Tag: China

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First Amendment rights ideological culture too much government

The Way We Censor Now

Joe Biden, social media, China, censorship

In China, the government now sells software to social media companies so they have the best real-time idea of what the government currently does not want people to say. 

The companies then perform such obliging actions as removing posts and banning users.

The software serves as a self-defense system — of the social media companies. You see, if the companies fail to sufficiently prevent government-outlawed speech on their websites, they will be punished. Maybe ruinously. By the Chinese government.

So who is doing the censoring here? 

Obviously, the government.

In the U.S., the intimidatory relationship between government and social media firms is not quite so advanced or nearly so clear. But as we keep learning from documents extracted by litigation and subpoenas, for years now our federal government has been telling firms to censor things, and the firms have complied.

The latest example is that Facebook, which has always said that its content-moderation policies are “independent,” obeyed White House demands to censor posts about the likelihood that the COVID-19 virus originated in a Chinese lab, not in nature.

In a July 2021 email, Nick Clegg, a Facebook executive, asked whether anyone could “remind me why we were removing — rather than demoting/labeling — claims that Covid is man-made.”

To which a VP in charge of content policy replied: “We were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more. We shouldn’t have done it.”

No matter how White House press secretaries or others try to dress it up, “private” censorship conducted in obedience to governmental requests is governmental censorship.

And is eerily close to the Chinese practice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Truth, Compassion & Forbearance

China, Falun Gong, genocide

The Chinese Communist Party’s genocidal ways did not begin with the mass Uyghur incarcerations. Twenty-four years ago the CCP kicked off “its brutal campaign to eradicate Falun Gong in China,” writes John A. Deller in The Epoch Times.

“Falun Gong (also called Falun Dafa) was introduced to the public in China by Mr. Li Hongzhi in May 1992,” explains Mr. Deller. “It is a spiritual practice in the Buddhist tradition based on the principles of truth, compassion, and forbearance. . . . By 1998, over 70 million people across China had found improved health and morality through Falun Gong.”

In the West, we may not immediately see how dangerous (to tyrants) a religio-philosophical movement like Falun Gong could be. 

Isn’t it innocuous? When D. T. Suzuki introduced Zen Buddhism to the U.S. in the last century, most Americans . . . yawned. 

But the Chinazis did not yawn. They banned Falun Gong on July 20, 1999. And began arresting and imprisoning and torturing and executing its practitioners.

While Deller insists that Falun Gong was not perceived by most of its practitioners to be intrinsically anti-communist, over the course of the antagonism it has dawned on the persecuted that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is indeed at odds with “truth, compassion, and forbearance.”

What really bothers the CCP? Ideas. 

Of independence . . . forbearance. 

Of truth . . . not propaganda. 

Of compassion . . . the idea that maybe prisoners shouldn’t be killed to facilitate lucrative organ transplants.

The 24-year-old genocide is a memecide, the attempted final solution to these paramount ideas.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Big Biz-Big China Alliance

Cisco is in trouble, again, for a reason that many American technology firms should be: for aiding and abetting the tyranny of the Chinese government.

Cisco may have thought it was out of the woods after a lawsuit against it, originally filed in 2011, was wrongly dismissed in 2014. The litigation has just been revived by an appellate court.

The suit pertains to the company’s sale of software called Golden Shield to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Golden Shield is used to track down members of the popular and peaceful Falun Gong spiritual movement so that the CCP can persecute them as subversives (as proved by being part of Falun Gong). For the Chinese regime, all dissent and all activity it disapproves of are threats to national security.

Arrestees are tortured, imprisoned, even murdered, and the lawsuit contends that Cisco knew the ultimate goals that the software would serve. (The culpability of Cisco, Thermo Fisher, Microsoft, and other firms that abet CCP oppression is discussed with sarcastic brio by the YouTube channel China Uncensored.)

Ninth Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon states that the allegations are “sufficient to state a plausible claim that Cisco provided essential technical assistance to the [persecution] of Falun Gong with awareness that the international law violations of torture, arbitrary detention, disappearance, and extrajudicial killing were substantially likely to take place.”

The revival of this lawsuit and its ultimate resolution will deter, I hope, all U.S. firms from helping the Chinazis to systematically destroy innocent people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Haunted by the Specter of Mao

red guard, America, United States, antifa, revolution

“There is a whole intellectual structure, architecture, and, ultimately, strategy bound up with the idea of how to disrupt society, disrupt the West, overthrow the traditional order,” M.L.R. Smith tells Epoch Times.

According to Smith and David Jones, authors of The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left (2022), the conduct of the America’s radical Left resembles that of the Red Guards and others during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s in China.

The authors got the idea for their study from the riots that swept the U.S. after the killing of George Floyd. These rage-filled protests-turned-riots made them think of Maoism:

  • Defacing and toppling of monuments, reminders of the pesky past.
  • Shouting down and “cancelling” speakers. (Sometimes physically as well as verbally assaulting them.)
  • Abject kneeling and self-criticism in response to alleged wrongdoing, including “‘white guilt’ genuflection.”

The parallels are real, even though the scale of the humiliations and destruction that we have seen is nowhere near that of the Cultural Revolution, when millions were tortured and murdered. 

Jones says Maoism was bred in China and hothoused in Paris but “achieved its global appeal in the Ivy League schools of the United States,” where it is manifest in thinking about race and gender.

The authors explore the nature of rage as a motivating force and strategy, “an energy to be harnessed as a mode of power.” This is the fuel of many a revolution, where mob action serves as a kind of open terrorism. Histories and treatises are filled with it.

America’s Founding Fathers feared such rage, hence in their revolution they stated principles in elegant but clear sentences. They expected argument and readily engaged.

But now?You can’t reason with rage.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs national politics & policies

Not Just a Border-Line Case

China, wolves, border, invasion

Should the U.S. Government let soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) enter these United States through the southern border so that they’re in place if and when the Chinese government directs them to undertake sabotage against the United States (perhaps during a Chinese invasion of Taiwan)?

We are not talking about borderline cases of one or two Chinese soldiers a year. The U.S. Border Patrol now acknowledges 347 encounters with Chinese nationals in 2021; 1,987 in 2022; and a whopping 12,533 encounters so far this year!

In a piece for Gatestone Institute, Gordon Chang reports that although some Chinese migrants entering through the southern border are simply “seeking a better life for themselves and their children,” many “are coming to commit acts of sabotage.” These are PLA soldiers.

They can first go to a country like Ecuador, which permits entry without a visa. They can then make their way through jungle before catching a bus to the border. They are often then simply released into the U.S.

Representative Mark Greenn (R-Tenn.) says that he was told by a Border Patrol sector chief that some of the people coming across have “known ties to the PLA.”

Chang quotes war correspondent Michael Yon: “At the Darien Gap, I have seen countless packs of Chinese males of military age, unattached to family groups, and pretending not to understand English. They were all headed to the American border.”

This is consistent with the pattern of Chinese aggression.

So maybe we — and maybe the government whose job is to protect us — should pay attention to this.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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China’s Many Rushdies

China, bounties, crime, censorship, protest

Since when do police place bounties on the heads of former residents who have committed no crime?

Since just now. 

But it depends on how you define “crime.”

For me, to be guilty of a crime you must have committed an objectively definable, willful violation of the rights of others — fraud, robbery, kidnapping, torture, rape, murder. Speech criticizing the crimes of a crime-committing government cannot count as “crime.” To pretend otherwise would be an abuse and usurpation of proper standards of thought.

But the dictatorial Chinese regime is unbound by such considerations.

On July 3, the Hong Kong police, mere lackeys of the mainland government, placed bounties of one million Hong Kong dollars (about $128,000 USD) on the heads of eight pro-democracy dissidents no longer living in Hong Kong.

“We’re absolutely not staging any show or spreading terror,” says top HK police official Steve Li. “We’re enforcing the law.” Oh.

CNN notes that “many of the activists have continued to speak out against what they say is Beijing’s crackdown on their home city’s freedoms and autonomy.”

“What they say” is Beijing’s crackdown? 

Just a smidgen of investigative journalism would enable CNN’s reporters to report, as fact, that there has indeed been a crackdown, that it’s not just “critics” who say that the 2020 National Security Law has been used to destroy the pro-democracy, pro-human rights movement in Hong Kong and “cripple its once vibrant society.”

But I guess folks at CNN dare not risk bounties on their heads, also.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs privacy

The Cuban Missive Crisis

Cuba, China, surveillance

Very soon, maybe, the Chinese government will be able to peruse secret military and other electronic missives being transmitted “throughout the southeastern U.S., where many military bases are located, and monitor U.S. ship traffic,” according to a Wall Street Journal story.

Under an until-now secret agreement between China and Cuba, Cuba will charge China a mere several billion dollars for Cuba’s permission to build the eavesdropping station on Cuban territory.

If cited intelligence is accurate, the planned station would enable China to spy on emails, phone calls, satellite transmissions, and other communications. The data thus scooped up would probably facilitate China-sponsored cyberwarfare and other sabotage, as well as its pursuit of overseas Chinese nationals that the Chinese government wants to keep trapped in China.

Craig Singleton, an analyst for the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says that moving to establish the spy facility “signals a new, escalatory phase in China’s broader defense strategy. The selection of Cuba is also intentionally provocative.”

Perhaps the publicity about the spy station will help to stop it from happening.

John Kirby, a National Security Council spokesman, told the Journal that its story is “inaccurate” without spelling out the inaccuracies. He also said that the U.S. is taking steps to counter Chinese development of such spy infrastructure. “We remain confident that we are able to meet all our security commitments at home and in the region.”

I guess we’ll see. Before it’s too late, I hope.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom media and media people

People Lover

China, children, population

Steven Mosher loves people.

Mosher is a student of China who, according to the bio at his Population Research Institute website, pop.org, “has worked tirelessly since 1979 to fight coercive population control programs. . . .”

In 1979, the Chinese government let him pursue research in a village where he observed many instances of compulsory abortions under the country’s one-child policy. Some of the women were in their eighth or ninth month of pregnancy.

Perhaps the Chinese government expected Mosher to produce rosy-eyed, footnoted rationalizations of what he saw. When he published his unvarnished findings in a Taiwanese magazine, officials complained to the U.S. Embassy and to Stanford University.

Stanford appeased China by denying Mosher his PhD. I note the university’s injustice in part because Mosher tends to omit this detail. But it should not be forgotten.

Back then, he said he “did what was right to do. I told the truth.”

He opposes population control because, in his view, people are a good thing, not a bad thing.

This viewpoint is beautifully conveyed in a video on the pop.org home page, in which Mosher says that people “are the ultimate resource, the one resource that you cannot do without.” The Institute works to expose “the myth of overpopulation” and the violations of human rights that occur in the name of population control.

The prolific scholar argues that people “can become the agents of their own development without having to sacrifice their children in the process.”

My wife and I glad to hear it. We’ll let the kids know.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Look Around

China, war, freedom, slavery

Yesterday marked the 34th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Not in China, where the Communist Party (CCP) has always clubbed down any public remembrance of the thousands murdered on that day by the bullets from the so-called People’s Liberation Army. 

While Hong Kong long witnessed massive June 4 vigils — even under COVID restrictions — that changed after the draconian National Security Law in 2020. Still, this year public silence required the Chinazis to arrest more than 30 Hong Kongers, some for “suspicion of carrying out acts with seditious intent.”

Seems our “leaders” quite quickly forgot about the Butchers of Beijing . . . and only now are waking up to the threat the CCP poses via their embrace of totalitarianism, their military build-up, the biggest since World War II, and their claims to Taiwan as well as the entire South China Sea.

“China has been bullying its neighbors for years,” explains Chris Chappell, host of China Uncensored on Rumble, before adding: “Now its bullying is coming back to bite it.”

Chappell notes that “[e]ven countries that kinda hate each other, like Japan and South Korea, have been teaming up because of the China threat.”

Mr. Chappell offers:

  • “Thanks to China, last year Japan announced a plan to double its military budget.”
  • South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol recently called Taiwan “a global issue” and joined President Biden in “[opposing] any unilateral attempts to change the status quo.”
  • “Australia is beefing up its military — specifically in response to China.”
  • “The Philippines . . . has moved back to closer ties with the United States, allowing the U.S. to expand its military presence there.” 
  • “India is also increasing its defense budget.”

This allied response has been spurred not by U.S. arm-twisting, but good old-fashioned fear. 

Chappell also applauded open collaboration with the U.S. and NATO by South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. But he dubbed NATO’s declaration of China as “a security challenge” “the understatement of the year.”

Attested by the weekend’s near collision of Chinese and U.S. naval vessels in the Taiwan Strait.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

Note: China Uncensored also plays on YouTube, but, as Chappell complains, “YouTube frequently demonetizes, suppresses, and secretly unsubscribes people from this channel.” 

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No Laughing Matter

China, censorship, comedian, comedy

Without freedom of speech, the jester’s art can be perilous.

Chinese comedian Li Haoshi, who performs under the name House, recently did stand-up comedy at a Beijing club, after which, reports Reuters, “an audience member posted online a description of a joke he had made . . . describing it as demeaning to China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).”

That went viral on Chinese social media.

“In the joke,” Reuters explains, “Li recounted seeing two stray dogs he had adopted chase a squirrel and said it had reminded him of the phrase ‘have a good work style, be able to fight and win battles,’ a slogan Chinese President Xi Jinping used in 2013 to praise the PLA’s work ethic.”

Not exactly a ripsnorter, it is hardly biting satire, either — after all, Li steered clear of any mention of Winnie the Pooh.

But no matter. Next thing the funny man’s employer knew, “China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism Bureau said it would fine Shanghai Xiaoguo Culture Media Co 13.35 million yuan and confiscate 1.35 million yuan in ‘illegal gains’ from the firm.”

That’s a cool $2 million U.S. for the ever-so specific crime of “harming society.”

“In response to the fine, Xiaoguo Culture . . . said it had terminated Li’s contract,” and, for good measure if you are a totalitarian, Reuters adds that “Weibo appears to have banned him from posting to his account there.”

“We will never allow any company or individual [to] use the Chinese capital as a stage to wantonly slander the glorious image of the PLA,” declared China’s cultural ministry.

Suffice it to say, China isn’t currently known for its comedy. 

And won’t be until more people perform their own stand-up act.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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