Advocacy Group Urges China to Lift Exit Bans on 7-Year-Old and His Mother
On Aug. 7, the Dui Hua Foundation, a San Francisco-based advocacy group for at-risk detainees in China, raised the plight of the Gao family—permanent U.S. residents Gao Zhen and his wife Zhao Yaliang, and their seven-year-old son, Gao Jia, a U.S. citizen from New York.
The senior Gao and his younger brother, Gao Qiang, are well-known as the 'Gao Brothers' for their artworks critical of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). One particularly well-known art piece is a bronze statue of former CCP leader Mao Zedong kneeling, his right hand on his chest with a sorrowful expression.
In August last year, Gao Zhen was detained on the charge of 'slandering China's heroes and martyrs' during a family trip. The foundation pointed out that the charge was based on the Heroes and Martyrs Protection Law, which went into effect in 2018, even though his artworks mocking the Chinese regime's leadership were created before 2009.
Zhao and her son have been barred from leaving China since the senior Gao's arrest. The foundation questioned why Beijing chose to impose the exit ban on them, noting that neither has been accused of a crime nor is required for any criminal investigation by the Chinese authorities.
Unable to return to the United States, the seven-year-old Gao 'has been unable to attend school for a full year,' the foundation added.
'It's one thing to slap exit bans on adult Americans like bankers or government employees, it's an entirely different matter to impose an exit ban on a young child,' John Kamm, executive director of the Dui Hua Foundation, said in a statement.
Last month, the Chinese regime announced that it had imposed an exit ban on Mao Chenyue, an Atlanta-based managing director at Wells Fargo, accusing the banker of being 'involved in a criminal case.'
Also in July, the U.S. State Department confirmed that a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office employee was being prevented from leaving China after traveling there in a personal capacity.
In September last year, the foundation estimated that there were 'more than 300 Americans under coercive measures in China,' and 'more than 30 are under exit bans.'
The foundation stated that China's treatment of the younger Gao violates the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which China signed in 1990 and ratified two years later.
As for the senior Gao, the foundation stated that he is scheduled to be tried and sentenced 'in the coming weeks,' and warned that he could receive a long sentence, despite his not guilty plea.
'Charging someone with a crime that was not a crime at the time the alleged offense took place,' Kamm said, 'is a violation of a fundamental principle of justice, the principle of non-retroactive application of the law.'
'The Chinese government must stop persecuting the Gao family. It must free Gao Zhen and lift the exit bans on Gao Jia and his mother and allow them to return to the United States.'
New York-based nonprofit, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), sent a letter dated Oct. 31 last year to the consulate general of China in New York, demanding the senior Gao's immediate and unconditional release.
The letter, written by HRF Chief Advocacy Officer Roberto González, argued that his artworks 'are incredibly necessary to educating the world on the truth of Mao's dictatorial legacy.'
Mao instigated the Red Guards, who were Chinese high school and university students, to persecute those identified as 'class enemies' of the communist regime, amid the Cultural Revolution that lasted 10 years until Mao's death in 1976.
González also argued that Beijing should repeal the Heroes and Martyrs Protection Law to 'safeguard artistic freedom in China.'
'His detention is not just a violation of his rights but a blatant abuse of power and an attack on the fundamental human freedoms of all Chinese people who have the right to learn the truth about dictator Mao Zedong,' the letter reads.
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Los Angeles Times
15 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Social Security turns 90 this week. Republicans are trying to keep it from reaching 100
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a clear mind about the value of Social Security on Aug. 14, 1935, the day he signed it into law. 'The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure,' he said in the Oval Office. 'We can never insure 100 per cent of the population against 100 per cent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against ... poverty-ridden old age.' He called it a 'cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete.' FDR envisioned further programs to bring relief to the needy and healthcare for all Americans. Some of that happened during the following nine decades, but the structure is still incomplete. And now, as Social Security observes the 90th anniversary of that day, the program faces a crisis. If there are doubts about whether Social Security will survive long enough to observe its centennial, those have less to do with its fiscal challenges, the solutions of which are certainly within the economic reach of the richest nation on Earth. They have more to do with partisan politics, specifically the culmination of a decades-long GOP project to dismantle the most successful, and the most popular, government assistance program in American history. From a distance, the raids on the program's customer service infrastructure and the security of its data mounted by Elon Musk's DOGE earlier this year looked somewhat random. Fueled by abject ignorance about how the program worked and what its data meant, DOGE set in place plans to cut the program's staff by 7,000, or 12 percent, and to close dozens of field offices serving Social Security applicants and beneficiaries. This at a time when the Social Security case load is higher than ever and staffing had already approached a 50-year low. This might have been billed as an effort to impose 'efficiency' on the system. But 'a more accurate description,' writes Monique Morrissey of the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute, 'is sabotage.' That has been conservatives' long-term plan — make interactions with Social Security more involved, more difficult and more time-consuming in order to make it seem ever less relevant to average Americans' lives. Once that happened, the public would be softened up to accept a privatized retirement system. Get the inefficient government off the backs of the people, the idea goes, so Wall Street can saddle up. George W. Bush's privatization plan, indeed, was conceived and promoted by Wall Street bankers, who thirsted for access to the trillions of dollars passing through the system's hands. This was never much of a secret, but it simmered beneath the surface. But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, speaking at a July 30 event sponsored by Breitbart News, said the quiet part out loud. Referring to a private savings account program enacted as part of the GOP budget reconciliation bill Trump signed July 4, Bessent said, 'In a way, it is a back door for privatizing Social Security.' The private accounts are to be jump-started with $1,000 deposits for children born this year through 2028, to be invested in stock index mutual funds; families can add up to $5,000 annually in after-tax income, with withdrawals beginning when the child reaches 18, though in some cases incurring a stiff penalty. I asked the Treasury Department for a clarification of Bessent's remark, but didn't receive a reply. Bessent, however, did try to walk the statement back via a post on X in which he stated that the Trump accounts are 'an additive benefit for future generations, which will supplement the sanctity of Social Security's guaranteed payments.' Sorry, Mr. Secretary, no sale. You're the one who talked about 'privatizing Social Security' at the Breitbart event. You're stuck with it. Plainly, an 'additive' benefit would have nothing to do with Social Security. How it would 'supplement the sanctity' of Social Security benefits isn't apparent from Bessent's statement, or the law. Still, we can parse out the implications based on the long history of conservative attacks on the program. In 1983, the libertarian Cato Journal published a paper by Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, two policy analysts at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, titled 'Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy—i.e., for privatizing Social Security. From Lenin they drew the idea of mobilizing the working class to undermine existing capitalist structures. Cato's 'Leninist' strategy paper explicitly advocated encouraging workers to opt out of Social Security by promising them a payroll tax reduction if they put the money in a private account. IRAs, the authors asserted, would acclimate Americans to entrusting their retirements to a privatized system. They advocated an increase in the maximum annual contribution and its tax deductibility. 'The public would gradually become more familiar with the private option,' they wrote. 'If that did happen, it would be far easier than it is now to adopt the private plan as their principal source of old-age insurance and retirement income.' In other words, it would provide a backdoor for privatizing Social Security. (Germanis has since emerged as a cogent critic of conservative economics. Butler served at Heritage until 2014 and is currently a scholar in residence at the Brookings Institution; he told me in March that he still believes in parallel systems of private retirement savings as we have today, but as 'add on' savings rather than a substitute for Social Security.) Cato, a think tank co-founded by Charles Koch, has never relinquished its quest to privatize Social Security; the notion still occupies pride of place on the institution's web page devoted to the program. In 2005, when I attended a two-day conference on the topic at Cato's Washington headquarters, Michael D. Tanner, then the chair of Cato's Social Security task force, explained that Cato wasn't concerned so much with the system's fiscal and economic issues as with its politics. Its goal, he stated frankly, was to unmake FDR's New Deal. 'This is about whether we redefine a relationship between individuals and government that we've had since 1935,' he told me. 'We say that what was done was wrong then, and it's wrong now. Our position is that people need to be responsible for their own lives.' Yet forcing dramatic change on a program so widely trusted and appreciated is a heavy lift. That's why Republicans have tried to downplay their intentions. Back in 2019, for instance, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) talked about the need to hold discussions about Social Security's future 'behind closed doors.' Secrecy was essential, Ernst said, 'so we're not being scrutinized by this group or the other, and just have an open and honest conversation about what are some of the ideas that we have for maintaining Social Security in the future.' As I observed at the time, that was a giveaway: The only time politicians take actions behind closed doors is when they know the results will be massively unpopular. Raising taxes on the rich to pay for Social Security benefits? That discussion can be held in the open, because the option is decisively favored in opinion polls. Cut benefits? That needs to be done in secret, because Americans overwhelmingly oppose it. Curiously, Trump and his fellow Republicans seem to think that attacking Social Security is an electoral winner. Possibly they've lost sight of the program's importance to the average American. Among Social Security beneficiaries age 65 and older, 39% of men and 44% of women receive half their income or more from Social Security. In the same cohort, 12% of men and 15% of women rely on Social Security for 90% or more of their income. Notwithstanding that reality, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently asserted that delays in sending out Social Security checks or bank deposits would be no big deal. 'Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks this month,' Lutnick said. 'My mother-in-law, who's 94 — she wouldn't call and complain.... She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month.' He claimed that only 'fraudsters' would complain. I had a different take. Mine was that even a 24-hour delay in benefit payments would have a cataclysmic fallout for the Republican Party. It would be front-page news coast to coast. There would be nowhere for them to hide. While bringing misery to millions of Americans, a delay — which would be unprecedented since the first checks went out in 1940 — would be a gift for Democrats, if they knew how to use it. Where will we go from here? The current administration has already done damage to this critically-important program. An acting commissioner Trump installed briefly interfered with the enrollment process for infants born in Maine—an important procedure to ensure that government benefits continue to flow to their families—because the state's governor had pushed back against Trump in public. In July, the newly-appointed Social Security commissioner, Frank Bisignano, allowed a false and flagrantly political email to go out to beneficiaries and to be posted on the program's website implying that the budget reconciliation bill relieved most seniors of federal income taxes on their benefits. It did nothing of the kind. To the extent that Social Security may face a fiscal reckoning in the next decade, the most effective fix is well-understood by those familiar with the program's structure. It's removing the income cap on the payroll tax, which tops out this year at $176,100 in wage income. Up to that point, wages are taxed at 12.4%, split evenly between workers and their employers. Above the ceiling, the tax is zero. Remove the cap, and make capital gains, dividends and interest income subject to the tax, and Social Security will remain fully solvent into the foreseeable future. Trump and his fellow Republicans don't seem to understand how most Americans view Social Security: as an 'entitlement,' not because they think they're getting something for nothing, but because they know they've paid for it all their working lives. As much as the system's foes would like it to go away, as long as the rest of us remain vigilant against efforts to 'redefine a relationship between individuals and government' established in 1935, we will be able to celebrate its 100th anniversary 10 years from now, in 2035.
USA Today
15 minutes ago
- USA Today
The IRS has had six leaders in 2025. What that means for taxpayers.
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Implementing the GOP tax law The IRS and Treasury Department are rushing to stand up Republicans' new tax law. Lawmakers left it up to the agencies to fill in the details of the policy changes, many of which take effect this tax year, including sorting out specifics of how new breaks for overtime pay, tips and other provisions will work. Muresianu, the tax analyst, said taxpayers often need more clarification from the IRS when new tax laws take effect, and the call volume will likely be higher next year. 'If you have instability at the IRS, management problems at the IRS, and their ability to provide service declines, that is particularly bad if it's coming at a time where there a lot of people looking for clarity,' he said.
Time Magazine
16 minutes ago
- Time Magazine
China Is Taking AI Safety Seriously. So Must the U.S.
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China's National Emergency Response Plan now lists AI safety alongside pandemics and cyberattacks. Regulators require pre-deployment safety assessments for generative AI and recently removed over 3,500 non-compliant AI products from the market. In just the first half of this year, China has issued more national AI standards than in the previous three years combined. Meanwhile, the volume of technical papers focused on frontier AI safety has more than doubled over the past year in China. But the last time U.S. and Chinese leaders met to discuss AI's risks was in May 2024. In September, officials from both nations hinted at a second round of conversations 'at an appropriate time.' But no meeting took place under the Biden Administration, and there is even greater uncertainty over whether the Trump Administration will pick up the baton. This is a missed opportunity. Read More: The Politics, and Geopolitics, of Artificial Intelligence China is open to collaboration. In May 2025, it launched a bilateral AI dialogue with the United Kingdom. Esteemed Chinese scientists have contributed to major international efforts, such as the International AI Safety Report backed by 33 countries and intergovernmental organisations (including the U.S. and China) and The Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities. A necessary first step is to revive the dormant U.S.–China dialogue on AI risks. Without a functioning government-to-government channel, prospects for coordination remain slim. China indicated it was open to continuing the conversation at the end of the Biden Administration. It already yielded a modest but symbolically important agreement: both sides affirmed that human decision-making must remain in control of nuclear weapons. This channel has potential for further progress. Going forward, discussions should focus on shared, high-stakes threats. Consider OpenAI's recent classification of its latest ChatGPT Agent as having crossed the 'High Capability' threshold in the biological domain under the company's own Preparedness Framework. This means the agent could, at least in principle, provide users with meaningful guidance that might facilitate the creation of dangerous biological threats. Both Washington and Beijing have a vital interest in preventing non-state actors from weaponizing such tools. An AI-assisted biological attack would not respect national borders. In addition, leading experts and Turing Award winners from the West and China share concerns that advanced general-purpose AI systems may come to operate outside of human control, posing catastrophic and existential risks. Both governments have already acknowledged some of these risks. President Trump's AI Action Plan warns that AI may 'pose novel national security risks in the near future,' specifically in cybersecurity and in chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) domains. Similarly, in September last year, China's primary AI security standards body highlighted the need for AI safety standards addressing cybersecurity, CBRN, and loss of control risks. From there, the two sides could take practical steps to build technical trust between leading standards organizations—such as China's National Information Security Standardization Technical Committee (TC260) and the America's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Plus, industry authorities, such as the AI Industry Alliance of China (AIIA) and the Frontier Model Forum in the US, could share best practices on risk management frameworks. AIIA has formulated 'Safety Commitments' which most leading Chinese developers have signed. A new Chinese risk management framework, focused fully on frontier risks including cyber misuse, biological misuse, large-scale persuasion and manipulation, and loss of control scenarios, was published during the World AI Conference (WAIC) and can help both countries align. Read More: The U.S. Can't Afford to Lose the Biotech Race with China As trust deepens, governments and leading labs could begin sharing safety evaluation methods and results for the most advanced models. The Global AI Governance Action Plan, unveiled at WAIC, explicitly calls for the creation of 'mutually recognized safety evaluation platforms.' As an Anthropic co-founder said, a recent Chinese AI safety evaluation report has similar findings with the West: frontier AI systems pose some non-trivial CBRN risks, and are beginning to show early warning signs of autonomous self-replication and deception. A shared understanding of model vulnerabilities—and of how those vulnerabilities are being tested—would lay the groundwork for broader safety cooperation. Finally, the two sides could establish incident-reporting channels and emergency response protocols. In the event of an AI-related accident or misuse, rapid and transparent communication will be essential. A modern equivalent to 'hotlines' between top AI officials in both countries could ensure real-time alerts when models breach safety thresholds or behave unexpectedly. In April, President Xi Jinping explicitly stressed the need for 'monitoring, early risk warning and emergency response' in AI. After any dangerous incident, there should be a pre-agreed upon plan for how to react. Engagement won't be easy—political and technical hurdles are inevitable. But AI risks are global—and so must be the governance response. Rather than using China as a justification for domestic inaction on AI regulation, American policymakers and industry leaders should engage directly. AI risks won't wait.
