Tag: China

Categories
international affairs

First-Class Freedom Fighting

Taiwan, sunflower, China

Just seven years ago today — March 18, 2014 — Taiwanese students began a 23-day occupation of the country’s legislature, in what became known as the Sunflower Student Movement. They were protesting the rushed and opaque passage of a Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement with China.

Trade deals usually aren’t so explosive, but China is a neighbor 58 times larger than Taiwan’s 24-million population and one that regularly threatens military invasion. Furthermore, the agreement was negotiated in secret and initially passed by the Legislative Yuan in 30 seconds. 

Obviously without debate.

Opponents of the deal argued it would allow China to effectively “purchase” Taiwan, and to economically leverage and then strangle Taiwan’s vibrant democracy, which like Hong Kong’s aspirations constitutes a terrible affront to the anti-democratic Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ruling over more than a billion silenced, disenfranchised Chinese. 

The students’ concerns for transparency and safeguards connected with the Taiwanese public, which put enormous pressure on the government. 

Ultimately, the spring Sunflower Movement in Taiwan helped influence the autumn Umbrella Movement protests in Hong Kong as well as energizing the 2016 win for Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party and far less Beijing-friendly President Tsai Ing-wen (who won a second term last year).

In these last seven years, the world has come a long way in recognizing the threat posed by totalitarian China. For that I give those students in Taipei a lot of credit. Their standing up kept Taiwan free — and helped us all begin to stand up to the Chinazis (as Hong Kongers call the CCP). 

The other aftermath? Le Monde’s report on students finally leaving the Yuan, noted it was “not without having thoroughly cleaned the building.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
international affairs

Now Safe to Blame?

Joe Biden, China

Is it safe yet for big media to tell the truth about China’s virus? 

“Beijing’s efforts from the very start of the crisis to hide information, silence whistleblowers, put out false data and thwart any real outside investigation are too extensive to fully recount,” Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote over the weekend, pointedly adding, “the Chinese government’s actions were both reckless and deliberate.”

Leading to many more deaths — the official tally being 2.6 million souls worldwide. So far. 

Yes, the Chinese Communist Party leaders are actually “bad folks.” 

Last year, though, the media treated candidate Trump’s attacks on China as just so much posturing and blame-shifting. The Post, for example complained of “too much political heat” regarding the pandemic — “some generated by China” and “some by Donald Trump in his attempt to distract attention from his catastrophic pandemic response as president.”

A month ago, a World Health Organization team traveled to China to finally look for the source of the contagion. “International experts investigating the origins of Covid-19,” the BBC reported at the time, “have all but dismissed a theory that the virus came from a laboratory in China.” 

It turns out, as the Post explained, “the team lacked the training and forensic skills required to investigate this possibility” and “were under strong pressure from China to steer clear of the subject altogether.” The editorial urged the WHO to renew their investigation and “forcefully insist that China not stand in its way.”

“Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 shattered a fragile understanding between Washington and Beijing,” Rogin had informed readers at the outset of his essay, “and put the most important relationship of the 21st century in the hands of a novice.”

I call that a reprieve.

But the fact that our current prez is an old political pro? 

Worrisome.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* There is “no going back to the stance that the Obama administration had taken toward China in 2016,” Rogin argued, “when . . . most uncomfortable issues were swept under the rug.”

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

More on the Wuhan Lab angle: “Twelve Monkeys in Charge”

Categories
education and schooling international affairs

Subsidizing Chinese Attacks on American Ideals

Should the federal government fund organizations working at the behest of China and the Chinese Communist Party?

Democrats on the House Education and Labor Committee have blocked an amendment sponsored by Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) that, in her words, would have banned funding of academic institutions “if they have a partnership with any entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by the government of the People’s Republic of China or organized under the laws of the Chinese Communist Party.”

The entities being referred to are so-called Confucius Institutes, which, in addition to promoting innocuous educational goals, help spread the propaganda of the misnamed CCP. (The Chinese Communist Party should really now be called the Chinazi Party. Post-Mao, the Chinese have stopped trying to communize everything and now permit markets to function to a significant extent — but, as in the fascist Nazi version of totalitarianism, always subject to sweeping interference and oppression.)

The current number of active Confucius Institutes in the U.S. is uncertain, but the National Association of Scholars counts at least 55, including 48 at colleges and universities.

Meanwhile, as part of a freeze on regulations issued toward the end of the Trump administration, President Biden has withdrawn a proposed rule that would have required schools to reveal any ties to Confucius Institutes.

Is it a bad idea to find out which schools are facilitating Chinazi propaganda? 

Is it a good idea to directly or indirectly fund Chinazi propaganda? 

No and no.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
media and media people

Should Oppressors Host the Olympics?

Olympics, China

China is scheduled to host the Winter Olympics in 2022. Should it be allowed to? If allowed, should anybody go?

Cato scholar Ilya Somin argues, at Reason, for at least boycotting the event.

Why? To respond to the Chinese government’s “many egregious atrocities, including its detention of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in concentration camps, brutal repression in Hong Kong, and much else.”

China is one of the worst violators of human rights in the world. So why let the Olympics serve as a “propaganda showcase” for the regime?

The ideal of an Olympic Games unencumbered by politics is untenable. You can’t keep the games free of politics when tyrant-hosts routinely exploit the event for political purposes while appeasers turn a blind eye.

A globally publicized boycott would make the work of the appeasers much harder.

Somin goes further, however. He argues that the International Olympic Committee should permanently prohibit oppressive governments from hosting the Olympics.

If this policy were enacted, there would be heated debates about whether Country Y or Country Z belong to the same ban-worthy category as China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and Zimbabwe.

Maybe we could use Cato’s Human Freedom Index as a guide to oppression.

How brutal is too brutal? Let’s talk, because without open argument, any decision or policy will be arbitrary and useless.

And I welcome those debates about borderline cases, just as long as the most blatantly brutal regimes can never again host the Olympics and exploit them to advance their vicious agendas.

Until then: Boycott the 2022 games in China.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
international affairs

The China Syndrome

China, flag, blood, red

Is the Chinese government under Xi Jinping becoming as murderously totalitarian as it was in the time of Mao?

Since Mao was responsible for the slaughter of tens of millions, today’s China is not, at least yet, Maoist bad. But as Doug Bandow reports in a recent overview (“China’s Terrifying Return to Maoism”), it is indeed awful.

The scuttling of presidential term limits is the merest tip of a titanic iceberg of tyranny. 

Beneath the surface is China’s intensified repression of the Uyghurs, Tibet, and Hong Kong; prolific use of torture; a rise in coerced televised confessions; increased censorship and detaining of foreign journalists; massive expansion of the surveillance state with the help of technology firms like Huawei; and new crackdowns on practices of religion.

A few years ago, churches in many provinces of China could carry on without interference as long as they steered clear of politics. Hardly a minor restriction. But today, writes Bandow, “ministers are arrested, churches are closed or destroyed, members are barred from bringing their children and forced to display communist agitprop, and the [Chinese Communist Party] even wants to rewrite Scripture. Islam, Buddhism, and Daoism are also under sustained attack.”

Bandow bases his observations in part on a Human Rights Commission report just published by the UK Conservative Party.

Too often, journalists, politicians and others ignore or whitewash what the Chinese regime is doing at home and abroad. Whatever our policies toward China should be, they should be based on eyes-wide-open reality.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
international affairs

Continuity Against the Chinazis?

Taiwan, China

With Joe Biden now in the White House, will the U.S. continue former President Trump’s hardline toward China?

Especially regarding Taiwan, regularly threatened with invasion by Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Or will President Joe Biden — dubbed “Beijing Biden” by some Trump supporters during the campaign — return to the softer approach of previous administrations toward the Chinazis?*

Mr. Trump “approved weapons sales to Taiwan totaling more than $15 billion,” reported The Washington Post last October, “including coveted F-16 jets that frustrated Taiwanese hawks say Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush withheld.”

In that same article, a Taiwanese foreign policy scholar voiced alarm that Biden’s advisors, including Antony Blinken, now Biden’s pick to be Secretary of State, “still view Taiwan as a problem that needs to be handled within the greater U.S.-China relationship. . . . The lack of deeper understanding on the issue of Taiwan . . . is something that causes a lot of concern here.”

When then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the removal of all “self-imposed restrictions” on contact between the U.S. and Taiwanese governments, weeks ago, a Washington Post headline declared: “Trump upsets decades of U.S. policy on Taiwan, leaving thorny questions for Biden.” 

Perhaps not so prickly, however: Taiwan’s representative to the U.S. was soon invited to Biden’s inauguration . . . the first official invitation since the 1979 severing of diplomatic ties.

Not only that, “President Trump was right in taking a tougher approach to China,” Secretary of State nominee Blinken told The Epoch Times. 

“Nuclear-capable Chinese bombers and fighter jets,” Reuters informed on Saturday, “entered the southwestern corner of Taiwan’s air defence identification zone.”

Unified, bi-partisan opposition to the genocidal ‘Butchers of Beijing’ remains more critical than ever.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The term “Chinazi” springs from 2019 Hong Kong protesters. It seems the most accurate label for the totalitarian state inflicted on the Chinese people for the last 70 years by the Chinese Communist Party, especially in more recent times.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
international affairs

Slow on Subjugation

Hong Kong, China, flag

Latest: China opposes democracy!

When Great Britain turned Hong Kong over to China in 1997, the half-capitalist, ninety-nine-percent-totalitarian mainland government promised, scout’s honor, to preserve “one country, two systems” for 50 years. Hong Kong was to be mostly autonomous.

Almost immediately, China began interfering in Hong Kong’s democracy with the help of puppet officials on the island. 

In 2003, China tried to impose a “national security law” to squelch the Hong-Kong-system part of the two systems. Criticism of the Chinese government would be treated as sedition. Five hundred thousand Hong Kongers marched in protest. Not wanting to send bombs and tanks, China retreated.

Hong Kongers blunted other assaults in 2012, 2014, and 2016.

But this last year, with the help of pandemic-rationalized restrictions on civic life, China has been making great leaps forward with its agenda. Recently, it detained 53 Hong Kongers for the terrible crime oftrying to run candidates in local elections.

Observing this, Victoria Hui, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame, has reached an insight. 

“This is a total sweep of all opposition leaders,” she says. Why, if it is judged “subversion” just to run for office in Hong Kong, then the true purpose of the new security law is “the total subjugation of Hong Kong people.”

This goal has been blatant at least since 2003; longer, to anyone who knows China’s history. Sounds like Ms. Hui is only now catching on. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
international affairs scandal

Two Conspiracies Unearthed

night, mystery

Two huge stories broke this week.

The first is that the “People’s Republic” of China guided American policy for decades using “old friends” who had “penetrated the highest levels of the U.S. government and financial institutions before the Trump administration.” 

Bill Gerz, writing in The Washington Times, reported that “Di Dongsheng, a professor and associate dean of the School of International Studies at Renmin University in Beijing, also suggested in a Nov. 28 speech that China’s Communist Party helped Hunter Biden, a son of presumptive President-elect Joseph R. Biden, obtain Chinese business deals.” 

These remarks were posted as a video on the professor’s Weibo account (think “Chinese Facebook”). Though quickly removed, copies went viral.

The second story? “Did Donald Trump Nearly Confirm Existence of Aliens? Israeli Ex-Space Chief Makes Bizarre Claim,” by Jeffrey Martin, writing at Newsweek. “Professor Haim Eshed, who served as the head of Israel’s space program from 1981 to 2010 spoke to the Hebrew newspaper Yediot Aharonot on Sunday. On Tuesday, the Jerusalem Post published some of Eshed’s quotes in English and they contained the most incredible claims made about Trump, who has long [been] the center of conspiracy theories—some of which he has actively encouraged.”

Eshed claims that both the U.S. and Israel have had contact with extraterrestrial civilizations (a “Galactic Federation,” no less) and that President Trump was about to go full-on Full Disclosure but — somehow — the aliens stopped him.

Quite a yarn, not unfamiliar to science fiction readers and moviegoers. But note: quite a few de-classified Pentagon, FBI and CIA documents suggest something very much like this. And in the last few years we’ve covered the U.S. Government’s trickling admissions that the UFO phenomenon is not all fakery, but real and odd.

Both stories hail from professors with close ties to foreign governments. Both point to actual conspiracies. Both present “epistemic” problems for us: they are neither easily proved or disproved.

Both, also, are too eerily plausible.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
international affairs

Good Relations with Genocide?

Joe Biden, China, communism, human rights

“Beijing is trying to convince the incoming Biden administration that the U.S.-China relationship can be smooth and positive,” writes Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, “but only if Washington dumps the Trump administration’s policies, ignores China’s worst behaviors and pretends everything is fine.”

It is more than a little scary because “pretending” is one of the political establishment’s greatest skill-sets. Plus, the columnist reminds that “calls for the Biden administration to reverse course are coming not only from China but also from . . . former secretary of state Henry Kissinger” and a “range of interest groups.”  

But “yielding to China’s demands,” Rogin warns President-Elect Biden, “would be going against a majority of Americans in both parties and breaking Biden’s campaign promises to stand up to [Chinese leader] Xi.”

Consider “Beijing’s naked economic extortion of Australia,” argues Rogin. “If Biden intends to repair alliances, he should realize that allies like Australia want support for resistance to China’s bullying.”

So, what does China want?

“A Chinese official gave the Sydney Morning Herald a list of the conditions it expects in return for lifting harsh sanctions on Australia’s agricultural and mineral export industries,” Rogin explains. “. . . Australia must stop exposing Chinese Communist Party influence efforts on its soil; shut up about Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Uighurs; open its doors to Chinese tech companies; and quit calling for an independent investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.”

Rogin notes “concern in Asia” about whether Mr. Biden will return to the Obama Administration’s weak stance on China, which “would allow serious problems to fester, raising the long-term risk of just the kind of serious conflict both countries would like to avoid.”

How “good” should our relations be with nations engaged in genocide, such as China?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
general freedom ideological culture

The NBA’s China Syndrome

Mark Cuban, China, NBA

“I’m against human rights violations around the world,” declared Mark Cuban, owner of the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Dallas Mavericks, joining Megyn Kelly for her Apple podcast.

“Including the ones in China?” Kelly posed ever-so impolitely.

“China is not the only country with human rights violations,” Cuban prevaricated. Adding that, “Any human rights violations anywhere are wrong.”

Then Kelly dropped the bombshell: “Why would the NBA take $500 million dollars-plus from a country that is engaging in ethnic cleansing?”

“So basically,” the NBA owner fumed, “you’re saying nobody should do business with China ever?”

Perhaps not entertaining Chinazis is the right course — especially if doing so leads to kowtowing to Chinese government demands that their genocide be met with your well-compensated silence.

“They are a customer of ours . . .” he continued. “I’m okay with doing business with China. And so we have to pick our battles. I wish we could solve all the world’s problems. But we can’t.”

In addition to the PR problems brought by cuddling up to China, Kelly also asked whether prominently placing “Black Lives Matter” on the league’s courts had contributed to an “unprecedented viewership collapse” for the just-finished NBA Finals. 

“Each game has broken another all-time low,” wrote Bobby Burack for Outkick.com. “With a marquee match-up between the Lakers and the Heat and the league’s biggest draw in LeBron James, a drop of almost 60% is inexcusable.”

“Your audience is fleeing,” Kelly noted. “They object to the politicization of their game.”

Cuban demurred, but as Election Day approaches, I bet it has occurred to him more than once that Americans have already used their television remotes to cast some powerful votes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts