It’s become a boring habit of Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping and his senior officials to ridicule any effort by the world’s democracies to uphold some modicum of “rules-based” international decorum as evidence of a zero-sum “Cold War” mentality. It’s a propaganda tool that has proved somewhat useful in the work of infantilizing the western “discourse” around China, which is why Beijing employs it so frequently.
An official with China’s Olympics organizing committee has cautioned foreign athletes against speaking out during next month’s Winter Olympics, warning that any behavior that violates Chinese regulations could potentially get them ejected from the Games.
“Any expression that is in line with the Olympic spirit I’m sure will be protected, and anything and any behavior or speeches that is against the Olympic spirit, especially against Chinese laws and regulations, are also subject to certain punishment,” said Yang Shu, deputy director-general of Beijing 2022’s international relations department.
‘I’m ready to risk everything’: Documents from failed prosecution detail GTA engineer’s alleged offer to spy for China
“I’m willing to be of paramount service to the Chinese government,” disgruntled naval engineer Qing Quentin Huang said during one of two calls to the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa, unaware the line had been wiretapped by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
Those phone calls in November 2013 led the RCMP to arrest Huang in Burlington, Ont., for allegedly attempting to spy for China. At the time, the Mounties told the public his actions were “a threat to Canada.”
Eleven fishermen and five “related personnel” reaped the rewards of their vigilance on Monday – quite literally – with authorities in China’s Jiangsu Province remunerating them generously for capturing a total of 10 “suspicious foreign devices with spying functions in Chinese territorial waters since 2020.” According to China’s state-affiliated Global Times outlet, upon technical investigation all 10 drones turned out be foreign-made and “posing a threat to national security.”
Liberals ask Conservatives to reconsider stance on Winnipeg lab documents
OTTAWA – Liberal house leader Mark Holland is again asking the Conservatives to agree to a compromise over documents the government wants to keep secret on the firing of two scientists from Canada’s national microbiology lab.
In July 2019, scientist Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, were escorted from the National Microbiology Laboratory and then later fired.
Federal authorities are investigating Chinese investment in a California-based plane maker after shareholders alleged that the firm’s technology was being transferred to China, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The FBI and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) have launched separate reviews of Chinese investment in small plane manufacturer Icon Aircraft Inc., according to the WSJ, which cited company documents and people familiar with the matter. The authorities are investigating allegations that technology from the company with military applications was transferred to China.
The year of the Tiger, 2022, is shaping up to be a year of escalating tension between the world’s two major superpowers. It will be go big or go home.
Not only will the U.S. go big against China, but it is likely the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will see 2022 as an opportunity to go big against the U.S. The target will be Taiwan.
For the CCP, the most important domestic and international goal is reclaiming and integrating Taiwan into the political, economic and military sphere of China. In 2022, we will see the CCP taking the first major offensive steps to move this process forward. The existing long-term framework will be challenged in a way not seen before, including possible kinetic military action against Taiwan.
America picked a bad time to elect Joe Biden president.
China’s Olympic app contains ‘simple but devastating’ flaw
TORONTO — Researchers at a Toronto-based tech laboratory have uncovered security vulnerabilities and censorship frameworks in an app all 2022 Beijing Olympics attendees must use.
The Citizen Lab, a research institute at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy that studies spyware, found a “simple but devastating” flaw in the MY2022 app that makes audio files, health and customs forms transmitting passport details, and medical and travel history vulnerable to hackers.
Golden State Warriors owner Chamath Palihapitiya wants fans to know he doesn’t care about China trampling on human rights.
China’s coal production reached record levels last year as the state encouraged miners to ramp up their fossil fuel output to safeguard the country’s energy supplies through the winter gas crisis.
The world’s biggest coal producer and consumer mined 384.67m tonnes of the fossil fuel last month, easily topping its previous record of 370.84m tonnes set in November, after the government called for miners to work at maximum capacity to help fuel the country’s economic growth.
Official government figures show that China’s coal binge also spurred the country to record high coal output over the year as a whole. Chinese coal production climbed to an all-time high of 4.07bn tonnes, up 4.7% on the previous year, in a blow to climate campaigners months after the UN’s Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow.
China’s population growth rate has fallen to its lowest level in six decades, barely outnumbering deaths in 2021 despite major government efforts to increase population growth and stave off a demographic crisis.
Across China, 10.62 million babies were born in 2021, a rate of 7.52 per thousand people, the national bureau of statistics said on Monday. In the same period 10.14 million deaths were recorded, a mortality rate of 7.18 per thousand, producing a population growth rate of just 0.34 per thousand head of population.
Did Omicron arrive in China’s capital Beijing by mail from Canada?
The Omicron variant of the coronavirus could have entered the Chinese capital Beijing via contaminated mail from Canada, the city’s centre for disease control said on Monday.
Pang Xinghuo, deputy director of the Beijing Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said the city’s first Covid-19 patient to be diagnosed with the variant had received a letter mailed from Canada on January 7.
“We do not rule out the possibility that the person was infected through contacting an object from overseas,” she said.
h/t FD
America can save Taiwan from Chinese invasion by promising to destroy it, or at least its chipmaking capability, argues an article in Parameters, the U.S. Army War College’s quarterly. In “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan,” Air University’s Jared McKinney and Colorado State University’s Peter Harris say that Taipei and Washington should make the island “unwantable.”
Recent revelations of a Chinese communist spy operating in the British Parliament is “just the tip of the iceberg,” a senior Conservative lawmaker has said.
Britain’s MI5 security agency took the unusual step of sending an alert to Parliament on Jan. 12 warning that an individual named Christine Ching Kui Lee has been “knowingly engaged in political interference activities on behalf of the United Front Work Department (UFWD) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”
One of the latest fads on the left is the “environmental, social and governance,” or ESG, movement, in which large companies and financial institutions promise to be environmentally sensitive, diverse, inclusive and whatever, while remaining focused on making money. In reality, ESG, especially on the investing side, seems more like window dressing and an exercise in mass hypocrisy than anything else.
Not surprisingly, those who stand to make money from the ESG ecosystem — ratings firms, corporate lawyers, audit firms, investment banks, asset managers, proxy advisers, index providers, etc. — want the federal government to create and mandate ESG standards for all companies.
While ESG advocates typically talk about the importance of climate and social issues, they ignore the reality below their rhetoric.
