning.

“We don’t think they’ll be able to prove this was all purely campaign-related,” the source added, suggesting the timing works in the former president's favor.

The defense team is expected to ask for briefing schedule to argue why the superseding indictment should be dismissed too — a process that could drag out for months.

Trump's original challenge on immunity grounds led U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to fr e eze the underlying case in December while he appealed. The case was returned to her court this month; the defense and the prosecution are scheduled to file a joint status report Friday laying out their proposed schedules for proceeding.

Any litigation on pending immunity questions must be settled before other action in the case, the Supreme Court ruling said. That could take multiple forms, from a public evidentiary hearing with witnesses or a fully on-paper process consisting of multiple rounds of briefings followed by written rulings from the judge.

Trump is also using the immunity ruling to fight his conviction on charges of falsifying business record in New York. His attorneys contend that the indictment in that case should be dismissed because the grand jury was presented with evidence of official acts — tweets and conversations with advisers — that shouldn't have been considered.

A new grand jury brought the new indictment in the federal case. The slimmed-down allegations could also be a way for prosecutors to avoid extensive fights over evidence they were concerned wouldn't be allowed because of the Supreme Court ruling.

Ryan J. Reilly is a justice reporter for NBC News.

Daniel Barnes reports for NBC News, based in Washington.

Dareh Gregorian is a politics reporter for NBC News.

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162 lies and distortions in a news conference. NPR fact-checks former President Trump

Domenico Montanaro

Former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, speaks during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Aug. 8. Joe Raedle/Getty Images hide caption

There were a host of false things that Donald Trump said during his hour-long news conference Thursday that have gotten attention.

A glaring example is his helicopter emergency landing story, which has not stood up to scrutiny .

But there was so much more. A team of NPR reporters and editors reviewed the transcript of his news conference and found at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes. That’s more than two a minute. It’s a stunning number for anyone – and even more problematic for a person running to lead the free world.

Politicians spin. They fib. They misspeak. They make honest mistakes like the rest of us. And, yes, they even sometimes exaggerate their biographies .

The expectation, though, is that they will treat the truth as something important and correct any errors.

But what former President Trump did this past Thursday went well beyond the bounds of what most politicians would do.

Here’s what we found, going chronologically from the beginning of Trump’s remarks to the end:

1. “I think our country right now is in the most dangerous position it’s ever been in from an economic standpoint…” 

The U.S. economy has rebounded from the pandemic downturn more rapidly than most other countries around the world. Growth has slowed in recent months, but gross domestic product still grew at a relatively healthy annual clip of 2.8% in April, May and June – which is faster than the pace in three of the four years when Trump was president. — Scott Horsley, NPR chief economics correspondent

2. “…from a safety standpoint, both gangs on the street…”

We don’t have great, up-to-date data on gang activity in the U.S., but violent crime trends offer a good glimpse into safety in the country. Nationally, violent crime – that includes murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault – has been trending way down after a surge in 2020, according to the most recent data from the FBI . That data is preliminary and incomplete, covering around three-quarters of the country, but other crime analysts have found similar trends. Crime levels, of course, vary locally : murders are down in Philadelphia, for instance, but up in Charlotte, N.C. — Meg Anderson, NPR National Desk reporter covering criminal justice

3. “...and frankly, gangs outside of our country in the form of other countries that are, frankly, very powerful. They’re very powerful countries.”

The U.S. is not in the “most dangerous position” from a foreign-policy standpoint than ever before. Biden pulled troops out of Afghanistan in his first year in office — though the withdrawal itself was chaotic and a target of much criticism — and since then, U.S. troops have not been actively engaged in a war for the first time in 20 years. The U.S. is supporting Ukraine and Israel, of course, and has troops in Iraq and Syria, but they’re not fighting on any regular basis.

What’s more, however, FBI Director Christopher Wray has said the greatest threat to the country is domestic extremism . And beyond organized groups the very definition of extremism is changing, as fringe ideologies move into the mainstream, and radicalization takes hold amongst parts of the populace. Consider: the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, even with a motive that remains murky at best. Regardless, the call is coming from inside the house, domestic extremism experts warn. Many polls show a sobering degree of support for political violence to drive change. — Andrew Sussman, NPR supervising editor for national security

4-5. “ We have a lot of bad things coming up. You could end up in a Depression of the 1929 variety, which would be a devastating thing, took many years– took many decades to recover from it, and we’re very close to that.”

There is nothing to suggest that a 1930s style Depression is on the horizon for the United States. And the Depression did not take “many decades to recover from.” It ended during World War Two , in 1941. — Scott Horsley

6. “And we’re very close to a world war. In my opinion, we’re very close to a world war.”

No serious person thinks that the U.S., Russia and China are about to start a world war. Right now, Russia appears to be having a hard time defending Russia, given Ukraine’s recent incursions. While there are concerns about things like the potential for regional conflagrations in the Middle East, only Trump is talking about world war. — Andrew Sussman

7. “ Kamala's record is horrible. She's a radical left person at a level that nobody's seen.” 

It’s debatable how liberal Harris is. Some in California didn’t like her record on criminal justice and thought she was not progressive enough. She’s clearly liked by progressives and her voting scores as a senator are on the liberal end of the spectrum, but is she “radical left” and “at a level that nobody’s seen”? There are plenty of people alive and in history who would be considered far more liberal and more radical.

8. “She picked a radical left man.”

Few, if any, reasonable people would say Walz is a “radical left man.” He had a progressive record as governor with a Democratic legislature, but the things passed are hardly radical – free school lunch, protecting abortion rights, legalizing marijuana, restricting access to certain types of guns. All of these things have majority support from voters. What’s more, that “progressive” record ignores Walz’s first term as governor when he worked with Republicans because Democrats didn’t control the legislature. And it ignores Walz’s time as a congressman when he was considered a more moderate member given that he was from a district that had been previously held by a Republican.

9. “He's going for things that nobody's ever even heard of. Heavy into the transgender world.” 

Last year, Walz championed and signed a bill that prevented state courts of officials from complying with child-removal requests, extraditions, arrests or subpoenas related to gender-affirming health care that a person receives or provides in Minnesota. “Heavy into the transgender world” is vague and misleading.

10. “He doesn't want to have borders. He doesn't want to have walls.”

Walz has never called for having no borders. He has voiced opposition to a wall because he doesn't think it will stop illegal immigration. He told Anderson Cooper on CNN , for example, that a wall "is not how you stop" illegal immigration He called for more border-control agents, electronics and more legal ways to immigrate.

11. “He doesn't want to have any form of safety for our country.”

Trump himself praised Walz’s handling of the aftermath of the George Floyd murder at the hands of a police officer. And it’s certainly hyperbole to say he “doesn’t want any form of safety for our country.” Walz served in the U.S. National Guard for 24 years, so clearly, he’s interested in the country having national security. And domestically, he’s never been a “defund the police” advocate. Walz opposed a ballot measure that would have gotten rid of minimum police staffing levels, for example. That angered advocates. He signed police reforms into law , but that does not prove wanting no safety.

12. “He doesn't mind people coming in from prisons.”

Walz has not said he wants people coming in from prisons. Trump is trying to tie his claim that other countries are sending prisoners to the United States to Democrats’ immigration policies.

13. “And neither does she, I guess. Because she's not, she couldn't care less.”

Harris has said a lot to the contrary of not caring about the levels of migrants coming across the border, let alone people coming in from prisons. In fact, when in Guatemala, she said her message for people thinking of immigrating to the United States was: " Do not come. Do not come ."

14. “She's the border czar. By the way, she was the border czar, 100%. And all of a sudden, for the last few weeks, she's not the border czar anymore, like nobody ever said it.”

Harris was never appointed “border czar.” That’s a phrase that was used incorrectly by some media outlets. Biden tasked Harris with leading the “ diplomatic effort ” with leaders in Central American countries, where many migrants are coming from.

Biden said he wants Harris “to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help — are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.” He added that Harris “agreed to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept — the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders — at their borders.”

Harris herself that day spoke of “the need to address root causes for the migration that we’ve been seeing.”

15. “We have a very, very sick country right now. You saw the other day with the stock market crashing. That was just the beginning. That was just the beginning.”

The stock market did not “crash.” The stock market fell sharply at the end of last week as investors fretted about a softening job market. This was amplified on Monday when Japan’s stock market tumbled 12%, sparking a selloff around the world. Stocks in Japan and elsewhere have since regained much of this ground, however. The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 683 points on the day of Trump’s news conference. — Scott Horsley

16. “Fortunately, we've had some very good polls over the last fairly short period of time.”

Most good polls have shown Harris gaining not just nationally, but also in the swing states, though these same polls show a very close race.

17. “Rasmussen came out today. We're substantially leading.” 

Trump is not substantially leading, and Rasmussen is viewed as one of the least credible pollsters in the country.

18. “And others came out today that we're leading, and in some cases, substantially, I guess, MSNBC came out, or CNBC came out also, with a poll that was, you know, has us leading.” 

Polls have not shown substantial leads. CNBC had Trump leading by 2, unchanged from his 2-point lead in July.

19. “And leading fairly big in swing states. In some polls, I'm leading very big in swing states… .”

Again, polls in swing states have shown a tightened race.

20. “But as a border czar, she's been the worst border czar in history, in the world history.”

Vice President Harris was never asked to lead immigration policy. That’s the job of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Again, the term “border czar” was used inaccurately by some media outlets, and it’s a term conservatives have been using to attack her, in part, because she has only visited the Southern U.S. border a few times since 2021. But in reality, Harris was tapped by President Biden to address the root causes of migration . Her approach has focused on deterrence. She’s told migrants to not come to the U.S., and she has been able to secure more than $5 billion in commitments from private companies to help boost the economy in Central American countries. — Sergio Martínez-Beltrán, NPR immigration correspondent based in Texas 

21. “I think the number is 20 million, but whether it's 15 or 20, it's numbers that nobody's ever heard before. 20 million people came over the border in the last– during the Biden-Harris administration. Twenty-million people. And it could be very much higher than that. Nobody really knows what the number is.”

It’s unclear where Trump is getting this number from. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection , since 2021 agents have had more than 7.3 million encounters nationwide with migrants trying to cross into the country illegally. Under Biden, unlawful crossings hit an all-time high last year, but that number has decreased significantly, in part, due to Biden’s asylum restrictions at the Southern U.S. border. An April report from the Office of Homeland Security Statistics found there’s nearly 11 million unauthorized migrants in the country. — Sergio Martínez-Beltrán

22. “Just like far more people were killed in the Ukraine-Russia war than you have reported.”

Neither Russia nor Ukraine is revealing its own casualty figures, so there are only very broad estimates. — Andrew Sussman 

23. “A lot of great things would have happened, but now you have millions and millions of dead people. And you have people dying financially, because they can't buy bacon; they can't buy food; they can't buy groceries; they can't do anything. And they're living horribly in our country right now.”

Grocery prices actually jumped sharply during Trump’s last year in office, as pandemic lockdowns disrupted the food supply chain and Americans were suddenly forced to eat more of their meals at home. Grocery inflation in June 2020 hit 5.6%. This was masked, however, by a plunge in other prices, as the global economy fell into pandemic recession.

As the economy rebounded, prices did, too. Inflation began to rise in 2021, and spiked in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent food and energy prices soaring. Inflation has since moderated, falling from a peak of 9.1% in June 2022 to 3% in June 2024 . (July’s inflation figures will be released next week.) Grocery prices have largely leveled off in the last year, although they remain higher than they were before the pandemic – a potent reminder of the rising cost of living.

Economists have warned that Trump’s proposed import tariffs and immigration restrictions could result in higher inflation in the years to come. Researchers from the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimate the tariffs alone would cost the typical family about $1,700 a year . — Scott Horsley

24. “We've agreed with NBC, fairly full agreement, subject to them, on Sept. 10th.”

This is ABC, not NBC.

25. “She can't do an interview. She's barely competent and she can't do an interview.” 

Harris hasn’t done interviews since getting into the campaign, but she has done them in the past, so saying “she can’t do” one or that she is “barely competent” are just insults. Trump tends to revert to questioning the intelligence of Black women who challenge him. In fact, Trump did it nine times in this news conference, saying either Harris is not that “smart” (five times) "incompetent” (three times) or “barely competent,” as he did here.

26-27. “Why is it that millions of people were allowed to come into our country from prisons, from jails, from mental institutions, insane asylums, even insane asylums, that's a– it's a mental institution on steroids. That's what it is.”

Immigration experts have said they have not been able to find any evidence of this. Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, told FactCheck.org : “It’s hard to prove a negative — nobody’s writing a report saying, ‘Ecuador is not opening its mental institutions’ — but what I can say is that I work full-time on migration, am on many coalition mailing lists, correspond constantly with partners in the region, and scan 300+ RSS feeds and Twitter lists of press outlets and activists region wide, and I have not seen a single report indicating that this is happening. … As far as I can tell, it’s a total fabrication.”

Notably, a version of this did happen in 1980 during the Mariel boatlift from Cuba . The Washington Post noted three years later: “Back in 1980, it seemed to be a humanitarian and patriotic gesture to accept provisionally, without papers or visas, all those fleeing from the port of Mariel. More than 125,000 came. Most were true refugees, many had families here, and the great majority has settled into American communities without mishap. But the Cuban dictator played a cruel joke. He opened his jails and mental hospitals and put their inmates on the boats too.”

Without a question, some migrants who have come into the U.S. have committed crimes, but the data show the vast majority do not. According to Northwestern University , immigrants are less likely to commit a crime than U.S.-born people and certainly at no higher rates that the population writ large. (Trump goes on to repeat this claim minutes later in the news conference as well, so it is included in our count here.)

28. “We have a president that's the worst president in the history of our country.”

Trump may have this opinion, but he says it as if it’s fact, and a 2022 survey of historians ranked Biden in the top half of presidents. Trump, on the other hand, was No. 43. The two below Trump were James Buchanan, who did little to stop the impending U.S. Civil War, and the impeached and nearly convicted Andrew Johnson.

29. “We have a vice president who is the least admired, least respected, and the worst vice president in the history of our country.” 

A recent rating of vice presidents did not show this. Harris was in the bottom half of vice presidents, but Spiro Agnew, Dan Quayle, Henry A. Wallace and were toward the bottom of the list.

30. “The most unpopular vice president.”

This might have been true about a year ago or so, but not anymore. An NBC poll then showed Harris had the lowest favorability rating of any modern VP they’d tested. But her numbers have turned around. The NPR poll had Harris with a 46%/48% favorable to unfavorable rating, which was higher than Trump’s and his running mate, JD Vance, who is among the least popular running mates in recent history .

31. “Don't forget, she was the first one defeated. As I remember it, because I watched it very closely, but she was the first one.”

Harris was not “defeated,” because she dropped out of the Democratic presidential race before Iowa. But even if one considers her dropping out on Dec. 3, 2019, a defeat, she was not the first of the Democratic candidates in that primary campaign to do so. At least 10 others dropped out sooner .

32-34. “And I'm no Biden fan, but I'll tell you what, from a constitutional standpoint, from any standpoint you're looking at, they took the presidency away. … And they took it away.” 

There’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution about picking presidential candidates. This is a party process, and everything has been done within party rules. And, again, the presidency wasn’t taken away: Biden is still president.

35. “They said they're going to use the 25th Amendment.”

This was never floated as a possibility to get Biden to withdraw from the race. Biden’s Cabinet members are all people he appointed and who are loyal to him. In addition, the 25th Amendment outlines a procedure for removing a sitting president from office, not from running for a second term.

36-39. "They're going to hit you hard. ‘Either we can do it the nice way. I heard, I know exactly, because I know a lot of people on the other side, believe it or not. And, they said, ‘We'll do it the nice way, or we'll do it the hard way.’ And he said, ‘All right.”

This was not said; he did not hear; no Democrats in the know are talking to Trump; and this dialogue is made up.

40. “We're leading, we're leading.”

The race is statistically tied in national polls and in the states. In some national polls, Harris leads. In some, Trump does.

41-42. “I'm saying it's a–, for a country with a Constitution that we cherish, we cherish this Constitution to have done it this way is pretty severe, pretty horrible. … But to just take it away from him, like he was a child.”

Again, this is Trump talking about how Biden stepped aside, and there’s nothing in the Constitution about how the political parties should pick candidates. And nothing was taken away.

43-46. “And he's a very angry man right now, I can tell you that. He's not happy with Obama, and he's not happy with Nancy Pelosi. Crazy Nancy, she is crazy, too. She's not happy with any of the people that told him that you've gotta leave. He's very unhappy, very angry, and I think he, He also blames her. He's trying to put up a good face, but it's a very bad thing in terms of a country when you do that. I'm not a fan of his, as you probably have noticed, and he had a rough debate, but that doesn't mean that you just take it away like that.” 

Trump can’t speak to Biden’s state of mind; all evidence is that Nancy Pelosi is perfectly sane – see her recent multiple rounds of interviews about her book, including with NPR ; again, Trump doesn’t know Biden’s state of mind; and again, nobody took it away.

47-51. “She's trying to say she had nothing to do with the border. She had everything. She was appointed to head the border. And then they said border czar. Oh, she loved that name. She loved that name. But she never went there. She went to a location once along the border, but that was a location that you would love to go and have dinner with your husband or whoever. That was a location that was not part of the problem. That was not really going to the border. So I– essentially she never went to the border.”

(1) As previously noted, she was not put in charge of the border and certainly did not have “everything” to do with it; (2) she was not appointed to head the border; (3) if “they” is the White House, then “they” did not call her “border czar”; (4) Trump doesn’t know what Harris might have thought about the term; (5) Harris did not go to a place at the border “you would love to go and have dinner with your husband or whoever.”

In 2021, Harris toured border patrol facilities in El Paso, Texas, visited an area where asylum seekers were screened, and met with migrants. Republicans criticized her at the time for not going to the Rio Grande Valley.

52. “Now we have the worst border in the history of the world.” 

World history is filled with cases where one country has crossed a border and invaded a neighboring country.

53. “She destroyed San Francisco. She destroyed California as the A.G. But as the D.A. She destroyed it. She– San Francisco. … She destroyed– no cash bail, weak on crime, uh, she's terrible.”

As San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011, and then California’s attorney general until 2017, it’s true that Kamala Harris was deeply connected to how crime was prosecuted during that particular period. However, no single person is responsible for destroying any city or state, not to mention that both are not destroyed.

There are just too many factors that contribute to why crime rises and falls. What’s more, according to the FBI , both violent and property crime rates in California more or less mirrored national trends during her tenures. As a prosecutor, Harris was largely seen as aligning more with law-and-order tendencies, though she has supported some progressive reforms, like offering certain criminal defendants drug treatment instead of going to trial. She also tweeted support for a Minnesota bail fund after the 2020 protests of George Floyd’s murder. — Meg Anderson

During her campaign for the 2020 nomination, she rolled out a plan that would have phased out cash bail , and she pledged to eliminate it as president because “no one should have to sit in jail for days or even years because they don’t have the money to pay bail.” But in the same campaign, during a debate, former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard criticized Harris for keeping cash bail in place as district attorney.

54. “And yet they weaponized the system against me.” 

The justice system was not weaponized against Trump. Biden went through pains to not show any interference with the Justice Department. And Trump was found guilty by a jury of his peers in New York in a state case.

55-58. “I won the big case in Florida. I won the big case. … Nobody even wrote about it. The big case.” 

(1) Trump did not “win” the classified documents case against him in Florida; (2) this was not “the big case” against him; (3) there was plenty of coverage of it; and (4) he goes on to repeat that he won the case later.

For context: the judge in the case controversially dismissed it, claiming the special counsel was unconstitutionally appointed despite Supreme Court decisions upholding independent counsels. The Justice Department has signaled it will appeal by the end of August but by the time the decision comes back, the election will be over.

Trump had four criminal cases against him including the classified documents case – the fraudulent business practices case in New York, for which he was convicted on 34 felony counts; an election interference case in Georgia; and the other federal case dealing with Jan. 6. If there was a biggest case, it was the last one.

59. “The judge was a brilliant judge, and all they do is they play the ref with the judges. But this judge was a fair but brilliant judge.”

There has been lots of criticism of the judge in the case, Aileen Cannon, who Trump appointed. She had very little experience as a trial judge, made several decisions that were questioned by legal experts and early in this case, had a ruling, in which she called for a special master to review classified documents first, overturned by the 11th Circuit.

60. “Now Biden lost it because he didn't have presidential immunity. He didn't have the Presidential Records Act. He lost it.”

This was not “Biden’s case.” It was to be tried by special counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. The Biden White House has made efforts to keep an arms-length distance from the investigation. Biden often declined to comment on the Justice Department’s and state investigations into Trump when it would likely have been politically advantageous for him to talk about it on the campaign trail.

61. “But the– I call it prosecutors, special counsel, special prosecutor to me. He–, appointed by him and appointed by Garland. He said the man's incompetent. He can't stand trial, but he can run for president.” 

This appears to be a misrepresentation of what special counsel Robert Hur said of Biden in a report he released investigating the president’s handling of classified documents. Hur said he wouldn’t be charging Biden, called the president “an elderly man with a poor memory" and said a jury might find sympathy with him because of it. He did not say Biden was incompetent and could not stand trial.

62. “She couldn't pass her bar exam.”

This is false. Harris passed her bar exam on the second try . She failed on first attempt, which is not unusual for California’s bar exam given its difficulty.

63. “I was doing very well with Black voters, and I still am. I seem to be doing very well with Black males. This is according to polls, as you know. 

Trump was not doing “very well” with Black voters. Biden was not doing as well with Black voters as he did in 2020, according to most surveys, but that didn’t mean Black voters were moving heavily toward Trump. Many seemed more likely not to vote. There were signs that Trump was doing better with Black men, but there wasn’t much good evidence to support this in polling, considering most national polls have such high margins of error with voter groups. A typical national survey might have 1,000 voters and 100 or so Black voters, give or take. That’s typically a margin of error upward of +/- 10 percentage points, meaning results could be a whopping 10 points higher or lower.

64. “Extremely well with Hispanic.”

Like with Black voters, it’s difficult to tell in most national surveys exactly how well a candidate is doing with Latino voters because of high margins of error. “Extremely well” depends on how it’s defined, but this is an exaggeration.

65. “Jewish voters, way up.”

Jewish voters traditionally vote roughly 2-to-1 for Democrats in presidential elections, so this seems more like a hope than reality.

66. “White males, way up. White males have gone through the roof. White males, way up.” 

It’s just not the case that Trump is “way up.” NPR polling finds that while Trump is doing as well as ever with white men without college degrees, Harris – and Biden before her – is actually leading with white men with college degrees, a group Trump won in 2020, according to exit polls .

67. “It could be that I'll be affected somewhat with Black females. Well, we're doing pretty well. And I think ultimately they'll like me better, because I'm gonna give them security, safety and jobs.”

Trump is not doing well with Black females. Black women are a key pillar Democratic voting group, and Black voters have moved more in Harris’ favor since she’s gotten in.

69. “We have a very bad economy right now. We could, we could literally be on the throes of a depression. Not recession, a Depression. And they can't have that. They can't have that.”

This is not the case. See earlier fact check. (He repeats this again later in the press conference, so it is included here in the count.)

70. “I know Josh Shapiro. He's a terrible guy. And he's not very popular with anybody.” 

A Fox News poll last month showed Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a finalist to be Harris’ running mate, had a 61% approval rating in the state. Other polls also found him with a net-positive rating, though, not quite as high.

71. “Listen, I had 107,000 people in New Jersey. You didn't report it.”

It was reported that the numbers come from faulty information about the size of a crowd at Trump’s rally. More accurate estimates appear to be anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 . Still, a very large crowd, but Trump is exaggerating here.

72-77. “What did she have yesterday? 2,000 people? If I ever had 2,000 people, you'd say my campaign is finished. It's so dishonest, the press. … When she gets 1,500 people, and I saw it yesterday on ABC, which they said, ‘Oh, the crowd was so big.’ … I have 10 times, 20 times, 30 times the crowd size. And no, they never say the crowd was big. … I think it's so terrible when you say, ‘Well she has 1,500 people, 1,000 people,’ and they talk about, oh, the enthusiasm.” 

(1-3) Trump gave at least three incorrect estimates here, downplaying Harris’ crowd sizes (2,000, 1,500 and 1,000); (4) He also far overestimated how big his crowd sizes are compared to Harris’; (5-6) He twice said the press is dishonest about her crowd size and about his.

For context, the Harris campaign’s estimate was 10,000 or more at each rally. What the exact number is might be unclear — as is often the case with crowd-size estimates — but they were bigger than 2,000 and 1,500. Reporters have often commented on the size of Trump’s crowds. Frequently, they are very large, certainly larger than ones that Hillary Clinton drew in 2016 or Joe Biden this year, but Trump also regularly exaggerates their sizes.

78. “If I were president, you wouldn't have Russia and Ukraine, where it never happened. Zero chance. You wouldn't have had Oct. 7th of Israel.”

This is speculation, and that there is simply no way to know what would have happened in either case if he'd been reelected.

79. “You wouldn't have had inflation. You wouldn't have had any inflation because inflation was caused by their bad energy problems.” 

Again, this is speculative. Energy and food prices jumped sharply around the world following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting sanctions on Russian energy. Gasoline prices in the U.S. hit a record high topping $5 a gallon. But domestic energy production has not suffered during the Biden administration. In fact, U.S. oil and natural gas production hit record highs last year. AAA reports the average price of gasoline today is $3.45/gallon. — Scott Horsley

80. "I don't know if you know, they're drilling now because they had to go back because gasoline was going up to $7, $8, $9 a barrel."

Oil and gas production has largely been determined by energy companies. They were disciplined about not expanding production when prices were low but have become more aggressive as prices climbed. While Kamala Harris opposed “fracking” for oil and gas during her 2019 presidential campaign, she now says she would not try to outlaw the practice – which is important in battleground states such as Pennsylvania. — Scott Horsley

81. “Everybody's going to be forced to buy an electric car, which they're not going to do because they don't want that. It's got a great market. It's got a market. It's really a sub market.”

The Biden administration has set a goal of having 50% of new vehicle sales be electric by 2030 . It has primarily tried to achieve this through carrots rather than sticks, offering incentives to make electric cars more affordable, encouraging the development of electric charging stations and using the federal government’s own purchasing power to create demand. — Scott Horsley

82. “We don't have enough electricity. We couldn't make enough electricity for that.”

A shift to electric vehicles will require a rapid updating and expansion of the U.S. power grid, according to the Electric Power Research Institute . However, as EVs become more efficient, the increased demand could be reduced by as much as 50% per mile traveled over the next three decades. — Scott Horsley

83. “The weight of a car, the weight of a truck, they want all trucks to be electric. Little things that a lot of people don't talk about. The weight of a truck is two-and-a-half times, two-and-a- half times heavier.” 

Electric vehicles are typically heavier than gasoline-powered vehicles, because of the batteries. But the weight difference is about 30% , not 250% as Trump said. What’s more, American vehicles have been getting heavier for decades, long before the move to EVs, thanks to the popularity of pickup trucks and SUVs.

84. “You would have to rebuild every bridge in this country, if you were going to do this ridiculous policy.”

While many bridges and other transportation infrastructure need improvement , the additional weight of EVs is just one of many factors that will need to be considered. Another challenge is that bridges and highways are typically funded through gasoline taxes. The shift to EVs, which don’t use gasoline, will require an alternate source of highway funding.

85-90. “So, but on crowd size in history, for any country, nobody's had crowds like I have, and you know that. And when she gets 1,000 people and everybody starts jumping, you know that if I had a thousand people would say, people would say, that's the end of his campaign. I have hundreds of thousands of people in, uh, South Carolina. I had 88,000 people in Alabama. I had 68,000 people. Nobody says about crowd size with me, but she has 1,000 people or 1,500 people, and they say, oh, the enthusiasm's back.”

There were at least six different misstatements here – (1) Trump has had large crowds, but “in history,” there certainly there have been people with larger crowds, from Barack Obama and others; (2, 3) her crowds have been larger than 1,000, which he repeats twice; (4) no serious analysts have said this is the end of Trump’s campaign. This race is very close; (5) there’s no evidence for crowds of the size Trump notes in South Carolina and Alabama; (6) people do talk about Trump’s crowd sizes.

91. “They wanna stop people from pouring into our country, from places unknown and from countries unknown from countries that nobody ever heard of.”

Someone has likely heard of whatever the unnamed country is.

92-93. “We're leading in Georgia by a lot. We're leading in Pennsylvania by a lot.”

The races in Georgia and Pennsylvania are within the margin of error, according to an average of the polls.

94. “So I won Alabama by a record. Nobody's ever gotten that many votes. I won South Carolina by a record. You don't win Alabama and South Carolina by records and lose Georgia. It doesn't happen.”

It does, and here’s why. Demographically, Georgia has become very different from South Carolina and Alabama. Georgia’s population is now majority-minority, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Alabama and South Carolina are 64% and 63% white, respectively.

Georgia’s Black population is also significant politically — 33% of the state’s population is Black. By comparison, Alabama is 27% Black, South Carolina 26%. Latinos also make up 11% of Georgia’s population and Asian Americans are 5%, both of which are higher than Alabama and South Carolina. And Georgia’s population is marginally younger — 15% of Georgia’s population is older than 65% compared to 18% in Alabama and 19% in South Carolina.

95. “If we have honest elections in Georgia, if we have honest elections in Pennsylvania, We're gonna win them by a lot.”

Winning them by a lot is highly unlikely, considering how close the states have been in recent elections, but perhaps more pressing is Trump’s insinuation that there were voting problems in the two states, which there were not. That’s why Trump is upset with Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, for example, because he upheld the valid 2020 election results even in the face of pressure from Trump.

96. “Of course there'll be a peaceful transfer. And there was last time.”

This wholly ignores the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol, which took place because of Trump’s election lies.

97. “Because I'm leading by a lot.”

Again, this is a very close race.

98. “We have commercials that are at a level I don't think that anybody's ever done before.”

This is false. Since Super Tuesday, Democrats have outspent Trump’s campaign and outside groups supporting him by more than double, according to data provided by AdImpact and analyzed by NPR — $373.5 million to $150.6 million.

99. “She's not smart enough to do a news conference.”

There is plenty of evidence that Harris is “smart enough to do a news conference,” as she has done in the past.

100. "We're in great danger of being in World War III. That could happen." 

Again, no serious analyst believes this.

101. “I think those people were treated very harshly, when you compare them to other things that took place in this country where a lot of people were killed.”

The Justice Department investigation into the events of Jan. 6, 2021, is the largest and most complex federal criminal probe in U.S. history, the attorney general has said. More than 140 law enforcement officers were injured that day, in what U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves has described as the biggest mass casualty event involving police. It’s hard to find any comparable event in recent American history.

As of Aug. 6, 2024, according to Graves’s office, prosecutors have charged more than 160 people with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer. Prosecutors have also secured convictions on the rarely-deployed charge of seditious conspiracy, or attempting to overthrow the government by use of force, against top leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.

Even so, only a small number of Jan. 6 defendants have been held in federal custody while they await trial. Mostly, these are the rioters who allegedly used the most violence on that day more than three years ago. Republican members of Congress have toured the jail facilities and decried conditions there, expressions of support that defendants facing ordinary charges in D.C. have not received. — Carrie Johnson, NPR national justice correspondent

102. “Nobody was killed on Jan. 6th.” 

Conservatives were upset at the time that one of the rioters, Ashli Babbitt, was killed when she was shot by police, as she was trying to force her way into the Speaker’s Lobby of the Capitol, which leads to the House chamber, with a crowd of others. Many officers were injured that day; one died of a stroke as a result of Jan. 6; and others later died by suicide that their families say was also a result of Jan. 6.

103-105. “And, you know, it's very interesting, the biggest crowd I've ever spoken to. … The biggest crowd I've ever spoken before was that day. … The biggest crowd I've ever spoken. … I've spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody's spoken to crowds bigger than me.” 

It was not the biggest crowd he’s ever spoken to. His inauguration would have topped that. And others have had bigger crowds, as noted earlier.

106. “I said peacefully and patriotically.”

While Trump did utter those words, it is misleading. Trump also said the word “fight” multiple times , and he told the already angry crowd because of the election lies he fed them: “We fight like Hell and if you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Trump aides testified that he “refused” to tweet the word “peaceful” in the days leading up to the rally because he thought it might discourage people from being there, and he was concerned about his crowd size.

107-108. “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, same real estate, same, everything, same number of people. If not, we had more. …You look at the picture of his crowd, my crowd, uh, we actually had more people.”

First, the speeches did not take place at the “same real estate.” Trump spoke from a position just south of the Ellipse. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial

Second, the crowds were not the same size and Trump’s was certainly not larger. It is an extraordinary claim and shows just how much Trump cares about crowd size.

109. “We have a Constitution. It's a very important document, and we live by it. She has no votes.” 

Again, there’s nothing in the Constitution about how parties should pick their presidents.

110-111. “They said, ‘You're not going to win, you can't win, you're out.’ And at first they said it nicely, and he wasn't leaving, and then you, you know, the, you know it better than anybody. … At first, they were going to go out to another vote, they were going to go through a primary system, a quick primary system, which it would have to be. And then it all disappeared, and they just picked a person.”

As explained earlier, this is not how Biden wound up stepping aside. The story is yet another Trump invention. He also lies here in saying that “they were going to go through a primary system” and “it would have to be” a quick primary system.” There’s no requirement that a primary is held. In fact, for many years, candidates’ selection as party nominees had nothing to do with primaries, and they were not as prevalent as today.

112-113. “That was the first out. She was the first loser, OK? So, we call her the first loser. She was the first loser when– during the primary system, during the Democrat primary system, she was the first one to quit. And she quit.”

As explained earlier, Harris was not the first one out in the 2020 Democratic primary race. And “first loser” appears to be a name Trump made up at this news conference, as Harris has not been referred to that way as a result of her run for the 2020 nomination.

114. “She did, obviously, a bad job. She never made it to Iowa. Then for some reason, and I'm, I know he regrets it, you do too, uh, he picked her, and she turned on him too. She was working with the people that wanted him out."

Once again, this is a false conspiracy invented by Trump.

115. “She was the first one out.” 

Trump repeats this false line again.

116. “I think the abortion issue is written very much tempered down, and I've answered I think very well in the debate, and it seems to be much less of an issue, especially for those where they have the exceptions.”

Abortion rights as a political and social issue has certainly not “tempered down.” There are millions of women, especially across the South, who do not have access to abortion and women who have experienced pregnancy losses with the inability to access medications for those necessary procedures.

117. “As you know, and I think it's when I look for 52 years, they wanted to bring abortion back to the states. They wanted to get rid of Roe v. Wade and that's Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, and everybody. Liberals, conservatives, everybody wanted it back in the states. And I did that.”

Everybody absolutely did not want that. It was actually quite unpopular for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe . And he again repeats that it has become less of an issue.

118-119. “I think that abortion has become much less of an issue. It's a very small.” 

“I think it's actually going to be a very small issue. What I've done is I've done what every Democrat and every Every Republican wanted to have done.” 

“I think the abortion issue has been taken down many notches. I don't think it's of– I don't think it's a big factor anymore, really.”

Minutes apart from each other, he repeats these three false claims. Abortion rights is not a “very small” issue for millions of voters. Democrats are organizing around it, and it has been seminal to Biden and Harris’ campaigns.

120. “Previous to [Virginia Gov.] Glenn [Youngkin], the governor, he said the baby will be born, we will put the baby aside, and we will decide with the mother what we're going to do. In other words, whether or not we're going to kill the baby.”

This is a distortion Republicans continue to push about what former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam said. This has been fact-checked by others multiple times .

121-122. “I think the abortion issue has been, uh, taken down many notches. I don't think it's of, uh, I don't think it's a big factor anymore, really.”

“Everybody wanted it in the states.”

“But that issue has is very much subdued.”

He once again returns to the issue of abortions, which remains a “factor,” not everybody wanted it in the states, the issue is not “very much subdued.”

123-124. “ She wants to take away everyone's gun.” 

Harris has not proposed taking away all guns. She has proposed banning assault-style weapons, something that was in place for a decade. Some surveys had shown majority support for this. Others show a split. (Trump makes this case later, as well, so that is also included in the count.)

125. “Some countries have actually gone the opposite way. They had very strong gun laws and now they have gone the opposite way, where they allowed people to have guns, where in one case they encouraged people to go out and get guns, and crime is down 29%.”

It’s difficult to compare gun violence and gun laws in the United States to other countries, simply because of the staggering amount of guns we have here. Although the U.S. has less than 5% of the world’s population, it holds almost 40% or more of the world’s civilian-owned guns. And it has “the highest homicide-by-firearm rate of the world’s most developed nations,” per the Council on Foreign Relations . Norway, Canada and Australia all tightened their gun restrictions after shootings. — Meg Anderson

126. “On July 4th, 117 people were shot and 17 died. The toughest gun laws in the United States are in the city of Chicago. You know that. They had 117 people shot. Afghanistan does not have that.” 

Though Trump didn’t get the numbers exactly right, Chicago did have an incredibly violent July 4th holiday weekend this year. According to Mayor Brandon Johnson, more than 100 people were shot and 19 of those people died. Chicago does have strict gun laws, in part because its state does: Everytown For Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun control, ranks Illinois third in the nation for the strength of its gun-control laws. However, no state or city exists within a bubble, and Illinois is surrounded by states with much weaker laws, including Indiana, which is just a short drive from Chicago. — Meg Anderson

127. “For 18 months, not one American soldier was shot at or killed, but not even shot at.” 

This is, to put it charitably, misleading. It appears that he’s actually referencing the period when the Trump administration signed the deal with the Taliban, in advance of U.S. troops leaving. The deal said the U.S. would be out in 14 months, and in exchange the Taliban wouldn’t harbor terrorists and would stop attacking U.S. service members. Needless to say, the deal didn’t hold. But as the AP notes , “There was an 18-month stretch that saw no combat, or ‘hostile,’ deaths in Afghanistan: from early February 2020 to August 2021.” – Andrew Sussman

128. “Kamala is in favor of not giving Israel weapons. That's what I hear.”

Harris does not support an Israel weapons embargo. A Biden administration official posted on social media that Harris "has been clear: she will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups.” A leader of the uncommitted movement said Harris “expressed an openness” to a meeting about an embargo, but the Biden administration official said Harris "will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and to uphold international humanitarian law,” not that she would support an embargo.

129. “She's been very, very bad to Israel, and she's been very bad and disrespectful to Jewish people.”

Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish. The couple has hosted Passover Seders.

130. “Well, I know Willie Brown very well. In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought maybe this is the end. We were in a helicopter going to a certain location together and there was an emergency landing.”

This claim has not held up to scrutiny. Politico reported that Trump did have to make an emergency landing in a helicopter with a Black California politician decades ago, but it wasn’t Willie Brown, the former San Francisco mayor and state assembly speaker. It was Nate Holden, a former Los Angeles city councilman and state senator.

131-132. “This was not a pleasant landing, and Willie was— he was a little concerned. So I know him. I know him pretty well. I mean, I haven't seen him in years. But he told me terrible things about her.”

“He was not a fan of hers very much at that point.”

This is something Trump repeated twice, minutes apart from each other. Brown strongly denies having been on a helicopter with Trump or telling Trump negative things about Harris, whom he dated in the mid-1990s and supports now for president. The relationship ended in 1995.

133. “Our tax cuts, which are the biggest in history… .”

The 2017 tax cuts were not the biggest in history. As a share of the economy, they barely make the top 10 . They were big enough, however, to blow a big hole in the federal budget, which is why Trump was overseeing a nearly $1 trillion dollar annual deficit before the pandemic. — Scott Horsley

134. “It'll destroy the economy.”

This is what Trump said will happen if his tax cuts are not renewed. But The 2017 tax cut did not deliver the economic boom that its supporters promised, and there’s no reason to think reversing a portion of the cut would cause economic destruction. — Scott Horsley

135. “I've never seen people get elected by saying, 'We're going to give you a tax increase.'”

Vice President Harris has echoed President Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000. However, Biden has called for raising taxes on wealthy individuals and raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% – halfway back to where it was before the 2017 cut. — Scott Horsley

136. “These guys get up, think of it. ‘We're going to give you no security.’ …”

No Democratic presidential candidate has advocated “no security.”

137. “We're going to give you a weak military… .’ ”

An analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, showed a “review of historical defense budget trends shows there is more at play in determining overall investments in defense than just which party is in the White House.” Indeed, since the year 2000, U.S.-led wars overseas have resulted in a surge of spending by both Democratic and Republican administrations.

138-139. “…We're going to give you no walls, no borders, no anything.”

Harris, Walz and the Democratic Party have never said they want “no borders.” They certainly oppose Trump’s wall/fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, citing the exorbitant cost and its relative ineffectiveness, they say, compared to using other methods. (Trump later says that Harris wants “open borders,” so that’s included in the count here.)

140. “...We're going to give you a tax increase.”

Again, this is misleading and suggests Harris wants to increase taxes across the board when they have consistently talked about increasing taxes only on the wealthy. In Harris’ view, those making more than $400,000 a year .

141. “They're gonna destroy Social Security.”

Democrats have consistently advocated for keeping Social Security and making it solvent.

142. “They've weaponized government against me. Look at the Florida case. It was a totally weaponized case. All of these cases, by the way, the New York cases are totally controlled out of the Department of Justice. They sent their top person to the various places. They went to the A.G.'s office, got that one going, then he went to the D.A.'s office, got that one going, ran through it. No, no, this is all politics, and it's a disgrace.”

In congressional testimony this year, Attorney General Merrick Garland told lawmakers that President Biden had never called him to discuss any of the cases against Trump. Garland also had aides review Justice Department leaders’ email for any correspondence with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. In a letter to Congress in June 2024, the Justice Department said it had found no such contacts.

In that same letter, Justice Department legislative affairs chief Carlos Uriarte said the department did not “dispatch” former acting Associate Attorney General Matthew Colangelo to New York to join Bragg’s team prosecuting Trump. “Department leadership was unaware of his work on the investigation and prosecution involving the former president until it was reported in the news,” Uriarte wrote. — Carrie Johnson

143. “Any time you have mail-in ballots, you're gonna have problems. ... We should have one-day voting; we should have paper ballots; we should have voter ID; and we should have proof of citizenship.” 

Trump continues to spread baseless claims about mail ballots. There’s no proof of widespread fraud with the voting method. When it comes to paper ballots, they're standard. One estimate found that in the 2024 general election, "nearly 99% of all registered voters will live in jurisdictions where they can cast a ballot with a paper record of the vote."

The proof of citizenship comment echoes a Republican push on the issue , though studies have shown voting by non-U.S. citizens in federal elections to be exceedingly rare. The GOP-led House has passed a bill to require such documentary proof, but it’s likely to go no further in a Senate led by Democrats who are opposed to adding new voting restrictions. — Ben Swasey, voting editor

144. “The polls have suggested, there are some polls that say we're going to win in a landslide.” 

There are no polls that suggest Trump will win in a landslide. By all accounts, this is a very close race.

145. “...they're paying 50, 60, 70 percent more for food than they did just a couple of years ago.”

The rise in grocery prices is a common complaint , but Trump exaggerates the scale of the increase. According to the Consumer Price Index, grocery prices have risen 25% since before the pandemic and 21% since President Biden took office. (At the same time, average wages have risen 23% since before the pandemic and 17% since President Biden took office.)

146-149. The Strategic National Reserve is “virtually empty now. We've never had it this low.”

“He's sucked all of the oil out.”

“Essentially the gasoline to keep the, to keep the price down a little bit. … But you know what? We have no strategic national reserves now. He's emptied it. It's almost empty. It's never been this low.”

“They've just, for the sake of getting some votes, for the sake of having gasoline–. You know, that's meant for wars. It's meant for, like, tragedy. It's not meant to keep a gasoline price down, so that somebody can vote for Biden or, in this case, Kamala.” 

The strategic oil reserve is actually up in the past year . Biden has since repurchased about 32 million barrels of oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. As of this month, the reserve held about 376 million barrels of oil. The reserve was lower when Trump left office than when he got in.

150. “I see it right now, I see her going way down on the polls now.”

The opposite is true. Harris has continued her momentum since getting into the race.

151-152. “...now that people are finding out that she destroyed San Francisco, she destroyed the state of California.” 

As addressed earlier, Harris is not entirely responsible for San Francisco or the state of California. Crime trends there were similar to national crime trends during her time as district attorney in San Francisco and as the state’s attorney general. What’s more, preliminary data for this year indicates that many cities in California, including San Francisco, are seeing murder rates falling. (Trump repeats the claim one more time later in the news conference, so it is included in the count here.) — Meg Anderson

153. “She was early, I mean, she was the first of the prosecutors, really, you know, now you see Philadelphia, you see Los Angeles, you see New York, you see various people that are very bad, but she was the first of the bad prosecutors, she was early.”

Although Harris did refer to herself in her 2019 memoir as a “progressive prosecutor,” her legacy has largely been seen as tougher on crime. She has supported some progressive reforms, such as pretrial diversion, which offers certain criminal defendants things like drug treatment instead of going to trial. — Meg Anderson

154. “You know, with Hillary Clinton, I could have done things to her that would have made your head spin. I thought it was a very bad thing – take the wife of a president of the United States, and put her in jail. And then I see the way they treat me. That's the way it goes. But I was very protective of her. Nobody would understand that. But I was. I think my people understand it. They used to say, lock her up, lock her up. And I'd say, just relax, please.”

Trump called for Clinton’s imprisonment multiple times , including going along with crowd chants of “lock her up.”

155. “Don't forget, she got a subpoena from the United States Congress, and then after getting the subpoena, she destroyed everything that she was supposed to get. 

Clinton aides requested emails be deleted months before the subpoena, and the FBI said there’s no evidence the messages were deleted with a subpoena in mind. — Carrie Johnson

156. “I thought it was so bad to take her, and put her in jail, the wife of a president of the United States. And then, when it's my turn, nobody thinks that way.”

The Justice Department closed an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct some State Department business in 2016. Then-FBI Director Jim Comey gave a press conference to explain his reasoning in July of that election year. Comey said, “We did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information,” but he criticized Clinton and her aides for being “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information” that flowed through the server.

By contrast, prosecutors in the Florida case against former President Donald Trump said Trump had flouted requests from the FBI and a subpoena for highly classified materials he stored in unsecure spaces like a ballroom and a bathroom at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The indictment in that case accuses Trump of unlawfully retaining government secrets and of intentionally obstructing justice with the help of an aide who moved boxes of materials and otherwise allegedly thwarted the FBI probe. Trump and his co-defendants pleaded not guilty. The Justice Department says it is appealing the district court’s decision to toss the case on constitutional grounds. — Carrie Johnson

157. “A lot of the MAGA, as they call them, but the base. And I think the base is, I think the base is 75% of the country, far beyond the Republican Party.”

Rounding up, Trump won 46% of the vote in 2016 and 47% of the vote in 2020. He has a high floor, but a low ceiling politically. Majorities continue to say they have an unfavorable rating of Trump, which has been consistent for years. No American presidential candidate has ever gotten 75% of the vote in this country, dating back to 1824 since data was kept for popular votes. Lyndon B. Johnson got 61% in 1964, Richard Nixon slightly less than 61% in 1972, Ronald Reagan 59% in 1984. Since then, Barack Obama got nearly 53% in 2008 and 51% in 2012, the first candidate since Eisenhower to win at least 51% of the vote twice.

158. “My sons are members, and I guess indirectly I'm a member, too.”

Trump here is talking about membership in the National Rifle Association. Another family member being an NRA member does not make someone else an NRA member “indirectly.”

159. “She served 24 years for being on a phone call having to do with drugs. You know who I'm talking about. She was great. And she had another 24 years to go. And it was largely about marijuana, which in many cases is now legalized, OK?”

Presumably, Trump is talking about Alice Marie Johnson, who had been convicted on cocaine conspiracy and money laundering charges . Kim Kardashian advocated for Johnson and won a pardon for her from Trump.

160. “They're either really stupid, and I don't believe they're stupid, because anybody that can cheat in elections like they cheat is not stupid.”

More than 60 court cases proved there was not widespread fraud or cheating that would have made any difference in any state.

161. “Lately I've seen where they're trying to sign these people up to vote. And they have to stop. They cannot let illegal immigrants vote in this upcoming election.”

This is a conspiracy not based in fact. Immigrants in the country illegally cannot vote in presidential elections, and there’s no evidence there is an intentional effort to sign them up in mass numbers to sway elections.

162. “If you go to California, and you ask the people of California, do they like the idea of sanctuary cities? They don't like it.”

The subject of sanctuary cities actually mostly splits Californians. Slim majorities have actually said that they favor the sanctuary-state law and are against their cities opting out of the law. Of course, this breaks down along party lines, and since California is heavily Democratic, those results might not be surprising. But it’s more divided than Trump suggests.

• 2024 presidential election

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a day that you spend somewhere that is not your home or usual place of work

It’s not really my thing (How to say you don’t like something)

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Malaysia 1MDB scandal: Swiss court convicts 2 executives in USUS$1.8 billion embezzlement case

The verdict marks the latest development in the complex international corruption scandal

The Swiss Federal Criminal Court convicted on Wednesday two executives at an oil exploration company for embezzling more than US$1.8 billion from Malaysia’s state investment fund 1MDB.

Swiss-British national Patrick Mahony and Swiss-Saudi Tarek Obaid were also ordered to pay back more than US$1.75 billion to the fund, which was at the centre of an international kleptocracy scandal.

The difference between the two amounts was interest payments the fraudsters paid back to 1MDB during the scam.

The verdict was the latest episode in the 1MDB affair, a complex tale of international corruption that has buffeted a slew of financial institutions and individuals across the globe since allegations of wrongdoing first surfaced in 2015.

Prosecutors alleged that Mahony and Obaid had helped to set up a joint venture with 1MDB by creating the impression that their company, PetroSaudi, was backed by the Saudi government.

This was not in fact the case, but the accused managed to persuade 1MDB’s board into signing up to the scheme in 2009 before going on to defraud the fund, prosecutors said

“The accused deceived the members of the 1MDB board of directors into believing that Petrosaudi had links with the Saudi Arabian government and that Petrosaudi would contribute significant oil assets to the joint venture,” the court said.

“These statements were false, and the accused knew this very well.”

According to the indictment, the two executives defrauded the wealth fund of US$1.8 billion to enrich themselves, with Obaid getting at least US$805 million and Mahony at least US$37 million

They were both convicted of fraud, criminal mismanagement and money laundering by the court in the southern Swiss city of Bellinzona.

Obaid was sentenced to seven years in prison, while Mahony received a sentence of six years. The court said the sentences differed because Obaid had enriched himself more than Mahony. “The court took into account the very high amounts involved, the intensity of the criminal activity, [and] the selfish motive,” it said.

Lawyers for the two men, who had denied wrongdoing, did not respond to a request for comment.

Prosecutors said the two men created the fraudulent scheme with fugitive Malaysian financier Jho Low, an adviser to former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak, who is already in prison over his role in the multibillion-dollar scandal.

Initially extracting US$1 billion from 1MDB so it could buy a stake in their venture, the accused took a further US$830 million from the fund between 2010 and 2011 as part of an Islamic loan that followed on from their tie-up, prosecutors said.

Between September 2009 and at least July 2015 the accused arranged for bank accounts to be opened in Switzerland to help launder the millions, prosecutors said.

The legacy of Malaysia’s 1MDB scandal on politics and corruption-fighting

They used the money to buy real estate in Switzerland and London, jewellery and private equity, as well as to develop the PetroSaudi business from which they received a sizeable income, and to maintain “a lavish lifestyle”, prosecutors said.

Malaysian and US investigators estimate a total of US$4.5 billion was siphoned away from 1MDB following its inception in 2009, implicating figures including Razak, Goldman Sachs staff and high-level officials elsewhere.

1MDB, the former sovereign wealth fund which is currently trying to recover its stolen assets, welcomed the judgment.

“We welcome today’s verdict … which means that Patrick Mahony and Tarek Obaid will face justice for their role in embezzling and defrauding the people of Malaysia,” a spokesperson said.