India and the US have signed a military pact.
The CCP goes after political opponents abroad.
And how one Chinese city is predicting the outcome of the US election.
That and more on this week’s China news headlines
Welcome to China Uncensored I’m Chris Chappell.
This week’s China news headlines.
It’s something Beijing has been terrified of for years.
India and the United States are signing a landmark military agreement.
Now before I tell you more, did you know 60% of you who watch the show
aren’t subscribed? It would really mean a lot to me if you hit that subscribe button.
It’s a huge help to the show and you can always unsubscribe later if you want.
In fact, YouTube might just randomly unsubscribe you even if you don’t want.
Okay, so this military agreement between India and the US is a big deal. The agreement is
called the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for Geospatial Cooperation.
It’s a mechanism for India and the US to share military intelligence, particularly military
satellite surveillance. Which might be useful in, oh I don’t know, the high mountain passes
of the Himalayas, where Chinese soldiers have been encroaching on the Indian border.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper
visited New Delhi this week. And Pompeo had some strong words on the Chinese Communist Party.
“Our leaders and our citizens see with increasing clarity that the CCP is no friend to democracy,
the rule of law, transparency, nor to freedom of navigation, the foundation of a free and open
and prosperous Indo-Pacific.”
Speaking of the Indo-Pacific, the US, Australia, Japan, and India
will be participating in joint naval exercises next month, held in the Indian Ocean.
These four countries make up what’s known as the Quad, an informal alliance basically aimed at
standing up to the Chinese Communist Party. That alliance was conceived more than a decade ago,
but it did almost nothing because no one wanted to challenge China at the time. But
boy have things changed in 2020. Now all four countries are doing joint naval exercises.
Meanwhile Secretary of State Pompeo continued
his trip around Asia by bringing up the Chinese Communist Party pretty much everywhere he went.
In Sri Lanka, he called the Chinese Communist Party a predator.
In the Maldives, he said that Beijing was illegally
occupying territory and damaging the environment.
Pompeo also announced that the US will be building an embassy in the Maldives.
It’s part of an effort to check China’s influence in the region.
In Indonesia,
Pompeo said that the US would find new ways to cooperate with Indonesia in the South China Sea.
He also called China’s claims there “unlawful.”
In Indonesia, Pompeo also notably brought up China’s religious repression,
especially their treatment of the Uyghurs.
"The Chinese Communist Party's war against people of all faiths:
Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, and Falun Gong practitioners alike.
The atheist CCP (Chinese Communist Party) has tried to convince the world that its brutalisation
of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang is necessary as a part of its counterterrorism efforts,
or poverty alleviation, depending on which audience that they are speaking to."
Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world.
And Pompeo asked Indonesians to not look away from what the Chinese Communist Party was doing.
"I know the CCP has tried to convince Indonesians to look away,
to look away from the torments your fellow Muslims are suffering.
I know the same CCP officials have spun fantastic tales of happy Uighurs, eager
to discard their ethnic, religious and cultural identities to become more modern and enjoy the
benefits of CCP-led development. When you hear these arguments, I just ask you to do this:
Search your hearts. Look at the facts. Listen to the tales of the survivors and of their families."
I can see why the Chinese Communist Party really hates Mike Pompeo.
The YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project did a survey of 26,000 people in 25 countries,
asking them about the coronavirus.
The results? “China appears to have comprehensively lost the international battle
for hearts and minds over its handling of coronavirus with most people believing it was
responsible for the start of the outbreak and was not transparent about the problem at the outset.”
This was the widest survey of global public opinion about China’s handling of the pandemic.
The Chinese Communist Party was not happy about the survey.
Mainly because they hate it when anyone asks the people what they think.
Also bad news for the Party, they may have a massive new coronavirus outbreak on their hands.
In Xinjiang. Where they have those concentration camps.
According to state media, there was one case of the coronavirus in the city of Kashgar.
And so within two days, they tested everyone in the city. All 4.75 million of them.
It’s hard to know what to make of this news.
China has definitely exaggerated its ability to do mass coronavirus testing.
But it could also be that the coronavirus situation
might be much worse than the Chinese government is telling people. Or both.
Officially, “The testing drive has so far
identified 137 additional cases—and all are asymptomatic.”
And when has the CCP ever lied about coronavirus numbers? Don’t answer that.
In July, there was an outbreak in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi. That
resulted in an insane lockdown, where officials forced residents to take unproven Covid drugs.
Makes sense. If you’re already ethnically cleansing the region,
might as well test out some experimental drugs on them, right?
Speaking of crimes against humanity, organ harvesting. It’s a thing Chinese state-run
hospitals do because selling dissidents’ organs to rich people can make you a lot of money.
Well, at a recent online press conference, a journalist from Taiwan raised the issue.
This was the US Assistant Secretary of State’s response.
“Well, I can’t think of a more horrific human rights
abuse than stealing somebody’s liver. We have had consistent reports of this. We
have actually looked into allegations of it. And I encourage anybody who has
information that we could use to nail this down to please be in touch with us.”
This follows the final ruling earlier this year of the China Tribunal. It found that
“Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale
and… Falun Gong practitioners have been one—and probably the main—source of organ supply.”
And “In regard to the Uyghurs the Tribunal had evidence of medical testing on a scale
that could allow them, amongst other uses, to become an ‘organ bank.’”
Why haven’t you heard more about that?
Well, according to former New York Times journalist Didi Kirsten Tatlow who submitted
testimony to the China Tribunal, her editors discouraged her from reporting about the issue.
In her testimony, Tatlow says that her editors believed that the Chinese state was no longer
harvesting organs from prisoners. She was told that there was “nothing new” to the story.
And that people who believed this was happening to prisoners of conscience
were “on the fringes of advocacy.”
I mean, why anger the Chinese authorities and put your entire company's China bureau at risk,
just to cover one story, right?
Ironically, the Chinese government eventually expelled the New York Times anyway.
For unrelated reasons.
Even today, the medical community is mostly turning a blind eye to forced organ harvesting.
Well gosh, if they have a blind eye, they should go to China!
I hear you can get great cornea transplants there, no questions asked.
And stay tuned after the break, because Chinese leaders are deciding the future of China.
Welcome back!
China’s Communist leaders met behind closed doors this week to discuss their 14th 5 year plan.
That’s when the Communist Party plans out the next 5 years of the economy. Because China is
still Communist and has a planned economy. In case anyone tries to tell you otherwise.
In the leadup to the meeting, Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping made a bunch of personnel changes.
That includes appointing new—and loyal—heads to China’s biggest state-run media organizations:
Xinhua and People’s Daily.
Wow, stop the presses! No, seriously. Stop the presses.
You need to make sure you’re following Party guidelines.
Ready for a story just dripping with delicious irony? The Communist Party of the
Philippines has ordered, “its armed wing to target Chinese-owned companies operating in the country.”
Communists just can’t seem to get along. The Communist Party has been outlawed in
the Philippines. But the communist guerilla group says, “These [Chinese] infrastructure
projects not only displace thousands of peasants and minorities from their lands,
they also wreak havoc [on] the natural ecosystem of the country’s remaining forests.”
I mean, they’re not wrong. We did an episode about how a Chinese-built dam
in Malaysia could kill thousands. Check it out.
But even if the Chinese Communist Party may not have allies in Communist Parties
in developing countries, at least it still has friends in Europe.
Officials at the European Parliament and the European Commission have hired Hikvision
to supply thermal imaging cameras for their buildings.
It’s to test people’s temperatures to see if they have the coronavirus.
Hikvision is a great choice. They have a long, proud history of using
their surveillance equipment in those Muslim internment camps in Xinjiang.
Hikvision is also tied to China’s People’s Liberation Army.
So good job EU. You literally have installed PLA cameras in your buildings.
The FBI has indicted eight Chinese operatives for harassing Chinese dissidents in the US.
These Chinese operatives were a part of what’s called Operation Fox Hunt.
“The Chinese government claims [it] is an international anti-corruption campaign,
but the U.S. believes to be a plot to target political opponents and critics.”
Makes sense. China’s *domestic* anti-corruption
campaign is also used to target political opponents and critics.
As part of the FBI investigation, “At one point, one of the defendants and an unidentified
co-conspirator allegedly placed a note on the door of [a John Doe’s home] that said,
‘If you are willing to go back to the mainland and spend 10 years in prison,
your wife and children will be all right. That’s the end of this matter!’”
The Chinese Communist Party—it always thinks of the children.
The Chinese city of Yiwu is predicting the outcome of the upcoming US election.
Factories there make a lot of cheap products for the US market.
And according to the New York Times, “President Trump’s campaign paraphernalia—hats,
banners, mugs and practically anything else that can carry a logo—has been selling briskly...
By contrast, shop owners said during recent visits, bulk orders for materials supporting
former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. have been almost nonexistent.
This is how an almost unknown Chinese city was able to accurately predict the
winner of the 2016 presidential election months ahead of time,
when major American media still had no clue on the day of the election.
We’ll know next week if the Yiwu Index, as it's called,
is right again. At least I hope we’ll know next week.
And now, it’s time for me to answer another question from one of
you, a fan who supports China Uncensored on the crowd funding website Patreon.
Joesph Griffith asks, “Is flood season over in China?”
That’s a good question, because the flood season this year was devastating.
It’s hard to get accurate figures, since China downplays the damage and deaths in
natural disasters, but at least 15 million people were affected in a record breaking flood season.
There were 21 large scale floods this year. The last time flooding was this bad was in 1998.
At least according to my favorite Chinese state run media, the Global Times.
That seems to be mostly over. Which is good because the massive Three Gorges
Dam had begun to deform under the pressure of all those flood waters.
That would have been a black swan disaster for the Chinese Communist Party.
But it seems like for this year, that swan has flown.
Anyway, thanks for your question Joseph!
And thank you for watching. Remember, it's hard for us to keep this show running. There’s
not a lot of money in criticizing China. Which is why we rely on your support on
the crowd funding website Patreon. For as little as a dollar an episode,
you can help us in our fight against the Chinese Communist Party.
Head over to patreon.com/chinauncensored. You’ll also get some other cool perks.
Once again I’m Chris Chappell. See you next time.