RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17219/china-free-speech-europe

The current standoff is, in essence, about the future of free speech in Europe. If notoriously feckless European officials fail to stand firm in the face of mounting Chinese pressure, Europeans who dare publicly to criticize the CCP in the future can expect to pay an increasingly high personal cost for doing so.

“As long as human rights are being violated, I cannot stay silent. These sanctions prove that China is sensitive to pressure. Let this be an encouragement to all my European colleagues: Speak out!” — Dutch lawmaker Sjoerd Sjoerdsma.

“It is our duty to call out the Chinese government’s human rights abuses in Hong Kong and their genocide of the Uighur people. Those of us who live free lives under the rule of law must speak for those who have no voice.” — Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith.

“Beijing’s strategy is to simply crush and silence any global opposition to its atrocity by inflicting crushingly punitive measures on anyone who speaks out. A very concerning development.” — Adrian Zenz, German scholar.

“It is telling that China now responds to even moderate criticism with sanctions, rather than attempting to defend its actions in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.” — China Research Group.

“For far too long the EU has believed in the illusion of a middle ground.” — Lea Dauber, Süddeutsche Zeitung.

“In plain language: Beijing wants to decide who in Europe can talk or write about China.” — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

“Beijing’s sanctions against the UK and EU — targeting MPs, academics, even legal groups — show the regime of Xi Jinping will not tolerate dissent from anyone, anywhere.” — Sophia Yan, China correspondent for the Telegraph.

“Beijing’s message is unmistakable: You must choose. If you want to do business in China, it must be at the expense of American values. You will meticulously ignore the genocide of ethnic and religious minorities inside China’s borders; you must disregard that Beijing has reneged on its major promises—including the international treaty guaranteeing a ‘high degree of autonomy’ for Hong Kong; and you must stop engaging with security-minded officials in your own capital unless it’s to lobby them on Beijing’s behalf.” — Matt Pottinger, former deputy White House national security adviser, Wall Street Journal.

China has imposed sanctions on more than two dozen European and British lawmakers, academics and think tanks. The move comes after the European Union and the United Kingdom imposed sanctions on Chinese officials for human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region.

China contends that its sanctions are tit for tat — morally equivalent retaliation — in response to those imposed by Western countries. This is false. The European sanctions are for crimes against humanity, whereas the Chinese sanctions seek to silence European critics of the Chinese Communist Party.

The current standoff is, in essence, about the future of free speech in Europe. If notoriously feckless European officials fail to stand firm in the face of mounting Chinese pressure, Europeans who dare publicly to criticize the CCP in the future can expect to pay an increasingly high personal cost for doing so.

On March 22, the European Union and the United Kingdom announced (here and here) that they had imposed sanctions on four Chinese officials accused of responsibility for abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, a remote autonomous region in northwestern China.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wuhan-whitewash-11617142921?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The World Health Organization on Tuesday finally released its report on the origins of the coronavirus, and the result wasn’t worth the wait. The document is best understood as a whitewash heavily influenced by the Chinese Communist Party and Westerners with conflicts of interest.

The report—based primarily on an international team’s visit this year to the city of Wuhan, where Covid-19 was first detected—has little new information. But the team analyzes four origin scenarios.

The report says the most likely origin was a transfer to humans through bats with an intermediary host. The second most probable, according to the report, is that bats directly transmitted Covid-19 to humans. The report also takes too seriously a third theory, pushed by Beijing, that the virus arrived in China in frozen food, which the WHO claims is “possible” and merits more study.

Most telling is that the team concludes it is “extremely unlikely” that the virus leaked from a lab such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The report simply asserts that WIV facilities “were well-managed, with a staff health monitoring programme.” The report suggests “regular administrative and internal review of high-level biosafety laboratories worldwide” and following up on new evidence.

Yet enough already is known about the WIV to suggest this lacks credibility. In 2018 U.S. officials warned in diplomatic cables about safety and management issues at the WIV that could lead to a pandemic. This is especially troubling because the WIV conducted “gain of function” research on coronaviruses that theoretically can enable them to infect a new species.

The U.S. State Department warned in a January fact sheet that WIV researchers had developed “symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses” in autumn 2019. The WHO report nonetheless takes the Chinese government at its word when it says there was “no reporting of COVID-19 compatible respiratory illness during the weeks/months prior to December 2019.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/uk-whistleblower-bruce-bawer/

Though not well known in the U.S., former cop Maggie Oliver is a household name in Britain, where she blew the whistle on official indifference to the so-called “grooming gangs” – that is, the Muslim rape crews that have victimized thousands of white girls in cities around England. A recent YouTube interview with Peter Whittle led me, belatedly, to her 1999 memoir, Survivors, and let me begin by saying this: however much you may know about the grooming gangs – and, in particular, about the years of shameless stonewalling by police and other authorities who were terrified of Muslim unrest – reading about it all from the point of view of a frustrated insider is a supremely enraging experience.

Oliver was not a career cop. She’d already raised four children before she decided, in middle age, to join the Greater Manchester Police (GMP). Four years into the job, in 2001, she was put on a team investigating the drug death of 15-year-old Victoria Agoglia, a social-services client. A man was already in custody, charged with giving her drugs. It was soon established that there were a number of other white Manchester girls who were being plied with alcohol and narcotics by gangs of Pakistani men who treated them more or less as a shared harem.

What ensued was Operation Augusta, an attempt to identify and prosecute these malefactors. The gangs, Oliver learned, were no secret to social workers, who’d been trying for years to get the police to shut them down. One reason why police had refused was that national “performance indicators” rewarded them for solving burglaries and robberies, not child rapes. Another reason was that they saw the girls not as rape victims but as prostitutes. (This was largely a class issue: virtually all of the victims were working-class girls whom the police considered “white trash.”) Finally, the cops knew that if they started cuffing Muslim men, they’d be tagged as racists in the Guardian and by members of what the Brits like to call “certain communities.”

Though shocked by her fellow officers’ apathy, Oliver hoped to turn it around. By August 2004, her team had compiled a list of over 200 men who they suspected of abusing at least 26 girls. She was sure that the evidence they’d accumulated would set the wheels of justice turning. But she was wrong. Higher-ups ordered Operation Augusta shut down, the decision coming immediately on the heels of the jihadist London bombings of July 5, 2005, in which 52 people were killed and almost 800 wounded. In short, instead of responding to this barbaric act of religious war by stepping up efforts to crush a rape gang that was, after all, pursuing its own brand of jihad against the most vulnerable of infidels, the powers that be decided to go into a defeatist cringe.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17217/china-five-year-plan

The Chinese Communist Party’s overarching strategy for the next five to fifteen years, apparently, is to accelerate China’s rise by becoming an innovation superpower, technologically independent of the West and dominating global tech.

One of the great causes of tension between China, the US and other Western countries is how the CCP carries out its goal of becoming a dominant technological power — by using deception and theft.

Chinese theft of US intellectual and other property was happening on “a scale so massive that it represents one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history.” — Christopher Wray, Director Federal Bureau of Investigation, July 7, 2020.

The plan calls for the acceleration of “national defense and armed forces modernization,” and aims to “speed up weapons and equipment upgrading and the development of intelligentized weapons and equipment”.

Since General Secretary Xi Jinping became leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2012, he has spoken repeatedly of the “Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of Chinese nation”. This statement translates into China’s ambition of becoming the world’s greatest power by 2049, thereby surpassing the US as the economic, political and military leader of the world, as pointed out by Michael Pillsbury in his 2015 book, The Hundred Year Marathon.

This March, China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) passed a roadmap for China’s rise in the coming years, when it approved China’s new Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development (2021-2025). This time, however, the five-year plan also included long-range objectives through the year 2035, by which time the Chinese Communist Party expects China’s economic, scientific, technological and overall national strength to “leap dramatically” and for China to have achieved major breakthroughs in “key and core technologies”.

The CCP’s overarching strategy for the next five to fifteen years apparently is to accelerate China’s rise by becoming an innovation superpower, technologically independent of the West and dominating global tech.

China’s five-year plan sets out that China will focus on innovation in “artificial intelligence (AI), quantum information, integrated circuits, life and health, brain science, bioengineered breeding, aerospace technology, deep earth and deep sea [exploration], and other cutting-edge fields”. It will carry out “major forward-looking and strategic national science and technology projects” and construct “comprehensive national science centers and regional innovation hubs” in addition to “the formation of science and technology innovation centers for Beijing, Shanghai and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area”.

The strategy has already been set in motion with the 10-year “Made in China 2025” plan, which the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released in 2015. That plan aims to make China a global tech leader by accelerating innovations in ten strategic areas, among them electric cars and other new energy vehicles, next-generation information technology and telecommunications, advanced robotics and artificial intelligence, emerging bio-medicine, new materials, aerospace engineering and agricultural technology.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-china-iran-axis-11617059716?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Anyone who thought the world would warm to U.S. interests once Donald Trump left the scene has received a rude awakening in the last two months. The latest sign is the weekend’s pact between China and Iran, an example of U.S. adversaries uniting to advance their strategic ambitions.

The two sides signed what they described as a 25-year “strategic partnership” that amounts to a significant deepening of ties. China will invest several hundred million dollars in a variety of Iranian projects, including nuclear power, ports, and oil and gas development. In return China will get a steady supply of Iranian oil. The two will also deepen their defense cooperation as China will transfer some military technology.

Apologists for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal are saying this doesn’t add up to more than the status quo, and thus shouldn’t interfere with renewed U.S. courtship of Iran. Don’t believe them. This is a big deal that advances the strategic interests of both sides—at the expense of the U.S. and stability in the Middle East.

The deal helps Iran dodge American sanctions, and the cash infusion will ease economic pressure on the ruling mullahs. Iran will have a long-time buyer for its oil exports that were reduced by U.S. sanctions. The foreign-exchange income, if that’s how the payments are made, will finance the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and proxy forces in Yemen, Syria and Iraq.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17215/china-whitsun-reef

The failure of the Obama administration to defend the Philippines in early 2012, in a confrontation similar to today’s, emboldened China’s regime to adopt an even more aggressive posture in its peripheral waters.

China claims all the waters inside the dashes are sovereign as well, terming them “blue national soil.” There is no legal basis for an assertion of sovereignty of this sort.

Whitsun, which Manila calls Julian Felipe Reef, is 175 nautical miles from Palawan, an island of the Philippines. The feature is within the Philippine “exclusive economic zone”….

Since December, large Chinese trawlers have lashed themselves together and parked in formations near Whitsun. Vessels come and go, but the numbers have gone up over time. They have not been engaged in fishing.

Near Whitsun, retired U.S. Navy Capt. James Fanell tells Gatestone, China is building “two concentric rings of new artificial island bases.”

Washington [in 2012] brokered an agreement for [China and the Philippines] to withdraw their craft [from Scarborough Shoal], but only Manila complied. Beijing has been in firm control of Scarborough Shoal ever since. The Obama administration, despite the brazen Chinese seizure, decided not to enforce the agreement it had just arranged.

Worse, by doing nothing to hold China accountable for deception and aggression at Scarborough, Washington empowered the most belligerent elements in the Chinese political system by showing everybody else in Beijing that aggression worked.

Chinese vessels have continued pressure in the South China Sea, especially at Second Thomas Shoal, also thought to be part of the Philippines, as well as other Philippine-controlled features.

“Many on the Biden team failed to act in 2012. They now have a very rare opportunity to get another chance to do the right thing. Let’s hope they will.” — Capt. James Fanell, former director of Intelligence and Information Operations at the U.S. Pacific Fleet, to Gatestone Institute, March 2021.

James Holmes, who holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, told Gatestone that China’s current actions at Whitsun are “an offensive that looks like conquest by increments.” Fanell maintains that not opposing China’s actions at Whitsun will soon put both Taiwan and the Senkakus at risk.

About 220 Chinese fishing vessels, almost certainly part of China’s maritime militia, are now crowding around Whitsun Reef in the Spratly chain in the South China Sea in another attempt to break apart the Philippines.

Whitsun is where the United States and the region should confront an increasingly expansionist China. The failure of the Obama administration to defend the Philippines in early 2012, in a confrontation similar to today’s, emboldened China’s regime to adopt an even more aggressive posture in its peripheral waters.

Whitsun Reef is inside China’s infamous nine-dash line. The line on official maps defines an area informally known as the “cow’s tongue,” which includes about 85 percent of the South China Sea. Beijing maintains it has sovereignty over every feature there, including Whitsun, which Beijing has named Niue Jiao.