A top member of Congress plans to visit Taiwan.
Bill Gates is funding Chinese science
And China is spying on the Federal Reserve That and more on this week’s China news headlines.
Welcome to China Uncensored. I’m Matt Gnaizda.
This episode is sponsored by Surfshark.
You should be using a VPN like Surfshark to protect yourself whenever you go online.
US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
She’s always been controversial. But one thing’s for sure. She’s always taken a stand on China.
Like in the 90s, when she was a champion of the Free Tibet movement.
You know, when standing up to the Chinese Communist Party used to be cool.
Well, like spaghetti straps and bucket hats...
standing up the CCP has become cool once again.
No.
Anyway,
this time, Pelosi is standing up to the Chinese Communist Party by planning a visit to Taiwan.
There’s been no official confirmation of the trip yet, but it’s been widely reported.
The last US Speaker of the House to visit Taiwan
was Newt Gingrich—back in the 90s, you know, when it was cool the first time.
The predictable outcome of the reports of Pelosi’s trip, of course, is that it angers China.
Which, might I remind the mainstream media, is not Pelosi’s fault.
If supporting a democratic ally
in the face a genocidal bully makes that genocidal bully angry...the
problem doesn’t lie with supporting your ally. It lies with the bully being a jerkface.
And anyway, what’s China gonna do? Invade Taiwan? They’re already planning to invade Taiwan.
But President Biden doesn’t seem to understand this.
In a response to a reporter’s question about Pelosi’s potential visit, Biden said this:
“Well, I think that the military thinks it’s not a good idea right now.”
Now officially the White House says it has not taken a position on Pelosi’s Taiwan visit.
Unofficially, there are reports coming out about the Biden administration trying
to convince Nancy Pelosi of the risks of her trip.
It’s not clear from these anonymous reports whether this is actually about making sure
Pelosi understands the risks, or if it’s about pressuring her to not go to Taiwan.
Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich has some advice for Pelosi:
tell risk-averse Biden officials to shut up and go to Taiwan anyway.
I never thought I’d say this, but I’m with Newt Gingrich on this one.
The Chinese Communist Party is not going to start World War III over Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan.
They just want to scare the US into thinking they will.
And unfortunately it’s looking like the Biden administration scares easy.
President Biden had a phone call with Xi Jinping on Thursday.
The call lasted for more than 2 hours.
As of when I recorded this video, we don’t know what exactly they talked about.
I wonder if Xi Jinping told Biden it would be a big mistake to let Pelosi visit Taiwan.
Fortunately, President Biden is very good...at making mistakes.
Hit ‘em with strategic confusion, Mr. President!
But it’s not all tension between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping.
Last week—when we didn’t record a weekly headlines episode—Xi
had apparently sent Biden a message, wishing him a speedy recovery from Covid.
That’s so sweet!
How about also writing Biden an apology...for
China’s initial six-week coverup that let Covid spread around the world?
And after the break, Bill Gates is funding the Chinese regime’s science projects.
Welcome back.
There’s no nice way to say this.
Bill Gates’s foundation just paid for the Chinese Communist Party to recruit foreign scientists.
Basically, the Gates foundation is funding the Foreign Talent Research
Center of China’s Ministry of Science and Technology...
to the tune of $100,000.
In theory, the money is to help organize a forum on pandemic preparedness and response.
Makes sense. Like I said earlier, the Chinese regime is responsible for that
massive six-week coverup that allowed the pandemic to spread globally.
So obviously, if you give them more money, surely they’ll do better next time.
That Gates Foundation money, though, is being given to the Foreign Talent Research Center.
That’s a Communist Party-affiliated group whose job is to recruit top scientists from the West,
and bring them to China, where they get paid boatloads of money to do cutting edge
research...designed to help China’s private sector and military out-compete the West.
Bill Gates may be smart. But he’s extremely stupid. And that’s me being nice about it.
But maybe the Chinese Communist Party just wants to be America’s
friend. Which is why they tried to plant spies inside the US Federal Reserve.
And also detained a Fed employee in a hotel room in China
and threatened his family to get secret US economic data.
These allegations are in a report from Republican Senator Rob
Portman on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The report says that “Chinese operatives have employed both bribery and coercion
to garner influence with employees of the Federal Reserve system in attempts to get
them to provide sensitive information about the U.S. economy to the Chinese Communist Party.”
That sounds pretty scary. The Chinese Communist Party has infiltrated the most
important banking institution in the US. The very institution that literally prints America’s money.
The good news is, as the Fed has clearly demonstrated over the past two years,
they literally can’t even predict when inflation is going to happen,
even when that inflation is caused by their own money-printing.
In other words, America’s best natural defense against China’s infiltration of the banking system
is human incompetence.
But you know what will fix America’s inflation problem? Selling oil to China.
As part of the Biden administration’s efforts to combat high gas prices,
he’s ordered the release of a record amount of US Strategic Petroleum Reserves.
And over the last few months, millions of barrels from the reserves have been sold overseas.
And nearly a million barrels of it have now been sold to China—specifically,
to Unipec, the trading arm of Sinopec, which is owned directly by the Chinese government.
Which sounds pretty scary. Until you realize...yeah it *is* legitimately scary.
The problem isn’t with selling US oil reserves. That pretty much has to happen
because US oil refineries aren’t set up to refine the kind of crude oil the US produces.
So the US government releases the oil and sells it to other countries to try to lower
overall oil prices, which theoretically would lower gas prices in the US.
The problem is, the US is selling some of that oil
to China—a regime that kills ethnic minorities for breakfast.
And it gets even worse, because this is not a one-time “oopsie.”
In 2017, president Trump’s administration had sold half a million barrels from the
U.S. strategic reserves to a different Chinese oil producer, PetroChina.
So while everyone is quick to blame whichever president they hate most,
the real problem is that the US Department of Energy
is actually required to sell those Strategic Petroleum Reserves to the highest bidder. Even
if that highest bidder is linked to a regime that’s threatening to start World War III.
Although to be fair, America does so much business with China that even a million
barrels of oil is a drop in the bucket of how much money it pumps into the Chinese regime.
That doesn’t make me feel better.
And finally this week, an Australian human-rights activist was arrested in the UK
after protesting the genocide of the Uyghurs.
Drew Pavlou was detained for allegedly emailing a bomb threat to the Chinese embassy in London.
Police held him for 23 hours, and initially denied him access to a phone call or a lawyer.
Pavlou says he never sent any bomb threat, calling it an
“orchestrated campaign” against him by the Chinese Communist Party.
Hmmm... Should we believe that a cheeky human rights activist with no history of violence
suddenly threatened to murder a bunch of people?
Or that a regime that justifies genocide of ethnic minorities by claiming they’re terrorists
would lie... to make a peaceful activist look like a terrorist?
It’s hard to say.
This is what the bomb-threat allegedly emailed to the Chinese embassy said:
“This is Drew Pavlou, you have until 12pm
to stop the Uyghur genocide or I blow up the embassy with a bomb. Regards, Drew.”
“Regards, Drew”?! Now I know he didn’t send the bomb threat. It’s way too polite.
The first time we had Drew on our podcast, he used more swear words than all our previous guests
combined. We actually had to pause part way through and ask him to please stop swearing
so we could keep our clean rating on iTunes. And then we still had to bleep things out.
Drew Pavlou is not the kind of guy who would *politely* threaten anything.
He’s the kind of guy who would pull some outrageous publicity stunt, like, I don’t know,
hold up a sign that says Xi Jinping f’s your mother....
or like glue himself to the Chinese embassy to get media attention.
“A spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan Police said... ‘He was found to be in possession of a
quantity of glue and had attempted to glue his hand to the outside of the embassy building.’”
Yep, that sounds like Drew.
Drew has now been released, without actually being charged with anything.
Although he has been told he’s not allowed to leave the UK.
Which just goes to show, the UK clearly does not actually think Drew Pavlou is a criminal.
If they did, they’d send him right back to Australia... where criminals belong.
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Once again, I’m Matt Gnaizda. Thanks for watching China Uncensored.