NYT Breaking News: Except for the whistle blower who sent to jail for 14 month exposing the crimes against humanity. No U.S. troops will be punished for the botched strike in Afghanistan that killed 10 civilians, including children, a Pentagon official said.
Video: Canada horrific human rights records will boycotts Olympics in China “over fake human rights reasons” 加拿大可怕的人權記錄將“以虛假的人權理由”抵制中國奧運會
https://vimeo.com/656170756
https://youtu.be/PL2KzDmizvw
https://www.facebook.com/100036400039778/posts/620536879169641/?d=n
As Canada is a member of the once secret 5-eyes intelligence alliance (US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) it needs to create certain media spectacles to attack their “enemies”. Listen to the PM declare a boycott of the Beijing games “over human rights” while his gov’t continues its genocide on our First Nations.
We used to brought up using our parents, our grandfather, our teachers and our leaders as role models!
For our future generations continue to lives in the “Western Foster Homes” countries brought up hearing lies from the leaders and news medias everyday as a way of lives. We really cannot blame majority of children turned out morally sick. 種瓜得瓜 種豆得豆 like my father taught us.
Look at Canada Prime Minister talk about boycotting Beijing Olympic, really disgusting and shameless.
How five democracies by Australia, Sweden and Britain conspired with US to entrap Julian Assange is well-known. by Alex Lo SCMP
The roles played by Australia, Sweden and Britain under pressure from America to persecute the founder of WikiLeaks is well-known. However, Ecuador and its domestic politics in the past decade may be even more relevant, but little understood.
Throughout the second half of 2019, riots and protests gripped the city, leading to increasingly intense and violent confrontations with police. Many businesses throughout the city were hurt. Myriad social, political and economic problems long simmering under the surface burst forth, all causing intense dissatisfaction with the government, even hatred against it. At times, the city was paralysed.
Oh, you thought I was talking about Hong Kong? Actually no; the following would have given the game away. At least six protesters were killed and hundreds injured, according to official estimates. A state of emergency, or what the government of Ecuador called “a state of exception”, was eventually declared in the capital, Quito, allowing the military to exercise total control and discretion. Lenin Moreno, who was president at the time, fled the city.
Back in Hong Kong, no rioter or protester was killed. No state of emergency or martial law was ever declared. No People’s Liberation Army personnel were ever involved, except in cleaning up debris after a particularly nasty typhoon.
But Western media and governments, especially US media and Washington, went into a hysterical feeding frenzy over Hong Kong that continues to this day. Meanwhile, Washington was practically silent about the troubles in Ecuador, which became friendly with the United States once again after a period of hostility under Moreno’s predecessor and former mentor, the leftist Rafael Vicente Correa, most famous to many foreigners for providing sanctuary to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy in London and granting him citizenship.
In the case of Assange and how Washington managed to trap the world’s greatest citizen-journalist by bending not one, not two but four supposedly democratic governments to its will, the domestic politics of Ecuador in the past decade is perhaps the least understood but also the most relevant.
In our part of the world, it’s well-known how the Australian government (both Labor and Liberal), beginning with former prime minister Julia Gillard and then with Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, has washed its hands of the country’s world-famous citizen; and how the media empire controlled by Rupert Murdoch has routinely conducted minimal reporting, if at all, instead of expressing its brand of speciality outrage.
The kangaroo courts of London went into action as soon as the Ecuadorean embassy released Assange into the custody of British police in 2019. And, throughout the past decade, the prosecutorial office of Sweden kept resurrecting sexual assault charges and extradition requests against Assange, whose lawyers had warned once he was sent to Sweden, US authorities would immediately request extradition on sealed or undisclosed charges. Sure enough, once he was handed to British authorities, US prosecutors immediately unsealed the espionage charges based on a set of obscure and rarely used American laws dating back to the first world war with a maximum jail term of 175 years. Swedish prosecutors immediately “reopened” and then dropped the case once and for all. Interestingly, the alleged key victim in the case had declared, for a long time, that she had no interest in pursuing rape charges against Assange.
But the cooperation, both tacit and active, of Australia, Britain and Sweden would have been for nothing without a change of government in Ecuador. Correa was part of a group of leftist leaders in South America led by the late Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who proved to be a thorn in the side of Washington and its allied oligarchic business elites in the region.
When Moreno took over the presidency in 2017, he dismantled many popular measures of his predecessor by launching a neoliberal economic reform.
He lowered taxes, especially for big companies and to attract foreign investors; granted amnesty to some people previously convicted on financial fraud; relaxed labour protection laws, liberalised trade policy, reduced public spending and ended fuel subsidies. He supported oil drilling in the Amazon and allowed the US military to access an airbase on the environmentally sensitive Galapagos Islands, most famous for a historic visit by Charles Darwin that led to his formulation of the theory of evolution.
In other words, he imposed International Monetary Fund-like austerity measures or “conditionalities”, usually hated by the recipient countries, even before the IMF and World Bank were invited to step in with more than US$10 billion in loans. That must have been easy negotiations.
His government did restore some public subsidies, which helped end the protests in October 2019.
Moreno was close to the Americans. As the incoming president, Moreno secretly met Donald Trump’s election campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in May 2017 to discuss evicting Assange from the Ecuadorean embassy in London. That disclosure came from an investigation by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller looking into links between the Russian government and Trump’s presidential election campaign.
The then US vice-president, Mike Pence, also met Moreno the following year during which they discussed the Assange case and the need to improve bilateral relations.
Thereafter, the Moreno government started complaining publicly about how bad Assange had been as a guest of the embassy, such as disturbing and abusing staff, hacking computers and even having poor personal hygiene. All that was duly swallowed by some mainstream Anglo-American media outlets. Having made the case against him, Assange was duly stripped of his Ecuadorean citizenship and handed over to British police.
Washington, predictably, ignored Moreno’s troubles at home and the popular protests against his regime, while going into overdrive over Hong Kong’s riots, portraying them as a peaceful fight for freedom and democracy.
Assange probably knew his time was up as soon as Moreno was elected president. He was the proverbial sitting duck, or bird in a cage.
Alex Lo has been a Post columnist since 2012, covering major issues affecting Hong Kong and the rest of China. A journalist for 25 years, he has worked for various publications in Hong Kong and Toronto as a news reporter and editor. He has also lectured in journalism at the University of Hong Kong.
Video: Lone video reveals tragedy of Nanjing Massacre 唯一的視頻揭示南京大屠殺的悲劇
https://vimeo.com/656124291
https://youtu.be/89kM9cPQd7U
https://www.facebook.com/100036400039778/posts/620468052509857/?d=n
On December 13, 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army captured the city of Nanjing and brutally killed approximately 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers over the next six weeks, making it one of the most barbaric episodes of World War II.
The only surviving video documentation of the inhuman massacre discovered to date was shot by John Gillespie Magee, an American missionary who later testified at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
American Indian Wars: The roar of capital and a dirge of humanity – CGTN Insight
Editor’s note: The United States has been at war for more than 200 of its 240 years of existence. Between the end of WW II and 9/11 – barely 50 years – the U.S. initiated 201 conflicts that ravaged 153 countries and regions. “America: War by another name” is a special eight-part series that explores the sinister motivations for its warmongering. Episode 1 examines how the pursuit of capital justified multiple genocides.
In the film “Good Will Hunting,” there is a scene when the protagonist Will Hunting is asked why he refused to work for the National Security Agency.
He replied, “Say I’m working at NSA. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. So I take a shot at it and maybe I break it… But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and 1,500 people I never had a problem with get killed. Now the politicians are saying, ‘Send in the marines to secure the area’… It won’t be their kid over there, getting shot… It’ll be some kid from Southie taking shrapnel in the as… And the guy who put the shrapnel in his as got his old job, cause he’ll work for 15 cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the skirmish to scare up oil prices so they could turn a quick buck… So what did I think? I’m holding out for something better.”
What he said was an accurate reflection of the giant web of interests woven by American political and capital powers through wars. It also expressed the frustration keenly felt by decent Americans of conscience over their own country’s waging of wars.
History always repeats itself. Will’s telling analysis of America’s war logic also tells the fate of army officers who did not have the heart to draw their sword against innocent people in the genocide of American Indians.
On November 29, 1864, a 700-man force of the Third Colorado Cavalry under the command of Colonel John Chivington raided an Indian encampment, committing the blood-curdling Sand Creek Massacre. Chivington, once a Methodist pastor but now a butcher, shouted, “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians.”
Under his instruction, more than 100 American Indians were killed, two-thirds being defenseless women and children. Some victims were even dismembered, with their scalps and body organs treated as trophies by American soldiers. In spite of the ruthlessness, there were still a small number of compassionate officers in the army who refused to kill innocent people. Captain Silas Soule was one of them. His frustration-laden letters back then, now kept in the Denver Library, detailed the tragedy.
One letter written to Major Edward Wynkoop reads:
“The massacre lasted six or eight hours, and a good many Indians escaped. I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized. One squaw was wounded, and a fellow took a hatchet to finish her, and he cut one arm off, and held the other with one hand and dashed the hatchet through her brain.”
In another letter to his mother, he wrote:
“The day you wrote, I was present at a Massacre of three hundred Indians mostly women and children. It was a horrible scene, and I would not let my Company fire. They were friendly and some of our soldiers were in their Camp at the time trading… Some of the Indians fought when they saw no chance of escape and killed twelve… of our men. I had one Horse shot… I hope the authorities at Washington will investigate the killing of those Indians. I think they will be apt to hoist some of our high officials. I would not fire on the Indians with my Co. and the Col. said he would have me cashiered, but he is out of the service before me and I think I stand better than he does in regard to his great Indian fight.”
The records and narratives of Soule and other righteous officers who refused to participate in the massacre sparked such outrage that the authorities had to initiate an investigation. Despite Chivington’s coercion and cajolery, Soule resolutely chose to testify about the war crime before the Colorado military commission. Because of this, he was eventually assassinated. The name Silas Soule is not known to many Americans, but as historian David Fridtjof Halaas put it, without people like him who had the courage to disobey orders, “the descendants probably wouldn’t be around today, and there would be no one to tell the stories.”
The Sand Creek Massacre is but one episode of the 100-year U.S. genocide against Native Americans. Rapacious acts including ethnic cleansing, cultural erosion and environment destruction reinforced America’s national strength and paved the way for its rise. The misdeed was seemingly driven by Washington’s land policy to promote westward expansion, but, in its essence, this was the one and only path for the U.S. to complete its primitive accumulation of capital and the transition from free competition to monopoly.
For a long time after the founding of the U.S., an extremely large portion of Congress seats were occupied by land opportunists, land brokers, big capitalists and those who had a close connection with them. In an era where the country had just emerged out of the rubble of war and had to start from scratch, the U.S. government did two things to ease financial difficulties.
For one, taking advantage of Native Americans’ ignorance of modern concepts such as sovereignty, territory, real right and human rights, it implemented an exploitative policy combining massacre, deceptive treaties, loans and forced assimilation to arbitrarily snatch away control over their ancestral homelands.
For another, it traded the “fruits” of war, namely lands, for scarce capital. Big capitalists and land opportunists sold lands to ordinary immigrants at a high price in the form of usurious loans to bankrupt the latter. This indirectly promoted the development of capitalist farms and the land tenancy system. In the meantime, they invested the profits from land opportunism in high-returning sectors such as the fur trade and the transportation industry.
If, in the American Indian Wars, Native Americans were the biggest victims, followed by the ordinary public, then investors including businessmen, bankers, financiers and factory owners, together with social elites and senior politicians, were the ultimate winners in the capital reshuffle.
Until this day, while the feats of America’s founding fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are much celebrated, there has rarely been any mention of the Indian lives that they trod underfoot and slaughtered like lambs.
When people eulogize the pioneering, aspiring and reformative American spirit fostered by the westward movement, they intuitively turn a blind eye to the blood of innocent American Indians flowing underneath capitalist lust and greed.
Captain Silas Soule’s letters and fate unveiled, through the American Indian Wars, an age of roaring capital growth. As a witness of the tragedy of Native Americans, a man of conscience and an army officer serving the government, he wrote a dirge of humanity that is supposed to be dedicated to American Indians.
(The author, Wang Congyue, is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of American Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. If you want to contribute and have specific expertise, please contact us at opinions@cgtn.com.)
Reuter: The curious case of a map and a disappearing Taiwan minister at U.S. democracy summit. Embarrassing map with independent Taiwan causes US to cut video feed. Taiwan is part of China. 路透社：美國民主峰會上地圖和台灣部長失踪的奇怪案例。 台灣獨立的尷尬地圖導緻美國切斷視頻源。 台灣是中國的一部分。
A video feed of a Taiwanese minister was cut during U.S. President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy last week after a map in her slide presentation showed Taiwan in a different color to China, which claims the island as its own.
Sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that Friday’s slide show by Taiwanese Digital Minister Audrey Tang caused consternation among U.S. officials after the map appeared in her video feed for about a minute.
The sources, who did not want to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter, said the video feed showing Tang was cut during an ongoing panel discussion and replaced with audio only – at the behest of the White House.
The White House was concerned that differentiating Taiwan and China on a map in a U.S.-hosted conference – to which Taiwan had been invited in a show of support at a time when it is under intense pressure from Beijing – could be seen as being at odds with Washington’s “one-China” policy, which avoids taking a position as to whether Taiwan is part of China, the sources said.
CGTN: Confronted with Omicron, countries are endorsing China’s COVID-19 approach: expert.
China’s top epidemiologist said on Saturday that many countries taking strict measures when facing the Omicron variant are echoing China’s approach in fighting COVID-19.
“The world is gradually recognizing China’s approach against the virus during the two-year battle against the pandemic,” Zhong Nanshan told a sub-forum of the Greater Bay Science Forum.
He said research and development on vaccines, antibodies and medicines are still lagging due to a lack of understanding of the origins of the virus, the intermediate hosts and transmission routes.
Zhong reiterated that taking vaccines or other treatments is still essential to keep the transmission at low rates.
“It’s estimated China will hit the target of herd immunity by the end of the year with 83 percent population fully vaccinated,” he said.
The pulmonologist also mentioned the latest progress in China’s first COVID-19 treatment, Brii Biosciences’ (Brii) neutralizing antibody cocktail. “The drug is working as many COVID-19 patients with severe conditions in Yunnan, Qinghai and other places have reacted to the drug well,” Zhong said.
In addition, he said the consistent development of new drugs against COVID-19 and the joint effort from different countries are also required to battle the virus.
“We can’t win the battle against the pandemic if only depending on one country or one company,” he said.
BBC: How the West invited China to eat its lunch? There were two events in late 2001 that shook the axis of the world. So, 20 years on – the world transformed by a little-noticed decision. It’s been a huge success for China. 西方是如何邀請中國吃午飯的？ 2001 年末有兩件事震動了世界軸心。 因此，20 年後 – 世界因一個鮮為人知的決定而改變。 這對中國來說是一個巨大的成功. by Faisal Islam – Economics editor
The world was preoccupied with the immediate aftermath of 9/11. But exactly three months later, on 11 December, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was at the centre of an event that was to cast as strong a shadow over the 21st century, changing more people’s lives and livelihoods around the world than the attacks on America.
Yet few know it even happened, let alone its date. China’s admission to the World Trade Organization changed the game for America, Europe and most of Asia, and indeed for any country in possession of industrially valuable resources, such as oil and metals.
It was a largely unnoticed event of epic geopolitical and economic importance. It was the root imbalance behind the global financial crisis. The domestic political backlash against the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to China has reverberated around the western G7 nations.
The promise, suggested by the likes of former US President Bill Clinton, was that “importing one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom”, would enable the world’s most populous nation to follow the path of political freedom too.
“When individuals have the power not just to dream, but to realise their dreams, they will demand a greater say,” he said.
But that strategy failed. China began its ascent to its current status as the world’s second biggest economy – and is on a seemingly inevitable path to becoming the world’s biggest.
Indeed the US trade representative responsible for negotiating China’s WTO deal, Charlene Barshefsky, told a Washington International Trade Association panel this week that China’s economic model “somewhat disproved” the Western view that “you can’t have an innovative society, and political control”
“It’s not to say that China’s innovative capacity is enhanced by its economic model,” she added. “But it is to say that what the West thought were incompatible systems may not be necessarily incompatible systems.”
Up until 2000 China’s global economic role had been principally as one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of plastic gubbins and cheap tat. Important, yes, but neither world-beating nor world-changing.
China’s accession to the top table of world trade heralded a massive global transformation. A powerful combination of China’s willing workforce, its super-high-tech factories, and the special relationship between the Chinese government and Western multinational corporations changed the face of the planet.
An army of cheap Chinese labour began to produce the goods that underpin Western living standards, as China seamlessly inserted itself into the supply chains of the world’s biggest companies. Economists call it a “supply shock”, and its impact certainly was shocking. Its effects are still reverberating around the world.
China’s integration into the world economy has seen significant economic achievements, including the eradication of extreme poverty, which stood at 500 million before WTO membership and is now basically zero as the value of the economy, in dollar terms, increased 12-fold. Foreign exchange reserves increased 16-fold to $2.3 trillion, as the world’s purchases from China’s workshops were banked by the Chinese state.
In 2000, China was the seventh-largest goods exporter in the world, but it quickly reached the number one spot. China’s annual growth rate, already at 8%, went stratospheric at the height of the world boom, peaking at 14%, and stabilised at 15% last year.
Container ships are the juggernauts of global trade. In the five years after China joined the WTO, the number of containers on ships coming in and out of China doubled from 40 million to more than 80 million. By 2011, a decade after the country became a WTO member, the number of containers going in and out of China had more than trebled to 129 million.
Last year it was 245 million, and while about half of the containers going into China were empty, nearly all those leaving China were full of exports.
There has also been a massive expansion in China’s highway network, which increased from 4,700km in 1997 to 161,000km by 2020, making it the largest network in the world, connecting 99% of cities with populations of over 200,000.
In addition to its state-of-the-art freight infrastructure, China also needs materials such as metals, minerals and fossil fuels to support its manufacturing boom. One material essential to China’s burgeoning automotive and electrical appliance industries is steel. In 2005 China became, for the first time, a net exporter of steel, and has since become the world’s largest exporter.
Through the 1990s, China’s production of steel hovered at around 100 million tonnes per year. After WTO membership, it exploded to around 700 million tonnes by 2012 and exceeded one billion tonnes in 2020.
China now accounts for 57% of world production and produces significantly more steel on its own than the rest of the globe managed together back in 2001. The same goes for ceramic tiles, and plenty of other ingredients of industry.
In electronics, clothing, toys and furniture, China became the dominant source of supply, forcing down export prices all around the world. Economists noticed a “once-for-all” shock in global prices following China’s WTO entry. China’s clothing exports doubled between 2000 and 2005, and its share of the value of global trade went from one fifth to one third.
After 2005, production quotas in the textile industry were also lifted, leading to an even bigger production shift to China. However, as production in China became more expensive and production has shifted to developing countries such as Bangladesh and Vietnam, this has fallen back to 32% of clothes last year.
The Chinese minister responsible for WTO accession, Long Yongtu, made an admission reflecting on the past two decades. “I don’t believe China’s WTO accession was a historic job-killing mistake [for the US and the West],” he said. “However I recognise the allocation or the benefit is uneven. The complete picture is that when China got his own development, it also provided the rest of the world with a huge export market.”
But there was a sting in the tail – that it was US politics that failed to account for the inevitable impact of Chinese competition on some sectors. “When the uneven distribution of wealth happens, a government should take measures to adjust that distribution through domestic policies, but it’s not easy to do that,” said Long Yongtu.
“Maybe blaming others much easier, but I don’t think blaming others can help to solve the problem. In China’s absence, the US manufacturing industry would move to Mexico.”
He then relayed an anecdote of a Chinese glass manufacturer who struggled with opening a factory in the USA: “It’s very difficult for him to find competitive workers there. He told me American workers’ bellies are bigger than his,” said the minister.
So right now we have come full circle. China has had significant economic success within the WTO. Right now the Biden administration seems in no hurry to change the obstructive policies of his predecessor there. The trade scepticism is very real. China has used WTO membership to go well beyond its earmarked role as workshop to the West.
It has, for example, strategically planned alliances to get access to significant amounts of the rare earth materials that should power the net zero climate change economic revolution. It has deployed the state behind industrial expansion around the world. The US is looking to contain China diplomatically and economically, and seeking allies in this endeavour in Europe and Asia.
As former US trade representative Barshefsky puts it, China has been “on this very divergent course for some time. What does that mean? A strengthening of a state-centric economic model fuelled by massive subsidisation to designated industries… the re-emergence of China as a great power, and the leader of what it calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This is a lot to handle. The WTO can’t handle it.”
So, 20 years on – the world transformed by a little-noticed decision. It’s been a huge success for China. The intended geopolitical strategy of the West failed. Indeed, rather than China becoming more like the West politically, as a result of this decision, the West economically speaking is becoming a bit more like China.
If Assange had been a Chinese journalist-hacker, for sure he would be languishing in a Chinese jail. But he would have been celebrated all around the West, and headlined the democracy summit just held in Washington.
How China and Africa have developed cooperation over the past two decades. On April 6, 2020, China-aided medical supplies to Africa fighting Covid-19 arrived in Ghana (photo)
Zhang Zhongxiang and Tao Tao points out that since the establishment of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) (中非合作论坛 zhōng fēi hézuò lùntán) in October 2000, China has supported Africa addressing problems that have severely restricted economic development – including inadequate infrastructure and shortage of funds – and has become a driving force in the continent’s development. For example, over the last two decades, the scope of China’s duty-free access to African products expanded steadily. Between 2000 and 2012, China-Africa trade increased from 3.82 percent to 16.13 percent of Africa’s total foreign trade. Chinese companies have built 10,000 km of roads, 6,000 km of railroads, 30 ports, 20 airports, and 80 power stations on the continent in ten years (2008-2018). Furthermore, China has provided aid to Africa in areas such as debt relief, human resource training, and dispatching of medical and agricultural experts. The number of Africans trained in these cooperation projects have increased from 7,000 to 50,000 people between 2000 and 2018, totaling 172,000 people. Adhering to its core principles, China’s aid is provided without political conditionality (不附加任何政治条件 bù fùjiā rènhé zhèngzhì tiáojiàn) and interference in the internal affairs of receiving countries (不干涉别国内政 bù gānshè bié guónèi zhèng). The authors point out that Africa’s international attention has grown significantly recently, in part due to the successful China-Africa cooperation. However, as China’s influence in Africa grows, the US government has begun to suppress and discredit China, “seeing it as a threat to African democracy,” and Western public opinion continues to stigmatize China-Africa cooperation. The Covid-19 pandemic has also impacted African economies and this cooperation. In conclusion, the authors point to the two-decades worth of accumulated experiences that have promoted mutual benefit and win-win cooperation, noting the importance of continuing to follow these successful experiences in future development. At the same time, against the backdrop of significant global challenges, it is important to actively plan post-pandemic cooperation and build a community of common destiny for China and African countries.
Zhang Zhongxiang (张忠祥) is director of the Center for African Studies and professor and doctoral supervisor of Shanghai Normal University
Tao Tao (陶陶) is a doctoral student at the Center for African Studies, Shanghai Normal University
Johnson Choi Biz