“China – Communist Slave State”

Will a housing revolt, jobs crisis and ‘zero Covid’ douse the dragon’s fire?

China is being swept by a new kind of protest — stealthy, rapid and difficult for the country’s communist leaders to suppress. Tens of thousands of homebuyers are withholding mortgage payments on their unfinished homes, fearing their money is being stolen by property developers.

The mortgage strike is snowballing and has reached more than 100 cities. Nine out of ten new properties in China are sold before they are finished, and advance payments are a lifeline for developers and banks. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is rattled and attempting to erase news of the protest from social media to stop the strikers organising.

The authorities have summoned China’s beleaguered banks to emergency talks to find a way out of a morass that threatens the health of the country’s tottering financial system.

In the book Red Handed, we meet a remarkable young man named Nathan Law, the Chinese-born, Hong Kong-raised leader of a pro-democracy effort called the “Umbrella Movement,” which protested Beijing’s crackdowns on freedom in Hong Kong. His efforts were brutally crushed by the Chinese government and Nathan Law went to prison for eight months. TIME Magazine named him one of “the 100 Most Influential People of 2020.”

Once freed from Chinese prison, he decided to attend graduate school at Yale University, an institution whose history of educating Chinese students goes back to 1850, when the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university took his degree from there.

Chinese mega-projects, both at home and abroad, are not only a vehicle for corruption. They are a deadly public hazard.

Over the past few weeks, several regions in southern, eastern, and central China have experienced torrential rains and large-scale flooding. Affected regions include Hubei province, where Wuhan (the epicenter of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic) is located. So far, more than 140 people have died and over 200,000 people have been displaced from towns, where the floods have damaged houses and other infrastructure. Overall, an estimated 37 million people have been affected by these floods. Economic losses arising from this are estimated to be around $3 billion and might rise further if the situation continues deteriorating.