Tag: china

China Eyes Iran’s Postwar Reconstruction In Bid To Lock Up Future Oil Supplies

Beijing is positioning itself to lead the post-war reconstruction effort in Tehran – a move analysts suggest could secure China long-term access to critical Iranian oil reserves.

The diplomatic groundwork was laid during a recent meeting in New Delhi between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and the deputy secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, according to Nikkei Asia. The talks underscore China’s broader strategy to expand its economic and diplomatic footprint in the Middle East amid the vacuum left in the wake of one failed US regime change and occupation war after another.

According to the report, Wang signaled Beijing’s long-term commitment to the Islamic Republic in the wake of prior weeks of heavy US-Israeli bombing, stating that: “China will continue to provide assistance to Iran while supporting reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts in the region.”

To date, China’s official involvement has largely centered on humanitarian logistics – at least according to its public-facing narrative.

This includes an upcoming deployment of emergency medical supplies to Lebanon, following recent Israeli military strikes in the country. However, observers note that the transition from humanitarian relief to large-scale infrastructure development is a key mechanism for Beijing to solidify energy security.

Nikkei Asia has issued the following commentary on China’s long-term plans in the Middle East:

Some observers argue that the U.S.-Iran war has strengthened Beijing’s presence in the Middle East. Rumi Aoyama, a professor at Japan’s Waseda University specializing in Chinese diplomacy, called China a “central hub where information on the situation in the Middle East was concentrated.”

China has dialogue channels with both Washington and Tehran, and it enjoys friendly ties with mediator Pakistan as an arms supplier. The Iranian and Pakistani foreign ministers frequently visited China during negotiations on ending the war to report on the situation.

The Iran war may also have worked to Beijing’s advantage in its dealings with Washington. With the U.S. prioritizing that conflict, it has been forced to ease up its pressure on China with regard to security and trade.

Yet Beijing has still welcomed the memorandum of understanding toward ending the war because stability in the Middle East is crucial for its energy security. Higher fuel and material prices caused by the war have dealt a blow to the Chinese economy.

Tehran, facing severe economic devastation and isolation from Western markets, has welcomed the Chinese overtures. High-level Iranian officials have made it clear they view Beijing not merely as an investor, but as a strategic anchor – akin to how defense ties with Russia have rapidly improved.

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China’s “Ethnic Unity” Law: A Framework for Forced Assimilation

China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress was submitted to the National People’s Congress on September 8, 2025, passed by a vote of 2,756 to 3 with three abstentions, signed by Xi Jinping on March 12, 2026, and takes effect July 1, 2026. The 62-article law codifies Xi’s sinicization policies and extends their reach into every sector of Chinese society, and beyond China’s borders.

The law also applies to foreign nationals living in or visiting China, who could now be punished or possibly jailed for advocating freedom for Tibet or independence for Taiwan. The law’s preamble frames China as a civilization with more than 5,000 years of history that has forged “a unified multi-ethnic nation” under the CCP. This is despite the fact that China has 56 recognized ethnic groups and five ethnic autonomous regions: Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Guangxi, and Ningxia. Several of these regions have movements seeking independence or greater autonomy.

China also includes Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region whose residents have mounted sustained resistance to Beijing’s encroachment on political freedoms. Taiwan, meanwhile, already functions as an independent democratic country despite lacking official international recognition.

Its Chapter II mandates fostering identification with the “great motherland, the Chinese nation, Chinese culture, the Communist Party of China, and socialism with Chinese characteristics” through patriotic education, official historical narratives, and promotion of Chinese cultural symbols. Article 14 directs authorities to “establish and highlight … Chinese cultural symbols” in public facilities, architecture, and tourist sites, including in the naming of places.

The law imposes ideological obligations on a sweeping range of actors, including public employees, mass organizations, enterprises, public-service institutions, industry groups, religious institutions, neighborhood committees, and the military. Under Article 20(2), parents and guardians are required to “educate and guide minors to love the Chinese Communist Party” and are forbidden from teaching minors “concepts detrimental to ethnic unity and progress.”

The provision reinforces existing law. The CCP’s 1982 Document 19 banned religious education among minors, a prohibition the U.S. State Department confirms remains in force: children younger than 18 are prohibited from participating in religious activities and receiving religious education, even in schools run by religious organizations, and the law mandates the teaching of atheism in schools.

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) has documented enforcement of these prohibitions against minority communities specifically, with Uyghur and Tibetan children, among whom religion and ethnic identity are inseparable, subject to the strictest application.

Language policy is a central mechanism that builds on previous restrictive legislation. In December 2025, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee revised the Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language, originally adopted in 2000. The revision removed a provision that had allowed minority languages to be used as the medium of instruction in schools, declaring such education “no longer necessary.” The changes took effect on January 1, 2026.

A years-long trend of replacing Mongolian-, Tibetan-, and Uyghur-medium instruction with Mandarin was thereby codified into law. Students in those communities are now permitted to study their mother tongue only as a standalone class, while all other subjects are taught in Chinese.

The March 2026 ethnic unity law reinforced and expanded that framework. It codifies the predominance of Standard Chinese (Putonghua) in public life, sets a goal of preschool-level Mandarin proficiency, and requires Chinese characters to be displayed more prominently than minority scripts wherever both appear.

The CECC found that the law promotes Mandarin-language instruction for ethnic minority children beginning in preschool. It also embeds ideological education prescribing a single “correct” understanding of history, ethnicity, culture, and religion as defined by the CCP.

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CIA Official Confirms Agency Flip-Flopped Over COVID-19 Origins Over Five-Day Period

Over the span of five days in 2021, the CIA abruptly changed its opinion on the origins of COVID-19 from a laboratory to neutral, a newly released document confirms.

Originally, CIA analysts concluded that COVID-19 likely came from a high-level laboratory in Wuhan, China located near where the first cases were detected in late 2019, senior CIA officer James Erdman III told lawmakers in May. Over the span of five days in 2021, however, Edman says the agency changed its stance to ‘neutral.’ 

Then in September of 2024 during a private briefing between intelligence officials and members of Congress, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) inquired as to how the agency came to the conclusion that lab-origin vs. natural origin were about equal, according to yesterday’s document release by outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard. 

In response, an unnamed CIA employee told Wenstrup that “he made the call to stop the shift to lab because [redacted] had come in the day before they were ready to publish which made them back off the call,” according to a summary of the briefing compiled by an intelligence official. 

As the Epoch Times notes further, officials said in a declassified assessment based on information through August 2021 that only one agency – which was not the CIA, based on details since made public – favored a lab origin for COVID-19.

An updated assessment released in mid-2023 states that the CIA was unable to determine the origin of COVID-19 because both the lab and natural origin theories “rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.”

The CIA said in 2025 that a lab origin for COVID-19 was “more likely.” The Trump administration maintains that COVID-19 came from the lab in China.

More on Changes

A whistleblower in 2023 told members of Congress that the CIA team tasked with analyzing the origins of COVID-19 favored a lab origin, but that after the team was paid, it changed its position.

The CIA at the time denied paying analysts to reach specific conclusions.

Erdman, the senior CIA official, told a Senate panel in May that he was on a team investigating how intelligence agencies handled the COVID-19 pandemic and that the CIA declined to provide documents the team had requested that may have shed light on the change.

Erdman said that the team found the shift happened after Dr. Anthony Fauci, at the time the head of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – which provided funding for the lab in Wuhan – briefed intelligence officials and suggested to officials that they talk to specific scientists, including researchers who wrote a paper with which Fauci and the institute’s head secretly assisted.

The paper, called “Proximal Origin,” purported to rule out a laboratory origin.

Wenstrup also asked intelligence officials in the 2024 briefing about a white paper that National Center for Medical Intelligence analysts compiled as a rebuttal to the “Proximal Origin.” The authors of the white paper felt their conclusions were ignored by intelligence officials, they informed Wenstrup.

A representative for the center was not prepared for the questioning, “which annoyed Wenstrup,” according to the briefing summary.

Fauci Briefed Intelligence Officials

Fauci briefed intelligence officials on June 4, 2021, and promoted the idea that COVID-19 had a natural origin, according to another briefing summary released by Gabbard.

Fauci “recommended that [intelligence officials] take a look at Tulane’s paper on two lineages from two separate markets,” the summary states. “To Dr. Fauci, this paper’s findings were a clear indication of natural origins of COVID-19.”

Fauci also “reminded the group that even for SARS, it took 12 years to make the link to a bat even though it only took 4 months to identify the natural reservoir” and that “we still haven’t identified source/origin of Ebola,” which is believed to have a natural origin, according to the summary.

Fauci, who has not responded to requests for comment, told lawmakers during a hearing in 2024 that he did not talk about viral research related to COVID-19 with intelligence officials.

“After the investigations began about COVID, I was briefed by intelligence agencies about possibilities of there being activities going on in different laboratories,” he said.

In another readout of the 2021 briefing, Fauci was said to have suggested intelligence officials connect with three scientists whose names were redacted.

“All three … have advocated for features of the virus that they judge to be consistent with a natural origin,” the readout states.

An email disclosed that one of the scientists was Kristian Andersen, a Scripps Research researcher who coauthored the “Proximal Origin.”

Andersen said in private messages with coauthors that COVID-19 may have been engineered before the paper was published. He has said that further analysis of the virus altered his and others’ views.

“Dr. Fauci was the behind-the-scenes adviser who, alongside his hand-picked so-called experts, pushed the intelligence community to endorse a natural animal origin to hide his dangerous gain-of-function research that he funded using taxpayer dollars,” Gabbard said in a video statement posted to X on June 18.

“All of this in a deliberate attempt to cover up the truth and shift the blame and attention away from Fauci’s own actions.”

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Lawsuit: Top Chip Company Gets $6.6 Billion from the Feds, but Excludes American Workers

Many skilled Americans are being pushed out of high-tech jobs by the ethnic-Chinese Taiwanese managers of a taxpayer-funded computer-chip company in Arizona, says a lawsuit by 13 Americans.

The “grossly disproportionate [ethnic Chinese] workforce is the result of [company’s] intentional pattern and practice of employment discrimination… including discrimination in hiring, staffing, promotion, and retention/termination decisions,” says the lawsuit by 13 American plaintiffs, filed by Kotchen & Low LLC.

The plaintiffs suing the Taiwan-based Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company [TSMC] — which has gotten $6.6 billion from taxpayers — say in their lawsuit:

TSMC’s preference for East Asians and those of Taiwanese or Chinese national origin is reflected in the demographics of the company’s managers and executive leadership. In one of the offsite meetings led by Mr. Perry, all 160 front-line managers in attendance were of Taiwanese national origin, and TSMC’s executive leadership team is exclusively made up of those of Taiwanese or Chinese descent.

….

Taiwanese leadership expressed a desire for a militant and authoritative culture where employees obey commands without question and offer no pushback. One female, a frontline manager at the meeting who is Taiwanese, began crying and stated: “I’m so embarrassed; Americans are lazy, they don’t work hard enough, they don’t know enough, and they don’t know commitment.”

These discriminatory comments towards Americans were common at TSMC Arizona. During Mr. [James] Perry’s employment, he heard Americans being called “lazy” and “not hard working” by members of management (who were predominantly Taiwanese and Chinese). And employees who refused to consistently work twelve-hour days were considered poor performers.

“At TSMC, it was understood that in order to advance in IT, employees needed to speak and understand Mandarin, despite the fact that there is no Mandarin language requirement at TSMC and business was supposed to be conducted in English,” the lawsuit says.

“It’s our tax dollars that we’re paying to be replaced by foreign workers,” noted Rosemary Jenks, a Harvard graduate who founded the Immigration Accountability Project. “It is not the responsibility of the government to make cheaper labor available to employers… [and] if national security is the concern, then the only way to deal with it is to have Americans doing the work,” she said, adding:

There is increasing [public] understanding of the problems with H-1B visas — but there is so much money on the pro-H-1B side that it is distracting — to say the least — for members of Congress because they would have to oppose their donors [to fix the problem].

Polls show rising GOP opposition to the legalized migration — including the white-collar H-1B program — which extracts foreign workers, consumers, and renters from countries.

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Military doesn’t know how many recruits hold citizenship in China, Iran, Russia or other non-NATO states

The Canadian Armed Forces has recruited nearly 3,000 permanent residents since opening enlistment to non-citizens in late 2022, but military officials admit they do not track the foreign citizenships of those recruits.

The disclosure came in response to an order paper question from Conservative MP Scott Anderson regarding the CAF’s recruitment of permanent residents.

According to the Department of National Defence, the military enrolled 1,844 permanent residents into the regular force and another 1,017 into the reserve force between December 2022 and May 2026, for a total of 2,861 recruits.

Recruitment accelerated dramatically over the past year, with more than 1,800 permanent residents joining during the 2025-26 fiscal year alone.

The military also revealed that permanent residents are permitted to serve in dozens of occupations, including infantry, artillery, combat engineering, logistics, military police, intelligence-related roles, aerospace operations, naval positions and a variety of technical trades.

But when Anderson asked how many of those permanent residents were citizens of countries outside NATO, the government said it simply doesn’t know.

“The Canadian Armed Forces does not centrally record members’ citizenship of countries other than Canada,” the department replied.

The admission means the military cannot say how many permanent-resident recruits hold citizenship in countries such as China, Iran, Russia, Pakistan or any other non-NATO state.

The department also acknowledged that it cannot determine how many of those recruits have since become Canadian citizens because that information is not tracked in a way that can be readily reported.

The figures come as the CAF continues to grapple with a recruiting crisis and personnel shortages. In an effort to boost numbers, the military opened many occupations to permanent residents in 2022, ending a longstanding preference for Canadian citizens.

Since then, 292 permanent-resident recruits have already left the CAF, including 234 regular force members and 58 reservists.

While the CAF can provide detailed breakdowns of where permanent residents serve and what ranks they hold, it cannot say how many are citizens of foreign countries outside Canada’s military alliances.

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Missouri AG Catherine Hanaway Launches Lawsuit Against Baby Monitors and Home Cameras Company ‘Lorex’ Over Concealed CCP and Chinese Military Ties

Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway is taking aim at a major surveillance technology company over what she says are hidden ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese military.

Hanaway announced legal action against Lorex, a popular manufacturer of baby monitors, home security cameras, and surveillance systems sold by major American retailers including Costco, Best Buy, and Amazon.

“Families and retailers like Costco, Best Buy, and Amazon are being lied to,” Hanaway wrote. “Lorex, a leading manufacturer of baby monitors and home cameras, is concealing material ties to the CCP and Chinese military. We’re taking them to court.”

The company’s products have maintained deep ties to Dahua, its former owner and ongoing supplier of critical components, even after Dahua was designated a Chinese Military Company that poses a direct threat to U.S. national security. Researchers found Lorex firmware routing straight back to Dahua servers, giving the Chinese Communist Party potential real-time access to the most intimate moments inside American homes.

These are the cameras watching babies breathe in their cribs. Recording children’s voices. Capturing family life in bedrooms and living rooms across Missouri and the country. Sold at Costco, Best Buy, Amazon, Staples, Menards, Micro Center, Office Depot, and directly through Lorex’s own site.

“The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world,” Attorney General Hanaway said in a statement. “Missouri will not allow the CCP to put its hand on our cradles. Parents place these cameras over cribs and in bedrooms to protect their children, not to invite a foreign adversary into their homes.”

“Lorex tells families its video cameras are ‘private by design’ while concealing ties to a Chinese military company,” she continued. “These cameras watch our babies breathe, capture our children’s voices, and record families’ most intimate moments. When companies won’t tell the truth about their connection to hostile foreign governments, my office will step in to protect families.”

The lawsuit, brought under Missouri’s Merchandising Practices Act, seeks up to $1,000 in restitution for every Missouri consumer who purchased a Lorex camera in the last five years, plus more than $1.8 million in damages and a court order barring the company from continuing its deceptive practices.

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A Chinese robot in a clown wig kicked a child. Your kid could be next.

At a Children’s Day demo in Xinjiang last week, a Chinese Unitree G1—seventy pounds of metal plus a clown wig—wound up for a roundhouse kick and planted it square in a small child’s stomach. The kid doubled over. The crowd, by most accounts, kept clapping. (The kid is reportedly not seriously injured.)

The point is, there’s something most people get wrong about killer robots. We picture malice—red eyes, Skynet, a machine designed to hurt us. Relax. That’s the optimistic version.

The dystopian version is dumber, and a lot more likely: That Unitree robot didn’t want to kick the kid. It just wasn’t built well enough not to. Not hatred. Just sloppy programming, made-in-China safety mechanisms, and a child standing in the way.

And it’s not a one-off. China’s humanoid robots have face-planted in half-marathons, kicked an engineer in the groin mid-demo, and slapped a different kid across the face during a dance routine. The showroom magic is wearing thin. Turns out “move fast and break things” hits differently when the things it breaks are innocent people’s faces.

And you think this only affects China? No way. Chinese robots are already infiltrating New York City. Protect your children. Seriously.

My point is, the danger from Chinese AI isn’t that it’s evil. It’s that it’s rushed, unaccountable, and getting shoved into crowds before anyone’s sure it works.

The 1987 classic Robocop warned us about this, people! ED-209 machine-gunning a hapless junior executive was never about malice. Just a programming glitch. Oopsie! (NSFW clip from that movie)

At least if it’s malice, can you plan for that. But if you want to avoid accidents, you need to completely stay away from Chinese-made robots.

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WHAT? China Demands Foreign Intelligence Services Stop Using ‘Spy Turtles’ To Scan Its Waters

The assets from the animal kingdom.

After India complained of the Mumbai ‘Chinese spy pigeon’ and the Ukrainians warned of the ‘Russian spy beluga whale’, the allegations of utilizing animals for information gathering see a new chapter.

China has warned against foreign governments using sensor-fitted fish and turtles to spy on its waters.

The Telegraph reported:

“In a post on social media, Beijing’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) claimed that ‘foreign intelligence services are continuously collecting and stealing sensitive marine data’.

Among the different types of espionage equipment allegedly in use, the agency claimed that fish and turtles had been fitted with sensors and were found to be collecting data such as ‘water temperature, salinity and ocean currents’, which were then transmitted via satellite in real time.”

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China’s Biological Warfare Threat to the United States

On June 2, 2026, the Department of Justice charged two NIH researchers, Vincent Munster, 53, a Dutch national and Chief of the Virus Ecology Section at NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana, and Claude Kwe, 38, a Cameroonian research fellow, with conspiracy to smuggle monkeypox virus into the United States and making false statements to federal law enforcement.

While Munster is Dutch and Kwe Cameroonian, neither is a Chinese national. However, the case’s connection to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) biological threat framework is well documented.

Sen. Rand Paul’s April 2024 letters revealed that Munster was a named partner in the DEFUSE proposal. The EcoHealth Alliance-DARPA grant application proposed engineering chimeric bat coronaviruses and listed the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) as a partner. Paul said the disclosure “appears to contradict” Dr. Fauci’s prior testimony that the NIH was unaware of the proposal.

The WIV operates under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a State Council institution. A House Foreign Affairs Committee report found that local CCP leaders, including Director General Wang Yanyi and BSL-4 laboratory manager Yuan Zhiming, directly oversaw the WIV and its highest-containment laboratory.

The State Department further determined that the WIV has conducted classified research for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) since at least 2017. Cables obtained by U.S. Right to Know cited the existence of “PLA shadow labs at WIV.”

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence also linked the WIV to the Fifth Institute of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), which is part of China’s acknowledged biological weapons program. The committee concluded that SARS-CoV-2 may have links to that program.

This case is the latest in a documented series of biological-smuggling incidents involving China-linked research networks operating in the United States. Most of these cases have been intercepted at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Several examples are detailed in the section below.

China’s asymmetric warfare toolkit includes numerous vectors designed to pressure the United States, including biological warfare. These components work together as part of a broader strategy.

For example, the cyber component, led by Chinese state-sponsored hacking groups Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, has been confirmed to have penetrated U.S. power grids, water systems, and telecommunications networks.

On the economic and demographic front, Chinese chemical manufacturers supply fentanyl precursors that flow through Mexican cartels into American communities.

The State Department has assessed that China operated an offensive biological warfare program from the early 1950s until at least the late 1980s. During that period, China weaponized ricin, botulinum toxins, and the causative agents of anthrax, cholera, plague, and tularemia.

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DOJ announces seizure of 13 internet domains being operated by suspected Chinese intelligence agents

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that it seized 13 internet domains allegedly being used by Chinese operatives to recruit former and current American officials with security clearances.

Several unnamed individuals are accused of using these websites as a front for fake “consulting companies to recruit individuals in the United States to obtain sensitive and possibly classified information in exchange for monetary payments.”

“A lot of this information came from doing interviews, interviews with people who came forward that something didn’t seem right. They provided information and said, ‘Hey, this is kind of weird, we’re kind of getting paid by a cryptocurrency or an online payment system that’s not typical,” said Dan Wierzbicki, the special agent in charge of the counterintelligence and cyber division of the FBI’s Washington field office in an interview.

The FBI believes that the individuals behind the scheme acted on behalf of the Chinese government “wittingly or unwittingly.”

This operation follows a pattern of heightened economic and political espionage. A report from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) last year accused foreign actors of attempting to hire federal employees and capitalizing on the Trump administration’s plans for layoffs across various companies.

The Five Eyes intelligence alliance — comprising the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — recently issued a joint warning detailing how Chinese military intelligence targets Western personnel.

Operating under the guise of think tanks or private businesses, these operatives post fraudulent job listings for foreign policy and defense analysts on legitimate recruiting sites. Once a candidate applies, handlers pressure them for sensitive information, offering cryptocurrency and online payments for “reports” to effectively conceal their true identities.

“For too long, the Chinese government has tried to exploit U.S. government employees behind the cover of fake companies and phony job postings. Today, we shut them down. These seizures will prevent these fraudulent sites from being used to target Americans with access to sensitive information. The FBI will continue to use every tool available to protect Americans and our national security from this threat,” said Special Agent in Charge Daniel Wierzbicki of the FBI’s Washington Field Office Counterintelligence and Cyber Division.

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