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Interpol chief Meng Hongwei vanishes on trip to China
- hereiskkb 8y agoDamn if it doesn't get every thriller writer high!
- ohiovr 8y agoAlledged disappearance.. Well china is a big area I guess maybe they don’t have telephones everywhere. I laugh.
- emodendroket 8y agoDoes any government know where all its citizens are at all times?
- ohiovr 8y agoChina probably does.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- emodendroket 8y agoThat's not a realistic expectation.
- PakG1 8y agoGive it a few decades.
- chatmasta 8y agoIt’s not like this is some random citizen. He’s a CCP member and the head of Interpol. I would be surprised if China were the only country tracking his whereabouts 24/7.
- erikb 8y agoLet's rephrase it. China and the US probably have very good guesses almost all of the time. So the Chinese government can probably provide a very small area to search for him, if they didn't apprehend him themselves.
- ethbro 8y ago... almost all the time [one is on the digital grid] The more capability superpowers build into digital tracking, the easier it is to leave that behind. If I took a bag of cash, left all digital devices and credit / banking cards on my table, and walked out of my house, I find it incredibly hard to believe the US government could reliably track me if I wasn't already marked for surveillance. China, I might pop up on a camera, but there are ways around that. So yes, agreed if people are connected and behaving "normally." (I.e. buying things, showing their id, etc)
- 794CD01 8y agoIf you stick to walking, why even bother to track you? You're not going very far from your house that way. If you board a plane, rent a car, etc, you get tracked.
- emodendroket 8y agoMight be wiser to use public transit.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoBoard an intercity train? I think you get tracked now, but I'm not certain. Intercity bus? I don't know. Intercity van? Probably not... but you might. Public transit within a city? I don't think you get tracked for that.
- ethbro 8y agoFrom looking it up, looks like you need ID for anything commercial interstate (bus or rail).
- forapurpose 8y agoDo you have your phone with you?
- emodendroket 8y agoI wouldn't if I did not want to be found.
- mcherm 8y agoSo what is your point here? That there is no such thing as a "missing person"?
- emodendroket 8y agoThat seems to be the point of the guy I'm replying to, given that he says he "laughs" at the idea of a disappearance. I'm just saying that, while it's quite plausible the government of China is detaining him, it's not outside the realm of possibility they have no idea where he is.
- ohiovr 8y agoThe point is I don’t believe China is telling the truth how can they say the disappearance is “alleged”. Its totally bullshit downvote that too I don’t care.
- jnbiche 8y ago> Alledged disappearance.. His wife filed a missing person report.
- ohiovr 8y agoI failed to use quotes on that.
- hawkice 8y agoI guess I don't totally understand how a public official can "allegedly" disappear. Doesn't he have job responsibilities? It's been a week.
- emodendroket 8y agoI guess the question is whether he's gone off somewhere of his own volition or somehow ended up dead or been apprehended or... who knows what else.
- cm2187 8y agoBased on the history of other people disappearing in China, I would speculate that he must rather have been caught on some anti-corruption/anti-tax evasion campaign of some sort.
- ethbro 8y agoOr at least accused of same. Which doesn't seem to be different in Chinese courts.
- coldtea 8y agoBased on what deep knowledge of Chinese courts cases?
- emodendroket 8y agoI wish people would give more examples of what they're talking about or even citations before making sweeping blanket statements about the character of the Chinese state in discussions here. Many of their accusations may even be well founded, but how would I know? I would not want to live under CCP rule, but it seems like skepticism goes out the window and people will believe anything if the story is about China.
- 8y ago
- vjsc 8y agoNot much information in the article. Interpol has issued a Red Corner notice, but ultimately it's the French and Chinese governments that have to find what happened. Now let me get this straight. He was traveling from France to China, somewhere in the middle he disappeared. What do the flight manifests say? How about the security cameras at Airports, especially in China, where we have often heard what they allegedly doing with real time facial recognition and stuff. For someone this high profile, there must have been security, staff etc. What do they have to say? It's been two weeks since he disappeared. No alarm bells till now, at least the media. I find this article to be very slim on details. There are some very simple questions not covered in the article. I guess they were in a hurry to publish this.
- adventured 8y agoHe didn't disappear in the middle. It was confirmed by the French that he arrived safely in China - "The French official said Meng did arrive in China. There was no further word on Meng’s schedule in China or what prompted his wife to wait until now to report his absence." https://apnews.com/af741e061cfe40f9b80a252a2bfc0a46 https://apnews.com/af741e061cfe40f9b80a252a2bfc0a46
- forapurpose 8y ago> Interpol has issued a Red Corner notice The article says they can issue one for a certain purpose, and it's not clear to me that this situation fits that purpose; it doesn't say that they have issued one. Interpol can issue a red notice - an international alert - for a wanted person. But it does not have the power to send officers into countries to arrest individuals, nor issue arrest warrants.
- krn 8y agoThese high-profile disappearances have become normal in China[1]: > Chinese mega star Fan Bingbing has been fined around 883 million yuan ($129m; £98.9m) for tax evasion and other offences, authorities said Wednesday. The star, who disappeared in July, posted a long apology on social media. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45728459 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45728459
- avoutthere 8y agoHeld in "secret detention" and posting a full apology including praise for the government. It sounds like the Chinese government is in full tyranny mode.
- 24gttghh 8y agoAs opposed to when it wasn't in full tyranny mode... when exactly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequence... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China#Technical_implementation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China#T... etc, etc...
- rm_-rf_slash 8y agoI mean you could technically go all the way back to the Qin emperor and the Great Wall...
- emodendroket 8y agoI suppose, if you want to argue on explicitly racist grounds, that you might do that. I wouldn't because the states where those things happened don't even exist anymore.
- rm_-rf_slash 8y ago
- sndean 8y agoSCMP says the Chinese government knows where he is: he's under investigation [0]. "The 64-year-old official, who is also a vice-minister at China’s Ministry of Public Security, was “taken away” for questioning by discipline authorities “as soon as he landed in China” last week, according to the source." [0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/2167213/french-police-launch-hunt-missing-chinese-head-interpol-meng https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/2167213/fr...
- the_duke 8y agoThe more interesting question to me is, how does a country with a human rights record like China get to provide the head of Interpol? edit: President is elected by the General Assembly [1] [1] https://www.interpol.int/About-INTERPOL/Structure-and-governance/President https://www.interpol.int/About-INTERPOL/Structure-and-govern...
- ethbro 8y ago元
- ptaipale 8y agoOne could ask the same question about things like United Nations Human Rights Council. The answer is that money, and representation of all governments is what counts. It leads to rather absurd outcomes.
- secfirstmd 8y agoTrue. I mean in reality though, there would probably be very few countries on the UN HRC if the position required being holier than though.
- bashallah 8y agoNot to be a dick but it’s “thou”
- onetimemanytime 8y ago"Mr Meng is a senior Communist Party official in China." He didn't vanish, that's something he signed up for. Just the Party decided to execute call in the contract at this time.
- goombastic 8y agoI predict that the Chinese style of governance will eventually succeed and will be improved upon by others. They seem to be able to get away with everything. Chinese style data oriented micromanagement of populations is likely to be the norm for the future. You cannot escape algorithms judging you and placing you in a category. The "category" that will define your experience of the world from then on. Western tech companies are complicit in all of this. As people in the field, we need to resist this at every turn but the money is just too great of a lure for now.
- kopo 8y agoPeople just have to be told what direction we can head in. I like the way Yanis Varoufakis frames the matter - do you want a Matrix style future where the machines control you or a Star Trek kind of future where the machines take care of all the mundane BS and we get to go places we haven't gone before. I don't think there is a big debate about what people will choose. We just have to get the mindlessly ambitious minority of the population with god emperor delusions to behave themselves.
- mleonhard 8y agoWe need a way to get there from here. We will never reach Star Trek style society if we just continue as we are. I think we need to transition to socialist democracy. But how to start?
- kopo 8y agoNovember elections are going to be very interesting. I think Bernie and the next generation of Bernie's who manage to also connect with some part of the rural votebase can take us in the right direction. Fingers crossed.
- alcover 8y agoSorry to be that guy but.. sigh.. this is no hacker news, it's just news. Please don't turn this beloved site into a news aggregator. From the guidelines : "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics [...]"
- severine 8y agoYou might be right, but a sci-fi novelette published X years ago with this storyline could very well be on HN's first page, and bring a great discussion, any day. Just because it's real doesn't mean is less interesting, for some readers.
- alcover 8y agoI agree. Discussions here are often very good. But how will you - or moderators - guess that a story will generate such quality ? Problem is, the disappearing of an Interpol chief IS striking news. So it gets upvotes and stays on the front. Now you, I, and many others have to filter more submissions to get to a real "HACKER" piece of news.
- severine 8y agoWell, hackers are good at filtering, plus the fold thread button works wonders too, it can make some discussions much better for you.
- alcover 8y agoWhy the down-votes ? I kindly meant that it's good to have a somewhat specialized site towards intellectual curiosity. It takes more time to visually filter submissions if they are interspersed with world news in general.
- xapata 8y agoOne of my professors at GaTech was detained while leading a study abroad course in China. After he was released, he said it probably was because they didn't like a book he wrote.
- ilaksh 8y agoI guess if someone that high up isn't safe then who is? And China is so big, how do we know this type of thing won't spread to more countries? Literally makes me want to move to Mars as soon as possible.