United Front groups in Canada helped Beijing stockpile coronavirus safety supplies

Ellanjay

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The Chinese Communist Party’s Cover-up of One Disaster after Another

Aug. 4, 2020 | By Shi Zhi and Qing Shan (Minghui.org)


“For any infectious disease outbreak in China, whether new or recurring, China's National Health Commission would know about it within six hours,” declared Gao Fu, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in June 2019 at a major forum, “This is because we have established an effective, nationwide information submission system.”

Gao was not lying. After the Chinese Communist Party covered up the SARS epidemic in 2003, the WHO mandated that China establish an infectious disease reporting system, which was then listed as one of the accomplishments in the 2017 China State Council Information Office’s white paper titled “Development of China’s Public Health as an Essential Element of Human Rights.” This system was tested in July 2019 with more than 8,200 participants from 31 provinces and provincial-level cities. The test scenario was about how to respond should a virus break out in 2020.

A virus did break out. And the reporting system was turned into a water-tight mechanism to block information, suppress whistleblowers, and mislead the public.

A System Failure

According to news reports and scientific research, coronavirus infections occurred as early as December 1, 2019. By mid-December of last year, there had already been several cases of human-to-human transmission. On December 30, Wuhan Central Hospital received test results of coronavirus. Doctors reported to higher officials and passed on the information through social media.

But none of these communication channels worked. Because they sounded the alarm on the outbreak, Ai Fen, Li Wenliang, and other doctors were punished by the Wuhan police for “spreading rumors.” They were charged with “illegal acts of fabricating and spreading rumors and disrupting social order.”

China's National Health Commission and CDC both have branches at every level of government, with the former overseeing the latter. After the coronavirus broke out, the National Health Commission sent officials to investigate the situation in Wuhan on December 29. At that time, multiple hospitals were reporting cases of coronavirus.

On December 30, the Wuhan Health Commission sent a notice to healthcare workers, warning them of an unknown pneumonia, without mentioning the coronavirus. It also prohibited medical staff from discussing the information.

On January 3, 2020, the National Health Commission issued a policy (Document 2020 No. 3) with the following instructions:1) All regional governments and health commissions need to manage samples of coronavirus that caused Wuhan pneumonia according to regulations on “Highly Pathogenic Microorganisms (Type 2);”(2) Without authorization, no organization is allowed to provide test results to any other organizations or individuals;(3) all medical facilities must immediately stop any ongoing viral testing;(4) all medical facilities must destroy all samples from patients;(5) front-line doctors in Wuhan are not allowed to disclose any information about Wuhan pneumonia.

This series of events shows that the public did not know about the coronavirus virus outbreak because officials at each layer withheld information in order to follow the Party’s narrative—and punished anyone who dared to challenge that protocol.

China’s Internet Army

Disinformation is only part of the picture of China’s censorship and manipulation of information. Outside mainland China, the CCP heavily influences public opinion, especially on social media platforms.

An article from Radio Free Asia on April 28, 2020, reviewed three Twitter accounts over the past 100 days, including Hua Chunying (@SpokespersonCHN), Zhao Lijian (@zlj517), and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (@MFA_China). Hua is the director of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Information Department and Zhao is her deputy director.

A total of 4,574 tweets were posted from the three accounts between January 1 and April 10. In January and February, the tweets mostly praised the CCP's success in combating the coronavirus and exuding “positive energy” (a slogan proposed by the CCP leadership since 2014), but there was no information about the ever-increasing confirmed cases.

Since February 20, these tweets changed from depicting China as an outbreak area to bragging about itself as the savior of the world. On March 12, one day after the WHO declared the coronavirus pandemic, Zhao tweeted that, “It might be the US Army that brought the epidemic to Wuhan.”

In fact, nearly 80% of the tweets posted by the three Twitter accounts were critical of the U.S. It is worth noting that Twitter is banned in China. While ordinary Chinese citizens could face jail terms for accessing such platforms, these CCP officials abused them to promote the CCP propaganda and attack the West.

The CCP has a massive internet army whose job is to mislead the public, both inside and outside China. In addition to paid staff, about 10 million volunteers were recruited to monitor the internet according to BBC News on April 7, 2015. A document from the Youth League [2015-9], a junior organization of the CCP, revealed that about 4 million of these volunteers were college students.

Tangshan Earthquake

The CCP cover-up and mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic is not the first time that the regime has downplayed disasters in the name of maintaining stability.

Another example is the Tangshan earthquake in Hebei, China, on July 28, 1976. With a magnitude of 7.6, Chinese authorities said that about 240,000 people died in the calamity. Experts believe the majority of the deaths could have been avoided.

Two weeks before the disaster, the Beijing Earthquake Office detected unusual signals and contacted the National Earthquake Bureau for immediate measures. The bureau did not reply until July 26. “The earthquake warning in Sichuan Province is already chaotic. Tangshan is close to Beijing, so think twice before messing things up!” replied an official.

Geng Qingguo from the Beijing Earthquake Office said that predicting earthquakes above a magnitude of above 5 was fairly easy even with technologies at that time, let alone the Tangshan earthquake that had a magnitude of 7.6. “Plus, 6 hours before the earthquake, there were already abnormal sound and light from the ground. Had the local residents been warned, the loss of life would have been significantly less,” he said.

The Disasters Continue

Many areas in China have been experiencing flooding since June. As water levels increased in the Chu River, one branch of the Yangtze River, officials gave the authorization to blow off two places on July 19 to discharge water. Although the goal was to protect Jiangsu Province, many places in Anhui Province were instantly submerged.

Similar things have happened in many areas. Yichang, the second-largest city in Hubei Province, was flooded on June 27. Local residents suspect officials intentionally discharged water to protect the Three Gorges Dam.

“If we’d been notified ahead of time about the discharge, the losses would have been much less,” one Netizen wrote. “The Party treats us like dirt. People’s lives mean nothing as long as the Party exists,” another one added.

Speaking at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum on July 23, U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said he grew up and served 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 remarked.

“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,” he explained, “Just think how much better off the world would be – not to mention the people inside of China – if we had been able to hear from the doctors in Wuhan and they’d been allowed to raise the alarm about the outbreak of a new and novel virus.”

But for too many decades, Western leaders have ignored this. “We can’t ignore it any longer. They know as well as anyone that we can never go back to the status quo,” he said.

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/8/4/186179.html
 

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War Room Pandemic: Mother’s Milk (w/ Dr. Yan and Evan Sayet)

Raheem Kassam and Jack Maxey are joined by Steve Bannon to discuss the latest on the coronavirus pandemic as the proxy war over hydroxychloroquine heats up. Calling in is Dr. Li Meng Yan to give her insights HCQ. Also calling in is Evan Sayet to discuss his new short book on anti-socialism.
Aired On: 08/04/2020
 

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A Look Into History: Causes Behind Disasters

Aug. 5, 2020 | By Zhang Min (Minghui.org)


Stories from the past have helped to shape many cultural traditions of the world. And very often, they can help guide us out of desperate situations whenever we choose to view them through the lens of humility and sincerity.

Humanity has been no stranger to natural disasters throughout history. Floods, droughts, earthquakes, cyclones, and plagues, are often viewed as “acts of God,” “blameless misfortunes,” or are attempted to be explained away with a wide array of reasoning and theories.

In ancient China, one such explanation is that natural disasters often result as a consequence of gross injustices.

In ancient Chinese culture, whenever natural disasters occurred, emperors and court officials would reflect upon their governance and check to see if they had done something wrong, if there were cases of injustice that needed to be addressed.

Such a concept had become a common practice by the Han Dynasty (202 BC - 220 A.D.). In The Book of Later Han, a book that records the history of the Eastern Han period, there are a number of incidents during which severe droughts suddenly gave way to pouring rains after emperors redressed cases of injustice and released people who had been wrongfully jailed.

It was recorded for example, that the capital city suffered a severe drought in the sixth year of the Yongyuan era under the reign of Emperor He of Han (88 - 106 A.D.). The emperor decided to reopen cases where the convicted were given heavy sentences and allowed them to appeal for their innocence. Consequently, those who had been wronged earlier were rehabilitated, and justice was restored. Heavy rains poured down even before the emperor got back to the palace.

Another incident was also recorded: In the second year of Emperor An of Han (106 - 125 A.D.)’s reign, the empress-dowager redressed misjudged cases, and again, torrential rains fell in the drought-affected regions almost immediately.

The He Tu, which consists of cosmological diagrams used in ancient China, was said to offer clear indications for the causes of natural disasters. A locust disaster, for example, was said to be the result of the tyranny and greed of officials, who would have most likely put many innocent people in jail. In such situations, natural disasters would occur as warnings and punishments by the divine. When court officials reflected upon themselves and amended their wrongdoings, the natural disasters would disappear accordingly.

The Story of Zhou Qing in the Han Dynasty

This is a true story documented in The Book of Han.

It happened during the Western Han period (202 B.C. - 9 A.D.) in Donghai (today’s Shandong Province). There was a young widow named Zhou Qing, who continued to look after her mother-in-law for more than ten years after her husband passed away. Her upstanding character and filial piety earned her high praise from the local people. Her mother-in-law tried to persuade her to remarry a number of times so that she could make a new life for herself, but she always refused to and kept taking good care of her mother-in-law. In order to relieve the burden on her kindhearted daughter-in-law, the elderly woman committed suicide by hanging herself while Zhou was out. Zhou was heartbroken when she saw what had happened and wailed in grief. However, her sister-in-law accused her of killing her mother-in-law and reported her to the local magistrate office. The magistrate refused to listen to Zhou’s appeal for her innocence and ordered Zhou's execution. Even though the local people knew she was innocent, nobody stepped forward to seek justice for her, except for one prison officer, who later resigned in grief when the magistrate rejected his repeated appeals for Zhou. On the day of her execution, Zhou proclaimed her innocence to heaven, saying if she was not guilty, there would be snow in June and a three-year drought. Indeed, it snowed in June that year, and for the next three years, the region experienced a severe drought with no rain and little agricultural produce, devastating the locals’ livelihoods. When the new prefecture magistrate learned about Zhou’s case from the resigned prison officer, he realized that the three-year-drought was a form of punishment for the gross injustice done to Zhou and the silence of the local people. So, he immediately organized a memorial ceremony before Zhou’s tomb to sincerely redress her grievance and to apologize to her on behalf of the people. As he repented, dark clouds built up, and before the ceremony was finished, it began to pour. That year, the region had good weather for the crops, and the people enjoyed a prosperous harvest.

Consistency Is the Touchstone of Virtue

Even though it is understood that bad conduct and moral decline would result in disasters, people still make the same mistakes again and again.

Emperor Taizong of Tang, one of the greatest leaders in China’s history, wrote in Di Fan, a set of books, about how emperors should behave. In it, he included a line, which, translated, means roughly, “It is not difficult to understand good reasoning, but difficult to put it into practice, and even more difficult to always stick to it.”

Emperor Taizong of Tang also reminded his court officials of proper behavior: “As court officials, you should attend state affairs with intense conviction. If you don’t speak up when you see things that I did not do properly, how can you assist me? If you keep a blind eye, injustice would occur and would bring harm to the world.”

Emperor Taizong was always careful to use his power righteously and always encouraged his ministers to point out his shortcomings so that he could correct them. Under his incorruptible reign, the Tang Dynasty flourished economically, militarily and culturally, and was considered an exemplary model for all future emperors and a golden age in Chinese history. The people lived under peace and prosperity.

In contrast, the Ming Dynasty fared worst in terms of governmental corruption, with the abuse of power reaching an unprecedented level. Eunuchs gained unparalleled power over state affairs and established the first secret service in Chinese history, known as Dongchang (Eastern Depot) and Xichang (Western Depot), which had absolute power in the suppression of “unfavorable” court officials and commoners. People were living in fear and a large number of innocent people were wrongfully tried, tortured, convicted and died.

Correspondingly, the Ming Dynasty also suffered the most frequent natural disasters. According to historical statistics, out of the 276 years of the Ming Dynasty, at least 168 were recorded to have disease breakouts, and there had been 330 instances of plagues over the entire dynasty.

As usual, when there were severe droughts, floods, or earthquakes, emperors would tell their subordinates to speak up about what had gone wrong. The Ming court burned incense, offered sacrifices to the divine, and issued a rescript for penitence. However, it still ruled the people with an iron fist and was not above using violence to consolidate its power.

How could the divine possibly offer any help and protection in such circumstances?

History Keeps Repeating Itself

This pattern of injustice followed by a natural disaster of some sort can be found even in contemporary times. Let us take a look at the events which led up to the outbreak of SARS in 2003.

In 1992, Falun Gong, a spiritual practice based on the principles of “Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance” started to spread rapidly from Changchun in Northeastern China. Within seven years, the number of people practicing Falun Gong reached nearly 100 million in China alone.

However, due to the popularity of the practice and his fear of losing control of the Chinese people, then-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Jiang Zemin launched a nationwide crackdown on Falun Gong practitioners in July 1999.

At the end of 2000, the “China Anti-Cult Association” (CACA) organized an anti-Falun Gong “one million signatures” campaign, originating from Beijing University on January 11, 2001. The CACA distributed 100 hundred-meter-long petition scrolls to various places, and the local CCP departments organized the local people to sign these petitions. As of February 26, 2001, the organizers claimed that the number of signatures had exceeded 1.5 million.

Those who signed the petition included relatives of Falun Gong practitioners who had benefitted from the practice both physically and mentally themselves, as well as their neighbors, friends, colleagues, classmates––many of which knew that Falun Gong is good, but signed the petition to toe the Party line.

In March of the same year, the CACA representatives took the signatures to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva in order to deceive more people in the international community.

Although the 610 Offices, the police, courts and public prosecutors played a key role in the persecution of Falun Gong, those who signed anti-Falun Gong petitions could not absolve themselves from the blame of aiding a tyrant in his draconian rule.

With the momentum gained by the “one million signatures” campaign, the CCP was able to intensify the persecution of Falun Gong on a broader scale. To date, several millions of innocent practitioners have been subjected to unlawful arrests, detention, forced labor, imprisonment; thousands of them have died as a result of torture, and many more were killed for their organs.

In addition to physical persecution, the rounds and rounds of propaganda campaigns put out by the CCP to demonize Falun Gong as a cult only added magnified the hatred against the peaceful, virtuous practice in the general public.

While such a gross injustice was raging across China, SARS broke out in 2003. For many Chinese who were well-versed in Chinese history, it was a divine warning to people to stop such crimes against humanity.

Many people panicked and started to reflect upon themselves in fear. However, as soon as the epidemic subsided, they forgot the pain and continued with their wrongdoings. The persecution of Falun Gong continued.

In 2007, a new persecution campaign to force families to sign the “Reject All Cults” family commitment card was launched in Guangxi Province, which soon spread all over China. Residents were encouraged to monitor and report on each other; some people even reported their own family members, who were then sent to brainwashing centers to be “transformed.”

In August 2011, the central 610 Office launched a nationwide promotion of the “Guangxi experience.”

In 2013, the CCP carried out another nationwide brainwashing campaign to defame Falun Gong, mainly targeting family members of Falun Gong practitioners, women in rural China and primary and secondary school students as their brainwashing victims.

On September 22, 2017, the CCP conducted an online signature activity, urging netizens to sign to “Say No to Cults.” A large number of people who did not know the truth about Falun Gong fell victim to the brainwashing activity, and at the same time helped the CCP commit further crimes.

After the devastating coronavirus pandemic started in Wuhan 2020, many have regarded it as another warning to human beings. People have realized that humanity is in a critical moment of history, and everyone is facing, among other things, a test of conscience.

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/8/5/186195.html
 

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The Chinese Communist Party’s Global Ambitions

(Chapter 18 of "How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World")

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. The Chinese Communist Party’s Ambition to Replace the United States and Dominate the World

a. The CCP Has Always Aimed for World Domination
b. World Domination Requires Defeating the United States
c. The CCP Has a Multi-Pronged Strategy to Subvert and Contain the United States
d. The CCP Incites Anti-US Hatred to Prepare for War With America
e. The CCP No Longer Conceals Its Intentions in the Sino-US Relationship

2. Communist China’s Strategies for World Domination
a. One Belt, One Road Initiative Is Territorial Expansion Masked as Globalization
b. The CCP’s Great Periphery Strategy Aims to Exclude the US From the Asia-Pacific Region
c. Divide and Conquer in Europe Serves to Create a Split With the United States
d. The CCP Exports the ‘Chinese Model’ to Colonize Africa
e. Advancing Into Latin America Encroaches on America’s Backyard
f. Communist China Flaunts Its Military Ambitions

3. ‘Unrestricted Warfare’ With Chinese Communist Characteristics

a. The CCP Promotes Party Culture Worldwide
b. United Front Work Aims to Disintegrate the Free World From Within
c. Unrestricted Economic Warfare Is the CCP’s Heavy Weaponry
d. The CCP Uses the Masses for Espionage
e. Unrestricted Warfare Takes Many Forms

4. The ‘China Model’ and Its Destructive Impact

5. Lessons Learned and the Way Out
a. The Policy of Appeasement Was a Grave Mistake
b. Why Did the West Get China Wrong?
c. What Is the Way Out?
References



Introduction

The beginning of the twentieth century saw the Soviet communists seize power in Russia through violent force. The success of this revolution, in turn, paved the way for the communist specter’s primary actor — the Chinese Communist Party.

The CCP was established in 1921 by agents of the Far Eastern branch of the Communist International. Over the several decades that followed, the Soviet Union played a major role on the world stage, confronting the Western democratic camp in the Cold War. Westerners took the Soviet Union and its satellite communist regimes in Eastern Europe to be the archetypical communist adversary. Meanwhile, the CCP regime had ample time for its establishment and maturation.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, leaving the CCP regime alone on the world stage. Communist China took a new, non-confrontational approach, enticing the rest of the world to engage with its capitalist market economy while retaining a totalitarian political system. Therefore, many Western scholars, entrepreneurs, and politicians did not regard the CCP as a communist party, but rather considered it a variant at most .

This could not be further from the truth. The CCP has brought the defining characteristics of communist ideology — deceit, malice, and struggle — to the apex, creating a regime that employs the most pernicious and insidious methods of political intrigue developed over thousands of years of human history. The CCP seduces people with profits, controls them with power, and deceives them with lies. It has cultivated its demonic technique to the point of mastery.

China is home to five thousand years of history and a splendid traditional heritage, which have earned that ancient land and its people respect and admiration from people around the world. The CCP has capitalized on these positive sentiments. After seizing power and taking the Chinese people captive, it muddled the concepts of the Chinese nation and the CCP regime. It presented its ambitions under the camouflage of China’s “peaceful rise,” making it difficult for the international community to understand its true motives.

But the essential nature of the CCP has never changed. The Party’s strategy of economic engagement is simply to use the “nutrition of the capitalist body” [1] to strengthen its own socialist body, to stabilize its rule, and realize its ambitions, rather than to enable China to see true prosperity and strength. In practice, its methods disregard basic moral ethics and universal values.

The countries that mankind has founded exist on the basis of their founders’ wisdom and faith in the Divine. Human society must follow the standards of conduct laid down by the Creator: to maintain high moral character, protect the right to private property, and adhere to universal values. The economic development of a normal society needs to be supported by corresponding moral standards.

But the CCP’s Party-state has followed a diametrically opposite path, creating a fast-rising economic abomination that has encouraged severe moral degeneracy. The evil specter’s motivation for arranging China’s “economic miracle” is simple: Without economic strength, the CCP regime would have no persuasive influence with which to dictate its terms to the world. These arrangements are not to benefit China or the Chinese, but to play on people’s worship of money and wealth so that the world will align with the CCP in economic cooperation and international affairs.

Internally, the Communist Party rules through tyranny and the most ruthless aspects of the capitalist system. It rewards evil and and punishes good, making the worst individuals into society’s most successful. Its policies magnify the evil side of human nature, using atheism to create a state of utter degeneracy in which people have no moral qualms.

When operating abroad, the CCP regime advocates the ideology of “Chinese characteristics,” meaning communism, and offers powerful economic incentives as a lure to have the people of the free world let down their guard, abandon moral principle, and turn a blind eye to the CCP’s vast abuses of human rights and its persecution of religion. Many politicians and corporations in Western countries have betrayed their values and compromised themselves in the face of profit, aligning themselves with the CCP’s practices.

Western countries hope they can help the CCP make a peaceful transformation, but while China has indeed undergone a degree of superficial modernization and westernization, the Party never changed its underlying nature. Over the past few decades, the practical result of engagement has seen the CCP successfully and peacefully undermine the moral obligations of the United States and corrupt the public will.

The CCP is the main arm of communism and thus the greatest threat worldwide. The communist specter’s aim in strengthening the global power of the CCP is to spread its poison to all corners of the earth and ultimately to have people betray tradition and the Divine. Even if the Party’s schemes for world domination are not directly successful, it will still have achieved the underlying purpose: to part people from their moral values. It does this by tempting people with economic interests, manipulating them with financial traps, infiltrating their political systems, intimidating them with military force, and confusing them with its propaganda.

Faced with such great danger, we must carefully examine the CCP regime’s ambition, strategy, tactics, and goals.
 

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CCP's Global Ambition
1. The Chinese Communist Party’s Ambition to Replace the US and Dominate the World
a. The CCP Has Always Aimed for World Domination




The CCP is not satisfied with being a regional power. It wants to control the world. This is determined by the Party’s inbuilt characteristic of tyranny. By its very nature, the Communist Party opposes heaven, earth, and tradition; it resorts to violence to smash the “old world” and aims to destroy all states, nations, and classes with the feigned goal of “liberating all humanity.” Its unchanging mission is one of constant expansion until the world is united under communist ideology. Its doctrines and practice are by definition globalist.

But because traditional culture was once quite powerful, communism has at times had to adopt a gradual and roundabout approach. In the Soviet Union, Stalin claimed the need for “socialism in one country;” more recently, the CCP has adopted “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Unlike the political parties that share power or hold power by rotation in Western democracies, the CCP has uncontested authority. It sets its strategic goals in the scope of decades or centuries. A few years after the Party established itself in 1949, it rolled out the slogan “surpass Britain and catch up to America” that prefaced the Great Leap Forward. Later, owing to unfavorable domestic and international situations, the CCP assumed a low profile for decades.

After the Tiananmen Massacre, the international community boycotted the Chinese regime. In response, the Party evaluated the situation and concluded that it was still unable to compete directly with the United States. Therefore, it took the path of hiding its strengths and biding its time, rather than attempting to take the lead on the international stage. This was not because the CCP had changed its goals, but because it adopts different strategies according to the circumstances in its struggle to ultimately establish world hegemony.

It can be said that the communist specter used the ancient Chinese strategic feint of “openly repairing the plank roads while secretly advancing via the hidden route of Chencang.” The first communist superpower was the Soviet Union, but its ultimate role ended up being to aid the rise and maturation of the Chinese communist regime.
 

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Three Gorges Dam: A Costly Political Project with an Uncertain Future
Aug. 12, 2020 | By Zhang Zhongmin(Minghui.org)
Regions along the Yangtze River, the longest river in Asia, have experienced severe flooding this summer. Hubei Province, still reeling from the aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak, was hit by floods in late June; Jiangxi Province raised the flood-control response from Level II to Level I, the highest flooding warning, on July 11; further downstream, Xinanjiang Dam in Zhejiang Province opened all nine of its floodgates to discharge water on July 8, leaving 300,000 people in danger.
Adding to the complexity is the water discharge from Three Gorges Dam, where three floodgates were opened on July 7 to protect it from damage, reported Taiwan News on July 9. Once celebrated as a high-profile political project, Three Gorges Dam was claimed to rein in major floods that occur once every 10,000 years, as reported by Xinhua on June 1, 2003,
Within several years, however, its function was downplayed. Chinese authority announced in May 2007 that the dam was able to withstand floods that happen once every 1,000 years, In October 2008, the term was quietly reduced to floods once every 100 years.
The changes in tones highlight the project’s over-hyped benefits versus its high price. Constructed between 1994 and 2003, the Three Gorges Dam cost over 200 billion yuan (or $32 billion) with millions of people relocated. Despite the huge sacrifice from the Chinese people, Chinese media hardly mentioned any drawback of the project, let alone long-term economical, social, and ecological risks.
Li Rui, the former vice-minister of Water Conservation, was a strong opponent of the project. His last article about the project was written in April 1996, two years after the project started. He was then told to keep quiet on this matter by then Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Jiang Zemin.
When his book On the Project of Three Gorges Dam was published in Hong Kong, he wrote, “I have said all I could say. My sincere heart could be seen by both the divine and mankind.” Worried about the dam’s future, he also told his granddaughter, “If the Three Gorges Dam causes major issues one day, please remember that your grandfather was always against it.”
An Exception to the Great Leap Forward Movement
One of the most comprehensive reviews about this project was Li Rui’s article titled “The History of Three Gorge Dam that I Know of.”
When Mao Zedong visited the Yangtze River in 1953, Lin Yishan from the Ministry of Water Resources suggested building a major dam to resolve the flooding issue in the region. Mao agreed with the idea and, as he swam in the Yangtze River in June 1956, he wrote a poem of blocking the river with high dams for a “high flat lake.” People’s Daily followed closely and proposed on September 1, 1953, to finalize plans for the Phase 1 project.
Li Rui, chief of General Administration of Hydro-power, opposed the idea since Lin’s plan to build a 235-meter high dam would submerge about 10 cities including Chongqing with the relocation of over two million residents. He also consulted experts in this field, who confirmed his concerns.
Li Rui wrote an article in 1956 and submitted it to People’s Daily, but then-premier Zhou Enlai didn't allow it to be published on the grounds that this project was supported by Mao. Nonetheless, Li Rui and some other experts published several low-profile articles on this matter.
During a high profile meeting in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province in January 1958, both Lin Yishan and Li Rui presented their ideas to the Politburo. After Lin advocated for the dam project, Li shared his concerns. His main points were:
* Yangtze River has immense and rapid water flow, resulting in a strong self-cleaning ability. If a dam were to be built, it would have damaged the river's self-cleaning ability and possibly lead to a worse flood outcome.
* Yangtze River has many tributaries especially in the provinces of Sichuan, Hubei, Hunan, and Jiangxi, with about 50% of the water coming from downstream of the proposed location of the dam at Three Gorges. Therefore, even if the dam were to be built, it could do very little to prevent flooding in the downstream of the dam.
* Lin argued that the dam would help prevent and control flood, such as the largest flood in recent history that happened in 1870 in upstream Chuan River in Sichuan Province. Li countered that embankment remains the major flood prevention method, and even if the dam were there in 1870, due to its location, it would not have prevented that largest flood in upstream Chuan River.
* A dam of 200 meters or higher would require relocation of over one million people, which is not a trivial matter.
* A high profile dam could easily become a target during wartime.
Mao supported Li Rui’s arguments, especially the last one, and dismissed the dam idea. At later Politburo meetings that year, such as the one in Chengdu in March and another one in Beidaihe in August, “Numerous resolutions were passed for the Great Leap Forward movement, the one related to Three Gorges [of not building a dam] was the only outlier. It was probably the right decision made in those meetings,” recalled Li Rui.
As the political movement advanced, however, Li Rui and some other officials were targeted in 1959 for not keeping up with the Party. Li Rui was stripped of all titles and sent to rural areas to do hard labor. His daughter initially abandoned him because he had been declared an enemy of the state, but later helped him after the Cultural Revolution was over in 1976.
When Li Rui returned to Beijing in January 1979, he was appointed a Vice Minister of Water Resources and Electric Power Ministry. By then, he learned that Gezhouba Dam, another project on the Yangtze River, had been built in 1970. Due to major issues, however, it was delayed by two years and was not fully completed until 1988.
A Political Project
Deng Xiaoping visited Three Gorges in July 1980 after he regained power and an official told him that a dam there would allow 10,000-ton ships to arrive in Chongqing from the ocean. “This was cheating since even downstream bridges in Wuhan and Nanjing only allow 5,000-ton ships,” Li Rui wrote in his memoir.
Nonetheless, Deng specifically told then-premier Li Peng in February 1984 to launch the project. Sun Yueqi from the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and other officials explored the area extensively multiple times and wrote numerous reports to oppose the project. These reports were collected in a book and published in early 1989, which was soon banned when the Tienanmen Square Massacre took place months later.
The Three Gorges project team then produced a documentary and showed it to top Party leaders in 1991. Wang Zhen, one of the veteran generals and then Vice President of China, contacted Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Li Peng to start the project. Since then, opponents were removed from nearly all forms of discussions.
The project was finally approved in a rubber stamp process by the National People’s Congress in 1992. Those with objections were barred from the meetings and the discussions focused on how to build it instead of evaluating its risk and benefits. Moreover, top leaders including Jiang Zemin specifically asked attendees to support this political project. Still, only 67% of the attendees voted yes for this project.
Scientifically Unjustified
Scholars who objected to the Three Gorges project also faced serious consequences. Huang Wanli, who received a master's degree in hydrology from Cornell University and then a doctor's degree in engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the 1930s, had conducted comprehensive research of both the Yellow River and Yangtze River. Four years after becoming a professor of Tsinghua University in 1953, he was labeled as a Rightist by Mao Zedong and targeted for being unwilling to align with the Party’s tone.
Huang found that the Chuan River, a branch of the Yangtze River, had pebbles and grit in the bed. Were a high dam to be built, migration of pebbles—about 100 million tons per year—would be trapped and extend backward upstream. This would ruin adjacent farmland and turn large areas in Sichuan Province into swamps, not to mention irreversible ecological damage and impairment of river transport.
Despite his reputation, Huang was mistreated all along during numerous political campaigns. It was not until 1998 that 87-year-old Huang was allowed to teach graduate students in Tsinghua, three years before he passed away.
When interviewed by the Voice of America in July 2019, Huang’s daughter Xiaolu said her father had written 6 letters opposing the dam. “If they give me half an hour, I can convince top leaders why we should not build it,” Huang once said. But the CCP never gave him the opportunity.
Li Rui had observed the same darkness in the CCP political system, which he described as “correct opinions are rejected while incorrect ones are favors. Similarly, capable people are suppressed and incapable ones are promoted.

Defying Nature
Pan Jiazhen, former Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, used to be a strong opponent of the Three Gorges Dam. He once listed 20 harms of the project, such as submersion of land and forest, relocation of a large number of residents, potential earthquakes, loss of cultural heritage sites, a decline in water quality, and potential collapse of the dam.
Pan, however, later became the technical chief of the project. He gave three reasons, all of which were political, for why he turned from an opponent to a strong advocate of the dam project. First, “Science can solve all problems and mankind will conquer nature.” Second, 20 drawbacks of the dam could not be an excuse for not following the Party lines. Third, opposing voices to the dam were mainly from the so-called anti-China forces. “On behalf of the Chinese people,” Pan declared “I would never allow the river to run at will without constraint.”
Wang Weiluo, an expert of Three Gorges Dam, revealed in his book that the project was a deal between former CCP leaders Jiang Zemin and Li Peng. Li helped Jiang to arise as top CCP leader during the Tienanmen Square Massacre in 1989, while Jiang in turn advocated for the project on behalf of Li, who was in charge of electricity in China.
Shortly after being appointed the top CCP leader, Jiang visited the Three Gorges for the project and silenced both Li Rui and Huang Wanli for expressing different opinions. Under Jiang's influence, the National People’s Congress approved the project in 1992, but with an unprecedented low approval rate.
Data released by China’s National Audit Office in June 2013 showed at least 76 corruption cases related to the Three Gorges Dam project. There were 113 people involved with a sum of 3.4 billion yuan (or $490 million). Inspection officers and the National Audit Office acknowledged that the project had become a tool for high officials to turn public lands and other resources for their own profits.
Furthermore, the dam, which generates about 20 billion yuan (or $2.9 billion) worth of electricity per year, has been privatized, although its earlier investment came from public funds. That is, after contributing tremendously to the project including forced relocation, ordinary people not only didn't receive discounts on electricity fees as promised early, but they instead had experienced more frequent droughts, high temperatures, flooding, and earthquakes.
Safety Becoming a Big Concern
Huang Wanli, who knew well the drawbacks of the dam, once predicted 12 consequences of the dam. The first 11 were: the collapse of downstream banks, affecting voyage, the issue of residents' relocation, silting problems, poor water quality, lower electricity generated, abnormal climate, frequent earthquakes, spreading of schistosomiasis (a disease), the deteriorating of the ecological environment, and upstream flooding. All of them later became reality. The last prediction was, when the risks exceeded benefits, the dam would be blown off.

Google maps of Three Gorges Dam: left taken in 2009 and right was taken in 2018
One comparison of Google maps of the dam taken in 2009 and in 2018, was recently circulating online, which drew broad concerns. The earlier image in 2009 showed the dam was straight, but the later one in 2018 showed a severely deformed structure. Chinese authorities gave several explanations, but none of them made much sense. The situation is more suspicious when considering what the Chinese authority said in 2010, “The dam has limited capability of handling flooding. Better not count too much on it.”
It was also worth noting that despite such a high-profile project, no top CCP leaders attended the ceremony upon its completion in 2009. No official certificate of completion was issued for the project, either. Netizens believed that this was because no one wanted to be held responsible for the time bomb.
To some degree, such cover-ups by the CCP officials are similar to what happened during the corona-virus outbreak in China. After a series of political campaigns that targeted intellectuals(1950s), destroyed cultures (1960s-1970s), suppressed a democratic movement (1980s), and persecuted religious groups (such as Falun Gong practitioners), the CCP did not spare China’s lands and rivers, either.
Sanmenxia Dam, a major project on the Yellow River, was also politically based and it started in 1957. Because of opposing the project, Huang Wangli was attacked by the CCP for decades. Zhang Guangdou, a strong advocate who manipulated numbers for the project to pass, was instead constantly promoted. Within two years after the dam was completed, problems surfaced in 1962 making Mao Zedong so disappointed that he talked about blowing up the dam. But proven facts did not change the fate of Huang and Zhang, and the CCP did not openly admit the project was a mistake until 2004.
Beside dams, Pan and Zhang also followed the Party line closely in other aspects. Pan was Vice Chairman of China’s Anti-Cult Association (an organization of the CCP that facilitates the persecution of Falun Gong) while Zhang was also a key member of the organization.
As the CCP continues to harm the Chinese citizens, and now the people of the world as seen in the coronavirus pandemic, one may find rejecting the CCP is a major step for our society to go back to normal.
http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/8/12/186307.html
 

Ellanjay

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Three Ways to Counter the Chinese Regime Without a War

Commentary by Wang He
August 11, 2020




The year 2020 has marked the beginning of a new phase in the “cold war” between the United States and the Chinese communist regime.

Following U.S. sanctions against human rights violators in Xinjiang came the removal of Hong Kong’s special trade status, and formal denial of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) hegemony in the South China Sea. And now the conflict has intensified with the closing of the Chinese consulate in Houston, and successive China policy statements by high-ranking U.S. government officials. All these events have taken the international community by surprise.

But are there ways to bring down the CCP? There are, for sure. And I believe American policymakers have long been aware of them.

Taking Down the Internet Firewall

First, dismantle the CCP’s Great Firewall to gain internet freedom for the Chinese people.

In the mid 1990s, when China was connected to the global internet, the surveillance and blockade started almost simultaneously. Known as the “Golden Shield Project,” the CCP’s firewall has long been notorious. In addition, on June 1, 2017, Beijing’s draconian cyber security law was implemented to block VPNs, delete posts, ban users, and arrest people. China has become the world’s number one “state behind the wall.”

The CCP’s cyber wall not only deprives the Chinese people of their freedom of speech and freedom of thought, but also seriously endangers the world.

An article commemorating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall published by Radio France Internationale on Nov. 11, 2019 pointed out that, if the world fails to see that the visible Berlin Wall has transformed into an even more vicious invisible (internet) firewall in China, then any rhetoric about freedom is empty.

One of the most important reasons for the raging coronavirus pandemic around the world is the CCP’s concealment and fraud, and its internet blockade. This has become the consensus among the United States and the international community. The United States can no longer ignore the CCP’s cyber wall.

Michael Pack, the new head of the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM), waited two years for Senate confirmation of his nomination and finally took charge of the agency last month. He immediately fired the top leadership at each of the agency’s news outlets, such as the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, that are known to be severely infiltrated by the CCP. A USAGM spokesperson said, “Mr. Pack understands the scale and nature of the threat posed by opponents of freedom of expression, and that is precisely why he considers bolstering firewall circumvention as a top priority of his tenure at USAGM.”

Radio talk show host and former White House strategist Steve Bannon made it clear on his War Room broadcast program “Pandemic EP166” that tearing down the firewall is phase one of how to destroy the CCP and begin the liberation of the Chinese people.

In the May 8 program, Bannon interviewed Michael Horowitz, the CEO of 21st Century Initiatives and the former general counsel for the Office of Management and Budget under the Reagan Administration. Horowitz stated, “It is technologically feasible for us to bypass the Chinese firewall, it won’t take a lot of money, but it’ll take a Manhattan project effort.”

Horowitz went on to say: “The U.S. has lined up a major American University to assign its key information technology and computer security experts to work with…the State Department or the Board of Broadcasting Governors. The experts and government believe that the chances are substantial and that we can take down the firewall before the election.”

The United States has unlimited funds from three billion dollars worth of accounts to tear down the firewall, according to Horowitz.

There is another item of encouragement regarding dismantling of the CCP’s firewall. On June 13, SpaceX completed its ninth bulk Starlink launch, carrying 58 Starlink broadband satellites. According to astronomy news website Space.com, the goal of SpaceX’s Starlink project is to provide users around the world with constant, high-speed internet access. The company plans to achieve this by launching a massive constellation of broadband internet satellites. Users on the ground would then operate a small terminal—no bigger than a laptop—to gain internet access.

This accomplishment could very likely become the terminator of the CCP’s firewall.

In general, technically breaking down China’s firewall is highly plausible as demonstrated by the success of circumvention software, such as Freegate and Wujie. It is merely a political decision.

For example, during the Obama administration, on July 31, 2015, the New York Times stated that Washington had decided to retaliate against China’s hacking of government computers and information of 21.5 million people. Pursuing internet freedom was within the scope of retaliation.

Also, in 2016, the office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) for the first time listed Chinese internet censorship as a trade barrier. In 2018, USTR reported to Congress on China’s WTO compliance, saying the CCP’s engaging in “extensive blocking of legitimate websites is affecting billions of dollars in business.”

However, concrete actions are yet to be seen.

Taking down the Great Firewall will bring great change to China. As one netizen has commented, “Leave the rest to the Chinese people, as long as the firewall is dismantled.”

Sanctioning CCP Human Rights Violators

The second way to bring down the CCP is to comprehensively publicize and sanction Chinese communist officials who have committed human rights violations by freezing their overseas assets.

Accountability, the ability to hold individual human rights violators responsible for their actions, is one of the basic principles of international human rights law and international criminal law. It is never right to cover up personal crimes under the pretext of orders from a superior, national interests, institutional systems, etc. Applying this principle, comprehensively sanctioning CCP officials for their human rights violations will bring great results.

On Dec. 23, 2016 the “Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act” was signed into law, and on Dec. 21, 2017 the United States used it to slap sanctions on Gao Yan, a former police chief of Beijing’s Chaoyang district, over the death of an activist in custody. It was the first time the Trump administration took this kind of specific action in response to a human rights abuse in China.

On Aug. 2, 2017 President Trump signed into law the “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.” The State Department used it the first time on Sept. 20, 2018 to impose sanctions on China’s Equipment Development Department (EDD), the military branch responsible for weapons and equipment, and its director, Li Shangfu, for engaging in “significant transactions” with Russia’s main arms exporter.

The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 is another U.S. law for sanctioning CCP criminals by imposing “property and visa-blocking sanctions on foreign persons responsible for gross human rights violations in Hong Kong.”

This year, the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020 and the Hong Kong Autonomy Act of 2020, laid a legal foundation for comprehensive sanctions against CCP human rights violators.

In terms of law enforcement, on July 9, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned four current or former government officials in connection with serious rights abuses against ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The designation included Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party Secretary of Xinjiang, and Zhu Hailun, a former Deputy Party Secretary of Xinjiang. Also designated were the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau (XPSB), as well as the current Director and Communist Party Secretary of the XPSB, Wang Mingshan, and the former Party Secretary of the XPSB, Huo Liujun.

This action was being taken pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13818, “Blocking the Property of Persons Involved in Serious Human Rights Abuse or Corruption,” which builds upon and implements the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.

Simultaneously, the State Department also placed additional visa restrictions on Chen Quanguo, Zhu Hailun, and Wang Mingshan, and their immediate family members.

The sanctions were imposed under the Global Magnitsky Act, which allows the U.S. government to target human rights violators worldwide by freezing any of their U.S. assets, banning U.S. travel, and prohibiting Americans from doing business with them.

On July 7, U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo also announced the implementation of visa restrictions on Chinese Communist Party officials who are “substantially involved in the formulation or execution of policies related to access for foreigners to Tibetan areas,” pursuant to the Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act of 2018.

Previously, on June 26, Pompeo announced visa restrictions on current and former CCP officials who were believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, undermining Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy. The visa restrictions were to fulfill President Trump’s promise to punish CCP officials who were responsible for eviscerating Hong Kong’s freedoms, and this was enacted prior to the CCP having unveiled the full text of the Hong Kong national security law.

And even prior to this, on June 11, the members of the Republican Study Committee’s National Security & Foreign Affairs Task Force recommended that the Department of the Treasury impose sanctions on key CCP leaders, including Luo Huining, the director of the Hong Kong liaison office, Han Zheng, a member of the seven-person elite Politburo of the CCP and also Xi Jinping’s “point man” on Hong Kong affairs, Xia Baolong, the head of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, and others.

The above examples show that the Trump administration has stepped up its use of comprehensive sanctions against CCP human rights abusers. The effect and impact on the communist dictators and their followers is incalculable.

Quit the Party and Travel Ban

The third way to bring down the CCP is to ban all CCP members from entering the United States unless they publicly declare their withdrawal from the CCP.

On July 15, a New York Times report said: “The Trump administration is considering a sweeping ban on travel to the United States by members of the Chinese Communist Party and their families.”

The article went on to say: “The presidential proclamation, still in draft form, could also authorize the United States government to revoke the visas of party members and their families who are already in the country, leading to their expulsion. … Counting party members as well as their families, the ban could technically bar travel to the United States for as many as 270 million people, according to one internal administration estimate.”

The next day, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters in a press briefing regarding the ban, “So, I have no announcements on that front, but rest assured we keep every option on the table with regard to China.”

The travel ban rattled the CCP and created huge panic in the communist regime.

The Chinese people were greatly encouraged and rejoiced. Not only did mainland netizens strongly support the passage of this ban, they also provided suggestions for Trump to increase the sanctions. In Google’s Chinese search, the term “withdraw from the party” soared.

It is generally anticipated that the consequence of such a travel ban will be the severance of diplomatic relations or worse.

The current U.S. Immigration Law prohibits communist members from immigrating to the United States, but it does not prohibit communist members from entering the country.

However, the United States has recently begun to impose visa restrictions on some Chinese citizens, including senior CCP officials who participated in the suppression of Uyghurs, Chinese journalists working in the United States, and some employees of Chinese technology companies that “violate human rights,” such as Huawei.

In early June, the United States also announced that it would no longer issue visas to foreign students related to the Chinese military, and that visas already issued would also become invalid. In addition, the U.S. government plans to impose visa and economic sanctions on CCP officials involved in suppressing Hong Kong’s freedom.

In terms of operations, it is not difficult to ban the entry of communists. The Trump administration has already distinguished the CCP from the Chinese people. The key now lies in the Trump administration’s recognition of the nature of the CCP and holding the opportunity and the timing. When this move is made, it will set the tone for the new China-U.S. cold war.

In conclusion, I believe the effectiveness of these methods mainly relies on the political will and leadership of President Trump.

Here I’d like to point out that critical to the success of the three methods is to promote the awakening of the Chinese people. The Chinese people are the protagonists in overthrowing the Chinese communist regime. American politicians have made it very clear: the CCP is not afraid of the United States, but of the Chinese people. It’s the Chinese people’s hearts that the CCP and the United States are fighting over.

If the Chinese people don’t awaken, then no one can save them. The help from the United States and the international community’s forces of justice cannot replace the Chinese people’s will to help themselves.

What is encouraging is that more than 360 million Chinese nationals have publicly declared that they have quit from the CCP and its affiliated organizations, the Communist Youth League and the Young Pioneers. The Chinese people’s awakening and the supporting actions from the international community, led by President Trump, will open a new page in history for China and the world.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/three-ways-to-counter-the-chinese-regime-without-a-war_3456433.html
 

Ellanjay

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CCP's Global Ambitions

1. The Chinese Communist Party’s Ambition to Replace the US and Dominate the World

b. World Domination Requires Defeating the United States


Since World War I, the United States has been the most powerful country on earth and serves to maintain international order. Any country that wants to overturn this order must bring down the United States, so in terms of overall strategic considerations, America is the CCP’s main enemy. This has been the case for decades, and the Party has never stopped preparing for an all-out offensive against the United States.

In his book The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, Michael Pillsbury wrote that China has a long-term strategy to subvert the U.S.-led world economic and political order and to replace it with communism by 2049, the one-hundredth anniversary of the Communist Party’s rise to power in China. Pillsbury notes that in the TV series Silent Contest, produced by the National Defense University of China, the ambition to compete with the United States is laid out clearly: The CCP’s process of realizing its “great cause” of dominating the world “will inevitably run into constant wear-and-tear and struggle with the U.S. hegemonic system.” “It is a centennial contest, not to be shifted by the human will.” [2]

The CCP’s global strategy is centered on countering the United States. Arthur Waldron, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a China expert, stated at a Senate hearing in 2004 that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army is the only army in the world that is dedicated for anti-U.S. operations. [3] In fact, apart from the PLA, most of the CCP’s diplomatic relations and international activities have the United States as their direct or indirect target.
 

Ellanjay

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The Reality of Communism in China: Poverty, Inequality, and Corruption

Aug. 14, 2020 | By Shi Chuan(Minghui.org)


Some people in Western society were misled by the claim that communism is a system of equality despite its tyrannical ruling. When looking into facts and uncensored statistics, however, one would find it a brewery of poverty, inequality, and corruption.

Below is an analysis using China as an example. I hope it will help people recognize the nature of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and distance themselves from the totalitarian regime and its human rights violations and religious persecution.

The Issue of Poverty in China

China Society for Human Rights Studies recently published a report to promote China as being far superior to the United States which was said to see half of the American families struggling to maintain their basic life. The statement is untrue but could mislead Chinese people once parroted through various CCP-controlled news media.

According to per capita nominal GDP for 2019 released by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the per capita GPD for the United States was over $65,000 and about $10,000 for China.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced in May that about 600 million Chinese citizens have a monthly income of 1,000 yuan (or $144) or less. A research report published by Beijing Normal University in 2019 supported Li's claim. The report sampled 70,000 people and inferred that 43% of the population (or 600 million) has a monthly income of less than 1,090 yuan. Among them, 220 million have a monthly income of less than 500 yuan (or $72).

The Number Game of Gini Index

The CCP is known to manipulate numbers to support its narratives. After the Tangshan Earthquake in 1976, for example, Chinese authorities first reported a death toll of 655,000, but later lowered it to 240,000. The sudden drop in the number of coupons distributed (which was a necessity at the time to buy fabric or food), on the other hand, indicated a population decline of at least 550,000 people, a figure that was more on par with the initially announced higher death toll.

Another example was the man-made famine in 1959-1961. The CCP never announced the death toll and in fact treated the topic as a taboo for researchers. Frank Dikötter, chair professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, conducted independent studies and concluded the death toll was at least 45 million in his book Mao’s Great Famine.

Similarly, the Gini index, an indicator of income inequality, also remains a mystery in China. In 1978, China reported a Gini index of 0.3, which climbed to 0.4 by 1994. There was no official announcement of the Gini index between 2002 and 2011. In 2012, the National Statistics Bureau (NSB) abruptly reported all numbers between 2002 and 2012, and claimed the index had dropped from 0.479 in 2003 to 0.474 in 2012.

But these numbers received broad skepticism. In a report in The Atlantic in January 2013 titled “What China's Newly Released Inequality Data Really Means,” Xu Xiaonian, a professor of economics and finance at China Europe International Business School, was cited as saying these data were like “a fairy-tale that no one would dare to write.” He was further cited as writing on social media, “A journalist called me and asked me to comment on today's macroeconomic figures. Wouldn't I be sick in my head to comment on such false figures?”

A Gini index of above 0.4 is often considered inequality that could lead to political instability and social conflicts. After this number reached 0.41 in China by 2000, NBS stopped releasing such data. A research team at the University of Michigan analyzed 7 nationwide surveys in China and calculated Gini indices based on them. The results were published in May 2014 on Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) with a title of “Income inequality in today's China.”

Numbers from these 7 surveys ranged from 0.483 to 0.611, with an average at 0.54. Given the information censorship in China, the real number could be much higher. But even 0.54 would put China the highest Gini index among major countries in the world.

“Holding back data have been in the [Chinese] government's interest, an attempt to avoid drawing attention to a reality that an increasing number of Chinese find frustrating,” reported an article on Quartz in April 2014 with a title of “China is hiding how bad income inequality.”

Corruption: When Cash Is Measured in Tons

The real Gini index could be higher because senior officials have large sums of unreported income. Wei Pengyuan, former director of the coal department at the National Energy Administration, was investigated for corruption in May 2014. Since a large amount of cash was found at his residence, local banks provided 16 money counters, among them 4 were damaged onsite because of the heavy use. In the end, the money was determined to be 230 million yuan (or $33 million).

Lai Xiaomin, a business executive and senior economist, was the Party chief and chairperson of the board for China Huarong Asset Management. Among all the fortune he accumulated through corruption and bribery, some of it was kept in his numerous safes. After he was investigated in April 2018, officials found 270 million yuan (or $39 million) of cash in his residence, with a total weight of about 3 tons (or 6,600 pounds).

Besides high officials, offsprings of senior political officials—known as princelings—also accumulated large amounts of assets, which are deposited both inside China and overseas. Deutsche Welle, a German public radio, reported in April 2012 that 2,900 Chinese princelings owned a fortune of about 2 trillion yuan (or $320 billion at that time). They had controlled many industries, especially finance, foreign trade, and real estate. “Among 3,220 Chinese people with fortunes of over 100 million yuan, only 288 are not offspring of high officials,” wrote the report.

https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/8/14/186337.html
 

Ellanjay

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CCP's Global Ambitions

1. The CCP’s Ambition to Replace the US and Dominate the World

c. The CCP Has a Multi-Pronged Strategy to Subvert and Contain the United States

The CCP has taken a comprehensive approach toward succeeding in its attempt to dominate the world. In ideology, it competes with the United States and other countries where there is freedom and democracy. It uses forced technology transfers and intellectual-property theft to close the tech gap and boost its economic confidence. Militarily, it engages in a silent rivalry against the United States by means of asymmetrical and “unrestricted warfare” in places like the South China Sea. It backs North Korea, Iran, and other rogue regimes to impede the United States and NATO.

In diplomacy, the CCP regime has promoted its “great peripheral strategy” and the One Belt, One Road plan. It has very quickly expanded its international influence, including neighboring countries as well as countries in Europe, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, in an attempt to build an international coalition, develop a Chinese-led sphere, and isolate the United States.

The CCP has multiple methods to accomplish these goals. It established the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 1996, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2015, and the “16+1” cooperation with Central and Eastern European countries in 2012. It cooperates keenly as part of the five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), and vigorously promotes internationalization of its currency. It seeks to control the formulation of industrial standards (such as those used for the proposed 5G cellular networks) and to dominate public discourse.

The CCP regime has taken advantage of the democracy and freedom of the press that exist in the United States and other Western countries to carry out united front operations, spread propaganda, and engage in espionage. This is its attempt to manipulate the United States as much as possible and impose bloodless change from within.

Using these tactics, CCP agents bribe U.S. government officials, congressmen, diplomats, and retired military officers. The Party uses economic interests to guide American capitalists to lobby for the Chinese communists and to influence U.S. policy on China. It forces high-tech companies to cooperate with the CCP’s internet censorship and Great Firewall, coerces and incentivizes many in the overseas Chinese communities to serve as fifth columnists, and infiltrates Western think tanks and academic departments. It manipulates these institutions into exercising self-censorship on sensitive topics, effectively adopting the stand of the Communist Party. Chinese companies, which are controlled or influenced by the CCP, have been investing heavily in Hollywood.

While developing its influence in various countries to envelop and contain the United States on one hand, on the other, it establishes hidden strongholds on American soil so that it can undermine the United States from within. It has built an extensive network of agents and has fostered splits in U.S. society, posing a serious internal threat.
 

Ellanjay

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CCP's Global Ambitions

1. The Chinese Communist Party’s Ambition to Replace the United States and Dominate the World

d. The CCP Incites Anti-U.S. Hatred to Prepare for War With America



The CCP’s ideology runs on hatred. The patriotism it promotes entails hating Japan, hating Taiwan, hating Tibetans, hating the ethnic minorities of Xinjiang, hating religious believers, hating dissidents, and most importantly, hating the United States. There is a saying among Chinese netizens: “For small problems, blame Japan, and for big ones, blame the United States.” This means that by inciting hatred against foreign foes, the Party helps smooth over public outrage during a crisis.

Before the Chinese communists seized power, they repeatedly praised the United States for its friendship with China and for the American democratic system. However, after the CCP set up its regime, it immediately took advantage of the suffering China had undergone in modern history, as well as the eagerness of the people to have a strong nation. The CCP painted itself as China’s savior by stoking hatred against America and other foreign countries.

In fact, the CCP does not care about the lives and deaths of the Chinese people, nor does it care about China’s territorial integrity or the sustainable long-term development of the Chinese nation. It is impossible to describe the evilness of how the CCP has persecuted the Chinese people, betrayed China’s sovereignty, destroyed Chinese morality and traditional culture, and squandered China’s future.

By inciting hatred of foreign countries, the CCP’s aims are first to paint itself as a savior so as to legitimize its brutal rule; second, to use nationalist sentiment to divert public attention in times of crisis; third, to build support for the CCP’s expansionist ambitions and base schemes as a means of supposedly rectifying the humiliations of modern times; and fourth, to use hatred to create the psychological preparedness needed for future wars and to desensitize the public to acts of barbarity.

The CCP has indoctrinated the younger generation with hatred of the United States in order to use them as its tools in the effort to supercede America and dominate the world. When the time comes, the CCP intends to use China’s youth to infiltrate the United States and its allied democratic states in various fashions, participate in all-out armed conflict, wage unrestricted warfare, and should the need arise, sacrifice themselves in a nuclear holocaust.

The jubilant Chinese public reactions following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, indicated that the CCP was making good progress with its propaganda. On major Chinese political and military forums, one sees common sentiments like “China and the United States must have a war” — another indication of the CCP’s success in educating people to hate the United States. This is a long-term, gradual mobilization for war, deliberately planned and systematically carried out by the CCP.

The CCP’s hate propaganda is not limited to within China. Internationally, it explicitly or overtly supports rogue regimes and terrorist organizations to fight against the United States, providing them with financial assistance, weapons and equipment, theoretical contributions, tactical training, and public support. The CCP has become the head of an axis of anti-American states and arrogantly steers the global forces of anti-Americanism.
 

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Letter to the Editor: “Although I’m Clothed, I Feel Naked”

Aug. 16, 2020 | By Li Fugui, a farmer in China(Minghui.org)


I used to be a farmer. But after the government seized the land and put buildings on it, we no longer had any land left to farm. To make a living and support my elderly parents, I went to Beijing to look for a job.

A friend of mine in our village went to Beijing several years ago and now works for a delivery company. I went straight to him for help.

At the entrance to his residential district, a security guard stopped me and asked me for the “Health Code.” (Editor’s note: “Health Code” is a mobile app that tracks one’s location and scores a person based on whether he or she has been to a coronavirus hotspot.)

“What is that?”

“It verifies that you’ve been here. It has nothing to do with your health.”

Seeing that I was holding a Nokia (Editor’s note: Nokia is a smartphone that can install the “Health Code” app), the guard took out his own cellphone to scan my face and collected my information before letting me in.

After I found a place to live, a woman from the residential committee told me to get a pass. I was also required to have my face scanned every time I entered and left the apartment building.

She said, “This is to verify that you are the one going in and out of this place, not someone else.”

I soon realized that, no matter where I went, I was required to have my face scanned, whether I was buying groceries at the supermarket, dining at a restaurant, entering a public bathroom, or even before I used the toilet paper dispenser! I once thought that the restaurant didn’t let me in because I didn’t look good enough.

One day when I was walking in Zhongshan Park, a patrol officer stopped me and asked to see my ID. He had a device on his shoulder that scanned my face.

“Why are you scanning my face?”

“We are investigating a case and are collecting evidence.”

I didn’t break any law. Why did he have to record my face?

Wherever I looked, I saw surveillance cameras. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I felt naked, even though I had clothes on.

I later realized that the communist government treats all citizens as “outlaws.” No wonder they spend so much effort monitoring every citizen, everywhere.

That’s why I was delighted to come across a Falun Gong practitioner the other day. She urged me to quit the Chinese Communist Party. She also told me how the government fabricated the “self-immolation” hoax to defame Falun Gong and justify the persecution.

“That’s right!” I said. “I saw a movie the other day that talked about the self-immolation incident. I know all Falun Gong practitioners in my village are good people and they are persecuted so terribly by the government. The government has done so much evil and now has invited the ‘god of plague.’ I truly believe it’s heaven’s will to eliminate it.

“Please help me to quit the Youth League and the Young Pioneers! Then I can be a true Chinese, not a follower of the communist ghost that came from the West.”

http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/8/16/186369.html
 

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CCP' Global Ambitions

1. The CCP’s Ambition to Replace the US and Dominate the World

e. The CCP No Longer Conceals Its Intentions in the Sino-U.S. Relationship




In 2008, while the United States was struggling with an economic crisis, China hosted in Beijing the most expensive Olympics Games in history. Dressed in a costume of prosperity, the regime pushed itself onto the international stage. As a result of globalization, the U.S. manufacturing industry declined. In the face of economic difficulties, the United States asked China for help. “America is surviving by borrowing money from us Chinese” became a hot topic in the CCP’s propaganda. “America is going downhill, China is in position to replace it.” Virtually all the Party-controlled media in China touted such headlines, and the ideas even became popular opinion among Western media and scholars.

Since 2008, America has showed signs of decline in areas such as economic standing, military strength, and political stability. On the economic front, the United States was pushing universal health care, expanding social benefits, placing climate issues at the center of policy, strengthening environmental monitoring, and placing restrictions on traditional manufacturing business. Still, the green energy industry was defeated by made-in-China products, and U.S. manufacturing continued to be hollowed out. There was no way to counter and guard against China’s attacks in trade and intellectual-property theft.

In the face of these trends, many simply accepted as fact the narrative that China was in ascendance and America was in decline. U.S. military spending decreased, and the United States adopted a weak diplomatic stand. On the U.S. political front, socialist ideology was on the rise, social divisions widened, democratic politics became a showground for partisan squabbling, and government functions were often handicapped as a result. The CCP compared this chaos unfavorably with the focused totalitarianism of its own system, depicting America’s democracy as a laughingstock.

In 2010, China surpassed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy in the world. In 2014, according to the World Bank’s statistics, if calculated based on purchasing power parity, China’s GDP might have surpassed that of the United States.[4] The CCP saw that the contrast in power between China and the United States was shifting, and thinking that America’s decline was irreversible, it ended its old strategy of hiding its strength and biding its time. Instead, the CCP openly and directly took aim at the international order led by the United States. The official stance of the CCP, the media, and the experts gradually started to speak unabashedly of an expansionist “China dream.”

In 2012, during its 18th National Congress, the CCP introduced the notion of building a “community of shared future for mankind.” In 2017, the CCP held its Grand Gathering of World Political Parties in order to falsely evoke the ancient imagery of the myriad kingdoms coming to pay their respects at the Chinese imperial court. The CCP went public with its desire to export the communist “China model” to the rest of the world.

In the name of spreading what the CCP calls the China model, the Chinese plan, or Chinese wisdom, the CCP’s ambition is to lead the world and to establish a new world order in accordance with the Party’s rules. The CCP has been preparing for this in all respects for decades. If this new world order is indeed established, it would present a formidable new axis of evil, an adversary even more threatening to the free world than the Axis alliance during World War II.
 

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Coronavirus: A Moving Target for Medical and Vaccine Research

Aug. 17, 2020 | By Tong Gen, Gu Jin and Wu Xian (Minghui.org)


The coronavirus pandemic has spread to nearly all countries, resulting in tens of millions of infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Dozens of companies have been working on vaccines, hoping to curb the disease.

Recent discoveries, however, indicate that from its genetic mutations to its route of spread, and from its symptoms to its damage to the immune system, coronavirus is anything but a normal disease and poses significant challenge to vaccine research.

Nearly 200 Genetic Mutations

The coronavirus disease is a respiratory illness, but its targets are beyond the lungs. “[The disease] can attack almost anything in the body with devastating consequences,” says cardiologist Harlan Krumholz of Yale University in an April article in Science titled “How does coronavirus kill? Clinicians trace a ferocious rampage through the body, from brain to toes.”

Scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory published a draft paper titled “Spike mutation pipeline reveals the emergence of a more transmissible form of SARS-CoV-2” at BioRx (www.biorxiv.org) on May 5, 2020, announcing 14 mutations of coronavirus they had identified associated with the surface protein called spikes. One of the mutations, D614G, has been found to be more transmissible than regular coronavirus strains.

The finalized paper was later published in Cell on July 3, 2020, with the title “Tracking Changes in SARS-CoV-2 Spike: Evidence that D614G Increases Infectivity of the COVID-19 Virus.” The paper found that the D614 mutation has been the most prevalent form in the global pandemic, as observed on the national, regional, and municipal levels.

Further analysis indicated that this variant grows rapidly in the lab while infected individuals also have a higher viral loads in the upper respiratory tract.

Another paper, titled “Emergence of genomic diversity and recurrent mutations in SARS-CoV-2,” is to be published in Infection, Genetics and Evolution in September 2020 by scientists from University College London. By analyzing over 7,600 public genome assemblies, the authors identified 198 recurrent mutations. While all these mutations shared a common ancestor at the end of 2019, they occurred in different regions of the genome, including non-structural proteins and spike proteins.

And the situation keeps changing. “Chinese doctors are seeing the coronavirus manifest differently among patients in its new cluster of cases in the northeast region compared to the original outbreak in Wuhan, suggesting that the pathogen may be changing in unknown ways and complicating efforts to stamp it out,” reported Bloomberg on May 20, 2020, in an article titled “China’s New Outbreak Shows Signs the Virus Could Be Changing.”

More specifically, the virus mutants seem to have a longer incubation time for developing symptoms and appear to be more persistent afterwards.

Unusual Symptoms

The typical coronavirus symptoms include cough, fever, muscle aches, headaches, and difficulty in breathing. But there are also unusual symptoms such as skin rashes, diarrhea, kidney abnormalities, and risky blood blots, something rarely seen for respiratory viruses, reported Time magazine in an article titled “Unusual Symptoms of Coronavirus: What We Know So Far” on May 19, 2020.

Scientific American published an article titled “From Headaches to ‘COVID Toes,’ Coronavirus Symptoms Are a Bizarre Mix” on May 18, 2020, speculating there are two main mechanisms that lead to problems in almost every organ, including the brain, heart, kidneys, gastrointestinal tract, and skin. One of the mechanisms involves one’s immune response, and the other is blood clotting.

Clotting-related complications such as lung artery blockage and stroke were seen in as many as 30% of critically ill patients. What puzzles scientists is that it could happen even to middle-aged people and in unusual places in one's body.

“Genetic sequencing showed some patients have gene variants associated with a hyperactive immune response to viral infections, yielding one possible clue into why some people develop serious complications,” according to doctors at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, as reported by the Wall Street Journal on May 7 in an article titled “Coronavirus Hijacks the Body From Head to Toe, Perplexing Doctors.”

Other scientist agree. "It comes across more as a systemic disease exhibited initially as a respiratory disease," says Mark Poznansky, director of the Vaccine & Immunotherapy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, in a May article on Axios titled “The coronavirus is a moving target.” For example, it is unclear whether the cause is the virus itself, the immune system's response to it, or the treatment received, explained the article.

Devastating Effect on the Immune System

Normally, a person infected with a pathogen could develop antibodies that would fend off pathogen were it to attack the individual again. But for coronavirus, only around 10% to 15% of the infected population have developed immunity, said Danny Altmann, an immunologist from London to CNBC on July 6. “Its a very deceitful virus, and immunity to it is very confusing and rather short-lived,” he explained.

Additional research, on the other hand, has shown that a low amount of antibodies could instead aid the entry of the virus into cells, making it more deadly to the body. This phenomenon is referred to as antibody-dependent enhancement, or immune enhancement. It has been observed for Yellow fever virus, Zika virus, HIV, and now coronavirus.

This situation has been confirmed by vaccine developers, reported Nature on June 5 in an article titled “Coronavirus vaccine developers wary of errant antibodies.” More specifically, “vaccines generating antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 may bind to the virus without neutralizing it. Should this happen, the non-neutralizing antibodies could enhance viral entry into cells and viral replication and end up worsening infection instead of offering protection,” the article wrote.

In addition to immune enhancement, other factors also contribute to the damage. COVID-19 results in pneumonia in most cases and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in about 15% of the cases, wrote an article in Frontiers in Immunology on June 16 titled “The COVID-19 Cytokine Storm; What We Know So Far.”

“Mortality in COVID-19 patients has been linked to the presence of the so-called ‘cytokine storm’ induced by the virus. Excessive production of proinflammatory cytokines leads to ARDS aggravation and widespread tissue damage resulting in multi-organ failure and death,” the article explained.

A Challenge for Vaccine Research

Producing a vaccine for COVID-19 is not simple. One reason is that coronavirus is a RNA virus, which has a much higher mutation rate compared to DNA viruses.

An example is the flu virus. In the past few decades, flu vaccines have been provided to the public, but the disease still claims about 50,000 lives each year in the United States alone. “The most commonly used flu shots protect no more than 60% of people who receive them; some years, effectiveness plunges to as low as 10%,” wrote an article in the Science magazine in September 2017 with a title of “Why flu vaccines so often fail.”

Between the 1940s and the 1960s, people believed the vaccine had an efficacy of 70%-90% based on antibody levels. Through more accurate methods, such as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), the number of infections in vaccinated populations was found to be much higher.

Several factors contributed to the failure of vaccines, explained Arnold Monto, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. One was the mutation of the circulating strain, or “escape mutants”; the other is mutation of the vaccine strain itself during production.

Vaccine research for coronavirus also has other challenges. Anti-spike antibodies (S-IgG) that bind spike protein on the virus surface have been shown to cause acute lung injury (ALI) by disrupting the immune system, as mentioned above. In a paper published in JCI Insight in February 2019 titled “Anti–spike IgG causes severe acute lung injury by skewing macrophage responses during acute SARS-CoV infection,” scientists found similar inflammatory responses also existed in patients who died of coronavirus. Numerous pieces of evidence indicate that COVID-19 can infect more efficiently and replicate more robustly than SARS-CoV.

A Diseases with Many Uncertainties

There are still many unknowns about the coronavirus. The 1918 influenza pandemic was by far the deadliest infectious disease in human history with a death toll of 50 million or more, wrote an April article in the New England Journal of Medicine with a title of “Escaping Pandora’s Box—Another Novel Coronavirus.”

The article wrote that diseases such as pandemics are closely related to human behavior and that such diseases could accelerate suddenly. “Evidence suggests that wherever it began, it silently spread around the world, causing mostly mild cases but also mortality of 0.5 to 1% or higher—a rate that was initially too low to be detected against a high background rate of death from unrelated respiratory illnesses,” the article wrote. “Then it suddenly exploded in urban centers almost everywhere at once, making a dramatic entrance after a long, stealthy approach.” Unfortunately, COVID-19 resembles the 1918 influenza pandemic in many ways, including its rapid growth and geographic spread.

What will happen next remains unknown. Altmann from Imperial College London said he expects a second wave and that the situation remains “very, very scary.” He emphasized that it is difficult to predict if or when an effective vaccine for COVID-19 might be identified. “The devil is in the details, vaccines aren’t that easy,” he added.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) covered up the 2003 SARS outbreak, and it did the same when COVID-19 broke out. Many patterns have indicated that areas heavily influenced by the CCP have high numbers of cases. With this in mind, rejecting the totalitarian regime of the CCP and returning to traditional values will lead us to a path of safety.

http://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2020/8/17/186388.html
 

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CCP's Global Ambitions

2. Communist China’s Strategies for World Domination
a. One Belt, One Road Initiative Is Territorial Expansion Under the Guise of Globalization




One Belt, One Road Takes Center Stage

In 2013, the CCP officially introduced the plan for its Silk Road Economic Belt and Twenty-First-Century Maritime Silk Road, or One Belt, One Road (OBOR) for short. The plan is for the Chinese regime to invest billions and trillions of dollars to build critical infrastructure, such as bridges, railroads, ports, and energy generation in dozens of countries. OBOR is the biggest planned investment project in history.

One Belt refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt, which consists of three land-based components: from China through Central Asia and Russia to Europe and the Baltic Sea; from northwestern China through Central Asia and West Asia to the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean; and from southwestern China through the Indochina peninsula to the Indian Ocean.

One Road refers to the Twenty-First-Century Maritime Silk Road, which is a two-pronged effort: The first route goes from the ports in China to the South China Sea, through the Strait of Malacca and on to Europe via the Indian Ocean; the second heads to the southern Pacific Ocean.

The One Belt on land consists of six economic corridors: the China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor (CMREC), the New Eurasian Land Bridge (NELB), the China-Central and West Asia Economic Corridor (CCWAEC), the China-Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor (CICPEC), the China Pakistan-Economic Corridor (CPEC), and the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Economic Corridor (BCIMEC).

The New Eurasian Land Bridge will be based on rail links between China and Europe, called China Railway Express. Transportation from China to Europe by sea takes over thirty days, compared with just over ten days by rail. The China Railway Express began operation in 2011 and has been an important component in OBOR.

The China Pakistan-Economic Corridor (CPEC) is a joint plan by the two governments. It includes a highway connecting Kashgar in Xinjiang Province with the Gwadar Port in Pakistan, on the Indian Ocean. China gained the right to operate the port in 2013. Being Pakistan’s gateway to the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, the Gwadar Port occupies a critical strategic location. It connects to the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world’s crude oil passes to reach the Arabian Sea.

The general framework of the One Road by sea is to build a number of strategic ports and gain control over the sea transportation. In financially robust countries, Chinese companies enter into equity participation or joint ventures. With financially weaker countries, China invests large amounts of money locally and attempts to obtain the rights to operate the ports.

In 2013 alone, Chinese enterprises received the rights to operate at least seventeen ports or terminals. China Merchants Port Holdings Company Limited bought 49 percent equity from Terminal Link SAS in France. With this purchase, it obtained the operating rights to fifteen terminals in eight countries on four continents.[5]

These ports and terminals include the ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge in Belgium; the Suez Canal Terminal in Egypt; Kumport in Istanbul, Turkey; the Port of Piraeus in Greece; Pasir Panjang Port in Singapore; the largest port in the Netherlands (Euromax Terminal Rotterdam, which is called “the gate of Europe”); the second-phase terminal at Khalifa Port in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; the Port of Vado in Italy’s Liguria region; Kuantan Port in the Strait of Malacca, Malaysia; the Port of Djibouti in eastern Africa; and the Panama Canal.

In addition to investment, the Communist Party also uses the debt traps created by OBOR to obtain control of strategic locations. Sri Lanka could not pay its debt to Chinese companies, so in 2017, it signed a ninety-nine-year lease with Chinese company for use of the Hambantota Port.

The CCP launched its Digital Silk Road in 2018 with the intention of reshaping the future development of internet infrastructure. The Digital Silk Road is considered an advanced stage in the OBOR project and is its newest development. It mainly includes building fiber optic infrastructure, digital information services, international telecommunications, and e-commerce.

Many countries involved in OBOR do not have a complete credit system. The CCP aims to introduce its systems of e-commerce and electronic payment services, such as Alipay, to these countries, while totally shutting out Western competition. The Great Firewall, which filters internet traffic in China, is being exported to the countries of the Belt and Road, as are the systems of mass surveillance already adopted by the CCP for use within China.

The extent of the CCP’s strategic reach can be seen from its investment in global infrastructure. According to a November 2018 report by The New York Times, the CCP has constructed or is constructing over forty pipelines and other oil and gas infrastructure, over two hundred bridges, roads and railways, almost two hundred power plants for nuclear power, natural gas, coal, and renewables, and a series of major dams. It has invested in 112 countries, most of which belong to the OBOR initiative. The CCP has spread its tendrils around the globe.[6]

As OBOR took shape, the CCP’s efforts to supplant the United States on the world stage swelled. It aggressively promoted the yuan as an international currency, as well as its own credit system. Chinese-made telecommunications networks (including 5G) are being pushed as the future in many countries, as are Chinese-built high-speed rail lines. The aim is to eventually establish a set of standards controlled by the CCP and independent of the current Western standards.

One Belt, One Road Has a Global Reach

In the early stage of the One Belt, One Road initiative, the CCP focused on countries neighboring China, reaching as far as Europe. Very quickly, the CCP expanded its reach to Africa, Latin America, and even the Arctic Ocean, covering the entire world. The Maritime Silk Road originally consisted of just two routes. A third route, the Silk Road on Ice, or the Polar Silk Road, was added to connect to Europe via the Arctic Ocean. Prior to OBOR, the CCP had already invested heavily in Africa and Latin America. These countries are now part of the major structure of OBOR, which has enabled the CCP to more rapidly expand its financial and military reach in Africa and Latin America.

The primary goal of OBOR is to export China’s excess capacity by building up basic infrastructure such as railways and highways in other countries. These countries are rich in resources and energy. By helping them build infrastructure, the CCP accomplishes two secondary goals. One is to open routes to ship domestic products to Europe at low cost; the other is to secure the strategic resources of countries that participate in OBOR. The CCP’s intention is to increase its own exports, not to help the countries along the Belt and Road to establish their own manufacturing industries — the CCP would not relinquish Chinese manufacturing.

The real ambition behind OBOR is to use economic means as a vanguard to establish control over the financial and political lifelines of other countries and turn them into the CCP’s colonies in its globalist strategy. Byproducts of participation in OBOR schemes include importation of all the pernicious aspects of communism: corruption, debt, and totalitarian repression. The project is a deceptive trap that will not bring lasting economic prosperity to its participants.

Many countries have become alarmed and are either stopping or re-evaluating the OBOR project. The CCP has conceded that it should be more transparent and make adjustments to the heavily criticized debt traps. Nevertheless, the CCP’s plans can’t be underestimated. While Western enterprises operate on profit-seeking principles and won’t tough it out in turbulent host countries for more than a few years, the CCP’s calculus extends into the next century. It can tolerate operations in turbulent international environments for the long term without regard for immediate losses.

What the CCP wants are pro-communist governments that will support it in the United Nations. The CCP wants to become the leader of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, to struggle with the free world, and to replace America as the world’s number one power. The CCP is willing to foot any human costs necessary to achieve this goal. For instance, the Party can force the Chinese people to pay for costs that privately owned Western enterprises could never handle. In this war to conquer the world, it is not about how powerful the CCP is on paper, but that the CCP has at its disposal the resources of hundreds of millions of Chinese people irrespective of their lives or their deaths. They are its sacrificial pawns.

Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon offered a unique interpretation of the OBOR project. He credits the Chinese Belt and Road initiative as having successfully integrated the Mackinder-Mahan-Spykman theses of how to dominate the world.


Andrew Sheng, of the Asia Global Institute, summed up Bannon’s views:

Sir Halford Mackinder was an influential British geographer/historian who argued in 1904 that ‘Whoever rules the Heartland (central Asia) commands the World-Island (Eurasia); whoever rules the World-Island commands the World.’ His American contemporary, Alfred Mahan was a naval historian who shaped the U.S. strategy to dominate sea power, extending the British maritime empire logic of controlling the sea lanes, choke points and canals by policing global trade. In contrast, Nicholas John Spykman argued that the Rimland (the coastal lands encircling Asia) is more important tha[n] the Heartland, thus: ‘Who controls the Rimland rules EuroAsia; who rules EuroAsia controls the destinies of the world.’ [7]

Bannon’s assessments reflect the Western world’s growing vigilance against the CCP’s ambitions contained in the OBOR project.

In fact, the CCP’s ambition is not limited to the scope of OBOR. The initiative is not merely focused on obtaining the rights to land routes, sea lanes, and major ports. The CCP wants to take advantage of loopholes, wherever they may be around the world. Many countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are newly independent states created by decolonization. These regions experienced a power vacuum, inviting the CCP to gain footholds. The newly independent countries that once comprised the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites had weak sovereign control and were also easy pickings for the CCP regime. Other turbulent countries, which Western investors tend to stay away from, naturally fell into the CCP’s trap. Small countries, island countries, and underdeveloped countries occupying strategic locations are all in the CCP’s crosshairs.

Even some states once firmly in the Western democratic camp have drifted into the CCP’s orbit after suffering from weak economies and high debt. Geopolitically, the CCP is gradually surrounding the United States by controlling the economy of other countries. The aim is to have American influence marginalized and eventually removed from those countries, by which time the CCP will have established a separate world order centered on communist tyranny. This is not a new approach. It has its roots in the old CCP strategy of occupying the countryside to surround the cities, which led it to victory in the Chinese Civil War.
 

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China Grows Hungry

Food shortages and economic shortfalls drive Beijing to further extremes

Commentary by James Gorrie
August 17, 2020


The leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) knows what’s coming to the people of China: food shortages. That’s the reason behind Beijing’s latest draconian edict to the people, the so-called “Clean Plates Campaign.” Once enacted, the new law will limit the amount of food that people can order at a restaurant and may even extend into what amounts Chinese citizens can consume in their own households.

This latest totalitarian move by the CCP comes on the heels of Beijing’s very public arrest of Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai, whom Beijing designated a threat to national security. The two may not seem related, but evidently, freedom of speech and freedom of dining are both considered by the Party to pose national security risks.

Unfortunately, China has seen a significant rise in China’s food prices, particularly pork, which is the national staple. As of this past July, an almost 90 percent year-over-year rise in pork prices was recorded, and overall food prices rose 10 percent over the same time period.

The Party rightly fears that food shortages and the accompanying inflation can lead to widespread civil unrest in China. What’s more, the shortages aren’t expected to end anytime soon, either. In fact, they will likely grow worse.

Chinese government authorities and their official media outlets are citing food wastage on the part of ordinary citizens as the reason for the new policy. Essentially, they’re blaming the people for the food shortages, while deliberately ignoring the true causes. The fault lies partially with Mother Nature, but in large measure, the CCP is to blame.

The CCP Makes Natural Disasters Worse

Consider, for example, that in 2019, China lost at least half of its swine herds due to Beijing’s poorly managed response to the African swine flu. With China possessing over half the world’s pig population, there is not enough swine in the rest of the world to fill that gap. In some areas, pork in the market place is as rare as a panda sighting.

But in addition to African swine flu, China’s crops are threatened by infestation from ravenous insects. Swarms of desert locusts in Biblical proportions have ravaged East Africa and Pakistan. They may also soon impact China’s grain production in Yunnan Province, located in China’s Southwest. But they’re not the only locusts. Swarms of a different breed from Laos are already eating into China’s crops.

An even more dangerous threat looms this fall with the expected resurgence of the armyworm. The pest, which breeds even faster than locusts, first appeared in China last year, but now has a foothold in the south and southwest. Chinese agricultural authorities fear that the losses to corn and wheat crops may be much worse than in 2019.

Then there are the floods. More than 13 million acres of farmland are underwater, destroying at least five percent of China’s rice production, and perhaps twice that if flooding continues. The financial costs exceed $21 billion dollars and have affected more than 55 million citizens.

Depleting Grain Reserves and Importing More

As a result, China’s food imports have risen dramatically. By July of 2020, China’s grain imports were already 21 percent over the entire prior year. But that may not be enough. With the pandemic still impacting the world, importing food may be less reliable than before. Some nations are even halting food exports during the pandemic.

Geopolitical strains with the United States and Australia also play a factor. China has imported more than 9 million tons of soybeans, about 100,000 tons of wheat and almost 65,000 tons of corn from the United States. But if relations continue to deteriorate, the United States, China’s top agricultural trading partner, could cut China off from food exports, making China more vulnerable to scarcity than it already is.

Another red flag is the Party’s recent prohibition against photographing the nation’s strategic grain reserves. This new restriction comes after images of moldy corn taken at a storage depot in Heilongjiang Province showed up on Chinese social media.

Typically, strategic reserves of food or fuel are used as propaganda tools to assuage public concerns. But as of August, two main Chinese agricultural authorities, the China Grain Reserves Corp and the National Grain Trade Center, have already released more of grain reserves than was used the entire year of 2019. The disturbing images of rotten food supplies and subsequent photo ban will only stoke fears and raise doubts in the minds of the people about the Party’s ability to feed them.

Falling Incomes and Rising Unemployment

As if food shortages, price inflation, and natural disasters weren’t trouble enough for the Party, double digit unemployment and falling consumer incomes are putting even more pressure on citizens. But the Party’s decision to pour more salt into those wounds with its Clean Plates Campaign may not yield the desired results.

It’s one thing for a generation to be born into scarcity, but quite another to have it forced upon it. In the former case, one knows no other reality; hopeless acceptance is perhaps all one knows from the first day to last. But in the latter, anger, dissent, and rebellion against the Party could be much more probable outcomes.

CCP Virus and History Boomerang on China

The CCP virus is likely a synthesized pathogen according to Luc Montaigner, Nobel Prize winner virologist who discovered HIV and Dr. Fang Chi-Tai of National Taiwan University. Its China origins, specifically Wuhan, and the Party’s deliberate or accidental mismanagement of the outbreak has been a major factor in the emerging national food shortage.

The cause is simple and predictable. Lockdown measures in agricultural exporting nations has led to less food being harvested and exported. In short, the pandemic has been a major cause of China’s imminent food crisis. The political impact of the Party’s pandemic culpability and ineffective responses, including its latest insulting Clean Plates Campaign, remain to be seen. But it could be much higher and more difficult to manage than Party leaders anticipate.

Perhaps it’s just coincidence, but the last time food scarcity was a major problem in China was in the 1970s, when one man with absolute power ruled over the nation with an iron fist, re-education camps, and a little red book of wisdom. China was alienated from the rest of the world, and the Party was on the brink of collapse, saved by Western economic intervention.

Today, another solitary man wields absolute power in China, which he rules with a digital fist, re-education camps, and his own little black book of personal wisdom. Like his predecessor, he too, is rapidly alienating China from the rest of the world, driven by the Party’s abuse of the international system and the resultant Western economic decoupling.

Yes, food scarcity is a matter of national security for China; but it’s a much bigger threat to the survival of the Party.

James R. Gorrie is the author of “The China Crisis” (Wiley, 2013) and writes on his blog, TheBananaRepublican.com. He is based in Southern California.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-grows-hungry_3461946.html
 

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CCP's Global Ambitions
2.b. The CCP’s Great-Periphery Strategy Aims to Exclude the US From the Asia-Pacific Region

What is the CCP’s so-called Great Periphery Diplomacy? Party think tanks define it like this: “China neighbors fourteen countries along a lengthy land border, and looks across the sea at six other neighboring countries. Beyond that, to the east is the Asia-Pacific region, and to the west is Eurasia. That is, the radial extent of China’s extended neighborhood covers two-thirds of international politics, economy, and security. Thus, the framework of periphery diplomacy is more than mere regional strategy. … It is a true grand strategy.” [8]

Australia Is the Weak Link of the Western World

In June 2017, Fairfax Media Limited and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation released the results of their five-month investigation, the documentary Power and Influence: The Hard Edge of China’s Soft Power. The documentary raised concerns around the world by describing the CCP’s widespread infiltration and control over Australian society. [9] Six months later, Sam Dastyari, a member of the Australian Labor Party, announced his resignation from the Senate. Dastyari’s resignation followed accusations that he had accepted money from CCP-linked Chinese merchants for making statements in support of Beijing regarding South China Sea territorial disputes. His statements on this critical issue clashed with the views of his own party. [10]

In September 2016, Australia’s SBS News published a news report revealing political donations by a Chinese businessman intended to influence Australia-China trade policies. [11] Furthermore, in recent years, Chinese state-run media outlets have signed contracts with Australian media, allowing them to broadcast content provided by Chinese media to Australian audiences. [12]

In fact, as early as 2015, Australia allowed a Chinese company with close ties to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to secure a ninety-nine-year lease over the Port of Darwin. The seaport occupies an important military location for guarding against attack from the north. Richard Armitage, a former U.S. deputy secretary of state, said he was stunned by the deal, and that the United States was concerned about the development. [13]

In 2017, a book called Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia, by author Clive Hamilton was rejected three times by Australian publishers due to fear of Chinese repercussions. Finally, following much consideration, the third publisher agreed to publish it. The censorship elicited widespread concern among Australians about China’s influence in their country. [14]

Many more wonder why China has directed so much effort to Australia. What is the military strategic value of the CCP infiltrating Australia and exerting control there?

In December 2017, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) stated in its report Sharp Power: Rising Authoritarian Influence that the Chinese Communist Party is influencing and changing Australian politics and academia by means of bribery and infiltration for the main purpose of weakening the U.S.-Australia alliance. [15]

In its 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper, the Australian government said: “The United States has been the dominant power in our region throughout Australia’s post-Second World War history. Today, China is challenging America’s position.” [16] Dr. Malcolm Davis, senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said Beijing was trying to gain a strategic advantage in the Australian region to achieve its final goal of ending Australia’s alliance with the United States. [17]

Australia is the CCP regime’s testing ground for soft-power operations in its strategy of periphery diplomacy. [18] The CCP’s infiltration of Australia dates back to 2005, when Zhou Wenzhong, then deputy head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, arrived in Canberra and informed senior officials at the Chinese Embassy of the CCP’s new diplomatic approach. He said that the first goal of including Australia in China’s greater periphery is to ensure that Australia will serve as a trustworthy and stable supply base for China’s economic growth in the next twenty years. The long-term goal is to pry apart the U.S.-Australia alliance. The mission of those present at the meeting was to understand how the CCP could broadly exert influence over Australia in the spheres of economics, politics, and culture. [19]

The CCP regime uses its economic strength to force Australia to make concessions on a series of military issues and human rights affairs. The standard approach adopted by the CCP to coerce others into cooperation is to cultivate personal relationships via economic interests and simultaneously create the implicit threat of blackmail. [20]

After years of investigation, Clive Hamilton found that “Australia’s major institutions — from our schools, colleges and professional associations to our media; from professions of mining, farming and tourism to military assets of ports and electrical networks; from our local parliaments and state governments to our Canberra parties — are being infiltrated and transformed by a complicated control system under the supervision of CCP.” [21]

After the 2008 economic crisis, in practice, Australia has proven willing to serve as the CCP’s supply base due to the common belief that the CCP rescued Australia from the recession. Hamilton says that the reason the CCP’s infiltration and influence can be so effective in Australia is that Australians “have allowed it to happen right under our noses, because we are blinded by the belief that only China can guarantee our economic prosperity, and because we dare not stand up against Beijing’s bullying.” [22]

Despite awareness of the CCP’s infiltration and influence on Western society, and particularly the CCP’s infiltration and control of overseas Chinese communities, most well-meaning Westerners naively imagined initially that the main purpose of the Party’s strategies was “negative” — that is, to silence the voices of critics and those with different political opinions. However, Hamilton says that behind the “negative” operations are the CCP’s “positive” ambitions: to use ethnic Chinese immigrants to change the frame of Australian society, and to have Westerners sympathize with the CCP so as to allow Beijing to build up influence. In this way, Australia would be transformed into the CCP’s helper in becoming an Asian, then global superpower. [23]

Similarly, the CCP is extending its infiltration and control from Australia to New Zealand. Anne-Marie Brady, an expert in Chinese politics at the University of Canterbury, released a report titled Magic Weapons, which takes New Zealand as an example to illustrate how the CCP extends its infiltration and political influence overseas. The report reveals that several Chinese-born members of New Zealand’s Parliament have close links with the CCP, and that many politicians have been bribed by massive political donations from rich Chinese merchants and CCP united-front organizations such as Chinese trade associations in New Zealand. [24] Shortly after her report was published, Dr. Brady’s college office was broken into. Before the break-in, she also received an anonymous letter threatening her with the words “You are the next one.” [25]

China is actively roping in New Zealand’s local politicians. For example, members of New Zealand political parties are lavished cordial treatment on trips to China. Retired politicians are offered high-paying positions in Chinese enterprises, as well as other benefits to have them follow the Party’s directives. [26]

The CCP Targets Pacific Island Nations for Their Strategic Value

Despite their size, Pacific island nations have the critical strategic value of being able to serve as maritime bases. Their total land area is just 53,000 square kilometers (20,463 square miles) compared with their exclusive economic zones (EEZ) over ocean, which measure 19,000,000 square kilometers (7,335,941 square miles) — an area over six times the size of China’s EEZs. Developing greater ties with Pacific island nations is a publicly acknowledged component of the CCP’s military strategy.

Currently, spheres of influence in the Pacific area are divided between the United States, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and France. To develop its maritime capabilities in the Pacific Ocean, the CCP must first build good relations with the island nations, then slowly push out the U.S. presence. [27]

John Henderson, a New Zealand professor, and Benjamin Reilly, a professor in Australia, said that the CCP’s long-term goal in the South Pacific area is to take the place of America as the superpower there. [28] The CCP has invested immense amounts of money in Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia to assist these island nations in constructing infrastructure. It has promoted local tourism, and made e-business platforms available. It is outstripping American activity in the area. Ben Bohane, an Australian author, warned that America is losing influence over the Pacific Ocean to China. [29]

Following the CCP’s large-scale financial assistance and investment, the arrogant behavior of its officials reflects the real mentality of the CCP when it is strong and thinks highly of its abilities. It tries to treat the people of other nations the way it treats the Chinese people under its totalitarian control. The CCP’s goal is to demand obedience from countries of inferior strength. Naturally, the CCP cannot be expected to respect international regulations and protocol.

At the APEC summit held in late 2018 in Papua New Guinea, the rude and uncivilized behavior of Chinese officials shocked the locals and those in attendance. Chinese officials bluntly stopped journalists (including those of Papua New Guinea) from interviewing attendees at a forum held between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and leaders of the Pacific island nations. Instead, they demanded that all journalists refer to the Xinhua news release.

To prevent statements condemning the CCP regime’s unfair trade behavior from being written into a joint communique, Chinese officials demanded to meet the Papua New Guinea foreign minister. Since a private meeting with Chinese officials would affect his impartial stance, he turned down the request. Third, Chinese officials resorted to yelling and shouting at the summit when they accused other countries of plotting a scheme against China. One high-ranking U.S. official described the CCP officials’ behavior at APEC as “tantrum diplomacy.” [30]

Debt Traps Enable the CCP to Seize Control Over Central Asia’s Resources

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the CCP has taken great efforts to develop and cement its relationship with Central Asian countries, like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The goal of the CCP’s strategy in Central Asia can be viewed from several angles: For one, Central Asia is an unavoidable land route in China’s westward expansion. Further, when China constructs infrastructure to transport goods in and out of China, it can also expand its commercial interests in Central Asia. Secondly, China aims to seize the natural resources, including coal, oil, gas, and precious metals that are abundantly found in these countries. Thirdly, by controlling Central Asian countries that are geographically and culturally close to Xinjiang, China can tighten its control over ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

Though the CCP has not announced its desire to dominate Central Asia, it has effectively taken up the most influential role in this region. The International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, released a report in 2013 saying that China has been rapidly growing into an economically dominant power in this region by taking advantage of social unrest in Central Asia. Beijing sees Central Asia as a supply base of raw materials and resources and as a market for its low-priced, low-quality products. Meanwhile, the CCP has also poured millions of U.S. dollars into investment and aid in Central Asia in the name of maintaining stability in Xinjiang. [31]

A huge network of highways, railways, airways, communication, and oil pipelines has closely connected China with Central Asia. The China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) and its contractors have been responsible for the construction of highways, railways, and electricity transmission lines in Central Asia. They pave roads on some of the most dangerous and complex terrain and construct new roads to transport China’s goods to Europe and the Middle East, as well as to ports in Pakistan and Iran. In the two decades between 1992 and 2012, of diplomatic relations between China and the five Central Asian countries, the total volume of trade between China and Central Asia grew one-hundredfold. [32]

In Central Asia, the CCP has promoted investments in large state-run, credit-financed infrastructure projects. Some scholars have realized that such investments would form the basis of a new international order in which China would play a dominant role. Seen from this perspective, Central Asia, like Australia, is another testing ground for the CCP’s conceptual revolution in diplomatic strategy. [33]

Beijing tends to support the corrupt authoritarian leaders of the Central Asian countries, and its opaque investment projects are considered beneficial primarily for the local social elites. The International Crisis Group’s report noted that each of the Central Asian governments is weak, corrupt, and fraught with social and economic unrest. [34] The large infrastructure projects promoted by Beijing are not only linked to massive loans, but also involve official approvals and permits, which are based on vested interests. This gives rise to and worsens the corruption in these regimes.

In Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, the former first secretary of the Communist Party of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic in the USSR, served as the country’s president from the time of independence in 1991 to his death in 2016. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan was under Karimov’s authoritarian rule for another quarter century. In 2005, government forces clashed with protesters in the eastern city of Andijan, resulting in hundreds of deaths. The CCP placed itself as a firm supporter of Karimov, rendering firm support as usual to Uzbekistan and other countries in this region in their efforts to safeguard the status quo. [35]

The fragile economic structures of Central Asian countries, in combination with massive infrastructure loans from China, leave these countries especially prone to falling into China’s debt trap. Turkmenistan is suffering from a severe economic crisis, with an annual inflation rate of over 300 percent, unemployment estimated at over 50 percent, severe food shortages, and rampant corruption. Now China is the only customer of Turkmen gas, [36] and also the largest creditor of its foreign debt, which stands at US$9 billion (estimated at 30 percent of GDP in 2018). [37] It’s possible that Turkmenistan had no choice but to give its natural gas fields to China to pay off its debt. [38] This country has put its economic arteries in Beijing’s hands.

Tajikistan borrowed more than US$300 million from China to build a power plant. Unable to pay its debt, the country transferred ownership of a gold mine to China in order to pay off the liabilities. [39]

The Kyrgyz economy is also in danger, as large-scale infrastructure projects carried out by the CCP there also caused it to fall into the debt trap. The country is likely to give part of its natural resources to pay debt. Kyrgyzstan also cooperated with Chinese communications companies Huawei and ZTE to build digital communication tools in order to tighten governmental control over people, while also leaving China a backdoor to extend its surveillance into these countries. [40]

Beijing took advantage of the power vacuum in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union to enter the Kazakh energy sector. The Kazakh economy depends on production of crude oil, and oil revenue in U.S. dollars is used to buy cheap Chinese products. Apart from oil drilling, this nation’s industrial foundation is fragile. With the flow of cheap Chinese products into its market, the Kazakh manufacturing industry collapsed. [41]

Another motive for the CCP’s expansion in Central Asia is to crack down on Uyghur dissidents living in Central Asia. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Charter signed by the China-led SCO allows suspects to be extradited to member countries. A member country can even send their own officials to another member country to conduct an investigation. In this way, the CCP extends its suppression of Uyghurs abroad and arrests Uyghur dissents who have taken refuge in other countries. [42]

The CCP Uses Pivotal States to Secure Strategic Resources

Implementation of the Communist Party’s peripheral strategy involved first creating pivotal states, which are then used as a base for achieving strategic goals in the entire region. According to the Party’s think tanks, pivotal states are countries that have considerable regional power that Beijing has the capability and resources to guide; they have no direct conflicts with the CCP in terms of strategic interests, and don’t share close interests with the United States. [43] In addition to the aforementioned Australia, Kazakhstan, and others, examples of pivotal countries for the Chinese regime include Iran in the Middle East and Myanmar.

In the Middle East, Iran receives the greatest Chinese investment. Iran is an important oil producer in the region and has been in ideological opposition to the West since the late 1970s, making it a natural economic and military partner for the CCP. Beijing has maintained close economic and military relations with Iran since the 1980s.

In 1991, the International Atomic Energy Agency discovered that the CCP had exported uranium to Iran and that China and Iran had signed a secret nuclear agreement in 1990. [44] In 2002, when Iran’s uranium enrichment project was revealed, Western oil companies withdrew from the country, giving the CCP an opportunity to capitalize on the situation and cultivate closer relations with Iran. [45]

Bilateral trade volume between the CCP and Iran grew exponentially between 1992 and 2011, increasing by more than one hundred times in seventeen years, although there was significant slowdown due to pressure caused by international sanctions on the Iranian regime. [46] Due to the CCP’s assistance, Iran was able to weather the international isolation imposed on it and develop a broad arsenal of short- to medium-range ballistic missiles, as well as anti-ship cruise missiles. The Chinese also provided it with sea mines and fast attack craft, and helped Iran establish a covert chemical weapons project. [47]

Another pivotal state favored by the CCP regime is Myanmar, its neighboring country in South Asia. Myanmar has a long coastline, which provides strategic access to the Indian Ocean. The CCP regards the opening of a China-Myanmar channel as a strategic step to minimizing reliance on the Strait of Malacca. [48] The Burmese military government’s poor human rights record has caused it to be isolated by the international community. The 1988 democracy movement in Myanmar was ultimately crushed with military force. The following year, in Beijing, PLA tanks opened fire on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

The two authoritarian governments, both condemned by the international community, found a degree of solace in their diplomatic company and have since enjoyed close relations. In October 1989, Myanmar’s Than Shwe visited China, and the two sides signed a US$1.4 billion arms deal. [49] In the 1990s, there were again many arms deals between the two sides. Equipment the CCP has sold to Myanmar include fighter planes, patrol ships, tanks and armored personnel carriers, anti-aircraft guns, and rockets. [50] The CCP’s military, political, and economic support thus became the Burmese military junta’s lifeline in its struggle for continued survival. [51]

In 2013, the Chinese invested US$5 billion into the China-Myanmar crude oil and gas pipeline, said to be China’s fourth-largest strategic oil-and-gas import conduit. Although it met with strong popular opposition, in 2017, it went into operation with the backing of the CCP. [52] Similar investments include the Myitsone Dam (currently placed on hold due to local opposition) and the Letpadaung Copper Mine. In 2017, bilateral trade between China and Myanmar totaled $US13.54 billion. The CCP is currently planning to create a China-Myanmar economic corridor with 70 percent of the share held by the Chinese side. This includes a deep-water port for trade access to the Indian Ocean, [53] and the Kyaukpyu Special Economic Zone industrial park. [54]
 

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https://mp3mp4pdf.net/media/hcq.mp4

Hydroxychloroquine Is Widely Used Around the Globe

Commentary by Brian Giesbrecht
August 18, 2020



Death rates in countries that rely on hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for the treatment of COVID-19 appear to be dramatically lower than death rates in countries that discourage the use of the drug.

A new study claims that the death rate in the countries that used HCQ early on was 77 percent lower than in countries where the drug was not used (c19study.com).

The startling thing about this finding—if accurate—is that the countries where HCQ has been extensively used are poor in relation to the countries that could afford to adopt the “lockdown” model. Those poorer countries cannot afford the massive amounts of money spent by lockdown countries, where businesses were shut down and trillions were then spent compensating workers and business owners.

The HCQ countries are also unable to afford the expensive health-care systems that rich countries are lucky to have. If the findings of this study are borne out it will be a massive indictment not only of all of the HCQ naysayers, but of the advocates of the lockdown model.

It might also mean that a pill costing a few cents saves lives, while the mountain of money spent on lockdowns in the rich part of the world has failed to do so.

The other notable difference between the HCQ countries and lockdown countries is that those countries don’t attempt to prevent doctors from prescribing HCQ to their patients. Here, doctors are discouraged from doing so.

Speaking Out

A detailed analysis of the c19 study is far beyond the ability of this author. The fact is, the study is currently being attacked by scientists and other experts—as it should be. However, the point is, many countries claim that HCQ works, and the truth of this claim is largely being ignored by a biased media and self-serving politicians.

However, senior doctors are now beginning to speak out against the unofficial campaign that clearly exists to discredit any doctor or scientist who advocates for the use of HCQ.

Recently, Yale University Dean of Public Health Sten Vermund defended the right of a fellow senior doctor to openly discuss his view that HCQ works, and that American doctors must be freed up to prescribe a drug that could save many lives.

The general belief of these doctors is that HCQ, in combination with zinc and azithromycin, should be used as early as possible in the treatment of the disease for best results. Clearly, the campaign to stop doctors who believe that HCQ works from prescribing it to their patients is beginning to crack.

The doctor the dean was defending is Yale epidemiologist and public health professor Harvey Risch. Risch—the author of 300 published articles—is a distinguished professor and cancer epidemiologist. He had appeared on Fox News and told Ingraham Angle host Laura Ingraham that not only were doctors who believed in the use of HCQ being unfairly treated, but that the use of the drug could save between 75,000 and 100,000 lives.

For his advocacy of HCQ he was facing criticism, and Vermund defended Risch’s right to advocate for the use of a treatment he believed in.

Another senior doctor who spoke on Ingraham’s show recently is cardiologist Ramin Oskoui. He described the results of the finding of the c19 study on Fox News on Aug. 5, 2020. Speaking with Ingraham, Oskoui urged health officials to abandon their political opposition to the drug and incorporate it into a treatment program that could potentially save many lives, and reduce the suffering of people stricken by the disease.

It’s far too early to determine how this particular study will hold up. However, it’s clear that scientists and doctors in many nations have enough of a belief in the efficacy of the drug to incorporate it into both the prevention and the early treatment stage of their COVID-19 treatment regime.

How Countries Use HCQ

Perhaps it would be useful to look briefly at how some of these countries are using the drug. The following is a brief description of some of the countries that use HCQ extensively, both as a prophylactic and as a treatment for COVID-19 in the early stages.

Turkey is one such country. When a person shows symptoms of the disease in Turkey, they are prescribed low doses of HCQ and advised to remain at home and report on their progress. If their illness progresses to a stage where hospitalization is necessary, they are then prescribed slightly higher doses of HCQ, together with other treatment. Turkey’s reported death rate is dramatically lower than the death rate in countries such as Britain and the United States, where HCQ use is discouraged, and therefore not openly used.

India also uses HCQ extensively. This is made easier by the fact that much of the world’s supply of the drug comes from India, and as a result its use there is particularly inexpensive. The belief is that the early use of HCQ cuts the mortality rate in half. Statistics from India appear to bear that out. Police, health-care workers and frontline workers are given HCQ as a prophylactic, and the results there are very encouraging.

Israel has not only been making use of HCQ in COVID treatment, but has also been supplying it to its friends. For instance, Israel made a major donation of HCQ to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who incorporated the drug into the COVID treatment plan there. It should be noted that Florida’s COVID death rate remains far lower than the rate in states such as New York, despite Florida’s large elderly population. It’s an open question whether this lower death rate is related to Florida’s use of the donated drug.

Other countries where the use of HCQ is encouraged, rather than discouraged, also show dramatically lower death rates. Russia and South Korea are examples, but there are many countries, such as Switzerland, where the drug is used quietly.

Switzerland, in fact, provides strong proof that HCQ is effective. Simply put, when the flawed study that WHO relied upon to recommend the suspension of HCQ use, Switzerland followed that advice and suspended HCQ use. When that flawed Lancet reported study was withdrawn as false, Switzerland resumed HCQ use. During the few weeks when HCQ was not used, the death rate shot up. When HCQ use resumed, the death rate came down again. This is strong proof that the drug works.

In many countries, the drug is available as an easily affordable and safe over-the-counter drug. It’s sold in the same way that common pain relievers are marketed.

However, even in countries that do not encourage the use of HCQ, or even actively discourage its use, the drug is certainly being used. In the United States, for example, a significant number of doctors are defying the HCQ taboo and prescribing the drug to their patients both as a prophylactic, and for treatment. HCQ’s possible life-saving benefits (combined with its safety and low cost) are simply considered to be too great to ignore. The fact that it had been used safely by millions of people for decades has convinced many doctors that they cannot in good conscience keep the drug from their patients.

Exactly how many doctors worldwide are prescribing the drug for their patients, either as a prophylactic or as part of their treatment, is an unknown, but it’s known that the drug is being produced and sold in huge quantities.

Germany, as well, is reported to have made extensive use of HCQ in the very early stages of the pandemic. This might account for its relatively low COVID death rate. The fact that the huge German pharmaceutical company Bayer produces HCQ in Germany made German use easier. In fact, Bayer donated a million doses of HCQ to the United States during the height of the pandemic.

India, Brazil, and Ecuador all reported that when HCQ was administered to local populations, death rates fell sharply. In France, 466 million prescriptions for the drug have been written by doctors. And Russia refused to stop its reliance on HCQ, even when the later debunked Lancet study caused the WHO to recommend a temporary halt to all HCQ use. HCQ remains an important part of Russia’s COVID treatment regime.

The tragedy in all of this may be that the strongest opposition to the use of HCQ appears to be found in one of the countries most badly infected—the United States.

While the drug is being used—apparently successfully—in many parts of the world, politicians, the mainstream media, and social media vehicles such as Google (YouTube), Twitter, and Facebook are working aggressively to make it impossible for the American public to either obtain the drug, or to use it. They also appear to be working in concert with media organizations and politicians to promote a smear campaign against the use of the drug.

Why is that?

The answer is clear. Much of it is purely political. President Donald Trump famously stated his belief that the drug might work, and as a result his opponents have decided to make it unavailable to the American public—no matter the possible cost in lives.

As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, there are encouraging HCQ test results, although there’s no definitive answer at this time. Politics should play no part in what should be a purely medical decision.

Unbiased Testing

Perhaps some medical authorities worry that large-scale HCQ usage would prevent the widescale vaccinations that would be necessary to reach herd immunity when vaccines become available. But that is not a good reason. HCQ might prove to be a far safer and more affordable treatment. Unbiased testing should be undertaken to answer this question.

That unbiased, rigorous testing is incredibly important. In the words of visionary Scott Adams, it’s so important that we should be “chewing through concrete walls” to get definitive answers. And yet, mainstream testing is done almost reluctantly.

And even the WHO-approved studies that are undertaken almost look they were designed to fail. The two main studies studied the wrong things. They analyzed the results of using massive doses of HCQ in the advanced stages of the disease. None of the HCQ-using countries are administering it in that way. They are using it both as a prophylactic and, in the case of infection, at the very early stage of the disease—using modest doses to prevent the disease from progressing to the stage where the lungs have become severely impacted.

None of the HCQ-using countries administer it in the dangerously large doses used in the oft-quoted negative studies. The rigorous studies that the mainstream media insists on referring to when denouncing HCQ having nothing to do with how the drug is actually being used.

It should also be noted that the naysayers who talk about the dangers of taking the drug are grossly overstating any danger. All drugs have side effects, but HCQ has been used safely for the past 65 years. Billions of tablets have been consumed. As an example, anyone in the military who travelled to tropical areas was routinely given HCQ as protection against malaria. Rheumatism, arthritis, and lupus sufferers have been taking the drug safely since the 1950s.

Simply put, healthy people can tolerate this drug with no complications. Those with heart or other similar conditions need to consult their doctor about taking the drug in the same way that they need to consult about taking aspirin or ibuprofen. It’s a fact that HCQ is a safe, inexpensive drug.

Finally, for the naysayers who assert—quite correctly—that there are no definitive studies that HCQ works, it should be stated that the same can be said for other drugs and treatments that are proving to be successful in the treatment of COVID patients.

For instance, it appears that although the much-touted remdesivir has proven to be a disappointment, dexamethasone appears to have been very successful in the treatment of hospitalized COVID patients. The drug has not gone through the rigorous peer-reviewed testing usually required for experimental drugs for the simple reason that the coronavirus is new and the need is immediate. It’s hypocritical to demand a one- or two-year-long test for HCQ when other promising drugs are being used—quite properly—for COVID treatment.

And for that matter, the entire “science” of lockdowns, as a strategy to combat a virus, has not undergone any kind of normal scientific vetting. The “lockdown” is a brand new strategy that has literally been dreamed up by a group of leaders in consultation with various “experts.” The concept apparently came from a 2006 high-school science project.

It was a strategy—some would say a panicked response—that was very quickly improvised in an attempt to respond to a new virus that threatened to overwhelm health-care systems. It was decided upon very quickly largely in response to the now completely discredited Neil Ferguson Imperial College model that predicted massive death.

At this time there is absolutely no “science” behind the “lockdown” model, as it has never been used before in human history. If the lockdown model required a year-long study before it could be used, it would never have been implemented—which might have been a good thing.

Even if it transpires that HCQ was not effective, it should strike all of us as odd that poorer countries that could not afford to employ the lockdown model—closing businesses, sending workers home, and sending everyone money—had far lower death rates than richer countries that did all of those things. There will be many books written about this. But that’s for the future.

At some point there will be definitive tests results that prove conclusively that HCQ either does or does not work. If the result is that the drug does not work, people will have wasted the few dollars that the drug costs—that’s really the only downside. If it turns out the the drug does work—the way Risch and many others believe it does—it will be clear that thousands of lives could have been saved by its early use. The lawsuits will begin.

We should learn from the countries that have been using the drug. The dramatic fall in death rates that occurred after HCQ treatment was initiated in countries such as India, Brazil, and Ecuador can no longer be ignored. To do so, and to continue to interfere with a doctor’s right to prescribe HCQ to their patients, is reckless and immoral.

Brian Giesbrecht is a retired judge and a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/hydroxychloroquine-is-widely-used-around-the-globe_3457743.html
 

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CCP's Global Ambitions
2. Communist China’s Strategies for World Domination

c. Divide and Conquer in Europe Serves to Create a Split With the United States



In the Cold War, Europe was at the center of the confrontation between the free world and the communist camp. America and Western European nations maintained a close alliance via the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. After the end of the Cold War, Europe began to decline in terms of economic and political importance.

In order to drive a wedge between Europe and United States, the CCP adopted a strategy of dividing and conquering the European countries by adapting to local conditions to gradually penetrate and develop influence in Europe. In recent years, the differences between Europe and the United States on many major issues have become increasingly apparent. The CCP’s activities have had a hand in this.

After the 2008 financial crisis, the CCP exploited the fact that weaker European economies were in urgent need of foreign investment. The CCP injected large sums of money into these countries in exchange for compromises on issues such as international law and human rights. The CCP used this method to create and expand the cracks between European countries, and reaped the benefits. Countries targeted by the CCP include Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Hungary.

After the sovereign debt crisis in Greece, the CCP invested heavily there, exchanging money for political influence, and using Greece as an opening for building more influence in Europe. Within a few years, the CCP obtained a thirty-five-year concession for the second and third container terminals of Piraeus Port, Greece’s largest port, and took over the main transshipment hub at the port.

In May 2017, China and Greece signed a three-year action plan covering railways, ports, airport network construction, power-energy networks, and power-plant investments. [55] The CCP’s investment has already seen political returns. After 2016, Greece, a member of the European Union, has repeatedly opposed EU proposals that would criticize the Chinese regime’s policies and human rights record. Many potential EU statements to this effect did not materialize. In August 2017, commentary by The New York Times said, “Greece has embraced the advances of China, its most ardent and geopolitically ambitious suitor.” [56]

In 2012, the CCP regime launched a cooperation framework with sixteen countries in Central and Eastern Europe called “16+1.” Hungary was the first country to join the 16+1 initiative and the first European country to sign a One Belt, One Road agreement with China. In 2017, bilateral trade volume between China and Hungary exceeded US$10 billion. Like Greece, Hungary has repeatedly opposed EU criticism of the CCP’s human rights abuses. [57] The president of the Czech Republic hired a wealthy Chinese businessman to be his personal adviser and has kept his distance from the Dalai Lama. [58]

Among the sixteen countries included in the framework, eleven are EU countries, and five are non-EU countries. The CCP has ulteriorly proposed a new model of regional cooperation, with the intent to divide the European Union being obvious. Additionally, among the sixteen countries, many are former socialist countries. These countries all have a history of communist rule, and have preserved many ideological and organizational traces of those regimes. To some extent, conforming to the CCP’s demands comes naturally to them.

There are many small countries in Europe, and it is difficult for any one country to compete with the CCP. The CCP has used this to handle each government individually, intimidating them into staying silent on China’s human rights abuses and pernicious foreign policy. The most typical example is Norway. In 2010, the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee awarded the Peace Prize to an incarcerated Chinese dissident. The CCP quickly took revenge by setting up various obstacles to prevent Norway from exporting salmon to China, as well as causing other difficulties. Six years later, relations between the two countries were “normalized,” but Norway has remained silent on human rights issues in China. [59]

The traditional Western European powers have also felt the growing influence of the CCP. The CCP’s direct investment in Germany has grown substantially since 2010. In 2016 and 2017, China was Germany’s largest trading partner. In 2016, fifty-six German companies were acquired by mainland Chinese and Hong Kong investors, with investment reaching a high of 11 billion euros. These mergers and acquisitions allowed Chinese companies to quickly enter the market and acquire advanced Western technology, brands, and other assets. [60] The Hoover Institution of the United States, in a 2018 report, has labeled this the CCP’s “weaponization” investment. [61]

The industrial city of Duisburg in western Germany has become the European transit point for OBOR. Every week, thirty trains filled with Chinese goods come to the city, where they are then transported separately to other countries. The mayor of Duisburg has said that Duisburg is Germany’s “China City.” [62]

In dealing with France, the CCP has long used a strategy of “transaction diplomacy.” For example, when Jiang Zemin, then-CCP regime head, visited France in 1999, he provided a large sale worth 15 billion francs by purchasing nearly thirty Airbus aircraft, leading to the French government’s support for China’s admission into the WTO. Following the Tiananmen Square massacre, France became the first Western country to establish a comprehensive strategic partnership with China. The French president at the time was the first in the West to oppose criticism of China at the Geneva Human Rights Conference, the first to advocate strongly for the lifting of the EU arms embargo on China, and the first head of a Western government who praised the CCP. [63] In addition, the CCP established large-scale Chinese Culture Weeks in France at an early stage of its expansionary activity as a means of promoting communist ideology under the guise of culture. [64]

The United Kingdom, a traditional European power for much of history and an important ally of the United States, is also one of the CCP’s most prized targets. On September 15, 2016, the British government officially approved the start of the Hinkley Point C unit nuclear power project, a joint venture between China and a French consortium. Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is a nuclear power plant in Somerset, in southwest England, with an installed capacity of 3,200 megawatts.

The project was severely criticized by experts, including engineers, physicists, environmentalists, China experts, and business analysts, who especially referred to the huge hidden dangers to British national security. Nick Timothy, the ex-chief of staff to Theresa May, pointed out that security experts — reportedly inside as well as outside government — “are worried that Chinese people can use their role to build weaknesses in the computer system, which will enable them to shut down British energy production at will.” [65] The British Guardian calls this “the ‘dreadful deal’ behind the world’s most expensive power plant.” [66]

As in other parts of the world, the methods the Chinese regime uses to expand its influence in Europe are pervasive and legion. They include acquiring European high-tech companies, controlling the shares of important ports, bribing retired politicians to praise the CCP’s platform, coaxing sinologists to sing the praises of the CCP, penetrating universities, think tanks, and research institutes, and so on. [67] The English-language edition of the CCP-controlled China Daily has a monthly page insert in the long-established British newspaper The Daily Telegraph; the inserts carry articles beautifying the Chinese regime. Beijing pays The Daily Telegraph up to 750,000 pounds a year for the inserts. [68]

The CCP’s activities in Europe have caused great misgivings among researchers. The European Institute of Public Policy (GPPI), a leading think tank in Europe, published a research report in 2018 exposing the CCP’s infiltration activities in Europe:

China commands a comprehensive and flexible influencing toolset, ranging from the overt to the covert, primarily deployed across three arenas: political and economic elites, media and public opinion, and civil society and academia. In expanding its political influence, China takes advantage of the one-sided openness of Europe. Europe’s gates are wide open whereas China seeks to tightly restrict access of foreign ideas, actors and capital.

The effects of this asymmetric political relationship are beginning to show within Europe. European states increasingly tend to adjust their policies in fits of ‘preemptive obedience’ to curry favor with the Chinese side. Political elites within the European Union (EU) and in the European neighborhood have started to embrace Chinese rhetoric and interests, including where they contradict national and/or European interests. EU unity has suffered from Chinese divide and rule tactics, especially where the protection and projection of liberal values and human rights are concerned. Beijing also benefits from the ‘services’ of willing enablers among European political and professional classes who are happy to promote Chinese values and interests. Rather than only China trying to actively build up political capital, there is also much influence courting on the part of those political elites in EU member states who seek to attract Chinese money or to attain greater recognition on the global plane. [69]

In addition to political, economic, and cultural infiltration in Europe, the CCP has also engaged in various forms of espionage. On October 22, 2018, the French Le Figaro carried the headline “The revelations of Le Figaro on the Chinese spy program that targets France.” Through an exclusive series of special reports, Le Figaro revealed the CCP’s various espionage activities in France. This included how business social-networking websites, especially LinkedIn, were used to recruit French people to provide information to the CCP for the purpose of infiltrating France’s political, economic, and strategic realms, and for gaining extensive insider understanding in specific situations. The report also said that such cases are only the tip of the iceberg of the CCP’s espionage operations in France. [70] The CCP’s purpose is the large-scale plunder of sensitive information regarding the French state and its economic assets. Similar espionage activities have also taken place in Germany. [71]

The CCP’s Global Ambitions I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2_NW_Tv_Qk

The CCP’s Global Ambitions II

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAKj42tMdYU