These are tense times to be on the frontlines of democracy. Chinese incursions into Taiwan’s air defence zone has left the island’s residents feeling under siege — besides the 15 planes that entered Taiwanese airspace earlier this week, a Chinese aircraft carrier is carrying out what are called “routine exercises” close to the island.
Taiwan’s military “won’t stand a chance,” if China chooses to invade, an unnamed source told the Chinese state news service Global Times on Friday.
April 4, 2021, Easter Day, was the same day as the Ching Ming Festival in China, also known as Tomb Sweeping Day, the day when the Chinese honor ancestors and families gather to pay respect to the dead. On this day, the Chinese regime quietly opened the grave of former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing, but blocked that of former General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who stepped down because of his opposition to the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. This opening of one and closing of another released an important political signal.
In April, US President Joe Biden issued his Interim National Security Strategic Guidance. Across the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson presented the Integrated Review of Security, Defense, Development and Foreign Policy to parliament. Both leaders expressed concern over the increasing challenges in the gray zone and promised measures to respond more effectively.
The gray zone is the space between peace and war involving coercive actions that fall outside normal geopolitical competition between states but do not reach the level of armed conflict. Actions in the gray zone are conducted by states often using proxies including terrorists, and also by terrorist organizations in their own right. Gray zone actions are aggressive and often ambiguous, deniable and opaque. They are intended to damage, coerce or influence, to destabilise target states or undermine the international status quo. They usually seek to avoid a significant military response, though are often designed to intimidate and deter a target state by threatening further escalation.
Beijing has accused the US of causing humanitarian disasters through military intervention and proxy wars around the globe in a report by the Chinese state-backed human rights organization, published by Xinhua on Friday.
The report by the China Society for Human Rights Studies (CSHRS) lambasted US aggression and hegemony and rejected the US claim of “humanitarian intervention” behind its involvement in other countries’ affairs.
Peter Thiel, tech billionaire, has turned gamekeeper again. Though he’s an enthusiast for Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general, he’s just uttered the following warning at an event for the Richard Nixon Foundation…
“Even though I'm a pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin maximalist person, I do wonder whether if at this point Bitcoin should also be thought of in part as a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S.” says @Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel.
More on cryptocurrencies from The #NixonSeminar: pic.twitter.com/sIUQTQEWgr
— Richard Nixon Foundation (@nixonfoundation) April 7, 2021
The Chinese government is boycotting Western clothing retailers for expressing concerns about forced labor in Xinjiang, China’s biggest region. The companies are being pressured to scrub from their websites language about corporate policies on human rights, reverse decisions to stop buying cotton produced in Xinjian, and remove maps that depict Taiwan as an independent country.
The escalating fight comes after the European Union and the United Kingdom on March 22 joined the United States and Canada to impose sanctions on Chinese officials for human rights abuses in Xinjiang, a remote autonomous region in northwestern China.
The NBA is holding “ongoing business discussions” with China Central Television, the Chinese Communist Party’s chief propaganda network known for airing forced confessions of domestic dissidents.
The league told Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) in a March 30 letter that it is exploring a renewed partnership with the regime’s television organ. While the NBA has yet to finalize a deal for the 2021 season, deputy commissioner Mark Tatum wrote, the two sides are in “ongoing business discussions.” Tatum also revealed that NBA China CEO Michael Ma—whose father served as a top executive for CCTV Sports—is taking an “active role” in the negotiations.
Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel slammed Silicon Valley leaders for outsourcing vital technologies to the Chinese Communist Party.
Joined by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former national security adviser Robert O’Brien at a Tuesday Seminar On China, Thiel said his peers in the tech industry act as “useful idiots” for the interests of Beijing by transferring innovative American technology to the oppressive regime. The entrepreneur and founder of PayPal pointed to companies such as Google that export artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology to China, tools used to oversee the genocide of Uyghur Muslims in Western China.
At least two journalists who worked for Chinese state-controlled media came to the United States as visiting students and became organizers for a progressive activist group behind the “Stop AAPI Hate” movement, running outreach efforts to shape the political opinions of first-generation Chinese-American immigrants in California.
Solar material production skyrocketed in Xinjiang after Communist nation opened labor camps
An unlikely coalition of Republicans, Democrats, and labor leaders are concerned by the solar industry’s dependence on goods linked to Chinese forced labor camps, a development that threatens President Joe Biden’s push for a green energy economy.
Western China’s Xinjiang region—where China is forcing more than a million Uyghurs into brutal forced labor regimes—dominates the solar sector’s supply chain. Nearly half of the world’s polysilicon, a raw material crucial to producing solar cells, comes from Xinjiang. That economic dependency is attracting the attention of a bipartisan group of lawmakers and union heads, who cite credible reports linking the solar industry to the modern-day slavery regime.
Almost 200 British academics from 20 unnamed UK universities are being investigated for possibly sharing British technology with China that could be used in the Chinese government’s repression of minorities and dissidents, according to a recent news report by The Times. The revelation came shortly after the University of Manchester cancelled a research partnership with China Electronics Technology Group (CETC).
The cancellation came after the university was warned that CETC is, “one of the main architects of the Chinese government’s surveillance state in Xinjiang, China, providing both technology and infrastructure that is being used for the identity-based persecution of more than one million people, predominantly Uyghur Muslims”. The university said their research collaboration with CETC aimed to “significantly advance the field of radio astronomy” and that it had been unaware of CETC’s alleged role in the persecution of Uyghurs.
“It’s the largest American jobs investment since World War II,” President Joe Biden said on March 31 in Pittsburgh, as he announced his $2.3 trillion infrastructure program. “It will create millions of jobs, good-paying jobs.”
He is correct. Biden will, in his American Jobs Plan as it’s formally called, create millions of good-paying jobs. Many of those jobs, however, will not be in America,. For three principal reasons, his jobs plan will create full employment in China.
U.S. President Joe Biden said on April 6 that he has not talked to Chinese leader Xi Jinping about the origins of the CCP virus, which causes the disease COVID-19.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Biden was asked: “Have you had the chance to ask him [Xi] if these reports are true, that China maybe misled the world at the beginning?”
“I have not had that conversation with President Xi,” Biden said.
There was once a time when the official stance of the People’s Republic of China towards Canada was indifference spiced with the occasional Norman Bethune reference. Those days are now firmly over: Under the rule of Xi Jinping, China has adopted an openly aggressive stance towards the Maple Leaf, a position represented most notably by the imprisonment of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in apparent retaliation for Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou.
The Chinese Communist Party has been busy pushing through electoral and legal ‘reforms’ in Hong Kong that give it unprecedented powers.
The changes to Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (LegCo) are designed to ensure that a chamber that at least once provided a platform for pro-democracy politicians becomes merely a rubber-stamping operation, acting in the interests of China and big business.
