America’s Dependence on China Is a Crisis in the Making

America’s supply chain crisis is far from over. Persistent backlogs at West Coast ports have led shippers to reroute their cargoes to the east. As a result, container ships now sit offshore at ports such as New York, Houston, and Savannah, waiting in queue to offload.

What first triggered the unfamiliar phenomenon of our barren shop shelves was COVID-19 and a series of ill-advised policies implemented to “stop the spread.” Suddenly, there were too few dockworkers, too few warehouse workers, and too few truckers, creating what Lori Fellmer, chair of the ocean committee for the National Industrial Transportation League, called “a horror show.”

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Unofficial Chinese Police Stations in Canada Likely Number More Than 3, Says Report Co-Author

The Chinese regime has likely established more unofficial overseas police stations in Canada than the three in Toronto identified in a report by a human rights NGO, a co-author of the report says.

Spain-based Safeguard Defenders published a report in September warning of the regime’s “long-arm policing” around the world through what’s been dubbed the “110 overseas police stations”—an operation named after the police emergency phone number, 110, in China.

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Is China about to turn on Russia?

President Xi can’t afford to isolate the West

After managing a strained smile and handshake for the cameras, President Xi Jinping walked away from Vladimir Putin with a face like stone. By most accounts, the recent meeting in Uzbekistan between the two leaders, who once spoke of each other as “best friends” and “bosom buddies,” was frosty. In a remarkable admission, Putin acknowledged that the Chinese leader had arrived with “questions and concerns” about the course of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Putin promised to better explain “our position on this issue, although we have talked about it before”.

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Sabrina Maddeaux: How hard can it be for the Liberals to say Chinese laws don’t apply in Canada?

The federal Liberals have long shied away from confrontation with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but, as with all bullies, acquiescing to them results not in peace, but undaunted escalation.

The LPC promise love China long time.

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China: The ‘Massive’ Threat

In an unprecedented move, the head of the FBI, Christopher Wray, and the head of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, the MI5, Ken McCallum, came together in July to warn against the “massive” threat that both intelligence services consider China presents.

“We consistently see that it’s the Chinese government that poses the biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security, and by ‘our’, I mean both of our nations, along with our allies in Europe and elsewhere,” Wray said in a joint address by the two directors at the London headquarters of MI5.

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House Republicans sound the alarm over a China-linked food mill near N.D. Air Force base

Dozens of House Republicans told the Biden administration they fear a Chinese company’s purchase of farmland near a military base in North Dakota will imperil national security.

Rep. Carlos Gimenez, Florida Republican, sounded the alarm about the Fufeng Group’s purchase near Grand Forks Air Force Base in a new letter signed by 50 colleagues and sent to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. They fear the company will be too cozy with the communist government in Beijing.

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Why are Chinese police operating in Canada, while our own government and security services apparently look the other way?

In China, the high-profile TV drama In The Name Of The People has become a smash hit. In that show, Chinese agents enter the U.S. posing as businessmen so they can repatriate a factory manager who had fled abroad with huge ill-gotten wealth.

But a new study by the European non-governmental agency Safeguard Defenders suggests that there might be some truth to the fiction. According to the NGO, the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau has established more than 50 “overseas police service centres” in cities around the world – including three publicly documented ones in Toronto, home to Canada’s largest Chinese diaspora.

h/t DM

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A Ponzi scheme by any other name: the bursting of China’s property bubble

A little more than a year ago, a Chinese property developer largely unknown to the outside world said its cashflow was under “tremendous pressure” and it might not be able to pay back some of its eye-watering debts of $300bn (£275bn).

Today, that company, China Evergrande Group, is all too well known as the poster child of the country’s economic woes. House prices in China have fallen in each of the 12 months since Evergrande’s now prophetic warning, with Xi Jinping’s government now preparing to throw billions of dollars at a property market that experts say increasingly resembles a giant Ponzi scheme.

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The Golden Road to Samarkand

But what is it for? This is the question that the media in Russia, China, Iran and half a dozen countries were posing all last week in the wake of a summit in Samarkand that brought their leaders together as members or aspiring members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

The Russian media, echoing President Vladimir Putin’s speech at the summit, say the SCO is designed to end “the unipolar world “by creating a “multipolar system”.

The Chinese media offer a different version. The SCO is meant to offer a new political system for the whole world as an alternative to the Western democratic model.

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Xi Jinping Trends Online Amid Coup Rumors, Canceled Flights

Chinese President Xi Jinping became one of the top trending topics on Twitter amid unsubstantiated reports he is under house arrest and that China is in the midst of a military coup.

Xi and the phrase #ChinaCoup trended on social media after tens of thousands of users spread unconfirmed rumors that the president was detained and overthrown by the China’s People’s Liberation Army.

h/t DM

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154 Scientists at Los Alamos Nuke Lab Defected to China

… At least 154 Chinese scientists who worked on government-sponsored research at the U.S.’s foremost national security laboratory over the last two decades have been recruited to do scientific work in China — some of which helped advance military technology that threatens American national security — according to a new private intelligence report obtained by NBC News.

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Chinese police establish stations in Canada in ‘worrying’ crackdown on citizens abroad

On the evening of Feb. 7, a Chinese woman studying in Canada called a police hotline in a panic.

“Hello, is this the Fuzhou Public Security Bureau? I’ve been scammed,” the woman, surnamed Wang, told the operator. She described how she had been defrauded of about $400 by someone calling themselves a “love-life mentor.”

In Fuzhou, the capital of southeast China’s Fujian province, police tracked the fraudster to the city’s Taijiang district. The man, surnamed Lin, eventually confessed to scamming nine victims out of more than $3,700.

3 in the GTA? Shouldn’t they be shut down? Let’s ask Xi’s lickspittle Trudeau.

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How the US Squandered Its Strategic Minerals

“The PRC’s [Communist China’s] long-term goal,” the Pentagon wrote in 2020, “is to create an entirely self-reliant defense-industrial sector—fused with a strong civilian industrial and technology sector—that can meet the PLA’s needs for modern military capabilities.”

While China has been relentlessly pursuing self-reliance when it comes to raw materials — especially strategic ones such as titanium, tungsten and cobalt, which are used in the defense industry — the US for the past several decades has been selling off huge chunks of the strategic minerals stockpile to the extent that the National Defense Stockpile is reportedly reaching insolvency.

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Pope Francis Betrays the Anti-Totalitarian Legacy of John Paul II

Crux reports that the trial of Cardinal Joseph Zen, a stalwart opponent of the atheistic Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is set to begin this week in Hong Kong. Zen is facing charges for his association with the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, which “provided financial and legal aid to pro-democracy protesters” who publicly opposed a law that allows Hong Kong’s citizens to be extradited to mainland China. Prosecutors say that the organization was not properly registered. The trial has been delayed — likely for two days — because the presiding judge tested positive for COVID.

Zen was arrested earlier this year on charges of “collusion with foreign forces” in violation of the CCP-imposed national security law.

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Trudeau Commends Event Organized by Group Whose Chinese Affiliate Said Aims to ‘Spread the Voice’ of CCP

Any strong words Trudeau may mouth against China are to be taken with a very large grain of salt.

A democracy advocate is warning about the Chinese regime’s covert “cultural infiltration” after multiple Canadian politicians lent support to the opening celebration of a new Chinese library that’s part of a China-based project whose founder had said aims to “spread the voice” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The new B.C. library was unveiled during a Sept. 10 “Night of the Mid-Autumn Festival” event held at a winery in Richmond, just south of Vancouver, which was celebrated by a number of federal, provincial, and municipal politicians and reported on by various Chinese state media.

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