On June 4, 1989, student protests at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were brutally suppressed by the People’s Liberation Army.
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This notice, entitled “Triumphant 2025 Shen Yun Season Concludes,” may look like the usual glowing corporate self-congratulatory exercise in unwarranted hype. But it isn’t. “Shen Yun’s eight touring groups and hundreds of performers overcame tornadoes and fires as well as sabotage attempts from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its allies. And yet, not a single performance was missed.”
That is an accomplishment, indeed, for the theater troupe did face back-room political pressure from that great foe of freedom, the CCP.
I had seen several news reports of their troubles. It took a court order, for example, to enforce a venue contract with South Korea’s Kangwon National University. University officials had “greenlit the New York classical Chinese dance company’s application to perform at its Baekryeong Art Center on April 1,” explains The Epoch Times, “only to walk back on the agreement after the Chinese embassy voiced a complaint.”
The university “stated that its decision to cancel the show had to do with the public interests of the school,” of course. But while“escalating the matter into a ‘diplomatic issue’” obviously loomed large, the center also mentioned the danger from “the roughly 500 Chinese-national students studying at the center who it claimed could stage protests, potentially leading to clashes, should the performance go on as scheduled.”
The Shen Yun Performing Arts organization is made up of many artists who have fled communist China. The communists in China do not like defectors, and their reach is alarming.
Thankfully, in this case, the CCP failed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Ironic, considering that official U.S. policy is dubbed “strategic ambiguity,” meaning we don’t say one way or the other about our defensive intentions for helping the island nation against a regularly threatened and rehearsed-for Chinese invasion or naval blockade.
Four separate times during his term, however, former President Joe Biden publicly pledged American military help to counter a People’s Republic of China assault on Taiwan. As for the Trump 2.0 Pentagon, weeks ago it leaked (or suffered a leak of) a global defense strategy memo that said preventing a PRC takeover of Taiwan was the “sole pacing scenario” engaging our armed forces.
Surprising unanimity for the two parties in Washington. But has anyone asked what the American people think?
Well, Humanity for Freedom Foundation conducted a poll, released yesterday.*
Informed that “China claims Taiwan as its own territory,” 82 percent of respondents agreed that “Taiwan is an independent country.” Only 3 percent felt “Taiwan is part of China.”
A 58 percent majority favored full U.S. diplomatic recognition for Taiwan. When it comes to American military defense, a plurality of 39 percent wanted to continue the status quo of not saying (“strategic ambiguity”), while 32 percent of Americans preferred their government make a clear commitment to Taiwan. Only 2 percent supported ending arm sales and adopting a neutral stance.
The above results are thoroughly — and surprisingly — non-partisan, with arch conservatives and far-out progressives finding common ground to defend Asia’s freest society against the world’s most maniacal totalitarian state.
Could the specter of a future dictated by the Chinese Communist Party be bringing the world closer together?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* In full disclosure, I’m on HFF’s board of directors. As for the national poll, it had 800 respondents, giving the results a 3.5 percent margin of error with a 95 percent confidence level. Full results are here.
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That’s what U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R‑Ark.) asked Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of the United States Indo-Pacific Command. “Why could it lead not only to a catastrophic war, but also global Great Depression? Why should Americans care about an island on the other side of the world?”
The admiral told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the senator’s “last point [was] quite salient. Many a research organization postulate that conflict in the western Pacific over the Taiwan question would result in a 25 percent GDP contraction in Asia and a knock-on effect of 10 to 12 percent GDP reduction in the United States of America, with unemployment spiking seven to 10 points above base and likely 500,000 excess deaths of despair above base as well.
“This is just the importance of the regional stability to the world economy and its effect on people’s lives,” added Paparo. “And this is a function of freedom of navigation; it’s a function of the world dependency on semiconductors.”
“And to be clear,” offered Sen. Cotton, “simply having the conflict over Taiwan which is such a center of gravity in the modern economy could lead to many of the consequences you just outlined.”
Paparo explained that “most of the things” he has “studied indicate that American intervention would halve that impact,” adding “a successful American intervention would.
“Still a grave result,” Admiral Paparo acknowledged, “but half as grave, with savings of a lot of human misery.”
Let’s hope and pray and prepare militarily to deter Chinese aggression.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Tears have been shed, garments rent: $5.3 million would have been used to retrofit a building to make it more green; $1.5 million would have funded research on the practicality of “electric vehicle carshare programs” and the “resilience” and “equity” of U.S. business models.
These initiatives are just the tip of the spear. RMI is also a good buddy of the Chinese government. RMI even has an office in Beijing.
As James Roth puts it over at our sister publication StoptheCCP.org, “Yes, RMI works with the communist government and proudly. It’s all over their website. It’s their specialty.”
Hold on, Roth. We must all try to understand that this is the kind of thing we must do if we wish to pretend to effectuate real global change in order to pretend to finetune world climate. If we let reality infect our thinking, what happens to mankind’s noble dream of instituting a globe-girdling weather-control machine while fatuously enabling the policies, conduct, and lies of tyrants? It would evaporate in the morning sun.
We’d be stuck with facts.
We’d be stuck treating RMI as responsible for its actions, as U.S. Senator Ted Cruz did in a letter to the institute’s CEO in 2023, asking “whether RMI has ever received any funding from any entity or individual associated with the Chinese government. Please answer with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’.…”
There’s at least one such funder. RMI has gotten money from Energy Foundation China, which has CCP ties and is “run by former Chinese Communist Party officials.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The Dutch historian and author of four excellent books on Chinese history — Mao’s Great Famine; The Tragedy of Liberation; The Cultural Revolution; and China After Mao — Dikötter recently spoke at length with Peter Robinson, host of the Hoover Institution’s “Uncommon Knowledge” podcast.
Calling it “conventional wisdom,” Robinson offers that “the number that I found over and over again was eight to 900 million people lifted out of poverty since Deng Xiaoping announce[d] his reforms in ’78.”
“That’s all propaganda,” declares Dr. Dikötter. “The people in the countryside have lifted themselves out of poverty.”
Even before Mao’s death in 1976, the Cultural Revolution ended and the “army, which was deployed in every farm, every factory, every office from 1968 onwards, that army goes back to the barracks and is purged in turn,” he explains. “People in the countryside realize there’s nobody there to supervise them. There’s nobody there to tell them, go and work in the collective fields.”
Mr. Robinson chimes in: “The boot is off their neck.”
“So,” Dikötter expounds “they start operating underground factories; they open black markets; they trade among themselves.”
Deng “merely [put] the stamp of approval on something that escapes them altogether, namely the drive of ordinary villagers to claim back the freedoms they had before 1949.
“Allow ordinary people to get on with it,” he says, “they will!
“But this is not a party,” concludes Dikötter, “that will allow ordinary people to get on with it.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Reynolds serves as the United Kingdom’s Business Secretary. He’s talking about the behavior of Jungye, the Chinese owner of troubled British Steel.
“The conscious decision not just to not order raw materials but to sell existing supplies of raw materials …” Reynolds fulminated, leading him to tell the BBC that “he doesn’t want any future Chinese involvement in British steel making.”
Over the weekend, the UK Government seized British Steel, with Reynolds explaining that “he was forced to seek emergency powers to prevent owners Jingye” from “shutting down its two blast furnaces, which would have ended primary steel production in the UK.”
“They wanted to close down steel production in Britain,” argues Nigel Farage, an MP and leader of Reform UK, “This is a big strategic decision by the CCP.”
Asked if he was accusing the Chinese owners of “lying about the numbers,” the fiery Farage replied, “Yes, absolutely,” adding, “Lying about everything.”
In a single day, Saturday, Parliament passed emergency legislation to facilitate the Business Secretary’s request.
One opposition MP called it a “botched nationalization,” as the company is still in Chinese hands. It seems more a rescue attempt for Chinese owners who don’t want to be rescued.
Takeaway? Maybe China isn’t such a great economic partner after all.
Free countries are reluctantly rediscovering that we still live in a dangerous world, in which we better be able to protect ourselves and not depend on the sworn enemies of freedom.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Recently shared with military brass and congressional national security committees, and recently leaked, Hegseth’s Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance is, according to The Washington Post, “extraordinary in its description of the potential invasion of Taiwan as the exclusive animating scenario that must be prioritized over other potential dangers.”
While I can’t find a copy of the leaked document, The Post relates that “given personnel and resource constraints,” the United States will focus on China and “pressure allies in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia to spend more on defense to take on the bulk of the deterrence role against threats from Russia, North Korea and Iran.”
This makes enormous sense. We are already at war in Ukraine and across the Middle East, while China, the most dangerous aggressor, has been ratcheting up its bullying and threats against its neighbors whom we have pledged to defend.
Taiwan is too important — especially strategically, but also economically, and even symbolically, as an incredible democratic success story — to allow it to be gobbled up by the genocidal Chinese Communist Party regime.
Europe can step up to defend itself and is increasingly doing so. Germany has troops and tanks headed to Lithuania, the first such deployment since the Second World War.
These are serious times. Glad to have a more serious plan to address them. And to count other free countries as allies. We will need each other.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
P.S. On four separate occasions, President Biden publicly promised that the United States would come to Taiwan’s assistance militarily should China’s repeated threats to invade come to fruition, but where President Trump would stand in his second term seemed uncertain. Would he make a deal with Xi Jinping that sold out Taiwan, as John Bolton, his former national security advisor, has claimed? Bolton has been wrong before.
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But was it big news?
Most people had given up any hope of finding a natural origin, and evidence favoring the virus’s creation in Wuhan, China — partly funded by U.S. taxpayers courtesy of Big Pharma bureaucrat Dr. Antony Fauci — has been clear for a very long time.
So the CIA saying it now “believes” that COVID-19 was leaked from the Chinese lab looks, suspiciously, like a convenient change of opinion upon the beginning of the 47th presidency.
New beliefs for a new president!
Note that the CIA certainly offers plenty of reasons to make light of the turn.
Very political.
The change of mind looks like this: the CIA had pushed the natural origination story because it had an agenda, and Americans have largely given up on that agenda. Left pushing a wet noodle, the CIA now tries to recover some of its cachet — or prevent further erosion of public opinion in the institution — by siding with the once-derided belief.
And the “low confidence” warning is there to allow mainstream news media to downplay the story. The whole thing smacks of propagandistic manipulation rather than honestly informing the president, Congress, the Pentagon, or the American people.
Oh, and what of that agenda?
Let’s just say that the agency always seeks to keep us ill-informed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Back in June, after his son was found guilty on gun charges, President Biden said: “I will not pardon him.”
Now he’s saying “I believe in the justice system, but …”
Let’s remember the Conspiracy Theory floating around before the election.
Various cynical people, cynics I call them, declared that despite Biden’s pledge not to pardon his son, he was only waiting for the election. After the election, when the action could no longer hurt him or any Biden-substitute candidate, he would then pardon his son.
And so it has come to pass— as of last night.
I guess if you can’t get Al Capone on anything else, you get him on tax evasion. But I don’t care that much about the gun charges or the tax charges against Hunter Biden. I care about the corruption.
I care about the many millions of dollars funneled into the Biden family and the Big Guy, Joe Biden, in consequence of Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling deal-making with firms in Ukraine, Romania, and China. Millions that fell into his lap over the years only because of who his dad is. And what daddy could do — as in fire a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into Biden family corruption.
Riding high, Hunter Biden felt he could get away with anything, including massive tax evasion.
The son can, I take it, no longer be imprisoned for any of the law-breaking we know about. Or even suspect.So maybe, thus unencumbered, Hunter can now take the stand about his father’s role in all the graft and bribery.
Interestingly, Hunter’s pardon removes his ability to assert his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Because he can’t be incriminated, i.e. criminalized, he can be compelled to testify.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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