US-sponsored separatists groups, backed by Washington for decades, are being mobilized to attack and undermine activities related to the Beijing 2022 Olympics starting with the torch relay in Greece.
I explain the background of the “Free Tibet” movement and how the US government through the CIA backed it as early as the 1950s and transferred its operations to the National Endowment for Democracy.
Olympic flame arrives in China for Beijing 2022 Winter Games. A timeline of China’s preparations by Xinhua Oct 19 2021
The Olympic flame for the Beijing 2022 Winter Games has landed in the Chinese capital on Wednesday morning after being flown from Athens, Greece.
A welcome ceremony is due to be held later at the Beijing Olympic Tower near the ‘Bird’s Nest’ National Stadium, which hosted the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics.
The flame was ignited Monday in a traditional lighting ceremony at Ancient Olympia in western Greece, and was handed over on Tuesday to the Beijing 2022 organizers at the Panathenaic stadium in Athens.
China successfully tests 500-ton solid rocket engine by Deng Xiaoci Oct 19 2021
Closely following the heart-stopping and spectacular launch of the Shenzhou-13 manned spacecraft on Saturday, China has made another breakthrough in its aerospace technology, as researchers at the Academy of Aerospace Solid Propulsion Technology (AASPT) announced on Tuesday they conducted a successful running test of a domestically developed solid rocket engine, with a thrust of more than 500 tons, in Xi’an, capital of Northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, setting a world record in the field,
The Global Times learned from the AASPT, which is affiliated with state-owned aerospace giant China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp (CASC), that the 3.5-meter-diameter solid engine’s fuel load reached 150 tons.
The successful test signals significant progress in China’s solid carrier rocket technology and lays the foundation for the development of large-scale, heavy-lift launch vehicle technology.
The development of the 500-ton thrust solid engine has entered the engineering application stage, while the landmark test opened up a key technology link for the development of China’s 1,000-ton solid thrust engine, the academy said in a statement sent to the Global Times.
The research and development of rocket engine technology has led the development of launch vehicles, with several steps along the way.
In 2009, China developed a 2-meter-diameter, 120-ton-thrust solid engine, a record at that time, which directly pushed forward the development of the country’s first solid carrier rocket, the Long March-11.
In 2016, by successfully linking 120-ton thrust engines, the country’s first bundled solid booster launch vehicle – the Long March-6A – won state approval for development.
In 2019, the roll-out of a 2.6-meter-diameter, 200-ton-thrust solid engine drove the project approval of the development of the Smart Dragon-3 (SD-3) commercial carrier rocket.
As the latest member of the CALT Smart Dragon commercial rocket family, the SD-3 gained project approval on December 31, 2020, and China will launch the new make through a seaborne platform in the first half of 2022, Jiang Jie, a CALT rocket expert, told the Global Times.
According to CALT, the 2.64-meter-diameter SD-3 with a 3.35-meter-diameter nose cone is the largest and strongest in the Smart Dragon rocket series. It is capable of sending a payload of 1.5 tons into 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit.
Jiang, who is also an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, revealed that the SD-3 aims to meet the market need for launches of large-scale commercial satellite constellations, as it is capable of sending as many as 20 satellites in one go.
The SD-3 would reduce the unit cost of payloads to $10,000 per kilogram, said CALT, highlighting the model’s strong market competitiveness.
Researchers with the academy told the Global Times on Tuesday that they believe the new 500-ton thrust engine offers more options for large and heavy-lift carrier rockets.
Observers said that the running test of the powerful solid engine set a new high in the field, lifting China’s large-scale solid rocket engine technology to world-leading levels, and will provide China’s new solid carrier rockets with more powerful and cost-effective advanced power. It will also significantly enhance the competitiveness of solid rockets in the commercial space launch market.
Based on the single 500-ton-thrust solid engine, the academy has set out to research a 3.5-meter-diameter five-stage engine, which would provide a total thrust of more than 1,000 tons, which is expected to be applied in the boosters of large and heavy-lift engines.
Such new technology would meet the demand of China’s space program such as manned moon landings and deep space exploration, the academy revealed.
Never a good idea to bet against HK$, George Soros learned his lesson in 1997-8. Most people don’t like short-sellers. I have a grudging admiration for a few of them. Others, not so much.
Short-seller Kyle Bass, backed by one-time Trump pal and White House adviser Steve Bannon and fugitive billionaire Guo Wengui, has learned it the hard way.
Few people would remember Sino-Forest today; I wish I could forget all about it. The bust in the early 2010s of this fraudulent company that claimed to own large swathes of forest for wood production in southern China marked the first big loss I had in the stock market; I am a serial loser when it comes to investing. I really should stop if I want to retire with a proper roof over my head.
For all that, I have to thank Carson Block, the US short-seller. He exposed Sino-Forest’s fake accounting claims. He did the research; countless other investors like me didn’t. Many of us thought it was the hottest ticket listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Block has legions of enemies in China; some have reportedly threatened to kill him, as he has repeatedly singled out dodgy mainland companies, which he often successfully shorted. I think Sino-Forest might have been the kill that made his name. Hat tip!
The end of the dollar-based US empire will be a self-inflicted blow.
Kyle Bass, another short-seller, is something else. I had to search for the popular German word schadenfreude when I read a hedge fund he managed lost more than 95 per cent of the US$30 million it invested, mostly by betting against the Hong Kong dollar after the breakout of violent social unrest in 2019. Two of his backers were former Donald Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon and fugitive billionaire Guo Wengui. In a related case, companies associated or controlled by Guo and Bannon have agreed to pay about US$539 million in a settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over claims that the companies illegally sold shares.
During the unrest, many Western commentators were declaring “the end of Hong Kong”; some still are. But Bass did one better by putting his money – well, investors’ money anyway – where his mouth was and went all out betting on a de-pegging of the Hong Kong dollar from the greenback under the linked exchange rate system, also called the currency board.
Most of us in or from Hong Kong just rolled our eyes. Writing on his Facebook page, former chief executive Leung Chun-ying said Bass didn’t know the basics about the currency peg. But Bass must have thought he had an insider’s take on the geopolitics of the whole thing from Bannon, despite the latter’s fallout with Trump.
After all, Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, were then moving from trade war to cold war against China. There were talks about cutting off China’s access to the US financial system and forcing the dollar peg to collapse in Hong Kong. Bass must have thought he was doing a George Soros and a Stanley Druckenmiller when the pair went after Asian currencies and helped trigger the Asian financial crisis. He should have remembered that the shorts against the Hong Kong currency didn’t go well back in 1997-98.
Far from an insider’s view, Bannon and Guo were likely to have fed him their own ideological and revengeful take on China. His bet against the Hong Kong dollar was partly funded by investors’ money in GTV Media Group, which has ties with Bannon and Guo and which the SEC said raised US$339 million through an unregistered share sale. GTV was set up with the express purpose of supposedly exposing high-level corruption within the Chinese communist state. GTV’s parent company, Saraca Media Group, transferred US$100 million of the GTV proceeds to Bass’ hedge fund that bet against the Hong Kong dollar. Saraca and Voice of Guo Media separately made an unregistered sale of a digital asset security.
In a settlement with the SEC, GTV and Saraca agreed to pay disgorgement and interest of US$450 million and each will pay a civil penalty of US$15 million. Voice of Guo also agreed to pay disgorgement and interest of about US$54 million and a US$5 million fine. The agreements were made without admitting or denying any wrongdoing. Bannon, Guo and Bass were not named in the SEC case; neither were any of Bass’ fund management companies.
In a tweet posted in July last year, Bass said he was “not a director of GTV as of July 9”. In 2019, Bass was listed as chairman of the Rule of Law Foundation, a non-profit founded by Guo with the aim of bringing down the Chinese Communist Party and helping its alleged victims.
Bannon was on Guo’s yacht off the coast of Connecticut when US law enforcement agents arrested Bannon and accused him of conspiring to siphon hundreds of thousands of dollars from a campaign to finance a wall on the US’ southern border. Trump controversially pardoned his former top White House adviser in January before leaving office.
Warren Buffett once said “never bet against America”. Interestingly, Wall Street is not betting against China. BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan have all advised clients to increase exposure to China.
BlackRock now wholly owns its Chinese mutual fund business. Goldman Sachs has just been licensed to run its fully owned securities firm in China. Morgan Stanley is raising its stakes in its mainland securities and mutual fund joint ventures, most likely with the goal of taking full ownership.
Great shorts have the courage of their conviction and are willing to go against the mainstream such as Wall Street. Bass, it seems, just got mixed up with the wrong crowd.
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.
Freedom of Navigation: China and Russia have continued their military cooperation with an anti-submarine drill and a first joint passage through Tsugaru Strait in the Japanese archipelago to counter pressure from the US and her vassal states. 航行自由：中俄繼續通過反潛演習和首次聯合通過日本列島津輕海峽進行軍事合作，以應對來自美國及其附庸國的壓力.
William Poy Lee, Born and raised in historic 1950s San Francisco in a halcyon era where our entire neighborhood of multi-racial rogues, roustabouts, family, retail store owners watched over and protected the sacredness of childhood. This was the International District, a community now long gone. My remembrances of this era are told from a child’s perspective in a child’s fragmentary perceptions in my literary collection, PORTSMOUTH SQUARE STORIES.
Suddenly, in my teens, the 1960s happened and I came of age in the epicenter of seismic social change: LSD laced hippie counter-revolution, passionate anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, and of course the idealistic Civil Rights movement, all of which I threw myself into 100%. Then, suddenly in the 1970s, the contradictions of my Chinatown community heightened to the point where it exploded in a violent struggle where other 30 people were shot and killed. This urban war culminated in the Golden Dragon Restaurant Massacre of Labor Day Weekend 1997.
At it’s start in 1972-3, one of the victims was my brother, a rebel with a dissident youth group, who along along with other leaders in his group, were framed and tossed into state prison. I joined in attempting to reverse these legal injustices and although we failed, yet I discovered a strength of compassion that kept me and my brother human through the desperate 1970s. This energy emanated through my mother with her mysterious Guan Yin lineage and the collective ways of our 1,000 year old peasant clan village, descendants of the Tang Dynasty, ancient China’s most developed Dynasty. In a duet of voices in alternating chapters between my mother and me, our heritage, Toisan wisdom, and family saga are told in THE EIGHTH PROMISE: An American Son Pays Tribute to his Toisanese Mother. Fulfilling an immigrant family’s American Dream, I earned a scholarship and graduated from UC Berkeley in 1974. Because of the legal injustices to my brother and his group, I then entered and graduated from UC Hastings School of Law in 1978. From there, utilizing my multi-cultural skills and street smarts, Bank of America employed me as an international banker and lawyer, eventually to smooth business expansion overseas and as a work-out specialist.
From 2007 to 2019, I primarily lived and taught universities students in China: Lhasa, Beijing, Shanghai, and Dali, Yunnan. While teaching at Beijing Central University for National Ethnicities in Beijing, many Tibetan students befriended me. Through them, I got to understand a generation of millennial Tibetans born and raised in the PRC.
One of them arranged for me to teach English in Lhasa, Tibet in the summer of 2010. Through these growing friendships and subsequent visits to Lhasa and other Tibetan areas, I realized that both the Free Tibet movement and the PRC perpetrate false, polarizing narratives of the factual situation on the ground in modern Tibet.
This inspired me to write a novel: THE TRISONG CAFE OF LHASA: Born in the PRC, the Millennial Tibetan Moderns. THE TRISONG CAFE takes no sides, but introduces millennial Tibetans as people, real people, like you and I, in all our complexity.
In 2019, listening to my intuition, I moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area on the heels of President Trump’s Tariff wars and declaration of a new Cold War against China as the America’s main strategic competitor and also just in front of the Corona-virus pandemic.
If there is a commonly heaven where all the souls met. What will the people from Vietnam and Iraq say to Colin Powell? Rest In Peace? 如果有一個所有靈魂相遇的共同天堂。 來自越南和伊拉克的人們會對科林·鮑威爾說些什麼？ 安息？看來他身後不會有好日子過？一生做了那麼多壞事, 早晚要還的.
The mouthpiece of U.S. Gov’t – Voice of America: Pompeo attended the gathering of HK people in the US to resist China’s socialism with Chinese characteristics, instead to promote American money democracy, fake civil rights, rule of law only for the riches and religious politics. 美國政府喉舌, 美國之音: 蓬佩奧出席旅美港人聚會：共同抵抗和取代中國特色的社會主義, 推動美式金錢民主, 吹水民權, 法治謊言, 宗教政治.
Hundreds of HongKongers, Chinese Traitors in US engaged in subversive activities against China gathered in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA this past weekend to discuss how to fight the Chinese Communist regime and turn Hong Kong into an anti-China base. 數以百計在美國的反中亂港香港人在剛剛過去的周末在美國加州舊金山灣區聚會，討論如何與中共政權抗爭、把香港成為反中基地.
An organization supported by the NED and CIA called “Hong Kong Freedom Beacon” hosted a number of speeches on Sat (Oct 16, 2021) and Sunday, and invited former Secretary of State Pompeo and his China adviser Yu Maochun attended and delivered a speech. 一個叫“香港自由燈塔”的美國民主基金會/美國中情局支持的組織在星期六（2021年10月16日）和星期天主辦了多場演講，並邀請到前國務卿蓬佩奧以及他的中國問題顧問余茂春出席並發表演講.
Former US Secretary of State Pompeo also attached pictures to his Twitter. One of the pictures shows him speaking at a large conference hall with the American flag and the slogan “Recover Hong Kong, the Revolution of the Times” hung on the scene, and the other picture shows him photos with Mao Chun and Yuan Gongyi, the founder of Hong Kong’s Freedom Lighthouse, a subversive terrorists group supported by the US Gov’t. 前國務卿蓬佩奧還為推文配上圖片，其中一張照片顯示他在一個大型會場演講，會場上懸掛了美國國旗和“光復香港、時代革命”的標語，另一張照片顯示他和余茂春與美國政府支持的香港自由燈塔創辦人袁弓夷的合照。 Chinese to English by Google Translate
Johnson Choi Biz 