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The body camera hung from the top of the IV drip, recording the slightest twitch made by Yang Guoliang as he lay bloody and paralysed in a hospital bed after a police beating with bricks. By then, surveillance was nothing new for the Yang family in rural China, snared in an intricate network based on US technology that spies on them and predicts what they'll do. Their train tickets, hotel bookings, purchases, text messages and phone calls are forwarded to the government. Their house is ringed with more than a dozen cameras. They've tried to go to Beijing 20 times in the past few years, but masked men show up and grab them, often before they depart. And last year, Yang's wife and younger daughter were detained and now face trial for disrupting the work of the Chinese state a crime carrying a sentence of up to a decade in prison. Yet the Yangs say they are not criminals. They are simply farmers trying to beg Beijing to stop local officials from seizing their 1 1/2 acres of land in ..
It was 7 a.m. on a recent Friday when Wang Gang, a 36-year-old Chinese immigrant, jostled for a day job in New York City's Flushing neighbourhood. When a potential employer pulled up near the street corner, Wang and dozens of other men swarmed around the car. They were hoping to be picked for work on a construction site, at a farm, as a mover anything that would pay. Wang had no luck, even as he waited for two more hours. It would be another day without a job since he crossed the southern US border illegally in February. The daily struggle of Chinese immigrants in Flushing is a far cry from the picture former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have sought to paint of them as a coordinated group of military-age men who have come to the United States to build an army and attack America. Since the start of the year, as the Chinese newcomers adjust to life in the US, Trump has alluded to fighting age or military age Chinese men at least six times and suggested at least twice