The Beijing Olympics are a soggy wet mess
An ESPN commentator says genocide in China is no big deal
And giant pandas could soon be everywhere
That and more on this week’s China news headlines
Welcome to China Uncensored, I’m Chris Chappell.
This episode is sponsored by PC-Doctor Toolbox.
Protect your PC from software crashes,
hardware failures, and the kind of glitches that make your life miserable.
Speaking of life being miserable, the foreign athletes at the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Olympic athletes have been complaining about no internet, bad food, and unsanitary rooms.
And this week, a Finnish skier shared videos of water gushing
into her and her team’s living quarters.
She had been posting all week about water leaking into the room.
Now, after athletes and journalists complained about the food at the Olympics, my favorite
state-run media, the Global Times, responded with a story about how great the food was.
So I expect to see a Global Times article about how dry
and unflooded all of the rooms are any day now.
But can we really blame China too much? After all, they’ve given the world so many things.
Including, apparently skiing.
Skiing is generally believed to have originated in Northern Europe.
But the Chinese Communist Party says skiing was actually invented in China. 10,000 years ago.
Yes, skiing has been a part of China since ancient times.
The Party has been making this claim since at least 2006.
What evidence do they have? This cave painting. It’s so obvious isn’t it! Okay, if it maybe isn’t,
it’s these human figures, totally hunting all the animals on skis. Those…could be skis.
And here’s the kicker. The cave painting is in Xinjiang. You know,
where the Chinese Communist Party is waging a bloody genocide on Uyghur Muslims?
Well, that region was definitely not part of China 10,000 years ago.
Today, ethnic Kazakhs, Mongolians, and other minorities still ski in the region.
The ones that haven’t been taken away to re-education camps.
But weirdly, instead of acknowledging the history of that region,
the Communist Party is also using the cave painting as propaganda to say Xinjiang
has always been a part of China. Since ancient times.
And speaking of Xinjiang, ESPN is helping the Chinese regime downplay all the genocide there.
A sportswriter and sports journalism professor for Northwestern University
was asked by an ESPN anchor how we reconcile the Olympics and genocide in China.
He compared it to Republican voting laws.
And sports injuries.
ESPN anchor:
“With genocide and human rights violations in the Tibetan regions and against Uyghurs in China,
the International Olympic Committee chose Beijing while stating it is committed to human rights.”
[flash cut] “J.A. Adande, as a fan and as then a reporter,
how do you reconcile enjoying this competition while also considering everything I just said?”
“I think it’s standard in sports right now—you have to have a cognitive dissonance. You need to
compartmentalize. We’ve never had a more enjoyable NFL playoffs in this country
and we’ve never had more people watching the playoffs, and yet it
goes on amid the ongoing allegations against Dan Snyder and the Washington Football Team,
and the continuous concussion concerns and now the concerns about diversity, and the
questions about competitive integrity even. All of that. And yet we’re still enjoying the games.
Don’t worry, it gets worse.
“And who are we to criticize China’s human rights records when we have attacks of agents of the
state against unarmed citizens and we have assaults on the voting rights of our people
of color in various states in this country. So sports—I think it is possible and it’s necessary
more than ever to just shut everything out if you are to enjoy the actual games themselves. ”
You know he’s got some good points. Guys are getting concussions in the NFL,
so we should just shut up about the genocide in Xinjiang and enjoy the Olympics.
To the anchor’s credit, he tries to ask the professor again about China,
since there is, you know, a genocide going on there. Here’s his response.
“Where can you choose that’s free? And look at some of the recent hosts of the games,
including Russia. It’s very hard to find a country
that isn’t problematic when it comes to human rights, including here.”
Ok, there’s a difference between “problematic” and genocide.
We are talking about the Chinese Communist Party killing people for their organs.
But hey, since no one’s perfect, let’s just enjoy the Genocide Games.
The International Olympic Committee is also
doing its part in keeping quiet on human rights atrocities in China.
There were a lot of concerns that Olympic uniforms would be made with forced labor in China.
Well, the IOC did a thorough investigation and guess what they concluded?!
They “did not find any forced, bonded, indentured or child labor”.
However, according to rights groups Human Rights Watch and the Coalition
to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region, , the IOC’s study lacked a few minor details.
Such as, “details about the factories and production sites visited,
the audit methodology and findings, or the steps taken to ensure that workers were
not subject to reprisals for speaking to auditors or reporting violations.”
Now while that sounds bad, keep in mind, tens of thousands of Americans
die in car accidents every year, so we should probably just shut up and enjoy the Olympics.
Chinese censors have been busy maintaining a proper image of the Olympics inside China.
Meanwhile, outside China, Chinese operatives have also been busy.
On American social media platforms like Twitter,
Pro-China accounts flooded hashtags critical of the Beijing Winter Olympics.
What is hashtag flooding? It means putting a specific hashtag on a ton
of posts that don’t have anything to do with the original topic.
“[It] aims to dilute the effectiveness of a popular hashtag so that other Twitter
users searching the term see swarms of unrelated content mixed in with
announcements for coming protests or calls for other organized action.”
For a while last year, they hashtag-flooded #GenocideGames,
so users saw a bunch of unrelated posts instead of posts critical of the Beijing Olympics.
In some cases, hashtag flooding also triggers Twitter’s anti-spam system,
and then all related content gets taken down.
The good news is that over the past year,
Twitter has been deleting accounts linked to China’s influence campaign.
Like, 170,000 accounts.
But if you happen to see a profile like this, it's a good bet it’s not a real person.
And coming up after the break, the US and China go to war—over pandas.
Welcome back.
Earlier this month, China and Russia released a joint statement.
It says “Friendship between the two States has no limits,
there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.”
No forbidden areas huh? Sounds like they should call it the Brokeback joint statement.
But this came out amidst fears Russia will invade Ukraine.
And that China will use that as a cover to invade Taiwan.
This week, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby spoke about the threat.
“Their February 4 joint statement certainly provided further evidence that
China has decided that they’re going to stand alongside Russia with respect to
what’s going on in Europe. We would say that their tacit support if you will for Russia is deeply
alarming and frankly even more destabilizing to the security situation in Europe.”
And a China-Russia alliance could be very dangerous for the United States.
Not that the US isn’t capable of shooting itself in the foot.
Part of the reason the early days of the pandemic were so difficult was because China dominated
the medical supply chain. China hoarded medical supplies and blockaded any shipments to the US.
China was able to do that because over the years, medical manufacturing slowly left the US
in favor of cheaper made-in-China alternatives. When the pandemic hit, the US had nothing.
Of course after that whole disaster, surely the US has learned its lesson, right?
Nope!
Chinese-made Covid tests were given to over 100,000 Super Bowl Fans.
The tests were made by iHealth Labs , a California-based subsidiary
of Chinese medical device maker Andon Health.
The Super Bowl required fans to show proof of vaccination and a negative Covid test.
So iHealth handed out 120,000 test kits to visitors at a pre-Super Bowl
event at the LA Convention Center. But it’s not just the Super Bowl.
The Biden Administration has been trying to get free Covid testing
kits to millions of American households. Guess who’s making a lot of them? Yeah,
a third of all these test kits are from iHealth.
“Since December 2021, the company has won contracts worth more than
$2.1 billion with the U.S. federal government and some state governments.”
And after a major advertising campaign at the Super Bowl itself,
I’m sure iHealth will only be getting more business.
Meanwhile, the FDA has issued a warning about China-developed drugs.
Apparently, some big Western drug makers are planning on making billions
by selling Chinese medicine in the US. Because of course they are.
But this new warning might actually put the brakes on it.
“FDA officials say they are concerned about the quality of the studies evaluating China-developed
drugs. The officials are also concerned the drugs haven’t been tested in U.S. patients.”
But the worst part about this is that Western drug companies want to use cheaper Chinese
versions of drugs. And like every time this has happened before with other products,
what that means is it would put American companies out of business.
And then we become entirely dependent for our medical needs
on a regime that kills political dissidents for their organs. This is, in a word—stupid!
The US is reopening an embassy in the Solomon Islands, to counter rising Chinese influence.
The Solomon Islands’ increasing dependence on
China is what sparked violent protests there in December.
China sees immense military and strategic value in alliances with Pacific Island nations,
filling a power vacuum left by declining US influence.
For more, check out the China Unscripted podcast episode,
China Is Trying to Kick the US Out of Asia.
At least this is a sign the US is not giving up so easily.
More bad news for troubled Chinese real estate giant Evergrande.
A Chinese court has frozen 157 million dollars of assets over missed construction payments.
Evergrande is the world’s most indebted property company. It
has over 300 billion dollars in liabilities. Yeah, billion.
And it seems like it’s the foreign investors who are going to be the biggest losers.
If only foreign investors would learn that that’s what always happens to foreign investors in China.
China’s going to crash on the moon.
There was a big story recently about how debris from SpaceX is going to crash into the moon.
Well, it turns out the astronomer who said that got his facts wrong
and it’s actually a chunk of a Chinese rocket that’s going to crash into the moon.
Don’t worry, this Chinese rocket debris isn’t a big deal.
It’s not like it’s going to blow up the moon or anything. Probably.
But there’s a greater evil to worry about—Pandas.
Get this—if you don’t know, China owns all pandas in the world. They essentially rent
them out to zoos around the world, for up to a million dollars a year on a 10 year contract.
Any babies they have still belong to China.
But that may change. There’s a new resolution proposed by Republican Congresswoman
Nancy Mace. It says that “Any giant panda born in the United States
should belong to the United States and the United States should seek the coordination of its allies
to establish collaborative giant panda breeding programs.”
He who controls the pandas controls the universe. Of course, resolutions are not laws. So even
if it passes, it just means Congress thinks we should do this, not that we’re going to do it.
Now I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand,
this will drive the Chinese regime crazy. Which I like. I really like.
And the state-run People’s Daily is already foaming at the mouth about this.
I really, really like.
However, this would also mean America will have its own pandas. Which I don’t like. Unless…the
US gets so successful at breeding giant pandas,
and then they escape into the wild, become an invasive species,
and then people need to start hunting them from helicopters, just like we do now with wild hogs.
I could see myself eating a Panda steak.
And this episode is sponsored by PC-Doctor Toolbox.
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Once again, I’m Chris Chappell. Thanks for watching China Uncensored.