Tag: China
It’s nice to be invited.
Either former NBA basketball player Yao Ming or a Chinese Communist Party handler standing just behind him had the idea of inviting Enes Kanter Freedom to visit China, where Yao Ming would be his tour guide.
Mr. Freedom, a current NBA player, is a sharp critic of the Chinazi regime and advocates boycotting the Beijing Olympics. Yao Ming says the proposed trip would help Freedom to “have a more comprehensive understanding of us.”
Enes Freedom has accepted the invitation, conditionally.
- He asks, in a video reply, whether he and Yao Ming could “visit the Uyghur slave labor camps? Or visit the innocent women being tortured, raped, and abused?”
- What about the Tibet Autonomous Region? “Can we see what the regime is doing to these beautiful people?” Such a trip could show the world how the CCP is “erasing Tibetan identity, religion, and culture.”
- Hong Kong too. “On this trip, can we please visit Hong Kong together? Hong Kong used to be one of the freest cities in the world, yet now the destruction of the free press, crackdowns on rights, and more arrests are happening each and every day.”
Enes Freedom is ready to learn more about China and Chinese government policies in the company of Yao Ming. But will the Chinazi government permit the trip to proceed as outlined?
We know the answer.
On the other hand, Enes invited Yao to visit Taiwan to witness how “democracy is thriving.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Very Free?
“Why would I be monitored?” Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai queried a reporter last Sunday. “I’ve always been very free.”
Yet governments the world over do certainly spy on citizens, and nowhere more virulently than in China, or with less accountability.
As for being “free,” or “very free,” that’s the real issue, the very reason those who love tennis along with all who love freedom — and life itself — have been so worried about Peng.
She’s not free. Not even close. Nor are 1.4 billion others living under Chinazi rule.
It’s a big problem.
To recap the story from last month: On November 2, Peng posted a statement on her official Weibo page, her country’s state-monitored-and-censored equivalent of Facebook* (which is banned there). According to The Washington Post, she “claimed that former vice minister Zhang Gaoli had pressured her into having sex with him.”
That’s a scandal — and possibly a crime.
Followed by another crime: Her post was removed. She was silenced. And then Grand Slam doubles tennis champion Peng Shuai was summarily erased from the Chinese Internet.
Gone. Disappeared. Nary a trace.
As weeks passed with neither sight nor sound of Peng, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) started to raise the alarm, threatening to withdraw from their quite lucrative activities in China if her safety could not be guaranteed.
That’s when Chinese media clumsily hyped an email wherein Peng supposedly said she was peachy-keen. Then the International Olympic Committee, on the CCP’s payroll, held a staged video call with her without bothering to even inquire about her allegations. Followed by a second silly call.
Now the update: last weekend, Peng appeared in a supposedly impromptu interview, telling a pro-Beijing newspaper in Singapore, “I have never said or written that anyone has sexually assaulted me.”
But more than her original allegation, which remains unproven and uninvestigated, it is the totalitarian treatment of this one professional tennis player post-allegation that has caught the world’s attention. Perhaps Peng’s plight is easier to get one’s head around than two million Uighurs in concentration camps or China’s organ harvesting exploits.
None of it will apparently lead to an Olympic boycott by the U.S.
Still, the WTA, to its enormous honor, has stuck to its guns, forfeiting millions in revenue by canceling all events in China and making clear that “these appearances [by Peng] do not alleviate or address the WTA’s significant concerns about her well-being and ability to communicate without censorship or coercion.”
Because Peng Shuai is not very free. Or safe.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Of course, Facebook is a U.S. Government-encouraged corporate censor. That’s terrible, as regularly noted on these pages, but not nearly as suffocating and brutal as the CCP’s system.
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Feckless Endangerment
The Biden administration sure knows how to look feckless when it comes to standing up to China.
The administration has decided that the best way to protest Chinazi aggression against Hong Kong democracy and freedom — and against the lives and freedom of millions of Uyghurs — is to announce a “diplomatic” boycott of the Beijing-sponsored Olympic games, scheduled to be held in February.
U.S. participation would continue as before: athletes will perform, sports fans will attend, and corporations will make money.
What will be missing?
Government officials.
Viewers around the world won’t notice any difference, of course. They don’t tune in to watch muckety-mucks photo-bombing the medal ceremonies.
Even Jimmy Carter, loath to be outdone in the fecklessness department, knew that the way for the U.S. to boycott the 1980 Moscow-hosted Olympics in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was to actually boycott the Olympics.
Columnist Cathal Kelly notes that the “diplomatic” boycott is “worse than meaningless.”
The administration’s language games amount to nothing less than “a more impressive sounding way of saying you are eliminating Olympic junkets,” Kelly writes. “Now all the sad, second-rate pols from North Dakota and Maine won’t get flown private to Beijing so they can take a bunch of ego shots with Auston Matthews.”
With the Winter Olympics mere months away, we can’t expect the U.S. government to improve its policy in time.
But that still leaves many other parties who can act, including governments of other countries, U.S. sports teams, and individual U.S. athletes.
Withdraw, and say why.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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China’s leaders fear Winnie the Pooh.
And The Simpsons.
The totalitarian regime’s opponents liken Xi Jinping, the latest Dear Leader, to Winnie the Pooh — due to an obvious resemblance. So Xi’s government works hard to expunge Winnie images.
The Chinazis also want everyone in China and Hong Kong (not to mention across the universe) to forget the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, when hundreds or thousands of people demanding democratic reform were killed.
The Walt Disney Company is eager to cooperate with this besieging of memory.
The Simpsons is part of its new streaming service in Hong Kong, where citizens have been losing the last remnants of political freedom permitted under the two-systems agreement of 1997. Whether preemptively or in compliance with instruction from the Chinese government, Disney has deleted a certain episode from the series’ archive available to Hong Kongers.
In the memory-holed episode, “Goo Goo Gai Pain,” Homer, presiding over the corpse of Mao, opines that Mao is “like a little angel that killed fifty million people.”
Another character has a stare-down with a tank, recalling the briefly effective “tank man” confrontation with a row of tanks in that fateful June of 1989.
The episode also satirizes the Chinazi determination to erase all discussion of Tiananmen. For instance, the Simpsons see a sign at Tiananmen Square announcing “on this site, in 1989, nothing happened.”
Instead of appeasing Xi’s government, what should Disney do?
What anybody who is paid to help repress a people and blank out the past: Stop doing that.
Forfeit the money.
Stand up for human rights.
Or lose them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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China Double-Faults
Whew! Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai has not been “disappeared.”
Three weeks ago, Peng publicly accused China’s former vice premier, Zhang Gaoli, of sexual assault. “Her accusation on social media was removed within minutes” by “the Chinese government,” notes Fox News.
“News of the controversy,” The Washington Post adds, “remains almost universally censored within China.”
No one heard from Peng for weeks after she made the charge, understandably concerning sports officials and fellow players. Adding to the ugly optics was a phony email scam — obviously perpetrated by Chinese state media — claiming that she was okay. Then, last Thursday, Women’s Tennis Association Chairman Steve Simon put Beijing on notice that over Peng’s safety his organization was “willing to pull out of China, potentially losing hundreds of millions of dollars.”
On Sunday, China responded, allowing Peng to join a video chat with International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, along with a Chinese sports official and the chair of the IOC Athlete’s Commission.
“Peng Shuai has officially reappeared in China,” explains The Washington Post, “but with silence surrounding her sexual assault allegations against a senior government official.”
“It was good to see Peng Shuai in recent videos,” a WTA spokesmen informed CNN, “but they don’t alleviate or address the WTA’s concern about her well-being and ability to communicate without censorship or coercion.”
Well, that applies to almost everyone in China. Censorship and coercion are what the Chinazis do.
So what will the world’s athletes do … when, in ten weeks’ time, they are scheduled to appear in Beijing at the 2022 Winter Olympics?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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