China is working aggressively to spread its influence and promote its interests throughout the globe, exploiting nations and flaunting individual rights and sovereignty as it does so. And it’s doing a pretty good job.
China invests huge amounts of capital into developing countries, with overseas investment and construction exceeding $2 trillion since 2005. Many of these projects fail to meet international standards and use illegal funds, according to The Heritage Foundation’s 2021 China Transparency Report. (The Daily Signal is the news and commentary platform of The Heritage Foundation.)
China uses these investments to influence voting at the United Nations. One William and Mary AidData research study found that “if African countries voted with China in the U.N. General Assembly an extra 10% of the time, they would get an 86% bump in official development assistance on average.” //
Despite its seeming successes, China lacks the most important ingredient for a thriving country, what the interim National Security Strategic Guidance calls “our most fundamental advantage”: democracy.
China lacks the basic freedoms that enable society and people to flourish. According to the Index of Economic Freedom, China remains a mostly unfree country with weak property rights and a protectionist financial system. New reports appear regularly about government interference stifling human expression in China. //
It is time to hold China accountable for such abuses. It is vital, however, that the U.S. and other Western nations not fall into the trap of countering the growth of Chinese influence by replicating authoritarian Chinese actions. It is the responsibility of democracies to work together to expose the corruption and authoritativeness of the Chinese Communist Party while emphasizing and staying true to their own values of democracy, respect for human rights, and economic freedom.
China isn’t invincible. Its regime lacks freedoms that people inherently desire. It is imperative that the U.S. makes it clear to other countries that cooperating with China means cooperating with a “regime that systematically violates the human rights of its citizens.”
Reliance on coal-fired electricity to produce solar panels raises concerns in the West
Solar panel installations are surging in the U.S. and Europe as Western countries seek to cut their reliance on fossil fuels.
But the West faces a conundrum as it installs panels on small rooftops and in sprawling desert arrays: Most of them are produced with energy from carbon-dioxide-belching, coal-burning plants in China.
I don’t think anyone, right or left, really thinks Joe Biden can afford to hold Beijing to account for much of anything due to the degree to which he and his drug-addled, sex-addicted grifting son are compromised by China’s intelligence services. It is also difficult to believe that Navy leadership, which has to be at least as aware of the Navy’s ineptitude as the rest of us, didn’t give the Benfold orders to skedaddle when faced with Chinese pushback. The US Navy, indeed the US military, is simply not capable of carrying out a limited conflict to defend freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and protecting the territorial integrity of the nations in the region, including those of our allies. The Chinese know it. Our allies know it. Our military and political leadership know it. Maybe, eventually, the American people will wake up to just how poorly they are being served before too many young Americans have to die to make the point.
National security reporter Bill Gertz's new book, 'Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China's Drive for Global Supremacy,' offers vital reporting on the Chinese threat and worthwhile ideas for keeping the Chinese communists in their place.
Zimbabwe is one of the African countries that hopes renewable energy technologies will help to address their energy problems. About 42% of Zimbabwe’s households are connected to the electricity grid.
The country has huge and diverse renewable energy potential. Its sustainable energy portfolio could include solar, hydro, biomass and, to a limited extent, wind and geothermal. //
For policy makers, non-governmental organisations, the private sector and some researchers, it’s a given that renewable energy technologies are the answer. They could meet Zimbabwe’s growing energy demand and achieve universal access sustainably. At face value this is appealing – but the devil is in the details.
My research looked into how renewable energy technologies are understood and how they could alleviate energy poverty in Zimbabwe.
I found that they’re only one piece of the puzzle and other pieces are habitually missing. No matter how well designed and efficient technologies are, their effectiveness is linked to the country’s political economy.
Socio-economic and political factors keep conventional energy out of reach of the poor. My study shows that they can do the same with renewable energy. These factors may even worsen inequality. Adding renewable energy technologies into the existing energy sector structures is like pouring new wine into old wine skins. //
The politics of energy and technological dependency: China has become a source of finance for large-scale energy projects in Zimbabwe. This is true for both coal-based and renewable energy generation.
What’s seldom acknowledged is the skewed nature of this relationship. China has global dominance in renewable energy technologies. For example, the Chinese solar PV cell and module makers quickly dominated global sales. And the country’s wind turbine producers are poised for significant exports. //
Energy as a tool of accumulation: For China, energy poverty in Zimbabwe is an opportunity for its economic growth. The unequal distribution of economic power keeps Zimbabwe energy poor. Accumulation is happening at one pole and energy poverty at another. //
Renewable energy technologies would work if, somehow, they did more for the poor than for the powerful. But in reality, the opposite is true.
First, the private partners (independent power producers) aren’t ordinary citizens, but the economically powerful and politically connected.
Second, the flawed nature of the tendering system cannot be overstated. It’s normally associated with corruption and political interference.
What’s more, this elite group tends to benefit from the state’s intervention.
Coca-Cola, Apple, Nike, Disney – they are interested in principles when those principles don’t disrupt the supply chain. Multinational companies are fine with chained labor if the supply chain remains unbroken.
In Hong Kong right now, Jimmy Lai is sacrificing all — his fortune and possibly his life — for his God, his fellow man, and for freedom. //
“The Communists,” he told Economic Strategy Institute President Clyde Berkowitz, “think they can buy and or intimidate everyone off, create their own reality, and write their own history. Effectively, they assume the role of God. They are kind of a religion or an anti-religion.”
‘They have initiation into the party as a kind of baptism. They have self-criticism as a kind of confession of sins, re-education as a kind of penance, and elevation to hero of the party as a kind of sainthood. And, of course, at least Mao [Zedong] has a kind of everlasting life as a photo smiling down on Tiananmen Square and as an embalmed corpse in a casket in the square.’
‘But the party and its members do not have souls. In fact, they are dead men walking, because the truth is not in them.’
“Life,” he told the Catholic Napa Institute in an October interview, “is more than just bread; life has a greater meaning.” //
We know that the martyrs and saints suffered and for their courage on earth are saved. We might hope and pray to have their courage if ever put to the test, but until we are we never truly know if we will — so many don’t. We know that suffering has a purpose, that it sharpens and tests our characters, and that it should be offered up to God, but have you ever tried? It can be done, but it is very, very difficult to lift up your heart while your body and mind drag you back down to the temporal things torturing them.
“Here is my body, take it!” the Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen preached on Good Friday, 1979. “Here is my soul, my will, my energy, my strength, my poverty, my wealth — all that I have. It is yours, take it! Consecrate it! Offer it! Offer it to the Heavenly Father with yourself, in order that he, looking down on this great sacrifice, may see only you, his beloved Son, in whom he is well pleased. Transmute the poor bread of my life into your life; thrill the wine of my wasted life into your divine Spirit; unite my broken heart with your Heart; change my cross into a crucifix.”
“If you believe in the Lord,” Lai told the Napa Institute, “if you believe that all suffering has a reason, and the Lord is suffering with me, it will definitely define the person I am becoming so I am at peace with it.”
“I am what I am. I am what I believe. I cannot change it. And if I can’t change it, I have to accept my fate with praise.”
But how many actually do? How many American leaders, how many corporate businessmen, do just that? How many executives at Disney and Nike, the NBA and Blizzard Entertainment, in Apple and Hollywood do just that? Maybe no other alive. //
In Western universities and board rooms, souls are cheap. But Lai’s is not. “What separates Jimmy Lai,” a friend in corporate consulting wrote me, “from many of this era’s modern-day princes is that he deeply cares about something beyond his own money, power and status.”
“This is just living my life,” he told the BBC this spring, sitting in his mansion in northern Hong Kong. “But if I’m in jail I’m living my life meaningfully.”
“But you must fear some things,” reporter Danny Vincent asked. “For your family, for Hong Kong, for your loved ones.”
“Yes,” he replied, shuddering, his lip quivering and tears suddenly in his eyes. “You’re right. I do have fear.”
As with courage, sacrifice, and pain, it’s easy to say we have what it will take. Going to church on Sunday or giving what amounts to a rounding error to some social justice cause is fine, but is it enough? Is it remotely enough? How many of our Western elites know in their hearts that if they died in their sleep tonight, no one could say they gave it all for God?
So a lot of media accounts weren’t wrong, they just got it half right. Jimmy Lai, a man born in poverty, who became a billionaire, who became a Christian, who became a Catholic, who became a freedom fighter, might die this time, next time, or the time after that, imprisoned and penniless. But when he is weighed and measured, he will not be found wanting. And for that, when Jimmy Lai dies he will die a very wealthy man indeed.
As the New York Post reported on June 4 (and which RedState’s Scott Hounsell elaborated on later), a Chinese military scientist named Zhou Yusen filed for a patent for a coronavirus vaccine on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army in February 2020, only five weeks after China finally admitted that COVID-19 could be transmitted from human to human. Zhou, an award-winning military scientist, died in May 2020, but the Chinese government didn’t issue any report on his death and there were no tributes, which one would expect for such a decorated scientist. The only documentation of his death is a brief mention in a July 2020 Chinese media report and a notation of “deceased” next to his name on a research paper published in December 2020. //
Once again, for emphasis. The United States government was funding gain-of-function research on coronaviruses performed by Chinese military scientists.
If that doesn’t infuriate everyone who reads it, we’re lost as a country.
For the last year or so, virologist and infectious diseases expert Dr. Steven Quay has been at the forefront of questioning the narrative of COVID-19’s origin, conducting studies, and analyzing the genetic properties that make up the viral strain that has sent the world into panic for the last 18 months. In Sunday’s Wall Street Journal Quay and UC Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller make an extremely strong, scientifically-based case that SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 infection, is a lab-created viral strain. //
There are 35 different two-word combinations that could be spliced into the site, but scientists have had the most success with one particular combination – one which is suppressed naturally – the CGG-CGG, or “double CGG” sequence. And, the authors explain:
An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.
So, this combination is suppressed naturally, but does that mean it can’t happen naturally? Yes, that’s exactly what it means, the authors argue:
If the insertion takes place naturally, say through recombination, then one of those 35 other sequences is far more likely to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.
“In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus.“ //
“[COVID-19] appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version. No serious viral ‘improvement’ took place until a minor variation occurred many months later in England.” //
“When the lab’s Shi Zhengli and colleagues published a paper in February 2020 with the virus’s partial genome, they omitted any mention of the special sequence that supercharges the virus or the rare double CGG section. Yet the fingerprint is easily identified in the data that accompanied the paper. Was it omitted in the hope that nobody would notice this evidence of the gain-of-function origin?” //
Since the data accompanying the paper made it easy for scientists to identify the fingerprint, why didn’t anyone do so? It stands to reason that if this sequence was the one universally used for double arginine in lab-manipulated viruses, all of those “experts” who signed on to letters in Lancet and Nature would have known exactly where to look to see if there was evidence that this virus didn’t originate in nature.
They didn’t look – they did the exact opposite, in fact, apparently “encouraged” by Dr. Fauci and Peter Daszak – but other scientists did. Those scientists found the sequence and published their findings, which were ignored by US scientists and the media.
RedState has exclusively reported since June 4 that a high-ranking member of the Chinese government we now know to be Dong Jingwei, the country’s top counterintelligence official, defected to the United States. Multiple sources within the US intelligence community who receive briefings on the matter told RedState details about Dong’s defection (as reported here) and that officials at the Defense Intelligence Agency have high confidence in the information Dong has provided, including information showing that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is in fact a military bioweapons research lab completely controlled by the People’s Liberation Army and that the virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in the Wuhan lab. Information from that defector was used by an expert virologist and a scientist formerly with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in conjunction with previously available public information about the virus’s genome, to independently determine that the virus was engineered.
Reactions to RedState's Exclusive Reporting on Chinese Defector Dong Jingwei Show Disturbing Pattern
Granted, it hasn’t been the standard operating procedure for defectors to be handled by DIA or for the information to be kept from other agencies or the White House for a time. But, as I said in an editor’s note at the end of my first post, I stand by my sources.
RedState’s website felt the reaction about 12 hours later, though, experiencing a DDOS attack.
As the story has progressed, though, the reactions are an interesting and disturbing insight into how those with their own agendas attempt to shape the narrative and marginalize those who won’t go along with that narrative.
Jmied01
3 hours ago
If anyone wants an example of the difference between the virtue of the United States and its role in the world compared with that of other nations, here you are.
The US military is big and powerful but a fully defensive force. Our enemies use their armies unprovoked and with naked aggression, to frighten and intimidate.
based on the propaganda they allowed to be printed in the New York Times Monday masquerading as an interview of WIV’s Dr. Shi Zhengli, it’s clear that they’re spooked. The reason for that is most likely the revelation that a high-ranking defector has been providing data to the US Defense Intelligence Agency that confirms much of what Dr. Li-Meng Yan told the FBI last year – that the Wuhan lab is run by the People’s Liberation Army, and that the COVID-19 virus didn’t just occur in nature but was engineered by scientists at Wuhan. Those revelations were part of an exclusive piece RedState published Friday evening.
Then, magically, Monday morning the New York Times wrote about an “unscheduled conversation” with Dr. Shi, whom they caught up with on her personal mobile phone. Shi was angry, they reported, and decried that “the world” was “constantly pouring filth” on a poor, innocent scientist and asking for things she cannot provide. //
Based on the contents of the article, here’s what the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army want you to believe about Dr. Shi, her research, the Wuhan lab, and the coronavirus pandemic:
- Dr. Shi’s lab has never conducted gain-of-function experiments
- Dr. Shi isn’t a member of the Chinese Communist Party
- Despite reports, three WIV employees weren’t sick with coronavirus/flu-type symptoms and hospitalized in the fall of 2019
- Both Dr. Shi and the Chinese government have been fully transparent and provided all data requested of them
- There were no sources of the new coronavirus before the pandemic erupted in the Wuhan lab
- The RaTG13 virus, which is 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2, couldn’t possibly have been the foundation for SARS-CoV-2
- Miners who got sick or died after working in the same mine where Dr. Shi collected the RaTG13 virus did not have bat SARS-like coronaviruses in their blood samples
- Any assertions that the Chinese government or Dr. Shi haven’t been fully open and honest or that they had anything to do with creating or disseminating SARS-CoV-2 are speculative and “rooted in utter distrust” //
How can she possibly say she didn’t do gain-of-function research? By changing the definition, obviously. Dr. Shi told the Times that:
“…[H]er experiments differed from gain-of-function work because she did not set out to make a virus more dangerous, but to understand how it might jump across species.”
So, jumping across species doesn’t make it more dangerous? Got it. That’s not what Dr. Shi’s research partner, Dr. Ralph Baric, said when their research was released in 2015. According to a Vice article, the scientists “created a hybrid version of a virus…just 12 percent different from SARS” from a horseshoe bat that “grew equally well to SARS in human cells” and “resisted all vaccines and immunotherapy too.”
Chris Wallace: So just to button this up, I’m gonna ask you one more question. Do you believe that the virus came from a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute?
Mike Pompeo: I do!
Wallace sat for almost 5 seconds, silently, after the former secretary of state answered, possibly stunned that he received such a direct, unequivocal answer on such a loaded question. No follow-up question was needed with that response.
By Irina Slav - Jun 11, 2021, 11:00 AM CDT
China will stop subsidizing new solar farm projects, distributed solar projects for commercial users, and onshore wind farms as soon as this year, Reuters reported, citing the central planning authority of the country.
The change will enter into effect on August 1 and is a departure from the course set late last year. The country’s finance ministry had previously committed to granting 57 percent more subsidies to solar power projects this year, although it did slash subsidies for wind power.
RedState has now learned some details of the information provided by the defector, including that he provided data proving that SARS-CoV-2 was manmade and leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in addition to evidence confirming that the People’s Liberation Army managed the Wuhan program (and others), as Chinese virologist Yan Li-Meng told the FBI last year.
Technical details provided by the defector, RedState is told, were given to scientists (who were not told how that information was given to the government) who then re-analyzed data from published sources in conjunction with the new data and concluded that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was engineered. And, the defector was able to confirm numerous non-public details Yan provided the US government. //
Dr. Li-Meng YAN
@DrLiMengYAN1
Verified again! “CGG-CGG” in SARS-CoV-2 genome is part of smoking-gun evidence to prove Gain-of-Function done by CCP.
I have presented analysis with other smoking guns in the First Yan Report last Sep.
However, CCP’s unrestricted misinformation campaign dismiss it using lies! //
And just how was it that Yan’s information was able to be so effectively dismissed? As we’ve covered over the last few weeks, EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak strongarmed other researchers into writing pieces in influential journals, like Lancet and Nature, dismissing the theory, and specifically dismissing Yan’s claims. Those pieces were used by Science Feedback, Facebook’s fact-checker, to deplatform news organizations who shared the information and wouldn’t take it down and to shut down the accounts of individuals who shared the information. News organizations couldn’t even report about Yan’s appearance on Tucker Carlson without being censored by big tech. //
Ted Cruz
@tedcruz
Wow. Stunning scientific evidence suggests that: (1) Covid escaped from a Chinese lab & (2) the virus was CREATED in that lab, thru “gain of function” research.
For over a year, corporate media & deep state insisted this was a “conspiracy theory.”
What do you get when you cross the largest social media platform in the world with the most powerful, Communist regime in existence? Apparently, you get a match made in Marxist heaven. A recent report shows that Facebook has become quite protective over the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda reports on its site. Indeed, the social media giant appears to be treating the brutal regime far better than Americans who happen to be right-leaning.
The Media Research Center recently published a report detailing how the CCP is allowed to operate unimpeded on Facebook, which routinely censors conservative content. //
Forty accounts on Facebook, amassing over 751 million followers, are managed by Chinese state-controlled media outlets. For comparison, 751 million is over six times (6.39x) more followers than CNN, Fox News, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, The Washington Post and CBS News have combined (roughly 117,500,000) on Facebook.
Facebook has removed disinformation operations connected to Iranian state-controlled media and had targeted Russian state-controlled media, as well. However, the company has done very little to curb Chinese propaganda disseminated on the platform through its government-run media outlets. //
Thirty-seven of the 40 Facebook accounts identified by the Media Research Center as belonging to Chinese state-controlled media have corresponding accounts on Twitter. There they were labeled “state-affiliated” media. The MRC identified only 23 out of the 40 accounts that Facebook labeled state-affiliated accounts on its platform — a blatant violation of its policy on identifying accounts run by state-controlled media outlets. //
etbass
3 hours ago
It's all about the money. They censor the right and they lose what? 20 million accounts, maybe? 10 million? 5?
CCP has 751 million. Money, money, money. They do what they are told to get China's money.
Now Cotton — along with colleagues Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and Rick Scott (R-FL) — has introduced the China Trade Relations Act to “strip China of its Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status and return to the pre-2001 system.”
If passed, the legislation would require China to obtain Most Favored Nation (MFN) status through annual presidential approval, per the requirements of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment. The bill would also expand the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to include human rights and trade abuses as disqualifying factors for MFN status. Companion legislation was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Representative Chris Smith (R-New Jersey).
“For twenty years, China has held permanent most-favored-nation status, which has supercharged the loss of American manufacturing jobs. It’s time to protect American jobs and hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for their forced labor camps and egregious human rights violations,” said Cotton.
A person believed to be among the highest-ranking defectors ever to the United States from the People’s Republic of China has been working with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for months, sources inside the intelligence community have told RedState on condition of anonymity. The defector has direct knowledge of special weapons programs in China, including bioweapons programs, those sources say.
The information provided to RedState corroborates and clarifies Thursday evening’s reporting by journalist Adam Housley. //
Adam Housley
@adamhousley
Also...US intelligence believes China is trying to produce variants that suggest it came from bats to cover up that it originally came from a lab. The belief is still that it escaped accidentally, but was allowed to spread.
12:27 AM · Jun 4, 2021
Make no mistake — these are official Twitter and YouTube accounts for the Chinese government, and the person delivering the statement is Wang Wenbin, the Official Spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry and member of the Chinese Communist Party. The allegation is that the United States and Japan worked together on continuing “germ warfare” programs that the Japanese were pursuing during World War II.