Leaked footage of a F-35 fighter crash
The Americans who played for team China
And China becomes an “epic” nuclear threat
That and more on this week’s China news headlines
Welcome to China Uncensored, I’m Chris Chappell.
This episode is sponsored by Surfshark. You should be using
a VPN like Surfshark to protect yourself whenever you go online.
New footage has emerged of the US F-35 fighter jet that crashed in the South China Sea.
The Pentagon is confirming the authenticity
of a new leaked video showing last month's fighter jet crash in the South China Sea.
In January, a freedom of navigation operation in the South China Sea ended with that disaster...
When a F-35 fighter jet crashed during routine flight operations.
No one was killed, but it did create a major problem.
Tonight one of the most sophisticated pieces of military technology on the planet
now at the bottom of the South China Sea and up for grabs.
And a race was on between the US and China to see who could recover it first.
This is an unconfirmed photo of the F-35 sinking in the South China Sea.
But this video, confirmed by the Pentagon shows the actual crash.
Frankly it’s a miracle no one was killed. But the race still continues for the wreckage.
Speaking of wreckage,
the US-China trade deal. President Trump signed the deal back in January 2020, right
around the time news reports started paying more attention to a certain virus outbreak in Wuhan.
But two years later it turns out that the Chinese Communist Party did not buy what they
said they were going to do under the trade deal. “In the end, China bought only 57 percent of the
US exports it had committed to purchase under the agreement, not even enough to reach its
import levels from before the trade war.” The Biden administration is now saying
they’re going to hold China to account for missing those targets.
How they’re going to do that is not clear.
But according to the US Chamber of Commerce,
the Biden administration is looking at more tariffs as one option.
Another option is working with US allies to demand
China provide a level playing field for international companies.
Yeah, that’s not going to happen.
Meanwhile, Chinese officials say the shortfall is not their fault, it’s the pandemic’s fault.
And that the US should cancel all their China tariffs. Yeah, that’s not going to happen either.
Sounds like US-China trade negotiations are going really well!
And coming up after the break,
what happened to the Americans who competed in the Olympics—for China?
Welcome back.
What can one say about the Beijing Winter Olympics?
I think it's best summed up by this video.
This year’s Olympics is remarkable for many reasons. One
is this fantastic t-shirt we’re selling. Beijing 2022. Fake snow. Real genocide.
Time is running out to celebrate the Olympics with our exclusive not-made-in-China t-shirt.
Another reason the Beijing Olympics are remarkable is that China
has relied on foreign-born athletes to compete for Team China.
“More than ever before, China has relied on athletes granted citizenship for events
where it previously struggled to win medals including figure skating, ice hockey and skiing.”
Just to be clear, China isn’t the only country to do this.
But China also does not recognize dual citizenship.
So it’s a little unclear what the status is over American born athletes who competed for China. Did
they give up their US citizenship to compete for China? These athletes tend to avoid that question.
Case in point Eileen Gu. She’s a darling on Chinese social media for winning gold.
In fact, she was interviewed by the Chinese Communist Party’s
Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Yeah, the organization Xi Jinping has used to
go after his political enemies for corruption. They’re interviewing athletes now, apparently.
In the interview Gu called China her Homeland.
Despite getting all the training she used to earn her gold in America.
Now, Gu lives a very privileged life in both China and America. Her mom is the daughter of a Chinese
government official. She was also a venture capitalist that aimed to connect the US and China.
Back in 2019, right before she decided to switch to competing for China,
Eileen Gu appeared at an event standing next to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Gu has also gotten a lot of modeling and sponsorship opportunities in China.
So it’s not a big surprise that Gu has been avoiding
all questions from foreign media about her citizenship status.
If she admits to giving up her US citizenship, that creates a backlash in America,
but if the Chinese regime made a special exception for her, that creates a backlash in China.
Now I actually feel bad for her. She will go down in history for turning her back on the United
States and winning a gold for a brutal communist regime guilty of genocide. Lots of genocide.
She’s only 18 years old and it seems like a lot of this was due to the influence of her Tiger Mom.
Gu might look at this differently in a few years.
I also feel bad for another US-born athlete who competed for China—skater Zhu Yi
She did not have as much success during the Games, falling twice.
She was obviously distraught.
But it only ets worse.
While Eileen Gu is the darling of Chinese social media, Zhu Yi is a pariah.
“Nationalists insulted her lack of fluency in Mandarin and questioned her suitability for
Olympic competition, to the point that China’s Internet censors stepped in.”
The fact Chinese censors stepped in shows how much of a problem this is for the Chinese Communist
Party. On the one hand, they don’t have enough gold medal winning athletes. So they have to go
abroad to find them. Like I said, this is actually something almost every country does to an extent.
But it’s relatively new for China because well…Chinese people have been
trained by the Communist Party to be extremely nationalistic and negative towards outsiders.
According to Susan Brownell, an anthropologist and expert on Chinese
sports . “The reason it hadn’t happened before was, quite frankly, xenophobia.”
And there’s a reason why the Chinese Communist Party is
reaching out to ethnically Chinese people abroad.
“For the average Chinese, it might be too much to swallow if we had a national team
entirely of non-Chinese-looking faces, especially during Winter Games on home soil.”
So if they do well, like Eileen Guthey’ll be happy. If they do poorly, like Zhu Yi
there’ll be hell to pay.
The Chinese Communist Party also uses this as a way to increase its soft power. When Eileen
Gu calls China her homeland, it makes China look great, better than America.
And it also justifies the Party’s possessive treatment of Chinese people around the world.
Like I’ve said before, the Chinese regime treats all ethnically Chinese people like
they treat giant pandas. No matter where they’re born, they belong to China.
And they eventually must return to the homeland.
Speaking of pandas, they are terrible and why does anyone even like them.
Including Bing Dwen Dwen. That’s the Beijing Winter Olympics mascot panda.
He’s supposed to look like he’s encased in ice,
but actually looks kind of like he’s wearing Covid PPE.
Anyway, when he debuted a few years ago, people didn’t really like him, but now he’s
so popular that Beijing police are punishing people for reselling Bing Dwen Dwen merch.
Apparently people have been buying up merch to resell at higher prices,
which is not ok according to Chinese officials.
Here’s one Chinese netizen describing how they feel about Bing Dwen Dwen. “In 2019,
when Bing Dwen Dwen stood out from thousands of design schemes, I had no feelings for it.
Like many netizens, I thought it looked ugly and simple-minded, but now I think it is so cute.”
There’s only one explanation for this: brainwashing.
And coming up after the break, China is becoming a quote epic nuclear threat.
Welcome back.
Yet another Chinese city has been put under
lockdown as the omicron variant surges across China.
Baise is a city of about 1.4 million people with another 3 million in surrounding rural areas.
Of course, it’s not that the omicron variant is more deadly. The Chinese Communist Party
is just doubling down on its Zero Covid Policy, despite, you know, it being next
to impossible to stop Omicron. But the CCP does love locking people away, so it’s still a win.
Speaking of locking people up, Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is going through an omicron outbreak. With over a thousand cases.
That’s not a lot for many parts of the world, but that’s unacceptable for the Chinese regime.
And now the state-run People’s Daily is writing articles about how
China’s dynamic zero Covid policy is the scientific choice for Hong Kong.
I just did an episode earlier this week about what China’s dynamic Zero Covid policy means, like a
health code that controls your movements, and how it has been used to repress Chinese activists.
I could definitely see the Chinese Communist Party rolling that out in Hong Kong,
in the name of preventing Covid infections.
The Chinese regime has put out a new documentary about how successfully
Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive has been. It’s called
Zero Tolerance. And 4.4 million people have been investigated.
But the documentary might be having an unintended consequence.
Part of it shows Chinese officials confessing to their crimes.
The problem is, “The show’s producers, the state broadcaster and the party’s anti-graft enforcer,
seemed unaware or unconcerned that they were airing the dirtiest laundry of
the Communist Party, which, as the ruling party of a one-party state,
has no one to blame for the rampant corruption but itself.”
Like, the level of corruption is insane. It almost sounds like make believe.
For example, “Getting seafood boxes stuffed with $300,000.
Owning a fancy house for nearly every season. Running red lights without getting tickets.”
Chinese netizens responded by saying the documentary was like a how-to guide for bribery.
Until Chinese censors quickly began deleting critical comments.
China is building its first tire factory in Europe.
And guess what? It’s using Vietnamese slave labor.
If you aren’t surprised, you’re smarter than the Serbian government, which denies all the
claims. Possibly because China has invested $900 million dollars into this one project alone.
But there’s more. “Chinese companies now run a large steel mill
and a copper mine in Serbia. They’re building rail networks and highways.”
What I wonder about all these people willing to work with the Chinese Communist Party is—if
the Party is willing to use slave labor, how are they going to treat you in the end?
Well, here’s a hint.
A US General is warning the US is facing an epic nuclear threat from China and Russia.
He said, “This is the first time ever that we have a three-party
nuclear peer dynamic. And we have no history of this. This is epic.”
China is ramping up its nuclear capabilities.
While Russia is threatening to deploy nuclear missiles in Europe.
So overall things are going well in the world.
But while China is becoming an even greater nuclear threat,
Hunter Biden—son of president Joe Biden—sought a forever deal with a military-tied Chinese company.
We know this from emails recovered from his laptop.
This follows close on the heels of a leaked subpoena of Hunter Biden’s China bank records.
Do you get the sense there’s more to this story? Me too.
And after the entire world, including me, mocked the Chinese ending to Fight Club,
they’ve restored the original ending.
The Chinese version re-made the ending to have a pro-government message.
That’s right, a pro-government message in Fight Club.
That’d be like making Dune into an anti-drug movie.
The spice must…be regulated by state-run industry.
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Once again, I’m Chris Chappell. Thanks for watching China Uncensored.