U.S. President Joe Biden said on April 6 that he has not talked to Chinese leader Xi Jinping about the origins of the CCP virus, which causes the disease COVID-19.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Biden was asked: “Have you had the chance to ask him [Xi] if these reports are true, that China maybe misled the world at the beginning?”
“I have not had that conversation with President Xi,” Biden said.
There was once a time when the official stance of the People’s Republic of China towards Canada was indifference spiced with the occasional Norman Bethune reference. Those days are now firmly over: Under the rule of Xi Jinping, China has adopted an openly aggressive stance towards the Maple Leaf, a position represented most notably by the imprisonment of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in apparent retaliation for Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou.
The Chinese Communist Party has been busy pushing through electoral and legal ‘reforms’ in Hong Kong that give it unprecedented powers.
The changes to Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (LegCo) are designed to ensure that a chamber that at least once provided a platform for pro-democracy politicians becomes merely a rubber-stamping operation, acting in the interests of China and big business.
OTTAWA — Mining executives and national security experts are warning the federal government about China’s domination of strategic mineral supplies, saying Ottawa needs to better protect supply chains for modern technology that relies on them like electric vehicles and smart phones.
I have read that one reason China became predominant in rare earth metals is that processing is an ecologically messy endeavour so Western companies shied away. Communist China of course could not care less about Western environmental concerns and seized the opportunity. Expect rare earth mining to be the next target of our eco-luddites.
“…In the agreement with Iran regarding the investment project, China has also included a clause for deployment of its troops there; and more than 5,000 Chinese troops will be deployed in Iran, and a [military] base will be built for them. Before this, China has also put its signature on investment projects with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which shows that China is implementing a plan to increase its influence in the Middle East…”
China last week signed a $400 billion, 30-year investment deal with Iran. American sanctions against Iran are effectively nullified. China’s state press declared, “As it stands, this deal will totally upend the prevailing geopolitical landscape in the West Asian region that has for so long been subject to US hegemony.” As former Indian diplomat MK Bhadrakumar reports in Asia Times, Chinese state media declare that China will trade with Iran and other Central Asian currencies in its own currency, bypassing the dollar-based world banking system. U.S. leverage against Iran is gone. It was obvious for the past year that China might play the Iran card.
Beijing may be deterred if it is clear that moving its naval and air force assets to attack Taiwan puts them at risk of humiliating losses.
If China is going to start a war, they are going to do it on their terms. All of our wonderful stuff won’t get there in time. You need to get your stuff there on Day Zero of the fight,” Adm. James “Sandy” Winnefeld, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told me last fall.
China has escalated “gray-zone” attacks against Taiwan in recent months. “Gray-zone” activity advances a state’s objectives outside the realm of accepted diplomacy, but below full military conflict. This can include disinformation campaigns, political or economic coercion, cyberattacks, or using proxies.
TORONTO — New polling data from Nanos Research, commissioned by CTV News, reveals Canadians’ thoughts on the upcoming federal budget, carbon pricing and the idea of returning Meng Wanzhou to China in exchange for the freedom of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.
On the latter point, Nanos found that far more Canadians are in favour of the prisoner swap than they were when that idea was floated last June.
The Hong Kong government recently rolled out a large-scale vaccination plan against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as COVID-19, but it’s been mired by frequent reports of serious adverse reactions. In just one month, 13 people died in Hong Kong after being inoculated, 11 of whom had been injected with the Sinovac vaccine, a Chinese domestically made vaccine.
The CCP has not reported a single case of serious side effects or death after it announced the administering of 100 million doses of the Sinovac vaccine in China on March 28.
Major League Baseball had extended and expanded its contract with a Chinese telecommunications giant shortly before boycotting the state of Georgia over the league’s disagreement with the election reforms recently enacted by the Peach State’s democratically elected governor and legislature.
Beijing is attempting to draw attention away from reports it is holding at least one million in Xinjiang internment camps
A new state-produced musical set in Xinjiang inspired by the Hollywood blockbuster “La La Land” has hit China’s cinemas, portraying a rural idyll of ethnic cohesion devoid of repression, mass surveillance and even the Islam of its majority Uyghur population.
China is on an elaborate PR offensive to rebrand the north-western region where the United States and other western nationals and human rights groups say genocide has been inflicted on the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.
Yang Jisheng’s newly translated history could be a cautionary tale or a sign of things to come.
…The World Turned Upside Down picks up roughly where Tombstone left off, in 1966, with Chairman Mao Zedong seeking to eradicate the remaining conservative and pragmatic leftist forces in his country by declaring a wenhua geming, a “cultural revolution” that would mobilize “the broad masses from the bottom up to expose these sinister phenomena.” Mao, contemptuous of the “Four Olds” (old ideas, old culture, old habits, and old customs) and eager to establish the “Four News” (new ideas, new culture, new habits, new customs), was under no illusion that the process would be straightforward; indeed, he declared that it was only “great disorder under heaven” that could create “great order under heaven.”
China has banned Facebook but that hasn’t stopped Beijing from using the social media platform as a gigantic instrument of state propaganda.
Hundreds of millions of people around the world are exposed to Facebook highlighting sponsored posts from the Chinese Communists that show Muslim ethnic minority Uyghurs happy and laughing the day away in China’s Xinjiang region.
A luxury UK auction house has withdrawn from sale a rare watch given to Chinese soldiers as a reward for their part in the Tiananmen Square massacre, after it said the vendor had received online threats.
The sale of the watch, depicting a green-helmeted soldier and the text “89.6 to commemorate the quelling of the rebellion” in Chinese characters, sparked questions over the ethics of profiting from an item associated with an atrocity.
In July 2019, Mehmet Tohti was just hours away from speaking publicly to politicians about the Chinese government’s horrific abuse of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang when he received a message on Twitter:
“Your f—ing mother is dead,” it read.
