Tag: china

How China Managed to Wipe Out All Mentions of Its Most Explosive #MeToo Case

Hours after Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai accused a former Communist Party official of sexual assault in a shocking online post, Eric Liu witnessed one of the most intensive censorship campaigns carried out before his eyes. 

The process looked familiar to Liu, who worked as a content censor at Weibo, the microblogging site where Peng described how former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli coerced her into sex before the two entered into an on-and-off affair. But the scale was unprecedented, the 34-year-old said, due to the shocking nature of Peng’s story, the sheer number of people on social media, and the Communist leadership’s growing desire to keep public opinion under control.

“It is an extremely grand-scale campaign,” said Liu, who quit the company in 2013 and is now tracking Chinese censorship for China Digital Times from the United States. “There is nothing that could be compared to this. Although more serious political events have taken place in the past, the internet censorship was not that strict. I would expect them to use their full capacity to carry this out.” 

The Communist Party leadership regards any scandal involving its core members as a threat to its rule. Since Peng’s post came out, Beijing has sought to wipe it out from the country’s history by banning media coverage, requiring around-the-clock human efforts from social media companies, and, through a system of punishments, coaxing citizens into self-censorship. It has demonstrated the country’s ability to keep its cyberspace insular even as the case was making international headlines every day. 

The goal is to make Peng’s accusations taboo, just like the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, so even those who have read the post would avoid talking about it, letting the incident recede from memory and lose its significance as China’s biggest #MeToo case.

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Efforts To Groom Us For War With China Are Getting More Forceful

If you thought western mass media have been brazenly pushy with their anti-China propaganda, wait til you see The Hill’s appalling new opinion piece titled “America must prepare for war with China over Taiwan“.

“China’s massive investment in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) may show China is preparing to fundamentally change the status quo and preparing for possible war with the United States over Taiwan,” the piece begins. “To deter China, the United States must rapidly build up its forces in the Pacific, continue to strengthen military alliances in the region to ensure access to bases in time of conflict, and accelerate deliveries of purchased military equipment to Taiwan.”

The article goes on to narrate about Taiwan’s importance on the global chessboard and why we should all expect a full-scale invasion by Beijing quite soon, casually discusses a direct military conflict between two nuclear-armed nations like it’s no big deal, and calls on the Biden administration to “articulate to the American people why Taiwan’s defense is critical to the United States.”

Then at the very bottom of the article you get to the part that really matters: the information about the author.

“David Sauer is a retired senior CIA officer who served as chief of station and deputy chief of station in multiple overseas command positions in East Asia and South Asia.”

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Pentagon officials ‘remain baffled by Chinese hypersonic missile technology’ after Beijing tested weapon that could deploy a nuke while travelling at five times the speed of sound

A hypersonic weapon test carried out by China in July featured a missile fired at five times the speed of sound – a technological feat which no other country has demonstrated, according to US intelligence.  

The hypersonic glide vehicle – a spacecraft with the ability to carry a nuclear warhead – fired a missile mid-flight over the South China Sea, catching Pentagon scientists unawares.

Experts at Darpa – the Pentagon’s advanced research agency – are apparently still baffled at how China was able to defy the constraints of physics to fire a weapon from the vehicle travelling at hypersonic speed, the Financial Times reports.

Analysts are also attempting to piece together the purpose of the missile, which was fired with no obvious target before landing into the sea. 

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Hunter Biden’s private equity firm helped Chinese conglomerate buy American-owned cobalt mine in $3.8 billion deal: Purchase helped China company gain world’s largest deposit of precious metal used to make batteries for electric vehicles

An investment firm founded by Hunter Biden assisted a Chinese company in purchasing one of the world’s richest cobalt mines from an American company for $3.8 billion – helping the conglomerate gain a massive share of the key metal used to make electric car batteries.

The president’s son was one of three Americans who joined Chinese partners in establishing the Bohai Harvest RST Equity Investment Fund Management Company, or BHR, in 2013.

The Americans controlled 30 percent of the company and made successful investments that culminated in aiding China Molybdenum purchase the Tenke Fungurume cobalt mine in the Congo from the American company Freeport-McMoRan in 2016, the New York Times reported. 

The news comes after President Joe Biden had warned that China could use its dominance of mined cobalt to disrupt America’s development of electric vehicles.

It also adds to the scrutiny Biden and his father have faced for his dealings with Chines and Ukrainian companies while Joe was vice president and later running for president. 

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Australian War Propaganda Keeps Getting Crazier

60 Minutes Australia has churned out yet another fearmongering war propaganda piece on China, this one so ham-fisted in its call to beef up military spending that it goes so far as to run a brazen advertisement for an actual Australian weapons manufacturer disguised as news reporting.

This round of psychological conformity-making features Australian former major general Jim “The Butcher of Fallujah” Molan saying that in three to ten years a war will be fought against China over Taiwan and that Australians are going to have to fight in that war to prevent a future Chinese invasion of the land down under. He argues Australia will need to greatly increase its military spending in order to accomplish this, because it can’t be certain the United States will protect it from Chinese aggression.

“Australia is monstrously vulnerable at the moment; we have this naive faith that American military power is infinite, and it’s not,” says Molan, who is a contributor to government/arms industry-funded think tanks Lowy Institute and Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

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Chinese tennis star, 35, vanishes after she was censored from the internet for accusing country’s former vice premier, 75, of sexual abuse

A Chinese tennis player has vanished a week after accusing the country’s former vice premier of sexual abuse.

Peng Shuai, 35, accused 75-year-old Zhang Gaoli of forcing her to have sex with him in a lengthy post uploaded to Weibo, the Chinese Facebook equivalent.

The post was soon deleted and all of her recent content on the site has been scrubbed. The word tennis (‘wangqiu’) was even censored on the social network.

The athlete, who became a household name after winning the French Open doubles in 2014, has not been seen since.

While China has been rocked by #MeToo scandals before, this is believed to be the first involving a high-ranking member of the Communist Party.  

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Deleted Webpages Reveal Bill Gates Praising Chinese Communist Party Group’s ‘Friendship.’

Deleted webpages reveal Bill Gates praising a controversial Chinese Communist Party-backed influence group – the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries – for its efforts to build “friendship.”

Gates, who has a long history of collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party in his personal and professional capacities, visited the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) in June 2014 to deliver a speech on philanthropy.

The CPAFFC has been dubbed the “public face” of the United Front Work Department – a billion-dollar effort executed by the Chinese Communist Party seeking “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party” and “influence foreign individuals and the policies of foreign states to serve Beijing’s interests,” according to the federal U.S.-China Security and Economic Review Commission.

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She told the truth about Wuhan. Now she is near death in a Chinese prison.

China committed one act of barbarity when it prosecuted the citizen journalist Zhang Zhan for her revealing look at Wuhan in the first stages of what became a global pandemic. Ms. Zhang was sentenced in December to four years in prison on the specious charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” which China uses to suffocate free speech. Now her health has deteriorated, and relatives say she is near death. China will compound the barbarity unless it sets her free and saves her life.

Ms. Zhang, a former lawyer, made an indelible contribution to our understanding of what happened in Wuhan. Over three months there, she posted 122 YouTube videos, the first of which she titled “My claim for the right of free speech.” When she got to Wuhan on Feb. 1, 2020, she later recalled, “There was not a single soul. It felt as if I stumbled on a movie set right after the shooting was over and everybody has left the set. The world didn’t feel real.” Her videos confirmed chaos inside a hospital. Ordered to stop filming, she moved around the city in February and March, posting what she witnessed.

Her arrest and imprisonment are part of China’s larger coverup. In December 2019, officials in Wuhan attempted to hide information about the outbreak of a new disease; when eight doctors expressed concern about the sickness, they were reprimanded. A second coverup occurred in early January 2020, when top Chinese officials remained silent, although they knew of human transmission of the virus, and informed the public only on Jan. 20. A third coverup has involved their repeated attempts to frustrate investigation into the origins of the pandemic and their campaign to blame it on sources outside China.

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Diplomat accuses State Department of cover-up over “directed energy weapons” attacks

Mark Lenzi, a Department of State official who sustained traumatic brain injuries while on assignment in Guangzhou, China, accused the department of hiding the source of his and other diplomats’ ailments and withdrawing information from Congress.

According to Lenzi, the State Department was doing its own medical tests to evaluate patients who experienced “directed energy exposure” on foreign soil. The disclosure forms of two victims were provided to Politico. Lenzi was on assignment in Guangzhou in late 2017 and was evaluated in June 2018. He was sent home days after a medical test. He was diagnosed with a brain injury on July 22, 2018.

Politico reported that lawmakers were not briefed on the State Department’s medical tests for directed energy exposure until early 2021. Lenzi claimed leaders in the State Department have retaliated against him for speaking out about the issue and working with Congress as it investigates the matter, Politico reported.

The federal agency that handles whistleblower claims previously found “a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” in the case of Lenzi and his claims of retaliation, according to an April 2020 Office of Special Counsel (OSC) memo. The retaliation probe is still underway. Lenzi’s administrative leave was revoked without explanation, according to Politico.

More than 200 American personnel – diplomats and intelligence officers alike – in foreign countries and on U.S. soil have suffered from unexplained health incidents since 2016. “The State Department has not treated this syndrome as seriously as it should. And that is very disturbing to me,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).

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EcoHealth Throws NIH Under The Bus Over Wuhan Gain-Of-Function Report; Researcher Claims ‘Massive Cover-Up’

The question over whether the NIH funded risky gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China was officially ‘answered’ last week, after the agency claimed that one of their partners – EcoHealth Alliance, failed to report that they had ‘accidentally’ created a chimeric coronavirus that was able to infect humanized mice.

To review, in a Wednesday letter addressed to Rep. James Comer (R-KY), NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence A. Tabak admits to funding a “limited experiment” to determine whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.” According to the letter, humanized mice infected with the modified bat virus “became sicker” than those exposed to an unmodified version of the same bat coronavirus.

The letter claims that EcoHealth CEO Peter Daszak failed to report this finding, and gave Daszak five days to submit “any and all unpublished data from the experiments and work conducted” under the NIH grant.

If true, it would mean Dr. Anthony Fauci, who runs the NIH’sNational Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wasn’t lying when he told Sen. Rand Paul in July when he denied the agency was conducting GoF research.

Except, according to Vanity Fair, EcoHealth did report their findings in a timely manner.

“These data were reported as soon as we were made aware, in our year four report in April 2018,” said New York City-based EcoHealth in a statement.

If that’s the case, Fauci is either incompetent for not knowing, or lying.

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