SCRIPT
China’s heat wave breaks records
Xi Jinping personally asked Biden to stop Nancy Pelosi
And Chinese censors target the new Minions movie
On this week’s China news headlines
Welcome to China Uncensored.
I’m Shelley Zhang, filling in for Chris Chappell, who is off doing his best praying
mantis.
Unlike temperatures in southern China this week, where a record breaking heat wave and
drought are still ongoing.
It’s affecting an area of more than 500,000 square miles.
“Equivalent to the states of Texas, Colorado and California combined.”
Due to power shortages, factories have been shut in Sichuan province and the neighboring
city of Chongqing for the second week in a row.
And Chinese authorities have ordered wider power cuts in the region.
And for people who do have to go to work, power cuts means there’s not a lot of air
conditioning.
Which means people are getting inventive.
Huge blocks of ice to the rescue.
Power cuts also mean people are taking the subway in the dark.
Sleeping in underground parking garages to stay cool.
And eating hotpot by candlelight.
I’m not sure how anyone can eat hotpot during a massive heat wave, but these people are
doing it.
But the heat wave isn’t just causing a terrible drought and power cuts.
It’s also causing forest fires.
Fires have broken out over the past week in the mountains surrounding Chongqing.
According to Chinese authorities, those fires are now under control.
It is not a good time to be in Chongqing right now.
And not just because of the heat wave, drought, wildfires, and power shortages.
Also because of Covid.
Actually, China’s Zero-Covid policy.
“Authorities ordered more than 10 million people in the city's central urban districts
to undergo mandatory Covid tests on Wednesday, when the highest temperature in Chongqing
soared past 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).”
Videos on Chinese social media show crowds of people lining up for testing.
This one even has smoke from the forest fires in the background.
And the lines continued at night.
It was so hot several posts showed people passing out while waiting in line.
Now you might be thinking, this sounds terrible.
Why didn’t people just refuse to get tested?
Well, because the authorities changed the health code on everyone’s mobile phone to
orange, which restricts their movement.
The health code would only turn green again after they took a Covid test.
The dystopian societal control of the future is here now.
More after the break.
Welcome back.
In the world’s least surprising news, the Washington Post reports that Chinese leader
Xi Jinping asked US President Joe Biden to prevent Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
from visiting Taiwan.
That was during a phone call between Xi and Biden shortly before Pelosi’s trip.
Of course this information comes from an anonymous senior White House official, but I tend to
believe this story.
Because it’s like reading a headline that says “Cats Hate Dogs” or “The Sky Is
Still Blue and Not Green.”
Of course Xi Jinping asked Biden to stop Pelosi from visiting.
It was probably the main reason he even agreed to the call.
The rest of the Post’s article has a lot of sniping at Pelosi from anonymous White
House officials who seemed big mad that she didn’t listen to their warnings.
“Administration officials told her China was likely to escalate its action in the region
regardless of whether she visited but could move up the timeline for doing so”
“Yet Pelosi was unmoved by White House officials’ arguments.”
So they basically told her that China is going to get aggressive either way, but if she went
to Taiwan, they could get aggressive sooner.
Why deal with that when everyone could just keep kicking the can down the road instead?
Pelosi told officials that she would consider not going to Taiwan if Biden directly asked
her to.
But she also said she would make it clear that she was canceling the trip because of
Biden.
Which would pretty much make it look like Biden was caving to China.
According to the Post, Biden never spoke to Pelosi about her Taiwan trip.
And he told Xi Jinping that he couldn’t stop Pelosi’s trip because Congress was
an independent branch of government.
Oh to be a fly on the wall as Biden tried to explain separation of powers to the guy
who’s spent the last decade trying to consolidate all of the power in the Chinese Communist
Party.
I hope he showed Xi the Schoolhouse Rock song about the three ring government.
I imagine Xi Jinping didn’t really get it though.
“Sure Mr President, you say you can’t stop Nancy Pelosi from visiting Taiwan, but
why don’t you just arrest her for corruption and replace her with a member of your own
faction instead?
See?
Easy!”
And in another example of how the Chinese Communist Party is totally a normal government
that does normal government things, Party official Wang Yang met with Chinese Catholic
leaders.
These are people who are appointed by the Communist Party to lead the Catholic church
in China.
Which explains why Wang told these Catholic leaders to “firmly uphold the leadership
of the [Chinese Communist Party] and to help the religion better adapt itself to socialist
society.”
Wang also told them to “resist infiltration by foreign forces and resolutely safeguard
China's sovereignty, security and development interests.”
The Communist Party doesn’t believe in separation of church and state.
They believe in the control of church by state.
Which is also why it’s important that they keep arresting those bishops from the underground
Catholic church.
Totally normal.
But US ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns , is calling out Beijing for what he calls
their not normal overreaction to Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.
He told CNN there’s concern around the world that China is becoming an “agent of instability”
in the Taiwan Strait.
Burns also said that the Chinese Communist Party’s reaction to Pelosi’s visit was
a manufactured crisis.
And an overreaction.
(Pull quote:
“‘It was a manufactured crisis by the government in Beijing.
It was an overreaction,’ Burns told CNN Friday from the US Embassy.”
The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to the US ambassador’s comment by not overreacting
at all.
Just kidding, they responded with a lot of ranting about how it is the US and not China
that started the crisis and did all of the terrible things.
Followed by more ranting where they accuse the US of doing everything that the Chinese
Communist Party is actually doing.
It’s basically like trying to win an argument by yelling “I know you are, but what am
I?” 5,000 times.
Meanwhile another US delegation arrived in Taiwan earlier this week, this one led by
the Indiana governor Eric Holcomb .
He met with President Tsai Ing-wen.
And several Taiwanese companies focused on semiconductor manufacturing.
Which is great and all, but just once can we have at least one headline about someone
visiting Taiwan that doesn’t mention angering China?
Is that too much to ask?
And after this final break, China censors its minions.
Welcome back.
The US National Institutes of Health has ended a grant it was giving to the Wuhan Institute
of Virology.
Leading everyone to ask, wait, they’re only ending that now?!
This is the grant that was given to EcoHealth Allianceto work with the Wuhan lab on bat
coronavirus research.
They were taking bat coronaviruses and adding spike proteins that were more transmissible
to human cells.
The NIH says these coronaviruses were too genetically distant to have become the SARS-CoV-2
virus.
But this is exactly the kind of research that many experts say may be connected to a lab-leak
origin of COVID-19.
Technically the NIH grant has been suspended since 2020.
But the NIH has now completely terminated it, because the Wuhan Institute of Virology
refused to share their lab notebooks and research with the NIH.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology refused to share its research with the US government?
Color me shocked.
And Chinese censors have changed the ending of the new Minions movie.
Minions: The Rise of Gru is the fifth movie in the Despicable Me franchise.
And it’s a movie that stars Michelle Yeoh, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Julie Andrews.
Everything about this is weird.
In the end, one of the main villains/heroes, Wild Knuckles, fakes his death to escape both
the authorities and his fellow villains.
And he and Gru ride off into the sunset.
Which is apparently not ok in China.
Instead, they added a few still images to the end of the movie, which said that Wild
Knuckles ended up in prison for 20 years.
Sure, ok.
But here’s where it gets even weirder.
They also added images about how Gru became one of the good guys.
And, here’s the important part, his biggest accomplishment is being the father to his
three girls.
Heartwarming family moment?
Or awkward propaganda promoting China’s three-child policy?
This isn’t the first time China has changed the ending to a foreign movie…this year.
Back in January, the ending of Fight Club was changed when it started streaming in China.
The Chinese version “ends with a note to viewers saying that the police ‘rapidly
figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb
from exploding.’”
Also, Brad Pitt’s character was sent to an asylum.
I guess in China, even imaginary friends can be locked up.
Anyway, after a lot of online ridicule and international headlines, the ending of Fight
Club was restored.
But I guess Chinese censors have short memories.
After news of the Minions ending changes broke, there was a lot of online ridicule and international
headlines.
And the ending of Minions: The Rise of Gru was restored.
And finally, reporting on China over the years, I’ve heard of a lot of weird reasons for
people getting detained by the police.
But this is the first time I’ve heard of a Chinese woman being detained for wearing
a kimono.
This happened in the city of Suzhou, in an area known as Little Tokyo because of all
the Japanese restaurants.
The woman was taking photos wearing a kimono and wig because she was cosplaying as a character
from the manga Summer Time Rendering.
So this is like someone getting detained for cosplaying as Elsa from Frozen outside an
IKEA.
The woman managed to film some of her interactions with the police.
They yelled at her for wearing kimono instead of hanfu, which is traditional Chinese clothing.
“I came to take photos.”
“If you were wearing hanfu, I wouldn’t say this, but you are wearing kimono, as a
Chinese person.
You are Chinese!”
“Are you Chinese or not?!”
“Excuse me, are you allowed to yell at me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“If you don’t cooperate.”
When she asks why she’s being stopped, the police accuse her of picking quarrels and
provoking trouble, a charge they usually use against dissidents.
When she says she’s just wearing a costume, they tell her she has to come with them.
And then they grab her and take her away.
The woman later said online that she was taken to the police station, questioned until 1
am, and that her phone was searched and her kimono confiscated.
She was also told not to post what happened to her online, which she obviously ignored.
But she did apologize for wearing a kimono on the street.
And that’s the important part.
Anti-Japanese sentiment has been getting worse in China lately.
And if US-China relations keep going downhill, I wonder if people are going to start getting
yelled at for cosplaying as
A Minion.
And that’s it for this episode of China Uncensored.
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To find out more about how you can help the show, visit our website at chinauncensored.tv/support.
Thanks for watching China Uncensored.
Once again, I’m Shelley Zhang.