Boots & Sabers

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Tag: China

China Tightens Grip

by | 0805, 18 May 2121 | | 1 Comment

The “nice” Communism of China, if such a thing ever existed, has fallen away and old-fashioned totalitarianism is back in Vogue in the Middle Kingdom.

Before last year, annual candlelight vigils had been lawfully held in Hong Kong since 1990, a year after soldiers and tanks rolled through Tiananmen Square in the Chinese capital and quashed a student-led protest for democratic reforms. Myriad questions still surround the Chinese government’s handling of the crackdown, which is said to have resulted in the deaths of hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of demonstrators and several soldiers.

 

Members of the public and civil servants who participate in next month’s memorial will be classified as “non-patriots,” and serving councilors or legislators face “immediate disqualification,” said HK01’s report, which cited persons with knowledge of the matter.

 

It said Hong Kong’s newly amended Basic Law—the city’s mini-constitution—means those who take part in the candlelight vigil may fail to meet the government’s “loyalty” requirement and have “no political future” in the semi-autonomous territory.

 

“Beijing will take unprecedented heavy-handed measures to handle matters” related to the event, which, like last year, will be considered an “unauthorized gathering,” it added. A heavy police presence is expected, as are “mass arrests” and prosecutions, the website said.

 

The strict enforcement by Hong Kong authorities is believed to be linked to upcoming events in Beijing, where Chinese leader Xi Jinping plans to lead the country in a landmark celebration for the centennial of the Communist Party of China on July 1.

U.S. Lost to China

by | 1008, 14 Mar 2121 | , , | 38 Comments

Yup

Comedian and late-night host Bill Maher said the United States has “lost” to China in the “battle for the 21st century.” 

 

During “Real Time with Bill Maher” on Friday, Maher argued that China was becoming more dominant on the world stage as the U.S. argues over “culture wars.”

 

“You know who doesn’t care that there’s a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Seuss book? China. All 1.4 billion of them could give a crouching tiger flying f—,” Maher said, referencing the controversy surrounding six of Seuss’s books that were pulled by Dr. Seuss Enterprises over racist imagery. 

 

“If anything, they are not a silly people. They are as serious as a prison fight,” he said

 

Maher criticized China’s authoritarian government over controversies surrounding Hong Kong’s autonomy and the nation’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims. However, the host went on to argue that China is able to quickly develop and solve problems as the U.S. debates partisan issues.

 

“On a national level, we’ve been having infrastructure week every week since 2009, but we never do anything,” Maher said.“Half the county is having a never-ending woke competition deciding whether Mr. Potato Head has a d—, and the other half believes that we have to stop the lizard people because they’re eating babies.”

China Launches Another Attack on U.S.

by | 0807, 6 Mar 2121 | , | 10 Comments

Biological. Economic. Cyber. China is waging a war on the U.S. whether we want to admit it or not.

The US is expressing growing concern over a hack on Microsoft’s Exchange email software that the tech company has blamed on China.

“This is an active threat,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday. “Everyone running these servers – government, private sector, academia – needs to act now to patch them.”

 

Microsoft said hackers had used its mail server to attack their targets.

 

It is reported that tens of thousands of US organisations may be impacted.

The US has long accused the Chinese government of cyber-espionage, something Beijing denies.

China Continues Policy of Ethnic Cleansing

by | 2118, 2 Mar 2121 | | 2 Comments

Tragic.

China’s policy of transferring hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang to new jobs often far from home is leading to a thinning out of their populations, according to a high-level Chinese study seen by the BBC.

 

The government denies that it is attempting to alter the demographics of its far-western region and says the job transfers are designed to raise incomes and alleviate chronic rural unemployment and poverty.

 

But our evidence suggests that – alongside the re-education camps built across Xinjiang in recent years – the policy involves a high risk of coercion and is similarly designed to assimilate minorities by changing their lifestyles and thinking.

 

The study, which was meant for the eyes of senior officials but accidentally placed online, forms part of a BBC investigation based on propaganda reports, interviews, and visits to factories across China.

 

China Tests Biden’s Resolve on Taiwan

by | 1631, 24 Jan 2121 | | 1 Comment

I think it’s more likely than not that China makes a hard play for Taiwan within the next year.

Taiwan has reported a large incursion by Chinese warplanes for the second day running, a show of force that coincides with the first days of US President Joe Biden’s term of office.

 

Sunday’s operation involved 15 aircraft and followed a similar drill that led to a warning from Washington.

 

China sees democratic Taiwan as a breakaway province, but Taiwan sees itself as a sovereign state.

 

Analysts say China is testing the level of support of Mr Biden for Taiwan.

Another Crackdown in Hong Kong

by | 2151, 5 Jan 2121 | | 4 Comments

And the world shrugs.

About 50 pro-democracy activists and politicians have reportedly been arrested in Hong Kong’s biggest crackdown since the introduction of a controversial national security law.

The arrests are said to be linked to an independently organised primary vote.

 

Officers are also understood to have searched the house of the detained democracy activist Joshua Wong, raided a law firm and pressed news outlets to hand over information.

 

It is unclear if these acts are linked.

 

Police have yet to comment on the various moves officially.

 

The Democratic Party’s Facebook page said the arrests were carried out under the security law imposed by Beijing on the territory last June in response to months of pro-democracy protests.

Among those detained are thought to be well-known opposition figures from both the Democratic Party and the Civic Party like James To, Lam Cheuk Ting, and Lester Shum.

China Increasingly Oppressive and Genocidal

by | 2122, 28 Sep 2020 | | 1 Comment

Horrific.

Over the past four years, the Chinese government has detained more than 1 million Uighurs in reeducation camps designed to strip them of their culture, language and religion. They’ve had to shave their beards and uncover their hair. They’ve been made to pledge allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party. Children have been taken from their parents and put into orphanages.

Returning to Kashgar, I was struck by how, at first glance, it seemed relatively normal. In the Old City, families were out at the night market, eating piles of meat and bread. Kids could be heard laughing through open upstairs windows. There were even young men — prime targets for the detention campaign, which was ostensibly about deradicalization — on the streets again.

Walking around, I was overcome by the same sense of sadness mixed with rage that I felt when reporting in Pyongyang. I knew it was a kind of “Truman Show,” but I couldn’t see the edges of the set. I could see a blankness in people’s eyes and feel a palpable heaviness in the air.

[…]

The Kims of North Korea may have learned from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Communist China founder Mao Zedong when they built their own personality cult, but Xi has stoked a level of personal adoration unseen in China for decades.

[…]

Not just in Xinjiang but across China, it has become extremely difficult to have conversations with ordinary folk. People are afraid to speak at all, critically or otherwise. Students and professors, supermarket workers and taxi drivers, parents and motorists have all waved me away this year.

China Using Covid As Cover for Genocide

by | 2233, 6 Sep 2020 | | 3 Comments

Horrific.

Even as Wuhan and the rest of China has mostly returned to ordinary life, Xinjiang’s lockdown is backed by a vast surveillance apparatus that has turned the region into a digital police state. Over the past three years, Xinjiang authorities have swept a million or more Uighurs, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities into various forms of detention, including extrajudicial internment camps, under a widespread security crackdown.

After being detained for over a month, the Uighur woman was released and locked into her home. Conditions are now better, she told the AP, but she is still under lockdown, despite regular tests showing she is free of the virus.

Once a day, she says, community workers force traditional medicine in white unmarked bottles on her, saying she’ll be detained if she doesn’t drink them. The AP saw photos of the bottles, which match those in images from another Xinjiang resident and others circulating on Chinese social media.

Authorities say the measures taken are for the well-being of all residents, though they haven’t commented on why they are harsher than those taken elsewhere. The Chinese government has struggled for decades to control Xinjiang, at times clashing violently with many of the region’s native Uighurs, who resent Beijing’s heavy-handed rule.

Demographic Genocide in China

by | 0843, 29 Jun 2020 | , | 54 Comments

Meanwhile, in communist China.

The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children.

While individual women have spoken out before about forced birth control, the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to an AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor. The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.”

The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.

The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.

Remember when you see the Soviet and communist symbols in these protests, this is where that ideology leads.

Chinese Military Accused of Hacking Equifax

by | 1028, 10 Feb 2020 | , , | 6 Comments

Cyber-warfare is real.

Four members of the Chinese military have been charged with breaking into the networks of the Equifax credit reporting agency and stealing the personal information of tens of millions of Americans.

The 2017 breach affected roughly 145 million people, with the hackers successfully stealing names, Social Security numbers and other personal information stored in the company’s databases.

The Justice Department on Monday blamed China for one of the largest hacks in history.

The four – Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke and Liu Lei – are members of the People’s Liberation Army, which is an arm of the Chinese military.

Hong Kong Protesters Fight with Arrows and Gas Bombs

by | 1222, 17 Nov 1919 | , , | 12 Comments

This is why we have the 2nd Amendment… so we can use our guns – not arrows – to fight a totalitarian government.

Police have besieged a university campus in Hong Kong occupied by protesters who have been fighting back with arrows and petrol bombs.

Officers have warned that they could use live ammunition if protesters do not stop attacking them using such weapons.

A media liaison officer was earlier wounded in the leg with an arrow near the Polytechnic University (PolyU).

Months of anti-government protests have caused turmoil in the city.

The latest violence is however some of the worst the semi-autonomous Chinese territory has seen since the movement began. The police have become targets for radical demonstrators, who accuse them of excessive force.

Police have so far been responding to violence around the PolyU campus mostly with tear gas and water cannon.

Xi Threatens Violence

by | 2125, 13 Oct 1919 | | 1 Comment

Chilling words coming from a tyrant.

China’s President Xi Jinping has issued a stern warning against dissent as protests continue in Hong Kong, saying any attempt to divide China will end in “crushed bodies and shattered bones”.

His comments came during a state visit to Nepal on Sunday, China’s state broadcaster CCTV said.

Protests in Hong Kong In Spite of Mask Ban

by | 1154, 6 Oct 1919 | | 1 Comment

Keep fightin‘

HONG KONG (AP) — Furiously yelling “Wearing a mask is not a crime,” tens of thousands of masked protesters hit Hong Kong’s rain-drenched streets Sunday in defiance of a new ban on facial coverings. Riot police later swept in with volleys of tear gas and muscular arrests as peaceful rallies again degenerated into widespread violence and chaos in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory.

Instead of deterring rioting and calming anti-government demonstrations that have gripped the international trading hub for four months, the ban that criminalized the wearing of face masks at rallies only redoubled the determination of both peaceful marchers and more radical black-clad youths. The hard-liners again lobbed gasoline bombs and trashed subway stations and China-linked banks in the city.

For the first time in the crisis, men on the roof of one of the Chinese military’s barracks in Hong Kong raised a yellow banner warning protesters they were breaking the law when laser pointers were flashed at the building, according to video broadcast by Hong Kong media.

Police said masked rioters also attacked bystanders, including two men left unconscious after bloody beatings and a woman who took photos of rioting.

A massive peaceful march to the central business district — on streets spray-painted with the word “resist” and hemmed in by high-rises that echoed with protesters’ chants — came as Hong Kong’s High Court rejected a second effort to invalidate the mask ban.

Hong Kong Continues to Fight Totalitarianism

by | 2154, 28 Sep 1919 | | 3 Comments

Keep on fighting.

HONG KONG, Sept 29 (Reuters) – Hong Kong protesters are to join a global “anti-totalitarianism rally” on Sunday, following another night of violent clashes with police after weeks of pro-democracy unrest in the Chinese-ruled city.

Police fired tear gas and water cannon on Saturday night to disperse protesters who threw petrol bombs and rocks, broke government office windows and blocked a key road near the local headquarters of China’s People’s Liberation Army.

A series of protests for and against the city’s Communist Party rulers in Beijing is planned ahead of the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic on Tuesday, including at the consulate of former colonial power Britain.

Thousands, young and old, gathered peacefully on Saturday at a harbourside park to mark the fifth anniversary of the “Umbrella” pro-democracy movement which gridlocked streets for 79 days in 2014.

Then the violence began, following a pattern of the last few weeks.

Anti-government protesters have attacked the legislature, Beijing’s main Liaison Office, occupied the airport, thrown petrol bombs at police, vandalised metro stations and set street fires.

Police have responded with tear gas, water cannon, rubber bullets and occasional live rounds fired into the air.

The protesters are angry about what they see as creeping Chinese interference in Hong Kong, which returned to China in 1997 under a “one country, two systems” formula guaranteeing freedoms that are not enjoyed on the mainland.

China Begins Sweeping Arrests Against Democratic Activists

by | 0657, 30 Aug 1919 | | 2 Comments

How many of them will be disappeared?

Several prominent Hong Kong democracy activists have been arrested in less than 24 hours amid a police crackdown.

Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow of the political party Demosisto were arrested on Friday for illegally organising a protest, before being released on bail.

Independence campaigner Andy Chan was arrested at the airport on Thursday while trying to fly to Japan.

They are among 900 people arrested since protests began in June.

Lawmaker Cheng Chung-tai of the localist Civic Passion party was also detained, his office said. It was unclear why he was held.

Hong Kong Continues to Rage

by | 2106, 13 Aug 1919 | | 4 Comments

I expect that totalitarian China is running out of patience, but Hong Kong is too important to their economy to risk a complete crackdown… yet.

Hong Kong International Airport saw chaotic scenes on a second consecutive day of massive anti-government protests that have paralysed one of Asia’s key transport hubs.

Squads of riot police arrived shortly before midnight after thousands of demonstrators again flooded the terminal buildings during the day.

Flight departures were brought to a standstill amid scuffles.

At least three men were mobbed inside the airport by protesters.

They were said to be holding identity cards showing they were police officers from mainland China.

Hong Kong police have admitted deploying officers disguised as anti-government protesters during the unrest in the city.

But the editor of China’s Global Times newspaper said one of those attacked was one of his reporters who was merely doing his job.

Hong Kong Fights for Freedom

by | 2155, 11 Aug 1919 | | 1 Comment

Fight on, brothers. We’re with you.

Hong Kong police have once again clashed with anti-government protesters as the city enters its 10th week of mass demonstrations and unrest.

Police fired tear gas across the city on Sunday night, including into an enclosed railway station.

In the Wan Chai district, petrol bombs and bricks were thrown at riot police who responded by charging at protesters with batons.

A number of people, including a police officer, were injured in the clashes.

Police were also filmed firing rubber bullets at close range inside a subway station, while other officers were seen beating people with batons on an escalator.

Two months of demonstrations sparked by a controversial extradition bill show no signs of abating, with both sides hardening their stance.

Disney Caves to Chinese Pressure

by | 2246, 8 Jul 1919 | , | 2 Comments

One lady’s opinion.

Although you can’t judge a film by its trailer, the muted, unhumorous tone of this teaser hints at the film’s objective. Mulan is no longer the self-conscious teenager who disappoints her parents by failing to become the ideal wife, before her fierce and beautiful transformation into the woman she wants to be. Instead, she appears solemn and resolute: Mulan is a now robotic warrior. The removal of the songs is a big mistake: it eliminates the joy and emotional heart that Disney do so well. I can’t help wonder why Disney are remaking Mulan at all if they are simply going to pander to the nationalistic values espoused by the mainland Chinese government – especially as it looks exactly like the kind of “Imperial dramas” that the state media are currently taking aim at.

No doubt Disney have in mind the commercial failure in China of 1998’s Mulan; it was caught up in the controversy over the Disney-funded film Kundun about the Dalai Lama, which led to the Chinese government effectively banning Disney films. The timing of this trailer release is awful, with recent events in Hong Kong culminating in police brutality against anti-extradition bill protesters, and the ongoing oppression of ethnic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. It feels like Disney is waving a big red flag in everyone’s faces in its desperation to secure success at the Chinese box office. For those who believe in democracy and freedom, this leaves a sour taste.

Protesters Thrown Out of Parliament in Hong Kong

by | 2035, 1 Jul 1919 | | 18 Comments

Ouch

Police firing tear gas have evicted protesters who stormed and ransacked Hong Kong’s parliament.

Activists had occupied the Legislative Council (LegCo) building for hours after breaking away from a protest on the anniversary of Hong Kong’s transfer of sovereignty to China from Britain.

After midnight (16:00 GMT), hundreds of police secured the building following a warning to protesters to clear it.

It follows weeks of unrest in the city over a controversial extradition law.

Hundreds of thousands took part in the earlier peaceful protest – the latest rally against a proposed law that critics fear could be used to extradite political dissidents to mainland China.

The protesters have also been demanding an independent inquiry into alleged police brutality during an earlier protest on 12 June.

China Threatens US Over Rare Earth Metals

by | 0811, 29 May 1919 | , , | 15 Comments

It is not impossible, but it is very difficult to win a trade war against a totalitarian regime. Their leaders can withstand decades of a down economy because they never have to stand for election. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try for vbetter terms and look for alternative trade partners. China only controls about a third of the known rare earth metal deposits, but that’s mainly because they are willing to take on the high cost and negative environmental consequences to mine them. If China pulls back, it opens the market for other countries to get in. Unfortunately, that will take years.

A Chinese state-run newspaper has warned the U.S. not to underestimate Beijing’s capabilities with its resources of rare earth minerals during a trade war between the two countries.

People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of China‘s ruling Communist Party, hinted serious consequences to the Trump Administration using a diplomatic term usually reserved by Beijing to signal the start of an armed warfare.

‘Don’t say we didn’t warn you!’ The newspaper said in a commentary today as it commented on the possibility of China suspending its exports of rare earths to the U.S.

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