Tag: china

China Floods the Skies Near Taiwan and Raises a Dangerous Question

Taiwan’s defense ministry reported a major surge of Chinese military aircraft operating near the island over the weekend. Radar operators tracked dozens of aircraft moving through the surrounding airspace in a pattern that drew immediate attention across the region. The activity marked one of the larger recent waves of Chinese air operations around Taiwan.


Taiwan didn’t report any Chinese military planes that went beyond the median line and entered the zone for a week from Feb. 27 to March 5. After two were detected on March 6, the next four days had none. Such flights resumed in small numbers between Wednesday and Friday.

The drop coincided with the annual meeting of China’s legislature. While such flights have fallen in the past during major events and public holidays, this year’s fall was more prominent than in the past.

Analysts said the meeting could not be the sole reason behind the recent drop. Another potential factor could be a desire to calm the waters with Washington weeks before a visit by U.S. President Donald Trump. The White House has said that Trump would travel to China from March 31 to April 2, though Beijing has not officially confirmed that.

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense released details showing fighters, surveillance aircraft, and support planes flying close to the island. The aircraft operated in areas near Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, which Taiwan closely monitors with radar and interceptor aircraft. Taiwan’s military scrambled its fighters and activated missile systems while tracking the formations and is treating the flights as another set of serious pressure points from Beijing.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has increased military pressure on Taiwan during the past ten years, as highlighted by Chinese aircraft and naval vessels now appearing around the island far more frequently than they did ten years ago, a pattern that’s raised concerns across the Indo-Pacific region.

Several explanations could account for the latest surge of aircraft.

The first possibility involves routine military drills. The People’s Liberation Army regularly conducts exercises designed to test readiness and coordination among air units. Large formations help pilots practice joint operations and refine command procedures. Military planners often run those drills in areas close to Taiwan because the region sits near important strategic sea lanes and air corridors.

Psychological pressure may be behind a second possibility. China views Taiwan as part of its territory and has never ruled out using force to bring the island under Beijing’s control.

Large aircraft formations near Taiwan send a visible message to Taipei and to governments that support Taiwan’s security, reminding observers that China continues building military strength capable of operating around the island.

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Iran Receiving ‘Military Cooperation’ From Russia and China, Iran Foreign Minister Confirms

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has openly admitted that the Islamic terror regime is receiving active “military cooperation” from Russia and China, confirming the worst fears of the axis of evil now openly uniting against America and its allies in the escalating Middle East war.

The revelation came during an exclusive interview with MS Now, in which Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed that Tehran maintains ongoing military cooperation with Moscow and Beijing, though he refused to provide details.

MS Now’s Ayman Mohyeldin pressed Araghchi on mounting reports that Russia and China may be providing targeting intelligence and military support to help Iran strike U.S. military facilities and infrastructure across the Middle East.

Instead of denying the allegations, Araghchi appeared to confirm the growing alliance.

Ayman Mohyeldin:
I wanted to ask you about the war strategy from an Iranian perspective. Can you tell us right now, because, as you know, there has been reporting that both Russia and China are providing targeting intelligence to Iran to target U.S. positions, facilities, and infrastructure across the region—can you confirm or deny whether Russia or China is providing military support and intelligence to Iran?

Abbas Araghchi:
Well, Russia and China are our strategic partners, and we have had close cooperation in the past, which still continues, and that includes military cooperation as well. I’m not going into any details of that. We have good cooperation with these two countries politically, economically, and even militarily.

But let me say once again that this is not our war. This is an imposed war against us. We didn’t start this war. It was an unprovoked, unwarranted, illegal act of aggression against us. We are only defending ourselves, and we will continue to defend ourselves as much as it takes and for as long as it takes in order to end this war in a way that it will not be repeated in the future.

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Peter Schweizer Exposes China’s Birth Tourism Industry Creating Army of U.S. Citizens Raised Under Communist Influence During Powerful Senate Testimony

During his testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, investigative journalist and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer exposed the alarming scale of China’s birth tourism operations targeting the United States.

Schweizer revealed during Tuesday’s hearing, titled “Protecting American Citizenship: Birthright Citizenship for Illegal Aliens and Tourists,” that over 1,000 birth tourism companies in China are almost exclusively focused on facilitating births in America, potentially resulting in up to 1 million U.S. citizens being raised in the People’s Republic of China.

Schweizer, author of the book The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon, described birth tourism as an “industrial-scale” operation where Chinese nationals pay up to $100,000 for concierge services.

These services include travel arrangements, medical care, and logistical support to ensure their children are born on U.S. soil, thereby granting them automatic citizenship under the 14th Amendment.

“In China alone, we have identified more than 1,000 birth tourism companies that are almost exclusively focused on the United States,” Schweizer stated.

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Iran War Supporters Invent a New and Absurd Justification: It Is All About China

Before Operation Epic Fury began, the Trump administration spent very little energy trying to justify the looming war with Iran. The few defenses they did offer were banal platitudes, just echoes of the case for the Iraq War from more than twenty years ago: that Iran was weeks away from obtaining a nuclear device, that their ballistic missile program posed a significant threat to American assets and allies in the region, and that the Iranian people deserved liberation via regime change.

But not long after the bombing began, a new (admittedly more creative) justification emerged online and in the pro-Israel media that war supporters assume will be more persuasive to those doubting the wisdom of yet another Middle East conflict. The war with Iran, we are now told by many, is not really about Iran at all. It is, instead, all about China.

“Some argue Israel dragged the U.S. into war,” a post from The Free Press reads, “But this conflict is bigger than Israel and Iran — it’s about China.” Another article from The Spectator, a British conservative outlet, sang the same tune: “Trump’s ultimate target in this war is China.” Glenn Beck, on March 2, unveiled C.R.I.N.K., or “the new Axis Powers of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea,” as a way to “understand why Trump attacked Iran.” Fox News’ Jesse Watters told his audience last week that “we are killing two birds with one stone: we stop the number-one sponsor of terror, and we checkmate the Chinese.”

At the very least, if China were really the motive, one would have expected the Trump administration to offer this theory — “this is the chance to counter America’s greatest geopolitical rival” — as a major justification to the American people. One would think they would be particularly motivated to do so, given the consensus of polling data showing that public support for this war is far weaker than for any American war in decades.

But Trump officials never mentioned China as a core motive. In fact, even now, the administration and its backers have hardly mentioned China. This is a theory invented out of whole cloth by Iran-war supporters and/or Trump supporters, grasping for some cogent reason why this new war is in Americans’ interests.

Late last week, Senator Lindsey Graham claimed that this conflict is “a religious war” waged by “radical Islamic terrorists.” On March 2, House Speaker Mike Johnson explained to a group of reporters that the United States “determined, because of the exquisite intelligence that [it] had, that if Israel fired on Iran,” then “[Iran] would have immediately retaliated against U.S. personnel and assets.” Therefore, the House Speaker insisted, because the U.S. would be attacked either way, it had to hit Iran with Israel. President Trump announced on Friday that the U.S. intends to select “GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s)” for the Iranian people, in order to make their country “economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.”

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TikTok Says Privacy Makes Users Less Safe

Over the past five years, the largest social platforms settled on a clear position about private messaging. Lock it down. Facebook turned on end-to-end encryption. Instagram and Messenger did the same. X joined the club. Yes, metadata is still an issue and the protocols used matter; but, generally speaking, the move was toward more privacy of actual messages.

TikTok looked at that trend and made a different choice. Then it scheduled a briefing in London with the BBC to explain the reasoning.

The explanation was safety.

In the UK, TikTok belongs to ByteDance, a Chinese technology company that operates under Beijing’s jurisdiction. China maintains strict limits on end-to-end encryption inside its borders. TikTok, after its own review of the issue, reached the same policy outcome for its messaging system.

Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at Surrey University, raised that point directly. The company’s “Chinese influence might be behind the decision,” he said, adding that end-to-end encryption is “largely banned in China.”

TikTok declined to engage with that suggestion, of course. The remark hung in the air. However, it’s worth adding that the US operation of TikTok has made no indication that it is moving towards private messaging standards either.

End-to-end encryption is simple in theory. Only the people in a conversation can read the messages. The platform running the service cannot access the content. Governments cannot request it. Engineers inside the company cannot view it.

TikTok’s system operates in a different way. Messages on the platform remain readable to the company. Employees can access them under defined circumstances. Law enforcement agencies can request them through legal channels.

TikTok argues that readable messages allow the company to identify harmful activity.

The debate turns on a basic technical fact. “We can read your messages to catch predators,” and “we can read your messages” describe the same system.

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Cannabis timeline pushed to 20,000+ years

New research suggests cannabis use may date back 20,000 years or more, far earlier than previously thought.

Most scholars agree cultivation of cannabis began in Asia between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, during the advent of farming following the last ice age. But a 2023 morphometric study of ancient cannabis seeds suggests it may have begun far earlier — 20,000 years ago or more — in what is now Western China and the Tibetan Plateau.

The study looked at the size of seeds, which began to change as people started using them thousands of years ago.

People have been living in the Tibetan Plateau for up to 38,000 years, and in Central Asia for up to 50,000 years, so it is plausible cannabis has been used up to that long.

Cannabis has been around for millions of years, and the oldest plant material discovered so far is seeds dated to 8000 BC, found in Okinoshima, Japan at a neolithic site linked to the Jomon people. The seeds were likely used as food and to make oil.

Pottery found at an ancient archaeological site in Taiwan and dated to the same period, around 8000 BC, has impressions made with hemp cord, meaning cannabis was used widely across Asia by that time.

Along with using it as a source of food, the 2023 study suggests that by 6000 BC, cannabis was being cultivated for its fibre — what we now call hemp. It was around 3000BC that people began selecting cannabis for its trichomes, which contain the medicinal and psychoactive compounds.

Those findings align with a 2021 genomic study that also places domestication around 10000 BC, with a slightly different timeline — hemp selection beginning around 4000 BC, and medicinal/psychoactive use emerging around 3000 BC. Cannabis also appears to have reached the Indian subcontinent from China around that time.

“The first users were probably nomadic peoples,” explains Barney Warf, a professor of geography at the University of Kansas. “We know this from burial mounds of chieftains.”

Warf authored the 2014 paper High Points: An Historical Geography of Cannabis, which traces the spread and use of cannabis from ancient to modern times.

Several nomadic tribes are thought to have been the main conduit for bringing cannabis from Central Asia into India, the Middle East, Northern Africa and Europe between 4000 BC and 2000 BC, says Warf, along routes that would later become known as the Silk Road.

One possible origin for the word ‘Cannabis’ is the Scythian word, ‘Kanab,’ which itself may have come from the Assyrian word ‘Qunubu’. The Scythians were a nomadic group dated to between 900 BC and 200 BC and the Assyrians were in Mesopotamia between 2000 BC and 600 BC.

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Building Our Enemy: China Still Gobbling Up High-end Chips and Chip Forges

News flash to politicians and media: China is preparing for war. All-out kinetic, military war. The communist regime has already been engaged in what it calls “Unrestricted Warfare” — economic, social, and political offensives, espionage, propaganda, technological theft, cyberattacks, disinformation, critical infrastructure attacks, and more — in other words, all-out asymmetric warfare against the United States and the West. A bipartisan group of congressmen has sent Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick a letter urging the Trump administration to close critical gaps in U.S. export controls over semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME) and more vigorously engage our allies to adopt similar restrictions on those technologies that threaten their and our security. That would seem to be a no-brainer since China’s phenomenal military expansion has been (and continues to be) built with U.S. technology.

China’s Massive Military Buildup

Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are dead serious. China’s September 3, 2025 “Victory Day” military parade in Tiananmen Square was the largest military display in CCP history and showcased a broad array of new advanced weapons systems: ICBMs, hypersonic anti-ship missiles, satellite hunter missiles, fighter jets, fourth-generation battle tanks, stealth attack drones, underwater attack drones, robotic wolves, and much more. (See full video of the parade here.)

It is no secret that Xi Jinping and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have been on a rapid, massive armament modernization and buildup for more than a decade. This has been especially notable regarding China’s navy, which now, in terms of quantity, is the largest in the world. (In 2024, the U.S. Department of Defense reported that China’s naval fleet numbered 332 vessels, compared to America’s 291). All of these advances are dependent on research and development (R&D), technology, materials, processes, education, and training provided by, or aided by, U.S. corporations and the U.S. government.

Allowing China to Leapfrog Us

In response to the Chinese buildup, President Donald Trump has called for an enormous military budget of $1.5 trillion for 2027, an increase of 50 percent over the $1 trillion 2025 budget. That includes a huge shipbuilding program and the launch of his “Golden Dome” missile defense system.

But if we continue providing Beijing with the cutting-edge technology that allows China to leapfrog over our latest weapons systems, we are trapping ourselves on a deadly treadmill that guarantees we will bankrupt America while giving the CCP eventual military dominance and global hegemony. We could spend $2 trillion, $3 trillion, or $4 trillion on new razzle-dazzle weapons systems, all to no avail if we then turn around and provide China with the technology to defeat those systems, as we have been doing for years. In 2021, TNA published a three-part article series on America’s suicidal technology transfers to China: China’s Tech War, China’s Chip Foundries Still Dependent on Foreign Tech Transfers, and China’s Brain: Made in USA. The evidence is crystal clear: Without the continuous treasonous transfers of American technology and know-how, Xi Jinping’s jaw-dropping hi-tech weapons systems would not exist. But the madness and treason continue.

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Trump Admin To Launch New Free-Speech Site To Combat Censorship Abroad

In response to what the Trump administration says is a rising tide of censorship in Europe, the State Department is launching a new app that will give users worldwide access to content that has been censored in other countries.

This includes not only Europe but also China and Iran. The platform, called Freedom.gov, will go live over the next several weeks, according to the State Department, and will be operable on iOS and Android devices.

“Freedom.gov is the latest in a long line of efforts by the State Department to protect and promote fundamental freedoms, both online and offline,” the State Department stated in an email to The Epoch Times. “The project will be global in its scope, but distinctly American in its mission: commemorating our commitment to free expression as we approach our 250th birthday.”

Lauding the move, Jeremy Tedesco, senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, a civil rights legal group that has been critical of recent EU speech laws, stated on X that “for 250 years, this is what America does,” citing examples such as Radio Free Europe, which broadcast into communist countries during the Cold War.

“If Europe’s bureaucrats don’t want you to see it, that tells you everything,” Tedesco stated. “Because even if your government fears freedom—ours doesn’t.”

The First Amendment, which prohibits the U.S. government from “abridging the freedom of speech,” has provided a legal restraint against government censorship that most other countries lack. 

Recent European speech laws, most notably the Digital Services Act (DSA), were ostensibly written to combat what lawmakers deemed “hate speech,” “harmful speech,” and “misinformation,” as well as pornography and abusive AI deep fakes. But critics of European speech codes say they are becoming increasingly draconian.  

In 2025, Virginie Joron, a French member of the European Parliament, called the DSA a “Trojan horse for surveillance and control.”

In Finland, Paivi Rasanen, a member of parliament, was charged for quoting Bible verses online in 2019, criticizing her church’s participation in a gay pride event. 

“I never imagined that quoting the Bible in a Twitter post would lead to years of criminal charges, yet this is now the reality in Europe,” she told The Epoch Times.

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Researchers Identify Chinese Influence Network That Targeted Trump, Japan Elections

Researchers have uncovered a network of more than 330 social media accounts linked to China that targeted U.S. President Donald Trump, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, human rights organizations, and other countries to push pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) narratives, according to a Feb. 26 policy brief.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a think tank based in Washington, discovered the network coordinating to push these narratives between December 2025 and February 2026 across X, YouTube, Tumblr, Blogger, and Quora.

The researchers identified six “clusters” of accounts that focused on different narratives, which were aimed at attacking political figures seen as acting against the CCP’s interests.

The largest nexus included 151 accounts that targeted audiences in the United States, including ones posing as American citizens and criticizing Trump’s policies, such as claiming that he had caused or worsened the fentanyl crisis. Notably, accounts with few or no followers made posts that generated thousands of replies, indicating the use of what researchers say is an “inauthentic amplification network.”

“This tactic is used to manipulate platform algorithms into pushing content into the feeds of real users,” the brief reads.

Another cluster attacked Takaichi before the Japanese election, portraying her as “corrupt and militaristic.”

A separate cluster of activity targeted Uyghur activists and promoted anti-Uyghur sentiments among Canadian and Japanese users. The CCP has persecuted the Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang region for years, conducting mass surveillance and forcing them into slave labor. There is also emerging evidence of forced organ harvesting from the group. The United States has designated the Uyghur persecution as a genocide.

A fourth narrative accused U.S. organizations of “collusion” with Taiwan and payouts to undermine China while denying the CCP’s human rights abuses.

A fifth cluster accused the United States of interfering with Honduran elections, and a sixth amplified criticism of and supported protests against the Philippine president.

In some cases, the inauthentic accounts adopted names and images similar to those of official organizations, such as U.S. agencies.

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How China purchased a prime cut of America’s pork industry

Nathan Halverson takes us inside this major investigation of America’s pork industry.

Smithfield Foods, producer of the iconic holiday ham, was one of America’s flagship food companies, steeped in centuries of U.S. tradition.

The Virginia-based pork company derived its ham from a curing process Native Americans taught settlers five centuries ago. It owned part of Main Street in the bucolic town of Smithfield – including a restaurant, a historic Southern hotel and the company’s nearby headquarters.

C. Larry Pope, its president and CEO, had a fireplace in his sprawling executive office, which looked more like a hunting lodge than the command center for what had become America’s largest pork business.

But in 2013, a Chinese firm bought this quintessential slice of Americana – Main Street and all. The takeover, valued at $7.1 billion, remains the largest-ever Chinese acquisition of an American company.

Naturally, it riled patriots and protectionists. Pope’s mother asked him why he sold to the communists. Pope also had to defend himself in the local newspaper: “These are not Russian communists. They like Americans.”

Some xenophobia was to be expected. Anti-Chinese racism in America goes back nearly as far as, well, holiday ham.

But behind the usual flag waving and Red Scare antics lies a stark new reality: Chinese companies, at the urging of their government, have launched a global buying spree, a new phase in their unprecedented economic experiment. And they’re targeting a resource that climate scientists, economists, the U.S. government, even Wall Street, all forecast will become dangerously scarce in the coming decades: food.

Food is poised to become the oil of the 21st century, with scarcity and demand creating a situation ripe for wars, riots and uprisings.

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