Deporting Chinese journalists
As a former member of the Beijing-based Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC), I believe that US President Donald Trump’s administration did the right thing in expelling 50 Chinese journalists.
While a member of the FCCC, I would often receive alerts that US or other foreign journalists were being detained or harassed by Chinese authorities. Bona fide press credentials issued by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs offered no solid protection against official intimidation.
To give officials plausible denial, many times thugs were hired by local officials or power brokers to impede reporting. It was not uncommon for such intimidation to result in journalists sustaining physical injury or their cameras and other equipment being damaged or broken beyond repair.
A tweet in early February from the FCCC tells it all: “Some telling stats from our 2019 report: 82% of reporters experienced interference or harassment or violence while reporting last year. 43% said digital/physical surveillance affected reporting. And 70% reported interviews canceled due to actions taken by Chinese authorities.”
In such situations, foreign reporters were advised to contact a Chinese foreign ministry telephone number. Sometimes contact was able to be made, often times it was not. Even if contact could be made, it was no sure guarantee of help.
The exact number is not known, but it is an open secret that China, like Russia, uses journalists posted abroad to collect intelligence detrimental to the security of the US.
Deporting 50 Chinese journalists is a big step in combating Chinese penetration of the US.
Bill Sharp
Visiting scholar in the Department of History, National Taiwan University
Beijing cannot be trusted
There are efforts to spin and politicize the deadly outbreak of COVID-19.
We Italians and Europeans are paying a heavy price because of our intense industrial and commercial contacts with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), particularly in Hubei Province.
Our technicians, managers and entrepreneurs were shuttling back and forth between China and Europe until mid-to-late January when the virus was already unleashed in the environs; COVID-19 was already causing numerous deaths and sickness in the Wuhan-Hankou metropolitan area of China.
The viral infection had already been noticed in mid-November by Wuhan’s local health professionals. The Chinese government was alerted in early December last year.
It took nearly seven weeks for the Chinese government to officially admit and take action after brutal suppression of the whistle-blowers and after hundreds of deaths — including that of an early whistle-blower doctor — and thousands became critically sick.
The communist government of China, which commands everything inside China with the great leader His Highest Excellency Mr Xi Jinping (習近平) at the core, was brutal in suppressing the early warning. It proved equally brutal in enforcing draconian measures (too late) to the common people.
Here in Italy and elsewhere in western Europe we are under draconian measures for now, but they are not brutal — they are collaborative and human.
Our governments are transparent and humble; unlike in mainland China, our government leaders do not dare demand or expect us to venerate them and express gratitude for their normal dutiful actions.
Only in communist China, North Korea and Islamic states are government leaders venerated despite their incompetence, lies and brutality.
C-hina O-riginated Vi-ral D-isease of 2019 = COVID-19.
COVID-19 = China Originated Viral Disease of 2019.
This is the fundamental truth, a concrete historical fact. No media spin can alter this truth. No nationalistic, patriotic chauvinism can remove it. No political profiteering can change it. No superpower rivalry or international gossip can add anything or subtract anything from this.
Let us try to be compassionate toward Chinese and let us NEVER trust the announcements and numbers (statistics) provided by the communist totalitarian state of the PRC.
Professor D. Raj Pant
Former visiting professor and cofounder of the Center for Sustainability at Nanhua University, Taiwan,
LIUC, Italy
The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
The diplomatic dispute between China and Japan over Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comments in the Japanese Diet continues to escalate. In a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, China’s UN Ambassador Fu Cong (傅聰) wrote that, “if Japan dares to attempt an armed intervention in the cross-Strait situation, it would be an act of aggression.” There was no indication that Fu was aware of the irony implicit in the complaint. Until this point, Beijing had limited its remonstrations to diplomatic summonses and weaponization of economic levers, such as banning Japanese seafood imports, discouraging Chinese from traveling to Japan or issuing
Since leaving office last year, former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has been journeying across continents. Her ability to connect with international audiences and foster goodwill toward her country continues to enhance understanding of Taiwan. It is possible because she can now walk through doors in Europe that are closed to President William Lai (賴清德). Tsai last week gave a speech at the Berlin Freedom Conference, where, standing in front of civil society leaders, human rights advocates and political and business figures, she highlighted Taiwan’s indispensable global role and shared its experience as a model for democratic resilience against cognitive warfare and
The diplomatic spat between China and Japan over comments Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi made on Nov. 7 continues to worsen. Beijing is angry about Takaichi’s remarks that military force used against Taiwan by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” necessitating the involvement of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. Rather than trying to reduce tensions, Beijing is looking to leverage the situation to its advantage in action and rhetoric. On Saturday last week, four armed China Coast Guard vessels sailed around the Japanese-controlled Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台), known to Japan as the Senkakus. On Friday, in what
RSS