United Front groups in Canada helped Beijing stockpile coronavirus safety supplies

petros

The Central Scrutinizer
Nov 21, 2008
108,893
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Low Earth Orbit
Keep up with the posts. Any media that ruffles the CBC's feather and completely pisses off the CCP is more than welcome.
 

Ellanjay

Council Member
Apr 11, 2020
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https://youtu.be/b-Py1tJghQc


Al Gore, John Kerry, Other World Leaders Call for Radical ‘Great Reset’ of Capitalism

Commentary by Justin Haskins
July 4, 2020



The COVID-19 pandemic has produced unprecedented economic conditions. Around the world, millions of people have lost their jobs, thousands of businesses have closed, and travel has been limited. The United States has not experienced an economic calamity of this magnitude since the Great Depression.

But one man’s economic depression can be another man’s “golden opportunity”—the words used by Prince Charles at a recent meeting of world powers seeking to impose a “Great Reset” of the global economy.

For Charles and other powerful international leaders, the present economic chaos offers a chance to remake nations across the planet, because desperate populations are now “more receptive to big visions of change.”

“We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis—its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change,” said Charles, adding later, “It is an opportunity we have never had before and may never have again.”

Of course, he’s right. The current state of affairs is so chaotic that virtually anything is possible, including a total transformation of capitalism, and that’s precisely what Charles and his allies want.

At a virtual meeting held by the World Economic Forum (WEF) earlier in June, global leaders, including Charles, gathered together to call for a Great Reset of capitalism.

Among those who spoke at the event or expressed their support separately for the plan were Ma Jun, the chairman of the Green Finance Committee at the China Society for Finance and Banking and a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the People’s Bank of China; António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations; powerful union leaders; activists from groups like Greenpeace International; CEOs and presidents of large corporations such as BP, MasterCard, and Microsoft; and officials from the International Monetary Fund.

Many of those at the meeting support the elimination of the world’s current capitalist system and have promoted socialist policies—such as wealth taxes, Green New Deal-like programs, and national job guarantees and government incomes. But the person who has most clearly articulated the vision of the Great Reset is Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum and one of the Reset’s most ardent supporters.

“Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed,” wrote Schwab in an article published on WEF’s website. “In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”

Schwab also said that “all aspects of our societies and economies” must be “revamped,” “from education to social contracts and working conditions.”

Of course, the elites at the World Economic Forum know that the COVID-19 pandemic won’t last forever, so how do they plan to pressure thousands of government officials and billions of people into adopting their vision for the Global Reset? By turning to yet another “crisis”: climate change.

In presentation after presentation, speakers at the WEF’s June event used climate change and environmental sustainability as a primary justification for a permanent, global economic overhaul.

“The threat of climate change has been more gradual—but its devastating reality for many people and their livelihoods around the world, and its ever greater potential to disrupt, surpasses even that of COVID-19,” Prince Charles said.

As terrifying as all of this sounds to those of us who support free markets and property rights, the worst has yet to come. At the June event, the World Economic Forum announced that the Great Reset will be the focus of its next highly influential annual meeting in Davos, scheduled for January 2021.

At the Davos meeting, powerful business leaders, government officials, activists, and academics will promote the Great Reset and coordinate a massive worldwide campaign to promote their agenda with a large youth activist organization called the Global Shapers Community.

The Global Shapers are present in 400 cities around the world and have close ties to Al Gore’s radical Climate Reality Project, which has already trained more than 1,300 global shapers in climate activism.

Gore, who serves on the World Economic Forum’s Board of Trustees, has a vast network of climate activists of his own—the Climate Reality Leadership Corps—who could also be used to promote the Great Reset, especially through strikes and protests. Climate Reality Leaders played a key role in the highly publicized “climate strikes” that occurred throughout world in 2019.

In a June 19 interview with NBC’s “Today” television show, Gore endorsed the Great Reset, making him the first notable U.S. political figure to do so.

But Gore isn’t alone. Since Gore’s interview, John Kerry, the co-chair of Joe Biden’s climate change “unity task force,” has also promoted the “Great Reset” and even encouraged the World Economic Forum to continue leading on the effort.

“This is a big moment,” Kerry said. “The World Economic Forum … is really going to have to play a front and center role in refining the Great Reset to deal with climate change and inequity—all of which is being laid bare as a consequence of COVID-19.”

With Gore and Kerry already actively promoting the Great Reset, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a key part of the Left’s platform—and potentially Biden’s, too—for 2020 and beyond.

This is a remarkable and dangerous moment for freedom, both in the United States and across the planet. Not only has government used the COVID-19 pandemic to increase its power, world leaders are now planning to expand it dramatically in the years to come through their Great Reset reforms.

If we don’t stop this radical move toward collectivism and the decimation of capitalism, the world’s freedom movement might never recover.

Justin Haskins (Jhaskins@heartland.org) is editor-in-chief of StoppingSocialism.com and the editorial director of The Heartland Institute.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/al-go...adical-great-reset-of-capitalism_3412203.html
 

petros

The Central Scrutinizer
Nov 21, 2008
108,893
11,179
113
Low Earth Orbit
I tried reading a few but they are too long and it requires caring what happens in CHina. But upsetting CBC is always good.
What happens in China impacts you immensely. Things are not stable right now.

When the ships and bombers open fire on Taipei, dont be surprised.
 

Ellanjay

Council Member
Apr 11, 2020
1,722
250
83
https://youtu.be/CsY5xlxmrkY

From Coronavirus Crisis to Economic Crisis

July 10, 2020 | By Yiming (Minghui.org)


The coronavirus (Wuhan pneumonia) crisis is not yet over, and the people in China are already being hit with an even more severe crisis—the economy. Housing prices and rental incomes have fallen, but monthly repayments to the bank remain the same; wages and bonuses have decreased, but school tuition fees and medical expenses for the elderly remain the same. Even as the people in China are struggling to make ends meet, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) generously forgave massive loan repayments from 77 countries. What is going on?

Life in Lockdown

In China, when the coronavirus infection breaks out in a city, it is immediately placed under lockdown and treated like a war zone. Residents in Wuhan (Hubei Province), Jilin and Shulan (Jilin Province) know only too well how terrible life can be under that kind of a lockdown.

Beijing also fell victim in mid-June when a cluster of infections broke out at Xinfadi Wholesale Market in the Fengtai District.

A netizen named “rice grain” posted on social media on June 17, appealing for help. She said that she lives in a 'high-risk' neighborhood near Xinfadi Wholesale Market and that it was placed under lockdown beginning at 3:00 a.m. on June 13. “Many families have run out of food. It might be bearable for strong adults, but what about young children and the elderly?” “At the beginning, we were still able to order takeaway, but it is impossible now because the roads are blocked. Relatives and friends cannot help either, because no one is allowed any movement.

“Today is the fifth day of the quarantine, and we have run out of gas at home, too,” she said. “We're really desperate and need help urgently!”

Another netizen said in a posting, “We are struggling to make ends meet. What can we do? Prices have skyrocketed, while the standard of living is getting worse. It's like living in jail. I truly hope that people stop following the Chinese Communist Party. We believed what they told us and didn't stock up on food for the crisis, and now we are not even allowed to withdraw our own money from the bank beyond the limit they have set. They have never cared about people's livelihood!”

Surge in Unemployment

According to Free Radio Asia, a video shared on social media on June 4 featured a scholar warning people in China: “Many Chinese are gloating over the recent rioting in the U.S., unaware of the seriousness of the unemployment problem in China. Without U.S. demand for goods from China, at least 10% of the labor force in China will lose their jobs. The closing down of businesses is only the beginning.”

Wu Hao, a businessman from Jiangsu Province, told Free Radio Asia that everyday life in China would be much worse than what the ordinary person could imagine. “It’s not as simple as just 'tightening your belt.’ In China today, everybody is in debt, especially young people born in the 1980s and 1990s. Many live on overdrawn credit cards, with an average debt of 30,000 to 50,000 yuan. Some have debts of more than 100,000 yuan. Now when they lose their jobs, they cannot even pay the interest on their credit cards.”

Even though the CCP re-opened the economy on March 1, it has provided no assistance to medium and small businesses, causing them to close down in large numbers. These medium and small businesses employed 70% of the urban workforce. When these enterprises closed down, the number of unemployed soared, and there is no solution in sight.

According to a report by Bloomberg News on May 21 that the Pearl River Delta, a major engine for China's economic growth since its open-up reforms, is currently experiencing a wave of unemployment. Some manufacturers in Dongguan said that nine out of ten factories in the region have closed down and that the ones still open are only able to offer wages at a level of ten years ago.

While private enterprises are suffering, the CCP's state-owned enterprises and financial institutions have received lavish funds from the public purse. Many local governments started to sell public land again at soaring prices, which has, in turn, pushed housing prices to new highs. In fact, what they are doing is none other thanusing money from state banks for speculative land deals to boost the CCP's GDP figures.

For ordinary people, the rashly printed banknotes will only decrease the value of their money in the bank. At the same time, the CCP initiated a pilot policy to restrict the withdrawal of large amounts of cash, which has caused a bit of a panic. Nervous bank-runs have occurred in a number of cities.

Liu Chenjie, chief economist at Shenzhen Wangzheng Asset Management Co. Ltd. said the coronavirus outbreak might result in 205 million people in China losing their jobs. That is about a quarter of the working population (775 million) out of work, a rate much higher than 6.2% announced by the CCP government.

It is recognized that China's official data only includes the 442 million urban labor force, excluding the 290 million migrant workers from the rural areas, who are more vulnerable to economic fluctuations. In addition, the CCP only uses about 120,000 households in its monthly survey, which only accounts for 0.03% of the urban labor force. It is not surprising that the CCP's official unemployment rate cannot be taken as truth.

“Throwing Big Money Around”

The CCP has been throwing large amounts of money around in recent years, targeting countries and institutions perceived to be useful in enhancing its global standing and image on the international stage.

During the pandemic crisis, unlike Western countries or Japan and Taiwan, which implemented large-scale relief programs, offering cash relief to businesses and individuals, the CCP is again throwing money around while its own people are having a tough time.

On June 7, the CCP regime announced that it would suspend debt repayment for 77 developing countries and regions, saying that, through the pandemic, their “friends are closer and their circle of friends is bigger.” Experts believe the CCP's conduct is nothing less than outright bribery.

According to data from China’s mouthpiece Global Times, in the past four years, China's foreign aid has reached 6.0365 trillion yuan.

Someone calculated that, if that money were evenly distributed to 3,000 publicly-traded companies in China, each would receive 2 billion yuan. If it were lent to domestic small and micro enterprises, it could solve virtually all the financial problems of 10 million enterprises, each receiving 600,000 yuan. If it were funneled to agriculture, rural areas, and farmers, 100 million people who live in rural areas could maintain a reasonable standard of living, with an average of 60,000 yuan per household.

None of the above, however, seems of interest to the CCP decision-makers. Their top priority is clearly on expanding the Party’s control and dominance worldwide, and “throwing big money around” appears to be one of their strategies to gain “buddy friendship” and support.

Truth be told, the CCP has never been more isolated than now as a result of its unscrupulous conduct in concealing critical information on the source and spread of the coronavirus, in shirking responsibility by spreading disinformation and making groundless accusations, and its enacting the highly controversial “Hong Kong National Security Law.”

Barring Africans from restaurants, supermarkets, and other public places in Guangzhou prompted an unusual wave of anger against the CCP regime in its “buddy friends” countries such as Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria.

Some politicians in European countries that have been very close to the CCP regime have also lashed out.

For example, Italy's nationalist politician Matteo Salvini said that if China deliberately covered up the initial spread of the coronavirus, it would amount to a crime against humanity: “Those who have infected the world cannot be made saviors.”

Parliamentarians from eight countries and members of the European Parliament have recently formed the “Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC)” to jointly counter the CCP's threats to global trade, security, and human rights. The alliance is sometimes referred to as the “New Eight-Nation Alliance.”

From Coronavirus Crisis to Economic Crisis

In most countries, the legitimacy of a government is based on its citizens’ approval. In the face of a pandemic, as long as the government does what it should, people will understand even if there are disasters and will work with the government to deal with them.

In the CCP's totalitarian regime, decisions are made by a handful of individuals, handpicked by previous authorities. The general population is not consulted, nor is their approval sought or required. In addition to systematic brainwashing, economic development has become another “legal basis” for the CCP's governance.

However, this “economic backing” has started to crumble as foreign businesses are moving their production lines out of China, one after the other, due to concerns over rising labor costs, stricter environmental regulations, and the uncertainty of a trade war between China and the U.S. The coronavirus crisis has only quickened the pace of such relocating.

According to a report on Nikkei Asian News on June 22, Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motors, Kia Motors, and LG Electronics are moving production out of China in an effort to reduce an over-dependence that has left them vulnerable to a combination of local competition, geopolitical friction, and economic headwinds. Hyundai Motors has temporarily suspended operations at a plant in Beijing that is capable of churning out 300,000 vehicles a year. Affiliate Kia will end production of Kia-branded autos at a Jiangsu Province factory late this month. Appliance maker LG Electronics recently moved all production of U.S.-bound refrigerators at a facility in Zhejiang Province to South Korea.

By May, at least 180 Taiwanese companies have brought manufacturing back from China, investing NT$751 billion (A$39.01 billion) on its own soil.

Surveys conducted by UBS, a Swiss bank, showed that among its over 1,000 respondents from senior executives of big companies from America, China and northern Asia (eg, Japan and South Korea), 76% of American companies, 85% of northern Asian ones, and even 60% of Chinese firms said that they had already moved or were planning to move some production out of China.

Western governments have also become aware of the underlying fragility of China's economy and the untrustworthiness of the CCP regime, in particular its dissembling on the origins of the pandemic, and expressed great concern about the danger and vulnerability of having their supply chains for critical products anchored in a country like China, which does not follow the same principles and ethical values when it comes to doing business.

All this is an indication that the era of China as the “World’s Factory” is drawing to an end, and its economy, which relies largely on foreign investment and exportation, is on the road to ruin.

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/7/10/185820.html
 

Ellanjay

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Apr 11, 2020
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https://youtu.be/_gOQl4cvafc

Despite ‘Decoupling’ Narrative, Companies Continue Flocking to China

Lawmakers must do more to encourage shift in corporate behavior

Commentary by Fan Yu
July 12, 2020


“Decoupling” from China seems easier said than done.

Despite signals from U.S. political leaders to reduce economic and financial affiliation with the Chinese regime, in practice, U.S. financial institutions seem to be edging ever closer to Beijing.

On the ground, evidence suggests that there’s more work to be done on the “decoupling” front. U.S. companies’ investments in China continue at an elevated level, and financial firms are planning to expand their operational footprint within China.

President Donald Trump suggested in a mid-June tweet that “a complete decoupling from China” was on the table. Since then, administration officials have been careful to strike a more nuanced tone, given the precarious position of the phase one trade deal. Regardless, U.S. foreign policy has been trending toward cooler relations with Beijing on the economic front, with the administration barring federal pension funds from investing in Chinese companies, and ongoing investigations into Chinese companies listing their stock on U.S. markets.

Washington’s recent sanctions of top Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials over their involvement in persecuting Xinjiang Uyghur Muslims is just the latest policy action in that trend.

Reactions from China to date have been largely dismissive of decoupling, but Chinese commentators are increasingly preparing for the deterioration of economic relations. Zhou Li, a former deputy head of the Chinese Communist Party’s International Liaison Department, recently caused a stir when he wrote an article warning that China must prepare for the consequences of economic decoupling, including shrinking foreign demand for Chinese goods, disruption of supply chains, and limited access to the U.S. dollar in foreign transactions.

Zhou’s article appeared in a journal published by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University.

Investment and Trade Realities

Despite the position of U.S. officials, on-the-ground investments and financial exchange are continuing unabated. With few legal or economic ramifications in place, it has been difficult to reverse the momentum of companies expanding into China.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) into China has remained relatively stable over the past 10 years. U.S. FDI into China was $14 billion in 2019, slightly above 2018 levels, according to a recent report by the Rhodium Group.

“Much of the stability of U.S. investment into China was due to large multi-year greenfield projects geared towards meeting local demand in areas such as automotive and entertainment,” Rhodium stated.

The year 2020 was shaping up to be a big one for U.S. corporate investments in China until the onset of the CCP virus pandemic. While China’s outbound FDI into the United States halted in the first quarter, U.S. FDI into China continued with $2.3 billion of announced projects, only slightly behind the $2.9 billion quarterly pace from last year.

The data supports an April survey conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with a majority (70 percent) of respondents stating that there are currently no plans to move supply chains out of China. Having said that, 52 percent of respondents said it was too early to tell whether they will do so in the future, while 8 percent said they would move out of China.

So as of April 2020, most businesses were either on the fence or weren’t ready to commit.

China’s Market ‘Liberalization’ Tempts US Financial Firms

For financial institutions, the siren call of China’s market is a huge hurdle. Financial institutions, unlike companies in other industries, were mostly locked out of the mainland Chinese market until recently.

Last year, Beijing loosened longstanding restrictions on foreign ownership of the Chinese financial sector, including brokerages, securities firms, and insurance companies. This recently has led to a huge increase in the number of U.S. companies flocking into China to take majority ownership of their local joint ventures.

Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs received approval in March to take majority ownership of its Chinese joint venture, Goldman Sachs Gao Hua Securities Co. It previously had only a 33 percent stake. JPMorgan Chase received permission from Beijing regulators in June to begin operating a fully foreign-owned Chinese subsidiary.

On the payments front, credit card issuer American Express in June received approval to operate a Chinese credit card clearing operation, becoming the first U.S. credit card issuer to enter the Chinese market. Competitors MasterCard and Visa have also applied and are awaiting permission.

PayPal last year became the first foreign digital payments provider to receive permission to operate in China, a market currently dominated by Chinese technology giants Tencent and Alibaba.

One area that was massively holding back China’s onshore capital markets was the quality of its rating agencies. Earlier this year, Fitch Ratings received a license to start a Chinese subsidiary to rate bonds in China, following the footsteps of S&P Global last year.

The increased willingness to open China’s onshore financial markets to foreign companies may be one reason Beijing isn’t budging on imposing the national security law over Hong Kong. With enough foreign banks, investment firms, and payment providers in its fold, Beijing has less need for Hong Kong to act as a financial pipeline between China and the West.

The reality is, U.S. officials and lawmakers have much work to do to keep U.S. companies home. If the administration is serious about reversing this ongoing trend, legislation and economic incentives—beyond rhetoric or moral obligation—must be established. And quickly.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/despi...anies-continue-flocking-to-china_3420930.html
 

Ellanjay

Council Member
Apr 11, 2020
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https://youtu.be/PzvLezeJRRw


From Ancient Times to Modern Day, Religious Persecution Has Invited Dire Consequences

July 19, 2020 | By Jian Yi and Zhen Yan(Minghui.org)

History is filled with persecutions of righteous faiths being met with plagues, natural disasters, and other consequences. Below are a few examples.

Fate of a Young Emperor

The Buddhist book Fuyuan Zhulin from the Tang Dynasty recorded the story of Zhao Wenchang, a high-ranking official in the Sui Dynasty, who suddenly died in 591 AD. Noticing his heart was still warm, his family did not put him in the coffin right away. Zhao later came back to life and told his family what he had experienced.

Zhao went to hell and saw its king, Yan Luo. Impressed by his familiarity with Buddhist scriptures, the king allowed him to return to the world of the living. While in hell, Zhao saw two people. One was Bai Qi, an infamous general during the Warring States Period who gave orders to kill 450,000 enemy soldiers during the Battle of Changping (261 BC), including 200,000 who had surrendered. Bai was detained in a cesspool with his hair visible on the surface. Over 800 years had passed, and he was still suffering for his karma from killing innocent lives.

Another person Zhao saw was Yuwen Yong. Also known as Emperor Wu of Northern Zhou, he reigned from 561 to 578 AD. After becoming emperor at the age of 18, he worked diligently and thriftily. However, he decided to eradicate both Buddhism and Taoism. In 577 AD, he ordered the destruction of Buddha statues and scriptures in about 40,000 temples, forcible secularization of three million monks and nuns, and confiscation of their lands.

The next year, the emperor became severely ill and his entire body festered. He died miserably at 35. Within three years, the dynasty ended and was replaced by the Sui Dynasty.

When the former emperor saw Zhao in hell, he told him that many of his wrongdoings could be pardoned by the divine, but his suppression of Buddhism and Taoism could not. He hoped Zhao could tell the Sui emperor to do more good deeds on his behalf so that his pain could be relieved.

Three More Emperors Meet Similar Fates

The above story was recorded in Taiping Guangji, a renowned history book compiled in the Song Dynasty. Other than Emperor Wu of Northern Zhou, three other emperors in Chinese history also suppressed Buddhism. All of them faced serious consequences.

Tuoba Tao (Emperor Taiwu of Northern Wei, who reigned between 423 and 452) died at 45, and his two sons were also killed. Senior official Cui Hao, who recommended for the emperor to kill all monks, was whipped and had ten guards urinate in his mouth before he was executed. Similarly, Emperor Wuzong of Tang tried to eradicate Buddhism five years after his reign (845), destroying over 40,000 temples. He died at 32 the next year in extreme pain, with a swollen head, bulging eyes, and ulcers all over.

Cai Rong, also known as Emperor Shizong of Later Zhou, met a similar fate. One year after becoming emperor, he gave orders in 955 to suppress Buddhism. More than 30,000 temples were demolished as a result. Zhenzhou (in today’s Hebei Province) had a Bodhisattva Guanyin statue that no one dared to touch. The emperor personally took an ax to the statue’s chest. Four years later, he died at 39 with ulcers on his chest.

Persecution of Christianity in Ancient Rome

After the Great Fire of Rome in July 64 AD, Nero accused innocent Christians of arson. He and other Roman emperors ordered for Christians to be put in arenas to feed the lions or be burnt as human torches in the garden. Determined believers were detained and tortured.

“They were covered with the hides of wild beasts, and worried to death by dogs, or nailed to crosses, or set fire to, and when the day waned, burned to serve for the evening lights,” wrote Annals by Roman historian Tacitus, who was a boy at the time. “Nero offered his own garden players for the spectacle, and exhibited a Circensian game, indiscriminately mingling with the common people in the dress of a charioteer, or else standing in his chariot.”

Four years later, Nero was declared a public enemy and died in 68 AD. But the persecution of Christians continued. Historians have documented numerous plagues in the Roman Empire. Among them, the Antonine Plague (165-180) alone killed about five million people, while the Plague of Cyprian (250-271) took the lives of 5,000 in Rome alone. The Justinian plague (541-542), on the other hand, led to an estimated 30-50 million deaths.

John of Ephesus, bishop and historian, witnessed the Justinian plague and described in Part 2 of Chronicle:

—staging-posts on the roads full of darkness and solitude filling with fright everyone who happened to enter and leave them;—cattle abandoned and roaming scattered over the mountains with nobody to gather them;—flocks of sheep, goats, oxen and pigs which had become like wild animals, having forgotten [life in] a cultivated land and the human voice which used to lead them;—areas that were tilled and full of all kinds of fruits [which] had become overripe and fallen for lack of anyone to gather [them];

John wrote that people could remember the terror and learn from these lessons. By being wiser, they would be able to stay away from these troubles and suffering.

Modern China

In China, the biggest persecution of belief is the suppression of Falun Gong, a meditation discipline based on the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance.

Since July 1999, tens of millions of Falun Gong practitioners have been persecuted and discriminated against in China. A large number have been detained, imprisoned, and tortured for their belief. Many have also been subjected to psychiatric abuse and forced organ harvesting.

Mr. Wang Xinchun, a resident in Heilongjiang Province, was detained and harassed countless times for upholding his faith in Falun Gong. When the police arrested him in January 2002, Wang fell in a river, and both of his feet were frozen. The police forced him to put his feet in warm water, which caused him to lose both feet at 26.

After continued detention, threats, and torture, Mr. Wang died miserably at 43 in April 2019. Both his parents died of stress and grief.

Another tragedy was that of Mr. Ding Gangzi in Hebei Province. While detained, he was beaten, shocked with electric batons, cuffed and shackled, and malnourished. The guards ignored him when he was in critical condition. Mr. Ding died at 47 on June 11, 2001.

The guards then took Mr. Ding’s body, still in handcuffs and foot shackles, to the county hospital, falsely claiming that he needed emergency treatment. The hospital determined that Mr. Ding had died days prior. Because his corpse was decomposing and attracting flies, the hospital wanted to send it straight to the morgue. However, the police forced the doctors to “resuscitate” him and give him infusions. The doctors pretended to treat the patient and found that he had “no breathing, no heartbeat, and no returned blood during transfusion.” The police also forced the doctors to provide false evidence by filling out a report claiming Mr. Ding “died after failed emergency treatment.”

SARS broke out in China in 2003, followed by the novel coronavirus in late 2019. If history is any indication, these epidemics did not occur without a reason. Instead of learning from history, the Chinese Communist Party has intensified its persecution of Falun Gong amid the coronavirus pandemic. In the first half of 2020 alone, 5,313 practitioners were targeted for their faith, and some of them were arrested for telling people that the CCP has been using the same cover-up tactics in its handling of the outbreak as in its persecution of Falun Gong.

We hope that people can see through the CCP's deceit and stand up against the persecution so as to have a safe way out of the pandemic.

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/7/19/185930.html
 

Ellanjay

Council Member
Apr 11, 2020
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https://youtu.be/5bcI0KMaqW4

Sanction the Leaders of the Chinese Communist Party—Then Work Downwards

All members of the CCP are complicit in its crimes at home and abroad

Commentary by Steven W. Mosher
July 20, 2020, Updated July 21, 2020


On July 16, William Barr gave the speech I have been waiting 25 years to hear.

The U.S. attorney general flatly declared that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seeks “to overthrow the rules-based international system and to make the world safe for dictatorship. How the United States responds to this challenge will … determine whether the United States and its liberal democratic allies will continue to shape their own destiny or whether the CCP and its autocratic tributaries will control the future.”

Using some of the toughest language ever used by any U.S. official, Barr described the People’s Republic of China’s attack on the United States as “an economic blitzkrieg—an aggressive, orchestrated, whole-of-government … campaign to seize the commanding heights of the global economy and to surpass the United States as the world’s preeminent superpower. … The PRC’s predatory economic policies are succeeding. … China overtook the United States in manufacturing output in 2010. The PRC is now the world’s ‘arsenal of dictatorship.’”

Our struggle with the CCP isn’t limited to economics and trade, Barr went on to suggest, but threatens the very existence of the United States itself.

“The CCP has launched an orchestrated campaign, across all of its many tentacles in Chinese government and society, to exploit the openness of [U.S.] institutions in order to destroy them.”

He closed by reiterating “the threat that the Chinese Communist Party poses not only to our way of life, but to our very lives and livelihoods,” urging Americans to “stand together … in resisting the Chinese Communist Party’s corrupt and dictatorial rule.”

The China threat that Barr’s words outlined is one we have been living with for some decades now. But until Trump took office, few Americans of influence—out of fear, greed, or simple ignorance—had openly acknowledged it. Those of us who did, such as Peter Navarro, Gordon Chang, and myself, were generally dismissed as fear mongers.

The fact is that the CCP is, and has always been, unutterably hostile to every aspect of American life. It’s not just that they’ve rejected the free market and democratic rule, but rather that they’re actively seeking to undermine and destroy it. We know—because they have said so—that they’re the sworn enemy of every aspect of the liberal democratic order, from human rights and civil society to freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

But although Barr laid out, perhaps more clearly than any official up to now, the deadly threat that America faces, he was careful to identify our adversary as the Chinese Communist Party and not the people it oppresses: “The CCP rules with an iron fist over one of the great ancient civilizations of the world. It seeks to leverage the immense power, productivity, and ingenuity of the Chinese people to overthrow the rules-based international system and to make the world safe for dictatorship.”

The attorney general even intimated that the day would come when the CCP no longer ruled China, telling Americans that they should “reevaluate their relationship with China, so long as it continues to be ruled by the Communist Party.”

Working Toward Regime Change

Now, I believe that the Red Dynasty that currently rules China will one day soon come to an end, and that the United States should be proactively working toward that end. It’s not enough to talk in general terms about the promotion of human rights and democracy in China. We need robust programs, specifically directed at the weaknesses of the CCP, to bring about its demise.

Working for regime change in China is, at the most basic level, a matter of simple reciprocity. If the policy of the CCP is to undermine and destroy the U.S. economy and its democratic institutions—which, as Barr indicated, it clearly is—then our China policy ought to mirror that. It should be focused on the destruction of the CCP, along with the dissolution of the political and economic institutions through which it controls China and preys on its people.

One of the most efficacious ways to accomplish this, in my view, is to impose sanctions on a widening number of CCP officials and their immediate family members, while encouraging our allies to do likewise. Denying visas to leading CCP officials and their families, while confiscating any assets they hold in the United States, is an appropriate punishment for the crimes they have committed against the Chinese people and the world.

Such sanctions would also sow rancor and division within the ranks of the larger Party, as well as drive a wedge between the Party and the Chinese people, by exposing truly massive corruption.

It’s widely known that many members of the criminal enterprise known as the CCP engage in what might be called “international money laundering.” Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of CCP officials have over the years moved some of their ill-gotten gains offshore as “insurance” against their own political downfall, or against the collapse of the CCP itself.

China expert Jonathan Manthorpe estimates that some $1 trillion has been “spirited out of China by Communist Party leaders and their hangers-on” for the purpose of hiding their assets “in stable overseas havens like Canada, the United States, Australia or Europe.” I believe this number may well underestimate the real amount.

These funds are accompanied by family members, who are tasked with watching over the family’s overseas “investments,” and creating a safe haven for the officials themselves if it’s ever necessary for them to flee the country. I would venture to say that each and every one of the 25 members of the Politburo has a family member in the United States or another Western country. Even CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping’s own daughter is a graduate of Harvard University, and is said by some to be pursuing a graduate degree there even now.

The same is true of countless other CCP officials at every level of government. The former spokesman of the Foreign Ministry, Geng Shuang, had a child attending school in the United States while he was, on a daily basis, denouncing the United States. If the visas of these family members are revoked, and their assets confiscated, it will hit home in a way that few other U.S. actions would.

The good news is that the sanctioning of CCP officials, in this case for egregious human rights violations against Xinjiang Uyghurs, has already begun. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in conjunction with the U.S. Treasury Department, announced on July 9 that Chen Quanguo, the Party secretary of Xinjiang, and two other CCP officials would no longer be welcome in the United States. A fourth official also faced sanctions. The sanctioning of Chen was especially significant since, as a member of the 25-man Politburo, he’s one of the CCP’s top leaders.

The CCP retaliated—predictably—with sanctions of its own against an identical number of Americans. This new “gang of four” are Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom Sam Brownback. (Curiously, they’re all Republicans. Not a single member of the Democratic Party is being sanctioned.)

China’s sanctions are merely symbolic, of course, since the “gang of four” have no interest in traveling to, much less investing in, China. America’s sanctions, on the other hand, have real bite, since some of the CCP officials sanctioned probably do have homes and bank accounts in the United States, along with family members to oversee them. The sanctioning of Politburo member Chen, in particular, must have shocked its 24 other members, who now understand that their assets in, and access to, the United States is no longer assured.

Perhaps this explains why the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman, after sanctioning the “gang of four,” seemed so eager to suggest that the two sides had now reached closure.

“We don’t plan any further sanctions,” she said, sounding plaintive, “and we hope the American side doesn’t either.”

We have only begun to sanction, we should say in response.

But I would counsel those making China policy not to waste everyone’s time by sanctioning low-level, or even mid-level, officials.

The authors of the CCP virus pandemic and the authors of the Uyghur genocide are one and the same. And they aren’t the heads of Chinese companies like Huawei, or provincial-level officials in Xinjiang. Rather, they are the members of the Politburo and, most importantly, Xi himself. Power in China is concentrated in the hands of very few, and it’s those few who should first be sanctioned.

So let’s start with the Politburo and take away the assets that they and their family members have stashed overseas. What better way to illustrate to the Chinese people how the highest leaders of the CCP have pillaged their own country and people than by confiscating—in a highly public manner—their ill-gotten holdings in the United States? What better way to illustrate that their corrupt, criminal behavior is unacceptable in the civilized world than by denying them visas to the United States?

When we are done publicly humiliating the members of the Politburo, let’s move on to the entire Central Committee and the National People’s Congress, and from there to sanctioning each and every member of the CCP. These actions, if taken sequentially, would cause tremendous unrest within the ranks of the Party, as well as widen the already enormous gap between the Chinese people and their political masters.

CCP leaders surely understand the danger that they’ll face if the United States delegitimizes their rule in this way. That’s why, as soon as the idea of sanctioning CCP members began being discussed in U.S. policy circles, the Global Times responded in a panic with rhetoric about how the CCP was the “heart and nervous system” of Chinese society.

“Opposing all CCP members is undoubtedly opposing all Chinese people,” it claimed.

Another article in the CCP mouthpiece screamed that a “US travel ban on CCP members would be ‘paranoid.’”

“The CCP comes from the Chinese people,” the authors wrote, “and it cannot be alienated from the Chinese people.”

Oh yes, it can.

The CCP’s worst fear should be our policy.

Steven W. Mosher is the president of the Population Research Institute and the author of “Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/sanct...munist-party-then-work-downwards_3430656.html
 

Ellanjay

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US Congress Task Force Proposes Tough Sanctions on the Chinese Communist Party

July 13, 2020 | By Hong Zhong and Wu Yue (Minghui.org)


The United States Congress is calling for imposing the toughest sanctions on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for its threats to America’s national security.

The Republican Study Committee (RSC) Foreign Affairs Task Force released a report, titled “RSC National Security Strategy: Strengthening America and Countering Global Threats,” on June 10. In this 120-page document, which is available on the U.S. House website, 25 pages were dedicated to issues related to the CCP.

The RSC report cited a quote from an earlier report, “U.S. Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China,” from the White House on May 20: “The PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] rapid economic development and increasedengagement with the world did not lead to convergence with the citizen-centric, free and open order as the United States had hoped...Beijing openly acknowledges that it seeks to transform the international order to align with CCP interests and ideology. The CCP’s expanding use of economic, political, and military power to compel acquiescence from nation states harms vital American interests and undermines the sovereignty and dignity of countries and individuals around the world.”

To counter the CCP's threats, the RSC report proposed various sanctions to reign in the CCP's influence and safeguard America's national security. One of the proposed sanctions read: “Congress should also mandate that the Department of the Treasury impose sanctions on key CCP leaders involved in gross human rights violations in Tibet and Hong Kong using the Global Magnitsky Act’s authorities.”

The RSC proposals follow a series of actions in recent years by the U.S. government to curb increasing threats and instability brought about by the CCP. For example, the U.S. Government issued a sanction in December 2017 targeting 13 perpetrators or enablers of human rights violations and corruption around the world. They included Gao Yan, former police chief of Beijing’s Chaoyang District.

Gao was responsible for the mistreatment of veteran activist Cao Shunli, who died in custody in 2014 after suffering with tuberculosis for six months without being given any medical attention.

The sanction in 2017, authorized under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, was administered by the U.S. Treasury Department. It blocked assets of the targeted individuals under U.S. jurisdiction and barred their financial transactions with Americans.

The CCP: From Global Propaganda to Religious Persecution

Supported by nearly 150 U.S. Congress members, the RSC proposals are considered “The toughest sanctions on the CCP ever proposed.”

As it says in the RSC report: “For the CCP, foreign assistance and involvement in international organizations are a means to cast its political system and approach to economic development as superior alternatives to those of the United States and other democratic countries. As part of this approach, Beijing has increased pressure on foreign countries, companies, and even individuals to conform to its worldview.”

As seen in the coronavirus pandemic, under its current CCP leader, China has intensified its censorship of media and the internet and has established an elaborate system of surveillance of its citizens. Its influence outside China is also overwhelming. “China’s soft power strategy has paid dividends, including being appointed to bodies such as the United Nations (U.N.) Human Rights Council, where it possesses the ability to vet candidates for critical U.N. human rights posts,” the report continued.

Freedom of belief is also in great danger. “It [the CCP] has also undertaken a strategy of ‘sinicization’ of all religion, which attempts to control and manipulate all aspects of religious faith into a socialist mold with Chinese characteristics,” the report stated.

An example is Falun Dafa, a mediation system based on the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance practiced by about 100 million people when the CCP began to suppress it in July 1999. Falun Dafa Information Center recently launched an online campaign to raise awareness of the major human rights violation using the hashtag #21YearsTooLong.

Targeting the Totalitarian Regime

The RSC proposed to sanction key CCP leaders, including “the director of the Hong Kong liaison office Luo Huining, and Han Zheng, a member of the seven-person elite Politburo of the CCP.”

More specifically, the RSC report focused on the following areas related to China: 1) Industrial espionage and intellectual property theft; 2) IP theft at American research institutions and academia; 3) CCP-linked corporate subterfuge; 4) Malignant political influence and disinformation campaigns; 5) Human rights and international institutions; 6) China’s global military modernization; and 7) Strengthening U.S. alliances and partnerships.

“The crisis in Hong Kong is a watershed moment in the battle between freedom and authoritarianism. As China attempts to promote an alternative theory of governance,” the report wrote and called for sanctions against Han Zheng, Senior Vice Premier of the State Coucil and Politburo Standing Committee member, for his role in the situation with Hong Kong.

Although the report acknowledged that a blanket prohibition on visas to CCP members could lead to unintended consequences, it advised: “However, it would be appropriate to include the senior leadership including the Politburo of 25 members, the Central Committee of 205 full members and 171 alternates, and all 2,280 delegates of the 19th National Congress of the CCP, and their spouses and children.”

Ending the CCP’s Influence over International Organizations

The CCP’s human rights violations extend beyond China’s border. “The United States is the largest donor to the WHO and contributes between $400-500 million per year. Despite this, the WHO has apparently helped to cover up China’s mistakes in handling the COVID-19 pandemic,” wrote the RSC report.

Tedros Adhanom, Director-General of WHO, is a leader of Tigray People's Liberation Front, an organization associated with Marxism and terrorism. He was reported to have covered up three cholera epidemics that occurred in Ethiopia while he was the health minister. And yet, the CCP backed him to lead the WHO in 2017 and a global pandemic has unfolded under his watch.

Another example is the United Nations. Earlier this year, China was appointed to an influential U.N. Human Rights Council panel that picks the world’s human rights investigators. This “is the latest example of the CCP’s efforts to promote ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’ and re-define human rights,” according to the RSC report.

The RSC report therefore urges Congress to direct the Congressional Executive Commission on China (CECC) “to report on China’s undue influence of international bodies to redefine human rights and spread the CCP philosophy, especially in institutions receiving U.S. taxpayer dollars.”

“The old way of thinking about China has failed. A strategy limited to trade and economic integration alone has not caused China to democratize or grow less aggressive in its behavior. On the contrary, the CCP has grown more authoritarian and aggressive,” according to the RSC report. “The Task Force believes that Congress must adapt to a new strategy, one which seeks also to push back against the CCP and its efforts to undermine U.S. interests, remake the world order, and promote an alternative form of governance.”

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/7/13/185861.html
 

Ellanjay

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A History of Consequences:
The Collapse of the Soviet Bloc and Other Dictatorships


July 24, 2020, | By Jin Yan(Minghui.org)


Although the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) survived the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 to continue its totalitarian rule, many communist regimes in Eastern Europe did not, as their one-party rule collapsed in one country after another. The Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein met a similar fate. In these cases, it wasn't only the top culprits who were put on trial and punished; officials, collaborators, and even the social elites like judges, scientists, and academics also suffered consequences for their disgraceful conduct.

This upheaval first appeared in Poland and later expanded to the former Warsaw Pact countries such as East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, culminating in the disintegration of the Soviet Communist Party and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Below are some examples.

The Sudden Downfall of Ceausescu and the Romanian Communist Party

During this anti-communist wave in Eastern Europe, all the countries chose to end the turbulence with a free election and a peaceful transfer of power from the Communist Party.

The majority of high-ranking Communist Party officials in these countries willingly gave up their power because they could see what the people were truly striving for and that the Communist Party had lost its ground. They knew that the best outcome was to go with the flow.

Romania, however, was the notable exception to this pattern of peace.

Nicolae Ceausescu established a dictatorship shortly after taking office and started sending secret police to monitor the people, which effectively deprived the people of their freedom of speech and basic human rights.

In the 1980s, he went so far as to enact the infamous “Great Romanian Typewriter Act,” under which every Romanian citizen, business, institution, and school that owned a typewriter had to seek and receive permission from the police and obtain a license for its use. To become a typist, one must go through the same procedure and report to the police samples of what he or she would type; if a typewriter needed to be repaired, both the user and the machine would have to have their licenses renewed. The setup aimed to ensure that any contraband literature that was ever typed could be traced back to its source.

Ceausescu was also highly nepotistic when appointing people to important positions. While at the helm as the General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, he appointed his wife to be the Deputy Prime Minister; his children, relatives, and friends were also put in charge of important government departments. Their luxurious lifestyle was far beyond what ordinary Romanians of the time could ever imagine.

On December 21, 1989, Ceausescu held a mass rally in the capital city of Bucharest. During his speech, a voice shouting “Down with Ceausescu!” was suddenly heard in the crowd, followed by yells of “Death to the criminal!” here and there. Armed policemen wearing helmets were sent out to cordon off the nearby streets, and officers shouted at the crowd to disperse.

Romania’s defense minister at the time, Vasile Milea, was said to have ordered his army to “shoot only blanks.” But the mayor of Bucharest passed a different order from Ceausescu to the soldiers on the front line: “You can shoot [live rounds]. Shoot towards the sky as a warning first; if that doesn't work, shoot them in the leg!”

Milea was later found dead in his office, the result of an alleged suicide.

On the morning of December 22, the army formerly loyal to Ceausescu changed sides and started to retreat from the city center. The police alone could no longer stop the protesting crowds. Later, protesters broke into the Party's Central Committee and defenestrated Ceausescu's writings, official portraits, and propaganda books.

In a great panic, Ceausescu and his wife fled from the roof via helicopter to a northern suburb of Bucharest, but they were captured that afternoon by the Romanian National Salvation Front. Three days later on December 25, the couple was put on trial at a drumhead court-martial for the genocide of 60,000 Romanian citizens, the embezzlement of over one billion U.S. dollars, sabotage of governance, and damage to the national economy.

The couple was found guilty and summarily executed outside the courtroom, marking the end of the Romanian Communist Party.

Settling Accounts for Crimes against Humanity

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989, the East German government (GDR) decided to embrace the concept of liberalization. The next year, it dissolved itself and became a fully sovereign state of the Federal Republic of Germany.

However, the crimes committed by the former communist regime did not escape punishment. Eight years later, the Germans began to settle accounts with the former East German communist regime for their crimes against humanity.

Egon Krenz, former leader of the Free German Youth and the last General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), was summoned to court in Berlin for trial. Two other former SED Politburo members also appeared in court. The trial of Krenz and two of his followers was the most significant lawsuit concerning East Germany.

The court sentenced Krenz to six and a half years in prison for killing people who tried to flee East Germany. In 1997, Günther Kleiber, former SED Politburo member, and economist, and Günter Schabowski, former First Secretary of the SED, were both sentenced to three years in prison on the same charges.

Former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic was also tried for his dictatorial actions.

In 2001, Milosevic was extradited to the International Criminal Court (ICC), an international tribunal in The Hague, and charged with 66 crimes during the three wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, including genocide; complicity in genocide; deportation; murder; persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds; inhumane acts and forcible transfer; extermination; imprisonment; torture; and willful killing.

He died in March 2006 in his cell at the ICC's detention center in The Hague before his trial could be concluded.

The execution of Saddam Hussein provides another telling case.

In 2003, Saddam Hussein, who was the leader of Iraq's repressive dictatorship from 1979 to 2003, was arrested by the U.S. military during the war launched by a coalition seeking to depose him. He was later handed over to the interim Iraqi government to stand trial along with 11 other senior leaders of his administration for crimes against humanity and other offenses.

Even though Saddam insisted on his innocence and denied all charges made against him, he was convicted by the Iraqi Special Tribunal with crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging on November 5, 2006. The execution was carried out on December 30 the same year.

The above cases show that even heads of state who commit crimes against humanity will be brought to justice.

Lustration in Poland

Poland adopted a new Constitution at its National Assembly on April 2, 1997, which abrogated all political parties and organizations with programs based upon totalitarian methods, such as those of Nazism, Fascism, and Communism.

The National Assembly also passed a lustration statute, viewed as a process of reckoning with the past. It required people who hold or are candidates for public positions in the state to make a statement about their collaboration with the secret police under the former communist regime. As it only targeted people in government agencies and those with high social status, the statute pertained to no more than 30,000 people, leaving most former informants for the secret police service unidentified.

In 2006, after the twin brothers Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski from the Law and Justice Party took the positions of President and Prime Minister of Poland, respectively, they called for a more thorough and transparent investigation of communist-era Poland.

The Kaczynski brothers believed that the “grey networks” formed by former Communist Party members, corrupt economists, and informants of the secret police were still in control of the country, causing chaos in Polish society. Therefore, it was necessary to continue their investigation into the past.

A new lustration law with additional articles was enacted in Poland on March 15, 2007, which aimed to expose those government officials who had collaborated with the secret police in the former communist regime before 1989. The law requires politicians, government officials, lawyers, school leaders, academics, journalists, and state company executives to state in writing whether they had cooperated with the communist secret police. The government entrusted the Institute of National Remembrance to collect and keep all the statements for records and investigation.

Under this law, around 700,000 Poles would have to confess and explain any disgraceful conduct they committed in collaboration with the secret police, as well as their spies and informants. Anyone who refused to fill in the declaration form or lied about facts would be suspended for ten years.

In 2008, the Polish Parliament passed a law to significantly reduce the pensions of former secret police and Communist Party officials involved in suppressing dissidents and opposition parties. Supporters of this law believe that the ex-secret police’s preferential pension violates the principles of social justice laid down in the Polish Constitution. This law was fiercely criticized by the Polish left, which appealed to the Constitutional Court to have the law canceled. Their request was rejected.

After the law was enacted in January 2010, pensions of up to 40,000 former Communist Party officials, secret police officers, border guards, and prison wardens were reportedly reduced by an average of more than 50% for human rights violations.

The Stasi Records Act in Germany

In Germany, the “Act Regarding The Records of The State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic” (also known as the “Stasi Records Act”) was passed in the German federal parliament in December of 1991. Under this act, Germany committed huge financial resources to the restoration of destroyed archival records and carried out intensive investigations on around 3.1 million individuals who served the former East German government.

The results were quite shocking: In addition to 90,000 secret police, East Germany hired as many as 180 informants; around 6 million people (more than a third of the total population of 17 million at the time) had secret archives filed against them; and 78,000 citizens were sentenced to jail by the communist government, accused of “endangering national security.”

As a result of the investigations, 20,000 of 180,000 teachers were dismissed from their employment, nearly half of the judges and prosecutors in what was formerly East Germany were fired, and a number of top SED officials and high-ranking secret police members were prosecuted and convicted.

The implementation of such laws not only reminds people of what happened in history but also serves as a warning for all government officials who side with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) today.

The Viciousness of Today’s CCP

Since the CCP took power in China in 1949, it has ruled China and its people with an iron fist, and tens of millions of Chinese people have died of unnatural causes as a result of its repressive policies and political purges. The CCP has completely destroyed China's 5,000-year-old civilization and moral values via coercive brainwashing of the entire population with atheist fallacies and communist doctrines; it has also crushed all spiritual beliefs outside the scope of its communist theories.

Its hands are awash in blood in its systematic persecutions of house Christians, underground Catholic church members, Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and most brutally, the tens of millions of Falun Gong practitioners who believe in the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance.

The CCP strongly believes that the most effective way to sustain its power over China is by brainwashing the Chinese people and keeping them from the truth. To achieve this, it spent billions building the “Great Firewall” to impose internet censorship and block “unfriendly” foreign websites, internet tools, and mobile apps.

At the same time, the CCP organized a massive army of Internet commenters who constantly make postings on social media to manipulate public discourse in favor of the CCP and attack its “enemies.”

The CCP appears to be quite successful in controlling the minds of Chinese people. For example, to this day, a large proportion of Chinese do not know about the bloody slaughter of thousands of young students at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

The CCP's desire for power does not seem to be limited to China. Its tentacles have now stretched around the world, infiltrating in a wide range of social and economic sectors through projects such as the “One Belt, One Road” initiative, “Made-in-China 2025,” Confucius Institutes, the militarization of man-made islets in the South China Sea, and so on. The CCP's ultimate goal, in its own words, is to achieve global supremacy economically, militarily, and ideologically.

But in the face of such serious threats to socioeconomic stability and world peace, many politicians and leaders in business and other fields have regrettably failed to see the dangers of the CCP. They still hold on to wishful thinking that the CCP would change for the better and be a reliable business partner.

The International Community Awakens

The CCP's intentional cover-up of the onset of the coronavirus infection led directly to the devastating pandemic around the world. Its lyings and shifting blame to others have awakened many people in the international community, who have begun to see the CCP for what it is.

Calls for independent investigations into the origin of the coronavirus and holding the CCP accountable for damages incurred from the pandemic have been echoed in the international community.

“The Chinese Communist Party lied. People died” is a phrase that White House Advisor Peter Navarro has used repeatedly when referring to the pandemic. It sends a simple but powerful message that the CCP must be held accountable for all the pain and suffering experienced by the world's people.

The recent Hong Kong National Security Law pushed through by the CCP has served as another wakeup call to the world's people who hold freedom and human rights in high esteem.

“China has chosen to break their promises to the people of Hong Kong and go against their obligations to the international community. The UK will not turn our backs on the commitments we have made to the people of Hong Kong,” Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab wrote on Twitter.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described the legislation as “draconian” that would “end free Hong Kong” in a tweet on June 30, 2020.

“The purpose of this brutal, sweeping law is to frighten, intimidate and suppress Hongkongers who are peacefully demanding the freedoms that were promised,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“This law risks seriously undermining the high degree of autonomy of Hong Kong and having a detrimental effect on the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law," said European Council President Charles Michel. “We deplore this decision.”

“Australia is troubled by the law's implications for Hong Kong's judicial independence, and on the rights and freedoms enjoyed by the people of Hong Kong, both of which underpin the city's success,” said Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne.

Twenty-seven countries made a joint statement at the United Nations Human Rights Council and expressed their “deep and growing concerns” over the new security law.

“Imposing the law without the direct participation of Hong Kong's people, legislature or judiciary 'undermines' the 'One Country, Two Systems' principle guaranteeing Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy, rights and freedoms,” said the signatories, which included Britain, Japan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland and 15 European Union states including France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden.

There is a saying in Chinese: “He who repeatedly commits wrongdoing will come to no good end.” The CCP is doing just that, and it may not be long before it disintegrates like the communist parties of Eastern Europe. When that happens, those who have collaborated with the CCP and willingly aided its crimes would also be held accountable. Breaking away from the CCP is thus the best choice to ensure oneself a bright future.

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/7/24/186005.html
 

Ellanjay

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Apr 11, 2020
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Chinese Communist Party's Disregard for Human Life Revealed in One Catastrophe after Another

July 25, 2020 | By Xing Min(Minghui.org)


While the CCP virus (the novel coronavirus named after the Chinese Communist Party) is still ravaging China, 26 Chinese provinces are being hit by severe flooding.

In a month of the ongoing flooding, there has been very little action or response from the Chinese communist government or reports by the state controlled media.

Some netizens asked on social media, “How can the mainstream media be collectively muffled while over ten million people are suffering? Why do the media keep focusing on news of the United States rather than reporting on the domestic flooding? Who is the central TV station serving?”

So far the only governmental assistance was the allocation of 150 million yuan to three provinces, which is about 0.5 to 2 yuan per capita in those regions and not even amounting to the cost of a single meal. The CCP propaganda has been using the pandemic as an excuse for not providing more rescue and emergency resources to combat the flood.

In early June, the Chinese government suspended debt repayment from 77 countries. According to the Global Times, China has loaned over six trillion yuan in the recent four years to developing countries in Africa. This figure is forty thousand times the money allotted to combat flooding.

Every level of government in China has a plaque hanging on their headquarter building that says “People's Government.” However, such plaques are merely a disguise, and they are truly the CCP's government that only serves the Party's interests. History has made this abundantly clear for all of us.

A Forgotten Dam Failure 45 Years Ago

A TV program by the Discovery channel in 2005 revealed a list of man-made disasters. At the top of the list was not the Chernobyl nuclear accident, rather it was the Banqiao Dam failure in 1975 that was rarely known to Chinese people.

According to Discovery, the Banqiao Dam in Henan Province collapsed due to heavy rain on August 8, 1975, flooding nine counties of an area 150 kilometers by 75 kilometers. Over 100,000 floating corpses were collected and another 140,000 died from the famine and plague that followed the flood.

At the time when the dam needed an emergency discharge, the local authorities telephoned their superior for permission but did not get a response. As disclosed by Ji Pomin, son of the then vice prime minister Ji Dengkui, when a local official called Deng Xiaoping (then Chief of the General Staff of the People's Liberation Army) and reported the urgent status, Deng’s family told the official that he had gone to sleep. They said that he wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t be woken up.

But Ji later found out Deng wasn’t sick or sleeping at that time. Instead, he was playing mahjong with others at the residence of Wan Li, another top CCP official, that night. Deng played until five o'clock the next morning.

After repeated urgent calls for permission for flood discharge went unanswered, the disaster finally came and the dam collapsed.

In addition to the unnecessary delay in the flood discharge, the dam had inherent flaws. The Banqiao Dam was one of the many that were constructed in the early 1950's as a product of the Great Leap Forward movement. Under the irresponsible policy, the dam was constructed in a rush with little quality control and lacked regular maintenance in the years after it was built. In times of urgent need, only five out of a total of 17 floodgates were able to lift properly and the rest were all rusted shut.

News of such a man-made disaster was suppressed by the CCP authorities. No memorial monument was built in the name of the perished. Instead, the government built one to praise and commemorate the feat of the CCP combating the flood.

Rescue That Came 72 Hours After Wenchuan Earthquake

A deadly earthquake took place on May 12, 2008 in Wenchuan County of Sichuan Province. While many people were watching closely the development of the situation, only 1,000 bare-handed soldiers arrived 42 hours later to rescue over a hundred thousand people who were buried under rubble.

Even toward the end of the most precious 72-hour period post earthquake, the total number of troops in the epicenter region was less than 10,000. In most instances, a minimum of three people are required on average to pull one out of the rubble.

About 79 hours after the earthquake, the military's engineering troops finally began to repair and restore the roads leading into Wenchuan County. Most of those buried had already died by then. Also, 34 out of 58 affected towns did not get any rescue personnel whatsoever.

Just like what had happened in previous disasters, the CCP ordered all media in China to praise the government for days after the earthquake. The deaths of over a hundred thousand Chinese people were somehow turned into another episode of glorifying the CCP's governance.

The CCP's Nature and Chinese People's Way Out

The CCP has never taken any responsibility for the man-made or natural disasters under its rule. They are very clear that if someone admits any wrongdoing, the CCP's perfect image would be blemished and their control would be breached.

What is the fundamental nature of the CCP? The Nine Commentaries on Communist Party has revealed it to us.

“The Communist Party does not hold universal standards for human nature. The concepts of good and evil, as well as all laws and rules, are arbitrarily manipulated. Communists do not allow murder, except for those categorized as enemies by the Communist Party. Filial piety is welcomed, except for those parents deemed class enemies. Benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and faithfulness are all good, but not applicable when the Party is not willing or doesn’t want to consider these traditional virtues. The Communist Party completely overthrows the universal standards for human nature, and builds itself on principles that oppose human nature.”

“The Chinese traditionally believe in the unity of heaven and human beings. Laozi said in Dao de Jing (Tao-Te Ching), ‘Man follows the earth, the earth follows heaven, heaven follows the Dao, and the Dao follows what is natural’. Human beings and nature exist within a harmonious relationship in the continuous cosmos. The communist party is a kind of being. However, it opposes nature, heaven, earth and mankind. It is an evil specter against the universe.”

“The Communist movement was then introduced to China as an experiment, and the CCP has set itself above all, conquering all in its path, thereby bringing endless catastrophe to China.”

“To eliminate from our lives the iniquitous doctrines instilled by the CCP, to discern the CCP’s utterly unscrupulous nature, and to restore our human nature and conscience— this is the first and essential step on the path toward a smooth transition to a society free from the Communist Party.”

“Even though the CCP appears to possess all the resources and violent apparatus in the country, if every citizen believes in the power of the truth and safeguards morality, the evil specter of the CCP will lose the foundation for its existence. All resources may instantly return to the hands of the just. That is when the rebirth of China will take place.”

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/7/25/186017.html
 

Ellanjay

Council Member
Apr 11, 2020
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https://youtu.be/PVVleDDRKac

U.S. Leads Free World in Curbing Chinese Communist Party's Influence

July 26, 2020 | By Minghui correspondent Wang Ying

From the U.S. to the U.K., from Canada to Taiwan, countries and regions around the globe have felt the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s threat to the free world. Among them, the U.S. government has been leading the effort to counter the CCP's influence.

When interviewed by The Hill on July 16, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo emphasized that the CCP had always failed its promises and, by doing so, endangered the world. He pointed to the coronavirus pandemic as an example. When he visited the U.K. on July 21, he applauded its decision to ban Huawei from future 5G networks and called on other countries to take similar actions. In a speech at The Richard Nixon Library, he reviewed missteps of U.S. administrations in the past several decades and expressed his wish for changes in China.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California on July 23, 2020.

Similarly, U.S. Attorney General William Barr spoke in Michigan on July 16 urging U.S. businesses not to bow to the CCP’s totalitarian regime.

Besides progress in the U.S., the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) was formed on June 5 with representatives from over 10 countries. In an announcement on July 19, the IPAC called for joint efforts to stop forced organ harvesting of and other brutalities against practitioners of Falun Gong, a meditation discipline based on the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance that has been persecuted by the CCP since July 1999.

Securing Freedom

During his interview with The Hill on July 16, Pompeo said, “This is a Chinese Communist Party that is acting in a way that poses real threats to the world.” He said the threats include the CCP's intellectual property theft, failure to comply with the Paris climate accord, and many other actions that belie what it promised to the world.

The CCP's coronavirus cover-up is a case in point: “The Chinese Communist Party has prevented anyone from finding out the answer to that question [the source of the virus]. They denied access to the laboratory, they’ve – to the World Health Organization, anyone who wanted to talk about it who was inside of that laboratory, whether they were a journalist or a doctor, has been precluded from talking about that,” Pompeo said. “This is a result of the Chinese Communist Party hiding the data.”

During his recent U.K. trip, Pompeo held a joint press conference with British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab on July 21. Raab reiterated the need to collaborate with the U.S. and other countries in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance and noted lessons learned from the coronavirus pandemic. He also endorsed cooperation with other other Western countries on issues such as Hong Kong to stand up for their values. “We’re more influential, we have more impact when we work together,” he said.

Pompeo called on more countries to join this effort and “condemn China’s broken promises on the Sino-British treaty.” When answering questions from reporters, he said such efforts were not to confront China; rather, “the entire world needs to work together to ensure that every country, including China, behaves in the international system in ways that are appropriate and consistent with the international order... You can’t threaten countries and bully them in the Himalayas. You can’t engage in cover-ups and co-opt international institutions like the World Health Organization.”

Speaking at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Los Angeles on July 23, Pompeo said previous U.S. administrations imagined engagement with China would produce prosperity, but “today we’re all still wearing masks and watching the pandemic’s body count rise because the CCP failed in its promises to the world. We’re reading every morning new headlines of repression in Hong Kong and in Xinjiang.”

It has been nearly 50 years since the engagement started. “And indeed, centrally, from the Secretary of State’s perspective, is America safer? Do we have a greater likelihood of peace for ourselves and peace for the generations which will follow us?” he asked.

He said Nixon hoped to change the CCP through collaboration. “The truth is that our policies – and those of other free nations – resurrected China’s failing economy, only to see Beijing bite the international hands that were feeding it,” he said. “We opened our arms to Chinese citizens, only to see the Chinese Communist Party exploit our free and open society. China sent propagandists into our press conferences, our research centers, our high schools, our colleges, and even into our PTA meetings.”

From businesses to Hollywood, from slave labor to other human rights violations being ignored, our universal values have been challenged. “I grew up and served my time in the Army during the Cold War. And if there is one thing I learned, communists almost always lie. The biggest lie that they tell is to think that they speak for 1.4 billion people who are surveilled, oppressed, and scared to speak out,” he said. “Quite the contrary. The CCP fears the Chinese people’s honest opinions more than any foe, and save for losing their own grip on power, they have reason – no reason to.”

That is why Pompeo called on the free world not to repeat the mistakes of the past. “And if we don’t act now, ultimately the CCP will erode our freedoms and subvert the rules-based order that our societies have worked so hard to build,” he said.

Barr: The Free World Should Not to Bow to the CCP

Speaking at the Ford Presidential Museum in Michigan on July 16, U.S. Attorney General William Barr said he agreed with National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien that “[t]he days of American passivity and naivety regarding the People’s Republic of China are over.”

When President Ford visited China in 1975, people would not know China would one day emerge after the Cold War as a near-peer competitor of the United States. Not only that, but the CCP’s “aggressive” and “orchestrated” moves are harming the world he said, adding that American businesses have played a critical role and that China has dominated the pharmaceutical supply industry, hacked universities, and stolen intellectual property.

Furthermore, the CCP has bent the values of the international community. “Hollywood now regularly censors its own movies to appease the Chinese Communist Party, the world’s most powerful violator of human rights,” Barr said.

“The CCP has launched an orchestrated campaign, across all of its many tentacles in Chinese government and society, to exploit the openness of our institutions in order to destroy them,” he concluded. “To secure a world of freedom and prosperity for our children and grandchildren, the free world will need its own version of the whole-of-society approach... Our freedom depends on it.”

Global Support

Conservative Party of Canada Leader Andrew Scheer said incidents over the past few years have shown a pattern of aggressive behavior by the CCP. “It is time for freedom-loving nations around the world to wake up to this reality, to work together to support each other in pushing back against these very assertive moves by the Chinese government in Beijing,” he said during a recent interview with Minghui.

Among all the suppressed groups in China, about 100 million Falun Gong practitioners have suffered tremendously for their belief since July 1999. On the 21st anniversary of the persecution of Falun Gong, the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) issued a statement in support of Falun Gong. They condemned the CCP’s crime of forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners and urged the world to help end the persecution.

Launched on June 5 with representation from over 10 nations, IPAC was established to foster collaboration between countries to handle the challenges posed by China on international rules, human rights, and national integrity.

“Over the past two decades the campaign against Falun Gong practitioners has resulted in the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of its followers, where they have been subjected to some of the most severe forms of torture,” wrote the statement, which also emphasized organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners in China.

“Today we highlight the plight of the Falun Gong together with all religious minorities who have suffered from repression under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party,” the statement concluded. “We remind the world of the depravities they continue to suffer, and urge the world to stand up and speak out for an end to such repression, an end to impunity, and for justice, accountability, human rights and human dignity for all the peoples of China.”

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/7/26/186041.html
 

Ellanjay

Council Member
Apr 11, 2020
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https://youtu.be/Hi_nmnkcvQY

From the Soviet Union to the CCP, the Same Lies Continue to Harm People

July 26, 2020 | By Xin Ming and Xin Yan(Minghui.org)


During the Soviet famine of 1932-1933, starving people were shot for trying to steal grain from the local commune and “executed even for trying to pick up a few loose seeds on the ground,” explained Oleh Shamshur, ambassador from Ukraine to the United States, in 2006. He also cited the testimony of Mykhaylo Naumenko, who was 11 at the time, “From our village of 75 homes, by May 24, houses were empty because all the inhabitants had died.”

Some 30 years later, similar tragedies happened in China under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). “One report, dated November 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership — most likely including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with wire, and a 10-kilogram stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling iron. His crime: digging up a potato,” wrote Frank Dikötter, a professor at the University of Hong Kong and author of Mao's Great Leap to Famine.

Dikötter spent several years in China between 2005 and 2009 examining hundreds of documents. He also read about a boy who stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village. A local official named Xiong Dechang forced the boy's father to bury his son alive on the spot. The father died of grief three weeks later.

Throughout the 20th century, more than 60 million people in the Soviet Union lost their lives due to wars, starvation, and political purges. In Communist China, as many as 80 million people have died of unnatural causes. Such facts, however, were tightly guarded as “top secret” because the knowledge being made public could threaten their totalitarian dictatorship.

Reflecting upon the lies of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), we can see many similarities to those told by the CCP, which is still deceiving both Chinese citizens and the international community. A case in point is the coronavirus outbreak: the CCP's cover-up has turned an epidemic into a global pandemic, killing more than half a million people worldwide.

The following are just a few of the communist parties’ big lies.

Domestic Disinformation

The Soviet Union experienced three great famines. The first one was during the Civil War of 1921, when the CPSU collected grain, destroyed rural productivity, and dampened farmers’ enthusiasm. Russia’s grain output fell by half, and 5 million people starved to death. Cannibalism was seen in many areas. The second famine occurred in 1929, when Stalin forced farmers to join collective farms and purchased agricultural produce at extremely low prices, while the price of grain sold to farmers was astonishingly high. That led to the deaths of 8 million people, including one quarter of the entire population of Ukraine. The third great famine took place during 1946 and 1947.

In addition to devastating famines, people in the Soviet Union struggled with shortages of daily necessities as a result of a decline in light industry, since top priority was given to heavy industry and the military. On top of all this, a great number of people were subjected to political purges and repression during the Stalin era, and everyone lived in fear. Meanwhile, the CPSU told people they were living lives of unparalleled bliss.

The CCP has told a similar lie throughout its reign. When more than 40 million people died from starvation as a result of the Great Leap Forward, the Party told the Chinese that they were better off than in other countries and that two-thirds of the world’s people were suffering in poverty. In China today, more than 600 million people are struggling on a monthly income of less than 1,000 yuan (around $140 USD). In fact, China ranked 92 out of 150 countries on the UN's World Happiness Report 2020, far behind Western countries.

The CCP also tells citizens that China is the safest place in the world and that only the CCP can protect them. Their propaganda is filled with exaggerated reports on issues in the U.S., such as shootings, riots, protesters, the severity of coronavirus infections, and so on. The fact is that 68% of the unemployed in the U.S. have received cash relief even greater than their salaries, and daily necessities are distributed to people in need of help for free.

If China is the safest country as the CCP claims, then why does the government refuse to arrange for Chinese students who got stuck overseas to return home? Why does it spend hundreds of billions on domestic “stability” and monitoring its own people? Without rule of law, freedom of speech, and freedom of belief, this kind of stability, brought about by heavy-handed suppression, is anything but.

Poor People Propping Up a Strong Nation

It’s true that the Soviet armed forces, especially when it came to nuclear weapons, surpassed the United States as the world’s strongest military power in the mid-1980s, but to suggest that the Soviet Union was prosperous and strong would have been a grave mistake.

To maintain its military supremacy, the Soviet Union committed more than 80% of its industrial investment into heavy industry, which had little to do with people’s livelihoods. People had to get up at 5:00 a.m. to queue up for daily necessities. People starved and farmers were exploited. This “empire” was built on a shaky foundation.

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev once said that the past modernization at the expense of the people, the modernization to earn “face” for the country, the modernization for leaders’ worship of military power, the modernization to showcase “imperial glory,” and the development model by which the people became victims of the “national success ” were all proven to be the antithesis of “modern civilization.”

Regrettably, the lessons of the CPSU are still regarded as “magic weapons” by the CCP, which enthusiastically embraces the four so-called “modernizations” and believes that they are a reflection of China's prosperity and power.

While many people in China live in poverty, the CCP’s foreign aid has amounted to as much as 6 trillion yuan in the past four years, a truly astronomical figure. The CPSU also offered generous financial aid to other countries in order to export its “red revolution” while leaving itself with massive debts. The CCP is following in the CPSU’s footsteps today by promoting communist ideology globally at the cost of Chinese citizens’ standard of living.

The Inherent Corruption of Communist Leaders

Communist leaders such as Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and so on were often worshipped as “great saviors” with high morals. Although they opposed religious beliefs, they deified themselves. Their ruthlessness, cold-bloodedness and extreme selfishness, on the other hand, were carefully concealed and unknown to people in communist countries even today.

Ballerina Olga Lepeshinskaya was said to have been one of Stalin’s mistresses. In 2004, she said this of Stalin: “He could be very sweet and very nice, but that was probably just the impression he created. Because at his core he was a bad person - vindictive and angry.”

Vera Davydova was said to have been Stalin’s most favored mistress and was with him for nearly two decades. In her memoir Confessions of Stalin's Lover, she described how ruthlessly and deceitfully Stalin and his senior colleagues fought for power and how profligate and devoid of principles they were in their debauched private lives. She also described how her life was spared when Alexander N. Pskrebyshev, believed to be Stalin’s most trusted official, didn’t obey Stalin’s last order to throw her into a cage of wolves.

Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were extremely indifferent when it came to human life, even the loss of millions. Engles wrote in The Magyar Struggle, “The next world war will not only cause the reactionary classes and reactionary dynasties, but also the entire reactionary people to disappear from the surface of the earth. That is also progress.”

Mao Zedong, the most influential Communist leader in China and hailed as the “great savior” of the people, in fact had his hands stained with the blood of tens of millions. He was ruthless to his comrades, ordinary people, and even his loved ones.

Yang Kaihui, Mao’s second wife, was captured by the Kuomintang (KMT) after Mao and his red army attacked Changsha. She was executed at the age of 29 after she refused to denounce Mao, leaving behind three young children.

According to historical records, Mao had many opportunities to save her by relocating her and their children to safety before the attack. But by then he had already taken up with another beautiful young woman, He Zizhen. It was believed that Mao ignored the immediate danger facing Yang and their children because he didn’t want them to interfere with his relationship with his new wife.

History repeated itself as Mao dumped his third wife, He Zizhen, ten years later. She was allegedly sent to the Soviet Union to be treated for mental illness. Mao married his fourth wife, Jiang Qing, who became very powerful during the Cultural Revolution but lost ground after Mao’s death. She was tried and jailed, and she committed suicide in 1991 while on medical parole. According to Mao’s personal secretary Li Rui, Yang described Mao as “a hooligan both in politics and in private life.”

Zhou Enlai, Mao’s right-hand man and China’s premier from 1954 until his death in 1976, was largely regarded by the Chinese people as a “nice premier” with integrity and high moral standards. However, when what he did behind the scenes was made known, especially during the Cultural Revolution, people were in total disbelief: Zhou was personally responsible for the persecution and even deaths of some of the most senior CCP officials, as well as people close to him, to save his own skin.

Take Ms. Sun Weishi for example. Ms. Sun was the daughter of a veteran CCP member, who also held a high-ranking position in the national government at the time and was a close friend of Zhou Enlai. Ms. Sun’s father was captured and executed in April 1927 when she was only five. She was later adopted by Zhou Enlai and studied in the Soviet Union. She became an accomplished artist. Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, who was said to be jealous of her talent, persecuted her. To protect himself, Zhou personally signed Ms. Sun’s arrest warrant. She was brutally beaten and abused and died several months later. When she died, her body was covered in bruises, her hands and feet were in shackles, and a nail had been hammered into the top of her skull.

In a way, it is not surprising that those “great” communist leaders treated their comrades and their family members so ruthlessly and cold-bloodedly. For them and many others in the system, “Party nature” far outweighed “human nature.”

The CCP Is Still Lying to the World Today

After the CPSU collapsed, former Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov once described how Soviet officials worked: “We stole what was entrusted to our care, offered and accepted bribes... while indulging in our lies, we put medals on each others’ chests. Everyone did this, from top to bottom, from bottom to top.”

As Western countries wake up from the never-ending stream of lies churned out by the CCP, a coalition is coming together to hold the CCP accountable for the terrible loss of life and catastrophic social and economic destruction. That coalition is made up of countries that have fallen victim to the devastating pandemic caused by the CCP’s intentional cover-up of the outbreak and subsequent disinformation campaigns.

The CCP’s Hong Kong National Security Law has provided more reason for such a coalition, as more countries realize that the fundamental principles of freedom, peace, justice, human rights and the rule of law will never have a place on its agenda.

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/7/26/186042.html
 

Ellanjay

Council Member
Apr 11, 2020
1,722
250
83
https://youtu.be/uRlFZWlbies

Pompeo Speaks on How to Deal With China and the CCP

Conrad Black
July 27, 2020, Updated July 27, 2020


Secretary of State Michael Pompeo gave a seminal foreign policy address at the Nixon Library on July 23.

For those of us who knew and admired President Nixon it was a nostalgic occasion. And after Secretary Pompeo had delivered a thorough address on the problems and dangers and requirements of relations between China and the democratic world, the president of the Library, distinguished broadcaster Hugh Hewitt, struck a parallel between the Pompeo address and, as he put it, that of another secretary of state with a military background speaking to this secretary’s alma mater, Harvard University, when General George C. Marshall unveiled the Marshall plan there in 1948.

The secretary of state’s address was the last of a series of four by senior administration figures designed to attract public attention and the interest of allies to the complicated developing relationship with China. National security advisor Robert O’Brien, FBI director Christopher Wray, and Attorney General William Barr had all spoken on different aspects of Chinese relations in the last several weeks. It is now the principal foreign and national security preoccupation of the government and will remain so after the election, whatever its result.

Distinguishing China From the Soviet Union

Pompeo went to some lengths to distinguish what needed to be done with China from the containment policy that was devised and implemented in respect of the Soviet Union.

The USSR was never an economic threat and was never seriously integrated in the world economy, where much of the threat posed by China is precisely the theft of industrial and technological intelligence and the undermining and usurpation of much of the basis of the commercial prosperity of the West.

Where the Soviet Union required military containment including assistance against armed rebellions based on militant ideological differences in under-developed countries, the threat from China is a combination of economic and technological skulduggery and the gradual assertion of a sphere of military and economic influence over an ever-widening part of the world, gradually approaching the North American and Western European citadel of our democratic civilization.

In one of the questions afterwards, Hugh Hewitt presciently asked if there was a comparison to be made between President Nixon’s triangulation of Great Power relations with his historic visit to Beijing in 1972, and the current status of Russian-American relations. The secretary of state delicately implied that President Trump is exploring a relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin that could capitalize on a shared concern about the expansion of Chinese influence at the expense of both the former Soviet Union and Russia itself, and America’s East and South Asian allies.

Distinguishing the CCP From China

As is now the common practice of this administration, a distinction is made between China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Hewitt posed a question, based on a comment by the director of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas, that this was a spurious distinction.

Pompeo replied that it is legitimate as the United States and the West generally want to stop dishonest Chinese commercial practices, intellectual property theft, and the intimidation of other countries, but not to impose an airtight segregation of China from the rest of the world.

Pompeo endorsed Nixon’s declared goal of bringing China back into the world and conducting useful relations with it, while updating President Reagan’s policy towards the Soviet Union, “Trust but verify,” to “Mistrust and verify,” while hoping to incentivize a reform of dishonest Chinese practices. He declared what is intended to be the Western policy to “engage and empower the Chinese people—a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party.”

The Chinese have no history of freedom in 4000 years, but in the present racially charged climate, it is justifiable to distinguish between one of the world’s ancient and eminent nationalities and its current official regime. The idea is to reciprocate the Chinese meddling and espionage and propaganda effort by inciting as much righteous objection to the totalitarian oppression of the Beijing regime as possible. There is no reason for us to continue to practice unilateral restraint in dealing with the Chinese threat.

Democratic Alliance Considered

The secretary of state lamented that Chinese intimidation has already effectively immobilized and intimidated several American allies, but he believes that most traditional American allies, once convinced of the seriousness of the United States in assisting all countries to resist unfair pressure from China, and as long as they understand that it is only dishonest conduct that is supposed, not any fundamental hostility to China itself, that the state of international resolution will rise steadily.

He raised the interesting point of creating an alliance of Democratic states. From my modest and completely unofficial podium, I have often suggested that NATO be reconstituted not as a North Atlantic organization, but as a defensive alliance of at least semi-democratic states all over the world, reciprocally guaranteeing existing frontiers and arrangements.

The logical cornerstones of such an alliance on the edge of the declared areas of Chinese expansionist ambitions are India, Japan, Indonesia, Australia, and, if there is not an early improvement in Chinese conduct, Taiwan. Vietnam is not democratic and the Philippines and Thailand at the moment are playing footsie with Beijing. It is a fluid situation but by any calculation the United States and its reliable allies have the ability to assemble all the political, economic, and military strength needed to protect the legitimate interests of all associated countries.

Failed Hopes

The Secretary of State acknowledged candidly the failure of the long-standing hope that accommodation of China and indulgence of its idiosyncratic notions of international agreements would gradually lead to a policy of responsible compliance with agreed international rules.

He left conspicuously open the possibility that the CCP deliberately exported the coronavirus to the world to sow political and economic chaos amongst its chief competitors.

The secretary announced and encouraged relentless responses to Chinese human rights violations and the breaking of treaty obligations, including the Uyghurs and Hong Kong. (Tibet was not mentioned.)

And he was particularly critical of Hollywood: “the epicenter of American creative freedom and self-appointed arbiters of social justice,” for being obsequious “self- censors (of) even the most mildly unfavorable references to China.”

Pompeo declared that China “is increasingly authoritarian at home and more aggressive in its hostility to freedom everywhere else.” This is not obviously true, but it is certainly true that China is becoming much more efficient and formidable in its ability to control its own population and to discomfort countries that are inadequately submissive.

He concluded by asking “every leader of every nation to start by doing what America has done-to simply insist on reciprocity, transparency and accountability from the Chinese Communist Party.” It was an excellent speech presaging a very necessary adjustment to American and Western foreign and security policy.

Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, and, most recently “Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pompeo-speaks-on-how-to-deal-with-china-and-the-ccp_3440807.html
 

Ellanjay

Council Member
Apr 11, 2020
1,722
250
83
https://youtu.be/uRlFZWlbies

Pompeo Speaks on How to Deal With China and the CCP

Conrad Black
July 27, 2020, Updated July 27, 2020


Secretary of State Michael Pompeo gave a seminal foreign policy address at the Nixon Library on July 23.

For those of us who knew and admired President Nixon it was a nostalgic occasion. And after Secretary Pompeo had delivered a thorough address on the problems and dangers and requirements of relations between China and the democratic world, the president of the Library, distinguished broadcaster Hugh Hewitt, struck a parallel between the Pompeo address and, as he put it, that of another secretary of state with a military background speaking to this secretary’s alma mater, Harvard University, when General George C. Marshall unveiled the Marshall plan there in 1948.

The secretary of state’s address was the last of a series of four by senior administration figures designed to attract public attention and the interest of allies to the complicated developing relationship with China. National security advisor Robert O’Brien, FBI director Christopher Wray, and Attorney General William Barr had all spoken on different aspects of Chinese relations in the last several weeks. It is now the principal foreign and national security preoccupation of the government and will remain so after the election, whatever its result.

Distinguishing China From the Soviet Union

Pompeo went to some lengths to distinguish what needed to be done with China from the containment policy that was devised and implemented in respect of the Soviet Union.

The USSR was never an economic threat and was never seriously integrated in the world economy, where much of the threat posed by China is precisely the theft of industrial and technological intelligence and the undermining and usurpation of much of the basis of the commercial prosperity of the West.

Where the Soviet Union required military containment including assistance against armed rebellions based on militant ideological differences in under-developed countries, the threat from China is a combination of economic and technological skulduggery and the gradual assertion of a sphere of military and economic influence over an ever-widening part of the world, gradually approaching the North American and Western European citadel of our democratic civilization.

In one of the questions afterwards, Hugh Hewitt presciently asked if there was a comparison to be made between President Nixon’s triangulation of Great Power relations with his historic visit to Beijing in 1972, and the current status of Russian-American relations. The secretary of state delicately implied that President Trump is exploring a relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin that could capitalize on a shared concern about the expansion of Chinese influence at the expense of both the former Soviet Union and Russia itself, and America’s East and South Asian allies.

Distinguishing the CCP From China

As is now the common practice of this administration, a distinction is made between China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Hewitt posed a question, based on a comment by the director of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas, that this was a spurious distinction.

Pompeo replied that it is legitimate as the United States and the West generally want to stop dishonest Chinese commercial practices, intellectual property theft, and the intimidation of other countries, but not to impose an airtight segregation of China from the rest of the world.

Pompeo endorsed Nixon’s declared goal of bringing China back into the world and conducting useful relations with it, while updating President Reagan’s policy towards the Soviet Union, “Trust but verify,” to “Mistrust and verify,” while hoping to incentivize a reform of dishonest Chinese practices. He declared what is intended to be the Western policy to “engage and empower the Chinese people—a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party.”

The Chinese have no history of freedom in 4000 years, but in the present racially charged climate, it is justifiable to distinguish between one of the world’s ancient and eminent nationalities and its current official regime. The idea is to reciprocate the Chinese meddling and espionage and propaganda effort by inciting as much righteous objection to the totalitarian oppression of the Beijing regime as possible. There is no reason for us to continue to practice unilateral restraint in dealing with the Chinese threat.

Democratic Alliance Considered

The secretary of state lamented that Chinese intimidation has already effectively immobilized and intimidated several American allies, but he believes that most traditional American allies, once convinced of the seriousness of the United States in assisting all countries to resist unfair pressure from China, and as long as they understand that it is only dishonest conduct that is supposed, not any fundamental hostility to China itself, that the state of international resolution will rise steadily.

He raised the interesting point of creating an alliance of Democratic states. From my modest and completely unofficial podium, I have often suggested that NATO be reconstituted not as a North Atlantic organization, but as a defensive alliance of at least semi-democratic states all over the world, reciprocally guaranteeing existing frontiers and arrangements.

The logical cornerstones of such an alliance on the edge of the declared areas of Chinese expansionist ambitions are India, Japan, Indonesia, Australia, and, if there is not an early improvement in Chinese conduct, Taiwan. Vietnam is not democratic and the Philippines and Thailand at the moment are playing footsie with Beijing. It is a fluid situation but by any calculation the United States and its reliable allies have the ability to assemble all the political, economic, and military strength needed to protect the legitimate interests of all associated countries.

Failed Hopes

The Secretary of State acknowledged candidly the failure of the long-standing hope that accommodation of China and indulgence of its idiosyncratic notions of international agreements would gradually lead to a policy of responsible compliance with agreed international rules.

He left conspicuously open the possibility that the CCP deliberately exported the coronavirus to the world to sow political and economic chaos amongst its chief competitors.

The secretary announced and encouraged relentless responses to Chinese human rights violations and the breaking of treaty obligations, including the Uyghurs and Hong Kong. (Tibet was not mentioned.)

And he was particularly critical of Hollywood: “the epicenter of American creative freedom and self-appointed arbiters of social justice,” for being obsequious “self- censors (of) even the most mildly unfavorable references to China.”

Pompeo declared that China “is increasingly authoritarian at home and more aggressive in its hostility to freedom everywhere else.” This is not obviously true, but it is certainly true that China is becoming much more efficient and formidable in its ability to control its own population and to discomfort countries that are inadequately submissive.

He concluded by asking “every leader of every nation to start by doing what America has done-to simply insist on reciprocity, transparency and accountability from the Chinese Communist Party.” It was an excellent speech presaging a very necessary adjustment to American and Western foreign and security policy.

Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, and, most recently “Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pompeo-speaks-on-how-to-deal-with-china-and-the-ccp_3440807.html
Updated: https://youtu.be/rkqJprDLhhc

[Ellanjay’s comment]:
Mr. Black mentioned: "The Chinese have no history of freedom in 4000 years” which is debatable. For one thing, the Chinese had enjoyed the freedom of faith and religion for 5000 years before the CCP took power. Be it Buddhism, Taoism, or Confucianism, they coexisted peacefully and highly respected by most of the emperors of all the dynasties, which is totally in contrast to the CCP’s persecution of faith and religion. Even for the freedom of election, China had its moment, after the downfall of the Qing Dynasty, to have had elected the first government of the Republic of China, which was later defeated by the CCP in the Civil War.
 

Ellanjay

Council Member
Apr 11, 2020
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https://youtu.be/lZs8jjK30dw

From Persecution of Falun Gong to Coronavirus Cover-up, Many Have Learned to Stand Up to the Chinese Communist Party

July 29, 2020 | By Zhong Yan and Yan Ming(Minghui.org)


The year 2020 has been unusual for China and the rest of the world. Starting with the coronavirus outbreak, the world witnessed how consistent cover-up by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led to a global pandemic. So far, the disease has caused more than 16 million infections and over 640,000 deaths.

Wary of the harm brought about by the CCP, many countries have awakened to the CCP's brutality and lies, as well as its immediate threat to freedom. Among the many crimes committed by the CCP, the recently enacted National Security Law in Hong Kong was the latest evidence, while the persecution of Falun Gong is probably the worst human rights violation over the past two decades.

Falun Gong, also known as a Falun Dafa, is a meditation system based on the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. Since July 1999, the CCP has targeted about 100 million practitioners with detention, imprisonment, torture, psychiatric abuse, and forced organ harvesting.

Aside from the harsh physical abuse, the CCP has also subjected practitioners to intensive brainwashing in attempts to force them to give up their faith. In addition, news media and the education system were mobilized nationwide to defame Falun Gong, with the 21-year-long hate propaganda turning a large number of Chinese against innocent Falun Gong practitioners and the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance.

Realizing the severity of the persecution, over 600 leaders from about 30 countries recently issued a joint statement calling for an end to the persecution. The United States, in particular, has shown its support of Falun Gong practitioners in its religious freedom report and recent State Department announcements.

As nearly 200 countries continue to suffer from the coronavirus pandemic, China has experienced losses caused by flooding, locust plague, and other disasters. Given this situation, quitting the CCP organizations inside China and rejecting the CCP in the international community will benefit our society for the long term.

Support from Over 600 Officials in 32 Countries

July 20, 2020 marked the 21th anniversary of the persecution of Falun Gong in China. More than 600 officials from over 30 countries issued a joint statement on July 18 condemning the persecution by the CCP and calling to stop the brutality.

The list of signatories, available from Falun Dafa Information Center, consists of current and former ministers, senators, members of parliament, members of congress, and state-level lawmakers.

“The persecution of Falun Gong in China has been one of the harshest campaigns against a faith group in modern times,” the statement wrote, “We … urge the Chinese government to respect international norms and … to immediately stop the persecution of Falun Gong in China, and to unconditionally release all detained Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience.”

Among the signatories are 28 U.S. Senators and House Representatives. “Thank you for the kind invitation to participate in this years’ virtual Falun Gong rally,” stated Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler from Washington State, “I would like to express my most sincere support for the practitioners of Falun Gong. Let’s take a moment today to reflect on the persecution and those still suffering from the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”

Australian Member of Parliament George Christensen said the CCP’s atheist ideology meant it was afraid of groups with spiritual beliefs. “They do not like Falun Gong, they do not like its practitioners, they do not like Christians, they do not like Buddhists, they do not like Muslim Uyghurs and there are reasons for that.” he said, “Half of them is because all of those [religious followers] hold that there is a higher power, a higher power than the Chinese Communist Party, they will not accept that, and that’s why there’s such persecution of people of faith including Falun Gong practitioners.”

Separate from the statement, the U.S. State Secretary Michael Pompeo issued a statement on July 20 urging to stop the suppression against Falun Gong in China. Similarly, U.S. Mission Geneva also tweeted the following in support, “On this day 21 years ago, the PRC pledged to eradicate the practice of Falun Gong. Today, we stand with this peaceful religious community and call for the release of the thousands unjustly imprisoned for their beliefs.”

Since July 2015, over 3.65 million criminal complaints from 37 countries have been submitted to China’s Supreme Court and Supreme Procuratorate against former CCP lead Jiang Zemin for ordering the persecution of Falun Gong in 1999. In Canada, a list of human rights violators was recently submitted to François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Foreign Affairs, calling for an investigation of their roles in the persecution of Falun Gong and measures to be taken against them based on the Canadian Magnitsky legislation.

Dire Consequences

Since ancient times, people in China believe in the harmony of heaven, earth, and mankind. When people committed major wrongdoings, serious disasters often followed.

As the world yielded to the CCP, allowing it to push the communist ideology and other lies globally, the entire world suffers. The coronavirus pandemic is one example. Li-Meng Yan, a Hong Kong virologist who fled to the United States in April, said the CCP knew about coronavirus in December 2019, but chose to withhold the information.

The CCP influence also extended to Hong Kong. When Dr. Yan heard from her medical professional friends in mainland China about the human-to-human transmission on December 31, 2019, she notified her supervisor, but was told to keep quiet. As the situation in mainland China deteriorated, her friends said, “We can’t talk about it, but we need to wear masks.” She tried again telling her supervisor about this. “Keep silent and be careful. Don’t touch the red line,” the supervisor replied, “[Otherwise] we will get in trouble and we’ll be disappeared.”

Right now, the pandemic has infected nearly 200 countries. From July 13 to July 17, about one million infection new cases were identified in those four days alone. During a recent interview, Dr. Yan said, “I also want the U.S. people to understand how terrible this is. It is not what you have seen ... This is something very different... We don't have much time.”

Inside China, flooding has been threatening people's safety when the coronavirus pandemic is still out of control in certain places. Twenty-seven provinces are experiencing flooding including the Yangtze River and Huai River regions. China’s Ministry of Water Resources said that since June there are 433 rivers with water levels higher than alert limits. Among them, 33 have unprecedented high water levels.

The Three Gorges Dam, a costly political project in China that was once claimed to protect the Yangtze River region from flooding for 1,000 years, has been reported to discharge water numerous times recently, making the downstream areas even more vulnerable to flood damage.

International Community Rejecting the CCP

The CCP did not learn its lesson from the pandemic or flooding. Instead it ramped up its efforts to force a National Security Law on Hong Kong.

These serious actions have made world leaders more clear on the CCP’s damage to our society. FBI Director Christopher Wray recently spoke at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. on July 7 that “it’s the people of the United States who are the victims of what amounts to Chinese theft on a scale so massive that it represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history.”

For example, in 2017 the Chinese military hacked Equifax and stole the sensitive personal information of 150 million Americans. With situations like that, the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about once every 10 hours.

To achieve its goals of surpassing America and dominating the world, the CCP often steals American intellectual property and then uses it to compete against the very companies it victimized.

From talent recruitment programs like the so-called Thousand Talents Program, to military as well as non-state hacking, from data theft for artificial intelligence gathering to targeting key platforms as “consulting services”, “all of these seemingly inconsequential pressures add up to a policy-making environment in which Americans find themselves held over a barrel by the Chinese Communist Party.”

Wray also emphasized that he was not talking about Chinese people—who have contributed significantly. “When I speak of the threat from China, I mean the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party,” he explained, “China has a fundamentally different system than ours—and it’s doing all it can to exploit the openness of ours while taking advantage of its own closed system.”

The World Health Assembly (WHA), the decision-making body of the WHO, adopted a resolution in late May that calls for impartial evaluation of responses to the coronavirus pandemic. Proposed by Australia and other countries, this initiative has been supported by 122 countries, as reported by The Guardian on May 18 in an article titled “Australia hails global support for independent coronavirus investigation.”

Australia is one of the earliest co-sponsors, and its foreign minister Marise Payne said the resolution includes the three main elements his government had sought. That is, the review should be “impartial, independent and comprehensive.”

“We’re not interested in blame; we’re not interested in any kind of witch-hunt; we’re just interested in learning,” said New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, adding that her country was also backing the motion.

Decommunization: A Global Trend

A New York Times article on July 17 discussed the possibility for the U.S. Government to ban the CCP members from entry. Although considered by some as a new initiative, it is actually a continuation of the thirty-year long decommunization movement that started over 30 years ago.

As communism collapsed in Eastern Europe in 1989, laws were passed in numerous countries to investigate communism members. One law from the Czech Republic in October 1991 banned all employees of the StB, the Communist-era secret police, from designated public offices.

Similar actions were taken in other countries. Germany has a federal agency known as the Stasi Records Agency that is dedicated to preserving and protecting the archives and investigating the past actions of the former East German secret police. Following the first lustration bill in 1992 and a new law in 1996, the lustration was handled by the office of the Public Interest, which was later replaced by the Institute of National Remembrance.

After Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party was published in 2004, over 360 million Chinese have renounced membership of the CCP and its junior organizations. The recent rejection by Western countries makes many Chinese people eager to separate themselves from the regime, said Global Service Quitting the CCP (Tuidang) Center coordinator Yi Rong.

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/7/29/186085.html
 

Ellanjay

Council Member
Apr 11, 2020
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https://youtu.be/NFcU1CElsEE


Lessons to Learn from the Misfortunes of Wuhan

Aug. 3, 2020 | By Shu Chu (Minghui.org)


Wuhan is one of the most famous ancient cities of China and has a magnificent historical and cultural legacy. One of the most famous events to have taken place there was the Wuchang Uprising of 1911, which led to the downfall of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China––the first of its kind in Asia.

As a key transportation hub with a population of 11 million, Wuhan is also one of the economic hubs of Central China, earning it the nickname “China's Chicago.” It is home to over 350 research institutes, 1,656 high-tech enterprises, and numerous enterprise incubators backed by funding from 230 of the Fortune 500.

However, Wuhan has become a ghost town since the coronavirus outbreak. As the deadly pandemic has spread around the world, it has infected at least 15 million globally and accumulated a death toll of over half a million.

When we take a look at a few major events that have taken place in Wuhan during the reign of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), it may give us some clues as to how a once-glorious city devolved into a global epicenter of misfortune.

1958: Model City During the Great Leap Forward

After the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957 that sought to take down intellectuals, then-CCP leader Mao Zedong had the ambition for China to surpass Britain and the U.S. in industrial output within 15 years.

In response to Mao's call and its manifestation in the Great Leap Forward movement of 1958, many CCP leaders, local cadres and reporters in China all scrambled to beat each other at fabricating impossibly high farming production figures.

For example, a single Chinese cabbage in Hebei was reported as weighing 250 kilograms. On August 13, 1958, People's Daily published a headline claiming that Macheng, a city near Wuhan, had a rice yield of nearly 37,000 jin per mu (110 tons per acre), about 90 times higher than actual output at the time.

The news was quickly reprinted in the Soviet Communist Party’s mouthpiece, Pravda. More than 100,000 people visited this “satellite field” to learn from the farmers' experience, including many experts from socialist countries such as the Soviet Union, East Germany, the Czech Republic, North Korea, and so on. China’s then-premier Zhou Enlai also went in person and had a film made of his visit.

How did this seemingly ridiculous figure come into being? It turned out that in order to beat another commune, which had reported a unit yield of 10,000 jin per mu, the Jianguo No. 1 commune decided to weigh the same baskets of rice again and again until they reached the 37,000-jin mark.

When a young man on an inspection team asked how they managed to grow so many rice plants at such high density, the team leader accused him of being “too fussy” and “running counter to the CCP central government and Chairman Mao.” The young man was pulled aside and criticized on the spot. He was later labeled as a rightist and punished.

This is similar to what happened at the beginning of the pandemic. When Dr. Li Wenliang in Wuhan shared coronavirus information on social media with his medical colleagues on December 30, 2019, he was immediately reprimanded by the authorities and punished for “spreading rumors.” Sadly, Dr. Li died from the infection later on.

Less than a year after Jianguo No. 1 Commune’s glorious moment, China was hit by a devastating famine as a result of the CCP’s preposterous policies and local Party leaders blindly following the party line. There was little grain left in the village, leaving people with no choice but to eat wild herbs and tree bark.

Gong Zhentang, a survivor of the tragedy, said to a reporter in 2019, “It was really terrible. The deaths were too many to count.”

According to credible statistics, about 45 million people in China starved to death during the man-made famine lasting from 1959 to 1962. CCP leaders have never apologized for their wrongdoings to this day.

1967: Unknown Number of Youngsters Perished in the Yangtze River

Mao called upon the Chinese youth to “temper themselves” in rivers and lakes in 1962. A keen swimmer himself, Mao went for his last swim in the Yangtze river on July 16, 1966, at the age of 73. To commemorate Mao’s swim in the Yangtze river, CCP authorities in Wuhan organized a “Crossing the Yangtze River” event on August 1, 1967.

For many, it would become a disastrous day.

Under Mao's cult of personality, he was hailed as someone beyond the gods. Young people, mostly from colleges and universities, participated in the river-crossing event with pride and honor.

Tens of thousands of spectators crowded along Hanyang's docks that day. It was blazing hot, and some people fainted from the scorching summer heat while bureaucrats made long speeches one after another. People started to panic.

Just then, the starting gun went off, and crowds of people rushed to get into the river. Thousands tried to get in at the same time from a 20-meter-wide entrance. A stampede began––some people were trampled to death, some were suffocated to death, some were pushed into the river and drowned.

A survivor recalled his ordeal later, “As soon as I jumped into the river, my head and shoulders were immediately pushed into the water by several hands. I instinctively pulled and kicked to try to come up to the surface, but I felt I was surrounded by hands, feet and bodies that were tangled in the water. Finally, I managed to raise my head above the water, but all my friends were nowhere to be seen. I could only see countless heads squirming in the water, like a pot of dumplings bobbing up and down.”

The freezing chamber of the Wuhan Meat Processing Plant was stacked with bodies from this event, and so were the hospitals and funeral homes. Nobody knows the exact death toll.

1999: Crimes Committed by Wuhan TV Station, Education and Medical Sectors

The CCP began to persecute Falun Gong practitioners on July 20, 1999. Wuhan TV Station spearheaded the CCP’s persecution policy; even before the formal launch of the crackdown, Zhao Zhizhen, then-head of the station, followed the Party closely and produced a defamatory program on Falun Gong. The 6-hour film was later used as brainwashing material by the CCP to slander Falun Gong and was broadcast nationwide to incite people’s hatred of the peaceful spiritual practice.

Countless people began to harbor resentment against Falun Gong as a result. This act by Wuhan TV Station, headed by Zhao Zhizhen, would lead to serious consequences.

Regrettably, the education sector in Wuhan also followed the CCP closely and actively participated in the persecution of Falun Gong as hatchetmen. For example, Wuhan University set up a so-called “Hubei Anti-Cult Association” on its campus, compiled teaching materials to smear Falun Gong, and pushed disinformation about the practice to international society. Countless people, especially young people, were brainwashed by the libelous textbooks and so-called research outcomes into blindly siding with the CCP.

Worst of all, Wuhan's medical institutions have actively participated in a crime against humanity–live organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners. According to a report by the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (WOIPFG), Lin Zhengbin and more than 80 other doctors in Wuhan Tongji Hospital, as well as 48 others in Wuhan Union Hospital, had participated in forced organ harvesting. Investigators found in 2014 that Tongji Hospital alone performed nearly 3,000 kidney transplants, and by 2018, the number had reached a staggering 6,000, the most of any hospital in China. This atrocity still continues today.

In addition, Wuhan is one of the cities where the persecution of Falun Gong is most severe. There are over 60 brainwashing centers in its various districts, which in the past 21 years have persecuted tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners. These practitioners were beaten, chronically deprived of sleep, shocked with electric batons in sensitive areas, tied up in painful positions, and subjected to many other forms of physical torture and mental torment.

The 610 Office is a Gestapo-like organization set up on June 10, 1999, by the central CCP leadership for the express purpose of persecuting Falun Gong. It has branches at all levels of administration across China. The Wuhan 610 Office, the local police, and the judiciary have colluded to send practitioners to labor camps and prisons, and many of them have died from torture.

One of the victims was the 50-year-old Ms. Liu Lihua, director of the Hongshan District Farming Technology Service Center in Wuhan. Ms. Liu was persecuted numerous times for talking to people about Falun Gong and refusing to renounce her faith in Falun Gong’s principles of “Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance.”

First, she was detained for two years in Wuhan City First Detention Center and Hewan Forced Labor Camp, where she was tied onto a “death bed” and hung up in the air for doing Falun Gong exercises. She was later taken to another forced labor camp for a year, where she was beaten, forced-fed, and deprived of sleep for four months.

In April 2003, she was unlawfully arrested again by personnel from the 610 Office and taken to the Tangxun Lake Brainwashing Center, where she was further tortured. She became extremely weak and died on June 9, 2006.

Waking Up in the Face of Disasters

The coronavirus hit Wuhan first, and it hit very hard. The exact death toll in Wuhan and all of China still remain unknown due to the cover-up by CCP authorities. The official figure sits at over 4,000, but much evidence, including the number of urns released to families of virus victims, seemed to suggest a death toll of at least 60,000 in the city.

Many people have awakened because of the pandemic, both in China and abroad.

Tu Long, a young man born and raised in China in the 1990s, used to believe that as long as he didn’t say anything out of line and became an “obedient citizen,” he would be able to make his way upward. But his outlook completely changed after he learned the truth by reading information outside the CCP's firewall. Now, he can no longer keep silent, reported Voice of America on March 14, 2020, in an article titled “’I Have the Obligation to Speak for the Dead.’”

“When they expelled the ‘low-end population’ [migrant workers] in Beijing, I said to myself, I worked very hard. I’m not part of the ‘low-end population,’ I would not be expelled.”

“When they built the concentration camps in Xinjiang [for Uighurs], I thought, I’m not an ethnic minority, I don't have any religious beliefs, I would not be in trouble.”

“I sympathize with the suffering of the Hong Kong people, but I thought I would not go on the street to protest [for democracy], so it has nothing to do with me,” he said. “This time it hit my hometown. Many people around me had already gotten sick, some had died, so I couldn’t stand it any longer.”

Tu Long was angered by CCP officials’ behavior in dealing with the pandemic.

“Until today, not only did no [official] come out to apologize to the Wuhan people, they told us we should hate the United States, we should hate Japan, we should hate South Korea, we should hate Taiwan, and we should hate The Wall Street Journal. No one came out to take responsibility,” he said.

Tu Long found it absurd that officials started praising the CCP for its “wise leadership” and celebrating its “great success” when people were still sick and dying.

Tu Long also reflected upon himself when condemning the CCP: “The majority of Chinese, myself included, are not innocent. We condone [the CCP leadership] to do evil, and some have even assisted them in committing evil acts.”

What he said echos a well-known line by Edmund Burke, an Irish statesman and philosopher in the 18th century: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Tu Long represents a large group of people in China who no longer trust the CCP and are longing for freedom.

Internationally, a global coalition to hold the CCP accountable for its aggressive and criminal conduct is taking shape and expanding quickly. More and more politicians, business leaders, and other people have realized that the CCP would never abide by the same rules and values expected of a decent and responsible government, and that the “appeasement policy” taken in the past when dealing with the CCP would only lead to greater instability and chaos in the world. The CCP must be challenged directly, as they have come to realize.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo condemned the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong: “Twenty-one years of persecution of Falun Gong practitioners is far too long, and it must end.”

More than 600 parliamentarians from 30 countries have also signed a joint statement supporting Falun Gong and calling on the CCP to stop the persecution.

Many people hold the view that this is not just an issue between Falun Gong and the CCP but a battle between good and evil and a test for us all. Perhaps when such a brutal persecution of the innocent comes to an end, it would be a turning point for Wuhan and China.

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/8/3/186171.html

https://pandemic.mp3mp4pdf.net/media-players/